Abstract
Summary This article is concerned with the origins and the rhetoric of one of Piotr Skarga’s less known publications, Seven Pillars [of the Catholic Teaching about the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar]. Published in 1582, the treatise sums up a polemic, which went on for nine years, with Andrzej Wolan, a leading Calvinist theologian, over the nature of the sacrament of the Eucharist (the issue of real vs spiritual presence of Christ) and points of worship in the Catholic and the Reformed churches. The Seven Pillars is a fine example of highly-skilled rhetoric, especially in the elocutio and dispositio. Adjusting his tropes carefully to the perception of an average reader, Skarga chooses the mode of mocking, down-to-earth realism to counter and wreck Wolan’s symbolic constructions. In his argument he relies heavily on rhetorical amplificatio, yet in the wind-up he shifts to the questions of when an individual worshipper may receive or abstain from Communion, clearly an issue of secondary importance in this fundamental polemic.
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