Comparative Organic Reading in the Responsive Rhetoric of Plato’s Gorgias, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine

Abstract

This study introduces a new methodology for reading Plato’s Gorgias (c. 380 BC), Aristotle’s Rhetoric (384–322 BC), and Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine (Books I–III, A.D. 396/7, Book IV, A.D. 426). Taking Gorgias as a mutual text, this study adopts a “comparative organic reading” to evaluate ways in which Aristotle and Augustine responded to Gorgias. Comparative organic reading is the assertion, by reader-centered progressive, formative, and hermeneutic selective reading action, that a textual understanding can be potentially created between Rhetoric and On Christian Doctrine, which are not directly compared. This argument can be justified by comparing the responsive rhetoric of these two texts, which implies that in Gorgias, Socrates was rather negative about rhetoric, while in Rhetoric and On Christian Doctrine, both Aristotle and Augustine, respectively, established a different opinion that seems to justify the development of rhetoric. The findings of this study reveal that “comparative organic reading” is a kind of reading pattern that meditates a text as a reader. Therefore, it seems legitimate to propose that the comparative methodology of modern readers’ reading of classical texts―that is, the way in which two texts are selectively chosen by the reader’s recognition of a common reaction to one text―is consistent with Roland Barthes’s notion of “The Death of the Author,” which is equivalent to what this article identifies as comparative epiphany. The aesthetics of comparative organic reading in triumphant moments of comparative epiphany present endless opportunities for comparative readers to share their findings with other readers.