Secularisation and the Leiden Circle

Secularisation and the Leiden Circle

Secularisation and the Leiden Circle By

Mark Somos

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

Cover illustration: Fame and History. Print by Hendrik Goltzius, 1586. © Trustees of the British Museum. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN 978 90 04 20955 8 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

preface

To Marketa

v

‘Every nation has its own morals and a nature of its own, and particular institutions corresponding to them. Once you start Â�trying to transfer these to another structure, the outcome will as likely as not be a completely dissimilar duplicate.’ Hugo Grotius, De republica emendanda

contents

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Contents List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . ╇╇ xi Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ╇ xiii I.╇ Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . .â•… 1 1. Question and Term . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇╇ 1 2.╇ Method: Leiden as Illustration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . .╇╇ 7 2.1. The Leiden Circle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇╇ 9 3. The Medieval Background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . .╇ 14 3.1. The Omnipresence of Theology: Generic Problems and Solutions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . .╇ 14 3.2. A Specific Example: The Reign of Philip IV. . . . . . . .╇ 21 3.3. The Persistence of Theological Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 26 4. Change and Continuity: The Early Modern Crises of ChrisÂ�tianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . .╇ 30 4.1. The Religious Foundations of Early Modernity: Generic Problems and Solutions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓╇ 30 4.2. A Specific Example: Historicisation as Secularisation’s Point of Entry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ╇ 33 5. Scaliger’s Secularising Historiography: A Valuable Start to Constructing Leiden as Illustration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ .╇ 42 ii.╇Scaliger: History Comes of Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . .╇ 49 1. Vita Brevis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . .╇ 49 2. Scaliger’s Significance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 52 3. Premature Universal History: The French Origins of Scaliger’s Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4. Everything a Target: History as Master Discipline. . . . . .╇ 60 4.1. First Illustration of History as the Master Discipline: Historical vs. Astronomical Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 61 4.2. Second Illustration of History as the Master Discipline: History vs. Theology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . .╇ 73 5. Scaligerian History as Master Discipline: ConseÂ�quences for the Leiden Circle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 86

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III.╇ Heinsius: Enter Secularisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . .â•… 93 1. Vita Brevis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . .╇╇ 93 2. Virtuous Poverty of Reason: The Bucolic Heinsius (1603-4). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . .â•… 96 3. Dwelling on the Pagan-Christian Borders: HeinÂ�sius ╇ and Cunaeus on Nonnus (1610) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . .╇ 100 4. Enter Secularisation: On The Constitution Of Tragedy (1611). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . .╇ 104 4.1. Intellectual Context: Theatre and Sixteenth-Century Politics of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . .╇ 107 4.2. A Close Textual Analysis of DTC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 117 4.3. DTC and Secularisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . .╇ 139 4.4. Reception and Controversy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . .╇ 143 4.5. Heinsius’s Secularising Contributions in DTC and Related Works. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 148 5. On The Superiority And Dignity Of History (1613). . . . .╇ 150 5.1. The Greatest Good: Eternal Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 151 5.2. Universal-Particular in DPDH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓╇ 154 5.3. Epistemic Humility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . .╇ 157 5.4. The Politics of Writing History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 159 5.5. History-Writing Polities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . .╇ 161 5.6. History’s Triumphal March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . .╇ 163 5.7. Unsecularised Counterparts of Triumph and Immortality through Historiography. . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 166 6. Hymns to Gods of Frenzy: Lof-sanck Van Bacchus (1614), Lof-sanck Van Jesus Christus (1616) . . . . . . . . . .╇ 170 6.1. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 171 6.2. Frenzy and the Brethren of the Common Life: The Epistemic Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . .╇ 175 6.3. The Lofzangen: Satire, Satyr, Silenos and Christ . . .╇ 177 IV.╇ Cunaeus: Sophia’s Dream. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 201 1. Vita Brevis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . .╇ 202 1.1. Leiden’s Young Zeelanders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .å°“ . . .╇ 204 2. Sardi Venales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 212 2.1. Brief Introduction: Text, Context, Reception. . . . . .╇ 213 2.2. Textual Analysis: Text, Context, Reception . . . . . . .╇ 219

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V.╇ Grotius: From Bible Criticism to a Theory of War and Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . .╇ 383 1. Vita Brevis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . .╇ 383 2. Secularisation in IPC: From Bible Criticism to a Theory of War and Peace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 387 2.1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 387 2.2. Textual Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 388 3. Conclusion: From Fox to Hedgehog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 433 VI.╇ Conclusion and Outlook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 439 Appendix: Excerpts from the Exegetical Tradition . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 447 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . .╇ 477 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 529

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list of illustrations

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List of Illustrations Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, 1577 ed., Antwerp. Emblem 132: Ex literarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri. . . . . . . . .╇ 162 2. Dionysos with retinue. Attic marble sarcophagus, AD 150175. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 172 3. Silenos. Archaeological Museum, Thessaloniki.. . . . . . . . . .╇ 181 4. Silenos. New Acropolis Museum, Athens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 185 5. Part of the proscenium of the Theatre of Dionysos. 3rd century AD. The high reliefs are from the 1st century AD. Theatre of Dionysos, Athens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . .╇ 189 6. Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, 1577 ed., Antwerp. Emblem 182: Antiquissima quaeque commenticia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .╇ 192 7. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Rome, 1652-4, Vol. IIB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . .╇ 331 8. The Sephirotic vision of St. John. Liber sacrosancti evangelii de Iesv Christo domino & Deo nostro. Ed. and tr. Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter and Moses Mardenus..╇╇ 336 9. Dirk Bouts the Elder, Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek, 1464-7, a panel from the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament, Church of St. Peter, Leuven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . .╇ 421 10. Piero della Francesca, Legend of the True Cross: the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes. c. 1455-60. San Francesco, Arezzo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .尓 . . . . . . . .╇ 429 1.

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preface

xiii

Preface Most of the research for this book was done between 2000 and 2006. Most of the text was written as a Ph.D. Thesis and defended in May 2007. Due to personal reasons, I have been unable to incorporate recent studies and research as much as I would have liked. Nonetheless, I hope this book will be of interest and use. The debts contracted between the first framing of the research question and the completion of this book are too numerous to acknowledge. It is my pleasure to try. I thank John Dunn and István Hont for kindling my enthusiasm for the history of political thought. I am grateful to Ioannis Evrigenis, Stanley Hoffmann, Harvey Mansfield, Russell Muirhead and Richard Tuck, my Ph.D. Committee, who guided the Thesis safely into harbour. Their complementary perspectives continue to help me navigate between disciplinary boundaries and fields. Hans Blom helped me every step of the way. His invitations to conferences allowed me to present aspects of my work in front of various audiences, and benefit from international feedback over the years. His help with obtaining a Nuffic fellowship in 2005 was also key to conducting archival research and benefiting from discussions with outstanding Dutch scholars. Finally, Knud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore provided a most congenial working environment at the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History. Ioannis Evrigenis has read and commented on every draft, and Hans Blom and Richard Whatmore on most drafts of the last three years. József Kömüves provided constant and invaluable support. The result embodies much of their hard work, patience, and generosity. Béla Kapossy, Tarik Kochi, Jim Livesey, Dániel Margócsy, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Koen Stapelbroek intervened with sound judgement at decisive stages. Renaud Gagné, Marius Hentea and Robert Iliffe provided crucial help. I thank Hans Blom, Joe Kochanek, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Sarah Mortimer for helpful response papers to various presentations of aspects of this book. Memorably helpful conversations were had with Jan Bloemendal, Lea Campos Boralevi, Cesare Cuttica, Joris van Eijnatten, Henk Jan de Jonge, Henk Nellen, Eric Nelson and Richard Serjeantson.

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preface

Fellowships, research grants and prizes from Harvard University, the Program on Constitutional Government, the Hayek Fund for Scholars, the Edward M. Chase Prize, Nuffic and The Leverhulme Trust made this work possible. Though research for this book was conducted after my time in Cambridge, I am grateful to Gonville and Caius College for their care long after I left. Finally, I want to thank Hans Blom, Lea Campos Boralevi, Melissa Calaresu and Joan-Pau Rubiés, Mike Edwards, Tessa Elliott, Ioannis Evrigenis, Renaud Gagné, Anna and István Hont, Boris Kalnoky, Béla Kapossy, Krisztián Kecskés, Joe Kochanek, Tarik Kochi, József and Mária Kömüves, Dániel Margócsy, Chris Moore, Russell Muirhead, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Chitra and Muthulakshmi Ramalingam, Ghanem Nuseibeh, Norman Stone, Julius Strauss, Philip and Richard Tuck, Jan Waszink and Richard Whatmore for their friendship. Special thanks to Jan Austera, Sameer Desai, Adrien O’Reilly and Jane Robson, for going above and beyond. Nothing would be the same without them. Apologies to the many I failed to mention. The chief consideration in the spelling convention of this book was the reader’s convenience. The forms adopted follow the majority of the sources cited here. Hence, for instance, “Silenos” but “Bacchus,” and the Latin “Salmasius” but the vernacular “Balzac.” An earlier version of one section of chapter 3 was published as “Enter secularisation: Heinsius’s De tragoediae constitutione” (2010, History of European Ideas 36:1, 19-38), and of chapter 5 as “Secularization in De iure praedae: from Bible criticism to international law” (Grotiana 26-28: 147-91; reprinted in ed. Hans W. Blom, 2009. Property, piracy and punishment: Hugo Grotius on war and booty in De iure praedae – concepts and contexts. Leiden: Brill). This book is dedicated to my wife; a small token of thanks for things I have no words for.

introduction

1

Chapter one

Introduction 1.╇ Question and Term The research question behind this book presented itself readily: when, how and why did religious justifications fade out from mainstream legal, political, and scientific writings in the West? That they did is a fact, historical and stubborn. The term “secularisation” has a bad press among historians today. There are good and bad reasons for this. They range from a healthy suspicion of sweeping generalisations and ideology-driven models of historical progress, through overspecialisation among historians, to a burgeoning literature in other disciplines, including anthropology and sociology, that load the term with technical connotations that make it increasingly risqué among historians. Some historians buck the trend and use the term without justification, allowing its sense to emerge from their use. Made of less stern stuff, I experimented with the English domestication of the French laicisation, the quartet of “detheologisation,” “deconfessionalisation,” “dechristianisation” and “decatholicisation” and their “re-” counterparts, but in the end they raised more problems than they solved. Here I shall use “secularisation” in the broad, intuitive sense, not with the specialised meanings of Victorian decline in church attendance, the transferral of property from church to state ownership, the consequences of the 1905 French Law on the Separation of the Churches and State, or a Dutch sociological phenomenon that began in the 1960s.1 As explained below, neither is secularisation synonymous with secularism, Erastianism or atheism, nor is it a necessary corollary of

1 ╇ A few writers resist the onslaught of overspecialised terminologies; see Fix, Prophecy. Fubini, Umanesimo. Hunter, Secularisation. The present broad and commonsensical usage of “secularisation” can be found in several languages, including d’Entrèves, Natural law, 50 ff. Klempt, Die Säkulärisierung. Léonard, Histoire Générale, t. 2. ch. 4. Todescan, Radici teologiche. “Laicization” is a useful term denoting a shift from clerical to lay cultural dominance. Parkinson, “Introduction,” 4-5.

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chapter one

state-building, rationalisation, empiricism, the Age of Discovery, or the personal accomplishment of Nietzsche, Hobbes, or Machiavelli. I also do not mean that the thinkers who contributed to secularisation were atheists, or that the separation of politics and religion is complete, continuous, or irreversible. The model I would like to propose combines broad forces with intense episodes. Some trends that contributed to secularisation, including counter-intuitively secularising ones like the increasingly minimalist definitions of Christianity, or Christianity’s in-built anti-political proclivities, have always been present. From time to time, the conflict between politics and ChrisÂ� tianity would intensify and demand an unusually focused set of responses. Groups of thinkers under these conditions, like the Italian “neoskeptics,” the French “new historians” or the German “irenic patriots,” developed responses that were clearer and touched on more aspects of Christianity’s admixture with other parts of European thought than the broader, generic trend of secularisation. Most of these groups came to a hasty end due to oppressive political circumstances. Their writings hastened and reformulated the broader response. Some of these thinkers’ formulation of what constitutes the unum necessarium to be a Christian, for instance, profoundly shifted the discourse. Their ideas would also be picked up and carried forward by another group that faced similar challenges. This is the model that emerged from my research, and the one I both illustrate in this book through the Leiden Circle and contextualise, hopefully broadly enough, for the other groups and the generic forces to become visible. I have no intention of resurrecting any of the ideology-driven accounts, bringing in non-historical methodologies, or oversimplifying the process and its glorious complexity, glossing over its non-linear, incremental, asynchronous and polygenetic features and its heavy dose of unintended consequences.2 Several distinctions are meant to support this bid for clarity. One is the above statement of research question and intention. Another is to anticipate some of the more obvious objections, namely that medieval religiosity is overstated, that many of the Renaissance and early modern secularisers I discuss were either profoundly religious or cryptoatheist agents of progress; that by focusing on a Protestant group of thinkers I risk neglecting secularisation’s cross-confessional appeal; or that the phrase ‘premature secularisation’ is a coherent objection to 2

╇ Hunter, Secularisation, 116.

introduction

3

any and all possible historical accounts of secularisation, and requires no further thought after its automatic deployment. Thanks to the wonderful opportunities I had to discuss my argument over more than a decade, with audiences and language communities in a dozen countries or so, I am mindful of these pitfalls. I will try to address them in the hope that from my dual focus on large historical forces and specific groups of secularisers, and from the refinements prompted by these valuable objections over the years, a good framework will emerge in which to make sense of the historical fact that is secularisation. The argument is not that atheists did not exist, but that Scaliger, Heinsius, Vossius, Cunaeus and Grotius secularised in the pursuit of peace, without being atheists. The process of secularisation is not identical with secularism as a norm. Ancient and even a handful of Renaissance and early modern philosophers found the exclusion of Christianity from political thinking a straightforward matter.3 MainÂ� stream European thought between the fourth and seventeenth centuries would not accommodate their secularism. Aristotle and MachiaÂ�velli, for instance, had an indisputably profound influence. Yet any attempt to use their ideas, on whatever subject, had to first reconcile them with the overwhelming intellectual predominance of Christianity. There were several ways of doing this. Aristotle had to be repackaged as a proto-Christian, or his ideas had to be presented as almost complete and almost perfect, missing only the touchstone of faith in Christ and redemption. Machiavelli received the highest accolade a political philosopher can get from posterity: his name became a term of abuse and accusation. His arguments were too troubling to accept, but too powerful to ignore. For most of early modernity, ‘Machiavellist’ was a charge that, if proved, put the culprit beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. In early modern English, the devil himor herself gained the nickname, ‘Old Nick’.4 The other, equally widespread way of reconciling the tension between Machiavelli and Christianity was to hide Machiavellian ideas inside pious arguments, and try to avoid even the shadow of attribution.5 The process of safely, 3 ╇ Durant describes the cases and debates provoked by four famous self-confessed atheists between 1428 and 1500. Renaissance. Also see Davidson, “Unbelief.” Cases of philosophical as well as popular atheism in seventeenth-century England are discussed in Hunter, “The problem of ‘atheism’.” Hunter and Wootton, Atheism. 4 ╇ Butler, Hudibras, Part iii, Canto i, LL1313-4. For further examples see Connell in Machiavelli, Prince, 3-4. 5 ╇ Evrigenis, Fear, chapter 4. Evrigenis and Somos, “Pact.”

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chapter one

irreversibly secularising mainstream political philosophy required more finesse and a more gradual approach than blunt statements of secularism. Secularisation, by contrast, refers to the process of gradual, and often unintentional, removal of Christian theology from all aspects of thought. From the fourth to the seventeenth century, Christian theology underpinned all aspects of thought, from the natural sciences to international relations (IR). As the Reformation eroded Catholic doctrinal monopoly, much of European thought broke down. ‘SecuÂ�lariÂ� sation’ is the process whereby Europe’s Weltanschauung was rebuilt without theology. Gradual secularisation was the least objectionable, whether in IR theory, the natural sciences, or formulations of sovereignty and legitimacy. Even the small steps provoked fierce controversy, before eventual acceptance or acquiescence. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was one of the larger steps in the absorption of interests and values into international law, now redefined without Christian legitimacy claims.6 In addition to territorially defined sovereignty and the severe curtailment of the universalising legal claims of the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Westphalia also settled the Wars of Religion with a series of territorial reshuffles and compensations in which the real losers were the Prince-Bishoprics, Bishoprics, and other political entities that amassed wealth and influence under the protection of ecclesiastical exemptions and privileges. The clearest and most powerful message of the Peace was that if the centuries-long religious conflict were to end, religious legitimacy claims would have to be abandoned. The other insight gained by distinguishing the process of secularisation from the norm of secularism is that there need not be a contradiction between the evidence that secularising thinkers were deeply religious, and between the secularising effect of their work. Clearheaded patriots and pacifists recognised that the religious basis of competing claims in all kinds of thought, from cosmology to epistemology, only served to perpetuate and institutionalise irreconcilable differences. Moreover, reducing or even eliminating the religious 6 ╇ All legal writing is an act of contestation. A “mainstream” can nonetheless be identified with reference to the consensus, whether used by the majority or disputed by the minority, regarding the terms, norms, and hallmarks of acceptable legal argument. A salient example of “mainstream” and its evolution is the ubiquity of Christian references in acceptable legal writing until the seventeenth century, and their absence today.

introduction

5

foundation of most aspects of thought—theology excepted—did not require denying the truth of Christianity. Epistemic humility, minimalism, ecumenism, the distinction of essential from inessential doctrines, the historicisation of the Bible and of the early church, and increased emphasis on man’s ignorance of the divine, were all readily available techniques with which one could disengage and stop the religious engine of conflict. Grotius’s deployment of a rich array of secularising techniques in De iure praedae, or Heinsius’s in De tragoediae constitutione, were direct responses to theologico-political debates raging around them at the time, threatening to break up the Republic. Their ingenious neutralisation of the religious component of the debates involved the denial not of the truth of Christianity, but of the possibility of applying theology to political problems. Their substantial contribution to secularisation does not mean that their public and private expressions of piety were hypocritical or disingenuous attempts to hide their atheism. An outright expression of atheism and secularist principles would not have been effective, in any case. The disengagement of theology and politics had to take place slowly and gradually, through detailed and tortuous debates every step of the way; otherwise the Christian mainstream and majority opinion of Renaissance and early modern Europe could simply refuse to listen, and disqualify the offered solutions as irrelevant, on account of ignoring the greatest motivation and the greatest good: eternal life through Christ. The motivation behind the process of secularisation was not atheism, but pacifism. The instrumental and procedural nature of secularisation makes its analysis harder, because it requires a wider view, a larger number of texts, and more detailed contextualisation than a straightforward interpretation of a set of atheistic texts would require. Yet it also makes analysis more rewarding, because the attendant contextualisation makes it possible to identify and compare groups of thinkers, like the French politiques and the English Arminians, who had an affinity with the Leiden secularisers, and who preceded or continued their secularising project by engaging in the same discourses in rather similar ways.7 This may make ‘secularisation’ as a phenomenon in intellectual 7 ╇ I appreciate the many particular differences between French politiques, and Dutch and English Arminians, but I find that Trevor-Roper’s generalised use of “Arminian” and “Socinian” to mean anti-Calvinist agents of progress, from the time before their eponyms’ birth until well into the Enlightenment, continues in some ways to be compelling. “Religious foundations.” At least one aspect of Trevor-Â�

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chapter one

history more diffuse, but also deeper and more powerful. In addition to the connections between the writings and the groups discussed below, understanding the procedural nature of secularisation also enables one to detect the underlying logic of the process that connects the secularisers. Most of them were pious Christians, who nonetheless found themselves in a position where the most promising way to guarantee peace was to remove aspects of ChrisÂ�tianity from whatever discourse was creating conflict. Republican secularisers argued against false friends and dangerous allies who justified the republican form of government as divinely ordained, and/or their nation as the divinely chosen one. Secularising astronomers had to refrain from justifying their findings and theories with reference to the Bible. Even a resounding and undisputed success in creating a new astronomical theory and justifying it on biblical grounds would not have achieved their purpose, which was to liberate their discipline from theological concerns. One also sees a trial-and-error pattern in secularisation. Many secularisers were faithful Christians, and their first instinct was to preserve as much as possible of Christianity’s omnipresent influence in the various disciplines. They removed Christian theology step by step, as and when they had to. After one successful step the debate would move to another aspect of Christianity’s entanglement with the given discipline. The secularising politique then followed up his or her previous argument with a new one; and so secularisation penetrated Â�further and further. The eventual outcome of the step-by-step, trialand-error, cumulative process of secularisation, namely the unacceptability of religious legitimacy claims in political discourse, was not necessarily the intention of the secularisers, who responded to immediate challenges. One finds the best of them, like Grotius and Locke, spending their last years trying to define a Christianity that can withstand the force of their own earlier arguments, which gave expression to the political imperative of pacifist secularisation.

Roper’s combination of these groups, in biblical exegesis, has a longer pedigree: ‘[David] Strauss always mentioned Socinians and Remonstrants in the same breath when he spoke of them as having paved the way for modern biblical interpretation.’ Daugirdas, “Biblical,” 89 fn3, with references. Van Kley, “Christianity,” 1087: ‘Viewed from the perspective of the late sixteenth century—to take the Germanic examples—the very tame Dutch Enlightenment looks like nothing quite so much as the revenge of Arminianism plus the new science of the late seventeenth century.’ Also Mulsow and Rohls, Preface to Socinianism.

introduction

7

2.╇ Method: Leiden as Illustration One can retrace the story of secularisation through several discourses or fields. Treatments of the Hebrew Republic, the figure of the lawgiver, biblical exegesis, methodological disputes in the natural Â�sciences, even drama theory are closely interlinked, sometimes overÂ� lapping, but still useful labels for discourses through which the same story can be told. Furthermore, secularisation was not a straightforward process. It had setbacks and limitations, like the disruption of the French politique project with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572). However, as the Reformation undermined all aspects of thought, and the intermingling of politics with religion made intellectual and violent conflict endemic, a certain secularising logic came into existence, instantiated by groups of thinkers here and there. They exerted a cumulative secularising effect even after falling victim to reaction. Convincing partial accounts exist of Swiss, Italian and French secularisation in the sixteenth century.8 This book considers the Dutch episode around the turn of the seventeenth century, from the opening of Leiden University in 1575 to the Synod of Dordt in 1618-9. This was a major turning-point in the broader history of secularisation, and illustrates superbly its complex, contingent and cumulative character. The first, smallest circle of contextualisation will connect some of the work at Leiden University with the political history of the young Republic, before drawing out their importance for the broader arc of Western secularisation. The Dutch reasons for secularisation could not be clearer. The Eighty Years’ War against the Habsburg Empire (1568-1648) required a closer union, but the country fragmented along several fault-lines. In the late sixteenth century the high nobility, rich merchants, peasants and the urban poor were mostly Catholics, while the middle classes and textile workers opted for some form of Protestantism. The rural northeast was predominantly Catholic. The Pacification of Ghent (1576), whereby the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries agreed to set aside their religious differences and unite against Spain, fell apart under religious pressure by 1579, when the ten southern provinces pledged allegiance in the Union of Arras to Catholicism and Spain. The other provinces countered with the Union of Utrecht, the 8

╇ Cochrane, Historians. Fubini, Umanesimo. Huppert, Idea.

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founding document of the Dutch Republic. The nation-creating vision of William the Silent (1533-84) for a tolerant and united Netherlands came to nothing, because his enemies could again and again put pressure on the Flemish-Wallon, Protestant-Catholic, rural-urban faultlines. Even the Protestant provinces continued to quarrel internally. Rifts appeared between the House of Orange and the leaders of Holland, eventually leading to Prince Maurice (1567-1625) teaming up with the Calvinists, and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) with the Arminians. Rivalry for control over Dutch domestic and foreign policy became entangled with religious disputes, threatening to lock the young nation into a self-destructive war.9 A long-term antidote had to be found to the religious and social divisions.10 In sum, the Dutch had to learn to neutralise, and institutionalise the neutralisation of, numerous sources of conflict and instability, including war with Spain, France, the Empire and the Papacy, domestic religious, ethnic and social differences, and destabilisingly rapid commercial and colonial expansion. They learnt at their own expense that conflicting claims that stake their validity on religious belief are ultimately irreconcilable. Increasingly, thinkers began to remove such claims from legal and political discourse. After its memorable foundation in 1575, Leiden University became the hothouse of secularising thought until 1618-19, when the Calvinist purge destroyed this experiment, and exiled or executed the leading figures of Dutch secularisation. 1618 was also the first year of the Thirty Years’ War, which in many ways signalled the political failure of the secularising experiment. Yet Leiden’s intellectually (if not politically) successful solution to the problems of theological politics had nevertheless laid new foun9 ╇ For an account of these complex events see Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic world, 18-33, 60-4. Idem, Dutch Republic, chapters 18-20. For the effect of the disputed religious components of the new self-identity on foreign policy, see van Eijnatten, “Religionis causa.” Plays portraying the Dutch as God’s new chosen people by Coornhert, Hooft, Vondel, Valerius, and Koning, are discussed in Breen, “GeÂ�Â� reformeerde,” especially 254-73 and 372-82. Schama, Embarrassment, 93-125. Smitskamp, Calvinistisch. Bodian, “Biblical.” Campos Boralevi, “Classical.” Groenhuis, De preÂ�diÂ�Â�kanten, especially 77-102. Perlove, “An irenic.” van Rooden, “Contesting.” Â�Frijhoff, “Religious.” For a misunderstanding that the United Provinces were relatively immune to religious tension because the Union of Utrecht was built on religious unity, see Carleton’s account of his conversation with Grotius in September 1617, in Milton, Political, 14. 10 ╇ Grell and Scribner, Tolerance. Israel, “Intellectual debate.” Idem, Dutch Republic. Tuck, Philosophy, chapter 5. Van Rooden, “Contesting,” section 1. Rohls, “Calvinism,” 3-8.

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dations for modernity. The thinkers there formed a remarkable rollcall, and the academic community they created is a distinctive and useful illustration of how the secularising discourse unfolded. What follows is a brief overview of the leading figures. 2.1.╇ The Leiden Circle Janus Dousa (1545-1604) was the first curator of the University, an office he held for nearly thirty years. His Annales of Holland had a great impact on Dutch historiography, and his son, Janus Dousa the Younger (1571-96), took the ancient constitutionalist Batavian argument, a secular alternative to the Dutch ‘chosen nation’ theories, closer to the standards of modern historiography.11 Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) treated ancient calendars and the Bible as equally reliable sources. In De emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurus temporum (1606) he extrapolated from them a unified linear chronology that put European awareness of time on a new footing. He also proved that the Hebrew language changed over the centuries, thereby gainsaying those who insisted that the Bible was an unchanging source of truth, not to be subjected to rational criticism.12 Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) was Professor of History at Leiden from 1579 to 1590. Here he perfected his editions of Tacitus and Seneca, and proved instrumental in the Stoic and Tacitist revival. His search for an end to the Wars of Religion often framed his works. Johannes Drusius (15501616), a close friend of Arminius and Scaliger, taught at Leiden from 1577 to 1585, making great strides in theological philology and textual criticism. He deeply influenced Cunaeus, and fundamentally shaped the project to publish the Bible in the vernacular.13 Arminius (1560-1609), Professor of Theology from 1603 to 1609, broke with Calvinist predestination and formulated a new doctrine of free will and salvation. He came to assert a conditional election, ╇ Waszink, Introduction to Grotius, Antiquity. ╇Scaliger’s Bible criticism and friendship with de Thou: de Jonge, “Study,” especially 76-87. Summaries and contexts of Scaliger’s debates about the status of Hebrew can be found in Bernays, Scaliger, 82-3. Burnett, Christian Hebraism. Droixhe, De l’origine, especially chapters 4-6. Idem, “La crise.” Grafton, Scaliger, II.624-41, 732-7, passim. Katchen, Christian Hebraists, 1-36. Goshen-Gottstein, “Foundations.” van Rooden, Theology. Olender, “Europe.” Woltjer, “Introduction.” 13 ╇ ‘Drusius’ literal-historical exegesis proves to have been especially appreciated as a method in which theological intentions play no role.’ Korteweg, De Nieuwtestamentische, 171. 11 12

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according to which God elects those who respond in faith to the divine offer of salvation. The year after his death the Remonstrance was composed by his followers, including Johannes Uyttenbogaert (15571644) and Simon Episcopius (1583-1643), both family friends of Grotius’s. Its five points stated that: (1) election (and condemnation on the Day of Judgement) was conditioned by man’s rational faith (or nonfaith); (2) the Atonement was efficacious only for the men of faith; (3) unaided by the Holy Spirit, one cannot respond to God’s will; (4) grace is not irresistible, and (5) believers are able to resist sin but they are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace. The crux of Remonstrant Arminianism was that dignity and responsibility are untenable without freedom of will.14 The Remonstrance was condemned by the Dutch Reformed Church at the 1618-19 Synod of Dordt, but achieved legal toleration in 1630.15 The Calvinists’ persecution of their Remonstrant compatriots was a historical milestone, and a lesson and warning to thinkers who contributed to the transformation of England into a tolerant, effectively secularised state.16 It was also under Arminius’s influence that Conrad Vorstius (1569-1622) and Johannes Cocceius (1603-69) made their contributions to confederative theology, in which all parties are bound by a voluntary contract or covenant. As previously the absolute power of monarchs was derived from an analogy with God, now both God and kings became accountable, and inevitably diminished in stature.17 Modern politics and secularisation connected: individual responsibility proved to be the price of autonomy, in religion as well as in politics. Petrus Scriverius (1576-1660), a great historian and ancient constitutionalist, spent most of his life in Leiden as a facilitator of the secularising project. Gerhardus Vossius (1577-1649), a lifelong friend of Grotius, mastered the Classics, Hebrew, church history, theology, ╇ “Arminian” and “Remonstrant” are not synonymous. Katchen, Christian, 20-1, reviews one possible distinction, between Arminianism as a cultural and the Remonstrance as a political movement. Unless applied to England, the terms will be used interchangeably here, as this book’s focus is on the Netherlands before 1619, and the cultural, theological, and political aspects of the Leiden Circle are studied in their unity. 15 ╇ And political toleration after 1627. Israel, “Frederick Henry.” 16 ╇ Trevor-Roper, “Religious foundations.” Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists. Marshall, Locke, toleration. Blom, “Foreign gods.” Mortimer in Reason discusses the English reception of Dutch Arminianism (see e.g. ch. 3). 17 ╇ Bryson, Tyranny. Bodian, “Biblical,” 194-6. 14

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rhetoric, and grammar. Despite his moderate views, he was accused of heresy in 1619, and forced to resign from Leiden. After three years he returned as Professor of Rhetoric and Chronology, a position he held for ten years. He made pioneering contributions to the secularisation of historiography and the comparative anthropology of religion.18 Episcopius studied theology at Leiden before becoming Professor of Theology in 1612, succeeding the Counter-Remonstrant Franciscus Gomarus (1563-1641). In Institutiones theologicae he systematised Arminianism, asserting that God’s sovereignty and man’s free will are compatible. He was the Remonstrants’ spokesman at Dordt, but he was refused a hearing and exiled until Prince Maurice’s death in 1625. This generation also includes Antonius Walaeus (1573-1639), Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Petrus Cunaeus (1586-1638) and Johannes Borelius (1577-1629). The famous Grotius was one of Scaliger’s favourite pupils, and was also influenced in his Leiden student days by Uyttenbogaert and Episcopius.19 The secularising significance of many of his early works, including De republica emendanda, Meletius, Ordinum pietas and De imperio, awaits detailed analysis. Cunaeus, a friend and peer to Grotius at Leiden, is best remembered as the author of De Republica Hebraeorum (1617), where he deployed Scaliger’s historical method to advance a radically secularising agenda. One of the book’s great merits—recognised by contemporaries and into the nineteenth century—was that it compared OT stories with ancient histories as fully equiparant, and gave an ethnographic description of the Hebrew Republic under God’s direct rule. Cunaeus also showed that legal continuity from the divine commonwealth was already broken, irreparably and several times, within the OT account of Jewish history. Moreover, the divine commonwealth was so closely linked to Jerusalem that its legitimacy was non-transferable to begin with. Cunaeus’s historicisation of the divine commonwealth, along with his emphasis on its non-transferability and on the broken chain of succession, made it intellectually impossible to use ancient Israel as a source of right claims and the model of postbiblical ‘divine’ forms of government. This second generation of the Leiden Circle also included Heinsius and Vossius. Their contributions 18 ╇ Rademaker, Life. Idem, Introduction to Vossius, Geschiedenis. Wickenden, Vossius. 19 ╇ Eyffinger, “The Dutch period.”

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to secularisation similarly extended the Scaligerian historiographical method into a comprehensive system of Symbolforschung and a comparative anthropology of religion, which overrode Christianity’s truth-claims and rendered it comparable to other religions in every respect. Cocceius, Louis de Dieu (1590-1642), the great Constantijn l’EmpeÂ� reur (1591-1648), Johann Friedrich Gronovius (1611-71), Franciscus Sylvius (1614-72) and Levinus Warner (1619-65) belong to the next generation. Enjoying a rapprochement with the House of Orange after the late 1620s, they revived the discourses established by their predecessors, and also made Leiden a centre for Hebrew and Karaite research.20 Thanks to first-rate partial accounts, it is now possible to show the intellectual continuities within the Leiden Circle, the coordinated division of labour among its members, and the secularising import of their work.21 2.1.1.╇ A Thickening Description: Illustration and Contextualisation The Leiden Circle is an illuminating synecdoche of my overall argument. Given Grotius’s continued prominence in discussions of international law today, it is both an iconic and substantive illustration of how secularisation unravelled. Its members, influencing each other and carefully co-ordinating divisions of labour, worked on several of the aforementioned discourses. Using Leiden to illustrate the wider secularisation thesis, I will show how Scaliger’s historiographical innoÂ�vations enabled Heinsius to secularise the figure of Christ and the Christian version of immortality; how Cunaeus was able to neutralise the Old Testament commonwealth in political discourse; and how Grotius could take a major step toward the secularisation of law. I will ╇ Excellent accounts of Hebrew studies at Leiden: Brugman, “Arabic scholarship.” Van Rooden, Theology, chapters 3-4. Summaries of theological arguments from the Leiden Circle: de Jonge, “Grotius as an interpreter.” Platt, Reformed thought, chapter 6. Van Asselt, Federal theology. Yoffie, “Cocceius.” Hillerbrand, “Covenant.” McCoy, Fountainhead. Weir, Origins. 21 ╇ Meursius, Illustris Academia Lugd-Batava. Further editions under different titles appeared in 1614 and 1625. Although outstanding books have been written about Leiden University and the lives of, and interaction between, some of its members, there is no previous monograph on the Leiden Circle’s collective work and its significance for the history of political thought. Land, “Philosophy.” Hulshoff Pol, The first century. Posthumus Meyjes et al, Leiden University. Ekkart, Athenae Batavae. Berkvens-Stevelinck, Magna commoditas. Dibon, La philosophie néerlandaise. Grafton, “Civic humanism.” Blok, History, III.347-8. De Jonge, “The study.” 20

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also refer to French, Italian and English thinkers, and discourses like the nature of man, epistemology, ‘new science’, the origins of laws, and imperialism, to give a broader geographical and intellectual context to the Leiden secularising project. Yet even within the Circle only four thinkers, Scaliger, Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius will be discussed in detail. Notably absent members include Vulcanius, FranÂ� ciscus Junius the Elder, Lipsius, Scriverius, Dousa the Elder, and Vossius. The chronological cut-off point also means that Spinoza (1632-77) and the Peace of Westphalia, both with strong causal ties to the Leiden Circle, are beyond our immediate focus. There are advantages and disadvantages to this illustrative method and such a narrow focus. The main disadvantage is the disproportionate relationship between the proof offered and the larger claim concerning secularisation. However, it is hard to see what could provide a better proof of a claim of this nature. The survey of instances of secularising techniques at work in particular discourses could be greatly extended, and it still would not prove much unless one also reviewed the counterarguments, i.e. the religious and anti-secularising works. The unique features of secularising works are hard to appreciate without their juxtaposition with early modern reactionaries, who carried on with essentially medieval doctrines. The larger the sample of secularising works discussed, the stronger the ‘source selection bias’, the impression that the secularising features belonged to mainstream thought, as opposed to being rare and exceptional. Using a larger sample of secularising texts and bringing out their unique features through juxtaposition with rival works of political philosophy, science and other disciplines, leads to additional bulk without much added value. The story of secularisation must be illustrated; an abbreviated, oversimplified overview would explain not a smaller part of the story, but nothing. Occasionally one finds majestic and coherent overviews, like Dibon’s, Grafton’s, Weinberg’s, Parsons’ or Rummel’s, with a richness of detail that captures and conveys the originals.22 These are precise and comprehensive, but daunting to imitate. A survey of secularisation, in a bid for fidelity to the subject matter, would run from the life of Christ through the 1291 Federal Charter between Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden and the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant between ╇ Dibon, La philosophie néerlandaise. Grafton, Scaliger. Weinberg, A history. Â�Parsons, Church. Rummel, Humanist-scholastic. 22

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English parliamentarians and Scottish Presbyterians, to some prominent features of the political landscape today. While these are all essential steps in understanding the history of secularisation, presenting them at once is difficult. One must strike a balance between overgeneralisation and encyclopaedism. The best policy is to use a subÂ�stantial illustration, with plenty of outward-pointing connections, and extensive use of reliable secondary literature. To ward against source seletion bias, contrasts will also be offered, such as Kepler against Scaliger, Balzac to Heinsius, or Welwod and Grotius. Another useful contrast to bring out the features of secularisation is the medieval background. A cursory overview helps to appreciate the nature, strength and omnipresence of the religious mentality that the secularisers set out to overcome. 3.╇ The Medieval Background 3.1.╇ The Omnipresence of Theology: Generic Problems and Solutions Christianity and politics never made for an easy alliance. Early ChrisÂ� tians denounced Roman imperial ideology as false, branded the polytheism that enabled cohesion among the numerous cultures and ethnic groups sinful, and waited for Christ to return, defeat the Romans, and establish his Kingdom. Rome reacted with persecution at first. After the Edict of Milan (313), Christians developed three basic positions: (I) some continued to abhor the combination of Christianity with Roman patriotism, (II) others thought that worldly affairs were irrelevant to salvation, and (III) some accepted Rome as God’s instrument, or even the promised kingdom.23 Several schisms 23 ╇See Burns, Cambridge history, esp. sections I and III. Markus, The end. Walker, Ancient, 7-10. To understand the process of secularisation it is more important to grasp the dynamic between these positions than to force actual thinkers and writings into one of these three abstract, ideal-type positions. Yet if one had to show speciÂ� ficity behind the generalisations, within the period of early Christianity between the 2nd and 4th century AD one could name Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Tertullian as advocates of religious supremacy over per se meaningless worldly affairs. The Desert Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Lactantius and perhaps John Cassian belong to the same group, but because of their assertion of man’s definite epistemic limitations. Eusebius and Orosius were Reichstheologen, while Athanasius, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Meletius of Antioch took the position championed by Augustine. These three positions will be clarified below with particular references to historioÂ� graphy, the discourse chosen as the starting-point of this particular illustration of

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took place very early on, and the slowly and somewhat haphazardly formulated orthodoxy rarely, if ever, managed to reverse them. Arian, Pelagian, Nestorian and other heresies shadow the whole history of Christianity, even if they did not always assume a form that the secular powers could or would suppress.24 By the fall of Rome, conventionally dated to the abdication of Romulus Augustus in 476, Christianity penetrated all fields of thought. A concentrically widening description of Christianity’s redefinition of agency begins with the individual: in the medieval worldview, the greatest good that he or she could achieve was eternal life, compared to which life on earth was but a brief trial. The family was one of several divinely ordained arenas for practising responsibility and earning salvation. The local community, the sense of belonging to a nation and a state (as much as one existed), the three orders of those who work, fight, and pray, and the community of all Christians, were the sources for individual and communal self-definitions and identities. These identities and the intellectual, cultural and social systems that created and sustained them were permeated deeply by an ideology in which theology and politics were wholly interwoven. They began to be clearly separated only in the last few centuries, through a process of secularisation that remains incomplete. The claim to universality made by Judaism and Christianity are often lumped together.25 It is important to remember, however, that the religious precepts of Judaism are not apolitical, while Christianity’s relationship with the secular powers is more chequered - in other words, the dichotomy of secular and religious is part of one’s universalism, but not of the other’s. Easy as it might be to politicise ChrisÂ� tianity, it is nevertheless an ideology with no built-in political comÂ�Â�ponents. It is self-contained and self-sufficient without politics. This wedge between non-political and political spheres or communities was driven in, if not fashioned, by Augustine, who redefined populus in terms of a telos external to political life, overturning the secularisation. The same positions could be introduced and illustrated through other discourses, notably the Christian approaches to the earthly state, the hierarchy of laws (divine, natural and civil), the figure of law-givers like Solon and Moses, and international relations. 24 ╇See, for instance, Nystrom and David, History, chapters 3-10. The continuity and recurrence of heresies was recognised throughout the ages; e.g. Vossius’s reaction to accusations against the Remonstrants was to publish his Historia Pelagiana (1618). See also Wiles, Archetypal, especially on Locke and Newton. 25 ╇Nietzsche, Genealogy. Spengler, Decline.

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self-contained Aristotelian and Ciceronian scheme and converting the state from the means of acquiring virtue into a badge of lost innocence and an irreparably ineffectual corrective to the postlapsarian condition.26 The Augustinian modus vivendi between Christianity and politics (III) gave rise to numerous theories concerning the relationship between these arenas. Ideologies of national churches and ‘chosen people’ arguments emerged, and holy wars were waged against Muslims, heretics, and occasionally between and within Christian states. These arguments relied fundamentally and extensively on the interpretation of biblical passages, deploying for political ends several or all of the interpretative levels of Christian hermeneutics (e.g. literal, allegorical, symbolic and anagogical), and/or on interpretations of the divine will, as manifested in Nature and the Bible.27 A salient set of examples comes from the range of so-called ‘two swords’ theories, built around one short verse, Luke 22.38: ‘And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.’ Did Jesus mean, argued the exegetes, that regnum and sacerdotium, the secular and the spiritual rulers, both have the power of coercion? Or does the Pope’s sword refer only to his power of excommunication? Or do both swords belong to the king or emperor, but he must wield one (or both) at the command of the Pope?28 Another example, of great importance for the history of political thought, is the category of theories of state that drew on the Old Testament description of Jahveh’s reign over Israel, elected by the people, confirmed by the covenant, and represented by Moses and the High Priests.29 Nobody could doubt that the best form of government was the one instituted by God; the disagreements arose about what this form actually was. Was it a theocracy, a monarchy (absolute, limited or constitutional, depending on the interpretation of God’s election and covenant), or an aristocracy, given the importance of the elders in negotiating with God and performing religious and political 26 ╇ Geuss, Public goods. Somos, “Augustine.” Morrison, “Rome.” Nietzsche, Genealogy, 106: ‘Christian asceticism’ and other-worldliness as ressentiment. 27 ╇ De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. 28 ╇ An instance of this, discussed in detail below, is the Melchizedek controversy, and Grotius’s efforts in De iure praedae to neutralise it. 29 ╇ This is the age-old, powerful debate that Cunaeus secularised in De Republica Hebraeorum, a work I hope to discuss in more detail in the future. For more on this theme see Campos Boralevi, “Classical foundational myths.” Sutcliffe, Judaism. Nelson, Hebrew Republic. Articles in Hebraic Political Studies, 2005-.

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duties? Or was it perhaps a federation of tribes and territories, where councils constituted the main legislative—and, in some readings, also judicial—authority? Or a republic, since the approval of all Jews was required to make God a ruler in the first place, just as vox populi later replaced God with Saul? These and many other interpretations were derived from the Bible. They all gave rise to competing legal claims, feeding endemic battles between medieval and early modern monarchists, papal apologists, monarchomachi, conciliarists, aristocratic parliamentarians, republicans, democrats and communitarians.30 Christianity also played a defining role in international relations. The concepts of Corpus Christianorum and respublica Christiana or Christendom emerged, according to which Christian countries, and all Christians, constitute a single body in which the integrity and welfare of all members is in the interest of all.31 Other theories were built upon the doctrines of the creation of man in God’s own image, the love of fellow men, the stewardship that God gave man over all Creation, and the universal truth of Christianity. The ideology behind human rights and international courts are descendants of these theories.32 The history of the debates, the schools, trains of thought and practical solutions is complex and fascinating. For the present purpose we only need to note that there is not a single area of European thinking, science included, where Christian theology did not exert a direct and profound influence. The issues which today fall under the cognisance of the state, including the right to tax and punish, conduct foreign policy and regulate commerce, were shaped by contesting Bible interpretations, the distinction between sacred and secular histories, and other theological doctrine. 3.1.1.╇ IR Theology: Just War Theories during the Crusades Just war theories, already well-established, flourished during the crusades. Apologists continued to rely on three tried-and-tested forms of 30 ╇ An example of several interpretations used by one regime is in Barber, “World picture.” The variety of the political uses of a single passage is superbly introduced in Walzer, “Exodus 32,” and in Housley, “Pro deo.” Numerous instances are discussed in Burns, Cambridge history. The importance and historical continuity of the Bible’s role in politics is well shown in two complementary works: Housley, Religious, and Mastnak, Crusading. In this age democrats were rare and silent, though not nonexistent—e.g. Wycliffe. Fortescue, Difference. Starkey, Dialogue. 31 ╇ Figgis, “Respublica Christiana.” Bainton, Attitudes. Barnes, “Just war.” 32 ╇ Douzinas, Human rights.

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just war justification: first, that since only Christians were saved, it was their duty and right to spread their faith, even at the material and worldly discomfort of the heathen. Second, the whole world should rightfully be Christian. The fact that God chose not to make it so shows that it is a sacred duty and a test for Christians to expand territorially by conquest, and numerically through conversion. Pagans and heretics were better off suppressed and subjected to bodily discomfort than receiving no instruction and ending up in Hell.33 According to the third argument, since God is omnipotent and rewards the good, every battle, even those between Christians, had the aspect of a judicial duel and an appeal to Heaven.34 Medieval international relations theory often drew on these arguments. The counterarguments also fell into a pattern: Christ refused to use violence, and his followers should imitate Him.35 Walter Map was one of many who argued against the crusades on these grounds.36 Nonetheless, a major motivation to go on a crusade, or contribute towards it, was the papal promise of the remission of sins. Leo IV (847-855) and John II (878) have already made such promises, but it was only with the crusades that the exchange became standard procedure.37 As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) wrote about Israel in In praise of the new knighthood, ‘Hail promised land, source of milk and honey for your ancient inhabitants, now become the source of healing grace and vital sustenance for the whole earth! Yes, I say, you are that good and excellent soil which received into its fruitful depths the heavenly seed from the heart of the eternal Father. What a rich harvest of martyrs you have produced from that heavenly seed!’ There are three discourses we need to touch on briefly to flesh out European IR thought during the crusades: the concept of unitary Christendom, kinship, and the Second Coming.

╇ Brundage, Medieval. The crusades. Moore, Formation. Mastnak, Crusading. Walzer, Just. 34 ╇ Fawtier, Capetian, 64-5. 35 ╇ The early modern proponents of this view included the Mennonites, whom Marnix, Grotius and other secularisers thought to be reprehensibly naïve and inexcusably fanatical. Since all religious doctrines, including the foundations of Christian pacifism, have become a matter of debate by the late sixteenth century, the only way to put a permanent end to religious conflict was to create a secular worldview and a rationale for pacifism that was based on secular principles. 36 ╇ Walter Map, De nugis curialium, I.20, 60. 37 ╇ Housley, Contesting, 55-7. Hehl, “War,” 208-14. 33

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Corpus Christianorum In Hierosolymita, his chronicle of the first crusade, Ekkehard of Aurach (d. 1126) gives a long account of the multitude and variety of people who joined the crusade. ‘Thus, through the marvellous and unexampled working of divine dispensation, all these members of Christ, so different in speech, origin, and nationality, were suddenly brought together as one body through their love of Christ.’38 The fact that such different peoples united in one cause proved, he argued, the divine inspiration behind the event. Corpus Christianorum arguments multiplied as Latin Christians came together in the crusades, partly out of solidarity with the Oriental Christians, whom they previously often regarded as rivals, schismatics and pretenders to the true religion. Hitherto little-known sects, like the Melkites, were invited to celebrate mass in the royal courts of Europe to attest to the newly rediscovered unity of Christendom.39 This ecumenical spirit did not stop Byzantines and Europeans from in-fighting, as the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 spectacularly demonstrated; but in Western international relations theory such conflicts became harder to justify with religious arguments, and tended to draw down the full weight of papal, royal and monastic theorists’ condemnation for centuries to come.40 The importance attached to the ostensibly restored unity of ChrisÂ� tendom explains both the universal condemnation of the capture of Constantinople, and the laws of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem concerning the integration of Oriental Christians.41 The new forms ╇ Cited in Robinson, Readings, I.316. ╇ Kennedy, “The Melkite.” Meyendorff, “The medieval.” Nicol, “The unity.” An appreciation of Grotius’s originality depends on recognising the continuities between this medieval move toward Christian ecumenism in international relations and the writings of Balthazar Ayala, Suárez, de Soto and Vitoria. Although their writings defined a broad spectrum, from scholastic justifications of forced conversion and the enslavement of non-Christians, to acknowledgements of non-Christian civilisation, right to property, and status in international law, nevertheless Christianity remained a touchstone of recognition in one form or another. By contrast, Grotius’s extension of the ecumenist tradition in his international relations theory, from Meletius through De iure belli ac pacis to De veritate, extends naturally from Christians to all mankind. This aspect of Grotius’s originality is discussed in detail in the Grotius chapter below. Schmitt, Nomos. Tuck, Rights. Kochi, Other’s. 40 ╇ Runciman, The fall. Efforts to launch new crusades persisted well into the eighteenth century. Housley, “Clement.” “Politics.” The later crusades. Crusading. Religious warfare. 41 ╇ Edbury, “Law.” Richard, Croisades. Prawer, Latin Kingdom. Riley-Smith, Feudal nobility. 38 39

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and depth of the Corpus Christianorum discourse meant that certain biblical passages, hitherto interpreted as parables or analogies, were now re-read literally and gave rise to fanciful genealogies and legitimacy claims, making Europeans even less tolerant of Muslims. Those who reached the Holy Land and settled down, however, quickly discovered that there were practical limits to converting or expelling Muslims. They gradually came to a comfortable modus vivendi. Those who remained in Europe, and those who reached the Holy Land after the crusader kingdoms were consolidated, often found themselves at loggerheads with those who had lived there for a while. There are many papal bulls and travellers’ accounts that show how the strong version of the Corpus Christianorum discourse deepened the rift between Christians and non-Christians in medieval IR theories.42 With very few exceptions, the political theory of Latin Christianity could not accommodate the practice of amicable relations with Muslims, just as it rarely managed to excuse or justify the atrocities on Byzantium.43 For a half millenium before the Treaty of Westphalia, accusations of ungodly collaboration and bans against trade with Muslims and other infidel were as common an occurrence as the persecution of Jews, the condemnation of Venice and crusader greed, and the breakdown of new crusading schemes due to European rulers’ treachery, suspicion, and reiterated breaches of faith. Kinship: The Family of all Christians, inheriting the Holy Land Another prominent justification was that since Christ was king in the Holy Land, and Latin Christians the new chosen people, they had a legitimate claim of possession. Their property was inherited from God, their common father. The kinship was taken so literally that it became fashionable among crusader nobles, most of whom returned to Europe, to bring back objects and stories to prove their descent from a particular biblical figure.44 Kinship provided several justifications for war, as it also evoked deep-seated rules of vendetta for the Muslims’ alleged murder of Oriental Christians. Gregory VII’s 1074 call for a crusade consists of little more than arguments from kinship. Syrian Christians have to be saved, because ‘a pagan race had over42 ╇ Barber, Crusaders. D’Alverny, La connaissance. Housley, “Politics.” Moore, Formation. Disagreements between long-term settlers and newcomers: ibn Munqidh, Memoirs. Joinville, Chronicles. Gabrieli, Arab historians. 43 ╇ Daniel, Islam. Hallam, Chronicles. Southern, Western. Tolan, Medieval. 44 ╇ Runciman, “Medieval history.” Balard, Autour.

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come’ them, and the ‘bond of fraternal love’ obliges Latin Christians to intervene.45 The Second Coming Another form of argument concerned the Second Coming: Christ would return only when the Holy Land was settled by believers. Europeans were quite willing to try. Sermons, mystery plays, devotional exercises, processions that re-enacted the Stages of the Cross, and many other forms of popular and high religious culture combined to create a European mental map of the Levant that was often more detailed and precise than what Europeans had of their own country or region.46 We now have archaeological evidence for the systematic settlement of Franks in the Levant.47 The belief that the Second Coming would take place after “the new Jews” settled in the Holy Land was not an inconsiderable motivation behind this process.48 Another form of this argument was that it was the original Jews who have to be settled in the Holy Land for Christ to return; this belief shapes the fortunes of Israel to this day.49 3.2.╇ A Specific Example: The Reign of Philip IV The reign of every medieval European king after Clovis I (466-511) adds its own evidence to the survey of the particularly European combination of theology and politics. Some of them, including Pippin, Charlemagne, the Ottonians, Edward III of England, the Emperor Henry II, Louis IX of France, and a host of others, could serve as com╇ Bull, Knightly. Riley-Smith, The first crusaders. ╇ Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux. Katzir, “The conquests.” Kedar, Sacred. Wright, Geographical lore. 47 ╇Shatzmiller, Crusaders. On settlement: Benvenisti, Crusaders. Boas, “The Frankish.” Ellenblum, Frankish. On trade: Ashtor, Studies. On intermarriage: Fulcher, A history. Morgan, “The meanings.” Nicol, Byzantium, Section IV. On religious syncretism unexpectedly emerging in the intermittent absence of organised zealotry: Bowman, “Christian ideology.” Edgington, “The doves.” Elad, Medieval Jerusalem. Grabar, Martyrium. Grabois, Civilisation. Hahn, “Loca Sancta.” Kennedy, “The Melkite church.” Maraval, Lieux saints. Ousterhout, The blessings. Wilkinson, “Jewish.” On the emerging culture of tolerance and syncretising art see Elisséeff, “Les échanges.” Folda, The art. Kühnel, Crusader art. On legal assimilation: Edbury, “Law and custom.” On technology: Cahen, “Les changements.” Pryor, Commerce. Watson, Agricultural. White, “The crusades.” 48 ╇ Kedar, Crusade. Maier, Preaching; Crusade. Rubin, “Christianity.” For Muslim reaction: ibn al-Furāt, Ayyubids. Ibn Munqidh, Memoirs. Gabrieli, Arab historians. Hallam, Chronicles. Sivan, L’Islam. 49 ╇ Gilbert, Jerusalem; Jerusalem: rebirth. Sinclair, Jerusalem. 45 46

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pelling illustrations of the omnipresence of Christian theology in every aspect of medieval politics. Since Christianity became an essential part of theories on international relations, sovereignty, and other facets of medieval political thought, a publicly atheist or apostate ruler posed a threat to the whole fabric of medieval Europe.50 Philip IV is only one of the possible, though one of the strongest, illustrations of theology’s omnipresence. He is a particularly good example because his rule is sometimes seen as the maturation, even the birth of Gallicanism, and sometimes as the first formulation of secular, etatist sovereignty.51 I disagree with this assessment. Pointing out some problems with backprojecting early modern notions to elements of Philip’s reign, from territorial expansion to the reconceptualisation of state sovereignty as unitary and indivisible, can elucidate the extent and continuity of Christianity’s effect on politics, and underline thereby the magnitude of the task and achievements of Renaissance and early modern secularisers. Teleology is not explanation. The model of secularisation as a cumulative, stop-start, polygenetic, and historically contingent process does not readily fit into those genealogies of nation-states and the modern world order that assume the necessity of rationalisation and centralisation, or an intrinsic connection between secularisation and either. 3.2.1.╇ The Sacrosanct State and its Gallican Church There are several indications that Philip was more pious, not to say fanatic, than his peers. His vision of the French monarchy and his own place in it was strongly rooted in his religious convictions. In letters and commands Philip regularly justified his actions with refer50 ╇ Ecclesiastical authorities’ attack on the feudal structure provides a trenchant set of examples. Well-known instances include the numerous papal excommunications of kings and emperors, and releases of their vassals from their oath of fealty. Gregory VII’s excommunication and deposition of Henry IV in 1076 was taken seriously by Henry’s subjects. The social and political consequences of Alexander III’s excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa in 1160, the four excommunications of Frederick II, Innocent III’s excommunication of John of England, and other such cases (including interdicts and other measures by councils, bishops and church officials) illustrate the difficulty of considering medieval Christianity and politics separately. 51 ╇ Fawtier, Capetian. Strayer, Reign; Medieval. Ertman, Birth. Pethő, Démosz. Spruyt, The sovereign. Tilly, Cities. This is partly the responsibility of some historians who regard Philip IV’s break with the papacy as the establishment of a ‘new monarchy.’ The break was, however, accompanied by the re-foundation of a Gallican Church ideology.

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ence to the divine character of his kingship. In addition to the usual theological idiom, the documents from Philip’s reign employ substantive religious justifications, including Clement’s 1311 bull, Rex gloriae: ‘like the people of Israel [...] the kingdom of France, as a peculiar people chosen by God to carry out divine mandates, is distinguished by marks of special honour and grace.’52 Another example of using biblical scenes as a source of legitimacy claims is a speech by Plaisians, one of Philip’s lawyers, at the condemnation of the Templars. Plaisians described Philip as ‘so great and so Catholic a prince, minister of Christ in this affair,’ that he is justified in seizing the Templars and their property without papal agreement.53 Philip was renowned for his personal piety and austere morals. When visiting young noblemen were accused of seducing his cousins, he castrated the supposed offenders without an investigation.54 He also regarded his dynasty, which turned out to end with him, as sacrosanct. It was only due to immense pressure from Philip that Boniface VIII canonised Louis IX, the only French king to attain this status in the Catholic Church.55 With careful instructions for the physical presÂ� entation of the sanctity of his dynasty at Saint-Denis, drawing on the official sainthood of his grandfather and by rewriting his family’s history to connect the Capetians with the founding kings of France, Philip established a basis of divine legitimacy that he drew on heavily

52 ╇ Cited by Strayer, The reign, 295, and by Pethő, Démosz, 108, in the context of the emergence of European notions of sovereignty. Another example used to portray Philip IV as the father of a new kind of nation-state is the convocation of the Estates in 1308: ‘You know that it is the Catholic faith by which we remain that which we are in Christ; by which we live, by which in this way we, exiled and liable to death, are ennobled in the Lord Jesus Christ, in order that we may be with Christ the true sons of the living God, our eternal father, and also heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. This most beautiful hope comforts us; this then is our whole substance. If someone therefore strives to break this chain, he tries to kill us Catholics; Christ is the way to us, the life and the truth. Who then can deny him, by whom and in whom we subsist, who is not acting to destroy us?’ 53 ╇ Barber, Trial. Pegues, Lawyers. 54 ╇ Brown analysed this and other such cases before concluding: ‘Philip emerges as a person primarily interested not in the individuals who had supported and served him but rather in the means he could employ to gain his own salvation.’ “The prince,” 298. 55 ╇ Although even Voltaire suggested canonising Henri IV, the politique king discussed below. Homily on superstition, 116-7, 119.

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and often.56 In Strayer’s apt phrase, Philip saw himself as ‘the high priest of the religion of monarchy.’57 3.2.2.╇ Crown vs. Tiara: Boniface VIII, Clement V and the Avignon Papacy His exalted view of the French monarchy explains much about Philip’s reign. He had a long and bitter dispute with Boniface VIII, reportedly ending with Boniface’s death from fasting induced by shame after Nogaret, one of Philip’s lawyers, slapped him.58 His successor, Clement V, was the first of the Avignon popes. Philip effectively abducted and forced him to set up court there. As Neander summed it up, ‘The popes at Avignon were often little better than tools of the French kings, who used their spiritual power to promote the ends of French policy. They served those kings in matters which stood in most direct contradiction to their spiritual vocation.’59 The Avignon Papacy commanded little respect in Europe, and anti-popes became common. The ensuing series of scandalous schisms directly caused the rise of conciliarism. Although conciliarism profoundly shaped theories of corporatism, federalism and parliamentary representation well into the nineteenth century, it was still thoroughly religious.60

╇ Brown, “The prince,” 315: ‘Thus it is particularly interesting that, according to one chronicle, Philip the Fair declared to agents of Boniface VIII that his ancestors, under God’s direction, had won the kingdom of France from the infidels and turned it to the Catholic faith, an evident allusion to Clovis, and that he held the realm, as he had received it from his ancestors, from God alone.’ Strayer, The reign, 387: ‘Such beliefs gave Philip a tremendous advantage; it was difficult to oppose a ruler who had received evident marks of divine favor and who was unquestionably a pious Christian.’ On Philip’s use of Louis: Hallam, “Royal burial,” 362. 57 ╇Strayer, The reign, 3. 58 ╇ Pegues, The lawyers. Wood, Philip. 59 ╇Neander, General history, iv.29. See also Housley, “Pope Clement V.” Barber, The trial, 112: ‘The dynamic, reforming papacy of Gregory VII, Urban II and Innocent III had often had to fight grim battles for its independence, but these had been on the heroic scale between participants of roughly equal power, a giant battle between the two competing universal powers of Papacy and Empire, whereas Â�Clement found himself driven into a sordid and essentially unequal struggle in which he could only manoeuvre and wriggle, and from which he could never decisively break free.’ 60 ╇See the excellent Oakley, Conciliarist tradition. Brundage, Medieval canon law. Burns, “Conciliarism.” Burns and Izbicki, Conciliarism and papalism. Figgis, “Respublica Christiana.” Idem, From Gerson. Tierney, Religion. Ullmann, Principles. Monahan, Personal, especially Part Two. 56

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“State” and “nation” made great strides toward disengaging themselves from the papacy’s doctrinal influence. It is, however, a mistake to see this process of disengagement as identical with secularisation and/or rationalisation. The concepts of state, nation and sovereignty often remained deeply religious, and merely appropriated, rather than replaced, Catholic ideology. The royal strengthening of the Gallican Church, the ‘religion of monarchy’ that enabled a frontal assault on the Papacy, and the idea of the French as God’s chosen nation, do not resemble or prefigure today’s secular worldview.61 Unsecularised state theories and conciliarist experiments in representation reproduced the same irresolvable political conflicts as any other brand of political theology, including papal absolutism. ‘Chosen nation’ ideologies grew into deceptively modern-looking nation-state theories. 3.2.3.╇ Expansion and Centralisation Philip the Fair is known mainly as a state-builder and centraliser. He conquered Flanders, reformed the treasury and the civil service, and reined in the nobility. General taxes were introduced for the first time, and a great number of permanent institutions were set up, from the Chambre des Comptes to the juges-mages, providing the core of French civil service for centuries to come. The extraordinary ceremonial and legal rhetoric unrolled by the court for both the centralisation and the territorial expansion programmes brings out the extent to which Philip regarded the French state as a sacrosanct entity, and a divine trust.62 The period known as the Avignon Papacy also saw the foundation and extension of the Gallican Church. Philip usually managed to put his own people into the church offices even against the protestations of Boniface, who had his own nominees (unlike Clement V). Civil servants came from the Church throughout the Middle Ages, and so Philip’s establishment of a strong link between the French monarchy and clergy was particularly useful for the centralisation of the theologised state. Even the clerics who remained outside royal service were enlisted to promote the new self-image of France as the nation chosen by God, represented by His appointed king. Much of the brainpower at the University of Paris, together with tithes and other ecclesiastical taxes, was by and large willingly and with increasing regularity put at 61 62

╇Strayer, The reign, xii-xiii. ╇ Brown, “Taxation.” Strayer, The reign.

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Philip’s disposal. Unseemly aberrations, especially the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the pope at Avignon, were justified by the simple argument that the French, as God’s chosen nation, represented true orthodoxy, and could not do anything against God’s will—unlike the Pope.63 The divine legitimacy he claimed for himself and his dynasty was extended to the whole nation. Philip never hesitated to stress that France was ‘chosen and blessed by the Lord before the other kingdoms of the world.’64 He admired Louis’s crusade and the gesta Dei per Francos, even though they were spectacular military débâcles.65 He had religiously based legal justifications drawn up for a plan to lead a panEuropean crusade to recapture Jerusalem, and to do so as the head of a united military order. His deeply religious worldview, and the views of international relations, state, nation and monarchy that he left behind, cannot be understood without this approach to the Holy Land. The ideology that underpinned the crusades and centralisation overlapped, and were equally far from secularisation. 3.3.╇ The Persistence of Theological Politics The reigns of Philip IV, Charlemagne, the Merovingians, Ottonians, Louis IX of France, Edward I and III of England, and every one of the Holy Roman Emperors, serve as salutary reminders that all aspects of the theory and practice of international and domestic politics, from the criteria for just wars to centralised taxation, were grounded in religious arguments. Current accounts of European state-building that view this process as necessarily advancing secularism rely on teleological backprojections of unitary and premature secularisation.66 As Guizot, Renan, William Robertson and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians still knew well, the self-perception of any medieval and Renaissance private and public entity was so thoroughly enmeshed with the Christian worldview that when they came into conflict with official church doctrine, they created their own, independent religious self-justifications, instead of diminishing religiosity to any degree.67 The influx of relics from the Holy Land led to a prolifera╇Strayer, The reign. Menache, “Les Hébreux,” 137. ╇ Barber, “The world picture,” 22. 65 ╇ Jordan, Louis IX. 66 ╇ Ertman, Birth. Spruyt, Sovereign. Tilly, European revolutions. Cities. The useful phrase, “premature secularization,” comes from Forbes, Hume’s, 41. 67 ╇ Robertson, Charles V, I.1. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation: although the point about the role of towns’ religious self-justification in the history of progress already 63 64

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tion of fabricated genealogies, and claims of privileges and tax exemptions on grounds of descent from King David, or relations with ‘Cousin Mary’.68 Villages, rising city-states, overmighty subjects, banks and republics routinely based their political claims on religious foundations.69 Renaissance republicanism was more a continuation of the central medieval rise of individualism than an abrupt declaration of secular self-reliance.70 Max Weber is probably the last great theorist never to lose sight of the fact that the trialectic game between king, church and cities, which defined much of Western history and institutions, was never without a religious dimension.71 Rational strategies were being pursued for irrational payoffs or, from another perspective, religion helped the rising republics change an asymmetric game (politics against religion) into a symmetric game (one political theology against another).72 Despite some political scientists’ postulation of republicanism as a cause of secularisation, the causal connection between these large trends may run from post-Augustinian individualism to secularisation, and from there to republicanism.73 Similarly to secular encroachments on sacred ideology, the papacy made several systematic bids for control over arms, notably through appears in his Histoire des origines du gouvernement representatif. See also Owen, Skeptics. 68 ╇ Familial claims on David and Mary in Runciman, “Medieval history.” 69 ╇ Gardner, “The Capetian.” Heyman, “The representation.” Ligato, “The political.” Powell, “Myth.” 70 ╇Somos, “Augustine.” Cochrane, Historians, 33, 42, 47-8 on the initiative to reform historiography in the interest of the papacy, 80 on Verona and Venice fabricating competing OT genealogies for their cities, 120 on historians of Lucca, Viterbo and Florence who wrote ‘universal histories’ from their city’s vantage point and attributed divine design to events in the partisan service of Pope or Emperor. Contrast this with the universal histories by de Thou, Le Roy, Pithou, Pasquier, Vignier, La Popelinière et al, discussed below. Huppert, Idea, 20-1, 24, 113. Kelley, “History,” “Ancient verses” and “Jurisconsultus perfectus” in The Writing. The short but excellent “Christian interpretations” by Lebègue. Tuck, “Review of Haggenmacher,” 91. 71 ╇ Weber, Economy and society. Some first-rate historians, like Eijnatten, Housley and Mastnak, still point this out. 72 ╇ Benson and Constable, Renaissance; Brooke, Twelfth century; and Luscombe and Evans, “Twelfth-century,” offer the best introductions to the twelfth-century renaissance. Individualism as one of its components is illuminatingly discussed by Bynum, “Did the twelfth century,” Chenu, Nature, and Morris, “Individualism.” Morris overviews the arguments against the use of the term, agrees with most of them, yet still finds the term invaluable, as long as its limits are acknowledged. One can read Moore’s ground-breaking Origins and Formation as the story of centralised reactions to the rise of religious, political, and economic individualism. Becker, “Individualism,” considers its influence in the early Renaissance. 73 ╇ Oakeshott, Rationalism, 368. Somos, “Augustine.”

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the alliance with the Normans, the crusades, and under Renaissance soldier-popes like Julius II.74 However, it failed to retain control over these projects, and the Avignon Papacy, the Great and subsequent schisms, the rise of national churches, and Charles’s 1527 Sack of Rome, thwarted the attempts to turn the papacy into a state that combined arms with doctrinal monopoly.75 On the state’s side, the chief agents of medieval rationalisation, in Weber’s compelling account, were bureaucrats, priests and monks trained by the Church to read, write, count, and govern. They may have switched allegiance, and become faithful royal servants; but until the seventeenth century it was difficult to get an education in Europe that did not involve some training in Christian theology, which permeated every discipline, from geometry through medicine to the visual arts. The secular nature of Western politics today arose from the conscious, deliberate and, for their personal safety, often perilous work of secularising thinkers like Pierre Pithou (1539-1596) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). The brief sketch of Philip IV and the crusades above, and the French and Iberian contemporaries of the Leiden Circle discussed below, show the continuity and power of the worldviews that were opposed to the secularisers’, and the unsecularised alternative courses that the political history of the West could have taken.76 The ReforÂ� mation prompted an enormous amount of violence. Without an intellectually viable alternative to political theology, it could have continued until one side or the other was subdued or eliminated. Without the secularising thinkers there was no intrinsic reason why Western civilisation, built on the ruins of ancient Rome with a Christian worldview, should have reached its present form. Secularisation is a defining Western discourse. The rise and progress of autonomous individuals, nation-states, republicanism, representation, rationalisation, legalism, technology, the modern scientific method, commercial sociability, ╇ Tierney, Foundations, 13-4. On the Norman-papal alliance: Loud, “Papacy,” “Southern Italy,” 110-4, and “Norman Sicily.” On Medici soldier-popes: Machiavelli, The Prince. 75 ╇ Waley, “Papal armies.” It is enough to recall the crusaders’ consistent refusal to honour papal overlordship over conquered territories in the Holy Land, to recognise papal agreements with Byzantium, and to follow papal orders to refrain from treaties and trade with Muslims. Secular independence characterised every crusade, despite crusading vows to the contrary and notwithstanding the lords’ eagerness to use papal legitimacy to tax and recruit at home. 76 ╇Nice, “‘Peculiar’” reviews some of the secondary literature, from Chenu to Smith, that deals with these religious alternatives. 74

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empiricism, and other hallmarks of Western history and modernity, cannot be cogently explained without secularisation. A history and analysis of the implications of secularisation, by contrast, is the best free-standing and self-sufficient account of the essence of Western modernity. This book offers the Leiden Circle as only an illustration of the historical process of secularisation. Since most of the texts treated below were written by secularisers, the effectiveness of the illustrative method depends on the ability to remind the reader of the rare, unusual, distinctive features of secularising texts, without overloading the argument with references to the mainstream, non-secularising sources. The French Renaissance and early modern monarchy’s continuation of the ‘chosen nation’ Gallicanism of Philip IV and his lawyers, for instance, is the background to l’Hôpital’s and Pithou’s politique, secularising Gallicanism, discussed below. Similarly, an appreciation of Grotius’s originality depends on recognising how he differs from Ayala, Gentili, Suárez, de Soto, Vitoria and others.77 Another thing that can be obscured by selecting secularising texts only is that the medieval legitimacy claims related to the Holy Land are verisimilar to, and ever-present originals of, the early modern discourse about Israel. Chosen nation claims flourished and co-existed with secularising attempts to extinguish them. It is the forceful and systematic attempts to neutralise such claims by Scaliger, Cunaeus and Vossius, that constitute a unique and recognisable body of secularising work. Focusing on secularising works to the exclusion of their rivals can, paradoxically, understate how remarkable the secularisers were. Brief references will be made therefore to the political theology of medieval, Renaissance and early modern intellectual rivals of the secularising politiques. Hopefully, they will be sufficient reminders of the secularisers’ originality. In addition to these references, this introduction to the generic problems and discourses of medieval and early modern Europe is intended to serve the same purpose.

77 ╇ This is a call for more precise delineations of secularising originality through contextualisation, not a denial that Las Casas, Vitoria and others were original in their own ways, or that Grotius learned from them. For one way to set up useful and avoid misleading comparisons between them, see Haakonssen, “Grotius,” 25-7.

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chapter one 4.╇ Change and Continuity: The Early Modern Crises of Christianity

4.1.╇ The Religious Foundations of Early Modernity: Generic Problems and Solutions It is no accident that we have largely forgotten the Christian roots of our thinking. Certain tenets featured too regularly in the struggles between Church, kings, burghers and the nobility. Such were the Second Coming, disparaging the importance of worldly existence, and emphasising the incompetence of worldly authorities to help atone for the original sin, guarantee salvation, or otherwise affect the values that Christians held to be the highest. As the Reformation eroded the monopoly of the Catholic Church as a source of Christian ideology, this built-in propensity for church-state conflict intensified. The Reformation rekindled questions about the right interpretation of the Bible, who is entitled to interpret it, and how it applies to the abovementioned problems. It opened up a veritable Pandora’s Box precisely because theology had such a profound effect on all aspects of life. Most Protestant denominations encouraged reading the Bible for oneself (sola Scriptura). This posed a new challenge to the established power structures, from church to government, that drew heavily for their legitimacy on particular Bible interpretations. It also meant that matters of Church hierarchy and ecclesiastical functions, more or less settled in Catholicism, were reopened for debate, together with church-state relations. But Luther (1483-1546) was not the first religious revolutionary. Eleventh-century heresiarchs, the Cathars and Waldenses, Wycliffe (mid-1320s-1384), Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415) and others have devised sophisticated arguments that questioned the legitimacy of the established church, and often of political entities. Nevertheless, with historical hindsight we can say that Luther was the first successful reformer, simply because the fault-lines that solidified around the theological positions opened up by his work proved to be long-lasting. Echoes of these fault-lines opening reverberated across all the issues and identities discussed above. The explosive combination of new religious and secular ideologies, armies and claims, led to the wars of religion. The vicious and seemingly unstoppable wars of religion were a severe trauma in European history. It is enough to recall the numerous expulsions of Huguenots, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

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(1572), the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the hundreds of thousands driven out by the Habsburg recatholicisation of Central Europe, the displaced Waldensian masses’ wandering, Wallenstein’s atrocities, and the bellum se ipsum alet strategy that systematically devastated Europe, in order to appreciate the shock, anger and urgency in much of the writing from this period. These events became stock themes in contemporary discourse and debate. It is difficult to generalise about the effects of Rome’s loss of authority, when they include irenicist criticisms by Erasmus and the opportunistic violence of Wallenstein. Power games, individual ambition, historical accidents, and a host of other factors have to be taken into account. All we need to note here is that thinkers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, including the Leiden Circle, saw their ideas contribute directly to the struggles around them. The Catholic and Protestant thinkers who grew tired of fear and butchery began to think about ways of ending this state of affairs. Those who reached the root of the problem discovered that religious arguments can always fuel zero-sum games, and that peace could not wait for the genie to return to the bottle, or for theologians to find a formula to reunite and/or pacify Christendom. Instead, they tried to stop and prevent the use of religious arguments in those power games that left no room for compromise. Such arguments included fanatical assertions about the right form of government, Church-State relations, the respective status of divine, natural and civil laws, and about the right way to live. It is rare to find a writer, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, who secularised all these fields at once. Radical secularisation tended to backfire and be rejected outright. Yet there are several thinkers, such as Grotius and Locke, whose various works over time made the very foundations of these large topics more secular and less vulnerable to hijacking by zealotry. These were the thinkers who made it gradually impossible to continue and revive religious reasoning. Various solutions were proposed, some of them still visible, like modern international law, the secularised state, historiography and the ‘new science’ of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton.78 Among the now faded, but at the time powerÂ� 78 ╇ Force and Popkin, Newton. It is notoriously difficult to define what makes ‘new science’ new. Geocentrism, empiricism and falsifiability have ancient and medieval precedents. Perhaps what was ‘new’ was primarily the improvement of instruments.

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ful topics I count confederative theology, deism, the minimalist project to find theological formulae acceptable to all sides, the substitution of the Bible with ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah as an authoritative source of wisdom, the purposeful construction of a fashion of politesse, and other attempts to found a new, pacifist morality after Catholicism failed to preserve its authority. Not all thinkers were interested in solving the conflict through compromise. Many preferred to win and defeat those who disagreed with their worldview. A more subtle, less violent version of the same inflexible position was to educate the next generation in Catholicism—a major function of the Jesuits. Accordingly, we can distinguish between three processes in early modern discourses: secularisation, rechristianisation, and the substitution of alternative truth claims for Christianity that merely reproduced the vicious circle of irresolvable conflict that began after the Papacy lost its doctrinal monopoly. Rechristianisation had Protestant and Catholic varieties, and many shades within. Instances of attempts to rechristianise astronomy, international law, and other elements of thought will be given below, as complementary strands that ran along the central story of secularisation. The method of finding alternatives to Christianity will be mentioned less often, but it is important to keep it in mind. It is a useful reminder that the Reformation did not limit intellectual options to the binary choice between secularisation or rechristianisation. One could perhaps lump the attempts to preserve the Christian foundations of thought together with the attempt to introduce alternative supernatural foundations, and call them ‘retheologisation’; but this would sacrifice too much nuance, while adding no analytical value beyond what the story of the obstructions to the process of secularisation reveal. These processes, namely rechristianisation, the substition of Christian with alternative beliefs, and secularisation, co-existed, usually in competition, sometimes in temporary alliance.79 It took a while for secularisation to become the dominant mode, and it never eliminated the others. The three processes can be seen at work in several distinct subjects or discourses. These include ancient constitutionalism, the Hebrew 79 ╇ For instance, alternativists like Giordano Bruno used non-Christian mysticisms to debunk Christianity; and Dutch Christians and secularisers occasionally co-operated in the late sixteenth century to stop the extremist social reforms advocated by Anabaptists in Haarlem, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

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Republic, the basic conception of human nature, the definition and hierarchy of divine, natural and civil law, accounts of the origin, purpose and operation of language, the figure of the law-giver, the State, concepts of sociability, the State of Nature, commercial morality, and international relations. All of these had a secularising, a rechristianising, and an alternative version, vying for memetic supreÂ�macy. In this book I chose to enter the story through one particular discourse: historiography. This is a convenient, but by no means the only possible way. No discourse is an island, and other discourses will enter the stage as and where appropriate. 4.2.╇ A Specific Example: Historicisation as Secularisation’s Point of Entry Any of these discourses can be formulated in terms of the three idealtypical Christian positions outlined above (3.1). For historiography, Christians’ views on the relationship between sacred and secular can be divided into the following categories: (I) those who believed that political events between God’s biblical, direct rule over the Jews and Christ’s Second Coming were meaningless, accidental and irrelevant, and only sacred history mattered; (II) those who reduced politics to religion and accepted Rome as God’s instrument, or even the promised kingdom itself (Eusebius, Orosius); and finally (III) those who regarded religion and politics as equally valid and legitimate, believing that worldly affairs were of some genuine significance, but touched salvation history only tangentially (Augustine, Meletius). The first position can be subdivided into those who thought worldly politics irrelevant because of its complete subordination to sacred history (Ia), and those who considered it meaningless because fallible and fallen man cannot in this life know anything about God’s salvation plan (Ib). Largely due to Augustine’s influence, the last (III) became the dominant Christian position. The others never completely disappeared, assuming a variety of forms from internal church debates to outright schism.80

80

╇Somos, “Augustine.”

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Yet states constructed sacred histories as prolifically as the Church.81 Every state needs to write its own history.82 Medieval history-writing was inconceivable without religion. The official histories of centralising monarchs like Philip IV of France or Edward III of England often continued where the Bible left off. They saw and presented themselves as continuations in the story of Christian salvation. Legitimacy claims, records concerning the genealogy of ruling and noble dynasties, of privileges won and gradually accumulated by cities, ecclesiastical entities and families—in short, legal, dynastic and institutional claims— relied in one form or another on theology, the most powerful source of legitimacy.83 Yet one must be careful. The religious character of historiography was not limited to millenarian kingdoms and ‘new Israel’ theories. Eschatological and chosen nation claims were frequent but, contrary to the impression that emerges from much of the current literature, not inescapable parts of sacred histories. One could claim a throne, like Charlemagne or Otto III did, by constructing a legitimising version of God’s plan for mankind, but without giving much thought to the end of the world. Sacred history could run in parallel with secular, the two meeting only in God’s infinite knowledge.84 Such methodical separation was acceptable to those who were deeply religious and saw the history of the tangible world as the vulgar, extraneous and largely valueless subset of divine history (category Ia); but also to those who regarded sacred history as wholly unknowable (cat81 ╇ The secondary literature is too voluminous to allow a representative cross-section, but it includes Barber, “World picture.” Walzer, “Exodus 32.” Housley, “Pro deo,” and Warfare. Mastnak, Crusading. Figgis, “Respublica.” Barnes, “Just war.” Bainton, Attitudes, and Grabois, “Un mythe fondamental.” 82 ╇ Renan, Qu’est ce qu’une nation? formulates this perfectly, although he is sometimes misunderstood. He was not condemning states for selective and distorted history-writing, but making an insightful observation about the functionality of historiography in the large-scale collective identity called ‘a nation.’ 83 ╇ The literature on religious legitimacy in medieval political discourse is enormous. Seminal accounts of the general point: Reuter, “Imperial.” Smith, Chosen peoples. Nelson, “Kingship.” Le Goff, Birth. Wood, Church. On papal political theology: Robinson, “Church.” Ullmann, Principles. Pethő, Démosz. On monarchs’ theological politics: Hallam, “Royal.” Jordan, Louis IX. Kantorowicz, The King’s. Suffert, Le pape. Barber, “World picture.” On conciliarism: Burns, “Conciliarism.” Burns and Izbicki, Conciliarism. On the political theology of international relations: Vismara, Impium foedus. Zerbi, Papato. A few pagan aspects of religious legitimation survived, but even these had to accommodate Christianity and its problematic relationship with politics. Malory, Kyng Arthur. Clancy, “King-making.” 84 ╇ A very clear layout of this notion is in Mignucci, “Logic and omniscience.” Also Markus, Signs. Momigliano, “History.” Its development up to Augustine is traced brilliantly in Perczel, Isten.

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egory Ib), irrelevant, or even non-existent. The dialectic between these two extreme understandings of the dividing line between sacred and secular histories, and several positions between, were ineradicably wired into Western thought by Augustine, a towering figure in the Western theory of history. Writing from the sub specie aeternitatis epistemic standpoint that he attributed to God and His prophets, Augustine introduced the possibility that the City of Man and the City of God may co-exist without being either virtually identical or radically distinct (III). Thinkers after him had to creatively contend with the resultant ambiguity.85 To understand any subsequent thinker, one can locate him or her along the political theology axis (I-III). The other major factor to consider is the thinker’s position on man’s epistemic capacity. The six basic variations are easy to grasp and essential to remember: 1) all political actions have theological significance, and one can know what these are; 2) all political actions have theological significance, but it is not for man to know; 3) no political action has theological significance, and this is certain (therefore either politics, or theology is irrelevant); 4) man must operate on the assumption that no political action has theological significance, but it would be arrogant to be sure (therefore the best course of action is to let religious principles guide us in all actions, including political ones); 5) some political actions have knowable theological significance (oaths, judicial murder, etc.), as exemplified by Augustine’s view on soldiers, judges, and the death penalty; 6) some political actions have theological import, but it is impossible for man to know them. Religion determines the right course of action in political matters that have theological significance. Pacifism, Christian Stoicism, epistemic humility or agnosticism hands priority over to politics in the issues that theology identifies as inessential. It is invariably indispensable and sometimes sufficient—for the purÂ� poses of a history of political thought—to figure out a thinker’s stance 85 ╇ This argument and its significance for political thought is developed in Somos, “Augustine.” The best of the secondary literature includes Marrou, L’ambivalence. Van Oort, Jerusalem. Cary, Augustine’s. Brown, Augustine. Frend, “Roman Empire.” Markus, Saeculum. Pelikan, The mystery. Teske, Paradoxes.

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on political theology on the one hand (I-III), and human episteÂ�mology (1-6), on the other. Ullmann, Tierney and others have developed a useful distinction between monarchs’, city-states’, and the Church’s versions of sacred historiography.86 The major difference between them, it turns out, was neither their rhetorical method nor the kind of legitimacy they aimed at, but simply their object of theological legitimation. In times of State-Church conflict the second group described above, that of ReichsÂ�theologen like Eusebius, Orosius, Otto of Freising or Alexander of Roes, were co-opted into supporting the lay, imperial counterpoint to papal historiography.87 To counter-balance exaggerated claims for Renaissance republicanism’s pioneering role in secularisation, one might argue that even the seeds of the humanistic flowering of historiography, namely the business and personal records of up-and-coming bourgeois or petty noble families (which are often said to contribute greatly to the secularisation of historiography) were as thoroughly enmeshed with religious claims as any other European entity’s selfperception at the time. The aforementioned intense influx of relics from the Holy Land to Europe during the crusades led not, as it is sometimes proposed, only to the church’s co-optation of laymen, but to an even further multiplication of religious identity claims.88 For the specific, illustrative discourse of historiography, this meant that while previously only kings and popes could claim divine approval, now any nobleman, rising city-state, or even village church could, and did, obtain an autonomous link to biblical history.89 The reason why 86 ╇ Ullmann, Principles. Idem, Papacy. Tierney, Religion. The account of the development of monarchs’ sacred historiography is sometimes revealingly misappropriated in historical models of modernisation (in the political science sense of the term). Spruyt, Sovereign, especially chapters 4-5. Ertman, Birth. 87 ╇ Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history. Life of Constantine. In praise of Constantine. Barnes is a fair apologist of Eusebius’s political position in Constantine. Scaliger’s criticism is discussed below. Orosius, The Seven Books. Otto of Freising, The Two Cities. Idem, and continuator Rahewin, Deeds of Barbarossa. Alexander of Roes, Schriften. 88 ╇ Cochrane argues for the secularising effect of early humanistic historiography in his magisterial Historians, e.g. on p. xii; 5 on Bruni as forerunner of secular historiography; 9-15 and 52-8 on the secularising effect of, and moves within, a range of genres, from business accounts to chronicles; 36-7 on Biondo grappling with secularising historiography; 114-5 on Merula debunking origin myths, etc. Also see Owen, Skeptics. For a strong version of the thesis that lay actors co-opted religious ideology, see for instance Bull, Knightly piety and Maier, Preaching. 89 ╇ Runciman, “Medieval history.” In Balard, Autour, two chapters, Gardner’s “Capetian presence” and Heyman, “The representation” provide good case studies of

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Renaissance republican historiography was effective against both papacy and empire was, by and large, not because it was secular, but because it acquired its own independent sources of religious legitimation.90 The Avignon Papacy (1309-78), the Western Schism (1378-1417), and monarchs’, republics’ and church councils’ contestation of divine legitimacy reinforced the lesson, already known to Leo IV, Gregory the Great, Urban IV and others, that popes needed better weapons than their words.91 Renaissance popes in turn became notoriously secular and materialistic. Luther was not the only one to find their worldly display revolting. Under the three Medici popes, they moved from the Augustinian dialectic between the two extremes of Reichstheologie and this-worldly eremitism to unabashed Reichstheologie—but this time with openly secular and imperial aspirations. Intellectual reactions to the crusades and to the Renaissance papacy swung back toward the rejection of this world.92 The three basic positions that eventually re-emerged in the massive upset of the Reformation were essentially the same as the three alternatives facing the early Church architectural representations of European communities’ pride in returning crusader personnel and objects, and their use for self-legitimation independently from, even in opposition to, church authority. France, “Les origines” points out that ‘localised theologies of Jerusalem’, manifest for instance in Romanesque round churches, have already existed before the First Crusade, and continued to grow during the crusading period. Church organisers failed in their attempt to co-opt these traditions into furthering the claim of papal pre-eminence over kings, secular lords and city councils. In the same volume Ligato, “Political meanings” and Powell, “Myth,” describe the same dynamic in the political events and literature of the period. 90 ╇ Robertson, Charles V, I.1. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation. Renan, Qu’est ce qu’une nation? Weber, The Rejection. Runciman, “Medieval history.” 91 ╇ Papal supremacy claims were most clearly expressed in crusader propaganda and the just and holy war theories of Humbert, Damien and St. Bernard, in the polemics surrounding the Investiture Controversy, and in Boniface’s epoch-making bull, the Unam sanctam of 1302, which proclaimed that ‘it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every man be subject to the Roman pontiff’ and that ‘it belongs to the spiritual power to establish the secular power and to pass judgement if it has not been good’. Brundage, The Crusades. Henderson, Select historical documents. Maier, Crusade propaganda. Riley-Smith, The crusades. Tierney, Crisis. Barnes in “Just war,” and Brundage in Medieval canon law, explain the legal significance and political impact of these texts. Pethő in Démosz capably puts both texts and events in the wider context of competing notions of sovereignty. On the ‘Magisterial Reformation’ see Luther and Calvin, On secular authority. Forrester, “Luther and Calvin.” Kingdon, “Political resistance.” Idem, “Calvinism and resistance.” Monahan, From personal, 185-249. 92 ╇ Weber, “Rejection.”

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Fathers. Catholics reaffirmed the political relevance of the papacy (Council of Trent, infallibility), and many Protestants similarly subjected politics to religion; the so-called Radical Reformation rejected politics altogether; and mainstream Lutherans and Calvinists reinstated the Augustinian dialectic in what is known as the ‘Magisterial Reformation’.93 The aforementioned three ideal-typical choices that the early Fathers had to make (Church over State, State over Church, or superficial co-existence covering a radical disjunction) re-presented themselves in a similarly pristine format by the turn of the sixteenth century. Just as Augustine was the solution to the end of Antiquity, Protestantism worked best for the end of the Middle Ages. This is why, and the sense in which, Robertson, Guizot, Weber, Troeltsch, Tawney, Jellinek, Macpherson, Trevor-Roper, Zaret and many others, for all their differences, were right to point out a connection between some forms of Protestantism, capitalism, and democracy.94 And this is the reason why it is not the ostensibly etatist, anti-papal historiographiÂ� cal projects, but the comprehensive departures from both Church’s and State’s sacred histories that constitute a key chapter in the story of secularisation. Two crucial instances of such departure, discussed below, are the French New Historians and the Leiden Circle. The Reformation shook every pillar of the European conceptual edifice. History was no exception. The intense intellectual experimentation that eventually led to secular historiography began with the 93 ╇ This turning-point in intellectual history is described exactly right in Walzer, “Exodus 32,” Grafton, “Footnote,” and Kedar, Crusade. As comprehensive an account of this dynamic as one could wish for is provided by Housley, “‘Pro deo’,” Warfare, together with Mastnak, Crusading. Housley compellingly traces the continuity of holy and just war traditions from Augustine to the seventeenth century, and shows how religious claims were used by kings, noblemen, the national clergy, the papacy, and all other political actors. He also points out that the explosive combination of religion and politics was pervasive not only in the countries that heavily participated in the crusades. The continuity from medieval to early modern religious justifications is important, but a crusading past is neither sufficient nor necessary for early modern theological politics. In all early modern states some form of religious politics was integral to the centralisation and the construction of nation-states. Mastnak’s Crusading peace is a complementary treatment of European just war theory and practice in the Middle Ages. He identifies several problems and characteristics that remained acute in early modern Europe, and outlines some implications for our time. A similarly informative chronological overview, but limited to Dutch history, is given in Section One of van Rooden, “Contesting.” 94 ╇ The recognition of this connection is identical, and the explanations not entirely dissimilar, in Robertson, Charles V. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation. Weber, Protestant ethic. Tawney, Religion. Macpherson, Possessive. Trevor-Roper, Crisis, 12, and passim. Zaret, Heavenly.

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gradual realisation of the far-reaching consequences of the unravelling Reformation, but in many ways it also intended to undo its adverse effects. The settlement of religious wars is the most obvious case in point. Legal claims, treaties, rights of succession, the content and authority of different kinds of law (natural, divine, civil), and legal entities were difficult to formulate without a version of history that the parties could agree upon. The sooner the irreversibility of Christian historiography’s collapse was recognised, the sooner could a new history be constructed and legal and political claims settled, or at least debated with realistic hopes of resolution.95 There were further reasons to secularise historiography. Medieval Catholicism played a role in the long-term formation of national identity and the short-term conduct of everyday life, from weddings to calendars.96 The suggestion that there may be no divine plan of salvation, or that it was unknowable, or papal authority on history’s meaning is open to argument, was drastic enough to necessitate momentous adjustments. The need for new foundations arose with renewed urgency after the realisation that Catholic sacred history was no Â�longer tenable. From the early sixteenth century onward, the flow of historical literature increased manifold. Pagan sources and new ways of using them were devised during the Renaissance; but it was the Reformation that fundamentally challenged the biblical element in the historical literature that was produced, read, and deployed by and for all players in European politics. The late sixteenth century saw another eruption of new historical literature, especially as the CounterReformation began to produce its own history-books.97 As the partici95 ╇ Kahn, “Introduction.” Hunter, Secularisation, 151. The best known cases of preReformation political deadlock caused by rival claims to exclusive legitimacy include the Investiture Controversy (1059-1122), the Avignon Papacy (1309-77), and the Western Schism (1378-1417) of competing popes, leading to a further loss of papal prestige and the rise of Conciliarism. Burns, “Conciliarism.” Burns and Izbicki, Conciliarism. Oakley, Conciliarist. Nystrom, History. 96 ╇ Accordingly, any disruption or questioning of these foundations had momentous and far-reaching effects. The confusion from the staggered acceptance of the Gregorian calendar reform between 1582 (Iberia, Poland, the Netherlands) and 1752 (the British Empire) is a well-known case in point. General introductions to the religiosity of everyday life include Langlois, La vie, t.iii. Chenu, Nature. Dom Leclerq et al, Spirituality. Moore, Origins; Formation. Barber, Two cities. Bowman, “Christian ideology.” Le Goff, Time, work; The birth of Europe; The birth of Purgatory. 97 ╇ Klempt, Die Säkulärisierung. Kelley, “Theory.” Grafton, Scaliger, II.10 ff., 140, and passim give a dazzling catalogue of historiographical innovations. The challenge of harmonising classical and biblical histories became increasingly acute as new sources and theories reached Europe in ‘the Age of Discovery’ between the early fif-

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pants of the historiography discourse continued their research and polemic, they increasingly moved on to topics that now appear arcane and abstruse, yet which often acquired new significance in their debate. The rhetorical importance and subtext of these debates is impossible to recapture without extensive contextualisation. What may seem tedious antiquarianism is often a riveting race to find or flee common ground. We shall see examples of this in Scaliger’s use of Berosus and Manetho, Cunaeus’s work on the Hebrew Republic, Grotius’s allusions to Melchizedek in De iure praedae, or Scaliger’s and Heinsius’s now seemingly innocuous distinction between Rabbinic and Hellenic Jews. The post-Reformation replication of medieval and Renaissance options for the relationship between politics and theology seemed not to work for the early moderns. Criticising the medieval mindset was one thing. Yet rediscovering the Classics, geographical discovery, cultural relativism, commerce and colonialism remained compatible with at least some of the host of religious views that now flooded the market of ideas. The accommodation of Classics with Protestant humanism; the acceptable face that Montaigne and others put on neoskeptical cultural relativism; and enlisting divine workmanship and stewardship arguments in favour of commerce and conquest, all failed to halt or forestall violence. As Pasquier wrote to Raimond, a colleague at the Bordeaux parlement, All the world was peaceful, there were no religious disputes, everyone lived in peace in his corner, followed the faith of his ancestors, and fought only for territorial gains. Suddenly, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, everything fell apart, Christendom was divided by sects and heresies which covered the earth with misery and desolation, in Asia and Africa and Europe.98 teenth and early seventeenth centuries. See Hodgen, Early anthropology. Huppert, Idea, 90-1. 98 ╇ ‘Toute la terre (dites-vous) vivoit en paix pour les Religions: chacun dedans son destroit en repos, & en la foy de ses peres, & ne debattoit avec ceux de sa Loy, que pour l’estenduë des Empires & Principautez, quand à l’entrée du quinziesme siecle, tout se desunit & divisa en Sectes & Heresies, qui coururent toutes les contrées du monde en miseres & desolations, l’Asia & l’Afrique, & l’Europe.’ Undated. Pasquier, Oeuvres, vol. 2, 605. He goes on to summarise the history of violence provoked by Christian schisms since ancient times. He also blames Muhammad and Luther for a resurgence in violence, and names Copernicus, Paracelsus and Ramus as three great contemporary innovators whose ideas also caused turmoil. Then comes the polemical role of historiography: ‘Or sont tous nos Historiographes d’accord, que ce nouveau trouble s’excita en haine de la Croisade, publiée par le Pape Leon X. & que celuy

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Something new was needed. As religious auctoritas was being effectively individualised (sole fide and sola Scriptura both achieve this), the repeatedly replayed game of religion vs. politics incrementally led to a dramatically new outcome: a world of reluctantly but irrevocably secularised epistemology, ethics, and politics. The secular state, a particular form of institutionalised toleration, and the freedoms of conscience, religion and speech, turned out to be integral components of this new solution. Some of the battles around them were fought in the arena of historiography. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to realise that any lasting solution to the Wars of Religion had to include a secularised historiography.99 National identity, the authority of the church, and other bones of contention made history-books and the minutiae of source criticism hotly debated, over and over again, with seemingly disproportionate intensity. The dawn of modernity saw vigorous experimentation with possible models for re-founding historical method and fact. The invention of the “Middle Ages” itself was a grab for a new self-identity.100 The story of these adjustments in history-writing has, understandably, never been told in its full, glorious complexity. However, what has been done is the somewhat anachronistic nationalisation of these

qui remua premier cette querelle à face ouverte, fut Martin Luther. Et tout ainsi qu’il bigarra nostre Religion, aussi se trouvent nos Historiens bigarrez en l’Histoire de luy.’ After discussing Hus, the French Pragmatic Sanction and charlatans who hijack crusader legitimacy, Pasquier draws the conclusion that a strong secular power, religiously neutral and independent, is essential for avoiding the repetition of the same mistake, and halting the exacerbation of Huguenot troubles. 607. Huppert, Idea, 46-7. 99 ╇ Klempt, Säkulärisierung. Huppert, Idea, Kelley, Beginning. 100 ╇ Grafton captured the essence and significance of Bodin and de Thou, two influential experimenters with pacifying historiographical models: ‘Bodin presented readers terrified by the European religious wars of the mid- and late sixteenth century and crushed by the rapid expansion of European scholarly writing with a massive program of social reconstruction through discriminating scholarship.’ The footnote, 66. ‘Like Bodin, de Thou had watched the French polity fall apart in the Wars of Religion. Unlike Bodin, he continued to believe that Catholic France bore as much of the blame as the Protestants, or perhaps more. An honest, impartial narrative, he decided, would serve as a foundation for social and political peace.’ The footnote, 67. On 68-70 Grafton outlines the major forces at work for and against these projects. Compare Pasquier’s criticism of Sleidan, whose work he otherwise admired, for allowing religion to jettison the constructivity of his historical writing: Huppert, Idea, 62, and 128 for Vignier’s division of history into Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. See also Kelley, “Sleidan.”

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debates, the retroactive compilation of national historiographies.101 What was Italy or Germany in the fifteenth century? The beginning of national identity and statehood is a quagmire we need not enter here; it is enough to say that many overviews of Italian, French, German or Spanish historiography now available suffer from at the least the same weaknesses as the anachronising history books written during or after the nineteenth century about the nations themselves.102 The closest we get to a grand unified account of European historiographical development is Donald Kelley’s work, but the outstanding and relatively comprehensive overviews he provided neither claimed nor proved to be sufficient to explain the context of historiographical changes.103 One may occasionally catch even the superlative Momigliano propagating a Whig-like, progress-based account of historiography. The trajectory he draws from de Thou, Flacius, the Magdeburg Centuriators, MabilÂ� lon and the Bollandists to history-writing in his time does little justice to the contingency, strength of personalities, currents, counter-currents and complexity that one finds in the original sources.104 5.╇Scaliger’s Secularising Historiography: A Valuable Start to Constructing Leiden as Illustration It is of course far beyond my ability and present intention to take up the challenge of surveying secularising historiographical departures. The sole purpose of the next chapter is to show how some works of some members of the Leiden Circle contributed to this development.105 Groenhuis, Breen, Schama, Smitskamp, Frijhoff, Bodian and Campos Boralevi list a number of Dutch thinkers who constructed rival versions of Dutch sacred history—many of them Leideners and good ╇ E.g. Fitzsimons, Development. Hay, Annalists. On occasion Parker’s otherwise excellent “‘To the Attentive’” skirts close to this anachronism. Pocock, “The French prelude.” 102 ╇Schiffman provides an illuminating overview of this trend, from Meinecke through Berlin to Pocock, in “Renaissance historicism.” 103 ╇ Kelley, Beginning. Faces. Kelley’s general introduction, and introductions to each section, in Kelley, Versions. See also Manuel, Shapes. 104 ╇ Momigliano, Classical foundations. 105 ╇ It is my contention that one can meaningfully call Leiden politiques around the turn of the seventeenth century a ‘circle’. For background on this period in the intellectual history of Leiden see Berkvens-Stevelinck, Magna commoditas. Grafton, “Civic humanism.” Prak, Gouden eeuw. Rademaker, Life, 41 ff. Scheurleer et al, Leiden University. Instructive portraits in Athenae Batavae. 101

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friends of our secularisers, like Jan Dousa the Elder and Scriverius— partly on Calvinist, but also on a republican basis.106 The innovative feature of the Leiden Circle’s historiography was that it broke away from these options. Their sharp separation of political from religious history undermined Prince Maurice’s, as well as the Spanish and French claims to Dutch sovereignty, and it enraged Dutch ‘sacred nation’ theorists with equal efficiency. This goes some way toward explaining how our Leideners lost the support of both Calvinists and many republicans. They tried to exclude exclusivism and introduce a version of toleration: a more thorough-going and more difficult manœuvre than replacing one kind of exclusivism with another. Instead of siding with Pope or Emperor, Republic or Congregation, Prince, People or Priest, the students of Lipsius, Vulcanius, Junius and Scaliger opted for ‘objective’ historiography, navigating the narrow course between the Scylla of zealotry and the Charybdis of skepticism, both of which have shipwrecked many a theorist concerned with the possibility and merits of history-writing. The Leiden Circle’s secularisation-through-historicisation did not take the Pyrrhonist or neoskeptical route. Instead, it limited the scope of divine intervention in history. This dovetailed rather well with the new emphasis on free will that the Arminians came to be known for; and they raised the profile of reason and human (as opposed to divine) motivation in explaining history. They hoped to find practical means of achieving political stability and a theoretical justification of free will, and prevent the revival of skepticism and of another version of sacred history (whether republican, monarchist, ancient constitutionalist, Calvinist or Dutch). Not only the way, but also the extent to which the Leideners used history, sets them apart from other craftsmen of modernity. Before the more detailed treatment, let us take a simplified, schematic overview of the ways in which members of the Leiden Circle used history to secularise various sections of European thought. 106 ╇ Campos Boralevi, “Classical.” Groenhuis, Predikanten, especially chapter 3, 77-102. Frijhoff, “Religious.” Smitskamp, Calvinistisch. Breen, “Gereformeerde,” at 254-73, 372-82. Schama, Embarrassment, 94-125. Bodian, “Biblical.” A good introduction to the political significance of early modern Dutch historiography is given by Parker, “‘To the Attentive’.” After a well-balanced introduction, Parker focuses on the histories written by Uyttenbogaert and Trigland, both close to our Leideners, but following the ‘chosen nation’ model. Compare the French New Historians’ successful repeal of the myth of Trojan origin in the sixteenth century, only to see it return after the expulsion of Huguenots: Huppert, Idea, chapter 4. Asher, National myths.

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Lipsius’s Tacitism and bold historical comparisons across cultures are discussed, sufficiently for the present purpose, in the secondary literature.107 Scaliger turned history into a master discipline, which lent a poignantly demystifying edge to his critical works on the Bible, the Hebrew language, and the person of Christ. His students unfailingly treated the biblical commonwealth as fully comparable with other historical states, one that had no power to bestow special legitimacy through claims of direct descent or strong analogy. The most notable instance of this is Cunaeus’s De Republica Hebraeorum, but this decisive break with the special treatment of the biblical commonwealth, which Scaliger made possible, also features prominently in Grotius’s Parallelon, De emendanda, De veritate and the Annotationes, as well as in the many works by Vossius. Vossius’s other contribution to Leiden secularisation-through-historicisation, namely the elimination of all earthly institutional churches’ and congregations’ claims to any form of political legitimacy, also took its clue from Scaliger. While Scaliger circumvented the endless, unfalsifiable Protestant-Catholic theological debate about the Jewish origins (and, by implication, the efficacy) of the various Christian sacraments by paying strict attention to the verifiable history of these sacraments, Vossius generalised this kind of reduction to human institutions to the point where all ‘sacred history’ came to be defined as the institutional history of all churches and nothing more. In this manner Vossius historicised the Christian creeds, the sacraments, and reduced every aspect of ‘sacred history’ to the chequered and all-too-human history of the church. Rituals, communities, even the primitive church (direct descent or even just analogy with which was claimed ferociously by many reformers and churches) were represented by Vossius as accidental outcomes of historically contingent processes, with no special claim to divine approval or privilege. It would probably be an exaggeration to ascribe a full-fledged theory of history to Heinsius, but he did make original contributions to it, most notably by showing a way out of the passionate debates over exemplars (pagan heroes, saints or Christ) in preaching, pedagogy, fiction, and all other speech acts. This book’s main task is to introduce some of the texts by these thinkers, fit them into a Leiden context of cooperation and mutual influence, and to show their innovatively secularising impact on European thought. ╇ Burke, “Tacitism.” Momigliano, “Tacitus.” Tuck, Philosophy. Waszink, Introduction to Lipsius, Politica. Idem, “Your Tacitism.” 107

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There were of course significant differences among these Leideners, too. As we will see, Grotius thought that the strength and particular composition of all men’s reasoning faculty is such that a minimal version of Christianity can be proven to everyone. By contrast, Heinsius believed that reason must be excluded from the religious experience. This was a genuine, substantive difference; yet in many other cases, the differences between Leiden positions are illusory. There are several reasons for this. Temperamental differences can overlay substantive agreement. The secularising method of reducing religious rituals and values to the history of human institutions was consistently employed by Scaliger, Cunaeus, Grotius and Vossius. Scaliger’s and Cunaeus’s formulations were abrasive and scandalous at the time, while Grotius and Vossius tried to present these histories as potential common ground in the religious conflict. They hoped to reconcile the factions and formulate an account of events that would remove the threat of the same potential religious causes of conflict re-emerging in subsequent generations. The tone and structure of these works are understandably different, but the objective is the same, and they employ secularising techniques that were specifically developed at Leiden. The second explanation for illusory differences is that a Leiden work often builds squarely on top of another. Apparent differences are often developments, not refutations.108 Members of the Leiden Circle were conscious of participating in a joint project, and even engaged in division of labour. Finally, they practised strategic obfuscation when their claims were too revolutionary, or there was a shift in power or opinion against them. The publishing records of Heinsius and Vossius reveal the same pattern of political caution and more carefully coded secularisation between the Synod of Dordt, and the more permissive 1630s.109 In short, their own texts, letters, university and official records show an intense personal, intellectual and professional interaction, and differences between them are not substantial enough to contradict the utility of treating them as a group. They do not exceed the variation within any other set of thinkers commonly labelled a ‘school’ or a ‘group,’ such as ‘Italian humanist historians,’ ‘French New Historians,’ or even the Annales or Cambridge ‘Schools.’ 108 ╇ A good example is Cunaeus’s respectful disagreement in De Republica Hebraeorum with a minor point in Scaliger, while endorsing and building directly on both Scaliger’s method and major findings. Book I, chapter 12; and III.6, 197. 109 ╇Sellin, Heinsius, Checklist. Wickenden, Vossius.

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To show the relative insignificance of these differences, I will plug in comparisons with the so-called French New Historians and with several early modern Catholic and Protestant historiographical projects of intense partisanship, and thereby show that the label ‘Leiden historiography’ remains at least as useful and meaningful as these other groups’. The other advantage of systematic references to the alllawyer French New Historian team is that they also secularised heavily and explicitly before the Catholic reaction in France brought their experimentation to a close, as the Calvinist reaction did to the Leiden Circle. Comparisons between the groups will illustrate a key component of secularisation’s definition, namely its cumulative character. Peace-seeking groups across Europe between the fifteenth and eightÂ� eenth centuries followed the same logic of gradually removing the religious components of the conflict they found themselves in. Although they often used the previous groups’ findings and methods, the purpose and the basic mechanism remained the same. As individualisation was the Italian humanist historians’ common theme, the Frenchmen’s was the construction of universal histories as the solution to the ideological turmoil that led to, and fed from, the widespread physical violence. Perhaps it was the combination of this idea with the all-pervasive application of humanist critice by Dorat, Muret, Turnèbe and Cujas (the original master of New Historians) that inspired Scaliger’s transmutation of history into a master discipline.110 110 ╇ Dorat also sired and raised La Pléiade (a.k.a. ‘the Brigade’) who, following Dante, Petrarch and Sperone Speroni, turned their vernacular into a vessel worthy of high literature. The number and length of parallels indicate underlying structural similarities, and it is these shared features that make up my definition of secularisation. I also claimed in the Introduction that historiography is only one of many discourses that reveal the exact same secularising logic. Notions of law, language, man and the state are other examples. In addition to showing the Leiden Circle’s unity and illustrating the staggered nature of secularisation, background references to French predecessors of the Leiden politiques will offer glimpses into how secularisation can be traced and presented through the early modern discourses of linguistic and literary reform. Compare, for instance, the Pléiade manifesto, du Bellay’s Deffence (1549), with Spieghel’s Twee-spraack (1584). Their central claims are similar: thought and literature in their vernacular can be brought to a level of perfection that rivals the Ancients’. This is a potentially secularising position, because it rejects the divine superiority of biblical Hebrew, contests the sacred inspiration of the Greek Septuagint and the Vulgate’s Latin, and encourages translation projects to make religious texts accessible and challenge the monopoly of church interpretations. On the influence of Bellay, Ronsard and the new French literary style on Leiden scholars in particular, see e.g. Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 24-7. Both the French and Dutch versions of linguistic secularisation, however, were soon adopted by a new kind of chosen nation theorist, one that argued for national

introduction

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Thanks to borrowing from previous secularising groups, the Leiden Circle’s historiography seems closer to modern European historical thought than the Italians or the French. Leiden struck a blow not for the epistemic humility of the Fathers and not for humanist historiography, but for something profoundly modern and secular. It is not surprising, but perhaps important to clearly state: secularisation came about in many steps and forms, many of which could have happened very differently, or not at all. We only get useful conclusions if we maintain the right balance between system-fabricating hindsight or determinism, and a renouncement of all generalisations. Heinsius and Vossius would concur that this is the most a historian can do; and Scaliger would curse our pusillanimity.

pre-eminence with exclusivist claims to the historical and/or divine superiority of their language. Pontus de Tyard’s notion of good French writing as divinely inspired, and Becanus’s or Simon Stevin’s view on the sanctity of the Dutch language, are comparable retheologisations of the parallel French and Dutch linguistic secularisation projects. Later we will see similar deviations from the historical secularisation project by French and Dutch chosen nation theorists. On Becanus and others see Olender, “Europe.” Stevin’s view of Dutch as the perfect language is summarised by Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 58-9. Van Rooden, Theology. For more on early modern linguistic nationalism see Grafton, “The footnote.” Patten, “The humanist roots.”

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scaliger: history comes of age

49

Chapter two

Scaliger: History Comes of Age 1.╇ Vita Brevis The founding figure of secularising Leiden historiography is Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609). He was born at Agen, France, the tenth child of the Italian humanist medic and philologist, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558). The young Joseph studied languages in Paris under Turnèbe and Dorat (leader of La Pléiade), and law from Cujas at Valence. He began studying Hebrew at the suggestion of the Christian Cabalist Guillaume Postel, and converted to Calvinism the same year (1562). The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and other calamities of the Wars of Religion drove him to Geneva, then to an itinerant lifestyle. He finally moved to Leiden in 1593, and remained there until his death.1 His early works, editions of the Catalecta, Festus, Catullus, Tiberius, Propertius and others, established his reputation as an extraordinary philologist. His De emendatione temporum (DET, first published in 1583, with several revised editions until his death) and Thesaurus temporum (ThT, 1606) became famous for reconstructing a wide range of ancient calendars, and for criticising the chronology of the Bible and the Church Fathers on the basis of his findings. ThT purportedly revolved around Scaliger’s reconstruction of Eusebius’s lost Chronicle, but its methodological apparatus and juxtaposition with a wide array of other carefully edited texts made it a critical commentary on the Church authorities’ historical method and understanding. These books are regularly credited for laying the foundations of the modern historiographical method, and for providing inspired and reliable editions of an enormous variety of sources, from ancient Sumeric and Chinese texts to Copernican observations on Roman astronomy.2 1 ╇ For the political context of Scaliger’s appointment see Bernays, Scaliger, 54-60. For more details on Scaliger’s life see Bernays, Scaliger. Grafton, Scaliger. Pattison, “Scaliger” and “Life of Scaliger.” 2 ╇ For Scaliger as founder and pioneer, see Bernays, Scaliger. Pattison, “Review,” “Life.” Grafton, Scaliger. Bernays and Mommsen, for all their differences, agreed on Scaliger’s momentous importance. See Bernays’s biography of Â�Scaliger, and the

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Anthony Grafton’s two-volume biography brought back into focus both Scaliger’s significance, and the dominant place of historiography in Scaliger’s multifarious legacy. He insisted that he sought only the truth about history, that irresistible process by which, as he reflected, “all things depart from their original form in the course of use, handling, and the passage of a long period of time, but still in such a way that their real origin cannot be concealed.” And he followed his history even when it led him to the conclusion that in addition to applying the critical apparatus to the Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament, even the Hebrew Old Testament had undergone major historical traumas, including transliteration. The range and sweep of Scaliger’s historical arguments, the depth and breadth of his faith in historical research, far outweigh the defects of his sources and methods. No previous student of language and writing had adumbrated the programme of research that Scaliger undertook.3

Grafton’s words are well-chosen. Scaliger was a student of language and writing, but his relationship with history is better characterised as faith. By the time he began his scholarly, critical reading of the Bible, Bruni, Valla, Robert I Estienne, Erasmus and others had already broken many of the barriers that institutional Christianity raised against impious philology.4 Humanist philology even cast doubt on whether the authentic, indisputable version of the divine text could ever be recovered. Scaliger was one of the towering philologists of his age, and he played a defining role in these ongoing debates;5 but his historiÂ� ographical innovation was revolutionary. Historical criticism in Scaliger’s hands became the knife that opened up further theological doubts in Europe’s heart. Despite persecution and temporary setbacks, he pushed the pacificist impetus to secularisation past the point of no return.6 This was amplified in the young Mommsen’s proposal in 1845 in a letter to a friend to continue where Scaliger left off. Nippel, “New paths,” 209. 3 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.631-2. The translation is of a much-revised passage in Â�Scaliger’s ThT and Animadversiones. 4 ╇ Fubini, Umanesimo. Scott. “New learning.” Rummel, Humanist-scholastic. 5 ╇ Pattison credits him with being the first to lay down sound, scientific rules of criticism, from establishing source provenance to the use of probability in conjectures and rules of emendation. From a series of haphazard guesses, Scaliger transformed philology into ‘a rational procedure subject to fixed laws.’ “Scaliger,” 161. Bernays credits him with a similar transformation of epigraphy in his Index to Â�Gruter’s Inscriptiones antiquae: Scaliger, 68-9. 6 ╇ Pattison argues that Scaliger devised his philological method as a secular and a scientific remedy to the Wars of Religion. “Scaliger,” 155-6. Van Dorsten discerns

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works of the students he taught and inspired. The two strongest uniting motifs of Leiden secularisation are historicisation and irenicism; Scaliger is by far the most important figure in working out the former, and in setting the rest of the Leiden project on its idiosyncratic path. He oversaw the early education and career of several members of the Leiden Circle, including Vossius, Cunaeus, Borelius, Heinsius and Grotius, and assigned them astronomical texts, such as Eusebius’s treatment of Eratosthenes, Aratus’s account of Eudoxus, and Book 8 of Martianus Capella’s Satyricon, to subject to historical criticism.7 As we shall see, his students unrolled his secularising programme and extended his historical criticism into disciplines like literary criticism, law, politics, and theology. His tutelage is one reason why the interests of the second generation of Leiden secularisers varied but complemented each other: Cunaeus’s ethnography, Heinsius’s literary work, Willebrord Snellius’s astronomy, and Grotius’s legal writings equally rely on Scaliger’s historicising method, and share the same desire for, and practical focus upon, peace and stability in the young republic. Although the value of the treasure-trove of detail in Scaliger’s work cannot be overestimated, it is more important here to understand the originality of his method. To trace his influence in its numerous forms, one must grasp the central assumption behind the entirety of his work. In addition to the figure of Christ, a few more examples on Eusebius, chronology and textual authority will be given. The unhidden agenda of both DET and ThT was to present the particular secularising results of Scaliger’s historical method. One only has to open these books to find more examples of it. Instead of multiplying examples I will try to outline his method, which served as the inspiration and starting point for all Leiden works discussed here, more clearly and precisely by describing first the origins of his thinking in French ‘new history,’ then contrasting his vision of history as a master disÂ� cipline with the method of the ‘new scientists,’ and finally by turning to a few choice examples of how his historical method helped to remove Christian theology from European thought.

the same motive behind Scaliger’s work on chronology: “Temporis,” 42. The potential of Scaliger’s historical method to disengage from religious debates also had a fundamental effect on Peiresc. Miller, “Antiquary.” 7 ╇ des Maizeaux, Scaligerana, vol. 2, s.v. ‘Capellus.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.601. Â�Scaliger shaping Heinsius: Somos, “Enter.” Shaping Grotius: Somos, “Secularization,” and below.

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chapter two 2.╇Scaliger’s Significance

The Enlightenment’s self-promoting claims to novelty, and nationalising histories of historiography written since the nineteenth century, now dim our appreciation of the far-reaching significance of Scaliger’s innovation. A look at his French inspirations can delineate more clearly what was original about his method, and serve as a reminder that Leiden around the turn of the seventeenth century is one of four or five times and places, and historiography is one of about a dozen distinct discourses, that can be counted as a defining episode in secularisation.8 As noted earlier, nationalised histories of historiography occasionally back-project a unity of purpose, nation and voice that did not exist. Modern nationalism and rationalisation changed the way we write history, and it is almost irresistibly tempting to see the past in the terms of the present. There is a way we can talk about Renaissance and early modern Italian, French and Dutch ideas about history, since a common language, cultural background and geographical proximity mold the mental and physical conditions of writing (libraries, professional and social structures, access to sources), and create a closer community. At the same time national identities, when they appear, function differently in these books. Sometimes a militant claim of national uniqueness and cohesion is wishful thinking or propaganda, with no factual ground (for instance claims for one’s vernacular to be “Adam’s language,” as by Giambullari or Becanus), while in other cases an early modern French or imperial historian’s adoption of a broad European perspective was, and was read as, a flagrant claim to national supremacy over the whole continent. Similar expressions in today’s history books are written and read with a different meaning of national identity in mind. At the same time, the thinkers discussed here were at least as well connected with each other as scholars are 8 ╇ Trevor-Roper in “Religious origins” lays out a clear vision of the widespread danger of uncritically accepting the historical account warped by the Enlightenment’s exaggerated claims to novelty. He also traces a French-Dutch-Scottish-English trajectory of an argument that, he suspects, is the key to modernity: a self-destructively individualist and progressive strand of Calvinism that gave rise to capitalism and the Enlightenment. Interestingly, tracing the discourse of secularisation yields almost exactly the same timeline and trajectory, but with a different cast of thinkers. Pertinent French-Dutch continuities in the pamphlet literature on religious toleration are described in Hunt, “Some pamphlets,” and Kingdon, “Political resistance.”

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today. The famously cosmopolitan republic of letters was, among other things, a reaction to the institutional restrictions imposed on academia by the centralising nation-states.9 I will use terms like ‘Dutch historiography’ or ‘French historians’ with these caveats against anachronistic nationalisation in mind. History-books like Vossius’s History of Pelagianism (1618) or Uyttenbogaert’s Ecclesiastical History (posthum., 1646) should not be contextualised on the basis of teleological assumptions regarding the kind of instrumentalisation of rhetoric and of historiography that a modern nationalist agenda would require.10 Using national labels as signifiers shifting through early modernity, I contend that it was an essentially French idea that Scaliger took up, brought to the Dutch Provinces, developed, and bequeathed to Grotius, Heinsius, Cunaeus, Vossius and others. 3.╇ Premature Universal History: The French Origins of Scaliger’s Method Before the Leideners, the most interesting new historians were a group of French politiques and lawyers, including Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), Pierre Pithou (1539-96), La Popelinière (1541-1608), and François Hotman (1524-90). The French ‘new historians’ were original. From humanist philology, legal exegesis and historical comparison, they constructed secular versions of universal history. France reversed and, for two centuries, lost these achievements’ potential in the Catholic purge that was typified in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, and started a chain of events that led to the assassinations of Henri III in 1589 and of le bon roi Henri IV in 1610.11 Their 9 ╇ The literature on the republic of letters is too large to parse. Most relevant to seventeenth-century French-Dutch relations are Cerny, Theology. Saunders, Seventeenth-century. de Smet, Menippean satires. Miller, Peiresc. Stegeman, Patronage. Van Rooden, “Sects.” An occasionally neglected part of Kuhn’s argument is that it is not always intellectual cowardice or conservatism, but the inertia of an institutionalised paradigm that leads to scientific revolutions (as opposed to cumulative revisions), and the concomitant social problems of a violent transition. Kuhn, Structure, 80-7. 10 ╇ Fitzsimons, Development. Hay, Annalists. Kelley, Faces of history. Pocock, “The French prelude.” Coudert connects Pelagianism with early modern epistemic hubris, including the Kabbalist variety. Coudert, “Forgotten,” 89. 11 ╇Some historians regard the 1562 Massacre of Vassy as the start of the French Wars of Religion, and it is a useful marker. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was better planned, and more emblematic of the organised reaction that the politique

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secularising methods and politique arguments lived on, particularly in the Netherlands.12 In a very real sense it was the French Catholic reaction that the Dutch Calvinist Synod of Dordt mimicked in 1618-19, driving Dutch thinkers and ideas into exile—most notably to England. Joint diplomatic and military action, continuity of personnel (e.g. through universities, printers, and refugees engaged in similar activities in their new country), textual interconnections, and echoes and developments of ideas enable us to project an image of the secularising process as a relay race, not without stumbles, but in the end overtaking retheologisation, factional exclusivism, and other memetic rivals.13 New History, as a movement, was dominated by lawyers and shortlived. As to duration, Huppert dates its beginning to 1560, the appearance of Pasquier’s Recherches de la France.14 With the publication of Le Roy’s Vicissitudes in 1575, Huppert says, ‘[t]he break with theological history is complete.’ The Catholic reaction was soon to reverse this process.15 The significance of lawyers in the secularising breakthrough in historiography is underscored by their clear statements of intent to wrest historiography from the priests.16 The hallmark of the project, as well as others, fell victim to. For an excellent account of the intellectual consequences of the massacre see Kingdon, Myths. Huppert, Idea, 130, 169, and Conclusion. 12 ╇ On the history of the term ‘politique,’ from Catholic malcontents to early modern advocates of peace and toleration, see Beame, “The politiques.” 13 ╇ Despite similar problems, similar solutions and personal relations, some of the larger connections between these movements are hardly recognised today. One can profitably compare l’Hôpital with Oldenbarnevelt, Beza with Marnix, or the influence of the Arminians Wesley and Leclerc in England, with the deep impression made by Phillip van Limborch on Locke. Locke, Correspondence. Cranston, Locke. Dunn, Locke. On the Dutch-English connection see Scott, “Classical.” 14 ╇ Kelley calls this book ‘one of the first and most distinguished achievements of European historicism.’ Foundations, 300. 15 ╇ Terminus a quo: Huppert, Idea, 31. Ad quem: 117. Reversal: Conclusion. Centering on Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), Haran shows how French imperial messianism continues to run uninterrupted throughout this period, alongside the exceptional New Historians. Haran, Le lys et le globe. Also see the essays in Dubois, La mythologie. 16 ╇ Claude Fauchet (1530-1601) thought medieval chroniclers ‘failed in the chief responsibility of the historian, which is to tell the truth.’ La Popelinière thought the chief weakness of French historiography was that ‘no man of honor ever practiced it since the profession had always been in the hands of clerics.’ Pithou argued that priests and monks always and necessarily distort historical accounts, due to their peculiar limitations and prejudices. For detailed accounts of the invigorating effect of legal techniques on historiography see Huppert, Idea, 20-1, 24, 113. Kelley,

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secularisers’ defense of Gallican liberties was their attack on both papal and French religious legitimacy claims. Having taken many of their anti-clerical leaves from Italian history-books, and having derived their comparative relativism from both legal and classical studies, French politiques began to pen new histories of France. Anti-clericalism was particularly acute in the wake of the Council of Trent, and in France this meant another step in the march of Gallicanism.17 The relationship between New Historians and Gallicanism has attracted a great deal of fruitful academic debate in the last few decades. Good surveys and summaries of this material are available.18 The only thing to note here, since the secondary literature seldom emphasises this, is that the Gallican legal and political theories of Pithou, Hotman, La Popelinière and others differed from medieval or late seventeenth-century Gallicanism in one crucial respect: they secularised. The clergy and scholars of Philip IV and Louis XIV argued for state supremacy over the French Catholic church, and offered religious monopoly and a co-existence to the church in exchange. Every major theoretical formulation of Gallicanism, except for the politiques’, coincided with the political persecution of non-Catholics, from the expulsion of the Jews in 1306 to the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, followed by many tens of thousands of Huguenots fleeing the country. In a striking contrast, Pierre Pithou’s famous Libertés de l'église gallicane (1594) is a brilliant re-codification of Gallicanism with an absolute focus on securing peace and stability. The previous year Pithou collaborated on La Satyre Ménippée (discussed in chapter 4) and, following Henri IV without delay, renounced his Calvinism for Catholicism in order to facilitate national reconciliation and help put an end to the Wars of Religion. This chapter in the evolution of Gallicanism led to the Edict of Nantes in 1598, the model and ideal of a political settlement of religious toleration for all of Europe in the centuries to come. This is hardly the same kind of Gallicanism that necessitated this Edict in the first place, and later led to its revocation. Kelley, Kingdon, TrevorÂ� “History as a calling,” “Ancient verses” and “Jurisconsultus perfectus” in The writing. Lebègue’s short but excellent, “Christian interpretations.” Tuck, Review of Haggenmacher, 91. 17 ╇ Bouwsma, “Gallicanism.” Kelley, Beginning. Parsons, The church. Kingdon, “Some French.” Pocock, “The French prelude.” 18 ╇Salmon, “Clovis;” Kelley, Foundations; Parsons, Church, among the many.

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Roper and others are right to point out that fear of a papal and Â� ultramontanist resurgence periodically pushed moderate Catholics and Calvinists into volatile, but functioning political alliances. Yet the salient point is that some of them, exactly those who remained untempted by chosen nation theories—whether of the Genevan, Dutch republican, or earlier and later French Gallican variety—also remained allies after the political allegiances shifted, and their own governments began to persecute them. It was not Gallicanism, Erastianism, or a fear of papal resurgence that united them, but a search for peace, and the realisation that religion must be removed from politics in order to achieve it. The anomalous Gallicanism of the politiques is often pointed out, but either as a puzzle, or to deconstruct Gallicanism as a coherent entity.19 The secularisating perspective can help dispel the confusion in recent attempts to connect Gallicanism with the rise of the modern nation-state. The New Historians were clearly aware that they were doing something new and, contrary to most reformers, did not even pretend to restrain themselves to merely reinstating the exalted standards of ancient and early Christian historiography. Instead, they believed they could write history better than anyone before.20 Their universalisation and secularisation of historiography came to an end with the Catholic triumphs in the Wars of Religion, but the lessons learnt and methods developed passed on to Leiden through, among other channels, the education that Scaliger ╇ For instance Salmon: “The erudition of the Pithou brothers is not in doubt, but their use of it in the Gallican cause is suspect by historicist criteria.” He goes on to discuss features of Fauchet and Pasquier that set them apart from mainstream Gallicanism. “Clovis,” 599-600. Also compare Walker’s comment that the most conspicuous difference between Italian and French syncretists is that the latter form a patriotic movement, and use non-Christian mystical and religious claims to construct national historical myths. Walker, Ancient, chapter 3. 20 ╇ ‘Ie voy ce iourd’huy des esprits si nets et entiers, des iugements si universels, (chose rare aux plus excellentes Republiques qui furent oncques). Parmi ceste tant rare troupe, plusieurs se façonnans au Modelle d’un vray Historiographe: me font esperer de voir en brief l’Histoire de nostre France devancer en toute sorte de merite la plus renommée de toutes celles que nous ont laissé les Grecs et Latins.’ La Popelinière, Preface to La vraye et entière histoire. New Historians, La Popelinière argued, were better than any ancient, with one exception: Herodotus wrote perfect history. Unfortunately, his methods were not imitated. La Popelinière as representative of New History: Huppert, Idea, 20, 135. Compare 104: ‘Bodin’s Method was, to the best of my knowledge, the first book published to advance a theory of universal history based on a purely secular study of the growth of civilization. Such a view of history was by no means uncommon among the humanists and jurists who dominated the intellectual world of Paris in Bodin’s time. Still, Bodin published his book first.’ 19

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gave his favourite pupils (notably Grotius and Heinsius) and the personal relations he encouraged. The fondness of these two pupils for de Thou, discussed below, is a well-known example. Kelley, Pocock, Huppert and others have picked up on something in French historiography that became absolutely crucial for Leiden, through Scaliger mostly, and to an extent perhaps through Lipsius. There is no denying that much of the inspiration behind the historical works of Leideners like the two Dousas, Scriverius,21 Grotius, Cunaeus, Heinsius, Gerhard and Matthias Vossius, came from Italian histories. Yet Italian anti-clerical, humanist historiography alone was not enough. The price that Renaissance Italian historical works paid for their secularism, or rather anti-clericalist autonomy, was the restriction of their scope to Italian affairs and to an individualism-driven anti-clericalism of the superficial or, at best, Machiavellian variety.22 The extension of the Italian Renaissance view of history would have given the Dutch at most the kind of ancient constitutionalism that we see in the two Dousas, in much of Scriverius, and in parts of Grotius’s De antiquitate. However, a wider, non-nationalist, European solution to the Wars of Religion needed French universalism as a foundation, with its ascription of unflinchingly comprehensive jurisdiction to source criticism and historical inquiry. This set the stage for Leiden’s stadial and critical theories of panhuman development which could, in turn, remove Christianity from historiography and law, serve as an efficient agent in secularisation, and provide in their turn a universal theory of stadial progress that could later be re-particularised and renationalised in the late seventeenth century.23 Without the influence 21 ╇ For Scriverius as a link between rederijkers and Italian ancient constitutionalism, see Koppenol, “van der Mersch.” 22 ╇ Fubini, Umanesimo. See Nederman’s though-provoking critique, “Empire,” of Pocock’s interpretation of Renaissance Italian historiography as the turning-point of modernity. Although in his various writings Pocock points out many of the same revolutionary features in the Italian, the French, then the English chapter in the history of European history-writing, his subject-shifting but undaunted enthusiasm remains helpful and inspiring. His vision of the evolution of historiography is probably best captured in its original coherence in “The origins of study.” 23 ╇ French technical terms for distinguishing their historiographical method from previous ones include histoire universelle, générale, accomplie; historia integra, iusta, perfecta, consummata. Kelley, “Historia integra.” Huppert, Idea, 144. On Vignier’s Bibliothèque (1588), 121: ‘His work is different in conception from the histories written in the classical manner. It is also different from the universal histories in the Eusebian manner, such as the German chronicles, because Vignier’s compendium is truly universal in scope and because it is entirely secular in spirit.’ Compare the older

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of French universalism on the scope and ambition of Scaliger’s Â� elevation of history into a master discipline, his students at best could have developed secular and Erastian political theories that would have nonetheless remained limited to the Netherlands, a sort of Dutch equivalent of Italian humanism. In the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the Wars of Religion, annals and chronicles, however universal in name, were less helpful genres even than Renaissance ricordi. The Leiden Circle needed a methodological innovation like Scaliger’s, and Scaliger needed a French foundation for his historiography. He did not simply follow them: French New Historians wrote histories of everything, while Scaliger placed history above everything.24 One wonders how many ideas perished on St BarthoÂ�lomew’s Day; the historiographical revolution of the French jurists came to a premature end, and French history reverted to old religious forms.25 Huppert suggests that the New Historians’ ideas resurfaced in the eighteenth century. I submit that Leiden historians were indispensable torchbearers in the relay from Italy and France to England and back, and conversely, it was

Italian ‘universal chronicles’, so called because they touched on several cities: Cochrane, Historians, 94-9, 129. For Kelley’s distinction between Italian and French historiography see “Theory,” 756. 24 ╇ Pace van Dorsten, who defines the difference between New Historians and Leideners this way: ‘this generation of Dutchmen [around the turn of the seventeenth century] tended more and more to abandon theology—in contrast to their French predecessors who put their professional knowledge as lawyers, doctors, or whatever, to the service of religious peace and applied it to theological problems. Despairing, it would appear, of ever finding unity in theological diversity, they searched for information outside dogma, even outside the Bible, which was nevertheless incontrovertibly “true” in relation to man and creation.’ “Temporis,” 40-1. Van Dorsten is right to identify irenicism as the main motivation; yet Scaliger, Grotius, Vossius, Cunaeus and Heinsius engaged extensively with Christianity and the Bible, and considered neither to be undisputably and unproblematically ‘true’. The French and Dutch groups were pacifists, and secularisers; their differences are smaller than their similarities. Salmon names Bodin as unique among the French, but also the first to turn history into a master discipline. 25 ╇ The best summary is Huppert’s paraphrase of La Popelinière, Idea, 140-4. See also 89 for Huppert’s own formulation, 102-3 for the secularising effect of Bodin’s stadial theory, and 110-1 for Le Roy’s. Pocock realises the importance of New Historians, but probably overstates the longevity of their particular influence in “The French prelude.” For balance, see Bouwsma, “Three types.” Cochrane, Historians. Huppert, Idea, 169 on the end of robin-hood and the reversal of their achievements on almost every front. See his Conclusion. Nederman, “Empire.” Bossuet is described in Perreau-Saussine, “Why draw?” as a strong and revealing example of post-politique reversion to a fully religious political theory. Pocock, “The origins.”

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Scaliger’s conceptual reinvention of history as the master discipline that made Leiden history-writing unique and influential. Scaliger is as integral a part of this story as the Huguenot refugees and the politique alliance of European moderates. His years in France were deeply formative. He learnt from Dorat and Turnèbe, and stayed with Cujas, head of the mos Gallicus movement, from 1570 to 1572. There he probably met Pasquier. He co-edited Varro’s Opera omnia with the great Henri Estienne (1528?-98), and began life-long friendships and working associations with de Thou and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614). Largely due to the voluminous correspondence he maintained with these early-made friends, his French associations survived all the upheavals of French, Swiss and Dutch religious persecution and international conflict. And these were only his direct personal connections; beyond which, the French legal humanists’ deliberate project to construct a New History, integrating forensic source criticism and argumentation, made a lasting and evident mark on Scaliger’s work. He passed many of his French contacts on to his pupils, arranged for the publication of his friends’ books, encouraged them in their work (especially to edit and publish historical manuscripts), and kept up a steady flow of student exchange between Leiden and other universities across Europe.26 My model of secularisation, up to seventeenth-century England, can be portrayed as a relay race from one isolated pocket of transitory toleration and intellectual experimentation to the next. While all groups learnt from their predecessors, they also added their own peculiar solutions to the generic problem of religious conflict. Leiden’s particular contribution began with Scaliger’s elevation of historiography into a master discipline. His students rolled out its implications, and ingeniously and creatively applied this method to a growing number and variety of topics, from pedagogy to international law. After the continuities and discontinuities with his French models, the next most economical way to refine the description of Scaliger’s method is to contrast it with ‘new science’. These two counter-points, namely 26 ╇Nelles argues that Lipsius saw Scaliger as a fully-fledged member of this ‘circle of French jurists, historians and classical scholars.” “Lipsius,” 234. Bernays, Scaliger, 39-41 and passim. Volterra, “Collatio,” especially 16-7. Scaliger’s friendship with de Thou had a formative influence on Scaliger’s Bible criticism. De Jonge, “The Study,” 76-87. On Grotius and Hotman’s son see Posthumus Meyjes, “Hotman and Grotius.” Grotius’s and Vossius’s indebtedness to the mos gallicus: Bergjan, “The patristic context”; van Dam in Grotius, De imperio, 3 and passim. Heinsius’s appreciation of de Thou is discussed below in chapter 3, 5.4.

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French politique historiography and early modern empiricism, will add a great deal of precision to the reconstruction of what the Scaligerian method did and did not do to Europe’s political theology. 4.╇ Everything a Target: History as Master Discipline To understand the other Leiden thinkers, one must appreciate the impact of Scaliger’s new historical method on Christian theology. This is not easy to do across a four-hundred-year expanse. One could look at Lorenzo Valla, Bodin, de Thou and others, and find similar-looking historical approaches to religion and politics. Yet Scaliger’s approach differs from his contemporaries’ in one crucial respect: he did not extend any kind of privileged epistemic status to any subject of historical inquiry, not even to the historicity of Christ’s resurrection, the divine inspiration of the Bible, or Euclidean geometry. Scaliger consistÂ�ently rejected the claims of revelation or empirical observation to epistemic superiority over the critical history of the subject in question. We will see this in his historicisation of the Hebrew language, the early church, the birth of Christ, Roman satire, his justification of Jewish anti-Christian polemic as a source for his fellow Protestants’ anti-Catholicism, and so on. Although we could present the same ‘history as master discipline’ thesis through any or all of these Scaligerian arguments, perhaps the best way to make a twenty-first century audience appreciate the full weight of Scaliger’s unique historical method is by starting with how it applied to the natural sciences, a mind-set that is closer to our own than theology. The natural sciences permeate our lives much like the way Christian theology underpinned European thought between the fourth and seventeenth century. Instead of harmonising chronologies, or criticising various books of the Bible for claiming to have been written by people whose deaths are reported in it, the best introduction to this notion is through Scaliger’s astronomical polemics and the Leiden-related literature on Eratosthenes, EudoÂ� xus, Aratus, and Martianus Capella. It is also useful to show that even if some secularisers may have shared the same pacifist impulse, they could still fundamentally disagree about the method most conducive to peace-mongering, including the hierachy of discourses and disciplines through which secularisation could be effected.

