The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.

Man is rotten with perfection.

Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actionsin other human agents.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.