Nathalie Zimpfer, The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric
ZIMPFER, Nathalie. The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024, 270 pages, ISBN 978-1-80207-528-1.
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- 1 Patrick Delany, Observations Upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Sw (...)
1Jonathan Swift was a career clergyman in the Church of Ireland, ordained a priest in 1695 and appointed Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713. Swift was professionally obliged to preach sermons, of course, but he did not publish any of them and only a dozen sermons attributed to him are extant, and of these eleven are securely canonical. In recent decades there has been renewed scholarly interest and a growing body of work on preaching and sermons in the religious and political history and oral and print culture of the eighteenth century. The defence of the established Church and Anglican orthodoxy against the challenge of anticlericalism and religious heterodoxy are now seen as central to understanding the nature of the Enlightenment in the British archipelago in the long eighteenth century. In Swift’s era religion and politics were interconnected and High Church Tory, Whig and Dissenting sermons occasioned paper wars in the partisan politicised culture. The Sacheverell and Bangorian controversies, ignited by notorious sermons, challenged the foundations of the establishment in Church and State. Printed sermons were a very popular genre, and the pulpit was a major theatre of the party-political polemic in Swift’s lifetime. The sermon was a vital part of the mass media of the period reaching illiterate and literate alike through the pulpit and the press. Swift was a powerful and provocative religio-political pamphleteer in England and Ireland, many of his political poems were libels, and even his History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne’s reign was regarded as a libellous pamphlet by his contemporaries. Swift is reported (by his High Church Tory friend Patrick Delany) to have opined that “in the pulpit, he could never rise higher than preaching pamphlets” and Alexander Pope wrote that Swift was “a dignified Clergyman, but One who, by his own Confession, has composed more Libels than Sermons”.1
- 2 Louis A. Landa, “The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: An Edition” (doctoral dissertation, University of C (...)
2Since the foundational scholarly work on Swift’s sermons in the twentieth century by Louis A. Landa and C. P. Daw2 there have been distinguished scholarly studies of particular individual sermons examining them within their controversial contexts. Swift’s biographers and literary and historical scholars have drawn upon the sermons for evidence of his religious, political and social views, and position on controverted points of Christian doctrine. However, it is the case that compared to the attention accorded to the famous satires, poetry and pamphlets upon which Swift’s literary reputation and popular fame as an Irish patriot rest, his religious writings and sermons have been relatively neglected. Nathalie Zimpfer’s The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: silent rhetoric is the first book devoted solely to Swift’s sermons. The book offers a comprehensive account of Swiftian homiletics and a densely detailed study of the language, style and rhetoric of the sermons through the lens of linguistic and epistemological theory. While there is scholarly work applying linguistic analysis to Swift’s oeuvre more generally, Zimpfer gives intensive focus to the sermons, productively applying a linguistic pragmatics approach. In the book “greater emphasis is laid on textual analysis than on the study of the historical and theological particulars surrounding the sermons, since the latter have been and are being dealt with by other scholars” (50). Zimpfer's contribution to the existing scholarship is indeed to approach the sermons from an essentially textual point of view, examining their style and rhetoric, and presenting textual analysis and commentary articulated in linguistic terms. Such an extended examination of Swift's homiletic style has not been done before. Explicitly and repeatedly identifying the book as a stylistic study of the sermons and of Swift's Anglican rhetoric, Zimpfer’s originality is in the linguistic investigative focus rather than on the controversial contexts and topical polemical character of these occasional sermons, for which Zimpfer draws upon the work of other scholars. This book anatomises the complex rhetorical art of Swift’s “plain style” in his sermons, their “silent rhetoric”.
3The work is in two sections, each section containing introductory matter and three chapters. The first section addresses linguistic contexts and theories in which Swift's linguistic prescriptions and practices can be situated. A case is newly made for the importance of the French Port-Royal logic on Swift’s conception and practice of language, especially in relation to the duality of signs (26-37). The section describes the linguistic pragmatics approach adopted in this study. It considers hermeneutical issues and homiletic language. The second section is about reading Swift’s sermons. It addresses Swift as satirist and preacher, his preaching, confession and apologetics, and the rhetoric and communication style of Swiftian homiletics. Some of the main conclusions that emerge from Zimpfer’s analysis of Swift’s sermons and the fresh perspective offered on Swift’s homiletics and linguistic practice more generally may be briefly stated.