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4.1.╇ First Illustration of History as the Master Discipline: Historical vs. Astronomical Method There are many indications of Scaliger’s respect for geometry and observation, two cornerstones of ‘new science.’ In a posthumous table-talk, the Secunda Scaligerana, under the subject heading ‘Capellus,’ we find him telling his boarding students (probably Grotius among them) that his chronological arguments worked in compliance with the celebrated mos geometricus.27 He tried to learn enough mathematics and astronomy to construct hypotheses of his own, in order for instance to reform the Julian calendar and to prove that the Greek Attic calendar was not lunar. However, even before his hypotheses were rejected by the new scientists as full of errors, and Scaliger was still at the height of his self-confidence as a mathematician and astronomer, he never failed to justify his calculations by philological analyses of ancient texts. Not unlike the Wittenberg circle around MelanchÂ�thon, who conceived of mathematical astronomy as a maiden to natural philosophy, Scaliger consistently regarded his philological and historical method as more definitive guides to the stars than mere observation.28 And when he praised observation, it was chiefly for its assistance in resolving textual questions. He applauded Philochorus, Apollodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and others for using astronomical observations as aides to figuring out events and epochs that only survive in mythical or ‘heroic’ texts. In 1606 Pareus publicly challenged him on the value of pagan myths, which he saw as evidence of ungodliness. Scaliger’s defense of pagan myths from the charge of being corrupt and mendacious appeared in Elenchus, published the next year. The main thrust of his argument was that a whole range of pagan texts, many of them neglected until then, shared certain details for which they had no textual source in common, and thereby corroborated each other’s veracity. In this book he also argued that by the time of the Maccabees not even the most learned Jews could compute their own chronology as well as Eratosthenes and other Greek scientists could, and that Beroaldus, Pareus and their ilk were even less proficient than these Jewish scholars.29 In astronomy, Scaliger tended to

╇ Scaligerana II, ‘Capellus.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.601. ╇ On the Wittenberg interpretation see Westman, “Melanchthon Circle.” Â�Kusukawa, The transformation. 29 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.609-13. 27 28

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side with the Ancients. Moderns, however, had the upper hand in historiography. In the same year that Pareus issued his challenge, Scaliger received another attack in the form of a long letter by Kepler. Some of the texts that formed the basis of Scaliger’s attack on the lunar base of the Attic calendar turned out to be defective. In his refutation of Scaliger’s reconstruction of the Attic calendar, Kepler effectively combined philology with his own, independent observations.30 The two men differed not in the synchronisation of disciplines, but in the priority they ascribed to them. While Scaliger did not think these observations useless, he contended that they were ancillary to history and philology. Observational facts could not overrule the results obtained by historical analysis. Furthermore, historiography was also supreme because it alone could identify the “path dependence,” for want of a better term, that determined what future directions of development were possible, and which inherited errors became embedded, in other disciplines. In another controversy over Greek astronomy, Scaliger used his unrivalled authority as a critic and philologist to show that Thales did not need a wise barbarian teacher, because Greek science achieved almost everything without external help, source, or inspiration.31 The confirmation of Scaliger’s view of Greek scientific advance was his reinstatement of Euripides’s Rhesus and Iphigenia at Aulis as texts that were based on solid scientific results. (As we will see with Heinsius, Iphigenia at Aulis particularly bothered Christian readers, because Iphigenia’s moralising speech on self-sacrifice had uncomfortably strong parallels with Christ. Scaliger’s readers probably found his acknowledgement of the play’s scientific credentials somewhat disturbing.) In his refutation, Kepler criticised Scaliger for fundamentally misunderstanding what the astronomical method and the accumulation of observed data meant. Even if Thales was an exceptional figure, he could not single-handedly reform Greek astronomy, because ‘it is not the work of one lifetime to trace enough anomalies of the moon for the prediction of an eclipse of the sun […] it is reason-

╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.158-9. Mosley, Bearing. ╇ As he did with antiquity and authority, Scaliger also cut through the assumption of a causal connection between autonomy and quality in science. Grafton sums up Scaliger’s assessment of Greek astronomy: ‘Crudity, not perfection, proved the originality of Greek science.’ Scaliger, 468; also 467-83. 30 31

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able to believe that Thales learnt the art of computing eclipses from the Babylonians.’32 Among top-notch scientists, only Tycho de Brahe was patient with Scaliger’s antics, while Scaliger was quickly losing his patience with mathematicians and astronomers. At the end of 1600 he wrote to Brahe that he was preparing a Diatriba against his entire profession. Astronomers were poor philologists when it came to evaluating the observations and hypotheses of Ancient scholars: From [Hipparchus’] time on down to the present you [astronomers] have believed that precession takes place as he said, and for no reason except that ‘he said it’, which should have no place in mathematics. No order of men in modern times has suffered more from ignorance of antiquity than the astronomers. I find it astonishing in the extreme that no astronomer has perceived that error and the absurdities to which it gives rise, even to a limited extent, except Copernicus, who did perceive the precession of the equinoxes and the obliquity of the [celestial] equator, but in his ignorance of antiquity took refuge in absurd hypotheses.33 [my emphasis]

Scaliger had no qualms about rejecting authority. The difference between his and Kepler’s vision was not about the merits of observation, of history, or of textual criticism, for they were equally fond of all these methods. It was about which method had the last say. Scaliger’s aim was to figure out historical chronology, and astronomy played an important part in that. At the same time it remained only one of history’s diverse handmaidens, like philology or biblical exegesis. The arguments in the Diatriba, written in 1600-1 and published posthumously in Paris in 1613, pivoted around Scaliger’s conviction that the polestar was immobile. In vain did Brahe send him reams of observations to the contrary, and warn him gently of the dangers of this view long before Scaliger became an object of less gentle ridicule at the ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.472. Jardine, Birth, 158. ╇ ‘Nihil magis mirari mihi succurrit, quam nemini astrologo de vitio illius hypotheseos soboluisse, neque quot et quanta absurda ex illa propagari necesse sit, si unum excipias Copernicum, qui et praecessionem aequinoctorium et obliquitatem circuli aequinoctialis animadvertit, sed ignoratione rerum vetustarum ad absurdas hypotheses confugit.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.477-8. Contrast Scaliger’s criticism with, for instance, the lower status of historiography in the debate between Ursus and Kepler concerning the role of hypotheses in astronomy. Jardine, The birth. Also see Scaliger, Diatriba, 82 and 87-96 for his criticism of mathematicians. Similar incidents characterise the whole saga of Scaliger’s denial of the precession; see Grafton, Scaliger, ch. 3.4, “Don Quixote’s last ride: the attack on precession.” II.459-88. 32 33

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hands of Kepler, Magini and others.34 What kind of source would the normally hypercritical Scaliger rely on so trustingly that he would stake his reputation on defending it against all comers? The answer is his historical work on Eudoxus and Eratosthenes, whom he deemed superior to Hipparchus. Even when Scaliger cited Hipparchus in the Diatriba, it was to correct Hipparchus’s correction of Eudoxus.35 Once his historical analysis convinced him of the superiority of Eratosthenes’s and Eudoxus’s theories, Scaliger was not deterred by any amount of observational evidence to the contrary, whether offered by Hipparchus or Brahe. Historiography had a higher status in Scaliger’s scheme than observational science, a position that becomes especially clear in his debate with Magini. Magini’s criticism of Scaliger is interesting partly because it clarifies the way in which history worked as a master discipline for Scaliger, and partly because Magini was an opponent of Copernicus and Galileo and constructed his own Catholic, geocentric system at Bologna, where he took the chair of mathematics after Galileo was passed over for the same appointment.36 He also believed in the power of astrology, and published popular predictions about the end of the world. The points on which even heliocentrically and geocentrically minded, and pro- and anti-astrology, scientists agreed in their criticism of Scaliger, bring out the underlying methodological difference between the master historian’s and the astronomers’ approach to the exact same texts and phenomena.37 4.1.1.╇ Leiden’s Scaligerian Astronomy 1617 saw the publication of Magini’s Confutatio, in which this Catholic supporter of the geocentric model joined Brahe and Kepler in criticis╇ “Tychonis Brahe Stellarum Octavi Orbis Inerrantium accurata Restitutio.” Scal. 13 in Codices Scaligerani, 3. Mosley combines private correspondence, networks of correspondence, and publications in his contextualisation of the Scaliger-Brahe exchange. Mosley, Bearing. 35 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.477-85. Scaliger defends Eudoxus even against Ramus, his intellectual ally: Scaliger, I.216-7. 36 ╇ When Magini died in 1617, Bologna invited Kepler to take his chair. Galileo urged Kepler to accept it, but he excused himself on the ground that ‘he was a German and brought up among Germans with such liberty of speech as he thought might get him into trouble in Italy.’ Bryant, Kepler, chapter 5. 37 ╇ In other words, the way in which this was not a repetition of the Galileo-Â� Bellarmine controversy, which was about Bible vs. observation. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine. 34

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ing Scaliger’s theory of the procession of the equinoxes, as stated in the Diatriba. After refuting Scaliger’s argument in disdainful detail, Magini made the same point as Kepler: astronomical arguments take the form of observations, with high-quality instruments, ‘and not the erroneous decrees and opinions of Eudoxus, Eratosthenes, and others who never pointed instruments at the sky,’ including Scaliger himself, who argued ‘as a rhetorician or orator rather than as a serious astronomer and truth-loving mathematician.’38 We have already seen Scaliger’s inordinate fondness for these two Greek astronomers; but is there more to Magini’s reference? I suggest that Scaliger’s ‘textual astronomy,’ as one manifestation of history’s overlordship, left a lasting impression on Leiden, and the un-scientific nature of Scaligerian astronomical discourse encouraged Magini in turn to use the two Greek names as derogatory labels for other Leiden astronomers, and to try to paint—ironically enough—other doubters of the geocentric model with the same brush of using an unscientific method. Eudoxus (410/8-355/47 BC) was an influential mathematician, who used observations to disprove his friend Plato’s cosmology, but then proceeded to use only abstract mathematical models to try to correct it. One of his biggest and most controversial achievements was a heliocentric model. A standard criticism levelled against early modern professors of the heliocentric model was that their hypotheses not only went beyond the empirical evidence, but they were also unverifiable by any conceivable amount of hard evidence. The phases of Venus, for instance, would support Brahe’s geo-heliocentric system, too. Given the context of the debate, Magini’s criticism of Scaliger can be read as an adroit attempt to accuse all heliocentrists at once of wandering in the wilderness of pure speculation. It is almost certainly a jab at those who practised Scaligerian astronomy at Leiden, including Scaliger’s two beloved pupils, Grotius and Willebrord Snellius. Scaliger was deft at guiding his students toward topics and texts that gained them an early reputation and shaped their intellectual development. At his encouragement and supply of manuscripts, the 15-year old Grotius began editing and commenting on Aratus’s Phaenomena and the Satyricon by Martianus Capella. His edition of the Satyricon, dedicated to the then heir presumptive Prince of Condé, was published in 1599, and the Syntagma Arataeorum in 1600, the

38

╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.484-5.

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same period when Scaliger composed his Diatriba.39 These were key texts, closely studied and keenly disputed in the cosmological circles of the time. They provided exactly the humanistic, textual and historical grounding that Scaliger favoured above the mathematical and experimental approach. Aratus’s (315/10-240 BC) Phaenomena is a paraphrase in hexameter of Eudoxus’s lost work by the same title. Its first half is actually our main source for Eudoxus, none of whose works have directly survived. It describes the principal features of the celestial sphere, the axis terminated by the north and south poles, the great circle of the equator as perpendicular to the axis, and the two circles of the tropics. The zodiac, with its twelve constellations through which the sun follows its annual course, is shown to be inclined at an angle to the circle of the Earth’s equator. The Milky Way is another circle, equally dividing the heavens. Aratus’s paraphrase of Eudoxus also describes the independent planetary motions. The Phaenomena already had outstanding classical credentials by the time the young Grotius began to work on it. It was admired by Aratus’s contemporaries, Callimachus and Theocritus (whose bucolic poems were being edited by Heinsius around the time of Grotius’s publication), held in high respect by Ovid and Virgil, translated into Latin by Cicero, and cited by Paul at Athens (Acts 17.28 cites Line 5). The one and only surviving work of Hipparchus, whom Scaliger rejects in favour of Eudoxus, is his commentary on Aratus. Concurrently under astronomical attack, Scaliger must have regarded the work that he assigned to his precocious pupil as complementary to his own. Moreover, the manuscript that Scaliger was working with contained an early illustration of a partially heliocentric sytem, an important support for Scaliger’s argument. Characteristically, Scaliger and Grotius worked with an excellent artist, Jacques de Gheyn II, who carefully copied the manuscript drawing, but they paid less attention to the observational data in the same illustration, which was copied incorrectly. Grotius’s edition of Capella’s Satyricon is often cited as evidence of his brilliance, but rarely fitted into the context of his later development.40 The eighth book of this encyclopaedic composition contains a famously well-formulated and memorable exposition of the heliocentric system. It was cited by Copernicus, Kepler and others at length. The Satyricon is a very strange book. Written some time between 410 39 40

╇ Grotius, Satyricon. Idem, Syntagma Arataeorum. ╇ Knight, “Grotius’” is exceptional.

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and 429 AD, it is an elaborate didactic allegory in a mixture of prose and verse. The mix was probably inspired by Varro’s Menippean satires. It had two monumental impacts on Europe. It became the main source and model for medieval allegories and personifications of love and knowledge, and it codified the seven Liberal Arts in education.41 The framework is the wedding of Mercury and Philology. The seven Liberal Arts are given to the bride as a wedding present, to serve as her maids. One book is dedicated to each; book eight concerns Astronomy. It begins with the drunken Silenos, the side-kick of Bacchus, waking up after Arithmetic’s speech, belching thunderously, and having to be restrained by Satire from provoking a brawl. Satire then momentarily transforms from character into critic, reproaches Martianus for introducing a brawl into the august divine company, and accuses him of acting in cahoots with the entourage of Bacchus (as his name, Capella, means she-goat). Martianus retorts that if anyone, then at least Satire should appreciate his account of rowdy allegorical personifications. Order restored, Astronomy rises. She demurely protests that instead of listening to her long speech, the wedding guests could read Eratosthenes, Ptolemy or Hipparchus; yet she proceeds to describe a heliocentric cosmology very close to that of Aratus, or rather of Eudoxus. This is the account that Copernicus praised so highly in Book I of De revolutionibus.42 ╇Stahl, “To a better.” ╇ II.318 in the Stahl-Johnson edition. Knight thinks that Grotius showed poor judgement in offering this book, so obviously out of date and alien to early modern knowledge, as a general student handbook. “Grotius,” 7-8. He then associates Grotius’s father and Scaliger with the work and asks, ‘Why, if Grotius, or those actually responsible for the work, were so exceptionally learned and wise, did they not edit Capella from the point of view of the science of their day? Why, contenting themselves merely with philological comment—and that not always showing either great knowledge or care—did they thus strive their utmost to retard modern knowledge by again throwing into the world—apparently rehabilitated—an out-of-date, inaccurate and misleading text-book of so-called knowledge?’ 12. Simon Stevin in particular, Knight speculates, must have been devastated by Grotius, father and son, publishing such a bad text on Arithmetic. Grotius’s next publication, however, was a Latin translation of Simon Stevin’s 1599 De Havenfinding. This allowed immediate translation into English in the same year. Note that roughly the last third of Aratus’s text (LL733-1154), beside discussing cosmology and meteorology, doubles as a practical manual for sailing. Grotius’s edition of Aratus in 1600, and his translation of Stevin into Latin in 1599, begin to suggest a specific interest in sailing, separate from cosmology. Relihan connects ‘new science’ with a subset of early modern Menippean satires, including Kepler’s Somnium and Heinsius’s 1621 Cras credo, in which the narrator Menippos, unlike in Lucian’s original, requires a telescope to make miraculous observations. Relihan, “Menippus,” 269. 41 42

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This book is important for Leiden astronomy and the students of Scaliger, for a number of reasons. In 1605 Casaubon grouped Capella with Petronius as not only a satirist, but a Menippean one.43 Scaliger shaped Grotius’s and others’ appreciation of the satirical possibilities inherent in editing and commenting on Capella, including using the connotations around Menippos as the ‘man in the moon.’44 In 1612 Cunaeus published a revolutionary Menippean satire, the Sardi venales, in which he placed the republic of letters in a strange cosmological setting, a planetary version of Epicuri intermundia, the space between worlds where the gods reside. The debates that take place there end up systematically discrediting all theological endeavour. Heinsius, another favourite pupil of Scaliger’s, pursued a life-long interest in Bacchus, and took his cue from Erasmus’s The Sileni of Alcibiades to transform the pagan figure of Bacchus into a God, simultaneously symbolic and more real than Christ. These works are discussed in detail below. Here the connections are merely prefigured, the better to show the significance and consequences of Scaliger’s involvement. Magini’s reference to the figure of Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) offers another clue as to what astronomers found objectionable about Scaliger’s method. Eratosthenes was famous for economically using the minimum of necessary observations to accurately determine the diameter, circumference and axial tilt of the Earth. At first glance, his success makes him an unlikely aide to Magini’s Scaliger-bashing. However, Eratosthenes was also known to think of various disciplines, from mathematics and chronology to mythography, in terms of the discipline’s history. This allowed him to ponder and produce results in a wide range of subjects, but not without paying a price. Sir Thomas Little Heath writes, Eratosthenes was, indeed, recognised by his contemporaries as a man of great distinction in all branches of knowledge, though in each subject he just fell short of the highest place. On the latter ground he was called Beta, and another nickname applied to him, Pentathlos, has the same implication, representing as it does an all-round athlete who was not the first runner or wrestler but took the second prize in these contests as well as others.45

╇ Casaubon, De satyrica poesi, 268-9. ╇See chapter 4 on Cunaeus below, and Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 37-45. 45 ╇ Heath, Greek astronomy. 43 44

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The exception to this charge was Eratosthenes’s view of history, which he applied liberally to every discipline. The parallel with Scaliger is clear. Magini probably had this characterisation of Eratosthenes in mind, in addition to Scaliger’s observational shortcomings.46 At this critical juncture in European thought, Magini’s was not an inconsequential statement in the methodological reform that was at least partly an attempted answer to the profound epistemic uncertainty taking hold in the wake of the Reformation. Scaliger did not deny the charge, but instead repeated the accusation in letters to Casaubon and Rivault (probably meant for public consumption) that he already made in the Thesaurus and the Diatriba, namely that astronomers and mathematicians know nothing about the history of their craft. Like in his letter to Brahe, for him this was clearly sufficient condemnation in this particular controversy, as well.47 Observational astronomy was useless unless supervised by well-trained historians. Scaliger’s ultimate validation (or invalidation) was always and primarily historical. He piqued another favourite pupil’s life-long interest in astronomy when, as a school exercise, he gave him rare ancient scientific texts to reconstruct and edit. Willebrord Snel van Royen (1580-1626) went on to become one of the greatest Leiden natural scientists. His Eratosthenes batavus, prefaced with a poem by Cunaeus, came out in 1617, the same year that Magini’s criticism of Scaliger as the new Eratosthenes appeared. True to Scaliger’s spirit, the book’s first half consists entirely of philological and historical examinations of classical texts. Descriptions of pioneering practical applications in land surveying, navigation and suchlike, follow only after their mathematical and astronomical principles have been verified by philology and history, in accordance with Scaligerian method. Scaliger’s view of history as the master discipline left an indelible mark on Leiden secularisation through several disciplines, from law to astronomy.48 ╇ This may be pushing the evidence too far, but Magini may have had a similar characterisation of Eudoxus in mind when he compared him to Scaliger. At one point in Aratus’s paraphrase of Eudoxus the constellations themselves are explained not in terms of myths, but in terms of mnemonic devices invented and developed through the history of the discipline of astronomy. Phaenomena, LL 375-85. 47 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.486. 48 ╇ A brief overview of the invigorating effect of Scaliger on Leiden astronomy is given by Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 18-23. Further examples are easy to find. Simon Stevin, the great mathematician, collaborated with Grotius and was inspired in discussions with Scaliger to develop his notion of wijsentijt, the pre-classical but historical golden age of sages and perfect knowledge that observation and new 46

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We saw Scaliger clash with the new scientists on five related but separable topics: the Attic calendar; Thales; Eratosthenes and Eudoxus over Hipparchus; the polestar; and the precession of the equinoxes. Scaliger began and concluded these controversies with history and texts, not with observation. Yet he was as respectful of the empirical method as any natural scientist. His ‘master discipline’ vision of history is not explicable within a simplified progressive empiricism vs. atavistic dogmatism framework. It is notoriously difficult to define the distinguishing feature(s) of ‘new science’. Mathematisation, empiricism, or the comparison and critique of historical accounts of natural events, had strong ancient and medieval roots. Nor is it clear that the claim to have supplanted theology and other disciplines with the supremacy of mathematics is a reliable hallmark of a ‘new scientist’.49 Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler or Newton were as comfortable with comÂ�bining philology, history, mathematics and observation, as Scaliger was. Similarly to the probabilities Scaliger developed for estabÂ�lishing textual provenance,50 their theories were not restricted to, and could not always be verified by, empirical observation. These ‘new scientists’ occasionally expressed as much contempt for philosophers as for those who were satisfied with the mundane task of compiling observations and failed to derive generalisations from them. They used observations as raw material and verification, but did not always think that all their hypotheses could be fully explained by scientific observation alone. Despite his high rhetorics, Newton himself had to confess that he could not provide an observational, or mechanical, explanation for the nature of the gravitational force. In other words, the ability to observe everything as it is, independently from man’s

Â�science are called upon to restore. Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 58-61. Jacob du Bois, a Reformed minister at Leiden, published a Dialogus theologico-astronomicus in 1653, in which he tried to reconcile the Bible with state-of-the-art Leiden astronomy. The dialogue is between Asterictus and Eudoxus. Asterictus is a straightforward Copernican, down to repeating Copernicus’s arguments for the compatibility of the Bible and astronomy, and the epistemic superiority of the Bible when the two cannot be reconciled. Eudoxus refutes all of these attempts, and ends up winning Asterictus over. Ruestow, Physics. Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 252-5. The long section I.2 of his book is dedicated to what Vermij calls ‘the Leiden interpretation’ of Copernicus. Scaliger, I submit, was a defining architect of it. 49 ╇ Jardine, The birth of history, chapter 3: “The significance of the Apologia.” Dear, Discipline. Idem, Revolutionizing, chapter 4. 50 ╇ De Jonge, “The study.”

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epistemic limitations, was not the distinctive ambition of ‘new science’, either.51 There was always room left for pure theory. Yet this theory was no longer Scaliger’s history: it was the physics of the seventeenth century.52 Scaliger used the grand historical vision emerging from his systematic comparison of sources to criticise any particular point winnowed from any other discipline. In addition to their own observations, ‘new scientists’ also relied heavily on biblical and historical accounts in their explanation of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. Scaliger always started from history. Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and many others championed the superiority of undogmatic observation over reliance on authority, metaphysics, and other forms of argumentation that regarded observation as confirmation or a sidetrack at best. At worst, anti-empiricist methodologies took observation to be a counter-indication of truth content: because of man’s Fall and/or imperfections, or due to the Devil’s deceptions, what man observes could not be real.53 Like Scaliger, astronomers and anthropologists used data from several disciplines, and hoped to arrive at first principles. After clearing them from the grime of dogmatism and age, they were as happy to integrate ancient authorities’ data (including biblical and patristic) on eclipses and other natural phenomena as their own direct observations. The historical fitted snugly with their empiricist and comparative method. Scaliger, by contrast, used the historical as his first principle, and turned everything else into fodder for historicisation. What the astronomers and anthropologists arrived at was a new set of first principles for astronomy and anthropology,

╇ For ‘accommodationism’ between theology and the natural sciences, see Mosley, Bearing, 92-3. Dear, Discipline. Among others, Coudert argues that this kind of eclectic mysticism was not ‘pre-rational’, but a corollary of neoplatonism and early modern scientific progress. Coudert, “Forgotten,” 92-6. 52 ╇ This is explained in a framework that proves perfectly helpful here in Dear, Discipline, chapter 4. From the perspective of secularisation as a historical process, one could argue that for a decade on either side of 1600, Scaliger’s historical method and ‘new science’ were competing for the same secularised space. There is a strong argument that what made ‘new science’ new was less an epistemic shift than the development of radically better instruments. 53 ╇ Dronke, Imagination; A history. Marenbon, Medieval. 51

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not the historical devaluation of their disciplines and predecessors.54 That was Scaliger’s department.55 It is essential to grasp this difference before we look at concrete applications of Scaliger’s method to problems in chronology, church history, and politics.56 To rephrase the point in terms of another current discourse among intellectual historians, it is possible but not really informative to understand the Scaliger-Kepler debate as part of a humanist rhetoric vs. new science argument:57 Scaliger’s treatment of texts (though not of nature), for instance his method for establishing source provenance, was not rhetorical but scientific, by standards both current and contemporary.58 It is difficult to overstate the direct and indirect impact of Scaliger’s historical innovation on Christian theology. Although many of the methods he used, from philology to astronomical observation, were already available, after the ‘master discipline’ turn these also gained new significance. Scaliger’s philology, source provenance, textual criticism and comparative method belong squarely to the humanistic hermeneutical tradition. But through his application of this apparatus to absolutely everything, including the Bible and hallowed texts of other disciplines, coupled with his prime working assumption that the historical analysis thus gained was the most authoritative description of both fact and value of the explanans (whether the explanans was Dutch Calvinist chosen nation theory or Copernicus’s claim of merely revising Ptolemy), Scaliger systematised these old humanistic methods in a way that transformed post-Reformation epistemological damage control by way of comparative relativism into a radical, yet constructive search for new and better first principles. 54 ╇ Here I use “anthropologists” in the sense of Hodgen, Early anthropology, to denote those who observed, classified and discussed man in ways that were aligned with what we now call ‘new science’. Similar uses in Harrison, Fall, and Katchen, Christian. 55 ╇ The methodological disagreement between Scaligerians and Copernicans did not always end in hostility. Grotius and Vossius, for instance, made elaborate plans to save Galileo from execution by arranging refuge for him in the Netherlands. Â�Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 107. 56 ╇See Spinoza, and Velthuysen vs. Lodewijk Meijer’s ‘extremely rationalist Bibleinterpretation’ in Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres (1666), discussed in Blom, Causality, 106. This is essentially the same debate, restated on a Scaligerian premise. Otherwise the Bible could not have been treated as a plain historical text. 57 ╇ Rademaker, Vossius, 178-9 and passim. 58 ╇ Bernays, Mommsen, Pattison and Grafton all point out the scientific significance of Scaliger’s work.

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In other words, Scaliger saw the world as a pattern of criss-crossing continuities. Bible-based claims of any kind opened up the claimant to the challenge of having to answer every historical problem in the Bible, the basic credibility of which now had to be defended in the same way as any other historical document’s. Dutch sects and French monarchs became not less but more open to criticism, if they claimed biblical legitimacy. Moreover, the claim to belong to, and derive authority from, any tradition made one fully liable to the historical critice of the tradition in question.59 Scaliger’s criticism of astronomers is similar to his skepticism concerning theological politics. He read Ptolemy, Eudoxus, or for that matter the Bible and Eusebius very differently than most new scientists, humanists, or early modern theologians did.60 4.2.╇ Second Illustration of History as the Master Discipline: History vs. Theology Although the broad story of secularisation could be written from many other examples, nations and thinkers, historicisation is exceptionally salient in the Leiden Circle. Roughly speaking, philology was the master discipline of the early to mid-sixteenth century, and geometry and observation took over in the seventeenth.61 For about four decades around the turn of the seventeenth century, due largely to Scaliger’s influence, history conquered all in the Netherlands. A cardinal part of Scaliger’s project was the introduction of new targets of historical inquiry. One of the most striking public claims he made was that early Christian sources with established doctrinal significance should be as open to historical criticism as any pagan text.

╇ Compare the debates around the secularising effects of Vives’s historiographical innovations, based on a notion not unlike Scaliger’s master discipline. E.g. Bejczy, “‘Historia’,” especially 73. 60 ╇Sypher in “Similarities” draws a parallel portrait of La Popelinière and Francis Bacon, which follows a trajectory strikingly similar to the present contrast and parallel between Scaliger and the new scientists. 61 ╇ These broad periods are notoriously open to debate, but pushed to name a date when geometry and observation became the master discipline, one could do worse than 1621, the publication of the last volume of Kepler’s Epitome. Descartes’s 1637 Discours de le méthode is another contender. Vermij dates the shift—cautious at first, but irreversible—from predominantly humanistic to modern scientific astronomy in the Netherlands to 1628, as a consequence of the arrival of Cartesian method. Calvinist Copernicans 115, 132-3, passim. 59

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Does this make Scaliger a pioneering, proto-Enlightened prophet of progress? To say so would be misleading. Scaliger agreed with the French New Historians that his was the best age of history-writing yet.62 He was glad to see and report political, technological, cultural or intellectual progress. The contrast between him, Whig historians and those who believed in an interventionist, benevolent God’s plan for history (in other words, most of Scaliger’s European contemporaries), is better captured by saying that Scaliger did not believe that progress was inevitable.63 For Scaliger, historical events were neither evident nor hidden steps in God’s salvation plan.64 Perhaps it is less surprising that Scaliger’s high esteem for the historical method routinely wrought theological havoc than the fact that his incidental secularisation does not readily fit into a liberal-democratic account of the unstoppable march of progress. A small but telling example of the theological repercussions of Scaliger’s work is his reply to Feuardent, who in his edition of Irenaeus tried to breathe life into the argument that the Septuagint’s divine inspiration was proven by the Jews’ commemoration of the event. Scaliger’s rejoinder is enlightening. In a withering attack on Feuardent in ThT, he showed that the fast on the Tenth of Tevet was instituted as an annual reenactment of chagrin, regret and remonstrance against Ptolemy’s coercive translation project. ‘For these are established traditions, and their truth cannot be denied, since they are hidden away in rituals and in the guardianship of time, i.e. the calendar, and have true reasons for 62 ╇ Like Scaliger, and unlike Bacon, Bodin did not believe in unilinear progress, either. Bodin, Method, 226-8. Neither did La Popelinière: Huppert, Idea, 99, 139. 63 ╇ Paradoxically, this makes him more modern than the confident eschatologists, from Paul and the Qumran sect to Marx and Fukuyama. See Furet, “History,” especially 6. Somos, “Augustine.” 64 ╇ For another French parallel see Huppert, Idea, 60: ‘Pasquier does not for a moment believe that the course of human history is to be understood as a long fall from grace. On this question, he would agree with Bodin, for whom history was the progress of humanity from savagery to civilization, the highest stage of which, so far, had been reached by men in his own century. Pasquier is a good Christian, but his historiography is secular.’ Parsons, Church, 112-6. ‘At the heart of Pasquier’s historical and political account of French religion lay an entire theory of the nature and historical contingency of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, one that in various forms can be traced through the growing Gallican literature produced in the Wars of Religion.’ 116 Also Huppert, Idea, 125: ‘For an infinity of different reasons, Vignier realizes, a nation can degenerate or revive; prosperity corrupted the Greeks and the Romans, but servitude, poverty, and other afflictions as well as religious enthusiasm often regenerated nations, as was the case of the Spartans, of the Jews in captivity, or of the persecuted Christians, for instance.’

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their establishment.’65 The historical fact of an institutionalised, negative memory outranked the religious, non-historical claim that the meaning of the event is God passing on His inspiration and approval from one nation to another. In fact, Scaliger insisted that most ritual elements of Christianity derive from Judaism, and Christ did not institute anything new, or even transform the nature of the Jewish rituals. Passover, Christmas, baptism and other rites, feasts and sacraments, are only superficially different from Judaism, due to historical change, cultural adaptation, and distortion. Even the Eucharist is not in remembrance of the Last Supper, but a Jewish ritual, slightly modified.66 The theological consequences of Scaliger’s elevation of history into a master method are also conspicuous in the DET, where he synthesised an astonishingly wide range of sources: ‘the real fragments of Berosus and Megasthenes preserved by Josephus and Eusebius, combined with the historical information in Herodotus and Thucydides and the astronomical data of the Almagest, made it possible to reconstruct the Near Eastern history of the eighth through to the fifth centuries BC in a rigorous, consistent way.’67 Like the attempts to clarify biblical chronology from internal evidence, any rigorous reconstruc65 ╇ ‘Nam haec sunt πατροπαράδοτα, et quae negari non possunt vera esse, quum in ritibus et in custodia temporum, hoc est in Fastis, recondita caussas veras instituti sui habeant.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.646-8, cited at 647-8. See also de Jonge, “Scaliger’s historical,” and Grotius’s demolition of the Mennonite reading of Gen. 14, discussed in chapter 5 below. 66 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.316-24, 502 and passim. Compare the scandal surrounding Dirk Bouts’s altarpiece at St Peter’s in Leuven. On another scandalous element in the same painting, which is connected to Grotius’s De iure praedae, see Appendix I.11. Compare the controversy provoked by Ibn Ezra, one of Scaliger’s favourite Rabbis, with statements like ‘There are many commandments whose time has passed’, and ‘Some commandments were given to Moses alone.’ Ibn Ezra, The secret, 42-3. 67 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.424. In his second edition of Manilius, Scaliger offered another bravura systematisation of an unusually wide range of sources. Grafton, Scaliger, II.450-6. Peiresc realised the implications of Scaliger’s comparative method: Miller, Peiresc, 10, 86, 125. Scholarship on the Babylonian Berosus and the Egyptian Manetho increased considerably in this period. As part of the process described in the Introduction, the increasingly detailed and intense antiquarianism that seems fruitlessly pedantic, self-referential and damnably pre-Enlightenment to us now was often a movement in the very frontlines of early modern religious and ideological battles. Attributing authority to historians like Berosus and Manetho, and treating texts by Christian fathers like Eusebius and Syncellus as unreliable transmissions of pagan histories, could turn the names of pagan historians into a cipher of dissent. Walker, Ancient, 78-9. Grafton, Scaliger, II.433, 617, 687, 708. Grotius, De veritate. Vossius, De idololatria. Stillingfleet, Origines. III.5. Cotton Mather, Â�Biblia Americana.

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tion of a part of biblical history that brought in external evidence risked upsetting those Christians, Catholic or Protestant, who believed in the literal reading of Scripture.68 The best indication of the nature and scope of Scaliger’s ambition is in the totality of his œuvre, rather than any particular text. What he set up, pursued and refined with tremendous rigour and commitment was a programme for the systematic collation and comprehensive synthesisation of all available sources. One example of a relatively straightforward synthesis is his equation of Persian with Egyptian years.69 However, the central assumption behind his working programme was not simply the possibility and desirability of synthesis. He was more than ready to dismiss as unreliable the most respected Christian texts, when they irreconcilably contradicted a historical fact that Scaliger reconstructed from more or better sources. He did not strive to uphold Christianity; neither was he interested in finding a compromise at all costs. It is enough to refer to his brilliant attempt in DET to reconstruct the Julian calendar from a wide range of sources, and against most Christian authorities. This was accompanied by a statement of intent and method for reconstructing all known historical calendars, both as guide to fitting any ancient text into a unified chronology, and to help construct a viable modern calendar.70 4.2.1.╇ Ancient Christianity vs. Modern Progress Having overcome the Catholic and humanistic urge to reconcile pagan and Christian sources through syntheses, however strained, Scaliger proceeded not only to undermine the authority of church fathers like Jerome and Eusebius, church law, popes and the Christian tradition over particular points of historical fact, but also to question the causal connection between authority and antiquity, which was one of the basic premises of Western scholarship at the time. Scaliger may 68 ╇See the Jesuit prohibition against such attempts in Ratio Studiorum (1599), §162, 59. On Hobbes’s subversive, secularising, ironic re-allegorisation of difficult passages, contrary to Protestant calls to apply humanistic critical tools to restore the literal meaning, see Springborg, “Hobbes’s biblical.” A similarly subversive exegetical technique will be described in chapter 5 on Grotius. 69 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.212. 70 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.240-5, citing Scaliger’s statement. Compare Huppert on Vignier: ‘Historical research now stood emancipated from theology, and its task was clearly defined as the reconstruction all past events for which reliable sources existed. Universality had acquired a new meaning.’ Idea, 128-9.

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not have been the first to doubt it, but his formulation was unusually bold.71 It would be a mistake to think of pre-Scaligerian thinkers as abjectly superstitious worshippers of antiquity. It is not a prima facie absurd notion that the survival of an opinion through the tests of time and the ravages of intellectual history—in other words, hallowed by consensus over time and/or across cultures—in itself bestows authority on an opinion.72 Yet centuries of Christian consensus could not hold up a shield to Scaliger’s reasoning. Scaliger subjected the Bible, Christianity, the Church, and absolutely everything to his historical metahodos.73 As Grafton put it: Scaliger, the most faithful of Calvinists in his conduct, was the freest of Christian thinkers in his historical speculation. Chronology, prac╇Nelles in “Lipsius” draws an instructive contrast between Scaliger’s and Â�Lipsius’ treatment of the Church Fathers as historians. Also see Bergjan, “Patristic,” for Grotius’s. Grafton on Scaliger’s Manilius and break with the old assumption: ‘The ancient anecdotes had all rested on the assumption, as widespread in Antiquity itself as in the Renaissance, that priority in time implied superiority in doctrine. For Â�Scaliger, priority meant crudity.’ ‘For him, complex intellectual disciplines were not given out by a beneficient God to the virtuous Jews and Egyptians and Druids of the world’s beginning, and then corrupted over time. Rather, they were the product of history itself.’ Scaliger, I.211-2. In Scaliger, I.333, fn. 143 Grafton gives secondary sources that list, cite and summarise primary texts that embodied the old assumption that age entails authority. Scaliger also refuted Eusebius and others who held that Christianity was the oldest religion, descending from Moses. Grafton, Scaliger, II.570. Also see Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, chapter 5. Scaliger’s new philosophy remained in force for the second, revised edition of his Manilius, in which he justified the new textual conjectures thus: “See how old the errors in texts are; they were even acknowledged [as the true readings] by ancient authors.” Grafton, Scaliger, II.442, 468. For Leiden’s adoption of Scaliger’s attitude see Parker, “‘To the Attentive’,” 69. For a comparable thirteenth-century attack on scriptural authority see House, “L’évoÂ�luÂ�tion.” 72 ╇ For a well-balanced and convincing modern application of this notion see Mill, “Coleridge,” especially 120. Hodgson, “Darwinism.” 73 ╇ As Gilbert pointed out, the advantage of using the ancient Greek term, when suitable, is that evokes the distinction between the original and the current meaning. Gilbert, Renaissance, chapter 2. It originally meant pursuit, the mode of pursuing an inquiry, a trick or a ruse, or the treatment of a subject-matter in rhetoric. The modern sense of ‘systematic arrangement’ was only acquired in the sixteenth century (OED) and used by, among others, Flacius Illyricus, as described in Lyon, “Â�Baudouin.” Reynolds, Introduction to Bodin, Method. Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, chapters 6 and 7. Here I evoke the original meaning, as Gilbert does, to emphasise the novelty of Scaliger’s methodological innovation. True, he was one of early modernity’s several ‘great systematisers’; but his elevation of history into a master discipline is a unique and significant choice. 71

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chapter two tised in Scaliger’s open-minded and exploratory manner, became the forum in which an idiosyncratic temperament and religious experience could find expression and inspire research of a new kind. â•… Valla and Erasmus enraged the viri obscuri when they bravely insisted on treating the New Testament as a document transmitted— and corrupted—by fallible men. Scaliger ruffled the feathers of the Genevan divines by going much further, by treating the New Testament as only a partial record of the early history and practice of the Church. He saw it as a document not only corruptible but lacunose. Much as the obscure men had feared, Scaliger went beyond employing the historical method of humanist exegesis; he subjected exegesis itself to the verdict of history.74

In the middle of these complicated debates about the history of history-writing, perhaps the best indication of Scaliger’s novelty and influence is his contemporaries’ reaction. Typically, they were furious. They found his application of historical method to Christianity particularly scandalous. Several instances are mentioned in this chapter, but his verdict on Eusebius is a par excellence example of how Scaliger’s matter-of-fact verdict on, among others, the Church Fathers as historians, maddened his contemporaries. Even when he praised he managed to offend, as in DET on Eusebius: Their [Christian historians’] chief Eusebius undoubtedly contributed much to the study of history. For he took all the material that was scattered in ancient writers like Africanus, Tatian, and others, and fixed it into a single coherent survey. On that account he is owed a great deal. But anyone who reads his works more carefully than he read those of the ancients will not doubt that they must be read with reserve.75

‘There is nothing rich, old or excellent that Eusebius did not take from Africanus,’ he argues elsewhere. One only has to survey the afterlife and the varied but prevalent use of Eusebius’s Chronicles by all parties in the Catholic-Protestant polemic to see that Scaliger’s detailed and sustained criticism of him was not a minor adjustment, but cut to the heart of Christianity’s historical credibility.76 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.324. ╇ ‘Eorum princeps Eusebius multum historiae contulit: quod negari non potest. Omnia enim apud veteres scriptores Africanum, Tatianum, alios sparsa in unum conspectum coniecit: ut hoc nomine plurimum illi debeatur. Sed cum delectu eius scripta legenda esse non dubitabit, quisquis illa attentius leget, quam ipse scripta veterum.’ Scaliger, DET, 251. Grafton, Scaliger, II.298-300. 76 ╇ Also shown in Nelles, “Lipsius,” 245-6. Grafton, Scaliger, II.580-2. Momigliano: ‘the whole modern method of historical research is founded upon the distinctions 74 75

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This leads us to a recapitulation of the several ways in which Scaliger’s work had a secularising effect. Whether he was working on the Bible, Eusebius, Manilius, or chronology in general, Scaliger compared Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, early Christian, Ptolemaic, Chinese, biblical, and a host of other sources. As sources, they all had equal status for him. The only source he used more rarely than one would expect from an intellectual pioneer was empirical observation—unless his independent work on manuscripts counts as such, notwithstanding the speciaÂ�lised current uses of this term by historians of science and philosophy. It is difficult to say whether Scaliger did this due to his methoÂ�dological commitment to history as the master discipline (which allowed him to criticise practitioners in any other field, including the observational ones), or at least partly out of an acute awareness of his shortcomings in science (mainly mathematics). He did try to introduce his own astronomical observations into his chronological work, but would not for a minute suspend his attack on contemporary observational scientists for being hopelessly blinkered by past errors that became embedded in their discipline. The fact that he stuck to his guns even at the cost of losing the argument with the new observers only goes to show his commitment to history as the master discipline, over both religion and science. This part of his theory obviously died out soon; but it is hard to overestimate the importance of Scaliger’s historicisation of Christianity for the cumulative process of secularisation that so dramatically reduced the role of religion (whether as real motive or as viable political pretext) in European conflict and thought. How exactly did Scaliger’s historical method secularise? As we saw, there were three ideal-type theoretical positions that a Christian could take about the meaning of history: Reichstheologie; the radical disjunction between secular and sacred history due to religion’s supremacy; or an Augustinian middle way between these two. At first glance, it is unclear how to position Scaliger. He despised Reichstheologen, whether early Fathers or contemporary Catholics or Calvinists; and he did not have an ounce of epistemic humility in him. Neither did he attribute supernatural significance to human deeds, institutions, states or traditions, including the Apostles, the Fathers, the Church, and politics. There is conspicuously little trace of old-fashioned sacred his-

between original and derivative authorities.’ “Ancient history.” If so, then Scaliger’s was perhaps the first modern assessment of Eusebius’s merits.

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tory in his writings.77 Nonetheless, Scaliger firmly believed that human history was meaningful and significant. He would hardly have spent his life writing about it, otherwise. This leaves two possibilities: either Scaliger thought that God hid all of sacred history from man’s prying eyes, or he was a Christian in a very loose sense at best, since he conceptualised and practised an interpretative method of history that left little room for divine agency. In the first case, a form of epistemic humility strictly limited to matters divine, Scaliger can be called an unusual Augustinian or an unorthodox Calvinist, who believed that details of God’s salvation plan were unknowable, yet the rest of human history still remained meaningful enough to merit a life-time of study and a claim to the cathedra of epistemic authority, from which to puncture all others’ sacred history claims. ‘Skepticism’ is the right term only for the second possibility in this period, a vague and shifting Christian identity embraced for the sake of expedience. Given the last element, ‘Stoicism’ may be better.78 To call the first position ‘skeptical’ would lead to confusion, since an epistemic humility restricted to divine matters is perfectly compatible, even begs to be complemented by, a new-found episteÂ�mic confidence in human capacity.79 The personal piety of many founders of modern science, empirical method and the EnlightÂ� enment, as well as their rejection of Pyrrhonian skepticism, will seem less incongruous, if this crucial distinction is remembered. Thinkers like Bruno, Ficino or Kepler, who perceived Christianity as intellectually bankrupt and carved new systems of thought from a synthesis of empirical observation and neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Egyptian mysteries or other alternatives to Christian claims about the supernatural, were also not ‘skeptics’ or ‘neoskeptics’. Their work had a dechristianising and remythologising effect, and therefore at best only an indirectly secularising one. Conversely, outright atheism can be held concurrently with both Pyrrhonian skepticism and a deep-seated belief in the knowability of the whole of reality. Even if positive proof existed that a given thinker was an atheist, it would tell us little about his or her epistemic position and role in Western intellectual history.80 77 ╇ He thought sacred history impossible to write, and useless even if it could be written: Grafton, Scaliger, II.261-3. 78 ╇ Oestreich, Neostoicism. Tuck, Philosophy. Brooke, “How the Stoics;” “Grotius.” Ginzburg’s account in “High and low” is very useful here. 79 ╇ Popkin, History. See also the studies in Popkin and Neto, Skepticism. 80 ╇See the six ideal-typical positions on epistemology in the Introduction.

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For now, it is enough to distinguish between the secularising effects of epistemic humility, neoskepticism, and atheism. Epistemic humility secularised by removing divine matters from the sphere of legitimate human inquiry, making them irrelevant (in this life) by making them unknowable. Skepticism and atheism secularised in more obvious ways; yet their more pointed attack on religion also made them a less effective secularising agent than epistemic humility in an age when religiosity permeated all aspects of life, and the central challenge was to stop the ubiquitous violence that resulted from disagreements over details and doctrines within Christianity. There is not enough evidence to decide where Scaliger belonged, though there are hints that his historical studies have strained his Â�private beliefs in Christianity. Copernicus, Newton and many ‘new scientists’ keen on empirical observation used their data to construct theories that remained, in the final analysis, deeply religious. When the data spurred them to posit a hypothesis that contradicted their church or their faith, they would go out of their way to render the new theory compatible with a theological explanation.81 By contrast, whenÂ� ever Scaliger’s historical findings undermined religion, he eschewed Â� this kind of rescue mission. His debates with contemporary astronomers vividly bring out Scaliger’s prioritisation of the historical method over theology. Although he did not explicitly reject the possibility of divine agency, he created a method for discovering and writing history that did not rely on any kind or degree of theology, a history explicable even if we assumed that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.82 This is not to say that his method was faultless; but it was formidably secularising. In addition to a lack of systematic effort to provide theological solutions to biblical inconsistencies, we have a number of snippets, not least among them Scaliger’s comments to the Vassan brothers, that may shed further light on the issue. As a young man, Scaliger had plunged through the Christian surface of the Gospels into the world of Palestinian Judaism in which Jesus lived and taught. Inspired as well as troubled by the experience, he devised new ways of explicating the New Testament and imagined the 81 ╇ The vast and vastly controversial literature on this subject includes Popkin and Force, The Books, which compares the role of skepticism in Spinoza’s Netherlands and Newton’s Britain; and their Newton. Yolton, Philosophy. 82 ╇ ‘etiamsi daremus, quod sine summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum, aut non curari ab eo negotia humana.’ Grotius, DIBP, Prolegomeni XI.

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chapter two restoration of a purified Christianity, one that would have much in common with the Judaism Jesus had set out not to replace but to reform. As an old man, he plunged again through the smooth, brittle surface of the text. But this time he floundered. He could not even publish his findings, as he admitted to the Vassani: “There are more than fifty additions or changes to the New Testament and the Gospels. It’s a strange thing, I don’t dare to say this. If it was a pagan author, I would speak of it differently.” 83

What he did say was clear enough. When the results of his work contradicted the Church, whether the early Fathers’ or Calvin’s, Scaliger rejected the authorities. When his methodology indicated that the Bible was a less reliable source than other texts, he questioned the Bible’s veracity. Scaliger’s philological results led him not to a reassertion of the importance of faith, even when it clashed with reason, nor at least to the pious suspension of judgement, for instance in the tradition of the Brethren of the Common Life. This refusal to suspend judgement in case of theological doubt, a strategy typical in moderate, irenicist and/or epistemically minimalist Christian traditions, became a dominant theme in the Leiden Circle’s secularising works.84 The coherence of the Leiden politiques’ epistemology is shown not only by their criticism of uncritical faith, but also by the lengths to which they went to distinguish themselves from another tradition, namely pious theologies that balanced blind faith against arrogant reason through a “natural reason” that was accessible to all, shunned sophistry, and could effectively show the way to God. This tradition also had an unintended secularising effect, but not strong enough for the radical disjunction between politics and theology upon which the survival of the new republic depended. Kempis, Cusanus and Erasmus are representÂ� ative of this “natural reason” mid-way between reason and faith, and stand in revealing contrast to Scaliger’s assertiveness regarding the unlimited cognisance of his historical method, which is a French and

83 ╇ ‘Il y a plus de 50 additions ou mutations au Nouveau Testament et aux Evangiles; c’est chose estrange, je n’ose la dire; si c’estoit un Auteur profane, j’en parlerois autrement.’ Scaligeriana II.398-9, s.v. ‘Josephe.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.500, 644-5, 73940, 742, and Eisenstein, “Clio.” Also see Bernays, Scaliger, 125-9, and 203-5. De Jonge, “The study.” Scaliger also told the Vassani that “in the Bible there are many quotations from books that we do not have.” Grafton, Scaliger, II.733. Compare Pasquier turning his historical method on the NT in his old age. Huppert, Idea, 66-7. 84 ╇See chapters 3 to 5 on Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius.

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‘new historian’ feature.85 In the same table-talk section cited above, Scaliger sides with Josephus against Mark and Matthew over the matter of Herod’s wife, because Josephus was a man of integrity and had no cause for fabrication. Famously, Scaliger also proved that the Hebrew language changed over the centuries, and thereby deprived of a justification those who insisted that the Bible was an unchanging source of truth, not to be subjected to rational analysis.86 Such antics and liberties with the Bible were not new. Valla, Erasmus, Robert Estienne and several others have done the same.87 But Scaliger’s philological results led him not to a reassertion of the importance of faith, even when it clashed with reason, or at least to the conventional apology, the suspension of judgement. No part of the Bible was given the benefit of the doubt, not even those that concern Christ.88

85 ╇ Kempis, De imitatione, III.102. Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, I.26. Erasmus, Praise. 86 ╇Summaries of Scaliger’s debates about the status of Hebrew are in Bernays, Scaliger, 82-3. Woltjer, “Introduction.” Goshen-Gottstein, “Foundations.” Burnett, Christian Hebraism. Katchen, Christian Hebraists, 1-36. Droixhe, De l’origine, chapters 4-6. Idem, “La crise.” Grafton, Scaliger, II.624-41, 732-7, and passim. Olender, “Europe.” Van Rooden, Theology. 87 ╇ Amos, “New learning.” Rummel, Humanist-scholastic. 88 ╇ Bernays, Scaliger, 78-80 first places Scaliger in the same context, then explains his originality. Pius X (pope in 1903-14) saw with great clarity the profound and comprehensive secularising implications of this approach to the Bible. To a stunning degree, his 1907 encyclicals, Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis, against what he called modernism and integralism, ‘the synthesis of all heresies,’ could have been easily written against Scaliger rather than Alfred Loisy, whose 1881 Five Theses claimed that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, that the beginning of Genesis is not literally true, that the OT and the NT have different historical merits, that Scripture shows a development in religious doctrine, and that sacred writings have the same limitations as other ancient texts. Loisy was excommunicated in 1908. With the 1910 Sacrorum antistitum, Pius ordered all Catholic clergy to take an oath that included sentences like: ‘Finally, I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition; or what is far worse, say that there is, but in a pantheistic sense, with the result that there would remain nothing but this plain simple fact - one to be put on a par with the ordinary facts of history - the fact, namely, that a group of men by their own labor, skill, and talent have continued through subsequent ages a school begun by Christ and his apostles.’ See Pius, All things. His quarrel with the French state led to the 1905 Law of Separation, which formalised French secularism. He was also the first pope to be canonised since Pius V (1566-72), the father of the Counter-Reformation. The nineteenth-century scandals around David Strauss’s historicisation of Christ provide another useful comparison with the boldness of Scaliger’s work.

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4.2.2.╇ The Secularisation of Christ Grotius, Hobbes, and several others have pointed out that the essence of Christianity, the unum necessarium of belief, the linchpin that secures all the parts, is the actual, historical existence of Christ.89 When Scaliger realised that no amount of philological and historical legwork will reconcile the Gospels’ account of Christ’s life, and that instead of verifying the historicity of Christ (including his birth), the Bible and other texts available that mention him create the exact pattern of intertextual subterfuge that indicates an unhistorical myth or a forgery, he became overjoyed by the leniency of Calvinism toward those who express such findings. If I had said sixty years ago that Our Lord was not born on 25 December, I would have been burned. If a Papist said it nowadays, he would be hauled before the Inquisition. But it is allowed in our religion, since we are permitted to speak and profess the truth.90

This may have been wishful thinking and/or somewhat disingenuous. Scaliger’s familiarity with religious persecution included not only the Catholics’ attack on Huguenots in the St Bartholomew’s Day Â�MasÂ�sacre, but also the execution of Servetus (who ‘only’ questioned the eternal quality of Christ’s bodily manifestation) at the instigation of Calvin himself in 1553, just 30 years before Scaliger’s DET came out. There were many more incidents of religious violence by Calvinists—and Catholics, Lutherans and others—but Servetus became iconic. Castellio was expelled from Geneva only 20 years before Scaliger’s appointment there. His Leiden career provided similar warnings about Calvinist toleration, from the Lipsius-Coornhert debate to the suppression of Catholic worship in Groningen the year after Scaliger arrived in the Netherlands.91 Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded and Grotius exiled not long after Scaliger’s death. Scaliger

89 ╇ Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 43 and passim. Grotius, De veritate. As Grafton put it, ‘Calvin would have had little use for Scaliger’s Jewish Jesus.’ Scaliger, II.323. 90 ╇ ‘Si j’eusse dit, il y a 60 ans, que Nostre Seigneur n’est pas né le 25 Decembre, j’eusse esté bruslé, maintenant si un Papiste ? le disoit, il seroit mis à l’Inquisition; mais il est permit en nostre Religion, parce que veritatem licet dicere & profiteri.’ Scaligerana II.467-8, ‘Natalis Christi.’ Grafton, Scaliger, II.738-9. See also ThT (1658 ed.), ICC 306. 91 ╇ Voogt, Constraint, 197-235. For a range of religious conflicts see Pettegree, “Coming.”

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pretended to exult in a toleration of free inquiry that was notable by its absence. Questioning Christ’s existence was dangerously controversial for his time and place, but it still does not capture the full force of Scaliger’s secularisation. During his lifetime he uncovered a great number of new sources, and he was acutely aware that more will be found in the future.92 The thousands of Egyptian, Gnostic, Greek, Jewish and early Christian texts found within the last 120 years in the caches of Nag Hammadi, the Dead Sea caves, Oxyrhynchus and the Cairo Genizah would have delighted him immeasurably. Yet however many new sources were uncovered, and however keenly appreciative he was of the openness that came with future discoveries, Scaliger’s methodological innovation remained unchanged. In placing the epistemic power of his historical method beyond doubt and above faith, even in the central tenet of Christianity, Scaliger elevated history into a master discipline to which everything could and must be subjected. The secularising impact of this innovation will be illustrated through the works of his students. Cunaeus countered actual and Â�prevented future legitimacy claims based on assertions of direct descent from, or strong analogy with, the biblical commonwealth that was ruled directly by God. Surely, the age-old argument ran, that was the perfect polity; if it were shown to be a monarchy, an arisÂ� tocracy, a republic, or a particular country, then popes and politiÂ�cians could claim legal succession from it, with undisputable authority as their reward. Cunaeus used the Bible as a historical document, deployed the full range of Scaliger’s method, and historicised the Â�biblical commonwealth to the point of making any such claim inÂ�Â� tellectually untenable. Vossius countered and prevented legitimacy claims based on assertions of direct descent from, or strong analogy with, the pristine primitive church, using the Scaligerian template to similar effect. Grotius assisted with the neutralisation of potentially explosive religious legitimacy claims, and constructed a new, secular foundation for law. Heinsius used Scaliger’s philology and comÂ�parative mythography to demonstrate the unsuitability of the Christian story in pedagogy, drama and rhetoric, and thereby to

92 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.90, 401: Scaliger calls upon all government and scholars, from Turks to Jesuits, to supply him with newly discovered chronological information.

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stop vitriolic Christian debates over exemplarity, habituation, and internalisation. 5.╇Scaligerian History as Master Discipline: Consequences for the Leiden Circle The extension of the scope of historical criticism can, and often did, lead to disbelief in assertions that had no historical proof or, even worse, those that claimed to have historical corroboration but used unacceptably poor method. An all-pervasive attention to cultural relativism and an acute sense of historical contingency characterised those who were driven to doubt through a contemplation of history. In the wake of Raymond Lull, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and Pierre Dubois, one finds practitioners of this critical function of historywriting increase rapidly in number, convinced by philological criticism and/or cultural relativism.93 The net effect of new historiography was strongly secularising, and some ‘new historians’ were fearful of contradicting their faith.94 A few outspoken, irreverent champions of historical doubt stood out. Yet in spite of the powerful lessons from Italian and French lawyer-historians, Scaliger aimed at something greater than the antiquarian’s comprehensive correlation, or the humanist’s synthesising reconciliation, of major historical texts from different cultures, centuries, languages and continents. In addition to the ingenious systematisation of the material already known or discovered by him, Scaliger raised history to the Â�status of a ‘master discipline’: he re-formulated historiography’s methoÂ�dological claim and cognisance to become applicable to, and proÂ�nounce the final word on, everything under the sun—including all other disciplines and their objects of inquiry. Copernican astronomy, biblical veracity and Christ are just three examples of Scaliger’s use of history as ‘master discipline’. Historicising everything was the inevitable outcome of a methodical universalisation of historical inquiry’s legitimate targets. This is not to say that the Leiden Circle gave the outcome of historical inquiry the highest place

93 ╇ Kelley, Faces. Owen, Skeptics. Rummel, Humanist-scholastic. Bejczy, “‘Historia praestat omnibus disciplinis’.” 94 ╇ Blom, “Foreign gods.” Cochrane, Historians. Huppert, Idea.

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in the human experience.95 Religion and salvation continued to exercise them, but historical inquiry became their main instrument for drawing the new line of demarcation between reason and revelation. For the second Leiden generation, namely Cunaeus, Grotius, Heinsius, Vossius and Walaeus, Scaliger’s elevation of history into the master discipline became a stepping stone toward secular modernity. His historical method was strong enough to forestall for a while the advent, or rather return in different guise, of uncritical belief in progress. In the quarter-century between Scaliger’s arrival and the Synod of Dordt, the Leiden Circle developed a kind of historiography that was far ahead of its time in objectivity, lack of bias, and intellectual discipline. Secularisation was the inevitable corollary of Scaliger’s historicisation. Nonetheless, the Vassani remarks show Scaliger’s discomfort with the secularising results of his work. We will see other Leideners face the same dilemma over and over again: if the conflicts were to end and the commonwealth to survive, the bones of religious contention had to be buried. Sometimes this involved burying beliefs that many held dear. Comparative relativism, historicisation and the combination of the two in historical criticism as the master discipline, applicable to absolutely everything, were swords that at this time could scare their wielders as much as their opponents. This will become increasingly inapplicable as we approach the Enlightenment. Scaliger’s introduction of new targets for historical criticism was a major manœuvre, probably with a few unintended consequences. It undermined the possibility of making political claims on the basis of any version or chapter of sacred history. Perhaps this outcome was realised gradually, perhaps some of our Leideners did not categorically and at all times exclude the possibility that special people, prophets or saints, may have had insights into the divine plan that neither reason nor method could match. The Leiden Circle have, however, made it much more difficult to allow such claims into valid argumentation and acceptable conversation. Even Vossius, appreciably more irenicist than the others, contributed to this decisive break with sacred history when he proposed to reform the discipline of history in a way that reduced Augustinian ‘sacred history’ to a mere history of institutions, and presented even those as an extended, comparative history ╇ Although Heinsius’s 1613 oration on the dignity of history, examined in chapter 3, section 5 below, comes close. 95

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of all the churches, rituals and sects, not just the Christian ones. This was no minor step on the road that Scaliger’s secularisation of Christian exegetical and chronological traditions had opened up.96 The move that Scaliger represents in my account, the search for new standards by which to judge claims, is radically distinct from eighteenth-century claims for novelty whose proponents misrepresented medieval and early modern Christianity and its adoration of authority and tradition as uncomplicated superstition, only to replace it with (an occasionally blind) faith in progress.97 Scaliger, Cunaeus, Grotius, Heinsius, Vossius, no member of the Leiden Circle subscribed unconditionally to the superiority of one age, one type of source, or any particular set of authors, over another. Their critical method was relatively unbiased. It had to be, since it aimed to produce results defensible against every brand of fanaticism. It was designed as a substantial contribution to the reconstruction of European WeltÂ� anschauung. The Leiden Circle’s objective was not atheism, but peace. Some of the secularising implications of their work, which after all had pragmatic aims in political stability and the form of toleration that served it best, were attained at the cost of stretching their private beliefs, and not quite in keeping with their original intention. It is not the case that they were crypto-atheistic agents of progress; but neither is it true to say that religion blinded them. Again and again we see them trying to ╇ An instructive French parallel for the Scaliger-Vossius duo: ‘Vignier’s beliefs, or doubts, concerning the Creation were irrelevant to his functions as an historian. It did not matter how many thousands of years the earth or mankind had existed before the creation of the earliest historical documents, for in Vignier’s view history proper began only then, and the historian could not make professional pronouncements about the spatium incognitum which stretched out beyond. Within the spatium historicum for which Vignier accepted responsibility, however, he conceived of no theoretical limits to the direction of his inquiries. Whatever could be documented was a fitting subject for the historian. He proceeds on the assumption that his reader will want to know not only about politics but also about religion and culture. The most striking result of this policy is that the history of religion is taken over by the historian and treated in as objective a fashion as politics. Twenty years earlier, Bodin had expelled church history from the historian’s domain in order to free him from a theological interpretation of events. Now we have come full circle, for Vignier takes over church history and treats it exactly as if it were profane history. He has secularized the history of religion itself.’ Huppert, Idea, 129. 97 ╇ Voltaire, Letter XIII: On Mr Locke. Rousseau’s famous 18 August, 1756 letter to Voltaire, reacting to Voltaire’s Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, contains a bona fide, dangerous and understandably irritating challenge to Voltaire to construct a civic religion. Rousseau, Discourses, 245-6. Diderot, s.v. ‘Encyclopédie’ in Encyclopédie. 96

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work out a compromise, a formula for toleration, a viable state, education, system of laws, natural science, history and economics, formulae that would be acceptable to all sides and bring the fighting to an end. Again and again we see them experiment with restraining religion in a number of ways, from ecumenism to minimalism, through deism and rationalism, to Erastianism and downright secularism; over and over we watch them realise that even the remaining points of religion lead inevitably to renewed controversy and conflict, and that all such points have to be gradually removed. We see this pattern in the Swiss cantons around the turn of the sixteenth century, briefly in France in the second half of the same century, England in the mid-seventeenth century and in Leiden until the Precisian Calvinists’ reactionary purge in 1618. The neoplatonism—Aristotelianism, pro- and counter-Cartesianism, pre- and post-Spinozan theology and philosophy, are useful distinctions, but not the most salient ones for a history of political thought. The most instructive contrast is secularising politiques against non-secularisers of all stripes, whether republican, monarchist, French, Dutch, Calvinist, Catholic, and so on. A general rule of thumb for identifying the secularisers is simply to ask how much bloodshed a thinker or politician was prepared to put up with, and then pick out the pragmatic pacifists. A commitment to irenicism bred pragmatism, and vice versa, with both prompting the development of ingenious techniques to remove inflexible dogmatism. If the all-pervasive dogma happens to belong to a religion, secularisation will be the unintended but unavoidable corollary of this process. Scaliger’s notion of history as the master discipline, the ultimate tool of critice, was a foundational technique for the whole of Leiden secularisation. The eighteenth century is too often credited with demolishing Christian credibility and, for the first time since Antiquity, forcing man to come to terms with his mortality; but also with soothing man’s fear of mortality by offering a way to live a worthy life. As Scaliger elevated history into a master discipline, and Heinsius turned the ancient pagan idea that immortality lies in great deeds into an eulogy of historical studies, Diderot used a concept of identical shape to justify the Encyclopédie. If we substitute ‘Scaligerian historiography’ for ‘Encyclopédie,’ this statement of faith in a new kind of immortality through memory, and the republic of historians, could have easily been spoken by Heinsius in his funeral oration for Scaliger:

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chapter two We have seen that the Encyclopedia could only be the effort of a philosophical century; that that century had come; that fame, by conferring immortality on the names of those who would bring it to fruition, would perhaps not refuse to take up ours; and we have felt inspired by the pleasant and consoling thought that people would talk about us when we were gone; by the sensual whisper that made us hear, in the mouths of a few of our contemporaries, what men to whose instruction and happiness we were sacrificing ourselves would say about us, men we esteemed and loved, even though they did not yet exist. We have felt grow in ourselves the seed of emulation, which at death envies the best part of ourselves, and snatches from oblivion the only moments of our existence that were genuinely charmed. […] I have said that only a philosophical century could attempt an encyclopedia; and I said this because this work everywhere requires more boldness of mind than is normally possessed in centuries of cowardly taste.98

Like Voltaire, Diderot overstated the originality of his age. For two decades on either side of 1600 one could find more hardiesse dans l’esprit in Leiden than in Paris a century and a half later; only Leiden’s heart was in history. Leiden’s admittedly short-lived historical turn of secularisation is now less remembered, but for Western intellectual history it is no less significant, than the progressive turn of the enduring Enlightenment. In Leiden, as in a microcosm, we see all the components of the Enlightenment present and prefigured. Some of them had unfulfilled secularising potential left by the time of the Synod. The Calvinist reaction also prevented the Remonstrants from turning their theories into more radical political change, just as the escalating Wars of Religion managed to thwart the French politiques, in contrast to Cromwell’s politically secularising containment or expulsion of the overzealous sects. Enlightenment thinkers seized many of these seventeenth-cen╇ ‘Nous avons vû que l’Encyclopédie ne pouvoit être que la tentative d’un siècle philosophe; que ce siècle étoit arrivé; que la renommée, en portant à l’immortalité les noms de ceux qui l’acheveroient, peut - être ne dédaigneroit pas de se charger des nôtres; & nous nous sommes sentis ranimés par cette idée si consolante & si douce, qu’on s’entretiendroit aussi de nous, lorsque nous ne serions plus; par ce murmure si voluptueux, qui nous faisoit entendre dans la bouche de quelques - uns de nos contemporains, ce que diroient de nous des hommes à l’instruction & au bonheur desquels nous nous immolions, que nous estimions & que nous aimions, quoiqu’ils ne fussent pas encore. […] J’ai dit qu’il n’appartenoit qu’à un siecle philosophe, de tenter une Encyclopédie; & je l’ai dit, parce que cet ouvrage demande par - tout plus de hardiesse dans l’esprit, qu’on n’en a communément dans les siecles pusillanimes du goût.’ (5:635, s.v. ‘Encyclopédie’) Translation by Philip Stewart. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. 98

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tury ideas, and used them to launch radical political change. To do this, they often had to claim credit for novelty, and while these claims were necessary—for every church and state needs to write its own history—their exaggerated originality found its way into our current understanding. Marx, Spengler, Löwith, and many others (but not Herder, Trevor-Roper or Momigliano) have grossly overestimated the intellectual originality of the Enlightenment at the expense of its political novelty, and at the expense of brief, isolated, but brilliant and influential flashes of proto-enlightenments, including the MontaigneL’Hôpital-Pithou type politiques, and the Leiden Circle founded by J-J. Scaliger, Vulcanius, and Franciscus Junius. To approach this from another angle, the similarity or essential identity of the formal features of eschatological histories, from Abraham to Marx, are easy to identify: an end-point, and a meaning in the process leading there that is both more important and harder to see than the observed event.99 This shared characteristic makes the conclusion of this chapter fairly straightforward. In contrast to eschatological and sectarian historiographies, Scaliger opened to historical inquiry not seasonal, but all-year-round hunting for dogmatism.

╇ Akenson, Surpassing wonder. Gunnell, Time. Herder was a sharp and precise critic of such forms of eschatological historiography. Another philosophy, xxxii-xxxv. 99

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Chapter three

Heinsius: Enter Secularisation 1.╇ Vita Brevis Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655) is known today in some seldom-overlapping circles of intellectual historians for his biblical criticism, or for his literary influence. His emblem books, love poetry and moralising epigrams had a substantial impact on the genre. His drama theory and vernacular poetry profoundly influenced German poetry through Martin Opitz, English literature through Ben Jonson, Milton and Dryden, and practically every seventeenth-century French playwright and literary theorist.1 Although Diderot ranks him with Lipsius, Scioppius and Gataker as one ‘des restaurateurs de la Philosophie stoicienne parmi les modernes,’ today there is no discussion of the political relevance of Heinsius’s thought.2 This may be because he wrote no single great statement on law or politics. But placing him in the context of other Leiden thinkers allows us to reread his texts with a sharper eye, and reinstate him as a prominent seculariser and political theorist. Religious warfare defined Heinsius’s early life. Born in Ghent in 1580, his parents fled with the child to Zeeland from the invading Spanish armies, then to England for a short while, and back to Flushing in Zeeland. Flushing then was nominally held by the English Crown as one of three ‘cautionary towns’, securities for Elizabeth’s loan to the young republic. In 1596 Heinsius enrolled at the University of FraÂ� neker, moved to Leiden two years later, and quickly became one of Scaliger’s most highly prized students and friends.3 ╇Sellin, Heinsius. Kern, Influence. ╇ Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘Stoicisme,’ 15.525-33, at 532-3. Christopher Brooke points out that this illustrious roll-call was an approving inversion of what was originally a hitlist, developed by Buddeus and Brucker as part of an anti-Spinozist drive to equate Stoics with atheists, against syncretists who ‘tried to equate Stoic fate with divine Providence.’ Brooke, “How the Stoics,” 401-2. 3 ╇ It was an honour for Heinsius that Scaliger chose his panegyric to preface the Thesaurus temporum. According to Heinsius, Scaliger died in his arms. See his letter to Casaubon, Leiden, 28 March, 1609. Heinsius, Scaligeri Epistolae, Ep. 453. Kern, Influence, 50-1 cites Scaliger’s last letter to Heinsius, and a part of Heinsius’s funeral 1 2

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Volumes of original poetry in Latin are among his earliest publications: the Iambi in 1602, Elegiae in 1603, and the Poemata of 1605. His Emblemata amatoria, in Dutch and Latin, first appeared in 1604. Although the genre of ‘visual epigrams’ was well established by then (most notably by Alciato’s Emblematum liber, published first in 1531), Heinsius’s verve and originality turned his book into a runaway bestseller, inspiring scores of imitators over the next two centuries. His collected Latin orations were first printed in 1609, and expanded versions were republished throughout his life and long after his death. His Auriacus, sive Libertas Saucia (William of Orange, or Liberty Wounded), a patriotic play about the assassination of William the Silent, was performed and first published in 1602. His close Leiden friend and associate, the historian Petrus Scriverius, edited the first collection of Heinsius’s Dutch poetry in 1615 as the Nederduytsche poemata. Many enlarged editions followed. In addition to original compositions, the young Heinsius was also a prolific editor of texts. In 1603 he published Hesiod and the bucolic poets. In 1610 alone he brought out editions of Nonnus, Horace, Seneca and Aristotle’s Poetics, all of key importance to the Leiden project, as we will see later. His rise at Leiden was accordingly meteoric. In 1603 he was appointed professor of poetics, in 1605 professor of Greek, in 1612 he took the chair of politics, and in 1613 that of Â�history. In 1607 he became the fourth librarian of the University, a coveted position that put him at the centre of institutional affairs. Albeit the political significance of his writings is now forgotten, one can detect Leiden secularising techniques at work in almost everything he wrote before 1617, and more often than not in writings after Dordt. What makes Heinsius especially fascinating in the context of Leiden secularisation is the variety of subjects, fields and genres to which he managed to adapt the Scaligerian method, namely the application of historical critice as the touch-stone of all statements, religious or otherwise. A famous instance is Heinsius’s discovery, expounded in several books discussed below, that certain linguistic turns in the New Testament came not from divine inspiration, but from the Hellenistic dialect of predominantly Alexandrian Jews. Similarly to Scaliger’s debunking of Christian stories through historioration for Scaliger. De Jonge, “Daniel Heinsius.” For more details on Heinsius’s life see Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, and her introduction to the NÂ�ederduytsche poemata. Sellin, Heinsius.

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cal analysis and comparison with other religions, the comparative mythoÂ�graphy of Dionysos and Christ—particularly corrosive to ChrisÂ�tianity when the former god is portrayed as superior—appears in many of Heinsius’s writings. So does the rejection of the thesis that natural reason confirms the truth of Christianity, or that Christian figures of any kind, from martyrs to Mary, can be used as exemplars in the internalisation techniques developed for Christian education, preaching and moral entertainment.4 From this prolific output we will only consider a few of his works here. The selection aims not to give a comprehensive catalogue of the cases in which his pre-Dordt writings secularised, but rather an overview of the various methods, genres and subjects in which he advanced Leiden secularisation. The following works will be discussed: his early editions of the bucolic poets (1603 and 1604), his edition and commentary on Nonnus (1610), his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, the De tragoediae constitutione (DTC, 1611), the inaugural speech he gave on accepting the chair of history at Leiden, De praestantia ac dignitate historiae oratio (DPDH, 1613/4), and his Lofsanck van Bacchus (LB, 1614) together with its later counterpart, the Lofsanck van Iesus Christus (LIC, 1617/8). His book on the bucolics provides an insight into the early modern transformation of material poverty into epiÂ� stemic humility. Nonnus taught him about the collapse of character in literature, comparative mythography and the falsity of the stock Christian argument that the precise text of the New Testament was divinely approved and inspired. In DTC he recut the sequence of Aristotle’s Poetics and built a new general theory of literature on it. The new scheme was designed to render Christian exemplars and most available Christian theories of internalisation, pedagogy and motivation unsustainable, and thereby sidestep one of the most divisive issues in the doctrinal debates of the Wars of Religion. In DPDH we find Heinsius joyfully merging the old pagan notion of immortality through patriotism with the humanistic concept of a republic of letters that transcends national boundaries and religious divides. In these last two works, Heinsius also gives full rein to Leiden epistemic humility, denying human reason’s potential to grasp universals, while rewarding a pursuit of particulars with immortality—the highest of prizes over which, as Heinsius knew, Christianity had to maintain its ╇ On such techniques see Levi, French moralists. James, “The passions,” especially 204-10. Tilmouth, Passion’s triumph. 4

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monopoly if it were to retain its public attraction. In LB Heinsius drew strongly suggestive parallels between Bacchus and Christ, and hinted at the superiority of the pagan divinity. As the fortunes of the Leiden Circle were reversed, and the Calvinist reaction and purge began, Heinsius wrote LIC to repair the damage that LB did to his image as a Calvinist. Another possible reason why the significance of these works for political theory is overlooked today is Heinsius’s well-known lack of political acumen. He worked closely with the Leiden Remonstrants until 1617, when he declared for the Counter-Remonstrant side. He was appointed Secretary to the Synod of Dordt by the States General, yet his own Remonstrant sympathies came into question there. (His life-long naïveté was also evident in his dealings with the Swedish court, to which he lent money and performed a variety of services in the Netherlands over decades, expecting in vain to be recompensed.) Yet his friendships did not altogether cease after he sided with the Counter-Remonstrants. He kept in touch with Grotius in prison, then in exile. He remained in close professional and personal contact with Vossius, and his nemesis Salmasius regarded him and Cunaeus as close collaborators in ungodly attacks on the biblical foundation of divine law.5 Except for a brief period of unimpeachable orthodoxy around 1618, many secularising elements resurface in Heinsius’s postDordt works. His 1617-19 allegiance, however suspect, to the Calvinist reactionaries did not make him switch sides intellectually, and his works both before and after the Synod of Dordt mark him out as a key member of the Leiden Circle. 2.╇ Virtuous Poverty of Reason: The Bucolic Heinsius (1603-4) Heinsius was still finding his way in academia when at age 23 and in collaboration with Scaliger and Grotius he published Emendationes et notae in Theocriti idyllia bucolica in 1603.6 Next year an expanded edition appeared, incorporating Casaubon’s notes. Heinsius probably 5 ╇Some primary sources on the Heinsius-Grotius friendship are discussed in Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 84-5. Salmasius’s accusation of surreptitious co-operation between Cunaeus and Heinsius: Cohen, Écrivains, 275-91. Sellin, Heinsius, 43-51. 6 ╇ Heinsius’s early interest in the bucolic poets may have been inspired by his other patron and professor, Vulcanius, who owned some fine manuscripts and edi-

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had more than a passing philological interest in these writers, since after this period he usually signed off as ‘Theocritus à Ganda’ whenever he felt obliged to use a pseudonym.7 The transformation of physical poverty into epistemic humility, a theme also found in Erasmus, Cunaeus and Vossius, is the reason for including this book among the works that represent Heinsius’s contribution to Leiden secularisation. The bucolics wrote numerous thought-provoking, but simple moralising fables. Perhaps the best known is Theocritus’s story about two fishermen, one of whom, Asphalion, is telling his friend about a dream he just had, in which he catches a huge and powerful monster, a fish of gold (not a gold-fish).8 He is scared, ‘lest he might be some fish beloved of Poseidon, or perchance some jewel of the sea-gray Amphitrite.’ In his dream, Asphalion carefully unhooks the fish, sings a little hymn, and swears never to go out to sea again, ‘but abide on land, and lord it over the gold.’ He wakes up, finds he has no gold to lord over, but is afraid that his oath still binds him, and the gods will punish him if he resumes his trade. His friend replies, Be of good cheer; never you fear that. ‘Twas no swearing when you sware that oath any more than ‘twas seeing when you saw the golden fish. Howbeit there’s wisdom to be had of empty shows; for if you will make real and waking search in these places there’s hope of your sleep and your dreams. Go seek the fish of flesh and blood, or you’ll die of hunger and golden visions.

The moral is obvious: work, do not daydream. As with all good stories, however, there are many more interpretations and niceties. For example, if the friend is right and Asphalion is not bound by the oath he gave to the gods in a dream, then neither could he have offended the gods by keeping the dream fish. Intention becomes irrelevant, because dreams are confusing and ‘but lies’. Of course, the suspension of moral responsibility is a common reason why such stories use the dream framework. This and similar much-fragmented stories of Theocritus, tions, and wrote his own commentaries. Codices Vulcaniani, Vulc. 8, f. 27-51, 53-57, and Vulc. 34. 7 ╇ That ‘Theocritus’ equates with ‘Daniel’ in Hebrew was probably an added spur to publish his prestigious Emblemata under this pseudonym. Sellin argues that since Heinsius took his name from an edition he did with the famous Scaliger and Casaubon, the pseudonym was meant less to conceal than to advertise and entertain. “First collection.” Also Heinsius, 16. Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 155. 8 ╇ Idyll XXI, The Fishermen. Edmonds, 246-53. Today scholars dispute whether this Idyll was written by Theocritus, but Heinsius still thought so.

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painstakingly pieced together by Heinsius, draw attention to moral a-responsibility under certain conditions, a topic that greatly exercised philosophers and theologians. Theocritus draws another lesson for the benefit of his reader: There’s but one stirrer-up of the crafts, Diophantus, and her name is Poverty. She is the true teacher of labour; for a man of toil may not so much as sleep for the disquietude of his heart. Nay, if he nod ever so little o’nights, then is his slumber broke suddenly short by the cares that beset him.

Erasmus quotes the same passages to support the Adage, “Poverty has drawn wisdom as her lot” (Paupertas sapientiam sortita est).9 Poverty not only teaches the value of honest hard work, it also awakens the arts. The Leideners were familiar with many of the classical arguments in favour of poverty: poverty keeps you honest, it habituates to moderaÂ�tion, assists the search for truth, it saves man from worldly anxieties that come with riches, and discourages dissembling and selfinterÂ�ested deceit in one’s relationships. The same classical tropes appear in many Leiden formulations of epistemic humility.10 Ancient poverty was an inspiration (readily available in texts that Scaliger suggested his students peruse) for the mature politiques’ understanding of right or humble reason. Lucian’s satire, The Dream or the Cock, begins with the cobbler Micyllus deciding to slaughter the cockerel, because it keeps waking him up from a dream of earthly riches and ease.11 But the cockerel turns out to be Pythagoras reincarnated, who 9 ╇ Erasmus, Collected, IV.22, 401, fn 12. Apparently without any manuscript, variant, edition, fragment or other form of evidence in Greek, Erasmus interpolates “the mistress of studies” in Theocritus’s description of Poverty. Erasmus’s citation runs: Theocritus in Piscatoribus : Ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρει· Αὐτὰ τὦ μόχθοιο διδάσκαλος, id est Unica paupertas, Diophantes, suscitat artes, Ipsa laborandi doctrix studiique magistra. 10 ╇ Beyond those discussed here, see the treatment of Florentius Schoonhovius, Emblemata (1618) in Ginzburg, “High and low.” 11 ╇ Rudolph Agricola, the father of Northern humanism and a speaking character in Cunaeus’s Sardi venales, was the first to translate this Lucianic satire into Latin. Ijsewijn “Agricola,” 26. Lucian’s Cynic, translated by More and Erasmus, and used as a textbook for learning Greek, also ends with a praise of the simple and uncomplicated life. The addition of the biblical adage, ‘radix malorum cupiditas est’ (“For the love of money is the root of all evil,” AV, 1. Tim. 6:10) at the end of the ErasmusMore translation of the The Cock, could have been another inspiration for Heinsius’s and Cunaeus’s translation of physical poverty into an epistemic one. Non-monetary

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proceeds to convince Micyllus that honest poverty is better than riches, whether dreamt or real. In Erasmus’s Praise of Folly we find another instance of connecting poverty with right understanding: What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things? If Micyllus in Lucian had been allowed to go on dreaming that golden dream of riches for evermore, he’d have had no reason to desire any other state of happiness. And so there’s nothing to choose between the two conditions, or if there is, the fools are better off, first because their happiness costs them so little, in fact only a grain of persuasion, secondly because they share their enjoyment of it with the majority of men.12

Erasmus’s praise of folly is partly ironic, and in part proudly Christian. Christianity may appear foolish to the world, but it is the world that is foolish.13 Heinsius, Cunaeus and other secularisers agree with the world instead, and strikingly transform Erasmian irony into cogent criticisms of Christianity’s epistemic claim. By the time Heinsius comes to publish DTC in 1611, and Cunaeus’s Sardi venales appears in 1612, they are well versed in classical treatments of the topic. Heinsius’s early work and life-long fondness for the bucolic poet Theocritus, and his adoption of the nom de plume, fit in well with the Leiden concern with epistemic humility.

Classical and early modern meanings of cupiditas include the kind of lust and covetousness that Leideners ascribed to overzealous theologians, and the allied early modern anti-clerical tropes attributed to priests’ sexual aberrations. Venality, epistemic hubris, and sexual deviance were charges commonly levelled against priests, and connected to the rest of 1 Tim. 6:10: “which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves with many sorrows.” 1. Tim. 6:3-5 specifically targets epistemic hubris. 12 ╇ ‘Num quid interesse censetis inter eos, qui in specu illo Platonico variarum rerum umbras ac simulacra demirantur, modo nihil desiderent, neque minus sibi placeant? et sapientem illum qui specum egressus, veras res adspicit? Quod si Mycillo Lucianico dives illud et aureum somnium perpetuo somniare licuisset, nihil erat cur aliam optaret felicitatem. Aut nihil igitur interest, aut si quid interest, potior etiam stultorum conditio. Primum quod iis sua felicitas minimo constat, id est, sola persuasiuncula. Deinde, quod ea fruuntur cum plurimis communiter.’ Erasmus, Moriae encomium,, 72-3. 13 ╇ Kempis, De imitatione, III.102. Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, I.26. Erasmus, Praise.

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chapter three 3.╇ Dwelling on the Pagan-Christian Borders: Heinsius and Cunaeus on Nonnus (1610)

Another text that brought Cunaeus and Heinsius together in this period was their edition of and commentary on the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, one of the strangest and most controversial of quasi-Christian writers. Two years later their immediate colleagues and students read the Sardi venales as Cunaeus’s attack on Heinsius, although the main thrust of the book is against all theologians; the following year, Heinsius delivered an inaugural on history in which man and even God depend for immortality on the historian alone. Another few years later, in 1617, Cunaeus published his revolutionary De Republica Hebraeorum, in which the fire of Scaliger’s view of history as the master discipline helped him to forge a popular and valuable weapon against zealots, especially chosen nation theorists of all stripes and colours. Nonnus is in many ways the beginning of this outpouring of secularising works. A brief overview of the issues at play can clarify the vision of history and epistemology that Cunaeus and Heinsius had in common, and the sort of inspiration they both found in Leiden’s working environment for their own lines of reasoning. As usual, the best way to find the answer starts with another question: who was Nonnus? He was a native of Egypt (his name means ‘saint’ in Egyptian), born around the turn of fifth century AD in Panopolis, known today as Akhmim, on the east bank of the Nile. The principal god of the city was Min, known to the Greeks as Pan, the god of fertility and master of the deserts between the Nile and the Red Sea. According to Plutarch, ‘The pans and Satyris who live near Chemmis (Akhmim) were the first to learn of the death of Osiris and spread the news. This was how the sudden fear that grips a multitude became known as panic.’14 Despite growing up in Panopolis, panic was not Nonnus’s default state of mind; he is regarded as one of the most rambling and bombastic writers of all time. His best known work is the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic collection of myths in Homeric hexameter, organised loosely around the figure of Dionysos, the god of wine, intoxication, and madness. It begins with the rape of Europa and the battle of the giants, and continues with the mythical history of Thebes (Panopolis was in the Theban nomos or precinct), before finally get╇ Plutarch, Moralia, Isis and Osiris, section 14, 356d. The same reference is made by Erasmus, Praise, 25. 14

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ting to the birth of Dionysos in Book Eight. The bulk of the epic Â� narrates the god’s journey to, and return from, India. Paid, unpaid, professional and spontaneous fans and admirers of Alexander the Great regularly seized on this epic to point out parallels between the king’s and the god’s expeditions to India and their triumphs over powerful enemies, and even compared unfavourably Dionysos’s imaginary exploits with Alexander’s historical ones. The two most often mentioned facts about this epic are that it amÂ�plifies action to the point of collapsing character, and that its Â�language and style are extremely florid, verging on displeasing artificiality. ‘Copious’ and ‘luxuriant’ in vocabulary yet ‘repetitive’ and ‘monoÂ�Â�tonous’ in style are probably the most copiously repeated critical assessments.15 Early modern scholars regarded it as a goldmine of obscure Greek words and their usage and context. Nonnus is also believed to have written a paraphrase of the Gospel of John, which gave rise to the speculation that he converted to ChrisÂ� tianity in later life. The charge of bombast applies here, too. FurtherÂ� more, according to an epigram in the Palatine Anthology (IX.198), Nonnus wrote the now lost Battle of the Giants, and Stephanus of Byzantium preserved four lines of the Bassarica, again on the subject of Dionysos, which he attributed to Nonnus.16 This is relevant to our query for two reasons: Heinsius had a longabiding interest in Nonnus, and during the period in focus here (until the Synod of Dordt) he also wrote some extraordinary pieces comparing Dionysos and Christ. Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and his eclectic halfChristian mythology in the Paraphrases appear to be formative influences that propelled Heinsius to take the secularising positions that he did, before reconsidering his allegiances and edging away (sometimes surprisingly slightly) from the secularisers toward the Counter-Remonstrants.17 In the later discussion of DTC we will see another effect of Nonnus, namely on Heinsius’s collapse of character in favour of action, as the solution to harsh and bloody early modern debates about the value of exemplars (whether pagan or Christian) in ╇ Peacock, Four ages, 191. Auger, “Le monde.” ╇ The interest of Heinsius and Cunaeus in Nonnus may have also been aroused by Scaliger’s critical evaluation of Eusebius as a historical source, especially Eusebius’s Christianisation of pagan historians and stories. See Coggan, Pandæmonia. 17 ╇ On Nonnus’s constructively ambivalent Christianity see Chuvin, “Nonnos.” Liebeschuetz, “The use.” Nonnus, Paraphrase. On Heinsius’s use of it, de Jonge, Heinsius, and idem, “‘Manuscriptus’.” 15 16

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drama, preaching, moral philosophy and education. Heinsius’s use of Nonnus in building a Dionysos-Christ parallel is discussed below at length, à propos his 1614 Lofsanck van Bacchus. Here only the most salient features of the parallel are given, those that occur irresistibly to anyone who reads both Nonnus and Heinsius. Since the early Fathers, similarities between pagan and Christian gods and rites have been the subject of much heated discussion. Currently it is anthropologists of religion who conduct the most interesting debates on the matter. Often they talk of prototypical gods like Orpheus-Bacchus or Osiris-Dionysos, divinely mad and in charge of love, fertility and wine. These gods also die in their respective mythologies, and relics and illustrations produced by the myriad ancient sects around the Mediterranean increasingly show these figures crucified in ways and settings that segue seamlessly into early Christian iconography.18 Christian scholars from Lactantius to James Akin rejected suggestions of pagan influences on Christianity as a ‘genetic influence fallacy’, while many others, from Scaliger to Kersey Graves, have argued for a formative connection.19 We need not engage in this debate, merely point out that it has flourished and raged from ChrisÂ� tianity’s beginning to this day. Heinsius’s striking parallel between Bacchus and Christ drew on Nonnus’s epic on the crucified Dionysos, an entirely coherent and well-developed mythology that was in direct competition with Christianity around the end of Antiquity. With his arresting parallels between Bacchus and Jesus, which drew heavily on Nonnus’s writings, Heinsius took a position in a long-running debate.20 Nonnus gave Heinsius a number of striking parallels between Christ and Dionysos to work with. They are both gods, born of the king of heaven and a human mother, and even then in an unusual manner. They induce divine frenzy, turn water into wine, rise from the dead and liberate mankind.21 Note that the story of Jesus turning ╇ Chuvin, Mythologie. MacCormack, “Loca sancta.” Maraval, Lieux saints. Sivan, “Pilgrimage.” 19 ╇ It is not in relation to Jesus but to Dionysos that Diodorus Siculus gives a sophisticated treatment of the ‘genetic influence fallacy’ in Library, III.62-5. A Dutch tradition, which adds Noah to this particular continuity of gods or heroes, includes Goropius Becanus, Indoscythica (1568?). See de Landtsheer, “Bacchus,” 289. 20 ╇ Lactantius, Institutes. Akin, “Pagan.” Graves, The world’s sixteen. Larson, The story. Nonnus also supplied abundant material for comparing Hermes and Christ. Accorinti, “Hermes e Cristo.” Fayant, “Hermès.” On Nonnus’s pertinent literary devices see Auger, “Le monde.” 21 ╇ Chuvin, “Nonnos.” Accorinti, “Hermes.” 18

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wine into water only occurs in the Gospel of John, and is one of several major features that cannot be found in the Synoptic Gospels. Later in the Lofzangen and other works Heinsius developed this particular comparison at length. Grotius pointed to this and other such parallels to advocate a suspension of judgement about the debatable, metaphorical elements of Christianity, and a reduction of both the Christian faith’s burden of proof, and the minimally acceptable Â�criteria of Christian morality, to their minimalist and ecumenist Â�versions. In Sardi venales and De Republica Hebraeorum Cunaeus, another member of the Leiden Circle, used such parallels as proofs of ChrisÂ�tianity’s historical contingency, cultural relativism, and unjustified claims to epistemic superiority. More subtly, yet with a more profoundly secularising effect, Vossius employed the same comparative perspective to catalogue a host of such parallels and to create a methodological foundation for comparing Christian myths, rituals and institutions with other cultures’ and religions’. His open-ended comparative method became the direct foundation of deism and the Symbolforschung of today’s anthropologists and students of comparative religion.22 The essence of Christianity is the historical figure of Christ and his promise of immortality. It is easy to see why Christianity is more vulnerable to demystification by comparative mythography than ab ovo syncretistic, and natural religions are. Demystification through systematic comparisons reduced Christianity to rubble, and transformed the contested components of European thought that were Christian. Scaliger, Heinisus, Grotius and Vossius were deeply pious thinkers, but they were profoundly committed to putting an end to religious conflict. This is why the Leiden Circle co-operated closely on these texts and developed dove-tailing, complementary secularising theories in the years before the Synod of Dordt. In addition to their joint work on Nonnus, another thing that connected Cunaeus and Heinsius before the Synod of Dordt was their criticism of Gregory Nazianzen. As an addendum to his 1612 Sardi venales, Cunaeus published his edition of the Greek text of Julian’s Cæsares, the apostate emperor’s satire against Christians, with a convenient Latin translation. In the 1611 De tragoediae constitutione ╇ Following Euhemerus, to a degree. Rademaker, Vossius; Geschiedenis, 16. Â�Wickenden, Vossius. 22

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(DTC) Heinsius defended Nonnus from Gregory, and strongly censured Gregory’s Christian tragedy, which was directed largely against Julian.23 4.╇ Enter Secularisation: On The Constitution Of Tragedy (1611)24 Tragedy may seem tangential to secularisation at best, but Heinsius’s contemporary readers, including Casaubon, Balzac, Salmasius and La Mesnardière, realised how thoroughly his subject was implicated in contemporary debates about the proper role of religion in politics. In the wake of the Reformation, one of the most disputed issues was the role of tragedy in the ethically sound and socially beneficial characterformation, education, and entertainment of the Christian citizen. These debates form the intellectual context of DTC, first published in 1611 as an addendum to Heinsius’s reissued edition of Aristotle’s Poetics, which first came out in 1610. Through a careful rearrangement of the sections of the Poetics (summarised in his short appended tract, Ordo Aristotelis), and by building a complex theory of drama from the new Aristotle, Heinsius sidestepped and precluded the fierce debates over theatrical motivation, the use of pagan and Christian exemplars, and much of the controversy surrounding katharsis and internalisation. In DTC Heinsius also subjected all Christian tragedies to heavy criticism. To signal that DTC is not just another literary attack on another Christian sect’s theory of drama and motivation, he carefully covered all groups by criticising tragedies by early Fathers, Renaissance Latin and Eastern Christian, and contemporary Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist playwrights in equal measure. He even retracted his own and fellow Leideners’ juvenile Christian tragedies, written as humanistic exercises in their student days.25 More striking still, he systematised his criticisms by setting new standards for theatre that no Christian tragedy, past or future, could possibly meet. At the same time, the deft rhetorical adjustments described here enabled

23 ╇ On Gregory against Nonnus see Gregory, Pseudo-Nonniani, and the enlightening article by Macé, “Les ‘Histoires’.” 24 ╇ DTC will refer to the first Latin edition of 1611. OCT refers to Sellin’s English translation of the 1643 edition. 25 ╇ OCT 121, and passim.

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Heinsius to deliver these radical criticisms in seemingly reputable Aristotelian guise.26 The circumstances of DTC’s publication confirm its now-forgotten political significance. It is dedicated to Rochus Honerdus (1572-1632), in 1611 a close advisor and confidant of Prince Maurice, a member of the High Court of Holland, Zeeland and West Friesland (the most powerful judicial body of the Republic), and later one of the ComÂ� missioners sent by the States General to conduct the 1618-9 Synod of Dordt. After the consequent purge, Honerdus was appointed the new Curator of Leiden University. He was a highly respected man of letters and had close family, political, literary and religious ties to Heinsius throughout his life. He exchanged numerous scholarly and political letters with Cunaeus.27 One of his plays, Thamara tragoedia, was published at Leiden also in 1611, with a dedication to Heinsius, Grotius and Apollonius Schotte. In DTC’s dedication, Heinsius offers the book in gratitude for this honour.28 1611, the year of the first edition, also saw the Vorstius affair in full swing. It is well described in the secondary literature.29 Briefly, when Arminius came to teach at Leiden in 1603, Gomarus began to suspect him of Pelagianism. The two had a number of public debates until 1609, when Arminius died. The next year, Arminius’s self-proclaimed followers, led by Uyttenbogaert, Grotius and Episcopius, published their Remonstrantiae, consisting of five objections to Calvinism.30 The 26 ╇ As Kern and Sellin point out, in DTC Heinsius carefully masques his often unAristotelian arguments behind Aristotelian terms, pretending not to change but restore and explicate the Poetics. Kern, Influence, 60-2. Sellin, Heinsius, 133, 135, 138. 27 ╇See Cunaeus, Epistolæ. Burmann dates their last letter to 1635, after Honerdus’s death. 28 ╇ In later editions, Heinsius added a few pages to the end of chapter 13 on Thyestes, which he rightly thought to be written by Seneca, not Virgil, as some rival critics believed. One hall-mark he identifies is the inferior quality; yet he closes the chapter by citing with admiration the beginning and end of the famous chorus in Thyestes about the characteristics of a good king (LL 336-403). In the second part of this speech the chorus reveals these qualities to be also the characteristics of all virtuous citizens: Hoc regnum sibi quisque dat (Such kingdom on himself each man bestows. L 390). Thirdly, the chorus praises the constancy and moral strength produced by these qualities. Heinsius in DTC cites LL 336 and 391-403, skipping the second, republican part. This may be another instance of the political caution that Heinsius was known for; or a reminder to Honerdus not to carry too far the Calvinist purge after Dordt. 29 ╇ E.g. Rabbie’s Introduction to Grotius, Ordinum pietas, 16-29. Rohls, “Calvinism.” Mortimer, Reason, 45-50. 30 ╇ A translation of the original is available in Schaff, The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, XI.482.

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most radical departure was the Arminians’ emphasis on free will. Most of the biblical passages they refer to come from John, whose Gospel differs from the other three—known as the Synoptic Gospels— in several respects, and whose Paraphrase by Nonnus was used by Heinsius with controversial effects.31 Remonstrants believed that predestination was conditional, not absolute; that the Atonement offered the possibility of salvation to everyone; and that divine grace was not irresistible. The Remonstrants engineered Leiden’s offer of Arminius’s chair to Conrad Vorstius in the summer of 1610. By then Vorstius was suspected of Socinianism, another school of thought that supported free will, questioned the Trinity and Christ’s divinity, and had a high regard for reason. The last element manifested itself in doctrines like God’s omniscience being limited to necessary truths, and not extending to contingent events in the future. They regarded this limitation on God as necessary for human free will. The proposed appointment of Vorstius greatly upset the Gomarists. This politically sensitive episode acquired an international dimension when James VI/I published letters and pamphlets against Vorstius in 1612, and put pressure on the Provinces to revoke his appointment. The world had its eyes on Leiden, the intellectual powerhouse of the young Republic, when DTC appeared in 1611. Isaac Casaubon presented it triumphantly to James, accompanied by Heinsius’s letters expressing support for James’s reconciliation of Protestantism and episcopacy, and admiring the wisdom of an Erastian political settlement—especially under a wise king like James—first and foremost because of its power to guarantee peace and stability in spite of theological disagreements.32 The Arminian controversy was further politicised as Prince Maurice began to use the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21) to develop an ambitious project of diplomatic and military intervention in Central Europe, and to arm for renewed hostilities with Spain. Oldenbarnevelt, the Grand Pensionary of Holland, and the Remonstrant Leiden politiques were wary of becoming entangled in alliances, and preferred to postpone war as long as possible. Orthodox Calvinist theologians allied with Maurice, and in 1618-9 the Synod of Dordt put an end to the Leiden experiment in secularisation. Honerdus was a CommisÂ� sioner and Heinsius was secretary on behalf of the States General at 31 32

╇ De Jonge, “‘Manuscriptus’.” Newbold, “Appendix 3.” ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 23-5.

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the Synod where competition for control over Dutch foreign policy combined with a theological debate, opening the way to the confirmation of Grotius’s prison sentence and the beheading of Oldenbarnevelt on 13 May, 1619.33 But in 1611 all this was yet to happen, and it was hard to foresee just how fatally divisive the issue would become. The camps were not yet entrenched; Honerdus’s Thamara was dedicated to Grotius as well as to Heinsius. DTC is a testimony to the hope that religion need not be co-opted in the political struggle. It was read avidly by Casaubon, Opitz, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Racine, Mlle Scudéry and others throughÂ�Â�out the seventeenth century, because it offered a peaceful solution to some religious debates by ejecting Christianity from drama, pedagogy, and rhetoric.34 Instead of resolving the debate, Heinsius showed how it could be avoided. 4.1.╇ Intellectual Context: Theatre and Sixteenth-Century Politics of Religion To understand how DTC exerted a secularising effect, we must reconstruct its intellectual context. Since the earliest days of Christianity, parallels with other religions—Jewish and Greek, for instance—have caused consternation among Christian apologists and believers. The archetypical choices for Christianity’s approach to theatre are similar to the three options vis-à-vis politics and history: complete rejection, conditional coexistence, or strong alliance. A subset of self-distinguishing Christian strategies aimed to adapt parts of ancient pagan techniques to the internalisation of Christian values.35 Christian psy╇ Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 18-33, 60-4. Idem, Dutch Republic, chapters 18-20. 34 ╇ Heinsius thought of tragedy as inherently political from its earliest days. DTC 103-4, 121, 130. For the political dimension of Grotius’s dramas see Eyffinger, “Fourth man.” Many of his contemporary readers, including Milton and Chapelain, read DTC as primarily a political statement. Kern, Influence, 70-1. Dubu, Les églises, especially 17-94. Further connections between Heinsius and French politiques are enumerated by Sellin, Heinsius, 60-1. For a longer treatment of DTC’s enormous impact on his English contemporaries, especially Jonson, Milton and Dryden, see Sellin, Heinsius 23-5, and 147-199. (Milton’s imitation of Grotius’s tragedies, Adamus Exul and Sophompaneas, is now better known). For the French reception see Kern, Influence. For his effect on Opitz, see Opitz’s translations (discussed below), as well as Gellinek, “Further Dutch,” and Weevers, “Some unrecorded.” DTC’s influence on Dutch tragedy is well documented; one overview is in Parente, Religious drama. 35 ╇ Tertullian, for instance, denied the relevance of worldly politics, and forbade Christians from attending spectacles. De spectaculis. Gregory Nazianzen also denied 33

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chological theories covered all aspects of internalisation, from medieval morality plays through preaching to the education of princes.36 A sophisticated theory of education, exemplarity and entertainment was developed specifically for Christian values by thinkers like Clement of Alexandria, Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis and Erasmus. In his 1516 The Education of a Christian Prince, Erasmus advises the teacher to ‘enter at once upon his duties, so as to implant the seeds of good moral conduct’ in his students. This is done through ‘stories, pleasing fables, and clever parables,’ among which the life of Christ is pre-eminent.37 Theatre was a major component of popular and elite religious life. From school theatre, morality plays, wandering minstrels’ pious songs, to everyday church rituals, annual processions and court productions, the observation and re-enactment of Christian stories was a hugely important part of Christianity. The basic theory was that the viewer or participant would dissociate from vicious characters, and identify with the virtuous. However, these personifications of ChrisÂ� tian virtues and vices became over time so overdrawn, vulgar and subversive, that the mystères were banned for profanity by the Sorbonne in 1584. They resumed in more moderate forms, became bolder again, and theologians started to denounce them routinely. Some Protestants broke new ground by inserting individual moral judgement into the process of critical appreciation.38 They presented morally complex scenes and figures (e.g. Milton’s infamously attractive Satan).39 Their idea was that not mere re-enactment, but a moral processing of the stories is what leads to virtue. Virtue is more lasting and precious if it is informed and not the result of uncritical empathy, the unthinking acceptance of authority, and repetition. Other ProÂ�tÂ� estant sects banned theatre altogether, along with singing and similar frivolities. Classical plays came roaring back into fashion during the RenaisÂ� sance, and new editions, translations and imitations proliferated. The the saeculum’s relevance, but did so due to his certainty about man’s severe epistemic limitations. Plays for him were the perfect accompaniments to a pious life. 36 ╇ Burke, Popular culture. Cawley, Everyman. James, “Ritual.” Ladurie, Carnival. Muir, Ritual. Spies, Rhetoric. Pettegree, Reformation. On the evolving and competing use of confessional catechisms in teaching see Ehrenpreis, “Teaching religion.” 37 ╇ Erasmus, Education, 141. 38 ╇ From the copious literature see e.g. Kendall, Drama, and Diehl, Staging. Muir, Ritual, chapter 5. Pettegree, Reformation. 39 ╇ Discussed in terms that are very helpful here in Tilmouth, Passion’s triumph, chapter 5.

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humanist revival was also motivated by concerns that popular theatre had become too profane. The French Pléiade spearheaded this new literature, inspired by Ancient models and by pioneers like Dante and Petrarch.40 Various theories exist as to why humanists reformers like George Buchanan (1506-82) or Theodore Beza (1519-1605) felt the need to replace the existing vibrant and popular medieval traditions with new dramatic forms. No doubt the impropriety, length, and cost of the mystères were among the reasons for the overhaul. Furthermore, the gradual insertion of gross and comic elements signalled a general loss of piety among both writers and their public. In addition to hoping to restore decorum, the humanists who read Seneca and the Greek dramatists aimed to redress the formal differences between contemporary theatre and that of Antiquity. In the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (1549), du Bellay spoke for all humanists when he wrote, “Quand aux Comedies & Tragedies, si les Roys & les RepuÂ� bliques les vouloient restituer en leur ancienne dignité, qu’ont usurpée les Farces & Moralitez, ie seroy’ bien d’opinion que tu t’y employasses, & si tu le veux faire pour l’ornement de ta Langue, tu scais ou tu en doibs trouver les Archetypes.” Add to this the pride in their separate national traditions—even in the mystères that they aimed to replace with superior literary forms—and it becomes easy to see why the disparate elements of the humanistic programme fitted together sometimes uneasily.41 The situation in the Netherlands differed only slightly from the European pattern. The country was still being formed, under constant attack from former overlords, and still hoping to reverse the Unions of Artois and Utrecht that divided the provinces in 1579. Literary extremes, such as Becanus’s or Stevin’s claim about the antiquity and divine superiority of the Dutch language, or plays portraying the Dutch as God’s new chosen nation, served to develop and bolster national identity.42 Most Dutch debates and discourses were neverÂ� 40 ╇Stone’s succinct summary of the French literary dynamic describes most of Europe. Stone, Four Renaissance, introduction. The relationship between humanism and the Reformation is famously complicated, and will not be separately discussed here. 41 ╇Stone, Four Renaissance, xii. Weinberg, A history is an excellent summary of the background to this debate. There are also good introductions in Davis, Society, Parente, Religious drama, and Weinberg’s introduction to Critical prefaces. 42 ╇See the discussion of literary texts, including plays portraying the Dutch as God’s new chosen people by Coornhert, Hooft, Vondel, Valerius and Koning, in

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theless very similar to those in France, England and Italy.43 The rivalry between the clergy, academicians and the Rederijkers (members of Dutch chambers of rhetoric) has, for instance, a dynamic comparable to the complex interaction between the Sorbonne, la Pléiade, and the mystères in France.44 Theatre productions turned into battle-grounds, and actors were fêted or hectored on the basis of minute matters like the visibility of the marker (black clothes or horns, for instance) that identified them as a bad or a good character.45 Catholic thinkers thought that the humanist revival followed Ancient pagan literary models much too closely for comfort. The Council of Trent issued guidelines for a reformed Catholic theatre in reaction to both the rise of vulgarity and the humanist literary innovations that hoped to remedy it. For the same reasons, theatre was banned or severely restricted by many Protestant sects, including the Mennonites, against whom the 22-year-old Heinsius defended tragedy as a worthy and royal art form in the opening of his 1602 patriotic tragedy, Auriacus.46 However, unlike in figurative art, where Trent gave rise to Mannerism, Tridentine literary guidelines were either ignored or the resulting plays, sermons and books of devotion proved to be far less popular than the new Christian literature produced by Breen, “Gereformeerde,” especially 254-73 and 372-82. Schama, Embarrassment, 93-125. Smitskamp, Calvinistisch. Groenhuis De predikanten, especially 77-102. Perlove, “An irenic.” Van Rooden, “Contesting.” Frijhoff, “Religious.” Bodian, “Biblical.” 43 ╇Schenkeveld, Dutch literature. 44 ╇ The Rederijkers or ‘rhetoricians’ are a fascinating group. They were Flemish and Dutch poets, singers and playwrights, first united in guilds in the 1440s. They wrote and staged popular mystery and miracle plays, and acted as both check upon, and conduit between, vulgar and academic literary styles and innovations. They embodied civic pride, culture and bourgeois values, as well as resistance, independence, and social toleration. During the Reformation they occasionally became powerful enough to take control of city councils, including Haarlem and Amsterdam, and incite rebellion, millenarian schemes like the Anabaptists’ in Münster, or heroic resistance against Spanish or French invasion. General introduction: Heppner, “Jan Steen.” Ramakers, Rederijkers. Puts, “Geschiedenis.” Marnef, “Chambers.” Rederijkers between aristocrats and the people: Pleij, “Geladen vermaak,” and van Autenboer, Volksfeesten. As revolutionary agents: Verduin, “The Chambers.” Waite, “Reformers;” “Vernacular;” Reformers; “On the stage.” 45 ╇ Conversely, historical minutes of a real meeting of theologians, which led to an execution, could be turned into a polemical play. See Rubianus’s Theologists in Council, in Rummel, Scheming. 46 ╇ Dedication to the Estates of Holland and West-Friesland, referring to Tragoedia: ‘Gravissimam eam dignitissimamque omnium scriptorum esse, multis argumentis probarunt Romani, et ante eos disciplinarum autores Graeci.’ Bloemendal’s edition, 190.

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humanists.47 French humanist drama by and after La Pléiade complements the rise of politique Gallicanism both in its nationalist resistance to Trent and in its search for religiously inoffensive, widely acceptable forms of expression. Nevertheless, upholding the classical revival in the face of Catholic reaction against Renaissance paganism and the Protestant schism presented further problems. Many cultural products of Antiquity fit uneasily with Christianity, as we said before; but ancient tragedies in particular presented distinctive problems in early modern Christian debates. To mention a few, particularly relevant to the Remonstrant controversy, Lucian in Zeus rants and Zeus catechized creates a sophisticated discussion between Momus and the gods about the paradoxes of predestination and divine foreknowledge, and Iphigenia at Aulis became controversial around the turn of the seventeenth century because Euripides, breaking with tradition, pictured the innocent Iphigenia first recoiling from her fate, then choosing to sacrifice herself at the behest of her father, Agamemnon.48 Aristotle denounced this scene as an untoward change of character, and Iphigenia as a bad play in consequence. Christian theologians disliked it because some of Iphigenia’s lines express sentiments uncomfortably close to Christ’s. The final piece missing from the context of Heinsius’s DTC, after this simplified overview of the Renaissance reaction to impious popu╇ Dubu takes this story into the nineteenth century in Les églises. A well-balanced summary of the theatrical reaction to Trent is Zampelli, “Trent.” For the seriousness and, for intellectual historians, the value of the debate over visual representations during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, see the scandal surrounding Dirk Bouts’s altarpiece at St Peter’s in Louvain, mentioned in the Scaliger chapter above, and the political message of the Raphael, Romano and Piero della Francesca frescoes of the first Christian emperors, described in chapter 5 on Grotius below. 48 ╇ A delightful proof that these Lucianic pieces were interpreted this way is in Alberti’s Momus (1443-1450?), 27-9 and passim. Note that before Erasmus began translating Lucian with More, he prepared by translating precisely Euripides’s Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis from Greek into Latin. Rummel, Erasmus as a translator, chapters 2 and 3. These youthful translations were often published together with Buchanan’s translation of Euripides’s Medea, and read and acted out by, among others, Montaigne at the Collège de Guyenne at Bordeaux. An example of a Christian theological reading of Iphigenia is Agricola, “In laudem philosophiae” (1539), 155. For an outstanding treatment of the role of goats and saviours in Renaissance, Reformation and early modern theories of sacrifice and katharsis (including brief discussions of Aristotle, Buchanan, Heinsius, Iphigenia and Jephtah), see Shuger, Renaissance Bible, chapter 4. Samuel Coster (1579-1665), the Leiden-educated physician and playwright, put on his play Iphigenia in 1617 in Amsterdam as an attack on fanatical Calvinist preachers. They protested to the city’s mayor. 47

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lar theatre and the humanist explosion of neoclassical styles, adapted to a new sense of pride in the vernacular and followed by the failed Tridentine bid to replace both vulgar and humanist literature,49 is the role of the Society of Jesus in this crucial battle for hearts and minds both in and outside Europe. By 1540, when Paul III confirmed the order, the direct political significance of theatre in education and in reshaping culture after the Reformation was widely understood. Yet unlike the Council of Trent, the Jesuits rose to the challenge with skill, efficiency and verve. The cuius regio eius religio principle acquired a certain piquancy when the best schools for princes turned out to be those established and run by the Jesuits; although, famously, the best critics of Catholicism and Christianity also matriculated there.50 Heinsius complained in his letter to James VI/I that he feared that since the Catholic armies of Spain were repeatedly thwarted, Rome would choose more subtle methods to sneak Catholicism back to the Netherlands through the back door.51 The Jesuit enterprise was taking off spectacularly around this time, shown by their growing numbers, influence at courts, and rapidly expanding educational programme. How exactly did their theory of motivation and internalisation work, and what could Heinsius do to counter it? Note that he could have easily written any number of polemical tracts against the Jesuits, using his proposed emendation of Aristotle’s Poetics. There was a wide range of models for him to follow, from humanists and moderates to the anti-theatre Mennonites. Instead, Heinsius chose to disqualify all Christian theatre, and by widening the principles derived from his Aristotle to every speech act, he cut across the politically explosive moral and psychological debates with a masterstroke. He simultaneously targeted Jesuit, humanist, and Protestant theories of motivation and internalisation. Having touched on the humanists above, the Jesuit theory of motivation, internalisation, education and drama is also worth reviewing briefly, not least because it was the major competitor to Protestant theories, and a main target of DTC. 49 ╇ The best introduction to the Reformation debate, with particular emphasis on the Dutch, is Wille, “De Gereformeerden.” See Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 114 for a check-list of the major steps. 50 ╇ Valentine, “Moral.” 51 ╇ For the Jesuit attack on Scaliger see Pattison, “Scaliger,” 187-194. Also see Israel, Dutch Republic, 414-9. One also wonders whether Grotius knew Meletius’s dislike for Jesuits when he picked him as eponym for his irenicist treatise. Posthumus Meyjes in Grotius, Meletius, 17.

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In 1534 Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus to promote reform within the Catholic Church and to preach the Gospel in foreign lands. Loyola’s religious experience had a strong visionary and mystical component, which he developed and codified in the Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises were designed to bring about a transformation of the will, such that the exercitant would always be directed to follow ‘the greater good.’ From an ethical perspective, Loyola argued, this meant exercising the proper attitude toward, and use of, all people and things. He designed a fascinating mental technique called ‘composition of place,’ whereby the praying Jesuit places himself at, typically, the scene of a biblical event. He must engage all his senses during the exercise to ensure that the prayer is not reduced to a purely intellectual activity. The emotional and psychological characteristics of the scene should transform into precisely targeted and well-defined impressions in the individual. But only a part of these impressions will be identical to those that the exercitant would receive if he or she were actually present at the scene; the other impressions are mediated through the mind and the soul in such a way that the exercitant also grasps the transcendental significance of the scene, not only its material aspects. This is how the Exercises can produce, for instance, mystical union with the divine, or become the efficient cause of absolution. Jesuits often acted as confessors to kings, and became successful missionaries due to their ability to adapt to the local culture and use their environment to prepare the natives for Christianity. In both activities, the ‘composition of place’ technique offered an advantage. Another effect of the Exercises is the rearrangement of a person’s emotional state, such as joy, sorrow, horror, attraction, desolation, consolation, and so on. In Jesuit philosophy it is neither reason, nor habit, but a specific series of exercises that establishes the connection between emotional states and virtuous actions. The psychology of the truly committed and well-trained exercitant will be reordered in the service of the good—for instance, praiseworthy activity will be associated with emotions of desire (before the praiseworthy act) and gratification (after), while base and sinful activities will evoke aversion, shame, and horror.52 Loyola made an almost Machiavellian admission within CathoÂ� licism: instead of merely assuming that pious actions form character and pious people perform pious acts, he recognised that man has nat52

╇ Loyola, Exercises, 12, 25-28.

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ural urges which, if unchecked, give rise to vice.53 Instead of individualistic, ascetic self-denial, and instead of tolerating collective acquiesÂ�cence in the ineradicability of evil and in the naturalness of a universal undercurrent of guilt and desire, fallen man’s weak nature must be not merely contained, but fundamentally overhauled. In addition to a set of techniques to essentially shape the emotional and cognitive processes in members of the Society, the Jesuits also had a profound influence on lay culture through four basic platforms: Jesuit training, preaching, public events, and schools. The Society regularly put on shows, pious plays, enormous and elaborate public spectacles and processions, all staged and organised according to their highly developed methodology to maximise the moral and psychological effect on audience and participants alike. The aim of Loyolan meditation was to instil the pursuit of ‘the greater good’ in the individual; the aim of Jesuit theatre was to inspire love of virtue in the multitude. A seventeenth-century physician, discussing edification by Jesuit drama, commented that while a sermon engages hearing alone, “when the eyes are also impressed, it makes an all-powerful impresÂ� sion.”54 The lavish sets, full orchestras, smart dialogue (in both Latin and the vernacular), powerful acting and occasional dances were designed to overwhelm the senses with persistent, long-abiding impressions. Although Loyola admitted that evil was inherent to human nature, which had to be transformed before it could overcome wickedness, he also believed that when man is presented with clear options of good and evil, he will choose the life of virtue and integrity. One function of Jesuit theatre was therefore to distill and dramatise good and evil. Old-fashioned medieval and non-Jesuit Baroque plays normally presÂ� ented evil as a result of weakness and/or the devil’s agency. In a show of subtlety, Jesuit plays occasionally presented evil as attractive. As Loyola pointed out, sometimes ‘the evil spirit assumes the appearance of an angel of light, […] drawing the soul into his hidden snares and evil designs.’55 Accordingly, it was important that the allure of vice and its destructive consequences are given ample space and dramatic power to play themselves out in the viewers’ mind and psyche.

╇ For more Jesuit Machiavellism see Höpfl, Jesuit. Idem, “Fitzherbert’s.” ╇ Janssen, History, 195-96, 32. 55 ╇ Exercises, 148. 53 54

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After the Exercises, preaching and public theatre, the fourth arena for applying the Jesuits’ theory of motivation through visualisation and acting was in their schools. Early on, Catholics and Protestants alike recognised the paramount importance of education in the religious struggle. The establishment of colleges played a key role in the Catholic or Counter-Reformation. Drawing on the Exercises and on Loyola’s Constitutiones, a sketch and call for a Jesuit curriculum, another founding text of the Society was the Ratio Studiorum, preliminary versions of which were being published and tested in-house from 1545 until 1599, when its first fully binding version was issued. Within the curriculum’s twenty-five-year testing period (1555-80), nineteen Jesuit schools were founded in the German-speaking provinces alone, and the number and quality of Jesuit schools became and long remained one of the greatest European achievements.56 The Ratio Studiorum defined the goals as well as the means of achieving a Jesuitic education. Students would attain ‘perfect eloquence’ and fully realise their intellectual, ethical, and spiritual potential. Theatre had two main functions in the curriculum. It allowed students to improve their grammatical and rhetorical skills, and instilled Catholic values in them.57 Many significant figures were involved in Jesuit theatrical productions in their youth. Broderick notes that ‘the more lasting influence of Jesuit drama lay in the effect it had on such great figures as Molière, Corneille and Lope de Vega.’58 Even Voltaire thought that the theatrical performances staged at the Jesuit college in Paris were the finest aspect of his education there.59 The discourses outlined above constitute DTC’s context and provide a key to unlocking its meaning and significance. Sellin, seldom given to exaggeration, has a great instinct for the value of DTC: the work is little less than a theoretical manifesto of new principles embraced by iconoclastic, young Dutch poets inspired by their Leiden Tityrus, Scaliger.60

The exact signification of Heinsius’s theory becomes clearer when one realises that DTC is not only about drama but also about education, writing and preaching, and that it lays out a secular methodology that ╇ Pavur, Ratio. Bangert, History, 71. ╇ Bangert, History, 73. Muir, Ritual, 131. 58 ╇ Broderick, “Jesuits,” VII.897. 59 ╇ Purdie, “Jesuit drama.” 60 ╇ OCT, xix. 56 57

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maximises the probability of agreement and peace among the contesting parties in the religious wars.61 One of many proofs that it was written with this real-life application in mind comes from the commentary of Scaliger’s father, Julius Cæsar Scaliger (1484-1558) on Aristotle’s Poetics, which heavily emphasised the application of these Aristotelian principles in education. J-J. Scaliger passed on his father’s notes to Heinsius, who praised both men in his 1609 funeral oration for Scaliger, and referred to J.C.’s work on Aristotle several times in DTC and elsewhere.62 Another indication is in chapter XVII, the penultimate and longest chapter of DTC, where Heinsius unexpectedly widens the scope of his argument from tragedy to all forms of rhetoric, quite contrary to Aristotle’s intention in the Poetics. (We will return to this passage again.) While Becker-Cantarino, Kern, Meter, Sellin, Warners and other recent Heinsius scholars have missed the political, secularising import of DTC, Sellin picked up on a similar passage from DTC’s beginning, and capably explained Heinsius’s strategy for encompassing all speech acts, while availing himself of Aristotle’s authority. But although Heinsius’s definition of tragedy is a literal translation of Aristotle’s, it involves a taxonomy derived from medieval and humanist criticism, not from the Stagirite. All poetry is assumed to belong to a family of arts existing in discourse (oratio). Though Heinsius offers no exhaustive enumeration of the members of this group, it undoubtedly includes disciplines like rhetoric and history as well as poetry. The factor common to all is their verbal nature—tragedy uses speech (sermo), Heinsius remarks curtly, because it consists of discourse (9). Ultimately, all are likewise conceived as serving practical ends of an ethical or political nature. The effect of this approach is that it establishes intimate links between poetry and utilitarian arts like oratory and history simply because they all derive their existence from words, regardless of how they may differ in other respects.63

Although Heinsius reiterates throughout the book that writing and enacting Christian tragedies is inadvisable and impossible by the cor61 ╇ For Heinsius’s keen awareness of the role of imitation in internalising not only Christian, but also civic values, see his introduction to Auriacus. 62 ╇ Heinsius, “In Iosephi Scaligeri Funere.” For a detailed comparison of J. C. Â�Scaliger’s and Heinsius’s reading of the Poetics see Weinberg, A history. Kern, Influence, 38-53, and passim. 63 ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 133. See also 137 for Sellin’s thought-provoking reconstruction of Heinsius’s implied parallel between poets’ use of non-verbal means and orators’ use of aids external to their speech, such as laws, contracts and witnesses.

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rect standards of the art, his intention is broader than a literary dispute about plays. Tellingly, in chapter XVII he also warns against using provocative and contentious phrases in any argument, especially terms like ‘predestine’ or ‘free will,’ which are causing real tragedies off stage.64 4.2.╇ A Close Textual Analysis of DTC Let us examine some of the secularising strategies at work. Some of them are concealed in Heinsius’s subtle redefinitions of Aristotelian concepts. Here we will only touch on a few that had a direct, profound and relatively straightforward secularising effect, namely imitation, passion, action, character, manners, verisimilitude, reason, peripety, and fable. 4.2.1.╇ Imitation and Passion At first, Heinsius follows Aristotle closely. All poetry and all tragedy is imitation. The utility and end of tragedy is the expiation or purgation of the passions.65 Heinsius discusses the conventional early modern dichotomy in the evaluation of passions, namely Plato’s contention that they correspond to virtues and vices, against Aristotle’s, that they are value-neutral. Heinsius takes Aristotle’s side: a farmer is rightly horrified by the sight of a wound while a surgeon, trained and accustomed to it, remains rightly indifferent. The function of theatre, accordingly, is to be ‘a kind of training hall for our passions which (since they are useful in life, even necessary) must there be readied and perfected.’66 This opening definition already contradicts the conventional theory of the efficacy of Christian drama, which is exerted through repetition and the integration of the plot in the everyday lives of the audience.67 In Heinsius’s ‘training hall’ it is no longer enough to watch pious plays at Easter and Christmas over and over again. Cultural historians and comparative anthropologists often point out 64 ╇ ‘Aut in sacro argumento, prædestinare, aut libera voluntas. Quæ nunc extra scenam dant tragœdias.’ DTC 212, OCT 119. This passage was already present in the first edition of 1611, and remained unaltered in subsequent editions. 65 ╇ OCT 44. 66 ╇ OCT 12. In Milton’s phrase, the poet can ‘allay the perturbations of the mind and set the affections in right tune.’ “Reason of Church-Government,” 111-2. 67 ╇ Burke, Popular culture. Cawley, Everyman. James, “Ritual.” Ladurie, Carnival. Valentine, “Moral.” Zampelli, “Trent.”

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that much of medieval, Renaissance and early modern European religious culture operated on the same principles of repetition, immersion and re-enactment as African or Central American religious-civic rituals;68 but as a good Protestant, Heinsius requires the viewer to take more responsibility, exercise his or her faculty of free will, step out from the crowd, and perform the moral calculus independently. How can theatre make this possible? According to Heinsius, Plato thought that the representation of passions turns, unfiltered, into vices or virtues in the spectator. Aristotle theorised that representation is filtered, and the viewer of tragedy purges and learns, rationally and emotionally alike. He purges and learns, purges and learns, becoming a better person with each play (if the play meets Heinsius’s criteria). Tragedy ‘allays terror and pity in the mind, and teaches these two passions to obey reason as is necessary.’69 Heinsius usually adheres closely to Aristotle, but veers toward Plato when his secularising goal requires.70 In this instance, he modifies the Aristotelian theory of katharsis by adding that ‘every imitation delights,’ even the imitation of vices. Since at the same time he takes Aristotle’s side that such delight does not entail the internalisation of the vice itself, the moral calculus comes about via purging the individual viewer’s (or participant’s) passion, which in the case of good tragedies results in virtue. In other words, Heinsius offers a Platonic mechanism in an Aristotelian setting, a kind of middle road between humanist neoplatonist and scholastic Aristotelian drama. Yet like the Remonstrants, he assigns more moral autonomy to the individual than Plato or the Catholics did, and does not fear uncritical identification with every enacted passion—even though he explicitly denies reason any role in the proceedings.71 ╇ Geertz, Person, time. Boglár, Religion. Descola, Les idées. Lawson and Â� McCauley, Rethinking. Verger, “Trance.” Wagner, Invention. Burke, Popular culture. Kantorowicz, The King’s. 69 ╇ OCT 15. 70 ╇ Also noted by Kern, Influence, 60-2, and Sellin, Heinsius, 133-9. Brown notes similar attempts to reinterpret and re-present Aristotle as more compatible with Protestantism. “Renaissance,” 79-80. 71 ╇ Kern argues that Heinsius was the first to interpret the Poetics in these terms, namely of a mediating and unreasoning empathy between actor and spectator. Influence, 63. Heinsius’s peculiar combination of a Calvinist insistence on faith, no apparent role for predestination, and a distrust of reason, may have been partly inspired by his study of Dionysian frenzy. On the wider framework see James, “The passions,” Tilmouth, Passion’s triumph, and Sierhuis, “Revenge.” 68

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Tragedy and imitation, in short, cannot lead to straightforward interÂ�nalisation. Their utility in a Christian education is undeniable, but according to Heinsius their effects are impossible to design with precision. Given this ineradicable element of indeterminacy according to Heinsius, tragedy and imitation cannot become a legitimate part of theological debate or grounds for acts of religious violence. ‘Teaching, as an end of tragedy,’ Sellin writes, ‘has disappeared completely, for Heinsius nowhere discusses the form as a means of transmitting doctrine of any kind.’72 Not only the conspicuous absence of such a discussion, but the very design and content of DTC (and of the Ordo Aristotelis), including its implications for teaching, make excellent sense when DTC is placed in the context of Leiden secularisation, stretching from Scaliger’s work to the Synod of Dordt, and if, more particularly, the first edition of DTC is put into the immediate context of the Vorstius affair. 4.2.2.╇ Character and Action The upshot of DTC most often mentioned in the secondary literature is that it abandons character in favour of action.73 This is prefigured in Heinsius’s work on Nonnus, whose Dionysiaca is also noted for its ‘entire neglect of character.’74 The important thing to realise is that this sidesteps, as good irenicist arguments do, the ferocious debates regarding the proper use of pagan and Christian exemplars, and the whole theory of internalisation. Collapsing character eliminates the need to take a position in the debate about exemplars, and this helps to avoid closely connected doctrinal issues like free will or the nature of divine intervention in the form of this- and/or other-worldly rewards and punishments.75 Securing this result in DTC was a major concern for Heinsius. He approaches it from several angles. Consider first his basic theory of the tragedy-defining passions. The best way of arousing them is to use characters of middling virtue, ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 131. ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 197 and passim. Meter remains the only contemporary reader of Heinsius to have missed this point. Literary theories. 74 ╇ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed. (1888), s.v. ‘Nonnus.’ 75 ╇ J.C. Scaliger, for instance, thought that Aristotle recommended the use of extremely good and bad characters, and that a Christianised Aristotle would use the characters’ clear moral value to portray divine reward or punishment. Robortellus also read Aristotle to be advocating the use of extreme characters. Kern, Influence, 40-1, 58-9, and passim. Sellin, “From Res.” 72 73

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easy to identify with, and not powerful or unique enough to stand in the way of action. This also reinforces the verisimilitude of the action, since most people belong to this middling sort. Heinsius approvingly invokes Aristotle’s law of humanity, according to which ‘man pities man as man.’ This is another barrier to representing Christ, the Father, Satan or the saints in a Christian tragedy.76 One way around this problem, used by some Renaissance theorists of moral psychology, is to argue that a cathartically represented emotion excites and discharges not the same emotion in the audience, but its counterpart. According to this scheme fear purges wrath, epistemic humiliation discharges arrogance, and visions of the superhuman purge the bestial from man.77 Although this would make Christian tragedies much more viable, it was not Heinsius’s version of katharsis. Second, Heinsius marginalises character by putting action at the heart of tragedy’s efficacy. He starts by affirming that ‘no one imitates human manners or ideas without action, but only through it.’78 ‘Moreover, action can exist without manners, but manners cannot exist without action.’79 Applied to tragedy, he continues, this principle means that ‘tragedy is an imitation not of quality but of action, for manners [mores] are qualities of actions.’80 ‘The end of the tragic poet, therefore, is not the imitation of manners but of the actions which

╇ OCT 53. Note that this principle, which Heinsius deployed against Christian representation in DTC, did not necessarily clash with it. In Poetica (first part published in 1529; second and third parts in 1562), Giangiorgo Trissino, for instance, used the same Aristotelian principle that empathy and verisimilitude require middling characters to criticise Ariosto’s and others’ Renaissance tales of neo-pagan and chivalric heroism. Gigante, “Figures,” 90-1. Compare Heinsius’s criticism of Christian tragedy with the Jesuit mediocritatis descriptio for their complex sliding scale between virtue and talent on the one hand, and the length and subject of studies, on the other. Ratio studiorum, 14-9, 23, 53, 122, etc. Also compare Maimonides, Book of Knowledge, 47b: ‘The right way is the mean in each group of dispositions common to humanity; namely, the disposition which is equally distant from the two extremes in its class, not being nearer to the one than to the other. […] Whoever is particularly scrupulous and deviates somewhat from the exact mean in disposition, in one direction or the other, is called a saint.’ 77 ╇ Argued by Madius, Minturnius, Robortellus and others. Kern, Influence, 28-9. Weinberg, A history. 78 ╇ OCT 20. ‘Nemo enim sine actione mores mitatur hominum vel sensus, sed per istam.’ DTC 35. 79 ╇ OCT 20-1. ‘Sed & actio absque moribus, sine actione esse non possunt mores.’ DTC 36. 80 ╇ OCT 21. ‘Ideoque negat qualitatis imitationem, verum actionis, esse tragoediam. Actionis enim qualitates sunt mores.’ DTC 36. 76

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those manners derive from.’81 By extending this principle to all speechacts in chapter XVII he effectively disqualifies pious prayers, sermons and exercises that look to Christ, angels and saints as exemplars to emulate. This tallies with his discussion of the character best suited to tragedy, a middling personage whose non-descriptness shows up the importance and meaning of action the most effectively.82 Heinsius’s ploy to raise the profile of action, occasionally misread as a result of ‘Golden Age Dutch pragmatism,’ was half of a twopart, well-designed strategy. The greater the distance that Heinsius, Cunaeus and Vossius managed to introduce between the character of a potential role model and the potential emulator, the more obvious it became that actions could not be replicated, either. They also endorsed the obverse formulation of this action-makes-character principle, namely that in order to acquire a character like Christ’s or a saint’s, speech-acts like drama or prayer will be less effective than learning to walk on water, turning water into wine, or rising from the dead. Add to this the second part, Scaligerian skepticism about the historicity of the actions described in the Bible, coupled with radical epistemic humility concerning the knowability of God’s and Christ’s real character, and there is little scope left for religion within any form of social interaction that relies on speech or representation, from plays to politics. This strategy is the reason for the close family resemblance between Heinsius’s demolition of Christian tragedy and exemplarity in DTC, Cunaeus’s neutralisation of the Hebrew Commonwealth as a source of modern divine legitimacy claims and, discussed below, Grotius’s consistent thwarting in De iure praedae of the various Catholic and Calvinist evocations of Old Testament mores in a modern legal problem. The central message of Cunaeus’s De Republica Hebraeorum and Grotius’s De republica emendanda was how not to imitate the biblical commonwealth; DTC shows why Christ, saints and martyrs cannot be imitated in drama, rhetoric, and education. 4.2.3.╇ Fable Speech and action—commensurate with the experience of players of middling virtue—must remain strictly relevant to fable, the central unit of tragedy. ‘Fable’ refers to both the tragedy’s subject matter and 81 ╇ OCT 21. ‘Quare neque morum imitatio, tragici est finis, verum actiones; quas sequuntur isti mores.’ DTC 37. 82 ╇ OCT 51.

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the arrangement of its enactment. It gives unity to epic poetry and tragedy alike.83 In Heinsius’s definition, fable is ‘a careful and verisimilar imitation of a real action’ and has two kinds, simple and complex. The simple has no peripety (sudden and surprising reversal of fortune), the complex does. Almost all fables are simple.84 In keeping with his collapse of character in favour of action, Heinsius states that a fable ‘imitates or copies not men insofar as they are men, but insofar as they act.’85 He stops character from coming back through the fable. His treatment of tragedy’s central unit makes Scripture even more unsuited to tragedy: Hence it is evident how much attention must be paid to the argument, and that this all involves judgment and choice, especially if it is taken from truth or from Scripture, where changing nearly everything is a violation of conscience. Obviously, there is more liberty in the fables, and hence, everything here is said with this in view.86

Representing a character like Theseus, Achilles or Christ at the expense of the rigorous unity of action is inexcusably bad fable.87 Even the disparate actions of a single individual cannot be presented in either epic or tragic form. A play about a Christian figure is still feasible, if it centers around a single action in his or her life; but a correct fable does not allow for several actions, which could add up to the depiction of a character.88 In Heinsius’s scheme, it became impossible to use the 83 ╇Sellin is right to translate constitutio as ‘plot’ and fabula as ‘fable’. What I am summarising here is Heinsius’s passages on fabula. Sellin, “Proper translation.” 84 ╇ OCT 34 ff. 85 ╇ OCT 44. 86 ╇ OCT 54. ‘Unde apparet, quanta argumenti ipsius sit habenda ratio. Et hoc totum in judicio & electione versari. Si præsertim aut evero, aut e sacris sumatur. Ubi prelaque mutare est religio. Nam in fabulis plus licet. Ideoque pleraque quæ hic dicuntur, eo spectant.’ DTC 109. 87 ╇ ‘Sic non pauci arbitrati sunt olim, unius actionem esse unam. Puta Herculis, Thesei, Achillis, Ulyssis, & aliorum. Quod ineptum est ac falsum cum ab uno eodeumÂ�que multa fieri omnino possint, que conjungi & referri ad eundem finem, commode non possunt.’ DTC 48-9. Also DTC 51: ‘Non enim ex omnibus separatis actionibus, una fit actio: verum ex iis tantum, quae sic inter se cohaerent, ut ex iis aliquam si ponas, altera aut necessario aut vero similiter sequatur.’ OCT 26. 88 ╇ Compare Heinsius’s tightening of the definition of fabula to the central incidents of tragedy, divorced from considerations of character, thought or speech. He did this in opposition to Macrobius, the chief competitor to Aristotle, and his followers. Sellin, Heinsius, 139. One also finds similiarities between Heinsius’s insistence that a tragedy must not build up a character by using many (let alone all) incidents from a person’s life, with Vossius’s distinction between civil prudence, dealing with universalia, and history, which deals strictly with singularia. Wickenden, Vossius.

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power of drama, epic poetry or rhetoric to help viewers and actors internalise the values of Christ or other Christian figures, or to internalise these figures themselves (as for instance Christ himself, or one’s eponymous interceding saint was supposed to be internalised at baptism and/or confirmation). When Heinsius finally comes to describe character, he poses a conventional pedagogical dilemma: in order for people to want to be good, they must see the rewards. History and Christianity make this equally difficult. In history bad people often do better than the good, and Christianity asks for belief in otherworldly rewards and punishments (partly to resolve the mismatch between character and success in this world).89 As we saw, Heinsius’s radical solution to the problem was to repudiate the importance of character in drama. He does this first by saying so explicitly. Then he shows character to be wholly derivative of action. Finally, he names the type of character with most verisimilitude and best suited for tragedy as the middling sort. He also carefully closes all back-doors, including fable and manners, to the possibility of characters being built up in the course of a tragedy. Heinsius offers no compromise: Christ and the saints remain uniquely unsuitable for dramatic representation. 4.2.4.╇ Manners Not only character but even manners (mores) cannot be exemplary in drama and other forms of Bildung. They are not wholly derivative, like character. Instead, Heinsius particularises and relativises them as much as possible: manners differ in individuals, across nations, ages, and social conditions.90 Manners and oratio morata (which, in addition to his use of the word character, we can also translate as ‘character,’ as it refers to Plutarch’s Moralia 79b) are further dissociated in chapter XIV with a similar particularising argument: what makes the speech and action of the tyrant, the lover, the angry man or any other figure understandable to the viewers is not their adherence to a character, from which moral lessons might otherwise be drawn, but their The agreement between Heinsius and Vossius regarding universals also shaped their influence on dramatic theory; see Kern, Influence. 89 ╇ In his 1613 inaugural as Professor of History, Heinsius adroitly avoided the same problem by proposing that it is not the action but the historical record of the action that determines virtue, and therefore all men, kings and even God depend on historians for their immortality. See section 5 on DPDH below. 90 ╇ OCT 86-7.

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individuality, their unique, as it were uncharacteristic set of manners. These arise from their origins, life stories, and other accidental circumstances. There are specific sets of manners that are appropriate to specific sets of tragic figures: it goes against verisimilitude to attribute too much prudence to women (as Euripides did), or maturity to a child.91 4.2.5.╇ Verisimilitude Verisimilitude is a crucial and complicated concept. It denotes the extent to which the characters and actions impress the audience as authentic and truth-like. This does not necessarily mean factual correctness. Heinsius’s distinction between historical accuracy and verisimilitude is very clear: verisimilitude in Old Comedy, tragedy, epic poetry and in philosophy depends on the successful capturing of the essence of the subject matter. For instance, a miser may have lived his life in an outrageously miserly fashion, but without committing a Â�single memorably outrageous act of miserliness. Historians should record the particulars of his miserly life (supposing he merits recording), but a tragedian’s job is to present the essence of his miserliness with a verisimilitude, such as stealing from a blind beggar girl, which the miser may never have actually done. He should not, however, show the miser squabbling with the gods over the precise amount of smoke due to them from a burnt sacrifice, if his aim is to use verisimilitude, not a parable or allegory. Verisimilitude must remain within the boundaries of the life-like and probable. How does this impact the possibility of Christian tragedy? Given that the fable itself imitates, that the fable itself is not only true but verisimilar (which pertains both to the fable itself and to the poet, who imitates and fabricates not things as they were really done but as they should occur)—can or should a tragic poet employ an argument that is true (e.g., as those have done who take their argument from Scripture)?92

╇ OCT 92; DTC, Appendix 1; and passim. ╇ OCT 31-2. Heinsius reworked this chapter after the first, 1611 edition, where it read: ‘Quippe cum poeta imitetur, imitetur autem ipsa fabula, fabula autem non sit vera, sed tum per se verisimilis, tum propter poetam, qui non facta, sed ut fieri oportet, imitatur ac fingit, utrumne & in vero argumento aut versari possit tragicus aut debeat? Sicut illi qui e sacris argumentum desumunt.’ DTC 60-1. 91 92

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Yes, Heinsius answers, so long as verisimilitude is maintained. His next move, however, is to exclude the possibility of representing the fundamental claims of Christianity, namely the miracles of Christ and the Father: Now, since the verisimilar is required in an action, but since the foundation of the verisimilar is the true, it no less follows that a true action must be permissible, especially since a true action can be verisimilar— which is always the case unless things either miraculous, or prodigious, or, for whatever reason, transcending the order of nature are true.93

Heinsius then cites Amnon deflowering his sister from 2 Samuel 13 as an example of a valid subject for scriptural tragedy, used by both Honerdus and Milton. He ends the chapter abruptly with the comment, ‘[a]nd if it were not true, it would still seem true for this very reason.’ (32) He later restates that tragedy must not contain miracles or prodigies, because they conflict with nature, and are therefore unsuitable to arouse and purge the passions (46-7). The implication that the most defining, miraculous parts of Scripture are inadmissible in tragedy is perfectly clear, and was noted by contemporary critics, including Salmasius.94 Even more astonishingly, Heinsius proceeds to exclude miracles from every kind of legitimate narration. ‘For some things cannot take place naturally, and these are either clearly untrue or have the appearance of truth.’ He catalogues the difficulties of presenting death, rape, apotheosis and other dramatic events on stage, then continues: Narration aids in all these, because it provides with word what is missing in deed. In fact, it also recounts things that cannot take place, for we concede much to the poets, not that they may lie but that they may teach. (Such is the whole wisdom of the ancients and their apologues.) It recounts things that either cannot be shown or which undermine their own credibility for this reason, as Horace rightly says. So too it recounts the things that seem not to square with truth, for narration 93 ╇ OCT 32. ‘Nam cum illud, quod est verisimile in actione requiratur, fundamentum autem eius quod est verisimile, sit verum, non contra; sequitur non minus veram admitti actionem: cum præsertim verisimilis quoque esse possit, qua est vera. quod fit semper; nisi vel miraculosa vel prodigiosa, aut quacunque ratione, præter ordinem naturæ sint vera.’ DTC 61-2. 94 ╇ One reason why this was so noticeable was its direct contradiction of another, enormously influential definition of fable, which allowed the use of miracles in creating a verisimilitude about the true god. This is in Macrobius, Commentary, Book I, chapter 2. Macrobius’s definition of fable has been fully and successfully co-opted by Christian literary theory.

