Religion is nothing if not a system of communication - if rather a special form. It is apparently designed to communicate with beings who are on the one hand invisible and on the other hand so categorically different and superior that normal communication is impossible. However, from a more sceptical, or sociological, point of view, although religion may indeed be thought to address scientifically unverifiable beings, in fact - with the important exception of purely private occasions - religion is a complex performance in which the participants address each other and address the secondary audience of non-participants. So a public prayer is a sort of fictional speech of persuasion in front of an appreciative audience. And a festival like the Great Panathenaea at Athens1 maybe communicated in a special way with the goddess, but more visibly it served to communicate to its participants their place in an organised and advanced society and to their onlookers the strength, confidence and energy of the Athenian state. Procession above all showcases the inner energy and external accoutrements of the religion according to a particular rhetoric.
In the most immediate meaning of the term ‘rhetoric’, prayer requires a carefully chosen vocabulary and a particular persuasive format.2 But gesture too is part of the science of rhetoric and so we can look out from the words {legomena, ‘things said’) to the actions of religious performances {drOmena, ‘things performed’) and their style. Greeks, after all, recognised that performances could be done especially well, and states strove, as we can see from inscriptions, to put on festivals of particular opulence and excellence of organisation. It is hard to know where to stop: ritual is a language and all rituals can be defined in terms of a ‘rhetoric’. Indeed, it must be possible to conduct a sort of rhetorical criticism of any ritual performance. The danger of shading into ‘mere’ metaphor is indeed always present, but even language when deployed for rhetorical purposes depends heavily on ‘psychological and aesthetic strategies’ {see A. L(Spez Eire, Chapter 22), which are of course the mainstay of non-linguistic ritual.
Thus, we will concentrate first on prayer because it shows rhetoric at work more clearly, or at least more conventionally, than any other part of religion. Secondly we
Will look at hymn, the transposition of prayer into a slightly different rhetorical register. And finally we will break free of the spoken word into the persuasive and impressive world of processions.
World History
