Abstract
Although this is a book about an idea central to classical thought and literature, which is its main focus, it has distinct relevance for the expositor of Scripture. Our Renaissance forebears regarded rhetoric as a core discipline for preaching and would have understood very precisely the niceties of varietas (variety) in offering diversity and interest to their discourse, through distinctio (distinction) of elements—chains of islands dotted on an ocean – in their copia (copious) sermons. Sections of this elegant study give close readings of prose by Pliny, Lucretius and Horace, and of Roman poetry, which may be of less immediate appeal in these un-Latinate days, although the description of the development and techniques of the miscellany (of which blogging is our contemporary version) is fascinating, as we see Montaigne trying his mental mettle by means of the essay, and mixing all levels of discourse together in such a way as to preserve some sense of an inherent unity.
It is here that the book again touches on theological interests, since the relation of the one and the many, or God and his creation, is at the heart of philosophical theology. The classical idea of variety emerges in the context of Nature rejoicing in all her diverse manifestations, as the God of Genesis delights in his works and in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom rejoices before God in the appreciation of the whole created order. The concept of variety becomes a way in which the plenitude and diversity of the many is related back to its source in God, the One as it were. Variety offers the mediating steps, which prevents multiplicity from becoming chaos, and although Fitzgerald does not state this, there is a Neo-Platonic idea of hierarchy, exitus and redditus—a going out and return—characteristic of Dionysius the Areopagite’s theology, for example, but equally of Augustine. Discerning variety is a way of enacting Augustine’s imagined lovely natural forms, saying, ‘we did not make ourselves’ of Book 9 of his Confessions; it prevents either over-valuing or under-valuing the creation.
This brings us back again to preachers, who must so display variety and diversity in their discourse, that their hearers not be distracted, and that all they say may itself have that ordered actualisation of variety that does not confuse but return praise to the God in whose name they dare to speak.