Abstract

This essay is prompted by a certain 'postmodern' presupposition, to the effect that every rhetorical transaction involves an original violence, especially in those instances where rhetoric is employed to convert others to its 'truth': which raises the question of whether the Christian understanding of its own rhetoric of persuasion--the peaceful transmission of an evangel of peace--is not contradictory. The essay traces the premises of the postmodern critique to a narrative of violence inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition, and takes Nietzsche as the first and most consistent exponent of this narrative in its postmodern form; and it locates the difference between the postmodern and Christian positions in differing narratives of the relation between beauty and infinity. An attempt is then made to reconstruct the Christian narrative of this relation according to the dogmatic tradition. Gregory of Nyssa--principally--is taken as providing an answer to Nietzsche's understanding of the infinite and, in the course of the essay's argument, a new reading of Gregory's understanding of divine infinity is offered, one that situates the infinite distance of creation from God within the Trinity, the event of God's perichoretic love, such that God is himself the distance of all things: a distance that may--in the motion Gregory calls epektasis--be eternally traversed. This part of the essay culminates in a consideration of sacrifice in Jewish and Christian tradition, involving an interpretation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo intended to exculpate this text of the charge that it depicts salvation as a sacrificial economy of violence. Finally, the essay inverts the question that prompts it, and asks whether the very terms of the postmodern critique of rhetorics of truth do not themselves dissemble a rhetorical violence, and then redefines the Christian practice of persuasion as 'the gift of martyrs' and a gesture of peace