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In short, the biblical narrative can either be used in teaching, or it can be literally true. This is a full rejoinder to Jesuits and Mennonites alike, and a radically secularising move toward a more peaceable theory of education.96 Heinsius eliminates miracles from drama altogether, and brilliantly sidesteps the attendant debates. Faith, in his account, must flourish independently from reason and miracles, whether witnessed or merely reported. The inadmissability of miracles is part and parcel of DTC’s secularising strategy. To show it, Heinsius expands DTC’s scope to cover all narratives. He does the same in chapter XVII, where he widens the applicability of his criteria for legitimate tragedy to cover all forms of rhetoric. 4.2.6.╇ Universal—Particular in DTC As we saw, regarding both mores and character Heinsius strikes a precarious balance between Aristotelian universalisation and particularisation: too universal a definition would lead to a system of characters, 95 ╇ OCT 76. ‘Quibus omnibus succurrit narratio: & quod deest in agendo supplet dicendo. Nam & quæ non possunt fieri, exponit. Multa enim damus poetis. non ut mentiantur, sed ut doceant. Qualis tota antiquorum sapientia, & Apologi. Quæ aut exhiberi non possunt, aut fidem ea ratione sibi detrahunt. Sicut recte Flaccus. Sic & quæ recedunt specie a vero. Omnia enim probabilia efficit narratio. Etiam quæ non evenere. Et hæc non minima est illius virtus. Eodem modo quæ vel non, vel difficulter possunt representari. Omnia enim sermo repræsentat.’ DTC 145. Heinsius is slightly more lenient toward poets than Agricola, that other great Dutch theorist of drama and education. Agricola establishes the pedagogical utility of dialectic, but sets an upper limit to poetic license by developing a notion of probability that seems akin to Heinsius’s verisimilitude. De inventione (1539), II.2 LL 76-90, in Mundt’s reprint 210-1. As examples of works beyond the pale of probability, Agricola cites Apuleius’s Golden Ass and Lucian’s True history. He admits, however, that even the extremely strange events taking place in these satires can be narrated convincingly; similarly, the Skeptical argument that nothing can be known is indubitably false and illogical—yet it can be proposed in such a way as to persuade an audience. Judging from Cunaeus’s Sardi venales and Heinsius’s Cras credo, the Leideners made the same connection between Menippean satires and Skepticism, but developed a more positive view concerning the didactic value of both. To make his point about epistemic humility in Cras credo, Heinsius relies on the exact same satires that Agricola mentions. 96 ╇ The seeds of some of these secularising solutions may be found in Agricola’s adaptation of Aristotle to his own theory of motivation. Mack, Renaissance argument, chapter 10.

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too particular would make it impossible to generalise manners into criteria for distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate tragedy. In his solution, manners are just universal enough to serve as such criteria, but also particularistic enough not to add up to characters, and be replaced by them as the benchmark of verisimilitude. Heinsius walks this tightrope in order to avoid having to take a position in the furious and politically treacherous debates concerning the respective moral benefits of Christian and pagan theatre.97 This was harder than it seems. By the seventeenth century, most known ancient philosophical texts were rejected or co-opted by one Christian thinker or another. To make a statement about universals automatically entailed taking a position within the complex theological discourse that grew up around pagan texts that dealt with universals. In the Leiden circumvention of using universals, the renowned ‘Dutch pragmatism’ was not the cause, but a side-effect of the systematic effort to avoid religious controversies. The fine balancing act between universals and particulars in DTC is characteristic of many pre-Dordt Leiden works, and belongs to a co-ordinated project for the secularisation of epistemology.98 The relevance of this move to political science and empiricism needs not be elaborated at length. One might detect the same motive and certainly a comparable method in Hobbes’s and Gassendi’s triumphant, and Descartes’s and Locke’s failed, attempt to do away with the problematics of innate ideas, and to prioritise experience and deduction over inspiration and faith.99 Heinsius’s position on thoughts, sentences or opinions (sententiae) is another major building-block in his secularising epistemology. He uses the same careful balancing act between universals and particulars—universal enough to be meaningful and set the norms for good theatre, particular enough to avoid doctrinal debate—to establish ╇ The Classical hermeneutical context that allowed Heinsius to construct this particular mean between universals and particulars, while purporting to follow Aristotle, is described in Eden, Hermeneutics, 24-5, via Plutarch’s reading of Aristotle (33-5), and passim. Another example of Plutarch’s profound but silent influence on Heinsius is the metaphorical method proposed in “Isis and Osiris” and Heinsius’s application of it to Bacchus. 98 ╇ For another instance of this circumvention see Heinsius’s 1613 inaugural, discussed in section 5 below. Compare Wickenden, Vossius. Braakhuis, “Agricola’s view.” Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 184. 99 ╇ Hobbes, De corpore. Gassendi on phantasia in Syntagma philosophicum, Part I. Descartes, Meditations. Locke, Essay concerning human understanding, Book I. A generous reader may accept that Locke successfully refuted knowledge innatism, but certainly not idea innatism. See also Miller, “Innate ideas.” 97

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what type of sententiae can be ascribed to a given figure. The more profound and maxim-like a thought or saying is, the more it should belong to elderly men or heroes, not youngsters or commoners, since ‘experience is the closest thing to divination.’ Heinsius’s balancing adaptation of this Aristotelian principle is calculated to rein in theological debate. Now since maxims are generally derived from things in life that are gradually assembled from particular instances, but since these cannot be understood without age and extensive experience of reality, it is necessary that such a mode of speaking fit most the period of life that (by common assent) fashions universals from particulars, even without purpose or cause.100

In addition to his explicit and repeated rejection of miracles, this requisite proportionality between experience and sententiae further excludes miracles and prophecies, i.e. the most theatre-worthy elements of Christianity, from the realm of valid speech. Heinsius makes no provisions anywhere in DTC for representing truthful prophecy or trustworthy divination, nor for anything supernatural that would compromise the principle that speech must be commensurate with experience. Universal-Particular: Methods for Professions The Reformation re-ignited Renaissance debates over ‘method’ and the subjects and techniques appropriate to the rhetorical professions. A case in point is Heinsius in Cras credo, Cunaeus in Sardi venales, and Grotius in Ordinum pietas attacking theologians for going beyond what is proper to their trade. Heinsius’s universal-particular balance, calculated to secularise by ending theologically divisive debate, returns in his paraphrase and commentary on Aristotle’s description of what is and what is not appropriate in the professions that rely on speech. In chapter V we find a quiet transformation of Aristotle’s view of historians and poets. ‘The tragic poet imitates in one way, the historian in another,’ the heading summarises. Heinsius states as his own opinion that it is certain that a somewhat greater difference separates the poet and the historian insofar as they surely differ in their very kind, the one usually exhibiting things that have occurred, the other the sorts of 100 ╇ OCT 102-3. ‘Nam cum generale eorum quæ in vita ex singulis paulatim colliguntur, effatum sit gnome, ea autem sine ætate longoque rerum usu cognosci non possint, illi potissimum ætati convenit sic loqui, quæ e singulis communi approbatione, universa colligit. Etiam absque ratione et causa.’ DTC, 186.

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things that generally do occur. This is more difficult, as Aristotle rightly says, and more worthy of a philosopher, and for this reason he did not hesitate to set the office of the tragic poet above that of the historian. The one, he says, deals with things more universal; the other, with things more particular. Indeed, the poet is wont to view things generically and as they are likely to be done or spoken, and that according to verisimilitude or necessity, while the historian simply shows what a particular person did or suffered.101

The philosopher and the poet therefore both deal in universals. They are better teachers than historians, who only deal with particulars, can ever be. ‘And therefore the philosopher shows that the task of the poet is much more serious than that of the historian, because the one represents things that exist; the other represents not things that exist, but as they exist.’102 Even the best historians, like Herodotus, Sallust and Tacitus, describe only individual events and characteristics—for instance, wicked men and acts. Philosophers and poets grasp the abstract characteristic and can formulate the genus of wickedness.103 To the degree that genus and species are nobler than particulars (one can have no knowledge of the latter, since they are infinite; precise knowledge of the former is possible), the office of the tragic poet is nobler than that of the historian.104

In the Conclusion, Heinsius cites Poetics 1451b6 with approval: “The office of the tragic poet is philosophical.” Sophocles is wiser and a better teacher than Tacitus, Sallust, or Herodotus. Heinsius continues, 101 ╇ OCT 30. ‘Aliquanto tamen amplius poetam & historicum differre certum est: ut quos genere ipso certum est differre. Alter enim quae sunt facta, alter qualia plerunque fiunt, exhibere solet. quod & operosum magis, magisque, sicut recte dicitur ab Aristotele, philosopho est dignum. Quare & longe tragicum munus muneri historico praeferre non dubitat. Alter enim, inquit, magis universa: alter magis singula exponit. Poeta enim, quae in generea quo fieri aut dici sit aequum, idque ex verisimili aut necessario spectat. Historicus, quae ab uno aliquo aut facta sunt, aut quae uni evenere, simpliciter ostendit.’ DTC 55-6. 102 ╇ OCT 20. ‘Ideoque; longe gravius poetae munus esse quam historici, philosophus ostendit. Quia alter quae sunt, alter, non quae sunt, sed ut sunt, repraesentat.’ DTC 33-4. Compare Lipsius, Somnium. 103 ╇ This also means that a theologian who posits the historical factuality of the Bible as proof for his distinction between, for instance, mortal and venial sins, becomes immediately vulnerable to a Scaligarian historical criticism of particulars. John, however, as a philosopher/poet, rightfully makes this distinction in 1 John 15-16. 104 ╇ OCT 31. ‘Quanto autem individiuis ac singularibus, genera nobiliora sunt & species; quod eorum nulla, cum sint infinita; horum certa esse possit scientia; tanto nobilius tragici est munus, quam historici.’ DTC 58.

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chapter three Although mores clearly fall under the political scientist, the discipline that hands them on is subordinate to his too, as the equestrian art subserves generalship, for the one furnishes the commander with his soldier, the other provides the magistrate with his citizen. Whatever is left, in truth, the poet lays claim to—nature made him, but art perfects him. Unless he makes use of the sweetness of fame, he acquires learning to no end, even of things that can be passed on and taught by everyone. This, however, is the genius of every poet. Aristotle did not compete with Sophocles, nor was he embarrassed because Sophocles knows those laws that he, led by nature rather than reason, was the first to codify in most other subjects. The grammarians therefore talk brilliantly about nonsense when they lay claim to these things—they rush heedlessly into harvest and holdings not their own.105

Shortly after DTC, Heinsius became Professor of History and Politics at Leiden. In a remarkable inaugural oration, discussed in more detail below, he argued that historiography holds the key to immortality. Did he change his mind about the scope and respective value of history on the one hand, and poetry and philosophy, on the other? Not necessarily. There is one way in which the positions expressed in DTC and in the 1613 inaugural can be reconciled. The same specific brand of epistemic humility that we find in other Leiden politiques renders the two positions compatible. If we add Heinsius’s notion that the poetic-philosophic-theological universals are not open to rational inquiry, debate or doubt (DTC), to the immortalising power of the pursuit of critically established particular facts by man (DPDH), then we arrive at a secular method of letters and education that is ironclad against religious propaganda and foolproof against both grammatici and pious fools of the Christian, Erasmian variety. Epistemic humility regarding universals and Scaligerian historical criticism regarding particulars (including the Bible and the life of Christ) combine to proscribe zero-sum, ex cathedra theological statements that can be used to provoke or justify political violence.106 ╇ OCT 152. ‘Quanquam sane sub politico sunt mores; & sub eius disciplina, illa quæ hos tradit. Ut sub arte ducis bellici, equestris. Alter enim imperatori militem, altera autem magistratui dat civem. Quicquid restat, est poetæ; quem natura fecit, ars absoluit. Qui nisi famæ condimentum adfert, frustra discit, etiam quæ tradi ab omnibus possunt Id autem est, genius cuiusque. Nam nec Aristoteles cum Sophocle certasset; neque; hunc leges eas scire puduisset, quas natura duce potius quam ratione, in plerisque, primus cæteris præfixit. Quare splendide nugantur, dum hæc sibi vindicant, Grammatici: qui in alienam frustra possessionem irrumpunt.’ DTC 249. See also OCT 76, DTC 145. 106 ╇ Heinsius’s 1617 Apotheosis of Thuanus, discussed below, confirms that the Leiden Circle’s version of epistemic humility is the key to reconciling his immortalising 105

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In another prefiguration of the inaugural, Heinsius calls Lucan’s Pharsalia a tragedy. Even though Pharsalia concerns historical events, Heinsius contrasts it with history proper. This is a complex tragedy. Indeed, fortune unrestrainedly displays such things upon this the world’s great stage whenever she practices her cruel acting. It is unimportant whether the subject is not fictional, for what is real does not cease to be verisimilar, as we said earlier, although grammarians perhaps do not understand that.107

The notion of the real that remains verisimilar relates to ongoing debates about inserting set speeches into history-books. One side argued that if there are no reliable contemporary witnesses, then the speeches are unhistorical and must be discarded. Others thought that well-composed speeches attributed to Themistocles or Charlemagne can capture such men’s and their actions’ essence and educate the reader better than a mere list of facts; therefore they are an acceptable sacrifice of accuracy.108 In keeping with the extension of his theory to all speech-acts, Heinsius turned the screw further when he called attention to the possibility that some factual, historical speeches may obtain their effect from the same verisimilitude that makes fictitious speeches work well. The real concern of those who discuss the role of history in education should be verisimilitude, not factual accuracy. This is another secularising assertion. As Scaliger, Cunaeus, and Â�others applied historical critice to the Bible, Heinsius closed another avenue to using Christian stories when he argued that reports of supernatural events like a resurrection are not only open to historical criticism, but cannot produce verisimilitude, either. Heinsius’s application of Aristotelian dramatic principles to the Bible underscored that no Christian story could be rightly represented or enjoyed on stage. By extending these principles to other forms of historiography in the inaugural with his ascription of dangerous, epistemically arrogant superiority to the pursuit of universals in DTC. Also see Ginzburg, “High and low,” for Schoonhovius’s 1618 Emblemata put in the same context. 107 ╇ OCT 127. ‘Quæ Implexa est tragœdia. quales in hoc magno universi theatro exhibet fortuna, quoties crudelem histrioniam exercet. Neque refert, quod subiectum non fit falsum. Non enim verisimile esse definit, quia est verum; sicut supra dicebamus. quamuis id Grammatici non capiant.’ DTC 228. 108 ╇ Hampton, Writing. This was the debate, and the role of verisimilitude in it, that was transformed into a synthesis of factual and rhetorical historiographical methods in an attempt to turn auditors into spectators, and find a historiographical middle path between solipsistic reliance on fact and complete subservience to others’ authority. Evrigenis, “Hobbes’s Thucydides.”

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verbalisation, Heinsius laid down correct methods for the professions of philosophers, poets, and historians. The Bible is shown to be inappropriate as a subject matter to all of these: to philosophers and poets because Christian universals cannot be known to man, only believed; and to historians because the Bible’s historical particulars are irremediably debatable. From Universal vs. Particular to Religion vs. Reason At the heart of DTC is the dual tactics of decoupling imitation from internalisation, and excluding perfect universals and perfect particulars. The two manoeuvres are intimately connected, since in the Christian discourse of universals and internalisation, the values to be internalised through imitation are said to be universal. During the late medieval and early Renaissance period, exempla and moral qualities in instructional literature (including the mirrors for princes) often turned into neoplatonic Ideas, while exemplars resurfaced as embodiments of an Idea. The proto-Christianised Aeneas, for instance, stood for the Idea of ‘Piety made flesh’. Alexander and Constantine were Perfect Rulers, Sebastian and Catherine were ideal Martyrs, and Jesus was Sacrifice and Resurrection. Sermons, handbooks, devotional and political texts offered up these figures as ideals that readers had to imitate, on the one hand by internalising the values they each represent, and on the other by emulating their verisimilitude through action (as opposed to striving to literally re-enact their deeds).109 Given this background, finding the middle road between universals and particulars was the only way for Heinsius to dissociate imitation from internalisation. His compass for finding and keeping to it was a carefully constructed moral calculus that allowed neither reason nor miracles to support belief, leaving room only for grace and unquestioning faith.110 The upshot of this strategy was a set of formal 109 ╇ Examples in Watter, “Balzac’s Le Prince,” especially 224-6. The utility and difficulties of distinguishing between ‘Christian’ and ‘humanist’ that we encountered in the previous section on imitation reappears here. Renaissance neoplatonic exemplars found verisimilitude easier to accommodate than post-Tridentine non-Jesuit Catholics did, like the Sorbonne faculty of theology. The distinction between bad, literal imitation through re-enactment of deeds, and true imitation of the verisimilitude of ideal figures, is prominent in several fields of medieval, Renaissance and Reformation literature; including warnings to princes that Alexander’s glory is sometimes best emulated by the wise preservation of peace. 110 ╇ Arnaud and others actually found Heinsius’s open-ended, deliberately indefinable moral calculus to be more credible than others’ overelaborate psychological accounts. Kern, Influence, 56-7.

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requirements most unfavourable to Christian tragedy, including (1) the impossibility of using miracles, (2) the ostracism of natural reason, (3) making emotional effects (namely arousing, discharging or removing specific passions, to form a particular sort of character) impossible to foreplan with targeted precision (as the Jesuits hoped), and (4) an epistemic humility regarding the divine (Christian universals). 4.2.7.╇ Contrivance The exclusion of miracles is a recurring theme in DTC. In chapter XII Heinsius condemns all supernatural devices and resolutions as desperate acts of bad writers. Just as it commonly happens that someone who ties a knot thereupon finds it difficult to untie the same and sometimes, conquered by the difficulty of the matter, is at length even forced to quit, so a poet often ties something together that is impossible either to untie, or do so correctly. For this problem, men found a much-used denouement which they called denouement by contrivance. This has no art to it whatsoever, and utterly conflicts with art. However, it is wont to be the one dodge of a poet when he is unable happily to untie what he imprudently knotted up. Hence, Plato did very well in calling contrivance a sign of tragical despair, for there is nothing that cannot be done by a god. This is why for the most part, he says, when poets have constructed inextricable actions, they tag on a miraculous ending, and of necessity are forced to seek from a god the denouement which they themselves are not able to bring about, since there is nothing that cannot be thus resolved. Hence the use of contrivance, which learned men seem insufficiently to have examined.111

╇ ‘Sicut autem sæpe evenire solet, ut qui nodum nectit, mox eundem ægre solvat, interdum vero rei difficultate victus. prorsus abstinere se cogatur: sic poeta sæpe nectit, quę aut nulla ratione, aut non recte extricare potest. Huic rei usitatam Solutionem invenere, quam e machina dixerunt. Quæ nec artis quicquam habet, & cum arte pugnat, ut plurimum. Solet autem unicum esse effugium poetæ, cum quæ imprudenter connexuit, solvere feliciter non potest. Unde Plato disperationis tragicæ indicium, esse dixit machinam. Nihil enim est quod fieri a Deo non potest. Quare cum plerunque inextricables fecerunt actiones, finem miraculosum imponunt: & Solutionem petunt a Deo, quam inferre nou possunt. Cum nihil non dissolui sic possit. Ex quo usus machinæ apparet. quem non satis perspexisse viri docti videntur.’ OCT 63. Note the allusion to the Christian idiom of tying and loosening. Heinsius ends up arguing that to bring in God is tantamount to admitting that the writer cannot untie the knot he fashioned. 111

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Heinsius then claims to offer an original treatment of ‘contrivance.’ There are two kinds, he says: the involvement of a god, or of a mechanical device. Although he knew less about ancient stage techniques than we do now, thanks to archaeological findings, Heinsius made the right conjecture about the difference between the two contrivances, and about the connection between them. Gods who appeared in the resolution of a play were sometimes lowered from a crane or from the skene,112 or introduced on stage with a similar device. After making the distinction between the two meanings of ápo mēchanēs theós (ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός), deus ex machina, or contrivance in the Poetics, Heinsius decries both as a sure sign of the playwright’s incompetence. Having roundly condemned the use of miracles and gods in plays, he wastes little time on mechanical devices before he introduces an extraordinary new principle, namely disallowing the use of reason as an incongruous contrivance in tragedy. He asserts that it is invoked only when an incompetent playwright cannot follow the cathartic logic imposed by his own tragedy’s plot. Heinsius does this in two steps: he first replaces Mind with God in his interpretation of Aristotle’s criticism in the Metaphysics of Anaxagoras’s use of contrivances; he then equates that contrivance with the theatrical contrivance mentioned in the Poetics. Heinsius begins by introducing Metaphysics 985a.18-22, where Aristotle criticises Anaxagoras for using ‘Mind’ as a contrivance. He sets up his own interpretation of this passage as a respectful but sharp criticism of Erasmus’s reading.113 How did Heinsius connect Aristotle’s text on fiction with another Aristotelian text on the knowledge of real things, and why would this put him at loggerheads with Erasmus? Aristotle’s comment comes in the middle of a long criticism of thinkers like Plato and Empedocles, who fail to grasp the value and logical priority of causes. Anaxagoras, writes Aristotle, used ‘the Mind’ as a contrivance to evade problems in epistemology. What does not appear in either Heinsius’s Latin translation of Aristotle or in English translations of Aristotle (and of Heinsius) is just how much nuance, 112 ╇ This is the tent in the Greek theatre. First temporary, later built from stone, it was originally used as the actors’ entrance and for mask storage, and later for increasingly elaborate designs. 113 ╇ Heinsius’s translation of Metaphysics 985a 18-22: ‘Anaxagoras autem Mente sua utitur pro machina, cum de mundi creatione agit. Quippe cum hæret, quare sit necessario, tunc eam attrahit. Cum in reliquis quamlibet potius eorum quæ fiunt causam adferat, quam Mentem.’ DTC 128. OCT 64-6. This is a brilliant and revealing contradiction to Macrobius, Commentary, Book I, chapter 2, 85-6.

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ambiguity and meaning is lost in the translation of Aristotle’s Noûs as Mind in English, and as Mens in Heinsius’s Latin. For one, Noûs can equally mean reason, Mind, or God; and Heinsius makes full, creative use of the resulting ambiguity. Noûs is a very complex idea, or rather several ideas. Even an oversimplified account of its meanings and development would have to include Homer, for whom it meant mental activity in general. For Anaxagoras it was a mechanical force in the world that created order from chaos, akin to the anthropomorphic Demiurge in some early forms of Greek mythology. Plato used Noûs for the immortal, rational part of the soul that arranges the universe into comprehensible order. This is the divine part of the individual that springs into action when we grasp something, such as a geometrical or logical truth, without having to reflect on its preliminary premises (nóêsis). Aristotle thought it was the intellect, as distinguished from sense perception. He postulated two kinds of Noûs, active and passive. The passive relates to knowledge and understanding, the active is the immortal first cause of all subsequent causes in the universe. For the Stoics, Noûs was identical with Logos, the supreme cosmic reason, of which human reason was one component. Plotinus described it as one of the divine emanations.114 The meaning of Noûs, in short, ranges from reason to God. ArisÂ� totle’s criticism of Anaxagoras in the Metaphysics targets the latter’s penchant for treating Noûs as a god, an active principle, ‘unmixed with other substances but capable of ordering and controlling them,’ and the creator of the differentiated, ordered universe out of chaos.115 Heinsius understands Aristotle to say in the Poetics that lowering an actor who plays a god on a piece of string from the skene at the dénouement of a tragedy is poor theatre. He also understands Aristotle’s critiÂ� cism of Anaxagoras in the Metaphysics for the latter’s undue mysÂ�tiÂ�fication of Noûs as an active, personified god. In a reminder of the wider epistemological significance of his theory of drama, he then connects the two Aristotelian texts around the pivotal term ápo mēchanēs theós, or contrivance. While Aristotle objected to the deification of Noûs in the Metaphysics, and to the mechanical contrivance of inserting a god-actor in the Poetics, Heinsius makes him object to 114 ╇ Anaxagoras, DK B12. Plato, Phaedo 97-9, Phaedrus, 245c-e. Aristotle, De Anima, III.3-5. Alexander of Aphrodisias, De fato, 191, 30. 115 ╇ Hornblower and Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. ‘Anaxagoras.’

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using miracles, gods, and human reason as a contrivance in theatre and in all forms of instructional rhetoric. At this juncture, Heinsius strikes out on his own, maintaining the appearance that he is following Aristotle.116 Aristotle’s objection to Anaxagoras’s use of Noûs as contrivance concerned the latter’s deification of reason. When Heinsius moulded this criticism in order to disallow genuine, divine miracles from being shown on stage, he inverted the criticism by accepting the premise of Anaxagoras— namely that the Noûs is divine—and proceeded to remove both God and reason as adequate explanations from acceptable speech. Similarly to his extension of the principles of tragedy to all oratory, this move uncovers Heinsius’s consistent secularising agenda in DTC. It is worth noting that shortly before his re-ordered Poetics came out, and following a cursory verdict from Scaliger, Heinsius’s 1609 Orationes contains the first systematic refutation of Aristotle’s authorship of De mundo.117 The year Arminius died, and shortly before his followers issued the Remonstrance, Heinsius was the first to properly block the most significant attempt in Western intellectual history to turn the Philosopher into a champion of the doctrine that God is directly involved in all aspects of human existence.118 While this work fits very well with the Arminian position, it is more specifically a major step in the Leiden Circle’s formulation of epistemic humility. Heinsius’s connection between this Aristotelian remark on using Noûs as a contrivance, and Aristotle’s aversion in the Poetics to ápo mēchanēs theós, combine to bar the use of human reason from Heinsius’s own drama theory. This is in perfect accord with his earlier exclusion of reason from the moral calculus of drama.119 We find a 116 ╇ Heinsius is not following Socrates’s criticism of Anaxagoras, either. Socrates levels similar charges against Anaxagoras as Aristotle does, with the additional twist that he also blames Anaxagoras for only claiming to make, but not in fact making, Noûs the first cause and Prime Mover. Anaxagoras’s reliance on further causes, after he made this claim, is seen by Socrates as cheating—much like how Heinsius thought ápo mēchanēs theós always ruins a good play. Plato, Phaedo, 98b-c. 117 ╇ Heinsius, “Oratiuncula.” 118 ╇ Kraye, “Heinsius,” and “Aristotle’s God.” In “Heinsius,” Kraye shows that Heinsius’s emphasis on providence in his refutation of Aristotle’s authorship of De mundo expanded considerably from the 1609 to the 1615 version of his Oration. 119 ╇ Also compare Cunaeus, Sardi venales, 96. ‘Est genus hominum, qui rerum memoriam annalibus consecrant, qui seria omnia profitentur et severa; inspicite libros eorum: nulla pagella est quæ mendaciolo aspersa non sit! Quam libenter urbium origines ex alto repentunt? Quanto apparatu montes perfodiunt aut contegunt maria aut fluvios epotant uno prandio? Ubique pannus aliquis ex purpura, qui

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specific clue in his long apology for opposing Erasmus’s comments on the Metaphysics passage. It suggests that the target of his transformation of Aristotle’s criticism of using Noûs as ápo mēchanēs theós from an epistemological argument into a theatrical one was Erasmus’s influential theory of theatre and education, in which unfettered natural reason, instilled in all men by God as an inner light to lead them to religion, was expected to lead the actor, the viewer and the student to a recognition and confirmation of the particular truth of Christ’s existence and teachings.120 The application of natural reason in the resolution of a play is an unallowable contrivance for Heinsius. He extends Aristotle’s criticism of Anaxagoras to Erasmus. The rest of the relatively long Chapter XII is spent emphasising and illustrating the impropriety of the divine in dénouement. Heinsius explains that he had to devote a lengthy chapter to this argument because it derives directly from his speculative reconstruction and reordering of the Poetics, and therefore requires detailed defence. He hopes that, once defended, the internal logic and probability of his interpretation—according to which the Aristotelian passage on verisimilitude in tragedy is closely connected to an epistemological passage on Noûs and causation—will in turn provide confirmation for his conjectured re-ordering.121

late splendeat, intexitur. Saepe ubi in arctum desiluerunt, unde pedem referrem nequeunt, accersitur e machine deus; nam oracula quidem et coelestes voces toties audio, ut iam pene hominum linguam nesciam. Habet hoc vitii illa natio, cum sit periculum in nullo mendacio maius; tamen ni insolens aliquid et inauditum memorent, lectorem dormiturum putant: miraculo excitandus est.’ Christoph Cellarius, in his 1693 edition of Cunaeus’s writings, made the same connection between this passage and DTC’s chapter XII. “Notae in Satyram,” in Cunaeus, Orationes, 592-3. 120 ╇ Erasmus, Education; and Enchiridion (1503). Although his explicit target is Erasmus’s interpretation of this Aristotelian passage as a statement in favour of the compatibility of natural reason and Christianity, Heinsius may also have aimed the same criticism at another strand within the Western reception of the Poetics, one that drew heavily on Averroes’s commentary and, interestingly, interpreted Aristotle as advocating the exact same compatibility. Averroes and the Platonic-Plotinian treatment of Noûs shaped much of the Christian transformation and adoption of Aristotle. Averroes, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. See also the Jesuit warning that the arguments of Averroes can seduce students, therefore their teacher should not cite him; ‘and if anything good has to be cited from him, he should cite it without praise; and if it is possible, he should indicate that he has taken it from elsewhere.’ Ratio Studiorum §§ 209-11, 100. Compare Agricola on Skeptics, op. cit. For a Philo-Maimonides-Bodin genealogy of this notion, see Rose, Bodin. A relevant sample of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s version is in Harrison, Fall, 93-107. 121 ╇ OCT 70. Sellin, “From Res,” 73-8.

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This complex manoeuvre exemplifies the genius of Heinsius in DTC.122 His exclusion of both God and reason from tragedy, epic poetry, rhetoric and other speech-acts that present Christian exemplars for emulation and internalisation, challenged the normative Â�theory of man in every Christian sect and denomination. DTC underÂ� mined Christian theories of exemplarity as varied as Thomas à Kempis’s, the 1599 Geneva Bible commentators’ (viz. e.g. marginals to Eph. 4.11-16), and the Jesuits’.123 While Heinsius’s rules forbade tragedy and rhetoric to present the life of a single individual as an example, individual actions could still be represented, as long as they were not miraculous. This damaged Christian exemplarity more than it affected Classical models. It brings to mind a similarly memorable thought experiment that undermined Christian more than Classical exemplarity. Batt in Erasmus’s Antibarbari (1494-5) shows the wicked man to be worse than the righteous man, the educated better than the ignorant; but the learned wicked man is better than the righteous simpleton. It is possible to learn good and useful things from a bad man whose wickedness dies with him, but an unlearned good man’s goodness also dies, and he leaves nothing of value behind. Batt’s conclusion could have been said by Heinsius at the end of his exposition on the fruitlessness of attempting to instil virtue through imitation: I am not disparaging the glory of the martyrs, which a man could not attain to even by unlimited eloquence; but to speak simply of usefulness to us, we owe more to some heretics than to some martyrs. There was indeed a plentiful supply of martyrs, but very few doctors. The martyrs died, and so diminished the number of Christians; the scholars persuaded others and so increased it.124

However, DTC in this respect is best compared with Cunaeus’s Sardi venales, published the following year. Both books manage to steer a narrow course between religious factions, and avoid all shades of

122 ╇ Meter picks up on the oddity of this passage, but does not know what to do with it. He summarises it and ventures a few poor guesses at Heinsius’s purpose. ‘But whatever Heinsius actually did have in mind, the reasoning behind this exegesis is at any rate very farfetched and contrived.’ Theories, 224. 123 ╇See Parente, Drama, Diehl, Staging, and Weinberg, A history. 124 ╇ Erasmus, Antibarbari, 80-3. By contrast, Chrysostom’s Homily LXXIV Â�exemÂ�plifies the conventional Christian position that martyrs and prophets win eternal life whether they are forgotten, remembered by their enemies and persecutors, or remembered by Christians.

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Christian theology. DTC disqualifies predestination, God, human reason, natural reason, miracles, and the imitation of Christian characters in plays and rhetoric. Sardi venales calls all Christian theologians to task for their epistemic hubris. It argues against the acceptability of any individual’s claim to revelation and against the adequacy of Â�reason, nature, or relevation, as effective guides to religious truth. Heinsius systematically closed off every conceivable Christian strategy for exemplarity and internalisation, and thereby neutralised a persistent source of religious and political conflict.125 Doing so on the basis of rearranging Aristotle’s text allowed him to be less confrontational than most Catholic and Protestant polemicists, who proffered their politically charged arguments on drama and literature. Over the next two centuries a large proportion of the editions of Aristotle’s Poetics followed Heinsius’s arrangement, and included some or all of his textual commentaries. 4.3.╇ DTC and Secularisation Another sign of Heinsius’s position on Christian tragedy in general is that whenever he refers to one in DTC, he harshly disparages it. A great part of chapter XVII is one sustained criticism of Church Fathers and Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic playwrights. With lengthy citations and numerous examples, Heinsius covers all major denominations in an uncharacteristic breach of his erstwhile economy. It is hard to avoid the impression that he piles up the examples of bad style and poor tragedy, all of them Christian, in order to make sure that DTC would be read not as a partisan but an irenicist and secularising statement, offering sustainable peace through a theory of motivation, 125 ╇ In another passage, Heinsius draws a parallel between the legislator and the tragedian, for both of whom the intention of the actor is a crucial characteristic of an action. OCT 50. In DTC Heinsius renounces Auriacus, his youthful patriotic play about the assassination of William the Silent, for violating the principles of drama. In the Preface to a later edition he explains that the major violation occurs in the Epilogue, in which Prince Maurice vows to avenge his father. Maurice was an infant at the time of his father’s death, and his speech breaks the unity of time and place. Heinsius explicitly argues that the speech, which he inserted only at the urging of his peers and superiors, resembles too closely a deus ex machina. This seems to be a subtle attempt by Heinsius to keep himself equidistant from Calvinists and Remonstrants; if so, it is the third such passage in DCT, after the abovementioned Senecan warning to Honerdus (fn 28), and the rueful ban on terms like “predestine” and “free will” in tragedy.

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internalisation, tragedy and teaching that is acceptable to all factions. He therefore criticises every major Christian sect and denomination even-handedly.126 Conversely, when his theory of drama could have enabled him to accommodate Christian plots or characters, he remains studiously silent. For instance, Aristotle’s discussion of legendary tragedies, his third type of simple tragedy, could easily accommodate a Christian story. Heinsius chose not to point this out.127 He similarly fails to discuss the possibility of using Aristotelian verisimilitude to accommodate his own version of epistemic humility, belief in the truth-content of the Christian story, and/or unreasoning faith. In addition to trying not to favour any particular Christian group, Heinsius also walked a tightrope between scholastic Aristotelianism and humanist neoplatonism.128 His sleight of hand with Aristotle’s Noûs does not mean that Heinsius decided to side with Plato against Aristotle on this aspect of theatre. Although reason is excluded from the moral equation, and tragedy’s point and raison d’être remain the arousal and purging of passions, the relationship between the passions represented and those discharged is by no means a straightforward one. We do not become bad by identifying with actors who play bad parts. This empathetic effect is not entirely absent, but the passions in 126 ╇ With over-elaborate words ‘not just others, but the best two writers in the patristic age defiled tragedy.’ Sellin thinks Heinsius is referring to Gregory Nazianzen and John of Damascus. The list of plays Heinsius ridicules for their style continues with Buchanan’s Baptistes, just published in Leiden in 1609; Buchanan’s Jephthes, and Muretus’s Julius Caesar. OCT 116 and passim. Two Fathers, a contemporary Protestant, and a Catholic are scorned equally and in quick succession. In their dedicatory poems to Auriacus, Dousa and Grotius named Jephthes and Julius Caesar as worthy models for Heinsius’s work and for their own (Bloemendal’s edition, 208, 216); but that was before Heinsius’s change of heart and renunciation in DTC of his and other Leiden politiques’ juvenile Christian tragedies. One suspects that this section of chapter XVII also drew inspiration from Lipsius’s mocking of critics in Somnium (1581). Gregory is criticised further for poor meter and style, especially in Christus Patiens which, Heinsius notes, was written explicitly against Julian the Apostate. (A year after DTC Cunaeus published, with outrageous consequences, an edition of the Greek and the first Latin translation of Julian’s Cæsares, a satire on all Christians.) Heinsius’s list of bad Christian plays continues with Johannes Tzetzes, Constantine Manasses, Muretus and then Buchanan again: ‘Indeed there is scarcely anything to be called lowlier than the former’s Caesar or the latter’s Jephthes, since they hardly ever rise to the heights.’ OCT 130-2. Buchanan was the childhood tutor of James VI/I, to whom Casaubon presented DTC as soon as it came out. Sellin, Heinsius, 80. 127 ╇ OCT 62, DTC 121-2. 128 ╇ Kern, Influence, 60-2. Sellin, Heinsius, 133-9.

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Heinsian epistemology do not follow the rule of unmediated identification. Yet neither is reason a mediator in his scheme between perception and empathy, and/or between empathy and internalisation (in other words, between the passion observed, aroused and discharged, and the moral learnt).129 An unreasoning part of man does the mediation, draws and processes the lesson from the play, all the while distinguishing between the values to be internalised and those that are to be rejected. While epistemically humble and carefully isolated from any interpersonal clash of rhetoric or reason, this faculty is reliable and important enough for Heinsius to discuss its role in theatre appreciation in general, without—note this—having to introduce special qualifications, or subsets of trained and/or predestined audience members, into his theory. The Jesuits, Lipsius, Calvinists and others had their own distinctions between the mental processes of different groups that may or may not, according to the given theory, constitute a suitable target audience for particular forms of pious tragedy, education or preaching. Heinsius’s writings yield no trace of such a distinction. His theory of motivation and internalisation is applicable to all. Heinsius’s rearrangement of Aristotle proved effective against both Catholic neo-Aristotelianism and Renaissance neoplatonism. RedempÂ�tion became unattainable through most versions of Christian moral psychology. DTC placed the unquestionability of the factual truth of Scripture on a strictly faith-based foundation, allowing for neither religious retorts to the Scaligerian historical criticism of Christianity, nor for an effective method of internalising Christian values. His middle path between engaging in a fight over factuality or over the correct method of internalisation left all tenets of the Christian religion essentially unsuitable for both particular- and universal-based tragedy (using either truth or verisimilitude, respectively). In DTC, Heinsius also insists on the inadmissibility of reason in moral calculus. Erasmian ‘natural reason’ and the Calvinist epistemic scheme are both discarded.130 For Heinsius, the divine light within is not reason, and it is not predestined. Had he followed Cusanus, Kempis, Agricola, Erasmus and others, and allowed the introduction of natural reason into the moral calculus involved in appreciating Christian tragedies, he would have had to face the choice of either ╇ OCT 90-1, and passim. ╇ Heinsius cites with great approval two lines from Honerdus’s Thamara: ‘Infirma est fides/ Ratione nixa’ (Faith based on reason is weak). OCT 102, DTC 185. 129 130

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endorsing or rejecting Scaliger’s historical criticism of Christianity. Instead, he only left room for unreasoning faith. To minimise potentially zealous debate further, he made it impossible to use drama, fable, or Christian morality tales in the internalisation of Christianity. While Heinsius set up his criteria for good tragedy (and valid speech-acts of any kind) in a way that precluded politically divisive religious statements, he also made sure not to leave room for theories that deployed Christian values in education and internalisation through either mystère-type public, vulgar forms of expression, popular theatre like redeÂ� rijker anti-clerical plays, or neolatin tragedies. This is on par with his exclusion of Christian exemplarity from proper tragedy, and with making the Bible unsuitable for theatrical representation. Heinsius never published a fully-fledged pedagogical programme, but the implications of his reformation of drama and motivation Â�theory were far-reaching enough and easily recognisable to his contemporaries to justify calling it a revolutionary blueprint for such a proÂ�Â�Â�gramme. While Vossius’s intellectual autonomy and originality are indisputable, his comprehensive and enormously influential curricula are allied closely with the Heinsian blueprint.131 To draw a crude parallel, Heinsius’s inaugural on historical immortality, DTC on the rules of presentation, and Lofsanck van Bacchus with its imagery, mnemonic devices and symbols for contemplation, fit the curricula that Vossius designed the same way that the Exercises and ConstituÂ� tiones meshed with the Ratio Studiorum. When Heinsius made it impossible to use drama, fables, and ChrisÂ� tian morality tales for the purpose of internalising Christianity, he moved the onus of Christianity’s proof back to either unconditional, unreasoning faith, or to the historical accuracy of the particulars in the Bible. The first strategy pre-empted not only most of Christian education as theorised and practised at the time, but also the early modern adoption of the Stoic argument that Christianity must be embraced by those who are born into a Christian country, even by the doubters, due to the advisability of conforming to one’s fatherland’s practices in inessentials and matters in which no informed conclusion can be reached.132 Faith, for Heinsius, had to be attained individ131 ╇ Rademaker, Life, and introduction to Vossius, Geschiedenis. Wickenden, Â�Vossius. 132 ╇ Cuius regio is not only a realpolitik arrangement, it also has Stoic implications. Heinsius’s extraordinary stress on unreasoning faith, pace Diderot’s characterisation

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ually.133 The second strategy, the challenge to past, present and future Christian dramatists to prove the truth and verisimilitude of their chosen biblical subject, is doubly devastating: first, Scaliger had effectively demolished claims to the Bible’s historical accuracy, and second, even if such an argument were made successfully—concerning, for instance, the particular facts of Christ’s resurrection—the subject could only be represented in tragedy or speech, according to Heinsius’s rules, if its miraculous nature was denied or omitted.134 Heinsius shows great elegance and consummate skill in navigating across rival Christian theories and between pagan—Christian lines of division, to reach a theory of drama and internalisation that pre-empts Christian sectarian debates, yet does not render all drama and exemplarity impossible. The secularising import of DTC was understood by contemporaries. Yet the book, ostensibly a commentary on a conjectural edition of the Poetics, was subtle enough to allow them to adopt its secularising theatrical and educational principles by only referring to it, or by adopting the new arrangement of the Poetics, without having to address Heinsius’s conclusions.135 Forced to take a public position, French critics under Louis XIII and XIV, for instance, condemned Heinsius. Yet they paraphrased DTC in their own writings, and used Heinsius’s edition of Aristotle to pretend that they arrived at Heinsius’s findings independently. Still there was plenty left to criticise openly, when circumstances demanded. 4.4.╇ Reception and Controversy The Leiden Circle around the turn of the seventeenth century was one of the few intellectual workshops where today’s secular values were developed. Mid-sixteenth-century French politiques were the stage before, and mid-seventeenth-century England was the next. One way cited above, contrasts with the neo-stoicism of his Leiden peers, including Lipsius and Grotius. Tuck, Philosophy, chapters 2 and 5. Blom and Winkel, Grotius and the Stoa. 133 ╇ Montaigne calls for a similar combination of epistemic humility and suprarational faith in the Apology (1569). This is why it is difficult to see him as a skeptic, of Charron’s or Gassendi’s kind. Given the strategy described above, even Heinsius is closer to skepticism than Montaigne. See DTC, Appendix 1. 134 ╇ Becker-Cantarino thinks that Heinsius’s insistent rejection of reason was aimed against Lipsius. Heinsius, 103-6. However, Heinsius did not reject Scaliger’s use of reason, which often coincided with Lipsius’s. 135 ╇ Kern, Influence, 98-9. For a Calvinist version of the same, see Vondel’s use of pagan and biblical sources before and after he read DTC. Parente, Drama, 95-153.

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to prevent the presentation of these distinctive, secularising Leiden works from creating the impression that they represent a mainstream discourse is to give select instances of their reception. Scaliger’s numÂ� eÂ�rous polemics, and the international controversy of the early 1610s surrounding the Remonstrance and Vorstius’s appointment, have been alluded to before. The widespread but not always obvious adoption of Heinsius’s Aristotelian drama and motivation theory, singularly unsuited for Christianity, has also been discussed. The overt attacks on Heinsius are equally informative. After the French politique experiments described in the Introduction came to an end, a successful deal between the French Crown and Church led to a resurgence of Catholic Gallicanism and the persecution of Huguenots. As the generation of Scaliger’s French teachers and peers in the late sixteenth century provided a stepping-stone for secularisation, the French counterparts of Scaliger’s students’ generation provides an excellent non-secular contrast to the Leiden experiment.136 The case of Guez de Balzac and Salmasius is instructive. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597-1654) cut an imposing figure on the French literary scene. He studied with Heinsius at Leiden in the early 1610s, but after his return to France he came to criticise Heinsius and praise Louis XIII. (As they are made by a former insider, Balzac’s criticisms serve as a reminder of how unusual and radical the Leiden secularising texts discussed here really were.) He became an habitué of the exclusive circle at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, along with Mme de la Fayette, Richelieu, La Rouchefoucauld, Paul Scarron, Mlle de Scudéry and other précieux.137 He was best known for his letters, published first in 1624 and celebrated for setting new standards of style and elegance. Constantijn Huygens sought and won his friendship in 1632. Among their earliest letters we find Balzac’s fond recollection of his time at Leiden, and effusive praise for Heinsius and Cunaeus.138 The same year, however, saw the publication of the play Herodes Infanticida by Heinsius, destined to provoke a great deal of animosity between the old friends.

136 ╇ For the French influences on Scaliger and the Leiden Circle see the chapters above, and Huppert, Idea, Kelley, Foundations, and Grafton, Scaliger. 137 ╇ On Scudéry’s full acceptance of DTC, and of Heinsius’s rearrangement of the Poetics, see Kern, Influence, 80-3. 138 ╇ Cited in Kern, Influence, 66-7.

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Although Heinsius retracted his Christian plays in the 1611 DTC, and he added an apologetic preface to later editions of Auriacus, in 1608, around the time of his collaboration with Cunaeus on Nonnus’s comparative mythography, and Grotius’s composition of Christus patiens, Heinsius wrote all or at least part of Herodes Infanticida, a play with a Christian theme and a Senecan model.139 Eventually published in 1632, it was dedicated to Huygens, who forwarded it to Balzac the next year. Balzac liked it, but requested an explanation of several strikingly pagan solutions in the play, including the mingling of Christian angels with pagan Furies. Heinsius’s reply led to an ungodly row that became public in 1636, when Balzac first published his Discours sur une Tragédie de Monsieur Heinsius intitulée “Herodes Infanticida,” followed by Heinsius’s Epistola qua Dissertationi D. Balzaci responditur.140 Similarly to Camphuysen’s criticism of LB, Balzac found Heinsius’s equation of the value of pagan and Christian figures in Herodes indefensible.141 He was not alone in this. Heinsius had a track-record of systematically comparing Christianity to pagan religions, including his 1610 edition of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, published with Cunaeus’s commentary the same year as the Remonstrances, and the 1614 Lofsanck van Bacchus. These were direct continuations of Scaliger’s historical programme, and closely involved other Leideners like Grotius, Vossius and Cunaeus. Heinsius’s fascination with Nonnus extended to the Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, which contains many elements absent from the so-called Synoptic Gospels. His habitual reliance on this Gospel and on Nonnus was deeply controversial. In 1627 Heinsius published Aristarchus sacer, sive ad Nonni in Iohannem metaphrasin exercitationes, developing his earlier works on Nonnus.142 Soon afterward the States General instructed Heinsius to ╇ Bloemendal, “Mythology,” 333, fn 2. ╇ Balzac’s piece is easily accessible in the 1995 reprint of his 1644 Oeuvres diverses. 141 ╇ Kern, Influence, 87. Sellin, Heinsius, 43-51. Cohen, Écrivains, 275-91. Bloemendal, “Mythology.” Camphuysen’s 1624 attack on Heinsius for praising Bacchus at the expense of Christ: Spies, Rhetoric, 73-5. On the novelty and importance of the Balzac-Heinsius exchange see, Spies, Rhetoric, 76. 142 ╇ Opitz and Vossius also wrote books under titles beginning with Aristarchus. Aristarchus, sive De contemptu linguae Teutonicae was Opitz’s first essay, published in 1618. Following Heinsius (who followed Petrarch and du Bellay), he called for the liberation of his vernacular from foreign affectation and adulteration. Vossius pub139 140

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assist in the Dutch translation of the whole New Testament. Heinsius prepared a verse-by-verse commentary, using the Semitic texts of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, other translations and the Church Fathers, to interpret the Greek text of the NT.143 This undertaking was so reminiscent of Scaliger’s style that he was repeateadly accused of using his deceased teacher’s manuscripts. Irrespective of whether this is true, the accusation spotlights Heinsius’s debt to the Scaligerian method.144 The eventual commentary, Heinsius’s enormous Sacrarum Exercitationum ad Novum Testamentum Libri XX, was finally printed in 1639. The famous French scholar, Claude Saumaise (1588-1653) or Salmasius, who took Scaliger’s chair at Leiden in 1631, immediately wrote a scathing attack on the Exercitationes for its comparative method, and for applying the same critical standards to the Bible as to any other text. Balzac and Salmasius joined forces and began to catalogue, publish and extensively annotate the pagan, secularising, blasphemous elements in all of Heinsius’s writings. They found an ideal target in DTC.145 In the course of this increasingly bitter and vituperative polemic, Salmasius also attacked several Dutch lawyers for their work on the agreements between Roman and Christian law. This prompted HeinÂ� sius’s old colleague, Cunaeus, to intervene in defence of Dutch legal historiography. Just as Balzac believed that Heinsius and Cunaeus cooperated in using literary criticism to further secularisation, Salmasius came to suspect that Heinsius and Cunaeus worked together to deprive Christianity of its claims to unique legal authority.146 Salmasius savagely attacked Heinsius’s musings on the history and status of the Bible in Aristarchus. Heinsius argued there for the existÂ� ence of a separate Hellenistic Jewish dialect and thought-world. The Jews who were dispersed among the Greeks, especially those who lished Aristarchus, sive de arte grammatica in 1635, about a new system of linguistics, in which historiography was the master discipline. 143 ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 40. 144 ╇Sellin, Heinsius, 43-51 for details of the controversy. De Jonge forcefully points out in “The study,” 93-5, that the Exercitationes follows a historical and comparative model and quite deliberately not a theological one, as most such commentaries at the time did. De Jonge goes on to argue that the chief target of the Exercitationes was Beza, and the authority he enjoyed at Leiden. 145 ╇ Others joined the debate. La Mesnardière recorded the French consensus as a condemnation of Heinsius, for the reason that ‘il n’est plus certes pardonnable à ceux qui se meslent d’escrire, de faire du Christianisme, ce que les poëtes Payens faisoient de leur réligion.’ Kern, Influence, 87. 146 ╇ For more details see Cohen, Écrivains, 275-91. Sellin, Heinsius, 43-51.

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lived in Alexandria and spoke Greek by habit, have been called ‘Hellenists’ before. Heinsius now proposed to extend the term to their language as well. It was essentially Greek, he argued, but with Hebrew expressions and turns of phrase. Heinsius showed that the Septuagint and the New Testament were written in Hellenistic Hebrew, and this explained their many oddities, obscurities and infelicities. What rode on Heinsius’s commentary on Nonnus was the vexatious question of biblical exegesis on the basis of a Jewish Hellenic dialect. While some medieval and many early modern exegetes were comfortable using Hebrew texts as historical or polemical sources in their commentaries, to Judaise the actual text of the Septuagint and the New Testament was the key to opening the floodgates to the categorical reliance on Hebrew and Greek sources for intertextual analysis. Accepting Heinsius’s thesis meant that exegetes would have to prioritise the historical specificities of Hellenistic Jews over God’s complex linguistic hints, render systematic comparisons between Christianity, Jewish and Greek religions inescapable, and entrench the comparability of Christian doctrine and rites with other religions (mainly, but not only, Jewish and Greek). The Aristarchus and the Exercitationes were perfect Scaligerian projects, both in their target and their comparative method, in which historiography had the last say. These works were in many ways a re-enactment of Scaliger’s Â�battles with Buxtorf and others over historical changes in sacred languages. As Scaliger undermined the divine legitimacy claims surÂ�Â� rounding the Hebrew language of the OT, Heinsius did the same for the Greek of the Septuagint and the NT, the theological legitimacy of which was based on the writers’ and translators’ purported divine inspiration.147 Scaliger’s historicisation of Hebrew texts using Masoretic signs, and his bitter disputes with Buxtorf father and son about the issue, targeted the divine power of the text by showing that there was no unbroken continuity between the first and last recorded utterance of God. If the biblical language was not unchanged, then it was not divine. Similarly, Heinsius undercut millennia of speculations about the esoteric meaning of unusual Greek phrases in the Septuagint and the New Testament by pointing out their Hebrew ori147 ╇ Metzger and Ehrman, Text. Momigliano suggests that this argument ‘somehow originated with Scaliger and was supported by Heinsius.’ Nono contributo, 554. De Jonge shows that Scaliger never called NT Greek “hellenistic” in writing, though he may have done so in conversation. Yet even if he did, he would not have meant it the way Heinsius did. De Jonge, “The study.”

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gin, and applying a rich historical, linguistic, and cultural analysis to the Hellenists. Those who were convinced by Aristarchus through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to be known as ‘Hellenisticians.’ Salmasius attacked this position several times, his most sustained treatment being the 1643 De Hellenistica commentarius. This was a thick volume of all-out assault on Heinsius and the Hellenisticians. In the same year alone he published two further attacks, the Funus linguae Hellenisticae and the Ossilegium Hellenisticae. Balzac’s and Salmasius’s joint attack on the secularising inference of Heinsius’s historical and comparative method illustrates well how the controversy over the divine inspiration vs. the historical mutability of the language of the Septuagint and the New Testament was fully integrated with the debate about Christian tragedy, and about the status of pagan myths and symbols. The incident corroborates a number of arguments proposed above: that the Leiden Circle had some sort of division for its secularising labour, that the secularising import of their work was appreciated by their contemporaries, and that historical, legal, and literary arguments were so closely interwoven that we can unravel the whole texture of secularisation by pulling on a single thread, be it historiography, law, biblical exegesis, Hebrew linguistics, or any other field where members of the Leiden Circle made their distinctive mark. The joint attack by Balzac and Salmasius, for instance, is now often mistaken for an opportunistic alliance. This misses the point that Heinsius’s comparative mythography, and his adoption of the Scaligerian attack on the divine unquestionability of the biblical text, were fruits of the same tree. 4.5.╇ Heinsius’s Secularising Contributions in DTC and Related Works This controversy also illustrates the complexity of the process. Secularisation had to be subtle to be effective. An open sign of secularism disqualified the text or the thinker from acceptable seventeenthcentury exchange. Heinsius’s Herodes and Lof-sanck van Bacchus, for instance, attracted immediate criticism. DTC by contrast was understood as a secularising work, but it was subtle enough such that any side could use it for its own pacifist purposes, yet also attack Heinsius by easily exposing DTC’s secularising agenda, if that became opportune. The bold secularisation behind the claim of Bacchus’s and Greek

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tragedians’ superiority to Christ and Christian drama, respectively, was a less effective resolution of the religious debates than DTC’s facesaving neutralisation and elegant sidestepping of the issues under debate. Becker-Cantarino explains Heinsius’s motivation for merging pagan and Christian elements in Herodes, and for defending this mixture in the decades-long dispute: It is clear that Heinsius meant to show two worlds in his play: Betlehem, the redeemed world, and the pagan world of Herod the sinner. The actual historical appearance of religions was for him immaterial: they all embody the divine world order since God and His adversary are ever present regardless of their different manifestations in heathen religions. Irenic and ecumenical sentiments were strong among the humanists of the Dutch Republic who were fighting the parochialism of the renewed religious fervor of denominations in the seventeenth century.148

While Becker-Cantarino is right to identify the irenicist and ecumenist purpose, it is important to note that these were achieved at the price of secularisation. What effectively amounted to a new theory of psychology in DTC had less room for religion than its Catholic or Protestant alternatives. Heinsius did not equate only heathen religions in Herodes, but also the symbolism and truth-value of heathen religions and Christianity. Like many of Scaliger’s students’, Heinsius’s approach remained rooted in these religions’ historical contingency. Yet the same results were achieved in DTC without ruffling quite so many feathers, and the new ‘Aristotelian’ Poetics could be used to push theories of motivation and internalisation toward more irenicist, but also more secular formulations. Similarly, Vossius’s tremendous intellectual influence was largely due to quiet, deniable, yet clear and powerful expressions of secularisation. For all intents and purposes, DTC seems to be part of the same well-orchestrated programme. The radical de-emphasising of character in Heinsius’s theory of drama dealt a major blow to the foundations of the elaborate structure of conventional notions, practices and rituals of Christian exemplarity. The genius of the particular method Heinsius followed, a rearrangement and reinterpretation of Aristotle, was that it undermined at once the complex motivational theory behind the Jesuit ‘composition of place,’ the traditional idea behind reiterated uncritical identifications with exemplars in Catholic moral148

╇ Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 137.

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ity plays, and also most Protestant theories of right education. Heinsius and Vossius argued that good historiography constrains itself to particulars.149 Discarding universals in historiography and reducing it to particulars does away with the whole problematics of sacred history and of the Christianisation of Aristotle. Heinsius also says that political science, while it does deal with universals, derives all its universals from the particulars supplied by history. The proper scope of universals is systematically and rigorously reduced to poetry and philosophy; but both Leideners refuse to engage in speculative philosophy, as they define it. Heinsius also removes the possibility of non-rational, emotional identification with Christian exemplars, while Vossius reduces the whole of sacred history to a history of the human institutions associated with Christianity. In complementary ways, they make Christianity comparable with all other mythologies. Although all signs indicate that they were genuinely pious Christians, we can isolate and label three distinct things that turned them into secularisers: their predisposition to continue the secularising programme of the rest of the Leiden Circle (by education and life-long professional association); their commitment to an intellectual programme of pacifism, which logically required the removal of religion from progressively increasing spheres of thought; and the pragmatic, step-by-step process of following this programme, in the form of ad hoc reactions to external stimuli, like the heady secularisation of the 1600s and 1610s, the Calvinist purge of 1618-9, intellectual exile, and the politically imposed modus vivendi between politiques and chosen nation theorists after 1627.150 5.╇ On the Superiority and Dignity of History (1613) Heinsius’s De praestantia ac dignitate historiae oratio (DPDH), his inaugural on taking the Chair of History at Leiden in 1613, offers four secularising contributions. It elaborates an irenicist historiographical method that secularises by excluding religious controversy; it develops a reason, complementary to DTC’s, to marginalise the exemplar ╇ Wickenden, Vossius, II.4, III.3 ╇ These phases are clear even from the checklist of their works in Sellin, Heinsius, and Wickenden, Vossius. Jonathan Israel, “Frederick Henry.” Idem, “Toleration,” especially 248-52; Dutch Republic, chapter 21. 149 150

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problem; it explores alternatives to Christian immortality; and it transforms the Aristotelian limitation of historians to particulars into a component of Leiden’s brand of virtuous epistemic humility. 5.1.╇ The Greatest Good: Eternal Life Despite the personal and political risks of the historical criticism of theology, Scaliger was not the only Leidener to wield history as the master discipline. Heinsius, one of his favourite pupils, occupied the chair of history at Leiden in November 1613. To mark the occasion, he gave a formidable oration on the superiority and dignity of history.151 It was first published in 1614, and reissued many times in Heinsius’s collected orations and miscellaneous writings.152 Several, by now familiar Heinsian secularising solutions are evident in this speech: immortality, epistemic humility, irenicism, zealot-proof education, and creative uses of the universal-particular distinction. History, Heinsius announced, is a divine discipline: God made man in His image, and He cannot allow man’s accomplishments to disappear without trace. The divine spark in man makes him covet immortality—and it is out of this desire that man keeps historical records. Heinsius then moves to his central theme: eternal life is lost or gained through historiography.153 This belief is found in several pagan cultures. Plato’s “Vision of Er” in the Republic and Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” were well known to Heinsius.154 In addition to the importance that the Romans attached 151 ╇ ‘Dignitas’ in early modern usage meant not only dignity, but also authority and grace, and had strong theological connotations. It also harkened back to the scholastic translation of the Greek word ‘axiom.’ Trinkaus, “Renaissance.” Vermij, Calvinist, 105. In addition to this survey of thinkers who developed the concept, Lull’s combination of ‘axiom’ with ‘dignity’ under dignitas will be discussed below. See Bonner’s notes in Lull, Selected works. The chapter on Sardi venales, published the year before Heinsius’s inaugural, will show Cunaeus’s use of Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate. Heinsius was aware of both meanings, and the inaugural should be read as a praise and a methodological treatment of history-writing in one. 152 ╇ Translations cited here are Robinson’s, unless otherwise indicated. Latin originals are from the 1615 edition of Heinsius’s Orationes, in which DPDH is Oratio X. 153 ╇ Chrysostom, “Homily LXXIV on Matthew 23.29-30,” is one of many instances of a Christian reconciliation of historical record, immortality, and the truth of Christianity. 154 ╇ These are famously reconciled in Macrobius, Commentary (Book I, chapter 1, then throughout). Macrobius argues that Cicero’s criticism of Plato was a diversion to pre-empt the ignorant criticisms that plagued Plato.

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to the act of bestowing immortality on illustrious patriots, Heinsius was also familiar with the negative version, the damnatio memoriae, whereby the Senate, and also Augustus, Nero, Caligula, Caracalla and others regarded and meted out deletion from history as the greatest of punishments.155 Eternal life was the greatest good, and historical remembrance its only guarantee. Achilles’s choice in the Iliad and other literary expressions of aretē advise choosing a short but worthy life, if the prize is eternal remembrance. Exodus 32:31-33 and Philippians 4.8 are other instances. News of similar practices from Egypt may have also reached Heinsius: the Egyptian priests banished Hatshepsut, Akhenaton, Tutenkhamen and Aye from the records.156 Whatever the exact source of his inspiration, this was an exceedingly powerful idea to bring up in a discussion of the historian’s profession. Throughout DPDH, Heinsius does not stray from the pagan line: men want to leave marks in order to help others, and these marks, and the path to immortality that they chart, are made and then encountered in this world, not in the next. ‘Through thee,’ Heinsius addresses History, ‘whatever has been, is, while whatever is, never ceases to be. Through thee the people has its customs, the soothsayers their sacred rites, the magistrates their badges of office.’157 Life’s objective, and history’s proper subject, is eternal life through fame, not through divine grace; and fame can be obtained through practical politics or the study ╇See also Vives’s, Lipsius’s and Kepler’s Somnium, discussed below. Here I will not even speculate about the impact of Scipio’s Dream on the onoeiric framework of early modern Menippean satires like Sardi venales, and its theme of immortality through good citizenship in the republic of letters. Roman sources known to Heinsius include the proposal to banish the memory of all caesars in Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, Caligula LX: ‘quidam vero sententiae loco abolendam Caesarum memoriam ac diruenda templa censuerint.’ Vol. I, 506. Heinsius may also have known Gothic, Frank or Saxon instances of immortality through great deeds, since he worked closely with Vulcanius, Scriverius, and other students of such lore. E.g. the immortality of King Arthur, whether from Geoffrey of Monmouth or from Malory, Le morte Darthur. For the nature of immortality among post-Roman tribes see Markale, Arthur, 104. The damnatio memoriae was revived for Marino Faliero, the famous fourteenth-century Doge of Venice, who plotted to become absolute ruler. This law’s rather limited success is illustrated by the 15-year period in which Byron dramatised (1820), Delacroix painted (1827), and Donizetti wrote an opera (1835) about Faliero. 156 ╇ Ironically, we largely know about these pharaohs thanks to the vengeful priests who struck their names from the records. Tutenkhamen’s tomb and Akhenaton’s temples were preserved partly because tomb raiders did not know where to look. 157 ╇ ‘Per te est quicquid fuit, quicquid autem est, nunquam esse desinit. Per te ritus suos habet populus, sacra aruspices, magistratus insignia’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 239. 155

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of history. Heinsius’s occasional references to ‘some god’ do little to add a Christian colour to his argument.158 In keeping with the principles laid down in DTC, in DPDH Heinsius does not refer in any degree or form to the vivid and enormous literature concerning the various possible ways of learning from other Christians’ lives, whether from Christ’s, the Apostles’, saints’, martyrs’, or other exemplary Â�figures’.159 Heinsius’s inaugural was in many ways the most openly secularising declaration of the Leiden Circle’s secularisation-by-historicisation programme. How does Heinsius establish and defend this claim to historical criticism as the master method, and the pinnacle of human achievement? His train of thought concerning the Theatre of Pompey is a good demonstration.160 This theatre, he tells his audience, had been destroyed and rebuilt several times. Princes showed off their strength by destroying or rebuilding it, whichever option was available. Then it finally perished. Yet history preserved it, not as an object, Heinsius says, but as an object lesson. Nothing escapes destruction, whether by time or by enemies, ‘except only the monuments of mind and intellect.’161 Even the deeds of those who live now will disappear, unless they are recorded. O preserver of men, preserver of men’s deeds, preserver of chronology, preserver of all the centuries, of all years and generations the preserver, History! In thee Greece applies herself to philosophy, in thee Rome still rules, in thee likewise she waxes and flowers, begins and ends. […] To the hundred and seven years of Themistocles, who complained that he had lived so short a time, thou hast added all eternity. Again: Thou hast made Alexander the Great, whose life was quenched by the envy of the Fates within his thirty-third year, still survive with the world over which he triumphed. Go, now, Kings and Princes, go, and put your trophies elsewhere than in the eternity of letters. Believe that some rock or stone can avail against the long continuance of time. Poets, orators, and especially historians, the peculiar ministers of the Muses, and priests of eternity, heralds also of your glory and name—neglect

╇ DPDH, 9. ╇ Compare e.g. Augustine on using politics and history for a Christian education: On Christian teaching II.xxvii.42-xxviii.44, Against Faustus XII.26, Trin. XIII.24. 160 ╇ DPDH, 23 ff. 161 ╇ DPDH, 23. ‘… praeter sola animi ac mentis monumenta evasisse videamus, …’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 241. 158 159

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chapter three these, if ye see fit, and in their places load with benefits a monkey or a fool.162

As with DTC’s break with exemplarity (see 4.2 above), it is useful to recall the conventional Christian position that martyrs and prophets win eternal life irrespective of whether they are forgotten, remembered by their enemies and persecutors, or remembered by Christians. In DPDH, no amount of physical effort and no religion can ensure fame and preservation; only historians, those ‘priests of eternity,’ and their records offer immortality. 5.2.╇ Universal-Particular in DPDH In this inaugural we find another formulation of history as master discipline, when Heinsius announces that the whole idea or form of political science is inherent in history, which is a pursuit of particulars. ‘The designs, too, and the secrets of empire, which lie concealed in the minds of kings and princes as in a hidden shrine, he [the historian] would gather directly from the event, exactly like a physician who conducts a post mortem examination upon the human body.’163 The comparison with the physician is not accidental. Medicine was often used as a paradigm for testing new arguments in Renaissance and early modern methodological debates.164 Yet note that Heinsius ╇ ‘ô conservatrix hominum, conservatrix humanarum actionum, conservatrix temporum, conservatrix saeculorum omnium, omnium annorum ac aetatum conservatrix Historia! In te Graecia philosophatur, in te Roma adhuc imperat, in te crescit pariter & floret, incipit & desinit […] Tu Themistocli, qui se tam anguste vixisse querebatur, supra annos centum & septem, omne aevum adiecisti. Alexandrum autem Magnum, qui inuidia fatorum intra trigesimum & tertium exstinctus est, effecisti ut cum orbe suo superesset, nec nisi illo pereunte pariter extingueretur. Ite nunc Reges & Principes, ite & trophaea vestra alibi quam in aeternitate literarum ponite, saxum aliquod aut lapidem contra temporum diuturnitatem posse credite: poëtas, oratores, & praecipue Historicos, flamines Musarum, & aeternitatis sacerdotes, vestrae autem gloriae & nominis praecones & conservatores negligite, simiam vero aliquam aut morionem, si Diis placet, pro iis alite.’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 238-40. 163 ╇ DPDH, 11. ‘cogitationes quoque & immensum illud imperii arcanum, quod in regum principumque animis, tanquam in adyto quodam & occulto delubri sacrario, plerunque occultatur, in Rep. autem paginam utranque facit, non aliter quam medicus quidam, qui humana secat corpora, ex eventu colligeret.’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 230. Shortly after DPDH, Heinsius started using the combined titles of Professor of Politics and History. Sellin, Heinsius, 20, fn. 1 explains some of the difficulties involved in reconstructing the divisions of the curriculum and academic offices at Leiden at this time. 164 ╇Nicely shown in Gilbert, Renaissance concepts. 162

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compares a historian’s reconstruction of political science (the designs and arcana imperii) to a post mortem, not to diagnosing a live patient. History informs political prudence, but it works best retrospectively, and may not offer clear-cut rules for present and future political conduct. This reminds one of Butterfield’s argument that Guicciardini, not Machiavelli, was the first modern, because Guicciardini thought that history provides rules of thumb, while Machiavelli claimed to have discovered clear and infallible laws.165 The difference between the well-known comparison of the historical-legal-political method to geometry (e.g. Grotius, Hobbes), and between modelling it on a post mortem, may be connected to the early modern shift in the distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning—which, according to some, was accomplished by the physician William Harvey, not by his early client, Francis Bacon. Heinsius does not claim that all political science derives from history. Rather, he says that all of it can be reconstructed from history, should political science ever be lost by a strange accident. This tallies with his point in DTC that history deals with particulars only, while philosophy rules in the realm of universals. DPDH continues DTC’s epistemic humility: intellectual (as opposed to emotional) claims about universals arrogantly assume knowledge that men do not possess. Working with particulars, for instance from historical events toward civil prudence, rests on a proper acknowledgement of man’s limitations. Christian universals, the major battle ground for philosophical theology, form an inaccessible category in DTC and DPDH. There is no sacred history. There must be no Christian drama. What, then, is the task of history? To record the names of people who deserve immortality. Is it accuracy, or its fame-bestowing power that makes history the master discipline? Fact or rhetoric? If history is the key to immortality, what is the ideal life according to this inaugural: one spent in a way that merits historical fame and immortality, or one that obtains them, irrespective of merit? In this section of the inaugural, Heinsius leads us from another angle to the same conclusion: the pursuit of historical studies is a mission of historical importance in itself, perhaps more important than the deeds. ‘Let us cherish this brief time, this moment, which God hath prepared for the cultivation of this great trust, History.’ He continues:

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╇ Butterfield, Statecraft.

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chapter three In her reside for us and for almost all created things glory, memory, and dignity, and finally the destined keystone of eternity itself. So in surpassing the law of mortality under the will and favor of God immortal, who hath given us the means of perpetuity, we may seem to have conferred life and eternity upon all others. This must be looked for from History almost alone.166

History and not faith, works, theological study or grace, grants immortality. Heinsius’s message about history’s redeeming quality is more than a hyperbole for the occasion. His introduction and development of immortality through historiography, the theme to which Heinsius constantly returns, stands out from the inaugurals and laudations in praise of a discipline. DPDH’s unusualness is better appreciated when compared with Vossius’s 1632 moderate oration on the same subject, given almost twenty years later on the occasion of opening the AtheÂ� naeum Illustre in Amsterdam.167 Another comparison that underÂ� scores DPDH’s radicalism is with Bolingbroke’s posthumous Letters on the Study of History (1752), in which Letter 2 prompted outrage by making the same argument as Heinsius 140 years earlier. Letter 1 concludes on a very Scaligerian note, criticising Julius AfriÂ�canus, Eusebius, George the Monk and others for distorting true history in the interest of theology.168

╇ DPDH, 24. ‘… assurgamus animo, Auditores, assurgamus, & pusillum hoc temporis, quod ad excolendum hoc depositum, in quo nostram & eorum prope omnium quae nata sunt, famam, gloriam, existimationem, dignitatem, ipsam denique; aeternitatem divinitas constituit, a qua caetera omnia pendere voluit, ita habeamus, ut mortalitatis nostrae legem, volente ac favente Deo immortali, qui eternitatis instrumenta nobis dedit, excessisse, reliquis autem omnibus, vitam ipsi & perennitatem contulisse videamur. Quod a sola prope Historia est exspectandum.’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 241. 167 ╇ Barlaeus’s Mercator sapiens and Vossius’s De historiæ utilitate oratio marked the Athenaeum’s opening. ‘There before an audience of the city rulers, preachers, burghers and students Vossius held his inaugural address, which bore the title De historiae utilitate oratio. The school’s first professor said he was struck by the great interest and therefore had chosen a topic that both illuminated his new task and would be acceptable to the diverse company of listeners. Life is too short to learn to master all fields of knowledge. How therefore does a person arrive at the wisdom which he needs? The shortest way to that goal is history, mother and nurturer of all other fields of knowledge, the essential introduction to each and every area of study, school for life, and mirror of God’s providential dealing with man and the world.’ Rademaker, Vossius, 242, and passim. 168 ╇ Bolingbroke, Historical writings. 166

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5.3.╇ Epistemic Humility Scaliger may have been an abrasively historicising critic of Christianity, but to my knowledge he never suggested that his discipline, method, or a religion other than Christianity, could offer its followers immortality. Heinsius was less squeamish. In DPDH, delivered a few months before he composed his Hymn to Bacchus, Heinsius assigned to God no role in history (see epistemic position no. 3 above, p. 35), in Â�contrast with those who either ascribed theological meaning to all events (position 1), or at least humbly suspended judgement on the issue (positions 2 and 6). On the few occasions when Heinsius refers to God in DPDH, it is only to distance Him from historical pursuits further. There is a strong suggestion that theological debates must be removed from the art of history-writing because they run the risk of turning historiography into ideological justification for slaughter. Witness the silent march of the innocents, freshly killed in the wars of religion started and sustained by wrongful theological debates, in Sardi venales, and also in Erasmus’s fantastic Julius excluded. HeinÂ� sius’s outline of the correct historiographical method in DPDH closely resembles the warnings against epistemic hubris, delivered by Sophia and Sophrosyne to Cunaeus and his fellow academics, in the satirical Sardi venales published the year before DPDH. Epistemic humility must apply to God, and to His role in history, but historiography as a discipline has its own rules and right method, self-sufficient ‘even if we assumed that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him.’169 Their shared training in the Scaligerian historiographical method informs both Cunaeus’s satire against the fretful theologians, who accuse God with their speculations and resentments, and Heinsius’s inaugural as Professor of History. Cunaeus’s and Heinsius’s joint work before and after DPDH, from editing bucolics to becoming the butts of Salmasius’s attacks, shows that they were familiar with a range of ancient formulations of the value of epistemic humility, and of focusing on the knowable and the immediate. They built upon them a comprehensive Leiden method for sidestepping theological debates over universals. This emerges as a distinctive characteristic of the Leiden brand of epistemic humility, and the central message of both Sardi venales and DPDH, especially if we recall Heinsius’s emphasis in DTC on history’s limitation to the ╇ ‘etiamsi daremus, quod sine summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum, aut non curari ab eo negotia humana.’ Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI. 169

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pursuit of particulars. In the Theocritian story, particulars are like fish, and universals the gold-fish, about which one dreams at the risk of offending the gods and losing everything. Heinsius’s inaugural is more than a humanistic exordium and apologia for the historian’s craft. It is part and parcel of Leiden’s secularising history-writing. This is a secularising, not a secularist position. In agreement with his 1609 demolition of Aristotle’s authorship of De mundo (re-issued in a reworked and enlarged form in the 1615 Orationes), epistemic humility in the 1613 DPDH only extends to fathoming God’s relationship with human history. Following Scaliger’s creed, Heinsius argues that man is able to figure out the meaning of his own history. Study, not the grace of insight, is required to reach this understanding of history’s true significance.170 And once study rewards with understanding, man realises that God cannot be blamed for anything. After man studied and understood the real significance of history, ‘[t]ruly that fretful animal, whom we call man, because in life itself he ever touches only the fringes of life, would for once acquit of blame that Supreme Divinity, whose greatness he does not understand, and whose kindness he is quick to accuse.’171 God is not involved. From the three ideal-typical positions that Christians could take with respect to history, Heinsius selects the radical disjunction of secular history and sacred meaning. Not stopping here, he substitutes for God another, starkly un-Christian source of immortality. Personal merit and responsibility in DTC and DPDH go together, in both theology and politics; this is the heart of the Arminian message.172 DPDH is not a Calvinist speech, and one wonders whether it breaks with Christianity altogether by resurrecting the antique notion of immortality through history, and by additionally transferring it to those who pursue the art of history-writing. Heinsius does the latter by combining two themes: the immortality of virtuous citizens, and the commonwealth of scholars. Although there was an established Christian tradition of promising immortality to princes who do God’s business 170 ╇ For the contrary view, namely that writing a true history requires grace, see Lactantius, Augustine, and other examples in the Introduction. 171 ╇ DPDH, 9-10. ‘… nae morosum illud animal, quem hominem vocamus, quod in ipsa vita praeter propter vitam perpetuo oberrat, supremum illud numen, cuius magnitudinem non capit, & benignitatem facile accusat, aliquando absolveret.’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 229. 172 ╇ Languet and Mornay, Vindiciae. Trevor-Roper, “Foundations.” Monahan, Personal duties. Bryson in Tyranny astutely connects Milton’s republicanism with Satan’s rejection of God as king.

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faithfully, and a ‘magisterial reformed’ tradition of similarly putting princes’ mind at ease, the contrast of both with DPDH’s pagan immortality could not be greater.173 There is only one legitimate king, and that is a good king, rex a recte regendo dicitur; but none in DPDH’s list of immortal historical figures depends on Christianity for their goodness.174 5.4.╇ The Politics of Writing History Through the study of history, Heinsius argues, man ‘would be freed from the limits of time and space.’ ‘He would view in a moment an infinite multitude of matters and affairs.’ And again: ‘History renders man contemporary with the universe.’175 When he understands history, man achieves in this life something very close to immortality, and to the divine sub specie aeternitatis. This is exactly the privileged observer position that Augustine ascribed to God, and to a lesser extent to those in a state of grace.176 Heinsius’s historical twist on this logic is wonderfully brazen and clever: the preservation of one’s name gives immortality; one cannot achieve greatness, and therefore cannot become worthy of a good name, without understanding history. Not great deeds alone, it turns out in the course of his speech in defence of history, but the study itself also bestows immortality. The final twist on the value of history comes as no surprise: the recently deceased Dominicus Baudius (1561-1613) gained immortality by his teaching of history. He was a man quite comparable with antiquity, and of memory so strong, as to carry about, as if in a capacious purse, all histories and all annals, modern and ancient. To me, indeed, he left nothing except his love strong beyond belief, which he committed to me at his dying hour, and this position, so that my very incapacity might result to his praise and reputation. For his part, he used to seek from History all his glory, praise, and reputation, as well as in lectures as in writing. In her he lives, in her he speaks with us, in her he survives, in her we have his genius and pleasantry, in her we seem to look upon him face to face. ╇ E.g. Aquinas, De regimine principum, Book I. ╇ A medieval and early modern commonplace, probably originating from Isidore’s Etymologies, Book 7. The definition of ‘good’ always included ‘Christian.’ Grosseteste, Dictum 51, fol. 37 ra. Fortescue, Governance, 182 and passim. 175 ╇ DPDH, 11. ‘Haec aetatem hominis cum aetate aequat universi …’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 230. 176 ╇Somos, “Augustine.” It is tempting to imagine the effect of this inaugural on Heinsius’s would-be students, who were just informed by their new professor that their afterlife depends on how well they do in his class. 173 174

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Baudius was a former protégé of Philip Sidney and the decisive force behind Scaliger’s move to Leiden. Heinsius was taking over Baudius’s chair, and acknowledged him in this inaugural, alongside Scaliger, as his spiritual mentor and predecessor.178 Baudius and Heinsius were attacked together for alleged zèle forcené by Balzac, and some readers of Cunaeus thought that Sardi venales was likewise directed against them.179 In any case, in DPDH Themistocles, Alexander, and Baudius equally receive immortality from History. In 1617 Heinsius presented a parallel argument in The Apotheosis of Thuanus, in which de Thou goes to Heaven only by virtue of his history-writing and the irenicist purpose behind it. On arrival he looks at the mythological, allegorical and historical figures, among them Religion: Religio, quae bellorum nunc maxima causa Pacis et obsequii quondam mitissima nutrix, Priscas ipsa suo iungebat foedere gentes: Necdum in mille vias nequicquam scissa modosque, Necdum picta comas, multosque imbuta colores. (Religion, now the greatest cause of wars, once as the kind mother of peace and allegiance joined ancient nations in a bond, not yet torn

177 ╇ ‘Cuius expositionem aliquando ex hoc loco a Dominico Baudio audiuistis, viro plane cum antiquitate conferendo, memoriae autem tantae, ut historias omnes, omnes res gestas, novas simul & antiquas, tanquam in capaci quodam sinu circumferret. Qui quidem nihil nobis praeter incredibilem amorem sui, quem propinquus fato nobis commendavit, & hunc locum reliquit. Ut hoc ipsum quoque quantum est quod nos non possumus, laudi eius & existimationi cederet. Ipse autem omnem gloriam, omnem existimationem suam, tam legendo quam scribendo, ex Historia petebat. In hac vivit, in hac loquitur nobiscum, in hac superest, in hac genium eius & festivitatem habemus, in hac praesentem quasi intueri videmur: hac postremo decus patriae, sibi vitam peperit post obitum.’ Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, 238. 178 ╇ Grootens, Baudius. Compare Heinsius’s poem on another great historian, The Apotheosis of Thuanus. Heinsius also arranged the posthumous publication of the second part of Camden’s Annales rerum Anglicarum in 1625. Baudius, like Scaliger, was deeply influenced by French politique historiography. See Saulnier, “Les dix années.” Heinsius himself became an internationally renowned history teacher. Dutch and foreign scholars and politicians came to Leiden just to hear him lecture on the subject. Sellin, Heinsius, 36, 52. 179 ╇ Balzac, Oeuvres, 214. Beside DPDH, two other Leiden texts that associate Baudius and Heinsius are Scaliger’s 1606 Thesaurus temporum, prefaced by verse praises by these two historians, and Sardi venales, passages of which are occasionally interpreted as gentle digs at the same pair.

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apart in a thousand ways and manners, not yet adorned with hair of all colours. Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 86).

It is Religion, ‘now the greatest cause of wars,’ who kisses de Thou as a reward for his efforts to restore peace. War, Peace, Liberty, the Muses and Henri IV appear and congratulate him. In this poem for de Thou, like for Baudius in DPDH, and in a range of orations and poems on the deification and immortalisation of Dousa, Lipsius and Scaliger, Heinsius leaves no room for Christian merit, whether through faith, works, or predestination.180 Not even god(s) can survive without historians. Fear of death, as many knew and a few pointed out, was the greatest motive for becoming and remaining a Christian. The greatest challenge to Christianity is therefore an alternative route to eternal life. With originality and skill, in this inaugural Heinsius deployed what superficially seem standard humanistic themes to secularising effect. Focusing on DPDH’s specific features, I will try to pinpoint his sources and train of thought with greater accuracy. 5.5.╇ History-Writing Polities The turn of the seventeenth century saw fundamental changes in the ways that the “republic of letters” theme was conceptualised and discussed. In DPDH, Heinsius drew on a particular variety in which a republic of letters constitutes an alternative polity, where immortality is won through other scholars’ remembrance and their use of one’s work. He then married this notion with the pagan model of immortality through history. The two crystallised in this elegantly impudent inaugural about immortality through the study and teaching of history, and in its message that good historians get a higher-order immortality than great men, however famous. Where did this idea of immortality in a republic of academics come from, and how does it fit in with the rest of the Leiden project for refitting historiography with more secular tools, less vulnerable to religious wrangling? Immortality through the general study of letters was a well-established theme. As references in his books, letters, and his own EmbleÂ� mata show, Heinsius was an avid reader of Alciato’s Emblematum liber, first published in 1531 and wildly popular until the eighteenth ╇ Oratio I in Heinsius, 1615 Orationes, is his funeral oration for Scaliger. Other relevant texts are discussed in Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 86-93. 180

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century. Alciato, who ‘helped popularise a purely historical approach to the law,’ is a doubly apposite source for Heinsius’s republic of letters.181 Emblem 132 in a 1577 edition of Alciato’s emblems is entitled Ex literarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri (That immortality is attained through the study of letters). It runs, Neptuni tubicen (cuius pars ultima cetum, Aequoreum facies indicat esse â•… Deum) Serpentis medio Triton comprenâ•… ditur orbe, Qui caudam inserto mordicus in â•… ore tenet. Fama viros animo insignes, praeâ•… claraque gesta Prosequitur, toto mandat et orbe â•… legi. (Triton, the trumpeter of Neptune (whose lower part shows he is a sea-monster, whose face shows him to be a god), is enclosed in the middle of a circle of a snake, who seizes his tail in his mouth with his teeth. Fame pursues men worthy in spirit and their splendid deeds, and commands that they be read by all the world.)182 Figure 1. Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, Emblem 132: Ex literarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri.With kind permission of CAMENA.

Heinsius argued in DTC that history can only treat particulars, and only poetry and philosophy can access universals. In DPDH he showed that the study of history, with its glorious particulars, is nevertheless the high road to immortality. In spite of the general currency of the idea of immortality through letters, immortality through the particular combination of the pursuit of particulars and remembrance in the republic of letters is more rare. Another notable case is Sardi venales, where Cunaeus writes that the true academic in search of Heaven and immortality will limit his inquiry to match man’s 181 ╇ Kelley, Foundations. Skinner, Foundations 1, 106. For the story of Contra vitam monasticam, a reformist and anti-clerical treatise by Alciato, suppressed by him and lurking in Leiden until its first publication in 1695, see Visser, “Escaping,” 154-6. 182 ╇ Other formulations of immortality through letters are given in Eden, Friends. Miller, Peiresc.

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severe epistemic limitations. Universals are unknowable, or only knowable with an intimate, unreasoned type of knowledge that is not open to debate, and therefore cannot lead to, or be used to justify, bloodshed and persecution. Cunaeus’s 1612 Sardi venales and Heinsius’s 1613 DPDH both make responsible citizenship in the republic of letters a precondition of immortality, and the form of right knowledge—namely that of particulars, kept within the bounds of valid debate—a hallmark of this responsibility. 5.6.╇ History’s Triumphal March In addition to the Leiden combination of the pagan, civic notion of immortality with good, epistemically unassuming citizenship in a non-Christian republic of letters, another theme that inspired the content and structure of this inaugural is the Triumph. Triumphs in ancient Rome were religious rites and civil ceremonies combined, held publicly to honour a returning commander. Their elaborate symbolism centered around immortality: the triumphator became immortal through this official recognition of his patriotic valour. Under the Principate, the triumphs and their power to confer immortality came to be reserved for members of the imperial family, and merged with other paraphernalia in the cult of divine emperors.183 Interestingly, Christian accounts of triumphs added a few details, most saliently that the servant who held the laurel crown above the triumphator’s head (never touching) incessantly had to whisper in his ear, ‘Remember you are mortal’ (Memento mori), or ‘Look behind, remember you are only a man’ (Respice te hominem te memento).184 The academic literature on this subject is scarce, but one wonders if this detail, which subverts the whole idea of a triumph, was added in the Christian accounts more out of a concern for the pedagogical impact of pagan history than for factual accuracy. The most influential, or at least the most iconic, humanist expression of this theme is Petrarch’s (1304-74) Triumphs.185 This cycle of 183 ╇ Tacitus, Annals, ii.41. Livy, xlv.40. Dio Cassius, much of vi, and li.16, lxiii.20. Pliny, Natural history, xv.38 ff., xxiii.36, xxviii.7, xxxiii.4, 111, etc. 184 ╇ This is first reported by Tertullian, Apology, 33. Isidorus thought the slave in question was actually the common executioner. Pliny thought that the slave was there to avert the evil eye. Natural history, xviii.2, xviii.7. 185 ╇ For an overview of Petrarch’s afterlife up to the sixteenth century see Enenkel and Papy, Petrarch. The three essays in the section, ‘Petrarch read and imitated in 16th-century France,’ describe French Catholics’, Huguenots’, politiques’, and the

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poems, which Heinsius knew well, was one of those rare works which, in spite of their highly symbolic and cryptic character, are aesthetically so pleasing that they filter down and become an ineradicable part of folklore.186 It consists of six poems, each heralding the triumph of an allegorical character. These characters triumph over many things, but also over each other, with each successive one defeating its predecessor. The Petrarchan sequence is the following: Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. The pagan tradition is apparent in Fame’s triumph over death, while Eternity’s triumph over Time is Augustinian.187 The poem’s popularity revived in the Dutch Golden Age, with a veritable explosion of pictorial illustrations and literary allusions. Rembrandt, Maarten van Heemskerck, Pieter van Verren, Dirk Bouts and many others illustrated several or all of the Petrarchan Triumphs. Jacob Cats wrote an imitation, in which he rearranged the sequence to make Death triumph over Fame and Time, only to be vanquished by Eternity in turn.188 There are both textual and thematic similarities between Petrarch’s Triumphs and Heinsius’s DPDH. Consider, for instance, this section of Petrarch’s fifth Triumph. The Sun is jealous of the fame of the mortals, whose petty, transitory earthly actions can nevertheless win them immortality, if only historians record them. Triumph of Time forth from his golden palace, after the dawn, So swiftly rose the Sun, begirt with rays, Thou wouldst have said: “Yet hardly had it set.” Risen a little, he looked round about As wise men do, and to himself he said: “What thinkest thou? Thou shouldst take greater care. For if a man who had been famed in life Continues in his fame in spite of death, What will become of the law that heaven made? If mortal fame, that soon should fade away, Increases after death, then I foresee Our excellence at an end, wherefor I grieve. Pléiade’s use of Petrarchan themes and ideas, and complements the Italian-FrenchDutch connection that is traced here in historiography. 186 ╇ Heinsius’s knowledge of Petrarch: Ypes, Petrarca. 187 ╇See Petrarch’s Secretum, his book of meditations in which he and Augustine converse in the presence of Lady Truth. 188 ╇ Enenkel and Gerritsen, De luister. Ypes, Petrarca, 164-5.

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What more is to befall? What could be worse? What more have I in the heavens than man on earth? Must I then plead for equality with him? My four good steeds I curry faithfully, And feed them in the seas, and spur, and lash, And yet I yield to the fame of mortal man. An injury for anger, not for jest, That this should be my lot, e’en though I were But second or third in the heavens, rather than first! Now must I kindle all the zeal I have And in my wrath double my winged speed: For I am envious, I confess, of men. For some I see who after a thousand years, And other thousands, grow more famous still, While I continue my perpetual task. I am as erst I was, ere the earth itself Was stablished, wheeling ever, day and night, In my round course, that never comes to an end.”189

Given Heinsius’s essays into comparative mythography, and that the sun is the oldest and most common material symbol for God, it is perhaps not too far a stretch to connect the Petrarchan text of solar envy with DPDH’s assertion that even God’s fame and immortality depends on historians. Another connection is found in the structure of these works. Like Cats, Heinsius rearranges the sequence of Petrarchan triumphs, but unlike in Petrarch and Cats, in DPDH it is Time, embodied by historians such as Baudius, that triumphs over God’s Eternity.190 189 ╇ Trionfo del Tempo. De l’aureo albergo co l’aurora inanzi/ sì ratto usciva ’l sol cinto di raggi,/ che detto avresti: - e' si corcò pur dianzi. -/ Alzato un poco, come fanno i saggi/ guardoss’intorno, et a se stesso disse:/ - Che pensi? omai convien che più cura aggi./ Ecco, s’un che famoso in terra visse,/ de la sua fama per morir non esce,/ che sarà de la legge che ’l Ciel fisse?/ E se fama mortal morendo cresce,/ che spegner si devea in breve, veggio/ nostra eccellenzia al fine; onde m’incresce./ Che più s’aspetta? o che puote esser peggio?/ che più nel ciel ho io che ’n terra un uomo,/ a cui esser egual per grazia cheggio?/ Quattro cavai con quanto studio como,/ pasco nell’oceano e sprono e sferzo,/ e pur la fama d’un mortal non domo!/ Ingiuria da corruccio e non da scherzo,/ avenir questo a me, s’ i’ fossi in cielo/ non dirò primo, ma secondo, o terzo!/ Or conven che s’accenda ogni mio zelo,/ sì ch’al mio volo l’ira addoppi i vanni,/ ch’io porto invidia agli uomini, e nol celo;/ de’ quali io veggio alcun dopo mille anni/ e mille e mille, più chiari che ’n vita,/ et io m’avanzo di perpetui affanni./ Tal son qual era anzi che stabilita/ fusse la terra, dì e notte rotando/ per la strada ritonda ch’è infinita.’ 190 ╇ For other instances close to Heinsius, see Ypes, Petrarca, esp. 86-8, 161-6, 198, 218 and passim. Ypes mentions that Heinsius also relied on Petrarch for many of his Emblems: 157. For Dutch editions and influence of the Triumphs, see Enenkel and Gerritsen, De luister.

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The Triumphs were incorporated into North Italian rural festivities, which became official Florentine celebrations under Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92). Lorenzo’s birth was celebrated with a commemorative desco da parto or birth plate, portraying the Triumph of Fame from Petrarch. His childhood tutor was Marsilio Ficino (143399), who allegedly promised immortality to Cosimo, Lorenzo’s grandfather, through Socrates rather than Christ. Later, when Lorenzo rose to prominence, he instituted the annual celebration of Triumphs as an urban and official public event in Florence, and himself wrote a song for the occasion, Il trionfo di Bacco e Arianna. The state celebrations were modelled on the Renaissance reconstruction of the ancient Greek Bacchanalia.191 It appears from the texts, from Heinsius’s aforementioned Dutch, French, and other contemporaries’ adaptation of Petrarch’s triumphs, and from the Triumphs’ broader impact on European political symbolism, that in DPDH Heinsius modelled the immortalising power of the pursuit of historical knowledge in the republic of letters at least partly on the Medici Bacchanalia. Lorenzo’s poem may have also been a major source of inspiration for Heinsius’s Lofsanck van Bacchus, composed in early 1614, a few months after he delivered DPDH, and probably while he was preparing the inaugural for publication. And as already mentioned above, Heinsius began his investigation of the lore of Bacchus years before DPDH. It is probable that he knew about the Florentine festivity that connected Bacchus and Petrarch’s Triumphs by the common thread of immortality. 5.7╇ Unsecularised Counterparts of Triumph and Immortality through Historiography The closest French parallels to Heinsius’s DPDH are found in the works of the mid-sixteenth century New Historians who inspired Scaliger. Ideas like immortality through the republic of letters came 191 ╇ The influence of these triumphs on other courts has a complex history. The importance of Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s translation of Petrarch’s Triumphs for Tudor pageantry and self-perception is discussed from several complementary perspectives in the essays in Axton and Carley, Triumphs. Carnicelli’s Introduction to Morley, Tryumphes and Coogan, “Petrarch’s Trionfi” outline a broader English Renaissance context. Notable in the Scottish reception is William Fowler’s translation around 1587 at the request of James VI/I, a fellow member of the “Castalian band” (modelled on the Pléiade). The king wrote a prefatory sonnet to the translation. The scheme of Petrarchan triumphs in the court of Louis XIII is briefly discussed below.

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back to France with the Enlightenment, as exemplified by Diderot’s creed about his age and the function of the Encyclopédie. It is worth re-reading the passage cited at the end of chapter 2; DPDH and Diderot’s praise of his age have a lot in common. Guez de Balzac’s controversy with Heinsius over mixing pagan and Christian elements in tragedy serves as an informative contrast with the Leiden Circle. It shows how after the Catholic reaction to the Â�politiques, in the France of Richelieu and Louis XIII (often called the first absolute monarch), there was little toleration for secularising experiments. Similarly, Balzac’s Le Prince, published in 1631 but circulating in manuscript as early as 1627, is an excellent contrast to DPDH, highlighting some elements of the Leiden experiment that made it unique in Europe in this particular period. It is a useful text also because the two contrasts, between DPDH and Le Prince, and Heinsius’s and Balzac’s view on syncretism in tragedy, begin to add up to a systematic comparison. Le Prince has not been hailed as a great work when it appeared, or since. It is a baroque and ponderous treatise dedicated to Richelieu, and attempts to navigate between a mirror for princes and a portrait of Louis XIII as the epitome of good monarchy, divine already in life, who has nothing to learn from the kind of political textbook that Le Prince in fact aspires to be. Louis, Balzac argues, has become divine and immortal by his deeds. Balzac pushed this point to such lengths that the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne issued an official censure. Balzac’s suspiciously un-Christian thesis of royal immortality through deeds alone did not amuse Richelieu, either. Balzac’s particular formulation of royal immortality was the opposite of Heinsius’s verdict on rulers and deeds in DPDH. Yet both men were censured for emphasising pagan immortality to the exclusion of Christianity. Perhaps Balzac’s attack on the impiety of Heinsius’s HeroÂ�des Infanticida, a few years after the Sorbonne censured his Prince for the same shortcoming, was at least partly Balzac’s attempt to affirm his Catholic orthodoxy. The objectionable paganisms that Le Prince and Herodes Infanticida interestingly share contrast with pleasing symÂ�metry in that the former work’s pagan motifs are used to present a paragon of a monarch, while in the latter, the worst tyrant imaginable. The similarity between Heinsius’s and Balzac’s use of pagan symÂ� bolism for dechristianisation on the one hand, and the series of instructive contrasts between the PetrarÂ�chan-Florentine celebration of the republic’s immortality, Heinsius’s immortalisation of fellow

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historians, and Balzac’s immortalisation of Louis, on the other hand, are fleshed out further through the shared cultural referent of triumphs. Louis XIII held spectacular and luxurious triumphal processions that suggested strongly that his military victories made him an equal to the gods. On the twenty-four plates in Henri Estienne’s Â�commemorative Triomphes de Louis XIII, the king is depicted as Augustus, and an earthly Jupiter, with various personified virtues in attendance.192 Unlike in Florence and Leiden, what was unacceptable in Balzac was the unabashed deployment of purely pagan symbolism for this grand political spectacle in the Catholic French framework of absolutist propaganda. Another fruitful comparison concerns the epistemic status of the immortalised figure in La Prince on the one hand, and Heinsius’s DPDH, funeral oration for Scaliger, The Apotheosis of Thuanus, and the allied texts mentioned above, on the other. In Heinsius, historians earn immortality by their righteous epistemic humility, apparent from their pursuit of particulars, avoidance of universals, and irenicism. Balzac shows Louis ceaselessly engaged upon his royal duties, driven by a piety tantamount to divine frenzy. His courage, too, is like divine fury.193 While the contrast between the two immortalisations could not be more stark, Balzac’s phrases echo strongly the theme of Dionysic frenzy in Heinsius. Ironically, Cunaeus’s attack on theologians in Sardi venales is also echoed by Balzac, when he accuses the Huguenots and the politiques of using the cloak of religion for their own aggrandisement. As remedy, he recommends further centralisation and more persecution, until neither punishments nor tortures will be necessary in the kingdom. The state will maintain itself through the reputation of the Prince, while he will be feared because of his authority alone.194

The King is the embodiment of law, and his prudence can always be trusted. Absolute power is best, because Louis XIII has perfect morals and perfect prudence; therefore codified law or any division of power could only hamper good government. For Heinsius, wisdom is limited to the pursuit of particulars, and complemented by a blind faith 192 ╇ For more information about these triumphs, and other texts describing them, see Watter, “Balzac,” 227-9. 193 ╇ Watter, “Balzac,” 230-2. 194 ╇ Also see Watter, “Balzac,” 233-4.

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that draws nothing from reason. In Balzac, Louis himself is divine, and his knowledge and experience rival divine omniscience. In spite of his idealisation of Louis, Balzac takes the Leiden Circle’s middle road to follow right understanding, even though he gives Â�different reasons. Louis’s perfect knowledge notwithstanding, Balzac does not attribute to him a knowledge of politics as a universal. He gives two reasons: the knowledge of kings must be constrained to ‘practical philosophy’ and other forms of useful knowledge, and they must avoid all forms of useless, ‘pure’ knowledge. At the same time they must be extremely well versed—as Louis is—in the knowledge of history. History ‘teaches them, it being a continuous repetition of essentially similar situations, to act correctly, to recognize developments, to prognosticate accurately, and is, in short, a rational means of controlling events about which neither auspices nor auguries can tell one anything.’195 Elsewhere, Balzac recommends the study of … History to your young men. Without History, Politics is but a ghost, hollow and insubstantial, which one manipulates by means of countless trivial scholastic distinctions and divisions in order to play games and amuse children. This fine Politics, separated from action and example, makes no sense even to itself. It requires a guide in the world; it needs interpreters in the assemblies of men. History alone therefore informs and organizes politics, gives it body and substance; and History alone is worthy of an exceedingly busy man, and of the speculations of an active mind.196

Following Baudouin’s and other French thinkers’ adaptation of Polybius’s optimistic pragmatism to early modern conditions, Balzac regards history as the source of political science.197 The connection between this position and Heinsius’s dissociation of the two, whereby political science is independent from history, but in case of a discipliÂ� nary catastrophe or purge could be derived from it, remains to be explored.198 Although both Heinsius and Balzac called for a Â�deliberate investigative strategy that was distinct from the pursuit of universals (be they pursued through theology or mathematics), they offered their own versions of the middle path between particulars and universals as the high road to clearly different destinations. There is no older trick than to present a contentious position as the reconciliatory compro╇ Watter, “Balzac,” 240. ╇ Balzac, “Dissertations Politiques XI: De l’utilité de l’histoire aux gens de la Cour,” in Oeuvres, 1665, II.494. Watter, “Balzac,” 219. 197 ╇ Kelley, “Historia integra.” 198 ╇ Also see Wickenden, Vossius. 195 196

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mise. A comparison of Heinsius with Balzac shows that it was possible to agree on right understanding, on the value of history, and even to paganise immortality, and at the same time to radically disagree about the right form of government and Christianity. In a throwback to a thousand-year-long Christian discourse, Balzac even advocated a new, universal monarchy under Louis XIII. Balzac is a powerful case to test Leiden secularisation. Scaliger’s unbiased application of historiographical methods to all aspects of Christianity, from the biblical text to Christ’s historicity; Heinsius’s systematic elimination of forms of Christian emulation; and all Leideners’ emphasis on epistemic humility, were not shared by Balzac or Salmasius. These elements must be viewed and understood in conjunction. It is nevertheless fascinating to see the ideas that Balzac retained from his Leiden years, and how these could be put to a French, monarchist use. Yet even though Balzac applied the immortalising effects of deeds, of the right kind of knowledge (i.e. of particulars), and of triumphs only to the divine Louis, his arguments were deemed too pagan and unchristian to be acceptable.199 Heinsius in DPDH, Cunaeus in Sardi venales and Vossius in De theologia gentili ascribed the same immortalising effects of the same things to commoners and historians; the unchristian message is unlikely to have been lost on their readership. Balzac wrote a fiery praise and defence of the Dutch Republic on his second visit, in 1615. In a wonderful twist, shortly after the drawn-out and vitriolic controversy with Heinsius thirty-odd years later, Heinsius published this piece, against Balzac’s loud protestations. 6.╇ Hymns to Gods of Frenzy: Lof-sanck Van Bacchus (1614), Lof-sanck Van Jesus Christus (1616) Heinsius’s fascination with Dionysos ties together many of our present concerns. First, I will trace his life-long interest with a partial survey of his relevant works. An exploration of frenzy and satire follows, two topics that connect many of our thinkers’ writings in a way that spotlights some of the core conceptual innovations that support their 199 ╇ Balzac’s 1652 Socrate chrestien was criticised in comparable terms by his contemporaries. Jehasse, “Introduction,” in Balzac, Socrate. For another connection between the Leiden Circle’s and Balzac’s historical understanding of religion see Spies, Rhetoric, 75.

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shared secularising strategies. Finally, we will look at the place HeinÂ� sius’s concern with Dionysos occupies within the secularising presentation of Christianity by Leideners as a religion fully comparable with other religions, and without a special claim to superiority based on its truth content, efficacy, or other characteristics. 6.1.╇ Background Dionysos, also known as Bacchus or Liber, was the god of wine, fertility, and civilisation. He is also known as a lawgiver, a lover of peace, a flutist, a liberator (Eleutherios) from one’s earthly self, and a patron deity of agriculture and a commanding figure in ancient Greek theatre (fl. c. 550-220 BC). His presence is signalled or foreshadowed by a bull, a serpent, ivy or vine. Among mythical creatures satyrs, centaurs and sileni belong to him. Female followers are known as maenads or Bacchantes. Ritual worship includes the Bacchanalia—which at certain times became so notorious that they had to be banned, and Bacchanals were persecuted, often hiding and celebrating in caves and catacombs (see e.g. Livy, throughout Book 39). One such ban, a bronze tablet with a Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus inscribed, was unearthed in Calabria in 1640, in Heinsius’s lifetime. Livy describes their religio-political conspiracies, seen by Roman authorities as a credible threat to state security. As shown below, Cunaeus in 1612 adapted Livy’s description of the Bacchanal conspiracies to characterise theologians who jeopardise political stability by making claims that transgress the Leiden rules of epistemic humility. It is Heinsius, however, who pursues a sustained and consistent research programme on Dionysos. Dionysos was the son of Zeus and Semele (a.k.a. Persephone or Demeter). Uniquely in Greek mythology, he was born as a god from the union of a god and a mortal. Other figures of semi-divine parentage are born human, and at best they become gods after their death (e.g. Hercules). When Hera found out that Semele was pregnant from Zeus, she played on Semele’s doubting nature and tricked her into forcing Zeus to reveal himself. No mortal can survive the presence of a god in full glory; when Zeus appeared, Semele was struck by lightning. It was probably not lost on Heinsius that in this myth the replacement of blind faith with reasonable doubt about the chief deity turns out to be fatal. Yet as Semele was dying, Zeus rescued the fetus and sewed him into his thigh or testicles. Dionysos was born a few

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Figure 2. Dionysos with retinue. Note the presence of both generic and differentiated features among his followers. Attic marble sarcophagus, AD 150-175. With kind permission of the Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photograph by the author, 2009.

months later. In another version, Hera sent the Titans to destroy the infant Dionysos, and Athena (or Rhea, or Demeter) only managed to save the heart. Zeus resurrected Dionysos by planting the heart in Semele’s womb. In all versions it is agreed that Dionysos was twiceborn, and his death and rebirth put him at the centre of a bewildering variety of mystery religions, from Phrygia to Hellenic Egypt. Several stories circulated about the grown-up Dionysos visiting the UnderÂ� world, once to fetch his mother, once to restore his lover AriadÂ�ne to Olympus. In Aristophanes’s comedy, Frogs (405 BC), Dionysos goes to Hades to bring Aeschylus back to Athens, because no good tragedians live there any more. His 1610 edition of Nonnus gave Heinsius a number of striking parallels between Christ and Dionysos to work with. They are both gods, born of the king of heaven and a human mother, and even then in an unusual manner. Dionysos was carried out by Zeus, and Christ is regularly described as being born of his father, since he shared the Father’s nature more than Mary’s. They induce divine frenzy, turn

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water into wine, rise from the dead, and liberate mankind. Note that the story of Jesus turning water into wine occurs only in the Gospel of John. It is one of several episodes that cannot be found in the Synoptic Gospels. Furthermore, Kerényi shows that the long tradition of comparing Jesus with Dionysos relies primarily on John, Heinsius’s and the Remonstrants’ favourite evangelist.200 We recall Heinsius’s fascination with Nonnus’s paraphrase of this gospel, and his unabashed but much-criticised use of it in his own theological commentaries. Barry Powell and others argue that the Christian sacrament of consuming the transformed flesh and blood of Christ are derived directly from Dionysian cults.201 Given the texts Heinsius was working with, the wine-based parallel between Bacchus and Christ was irresistible. Martin Larson’s The story of Christian origins is one of the most inÂ�fluential statements of the theory that Dionysos, Mithras, Christ, OrÂ�pheus, Sabazius, Adonis, and a host of other gods are variations directly inspired by the ‘grand prototype’ of the Egyptian Osiris.202 They die and they are resurrected, and their sacraments involve eating seasonal produce. Larson points out that Plutarch explicitly identifies Osiris with Dionysos, while Herodotus uses their names interchangeably. One could argue that the idea of a comparative reading of reborn and redeeming saviours is already present in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, a work also used by Heinsius and Cunaeus in their edition of Nonnus. Heinsius came across Dionysos in many of his research projects and publications, including his edition of Nonnus, DTC, and his work on Greek tragedy related to the re-arranged edition of the Poetics. The relationship between Dionysos and tragedy is still unclear and subject to intense speculation. The main bone of contention is whether or not tragedy derives from the ritual worship of the god of fertility, renewal and frenzy, or it is an independent development. In the first version, tragedy developed from the worship of Dionysos when a competition was introduced for Dionysic songs, the best being rewarded with the gift of a goat (hence ‘goat song,’ or tragedy). Masks were first worn not because of staging difficulties and the limited number of speaking actors, but because of their association with Dionysic possession. One counter-argument to this ritualist derivation is that only a tiny portion of the surviving Greek plays have anything to do with Dionysos ╇ Kerényi, Dionysos, 256-9. ╇ Powell, Classical myth. 202 ╇ Larson, The story, 38 and passim. 200 201

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(Euripides, Bacchae, Aristophanes, Frogs); although this counterargument is weakened by the fact that only a few dozen plays survived from the thousands that we know to have existed. The alternative theory is that tragedies developed independently of the cult of Dionysos. They retell tales of Greek mythology, occasionally augmenting and varying the stories. Prima facie, the choice does not affect Dionysos’s relevance to Heinsius and other Leideners. What almost everyone agreed on in Heinsius’s time was that theatrical competitions were originally held in the town of Dionysia, whether or not the cult of Dionysos was integral or accidental to this. Competitors entered a trilogy of plays and an additional satyr-play. A prominent citizen was then chosen by lot to finance the best of these entries, which were presented on stage, and a winner was elected (see, among other sources, Aristotle’s Poetics, 1449a). Heinsius’s works reveal a systematic programme to explore the meanings of this ancient Greek god. He edited Nonnus’s epic DionyÂ� siaca, an attempted synthesis with Orpheus, about the life and deeds of Dionysos. Heinsius referred to this text throughout his life. It alone was an arresting enough comparison between Dionysos and Christ.203 Yet DTC revealed another aspect of his interest, since his sources argue that all theatre (tragedy, comedy and satyr-play) is Dionysian in nature. His Hymn to Bacchus (LB), written in early 1614 and first published in 1616 with an authorised and extensive commentary by Scriverius, is a bold exercise in the comparative anthropology of religion. In it, Heinsius draws attention to the many resemblances between Dionysic and Christian mythology (from mystical birth, crucifixion and resurrection to sacred frenzy, wine and redemption), ritual, forms of worship, and doctrine.204 Shortly after publishing this hymn, Heinsius wrote the Hymn to Jesus (LIC) as a counter-point to LB, to demonstate his orthodoxy during the Calvinist reaction to the secularising project spearheaded intellectually by Leiden, and politically by figures closely allied with the university.

203 ╇ Chuvin, Mythologie. Accorinti, “Hermes.” De la Fuente, “Las Dionisíacas.” Newbold, “Nonnus.” 204 ╇ Liebeschuetz, “Use.”

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6.2.╇ Frenzy and the Brethren of the Common Life: The Epistemic Context Unlike Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde (1538-1598) in his satire, The Roman Beehive (1569), Heinsius did not use the Dionysian symbol of wine and drunkenness to mock Catholics. Instead, he compared Dionysian frenzy with the right kind of faith, unsullied by reason. As possible models, he had before him at least three distinctions between good and bad kinds of frenzy. First, the Christian distinction of Paul and Erasmus between the mad arrogance of reason, and the wise foolishness of faith. Second, the voluntary frenzy of Dionysos’s followers in Euripides’s Bacchae (405 BC), which gives them powers of prophecy, command over earthquakes, rivers and some animals, and long-lasting happiness in exchange for a reduced autonomy, is contrasted with an involuntary, imposed frenzy in the same play. Some scholars label the former European, the latter Asian frenzy, after the locations where the respective scenes of possession take place. The latter kind, for instance of Pentheus and his mother Agave, who ends up killing him in Dionysian rage, first manifests as deceit and illusion, ultimately leading to death, destruction, and disillusion. In this sense it is akin to the madness of epistemic arrogance—lampooned in Sardi venales and attacked in DTC—that was imposed by the sinful human urge, inherited from the Fall, to use reason to pry into the divine mysteries. In addition to the two sets of distinctions, made by Euripides and Erasmus, between a good and a bad kind of madness, Heinsius was familiar with a third, from Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, between Dionysian frenzy (good) and Até (bad).205 In Nonnus’s account, Dionysos fell 205 ╇ Plato in Phaedrus famously distinguishes prophetic, sacrificial, and inspired madness. The last of these, induced by the Muses according to Socrates, was explicitly connected by Pico della Mirandola to Bacchus in his Oration on the dignity of man. Mirandola, De hominis, 26. Walker argues that Ficino similarly connected Â�Bacchic madness with the greatest poets’ furor, exemplified by Orpheus’s. Walker, Ancient, 23. Heinsius’s aforementioned oration on the dignity of history calls historians flamines Musarum. The influence of Mirandola’s text on DTC’s sister text, Sardi venales, will be discussed below. Another passage in Phaedrus connects madness with public utility: “I told a lie when I said that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have the lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.” For Heinsius’s, Scriverius’s and Rembrandt’s

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madly in love with Ampelos, one of his young satyrs.206 At Hera’s urging Até, the goddess of folly, delusion and ruin (whose name in tragedy stands for the act of hubris that brings about the hero’s downfall), persuades Ampelos to show off in front of Dionysos by riding on a huge bull.207 Até sends a gadfly to drive the bull mad. Ampelos falls and breaks his neck.208 Até in Nonnus is analogous with the folly described by Cunaeus, Heinsius’s collaborator on the Nonnus edition, in his Sardi venales: epistemic arrogance and hubris leads to a fatal madness in the theologians. Some modern readers of the Bacchae argue that the main folly of Pentheus, the king and cousin of Dionysos, punished in the Bacchae for banning the god’s worship, was not ignorance, pride, violence or ambition but até, the kind of well-defined hubris that arises from only one particular form of arrogance, namely an exaggerated belief in the power of reasoning.209 This is what made Pentheus doubt Dionysos’s divinity, just as the theologians in Sardi venales believe that divinely instilled natural reason, supported by the technical mumbo-jumbo of scholasticism—which influenced ProÂ� testantism greatly—will open to man all of Scripture and Creation, the twin books of Nature and the Bible. Note that by Greek standards Pentheus’s doubt was fully rational: Dionysos was, irregularly, a god born from the union of a god and a mortal. He was also Pentheus’s close relative, which is normally an excusable reason to doubt someone’s divinity. Nonnus retells Euripides’s Bacchae in Dionysiaca 44-6, but presents Dionysos as a justly incensed, compassionate and much more Christ-like god than Euripides did. For instance, Dionysos in the Dionysiaca shows compassion for Agave and Autonoe, which is entirely missing from Euripides.210 However, the gap between Nonnus’s Dionysos and the biblical Christ remains deep and wide, and Heinsius’s connection of the two figures would have been only association of Dionysos and Silenos with yet another kind of frenzy, that of ecstatic artistic creation, see de Clippel, “Rough Bacchus,” 106-7. 206 ╇Nonnus, Dionysiaca, X.175-430, all of XI, and XII.1-117. 207 ╇Nonnus, Dionysiaca, XI.113. 208 ╇See also Ovid, Fasti, III.407-414. 209 ╇See the inspired edition, translation, textual notes and commentary on Les Â�Bacchantes by Roux, especially 39-44. Roux also provides interesting conjectures concerning deus ex machina devices used in the original and later stagings of the play. 210 ╇ This scene is best read in Simon’s edition of Nonnos, Les Dionysiaques. Vol. 16, Chants 44-66. For instance, Simon convincingly refutes Tissoni’s argument in Nonno that Nonnus’s more forgiving Dionysos in these chapters is an indication that Nonnus was already a quasi-Christian. 133-4.

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slightly less drastic if he had known only Nonnus’s version of the Bacchae, and never read Euripides’s. He was of course familiar with both, as DTC and his Nonnus edition show. In LB, the Pauline and Erasmian folly of virtuous Christianity is equated with powerful language and imagery with voluntary DioÂ�nyÂ� sian frenzy. To make the comparison as compelling as possible, Heinsius uses all of the aforementioned parallels between Christ and Dionysos, from the circumstances of their birth, through cannibalistic sacrificial rituals, to their resurrection and the use of wine as selfabandoning self-liberation in the memory and service of the god. The least that he achieves is showing that the wise folly of Christianity, risibly rejecting reason yet fair in foolish faith, is far from being a unique doctrine. Yet his comparisons generate a momentum that does not stop here. The strength and number of parallels between Christ and Bacchus pointed out in LB raise some serious doubts about the persuasive potential of several cardinal tenets of Christianity, from the merits of faith and the saving power of grace to the unique attraction of Christ’s promise of immortality. Similarly to Cunaeus’s use in Sardi venales of the ambiguities inherent in the literary dream framework, discussed below, Heinsius’s full utilisation of the possibilities offered by these rival and overlapping schematisations of divine frenzy enable him to shift several versions of Christian piety, including the Erasmian variety, from a benign into a suspicious epistemic category. 6.3.╇ The Lofzangen: Satire, Satyr, Silenos and Christ The Dionysian themes converge in Heinsius’s companion hymns, LB and LIC. LB was written in 1614 and first published in 1615. LIC was written in 1617, and published the next year. Let us consider their joint publishing history before examining their importance for the Leiden Circle. In 1615 Petrus Scriverius, a great Leiden historian, ancient constitutionalist and committed facilitator of the Leiden project, published Heinsius’s occasional poems in Dutch under the title, Nederduytsche Poemata (NP).211 NP has a curious publishing history. The first 1616 edition came out in Amsterdam, not Leiden, like the vast majority of 211 ╇ The title page gives 1616, but 1615 is more likely. See Sellin’s checklist in Heinsius, no. 40, and Becker-Cantarino’s introduction to the 1979 reprint of Heinsius, Nederduytsche poemata. Relevant treatments of ancient constitutionalism include Pocock, Ancient constitution. Waszink, Introduction to Grotius, Antiquity.

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Heinsius’s books. It begins with a patriotic eulogy on the death of Admiral Jacob Heemskerck, and includes Heinsius’s love emblems, signed Theocritus. NP ends with the Hymnus oft Lof-sanck van Bacchus, bound with, but titled and paginated separately from, the rest of the NP, and accompanied by the extensive learned commentary of Scriverius. In LB, Heinsius has a long passage on the immortality of Bacchus/Dionysos, which he contrasts with human death and misery. NP was an instant best-seller, not least due to Heinsius’s love emblems, and because it settled an early version of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes, showing that poetry matching Ancient standards can be written in Dutch. Another edition followed the same year, with substantial additions to Scriverius’s commentary. The book was soon translated by Heinsius’s student and admirer, Martin Opitz, regarded by literary historians today as the father of modern German literature.212 The significance of this translation is difficult to overemphasise. Beginning with La Pléiade, the rhyming alexandrine became both touchstone and touchpaper of European moveÂ�ments that espoused the idea that the literary quality of their vernaculars could compete with the Ancients’.213 Opitz’s translation of Heinsius’s LB into German rhyming alexandrines was the first introduction of the form into German, and a momentous political statement. German literary independence was declared with Heinsius’s systematic comparison of Dionysos and Christ.214 An expanded edition of the Dutch NP came out in 1618, with new poems and a foreword by Heinsius. Many things have changed since the previous edition. The Calvinist purge of Leiden secularisers ╇ Opitz, Danielis Heinsii Hymnus oder Lobgesang Bacchi. Liegnitz, 1622. ╇ Dante and Petrarch were among the early pioneers of this agenda. The idea of a vernacular literature that rivals the Ancients was considerably elaborated and refined in France. A famous programmatic statement is du Bellay’s La Défense (1549). The particular application of du Bellay’s programme to alexandrines was proposed in La maniére de faire des vers en français comme en grec et en latin, by Jacques de la Taille (written 1562, first published 1573), and the Etrènes de poëzie Franzoëze an vers mezurés (1574) of Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The rhyming alexandrine soon afterward became a trademark of support for the vernaculars all over Europe. Note that linguistic and literary pride was an expression of a sense of national identity that had both Catholic and Protestant varieties: Ronsard, du Bellay and de Baïf were also ardent defenders of the Catholic policies of the French monarchy. In England, masters of the patriotic alexandrine included Spenser, Milton, and Dryden. On the role of Heinsius’s NP see for instance Spies, Rhetoric, 32, 73, 111, and passim. 214 ╇ Opitz also translated Grotius’s Bewijs into German in 1631. Heering, Hugo Grotius, 218-23. 212 213

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was in full swing, and Heinsius preferred compromise to martyrdom. His marriage in 1617 also brought him into closer alliance with the Counter-Remonstrants.215 The most prominent new poem in the 1618 edition was the Lof-sanck van Iesus Christus (LIC), again with ScriÂ� verius’s comments. His commentary on LB was substantially revised for this edition, as well. Interestingly, the title page of this 1618 edition gives 1616 as the year of publication. Like the revised commentary, the pre-dating was probably an attempt to avoid political repercussions: Heinsius worried that the 1616 editions would get him into trouble. Among the poems in the original NP, the most likely to cause trouble was the LB. The publication of LIC to off-set the LB, and the repeated revisions of Scriverius’s commentary, written in close consultation with Heinsius, attest to the pair’s uneasiness about LB. Another piece of evidence is the general publication record of HeinÂ� sius, Vossius, and other members of the Leiden Circle who survived the Calvinist purge relatively intact. Their lists of publications show that they responded closely to the political climate that ended secularising experimentation after 1618; they rarely veer from impeccable orthodoxy before the rapprochement of the late 1620s—early 1630s.216 Thus it was all the more embarrassing for Heinsius when, against his vehement objections, another version of NP came out in 1621, backdated to 1618.217 Further editions followed in 1622, when finally the Amsterdam publisher’s license ran out. Apart from translations, LB did not see print from 1622 to 1640. LIC was however published without the rest of NP, for instance in Rotterdam in 1628.218 6.3.1.╇ The Hymn to Bacchus Heinsius’s preface to LB, addressed to Scriverius, is dated Lent 1614, the most likely date of composition.219 The poem is 668 lines long and ╇ Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 49. Sellin, Heinsius, 23, 53-4. ╇See the checklist of their works in Sellin, Heinsius, and Wickenden, Vossius. Israel, “Frederick Henry.” Idem, “Toleration,” especially 248-52; Dutch Republic, chapter 21. 217 ╇ For Heinsius’s objections and bitter controversy with the publishers, see Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 27-8. Idem, ‘Einleitung,’ in Heinsius, Nederduytsche poemata. 218 ╇Sellin, Heinsius, checklist. Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, and ‘Einleitung.’ 219 ╇ Although in LB, L139, ‘ick de luys gepresen hebbe’, Heinsius refers to his mock encomium on lice, Laus pediculi, written around 1615, first published in 1629. This raises the question of Heinsius’s original target audience. His co-operation with Scriverius on the NP, and his readiness to present these poems to a wider audience, 215 216

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comes with extensive comments by Scriverius. In the preface Heinsius cites Euripides’s Cyclops, refers to Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, and names Ronsard’s Bacchus poems as his inspiration, only to contend that his own scholarly knowledge and the suitability of the Dutch language to poetry combine to make LB superior to Ronsard’s. He also offers a brave defence of Socrates and his pupil Euripides, two wise pagans who rose above their civilisation to fight against the heathen notion of worshipping sins personified as gods (LL 9-10 and passim). He ends the preface with references to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and to the drunkard Silenos. This was no casual Dionysian reference. Silenos was a satyr, but also a metaphor for hidden truth. Ancient texts and figurative representations gradually transformed him from Dionysos’s jester into the god’s surrogate, earthly father, and teacher.220 In Heinsius’s time the most popular text on this theme was The Sileni of Alcibiades (1515), ErasÂ� mus’s call for academic and church reform.221 In addition to classical sources, Heinsius probably had this Erasmus text in mind while writing the LB. The double reference to Erasmus and Silenos at the end of the Preface is not the only clue. I submit that this Lofsanck was intended as a manifesto, using the figure of Silenos to announce a new, secularising comparative anthropology of religion, about to emerge from the systematic application of Scaliger’s historiography to religion. Cunaeus’s De Republica Hebraeorum and its demolition of legitimacy claims based on linear succession from, or strong analogy with, the biblical commonwealth, was the boldest and most controverÂ� sial contribution to the Leiden Circle’s comparative religious anthropology.222 In the end Vossius brought the project to completion, and

contrast with what must have been an obscure reference before the publication of Laus pediculi—unless there was an earlier edition, now forgotten. Geraldine dates this satire to 1595, but I was unable to verify this. Geraldine, “Erasmus,” 57. 220 ╇New Pauly Online, lemma ‘Silenus,’ lists some of the sources and some of these developments. However, the true progression of the character seems less straightforward. One aspect missing from NPO, for instance, is Silenos as scientist, based partly on Virgil’s Eclogue 6. Notopoulos, “Silenus.” The sources of this eclogue relevant to Silenos’s aspect as a scientist are discussed in Paschalis, “‘Semina’.” 221 ╇ Elements of The Sileni can already be found in the 1508 edition of Adagia, e.g. III.iii.1: ‘Sileni Alcibiadis.’ Barker’s edition, 241-68. 222 ╇Silenos also features in Julian’s Caesares, the first Latin translation of which was appended to Cunaeus’s 1612 Sardi venales. Silenos, who has the longest speaking role in Julian’s satire, amuses Dionysos by mocking the Roman emperors, except Marcus Aurelius.

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Figure 3. Early, simple Silenos. With kind permission of the Archaeological Museum, Thessaloniki. Photograph by the author, 2009.

put the discipline on solid and enduring systematic foundations in De theologia gentili (1641-2) and in the De tribus symbolis (1642). Heinsius’s transformation of Dionysos from a pagan Greek god into an equivalent of Jesus did not come ex nihilo. Similiarities between pagan and Christian mythology have long been noticed and pointed out, normally with a proviso about the inferiority of the pagan myths (Tertullian, Lactantius, Augustine, and others). The most charitable Christian interpretation of pagan myths was that they somehow prefigured Christian truth. A few thinkers went a step further and gave credit to a select few pagan ideas or figures, though seldom without in some way Christianising them first. Socrates, Virgil, Seneca the Elder, and many others were re-presented in a proto- or crypto-Christian light. The exception to this pattern was Erasmus’s extraordinary essay on the Sileni, published 101 years before Heinsius’s LB. Here Erasmus breaks with the conventional Christian strategy and turns Silenos from a prefiguration into a type for Jesus, and Jesus into not a summation and fruition of a type, but one instantiation among many. This is the price Erasmus makes Jesus pay to become like Silenos, and obtain a wealth of hidden value. This value is then developed in arguments familiar from the Praise of Folly, for instance that Jesus and his followers may appear foolish, but are in fact wiser than the powerful men of this world.

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In the first and last sentence of The Sileni, Erasmus claims that the phrase, “the Sileni of Alcibiades” has recently become a proverb, and therefore needs explication. To our knowledge it did not become a proverb, and Erasmus was playing a learned trick similar to Lipsius’s claim to ‘resurrect’ Menippean satires.223 The Sileni, Erasmus explains, were originally satyrs, until the name came to be applied specifically to Silenos, Dionysos’s chief drunk and schoolteacher. Athenian craftsmen made little statuettes of Silenos, representing him in all his ugliness and deformity; ‘but when opened all of a sudden they displayed a god.’224 Silenos is a court jester and a fool in appearance, but a god and philosopher in reality. Socrates was a Silenos, Erasmus continues. Antisthenes, one of the founders of the schools of Cynics, was another. So was Diogenes, and Epictetus. And was not Christ, too, a marvelous Silenus—if I may be permitted to speak of him in such terms? I cannot see why all those who take pride in calling themselves Christians do not feel an obligation to make their best efforts to copy this aspect of his nature.225

Christ could have easily silenced the sophists and prattling philosophers, but ‘instead he chose to be a Silenos, and it is this example that he wanted his disciples and friends, that is, all Christians, to imitate.’226 John the Baptist, the Apostles, and some martyrs followed his example faithfully, but the ‘majority of men are Sileni turned inside out’: outwardly they seem rich or clever, but inwardly they are worthless.227 In contrast to the ‘worldly person,’ Christians base ‘their judgment of all things on their hidden characteristics.’228 This applies not only to men, but to all things: ‘In this world there are really two worlds, in conflict with each other in every possible way. One is gross and physical, the other heavenly and already straining every nerve to practice being what it one day will become.’229 ╇ Unless Erasmus was referring to the use of Silenos as a symbol for hidden meaning in the letters of Pico della Mirandola and Hermolaus Barbarus, discussed in the chapter on Cunaeus. 224 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 169. Plato, Symposium. 225 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 171. Erasmus writes up the same symbol and the same idea in Praise of Folly, 42-4. Here it is Folly speaking, however, so the reader cannot be sure how much to credit her words. In The Sileni, Erasmus speaks as himself. The famous passage on Plato’s cave and the dream of Micyllus in Lucian, The Dream, cited above, is followed by one of many references to Bacchus in Praise of Folly. 226 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 172. 227 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 173. 228 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 176-7. 229 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 185. 223

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The ‘Silenos principle’ also applies to texts; Scripture is another Silenos. ‘If you stay on the surface, much of it seems absurd. If you penetrate to the spiritual meaning, you will be full of admiration for God’s wisdom.’ It is the same with questions of knowledge. The real truth always lies deeply hidden, so that it cannot be easily attained, nor by most people. Most people are stupid and have a distorted vision of the world. They judge everything according to the first impression made on their senses. Over and over again they make mistakes, they go astray, they are misled by false images of the good and the bad. It is the inside-out Sileni that they admire and respect.230

False values in turn corrupt language itself. In addition to the outwardly visible value of people, gods, items and texts, one must therefore treat inherited language as a trap for the unwary: ‘Upside-down values mean that the meanings of words have to be displaced.’231 Erasmus then launches into a passionate plea for theology to get unstuck from grammar and sophistry, and for the church to withdraw from politics. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. Erasmus closes the argument with a series of paradoxes, meant to uncover the truth through contradictions, and to demonstrate the wisdom of Christian folly.232 In the final sentence, Erasmus apologises for being carried away by his mere commentary on a proverb (which he just made up), and cites another proverb in self-defence: “nothing to do with Dionysos.” The phrase comes from Greek theatre and refers to an irrelevant argument, or out-of-place character or device. In an echo of his opening ruse, Erasmus impishly subverts another adage, and Â�concludes that whatever seems irelevant in his writing on Silenos is in fact ‘very much to the point in relation to the task we all face, that of living.’233 The seemingly irrelevant pagan figures of Silenos and Dionysos are relevant, even and especially when they do not seem to be. Beside the 100-year-old Sileni, Heinsius had Erasmus’s fool in mind in early 1614, while writing DPDH and LB. Folly argues that monarchs cannot survive without fools because they speak the truth, like wine-drinkers or children, as described by Alcibiades and Euripides. ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 174-5. ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 178. 232 ╇ E.g. ‘those things I wish they would despise will be theirs more abundantly if they have contempt for them,’ or 191: the Church will own more worldly riches and power, if only she stopped seeking them and thereby regained her credibility. 233 ╇ Erasmus, Sileni, 191. 230 231

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The following passage in Praise of Folly may have been instrumental in allowing Heinsius to develop a substantive intellectual connection between Silenos, the immortality of Dionysos, and the immortality of historians. In fact, even the mightiest monarchs are so delighted with them that without these fools some of them can neither eat breakfast, nor make their entry, nor even so much as survive for a single hour. And they value these simpletons far more than those sour wisemen, though it is true that they usually maintain some of them too, for the sake of appearances. The reason why they value them more is not far to seek, I think, and ought not to surprise anyone, since those wisemen normally offer princes nothing but melancholy—indeed, relying on their learning, they sometimes do not hesitate to make harsh truth grate upon their tender ears—whereas fools provide the very thing for which princes are always on the lookout: jokes, laughs, guffaws, fun. And don’t forget another talent, by no means contemptible, that is peculiar to fools: they alone speak the plain, unvarnished truth. And what is more worthy of praise than truthfulness? True, Alcibiades’ proverb in Plato attributes truthfulness to wine and children, but actually the praise for that virtue is all mine and mine alone, as Euripides himself testifies in that famous saying about us which has come down from him: “a fool speaks like a fool.” [Bacchae, L 369] Whatever a fool has in his heart, he reveals in his face and expresses in his speech. […] For truthfulness has a certain inherent power of giving pleasure, if it contains nothing that gives offense. But the skill to manage this the gods have granted only to fools.234

Silenos, as we saw, is Dionysos’s court jester, fool, side-kick, mentor, and earthly father. A wise philosopher in the guise of a drunkard, he speaks truth to Dionysos, the Jesus-like god of liberation. The complex problem of truthful speech among Christians or Bacchantes is the common theme of Erasmus’s The Sileni, Praise of Folly, Heinsius’s DPDH and LB, Cunaeus’s Sardi venales and, as we will see, seventeenth-century secularising uses of Maimonides’s Guide to the PerÂ� plexed. Another connection between DPDH, NP and LB is Heinsius’s Elegie, first published in the 1616 NP. It is a long epic poem on love, love with a flesh-and-blood girl as well as with ‘the princess of Dutch cities,’ Leiden. Becker-Cantarino, in a convincing textual analysis of this poem, puts the date of composition after 1613. In the Elegie Heinsius claims to break away from the French literary tradition: 234

╇ Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 55-6.

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Figure 4. A late stage in Silenos’s evolution, as schoolmaster and father-figure to the young Dionysos, with an increasingly prominent role in the theatre. With kind permission of the New Acropolis Museum, Athens. Photograph by the author, 2009.

[Ick hebbe] … ten lesten opgedaen Dan ongebaende padt taer Nederlandt mach gaen, Soo datse van nu voort met Phoebi susters danssen Op’t hoogste van den berch, niet passend’ op de Franssen. (I have at last opened the untrodden path where the Netherlands may go, so that they henceforth dance with Apollo’s sisters on top of the hill without paying attention to the French.)235

Becker-Cantarino identifies several Bacchaean and Petrarchan motifs in the Elegie, including a scene at Heinsius’s own graveside. From there he proceeds to Mount Parnassus, having earned immortality by his poetry. Some time between the end of 1613 and early 1614, therefore, Heinsius wrote DPDH, this Elegie, and the LB. The Elegie 235

╇ L 24, tr. Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 31.

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Â� supports the earlier conjecture about Petrarchan triumphs as an inÂ�spiÂ� ration for immortality in DPDH, and connects DPDH and LB through Henisius’s preoccupation with alternative, non-Christian roads to eternal life. Satyrs, more particularly the figure of Silenos, Dionysos’s main side-kick, is the key to Heinsius’s restoration of the value of pagan mythology. Silenos is doubly double: he is a satyr (a composite creature), and also both a vessel and a metaphor of hidden value. His appearances in Plato and other texts is equally multi-layered. When Erasmus refers to Alcibiades, he could mean the Symposium, in which Alcibiades is in love with Socrates—just as Silenos is the main loverfollower of Dionysos. Or he could be making a political statement. In another Platonic passage, Alcibiades is presented as the young student of Socrates, who embodies the culmination of political virtue, and will therefore bring ruin to Athens. Erasmus’s Sileni captures these and other nuances, since starting from his description of Silenos as a metaphor, Erasmus ends up attacking the Pope and the clergy for their ostentatious lifestyles and similar abuses. The Sileni is a text that hides the key to its meaning, but offers a map to the key with a confounding admixture of cunningly deceptive and unexpectedly explicit clues.236 In the Preface to LB, Heinsius presents ancient Greek myths as valuable and, given the right decoding tools, reliable sources of philosophical insight. ‘Almost the entire wisdom and philosophy, which Aristotle then wanted to reform, is hidden under these [mythological] names.’237 This is particularly true for the Bacchus/Dionysos myth, which Heinsius proceeds to trace through the ages. He uses this figure to illustrate that the whole of pagan mythology is like Silenos: judged worthless for its outward appearance by the superficial observers of today, but with great value hidden inside it. Pagan mythology yields a 236 ╇Note that before LB Heinsius had already brought together satyrs, the Â� Bacchantes, Silenos, Nonnus, and the problem of creating meaning in texts, within one passage, namely in the preface to his political tragedy, Auriacus. ‘Pro Auriaco sua,’ LL 51-5, 236 in Bloemendal’s edition. 237 ╇ ‘Soo dat bynae gans de oude wijsheyt ende philosophie, die Aristoteles daer nae op een ander maet heeft willen brengen, onder dese namen ende woorden, begraven ende bedeckt licht.’ LL54-6, 101. Becker-Cantarino, 44. On ‘Saint Socrates’ as Erasmus’s most prominent Silenos: Bartholin and Christian, “Figure of Socrates.” For Erasmian inspirations of the Leiden Circle see the excellent Eden, Hermeneutics, chapter 4: ‘Erasmian hermeneutics.’ For elements of early Christian hermeneutics that are directly relevant to the Leiden Circle see the rest of Eden’s Hermeneutics, and Markus, Signs.