- 3 Passages from it are quoted from Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, Vie Politique, Sociale et Religieuse (...)
4The book contends that of the three identified dimensions of the preacher’s homiletic task—the theological (concerned with exegesis), the biblical (concerned with preaching the scriptural message), and the pastoral (addressing a specific congregation and emphasising the practical actualisation of the Christian message)—Swift’s sermons strongly emphasise the pastoral. Swift’s choice is said to be “idiosyncratic” deriving from his “conception of the clergyman less as a theologian than as a public man fighting for the public good”. He takes the perspective of the community rather than the individual (101). Swift’s well-known prescriptive statements in his A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately enter’d into Holy Orders declare that the preacher’s role is pastoral: to tell the people their duty and direct them in the conduct of their lives, and on controverted points of faith to deliver the doctrine as the Church holds it. Pulpit oratory should ordinarily be in a plain style using plain speech. (Swift included in a long list of terms to be avoided in a pulpit the word “Idiosyncracy”.) The doctrinal content of Swift’s sermons, unsurprisingly, was orthodox and not, of course, original, but his homiletic style, Zimpfer argues, was peculiar to himself. Zimpfer identifies Swift’s homiletic perspective and sermons with eisegesis rather than exegesis (11, 68, 118-120). The book provides extended comparisons of Swift’s sermons with those of the great preachers of the previous generation, the High Churchman Robert South and the Latitudinarian Low Churchman Archbishop John Tillotson, who both had different (exegetical and biblical) homiletic emphases and approaches to Swift’s, and with Laurence Sterne, of a later generation. There is reference to a sermon by the Tory Archbishop of York John Sharp3 but neither Sharp’s sermons nor even those of the Archbishop of Dublin William King appear in the bibliography. Since there is little notice of the sermons of other contemporary clergymen, and especially of other famous High Church polemical divines in England and Ireland (such as his near contemporaries Francis Atterbury, Henry Sacheverell and Francis Higgins) it is difficult to ascertain just how “idiosyncratic” Swift was in homiletic style. It might be the case that Swift’s treatment of scripture for polemical purpose, his choice of topoi and tropes, and appropriation of biblical language were also characteristic of preachers and polemicists among the High Church militants in the early eighteenth century with whom Swift as a divine was associated in the contemporary press. Nevertheless, this book provides striking illustrations of Swift’s eisegetical rather than exegetical perspective in his sermons, finding many instances of Swift “altering, extending or distorting the meaning of a [biblical] verse or even of using it in an unscriptural way” (119). Swift is shown to impose an interpretation on a scriptural text in order to confirm a pre-held position rather than seek to explain the scriptural text in its context. He applies a text to buttress a particular polemical position on a political, ecclesiological or social issue.
5The final chapter of the book examines the art of the plain style in Swift’s sermons. “Plain eloquence for plain people, such was the homiletic ideal of eighteenth-century Anglican divines, and Swift’s pronouncements on the topic are in keeping with this ideal” (161). Zimpfer refers to Coleridge’s insight that in Swift’s style the artifice is concealed (162). She gives a painstaking account of the rhetorical devices encountered in Swift’s sermons and how a memorable rhythmic prose was achieved for their oral delivery. Unpicking the paradoxes of Swift’s pulpit rhetoric, Zimpfer comprehensively shows how his anti-rhetorical stance and plain style were intrinsically rhetorical, and how an agonistic dimension is concealed or covert.
