Original scientific paper

Marko Marulić and Theologia Rhetorica

Lučin Bratislav

Abstract

Marulić’s epistle to Thomas Niger dedicating the Dialogue about Hercules to him is a text the importance of which is in inverse proportion to its length. So far it has been dealt with only by Branimir Glavičić in his fundamental study Marko Marulić and Erasmus of Rotterdam. However, the epistle to Thomas Niger is important as one of the very few places in Marulić’s oeuvre where the humanist of Split gives an express statement of his literary standpoints. This work analyses in detail the central part of the epistle, in which Marulić gives his views on the relationship between rhetoric and religious literature. It will be seen that this episode is structured in terms of a series of binary oppositions between desirable and undesirable features in religious literature, from which we can clearly distinguish which literary tradition Marulić acknowledges his own. Marulić describes the desirable qualities (along, of course, with pietas, which occupies pride of place) in expressions that unambiguously recall the rhetorical theory of antiquity, and then the best tradition of Renaissance Humanism: eruditio, eloquentia, uenustas, pristina pigmenta rhetoricique colores, delectatio. A more detailed terminological analysis will show in addition an intertextual link with Erasmus’ writings (Praise of Folly, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier).
The epistle to Thomas Niger can be read as an in nuce manifesto of rhetorical theology, as it is called (the term was brought into circulation by Charles Trinkhaus in 1970). Theologia rhetorica is the kind of approach to religious considerations, religious teaching and encouragement to an active application of religious principles in which more trust is placed in the power of rhetoric than in philosophy and dialectics. It might be said that it is a philosophia moralis Christiana modo rhetorico that is at issue here. Among the Humanists, such views were worked out theoretically by Lorenzo Valla and Aurelio Brandolini, and in practice were applied by Sicco Polenton, Bartolemeo della Fonte, Christoforo Landino and others. Although theological rhetoric is met with in various genres, its principles can best be seen in the Humanist sermon. It is also revealing that in Marulić’s oeuvre the clearest practical employment of the views laid out in the epistle to Thomas Niger is to be found in his Sermon about Christ’s Last Judgement.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

2483

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/2483

Publication date:

22.4.2001.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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