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better verisimilitude of divine meaning than a literalist reading of Scripture does.238 Dionysos features in many of Heinsius’s works both before and after the Synod of Dordt. If this reading is correct, then the theme of Dionysos was Heinsius’s preferred entry-point into a much wider range of debates than a merely philological focus on his Dionysian texts, from Auriacus through Nonnus to LIC, would lead us to believe. Satire, the status of pagan mythology, of Christianity, immortality, hidden true and superficial false values, were subjects where Dionysos featured prominently in Heinsius’s thinking, even when no text connected the god directly to the issue. Epistemology was no exception. But especially among the Bacchantes and in the histories of Bacchus we find extensive accounts of everything that philosophers and poets (who were the first wise men) could say about wine, both about its honour and its shame - or rather, about the people who misuse God’s gifts.239

6.3.2.╇ Satire While LB is Silenian in Erasmus’s sense, it also has a satirical register. There was an intense, politically charged debate around the turn of the seventeenth century about the origin of satires. Casaubon, Dacier, Spanheim and others derived it from the Latin ‘satura,’ a plate filled with a variety of dishes. Scaliger thought it stemmed from the Greek figure and genre. It was commonly agreed that satyr-plays were submitted in addition to three full-length plays in Greek theatrical competitions.240 Euripides’s Cyclops is the only one that survives in full, therefore it was at the centre of this debate.241 Florent Chrestien (154196), one of Pithou’s collaborators on La Satyre Ménippée, translated the Cyclops into Latin, and wrote a commentary that disentangled the Greek and Roman texts relating to satire. This edition impressed all ╇See the same message in Jacob Cats, Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus. ╇ ‘Maer sonderlinge onder die van Bacchus ende zijne historien, wort ons, al het gene van de wijn tot eere ende schande van den selven, ofte veel eer van de menschen, die de gaven Godes misbruycken, soude geseyt konnen worden, by de philosophen ende poëten, die de eerste wyse geweest sijn, wijtloopich beschreven.’ Heinsius, Bacchus, 101, LL 59-62. 240 ╇ Although Heinsius first got into satires from Horace. Geerars has a good description of this debate in “Theorie.” 241 ╇ In 1907 at Oxyrhyncus a papyrus was found with a long fragment from Searching Satyrs (Ichneutae), a satyr-play by Sophocles. 238 239

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participants of the debate, and became a standard point of reference. Invoking this debate, Heinsius’s Preface to LB begins with an allusion to the Cyclops, and ends by citing Erasmus on folly and the figure of the drunk Silenos.242 Heinsius followed Scaliger into the Greek corner.243 From the hidden truth of pagan myths to the unthinking, frenzied, yet still decorous purging of passions in theatre, the satire-satyr connection and its symbolism became ubiquitous in Heinsius’s thinking. His life-long interest in the Dionysos-Bacchus-Pan mytheme is one aspect of this complex but unified pursuit, since satyrs are the standard entourage of this god. They are half-goat creatures, especially in Roman sources. Tragedies were written and performed in honour of Dionysos and, as mentioned above, one school of thought that Heinsius was familiar with held that tragedy got its name from the goat, sacred to Dionysos, and originally the winner’s prize. The joint attack by Balzac and Salmasius against Heinsius in the 1630s illustrates how early modern scholars understood all disciplines as closely connected. The contingencies of the way in which denominational and political camps formed and solidified meant that a Â�thinker’s position on topics, like the historicity of the Bible, or the posÂ�sibility of Christian drama, became a badge of allegiance. OstenÂ� sibly Â�antiÂ�quarÂ�ian references acquired immediately recognisable political Â�meaning. Dryden’s position on satires is a case in point. His public appreÂ�ciation of Heinsius, like other Restoration theorists’, shifted after he transferred his allegiance to the monarchy in 1660.244 While the young Dryden was a sympathetic follower of Heinsius, after the Restoration of 1660 he wrote about tragedy and poetry as utilitarian vehicles for a carefully designed program of moral improvement. He now professed that the aroused passion cancels out the undesirable ╇ Heinsius, Bacchus, 99 and 104. ╇ One can also argue that he tried to reconcile two rival Renaissance and early modern literary traditions, embodied by J-C. Scaliger and Casaubon. The former derived all satire from Greek satyr-plays and customs, the latter from the Roman combination of prose and verse. Salmon, “French satire” is one account of this debate that positions Heinsius as a mediator between the two, arguing that satires derived from Varro and the Roman tradition, but they often reached back to the psychological function (for both individuals and the community) of Greek satyrplays. One can additionally point to an early attempt at mediation in Heinsius’s conclusion of “De libello” on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, no. IX in the 1615 Orationes, esp. 213-6. 244 ╇ For others, see references in Sellin, Heinsius, 178-81, 198. 242 243

Figure 5. Part of the proscenium of the Theatre of Dionysos. 3rd century AD, dedicated by archon Phaedrus (224-5). The high reliefs are from the 1st century AD, representing scenes from the life and worship of Dionysos. Note Silenos in the centre, crouching in the posture of Atlas. With kind permission of the Theatre of Dionysos, Athens. Photograph by the author, 2009.

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one; that the unfortunate characters must be shown to be evil and under God’s punishment; that miracles must be allowed back on stage; that well-trained pious reason must have its way (as long as it deems Christian miracles to be probable, therefore credible and in support of religious tenets); and so on. His reversal to pre-Heinsian theory was duly accompanied by a change of heart about satires: now Dryden came to disagree with Heinsius, and in his discussions of satires he emphasised at length that his intention was to write for a Christian audience. Satire, and the literary criticism around it, were politically charged genres.245 6.3.3.╇ The Hymn to Christ As the political conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-RemonÂ� strants intensified, Heinsius gradually stopped writing about controversial issues. His marriage in 1617 brought him into alliance with the Counter-Remonstrants.246 The revisions, pre-dating, and attempts to control NP’s publication have been described above. They match the pattern that emerges from the checklist of his works in Sellin’s biography. Becker-Cantarino also notes the tendentious shift in his choice of subject matters. His theological writings, too, became more orthodox. This is the immediate context for his composition and publication of a companion-piece to Bacchus, the LIC. Put together, these circumstances, from publishing history through the shift in his works to the content of the two hymns and the ferocious criticisms LB received, show that the two hymns hold more interest for a history of secularisation than the majority of Heinsius’s occasional poems. One function of LIC was to make a public statement about HeinÂ� sius’s belief in Christ’s superiority over Bacchus/Dionysos. The poem has 804 lines and prefatory pieces, including Heinsius’s prose dedication to Jacob van Dyck (1567-1631), the first Swedish ambassador to The Hague, recipient of an epigram in Grotius’s 1617 Poëmata, and mentioned in Brederode’s 1618 De Spaansche BraÂ�bander; a short poem to the same; a laudatory poem by Scriverius on Heinsius; and Heinsius’s brief introduction describing the utility (nuttigheyt) of the 245 ╇ Dryden, Discourse, especially Sections 100, 109. Further details in Sellin, Heinsius, 178-99. In this otherwise thoughtful and well-researched section, Sellin does not mention religion or the Restoration. The correlation between the date and the Â�manner of Dryden’s numerous references to Heinsius are revealing. 246 ╇ Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 49. Sellin, Heinsius, 23, 53-4.

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Hymn. In the dedicatory poem to van Dyck and in the last prose piece on utility Heinsius announces emphatically his decision to abandon secular subjects like love and pagan myths for unassailably pious Â�treatments of Christ.247 He was not the only one to announce his rejection of pagan themes for religious ones. The story of a work, closely allied with LB, by the writer, diplomat, lawyer, and fellow Zeeland-born Leiden student, Jacob Cats (1577-1660), is enlightening. Although Silenos was the favourite symbol for pagan and hidden meaning among Leideners, in other circles the multifarious, ever-changing sea-god, Proteus was the preferred emblem of hidden meaning.248 Πρωτόγονος, protogonos, the first-born, Proteus in Homer is the son of Poseidon with the power to foretell the future, but changing his shape to avoid having to do so. To get him to prophesy, you must capture him despite his shape-shifting.249 Proteus is also named as the king of Egypt, who welcomed Dionysos on his journey.250 Some of Heinsius’s contemporaries (e.g. Shakespeare, Browne, Khunrath, Milton) treated Proteus as a symbol of alchemical transformation, but Alciato, whom as we saw Heinsius knew well, applied the metaphor to meaning in general.251 Emblem 182, Antiquissima quaeque commenticia (All that is most ancient is fanciful):252 ╇ Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 48-54. ╇ The meanings of Silenos, and the deployment and transformation of these meanings, have been discussed above. Similar treatments of Proteus are in Burns, “‘A Proverb’”; Pesic, “Proteus unbound,” idem, “Shapes.” Erasmus, Alciato, Francis Bacon, Comes, Vives, and a host of Renaissance and early modern thinkers who availed themselves of Proteus are discussed there. 249 ╇ Homer, Odyssey, IV.412 ff. Euripides, Helen. Virgil, Georgics. Morgan, Patterns. 250 ╇ As king of Egypt and ‘Old Man of the Sea’: Homer, Odyssey, IV.430 ff. As Egyptian kings, without being a sea-god: Euripides, Helen. Herodotus, Histories, 2.113.1 ff. Receiving Dionysos: Apollodorus, Library, II.29; III.4.1. Conon, Narratives 8. Dictys 6.4. Diodorus Siculus, 1.61.1 ff. Euripides, Electra 1280. Helen 4-11, 31, 582, 669, 1643 ff., etc. 251 ╇ Milton, Paradise Lost, III.603-6. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part III, III.ii, the future Richard III boasts: I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school. 252 ╇ “Commentitia” is a loaded term, and difficult to capture in translation. It was used to mean “fictitious,” “discovered by reason,” “contrived,” and “fanciful.” Discussing the famous 1536 master’s thesis defended at the University of Paris, “Quae247 248

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PALLENAEE senex, cui forma est â•… histrica, Proteu, Qui modo membra viri fers, modo â•… membra feri: Dic age, quae species ratio te vertit in â•… omnes, Nulla sit ut vario certa figura tibi? Signa vetustatis, primaevi et praefero â•… saecli, De quo quisque suo somniat arbitrio.

(O Proteus, old man of Pallene, with the form of an actor, who at one moment takes the limbs of a man, at another those of a beast, come tell us why you turn into all shapes, so that, forever changing, you have no fixed form? I bring forth symbols of antiquity and a primaeval age, of which each man dreams by will/ according to his wishes.) Figure 6. Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, Emblem 182: Antiquissima quaeque com�men�ticia. With kind permission of CAMENA.

In addition to Alciato, Heinsius certainly knew (probably well before publication) Cats’s own multilingual emblem book, modelled after Alciatio and Heinsius, entitled Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus, Vitae humanae ideam, Emblemate trifariàm variato, oculis subijciens. Sinnen Minne-beelden. Emblemata, amores moresque spectantia. EmÂ�blemes touchants les amours et les moeurs, first published in 1618. Silenos, Proteus and the very act of manipulating and presenting emblems, were closely connected. At this particular historical juncture, in this particular Leiden-based literature, Silenos and Proteus were both key symbols for meaning itself. Together with Cats’s Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus, LB belongs to an intense period in which the battle of ideas extended from biblical passages to ever-increasing swathes of cumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse,” attributed to Ramus, Ong provides a thought-provoking treatment of the term, concluding that Ramus applied it to Aristotle in the sense of ‘disordered’ and ‘irresponsibly inventive’. Ong, Ramus, 44-7. Interestingly, this particular emblem of Alciato seems to be missing from all editions before the 1542 Paris edition, which is the fifth Welchel edition of Jean Le Fevre’s translation from the Latin; at least I have not found it in the two 1531 Augsburg, the 1534 Augsburg, 1534 Paris, 1536 Paris, and 1539 Paris editions. Also see Zeller, Stoics, chapter 13, 346 fn. 3.

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classical iconography, as well as the natural sciences.253 Saunders masterfully shows how iconographical works like Heinsius’s and Cats’s fit into the religious debate, inter alia by contrasting them with Jesuit emblem books designed in accordance with Loyola’s principles.254 Her story about Heinsius’s emblems, together with Heinsius’s aforementioned letter to James VI/I, confirms and complements the thesis that the danger of a Jesuit infiltration of the Netherlands was one of HeinÂ� sius’s concerns in DTC. After 1618, a parallel change occurs in Cats’s and Heinsius’s handling of pagan symbols. Cats’s 1627 edition becomes Proteus Ofte Minne-Beelden Verandert In Sinne-Beelden (Proteus, or from love emblems to moral emblems). He drops Silenos from the title, probably because of its connotation of Erasmian and Heinsian comparisons with Christ.255 The title change from the 1618 edition also signals a shift from a mixture of love and moral emblems to moral emblems alone. As we saw, LB was greatly revised in 1618 because of these pagan connotations, and in LIC the same year Heinsius announced his intention of leaving love emblems and pagan subjects behind (not a promise that he kept). Beside the factors listed above, these parallels further confirm the interpretation of LB as a dangerously pagan, secularising writing, and Heinsius’s understanding and use of Silenos as a symbol for the comparative anthropology of religion, superficially ugly, but deeply valuable. Like Cats’s changes, LIC is a prudent apology for past secularising experiments, and a public affirmation of renewed orthodoxy that Ronsard, du Barthas, du Bellay and French politiques, including most New Historians, were similarly forced to make in late sixteenth-century France. The story, signs and rationale for the changing nature of their works have been recognised and documented better than the same process in Leiden after the Synod of Dordt. Vossius’s published works follow a similar trajectory.256 This does not make Leiden secularisation a dead end. In the early 1630s, when the political mood of the country became more tolerant again, the surviving Leideners ╇ Also see the neoskeptical allusions in Cats’s book: Blom, “Montaigne.” ╇Saunders, Seventeenth-century. Ehrenpreis, “Teaching religion.” 255 ╇See the excellent Meertens, Letterkundig, 244-99. The Erasmian and Dionysian significance of the two editions of Cats’s emblem book are explained on 254-7. The hypothesis that Silenos was dropped in a commercial attempt to extend the readership to those who did not know Plato seems to me less probable than the post-Dordt risk of association with the Dutch use of the Silenian metaphor. Visser, “Escaping.” 256 ╇ Wickenden, Vossius. 253 254

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republished their old books and wrote new ones on old topics, pursuing the Scaligerian method. The real impact of Leiden secularisation, however, was felt in England. The reasons for Heinsius’s turn away from his Remonstrant colleagues and friends are not easy to assess. Some of his contemporaries and a few uncharitable historians suspect cowardice. Others point out that his marriage was motivated by genuine affection, not political expedience, and that he played such a visibly reluctant part at the Synod of Dordt that he incurred censure himself. There is truth on both sides, and the gravity of the risk imposed by his earlier secularising works is another reason. While secularising elements were deleted or substantially de-emphasised just before and after the Calvinist purge, they gradually came back into Heinsius’s writings as the political pressure eased. His commitment to the Leiden programme was more genuine than he is sometimes given credit for. One must also remember that some of his apparent U-turns were due to political ineptitude, not design, and that he was variously accused of paganism, fanatic Calvinism, and crypto-Catholicism alike.257 What secularising elements remained in Heinsius’s work? In LIC Heinsius felt the need to declare loudly and clearly that Christ was superior to pagan gods, and all pagan religions were mere superstitions. Once the defence of his orthodoxy was out of the way, and he eliminated comparisons between Dionysos and Christ, as well as the methodological observations that subverted religious historiography, two secularising registers resurfaced: epistemic humility, and unapologetic comparative mythography. Echoing the epistemic humility, almost skepticism, of DTC’s guidelines for tragedy, epic poetry and all speech acts, Heinsius emphasises throughout LIC the excellence of unreasoning faith. This was the most defensible and politically safe secularising position he could take at the time. No Christian magistrate or churchman, pastor or priest was likely to fault someone else’s confession of ignorance—unless they examined closely the general implications of the kind of ignorance that was being pleaded. For a start, although it may appear an unassailably pious position, it contradicts the tenet, championed by Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Lipsius and Descartes, that natural reason leads man to Christ.258 257 ╇ For paganism and Calvinist zealotry, see Balzac and Salmasius above. For accusations of crypto-Catholicism see Sellin, Heinsius, 43-5, 62. 258 ╇ On the relevant Lipsius-Heinsius contrast see Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 105.

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A close reading also reveals how far LIC goes beyond pious humility. Heinsius places a proper understanding of Christ’s nature (LL 41-8, and passim), of the Trinity (LL 25-40, 570-7, 625-30, etc.),259 and of eternal life, well outside the reach of human knowledge. He does so rigorously and without allowing reason, experience, or other huÂ�man faculties any degree of purchase on the essence of things divine: Die verder willen gaen, die moeten onder blijven, Niet doende gants den dach dan twisten ende kijven, â•… Doorgronden uwen raet, en soecken sonder end’, â•… Het gene dat noch haer, noch ander is bekent. (Those who want to go further than they ought to [in their search to understand God] must err as they pass their days in dispute and quarrel and try fathoming your wise plan, and search without end for what neither they nor others can know. LL 717-20)

This is in keeping with the implications of DTC for epistemic humility, and echoes strongly the criticism of theologians in Cunaeus’s Sardi venales and Grotius’s Ordinum pietas. Like other politiques, Heinsius hoped to secure peace by removing theology from politics, making faith individual and undebatable. Unlike Erasmus in the Sileni, Heinsius portrayed the ‘heavenly world’ as barred to human reason.260 Heinsius subtly reintroduced a few other secularising trademarks, too. The first four lines are a paraphrase of John, who in turn is paraphrasing Genesis. Contemporaries would have picked up on the Remonstrant allusion. Becker-Cantarino compares Heinsius’s careful, irenicist use of the most widely accepted writings of the early church fathers in LIC with the irenicism of Grotius’s didactic poem, Bewijs van den waren godsdienst (In defense of true religion), also in Dutch and using the poetic form, written while Grotius was imprisoned at LoeÂ�venstein.261 Irenicism they indeed had in common, but Grotius appealed to every man’s reason (albeit not the pietistic kind) to demonstrate the truth of a minimalist Christianity, which he hoped would become common ground, aiding Dutch colonisation and religious

259 ╇ Compare these with Augustine on the imperative for unreasoned faith in the Trinity: Trin. IV.xxi.30; XV.vii.13. 260 ╇ Compare Heinsius respectfully but clearly distancing himself from Erasmian natural reason in his treatment of Noûs in DTC. 261 ╇ Becker-Cantarino, Heinsius, 51.

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reconciliation everywhere. By contrast, Heinsius aspired to achieve peace by removing reason from the equation.262 The most significant secularising technique that survives from Heinsius’s pre-Dordt days is comparative mythography. Pagan myths retain some of their Silenian character in LIC, assuming that Scriverius, admittedly more of a Remonstrant than Heinsius, expressed faithfully Heinsius’s intention at the beginning of his authorised afternote to the epic, the Uytlegginge van sekere werreltsche historien, woorden, ende manieren van spreken, die in desen Lofsanck gebruyckt worden (Notes on certain worldly histories, words, and manners of speech that were used in this Hymn). Here Scriverius enlists Ambrose, Augustine, the prophets, the Apostles, Scripture and the Holy Ghost to argue that the doctrines of the heathens were rightly rejected, but their words and writings are rightly kept and studied for their intrinsic truth and values. Even this chastened version of the Silenian secularising argument implies that Christianity is not the only fountain of truth, and when the Bible does express the truth, it may not be its best or only valid formulation. Heinsius’s syncretisation of Christian figures on par with their pagan equivalents, which raised objections in the 1610s with LB and in the 1630s with Herodes, also appears in his 1621 treatise on (im) mortality, De contemptu mortis (DCM). Here Heinsius describes Virgil and the Sybils as heralds and predictors of the Christ’s coming, and their prophecies as as valid and praiseworthy as any biblical prophets’.263 This inverts the time-honoured tradition of turning ancient figures like Aristotle, Virgil or Seneca into proto-Christians by attributing Christian views and inspiration to them. Instead, Heinsius leverages the same overlaps between pagan and Christian texts to make them fully comparable, and thereby deprive biblical characters of their special claim to true knowledge. Note that while Heinsius’s Virgil in DCM is a classic Scaligerian transformation, his reference to the Sybils was calculated to raise more eyebrows. The Sybillian Oracles 262 ╇ The same applies to the homily he gave on predestination in 1619, where Heinsius directly addressed the Five Points of the Remonstrance. While at first it seems like an unimpeachably zealous and Calvinist speech, in fact it stresses the importance of faith to the exclusion of reason, and cites Nonnus’s Paraphrase of John, a highly controversial source, several times. Very few copies were printed, and sent to James, Paolo Sarpi, and other important international figures. Sellin regards this homily as a direct precursor to Aristarchus, which incensed Balzac, Salmasius and others with its respect for pagan sources. Sellin, Heinsius, 35. De Jonge, “‘Manuscriptus’.” 263 ╇ Heinsius, DCM, IV.xi, 242 ff. in the excellent Bloemendal-Steenbeek edition.

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were so popular that the Church normally had to denounce them, and could seldom afford to co-opt them. Lactantius was, I think, the only major early Father who regarded the Sybillian Oracles as admissible evidence of pagan foreknowledge of Christ’s arrival. When Marsilio Ficino needed a cover for his praise of Hermes Trismegistos, he only had Lactantius’s references to Hermes and the Sybils to use as a shield of patristic authority. Even this was a thin enough shield, since Lactantius was long regarded as a quasi-heretic, and his restoration to Church orthodoxy was part of a wide Renaissance strategy to create the conditions in which pagan figures, approved by Lactantius, could be reinstated.264 Heinsius’s surprising exaltation of the Sybils makes no excuses at all. Always before 1618, and sometimes even after Dordt, comparative mythography and the unique take on the relationship between universals and particulars, two closely connected features of thought, are the surest means of clarifying the connection between Heinsius and Vossius as conscious agents of secularisation.265 Heinsius’s Dionysian work—his edition of Nonnus, DTC, LB, LIC, Aristarchus, etc.—is another exercise in secularisation through comparative mythography. This is not to imply that the cult of Dionysos was resurrected by Heinsius in any way. It never died in Europe, but survived uninterrupted, mostly because of its irresistible attraction in low and high culture alike. No ascetic early or medieval Father could stem the tide of Goliards’ and students’ songs or baldry plays that explicitly mentioned and jocundly worshipped this ancient Greek god.266 But Heinsius’s work is different. He set up a systematic comparison between Bacchus/Dionysos and Christ, accorded them equal adoration, hinted at Bacchus’s superiority in LB, and made amends for this in LIC; although he did so by repeating the comparison, even if this time ascribing superiority to Christ. 264 ╇See Grafton, “Higher criticism” for details on Scaliger’s edition of Hermes, and Casaubon’s refutation of its authenticity. 265 ╇ For further examples of Heinsius’s secularising background resurfacing after Dordt, see de Jonge, “Heinsius and the Textus Receptus.” 266 ╇ E.g. Addington, Wine, 140, 149, and passim. Waddell, Wandering. Dionysian themes were not restricted to popular culture. Boccaccio, Petrarch and others offer ample evidence. To continue the effort to at least indicate that the present argument could have equally been written about other periods in other nations, and of referring to fifteenth-century Italy and mid-sixteenth-century French culture to illustrate this, let me only mention Ronsard’s Hymn to Bacchus (also referenced by Heinsius), and Mahé’s book, Le mythes, on Bacchus in French literature in the second half of the sixteenth century.

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Heinsius’s many works on Dionysos add up to an exercise in comparative mythography that grew out of Scaliger’s historical method and humanist philology, with a license to innovate when it came to the Bible and Aristotle. Heinsius’s parallel between the Greek and Christian gods prefigures Vossius’s De theologia gentili (1641, 1642), which extended such comparisons to virtually all religions known in Europe at the time (including American Indians’), and constructed a methodology for continuing this work. As Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) and others have realised, in many ways it was the method itself that was revolutionary, and the implied claim that every aspect of Christianity, from its core myths to its rituals and institutions, was comparable with other religions, and had no special claims to eminence or exceptionality. The construction and demonstration of a viable historical critice for relativising every aspect of Christianity inspired not only deism, from Lord Cherbury (a contemporary of Heinsius, who spent a lot of time fighting and socialising in Holland) and Vossius to Toland, Voltaire, Tindal and Elihu Palmer, but also skepticism and disenchantment with Christianity.267 As Grotius, Hobbes, Locke and others pointed out, the unum necessarium, central message and strength of Christianity was the promise of resurrection and eternal life, with a threat of eternal torment for the wicked.268 Christianity and politics did not readily mix, because they posited different visions of the greatest good: life on earth, and life in heaven. Within the Leiden Circle, Heinsius had the most consistent preoccupation with immortality, and his parallelisation of Christ and Dionysos advanced Leiden secularisation to a significant extent. This is ironic, since among the Leideners discussed here he was probably the most orthodox Calvinist; yet perhaps this is why the conflicts he had to face, and the compromises he had to make in reaction to them, exemplify and illustrate so well the often unintentional but always self-reasserting structure of the early modern choice between secularisation, or religious discord. Heinsius explored many alternatives to Christian immortality. He awarded immortality through poetry (to Honerdus in DTC, to himself in the Elegie), through historiography (to Baudius in DPDH, de Thou in The Apotheosis and Scaliger in the Funeral oration), or through overall scholarship (to Dousa and Lipsius). In every discussion of immortality but one Heinsius repeat267 ╇ Popkin, “Crisis of polytheism.” On Cherbury’s dubious deism: Bedford, Defence. Serjeantson, “Herbert.” 268 ╇ Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 43. Grotius, De veritate.

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edly emphasised that immortality is only achieved if and only if these disciplines and efforts are put to pacificist purposes. The one exception comes in LB, where Heinsius describes Bacchus and his followers as superior, both regarding their quality of life and their immortality, without dwelling on peace at length. In all these works he proffers signally un-Christian ways of achieving immortality, which clash with every Christian convention.269 Undermining the Christian offer of immortality takes away everything, since—as Hobbes also points out—resurrection and immorÂ� tality are the greatest attractions of Christianity. These works are therefore not mere humanistic exercises in rhetoric on Heinsius’s part, but elements of a systematic attempt to minimise potential areas of religious conflict.

269

╇ Becker-Cantarino also finds this striking. Heinsius, 86-94, and 102-3.

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Cunaeus: Sophia’s Dream Petrus Cunaeus (1586-1638) features in the Leiden project before 1618 with three books: his 1610 commentary on Nonnus, discussed above, the Sardi venales (SV, 1612), briefly mentioned above, and the De Republica Hebraeorum libri tres (DRH, 1617). The latter two are rich and powerful works of secularisation.1 In both, Cunaeus openly states his intention of putting an end to the violence prompted by religious zealotry by undercutting the vain, misguided and dangerous intellectual projects of overzealous theologians and chosen nation theorists. In SV, his main instruments are speeches and discussions concerning man’s epistemic limitations and the justice of restricting oneself to one’s own field, which must be modestly and realistically defined in the first place. In DRH Cunaeus confronts all those who misuse the biblical commonwealth in order to claim legitimacy, and anyone who argues from a strong analogy with, or even direct descent from, the divinely approved polity. In DRH Cunaeus repeatedly and emphatically rejects the possibility of any post-biblical king’s or republic’s direct descent from Israel, David, or the lost tribes, as well as all forms of analogy between the divine and later human commonwealths that could bestow some degree of authority or legitimacy on the latter. He even shows several major and irreversible discontinuities between the truly divine Hebrew theocracy and the post-captivity Jewish republic. He makes it quite clear that the Jewish Republic, in spite of its watered-down divine ordainment, is as instructive a model for worldly polities as the Hebrew, and that one can compare the Sanhedrin with the Dutch Senate without deriving a more divine legitimacy from it than from, say, Livy, Sallust, or Tacitus.2 Grotius did the same in De republica

1 ╇ Interest in DRH has been gathering momentum thanks to the work of Lea Â� Campos Boralevi, among others. See her Introduction to Cunaeus, DRH (1996); and “Classical foundational myths.” Katchen, Christian. Nelson, Hebrew Republic. 2 ╇ DRH I.9, 10, and passim. Sanhedrin vs. Senate: DRH I.8, I.10, etc. In Book III Cunaeus offers detailed and systematic comparisons between religion and public life

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emendanda (1600?), and it was a masterstroke.3 Cunaeus did to Israel what Scaliger did to the Hebrew language: he put it beyond the reach of those who mixed religion with politics. Cunaeus’s book cleared the way for the radical secularisation of European thinking, and for a new toleration. With DRH he struck at the root of the problem: he chose not to dispute the troublesome religious legitimacy claims one by one, as for instance Valla did with the papacy, or Hotman with the French monarchy. Instead, he undercut all religion-based legitimacy claims by making the divine polity not special, but fully comparable with others, by applying new tools of comparative anthropology of religion to the Bible, and by showing that discontinuities of legal succession already existed within the various stages of the biblical story. This section on Cunaeus has the following structure. The short biographical introduction is not comprehensive, but limited to facts that help to contextualise Cunaeus’s works. A detailed analysis of SV follows, including its context, sources—especially the hitherto unnoticed probability of Hebrew influence—and its significance as an early and influential expression of the distinctive Leiden brand of epistemic skepticism. 1.╇ Vita Brevis Petrus Cunaeus (van der Cun) was born in Flushing, Zeeland. His father Adriaan, a merchant, moved shortly after his son’s birth to Middelburg, the provincial capital. Peter lived here until 1601, save for a short spell in Haarlem under the tutelage of the predikant JohanÂ� nes Matthisius, who prepared him for university. Cunaeus enrolled at Leiden for the first time in 1601. He boarded with a relative, Ambrosius Regemorterus, who taught him the elements of Hebrew and Greek. Regemorterus relocated to London permanently in 1608, and became prominent in a vibrant Dutch Calvinist congregation there. In 1602 they embarked together on a trip to England. There Cunaeus met and befriended Isaac Casaubon, who kindled his interest in Greek poetry. Returning to Leiden, he resumed his studies under the guidance of Scaliger and Heinsius, and cemented his friendship in Israel and ancient Athens, again treating Israel as a historical commonwealth no different from others. 3 ╇ For an extended comparison of DRH and DRE see Grotius, DRE. Eyffinger’s introduction, 17-22.

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with Grotius and Bonaventura Vulcanius (1538-1614). He found lodgings with Vulcanius, and his studies moved on from classical literature to theology and law. In October 1605, when the Arminius– Gomarus controversy began, he defended a thesis entitled De legis et evangelii comparatione before a committee presided over by Arminius. His next thesis, De cultu adorationis, was defended before Gomarus in March 1606. He continued his study of Oriental languages, and in 1606 he enrolled to study Hebrew and law at Franeker. On Scaliger’s recommendation he became an avid pupil of Johannes Drusius (1550-1616), who taught him Rabbinics, along with Chaldean and Syriac. Here he gained a deeper knowledge of Hebrew and Rabbinic writings, while continuing his legal studies under Martinus Lycklama and Timaeus Faber.4 After leaving Franeker, Cunaeus maintained a friendly correspondence with Drusius and his son. He re-enrolled at Leiden at the end of 1607 as a student of theology. Cunaeus soon began lecturing on Horace. Among his first works we find the Notae et animadversiones in Nonni Dionysiaca, published with Heinsius in Leiden in 1610, and the Sardi venales, Satyra Menippea in hujus seculi homines plerosque inepte eruditos, published in 1612 with his translation of Julian’s Caesares. In February 1612 Cunaeus was appointed to the chair of Latin, and became a full professor (ordinarius) the next year. In his funeral oration for Cunaeus, Adolph Vorstius, Conrad’s son, attested to the quality and popularity of Cunaeus’s lectures on Juvenal, Seneca, but also on historians like Suetonius and Tacitus. Cunaeus gained the chair of Greek the following year. In 1614 he was appointed to the Chair of History and Political Science which, as noted by Campos Boralevi, was inaugurated by Heinsius shortly beforehand. Soon afterward, Cunaeus was given a few months’ leave by the University’s curators to gain practical court experience at the Hague before becoming a Doctor of Law, defending his Theses ad legem Iuliam de Maiestate, a lost body of legislation on treason, under the supervision of Cornelius Swanenburg. In 1615 Cunaeus was tenured in Civil Law and the Digest. 4 ╇ The scant existing secondary literature on Cunaeus regularly dates his interest in Maimonides to 1615, after Borelius gave him the Venetian edition of Mishneh Torah. However, according to Vorstius’s funeral oration, Cunaeus already immersed himself in reading and interpreting Maimonides at Franeker. Dating the start of his acquaintance with the great Rambam is important for, among other things, the correct interpretation of the 1612 SV.

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In 1614 he received from Johannes Borelius (1577-1629) the complete edition of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, published in Venice in 1574. In 1616 he married Maria van Zeyst, daughter of Nicolaus van Zeyst, curator and pensioner of Leiden. In 1617, after he took a year’s leave to study rabbinical law and literature, Elzevier published De Republica Hebraeorum, which established Cunaeus’s reputation. During the Synod of Dordt (1618-19) he was instructed to retract parts of Sardi venales. He asked for a list of objectionable passages. Despite receiving it, he failed to make any retractions or corrections to the text. In 1620 he was put in charge of training students in rhetoric at the Collegium Oratorium. At Swanenburg’s death in 1630 he took over the professorship of Roman Law. According to Bayle, Cunaeus spent several years working on Josephus Flavius. No trace of this work survives because, it is claimed, he burnt the papers shortly before he died. 1.1.╇ Leiden’s Young Zeelanders Cunaeus’s place of birth is important. Like Heinsius, he was a ZeeÂ� lander. The circumstances and scenes of their childhood and early youth, Flushing, Middelburg, England and Franeker, form an important backdrop to their later work in Leiden. Eyffinger is one of the few scholars to recognise the existence of a ‘Zeeland connection’ in Leiden, but leaves its significance unexamined. Without aiming to explore the full implications, from personal connections to dialect, here I will only suggest that there was a particular urgency to the political thought of Zeelanders at Leiden. More than others in the Republic, they had to think not only about reforming existing political institutions, but starting new ones from scratch. Zeeland’s traditional capital is Middelburg where, as we saw, Heinsius and Cunaeus spent their childhood. It was probably here that they became acquainted with the prominent Schotte family, who later played an important role in shaping the political interests of the Leiden Zeelanders. Many young Zeelanders, including Walaeus, ApolÂ�lonius Schotte and Borelius, found themselves studying concurrently at Leiden, the first Dutch university and a symbol of national unity. Grotius also had strong personal ties and affinities to the region through his wife, Maria van Reigersberch, whom he married in 1608, and through her prominent Zeelander family. Other notable ZeeÂ� landers at Leiden at this time included Jacob Cats, mentioned above in

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connection with Heinsius.5 Every reader to whom Grotius confidentially sent a manuscript of his politically sensitive Meletius for review was a Zeelander. Cunaeus’s Sardi venales was dedicated to two very influential Zeelanders: Rombout Hogerbeets (1561-1625) and ApolÂ�loÂ� nius Schotte (1574-1639), high-ranking Dutch politicians sympathetic to the Leiden politique cause. Hogerbeets was the Pensionary of Leiden in 1590-96, Justice in the Supreme Court of Zeeland and Holland from 1596 to 1617 (i.e. including the time when SV was written), and shared imprisonment with Grotius in Castle Loevestein after OldenÂ� barnevelt’s fall from power. Schotte was another eminent politician and a notable scholar on his own right. A friend of Scaliger’s,6 he was also the dedicatee, along with Grotius and Heinsius, of Honerdus’s 1611 play, Thamara. As early as 1605, Schotte and Cunaeus were Â�corresponding about Arminius and the controversy in Leiden, and wider political issues concerning Zeeland and the Republic. They kept up their frequent correspondence until Cunaeus’s death in 1638. In virtually every one of their letters, their shared academic interests are related directly and immediately to their political concerns, especially with the fate of Zeeland.7 The earliest known letter between them was sent by Cunaeus to Schotte in Middelburg in October 1605, and contains high praise for ‘our doctor Arminius.’8 Shortly thereafter, Cunaeus asked Schotte to remember him to Hogerbeets, who showed him great benevolence on a previous occasion. References to Hogerbeets continue (e.g. Eps. IV, VI), but Schotte and Cunaeus devote most of their correspondence not to personal, but political and scholarly matters. Their political discussions often take on a tone of urgency, especially when they concern Zeeland. The threat of Zeeland’s secession, and the problem of its containment, prompted Grotius in 1611 to include Schotte among the four trustworthy recipients—Borelius, Schotte, Walaeus and Cunaeus, Zeelanders all—of a manuscript of his Meletius, a controversial irenicist writing that in the end Grotius decided to withhold from publication.9 Cunaeus and Schotte discussed the work in their private 5 ╇ For these and other important Zeeland thinkers of this period, most of whom studied at Leiden, see Meertens, Letterkundig, 217-39. 6 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.532, 544, passim. 7 ╇ Cunaeus, Epistolae, II-XXVII. 8 ╇ Cunaeus, Epistolae, Ep. II. 9 ╇ Grotius, Meletius, Posthumus Meyjes’s introduction, including a quotation on p. 14 from Grotius’s 1609 letter to Pierre Jeannin, describing the threat of secession.

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correspondence, with a delicacy and caution that matched GroÂ�tius’s own apprehensions about circulating the manuscript. Already in 1725 Burmann, who had access to the family papers of many members of the Leiden Circle, did not know about the existence of Meletius. When he published Cunaeus’ correspondence, he misspelled ‘Meletius’ as ‘Milesium’ in his transcription of a letter from Cunaeus to Schotte from April 1612.10 In DRH, Cunaeus credits Schotte for convincing him of the utmost importance of Maimonides for Dutch political thought. He thanks Schotte at length for their detailed discussions of Maimonides, while he was enjoying Schotte’s hospitality at the Hague.11 According to Cunaeus, Schotte told him that Maimonides was the most discussed and least understood author, and gave him a new, convincing interpretation. Cunaeus then crossed out all his earlier notes on the sacred polity, and began to work anew on the idea that eventually became DRH. This idea, he hastens to add, is nevertheless his own conjecture, nothing more; no certainty can be had about the biblical commonwealth. Cunaeus took to heart SophroÂ�syne’s salutary caution against certainty in the SV, described below. The extent of Schotte’s influence on DRH is probably more anecdotal and complimentary than accurate. Long before visiting Schotte at the Hague, during his Franeker years under Drusius’s tutelage, but perhaps even during his first Leiden student period (and certainly by the time of his discussions with Borelius at Leiden), Cunaeus has already read and discussed Maimonides. It is unlikely that Schotte was the first to point out to him the extent to which Maimonides’s selfavowedly esoteric style regularly thwarted and misdirected early modern non-Jewish scholars’ attempts at interpretation. In any case, Schotte and members of his family were much respected among the

╇ Cunaeus, Ep. IX. ‘Vir amplissime, dissertationem Grotii. sive Milesium tibi remitto, in qua ego putidos Theologos nostros quidquam reperisse miror, quod reÂ�Â�pÂ� rehendant. Adeo enim erudite & pulchre rem totam pertractavit, ut, si operam una conferant omnes isti praeclari sacrorum antistites, nihil tale eos magnis laboribus & multa cura extrudere posse existimem. Qui profecto viri, dum leges suas & decreta fanciunt, fines Theologiae paulo longius, quam rei natura ferret, protulerunt. Ego communis illius, quae inter Christianos esse debet, religionis, multo pauciora capita posuissem, eaque istiusmodi esse confiderem, ut, qui nihil ultra inquiereret, is & vir pius esse, & bene de Deo Opt. Max. sentire videretur. Vale, vir amplissime.’ 11 ╇ Cunaeus, DRH, Book I, chapter 9, 51-2. 10

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Leideners, as their numerous letters and confidences attest. Johannes Borelius, whose gift of Oriental manuscripts and books inspired both Meletius and DRH, was another Zeelander, who after his Leiden student days went on to become that province’s Grand Pensionary. To understand the significance and implications of ‘the Zeeland connection,’ a partial recapitulation of the historical situation is in order. With the Unions of Artois and Utrecht in 1579, the original seventeen provinces divided into two groups. The subsequent decades saw virtually constant skirmishes and several full-blown mutual invasions by the Spanish Netherlands (Habsburg and Catholic) and the United Provinces (independent and largely Protestant), with the intention of reuniting the original seventeen provinces by force. The by now proverbial violence and bitterness of fratricidal civil war was escalating.12 Religious ideology was brought into play in the propaganda and legal justifications for the wars on the one hand, and for the legitimacy of the newly created Unions, on the other. The ambition to reunite the provinces was matched only by fears of further secessions on both sides. In the Eighty Years’ War, or Dutch War of Independence (15681648) against the Spanish Habsburg empire, Zeeland was one of the seven rebellious United Provinces. Zeeland and Holland were both powerful and commercial provinces, but the differences between them should not be ignored. Holland was at the centre of successive political entities, from the realm of Philip the Good of Burgundy (13961467) to the United Provinces. By contrast, Zeeland was always contested, by the counts of Holland and Flanders throughout the early and central Middle Ages (until 1299, when Holland seized possession) until 1648, when Ferdinand III and Philip IV acknowledged the sovereignty of the Republic in the Treaty of Münster. Its relatively high political instability is partly explained by its topographical features. Zeeland is essentially a collection of islands and a strip of land bordering present-day Belgium. Large parts of it are regularly flooded, and 12 ╇ Israel, Dutch Republic. Although doubts about the peaceful reunification of the seventeen provinces may have been prominent by 1605, all hope was not lost. Military conquest of the Spanish Netherlands was always on the cards; see for instance Maurice’s campaigns. For the enduring significance of the two Unions in seventeenth-century Dutch political thought, see van Dam’s introduction to Grotius, De imperio, 10-1. On fears of further secession see e.g. Posthumus Meyjes’s introduction to Grotius, Meletius, 14-5, and Motley, History, Vol. IV, chapters 38-40.

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the individual islands have been known to pursue their own political agenda, independently from Middelburg. The degree of exposure and contestation distinguishes Zeeland from the other provinces. Its position as a meeting point between several countries, cultures and units of institutional scale (small states and empires, militias and armies, de facto city-states and colonial empires) was reflected in its government and in its demographic composition, as well as in being ‘the most religiously contentious Dutch province.’13 Today few commentators on Grotius’s early works, let alone readers of the other Leideners, realise the role that fears of Zeeland’s secession around the turn of the seventeenth century played in his thinking.14 While Dutch scholars do occasionally point to a ‘Zeeland connection,’ it is seldom noted that it is not always clear what ‘Zeeland’ refers to in early seventeenth-century texts. In addition to the aforementioned sources of Zeeland’s instability, the strip of mainland that currently belongs to it was even more fiercely contested in the seventeenth century than the rest of its territory. It was conquered by the Republic for the first time only in 1604, and almost recaptured by the Spanish several times, including the famous siege of Hulst in 1645. This other territory was called Zeeuws-Vlaanderen (Zeeland-FlanÂ� ders), and stretched south of the Scheldt estuary. Its main cities are Sluis, Terneuzen (home to the original Flying Dutchman), and Hulst. In 1579 it remained in Spanish hands as part of the countship of Flanders, and as a strategic and fertile land it quickly became a bone of bitter contention with the Union. When the United Provinces first conquered it in 1604, in recognition of the impracticability of a separate war-time provincial government it acquired a peculiar legal status as Generaliteitslanden (Generality or Common Lands). These were governed directly by the States General, and unlike the seven provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen) they had no estates of their own, and no separate representation in the central government. There were four such regions at the time: Staats-Vlaanderen, Staats-Brabant (now constituting most of North Brabant), the small scattered plots known collectively as 13 ╇ Cerny, review of Meletius, 118. For an overview of early modern intellectual life in Zeeland see Meertens, Letterkundig. 14 ╇ Exceptions include Eyffinger, Introduction to Cunaeus, Hebrew republic. Posthumus Meyjes, Introduction to Grotius, Meletius. Rabbie, Introduction to Grotius, Ordinum pietas.

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Staats-Limburg or Staats-Overmaas (originally bishopric-municipal condominiums), and Westerwolde-Wedde, which was generality land between 1594 and 1619, when it was consolidated into Groningen province. Zeeland-Flanders was almost reconquered by the Spanish in 1645 in a major invasion that culminated in the siege of Hulst. In other words, Zeelanders at Leiden, the intellectual powerhouse of the Republic, had to think about establishing entirely new governmental structures, as well as reforming existing ones. There was a lot of movement, instability and institutional adaptation, in short. Since Zeeland-Flanders today belongs to Zeeland, it is easy for present readers of Leidener texts to forget that from 1604 until 1648 it was a toss-up whether Zeeland-Flanders would be part of the Netherlands at all, let alone merge into Zeeland province. The thinkers of the Leiden Circle were in close touch with daily political events, often supplying intellectual ammunition to politicians— including Apollonius Schotte and Hogerbeets—who were worried about the threat of Zeeland’s, and Zeeland-Flanders’, loss or secession.15 The constant existential threat and the palpable immediacy of religious and political ideas’ impact must account for the ubiquitous political references in their work. As these writings and their correspondence shows, even their historical and seemingly abstract theoretical writings on government, institutional adaptation, federalism and religious tolerance were written with pragmatic implications in mind. When Grotius cautiously circulated his Meletius MSS in 1611, and Cunaeus and Schotte exchanged letters analysing its irenicist implications, when Cunaeus dedicated the first draft of DRH (which is probably now Book III) to Frans Duyck,16 or when Grotius discussed federations and secession in De republica emendanda, the Tractatus de iure magistratuum circa ecclesiastica, in Ordinum Pietas and in De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, then it is these United Provinces, this Zeeland, and this political problem that they had in mind. These texts should be read differently if we believe that they contain recommendations both for the reform of existing political arrangements within the United Provinces, or for the creation of a new kind of direct rule over freshly conquered and continually disputed frontline territory. The agrarian discussion in DRH, for instance, is hugely 15 16

╇ Posthumus Meyjes, in Grotius, Meletius, 15, 45. ╇ Duyck was a soldier and statesman, who suffered for his irenicist views.

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influential. Cunaeus, using Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, calls the Jubilee a lex agraria, comparing it to Gracchus’s 133 BC land reform, and the subsequent property debates that brought down the Republic. This comparison marks a major shift in modern republicanism: instead of a defense of property, the balance of republicanism’s political message shifts to social cohesion built upon a minimum of individual self-sufficiency. For now, the point is that Cunaeus’s move, made in a book whose contextualisation reveals a dominant concern with Zeeland, would apply to the fertile southern estuary differently than to the north. Instead of redistribution, it may refer to the disÂ� tribution of newly conquered and colonised land, or even to the reformation of the political powers of the States General in a way as to enable it to manage matters arising in both the existing Provinces, and in the Generaliteitslanden.17 The debate concerning the shape of the federal government is another example. Grotius in DRE, the Parallelon rerumpublicarum and in The Antiquity, and Cunaeus in DRH, argued strongly against ‘the Sanhedrin parallel.’ They refused to endorse the recommendations of chosen nation theorists to establish senatorial systems that derived divine legitimacy from the OT model of the Sanhedrin. This criticism applied to the existing arrangement of the States General in the United Provinces; but perhaps it also argued against setting up a Sanhedrin for Zeeland-Flanders. The material currently available does not suggest that the Leiden Circle was only concerned with the extant province of Zeeland proper, or that we can ignore the tasks involved in setting up direct rule in our interpretations of DRH and DRE as political advice on current affairs. The Leideners regularly made the trenchant point that the Jewish commonwealth as such, whatever its form may have been, can never be replicated elsewhere. Claiming legitimacy on the grounds of descent from, or even mere analogy with, the Sanhedrin was one of the many variants of Bible-based political claims. The Sanhedrin scheme best known today belongs to Napoleon, who claimed to have 17 ╇ However, one should note that Flushing or Vlissingen, where both Cunaeus and Heinsius spent brief periods of their childhood, had a unique status even within Zeeland. With Briel and Ramekins, Vlissingen was a ‘cautionary town,’ a collateral for Elizabeth’s loans to the Dutch Republic, and under virtually shared English and Dutch control. Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester, became governor of Â�Flushing in 1588, and spent most of his time there until his recall to England in 1603.

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called representatives of all the Jews of the world together to revive the old Sanhedrin of Jerusalem.18 His ‘Great Sanhedrin’ was in session from early 1806 to early 1807, and gave Napoleon much-needed political support. In addition to its messianic overtones and the confirmation of his claim to world monarchy, it also switched the allegiance of Jewish troops during the Prussian war. The war over, Napoleon promptly issued the 1808 decree restricting Jews’ legal rights.19 The common political problems faced by the Dutch at the time presented themselves in a more specific form to the Leiden Zeelanders: the province was commercial, ambitious, and under constant, dire threat from the south. It had to be persuaded again and again about the merits of the federation, as well as about the viability of a secular state in which religious strife can be contained. For the politique Â�secularisers in Leiden to do this, the standard Dutch chosen nation argument, including its federal variation (based on the Jewish tribes, for instance, or David’s unification of Israel), was not a viable model. Zeeland’s particular circumstances and these Leideners’ Zeeland Â�connections go some way toward explaining the particular solutions they came up with. These solutions formed the essence of the wider Dutch contribution to the broader story of secularisation in Europe. The fact that the referent of ‘Zeeland’ is at least debatable in these works also illustrates the role biographical detail can have in contextualisation. A similar level of biographical and literary detail will be deployed for the next subject, the SV. Details of Cunaeus’s knowledge of Hebraica before 1612 will help us determine the origin, and better define the nature of, the ‘skeptical turn’ that allowed the Leiden Circle to break the deadlock of competing religion-based legal and political arguments.

╇ For other such schemes see Sutcliffe, Judaism. ╇ Closer in time to the Leiden Circle was Major-General Thomas Harrison (160360), at one time a close friend of Cromwell. He was the 17th signatory of Charles I’s death warrant, and the first to be executed for it. A leading Fifth Monarchist, he suggested replacing the Rump Parliament with a new Sanhedrin of 70 elected ‘saints.’ Despite some of the current secondary literature on DRH, this was not the sort of scheme that Cunaeus had in mind for the Dutch States General. 18 19

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chapter four 2.╇ Sardi Venales Slaves are exposed to incessant hazards. Unable openly to express what he wanted, One of them projected his personal opinions Into fictional fables and found shelter From carping critics in comic inventions. Phaedrus, Book 3, Prologue

Sardi Venales. Satyra Menippea in huius seculi homines plerosque ineptè eruditos. Petrvs Cvnævs scripsit. In fine seorsim addita est ex eiusdem interpretatione D. Ivliani Imperatoris Satyra in principes romanos (Leiden, 1612) is a twenty-odd thousand word satire of great significance that deserves scrutiny. I propose that SV was central to both Leiden and European secularisation. This is supported by three distinct but interrelated claims: 1, SV shows signs of close coordination with other members of the Leiden Circle (complementing both Grotius’s Ordinum pietas and Heinsius’s DTC, for instance), 2, the radical epistemic humility in SV was inspired by Cunaeus’s Hebraic studies, and 3, it set the stage for DRH. After a brief introduction, the textual analysis will come in three parts: first, some basic features of the text, then its contextual background (Cynical, Christian minimalist and Rabbinic), and finally its impact will be discussed. The rest of this preliminary introduction will state the central claim briefly, and summarise the three supporting assertions. That SV marks a milestone in the progress of secularisation in Leiden and in general is evident from its form and content, its genre and its message, as well as from its effect, reception, and afterlife. The genre is Menippean satire, an early modern invention particularly well suited to religious polemic. SV was, nevertheless, the first in the new genre to attack all theology, not just one side or another. Its message is an unprecedented call to radical epistemic humility, and the removal of theology from all human inquiry. Cunaeus makes his reasons for this radical secularisation clear from the start. SV vividly presents the devastation caused by the Wars of Religion, then offers the wholesale secularisation of European thought as the solution. Cunaeus struck at the root of religiously motivated and/or justified violence by destroying Christian epistemology. To do this, he combined the attack of Rabbinism on reason, of Cynicism on faith, and of

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Christian minimalism on nature, as effectual guides to truth. He also appended the first Latin translation of Julian the Apostate’s antiChristian satire, Caesares. SV became widely popular, and inspired new forays into both rationalist epistemology and anti-theological satire. 2.1.╇ Brief Introduction: Text, Context, Reception 2.1.1.╇ Text: SV’s Secularising Message Catholicism after Aquinas maintained a relatively stable equilibrium between reason, faith, and nature. One generic formulation of this balance stated that God bestowed natural reason on man in order to illuminate his path to faith. The Reformation shook the foundations of this equilibrium, leading to violence and chaos. To neutralise the epistemic foundation of all Christian theology, including the various denominations’, Cunaeus had to strike at root and branch alike. He had, understandably, no Christian precedents to draw on; but other philosophies of such destructive yet well-targeted power were also hard to come by. Not even a reformulation of Stoicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism or Cynicism would have done the trick, since they all left enough certainty to allow the reintroduction of a modified Christian dogmatism. For instance, although Cynics offered the requisite arguments against faith and reason, they also advocated following one’s nature.20 Beside his eventual eclectic combination of Christian minimalism, Cynicism and Rabbinism, among established anti-theological avenues Pyrrhonian skepticism alone would have served Cunaeus’s secularising purpose, but only at the cost of making his normative assertions insupportable.21 Cunaeus’s ingenious solution in SV was to begin with established Christian minimalism. This tradition reduced the essence of Christianity to a minimal set of core tenets, whether out of epistemic humility, or as part of an ecumenical, irenicist, or (in England) latitudinarian programme. The history of this drive toward minimising essential tenets begins with Jesus and runs through Constantine’s intervention in the Arian controversy, the great tradition of writings ╇ Also see Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 49-51! ╇ I agree with Fogelin’s Pyrrhonian reflections that Agrippa set impossible standards of justification, and the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium declamatio invective (1526/7) led to neo-Pyrrhonism long before Montaigne. See also Harrison, Fall, 73-9. 20 21

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on the reasonableness of Christianity, and Hobbes’s unum necessarium. Cunaeus’s deployment of minimalism in SV comes in scholarly speeches by Erasmus, Agricola, Barbaro, and Pico della Mirandola about what is, what is not, and how things are, knowable to a Christian. Cunaeus then dissociates nature, faith, and reason, the three ingredients of this pure, Christian essentialist equilibrium, with the aid of Cynicism, which dispenses with faith and reliance on human consensus. The Cynical elements of SV are the following: first, Menippos, Cunaeus’s faithful guide, supplies a Cynical running commentary throughout the SV. Second, of all the scholars in the republic only Diogenes the Cynic succeeds in locating and inviting Sophia. Third, SV draws much from the Cynical writings of Julian the Apostate, whose Caesares in Cunaeus’s edition of the Greek original and with his Latin translation was published as a companion to SV, using the Leiden MSS that remains to this day the single most authoritative source for Julian. And fourth, three of the five symbolic Greek women in SV’s central scene, namely Eleutheria, Parrhesia and Sophrosyne, are featured together, and with SV’s allegorical meaning, in many, and to my knowledge in only, ancient Cynical sources. Finally, to initiate the chemical reaction of these ingredients, leading to the explosion, evaporation and sublimation of all Christian episÂ�temology, Cunaeus added anti-Aristotelian Rabbinic Judaism, from which he extracted the epistemology for the correct understanding of the lower, inferior truth in this world, and substituted this for the component that the Cynical solution used as true attainable knowledge. Close textual reading indicates, and Cunaeus’s biography, correspondence and further circumstantial evidence confirms, that SV’s Goddess Sophia corresponds to the lower Hokhmah of the rabbis. His sources were Drusius’s teachings, Kabbalistic tracts, MaimoÂ� nides’s Guide to the Perplexed, and ibn Tibbon’s commentary on MaiÂ�monides. These were written in response to the encroachment of Aristotelianism on Arabic and Jewish theology (represented by the Mutakallimun and the Karaites, respectively), and called for more respect for religious faith and a more mystical interpretation of nature. At the same time, similarly to Heinsius’s balancing act in DTC, Cunaeus’s secularisation depended on his ability to prevent his antiAristotelian Rabbinic borrowing from manifesting itself as a step toward the humanist neoplatonism of Pico, More and others. His ingenious and original combination of Christian minimalism, Cynicism and Rabbinism also proved the perfect protection against

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this danger. As Cynicism dissociated the Christian formula and neutralised faith, but left reason and nature standing, so this carefully isolated element of anti-Aristotelian rabbinic philosophy, when added to the SV solution, removed reason and assigned a much lower active value to nature than either Christianity or Cynicism did. The end result was a devastation of Christian epistemology: God-given nature, reason and faith were no longer acceptable guides. As Cunaeus’s final rejection of two humbled theologians’ different and complementary apologias vividly demonstrated, it became untenable to believe that even the combination of any two of these three elements could get man closer to an understanding of the divine. He needed all the three discourses to do the job, and prevent the mystical, scientific, or philosophical reassertion of Christianity’s normative monopoly. Without Cynicism faith, without Rabbinism nature would remain as a guide to God; without Christian minimalism, SV would have been an outsider’s attack with no credibility, easily refutable as pagan and atheistic. The following sections examine this secularising text in detail. 2.1.2.╇ Context: SV’s Secularising Genre Cunaeus wrote SV as a Menippean satire. He included the phrase in the title for good measure, and chose Menippos as his guide through the dream. I would like to argue that Menippean satires were revived in the Renaissance, and came to full maturity in the seventeenth century, primarily as an outlet for political and religious criticism. Theological politics is exclusivist and brooks little disagreement. To circumvent it, authors had to develop an increasingly complex literary form that obfuscated authorial intention and responsibility. Their critics in turn had to match this with increasingly recondite hermeneutical methods. It was a veritable literary arms-race, and today it is easy to forget that the losers could pay with their lives.22 With Heinsus’s DTC above, and its immediate French reception, we saw an example of the progress that was made in hermeneutics due to the 22 ╇See e.g. Ascoli, “Faith as cover-up.” Eden, Hermeneutics. Rummel, Scheming papists. Thompson, in More, Collected. Even satirists and sympathisers could be gruesome at times. In his 1540 Des. Erasmi Roterodami Funus, dialogus lepidissimus, Ortensio Lando stages in lurid detail a desecration of Erasmus’s tomb and the mutilation of his corpse, in order to call attention to how far irenicists have strayed from Erasmus’s teachings. Lando inspired Eyndius’s 1611 Nugarum liber, an anti-Jesuit and anti-clerical satire commenting on Leiden and the Vorstius affair. Heesakkers, “From Italian prose.”

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political intensity that the Wars of Religion conferred on academic debates. Given the rich context and predominantly polemical nature of this literature, it is generally safe to assume that if a neolatin satire seems non-political, constrained for instance to criticising philosophers or artists, then one’s reading is probably not attentive enough. This does not hold for ancient satires, where the political subtext was often, but not always present, the mocked authority was sometimes, but not always as efficiently oppressive as kings and popes during the Wars of Religion, and the satires’ intended audience was not as trained in letters and receptive to academic hints as an early modern reader. The turn of the seventeenth century is in a sense the eye of the storm, a momentary lull in the hermeneutical arms race between agents of political dissent and conformity. By the time Galileo published his revolutionary Dialogues in 1632, the Inquisition has worked out a hermeneutical system that enabled it to prove guilt in spite of Galileo’s ruse of using fictitious characters.23 The guidelines laid down by the Council of Trent (1545-63) for pictorial and verbal expression constitute a highly sophisticated hermeneutical method for safeguarding orthodoxy and verifying conformity. Writings like Lipsius’s Somnium, Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos (1581), the leading French politiques’ La Satyre Ménippée (1594), and Cunaeus’s Sardi venales (1612), introduced new techniques for fudging the authors’ identity and intention. Although their audiences understood their message, they escaped punishment until the powers that be, whether Protestant censors or the Catholic Inquisition, worked out a method for calling Lipsius, Le Roy, Pithou, Cunaeus and others to task for their mockery.24 Menippean satires occupy a special place in the tradition of political satire-writing. Though relying on the time-honoured ploys of the dream framework, dialogue, fictional setting, ‘manuscript found’ and similar devices, the new movement practically began when Lipsius decided to dream up a new genre. In his satire on bad contemporary criticism and inept students of the Classics, he pretended that Seneca, Varro, Apuleius, Lucian, Petronius and others wrote some of their satires with a well-defined genre in mind: the Menippean satire. As Relihan ╇ Blackwell, Galileo, especially chapters 2, 3, 5 and 7. ╇ Grendler, “Printing.” The internal logic and progression of this hermeneutical arms race is wonderfully illustrated in Rummel, Erasmus and his Catholic critics. Another illuminating reconstruction of such offensive and defensive hermeneutical techniques, for a different set of texts, is given in Mulsow, “Practices.” 23 24

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has convincingly shown, this genre never existed before Lipsius.25 ‘Neo-Menippean satire’ is his simulacrum, the instrumentally formed copy of a non-existent original. That the joke was understood is shown by the sudden explosion of ‘Menippean’ in the title of subsequent early modern political satires, in imitations of Lipsius’s Somnium, and in the ensuing technical debate between literary critics over the precise origins, ancient models and meaning of satires in general.26 Practising satirists often took part in the technical debate about the definition, sometimes satirically. One must be careful to avoid reading codes and secret messages into texts without good reason. There are several good reasons why esoteric layers of meaning can be assumed to exist in Menippean satires. A range of evidence, including correspondence, polemical pamphlets and codebooks for deciphering satires, shows that these texts were composed and read with a precise but highly complicated, evolving and self-referential system of allusions in mind, with decipherable veiled references to real-life events and characters that occasionally turned into meta- and micro-conventions within the new genre. Satires by and about Erasmus, for instance, turned Erasmus into a recurring figure within satires with a specific set of connotations, mostly of irenicism, or, among Lutherans, indeciviseness. Eventually the genre turned against itself in the form of anti-satire satires like Swift’s 1704 Battle of the Books, the Scribbleran Club’s books (including the 1741 Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Generally the best policy is to restrict oneself to the strictest possible reconstruction of meaning, and keep well away from overinterpretation, hindsight, unwarranted speculation and fantasy.27 In early modern Menippean satires, however, it is usually prudent to look for meaning behind the choice of symbolic figures and classical 25 ╇ Relihan, “On the origin.” Here and in Ancient Menippean satire he discusses earlier classifications of the genre by Cicero, Quintilian, Varro, Seneca and others. Relihan also draws attention to the related fact that not only the genre, but also the role of Menippos was an early modern invention: ‘The Renaissance typically suppresses the name of Menippus: the great early imitators of Lucian, such as Erasmus, Alberti, and Rabelais, feel no need to resuscitate Menippus himself and hardly speak of him.’ Relihan, “Menippus,” 267. 26 ╇ For a preliminary list see de Smet, Menippean satire. Casaubon, Scaliger, Dryden and others are discussed in the above chapter on Heinsius. Also see the 1709 history of satire by the intriguing Dutch politique and rederijker-theorist Pieter Vlaming (1686-1734), who also translated L’Hôpital’s letters. 27 ╇Strauss, Persecution.

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references. The layers of meaning and the cross-references are so numerous in this genre that readers and writers of Menippean satires after a while had to rely on codebooks that explained the references and cross-references in earlier satires, so that new ones could be written. Pseudonymous authorship is the least of our worries here. They wrote satires under different pseudonyms, they invented codenames for the place of publication, and published satires under their opponents’ real and assumed names. Given such complexity, the detailed discussion of SV below will be incomplete and limited to the details that bear directly on epistemic skepticism and the concomitant Leiden brand of secularisation. The selective context also aims to emphasise the novelty of SV in attacking all theologians comprehensively, not just one side or another, like other early modern satires. 2.1.3.╇ Reception: The Impact of SV’s Secularisation When SV was published at Christmas 1612, Cunaeus sent a complimentary copy directly to Conrad Vorstius. The book provoked an immediate scandal. Leiden students rioted, professors protested and lodged complaints, and the university had to be shut down for a while. Nevertheless, numerous new editions followed, Cunaeus’s career continued to advance, and when later the Synod of Dordt instructed him to retract parts of SV, they failed to follow through on their threats. In the end they let Cunaeus off the hook without a retraction. SV continued to be published, unchanged. The absence of detrimental consequences for Cunaeus is puzzling, given the book’s turbulent reception and the violent politics of the day. A possible explanation is that SV took aim at every faction involved. In spite of Cunaeus’s personal support for the Remonstrant cause, SV could be read as a non-partisan call for a peaceful resolution through epistemic humility, detachment and self-criticism. As we will see, this is how later French, Dutch and English generations of readers understood the SV, and appreciated the appended translation of Julian’s Caesares for its anti-theological stance.

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2.2.╇ Textual Analysis: Text, Context, Reception 2.2.1.╇ SV: The Text What exactly is in the book that proved so incendiary that its publication caused an uproar at Leiden, that the Synod of Dordt ordered Cunaeus to retract it, and that it came to have an equally tumultuous afterlife? The following paraphrase summarises SV, preserving its original structure in preparation for more detailed analytical study. Plot Summary Dedication. This is a satire, about bad and good kinds of understanding. It is a political satire, and was written out of concern for the public danger caused by epistemic arrogance. When he was young, Cunaeus hoped to satisfy his curiosity and ambition by studying the Ancients; then he moved on to Christian theology. He encountered some good theologians, but most of them are ignorant, verbose, and venture into mysteries where it is forbidden to tread. Their kind of insanity is no better than that of the lazy and the savage.28 Cunaeus must speak freely, if truth and thereby glory is to be attained. Truth arises from opposing those who are wrong (rather than from original inquiry), and criticism makes for more entertaining and less pretentious reading than theology. These are the reasons why Cunaeus cannot join a theological camp, or find an exemplar he can emulate. Schotte and Hogerbeets are truly clever, and serve the public. They inspire Cunaeus, and will understand the SV. As Senators in the republic of letters, they will find in favour of his plea. Their integrity in this republic, and not obscure monuments, will make posterity remember them forever.29 Preface to the Reader. Cunaeus claims no omniscience, like those corrupt and wicked theologians do. He is modest, simple and candid. SV is not a personal attack. Theologians and Catholics are arrogant, too serious, and afraid of criticism. Christ was a jocular fellow, a satirist, who spoke to the common man.30 Sardi venales. This is a satire, not to be taken too seriously. Yet it tells the truth. By contrast, self-important men always lie, especially about ╇ Compare Sanches, That nothing is known, 167-8.╇ ╇ Compare Heinsius’s DPDH, discussed in chapter 3, section V above. 30 ╇ Compare Erasmus on Christ in the Sileni. 28 29

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history, politics, and religion. They cover up their lies and failures by bringing in a deus ex machina.31 They also make up miracles. Cunaeus falls asleep and has visions, made up of remnants of things that previously kept him awake with worry. In a vision, God lifts him into a strange world, above the stars. He sees Menippos running toward him, with all the Cynic’s distinctive trappings. Cunaeus asks him where he is. Menippos replies that he transgressed into the realm of the dead, the Epicurean intermundia.32 Yet he assures Cunaeus that his vision was sent by God, unlike the theologians’, who pretend to know everything, while they are shut up in narrow cells and merely hallucinate, then use their false delusions to deceive the people. A bad case of this is the recent debate over fate, which is full of superstition.33 Cunaeus says to himself that Menippos speaks like a Cynic, attacking anyone just to get a laugh.34 But Menippos contradicts him: this is not a joke, he says, and shows Cunaeus the tortured corpses, mangled bones and bloody remains of those who recently died, and were conducted into this realm by Mercury only the day before. Menippos volunteers to act as Cunaeus’s guide. He describes his recent experience of long, venomous and turgid debates among the ghosts of theologians over free will and necessity. These pointless debates among ignorant fanatics lead to madness and civil strife. They set out toward the city together. On the way they encounter Mercury leading a procession of corpses, freshly killed in religious conflict, many of them French, Spanish and Italian. Cunaeus recognises a Dutchman in the crowd but Mercury leads on, preventing a conversation. Menippos explains that not everyone goes to Tartarus: those who pursued learning zealously in life go to the Republic of Scholars, an island nearby, where they live a blessed life of leisure. They have a sen31 ╇ Recall Heinsius’s anti-theology use of this notion in the 1611 DTC. Cellarius makes the same connection in his “Notae in Satyram,” in Cunaeus, Orationes, 592-3. 32 ╇ In Cicero, De natura deorum I.viii, this phrase is used for Velleius, who describes the Epicurean system with such confidence, ‘afraid of nothing so much as lest he should appear to have doubts about anything. One would have supposed he had just come down from the assembly of the gods in the intermundane spaces of Epicurus!’ For connections to Scaligerian astronomy at Leiden see Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 67 and 85. SV’s Epicurean intermundia is unlikely to come from Maimonides’s Book of Knowledge, in which there is no vacuum between the spheres (37a), and Epicureans are a very rare group for whom there is no forgiveness or eternal life (84b). 33 ╇ Cellarius has no difficulty identifying this as a reference to the Counter-Remonstrants. “Notae in Satyram,” Cunaeus, Orationes, 596. 34 ╇Note that despite Cunaeus’s misgiving, Menippos here says exactly what Cunaeus stated in the Dedication and the Preface.

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ate and hold public debates. Their most recent and pressing political problem is the sudden influx of newcomers, demanding citizen rights. This led to the rise of factionalism, exploited and exacerbated by aristocrats to further their own interests. The proletarian newcomers and the power-hungry aristocrats work together to divide the republic, erode all the old values, and seize everything that they can. The responsible majority of the citizenry set up a Senate, composed of the most venerable and learned scholars. Under its direction they began to debate. One party advocates the ejection of new citizens who proved themselves unworthy, the elimination of automatically endowing all comers with citizen’s rights, and the establishment of selection criteria for granting future newcomers citizenship and suffrage. The other main party advises moderation, and warns that such measures would lead to tyranny. Menippos invites Cunaeus to attend the final debate under his protection. Crossing a forest they come to a river, and are greeted by the Republic’s inhabitants. They are ferried across the river, and join the citizens’ crowd marching across Elysian meadows toward the city. A contingent in the march turns out to be all Dutchmen. They come to a huge underground cavern, and enter. The crowd inside is busy with its usual vulgar pursuits, involving sex, violence, poisoning and bragging. Passing this square, Cunaeus and his guide join a rush of citizens, coming from all directions to the temple of Paideia, where the Senate convoked the meeting. The benches are filled with Greeks, Romans and barbarians, eminent men of learning from all ages and countries. The Speaker of the Senate turns out to be Erasmus himself. He rises to speak. He reminds the assembly of the anger that prompted the meeting. He holds his authority by their command, but he does not share their anger. He asks the citizens for moderation, and vows to use his authority for calm. The influx of newcomers created serious social tension, he continues. A few arrogant citizens turned this into factionalism. Erasmus reminds his audience that he is mindful of their ancient rights and interests, but will not leave the newcomers voiceless and defenseless, either. The learned ones among them deserve citizenship. He invites the audience to stand and speak in favour of, or against, the newcomers. Mayhem breaks out as everyone begins to speak at once. They finally settle down, and Angelo Poliziano takes the floor. He reiterates Erasmus’s message that notwithstanding any clash of interests, the spirit of the republic must remain free from hatred and partisanship. He reminds the Republic’s citizens of their work to

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revive the ancient arts and sciences. This began an era of true happiness, until injustice brought it to an end. Ignorance and spiritual putrefaction now destroy more people than hunger or disease, while foolish scholars threaten divine wrath as the ultimate punishment. But you, immortal scholars, are wise and able to help. You left behind reminders of your divine nature for the whole of eternity to consider. Look at the newcomers: they are ignorant, hateful, and mistakenly hold zealotry to be the price of immortality. There are very few good recent thinkers, and even fewer who are virtuous also. Most writers spread disease and disorder among the public. It is like the seven-day frenzy and delirium induced once by Archelaus’s performance of Euripides’s Andromeda in an intensely hot summer.35 The immortal scholars must attack the problem head-on, instead of further debate. To protect the public interest, the ignorant writers of venomous volumes must be ejected. All newcomers must be branded on the forehead, their beards shaved, and themselves banished. Mercury should announce to all nations the fate of these foolish mortals, and thereby deter future generations of trouble-makers. Knowing that an overlong speech by the same man would annoy the audience, Poliziano then encourages Pico della Mirandola and Hermolaus Barbarus, who belong to the same faction, to take up his argument. But somebody interrupts the Italian hand-over, and demands to speak in defense of the poor. He is a northerner, but a pedant and an ass, affectatiously using obscure words and a droning voice. Menippos interrupts him, orders him to be silent, and calls in a physician, who prescribes long walks, a beetroot diet and plenty of vomiting, to purge the man’s bile. He is laughed out of court, and Hermolaus takes the stage. He begins by pointing out that the turgid and incompetent defender of newcomers represented their qualities faithfully. Moreover, this human blemish on scholarship is politically influential, because he counsels the authorities, and determines what is acceptable and Â�unacceptable teaching. Yet the urgency of the matter under debate is recognised by those who hear the deafening roar of arms throughout Europe. The war is so intense that in a short period it already produced a multitude of historians. Some scholars are lazy, others pretend to receive prophetic visions, and misinterpret regular events to serve their political agenda, and to make money. Hermolaus wishes he 35

╇ Cunaeus’s source here is Lucian, True history.

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could clean the Augean stable and sweep clean the manure from such books. He advises the citizenry to banish these fools. Menippos whispers in Cunaeus’s ear that while he does not care for prophecies, he recognises that Cunaeus is a good man among imbeciles. He encourages Cunaeus to stand up against fools, and suggests that the intellectual and political pretensions of the uneducated can be bought out with riches and leisure. This way they would be satisfied to toil, and come to assist the learned men. Nothing is so evil that it cannot be made use of, if only one knows how.36 Cunaeus is about to retort angrily, when Rudolph Agricola rises to speak. Poliziano and Barbaro spoke well, he begins, but they lack political prudence and pragmatism. Some time ago a group of men, who call themselves philosophers, instituted a new kind of learning.37 Their first act was patricide: they argued against Plato, Aristotle and all ancient philosophy, then replicated them, and claimed originality. Yet these accusers of antiquity are thoroughly unoriginal. All they have is verbal trickery, and a rat-like ability to evade real problems. They generate mental fog and reverse the natural order. Some of them only pretend to be foolish, in order to avoid persecution or to attain more power. All things that sustain life flee from their presence, and they have come to infect the Republic. But they are not insane. Once they destroy everything living from hearts and minds, they will turn to law and government to consolidate their new status. Next, they will bar all correct roads to knowledge and purge civilisation. The few who resist and wander astray will die. The newcomers must be punished, and the contagion prevented. Agricola resumes his seat. Mercury appears with more recently slain newcomers. One of them knows Cunaeus, and they exchange greetings. The man was killed by his relative, a physician, whom he included in his will and then asked him for treatment. Menippos ridicules naïve fools and physicians alike. Mercury continues the official handover of newcomers. Three are ministers and theologians, the rest are philosophers. They are all sick, starved, gaunt and silent. One of the churchmen knows Cunaeus, and tries to impress the scholars with a show of syllogisms and paradoxes. He asks Menippos to become his patron and defender, only to be laughed at. Mirandola begins to speak. 36 ╇ ‘Nihil tam malum est, mi fili, quin aliqua parte prosit, si uti scias.’ Compare Pliny the Younger: ‘Nullus est liber tam malus, ut non aliqua parte prosit.’ 37 ╇ Agricola was well known for his attacks on Scholasticism.

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Piqued at Agricola, he begins by disputing that the ancients are better than the moderns by the mere virtue of their age. Human nature is unchanging and perverse, always praising antiquity and despising the present. Accordingly, he closes with a very brief and vague defence of the newcomers. The majority votes to exile them. However, for the sake of theology and the common good, Erasmus requests further deliberation, and calls the Goddess Sophia as witness. Everyone agrees, and the Cynic Diogenes is sent to find her. She arrives with Alethea (Truth), Parrhesia (Candid Speech), Sophrosyne (Prudence) and Eleutheria (Liberty) as her handmaidens. The theologians shudder, and see little hope. Diogenes is exhausted, and tells Erasmus not to scorn Cynics from now on, and not to give him so difficult a task again. 38 He helps as a citizen, not as a servant. He searched for Sophia among the theologians in vain; they tried to sell him a painted prosÂ� titute instead. As he was about to return empty-handed, Sophia appearÂ�ed from some wilderness. Diogenes drops to the ground, wounded and exhausted, and Sophia begins to speak. The decision to move against the faction of the theologians is the correct one, she says. She is so used to their insults that she would rather remain in her own realm from now on. Far and wide all fools follow her rivals, and turn sacred rites into ridicule. Theologians possess not a trace of her principles, nor the willingness to learn. When they see true priests of Sophia, their indefatigable ambition is to wrestle their power and influence away from them, but without making any effort to pursue learning. They hasten down the quick road, disputing with tricks and cunning. They play the part of scholars, substituting volubility for knowledge, and grimaces for seriousness. Inexperience, flattery and deceit rule the day, and the multitude approves the silliest things it hears. But that is nothing new. The scariest new development is that coarse and untrained thinkers are trying to publicly discuss truly divine matters, on which the highest felicity depends. Many subjects are surrounded by a divine cloud, and it is more pious to believe in than to know about these.39 The highest god 38 ╇ Far from scorning him, Erasmus described Diogenes as a Silenos in the Sileni, 171 and in Praise of Folly, 42-4. Dante was also fond of Diogenes and put him in Limbo, the first circle of Hell, with all the blameless and God-fearing Ancients and Old Testament figures who had the misfortune of dying unbaptised. Divine Comedy, Canto IV, L137. 39 ╇ According to Tacitus, the persistent Drusus’s naval explorations were limited because ‘it was voted more religious and more reverent to believe in the works of Deity than to comprehend them.’ Tacitus, Germania, 34. Drusus died in a fall from

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lives far from prying eyes, ruling alone, without judge or witness. Only a few venerable men are graced with his oracles and inspiration. This is now forgotten, and whoever stumbles blindly in the deepest darkness now confidently believes that he obtained true knowledge, and clings to it in spite of all further evidence. This makes Sophia cry. Frenzy and arrogance are no substitute for the intelligence she demands from her followers, she continues. These wicked theologians never admit the possibility that they are wrong or ignorant of something. False belief is unfortunately a very fertile thing, and it mutates as it proliferates. One erroneous opinion is quickly divided into several, around which factions then form, and they fight endless conflicts due to that one error. The worst of these are the religious conflicts, because there is nothing that can more irresistibly deceive with a fair appearance than religion.40 Yet each pleads the will of God, to win every argument. Encircled by their daydreams and delusions, they are believed by everyone. Epistemically, all men are equally limited, whatever their status and learning. Those who transgress the mind’s proper boundaries disgust Sophia, who lets them destroy themselves by their own conduct.41 She will seek another kingdom and another home. From now on, she will accept as her citizens only those who accept freedom of speech, criticism from others, and never proceed beyond the verisimilar.42 The king of gods sent Sophia into the world to be his horse, like Ampelos, Dionysos’s lover, who fell from a bull due to hubris. Several texts studied and edited by the Leideners, including Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and Ovid’s Fasti, discuss these figures. 40 ╇ Here Cunaeus cites Livy, 39.16: nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio, ‘there is nothing that can more irresistibly deceive with a fair appearance than the pretext of religion.’ Cunaeus, however, omits prava. Montaigne cites the same passage in support of a political argument in “Of Physiognomy”: ‘There cannot a worse state of things be imagined, than where wickedness comes to be legitimate, and assumes with the magistrates’ permission, the cloak of virtue.’ 41 ╇ The phrase is from Sallust, Jugurthine War, 31.6: ‘There is at present no need of violence, no need of secession; for your tyrants must work their fall by their own misconduct.’ 42 ╇ This comment, widely disseminated through the Dutch, German, English and French translations of SV, and through Gerard Brandt’s History of the Reformation, which reprints Sophia’s speech, is Cunaeus’s rudimentary but not insignificant contribution to the development of a response from within theology to both neoskepticism and to the omnipresent loss of certainty after the Reformation. Essentially, renewed interest in the literary notion of verisimilitude, as discussed for instance in Heinsius’s commentary on Aristotle in DTC, informed the nascent mathematisation of probability. Heinsius’s DTC, and this speech by Sophia in SV, are integral to the correct contextualisation of the mathematical breakthroughs by Fermat, Pascal and

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neither completely open, nor completely closed to inquiry. It is just and proper to keep to her temple’s vestibules; they work in vain who try to discern the mysteries hidden in the inner shrine. As Cunaeus listens to Sophia, he is pulled aside and privately addressed by Sophrosyne. She realises that he will be returning to the company of the living, and tells him the greatest secret: those are the most noble who inquire neither into the distant beginnings or depths, nor into the ends of things. The most beautiful knowledge is to know nothing excessively. Men with such right understanding may appear slow and passive to others, but they are the wisest. They know all and not more than what is enough. Yet the majority of people misunderstand them, thereby turning the virtues inside out, and losing even the true names of things.43 Sophrosyne advises Cunaeus to praise few things, struggle for nothing, and observe everything. In the crowd of wise men he must behave as if in a crowded marketplace, walking attentively past the things that men foolishly fight for, to the valuable things that men regard as nothing. Regardless of party division, all of Cunaeus’s acquaintances are in error. The truly wise few will recognise Cunaeus as one of their own, but the majority will judge him perversely. Whatever the partisans assert they know, it is less than nothing. Cunaeus must face his opponents with laughter, not anger, to become a follower of Sophia and Sophrosyne. Cunaeus wants to ask questions, but Sophrosyne disappears in a gust of wind. He begins to doubt whether she was there at all, and whispers to himself that if he ever enjoyed a boon like this speech, he Christiaan Huygens around the middle of the seventeenth century. Pascal’s Wager is now perhaps the best known indication that they conceived of the theological, literary, and mathematical problem in constant interplay with one another. Agricola’s use of Lucianic satires to discuss probability in didactic narration (De inventione II.2), and the Preface of Cunaeus’s SV, exemplify the link between literary verisimilitude and mathematical probability. 43 ╇ The reference to Erasmus’s Sileni is clear. Nonetheless, similarly to Heinsius’s references to this text, Cunaeus also introduces strongly political overtones into this passage, through textual allusions to Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 52.11. On p. 101 Sophrosyne says, ‘Sed vos virtutes ipsas inversum itis, & iam dudum vera rerum amisistis vocabula.’ Compare Sallust, Cat. 52: ‘iam pridem equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus: quia bona aliena largiri liberalitas, malarum rerum audacia fortitudo vocatur, eo res publica in extremo sita est.’ (For some time past, it is true, we have lost the real names of things; for to lavish the property of others is called generosity, and audacity in wickedness is called heroism; and hence the state is reduced to the brink of ruin.) Heinsius achieves a similar politicising effect through textual references to Livy 39, and by comparing the overzealous Christians of his age to the Bacchantes who conspired to threaten the political stability of Rome.

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would be indebted to Heaven. He turns his attention back to the debate. Erasmus, Cassander and Melanchthon complain that the whole world persecutes and disgraces them, because they tried to prudently walk the middle road between hostile parties. A newcomer, a Dutch theologian well known to Cunaeus, stands up to speak. He explains that wisdom guides men to virtue, and reconciles virtue with the desire for honour. He agrees with those who verbally scourge vices, but accuses most of them of hypocrisy and indecent behaviour. The most effective method of teaching is to set an example with one’s life. This not only increases credibility, but also illustrates the imparted principles’ practicability. Charity, concord and mutual love must be practised, not only preached. Ashamed, the speaker confesses to having formerly been a party to foolish theologians’ assemblies, where a disagreement over trivial matters immediately drove everyone into a frenzied fury, bacchanalia, and theatrics. Ambition at most can only assume the appearance of pious devotion, and conceal for a while the self-seeking impulse.44 The Dutchman calls upon the immortal scholars to mend their ways and tell others to rein in their unholy curiosity. He recalls that even when he was one of them, he constantly criticised his theologian peers for their many manifest failings. One trend he witnessed was the sale of ecclesiastical and academic positions to rich but wholly unsuitable commoners. Another such vice was their desire for marriage and children. The Batavian is now interrupted by someone, who praises this desire to follow nature. Having a family grounds a man’s desires and attention in reality. Moreover, he continues (perhaps ironically), now that there are many thousands of men dying due to religious Â�violence, this is a good time for every man, fathers of the homeland and the whole world, to propagate the species. But it is impossible to make the theologians laugh. They suddenly realise that they are no longer masters of the land, and they are in serious trouble. Their petty differences temporarily forgotten, the common danger unites their minds. One of them is chosen to respond in the name of all. He is a distinguished gentleman, with innate nobility, modesty, and virtue. Before he speaks, the other theologians remind him of his responsibility. He begins by admitting the truth of the 44 ╇ Much of this section is based on various parts of Sallust’s Catiline, which Cunaeus reworks masterfully. Adding many puns, he intimates a conspiracy and a civil war in the European republic of letters, with specific allusions to Leiden.

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charges against them. They are indeed prone to over-reaching and transgressing the epistemic boundaries of the human mind. However, they do so from an impulse that is natural to man. Man’s attempt to try to explore and approximate the vast divine intellect is valuable in itself, even if it is bound to fail. Next, he acknowledges that theologians can err, like any other human being. He argues that Sophia accused the theologians not of obstinacy, but only of rashness and immodesty. Once their faults are pointed out, they can change. Other accusations, levelled against them by the common people, are designed to tarnish all religion, and turn men into atheists. Profane people accuse theologians because teachers of virtue are never popular, and have always been the butt of all jokes. The theologians’ spokesman then asks the immortal scholars to make sure that these two unfair, invalid strata of anti-theology accusations do not influence their verdict. Criticism and misunderstanding will not deter them, the theologian says, from doing good deeds, and working as teachers for the whole human race. He warns the scholars that the accusations brought against them are motivated by malice, not truth. He finally asks the scholars for a fair verdict. If they are to be punished, the scholars at least must make certain that the divine laws, mixed up with the theologians’ erroneous teachings, are not violated in the process. Cunaeus thinks that this was an outstanding defense, and visibly affected the audience. The counting of the votes begins. Before the votes are counted, and the Republic makes its gravest decision since its foundation, a messenger arrives and informs ErasÂ� mus that criminals, detained in Tartarus for a thousand years, broke their chains and are planning to invade the Republic. A commotion breaks out: the cowards abandon all hope, the Stoics want to fight, the Skeptics sit idle, the theologians divide among the bellicose and those who wish to entrust the matter to the gods. Menippos leads Cunaeus away, deep into the mountain, where they come across a lightless natural grotto with a wine-fountain and a group of drunks. Menippos mocks them, but they are invited to join. Cunaeus does not mind, because it lets him observe man at his worst, and shows up the witticisms, writings, mutual praises and debates of scholars in their true light, as worthless and inane chatter. One of the revellers declares himself the beginning and end of letters. His side-kick completes and echoes his drunken speeches. After he brags and sings praises to wine, he begins to argue for the use of wine in church, as it both focuses and elevates the mind. Should it lead to excessive drinking in church, all

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the better: wine can bring man into a state of holy madness, beyond the limits of understanding. A priest who sits nearby and knows about the impending invasion begins to goad on the drunkard, and challenges the party to take over the Republic. At this point, Cunaeus makes a sarcastic comment to Menippos, and he is promptly attacked by the drunkard. As he dodges the blow he awakes, angry that he would not find out the resolution of the tale. According to Heesakkers and Matheeussen, its modern editors, the text remained unchanged in the seven editions issued in Cunaeus’s lifetime.45 Heesakkers and Matheeussen are neolatin scholars, and note in their edition of SV many of the classical Latin allusions, references and silent citations in the text (though omitting most of those in the footnotes above). Among the references that they identify Livy, Sallust, Terence and Seneca predominate. Greek, Hebrew, and some Latin references—including Lucian, Erasmus, and Julian, whose Caesares is attached to SV—are not noted, understandably, given the editors’ purposes.46 A parallel translation in a fully annotated edition of this innovative satire, with Heinsius’s Cras credo, hodie nihil, would be of equal interest to historians, literary historians, and historians of political thought. As we saw, one unique feature of SV is the relentless parade of the victims of the Wars of Religion. Another is its wide, European dimension. The few scholars who currently mention SV consider it a piece occasioned by Leiden infighting during the Vorstius affair (described above). In addition, Eyffinger rightly notes that SV is something of a companion piece to Grotius’s well-argued, systematic, official OrdiÂ� num pietas. Yet the numerous editions throughout the century, its roll-call of European speakers, Cunaeus’s consistent signalling of a speaker’s and the marching dead cohorts’ nationality, the early modern German editions and French translation of the text, and indeed the international dimension of the Vorstius affair itself, should alert one to the wider European contexts, both literary and political. 45 ╇ For more on its publishing history, see their Introduction in Cunaeus, Sardi venales. 46 ╇ Compare de Smet, Menippean, 75: ‘It is not our purpose here to enter into a debate about the political and philosophical value of these texts’. Nonetheless, disregard for its political context need not diminish SV’s importance. The neolatinist G. Hess regards it as the culmination of academic satirical tradition for its literary qualities alone. The best secondary literature on SV to date consists of footnote 12, page 4, Geraars, Theorie. It says nothing about the text, but gives exactly the right roll-call and sequence of major influences behind SV.

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Title There is no good explanation for Cunaeus’s choice of title, although not everyone realises that there are rival possibilities. The seventeenthcentury English translator of Brandt’s Dutch translation, for instance, believed that it meant Sprats for sale; others translated it as Sardinians for sale; Eyffinger chose Fools for sale.47 This last is the most probable, although it does not settle the issue. The title’s precise meaning remains uncertain, but narrowing down the possibilities and noting the ambiguity helps to unravel the satire’s message. The phrase, ‘sardi venales’, could equally refer to passages in Plutarch, Cicero, Varro, Festus, Erasmus, or Polydore Vergil. At first glance, the most obvious source seems to be a fragment from Varro’s lost Saturarum Menippearum libri CL. There are two reasons why this comes to mind first. Varro is usually credited as the first to identify Menippean satire as a genre—which he defined simply as a mixture of verse and prose. Secondly, from his teaching duties and correspondence with Grotius it is clear that Cunaeus was occupied with Varro and the origin of Roman satires around the time of SV’s composition. There are also two arguments against Varro as the direct inspiration. First, his Menippeans only survive in snippets, cited by others. His ‘sardi venales’ passage comes from a fragment, and seems to have little in common with SV’s plot: ‘non te tui saltem pudet, si nihil mei revereatur?’48 Second, early modern satirists tended to choose titles that invoked a richer plethora of associations. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1870) gives two other possibilities under ‘Ludi Capitolani’ (715b): One of the amusements at the Capitoline games, a solemnity which was observed as late as the time of Plutarch, was that a herald offered the Sardiani for public sale, and that some old man was led about, who wore a toga praetexta, and a bulla puerilis which hung down from his neck. (Plut. Quaest. Rom. p. 277; Fest. s.v. Sardi venales, & c.) According to some of the ancients this ceremony was intended to ridicule the Veientines, who were subdued, after long wars with Rome, and numbers of whom were sold as slaves, while their king, represented by the old man with the bulla (such was said to have been the costume of the Etruscan kings), was led through the city as an object of ridicule. 47 ╇Noted as first published in 1613 in Eyffinger, “How Wondrously,” 88. Correctly noted as Christmas 1612 in Cunaeus, Hebrew Republic, xxi. 48 ╇ Varro, Men. Frag. LXXVI, Fragmentum CCCCLII. 496.23. See also Erasmus, Adagia—1.6.5 Sardi venales. Polydorus, Adagia, 1524, p. 21: Sardi venales. Cicero, Ad fam. 7.24, 2. Schol. ad Horace, Sat. 1, 3, 3.

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The Veientines, it is further said, were designated by the name Sardiani or Sardi, because they were believed to have come from Lydia, the capital of which was Sardes. This specimen of ancient etymology, however, is opposed by another interpretation of the origin of the ceremony given by Sinnius Capito. According to this author, the name Sardiani or Sardi had nothing to do with the Veientines, but referred to the inhabitants of Sardinia. When their island was subdued by the Romans in B.C. 238, no spoils were found, but a great number of Sardinians were brought to Rome and sold as slaves, and these proved to be slaves of the worst kind. (Fest. l.c.; Aurel. Vict. de Vir. Illustr. c.57.) Hence arose the proverb, Sardi venales; alius alio nequior (Cic. ad. Fam. vii.24), and hence also the ceremony at the Capitoline games.

These connotations are also difficult to relate to Cunaeus’s SV in any meaningful way. His theologians are neither slaves nor slave-owners, and they are not for sale, but venal. Being bad at something resembles their censure at Cunaeus’s hand, but being bad at being a slave is neither their situation, nor clearly morally reprehensible. We must look elsewhere. In the Roman Questions (in Moralia, Book IV) Plutarch explains the origin of 113 odd Roman customs, most of them religious. The salient passage runs: Why do they even now, at the celebration of the Capitoline games, proclaim “Sardians for sale!,” and why is an old man led forth in derision, wearing around his neck a child’s amulet which they call a bulla? Is it because the Etruscans called Veians fought against Romulus for a long time, and he took this city last of all and sold at auction many captives together with their king, taunting him for his stupidity and folly? But since the Etruscans were originally Lydians, and Sardis was the capital city of the Lydians, they offered the Veians for sale under this name; and even to this day they preserve the custom in sport.49

We are getting closer to an explanation. The element of taunting for stupidity and folly makes this a more likely, but still a bit far-fetched source for Cunaeus’s title. Several new Latin translations of the Moralia were published in Cunaeus’s lifetime. Scaliger weighed in on the historical details of the Capitoline games on numerous occasions, and his long-abiding interest in the close textual analysis of Ausonius and Festus probably rubbed off on his Leiden students.50 At any rate, the image of mocking a procession of defeated people for their stupid╇ Plutarch, Roman questions, 53. ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, I.122-3, and passim. His edition of Festus has been called the beginning of modern philology (e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. ‘Sextus Pompeius Festus’). Grafton sees Scaliger’s edition of Ausonius, which followed Poliziano’s and 49 50

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ity (Plutarch) is a more likely and apt inspiration than their low quality as slaves (Festus, Cicero). Without claiming to settle the matter, I would like to suggest two other possibilities. The first, that ‘sardi venales’ refers to a drug, is based on the passage from Sextus Aurelius Victor’s De viris illustribus that Smith also cites. According to this, when Gracchus was consul, he put down a revolt in Sardinia in 177 BC, and brought back so many prisoners that ‘Sardi venales’ became a catch phrase for products that suddenly flood the market, more particularly a drug of some sort or another. If so, then Cunaeus is combining, as good Menippean satirists do, classical references with three self-referential allusions to the Menippean satire genre, namely to Marnix’s 1569 De roomsche byenkorf, the Roman beehive with its poisonous honey, the 1593-4 La Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne, in which catholicon is a substance with powerful laxative and emetic properties, and the laxative Onopordon in Rigault’s Somnium (later entitled Funus parasiticum). The second suggestion is that the title derives from the amalgamation of the early modern satirical symbolism based on the quasi-Christianity of the Emperor Heliogabalus, the venality of Pope Callixtus I, and particular features of their portrayal in the fourth-century Augustan History, and in Rigault’s 1599 Somnium. Let us briefly examine these hypotheses. Aurelius Victor’s (320-390) imperial History of Rome, from Augustus to Julian, was published in 361, the year when Julian the Apostate became emperor. Julian rewarded the History with the prefectship of Pannonia Secunda. Four shorter historical works are attributed to its author: one on the origin of the Romans, another on the origin of illustrious Roman men, on the origin of the Caesars, and one on the lives and deaths of Roman emperors. These four were first edited and published together by Andreas Schotte in 1579.51 If this was his direct inspiration, then Cunaeus’s choice of title was nothing short of genius. This text, and to my knowledge this text alone, attributes to ‘sardi venales’ the two, and only two, specific meanings of defeated Pithou’s, as a similar landmark achievement: Scaliger, I.128-132. Grafton on Festus: Scaliger, I.134-60, and passim. 51 ╇ Andreas Schotte was an acquaintance of Lipsius and of Vulcanius, who owned several of Schotte’s editions. Codices Vulcaniani, Vulc. 10. f1-7, Vulc. 20. 2a, f7-10, Vulc. 21, 29, 31, et al. Scaliger also praised Schotte’s edition: Nelles, “Lipsius,” 238. For Andreas Schotte’s comparative mythography, in a context of dissimulation under persecution, see Brout, “La mythologie.”

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and mocked stupid slaves on the one hand, and cheap drugs, on the other. Aurelius Victor does not use the other referents mentioned above. The mocked foolish slave is clearly useful for Cunaeus; and out of all classical notions and phrases that refer to such slaves he would have been encouraged to pick this one, because the cheap drug association fits very well with a trend in other Menippean satires whereby a drug, poison or liquid is used to symbolise the malignant influence of liars and deceivers. Marnix’s aforementioned Beehive, La Satyra Ménippée, and Rigault’s Somnium are only three such texts that Cunaeus was certainly familiar with. If the drug connotation from Aurelius Victor is present, and the other possible sources can therefore be eliminated, then Cunaeus’s choice of title may also reflect his recent study of Julian the Apostate and Gregory Nazianzen. As we saw earlier, the 1610 Nonnus edition and commentary, as well as Heinsius’s 1611 DTC, show evidence of interest in Julian, and serve as a useful background to Cunaeus’s decision to publish Julian’s Caesares as an appendix to SV.52 Another possible inspiration is the oft-forgotten tale of a confrontation between another apostate Roman emperor and a Christian leader, Heliogabalus (203-22, r. 218-22) and Pope Callixtus I (?-222). According to Saint Hippolytus, his contemporary and enemy (a.k.a. ‘the first antipope,’ ?-235), the young Callixtus once lost all the money of a bank run by his Christian master Carpophorus, including deposits from other persecuted Christians. Callixtus fled from Rome, got caught, and returned to Carpophorus. He was released at the request of the merciful Christian creditors. Callixtus then went to a synagogue, tried to collect debts or borrow some money, and was promptly rearrested in the ensuing fisticuffs. He was denounced as a Christian, and sent to work in the mines of Sardinia.53 When he returned to Rome and became pope, he introduced the doctrine of the absolution of all repented sins. Hippolytus was especially upset by the resulting admission to communion of all those who had committed, and then repented for, murder, adultery, fornication, and the like. Tertullian also objected to this doctrine in no uncertain terms.54 Hippolytus 52 ╇ Voltaire, s.v. ‘Julien’, in Dictionnaire. Eyffinger in his introduction to Cunaeus, Hebrew republic, argues convincingly that Cunaeus’s Animadversiones in the Nonnus edition should be regarded as a major work. 53 ╇ Hippolytus, Philosophumena. Hippolytus was similarly denounced as a Christian and died in a Sardinian salt mine. 54 ╇ Tertullian, On modesty, chapters 1, 21.

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Â�further relates that Callixtus became pope by bribing his predecessor, the ignorant, illiterate, and venal Zephyrinus. The Augustan History, a late Roman collection of biographies from the fourth century AD, contains the anecdote that when the plot on which Callixtus built his oratory was claimed by tavern-keepers, the Emperor—probably Alexander Severus—in an uncharacteristic favour to Christianity ruled that the worship of any god was better than a tavern. Saved from creditors, the resultant building became the foundation of today’s Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the oldest churches still standing in Rome. Callixtus is seen sometimes as a peace-maker because he excommunicated both Hippolytus and Sabellius for their virulent and divisive debate over the nature of Christ.55 Sabellius was a kind of Unitarian or Monarchist and the chief proponent of Modalism, which held that the Trinity was not an essential but a modal description of God. Christ, the Father and the Holy Spirit were all the same Godhead, appearing in different modes. ‘Sabellianism’, like Pelagianism or Nestorianism, became a favourite early modern accusation of heresy, banded about liberally by theologians on all sides. It was applied particularly to those who ventured to point out that nowhere in the Bible is the triune nature of God explained, referred to, or implied in any way, with the sole exception of 1 John 5:7-8. This, the so-called Comma Johanneum, does not appear in the Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and other versions of the New Testament, nor in the early patristic writings. In the Authorised Version it reads, 5:7╇ For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 5:8╇ And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

The Comma Johanneum, indicated in italics, only appears in Latin versions of the Bible from the fourth century onward. It has never commanded a satisfying degree of consensus, and doubts about its authority played a prominent role in debates concerning the Trinity. Erasmus omitted it from his 1516 and 1519 editions of the New Testament, until controversy eventually forced him to include it in 1522. Several later editions of the Greek NT reproduced his omission,

55

╇ Renan, History, Book VII: Marcus Aurelius. Chapter xiv, 129-133.

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but the Comma found its way into the vernacular translations, consolidating its authority.56 Returning from possible doctrinal referents behind Cunaeus’s choice of title, Callixtus was, in sum, venal for a number of reasons: for exchanging his Christianity for the prospect of financial reward when he was young, for building the oratory, for starting the practice of absolution of all repented sins, and for allegedly buying his Roman bishopric. ‘Sardi venales’ was an appropriate description of him in multiple senses: he became a Sardinian slave for the first manifestation of his venality; the second accusation shows a Roman emperor intervening in a commercial dispute in favour of true religion and against drunkenness (a recurring theme in mockeries of Catholicism), the devaluation of absolution being a common Protestant accusation against the papacy; and the last accusation shows Callixtus lording it over the ignoramus Zephyrinus, reminiscent of the pompous old guard attacking the ignorant and profit-seeking newcomers and theologians in SV. The anecdote about the papacy’s dependence on the secular ruler’s preference for church over tavern, which features in the Augustan History but not in Hippolytus or Tertullian, offers another clue. Although the editio princeps of the Augustan History was published in Milan in 1475, the first critical edition that laid out the complex manuscript tradition and gave the collection its name was published by none other than Isaac Casaubon in 1603, the year when Cunaeus visited him in England and their friendship began. Whether then or later, while teaching Roman law and history, Cunaeus must have come across this work. It may also have stirred his satirical impulse. The Augustan History (AH) is a very strange text. It is anonymous, much of it is definitely sheer fiction, and its tone and vocabulary led several critics to conclude that it is a historical satire or a playful mixture of real and invented history, a late Roman 1066 And All That. One of its odd features is that it supplies biographies not only of emperors, but also of their junior colleagues, designated heirs, and would-be usurpers. It is hostile to Christianity, and has been described as pagan propaganda. Its historical method is strikingly unusual for its purported period: it makes fun of antiquarian practices, yet at the same time it systematically cites and invokes a great number of primary sources, legal docu╇ Metzger, The text, 101 ff. The story that a Greek manuscript was forged with the explicit purpose of convincing Erasmus is refuted in de Jonge, “Erasmus.” 56

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ments, eye-witness accounts, imperial letters, extracts from Senate meetings, and the like. Although Sallust, Suetonius and a few other ancient historians have used primary sources often, none did so with the regularity and comprehensiveness of the author(s) of the Augustan History. Also, no other ancient historian who used primary sources as a matter of disciplinary principle is known to have made up and forged every last one of them, as the Augustan historian(s) did. The ratio of rhetoric and fiction rises exponentially after the biography of Caracalla. After a partial return to facts in Heliogabalus, the life of the succeeding Alexander Severus tails off into a long, exemplary fable about the philosopher king. Dessau, Syme and others argued for a late fourth-century date, sometimes hazarding the conjecture of a TheoÂ� dosian editor, rewriter and embellisher working from early fourthcentury histories, and a date of composition around 395. It has been argued, by Norman Baynes amongst others, that it was written a few decades earlier, under Julian the Apostate, as a piece of pagan propaganda against Christianity. Others agree with the pagan propaganda thesis but put the date later, and attribute the deliberate and elaborate obfuscation of authorship to a fear of Christian imperial retribution. Dessau and Mommsen identified textual references to the histories of Aurelius Victor and Eutropius. Eutropius served under Julian in the Persian campaign, and dedicated his Breviarium historiae Romanae to the emperor Valens (r. 364-78). On balance, Syme’s argument for the later date (later than Mommsen’s conjecture), the sophisticated satirical intent and writing strategy, and the motive of self-concealment from Theodosian wrath, are to my mind the most persuasively argued features of AH.57 In spite of the more advanced state of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury classical scholarship, Casaubon, Scaliger and others also realised the fantastic ambiguities in the AH, and the opportunities that they provided. They knew their Roman histories in great detail, including Aurelius Victor’s text; the discrepancies with the AH are glaring. Casaubon was working at the exact same time, around 1603, on unravelling the history of the satirical genre. The historical method described in AH would have appealed to Scaliger as much as their forged contents would have amused him. Other historian in-jokes include the unlikely proposition that the Emperor Tacitus (c. 200-76, r. 275-6) was a direct descendant of the historian; a whole universe of invented historians, witnesses and secondary authorities that the AH 57

╇Syme, Historia. Mommsen, History, 464.

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author(s) call(s) on for evidence; and scenes like an imaginary historian’s record of a conversation he had with the prefect of Rome during the festival of Hilaria, in which the prefect urged him to write a great and memorable biography of the Deified Aurelian, from whom he himself claims descent. If there are no primary sources to be found, he advises, the historian is welcome to make things up, as Livy, Sallust, Tacitus and others have done. The AH author(s) then embed(s) a couple of poems in the biography, supposedly composed in honour of Aurelian’s military exploits, and introduce(s) the first with the words: ‘the boys even composed in his honour the following jingles and dance-ditties, to which they would dance on holidays in soldier fashion’.58 Although Syme’s theory remains hotly contested, the sense of reading a first-rate satire, not a history, is very hard to avoid. Anthony Birley, for instance, believes that the first half of AH is based on the otherwise lost works of Marius Maximus (160?—after 223), the phenomenally successful novus homo and writer, a contemporary of Heliogabalus and Callixtus, twice consul, prefect of Rome, governor of Gallia Belgica, governor of Coele-Syria, proconsul of Asia and later Africa, and colleague of the later Emperor Alexander Severus (208-35, r. 222-35) as consul in 223. Imitating Suetonius, he composed the biographies of twelve emperors, entitled Caesares, full of anecdotes, scandals and gossip, instead of facts, reports, or analysis.59 A vivid and detailed section of AH, concerning the decadent life and latrinal assassination of Heliogabalus, is generally considered to derive from Marius’s account. Birley’s Penguin edition of AH as The Lives of the Later Caesars is based on his assumption that AH up to Septimius Severus (145-211, r. 193-211) replicates Marius’s text in more or less intact form; he therefore removes the rest of the AH, and adds the lives of Nerva and Trajan himself. Syme, however, contends that AH’s interpolations of Marius are too random and too creative to warrant this division of AH into a more factual Marian, and a wholly fictitious later part. It is interesting to note that while the eccentric author(s) of AH draw(s) heavily and often on Marius, whose work undoubtedly fails to meet historiographical standards (ancient or modern alike), he or they playfully criticise(s) Marius as ‘homo omnium verbosissimus, ╇ AH, chapter on Aurelian. ╇Since this text was known to AH’s author(s) in the middle or the end of the fourth century, it was probably known to Julian, as well. Can the parade of emperors in Julian’s Caesares, the exposition of their flagrant vices, and the moral judgement of Silenos upon each and every one of them, be at least partly inspired by Marius’s Caesares? 58 59

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qui et mythistoricis se voluminibus implicavit.’60 This is the only known occurrence of ‘mythistoricis’ in Latin. Another reason why this is relevant to SV’s mysterious title is that Heliogabalus, the emperor who sent Callixtus to Sardinia, became an intricate but valuable code in his own right in early modern Menippean satires. Heliogabalus was a controversial Severan emperor, born in modern-day Syria, who ruled from 218 to 222. He worshipped El-Gabal, the local version of the generic Semitic god El. Similarly to what Akhenaton did in Egypt, and in contrast with Julian’s policy of toleration, Heliogabalus replaced the entire Roman pantheon with El-Gabal under its aspect as ‘Deus Sol Invictus.’ He created his own rituals and led them in person. His extreme decadence made him reviled throughout the subsequent centuries, with the exception of his hero-worship by Baudelaire, Alma-Tadema, Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, and other members of the Decadent movement. Practically the only contemporary who had a good word for him was Julius Africanus, whose request to rebuild his hometown, Emmaus, was granted by Heliogabalus. Although Africanus now only survives in extracts and citations in Eusebius’s Chronicon, Scaliger, as already mentioned, had a high regard for him: ‘There is nothing rich, old or excellent that Eusebius did not take from Africanus.’61 After his death, Heliogabalus was subjected to damnatio memoriae.62 If Heinsius and Cunaeus knew and studied the AH at Leiden around 1612, it may also be a source for Heinsius’s DPDH, in which paganism, eternal life, and the paradoxes and glory of being a historian are the defining themes. In spite of Scaliger’s verdict against Eusebius, and in favour of Africanus, it is Marius’s account of Heliogabalus and his parasites, as found in the AH, rather than Africanus’s surviving description, that served as the source for Nicolas Rigault’s (1577-1654) Menippean Â�satires. Rigault published commentaries on Phaedrus, Aesop, Juvenal, Persius and de Thou, but here only one of his satires will be discussed. In 1596 Rigault, then a law student at Poitiers, published Satyra Menippaea. Somnium; Biberii Curculionis parasiti mortualia apta ad 60 ╇ AH, “Firmus, Saturninus, Proculus and Bonosus.” On Marius and AH see also Syme, Historia, 42-3. 61 ╇ ‘Nihil enim luculentum, vetustum, excellens in eo est, quod non ex Africano deprompserit.’ Scaliger, ThT Prolegomena, cited in Grafton, Scaliger, II.582-3. 62 ╇Some connections between the Leiden Circle’s works and damnatio memoriae are discussed above in chapter 3, 5.1.

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ritum prisci funeris. De Smet calls it ‘a politique satire in the wake of the Satyre Ménipéé,’ as well as ‘the first emulation of Justus Lipsius’ Somnium.’63 Expanded editions followed in 1599, 1601, 1606 and so on, and the title changed to Funus parasiticum (FP) and dropped ‘Menippean satire.’ It is a brilliant combination of the mock eulogy and the parasite theme. The action takes place on Onocrene, the island of donkeys, and begins with clever speeches by Apuleius and Lucian. Soon the scene shifts to the funeral rites of L. Biberius M. F. Curculio, the recently deceased parasitic donkey and favourite dinner companion of Heliogabalus. After the eulogies and flute-playing, Heliogabalus takes the lead in the funeral procession. He previously consumed a laxative called Onopordon, which begins to work its effect at this point. The crowd parts spontaneously, without the need for lictores, to let him forward. A great feast, monuments and praises end the satire. De Smet charts the textual and thematic changes in the various versions and revisions up to the 1601 edition.64 De Smet sets out to recover the key to the meaning of FP, and Â�concludes that it was written under the reign of Henri IV to ridicule Henri III. Heliogabalus’s limp is, according to de Smet, a reference to Henri III’s gout, rather than to Claudius’s infliction in Seneca’s ApoÂ� colocyntosis. The cross-dressing and sun-worshipping elements of Heliogabalus’s career are also brought in as cryptic references to Henri III. Yet each of the connections that de Smet brings up can apply equally easily to the famously gout-ridden Pope Clement VIII (pope 1592-1605), who reconciled Henri IV to the Catholic church, and was known for his anti-Semitism. Protestant and/or moderate humanists like Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus or Scaliger, discussed the continuities between Judaism and Christianity. To such scholars, Clement’s attacks on the Jews and the Jewish elements of a dehistoricised Roman Catholicism would recall, through a straightÂ�forward inversion customary in Menippean satires, HelioÂ�gabalus’s replacement of the established Roman religion with a corrupt Semitic sect. The reference to the adage about the one-eyed being king among the blind, which Rigault introduced into the last revision of FP, also applies more easily to Clement’s expulsion of Jews from Rome with the 1593 bull Caeca et obdurata Hebraeorum perfidia (from which the slur ‘kike’ is often said to derive from), than to the indirect evidence that de Smet offers for a 63 64

╇ De Smet, Menippean, 117. ╇ De Smet, Menippean, 120-1.

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solar-king iconography under Henri III, the supposed Heliogabalus, and her attendant supposition that a mistranslation of Heliogabalus as “Sun-shine Nag” evoked blindness, and thereby the aforesaid adage, in the reader’s mind. This is the evidence she presents for a ‘most convincing identification of Henri III with Heliogabalus’.65 The parasite himself, for instance, is left unidentified. She also leaves it unclear which version of AH Rigault would have had access to, before Casaubon’s editio princeps, which came out only in 1603. More compelling are the connections she draws between FP, La Satyre Ménippée, and the Ioci funebres in the Nugarum liber of the aforementioned Eyndius, published in Leiden in 1611.66 Cunaeus therefore could have heard about Rigault’s satire from several possible sources. The Leiden professor Paulus Merula owned an unbound copy at his death, and so did Scaliger. De Thou had a copy of the 1601 edition of FP, and was in frequent correspondence with Scaliger. He also had Rigault appointed guardian of the Royal Library, and in his will entrusted the education of his own children to Rigault. Rigault wrote a continuation of de Thou’s politique history. And although de Smet fails to mention this, Rigault’s satire was accompanied by his translation of the letters of Julian the Apostate, only a few years before Cunaeus published Sardi venales, attaching his translation of Julian’s Caesares to it. In his 1693 edition Cellarius identifies several connections to Rigault’s satire in Cunaeus’s early oration on Juvenal.67 The link between the SV and the FP was clear to contemporaries. They were published together in several editions, most notably in the 1620 Leiden Quatuor clariss. virorum satyrae, which included Rigault’s FP, Lipsius’s Somnium, Cunaeus’s SV, and his translation of the Caesares by Julian—the last of the four illustrious men. Rigault’s Menippean satire, Casaubon’s 1603 edition of AH, and his 1605 De satyrica—all books that Cunaeus had read by 1612—enabled the following train of thought: AH is a satire, masking as history. Its authorial intention and responsibility is as skilfully obscured as possible. It is the main source for the life of Heliogabalus (probably beside Marius’s Caesares), who tried to introduce a religion similar to Christianity in order to replace Christianity itself. Christianity at the ╇ De Smet, Menippean, 136. ╇ De Smet, Menippean, 139-40. On Eyndius see Heesakkers, “From Italian prose.” 67 ╇ Cunaeus, Oratio XII in Orationes, 225, 227, 229-30, 239-40, etc. 65 66

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time was represented by Callixtus, a dishonourable and venal pope who, in addition to personal venality, defiled the church and the papacy by devaluing absolution, provoking the first anti-papacy. Julian’s Cynicism, satirical Caesares against Constantine, and his historian’s, Aurelius Victor’s association of ‘sardi venales’ with venality, foolishness, and a cheap drug (similar to the French politique 1593-4 La Satyre Ménippée’s ‘catholicon,’ the absolving Eucharist in Marnix’s Beehive, and Rigault’s Onopordon), combine to make ‘sardi venales’ Cunaeus’s perfect title, rich in satirical associations, and the Latin translation of Julian’s satire its perfect companion-piece. Note also that de Smet, Robinson, and commentators on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, provide plenty of primary textual evidence for this level of complexity in the title, message and layout of other satires from the same period. Also note that while Marnix, Kaspar Scioppius (1576-1649), and the satirists edited by Rummel wrote against one Christian denomination or another, and constructed their symbolism accordingly, Heliogabalus and Julian stand for opposition to the entire religion, announcing and matching the core of SV. In summary, although pinpointing the exact source for the title remains a challenge, the balance of evidence indicates that not Varro, Cicero, Plutarch, Polydore Vergil, Erasmus or other expositions of the adage, but Aurelius Victor or the AH are its most probable classical sources, overlaid by layers of meaning taken from Marnix’s, French politiques’, Rigault’s, and other Menippean satires. These are only probable explanations for the title. The continuous procession of the recently murdered fools in the background of the satire remains, for instance, an untraced image of unmatched urgency. The intellectual, textual, and publishing connection between Cunaeus’s SV and Rigault’s FP, Casaubon’s 1603 AH edition, and Scaliger’s work on Africanus, support the AH theory, while the Cynical features of SV, including the actual attachment of Cunaeus’s edition and translation of Julian’s Caesares to the SV, and Scaliger’s work on Aurelius Victor, suggest that this was the main inspiration. In either case, the idea behind SV is the figure of a venal and hypocritical Christian leader (Christ, Constantine the Great, or Callixtus I), and his criticism by an apostate Emperor (Julian or Heliogabalus). Whether Cunaeus took it from Aurelius Victor, the AH, or a combination of these, the title carries several possible connotations and combinations of connotations that cannot be settled here with a greater degree of certainty. Yet the common features of the two most

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probable sources are more than sufficient to support the case for SV being not an anti-Catholic, but an anti-theology satire. This will be confirmed by an analysis of SV’s contents, even if a single origin of the title remains hard to pinpoint. We may have more luck with the political message of Cunaeus’s choice of genre. 2.2.2.╇ Context Cynicism: Against Faith In SV Cunaeus gives several signs of his alliance with the Cynics. The title identifies the work as a Menippean satire. Second, Menippos himself—who does not appear in all Menippean satires—serves as Cunaeus’s faithful guide, and supplies a Cynical running commentary throughout the SV. Third, of all the scholars in the republic only Diogenes the Cynic succeeds in locating and inviting Sophia. Fourth, SV draws heavily on the Cynical writings of Julian the Apostate, whose Caesares in Cunaeus’s edition of the Greek original and in his Latin translation was published as a companion to SV, using the Leiden MSS that remains to this day the single most authoritative source for Julian.68 Finally, three of the five symbolic Greek women—Eleutheria, Parrhesia and Sophrosyne—appear together, with the same allegorical meaning as in SV, only in Cynical sources. What was the early modern significance of so thoroughgoing an invocation of the Cynics, especially Menippos, and why did Cunaeus choose the form of a Menippean satire to propose his secularising solution to the Vorstius controversy, and to the wider European religious conflict? The answers come in three sections: first, a short introduction to Menippos and Lucian in Renaissance and early modern Europe, followed by a definition and literary critical overview of Menippean satires, and finally a selective reconstruction of SV’s Â�politique context. The sub-sections on Cynics, Menippos, Menippean 68 ╇ This MS is now known as the Vossianus, as it was edited and published by Isaac, the son of Gerardus Vossius. It is uncertain whether Cunaeus used the same MS for his translation of this anti-Christian and anti-imperial Cynical satire, which has Silenos as its protagonist. According to Sardiello, ‘Una dozzina d’anni dopo, ovvero nel 1612, Peter van d. Kuhn (Cunaeus) ripubblica a Leida il testo greco del Cantoclarus—dopo avervi apposto solo piccole correzioni—insieme con la traduzione latina, rinnovata e rimaneggiata per fini di eleganza. Il tutto è preceduto da una introduzione dove Giuliano è presentato con tratti di simpatia, in virtu dell’austerita del suo carattere.’ Julian, Simposio, XXXIII.

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Â� satire, and Lucian and early modern satire, are not comprehensive overviews, only short descriptions of selected characteristics that pertain to Cunaeus’s secularising method. Early modern neostoicism and neoskepticism are much-discussed topics. There is no need to reproduce the surrounding debates here.69 SV is not a neostoic or neoskeptical text; it is a contribution to the Leiden Circle’s distinctive, secularising epistemological position.70 It also displays the hallmarks of Cynicism: flouting social conventions, disbelief in the goodness of human motives, and a contemptuous feeling of superiority. It features two Cynics by name, Diogenes and MenipÂ�pos. Menippos Mommsen called Menippos ‘the father of feuilleton-literature,’ ‘the most genuine representative’ of Diogenes’s dog-wisdom, the merry master advocate of the same simple and honest life that we found in Heinsius’s bucolics.71 Menippos of Gadara (330?-260? BC) was a Greek Cynic and satirist, who lived in what is today Jordan. Diogenes Laertius reports that he was originally a slave, who amassed a fortune from money-lending, then committed suicide when he lost it all.72 He wrote in a mixture of prose and verse, most gladly against Epicureans and Stoics. Two surviving titles from his works are Necromancy and The sale of Diogenes.73 His greatest advocate and imitator is Lucian of 69 ╇ Popkin, The history; Skepticism. Oestreich, Neostoicism. Tuck, Philosophy. One should also remember Floridi’s salutary warning against oversimplification: ‘Equating unbelief and skepticism, either during the Middle Ages or in the following epochs, without any further proviso, simply means muddling the history of skepticism and misinterpreting its importance.’ Floridi, Sextus, 15. In what follows, even the Cynicism present in SV will need further qualifications to explain its secularising effect. 70 ╇ On the useful Popkinian emphasis of neoskepticism, and his clearing of the ground for tracing neocynicism, see Laursen, “Popkin’s Skepticism.” 71 ╇ ‘der echteste literarische Vertreter derjenigen Philosophie, deren Weisheit darin besteht, die Philosophie zu leugnen und die Philosophen zu verhöhnen, der Hundeweisheit (Anm.: gemeint ist Kynismus, von κυνος = Hund) des Diogenes; ein lustiger Meister ernsthafter Weisheit, bewies er in Exempeln und Schnurren, dass ausser dem rechtschaffenen Leben alles auf Erden und im Himmel eitel sei, nichts aber eitler als der Hader der sogenannten Weisen.’ Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, V.12. 72 ╇ Diogenes Laertius, Lives, vi.8. I. 73 ╇ This was a popular title of caricatures upon Diogenes. Menippos, Lucian, Eubulus and Hermippus all wrote one. The last may hold a clue to SV. According to Diogenes Laertius, Hermippus had a scene in his Sale of Diogenes in which Diogenes was taken prisoner and put up for sale. Asked what he could do, he answered, ‘Govern men.’ And so he bade the crier ‘give notice that if any one wants to purchase a mas-

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Samosata (c.125—after 180), in whose writings he frequently appears. Some critics believe that Lucian’s Menippos is Menippos’s own Necromancy, or at least a very close imitation. Varro named his Menippean Satires after him because they combined prose and verse; but as only fragments of these survive, Lucian is a more prominent source of the idiom of political satires that Lipsius dubbed Menippean. Lucian: textbooks of dissent “Every country hath its Machiavell, every age its Lucian” Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pt. 1, sect. 20

All of Lucian’s surviving works, not only his Menippos-related writings, constitute a phenomenally important source for Renaissance and early modern satire. Lucian’s satires offered sophisticated treatments of subjects like tyrannicide, free will, predestination, Christians’ folly and gullibility, history-writing, the efficacy of prayer, and so forth. Not surprisingly, the More-Erasmus collaborative project of translations and commentaries on Lucian (1505-6, and revised until their deaths) inspired numerous early modern discussions. It is also understandable that More, like Kepler, chose this project as the “first fruits” of his Greek studies, as he wrote to Thomas Ruthall. His earliest surviving Latin prose is also a commentary on Lucian.74 The secondary literature on this project is inexhaustible and riveting.75 Some of ter, there is one here for him.’ When he was ordered not to sit down he said, ‘It makes no difference, for fish are sold, be where they may.’ 74 ╇ Thompson in More, Collected, xxv. It was a response to Lucian’s Tyrannicide. Although Tacitus named this as a typically absurd and perverse topic for a declamation (Dialogus, 35), More chose to follow Lucian here. Thompson in More, Collected, xxxiv. Lucian’s tyrant is probably the origin of the Shakespearean portrayal of Richard III, a major source of which was More’s The history of kinge Richard the thirde. Ackroyd shows that The history was a stylistic exercise, a disputatio, not a real history. Life, ch. 15. Thompson argues, very plausibly to my mind, that the Aldine volumes of Greek authors owned by More’s Utopians (whose favourite author was Lucian) were More’s own Lucian: Thompson in More, Collected, xl-xli. In the letter to Ruthall, More explicitly defends the truth of Lucian’s assertions from accusations of paganism, agrees with him—against St. Augustine—about the spuriousness of the Christian miracle of the two Spurinnae, and advocates using Lucian’s Cynicism against other Christian stories that may only serve to turn the religion into a laughing-stock. Thompson in More, Collected, 4-7. 75 ╇ The highlights are: Benda, The tradition; Bompaire, Lucien; Ligota and Panniza, Lucian; Relihan, Ancient Menippean; Robinson, Lucian. These are specialised to certain eras of Menippos’s influence. Good general introductions to a period in intellectual history can also begin with Menippos, since smart satires capture the spirit of

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the best minds of the Renaissance took Lucian for their model, and the More-Erasmus parallel editions became standard school Greek textbooks. Subsequent generations were introduced to the venerable language through the Lucianic treatment of the aforementioned subjects. Lucian’s Zeus rants and Zeus catechized, for instance, must be seen as the starting-point of many a Protestant and/or Catholic debate on predestination. Thanks to the use of the More-Erasmus editions, Lucian supplied school children during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion with arguments against predestination, perhaps not entirely without a secularising effect. During the Arminian—Calvinist conflicts, and in the run-up to the Synod of Dordt, Lucianic passages assumed the particular meanings of the circumstances in which they were read. As a sign of the highest honour that history can bestow on a writer, ‘Lucianist’ became a term of abuse comparable with ‘Hobbist’ or ‘Machiavellian.’ It was used in this sense by Pirckhermeir against Reuchlin, by Luther against Erasmus, by John Firth and others against Thomas More, by Gabriel Harvey against Robert Greene, and so on.76 Tyndale and his fiercest critic came together in a rare moment of agreement in that teasing out the truth from Christianity with Lucianic jokes, like More did, was wholly unacceptable.77 Even though Lucian was widely seen as an explicitly anti-Christian writer (for Mors Peregrini, though Philopatris was also attributed to him at the time), More and Erasmus repeatedly defended their translation and dissemination with the argument that Lucian is an unrivalled guide to detecting and exposing hypocrisy, superstition and fraud.78 This constellation of rhetorical connotations seems ideally suited to Cunaeus’s objective, even more so than to Lipsius’s satire against the critics, or to Scaliger’s and Heinsius’s satirical attacks on parasitic scholars; yet the modern editors of SV did not detect a single reference to Lucian in the text. Parasitism was a charge that a well-trained Lucianist could level against anyone with ease. In addition to the Menippean and ‘man in an age; see e.g. Rummel’s Humanist-scholastic. No wonder that Hume read Lucian on his deathbed, and imagined himself in the scene of Dialogues of the dead, making excuses to Charon. See Adam Smith’s letter to William Strahan, 9 Nov, 1776, appended to Hume, The life, 47-51. 76 ╇ Robinson, Lucian, 97 and passim. Thompson in More, Collected, xliv, fn 2. See also Elyot, The Governour, I.58: ‘It were better that a childe shuld neuer rede any parte of Luciane than all Luciane.’ 77 ╇ Thompson in More, Collected, xxiv, xxxiii-iv, and li, fn 2. 78 ╇ References by Thompson in More, Collected, xliii, fns 1, 2.

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the moon’ themes, discussed below, Lucian was famous for converting the Cynical, Sophist and rhetorical virtues of flexibility and adaptation into the complex symbolic figure of the parasite.79 Nesselrath convincingly showed that Lucian’s The parasite; or that parasitic is an art is a satirical and paradoxical dialogue based on a rhetorician’s attack on Stoicism.80 Simon the parasite uses the Socratic dialogue form to make Tychiades admit that parasitism is an art or profession. Simon also invalidates Stoic arguments along the way, and leads Tychiades to the conclusion that parasitism is superior to all Philosophy—but also to Rhetoric. Homer, Plato and other figures are shown to owe their fame to their willingness to become parasites, whenever they could. The second Nesselrath essay in the volume, practically a free-standing monograph, is a superb demonstration of Lucian’s technical mastery of the philosophical arguments and terminology of his day. Lucian’s early modern readers were not mistaken or forcing the material when they picked up and carried on with the direct and immediate epistemological relevance of Lucianic satires. The Man in the Moon Lucian’s influence on Renaissance and early modern satire was not only widespread, it was also diverse. In addition to giving Menippos the textual and philosophical features of a Cynic for future generations to copy and refer to, Lucian also developed the ‘man in the moon’ topos. In Icaromenippus, the old sage travels to the moon. The image of a Cynic observing earthly affairs from such height became extremely popular in the sixteenth century, and gained an additional set of meanings from the cosmological debates and discoveries. Icaromenippus was not Lucian’s only lunar fiction. Around 160 AD, the savant wrote another satire on a trip to the Moon, the True history.81 The privileged observational position he ascribed to Menippos ╇ The origin of the specific image and discourse about the parasite was probably Stoic, but early modern scholars thought that it was Lucian’s. Gilbert, Renaissance concepts, 70. 80 ╇Nesselrath, Lukians Parasitendialog. 81 ╇ Referenced in Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 50. Thomas Franckling, Greek Professor at Cambridge and the first English translator of the True history, wrote in his 1780 commentary: ‘Modern astronomers are, I think agreed, that we are to the moon just the same as the moon is to us. Though Lucian’s history may be false, therefore, his philosophy, we see, was true.’ The 1887 Cassell editors found it necessary to tersely add to this the comment, ‘The moon is not habitable.’ Nevertheless, Fredericks argues convincingly that the True history is the oldest known science fiction because 79

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could even be appreciated separately from his Cynicism. Thomas Morton (1564-1659) wrote unflatteringly about Menippos as the ‘man in the moon,’ ‘beholding all the infinite corners of the world,’ and George Chapman (1559?-1634) featured him no less begrudgingly in The blinde beggar of Alexandria (1598). More approving was Michael Drayton (1563-1631), who took some time off from his vast PolyOlbion (famously annotated by Selden) to pen The Man in the Moon in 1605, which he later rewrote and reissued many times. Bishop Francis Godwin’s satire of the same title (written in 1620, first published in 1638) is perhaps the best known literary usage of this otherworldly perspective, which ultimately goes back to Menippos. The Lucianic works on Menippos as space traveller inspired Ben Jonson’s 1620 News from the New World discovered in the Moon. And so on. One could multiply the references almost endlessly to support the point about the importance of the lunar perspective in epistemology and political commentary.82 For now I will only mention one other work, Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) extraordinary Somnium. As the comparison with Scaliger’s historiography helped to clarify the similarities and the differences between their methods (they used the same sources and disciplines, but for Scaliger history, for Kepler, observation gave the final word of judgement), a comparison with Kepler’s Somnium can help to sharpen our understanding of the nature of the epistemic humility that Cunaeus developed in Sardi venales. Kepler wrote Somnium in 1609 and began to circulate the manuscript cautiously, but not cautiously enough. A copy got away from him in 1611, the year before SV. A distorted account of its contents later found its way into the charges brought against Kepler’s mother for witchcraft. Kepler spent much of 1617-23, the years of the trial, defending his mother, and composing explanatory notes to his satire. it uses the Greek “physical sciences” to create credible alternative realities for his combination of satire, thought experiment, and systematic treatise on epistemology. Fredericks, “Lucian’s.” 82 ╇ All the works mentioned here reward close attention to the epistemological statements made or implied in them. The list of works that use Menippos specifically to connect epistemological and political topics continues, and includes Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 49-52 and passim. For analyses of the epistemological implications of other satires see de Smet, Menippean, Robinson, Lucian, and Bracht, Cynics. For a list of satires that should be so read see Kirk, Menippean. For the politics, see Appelbaum, Literature. Lauvergnat-Gagniere, Lucien. McRae, Literature. Sellin, “The politics.” Cyrano de Bergerac and Fontenelle are obvious connections; the above overview is limited to major seventeenth-century English works that followed the Lucian tradition to which Sardi venales also belonged.

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It is a magnificent text, rich and strange, and its present discussion is severely limited. In the second of his several hundred notes Kepler relates that he learnt Greek and prepared for Somnium by studying Plutarch’s Face of the moon, and Lucian’s True history. The Somnium’s indebtedness to Lucian’s Menippos is also clear.83 It is a rich combination of allegory, autobiography, Cynicism, and ‘new science.’ Kepler describes a non-geocentric cosmological system from the perspective of someone who reaches the moon after a fantastic voyage. Heeding the imperative of life-saving ambiguity in early modern satires (though as the trial shows, not quite successfully), this cosmology is explained by a daemon, whose shadowy nature at times seems to be an accurate and self-validating part of Kepler’s scientific description of the Moon’s reflected light. At other times it leaves the reader wondering whether the daemon is telling the truth. Cunaeus’s use of Menippos, Lucian’s man on the moon, is less subtle in SV.84 Cynics, including Menippos, were also known to Renaissance and early modern scholars as compilers of catalogues of individual sins and social vices. This is how they appear in George Gascoigne’s 1576 satire The Steele Glas, in which the narrator Satyra catalogues the social wrongdoings of the time. Imitations of Theophrastus’s CharacÂ� ters began to rise rapidly in number at the same time, the turn of the seventeenth century, and for much the same reason as Lucianic and Cynical works: political and religious criticism was best exercised behind the veil of humanistic exercises in style. One of the most Â�popular Latin translations of the Characters, reissued well into the eightÂ�eenth century, was by Isaac Casaubon. Bishop Joseph Hall’s sixvolÂ�ume Virgidemiarum (1597-1602) and Characters of vertues and vices (1608) are the most compendious attempts to list all the modern moral Â�shortcomings, followed closely by Bishop John Earle’s aphoristic, hilarious and anonymously published Microcosmographie (1628).85 Still, attempts to deflect the blame for political criticism by hiding behind a Cynical genre were not always successful. Sir Thomas 83 ╇ Kepler, Somnium, including Lear’s and Rosen’s introductions. Chen-Morris, “Shadows.” 84 ╇ But other Leiden scholars like Pontanus and Snellius, influenced by Scaliger, did grasp the possibilities inherent in a satirical presentation of sensitive astronomical speculation. Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 37-45. 85 ╇ In keeping with the genre, there are very few specific references to people and events in this widely popular book (ten editions in Earle’s lifetime). Oddly, the majority of these few references are not to English but to contemporary Dutch figures. See e.g. X, XLV.

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Overbury, a friend of Cornwallis (an English imitator of Cunaeus) and author of another Characters, modelled on Theophrastus and the Cynic list of vices, was poisoned in the Tower in 1613 for his trouble. The second part of John Barclay’s great Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (published in 1605-7 and including, as the first part, a mock Jesuit play-within-a-play) was deciphered, the authorial intention and the references proven, and the book put on the Index. Similarly to how ‘method’ and ‘dignity’ changed their meanings in both Latin and the vernaculars around this time, Cynical lists of vices metamorphosed into the early ‘anatomies,’ all of which, according to Frye, were in fact Menippean satires as well.86 The most Menippean of these were written by John Harington of Kelston, who was first banished from court for his 1596 Metamorphosis of Ajax (a satire against the Earl of Leicester and a pun on ‘a jakes,’ the first flushing toilet in Britain, of Harington’s own design), followed by An anatomie of the metamorphosed Ajax, and Ulysses upon Ajax. The anatomy best known now is undoubtedly Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, published first in 1621 under the pseudonym, Democritus Junior. To understand SV, one must remember the early modern distinction and interplay between the connotations and functions of Menippos as a Cynic, eponym of a new genre, cataloguer of sins, and the man in the moon whose presence denotes that the text will deal with epistemical, and/or with cosmological issues. All the Menippean satires described above deploy Menippos in one or more of these senses. Some of them, like Kepler’s Somnium, combine these established and distinct functions for particular ends, for instance to present a cosmological position with profound epistemic implications, or to trace a whole catalogue of vices back to epistemic hubris. While all these functions are innovatively combined in SV, they are not equal. SV takes place in the Epicurean intermundia, but the emphasis is on Cynicism and epistemic issues, at the expense of cosmology. Kepler and Cunaeus, like Erasmus, More, Harington, Earle, Galileo and others, set up guards against the plain literal reading of the con86 ╇ A counter-example to this argument comes from serious texts that called themselves anatomies, and offered a theological classification of types of ‘atheism.’ Wingfield’s Atheisme close and open, anatomized (1634), for instance, cannot be called a Menippean satire. Lyly’s famous 1578 Euphues: the anatomy of wit also contains serious theological arguments, and Euphues’s conversation partners, including Atheos, add up to a classification of errors. See Hunter, “The problem” for more examples of anatomies, Theophrastian imitations, and allied genres that framed seventeenthcentury discussions of philosophical doubt, rationality, and atheism.

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tents of their dialogues and satires as the authors’ own opinion. The onoeiric framework, the ‘man in the moon’ fictive device, the ambiguous credibility of the guide, and other such solutions enabled them to express contentious, even dangerous theological and scientific opinions in a playful disguise, without sacrificing complexity. Yet in Kepler’s account, the epistemic position occupied by the man in the moon is justified by observation; in Cunaeus, observation is given short shrift, together with faith and the guidance of human nature, and wisdom depends on severely limiting one’s inquiries to issues and formulations that cannot lead to violence. How could the figure of Menippos allow such a writing strategy, and what other connotations did the choice of the genre named after him carry? Menippean Satire: Definition and Overview of the Critical Literature The notion that Menippean satires constitute a point of departure in European thought has occurred to several outstanding intellectual historians and literary critics. Unfortunately, there is no workable definition of the genre. The broad consensus is that Menippean satires were a turning-point because they dared to question and subvert faith-based parts of the European Weltanschauung. Critics invariably offer a widely varying list of works that they believe constitute the genre. Many of them base their opinion on formal or incidental characteristics that they perceive, sometimes at the expense of elementary, uncomplicated textual analysis that begins with an author’s own statements, whether in the satire, in his or her correspondence, or in other sources, concerning the origin, motive and universe of references in the text. Cotemporaneous contexts are also regularly ignored in favour of anachronistic schemes of intellectual progress. Even if the precise reception is not always properly traced, at least the significance of Lucian and Menippean satires is generally recognised. This does not mean that the literary cognoscenti agree on a definition of what a Menippean satire actually is. Perhaps its most widely accepted characteristic is the mixture of prose and verse, but the dream framework and the satirical intent are also often mentioned. Literary genre boundaries are notoriously blurry. Yet even these three basic characteristics have counterexamples: there are texts that identify themselves as members of the genre, yet lack one or more of these formal characteristics, and other texts exist that call themselves something else (masques, anti-masques, pasquinades, animal fables and

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imaginary travels), but incorporate all three. It is best to cast our net a little wider in the trawl for, if not a definition, at least a viable approximation to one. What we will not arrive at is a hard and fast rule for identifying Menippean satires. Since it livened up and informed the spirit of the age, it is no wonder that its own boundaries constantly shifted over time. In addition to the aforementioned Menippos, Lucian, Varro, ErasÂ� mus, Vives and More, literary critics have named writers as diverse as Seneca, Petronius, Boethius, Chaucer, William Langland, Elias of Thriplow, Ariosto, Rabelais, Cervantes, Donne, Mandeville, Swift, Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, Joyce, and Thomas Pynchon as devotees of the genre.87 The textual tradition, in other words, is seen as unbroken from Lucian to Pynchon. Seminal fans of Menippean satire include Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Northrop Frye. Kristeva argued that Menippean satire was the big break from the Middle Ages.88 Bakhtin agreed about the significance but not (obviously) about the definition of the form or the list of its practitioners. In a later revision of his early works on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, Bakhtin described fourteen characteristics that Menippean satires shared throughout the ages.89 Fry devoted a chapter of From anatomy to criticism to Menippean satires alone, single-handedly spawning a school of later literary critics. A rare convincing “thick definition” comes in a book by Paul Crawford, the Politics and history in William Golding (in chapter 2: “Menippean satire, the Fantastic, and the CarniÂ�valesque”). In terms of intellectual history, Voegelin’s verdict is the most perspicacious: early modern Menippean satires were a kind of negative utopias with a strong epis87 ╇ Boethius’s Consolation is a Menippean satire according to Dentith, Parody, 49. Chaucer: Payne, Chaucer. Bloomfield argues that Piers Plowman incorporates three traditions, Menippean satire being one. On Elias as Menippean, see Hillas’s introduction to Elias of Thriplow, Serium senectutis. Ascoli, “Faith as cover-up” on Ariosto. On Cervantes as Menippean, and on his influence on seventeenth-century French satires, see Hainsworth, Les “Novelas exemplares.” Donne’s Metempsychosis as Menippean satire: Hester’s chapter in Summers, Literary circles, 53. Mandeville: Hind, “Mandeville’s Fable.” In a 1776 review, Tristram Shandy was described as ‘blasphemous, obscene, Menippean’. In Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 384. McLuhan on Joyce as Menippean in The role of thunder. On Pynchon see Kharpertian, A hand. In addition to the vagueness and broadness of the secondary literature on Menippean satire, another cause of its limited utility is its tendency to ignore the role of Julian the Apostate and Erasmus who, as I will argue, were key figures in its development. Weinbrot’s recent Menippean satire reconsidered, which locates Julian squarely in the Menippean satire tradition, is a rare exception. 88 ╇ Kristeva, Semiotikē, 168-9 and passim. 89 ╇ Bakhtin, Speech genres.

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temological and political message, and it is the particular combination of these two elements that make them direct forerunners of 1984 and Animal Farm.90 Two overviews of the early modern resurrection (or birth) of the genre are Scott Blanchard’s Scholar’s Bedlam (1995) and Ingrid de Smet’s Menippean satire and the Republic of Letters, 15811655 (1996). The subversive and challenging nature of Menippean satires is clear to everyone; the political relevance of subversion is noted by several.91 To my knowledge, not a single post-Enlightenment literary critic or reader discusses the aspect of Menippos as the man in the moon. With the exception of Ascoli and Voegelin, they also miss the epistemological significance of featuring this Cynic over-seer in satires. This brief roll-call of major literary theorists who found Menippean satires highly significant, albeit for a variety of reasons, indicates the enormous importance of the genre, even if it does not provide a usable explanation. It is clear though that Lucian, politics, epistemology, and a deliberately ambiguous authorial standpoint would have to be included in any working definition of the genre. Menippean satire as an anti-theology genre It is interesting to note that despite current critics’ and literary theorists’ disagreements about the definition and practitioners of Lucianic and Menippean satire, and despite the overwhelming failure to put satirists into a political context, the roll calls that these critics produce (each based on his or her own definition) tend to consist of authors whose political views were predominantly irenicist. This is in stark contrast with the list of early modern satirists in general, who usually wrote against each other on the basis of political and religious factionalism.92 Early modern political, religious, epistemological and Menippean satires have enormous primary and secondary literatures. What follows is a highly selective sample from both, limited to the minimum needed to support the briefest description of three steps that preceded SV: the Renaissance and early modern revival of satire, its move into ╇ Voegelin, Collected, vol. 11, 237. ╇ Voltaire understood that Menippean satires are primarily political. See Letters on England, Letter XXII, ‘On Mr. Pope and some other famous poets.’ 92 ╇Salmon, “French satire.” Although one also finds a thought-provokingly large coincidence between early modern Menippean satirists and those who were accused of atheism on account of defending the Skeptics. Rummel, Confessionalization, 50-3. 90 91

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religious polemic with the French politiques, and Lipsius’s brilliant creation of Menippean satire as a genre, opaquely disguised as the revival of an ancient tradition. Path-breaking and innovative new translations and original satires by Juan Vives and by the More-Erasmus team were by far and away the most defining influences on the shape of early modern satires. In 1520 Juan Vives (1492-1540), the great Spanish historian and polymath,93 published his satire, the Somnium Vivis, as an introduction to his landmark edition of and commentary upon Scipio’s Dream, Somnum et vigilia in “Somnium Scipionis.”94 Similarly to its role in Heinsius’s 1613 DPDH, Scipio’s Dream for Vives provided a point of departure to discuss non-Christian ways of securing immortality. Vives’s converso family experienced intense and continuous persecution. His mother was hauled before the Inquisition several times before his parents and grandparents were eventually executed.95 Vives left Spain at an early age, never to return. His writings are irenicist, advocating toleration and epistemic humility; yet the Somnium Vivis was a bold reintroduction of non-Christian eternal life as a proper subject of philosophical literature. Vives wrote it under Erasmus’s encouragement, while also composing his monumental Commentary on Augustine’s ‘City of God’. The three men, More, Vives and Erasmus, became life-long friends. More’s famous commentary on Lucian’s Tyrannicide, and Erasmus’s Julius excluded from Heaven (which applied Seneca’s Menippean satire, the Pumpkinification of Claudius, to the so-called Warrior Pope), carried on the satirical treatment of immortality.96 Earlier we noted the importance of Scipio’s Dream for 93 ╇ On Vives’s innovations in historiography and education see Bejczy, “‘Historia praestat’,” especially 73 on their secularising effect. 94 ╇ On the impact of this book on the development of early modern satires, especially in Spain, see the excellent Lerner, “Golden Age.” Yet Vives’s influence was not limited to Spain. Not only did he write in Latin, he never actually returned to Spain after he saw his family massacred. 95 ╇ Cárcel gives an overview of the current debate over the significance of Vives’s Jewish origin, dates the family’s conversion to 1391 (492), and describes the various instances and stages of the inquisitorial proceedings against the family (497-502). “La familia,” in Vives, Opera Omnia, Vol. Introductorio. His books on the education of women and De subventione pauperum parallel Jewish law more closely than the Christian social practices of his time. 96 ╇ Vives also read, cited and generously praised More and his Latin translation of Lucian’s Menippos (which many thought, and some still think, to be in fact Menippos’s own play, the Necromantia). Vives did this in his Latin commentary on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, II.7.

