Among the many provocative statements Scott-Coe makes, I'll use this one as jumping-off point here: I find it helpful to see Burke's work as an 'ecumenism' between rhetoric and dialectic, the sacred and the secular, between content and form, serving simultaneously linguistic and religious ends. It is well-taken and consistent with the passage of hers I quoted above about how logology and theology in Burke are not easily separable. In fact, as Scott-Coe notes, logology evinces connections with gnosticism, where both systems see the Divine inside the human, inextricable from it. As Burke says in the intro to RR, the theological motive of perfection is necessarily present even in language used trivially.

This gnostic perspective on Burke has more than one facet, I do believe. The Divine essence, spirit, or pneuma that the gnostics saw as entrapped or imprisoned in the psycho-physical nature of man and woman is, it is true, analogous to the Infinite-Negative intuition that undergirds humankind's fitful pilgrimage along the Upward Way toward Divine enlightenment. That gnostic sense of radical Fallenness has its analogue also, I think, in Burke's scheme of things. Only, for Burke, that descent or (partial?) entrapment isn't wrought by body or cosmos, but rather by language, its selective and deflective myopia, and the molecular rigidities or pieties, our preferred terminological linkages, by which our social and political orientations confront ever-changing environmental conditions with trained incapacities. Burke's philosophy exudes, it seems to me, a radical sense of the Fall. not altogether unlike that of gnosticism in intensity.

Then, too, there is that mutual devotion to an Upward Way, a hierarchy of beings and values, a development and ramification of concepts that adumbrates semi-divine powers of creation within language itself. For the gnostics, it's the Pleroma with its many Aeons subordinate to the true, unknown, and hidden High God Himself, best referred to in negative terms. Beneath these Worthies are the fearsome Archons, offspring of the evil Demiurge that created this problematic universe, inhabitants of the planets above, sentinels on guard to arrest the Divine Light (read: spirit) of the uninitiated, as it tries to ascend to its Heavenly home after death. Burke's obsession with hierarchies and their ubiquitous manifestations in human life and thought hardly needs mention.

The need for gnosis central to this ancient religion has its counterpart in Burke as well. Salvation came to believers through understanding, via verbal instruction, of the ultimate sources of human bondage and the linguistic formuli that could finesse their spirit through the gauntlet of Supernatural Enemies it would meet on its upward flight. Salvation, Burke-style, comes in part through perspective by incongruity, verbal atom-smashing, and most particularly through reorientation via the paradox of purity, change wrought by reidentification from above. Some higher order of abstraction, not unlike the gnosis of long ago, places symbol-users in a startlingly new context in which they see themselves, to borrow Nietzsche's term, as an average. This new situation serves as motive for change.

One more possible similarity might provoke contention and debate. . Gnosticism was nihilistic in respect to this world and humankind's predicament within it. Recall how Burke characterizes his philosophy at the end of GM: He calls it NeoStoic. Stoicism was, for the Ancients, just a slightly milder form of Cynicism, the intensely nihilistic and iconoclastic orientation begun by Diogenes of Sinope at the time of Aristotle. I think Burke takes a pretty pessimistic view of the being he characterizes as rotten with perfection.

(Yes, yes, Burke's whole project focuses on how to go by [way of] language, through language, to [somehow, someway get] beyond [the deleterious temptations of] language. We all know that.)

compulsive thrust upward toward an overarching god-term (always perfected by way of a God-term, upper case), and disorder-guilt-redemption cycle of social interactions that serve, for good and/or ill, as life's Iron Law of History.

We know for sure what Augustine had in mind, among possibly other things: the exploitation of pagan or secular terms, concepts, and associations to further a Christian rhetorical appeal, as our commentator puts it.

I'm not sure I can agree with this as a basic premise. Clearly, in his Confessions, Augustine struggled with rhetoric, likening it to a mistress. Rather than try and use the terms to further a Christian appeal, it seems to me that Augustin tried to applied what he felt wer the keep-able truths in Rhetoric as seen through the frame of his Christian beliefs.

Also,

Burke said he was an agnostic, more than one of his acquaintances has reported. Logology's bottom line, if there is one, comes in the last codicil of Burke's Definition of Man [sic]: The symbol-using [and] -misusing animal is rotten with perfection, the theological motive of perfection being the very driving force at the core of language-charged human life. The motive that forces to the surface thoughts of the ultimately perfect Being of negative theology---Infinite, Eternal, Almighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, etc.---is, at base, the same drive that is threatening the ecosystems of planet Earth, Burke's bete noir as early as CS and P&C.

What gives, then, with Burke's theological obsessions, his relentless need for God talk way above and beyond the explanatory requirements of a pure logologer? More than one Burkean exegete has taken notice of these obsessions, as well as Burke's recurrent tendency to take the side of religion in discussions of its conflicts with secularism and science. Scott-Coe cites, in particular, Wayne Booth's take on the matter. Booth called Burke a theologian and prophet, based on his vast correspondence with our sage and leader.

It seems to me that Booth may just be correct in his estimation of Burke. He was a theologian and prohpet, or a coy theologian as described by Ed Appel, if one interprets his logology in such a way to include the argument of prime mover. In spite of his self-proclaimed agnosticism, he argued persuasively concerning the definition of man, in particularly as rotten with perfection. The often unconscious drive toward final cause combined with a relentless fascination and construction of religion would seem a compelling argument to the existence of prime mover. That, along with Burke's continued discussion of god-terms. Why? He himself it seemed, could not drown out the drive toward the Ultimate.

I'm not sure that Burke was an intentional theologian, but surely does much to advance the knowledge of the Absolute through the borrowing of religious terms used in secular way. Hence, the word coy aptly describes his status as a theologian.

Thanks for encouraging this conversation, Ed. When life gets too busy to enter into such stimulated, excellent discourse with peers and friends, then life... is too busy.

Stephanie