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Nathalie Zimpfer, The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press on behalf of The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2024. 270 p. ISBN: 978-1-80207-528-1. £75
Nicholas SEAGER
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Nathalie Zimpfer, The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press on behalf of The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2024. 270 p. ISBN: 978-1-80207-528-1. £75

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1Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) preached many sermons during a fifty-year career in the Church of Ireland, beginning with his appointment to the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, in 1695, and plateauing after 1713 when he became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Yet only a dozen of his sermons survives, published in eighteenth-century editions that Swift did not oversee. Swift inhabited a culture mired in denominational conflict, with religion and politics inseparable in the wake of the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century. He identified as a “High Churchman” and placed himself among “the rank Toryes” in Church affairs, signalling his hostility to Protestant Nonconformity and its ecumenical Whig apologists (Correspondence, II, 650). In the pulpit, Swift promoted Anglican orthodoxy and embodied the ecclesiastical authority he unwaveringly endorsed.

2Disillusioned by the moribund state of the Church of Ireland and his own failure to secure a bishopric in England, Swift nonetheless took his sacerdotal function seriously. He invested time in composing and practising sermons, and recommends the same sedulity in his instructional Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders (1720). Even so, Swift habitually deprecated his sermons and would rather have seen them burned than published, both because they were pitched at an unlearned audience and because they could incur legal reprisals after 1714, when Swift was a political dissident. (One of his sermons, “On False Witness,” denounces state informers; another, “On Mutual Subjection,” was complained of to the Archbishop of Canterbury.) His homiletic approach was combative because he thought true faith was embattled: “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” (Prose Works, IX, 262). This militaristic outlook belies Swift’s genuine concern for his parishioners’ spiritual well-being, though his attitude towards them was authoritarian: “The two principal Branches of Preaching, are first to tell the People what is their Duty; and then to convince them that it is so” (Prose Works, IX, 70). He thought the suasive element best achieved through a plain style that is faithful to the simplicity of Christianity and suited to the intellectual capacities of his auditors. “A Divine hath nothing to say to the wisest Congregation of any Parish in this Kingdom,” Swift intoned, “which he may not express in a Manner to be understood by the meanest among them” (Prose Works, IX, 66). His sermons strive for linguistic clarity, eschewing exposition of doctrine, metaphysics, allegoresis, learned allusions, Greek and Latin phrases, and—if we are candid—the linguistic sophistication for which Swift is otherwise valued as a writer.

3This is where Nathalie Zimpfer’s study comes in. Swift’s sermons, Zimpfer acknowledges, are less celebrated than his satirical writings, which are characterised by a self-subversive polysemy, utilising elusive and ambiguous personae. Though Swift professed that A Tale of a Tub (1704) was written to uphold orthodoxy, its irreverent treatment of Christianity has fuelled debate about Swift’s actual position. By contrast, the sermons spoken in propria persona seem trite and tralatitious. The most thorough student of Swift’s sermons prior to Zimpfer, Louis Landa, called them “orthodox and conventional” (47). Zimpfer counters that Swift’s sermons are poorly served by assumptions derived from his satires (4, 91) or political writings (9). There has been too much effort to try to reconcile the ludic satirist with the earnest sermoniser (93). She therefore aims to position Swift’s sermons and satires as contiguous but distinctive performances (97): both are modes of polemic, but their aims and methods differ (210). To this end, Zimpfer works with linguistic pragmatics, drawing a “crucial distinction between what a text says and what it does” (11). This approach, she maintains, is preferable for analysis of sermons to an “excessively literary conception of rhetoric,” which is better suited to slippery satires (14). Sermons certainly try to effect changes in their audience, sending listeners away from church with an altered attitude or fresh resolutions, which may or may not be true of satires for which ridicule and vituperation may compromise the aim of reformation (66).

4Zimpfer’s analysis of Swift’s sermon rhetoric is assured and insightful throughout. Her principle is that “Swift asserts the necessity of clarity while cultivating hidden complexity and resorting to the possibilities of implied and implicit meaning” (42). This is the Silent Rhetoric of Zimpfer’s title. She shows that Swift expressed unequivocal antipathy to classical rhetoric in his sermons, prizing plainness over artifice and affectation, which risk distracting the congregation and detracting from their inculcation (161). But the polarity between perspicuity and artifice is a ploy: Swift does not practise what he preaches! “Swift’s doctrinal orthodoxy and his typically Anglican pronouncements on style mask a complex pulpit rhetoric which is governed by a triple paradox,” Zimpfer argues (162). The anti-rhetorical stance is itself rhetorical, concealing latent designs; and the plain style veils surreptitious work Swift conducts with scripture and thereby hides the sermons’ agonistic aspects. His sermons are attempts to convince and coerce listeners through persuasion that masks itself, concealing non sequiturs and offering tendentious positions as self-evident (182–4). Swift’s “sermons were intended to be strictly prescriptive and monological,” denying his congregation scope for interpretation; he pursued this effect through complex rhetorical techniques (203).

5We need to understand where Swift was coming from as a clergyman and social thinker. His experience and outlook led him to emphasise practical faith over theological doctrine (101). He sees things from the point of view of the Church, and his sermonising is a form of “institutional regulation” (129) that appeals to the individual’s role in the community, society, or polity rather than to their outlook as a believer (101, 107). There are few appeals to the emotions but many to reason and the concomitant onus of duty (108). Zimpfer’s relation of Swift’s rhetorical choices to his intended effect—the promotion of deference—is consistently good.

6Next, we need to drill down into detail about Swift’s rhetorical techniques and how these serve his ends. Scripture is key for Swift’s arrogation of authority to his own words. Zimpfer shows that he uses the Bible eisegetically rather than exegetically (11, 68, 114ff), adducing scripture to buttress principles rather than interpreting scripture to extract lessons from it. Zimpfer regards this strategy as an unorthodox method in service of an orthodox aim (12). It involves refusing to get into the “niceties” of scripture and doctrine—such as in “On the Trinity”—instead stressing prudential obligations and implicit faith (115). This entails subtle distortion as well as invocation of scripture, as when in “On Mutual Subjection” Swift justifies a distinction between the industrious (deserving) and the idle (undeserving) poor with ostensible reference to scripture (123). Fudging what is actually biblical and what he has interlarded in his commentary, Swift practises a polemical rather than expositional use of the Bible (125). Zimpfer helpfully compares Swift’s sermon rhetoric to that of influential contemporaries and predecessors such as Joseph Glanvill and Robert South. She analyses Swift’s commatic prose; the self-evident quality he gives to his own asseverations; his stylish use of alliteration and zeugma; his employment of enthymeme and perissology; and ternary and binary rhythms that reinforce the establishment of right and wrong (164–9). Sometimes this analysis is a bit of a stretch, such as when Zimpfer argues that Swift uses hypotyposis (175–7). But on the whole, the book provides welcome attention to the language of a corpus of Swift’s writings that have not attracted a lot of attention.

7The book has some weaknesses. Zimpfer’s idea that plainness can be rhetorical is less revelatory than she allows (189). Swift is not unique in this period in touting plainness while doing more complex things. Second, Zimpfer regards eleven sermons as canonical: the dubious case is “On the Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self” (13n39). Fischer has made a strong case for Swift’s authorship, so its omission rather than inclusion needs justification. The sermon contains some interesting metaphorical language and attention to individual emotion that complicates Zimpfer’s overall take on Swift:

It is easy to observe very different thoughts in a Man, of the Sin that he is most fond of, according to the different Ebbs and Flows of his Inclination to it. For as soon as the Appetite is alarmed, and seizeth upon the Heart, a little Cloud gathereth about the Head, and spreadeth a kind of Darkness over the Face of the Soul, whereby it is hindered from takeing a clear and distinct View of Things; but no sooner is the Appetite tired and satiated, but the same Cloud passeth away like a Shadow, and a new Light springing up in the Mind of a sudden, the Man seeth much more, both of the Folly and of the Danger of the Sin, than he did before. (Prose Works, IX, 358–59)

8Third, Zimpfer adheres to the belief that the sermons all date from 1717–26, but one, “A Sermon upon the Excellence of Christianity,” may be much earlier (see C. P. Daw, “The Occasion of Swift’s Excellency of Christianity,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 41 (1978), 251–9). In more minor affairs: some paragraphs are presented as quotations when they are not (113, 115), and some that should be presented as quotations are not (173); the subdivided bibliography is a hindrance to tracing sources.

9More generally, Zimpfer states that The Sermons of Jonathan Swift will “reassess his relation to language in general as well as his practice of plain style” (10). This early claim put me in anticipation of more exploration of Swift’s other writings as comparisons to his sermons. For example, Zimpfer talks about Swift’s anxieties that even the most lucid language is slippery with respect to “On the Trinity” and argues on the whole that Swift harnessed “the implicit dimension of language” (211), but if there is more to say about Swift and ambiguity, deliberate or inadvertent, it is not extended beyond the sermons (198). Some avoidance of repetition in this book would have created space for these comparisons. Zimpfer labours points about Swift’s sermons not deserving to be judged as failed satires, and when she states halfway through that “Swift’s frame of reference is not the Scriptures but Anglican doctrine” (138), she repeats a point already well-made. Some of Zimpfer’s generalisations about “Anglican doctrine” are also dubious. Mutual dependence, the Great Chain of Being, and a hierarchical society are examples of concepts in Swift’s sermons attributed narrowly to Anglicanism (142–3, 152). The repetitious aspect is evident again on plain style (189). The conclusions reached around pp. 204ff would have met little resistance near the start of the book. The long literature review could have come earlier (85–90). There is a lot of theoretical scaffolding for some fairly straightforward ideas. When we go from Swift’s sermons to “person deixis,” we must ask: is this needed (134)?

10Finally, the idea that Swift presents his sermons’ arguments as self-evident leads to strange statements such as that they are “ostensibly irenic, seemingly uncontroversial” (210). Sermons in which he fires potshots at Dissenters, lambasts Wood for his unwanted currency, and derides the Hanoverians and Whigs (“abominable Ministers and Stewards” (Prose Works, IX, 147) are not well served by this emphasis on them as anodyne. Zimpfer’s foregrounding Swift’s authoritarian orthodoxy does not always therefore recognise subversive moments in his sermons: what he described to John Arbuthnot as an “Inclination to preach what is forbid” (Correspondence, II, 107).

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Bibliographie

DAVIS, Herbert. “The Manuscript of Swift’s Sermon on Brotherly Love.” Pope and his Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn. Ed. James L. Clifford and J. E. Tobin, 1945; Clarendon Press, 1949, 7–16.

DAW, C. P. “The Occasion of Swift’s Excellency of Christianity.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 41, 1978, 251–259.

DELANY, Patrick. Observations upon Lord Orrery's Remarks on … Swift. London, 1754.

FISCHER, John Irwin. “Swift’s Authorship of ‘The Difficulty of Knowing Oneself’: A Review of the Evidence.” The First Wit of the Age: Essays on Swift and His Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real. Ed. Kirsten Juhas et al. Peter Lang, 2013, 109–116.

SWIFT, Jonathan. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Ed. David Woolley, 5 vols. Peter Lang, 1999–2014.

SWIFT, Jonathan. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 16 vols. Ed. Herbert Davis. Blackwell, 1939–1968.

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Nicholas SEAGER, « Nathalie Zimpfer, The Sermons of Jonathan Swift: Silent Rhetoric »e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 19 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20808 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cjb

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