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discussions like Heinsius’s inaugural on historiography’s immortalising power. Given the Leiden context of Menippean satires, now we can speculate that this particular satirical discourse encouraged Heinsius to take the standard humanist topos of history’s importance to a new extreme by making God’s own powers, and the eternal life of kings and commoners, depend wholly on historiography. Together with More’s and Erasmus’s popularisation and reformulation of the Lucianic—Senecan satire as the most sophisticated early modern form of deniable political commentary, Vives inspired a prolific satirical literature. It was mainly written by and for academics, and quickly grew into a lively, not to say virulently factional, forum for philological, religious, and political exchange. There were ProtesÂ� tant and Catholic satires against the other camp; republican satires vs. monarchists; epistemically skeptical vs. epistemically optimistic or arrogant; deniers against advocates of the value of Hebraic studies for understanding Christianity; and so forth. These texts were written by people with a similar education, drinking from the same humanistic fountains, and responding to one another’s texts very closely. Many satires used the onoeiric framework, ‘found manuscript’ and other diversionary tactics. Most books were published under a pseudonym, with non-existent and/or coded placenames of publication, and sometimes under the real name of the authors’ opponents. No wonder that after the accumulation of a few layers of meaning and allusion, new readers did not always get the references as readily as the original audience. Misunderstandings occurred, and dangerous speculation was rife. The internal references and cross-references became so Â�complicated that notes and addenda had to be published, in which the external and internal self- and cross-references to past and present texts, people, events and states were explained. Growing from the increasingly complex annotated editions, whole free-standing codebooks were published to ease the learned confusion.97 Early modern satires were unlike other texts. The volume of past and present hermeneutical conjecturing has an uncommonly justified order of magnitude. Menippean satires comprised an extraordinary genre. Their immense complexity, evinced by contemporary reception, warrants a degree of close textual analysis that would be blatant 97 ╇ For several such plots see de Smet, Menippean. Grafton, “Petronius,” 243-4, 247. Robinson, Lucian. For a similar effect in Erasmus, see Miller’s Introduction to Praise of Folly, xv.

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over-interpretation for most other texts. This is why SV deserves and rewards extremely close reading, especially given its extraordinary afterlife. The close analysis should begin with a bit of contextualisation. To keep contextualisation to the necessary minimum, I focus on two features of SV: its plea for epistemic humility, and its self-designation as a Menippean satire. Epistemic humility, and the concomitant emphasis on the violent dangers of hubris and dogmatic zealotry, is the satire’s leitmotif. All the speakers named explicitly by Cunaeus—Erasmus, Poliziano, Agricola, Barbaro, and Pico—were known for their role in the revival of ancient learning. A more particular connection between them was their extensive work on epistemology, and their aspiration to serve as mediators in the religious and political conflicts of their day. The heart of SV, the clear and emphatic statements by Sophia and Sophrosyne, bring out SV’s focus on epistemology. It would be hard to accuse Cunaeus of not giving a fair hearing to his targets, the arrogant and overambitious theologians. The last two theologians present one seductive argument each. The first theologian acknowledges the dangers of over-reach, but blames peer pressure and fear of the mob, arguing that wild dissent is less productive than subscribing to general opinion, however false. Therefore it is better to change the system from within, by education and by setting an example with virtuous living, than to openly disagree about the truth. The other theologian asserts that much of the epistemic over-reach is due to nature, which makes man strive for understanding. Arguments resembling those proposed by the second theologian, for whom Cunaeus expresses considerable sympathy, were put forward by the converso philosopher and physician Francisco Sanches (c. 1550-1623), author of Quod nihil scitur (1581) and De divinatione per somnum, ad Aristotelem (1585).98 In the end Cunaeus rejects both lines of reasoning, and mercilessly discredits the theologians as venal, arrogant, and intellectually craven. 98 ╇Note the similarities between Cunaeus’s account of his intellectual journey from respect for authorities, through systematic doubt, to introspection and first principles, in the Dedication to the SV, and Sanches’s Dedication in That nothing is known, 167-8. Sanches’s book was a key inspiration for Descartes. It belongs to a variety of natural philosophy that took for its starting-point an acknowledgement of Pyrrhonian skepticism and the irremediable imperfection of human understanding, but then moved on to advocate a programme of empirical inquiry as the next best thing to certainty, which is unattainable. E.g. Brown, “Renaissance,” 86-8. A noteworthy difference between Sanches and Descartes is the former’s use of Phaedrus texts and self-irony.

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Erasmus in a concluding speech admits that the Goddess was right in everything, pleads fallibility, and accuses the two theologians of powerlust and sedition. Both individual and collective human wisdom are dismissed; neither nature, nor reason, nor consensus can attain to Wisdom. Where could the idea of such a severely restricted scope for theology come from? Of course, Cunaeus may have come up with it on his own, and even if we found a source, it would not explain why and how he adopted the idea—especially in this harrowing form, with the recent victims of religious violence appearing and reappearing throughÂ�Â�out the book, marching in the background or coming to the fore to participate in debate. Perhaps the state of Menippean satire as a genre in Cunaeus’s time can give us a clue to these questions. Texts by Lucian, Varro, Seneca, Petronius, Terence, Juvenal, Horace and other satirists were edited, republished, and intensely discussed at this time. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly was then, as it is now, his best-selling book. Satires, the hardesthitting and most easily defensible form of political commentary, started to flourish and multiply at the end of the sixteenth century. Yet given the state of critical confusion sketched out above, perhaps it is prudent to focus on works that identified themselves as Menippean satires. There were two seminal books published with ‘Menippean satire’ in their title: Lipsius’s 1581 Somnium and La Satyre Ménippée (LSM) by Pithou, Le Roy, Rapin and other politiques. They both mixed verse and prose. The former was dedicated to Scaliger, and as an injoke upon the bad literary critics against whom he wrote it, Lipsius pretended that it belonged to a Classical genre that did not in fact exist. The latter revealed parodised, but factually true, insider details about the 1593-4 États Généraux, convoked by the Spanish under the aegis of the Catholic League to reconquer France for the faith. LSM had a decisive role in swaying Parisian public opinion to let in and crown Henri de Bourbon, and avert a Spanish takeover. French and Dutch politique satire For these politikes have dragons in the fieldes, that take all your packets, and by divelish arte divine and decipher al your ciphers, as also those of the King of Spaine and of the Pope, though they bee never so subtile and craftie, so well that they know all your affaires, both at Rome, and at Madrill, and in Savoy and in Germanie. You iuggle and

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deale craftily with all the world, and all the world doth deale so with you likewise. LSM, 1595 translation, 78

Italian, German, Spanish and English Menippean satires are packed with direct literary and personal connections and allusions to, and lendings and borrowings from, the Sardi venales. However, to continue the earlier pattern of showing the French forerunners (and hinting at the English descendants) of Leiden secularisation, here I will take only a cursory look at French political satires around the turn of the century. The function of this systematic comparison is to show that there are several illustrative chapters in the story of early modern secularisation, which was a trial-and-error process, the stages of which nevertheless built on the achievements of the previous stages. Within this limited sample, our scope here is further limited to works directly relevant to the secularising aspect of SV. This section aims in no way to be a summary of the secularising French-Dutch Menippean satire discourse, beyond what is required for SV’s contextualisation. French politique Menippeans. The French story of pre-SV satire includes two great relevant items: La Satyre Ménippée and Theodore Beza’s satirical works, most notably Le Passavant and Satyres chrestienne de la cuisine papale (1560), and his influence on Leiden via, among others, Philips van Marnix, Lord of Sint-Aldegonde.99 The first version of La Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne (LSM) was written in 1593 during the États Généraux convened by Charles of Lorraine, head of the Catholic League. With Spanish backing, Charles tried to get himself crowned king against the claim of the Huguenot Henri de Bourbon, who with substantial English assistance conquered and consolidated much of France, but could not take Paris. The États Généraux began deliberation in February, and drafts and verses from LSM, a mixture of verse and prose, began to circulate shortly thereafter. LSM was instrumental in unmasking the États Généraux as a cloak for Spanish ambitions against France, and it swayed Parisian public opinion into opening the gates to Henri. In this moment of extraordinarily high tension 99 ╇ For other French political satires see Simonin, Dictionnaire, Petris, La plume, esp. chapter 3 (including L’Hôpital’s views on satire!), and Vianey, Les prosateurs. A political theory reading of French Menippean satires is Salmon, “French satire.”

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Henri, persuaded by his wife, announced his decision on 25 July, 1593 to abandon the Protestant alliance with Queen Elizabeth and convert to Catholicism (“Paris vaut bien une messe”). LSM spread like wildfire, and was quickly translated into English, German, and other Â�languages.100 From the beginning of LSM, authorial accountability is banished as far as literarily possible. The manuscript, it is claimed, went through several translations, was stolen, the thieves were arrested but under illegal circumstances, the document passed to a monk who turned out to be an assassin, and so on. No one country’s civil law, no international law, and no church law can apply to the complex and fictitious case of the original manuscript. LSM is a breathless page-turner of a very long extended metaphor, a satire par excellence with an overwhelming abundance of imagery, symbols, rich but never cloying or undisciplined in its profusion of detail, every part being rigorously and effectively subjected to the overarching purpose of ridiculing the Spanish-French Catholic alliance and uncovering the League’s secret plans and manipulations. From this splendid cornucopia I will only retrieve here a few central elements of imagery, relevant to Sardi venales, and even these will not be discussed or followed through to their full length and breadth of meaning.101 The catholicon in the title is a laxative and an emetic substance, symbolising specifically the bribes that the Spanish invaders paid to aid and to buy off the venal French.102 With the help of this drug, the deeds of Charles V and Philip II/I are translated into images of manipulation. The Catholic missions in the New World, as well as the Jesuit and papal machinations within Europe, are systematically retold in terms of making, distributing, disguising and controlling the mighty 100 ╇ The first English translation, complete with its own puns, was A Pleasant Satyre or Poesie: A Satyre Menippized. Wherein is discouered the Catholicon of Spayne, and the chiefe leagder [sic] of the League. Printed by the Widdow Orwin for Thomas Man, dwelling in Pater-noster row at the signe of the Talbot. London, 1595. 101 ╇ For a short summary of the plot see Salmon, “French satire.” 102 ╇Several descriptions, incl. 140: ‘But as for the catholike & Romane religion, it is the drinke wherewith they have infatuated us, and caused us to fall on sleep, and a poyson wel sweetned with sugar, and which serveth for an obstupative, or benumming medicine, to astonish or benumme all our members, which whilest we are on sleepe wee feele not, when they cut away now one piece, then an other, even one after an other, and that which remaineth be but as a truncke, which very quickly will leese all the blood and the heate, and the very life it selfe, thorow overmuch evacuation.’ In spite of the obvious similarities with Marnix’s Beehive, I have not come across a systematic comparison between the Catholic honey and the catholicon in LSM.

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catholicon. Descriptions of the rich tapestries with symbolic images from the Bible and from French history are interspersed with tableaux vivants, still-life depictions of the actual attendants convened by the League. Prose alternates with frequent summaries, side-plots and character assassinations in verse, which were instantly set to music and became extremely popular on the streets of Paris. After showing their religious intolerance, in chapters XI, XIV, XVII, XIX and elsewhere the catholicon-users are shown repeatedly as not even genuinely intolerant by principle, but out-and-out mercenaries with no religious convictions, who use Catholicism as a cloak and an excuse to achieve their devious, venal and libidinous objectives without an ounce of true religious conviction behind them. The États Généraux is depicted with great ingenuity and satirical skill. Its most blameworthy sin is not its self-seeking and corruption, but its calculating abuse of the fervent general desire for peace, and its deceptive promise to ‘put an ende to the warre’. The speakers reveal their true motives in the satire, giving well-crafted speeches in devious statecraft and their zeal to advance their own interests at the expense of the people. Charles of Lorraine’s key speech, for instance, mentions ‘these hundred thousands of holie French Martyrs, which are dead by the sword, by famine, by fire, by rage, by desperation, and other violence.’ And through our good diligence, wee have brought to passe that this kingdome which was nothing els but a pleasurefull garden of all pleasure and aboundance, is now become a great and large universall buriall place, full of all violences, faire painted crosses, coffins, gallowses and gibbers.103

Several similar passages follow. The urgency of, and clear focus on, the primacy of peace, and the Leaguers’ determination to prevent it, remains palpable throughout the text.104 Among the sources surveyed 103 ╇ LSM, 31. See also 38, 39, 41 (‘we shall hinder the peace, and shall make immortal warre in France’), and passim. 104 ╇ The Leaguers, including the Spanish agents and the Pope, are even said to perpetuate the civil conflict by forbidding the French people ‘under paine of eternall damnation to desire peace’. 1595 ed., 66. Or as Monsieur d’Aubray put it: ‘But you and yours, being impatient of peace, and having alwaies small regard of religion, so that you might come to your attempts and purposes, would not suffer this tranquillitie, which was not healthfull or good for you. You had learned that fishing was the best, when the water was most troubled, so that indeede you never had had rest, had you not seene borne this goodly day of the barricades, which hath ruinated and overthrowne both us to you, and you to us.’ 114. Elsewhere: ‘You have lived sufficiently enough in anarchie and disorder. Is it your minde that for your pleasure, & to make

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here, only LSM and SV share this particular feature. The solutions they propose are, however, quite different. They are both unquestionably Menippean satires, but while LSM imitates Lucian in exposing hypocrisy, superstition and fraud, and uses the mixed form purposefully to popularise its message, SV by contrast emphasises the Cynical component of Menippean satires. In addition to exposing hypocrisy, it makes Cynicism an integral part of the solution offered. There is no epistemic questioning of Christianity in LSM, not even when the Pope’s sinister political manoeuvres are exposed in full gory detail by the papal legate. Various church institutions, sacraments, Bible passages and patristic interpretations are shown falling victims to the unbounded secular ambitions of the Curia; yet the intrinsic value of these things, and the truth of the Bible, Christianity, and the Catholic doctrine, do not become targets of cynical attacks in LSM.105 The Low Countries are warned against Spanish ambition several times in LSM, and the Catholic zealots often voice their intention to sabotage a broad, united Christian alliance for the conversion of the newly discovered peoples and for repelling the threat of Ottoman and Muslim incursion. The zealots’ satirical descriptions of their designs against the Dutch for the benefit of Spain, and for the Turks against Europe, appear (individually or combined) in virtually every set speech in LSM. The French and Dutch politique writers of Menippean satires knew what interests they had in common. Conversely, a theme that comes out strongly in LSM, Grotius and Vossius, but not in SV, is the supremacy of the magistrate in religious affairs.106 LSM accuses the your selfe and yours great, against all reach and reason, wee should for ever continue miserable and wretched? Will you proceed to destroy that little that remayneth? How long will you be sustained and nourished with our bloud and our bowels? When wil you bee full with eating us, and satisfied with seeing us to kill one another, to cause you to live at your ease?’ 143. 105 ╇ Although one wonders whether the immediate purpose of LSM, namely the exposition of the religious and political machinations of the zealous Catholics, did not force the politiques to occasionally approach Cynicism. E.g. on preachers and instrumental biblical exegeses: ‘They know the passages of Scripture, to accommodate them to their purpose, and to turne them and to use them to the occasions as they shall have neede. For it was never sayd for naught, that the Gospell is, a tripe wifes knife, that cutteth on both sides’. 65-6. See also 135, and passim. On the Church: ‘Every one now maketh a religion after his owne manner, and divine service, serveth for no other use, but to deceive the world through hypocrisie: the priests and preachers have so set themselves on sale, and made themselves so contemptible, by their offensive life, than men regarde them no more, nor their sermons neither, but when they are to be used to preach and spread abroade false newes.’ 95-6. 106 ╇ This is a recurring theme throughout LSM. On 158, for instance, Erastianism is even named as the hallmark of the special virtue of Christianity: ‘And the chris-

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Leaguers of deliberately distorting Scripture, faking prophecies, and creating doctrines that disguise high treason as Christian martyrdom. Although this probably referred to the assassination of Henri III, the LSM authors could have equally meant the death of William the Silent, or prophecied the murder of Henri IV. LSM goes so far as to argue that not Luther, Calvin and other reformers (however radical), but political manipulators are the real villains, who ‘maintaine the troubles of divisions in this realme, under the beautifull name of religion.’107 For concerning that which they would make you beleeve touching religion, it is but a maske or visor, wherewith they busie the simple (as the foxes cover their footing, with their long tailes) that so they might catch them, & eate them up at their pleasure. Have you ever seene any other respects in them that have aspired after tyrannous governent over the people, than this, that they have alwaies made, taken, and used, some goodly title and shew of the common wealth or of religion? And yet when question hath been of coming to some agreement, their particular interest and profit, hath alwaies been in the vantgard, and they have set the benefit and good of the people behinde, as a matter that did not touch them.108

Due to the political risk, LSM was published anonymously. To the best of our knowledge the idea for it came from Pierre Le Roy, chanione of Rouen and aumônier to the cardinal of Bourbon, in a discussion at the home of Jacques Guillot (chanione of the St-Chapelle) with a group of friends, “français en politique et gallicans en religion.”109 It was probably written by the following: Florent Chrestien, former tutor to Henri, and whose influence on the satirical debate was briefly discussed in the chapter on Heinsius; Gilles Durant, sieur de La Bergerie; Jacques Gillot, councillor at Parlement; Jean Passerat, professor of philosophy at the Collège de France; Nicolas Rapin, grand provost of tians alwaies had this maxime or rule, as a perpetuall marke or cognisance of their religion, that they did obey such Kings and Emperors, as it pleased God to give or set over them, whether they were Arrians or Pagans, conforming themselves therein to the example of Iesus Christ, that did obey the lawes of Tiberius the Emperour, imitating likewise Saint Paul and Saint Peter, that obeyed Nero, and have in their epistles expressely commaunded, to obeye Kings and Princes, because all soveraigne power is of God, and representeth the image of God himselfe. This differeth much from the mindes of our mutinous men, that drive them away, and murther them.’ 107 ╇ LSM, 103. Compare Livy 39 on the Bacchantes, cited by both Heinsius, and Cunaeus in SV. 108 ╇ LSM, 139, given to Monsieur d’Aubray to say. 109 ╇See the discussion of Gallicanism in chapters 1 and 2 above. The literature on LSM is wide and varied. A good starting point is Lestringant, Études.

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the constabulary; and the jurist Pierre Pithou, who also revised and edited the whole text before publication. These men were politiques, whose first and foremost objective was peace. The term ‘politique’ was coined in the sixteenth century and came to mean not simply moderates, but secularisers who banished unverifiable matters of faith beyond the sphere of apposite political discourse.110 Throughout LSM the term is used by the satirised Leaguers derisively for those who seek peace, and are not prepared to insist on religious minutiae in order to perpetuate the war. In other words, the authors of LSM embrace politique as a term of abuse from their enemies. Erastianism and the advocacy of undivided, unitary sovereignty were unavoidable corollaries of the politique position. The intellectual position had clear implications for the practice of politics, and Elizabeth I of England, Henri IV of France, and the Dutch William the Silent, are often called politiques in early modern texts. In France after 1568 the term was also applied, with pejorative connotations, particularly to the moderate Catholics who were prepared to tolerate Huguenots. French politiques at this time were mostly Gallicans, supporters of the national church. This is a trend one often finds among Catholic politiques. Their Erastian and irenicist position led them toward the modern, secular notion of sovereignty, which in turn distanced them from the Papacy, and closer to a national church, where one existed. However, as argued above, their most distinctive feature was not their adherence to the Gallican Church in opposition to Rome. French Â�chosen nation and sacred monarchy theorists professed the same allegiance. The hallmark of politique Gallicans was their use of secuÂ�larisaÂ� tion in the service of peace, reconciliation and stability, and to the detriment of the ubiquity of theology in both papal and monarchist arguments. Protestant politiques did not have this problem. Their irenicism and Erastianism was compatible with a plethora of positions on national churches. In this sense, it was intellectually easier to be a Protestant 110 ╇ Butler defined them as ‘opposed to all coercion in matters of religion. The greatest and most enlightened exponent of this view was, no doubt, the Chancellor L’Hôpital. “Let us get rid,” he had said to the Estates assembled at Orleans in December, 1560, “of these devilish words, these names of party, of faction, of sedition— Lutheran, Huguenot, Papist—let us keep unadulterated the name of Christian.” And again: “A man does not cease to be a citizen for being excommunicated.”’ Butler, “French wars.” See also Petris, La plume, Gundersheimer, French humanism, and Tilley, “French humanism.”

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pacifist in the sixteenth century than a Catholic one.111 However, some of the incompatibilities between Catholicism and nationalism, including papal authority, predisposed Catholic politiques to be more reliably cosmopolitan members of the European republic of letters. Without bearing in mind the distinctions between secularising and non-secularising Gallicans, and Catholic and Protestant politiques, it can be a baffling task to try to reconstruct the source of conflict and the battle lines between a chosen nation theorist like Calvin and the Catholic irenicist Sadoleto, or between the non-exclusivist politique Arminius and the religiously patriotic Dutch opponents of the Remonstrant movement he inspired. Another axis of politique distinction runs from Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1580, expanded until 1592) to Cunaeus’s SV. Montaigne symÂ�pathises with the position of reason-faith, and theology-philosophy compatibility while, as we shall see, this is exactly Cunaeus’s target in SV. How did the authors of LSM come to choose this form for their quick, popular, yet profound and ingenious pièce d’occasion-turnedpièce de résistance? The satirical genre was an obvious choice, but why call it Menippean? There have been no Menippean satires since Seneca, except for Lipsius’s Somnium, which differs from LSM in practically everything but having ‘Menippean satire’ in the title. The simplest and best guess is that they chose to enlist in the genre not only due to their ambition to expose false religion, but because of the poems set into their prose. These poems were popular, easy summaries of the main argument that went before, vignettes to capture the League’s various machinations. Some of them were set to music, and many were reprinted separately and circulated on the streets of Paris. The authors probably had this popularising effect in mind; and the prose-verse mixed form naturally suggested that they include ‘Menippean satire’ in the title of their book. Although one should not ╇Schmidt, Vaterlandsliebe, II.7 and III.3.3 are particularly relevant here. Visser in “Escaping” describes further strategies for avoiding confessional conflict. The changes in language, publication, dedication, emblem book practices, choice of references and behaviour that these strategies required seem more the result of an active search for robust peace than a passive avoidance of trouble. As Visser notes, ‘[b]y 1618, it seems, an a-confessional language had become virtually impossible.’ Visser, “Escaping,” 162. The relationship between politiques, irenicist patriots (as discussed by Schmidt), a-confessionalists (Visser), de-confessionalists (as discussed by Ian Hunter, Luc Racaut and others), anti-confessionalists, including the category of Melanchthon’s followers called “Phillippists” (as discussed by Stillman), and secularisers, awaits further study. 111

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discard the possibility that the trope of Menippos as a revealer of superstition and religious deceit was relevant, LSM was not entitled a Menippean satire for the same reason that Lipsius’s Somnium was. As the later section on its reception will show, the high-brow, technical, academic, literary critical debate about the origin and characteristics of a Menippean satire, and the enormous popularising impact of the verse parts, were to meet again in the Dutch and English translations of Cunaeus’s SV. In addition to the calculated effects and afterlife of their form, LSM and SV also have some substance in common: they both claim to expose the ulterior motives of a venal group of theologians and politicians, bent on keeping a good man down (Henri and Vorstius, respectively). The extraordinary group of men who contributed to LSM provides further clues and texture. Florent Chrestien (1541-96) was Henri Estienne’s pupil before becoming the later Henri IV’s tutor and librarian.112 Brought up a Calvinist, he converted to moderate Catholicism. He translated a great many texts from Greek to Latin and, in keeping with the Pléiade spirit, many works into French. His French Â�renditions include the radical, Vives-inspired pedagogue George Buchanan’s (1506-82)113 play Jephthes, which Montaigne remembers gleefully enacting at the famous Collège de Guyenne (a hotbed of radicalism and new ideas), and which Heinsius singled out in DTC for criticism. Chrestien also edited and translated Euripides’s Cyclops, which is the only satyr play to survive in full, and consequently at the heart of every ╇ Prevost, biography of Chrestien in Dictionnaire de Biographie Française. ╇ Buchanan was a pivotal figure in the republic of letters. His first known work, Somnium, was a satire against Franciscans and monks in general. It pleased James V enough to engage Buchanan as tutor to his son, later Lord James Stewart. Buchanan later became professor of Latin at the new Collège de Guyenne at Bordeaux. There he translated Medea and Alcestis, and wrote Jephthes, sive Votum, and Baptistes, sive Calumnia. These were enacted by, among others, Montaigne, a fond pupil of his. At Bordeaux, Buchanan became a life-long and intimate friend of J-C., and later of J.J. Scaliger. Due to political and religious pressures Buchanan moved to Coimbra, where he was soon imprisoned under accusations of Lutheran and Judaistic teachings. Witnessing Francis I’s severe repression of French Protestants, Buchanan converted to Calvinism. In 1560 or 1561 he returned to Scotland, and became tutor to the young queen Mary. Moderator of the General Assembly after 1567, he played a prominent role in the Scottish Reformation. Later tutor to the future James VI and acting as Lord Privy Seal, Buchanan published De iure regni apud Scotos in 1579 as a guide to political philosophy and a handbook against tyrants. The book was condemned by several Acts of Parliament and sporadically burned by the public hangman over the next two centuries, for condoning tyrannicide. 112 113

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early modern debate about the origin and nature of satires. Chrestien’s edition was published with Scaliger’s notes, but it is unclear whether they worked together on the text.114 In either case, it shows that he had a more than perfunctory interest in satires. Vlaming, Vossius and Â�others maintained that the genre and its characteristics stem from ancient myths, rituals and texts surrounding satyrs, while others derived the term and the art form from the Latin satur, full, which shifted to “varied.” Casaubon was so impressed by Chrestien’s Latin translation of the Cyclops that he appended it to his extremely popular and often reprinted De satyrica, in which he sharply distinguished between Greek satyr plays and Roman satires, ending the literary Â�confusion that persisted since the time of Donatus.115 Chrestien’s work on the subject prepared him for LSM, and places LSM in the early modern context of Menippean satires discussed above. His translaÂ�tion was certainly known to Cunaeus, an avid reader and friend of CaÂ�saubon. While composing parts of LSM, Durant (1550?-1615) wrote another verse satire against the League, Regrets fvnebres svr la mort d’vn asne ligueur, using the parasite trope of Lucianic satires. But Jean Passerat (1534-1602) was the real poet of the enterprise. He wrote his poetry in the Pléiade’s style, mocking the mighty (his poem on the duc d’Aumale’s skill in running away became extremely popular, and it is widely known to this day). Passerat took over the chair of Latin at the University of Paris after Ramus’s death in 1572. When Dousa began his campaign in 1591 to convince Scaliger to move to Leiden, it was Passerat whom Scaliger first recommended instead. Shortly before the LSM, Scaliger saw himself and Passerat as kindred spirits, engaged on

114 ╇ Their annotations are collated, for instance, in Crenius, Museum philologicum, vol. 1, text 3: Euripidae Cyclopem latinitate & notis donatam à Q. Septimio Florente Christiano, & Josepho Scaligero. Scaliger had several letters and writings by Chrestien in his possession when he died. Cod. Scaligeriani, Scal. 60a f122, 60b f31, etc. 115 ╇ Casaubon, De satyrica. Ullman, “Satura.” Seidensticker, “Das Satyrspiel.” Sutton, Greek Satyr. Many sources recount the disagreement between J-C. Scaliger, who argued for a Greek origin and derivation from “satyr,” and Casaubon, who favoured the genre’s Roman origin in mixed dishes. Dryden cited Heinsius’s attempt to find a middle road, accepting the Roman origin but ascribing psychological functions to satire that invoked Greek satyr-plays. Salmon, “French satire” is a succinct introduction. See Heinsius’s conclusion of “De libello” on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, no. IX in the 1615 Orationes, esp. 213-6. Cunaeus also engaged in the debate, for instance in Oratio XI from 1611 on Horace, and Oratio XII on Juvenal.

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the same politique project.116 De Smet speculates that Passerat is the author of the ‘Discours de l’Imprimeur’ in the second, 1594 LSM edition. Here the usual philological lines of division are garbled—perhaps satirically—with the argument that while satire derives from the Latin sense of ‘mixed things,’ the genre is nevertheless Greek, not Roman, and refers to the Greek custom of putting satyrs on stage. Like Lipsius’s 1581 Somnium, LSM explains Menippean satire as nothing new, merely an imitation of Varro, Menippos, Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius.117 However, Passerat refers to ‘a learned Flemming and a good Antiquarian,’ i.e. Lipsius, as a recent practitioner of the genre after a long hibernation.118 Since this is a satirical introduction to a Menippean satire, it does not settle the question of the LSM authors’ awareness of the true novelty of their genre. Nicolas Rapin (15351608), soldier, lawyer, civil servant, poet, was the consummate secularising politique. He is famous as a French New Historian whose historical method served as long-term stimulant to Hume, and as a translator and populariser of politique poetry, including works by L’Hôpital, Beza, Scaliger and Grotius. He was an old friend of Casaubon’s, and they discussed the ongoing debate about the proper definition of satire, not neglecting its trenchant political overtones.119 He was proud of the French language, and whole-heartedly participated in the Petrarchan project of producing great literary traditions in modern vernaculars.120 In writing he railed against the Jesuits, and defended Poitiers in deed against Coligny’s Huguenots. He stands at the cross-roads of our many pathways and byways: a satirist, historian, and a direct mediator between the French and Dutch secularisers. Pierre Pithou (1539-96) is another intellectual giant in the group and, like Casaubon, a nodal figure in the French-Dutch secularising continuity.121 One of four lawyer brothers, Pithou studied under Turnèbe and Cujas, like Scaliger. He was a staunch Gallican, and codified the principles of Gallicanism for the first time in his groundbreaking Les libertés de l’église gallicane (1594). Most of the articles therein were passed into law by various governments over the next ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.373. ╇ LSM, 202-4. de Smet, Menippean, 43-5. 118 ╇ LSM, 204. 119 ╇ E.g. Oeuvres, vol. 3, 107. 120 ╇See his defence of French against Beza in Oeuvres, vol. 2, 216-9, and 254. 121 ╇ Kelley, Foundations, 56-9. 116 117

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two centuries. He was also a Calvinist, who converted with Henri IV right around the time that he took charge of the collaborative LSM project. He also acquired, edited and shared extraordinary manuscripts that reveal his preoccupation with several strands of secularisation. He was responsible for the editio princeps of the fables of Phaedrus (1596), from far and away the best and most reliable MSS, in his possession. Marnix’s immensely popular Beehive against Catholics (1569) is more likely to have been inspired by Phaedrus than by Virgil’s Georgics IV, as it is now often asserted.122 Critical considerations and literary revivals of Phaedrus provide another direct connection between Pithou and the Dutch secularising discourse. Together with the aforementioned unique Leiden MSS of Julian, Pithou’s matchless Phaedrus will help us trace the dissemination of the discourse with greater precision. Some of Phaedrus’s fables were known in prose form in the Middle Ages. The oldest known version is now called the Anonymus Nilanti, finally edited by Nilant at Leiden in 1709 from a thirteenth-century manuscript. It is also regarded as the most authoritative version by the current stage of the critical tradition. It has 67 fables, 30 not found elsewhere. The so-called Romulus collection is the largest prose collection of fables, many by Phaedrus, that was read, imitated and discussed throughout the Middle Ages. An intermediary step between the popular medieval tradition and Nilant’s 1709 scholarly edition was Isaac Nevelet’s 1610 Mythologia Aesopica, a handsome parallel edition based on the medieval Romulus collection, but with new textual emendations of Aesop, Phaedrus, Babrius, Avianus and the Sophist Aphthonius. In addition to the best-quality Greek edition and Latin translation of all the fables known in the Middle Ages (including the Romulus and Planudes’s Aesop), Nevelet included 136 new, hitherto unpublished fables, including 40 attributed to Aphthonius, and 43 to Babrius. Hervieux, who surveyed the Latin fables from Augustus to the Renaissance, credits Nevelet, not any of the host of earlier and later editors, with restoring Aesop to universal favour.123 If Nevelet drew on the Nilanti as early as 1610, that would establish a terminus ad quem for the manuscripts’ arrival at Leiden. Given the works of Marnix, Pithou and Scaliger about Phaedrus, this is not improbable, and would be another piece in the reconstruction of the French-Dutch 122 123

╇ This is discussed in more detail below. ╇ Hervieux, Les Fabulistes.

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secularising satire discourse. Like most scholars, and unlike Scaliger, Vulcanius owned copies only of the Planudes edition.124 The contours of a shared cast, chronology, and technique of secularisation via historiography and literature in France and the Netherlands are again redrawn here. Another editio princeps by Pithou, the leading New Historian, was Petronius’s Satyricon, significantly more subversive than Phaedrus, and classified as a Menippean satire by Pithou and Casaubon.125 Pithou’s 1596 landmark edition is based on a jealously guarded MSS that he discussed and shared with Scaliger long before its publicaÂ�tion.126 Carver argues that Turnèbe, de Mesmes and Pithou all decided to keep their Petronius manuscripts ‘under lock and key,’ lest they further corrupt the reading public.127 The substantial contributions and improvements to the text made in Pithou’s 1577 and 1587 editions indicate that his manuscript, lost after his death, was one of a kind.128 However, the best Petronius manuscript known today that preceded the recovery of the full text of the Banquet of Trimalchio is the so-called Leiden MS, owned and edited by Scaliger. According to its contemporary description in the Codices Scaligeriani, it belonged to Cujas before it passed to Scaliger, and then to Heinsius.129 124 ╇ Cod. Vulcaniani, Vulc. 93, Graec. Chart. saec. XV. f113-152, f153-181. This does not disprove the theory that Marnix’s Beehive was based on Phaedrus, since the Beehive was published long before Marnix came to Leiden and hired Vulcanius as his secretary. Nonetheless, the connection remains speculative: Marnix wrote the Beehive while in exile in Friesland, and it is unclear what Phaedrus editions and manuscripts he would have had access to. 125 ╇ Grafton, “Petronius.” 126 ╇ Grafton, “Petronius.” Richardson, Reading. For other continuities within French-Dutch politique satire see also Lauvergnat-Gagniere, Lucien. 127 ╇ Compare the Florentine neoplatonists’ alleged fear of corrupting public morals by publishing Orphic Hymns. Walker, Ancient, 27-31, and passim. 128 ╇ Carver, “Rediscovery,” 256 and passim. 129 ╇ Cod. Scaligeriani, Scal. 61, f. 4-44. See also the unusual, cryptically described Scal. 61, f69, and Richardson, Reading, 61, 120-1, 147-8. Heinsius’s notes now cover this manuscript. Grafton, “Petronius.” Cunaeus’s 1611 oration on taking the Chair of Latin cites ‘histrioniam in hoc mundo, tanquam in theatro, agimus, & summam stultitiam tegimus sapientiae simulatione.’ Oratio XI, 215 in Orationes. Cellarius identifies this as a fragment from Petronius, usually cited in the form, ‘non duco contentionis funem, dum constet inter nos, quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem’ in, among other works, the 1669 Amsterdam edition of Petronius’s works, and transmitted through John of Salisbury’s Policraticus: ‘Aut si nomen comoediae gratiosius est, non duco contentionis funem, dum constet inter nos, quod fere totus mundus, iuxta Petronium, exerceat histrionem.’ Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage,” the opening of Jacques’s monologue in Act II, Scene VII of As you like it,

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In all likelihood, Pithou’s and Scaliger’s collaboration on satirical texts did not end with their student days. And if this pattern of semisecret collaboration in editing a dangerously satirical manuscript is probable, then scholarly exchanges concerning the less controversial Phaedrus are almost certain.130 Their discussions about the old and new meaning of satire confirm our earlier argument for a distinct, yet mutually and substantially inspiring French-Dutch politique discourse. Petronius’s wicked text has always fascinated readers, and aroused great interest about the author. Around 1570 Scaliger was the first to connect a passage in Tacitus’s Annals to the author of the Satyricon. This allowed dating, and Pithou, Lipsius, Dousa and Jacques Durant de Chazelle suddenly realised that it was Nero’s actual deeds that Petronius was satirising. Pithou and Casaubon now managed to classify the text and claim it as a Menippean satire.131 Although another of Pithou’s great discoveries, the Pervigilium Veneris, which he first published in 1577, is not a satire, it corroborates the impression of a flurry of scholarly exchange between the New Historians and the Leiden Circle. The first round of responses to Pithou’s editio princeps, which followed the new find, came almost exclusively from Leiden (Lipsius, Salmasius, Scriverius, Scaliger and Rivinus). This leads one to suspect that Pithou may have collaborated on this project with Leiden scholars more than with French or other European fellow academics. The same applies to the satires of Juvenal and Persius: collaborations and many collected editions featured Pithou and the Leideners together.132 A pattern emerges from the together with the Globe’s motto, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem,’ is also traced to John of Salisbury’s quotation. However, unlike John of Salisbury, Cunaeus and Shakespeare both connect the theatrum mundi with the foolish pretending to be wise (Jacques in As you like it, II.vii, LL 36ff.). This raises the possibility that Pithou’s precious Petronius manuscript, shared by French and Dutch politiques but unpublished at the time to save public morals, may have reached Shakespeare. Thomas Lodge (1558-1625) is one of several possible intermediaries. For a contextualisation of Lodge that is helpful here see Kelly, “Jewish history,” including details of Lodge’s keen interest in Josephus Flavius, shared by Cunaeus. 130 ╇ The forthcoming new edition of Scaliger’s correspondence will be invaluable in tracing networks, as well as individual projects and collaborations. 131 ╇ Grafton, “Petronius.” de Smet, Menippean, 41-2, cites Lipsius’s praise of Petronius in his Tacitus edition. 132 ╇ E.g. D. Iunii Iuvenalis Aquinatis satyrae, edited by Meric Casaubon and published in 1695 at Leiden. The more than twenty commentators and editors whose notes he collected were all Leideners, with the exception of his father, Pithou and Giorgio Valla (1447-1500), the fifteenth-century Italian mathematician, philologist and medic.

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overview of the surveys of individual satirists’ and fabulists’ reception. Although secondary sources that describe the literary and hermeneutical histories of Lucian, Phaedrus, Petronius and other satirical texts are not usually restricted to a small group of editors and philologists, out of the hundreds of careful editors of classical satires Pithou, Casaubon and the Leideners crop up a surprising number of times as the most perceptive, and frequently the definitive, authorities on satirical texts. This pattern does not apply to religious or astronomical texts, nor to another group of early modern scholars. Although many New Historians and Leideners also have landmark editions of nonsatirical texts to their credit, their collaboration on satires reveals a striking richness and a uniquely intense concern. In addition to their wide-ranging and path-breaking work in the world of satires, the historical works of Pithou and Rapin show noteworthy similarities with, as well as instructive differences from, Leiden historiography. Rapin’s work has been briefly discussed above, and it is covered better in the secondary literature than Pithou’s. As a historian, Pithou appears to have been interested in uncovering and editing two kinds of sources. The first kind allowed him to argue for his version of Gallicanism, and included the Edict of Theodoric (1579), the Capitularies of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald (published in 1588), as well as the great Leges Visigothorum. Although these medieval legal collections were renowned for relying on a dense and consistent network of biblical references for their illustrations and legal claims, what Pithou built from these documents was an ancient constitutionalist, anti-papal, and above all tolerant GalliÂ� canism. His Gallicanism remained Erastian but did not come to the verge of becoming a French chosen nation theory, whether on an ancient constitutionalist or a biblical basis. The other type of historical text he was interested in seems a bit surprising: he edited a number of ancient and medieval histories of the most extreme, divine interventionist Reichstheologie kind. Salvianus (published in 1580), Otto of Freising’s Vie de Frédéric Barberousse, a history of the ecclesiastical institution of excommunication, and Warnfrid’s Historia miscellanea, tracked down and carefully edited by Pithou, all belonged to the Reichstheologie tradition described in the opening chapter. This tradition was the diametrical opposite of secularisation, since it not only ascribed divine significance to every worldly historical event, but left no quarter for epistemic uncertainty about their significance. As shown above, Pithou’s

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theory of law and history was exceptional in the development of Gallicanism for its secularising effects and assumptions. He can hardly be accused of reckless Reichstheologie. Although the LSM defended Henri IV, whom Pithou followed into Catholicism, the Gallican politiques were more reluctant to apotheosise le bon roi Henri than even the enlightened Voltaire was.133 Their aim was not to substitute one form of exclusivism with another, but to achieve and consolidate civic concord by getting rid of exclusivism and implanting moderation (sophrosyne) for the sake of peace and stability. The only non-literary, historical edition by Pithou I found that does not fall into one of these two categories does, however, fit into the Franciscus Junius-Cunaeus-Grotius project of neutralising the Bible by systematically comparing its precepts with other cultures’. When Pithou came across and started to edit a unique late antique legal work, the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, a comparison of the Pentateuch and the Twelve Tables, he sent a copy to Cujas, who was hosting and teaching Scaliger at the time.134 Pithou eventually published the collation with his commentary as Mosaycarum et romanarum legum collatio in 1574, and Scaliger copied this manuscript as well for his own use.135 This is the MS listed as Leges Mosaicae collatae cum Corpore Iuris Civilis in Cod. Scaligeriani, Scal. 61, f107. The same item, Scal. 61, contains Cujas’s Petronius, and another Petronius fragment, both indicating the Pithou connection. The Collatio and its French-Leiden lineage is important to note because the existence of this fourth-century historical document was partly responsible for the favoured Leiden project of systematically comparing the divine laws of the Hebrew Republic with the civil laws of other countries, and denying the divine laws any epistemic or legal superiority. We find this secularising approach to divine law, much in con╇ ‘Suppose there had been placed in some church the statue of Henry IV., who won his kingdom with the valour of Alexander and the clemency of Titus, who was good and compassionate, chose the best ministers and was his own first minister; suppose that, in spite of his weaknesses, he received a homage beyond the respect which we owe to great to men. What harm would be done? It would assuredly be better to bend the knee before him than before this crowd of unknown saints, whose very names have become a subject of opprobrium and ridicule. I agree that it would be a superstition, but a superstition that could do no harm; a patriotic enthusiasm, not a pernicious fanaticism. If man is born to error, let us wish him virtuous errors.’ Voltaire, Homily on superstition, 116-7. See also 119; and of course La Henriade (1723). 134 ╇See Jacobs’ excellent “Papinian” for more on this text. 135 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, I.123. 133

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trast with contemporaries’ legal commentaries, in CunaÂ�eus’s De Republica Hebraeorum and in Grotius’s De iure praedae.136 An examination of the texts edited and written by the French politiques and members of the Leiden Circle reveal identical interests and regular personal collaboration. The number and intensity of connections between them are best explained by their shared appreciation of secularisation as the best guarantee of peace and the fastest way out of the Wars of Religion. The original and edited texts themselves, including their new histories, satires, and anthropological, historical, legal and philological comparisons between Christianity and other civilisations, make the best sense after their secularising significance is brought out by a comparison of their political contexts, namely the challenge in late sixteenth-century France and early seventeenth-century Holland to pacify without persecution and the elimination of the opposing camps. While the reformulation of ‘sacred history’ as a mere history of human institutions, or the revival of Menippos the Cynic in political satire, may seem incongruous with these men’s political stance at first, a closer look at the primary sources and at their own declarations of intention indicates that the writings themselves, and the connection between these particular thinkers, are explained by the secularising context better than by any other intellectual discourse attributed them today, be it their broad humanism, particular neolatin or vernacular literary projects, or the mere fact (as opposed to the intellectual stimulus) of their personal experience of religious persecution. Secularisation is not only a viable, but a most useful discourse to bear in mind while reading any of these thinkers’ works.

136 ╇ The connection between the Collatio and Sigonius’s 1582 De republica Hebraeorum is yet to be determined. Some links between Sigonius and the Leiden Circle are discussed below. See also Bartolucci, “The influence,” 197-9. Bartolucci is right to draw attention to the unique features of Sigonius’s work. Yet pioneering as he was, Sigonius was not alone. The 1570s already saw comparative legal studies that demystified biblical law, both Old and New Testament. Pithou published his Collatio legum in 1574. Bertram’s De politica iudaica tam civili quam ecclesiastica appeared the same year. Another case in point is Scaliger’s stay with Cujas in the early 1570s. ‘Erat hac ætate maximum ac celeberrimum Cuiacij nomen, cui principatum iuris omnes deferebant: cum hoc ita annos quinque vixit, ut iucunditatem literarum penitus ex animo deleret, & cum præceptore suo, quo & postea usus est amico, totus in collatione legum hæreret.’ Heinsius, funeral oration for Scaliger, Oratio I in 1615 Orationes, 5. Franciscus Junius’s De politiae Mosis observatione dates from 1593, after Sigonius. As shown above, Pithou’s and Scaliger’s historicising method blossomed in the Leiden Circle.

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These are then some of the direct personal and textual connections in the anti-theological reinvention of history and Menippean satires within the short-lived but path-breaking French and Leiden episodes of secularisation. Let us now turn to the Leiden context of Sardi venales. What French and Dutch Menippean satires, which demonstrably influenced each other, had in common was not the formal characteristic of mixing verse and prose. In Lipsius’s Somnium or Cunaeus’s original SV there is no verse other than a few lines of quotation. By contrast, facility of recollection, dissemination and popularisation are consciously aided in LSM by the inset poems. What they do have in common is that they take a very specific, clearly delineated politique position on the political and religious conflict of the day, and that they explicitly claim to be Menippean, after the Cynic. The Menippising Dutch. The Dutch tradition of Menippean satires also reveals a secularising agenda. Lipsius (1547-1606), the great humanist and philologist, crossed the religious divide several times in his lifetime. He received his elementary education at a Jesuit college, then moved to the Catholic University of Leuven and studied philology with Janus Dousa and Andreas Schotte. Two years of archival research at the Vatican as Latin Secretary to Cardinal Granvella raised Lipsius’s philological acumen to new heights. In 1570 he taught for a year at the University of Jena, where his presence and some of his speeches signalled to the republic of letters that he became a Lutheran. He returned to Leuven, but was soon driven by the wars of religion to Leiden, the brand new and iconic Calvinist university of the United Provinces, where he was appointed professor of history in 1579. He did his best work here, from editions of Seneca and Tacitus to the bestselling De constantia (1584) and the Politicorum libri sex (1589). Contrary to the prevailing toleration in his adopted homeland, in the Politica Lipsius argued for the importance of the government’s recognition of only one religion at a time, in order to secure social stability. Dissent must be burnt and carved from the body politic. Lipsius consistently treated philology and classical studies as a means to an end, namely the betterment of current political conditions. One consequence of this writing strategy is that he is known as one of the founders of modern Tacitism.137 The uproar that followed his statement of ╇ On Tacitism as a writing strategy and not a political stance, see Waszink, “Your Tacitism.” 137

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intolerance in the Politica was, ironically, qualmed by the tolerant university authorities, who prevailed upon Lipsius to publish a statement that explained that Ure, seca (burn! chop up!) was merely a metaphor for vigorous treatment. The next year he sneaked out from Leiden and reconciled with the Catholic church, which turned this into a triumphant publicity event. Lipsius returned to Leuven and worked as privy councillor and historiographer to Philip II/I. His fondness for Stoicism and the utility of adaptation to local circumstances is often invoked as a defence against accusations of opportunism and insincerity in religion. As noted above, his 1581 Somnium created the genre of early modern Menippean satire. It was dedicated to Scaliger and rebuked many of their contemporary critics for their zealotry and religious partisanship. The book offended many of Lipsius’s former German friends, as it ridiculed the imperial custom of crowning semi-barbaric and semiGreek or semi-Latin poets laureate. Copies of the Somnium were confiscated at the Frankfurt book fair, and attempts were made to ban it from the Habsburg empire. For the rest of his life, Lipsius had to counter accusations and plead the inoffensive playfulness of this short work.138 Some histories of Renaissance and early modern satires describe a wonderfully rich and intense burst of satirical activity in the United Provinces, inspired by Erasmus and Lipsius. Existing monographs on Leiden University provide a satisfying account of intellectual life at this time but they rarely, if ever, focus on Leiden satires, let alone connect them to events outside the University. It is understandable that literary histories ignore local influences, and local histories neglect international ones, but there is something to be said for considering the Leiden satirical tradition as a separate phenomenon. Considering the political context, the shared working conditions and regular contact among these writers, and the actual text of their satires, one can for instance amend the currently perpetuated assumption that popular, academic and political literatures existed in strictly separate realms. The connections and cross-overs are integral to their right interpretation. For instance, it is often pointed out that neolatin satires were written and read in the ‘republic of scholars.’ Their thick thicket of self-references, bordering on navel-gazing, reinforces the ╇ De Smet, Menippean, 87-90. Heesakkers, “Two Leiden.” Relihan, “On the origin.” 138

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impression of a vibrant but isolated, hermeneutically sealed world. Yet their complexity and self-referentiality do not mean that non-academic politicians and popular playwrights could not or did not follow closely, and grasp the intricacies of, the rich and strange satirical output of the academics. Political dignitaries with close ties to Leiden, like the Schottes, Marnix, Honerdus, Hogerbeets and others, writers who straddled academia and popular culture like Cats and Hooft, and the primarily non-academic rederijkers, are specific cases in point. The secularising, politique and Erastian ideals embodied in Menippean satires not only filtered down into popular culture, they stretched right across class, city and language barriers within and beyond the United Provinces. New writings in Latin, French, German and Dutch interacted as and when they appeared. D.V. Coornhert (1522-90) and H.L. Spiegel (1549-1612) are well-known links between academic and popular literature, but erroneously regarded as exceptional, or examples of an interchange limited to Amsterdam. The Protestant firebrand lord Marnix, the scholars Cunaeus and Johannes Meursius (15791639), and common rederijkers like Lauris Jansz, who wrote almost exclusively in Dutch, were knowing participants in the same secularising satirical discourse that connected styles and writers as varied as Lipsius, Beza, and the most popular anti-clerical plays going back to the middle ages.139 The transformation of classical anti-philosophy satires and fables from Lucian through Theophrastus to Phaedrus into the polemical Menippean satires of early modernity, among which SV stands out for targeting all theology, takes place in this contextual continuity. Marnix. The dearth of references to Philips van Marnix, lord of St Aldegonde (1538-98), in current discussions of Menippean satire is a telling symptom of the problem that the recognition of secularisation’s importance can redress. Marnix is now best remembered as the author of Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem. In his own time his fame rested equally on his military exploits and his long but endearingly rancorous satire, De roomsche byen-korf, rapidly translated into English, German and French. He studied theology under Calvin and Beza in Geneva. On his return to the Netherlands he 139 ╇ Parts of the institutional structure of this cross-over between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is described in A. van Dixhoorn, “Writing poetry.” Blok, History, III.343-7. Marnef, “Chambers.”

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became one of the chief agents of the Reformation, playing a major part at the Assembly of St. Trond, where some of the higher and most of the lower nobility pledged to co-operate with the Calvinist congregations.140 He wrote a pamphlet in defense of Flemish iconoclasts and had to flee the country when Alva’s troops arrived in 1567. In 1570 William of Orange took him into his service, and in 1572 Marnix was his representative at the first meeting of the States GenÂ� eral. He fell into Spanish captivity, was exchanged, sent on diplomatic and rebel-rousing missions to Paris and London, and given the hopeless task of trying to win European monarchs, nobles and commoners over to the Dutch cause at the 1578 Diet of Worms. Marnix played a major role in bringing about the Union of Utrecht in January 1579. He was not, however, the average zealous Calvinist nobleman. He was a politique. Similarly to the French politiques, Marnix’s most vicious attacks were not directed against one denomination or another, but against both Jesuits and Mennonites, the most exclusivist Catholic and Protestant groups at the time.141 Although he spent his life fighting for the Protestant cause, he tried (in vain) to convince the magistrates of Utrecht to stop persecuting the Catholic population. His surrender of Antwerp to the Spanish in 1585, as well as his negotiations there, aimed to save the populace above all. Similarly to his negotiations while in captivity more than a decade earlier, Antwerp’s surrender was reviled by his zealous critics as signs of irreligious, unprincipled pragmatism, and compromises with the Antichrist.142 He retired from public affairs to Leiden and to his estate in Zeeland. In spite of having an enormous personal library, including rare Â�manuscripts, he maintained a residence in Leiden, to enjoy the facilities of the university. There he began to work on a new and better Dutch translation of the Bible with the help of Vulcanius, whom he hired in 1577 as his personal secretary.143 Although Marnix, using ╇ On this, in the context of the French-Dutch parallel, see Koenigsberger, “Organization.” Emblematic of this axis in the “Calvinist international,” Wilhelmus was a Dutch anthem, but a French tune: Pettegree, Reformation, 71. 141 ╇ Marnix believed that Anabaptists sought to destroy the bonds of all human society, and recommended to William of Orange the imposition of the death penalty on Mennonites. For a similar argument against unconditional Mennonite pacifism, see chapter 5 on Grotius below. 142 ╇ The details of the political and personal price Marnix repeatedly paid for his moderation are described in van Kalken and Jonckheere, Marnix. 143 ╇ With the blessing of William of Orange. See Marnix, Epistulae II. No. 105. Vulcanius as his secretary from 1577: Lohr, “Renaissance,” 227. 140

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state-of-the-art scholarship on Hebrew linguistics and exegesis, only got as far as the complete translation of Genesis, his notes and his methods were taken up and utilised for the first complete Dutch Bible translation. After his move to Leiden his surviving correspondence is of little use in establishing the precise nature of his interaction with Leiden students and faculty—other than Vulcanius, with whom he conducted much official business that left a good paper trail—but it is difficult to believe that he had none. The authors of modern short biographical notes on Heinsius, Grotius and Cunaeus in encyclopaedias and other reference works routinely hint at Marnix’s personal influence on the second Leiden generation of secularisers, even though primary evidence is hard to come by. Marnix died at Leiden at the end of 1598. In addition to his talents as a soldier, diplomat and statesman, Marnix was a prolific author and scholar. Only a few of his numerous writings will be considered here. The Beehive purports to be written against the Catholic Church, using six arguments of Gentian Hervet (1499-1584) as the initial target of ridicule. Bishop Hervet wrote a letter to all Protestants to convince them of the error of their ways and shepherd them back to Catholicism. Marnix wrote a commentary on Hervet’s letter, and constructed the Beehive around it. The end result is an often subtle, always funny criticism of certain Catholic tenets and of papal politics. Marnix, who signs the satire as Isaac Rabbotenu van Loven (perhaps a pun meaning ‘our laughing teacher’), pretends to defend Catholics, depicting them as a beehive. Popes, cardinals, bishops, monks, priests and inquisitors are likened to different kinds of bees, all with distinctive characteristics. Some of them—bishops and cardinals—like to live near a king, and the closer they approach, ‘the thicker and rounder they commonly grow.’ Others are solitary; mendicants are drones; yet others are horseflies, wasps or hornets, parasites who feed not on horses but on sheep (i.e. the congregation). These ‘for fear of being entangled in the fleece, first bite away the wool, after that their skinne, and lastly do suckle their blood, to which they are wonderfully adjected.’ A full account of this extremely popular satire would be out of place here. Several features are worth noting for their connection to Sardi venales, and as evidence of a wider Leiden satirical tradition than hitherto supposed, one that includes popular references that both question the strict division between neolatin aca-

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demic and popular vernacular traditions, and prepare the ground for understanding the causes and extent of SV’s reception. Similarly to Mandeville’s Fable of the bees (1705, reworked until 1732), the original image was so powerful, and the book became so popular, that Marnix’s own revisions and enlargements ended up running to 400-500 pages, depending on the edition. The eventual Beehive can be described as a serious theological tract disguised as a satire. Therein Marnix mockingly takes the Catholic side and attacks Protestants for reading the Bible for themselves, without intermediary interpreters, learned commentaries, ‘Sophisticall glosses’ and decretals, and for praying to God, not to saints. In the epistle dedicatory, addressed to Franciscus Sonnius (1506-76, Bishop of Antwerp), the ‘Rabbi’ explains that the Catholics read the Bible selectively, and construct far-fetched interpretations with no epistemical justification. In chapter 7 we learn about the various types of substances produced in the beehive. Since the Catholic bees would die of undiluted honey (it is too pure for them), they mix in the muddy water of the Tiber in Rome, the Seine in Paris, and the Dijle at Leuven. The resulting mudcake is sometimes mixed with ‘the best Vinum Theologicum,’ and it is liberally dispersed as the Eucharist by the jovial Whore of Babylon amongst kings and princes. Mixed in with the dribble of scholars, the substance turns into the wax of papal bulls. And so on; Marnix shows great ingenuity and apicultural know-how in pursuing the extended metaphor. In chapter 10 we see a particular type of bee, one that provokes physical violence on the grounds of religious disagreement. It has the colour of blood, ‘creeping and cralling on the ground, very loath to looke up towards Heaven,’ and mixes a poisonous syrup. The antidote is raw honey, unmixed and undiluted, in the form of critical, rational, but sympathetic readings of the Bible for oneself, without any intermediary (chapter 11). The good type of honey and honey-bee shown in the Beehive is usefully compared with Folly’s description in Praise of Folly of bees as the proof of the wisdom of following Nature. Bees lead the happiest lives because they follow Nature alone. Erasmus combines this image from Virgil’s Georgics IV with Pliny’s observation that bees lack some of the bodily senses, and argues that the bees’ happiness is not only undiminished, but it is in fact augmented by their shortcomings. Horses, by contrast, have the same senses as men, and are equally miserable. Folly then suggests that men should ‘remain within the limits of Nature’ and not ‘go beyond the bounds of his lot.’

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Therefore, just as among mortals those men who seek wisdom are furthest from happiness—indeed, they are fools twice over because, forgetting the human condition to which they were born, they aspire to the life of the immortal gods and (like the giants) wage war against Nature with the engines of learning—so too, the least miserable among men are those who come closest to the level of intelligence (that is, the folly) of brute animals and never undertake anything beyond human nature.144

Folly elaborates on this theme over the next few pages, and explicitly claims to do so without and against Stoicism. The qualities she attributes to the fool are all Stoic ideals, known as apatheia: lack of fear, ambition and shame, enabling unwavering constancy, kindness and truthfulness. Folly then moves beyond Stoicism, and cites with approval classic Cynical examples of perfectly happy states of delusion and madness. Throughout this passage, Nature is the only unquestionable, authoritative guide and the antidote to human corruption, epistemic shortcomings and arrogance. Cunaeus takes a leaf out of the same book of early modern readings of Stoics and Cynics, but in SV he refutes even Nature’s guidance and the defence of natural curiosity. The analogous Cynical and Menippean nature of the Beehive was not lost on its readers. George Gilpin’s 1579 English translation was prefaced with a dedication to Philip Sidney by John Stell, who calls the work a catalogue of vices, an Anatomie, ‘beeing but a manuell, the verie secrets of the Romishe Church are so discovered (which in the opinion of the Pope and his consistorie, is high treason, and unpardonable,) that verie babes and sucklings may beholde their abhominations, and spitte at their villanous practises.’ In addition to its unusually comprehensive anti-clericalism, the epistemic humility enjoined upon the bees and upon the victims of their poisoning also connect the Beehive to the Sardi venales, albeit SV goes much further in the same direction. Throughout the work Marnix frequently refers to Aristotle, Pliny the Elder and others as apiary authorities, and both admiring and disparaging readers of the Beehive have pointed out the inspira144 ╇ ‘Ut igitur inter mortales, ii longissime absunt a felicitate, qui sapientiae student, nimirum hoc ipso bis stulti, quod homines nati cum sint, tamen obliti conÂ� ditionis suae Deorum immortalium vitam affectant, et Gigantum exemplo, disciplinarum machinis, naturae bellum inferunt, ita quam minime miseri videntur ii, qui ad brutorum ingenium stultitiamque quam proxime accedunt, neque quidÂ� quam ultra hominem moliuntur.’ See p. 54 in Clarence Miller’s translation of Praise of Folly. The train of thought that Erasmus summarises here is on 52-61. More work is needed on the epistemic differences between Erasmus, Hervet (translator of Sextus Empiricus) in his letters against Calvinists, and Marnix.

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tion of Virgil’s Georgics IV. However, none of these texts distinguish between bad and good kinds of honey-like substances, which is the central leitmotif of the satire, and very similar to Cunaeus’s distinction between good and bad kinds of intellectual inquiry. Beemon, for instance, in his excellent article on the theology of this distinction, candidly admits that he cannot find its source and inspiration.145 In the secondary literature on Marnix and the Beehive that is used here, references to Phaedrus are curiously absent. One of his fables, The bees and the drones, relates a legal feud between the two swarms over a honeycomb. The wise judge calls on both to produce honey and wax and to start making a new comb, so he can judge from its taste and colour the owner of the disputed comb. The drones refuse, and the bees are victorious. The distinction between types of apiary substances, and good and bad bees, shows a closer similarity with Marnix’s Beehive than with Georgics IV. Pithou and his circle were discussing Phaedrus as early as the 1560s, and similarly to his priceless Petronius manuscript, Pithou may have circulated his Phaedrus manuscript decades before he published its editio princeps in 1596. Note also the similarities between this particular Phaedrus fable, Marnix’s Beehive, the Onopordon that Rigault fed to the unfortunate crypto-Christian Heliogabalus in the Funus parasiticum, and the substance called catholicon in LSM.146 Milton’s description of Pandemonium and the Council of Hell in Paradise Lost, Book I (written as early as 1658), has also been connected to Marnix’s Beehive.147 LSM’s description of the divided and treacherous États Généraux may be an even better candidate. Did Pithou or his circle encourage Marnix to imitate the Phaedrus fable, perhaps even giving him a sneak preview into his precious manuscript? No evidence survives in Marnix’s correspondence

╇ Beemon, “Poisonous.” ╇ Another strong contender among direct models for SV is Le Tocsin au Roy, &c., &c., Contra le livre de la Puissance Temporelle du Pape, mis n’agueres en lumiere par le Cardinal Bellarmin (Paris, 1610), in which the Jesuits’ sugary syrup deprives the people of reason. Cuttica, “Strong antidote.” Le Tocsin was translated into English and Dutch shortly after publication, and was also re-issued in French in Leiden in 1611. Cunaeus was ideally positioned to read it and participate in the ensuing debate. It is part of the context of sensibilities that were offended by the 1612 SV, and which further demonstrate the international political nature of satirical literature that SV belonged to. 147 ╇ By many, e.g. Smith, “The source.” 145 146

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that he received a copy or extracts from Pithou’s Phaedrus, and for now this connection remains conjectural.148 Yet the distinction between good and bad kinds of knowledge, corresponding to pure and poisonous honey in the Beehive, is the dominant theme in Sardi venales. An echo of Lucian’s parasite trope in its Marnixian formulation may be found near the end of SV, where the drunken character, who claims immortality through his poetry, and argues that there is no greatness without a touch of madness (and who was read by some contemporaries as a reference to Heinsius), is compared to a strange type of gadfly that neither bites nor pricks, but sucks through a tube it has instead of a tongue.149 And whether Cunaeus got the idea from the various kinds of unsavoury honey in the Beehive, and/or from the drug catholicon in LSM, the connotation corroborates the likelihood that the title of Sardi venales refers to Aurelius Victor’s History of Rome, dedicated to Julian, in which “Sardi venales” is a catch phrase for stupid slaves and for cheap drugs that suddenly flood the market. Cunaeus may have been reading Aurelius Victor in any case in preparation for his edition and Latin translation of Julian’s Caesares. As mentioned earlier, it was Casaubon who finally disentangled the debate over the connection and afterlife of Greek satyr-plays and Roman satires in his groundbreaking 1605 De satyrica poesi. To do so, he had to overemphasise the disconnect between Varro and Menippos, even arguing that Menippos’s own writings should not be considered satires but parodies, and that Varro only named the genre ‘Menippean satire’ out of respect for the Greek Cynic. He also contended that among surviving Greek texts not Lucian’s, but Julian’s follow Menippos the most closely.150 Caesares begins with Julian explaining to his interlocutor—probably Sallust—that satire is against his nature, and he is only indulging in this one out of a sense of obligation toward the god, Saturn, whose festival is about to begin.151 Cunaeus’s combination of his own satire with Julian’s reminds us of the role of 148 ╇ Marnix, Epistulae. Intellectual exchanges between Marnix and the Pléiade are better documented. See Govaert, La langue, 73 ff. 149 ╇ Cunaeus, SV, 143: ‘Scires facile ex hac nota literatorum esse, qui apud nos suctu vivunt, muscarum in morem, quibus pro lingua data fistula est.’ Cunaeus’s sentence echoes Pliny, Natural history, 11.100. 150 ╇ Casaubon, De satyrica, 261-7. De Smet, Menippean, 46-7. For Cunaeus’s knowledge of the debate about satire as a genre, see his Oratio XI from 1611 on Horace, and Oratio XII on Juvenal. 151 ╇ This is an inside joke, since Julian wrote several satires.

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Erasmus’s Sileni in Heinsius’s Hymn to Bacchus. Heinsius adopts the Erasmian version of Silenos, the satyr and chief servant of Bacchus, who symbolises hidden value, to make the case for the hidden value of Bacchus himself, and for the comparability and even superiority of pagan over Christian doctrines concerning immortality and divine frenzy. Cunaeus takes Julian’s character, featured in Julian’s own satire, to indicate the perfectly serious nature of the discussion laid out in satirical form. Silenos also features prominently in the Caesares as the chief sounding board of Julian himself. He has the longest of the speaking roles. Every past emperor who appears in the satire is criticised by Silenos, who unleashes his wit to try score points with the laughing Dionysos. At one point several emperors enter the scene at once, and Silenos is horrified at the ‘swarm of monarchs.’ In another scene Hadrian enters, gazing into heaven and prying into hidden things; upon which Silenos mocks him for his ‘madness and folly.’ Marcus Aurelius alone can stand up to Silenos, and wins the gods’ votes as the most exalted emperor. Jesus appears briefly at the end of Caesares, under the protection of Incontinence, shouting out blasphemies. Constantine is shown the fool for coming to him gladly, but the Greek gods extract their vengeance. There are many interesting similarities between the Caesares and the SV, but not all are directly relevant to the intricate, yet, based on the book’s reception, extremely successful secularising message. Cunaeus’s work on Julian—which he did simultaneously and/or jointly with Heinsius—was combined with the imagery and political relevance of neolatin satires, leading to an up-to-date amalgam of the ancient form and the modern content. Another thing that may have inspired Cunaeus is the intellectual ambivalence that Gentian Hervet, the Beehive’s immediate target, acquired after the Beehive’s first appeareance. Although Marnix ridicules him in his capacity as a Catholic, Hervet is now remembered as one of the main originators of the Pyrrhonian crisis. His monumental and widely influential translation of Sextus Empiricus was published in 1569, the same year as the first edition of the Beehive. Hervet is often called the first Christian Pyrrhonian, although in the preface to his 1569 translation of Empiricus’s Adversus Mathematicos he argued that Skepticism was the best defence against Calvinists and the road to true Christianity.152 Earlier, Savonarola tried to turn Sextus Empiricus 152

╇ Floridi, Sextus, 39. Hervet tried to introduce the Inquisition into France, but

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into a statement of Ancient philosophy’s self-confessed inadequacy, and thereby a justification of Christianity; but he probably realised that skepticism was too powerful a force to unleash, and brought the project to a premature conclusion.153 Henri Estienne’s pioneering 1562 edition and translation of the Outlines was used as an argument against Catholics;154 Hervet’s translation was in many ways a response to that. Out of all Catholic apologists, this is the Hervet that Marnix targeted with the Beehive, in the year of Hervet’s publication of the Adversus Mathematicos. The Beehive, more than any other early modern satire until the Sardi venales, utilised the full potential of the satirical genre to undermine both reason and faith, and to do so in a vivid, memorable form. In spite of the current academic miscompartmentalisation, the Beehive crossed the boundaries between Latin and vernacular, high and popular culture, satire and theology. It should be read as an integral part of the European satirical tradition. Some of the secondary literature cited here distinguishes between high and low culture too strictly, to my mind. The poems set into the main text of LSM, which became independent street songs of their own, and this account of the role of Marnix’s Dutch Beehive in Leiden satire-writing, are meant to correct that impression, and to prefigure the later discussion of the Latin SV’s translation and reception in Dutch, French, and English writings.155 Marnix wrote another theological satire along similar lines, which was published shortly after his death. The Tableau des différends de la religion is another mock praise and apology of Catholicism against Calvinism, with serious theological discussions in a satirical setting. was stopped by l’Hôpital. Hervet’s translation of Sextus, and the argument about its utility for Catholicism, is dedicated to him. 153 ╇ Popkin, The history of scepticism. Walker, Ancient. 154 ╇ And dedicated to the same Henri de Mesmes who owned a rare Petronius manuscript, and agreed with Pithou about the need to keep it from the public. Richardson, Reading. Estienne’s Sextus is also the source of much of Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1580, reworked until Montaigne’s death in 1592). 155 ╇ Another example is Vondel’s dramas that follow closely the trajectory of Leiden secularisation, from Lipsius’s 1581 Somnium to Heinsius’s 1621 Cras credo. See Vondel and Heinsius above, and further details in Parente, Religious drama. Dubu’s overview of French theatre, and the popularisation of Heinsius’s secularising ideas on drama, are also to the point. One also suspects that the unusually broad anti-clericalism of Lauris Jansz’s 1583 play, Van onse lieven heers mineevaer, is a rederijker version of the anti-clerical satirical tradition, and further corroborates the academy-to-street filter-down effect. Koppenol, “Pieter Cornelisz.” Ramaker, Conformisten. Further details of academics and rederijkers interacting in each other’s spaces, including universities and chambers of rhetoric: Blok, History, III.343-7.

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While quite similar to the Beehive, this work used a systematic, comparative framework to explore the differences between the creeds. Marnix was probably writing or rewriting this while he was at Leiden. In other words, he brought to Leiden with him not only a previously published satire that he repeatedly revised, but also a new, half-finished and yet unpublished one. There is evidence that he sought and received active co-operation from several Leideners in researching and writing up this satire.156 As the notion and ancient textual inspiration for the value-free, unchristian comparison of Mosaic and Roman law was probably passed from Pithou to Scaliger to Cunaeus (DRH), so could the systematic comparison of religions pass from Marnix to Vulcanius, and on to Heinsius and Vossius. After Marnix’s death in 1598 Vulcanius, teacher, host and friend to Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius, took over much of Marnix’s papers, including many of his political documents, drafts and correspondence. What else did he bring with him that may have influenced the second generation of Leideners, and may have found its way into the unique text and agenda of Cunaeus’s SV? Marnix brought to Leiden his political experience at the highest diplomatic and military levels; anti-clericalism; a profound understanding of the epistemic issues involved in religious debates and of the efficient rhetorical strategies for presenting them; a distinction between good and bad kinds of inquiry; and the principle of politique moderation, tried and tested even at the cost of disgrace and political exile. The textual connections with Cunaeus’s Sardi venales show only one element of one aspect of his contribution, namely to Cunaeus’s delivery of a topical, urgent political message (occasioned by the Vorstius scandal) in a time-honoured yet living tradition of political satire. Directly and through Vulcanius and other intermediaries, Marnix made a sigÂ� nificant contribution to the education and formation of the Leiden Circle. Leiden: a satirical education. It is generally recognised that European Christianity had at its heart a fundamental contradiction, and perhaps a consequent dialectic, that derives from the fact that the keys to its holy texts are held by and acquired from unbelievers.157 Children were ╇See Oosterhof’s comments in Marnix, Tableau, 20-1, 28, and passim. ╇ Erasmus, Antibarbari. Rummel, Erasmus and his Catholic critics; Humanistscholastic. 156 157

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raised on classical Greek and Roman texts in school before they read the Fathers or any theology. The education of the second generation at Leiden fits into this pattern. Even so, Leiden’s pedagogical choices in the selection of ancient material stand out as unusual. Given their early immersion not in any old pagan literature, but in Stoics, Skeptics and Cynics, it becomes less surprising that the second generation ended up writing the sort of books that they did, from Grotius’s secular international law through Cunaeus’s demystification of Israel to Vossius’s deism. It is interesting to note that while the first Leiden generation (Dousa, Junius, Lipsius, Vulcanius, Scaliger) did not begin their academic careers with satirical, skeptical or stoical texts, they made sure that the second generation did. It seems that the first generation of the Leiden Circle decided to thoroughly coach their students in satire and skepticism at the earliest possible opportunity. The great second Leiden generation, which included Grotius, Walaeus, Vossius, HeinÂ� sius and Cunaeus, also cut their teeth on cynical rhetoric before they tackled Church and State, or the details of Christian doctrine. Earlier we saw the significance of Scaliger’s and Casaubon’s help and encouragement for the young Grotius’s edition of Martianus Capella’s Satyricon, which Casaubon deemed a Menippean satire.158 The consequences for Heinsius’s intellectual development of Scaliger’s guidance toward the bucolics (whose praise of the simple life was transformed into an argument for epistemic humility), Nonnus, Aristotle’s Poetics, the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, Hellenistic Jews, and the application of history as a master discipline, have also been shown. Heinsius’s first original satires were written in collaboration with, and in defense of, Scaliger.159 The role of Scaliger, Vulcanius, Casaubon and Marnix ╇ Casaubon, De satyrica poesi, 268-9. Although Relihan’s argument that Menippean satire as a genre was invented by Lipsius is convincing, Shanzer’s study of the Menippean elements in Capella remains valuable here. She also shows that assessing the De Nuptiis in terms of Menippean satire as a literary genre is a non-starter. Instead, she concentrates on themes that classical works share, and on the basis of which a Menippean mode may emerge. The heavenly voyage, the satirical intent, personifications, the parody of religions and the ridiculing of philosophers are among the themes she surveys. Shanzer, A philosophical. For Scaliger’s influence on Grotius’s and others’ appreciation of the satirical possibilities inherent in editing and commenting on Capella, including the deployments of Menippos as the ‘man in the moon’ for astronomical, Cynical, epistemic and other arguments, see Vermij, CalviÂ� nist Copernicans, 37-45. 159 ╇ These are instances of partisan Catholic-Protestant satire wars. The conversion of the infamously vituperative Kaspar Scioppius (1576?-1649) to Catholicism, and 158

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in getting Cunaeus to read and think about satires at Leiden is discussed above; and the Erasmus-More translation of Lucian was a standard text in teaching Greek at Leiden. The intelligent, philosophically Cynical and formally satirical discussion of free will and predestination in Lucian’s Zeus rants and Zeus catechized was known to Cunaeus before he contributed SV to the controversies surrounding ArminiÂ�aÂ�nism and the appointment of Vorstius. Lucian’s Parliament of the gods was a ready-made model for SV’s republic of letters, where the dead scholars, in accordance with Heinsius’s identically non-Christian notions of immortality, became dii manes thanks to the quality of their scholarship and commitment. Reading Icaromenippus, The descent into Hades and the Dialogues of the dead was first-rate preparation for Cunaeus’s use of Menippos and Diogenes in SV, as Cynics and great epistemic authorities. Erasmus and More started a fashion when they commented on and imitated Lucian’s Tyrannicide. Early modern imitators and commentators of Lucian thought of him as a destroyer of hypocrisy. In Mors Peregrini and several early modern Menippean satires based on Lucian, Cunaeus could find the Lucianic armory of anti-hypocrisy tropes, schemes and allusions deployed against Christianity in particular. We also showed how a Leiden education, Scaliger’s historiographical demolition of Eusebius, and the French connection to Rigault’s Somnium and/or to Casaubon’s pioneering edition of the Augustan his joining the Jesuits, was followed by his attack on Scaliger and on his pretence to an aristocratic lineage in the near 500-page long satire, Scaliger hypobolimaevs (1607, reissued twice in 1608). This was answered by the anonymous publication of the Satirae duae, by Scaliger and Heinsius. It begins with a Praefatio dedicated to Scaliger, and is followed by a reprint, suitably renamed, of the ‘Judicia de Josepho Scaligero Gasperis Scioppii nondum parasiti’, Scioppius’s praise of Scaliger from the time when Scioppius was still a Protestant. A testimonial and letter by Casaubon, praising Scaliger, comes next. Then we have Heinsius’s Hercules tuam fidem, sive Munsterus Hypobolimaeus, id est, satyra Menippea… (the ‘Munsterus’ is Scioppius, who occasionally signed off as ‘G. S. à Munster’). Then comes a second satire, the Virgula divina, sive apotheosis Lucretii Vespilioni, followed by a personal counterattack, the Vita et parentes Gasp. Schoppii. Next, Scaliger’s own defense, Confutatio stultissimae Burdonum fabulae, under a pseudonym hinting at authorship by J(anus) R(utgersius), but included in Scaliger’s own Opuscula as early as 1612. Grotius contributed a poem to the volume extolling Scaliger. See Bernays, Scaliger, and Sellin, Heinsius, 410. Given Scaliger’s stature, it is understandable that this satirical exchange generated shockwaves around Europe, as well as a flurry of frenzied correspondence, further satires and counter-satires over the next several decades. In 1611 Scioppius wrote an attack on James VI/I, and after he moved from Germany and Italy, spent much of the 1630s writing influential anti-Jesuit works.

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History have inspired SV’s title, which comes from Aurelius Victor’s History, written for and in praise of the emperor Julian, and/or from the anti-Christian and satirical Augustan History’s account of Heliogabalus and Callixtus, the venal pope. The particular tradition of Menippean satire at Leiden before the SV has also been briefly introduced. It includes Lipsius’s pioneering Somnium, which invented the genre; second, Leiden’s politique connections to LSM and Marnix; third, the exchanges between Chrestien and Casaubon, between Pithou and Scaliger, and Passerat’s reading of Lipsius, as parts of the French-Leiden discussion of satires from the technical perspective of literary criticism. Finally, some speculations were offered about a French politique—Leiden Circle philological cooperation on anti-theology satire, especially with regard to Phaedrus, Petronius, and other salient manuscripts. With regard to the SV, the classical education and the first Leiden generation was shown to prepare SV’s precise and skilful use of Cynical philosophy by directing Cunaeus’s (and Heinsius’s) attention to Julian the Apostate, and the Erasmian metaphorical use of Silenos as a token of hidden value (including Diogenes’s). The same Leiden education helped Cunaeus understand the historical figures of the anti-Christian emperors Heliogabalus and Julian, and the venal Pope Callixtus, and also showed him the ease with which the historical facts can be transformed into political messages in an early modern Menippean satire. Yet the point worth making about SV is not simply that it was antitheological, using Cynical satire as its model and putting Cynics on a pedestal throughout (Menippos is the guide, Diogenes the Cynic the only one who can find Sophia, Julian’s multiple roles, etc.), but that in spite of all this, Cunaeus still does not lapse into Cynicism himself. Instead, the Cynical attacks on religious faith in general, and on Christianity in particular are one of three components. It is the successful combination of these that makes SV a milestone of epistemic humility on the road to secularism. Christian Minimalism: Against Nature The satirical application of Cynicism against faith was a singularly important step for secularisation, but supplied only one component of Cunaeus’s silver bullet. For a complete demolition of Christian epistemology he needed a comprehensive and definitive refutation of the argument that God gave Nature to Man as the light to salvation.

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This notion, which runs through the history of Christian thought from its earliest beginnings, comes in several formulations. For the present purpose, these formulations are divided into two ideal-types: when nature is thought to provide adequate light for man to find God, and when nature is insufficient, but legitimates all inquiry. The first ideal-type has two basic forms: first, when natural reason lights the path to God, and second, when there is no need for reason: being human is enough, because the sacrifice of Christ (made by Christ as man) redeemed the whole of human nature, and offers salvation to everyone who shares in human nature, irrespective of their degree of reasonableness. In the latter form, human nature as guide to salvation had little use for reason, and was often described as an “inner light” allied to the notions of “conscience” and “common sense,” yet without an active, reasoning component. Regarding the Christian epistemic status of Nature other than Man’s, it was also seen as a guide to God, since it was the legitimate object of inquiry for man’s natural reason. This was the only point and extent of agreement between those Christian thinkers who regarded man’s natural reason as a sufficient guide to salvation, and those who thought that the Book of Nature (universal revelation) was insufficient without the Book of Scripture (particular revelation).160 These ideal-types are useful starting-points for understanding many Christian thinkers’ attitude to pagans, preand post-Christ Ancients, and the newly discovered savages. When a Christian thinker is positioned in one of these groups—e.g. all men are potentially saved, by virtue of sharing human nature; or that natural reason is sufficient for finding God, but only when applied to both Books—, then his or her approach to the aforementioned range of non-Christian figures usually turns out to be quite consistent. Many arguments that seem self-contradictory to the modern mind disappear when the strength and importance of these ideal-types in structuring Christian thought are recognised.161 160 ╇ It is beyond the scope of this work to offer a comprehensive or even representative sample of these arguments. It would barely scratch the surface to refer to the treatment of natural reason in Montaigne, “On cannibals.” Grotius, DIBP. Hobbes, Leviathan pp. 9, 19, 21, 23, 24, 30, 34, 42, 75, etc. Locke, Second Treatise §63. Locke, Letter concerning toleration. Paine, Rights of Man, 138, 169. 161 ╇ For a good account of this dynamic see Hodgen, Early anthropology. A clear formulation of the divinely ordained adequacy of reason, and the consequent domination over nature and political equality among men, can be found at the opening of the 1649 The true Levellers standard advanced: ‘In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds,

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Cunaeus attacks both basic versions of nature-based Christianity in SV, together with their subgroups. From the start we learn that the civil strife that plagues the Republic is fuelled by the epistemic arrogance of theologians, whose inevitable failure to understand divine matters, including free will and predestination, leads them to frantic folly and anger.162 Near the end of SV one theologian puts forward the other version, explaining that while expecting a successful inquiry into all things is indeed hubris, the pursuit itself is natural and divinely approved.163 Another theologian argues that trusting in God’s benevolence carries the assumption that natural reason provides sufficient light to guide man to God. Sophia, Sophrosyne and Cunaeus disagree with both.164 Cunaeus himself confesses that in his adolescence it was his nature that first drove him to the study of sacred letters, but he found no understanding, only further confusion and a trap for the soul. Menippos greets Cunaeus with promises of intellectual rewards for his courage in transgressing the boundaries of nature.165 From SV’s beginning to its end, Cunaeus makes certain that nature-based epistemic justifications of Christianity and theological overreach are consistently refuted, in all their various forms. Cunaeus could have acquired these refutations from various philosophical schools and sources. The text of SV, however, shows that his main inspiration was Christian minimalism, which holds that while most doctrinal details are disputable and inessential, some sort of central core remains to Christianity that defies or transcends both reason and nature. The virgin birth, the Trinity, the Eucharist have all been used by various Christian minimalists in this way. In its extreme forFishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.€And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.’ In Winstanley, Law. See also Locke, Two treatises. Hill, “Reason.” Further references to sources discussing this issue can be multiplied. 162 ╇ Cunaeus states this as his own observation in the Dedication and the Preface. Menippos makes the same point in §11. 163 ╇ Cunaeus, SV §§111-2. 164 ╇ Cunaeus, SV §§83, 86, 88, 120, etc. 165 ╇ Cunaeus, SV §§ Preface 1, 6, SV §21.

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mulation, the only unnatural thing according to Christian minimalists that still must be believed for someone to be a Christian at all is that Jesus was the Christ, who came back from the dead and through whom all believers can be saved. Following nature was not enough, according to the minimalists, to be a Christian. Although at times minimalists like Grotius, Pascal or Hobbes could get close to making natural reason alone sufficient, in the end a certain amount of belief (or willing suspension of disbelief) always distinguishes the Christian minimalist from the deist. Grotius’s De veritate, Locke’s ReasonableÂ� ness, and Hobbes’s unum necessarium show, each in its own, otherwise quite different way, the underlying reasonableness and utility of Christianity; but they leave the last step to faith and/or grace. Even minimalism, let alone full-blown theologies, contrast strikingly with Heinsius’s Hymn of Bacchus, Vossius’s De theologia gentili, or CherÂ� bury’s works, in which the supremacy of Christian irrational fidenda completely disappear, replaced by non-Christian ones in the first case, and with Scaligerian comparative religious anthropology in the last two. At first it may seem ironic that Cunaeus’s attack on nature as a guide to Christianity comes from Christian sources. His combination of this feature of Christianity with the Cynical attack on faith, and the Rabbinic attack on reason, however, makes his use of Christian minimalism infinitely more devastating to Christianity than the use of only non-Christian sources would have. Otherwise, a critique of SV—and there were plenty—could have pointed out that the satire was wholly irrelevant to Christianity. This way Cunaeus could bring his extreme version of epistemic humility inside the Christian discourse, and play out the debates that led him there largely through the mouths of Christians. Cunaeus’s intention to use Christian minimalism against nature-based arguments supporting Christianity is the key to understanding why he chose the particular cast of characters for the first half of the Republic’s debate, before Sophia’s arrival. Menippos is Cunaeus’s guide, and Diogenes finds Sophia. Although Greeks, Romans, barbarians and all manner of people fill the benches, the ones who actually get to speak in the Republic’s deliberations are all Christians (except for the goddess Sophia), and none of them are born before the fifteenth century. The opening and closing statements are given by Erasmus, the Republic’s elected leader for that year. After his introduction we hear Poliziano, followed by Hermolaus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Pico della Mirandola. It is after these four speeches that Erasmus calls for the testimony of Sophia, and the assembly has to

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wait until Diogenes finds her. In this second context, after the description of the Cynics above, we begin to see how the structure of the satire unfolds. Cynics are present throughout, in the choice of genre, in Cunaeus’s guide, Sophia’s finder, and in the Julian translation after the SV text. Simply put, Cynicism in SV represents the unreliability of religious faith in general, and of Christianity in particular. Cynics, however, like Erasmus’s Folly, believe that following one’s nature is the best way to live and to think. This leaves Cunaeus’s secularising project vulnerable to Christianity staging a come-back on the basis of nature. The central part of the satire, the deliberation itself, begins with four Christian minimalist speeches, which disprove the adequacy of nature in attaining truth. Some form of belief in something supernatural must remain if one is to be a Christian at all, and therefore this belief is essential for right understanding. Nevertheless, the Cynics believe in the efficacy of their own reasoning, and give ample scope to natural reason; and while the Christian minimalists dispute that relying on nature alone is sufficient—whether through natural reason or through Christ’s human nature—they also leave the utility (if not the sufficiency) of natural reason standing. Christianity and epistemic over-reach can stage a come-back, using something akin to Pascal’s Wager, for instance. What Sophia brings in, after the four anti-nature minimalist speeches, is a frontal attack on reason, based on Rabbinic reactions to Aristotelianism. Cunaeus’s task is now complete. After Sophia’s speech, and Sophrosyne’s aside to Cunaeus, we hear various theologians (all of them nameless), who play through the permutation of Christian arguments from nature, reason, and faith, only to have each of them refuted. The five Christians who give speeches in SV, namely Erasmus (1466-1536), Poliziano (1454-94), Hermolaus (1454-93), Agricola (1444-85) and Mirandola (1463-94), were all tremendously influential scholars of their day. They edited texts, wrote best-sellers, advised kings and princes, and left an indelible mark on biblical hermeneutics. Therefore it is surprising to find that in spite of the high probability of overlapping subject matters, the specific subject that all five figures wrote about was epistemology. Hermolaus and Mirandola, the two Italians, had a much deeper interest in Neoplatonism than the three Dutchmen. Poliziano and Mirandola left extensive evidence of their intimate knowledge of Sextus Empiricus, but the others did not.166 166

╇ Floridi, Sextus, 30-2.

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Virgil, Cicero, Homer, Seneca, Roman law, the Bible: all five scholars touched on these subjects, but it is epistemology alone that they all devoted major works to, works that remained widely read and discussed until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Cunaeus calls them in as experts in Christian epistemology, more specifically in the minimalist formulation that gave reason ample cognisance, but insisted on the ultimately supernatural character of the core of Christianity. Apart from Erasmus, the princeps of the republic and arbiter of the debate, the four other debaters died before the Reformation. They saw and lived through momentous and turbulent events. Yet if such comparisons may be permitted, that degree of violence, bloodshed and instability was far below what followed Luther, the formation of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany in 1531, and the so-called Affair of the Placards in 1534 in France, the two earliest events that formally combined the religious divisions opened by the Reformation with the political engines of violence, heralding and prefiguring the dynamic of religious wars over the next one hundred years. In other words, these four Christian humanists’ statements were not yet tinted by the fear of seeing their ideas turned into excuses for war. The worst they could expect was pressure to recant their own intellectual positions. While much of their work resurrected Classical themes and ideas, a true Christian piety remained at their core. As stated from the outset, this book illustrates the secularisation thesis through the Leiden Circle, but also aims to reconstruct a chronologically and geographically broader context by discussing secularising works in Italy and France. Like French New Historians and Menippean satirists, SV’s Italian speakers allow us to sample some of the Italian models from whom the Leiden Circle adopted, among other methods, textual criticism and doctrinal minimalism. By placing these pre-Reformation thinkers in SV, Cunaeus accomplishes two things. Recalling Heinsius’s rejection of a balanced spectrum of Protestant and Catholic religious plays in DTC, Cunaeus avoids the appearance of Reformation partisanship. He traces the origin of early modern epistemological debates back one generation, before they fed into religious violence. Had he staged the same epistemological debate concerning the correct sphere of theology’s cognisance through the early Fathers, Cunaeus would have had to contend with the polemical baggage that the Reformation bestowed upon these venerable figures. The generation before Luther was distant enough from early seven-

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teenth-century Leiden to help find the roots of religious conflict, and close enough to provide a widely acceptable ground for discussion. Agricola was Erasmus’s teacher and role model. His great book, the De inventione dialectica, went through 43 editions from its first publication in 1515, to 1543. Rummel calls it ‘the textbook format’ of ‘Valla’s critique of scholastic dialectic.’167 Moreover, it fit dialectic into rhetoric in a new way, and skilfully distinguished between the validity and the truth content of an argument.168 This opened up new ways to discuss pagan historians, poets and orators in the same breath as Christian theologians, even Scripture.169 The bracketing of truth content was later to bring new doubts about Christian statements’ validity. Agricola’s criticism of a scholastic teacher, who uses cunning and traps to win an argument, instead of achieving the desired educational effect in the students, is strongly reminiscent of Menippos’s criticism of the new theologians in SV, with the difference that the theologians in SV use cunning to trap themselves, and the vulgar multitude.170 His proposed combination of rhetoric and dialectic, organised with a view to the practical utility of clear and effective teaching, is reminiscent of Heinsius’s dramatic theory in DTC and elsewhere. Instead of a frontal presentation of truths, whether in the form of a large comprehensive system or condensed into methodological handbooks, Agricola and Heinsius both argue that the mechanics of understanding and the limits of reason must always be taken into account, and that the reader or audience has to go through progressive stages of understanding that increasingly approximate the true nature of the subject being studied. Moreover, Agricola’s uncompromising attack on nominalists but 167 ╇ Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 156-7, 171. Also see Mack, Renaissance, chapters 13-15 for excellent qualitative and quantitative surveys of the dissemination, reception and influence of De inventione. 168 ╇ De inventione, Book II, cited by Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 164-5. Agricola achieved this by starting his interpretation of Aristotle with the Topics rather than the Analytics, reversing the scholastic order. 169 ╇ He also distinguishes between the tasks of instructing, moving, and delighting an audience, and connects them thus: ‘it is possible for a speaker to instruct without moving or delighting the audience, but it is not possible to move and delight without also instructing.’ Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 170. This seems to be a major premise of Heinsius’s theory of drama, built on his rearranged Aristotle, in DTC. 170 ╇ The influence of Agricola’s reconciliation of rhetoric and dialectic on early modern European education is described in Jardine, “Distinctive discipline.” AgriÂ� cola was a keen fan of Lucian, and the first translator of the Micyllus. IJsewijn, “Agricola,” 26. He also used Lucianic satires to argue about probability in didactic narration. De inventione II.2 LL 76-90, in Mundt’s reprint 210-1.

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deliberately incomplete demolition of universals is, again, strongly suggestive of the Leiden Circle’s skilful navigation between universals and particulars, albeit in their case for the secularising purposes explained above.171 Yet Agricola’s groundbreaking work on epistemology also devalued the role of logic and dialectic in conveying the truth of Christianity, putting more emphasis on the mystical, supernatural elements, and shifting the burden of allegiance to belief.172 Poliziano (1454-94) was a student of Ficino, an enemy of SavoÂ� narola, and he served as tutor to Lorenzo de Medici’s children. A voracious reader and prolific writer and translator, his Miscellanea (1489), dedicated to Lorenzo, Pico and Hermolaus, became a benchmark for literary criticism. Gilbert names him as the leader of the ‘Humanist method of legal interpretation’, a philological approach that later came to be known as the mos Gallicus, which replaced the ‘purely destructive criticism’ of glossators and theologians.173 His philological and historical work on the Digest, in particular, is often said to be the main inspiration for Budé and the founding of the humanist lawyers’ New History. Grafton begins his biography of Scaliger with a hundred pages on Poliziano and his influence on the French intellectual environment that nourished the young Scaliger. Among his many works, a possible source for SV may be Poliziano’s Lamia, a satirical oration delivered and first published in 1492, in which he compared scholastics with slandering and snooping female vampires, and also mocked Neoplatonists, which was unusual, though not unique, for a Quattrocento Florentine.174 In contrast with these two extremes, and navigating between Christian readings of Aristotle and Plato with the aid of Aesop, Apuleius, Horace and other satirists, Poliziano defined and defended the true Christian philosopher as someone who is driven to strive after wisdom and who perseveres without pretence or malevolence.175 Perfected human nature is the necessary and sufficient condition for right Christian understanding.

╇ Braakhuis, “Agricola’s view on universals.” ╇ Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 184. 173 ╇ Gilbert, Renaissance, 94-5. Grafton, “On the scholarship.” 174 ╇ The Renaissance tradition of anti-platonism is exemplified by George of Trebizond in Venice, and in Florence by Bruni’s progressive disappointment with Plato’s morals. Walker, Ancient. Kraye, “Philosophy,” 20-37. Lamia seems more controversial in the late fifteenth-century Florentine context, where eclectic syncretism was the order of the day. 175 ╇ Poliziano, Lamia, p. 4, L 21—8,19, incl., inter alia, the excellent 6,2—6,14. 171 172

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Poliziano’s philological writings and lectures on Plato and ArisÂ�Â�totle, especially those published in 1489-94, shared the same intention of finding a middle way between scholastic Aristotelianism and Florentine Neoplatonism; only these works took more serious forms than the Lamia. Poliziano gave a unique spin to the conventional distinction and opposition between words and things. He argued that they were so distinct, the relationship between them so complicated, and men so prone to error in reconstructing this relationship, that the best way to proceed is to posit the existence of two distinct dialects, one for words, and another for things; and to concentrate on the Â�former (i.e. philology and rhetoric) as much as possible, minimising philosophy and human speculation. This had the same effect as his minimalist definition of the good philosopher, namely a shift of emphasis toward the mysterious and supernatural core of Christianity. Hermolaus (1454-93) was a close friend of Poliziano’s. He studied and then taught at Padua, and played an active part in papal diplomacy. The most relevant writings that may have prompted Cunaeus to introduce Hermolaus as a speaking character in SV are Hermolaus’s Â�correspondence with Pico della Mirandola and his exchanges with Poliziano. The Mirandola-Hermolaus exchange in 1485 on the respective merits of philosophy and rhetoric was a famous text in its time. It is now interpreted as Pico’s defense of the preeminence of words over things, therefore of philosophy over rhetoric, in seeming contradiction to Poliziano’s and Hermolaus’s views. However, there are several signs that this interpretation is flawed, or at least should be augmented with a few additional layers of meaning. Only three such signs will be mentioned here: the by now familiar figure of Silenos; Pico’s own claim to be defending philosophy for the sake of the exercise, without really meaning to, like Glaucon defending injustice; and finally Poliziano’s correspondence with both Pico and Hermolaus about the matter. The Pico-Hermolaus exchange is rarely remembered in current secondary literature as a landmark in the post-Classical metaphorical use of the figure of Silenos. It probably influenced Erasmus’s first formulation of his Silenos thesis in the Adagia.176 As already shown, Erasmus turned Silenos into a symbol of the kind of hidden value that operates on a plane where Christian and pagan figures are fully com╇ For instance in the 1508 edition, III.iii.1: ‘Sileni Alcibiadis.’ Barker’s edition, 241-68. 176

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parable. Diogenes, Epictetus, Christ, Paul and the good Christian are all such Sileni. Since Silenos and his master Dionysos are pagan figures, this gave Heinsius an opening to intimate the superiority of pagan over Christian expressions of truth. But in Pico’s usage, it is a symbol for scholastic Aristotelian philosophy, rougher on the outside, but more valuable inside, than rhetoric and ornamental style.177 Hermolaus began the learned exchange with a letter praising Pico, and elaborating on the value of Greek studies for Latin writing and style. In this opening letter Hermolaus attacked the obscure, barbarian philosophers—meaning the Scholastics—who have no style and read little Plato. They will have no immortality, on account of having no literary style to speak of. Pico’s reply has long been celebrated as a masterpiece of clarity, elegance, and taste. It demonstrated once and for all that he was among the best Latin stylists of the age. After a general, polite introduction, Pico defends the ‘barbarians’, such as Aquinas, John Scotus, Albert the Great, and Averroes. He then introduces the persona of a ‘barbarian’ who counters Hermolaus with a most persuasive argument, delivered in the same polished style as the rest of Pico’s letter. Literary devices begin to rapidly multiply: the invented speaker’s powerfully eloquent attack on eloquence applies all the Cynical and Sophist tropes… in the defense of Scholasticism. The ‘barbarian’ accuses Hermolaus and other rhetoricians of disputing insignificant things, while real philosophers talk ‘about the reasons of things human and divine.’ Eloquence must be in the heart, not on the tongue. Rhetors are, by definition, liars. Scripture is written ‘rustically rather than elegantly,’ because ornamental style in human speech is unworthy of expressing the truth. The barbarian concedes that rhetoric is appropriate to public debate and pleading in the forum, but not in discussing philosophical matters. (Note that Hermolaus’s reply begins with an expression of astonishment that Pico took their debate public, by circulating and publishing Hermolaus Barbarus’s first letter, and the present rejoinder. The barbarian’s use of eloquence is selfconsistent, partly because he argues that it is a sign of untruthfulness.) Scholastics, like Cynics, prefer to dress in shaggy clothes rather than prance around wantonly. They carefully eschew all theatrical and linguistic effects in order to find the treasures hidden ‘in the inner depths of nature.’ They are not bothered by their unpopularity, which they regard as a sign of glory—for they believe they will gain immortality 177

╇ This is the interpretation given by McNally in “Rector et dux populi.”

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by discovering the truths that they afterward must hide, like the ancients, behind fables, mysteries and riddles, to scare off the noninitiate. The poor Scholastic style, in other words, becomes an instrument to prevent distractions in the search for the truth, as well as a method of concealment analogous to satire itself. All this is perhaps argued satirically, given the literary devices at play in this letter, from Pico’s choice of a mouthpiece in the barbarian, who is both accused by Hermolaus and either defended or false-defended by Pico (who could be using the barbarian as Hermolaus Barbarus’s DoppelÂ�gänger), to the eloquent equation of eloquence with untruth. SchoÂ�lasticism thus described is also strongly reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination in that only a select group is saved, while the vulgar perish. The difference of course is that in the satirical account of Pico’s barbarian the few achieve salvation not through grace, but through superior intellect. Both the similarity and the difference between Pico’s barbarian’s defense of Scholastics, and between CalÂ�vinist preciezen, therefore make this a perfect text for Cunaeus’s ridiculing of the epistemic arrogance and hubris of Counter-RemonÂ�strant theologians.178 The attack on ‘barbarians’ in SV may not primarily denote social tension, as some critics suggested. Pico then makes the barbarian, the Scholastic philosopher who claims descent from the Ancients (and a pun on Hermolaus’s name), reveal that the true form of Scholastic discourse is a Silenos, disgusting on the outside, full of gems and something divine within.179 The discordant presentation is an aide to understanding: the listener must avoid all artifice and return to the innermost parts of his soul ‘and the hiding-place of the mind.’ Reason, not speech (ratio non oratio) must be the guide; Plato was right to exclude all poets from his Republic. Unlike Heinsius, Cunaeus and Agricola, Pico’s barbarian is not worried about motivation. The rough and rustic words of Socrates and Scripture not only convince, but also persuade and motivate the audience. He will not settle for a compromise. Against the objection that 178 ╇ For a discussion of preciezen and rekkelyken categories in the context of the Remonstrant and Counter-Remonstrant theological and political debates, see Blok, History, Book 3, chapter XIV. 179 ╇ ‘Sed vis effingam ideam sermonis nostri? Ea est ipsissima, quae Silenorum nostri Alcibiadis. Erant enim horum simulacra hispido ore, tetro et aspernabili, sed intus plena gemmarum, supellectilis rarae et pretiosae. Ita extrinsecus si aspexeris, feram videas; si introspexeris, numen agnoscas.’ Barbaro and Mirandola, Filosofia o eloquenza?, 48.

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even unadorned wisdom can benefit from a little elegance in presentation, the barbarian replies, In general, whatever of beauty we may keep putting on, it hides what it covers: for the overlay shows only the overlay itself. Wherefore, if what before had been foreign to the thing is now conspicuous, it will have caused a loss, not a gain. For this reason alone philosophy presents herself everywhere in full view, wholly visible; she eagerly awaits cross-questioning.180

Pico’s barbarian is unbending on the question of style. Cicero or any other model of good Latin is discarded. Rough, plain and idiomatic expressions are as, if not more, acceptable as unadorned Latin. This is because the roughness helps the reader remember that the words are not things. If the correspondence of words to things is purely arbitrary, then the philosopher may agree with any usage he wants; if it is not, then he is a better judge of the natural correspondence between words and things than any rhetor can be. Nature is a more powerful standard than Latin, and philosophy is more eminent than rhetoric. Lucretius is a great writer, but his world view is blasphemous; John Scotus’s style is terrible, but his insights into God and Creation offer the key to salvation. Here Pico is in perfect agreement with Agricola, even to the extent of probable textual echoes with De inventione, completed six years before the Pico-Hermolaus correspondence.181 When the barbarian finishes, Pico pleads that he does not fully agree with these arguments, and only wrote them as a mock-encomium, or as Glaucon, ‘to goad Socrates to the praise of justice.’ In his own voice, avowing this as his own opinion, he adds that certain ‘grammaticasters’ turn his stomach with their strutting and pretensions. This part of the letter is strongly reminiscent of Lipsius’s Somnium, and its prefatory discussion dedicated to Scaliger. Melanchthon and many readers since him have failed to appreciate the playfulness of this exchange, and by overstating its seriousness, 180 ╇ ‘In universum, quicquid pulchri superimponas, celat quod invenit, quod affert secum illud ostentat. Quare, si quod prius fuerat adventitio praestat, iacturam fecerit illud, quicquid est, non lucrum. Ob eam causam nudam se praebet philosophia, undique conspicuam, tota sub oculos, sub iudicium venire gestit…’ 54. 181 ╇ Compare this part of Pico’s letter with Agricola, De inventione, I.xxvi. §155, LL61-8 and II.xxiii. §306, LL172-4 (168-9 and 364-5 in Mundt’s reprint). Crinito cites Savonarola’s warning to Laurentianus not to confuse words and things, when the latter favourably compares pagan philosophy with Christianity. Pico counters by a radical syncretisation of Cabala, Egyptian wisdom, and Christianity. Walker, Ancient, 48-51.

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they lose much of the actual meaning. The visible but unarticulated literary devices, such as the imaginary barbarian speaker, form an integral part of the discussion about rhetoric and dialectic, mixing paradoxes with syllogisms. Pico’s playfulness here is confirmed by a letter to Poliziano in which he plays the exact same trick about Greek and Latin studies as he does in his letter to Hermolaus about rhetoric and philosophy. ‘Meanwhile, I shall imitate you, Angelo, excusing yourself for your Greek by saying you are Latin, and for your Latin because you are trying to be Greek. I too shall employ a similar dodge in order to make myself acceptable to poets and orators, because I claim to be philosophizing, and to philosophers, because I orate and worship the Muses. Nonetheless, things turn out far differently for me than they do for you, since, while I want to sit, as they say, in two seats, I am excluded from both, and to be brief, the end result is that I am neither orator nor philosopher.’182 Hermolaus responded to Pico’s opening salvo with a short letter, in which he expresses his surprise at Pico’s taking the debate public, and offers to let Pico read his proper, full-length reply before it is released into wider circulation. The substantive reply begins with Hermolaus pointing out the basic paradox involved in Pico’s eloquent attack on eloquence, and setting up a series of paradoxes based on the implications of this method. Then Hermolaus relates how a barbarian approached him at Padua, and delivered a long criticism of Pico’s letter. This imaginary persona is the perfect inverse of Pico’s barbarian: he is a Scholastic like Pico’s, but he, Hermolaus promises, will use Scholastic method instead of eloquence to argue against Pico’s barbarian. Yet he does so sometimes convincingly, and sometimes opening up such wide gaps in his own argument that one wonders whether Hermolaus has inserted these flaws on purpose. All in all, this third letter in the exchange by Hermolaus is relentlessly funny in maintaining a turgid, tortuous and twisted Scholastic style and structure in arguing for the benefits of eloquence, interspersed with occasional flashes of humanist brilliance.

182 ╇ ‘Interea imitabor te, Angele, qui te Graecis excusas quod sis Latinus, Latinis quod Graecisses. Simili et ego utar perfugio, ut poetis rhetoribusque me approbem propterea quod philosophari dicar, philosophis quod rhetorissem et musas colam. Quanquam mihi longe aliter accidit atque tibi, quippe ego dum geminis sellis (ut aiunt) sedere volo, utraque excludor, fitque demum, ut dicam paucis, ut nec poeta nec rhetor sim, neque philosophus.’ Poliziano, Letters, 28-9.

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Hermolaus’s barbarian begins by accusing Pico of demolishing the Scholastic case, as opposed to defending it. Even if Pico’s defense was successful, it would be so because of its eloquence, and would therefore make the Scholastic side lose even more resoundingly. Moreover, only an orator could come up with this sort of false defense. He also argues that while the word-thing relationship cannot be settled with finality, the odds are that words are based on the real nature of things, and therefore good words must be used in describing good things (this of course reinforces the argument for eloquence, which the barbarian seems to be arguing against—but which is Hermolaus’s own opinion).183 That is why philosophy not only permits herself to be adorned but even loves it, they say, and labours at it. Nothing is more perfect and complete than God; yet nowhere are there more gold, more silver, more marble, more expensive cloths, more jewels to be seen than in temples and on altars. Hence, they say, it cannot be permitted to honor the gods, yet forbidden to honor philosophy.184

The connection between Lady Sophia and God is now made. Before his barbarian’s argument could become too convincing, Hermolaus introduces a blatantly absurd syllogism, one that Scholastics were famous for. Moreover, he hides the figure of Silenos inside the syllogism. By making Silenos’s half-beast, half-man nature the proof of the natural connection between rhetoric and philosophy, Hermolaus turns Pico’s philosopher into a Silenos, whose inner virtue is revealed after he is cut cruelly in half and rhetoric, normally a part of philosophy, has been removed from him.185 Hermolaus then mocks the notion that rugged clothing and rustic manners prove philosophical purity, since rustics and artisans share them, without being philosophers.

╇ This is echoed on SV, p. 101, when Sophrosyne tells Cunaeus that the majority of people turn virtues inside out, and thereby lose even the true names of things. As shown above, Cunaeus here unites Sallust, The conspiracy of Catiline, 52.11, Erasmus’s Sileni, and this correspondence, to show that the intellectual hubris and errors of theologians have direct and grave political implications. 184 ╇ ‘… ita philosophia ornari se non modo patitur, sed amat, inquiunt, et laborat. Deo perfectius, absolutius nihil esse; nusquam tamen plus auri, plus argenti, plus marmoris, plus preciosae vestis, plus gemmarum quam in templis et in altaribus conspici. Non igitur licere deos colere, philosophiam nefas esse.’ 74. Compare Agricola, “In laudem philosophiae,” 150-1! 185 ╇ Barbaro and Mirandola, Filosofia o eloquenza?, 78, §§52-59. 183

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The salient divisions in this debate are not along aristocratic-popular lines, as SV is sometimes interpreted. According to Pico’s barbarian, only a few plunge through superficial ornaments and discover the unadorned truth. At the same time, the opportunity is open to everyone, since all men can follow their natural reason until the final step to truth, which is taken by faith. Among the Christian minimalists in SV’s republic of immortal scholars, Pico is the only one whom Cunaeus makes stand in the Forum in support of the newcomers, the vulgar and barbaric scholastics. Cunaeus’s scene of Pico’s eloquent public defense of the uncultured newcomers suggests that this is the text he had in mind when he included Pico and Hermolaus, and probably Melanchthon and Poliziano, as characters in SV. More than fifty years after this exchange Franz Burchard, a student of the great Melanchthon (1497-1560), dissatisfied with the outcome, composed a remarkable response to Pico on behalf of Hermolaus. It was published in 1558 and has been associated with Melanchthon, printed under his name and discussed as his work, from 1565 until 1992, when Rummel identified the author as Burchard. Burchard’s fictitious reply under the name of Barbaro, traditionally misattributed to Melanchthon, conforms to Melanchthon’s life-long interest in the Pico-Barbaro correspondence, which Melanchthon discussed at length in the 1523 Encomium eloquentiae as well as in a range of educational manuals.186 Given Melanchthon’s own writings about the correspondence, the historical significance of his traditionally assumed authorship, and Burchard’s faithful reflection of MelanchÂ� thon’s teachings, this letter remains an economic and valid way to compare and contrast three of the Christian minimalists whom Cunaeus chose to feature in SV. As the present objective is to understand the significance of Cunaeus’s choices of named figures in SV, and Cunaeus thought that Melanchthon was the author of this reply on behalf of Barbaro to Pico, the likelihood that one of Melanchthon’s students wrote the reply that was printed under Melanchthon’s name makes little difference to understanding Cunaeus’s choices.187 The case ╇Some of these are listed by Stillman, Philip Sidney, 48. ╇ Beside the great similarity to Melanchthon’s writings, Burchard’s proximity to Melanchthon, and more than four centuries’ misattribution of this text to Melanchthon, more reasons why it is an acceptable stand-in are given in Stillman, Philip Sidney, 47-9. For a discussion of this letter’s place in humanism see Rummel, Humanist-scholastic, 147-51. On p. 149 Rummel adds to the list of reasons why it is problematic, but on balance useful to associate Melanchthon with this text: ‘The moral urgency of Burchard’s reply stands in marked contrast to Barbaro’s letter of 186 187

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is similar to the problem of authorship in early modern university theses. In many cases it is clear from correspondence, the professor’s later publications, or other evidence, that the theses written for the student to defend reflected the professor’s own opinions, as much as they were an educational exercise.188 In other cases, authorial intention is less clear. Since this letter was printed under Melanchthon’s name, it is in harmony with his other writings, and reflects both Melanchthon’s and Burchard’s opinion, Cunaeus’s association between Melanchthon and this text lies on the stronger end of the scale of authorship. Burchard, as pseudo-Melanchthon, who unlike Pico and Hermolaus did experience the Wars of Religion, reformulated in his Reply to Pico the entire debate on the basis of public utility. Calls to justify philosophy, eloquence, the debate itself, and all other things in terms of public utility appear more than a dozen times, distributed with even frequency across the text. It is a rich and strange letter. In the parts relevant to Cunaeus’s SV, Burchard’s Barbaro argues that philosophy and rhetoric are joined together by nature and by God, who made eloquence necessary for bringing nomads together for the first time, for establishing the commonwealth, co-ordinating labour, instilling morals and religion, and for stating ideas both clearly and persuasively.189 The best ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, were both eloquent and wise. Separating philosophy from eloquence is therefore against nature, blasphemous, and a sign that God has for1485. The earlier writer offered a playful reply, criticizing scholasticism implicitly by presenting an amusing caricature of scholastic foibles. Instead of this, Burchard substituted an explicit argument representing his personal convictions. Although his letter was a rhetorical exercise and was published as an appendix to Melanchthon’s manual of rhetoric, epideixis was not the author’s ultimate goal. The exercise clearly served an educational purpose. It was to teach the student correct thinking along with correct speaking.’ 188 ╇See, among others, Fasolt’s analysis of Conring’s authorship of a student thesis. To establish provenance, authorship, authorial intent, and the use of a student thesis as a testing ground for ideas developed and published later, Fasolt utilises the polemic surrounding an unauthorised printing, denials and affirmations of authorship, and similarities with Conring’s other texts. Fasolt in Conring, New discourse. Fasolt, “Author.” 189 ╇ This is a magnificent part of the tradition that centres on sociability and the State of Nature, including the role of language in both. It is rewarding to consider Melanchthon’s passages in this context, which runs from Plato through Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Note, however, that Erasmus’s Folly also claims to support the same social functions, both through the historical stages of progress that they individually dominated (coming together to form society, then to form a state, etc.), and by helping to maintain the institutions that resulted.

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saken the thinker who does so. Recognising the natural connection between them, however, reduces the active role of God and the necessity of Christian mystery. Here, as in his other works (especially against the Anabaptists, whom he accused of literary barbarism and concomitant Christian heresies),190 Melanchthon and Burchard took Christian minimalism a step further than the Italians did, and prepared the way for the extremely minimalist formulations in Grotius and Hobbes. Burchard (here as pseudo-Melanchthon) also alerted Cunaeus to the possibility of using earlier versions of Christian minimalism, such as those of Pico and Hermolaus, to emphasise the supernaturality of the things one must believe in to be a good Christian.191 In this letter, Burchard takes natural theology further than most sixteenth-century theologians. Pico made the point that Scripture is simple, devoid of eloquence, and therefore it proves unadorned philosophy’s and natural reason’s superiority over mere eloquence. Burchard, thought to be Melanchthon in Cunaeus’s time, addresses this on two fronts: first, he argues that David, Paul, and God were excellent orators. Second, he states that the parables, symbols and 190 ╇ “On philosophy,” 65-70, “The Augsburg Confession,” 97-125, and “Refutation of Servetus and the Anabaptists’ errors,” 169-77, in: A Melanchthon Reader. To understand Melanchthon’s Christian minimalism, it is also instructive to contrast his criticism of the Anabaptist rejection of pagan literature with Calvin’s attack on Anabaptist exegesis. Calvin agreed with Melanchthon about the Anabaptists’ philological shortcomings, but did not propose to remedy this with a return to pagan literary studies. Calvin, Brevis instructio adversus errores Anabaptistarum. Melanchthon was a mediator between the new brands of Christian zealotry and neopagan humanism, and his intellectual and political influence is comparable to ibn Ezra’s mediation between Aristotelianism and Jewish mysticism. 191 ╇ Walker describes the outcome of the meeting of Savonarola and Florentine neoplatonists as ‘the revival of ancient scepticism and, based on this, the development of a new kind of Christian apologetic, fideism.’ This ‘rests on the destruction of the philosophical pretensions of human reason’, and it is ‘possible for one and the same person to be both a sceptic and a believer in the Ancient Theology.’ He concludes that ‘Savonarola was in fact the ultimate source of modern scepticism and its use for apologetic purposes.’ Walker, Ancient, 58-62. Also see 35, and throughout. While I sympathise with these labels, the more they are developed, the less suitable they become to describing the texts and to being used coherently. My earlier attempt to distinguish between ‘dechristianisation,’ ‘detheologisation,’ and re-christianisation and re-theologisation similarly ran aground. The increasingly strong appeal to nonChristian wisdom, including Egypt, Hermes, Orpheus, the Kabbalah, and an eclectic account of the Christian early church, can be characterised as dechristianisation and retheologisation. However, if one frames the problem as we did, namely to try to find the reason why Christianity is not an acceptable hallmark for judging claims in the natural sciences, politics and various non-theological disciplines, then the effect of Pico’s work is rightly described as Christian minimalism.

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metaphors in Scripture are not about concealing truth, but serve the purpose of making the truth more easily accessible to the human mind, which by its nature is not entirely rational, but loves and admires pictures and exemplars. In light of the basic agreement between Agricola, Melanchthon, Heinsius and other Leideners concerning right instruction, the utility that Burchard ascribes to exemplars differs revealingly from the Leiden exegesis we find in Scaliger, Heinsius, Vossius, or even Rudolph Agricola.192 Agricola, Hermolaus and Melanchthon are in agreement concerning the harmony and necessary connection between rhetoric, dialectic and eloquence. Yet for Burchard’s Barbaro, exemplars are useful, and eloquence is uppermost, since it offers the greatest utility to the community of men and of Christians, none of whom are wholly rational and could not survive without persuasion.193 Given the linkages between these positions described above, the respect of Burchard’s Barbaro (thought to be Melanchthon) for pagan philosophers is a natural corollary of his emphasis on the utility of survival, social cohesion and the perpetuation of socially useful beliefs. With the greatest sapience they described the nature of things; with the finest discrimination they painted images of all things which can occur in private or public life; they propounded the most useful precepts and examples of life and morals.194

In one of the many statements on the supreme importance of utility and necessity, Burchard, still pretending to stand in for Hermolaus in dialogue with Pico, completely overrides the two Italians’ agreedupon distinction between rhetor and philosopher: As a matter of fact I call a philosopher one who when he has learned and knows things good and useful for mankind, takes a theory (doctrina) out of academic obscurity and makes it practically useful in public affairs, and instructs men about natural phenomena, or religions, or about government. Moreover, however much you [i.e. Pico] would 192 ╇ For Agricola’s own clearest version of the Pico-Hermolaus debate, in not entirely dissimilar form, see his “In laudem philosophiae.” 193 ╇ The basic similarities and profound differences between Agricola and Melanchthon come out equally well in Gilbert’s description of the transformation of the meaning of ‘method,’ from Agricola’s instructions on inventione to Melanchthon’s hope of stopping religious controversies by a universally accepted codification of correct speech and teaching. Gilbert, Renaissance concepts, 119-28. For “Philippism” as a rhetorical and political strategy for the construction and maintenance of social order see Stillman, Philip Sidney. 194 ╇ Breen’s translation, 423.

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relegate the orator to the forum alone, nevertheless those barbarians whom you defend have undertaken to explain those parts of philosophy which cannot be illuminated without eloquence.195

This redefinition of the philosopher offers another clue to MelanchÂ� thon’s influence on SV. When Cunaeus writes speeches for Poliziano, Agricola, Pico and Hermolaus, he represents their opinions faithfully. He only adds, as we saw in the summary of SV, an acute sense of political urgency to their pre-Luther intellectual gentility. He updates their views by making them spell out the political implications for a continent and a century ravaged by the Wars of Religion. Cunaeus’s transition from the Italian epistemological debate to the Vorstius affair and the marching columns of freshly killed victims of religious violence was facilitated by Melanchthon’s contribution to the debate, which foregrounded the connection between academics’ epistemological debates, religious violence, and the people’s well-being. The politicisation of the epistemological debate between the four Christian minimalists comes from Melanchthon. 196 Melanchthon also provides the inspiration for Cunaeus to turn the emphasis that minimalism put on the remaining, mysterious core aspects of Christianity into several, closely connected arguments against epistemic arrogance based on nature, refuting one after another all of the ideal-typical formulations deÂ�scribed above. Although Melanchthon is not given a speech in SV, in §94 he is portrayed as a true politique, complaining about the hatred and disgrace he received for his prudent attempts to walk the middle road and mediate between the hostile parties of religious fanatics. Yet in the end, after Sophia’s speech and the Rabbinic attack on reason, even Melanchthon’s natural theology is demolished. What happens to Silenos in the process, and to creative ambiguity? In stark contrast with the Italians’ and with Erasmus’s playful deployment of satirical and related literary devices, Burchard’s Letter is unrelentingly pragmatic. When he blames the Scholastics for having neither classical learning nor eloquence, he also accuses them of constructing a new and altogether erroneous theology simply because they fail to understand Christ, Paul and the prophets, who used rhetorical devices. The whole falsity of the new, philosophical theology will be revealed elsewhere, he promises, ‘when I shall open their vol╇ Breen’s translation, 417-8. ╇ Gilbert, Renaissance concepts, 108. For a French version of the same process see Jehasse, “Introduction,” in Balzac, Socrate chrestien, 41-4. 195 196

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umes and show these your masters to be more truly monkeys in purple robes than the Silenuses of Alcibiades, as you think.’197 As he did over the role of nature, here Cunaeus parts company with Melanchthon again and returns to the satirical genre. This is not only stylistically appropriate, but also substantively necessary for turning his unification of Cynical, Christian minimalist, and Rabbinic arguments into a devastating Leiden attack on Christian epistemology. It is useful to remember that unlike Melanchthon, Pico and Hermolaus couched their epistemic debate in several layers of satire and contemplative distance from authorial intention. Put together, Silenos, the two barbarians, and the correspondence of these two scholars with Poliziano about this exchange, suggest that these creative ambiguities were deployed purposefully in SV. Yet the positions taken by the three Italians are all minimalist. The disagreement between the Christian philosopher and the Christian orator, Pico’s eloquent and Hermolaus’s Scholastic barbarian, are in a sense the disagreements between Christian minimalists of different stripes. Pico’s philosophers believed that natural reason is an adequate light shone on the path to God. Hermolaus’s pseudo-Scholastic champion of eloquence asserts that words are rooted in the natural state of things themselves, therefore good words are properly used about good and divine things. Burchard and Melanchthon attribute the inseparable unity of eloquence and philosophy to God’s will and nature. According to the three Florentines, Pico, Hermolaus and Poliziano, whatever is beyond these natural connections, whatever remains inaccessible to natural reason and to the natural connection between philosÂ�ophy and eloquence, whatever remains impervious to compreÂ� hension through either philosophy or eloquence, is what distinguishes Christianity from pagan philosophy. Wherever minimalists locate nature in their scheme, the minimalist formula is the same with respect to the sine qua non of Christianity. Minimalists who, unlike Bruno or Condorcet, forego ascribing to man a potential for present or future omniscience, are in a position where the more truth or utility they allow pagans to gain from wisdom or eloquence, the more clearly delineated and distinct the remaining core of their minimalist Christianity will be. The personified figure of wisdom in SV deserves further explanation. As mentioned before, debates concerning the nature of Christ 197

╇ Breen’s translation, 425.

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were continuous from the earliest beginnings of Christianity to Cunaeus’s time and beyond. In a complex and fascinating tradition of Mediterranean syncretism, Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and a host of other ideas shaped the eventual broad Christian consensus over Christ as redeemer, mediator, and a Person, Word, and Son of God.198 Logos was analogous to the Sophia of the Gnostics and the Hellenised Rabbis. This is a complex story, one that Pico, Scaliger, and most of the Leideners had studied intensely.199 For the present purpose, suffice it to say that when the Goddess Sophia appears in Sardi venales, for Cunaeus’s secularising scheme it is essential that she is neither wholly mysterious—and winning her over does not depend on mere blind faith—nor completely open to human discussion, as she was for Melanchthon. As described in SV’s summary above, Sophia closes her speech by defining the only kind of follower she will accept as one who accepts freedom of speech, criticism from others, and never ventures beyond the verisimilar. She also explains that God sent her into the world to be neither competely open, nor completely closed to inquiry (§§87-8). Cunaeus’s attack on the theologians who rely on nature to argue the truth of Christianity draws on the Christian minimalists’ focused, concentrated claim concerning the supernatural quality of Christianity’s core tenets. Sophia’s half-natural, half-supernatural character is the key to Cunaeus’s secularising manoeuvre here. It allows him to bring in Cynical, Christian minimalist and Rabbinic arguments to deploy reason, nature and revelation against one another. To understand the significance and implications of Cunaeus’s tactical transformation of a familiar Christian theme, it is useful to exam198 ╇ This is the contextualisation done for Maimonides in Stroumsa, Maimonides. For the Mediterranean thought-world, and warnings about constructing anachronistic ‘orthodoxies,’ see King, What is Gnosticism. 199 ╇ Pico himself is often called a ‘syncretist.’ For the present purpose his syncretism is better described as minimalism, since despite the 900 Theses, the Oration on the Dignity of Man and other works, he remained a Christian. All syncretism, in a sense, is minimalist with respect to the originally distinct components that are brought together. In the course of reconciling Christianity with Kabbalah, Hermetica, neoplatonism and other thought-worlds, Pico brought out from Christianity the core features he regarded as essential. This is a minimalist project, albeit more eclectic than Cassander’s or George Calixtus’s, whose attempts to heal the Catholic-Protestant schism with a ‘unified theology’ featured substantially fewer non-Christian elements than Pico’s. From the perspective of secularisation as a process of gradually removing Christianity from politics, all these projects are minimalists, and exert comparable effects.

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ine two texts on Sophia from the Christian wisdom literature. For present purposes, the medieval version is best exemplified by Raymond Lull (1232-1325). The minimalist and ecumenical elements of ChrisÂ� tianity and Lady Reason are both key elements. Lull’s version is useful because of its similarity, on the one hand, to the numerous medieval texts that use these elements, and on the other because of its dissimilarity in being a rare and genuine medieval forerunner of early modern toleration discourses.200 Lull is therefore a hard test case for the proposition that no Christian had expressed epistemic humility in as radical a form as Cunaeus in SV, and helps us to throw SV’s radically distinct features into sharp relief economically, without reviewing medieval and Renaissance epistemic humility with a broader survey than the text, and context, of Lull’s works give us occasion for. In all minimalist formulations some Christianity remains, and its central mystery becomes a more weight-bearing component. The other key text with which SV must be compared in order to understand Cunaeus’s strategy with Sophia is Pico’s Oration on the dignity of man. Raymond Lull (1232-1325) is a complex and towering figure. He would have been right at home in early seventeenth-century Leiden.201 In 1276 he wrote The book of the Gentile and the three wise men, in which a Jewish, a Muslim and a Christian scholar are trying to convert an infidel to their own religion. There are several important books with this basic structure, trying to demonstrate the truth of Christianity through confrontation with other religions.202 Lactantius, Augustine, 200 ╇See, among others, Blum, Philosophy, in which Lull plays a central role. Blum draws a direct line from Lull through Sebond to Montaigne and beyond. This is not to say that Lull intended to be a forerunner of modern toleration; and Blum conveys enough of the complexity of the move from a belief in the unity of reason and faith to skepticism, fideism and toleration, to prevent charges of teleology. Drawing attention to common problems, uncovering the influence of texts, and understanding the connection between uses of texts and responses to shared problems at different moments are tools without which intellectual history could not even be descriptive. 201 ╇ He suggested a pacifist spiritual crusade in an age ripe with fanatical crusading plans. It took guts to replace the gore. 202 ╇ Abulafia, Christians and Jews, shows how repetitive and relentlessly exhortative this genre could be. Against this background it is all the more striking that Lull avoids so many of the clichés. See also the trial of the Torah, of the Quran, and the burning of other Christians’ books. An allied genre is a dispute of religions moderated by a ruler. William of Rubruck described in his 1255 Itinerarium the Mongol khan’s staging of a debate between Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. This is one of several historical accounts that make fictional debates, including Halevi’s Kuzari, not only parables and literary devices in support of a religion’s supremacy over others,

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Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and many other Fathers used it as a standard format. The medieval version of the genre is perhaps best seen as the link between these early Christian texts, which adapted Socratic dialogues to more or less doctrinaire arguments for ChrisÂ� tianity, and the ‘reasonableness of Christianity’ genre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also inspired its own skeptically inverted genre that presented Moses, Christ and Muhammed as the ‘three impostors,’ which by conservative calculation ran at the very least from Gregory IX’s ascription of such a work to Frederick II in 1239 to the 1753 De tribus impostoribus and its tempestuous afterlife.203 Some of the inversions continue the original agenda in important ways. The desire for moderation, toleration and mutual understanding in Lull’s Book of the Gentile also animates the Three Impostors, even though genuine Christian piety, a part of Lull’s irenicist motive, is replaced by deism or atheism in those comparisons of the three religions that follow the “three impostors” model. 204 This dual development, the furthering and its inversion (with the occasional furthering by inversion), is shared by the ‘mirror of princes’ literature. By the early eighteenth century it turned into a speculum literature for a political audience broader than the princes, on the one hand, and into a delightful series of mock-mirror and anti-mirror books, on the other.205 I chose Lull’s piece, instead of something more obvious and closer to Cunaeus in time and place (Bodin’s HeptaÂ� but also possible handbooks containing arguments for a real disputation. The literary and the forensic are similarly united in Grotius’s Bewijs, grown into the De veritate. 203 ╇Note the at least equally influential partial varieties, in which one religious figure or another is described as an impostor. By the Renaissance, attributing the political instrumentalisation of religion to Moses, Jesus or Mohammed has created their separate traditions. The themes these traditions shared made their unification relatively straightforward. Machiavelli considerably stimulated the attributions of such instrumentalisation to all three. 204 ╇ For aspects of such continuity see Mulsow’s Drei Ringe. 205 ╇ Ramsay, Cyrus. Terrasson, Sethos. Fénelon’s Telemachus is a borderline case: originally written for the education of the Dauphin, it is hard to account for some parts of the text without considering the possibility that Fénelon had a wider audience in mind. For the anti-mirror development, often combined with the inversion of the mirror literature that was supposed to prepare young aristocrats for their Grand Tour, see Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Voltaire, Candide. Needless to say, these genre distinctions are useful up to a point. Hostile contemporary critics, for instance, accused Tristram Shandy of being a Menippean satire. One can also argue that what I call anti-mirror is in fact anti-courtier, and it is aimed from the start at a wider audience than the prince. Candide, beside being an inverted mirror, is also an antiBildungsroman akin to Wells’s The New Machiavelli.

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plomeres, for instance),206 for two reasons: first, it shows the longevity and variety of this Christian discourse. Second, despite its fame for being unusually lenient toward Jews and Muslims, Lull’s book still retains enough exclusivism to underscore the point: however toneddown, moderate and humanistic this tradition became, it had to, and continued to, assume its own epistemic superiority. Among Lull’s contemporaries the most notable books in this genre are Gilbert Crispin, Disputatio Judei et Christiani, Abelard’s Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum, and Pierre Alphonse with his Dialogus Petri cognomento Alphonsi ex Judaeo Christiani et Moysi. Lull’s book remained widely read until the Enlightenment.207 In The book of the Gentile and the three wise men, the three wise men find themselves standing in a lovely field, where they meet a charming young lady. It quickly turns out that she is Reason herself, and that her purpose is to love God. Then the infidel turns up, and the three wise men tell him about their own religion. After the infidel leaves (!), the three wise men recognise that they essentially believe in the exact same God, and if they followed the guidance of Lady Reason, they could continue their debate and eventually agree to believe in a common truth. This turns out to be the essence of the only truth that exists. Sophia and the irenicist intention are already there, like in the SV. Lull, however, like Bessarion, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and so many others, thought that a minimalist religion, something that even a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim would agree upon when guided by Reason, is the necessary requisite for such peace. Cunaeus’s solution is more drastic. Ecumenism, irenicism and minimalism overlap in many cases, and they have a natural affinity with each other. Yet for Heinsius and Cunaeus to say that theology must stop trying to understand issues like free will, providence or predestination, because they are beyond ╇See also Boccaccio, Decameron, “The three rings,” in which Melchizedek and Saladin become friends. First day, third story, 39-41. It is unlikely that Cunaeus would have known the Heptaplomeres before he wrote SV, unless through Johannes Cordesius, who lent Grotius a copy in the 1630s. For the controversy surrounding its authorship and reception see Popkin, “Could Spinoza,” and Malcolm, “Bodin.” 207 ╇ Courcelles, La parole, especially 120 ff. Rossi, Legacy. Yates, Lull and Bruno. Mulsow, Drei Ringe. That Lull was unusually tolerant and syncretistic, and is therefore the best test case of the argument for the continued existence of an uncomÂ� promising core of Christian beliefs, is shown by the medieval context of ChrisÂ�tian-Jewish relations. Primary sources in Maccoby, Judaism; and Abulafia, Christians and Jews. 206

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the ken of human inquiry, is not only irenicism and minimalism, but secularisation. The other text, Mirandola’s famous On the dignity of man, is an equally ingenious yet representative piece on another pertinent topic, the neoplatonic Great Chain of Being. The literature on this is enormous. Mirandola’s text is relevant to SV for four reasons. First, because Pico plays a direct role in SV. Second, because the place that Pico assigns to man in his scheme hinges entirely on man’s epistemic capacity. Third, because the expression of Pico’s concept of natural reason in this oration, the manifesto of humanism, was highly influential, and therefore surprisingly but tellingly rejected by Cunaeus. Finally, because in On the dignity, unlike in the aforementioned correspondence with Hermolaus, Pico shows a keen awareness of the political conflict and violence that can arise from bad philosophy.208 Pico’s account is complicated, and representative of humanist, neoplatonist epistemic optimism. After God finished the perfect Creation, He longed for somebody to appreciate it. As there were no archetypes and no character left available, He created man outside the Great Chain of Being, with the unique ability to imitate, and to change himself. Natural philosophy helps him understand and become a part of nature. With theology, man can reach the heavens. The disciplines follow the hierarchy of Creation, but no discipline is inferior in value to another, in spite of being arranged on a scale. Each element has its unique function, without which the harmony of the whole would be disrupted. Philosophy settles the conflict between opinions and gives men peace; but only theology bestows permanent peace. Pico distinguishes between peace on earth and in heaven, but regards them as closely connected. Despite the relative calm before the Reformation, Pico repeatedly makes the point that theological differences can lead to violent conflict in this life. ╇ Thomas More loved and carefully studied Pico’s text, which is now usually regarded as ‘the manifesto of humanism’. He also expanded and translated Pico’s biography into English. Note that the neoplatonist concept could be used by all parties. A golden chaine, a Calvinist version of the ‘great chain of being’ trope by William Perkins, introduced Beza’s instructions and famous chart to the English audience, and became the major target of Arminius’s attack on the extreme formulations of double predestination. See Part 4 of Appendix I.7 to chapter 5 on Grotius. John Robinson, Perkins’s pupil, was the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers from 1609, when they settled in Leiden, to 1619, when the first group of Pilgrim Fathers left for Massachusetts. Robinson played an active and zealous part in the Remonstrant controversy, siding with the Calvinists. 208

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chapter four §17. For it is a patent thing, O Fathers, that many forces strive within us, in grave, intestine warfare, worse than the civil wars of states. Equally clear is it that, if we are to overcome this warfare, if we are to establish that peace which must establish us finally among the exalted of God, philosophy alone can compose and allay that strife. In the first place, if our man seeks only truce with his enemies, moral philosophy will restrain the unreasoning drives of the protean brute, the passionate violence and wrath of the lion within us. If, acting on wiser counsel, we should seek to secure an unbroken peace, moral philosophy will still be at hand to fulfill our desires abundantly; and having slain either beast, like sacrificed sows, it will establish an inviolable compact of peace between the flesh and the spirit. Dialectic will compose the disorders of reason torn by anxiety and uncertainty amid the conflicting hordes of words and captious reasonings. Natural philosophy will reduce the conflict of opinions and the endless debates which from every side vex, distract and lacerate the disturbed mind. It will compose this conflict, however, in such a manner as to remind us that nature, as Heraclitus wrote, is generated by war and for this reason is called by Homer, “strife.’’ Natural philosophy, therefore, cannot assure us a true and unshakable peace. To bestow such peace is rather the privilege and office of the queen of the sciences, most holy theology. Natural philosophy will at best point out the way to theology and even accompany us along the path, while theology, seeing us from afar hastening to draw close to her, will call out: ”Come unto me you who are spent in labour and I will restore you; come to me and I will give you the peace which the world and nature cannot give.’’209

It is this exact lofty role, peace-making power and end-like characteristic that Wisdom wrenches roughly away from Theology in Sardi 209 ╇ ‘Multiplex profecto, Patres, in nobis discordia; gravia et intestina domi habemus et plusquam civilia bella. Quae si noluerimus, si illam affectaverimus pacem, quae in sublime ita nos tollat ut inter excelsos Domini statuamur, sola in nobis compescet prorsus et sedabit philosophia: moralis primum, si noster homo ab hostibus indutias tantum quesierit, multiplicis bruti effrenes excursiones et leonis iurgia, iras animosque contundet. Tum si rectius consulentes nobis perpetuae pacis securitatem desideraverimus, aderit illa et vota nostra liberaliter implebit, quippe quae cesa utraque bestia, quasi icta porca, inviolabile inter carnem et spiritum foedus sanctissimae pacis sanciet. Sedabit dyalectica rationis turbas inter orationum pugnantias et sillogismo captiones anxie tumultuantis. Sedabit naturalis philosophia opinionis lites et dis[s]idia, quae inquietam hinc inde animam vexant, distrahunt et lacerant. Sed ita sedabit, ut meminisse nos iubeat esse naturam iuxta Heraclytum ex bello genitam, ob id ab Homero contentionem vocitatam. Idcirco in ea veram quietem et solidam pacem se nobis prestare non posse, esse hoc dominae suae, idest sanctissimae th[e]ologiae, munus et privilegium. Ad illam ipsa et viam monstrabit et comes ducet, quae procul nos videns properantes: “Venite, inclamabit, ad me qui laborastis; venite et ego reficiam vos; venite ad me et dabo vobis pacem quam mundus et natura vobis dare non possunt.”’

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venales. Pico continues: prompted by the inadequacies of philosophy and summoned by theology we fly, like winged Mercuries, to theology as to a mother, and embrace peace. The soul, dressed up in the raiment of all the sciences, will ascend to God and becomes His selfless bride. In SV Pico supports the new theologians, but he is voted down by the other scholars in the assembly. Mercury, who leads men to theology in Pico, in SV leads the march of those recently killed in theological conflict. The reversed utility of theology in SV and in On the dignity of man is enlightening. For Cunaeus, theology always leads to violent conflict, unless its scope of inquiry is drastically curbed. Pico has no doubt that theology can show man enough of God to enable man’s identification and mystical union with the divine; nothing could be further from Cunaeus’s position. The theologians in SV use the Great Chain of Being argument and language to justify their aim of reaching ever higher. Sophia, Sophrosyne and the few righteous scholars strongly deny that this is a meritorious passion, natural to man. The textual echoes, the irenicist concern with disciplinary boundaries, and the dramatis personae all indicate that beside his correspondence with Hermolaus, this is another text that Cunaeus had in mind when he decided to write Pico into the book. They share a deep dread of the potentially violent impact of intellectual discord, but while Pico finds the answer in more theology, Cunaeus finds it in less, or rather none. We saw earlier that Heinsius’s own theory of drama and history drew heavily but inventively on Aristotle’s Poetics. The connection between Heinsius’s poetry, DPDH, and Petrarch’s and Lorenzo’s Triumphs (and the state festivities they inspired, as we saw, all around Europe), is a direct one. By contrast, there is no immediately recognisÂ� able Florentine neoplatonic influence in DTC.210 Yet it is in DTC that Heinsius fits together Aristotle’s schematisation of knowledge, in particular the difference between the pursuit of particulars and of universals, with the Aristotelian theory of discharging the passions. He added the notion that immortality is the greatest motivation, and came up with an almost neoplatonic language on history as the high 210 ╇ Another connection is the use of dignitas, meaning both ‘dignity’ and ‘axiom,’ in the titles of Pico’s and Heinsius’s orations. All men in Pico, but only historians in Heinsius, acquire their dignity by ascending to immortality. Comparing imitatio in the two texts is equally instructive. For Pico, this is the method that enables man to move along the Great Chain of Being; for Heinsius, imitatio must be excluded from learning.

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road to immortality, and to mastery over kings and gods. We find the same pattern in Vossius’s move from Aristotelian epistemology to a deism strongly reminiscent of neoplatonism, yet on predominantly Aristotelian foundations. Kristeller’s point could not be served better by another community than the Leiden Circle: in spite of the early modern conflict between neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, the latter not only survived the Scholastics’ loss of reputation, but continued to grow in new directions, and played a greater role in shaping today’s thought-world than it is usually given credit for.211 Let us connect the dots with a quick look at foolishness. The last move in Pico’s text, from a mature understanding of the sciences to the mystical union, is divine inspiration or mystical frenzy, presided over by our old friend Bacchus. As with Heinsius, the Bacchus—Christ parallelism becomes a leitmotif in Pico’s oration. In one of his poems, Lull economically combines the same ideas about the ascent of reason and the foolishness of belief: Q: Tell me, fool, where does wisdom begin? A: It begins in faith and piety, upon which reason ascends, as if on a ladder, to find out the secrets of Love. Q: And where is the beginning of faith and piety? A: From my beloved, who illuminates the faith, and sparkles with piety.212 ╇ Kristeller, Renaissance, 34-7, 105, 112. In the scientific field, the same balancing act in Leiden cosmology is described by Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 89 and passim. Leiden astronomy edged toward neoplatonism, but without any Plato, only by stretching Aristotelianism. Given the zero-sum, exclusivist character of mysticism, it was not a better proposal for containing Dutch religious tension than a return to Catholicism was. Vermij’s account of the Dutch systematisation of Spanish Jesuit scholasticism with Reformed Aristotelianism is exactly right (161). Cocceius and others demonstrated that a repetition of the Renaissance’s neoplatonic turn away from Christianity was a clear and present danger to political stability. Vermij, Calvinist Copernicans, 211 and passim. 212 ╇ ‘-Di, loco, ¿dónde empieza la sabiduría?—Respondió:—En la fe y en la devoción, que son las escaleras por donde asciende el entendimiento a entender los secretos de mi Amado.—Y la fe y la devoción, ¿dónde empiezan?—Respondió:—En mi Amado, que ilumina la fe y enardece la devoción.’ Lull, Libre d’amich e amat, 288. Compare Socrates (claiming to cite Stesichorus) in Plato’s Phaedrus: ‘“I told a lie when I said that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have the lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.”’ 211

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The danger of this final leap of faith is that one could end up transcending not only reason, but also Christianity. The individualist pursuit of faith could be as inimical to Christianity as the pursuit of pure reason. One can come to see, like Pico and Heinsius did, that other mythologies are just as valid or even better aids for the final leap to mystical union with the divine than the Christian story. The RenaisÂ� sance and Reformation elevation of neoplatonism (Ficino, Poliziano), Egypt (Bruno, Kircher, Fludd), the Kabbalah (Reuchlin, Mirandola, Postel, later von Rosenroth, van Helmont), and of other texts and people who could serve as alternative sources of wisdom to Christianity, including even splinter sects like the Karaites and the Essenes, are comparable attempts to find through prisca sapientia a road to mystical union and divine understanding that is not as compromised by politics and less policed than the doctrines of institutionalised Christianity.213 Yet in the final analysis, with the exception perhaps of Giordano Bruno and Pomponazzi, most humanists remained Christian, retaining and relishing their belief in the central, supernatural claims of Christianity. The ultimate test case of this statement on minimalism is the humanist attitude to the Skeptics. As shown above, the few Christian humanists who did not condemn the Skeptics outright, like Henri Estienne, Hervet and Erasmus, argued that Skepticism in fact reinforced their Christianity, since after questioning all human knowledge it left the burden of proof squarely on unreasoning, humble faith.214 Cunaeus’s decision to pair Melanchthon with George Cassander (1513-66) as persecuted for their sensible middle road is interesting for several reasons. For one, Cassander was a Catholic. Like Heinsius in DTC, Cunaeus avoided the semblance of religious partisanship by blaming and praising a balanced cast of theologians. Second, 213 ╇ Walker, Ancient. Manuel, Broken. Mulsow, “Ambiguities.” In this sense, it is also comparable to the search for the lost apostolic or primitive church. As Andrew Fix and others pointed out, civic humanism’s emulation of Rome, the neoplatonist, Christian Kabbalist and early Protestant search for prisca sapientia, and northern humanism’s reconstruction of the pristine church, have similar and overlapping foundations. Fix, Prophecy. Brown compares Melanchthon’s and other Protestants’ attempt to restore the ‘original’ Aristotle to the restoration of the Bible. Brown, “Renaissance,” 80. For Cunaeus on the Karaites see, i.a., Hebrew Republic, 210-1. 214 ╇ ‘There was safety in presenting skeptical thought in the context of mysticism and fideism, in proceeding from an acknowledgment of the impotence of the human mind to expressions of trust in divine knowledge.’ Rummel, Confessionalization, 53. Floridi, Sextus, 39.

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Cassander was not just any irenicist. Famous for his moderate, reasonable and frankly relentless advocacy of reconciliation and reunion, he was commissioned by the emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II to formulate plans to enable the theological and political reunification of the faiths, or failing that, pacification at the least. Among the varieÂ� ties of ecumenist and irenicist projects, he stood for a rather specific one. Instead of arguing for epistemic limitations, and the consequent desirability of tolerating disagreement over unknowables, or instead of minimising the essential tenets of Christianity, he presented reconciliation as not only a reasonable, politically prudent, and religiously allowable compromise, but as a religious and patriotic duty.215 He was attacked from all sides for his pains, and in SV Cunaeus makes him complain of being disgraced for his irenical efforts. The most famous attack against him came from Calvin, who misattributed Cassander’s 1561 De officio pii ac publicae tranquillitatis vere amantis viri, in hoc Religionis dissidio (On the duty of a pious man who truly loves peace in differences concerning religion) to François Baudouin.216 Baudouin disavowed authorship, Calvin viciously condemned him as a liar, and Cassander came forward to reveal himself as the author. De officio pii viri now drew outraged criticism from Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics alike. Suitably encouraged by this, secular rulers began to invite Cassander to design formulae for reconciliation. William, Duke of Jülich-ClevesBerg, and the emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, were among those who employed him in this capacity. The best remembered result of this attempt was the 1564 Consultatio de articulis Religionis inter Catholicos et Protestantes controversis. Minimalism, epistemic humility, the call for the corrupted and superstitious Church’s internal reforms, a return to the primitive church, all feature prominently in Cassander’s thought; yet the prioritisation of earthly peace, and the attention paid to practical reconciliation, distinguish him from many others engaged in the same enterprise. He also went farther than most Catholic moderates for the sake of peace. Through a systematic historicisation of church institutions he proposed reducing the prestige 215 ╇ Compare the account of German thinkers and debates from the same period in Schmidt, Vaterlandsliebe, and idem, “Irenic patriotism.” Contrast the comparatively passive avoidance of contentious issues through “confessional silence:” Visser, “Escaping.” 216 ╇ Cassander’s 1562 De officii pii viri was later expanded and reprinted several times, and translated under different titles.

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ascribed to saints, debunked a few of them entirely (Catherine, for instance), and while condemning the Albigensians and the Anabaptists for doctrinal error, he excused the Waldenses in the matter of adult baptism. Cassander opens the De officio pii viri by describing the confusion caused among his contemporaries by the onslaught of rival Christian doctrines. To find a safe port, he resolves to rely on one authority only: the Bible. However, he quickly realises that no amount of learning will enable a person to settle contentious interpretations of many biblical passages, and he has to call in the Apostles, the Christian traditions, and common consent. The preserved traditions and the Church itself constitute an Unwritten Truth, though in the Questions which concern Faith, there is nothing which is not in some way to be found in Holy Scripture; and though this Tradition is only an Explication and Interpretation of Scripture, so that it may be said that Scripture is a kind of shut and sealed Tradition, and Tradition is an open and unfolded Scripture.217

This half-open, half-closed epistemic status of Scripture is reminiscent of Sophia in SV. Yet Maimonides remains a stronger candidate as Cunaeus’s model because unlike Cassander, Maimonides develops the implications of this position, namely the duties of intellectual discovery that follow, and the precise limitations that cannot be transgressed in this life. Nonetheless, Cassander was worthy of emulation, too. It was upon Cassander that Grotius modeled his irenicist project in the 1640s, whose Consultatio he commented on, and who became the bone of contention in his famous controversy with André Rivet.218 It bears repeating that the Christian minimalist solution must have looked very tempting to Cunaeus. This is the point at which most ╇ Du Pin, A new ecclesiastical history, Book V, 48. ╇ In a letter to his brother William, Grotius lists Erasmus, Cassander, Witzel and Casaubon as past models for his irenicist project. Note that three of the four are Lowlanders. ‘Ad meum propositum pacis quaerendae aut certe viae ad eam struendae quod attinet, firmus in eo maneo. Opus saepe est luctari contra alveum, nec ego solus hoc stadium curro. Cucurrit Erasmus, Cassander, Vecelius, Casaubonus; currit nunc Mileterius.’ Grotius, Briefwisseling, 14 April, 1640, Ep. 4599. He lists those who suffered for their irenicist views as the exact same three who appear in SV. ‘Neque tales furores absterruerunt Erasmum, Cassandrum, Melanchthonem, quominus et preces suas et consilia ad veritatem pacemque conferrent.’ Grotius, Briefwisseling, to William, 19 Jan. 1641, Ep. 5018. Closer to SV in time, Posthumus Meyjes suggests that already in 1611 Grotius expressed an affinity with the reunificatory, politically aware irenicism of Cassander in a letter to Walaeus. See Grotius, Meletius, 51, 173. 217 218

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thinkers, including Grotius, Hobbes and Locke, give free rein to reason to roam all parts of Christianity, except for a small area that houses only one or a few, minimalist articles of faith. The same kind of comparison can be made not only between Christian sects but also between religions, with much the same minimalist result, as the tradition exemplified here by Lull shows. Yet as Cunaeus shunned a neoplatonist, Kabbalist or analogous mystical solution to the problem of overbearing theology, he also refrained from taking the minimalist route out. In effect, the scholars’ speeches in SV leave the problem unresolved. The concluding defense of the theologians is easy to identify with, but in the final verdict over-reaching remains unacceptable, as Cunaeus’s commentary on the character of the apologist theologians makes clear. However, the revolt of criminals interrupts the counting of votes, and we never find out how the scholars’ collective wisdom would have settled the issue. Fortunately, Cunaeus receives better guidance than the dead academics, when Sophrosyne explains and elaborates on Sophia’s speech to him. The conclusion refutes all theologians, but they are spared the embarrassment of a public condemnation. The ambiguity of the theologians’ conclusion could be uncalculated. It may simply reflect Cunaeus’s belief that his epistemological stance, expressed through Sophia and Sophrosyne, was superior to previous proposals; therefore there was no need to risk refutation by unnecessarily putting words in the debating scholars’ mouths that could have contradicted what they actually published. Or it may be intentional, meaning that Cunaeus utilised the creative ambiguity that the dialogue form offered because he regarded the problem intransigent within the existing framework of debate, which did not separate strictly epistemology and theology. No theologian could have supplied the right answer in SV, and one was not allowed to emerge from the scholars’ discussions, either. Sophia had to come in from the outside. Both Cunaeus’s imaginary dreaming self, who reacts to Sophrosyne’s speech, and his fictitious other self who narrates the dream, unambiguously declare the defeat of the theologians. Cunaeus’s readers’ reaction to and use of the text also point to the same conclusion. The afterlife of Sophia’s speech, and of Cunaeus’s preface to the Caesares, offer further evidence for the secularising impact of SV. Beyond the failure of Christian theology and minimalism to provide solid foundations for peace, adding Cynicism to the armory was still not enough. Whatever solution would have been provided by the

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combination of Cynicism and Christian minimalism to the theological, epistemic and political problem that Cunaeus posed with precision and consummate skill in SV, Sophia and Sophrosyne would have been central to it. Combining Christian minimalism with Cynical attacks on faith was in itself a ground-breaking move toward secularisation; adding the Rabbinic attack on reason left Christian epistemology in tatters. Rabbinism: Against Reason As for wisdom herself, if she does not know whether she is wisdom or not, how in the first place will she make good her claim to the name of wisdom? Cicero, Academica, II.24

Summary and Introduction The central figure of SV, the goddess Sophia, is the third key component in the neutralisation of Christian epistemology. Her speech took on a life of its own, and was translated and cited separately from the rest of the satire. In the concluding accumulatio of her speech Sophia defines her legitimate follower: one who is free in his or her inquiries, insists publicly on the freedom of opinion, yet does not at any time go beyond the probable or the verisimilar. Sophia explains that God appointed boundaries to human knowledge, and wishes her to be neither entirely revealed, nor wholly concealed from the eyes of the world.219 The half-open, half-closed stance allows Cunaeus to complete the systematic negation of every epistemic possibility that would make it possible for theology to interfere with politics. Cynics, Sophists, orators and atheists point out the limits of faith; Christian minimalists and mystics of all stripes and colours emphasise the limits of nature in the pursuit of truth; and some philosophers, but for Cunaeus most prominently, the anti-Aristotelian Rabbis and Kabbalists, argue against the hyperextension of the faculty of reason. This is a useful, but simplified model of Cunaeus’s strategy in SV. The trajectory SV follows, from the Cynics through the minimalists to the Rabbis, outlines not so much an atheistic master plan as a step-by╇ Cunaeus, SV, pp. 98-9. ‘Cives quidem meos in posterum nullos nisi eos agnoscam, qui et libera esse iudicia patiuntur neque unquam ultra id quod verisimile occurrerit procedunt. Est enim aegris mortalibus, sicut caeterarum rerum, ita et scientiae positus modus; et me, cum in terras deum hominumque mitteret rex, nec totam patere nec ab omni parte esse clausam voluit. In vestibulis templi mei haerere ius fasque est; illa arcana, quae in interiore sacrario abdita sunt, frustra cernere laborant.’ 219

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step reaction to the theological debates of the time, grounded in questions of epistemology, by an erudite thinker who took care to remain coherent despite the literary excuses offered by the satirical form. The Cynics allowed him to counter the blind zealous believers, and caricature their hypocrisy. The minimalists’ speeches in SV allowed him to invoke the eloquence-philosophy debate in all its complexity, and to turn its full force against Scholastic and allied theologians who held that man’s natural inclination and/or natural reason justified all inquiry into the Divine. Finally, the half-open, half-closed epistemic accessibility of Sophia enabled Cunaeus to transcend the binary Christian approach to the sufficiency of human reason and/or of human nature in the pursuit of truth. Given that the natural inclination to inquiry has already been rejected, Cunaeus can present the resultant epistemic humility as man’s correct default position. The position advocated in SV by Sophia, Sophrosyne, and Cunaeus in the first person singular, is not Skeptical, Cynical, or another kind of reheated ancient philosophy; yet it is wholly unsuited to support any form of Christianity. Although the correspondence, the context and the text all bear the marks of the particular challenges to political stability to which Cunaeus was responding (including but not limited to the Vorstius scandal), SV represents the general logic of post-Reformation conflict resolution in its delineation of a wholly secularised epistemic position. Cunaeus’s satirical dream encapsulates the end result of the next century and half’s trial-and-error groping toward secular modernity. But where could the idea of Sophia’s double nature come from? Several Christian ascetics and classical figures, like Lucian’s Tiresias in Charon, could have inspired Sophrosyne’s speech,220 but not Sophia’s strange duality. I suspect that it is Rabbinic in origin. Jewish refugees from the Iberian peninsula to the relatively tolerant Netherlands had a great impact on the republic’s intellectual life.221 Moreover, Cunaeus maintained long and intense correspondence with Schotte, Drusius, and others before 1612, SV’s publication. These letters show them frequently discussing Rabbinic and Kabbalistic issues and texts. We know from both Cunaeus’s correspondence and from recent scholarly works, including Eyffinger’s introduction to the recent translation of 220 ╇Shortly after SV’s publication Joannes Forestius, for instance, the son of a Dutch Supreme Judge, congratulated Cunaeus on his use of the Lucianic dialogue between Mercury and Charon. Cunaeus, Epistolae, Ep. LXXIII. 221 ╇ Katchen, Christian. Manuel, Broken. Van Rooden, Theology.

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DRH, and Bartolucci’s writings on Sigonio, that Cunaeus was a close reader of Maimonides years before 1614.222 One can identify the lower hokmah in Kabbalah as one of the sources for the central, defining figure of Sophia in SV. One may also reasonably conjecture that ibn Tibbon’s commentary on Maimonides was another source for her depiction and speech. Discussion: Leiden Hebraism SV was motivated by a secularising desire for political peace, which is a social value. Unlike the Stoics, the Cynics are not renowned for holding such values. The opposite is the case: Cynics catalogue social vices, subvert and ridicule social conventions, and strive for extreme versions of psychological, economic, and intellectual autonomy. Their critics often challenged their statements and public antics, pointed out that they needed an audience for their statements to be effective, and urged them to retire into deserts and caves. Some Cynics took the advice; the affinity between Cynicism and ascetism has been well documented. The Leideners’ and other politiques’ brand of epistemic humility was not asocial, antisocial or only incidentally political, like ancient Cynicism, but the cornerstone of a new public order.223 SV’s intense and immediate political context, symbolism and allusions, from the march of the recently killed to the ubiquitous and welladapted references from Livy and Sallust, fit the Leiden pattern, and show that the irenicist and socially constructive uses to which they put Cynicism did not come from Cynicism itself. The adoption of Hebrew sources into Christian thought is recognised now as a defining part of European intellectual history. The most recurring argument is that Christian adoptions of Hebrew sources have contributed to the development of early modern religious toleration.224 While research is intense, multifarious and fascinating, it is also in its early stages. The following treatment of the Rabbinic dimension of SV is an attempt to show that Sophia’s figure and speech, i.e. the key and most celebrated and cited component in 222 ╇ Eyffinger’s introduction to Cunaeus, Hebrew Republic, xxxi-iv. Bartolucci, “Influence.” Idem, Introduction to Sigonius, The Hebrew Republic. 223 ╇ Compare, for instance, the political dimension of Lucian’s Cynic with the politics of its early modern reception, including More’s commentary. More, Collected. Ligota, Lucian. 224 ╇ Rose, Bodin. Rosenblatt, Renaissance. Stroumsa, A new science, 39-61. Laplanche, “Christian erudition.” Nelson, Hebrew Republic.

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this potent refutation of Christian epistemology, came from Cunaeus’s Hebraic studies. This is meant to be both a contribution to the growing body of case studies in early modern Hebraism, and an offering of its implications for secularisation as a new, larger theme for consideration. For Leiden secularisation, as well as for understanding SV, it is vitally important to figure out where the keystone of Cunaeus’s gate to secular modernity, namely the half-open, half-closed figure of Sophia, comes from, and how it fits in with the rest of his conceptual edifice. The Wars of Religion re-focused Christian minimalists’ attention to peace and stability. Yet whether they achieved their minimalism by enlarging the cognisance of reason in tackling theological issues, or by syncretising Kabbalistic, neoplatonic and other kinds of mysticism with Christianity, Cunaeus in SV presented the resulting increase in emphasis on the supernatural claims of Christianity as unacceptable, dangerous, epistemically arrogant, and politically subversive. While Christian minimalism provides a useful foil against certain kinds of epistemic arrogance, its social implications are not broad, irenicist, or reliable enough to safeguard the Dutch Republic. Faith, nature and reason must be neutralised to stop the daily march of the dead. After questioning faith through Cynicism, and nature through Christian miniÂ�malism, Cunaeus’s suspension of human reason is drawn from the Rabbinic reaction to medieval Aristotelianism. This tradition explicitly named social concord as its primary objective in razing reason’s pretensions to the ground. Halevi (c. 1075-1141) and MaimoÂ� nides (c. 1135-1204) are the most notable representatives of this reaction; the latter played the lead role in Cunaeus’s 1617 De Republica Hebraeorum. The interaction between Judaism and Christianity is a rich and fascinating subject. Certain episodes have been mentioned above, from Paul’s and later Christians’ fear of ‘Judaising seducers’ to medieval anti-Semitism, through converso agents of transmission like Vives and the more tolerant and sympathetic Christian Kabbalah of Reuchlin and Mirandola, to Scaliger’s and his students’ use of Hebrew sources to establish the historical genealogy of Christian institutions. The composition, circumstances and consequences of the large influx of Iberian Jews into the United Provinces in particular have been treated elsewhere.225 It is easy to get lost in the maze of the vibrant and intense 225 ╇See Katchen, Christian. Manuel, Broken. Popkin, Jewish Christians. Van Rooden, Theology, etc. Judaism’s impact on Renaissance Christianity was wide and varied, including Christian Kabbalah as well as rationalism. The Iberian Rabbi Judah

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intellectual exchanges of the time. The Leiden Circle’s secularising use of the new Hebrew learning, exemplified by Scaliger’s historicisation of Christianity, by Cunaeus’s SV and DRH, Grotius’s Parallelon, Commentarius in Theses XI, De republica emendanda and De iure praedae, and so on, comprise only a tiny but not insignificant facet of the complex and intricate interaction between these Abrahamic religions. Within this facet, the Rabbinic inspiration of Cunaeus’s wellconstructed and comprehensive warning against epistemic arrogance is a minute feature. Could he have known the anti-Aristotelian Rabbis in general, and Maimonides in particular, well enough by 1612 to borrow the figure of Sophia, and the socially constructive arguments against reason, from them? If so, is there any evidence that he did? Unlike the four Christian minimalists, politique theologians like Cassander and Melanchthon, and the Cynics Menippos, Diogenes and Julian, Rabbinic literature is not mentioned explicitly in SV. While in the previous sections the primary text itself provided sufficient evidence, here we must rely on correspondence and other Â�circumstantial signs for his knowledge of Rabbinica. Instead of conÂ� textualising distinct parts of the text, this is more of a reconÂ�struction of Cunaeus’s mental environment, an examination of what kind of Rabbinic sources influenced him at which particular stage of his Â�development. The decisive preliminary question regarding the RabÂ� binic influence on SV is how much Cunaeus knew about MaiÂ�monides and the Rabbinic reactions to Aristotelianism by the time he came to write the SV. He was the best Hebraist among the Leideners discussed here, but his reputation derives largely from the 1617 DRH. It is also known that he took a sabbatical in 1616-7 with the explicit purpose of studying Hebrew and Rabbinic literature. DRH, the influence of which reverbated through the next two centuries, was published in 1617; this is the definite terminus ad quem when Cunaeus became a respected specialist in Hebraic studies. What is the terminus a quo? How advanced was his knowledge by 1612, when he wrote SV? Could this turning-point in secularisation really be influenced by Hebrew epistemology as much as by classical skepticism, or is this wishful fancy? Due to their interest in its neolatin features, SV’s modern ediCrescas (1340-1411), for instance, wrote a clear and accessible Refutation of the Christian principles, in which he used not Judaism, but philosophy and common sense to argue that central Christian doctrines like original sin, the Trinity, virgin birth, transubstantiation, and the like, contradict human reason.

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tors noted no textual references to possible Hebrew (or Greek) sources. Circumstantial sources tell a different story. According to Vorstius, Cunaeus began to learn Hebrew at age 14 from his relative and Leiden host, Ambrosius Regemorterus, and he already entered the innermost shrines of Hebraic studies under Drusius’s tutelage at Franeker in 1606-08.226 His studies with Drusius continued, in a sense, in the form of frequent and detailed scholarly exchanges between Cunaeus, Drusius, and Drusius’s son, on all kinds of Hebraic and Rabbinic matters. Epistle XXXIX between Cunaeus and the young Drusius, for instance, which the Leiden Circle’s faithful editor and promoter, Peter Burmann (1668-1741) dates to between 1607-09, is a veritable treasure-trove of Rabbinica, rich in references to Christian Hebraists like Sebastian Münster, Jean Mercier,227 Scaliger’s polemic with Cardano’s astrology,228 but mostly to Hebrew sources themselves, including Kabbalistic texts, Rabbis Saadia Gaon (882/892-942), Abraham ibn Ezra (1092/3-1167), the great Kabbalist ibn Daud (c. 1110-1180) (if I decipher ‘Cabbala R. Abrahami Davidis filii’ correctly), Elias Levita (1469-1549), the Hebrew grammarian, poet, Kabbalist and author of chivalric romances, and so on. Cunaeus also exchanged letters with Petrus Bertius (1565-1629), the famous Dutch polymath, later Professor of Mathematics and Librarian at Leiden. Ep. LXII from November 1610 is a learned letter from Cunaeus to Bertius concerning a range of Rabbinic matters and various Targumim (‘Chaldaeus Paraphrastes’). In May 1614 Cunaeus sent a letter to Grotius, describing his plan to review and publish some notes on the Jewish Republic that he took ‘iampridem,’ and how their previous joint Hebraic studies helped him a great deal with these notes.229 Based on this letter, Eyffinger dates the origin of Cunaeus’s idea behind DRH to ‘some years prior to 1614.’230 This puts the 1612 SV well within the range of 226 ╇ ‘Eadem discendi proficiendique cupiditas Franequeram Frisiorum eum pelÂ� lexit, uti opera consilioque Clarissimi Ioannis Drusii in ipsa Hebraismi adyta peÂ�Â�neÂ� traret. Hoc praeceptore Chaldaica, ac Syriaca, et Rabbinorum commentarios Â�adortus est.’ Vorstius, “Oratio funebris,” 203. Regemorterus moved to London by 1608, and was active in the Dutch Calvinist congregation. Der Aa, Biographisch, 16.164. Grell, Dutch Calvinists, 61. Korteweg, “De nieuwtestamentische commentaren.” 227 ╇See Burnett, “Christian Aramaism.” 228 ╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.456 and passim. 229 ╇ These letters are in Cunaeus, Epistolae. 230 ╇ Cunaeus, Hebrew Republic, xxxiv.

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the serious period of Cunaeus’s Hebraic Â�studies, building on his early foundations laid down with Regemorterus and Drusius. For the present purpose, the most interesting letters are those that Cunaeus exchanged with Apollonius Schotte. As mentioned above, their earliest surviving letter dates from 1605, and their friendship and correspondence lasted until Cunaeus’s death in 1638. In almost every letter they combined academic discussions with a close attention to the political repercussions of ideas. Time and again they told each other that state policy and the young Republic’s cohesion and fate depended all too often on the interpretation of a biblical passage. The hope of reuniting the original seventeen provinces was still alive, Zeeland still teetered on the brink of secession, Zeeland-Flanders was still the theatre of intense military operations, and internal dissent by Calvinists, chosen nation theorists, Mennonites and others continued to threaten the stability of the United Provinces. An acute sense of the immediate connection between religious exegesis and political survival is manifest in every Schotte-Cunaeus letter. This is the context of their correspondence on Rabbinic matters both before and after the publication of SV. In identifying the Rabbinic inspiration of Sophia in SV, Cunaeus’s letter to Schotte from 18 July, 1611 is the most helpful. Since their first exchange in 1605, Schotte moved from Middelburg to the Hague, but his evident concern for Zeeland is not diminished by his more frequent references to wider national affairs. He continues to encourage Cunaeus’s studies, always pointing out the political, pacifist imperative of minimising religious zealotry. In this letter, published as Ep. VII and misdated to 1711, Cunaeus engages Schotte in interpreting Ecclesiastes. He marshalls David Kimchi, ibn Ezra, Maimonides, ‘Avranel’ (Isaac Abravanel, 1437-1508), Solomon Jarchi, and other Talmudicos and Judaei magistri in support. ‘Schelemo Jarchi’ in this letter probably refers to the Rashi (10401105), revered author of the first comprehensive commentary on the Tanakh and the Talmud. Ramón Martí, the thirteenth-century Dominican Hebraist and missionary, is the source of this identification, which may not be correct. Heering argues that Martí mistook Solomon Jarchi for the Rashi, a.k.a. Solomon ben Isaac or Shlomo Yitzhaki. The mistake occurs, according to Heering, in Martí’s famous Pugio fidei (c. 1278), his official recommendation for state policy

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toward the Jewish community.231 In 1264 the king of Aragon appointed him to the Dominican committee examining Jewish manuscripts, in order to ban any material that contradicted Christianity. Although essentially a Christian apology, the Dagger of Faith was better informed and more tolerant than some medieval Christian texts. It cited and translated long passages from the Talmud, the Midrash and other Hebrew sources, and concluded that much of Judaism confirms the truth of Christianity, and is therefore valuable. The official Dominican recommendation that followed the Pugio was that the Talmud should not be burnt entirely. The Pugio was often cited and plagiarised throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, albeit in increasingly corrupt form. Martí’s mistake about the Rashi was adopted by Calvin, Münster, Buxtorf junior, and even L’Empereur. Heering notes in his excellent book on Grotius’s 1620 Bewijs van den waren godsdienst that Grotius reproduces this mistake.232 The Bewijs grew into the De veritate religionis Christianae by 1627. This book has been called the first Protestant textbook in Christian apologetics, written with a missionary intention that Martí would have recognised, and containing the same mistake. Whether Cunaeus in this letter, and Grotius in De veritate, took the misidentification of Rashi directly from Martí or from an intermediary source is unclear; but a direct adoption is not impossible. Scaliger knew the Pugio well enough to detect Pietro Galatini’s extensive and unacknowledged borrowings, and corruptions in the text.233 Although he did not publish the Pugio himself, he probably discussed it with his students. Du Plessis-Mornay had a manuscript of the Pugio, and encouraged Buxtorf (whose 1603 Juden Schul impressed Scaliger) to

╇ For more on Martí, see Burnett, From Christian, and Katchen, Christian. ╇ Heering, Grotius, 189-90. Most scholars take early modern mentions to “Rabbi Jarchi” to refer to the Rashi. Heering is probably right, however, that this is a compound character arising from an early modern confusion of several rabbis. The Rashi lived and worked around Troyes for most of his life, save for a brief studentship in Mainz. The Rabbi Abraham Jarchi mentioned, for instance, by Thomas Browne in Musaeum Clausum (written in or after 1675, first publ. 1683), lived in Lunet or Lunel, near Montpellier. Although Browne’s editors assume that he also confused him with the Rashi in Musaeum Clausum, Browne gets the name right, as Solomon, in Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646). 233 ╇ For details of Scaliger’s work with the Pugio see Bayle, Dictionaire (1702 ed.), s.v. ‘Martini,’ t. 2. 2077-8, incl. notes A, B, C. Bayle shows that Scaliger may not have been the first to notice Galatini’s plagiarism. 231 232

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edit it for publication.234 Like Grotius, Cunaeus certainly had direct knowledge of Martí by the time he wrote DRH. He provided Buxtorf Jr. with generous notes on the Dominican, as well as on Maimonides’s Guide and the Zohar (Ep. XCVI–CIII). The passage that Cunaeus dedicates the most attention to in his 1611 letter to Schotte is from Ecclesiastes 7.235 19€ Wisdom strengtheneth the wise more than ten mighty men which are in the city. 20€ For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not. 21€ Also take no heed unto all words that are spoken; lest thou hear thy servant curse thee: 22€ for oftentimes also thine own heart knoweth that thou thyself likewise hast cursed others. 23€ All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. 24€ That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out? 25€ I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness

Cunaeus’s deployment of his Rabbinic learning in interpreting this passage for the benefit of Schotte the year before he published SV, in a letter full of concern with overzealous theologians and the danger they bring to Zeeland and the entire Republic, illustrates the torrid confluence of political and religious discourses. It also illustrates the Leiden politiques’ appreciation of the urgency and importance of separating these discourses from one another, especially politics from theology, via secularisation. Strange as it may seem now, one must remember the ever-present trend among Christians to scour Jewish hermeneutics for exegetical features that they could use against their own Christian opponents. Similarly, if a Hebrew source could be introduced as new evidence, and used to clarify and establish consensus around the meaning of a biblical passage, it could break the impasse that a group or a country may have reached due to irreconcilable internal differences of religious opinion, and consequently of political allegiance. Zeeland may be pacified, the Mennonites may be con╇ Burnett, From Christian, 95-9. ╇ Ecclesiastes is a major source for Montaigne’s skepticism. It features in many of his Essays, including the treatment of epistemic arrogance in “On presumption.” Along with Sextus Empiricus, Ecclesiastes was Montaigne’s dominant source of inscriptions for the beams in his library. Legros, Essais. 234 235

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vinced to fight, the provinces may be rejoined in a stronger and more perfect union. In other Leiden texts we find a similar conviction that that ending the violence required a hermeneutical technique to enable the parties to agree or to suspend their disagreement, whether by relegating the issues to the category of adiaphora, or coming to an agreement that they are unknowable, or through other means.236 The concern with right understanding and political stability dominate both the Cunaeus-Schotte correspondence and SV. After this letter from 1611, detailed discussions of Hebrew sources become a fixture in their correspondence (Eps. VIII, X, XI, XIII-XIX, etc.). If anything, the written evidence available downplays the intensity of Cunaeus’s skill and interest in Hebraica. Based on how passionate and energetic his private correspondence with Schotte was on this subject, one can imagine the debates and conversations Cunaeus participated in at Franeker and Leiden.237 Cunaeus’s conviction that we see in the correspondence and in DRH, namely that the application of Jewish epistemic humility to intra-Christian polemics was key to quelling pointless and virulent controversy, reinforces the earlier conjecture about the Jewish influence on the figure of Sophia in SV. It also suggests that in 1612 Cunaeus was among the best Hebraists of the second Leiden generation of secularisers.238 He was capable of constructing Sophia from his Hebrew studies; but what was the exact source of the half-open, halfclosed model of Wisdom? Among the Hebraic sources mentioned in his letters, Maimonides and the Kabbalah are two possibilities; the other Rabbis and writers either do not discuss Wisdom at length or, like ibn Ezra, were known to early modern Christian Hebraists primarily for their value in the straightforward, literal elucidation of the biblical and related texts, not for their philosophical arguments.

╇ The discussion of Grotius’s De iure praedae below will furnish detailed case studies of hermeneutical techniques to this effect. 237╇ There is a gap in their surviving correspondence from April 1612 to February 1615, crucial years for both Dutch politics and the work of the Leiden Circle. Given internal evidence, the frequency of their correspondence in other years, and the secrecy surrounding, for instance, the circulation of Grotius’s Meletius manuscript, this gap may be deliberate. 238 ╇ The following year his Leiden schoolmate, Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), returned from his extensive travels and pursuit of Oriental languages. Erpenius was appointed professor of Arabic and other Oriental languages. Brugman, “Arabic scholarship.” Van Rooden, L’Empereur. 236

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SV’s Sophia and the Kabbalah’s Lower Hokmah. By 1612 Cunaeus Â� displayed evident signs of familiarity with the Kabbalah. Christian Kabbalists and sympathisers, like Pico, Ficino, Cardano, Mercier and Marnix, are mentioned and cited in SV and in the correspondence, together with Jewish scholars like ibn Daud and Elias Levita. Even a schematic overview of Kabbalah, whether Jewish or Christian, is beyond our present scope. Suffice it to say that it is a highly complex branch of esoteric Jewish mysticism, which incorporates Greek philosophical, Gnostic, Christian, and numerous other ideas, and was in turn closely studied and imitated by Christians since at least the twelfth century. Poor transmission and profound misunderstandings of the Jewish ideas did not unduly worry the Christian mystics, who filled the gaps with their own inventions. Lull is often considered to be the first Christian Kabbalist. He translated the divine names or attributes that make up the Sefirot as ‘dignities,’ adding another layer of meaning to Pico’s and Heinsius’s use of the term.239 Pico’s Oration on the dignity of man, as well as his famous 900 Theses (for which the Oration became an introduction), combine Aristotelianism, neoplatonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah. The ‘dignity of history’ in Heinsius’s DPDH, wherein he claimed that history and its study immortalises, may be connected to the Kabbalist notion of immorÂ� tality through the study of Creation and sacred scriptures.240 It was Reuchlin, arguably the most influential Christian Kabbalist, who convinced Luther to learn Hebrew, just as another great Kabbalist, Guillaume Postel, convinced Scaliger of the same. By the beginning of the seventeenth century many European thinkers knew about the existence of Kabbalah in some form, whether through neoplatonist texts, annotated Hebrew grammar books, or from the ProtestantCatholic polemic.241 Pico commissioned Flavius Mithridates, a converted Sicilian Jew, to translate the known Kabbalistic texts from Hebrew into Latin. First published in 1486, Mithridates’s translation and explanation of part of Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Brightness, convinced Pico to add the ╇Secret, Kabbalistes. ╇ Compare Idel, “Ramon Lull.” 241 ╇ And in many other forms. One suspects that Marnix’s phenomenal success as the lead cryptographer for William the Silent was not uninfluenced by his study of the number and letter permutations, gematria, combinatorics, magic squares and deconstructionism in the Sefer Yetzirah, Abraham Abulafia, and miscellaneous Kabbalistic writers and texts. His letter games live on in the Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem. Idel, Language, Torah. Kahn, Codebreakers. 239 240

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Kabbalah to his growing list of traditions that could and should be reconciled with Christianity. Two sets of propositions in his 900 Theses, one of 47 and another of 72 items, are based on the Bahir.242 When the papacy challenged the orthodoxy of the Theses, Pico’s Apologia included a defense of the Kabbalah. It was not a part of his grand synthesis that he was willing to compromise. Earlier, another Jewish convert, Abner of Burgos (c. 1270-1347), reported and published extracts and paraphrases from the Bahir, known to and cited by Ficino. In sum, many of the basic ideas in the Bahir were available since the fourteenth century. Pico’s project renewed interest in it, and greatly improved knowledge of the text. Even in the best copies, the Bahir is still a fragmentary and difficult text, of uncertain date and provenance. The currently known version first appeared in the twelfth century in southern France. It claims to derive from scattered scrolls and fragments of a much older, 1st–2nd century BC text. Internal evidence corrobates this claim, but does not confirm it definitively. It is essentially an exegesis of the first chapters of Genesis in the form of a loose dialogue between master and disciples, and with a thicket of cross-references to other parts of the Tanakh. The Bahir is interesting for several reasons, not least because it explains the mystical meaning of the verses, including the significance of the shapes of the Hebrew characters, the use of sacred names in magic, and because it comments on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, another foundational text of Jewish mysticism, that was at least as popular, if not more, with Christian readers as the Bahir. The Sefer Yetzirah is the earliest known description of the later standard Kabbalistic account of Creation through the Ten Numbers (the SefiÂ� rot), Three Mother Letters, Seven Double Letters, and Twelve EleÂ� mental Letters. The permutation and combination of these four categories generate the structures that make up the Universe. They also correspond to astrological units, parts of the human body, and language.243 Among its many amazing features, the most salient part of the Bahir explains Creation in the following terms. In actuality, as well as in potentiality, the World has always co-existed with God. The Act of Creation was the actualisation of the latent power of the first Sefirot, 242 ╇ Hamilton, The apocryphal, 33-6, and passim. Pico’s Heptaplus, also widely read among Leideners, drew from the Bahir in equal measure. See Busi’s foreword to Pico’s Bahir, 89-95. 243 ╇ Compare ibn Ezra, The secret, 149-69.

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Figure 7.╇ Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652-4), Vol. IIB. With kind permission of ECHO.

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the Keter ‘Elyon or Crown, which in turn gave birth to the next Sefirot, known as Hokhmah, a.k.a. Sophia or Wisdom. From this emanated Binah, Intelligence, and so forth. Philo’s and various Gnostics’ and neoplatonists’ theories of emanation, which also left an indelible mark on Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Locke, Leibniz and Â�others, are easiest to discern in this part of the Bahir. â•… The range of fields that this dynamic conceptualisation of Creation has influenced over the ages, from Renaissance physiology to modern cybernetics, is easy to imagine. The most pertinent point here is that in transforming a Gnostic idea, the Bahir developed the notion of double Sophia or hokmah. In this story, Sophia succumbs to the temptation of the hyle, and falls from the pleroma into the lower world. Scholem explains, Even so, this lower, fallen Sophia remains related to the pneuma, the highest constitutive part of the human soul. […] When God placed this Wisdom in the heart of Solomon, he adapted the upper Wisdom to the form of the lower Wisdom, which he was able to grasp. In the form of the lower Wisdom, which is the “daughter” whom God, as it were, gave in marriage to Solomon, “the thirty-two paths of the Sophia,” all the powers and ways of the pleroma are united (sections 43, 62, 67). […] The conception of the Torah as daughter and bride thus combines with the gnostic conception of the Sophia, which possesses the qualities of the last sefirah and helps not only Solomon, but all men: “As long as a man does what is just, this hokmah of Elohim assists him and brings him close [to God], but if he does not do it, she removes him [from God] and punishes him.”244

Scholem regards Section 90 of the Bahir as ‘the most astonishing’ formulation of double Wisdom. Here, the lower Sophia transforms by direct emanation into Glory, the eighth Sephirot, which fills the whole of ‘earth,’ the part of Creation that is perceptible to man, and is therefore approximately identical with it. Lower Sophia becomes the humanly knowable. Or, more precisely, she delineates the sphere in which human reason can be justly exercised. The Bahir’s parable for this (which Scholem cites at length in his own translation from the Hebrew Bahir), is translated here from Mithridates’s version: And what is the meaning of the verse Holy, holy, holy, followed by Lord sabaoth (Is. 6.3)? The [first] holy is the supreme crown, the [second] holy is the root of the tree, the [third] holy is in all: Lord sabaoth, the whole earth is filled with his glory (Is. 6.3). 244

╇Scholem, Origins, 91-3.

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â•… And what is the holy that is attached and specific? By way of example: it is similar to a king who had sons, and the sons in turn had sons. Whenever the sons did his will, he came among them and nourished them, sustained them, and let his goodness flow upon all of them, so that the sons and the fathers were satiated. When, on the other hand, the sons did not do his will, he radiated upon them as much as they needed. â•… What is the meaning of: The whole earth is filled with his glory? It refers to the whole earth, which was created on the first day. It is on high, corresponding to the land of Israel; it is filled with the glory of the Lord. â•… What is it? It is wisdom, about which it is written: The wise shall inherit glory (Prov. 3.35), and we say: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place (Ez. 3.12). â•… What is then the glory of the Lord? By way of example: it is similar to a king who had the queen in a chamber of his. All of his army were delighted in her. She had beautiful sons who came each day to see the king; they blessed him as a salutation, and they asked him: Where is our mother? He replied: You cannot see her now. They said: Let her too be blessed wherever she is. What is the meaning of the words: From his place? It teaches that absolutely nobody knows his place. By way of example: it is similar to the daughter of a king who came from a distant, far place, and nobody knew where she came from, until they saw that she was an honest, beautiful, valorous, and chaste woman in all her doings. They said: Certainly she, zoth, has been taken from the side of light, because through her doings the whole world is illuminated. They asked her: Where are you from? She answered: From my place. They said: Truly the people from her place, as she said, are great. Blessed be she and blessed be her place. â•… Is this the glory of the Lord not one of his hosts? No, it is inferior. Why, then, do we bless her?245

Let us assume that Scholem’s decipherment of this parable, summarised above this quotation, is correct. If so, then the passage contains four elements that make it necessary to interpret it in the light of another Bahir passage, one that comes just a few sections before this series of parables. The four elements that indicate that the passage only makes sense when read as a continuation of the earlier passage are: 1) the description of the process of emanation at the beginning of the passage, 2) the repeated clarifications that the passage is about the lower Sophia, the wife of Solomon, 3) the comparison between the King and the Crown (the first Sefirot), and 4) the varying degrees of 245

╇ Pico’s Bahir, 318-20.

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their sons’ righteousness. The earlier passage that provides the proper context runs: It has been handed down: There is one pillar extending from earth to the firmament and it is called sadic, after the righteous. When men are righteous, it grows and becomes strong, when not, it becomes weak. It sustains the whole world, as it is written: Foundation of the world. Therefore, if only one righteous [person] is left in the world, he can sustain the world.246

The handed-down tradition, the Kabbalah, describes the Sefirot tree as the foundation of the world, nourished or weakened by the righteousness of men. It is along this tree that the emanation of the fallen Sophia, described above, can take place.247 In individual terms, righteousness is a prerequisite of seeing the lower hokmah as the glory of God, which fills the earth. In universal terms, Wisdom fills the earth and becomes God’s glory only thanks to, and in the understanding of, the righteous man. Therefore the lower Sophia herself acquires a double nature for the righteous man. She is attainable wisdom, as well as evidence that the higher wisdom, unattainable in this life, exists.248 This is the meaning of God making true Wisdom in this world half open, and half closed. Those who limit their attention to the lower Sophia, who is a legitimate target of human inquiry, not only behave as righteous men, but they also gain an insight. Even though they cannot access it, at least they discover the presence of higher Wisdom in the lower Wisdom, which displays a double nature to the wise man, as opposed to showing only a single facet to the arrogant and foolish. This is the Kabbalistic equivalent of Erasmus’s and Heinsius’s Silenos. This part of the Bahir also corresponds perfectly to Sophia’s keynote speech in SV. Moreover, when Sophrosyne and Menippos, on separate occasions, tell Cunaeus that he is a righteous man, they both give Cunaeus’s epistemic humility as the one and only reason for their verdict. ╇ Pico’s Bahir, 300. ╇ That the Sephiroth depicts not only categories but also the paths of their ordered interaction, not only a set of ideas/entities but the organised dynamic between them, was clearly recognised and used by Christian Cabalists like Paul Riccius (a German convert from Judaism) in his 1516 Porta lucis, and by Reuchlin in the 1517 De arte cabalistica (see e.g. the 1612 ed., I, 650). Perhaps also by Bodin: Rose, Bodin, 12. 248 ╇ There are versions of Kabbalah in which union with the higher hokmah is also possible. Several cases are discussed in Idel, Kabbalah, chapter 9. In Christian Kabbalist adaptations, this mystical union with God’s own Wisdom becomes the equivalent of the epistemic hubris of the theologians who are targeted by the Leiden Circle. 246 247

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Sophia’s and Sophrosyne’s advice to aspiring righteous thinkers also resembles the Bahir strongly: by her sons, one knows the mother. She is a goddess and a queen in both SV and the Bahir. She is the lower Sophia, adjusted by God to fit human understanding. Sophia’s references to her kingdom in SV §§81, 87 and 88 also corroborate that the Bahir, or a closely allied Jewish or Christian Kabbalistic text, was the inspiration for Cunaeus’s Sophia. As Scholem put it, ‘it is important for the Jewish conception of the Bahir that it is the daughter’s destination to rule and to reign in the lower world, and thereby to indicate the place where she really belongs in the realm of the aeons.’249 Yet the Bahir is only the beginning, and one of several possible Kabbalistic sources for Cunaeus’s Sophia in SV. After the Bahir, the distinction between the two kinds of Wisdom becomes increasingly precise and clarified in subsequent Kabbalistic texts.250 Cunaeus frequently refers to the Kabbalah and to Kabbalistic writers in his correspondence before 1612, but seldom specifies the texts he has in mind. The Bahir was considered here because no Kabbalistic text could fail to draw from it. If Cunaeus took the double figure of Sophia from the Kabbalah, it came directly or indirectly from the Bahir. The sixteenth century saw a major Kabbalistic revival centered around Safed, nurtured by Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz (c. 1500-80), Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-70), Isaac Luria (1534-72), Hayyim ben Joseph Vital (1543-1620), and others. It is tempting to speculate about what Kabbalistic texts Cunaeus may have known by 1612, but showing the Bahir connection is sufficient, partly because it profoundly shapes all Kabbalah, partly because it is directly connected to Pico’s epistemology, which is used extensively in SV, and partly because Cunaeus’s correspondence before 1612, and others’ accounts of Cunaeus’s work, also demonstrate his interest in other Kabbalists, including Ficino, Cardano, Marnix and Mercier. The same Bahir—SV parallel is in keeping with the Bahir’s unique account of Creation: if the World has always co-existed with God, then renouncing the ambition to know

╇Scholem, Origins, 96. ╇Scholem, Origins, 91-4. For the most salient formulations of this in the version of Bahir that was known to Pico, see Bahir, 152-3 and 159 for Mithridates’s Latin translation, and 276-7 and 284-5 for the English translation of the same passages. For later variations on the Bahir’s double Sophia, including a dual version of the Shekhinah, see Scholem, Origins, 176-80. 249 250

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Figure 8. A Christian Kabbalist version, from a Peshitta NT: the Sephirotic vision of St. John. Liber sacrosancti evangelii de Iesv Christo domino & Deo nostro. Ed. and tr. Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter and Moses Mardenus. Publ. Michael Zimmermann. Vienna, 1555, p. 124v. Photograph by the author.

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God leads not to epistemic paralysis, but to a secular, new epistemic autonomy. In addition to the interaction between early modern Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, there was also an area of overlap between the Kabbalistic and Rabbinic attacks on the overextension of reason. The lower Sophia in the Bahir, the Book of Brightness, can be compared for instance with ibn Ezra’s Secret: ‘An intelligent person can know the One in the following way. He can know the One because everything is connected to God. However, a created being cannot know God’s entire goodness. This may be compared to the sunlight that passes over someone whose eyes are closed. He cannot see the face of the brightness of the sun until it passes.’251 Ibn Ezra also discusses the Sefer Yetzirah at length. Other similarities and differences between the Kabbalists’ and the Rabbis’ epistemology, and Cunaeus’s use of both similarities and differences, are explored next. SV’s Sophia and the Rabbis Against Reason and Aristotle. Rabbinic anti-Aristotelianism, in spite of its stated objective of demolishing reason and countering the influence of Aristotle on Jewish theology, was notoriously moderate, respectful of Aristotle, and fond of the middle road between Plato and Aristotle, and between theology and philosophy. This did not blunt their criticism of Aristotelian encroachments on fields of human inquiry that ought not to be approached by reason. Their unique combination of moderation with the attack on reason, almost a willingness to act as a self-conscious antithesis to the opposition of reason to faith, makes the anti-Aristotelian Rabbis an ideal source for Cunaeus’s Sophia, and for Leiden secularisation at large. But while Cunaeus’s use of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah is well documented, there is less evidence about his pre-1612 knowledge of the Guide, a representative and influential Rabbinic work in this traÂ� dition. The previous arguments relied on clear and explicit passages in the primary sources themselves; for the Kabbalistic and Rabbinic sections we only have circumstantial evidence (the correspondence, for instance), and conjecture. The onus of proof here is not on the correct tracing of our central texts back to their sources, but on finding probable sources, and comparing them to the texts we wish to understand. The Hebraic inspiration for Cunaeus’s Sophia stands or falls by the 251

╇ Ibn Ezra, Secret, 178.

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credibility of the conceptual similarity with the double Sophia in Bahir, and with the textual and conceptual similarities with Maimonides’s Guide. Aristotle’s politics and metaphysics resurfaced in the central Middle Ages in Islam. Reason proved too seductive, and the adaptation of Aristotle gave rise to the Kalam and Arabic falsafa. Kalam means ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’ in Arabic. It gave its name to an Islamic school of thought that tried to clarify theological problems through dialectic, based chiefly on the Arabic reception of Aristotle. For better or worse, Kalam is now often called a kind of Islamic Scholasticism. It was not long after the golden age of the Kalam that Aquinas likewise syncretised Aristotle with Christianity. The dominant Islamic reaction to the Aristotle-Islam syncretism was a new mysticism, which drew heavily on the Gnostic and neoplatonic ideas that were cross-pollinating in the Mediterranean around the 3rd century BC, an area and period of extraordinary intellectual fertility. In roughly the same countries, and drawing on Kalam’s texts and terminology, this split was reproduced in the Jewish community in the Karaite-Rabbinic debates. Karaites hold the Tanakh (the OT, essentially) to be the only divinely inspired text, and try to adhere to p’shat, the strictest literal reading of the text. Rabbinical Jews, in contrast, also employ remez (clue, implication), d’rash (deep interpretation, based on changes in words’ meanings) and sod (secret, mystical meaning, linked to the Kabbalah). The Karaites reject the authority of the Oral Law (the Mishnah and the Talmud) as halakha, legally binding religious precepts. One of their reasons for doing so is that the Mishnah and the Talmud record disagreements between the Rabbis, and in these cases both opinions are said to be ‘the words of the living God’: but Karaites think it unreasonable to suppose that God would contradict Himself. They also believe that the whole of the Tanakh was written during the lifetimes of Moses and Joshua. Despite steering between, and combating, the Mutakallimun emÂ�phasis on reason and Karaite puritanism, many of the Rabbis (Saadia Gaon, ibn Ezra, Maimonides) became deeply influenced by both Aristotle and mysticism. Their texts were translated into Hebrew (mostly by six generations of Tibbons), and the anti-rationalist new mysticism of Halevi and others came to fundamentally shape and renew Kabbalah. In the meantime, Aristotle was transmitted to Europe through the Muslims and the Latin translators, and the Aristotle-Christianity syncretism led to, and was further developed

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by, Aquinas and the Scholastics. It is against this that the Renaissance reacted, picking up on the Kabbalah and other variants of neoplatonism in the process. The Wars of Religion began, and the Protestants followed a trajectory very similar to the Karaites: sola Scriptura, enlarging reason’s realm, raising the value of faith in the tenets that remain closed to reason. The Dutch politiques looked for a way out from the conflict, and realised that Christian Aristotelianism must be disproved from within. No conceivable rerun of the Aristotelianneoplatonic debate within Christianity could lead to peace. This is why Scaliger, Heinsius, Grotius and Vossius continued to tweak Aristotle’s texts and ideas, but kept away from overt neoplatonism. Instead of framing the debates as a struggle between reason and revelation, it is probably more helpful to think of their work in terms of multiple vs. unitary goods. This book began with a schematic of the three ideal-types of Christian attitude to politics: complete rejection, complete acceptance, and the Augustinian dialectic of constructive ambiguity. In the central Middle Ages, with the return of Aristotle, the unity-multiplicity contrast was superimposed upon these choices. If one believes that only one kind of good life is possible, then one needs a mythology of power, whether for Church or State. As described in the Introduction, the papacy on the one side, and states’ own sacred histories on the other, stand witness to this. If one accepts a multiplicity of goods, then the two exclusivist positions collapse; and the third, the Augustinian dialectic, also grinds to a halt. Christianity and politics become compatible, but only at the price of virtually eliminating Christianity, which can find it problematic to accommodate a multiplicity of equivalent goods. In the SV the theologians are instructed to withdraw and stop interfering with fields and questions that are not properly in their domain: in other words, the reader learns that several goods can be independently valid at the same time. Cunaeus could not have formulated this position if he lapsed into neoplatonism, Christian or otherwise. Another way to escape the three medieval ideal-types is to redefine and codify the academic disciplines. Heinsius’s and Cunaeus’s admonition to the theologians to stay away from politics owe a great deal to early modern debates about their proper sphere and definitions.252 Some of the relevance of this early modern discourse on academic dis252

╇ Gilbert, Renaissance concepts. Essays in Kelley, Shapes.

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ciplines to non-academic political and legal claims came from the enormous tradition built upon the connection that Plato and Aristotle drew between ‘justice’ and keeping to one’s profession.253 Nevertheless, as Heinsius’s criticism of all theologians in DTC, and Cunaeus’s in SV show, the Leideners went far beyond the disciplinary discourse. Halevi. A good place to start unravelling the story of the Leiden recognition of the salience of Jewish hermeneutics, and their subsequent adoption of its arguments, is with Yehuda Halevi (1085-1141). He was a poet, a mystic and a philosopher who tried to liberate religion from the ‘bondage’ of philosophical systems. There are two points about SV that cannot be made without discussing Halevi briefly. First, within the range of anti-Aristotelian Rabbinism he represents the diametrical opposite of Maimonides’s position. Maimonides encouraged lenience toward the Karaite use of anthropomorphic language about God, because he allowed for the inevitable weakness of human nature and man’s temptation to use his limited reason even when he should not. In the Kuzari, by contrast, Halevi disallows anthropomorphic language in argumentation in no uncertain terms. Paradoxically, this implies a kind of optimism about man’s ability to recognise his epistemic limits, and to potentially acquire the self-mastery required to overcome the irrational passion for applying reason to everything. This, in turn, puts emphasis on Halevi’s mystical poetry. What cannot be expressed in argumentation—such as the Kuzari—can find expression in poetry, in the conveyance of images that bypass the rational faculty and go straight to man’s heart. Yet this was a highly technical form of mysticism. Similarly to the Kabbalah, and sharing many of its elements, the symbolism of Halevi’s poetry was by no means random or merely evocative. The poet’s epistemic status in Halevi is similar to the righteous man’s epistemic status in Maimonides. Given also the early modern Menippean form of satires (a mix of prose and verse, with the verse part for easy recollection and popularisation), Halevi’s poetry is a convenient illustration of the possible influence that Hebrew mystical poetry had on Cunaeus, on the form and central message of SV, and on the Rabbinic formulation of man’s epistemic limits that he incorporated into his attack on Christian epistemology. In structural terms, the Halevi-Maimonides similarities and differences mirror the similarities and differences between Lull and MiranÂ� 253

╇ E.g. Plato, Republic, 433.

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dola in the Christian minimalist section above. Halevi and Lull used prose and poetry purposefully, with a clear distinction between the possible range of meanings that could be conveyed through either medium. Mirandola and Maimonides knew the distinction well, but decided not to use it. Instead, they wrote systematic expositions about the various epistemic positions available, even though some of these positions admittedly tested the limits of what could be described systematically. In spite of this difference, Halevi and Maimonides pair up easily in the substance of their Rabbinic message, concerning the limits of reason. Similarly, Lull and Mirandola took part in the same Christian minimalist discourse regarding the limitations of nature as an effective guide to truth. The works of Halevi and Maimonides shared substance, context, and translators. One of Halevi’s greatest works, the Kitab al-Hujjah wal-Dalil fi Nusr al-Din al-Dhalil, was translated by Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon, Samuel’s father, into Hebrew as the Sefer ha-Kuzari.254 In the Kuzari, Halevi defended Judaism against the Karaites and other heretics seduced by philosophy. Halevi, Saadia Gaon, Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra all wrote strongly against the Karaites, mostly to defend the Mishnah and the Talmud. The voluminuous controversy was bitter at times, but remained by and large respectful, and greatly stimulated Jewish culture. Ibn Ezra in particular regularly quoted Karaite commentators with approval, so much so that some Karaites came to believe that he was secretly one of them.255 However, one could argue that this was a Karaite gambit to garner support and respectability, for although ibn Ezra was moderate and gentle, he was also forceful and perfectly clear in discussing the Karaite notions that he found unacceptable.256 254 ╇ It was first translated into Latin by Buxtorf Jr. in 1660. Since the above argument relies on Cunaeus having read the Kuzari in Tibbon’s Hebrew translation, or having come across closely associated texts with similar content (including paraphrases and extracts), there is no need to go into the circumstances and afterlife of the Latin translation. Yet the story is interesting, relevant, and told well in Burnett, Christian Hebraism. Note also that Buxtorf Jr. attended the Synod of Dordt, and befriended there Episcopius and other Remonstrants on the sharp end of the Calvinist reaction. His 1629 Latin translation and annotation of Maimonides’s Guide (based on ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew) was very influential, and in his surviving correspondence with Cunaeus after 1617 we see him soliciting and receiving lengthy and detailed advice from the Leiden Hebraist about the Guide, about the Zohar, and about Ramón Martí. See e.g. Cunaeus, Epistolae, all of XCVI—CIII. 255 ╇Nemoy, introduction to Karaite. 256 ╇ Ibn Ezra, Commentary on the Pentateuch, 3; Secret, 13, 17, etc.

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According to ibn Ezra, logic (Hokhmat ha-mivta), grammar, geometry, astronomy and other natural sciences are all required to properly understand the Talmud. Yet since man cannot grasp all particulars, and the particulars of all arts and sciences are in constant flux, the divinely appointed task of self-perfection entails trying to grasp the form and essence of these arts and sciences, and apply them to theology.257 It would be misleading to conceptualise the Karaite-Rabbinic debate along reactionary-progressive, or reason-revelation lines. Karaites returned to the Tanakh and to plain meaning alone, but they gave free rein to reason in theology. No wonder that many came to regard them as a Jewish prefiguration of the Protestant principles of ad fontes and sola Scriptura, of allegiance to the evident meaning of God’s Word, and of early modern rationalism.258 Scaliger was very interested in them, championed their hermeneutics over the Rabbinic sources at times, and thought that the Sadducees, keepers of an important independent tradition of Judaism, were directly descended from them.259 As such, their literal reading is of enormous value, because it serves as a corrective and comparison to Hellenistic Judaism. Scaliger thought Hellenistic Judaism valuable, too, but fundamentally different in its development.260 This—correct—historical analysis involved him 257 ╇ Ibn Ezra, Secret, 10-22, 38. See also his comments on the Masoretes, whose close reading of Scripture is a necessary though insufficient part of True Wisdom. Secret, 9-10. Compare the pansophic pedagogical principles of ‘the father of modern education,’ Comenius (Pansophiae prodromus, 1639, and Pansophiae diatyposis) and Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib, in addition to collaborating with Comenius, also established the famous ‘Hartlib circle,’ which played a role in the foundation of the Royal Society of London in 1660. The well-known role of Freemasons in the Society’s foundation is another sign that it was a religious (if not only Christian) aspiration at this time to reach a comprehensive understanding of Creation. Epistemic humility and/or apophatic theology lead easily to pansophism, which defines modern science. 258 ╇ Popkin and Force, Books. Grafton, Scaliger, II.413-7. For another of the many ways in which the Karaite-Rabbinic debate was referenced and replicated during the Reformation, see van den Berg, “Proto-Protestants?” Note that the Protestants who maintained that the Bible was divinely inspired could proceed to draw further support for their ad fontes and sola Scriptura approach from Plato’s juxtaposition of sophia and hermeneutics in the Phaedrus, as long as they regarded the Bible as a direct object of wisdom. 259 ╇ Contrast Marnix’s 1577 letter to van Pottelberg against the Anabaptists: Marnix, Epistulae II, no. 74, 32-3. 260 ╇ For Scaliger’s notion of a Karaite-Sadducee continuity, his general fondness for Karaites, and for the ensuing controversy, see Grafton, Scaliger, II.414-8, 507-12. Note that in addition to his own historical speculations, he might also have taken this notion directly from ibn Ezra. Lancaster, Deconstructing, 148.

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in numerous debates with theologians. He allied with Cunaeus’s old teacher and life-long correspondent, Drusius, in arguing for this position against the Jesuit Nicholas Serarius (1555-1609) and other Catholic thinkers. The participants were acutely conscious of the political implications of the debate over who got to inherit the mantle of legitimacy from the true biblical tradition, and whether this mantle could be inherited at all, or the breaks in biblical legitimacy were irreperable already within Judaism.261 Heinsius’s recasting of the same point landed him in trouble, discussed above, with the zealous factions commanded by Salmasius. This is another iconic scene in the reenactment of the Karaite-Rabbinic debate in early modern Europe. Another reason why a ‘reason vs. revelation,’ or ‘reactionary vs. progressive’ model of the Karaite/Mutakallimun—Rabbinic debate would be uselessly oversimplistic is that the Rabbis placed fundamental value in Reason. They thought that when the Torah or the rest of the Tanakh contradicted reason, the inviolability of reason dictated that the passage must be read, with all due care and rational attention, in a nonliteral sense. There was no disagreement between reason and Scripture, and the integrity and veracity of neither had to be compromised in order to reconcile them.262 Therefore the anti-Aristotelian, anti-ratio261 ╇Summarised in Shuger, Renaissance Bible, fn 114 to chapter 1: ‘Once again, Scaliger is a seminal figure here. Discussion of the Hasids begins with the opening section of book 6 of De emendatione, which argues, contra Eusebius, that the monastic “Therapeutae” mentioned by Philo were not Christians but rather Essenes; furthermore, the name does not mean “healers” but “holy ones.” He then goes on to note in passing the similarity between Philo’s Essenes and “Asidaioi” mentioned in 1 and 2 Maccabees (502-3). Drusius continued this line of inquiry in a brief passage in Quaestionum Ebraicarum libri tres (1599), where he argues that the Hasids mentioned in Maccabees were forerunners of Pharisees; hence, there were two main Jewish sects in Israel during the Hellenistic period—Hasids and Saducees. The Jesuit Nicholas Serarius rejected this interpretation, instead claiming that the Hasids were Essenes, and hence three groups existed within intertestamental Judaism. Drusius’s De Hasidaeis (1603) then responded to Serarius, who replied in the Trihaeresium, defending his original opinion. In 1605 Drusius wrote an extended essay on the religious beliefs and politics of intertestamental Judaism, the De sectis Judaicis, dedicated to James VI/I (to which was appended Scaliger’s critique of Serarius, the Elenchus Trihaeresii). The contributions of Scaliger and Drusius were republished together by Amama in 1619 as De sectis Judaicis commentarii trihaeresio ... accessit denuo Iosephi Scaligeri I.C.F. Elenchus Trihaeresii (Arnheim, 1619). See also Abraham Scultetus, Exercitationes Evangelicae 1.20-33, in Critici sacri 6:367-79; Bonaventura Bertramus, De Republica Ebraeorum, in Critici sacri 5:367; and Petrus Cunaeus, De Republica Hebraeorum libri III, in Critici sacri 5:420.’ 262 ╇ This is a constant theme in Saadia Gaon, Book of doctrines (e.g. chapter 7), ibn Ezra, Secret (e.g. 108-9), Halevi, Kuzari, Maimonides, Guide (e.g. his Introduction).

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nalist, mystical revival of Judaism that was advocated by these central medieval Rabbis revolved around the most difficult and poetic passages of the Tanakh. Non-rational understanding did not contradict, but complemented rational understanding. Reason reÂ�mainÂ�ed imÂ�Â� portant enough not to be merely dismissed by mysticism (as some Christian mystics suggested), and it remained essential even on the road to the mystical understanding of the esoteric texts. Halevi attacks the Karaites in the Kuzari in an interesting fashion. The book consists of five essays and, after a few introductory remarks, begins with the dialogues of the pagan king of the Khazars with a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim, about their respective beliefs. Then a Jewish teacher appears, and shocks the king when instead of giving rational proofs for the existence of God he asserts that the Jews are God’s chosen nation, and that God performed a variety of miracles for them. Much of the book is the ensuing dialogue between the king and the Jew, and the king eventually converts to Judaism. The parallels with Lull’s Book of the Gentile and the three wise men and with Bodin’s Heptaplomeres (where the Jewish position is also more convincing than the Christian) are notable. Several times in the Kuzari, Halevi outright refutes the philosophers’ and the Karaites’ faith in rational philosophy and literal interpretation.263 He then sets out to demonstrate the truth of Judaism, and the hidden nature of this truth, through the following miracles: the preservation of the Israelites in Egypt and the wilderness, the delivery of the Law on Mount Sinai, and the later history of the Jewish people. In other words, he historicises the Tanakh. This yields at least two benefits: the historical authenticity of the events demonstrates to the unbeliever that Judaism is the true religion; and at the same time it shows the Karaites that a literal reading is insufficient, because the historical events were also miracles, and have deep and complex symbolic significance. Halevi’s is a sacred history, and history occupies a very high place in his thought, since it provides the most authoritative proof that God chose the Jewish people as His own. The historical nature of the Tanakh expresses a real truth about divine reality, but simultaneously hides another, higher truth about it. We have seen this half-open, half-closed stance before. In Halevi’s Kuzari and CassanÂ� 263 ╇ Halevi, Kuzari, 2, 157, 162-8 (a marvellous challenge by the Rabbi to the Karaites to make any sense of the Tanakh and the Torah, using literal reading alone), 175-6, 258, 284, etc.

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der’s Consultatio, historicised Scripture is a double Sophia, closely related to Scaliger’s and Cunaeus’s historicisation of Scripture, and to the figurine and metaphor that is Erasmus’s and Heinsius’s Silenos. Yet Halevi’s is not an uncritical or unreflecting sacred historiography. The quintessential scene of sacred history that he tackles is the making of the Covenant. God’s handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses and the Jewish people on Mount Sinai, in Exodus 19, is one of the most discussed Bible passages. It is also one of the most extraordinary scenes ever written. Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, and God tells him that the Jews are His chosen nation, and that they will make a covenant. Moses returns and reports, and the people accept the offer. Moses goes back to God, and they make further arrangements: God gives a sign to prove to the people that it is really He, talking to Moses, and that they should all return after three days to Mount Sinai to enter the covenant. Mount Sinai must be cordoned off, and any man except Moses who so much as touches the mountain will surely die. The day comes, and God repeats the command: make sure that no one can come near, except you and Aaron. For a couple of millennia this text had been subjected to very close scrutiny, both to reconstruct the real scene and to find any symbolic meaning that may be inherent.264 Understandably, the central question of this scrutiny was: how can God and man talk to each other, let alone enter into a covenant? Does God hide and use intermediaries in this passage, because His true presence is so majestic and awe-inspiring that exposure would kill humans (as Zeus unwittingly killed Semele before Dionysos’s birth). Does the distance between God and man signify that His words, including the Decalogue, cannot be understood without an authorised intermediary? What is the exact function and nature of the boundaries set up all around Mount Sinai, which prevent the direct meeting of God and His chosen people? This is not the place to give an overview of the wide-ranging exegetical debates over this passage, but by now the reader can probably recon-

264 ╇ The list of salient references is prohibitively long. Among the first generation of Reformers alone see Luther, Operationes, 292. Idem, Deuteronomios, 37. Melanchthon, Ioannis annotationes, 26 (Christ as the more widely accessible manifestation of God than the Sinai scene), Oecolampadius, Ad Rhomanos adnotationes, 69 (on pious spirit of service), and so on. Cunaeus’s forerunners in the comparativism of DRH, like Bertramus and Sigonius, but also Christian Kabbalists like Pico, Postel and Reuchlin, adopted this biblical passage to their own purposes.

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struct their basic parameters.265 Irrespective of the degree of success in this, a cursory and direct reading of the passage itself demonstrates its relevance to SV. This is the AV of a few verses: 21 And the lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the lord to gaze, and many of them perish. 22 And let the priests also, which come near to the lord, sanctify themselves, lest the lord break forth upon them. 23 And Moses said unto the lord, The people cannot come up to mount Sinai: for thou chargedst us, saying, Set bounds about the mount, and sanctify it. 24 And the lord said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt come up, thou, and Aaron with thee: but let not the priests and the people break through to come up unto the lord, lest he break forth upon them.

Jerome’s Vulgate: 21 dixit ad eum descende et contestare populum ne forte velint transcendere terminos ad videndum Dominum et pereat ex eis plurima multitudo 22 sacerdotes quoque qui accedunt ad Dominum sanctificentur ne percutiat eos 23 dixitque Moses ad Dominum non poterit vulgus ascendere in montem Sinai tu enim testificatus es et iussisti dicens pone terminos circa montem et sanctifica illum 24 cui ait Dominus vade descende ascendesque tu et Aaron tecum sacerdotes autem et populus ne transeant terminos nec ascendant ad Dominum ne forte interficiat illos

The first striking thing is the loss of the linguistic connotation of ‘terminos’ in the English translation of verses 21, 23 and 24. The Vulgatereading exegetes pounced on the term with delight, because it anchored all kinds of complex speculations about the conveyance of meaning between God and everyman. Interestingly, Jewish exegetes travelled an almost parallel path toward deciphering these verses. Tibbon’s commentary on Maimonides’s Guide has the following passage on haras, harisa (the root of which means ‘destruction’): ‘Haras’ or ‘hores’ means a person who engages in something that he is not suited for. The term comes from a scriptural verse, Exod. 19.21: 265 ╇ Even a superficial list would have to include Hugh of St. Victor, De scripturis. Hugh also precedes Cunaeus in using Josephus for historiography. His disciples, Andrew and Richard of St. Victor, followed the double interest in Josephus and Exodus. See also Bruno Astensis, Sententiae, Liber I, Prologus; and Adamus Scotus, De triplici, XVI.28. The most reliable and comprehensive secondary overviews of the pertinent Christian readings of Exodus are Chenu, La théologie, especially 192-6. De Lubac, Exégèse. Németh, “Una cum pictura.”

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‘let them not charge ahead (yehersu) to the Eternal One, to see’. The literal meaning of the verse is that they should not enter the place that it is not fitting for them to enter, to see what it is not fitting for them to see. Its actual meaning is that they should not speculate about matters that they are not fit for. Accordingly, if somebody undertakes the task of studying wisdom without the preparation required, he is called ahead-charger (hores).266

This chimes with the Vulgate’s ambiguity of terminus as a physical boundary, or a verbal definition. Transcendere terminos ad videndum Dominum (or transire terminos et ascendere ad Dominum) no longer sounds frightening, and even when one dies in the process of folÂ� lowing Moses and Aaron, it is a good Christian death. This is how Lull, Pico and hundreds of readers interpreted this text.267 Maimonides and Tibbon also made the physical to theological move in the Â�interpretation of the passage, but they did not construe the transcen-

╇ Also see Maimonides, Guide, I.5 (17a), 30. ╇ A Christian reader who gets close to Tibbon’s disapproval of the hores is Zwingli, who nonetheless relies on a Hebrew source (maybe Tibbon?): ‘Ne forte velint transcendere terminos ad videndum dominum, & pereat ex eis plurima multitudo. ‫ פן יהרסו‬Pen iehersu, Ne forte conterant aut irruant, terminos scilicet sibi à domino constitutos, cupidi scilicet dei videndi. Verbum ergo ‫ הרס‬haras, Latinus Periphrasi circumloquitur, his verbis, Ne forte transcendere velint terminos. Sunt qui hoc verbum à sole deducunt. ‫ הרס‬haras enim praeterque quod evertere ac conterere, etiam solem significat. Quem sensum imitati forte sunt Septuaginta, cum dicunt: μήποτε ἐγγίσωσι πρὸς τὸν θεὸν κατανοῆσαι … Tunc sensus esset, Ne quando incalescant, zelo scilicet, aut curiositate videndi dei, ut lucis huius claritate ac amoenitate capti, forte velint adpropinquare & agnoscere. Chaldaeus ‫ פגר‬pagar, utitur, quod significat, transgressus est.’ Zwingli, Farrago, 114. Perhaps unknown to Cunaeus, Calvin himself wrote a similar gloss on Exod. 19.21, albeit without invoking Hebrew sources: ‘21. Dixitque Iehova ad Mosen. Iteratur Dei mandato eadem prohibitio, ne populus fines transcendat, haud dubie quia non satis fuisset semel vetuisse: quod ex Mosis responso colligitur. Putabat enim, quum admoniti essent omnes, nihil opus esse novo interdicto. Atqui vehementius instat Deus, & iterum minis adhibitis denunciari iubet ut sibi attente caveant. Nempe sciebat cum praefractis sibi esse negotium: quibus domandis acrior poenae metus necessarius foret. Iam quum nihilo simus meliores, ne miremur si pluribus exhortationum stimulis subinde nos Deus pungat, minasque ingeminet: alioqui facile obreperet omnium quae semel praecepit, oblivio. Confirmat etiam hic locus, quantopere displiceat Deo quae humana ingenia titillat curiositas. Diserte enim edicit, ne perrumpant ad videndum: non quod occultum aut absconditum esse vellet quicquid erat utile cognitu: sed quia sobria esse debet inquisitio. & hic est legitimus sapiendi modus, humiliter discere ex ore Dei quod sponte docet, nec praecurrere nimio ardore cupiditatis, sed praeeuntem ipsum sequi.’ Calvin, Comentarii, 326. 266 267

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dence of these boundaries as a righteous act.268 Cunaeus knew his Maimonides well, together with a few other midrashim by ibn Ezra, Kimchi and Abarbanel, and rabbinic tracts (Zacut, Gaon), by the time he wrote DRH in 1617. Is it a bridge too far to argue that he may have come across this passage in the Guide, or a similar Hebrew etymological discussion that makes the same point, and it became an inspiration for his reversal of the Christian view of reason’s merit and function in theology? I at least have not come across any Christian text, however neoplatonist or proto-deist, that makes the point about the need to limit all human inquiry, most importantly theology, in quite the same way as Cunaeus in SV, and Maimonides and Tibbon in the Guide. Pico, Erasmus and others cheerfully acknowledged theology’s inadequacy, and the limits on reason, but had sympathy for those who tried to extend theology’s scope nevertheless. The standard minimalist and irenicist strategy was to extend the scope of reason, reduce the number of doctrines that must be unquestioningly believed, and thereby minimise the issues around which disagreements can develop. This is not the strategy in SV. In a strongly Cynical setting, following four Christian minimalist speeches, reason gets its come-uppance. Cunaeus can also see that this attempt by reason to ‘charge ahead’ leads to constant war and violence; so he rejects this position altogether. The Hebrew texts he was working on seem to be the most likely source of this particular idea. However, neither does the case made for Â�epistemic humility in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, including the Book of Knowledge, resemble Sophia’s speech nearly as closely as Maimonides’s Guide. In the Kuzari, the Exodus scene cited above becomes the object of Halevi’s central argument: the account of the covenant and God’s appearance on Mount Sinai must have originated with a real event, because so many people believed it. If the stories had no historical reality and were introduced much later, the people would have been able to discover their falsehood, at least from their lack of previous knowledge of the stories. In other words, the stories could have only survived because those who lived closest in time and space to the events they describe have accepted their veracity, and thereby turned from a superstitious multitude into a group of reliable historical 268 ╇Not all Rabbis built non-literal interpretations on this passage. Rashi’s pioneering commentary on the Tanakh, included in every printed version and carefully studied by Christians ever since the Middle Ages, was written in order to explain every phrase so clearly and literally that even children could understand it. His commentary on Exodus 19.21-24 is no exception. Rashi, Exodus, 101-2.

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Â�witnesses, more authoritative than later commentators (Christian or otherwise), according to Scaliger’s hierarchy of historical authority, which was adopted by his students.269 This has been recently formulated as ‘the Kuzari principle’: Let E be a possible event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence. If the evidence does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred.270

Gottlieb restates Halevi’s point in a quasi-logical form, showing that the Sinai revelation fits the Kuzari principle. Therefore its veracity can be deduced from the fact that the Jewish people believed that it was true. There are several problems with this argument. Winer points out that it assumes that the meaning of the Tanakh must be held constant. If people today believe that its literal meaning is historically true, then it must have always been understood in exactly this way for Gottlieb’s formulation to work. This allows for no shifts in the text, in its meaning, in the language in which it was conveyed, and so on; overwhelming evidence indicates, however, both that the Tanakh had undergone many such changes in form and meaning over the last few thousand years, and that Halevi was aware that texts underwent such transformations.271 The urgency and relevance of this debate is further shown in the vicious debate between Scaliger and his opponents, including Buxtorf, who thought of Hebrew as the divine, unchanging language, and the Bible as the clear and eternal Word of God; and by Scaliger’s abovementioned use of the Tenth of Tevet fast as proof of the wicked nature of Ptolemy’s forced translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. Halevi and Scaliger both use the sacred text critically and constructively in order to find and explore the historical event behind it. Yet unlike Halevi, Scaliger attributes no extra layer of mystical meaning to the Old Testament. Maimonides’s addition to Halevi’s historiography is much closer to Scaliger’s in its perfectly deliberate avoidance or minimisation of the controversial aspects of scriptural exegesis.

╇ Grafton, Scaliger, II.542 and passim. Wickenden, Vossius, 99-104, 121-2. ╇ Gottlieb, Living, chapter 6. 271 ╇ Winer can be easily refuted by reading Barthes’s “The death of the author.” Shifting signifiers in a cultural context mean that while a text and its readers can both transform endlessly, in the case of canonical texts that define a culture the changes can be concurrent, and thus the meaning held relatively constant. 269 270

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Let me add a few words about Halevi’s philosophy. He strongly denied that the anthropomorphic language used to describe God had any truth content whatsoever.272 At the same time he considered this language to be valid, because perception-based anthropomorphic concepts fill the human soul with intimations of God, and what is inside the human soul can be expressed through poetry, even if that content (including the soul’s vision of God) does not correspond to reality. Halevi not only recognises, but also accommodates man’s epistemic limitations, and turns them to advantage. Maimonides disagrees: and the slight, elegant, but in truth momentous shift from Halevi’s to Maimonides’s patience with the Karaites’ anthropomorphic language mirrors exactly the move from Erasmus’s view of Christian folly to Cunaeus’s wholesale rejection of it in SV. Aristotle is present throughout the book. In the fifth and last essay of the Kuzari, Halevi gives a systematic exposition and criticism of all the various philosophical systems known to him. In the process, he singles out Aristotelian cosmology, psychology and metaphysics for particular criticism and contrast with the truth of Judaism. He also upholds, perhaps surprisingly, the doctrine of free will against the Epicureans and the ‘Fatalists’, and works out his own brand of reconciliation between free will, God’s omniscience, and Providence. He presents a strong and cogent criticism of the Mutakallimun and their influence on the Karaites. Halevi criticises Plato’s theology and philosophy, but Aristotle is his most stimulating debating partner. Most of Halevi’s natural scientific arguments come straight out of Aristotle, and are regularly used by his imaginary Rabbi (although without naming Aristotle as his source) to convince the Kazar king that the Karaites and other Aristotelian rationalists are wrong because the Torah, the rest of the Tanakh, and the Talmud, would make no sense under a strictly literalist interpretation, since they would contradict the findings of natural science.273 In addition to the Mutakallimun and Karaite debate, another reason why Halevi spends more time contradicting Aristotle than Plato in the Kuzari is to be found in the centuries of parallel and related development shared by neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Jewish and Christian mysticism.274 ╇ Halevi, Kuzari, 40, 57, and so on. ╇ Many of these natural scientific arguments concern astronomy. 274 ╇ In What is Gnosticism, King convincingly reconstructs the diversity and complexity of this Mediterranean thought-world, and gives salutary warnings about the 272 273

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In some respects, the logic of the situation in which central medieval Rabbis and early modern Protestants found themselves was surprisingly similar. Protestantism’s take on the humanist ad fontes principle, i.e. sola Scriptura, questioned the authority of the Fathers and the institutionalised church, including the papacy. The resulting void was filled partly by rational inquiry, and partly by mysticism and fideism in whatever supernatural elements remained and were Â�emphasised by Christian minimalism. Similiarly, Karaites returned to the Tanakh, and filled much of the resulting void with the Arabic reception of Aristotle. The Rabbinists saw this as undue pampering to human reason. This is the context of Halevi’s criticism of Aristotle and of the Karaites in Book V of the Kuzari. The Protestant interest in the Karaites and their Rabbinic opponents was not only a historical and scriptural curiosity, but also a part of genuine doctrinal development. Maimonides. Maimonides was no stranger to religious persecution. The Almohads conquered his native city, Córdoba, when he was 13. From their offer of death, conversion to Islam, or exile, Maimonides’s family chose the last option. After ten peripatetic years around the Mediterranean they eventually settled in Fez, Morocco. Maimonides attended its famous university, and composed the Commentary on the Mishnah. Later he moved to Palestine, then settled down in Egypt. He became the head of the large Jewish community there, and worked as court physician to Saladin. He wrote the Mishneh Torah and the Guide to the Perplexed here, in Arabic. As the Erasmus-More edition of Lucian provided one of the keys to Cunaeus’s choice of the satire format for SV, a close look at the Maimonides edition used by Cunaeus also offers valuable clues. There were several translations of the Commentary, the Mishneh Torah and the Guide in Maimonides’s lifetime into Hebrew. The two main rival translators were Judah al-Harizi and Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon. Tibbon, a great translator and philosopher in his own right, prepared far better translations, in personal consultation with Maimonides. He also compiled etymological glosses on the text, which grew into philosophical commentaries. Maimonides was grateful for the translation, as well as for Tibbon’s help in clarifying his original ideas in the prodangers of anachronistic notions of ‘orthodoxy’. See also Idel, Language. Scholem, Origins. Stroumsa, Maimonides.

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cess of preparing it. Tibbon’s commentary and Maimonides’s written approval of the translation became integral parts of the Guide. Although Tibbon’s translations were widely recognised as superior, both his and Harizi’s translations were put into Latin by the end of the fifteenth century. When Harizi’s translations occasionally resurfaced, they often had disastrous consequences.275 Double Wisdom and Double Writing. Another difference between Halevi and Maimonides is that the latter found himself more often in agreement with Aristotle. Both ibn Ezra and Maimonides were well known for defending the Rabbis against the Karaites and the philosophers, but at the same time frequently slipping towards the rationalist position. For this, and for its strong defense of free will, the Guide was often banned by Jewish authorities.276 In the midst of this controversy, Maimonides did his best to avoid more trouble. Famously, he wrote in the Introduction: A sensible man should not demand of me, or hope that when we mention a subject, we shall make a complete exposition of it. […] My object in adopting this arrangement is that the truths should be at one time apparent and at another time concealed [my emphasis]. Thus we shall not be in opposition to the Divine Will (from which it is wrong to deviate) which has withheld from the multitude the truths required for the knowledge of God, according to the words, ‘The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him (Psalm 25:14)’. […] In speaking about very obscure matters it is necessary to conceal some parts and to disclose others. Sometimes in the case of certain dicta this necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of a certain premise, where in another place necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of another premise contradicting the first one. In such cases the vulgar must in no way be aware of the contradictions; the author accordingly uses some device to conceal it by all means. 275 ╇ E.g. Selden first used Harizi’s faulty translation of the Guide. The resulting confusion is described in Rosenblatt, Renaissance, 281, fn 11. For Scaliger’s praise of the Guide see Katchen, Christian, 35. Is it possible that the title of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is not a triple but a quadruple pun, and in addition to Thomas More, the Latin mores and the Greek Μωρίας (morias), it also refers to Maimonides’s ‫נבוכים מורה‬ (Moreh Nevukhim)? Adding the praise of the Guide to the praise of More and to the praise of Folly would be singularly appropriate to the work’s spirit and the letter, and to Erasmus’s commitment to the essential connection between the three sacred languages. 276 ╇S.v. ‘Maimonidean controversy’, under ‘Maimonides,’ vol. 11, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Kellner, Dogma. Waxman, A history. Aristotle’s influence on the Misneh Torah is equally important. Stroumsa, Maimonides.

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The affinity between Maimonides’s treatment of ‘very obscure matters’ in a half-concealed, half-disclosed manner and between the hidden wisdom of the Kabbalah is evident. Moreover, this double way of writing (esoteric and exoteric) also minimised noxious controversy, and served as a self-selection criterion for the educated and the simpletons in his readership. Tibbon, Strauss and others have often pointed out that many of the Guide’s contradictions are deliberate, and do not compromise the coherence of the argument.277 Marvin Fox gives a basic outline of the problem: In his introduction to the Guide Maimonides speaks repeatedly of the “secret” doctrine that must be set forth in a way appropriate to its secret character. Rabbinic law, to which Maimonides as a loyal Jew is committed, prohibits any direct, public teaching of the secrets of the Torah. One is permitted to teach these only in private to selected students of proven competence; even to such students it is only permissible to teach the “chapter headings” (Mishnah Hagigah 2.1) Thus, anyone who proposes to write a book dealing with natural philosophy and metaphysics of the Torah faces a problem. Basically a book, by nature, is available to an unrestricted readership, there is no way to guarantee that it will fall only into the hands of those whom we may expose to this subject matter. Furthermore, if the author sets forth his teachings openly so as to make them readily available to his readers, he violates the rule against teaching more than “chapter headings.” â•… It would seem that there is no way to write such a book without violating rabbinic law. For a faithful Jew this is not acceptable. Yet at times it is urgent to teach a body of sound doctrine to those who require it. Indeed, in a generation in which worthy and qualified students are spread throughout the Diaspora, and there are few fully qualified teachers, it would seem that there is no choice but to write a book that conveys the true teaching [...] The problem is to find a method for writing such book in a way that does not violate Jewish law while conveying its message successfully to those who are properly qualified. [...] Despite the inherent hazards in producing such a book, Maimonides felt that it was his absolute duty to find an acceptable way of preserving his insights and understanding of the highest truths in a form accessible to others. He says that “if I had omitted setting down something of that which has appeared to me as clear, so that the knowledge would perish when I perish, as is inevitable, I should have considered that conduct as extremely cowardly with regard to you and everyone who is perplexed.”278

277 278

╇ Ravitzky, “Samuel.” Fox, Interpreting. Strauss, Persecution. ╇ Fox, Interpreting, 62-3 and passim.

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Faithful to the epistemic humility of the Rabbinic tradition, MaimoÂ� nides intended this method of writing to be a load-bearing pillar of his argument, not merely a way to hide and code his true meaning. When Samuel ibn Tibbon proposed to translate the Guide, Maimonides was delighted to have found such a competent translator, capable not only of breaking the code in the original text, but also of resetting it in the translation.279 Perhaps it was Maimonides’s clear and explicit warnings about his dual writing that made Schotte confide in Cunaeus that Maimonides was the most underrated writer of their time (DRH 1.9). If so, or if Cunaeus got this idea earlier from Drusius or Vulcanius, or from his own careful reading of Maimonides, he was in any case well equipped to tackle the thorny business of writing a satire about the predestination and free will debate at Leiden around 1612. SV could not name names, but had to be understood by those in the know, while also making a bid for wide appeal and comprehension. Its dramatic resolution revolved around free will and the imposition of strict restraints on human understanding. As such, SV fits into the neolatin Menippean satire tradition beautifully. What makes its message unique within this tradition, namely its efficient restriction of ChrisÂ� tian epistemology and its attack on all theologians, relies on Cunaeus’s use of the Jewish anti-Karaite apophatic literature, and of Maimonides in particular, in the speeches of Sophia and Sophrosyne.280 The dates ╇ Letter of September 1199 in Maimonides, Letters, 131-3. ╇ This is not to say that the Christian tradition is wholly bereft of similar esoterical writings. See e.g. Rugási, Eszkhatológia, especially chapter 6 on Irenaeus and his later reception. Moreover, Cunaeus would have known apophatic arguments from Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), I Ambig., VI.38 (PG 91.1180B9-10), XI (PG 91.1220C8-10), Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, beginning of Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, Thomas Aquinas (who also cites Pseudo-Dionysius extensively), and from Cusanus. Sheldon-Williams shows how the argument that human concepts and words necessarily fail to describe God leads to negative or apophatic theology, and raises the temptation to introduce a demiurge into the gap between God and Creation. This structural development, from epistemic humility through apophatic theology, to the introduction of a mediator, reasserts itself several times, in several religions, in full-blown doctrines and philosophies of religion. Also see Hancock, “Negative theology,” especially 175-80. The same pressure toward negative theology and/or the interposition of a demiurge applies to Augustine’s view of language: Trinity, VII.iv.7; V.iii.4. God ‘transcends the power of customary speech. For God is more truly thought than he is uttered, and exists more truly than he is thought’; when talking about God, ‘things are neither said as they are thought, nor thought as they really are.’ Trinity, I.i.3: need to ‘purge our minds in order to be able to see ineffably that which is ineffable.’ I contend that in spite of these Christian sources, Cunaeus got the character of Sophia, and the rejection of rationalist hermeneutics, from Rabbinism, and perhaps partly from Christian Kabbalah. See Pico and 279 280

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and contents of the Schotte correspondence and Cunaeus’s own account in DRH of his earlier work on Maimonides both support this conjecture. If so, then SV follows a writing strategy comparable to the Guide’s. It argues for epistemic humility. At the same time it uses its own form, notably its many allusions and highly complex system of references, to pre-select the discerning from the epistemically challenged reader. Other Menippean satires, like Kepler’s Somnium, occasionally used the same strategy, for reasons similar to Maimonides’s and Cunaeus’s: fear of controversy, an esoteric subject matter, elevated levels of intertextuality, and hermeneutical complexity. Yet Cunaeus’s SV seems to be the only one from this period that adapts Maimonides’s epistemic position to a Menippean satirical form. Let us examine the implications of this combination. Three Ways of Knowing and Not Knowing (Doubly Written). In Â�addition to the self-revelatory methodological passages in the Guide, alerting the reader to its double meaning, there is another passage conÂ�Â�cerning human epistemology in general, written jointly by MaimoÂ� nides and ibn Tibbon, and evocative of SV’s dual Sophia: Know that there are objects of perception which are within the capacity and nature of the human intellect to grasp. There are in existence other things and objects which are not in its nature to perceive in any shape or form; indeed the gates of perception are closed against it. There are in existence still other things of which the intellect may grasp one part, while remaining ignorant of the other.

The three categories recall the Christian minimalists’, Cynics’, and Sophia’s delineation of the purview of legitimate theology in SV. After further elaboration of these categories, Maimonides and ibn Tibbon continue: For while one man can discover a certain thing by himself through his own speculations, another man is never able to understand it; even if he is taught by means of all possible expressions and examples, and during a long period, his intellect can in no way grasp it, the power of his mind being insufficient to understand it. This distinction is likewise not unlimited. Indeed, the human intellect undoubtedly has a boundary where it must stop. There are certain things which are manifestly others in Secret, Les Kabbalistes, and compare SV’s Sophia with Scholem, Origins, 270-82. The figure of Mercury as psychopomp to the wise dead in SV may also be closer to Christian Kabbalah (e.g. Pico’s ‘Mercurius Trismegistos’) than to Roman mythology.

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chapter four inaccessible to the understanding of man, so that his soul does not even long to know them, being aware of the impossibility of such knowledge, as there is no opening through which he may enter to attain to it. For instance, we are ignorant as to the number of the stars of heaven, whether it is even or odd; nor do we know the number of the species of animals, minerals, plants, and similar things. There are, however, other things to comprehend which man entertains a strong desire, and mental efforts to seek and investigate the truth thereof are made by every thinking sect of men at all times. It is with regard to these things that opinions differ, and thinkers disagree, and confusions constantly arise, because the intellect is bent on comprehending them, that is to say, on account of the longing entertained for them: every one thinks that he has discovered a way by which he may know the truth of the thing, whereas it is not within the power of the human intellect to produce demonstrative proof on the matter. (For every proposition, the truth of which can be ascertained by proof, is not subject to dispute, contradiction, or rejection; none but the ignorant would join in a controversy which is known as the ‘controversy capable of demonstrative proof’.)281

Maimonides and ibn Tibbon continue to cite astronomical problems as examples of what man should not even desire to understand, and assert that these are not what the Guide is concerned with. They excuse the carefully coded revelation of secrets by stating that the confusion that the Guide was written to address arose in the first place because such proofs are increasingly demanded, by foolish and ignorant people, in metaphysical matters. They then cite Alexander of Aphrodisias on the causes of debate: the desire for authority, the difficulty of the subject, and the ignorance of the investigator. This is probably based on the two difficulties of philosophical study named by Aristotle in Metaphysics 933b, 7-11, to which Alexander adds the third, and transforms them into a list of causes of debate.282

╇ Maimonides, Guide, I.31. ╇ Genequand’s note in Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Cosmos, 167 fn. 149. Shlomo Pines points out in Maimonides, Guide, 66 fn. 7 that Alexander’s work to which Maimonides refers here has survived only in Arabic. It was edited for the first time in 1947 by Badawi from the only surviving manuscript, in Damascus. If so, then the Leideners would have only encountered this list in Maimonides, who refers to it in several works, including the Guide, the Book of asthma, and the perhaps pseudoMaimonidean Treatise on the art of logic. Taube, however, has recently shown that this specific list of the causes of disagreement also appears in creative compilations on logic, versions of Secretum Secretorum, and other texts between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taube, “Transmission.” 281 282

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Continuing the expansion, Maimonides and Tibbon announce that a fourth cause has recently arisen, which did not yet exist in Alexander’s time: habit and training. Habituation makes a man cling to the opinions he was brought up with and finds all around him, especially if these opinions are false, and stem from the misapplication of reason to Scripture and to God.283 Since the misapplication of method means that these opinions are not only false, but also impossible to settle or even debate profitably, those who have internalised such opinions will cling to them more ferociously and fanatically than to other opinions (about, say, the physical world). Whether Maimonides inspired or confirmed Cunaeus’s adaptation of Alexander’s list of causes of counter-productive and dangerous debate in SV, it fits well with other Leiden uses.284 In his 1609 rebuttal of the Aristotelian authorship of De mundo, Heinsius drew on Alexander of Aphrodisias to refute the long-standing claim that Aristotle championed divine interventionism. As described above, Heinsius also made the direct connection between habituation and counter-productive theological argument in the 1611 DTC. Â�AlexÂ�ander, known as “the expositor” for his pre-eminence among ArisÂ�totle’s interpreters, was also a definitive influence on Grotius’s works on predestination and free will, including his annotated translation of De fato (1648). While the above-cited passage fits Sophia’s dual nature in SV perfectly, Maimonides’s and Tibbon’s claim that theology caused the appearance of a new challenge of habituated false and logically invalid propositions could have been a direct inspiration for SV’s whole agenda. The Maimonidean list of causes shaped the specific form of 283 ╇ Fifteenth-century translators and compilers understood that the theology of the Abrahamic faiths was the new, fourth cause of disagreement that was missing from Aphrodisias. A Slavic text on the division of sciences reserves this catalogue of disagreements for the treatment of theology, the seventh science. Taube, “Transmission,” 340-6. 284 ╇ The figure of Sophia in SV may also be partly an inversion of Cesare Ripa’s (real name Giovanni Campani) emblem, “Ambition.” Ripa’s emblem portrays Ambition as a young lady, complete with laurels, lion, multiple sceptres and hats of authority (including a cardinal’s), and other paraphernalia. In several (though not all) editions, including the first 1593 version and the 1644 Dutch translation by Dirck Pieters, the text for the emblem cites Alexander of Aphrodisias on ambition, as well as Paul and Seneca. A survey of the early modern uses of Alexander—including pseudo-Aphrodisiana like the Problemata, translated by Theodore Gaza and Giorgio Valla—would make a tremendous contribution to our understanding of Aristotelianism in this period, and offer several benefits besides.

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epistemic humility developed in Leiden. Since habituation and upÂ�bringing could entrench destructive theological debate, public institutions like churches and universities need to embody the epiÂ� stemic humility that makes peaceful co-existence possible. Cunaeus’s letters on politics and education, SV on the Arminian controversy and the Vorstius scandal, and closely allied writings like Grotius’s Ordinum pietas, show a sensibility to the political risk of the wrong sort of Â�theological habituation that mirrors Maimonides’s new claim. The primary sources examined here do not conclusively prove that Cunaeus knew well the Guide and ibn Tibbon’s commentary by 1612. Nevertheless, Eyffinger’s back-dating (in the context of DRH) of Cunaeus’s familiarity with Maimonides ‘some years prior to 1614,’ Cunaeus’s legal and Rabbinic studies at Leiden with Regemorterus and at Franeker with Drusius, and his extensive and detailed correspondence on Rabbinic and Kabbalistic matters before 1612, combine to corroborate the case for direct textual and intellectual connections between the Guide and SV, together with the possibility that the Kabbalistic notion of the two Sophias, a lower and a higher hokmah, was an equally influential source of inspiration. Maimonides shares Halevi’s apophatic theology. They consider unqualified anthropomorphism and the ascription of positive attribÂ� utes to God to be rank idolatry. Maimonides’s partial excuse for the Karaites and anthropomorphic theological language seems like a minor divergence from Halevi’s position, but it has considerable implications. In Book 3, chapter 28 of the Guide Maimonides draws a distinction between ‘true beliefs’ about God that produce intellectual perfection, and ‘necessary beliefs’ that are conducive to social order. Anthropomorphic articulations of theology belong in the latter group. One of his examples is God’s anger against sinners. Maimonides argues that God never becomes angry with people; at the same time, it is important for man to imagine God as angry and wrathful, so as to turn the avoidance of wrongdoing into a habituated, second nature. Halevi and Maimonides both regard the Karaites as terrible heretics, but Maimonides advises that they are nevertheless dealt with leniently. Once Cunaeus decided to bring in the Rabbis, he faced the danger of falling into the Christian Kabbalist or ‘Judaising seducer’ pattern of undue mysticism.285 This is another reason why Maimonides is a great ╇ ‘Judaising seducer’ was a common charge among Christian opponents, from Paul and Marcion to Locke and beyond. 285

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source for Cunaeus to draw his image of Sophia from. Although the Rambam wrote often and extensively against Aristotelian rationalism, he had great respect for the Philosopher. The particular targets of his criticisms of Aristotle make the Guide and the Commentary fit in admirably with Leiden’s creation and pursuit of the narrow middle course between scholastic Aristotelianism and Renaissance neoplatonism. A direct or, through Scaliger or Cunaeus, indirect acquaintance with Maimonides would also shed light on many of the choices Heinsius made in the 1611 DTC.286 The Rabbis and the Leideners shared the conviction that the prevention of violence must be the guiding principle for organising and pursuing knowledge. For both groups, this required treading carefully parallel, or divergent, but not identical paths with the neoplatonists, in order to escape the quandary of theological debates concerning unknowables. Unreasoning faith, they knew, could cause bloodshed as easily as the reasoning kind.287 But the inference does not end here. If the connections made so far are more or less correct, then the SV also exemplifies, and helps us formulate, a more general feature of the Leiden project. The Epistemology of Dreams, Poetry, Prophecy and Madness. Another way to approach the same epistemological story is not through the reception of Plato and Aristotle, but by following the themes of dreams, poetry, madness and prophecy in the texts that are now set before us. SV is a dream satire, for the oft-discussed reasons. The onoeiric framework introduces distance between the writer and the tale. It gives him greater liberty to experiment with ideas and forms, and it makes it harder to take him to task for what he had written. The epistemological debates surrounding dreams, visions, poetry, madness and prophecy are at least as old as writing. I will not summarise ╇ In his letter sent in September 1199 Maimonides tells ibn Tibbon that while Plato is an excellent philosopher, Aristotle knew everything that Plato knew, and more. ‘For Aristotle reached the highest level of knowledge to which man can ascend, with the exception of one who experiences the emanation of the Divine Spirit, who can attain the degree of prophecy, above which there is no higher stage.’ Maimonides’s respect for both philosophers in clear throughout his writings, alongside equally clear expressions of his firm disagreement with them. Maimonides, Letters, 136. 287 ╇ Cunaeus’s SV with its demystified epistemic humility, together with the other Leiden texts discussed here, prepared Descartes’s reception in the Netherlands, where Calvinists still often claimed that doubts were invariably placed in men’s minds by the Devil. See e.g. Vermij, Calvinist, 162-3. For another connection between Christian Kabbalah and the Leiden Circle see Visser, “Escaping,” 146-8. 286

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them here. An indication of their complexity, and some of the central concepts at play in the traditions that intersect in SV, is the most we can hope for. In the simplest form, various types of texts, authors, and various types of dreams were differentiated. They could be authoritative, or deceptive. They could be either of these in a number of different ways. For instance, a story that was related explicitly as a metaphor by an ambiguous figure, like the demon in Kepler’s dream, may in fact be true literally, but not metaphorically (i.e. not in the sense it was originally told by an unreliable narrator). Ancient hermeneutical traditions played through every permutation of the various degrees and manners of the reliability of texts, authors, genres, and the type of perception involved. In addition to these permutations, every conceivable (and several inconceivable) logical relationship between every element of human expression has also been fully explored. Authors have been equated with dreams, existing and suppositious texts have been placed in either/or relations. The consistency and completeness of prophecies, poems and dreams have been challenged on both similar and on opposing grounds. The problem of interpreting dreams is similar to the problem of interpreting texts. How many levels of meaning are there? How much of it is intended, does intention matter, and should one force rhetorical devices and ambiguities open, or can that jeopardise meaning itself? Greek, Jewish and Christian hermeneutics distinguished, at their most basic level, between four modalities of meaning, all or some of which could be valid at any given time, for any of the aforementioned elements (i.e. even an author or a text itself could serve as a metaphor). The patristic and medieval Christian distinction between a text’s sensus historicus (literal), sensus allegoricus (allegorical), sensus tropologicus or moralis (symbolic) and sensus anagogicus (anagogical) correspond, if not in letter, at least in spirit, to the aforementioned Rabbinic p’shat (literal), remez (allusive), d’rash (interpretative), and sod (secret or mystical). Given theology’s omnipresence prior to the Leiden Circle, the fourfold interpretation was also applied to law, Nature, human understanding, and to the act of interpretation itself. It is not Christian theology’s ubiquitous predominance that first brought these distinctions into every aspect of thought; many of these debates reached a high level of sophistication long beforehand. Greek and Roman formulations were integral to Renaissance and early modern education, while biblical hermeneutics was less a part of basic edu-

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cation than a technical skill acquired, primarily though not only, by theologians. It is unwise to try to generalise about the history of hermeneutics in a paragraph, but the surveyable field can be narrowed down somewhat by focusing on particular paradigms, such as dreams, prophecy and madness, key concepts in Greek philosophy that fed directly into the SV. Some of the elements involved in Menippean satires, including the dream framework, the various kinds of madness (real or apparent, arising from human nature or from unnatural arrogance), and the hypocritical theologians’ mocked claims to prophecy, had their own literary and hermeneutical traditions independent from (and, in the case of SV, in addition to) the aforementioned epistemological discourse. They acquired their own loci or topoi, commonplaces hallowed by literary usage, and extremely useful as didactic shortcuts and illustrations. In addition to the inherent difficulty of the subject, Lucian and early modern practitioners of the Menippean satirical genre played on the triple nature of these topics as literary and as philosophical items that also had physical referents—places, bodily states, and other outward signs. The republic of immortal scholars is one such topic. Within the salient aspects of Classical philosophy, narrowed down to epistemic discussions using the loci of dreams, poetry, prophecy and madness, the field can be narrowed even further by selecting passages only from Cicero and Sextus Empiricus, whose works were verifiably read by the Leideners, and which numbered among the core texts at the heart of the early modern epistemological debate. In Cicero’s overview in Academica, the Stoics maintain that man can achieve wisdom entirely free from opinion, i.e. false or insecure belief. Cognitive impressions, according to Cicero’s account of the Stoics, correspond to reality, guarantee unopinionated wisdom, and include perceptual impressions. The acts of perception and cognition furnish their own guarantees. When one perceives an object, identifies it for what it is, and does so with confidence in the clarity and distinctness of the impression, then the risk of mistaking a false for a true impression can be minimised. Since cognitive impressions are the ultimate foundation of all knowledge, and assuming otherwise leads to infinite regress, therefore the impressions that are verified by the perceiver, who observes the aforementioned conditions (as opposed to relying on hearsay and others’ authority), provide the best possible way of avoiding error.

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The Academic response invoked the Skeptics’ usual paradoxes about dreams, madness, optical illusions, drunkenness and divine visions to argue that the same self-verification can occur for untrue impressions, and that these will be indistinguishable to the Stoic from the true impressions.288 The Academics then pretended to agree with the Stoic attack on opinions, and deduced that since cognitive impressions are impossible to verify, only opinions are possible. Since opinions are inferior, the wise man should suspend judgement.289 They agreed with the Skeptics on this, symbolised most memorably by the unexpected agreement of Arcesilas and Zeno that opinion is a sin, utterly alien to wisdom, and that judgement must be suspended.290 However, the Academics then moved on, and asserted that the suspension of judgement must also be a provisional position, not a dogmatic one, given the reasoning behind it. This allowed them to break the deadlock and to depart from both Stoics and Skeptics by adding that although suspending all judgement is the correct stance, because certainty cannot be had, well-founded probabilities are possible to come by—including this self-same Academic argument about probability, which validates itself. The half-open, half-closed stance of Sophia, which was crucial for the completion of Cunaeus’s secularising manœuvre in SV, bears the marks of these debates, but does not directly derive from any of them. Constitutive elements of the peculiar half-open, half-closed epistemic status that Cunaeus makes Sophia profess can be found in ancient philosophy, but not in the configuration advocated by Sophia in SV. In spite of the strong Cynical element in SV, discussed above, the central figure of Sophia comes from the Rabbis. Similarly to the limited usability of the Greek and Roman onoeiric traditions, Cunaeus needs the Hebrew dream literature for his refutation of the theologians. Earlier I argued that Lull and Mirandola serve as examples of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ group of neoplatonist thinkers. In Lull’s case we referred to two texts that express the same argument, a didactic treatise in the form of an allegorical fable in prose, and a poem. Their forms differ, but the content, for the present purpose, is the same: God gave man reason so that he could reach God, and even become like God. In Halevi’s case the argument is the oppo288 ╇ Cicero, Academica, II.49-54, 79-82, 88-90. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII.402-8. 289 ╇Sextus, Adversus mathematicos, VII.155-7. 290 ╇ Cicero, Academica, II.66–7, 77, 108, 133, and passim.

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site, namely that reason cannot take us all the way. This is also common to the other two texts referred to, a treatise (the Kuzari) and, as with Lull, an allegorical poem. The juxtaposition of a poem and a treatise by Halevi, and examples from the two same two genres by Lull, is helpful because Halevi believes that poems, dreams and prophecies can get a man closer to God than reason can. Literary devices express profound truths, even if these truths are inexplicable through reason. They also appeal to the passions better than a rational argument. In other words, the fictional genre is epistemically optimistic for Halevi, but not for Lull. It is content that is epistemically optimistic for Lull, and not for Halevi. The restoration of poetry as a legitimate means of expressing the truth is part and parcel of the anti-Karaite Rabbinic programme.291 The literal reading and the exclusive, overpowering use of reason are idolatrous and insufficient. This recalls Heinsius’s rejection of reason in DTC for achieving katharsis for didactic ends, and may well be a source for his subtle transformation of Aristotle’s Poetics on this point. Cunaeus’s taking this leaf out of the Rabbis’ book also confers additional significance to one of the early modern definitions of Menippean 291 ╇ There is also an interesting parallel between Socrates’s philological questioning of the difference between madness and prophecy, leading to his distinction between types of madness, and Halevi’s criticism of the philological narrow-mindedness of the Karaites, leading to his discussion of prose and poetry. Socrates: ‘There will be more reason in appealing to the ancient inventors of names, who would never have connected prophecy (mantike) which foretells the future and is the noblest of arts, with madness (manike), or called them both by the same name, if they had deemed madness to be a disgrace or dishonour;—they must have thought that there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two words, mantike and manike, are really the same, and the letter “t” is only a modern and tasteless insertion. And this is confirmed by the name which was given by them to the rational investigation of futurity, whether made by the help of birds or of other signs—this, for as much as it is an art which supplies from the reasoning faculty mind (nous) and information (istoria) to human thought (oiesis) they originally termed oionoistike, but the word has been lately altered and made sonorous by the modern introduction of the letter Omega (oionoistike and oionistike), and in proportion prophecy (mantike) is more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind (sophrosyne) for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin.’ Plato, Phaedrus, 244b-c. This is followed by Socrates’s famous metaphor of the soul as a winged chariot, which is remarkably similar to Merkabah mysticism and its incorporation into Kabbalah. Scholem, Major trends. Stroumsa, Maimonides. Partly because of the aforementioned common civilisation around the Mediterranean until the fall of Rome, the early modern project of learning the three sacred languages not tripled, but exponentially multiplied the number and quality of connections that scholars could make.

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satires as a mixed form alternating prose and verse. As in the case of LSM, and with the Dutch translation of SV, verse summaries of the main argument were ideally suited to popularising the book’s central message. In the case of SV, the Dutch verse translation of Sophia’s speech therefore met the formal requirement of Menippean satires, and fulfilled the Rabbinic criteria for the philosophical use of poetry, thereby formalising Sophia’s dual nature and oscillation between epistemic positions. When Cunaeus wanted to warn against epistemic hubris, he wrote a dream satire to express a profound truth; yet he resisted taking the form itself too seriously. Menippos the Cynic is our guide through the dream. There are odd discontinuities in the plot, and the reader is constantly reminded with odd little scenes and background features that he or she is in a strange and complicated dream. Lull’s fool ascends the Great Chain of Being, and Halevi’s dreamer rises to the status of a prophet. Cunaeus’s dream contrasts with both: form and content equally convey the futility of theologians’ and philosophers’ attempt to reason their way to God. When he borrows epistemic humility from the Jewish tradition (since it is fallen Sophia, the lower hokhma herself, who gives the speech about the limits of reason), Cunaeus makes a conscious effort not to let in hubris through the back door. He blocks the argument that one can get closer to God through dreams, prophecies or mystical visions. Hobbes famously expounds at length upon the social dangers of paying heed to such visionary claims to divine inspiration.292 When it comes to Cunaeus’s understanding of the epistemic status of his own dream, the closest approximation is in the Guide, II.36, where Maimonides argues that a true vision, acquired in a dream, is the ‘unripe fruit’ of prophecy: the same fruit, but unripe and invalid, because the man who had it has not yet achieved perfect mastery of his own nature. The wise man who is capable of becoming a prophet is like Aristotle’s philosopher, defined in the Nicomachean Ethics as one who has abolished all beastly desires.293 Cunaeus has nothing to say about this operation. Neither Sophia, nor Sophrosyne talks about the vita contemplativa; they merely express their disgust with venality and deception for material gains. In other words, Maimonides’s distinction between dream and prophecy served Cunaeus doubly well, both in demolishing false prophets, and in adhering to his own advice on epistemic humility. 292 293

╇ E.g. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters 32 and 36. ╇ Maimonides, Guide, 370-1.

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This is not to say that Cunaeus adopted Rabbinic hermeneutics completely. He used it to create Sophia, but Cynical dream devices remain equally important in framing SV as a whole. Cellarius thought that there is a connection between Cunaeus’s description of the pollution of the majesty of teaching by inept and feverish men, in SV’s Dedication to Hogerbeets and Schotte; Cunaeus’s account of Maimonides in DRH I.6 as a man driven into hallucination by the problem of calculating the Jubilee; Cunaeus’s account of feverish Hebrew mortals who miscalculate the Jubilee in his 1624 Oratio in Natalem Academiae Leidensis; and finally his repetition of the same description in the 1638 Oratio de annis climactericis.294 Even though the DRH uses hallucination, not fever, Cellarius is right, and the Jubilee problem and other terms (e.g. ‘feverish mortals’) sufficiently connect DRH and the two orations. Cellarius justifies his other claim, namely that Cunaeus connected these descriptions of the Rabbis to his characterisation of the theologians in SV’s Dedication, by arguing that the polluters in SV’s Dedication confuse dreams and delusions, like the Rabbis do in the other texts. This may be doubtful, but it is a salutary warning against assuming that Cunaeus’s use of Sophia, taken from the Rabbinic epistemology of dreams, poetry, prophecy and madness, indicates that he adopted the Rabbinic philosophy of herÂ� meneutics as his own, or that he ranked it above the Cynic and Christian minimalist epistemic schemes. Neither did Cunaeus agree with Agricola or Mirandola, who both feature in the text, that a syncretism of the various traditions, from philosophy and Christian theology to ancient Egyptian wisdom and the Kabbalah, helps man understand God any better. Cunaeus is neither a Skeptic nor a Cynic, and it would be misleading to call him an agnostic. In the SV, the DRH, and in all Leiden works discussed in this book, one finds the same effort to separate religion and politics in a way and to the extent that the restoration and preservation of domes294 ╇ 1) SV Dedication: ‘Nuper status controversiam movi ineptis febriculosisque hominibus, qui mihi decus majestatemque doctrinae suis sordibus conspurcare videbantur.’ 2) DRH I.6: ‘Et nobis quidem in promptu est quid rectissimè dici contra possit. putamus tamen hanc esse causam, quæ Maimonidem in hallucinationem quandam impulit.’ 3) Oratio in Natalem: ‘Sane quod Hebræorum magistri, febriculosi mortales, adeo sudant æstuantque, dum anxie quærunt, cur in sacro codice Iubilæus quinquagesimus annus dicatur, ex inscitia profectum est, quia communem hominum sermonem haud intellexere.’ 4) Oratio de annis: ‘Ineptos autem fuisse Hebræorum magistros, sive Rabbinos, febriculosos mortales, dum anxie quæsiverunt, cur in sacro Codice Jubilæus quinquagesimus annus diceretur.’

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tic and European order and peace require. To understand Cunaeus’s solution in SV it is important to also see what he did not borrow from the Jewish tradition, in accordance with his selection of only the epistemically humble elements from the other traditions, namely Cynicism and Christianity.295 295 ╇ As in the case of Lull’s treatise and poem, a brief examination of one of Halevi’s poems in the light of the prose Kuzari provides valuable insights into what kind of meaning the author regarded as legitimate for which sort of medium. Many of Halevi’s poems express the same principles he laid down in the Kuzari. These were highly complex poems around which great exegetical traditions gradually came to life and blossomed. Here is a famous example.

My Dream My God, Thy dwelling-places are lovely! It is in vision and not in dark speeches that Thou art near. My dream did bring me into the sanctuaries of God, And I beheld His beautiful services; And the burnt-offering and meal-offering and drink-offering, And round about, heavy clouds of smoke. And it was ecstasy to me to hear the Levites’ song, In their council for the order of services. I awoke, and I was yet with Thee, O God, And I gave thanks, and it was sweet to thank Thee. As the editor notes, mare (vision) and hida (dark speech) in the second line refer to Num. 12, where God bears witness to Moses’s special prophetic status, against Miriam and Aron. In the AV and the Vulgate, 4 And the LORD spake suddenly unto Moses, and unto Aaron, and unto Miriam, Come out ye three unto the tabernacle of the congregation. And they three came out. 5 And the LORD came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood in the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam: and they both came forth. 6 And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. 7 My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. 8 With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? 9 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them; and he departed. 4 statim locutus est ad eum et ad Aaron et Mariam egredimini vos tantum tres ad tabernaculum foederis cumque fuissent egressi 5 descendit Dominus in columna nubis et stetit in introitu tabernaculi vocans Aaron et Mariam qui cum issent 6 dixit ad eos audite sermones meos si quis fuerit inter vos propheta Domini in visione apparebo ei vel per somnium loquar ad illum 7 at non talis servus meus Moses qui in omni domo mea fidelissimus est

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It is a challenge for a modern reader to enter this world of selfreflexive hermeneutical philosophy. The extended discussions given by our authors, from Christ to the Tibbons, shows that the aesthetics of imagery and paradoxes was not their main concern; they used these words and images with technical precision. The use of non-logical modes of speech, such as metaphors and paradoxes, was not in that age considered to be an admission of the defeat of one’s argumentative powers, but a prized manifestation of such powers. For better or worse, it is exactly the early modern period and particularly the religious debates I am trying to outline here that made the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment so wary of theological overinterpretation and strategic ambiguity. Even within the narrow parameters of current sensibilities and our (sometimes selectively) suspicious rationality, the texts and explanations marshalled here hopefully demon8 ore enim ad os loquor ei et palam non per enigmata et figuras Dominum videt quare igitur non timuistis detrahere servo meo Mosi 9 iratusque contra eos abiit In visione and per somnium, neither of which have connotations to double wisdom, is all that Cunaeus would have come across in the Vulgate, had he not read etymological discussions and comments in Hebrew sources on the Torah. Compare here Maimonides’s famous scheme in the Guide, II.36, esp. pp. 370 ff. Although most prophecies occur in dreams, Moses’s visions are special. His mareim are epiphanies. Halevi emphasises that they are valid and true, unlike the visions of the false prophets. (In this light it is interesting to note that Maimonides considers the episode of angels visiting Abraham to have taken place in a dream, as opposed to the more mainstream Rabbinic interpretation as a physical event. Maimonides, Guide, II.4, II.6. Some twentieth-century commentators on Maimonides take this to be a sign of rationalism, and an expression of scorn for the ignorant who, similarly to Vossius’s account of the rise of Gentile idolatry, mistake various forces of nature for supernatural beings.) Hida carries a host of connotations that Cunaeus could have picked up on. In addition to undecipherable prophetic speech, the term also means “puzzle” or “trick question,” as in Saba’s poser in 1 Reg. 10.1, or Samson’s in Bir. 14.12. Its meaning is also close to masal, parable. The Sphinx’s question to Oedipus and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount are closely connected in the Mediterranean, Egyptian-Greek-Jewish tradition of eliciting intuitive understanding through non-rational literary techniques. In the wake of the Reformation these techniques, and the debate over their validity, had a remarkable afterlife with far-reaching consequences. In addition to unintelligible prophecy, puzzle, and parable, Halevi’s poem grafts a fourth association onto God’s hida: Moses’s dream images approximate divine reality as closely as possible for a human. They work not only as windows to the overbearing divine intelligence, as riddles that one can solve with one’s God-given reason, or as extended metaphors or poetic imagery, but also as mental impressions of Reality, or more precisely of its divine version unadulterated by epistemic limitations. Halom comes to resemble mare in Moses in Halevi’s philosophical poetry. Rugási, “Száműzetés.”

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strate that the Rabbinic reaction to the consequences of giving philosophy free rein was not simply one, but rather the decisive source for Cunaeus’s anti-theologian, yet non-platonic and non-Aristotelian epistemic humility. He did not fall into neoplatonism, Christian mysticism, or accept the assumption of the wide cognisance of reason that underlay most issues that were debated, and fought over, in the aftermath of the Reformation. The particular epistemic humility that remained open to him, and brought powerfully to bear on theology in SV and upon politics in DRH, was the only path left open for peaceseeking Europe.296 Note also that irenicism does not make our politiques withdraw from the world with their tail between their legs, as Russel, Huizinga and others suggest.297 Ascetic or monastic withdrawal from the saeculum, in other words the post-Reformation reenactment of the first relationship of Christianity to politics (as laid out in the Introduction) was the choice of many, but not of the politically minded secularisers. According to Halevi, only philosophers question the truth of an angel’s speech. They argue that God’s nature does not allow likes or dislikes, since He stands far above all desire and volition. In the Kuzari we find Halevi pursuing a systematic project of criticism against Plato and Aristotle, including an attack on the hypokeimenon, ‘Aristotle’s God,’ as well as against the meaning of philosophy specifically held by the Mutakallimun. Halevi’s, like Maimonides’s, love-hate relationship with philosophy is an organising principle of his writings. What both Rabbis unambiguously rejected was the forward-chargers, al-horsim.298 The least we have here is, therefore, Maimonides’s treatise and Halevi’s prophetic dream against the forward-chargers and AristoÂ� telian theology, using a terminology and philosophy that reappears in SV, and was read by Strauss with persecution in mind. In search for more immediate textual echoes it is tempting to speculate that the central Sophia speech comes specifically from Halevi, Maimonides, ╇ As noted, the harisa root in Tibbon’s commentary on Maimonides’s treatment of al-horsim in Exod. 19, quoted above, also makes it clear that there was a strong connotation between forward-charging arrogance and violence; epistemic presumption and destructive violence were bound up in this term. The Dutch politiques could not have wished for a better term and discourse to deploy against political theology. 297 ╇ Huizinga, Waning. Russel, Profilo. 298 ╇See Strauss in Kuzari, and Herder Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie (1782-3), inspired by the Kuzari. In James Marsh’s translation of 1833 it became a milestone in the development of biblical hermeneutics, and a founding text of Transcendentalism. 296

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the Tibbons and others in the anti-Karaite Rabbinic tradition with an Islamic anti-Aristotelian origin, since other texts on epistemic humility that are evidently connected to the SV (namely the texts and authors mentioned therein) do not formulate this epistemic humility in such a devastating, stark form. Nor do the related traditions either, to my knowledge: not neostoicism, not Hasidic literature (see e.g. sources in Louis Newman’s Hasidic Anthology, entry ‘Humility’), nor any brand of Calvinism. Sardi venales is, as it were, a trend-setting Leiden call for epistemic humility, which prepared the way for what turned out to be the varied, peculiar and untypical story of Dutch Cartesianism, unfolding in the second half of the seventeenth century. Reason and Idolatry. It is against the background of this adaptation of the Rabbinic criticism of overextended reason that one must read the Leideners’ many works on idolatry. In response to the impact of Aristotelianism on theology, the Rabbis revamped the definition of idolatry and extended it to the application of reason to God. They did this by arguing, among other things, that the injunction against depiction is grounded in the sinfulness of anthropomorphic representations of God. These are not only wrong but sinful, because they derive from man’s epistemic arrogance. The depicter assumes to know what God, angels and other higher beings look like, and may even pretend that they look like himself. From this, the anti-Karaite Rabbis drew the broader inference that all epistemic arrogance, including attempts to syncretise Aristotle with monotheism, is idolatry.299 When the ProÂ� testants replicated this argument, the same logic led to the powerful sixteenth- and seventeenth-century iconoclastic movements across Europe. The Protestants who discovered the Rabbinic arguments adopted them with zeal. In this sense, politique Protestants like Marnix at first seem to adhere to mainstream Protestantism, and even popular Anabaptist iconoclasm, when they adapt the Rabbinic equation of epistemic arrogance to the wanton depiction of God. In their case, however, it became a part of a secularising strategy with peace and stability as their primary objectives. According to Halevi and Maimonides, anthropomorphic descriptions of God had three main causes. First, there are man’s own epistemic limitations, especially the failure to realise that there is no ╇ In spite of the intense and rich interaction between Greek and Jewish thinkers, there seems to be no Greek equivalent of the equation of Reason with Idolatry. 299

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‘reason’ per se that would be accessible to mankind. There is only human reason, which in turn anthropomorphises the subjects it is applied to. Second, there is the common, natural, understandable but nonetheless reprehensible inclination to pry into God’s secrets. Finally, there is the less common, less natural, and much less forgivable conscious philosophical decision to do so. Halevi almost excuses the second of these, but if and only if the other two are absent.300 Poets and prophets can legitimately anthropomorphise God as long as they do not claim to thereby gain real access to divine truth. Both Rabbis, together with ibn Ezra, ibn Tibbon, Saadia Gaon and others, disparage the excessive use of reason and anthropomorphism as idolatry. Idolatry was a hot topic during the Reformation, and the theories and actions of the various iconoclastic movements are amply documented. It was a subject that inherently, and independently from other intellectual trends, invited a re-reading of Jewish theological texts. As Tacitus, Assmann, and others have pointed out, the Semitic taboo of anthropomorphic depictions of God probably originated from the Jewish effort to maintain a separate identity during their Egyptian and Babylonian captivities.301 After some initial hesitation, the Christians in turn inverted this inverted taboo, and developed a rich and complex iconographical tradition. The Protestant inversion of the inversion of the inverted taboo did, in this sense, reproduce the original Jewish rationale, and it is not surprising that the early modern iconoclastic movements that swept across Europe invariably invoked the first three Commandments, and often other parts of the Old Testament as well, and that their leading theorists freely adopted Rabbinic expositions on this subject. Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin and others encouraged the forcible removal of graven images from all places of worship.302 The Dutch iconoclastic frenzy differed from the numerous other European incidents, except the Scottish, in that it also marked the beginning of a half-successful, half-failed war of independence. The Beeldenstorm of 1562-66, led among others by the young Marnix, succeeded in signalling a break away from the Habsburg Empire, but the ╇ E.g. Halevi, Kuzari, 217. ╇ Tacitus, Histories 5.2-5. Assmann, “Mosaic distinction;” Moses the Egyptian. Assmann’s study is excellent for its details and its tracing of the Egyptian-Mosaic discourse from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Note that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are outside its scope. 302 ╇ Duffy, Stripping. Sheehan, “The altars.” 300 301

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major Flemish cities and provinces, where the movement originated, and from where it spread to the rest of the Lowlands, remained in the end under Spanish domination. Intellectual discussions of idolatry carried clear and powerful political overtones well into the eighteenth century. Cunaeus’s and Vossius’s work on Maimonides’s moderate, but stern warnings against epistemic hubris was coupled with their exposition of Maimonides’s views on idolatry. Bringing the Rabbinic connection between these two issues into the Christian debate may, on balance, support the Protestant policy of removing graven images from churches, but even more conclusively it supports the cessation of violence that invokes undecidable religious arguments. In a unique contribution to these debates, the politique Leiden Circle transferred to the theologians the Rabbis’ coupling of idolatry and epistemic hubris in their criticism of over-reaching philosophers. Typically, it reveals a strategy calculated to maximise political stability. This in turn raises the question: did members of the Leiden Circle ever adopt a method or strategy that the Rabbis denounced as idolatrous? Given the standard mutual accusations of heresy and idolatry between the various Protestant and Catholic sects, there is no question of, and no real importance to, their use of certain exegetical and theological arguments that other Christians declared to be idolatrous at some point or another. The Rabbis’ case is more intriguing. Cunaeus and Heinsius clearly opposed anthropomorphism in theology, and Cunaeus’s SV can be read as an extended and secularised adaptation of Rabbinic negative theology. Right understanding and decorous conduct, according to SV’s Sophia and Sophrosyne, is the result of following a list of ‘don’t’s; the only difference from the Rabbis is that by following SV’s injunctions (including the refutation of the theologians at the end), Cunaeus leaves no room for any kind of theology. Scaliger and Vossius, however, used reason wherever they could, and did not shirk from systematically comparing religions and religious sources with each other without assigning a special status to any Christian figure or text. Cunaeus did the same with the divine commonwealth in DRH. Vossius in particular seems to have followed the exact train of thought that the Rabbis condemned. He argued that in spite of Adam’s Fall, the patriarchs until Noah still had exceptional access to God. The Flood led to a loss of this tradition, and idolatry arose when people’s epistemic ability partially failed them. Although they successfully decoded the archetypes behind Nature, they took these to be gods

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themselves, rather than aspects of the One God. In Cunaeus’s terms, the half-open aspect of the fallen Sophia became discernible but not, obviously, the half that God wanted to keep hidden. Vossius’s account of the rise of idolatry among the Gentiles is reminiscent of Halevi and of other anti-Aristotelian Rabbis who assigned some epistemic value to the poetic representations of God. When Vossius’s brilliant and tragically short-lived son, Dionysius Vossius (1612-33) edited, translated and commented on Maimonides’s short tract on idolatry in 1632, it became a standard attachment to his father’s De theologia gentili. The right use of reason, Vossius argues, should have guided the Gentiles to monotheism, although without revelation they still would have been unable to identify the real God. Even better than the study of Nature, the study of history could have reversed the process of the gradual erosion of reason and right religion. Vossius also maintained that Gentiles not only had no chance of finding the real God without revelation, but that the gradual, historical corruption of Gentile reason was the inevitable consequence of the natural limitations on human reason. The first priests were extraordinarily wise men who still had access to the true theological tradition, but the people could not understand them. When these pagan, yet righteous priests pointed to natural objects (planets, bodies of water) as symbols of god, the people mistook them for gods themselves. They also began to regard the priests, and their kings and their heroes, as equally divine, and equipped even the observed natural phenomena with human characteristics. They were, in summary, wrong to follow their irredeemably faulty reason into the anthropomorphic, idolatrous religions that the pagan world produced. The gods they created do correspond to real natural forces, and to real historical figures such as heroes and kings. Pagan religions are Silenos-like, because both the natural forces and the extraordinary humans they deify are aspects of the true God.303 Furthermore, beyond universal truths, religions also carry specific historical and scientific information. The primacy of the 303 ╇See Wickenden’s summary of the salient parts of Vossius’s De theologia gentili (1642), with elements of Ars historica (1623), Theses theologicae et historicae (1628), De artis poeticae natura ac constitutione (1647), and unpublished manuscripts preserved in Amsterdam. Wickenden, Vossius, 155-61. Wickenden’s Conclusion concerning Vossius’s coherence is a convincing methodological justification of his systematisation of these texts. See also Sheehan, “The altars.” Some of the effects that Vossius had on deism, new science, and secularised politics, are described in Kern, Influence; Rademaker, Vossius; Rademaker’s introduction to Vossius, Geschiedenis; and Popkin, “The crisis of polytheism.”

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historical method in Vossius is Scaligerian, and its immortalising effect chimes with Heinsius. The play-off between reason and revelation, the real value and ultimate idolatry of the pagan religions that apply Reason to Nature, is profoundly similar to Cunaeus’s SV, and to the rest of Leiden’s careful balancing act. Conclusion Similarly to SV and the Kabbalah, the absence of detailed, hard textual evidence for the connection between Rabbinism and SV’s Sophia necessitates the use of circumstantial evidence—mostly Cunaeus’s other writings and correspondence—and the use of representative Rabbis to illustrate Cunaeus’s adaptation of Rabbinic arguments against reason to his own secularising epistemology. Halevi and Maimonides are the best sources for showing how this strand of Rabbinism influenced Leiden secularisation which, in spite of many Leideners’ personal piety, could not reconcile Calvinism with the imperative of political stability. There is also textual evidence for Cunaeus’s reading of Maimonides and Halevi. The Kabbalistic Bahir and the passage cited from the Guide above show close affinities with Sophia’s speech. It is nevertheless useful to remember that many other anti-Karaite Rabbinic sources were being read and translated by Christians around this time. Further reading and search for Cunaeus’s Hebrew sources in SV will probably find not only other textual connections but also important, interesting and specific conceptual links between the growing Christian understanding of Hebrew sources, and the demise of Christian zealotry. Reuchlin, for instance, translated Joseph Ezobi’s Ke’arath Keseph, a thirteenth-century philosophical poem to his son on his wedding day, in which he warns his son not to be tempted and misled by Greek philosophy, to study instead the Torah, the Talmud and Maimonides’s commentary, and not to favour rich people and their way of life over honest poverty. Reuchlin thought Ezobi, a.k.a. Rabbi Joseph Hyssopaeus, was ‘the best of Jewish poets,’ and his introduction and translation was probably known to most Leideners. He also referred to, and cited from, the Hebrew texts of both the Guide and the Kuzari in his 1516 De arte cabalistica.304 Bodin’s use of the Guide is well known.305 Even if it is true that their retranslations after the late seventeenth century prompted a breakthrough in ╇ Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, e.g. 52-3, 266-9. ╇ E.g. Del Grosso, “Respublica Hebraeorum,” 564. Rose, Bodin. Beside the close similarities identified there, I also wonder if Bodin, Methodus, 219a, on monarchy 304 305

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the popularisation and dissemination of these Rabbinic works, Halevi and Maimonides were nevertheless widely known and intelligently used for important purposes, secularisation not least among them, long before that. In summary, Cunaeus needed all three components to make his case. He followed the Cynics in ridiculing the hypocritical, venal and power-thirsty theologians. He used Christian minimalism to both reduce the essential content of Christianity and to refute those who believed that following Nature could lead to right understanding. He also needed the Kabbalist and/or Rabbinic toolkit to criticise pure reason without lapsing into uncontrollable mysticism. The Cynical, Academic, Skeptical and Stoic literature on dreams, wisdom, prophecy and visions did not give Cunaeus the Silenos-like and dual, halfopen and half-closed figure of Sophia. There was no Cynical or Christian equivalent of, or substitute for, a Jewish Sophia. The recipe for the ideal epistemic life in SV rendered all theology futile, and even human inquiry barely viable. Sophia’s and Sophrosyne’s advice prefigures the early Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy: the last lesson of theology is that all theology must be abandoned. The SV as a whole fully represents the secularising version of epistemic humility that characterises of the Leiden project, and Cunaeus’s contemporaries clearly understood SV’s politique and secularising message. 2.2.3.╇ Reception The reception of SV is complicated. The secondary literature mentions the context of the Vorstius dispute, but in spite of SV’s cast of European thinkers, its international audience and its various German editions, the wider European context is seldom considered. It also fails to explain why SV did not land Cunaeus in more trouble with the Synod of Dordt, if it really was a pièce d’occasion focused on the Vorstius affair; or if it caricatured Heinsius and Baudius, why the relationship between Cunaeus and Heinsius did not seem to have suffered. The narrow contextualisation of SV does not explain the facts surrounding the text, let alone its meaning.306 putting an end to rebellion, draws directly on Maimonides, Guide, Part III, ch. 47, and not on another or intermediary source. 306 ╇See Heesakkers’s and Matheeussen’s Introduction to SV, Eyffinger’s treatment of SV in his introduction to the Hebrew republic, and de Smet in Menippean. Note that if Heinsius is the drunkard at the end of SV, as some critics suggested, it may still be a reference to Heinsius’s use of wine to set up strong parallels between Jesus

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Heesakkers and Matheeussen list the 14 known editions between 1612 and 1735. They place SV in the immediate context of the Vorstius dispute, and cite Cunaeus’s letter to Vorstius that accompanied his complimentary copy of the satire.307 They also relate the immediate effect of the publication. As the University reconvened after Christmas 1612, the scandal broke immediately. Students revolted, professors lodged formal complaints, and teaching had to be suspended. Many believed that Heinsius and Baudius, Heinsius’s predecessor and object of praise in DPDH, were the targets of SV. Mystifyingly, the scandal did not affect Cunaeus’s later career; in 1613 he was appointed professor ordinarius. Even when the Synod of Dordt instructed him to withdraw his attacks on the theologians, Cunaeus asked for a specific list of objectionable references. He received this, and the satire featured prominently among them. He replied with a vague blanket defence, claiming that his possible past offences were unintentional. There is no indication that he ever retracted the particulars or that he was called to task later, not even when his satire was repeatedly reissued without revision. To my knowledge he never rewrote any part of SV, and it was continued to be published without alterations even immediately before and after the Synod of Dordt: in 1618 together with Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and in 1620 with Rigault’s Funus parasiticum and Lipsius’s Somnium. Given the Leiden riots and the Dordt objections, it is hard to believe that SV was thought innocuous. A possible explanation for Cunaeus’s immunity is that it was interpreted as an equitable attack on both parties. and Dionysos, rather than a personal attack for immoderation. Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, from which Cunaeus draws much of his comparative political science in DRH, prohibits the intoxicated from entering the Sanctuary, which is the symbol of correct understanding in SV. Maimonides, Book of Knowledge, Negative Precept 73, p. 11a and passim. 307 ╇ Cunaeus, Ep. LXXII. 21 December, 1612. ‘Nuper scriptum quoddam edidi, quod tibo mitto, & uti iudicium de illo tuum perscribere nobis velis, etiam te atque etiam rogo, maxime Vorsti. Omnes eruditorum familias atque ordines perambulavi, & quia Theologi hodie maxima pars sunt ineptientium, sane continere me non potui, quin saepe illos, & non uno loco, in hanc Satyrae nostrae scenam introducerem. Elusi Parcarum tabulas, & anile fatum, quod hodie inter sacrificulos nostros excitat tragoedias. tum & multa de eorum vernilitate dixi, ferunt a se dissentientem. Etiam de Iuliano sententiam meam, non sine multorum indignatione, exposui Epistola ad Ampliss. Zeystium, quae est in limine posterioris libelli.’ The ‘quod hodie inter sacrificulos nostros excitat tragoedias’ clause echoes Heinsius’s passage in DTC, comÂ� plaining of uses of terms like ‘predestination’ that provoke real-life tragedies. DTC 212, OCT 119.

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Even before he wrote to Vorstius, the object of the controversy, Cunaeus sent a complimentary copy of SV to Casaubon who, as we saw, was a chief authority on satires at the time.308 In the eloquent cover letter Cunaeus describes the politically disruptive and pointless theological debates of his time, which make it hard for him not to write a satire. After a discussion of satires and Julian, he prophesises that further dissension and destruction will arise from the implacable theological factionalism.309 Casaubon’s reply was affectionate and supportive, but dates from March 1613. Perhaps he chose to wait and see how SV would be received. Gently he reminds Cunaeus that not all church ministers are as bad as he describes them, and that Theology is a sacred matter, not to be mocked. God does not tease man with his mysteries, and although parts of Scripture may be obscure, they are necessary for salvation; to say otherwise would be wrong and dangerous.310 Cunaeus’s attack on Christianity was understood to be not partisan, but comprehensive. 308 ╇ The odd, half-chronological half-alphabetical arrangement of Burmann’s edition of the letters may be a reason why these letters, which appear half-way through the correspondence, are rarely mentioned. They are Eps. LXXV and LXXVI. 309 ╇ ‘Eorum enim contentiones & dissidia quoties viderem, toties illud in animo mihi erat Difficile est Satyram non scribere. Sciebam quidem Sanctum illum ordinem inexpiabiles iras interdum concipere: verum id quoque memineram, in hac patriae nostrae libertate eorum hominum saevitiam atque tempesta, nihil admodum nobis, aut certe parum nocere posse. Rigant se versentque in omnem partem, nunquam efficient, uti quae diximus vera non sint. Mire favent nobis & applaudunt omnes boni : Etiam ii ipsi, qui ante studio pietatis in contrarias factiones scindebantur. Quod ego plane sic futurum divinavi.’ 310 ╇ ‘Utraque scriptio valde mihi fuit grata. Gavisus sum constantem esse te in suscepto semel mei amore: in quo debes credere mutuum facere me, neque in affectus sinceritate tibi concedere. Gavisus etiam sum perditissimos mores nunc hominum excitasse ingenium tuum, ad illud scribendi genus capessendum, quod adversus vitia iam olim fuit inventum. Non poteras illam eximiam tuam Latini sermonis facultatem alia in re utilius, ut arbitror, occupare. Omnino enim ita hodie vivitur, ut, quemadmodum ipse scribis, difficile sit Satyram non scribere. Non dubito fore multos, qui iniquo animo ferant, Theologos esse a te perstrictos. Atque ego redemptum magno vellem, minus justam occasionem te habere ea ludendi, quae in illos ludis. nunc ipsi sibi imputent: & si sapiunt, admoniti proficiant in melius. de illis loquor, quibus tua descriptio congruit, quos nimio plures, esse quam par esset, boni non diffitebuntur. At non sunt omnes, quales tu descripsisti. habet adhuc Ecclesia Dei fideles aliquot pastores, quos separari a malis, nisi fallor, aequum erat. Sacra enim res est Theologia: quae ne ludibrio exponatur magna cautio est. Ante omnia cavendum ne, dum Theologos malo infectamur, ipsi Theologiae, atque adeo ipsi Deo, ejus disciplinae auctori, injuriam faciamus. Quod igitur ais pag. 91. divina oracula, si aperta forent, melius res mortalium habituras; etsi non dubito pio sensu esse a te scriptum: vereor tamen ne calumniae sit obnoxium: quasi cum Deo expostulares qui aenigmatis quibusdam genus humanum luserit. Scis quam sit haec sententia falsa, & quam

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Given its secularising message, what was the afterlife of SV? Deep suspicions about SV’s theology did not prevent either its many reprintings, or its translation into the vernacular. A verse translation appeared first in 1675, entitled Gekken te hoop, of schimp-schrift, op de verkeerd-geleerden van onzen tijd, ‘Sots on a heap, or a lampoon on the ill-educated of our time.’ In the discussion of LSM above, the similarity between the popularising intent and effect of LSM’s and this SV translation’s verse passages has already been noted. There was no better way to spread a message than to capture it in an image (Sophia), and publish a memorable summary in vernacular verse. LSM swayed Parisian public opinion in favour of Henri IV. Based on the number of editions of this verse translation of SV, Gekken te hoop may have had some considerable political impact. Similarly, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, with which SV was routinely bound together, was transÂ�Â�lated into verse several times as Het Lof der Sotheyt. Jacob Westerbaen (1599-1670), a famous Remonstrant poet, published a verse translation and adaptation of the PF in 1659.311 Beside the vernacular and the verse form, a nuance in the title is also relevant: gek means both fool and jester, the genuine and the make-believe stupid, in Golden Age Dutch.312 The title alludes to Lucian’s Philosophies for sale but also to Christian folly—risible in rejecting reason, but fair in foolish faith—that Erasmus expressed so well and influentially in the Praise of Folly. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly was translated as Het Lof der Sotheyt. Sot (or zot) and gek are similar, but not the same. periculosa. Sunt sane in S.S. multa obscura: & insaniunt qui negant: sed necessaria ad salutem, non suapte natura sunt obscura, verum per hominum malitiam sunt obscurata.’ 311 ╇ Westerbaen attended the Synod of Dordt as a student. Oldenbarnevelt’s walking stick, turned into a symbol in Vondel’s ‘t Stockske, remained in Westerbaen’s possession after the landsadvocaat’s execution. In 1625 he married Anna Weysten, widow of Reinier van Oldenbarnevelt, Johan’s son, after Reinier’s execution in 1623 for conspiring to assassinate Maurice of Nassau. 312 ╇ One finds this usage in books like: Il Callotto resuscitato. Oder neü eingerichtes Zwerchen Cabinet. Le monde est plein de sots joieux, les plus petits sots sont les mieux. De waereld is vol gekken-nesten, de klynste narren zyn de beste. Amsterdam, 1716. This polyglot edition is particularly helpful in recreating the early modern connotations of ‘gek.’ Het gasthuis der gekken: Tooneelspel. Amsterdam, 1688. Akademische verhandeling van de gekheyt en gekken ... verdedigt, op eene koninklyke hooge schoole in Duitschlant, 1737, Salomon Jacob Morgenstern. Den derden nieuwe Spaanse Harlequin, met zijn Rarekiek, is komen reyden, inde gekken kack-stoel, van Philippus de Vyfde; naar Amsterdam, en vertoont hem alhier, op een boertige wyse / G.S. 1706.

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Why did the translators (N.A.B., N.B.A., or A.B.N. in various editions, probably Antonius and Nicolaas Borremans, translators of history books, mostly Matthias Vossius’s) decide to use gek instead of the Erasmian zot, the pretended fool and venal jester against the genuinely unwise? They may have picked the word because they understood Cunaeus’s meaning accurately, and by distinguishing it from Erasmus’s terminology they wished to indicate that in Cunaeus there was no mercy for the Christian but foolish.313 Schimp-schrift is also stronger than ‘satire,’ it is a more popular, self-righteous and ruder genre.314 I would not want to overload the Dutch translation’s merit as evidence, but it suggests that not only Heinsius, Casaubon, the Synod of Dordt and other contemporaries, but readers and translators more than sixty years later also picked up on Cunaeus’s shift from Erasmian to a secularising epistemic humility.315 Another intriguing late seventeenth-century use of SV appears in volume 2 of Gerard Brandt’s Historie de Reformatie, en andere kerkelyke geschiedenissen, in en ontrent de Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 1674). It is hard to overstate the impact of this book. There were numerous editions, translations and citations well into the nineteenth century. It was universally respected as an objective account of the Dutch religious troubles. Commissioned by the States General as a report for the Synod of Dordt, it grew into a four-volume history, and continued to shape the Calvinist-Catholic-politique polemic. It was immediately translated into English, and soon into other languages.

╇ Compare Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 54, including fn 2, and 58. ╇ For instance, in 1599 Pieter Cornelisz translated Marnix’s book as Ontschuldinghe gestelt antwoordischer wijse [..] op een schimpschrift [...] Preseruatijf oft tegenuergift. Cornelisz is discussed in the political and Leiden context of rederijker activism in Koppenol, “Cornelisz.” 315 ╇ The case that this was a well-considered decision on the part of the translators is supported by their preface to the reader. Here they (or he, if only one of the Borremans was involved) trace the origin of the phrase, Sardi venales, from Cicero to Gracchus. The Dutch translation they give for this Classical phrase is Boeven te koop. Having recounted its Classical origin and meanings, they announce their decision to translate it as Gekken te hoop because it fits the issue better (‘om dat my dunkt, dat die in het Hollands beter op de zaake past’). Cunaeus, Gekken, “Tot den Lezer,” 3. A possible reason for changing te koop to te hoop was the risk of offending theologians in 1675. The medical doctor Peter Trist, to whom the translation is dedicated, belonged to a previously powerful Gouda family that was losing its influence, eventually its land, between 1672 and 1689. In 1672 Peter and Philip van Limborch were appointed custodian to Meynard van Wassenaer. 313 314

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Astute readers throughout the centuries have, however, noticed traces of partisanship. Despite impressing his contemporaries—CalÂ� vinists included—with his historical objectivity, Brandt was a RemonÂ� strant, and he dropped occasional hints of disapproval against the Synod, his official target audience. Harskamp notes an interesting example: In volume 3 (p. 419) of the study he made his true feelings known. Brandt included a fierce anti-Calvinistic poem that had been nailed to the doors of an assembly meeting room by angry Arminians, entitled “De triumphe van de Gereformeerde duivel op zijn synode” (The triumph of the Calvinist devil at the synod; the poem is signed: ‘Antonie Spierinx de Jonge, in de Kamerstraat’). By implication, he attacked the English delegation that had been instrumental in the rejection of Arminian doctrines. It enraged the States General fearing political repercussions. Volume 3 was taken out of circulation and destroyed. Only a few copies (an estimated 10 to 15) survived. In later editions, the page concerned is left empty.316

Brandt’s book was a battle for the self-understanding of the Dutch Reformation. In an excellent article Charles Parker provides an overview of several Dutch history-books as contributions to the religious polemic, and argues that their common strategy of claiming non-partisanship, while presenting their own faction as the true torchbearers of the Reformation and real representatives of manifest Dutch destiny, shows the early emergence of a pervasive sense of national identity.317 I would however argue that the more important dividing line was not between Calvinist, Remonstrant, and Catholic Dutch histories, but between tolerant and exclusivist. As said at the beginning, every nation needs to write its own history. Parker himself points out that most of the nation-forming history books were exclusivist, and claimed that their particular party or church inherited a Bible-based legitimacy and Dutch identity.318 Religious varieties of exclusivism, however, were untenable.

╇ Harskamp, “The politics.” ╇ Parker, “‘To the attentive’.” 318 ╇See also Campos Boralevi, Schama, Frijhoff, Bodian, Groenhuis, Smitskamp and others for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century examples that can easily fit into Parker’s mid- and late-seventeenth century argument. Also see Kampinga, De opvattingen; Haitsma Mulier, “Between humanism,” and “Grotius, Hoof;” Schoffer, “The Batavian myth;” and Nauta, “De Reformatie.” 316 317

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This should be the background to our appreciation of the fact that Brandt, a fellow Zeelander from Middelburg, saw it fit to translate the whole of Sophia’s speech (§78-88) into Dutch and insert it into vol. 2 of his History of the Reformation. Cunaeus, he wrote in his introduction to this passage, was ‘one of the greatest Lights of his age’, and in SV ‘he lashes the faults of the Learned, without sparing the Divines themselves.’ Brandt picked the absolutely central passage in SV, and his translation conveys much of its anti-theologian force. At the same time even Brandt, who was not afraid to include the aforementioned anti-Calvinist poem in his historical report to the Synod of Dordt, removed the most outrageous passages from Sophia’s speech. For instance, a part of §85 reads in the original: Nihil in speciem fallacius est quam religio. Etenim quisquis Dei numen obtendit, statim efficit uti caeteri credere quam iudicare malint illudque habeant ratum quod ab eo quem sequuntur semel audivere. In huius verba sacramentum iurant, huius somnia et deliramenta amplecti, certum omnibus obstinatumque est. Quae est omnino servitus, si haec non est dicenda?

The first sentence is from Livy, 39.16.6, and originally says prava religio, in reference to the politically subversive secret meeting of BacchanÂ�tes.319 Cunaeus makes Sophia omit the adjective, drastically changing the meaning: instead of perverse religion, or the pretext of religion, all religion deceives. Brandt’s puts the prava back in: “There is nothing that can more irresistibly deceive with a fair appearance, than the pretext of religion.” Similarly, Dei numen becomes ‘the majesty of God,’ more subdued than when it is used as a technical term for ‘divine will / law.’ But the conclusion of Sophia’s speech comes through loud and clear: Henceforwards I shall never own any for my citizens, but those that leave reason free, and who never go further than that which appears probable to them; for the bounds of knowledge, as well as of all other things, are appointed to feeble mankind, and when the Father of Gods and Men sent me down to the earth, it was his pleasure, that I should not be entirely revealed, nor absolutely concealed from the eyes of the world; it is just and fitting, that people stop at the threshold of my Temple; in vain do men seek to discover the mysteries that are hid in the Sanctum Sanctorum…320

319 320

╇ Compare Machiavelli, Discourses, III.49. ╇ Brandt, History, II.121.

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Together with the popularising Dutch verse translation in Gekken te koop, Brandt’s monumental, widely read and translated history became another channel of dissemination for Cunaeus’s secularising critique of overambitious theologians. His blanket attack on all Â�theologians moved him away from Erasmus’s essentially Christian epistemic humility (already a secularising step) to a radically antitheological position. In SV, the theologians’ Christian faith does not rescue them from Sophia’s attack, or from blame for the innocently massacred. This may seem like a small step for the man in the moon, the Menippean observer, guide and satirist, but it was a gigantic leap for the protagonist and narrator. No doubt remained that the theologians are wrong: they are venal, ill-educated and worthy of scorn, humiliation and abuse. Cunaeus moved from equating Christianity with inspired folly to regarding it as real madness, at least when it was unable to stop trying to encroach on other disciplines. The symbolic language he used to do this was well-known to his contemporaries, and derived from Classical sources like Plato’s Phaedrus, Euripides’s Bacchae and Nonnus’s DioÂ�nyÂ�siaca, as well as from Rabbinic texts. Perhaps the most instructive after-effect of SV was another Leiden satire, Heinsius’s Cras credo, hodie nihil from 1621. It combines all the elements of a Menippean satire. In a dream vision the narrator goes to the Moon, speaks to Luna directly, and notes from his lunar perspective the vanity and madness of all human life. He observes quasi-nobiles, quasi-Theologi, even quasi-virgines below. Disgusted, he turns to the lunar world, which is inhabited and equipped with a magical fountain, the refractions of which depict multiple worlds.321 The next fountain offers an inverse version of this, i.e. a universal view of the moon itself.322 A talking comet flies by, reminiscent of Kepler’s Somnium, except its tail delineates a vast segment of space that has seven cities in it, each inhabited by a particular sect of zealous philosophers. Diogenes and Menippos divide the Moon among themselves and rule over it, while Epicuros is outside this world, roasting doves in his intermundia. The narrator knows that his writing is trivial, and so it pleases him all the more to know that others’ writings are even worse. One of his 321 ╇ Compare Lucian’s lunar well in the True history, and other elements from Icaromenippus. 322 ╇ Relihan notes the early modern fascination with universal vision, and describes SV’s otherworldly assembly, with people from all nations and all ages, as an instance of it. Relihan, “Menippus,” 269, fn 14.

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critics is turned into an ass, and while the narrator himself is being mocked as a Silenos, he proceeds to ride his former critic. In Relihan’s summary of the conclusion, He drinks nepenthe, and witnesses the wedding of a grammarian’s daughter; he opens a box containing a chameleon on whose back are written words of humility and caution. There is a concluding moral after he wakes from his dream, expanding on the satire’s theme of moderation in learning.323

This moderation, and the Cynical, minimalist and Rabbinic arguments deployed in its defense, lead to a rejection of all parts and schools of Christian theology on account of being potentially and actually immoderate. SV can safely be called a companion piece to Grotius’s Ordinum pietas in the more immediate context of the international scandal that surrounded the Vorstius appointment. While Grotius laid out with brilliant legalistic logic and rhetoric the case for Erastianism and the ability of magistrates to guarantee peace if and only if the churchmen did not interfere in politics, Cunaeus supplied memorable images and well-crafted phrases to emphasise that by its very nature, theology was unsuited to achieving indisputable positions, and thereÂ�fore theologians’ interference with politics always and inevitably leads to war (civil or interstate). Through the numerous editions, translations and citations SV, a key anti-theology satire, and Sophia’s speech in particular, became the most influential popular mnemonics for the secularising programme. The book inspired new forays into rationalist epistemology, secular historiography, and EnlightÂ�enment satire.

╇ Relihan, “Menippus,” 270. However, Heering, Hugo Grotius, 203 fn 18, regards Cras credo as a treatise that attacks the Remonstrants for atheism. 323

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Grotius: From Bible Criticism to a Theory of War and Peace 1.╇ Vita Brevis Hugo Grotius, the ‘miracle of Holland,’ was born at Delft in 1583, the year before William the Silent was assassinated there. At Leiden he was taught by, among others, Scaliger, Uyttenbogaert, Vulcanius and Franciscus Junius.1 Age fifteen, he took his Doctorate in Law at the University of Orléans. He published several major works before his arrest in 1618. In 1599 or 1600 he wrote De republica emendanda, which begins with a comparison between the Dutch and the Hebrew commonwealths, and continues with normative suggestions. The intellectual and political significance of other works from his student days, including his editions of Martianus Capella and Aratus, and translation of Stevin’s De Havenvinding into Latin, are discussed in chapter 2 above. Both in the Epistle to the Reader of Adamus Exul (1601), and in his autobiography of 1613, Grotius refers to his Illustratio in historiae Mosaicae ex scriptis Ethnicorum, now sadly lost. In the Parallelon rerumpublicarum, written in 1601-02, of which only the third book survives, he compared the Athenian, Roman and Batavian peoples. De iure praedae, precursor to De iure belli ac pacis (DIBP), was written between 1604-6, with the chapter Mare liberum (ML) published in 1609. It was probably in the same years that he wrote the Commentarius in Theses XI, the Preface to which strongly criticises those who make legitimacy claims from descent from, or strong analogy with, polities based on God’s specific commands. Grotius received a considerable sum from the States of Holland and West-Friesland for The antiquity of the Batavian republic (1610), translated into Dutch the same year, which continued the Dousas’ and Lipsius’s Tacitist, ancient constitutionalist justification of the Revolt

1

╇ Eyffinger, “Dutch period.”

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against Spain.2 A new edition was published in 1630 with notes by Scriverius, whose collaboration with Heinsius has been discussed above. A poem by Scaliger on the Batavians prefaces The antiquity. In contrast with his predecessors and peers, Grotius used no biblical references in the legal arguments of this book; although in the conclusion the Hebrew state is mentioned briefly with Sparta, the Achaean League, Venice, the German empire and other states which, similarly to the Dutch Republic, had a council or “government by the best.” By the end of 1611 Grotius completed Meletius. It begins with a passionate plea against the Wars of Religion, and continues with an appeal for tolerance in order to preserve the young republic. Grotius circulated a draft among Borelius, Walaeus, Apollonius Schotte and Cunaeus, partly to gauge its impact on Zeelanders.3 The story of the book itself is a potent illustration of the minimalist project. On his Middle Eastern journey Borelius, who gave Cunaeus a copy of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, met Bishop Meletius, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria. Meletius sent a letter of condolence to Dousa on the death of his son and, in typical ecumenist vein, urged all Christians to consider what they have in common, instead of dwelling on their differences. This exhortation gave Grotius the opening to his unique contribution to the minimalist project. In addition to the community of all Christians, in Meletius Grotius also addressed himself to pagans and Jews.4 From a letter to his brother William we also know that he had the same target audience, including Muslims, in DIBP, the work for which he is most—and emblematically—remembered as the father of modern international law. Although our present focus is the 1610s, it is hard not to touch on DIBP. The book is regarded as revolutionary because it builds on natural sociability, rational self-interest and the principle of voluntary consent to construct universal human rights and international law, and not on the Bible or a minimalist image of God that would be acceptable to the largest possible number of Christian denominations. If one has to date the birth of secular international law, one cannot find a better year than 1625.5 Although some 2 ╇ On Grotius’ ancient constitutionalism see Grotius, Antiquity, Waszink’s introduction. Schama, Embarrassment, 69-83. Tuck, Philosophy, chapter 5. Heesakkers, “Grotius as a historiographer.” 3 ╇ Grotius, Meletius. Meyjes’s introduction, 15, 46-60. 4 ╇ Grotius, Meletius. Meyjes’s introduction, 24-5. 5 ╇ Bull, Anarchical, 322. Idem, “The importance.” Keene, “Reception.”

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have argued for continuities between the scholastics, the School of Salamanca and Grotius, it remains generally accepted that Grotius marks a major departure in the history of international law. On a superficial, yet indicative first examination of Vitoria, de Soto or Suárez, a conspicuous difference with Grotius is that the Spaniards, in clear continuation of medieval international relations idioms, use “Saracen” to describe humans who are as distant as possible, relations with them being a truly natural law issue.6 In Grotius, legal rules for relationships with both Christians and others are based on the same natural foundation. He gives no distinct body of law based on Christian considerations, separating relations between Christians from other relationships, or superseding any of the natural laws for biblical or sectarian reasons. Property, commerce, treaties and slavery are guided by the same legal standards between Christians, nonChristians, and Christians and non-Christians. His audience now amounted to the whole of mankind. As he says in the opening address of the ML: ‘hath he [God] assigned two judges from himself to be always present in men’s affairs, whom the most happy offender cannot escape: to wit, every man’s own conscience and fame, or other men’s estimation of them.’7 To construct universally acceptable arguments, Grotius adopted Scaliger’s methods and used the Bible as a repository of stories, subject to rational analysis as much as other ancient histories.8 This is not to say that Grotius broke with Christianity. On the contrary, it was the rationalist and humanistic methodology he hit on that lent new force to his apologia for Christianity, the De veritate religionis Christianae, addressed explicitly to Muslims, Jews and pagans.9 Although De veritate was published in 1627, and in a reworked edition in 1640, it grew out of the Latin translation of Bewijs van den waren Godsdienst (“Proof of the True Religion”) that Grotius wrote during his imprisonment at Loevestein

╇ Grotius, Meletius. Meyjes’s introduction, 39. ╇ Grotius, ML, 7. See also 8: ‘We move no doubtful or entangled question, not of doubtful principles in religion, which seem to have much obscurity, which being so long disputed with so stout courage, have almost left this for certain amongst wise men: that truth is never less found than when consent is compelled.’ 8 ╇ Mortimer, Reason, 122-3. 9 ╇ The Arabic translation of De veritate was used for English colonial and missionary purposes. Brugman, “Arabic scholarship,” 210. Meyjes, “Grotius as a Â�theologian.” Heering, Hugo Grotius, 229-30, 239-40. 6 7

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from 1618 to 1621.10 Meletius and De veritate aimed at a common denominator between Christians. In addition to the irenicist patriÂ� otism he shared with other Leideners, in Grotius’s case secularisation is another corollary of using minimalism as a starting-point for a postChristian re-foundation of the system of natural law.11 Grotius committed himself on the Remonstrant side by publishing Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas in 1613. The immediate occasion for the book, the controversy over the appointment of VorÂ� stius to Leiden that grew into a debate about the respective authority of Church and State, has been told many times and well.12 The sections relevant to the present discussion are 89-94, where Grotius argues for religious comprehension and tolerance, and 137-151, where he gives the same weight to the OT and historical examples to support his position on investiture. The next stage of the controversy saw Grotius’s Tractatus de iure magistratuum circa ecclesiastica (1614). In the IntroÂ� duction Grotius gave a clear description of the methods with which secular and ecclesiastical authorities abuse religious tenets to gain unjust and dangerous advantages. Since humanism and legal rhetoric both furnished Grotius with a range of techniques to adjust the message to suit his audience, one should be particularly careful about taking passages out of context. At first he seems to employ an argument from analogy, when he counters his opponents with the assertion that the Jewish kings restored the proper worship of God in their capacity as kings, not as prophets, therefore secular powers can claim some kind of religious legitimacy. However, his next point is that just because post-biblical kings who served the cause of ChrisÂ�tianity are not mentioned in the NT, their historical exemplar is no less powerful and compelling an argument than the scriptural exemplars. He wished to meet his opponents on their own ground, while his own position remained consistent with the historicising method used in his other works.13 10 ╇ The 1627 edition was entitled, Sensus librorum sex quos pro veritate religionis christianae scripsit Hugo Grotius. 11 ╇See Meletius, Section 54 on simplicity, and 91 for an excellent formulation of the minimalist project. On De veritate meant for atheists, heathens, Jews and Muslims: Grotius, Briefwisseling II.600, to Willem de Groot, 12 April 1620. Also see Heering, “Grotius’s De veritate.” For German case studies, comparable to the Leiden Circle, of subsuming religious dogmatism to reason of state, see Schmidt, “Irenic patriotism.” 12 ╇ E.g. Grotius, Ordinum pietas, Rabbie’s introduction. 13 ╇ Van Dam, “Le droit.” Compare Grotius, De imperio, chapter 2 and passim.

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Grotius codified rules for national and international politics that did not depend on religion, providing a par excellence and influential case of secularisation. His removal of theology from law is a complementary enterprise to Cunaeus’s deployment of epistemic humility to refute over-reaching theologians, and Heinsius’s comparative mythoÂ� graphy and neutralisation of Christian psychology. His crucial contribution to secularisation is also fully compatible with ecumenism and Grotius’s life-long irenicist aim to unite Christianity and convince non-Christians of its truth. 2.╇Secularisation In IPC: From Bible Criticism to a Theory of War and Peace And so that was their contract. Brittle on both sides, no lying. Anne Carson, Book of Isaiah

2.1.╇ Introduction Grotius is the best known member of the Leiden Circle. The literature about him is truly enormous; yet he is rarely considered in the context of other Leiden politique thinkers and secularisers. In an encouraging trend, recent re-editions of his works provide the ideal apparatus for reconsidering and re-contextualising Grotius. Posthumus Meyjes’s edition and annotations of Meletius, Borschberg’s Commentarius in Theses XI, van Dam’s edition of and volume-length appendices to De imperio, his article prefacing the first modern edition of the Tractatus de iure magistratuum, Rabbie’s academic apparatus to Ordinum pietas, and Heering’s book on the De veritate are among the cases in which the modern editors, irrespective of their own interpretations of Grotius’s meaning and intention, prepared his texts with the care, attention to religious and political detail, biblical and author indices, and thick contextualisation that a secularising interpretation requires.14 For these two reasons, namely the enormity of the secondary literature and the excellence of these editions of Grotius’s writings before his exile, this chapter will only look at the secularising techniques in another pre-Dordt work, the De iure praedae commentarius (IPC). ╇ In contrast with the original editions in Grotius’s lifetime, even an index of biblical and patristic references is missing from many modern editions. 14

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The aim is to demonstrate, on the one hand, how Grotius’s trademark legal arguments, which made him ‘the father of modern international law,’ fit in with the rest of the Leiden project, and on the other hand to show one secularising strategy deployed in IPC, that of biblical neutralisation, as an illustration of how to read and find the same strategies in his other books. The editions mentioned readily lend themselves to a proper understanding; instead I will focus here on IPC.15 2.2.╇ Textual Analysis The realisation that Grotius had undermined the Bible in legal thought with uncommon efficacy is not new, only forgotten. In An abridgement of all sea-laws (1613), the Scottish jurist William Welwod (15781622) accused Grotius of advocating free-for-all fishing rights in Mare liberum (ML), published in 1609. ML was originally chapter 12 of IPC, which was written in 1604-6.16 Welwod’s first and most sustained criticism targeted the Dutchman’s use of the Bible, in particular his hierarchy of sources and authorities—not an inconsiderable point in a legal debate. Now remembering the first ground whereby the author would make Mare Liberum to be a position fortified by the opinions and sayings of some old poets, orators, philosophers, and (wrested) juristconsults— that land and sea, by the first condition of nature, hath been and should be common to all, and proper to none—against this I mind to use no other reason but a simple and orderly reciting of the words of the Holy Spirit.17 And thus far have we learned concerning the community and propriety of land and sea by him who is the great Creator and author of all, and therefore of greater authority and understanding than all the Grecian and Roman writers, poets, orators, philosophers, and jurisconsults, whosoever famous, whom the author of Mare Liberum protests he may use and lean to without offence.18

Welwod continues in much the same vein: Grotius is wrong to argue that natural features make the best borders, because ‘God, who is both the distributer and first author of the division and distinction of both 15 ╇ For excellent treatments of co-operation among members of the Leiden Circle for secularising purposes, see Rabbie’s introduction to Ordinum pietas, and van Dam’s discussion of the Vossius-Grotius correspondence in De imperio. 16 ╇ Ittersum, Introduction to Grotius, Commentary, xiv-xvii. 17 ╇ Grotius, ML, 66. 18 ╇ Grotius, ML, 67.

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land and sea, hath given an understanding heart to man’ exactly so he can measure nature and construct artificial boundaries for states. Grotius’s reasoning that the waters move, therefore borders cannot be established upon them, is again countered by Welwod with the argument that it is God’s purposeful design that makes the body of seas stay constantly in the same place.19 Welwod exploited with great relish and consistency what he considered to be Grotius’s principal vulnerability, namely the radical exclusion of Christianity from his argumentation. Why would Welwod regard this as Grotius’s biggest vulnerability? After reading almost any European political treatise written between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, the answer becomes obvious. In a very real and tangible sense, the Bible was the law of the land. The peculiarities of biblical interpretation in IPC become perfectly clear and accessible, if one recalls the wider, European context, and traces in IPC and in Grotius’s view of law the influence of Scaligerian historiography and of other Leiden secularising techniques, which Grotius further developed in collaboration with the second generation of Leiden politiques. Christianity permeated all aspects of medieval thought, from natural sciences to politics. Since religion is about the highest good, its ideologues cannot take prisoners. Institutional religion is almost never patient or kind, but envious and quick to take offense. Orthodoxy mixed with politics leads to zero-sum games. Divine legitimacy is an indivisible resource; claims to it lock the participants into murderous struggles. The Reformation exploded the entire European conceptual edifice. This is why the Reformation, not for example the Investiture Controversy or the Avignon Papacy, led to the Wars of Religion, one of the greatest traumas in European history. The solution to the Wars of Religion had to be built on new, more stable intellectual foundations. Numerous attempts were made, but with hindsight we can say that secularisation, including the radical disconnection of religion and politics, was the only solution that could have worked. A reaffirmation of the old orthodoxy, the victory of a new, or the co-existence of several exclusivist theologico-political ideologies, were not practical options.20

19 20

╇ Grotius, ML, 71, 72. ╇ Housley, Religious warfare, and “‘Pro Deo’.” Mastnak, Crusading.

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What Welwod and other contemporaries could not have known is the historical significance of Grotius’s move in ML and the whole IPC. Successful solutions to political problems in the aftermath of the Reformation often involved the neutralisation of controversial articles of faith, without necessarily wishing to eradicate religion. On the contrary, some of them hoped to save religion by disjoining it from politics, while others did have an anti-religious and/or a radically skeptical agenda. As long as they meant to solve post-Reformation violence by disentangling religion and politics, this whole range of theories can rightly be called ‘secularising’, though not always ‘secular.’ Secularising solutions, from institutionalised toleration to natural laws that would apply even ‘if there is no God,’ added up to a conceptual toolkit that gradually made it impossible to continue or revive religious politics. After the Reformation blew up the foundations under Europe’s entire conceptual edifice, this trial-and-error process of reconstruction eventually led to the secular state, modern international law and historiography, and ‘new science.’21 It was not a straightforward process by any means, but Grotius was responsible for much of the winning strategy and the eventual shape of the new world order that International Relations specialists now tend to epitomise as ‘the Westphalian system.’22 One distinguishing feature of Westphalian states and the rules for their interaction is that they are strictly secular. Again: this

╇ Grafton, “Footnote.” van Rooden, “Contesting,” especially section 1. Walzer, “Exodus 32.” Housley, “‘Pro Deo” gives as good a rendering of the situation as one could wish for. 22 ╇ The literature on Grotius’s role in the Westphalian system is massive. Today Western leaders and many scholars categorically avoid religious legitimacy claims and justify various acts, from embargoes to military intervention, based on notions of rationality and self-interest that all men share. The claim is that this is the Westphalian system, and Grotius is its father. I need not take positions on current affairs or on Grotius’s impact to note that this claim, and the mere size of scholarly literature on the subject, shows the importance and urgency of clarifying the importance of secularisation in Grotius’s work. A recent example of relating the Grotius-Westphalia nexus to current affairs is Mozafarri, “Just war,” especially 122. Notable milestones in this literature are Bull, Anarchical, and “The importance of Grotius.” Keene, “Reception.” Overviews of this literature are provided by Cutler, “The ‘Grotian tradition’,” 41. Hont, Jealousy, 13-5, 164-6, 419. Tuck, Natural rights, 175. Fine critical surveys of this literature are given by Haggenmacher, Grotius. Lesaffer, “The Westphalian.” Roelofsen, “Grotius,” section 2, 99-104. Teschke, The myth of 1648 is refreshingly skeptical, although for our present purpose it makes little difference whether the Treaty of Westphalia was the beginning of a new model or the end of the old one (Teschke’s “Conclusion,” 245). 21

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does not mean that they set out to disprove Christianity, but to disconnect it from politics. The story of Westphalian secularisation lends further significance to what otherwise would still be a valid curio in the history of political thought, namely Grotius’s use of the Bible in IPC, identified correctly by Welwod from the ML alone as its most striking feature. The overwhelming majority of Grotius’s biblical references not only ignored the original context of the verses, but flagrantly contradicted their prima facie, commonsensical, and conventionally established meaning. Grotius usually disagreed with, and often directly reversed, the interpretation that most of his contemporaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, attributed to the same passages. In addition to explicitly denying the applicability of the Bible in a legal dispute, we will see how he rebutted anyone who mixed religion with politics, including Catholics, such as the Iberian legal theorists, those who attributed the Spanish and Portuguese conquests to divine ordainment, papal apologists, but also Protestants like the Mennonite pacifists, the Calvinist resistance theories in contemporary Dutch writings and in the Vindiciae, and chosen nation theorists of all countries and denominations. His peculiar use of the Fathers also seems to be in keeping with the rest of his secularising strategy.23 This chapter aims to present a few of Grotius’s unusual Bible-interÂ� pretations, and suggests that their oddity is best explained in two contexts: Leiden secularisation as Grotius’s intellectual background, and the Dutch-Iberian conflict as the occasion for writing IPC. These contexts indicate that the main thrust of IPC’s argument is that the Bible must not be used in legal and political arguments, especially not in international legal disputes. 2.2.1.╇ Method and Contexts The question of Grotius’s authorial intention presents itself readily, given the consistent pattern of his idiosyncratic readings and his many explicit statements about the Bible’s inadmissibility as a legal source. To figure out Grotius’s exegetical strategy, this study adopted the simple method of widening sweeps of source-checking. To the earlier 23 ╇See the excellent Bergjan, “The patristic context.” Most of the pro and contra positions around Christian pacifism are as old as Christianity itself. Compare the Mennonites, for example, to Walter Map’s criticism of the crusades: De Nugis CuÂ�rialium, Section I.20.

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methods of tracing intellectual and textual influences on, uses of sources by, and personal connections between secularisers, here I add the method of verifying and defining the nature of a Leiden thinker’s novelty by systematically comparing a large number of probable sources for his biblical interpretations. These interpretations, numerous and selected from the most widely known and used sources, add up to a thick and large web of established connections with which to capture the significant idiosynracies of Grotius’s own exegetical choices. Once we know whose views he did, and whose he did not adopt and agree with, we can better define what was new about his approach to the Bible, and the extent to which, and the way in which, his originality hinged on his intention of contributing to the Leiden project of secularisation. First, all biblical references in IPC were catalogued and checked against Bible editions that may have shaped Grotius’s interpretation;24 almost all of Grotius’s readings turned out to be extremely peculiar. Is the peculiarity his own, or did he judiciously borrow his readings from one or several sources? The study next turned to Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologiae cursus completus Latina (221 volumes) and the Nicean-Antenicean series of Church Fathers (38 vol.s, eds. A. Roberts-J. Donaldson and P. Schaff-H. Wace), but found no similar readings. The next sweep took in the Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts (which had 708 works at the time), the Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation (83), and some basic texts not included in these collections, like the Complete Works of Aquinas, Calvin’s Institutes, and Luther’s Sermons. No similar readings were found. Third, Grotius’s readings were placed side by side with the interpretations advanced by other authors he refers to in IPC, including Vitoria, Cajetan, Vazquez, and also de Soto, Ayala, Gentili and Suárez. Fourthly, the study looked at some of the authors Grotius cited in other early works, notably in De republica emendanda, Commentarius in Theses XI, De antiquitate, Ordinum pietas, Tractatus de iure magistratuum circa ecclesiastica, De imperio, and De satisfactione. The Bible interpretations in IPC were also compared with Grotius’s use of the same passages in these early works. Finally, I checked the use of Bible passages in probable sources, like Marnix’s Beehive, Beza’s De iure magistratuum, the Dissertation sur l’église visible by du Plessis╇ Including the Douay-Rheims, the Tremellius, various Genevas, and the Erasmus-Stephanus ‘Regia’ bibles. 24

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Mornay, and the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. I looked at how these authors used each of the biblical passages that occur in IPC, as well as their war-related discussions featuring Abraham, Melchizedek, Joshua, David, John the Baptist, Christ, and other figures who play a role in Grotius’s discussion of war. There are very few readings in these thousand-odd books, and even in Grotius’s other works, that resemble the ones he advanced in IPC. To underscore this exceptionality, and also to suggest some possible models that Grotius may have considered when constructing his idiosyncratic exegetical strategy, the Appendix gives some other authors’ readings that come closest to Grotius’s.25 Finally, I picked out representative cases to chart and to illustrate Grotius’s method. The two criteria were the illustrative power of a case, and that the presentation of the cases here should be economical, involving the smallest possible total number of biblical references. This allows for more detailed treatment of individual cases, and hopefully enables the reader to appreciate the variety of Grotius’s techniques for adapting the Bible to his own intentions. To add breadth to depth, to show that the instances of a unique reading strategy given here are the norm and not the exception, other IPC cases will be given in the footnotes. Three possible objections to this method, namely an unidentified source, Grotius’s carelessness, and the lawyers’ cavalier and instrumental approach to texts, are easy to dismiss. Even if such a source existed, the significance of Grotius’s odd usage would remain. Identifying his source(s) would have only helped us better explain his reasons and perhaps refine our understanding of his working method. The fact that he studiously avoided the exegesis of all the authors examined is already interesting. Secondly, the consistent instrumentality of his own exegeses and his explicit statements asserting the Bible’s inadmissibility show that carelessness is an insufficient explanation. Finally, I fully appreciate that like any lawyer, Grotius was happy to wrench and cite any passage out of context, as long as it helped him make a case.26 However, the Bible references in IPC often25 ╇ The appendices in Rabbie’s edition of Ordinum pietas, and in van Dam’s edition of De imperio, serve the same purpose. 26 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 6. See e.g. Carleton’s letter from 1618, the parts cited in van Dam’s edition of De imperio, 21. In page references, IPC stands for the 2003 reprint of Hamaker’s 1868 Latin edition. LPB refers to the 1995 reprint of the WilliamsZeydel 1950 Carnegie translation.

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times do not help but contradict his arguments, whether about prizetaking, collective responsibility, or the treatment of non-combatants. The Bible passages are not only taken out of their context, but they are carefully placed in new contexts and consistently put to uses that flagrantly discredit them. The consistency suggests a particular agenda— which, I argue, is secularising—not a sophistical and instrumentalist approach to biblical exegesis. Many of the references that Grotius puts to an odd use are then not invoked when he is making a point that would have been much better supported by the same reference. His humanist and rhetorical skills were indeed put to excellent use, if the purpose behind the biblical references in IPC was to show in action the serious danger of ignoring his warnings about the Bible’s inadmissibility as evidence: Considerably better and more dependable is the method chosen by those who prefer to have such questions decided on the basis of Holy Writ, except that the persons employing this method frequently cite simple historical accounts or the civil law of the Hebrews in the place of divine law. For the materials collected indiscriminately from the annals of all nations, while they are extremely valuable in elucidating the question, have little or no value in providing a solution, since as a general rule the wrong course is the one more often followed [in the instances recorded in those annals].27 But that which we here propound hath nothing common with these; it needeth no man’s curious search; it dependeth not on the exposition of the Bible (whereof many understand not many things), not on the decrees of one people whereof the rest may justly be ignorant.28

The arguments advanced throughout IPC, except for the last that ends in prayer, work well ‘even if there is no God.’29 Grotius’s contribution to secularisation reminds one in turn of the rich background at Leiden, ╇ ‘Melius aliquanto illi et certius, qui ex sacris litteris ista malunt disceptari, nisi quod nudas plerunque historias, aut jus civile Hebraeorum pro jure divino obtenÂ� dunt. Nam quae passim ex omnium gentium Annalibus alii collegerunt, ut ad rem illustrandam plurimum, ita ad dijudicandum aut nihil aut parum valent, cum fere idem saepius fiat, quod male fit.’ IPC, 6. 28 ╇ Grotius, ML, Prolegomena, 8. 29 ╇ ‘Et haec quidem quae iam diximus, locum aliquem haberent etiamsi daremus, quod sine summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum, aut non curari ab eo negotia humana.’ Grotius, DIBP, Prolegomena, 11, ed. Molhuysen, 1919, 7. The literature on etiamsi daremus is gargantuan; here I only present the original for the sake of its nuances. More relevant here than the etiamsi daremus literature is de Jonge, “Joseph Scaliger’s historical criticism.” Idem, “Grotius as an interpreter,” and Nellen and Rabbie, Grotius. 27

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from Scaliger’s historicisation to Cunaeus’s removal of the Bible from acceptable legitimacy claims, that combined to enable Grotius to pursue this rhetorical strategy. It is in addition to the Leiden intellectual environment that one must take into account the situation in the East Indies, and van Heemskerck’s capture of the Portuguese ship Sta. Catarina in the straits of Malacca, as the immediate political context of IPC.30 The two larger contexts, post-Reformation reconstruction and Leiden scholarship, explain the why and how of Grotius’s use of the Bible in IPC. By 1604 Grotius had the insight and the required conceptual tools to be able to eliminate religious reasonings about trade, war and conquest from his legal justification of the Dutch position. The neutralisation of the religious components of this conflict would have made it much easier to come to a viable arrangement in the East Indies, and even to ally with the Spanish or the Portuguese against the other.31 This is not the place to give a history of early modern colonial conflict, but let me draw attention to two events that may help to explain the pattern of Bible misuse in IPC. The first is the 1604 Treaty of London between James VI/I and Philip III/II, whereby Spain made peace with England, the traditional ally and comrade-at-sea of the Dutch in the Indies. The peace lasted officially until 1654; the Dutch would have been right to worry about the Treaty and the preceding negotiations (the Somerset House Conference) just around the time of IPC’s composition. It probably redoubled Grotius’s motivation to try to split the Iberian front and construct a Christian-looking, but in effect secular argument that not only the Dutch and the Iberians, but also James would find acceptable. With the new motivation came a new opportunity. Philip II/I (1527-1598) promised Portugal that it would retain substantial autonomy under the union of crowns. The Duke of Lerma (1553-1625) under Philip III/II (1578-1621) reversed that policy. The Duke gave Grotius a great chance to split the Portuguese from the Spanish; and James gave him an excellent reason to do this as quickly and forcefully as possible. Failing that, the justifications for war and prize-taking, and the set of international laws proposed in IPC, were still secuÂ� lar(ised) enough to serve as the foundation of a good peace or at least ╇ Discussed in Borschberg, “The seizure.” ╇ Israel, Dutch Republic. Idem, introduction, The Dutch Republic: its rise. Housley, “‘Pro Deo’,” 243-6 on the themes of chosen nation, covenant, and ‘Messianic nationalism’ in Spanish imperial ideologies. 30 31

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a sensible modus vivendi between the Europeans engaged in commercial and colonial expansion. In any case, neither the justification of Dutch actions nor the Iberian split were likely to happen without a conclusive demonstration that the standard religious justifications for the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, from the Treaty of Tordesillas to Christian theories of conquest, were in fact untenable.32 The most direct and decisive way of doing this would have been to establish that the Bible was totally inapplicable to such cases. However, stressing this too often would have cost Grotius his and his arguments’ credibility; hence the perfectly consistent, often witty and ingenious exposition of the Bible in IPC.33 These two contexts not only help us uncover the ╇ On the status of papal bulls, see Straumann, “Ancient Caesarian.” ╇Strauss, Persecution. However, in 1604-6, more than a decade before the Synod of Dordt, Grotius may have been tempted to write a text that worked on these two levels (embedded, but wholly unusable biblical support) not so much because of his fears of persecution as by the disastrous failures of all French experiments with toleration without Erastianism that took place under Catherine Medici and Henri IV. Each of these led to a corresponding series of international debâcles (viz. Coligny’s and the Guizes’ pressure on Catherine and Charles IX through the threat of international alliances, which made the elimination of one party or the other inevitable, in spite of any number of declarations of toleration). All of these experiments and their failures concerned the United Provinces closely, and may have inspired Grotius’s more subtle method. IPC is written such that if it ever became an element in DutchIberian negotiations, it would have helped the parties to come to terms without public announcements and pledges of religious toleration, simultaneously avoiding the rage of domestic and international religious factions. If Grotius’s set of secular laws of nations, with its entirely unusable biblical references, were formally accepted by both sides, it would have put all contracting parties into an early modern version of the Mutually Assured Destruction dilemma. Walzer, “Exodus 32,” conclusion, 14: ‘Only when the Bible had ceased to be an authoritative text could men free themselves from the need to debate its precise meaning and to describe their own positions as consistent with that meaning. Then the way was open for the historical critics, and open also for a kind of judgment which could never have been uttered by Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin.’ Housley, “‘Pro Deo’,” 225 and passim, shows how the biblical story of the Maccabees was used and abused in these conflicts. Sommerville shows various political uses of Matthew 16 and 18: “Hobbes, Selden,” 168, 175, and fn18. To these we can add a few examples of similar uses of both Exod. 32 and the Maccabees in religious politics: in May 1590 the Legate Caetani blessed the 1,300 monks who swore to defend Paris against Henri de Bourbon as the ‘new Macchabees;’ while La Satyre Ménippée, the outstanding political lampoon that did much to turn Parisian public opinion in favour of Henri in 1594, described the scenery of the abortive Estates-General of 1593, at which the League proposed that the next king of France should be the Duc de Guise: ‘The first peece of tapistrie nigh to the cloath or chaire of estate, was the historie of the golden calfe, as it is described in the 32. chap. of Exodus, where Moses and Aaron were there represented by King Henry the 3. lately dead, and Monsieur late Cardinall of Bour32 33

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intention behind Grotius’s Bible-reading techniques, they also spare us the embarrassment of imputing unlikely intentions to him. To appreciate IPC’s place in the story of secularisation there is no need to imagine, for example, that Grotius was a crypto-atheist or –Catholic. A little hindsight is a dangerous thing. Grotius was clearly no atheist, and I doubt that he set out to write IPC, and later DIBP, to construct a secular theory of international relations. However, constricting the Bible to the role of just another historical source does appear, with hindsight, to have been the only masterstroke that could cut the Gordian knot made from the three threads of Dutch vs. Iberians (within which there was now hope of splitting the Spanish and the Portuguese), Mennonites vs. belligerents, and sacred nation theorists vs. secularisers (including those who knew that biblical support can only cause further dissent among and within the Provinces, as well as minimalists and ecumenists, who still hoped for the eventual reunification of Christendom).34 bon: but the golden calfe was the figure of the late Duke of Guise, lifted up on high and adored by the people;’ as it reads in the 1595 English translation, 19. Nationstates have become so dominant a unit of analysis that the integral unity of events in France and both Netherlands around the turn of the seventeenth century is often ignored these days. Temple and Motley knew it, and van Dam is right to say that ‘De imperio is the mature fruit of Grotius’s political thought on church and state, sovereignty and law, written in the spirit of French sixteenth-century legal and historical thinking.’ Grotius, De imperio, 3. Burns, Cambridge history effectively surveys many more, from the two swords in Luke 22.38 to Peter’s keys, Caesar’s money, stadial histories built upon Daniel, and so on. 34 ╇ ‘Biblical references also took a special importance in Grotius’s work [the IPC], not least because of the role he attributed to theology in working out a law of nations. A pacification of nations (though also at a domestic level, as Grotius himself had experienced during the last years of his political career in Holland) required a new theological consensus among Christians, and his reception of (inter alia, Spanish) sixteenth-century theological writings in his own works on international law should therefore not be viewed too exclusively in a polemical context.’ Wijffels, “Early modern,” 49. The same technique is identified by Borschberg in Grotius’s justification of the Dutch revolt. Grotius, Commentarius in Theses XI, 109: ‘it appears that Grotius sought to assuage Iberian sensitivities by steering clear of polemical issues. For example, religion and religiously inspired actions which assume a key role in many Protestant accounts of the Dutch Revolt, are almost completely neglected in the Commentarius.’ A similar tendency to minimise religious disagreement is found in the analysis of the Revolt in Grotius, Parallelon, cap. XXVI “De religione et pietate.” Please note that in this chapter I do not even touch on the conventional humanist or Protestant techniques of critice applied to the Bible, which ranged from questioning the Vulgate’s and the Pentateuch’s authority on the grounds of, respectively, Greek and Hebrew philological examination and hermeneutical analysis of their originals, to raising the problem of what is and what is not apocrypha, or who wrote

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2.2.2.╇ Discussion: Cases This is my tentatively proposed explanation. Still, if I only managed to show that Grotius systematically used the biblical citations in IPC for a radically new purpose, I would regard this argument a success. Let us examine a few representative cases. If It Does Not Break, Bend It a Few Times: Deut. 20 and the Inversion of the Universal and Positive Laws of Spoil A three-page section from chapter 4, in which Grotius sets out one of his early justifications for taking spoils, illustrate several of his Bibletwisting methods. First, he rejects the argument that despoliation among Christians is an act of civil war: As for the argument derived by our opponents from civil war, it is doubly absurd. For, in the first place, who will acquiesce in their assumption that the wars of Christians are civil wars, as if to say, forsooth, that the whole of Christendom constitutes a single state?35

This must be one of the pithiest dismissals of centuries of Corpus Christianorum and Respublica Christiana categories in theories of international relations. For twelve hundred years, the opposite of Grotius’s position was a starting point for papal bulls and decrees, and often the pretext for secular rulers to attack any other state that has exchanged ambassadors or so much as traded with an infidel.36 all those books of the Bible that report and continue beyond the death of their alleged author. All these criticisms are taken as given in IPC; as noted earlier, here I present only the Bible uses that were unique to Grotius. For a good summary of the history of Bible editions, which is in many ways the quickest introduction to the hermeneutical debates, see Metzger and Ehrman, The text. 35 ╇ ‘Nos ex principiis ante positis rem tam perspicuam putamus, ut longiore disputatione non egeat: quin et hoc animadverti posse, diversae sententiae auctores ne hoc quidem ipsum, quid esset praeda, satis intellexisse. Quod autem a civili bello sumunt argumentum dupliciter absurdum est: primo enim quis illis concedat, bella Christianorum esse civilia, quasi vero totus orbis Christianus una sit respublica?’ IPC, 51. 36 ╇Some cases are given and explained in Bowman, “Christian ideology.” Brundage, The crusades, holy war. Figgis, “Respublica Christiana.” Russell, The just war. Nicol, “The crusades.” Walzer, Just and unjust wars. The numerous calls from all Christian sects to mount joint European efforts against the Ottoman threat unfailingly invoked these notions. For a discussion more focused on this period, see Bainton’s classic Christian attitudes. Tuck, The rights on Sepúlveda and Vitoria, and “Grotius and Selden,” 504-9. Several chapters in Lesaffer, Peace treaties. For the wider importance of the relegation of these concepts see Schmitt, Nomos, 58-9. Even in the passage cited, Grotius retains totus orbis Christianus as a meaningful entity, and only denies that it is one state. But this is a long cry from the Corpus Christiano-

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Grotius continues: ‘Surely, since the despoliation of enemies is accepted under the law of nations, it must necessarily be sanctioned by civil law, too.’37 (51-2) To support this, he cites Roman law, canon law, Scripture, and ancient history. As biblical references he gives Deut. 20.14, Num. 31, Joshua 8.2 and 22.8 and 1 Sam. 30.26. There are two secularising techniques at work here: the demotion of God’s commands to the Jews to the status of the civil law of any pagan state, and the demonstration of the Bible’s inapplicability through the selection of stunningly inappropriate biblical passages in support of the point that Grotius is seemingly making. Let us look them in turn. Israel, Model No More Christ had no secular power, but the God of the Old Testament was active in both local and regional politics. He directly intervened in battles, promised and delivered land to the chosen nation, ruled them directly for a while, and regularly participated in the appointment and removal of kings and prophets.38 No wonder that so many of the medieval and early modern political theories claimed to be proven by one Old Testament scene or another. There could be no better proof of a system than showing that God approved of it. Coupled with the truism that there is no better system than what God approved of, this made for terribly volatile politics, since (as both cause and effect of such theories) all biblical scenes and passages were constantly being debated. It proved impossible to ground a political theory in Scripture in a way that made constructive debate viable. Religious politics became a zero-sum game, seldom allowing for compromise or stable settlement. The ‘Jewish Commonwealth’ theme encapsulates this dynamic. There had been many theories of state that used the Old Testament description of the time when Jahveh actually reigned over Israel, elected by the people, confirmed by the covenant, and represented by Moses and the High Priests. Nobody doubted that the best form of state was what God Himself instituted; the disagreements arose about rum in Fulcher of Chartres, Ekkehard of Aurach (both in the Recueil des Histoirens des Croisades/ Historiens Occidentaux), Bernard of Clairvaux and other authors and texts cited by Brundage, Housley and others. For more on Grotius’s use of related terms see Haggenmacher, Grotius, 132-3 and 229 ff. 37 ╇ ‘Quia vero jus est gentium hostem spoliare, etiam jus civile sit necesse est.’ IPC, 52. 38 ╇See Cross, Canaanite myth, for elements of the Bible’s politics (e.g. limited monarchy) that the European tradition of political thought picked up on.

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what this actually was. Was it a theocracy, a monarchy (absolute or limited, depending on the emphasis put on the election or the covenant), or an aristocracy, given the importance of the elders or the Sanhedrin in negotiations with God and in discharging religious and political duties? Or was it perhaps a federation of tribes and territories, where councils were the main legislative and judicial power? Or a republic, even a democracy, since the approval of all Jews was required to make God the political sovereign in the first place, just as vox populi replaced God with Saul? All possible and several far-fetched forms of government were derived from the Bible. Each gave rise to competing legal claims by medieval and early modern ultramontanists, papal apologists, conciliarists, royal absolutists, monarchomachs, mixed constitutionalists, parliamentarians, and a thousand other sects.39 39 ╇ We cannot of course survey even a representative cross-section of these. Many relevant varieties and instances have been mentioned in the preceding chapters, from patristic Reichstheologie to the Dutch Mennonites. Some of the extreme cases are Philip Augustus, Louis IX and Philip IV of France, especially the latter’s legal justification for attacking Boniface VIII and holding the next pope captive at Â�Avignon, setting up the Gallican Church, and sanctifying the French monarchy. For texts that justify absolutism by claiming descent from OT Israel, see the bull Rex gloriae, Plaisians’s defence of Philip’s seizure of church assets, and the convocation of the Estates in 1308, cited in: Brown, “Taxation,” and idem, The monarchy. Pethő, Démosz. Strayer, The reign. Wood, Philip the Fair. Similar texts can be cited from the reigns of Otto II of Germany, Edward I and III of England and others, and from practically any of the medieval Popes, who also claimed supreme legitimacy on the same grounds. For Renaissance and early modern examples of the same before IPC’s composition, see also Savonarola in Florence, Melchior Hoffman at Emden and Strasbourg, and Jan of Leiden at Münster. Such concerns could still not be ignored when Grotius came to write IPC. In the early 1530s Amsterdam almost became another Münster or Florence due to the rhetoricians’ popularisation of the apocalyptic vision of the Anabaptist heresiarch Melchior Hoffmann. See Deppermann, Melchior Hoffmann. On the rederijkers’ influence see Waite, Reformers, and “On the stage.” One of the arrested rhetoricians came from Leiden (fn 16). Further examples and literature in Breen, “Gereformeerde,” esp. 254-73 and 372-82; Groenhuis, De predikanten, chapter 3; Schama, Embarrassment, esp. chapter 2. For examples from across the Channel see Lamont, Godly rule. Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden.” As the meme rapidly spread, mutations and variations appeared. Many groups claimed descent from Adam but not Noah, Noah but not Abraham, Abraham not Moses, the Essenes, the Karaites (van den Berg, “Proto-Protestants?”), the lost tribes, the First Temple but not the Second, the Maccabees, or other biblical groups that could be shown to have been the one and only one approved by God. Claims of legitimacy through descent from, or at least precise analogy with, the OT commonwealth(s) were the norm, not the exception. Even Furly, Penn, and famously John Winthrop were no less exclusivist in their legitimacy claims. Every new religious legitimacy claim multiplied the causes for conflict. One exception was the Leiden Circle’s attack on the foundations of all such discourse. The Synod of Dordt drove secularising Leiden innovations in Hebraic studies underground (see

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The historicisation of the Hebrew commonwealth was the Leiden Circle’s coup de grâce to religious politics. In De Republica Hebraeorum (1617) Cunaeus showed that nobody’s hand is strengthened in the theologico-political debate by any reference to the OT Commonwealth, because the only divine polity ceased without a legal successor. Even its form and institutions were designed by God to fit particular, irreproducible circumstances, therefore they should not be borrowed or imitated with any less precaution than Athens, Sparta, Rome or Venice.40 To do this, Cunaeus described literally dozens of times and ways in which the legal succession from God had been broken. Grotius and Cunaeus were close in the early 1600s,41 and Grotius’s emphasis on the historicised nature of the Hebrew state in IPC strongly suggests that they discussed the desirability of countering chosen nation theories, even those of fellow Dutch patriots.42 In the IPC passage cited above (from p. 6), and in several other early works, e.g. Yoffie, “Cocceius”), and the torch they received from the similarly suppressed French lawyer-historians was passed on to England. See Selden, History of Tithes; De Synedriis. Cherbury, De veritate; De religione gentilium. Harrington, Oceana; Prerogative; The Art of Law-giving, esp. Book II. Hobbes, Leviathan; Behemoth; Historia Ecclesiastica. Toland, Reasons. Relevant secondary literature includes Mortimer, Reason. Reedy, Bible. Trevor-Roper, Crisis. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists. Champion, The Pillars. Cragg, From Puritanism. Harrison, ‘Religion’. Lennon, “Bayle, Locke,” and Marshall, John Locke: resistance. Idem, John Locke, toleration. 40 ╇ For more comparativism, see also Mulier, Myth. Tuck, Philosophy, 164-6. Direct precedents for DRH include Junius, De politiae Mosis, and Sigonius, De Republica Hebraeorum. A simplified and hugely popular English version of Cunaeus’s argument is Godwin’s 1625 Moses and Aaron (12th edition in 1685; see Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden,” 178), while the higher-order recognition of the need to neutralise the OT commonwealth was picked up by Selden, Hobbes, Harrington, Basnage, and others. 41 ╇See Eyffinger’s Introduction to Grotius’s De republica emendanda, 5-56, and Meyjes’s Introduction to Grotius, Meletius, 15, 45, 59. Also see their early correspondence in Cunaeus, Epistolae, and further details in chapter 4 on Cunaeus above. 42 ╇ In addition to the aforementioned predikanten and other chosen nation theorists, the chosen nation topos pervaded popular culture as well as high politics. See De Machabeen, Abrahams offerhande, both in 1590 alone; plays by Borstius, Wittewrongel, Coornhert’s Comedy of Israel, Hooft, Vondel, Abraham de Koning’s dramas Esther (1618) and Samson (1619), or Valerius’s Neder-Lantsche Gedenck-Clanck (1626), in which he thanks God for bringing Dutch to this land and enriching them through trade and commerce: compare the end of IPC. These used the chosen nation theme to comment on contemporary political events. See Ramakers, “Voor stad,” esp. 114-8. Plenty of further references in Groenhuis, Predikanten, 77-102, Perlove, “An irenic,” Campos Boralevi, “Classical,” Frijhoff, “Religious,” Schama, Embarrassment, 93-125, Bodian, “Biblical,” and Smitskamp, Calvinistisch. For a medieval version of this discourse see Menache, “Les Hébreux.”

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Grotius performs the same radical neutralisation-by-historicisation on the biblical commonwealth that Cunaeus laid out in a detailed and systematic fashion. The first [sort of men who failed to lay down ground-rules for argument], correctly perceiving that the judgment of our own natural reason is utterly weak and unreliable, inferred that the true rules of inquiry were to be sought from the Holy Writ. However, they made the mistake of failing to distinguish adequately the law of God, that is, the civil law peculiar to the Hebrew people, from the law which is common to all mankind. Similarly, they did not distinguish the things permitted under divine law from those things ordained by it, nor the things prescribed under particular circumstances, from those things which are necessarily binding for all time. Often, indeed, they took the events narrated in the Holy Scriptures to be commandments or patterns for [future] behaviour, when they might have seen that these same actions were done either incorrectly, or if performed correctly, then in accordance to a specific commandment of God.43

Grotius makes this point with clarity and force already in De republica emendanda: These are the points of agreement with the Hebrew form, which are so many and so striking that you may rightly wonder why we should not reasonably hope that, given such a similar model, we can simply adapt the remaining few points of difference, the more so since we do not intend to change all the points in which we differ forthwith. Every nation has its own morals and a nature of its own, and particular institutions corresponding to them. Once you start trying to transfer these to another structure, the outcome will as likely as not be a completely dissimilar duplicate.44 43 ╇ ‘Primi cum illud recte intellegerent, naturalis nostræ rationis iudicium esse admodum imbecille atque incertum, ideoque veras regulas ex sacris oraculis petendas, tamen in eo errarunt, quod legem Dei quæ Judæorum erat civilis et propria ab ea quæ humano generi communis esse debet non satis distinguerent. Neque item ea quæ sunt iuris divini permittentis ab iis quæ sunt eiusdem iuris imperantis quæque ex certis circumstantiis dicuntur ab his quæ perpetuo sunt necessaria. Sæpe etiam narrata pro iussis aut exemplis sequendis acciperent, cum tamen possent ea ipsa aut non recte facta esse, aut si recte, ex Dei mandato speciali.’ Grotius, Commentarius in Theses XI, Preface, §4, 208-9. 44 ╇ ‘Videmus communia; quae sane tam multa esse tamque insignia non immerito mireris; quo minus etiam desperandum est posse caetera, quae non admodum multa sunt, ad tam propinquum exemplar emendari. Neque enim omnia quae distant mutata continuo volumus: sunt sui populis mores, sua ingenia; quibus propria instituta respondent, quae si in alio velis imitari saepe rem efficias in simili dissimillimam.’ Grotius, De republica emendanda, 49, 109-11. For similar passages of frustration with his contemporaries who require biblical precedents for their politics,

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Then Grotius begins to list the differences between the Dutch and the Hebrew polities. His conclusion is that the Dutch should use the lessons learnt from the Bible, as from all other histories. There is a Copernican revolution in politics, right here: it is religion that revolves around the safety of the republic.45 And is it not clear that the state of the Hebrews, that was instituted by God, that is, before the people asked for a king, was governed by a council of the best? … However, when praising this form of government, I do not want to detract from those who use another. For it must be acknowledged that there is not one form which fits all people, and that there are many peoples who should rather be entrusted to the power of a king than left to their own freedom.46

Grotius’s refutation of the special status or reproducibility of the divine polity is perfectly consistent in the De republica emendanda (1600?), the Parallelon rerumpublicarum (1601-2), the Commentarius in Theses XI (1602-5), IPC (1604-6) and in De antiquitate (1610). This is the approach that we also find in the IPC passage on Deut. 20. Grotius takes God’s commands to be a set of historical civil laws, perfectly comparable with Greek and Roman laws. He does not attribute higher authority to the Bible. Later we will see him use the same technique of historicising the Old Testament that we find in Scaliger and Cunaeus to develop further cases in IPC, including his two responses to the Mennonites and his re-evaluation of the role of Melchizedek in political thought. The historicisation of the OT commonwealth may see also van Dam’s introduction to the Tractatus de iure magistratuum, finished late August 1614, and his remarks in De imperio, 33, and 886-7. 45 ╇ Interestingly, compare Welwod: Iuris diuini iudaeorum. In “Hobbes, Selden” Sommerville makes the same point about Selden’s History of tithes (1618) and De Synedriis (finished in 1638, but continuously revised until his death): ‘He de-mythologized the Scriptures, treating them simply as ancient texts which can be understood adequately only if they are seen in their historical and linguistic contexts. There was relatively little new about his overall theoretical stance, however, and he recognized his own debt to earlier writings including Grotius, whom he praised.’ Selden drew from the MSS of Grotius’s De imperio (finished in 1617, first published in 1647). 46 ╇ ‘Quid quod Hebraeorum quoque rempublicam, qualis a Deo fuit instituta, antequam regnum populus deposceret, optimatium consilio administratam satis apparet? … Neque tamen hanc cum laudamus reipublicae formam, illis quicquam detractum volumus, qui alia utuntur. Fatendum enim est, non eadem omnibus convenire; multosque esse populos, qui rectius potestati regiae, quam libertati suae committantur.’ Grotius, Antiquity, chapter 7, 18-19, pp. 112-5. The rest of Section 19, the penultimate chapter of IPC, gives further reasons why laws cannot simply be copied, even from the Bible.

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also be the linchpin for all other cases of historicisation in IPC, where Grotius treats the whole Bible as he does any other source of history, subject to the same rules of criticism, with the evidence gleaned from the critical reading accorded no more compelling power or applicability. The Inappropriateness of the Bible Verses Cited Another one of Grotius’s techniques for discrediting the Bible in legal arguments was to invert the order of natural and positive divine laws. There was tremendous disagreement concerning the divine precepts given in the Old and New Testaments, whether the new law replaced or perfected the old, and how much of either applied to the ‘new Jews’. Some even doubted that the Ten Commandments were all binding, and divided them into a historicised and a universal tablet. As we saw above, a great number of early modern political actors claimed to be the new Jews, to whom a particular set of biblical laws may or may not apply, depending on whether their observance was enjoined upon the Jews and consequently upon whomever was claimed to be the chosen nation.47 What better way to demonstrate the futility of such debates then by the extreme measure of reading the cruelest atrocities in the OT as universal laws, and the reasonable ones as historical, positive laws given to the Jews alone? Deuteronomy 20.5-17 gives one such command that has long troubled canon lawyers. Here God tells the Israelites to kill all males in far-away cities, but take the women and children alive; in nearby 47 ╇ A curious corollary is that one could attack one’s enemies by arguing that they deviated from the Bible, or because they stuck too close to it. The latter usually took the form of accusations of ‘Judaising.’ This is a frequent theme in early modern polemics, including Locke’s last book, A paraphrase. See e.g. his 1 Cor. Synopsis G, his notes on 1 Cor. II.6*, III.1†(b), 1 Cor. III.4,* and 17, 1 Cor. IV.6(a), 1 Cor. XIV.2*, 2 Cor. VII.12ff, 2 Cor. I.14*, 2 Cor. 12†, 2 Cor. V.16*, VII.11, X.1, X.12†, XI.22, XI.23, Rom. I.32‡, II.7*, 8*, Expl. Notes for Romans Section II, III.6* ‘to stop the mouths of the blasphemous Jews’, 7* ‘to Stop the Jews mouth’, 8* ‘’Tis past doubt that these were the Jews’, 9†, Romans Section VI. Contents (j). While Locke also takes the Epistle to the Galatians to be a condemnation of ‘Judaising seducers’ (120), Grotius in the Annotationes reads the same to refer to philosophers. On ‘Judaiser’ readings known to but not used by Grotius see Yoffie, “Cocceius,” fn 12. Instead, Grotius relied on the equally well-established but secular principle of non-transferability. Aristotle’s geographical effects, irreproducibility of history, spirit of nations, ancient constitutionalism, and other arguments could all be used to serve the secularising objective by limiting the transferability of biblical precepts. Using both the biblical chosen nation discourse for one’s ingroup, and the ‘Judaiser’ criticism against an outgroup, assumed and reinforced transferability.

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places they wish to keep, they must kill everybody. This incitement to slaughter was hard to accept as a straightforward divine law. Vitoria joined a long list of thinkers when he argued that this was a special command given under special circumstances (the exact sort of argument that we saw Grotius condemn above in Commentarius in Theses XI). This was not very hard to show, since the commands begin with military service dispensations for the dedication of new houses, eating grapes and sleeping with new wives, and build up from there to smiting everybody in the towns captured. Unless women and grapes were to be obligatory considerations before all wars, it was easy to show that the indiscriminate murder in Deut. 20 was an exception. Vitoria had no difficulty concluding that what God wanted understood as a universal rule was that all civilians and non-combatants are protected from every fighting party, and the maximum degree of reasonable mercy must be shown at all times.48 By contrast, Grotius takes Deut. 20, one of the most discussed Bible passages in the theory of war, and reads it as a straightforward law of nations!49 He does exactly the same with Num. 31, the second in the sequence on spoils, which posed a similar embarrassment for later interpreters.50 So did Joshua 8.2, in which God delivers the city of Ai to the Israelites, who then ‘had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants’. The only new element here is that unlike Deut. 20 and Num. 31, Joshua 8 is not even about spoils, but a tangential part of a particularly grisly tale.51 Joshua 22.8 describes a fairly complex and unmistakably particular, not universal, deal between the tribes, whereby Joshua shares out the spoils among the Reubenites, the Gadites and the second half of ╇ Appendix I.1. ╇ This contrast reminds us of the one between Augustine’s, Aquinas’s and Calvin’s reading of Exod. 32. Walzer, “Exodus 32,” esp. 9-11, where he shows that a similar subversion of Augustine’s reading by Aquinas ‘in effect denied the value of the citation altogether.’ Walzer also argues that Grotius extended Aquinas’s trick into ‘a modernist parody of the medieval argument about the Old Law.’ Walzer’s account of Calvin’s reading of Exod. 32 is also perfect for showing both the issues and the methods on which Grotius clashed with the Dutch Calvinists in IPC. Compare Grotius, DIBP I.2.2. Note however the danger of overrating comparisons of Grotius’s use of the same biblical reference in his various works, including the Annotationes. To do so would mean ignoring the specificities of the works’ context, and the instrumentality of exegetical decisions. See Walzer’s warning to this effect in the case of Calvin, “Exodus 32,” fn 22. 50 ╇ This section is in LPB, 51-3. For its exegetical conventions see Appendix I.1.3. 51 ╇ Appendix I.1.4. 48 49

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Manasseh’s tribe, which also receives land at last, along with some spoils. At least Deut. reported God’s word; Joshua 22.8 leaves no doubt that there was no divine command, let alone a universalisable one, in the story.52 Like the others, it is exactly the wrong verse for Grotius to invoke in support of his argument.53 1 Sam. 30 is about David and the Amalekites, another stock theme in reasonings about state and war. Grotius’s reading is, again, unique. The Amalekites capture Ziklag, one of David’s cities, and take the women and children captive; ‘they slew not any either great or small.’ David consults God with the ephod and leaves in hot pursuit. Two hundred of his men cannot keep up with the host, and fall behind. David catches the Amalekites, and ‘smote them from the twilight even unto the evening of the next day,’ with no intention of sparing anyone. He recovers everything the Amalekites had taken. A dispute ensues whether the 200 should receive their share of spoils, some of which may have originally been their own property. David makes a new law: from now on, those who stay behind to guard the baggage train will receive the same share as those who fight. When he returns to Ziklag, he also sends a share of the spoils to the elders of Judah, and to his friends. Several elements of this story were used in later arguments. David consulting the ephod was often said to show papal supremacy, and his new law about giving a stake in the battle to the camp guards was seen as a sensible piece of strategy.54 The contrast between the ruthless slaying of Amalekites and their aversion to bloodshed posed much the same problem as Deut. 20. Grotius simply glossed over the problem of divinely sanctioned slaughter, and to corroborate that spoil-taking is just by the law of nations, he cited David’s message to Judah: “Behold a present for you of the spoil of the enemies of the Lord.” Sufficient proof [of the justness of taking spoils] was afforded, however, in the sole fact that it was God’s will that the Israelites, a nation formed 52 ╇ Calvin even read the same passage as an expression of Joshua’s liberality beyond and in contradiction to the strict law of sharing! Calvin, Commentarii in librum Iosuae, 56-7. The Carnegie IPC edition’s alternate reading is Joshua 22.11, an equally odd verse to cite and one that had an equally extensive tradition of commentaries, as well as political tracts like Beza’s Concerning the rights of rulers, in Question 7, 73, that Grotius could react against. On the original biblical politics of these verses see Pressler, Joshua. 53 ╇ Appendix I.4. 54 ╇ IPC, 33. Grotius vs. the Pope: LPB 64, 222-3, 245, 258, 300. On the ephod, see e.g. Aretius, Problemata, 353.

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by God Himself, should defend their rights in this fashion; or again, in the fact that He prescribed limits for the seizure of spoils.55

The scene of David creating a new law on the spot comes in the immediately preceding verse: ‘And it was so from that day forward, that he made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel unto this day.’ This is one of those evergreen law-giver stories we often find in ancient literature, the story of how a great king—not God—handled a tricky situation by issuing a new law, one so good that it worked perfectly ever after. The emphasis is on David and the law’s novelty, not, as Grotius would have it, on God and the law’s universality. Even if Grotius’s reading is taken at face value, we still run into the problem that if the act of taking spoils is justified by God’s institution of it, must we not also observe the ‘prescribed limits for the seizure of spoils’? One does not even need to know the passage Grotius cites in order to recognise his inversion of particulars and universals. Deut. 20 Re-Inverted: Israel’s Naturally Conscientious Objection to God’s Command Another reason why Deut. 20 is a helpful illustration is that Grotius used it many times in IPC, therefore it offers us a chance to uncover more than one of his strategies. In chapter 8 of IPC, Grotius set out to show that there was no need for a formal declaration of war in the Dutch-Iberian conflict, since the other side was already behaving like an enemy. He chose Deut. 20.10 in support: A notable example is found in the history of the Israelites, who had been commanded by God to refrain from making an armed attack against any people without first inviting that people, by formal notification, to establish peaceful relations; for the Israelites thought that this prohibition was inapplicable to many of the Canaanite tribes, inasmuch as they themselves had previously been attacked in war by the Canaanites.56

55 ╇ ‘Accipite benedictionem de praeda hostium Domini. Sed vel hoc solum sufficere poterat, quod Deus Israelitas, formatum a se populum, ea ratione jus suum tutari voluit: aut etiam quod modum praedae circumscripsit et quomodo dividi deberet ostendit.’ IPC, 52-3. 56 ╇ LPB 102. ‘Nobile est exemplum in Israelitis, qui cum praeceptum haberent a Deo ne quam gentem armis aggrederentur, nisi quam denuntiando prius ad pacem invitassent, hoc ipsum tamen adversus gentes Chanaeorum plerasque observandum non putarunt, cum essent ab illis priores bello lacessiti.’ IPC, 100.

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Grotius’s point here is that it is indeed right and seemly to attack in some cases, including the capture of the Sta. Catarina, without a prior declaration of war. In other words, he finds for the Israelites in the case cited. Instead of the usual process of deriving a universal law of nations from a positive command given by God to the Israelites, Grotius takes the Israelites’ side in their disobedience to God’s direct command, which he said was given in contradiction to a law of nations. Grotius deliberately set out to subvert the status of the Bible in contemporary legal arguments. He made specific commands out of universal ones, and vice versa, in order to demonstrate that the Bible should not be used in law, and also to overturn centuries of Biblebased patterns of legal argumentation. The inherently debatable nature of biblical interpretation, therefore the Bible’s undesirability in such matters, is shown through these inversions of the universal and the particular in the conventional readings.57 Deut. 20 Thirdly Bent: the Law of Mercy We saw Grotius use Deut. 20 to justify despoliation, and to show up its absurdity by insisting that it be taken literally.58 Then we saw the same passage support the point about attacking enemies without a formal declaration of war, only this time Grotius upheld the Israelites’ disobedience to God as being in accordance with the law of nations, and the right thing to have done.59 A few pages later we come to another highly irregular, subverted use of this passage, this time in favour of unlimited rights of butchery against an enemy nation, with no regard for innocents. In so far as bodily attack is concerned, it is permissible—in accordance with the laws of the first order, which do not take into account the intent of one’s adversary—to make an attack upon all enemy subjects who resist, whether knowingly or in ignorance, the execution of our rights. For such subjects, without exception, are ‘bringing about’ an injury, even though that injury may not be ‘voluntary’. This assertion is expressly confirmed by divine law, which decrees the slaughter of the whole adult population of certain cities taken by storm, although many of the adults in question must be innocent.60 57 ╇ On this technique of inversion see Swift, The mechanical operation, and The Battle of the Books. Swift wrote both while still secretary to William Temple. 58 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 53. 59 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 102. 60 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 109. ‘Et num recte Tacito dictum: in pace causas et merita spectari, ubi bellum ingruat innocentes ac noxios juxta cadere. Ex hac enim similitudine

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For this, he sets up the following sequence: Tacitus (‘the innocent and the guilty fall side by side’), Deut. 20.13, Joshua 6, and 1 Sam. 15. The three biblical passages show, according to Grotius, that an army does have the right to murder all enemy subjects who resist it, ‘whether knowingly or in ignorance’ of the army’s justness of cause.61 Grotius declines to follow any of the conventional interpretations of these embarrassingly brutal biblical passages. Appendix I.1.1 for Deut. 20 gives Vitoria’s discussion of the same matter of innocents in wartime with reference to an identical sequence: Deut. 20, Joshua, and 1 Sam. 15. Vitoria defended the unusual cruelty in these verses as ex speciali mandato Dei. Grotius did the opposite: with horrifying implications, he argued for their universality. Again, he flipped conventional exegesis on its head to show that it could be done; and therefore these core biblical passages were open to endless debate and invited fanatical opinion; and so they had no place in clarifying the law of nations. Deut. 20 has been sufficiently discussed, but note how Grotius used it here for a different purpose. Joshua 6 is about the capture of Jericho, a glorious story that was usually seen even within biblical history as coming under rather special and unrepeatable circumstances.62 For a start, God does not intervene quite so directly in all biblical battles. By giving it general cognisance, Grotius denies the uniqueness of the event. This remains true even if we accept the conjecture of the editors of the Carnegie IPC that Grotius’s specific reference is to Joshua 6.25, in which Rahab, the harlot who saved the lives of Joshua’s spies, is rescued from Jericho before the siege. This would be in keeping both with Grotius’s unversalisation of obviously specific cases (here the treatment of the ‘innocent’ Rahab in war), as well as with the sense of humour we saw in the other cases.63

jus praedae apertius fiet. Ad corpus quod attinet, offendi ex legibus primi ordinis, quae animum adversarii non respiciunt, subditi hostium omnes possunt, qui juris nostri exsecutioni resistunt, scientes sive ignorantes: faciunt enim injuriam quamquam non injuria. Hoc divina lege expresse confirmatur, quae in expugnatione urbis puberes omnes interfici jubet, quorum multi non possunt non esse innocentes.’ IPC, 107-8. 61 ╇ Appendix I.5. 62 ╇ Cardinal William Allen, founder of the English College at Douay, exemplifies the typical interpretation in De Sacramentis, ch. 41, 685 and passim, where he cites Josh. 6 and Jericho to prove the absolute uniqueness of Christianity. 63 ╇ Appendix I.6.

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1 Samuel 15 is similar to the Deuteronomy passage: God expressly commands the Jews to kill all the Amalekites.64 What is different here is that Grotius blithely fails to mention that Saul, who has just replaced God as Israel’s new king, actually disobeyed God’s order to slaughter. When Saul spares the Kenites and returns with live captives and animals, Samuel accuses him of rebellion against the Lord. Saul at first denies this outright, then he tries to defend himself by saying that he only kept slaves and goods in order to sacrifice to God. This does not sit well with Samuel. v22 ‘Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.’ Saul then blames the people for keeping the spoils, but Samuel remains adamant: Saul disobeyed God, therefore God dethrones Saul. They make up in the end, and in an act of reconciliation Samuel hacks the Amalekite king into pieces. But in his heart he mourns for Saul, and God agrees that it was a mistake to make Saul king. Apart from the Fall and 1 Sam. 8, the people’s deposition of God in favour of Saul, this was probably the most cited OT passage in the political literature.65 If we assume that Grotius knew any of this literature, or had simply read the passage he cites, then ironies abound. Instead of siding with the people who followed the law of nations in defiance of God’s positive command, this time Grotius accepts and universalises God’s undeniably positive command to his chosen nation in a very specific historical situation, and against the sparing of innocents, including even the Kenites, who knew well the justness of the attackers’ cause, and therefore qualified for mercy even by Grotius’s own admission: ‘Nevertheless, if there are some individuals who can be separated from the whole body of the enemy and who do not impede the execution of our rights, such individuals should of course be spared altogether from attack upon their persons.’66 Let us pause and count the oddities so far. After refuting the conventional reading and his own earlier reading of Deut. 20, Grotius takes 1 Sam. 15 to show the justness of killing all innocents who impede the pursuit of the attackers’ just cause of action. In 1 Sam. 15 God gives a positive command in a highly particular situation, which ╇ Appendix I.5. ╇ Appendix I.7. 66 ╇ ‘Quodsi erunt nonnulli, qui ab hostium universitate separari possint neque exsecutionem nostram impediant, his sane quod ad corpus attinet omnino parcendum est.’ IPC, 108. 64 65

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Saul disobeys in three ways: he spares the Kenites, who did nothing wrong; he spares the Amalekite king; and he keeps some of the livestock as prize. If all three kinds of mercy were wrong, and this is indeed a universalisable law, as Grotius asserts, then not only is indiscriminate cruelty justified, but Grotius directly contradicts himself on both the justness of spoils and on sparing unresisting innocents. In spite of IPC’s consistent pattern of such Bible misuse, and the explicit statements asserting the Bible’s inadmissibility, this must still be one of the most idiosyncratic uses to which this passage has ever been put.67 Having taken the brutal biblical passages at face value, Grotius then begins to argue for mercy, but using only pagan history, Plato, Cicero and Roman law. It is from Cicero that—a relief to his readers—he now comes to the same conclusion that Vitoria drew from the same biblical sequence alone. Some people can be separated from the totality of the nation, and should be spared, at the very least those who surrendered and are patently innocent. In fact, natural law dictates that you spare as many as possible. In this last case we saw three biblical passages, beginning with the third use of Deut. 20, used in several ways to guide the reader by 67 ╇ The only seventeenth-century interpretation in the same league is the first edition of Bayle’s Historical and critical dictionary in 1697, s.v. ‘David,’ Remarks D, G and H (Hackett ed. 51-9). After the Huguenot church in Rotterdam indicted him for this entry, he removed much of it from the 1702 edition, including the Remarks in question. In D, Bayle criticised David for indiscriminate slaughter, whether or not it was authorised by God, and regardless of the objection that David’s knowledge of just war may have been inferior to ours. In G, Section VII, Bayle presented exquisitely the dilemma of faith or reason, which become incompatible as one ponders the OT scenes of violence. He ended up condemning David’s cruelty, and cited 2 Sam. 12.31 as one of the damning references. Grotius used 2 Sam. 12.30 in LBP, 163, to discuss how captured public property becomes the public property of the victor. He gives a great number of historical and contemporary laws and events, only one of which is biblical: David taking Rabbah’s land and crown in 2 Sam. 12.30. The next verse shows David maiming, torturing and horribly killing ‘the children of Ammon.’ Yet again, Grotius picked the most controversial biblical reference possible, one that had more than a millennium of embarrassed exegesis written about it. He could not just come out and say that the God of the Old Testament, Abraham, David, and other sacred figures of Christianity were guilty by his own standards of just war. Even a hundred years later, Bayle was publicly tried and humiliated for reading 2 Sam. 12.31 literally, as a statement of historical fact, and thereby condemning David for his cruelty in war. Not even Voltaire could raise this point in his entry on David in the Philosophical dictionary (1764-72) without inciting enormous controversy. What would have happened to Grotius if IPC were published in his lifetime? As I said at the beginning, the same kind of case can be built up, with the same result, for almost every single Bible reference in IPC.

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example to agree with Grotius’s opening statement in Mare liberum: his thesis really ‘dependeth not on the exposition of the Bible.’ The Bible Disqualified: Contradictory Interpretations are Equally Tenable, and Pagan Sources are Superior. Deut. 20 for the Fourth Time68 As supporting evidence for the natural law of mercy that he deduced from pagan sources, Grotius then recycles Deut. 20.14 for the fourth time, now taking out of context the other half of God’s command, the one that says women and children should be spared: ╇ The other elements as well as the sequence we started with (Deut. 20, Num. 31, Joshua 6 and 22) undergo several drastically different interpretations in IPC. For example, in arguing that the right over spoils is not in the individual, but in the state (LPB, 145 ff), Grotius deploys several secularising techniques. There is the deprioritisation of Scripture: Grotius’s hierarchy of sources is 1 reason, 2 the consensus of all nations and the tradition of all ages, 3 historical examples, 4 Homer, 5 the OT. This complements the technique of historicisation. The passages used here are: Num. 31.27, 31, 47, Josh. 6.27, 22.7-8, and 1 Sam. 30.22. He gives very unusual readings for each (the fourth technique). He vividly illustrates their inadmissability by constructing interpretations that contradict his earlier, equally convincing ones (the fifth technique). Yet another use of the sequence discussed in Case 1 above is at the end of chapter 4, where Grotius promises to marshall “examples set by holy men” to prove the justness of taking spoils. He begins with Abraham (LPB, 54), in the peculiar fashion discussed in Section 6 later. That is all. We get no more holy men. Instead, Grotius relates the actions of six ancient Romans as corroborating examples. When he finally remembers his promise to bring scriptural examples to bear (LPB, 56), he cites Moses, Joshua and David, specifically Num. 31, Joshua 8 and 22, and 1 Sam. 30—the very same sequence that he similarly misuses elsewhere, as we saw in Section 1! He continues in a similar vein: another Christian element that proves the legitimacy of spoils is history. Christian princes have always taken spoils, and slaves, too, although they do not do that any more. Christian customs are not, in other words, any more binding upon the present than biblical history. Next Grotius knocks out either the Bible or Christian historical precedents (both of which, he claims, support his point) by showing that the Bible actually forbade the kind of spoil-taking that Christian princes were doing. All throughout we see the same terrible choice of passages; the only thing they are really good for is to demonstrate why the Bible should be disregarded in such matters. These are examples of further Bible misuse in IPC, related to the Deut. 20 case in hand. The same techniques are applied to other passages and sequences. Another good case unravels from LBP 41 ff.: just wars were waged by various OT figures, and if we have the same faith (as the OT figures), then we can follow suit. However, not all just wars are ordained by God. A war can be equally just under natural law, if it is declared by a sovereign, and it is fought for a just cause and in a just manner. Here again Grotius leads us to the realisation, step by step, that the Bible should not be allowed to feature in international relations, because it can destroy any negotiation, and has nothing to add to them. 68

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Yet again, just as the precepts of equity and those of divine law [Deut. 20.14 and Plato, Republic 471a, b], that infallible guide of equity, direct us to spare all persons in a surrendered city, so also they direct that in the case of a city taken by assault, all those whose lives do not impede the execution of our rights shall be spared in so far as is possible.69

Let us recapitulate. Vitoria pointed out the specificity of Deut. 20. Grotius first agrees with this, but only to side with the Jews who disobeyed God’s specific command, just as he does in the case of 1 Samuel 15. A few pages later he emphatically disagrees, and reads Deut. 20 as a universal principle of brutality and cold-heartedness. This he then modifies with a universal law of mercy derived from pagan history and philosophy, not—as a Christian might be expected to, all else failing—with Christ’s message of love and compassion. Finally, Grotius cites another chopped-up half-sentence from the same verse to corroborate the universal principle of mercy that he found in Cicero and other Ancients. This is the usage of sources that Welwod strongly objected to in ML, and we can only speculate what reception the whole of IPC would have had.70 Choosing Flamboyantly Unsuitable Passages in Support: Collective Guilt in Gen. 20 Still in chapter 8, Grotius has another argument for which he enlists downright strange biblical support.71 What he wants to illustrate is that all Iberian citizens, including the owners and crew of the Sta. Catarina, are culpable for offenses against the Dutch. They all conferred authority on a ruler, and did nothing about his wicked deeds. To support this reasoning for collective culpability, Grotius cites Genesis 20.4 and 9 which, he says, shows God punishing the people for the sins of their princes. The original Gen. 20 borders on a comedy of errors. It narrates a would-be love triangle, thwarted by God. Abraham goes to Abimelech and pretends that his wife Sarah is his sister. Abimelech marries Sarah, 69 ╇ ‘Sicut autem in dedita urbe omnibus, ita in ea quae expugnatur quantum fieri potest illis parci, quorum corpora exsecutioni nostrae non obstant, aequitas praecipit et lex divina certissima aequitatis magistra.’ IPC, 110. 70 ╇Note the similarity between some of the secularising techniques in IPC and in Heinsius’s DTC. They are reflected in similar criticisms, by Balzac and Salmasius against Heinsius, and by Welwod, Freitas and others, against Grotius. 71 ╇See also Grotius, LPB, 295-6: the legal standing of States General and the VOC is established through a parallel between Rome and the States General on the one hand, and between Christ and the VOC, on the other.

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but then God steps in and tells him the truth. Abimelech is terrified and protests his innocence to God. His intentions were pure, and nothing actually happened. God agrees: integrity of heart and ‘innocency’ decide the case.72 Abimelech nevertheless reprimands AbraÂ� ham for the deception, which could have condemned the whole nation. If ever there was an odd biblical passage to cite in support of collective responsibility, this is it.73 Historicisation Historicisation is another technique that Grotius used to undermine the Bible’s authority in legal debates.74 He often took biblical passages conventionally read as expressing a universal law, and put them into a historical context to show that they expressed a particular command, not to be applied elsewhere. Our first example is his controversy with 72 ╇ The controversy between Michael Baius, professor of theology at Louvain, and Marnix about free will and predestination was well known to, and often cited by, their contemporaries. Abimelech featured prominently in this debate. See e.g. Baius’s reply to Marnix’s Theses aliquot theologicae in Marnix, Epistulae, III.185, from 1581. It is unlikely that Grotius was ignorant of this, and other politically incendiary debates using the figure of Abimelech. His misrepresentation of Gen. 20 as an example of God’s punishment of a prince fits into this discourse. Abimelech was also used by pseudo-Clementine in Homily XVII, ch. 17, to show that even the impious can see true dreams and visions. 73 ╇ Appendix I.8. 74 ╇ More good cases: ancient Hebrews and the meaning of ‘state’ (LPB, 63); one can attack when the call for satisfaction is unheeded, and the Israelite instances given in the Bible are not superior to Minos vs. Athens; same on arbitration (98 ff). See Heesakkers, “Grotius as a historiographer.” Historicisation was a principal technique of secularisation in French New History. See Huppert, Idea, on Pasquier against divine intervention in history (55), his criticism of Sleidan (62), and so on. ‘Bodin’s Method was, to the best of my knowledge, the first book published to advance a theory of universal history based on a purely secular study of the growth of civilization. Such a view of history was by no means uncommon among the humanists and jurists who dominated the intellectual world of Paris in Bodin’s time. Still, Bodin published his book first.’ (104), With the publication of Le Roy’s Vicissitudes in 1575 ‘[t]he break with theological history is complete.’ (117). Anything by Kelley is well worth reading on the subject. Grafton also captures the essence and post-Reformation significance of these works in “The footnote.” ‘Bodin presented readers terrified by the European religious wars of the mid- and late sixteenth century and crushed by the rapid expansion of European scholarly writing with a massive program of social reconstruction through discriminating scholarship.’ (66) ‘Like Bodin, de Thou had watched the French polity fall apart in the Wars of Religion. Unlike Bodin, he continued to believe that Catholic France bore as much of the blame as the Protestants, or perhaps more. An honest, impartial narrative, he decided, would serve as a foundation for social and political peace.’ (67) See chapters 1 and 2 above.

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the Mennonites. Grotius addresses them directly.75 To evaluate their anti-war stance, he cites their favourite passage, John the Baptist’s Do violence to no man (Luke 3.14). Grotius readily concedes that John could not have contradicted divine law, but maintains that general violence can be justified, and it is in fact often necessary and divinely ordained.76 How is this possible? According to Grotius, the Bible, a rather foundational text in European thought, recorded in this instance nothing more than John’s perfunctory words to some soldiers who happened to be harassing peasants. Grotius knew AugusÂ� tine’s and Calvin’s famous attacks on, respectively, the Manichean and Anabaptist pacifist readings of this passage. Either of these responses would have given Grotius a perfect riposte to the Mennonites critical of the capture of the Sta. Catarina. However, both Augustine and Calvin drew on other, similarly debatable Bible passages in their exposition of Luke 3.14.77 Grotius chose to relinquish the authority of these two authors in favour of the very Leidenian, fully historicised and secularising interpretation instead, one that also underscored that the sheer range of interpretations alone was enough to make the Bible unsuitable for use in a legal dispute. A more sophisticated historicisation follows soon after. In Genesis 14 Abraham turned down his share of booty, and the Mennonites took this passage to mean that all war and booty were illegal.78 Grotius counters this from the same verse: Abraham gave the spoils to the priests, and this was not a one-off event but an institution. The institution of paying tithes from war booty in turn proves the legitimacy of wars and spoils in the first place.79 Having replaced the literal with the historical reading, Grotius turned the passage’s meaning around. He ╇ Grotius, LPB, 51-4. ╇ For different solution to same problem see Grotius, DIBP II.7.3, 200-1. 77 ╇ Appendix I.9. Marnix believed that the Anabaptists sought to destroy the bonds of all human society, and recommended to William of Orange the imposition of the death penalty on Mennonites. 78 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 54. 79 ╇ In a very similar argument in chapter 10, using a different biblical passage to the same secularising effect, Grotius adds the rider that while tithes may be an institution, they fall under secular jurisdiction; the church has no independent claim. The consensus of nations, not theology, is the authoritative source on tithes, and this consensus says that tithes are awarded by the secular government. David’s transfer of spoils to his priests was a gift. Grotius does not cite the exact passage, but if he has 1 Sam. 30.26 in mind, then in addition to this being another case of historicisation, it is also an instance of Grotius ascribing several wildly different meanings to yet another passage in IPC (Grotius, LPB, 156). 75 76

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then adjoined the examples of Pericles, Fabius, Cato and others, who also turned down their share of spoils in order to avoid the suspicion of pursuing their self-interest in war. Grotius has the pacifists coming and going. He ends the passage with the aside that Cato’s reasoning for refusing his share was almost identical with Abraham’s—only Cato put it a bit more elegantly.80 Emphasising the historical origin and character of an institution at the expense of its claims to universal legitimacy, and reframing doctrinal debates concerning Church-State relations, the apostolic church, sacraments, holy days and so on, in terms of the history of institutions, were among the historicising techniques with which Scaliger, Grotius, Vossius and Cunaeus made their case for secularisation. As discussed in the chapter on Scaliger, the Leideners’ relegation of more and more theological bones of contention, from the changing language of the Old Testament through legal succession from the divine commonwealth to the historicity of Christ, was coupled with the confident attempt to turn philology, chronology, astronomy and other disciplines into ancillary sciences with which history can be refounded on methodological grounds that were solid, able to accommodate future discoveries, and immune to re-theologisation.81 Judicious Omission Omission is yet another technique for separating religion and politics through creative Bible (dis)use. This involves taking a well-known, much-debated problem, like the state’s authority over tithes, and marshalling all the usual sources and evidence—except for the Bible. Of all the rhetorical techniques used in IPC, omission yields perhaps the funniest, most straightforward and most ostentatiously pagan inÂ�Â� stances of secularisation. In the Prolegomena Grotius sets out to show that God is the King and supreme ruler of the world. By not invoking the authority of the Bible, he bypasses the immense theological debates that surrounded ╇ Appendix I.10. ╇ Compare Grotius’s move on Gen. 14 with Scaliger’s abovementioned attack on the Franciscan Feuardent, who tried to lend a new life to the argument that the Septuagint’s divine inspiration was proven by the Jews’ commemoration of the event. Scaliger, in a withering attack on Feuardent in Thesaurus Temporum (1606), showed that the fast on the Tenth of Tevet was instituted as an annual re-enactment of chagrin, regret and remonstrance against Ptolemy’s forced translation. On Vossius’s transformation of doctrinal debates into historical ones, see Wickenden, Vossius. Rademaker, Vossius. Bergjan, “The patristic.” 80 81

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every chapter and verse, including their established use as recognised loci in legal treatises. Grotius’s intended audience consisted of Catholic Iberians and the United Provinces. The latter was formed in 1581 by the seven mainly Protestant provinces of the originally 17-province Netherlands after they entered the Union of Utrecht in 1579, in reaction to the other ten, mostly Catholic provinces’ Union of Arras. Religious tension ran high at home and abroad, between regions and groups. The hope of reunification and the threat of military defeat and further secession were never far away in the early 1600s. This may be why in a space of 6 pages Grotius uses Cicero, Seneca, Homer, Hesiod, and a host of other pagans, but not the Bible or any theologian, to argue that God is the supreme ruler of the world, that He divided mankind into states, and He is the author and guarantor of the arrangement between prince or the magistrate, and the people.82 Near the end of the book, Grotius accuses the Portuguese of slandering the Dutch by spreading rumours of their atheism, thereby scaring off the natives from trading with the Dutch. But every charge that can be brought is exceeded by the abominable wickedness ascribed to those men who acknowledge no god and no religion; for such an attitude is so abhorrent to human nature that one may truthfully deny the existence of any nation that does not cherish some innate conception of divinity and practise some form of divine worship. Yet all of these charges have been heaped upon the Hollanders by the Portuguese...83

And to support this point about human nature, and the horrors of atheism, he promptly cites Cicero—and Cicero alone. Omissions with a Direct Political Message: Melchizedek Of course, the most striking secularising omission of all is that in IPC Grotius constructed a comprehensive theory of man, society, state, stadial theory of development and mankind that worked quite well ╇ LBP, 20-6. Although doubts about the peaceful reunification of the seventeen provinces may have been prominent by 1605, all hope was not lost. The military conquest of the Spanish Netherlands remained on the cards; viz. Maurice’s campaigns. For the enduring significance of the terms of the two Unions in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, see e.g. van Dam’s introduction to Grotius, De imperio, 10-1. On fears of further secession, Posthumus Meyjes’s introduction to Grotius, Meletius, 14-5, and Motley, History, Vol. IV, chapters 38-40. 83 ╇ LPB, 266. ‘sed supra omne quod dici potest illorum est nefas, qui Deum et religionem non agnoscunt, cum id eousque ab humana natura abhorreat, ut vere dictum sit nullum esse populum, cui non appareat aliquam inesse notitiam et cultum divinitatis. Cuncta haec crimina Lusitani in Hollandos congesserunt...’ IPC, 252. 82

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without God. We cannot go through all of these ‘omissions’ here.84 The few that are presented here are chosen as typical in particular of Grotius’s neutralisation of the Bible. In one of these he invokes the same Genesis 14 we saw earlier: This same principle—namely, that allies and subjects should have a share in the spoils—was in force among God’s chosen people at all times, that is to say, from the age of Abraham to the period covered in the Books of Maccabees.f f: Genesis, xiv, at end; 2 Macc. 8.28, 30.85

He then cites the Greek custom, and its Roman imitation, of promising a tenth to the gods in case of victory, to be paid strictly in the name of the state, not the general. It is an interesting passage to choose. Earlier Grotius used it to show the legitimacy of spoils. Here he uses it to clarify the division of spoils. Gen. 14 ends with Abraham giving his share to Melchizedek, the high priest (or king) of Salem (which may

84 ╇ E.g. Grotius promises to use divine authority to confirm that self-love is due to natural reason, but never does (LPB, 7); natural reason comes from God, point proven from pagan sources alone (LPB, 12); 34-6; the state must punish its own citizens for crimes against foreigners, otherwise it becomes liable: Grotius does not use the well-worn example of Jews falling out of divine favour or crucifying Jesus (LPB, 106); 153; ‘It is generally agreed that lands captured from the enemy are not a part of the private spoils but become, instead, public property,’ without reference to the most famous example, Canaan (LPB, 161); at first no private, only communal property exists, then private property in moveables, then extended to land (LPB, 22730)—all proofs taken from thoroughly pagan sources, myths, Cicero, Seneca, absolutely nothing from Scripture; commerce and states (LPB, 230), a similar stadial theory in his Defense of ML, 85-7; some things are common to all and can never become private property, argued from Cicero and others, even Plautus’s plays, but no Christian source (LPB, 232); power not with the prince but with the people, proved from pagan history (LPB, 284-7); to disprove Welwod’s accusation of impiety, Grotius sets out to show God’s role in his theory, but then bluntly replaces Him with nature: ‘The sea is open, that is, it is free, therefore it does not permit a servitude. It is open to all, therefore no one is to be excluded. It is open by nature to all, therefore there is no one who can make a decree against anyone else, since nature is no less potent against princes and peoples than against private individuals.’ (ML, 95); oaths bind, see Euripides, Alcibiades, Augustus, Roman history, but no biblical covenant (LPB, 295-6). One could list more; the point is that Grotius’s claim is true, all his arguments work without the Bible—and all, save the very last one in IPC, work also without God. In more ways than one, IPC is the dress rehearsal before the published DIBP. 85 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 158. ‘Et hoc ipsum in Dei populo perpetuo obtinuit, ab Abrahamo scilicet ad Maccabaica usque tempora, ut socii subditique praedae participes fierent.’ IPC, 154.

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or may not be Jerusalem), who offers him bread and wine.86 Together with the Melchizedek reference in Psalm 110, and their NT counterpart, Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, these verses were among the passages most heavily debated by European theorists of all political and religious allegiances.87 Paul relates the same story as Genesis, but endows Melchizedek with much more authority. So much so that he, rather than the patriarch Abraham, is said to be the forerunner, the image of Christ. Not surprisingly, Melchizedek was used in a vast number of debates over many issues, ranging from biblical hermeneutics, sacrosanct monarchy, through papal authority within the Church and over secular arms and money, to the nature of Christ and the Eucharist.88 Melchizedek was everywhere. A notable but typical example is the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561, convened to reconcile the French Catholics and Protestants.89 It was when Beza brought up Melchizedek and the ╇ Grotius, LPB, 158. The Maccabees references Grotius adds to this are also specious: they are not about sharing spoils with allies, but with orphans and widows. This would have struck readers especially because Grotius’s next point is the distinction between allies and subjects (LPB, 159). See van Dam in Grotius, De imperio, 911-2, fn 6. The idea that the Maccabees were still God’s chosen people, and therefore the biblical passages about them also apply to the Dutch as God’s new chosen nation, is the basis of the rhetorician Pieter Aelbertsz’s play De Machabeen (1590). Instances of predikanten’s use of the Maccabee-Dutch parallel are given in Groenhuis, De predikanten, 80-1. Numerous Catholic claims to be the new Maccabees are surveyed in Kelly, “Jewish history.” Parts of the competition for being seen as the new Maccabees, and the legitimacy claims based on them, are described in Housley, “Pro Deo,” and Religious warfare. 87 ╇ And of course even before European politics. See Gianotto, Melchizedek, for the political debate around the biblical Melchizedek among Jews, between Jews and Christians, and for the role of Josephus and the early Fathers in these debates. Although Gianotto’s account takes the story only to the third century AD, it is extremely useful for understanding early modern views on Christ and Melchizedek both because the positions and dynamic described by him prefigure the early modern debates, and because it enables us to recognise the importance of certain references, as well as to trace developments in the early modern reconstruction of the historical Maccabees, and the way in which new discoveries and new arguments were converted into the construction or rebuttal of early modern legitimacy claims. For continuity in the story of Melchizedek’s use in political arguments, from biblical to early modern times, see Elgavish, “The encounter,” Kuehn, “Melchizedek,” Dohi, “Melchizedek,” Harbert, “The quest.” Also see van Dam in Grotius, De imperio, 9112, fn 6, for references to the long correspondence between Vossius and Grotius over Melchizedek. Vitoria admits the difficulty of the passage in De iure belli, 34. Also see van Dam in Grotius, De imperio, 35-8, on the contribution by Bilson to the Melchizedek debate in De perpetua ecclesiae Christi gubernatione (1611). 88 ╇ Appendix I.11. 89 ╇ Philo and Augustine thought that Melchizedek prefigured Christ (Philo, De allegoriis legum III. 26, Augustine, Against Pelagius II.30, City of God XVI.22, XVII.5, 86

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EuchaÂ�rist that the Colloquy broke down, and the French Wars of Religion began.90 Divisions lurking among the Protestants, further incited by the Catholics, were also serious enough by this time to prevent them from presenting a unified front at this initially promising attempt to stem the tide of violence. The doctrinal debates over the Melchizedek passages became the principal manifestation not only of the Catholic-Protestant, but also of the intra-Protestant divisions. The most relevant instance is the Belgic Confession, which was presented at Poissy. Though mostly copied from the French Confession of 1559, it inserted several references to Melchizedek (from Gen. 14 and Heb. 7). One of these came in Article 18 in order to ‘confess, against the heresy of the Anabaptists,’ that Christ wholly assumed flesh. The use of Melchizedek as a prefiguration of Christ in Article 21 on the Atonement is also important.91 The reference to Melchizedek is absent from the 1559 French ConÂ� XX.21, etc.). See also Hippolytus, Refutatio haeresium (the same as his book against Callixtus), VII.36 and X.20, and Martí, Pugio fidei, 125. Wycliffe thought that Melchizedek was the ideal ruler, and his decisive break with Church authority came when he questioned Augustine’s interpretation of Melchizedek in Gen. 14 and Heb. 7. Ghosh, Wycliffite heresy, 46-8, Lahey, Philosophy, 48 and passim. Interestingly, Wycliffe’s position resembles nothing so closely as the Kabbalistic view of MelchiÂ� zedek as ‘the king who rules with complete sovereignty:’ Zohar, 1:86b-87a. Further examples of Melchizedek’s importance in Christian theology throughout the ages are given in Appendix I.11. Also see Boccaccio, Decameron, “The three rings,” in which Melchizedek and Saladin become friends. First day, third story, 39-41. The redoubtable Dirk Bouts was already mentioned in the Scaliger chapter for his scandalously historical, ‘Judaising’ altarpiece at Leuven, the centrepiece of which, the Last Supper, had to be repainted in compliance with specific ecclesiastical instructions to stop it from resembling a Jewish supper quite so faithfully. The top left side panel of the same altarpiece shows Melchizedek presenting Abraham with bread and wine, both of them in priest-kingly regalia, and kneeling down to each other (Fig. 9). 90 ╇Since the 1930s, the meaning and the significance of Melchizedek as the paramount biblical symbol in debates over religious authority became a bit neglected. For Beza’s Poissy speech see de Melin, “Rome et Poissy” and Evenett, “Claude.” See also de Ruble’s publication and commentary on the notes of a participant at Poissy, probably d’Espence, “Journal,” and Petris, La plume, 34-40, 419-28. Similarly to the Maccabees, our current understanding of the Reformation would be greatly helped by further research to explore the texts that use Melchizedek, the separate strands of exegesis and argument surrounding his figure—such as the nature of Christ and the Eucharist, pope-king-emperor relations, the priestly office, tithes, pacifism—and the relationship between these strands. 91 ╇ Article 21: ‘We believe that Jesus Christ is a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek—made such by an oath—and that he presented himself in our name before his Father, to appease his wrath with full satisfaction by offering himself on the tree of the cross and pouring out his precious blood for the cleansing of our sins, as the prophets had predicted.’

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Figure 9. Dirk Bouts the Elder, Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek, 1464-7, a panel from the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament, Church of St. Peter, Leuven. Note the controversial choice of depicting these figures as equal. Source: Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon.

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fession. Guido de Bräs, and whoever else wrote up the Belgic ConÂ� fession, held Melchizedek important enough to insert this reference even at the risk of undermining the unity of the French-Dutch Protestant front at Poissy, and thereby sacrificing the political gains that the Protestants achieved. In addition to the aforementioned intensity of the debates around Melchizedek, from ancient times to Wycliffe, the case of the Belgic Confession also illustrates the early modern Dutch intensity of the Melchizedek debate, and further underlines the deceptive casualness and real importance of Grotius sidestepping it in IPC, with conspicuously truncated citations and a carefully neutralised interpretation. Grotius must have known about these debates, at the very least about those surrounding the Belgic Confession. Consequently, in his discussion of Church and State he made a very loud point with the silent half of his exegesis of the explosive story of Abraham and Melchizedek. He would talk about Abraham at war, guided by the same rationale as Pericles or Cato in their relationship with their troops (who would follow more loyally if their chiefs were not selfaggrandising); but he would not contemplate Abraham facing the same problem as a king or a general who is first commissioned by the state to wage war, and who has to demonstrate after his victory the continued authority of the state over him as he is rewarding the troops and thanking the deities. By refusing to enter this debate, by conspicuously ignoring one of the key biblical passages for State-Church relations—especially after he just used the same reference several times in support of other points—Grotius signally broke with the legal and exegetical tradition that became increasingly unsuited to the challenge of his times. Cunaeus’s De Republica Hebraeorum raised a furore by undercutting every legitimacy claim derived from Melchizedek.92 His overt, and Grotius’s covert, neutralisation of this pivotal figure in theologico-political debates may be a specific instance of Leiden cooperation. Selective Citation, Pagan Superiority: Judges of Genesis Let us take another example of this humanist lawyer reading the Bible inventively for rhetorical advantage. In chapter 8 Grotius shows that 92 ╇ Among his seventeenth-century readers Heylyn cited, and respectfully disagreed with, Cunaeus’s position on Melchizedek (The history, 287). Tanner was more virulent in his disagreement: Primordia, 97-8. He was also critical of the lack of Christian faith in Cunaeus’s historical method: 130, 136. Edwards attacked Cunaeus on the same grounds. Polpoikilos sophia, 288-9.

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vengeance is just according to natural law.93 Lucretius, Cicero and other Ancients said so, and they have not been condemned for this by the most eminent theologians; therefore they must be correct.94 This is already tongue-in-cheek. The principle that vengeance can be just is taken from the Ancients; its validity is confirmed by the theologians’ silence (and Grotius pokes fun at the good Doctors many times in IPC), and finally by instances from scriptural history. To add insult to injury, he cites the aftermath of the Flood, when all survivors were members of the same household, but did not belong to any commonwealth. Yet the right to punish existed, which shows that it is a natural law, preceding and superior to civil law. Noah’s Ark was one of the most often used images of chosen nation theorists, whether monarchists or republicans, Calvinists, Catholics, Anabaptists, visionary theocrats or Holy Roman Emperors, and especially so in the waterbound and ship-happy Lowland Protestants, a sea-faring nation living largely on reclaimed land.95 These all hinged on the premise that Noah’s family did constitute a divine polity. Grotius wittily undercut all Noahide legitimacy claims with this one move, and in agreement with Cunaeus he put the biblical story to better use as a piece of historical evidence for pre-state punishment.96 The actual reference is Gen. 9.6, which cites as: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ He leaves out the final clause: ‘for in the image of God made he man.’ I looked at the structure of chapter 8 to try to figure out the reason for this striking omission.97 Chapter 8 is tightly and rigorously constructed. Its starting point is justice in private war. Private war is unacceptable within the state, but ╇ Grotius, LPB, 89-90. ╇ Grotius, Defense of ML, 86: eminent theologians believe that there was no property in Paradise. What can make their speculations somewhat more probable is not more theology, but historical and anthropological facts concerning, for instance, the Essenes and the Americans. Grotius is even more dismissive of theologians in IPC, e.g. LPB, 56 ff. 95 ╇ Everhard van Reyd, for example, grounds Dutch legitimacy on both Noah and the Maccabees. Reyd, Historie der Nederlandtscher oorlogen (first published posthumously in 1650). Also Horn, Arca Noae. Other examples in Groenhuis, De predikanten, 80-1, and Schama, Embarrassment. 96 ╇ To counter this chapter, which later became ML, in Mare clausum Selden simply replaced Grotius's right to punish with property, and argued that the Earth’s surface was owned collectively by Noah and his sons. 97 ╇ Consider, for example, the sheer size of the secondary literature on Hobbes’s mis-citation of the phrase “The fool hath said in his heart…” IPC is a veritable catalogue of these. 93 94

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private vengeance is more acceptable than the preceding, first injury. This gradation of justice, the continued presence of natural law under the surface of the civil, is already telling.98 Grotius then refers back to his earlier contention that private wars can be just outside the state. ‘Necessity based upon a superior law’ can therefore render his Ninth and Twelfth Laws dormant, ‘and it is understood that this necessity arises when judicial means for the attainment of our rights are defective.’99 Gradation and proportionality apply here, too. A little delay in the court trial of a debt does not authorise the creditor to break into the debtor’s house and seize his assets, or to enslave him. But what happens when judicial means are continuously defective, through ‘defect in law or a defect in fact’? This case is analogous to what it was before states and courts of justice were established. But in those days human beings were governed in their mutual relations solely by the six laws which we laid down first of all. Those six precepts were the source of all law, and also of the principle that each individual was the executor of his own right, a principle consonant with the natural order, as we have already remarked, and as is indicated by the conduct of other living creatures.100

Throughout the ensuing discussion Grotius writes about natural laws and self-interest that apply to all living creatures, and he explicitly includes animals.101 The very first Scripture reference we get in this discussion is Samson’s attack on the Philistines who carried off his wife (Judges 15.1-8). Grotius cites the story as a case of defending a loved one. This, as Cicero and Tacitus rightly point out, is justified by natural law. But what Grotius cites is in fact one in a string of episodes ╇ Grotius, LPB, 86. ╇ Grotius, LPB, 87. 100 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 88. ‘His casibus eo fere devenitur, quo in loco res erant, antequam respublica et judicia instituerentur, ut recte dicit Castrensis. Tunc autem secundum sex duntaxat leges, quas initio posuimus, inter homines agebatur: hinc omne jus et juris quisque sui exsecutor: quod naturaliter contingere diximus et animantia caetera nos docent.’ IPC, 88. The six precepts are given in chapter II, LPB 10-16. 101 ╇ The IPC assertion that natural law and self-interest is shared by all creatures is perfectly compatible with the claim that all creatures have natural sociability, too, and they voluntarily constrain the exercise of their natural rights in order to help their offspring or the species. Grotius’s main example in DIBP of a complex case of natural sociability is the stork: Prolegomena 6, 7, p. 8, in the de Kanter-van Hettinga edition. Compare the wildly popular and widely influential Alciato, Emblematum, Emblema XXX about the stork that nurtures the chicks, and who in turn take care of their mother in her old age. Emblem V in the 1534 Paris edition shows not only the stork nurturing its chicks, but also a grown chick carrying its parent on its back and feeding it fish. 98 99

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in which Samson’s wife is used by her own family to play tricks on Samson. In this instance her father sends her away with the Philistines, and tries to convince Samson to sleep with her younger sister instead. A very strange passage to choose, but we have seen this move before. The selective citation of Gen. 9.6 in the next paragraph exemplifies a different technique, also used throughout IPC. After evaluating SamÂ� son’s justice, Grotius writes: Accordingly, that precept of law which demands the punishment of evildoers is older than civil society and civil law, since it is derived from the law of nature, or law of nations. This assertion would seem to be supported by the Sacred Scriptures. For I find in them no reference to the existence of any civil state in the period following the Flood, during which the survivors of the human race were included in a single household, yet I do find reference to a law of that period which commands that evil deeds be punished: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ (Gen. 9.6)102

As we saw, Grotius leaves out the clause, ‘for in the image of God made he man.’ In the context it means that God’s authority, not man’s, is the underlying cause of this right. When it comes to pre-political ius, Grotius accepts the argument that God’s law precedes and remains superior to civil law. What he seems to reject with this tailored citation, the inclusion of animals in this account of natural sociability and law, and through the superiority ascribed to pagan sources, is the Christian version of this argument, which says that man is special, and owes God for having natural rights that other creatures lack. One is tempted to chalk this up to Grotius being in a hurry, not bothering to check his references. But in the next sentence he states that this law is subordinate to another, also laid down in Gen. 9, which ‘delivers beasts into man’s service.’ Then he begins to discuss the idea that wicked men are ‘stripped, as it were, of all likeness to God or humanity’—Grotius practically cites the other half of the biblical verse in a context that gives it the opposite meaning. He attributes this idea of wicked men as beasts to both ‘the theologians’ (Aquinas is the only one he cites) and the philosophers: Democritus, Seneca and Aristotle are quoted at length. Finally, we come to pre-state human society.103 102 ╇ LPB, 90. ‘Lex igitur illa quae maleficos punire jubet, cum ex jure naturae sive gentium descendat, civili societate et lege est antiquior. Quod a divina scriptura non videtur alienum, in qua post orbem submersum, cum in una domo reliquiae essent generis humani, civitatem non video, legem video, quae maleficia puniri jubet: Qui sanguinem hominis effudit, per hominem sanguis ejus effunditor.’ IPC, 90. 103 ╇ LPB, 92.

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Instead of problematising current accounts of Grotius’s system of natural law, all I hope to show here is that Grotius misquoted Gen. 9.6 for a pointedly secularising purpose.104 If he included the image clause, man’s natural right would rest on God’s gift and not on necessity, and Grotius’s argument would become open to every theological debate over the respective status and relative cognisance of every kind of divine law.105 Necessity and self-interest were more promising cornerstones for a new law of nations that Catholics and Protestants could accept and live by. Steering Clear from All Religions: the IPC and the Vindiciae It is important to realise that Grotius’s Bible-reading techniques in IPC do not simply undermine Catholic interpretations, they truly secularise. We already saw his counterargument to the Mennonites, and illustrated his rejection of all Dutch sacred nation theories. Let me suggest that, on the one hand, chapter 4 of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos may have been a source for IPC and, on the other, that it is significant that Grotius refused to adopt those arguments from this ‘handbook of international Calvinist resistance’ and foreign intervention that mixed politics with religion.106 On p. 126 Grotius starts to explain that one can instigate a just war for the sake of one’s allies’ rights. He gives three examples: So it was that Abraham undertook to wage war in behalf of Lot and the citizens of Sodom. Constantius did likewise in behalf of the Romans against Maxentius, as did Theodosius for the cause of the Christians against Chosroes the Persian.107

The first thing we notice—by this point hopefully without much surprise—is that Grotius treats Abraham as any other historical figure.

╇ One finds an equally deliberate omission from Num. 35 on 107. ╇ Johnson, “Grotius’s use of history,” 28 on how Grotius restricted parts of DIBP to Roman examples because of the wars of religion. Gen. 9.5-6 is traditionally understood as explaining why vengeance is not just, and blood may be shed only as the very last resort: for example John Chrysostom, “Homily LXXIV.” 106 ╇See Kingdon, “Calvinism,” 214. Borschberg dates the Commentarius in Theses XI as cotemporaneous with IPC (Grotius, Commentarius, 197), and establishes Â�Grotius’s familiarity with the Vindiciae and Beza’s Du droit des magistrats (75-81); it is probably not a stretch then to say that they also had an effect on IPC, traceable in the text. 107 ╇ LPB, 127. ‘Sic Abrahamus pro Lotho et Sodomi civibus bellum suscipit, sic Constantius pro Romanis contra Maxentium, Theodosius pro Christianis contra Chosroen Persam.’ IPC, 124. 104 105

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The OT has no claim to preferential treatment.108 But which AbrahamLot passage is he talking about? Presumably not the one in which Abraham confronts the Lord over Lot, Sodom, and Gomorrah, for surely Grotius would not call this ‘a just war.’ The other possibility is Genesis 14, which he used at least six times in IPC so far, in six different contexts, in six different ways. Interestingly, Vitoria uses the same sequence of references in De Indis to discuss the same issue, though his conclusion was not one that Grotius could accept: For there is no doubt, as Cajetan also asserts (Secunda Secundae, qu. 40, art. 1), that the cause of allies and friends is a just cause of war, a State being quite properly able, as against foreign wrongdoers, to summon foreigners to punish its enemies. And this is confirmed by the fact that this was a method very much in vogue among the Romans for the extension of their Empire; that is, they brought aid to their allies and friends and so making a just war came, by right of war, into possession of fresh provinces. Yet the Roman Empire is approved by St. Augustine (De civitate Dei, bk. 5 [bk. 3]) and by St. Thomas (Opusculum 21) as a lawful one. And Sylvester reckoned Constantine the Great as Emperor, as St. Ambrose did Theodosius. Now, there does not seem to be any other juridic title whereby the Romans came into possession of the world, save in right of war, and the most especial cause of their wars was the defense and protection of their friends [Non videtur autem quo alio iuridicio titulo venerint Romani in possessionem orbis nisi iure belli, cuius maximae occasiones fuerunt defensio et vindicatio sociorum.]. In just the same way Abraham championed the cause of the King of Salem and of other kings who had struck a treaty with him, and he fought against four kings of that region, though they had done him personally no wrong (Genesis, ch. 14). This is the seventh and the last title whereby the Indians and their lands could have come or might come into the possession and lordship of Spain.109

Is this Grotius’s source? If so, he is getting the story all wrong. ConÂ� stantine’s famous victory over Maxentius at the Pons Milvius in 312 was celebrated as the victory of Christianity over the pagan world. Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue that Constantine won this battle as a formal ally of the Roman people, or for that matter of 108 ╇ ‘Historical sources, in particular drawn from biblical and classical ancient history, also play an important part [in IPC], but not, as Grotius points out, as illustrations or for the sake of providing anecdotes, but precisely as a source which reveals the ratio naturalis, the fundamental authority on which the principles governing the relations between nations are based.’ Wijffels, “Early modern,” 49. This is correct, and this equation of the value of biblical and classical loci as fundamental authorities has the same secularising effect that we find in Scaliger, Heinsius and Cunaeus. 109 ╇ Vitoria, De Indis, III.17, 112-4 in the Schätzel ed.

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Christianity, as a distinct foreign entity. Neither has any Theodosius ever encountered any of the Persian Chosroes (or Khusrow) kings.110 There was, however, another famous Christian triumph, celebrated as much as Constantine’s victory and conversion. Chosroes II sacked Jerusalem in 614, killed or enslaved a large number of Christians, and carried off the True Cross. It took 13 years for Byzantium to recapture it, its armies led by the Emperor Heraclius.111 As you can see in Appendix I.1., Abraham, Constantine and Theodosius were connected in Vitoria’s discussion on allies; yet the last thing Grotius wanted to do was subscribe to Vitoria’s conclusion that the Spanish dominion over the Indies had divine approval. In transforming Vitoria’s argument, he also added Chosroes to the picture, joined with Theodosius. Where did these references come from? The last chapter of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos deals with the question: ‘Whether neighbour princes may, or are bound by law to, aid the subjects of other princes, persecuted for true religion, or oppressed by manifest tyranny.’ This is the same subject for which Vitoria and Grotius employed the same sequence of references. The Vindiciae chapter includes the following passage: Constans favoured the orthodox Christians, Constantus, being the elder, leaned to the Arrians, and for that cause banished the learned Athanasius from Alexandria; the greatest professed adversary of the Arrians. Certainly, if any consideration in matter of confines be absolutely requisite, it must needs be amongst brethren; and notwithstanding, Constans threatened to war on his brother if he restore not Athanasius, and had without doubt performed it, if the other had long deferred the accomplishment of his desire. And if he proceeded so far for the restitution of one bishop, had it not been much more likely and reasonable for him to have assisted a good part of the people, if they 110 ╇ Theodosius I (The Great), 346-95 AD, reigned from 379. Theodosius II lived 401-450. Theodosius III, originally a tax collector, was emperor 715-7, and Theodosius IV and V both lived in the thirteenth century. Chosroes/Khosrow I lived 531-79. One of the last Sassanian kings, Chosroes II lived 590-628. In short, no Theodosius could have fought a Chosroes. But when the Byzantine Emperor Maurice, his friend and ally, was assassinated in 602, Chosroes II embarked on a protracted campaign of revenge against the Romans. In 614 he invaded and sacked Jerusalem, and carried off the remains of the Holy Cross to Ctesiphon. Heraclius recaptured lost territories from the Persians, and returned the Cross to Jerusalem in 627. 111 ╇ A few works may be mentioned to indicate the popularity and significance of these themes. Raphael and Romano painted frescoes in the Vatican about Constantine’s victory over Maxentius, and Piero della Francesca painted one at Arezzo in 1458, during attempts to retake Constantinople from the Turks, about Heraclius’s recapture of the Cross (Fig. 10).

Figure 10. Piero della Francesca, Legend of the True Cross: the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes. c. 1455-60. San Francesco, Arezzo. The Turkish menace made such references frequently rehearsed and well known. Grotius’s mistake of pitting Theodosius against Chosroes in IPC probably occurred while copying from the Vindiciae.

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chapter five implored his aid against the tyranny of those who refused them the exercise of their religion, under the authority of their magistrates and governors? So at the persuasion of Atticus the bishop, Theodosius made war on Chosroes, King of Persia, to deliver the Christians of his kingdom from persecution, although they were but particular and private persons; which certainly those most just princes, who instituted so many worthy laws, and had so great and special care of justice, would not have done, if by that fact they had supposed anything were usurped on another man’s right, or the law of nations violated.

Although this text does not feature Abraham, it makes a connection between the brotherly love of Constans and Constantus on the one hand (neither of them Constantine the Great, but close in time and morphophoneme), and the liberation of true believers from tyranny on the other—in other words, it describes a religious justification for armed intervention. It is also the only other text I found that makes the same mistake of confusing Theodosius with Heraclius. Perhaps events went something like this: Grotius reread Vitoria’s De Indis as he was preparing IPC. One of the most authoritative Calvinist responses to Catholic international law was the Vindiciae. Most of these texts used essentially the same references, but put a different interpretation on them. Grotius took Vitoria’s sequence of Abraham, Constantine and Theodosius, and he looked through the Vindiciae in an effort to invalidate Vitoria’s point about the Spanish right to the Indies. He found a good counterargument to the Catholic position— but he was not prepared to adopt the Calvinist one instead.112 This would be all the more remarkable, given the occasion for writing IPC. It would have been extremely easy for Grotius to adopt the justification for attacking Portugal and Spain, non-Calvinist states 112 ╇ He gets the references right in DIBP: 38-40 and 247. Note that the salient dividing line is not between regicides and populists. The Vindiciae allowed the murder of a tyrant, but in the same decade Juan Mariana, S.J., also approved the assassination of Henri III in De rege et regis institutione (1599). Catholic Paris, left without a ruler, maintained the claim to be the nation’s capital by setting up a representative Council of Twelve. The ‘grand design’ that Sully claimed in his Mémoires to have proposed to Henri IV and James VI/I around the time Grotius wrote IPC is one of many great counter-examples to the simplistic accounts of Protestant proto-democracy, and Catholic absolutism, that are sometimes given as the historical context for Grotius’s work. Sully proposed that France, England, Scotland, Protestant Germany, the United Provinces, Denmark, Sweden, Venice and Switzerland enter an alliance to defeat the Habsburgs, seize America from Spain, free Germany from the Emperor, drive out Spain from the Netherlands, and set up a united Christian federation of 15 European states (not including Turkey, Russia, Italy and Spain), with free trade and foreign policy under a supreme federal council.

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that oppressed ‘true believers.’ Instead, he lifted the anti-Catholic part of the argument, and eschewed all religion-based legal justification for a Dutch attack on the Iberians. The justifications he did develop were all secular—this is the only thing that made sense, if he wanted to split the Spanish-Portuguese front or to avoid religious disagreements within the Provinces, within Holland, and among the VOC subscribers. His brief note at the end of this passage, in which he says that tyrannicides are acceptable, but are all too often staged by self-serving warriors ready to imperil the entire state, may even be a veiled criticism of Calvinist and other Dutch resistance theorists’ rhetoric, and a gesture of peace toward the Iberians.113 Attention to the sensibilities of his Dutch readership would also dictate that this gesture be made through a neutralisation of the Bible, not through any particular discussion of the political problem in hand. New Genies in Old Bottles: Grotius’s Defense After Welwod took him to task over his exegesis in IPC, Grotius published a Defense of Mare liberum against Welwod. He would neither retract, nor apologise. Instead, he again denied that the Bible has relevance in law, and played wonderful extended jokes at Welwod’s and the Bible’s expense. These jokes are even more noticeable and shocking than those in IPC, as if Grotius wanted to use his retort to Welwod to draw more attention to his explicitly stated and abundantly demonstrated view regarding the Bible’s inadmissability in legal arguments. Perhaps it is fitting to look at a few, in closing. Grotius says that Welwod should not have used the Bible in his criticism, because the Bible is the source of many contentions, and it is by and large irrelevant to nation-to-nation problems.114 Moreover, God did not legislate on everything explicitly. For example, in the marriage of persons who are joined by proximate ties of blood or affinity, even if we did not have the written law of God, nevertheless it would by no means be licit to ignore that such a union is illicit, since the Roman jurists say that any such is incest by the law of nations and the Apostle Paul says that such a crime “was not even mentioned among the gentiles.” [1 Cor. 5.1] Now if anyone wishes to give a reason for this precept, he will not easily find one to which no objection can be made, or equally certain and evident as is the precept itself. And surely what need to scrutinize causes, when these are to be referred “to the judgement of God.” [Rom. 1: 32] For in these also “the 113 114

╇See Bullinger, Sermonum decades, 272. ╇ Grotius, ML, 105 ff.

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chapter five nations disclose the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them.” [Rom. 2:15]115

The point that jumps out first is that ‘the Roman jurists’ seem to enjoy a higher authority than the ‘written law of God.’116 But the devil is in the references. Contrary to Grotius’s presentation, in every one of them the Jews did something in violation of God’s explicit law, while it was the godless, natural law of the Gentiles that worked in compliance with justice. 1 Cor. 5. 1 It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. Rom. 1.32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. Romans 2 11 For there is no respect of persons with God. 12 For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; 13 (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. 14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

All three passages show Paul railing against the Jews who, in spite of the added advantage of directly revealed divine laws, broke them. ‘[K]nowing the judgment of God’ may have been a cause that needed no scrutiny, but it failed, all the same. Yet again, Grotius argues that doctrinaire usage of the Bible in a legal debate is inappropriate, and he does this by saying it outright on the one hand, and on the other by supporting his statement with twisted and subverted citations from the Bible. Rejection and subversion, in harmony of form and substance: one cannot ask for a more coherent agenda. But the Defense ╇ Grotius, ML, 105. ╇ Ranking authorities is a separate technique that we see in IPC often. LPB, 35-6, 158: reason comes first; second, Roman law; then pagan poets; at its best, Scripture confirms these sources of law. 115 116

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continues: ‘Rightly therefore in the Institutes are the natural laws, among which are also to be included certain precepts of the law of nations, said to have been established by a certain divine providence.’117 Again, we see divine authority validated by Roman law. In further support Grotius brings in Sophocles, Isocrates and other Ancients— but not a single Christian. He really is playing here. The paragraph concludes: ‘Therefore this very fact, that God has insinuated such precepts in the minds of men, is sufficient to induce obligation even if no reason is apparent.’ Even by early modern standards this is a most unusual and radical argument. Like in the IPC, in the Defense Grotius also used both content and form to make the same point: no agreement can be reached if any of the parties invoked any part of the Bible to justify their politics. To drive the point home, we saw him deploy omission, historicisation, flamboyant subversion, straightforward denial of the Bible’s applicability, and combinations of these. 3.╇ Conclusion: from Fox to Hedgehog118 There is only one thing in IPC that Grotius attributes to direct divine intervention: the Dutch track record in impressing the superiority of true Christianity upon the Indian peoples. In addition to the straightforward, earthly rewards of Dutch virtù, this success, according to Grotius, is a sign of divinely ordained expansion of trade and missionary activities. It is in this sense that the war against the Spaniards and the Portuguese in the Indies is divinely—but never biblically—justified: In fact, there is nothing that serves the cause of the true religion better than such acts of kindness [i.e. defending the natives against the Spanish]. Care must be taken to keep men safe, lest the hope of converting them (as the Church Fathers were formerly wont to say) should perish with their bodies. The Indian peoples must be shown what it means to be a Christian, in order that they may not believe all Christians to be as the Spaniards are. Let those peoples look upon religion stripped of false symbols, commerce devoid of fraud, arms unattended by injuries. Let them marvel at the faith which forbids that even infidels should be neglected. In achieving these ends, we shall be preparing men for God.119 ╇ Grotius, Defense, 105. ╇ After Isaiah Berlin on Tolstoy and his road to eventual conversion. Berlin, The hedgehog. 119 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 316. ‘Nec sane quidquam magis interest verae religionis, quam istud fieri. Servandi sunt homines, ne cum ipsis (ut Patres quondam loquebantur) 117 118

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Commerce is God’s instrument for spreading the true faith, though not (of course) through the Spanish and the Portuguese; for these false believers only use commercial opportunities to oppress the natives and acquire luxuries for themselves.120 In an audacious twist, Grotius describes the contents of the recently seized Sta. Catarina to illustrate that the Portuguese have all the wrong motives for their commercial enterprises; therefore the Dutch can keep their goods.121 The Dutch must persevere in the Indies, and go on to establish a ‘substantial presence’ in China. He goes so far as to argue that God guided the hand of the States General when they helped create the VOC.122 The very end of IPC is a prayer with as fervent a belief in interventionism as any medieval saint’s: God chose the Dutch to convert the heathen in the newly discovered worlds.123 How much of this was in earnest and how much was formulaic is not relevant to our present thesis; but this concluding section of IPC may prefigure De veritate, perhaps the most extraordinary book in its genre because of its radical minimisation of revelation in favour of reason, and quickly translated into Arabic, Persian and Chinese for missionary work.124 The point is that Grotius does not ground the idea of a Dutch commercial mission in prophecy, or derive a chosen nation theory from the Bible. His main concern is to come up with a legal framework that all parties, irrespective of religious convictions, could agree on. For this the Bible had to be neutralised, and Grotius rose to the task with skill, aplomb, verve and ingenuity. spes exstinguatur conversionis. Ostendi Indis debet, quid sit esse Christianum, ne putent Christianos omnes hoc esse quod Hispanos. Videant religionem sine simulacris, mercaturam sine fraudibus, arma sine injuriis. Admirentur fidem, quae negligi vetet etiam infideles. Hoc erit homines Deo praeparare.’ IPC, 299. 120 ╇ Catholicism certainly lost some credibility at this time through its association with commercial imperialism. The Protestants were not without unease, either. Schama, Embarrassment. 121 ╇ Much the same argument, including blaming Portuguese moral shortcomings for the failure of missionary attempts, has been already made at least equally amusingly by an extraordinary Portuguese writer and adventurer, Fernão Mendes Pinto (1510?-1583), in his immensely popular Peregrinaçao. For thought-provoking parallels with Grotius’s concept of man, see Rubies, “Oriental voices.” Camões’s Disparates da India, written while in jail in Goa, also come to mind. Portuguese corruption in the Indies was well known to the Dutch audience before IPC was Â�written, for example from the Navigatio ac itinerarium by Johan Huighens van Â�Lynschotten (1583). Heesakkers, Linschoten, 187-265. 122 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 339-43. 123 ╇ Grotius, LPB, 365-6. 124 ╇ Brugman, “Arabic scholarship,” 210. Posthumus Meyjes, “Grotius as a theologian.” Heering, Hugo Grotius, 229-30, 239-40.

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Still, these closing pages of IPC seem to go against the rest of the work, in which he parried all legal attacks, but also carefully avoided religious arguments, in defense of the Dutch position. The claim of religious orthodoxy and the other party’s heterodoxy inevitably leads to a zero-sum game in which no agreement can be reached without one party’s total defeat, or the revision of the starting claims. Whether Grotius’s final prayer was due to a reluctance to give up a customary gladiator’s weapon in the arena of early seventeenth-century international relations, or it expressed Grotius’s genuine belief and fervour, it serves as a reminder to avoid historical determinism or the imposition of any over-abstracted explanation of such works, however definitive these works may later turn out to be. Gomarus, chief ideologue of the Counter-Remonstrants, also taught at Leiden. Many people other than the Leideners attempted to develop a secular or a minimalist Christian historiography acceptable to all the warring factions: Lorenzo Valla, Isaac Casaubon, Fra Sarpi, de Thou, La Popeliniére, the Bollandists and Mabillon come to mind, and we catch a glance at the English debate in Dorman, Selden, and Hobbes.125 Even after due respect to the contingency of historical events, we can still say that the causes of the events are clear. Once the Reformation successfully broke the monopoly of the papacy over the interpretation of the Bible, and the humanistically educated European nobility recognised the possibilities offered by a wholesale renegotiation of the religious and secular arrangements, bloodshed became inevitable. That allowed for no other solution than a re-construction of the power structure on the basis of a new kind of sovereignty, and a legal framework that became increasingly secular. Leiden is a synecdoche of this story, and in IPC we see Grotius make good use of what he learnt from his Leiden colleagues about strategies of secularisation.126 This chapter showed that the conspicuous and consistent idiosyncrasy of Grotius’s biblical interpretation was an important part of his revolutionary effort to secularise natural law. In IPC and related works, Grotius systematically deployed a range of exegetical tech125 ╇ Tuck on Grotius and secularisation: “Grotius and Selden,” 516-7. For more on Grotius and Dorman, see Appendix I.7. 126 ╇Note that here we only looked at how IPC combated Bible-based exclusivism; plenty of other options were available. Language, a non-Christian chosen nation theory (lost tribes, sole inheritance of Egyptian and/or Kabbalistic wisdom, most direct descent from a non-Christian hero), ancient constitutionalism, racism, Europe-centrism, natural masterhood and similar discourses could also be, and were, turned into organising principles of exclusivism.

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niques in order to demonstrate that the Bible, like all texts, is open to multiple interpretations, and susceptible to hijacking by rival agendas. This strategy aimed to render the Bible inadmissible as evidence in legal disputes and political legitimacy claims. The consistent instrumentality of Grotius’s use of the Bible in IPC cannot be dismissed as mere legalistic opportunism, or described as an atheistic move. Rather, Grotius’s exegetical strategy was motivated by pacifism, and a desire to protect religion from politicisation. This chapter positioned his secularisation strategy in the intellectual environment of the Leiden Circle, and showed how competing Catholic, Calvinist, and Mennonite political readings of the same key biblical passages during the DutchIberian conflict provided the immediate occasion for writing IPC. In order to construct a natural law theory that was independent from, and therefore acceptable to, all religious sides, it was necessary to ensure that the Bible have no final word in law or politics, lest its invocation link disagreements to belief, and thereby render them impossible to resolve. In conclusion, let me restate once more that I do not argue that Grotius did not believe in God, or that he set out in IPC to undermine the Bible. Instead, he presented an unbroken string of forced interpretations with shocking implications for just war theory. He did this in order to show that the Bible should not be used in international law at all, because using it would only perpetuate the situation in which all debates about legitimacy and international relations remained impossible to settle, anchored as they were in rival traditions of biblical exegesis. It was not quickly, as the VOC had hoped, in opportunistic and short-termist isolation, but as a particular instance of this broad realisation that Grotius set out to show the futility of trying to settle the legitimacy of the Sta. Catarina’s seizure within a framework of legal discourse heavily reliant on Christianity. At the beginning of IPC, of De republica emendanda, of the Commentarius, of De imperio, and at the end of De antiquitate, in the passages cited above, Grotius declares that one major cause of continued disagreement and conflict is the category mistake made by those who try to derive universal and divine laws from all and/or any part of the Bible. His arguments, by contrast, are no less compelling without Scripture, or even in the absence of God. What we see unfolding in IPC is simply Grotius making good on his promise. Sometimes he used the Bible as a source of mere historical incidents, sandwiched carefully between non-biblical historical events in order to show that the Bible had no claim to special privi-

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leges; at other times he used or omitted it in a provocative fashion to underscore and illustrate the dangers of its application in international law. It would not be hard or far-fetched to argue that one of the reasons why Grotius removed the Bible from politics was his genuine faith in the Good Book. The fact remains that his use of biblical references in IPC indicate that he was already thinking in terms of the essentially secular, new system of laws that we find in De iure belli ac pacis.

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Chapter six

Conclusion and Outlook In this book, the model of secularisation as a process was presented through a narrative with a dual focus. On the one hand, secularisation describes a generic set of solutions to the generic problem of repeatedly renewed religious conflict, including the development of ChrisÂ� tian minimalism, and the suspension of the debate concerning the content of the divine law as its knowability and applicability became increasingly contested.1 In this sense, the process of secularisation described here is a common denominator in the specific solutions recently studied under labels like laicisation, politiques, modÂ�erates resisting confessionalisation, irenicist patriots, a-confessionalists, deconfessionalists, and anti-confessionalists.2 On the other hand, this book offers a close and unmediated look at the short yet seminal period of intense localised secularising activity undertaken by the Leiden Circle. Through this dual focus, we saw the secularising project work itself out through numerous texts, and across a range of genres. This study arranged these genres and texts to begin with Scaliger’s elevation of historiography into a master discipline, and followed its effects in Scaliger’s students’ work. We traced its adaptation by Heinsius to literary criticism in order to neutralise forms of Christian instruction, 1 ╇ This suspension had a profound secularising effect. It could be accomplished by reprioritising natural over divine law. Another way was to continue presenting divine law as the overarching framework for all natural, civil, and other types of law, but effectively devoid divine law of content. Moderate neoskepticism and Leiden’s epistemic humility exemplify the means whereby divine law could be emptied of practical content. 2 ╇ For “laicization,” albeit for the late eighteenth century, see Van Kley, “Christianity.” Sheehan, “Enlightenment.” Irenic patriotism: Schmidt, Vaterlandsliebe; idem, “Irenic.” Moderates against confessionalisation: Racaut, “The sacrifice.” A-confessionalism: Visser, “Escaping.” Anti-confessionalism: Stillman, Philip Sidney. “Secularisation” in specific cases: Hunter, Secularisation. Fix, Prophecy. Hotson’s warning against detaching irenic projects from their time and place is as salutary as Forbes’s warning against ‘premature secularisation.’ Hotson, “Irenicism.” Forbes, Hume’s. The present attempt to formulate secularisation as a contingent, cumulative, unintended and incomplete historical process does not depend on teleology any more than other detections and labelings of patterns in the historical evidence do.

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from tragedy to education, and to comparative mythography, to explore non-Christian avenues to eternal life. We saw Cunaeus’s adaptation of it to a strong epistemological and political message in a Menippean satire against the theologians. We saw how Scaliger’s submission of Christianity to historiography informed Grotius’s historicisation of the Bible, and underpinned a variety of rhetorical strategies for demonstrating that the Bible was an inadmissible source in international law. The cross-section presented here of the discourses and genres pursued by the Leiden Circle, from philology and historiography, through poetry and satire to law, is meant to support the claim that secularisation took many forms. The contextualisation of the individual writings, in turn, has shown that what united them was a common agenda, namely a similar and often co-ordinated reaction to political problems that ranged from keeping the provinces together, through finding an alternative to zero-sum religious national identities, to justifying the seizure of the Sta. Catarina. The evidence that substantiated this model of the secularising project’s unraveling was twofold. The analysis of Leiden Circle texts was contextualised in the personal connections between Scaliger and the second generation of Leiden secularisers. It was also anchored in the political challenges of the day, from the reunification of the provinces and the consolidation of Zeeland through the Vorstius controversy to the battle between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, up to the Synod of Dordt. Although the genres and disciplines that played out the secularising project, fashioned in response to pressing practical issues in the domestic and international politics of the Dutch Republic, started in this case from Scaliger’s historiography, a similar story could have been told through theology, the natural sciences, comparative mythography, or law and political thought. If Leiden secularisation was to be told through theology, Franciscus Junius the Elder, Arminius, UytÂ� tenbogaert, Episcopius and Grotius would have supplied some of the most relevant texts. The story of Leiden natural sciences responding to the political problems caused by the interference of theology would begin with Scaliger, Willerbrord Snell and the two Huygenses. ComÂ� parative mythography would have to include Scaliger, Cunaeus, Vossius, L’Empereur, Erpenius, Cocceius, and so on. Law and political thought would certainly include Junius, Lipsius, Cunaeus and Grotius.

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These alternative tracings of the secularising process at Leiden are equally valid. Irrespective of whether secularised politics and/or a theology purified from politics was the intended outcome, or merely the irenicist tactical neutralisation of theological politics, any of these discourses can provide a useful analytical category and starting-point to following the advances, retreats, and renewed secularising responses to the otherwise intractable problems of early modern political theology. Read in this new way, the Leiden Circle becomes emblematic of early modern secularisation as a whole. The Leiden Circle was intenseÂ�ly connected to other secularising groups, such as French New Historians, German irenic patriots, and Italian humanists and neoskeptics. These linkages had cumulative effects, above all in the seventeenth-century England of Selden, Cherbury, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Barksdale, Harrington, Locke, Newton, Cudworth, Tillotson and Clarke. Although the Leiden Circle represents only one secularising group among several, it features a few elements that make it an excellent illustration of the full story, while also giving it an iconic significance. Whether or not one agrees with posterity’s verdict that Grotius was “the father of international law,” and 1648 was the beginning of “the Westphalian system” of nation-states that we still live in, the very fact of this widespread perception is a sufficient indication of the importance and illustrative power of Dutch secularisation for modernity. The demise of the Leiden Circle in 1618 was brought about by a Calvinist reaction that issued in the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia: a moment that remains a powerful icon for the secularised system of nation-states we live in. Books on law continue to refer to Grotius as “the father of international law,” and books on international relations continue to take “the Westphalian system” as a given. The intellectual historian has every reason to dispute these meanings, but no excuse for ignoring or denying their existence. It is also clear to me that while historical provisos can be, and should be, added to these law and international relations genealogies of modernity, they do not detract from the utility of using Grotius and Westphalia as figureheads and landmarks. Therefore the task of the intellectual historian in this case is not to convince lawyers and international relations experts that their specialties arose ex nihilo, and that their interest in Grotius is unjustified. Rather, the task is to begin to develop a richer and better grounded understanding of the connection between Grotius and modern international law, Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia, and between the Peace of Westphalia

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and the modern world order, with its nation-states and normatively secular international law. An account of secularisation at Leiden, the hint of a broader account from the mid-fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, and the contextualisation of Grotius as a Leidener, are the three initial contributions this book has made towards this larger project. The Leiden Circle’s range of contributions to the process of secularisation, the issue at the heart of this book, helps to prepare the ground for examining the place of Westphalia as a historical event, and as a useful reference point for the post-Leiden story of Western, colonial, and global secularisation. It remains important to remember the caveats developed in the chapters above. “Secular” and “religious” do not necessarily form a zero-sum game; one could secularise to avoid disputes, or out of epistemic humility and the unknowability of matters of belief. This brings the issue of intention into focus. There is nothing self-contradictory about a religious thinker who realises that stopping violence sustained by religious legitimacy claims requires removing religion from law, politics, and other aspects of life. Such removal has a secularising effect, even if done primarily to save religion from worldly contamination. In this sense, “secularisation” is intentional. Yet these thinkers may not recognise at the time that removing Christian theology from politics and law hastens the creation of a worldview that accommodates Christianity less and less. Or they may see this as a possibility, even a risk—recall the early modern warnings about atheism—but believe that natural reason or even political necessity will save Christianity, in an altered form, from disappearing as a touchstone of truth claims. In a third alternative, some thinkers sought to replace Christianity with another religion, eclectic, syncretistic, or invented entirely anew. In all three cases, whether the secularising outcome was seen and feared, not seen, or seen and desired, the efforts to remove Christian arguments from some or all aspects of debate equally contributed to secularisation, without upholding secularism (let alone atheism) as a norm in any way. A second caveat is that the proposed historical account of secularisation holds irrespective whether the religious component of the arguments examined was used as a pretext, or earnestly believed. The distinction between the end-points of non-secular and secular shifts, and revolves around what was regarded as a necessary, and/or authoritative, justification of a statement. A natural scientist may have posited a theorem or observation without invoking theology. Yet natural

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science cannot be regarded as fully secularised unless the natural scientist has assurances that s/he will not be held theologically responsible, and will be free to disregard the pressure of a potential or actual challenge to reconcile the theorem or observation with a theological statement. A substitution of “law,” “politics,” “history,” “logic” or “inÂ�Â� terÂ�national relations” for “natural science” in this formula Â�facilitates a discourse-based conceptualisation of the process of secularisation, and of the norm of secularism. This consideration may help to clarify why I describe the actual historical process of secularisation, but not the underlying need for it, as contingent, cumulative, unintended, and incomplete. When secularism as an outcome was intended, secularisation was unacceptable and unsuccessful. Any secularising strategy had to be gradual and circumspect, or it risked failure due to overwhelming incompatibility with societal norms and/or the polemical race to apply the label of atheism. The historical act of proposing a radically secularised worldview, or even a radically secularised reformulation of one discourse, was unlikely to be accepted—even though it may have set a benchmark, rendering later approximations more acceptable. MachiaÂ�velli, Hobbes and Spinoza are cases in point. The controversy they engendered is a better measure of their influence than the number of their self-confessed followers (unlike the cases of Plato, Aristotle or Christ). Cumulative changes were needed before the societal, political and disciplinary pressure to reconcile a theorem or observation with theology disappeared. Finally, a look at our world yields readily evident signs of the ways in which secularisation is incomplete. History provides similarly immediate reminders of the difference between secularisation and secularism. States seeking to buttress their legitimacy claims through religion are the norm throughout history. Perhaps the most important departure that made the West unique was not the rise of states (city-, nation- or federal), but secularisation. This included, as one aspect, the rise of secular states. To continue, this process had to battle not only the Church, but also secular actors’ powerful tradition of, continued trend toward, and ever-present temptation of, religious legitimacy claims. Examples have been given of chosen nation theories from medieval France to seventeenth-century Holland. This is why attempts to connect, for instance, GalliÂ� canism and Anglicanism to modernity continue to be frustrating. They had religious and secularising variants, all of which strengthened the State vis-à-vis the Church, but the religious ones proved to be a

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Trojan horse. Like centralisation, Gallicanism, Anglicanism, and similar take-overs are connected to modernity indirectly, through secularisation. In short, the rise of the state in itself is neither modern nor distinctive to early modern Europe. Secularisation is. It is important to realise that the religious state was for centuries a functioning and powerful alternative to the modern, secular state. Centralisation and rationalisation, from improving the efficiency of tax collection, police and post, through building roads and raising standing armies, to regulating trade and reducing ecclesiastical, municipal and aristocratic privileges in favour of an all-encompassing state, are neither inherently nor necessarily secularising. At the height of their theological politics, Spain and France went a long way toward building states that in retrospect may seem as advances toward and approximations of their modern form. The systemic shocks they suffered, like the French Revolution, problematise this genealogy somewhat. Secularism, which in its ideal-form is uniquely modern (albeit in reality far from unchallenged), is easily separable from either centralisation or rationalisation. I think that many features of modernity we tend to find attractive, from the scientific model to the celebration instead of suppression of diversity, obtained their current form through secularisation. At the same time, our lack of awareness of, and appreciation for, the contingency of secularisation is heavily implicated in our persistent inability to resolve political problems with a religious dimension. Similarly to how the Leiden Circle removed some causes of conflict by historicising the Bible, let me suggest that the recollection of the historical contingency of what is known as the “Westphalian system” can offer pragmatic benefits to those who seek to contain violence today. One of the reasons why the international community regularly fails to prevent and to resolve conflicts with a religious dimension is that Western concepts that currently frame international law and conflict resolution methods are not simply “secular,” but were designed to be blind to religious legitimacy claims. From the fourth to the seventeenth century, Christian theology underpinned all aspects of thought, from the natural sciences to international relations. As the Reformation eroded Catholic doctrinal monopoly, much of European thought broke down. Secularisation is the process whereby Europe’s WeltÂ� anschauung was rebuilt without theology. European conquest spread and imposed secular norms around the world, often with stabilising effect. However, when the historical contingency of secularisation is

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forgotten, and its norms are mistaken for universal ones, conflicts with a religious dimension become irresolvable. Had it not been tragic, it would be ironic to note the contrast of this outcome with pacifism, the original driving force behind secularisation as a historical and intellectual process. The primary obstacle to preventing conflict with a religious dimension is persistent, but rectifiable ignorance of history. Any attempt at improvement must begin by addressing this underlying failure. Misunderstandings and real-life disasters persist at least partly because ignorance of secularisation’s history has become institutionally embodied and embedded. In the social sciences at present, there is no more important subject to address than this systemic cause of conflict: the forgotten contingency of secularisation.

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Appendix

Excerpts from the exegetical tradition 1.╇ Texts for Deut. 20: Vitoria, Clement of Alexandria, Turnbull, Gibbens, Aretius 1.1.╇ Francisco de Vitoria, De Iure Belli, translation by John Pawley Bate, The Classics of International Law. Original in Schätzel, supr. cit., 148-52. 34. With regard to another question, namely, what degree of stress is lawful in a just war, there are also many doubts. The first is: Whether it is lawful in war to kill the innocent. It seems that it is; because, in the first place, the Sons of Israel slew children at Jericho, as appears from Joshua, ch. 6, and afterwards Saul slew children in Amalek (I Samuel, ch. 15), and in both these cases it was by the authority and at the bidding of God [utrumque ex auctoritate et mandato Domini]. “Now, whatever is written is written for our instruction,” as appears from Romans, ch. 15. Therefore, if a war of the present day be just, it will be lawful to kill the innocent. 35. With regard to this doubt, let my first proposition be: The deliberate slaughter of the innocent is never lawful in itself. This is proved, firstly, by Exodus, ch. 23: “The innocent and righteous slay thou not.” Secondly, the basis of a just war is a wrong done, as has been shown above. But wrong is not done by an innocent person. Therefore war may not be employed against him. Thirdly, it is not lawful within a State to punish the innocent for the wrongdoing of the guilty. Therefore this is not lawful among enemies. Fourthly, were this not so, a war would be just on both sides, although there was no ignorance, a thing which, as has been shown, is impossible. And the consequence is manifest, because it is certain that innocent folk may defend themselves against any who try to kill them. And all this is confirmed by Deuteronomy, ch. 20, where the Sons of Israel were ordered to take a certain city by force and to slay every one except women and little ones. 36. Hence it follows that even in war with the Turks it is not allowable to kill children- This is clear, because they are innocent. Aye, and the same holds with regard to the women of unbelievers. This is clear, because so far as the war is concerned, they are presumed innocent; but it does not hold in the case of any individual woman who is certainly guilty. Aye, and this same pronouncement must be made among Christians with regard to harmless agricultural folk, and also with regard to the rest of the peaceable civilian population, for all these are presumed innocent until

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appendix the contrary is shown. On this principle it follows that it is not lawful to slay either foreigners or guests who are sojourning among the enemy, for they are presumed innocent, and in truth they are not enemies. The same principle applies to clerics and members of a religious order, for they in war are presumed innocent unless the contrary be shown, as when they engage in actual fighting. 37. Second proposition: Sometimes it is right, in virtue of collateral circumstances, to slay the innocent even knowingly, as when a fortress or city is stormed in a just war, although it is known that there are a number of innocent people in it and although cannon and other engines of war can not be discharged or fire applied to buildings without destroying innocent together with guilty. The proof is that war could not otherwise be waged against even the guilty and the justice of belligerents would be balked. In the same way, conversely, if a town be wrongfully besieged and rightfully defended, it is lawful to fire cannon-shot and other missiles on the besiegers and into the hostile camp, even though we assume that there are some children and innocent people there. Great attention, however, must be paid to the point already taken, namely, the obligation to see that greater evils do not arise out of the war than the war would avert. For if little effect upon the ultimate issue of the war is to be expected from the storming of a fortress or fortified town wherein are many innocent folk, it would not be right, for the purpose of assailing a few guilty, to slay the many innocent by use of fire or engines of war or other means likely to overwhelm indifferently both innocent and guilty. In sum, it is never right to slay the guiltless, even as an indirect and unintended result, except when there is no other means of carrying on the operations of a just war, according to the passage (St. Matthew, ch. 13) “Let the tares grow, lest while ye gather up the tares ye root up also the wheat with them.” 38. Here a doubt may arise whether the killing of guiltless persons is lawful when they may be expected to cause danger in the future; thus, for example, the children of Saracens are guiltless, but there is good reason to fear that when grown up they will fight against Christians and bring on them all the hazards of war. Moreover, although the adult male civilians of the enemy who are not soldiers are presumed to be innocent, yet they will hereafter carry a soldier’s arms and cause the hazard named. Now, is it lawful to slay these youths? It seems so, on the same principle which justifies the incidental killing of other guiltless persons. Also (Deuteronomy, ch. 20) the Sons of Israel were ordered when assaulting any city to slay “every adult male.” Now, it can not be presumed that all of these would. My answer is that although this killing may possibly be defended, yet I believe that it is in no wise right [Respondetur ad hoc, licet posset fortasse defendi quod in tali casu possint interfici, tamen credo quod nullo modo licet], seeing that evil is not to be done even in order to avoid greater evil still, and it is intolerable that any one should be killed for a future fault. There are, moreover, other available measures of precaution against

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their future conduct, namely, captivity, exile, etc., as we shall forthwith show. Hence it follows that, whether victory has already been won or the war is still in progress, if the innocence of any soldier is evident and the soldiers can let him go free, they are bound to do so. To the argument on the opposite side my rejoinder is that the slaughter in the instances named was at the special command of God [speciali mandato Dei], who was wroth against the people in question and wished to destroy them utterly, just as he sent fire on Sodom and Gomorrah which devoured both guiltless and guilty together. He, however, is Lord of all and has not given this license as a common law [Ipse autem est Dominus omnium, nec dedit hanc licentiam ex lege communi.]. And the same answer might be made to that passage in Deuteronomy, ch. 20. But, inasmuch as what is there enjoined is in the form of a common law of war for all future time, it would rather seem that the Lord enjoined it [Sed quia illic data est lex belli communis in omne tempus futurum, potius videtur quod illud Dominus dixit] because all adult males in an enemy State are deemed guilty, and guiltless can not be distinguished from guilty. Therefore all may be killed. 1.2.╇ Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book 2, chapter 18: “The Mosaic Law the Fountain of All Ethics, and the Source from Which the Greeks Drew Theirs.” Now love is conceived in many ways, in the form of meekness, of mildness, of patience, of liberality, of freedom from envy, of absence of hatred, of forgetfulness of injuries. In all it is incapable of being divided or distinguished: its nature is to communicate. Again, it is said, “If you see the beast of your relatives, or friends, or, in general, of anybody you know, wandering in the wilderness, take it back and restore it; and if the owner be far away, keep it among your own till he return, and restore it.” It teaches a natural communication, that what is found is to be regarded as a deposit, and that we are not to bear malice to an enemy. “The command of the Lord being a fountain of life” truly, “causeth to turn away from the snare of death.” And what? Does it not command us “to love strangers not only as friends and relatives, but as ourselves, both in body and soul?” Nay more, it honoured the nations, and bears no grudge against those who have done ill. Accordingly it is expressly said, “Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, for thou wast a sojourner in Egypt;” designating by the term Egyptian either one of that race, or any one in the world. And enemies, although drawn up before the walls attempting to take the city, are not to be regarded as enemies till they are by the voice of the herald summoned to peace. 1.3.╇ Turnbull I found only one reading of Deut. 20 that is comparable to Grotius’s constructively selective interpretation: Richard Turnbull, An Exposition Upon the Canonical Epistle of Saint James, 1591, 1606 ed., 561:

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appendix Nowe as in some cases it is lawful to make private resistance to private men, howsoever blockish Anabaptistes chat, chirpe, or chatter to the contrary: so may it be demanded, whether it may stand with a righteous & just mans duty, to make public resistance by war, and public revengement. I answere that these places do not forbid lawful wars. Which to be a thing lawful in the Saints of God, it may many ways appeare evidently: the olde and the newe Testament confirmeth it: the examples of renowned men highly even therefore commended, approve it. Saint Augustine writeth that the Manichies for this cause found fault with Moises, because he was a man of war: and such a Prince, as armed the people of God against many Nations, and slue mighty Princes, and shed much bloud. Contra Faust. Manich lib. 22 c. p73. The like fault the Anabaptistes find now with Christians, whose opinions, as they are not soundly grounded upon the word of God, nor the examples of the Saintes: so neither is there any substantial reason to approve them: but manifoldly may they be refuted. And first of al, it may appeare that some wars be lawful, in that almighty God himselfe, teacheth what in wars by his people ought to be observed: as first to offer them conditions of peace, & other things in the law expressed. Deut. 20.1, 2, and 10.

Turnbull’s summary of Augustine is accurate, but Augustine explained away the cruelty of Deut. 20 as due to the specificity of the command and the situation. Turnbull, like Grotius, failed to follow suit. There is another Turnbull connection worth noting here. Grotius cites the same Augustine passage, not accompanied by Deut. 20 but by Num. 31 and 1 Sam. 15, in the Introduction to IPC (LPB, 3-4). There is no act more noble than defence Of one’s own land upon the battlefield. I could cite numerous examples of persons who have sinned in this way, but what need is there of such citations? For who doubts but that the Hebrews thought themselves pious and humane because they did not savagely massacre the Midianites and Canaanites? Who does not know of Saul’s mistaken pity for the conquered king? Yet on this very score both Saul and the Hebrews were severely rebuked and punished.3 There are three things to note here: first, the Hebrews did slaughter the Midianites. Second, in both cases cited, the OT Jews acted under God’s direct 3 ╇ ‘Multa possim exempla referre eorum, qui istam in partem peccaverunt. Sed quid necesse est? Quis enim dubitat, quin pios se et humanos Hebraei arbitrarentur, quod non in Madianitas et Cananaeos ad internecionem saevirent? Numerorum 31. Deut.7.2. Cui ignota est Saulis in regem devictum perversa misericordia? 1.Samuelis.15. Ambrosius lib.1.de Officiis. citatur 23.quaest.4.cap. Est iniusta. quam tamen ob rem et hic et illi reprehensi acriter et puniti sunt.’

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command, but Grotius considers this to be comparable to any other nation’s patriotism (except that the OT Hebrews under God’s command failed in their patriotism). Third, this is one of many radically different uses of these same passages in DIP. 1.4.╇ Gibbens Nicholas Gibbens is an interesting figure. His arguments about Adam and Eve breaking the Ten Commandments should earn him more present-day interest. See Rosenblatt, Torah and law, 21-2. His treatment of ius ad bello and ius in bellum, their respective criteria, the conditions of divine intervention in allocating victory, and the relationship between these three, rewards close study. See his Questions and disputations concerning the Holy Scripture, 1602, ch. 13, Question 1, verse 1: Wherefore doth the holy Scripture record this history of wars, with the names of the Kinges, and the originall cause of their contention? The principal purpose of the Scripture in this narration, is to declare unto the world, and especially unto the Church of God; that albeit wars, and seditions, and contentions, are raised, and begun by the pride and wickednes of men in earth: yet the end and successe of battels with all the miseries thereof, as well among the heathen as within the Church d of God, are guided & moderated by the Lord. (512) The best example of divinely approved just claim in war and to war is Abraham, Gibbons says. 1 Sam. 30 is cited to support the fourth condition of ius in bellum, ‘that they be assured of their authority, and the goodnes of the cause, asking counsaile therin at the word of God.’ Marginal [p]. Deut. 20 is cited in marginal gloss [z] to illustrate the sixth condition of ius in bellum, ‘that in war men be always inclinable unto z peace, using all lawfull meanes to avoide shedding of blood; & taking war in hand, as the last and uttermost remedy. Lastly, to be a mercifull in war and victory; but not b forgetting just severity.’ â•… Marginal [b] gives Num. 31 and 1 Sam. 15. We have here something that strongly resembles the IPC sequence end-noted here. See also Gibbens, Questions, 518-9. â•… While Grotius takes Deut. 20 to be a case of civil law—even if it is AbraÂ� ham’s—Gibbens uses Deut. 20 to show that Christians are the new Jews, and the Deut. 20.10 message of peace is neither an old law now superseded nor a universal one that applies to all. Instead, it applies only to Christians. Moreover, Grotius develops this argument in opposition to those who tried to exclude the Jews on OT grounds, by applying the negative divine command, about not associating with other nations, to the Jews after Christ. In other words, Gibbens’s case shows that the Christian identity claim as ‘new Jews’ did not necessarily have to be abandoned in order to argue for peace. Grotius chose to do so because he was aware of the dangers of exclusivism. Compare Gibbens, Questions 526 ff, Question 3, verse 13, 14: “Whether it were lawfull

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for Abraham to undertake this dangerous war, and to confederate himselfe with the Amorites, the people of the land?” Further more it may happen to be calinto doubt, whether Abram offended not in that he joined in society with Mamre, Aner, and Eshchol, which were Amorites of the posterity of Canaan; because the Lord not only forbad n the Israelites, the making of any league with the people of the land, but in all ages o of his Church hath prohibited his children to have society with the wicked. To this it p must be answered; that the godly are not forbidden, to make or maintaine peace with q wicked men, so that such peace containe not a conspiracy against the Lord, and the sincerity of true religion; unles they have authority from God to r afflict them for their sinne, as had the Israelites. For we are commaunded to have peace with s all men, so much as lieth in us, and to be not only peaceable, but furtherers of peace. Wherefore if any Heathen or Idolator shall seeke unto us for peace, we are to answere him t with peace, and to shew the fruit of our religion, which is to be peaceable u and good to all. For this cause did Abram make covenant with Aner and his brethren, and with Abimelec x requiring peace. [s] gives Deut. 20; we saw Grotius interpret Abimelech very differently in IPC, but with similar ingenuity. 1.5.╇ Aretius Like Grotius, the Protestant Benedict Aretius also uses Deut. 20, Gen. 14 and Luke 3.14 in the same passage, albeit in a different sequence. Examen theologicum, 1572, 1584 ed., 82. Licétne homini Christiano bellum gerere? Licet, quemadmodum veteri etiam licuit populo. Primùm Deus per Mosem formam belli gerendi praescripsit, Deut. 20. 1. Certum autem est non praescripturum formam rei bellicae, nisi voluisset suis belli usum concedere. Deinde pii bella gessisse leguntur, ut Abrahamus, qui Lothum liberat, & Chaldaeos praelio fundit, Gen. 14. 28. Tertiò, Ioannes Baptista apud Lucam. 3. 14. milites iubet, ne quem concuterent, sed contenti essent suis stipendiis. 1.6.╇ Gentili Although Gentili is in agreement with Grotius’s universalisation of the Deut. 20 commands, he goes to great lengths to save God from accusations of cruelty. He does so by imposing ever-tighter epistemic limitations on man. Man cannot, Gentili insists, understand God, and therefore cannot judge Him. This in turn makes it harder for Gentili to reintroduce the law of mercy and compassion in war, using biblical passages.

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Alberico Gentili, De iure belli libri tres, Book 2, chapter 21, 254-5: killing women and children is acceptable by God’s express command, Deut. 20. There is no wickedness in destroying a mother with her sons in obedience to the command of God. But man may not judge God for cruelty, for man cannot understand God. Those who recognize as just only those of his decrees which their reasoning commends to them; as if man were an animal adapted to understand the laws of God and to be the counselor of the Most High; as if the man were God or God were man. For one or the other of these things is necessary, if man is determined to understand God. Grotius, Bayle and others argued that this is a false dichotomy. After laboriously setting it up, Gentili enlists numerous church Fathers and other authorities against the position that God is man, or that man is God. 2.╇ Texts for Num. 31 in IPC: Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Musculus, Aretius. Grotius does the same with Num. 31 as with Deut. 20, which is why I do not discuss it separately in chapter 5. In both cases, he reformulates a very specific command as a universal one. Below are some possible models for IPC’s use of Num. 31. Yet Grotius’s habit of citing Num. 31 only when it fails conspicuously to support his point, together with the multiplicity of meanings that he ascribes to the same biblical passages, make his exegesis completely unique. 2.1.╇ Ambrose, Three Books on the Duties of the Clergy, Book 1, chapter 29: “Justice should be observed even in war and with enemies.” 139. How great a thing justice is can be gathered from the fact that there is no place, nor person, nor time, with which it has nothing to do. It must even be preserved in all dealings with enemies. For instance, if the day or the spot for a battle has been agreed upon with them, it would be considered an act against justice to occupy the spot beforehand, or to anticipate the time. For there is some difference whether one is overcome in some battle by a severe engagement, or by superior skill, or by a mere chance. But a deeper vengeance is taken on fiercer foes, and on those that are false as well as on those who have done greater wrongs, as was the case with the Midianites. For they had made many of the Jewish people to sin through their women; for which reason the anger of the Lord was poured out upon the people of our fathers. Thus it came about that Moses when victorious allowed none of them to live. On the other hand, Joshua did not attack the Gibeonites, who had tried the people of our fathers with guile rather than with war, but punished them by laying on them a law of bondage. Elisha again would not allow the king of Israel to slay the Syrians when he wished to do so. He had

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appendix brought them into the city, when they were besieging him, after he had struck them with instantaneous blindness, so that they could not see where they were going. For he said: “Thou shalt not smite those whom thou hast not taken captive with thy spear and with thy sword. Set before them bread and water, that they may eat and drink and return and go to their own home.” Incited by their kind treatment they should show forth to the world the kindness they had received. “Thus” (we read) “there came no more the bands of Syria into the land of Israel.”

2.2.╇ St. John Chrysostom, Homily XIV is another exegetical instance of attributing complete specificity to Num. 31. It is notable because unlike most interpretations, Chrysostom’s, like Grotius’s, adds military connotations. 9. But let us see what follows; “And Saul said, Let us go down after the strangers, and spoil them. And the priest said, Let us draw near hither unto God.” For in old times God led forth the people to battle; and without His consent no one dared to engage in the fight, and war was with them a matter of religion. For not from weakness of body, but from their sins they were conquered, whenever they were conquered; and not by might and courage, but by favour from above they prevailed, whenever they did prevail. Victory and defeat were also to them a means of training, and a school of virtue. And not to them only, but to their adversaries; for this was made evident to them too, that the fate of battle with the Jews was decided not by the nature of their arms, but by the life and good works of the warriors. The Midianites at least perceiving this, and knowing that people to be invincible, and that to have attacked them with arms and engines of war would have been fruitless, and that it was only possible to conquer them by sin, having decked out handsome virgins, and set them in the array, excited the soldiers to lasciviousness, endeavouring by means of fornication to deprive them of God’s assistance; which accordingly happened. For when they had fallen into sin, they became an easy prey to all; and those whom weapons, and horses, and soldiers, and so many engines availed not to capture, sin by its nature delivered over bound to their enemies. Shields, and spears, and darts were all alike found useless; but beauty of visage and wantonness of soul overpowered these brave men. 2.3.╇ See also Wolfgang Musculus, Loci communes theologiæ sacræ, 171 ff. Num. 31 and prize-taking in the chapter, “De præceptis iudicialibus.” On Erastus’s use of Musculus see Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden,” 172. 2.4.╇ Benedictus Aretius: S. S. Theologiæ Problemata, 161-2, 1617 ed., Locus LVI. De exemplis Veteris Testamenti, quatenus scilicet transferenda sint in unum nostrum. Videamus quomodo Exempla etiam non valeant: ut istis repagulum ponatur, qui ita licenter indicunt exempla. Primùm quae bonis moribus

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obsunt nihil concludunt: qualia primùm sunt impiorum scelera. Deinde piorum etiam errores: ut Davidis adulterium nemo sanus in exemplum trahit. Huc pertinent etiam piorum facta, tempore concessa magis quàm approbata: ut quòd Sara Abrahamo copiam facit ancillae. Genes. 16. versu 2. nemo ad exemplum debet trahere. Et Iacob duas sorores simul ducit, & insuper polygamus est. Genes. 29. Foediora sunt quòd Loth filias comprimit, oblitus poenarum tanti peccati in Sodomitis. Genes. 19. Iudas nurum suam Thamar impraegnat. Genes. 38. Haec & similia si quis in exemplum velit trahere, carcere dignus sit: & tamen ex illo acervo tuentur speciosi isti parasiti polygamiam, [162] cuius exemplum nostra vidit aetas in Landgravio. [marg. gloss: Quae Exempla in usum nostrum non sunt transferenda.] Deinde specialia facta etiam honesta, non sunt rapienda in exemplum: quia illic extat aliquod Dei mandatum, quo nos destituimur. Ut Helius Sacerdotes Baal occidit. 1. Reg. 8. v. 40. Ergo nobis sacrificos Papisticos occidere licebit: non valet, quia illic extat Dei spiritus impellens, qui vim mandati habet, nos nullum tale habemus. Samuel Agag regem occidit [marg. gloss: 1. Sam. 15. vers 33.]: non tamen idem faciet minister Christi. Iudaei prophanis Gentibus ultrò debuerunt inferre bellum: Ergo nos Turcis & Papistis: non sequitur, quia illic mandatum est, quo nos caremus. Tertiò, specialia facta, quibus inest species crudelitatis, aut alia quaedam turpitudo: Ut Israëlitae furto auferunt ex Aegypto vasa aurea & argentea, ac pretiosas vestes [marg. gloss: Exod. 11. vers. 2.]. Id minimè licet imitari: quia turpitudo in illis excusatur voluntate divina. Numer. 31. in Madian, debuerunt ne infantibus quidem parcere: id crudele sit post victoriam Christiano homini. Iosua idem praestat in eversa Ierichunte: non tamen mox idem imitabitur pius Imperator. 3.╇ Texts for Joshua 8 3.1.╇ St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 Thes. Whether it is lawful to lay ambushes in war? OBJ 1: It would seem that it is unlawful to lay ambushes in war. For it is written (Dt. 16:20): “Thou shalt follow justly after that which is just.” But ambushes, since they are a kind of deception, seem to pertain to injustice. Therefore it is unlawful to lay ambushes even in a just war. Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 Obj. 2 OBJ 2: Further, ambushes and deception seem to be opposed to faithfulness even as lies are. But since we are bound to keep faith with all men, it is wrong to lie to anyone, as Augustine states (Contra Mend. xv).

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appendix Therefore, as one is bound to keep faith with one’s enemy, as Augustine states (Ep. ad Bonif. clxxxix), it seems that it is unlawful to lay ambushes for one’s enemies. Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 Obj 3 OBJ 3: Further, it is written (Mt. 7:12): “Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them”: and we ought to observe this in all our dealings with our neighbor. Now our enemy is our neighbor. Therefore, since no man wishes ambushes or deceptions to be prepared for himself, it seems that no one ought to carry on war by laying ambushes. On the contrary, Augustine says (QQ. in Hept. qu. x super Jos): “Provided the war be just, it is no concern of justice whether it be carried on openly or by ambushes”: and he proves this by the authority of the Lord, Who commanded Joshua to lay ambushes for the city of Hai (Joshua 8:2). Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 I answer that, The object of laying ambushes is in order to deceive the enemy. Now a man may be deceived by another’s word or deed in two ways. First, through being told something false, or through the breaking of a promise, and this is always unlawful. No one ought to deceive the enemy in this way, for there are certain “rights of war and covenants, which ought to be observed even among enemies,” as Ambrose states (De Officiis i). Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 Secondly, a man may be deceived by what we say or do, because we do not declare our purpose or meaning to him. Now we are not always bound to do this, since even in the Sacred Doctrine many things have to be concealed, especially from unbelievers, lest they deride it, according to Mt. 7:6: “Give not that which is holy, to dogs.” Wherefore much more ought the plan of campaign to be hidden from the enemy. For this reason among other things that a soldier has to learn is the art of concealing his purpose lest it come to the enemy’s knowledge, as stated in the Book on Strategy [*Stratagematum i, 1] by Frontinus. Such like concealment is what is meant by an ambush which may be lawfully employed in a just war. Summa Theologiae SS Q 40 A 3 Nor can these ambushes be properly called deceptions, nor are they contrary to justice or to a well-ordered will. For a man would have an inordinate will if he were unwilling that others should hide anything from him… 3.2.╇ Calvin

Calvin’s solution to the indiscriminate slaughter of the citizens of Ai is

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ingenious, though visibly strained. First, he simply states that since Joshua was waging a war, he must have obeyed the rules of just war, and could not be guilty of massacre. Calvin then reads Joshua 8.17 to mean that the women, the elderly and others unfit for war did not take part in the sally against Joshua, therefore did not leave the city, and were therefore not massacred. Finally, Calvin’s long commentary on Joshua 8.18 explains that God had the spear raised because the Israelites’ spirits were flagging, not as a call to slaughter. Similarly: there was one isolated fire in the city of Ai, and then the Israelites entered without bloodshed. Videmus ergo primum ignem, delendae totius urbis causa non fuisse accensum; sed quia pars urbis flagrabat, indicium fuisse expugnationis: quanquam absque sanguine & sudore per apertas portas Israëlitae ingressi sunt. Commentarii in Librum Iosuae, 1562, 1671 ed., 26. Such complicated manoeuvres were sometimes used to explain this OT massacre and others. Calvin’s other argument for Joshua 8, namely that God directly intervened to win the battle, was the standard explanation. This is why what Grotius does with Joshua 8 would have been even more upsetting for contemporaries to read: it is not only a favourite of God, but it is God Himself who is responsible for the massacre. Another example of the view that Ai’s capture was due to direct intervention: Johann Wolf, In Sacram Historiam Iosuae, 1592, 95. 3.3.╇ Fenner Also interesting are the few sentences in Dudley Fenner, Sacra Theologia sive veritas quae est secundum pietatem, ad unicae & verae methodi leges descripta, & in decem libros per Dudleium Fennerum digesta, Geneva, Apud Eustathium Vignon, 1585, 1589 ed., 173-4, which have many of our passages: Ad bellum gerendum acies in struere debet tum ad impetum faciendum. tum ad stratagemata. Ios. 8. 1. 2. Stratagemata, sunt iustae in bello insidiae, & simulationes, quae tamen perfidia & mendacio prorsus immunes esse debent. Ios. 8. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Aliorum officium, ut Deo nixi, ipsoque inter pugnandum invocato fortiter, a lacriter, constanterque officio quique suo fungantur. Deut. 20. 3. 4. 5. â•… In victoria officia sunt Erga captivos ut (nisi iusta causa obfuerit in Deum scilicet impietas, & in homines iniustitia) illorum vitae consulant, praecipuè foeminarum: deinde ut vel in servitutem re digant: vel tributarios, prout necessarium fuerit, constituant. Deuter. 20. 10. 11. 12. 13. vel redemptionis pretium accipiant. Erga suos Publicum bonum respiciendum & quae conservari possunt, in bonum publicum debent absque labefactatione conser vari. Deut. 20. 19. 20.

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appendix Postea, praeda dividenda ad iustitiae normam, ut omnes pro suo officio & merito, etiam qui ad impedimenta restiterunt, partibus suis potiantur. 1. Sam. 30. 23. 24. In fuga officium est, omnibus quibus possit mediis, sibi suisque prospiciat. 1. Sa. 15. 24. 25. 26. 27. & 16 Atque haec de legibus administrantium officia definientibus, Sequuntur quae subditorum officia definiunt. 3.4.╇ Beza

See also Theodore Beza, Sermons Sur L’Histoire De La Resurrection De Nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, 1593, 318. Ainsi nous ne dirons pas que Iosué soit reprenable, mais qu’il a fait acte de grand Capitaine, ayant fait semblant d’avoir peur, & de s’enfuir pour surprendre les habitans de la ville de Hai, Ios. 8. 5. Et tels stratagemes de guerre sont lovables quand elle est iuste, & pourveu qu’il n’entreviene point de periures ni de pratiques illicites, à savoir contre la premiere ou seconde table ou contre toutes les deux. 4.╇ Texts for Joshua 22 4.1.╇ Rudolf Gwalther, In D. Pauli Apostoli Epistolam Ad Galatas Homiliae LXI, Heidelberg, 1598 ed., 175. Quam peccent sectarii.

Discimus praeterea, eos in Christum & Ecclesiam graviter peccare,

qui in religione sectas & partium studia invehunt. Etenim olim voluit Deus in suo populo unum esse Tabernaculum, ad quod omnes in festis solennibus convenirent: unum item altare, in quo omnium victimae immo�larentur, ne quae esset scismatis occasio: & nota est historia, quae in libro Ios. describitur de Transiordaninis tribubus, quas armis & bello petere volue�runt Israelitae, quod ab illis aram peculiarem contra Dei mandatum excitatam esse putarent. Constat item, nihil Iudaeis unquam nocentius accidisse sectis Pharisaeorum, Sadducaeorum & Essenorum. Sub his enim Legis doctrina corrupta, religio in quaestum conversa & seditionum semina iacta sunt, quae toti genti excidium pepererunt. At hodie inter Christiani nomi�nis professores summa pietatis, adeoque Christiana perfectio in Mona�chorum factionibus constituitur, & se aliis sanctiores esse sibi persuadent, qui abiecto Christi nomine, in quod baptizati sunt, Franciscani, Dominicani, Bernhardini, Benedictini dicuntur, & sectam suam vestitu ab aliis diverso & gesticulationibus nescio quibus pro�fitentur.

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5.╇ Texts for 1 Sam. 15 5.1.╇ Beza In his De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis libellus, 1554, 101-2, Beza used Deut. 20. and 1 Sam. 15, though not Joshua, in a sense similar to IPC’s. At Christus verberibus concisus, consputus, derisus, crucifixus ne mutivit quidem. Fateor: & hanc patientiam in privatis iniuriis utinam plures imitarentur. Idem tamen aliquando flagellum corripuit, & quum tempus ultioni constitutum advenit, quaeso quàm horribile irae suae exemplum edidit, & etiamnum hodie in Iudaeos edit? Quid? ut iam olim praeteritas Iudaeorum clades praetermittam, vastatio illa Turcarum, & Papistica tyrannis quid aliud est quàm terribilis ira Christi contemptum verbi sui vindicantis? An non Deus est qui infinitorum Regum, Principum, populorum, regionum vastatione & excidio quotidie maiestatem suam vindicat? Tyrannos à quibus haec saepe facta sunt, culpae non eximo: imò non dubito quin ea quae Deus iustè decreverat, ipsi sceleratè peregerint. Sed neque haec soli Tyranni fecerunt, verumetiam fideles Dei servi, idquè ex Dei mandato: neque aliud inde colligo quàm improbè vos facere qui publicam [marg.: Deut. 20, 1 Sam. 15] vindicationem, & auctoritate Dei factam à privata ultione, & crudelitatem à iusto iudicio distinguere nolitis. Quaeso verò quàm bella haec cōsecutio est? Christus idcirco huc missus ut peccata nostra elueret, nullis iniuriis restitit, neque Magistratum adversus haereticos appellavit. Ergo nefas est Magistratui haereticos ἀυτοκατακρίτους, à quibus Christi maiestas profanatur, à quibus Ecclesia perturbatur, à quibus animae ad interitum abducuntur, punire: ergo Ministris qui omnia frustrà tentaverint, petere à Magistratu non licebit ut lupum famelicum qui Ministrorum voce minus quàm lapis commovetur, aliqua ratione coerceat. 5.2.╇ Petrus Ramus Ramus has a good sequence: Joshua, Deut. 20, Rom, 1 Sam., in ComÂ�menÂ� tariorum de religione Christiana, 1576, 1577 ed., 207. Iusta enim bella vel Dei iussu á Iosua & Hebraeorum rectoribus gesta sacris libris continentur. Quin militares & bellicae leges quaedam describuntur, ut oppugnanda urbe pax proclametur, deditisque parcatur tributo tantum imposito: At vi capta mares internecione servatis caeteris deleantur, In Chananaea veró propter execrabilem idololatriam nulli neque sexui, neque aetati, neque ulli viventium generi parcatur, 20. Deuteronom. 10. Romana videlicet militia Hebraeam sequuta praecepit Parcere subiectis & debellare superbos. Itaque (ait Paulus 13. ad Romanos ) non sine causia magistratus gladium portat. Quare peccatur in hanc legem non solum iniusté occidendo,

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appendix sed etiam cúm ius exigit, non occidendo. Saul peccavit non occidendo Amalechum, quem occidendum dominus mandaverat, ut contra peccaverat Domini sacerdotes occidendo, 1. Samuel. 15. & 22. 5.3.╇ Wolfgang Musculus

The Protestant Musculus, in Loci communes theologiae sacrae, 1560 (p. 135 in the 1599 ed.), uses the following sequence: Admittitur enim, vel nos ipsos vel nostros defendendo. Dum nos ipsos defendere cogimur, excusatio est a necessitate: dum nostros defendimus, excusatur factum nostrum non solum necessitate, sed & officio fidei & charitatis, quam utramque nostris debemus. Et hoc discrimine homicidia defensoria sive unica, sive multa, sive privata, sive publica, separantur ab illegitimorum homicidiorum genere. Et ad hanc classem pertinent caedes bellicae, quae tum non sunt illegitimae, quando & necessitate defensionis, & officio magistratus excusantur. Quare & leges a Deo sunt latae, ad quarum praescriptum eiusmodi bella geri debeant, de quibus videre est Deut. 20. 6.╇ Rahab in Joshua 6.1.╇ Gregory Nazianzen Gregory Nazianzen points out that this action only justified Rahab because it was a righteous act, and in contrast with her normal behaviour. “Oration XL: on Holy Baptism,” 19. For our success is always judged by comparison with our place in life by our just and merciful Judge; and often one who is in public life and has had small success has had a greater reward than one who in the enjoyment of liberty has not completely succeeded. 6.2.╇ Augustine Augustine reveals a sense of humour similar to Grotius’s in interpreting this passage. Rahab, the harlot, feared and trusted God, and she was saved. Thus she prefigures the Church of the Gentiles. Augustine, “Commentary on Psalm LXXXVII,” 5. 7.╇ Texts for 1 Sam. 15 Augustine, Dorman, Edgeworth, Gregory of Nyssa, Parsons, Arias, Clichtove, Arminius, Gregory the Great, Canisius, John Chrysostom and John Cassian Augustine is one of many to attribute enormous significance to this passage. The rift between Saul and God, or Saul and Samuel, prefigures the division between the carnal and the spiritual Kingdom of Israel. Augustine, City of God, Book 17, chapter 7.

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The uniqueness of Grotius’s usage is all the more striking, as 1 Sam. 15 is a key passage in the history of Christian political thought, much commented on. It is not a locus that one was likely to forget, and use it unproblematically as evidence of Saul setting an example with his treatment of the vanquished. There are several works that deal with this biblical passage that need to be looked at, in order to begin to see the radical nature of Grotius’s exegesis. An attempt was therefore made to categorise these works. First, 1 Sam. 15 in the context of Catholic-Protestant exegetical debate The debate raging around the Catholic Dorman is both fascinating and pertinent to Grotius’s exegesis in IPC. Dorman constructed a structured series of counter-arguments against the Protestant position on 1 Sam. 15. He then set out to show the various kinds of tricks and deceits used by the Protestants to misuse the Bible in support of their erroneous opinions. One famous piece of polemic was Dorman’s A Proof of Certain Articles in Religion, Denied by M. Jewel, 1564 (see esp. pp. 69 ff). Grotius mentioned Jewel and the controversy in a letter to Casaubon from the end of 1613 (Grotius, Ordinum pietas, Appendix IV, no. 97), and also in De imperio (1614), cited in van Dam’s 2001 edition, p. 115. It is not impossible that news of this controversy over Church-State relations, drawing heavily on competing readings of 1 Sam. 15, reached Grotius before he completed IPC. Dorman’s issue here is with civil magistracy and its authority over religious affairs. Moses and Aaron, the first case Dorman posits to demonstrate the Protestants’ misuse of the Bible, begins on p. 82: These be the examples good readers which the adversaries to the truth bring for the maintenance of the contrary, out of the old Testament. Which manner of reasoning from examples in that age used, if it might be at these days in all points lawful to follow, what and how huge a number of inconveniences, might by just consequence thereupon be easily grounded and brought in, I need not here to rehearse, any man but meanly exercised in the holy scriptures may with himself easily conceive. If the miracles, examples significative, and singular privileges, done, practised and granted in that age, might without any danger, as well be to the present estate of the church which now is, drawn, applied and accomodate, as the moral precepts of that law may and are: why have not then the Kings nowadays, as many wives as had King David then? why should it not be as lawful for the clergy (I will not only say to admonish and reprehend) to put Kings doing amiss at this time to death, as it was at that for Samuel to cut in pieces with his own hands, the body of Agag king of Amalech? why not for them to depose kings, as well as kings to deprive them? For if they bring to us the example of Salomon, who deposed Abiathar the priest, and placed Sadoc in his room, they shall hear of us again, that Samuel by god’s own commandment pronounced Saul deprived of his kingdom, [p. 83] and settled David in the same. Phinees being a priest, killed with his dagger

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appendix the Israelite and the Madianite as they filthily abused themselves: and have priests therefore at this day think we like jurisdiction? Or would god (is it likely) praise him for the doing that would now do the like, as he then did him? No no good readers, they tread not uprightly that so interpret the scriptures. And thus you see how generally all these examples and authorities, being even after this sort answered, make no more for kings to rule in matters of religion, than other places do for the clergy to depose kings, or to kill them, or other doing amiss. [in bold my emphases]

Dorman has to engage with historicisation, somewhat against his will, in the course of building a case against Protestants. Dorman aims to show that Protestants are guilty of the same kind of hermeneutical trickery that Scaliger, Heinsius and Grotius criticise among all Christians. It shows Grotius’s mastery of all the varieties of partisan exegesis that he can invert and reinvert the interpretative traditions of the same biblical passages in order to counter Dorman as well as his Protestant targets. Dorman’s book was written in particular against the famous Bishop Jewel of Salisbury who, as a betting man, issued one of the most notorious challenges of the Reformation. He publicly promised to convert to Catholicism if anyone could prove that any of the Fathers of six centuries taught any single one of the 27 articles he selected, upheld by the Catholic Church at the time. Grotius in IPC may well have had this well-publicised challenge, and Dorman’s response in mind, when instead of propounding a Protestant exegesis of the same passages, he imposed farfetched and untenable readings on the passages under debate, as discussed in the Grotius chapter above. Second, A strongly metaphorical reading The Catholic Edgeworth, for example, took the divine command to slay indiscriminately in 1 Sam. 15 and Joshua 8 as strictly metaphorical for the Christian virtue of suffering punishment in patience, and fighting against every sin (489-90). Saul’s punishment for sparing some Amalekites ‘in sign and token, when we shall fight against vices, we must not leave any little sin alive, but kill them all, for else as long as one remaineth in us, we can not be counted just and good men afore God.’ (490) Third, Against reading 1 Sam. 15 anthropomorphically Amazingly, 1 Sam. 15 is the same passage that Gregory of Nyssa uses to argue against the overliteral anthropomorphic readings of Bible passages, where God is said to do or feel something. Answer to Eunomius’ second book, CCXCIII. The same point is made by Augustine, City of God, Book 14, ch. 11: For man, by his sin, could not disturb the divine counsel, nor compel God to change what He had decreed; for God’s foreknowledge had anticipated both,—that is to say, both how evil the man whom He had created good should become, and what good He Himself should even thus derive from him. For though God is said to change His determinations (so that in a

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tropical sense the Holy Scripture says even that God repented), this is said with reference to man’s expectation, or the order of natural causes, and not with reference to that which the Almighty had foreknown that He would do. Accordingly God, as it is written, made man upright, and consequently with a good will. For if he had not had a good will, he could not have been upright. The good will, then, is the work of God; for God created him with it. But the first evil will, which preceded all man’s evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the work of God to its own works than any positive work. And therefore the acts resulting were evil, not having God, but the will itself for their end; so that the will or the man himself, so far as his will is bad, was as it were the evil tree bringing forth evil fruit. Fourth, 1 Sam. 15 is always about sin, for Catholics and Protestants alike. Not for Grotius We saw how Grotius failed to mention Saul’s sin, and how this preyed on the minds of his contemporaries. The examples given here all deal with the sin aspect of 1 Sam. 15. Parsons is one of many who uses it for the single purpose of discussing sins. Robert Parsons, The First Book of the Christian Exercise, 1582, chapter 6 on sins, sinners and God’s justified rigour. Every sin is, by rights, punishable with infinite punishments, because all sins are against God’s person and dignity, which is eternal and infinite. Moreover, the Bible passage on Saul not killing all the Amalekites, which Grotius used as a statement of good natural law, is used by Parsons on pp. 84-5 as an example of a sin that God justly refused to forgive. â•… Another good example of the same is in Francisco Arias, SJ: The Little Memorial, Concerning The Good and Fruitful Use of the Sacraments, 1602 ed., chapter 9 on a special category of sins: those that are hidden, and were committed out of ignorance or misunderstanding. His two central examples are Saul sparing the Amalekites, and David’s proposed census of his people and of his soldiers (2 Sam. 24). Let me cite them, because they shed light on the politically instrumental interpretations that Grotius may have specifically targeted in IPC. Of these secret sins, which are committed through ignorance, and yet for all that be imputed by God, and severely by him punished, we have many examples in holy scripture. I will here only make mention of two, but those of the most notable, to give more light to that which hath been said. God commanded King Saul to invade the country of the Amalachites, and utterly to destroy [1 Reg. 15] them, not leaving either man or beast alive, because they did not shew mercy, but cruelty towards the Israelites, when they came out of Aegypt: Saul went, and conquered the country, slew men, and beasts as he was commanded: [122] but yet he did spare the life of the king, called Agag, and some of the best cattle: and in this fact, he never thought that he had committed any sin at all: for to save the kings life, he did it under the title of piety: and some of the beasts he reserved, for outward shew of religion, to offer them in sacrifice to

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appendix God: and therefore when the Prophet Samuel did reprehend him, for not having kept the commandment of God, he answered confidently, that he had done all that, which God had willed and appointed him. Albeit Saul sinned, because he should not have interpreted the commandment of God, according to his own fancy, nor to have done, expressly contrary to that which God gave him in [123] charge, either upon any pretext of piety, or colour of religion: yet he thought that he had not committed any sin therein, nay rather he supposed, that he had done very well: and so that which he reputed for no fault, God very justly did impute unto him for a grievous sin, and did punish him most severely for the same, depriving him of his kingdom, and casting him out of his favour, and suffering him by a naughty death to end his days.

This represents a standard reading of 1 Sam 15. See also the Catholic Josse Clichtove, Antilutherus Iudoci Clichtovei Neoportuensis, 1524 ed., ch. 8, 252. Arminius draws the conventional conclusion: Saul should have obeyed. Examen Libelli Perkinsiani De Praedestinationis Ordine & Modo, 1612, 1629 ed. Actiones enim non fine modo sed & principio & forma discriminantur. Saul a peccato non excusabatur quod armenta Amalecitarum servasset ad sacrificium. (77) Sauli permissa omissio occisionis eorum quos Deus volebat & iusserat interfici, qua peccatum, non qua omissio actus, quo perpetrato illi vita privati fuissent. Nam statuerat Deus regnum Saulis ab eo auferre, idque iam illi per Samuelem denuntiarat. Propterea quod sacrificasset non expecto Samuele: & Aga rex Amalecitarum postea ab ipso Propheta Samuele in frusta concisus est coram Iehova. (104) Fifth, still about sins, but 1 Sam. 15 shows the power of bishops and the pope A bishop who spares a wrongdoer is himself guilty, as shown by the guilt of Saul in sparing Agag. Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, Book 2, Sec 3.10. Although Augustine uses to same passage to justify tough love against the Pelagians, at his most extreme he is still nowhere near as drastic as Grotius in interpreting this passage. See, for instance, A Treatise on the Soul and its origin, Book 2, chapter 17. The new-fangled Pelagian heretics have been most justly condemned by the authority of catholic councils and of the Apostolic See, on the ground of their having dared to give to unbaptized infants a place of rest and salvation, even apart from the kingdom of heaven. This they would not have dared to do, if they did not deny their having original sin, and the need of its remission by the sacrament of baptism. This man, however, professes the catholic belief on this point, admitting that infants are tied in the bonds of original sin, and yet he releases them from these bonds without the laver of regeneration, and after death, in

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his compassion, he admits them into paradise; while, with a still ampler compassion, he introduces them after the resurrection even to the kingdom of heaven. Such compassion did Saul see fit to assume when he spared the king whom God commanded to be slain; deservedly, however, was his disobedient compassion, or (if you prefer it) his compassionate disobedience, reprobated and condemned, that man may be on his guard against extending mercy to his fellow-man, in opposition to the sentence of Him by whom man was made. Needless to say, this passage was used extensively in political theology. Pope Leo, for example, cited it to prove papal supremacy and to put down proud kings; see also Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, part 2, ch. 6, “That the ruler should be, through humility, a companion of good livers, but, through the zeal of righteousness, rigid against the vices of evildoers.” When Grotius takes 1 Sam. 15 so over-literally that it shows up God’s command as an incitement to indiscriminate murder, he is also demolishing the papal claims derived from this passage. See Hartigan, “Innocents.” â•… The Jesuit Petrus Canisius chose Saul’s disobedience as the prime example of sins committed through failure to follow a command: A summe of Christian doctrine, 254. ‘9 When are we by winking or indulgence entangled with alien sins?’ Canisius argues that Saul sinned in his capacity as magistrate by bearing the sword in vain, not executing God’s command! Using 1 Sam. 15 as a context for the point about the magistrate’s subservience to divine instruction is probably Canisius’s take on a passage in John Cassian, ch. 3 of the Second Conference of Abbot Moses, which has an almost identical sequence and phrases—up to Canisius’s point concerning the magistrate. Sixth, texts on 1 Sam. 15 as an exceptional case As we saw earlier, Grotius universalised many specific divine commands, but not the slaughter of Amalekites in 1 Sam. 15. Interestingly, John Chrysostom does this at one point, in his Exhortation to Theodore after the emperor’s lapse from the ascetic brotherhood to the planning of a marriage. Letter 2, Section 3. Slaughter has brought about righteousness, and mercy has been a cause of condemnation more than slaughter; because the latter has been according to the mind of God but the former has been forbidden. It was reckoned to Phinees for righteousness that he pierced to death the woman who committed fornication, together with the fornicator; but Samuel, that saint of God although he wept and mourned and entreated for whole nights, could not rescue Saul from the condemnation which God issued against him, because he saved, contrary to the design of God, the king of the alien tribes whom he ought to have slain. If then mercy has been a cause of condemnation more than slaughter because God was disobeyed, what wonder is it if marriage condemns more than adultery when it involves the rejection of Christ?

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The same 1 Sam. 15 account was used to prove the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free will. John Cassian, Conferences. The Second Conference of Abbot Joseph: On Making Promises, chapter 25. And by these passages it is declared that we ought not obstinately to stick to our decisions, but to modify them with reason and judgment, and that better courses should always be adopted and preferred, and that we should turn without any delay to that course which is considered the more profitable. For this above all that invaluable sentence teaches us, because though each man’s end is known beforehand to Him before his birth, yet somehow He so orders all things by a plan and method for all, and with regard to man’s disposition, that He decides on everything not by the mere exercise of His power, nor according to the ineffable knowledge which His Prescience possesses, but according to the present actions of men, and rejects or draws to Himself each one, and daily either grants or withholds His grace. And that this is so the election of Saul also shows us, of whose miserable end the foreknowledge of God certainly could not be ignorant, and yet He chose him out of so many thousands of Israel and anointed him king, rewarding the then existing merits of his life, and not considering the sin of his coming fall, so that after he became reprobate, God complains almost in human terms and, with man’s feelings, as if He repented of his choice, saying: “It repenteth Me that I have appointed Saul king: for he hath forsaken Me, and hath not performed My words;” and again: “But Samuel was grieved for Saul because the Lord repented that He had made Saul king over Israel.” 8.╇ Texts for Genesis 20: Augustine, Ps.-Clementine, Parsons, Calvin The closest we get to Grotius’s unique reading of these verses is Augustine’s argument that Christianity and politics can get along. Three books in answer to the letters of Petilian, the Donatist. Book 2, chapter 93. 204. “What,” say you, “have you to do with the kings of this world, in whom Christianity has never found anything save envy towards her?” Having said this, you endeavored to reckon up what kings the righteous had found to be their enemies, and did not consider how many more might be enumerated who have proved their friends. The patriarch Abraham was both most friendly treated, and presented with a token of friendship, by a king who had been warned from heaven not to defile his wife. Pseudo-Clementine, Homily XVII, chapter 17: the impious also see true dreams and visions, as did Abimelech. Robert Parsons wrote a brilliant survey of the arguments concerning the use of constructive ambiguity in theological debate. In his treatment of ambiguity and verbal trickery, he mentions the opinion that Abraham’s fib about his

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wife was specially allowed by the Holy Ghost. A Brief Apology, Or Defence Of The Catholic Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 1602, p. 432. God first tells Abimelech that he will die for his sin. He then acknowledges that Abimelech’s intentions were good, and spares him. As evidence of his argument Grotius managed to pick probably the one passage in which God seems to contradict Himself in the same breath. Calvin had to explain it away at length: Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, book 1, ch. 17, Answer to objections, No. 14: God firmly executes His plan. With reference to this contentious Gen. 20 passage, of course. 9.╇ Texts for Luke 3.14: Augustine, Chrysostom, Aretius, Socinus To appreciate Grotius’s interpretation, it helps to know some of the church Fathers’ position on Luke 3.14 and pacifism. Augustine Letter CXXXVIII, to Marcellinus, from 412. chapter 2, 15. For if the Christian religion condemned wars of every kind, the command given in the gospel to soldiers asking counsel as to salvation would rather be to cast away their arms, and withdraw themselves wholly from military service; whereas the word spoken to such was, “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages,”— the command to be content with their wages manifestly implying no prohibition to continue in the service. Wherefore, let those who say that the doctrine of Christ is incompatible with the State’s well-being, give us an army composed of soldiers such as the doctrine of Christ requires them to be; let them give us such subjects, such husbands and wives, such parents and children, such masters and servants, such kings, such judges—in fine, even such taxpayers and tax-gatherers, as the Christian religion has taught that men should be, and then let them dare to say that it is adverse to the State’s well-being; yea, rather, let them no longer hesitate to confess that this doctrine, if it were obeyed, would be the salvation of the commonwealth. Letter CLXXXIX, To Boniface, 418. 4. Do not think that it is impossible for any one to please God while engaged in active military service. Among such persons was the holy David, to whom God gave so great a testimony; among them also were many righteous men of that time; among them was also that centurion who said to the Lord: “I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed: for I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this

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appendix man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it;” and concerning whom the Lord said: “Verily, I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.” Among them was that Cornelius to whom an angel said: “Cornelius, thine alms are accepted, and thy prayers are heard,” when he directed him to send to the blessed Apostle Peter, and to hear from him what he ought to do, to which apostle he sent a devout soldier, requesting him to come to him. Among them were also the soldiers who, when they had come to be baptized by John,—the sacred forerunner of the Lord, and the friend of the Bridegroom, of whom the Lord says: “Among them that are born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist,”— and had inquired of him what they should do, received the answer, “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.” Certainly he did not prohibit them to serve as soldiers when he commanded them to be content with their pay for the service.

Reply to Faustus the Manichean, Book 22. If, therefore, while Abraham’s killing his son of his own accord would have been unnatural, his doing it at the command of God shows not only guiltless but praiseworthy compliance, why does Faustus blame Moses for spoiling the Egyptians? Your feeling of disapproval for the mere human action should be restrained by a regard for the divine sanction. Will you venture to blame God Himself for desiring such actions? Then “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou understandest not the things which be of God, but those which be of men.” Would that this rebuke might accomplish in you what it did in Peter, and that you might hereafter preach the truth concerning God, which you now, judging by feeble sense, find fault with! as Peter became a zealous messenger to announce to the Gentiles what he objected to at first, when the Lord spoke of it as His intention. 74. Now, if this explanation suffices to satisfy human obstinacy and perverse misinterpretation of right actions of the vast difference between the indulgence of passion and presumption on the part of men, and obedience to the command of God, who knows what to permit or to order, and also the time and the persons, and the due action or suffering in each case, the account of the wars of Moses will not excite surprise or abhorrence, for in wars carried on by divine command, he showed not ferocity but obedience; and God in giving the command, acted not in cruelty, but in righteous retribution, giving to all what they deserved, and warning those who needed warning. What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such

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a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act in this way. Otherwise John, when the soldiers who came to be baptized asked, What shall we do? would have replied, Throw away your arms; give up the service; never strike, or wound, or disable any one. But knowing that such actions in battle were not murderous but authorized by law, and that the soldiers did not thus avenge themselves, but defend the public safety, he replied, “Do violence to no man, accuse no man falsely, and be content with your wages.” But as the Manichæans are in the habit of speaking evil of John, let them hear the Lord Jesus Christ Himself ordering this money to be given to Cæsar, which John tells the soldiers to be content with. “Give,” He says, “to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” For tribute-money is given on purpose to pay the soldiers for war. On Psalm CXIX 159. We know what persecutions the body of Christ, that is, the holy Church, suffered from the kings of the earth. Let us therefore here also recognise the words of the Church: “Princes have persecuted me without a cause: and my heart hath stood in awe of Thee.” For how had the Christians injured the kingdoms of the earth, although their King promised them the kingdom of heaven? How, I ask, had they injured the kingdoms of earth? Did their King forbid His soldiers to pay and to render due service to the kings of the earth? Saith He not to the Jews who were striving to calumniate Him, “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”? Did He not even in His own Person pay tribute from the mouth of a fish? Did not His forerunner, when the soldiers of this kingdom were seeking what they ought to do for their everlasting salvation, instead of replying, Loose your belts, throw away your arms, desert your king, that ye may wage war for the Lord, answer, “Do violence to no man: neither accuse any falsely: and be content with your wages”? St. Chrysostom read Luke 3.14 as highly metaphorical. Homily XXI, on Matt. 6.24, Section 6. One’s first guess, namely that the most obvious source for Grotius’s antiMennonite reading of the verse is Calvin, turns out to be wrong. Brevis Instructio Adversus Errores Anabaptistarum, 1544, III.iv, 9 in 1671 ed. Also see Institutionum Christianae Religionis Libri Quatuor, 1559, Cap. 20: De politica administratione, Section 12, 417 in 1671 ed. Aretius, Examen Theologicum, 1584, 78: Omnis anima potestatibus subdita sit. Non enim est potestas nisi à Deo. Item, Quisquis potestati resistit, ordinationi Dei resistit, &c. Et 1. Pet. 2. 13. approbatur, aliisque locis compluribus. D. Petrus inter reliqua ait, 1. Pet. 2. 18. ut subditi sint servi non solùm bonis, sed etiam malis dominis: Luc. 3. 14 Ioannes Baptista milites non iubet stationem suam deserere.

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appendix [p. 86] Tertiò, Christus Publicanis non dat praeceptum deserendi suam professionem. Sic Ioannes Baptista ad se venientes Publicanos non iubet abiicere functionem: quod utique fecisset, si decimas, tributa & vectigalia colligere (quod illi factitabant) illicitum esset. Luc. 3. 13.

See also Aretius, SS Theologiae Problemata, 194. Faustus Socinus, Ad Iac. Palaeologi Librum de Magistratu Politico Responsio, 77, 80. Sequitur ratio quaedam ex Iohannis Baptistae verbis desumpta, qui interrogatus à militibus, quid ipsi facere deberent, respondit Luc. 3. 14, Ne quem concutiatis, ne quem calumniemini, & contenti estote stipendiis vestris. Ex hoc enim responso apparere ais, Iohannem illud genus militiae approbasse, in quo ad defensionem imperii alieni, & ad repellendum, atque invadendum hostem, & caedendum, aut occidendum, arma, mercede accepta, gestarentur. quod certe non fecisset, si haec facere non licuisset. Cum (inquis) sanctus esset vir & Spiritu Sancto plenus, adhuc ex utero matris suae, & quo maior nullus erat inter natos mulierum, nisi unus Rex Israël Iesus Christus. Haec à te scripta leguntur pag. 13. Perfacile dissolvitur tota ista argumentatio tua, si consideretur, etiamsi Evangelica disciplina multa non permittat, quae legalis disciplina permittebat, tamen Iohannis Baptistae officium non fuisse aliquid mutare eorum, quae sub lege erant, quippe cum hoc munus ipsius Iesu Christi proprium esset, qui primus omnium caelestem quandam doctrinam, multo, quam ea, quae ante ipsum in Dei populo fuerat, perfectiorem mundo traditurus erat. Quam ante ipsius praedicationem ipsi etiam Iohanni prorsus incognitam fuisse, credendum est, tantum abest, ut eam ipse publicare debuerit. Erat quidem magnus Iohannes, & spiritu sancto plenus, & quo maior Propheta nondum extiterat. Sed adhuc tamen sub Lege erat, terrena loquebatur Ioh. 3. 31, nec per se, id est sine Christo caelestis regni erat particeps, adeo ut minimus eius regni ipso maior esset Matth. 11. 11. [p. 80] Et sane, nisi is Lucae locus esset de militibus ad Iohannem Baptistam accedentibus Luc. 3. 14, quos Iudaeos fuisse necesse est, vix ullum Iudaeum in ea militia fuisse, ausus essem affirmare. Quae cum ita se habeant, quid oportuit Christum vel in bella, quae nulla erant, vel in militiam, & arma invehi, quae ab iis, ad quos eius praedicatio pertinebat, vix tractabantur? 10.╇ Texts for Gen. 14: Cassian, Chrysostom Grotius, as we saw, read Gen. 14 as the account of a specific institution, which enabled him to exclude the possibility of using it as a universal precept. Many earlier interpreters read the same passage as the expression of another, truly universal Christian institution, namely the inner law. See, for example, Conferences of John Cassian, Book VIII, The Second Conference of Abbot

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Serenus: On Principalities, chapter 23: ‘The answer, that by the law of nature men were from the beginning liable to judgment and punishment.’ Serenus: God at man’s creation implanted in him naturally complete knowledge of the law, and if this had been kept by man, as at the beginning, according to the Lord’s purposes, there would not have been any need for another law to be given, which He afterwards proclaimed in writing: for it were superfluous for an external remedy to be offered, where an internal one was still implanted and vigorous. [for otherwise…] How was Abraham taught to abstain from the spoils of the enemy which were offered to him, that he might not receive any recompense for his toil, or to pay to the priest Melchizedec the tithes which are ordered by the law of Moses? However, we also find the reading that Abraham obeyed neither a specific or a universal law, but ‘went beyond’ them, in John Cassian, Conferences, XXI, The First Conference of Abbot Theonas, chapter 4. For so we read that Abraham went beyond the requirement of the law which was afterwards to be given, when after his victory over the four kings, he would not touch any of the spoils of Sodom, which were fairly due to him as the conqueror, and which indeed the king himself, whose spoils he had rescued, offered him; and with an oath by the Divine name he exclaimed: “I lift up my hand to the Lord Most High, who made heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread to a shoe’s latchet of all that is thine.” So we know that David went beyond the requirement of the law, as, though Moses commanded that vengeance should be taken on enemies, he not only did not do this, but actually embraced his persecutors with love, and piously entreated the Lord for them, and wept bitterly and avenged them when they were slain. John Chrysostom argues that Abraham’s refusal of spoils is the best imaginable lesson in humility. Homily I, on 1 Cor. i. 1-3, Section 5. Chrysostom also believes that it is not spoil-taking that Gen. 14 justifies, but having riches in the first place—as long as all property is offered up to God, and it is held in self-conscious, acknowledged stewardship. Homily XXXIV on 1 Cor. xiii. 8, Section 10. There is one passage in Chrysostom where he says something similar to Grotius’s point in IPC: in Homily XXVIII on 2 Cor. xii. 16-18, Section 1, we find the argument that Abraham refused his share of the spoils in order to stop shameful mouths blaming him for greed. If this was Grotius’s inspiration, then he decided to turn Chrysostom’s values on their head. The IPC passage end-noted here brings in Abraham at the end of a list of outstanding pagans. In contrast, the church father used Gen. 14 to set up not an equation but a contrast in epistemic authority, and argued that Abraham was a great philosopher, while the Greeks were all terrible philosophers. Homily XXI on Eph. vi. 1-3:

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appendix However, if you will, let us carry our discourse to Abraham, whom all are continually bringing forward to us above all others. Had he not a wife? Had he not children? Yes, for I too use the same language to you, as you do to me. He had a wife, but it was not because he had a wife that he was so remarkable. He had riches, but it was not because he had riches that he pleased God. He begat children, but it was not because he begat children that he was pronounced blessed. He had three hundred and eighteen servants born in his house, but it was not on this account that he was accounted wonderful. But would you know why it was? It was for his hospitality, for his contempt of riches, for his chastened conduct. For what, tell me, is the duty of a philosopher? Is it not to despise both riches and glory? Is it not to be above both envy and every other passion? Come now then, let us bring him forward and strip him, and show you what a philosopher he was. First of all, he esteemed his fatherland as nothing. God said, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred” (Gen. 12.1) and immediately he went forth. He was not bound to his house, (or surely he would never have gone forth,) nor to his love of familiar friends, nor to anything else whatever. But what? glory and money he despised above all others. For when he had put an end to war by turning the enemy to flight, and was requested to take the spoil, he rejected it. (Gen. 14. 21-3). 11.╇ Texts on Melchizedek

Theophilus to Autolycus, Book 2, chapter 31, on history after the Flood: And at that time there was a righteous king called Melchisedek, in the city of Salem, which now is Jerusalem. This was the first priest of all priests of the Most High God; and from him the above-named city Hierosolyma was called Jerusalem. On Melchizedek as prefiguration of Christ, see Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, Book 10, ch. 4, 23-26, p. 373; and the Counter-Statements of Theodoret of Cyrus, ed. Schulze, V. I. seq. Or PL 76, col. 391. Also Theodoret of Cyrus, “Letter to John the Oeconomus,” in Ante-Nicene. On Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine to Abraham as the prefiguration of the Eucharist, see John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 13: ‘Concerning the holy and immaculate mysteries of the Lord.’ Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book 2, chapter 5: Moses, then, was a sage, king, legislator. But our Saviour surpasses all human nature. He is so lovely, as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true beauty, for “He was the true light.” He is shown to be a King, as such hailed by unsophisticated children and by the unbelieving and ignorant Jews, and heralded by the prophets. So rich is He, that He despised the whole earth, and the gold above and beneath it, with all glory, when given to Him by the adversary. What need is there to say

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that He is the only High Priest, who alone possesses the knowledge of the worship of God? He is Melchizedek, “King of peace,” the most fit of all to head the race of men. A legislator too, inasmuch as He gave the law by the mouth of the prophets, enjoining and teaching most distinctly what things are to be done, and what not. Jerome, Letter XLVI, to Marcella, 2, on Jerusalem: Turn back to Genesis, and you will find that this was the city over which Melchizedek held sway, that king of Salem who, as a type of Christ, offered to Abraham bread and wine, and even then consecrated the mystery which Christians consecrate in the body and blood of the Saviour. When writing against the Arians, Ambrose emphasised the limitations of the power of prefiguration, and gave an extended treatment of the Melchizedek passages in a book that grew out from an extension of a smaller book he wrote for Gratian, who was then going off to fight the Arian Goths. It is now known as De Fide, or Exposition of the Christian Faith; the salient passage is in Book 3, chapter 11, 88-9, p. 254, where Ambrose showed that whenever Christ is said to have “been made” (or “become”), this must be understood with reference to his incarnation, or to certain limitations on his divine nature. Melchizedek’s prefiguration of the eternal priesthood of Christ is such an instance. 88. Let no man, therefore, when he beholds an order of human estabÂ� lishment, contend that in it resides the claim of Divinity; for even that Melchizedek, by whose office Abraham offered sacrifice, the Church doth certainly not hold to be an angel (as some Jewish triflers do), but a holy man and priest of God, who, prefiguring our Lord, is described as “without father or mother, without history of his descent, without beginning and without end,” in order to show beforehand the coming into this world of the eternal Son of God, Who likewise was incarnate and then brought forth without any father, begotten as God without mother, and was without history of descent, for it is written: “His generation who shall declare?” 89. This Melchizedek, then, have we received as a priest of God made upon the model of Christ, but the one we regard as the type, the other as the original. Now a type is a shadow of the truth, and we have accepted the royalty of the one in the name of a single city, but that of the other as shown in the reconciliation of the whole world; for it is written: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself;” that is to say, [in Christ was] eternal Godhead: or, if the Father is in the Son, even as the Son is in the Father, then Their unity in both nature and operation is plainly not denied. Again, Grotius’s differences from Augustine’s view of these passages are not only significant because Augustine was such a definitive figure, but also because he seems to have been a genuine influence on Grotius—which

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makes the aforementioned differences all the more intriguing. For example, Augustine thought that Cyprian’s view on Melchizedek’s prefiguration of Christ could become an embarrassment to the church, so he set out to elucidate Cyprian’s exegetical and rhetorical method; see the references to Gen. 14 in Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book 4, chapter 21. â•… Augustine himself subscribed to the notion that Melchizedek prefigured Christ the Mediator. A Treatise on the grace of Christ, and on original sin, against Pelagius, Book 2, chapter 33. ‘This was not then an accomplished fact, but was still future; yet that faith of the fathers, which is the self-same faith as our own, used to chant it.’ In spite of initial hesitation, Augustine in the end decided to ascribe some divine significance to Melchizedek. His uneasiness never entirely went away. He also thought that Melchizedek was a sort of Everyman, a true believer with no special family or blood connections, but selected on ‘the merit that the divine grace has bestowed on him.’ City of God, 20.21. See also 16.22, 17.5 and 17.7. This sense of unease turned out to be exactly what Wycliffe picked up on, in order to debate Augustine’s hermeneutics, and eventually to question the reliability of the Vulgate, using Melchizedek in Gen. 14 and Heb. 7. Kantik Ghosh, Wycliffite heresy, 468. Wycliffe himself held Melchizedek, the priest-king, to be the ideal ruler, while Giles of Rome thought that such rulers were no longer possible. Lahey, Philosophy, 48. â•… The debate over Melchizedek raged right through the Middle Ages. Sicardus Cremonensis, for example, thought that Melchizedek prefigured church hierarchy: Episcopi mitrale seu de officiis ecclesiasticis summa, Liber Tertius, Caput VI, vol. 213 of the Patrologia Latina. Honorius invented an imaginary geography and chronology for Melchizedek, in De imagine mundi libri tres, Book 2, (2nd and 3rd age), vol. 172. Rupert of Deutz took Melchizedek to prefigure Christ. Rupert, Dissertatio chronologico-historica de vita et Scriptis Ruperti, § 2. â•… Among the Catholic opponents of Luther one must mention Augustin von Alveld, Tractatus de communie sub utraque specie, 1520. Here Alveld solidified and extended the Catholic position to state that Melchizedek’s greeting of Abraham in itself prefigured Christ, the Eucharist, and the precise figure of Catholic rites (p. 18). Similarly in Johann Eck, De Poenitentia Et Confessione Secreta Semper In Ecclesia Dei Observata, 1533, 45. Josse Clichtove, De bello et pace (1523), 59. Clichtove, one of the more moderate and influential Catholics, adhered to the Catholic line on Melchizedek with increasing inflexibility: Antilutherus Iudoci Clichtovei Neoportuensis (1524), pp. 150 and 157; even more radically in his De Sacramento Eucharistiae, Contra Oecolampadium (1526). We find an especially extended treatment of the subject and its history in ch. 4, 28-31. On Clichtove and IPC, see Haggenmacher, Grotius, 43-4. Petrus Canisius, the first Dutch Jesuit, in A summe of Christian doctrine, ch. 7, 149-155, 1544 (same pages in the 1622 ed.) is as clear as he is adamant on the Catholic prefiguration doctrine. See Edmund Bonner, the bishop known for his zealous persecution of heretics under Mary I, in A profitable and necessary doctrine, 1555, 165-6. See also Vitoria’s successor to the chair of theology at Salamanca, Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis libri duodecim

excerpts from the exegetical tradition

475

(1563), 496. Also influential is Cardinal William Allen, De sacramentis (1576), 128, 266-7, 566-7, where he also gave a history of this prior conviction; on pp. 284, 541, and passim, Melchizedek is used more to prefigure papal power. So did Alessandro Cariero, De potestate Romani Pontificis adversus impios politicos, p. 123, where he emphasised papal authority on the strength of Melchizedek in Gen. 14. Mark Twain also thought that Melchisedek levied a tribute on Abraham: The Innocents Abroad, p. 570. â•… Luther also thought that Melchizedek prefigured Christ, albeit very differently than the Catholics believed. The development of Luther’s thought on Melchizedek radically changed the Melchizedek discourses, and touched on a range of issues from Church-State relations, through objections to the legitimacy claims of the papacy, to the nature of the Eucharist. The trajectory of this development, and the significance of the various stages of Luther’s position on Melchizedek, demand a separate treatment. The salient passages are too long to be quoted here. For his early position, the reader’s attention is directed to his early commentary on Psalm 110, in Luthers Werke (LW) 4. Band, Psalmenvorlesung, 1513/15. â•… For Luther, Melchizedek prefigured Christ not as the Mediator or the Church, but as the King of Peace and Justice. See also LW, 14. Band, “ReihenÂ� predigten über 2. Petrus, Judas und 1. Mose,” 1523/24; “Vorlesung über 5. Mose,” 1523/24 ch. 14, S27 Dominica post Nativitatis Marie. In these passages Luther refers to Ps. 110 and Heb. 7, but not once to Genesis 14. â•… His position changed further by 1535/6. See LW, 41. Band, Predigten 1535/36 (RN von 1974), 16. 4. “Predigt über den 110. Psalm.” R] Dominica 1. post Trinitatis: Melchisedec Rex et Sacerdos benedicit Abraham et accipit ab eo decimas tanquam superior. pp. 167-82. â•… His commentary on Genesis 14 then grew into his definitive position on the importance of Melchizedek, the relationship between Abraham and Melchizedek, and what it reveals about the nature of Christ, the Second Coming, the Eucharist, and the correct relationship between Church and State. A later stage of Luther’s use of Melchizedek in his struggle against papal claims appears in LW, 43. Band, “Genesisvorlesung (cap. 8-30),” 1538/42, cap. 19, and 22. â•… Parts of this selection from the salient passages are translated in Luther’s works, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. Vol. 2 includes Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, with an exposition of Gen. 14 on 381-99. Vol. 11 has the First lectures on the Psalms, and the relevant, minimalist comment on Ps. 110.4, without reference to Genesis, on 368-9. Compare this with Luther’s mature, militant position on Ps. 110 in vol. 13. The discussion of salvation, sacrifice, the priestly office, the papacy, monasticism, and Church-State relations that Luther builds on Ps. 110. is on 304-334. As part of reconstructing the evolution of Luther’s interpretation and usage of the figure of Melchizedek, they greatly reward reading.

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index

529

Index Abraham, 91, 323, 326, 352, 367, 393, 400-1, 411-6, 418-22, 426-8, 430, 451-3, 455, 466, 468, 471-5, 477 Abravanel, Isaac, 325 Achilles, 122, 152 Aesop, 238, 267, 294 Agricola, Rudolph, 98, 111, 126-7, 137, 141, 214, 223-4, 226, 255, 290-1, 293-4, 297-8, 304-5, 365 works De inventione dialectica, 126, 226, 293, 298 Alberti, Leon Battista, 111, 217 Alciato, Andrea, 94, 161-2, 191-2, 424 Alexander III, Pope, 22 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 135, 356-7 Alkabetz, Shlomo Halevi, 335 Allen, William, 409, 475 Alphonse, Pierre, 310 Ambrose, 14, 196, 427, 450, 453, 456, 473 Anabaptists, 32, 110, 276, 303, 317, 342, 369, 400, 415, 417, 420, 423, 450, 460 Anaxagoras, 134-7 Apuleius, 126, 216, 239, 266, 294 Aquinas, Thomas, 108, 159, 194, 213, 296, 338-9, 354, 392, 396, 405, 425, 455 Aratus of Soli, 51, 60, 65-67, 69, 383 Arianism, 15, 213, 475 Aristophanes, 172, 174 Aristotle, 3, 94-5, 104, 111-2, 116-120, 122, 126-8, 130, 134-7, 139, 140-1, 143, 149-150, 158, 174, 186, 191, 196, 198, 223, 225, 279, 285, 293-5, 302, 313, 315, 337-340, 350-2, 3567, 359, 363-4, 368-9, 404, 425, 443 works Analytics, 293 De Anima, 135 Metaphysics, 134-5, 137 Poetics, 94-95, 104-5, 116, 118, 129, 134-7, 143-4, 173-4, 313 pseudo-Ar., De mundo, 136, 158, 285, 357 Topics, 293

Aristotelianism, 16, 89, 105, 116-8, 120, 126, 128, 131, 134-7, 140-1, 144, 149, 151, 214-5, 285, 291, 295-6, 303, 313-4, 319, 322-3, 329, 337, 339-340, 343, 350, 357, 359, 368-9, 372 Arminians see Remonstrants Arminius, Jacobus, 9-10, 105-6, 136, 203, 205, 263, 311, 440, 460, 464 astronomy, 6, 32, 49, 51, 60-66, 68-69, 71-73, 75, 79, 81, 86, 220, 246, 248, 270, 285, 314, 342, 350, 356, 416 Aratus of Soli, 51, 60, 65-67, 69, 383 Brahe, Tycho, 63-64, 69, 71 Capella, Martianus, 51, 60, 65-68, 285, 383 Cardano, Girolamo, 324, 329, 335 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 40, 49, 63, 64, 66-67, 69-72, 81, 86, 403 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 51, 60-61, 64-65, 67-70 Eudoxus of Cnidus, 51, 60, 64-67, 69-70, 73 Galilei, Galileo, 31, 64, 70-72, 216, 249 Kepler, Johannes, 14, 31, 62-67, 70-73, 80, 152, 244, 247-250, 355, 360, 381 Magini, Giovanni Antonio, 64-65, 68-69 Ptolemy, 67, 72-74, 79, 349, 416 Snellius, Willebrord, 51, 65, 69, 248, 440 Thales of Miletus, 62-63, 70 The Man in the Moon, 246-50 Wittenberg Circle, 61 Athanasius of Alexandria, 14, 331, 428 Augustan History, 232, 234-8, 240-1, 287 Augustine, 14-16, 27, 33-35, 38, 74, 153, 158-9, 164, 181, 194-6, 244, 253, 308, 332, 354, 396, 405, 415, 41920, 427, 450, 455-6, 460, 462, 464, 466-7, 473-4 dialectic between politics and Christianity, 16, 27, 37-38, 79, 339

530

index

Augustine of Alveld, 474 Averroes (ibn Rushd), 137, 296 Avignon Papacy, 24-26, 28, 37, 39, 389 Ayala, Balthazar, 19, 29, 392 Bacchus, see Bacchus-Dionysos Bacchus-Dionysos, 67-68, 95-96, 102, 127, 142, 145, 148, 157, 166, 17091, 197, 199, 282, 290, 314 Bacchanalia, 166, 171, 175-6, 184, 186-7, 226, 261, 380 Bacon, Francis, 73-74, 155, 191 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de, 14, 104, 132, 144-6, 148, 160, 167-70, 188, 194, 196, 305, 413 Barbarus, Hermolaus, 182, 222-3, 255, 290-306 works Letters to Pico della Mirandola, 295-306, 311, 313 Basil of Caesarea (‘the Great’), 14 Baudius, Dominicus, 159-161, 165, 198, 374-5 Baudouin, François, 77, 169, 316 Bayle, Pierre, 204, 326, 401, 411, 453 Becanus, Johannes Goropius, 46-47, 52, 102, 109 Bernard of Clairvaux, 18, 37, 399 Berosus, 40, 75 Bertius, Petrus, 324 Beza, Theodore, 54, 109, 146, 257, 266, 275, 311, 392, 406, 419-20, 426, 458-9 Bible, 5-7, 9, 11-12, 16-17, 20, 23, 30, 32-34, 36, 38-39, 44, 46, 49-50, 58-60, 63-64, 69, 71-79, 81-86, 93-96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 111, 113, 121-2, 124-6, 129-132, 138, 141-3, 145-8, 152, 170, 173, 176, 180, 183, 187-8, 192, 195-6, 198, 201-2, 206, 210, 224, 234, 259-261, 270-2, 2768, 288, 291-3, 296-7, 303-4, 315, 317, 325, 327-8, 330, 342-3, 345-7, 349, 351, 357, 360, 366, 368, 370, 376, 380, 383-400, 402-6, 408-9, 411-20, 422-7, 431-7, 440, 444, 451-3, 461-3, 466, 473-5 Genesis 9.5-6: 426 9.6: 423, 425-6 12.1: 472 14: 75, 415-6, 418-20, 427, 452, 470-2, 474-5

14.21-3: 472 14.28: 452 16.2:455 19: 455 20: 414, 466-7 29: 455 38: 455 Exodus 11.2: 455 19: 345, 348 19.21-24: 346-8 23: 447 32: 17, 34, 38, 152, 390, 396, 405 Numbers 31: 399, 405, 412, 450-1, 453-4 31.27: 412 31.31: 412 31.47: 412 Deuteronomy 7.2: 450 16.20: 455 20: 405-15, 447-9, 451-3, 459-60 20.1: 450, 452, 459 20.2: 450 20.3-5: 457 20.5-17: 404 20.10: 407, 450-2, 459 20.10-13: 457 20.13: 409 20.14: 399, 412-3 20.19-20: 457 Joshua 6: 409, 412, 417 6.22.7-8: 412 6.25: 409 6.27: 412 8: 405, 412, 455, 457, 462 8.2: 399, 405, 456 8.4-8: 457 8.5: 458 8.17: 457 8.18: 457 22: 412, 458 22.8: 399, 405-6, 412 Judges 15.1-8: 424 1 Samuel 8: 410 15: 409-10, 413, 447, 450-1, 45966 15.22: 410 15.24-7: 458 15.33: 455

index 16: 458 22: 460 30: 406, 412, 415, 451 30.22: 412 30.23-4: 458 30.26: 415 2 Samuel 12.30: 411 12.31: 411 13: 125 24: 463 1 Kings 8.40: 455 15: 463 Ezra 3.12: 333 2 Maccabees 8.28: 418 8.30: 418 Psalms 110: 419, 475 110.4: 475 Proverbs 3.35: 333 Ecclesiastes, 325, 327 Isaiah 6.3: 332 Matthew 7.6: 456 7.12: 456 11.11: 470 13: 448 16-18: 396 Luke 3.14: 415, 452, 467, 469-70 22.38: 16, 396 John, 101, 103, 106, 145, 173, 180 3.31: 470 Romans 1: 404 2: 404 13: 459 15: 432 32: 431 1 Corinthians, 404, 431-2, 471 5.1: 431 2 Corinthians, 404, 471 Ephesians. 4.11-16: 138 1 Timothy 6.3-5: 99 6.10: 98

531

Hebrews 7: 419-20, 474-5 1 John 5.7-8: 234 15-16: 129 Bilson, Thomas, 419 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 197, 310, 420 Bodin, Jean, 41, 56, 58, 60, 74, 77, 88, 137, 309-10, 321, 334, 344, 373-4, 414 Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount, Henry St John, 156 Boniface VIII, Pope, 23-25, 400 Borelius, Johannes, 11, 51, 203-7, 384 Borremans, Antonius and Nicolaas, 378 Bouts, Dirk, 75, 111, 164, 420-1 Brahe, Tycho, 63-64, 69, 71 Brandt, Gerard, 225, 230, 378-81 Brethren of the Common Life, 82, 175 Browne, Thomas, 191, 244, 326 Bruni, Leonardo, 36, 50, 294 Bruno, Giordano, 32, 80, 306, 310, 315, 346 Buchanan, George, 109, 111, 140, 264 Burchard, Franz, 301-6 Burmann, Peter, 105, 206, 324, 376 Buxtorf, Johannes, the Elder, 147, 326-7, 341 Buxtorf, Johannes, the Younger, 326 Callixtus I, Pope, 232-5, 237-8, 241, 287, 420 Calvin, Jean, 37, 82, 84-5, 261, 263, 275, 303, 316, 326, 347, 370, 392, 396, 405-6, 415, 456-7, 466-7, 469 Calvinism, 8, 37, 49, 52, 55, 84, 105, 194, 264, 283, 369, 373, 426 Calvinists, 5, 8-10, 38, 43, 46, 54, 56, 68-9, 72-3, 77, 79-80, 84, 89-90, 96, 104-6, 111, 118, 121, 139, 141, 143, 150-1, 158, 174, 178-9, 194, 196, 198, 202, 220, 245, 248, 264, 267, 273, 276, 279, 282, 285, 297, 311, 314, 316, 324-5, 341, 359, 378-80, 391, 401, 405, 423, 426, 430-1, 436, 441 Camphuysen, Dirck Rafaelsz, 145 Canisius, Petrus, 460, 465, 474 Cano, Melchior, 474-5 Capella, Martianus Minneus Felix, 51, 60, 65-8, 285, 383 Cardano, Girolamo, 324, 329, 335

532

index

Carleton, Dudley, 8, 395 Casaubon, Isaac, 59, 68-69, 93, 96-97, 104, 106-7, 140, 187-8, 197, 202, 217, 235-6, 240-1, 248, 265-6, 268270, 281, 285-7, 317, 376, 378, 381, 437, 463 works De satyrica, 68, 240, 265, 281, 285 Casaubon, Meric, 269 Cassander, George, 227, 307, 315-7, 323 Castellio, Sebastian, 84 Catholic League, 256-9, 263, 265, 396 Cato the Younger, 416, 422 Cats, Jacob, 164-5, 187, 191-3, 204, 275 works Silenus Alcibiadis, 187, 192-3 Chapman, George, 247 Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, 21, 26, 34, 131, 270 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 26, 37-8, 258 Cherbury, Edward Herbert, Lord, 198, 401, 441 chosen nation claims, 9, 21, 25-26, 29, 34, 42-43, 46, 56, 72, 100, 109, 150, 201, 206, 210-1, 262-3, 270, 325, 344-5, 391, 395, 399, 401, 404, 410, 419, 423, 434-5, 451 Philip IV, King of France, 25-6 Reichstheologie, 14, 36-37, 79, 270-1, 400 Chrestien, Florent, 187, 261, 264-5, 287 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 66, 151, 217, 220, 230, 232, 241, 292, 298, 319, 361-2, 378, 411, 413, 417-9, 423-4 works Academica, 319, 361-2 Somnium Scipionis (Book 6 of De re publica), 151-2, 253 Clement of Alexandria, 14, 108, 309, 332, 447, 449, 472 Clement V, Pope, 23 Clement VIII, Pope, 239 Clovis I, King of France, 21 Cocceius, Johannes, 10, 12, 314, 400, 404, 440 Conciliarism, 24-25, 34, 39 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 306

Constantine I, Roman Emperor, 36, 132, 140, 213, 241, 282, 427-8, 430, 472 Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon, 8, 84, 109, 275, 401 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 40, 49, 63-64, 66-67, 69-72, 81, 86, 403 Council of Trent, 38, 55, 110-2, 117, 132, 216 Counter-Remonstrants, 11, 96, 101, 106, 179, 190, 220, 297, 435, 440 Crescas, Judah, 322 Crispin, �Gilbert, 310 Cromwell, Oliver, 90, 211 Cujas, Jacques, 46, 49, 59, 266, 268, 271-2 Cunaeus, Petrus, 3, 9, 11-13, 16, 29, 40, 44-45, 51, 53, 57-58, 68-69, 82, 85, 87-88, 96-101, 103, 105, 121, 126, 128, 131, 136, 138, 140, 144-6, 151, 157, 160, 162-3, 168, 170-1, 173, 176-7, 180, 182, 184, 195, 201-383, 384, 387, 395, 401-3, 416, 422-3, 427, 440 works De Republica Hebraeorum, 11, 16, 44-45, 100, 103, 121, 180, 201-2, 204, 206-212, 272, 284, 321-4, 327-8, 343, 345, 348, 354-5, 358, 365, 368, 371, 375, 401, 422 Orationes, 220, 240, 265, 268, 281 Sardi venales, 68, 98-100, 103, 126, 128, 136, 138-9, 151-2, 157, 160, 162-3, 168, 170, 175-7, 180, 184, 195, 201-5, 212-382 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 82-83, 99, 141, 354 Cynicism, 182, 212-5, 224, 241-3, 246-9, 260, 279, 285-7, 290-1, 296, 306-7, 318-323, 348, 355, 362, 365-6, 374, 381 Diogenes, 182, 214, 224, 242-3, 2867, 290-1, 296, 323, 381 Menippos of Gadara, 53, 67-68, 126, 152, 182, 212, 214-8, 220-3, 228230, 232-3, 238-257, 260, 263-6, 268-9, 272-5, 279, 281, 285-7, 289-90, 292-3, 309, 323, 334, 340, 354-5, 361, 363-4, 374, 378, 3812, 440 Dante, Alighieri, 46, 86, 109, 178, 224

index David, 5, 15, 27, 83, 201, 211, 303, 325, 393, 406-7, 411-2, 417, 461, 463, 467, 471 de Baïf, Jean-Antoine, 178 de Dieu, Louis, 12 de la Taille, Jacques, 178 de l’Hôpital, Michel, 29, 54, 91, 217, 257, 262, 266, 283 de Mesmes, Henri, 268, 283 de Soto, Domingo, 19, 29, 385, 392 de Thou, Jacques Auguste, 9, 27, 41-42, 53, 57, 59-60, 130, 160-1, 168, 198, 238, 240, 414 deism, 32, 89, 103, 198, 285, 309, 314, 372 and the Leiden Circle, 11-12, 150, 170, 174, 180-1, 193, 198, 202, 284, 290, 372 Descartes, René, 31, 73, 127, 194, 255, 359 Diderot, Denis, 88-90, 93, 142, 167 Diogenes, 182, 214, 224, 242-3, 286-7, 290-1, 296, 323, 381 Dionysos, see Bacchus-Dionysos Dorat, Jean, 46, 49, 59 Dorman, Thomas, 435, 460-2 Dousa, Janus, the Elder, 9, 13, 43, 57, 198, 383-4 works Annales of Holland, 9 Dousa, Janus, the Younger, 9, 57, 383 Drayton, Michael, 247 Drusius, Johannes, 9, 203, 206, 214, 320, 324-5, 343, 354, 358 Drusus, Nero Claudius (Germanicus), Roman Emperor, 224 Dryden, John, 93, 107, 178, 188, 190, 217, 265 du Bellay, Joachim, 46, 109, 145, 178, 193 du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe, 158, 326, 395 Dubois, Pierre, 86 Durant, Gilles, 261, 265 Durant, Jacques, 269 Duyck, Frans, 209 Earle, John, 248 Eck, Johann, 476 Edict of Milan, 14 Edward I, King of England, 21, 26, 34, 400 Edward III, King of England, 21, 34 Eighty Years’ War, 7, 207

533

Ekkehard of Aurach, 19, 399 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 93, 210, 258, 262 Empedocles, 134 Empiricus, Sextus, 279, 282-3, 291, 327, 361-2 Epictetus, 182, 296 Epicureanism, 213, 220, 243, 249, 350, 382 Epicurus, 68, 220, 381 Lucretius, 298, 423 Epicurus, 68, 220, 381 Episcopius, Simon, 10-11, 105, 341, 440 works Institutiones theologicae, 11 epistemology, 4, 13-14, 35-36, 41, 47, 53, 60, 69, 71-72, 79-82, 85, 95, 97-100, 103, 107, 120-1, 126-7, 130, 133-7, 139-141, 143, 151, 155, 157-8, 162, 168, 170-1, 175-7, 187, 194-5, 201-2, 212, 213-5, 218-9, 228, 243, 246-7, 249-250, 252-3, 255, 260, 270-1, 279, 284-294, 297, 300, 305-6, 308, 310-1, 314, 316323, 327-8, 334-5, 337, 340-1, 348, 350, 354-5, 358-9, 361-2, 364-5, 367-9, 371-4, 378, 381, 382, 387, 439-40, 442, 452, 471 epistemic humility, 5, 33, 35, 47, 79-81, 95, 97-9, 121, 126, 130, 133, 136, 140, 143, 151, 155, 1578, 168, 170-1, 194-5, 212-3, 218, 247, 253, 255, 279, 285, 287, 290, 308, 316, 320-1, 328, 334, 342, 348, 354-5, 358-9, 364, 368-9, 374, 378, 381, 387, 439, 442 Philosophy vs. Rhetoric, 293, 295300, 302, 304 Sophia, 157, 201, 214, 224-6, 228, 242, 255-6, 287, 289-291, 300, 305, 307-8, 310, 313, 317-323, 325, 328-9, 332-5, 337-8, 345, 348, 354-5, 357, 359, 362, 364-5, 368, 371-4, 377-8, 380-1, 382 Sophrosyne, 157, 206, 214, 224, 226, 242, 255, 289, 291, 300, 313, 318320, 334-5, 354, 364, 371, 374 Erasmus, Desiderius, 31, 50, 68, 78, 82-83, 97-100, 108, 111, 130, 134, 137-8, 141, 157, 175, 177, 179-184, 186-8, 191, 193-5, 213-7, 219, 221, 224, 226-230, 234, 239, 241, 245-7,

534

index

249, 251, 253-6, 274, 278-9, 282, 284, 286-7, 290, 291-3, 295, 300, 302, 305, 310, 315, 317, 334, 345, 348, 350-2, 375, 377-8, 381, 392 works Adagia, 180, 230, 295 Antibarbari, 138, 284 Enchiridion, 137 Julius excluded, 157, 253 Praise of Folly, 83, 99-100, 180-4, 213, 224, 241, 246-7, 256, 278, 375, 377 The education of a Christian prince, 108, 137 The Sileni of Alcibiades, 68, 180, 182-4, 186, 195, 219, 224 Erastianism, 1, 56, 58, 89, 106, 260, 262, 270, 275, 382, 396 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 51, 60-61, 64-65, 67-70 Erpenius, Thomas, 11, 328, 440 Essenes, 315, 343, 400, 423 Estates General, Dutch, 96, 105-6, 145, 208, 210-1, 276, 379, 413, 434 Estates General, French, 23, 256-7, 259, 280, 400 Estienne, Henri, 59, 168, 264, 283, 315 Estienne, Robert I, 50, 83 Eudoxus of Cnidus, 51, 60, 64-7, 69-70, 73 Euripides, 111, 124, 175-6, 183-4, 418 works Andromeda, 222 Bacchae, 174-7, 184, 378, 381 Cyclops, 180, 187-8, 264-5 Electra, 191 Hecuba, 111 Helen, 191 Iphigenia at Aulis, 62, 111 Medea, 111, 264 Rhesus, 62 Eusebius of Caesarea, 14, 33, 36, 49, 51, 73, 75-79, 101, 156, 238, 286, 343, 472 Eyndius, Jacobus, 215, 240 Faber, Timaeus, 203 Faliero, Marino, 152 Fauchet, Claude, 54, 56 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe, 309 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, 207, 316

Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, 207 Fermat, Pierre de, 225 Ficino, Marsilio, 80, 166, 175, 197, 294, 315, 329-30, 335 Fludd, Robert, 315 Frederick I (‘Barbarossa’), Holy Roman Emperor, 22 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 22, 309 free will, 9, 11, 43, 106, 117-9, 139, 220, 244, 286, 289, 310, 350, 352, 354, 357, 414, 466 Galatini, Pietro, 326 Galilei, Galileo, 31, 64, 70-2, 216, 249 Gallicanism, 22, 25, 29, 55-6, 74, 111, 144, 261, 262, 266, 270, 271, 400, 443 Gaon, Saadia, 324, 338, 341, 343, 348, 370 Gassendi, Pierre, 127, 143 Gentili, Alberico, 29, 392, 453-4 Giambullari, Pier Francesco, 52 Gibbens, Nicholas, 447, 451 Giles of Rome, 474 Gillot, Jacques, 261 Gnosticism, 85, 307, 329, 332, 338, 350 Gomarists, see Counter-Remonstrants Gomarus, Franciscus, 11, 105, 203, 435 Gregory IX, Pope, 309 Gregory Nazianzen, 14, 103, 107, 140, 233, 460 Gregory of Nyssa, 14, 460, 462 Gregory VII, Pope, 20, 22, 24, 37, 460, 465 Gronovius, Johann Friedrich, 12 Grotius, Hugo, 3, 5-6, 8-14, 16, 18-19, 28-29, 31, 40, 44-45, 51, 53, 57-59, 61, 65-69, 72, 75-77, 80-82, 84-85, 87-88, 96, 103, 105, 107, 111-2, 121, 128, 140, 142, 145, 155, 157, 177-8, 190, 195, 198, 201-210, 212, 229-230, 260, 266, 271-2, 276-7, 284-5, 288, 290, 303, 308, 310-1, 317-8, 323-4, 326-8, 339, 357-8, 379, 382, 383-437, 440-2, 449-51, 457, 460-7, 469-74 works Annotationes in libros evangeliorum, 44, 404 Bewijs van den ware godsdienst, 178, 195, 308, 326, 385

index Capellae Satyricon, 65 Christus patiens, 140, 145 Commentarius in Theses XI, 323, 383, 387, 392, 397, 402-3, 405, 426 De antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae, 9, 57, 177, 210, 386, 392, 403, 436 De imperio summarum potestatum, 11, 59, 207, 209, 386-8, 392-3, 396, 402-3, 417, 419, 436, 461 De iure belli ac pacis, 19, 81, 157, 288, 383-4, 394, 397, 405, 415, 418, 424, 426, 430, 437 De iure praedae, 5, 16, 40, 75, 121, 272, 323, 328, 383, 387437, 451-3, 459, 461-3, 471, 474 De republica emendanda, 11, 121, 201-2, 209-210, 323, 383, 392, 401-3, 436 De veritate religionis Christianae, 19, 44, 84, 198, 290, 309, 326, 385-7, 434 Mare liberum, 385, 387, 390-1, 396, 414-5, 420, 425, 433-4 Meletius, 11, 14, 19, 33, 112, 2059, 317, 328, 384-7, 401, 417 Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas, 11, 105, 128, 195, 208, 212, 229, 358, 382, 386-8, 392-3, 461 Parallelon rerumpublicarum, 44, 210, 323, 383, 397, 403 Syntagma Arataeorum, 65-66, 69 Tractatus de iure magistratuum, 209, 386-7, 392, 403 Guillot, Jacques, 261 Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 26, 37-38 Habsburgs, 7, 31, 207, 274, 370 Hadrian, Publius Aelius, Roman Emperor, 282 Halevi, Judah, 308, 322, 335, 338, 340-1, 343-5, 348-352, 358, 362-4, 366, 368-370, 372-4 Hall, Joseph, 248 Harington, Sir John, 249 Harrington, James, 401, 441

535

Hebrew language, 46 Buxtorf Sr. and Jr. on the, 147, 326, 349 Heinsius on the, 146-8 Scaliger on the, 9, 44, 60, 83, 147, 202 Hebrew Republic, 11, 16-17, 32-33, 40, 44-5, 85, 100, 103, 121, 180, 201-2, 204, 206-7, 209-212, 272, 284, 3214, 327-8, 343, 345, 348, 354-5, 358, 365, 368, 371, 374, 399, 401-2, 422 Heemskerck, Jacob van, 164, 178, 395 Heemskerck, Maarten van, 164 Heinsius, Daniel, 3, 5, 11-14, 40, 44-47, 51, 53, 57-59, 62, 66-68, 82, 85, 87-89, 93-199, 202-5, 210, 212, 214, 217, 219-220, 225-6, 229, 233, 238, 243, 245, 253-4, 261, 264-5, 268, 272, 277, 281-7, 290, 292-3, 296-7, 304, 310, 313-5, 329, 334, 339-340, 343, 345, 357, 359, 363, 371, 373-5, 378, 381, 384, 387, 413, 427, 439, 462 theory of motivation, 44, 86, 95, 104, 107, 108, 112, 118, 119, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 149, 313 works Aristarchus sacer, 145-8, 196-7 Auriacus, sive Libertas Saucia, 94, 110, 116, 139-140, 145, 186-7 Cras credo, hodie nihil, 67, 126, 128, 229, 283, 381-2 De contemptu mortis, 196 De praestantia ac dignitate historiae oratio, 95, 150-170, 1836, 198, 219, 238, 253, 313, 329, 375 De tragoediae constitutione, 5, 95, 99, 101, 104-150, 153-5, 157-8, 162, 173-5, 177, 193-5, 197-8, 212, 214-5, 220, 225, 233, 264, 292-3, 313, 315, 340, 357, 359, 363, 375, 413 Elegie, 184-5, 198 Emblemata amatoria, 94, 97-8, 130, 161-2, 192 Emendationes et notae in Theocriti idyllia bucolica, 96 Epistola qua Dissertationi D. �Balzaci responditur, 145

536

index

Funeral oration on the death of Scaliger, 89, 93, 116, 161, 168, 198, 272 Hercules tuam fidem, 285 Herodes Infanticida, 144-5, 1489, 167, 196 Laus pediculi, 179 Lofsanck van Bacchus, 95-6, 1023, 142, 145, 148, 157, 166, 170-193, 196-7, 199, 282, 290 Lofsanck van Iesus Christus, 95-6, 103, 174, 177, 179, 187, 190, 193-7 Nederduytsche Poemata, 94, 1779, 184, 190 Orationes, 136, 151-4, 156, 158161, 188, 265, 272 Ordo Aristotelis, 104, 119 Sacrarum exercitationum, 146-7 The Apotheosis of Thuanus, 130, 160, 168, 198 Heliogabalus, Roman Emperor, 232-3, 236-241, 280, 287 Henri III, King of France, 53, 239-240, 261, 430 Henri IV, King of France, 23, 53, 55, 161, 239, 256-7, 261-2, 264, 267, 271, 377, 396, 430 Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, 21 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 22, 191, 271 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 91, 368 hermeneutics, 16, 72, 127, 186, 215-6, 254, 270, 291, 327-8, 340, 342, 354-5, 360-1, 365, 367-8, 399, 421, 464, 476 Hermes-Mercury, 67, 102, 220, 222-3, 303, 313, 320, 354 Hermes Trismegistos, 197, 355 Herodotus, 56, 75, 129, 173, 191 Hervet, Gentian, 277, 279, 282-3, 315 Hipparchus, 63-64, 66-67, 70 Hippolytus of Rome, 233-5, 420 historiography, 9, 11, 14, 27, 31, 33-34, 36-43, 46-47, 50, 52-54, 56-60, 62-63, 74, 78, 86-89, 91, 130, 1458, 150-1, 156-8, 160-1, 163, 180, 194, 198, 244, 247, 253-4, 268, 345-6, 349, 382, 389, 435, 439-40 historicisation, 5, 11, 43-47, 49-51, 60, 71, 73, 79, 83, 85-87, 132, 147, 153, 157, 201, 270, 272, 316,

323, 345, 386, 395, 401-4, 412, 415-6, 433, 440, 444, 462 religious, 33-34, 38-39, 42-44, 79-80, 87, 150, 155, 339, 344-5 Reichstheologie, 14, 36-37, 79, 270-1, 400 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 31, 76, 84, 127, 131, 155, 198-9, 214, 288, 290, 302-3, 318, 364, 396, 400-1, 403, 423, 435, 441, 443 Hogerbeets, Rombout, 205, 209, 219, 275, 365 Homer, 100, 135, 191, 246, 292, 312, 412, 417 works Iliad, 152 Odyssey, 191 Honerdus, Rochus, 105-7, 125, 139, 141, 198, 205, 275 works Thamara tragoedia, 105, 107, 141, 205 Honorius of Autun, 476 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon, 8, 109, 275, 403 Horace, 94, 125, 187, 203, 230, 256, 265, 281, 294 Hotman, François, 53, 55, 59, 202 House of Orange, 8, 11-12, 43, 94, 105-6, 139, 207, 276, 377, 415, 417, 428 Hus, Jan, 30, 40 Huygens, Christiaan, 225 Huygens, Constantijn, 144-5, 225 ibn Daud, Abraham, 324, 329 ibn Ezra, Abraham, 75, 303, 324-5, 328, 330, 337-8, 341-3, 348, 352, 370 ibn Tibbon, Samuel, 214, 321, 341, 351, 354-5, 370 Ignatius of Loyola, 113-5, 193 immortality, 5, 9-10, 12, 14-15, 23, 30, 33-34, 37, 39, 74, 80, 87, 89-90, 95, 100, 103, 106, 123, 130, 138, 142, 151-2, 154-168, 170, 177-8, 184-7, 195, 198-9, 220, 222, 238, 254, 281-2, 286-8, 296-8, 313-4, 329, 376, 464, 467, 469, 475 individualism, 27, 46, 57 Innocent III, Pope, 22 international relations, 4, 17-18, 20, 38 Christendom, 17-20, 31, 397-8

index crusades, 17-21, 26, 28, 36-38, 40, 308, 391, 398 holy wars, 16 Amalekites, 406, 410, 460, 462-3, 465 Midianites, 450, 453-4 just wars, 18, 26, 38, 398, 411-2, 426-7, 436, 447-8, 455-7 Irenaeus, 14, 74, 354 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England, 106, 112, 140, 166, 193, 264, 286, 343, 395, 430 Castalian band, 166 Jarchi, Solomon, 325-6 Jerome, 76, 346, 473 Jesuits, 32, 76, 85, 112-5, 120, 126, 132-3, 137-8, 141-2, 149, 193, 215, 249, 258, 266, 273, 276, 280, 285, 314, 343, 465, 474 Canisius, Petrus, 460, 465, 474 Ignatius of Loyola, 113-5, 193 Kircher, Athanasius, 315, 331 Parsons, Robert, 13, 55, 74, 460, 463, 466 Scioppius, Kaspar, 93, 241, 285-6 Serarius, Nicholas, 343 Jewel, John, 461-2 John Cassian, 14, 460, 465-6, 470-1 John Chrysostom, 14, 138, 151, 426, 4534, 460, 465, 467, 469-71 John II, Pope, 18 John of Damascus, 140, 472 John, King of England, 22 Jonson, Ben, 93, 107, 247 Josephus, Titus Flavius, 75, 83, 204, 268, 346, 419 Julian, Flavius Claudius (‘the Apostate’, or ‘the Philosopher’), Roman EmÂ�Â� peror, 103-4, 140, 180, 203, 213-4, 218, 229, 232-3, 236-8, 240-2, 251, 267, 281-2, 287, 291, 323, 376 Julius Africanus, 78, 156, 238, 241 Julius II, Pope, 28 Junius, Franciscus, the Elder, 13, 43, 91, 271-2, 285, 383, 401, 440 Juvenal, 203, 238, 240, 256, 265, 269, 281 Kabbalah, 32, 53, 80, 214, 303, 307, 315, 318-24, 328-330, 334-40, 353-4, 358, 363, 365, 373-4, 420, 435

537

Christian Kabbalah, 315, 321-2, 329, 334-7, 345, 354-5, 358-9 Ficino, Marsilio, 80, 166, 175, 197, 294, 315, 329-330, 335 Fludd, Robert, 315 Kircher, Athanasius, 315, 331 Mercier, Jean, 324, 329, 335 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della 151, 175, 182, 214, 222-3, 290-1, 295, 297, 300, 311, 315, 322, 341, 362, 365 Mithridates, Flavius, 329, 332, 335 Postel, Guillaume, 49, 54, 315, 329, 345 Reuchlin, Johann, 245, 315, 322, 329, 334, 345, 373 Riccius, Paul, 334 Lurianic revival Alkabetz, Shlomo Halevi, 335 Luria, Isaac, 335 Vital, Hayyim ben Joseph, 335 Sefer ha-Bahir, 329, 330, 332-5, 337, 338, 373 Sefer Yetzirah, 329, 330, 337 Sefirot, 329, 330, 333-4 Zohar, 327, 341, 420 Kalam, 214, 338, 343, 350, 368 Gaon, Saadia, 324, 338, 341, 343, 348, 370 Karaites, 12, 214, 315, 338-344, 3502, 354, 358, 363, 369, 373, 402 Kempis, Thomas à, 82-83, 99, 108, 138, 141 Kepler, Johannes, 14, 31, 62-67, 70-73, 80, 152, 244, 247-250, 355, 360, 381 Kimchi, David, 325, 348 Kircher, Athanasius, 315, 331 Knights Templar, 23 La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de, 104, 146 La Pléiade, 46, 49, 109-111, 163-4, 166, 178, 264-5, 281 Chrestien, Florent, 187, 261, 264-5, 287 de Baïf, Jean-Antoine, 178 de la Taille, Jacques, 178 Dorat, Jean, 46, 49, 59 du Bellay, Joachim, 46, 145, 178, 193

538

index

Passerat, Jean, 261, 265-6, 287 Ronsard, Pierre de, 46, 178, 180, 193, 197 La Popelinière, Lancelot Voisin de, 27, 53-56, 58, 73-74 La Satyre Ménippée, 55, 187, 216, 232, 240-1, 256-267, 271, 273, 280-1, 283, 287, 364, 377, 396 Lactantius, 14, 102, 158, 181, 197, 308 Lauris Jansz, 275, 283 Le Roy, Louis, 27, 54, 58, 216, 256, 416 Le Roy, Pierre, 261 Leiden Circle, 2, 5, 9-13, 28-29, 31, 38, 42-47, 51, 58, 73, 82, 86-88, 90-91, 96, 103, 130, 136, 143-4, 148, 150, 153, 167, 169-170, 177-180, 186, 198, 206, 209-212, 238, 243, 269, 272, 284-7, 292, 294, 314, 323-4, 328, 334, 359-360, 371, 387-8, 4001, 436, 439-42, 444 division of labour, 12, 45, 148 Leiden University, 7-8, 12, 42, 105, 274 L’Empereur, Constantijn, 12, 326, 328, 440 Leo IV, Pope, 18, 37 Levita, Elias, 324, 329 Limborch, Philip van, 54, 378 Lipsius, Justus, 9, 13, 43-44, 57, 59, 77-78, 84, 93, 129, 140-3, 152, 161, 182, 194, 198, 216-7, 232, 239-240, 244-5, 253, 256, 263-4, 266, 269, 273-5, 283, 285, 287, 298, 375, 385, 440 works De constantia, 273 Politicorum libri sex, 273-4 Somnium, Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos, 129, 140, 153, 216-7, 239-40, 256, 263-4, 266, 2734, 283, 287, 298, 375 Livy, 163, 171, 201, 225-6, 229, 237, 261, 321, 380 Locke, John, 6, 10, 15, 31, 54, 88, 127, 198, 288-90, 302, 318, 332, 358, 401, 404, 441 Lodge, Thomas, 268 Louis IX, King of France, 21, 23, 26, 34, 400 Louis XIII, King of France, 143-4, 166-8, 170 Lucian of Samosata, 67, 98-99, 111, 126, 182, 216-7, 222, 225-6, 229, 239,

242-8, 250-6, 260, 265-6, 270, 275, 281, 286, 293, 320-1, 351, 361, 377, 381 works Charon, 244, 320 Dialogues of the dead, 244, 286 Icaromenippus, 246, 286, 381 Menippos or the Descent into Hades, 244, 248, 253, 286 Mors Peregrini, 245, 286 Parliament of the Gods, 286 Philosophies for sale, 377 The Cynic, 98, 321 The Dream or The Cock, 98-99, 182, 293 The parasite, 246, 281 True history, 126, 222, 246-8, 381 Tyrannicide, 244, 253, 286 Zeus catechized, 111, 245, 286 Zeus rants, 111, 245, 286 Lucretius, 298, 423 Lull, Raymond, 86, 151, 308-310, 314, 318, 329, 340-1, 344, 347, 362-4, 366 works Book of the Gentile, 308-310, 344 Libre d’amich e amat, 314 Luria, Isaac, 335 Luther, Martin, 30, 37, 40, 137, 245, 261, 292, 305, 329, 345, 392, 474-5 Lycklama, Martinus, 203 Lyly, John, 249 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 2-3, 28, 31, 57, 113, 155, 245, 309, 443 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, 122, 125, 134, 151 Magini, Giovanni Antonio, 64-65, 68-69 Maimonides, 137, 203, 206, 307, 317, 321-3, 325, 328, 338-41, 347-59, 363-75 works Guide to the Perplexed, 184, 214, 327, 338, 343, 346-8, 350-9, 364, 367, 373-4 Mishneh Torah, 203-4, 210, 337, 348, 350-2, 375, 384 Book of Knowledge, 120, 220, 348, 375 Mandeville, Bernard, 251, 278 Manetho, 40, 75 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, 180, 234, 282

index Marius Maximus, 237-8, 240 Marnix, Philips of, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde, 18, 54, 175, 232-3, 241, 257-8, 267-8, 275-285, 287, 329, 335, 342, 369-370, 378, 392, 414-5 works De roomsche byen-korf, 175, 2323, 241, 258, 267-8, 277-284, 392 1579 English tr., 279 Tableau des différends de la religion, 283 Martí, Ramón, 325-7, 341, 420 Marx, Karl, 74, 91 Maurice, Count of Nassau and Prince of Orange, 8, 11, 43, 105-6, 139, 207, 377, 417, 428 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, 316 Medici, Lorenzo de, 60, 166, 239, 294, 313, 435 Melanchthon, Philipp, 61, 137, 227, 263, 298, 301-7, 310, 315, 323, 345 Melchizedek, 16, 40, 310, 393, 403, 41722, 472-5 Meletius of Antioch, 14 Menippean satires, 53, 67-68, 126, 152, 182, 212, 215-8, 229-230, 232-3, 238-57, 260, 263-6, 268-9, 2735, 279, 281, 285-7, 292, 309, 340, 354-5, 361, 363-4, 374, 378, 381, 440 Menippos of Gadara, 53, 67-68, 126, 152, 182, 212, 214-8, 220-3, 228-230, 232-3, 238-257, 260, 263-6, 268-9, 272-5, 279, 281, 285-7, 289-290, 292-3, 309, 323, 334, 340, 354-5, 361, 363-4, 374, 378, 381-2, 440 Mennonites, 18, 75, 110, 112, 126, 276, 325, 327, 391, 397, 400, 403, 415, 426 Mercier, Jean, 324, 329, 335 Merovingians, 26 Merula, Paulus, 36, 240 Meursius, Johannes, 12, 275 Midianites, 450, 453-4 Milton, John, 93, 107-8, 117, 125, 158, 178, 191, 280, 441 works Paradise Lost, 107-8, 158, 191, 280 Reason of Church-Government, 117

539

Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della, 151, 175, 182, 214, 222-3, 255, 290-1, 294-308, 311, 313-5, 322, 329-330, 333-5, 341, 345, 347-8, 354, 362, 365 works 900 Theses, 307, 329-330 Letters to Hermolaus Barbarus, 295-9, 304, 311, 313 Oration on the dignity of man, 175, 308, 329 Mithridates, Flavius, 329, 332, 335 Mommsen, Theodor, 49, 72, 236, 243 Montaigne, Michel de, 40, 91, 111, 143, 193, 213, 225, 263-4, 283, 288, 302, 308, 327 More, Thomas, 98, 111, 244-5, 249, 253, 311, 352 Morton, Thomas, 247 Moses, 14, 16, 75, 77, 83, 309, 335-6, 338, 345-7, 366, 370, 396, 399-401, 412, 453, 461, 465, 468, 471-2 Muret, Marc-Antoine, 46, 140 Münster, Sebastian, 324 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 210-1 nation-state, 22-23, 25, 28, 38-39, 42, 46, 52-53, 56, 109, 178, 263, 379, 396, 441-3 neoplatonism, 71, 80, 89, 118, 132, 140-1, 214, 268, 291, 294-5, 303, 307, 311, 313-5, 318, 322, 329, 332, 338-9, 348, 350, 359, 362, 368 neoskepticism, 2, 40, 43, 80-1, 193, 213, 225, 243, 303, 439, 441 early modern reception of Sextus Empiricus, 279, 282, 291, 327, 361, 362 Gassendi, Pierre, 127, 143 Montaigne, Michel de, 40, 91, 111, 143, 193, 213, 225, 263-4, 283, 288, 302, 308, 327 Sanches, Francisco, 219, 255 neostoicism, 142, 243, 369 Lipsius, Justus, 9, 13, 43-44, 57, 59, 77-78, 84, 93, 129, 140-3, 152, 161, 182, 194, 198, 216-7, 232, 239-240, 244-5, 253, 256, 263-4, 266, 269, 273-5, 283, 285, 287, 298, 375, 383, 440 Melanchthon, Philipp 61, 137, 227, 263, 298, 301-7, 310, 315, 323, 345

540

index

Nestorianism, 15, 234 New Historians, 2, 38, 43, 45-46, 53-56, 58-59, 74, 86, 166, 193, 266, 268270, 292, 294, 414, 443-4 Baudouin, François, 77, 169, 316 Bodin, Jean, 41, 56, 58, 60, 74, 77, 88, 137, 309-10, 321, 334, 344, 373-4, 414 Cujas, Jacques, 46, 49, 59, 266, 268, 271, 272 de Thou, Jacques Auguste, 9, 27, 41-42, 53, 57, 59-60, 160-1, 198, 238, 240, 414 Fauchet, Claude, 54, 56 Hotman, François, 53, 55, 59, 202 La Popelinière, Lancelot Voisin de, 27, 53-56, 58, 73-74 Le Roy, Louis, 27, 54, 58, 216, 256, 261, 416 Pasquier, Étienne, 27, 40-41, 54, 56, 59, 74, 82, 416 Pithou, Pierre, 27-29, 53-56, 91, 187, 216, 231, 256, 262, 266-272, 2801, 283-4, 287 Rapin, Nicolas, 256, 261, 266, 270 Vignier, Nicolas, 27, 41, 57, 74, 76, 88 new science, 5, 13, 31, 59, 61, 67, 69-72, 248, 372, 390 Newton, Isaac, 15, 31, 70, 81, 441 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 15, 16 Noah, 102, 371, 400, 423 Nogaret, Guillaume de, 24 Nonnus of Panopolis, 94-95, 100-4, 106, 119, 145, 147, 172-7, 180, 186-7, 196-7, 201, 224, 233, 285, 378, 381 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, 8, 54, 84, 106-7, 205, 377 Oldenbarnevelt, Reinier van, 377 Opitz, Martin, 93, 107, 145, 178 Origen, 14 Orosius, 14, 33, 36 Orpheus, 102, 173-5, 303 Otto of Freising, 36, 270 Ottonians, 21, 26, 34 Overbury, Thomas, 249 Ovid, 66, 176, 224 Pacification of Ghent, 7, 93 Pareus, David, 61-62 Parsons, Robert, 13, 55, 74, 460, 463, 466 Pascal, Blaise, 225, 290-1

Pasquier, Étienne, 27, 40-41, 54, 56, 59, 74, 82, 414 Passerat, Jean, 261, 265-6, 287 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 4, 13, 20, 391, 441-2 Pelagianism, 15, 466 Vossius, Historia Pelagiana, 15, 53 Perkins, William, 311 Persius, Aulus Flaccus, 238, 269 Petrarch, Francesco, 46, 86, 109, 145, 163-7, 178, 185-6, 197, 266, 313 works Triumphs, 163-6, 313 Petronius Arbiter, 68, 216, 251, 254, 256, 266, 268-271, 280, 283, 287 Phaedrus, 135, 175, 189, 212, 238, 255, 267-270, 275, 280-1, 287, 314, 363, 378, 381 editions Anonymus Nilanti, 267 Mythologia Aesopica, 267 Romulus collection, 267 Philip II/I, King of Spain and Portugal, 258, 274, 395 Philip IV, King of France, 21-26, 28-29, 34, 55, 207, 400 chosen nation claims, 25-26 Philip IV, King of Spain and Portugal, 207 Philo of Alexandria, 137, 332, 343, 419 Pithou, Pierre, 27-29, 53-56, 91, 187, 216, 231, 256, 262, 266-272, 280-1, 2834, 287 Pius V, Pope, 83 Pius X, Pope, 83 Plaisians, Guillaume de, 23, 400 Plato, 65, 99, 117-8, 133-6, 140, 151, 175, 182, 184, 186, 193, 223, 246, 294-7, 302, 314, 337, 340, 342, 350, 359, 363, 368, 378, 381, 411, 413, 443 works Phaedo, 135-6 Phaedrus, 135, 175, 280, 314, 342, 363, 381 Republic, 340, 413 Symposium, 182, 186 Pliny the Elder, 163, 223, 278-9, 281 Pliny the Younger, 223 Plutarch, 100, 123, 127, 173, 230-2, 241, 248 works Face of the Moon, 248

index Moralia, 123, 231 Isis and Osiris, 100, 127, 173 political theology, 25, 27-29, 34-36, 60, 368, 441, 465 politiques, 5-7, 23, 29, 42, 46, 53-56, 58-60, 82, 89-91, 98, 106-7, 111, 130, 140, 143-4, 150, 160, 163, 167-8, 193, 195, 205, 211, 216-7, 239-242, 253, 256-7, 260-3, 266, 268-9, 271-3, 275-6, 284, 287, 305, 321, 323, 327, 339, 368-9, 371, 374, 378, 387, 389, 439 Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini), 221-3, 231, 255, 290-1, 294-5, 299, 301, 305-6, 315 Polybius, 169 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 315 Postel, Guillaume, 49, 54, 315, 329, 345 predestination, 9, 10, 16, 401, 468 primitive church, 5, 44, 60, 85, 195, 303, 315-6 Proteus, 187, 191-3 Ptolemy, 67, 72-75, 79, 349, 416 Rabbinism, 212-5, 319, 326, 340, 354, 373 Crescas, Judah, 322 Halevi, Judah, 308, 322, 335, 338, 340-1, 343-5, 348-352, 358, 3624, 366, 368-370, 372-4 ibn Tibbon, Samuel, 214, 321, 341, 351, 354-5, 370 Kimchi, David, 325, 348 Maimonides, 120, 137, 184, 203-4, 206, 210, 214, 220, 307, 317, 3213, 325, 327-8, 337-8, 340-1, 343, 346-359, 363-6, 368-9, 371-4, 384 Rashi, 325 Racine, Jean, 107 Ramsay, Andrew Michael, 309 Ramus, Petrus, 40, 64, 191, 265, 459 Rapin, Nicolas, 256, 261, 266, 270 rationalisation, 2, 22, 25, 28, 52, 444 rederijkers, 110, 142, 217, 283, 378 Reformation, 4, 7, 28, 30, 32, 37-40, 69, 72, 83, 104, 108-112, 115, 128, 132, 213, 225, 245, 264, 276, 292, 311, 315, 320, 342, 366, 368, 370, 379380, 389-90, 392, 395, 414, 420, 435, 444, 462 Regemorterus, Ambrosius, 202, 324-5, 358 religious legitimacy claims, 1, 4, 6, 9, 16-21, 23, 25-26, 28-29, 34, 36-38,

541

40, 43-44, 46, 55-56, 72-73, 85, 100, 109, 150, 180, 201-2, 206, 210-1, 262-3, 270, 308, 325, 344-5, 379-81, 395-6, 398-9, 401, 404, 406, 408, 410-2, 419, 423, 426-7, 434-6, 442-4, 447-8, 450, 453-7, 460, 462-3, 465 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 164, 175 Remonstrants, 5, 10-11, 15, 90, 96, 105-6, 111, 118, 136, 139, 144-5, 173, 190, 194-6, 218, 263, 297, 311, 341, 377, 379-380, 382, 386, 440 Renan, Ernest, 26, 34, 37, 234 republicanism, 27-28, 36, 158, 210 Reuchlin, Johann, 245, 315, 322, 329, 334, 345, 373 Riccius, Paul, 334 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de, Cardinal-Duc, 144, 167 Rigault, Nicolas, 232-3, 238-241, 280, 286, 375 Rivault, Florence, 69 Robertson, William, 26, 37-38 Robinson, John, 311 Roes, Alexander of, 36 Ronsard, Pierre de, 46, 178, 180, 193, 197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 88, 302 Sabellius, 234 Sack of Constantinople, 19 Sack of Rome, 28 Sallust, 129, 201, 225-7, 229, 235, 237, 281, 300, 321 Salmasius, Claudius, 96, 104, 125, 144, 146, 148, 157, 170, 188, 194, 196, 269, 343, 413 Sanches, Francisco, 219, 255 Sarpi, Paolo, 196, 435 Saul, 17, 341, 400, 410-1, 447, 450, 454, 460-6 Savonarola, Girolamo, 282, 294, 298, 303, 400 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 3, 9, 11-14, 29, 36, 39-40, 42-47, 49-91, 93-94, 96-98, 100-3, 111-2, 115-6, 119, 131, 136, 142-7, 149, 151, 157-8, 160-1, 166, 170, 180, 186-8, 197-8, 202-3, 205, 217, 231-2, 236, 238241, 245, 247-8, 256, 264-9, 271-2, 274, 284-7, 294, 298, 304, 307, 322-4, 326, 329, 339, 342-3, 345,

542

index

349, 352, 359, 371, 383-5, 394-5, 403, 416, 420, 427, 439-40, 462 on the Hebrew language, 9, 44, 60, 83, 147, 202 the Scaligerian turn, 44, 46, 51, 58-60, 64, 69-73, 77, 79, 85-87, 89, 100, 131, 145, 151, 154-5, 285, 290, 441 works Confutatio stultissimae, 285 De aequinoctiorum anticipatione diatriba, 63-66, 69 De emendatione temporum, 9, 49, 51, 75-76, 78, 84, 343 Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 61, 343 Thesaurus temporum, 9, 49-51, 69, 74, 84, 93, 160, 238, 416 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 116, 119, 264 Schoonhovius, Florentius, 98, 130 Schotte, Andreas, 232, 273, 275 Schotte, Apollonius, 105, 204-6, 209, 219, 275, 320, 325, 327-8, 354-5, 365, 384 Scioppius, Kaspar, 93, 241, 285-6 Scotus, John, 296, 298 Scriverius, Petrus, 10, 13, 43, 57, 94, 152, 174-5, 177-180, 190, 196, 269, 384 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 107, 144 secularisation, 1-13, 28-29, 33, 36, 42, 44-47, 49, 51, 54, 58, 73, 76, 79-83, 85-90, 94, 96, 100-1, 103, 107, 1168, 126-7, 131, 136, 139, 143-4, 146, 148, 150-1, 153, 158, 161, 167, 171, 174, 179-180, 184, 193-7, 213, 215, 242-3, 245, 253, 257, 263, 266-8, 271-3, 275, 282-3, 291-2, 294, 307, 318, 321, 323, 362, 369, 371-4, 377-82, 386-94, 397, 414-7, 426-7, 435-6, 439-45 and deism, 11-12, 150, 170, 174, 180-1, 193, 198, 202, 284, 290, 372 and ecumenism, 5, 19, 89, 310, 384, 387, 397 and epistemic humility, 5, 35, 47, 79-81, 95, 97-99, 121, 126, 130, 133, 136, 140, 143, 151, 155, 1578, 168, 170-1, 194-5, 212-3, 218, 247, 253, 255, 279, 285, 287, 290, 308, 316, 320-1, 328, 334, 342, 348, 354-5, 358-9, 364, 368-9, 374, 378, 381, 387, 439, 442

and historicisation, 5, 11, 43, 45-47, 49-51, 60, 71, 73, 79, 83, 86-87, 147, 153, 157, 201, 270, 272, 316, 323, 345, 372-3, 386, 390, 394-5, 401-4, 410, 414-6, 420, 422, 433, 440, 444, 462 Cunaeus, Petrus, De Republica Hebraeorum, 11 the Scaligerian turn, 44, 46, 51, 58-60, 64, 69-73, 77, 79, 85-87, 89, 100, 145, 151, 1545, 272, 285, 290, 385, 389, 394-5, 416, 439 and irenicism, 2, 8, 51, 58, 82, 87, 89, 109, 112, 119, 139, 149-151, 160, 195, 205, 209, 213, 217, 227, 252-3, 262-3, 307, 309-11, 313, 315-17, 321, 322-3, 348, 368, 386-7, 439, 441 and minimalism, 2, 5, 32, 82, 89, 103, 195, 212-5, 289-292, 295, 301, 303, 305-8, 310-1, 315, 317320, 322-3, 341, 348, 351, 355, 365, 374, 382, 384, 386, 397, 435, 439 and the redefinition of disciplinary boundaries, 6, 28, 60, 68-69, 71, 79, 87, 130, 151, 156-7, 181, 293, 311 and theory of motivation, 44, 86, 95, 104, 107-8, 112, 118-9, 132, 138143, 149, 313 not atheism, 1, 3, 5, 80-81, 88, 249, 252, 309, 382, 397, 442-3 not secularism, 1, 3, 4, 26, 57, 83, 89, 148, 287, 442-3 Selden, John, 247, 352, 396, 398, 400-1, 403, 423, 435, 441 Semele-Persephone, 171-2, 345 Seneca the Elder, 181 Seneca the Younger, 9, 94, 105, 109, 139, 145, 188, 196, 203, 216-7, 229, 239, 251, 253-4, 256, 263, 265, 273, 292, 357, 417-8, 425 works Apocolocyntosis, 188, 239, 251, 253-4, 263, 265 Thyestes, 105 Serarius, Nicholas, 343 Servetus, Michael, 84, 303 Severus, Alexander, 234, 236-7 Shakespeare, William, 191, 268

index Sicardus Cremonensis, 476 Sidney, Philip, 160, 279, 301, 304, 439 Sigonius, Carolus, 272, 321, 345, 401 Silenos, 67, 175, 177, 180-6, 188-9, 191-3, 224, 237, 242, 282, 287, 295-7, 300, 305-6, 334, 345, 372, 374, 382 Skepticism, 26, 36, 80-81, 86, 126, 137, 213, 228, 243, 252, 282-3, 285, 303, 315, 362 Snellius, Willebrord, 51, 65, 69, 248, 440 Solon, 14 Sonnius, Franciscus, 278 Sophia, see epistemic humility Sophism, 82, 183, 246, 267, 278, 296, 319 Sophocles, 129-130, 187, 435 Sophrosyne, see epistemic humility sovereignty, 4, 11, 22-23, 25, 37, 43, 207, 262, 397, 400, 420, 435 Spinoza, Baruch, 13, 72, 81, 89, 93, 310, 443 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 7, 30, 49, 53, 58, 84 state-building, 2, 22, 25-26, 38, 168, 441, 444 Stevin, Simon, 46-47, 67, 69, 109, 383 stewardship, 17, 40, 471 Stoicism, 9, 35, 80, 93, 135, 142, 191, 213, 228, 243, 246, 274, 279, 285, 321, 361-2, 374 Cato the Younger, 416, 422 Epictetus, 182, 296 Marcus Aurelius, 180, 234, 282 Seneca, 9, 94, 105, 109, 139, 145, 181, 188, 196, 203, 216-7, 229, 239, 251, 253-4, 256, 263, 265, 273, 292, 357, 418, 425 Strauss, David, 83 Suárez, Francisco, 19, 29, 385, 392 Suetonius, 152, 203, 235, 237 Swift, Jonathan, 217, 251, 309, 408 works Battle of the Books, 217, 408 Sylvius, Franciscus, 12 Synod of Dordt, 7, 10-11, 45, 54, 87, 94-96, 101, 103, 105-6, 119, 127, 187, 193-4, 196-7, 204, 218-9, 245, 341, 374-5, 377-381, 387, 396, 4001, 440 Tacitus, 9, 44, 129, 163, 201, 203, 224, 236-7, 244, 269, 273, 370, 409, 424 Tertullian, 14, 107, 163, 181, 233, 235, 309

543

Thales of Miletus, 62-63, 70 The Three Impostors, 309 Themistocles, 131, 153, 160 Theocritus, 66, 97-99, 178 Theodoret of Cyrus, 472 Theophilus of Antioch, 472 Theophrastus, 248-9, 275 Thirty Years’ War, 8, 31, 441 Thucydides, 75, 131 Toland, John, 198, 402 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 5-6, 10, 38, 52, 55-56, 91, 158, 401 Trist, Peter, 378 triumphs, 56, 101, 163-6, 168, 170, 186, 313 Turnbull, Richard, 447, 449-50 Turnèbe, Adrien, 46, 49, 59, 266, 268 Twelve Years’ Truce, 106 Union of Arras, 7, 109, 207, 417 Union of Utrecht, 7-8, 109, 207-8, 276, 417 University of Paris, 25, 191, 265 Sorbonne, 108, 110, 132, 167 Urban IV, Pope, 37 Uyttenbogaert, Johannes, 10-11, 43, 53, 105, 385, 440 Valla, Giorgio, 269 Valla, Lorenzo, 50, 60, 78, 83, 202, 239, 435 van Dyck, Jacob, 190-1 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 59, 67, 188, 216-7, 230, 241, 244, 251, 256, 266, 281 Victor, Sextus Aurelius, 232-3, 236, 241, 281, 286, 346 Vignier, Nicolas, 27, 41, 57, 74, 76, 88 Virgil, 66, 105, 180-1, 191, 196, 267, 278, 280, 292 works Georgics, 191, 267, 278, 280 Vitoria, Francisco de, 19, 29, 385, 392, 398, 405, 409, 411, 413, 419, 427-8, 430, 447, 474 Vives, Juan Luis, 73, 86, 152, 191, 251, 253-4, 264, 322 Vlaming, Pieter, 217, 265 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 23, 88, 90, 115, 198, 217, 233, 251-2, 271, 309, 411

544

index

works Candide, 217, 309 Homily on superstition, 23, 271 La Henriade, 271 von Hohenheim, P.A. Theophrastus Bombastus (Paracelsus), 40 Vondel, Joost van den, 8, 109, 143, 283, 377, 401 Vorstius, Adolph, 203 Vorstius, Conrad, 10, 105-6, 119, 144, 203, 215, 218, 229, 242, 264, 284, 286, 305, 320, 324, 358, 374-6, 382, 386, 440 Vossius, Dionysus, 57, 372 Vossius, Gerardus, 3, 10-11, 13, 15, 29, 44-45, 47, 51, 53, 57-59, 72, 75, 85, 87-88, 96-97, 103, 121-2, 127, 142, 145, 149-150, 156, 170, 179-180, 193, 197-8, 242, 260, 265, 284-5, 290, 304, 314, 339, 349, 367, 371-3, 378, 388, 416, 419, 440 works De theologia gentili, 170, 181, 198, 290, 372 De tribus symbolis, 181 Historia Pelagiana, 15, 53

Vulcanius, Bonaventura, 13, 43, 91, 96, 152, 203, 232, 268, 276-7, 284-5, 354, 383 Walaeus, Antonius, 11, 87, 204-5, 285, 317, 386 Waldensians, 30-31, 317 Walter Map, 18, 393 Warner, Levinus, 12 Weber, Max, 27-28, 37-38 Welwod, William, 14, 388-91, 403, 413, 418, 431 Westerbaen, Jacob, 377 Western Schism, 37, 39 Weysten, Anna, 377 William I, Count of Nassau and Prince of Orange (‘the Silent’), 8, 94, 139, 261-2, 276, 329, 385, 415 Wingfield, John, 249 Wycliffe, John, 17, 30, 420, 422, 474 Yitzhaki, Shlomo (Rashi), 325 Zeeland, 93, 105, 191, 202, 204-5, 207211, 276, 325, 327, 440 Zeus, 111, 171-2, 245, 286, 345