The “plain” style of Puritanism, and its hatred of ornament is a reflection of the influence of Ramist logic. Petrus Ramus expelled Rhetoric from the discipline of Logic, identifying it with Sophistry. Rhetoric includes Dialectic, and Ramism is purely Analytical in its method.
This is the real subtext of cultural critics and discourse havers today who invoke the Puritans as a boogeyman of repression. These critics, who style themselves as “transgressive” artists against neo-Puritanism, are really acknowledging in the comparison that they’re Sophists.
Puritanism, in its allegiances to Ramism and later Cartesianism, and its contempt for sophistical dialectic and the empty discourse of contemporary academic and theological disputation, actually represented an intellectually progressive movement to generalized critical method
In Antiquity the Stoics divided Science into Physics, Ethics, and Logic. Logic’s primary division was into Rhetoric and Dialectic. Winning public disputations, not truth, was the main purpose of Logic. The Epicureans rejected this Sophistry, and replaced Logic with Canonics
The “Method” of Methodism is explicitly in reference to Ramist Method, as a generalized procedure of critical logical analysis. In John Wesley’s writing and sermons sophistical rhetoric is rejected, and man’s inherent divine capacity for logical understanding is emphasized
The Discourse haver fears the Ramist Puritan.
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