6This textual study of Swift’s sermons is also related to the debates about the depth of Swift’s faith and the relationship between the priest and the satirist that have long been issues in scholarly and popular writing on Swift (86-98). Swift has been seen as an ideologically conservative and orthodox priest, but a temperamentally and imaginatively radical author whose satires are unsettling, subversive and iconoclastic. Zimpfer addresses the matter in linguistic and generic terms. Swift’s linguistic theory and practice disclose “a keen awareness of the duality of the sign”. He responded to language in two different ways as an Anglican clergyman and as a literary writer. Swift’s “pronouncements on language foreground his religiously and socially inspired concerns with the dangerous implications of unclear and ambiguous language, his satirical works all rest on, and exhibit exuberant glee in, the potential of language for ambiguity” (34-35). Contesting the assumption that a writer's oeuvre must display consistency, Zimpfer prefers the descriptive concept of “contiguity”, suggesting “that very different works from the same author can coexist”. Zimpfer foregrounds strict generic boundaries. Swift’s personal testimony of faith is expressed in intimate private religious works such as the Prayers for Stella. His public and orthodox writings as an Anglican minister, such as the sermons, are seen as necessarily and to a certain extent irreconcilably different in kind from the literary satires and not to be read in the light of them (97-98). Not all readers of the profane passages in the satiric religious allegory A Tale of a Tub, for instance, would accept that the priest can be so easily quarantined from the scandalously transgressive satirist. Indeed, Swift the clergyman was aware of the need to control the damage caused by the literary author. He would never publicly acknowledge authorship of what is perhaps his greatest satire, and he published an anonymous apology for A Tale of a Tub claiming that its religious satire was consistent with the preaching of the clergy of the Church of England. Swift’s own later sermon “On Brotherly Love” is consistent with and can be read as a gloss on the religious allegory of the three brothers Peter (Roman Catholicism), Martin (the moderate Reformation and Anglicanism) and Jack (the radical Reformation and Protestant Dissent) in A Tale of a Tub.
7Unfortunately, there are presentational problems, typographical errors, and other inaccuracies in the book that were not picked up in the editing and proofing. Citations and quotations are not always accurate. Swift’s modern biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis was not “Swift’s first biographer” (190). Daniel Eilon was not the first to draw attention to Swift’s denunciation of “factions” (150). The book contains a very helpful “Appendix: scriptural references and allusions in the sermons”. But perhaps Luke 15.7 should have been explicitly listed in the Appendix among the scriptural references for “On the Poor Man’s Contentment” (226-228), since it features in the discussion of how Swift wrests scripture for his purposes and precepts in that sermon (121). The book’s index of names is quite limited. There is no entry for John Tillotson, for example, even though he is quoted, and compared with Swift throughout the book. In the index of topics particular topics discussed in some detail in relation to Swift’s rhetoric, such as “faction”, a term frequently mentioned by Swift in his sermons, seem to have been subsumed under the large general category of “politics”. Like “Moderation” and other loaded partisan terms of the period discussed in relation to Swift’s preaching in this book, it would have been helpful to have indexed them.
8Swift wrote in his “Thoughts on Religion” that “I look upon myself, in the capacity of a clergyman, to be one appointed by providence for defending a post assigned me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can”. Nathalie Zimpfer’s important study analyses the textual and rhetorical consequences, as they appear in the sermons, of Swift’s conception of the role of a clergyman (98). It demonstrates that Swift had an “agonistic conception of homiletics” (187) and that his sermons have an “agonistic dimension” (150). Swift in the pulpit was a dignified clergyman but the congregation in the pews were also in the presence of a preacher who was a famous and artful pamphleteer.
Notes
1 Patrick Delany, Observations Upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London, 1754) 42; Alexander Pope to Swift, 8 December 1713, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D. D., ed. David Woolley (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999-2014) vol. I, 559.
2 Louis A. Landa, “The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: An Edition” (doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1941); Louis A. Landa, “Introduction to the Sermons”, The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et.al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74) vol. IX, 97-137; Carl Pickens Daw, “An Annotated Edition of Five Sermons by Jonathan Swift” (doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1970).
3 Passages from it are quoted from Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, Vie Politique, Sociale et Religieuse en Grande-Bretagne d'après les Sermons Prêches ou Publiés dans le Nord de l'Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1984), 182-183, 196.
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Ian Higgins, « Nathalie Zimpfer, The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric », XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 15 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/14830 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffw
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