The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity

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THE PHILOSOPHER IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a new light, not as reason’s progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of selfcultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with a definite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing, this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of both philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and to the institutional and larger political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place. is Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences.

CONAL CONDREN

is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

STEPHEN GAUKROGER

is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Research Professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland.

IAN HUNTER

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe

77

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artifical distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

THE PHILOSOPHER IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE The Nature of a Contested Identity

EDITED BY

CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521866460 © Cambridge University Press 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents 395392

List of contributors Acknowledgements

page ix xii

Introduction 1

1

The persona of the natural philosopher Stephen Gaukroger

2

17

The university philosopher in early modern Germany Ian H unter

3

35

The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics of office in early modern England Co nal Co ndr en

4

66

From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: the laughing philosopher in the early modern period C ath eri ne C u rti s

5

90

Hobbes, the universities and the history of philosophy R. W. S erjeantson

6

113

The judicial persona in historical context: the case of Matthew Hale David Saund ers

7

140

Persona and office: Althusius on the formation of magistrates and councillors Robe rt von Fri edeb urg

8

160

Descartes as sage: spiritual askesis in Cartesian philosophy Jo hn C ott ingh am

182

vii

Contents

viii

9 The natural philosopher and the virtues Pe ter H arri son

202

10 Fictions of a feminine philosophical persona: Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and philosophia lost Karen Green and J acqueline B road

11

229

John Locke and polite philosophy Rich ar d Yeo

Index

254 276

Contributors

is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy and Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. Her main research area is the history of early modern women’s philosophy. She is the author of Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Together with Karen Green, she is working on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of women’s political thought. They are currently preparing an edited collection of essays on political themes in women’s writings from the late medieval period to the Enlightenment.

JACQUELINE BROAD

is Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales. His most recent book is Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presuppositions of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His current historical research is on conceptions of philosophy over the same broad period and on Shakespeare’s use of casuistry. His philosophical work is on metaphor and concept formation in politics.

CONAL CONDREN

is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Research at the University of Reading, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford. He is co-translator of the standard Cambridge edition of the philosophical writings of Descartes, and his many publications include The Rationalists (1988) and Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His latest book is The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

JOHN COTTINGHAM

is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of New South Wales who works in the history of early modern political thought and literature. Her recent articles focus on Tudor humanism and pedagogy, the diplomat Richard Pace, and Quentin Skinner’s

CATHERINE CURTIS

ix

List of contributors

x

reading of Sir Thomas More on liberty. She is currently working on Juan Luis Vives, and a book-length study of Thomas More as satirist and philosopher. is Chair of Early Modern History at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and is co-founder of the Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies. He was Heisenberg Fellow, Fellow at the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His recent books include SelfDefence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680 (2002); (ed.) Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300–1800 (2004); (ed.) Passions and the Legitimacy of Rule from Antiquity to the Early Enlightenment (Cultural and Social History, vol. 2, no. 2, London 2005); and (ed.) Patrioten und Patria vor dem Patriotismus. Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben und die Rekonfigurierung europaeischer Gemeinwesen im 17. Jahrhundert (2005). He is currently working on patriotism and the transformation of German princely rule during the early modern period.

ROBERT VON FRIEDEBURG

is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow, at the University of Sydney. He is author of Explanatory Structures (1978), Cartesian Logic (1989), Descartes, An Intellectual Biography (1995), Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has recently completed The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 1210–1685: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, vol. I (2006).

STEPHEN GAUKROGER

is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Monash University. She is the author of The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (1995), and Dummett: Philosophy of Language (2001). She has recently edited, with Constant Mews, Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan.

KAREN GREEN

is Professor of History and Philosophy at Bond University, Australia. His chief area of research is early modern thought, with a particular focus on philosophy, natural philosophy and religion. He is author of ‘Religion’ and Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His book, Adam’s Encyclopaedia: Theology and the Foundations of Scientific Knowledge, 1500–1700, will be published in 2006.

PETER HARRISON

List of contributors

xi

is a Research Professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland who works in the history of early modern philosophical, political and religious thought. His most recent monograph is Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Together with Thomas Ahnert and Frank Grunert, he has recently completed the first substantial English-language translation of works by Christian Thomasius – Christian Thomasius: Essays on State, Church and Politics (forthcoming) – and is currently finishing a book on Thomasius as civil philosopher.

IAN HUNTER

is Adjunct Professor in the Socio-Legal Research Centre at Griffith University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is also visiting Research Professor in the Centre for Research on Sociocultural Change at the Open University, UK. Since Anti-lawyers: Religion and the Critics of Law and State (1997), he has continued to publish regularly on the historical relations of law and the politics of religion, with a focus on the early modern period.

DAVID SAUNDERS

R . W . SERJEANTSON

is a Fellow and Lecturer in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of a number of studies in early modern philosophy and intellectual history, including the article on ‘Proof and Persuasion’ in the Cambridge History of Early Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a study of ‘Hume’s General Rules and the “Chief Business of Philosophers”’, in Impressions of Hume (2005). He is the editor of Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar, by Meric Casaubon (1999), and is also editing volume III of the Oxford Francis Bacon for the Clarendon Press. He is currently completing a monograph on the history of human understanding from the late Renaissance to Hume.

is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University, Brisbane, who works on the history of science and history of ideas. His books include Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He has recently published on John Locke’s methods of note-taking (Eighteenth Century Thought, vol. 2, 2004), and is working on a study of debates about memory and scientific information between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

RICHARD YEO

353217

Acknowledgements

The papers presented here were produced for an international workshop, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe’, held in Brisbane, Australia on 7–8 July 2004. This workshop was funded by the Australian Research Council as part of a similarly titled five-year grant awarded to the volume editors in the same year. We are thus grateful to the ARC for making this scholarly gathering possible. We are also grateful to the University of Queensland’s Centre for the History of European Discourses and its project officer, Peter White, for the flawless organisation of this event. Thanks are also due to Averil Condren for her work on the index. Chapter 3 is developed from themes in Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Introduction Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter

I

Individuals and the societies in which they live establish and maintain identity in relationship to some sense of a past, principally of interest insofar as it is of practical relevance in the present. The relationship may be unreliable: memories may be mischievous, a heritage fanciful, a history fabricated, or so brutally abridged as to be mythic. Regardless of the confidence with which a ‘past-relationship’1 is assumed, however, its disruption can be deeply destabilising. These commonplaces about what Michael Oakeshott called the ‘practical past’ are no less pertinent to academic disciplines than they are to societies and individuals. The history of political theory, for example, still sometimes presented as an on-going tradition of debate and dialogue reaching back to the ancient Greeks, was invented as an authenticating lineage for the newly institutionalised university study of politics only around the end of the nineteenth century. Much the same might be said of the gatherings of canonic texts conventionally studied as histories of national literatures. In all these cases, the posited history retains its shape, momentum and character by the competing needs to affirm, reform or subvert a contemporary disciplinary activity. Such histories are often so present-centred as to be largely convenient lineages, anachronistic in predication of content and ‘whiggish’ in narrative structure. In many ways the history of philosophy is at one with, and may have been a model for, the patterns of these adjacent academic genealogies. Aristotle set a precedent in isolating his own metaphysical position in counterpoint to figures such as Empedocles and Plato. But something approximating the modern history of philosophy was not born until the seventeenth century, when it appeared together with the history of theology, partly in an attempt to tame the incendiary absolute truths of 1

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Origins of the Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (1962), 209–46.

1

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CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER

systematic theology and philosophy by treating them as opinions held by historical sects.2 While it remained associated with ‘eclectic’ philosophy, the history of philosophy retained this relativising and pluralising tendency. Once pressed into the service of a priori philosophy by Kant, however, it was transformed into an historical apologetics for modern philosophical doctrine.3 It was Hegel, though, who showed just how far the past could be captured in the interests of promoting a present identity. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he provided the very dialectical structure that explained how what was worthy led to him.4 Since then, and irrespective of whether Hegel’s philosophy has itself been found acceptable, the history of philosophy has remained largely in the hands of philosophers as a tool of contemporary doctrinal exploration and justification. Certainly the difficulties in writing historically about a philosophical past have generated a substantial methodological literature from within philosophy; and in some defined sub-fields historical understanding may be enhanced by the use of specific philosophical techniques, such as the use of modern notation to elucidate medieval logic.5 Yet even here, the main point seems to be to see how far the translation of propositions into modern notational form can help us assess contributions to a discipline that have hitherto been obscured by the inadequacies of Latin.6 Leaving to one side the exploration of the past as a source of propositional treasure, the attitude of philosophers to their history has been instrumentalist in two ways. It may be taken as a relatively neutral territory on which they can meet ecumenically when otherwise divided. Most commonly, however, philosophy’s history may be used as a pedagogical induction into the present, in much the same way that, according to Kuhn, histories of physics functioned in science education.7 Similarly, for many years post-Reformation German philosophers have had to 2

3

4

5

6

7

John Christian Laursen (ed.), Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration (Houndmills: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002). Donald R. Kelley, ‘History and/or Philosophy’, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Teaching New Histories of Philosophy (Princeton N. J.: University Center for Human Values, 2004), 345–59. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. Haldane and F. Simson (3 vols., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892–5). See, for example, the journal History and Theory, an important repository of such arguments; also The Monist 53 (1969), special issue; Giorgio Tonelli, ‘A Contribution Towards a Bibliography on the Methodology of the History of Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 10 (1974), 456–8. Alexander Broadie, George Lokert: Late Scholastic Logician (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983); D. P. Henry, Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 1–4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1969), Preface and 1–9.

Introduction

3

trudge their way to Kant in order to be blessed with metaphysical respectability.8 Yet, as Kuhn also remarked of histories of science, when a new orthodoxy is established or an emergent school vies for recognition, the history has to be re-written. Thus fifteenth-century Italian rhetoricians are suddenly the precursors of structuralism;9 Hume the empiricist becomes a pragmatist, an emblem of the importance of William James’s battle with idealism.10 Shadowy or discounted figures are shifted into the glare of attention by the need to situate developing interests. The rediscovery of Hobbes as a philosopher of language had much to do with a twentieth-century ‘linguistic turn’. In the same present-centred idiom, lamentation can be as important as celebration. What might seem wrong now can be articulated by blaming selective figures from the past. Thus, according to Richard Rorty, the whole of seventeenth-century epistemology put philosophy on the wrong track;11 and for others Cartesian dualism is still in need of exorcism.12 In some way, however, the history of philosophy is a little different from the histories of other academic disciplines. The self-consciousness and highly contested nature of modern academic philosophical enquiry helps ensure particularly varied perceptions of what the relationship between philosophy and its past amounts to. But there are two polarised claims between which it might seem all other positions must be located. At one extreme is the notion that philosophy is essentially an historical activity and therefore that philosophising well in ignorance of it is impossible. As R. G. Collingwood famously argued, to understand the answers philosophers have given, it is necessary to reveal the contingent and variable nature of their problems, even if history here is really the medium in which such problems are resolved.13 At the other extreme

8

9

10

11

12

13

Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–29. Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 15, 43n, 184–5; Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and on the debate it generated, Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–8. Bruce Kuklick, ‘Seven Thinkers and How They Grew’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 125–40: on textbook histories of philosophy and the pragmatic lineage, 129–32. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, 1980), e.g. 4–9. Rorty, Philosophy, chs. 1–2; and for valuable discussion of much of the literature, Raia Prokhovnik, Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (London: Routledge, 1999), 50–90. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, 1967), 29–43, 53–76. Charles Taylor, ‘Philosophy and its History’, in Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 17–30.

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is the argument that a history of philosophy is impossible.14 For whereas historians infer and reconstruct from surviving evidence a philosophical proposition, the thought of a given philosopher is always in the present. The history of philosophy is always philosophy. That philosophy cannot or must be historical are synoptic extremities that would apparently demand a more reasonable position between the two, with scholars recognising history and philosophy to be different activities, yet holding that they can be mutually enlightening. Thus Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner argue that while entirely past-centred canons of historicity lead towards a futile antiquarianism, a present-centred abridgement of earlier philosophical propositions results only in legitimating anecdotalism. The first endeavour fails to distinguish philosophy from intellectual quackery, the second reduces history to myth.15 All that seems to be required is an avoidance of these excesses. Up to a point, a position such as this is appealing, not least because it invites an examination of evidence and cases of the interplay between historical knowledge and philosophical proposition. Yet, most broadly, it begs the question of whose criteria are to be used in judging an account of a philosopher from an earlier time insofar as philosophers and historians have diverging interests. If it is likely that philosophers will continue to expect their own standards and priorities to take precedence in their own history, it remains open to the historian to explore the linguistic and institutional means of asserting this precarious authority over a neighbouring discipline. What also remains unclear is the degree to which it is possible to avoid difficulties associated with the specific genre of philosophical history. As a mode of intellectual history, philosophical history is so structured that historical events unfold as the means of resolving present philosophical problems. As Hegel put it: ‘The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us, but the Becoming of ourselves and our knowledge.’16 ‘Our knowledge’ is supposed to arise from human subjectivity’s on-going pursuit of self-clarification, and is in this sense timeless. Eighteenth-century Kantians were amongst the first to practise this kind of philosophical history. They treated the entire history of philosophy

14

15 16

Gordon Graham, ‘Can There be a History of Philosophy?’ History and Theory 21 (1982), 37–52; and Jacques Derrida, ‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 154–68. Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 4–11. Cited in Kelley, ‘History and/or Philosophy’, 347.

Introduction

5

prior to Kant as if it were an attempt to overcome the impasse between an idea-less empiricism and a sense-less rationalism, even if this impasse was in fact internal to the structure of Kant’s transcendental idealism.17 We can find the same basic approach in more recent histories that assimilate the most diverse texts and contexts to a narrative leading to Kant’s discovery of the transcendental structure of subjectivity18 or the transcendent structure of a universal moral identity.19 A no less problematic feature of ‘presentist’ philosophical histories is their presumption that we already know what philosophy is – typically, some combination of the disciplines of epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy – such that its history is always a history of that which we call philosophy today. This is the presumption that all of the contributions to this book seek to question, by showing in different ways that we cannot read off early modern philosophies from current philosophical doctrines. What philosophy might be is a matter for historical investigation of the activities that have been called ‘philosophy’, regardless of whether to modern eyes these activities resemble post-Kantian epistemology, and regardless of whether they look more like theology, poetry, polemics or natural sciences. Viewed from a post-Kantian vantage, be it an analytic or a continental one, the landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophy appears as a foreign country. Not only was there little interest in the problems of epistemology, but the range of disciplines classified as philosophy was larger and more diverse than it became from the late eighteenth century. After scanning a number of different classifications typical of the European universities, Joseph Freedman concludes that ‘the nine disciplines which most frequently appeared . . . were metaphysics, physics, mathematics, ethics, family life, politics, logic, rhetoric, and grammar’.20 Once we recall that physics typically comprised the main Aristotelian works of natural philosophy – The Heavens, On Generation 17

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See, for example, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie fu¨r den akademischen Unterricht (3rd edn, Leipzig, 1820). In English: A Manual of the History of Philosophy, trans. A. Johnson, ed. and rev. J. R. Morell (London: Bohn, 1852). For a helpful discussion, see T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 213–19. Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Classifications of Philosophy, the Sciences, and the Arts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, The Modern Schoolman 72 (1994), 37–65 at 43.

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and Corruption, Meteorology, On the World, and On the Soul – and that mathematics included the musical and astronomical disciplines in addition to geometry and arithmetic, and that politics could embrace jurisprudence, the full diversity of the philosophical domain begins to appear. The fact that this array included all of the disciplines apart from theology, law and medicine is a pointer to the degree to which the concept of philosophy was determined by what was taught in university arts or philosophy faculties. As Ian Hunter shows, any such determination of philosophy’s scope could be contentious, often subject to the contingencies of overtly confessional dispute. The situation is complicated further if one turns to England, a country whose universities were quite often peripheral to what people saw as philosophy and whose major figures worked outside a university environment. In common usage ‘philosophy’ might not refer to any discipline at all, but to the ends or purposes of many jostling claimants to wisdom. Similarly, the increasing importance of natural philosophy during the seventeenth century could mean that there might be no stable distinction to be drawn between medicine and philosophy, as was attempted within the context of university structures. The anatomist and physician Walter Charleton presented himself to his readers as a philosopher;21 William Harvey was admired as a philosopher because of his work on circulation.22 Historically speaking, then, it becomes increasingly implausible to see early modern philosophy as a single discipline or intellectual endeavour expressive of something like the human subject’s struggle to clarify its consciousness or conscience. Some philosophical disciplines were indeed methods of self-clarification. Some, though, taught positive metaphysical or natural philosophical doctrines, still others the arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric, or of memory, navigation or computation. In certain times and places, a certain kind of philosophical persona could be cultivated by seeking self-clarification, yet other kinds of philosophical personae have been cultivated in other ways: by seeking union with God or knowledge of corpuscles, freedom from passion or the alphabet of all possible sciences, mastery of the classics or impartiality of legal judgment. Such purposive and doctrinal diversity raises the question of whether the history of philosophy can be conceived as an object of enquiry without accepting what philosophers are in the habit of taking for granted. There 21 22

See Emily Booth, A Subtle and Mysterious Machine (New York and Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). See, for example, Robert G. Frank Jr, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Introduction

7

is a way out of this apparent impasse, however, namely for the history of philosophy to take as its object those doctrines and disciplines that have been accepted as philosophical across a range of historical settings. By treating this acceptance as an object of historical investigation, we shift our focus from philosophical problems to the institutional contexts in which they are delimited, and from the subject of consciousness to the persona of the philosopher that is cultivated in such contexts. II

In proposing to recover understandings of philosophy not easily assimilated to the current self-understanding of the discipline, this volume of essays argues for a new and more thoroughly historical approach to the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the complementary phenomena of the contested character of philosophy, and the persona necessary for its practice, that is, the purpose-built ‘self’ whose cognitive capacities and moral bearing are cultivated for the sake of a knowledge deemed philosophical. To take an interest in the persona of the philosopher requires that we attend to the kind of intellectual work that individuals must perform on themselves in order to conduct their minds and persons in a way that is accepted as philosophical. By the same token it requires attention to the moral qualities needed for the education of others as philosophers. This interest is not sociological, as it makes no general assumptions regarding the organisation of societies in which philosophical personae are cultivated, or about the ‘structural’ functions this might serve. It is social, however, to the extent that modes of intellectual conduct are only recognised as philosophical in and for particular institutional settings: monasteries, seminaries, universities, courts, secret societies, epistolary networks, and so on. Further, this interest is historical, in the sense that the means of carrying out this intellectual and moral work – the modes of scepticism or assent, the forms of abstraction and argument, the image of the person one aspires to become by performing this inner labour – are historically transmitted and put to work under particular circumstances. These circumstances are frequently focused in a highly distinctive institutional milieu where an ensemble of disciplines that determines what counts as philosophy is taught, and where a particular philosophical persona is cultivated. A philosophical persona is thus not what one has to have in order to solve problems universally recognised as philosophical. Neither is it a proxy

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for the philosophical ‘subject’, deduced, transcendentally or otherwise, from universal acts of cognition or judgment. Rather, recognition of a problem as philosophical only takes place within the milieu where a philosophical persona is cultivated, as a result of the intellectual and moral means employed for this, and in accordance with the larger historical context in which this milieu operates. To understand a philosophical problem thus means to engage in a process of self-presentation, an act of self-problematisation, or to advocate an idealised character to which potential philosophers should aspire. This kind of process is as evident in the Cartesian procedures for purging the mind as it is in the spiritual exercises of the Jesuit philosophy course, where a whole class of scholars is required to doubt the adequacy of their intellect in the face of their corrupt desires, as a means of inducing their need for authoritative philosophical doctrine.23 The existence of a philosophical problem is integral to the instituted practice in which the special kind of person who knows and resolves such problems – the philosopher – is groomed for office. Any history of philosophy written from this perspective will not be an account of universal philosophical problems unfolding in time. It will not be an account of how the dialectic of rationalism and empiricism eventually resolved the relation between reason and the senses; or of how the discovery of the transcendent structure of thought finally established the true relation between the metaphysical and physical worlds, a story, to put it bluntly, of how this or that was solved, how we learned to get it right. Rather, it will be a more local and contextual undertaking, focused on uncovering the circumstances in which these ostensibly universal problems were posed for individuals in a manner that made their resolution contingent on the cultivation of a particular kind of philosophical persona. For this reason, disputes over philosophical problems quickly become disputes over what is to count as philosophy and what it is to be a philosopher. In this regard, early modern Europe witnessed a whole series of protracted border conflicts over the scope of philosophy and the duty of philosophers. These included disputes between the scholastic logician and the humanist rhetorician, the Aristotelian physicist and the Galilean astronomer, the philosopher and the jurist, the arts professor and the metaphysician, the court Neoplatonist and the university Aristotelian, and the philosopher and the theologian. Such disputes were in turn informed by the moral habitus of overlapping institutional environments 23

Paul Richard Blum, Philosophenphilosophie und Schulphilosophie. Typen des Philosophierens in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 142–6.

Introduction

9

and by the larger political and religious conflicts in which these institutions played their roles, especially those conflicts associated with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and the building, or more haphazard formation, of princely territorial states. III

There are a number of broad points arising from this shift in perspective. First, it has some precedent in recent scholarship on the history of ancient philosophy, in which attention to the presented way of life of a philosopher, an exercise or activity of the psyche, has been shown to be integral to what was specifically argued.24 Aristotle’s synoptic comments on the interrelationship between logos, the word or discourse, and ethos, the presentation of the speaker through these words, offers one kind of support for the view that, in antiquity, the relation between the identity of the speaker and the standing of the discourse was not a contingent matter. The attention given to his own dress and comportment in explaining why he did not succeed Plato as scholarch at the Academy, for example, is another.25 The essays of this volume show a continuity of concern with the nexus of persona and argument, highlighting the manner in which philosophical disputes could be about a way of life, and the qualities, aptitudes and education necessary for its conduct. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ancient notions of philosophical personae were preserved or recovered and made central to the elaboration of philosophical debate, a point illustrated, for example, in the chapters by Hunter and Friedeburg. Issues of living a certain kind of philosophical 24

25

Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Peter Brown, The Body and Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Juliusz Domanski, La philosophie, the´ories ou manie`re de vivre? (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires de Fribourg, 1996); Ilsetraut Hadot, Seneca und die griechisch-ro¨mische Tradition der Seeleneitlung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969); Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002); Dorothee Kimmich, Epikureische Aufkla¨rungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Anne Marie Malingrey, Philosophia (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961); Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie de l’aˆme (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1981); Paul Rabbow, Seelenfu¨hrung (Munich: Ko¨sel-Verlag, 1954); Andre´-Jean Voelke, La philosophie comme the´rapie de l’aˆme (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires de Fribourg, 1993). Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 1356a; Anton-Hermann Chroust, ‘Aristotle’s Alleged “Revolt” against Plato’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973), 91–4 at 93–4.

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life and exhibiting a specific philosophical moral decorum persisted. Moreover, this authenticating dimension to the business of philosophising could, as in antiquity, be displayed and advertised beyond words, through the semiotics of dress and cultivation. So the philosopher of the early modern world was bearded and modestly if not shabbily dressed, a constellation of values and priorities.26 He, and it was nearly always a he, was also likely to be afflicted or driven by a certain psychological disposition, the tyranny even, of melancholia (see the essay by Curtis), or the hubris of presuming to think like God. Second, the way of life was held to involve responsibilities to something beyond the interests of the individual philosopher. This locus of duty varied, as did the (sometimes interchangeable) terms used to express it. Philosophy involved responsibilities to truth, to Man, to God, to Nature, perhaps to a sovereign or else to God through a religious order; it could therefore be presented as an office. As a result, it was easy to assimilate notions of philosophy as conduct and activity to adjacent intellectual and practical offices understood through much the same moral vocabulary. The office of the philosopher was fashioned through the same general language as that of the judge, the spiritual director, the counsellor or the ruler (see the essays by Saunders and Friedeburg). Indeed, the language of office, inherited and augmented from antiquity – consider Platonic analogies between the midwife and the true philosopher, or Christian-Aristotelian figurations of philosophy as theology’s handmaid – was pervasive or implied in disputing philosophical personae. This was something that helps explain what has been noted above, that the word ‘philosophy’ had a range of use well beyond any putative coherent discipline. The long-standing topos for exploring the nature of the philosophical life, the choice between its active or contemplative modes as the best means towards its ends, had implications for religion and civic commitment. Arguments about the nature of philosophy could be conveyed through discussion of the responsibilities of institutionalised offices, and the model for the active philosophical life might be little different from the office of civic counsel. Conversely, the paradigm of the contemplative life could be the monk or nun exercising offices to God. Attention to the issue of religious character, as Harrison argues in his essay, makes clear why post-Reformation denominational divisions

26

See the iconography throughout Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy (London, 1660).

Introduction

11

helped shape philosophical activity, rendering plausible the connection between Protestantism and natural philosophy. Third, the very centrality of the issue of philosophical persona ensured a tighter relationship between what was said and who said it than that to which we are accustomed. This itself helps us understand the doxological, and intellectually capacious, character of pre-modern histories of philosophy, as much concerned with the character, life, death, even appearance, of philosophers and the schools that followed them, as with the problems they addressed and the arguments they developed.27 This was hardly accidental, for some presentation, display or affirmation of the persona’s appropriate qualities and attitudes helped give an utterance authority. Matters of entitlement could even put propositional cogency at a discount, a point central to understanding the force of Margaret Cavendish’s frustrations over her exclusion as a woman from the active life and her extolling the contemplative philosophic ideal (see the essay by Green and Broad). Eclecticism, which was a mainstream if not dominant mode of philosophy in early modern Europe, insisted on the philosophical responsibility of exploring and incorporating all evidence even at the expense of rigorous argumentation, and so the persona of the eclectic philosopher helped compensate for a necessary doctrinal diversity.28 It is partly against this background, and in reaction to it, as Serjeantson’s essay emphasises, that the Cartesian and Hobbesian image of the singular and systematic philosophic persona should be understood. Fourth, notions of personae are likely to be explicit and themselves matters of dispute where questions concerning the nature and direction of philosophy are important. If a community of scholars can work within the confines of an established activity, it is likely that questions of intellectual personae can be taken for granted. This may help explain why an overt philosophical persona is lacking in the writings of medieval logicians, Jesuit school philosophy, and nowadays those brought up in a strictly analytic tradition of academic philosophy (see the essay by Hunter). But particularly in early modern Europe, where the ends, direction, point and content of philosophy were matters of controversy, one central means by which a distinct activity was defined and promoted was, as Gaukroger 27

28

Stanley, History of Philosophy, in which life and style of death, reminiscent of martyrology, is often important. Ulrich Johannes Schneider, ‘Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy’, in D. R. Kelley (ed.), History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester, N. Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 83–101; Horst Dreitzel, ‘Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der “Eklektischen Philosophie”’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281–343.

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demonstrates, through the specification of a distinct persona. Ironically, those most readily acclaimed as philosophers because of the significance of their doctrines – Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke – were also seriously engaged in the business of defending and instantiating a philosophical persona against others they regarded as inimical to true philosophy. Fifth, and concomitantly, ad hominem argument, now considered illegitimate because of a clear line to be drawn between the merits of the argument and those of its expositor, was a variable feature of philosophical debate: as doctrine expressed a persona’s claim on an intellectual office, so either was a potential casualty in the criticism of the other (see the essays by Condren and Gaukroger). For this reason, the satire of philosophy and philosophers, also sidelined in histories of philosophy, was an idiom of philosophical presentation and subversion. Having a moral, satire, as Curtis and Serjeantson show, had a philosophical purpose. Hobbes was not therefore a satirist as well as a philosopher: satire was an expressive idiom of his philosophical persona. In the same vein, early modern philosophy was characterised by a strong explanatory and persuasive dimension now largely absent, at least in the self-representation of philosophers. As Gaukroger argues, Bacon’s account of nature and the procedures for uncovering the fundamental principles of the natural realm cannot be separated from his image of the natural philosopher. Much the same is argued by Cottingham about Descartes and Yeo about Locke. The upshot of all this is to make the identity of philosophy much more elusive and variable than it appears to philosophers whose interest lies in the propositional convenience of exemplary doctrines rather than historical truth, and who thus treat philosophy as a source of errors, achievements, puzzles and problems yet to be solved in an on-going communal activity. It is therefore important to try and recapture what was involved in notions of philosophical identity and doctrinal integrity, for on the evidence of early modern debate about the word ‘philosophy’, the evocation of a persona, the defence or promotion of the office, was ubiquitous. IV

The essays in the collection range over a wide spectrum of questions, some broaching general issues of the role of the philosopher, others looking at distinct personae and their reform in detail. As the centrality of epistemology is now itself a function of how the history of philosophy has been written, there is here a clear shift away from a history of epistemological issues. Conversely, political and social philosophy figure prominently, and

Introduction

13

so do figures such as Shaftesbury and Boyle who were central to the philosophical culture of their time, yet fail to fit at all into the epistemological canon. Conal Condren discusses one such group, rhetoricians, asking how a history of Renaissance/early modern philosophy that incorporates rhetoric as one of the contending streams might be used to open up questions of the nature and standing of the philosopher. In particular, he examines the pervasive understanding of the persona as a manifestation and representative of an office, an embodiment of a moral economy, across a wide range of professions sharing a sanctioning vocabulary of intellectual identity, yet lacking the institutional environment in which it could be solidified. If the philosopher can be promoted and defended as an office-holder, it becomes important to understand not just the disputed duties of office, but the strategies used to promote a particular style of philosopher over others. These debates employed various argumentative strategies, and Catherine Curtis looks at a persistent and often a central one: satire. In particular, she examines the way in which satire was used to cultivate the philosophical persona in four cases – those of Richard Pace, Thomas More, Erasmus, and Robert Burton – and at how the interaction between satire and the cultivation of the persona aided the communication of philosophical insight and the potential for problematic reception. A related theme is central to Serjeantson’s chapter exploring Hobbes’s hostility towards the universities. Hobbes was concerned with the public function of the universities as places where the minds of future elites among the ruler’s subjects were formed, where their personae were shaped. It is explicitly part of the sovereign’s ‘office’ to ensure that these institutions are able to fulfil this function in an appropriate manner. In this way, in a text such as Leviathan, there is an engagement with the question of what is the right kind of philosophical education. We witness a shift here from thinking of learning as a virtue to thinking of it as a duty, something that changes the nature and role of intellectual enquiry, and in the process demands something new of the enquirer. This at least involves a heightened awareness of the responsibilities of subjection, and so through a satiric parody we also witness a confrontation with the image of philosophical and educational duty that Friedeburg argues was central to Althusius’s sense of the polity. Yet another example of rethinking the persona of the philosopher by placing him in the context of competitors is Saunders’ highly contextual comparison of the philosopher and the judge. He focuses on the question of impartiality and objectivity of each persona. The judge in the Renaissance

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was seen very much on the model of the priest, but this changed in the seventeenth century, as the Roman iuris prudente or iuris consulti became the model. Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, set out criteria of objectivity and impartiality in making judicial decisions, and these match those devised by natural philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes. Gaukroger, in his essay, looks at the way in which three very influential natural philosophers of the first half of the seventeenth century – Bacon, Galileo and Descartes – each attempted to shape a new persona for the natural philosopher. Focusing on the preoccuation with ‘intellectual honesty’, Gaukroger examines why this concern came to the fore in natural philosophy, and how, riding on notions of objectivity and impartiality, it enabled debate about the aims of natural philosophy to be resituated around the persona of the natural philosopher. A similar argument is made in Cottingham’s chapter, which uses Descartes to explore the general question of the way in which the persona of the philosopher involves the development and expression of a distinctive identity or sense of self, something which gives intellectual shape and moral significance to that individual’s life and work. But such a persona may be more exclusive than it at first seems, and Broad and Green argue, in a comparison of Christine of Pizan and Margaret Cavendish, that the various personae adumbrated for the natural philosopher, and the philosopher more generally, did not provide a model for women who aspired to this role. By contrast with both traditional and new images, Cavendish saw writing philosophy as akin to writing fiction, and, contrary to a strong current in English seventeenth-century thought, she defended the philosophical life as one of contemplation. One issue here, developed by Harrison, is the move in the modern era to the idea that the perceived reliability of scientific methods is their insensitivity to the personal qualities of those who employ them. This is in contrast to the earlier expectation that natural philosophers needed to conform to traditional models of the philosophical persona, in which the moral characteristics of the individual were the pledge of the truth of what they knew. Harrison argues that the shift is motivated largely by the Protestant view that, because human beings were constitutionally incapable of the kinds of moral transformations required on the classical and scholastic models, reliable knowledge had to be grounded in other ways. As Harrison points out, central to Luther’s criticism of the ‘idle’ life of the contemplative was a new conception of divine vocation. Rejecting the notion that the spiritual estate of the clergy was superior to both of the temporal estates, he had regarded the clerical office as one calling

Introduction

15

amongst others: all vocations, on this view, were equally spiritual. Such a view makes possible Locke’s conception of the philosopher as an ‘underlabourer’, examined in Yeo’s chapter. As Yeo points out, Locke managed to combine in the philosopher the qualities of under-labourer while at the same time embodying a paradigm of polite culture carrying with it serious religious and moral implications. Not all forms of early modern philosophy are geared to the cultivation of a specifically philosophical persona, however. In looking at the textbook philosophy of the Jesuits in German universities, Hunter thus notes that because Jesuits typically taught the three-year philosophy course only once, before moving on to other religious duties, they neither saw themselves as specialist philosophers, nor sought to cultivate the philosophical persona in their students. This raises the question of potential competition between philosophical and non-philosophical personae. Hunter also observes that the characteristic mode of expression of particular philosophical schools varied, from commentary and disputation in the Catholic case to the encyclopedia in the Calvinist case, with Lutherans retaining a strict separation between natural and revealed knowledge. Freideburg pursues some of these matters more closely in a study of the Calvinist political theorist Althusius and his contemporaries. In particular, he shows how, in a practical political situation, the persona to be cultivated might not correspond to the material one teaches. Althusius thus argues that university-based teachers and councillors, although not themselves magistrates, nevertheless take part in government and therefore need abilities and virtues making them fit for that office, an office seen under the auspices of philosophy. If the concept of the philosophical subject focuses on the individual’s inner relation to consciousness and conscience, then that of the philosophical persona points us in a different direction: to the nexus between specifically cultivated moral and intellectual capacities, the distinctive comportment of the philosopher as a recognised social personality, and the institutional setting in and for which capacities were articulated to comportment, often through the language and ritual of the philosopher’s office. The essays in this volume begin to show the variety of philosophical personae to be found across the intellectual terrain of early modern Europe. In other words, they begin to show the multiplicity of moral and intellectual abilities that were cultivated under the auspices of philosophy, the different and sometimes competing kinds of philosophical personae to which those cultivating these capacities aspired, and the diverse and sometimes rival institutional contexts in which philosophical disciplines

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were elaborated and transmitted for various purposes. In showing how much is lost when the grid of epistemology is placed over the landscape of early modern philosophy, our Introduction has stressed the latter’s comprehensive and scarcely disciplined diversity. On one side philosophy continued to embrace the liberal arts, while on another it was not distinct from the natural sciences. If it reached upwards through metaphysics to theological insight, then it reached downwards through law and politics to the needs of civil society. The present essays do not explore in any detail the manner in which the (to modern eyes) wild landscape would be carved up and transmitted into modernity via a diversity of paths. We can, however, glimpse this process in Gaukroger’s account of the psychological transformation of natural philosopher that would issue in the natural scientist. It is also visible in Hunter’s account of the way in which the Jesuit universities restricted philosophy to logic, physics and metaphysics, even while Lutheran ones allowed it to sub-divide into such independent disciplines as politics, history and natural law. But clarification of these intimations of the diversity of modernity must await further research and writing.

CHAPTER

1

The persona of the natural philosopher 430537

Stephen Gaukroger

Philosophers in antiquity and in the early modern era reflected on and probed the nature of philosophical activity, asking what its legitimacy consisted in. But the kinds of answers that they came up with differed in a number of fundamental ways. The contrast for Plato and Aristotle was between the genuine philosopher and the sophist, whereas for early modern philosophers it was often between the secular natural philosopher and the scholastic. In both cases questions of intellectual honesty are paramount, but these are very much more in the foreground in the early modern period. Here they come to centre on the issue of commitment to a system, as charges of intellectual dishonesty are brought against those who argue from the standpoint of a purported systematic understanding. I explore this shift as part of a redefinition of the persona of the natural philosopher. THE ORIGINS OF THE PHILOSOPHER

The question of what it means to be a philosopher goes back to the origins of the understanding of what philosophy is, which we can trace to Plato and the immediate Platonist tradition.1 This tradition was not a disinterested one. Its concern was not to discover what had been meant by ‘philosophy’ – the Presocratics had in fact designated what they were doing as historia (enquiry)2 – but to carve out and shape a particular kind of discourse for its own purposes, providing it with a genealogy and

1

2

On the question of the origins of the terms philosophy and philosopher see Anne Marie Malingrey, Philosophia: ´etude d’un groupe des mots dans la litte´rature grecque, des Pre´socratiques au IVe sie`cle apre`s J.-C. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961); Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); and specifically on Plato’s use of the term, Monique Dixsaut, Le naturel philosophe (Paris: Vrin, 1985). See Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 16.

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characterising it in a way that marginalises its competitors.3 It did this in a particularly successful way, to the extent that it is difficult for us even to reconstruct what the alternatives might have been.4 We can think of the origins of philosophy as lying in a particular kind of dispute resolution. There were a number of relatively independent developments in the transition from archaic to classical Greece that transformed the discourse by which problems were resolved from what Detienne has called ‘efficacious speech’ to dialogue.5 ‘Efficacious speech’ had traditionally been the preserve of the poet or orator in praising the king, and of magic and religion; in both cases the words themselves are often taken to be endowed with causal powers. Take the case of law. In pre-legal disputes, efficacious words and gestures were directed not towards a judge for the benefit of his assessment, but towards an opponent who had to be overcome. With the emergence of the Greek polis, however, collective decisions gradually replaced straightforward commands, and these could only be arrived at in a satisfactory way through dialogue in which orators sought to convince through argument. Similarly in the case of law, use started to be made of witnesses who might produce proof, and judges were called upon to assess the cases made by both parties and come to a decision.6 There are two complementary features of the shift to dialogue: the use of argument and evidence to establish a case and, something which is a precondition of this, the refusal to accept ambiguity, trying instead to resolve conflicting accounts into contradictions between purported facts. This new approach first becomes evident in a systematic way in Thucydides’ histories, where a new probing search for causes, replacing the traditional narratives, requires an explicit resolution of factual questions. 3

4

5

6

See Walter Burkert, ‘Platon oder Pythagoras? Zum Ursprung des Wortes “Philosophie”’, Hermes 88 (1960), 159–77, who shows that the crucial etymology of philosophos given in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I.12–13, for example, cannot go back further than Plato and is rooted in Platonic thought. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire ´etymologique de la langue grecque, histoire des mots (4 vols., Paris: Klincksiek, 1968–80), is an invaluable source on etymologies. See also Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, ch. 2. For an attempt at such a reconstruction see Antonio Capizzi, The Cosmic Republic: Notes for a NonPeripatetic History of the Birth of Philosophy in Greece (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1990). See Marcel Detienne, Maıˆtres de ve´rite´ dans la gre`ce archaı¨que (Paris: Maspero, 1990). See also Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Gre`ce antique (Paris: Maspero, 1968), and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘La raison greque et la cite´’, Raison Pre´sente 2 (1967), 51–61. See Detienne, Maıˆtres de ve´rite´, ch. 5; Douglas M. McDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), ch. 14; and G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 4.

The persona of the natural philosopher

19

It is made fully explicit, however, only in Aristotle’s syllogistic. Here, the resolution of ambiguities into contradictions – so prevalent in ordinary discourse, in drama, in poetry, in political speeches – is a precondition for translation of arguments into logical form. Moreover, the idea of contradiction lies at the core of Aristotle’s understanding of logic, in the form of the justification of the principle of non-contradiction. This justification is linked closely with the nature of discursive argument, for, as he points out, anyone engaging in argument in the first place must assume the truth of the principle: if one is prepared to accept contradictions then anything follows from anything and argument is not possible. The shift to dialogue engages a new mode of dispute resolution, then, in that it gives priority to argument, and resolves ambiguities into contradictions. This is reflected in notions of cognitive grasp as we move from the archaic to the classical period, for these are features reflected in the notion of episte¯me¯ (knowledge). But for episte¯me¯ to become constitutive of philosophical activity, as Plato and his successors conceived of that activity, it needs more than just these two features. Plato is concerned to contrast what he considers to be genuine philosophical thought and sophistry. The sophist not only meets the criteria that philosophy be pursued in terms of arguments and that it resolve ambiguities into contradictions, but appears to meet them in a paradigm way. But the sophist is not only not a paradigm philosopher for Plato, he is not a philosopher at all. Why not? The key question here – one that will have fundamental ramifications for early modern attempts to rethink the nature of natural philosophy – is: what is needed over and above a commitment to resolution of ambiguities and argument if one is to be a philosopher, as opposed to a sophist? For both Plato and Aristotle, the line falls between those who use arguments to discover the truth of the matter, and those who use arguments simply to show off their ingenuity and thereby enhance their reputation or to seek simply to win arguments. The early dialogues of Plato, for example, dominated as they are by disputes with sophists, can be read as attempts to reconstrue argument as a means, not of outwitting opponents, but of establishing the truth of the matter. It is important to remember that Plato’s early dialogues, where his notion of what it is to be a philosopher is forged, and where the basic notions of philosophical argument are elaborated, work primarily in a moral context. The notion of truth as whatever survives the elenchos might be satisfactory in areas such as geometry, but in a moral context, where one wants to establish one system of values over another, it is problematic.

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For Plato, it is crucial in dealing with the sophists’ defences of moral relativity, in particular, that the argument be directed uncompromisingly towards the true system of moral values. The true system of values will be not just any set of values that emerges unscathed on some particular occasion of argument, and this matters because fundamental questions of morality are not the kinds of things one can disregard, or on which one can suspend judgment. The problem with Parmenides’ construal of argument, however, is not that it neglects to give argument a direction, but that he explicitly denies that it can have the direction Plato requires. For Parmenides, one simply cannot go beyond appearances to reality. Plato’s project is to show how argument can in fact do this, and he construes moral philosophy in these terms: as something that goes beyond the conventional aspects of morality – which the sophists, as Plato portrays them, emphasise – to the underlying nature of morality. The failing that Plato and Aristotle identify in the sophists is in an important sense a moral one. In pursuing philosophical argument in a sophistical way, one is not failing at the level of argument but at the level of what motivates argument. Argument is being used for the wrong purposes, and this is due not to an intellectual deficiency so much as a moral one. On the other hand, the virtue that is lacking is not one we associate with some form of goodness but with an intellectual quality. It is a question of intellectual morality. I want to distinguish two very different ways of exploring this question. There is a tradition in antiquity, usually identified as a rhetorical tradition, which focuses on the moral qualities of the philosopher, and this way of pursuing the question is also to be found in the Hellenistic schools.7 We encounter a revival of this approach in the Renaissance. The early modern concern with the question of the persona of the natural philosopher (in Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and others) has an explicit focus on questions of intellectual morality, and is a crucial ingredient in the rethinking of the standing of natural philosophy. We shall come to this tradition below. For the moment, I want to note that Plato and Aristotle move in a different direction. The way in which they characterise the sophist clearly involves a moral condemnation, and sophistry is identified as a kind of moral failing. However, this moral failing is countered primarily in epistemological terms rather than moral ones. Justifications for particular doctrines, they argue, should not only 7

See George Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

The persona of the natural philosopher

21

seek to convince on the basis of valid arguments and unambiguous evidence, but should also possess some extra quality which goes beyond these and indeed is independent of them. For both Plato and Aristotle, what the sophist fails to do, and what the philosopher must do, is to use argument to uncover something not normally apparent. Yet what they seek to uncover turns out to be very different. To highlight this difference, we can say that Plato seeks to uncover transcendent truth – transcendent in the sense that it is given independently of any means by which we might establish it – whereas what Aristotle seeks to uncover are explanations which could not possibly be independent of the means by which we establish them. This difference is of crucial importance in medieval and Renaissance thought, because the Platonist project is that which guides Christian theology, whereas the Aristotelian project is that which guides Aristotelian natural philosophy.8 The distinctive feature of the Platonist account of genuine philosophical enquiry is that it seeks the reality underlying the appearances. By engaging the world of appearances appropriately we can see through them to the world of forms, the realm of reality. Plato’s image of the cave, whereby there is a completely different world from that of shadows, to which we have access, encourages such a view by suggesting parallel worlds of appearance and reality.9 One extreme version of this conception of truth is the idea that we can transcend appearances completely and grasp reality directly. Neoplatonism comes close to this notion at times, but philosophical thought in the West generally does not encourage us to renounce appearances but to use them as a guide to reality. We see the world differently as a result of philosophical enlightenment only in a metaphorical sense, not literally. Nevertheless, despite his insistence on the idea that the path to reality is via reason, Plato’s cave suggests the idea of a separate realm of truth existing independently of our cognitive life, and it is unclear why reason should provide the route to this reality. The Neoplatonist movement had a commitment to reason, but it was a reason that one ultimately transcended once one had reached reality. Indeed it is striking that those who take up the Platonist option, both in late antiquity and in the Renaissance, see their project in terms of an interpretation of nature. Their version of natural philosophy

8

9

There are parallels here with the distinction between Philosophenphilosophie and Schulphilosophie, which Ian Hunter discusses in chapter 2. Plato, Republic, 514A–517C.

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is more like the hermeneutic interpretation of a sacred text in which one seeks to uncover a hidden and unique truth, than something to be pursued in terms of empirical investigation.10 In short, Plato’s notion of enquiry is designed to take us to something transcendent, whereas Aristotle’s notion of enquiry places the outcome firmly within our cognitive world. For the Neoplatonist, if not for Plato himself, once one had transcended sensory understanding, by whatever means, the world of appearances could be left behind. On the Aristotelian conception, to the extent to which we are concerned with genuinely philosophical – as opposed to mystical or theological – investigation, it is crucial that the point of the exercise not be seen as denying any reality to appearances. The reason why the philosophical approach retains a commitment to appearances is because that is what it sets out to explain. A successful explanation does not replace the explanandum: rather, it reveals to us why the explanandum has the features it has. A project that seeks the truth per se might not take the form of attempting to provide an explanation of something at all. For Aristotle, by contrast, philosophy in general, and natural philosophy in particular, is designed to provide an account of something, an explanation or reason for it; it is concerned to identify what causes it, or what rationale or grounds can be provided for it. Like Plato, Aristotle seeks a third ingredient to mark the philosopher out from the sophist and, like Plato, he identifies the failure of the sophist as a kind of moral failing, but offers an epistemological solution to the failure. By contrast, in place of Plato’s search for truth, Aristotle seeks explanations. Aristotle’s search is systematic: it includes a formal element and a nonformal one. The formal element is syllogistic. One thing to be noted about syllogistic is that it represents a radically adversarial procedure. The aim is to get someone to accept or believe something that they would not otherwise accept or believe, and syllogistic constrains the valid ways in which this can be done, by confining arguments to those in which the truth of the conclusion follows from the truth of the premisses. We can see syllogistic as a particular form of dispute resolution: it shows why you should believe something because it either follows from or underlies other things you believe. So far, however, this process is one which characterises not just genuinely philosophical arguments, but sophistical argument also. Like Plato, Aristotle distinguishes the sophistical from the genuinely

10

See Ian Hunter’s remarks on the Neoplatonic adept in chapter 2.

The persona of the natural philosopher

23

philosophical argument in terms of going beyond what emerges from the elenchos, but whereas Plato introduces something external to philosophical discourse, Aristotle advocates procedures internal to it. Distinguishing sophistical knowledge from genuine knowledge he writes: We suppose ourselves to have unqualified demonstrative knowledge of something, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows it, when we think we know the explanation/cause on which it depends, as the explanation/cause of that thing and of no other, and, further, that the thing could not be other than it is.11

The latter identifies those truths that spring from the nature of something,12 and these are the object of philosophy, by contrast with things which just happen to be true, which sophists do not distinguish from the former. The task of natural-philosophical demonstration is the understanding of phenomena in terms of their causes. The contrast here is captured in Aristotle’s theory of demonstration. Scientific demonstrations proceed syllogistically, and he argued that some forms of demonstration provide explanations or causes, whereas others do not. This may occur even where the syllogisms are formally identical. Consider, for example, the following two syllogisms: The planets do not twinkle That which does not twinkle is near The planets are near The planets are near That which is near does not twinkle The planets do not twinkle

In Aristotle’s discussion of these syllogisms in his Posterior Analytics, he argues that the first is only a demonstration ‘of fact’, whereas the second is a demonstration of ‘why’, or a scientific explanation. In the latter we are provided with a reason, or cause, or explanation of the conclusion: the reason why the planets do not twinkle is that they are near. In the former, we have a valid argument but not a demonstrative one, since the planets’ not twinkling is not a cause or explanation of their being near. So the first syllogism is in some way uninformative compared to the second: the latter produces understanding, the former does not. This is the key difference between genuine philosophical knowledge and sophistical knowledge for Aristotle. He was unable, 11 12

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 71b8–12. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1051b13–17.

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however, to specify what exactly the difference between the two syllogisms consisted in, and when this account was developed futher, in the regressus theory of the sixteenth century, there was increasing scepticism as to whether there was in fact any difference at all. THE MORALITY OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

Early modern conceptions of the natural philosopher are distinguished from classical notions of the philosopher in two main respects. First, they take up the option that Plato and Aristotle largely ignored, namely that what marks out the natural philosopher is ultimately a question of intellectual morality and needs to be treated as such. Second, the natural philosopher is now pitted against the scholastic, who takes on some traditional qualities of the sophist. The tendency to see philosophical failings along the lines of moral ones has a long history and it is especially prevalent in the seventeenth century. A crucial part of Bacon’s project for the reform of natural philosophy, for example, was a reform of its practitioners. One ingredient in this was the elaboration of a new image of the natural philosopher, an image that conveyed the fact that the natural philosopher is no longer an individual seeker after the arcane mysteries of the natural world, employing an esoteric language and protecting his discoveries from others, but a public figure in the service of the public good: that is, the crown.13 Renaissance humanists raised the question of the responsibilities appropriate to the humanist, in particular whether the life of activity in affairs of state (negotium) should be preferred to that of detachment and contemplation (otium).14 What Bacon effectively does is to transform philosophy into something that comes within the realm of negotium, as something good and useful, and thus as intrinsic to the active life. This is completely at odds with the conceptions of philosophy of classical antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages. With Bacon, natural philosophy starts to become a paradigmatic form of negotium. One crucial factor in this transformation is the self-fashioning of the natural philosopher, through mastery of his passions.15 This is a model inappropriate to the artisan, and it 13

14

15

This forms one of the central themes of Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): see esp. chs. 2 and 4. The antithesis between a quiet life of contemplation and public life can be traced back to Euripides’ Antiope. This is particularly evident in Bacon’s account of his scientific utopia, New Atlantis, where selfrespect, self-control and internalised moral authority are central.

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gives the new natural philosopher a dignity and standing that the collective nature of his work would not otherwise suggest. Another crucial factor is that, just as in Renaissance culture the moral philosopher had been expected to manifested his morality in his persona, so too the new natural philosopher manifested his worth through his persona. The aim of the natural philosopher is not merely to discover truths, even informative ones, but to produce new works for the public good. The moral basis of Bacon’s conception is evident in his discussion of the classical philosophers in Redargutio philosophiarum. We are told there that there are three classes of philosopher.16 First, there are the sophists, who claimed to know everything and travelled around teaching for a fee. Second, there are those philosophers who, having a more exalted sense of their own importance, opened schools which taught a fixed system of beliefs, in which category Bacon includes Plato, Aristotle, Zeno of Citium and Epicurus. Third, there were those who devoted themselves to the search for truth and the study of nature without fuss, without charging fees, and without setting up a school, such as Empedocles, Heraclitus, Democritus, Anaxagoras and Parmenides. Regarding philosophers of the second category as no better than those of the first, he proceeds to look at individuals, namely Plato and Aristotle. Rather than entering into controversy on points of doctrine, Bacon judges them by ‘signs’,17 that is, the distinguishing characteristics of a doctrine, including the character of those who propound it and what its effects are. What follows is a reflection on the personalities of Aristotle and Plato, in effect a reflection on their personal worth. In the case of Aristotle, the exercise could be mistaken for one in character assassination. Aristotle, we are told, was impatient, intolerant, ingenious in raising objections, perpetually concerned to contradict, hostile to and contemptuous of earlier thinkers, and purposely obscure. We need to ask what the point of these personal criticisms is. It is not as if Bacon does not have specific objections to the content of Aristotle’s philosophy. He mentions some of the major points on which he disagrees with Aristotle here in Redargutio philosophiarum: Aristotle mistakenly constructs the world from categories, and no less mistakenly deals with the distinctions between matter and void, and rarity and density, in terms 16

17

The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (14 vols., London: Longman, 1857–74), vol. III, 565. For more detail see Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, ch. 2. Bacon, Works, vol. III, 566.

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of a distinction between act and potency. The personal attack on Aristotle seems both unnecessary to make his point, and counterproductive. But I think that to see matters thus is to miss Bacon’s point. The personal criticism is not an added extra; it is integral to his project. He explicitly tells us he is going to judge not by the content of particular doctrines but by signs. Why, then, is the personal criticism so central to what he wants to do? For Bacon, the natural philosopher is not simply someone with a particular expertise, but someone with a particular kind of standing, a quasi-moral standing. This results from the replacement of the idea of the sage as a moral philosopher with the idea of the sage as a natural philosopher. We expect the moral philosopher to act in a particular way, like a sage, and this is an indication of the worth of his moral philosophy. The shift from moral philosopher to natural philosopher as the paradigmatic sage means that the natural philosopher now takes on this quality. The worth of a natural philosophy is reflected in its practitioners, just as the worth of a moral philosophy is reflected in its practitioners: or, perhaps, one should say embodied in its practitioners. In his discussion of moral philosophy in book II of the Advancement of Learning, Bacon remarks on the various ways in which reason can be affected: For we see Reason is disturbed in the administration thereof by three means; by Illaqueation or Sophism, which pertains to Logic; by Imagination or Impression, which pertains to Rhetoric; and by Passion or Affection, which pertains to Morality. And as in negotiation with others men are wrought by cunning, by importunity, and by vehemency; so in this negotiation with ourselves men are undermined by Inconsequences, solicited and importuned by Impressions or Observations, and transported by Passions. Neither is the nature of man so unfortunately built, as that these powers and arts should have the force to disturb reason, and not to establish and advance it: for the end of Logic is to teach a form of argument to secure reason, and not to entrap it; the end of Morality is to procure the affections to obey reason, and not to invade it; the end of Rhetoric is to fill the imagination to second reason, and not to oppress it: for these abuses of arts come in but ex obliquo, for caution.18

The ultimate aim of moral philosophy, in Bacon’s view, is to get people to behave morally. To discourse on the nature of the good, or to dispute whether ‘moral virtues are in the mind of man by habit and not by nature’, will not secure this end in its own right. What moral philosophy does not provide, and what needs to be provided, are the 18

Ibid., 409–10.

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means of educating the mind so that it might aspire to and attain what is good: The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the Exemplar or Platform of Good, and the Regimen or Culture of the Mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto.19

The first question, on the nature of the good, is divided into discussions of the various kinds of goods, and the various degrees of good. We can distinguish something that is good in itself – for example, from something that is good as part of a greater whole – and the latter should have priority over the former: ‘the conservation of duty to the public ought to be much more precious than the conservation of life and being’. It is on this basis that Bacon rejects Aristotle’s claims for the value of the contemplative life over the active life. All the arguments Aristotle gives for the contemplative life ‘are private, and respecting the pleasure and dignity of man’s self ’, where of course the contemplative life is pre-eminent, to which Bacon responds with examples of the social harm that can come from ignoring civil life and using one’s own happiness as a criterion. On the question of the relative merits of active and passive good – to actively propagate or to conserve – Bacon comes down firmly on the side of the former.20 In discussing the second question, of how to inculcate morality,21 Bacon refers to ‘the Culture and Regimen of the Mind’. He quotes Aristotle’s remark that we want to know what virtue is and how to be virtuous: they are part of the same package, as it were. But he also points to Cicero’s praise of Cato the Younger, who took up philosophy not that he might dispute like a philosopher, but that he might live like one. It is not just the parallel between the moral life and the philosophical life that is of interest here, but the fact that there is a particular persona associated with morality and with philosophy. It is not simply a question of having a particular expertise. What we must understand from the outset is what is within our power and what is not. We are limited in what we can do by the nature of the mind, and we need to ‘set down sound and true distributions and descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions, specially having regard to those differences which are most radical in being the fountains and causes of the rest, or most frequent in concurrence or comixture’. In understanding these, 19

Ibid., 419.

20

Ibid., 424–8.

21

Ibid., 432–42.

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we are discovering ‘the divers complexions and constitutions’ of the mind, but we also need to discover ‘secondly, the diseases, and lastly the cures’. The ‘diseases’ are the ‘perturbations and distempers of the affections’ that disturb the mind. The cure consists in setting before oneself ‘honest and good ends’, and being ‘resolute, constant, and true unto them’. The diseases and cure here have an importance that goes far beyond the moral realm, however, and Bacon’s detailed account of the nature of the diseases and the regimen required for their cure is developed not in the context of moral philosophy, but in that of natural philosophy. This takes us to the question of how one becomes such a sage in the Baconian sense. In the most general terms, at least one ingredient in the answer is a very traditional one: the purging of the emotions. But Bacon puts a distinctive gloss on this. The sage for Bacon must purge not just affective states but cognitive ones as well. This is the core of his doctrine of the ‘idols’ of the mind, the need for which he spells out in the Preface to Novum organum: I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. I retain the evidence of the senses, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction [reductio], but I shall reject, for the most part, the mental operation which follows the act of sense; instead of it I open up and set out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed along, starting directly from simple sense perception. Those who attributed so much importance to Logic no doubt felt the need for this; for they showed thereby that they were in search of aids for the understanding, and had no confidence in the native and spontaneous process of the mind. But this remedy comes too late to do any good, when the mind is already, through the daily intercourse and conversation of life, occupied with unsound doctrines and beset on all sides by vain idols. And therefore that art of Logic, coming (as I said) too late to the rescue, and no way able to set matters right again, has had the effect of fixing errors rather than disclosing truth. There remains but one course for the recovery of a sound and healthy condition, namely, that the entire work of the understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself, right from the very beginning, should not be left to take its own course, but should be guided at every step; and the matter must be carried out as if by machinery.22

Book I of Novum organum thus provides the platform for an account of the systematic forms of error to which the mind is subject. The crucial question raised here is that of the psychological or cognitive state we must be in to be able to pursue natural philosophy in the first place. Bacon believes an understanding of nature of a kind that had never been

22

Ibid., vol. I, 151–2 [text] / vol. IV, 40 [trans.].

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achieved since the Fall is possible in his own time because the distinctive obstacles that have held up all previous attempts have been identified. This has been achieved in what is in many respects a novel elaboration of the traditional theory of the passions, one directed specifically at naturalphilosophical practice. Bacon argues that there are identifiable obstacles to cognition arising from innate tendencies of the mind (idols of the tribe), from inherited or idiosyncratic features of individual minds (idols of the cave), from the nature of the language that we must use to communicate results (idols of the marketplace), or from the education and upbringing we receive (idols of the theatre). As a result of these obstacles, we pursue natural philosophy with seriously deficient natural faculties, we operate with a severely inadequate means of communication, and we rely on a hopelessly corrupt philosophical culture. In many respects, these defects are a result of the Fall and are beyond remedy. The practitioners of natural philosophy certainly need to reform their behaviour, overcome their natural inclinations and passions, and so on, not, however, in order to recover a prelapsarian state in which they might know things as they are with an unmediated knowledge. This they will never achieve. Rather, the reform of behaviour is a discipline to which they must subject themselves if they are to be able to follow a procedure which is in many respects quite contrary to their natural inclinations. In short, the reform of one’s persona is needed because of the Fall, which has left it defective in crucial ways. Whereas earlier philosophers had assumed that a certain kind of philosophical training would shape the requisite kind of character, Bacon argues that we need to start further back, as it were, with a radical purging of our natural characters, in order to shape something wholly new. INTELLECTUAL HONESTY: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Bacon’s understanding of the intellectual virtues of the natural philosopher centred around the notion of freedom from prejudice. This theme is reflected in a distinctive Baconian tradition in mid-century Royal Society apologetics. In these, concerns regarding the usefulness of philosophy and intellectual honesty play a major role, and what underlies them is above all the rejection of the idea of coming to natural philosophy with preconceived ideas. Bacon’s doctrine of idols is dedicated to removing such preconceived ideas, and this informs the whole outlook of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke, in his Preface to Robert Knox’s history of Ceylon,

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for example, describes to the reader the qualities required in the ideal reporter: ‘I conceive him to be no ways prejudiced or byassed by Interest, affection, hatred, fear or hopes, or the vain-glory of telling strange Things, so as to make him swarve from the truth of Matter of Fact.’23 In his history of the Royal Society, Sprat stresses that the ‘histories’ collected by the Royal Society ‘have fetch’d their Intelligence from the constant and unerring use of experienc’d Men of the most unaffected, and most unartificial kinds of life’24 and that: If we cannot have sufficient choice of those that are skill’d in all Divine and human things (which was the antient definition of a Philosopher) it suffices, if many of them be plain, diligent, and laborious observers: such, who, though they bring not much knowledg, yet bring their hands, and their eyes uncorrupted: such as have not their Brains infected by false Images; and can honestly assist in the examining, and Registring what the others represent to their view.25

The theme also occurs in Descartes, however, who is working in a very different context. He attacks Gassendi, for example, for raising objections which are not those that a philosopher would raise.26 Amongst other things, he charges Gassendi with using debating skills rather than philosophical argument; with being concerned with matters of the flesh rather than those of the mind; and with failing to recognise the importance of clearing the mind of preconceived ideas. The dispute pits Descartes, the advocate of a complete purging of the mind, against Gassendi, the defender of legitimate learning. But in fact matters are not quite so simple. If we distinguish the project for purging of the mind described in works designed to legitimate his natural philosophy – such as the Meditationes and Principia philosophiae – from the discussion of the qualities required in the natural philosopher in La recherche de la verite´, we see that, in the latter, Descartes’s concern is with the requisite state of mind and character of the natural philosopher. This is a concern that invokes psychological and moral considerations as much as epistemological ones.27

23

24

25 26

27

Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, in the East-Indies (London: Richard Chiswell, 1681), Preface, xlvii. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: A. Millar, 1657), 257. Ibid., 72–3. Rene´ Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (2nd edn, 11 vols., Paris: Vrin, 1974–86), vol. VII, 348–9. Ibid., 239–46.

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The thrust of Descartes’s discussion is that the honneˆte homme has been corrupted by book-learning, and so is trainable as the kind of natural philosopher that Descartes seeks. The honneˆte homme alone is identified as the kind of person who uses his natural faculty of forming clear and distinct ideas to the highest degree: or, at least, it is he who, when called upon, uses it to the highest degree. This does not mean that the honneˆte homme alone is able to put himself through the rigours of hyperbolic doubt and discover the true foundations of knowledge. In theory everyone is able to do this, scholastics included. But if the aim is to develop and refine natural-philosophical skills as one progresses, then we require something different, as we must recognise that some are more fitted than others to follow the path of instruction in natural philosophy. In La recherche, Descartes realises, practically, that people come to natural philosophy not with a tabula rasa but with different sets of highly developed beliefs which are motivated in different ways and developed to different degrees. These rest upon various things, and this is what leads him to construct an image of the honneˆte homme as a model in which the moral sage and the natural philosopher meet,28 for, as he puts it in the Prefatory Letter to the French translation of the Principia, ‘the study of philosophy is more necessary for the regulation of our morals and our conduct in this life than is the use of our eyes to guide our steps’.29 A similar concern can be found in Galileo, who uses the charge that his opponents have preconceived ideas as a rhetorical ploy, and he links this with their failure to control their passions. This is clear in his attacks on Grassi in Il saggiatore,30 where Grassi’s failure to appreciate the novel hypotheses on the nature of comets that Galileo presents to him is taken as ‘a sign of a soul altered by some passion’.31 Preconceived ideas are construed here as a form of vested interests, and Grassi, as a supporter of 28

29 30

31

There can be little doubt that this was a radical move, especially in view of the association of the honneˆte homme with a ‘scorn for religion’, as one contemporary put it: see Rene´ Pintard, Le libertinage ´erudit dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVIIe sie`cle (2 vols., Paris: Boivin, 1943), vol. I, 15. Descartes, Oeuvres, vol. IXB, 3–4. Galileo Galilei, Il saggiatore (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623), trans. in Stillman Drake, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 151–336. There is an excellent discussion of the controversy in Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 5. As Biagioli notes, the situation is complicated, for Galileo’s argument in Il saggiatore is not anti-system per se, but rather a response to the 1616 condemnation of the Copernican system. Worried that the Tychonic system might replace the condemned Copernican one (as indeed it was doing among Jesuit astronomers), Galileo responds by trying to put the whole question of astronomical reality on hold, denying validity to any system. Cited in Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, 308.

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Aristotelianism, is presented as someone with an axe to grind, someone who is unable to argue a case on its merits and so has to rely on a philosophical system, which is treated as a form of intellectual dishonesty and a lack of objectivity. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this dispute, the crucial point is that, whereas earlier disputes in natural philosophy automatically involved competing systems (for that was what was ultimately at stake), there is now a new ingredient in the brew, as charges of intellectual dishonesty are brought against those who argue from the standpoint of a purported systematic understanding. The scholastic philosopher cannot deal with issues in natural philosophy in their own right, but is obliged to translate them into the terms of a pre-given system, assessing them in terms of how well they fit with this system. Moreover, this system is not of his own devising, and he cannot be responsible for it in the way that one can if one is defending one’s own views. Full responsibility for what one is advocating is now the cornerstone of intellectual morality. SYSTEMATIC UNDERSTANDING

In the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century, natural philosophy and philosophy more generally were seen as being in desperate need of radical reform in several quarters. Bacon, Descartes and Galileo saw this reform as being carried out by a new kind of person: a philosopher quite unlike the clerical scholastics who wrote and taught philosophy. These new kinds of philosopher were not simply people who carried out investigations in a different way from their predecessors. To carry out such investigations they needed to have a wholly different persona. The techniques of self-examination and self-investigation, encouraged both by the wholesale attempt to transfer monastic religious values to the population at large, and by the sense that one was responsible for the minute details of one’s daily life in the form of new norms of appropriate behaviour, opened up the possibility of a new understanding of one’s psychology, motivation and sense of responsibility, and shaped one’s personal, moral and intellectual bearing.32 By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a clear split between those who advocated a systematic understanding of natural philosophy and those who rejected this. 32

For a detailed account of how this worked in the case of one small section of society – the French aristocracy between the late sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century – see Jonathan Detwald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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The issues here turned largely on foundational versus experimental approaches to natural philosophy, and then helped refine the notion of the persona of the natural philosopher in regard to systems. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the dominant foundational approach was Cartesian, and it was largely associated with two figures, Huygens and Malebranche. It hinged on the notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, and for Huygens and Malebranche this meant that natural philosophy was a form of kinematics. The doctrine of clear and distinct ideas had been part of the project of undermining systematic approaches to natural philosophy, although, particularly in the hands of Malebranche, it became the basis for a new kind of systematic approach to philosophy generally. By contrast, in the 1660s, in Boyle’s work on pneumatics,33 and in Newton’s work on the production of a coloured spectrum by refraction,34 a distinctive form of ‘experimental’ natural philosophy was being defended. Here, appeal to systematic natural philosophy was eschewed in favour of far more localised explanations which were very secure but in conflict with the available systematic mechanist accounts. Samuel Parker, for example, writing at the same time, sets out the advantages of mechanism over Aristotelianism in a way that contrasts an experimental approach with a speculative one, where the target is clearly broader than just Aristotle, and also covers Cartesianism: The chief reason, therefore, why I preferre the Mechanicall and Experimental Philosophie before the Aristotelean, is not so much because of its much greater certainty, but because it puts inquisitive men into a method to attain it, whereas the other serves but to obstruct their industry, by amusing them with empty and insignificant Notions. And therefore we may shortly expect a greater improvement of Natural Philosophie from the Royall Society, (if they pursue their design) then it has had in all former ages; for they having discarded all particular Hypotheses, and wholly addicted themselves to exact Experiments and Observations, they may not only furnish the world with a compleat History of Nature (which is the most useful part of Physiologie) but also lay firm and solid foundations to erect Hypotheses upon (though perhaps that must be the work of future Ages).35

33

34

35

New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of Air (1660), in Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols., London: printed for J. and F. Rivington, 1772), vol. I, 1–117. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall and Laura Tilling (7 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), vol. I, 92–9. Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: printed for W. Hall by Richard Davis, 1666), 46–8.

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With the appearance of Locke’s Essay, ‘experimental’ natural philosophy was given a defence of some philosophical sophistication. As Locke makes clear, this has radical implications for the understanding of what it is to be a philosopher: The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the Admiration of Posterity: But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great Huygenius, and the Incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain; ’tis Ambition enough to be imploy’d as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish that lies in the Way to Knowledg.36

The view of the philosopher as under-labourer was not universally accepted in the wake of Locke, but it did form a very powerful current of thought that had Voltaire and Hume among its major advocates. What had seemed one of the perennial and most secure features of philosophy, namely its proclivity for system-building, had become highly contentious, and with it the aims and aspirations of the philosopher had been transformed. Just how momentous this transformation was becomes evident when one considers the original Platonic characterisation of a philosopher. Plato draws on the systematic nature of philosophical enquiry, for the failing of the sophists lies in their seeking simply to win arguments or show off their ingenuity, whereas the truth that the philosopher seeks requires systematic connections. It is in part the systematic nature of philosophy that prevents the decontextualised form of argument for its own sake that characterises the sophists’ practice. Yet it is this very systematicity that is now called into question on the grounds of intellectual honesty, as the persona of the philosopher is turned inside out.

36

The Works of John Locke Esq (2nd edn., 3 vols., London: A. Churchill, 1722), vol. I, ix.

CHAPTER

2

The university philosopher in early modern Germany 430537

Ian Hunter

Until quite recently the history of early modern German academic philosophy was written in terms of its relation to a problem whose proper formulation is supposed to mark the autonomy of philosophy – its leap from the institutional constraints of church and state into the freedom of reason – and whose resolution marks the advent of an undivided modernity securely inhabited by all rational beings.1 Whether it is the reconciliation of empirical experience and pure ideas, as in Kantian histories of philosophy,2 or establishing the correct relation between naturalistic sciences and transcendent metaphysical concepts, as in Jesuit histories,3 the story is told in terms of a progressive development towards the resolution of such a problem. Drawing on an array of recent research, the present chapter departs from this kind of philosophical history. It does so by investigating how a series of impassioned disputes as to what counted as a properly philosophical problem were carried out on the basis of rival programmes for cultivating a proper philosophical persona. Far from being dissociated from church and state, rival academic philosophies were driven by conflicting campaigns of religious confessionalisation and political state-building.4 Universities were 1

2

3

4

This chapter has been improved as a result of discussions with participants in the workshop on the ‘Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe’ held at the University of Queensland in July 2004. It has also benefited from the comments of Knud Haakonssen, David Saunders and Michael Seidler. See Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). See Charles H. Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in C. B. Schmitt (ed.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 537–636; and Charles H. Lohr, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Natural Philosophy’, in E. Keßler, C. H. Lohr and W. Sparn (eds.), Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In memoriam Charles B. Schmitt (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), 89–99. In this regard, I have learned much from the rich array of studies in Helmut Holzhey and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, (eds.), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band IV: Das heilige Ro¨mische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (2 vols., Basle: Schwabe, 2001).

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central to these campaigns, for they were the principal source of teachers, clerics and officials with suitably formed personae and a proper sense of office. Rather than the story of philosophy’s drive towards modernity and the autonomy of reason – whether retarded or rapid, restrained by religious affiliation or impelled by philosophical genius – the picture that emerges is one of a contest between philosophical styles and personae so intense that neither reason nor modernity would escape it. SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SCHULPHILOSOPHIE

Philosophy in Germany during the seventeenth century was overwhelmingly academic. In other words, its forms, contents and purposes were largely determined by the teaching programmes of the philosophy or arts faculties of the Empire’s universities, and by the religious and political contexts in which they operated.5 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented and still unmatched proliferation of universities in continental Europe. This was driven not by humanism or the love of learning, however, but by the twin forces of confessionalisation and state-building.6 Breaking with the old model of the urban corporation funded by religious endowments, the creation of the University of Wittenberg in 1502 provided the prototype of the new Lutheran university: founded and funded by a state-building prince, staffed by Lutheran reformers and, from the 1520s, organised around Philip Melanchthon’s new anti-scholastic curriculum.7 The Catholic Church’s response to such developments began in 1540 with the founding of the Society of Jesus, the religious order that would be charged with staffing existing Catholic academies and building new ones.8 Calvinist university-building began in earnest with the so-called ‘Second Reformation’ that started in the 5

6

7

8

Notker Hammerstein, ‘Universita¨ten des Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reiches deutscher Nation als Ort der Philosophie des Barock’, Studia Leibnitiana 13 (1981), 242–66; Walter Sparn, ‘Einleitung’ [Die Schulphilosophie], in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 293–4. For an overview of the interaction between confessionalisation and state-building in the drive to found universities, see Anton Schindling, ‘Schulen und Universita¨ten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Zehn Thesen zu Bildungsexpansion, Laienbildung und Konfessionalisierung nach Reformation’, in W. Brandmu¨ller, H. Immenko¨tter and E. Iserloh (eds.), Ecclesia Militans. Studia zur Konzilienund Reformationsgeschichte Remigius Ba¨umer zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet (Paderborn: Ferdinand Scho¨ningh, 1988), 561–70. Heinz Scheible, ‘Gru¨ndung und Ausbau der Universita¨t Wittenberg’, in P. Baumgart and N. Hammerstein (eds.), Beitra¨ge zu Problemen deutscher Universita¨tsgru¨ndungen der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 131–47. Karl Hengst, Jesuiten an Universita¨ten und Jesuitenuniversita¨ten (Paderborn: Scho¨ningh, 1981).

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1580s. This was a campaign in which Calvinist princes sought to harness the disciplinary powers of religion to ambitious programmes of social reform inside their territories.9 The Calvinist ‘Second Reformation’ served to intensify rival programmes in Lutheran and Catholic territories and led to an educational arms race. During the seventeenth century, at least ten new German universities were added to the existing twenty-four and the number of academic gymnasiums swelled to over a hundred, during an expansionary period stretching from the 1580s to the 1690s.10 Most universities were small by modern standards – averaging around 200–300 students – and would typically be staffed by eight to ten philosophy or arts professors, complemented by three or four professors for each of the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine.11 These institutions were often founded in direct response to the appearance of confessionally opposed ones in neighbouring domains, or as the result of conquest or the conversion of the prince. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries German philosophy or arts faculties had two broad responsibilities: to prepare students for the theology faculty, whose professors were responsible for maintaining doctrinal purity and orthodoxy;12 and to prepare them for the study of law and medicine, in accordance with the needs of city councils and princely courts for jurists, politici and physicians.13 These tasks could be difficult to reconcile: sometimes they defined different kinds of university, and had parted company in Protestant universities by the end of the seventeenth century. Charles Schmitt, however, has argued that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the flourishing of Aristotelian philosophy in its late-humanist form provided a common philosophical language, not only for different faculties but also for the confessionally divided 9

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Heinz Schilling, ‘The Second Reformation – Problems and Issues’, in his Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 247–301. Notker Hammerstein, ‘Die Universita¨ten: Geschichte und Struktur’, in Holzhey and SchmidtBiggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 295–301, at 295. Ibid., 298; Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Philosophy Instruction within the Framework of Central European Schools and Universities during the Reformation Era’, History of Universities 5 (1985), 117–66, at 130–6. For the Lutheran case, see Thomas Kaufmann, Universita¨t und lutherische Konfessionalisierung. Die Rostocker Theologieprofessoren und ihr Beitrag zur theologischen Bildung und kirchlichen Gestaltung im Herzogtum Mecklenburg zwischen 1550 und 1675 (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlaghaus, 1997). Notker Hammerstein, ‘Universita¨ten – Territorialstaaten – Gelehrte Ra¨te’, in R. Schnur (ed.), Die Rolle der Juristen bei der Enstehung des modernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1986), 687–735.

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universities and their professors.14 The fact that most universities used commentaries on Aristotle’s key works as teaching handbooks meant that Aristotelianism provided a shared intellectual repertory for academic philosophy – in the areas of logic, physics, metaphysics and, to a lesser extent, ethics and politics – even if the commentaries were developed in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways. Indeed, Schmitt concludes: ‘Thus, after the initial smoke caused by the confessional fragmentation had blown away, all sides concentrated upon educational reforms whereby theologians and polemicists could be trained in a new orthodoxy. The basis of all these was one or another variety of Aristotelian-based philosophy. Thus, Aristotelianism continued as the foundation stone of philosophical education.’15 This shared Aristotelianism, however, turns out to be less revealing than it initially appears. In the first place, Aristotle’s works did not constitute a philosophical system in the modern sense. Rather, they formed a loose and variously useable encyclopaedia, comprising the books on logic, physics and metaphysics, cosmology and meteorology, rhetoric and politics and the neglected texts on the ‘parts of animals’.16 Theological ‘Jesuit Aristotelianism’, for example, oriented to the formation of priests and theologians, had almost nothing in common – methodologically or substantively – with political ‘Protestant Aristotelianism’, designed for the education of politicians and jurists.17 Indeed, a single key Aristotelian text such as the De anima could be subject to radically incompatible constructions, depending on whether it was construed within the secular medical faculties of northern Italy – which interpreted the Aristotelian soul as material and mortal – or in Jesuit philosophy faculties, where this soul was immaterial and immortal.18 Rather than speaking of Aristotelianism as if 14

15 16

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Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Universities: Some Preliminary Comments’, in J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla (eds.), The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science, and Theology in the Middle Ages – September 1973 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), 485–537. Ibid., 514. For discussions of this diverse use of the Aristotelian inheritance, see Keßler, Lohr and Sparn, Aristotelismus und Renaissance, in particular Horst Dreitzel’s chapter, ‘Der Aristotelismus in der politischen Philosophie Deutschlands im 17. Jahrhundert’, 163–92. Compare Charles H. Lohr, ‘Jesuit Aristotelianism and Sixteenth-Century Metaphysics’, in H. G. Fletcher and M. B. Schulte (eds.), Paradosis: Studies in Memory of Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 203–20; and Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca.1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970). For more on the political and pedagogical role of the politica genre, see chapter 7 by Robert von Friedeburg in this volume. See Stephen Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33–86,

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this were a unified intellectual ideology comparable with Kantianism or Hegelianism, it is more appropriate to refer to the widespread and various uses of Aristotle’s texts, adopted on account of their practical availability.19 Secondly, if the dominant ‘scholastic’ Aristotelianism was so diverse, it was also able to enter a variety of contextually specific transactions with external extra-scholastic ‘humanistic’ philosophies. These had their natural institutional home not in the university philosophy faculty but in the princely court where humanists enjoyed patronage as courtiers.20 Two of the most significant of these extra-academic non-Aristotelian forms of Renaissance philosophy were Lullism and hermetic-Neoplatonic natural philosophy. Named after its progenitor, the Catalan thinker Ramo´n Lull (Raimundus Lullus) (c. 1232 – c. 1316), Lullism rejected the scholastic Aristotelian conception of philosophy as a corporate ontological science centred on the doctrine of causes and the composition of substances from form and matter. Instead, it was centred in an ‘art’ or method, part mnemotechnique, part combinatoric. This could be practised by individual philosophers and was understood as the means by which they could participate in God’s thinking of the principles responsible for the entire order of things in the world.21 It was taken up in a more prosaic way by the French humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–72), however, who developed the mnemotechnical and rhetorical aspects of Lullism into a multifaceted topological method, suitable for arranging, storing and recovering topoi of widely different kinds.22 Ramist-Lullism aspired to be a confessionally neutral super-philosophy – beyond both logic and metaphysics as they were usually practised – but was excluded from Jesuit universities and took on a decidedly eschatological aspect when taken up in Calvinist academic philosophy, as we shall see below in the case of Johann Alsted.

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at 51–3; and Alison Simmons, ‘Jesuit Aristotelian Education: The De anima Commentaries’, in J. W. O’Malley SJ et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), 522–37. Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Aristotle and the Content of Philosophy Instruction at Central European Schools and Universities during the Reformation Era (1500–1650)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993), 213–53, at 234–6. See, for example, the discussion of Galileo as a court philosopher in Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Thomas Leinkauf, ‘Der Lullismus’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 239–68; Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, 538–48; Charles H. Lohr, ‘Ramon Lull oder der Kampf um die Befreiung der Wahrheit’, in G. Hartung (ed.), Zwischen Narretei und Weisheit: Biographische Skizzen und Konturen alter Gelehrsamkeit (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), 125–38. See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983).

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Hermetic-Platonic natural philosophy could also be practised by individual court savants outside the corporate orthodoxy of the confessional philosophy faculty, not least because it was presented as an esoteric art known only to initiates.23 This philosophy was transmitted in the socalled ‘Hermetic Corpus’, a mix of Neoplatonic, alchemical, kabbalistic, Neopythagorean, and Stoic doctrines attributed to the mythic Hermes Trismegistes.24 Grounded in a mytho-philosophical account of God’s creation of the ‘seed-forms’ of all future things from the primal chaos, hermetic Neoplatonism attributed the ordering of these forms to a world soul or world spirit. This conception was incompatible with Aristotelian and modern mechanical philosophy, as it rejected both conceptions of natural philosophy – the ontological and the experimental – in favour of a conception of philosophy as an essentially hermeneutic discipline. Through the great thought-figure of microcosm and macrocosm, the philosopher’s mind could be envisaged as containing the seed-forms or ideas of the entire cosmos, making it into the source of all magical and alchemical operations.25 Also central was the notion that the linkages between the two worlds were accessible only to initiates of the esoteric ancient wisdom (prisca philosophia), but visible in the form of ‘signatures’ carried by things themselves.26 These hieroglyphic signs could be interpreted by the adept – the central image of the philosophical persona in this tradition – and could be represented in emblem books, which formed an important part of the corpus of hermetic Neoplatonic nature philosophy. During the seventeenth century, the ways in which Lullism and hermetic Neoplatonism interacted with German scholastic Aristotelianism depended on the specific religious and political circumstances governing different kinds of universities, intellectual networks and princely courts. If Jesuit universities remained impervious to such humanist philosophies, this was because in them the Aristotelian philosophy curriculum was stabilised by the truth of Thomist theology, for which it was a preparation, and by the religious and political authority of the Order. If, however, Ramist-Lullism found ready access to the philosophy 23

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Bruce T. Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991). Stephan Meier-Oeser, ‘Hermetisch-platonische Naturphilosophie’, in Holzhey and SchmidtBiggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 7–18. For a good example of this form of thought, presented, characteristically, in the genre of the emblem book, see Martin Meyer, Homo microcosmus, hoc est: parvus mundus macrocosmo (Frankfurt, 1670). See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 17–45.

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curriculum of the Calvinist academy at Herborn, this was in part because it suited the needs of a reforming Protestant prince for a cheap and effective mnemotechnical pedagogy.27 It was also because the persona of the philosopher cultivated through Ramist-Lullism – that of the master of an esoteric art promising universal knowledge – was suited to individuals operating at the margins of the confessional university and in closer proximity to princely courts, where they could play the role of humanist savants. In any case, these are lines of enquiry that we shall pursue below. For the moment, it is enough to observe that, despite its shared ChristianAristotelian inheritance, German academic philosophy evolved not on the basis of the intrinsic universality of reason, but in accordance with a dual logic of division and distribution: into confessionally divided academicintellectual forms, and into distinct geo-religious archipelagoes of universities, forming and re-forming with the ebb and flow of religious conflict.28 Far from carrying the seeds of an autonomous rational-philosophical modernity, the German philosophers mentioned in the classic studies by Beck and Lohr – Alsted in Calvinist Herborn, Pereira in Catholic Cologne, Scheibler in Lutheran Giessen – were participants in an intellectual civil war closely shadowed by the military one. Alsted discovered this to his cost in 1625–26, when imperial troops occupied Herborn, unleashing a re-Catholicisation of the duchy of Nassau that would see the dissolution of the Calvinist academy and the opening of a Jesuit one.29 In this historical setting, the form of philosophy was bound to the persona of the philosopher by two distinct but overlapping factors. In the first place, this connection was secured by the philosopher’s office or formal academic duties. These typically determined not just the kind of philosophy he was required to teach, but also the textbooks and commentaries he could read from, and even the times of day and year on which these ‘lectures’ had to take place.30 Such duties were laid out in the statutes of early modern universities, either in the form of (medieval) 27

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Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 15–24. See Notker Hammerstein, ‘Relations with Authority’, in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, vol. II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114–54. Howard Hotson, Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 117–19. Peter A. Vandermeersch, ‘Teachers’, in Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe, vol. II, 210–55, at 210–18.

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corporation law or (increasingly) in statutes decreed by territorial princes.31 In the case of Germany’s Jesuit universities, they were prescribed in the Society’s Constitutions and Ratio studiorum (order of studies), which Jesuits accepted via the oath of unquestioning obedience required to enter the order. Philosophy was thus tied to the conduct of the philosopher by the oath he swore on entering his office, whether this was to a confession, a sovereign or a religious order, even if the policing of these oaths varied a good deal. Second, philosophy and persona were bound by an even more powerful and intimate bond, namely, the ‘ascetic’ function of philosophical discourse and philosophical pedagogy. By this we understand all of the exercises of thought and will carried in philosophical discourse – including discourse with oneself – and aimed at existential self-interrogation and self-transformation, typically with a view to forming the ‘higher self ’ required by a particular philosophical office or milieu.32 Belying the time-tarnished claims that philosophy is simply human reason reflecting on itself, and that the philosopher is everyman writ thoughtful, these spiritual and cognitive exercises comprise an array of rare and distinctive ‘practices of the self ’ whose outcome is the special and prestigious persona of the philosopher. Many of these exercises were inherited from pagan and Christian antiquity; most were governed by the telos of the philosophical persona as the higher self to which one aspires by studying philosophy; and all of them rendered access to specific objects of knowledge or contemplation contingent on the performance of a particular ‘work of the self on the self ’.33 These exercises varied with the spiritual and cognitive purposes they served. They included, for example, Ignatius Loyola’s exercises in selfabnegation, religious inwardness and devotional intensification, designed to form a cadre of disciplined religious militants;34 Francis Bacon’s purgation of the various mental ‘idols’ that stood in the way of forming natural philosophers oriented to empirical knowledge and the welfare of the commonwealth;35 and Descartes’s exercise in hyperbolic doubt designed to purge the mind of everything except attention to its own 31 32 33

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Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ‘Management and Resources’, in ibid., 154–209, at 164–7. See, in general, Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. The phrase is Foucault’s. See in particular Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985), 25–32. Robert E. McNally SJ, ‘The Council of Trent, the Spiritual Exercises and the Catholic Reform’, Church History 34 (1965), 36–49. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Gaukroger’s chapter 1 in the present volume.

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operations, on the basis of which the entire edifice of science could be rebuilt with new certainty.36 There were also the exercises in abstraction through which Aristotelian logicians arrived at the entia rationis of logic, and the ‘metaphysical abstraction’ through which Aristotelian metaphysicians acceded to knowledge of immaterial essences (universals) or immaterial substances (God, angels and separated souls).37 Further, there were the Ramist-Lullist mnemotechnical ‘methods’ designed to achieve assimilation and recall of a whole encyclopaedia of sciences;38 and the exercises in regression and composition through which Zabarella and the humanist Aristotelians sought to provide a method for deriving the principles needed to construct the objects of an array of new sciences.39 If what it meant to be a philosopher varied across Germany’s rival universities, this is because access to the cognitive and spiritual exercises that formed philosophical personae was controlled by a mix of academic, religious and civil authority and the larger purposes for which this authority was exercised: combative authorities made differing philosophical minds possible as vanguards in confessional struggles. This, at least, is the hypothesis we can now explore in more detail by comparing Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran Schulphilosophie in seventeenth-century Germany. JESUIT SCHULPHILOSOPHIE: PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT PHILOSOPHERS

To understand the teaching of philosophy in the Jesuit universities of seventeeth-century Catholic Germany one must situate it in relation to the aims of the Society of Jesus and the Catholic Counter-Reformation for which the Society was a cultural spearhead. The Society received its papal patent in 1540, just prior to the convocation of the Council of Trent (1545–63). Like the Council itself, the Society was charged with combating the Protestant heresy through a fundamental disciplining of the Catholic Church and laity, which it would carry out in accordance with the 36

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Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 309–21, 337–46, 365–6; Catherine Wilson, Descartes’s Meditations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Bradley Rubidge, ‘Descartes’s Meditations and Devotional Meditations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 27–49. Paul Richard Blum, ‘Grundzu¨ge der katholischen Schulphilosophie’, in Holzhey and SchmidtBiggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, 302–30. Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis. Nicholas Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua: Jacopo Zabarella and Francesco Piccolomini on the Offices of Philosophy’, in D. A. Di Liscia, E. Kessler and C. Methuen (eds.), Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotelian Commentary Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 182–209.

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tightened orthodoxy announced in the Tridentine decrees. Rather than organising and running teaching institutions as such, the purpose of the society announced in the Constitutions of 1550 was: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching, lectures, and any other ministration whatsoever of the word of God, and further by means of the Spiritual Exercises, the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity, and the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through hearing confessions and administering other sacraments.40

Initially at least, the Society was primarily concerned with missionary work amongst the infidels of both the old and new worlds, and with the provision of spiritual direction to Catholic rulers. It soon became clear, however, that such activities required the formation of educated and disciplined defenders of the faith, both to staff the Society itself and to influence civil elites. In Germany, Jesuits thus gradually began to take over the teaching of philosophy and theology in Catholic schools and universities, or else to build their own institutions, at the command of their General and at the behest of local Catholic princes and bishops.41 These were the circumstances in which Jesuits either entered or founded universities at Ingolstadt (1556/76), Dillingen (1563), Cologne (1584), Mainz (1563), Wu¨rzburg (1582), Graz (1586) and Freiburg (1620), in addition to a series of lesser institutions, at Molsheim (1618), Paderborn (1616), Osnabru¨ck (1632), Bamberg (1648), Trier (1561) and Erfurt (1611/28).42 Philosophy teaching in these institutions was instrumentally derived from its role in the defence and propagation of the one saving faith. It was thus functionally subordinate to the teaching of (Thomist) theology, for which it provided the ‘natural’ preparation. Protestant and modernist prejudices notwithstanding, this does not mean that Jesuit philosophy was sterile or ossified hack work, as is shown by the production of the highly sophisticated Aristotelian commentaries, particularly in the areas of logic, physics and metaphysics that served as teaching handbooks for Jesuit professors and missionaries.43 It does mean, though, that rather 40

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Ignatius Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. G. E. Ganss (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 66–7. For a rich account of the circumstances in which the Jesuits set up grammar schools and established their philosophy and theology courses within a variety of institutional shells, see Hengst, Jesuiten. See ibid.; and Blum, ‘Grundzu¨ge’. For persuasive discussion, see Lohr, ‘Jesuit Aristotelianism’; Lohr, ‘Sixteenth-Century Transformation’; and Simmons, ‘Jesuit Aristotelian Education’.

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than being conceived as a method by which individual philosophers discovered the truth, philosophy was understood as a body of doctrine through which a corps of philosophers taught truths that had already been discovered, mostly by Aristotle, or indeed revealed by God and preserved in the magisterium of the church. The Ratio studiorum of 1599, that regulated teaching across the entire system of Jesuit universities, could thus stabilise theological truth as the telos of the curriculum by declaring that: ‘In scholastic theology, all members of our Order shall follow the doctrine of St. Thomas, considering him their special teacher, and centring all their efforts in him so that their pupils may esteem him as highly as possible.’44 The propaedeutic role of philosophy is made clear in the ‘Rules for the Professor of Philosophy’, which state that: ‘Since the arts and the natural sciences prepare the mind for theology, serving to perfect its knowledge and use, and themselves helping to reach this end, the teacher . . . shall treat them as preparing his hearers, especially our members, for theology, inciting them to knowledge of their creator.’ To this end, ‘In matters of importance let him not deviate from Aristotle, unless something occurs that is foreign to the doctrine which academies everywhere approve of; and much more if it contradicts orthodox faith.’45 Paul Blum has drawn a valuable distinction between Philosophenphilosophie and Schulphilosophie, or ‘philosophers’ philosophy’ and ‘school philosophy’. Unlike philosophers’ philosophy, which treats truth as something the individual philosopher arrives at through a ‘method’ of reflecting on his own thoughts or subjectivity, school philosophy treats truth as already known and philosophy as the effective pedagogical transmission of truths transcending individual subjectivity.46 As the ideal type of Schulphilosophie, Jesuit philosophy was characterised by unity of doctrine, authority and teachability. Like all religious orders, the Jesuit was constituted in terms of a unified doctrine – here the combination of Thomist theology and Aristotelian philosophy laid down in the Ratio – that was taught as unchallengeable truth. This was in turn reciprocally related to the authority of the Society itself, as admission to the office of Jesuit required swearing an oath of obedience to the Order’s superiors that included a

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G. M. Pachtler SJ (ed.), Ratio studiorum et institutiones scholasticae Societatis Jesu (Berlin: Hofmann, 1887), 300. English translation, Edward A. Fitzpatrick (ed.), St. Ignatius and the Ratio Studiorum (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 160. Pachtler, Ratio studiorum, 328; Fitzpatrick, Ratio Studiorum, 167–8. Paul Richard Blum, Philosophenphilosophie und Schulphilosophie. Typen des Philosophierens in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 15–26, 117–18, 146–57.

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pledge to teach in accordance with the (Aristotelian-Thomistic) authorities enshrined in the Constitutions.47 Finally, the propaedeutic role of Aristotelian philosophy in relation to Thomist theology meant that philosophy was expounded only in a form able to be assimilated and repeated by the young scholars. As prescribed by the Ratio studiorum, the content of the Jesuit philosophy curriculum consisted of logic, physics (with some mathematics) and metaphysics (with some ethics), taught hierarchically, with one year devoted to each discipline over a three-year course. Where the full Jesuit system was in place, the philosophy course was preceded by a four- or five-year arts course – Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammar, plus rhetoric and poetics – and succeeded by the four-year course in scholastic and positive theology, where the students were taught via commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Lombard’s Sentences.48 The identification of philosophy with logic, physics and metaphysics, and the separation of this trio from the liberal arts – also known as philosophy – was a product of the theologically determined Jesuit curriculum itself, and was frequently resisted in universities oriented to the teaching of law and medicine, especially where the universities were Protestant.49 It was, however, the form and ordering of Jesuit logic, physics and metaphysics that rendered them distinctive in relation to the parallel disciplines taught in Calvinist and Lutheran universities. As courses of instruction in progressive preparation for Thomist theology, each discipline was inflected by those that succeeded it. This imbued the entire series with a metaphysicaltheological character, permitting significant latitude in the reconstruction and distribution of Arisotle’s texts.50 Taught via commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon – the Categories, Interpretation and the Analytics in particular – Jesuit logic rejected both the Ramist-Lullist conception of logic as an art or method for discovering argumentational topoi, and the humanist-Aristotelian method of Zabarella focused in the analytic recovery of principles and the synthesis of propositional judgments. Rather, Jesuit logic was conceived as a quasiontological science whose objects were mental entities (entia rationis), while argumentation was taught separately, in a purely practical way through disputational exercises. Also typical was the transfer of part of 47 48

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Loyola, Constitutions, 237–43. Paul Richard Blum, ‘Der Standardkursus der katholischen Schulphilosophie im 17. Jahrhundert’, in Keßler, Lohr and Sparn, Aristotelismus und Renaissance, 127–48; Hengst, Jesuiten, 55–79. Freedman, ‘Philosophy Instruction’. In the following I rely in particular on Blum, ‘Grundzu¨ge’, 313–30.

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Aristotle’s logic – the doctrine of universals – to the metaphysics course, where universals were treated within the category of being as real ‘natures’ of things.51 The Jesuit physics or natural philosophy course was also heavily informed by metaphysics. The central Aristotelian doctrines of the four kinds of causality, the form–matter relation, and the doctrine of substances were thus taught across both courses, physics and metaphysics, with the location of certain key commentaries – on the De anima and On Generation and Corruption – being largely a matter of pedagogical convenience. This is because in these texts theologically sensitive topics in the physics curriculum – especially the immortality of the soul, the creation of the world ex nihilo, and the capacity of infinite immaterial substances to occupy finite space and time – could only be resolved using Christian metaphysical constructs not found in Aristotle’s texts. Sua´rez thus shifted the De anima into the domain of metaphysics so that he could undermine Aristotle’s doctrine of three separate physical souls in man – vegetative, animal and rational – and treat the rational soul as the immaterial form of the body capable of existing separately from it.52 It was this metaphysicaltheological disposition of the physics course that kept it at a distance from the new experimental sciences and atomistic philosophies, which threatened to collapse substance into matter, thereby precluding the divine creation and the plasticity of substances and properties required by the Eucharist.53 Finally, Jesuit metaphysics too was conceived as a science of being rather than as a method for discovering its principles. In keeping with its theological purpose, metaphysics was held to accede to its object – ens qua ens or being as being – through the action of ‘metaphysical abstraction’, a process of real abstraction from material things. The highest or most perfect form of being – immaterial substance – was thus understood to really exist in its abstracted form. This meant that God and the angels could be incorporated in the science of being – as, respectively, infinite immaterial being and finite immaterial (intellectual) being – thereby allowing Jesuit metaphysics to function as a ‘natural’ or philosophical

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See, for example, Sua´rez’s treatment of them in this way in Francisco Sua´rez, Disputationes metaphysicae (2 vols., Paris: Vives, 1866; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), vol. I, Disputation VI, ‘De unitate formali et universale’, sec. ii, 206–11. Francisco Sua´rez, ‘De anima’, in Opera omnia (Paris: Vives, 1856), vol. II, 467–801, esp. 782–801. For a balanced account, see Marcus Hellyer, ‘“Because the Authority of my Superiors Commands”: Censorship, Physics and the German Jesuits’, Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996), 318–54.

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theology.54 One awkward consequence was that the substances or essences of ordinary things themselves really existed independently of material things, and this threatened to turn metaphysics into a universal science grounded in divine intellection of the substances. Leaving the attempted resolutions of this issue aside,55 it is the theological genesis of the problem that interests us – its emergence from the need to treat metaphysics as a unified science of real immaterial being – as this is something that the Jesuits’ Lutheran counterparts could avoid. Working in universities where metaphysics was not required to lead into scholastic theology, and drawing on Zabarella’s method of organising sciences around the principles required to construct particular scientific objects, the Lutherans could separate the science of being (ontology) from the science of God, angels and man (pneumatology). The content of Jesuit philosophy, however, was inseparable from the way in which it was taught, in the sense that philosophical knowledge was acceded to through a particular pedagogy or psychagogy. The philosophy students were not taught a method that they could then use for individual philosophical reflection, but a body of doctrine in a corporate setting characterised by intense discipline and supervision. The intellectual transition from logic through physics to metaphysics was thus grounded in a disciplinary pedagogy that made progress through the three classes dependent on the successful internalisation of stadial tasks of intellectual endeavour. For the boys who typically entered the logic class at around the age of ten and graduated from the metaphysics class three years later, philosophical knowledge and psychological formation were reciprocally dependent. Paul Blum provides striking evidence of the degree to which this was the case in discussing the Monita philosophiae tyronibus opportuna (1636), written by Julius Clemente Scotti SJ, teacher of physics in the Jesuit colleges at Parma and Ferrara. In this we can see the theoretical spiritual hierarchy found in the De anima commentaries – the elevation of the ‘noble’ active intellect over corrupt corporeal desires – mirrored in the ‘ascetic’ relation that the philosophy students are required to establish between their own intellect and passions. Philosophy is a divine gift, says Scotti, yet the student is unable to receive this unaided, for ‘As long the will is besieged by the perverse passions, the intellect conducts reasoning 54

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See, for example, the treatment of God and the angels in Sua´rez’s disputation immateriali substantia creata’, in Disputationes metaphysicae, vol. II, 424–77. For further discussion, see Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’.

XXXV,

‘De

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corruptly.’ The student is ‘to trust therefore in authority, to always rely on the reasoning of the learned, and on faith before everything else’.56 In the same spirit he must eschew that which is ‘ingenious’ or original, listen assiduously to lectures, engage in frequent disputations, keep a diary of examples and arguments to be shown to his teacher, and avoid reading books, even philosophical ones. For Scotti, then, philosophical knowledge is dependent on the formation of a particular persona. Students could only accede to the sophisticated intellectualist doctrines contained in the logic, physics and metaphysics courses through the particular way of relating to themselves – as creatures whose intellects are besieged by depraved passions – that they were required to adopt as philosophy students. This relation to the self permits external supervision to be internalised as self-watchfulness, and philosophy to be understood as a means of self-purification. The cultivated persona, however, was not that of the philosopher but that of the lay ‘Christian soldier’ or the novice of the Order itself, who learned to relate to themselves as philosophers only as a stage in their psychagogical transformation into theologians or Catholic militants.57 The tightly regulated propaedeutic and instrumental character of Jesuit philosophy gave rise to two key features that distinguished it from Protestant Schulphilosophie. First, as we have just seen, in Jesuit universities knowledge of philosophy was not developed through cultivation of the distinctive persona of the philosopher. Jesuits thus typically taught the three-year philosophy course only once, before being moved on to other duties: theology teaching, missionary work, and the spiritual direction of secular notables.58 As a result, members of the Jesuit teaching corps typically did not relate to themselves as specialist philosophers, and did not govern the formation of their students in this persona. Second, as a result of the clearly differentiated and hierarchically ordered relation between philosophy and theology – and due to the unified and centralised trans-territorial religious organisation that ensured its maintenance – the teaching of philosophy and theology in Germany’s Catholic universities was highly stable in comparison with Protestant institutions. This meant that Catholic universities did not witness the multiplication of styles of Schulphilosophie characteristic of the less tightly controlled Protestant academies. It also meant that throughout the seventeenth century 56 57 58

Scotti in Blum, Philosophenphilosophie, 143. McNally, ‘Council of Trent’. Blum, ‘Grundzu¨ge’, 307.

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Catholic Schulphilosophie would remain resistant to new forms of philosophy – Galilean astronomy, mathematical-experimental physics, Cartesian epistemology, Grotian-Hobbesian natural law and political philosophy – even though individual Jesuits contributed to these fields in their extra-curricular personae.59 CALVINIST PANSOPHISM

Calvinist or Reformed academic philosophy emerged from a network of universities and academies established in a number of north-west German cities and territories as part of the ‘Second Reformation’.60 Beginning in the 1580s this was a campaign to reform both church and society, led by activist princes who had refused to subscribe to the definitive confession of the Lutheran Church, the Formula of Concord of 1577. As with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the twin goals of reforming the church and confessionalising society impelled a reform of educational institutions and the establishment of new academies, designed to form educated and disciplined academics, school-teachers, politici and officials. In the Calvinist north, however, educational reform was not undertaken by a single centrally controlled religious order. Rather it emerged from particular alliances between religious reformers and reforming princes, the latter finding in Calvinism a means of stripping their churches of ‘superstitious’ sacraments and bringing them under territorial control, as part of a broader process that included reform of their territory’s armies, land-tenure systems, and feudal social relations.61 These were the broad circumstances driving the establishment of Calvinist universities or academies at Marburg (Calvinist in 1605), Heidelberg (Calvinist 1563/83), Steinfurt (1588/91), Bremen (1581), Herborn (1584), Duisburg (1636/55), and Frankfurt/Oder (mixed Calvinist and Lutheran since 1613). Often, as in the cases of Steinfurt and Duisburg, these institutions were established to counter the 59

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See Hellyer, ‘Censorship’; Marcus Hellyer, ‘Jesuit Physics in Eighteenth-Century Germany: Some Important Continuities’, in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits, 538–54; and Robert Bireley SJ, ‘Hofbeichtva¨ter und Politik im 17. Jahrhundert’, in M. Sievernich SJ and G. Switek SJ (eds.), Ignatianisch: Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), 386–403. For a wide-ranging discussion, see the papers in Heinz Schilling (ed.), Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ (Gu¨tersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1986). For a helpful sketch of this process at work in Alsted’s county of Nassau-Dillingen, see Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1–65. For a detailed discussion of the obstacles encountered by Calvinist reform in largely Lutheran electoral Brandenburg, see Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

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effects of rival Catholic or Lutheran institutions being built in neighbouring cities or territories. No less than its Catholic and Lutheran rivals, the objective of Calvinist Schulphilosophie was to teach a unified body of doctrine and disciplines in which natural (philosophical) and revealed knowledge were harmonised in accordance with overarching confessional imperatives. There was, however, no singular and obligatory Calvinist template for reaching this objective, analogous to the hierarchically ordered relations between Aristotelian philosophy and Thomist theology mandated in the Jesuit Ratio studiorum. Moreover, the complex interaction between university and court, academic employment and princely patronage in Calvinist states permitted philosophers like Herborn’s Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588– 1638) to draw on a more heterogeneous and heterodox array of philosophical styles than their Catholic counterparts. This ensured that Calvinist Schulphilosophie would have greater internal diversity than its confessional rivals, while nonetheless remaining distinguishable at its confessional borders. Howard Hotson has shown that in the small and relatively weak county of Nassau-Dillingen, the reforming Count Johann VI insisted on the use of Ramist philosophy in Alsted’s Herborn academy, largely because Ramus’s topical logic functioned as a simple yet powerful mnemotechnique.62 This permitted large amounts of knowledge to be organised, digested and transmitted to scholars, most of whom would be village school-teachers and would thus have no need of Aristotle’s more complex logic, let alone its vast hinterland of physics and metaphysics. At the same time, the patronage he found at the court of Duke Moritz of Hesse – whose reforming agenda stretched to the endowment of a well-equipped alchemical laboratory and the support of occult philosophers – allowed Alsted to incorporate heterodox Lullist, hermetic and Neoplatonic elements in his philosophy.63 In the nearby Calvinist headquarters of Heidelberg, such heterodoxy was much less visible, and Alsted’s colleague Bartholomew Keckermann (1572–1609) measured his distance from Ramism and taught more Aristotle.64 Defending Calvinism from the ramparts of the leading university in Reformed central Europe, Heidelberg’s philosophers could not do without the big Aristotelian guns, 62 63 64

Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 20–4. See Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court; and Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, ch. 2. Richard A. Muller, ‘Vera Philosophia cum sacra Theologia nusquam pugnat: Keckermann on Philosophy, Theology, and the Problem of Double Truth’, Sixteenth Century Journal 15 (1984), 341–65.

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particularly when engaged in ideological battle with such formidable Jesuit opponents as Robert Bellarmine. Despite these internal variations, however, Calvinist academic philosophy was separated from its Jesuit rival by several key features. In the first place, it was treated not as a theological handmaid, but as an independent science containing the principles of all the disciplines, including theology, but taught alongside law and medicine and a host of less important disciplines. Displaying a clear awareness of differences in what counted as philosophy, in his Philosophia digne` restituta Alsted observes that philosophia can be used broadly to refer to the entirety of the liberal arts, while the Aristotelians use it narrowly as a synecdoche for metaphysics. Plato, he argues, is closer to the mark in understanding philosophy ‘formally’, as the spark of divine knowledge present in man’s knowledge of the pure ideas. For Alsted, however, philosophy pertains to this divine knowledge understood ‘subjectively’ – that is, as it has been diffused through its reception in the finite human subject – as philosophy holds the key to the arts and disciplines whose role is to partially restore man’s capacity for divine intellection.65 Principles – and they vary from the selfevident law of non-contradiction to those that men have discovered as the basis of particular disciplines – are the dimly apprehended forms of divine reasoning. Moreover, the philosopher accedes to them by reflecting on his own mind, where God has placed them, rather than by learning transcendent truths guaranteed by faith and authority. Alsted thus calls the fundamental part of his philosophy the archelogia, treating it as the art or discipline whose object is the principles underlying all of the disciplines.66 This fundamental relocation of philosophy in relation to metaphysics and theology gave rise to a different conception of ‘first philosophy’ and a different ordering of the disciplines. No longer serving as a step on the intellectual ladder leading to Aristotelian metaphysics and Thomist theology, philosophy in the Calvinist academy developed a univocal conception of its object in terms of the principles underlying all objects of knowledge. Clemens Timpler (1563–1624) of the Steinfurt gymnasium could thus declare that the object of ‘first philosophy’ is no longer ‘being as being’ but ‘everything intelligible’ (omne intelligibile).67 In this way, a 65

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Johann Heinrich Alsted, Philosophia digne` restituta: libros quatuor praecognitorum philosophicorum (Herborn, 1612), 4–11. Ibid., 13–16. See Joseph S. Freedman, European Academic Philosophy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: The Life, Significance, and Philosophy of Clemens Timpler (1563/4–1624) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1988).

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new univocal metaphysics offering a single set of concepts or ‘intelligibles’, understood as divine concepts open to natural reason, could be used to generate a single all-embracing system of knowledge, beginning with God and extending to all of the arts and sciences.68 Given this rationalist dimension of Calvinist philosophy, it is not surprising that post-Kantian philosophers should have seen it as pointing towards modern epistemology and, more broadly, the modern autonomy of reason, contrasting it unfavourably with a supposedly more theological Lutheran Schulphilosophie in these regards.69 It should already be clear, however, that the Calvinist elevation of philosophy remained intensely theocentric, competing with the theological premisses of Jesuit and Lutheran Schulphilosophie, even if it was enunciated in a form that allowed secular philosophers to accede to the concepts presupposed in God’s creation of the cosmos. From the Jesuit perspective, Calvinist philosophy was thus not so much a rival philosophical system as a part of the heretical movement that was contesting the Catholic Church’s magisterium, or apostolic authority to enunciate divine truth and organise human learning around it. This helps to explain why one of the immediate consequences of the Catholic imperial occupation of Nassau-Dillingen in 1625–6 was the dissolution of Alsted’s academy and the scattering of its professors. Secondly, to recall Blum’s distinction, philosophy becomes Philosophenphilosophie, an art used by philosophers to illuminate their own subjectivity. For, if divine wisdom has been diffused and compromised through its reception in a damaged human nature, then its philosophical restoration must make use of artificial methods of knowledge. Keckermann thus departed from the Jesuit ontological conception of logic, defining it instead as an ars recte de rebus cogitandi, or art for the correct thinking of things.70 Drawing on Zabarella’s conception of method as a regression from the objective of a science to its principles, Keckermann was able to treat categories, causes, subjects and accidents as principles tied to the art of correct reasoning – rather than as metaphysical entities – allowing him to conclude his logic with syllogistic method. Operating towards the 68

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For a helpful account of this development, see Charles H. Lohr, ‘Latin Aristotelianism and the Seventeenth-Century Calvinist Theory of Scientific Method’, in Di Liscia, Kessler and Methuen, Method and Order, 369–80. For this argument, see Beck, Early German Philosophy, 127–31. Beck’s formulation of this theme finds an interesting precursor in Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1939). Bartholomew Keckermann, Systema logicae tribus libris, in J. H. Alsted (ed.), Systema systematum (Hanau, 1613), vol. I, 67–315, at 67.

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Lullist end of the method spectrum, Alsted treated first philosophy itself as an all-encompassing art, similar to the ars magna that Lull had perhaps received from God on a hilltop. In ‘explicating the universal and common principles of the disciplines’, Alsted’s archelogia is thus the alphabet on which the languages of all the arts are based.71 It is through the complete organisation of arts – the ‘system’ – that men can partially restore their lost intellectual abilities and gain the capacity to perfect society, in accordance with the divine cosmological order. The result, then, was also a new ordering of the disciplines through the notion of an encyclopaedia (circle of disciplines) or technologia (system of systems) – understood as a pansophic universal system of the arts. This became the defining genre for Calvinist academic philosophy. Keckermann pioneered the Calvinist encyclopaedia, but this genre was brought to its omnibus perfection by Alsted. The Herborn polymath treated the Lullist concepts underlying his encyclopaedic system – such things as goodness, magnitude, power, wisdom, will, truth, end – as both divine predicates and combinatorial possibilities. This meant that he could treat the cosmos as a totality unfolding in accordance with a divine calculus. The encyclopaedia was man’s way of gradually restoring his lost knowledge of this totality in the discursive manner suited to his damaged capacities, by unfolding the foundational principles of the archelogia into a totality of disciplines. In treating creation as already containing the complete course of nature and history, Alsted informed his encyclopaedia with a powerful eschatology.72 By elaborating the disciplines of the encyclopaedia, man is gradually restoring his damaged understanding and deciphering the divine plan hidden in the course of nature, such that the completion of the encyclopaedia brings human history to a close and sets the scene for the return of Christ.73 Alsted’s massive Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (1630) thus unfolds as a vast branching concatenation of disciplines, beginning with the most general principles or praecognita (including the archelogia) and descending through books on philology (grammar, rhetoric, logic and poetics), theoretical philosophy (containing large parts of Aristotelian psychology and natural philosophy), practical philosophy (ethics, politics and oeconomics), and the higher faculties (theology, law and medicine), then all the way to the mechanical arts of volume VI – agriculture, gardening, baking, brewing, pharmacology, metallurgy, 71 72

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Alsted, Philosophia digne` restituta, 48. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Apokalyptische Universalwissenschaft: Johann Heinrich Alsteds “Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis”’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 14 (1988), 50–71. Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 78–82.

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typography – in an extraordinary effort to follow the divine intelligibles down to the capillary arts of living. The final distinguishing feature of Calvinist Schulphilosophie is the shape that it gives to the persona of the philosopher. As in Jesuit so too in Calvinist academic culture, philosophical understanding is tied to a psychagogy designed to form a particular way of relating to and conducting the self. In the Calvinist case, though, this self is not that of the Christian militant, but a specifically philosophical self, understood as the subject whose mastery of the philosophical arts will disclose hidden truth. It is striking that, in his discussion of the motivation for doing philosophy, Alsted invokes the weakness of the human intellect in a manner similar to Scotti’s opening problematisation of his Jesuit novices.74 But in Alsted’s case this is an act of philosophical self-problematisation, the initiating device for the cultivation of arts whose role is to restore man’s capacity for universal knowledge – the imago Dei – in the illuminated subjectivity of the philosopher himself. In this figuration of the philosopher as an adept whose art restores man’s lost capacity for quasi-divine intellection, we find the characteristic persona of the Calvinist theosopher, possessing the spiritual qualifications needed to battle rival theologians and to advise Calvinist princes on the best way to reform society. Given the eschatological current flowing through Alsted’s conception of an encyclopaedic philosophy, it is perhaps not surprising that he exploited the capacity for prophecy latent in Calvinist rationalism.75 In his millenarian Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis (1627), he responded to the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years War – especially the destruction of the Palatinate and the disappointment of his own plans for universal reform – by interpreting these events in terms of the apocalyptic rise of the Catholic anti-Christ that presaged the millennium, to begin in 1694.76 In transforming philosophy such that it could scan the entirety of the world – divine and human – from within the single horizon of omnia intelligibile, Calvinist Schulphilosophie did indeed elevate the persona of the philosopher that it groomed to occupy this pansophic vantage. Yet the eschatological intensity of Calvinist rationalism also awakened the figure

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Alsted, Philosophia digne` restituta, 94–5. See Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 109–20; and Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Apokalyptische Universalwissenschaft’. See the English version: Johann Heinrich Alsted, The Beloved City, or, the saints reign on earth a thousand yeares asserted and illustrated from LXV places of Holy Scripture etc., trans. W. Burton (London, 1643), 34–7, 46–7.

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of the apocalyptic prophet, giving rise to a persona foreign to Catholic and Lutheran Schulphilosophie – the secular philosopher-prophet – but destined to reappear in Leibniz and his lineage.77 LUTHERAN SCHULPHILOSOPHIE: FROM METAPHYSICS TO ECLECTICISM

As in the Catholic and Calvinist cases, so in the German Empire’s Lutheran territories philosophy was shaped by the teaching programmes of the universities and by the movements of confessionalisation and statebuilding in which they were caught up. For Lutheran academic philosophy, the decisive event in this regard was the ratification of the Formula of Concord by an alliance of Lutheran princes in 1577. Intended as the definitive formulation of the Lutheran articles of faith, it provided the Lutheran Church with its first scholastic theology, in the form of a series of metaphysically charged articles dealing with Christ’s two natures and one person, the mode of his presence in the Eucharistic host, and the related question of his ‘ubiquity’, or capacity to be simultaneously present in diverse spatial and temporal locations.78 At the same time, it provided Lutheran princes with the instrument required to exercise the jus reformandi awarded them by the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, enabling them to reform their churches and universities in accordance with the Formula’s theology and Augsburg’s principle of cuius regio eius religio.79 In combining a scholastic theology with a programme of politically driven confessional reform, the Formula of Concord had something in common with the decrees of the Council of Trent. Mocking its title, it definitively excluded the Calvinists and provided an ideological battlestandard for use against the Empire’s Catholic estates and territories. It differed from the Tridentine decrees, however, in part because the Lutheran Church lacked instruments of trans-territorial control comparable to the Society of Jesus, and in part because a significant minority of Lutheran princes refused to ratify it.80 This meant that while the majority

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Maria Rosa Antognazza and Howard Hotson (eds.), Alsted and Leibniz: On God, the Magistrate and the Millennium (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999). For a modern English translation, see Theodore G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959). Martin Heckel, ‘Religionsbann und landesherrliches Kirchenregiment’, in H.-C. Rublack (ed.), Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gu¨tersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1992), 130–62. See Inge Mager, ‘Aufnahme und Ablehnung des Konkordienbuches in Nord- Mittel- und Ostdeutschland’, in M. Brecht, R. Schwarz and H. W. Krumwiede (eds.), Bekenntnis und Einheit

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of Lutheran universities fell within territories that subscribed to the Formula of Concord – Wittenberg, Leipzig, Jena, Tu¨bingen, Giessen, Strasbourg, Rinteln, Kiel, Greifswald, and Rostock – a number of key institutions did not. Lying outside the formal jurisdiction if not the theological force-field of the Formula, were Altdorf, Ko¨nigsberg and, most significantly, Helmstedt. The implementation of the Formula of Concord had a profound effect on a distinctively Lutheran style of academic philosophy during the seventeenth century. In developing its speculative Christology by drawing on the inheritance of metaphysical Aristotelianism – in particular the fundamental doctrine of the priority of transcendent substances in relation to bodies in space and time – it created the pressure for philosophy faculties to teach this kind of philosophy as a support for confessional theology. This brought to an end the century-long reign of Melanchthon’s philosophy curriculum, whose non-metaphysical humanism had embedded Aristotelian philosophy in a quasi-Ramist teaching of the liberal arts.81 It also signalled the return of metaphysics to a central place in the Lutheran curriculum. Metaphysics was the only discipline capable of reconciling natural philosophy and Christological doctrine, and thereby defending Lutheran scholastic theology against its Calvinist and Catholic rivals.82 It was the return of metaphysics in the service of the Formula of Concord’s speculative Christology that increasingly distinguished Lutheran academic philosophy from its Calvinist and Catholic competitors. On the one hand, the fact that Lutheranism continued to separate philosophy and theology as distinct ways of knowing meant that Lutheran philosophers rejected Calvinist constructions of a single universal philosophy as the foundation of all the disciplines, including theology. On the other, the separation of reason and faith also meant that Lutheran philosophy did not develop into a natural theology of the Jesuit kind, focused in a metaphysics of immaterial substances, and subordinate to a separate scholastic theology. This was in part because there was room for Lutheran

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der Kirche (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1980), 271–302; and Johannes Wallmann, ‘Lutherische ¨ berblick’, in Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 33–53. Konfessionalisierung – ein U On Melanchthon’s philosophy curriculum, see Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Law and Gospel: The Importance of Philosophy at Reformation Wittenberg’, History of Universities 11 (1992), 33–58; and Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The unsurpassed account of this development is given in Walter Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des fru¨hen 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1976).

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metaphysics to develop as an ontological science relatively autonomously of theology. It was also for the associated reason that the existence of Lutheran universities outside the jurisdiction of the Formula of Concord meant that Lutheran philosophy faculties remained open to a wider array of philosophical currents. In particular, the reception of Zabarella’s neoAristotelian humanistic method allowed Lutheran philosophers to construct academic sciences independently of their relation to metaphysics and theology. Under these intellectual circumstances, the Lutheran curriculum had to perform a difficult balancing act: to maintain the relative autonomy of philosophy without it swallowing theology; and to make philosophy serve theology without it being transformed into natural theology or Christian philosophy. Lutheran academic philosophy was thus not defined by a single curriculum but by a spectrum of programmes shifting in relation to this balance, and differentially distributed across its array of universities.83 Without attempting to cover the entirety of this spectrum, we can indicate its most important tendencies by arranging them in relation to the Hofmann controversy that took place at the University of Helmstedt during the 1590s. The university was founded by Duke Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbu¨ttel (1529–89) in 1576 as an instrument for introducing the Reformation to his territory, and as an institution that would help integrate the territory’s clerical and noble estates within a centralised princely territorial state.84 Despite the duke’s wishes to establish a moderate and irenic Lutheranism, the appointment of Daniel Hofmann (1538– 1621) to the theology faculty signalled the arrival of a combative ‘Saxon’ form of Lutheran orthodoxy. This was made all the more problematic by Hofmann’s emergence as a rallying point for Lutheran nobles resisting Julius’s centralising measures.85 The controversy that erupted shows just how difficult it was to integrate philosophy and theology in a Lutheran 83

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For a remarkable overview of the spectrum of forms that made up Lutheran academic philosophy, see Walter Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. VI/1, 475–97. Peter Baumgart, ‘Die Gru¨ndung der Universita¨t Helmstedt’, in P. Baumgart and N. Hammerstein (eds.), Beitra¨ge zu Problemen deutscher Universita¨tsgru¨ndungen der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 217–40. For the relation between Hofmann’s academic resistance to Julius’s programme and the political resistance of the Lutheran nobility, see Luise Schorn-Schu¨tte, ‘Lutherische Konfessionalisierung? Das Beispiel Braunschweig-Wolfenbu¨ttel (1589–1613)’, in Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 163–94. For a more detailed treatment, revealing many new facets, see Markus Friedrich, Die Grenzen der Venunft: Theologie, Philosophie und gelehrte Konflikte am Beispiel des Helmstedter Hofmannstreits und seiner Wirkungen auf das Luthertum um 1600 (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), 19–141.

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university. At Helmstedt the difficulty was magnified by Duke Julius’s refusal to subscribe to the Formula of Concord, which gave space to Hofmann’s anti-metaphysical theology, and by his decision to staff the philosophy faculty with a group of philosophers trained in the latest Zabarellan humanist Aristotelianism. This was the humanist circle of Johann Caselius (1533–1613) that would soon attract the brilliant young metaphysician Cornelius Martini (1568–1621). Hofmann’s theological polemics were as multifaceted as they were pugnacious. In the late 1580s he had entered into a controversy with a representative of Calvinist pansophism, Rudolf Goclenius the Elder (1547–1628) of Marburg.86 Goclenius had made the mistake of seeking Hofmann’s support for his characteristically Calvinist arguments for incorporating theology within philosophy and treating God and his creatures under a single set of Ramist topological categories.87 But Hofmann rejected the very idea of applying philosophical categories to God, who is the object of a distinct irreducibly theological knowledge.88 Hofmann’s position was also honed by specifically theological controversies – over the nature of conversion and the role of baptism – at whose centre lay the polar opposition between ‘natural man’ and ‘man reborn’, and the theme of man’s absolute dependence on divine grace for the renewal of his corrupt nature.89 On the basis of a moral anthropology stressing the complete corruption of man’s faculties at the Fall, Hofmann developed a conception of natural knowledge as sapientia carnis, carnal wisdom or wisdom of the flesh. He could use this to problematise philosophical knowledge as such, as incapable of knowing divine things because philosophers were not ‘reborn man’. It was his intervention in the ubiquity controversy, however, that brought the philosophical and theological aspects of Hofmann’s position to a head. In a series of disputations, Hofmann attacked the metaphysicaltheological doctrine of Christ’s ubiquity, based on the ‘abstract’ universal union of Christ’s omnipresent spiritual substance and his locally present human-corporeal nature. His favourite target in this regard was the

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See Inge Mager, ‘Lutherische Theologie und aristotelische Philosophie an der Universita¨t Helmstedt im 16. Jahrhundert. Zur Vorgeschichte des Hofmannischen Streites im Jahre 1598’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fu¨r Niedersa¨chsische Kirchengeschichte 73 (1975), 83–98, at 91–3. See, for example, Rudolf Goclenius, Isagoge in peripateticorum et scholasticorum primam philosophiam, quae dici consueuit metaphysica (Frankfurt, 1598), 1–21. Daniel Hofmann, De usu et applicatione notionum logicarum ad res theologicas (adversus Rud. Goclenium) (Frankfurt, 1596). See Friedrich, Grenzen, 241–53.

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‘Swabian school’ theologian, Jacob Andreae (1528–90), who had written this doctrine into the Formula of Concord itself. This doctrine, Hofmann argued, represented a heretical confusion of philosophical and theological knowledge. It is simply not true in philosophy that a body could appear in different places simultaneously, as this was a truth reserved for reborn theologians. In fact it was a truth inseparable from the performance of the Eucharist itself, as the institution created by Christ in which his divine and human natures would be ‘concretely’ united.90 Perhaps it was Andreae’s reliance on the metaphysics of Christian Aristotelianism that led Hofmann to target metaphysics itself as the prime source of this heretical confusion of the ‘two truths’, and thence to turn his fire on the teaching of metaphysics in his own university. In any case, in his preface to his student Pfaffrad’s disputation of 1598, Hofmann cited Tertullian’s characterisation of the philosopher as the ‘patriarch of heretics’, leaving no doubt that he was referring to the Helmstedt philosophers and to Cornelius Martini in particular, whose metaphysics lectures had started the year before.91 Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Martini’s construction of metaphysics itself sought to maintain a clear separation between philosophy and theology, and in so doing established one of the main lines of development followed by Lutheran philosophical culture. While successfully campaigning against the remnants of the ‘PhilippoRamist’ curriculum – Ramism was effectively banned from the university by ducal edict in 1597 – Martini did not introduce metaphysics on the Jesuit model, with philosophy functioning as a propaedeutic for theology. Instead, his aim was to establish philosophy and theology as separate (Aristotelian) sciences by ordering them in accordance with Zabarella’s humanist-Aristotelian method of proof.92 Zabarella’s method was also linked to a particular conception of the office or persona of the philosopher, as it restricted philosophy and the philosopher to the task of providing a common method in the construction of the sciences, rather than a metaphysical foundation for them in the universal theory of being.93 90

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For a brief version of this argument, see Daniel Hofmann, Errores XVII Jacobi Andreae (Helmstedt, 1588), Errors XI and XII. Daniel Hofmann (praes.) and Caspar Pfaffrad (resp.), Propositiones de Deo, et Christi tum persona tum officio (Helmstedt, 1598), fol. 2. See the Prolegomena to Cornelius Martini, Metaphysica commentatio compendiose, succincte, et perspicue comprehendens universam metaphysicam doctrinam (Strasbourg, 1605). Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua’.

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This method enabled Martini to reintroduce metaphysics to the Lutheran philosophy curriculum, but in the limited form of a positive analytic ontology. Helmstedt metaphysics thus took shape as a Zabarellan science of ‘being as being’. This included God but only in terms of his bare ‘whatness’ or existence, leaving knowledge of his divine qualities for the separate science of (revealed) theology. Of even more importance in the long run, however, was the capacity of this organisation of the philosophy curriculum to facilitate the construction of sciences that would eventually lead beyond the borders of Schulphilosophie itself. Martini’s student Henning Arnisaeus (1575–1636) could thus use Zabarellan method to construct a new discipline of political science, positing political order as its object, and thence deriving the principles of politics in terms of that which the prince must know and do in order to maintain political order.94 Disconnected from the hierarchy of disciplines leading up to theology and the hierarchy of being leading up to metaphysical substances, Lutheran philosophy of the Helmstedt kind facilitated the birth of autonomous sciences grounded in empirical objectives and observations. It thereby pointed the way towards the philosophical eclecticism associated with the notion of the Aufkla¨rung.95 During the first half of the seventeenth century, however, it was not Helmstedt humanism that dominated the Lutheran philosophical landscape, but the scholastic metaphysics developed in the heartlands of the Formula of Concord, at the universities of Wittenberg and Giessen in particular. In these universities, where philosophy was under maximum pressure to support the metaphysical premisses of the Formula’s speculative Christology, no quarter could be given to Hofmann’s ‘two truths’ doctrine, and metaphysics was pulled back in the direction of natural theology. Giessen’s Christoph Scheibler (1589–1653) thus begins his Opus metaphysicum – perhaps the most comprehensive work of Lutheran scholastic metaphysics – with a dedication to the Duke of Hesse on the utility of metaphysics for defending Lutheran Christology against Calvinist subversion. This is followed by a lengthy preface in which Scheibler rebuts the two truths doctrine, and displaces Hofmann’s anthropology of the philosopher as the bearer of ‘fleshly wisdom’ with the following quite different portrait of the philosophical persona, drawn from Gregory Nazianzus: ‘Understanding these two – God and angel – is difficult, 94 95

Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat. Horst Dreitzel, ‘Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der “Eklektischen Philosophie”’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281–343.

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and so too the third, the philosopher: in matter free of matter, in body not circumscribed, on earth heavenly, in affections free of affect; in all things easily able to be conquered, apart from greatness of spirit.’96 This is an image of the philosopher as natural theologian who, unlike Cornelius Martini’s metaphysician, is called upon to provide a metaphysical defence of the Formula of Concord’s doctrines of the union of Christ’s two natures and his ubiquity in relation to the Eucharist. Rather than drawing on Helmstedt’s Zabarellan construction of metaphysics as a positive ontology exclusive of the divine being, Scheibler has recourse to the doctrine of ‘metaphysical abstraction’ as elaborated by Sua´rez, Fonseca and Pereira – ‘abstraction from matter in accordance with the thing and reason’ – in order to arrive at the reality of immaterial substances.97 In this way, as Scheibler explains, metaphysics can combat the Calvinist view that Christ is not really present at the Eucharist by showing how infinite immaterial substance is present at all physical times and places.98 This of course is the metaphysical construction of ubiquity that Hofmann had declared heretical. Despite developing his metaphysics as a natural theology drawing on Sua´rez’s doctrine of metaphysical abstraction, however, Scheibler differed from the Jesuit both in significant details – in refusing to derive essences from non-contradiction, for example – but above all in the ordering of metaphysics in relation to theology. Scheibler’s metaphysics was not an ensemble of philosophical commentaries serving as a preparation for a culminating theology, as in the Ratio studiorum. It was a selfcontained exposition of being in general and God, with the former discussed in book I – dealing with the concept of being, the kinds of being, and the doctrine of causes – and the latter in book II, focused on God, the angels and separated souls, as kinds of immaterial substances. Nonetheless, Scheibler treats the entire domain of spatial bodies as dependent on and subordinate to the domain of immaterial substances. This made metaphysics foundational for all positive disciplines and thereby precluded the emergence of empirical and experimental sciences within the dominant form of Lutheran Schulphilosophie. These disputes within Lutheran academic philosophy have often been treated as exemplary intellectual divisions whose tensions impelled the 96

97

98

Christoph Scheibler, Opus metaphysicum, duobus libris universum hujus scientiae systema comprehendens (Giessen, 1617), Proemium, ch. VIII, n.p. See, for example, Scheibler’s appeal to metaphysical abstraction to explain why metaphysics deals with immaterial being rather than bodies, which belong to physics. Ibid., 454. Ibid., 418–19.

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evolution of an autonomous rational philosophy destined to overcome them. Lewis Beck thus views Hofmann as one of the ‘anti-intellectualist fanatics’ whose ‘two truths’ doctrine helped to fuel the opposition between philosophy and theology, and between empiricist and rationalist philosophies, that would eventually be overcome through Kant’s discovery of the transcendental conditions of knowledge.99 In Charles Lohr’s version of this history, Hofmann’s ‘irrationalism’ is a replay of the clash between secular naturalistic Aristotelianism and Christian doctrine, exacerbated by Hofmann’s extreme fideism, but still destined to be overcome through the recovery of Sua`rez’s doctrine of immaterial substances by the Lutheran metaphysicians.100 Hofmann’s views, however, are not mistaken philosophical ideas capable of being resolved in this way. They are doctrines concerning the relation between the kind of person who thinks philosophical ideas and the kind of person who accedes to revealed Christian mysteries. Further, they are doctrines founded in a moral anthropology designed to ensure that university philosophers will be incapable of acceding to theological truths, whose knowledge is dependent on the piety and office of the theologian.101 There is no higher-level evolutionary mediation of Hofmann’s pietistic theology and the kinds of philosophy elaborated by Cornelius Martini and Christoph Scheibler, which simply turn away from Hofmann by constructing different philosophical personae organised around the cultivation of different spiritual and cognitive capacities. Martini’s positive ontologist thus cultivates a (Zabarellan) method that restricts him to the domain of non-theological being, while Scheibler’s exalted natural theologian practises metaphysical abstraction in order to accede to the domain of immaterial substances that includes God, the angels and the separated souls of men. The conflict between these different elaborations of philosophy and the philosopher was thus not resolvable from within philosophy itself, as they concern divergences between philosophy’s modes of (‘ascetic’, institutional) existence. Given the direct relation between the cultivation of the philosophical persona and the religious and political functions of the philosophy curriculum in Lutheran universities, it should not come as a 99 100

101

Beck, Early German Philosophy, 117–31. Charles H. Lohr, ‘Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Philosophie in lutherischen Deutschland’, in Brandmu¨ller, Immenko¨tter and Iserloh, Ecclesia Militans, 179–92. For this point, see Walter Sparn, ‘Doppelte Wahrheit? Erinnerungen zur theologischer Struktur des Problems der Einheit des Denkens’, in F. Mildenberger and J. Track (eds.), Zugang zur Theologie. Fundamentaltheologische Beitra¨ge (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), 53–78.

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surprise to learn that the Hofmann controversy was resolved not by philosophical debate but by direct ducal invention.102 This resulted in Hofmann’s house arrest, sacking, and eventual exile, even if his antimetaphysical refusal to integrate philosophy and theology would return to haunt Lutheran Schulphilosophie in late seventeenth-century Pietism and eclecticism. CONCLUDING REMARKS

We began this account by arguing that the history of early modern philosophy should not be written as a series of attempted breakthroughs to a modernity characterised by the autonomy of reason and a universal philosophical subject. In sketching an alternative understanding of the field, we found not the philosophical subject but a variety of ways of determining what was to count as philosophy, which were simultaneously ways of grooming the philosopher. Working with the ChristianAristotelian heritage and the recovered classical philosophies of the Renaissance, German Schulphilosophie represented a series of rival confessional attempts to transmit true doctrine, from across the entire field of knowledge, to students whose comportment was bound to the offices they would occupy in confessional societies. The bearer of this doctrine was not the subject of experience but the philosophical persona, which we can understand in terms of the cultivation of an intellectual deportment required to accede to the truth, as this was variously understood in the rival confessional cultures. Philosophy was of course understood as natural or non-revealed knowledge, yet because this demarcation was itself determined by theology, the place of philosophy in the curriculum was dependent on instituted theological truths and their associated devotional practices. Unlike the English and French cases, the multiplication of independent confessional-political entities within the German Empire meant that three rival university systems developed, each with its own way of integrating philosophical knowledge and theological doctrine. The three kinds of university philosophy that emerged from this peculiar set of circumstances represented different institutional ways of determining what should count as philosophy and what a philosopher should be. Even if these philosophical institutions differed in their reception of the new natural philosophy, and the new methods associated with Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes, it is unhelpful to see them as open or closed in 102

Friedrich, Grenzen, 52–69.

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relation to an agreed philosophical modernity. Similarly, when modern commentators find modernity’s harbinger in one of these traditions, this is almost always a sign of residual philosophical sectarianism. The different academic philosophies represented independent institutional orderings of the truth which would be transmitted into chronological modernity in diverse ways. This is particularly apparent in the case of Jesuit Schulphilosophie, whose armed integrity allowed it to pass into the eighteenth century relatively untouched by the transformations that dissolved its Protestant rivals.

CHAPTER

3

The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics of office in early modern England 497314

Conal Condren

Through the work of writers such as Marcel Mauss, Ernst Kantorowicz and more recently Erving Goffman, notions of personae and role-play have become familiar as models for understanding society. What is meant by a persona, however, can be variable. At one extreme, it is little more than a performed role and presupposes an inner but ultimately accessible moral and decision-making agent. This inner ‘self’ is thus a postulated explanans for conduct. By the same token, we can hypothesise patterns of tension and socialised pressure when society or a group expects a persona to be adopted, and so compromises the moral integrity of the agent. As Michael Sandel has expressed it in abridging a major focus of communitarian social theory, selves are always socially situated and partially defined by the roles they play.1 Such triadic models of inner self, role and society have been taken back into the early modern world, for example, by Stephen Greenblatt in his influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt sought to analyse, inter alia, More’s ‘Dialogue of Counsel’ in Utopia, seen as a debate between Hythlodaeus, an unencumbered Self, and Morus, the socially constructed role-player, the point being to illustrate that the Renaissance self had been fully aware of the necessities of role-play and the constraints placed upon its freedom. At another extreme, however, is the notion of a persona as a manifestation and representative of an office, an embodiment of a moral economy. It is this that Kantorowicz explored with respect to medieval kingship. The office is a whole sphere of responsibilities, rights of action for their fulfilment, necessary attributes, skills and specific virtues, highlighted by concomitant vices and failures. The persona is an authentic type carried by a physical body. Kantorowicz’s argument was devoted to one institutionalised and ceremonially proclaimed office; but in fact, medieval and early modern England was structured by networks of such offices into which 1

Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), Introduction.

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people were inducted with the solemn formality of oath-taking. The oaths often elaborated in detail the duties defining the persona, advertising the responsibilities that justified its liberties of office, thus arming others with criteria to assess conduct.2 Such transformative and affirmative patterns of induction into office gave a religious dimension to identity, from midwife to monarch. This was at once a blessing and a curse, should the persona abuse its position. The world of social offices has recently begun to receive the attention it deserves, although the correlate that people in office were seen morally as personae, not as individuals or ‘selves’, has been less explored.3 I wish to note two things at this point. First, that a pervasive notion of office and persona gave a particular structure and character to the vocabulary of moral approbation and critique. The promotion of any persona was couched in the same general terms of defence and commendation, a positive register of rights, liberties, duty, rule and service to the office and often to those protected by it. Conversely, for those disappointed in the performance in office, a negative register of terms was also available, imputing neglect, oppression, licence and tyranny – in sum passionate excess. To claim an official persona was to gain access to these complementary registers and so acquire a social voice. Second, the interplay of contested personae went well beyond institutionalised social offices to the more elusive offices associated with the intellect. The concrete socialised offices of, say, monarch or mayor may have provided authenticating models for how people talked, but as I shall illustrate, in England the vocabulary of social office flowed through to the less obvious, though often emphatically asserted offices of poet, rhetor and philosopher. And it may be that people assuming such personae had to work harder to assure others that there was an office and that the persona was genuinely responsible to and representative of it. A contrast with Germany is instructive here. As Ian Hunter emphasises in his chapter, philosophy in early modern Germany was highly institutionalised, with university professors assuming formal offices, marked by the solemnities of swearing oaths of induction. As I will suggest, the lack of an analogous intellectual formality in England has a relevance to understanding the

2 3

The most detailed examples are the oaths of midwife and counsellor in The Booke of Oathes (1649). On social office see, especially, Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early-Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Goldie,‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-Holding in Early-Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (London: Palgrave, 2001), 1–37.

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Royal Society. Its establishment was not a leap towards the self-hood of modernity, but an attempt to reassure a potentially suspicious world by embedding the new philosophy in a familiar ethical habitus of officeholding. The language of office, together with the question of the persona required for office-holding, thus promises new insight into the persona of the philosopher in early modern England, not least where this persona overlapped with those of the rhetor and poet. I

The twin determinants of any office were its end, telos, and its limit; assertions as to end and limit thus were the axes for the definition of a persona, and the qualities that best fitted the end and recognised the limits of the office. This notion of persona as an expression of office is, I believe, more appropriate to understanding the ancient and early modern world as a whole than is one of persona as self and role. It is also more closely related to the original notion of a persona, from the stereotypical mask worn by an actor to manifest a type, such as the slave or warrior, a point also explored by John Cottingham in his chapter. Pierre Hadot has done much to alert us of the relevance of this to the philosopher in antiquity, for the philosopher, much like his intellectual companions or competitors, rhetors and poets, represented or manifested an activity. He might not wear a mask, but, like the poet or the rhetor who donned purple robes, he might well dress in a way that advertised his life form. In this way, as I will suggest, the question of wearing a beard was a semiotic aspect of a philosophical identity, as was the affectation of unaffected clothing, or habitation in a barrel. To clarify the difference between role and office, it is worth noting that the actor was attacked as having no office, as exhibiting and encouraging the protean irresponsibility of role-play.4 When defended, however, it was argued that he had an office;5 the player’s persona lay not in any specific role, but in the duties to poet and audience, requiring judgment and specific skill. The player could be defended as not unlike that 4

5

Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64; John Rainolds, Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), gives a sense of university disputation on the player as without or damaging to social offices; Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), B4r–v, C1; William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (1633), at length, but see Actus secundus, 34–42 (Prynne lifts Gosson’s conceit of acts for chapters); Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum triumphans (1670), 2. Samuel Butler, Characters, (c. 1667–9), ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), 300.

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paradigmatic socially instituted office-holder, the priest, in having a mediator’s responsibility. All flexibility and interpretative licence served the theatre’s ‘end . . . [which] is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature’.6 Role-play was the means of fulfilling the requirements of persona in office.7 Vivid representation in placing moral types before us is ‘the proper Office, and work of Plays’.8 In giving Hamlet such sentiments, Shakespeare was affirming a distinct conception of theatrical responsibility in the immediate context of heated competition between theatres, adults’ and boys’ companies; he adjusted his tragedy for performance in Cambridge, and so intervened in a lively university debate on office and the very legitimacy of the stage in a firmly reformed Protestant environment. The unmasking of villainy through the play within the play was a vindication of the office of the actor. Almost a century later it still needed to be affirmed that it is the ‘Office of the Stage to detect roguery’.9 The qualities of this persona might even be roguery in another.10 The most general notions under which the way of life of the philosopher might be understood were those of the active or contemplative ideals. It has, for example, been argued that Greek philosophy was characterised by giving greater weight and prestige to the contemplative life, Roman philosophy to the vita activa. This may work as a generalisation; Plato’s philosopher kings have as their reward a life of unalloyed contemplation, after they have sullied their hands with the necessities of ruling. Contemplative philosophy is so important that it is doubtful if, in being kings, they can be happy, a problem for the perfect, happy polis Plato set out to describe. Yet, philosophers must rule. There is an imperative of office here that renders The Republic ambivalent in its priorities. Again, Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a celebration of the ultimate ideal of philosophic contemplation; but Aristotle’s greatest praise for Socrates was that he brought philosophy down to the agora. Be this as it may, the counterpoint between a contemplative and an active ideal of the philosophic office, between differing patterns of moral responsibility towards the end of achieving wisdom, was crucially important in medieval and early modern Europe. Italian literary culture gave it a

6 7 8 9 10

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2. John Earl, ‘A Player’, in Micro-cosmographia, or a piece of the world discovered (1633). Baker, Theatrum triumphans, 110, 178, 133. Anon., The Immorality of the Pulpit (1698), 7. Butler, ‘A Player’, in Characters, 300.

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particular prominence during the Renaissance. It became an accommodating, if contrived topos of intellectual display.11 It is, however, handled with unusual skill by Thomas More and is the crux in his ‘Dialogue of counsel’, not a debate between a free self and a socialised role-player, but between contrasting personae claiming to represent wisdom, virtue and responsibility: the ultimately Platonic theme of otium versus negotium. This too is ambivalent. For each vision of office there is a different persona, manifesting divergent qualities, as the character and physical, even semiotic, differences between Hythlodaeus and Morus make clear.12 For the caped and bearded one, the end of true philosophy is the untrammelled pursuit of honestas, for Morus, utilitas. Each was an aspect of the ideal rhetorical synthesis in any argument. But the dramatic delineation is well served by More’s resisting a resolution between his characters, and thus leaving in the air the question of what really is true wisdom.13 That indeterminacy, inviting the reader’s active engagement, however, is more congruent with the office of the rhetor, whose garb the author More was wearing, than with the philosopher about whom he was writing. For the rhetor had perforce always to vary arguments according to audience and circumstances and it was, according to the ancient Quintilian and the modern Machiavelli, not always possible to argue from honestas, or to reconcile it with utilitas.14 The open hand of rhetoric, inviting the reader to engage and think, was to be preferred to the closed and dogmatic fist of dialectic.15 To replace this interplay between personifications of intellectual office with struggling individuality is to lose sight of a most prescient symbolic account of the complexities of philosophical identity and their ambivalent relationships with the socially instituted 11

12

13

14

15

See, for example, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, ‘On an Active and a Contemplative Life, and Why One Ought to be Preferred Before the Other’ (c. 1670), in Essays Moral and Entertaining (London, 1815), vol.II, 209, notes the Italian lineage, and initially indicates the artificiality of the polarity. C. M. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’, (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1996), 277, a seminal study to which I am much indebted. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George Logan, Robert Adams and Clarence Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), bk. 1. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920–2), vol.III, 8, 30–7; Niccolo` Machiavelli, The Prince (1513), trans. Russell Price, ‘Introduction’ Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xvii–xx; see also Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 118–19. Damian Grace, ‘Utopia: A Dialectical Interpretation’, in Claire Murphy, Henri Gibaud and Mario Di Cesare (eds.), Miscellanea Moreana, Essays for Germaine Marc’hadour, special issue of Moreana 100 (1989), 273–302.

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office of ruling. As needs no labouring, More’s Utopia was an imaginative if oblique commentary on Plato’s Republic. What greatly complicated matters by the time More wrote, however, was the entanglement of conceptions of philosophic office with those of Christianity, which in turn informed the long-standing claims to wisdom made on behalf of rhetoric and poetry. With respect to Christianity, true wisdom, thus true philosophy, was found through Christ and could be argued to be best approached through the contemplative ideal. This in turn could be seen as being expressed through the highly visible and calibrated monastic way of life. In the Renaissance and through the Reformation, then, the notion of the contemplative life was as much a matter of religion as philosophy, as well it might be, for each involved not just the dogmatics of propositional form, but offered consolation and therapy. Asserting the primacy of the active philosophic life, and denigrating, or even denying, the legitimacy of the purely contemplative could, as Peter Harrison makes clear, be as much a matter of attacking priests and Rome as it was of renegotiating the purpose of and conditions for philosophy. Well before the Reformation, Lorenzo Valla, in a highly declamatory dialogue between Lautentius and a Friar, argued vehemently that, even at its purest, the contemplative life was inferior to the active. In the early stages, he has contemplative philosophy partially in mind, but soon the attention shifts relentlessly to an attack on monasticism as a life-form for Christianity.16 In a fashion the work complements the Dialecticarum disputationem, an account of the structures and techniques of philosophical dispute. This judges them very much in terms of practical efficacy, presupposing the primacy of an engaged rather than purely contemplative philosophy, down-playing, for example, consistency of argument for the persuasive dexterity usually associated with rhetoric.17 Well after the Reformation, Clarendon, with a nod in the direction of the Italians (though he would not have known De professione), devoted one of his longest essays to the topos, denigrating the contemplative ideal as incoherent, inferior for this world and the next, and providing us with hardly any recognisable models to follow. The great men from antiquity had the virtue of experience, and the contemplative impulse, certainly to be valued, was a form of other directed service, appropriate to the ethics of 16

17

Lorenzo Valla, De professione religiosorum, Opuscula tria, in Opera omnia (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), vol. II, 287–322 (foot of pages), 99–134 (top of pages). Valla, Dialecticarum disputationum, liber tres, in Opera, vol. I, 759–60.

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office. But in all this hardly a mention of philosophy. The contemplative life is code for monkishness, and that is a synecdoche for the corruptions of Rome. Bacon had written in the same idiom, as a Protestant as well as a philosopher. His image of the purely contemplative life is that of the monk in service to God. That this is explicitly an office erodes the firm distinction between active and contemplative, as Clarendon would also recognise, and made it easier to see all philosophy, directly or indirectly, as properly aiding the commonwealth. This in turn helped Bacon present a highly developed sense of philosophy as an office: like ruling itself, it was a sphere of activity with responsibilities, and requiring, as Stephen Gaukroger has argued, a certain sort of moral persona for its exercise. In this way, Bacon’s projected reform of philosophy was also a Protestant reform, and a co-option of the view, espoused by Aristotle and then Marsilius, that religion properly had the function of supporting the office of rule. Additionally to all this, the Christianisation of the contemplative ideal cast the postulated human soul in the image of the inner, or the true philosopher. The vocabulary of office was one dominant linguistic resource for hypothesising the human soul, God and the relationship between them. If, as was sometimes said, God’s office was to rule, ruling the soul became an official relationship, and the soul’s understanding of its subject status could be construed in terms of true wisdom. Metaphors of social office could re-enforce and help shape that purely conjectured inner ‘self-like’ identity. The soul could be a judge, a ruler, a philosopher, all without significant contradiction, for each was a variation upon and an attempt to grasp aspects of an inner office. On a range of issues, then, arguments about the ends or scope of philosophy could become arguments about religious responsibility. I want now to turn at greater length to the relationships between poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, for each was re-asserted as an office during the Reformation, and each needed a new religious authentication. What I shall illustrate is that a common promotional rhetoric of office was shared across contested intellectual activities. That is, the semantic content of personae (the mix of moral values, skills, attitudes and aptitudes) exhibits a strong family resemblance between philosophy, poetry and rhetoric. At once this inhibited disciplinary insulation, and concomitantly it means now that the differences have to be looked for in the pragmatic mix of how the shared semantic resources were employed and to what purposes. Further, if philosophy was the love of wisdom, rhetors and poets might either claim to be superior to philosophers, or to be the true philosophers.

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The upshot is a little paradoxical: the one thing we do not need is an awareness of the current discipline philosophy to understand how people made philosophical claims. To over-extend a distinctive discipline in time (assuming it now to have a stable identity) is actually to obscure the question of how it emerged. To put the matter another way, insofar as we assume that it is the present discipline of philosophy that needs explaining historically, contexts are likely to be narrowed to matters of doctrinal content to fit the end result. As Knud Haakonssen has shown, insofar as epistemology is central now, we are likely to abstract what seem to us as epistemological arguments and deem those context and content for the history of philosophy. The same point applies to privileging scientific activity as epistemologically crucial to philosophical understanding.18 This problem of what I have elsewhere called structural anachronism is endemic to attempts to write the history of activities such as philosophy; but, equally, to rectify the imbalance by widening our notion of context can erode the explanatory value of any posited context. To focus on the persona and office of the philosopher – as opposed to the doctrinal content of the activity that nowadays defines the discipline, that drives the history, that narrows the context, that obscures the question, that looks anachronistic – may minimise the hermeneutic difficulty. To focus on the claimed persona of the philosopher in the context of bracing but sometimes confusing competition may also challenge the conceptual parochialism of genealogy, that narrowing of the past to interesting intimations of the present. II

It must be stressed immediately that, in touching on the literature of poetics, we are confronting a world in which, as Samuel Daniel put it, ‘of one science another may be born’.19 In the organised studies of the universities the parts of trivium and quadrivium were neither exhaustive nor incontestably distinct. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the shifting domains of intellectual endeavour were variously mapped in order to consolidate human knowledge. There was no certain place, for example, for mathematics, touching music, magic, natural philosophy 18

19

This, for example, mars Popper’s accounts of Bacon’s theories; see Sir Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963, 1972), 12–18, 137–8. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme (1603?), in English Critical Essays, ed. Edmund D. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956 edn), 63.

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and the practicalities of navigation. It might be, as Galileo had put it, the language of God, but He spoke in different tongues, deductive and probabilistic: in the static certainties of geometry, in the mobile flexibility of algebra. Richard Mulcaster saw logic as the grammar of mathematics, yet on the eve of Newtonian pre-eminence, John Eachard could see the two as combining no better than black pudding and anchovy sauce. Logic itself might be included and excluded from philosophy.20 There was no literature, but there was a crucial but variable understanding of poetics.21 In post-Reformation England the poet sometimes needed defending against the ancient accusation of lying, and of being a prop to purgatory, that most self-serving of the delusions of Catholicism.22 Just as negatively, the poet could also be associated with the undisciplined and prophetic incantations of enthusiasm. The defence of poetry and of the poet, then, frequently had a theological point, or shifted into theology or philosophy on the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics.23 Not surprisingly, poetry also needed to be circumscribed in tension with competing claimants to wisdom, such as history, rhetoric and philosophy. Intellectual identity might simply be assumed in re-characterising poetry;24 but invocations of office were always available as introductory ploys, at once justifying and situating the arguments to follow.25 They became most significant when used to define the ends and limits of the activity, to proclaim a superiority over competitors; or to allay suspicion and stabilise the contours of discourse all too easily susceptible to accusations of irresponsibility. Typically, however, the defence of poetry was a defence of its manifesting persona. This is particularly clear in a number of treatments of rhetoric and poetry, and in this limited context of discussion the two can be treated in tandem – for there was no less a theological edge given in the 20

21

22

23 24

25

Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined (1581), ch. 41, 246; John Eachard, Mr Hobbs State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue between Timothy and Philautus (1671), in John Eachard, Works, (1773), vol. II, 99; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1606), in Works, ed. Basil Montagu (London: Pickering, 1825), vol. II pt. 2. 125, 144–5. For salutary comment, see Michael McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses and the Rise of Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 35–47. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36–9; John Donne, The Pseudo-Martyr (1610), 115–19, on purgatory and priestly office; Sir John Harington, ‘Of reeding poetry’ (1604), in The Sixth Book of Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. Simon Cauchi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 97–8, 99–100. McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses’, 44–5. For example, Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602), or John Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, 62.

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Reformation to suspicions of the rhetor’s irresponsible powers and bogus wisdom. In the tragedy of the poet Collingbourne, gruesomely executed for his lines ‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovel our Dog / Do rule al England vnder a Hog’,26 the argument is that under a tyranny the office of the poet is dangerous. If the office of rule sustains other offices, the ultimate form of misrule contaminates them. The voice of Collingbourne states that ‘The Greekes do paynt a Poetes office whole’, but Collingbourne is judiciously succinct. The poet must be chaste and virtuous, ‘nymble, free and swyft’; in a tyranny decidedly swift.27 Mistakenly, he had thought the poet’s ancient liberty to chastise and correct could be pleaded at any bar: ‘I had forgot howe newefound tyrannies / Wyth ryght and freedome were at open warre’.28 The liberty of any office is predictably in tension with the licence of tyranny. Yet, however circumspect, indirect or jesting the poet is advised to be, the office remains to trade in moral truths. For all its abstract economy and procedural emphasis, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning illustrates a similar point with respect to rhetoric. The principal distinctions between poetry, history and philosophy are primarily related to, spring from, serve, or express (the relationships are not uniform) a human faculty. Poetry expresses imagination, history is memory and philosophy reason. A well-digested sense of office is there as an occasional point of reference. Throughout the text, Bacon occasionally shifts from accounts of intellectual procedure to what the practitioner actually does, in order to clarify intellectual responsibilities, virtues and spheres or ends to be served. If a man, as rhetorician, speaks to different people, he should do so in different ways, as he should not if the discourse is purely logical. Decorum and the liberties of speech, then, are functions of persona, and personae are instantiations of officia. So rhetoric is placed where Bacon took Aristotle to have put it, between logic and civic knowledge: ‘the duty and office of Rhetoric is, to apply reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will’.29 Further, the complementary scope of each sphere of learning is a way of insisting that conversation between them makes the vita contemplativa as a whole an aid to the commonwealth. The Advancement is an elaborate defence of what George Pettie, translating Stephano Guazzo, had put as a statement

26

27 28 29

William Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 349, lines 69–70. Ibid., 354, line 183. Ibid., 355, lines 198–200. Bacon, Advancement, 209.

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of fact: all learning must be of use, the means to which is conversation. This has its own office in the perfection of learning.30 In other more clearly apologetic writers, the imagery of office and persona is persistent as a mode of justification. The conventional early modern ideal of the poet was cloaked in the authority of antiquity. In Greece poets had been associated with divine inspiration, Homer’s blindness a gift of the gods that he might see further into people and the nature of things. Traditionally draped in purple, the poet was both a maker or creator and a teacher, whose standing Plato in particular felt the need to confront directly in asserting the primacy of philosophy. In lowland Scots as well as English, the term maker could mean poet, and Sidney in his Apology and then Jonson in Timber drew on the philology of poietes to emphasise the poet’s creative capacities. Each elaborates on a pattern of responsibilities, Jonson explicitly approaching the critical ideal of a poem by detailing the qualities necessary for the poet: natural wit, a capacity to imitate nature, hard work and learning.31 Much the same pattern of justificatory moves is found in advancing rhetoric. As the sophists had co-opted the purple cloaks of the poets by the fifth century BC, so there is a sort of clothes-stealing between the theorists of poetry and rhetoric.32 Since antiquity poetry and rhetoric alike had pretensions to magical powers: the capacity to make and re-make social reality as the magician could re-make nature through appropriate incantation.33 To assuage fear of such Faustian ambition, the promoters of the activities laid a balancing insistence on responsibility, the primacy of decorum and service to something greater. What, in a word, made something a liberty and not a licence, and made transformation and invention good things, was the telos of the office served and the limit observed by the persona. Even Plato (as Sidney insisted) considered the powers of poetry and rhetoric permissible if subject to the end of philosophy, the love of wisdom. Cicero and Quintilian with respect to rhetoric, Longinus with respect to poetry, trod in his footsteps. The understandings and expectations of poetry and rhetoric through medieval times and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued 30 31

32

33

George Pettie, Civil Conversation (1586), fols. 15–16, esp. 16r. Ben Jonson, ‘What is a Poet’, in Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1641), in Works, ed. W. Gifford (London: Bickers and Southeron, 1875), vol. IX, 210–12. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), in Jones, English Critical Essays, 50–1; Jonson, Timber, 218. Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3–16.

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to move within this compass.34 This was to participate in a veritable tradition of discussion of Man as imago Dei, that perforce involved the correlates of an omnipotent voluntarist God and a responsible rational creator. Man as the image of God was wonderfully creative, but to a point: even in its most hyperbolic celebrations, such as that put forth by Marsilio Ficino, it was an image of office.35 From the Reformation, however, as I have indicated, the stress on the persona of the good rhetorician or poet became rich with confessional implications and could sometimes be used to re-specify the nature and significance of theology. Thus Richard Pace on the much cited opening of Cicero’s De inventione: as eloquence founds cities and helps create all the arts, so its role in theology is central. The good man, rhetorician and Christian are one in creative responsibility; Christ is the perfection of great oratory, good rhetoric a form of imitatio Christi.36 The Protestant Thomas Wilson later made similar claims on the authority of the same Ciceronian text. The rhetor comes close to God in his capacity to make and civilise, not because of any uncontrolled and limitless power, but because he gives a wise ordering. Without him, duty, service, callings, vocations cannot be sustained. He is, in short, God-like, a microcosm of God’s own office of offices. The closer he is to God, the closer to wisdom itself.37 As George Puttenham also argued, whisking away the rhetor’s purple to re-adorn the poet, because of the ‘high charge and function’ of poetry, it was necessary for poets to live holy lives, deep in study and contemplation. Virtue made poets fit for prophecy. They were the first lawmakers and philosophers, keeping the commonwealth in order.38 The poet is an epitome of decorum, of ‘seemliness’. Comeliness, discretion, decency, Puttenham’s terms of amplification for seem-

34

35

36

37

38

Dr. John O. Ward has brought to my attention a fragment of William of Chartres referring to the officium of rhetoric and its end, finis, Bruges, Bibliothe`que de la ville, MS 553.s.xiv. Marsilio Ficino, Theologica Platonica, discussed at length in Charles Trinkhaus, In our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), vol. II, 483–4. Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1967); see Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, 109–14; cf. Rudolf Agrippa on the same Ciceronian text, De inventione dialectica libri tres (1479); and Juan de Guzman, La primera parte de la rhetorica (1589), ‘Convivium’, partially re-printed in Wayne A. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 233–43. See, at length, both Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553, 1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909); and Angel Day, The English Secretary (1586, 1592), ed. Robert O. Evans (Florida: Scholar’s Facsimiles, 1967). George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), Introduction Baxter Hatherway (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), ch. 3.

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liness, all imply discipline and moderation as a control on the transgressions of figurative creativity.39 Decorum is the courtly poet’s sprezzatura, making him an honest man and not a mere cunning dissembler.40 This kind of argument would echo through the pages of Paradise Lost in which Christ, as for Pace, is the supreme rhetorician, Lucifer the inverted parody, whose eloquence can sustain only a travesty of a properly ordered world. Sidney’s Apology is perhaps the most famous exploration of these themes. Although an apology for poetry, his discourse is of poets in the dissonant context of historians and philosophers. The central claim is that, of these, only the poet is a second creator to ‘be counted supernatural’ and ‘ranging freely within the zodiac of his own wit’.41 The poet is at once an imitator and a maker.42 This ranging is never a matter of capricious invention or Icarian flightiness, let alone popish fantasy to serve the interests of priests. Even when trading in the comic, the poet is a figure of responsibility.43 He was neither eccentric nor an individual, questing after originality for its own sake.44 He was more of a craftsman, tied to God’s creation and in service to an ethical vision. All the intellectual arts, and poetry’s immediate competitors are, he argued, ‘serving sciences’.45 Their shared end is to draw us towards perfection. The poet serves this end best by providing perfect pictures transcending the precepts of philosophy and the examples of history. At a meta-level, or viewed reflexively, this claim about poetry makes it singularly decorous that Sidney attempts more than poetic precept, but a perfect picture of the poetic persona whose office embraces the advancement of reformed religion; poetry can be an idiom of proper devotion.46 This ethos of creative religious responsibility is re-enforced by reference to Cicero and buttressed by alignment with the institutionalised office of priest as a mediator and mentor. The poet is also likened to those exemplary types of social office-holder, the lawyer, the physician, and above all the monarch.47 Poetry, Sidney had remarked at the outset, is ‘my own elected vocation’.48

39 43 44

45 46

47 48

40 41 42 Ibid., ch. 23. Ibid., ch. 25. Sidney, Apology, 7. Ibid., 6 Ibid., 26, on comedy. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972 edn), 245. Sidney, Apology, 11, 13. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early-Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 73–4. Sidney, Apology, 15, 21. Ibid., 2.

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The terms office and vocation were generally used as rough synonyms, and in Timber Jonson was reflecting as much on his own chosen, or manufactured, vocation of poetic critic as on poetry itself. Poetry is the queen of the arts, supreme in status, above even oratory.49 This standing had made sound criticism all the more important. It was Aristotle, the greatest of philosophers, who had taught the offices of proper criticism, judgment and the imitation of virtue. This ‘office of a true critic’ is no mere tinkering, nor is it a matter of dictating strict laws for poets to follow.50 It is, rather, a matter of sincere judgment of the poet and subject.51 Effectively, the poetic critic is the mediator, the priest, or, to anticipate Locke, an under-labourer in the poet’s commonwealth of letters. III

I want now to turn directly to office and persona of the philosopher, because what I have so far sketched has been the use of contested resources that were employed also to promote philosophy itself as an office. This should not be surprising, for defences of poetry and rhetoric made specific claims to wisdom, and as conventionally philosophy was love of wisdom, this could be to appropriate philosophy to other intellectual domains. This tactic can be found in the writings of Puttenham and Wilson who thus exploited the almost indiscriminate range that philosophy could have, even to the knowledge of all arts under heaven and on earth.52 Moreover, in whatever sense it had, philosophy, like its immediate neighbours in intellectual office, was itself subject to suspicion, not least for undermining true belief. ‘Philosophers’, wrote Sir John Harington, ‘are for the moste part the patryarcks to heretykes.’53 Although Sidney saw philosophy as a distinct serving science, he came perilously close to claiming that the poet was the true philosopher. As a reminder of the continued disciplinary slipperiness that the vocabulary of office allowed, we will see that Thomas Hobbes does go this far, if only for an unlikely moment. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, philosophy could quite properly refer not to any specific activity, but to the end of 49 52 53

50 51 Jonson, Timber, 218. Ibid., 220. Ibid. Laurentius Goslicius, De optimo senatore (1593), 107. Sir John Harington, ‘Of the sowl of man and the original thearof’, in The Sixth Book of Vergil’s Aeneid, 83.

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any of them. Philosophical eclecticism exacerbated the potential instability. The philosopher could be a hunter and gather of other people’s gems of wisdom, so adhering to no stable propositional doctrine. And, though largely filtered out of professional philosophy’s own sense of its past, during this period degrees of eclecticism were pervasive.54 So, in another sense of the word philosophy, it could be all the more important to establish the philosopher as someone with a specific identity, a persona of his own, or, just occasionally, her own. Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad show how Margaret Cavendish attempted to exploit exclusion from socialised office in order to reaffirm the value of the contemplative ideal. Plato had made the most ambitious claims for the intellectual authority of the philosopher. Aristotle had in some ways muted them and Aquinas had argued explicitly that metaphysics in particular had an office, conceived of in virtually Platonic terms as a responsibility of the highest wisdom to rule other disciplines and lesser claims to knowledge.55 Sidney’s poetic office had a long-standing and formidable opponent. For others, philosophy, more or less coherently understood, offered a guide for life. The quintessence of the vita contemplativa, it could be promoted as a mentor for the vita activa in its full and varied potential. This was the case for Bacon: as the office of the stomach was to nourish the whole body, so philosophy made sense of all other professions.56 At this level of generality, this was a restatement of ancient arguments presented by Cicero, out of Plato and Aristotle, and Aquinas out of all three; it is the duty of philosophy to make other realms of duty clear. Additionally, this provided a rationale for the most eclectic of philosophers. It modelled the office of the philosopher (like that of the rhetor or poet) on the metaphorical projection of the office of God, to create and order all subordinate offices in the natural and human world. Analogically, it was to make philosophers kings. Philosophical identity, then, was doubly protean. It had an unstable relationship with rhetoric and poetry, and for some writers it offered a 54

55

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The label itself is a little eclectic, as ‘ism’ terms are apt to be, but there is a difference between the apparent magpie eclecticism of John Aubrey, and the empirical eclecticism of Robert Boyle, whose hostility to systematisation was to systems developed in advance of adequate data. See Peter Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. There is a difference between both and the eclecticism of Walter Charleton which extended to using different theories for different problems. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. J. P. Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.: Dumbox, 1995), xxix–xxxi; Richard Johnson, ‘Early-modern Natural Law and the Problem of the Sacred State’ (Ph.D. thesis Griffith University, 2002), 41; it was fairly conventional to claim that philosophy’s office was to serve theology. Bacon, Advancement, 93; for a succinct discussion of Bacon’s counterclaims to Sidney’s poet, see Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 48–57.

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vision of human potential not unlike the picture of invention painted by the apologists of rhetoric. The most famous, and arguably the most misread example of this is Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man.57 Since Burckhardt’s search for nascent individualism in the Renaissance, Pico’s seminal image has commonly been taken as an unrestricted argument about human individuality, a celebration of Man’s protean capacity. Yet Pico uses the notion of man as a metaphor for philosophic creativity.58 He claims for the philosopher what Wilson, Puttenham and Sidney would use to vindicate poets and orators. We are to celebrate the protean nature of philosophy, which is to say its extensive intellectual liberty, because the philosopher’s is an office of such importance. It is the shared vocabulary of office used to define differences and priorities that does so much to confuse them. The philosopher as living the highest form of the vita contemplativa, or as the instrument of the vita activa, persistently treads on the toes of the poet and rhetor.59 What is needed is constant reassurance or affirmation that the activity has a rationale, that creative and intellectual liberty is not licence, and this gradually gets re-specified. Directly or indirectly, he serves the commonwealth, although always the immediate end of his office is the quest for truth and wisdom. For Bacon, adapting this shared rhetoric, it was by discovery and understanding that the philosopher was creative, in generating new works and eudaimonia through control of nature. It was the specific means to this end that did most to give the philosopher distinction. He was obliged to pursue free and thorough enquiry, and this had the attendant duty of taking nothing on authority and dismissing even the most elevated quacks of antiquity.60 But again we are not dealing with anything that was decisively defined. This intellectual freedom was directly analogous to that claimed by the counsellor, and similarly wedded to sovereign power. What can be seen, then, from Bacon’s attempted reform of philosophy is the continued frisson of association with other realms of office, even intimations of invasion of other intellectual and socially established

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W. G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Symbol of his Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981), for an invaluable discussion. Ibid., esp. ch. 2. Bacon, Advancement, 229ff; Goslicius, De optimo, 57–9. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 105–10; Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147–50.

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domains of responsibility: the philosopher is something of a priestly mediator and a counsellor. Quite independently, Althusius, as Robert von Friedeburg shows in his chapter, was about to argue for much the same nexus of responsibilities. As a corollary to positioning philosophy as a pre-eminent serving science to the public good of the commonwealth, Bacon insisted upon the discipline of practised scepticism as a precondition for informed judgment and advice. In a further way, his characterisation of philosophy as an activity in and for the public benefit was an affirmation of the philosopher as an office-holder. For, in early modern England, the distinction between the public and the private was not used to refer to complementary spheres of activity, a public sphere in contrast to a personal, domestic or private domain. The public denoted or connoted the moral legitimacy of office-holding wherever it was found; the private designated the absence of office or right of action, or outright corruption wheresoever it might lurk. The argument, then, that philosophy produced public benefit, was more ethically charged than the utilitarian assurance that it would be beneficial. It was a proclamation of the moral responsibilities and consequences by which a persona should be judged. For philosophers in Bacon’s increasingly fashionable idiom, sectarian dogmatism would be inimical to the public burdens of philosophy. It led back to reliance on authority and discipleship, and therefore to a curtailment of the critical faculties, behind all of which lay the argumentum artificiale of Catholic dogma. Boyle, whose religious casuistry and experimental empiricism re-enforced each other, would have Carneades as his spokesman in The Skeptical Chymist; the true philosopher was as pious as he was eclectic.61 So the philosopher ranged not unlike Hobbes’s (undogmatic) spaniel over all domains of knowledge. Just as with rhetoric, however, intellectual status was tied to the reassuring display of a socialised and decorous persona, the peripatetic image of the office. The philosopher’s moral economy of intellectual virtue had to be symbolically made manifest in an exemplary way of life.62 These generalisations apply particularly to Hobbes, despite the fact that he was at odds with the dedicated inductivism of Baconian method, and rather than an eclectic was a system-builder given to a faith in a priori 61

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Robert Boyle, The Skeptical Chymist (1661); Michael Hunter, Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 68–71. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 50–1, 44–56; Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Earlymodern Germany, (Cambridge: University Press, 2001), are all studies recapturing this point.

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principles. It is true also that his claims to singularity, his dismissive and cavalier treatment of others, isolated him and he was further marginalised by his enemies. Nevertheless, by employing the shared vocabulary of intellectual office, and assuming a self-image appropriate to it, he blurred what were often polemically exaggerated differences with those around him. After all, his vehement hostility to citation of authority, his belief that everything should be taken back to first reckonings, his hostility to the purblind controversialism of philosophical discipleship (Greek dogmatism had wrecked Christianity), to the schools and ‘Aristotlty’, were themselves but Baconian dicta writ loud. Indeed, as has recently been recognised, it is his not being elected to the Royal Society that needs explaining.63 Hobbes was a most procedurally minded defender of a discipline of philosophy, which is to say that he also had a clear awareness of intellectual modality; what was forbidden the philosopher was permissible to others. So too there was a style of life fit to the procedural calling. In his self-defence, he claimed that he lived a life appropriate to his intellectual endeavours. ‘My Life and Writings speak one Congruous Sense’, a rough translation of ‘Nam mea vita meis non est incongrua scriptis.’64 In his famous aphorism that he and fear were born twins, a central explanatory concept of Hobbesian philosophy is given a poetically autobiographical origin.65 Hobbes’s critics saw this unity in a different light. He was accused of arrogance, perversity and libertine atheism, and in this way his philosophy was attacked through the persona; and Hobbes did seem to lack the modest and undogmatic disposition so often taken to be the decorous sign of philosophy. I believe that Aubrey’s elaborate ‘Life’ took a cue from the asserted unity of life and doctrine; it was itself ‘the last Office’ to his dear friend.66 Fittingly, the ‘Life’ was a defence of philosophy through exemplification of virtuous conduct, a rebuttal of the indiscriminate accusations levelled at Hobbes. As the philosopher of motion, Hobbes had a mind, remarked Aubrey, that was never still, but the movement was neither random nor wanton. It was part of the perpetual quest to understand the causes of 63

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Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 317–35. Thomas Hobbes, The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury (1680), 18; cf. Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis Vita (1679), 14. Hobbes, Vita, 2. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), quoted Introduction, 83.

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things. Aubrey notes Hobbes’s melancholic temperament, for melancholia was the ague of the philosophic mind, a point most thoroughly explored in the labyrinthine analyses of Burton’s Anatomy. Melancholia was a preoccupation with contemplation, doubt and perplexity which few self-respecting philosophers wished to deny, or probably escape.67 The personal qualities Aubrey attributed to his friend – his curiosity, openness, generosity and charity, his energy, enjoyment of good company, discipline, consideration and abstemiousness – were all qualities echoing those attributed to Socrates. They were all singularly appropriate to the Epicurean persona Aubrey defends. He noted in his ‘Life’ that Hobbes would not wear a beard, wanting his reputation to depend upon his wit not the selfadvertising symbol of the sage.68 This probably referred to the beardwearers derided by Lucian and alluded to by More. And Hobbes certainly made an appropriate Lucianic commitment explicit in De corpore, although, as Butler maintained, whether with Hobbes in mind or not, nowadays philosophers have to shave to maintain their reputations.69 The symbolic manifestations of paraded office could always be decoded in opposing ways, like the Quaker’s plain dress, an expression of humility, could be seen as a proof of hypocrisy. Irrespective of this, the juncture of proposition and persona helps explain the ease with which philosophers like Hobbes shifted into satire and ad hominem argument and could be attacked in the same fashion. Discrediting a persona was hardly the irrelevance or exercise in indecorum it might now seem when doctrine was fused with persona and occupation of the office was at issue. More surprisingly, perhaps, Hobbes was capable of running poetry and philosophy together in a way that Sidney had made thoroughly familiar.70 In praising Davenant’s Gondibert, he discussed the poet’s office, partly by elaborating on a counterpoint between the responsibilities of the ancient and the Christian poet, and partly by stressing the dangers in the abuse of the powers of eloquence and figurative creativity. At first he distinguished the requirements of poetry and philosophy. He discussed fancy, imagin67

68 69

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Independently of Burton see, for example, Sir Thomas Overbury, His Wife with additions of New Characters (1622) (unpaginated), on the melancholy man as all contemplation and no action; John Sharp, ‘About Religious Melancholy’, in Works (1754), vol. III, 21–38. Writers like Walter Charleton would announce their serious philosophical credentials by remarking on the tyranny of the melancholic spirit. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 233. Thomas Hobbes, De corpore (1655), in Opera . . . latine, and English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth (1839–45), vol. I, ix; Butler, ‘A Philosopher’, in Characters, 95. For an astute intellectual association between Sidney and Hobbes, see Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’s Leviathan, (New York: Garland, 1991), ch. 3.

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ation and wit as fitting for the Christian poet, but went on to suggest that where philosophy has failed in its own responsibilities, poetic fancy must take its place.71 The reference to office here is so reified that it overrides the procedures that Hobbes normally took to exclude poetry’s quite proper reliance on metaphor. At the same time that Hobbes was writing Leviathan, and still pondering the strict regulae of the philosopher’s office that would appear in De corpore, he was extolling the almost primeval mystery of the poet’s calling, a voice in unison with Collingbourne, Sidney, Puttenham and Jonson, conjured and transformed from antiquity. IV

By the end of the seventeenth century, the philosopher and the natural philosopher were partially distinct. Daniel superficially sounds like a prophet: ‘of one science’ another was indeed ‘born’.72 There was no single or simple reason for this. Charles Schmitt, for example, has suggested in deflationary vein that it had much to do with the logistics of textbook production.73 But Bacon’s re-orientation of the office of the philosopher, and the momentous work in natural philosophy by figures such as Hooke, Boyle and Newton, are also crucial. Their work, together with the orchestrated energies and controlled image of the Royal Society (and others of similar style and function established in France and Tuscany) could, retrospectively, be seen as vindications of Baconian procedure. Irrespective of achievements, Bacon’s image of natural philosophy as an inductive communal endeavour seemed to be transformed into praxis through the development of networks of scholars communicating problems, experiments and discoveries in a way that distinguished them from the more isolated and text-based work of deductive metaphysics, theology and logic. The Royal Society presented a public image that was almost a ritualised application of Baconian expectations at odds with the evidence of actual discovery, debate and proof.74 Of all people, Bacon could be taken as providing an authoritative text on the scope and value of philosophy; add to this Hobbesian excoriations of Schoolmen and his related specifications of the necessary linguistic and political conditions 71 72 73

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Thomas Hobbes, Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert (1651), in English Works, vol. IV. Daniel, Defence, 63. Charles B. Schmitt, ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 792–804. I am indebted to Dr John Schuster for this point.

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for any Baconian communal activity, and we find by the end of the century a partial change of focus from the relationships between the offices of poet, rhetor and philosopher, to those between philosopher, natural philosopher and mathematician. Part of Richard Cumberland’s critique of Hobbes was that he had wrongly relied upon deductive mathematics to delineate philosophy, when the empirically attuned mathematics of probability was more relevant to understanding the world.75 Stephen Shapin has gone so far as to suggest an intimate relationship between the emerging image of natural science and the development of modern ‘selfhood’. Because the new science was a communal, public enterprise among gentlemen, it required modesty and respect for the arguments and experiments of fellows, the openness to attend to all relevant evidence, and for hypotheses to be tested in a public forum, sustained by the technologies of print.76 He is right to stress the relationship between proposition and persona, and that the shift away from this constitutes a change of ethical perspective.77 It is clear, however, that the construction or presentation of a persona was hardly a singular or novel achievement. In taking over the philosophical dialogue, for example, scientists like Boyle worked with canons of civility that had been characteristic of its functioning from antiquity to the Renaissance. In The Republic, even Thrasymachus is tamed. The significance of a figure like John Wilkins, and the collaboration between Locke and the gardeners at Oxford, would seem to suggest that natural philosophy was probably not exclusively the province of gentlemen, or if it was, we need to keep in mind how unusually open was the category of gentleman in seventeenthcentury England.78 Neither was a gentlemanly preoccupation with civil conversation in any way new when Boyle emphasised its importance. It had been an aspect of aristocratic and courtly offices for sufficiently long for the dueling provoked by its breakdown to be seen as native.79 Boyle further adapted the aristocratic virtue of liberality to the ends of enquiry – it was an undogmatic generosity towards the work of others in the philosophical community. His chastity, like that of Hobbes, was a virtue 75 76

77 78

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Richard Cumberland, De legibus naturae (1672). Stephen Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ibid., e.g. 409–10. For Locke’s botanical interests and assistance to the Oxford gardeners, I have relied on Peter Anstey’s exceptional paper, ‘Locke and Botany’, given at the John Locke Symposium, Brisbane, July 2004. Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early-Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 178–9.

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appropriate to the true Epicurean’s love of knowledge and finding true pleasure in the wisdom it gave. There was also an insistently Christian dimension to this. The Pauline injunction (2 Timothy 2:24, 25), was a familiar text concerning heresy. Those in error should, as Hobbes had reminded his critics in an attack on sectarian dogmatism, be treated with gentleness, patience and meekness.80 Here are dicta of the utmost civility, that are anything but the preserve of the new men of science, issuing from the mouth of one of the old, one too easily accused of incivility. In all, it is misleading to construe the continuing vitality of a register as a new ideology and to see a persona like Boyle’s as fashioning a modern self.81 It seems to me altogether more helpful to posit different inflections and contextual applications of a shared and robust vocabulary, necessarily used and adapted by any who wanted to claim the legitimacy of intellectual office. In this context, the establishment and organisation of the Royal Society under the aegis of the sovereign can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate natural philosophy to the established expectations of social office. It is not just that it provided, as it were, the institutional persona of Baconian theory, but also that it required formalised oaths of initiation to membership, and had a governing body and presidency. Above all, in the seventeenth century, as I have indicated, the licit oath initiated into established office and announced a new persona whose qualities were expected to be appropriate to it. There was nothing quite like this solidifying solemnity for poet, rhetor, philosopher or critic. By the end of the seventeenth century, natural science and philosophy might well be diverging activities geared to differing subject matters, but no more than with poetry or rhetoric at the end of the sixteenth century was one persona entirely denied the sanctioning, even sanctifying, clothing of the other. Robert Boyle lived the scientific persona with conspicuous success, to be sure, and his critiques of Hobbes were an effective way of presenting the openness of eclecticism, labouring in the interests of wisdom as an alternative to the a prioristic over-reaching, the intellectual tyranny of speculative dogmatism. Hobbes, the unkindest cut of all, was too much the scholastic. Nevertheless, the contrast between Hobbes and Boyle on the general character of philosophy would not seem as clear as it has if it were not also informed by the knowledge that Hobbes was wrong and Boyle right about the vacuum. 80

81

Thomas Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresy and the Punishment thereof (c. 1668), in English Works, vol. IV, 407–8. See Shapin, A Social History, 160–8.

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Locke went further in calling philosophy a matter of under-labouring for natural philosophy in the commonwealth of letters.82 With these metaphors we have in some ways come a long way from the world of Pico and Sidney. There is something new and important to philosophise about, but Locke’s image of philosophy still draws on the promotional rhetorics of office. The philosopher’s modesty is the humility of knowing an office and its limits, a point spelled out in Richard Yeo’s chapter. Locke casts his argument in the language of duty and responsibility, of ends and functions and what has impeded their fulfilment. The answer is, in general terms, cut and stitched with much the same materials of intellectual office and its abuse as Bacon and Hobbes had used: the over-reaching obfuscation of past philosophy and the delusions of rhetoric which are attacked tout court by ad hominem accounts of motivation, so stigmatising the persona of the rhetorician as the enemy of the under-labouring philosopher. As Locke’s modest toil amounted to an argument about what and how anything in the world can be studied and knowledge communicated, his vision of philosophy can be encompassed by Bacon’s analogy of the stomach. And for Locke also, this was not just a matter of dry doctrine or pure contemplation but of knowing enough to live as we should.83 In this way his revised image of philosophical responsibility is at one with Shaftsbury’s reassuringly Augustan echo of Platonic eudaimonia: the purpose of philosophy is to make us happy, the contemplative still served the active life, on the basis of which God would judge the soul. Philosophy can never be reduced to a matter of proposition and discipline; it is tied to and is an expression of character.84 The coalescence of doctrine and persona comprising philosophical office took time to dissolve. How relevant this is to understanding even the most academic (and so superficially familiar) philosophy of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Germany can be seen by Ian Hunter’s dramatic recapturing of the sense of office that divided the civil philosophies of writers like Pufendorf and Thomasius from Kantian metaphysics. Kant can be construed as achieving a dialectical resolution of his predecessors’ failures to reach his position only by reducing competing understandings of a way of life manifested in doctrines to a set of metaphysical propositions; we begin by seeing 82 83 84

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Epistle. John Locke, ‘Thus I think’, in Peter King, The Life of John Locke (1830), vol. II, 126–7. Anthony Cooper, Lord Shaftsbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711), vol. II, 207.

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things on his terms and, unsurprisingly, he provides a resolution.85 It is a microcosm of the whole problem of writing a history of philosophy. Office, then, provided a currency of promotion, defence and critique for intellectual activity, a vocabulary of ends, limits, essential liberties and attributes to be co-opted to the extent that it kept fluid, or could blur substantively, different intellectual endeavours. Fuller disciplinary delineation perhaps required a diminution of the status of the language of office; or perhaps an increasing differentiation in the minutiae of practice accompanied by institutional expression gradually over-stretched the common resources of advocacy and demonisation. Either way, we now live in a world in which the promotional rhetoric of office has a more uncertain place and a lower threshold of plausibility when, to borrow Pufendorf’s expression, it is applied to the entia moralia of the mind.

85

Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, at length, esp. 364–76.

CHAPTER

4

From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: the laughing philosopher in the early modern period 497314

Catherine Curtis

The serio-comic persona of the philosopher in the early modern period was adopted by many humanist authors with enormous enthusiasm. In the ancient satiric traditions of Old Comedy, Horatian and Juvenalian satire, and Menippean and Lucianic satire, Italian and northern European humanists found a wealth of argumentative strategies that could be deployed against rival schools of philosophy and theology. Such strategies also served to criticise abuses of power perpetrated by princes and popes, magistrates, councillors, scholastic theologians and lawyers. The satiric forms, adapted to contemporary circumstances, had as their fundamental purpose the censure of the guilty and the unmasking of truth. If the aim was serious, the ludus guaranteed the effect. But the use of such serio-comic forms of writing could be as dangerous to the humanist philosopher as to the ancient satirist, despite the distancing techniques of the mask. Juan Luis Vives, glossing Augustine’s De civitate Dei on classical Greek and Roman satire, explained both the value and the dangers posed by unfettered freedom of speech to the polis or respublica, and to the satirist himself.1 Vives was friend to the Dutch Erasmus, and the English courtiers Sir Thomas More and Richard Pace, all associated with the English court of Henry VIII and all aware of the necessity for liberty of speech in promoting a healthy and united Christian commonwealth and of the constraints placed upon that liberty in the papal and secular monarchies of their time. A century later the Anglican cleric and librarian of Christ Church College, Oxford, Robert Burton sat in the Oxford libraries reading and annotating the writings of Vives, Erasmus, More and Pace. In The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton adopted the same Democritean persona or mask and for much the same reasons – so that he 1

Saint Augustine, of the Citie of God: with the learned comments of I.L. Vives (London: G. Eld and M. Flesher, 1620), trans. I H[ealey]., second edn. corrected by W. Crashawe et al. Vives dedicated it to Henry VIII.

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might also ‘represent the city to the city’ without meeting the fate of others executed for allegedly treasonous words by English monarchs.2 It was Pace who first called Thomas More the son of Democritus and the kin of Demonax, while Erasmus followed Pace’s characterisation of More shortly after.3 Erasmus adopted the mask of Folly in his Moriae encomium (The Praise of Folly) which shares in the heritage of Democritus. The Cynic philosopher Diogenes is evoked by Pace and Erasmus, while Lucian’s Menippus informs the satire of More and Erasmus. These are not the only personae – all three humanists assume multiple satiric personae, themselves part of classical, particularly Greek, lineages that present a composite, complex and flexible image to the world in their writings. What were they attempting to communicate about the life and office of the philosopher more generally, as exemplified by More, and the practice of the related scientiae, philosophy, rhetoric and theology? Why create this particular Democritean genealogy and fashion it as a persona assumed not just by an individual philosopher, but a group of philosophers?4 How does a conception of office, civil and/or clerical, fare when it faces parrhesia modelled on classical forms of advice-giving and admonition? What reception did Pace, More and Erasmus receive? And more generally, does satire have a distinctive, but frequently unrecognised, place in the activity of early modern philosophy? And does the use of multiple and mutable satiric personae shared by a group problematise the notion of a stable philosophical persona as presented by other contributors to this volume? The following discussion seeks to consider these questions in its study of the satiric fortunes of Richard Pace, Thomas More, Erasmus and, more briefly, Robert Burton. My argument is that philosophy as an activity involved engagement with one’s critics and those peddling false opinion, in addition to the propagation of insight. It crossed national borders, was situated in diverse settings and was expressed through many genres. 2

3

4

On Burton, see Introduction, The Anatomy of Melancholy ed. T. C. Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling and R. L. Blair with intro. by J. B. Bamborough (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon press, 1989–2000), vol. II; Angus Dowling, ‘Rhetorical Structure and Function in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Rhetorica 19 (2001), 1–48. See chapter 3 by Conal Condren on the poet Collingbourne’s execution. Erasmus’s famous letter to Ulrich von Hutten composed in 1519, with, I believe, some assistance from Pace, who apparently stayed with Erasmus in Antwerp in May 1519 on his way to Mainz. Collected Works of Erasmus (86 vols. planned, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974– ) (hereafter CWE), vol. VII, Eps. 986, 988, 999. Edward Surtz has compared the similarity of the portraits of More by Pace and Erasmus in ‘Richard Pace’s Sketch of Thomas More’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958), 36–50. Cf. Stephen Gaukroger on the early to mid-seventeenth-century philosopher.

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Philosophical activity was conceived as an indispensable therapy to cure the distemper in Christian respublica and so reduce civil disharmony. The satiric philosopher needed to justify his methods, however, and had to be mindful of potential accusations of defamation and sedition. The career of Thomas More is familiar – he occupied many roles and offices as magistrate, councillor to Henry VIII, poet, orator, philosopher, Lord Chancellor and Catholic controversialist.5 Erasmus dedicated himself to the contemplative life as a theologian, educator through textbooks such as De copia and the Adagia, and more detached commentator on European religious and political affairs. He sought patronage, often unsuccessfully, but was never directly attached to a court. He did put forward counsel in his Institutio principis Christiani which was dedicated to Charles V, and in adages such as the anti-war Dulce bellum inexpertus. As a cleric he retained a certain independence from curial duties. Like More, the less well-known Richard Pace occupied multiple offices, many concurrently, and struggled to resolve the tension inherent in the opposition of the active life and the contemplative life.6 Pace studied in the universities of Padua, Bologna and Ferrara under the supervision of famous humanist scholars and translators in the fields of Latin, Greek, rhetoric, medicine, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and the natural sciences – such as Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo of Padua,7 Paolo Bombace of Bologna8 and Leoniceno of Ferrara.9 Pace’s long-enduring friendship with Erasmus dates from these years. Pace was successively secretary to 5

6

7

8

9

John Guy structures his recent excellent biography as a series of questions around More’s various private and public roles and offices. See Thomas More, (London: Arnold, 2000). Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996), ch.. 1. Jervis Wegg, Richard Pace: A Tudor Diplomatist, (New York: Barnes and Noble; London: Methuen, 1932), 9. For Leonico, see Daniela De Bellis, ‘La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo’, Quaderni per la storia dell’Universita` di Padova 18 (1980), 36–75; and ‘I veicoli dell’anima nell’analisi di Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo’, Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia Universita` di Firenze, 3 (1981), 1–21. See also D. J. Geanakoplos, ‘The Career of the Little-Known Renaissance Scholar Nicholas Leonicus Tomaeus’, Byzantina 13 (1985), 355–72; and Contemporaries of Erasmus – A Biographical Register, ed. P. Bietenholz et al. (3 vols., Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985–7), vol. II, 323–4. Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1998), for Leonico’s relationship with English humanists at the University of Padua. Pace, Latimer and Tunstall were the second generation of Englishmen connected to the anglophile Leonico (the first comprising Linacre and Grocyn). On Bombace, see Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. I, 163; Pierre de Nolhac, La bibliothe`que de Fulvio Orsini (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1887), 247, 395; D. J. Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 258–9; and Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, ed. A. M. Ghisalberti (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ). For Leoniceno, see Daniela Mugnai Carrara, ‘Profilo di Niccolo` Leoniceno’, Interpres 2 (1979) 169– 212; and William F. Edwards, ‘Niccolo` Leoniceno and the Origins of Humanist Discussion of

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Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge in Rome, First Secretary to Henry VIII, and Dean of St Paul’s. European contemporaries, notably the Venetians, thought Pace to be one of England’s most valued diplomats and gifted scholars and linguists, and, should Cardinal Wolsey become pope, a possible successor to him as chief counsellor to Henry VIII. A mediating figure between Italian and English humanism, Pace’s humanist and scriptural studies were circumscribed by his full and difficult diplomatic service, and his mental health was further compromised by Wolsey’s enmity. His mentors Erasmus and Leonico both lamented that the active life robbed him of his health and time to devote to writing. Pace, More and Erasmus were mutually supportive in a number of areas – Erasmian scriptural exegesis, the advocacy of Greek studies and the liberal arts and sciences (especially in England), the promotion of ecclesiastical reform, and the ideal of peace in Christendom. They subscribed to the philosophia Christi, and to the vital place of the arts of eloquence within it. They saw the need to educate others in the skills required to discriminate between true and false teachings; and they each contributed to Erasmus’s dispute with the theologian Martin Dorp to this end. I wish to consider each in turn in these contexts and discover what they conceived the role of philosophical satire to be. RICHARD PACE’S

‘DE

FRUCTU’

Pace reflected the interests of his teacher Leonico Tomeo in Plutarch and Lucian as excellent means through which to teach Greek, ethics and rhetoric in his own published collections of translations.10 Thomas Linacre, who studied with Pace, cast Lucian as the purveyor of Greek without tears.11 The hybrid satirical forms and essays of the urbane and witty writer of the Second Sophistic could also be accommodated to comment on contemporary theological and philosophical conflicts, as

10

11

Method’, in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. E. P. Mahoney (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 283–305. The first published 1514 or 1515 is dedicated to Cardinal Bainbridge and addressed to students, and is only the third book by an Englishman ever to be printed at Rome (by Jacopo Mazzochi); it consists of Plutarch’s Quomodo poterit quis ab inimicis aliquid commodi reportare and De modo audiendi, Lucian’s Demonax and Apollonius of Tyrana’s Epistola consolatio. The translations were reprinted in editions of 1522 in Venice, with additional translations of Plutarch’s De avaritia and De garrulitate. De Bellis, ‘La vita’, 53. Letter to John Claymond in Erasmus: Lectures and wayfaring sketches, ed. and trans. P. S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 153. Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 26; Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), 81ff.

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Erasmus and More were to explain in regard to their own desire to translate Lucian’s comic dialogues.12 One of Pace’s published translations from Greek to Latin was of Lucian’s Demonax. In Lucian’s treatise, Demonax the philosopher is presented as free of pomposity, and continually laughing and jesting, while he challenges established authorities (religious sages, sophists, prophets, magicians and philosophers) and exposes the foolishness of the alazoneia. Gentler than misanthropic Cynic preaching, much of the satiric humour is based on self-deprecating irony as revealed in puns and other wordplay.13 Leonico Tomeo also drew on the psychological and atomistic theories of Democritus in, for example, his discussions of the senses and the causes of premonitions in the Parva naturalia. This famous Aristotelian translation and commentary is dedicated to Pace, who presented it to the Venetian senate for publication in 1523.14 From classical sources Democritus, the Lawmaker and Recorder of Abdera (?460–357 BC), was known to the Renaissance as the ‘laughing philosopher’. The most extensive development of the story of Democritus is found in the spurious Letters of Hippocrates, an epistolary novel in which the physician goes to Abdera to cure the laughing philosopher, whom he declares more sane than other men.15 His treatise On Cheerfulness defined the moral ideal and psychology of moderation. In the constant combat between reason and passion, moderation is the only rational course since desires are permanent and recurrent, and the corresponding pleasures fleeting. Democritus was characteristically praised for his keen powers of observation, excellent wit, and learning in philosophy, theology, astronomy, ethics, physics and mathematics. Horace and Juvenal imagined him alive again, witnessing and laughing at contemporary follies. Lucian represented Zeus as putting Democritus and the pendant figure of the weeping Heraclitus

12

13

14

15

CWE, Ep. vol. II 193, 115–16; The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (14 vols., New Haven, Conn., and London: 1963– ) (hereafter CWM), vol. III, Part 1, Translations of Lucian, ed. C. R. Thompson, Letter to Ruthall, 2–8, 3–9 and xv–lv. R. Bracht Branham, ‘Utopian Laughter: Lucian and Thomas More’, Moreana Miscellanea 22 (1985), 23–43. On Demonax as a Lucianic type, see R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 59. Leonico Tomeo, Aristotelis stagiritae parva quae vocant naturalia (Paris: Simon Colinaeum, 1530), Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark Rel.a.533. Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1967), 104, 105. Charles H. Kahn, ‘Democritus and the Origins of Moral Psychology’, American Journal of Philology 106 (1985) 1–31; Z. Stewart, ‘Democritus and the Cynics’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958), 179–91.

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up for sale as examples of the philosophic creeds of smiles and tears, emphasising the Stoic affinities of the latter. Pace applied this anecdotal framework of Democritus/Demonax to More in his De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, published within months of the third edition of Utopia in early 1518 and sharing the same editors and printer, John Froben. More is cast by Pace as the philosopher of the serio-comic type descended from Socrates, who deflates the pretensions of critics and auditors with his sharp and self-deprecating wit. In order to appreciate the richness and meaning of More’s Democritean characterisation, it is first necessary to understand more of Pace’s satire. De fructu was composed as a Stoic consolation during a most difficult diplomatic mission trying to raise mercenaries amongst the Swiss, and dedicated to John Colet and his students at the newly established St Paul’s School, as well as to pedagogues and students more generally. I have argued elsewhere that this Menippean satire modelled on Martianus Capella and Fulgentius was part of the Erasmian campaign to encourage the study of Greek and the liberal arts and sciences in northern Europe, and in particular England. Its presentation of the unity and hierarchy of the arts and sciences is Italian in conception. Theology is the highest scientia, and connected with sacred law. Philosophy follows, being the contemplation of the human and divine and encompasses both ethics and metaphysics.16 The companions of philosophy are the branches of mathematics, while dialectic is the third part of philosophy. The three philosophies employ the training of the quadrivium and the trivium. The De fructu concentrates on the imperfect language arts of rhetoric, grammar and dialectic which are more elementary, but foundational, to the higher sciences. The seven liberal arts and sciences are personified, and their serio-comic declamations dramatise current philosophical and theological debates. Pace developed what in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive argument for the unity of theology, philosophy and rhetoric, and their connection to virtue. De fructu responds to the Chaucerian paradox that ‘the more learned you are, the less wise you become’, with the desire to prove that learning is superior to all other human goods.17 According to Cato, says Pace, the root of all virtue is bitter, but the fruit is sweet, and Isocrates had applied this notion to learning itself, so that all virtues

16 17

Pace, De fructu, 36, 37. Ibid., 14, 15. The proverb originates in Aesop’s Tale of the Wolf and the Mare; Aesop was a favoured pedagogical text at the time and More was to draw upon it often in The Dialogue of Comfort.

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originate in learning.18 Gaining an education may not always be without difficulties, but as a boy matures he comes to appreciate that compensation comes in the form of increase in virtue and inner happiness.19 Pace sets out to survey the various sciences useful and pertinent to the organisation of human life. Men cannot attain the three things on which all action is based – justice, honesty and utility – without learning. ‘I speak of the utility which the Stoics regard as part of honour and which Christians cannot easily distinguish from it, unless they want to praise the utility of fraud, deceit, greed, and innumerable evil arts.’20 In the course of the De fructu, as in these opening remarks, Pace repeatedly connects the fruits of learning to the qualities of the beautiful (pulcher), the right (rectum), the laudable (laudabile), the honourable (honestum) and the expedient (utile).21 While admitting that it is difficult to refute the case that prudentia without learning is preferable to learning without prudentia (Quintilian’s position on the question), Pace argues that although the man characterised by the former is capable of managing his business and domestic affairs well, it is only when the two are joined that he is able to consider the higher matters of nature and God, in whose image he is made.22 But a ‘prudent’ world judges as foolish both learning for use in the temporal sphere and, particularly, theology – the highest of the sciences. Ridicule is reserved for those whose learning and preaching originate in Christ, spurning the Epicurean vita voluptuosa and directing all their energies to

18

19 20

21

22

Ibid., 14, 15. This sententia of Isocrates was set as an exercise in the chreia or anecdote in the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius, and Pace here provides a model chreia. R. F. Hock, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, vol. I:s The Progymnasmata (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), Chreia 43, 227–8: ‘Isocrates said that education’s root / is bitter, its fruit sweet’. As George Kennedy explains, students were assigned a chreia to work out under the headings of ‘praise of the chreia; paraphrase; statement of the cause; example of the meaning; contrast and comparison; testimony of others; epilogue’. Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 61. Pace, De fructu, 122, 123. Ibid., 26, 27: ‘De illa autem utilitate loquor, quam ab honestate Stoici non separant, nec Christiani commode separare possunt, nisi uolunt illam laudare utilitatem, quam fraus, dolus, auaritia, & aliae innumerabiles mala artes comparant’. Recognising the complexity of the issue, Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes inquires whether honestum, which includes what is right, beautiful and decorous, can be separated from utile. Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (10 vols., Amsterdam: North Holland, 1969– ) ord. 5, vol. IV, 312–16. Manfred Hoffman, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutic of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 205–8. Pace, De fructu, 27, 26: ‘Igitur si omnem humanam uitam accurate & penitus introspicias, nihil laudabiliter, nihil bene, nihil recte fieri absque doctrina, liquido patebit’. cf. 30–2, 33–5. Ibid., 16, 17. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (4 vols. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1920–2), VI.v.11.

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attaining eternity.23 As the much cited hornblower of the De fructu counters to Pace, overhearing guests at a banquet praising the benefits of education, the learned are all beggars, and the most illustrious of them, Erasmus, is married to Lady Poverty, as Erasmus himself writes in one of his letters.24 Pace’s own situation has its paradoxes and tensions. He may be free by nature but he is not by choice, as his own education has rendered him of great service to Henry VIII as the servant of Cardinal Wolsey. But to serve one’s country exceeds all liberty.25 Learning is his great consolation in adversity.26 Refuting an imaginary opponent in utramque partem in his prefatory letter to Colet’s students, Pace declares that he would nevertheless prefer to be the pagan Cynic Diogenes who sowed good rules and clear examples than a false Christian who engenders hatred, deception, enmity, discord and war.27 With his customary freedom of speech, Diogenes had condemned what he saw was reprehensible and lauded and held up for imitation what was done well, and the students are informed that the kyrias doksas of the Cynics or select sententiae originated in this practice.28 In contrast the imaginary adversary is said to perpetually flatter, assent and adulate, praising to the heavens that which should excite the most vituperation.29 This false and self-interested Christian perverts the sacred 23

24

25

26 27

28

29

Card and dice playing, the reading of pernicious romances, drinking and hunting are frivolous and damaging pastimes. Cf. Erasmus on the perils of reading medieval chivalric romances. James D. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978), 59–66. Pace, De fructu, 22, 23. Cf. CWE, vol. III, Ep. 421. Pace here draws attention to Erasmus’s programme of letter publication. See Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993) for Erasmus’s promotion of an idealised image of the scholar-theologian. Pace, De fructu, 12: ‘Liber sum, natura quidam, sed non voluntate . . .patriae etiam seruire omnem superat libertatem’. De copia recommended the invention of the student’s own sententiae to suit the matter at hand, as well as the appropriation of those of authors. CWE, vol. XXIV, 626–7. Pace, De fructu, 124, 125. Ibid., 16, 17. In the Sileni Alcibiades, Erasmus saw Diogenes as a philosopher worthy to be placed besides Epictetus, the first-century Stoic sage so honoured by the Christians for his resistance to Nero, and Socrates – not as rival philosophical schools but collectively as Sileni, prefiguring the hidden wisdom of Christ. M. A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980), 217. In a letter to the future Emperor Charles V in 1516, Erasmus describes Diogenes as having a lofty and unshakeable mind, superior to all mortal things, able to bear immense burdens. CWE, vol. III, Ep. 393, 249. Pace, De fructu, 16, 17. A Cynic collection would contain a number of brief characterisations of the ‘wise man’ and ‘the fool’. It has been suggested that the sayings attributed to Democritus were part of a common store of maxims preserved by the Cynics and probably adapted for more convenient use. Stewart, ‘Democritus and the Cynics’, 184–5. In Erasmus’s De recta pronunciatione the interlocutor ‘Lion’ states that ethics is taught by aphorisms, especially those which refer to the Christian religion and one’s duties towards society. CWE, vol. XXVI, 387. Pace, De fructu, 16, 17.

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religion of Christ and early Christianity, neglects sacred theology, and pursues wealth and sensual pleasures, is likened to those later Cynics who did not imitate the good example of Diogenes but corrupted the sect.30 It becomes clear that Pace refers more specifically to the clergy here. Even so, the false Christian cannot fail to be attracted to the wise teaching of the good and upright preacher who addresses the vulgus.31 Pace insists, therefore, that the opponent changes his proverb and judge that no one is wise unless learned. This discussion is an exemplary exercise in contentio demonstrativa, an exercise of praise or blame of one through contrast with another.32 Diogenes, then, is one model for Renaissance preachers and counsellors to imitate in his uncompromising and courageous Cynic laudes and vituperationes which taught virtue from vice.33 Pace turns also to the classical Greek and Roman orators to provide a comprehensive method of advising, preaching, teaching and exegesis – a substitute for the ars praedicandi, the highly systematic manuals for thematic sermons.34 Paraphrasing Isocrates and Cicero in her declamation, the personified figure of ‘Rhetoric’ describes eloquence as both the civilising force in human life, transforming beast into rational man, and the liberal scientia which is indispensable to all others because it communicates knowledge. As certain prudent men have written, Cicero amongst them, savage men left their rustic ways and became civilised through the agency of eloquence and a trained voice alone. ‘They came together in groups called civitates only when led by strong and forceful persuasion. They agreed upon just laws and obeyed them only when they were moved to it by strong and valid arguments.’35 Eloquence not only established cities and laws, but allowed for the invention of the arts, ‘for just as the ancients taught that wisdom [sapientia] is the most important part of happiness [felicitas], I think that 30

31 32 33

34

35

In his preface to his Latin translation of Plutarch’s De avaritia dedicated to Cardinal Campeggio, Pace again cited Diogenes who spoke against the vice of avarice, and whose attitude was confirmed by the apostles and St Jerome. Richard Pace, Plutarchi cheronaei opuscula (Venice: Bernardino dei Vitali, 1522), Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark Td.52.63, sig. E2v. Pace, De fructu, 16, 17. De copia, CWE, vol. XXIV, 624–5. On Menippus as a follower of Diogenes, see Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 42–4. Diogenes often appears as a character in Menippean satire: for example, Lucian’s Sale of Diogenes. Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhe´torique chez Erasme (2 vols., Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), vol. I, 1072ff. Pace, De fructu, 90, 91: ‘Nam ut prudentissimi uiri scribunt, non aliter quam eloquentia & erudita uoce effectum est, ut illi primi incredibiliter rudes & agrestes homines, illis rusticis exutis moribus, induerent ciuiliores. non aliter, ut in coetus quae ciuitates uocantur, coirent, quam quum uehementi ducerentur persuasione. non alter, ut aequas leges abmitterent, eisque parerent, quam quum

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learning is the most important part of wisdom’. Hence learning, like prudence and eloquence, is a necessary part of the wider sapientia. It is the way not only to all other knowledge, but to salvation.36 In De fructu, Pace applied the anecdotal framework based on the chreia in Lucian’s Demonax designating More as a second Demonax/Democritus in his confrontation with two scholastic theologians.37 Challenging the two Scotists, More utters the words of Demonax in response to their ridiculous questions and irreligious answers: ‘When one of you milks a billygoat, the other stands by and catches it in a sieve. When he saw that they didn’t understand what he said, he went away smiling to himself and laughing at them.’38 More/Demonax approves in part of all philosophical schools and appreciates that which is excellent in them, but favours that of Democritus who laughed at all human affairs. More imitated him and even surpassed him by one syllable. Just as Democritus thought everything that pertained to man was laughable (ridenda), More thought it was worthy of ridicule (deridenda).39 ‘That’s why Richard Pace as a joke calls his dear friend More the son or successor to Democritus.’ When occasion gives cause, however, More imitates good cooks and pours vinegar over everything. ‘And finally, More declared all-out war on those who don’t tell the truth, of things resembling the truth, but things foreign to their own nature.’40 Another inner dialogue in De fructu is constructed as a defence of Erasmus’s Novum instrumentum41 by the characters Pace and his mentor

36 37

38

39 40

41

magnis ualidisque rationibus mouerentur’. De inventione, I.ii.2–3; De oratore, I.xliii. De legibus, XXIII.61: Lex for Cicero derived from the reason of prudent men because they had trained their judgment sufficiently to distinguish right from wrong. Eloquence persuades men to accept what the prudential man discovers as law. Pace, De fructu, 28, 29. Pace compares the Scotists to those who attacked Colet for his statement in a sermon that an unjust peace was preferable to the most just of wars. Richard Fitzjames, Edmund Birkhead and Henry Standish are the satiric targets. Pace, De fructu, 106, 107. Cf. Lucian, Demonax (8 vols., London: Loeb Classical Library, 1913, repr. 1961) vol. I, trans. A. M. Harmon XXVIII. The game of interpretation that Pace plays with his readers in such passages and colloquies is comparable in intention to that offered in Utopia. In the festivus dialogus at Morton’s table, for example, readers are invited to decipher the earnest jests of the parasite, the court satirist, and so to distinguish the serious matter from the ridiculous and trivial. The development of such skills in interpretation are crucial in political life. Argument and counsel advanced through humour may be more effective in many circumstances. Pace, De fructu, 104, 105. The pun on nasus employed by Pace refers to More’s sarcasm, wit and derision and has an equivalent use in More’s prefatory letter to Peter Giles in Utopia, The Complete Works, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (14 vols., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963– ), vol. IV, 44, 45 (hereafter CWM ). Title of 1516 Froben edition of Erasmus’s New Testament. Pace’s defence issues from the same printer. Curtis, ‘Pace’, 100ff.

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Bombace against a certain Italian archbishop. The archbishop is the Lucianic theologus gloriosus, too cowardly to face Erasmus directly with his tabulation of so-called errors, but wishing to call Erasmus before a general council as a heretic.42 Pace’s conception of the relationship between God’s word, Christ’s eloquence, theology and preaching is remarkably similar to that of Erasmus, as expressed in the Paraphrases on the New Testament and other theological writings. Assuming a selfdeprecating profession of ignorance for derisive purpose against a Scotist, the disingenuous Ambassador Pace claims to be no theologian or philosopher, and not even learned in fact, admitting only that he knows nothing. Under the aspect of Socratic humility, both sincerely and ironically used, Pace presents himself not as a theologian in the sense of one interested in speculative, dogmatic and systematic theology, but rather as interested in philology and the establishing of an authentic text and paraphrase of the New Testament.43 Erasmus is defended as adhering closely to the gospel, ‘that is Christ Himself and the church fathers’, and even includes them in his Adagia.44 Ensnared by the cunning interlocutor, the enraged Scotist finally insists that ‘words don’t matter’, to which Pace replies that since the Bible is the Word of God, and God Himself the Word, ‘if you neglect these, you are the heretic and not Erasmus. For he deals in nothing but words.’45 Ironically addressed as o bone vir, the interlocutor Pace replies to the archbishop (whose verba he despises) that he had done some reading of Erasmus as well as in theology and can find no errors of the nature he

42

43

44 45

In a letter to Paolo Bombace in March 1518, Erasmus speaks of mischievous divines in Italy who condemn what they have not read, yet it is mostly for their benefit that he has laboured. CWE, vol. V, Ep. 800, 349. I have not discovered the identity of the archbishop. More had warned Erasmus in October 1516 that the English Franciscans had divided Erasmus’s work systematically between them to comb through it for errors. Erica Rummell, Erasmus and his Catholic Critics (2 vols., Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1989), vol. I, identifies Erasmus critics across Europe. Chomarat, Grammaire et rhe´torique, vol. I, 18–19, n. 27. In his letter to the theologian Martin Dorp, Erasmus had made the distinction between the real theologians and the moderni (a term Pace uses) who are so preoccupied with the science of theology and battles of words that they are ignorant of sound learning and have no time to read the evangelists, prophets and apostles. CWE, vol. LXXI, 17. Pace composed a reply to Dorp which Erasmus suppressed. Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu and Early Tudor Pedagogy’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 56. Pace, De fructu, 118, 119. Ibid., 120, 121. These are precisely the sentiments of Erasmus. See Manfred Hoffman, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutic of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994), ch. 1. For Erasmus the authorship of God and the real presence of Christ give sacred text the highest authority and rhetorical power. The Bible, when contaminated by errors, gives rise to misinterpretations and heresies.

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suggests. But as the archbishop is a professor of theology, Pace will piously follow his teaching if he can offer something better than Erasmus. ‘And (to use your own words) “incited by true zeal,” we’ll damn Erasmus too, as friends not of Plato, nor of Socrates, but of truth.’46 It transpires that the Italian Scotist has never heard of the Adagia of Erasmus: ‘Adagijs, inquit, quid est hoc?’ But he now plans to buy a copy so as to tabulate more Erasmian heresies. As Pace demonstrates in his satirical textbook, the use of adages and related forms (epigrams, maxims and apophthegms) enlivens teaching and by implication sermons as well.47 Erasmus held that adages could also be deployed as proofs in argument, having more persuasive value as ancient or common testimony than the syllogisms of the scholastics, so far removed from the vox populi.48 Pace of the colloquy justifies his contentio with one so ignorant to his friend Bombace by arguing that the weapon of laughter was the most appropriate means of engagement. Cicero had stated that the stultitia of the opponent or witness often justifies witty attacks.49 The humanist liberal and didactic jest disarms the bitter, often personal and intemperate attacks of the slanderer. In the De fructu, as in Erasmus’s Colloquies, the friars and scholastic theologians revert to infantile or animalistic speech, cursing, muttering, blathering incoherently and retreating in anger to the risus and derisus of the common people who witness their encounters with unidentified jurists and humanists such as More and Erasmus. The internal colloquies of De fructu (as in Erasmus’s Colloquies) are then not only exercises in a living Latin language for students to imitate, but also place theological and philosophical matters in the context of the variety of everyday life rather than in strictly institutional settings. Theologians must acquire a persuasive rhetoric which is carried to the pulpits,

46

47

48

49

Pace, De fructu, 116, 117. The frequent parenthetical asides in this passage, feigned ignorance of the ineptness of his interlocutor’s speech and the associated mock flattery are all characteristics of Renaissance socratic ironia – defined as Socrates’ ironic self–deprecation or his profession of ignorance – designed to expose sophists and charlatans to ridicule. The Scotist becomes the latter-day sophist. Such techniques also afforded the writer a cover for his/her real opinions. Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 28, 47, 110–25. Pace uses here, for example, the adages I.iii.53 and I.ii.20. Erasmus in turn uses an adage which Pace had taken from Lucian’s Demonax, 28. Erasmus employed the adage to express his suspicion of those who call themselves ‘theologians’. CWE, vol. VII, 49. See Erasmus’s dedication to the 1500 Collectanea, in CWE, vol. I, Ep. 127, 258. Cf. CWE, vol. LXXI, 68, 76 on the usefulness of rhetorical commonplaces compared to Scotist hair-splitting which does nothing to arouse the emotions of a wider audience beyond the schools. Peter, the first of all the apostles to proclaim Christ to the ordinary people, used no philosophical concepts in his speeches. Cicero, De oratore. ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackman, vol. I (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1942), II.229.

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taverns, and secular and ecclesiastical courts from Rome to northern Europe.50 But rather than imitating the persuasiveness and learnedness of Christ’s discourse, or even that of the human orators who had drawn people together into communities, the language of many present-day theologians, friars and grammarians is inarticulate, contentious and divisive. The fructus studiorum of scholasticism is impoverished of persuasive, copious and extempore speech. In the mouths of the scholastics, all learning is debased and they cling tenaciously to their errors and medieval grammars.51 Opposed to the dissension of the scholastics and religious orders and their inattention to teaching and preaching effectively to the people of the church is the exemplary friendship, amicitia, of the humanists who are themselves preachers and educators, committed to theology, the acquisition of the classical languages and scriptural exegesis, and eloquent counsellors to kings and popes. The example of Linacre, Latimer, Tunstall, Leonico, Bombace, Bude´, Ammonio and of the author himself is described in De fructu and is designed to inspire Colet’s students to emulation.52 Erasmus himself is cast by Pace as the new Christ-like theologian and vir bonus who surpasses the ancient and early church orators as a model of eloquence uniting Christian Europe. De fructu proved to be a highly contentious work. Erasmus suppressed the potential for any further editions and censured Pace for irresponsibility in his portrayal of Erasmus’s clashes with the theologians. Under the cover of the Socratic mask, Pace aimed oblique but recognisable criticism at the papacies of Julius II and Leo X, endorsed a conciliarist constitution for the church, attacked clerical abuses, and painted Wolsey as alter rex in an ambivalent encomium as a warning to Henry VIII. Wolsey would not forget, and Pace’s final collapse into bipolar illness was hastened by his trial in Star Chamber and imprisonment in the Tower before he was released after the cardinal’s fall from power. Surviving editions reveal close study, however, by students of theology, medicine, law, rhetoric and the natural sciences. Copies were owned by Thomas Cranmer, Beatus Rhenanus and Martin Bucer, and the satire was favourably received by the French humanist Guillaume Bude´.53 50

51 52 53

M. O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977), 73, 108. C. Curtis, ‘Pace’, ch. 5, concerning Pace’s exegesis as applied to Henry VIII’s divorce and his linguistic skill in ancient languages. See Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 149–52, for Pace’s study of the Septuagint, his Praefatio and his disagreement with Fisher over its status as directly inspired by God. Pace, De fructu, 92, 93. CWE, vol. XXVI, 489. See Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu’, 43–77, 63–4.

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THOMAS MORE AND ERASMUS: THE MENIPPEAN MASK

Before turning directly to More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s Moriae encomium it is necessary to outline something of the significance of Menippean and Lucianic philosophic satire and what the form conveyed to More and Erasmus about true and false philosophic personae. Pace, Erasmus and More imitated the literary habits of classical and medieval authors who did not press satire into discrete categories, but rather acknowledged their predecessors and indicated a number of features to be exhibited. When Erasmus and More jointly published their early efforts to translate Lucian in 1506 they provided important prefatory justifications for their choice of the Menippean persona.54 In his dedicatory epistle to Ruthall, More indicated that he had read many of the works of Lucian but chose three dialogues to translate: the Cynicus, the Necromantia (also known as Menippus) and Philopseudes, and the declamation on tyrannicide. The basis of More’s admiration is outlined, and we see that the bugbears of Menippean satire (which absorbed aspects of Old Comedy and Cynicism) are his own targets. Lucian censures with such honest, clever and entertaining wit that the prick is sharply felt but no resentment follows.55 Lucian’s Philopseudes uses Socratic irony to reprove the propensity to lie and to believe lies, teaching that no trust should be placed in magic and that superstition which masquerades everywhere under the guise of religion should be eschewed.56 The Necromantia rebukes the trickery of magicians, ridiculous fictions of poets and the fruitless contentions of philosophers, and Cynicus is endorsed as having the approval of St John Chrysostom – the Christian man should be delighted with this dialogue that criticises enervating luxury while commending the severe life of the Cynics and thus the Christian values of simplicity, temperance and frugality.57 This particular satiric form employs marginal figures, such as the Cynic philosophers Menippus and Diogenes, who exercise parrhesia in exposing the hypocrisy, self-delusion and fallacious argument of philosophers and religious figures. Both More and Erasmus showed a predilection for dialogues involving Menippus. More identified with him in his Epigrammata, while Erasmus wrote in Adagia I.viii.89 that this Cynic preacher

54

55

Craig R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, N.Y.: Vail-Ballon Press, 1940), chs. 2 and 3. Duncan, Ben Jonson, 26–76. 56 57 CWM, vol. III, part I, 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 4–5.

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pretended that he had returned from the lower world in order to have more freedom to criticise the way men live. Erasmus defended his translations of Lucian in similar terms to those of More, but with different emphases.58 The preface to the translation of Gallus of 1506, which appeared in the Luciani opuscula, justifies the value of the incomparable Lucian who delights as he teaches, and who exposes fraud and hypocrisy through oblique and subtle attack.59 Philosophers are a particular butt, including the Pythagoreans, the Platonists and the Stoics who affect the sage’s beard – for what is more intolerable than rascality which publicly masquerades as virtue? Lucian has been labelled a slanderer, but by those whose sore spots he had touched. Lucian’s power lies in his ability to bring before the eyes, ‘as if with a painter’s vivid brush’, the customs, emotions and pursuits of men. His dialogues cannot be bettered by any works of comedy or satire.60 Lucian’s satires were not without their bite: in Lucian’s Bis accusatus the character of Socratic Dialogue complains that Lucianic dialogue has stripped philosophical discourse of its former dignity and respectable tragic mask, replacing it with that of Menippus, Jest, Satire, Cynicism, Eupolis and Aristophanes, and placing it on the level of the common herd. In the preface to his translation of Lucian’s Convivium of 1517, Erasmus drew analogies between the time of Lucian and his own, insisting on the need to subject intellectual and theological schools to scrutiny. Others, however, have thought such satire ought to be suppressed, because it attacks philosophies of every kind with such a carnivalesque freedom. He considers it more proper to be indignant with present-day schools of philosophers and theologians who squabble childishly and fight a no less internecine war than Lucian depicted in his banquet.61

58

59 60 61

Ibid., vol II, Ep. 193, 116–17. The preface to De mercede conductis points to the drawbacks of life at court, while that of the Pseudomantis enthuses that the work is most useful for the detection and refutation of the impostures of those who cheat the populace into believing in miracles and feigned indulgences. The black wit of Momus, the archfrank, is combined with the fair wit of Mercury, the god of profit. CWE, vol. II, Ep. 199. Ibid., Ep. 193, 115. Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., vol. IV, Ep. 550, 282. More and Erasmus both underplay Lucian’s sceptical tendencies in their prefaces for apologetic reasons. Many of Lucian’s works, especially those which are Menippean, do in fact question whether there is any possibility of ideal standards, and Cynic irony is directed against those who take any philosophy, religion or intellectual school too seriously, and with sole devotion, in a world governed by Fortune. More, imprisoned in the Tower, was to be taunted by John Frith as another Lucian who regarded neither God nor man. The epithet ‘Lucianist’ indeed came to be a term of abuse in the history of controversy. CWM, vol. VIII, xxiv.

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Erasmus’s dedicatory letter to More prefacing the editio princeps of the Moriae encomium of 1511 claimed that the satire was composed on his return to England and that More’s surname was the first inspiration. More is cast as playing the part of Democritus in human life and Erasmus believed that he would appreciate such trifles.62 He suspects that some wrangling critics will loudly accuse him of imitating Old Comedy or some kind of Lucianic satire, and of attacking the whole world with his teeth which does not befit the pen of a theologian.63 But such festivitas is more effective than arid demonstration.64 Erasmus refers to the deliberate paradox of spoudogelion – just as there is nothing more frivolous than to handle serious topics in a trifling manner, so there is nothing more agreeable than to handle trifling matters in such a way that what you have done seems anything but trifling.65 This justification is also encountered in Pace’s prefatory letter to the De fructu. Apart from naming no names at all, Erasmus argues that he has exercised such restraint that the intelligent reader will discern that his aim was to amuse and not to criticise. He has never followed in the tradition of Juvenal who stirs up the hidden cesspool of iniquities; and he has been mindful to examine practices which are to be laughed at rather than detested. Men’s intellects have always retained the freedom to exercise the play of wit upon human life at large with impunity, provided that liberty is kept within reasonable bounds. Erasmus is therefore surprised at the lack of tolerance in present times for anything beyond honorific titles; some hold such perverse religious conceptions that they would sooner countenance abuse of Christ than the slightest jest at the expense of a pope or prince. But in censuring lives without denouncing a single person by name, the satirist offers advice and warning, rather than

62 63

64

65

Ibid., vol. II, Ep. 222, 161–3. Ibid., vol. II, Ep. 193, 116. The epistolary exchange between Erasmus and Bude´ in 1516 to 1517 reflects on the strategy of satiric indirection as a means of offering criticism, or counsel, to public figures, and the constraints of professional decorum. Erasmus informs Bude´ that he is fully aware of their differences in approach, marvelling at his truly French outspokenness, a kind of unbridled Gallic wit which might be thought very close to insolence, which does not spare the pope himself. But Bude´ has two advantages in his De asse and Annotationes on the Pandects: it is less dangerous to attack the dead; and few appreciate the force of the attack, as it is directed beyond the grasp of the common audience. Erasmus continues that the De asse is so dense, deliberately elliptical and metaphorical that it requires a well-informed reader with an open mind to interpret it. Erasmus considered that as a theologian he is allowed less liberty than Bude´, although he writes with great freedom at times and had suffered for it. CWE, vol.IV, Eps. 480, 531. Horace, Satires and Epistles: Persius: Satires, ed. and verse trans. Niall Rudd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Satire I.10. Humour is often more effective than sharpness in cutting knots. CWE, vol. II, Ep. 222, 163–4.

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indulging in sarcasm. Erasmus is his own self-critic on many of the charges made.66 And if all types of persons are included, all vices are therefore censured rather than any individual. If anyone does consider himself injured, this merely reveals his apprehensive or guilty conscience.67 St Jerome is cited as employing more licence than Erasmus, sometimes even mentioning names. But why say all this to More, asks Erasmus, a lawyer of such brilliance?68 THOMAS MORE’S

‘UTOPIA’

One of the most perplexing and imitated works of English philosophy, More’s Utopia owes much of its conception, generic form and satiric force to Lucian’s Menippean and non-Menippean dialogues and essays, such as Vera historia, Nigrinus and Necromantia. The conventions of Menippean satire (such as the fantastic journey to Hades or to mythological universes) provide a vehicle for a philosophical comedy which questions notions of the ideal standard and encourages the capacity to discriminate between the true and the false.69 More employs the form to raise insight into the humanist preoccupation with the best state of the commonwealth and the exercise of constructing imaginary republics, of the problem of counsel and vera nobilitas. In More’s Utopia, Hythloday is cast as a European latter-day Menippus, caped and bearded, returned from nowhere, and insisting on unhampered liberty of speech without any concession to time, place or person. The persona of More is the other exemplary type found in Menippean dialogue, pragmatic and bound to his offices of lawyer and counsellor, who advocates the indirect way (obliquo ductu) of advancing advice. Their exchanges are based on the confrontation of conflicting sets of political perspectives and achieve no resolution or reconciliation. The historical 66

67

68 69

Certainly in Juvenal, Horace, Lucian, Seneca and Capella, displays of fallibility are common in untrustworthy or self-defeating spokesmen who frequently lapse into the very faults they attack. This is a means of enhancing the didactic effect, as people are more willing to learn from a flawed man. James S. Tillman, ‘The Satirist Satirized: Burton’s Democritus Junior’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977), 89–96, at 89. Burton cites the Moriae as a precedent for The Anatomy of Melancholy and paraphrases Erasmus’s response to Dorp on this very question – if anyone is displeased, let him not attack the author but be angry with himself. vol. I, 111. CWE, vol. II, Ep. 222, 164. On Menippean satire, see S. Blanchard, Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (London: Bucknell University Press, 1995); Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); B. P. McCarthy, ‘Lucian and Menippus’, Yale Classical Studies 4 (1934), 3–55.

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More has, of course, chosen the indirection of satire in Utopia to proffer counsel to kings, princes, popes and the clergy – and its fictionality affords protection against potential charges of defamation. More ironically claims that he had only to rehearse what Hythloday declared extempore, merely gathering and arranging his material. The complex and unstable elision of author, author-persona and narrator allows his More the author not only scope in the rhetorical exercise of prosopopoeia, but legal defence against any attempt to charge him with treasonous slander and sedition. The characterisations of the interlocutors and their relative positions are fluid. At times the historical More seems to coincide with the author/persona and the character More. It has been suggested, however, that More and Hythloday are two sides of the author, arguing in utramque partem on some issues such as the treatment of thieves and the problem of counsel.70 Furthermore, the contributors to the parerga simultaneously and playfully create and undermine More’s persona as the ideal statesman, the vir bonus dicendi peritus, casting doubt on his motives: has More perpetrated a fraud on his incredulous audience in the fashion of the classical historians and poets whom Lucian attacked in his Vera historia? Did he steal the story from Hythloday, or has the author-persona been deceived by a lying Hythloday? This articulates the dilemma recognised by Socrates and Erasmus alike and which has always bedevilled defenders of the integrity of rhetoric: the best teller of the truth is also the best teller of lies. This, coupled with a pervasive ironia, engendered even at the syntactical level by the figure of litotes, confounds attempts to pin down the author’s opinions.71 As for Pace, the model of Lucianic stock types of philosophers and religious frauds and pedants ensures that More need name no names in a derogatory manner. The council scene at the French court, which exposes corruption and warmongering amongst monarchs and counsellors, is constructed as hypothetical, although the details are clearly taken from current French and papal policy. The politico-ecclesiastical Pisan Council is never mentioned as part of Louis XII’s strategy, but readers would have supplied the context of conciliarist argument; Hythloday is absent from Europe precisely during the period 1510–15. The abuses of royal prerogative by past English kings to fill the treasury casts a negative light on Henry VIII, but offers no direct comparison. The cena at Cardinal 70

71

D. M. Bevington, ‘The Dialogue in Utopia: Two Sides to the Question’, Studies in the Renaissance 58 (1961), 496–509. Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘Denying the Contrary: More’s Use of Litotes in Utopia’, Moreana 31–2 (1971), 107–21.

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Morton’s table lambasts a stereotypical friar and lawyer (kin to Pace’s characters in the De fructu) and is cast at a safe distance in a previous reign. In Utopia, as in Erasmus’s Colloquies and the De fructu, it is the opponents of the humanists who are depicted in internal dialogues as engaging in angry, slanderous attacks, but who are publicly reduced to laughing-stocks before their enemies. The humanist interlocutor cunningly allows the ignorant friar, lawyer or theologian to damn himself. The paradoxical encomium which is one of the generic forms commonly found in Menippean satire, and which constitutes Book II of Utopia, renders the determination of the intention of the author a complex task, and encourages the reader to an open-ended appreciation of knotty philosophical and constitutional problems. If Utopia is indeed Menippean satire, the praise of the island, its people and customs is paradoxical – the defence of the unexpected. This perspective explains the troubling flaws in paradise, the Utopian’s morally questionable war practices, tolerance of slavery, and restrictions on the freedom of speech and travel. It also frustrates attempts to locate More’s voice behind the satire itself. Agrippa understood this well in his Apologia adversus calumnias, declaring that the declamation puts forward propositions alternately in a jocular or a serious form, in a deceptive or a straightforward way. In this undogmatic form, his opinions are sometimes expressed, as well as those of others; ideas and arguments are brought forward for dispute on both sides of the question.72 Given the elusive and doctrinally slippery character of More’s work, it is not surprising that, like Socrates, More enjoyed an ambivalent reputation during the sixteenth century both as a witty and charming corrector of folly, arrogance and ignorance, and a deceitful mocker who prostituted his learning to the Catholic cause.73 Wooden has examined what he regards as the two facets of More’s reputation which persist in Elizabethan literature. One is an extension of the early controversialists’ image of More as papal lackey, found in the portraits of Hall, Holinshed and Foxe. The other presents More as wit, ironist and ornament of English letters, as had the earlier recusant biographies of Harpsfield and Stapleton. The chroniclers, however, inverted the second tradition by amassing humorous anecdotes and examples of More’s ‘mocks’ in an attempt to discredit him as a serious figure. Furthermore, Protestant readers dismissed the 72

73

See M. van der Poel, ‘The Latin Declamatio in Renaissance Humanism’, Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989), 471–8, at 477–8. W. W. Wooden, ‘Thomas More in Hostile Hands: The English Image of More in the Protestant Literature of the Renaissance’, Moreana 19 (1982), 77–87, at 75–6.

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‘feigned’ image of Utopia as specious poetry with no truth value. Tyndale attacked More’s false wit and false logic as being one; More tries to ‘cavil Crystis clere wordis with sophistical sophisms, and to tryful out the trouthe with tauntis and mockis’.74 Tyndale well understood, and resented, the force of More’s mocking laughter. ERASMUS’S

‘PRAISE

OF FOLLY’

And what of Erasmus and his Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium)? Certainly the satire proved to be both hugely popular and controversial. First published in 1511, it is a paradoxical declamation by the persona of Folly on the subject of folly, as well as a praise of More under the ironic banner of his name. It displays vertiginous shifts in subject, tone and attitude. Despite Erasmus’s attempts to fend off potential criticism in his preface, the Folly received a mixed reception, and he was forced to articulate more fully his position. The 1514 edition contained antischolastic satire in its additions. Despite his Lucianic indirection which eschewed identifying individuals, but rather treated of types (and despite the appreciation of Leo X and some eminent theologians),75 Erasmus brought upon his head the fury of the theologians in Paris, Louvain and England who considered it irresponsible in its depiction of the folly of monks and theologians, and their ignorance of theology. This necessitated the enlargement of the preface of the 1514 edition, and the addition of a commentary to the 1515 Basle edition, ostensibly written by Listrius but in which Erasmus had a large part.76 The revised preface listed more examples of Greek and Latin predecessors in the paradoxical encomium, such as Seneca’s Ludus de morte Claudii Caesaris and Lucian’s Parasitica.77 The commentary, very frequently printed with the satire until the nineteenth century, establishes the autonomy of Folly’s dramatic characterisation, pointing to the irony of the declamation which parodies itself and provides a mask from behind which Erasmus could make acerbic comments.78 It argues that Erasmus touches upon nothing offensive, but only mentions some ridiculous foibles, his intention being 74

75 76

77 78

Cited in Sir Thomas More in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography, compiled J. C. Campbell, intro. Anne Lake Prescott (Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), xxv. CWE, vol. V, Ep. 673. J. Austin Gavin and Thomas M. Walsh, ‘The Praise of Folly in Context: The Commentary of Giardius Listrius’, Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971), 193–209. CWE, vol. III, Ep. 328, 81. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, 182–3. See notes on the commentary by Clarence H. Miller in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi, ord. 4, vol. V.

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to sport with lively wit, and he is careful not to mention the names of those he has satirised. Notes on particularly provocative sections seek to ameliorate their stridency and also to defend Erasmus from charges of heresy or blasphemy. Erasmus defended the satire in his exchange with the theologian Martin Dorp by contending that it was concerned, under the pretext of play, with the same subject as the serious Enchiridion, to guide men to be better and not to hurt them.79 Erasmus had only written to be useful and was almost sorry to have published the Moriae which had earned him a reputation, but one coupled with such ill-will. Explaining the psychological workings of wit and satire, which hold and attract the attention of all alike, Erasmus claims that he had worn the mask of Folly and acted his part in disguise, just as Socrates had covered his face before reciting an encomium on love. Augustine had pursued the idea that the gospel truth slips into our minds more agreeably and takes root more decisively when it has these kinds of charms to commend it. Plato, Horace and even Christ make the truth more palatable with their dialogues and fables. Cannot Folly be allowed the same liberty of speech conceded to popular comedies which jibe at monarchs, priests, monks and wives, yet do not contain personalised abuse, and causes all to laugh? Erasmus’s attitude to efficacious satire accords well with the values of moderation in temperament and behaviour associated with Democritus. Laughter should be tolerant rather than sarcastic, in contrast to the personalised abuse of Aristophanes and Old Comedy or the indignatio of Juvenal or Persius. Erasmus prefers Menander, Lucian, Horace and the New Comedians, Terence and Plautus.80 In Erasmus’s meditation on the diseases of the unbridled tongue in the Lingua, he held that the abuse of Old Comedy was brought under the control of the law when its jesting humour turned into savagery; the Cynic satirists were compared to dogs because although they rightly condemned vices, they paid no respect to propriety of persons, occasions or circumstances.81 Erasmus approximates rather to the sentiments of Horace in Satire I.4, in which the persona of the satirist refutes charges of malice by making the points that the Greek comic writers and the Roman satirist Lucilius branded criminals, and that he himself does not seek publicity or give public recitals, nor intend his 79 80

81

CWE, vol. II, Ep. 180, 80; Ep. 337, 114–15. D. Kinney, ‘Erasmus and the Latin Comedians’, in Actes Du Colloque International Erasme, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, ed. J. Chomarat, Andre´ Godin and Jean-Claude Margolin (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 57–70. CWE, vol. XXIX, 295.

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poems to be sold. Further, the innocent have nothing to fear since he is good-natured, his writings are amusement to pass the time, and his observations are for his own improvement as well.82 Erasmus emphasised the qualities of facetus rather than dicax, that is, the pervasive and habitual wit and irony which excites laughter and is good-natured, rather than the often bitter and personal attack of the type of witticism which draws admiration but not amusement.83 And certainly Erasmus did not identify his satiric targets in the Moriae encomium, Ciceronianus or Colloquies, although circumstantial evidence suggested real persons on occasions.84 As the Protestant Reformation increased in pace, Erasmus would increasingly urge his humanist friends to desist from satire, which only inflamed passions further. ROBERT BURTON’S

‘THE

ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY’

Like Pace, More and Erasmus, Robert Burton (1577–1640) was concerned with peace. The Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in 1621 and he continued to work on it for the rest of his life. New editions appeared in 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and posthumously, in 1651. Burton’s annotations to his copy of the Moriae encomium reveal his close attention to the preface, with a note on More playing Democritus; a note is similarly to be found at the relevant section in Burton’s copy of the De fructu.85 In The Anatomy of Melancholy, a Menippean satire that chronicles the history of the genre, Burton assumes the name of Democritus Junior, or Democritus Christianus. He refers explicitly to the issues raised by the Erasmus/Dorp dispute in his long entry to the text, the ‘Satyricall Preface of Democritus to the Reader’: I did sometime laugh and scoffe with Lucian, and satirically taxe with Menippus, lament with Heraclitus, sometimes again I was bitterly mirthful, and then again burning with rage: I was so much moved to see that abuse which I could not amend. In which passion howsoever I may sympathise with him or them, ’tis for no such respect I shroud my selfe under his name, but either in an unknown habit, to assume a little more liberty and freedom of speech.86 82 83

84 85

86

Horace, Satires and Epistles, 55–60. Mary A. Grant, The Ancient Theories of the Laughable: the Greek Rhetoricians and Cicero, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature XXI (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1924), 116–18. Such as the papal orator Inghirami in the Ciceronianus. Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘Burton and More’, Moreana 35 (1998), 135–6, 57–74. Pace, De fructu, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Shelfmark 4.oB.16.(5)Th. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, 5.

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Burton’s authorial voice reflects on the early modern satirists’ assumption of a complex and fluid persona in order to avoid charges of vindictive malice and defamation, and of offending the decorum of office: If I have overshot myselfe in this which hath beene hitherto said, or that it is, which I am sure some will object, too phantasticall, too light and Comicall for a divine, too Satyricall for one of my profession, I will presume to answere with Erasmus, in like case ’tis not I but Democritus , Democritus dixit : you must consider what it is to speake in ones owne or anothers person, an assumed habit or name; a difference betwixt him that affects or acts a Princes, a Philosophers, a Magistrates, a Fooles part, and him that is so indeed; and what liberty those old Satyrists have had, it is a Cento collected from others, not I, but they that say it.87

And without naming names but only castigating vices, Burton’s encyclopaedic satire meditates on the melancholic early modern world riven by futile religious, philosophical and secular contention – the Wars of Religion and the conditions which would give rise to the British civil wars. If man’s fallen nature and the need for sweeping institutional change to secular and ecclesiastical realms was the preoccupation of the early sixteenth-century humanists, conditions are certainly not improved, and may even be worse, in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the Anatomy reaches its climax with its discussion of ‘Religious Melancholy’. The persona of Burton/Democritus Junior looks despairingly to every writer from Plato to Bodin, Aristotle to Justus Lipsius, Lucian to Botero to no avail, before declaring that he will make his own Utopia. He argues from behind the mask of the detached observer Democritus that the only value to adhere to is Christian moderation – of the passions, and so too in debate and language. Unlike Pace, Erasmus and More, Burton does not appear to have excited criticism with his analysis of the causes of discord in the Christian commonwealth. For all these writers, the authority of ancient philosophy enhanced by Christian revelation gave licence to the use of laughter as a means of making necessary and health-giving criticism. It gave a measure of protection from allegations of defamation from adversaries cut down to size, and showed the means to convey unpalatable truths. But even more than this, the cultivation of its techniques of provocation and the virtues that led to its appreciation amounted to a duty for the philosopher in the world.

87

Ibid., vol. I, 110.

CHAPTER

5

Hobbes, the universities, and the history of philosophy 430537

R. W. Serjeantson

For some time now scholars have debated why Thomas Hobbes was never made a Fellow of the Royal Society.1 But about his relations with a different learned institution – Oxford University – there has been little doubt. Hobbes had been a student at Magdalene Hall between 1602 and 1608, but thereafter he was (one brief attempt at rapprochement aside) one of Oxford’s most inveterate enemies, and indeed an enemy of existing universities altogether.2 Few of the very many controversial things he said in Leviathan (1651) aroused more immediate anger than his closing claim that the book might be ‘profitably taught in the Universities’.3 Hobbes’s early readers reacted to this statement, as Hobbes himself subsequently acknowledged,4 with incredulity and disgust.5 Moreover, when members 1

2

3 4

5

See esp. Q. Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society’, Historical Journal 12 (1969), 217–39, revised and extended as ‘Hobbes and the Politics of the Early Royal Society’, in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. III, 324–45; S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 139; M. Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 178–9; N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds.), Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43–66; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘The Intellectual Relationship between Hobbes and Locke – a Reappraisal’, in Locke’s Enlightenment: Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998), 61–77, at 65–70. On Hobbes’s time at Oxford, see N. Malcolm, ‘A Summary Biography of Hobbes’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–26, at 3–5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), 395. Thomas Hobbes, Six lessons to the professors of the mathematiques (London, 1656), 56–7; Thomas Hobbes, Considerations upon the reputation . . . of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1680), 57–8. British Library (BL), MS Harley 6942, fol. 132v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 6 May [1651]); Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook (London, 1653), 96; [Seth Ward], Vindiciae academiarum (Oxford, 1654), 52; Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (Oxford, 1656), 11; George Lawson, An examination of the political part of Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan (London, 1657), 145–6; John Bramhall, The catching of Leviathan (London, 1658), 549; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of . . . Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 319. But see also William Rand to Samuel Hartlib, 18 July 1651 (Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers [CD-Rom edition], 62/30/3B–4A): ‘I should conceive that man an excellent Councellour in the matter of education’.

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of the English universities were accused of professing Hobbes’s ideas, as Daniel Scargill was at Cambridge in 1668, they were liable to find themselves in serious trouble.6 Yet, despite Hobbes’s hostility to them, the universities have a significant place in all of his major writings. They were a consistent component of his systematic political philosophy between the Elements of Law of 1640 and the Latin Leviathan of 1668. Hobbes regarded the universities as having a necessary ‘office in a Common-wealth’, and held that it was a duty of the sovereign representative to oversee what they taught.7 He was also, however, bitterly critical of the political role the universities had played in the Civil Wars, and also critical more generally of the philosophy they taught. In the course of articulating this critique, the universities also came to play an increasingly important role in Hobbes’s understanding of history: both the history of his own time, and also of European history since classical antiquity. Most importantly, perhaps, Hobbes’s relations with the universities constitute a decisive moment in the development of the persona of the ‘new philosopher’ or novator in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian philosophy of the schools had been attacked by Bernardino Telesio (1509–88) and his Italian followers, by Francis Bacon (1561–26), and by Paracelsians and alchemists. But it was the generation of Hobbes (1588–1679) and Descartes (1596–1650), above all, that ultimately succeeded in creating a view of the philosopher that emphasised novelty, iconclasm and the necessity of rejecting the philosophy of the schools. The historical consequences of this development are hard to overemphasise: it gave rise to nothing less than what came to be called ‘modern’ philosophy, which from the eighteenth century onwards came to be sharply differentiated from what came to be known as ‘scholasticism’, which was then associated with the Middle Ages. A consequence of this is that, until very recently, the philosophy of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries has suffered from persistent scholarly neglect. Yet it has become increasingly clear that a much richer understanding of the significance of the philosophy of the novatores can be gained by studying their relations to the philosophical perspectives of their immediate predecessors.8 A number of recent studies of Descartes have brought 6

7 8

J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 85–108, at 86–96. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4, 179–80. T. Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

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this out strongly,9 and the same tendency is also evident in relation to Hobbes. Brett has explored his relations to the writings of the Spanish second scholastic; Skinner to Renaissance rhetoric.10 Schuhmann emphasised the importance of a broad Renaissance Aristotelian philosophical culture for understanding Hobbes, and Schuhmann’s student Leijenhorst has explored in some detail how the account of prima philosophia in Hobbes’s De corpore can be regarded as being in some sense a ‘mechanisation’ of contemporary Aristotelian natural philosophy.11 This revisionism has had the salutary effect of reminding us that early modern philosophers were speaking to their contemporaries and not to us, and that the problems they addressed were those of their own philosophical milieu, and not of ours. It is true that these developments have been less evident in the history of political thought. There are some good reasons for this. The history of political doctrines is one of the few fields within early modern intellectual history in which it does not immediately make sense to ground one’s enquiries in the history of universities, broadly conceived. The study of politics as a discipline (politica) was not quite so prominent in the university curricula of early modern Europe as the study of logic or metaphysics, or moral or natural philosophy. Moreover, the majority of texts that now tend to be regarded as major contributions to the development of early modern political ideas were written outside the universities. For these and other reasons it is evidently not enough simply to reassimilate the novatores back into the milieu of the schools. We need to acknowledge the extent to which they emerged from that philosophical world. But we also need to understand, as precisely as possible, the personae that they created in order to escape from the schools.12 This chapter is a contribution to this enterprise in the case of Hobbes. In it, I draw attention to the important place education held in the political

9

10

11

12

See esp. D. Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); R. Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). A. S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205–35; Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). K. Schuhmann, ‘Hobbes and Renaissance Philosophy’, in A. Napoli, Hobbes oggi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), 331–49; C. Leijenhorst, The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), esp. 219–22. See also R. Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. I, 9–32.

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thought of the schools in the period. I explore the increasingly important place of the history of philosophy in Hobbes’s thought. At the heart of my account is a historical interpretation of chapter XLVI of Leviathan: Hobbes’s most thoroughgoing attack on the universities and the ‘Vaine Philosophy’ they taught. I

Hobbes’s views on the universities developed in a number of important ways throughout his publications. In certain key respects, however, his underlying position remained constant, and it is with this consistent position that I wish to begin. From the Elements of Law (1640) to Behemoth (1666–8) and the Latin Leviathan (1668), Hobbes’s view of the universities was characterised by a sense of their importance as places of education and, above all, education in political ideas. It was in the universities that young men received their political opinions, and the same young men then transmitted those opinions to the people by their conversation and preaching. This view is present in the Elements of Law.13 It remains in the De cive (1642), in which Hobbes asserted that ‘anyone who wants to introduce a sound doctrine has to begin with the Universities’.14 And it was memorably reformulated in the review and conclusion of the English Leviathan (1651), in which Hobbes emphasised his point with a striking metaphor. ‘For seeing’, he wrote, the Universities are the Fountains of Civill, and Morall Doctrine, from whence the Preachers, and the Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the Pulpit, and in their Conversation) upon the People, there ought certainly to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from the Venime of Heathen Politicians, and from the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits.15

Hobbes is quite consciously using an established metaphor – of the fountain – for the universities’ purpose.16 He is also drawing on the appropriation of this language in order to urge reform: the Grand 13

14

15 16

Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural & Politic, ed. F. To¨nnies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 145–6. Thomas Hobbes, De cive: The Latin version, ed. H. Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 199: ‘si quis sanam doctrinam introducere voluerit, incipiendum ei est ab Academiis’; trans. Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck, trans. M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 146. Hobbes, Leviathan, 395. Compare Hobbes, De cive, 198–9. V. Morgan and C. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II: 1546–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–10.

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Remonstrance of 1641 had spoken of Parliament’s intention to ‘purge the fountains of learning, the two Universities, that the streams flowing from them may be clear and pure’.17 The metaphor of the fountain in its turn also picks up on the motto of the University of Cambridge: hinc lucem et pocula sacra (‘From here [flows] light and sacred draughts’) – strikingly iconographically represented on a title page of 1671.18 Hobbes’s emphasis on the universities as the most effective means of teaching civil doctrine stems from his more general conviction of human educability. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes spoke of the young men entering the universities as having minds ‘yet as white paper, capable of any instruction’. In Leviathan, similarly, he spoke of the ‘Common-peoples minds’ as being ‘like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them’. Hobbes gives a formal explanation for his emphasis on human educability in the account of human nature in De homine (1658), the second part of his tripartite treatment of the ‘elements of philosophy’. Here he ascribes the various sources of human ingenia (‘wits’, defined as ‘the tendencies of men to certain things’) to temperament, custom, experience, good fortune, self-regard and authorities.19 Of the last of these – authorities – Hobbes curtly noted that ‘if they are good, the wits of youths are formed well; if corrupt, then corruptly, whether they are Magistrates, or Fathers, or any others of those whom they hear praised by the people for their wisdom’.20 From which it follows, Hobbes continues, that fathers, magistrates and tutors had better both impart good precepts and provide a good example in following them; and that the books which are read be ‘healthful, chaste and useful’.21 A further explanation for Hobbes’s insistence on the educational importance of the universities arises from their legal status as public foundations. Unlike the first education that parents provided privately for their children,22 the education that universities provided to their charges was licensed and authorised by the commonwealth itself by means of privileges, exemptions and laws specific to them – as a number of 17

18 19 20

21 22

Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 230. See further C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 115. Jeremy Taylor, Ductor dubitantium (London, 1671), title page. Hobbes, Elements of Law, 146; Hobbes, Leviathan, 176; Hobbes, De homine (London, 1658), 72. Hobbes, De homine, 74: ‘Ab his si boni, Ingenia adolescentum formantur bona; prava si pravi, sive Magistri ii sint, sive Patres, sive alii quicunque quos vulgo a sapientia laudari audiunt; nam laudatos reverentur & dignos existimant quos imitentur.’ Ibid., 75: ‘Secundo, quam, quos lecturi sunt libros, sunt sani, casti, & utiles.’ As Hobbes noted in Leviathan, 178.

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contemporary political writers pointed out.23 As we might expect, Hobbes took this ‘public’ aspect of the universities extremely seriously. Moreover, when he speaks – as he does in chapter XXIX of Leviathan – of seditious books being ‘publikely read’, he means that they are lectured upon in the schools.24 At a more general level, Hobbes’s conviction about the importance of the universities is also related to his emphasis on the political importance of opinion. In his later writings in particular, Hobbes increasingly stressed a view more commonly associated in the history of political thought with David Hume: that political power follows opinion.25 Since (in Hobbes’s view) the ‘common people’ derived their opinions from preachers and the gentry, and since the preachers and the gentry learnt their opinions in the universities, what the universities taught was of fundamental importance.26 II

Hobbes’s consistent emphasis on the public function of the universities as the places where the blank paper of the ruling classes’ minds was imprinted with civil doctrine had an important consequence for his political philosophy. In all his major political works, Hobbes asserts that a concern for university education is a formal duty or ‘office’ of the sovereign. Hobbes first made this point in the Elements of Law. It is repeated in De cive, where Hobbes writes: ‘I hold therefore that it is a duty of sovereigns to have the true Elements of civil doctrine written and to order that it be taught in all the Universities in the commonwealth.’ It is emphasised again in the English Leviathan.27 When considered in the context of the formal political treatises of late Renaissance Europe, Hobbes’s concern with the politics of education is entirely conventional. Leviathan is not often considered in the context of the systematic or encyclopaedic political philosophy that was largely 23

24 25 26

27

Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum (printed 1583), ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 87; Pierre Gregoire, De republica (2 vols., Lyons, 1609), vol. II, 72, col. 1; Christoph Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa (Oxford, 1639), 108–9. Hobbes, Leviathan, 171. See David Hume, Essays, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), esp. 32, 51. See also G. M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2002), 38. Hobbes, Elements, 146. Hobbes, De cive, 199: ‘Officii igitur summorum imperantium esse arbitror, Elementa vera doctrinae civilis conscribi facere, & imperare ut in omnibus civitatis Academiis doceantur’ (translation from Hobbes, On the citizen, 146–7). Hobbes, Leviathan, 4, 180–1.

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generated by the schools in the period. Indeed, this is a body of literature that anglophone historians tend to disparage when they consider it at all.28 But although not in terms of its doctrines, then perhaps in terms of its structure and comprehensive scope, Leviathan may be regarded as comparable with the ambitions of the encyclopaedic accounts of politics produced by authors such as Pierre Gregoire, Lambert Daneau, Bartholomew Keckermann and Johannes Althusius. More generally, in stressing the responsibility of the magistrate to the schools, Hobbes was simply endorsing a well-developed aspect of late Renaissance political philosophy.29 Several of these authors and their followers went so far as to regard ‘scholastics’ (scholastica) as a subalternate discipline to politics.30 One consequence of this can be seen in John Prideaux’s Lineamenta politica, a work treating education as one of the seven ‘parts’ of politics, alongside topics such as the best form of a commonwealth, laws, magistrates, the status of subjects and commerce.31 There was a wide variety of ways, though, in which the relationship between the schools and the commonwealth was considered in late Renaissance civil philosophy. A few authors of the period, such as Justus Lipsius, still followed the earlier Renaissance tendency of treating politics in terms of the virtues and hence the encouragement of education as a princely one.32 By extension, for a prince to suppress the schools was – as the English philosopher John Case argued, picking up on Aristotle – a mark of tyranny. Such was the behaviour of Julian the Apostate, or of the Turks in Hungary, not of a virtuous Christian monarch.33 For most late Renaissance writers on politics, however, care for education was rather more than a virtue: it was, as Hobbes also thought, a duty. 28

29

30 31 32

33

See e.g. R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158. But see H. Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: die “Politica” des Henning Arnisaeus (ca 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970), esp. 411–14; H. Dreitzel, ‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Fo¨deralismus’, in E. Bonfatti, G. Duso and M. Scattola (eds.), Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld in der Politica methodice digesta des Johannes Althusius (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 49–112, at 51–2; and Robert von Friedeburg’s chapter in this volume. See also J. P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 86. J. H. Alsted, Encyclopaedia (2 vols., Herborn, 1630), 1505. John Prideaux, Hypomnemata (Oxford, [?1650]), 336, 356–61. Justus Lipsius, Sixe bookes of politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), 40. See further Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. I, 234–6, 254; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 55. John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588), 498. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, V.ix, and also Johann Himmel, Idea boni gymnasii (Speyer, 1614), 1; Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), trans. W. Walker (London, 1648), 107.

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Hence Jean Bodin in the Six livres de la re´publique (1576) described the bringing up of youth as ‘l’une des principales charges d’une Republique’, albeit one that was unduly neglected.34 The Huguenot Lambert Daneau asserted that the magistrate ‘ought always to have the greatest care for the proper and pious education of his citizens’ children’.35 Similarly, for the widely read Reformed philosopher, Bartholomew Keckermann, the education of his subjects was a formal responsibility of the prince, and something that he ought to keep directly under his own eye.36 All these authors drew, explicitly or implicitly, on the fundamentally humanist assumption that education plays a vital role in making good citizens. This point was made by numerous authors writing in the century before Hobbes, and was fully shared by him.37 It was made particularly strongly by Jacques Simanca, whose popular De republica (1569) is a cento of quotations from classical, medieval and Renaissance authors on a comprehensive range of political topics. Like numerous other late Renaissance authors, the list of authorities that Simanca cites in support of his contention about the importance of education to the commonwealth is headed by book VIII of Aristotle’s Politics, followed by Plato’s Republic and Laws, Plutarch’s Life of the Spartan founder Lycurgus, book I of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoriae, and the epistles of the imperial moralist Seneca, who had said that ‘education forms the morals’ of the citizen.38 These authors often argued that the schools were not only useful but also actually necessary to a well-ordered commonwealth. For John Case, schools were necessary because they gave rise to amity and order in the commonwealth. The French author Pierre Gregoire – whose book De republica (1596) seems to have been one of the most widely read political works in the earlier seventeenth century after Bodin’s – followed Clement of Alexandria in asserting the necessity of schools to the commonwealth.39 The Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius wrote at length on this theme in his Politica of 1603, arguing that ‘if we wish to have good leaders, 34

35

36 37

38

39

Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la re´publique (Lyons, 1579), 590. See further Bodin, Oratio de instituenda in repub. juventute (Toulouse, 1559). Lambert Daneau, Politices Christianae libri septem ([s.l.], 1596), 129: ‘maximam semper esse debere optimi magistratus curam de pueris civibus suis recte, pieque educandis’. Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, 190–2. See e.g. Himmel, Idea, 1; Jacobus Gadebuschius, Aurea discendi triga (Magdeburg, 1623), sig. B3r; Prideaux, Hypomnemata, 356. Jacobus Simanca, De republica recte institutenda, conservanda & amplificanda libri IX (Cologne, 1609), 587: ‘educatio mores facit’. On Hobbes’s view of the cento as a form of learned madness, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 267. Simanca, De republica, 587, 594. Case, Sphaera civitatis, 498. Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 71.

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governors, and ministers in the Commonwealth and in the Church, it is necessary that we guard the schools in which such people are moulded.’40 As Gregoire noted, the consequences of failing to do so could be serious, since it was from education that ‘prosperity or subversion (or at least great corruption) can appear in a commonwealth.’41 For all these reasons, a number of early seventeenth-century writers on the role of the universities in the commonwealth set out what such schools required.42 One important condition was a suitable, permanent and healthy location.43 (As Robert Burton suggested in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51), some special pleading had to be made in this respect for the University of Cambridge.44) No less important were the privileges and immunities proper to ancien re´gime corporations, whether granted by the pope (for Catholic authors) or the local prince, as well as the laws specifically pertaining to the schools.45 Pious and well-affected teachers and professors were naturally often also listed as a desideratum. Finally, not the least important consideration for these authors was that universities be properly funded.46 These views are again quite consistent with the ones Hobbes expresses in the Elements of Law, De cive and Leviathan. Even Hobbes’s fierce early Restoration critic William Lucy sarcastically acknowledged that, despite his criticisms of the universities, Hobbes did not want to see an ‘utter extirpation’ of the schools, and that he did ‘reserve a room and office for them in the Commonwealth’.47 Yet while late Renaissance political theorists tended to agree about the value of schools and universities to the commonwealth, they showed no 40

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Althusius, ‘De utilitate, necessitate et antiquitate scholarum admonitio panegyrica’, in Johannes Althusius, Politica methodice digesta (Herborn, 1614), 983: ‘Si igitur in Rep. & Ecclesia bonos duces, gubernatores & ministros cupimus, necesse est, ut scholas, in quib. Tales informantur, conservemus.’ On Althusius, see further H. Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fu¨rstengesellschaft (2 vols., Cologne: Bo¨hlau, 1991), vol. II, 531–2, 1024–5. Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 70: ‘salus, vel subversio aut saltem corruptio major, oriri potest in republica’. For the points below, see especially Gregoire, De republica, lib. XVIII; Althusius, Politica, 586–87; Alsted, ‘Politica’, in his Encyclopaedia, 1417; