In his sermons, metropolitan Antimos of Iberia proves a good command of the techniques and strategies used in the religious discourse, his sermons being characterized by solemnity, persuasion, exaltation, the ability to concretize abstract notions, etc., all of them configured in a simple language and in a phrase that is either short, concrete, rhythmical, and elliptical or ample and built in large, rhythmical drawings. What convinces right from the beginning is the coherence, the inner symmetry, the harmony of the whole, and the transition from abstract elements to facts and examples representative for the Christian conduit, in a homiletic ensemble that is marked by orality and plasticity, thus entailing lyricism, narrative pithiness, well built ideas and rhetoric breaks.

Keywords: sermon, orality, discourse, ethos, expression

IULIAN BOLDEA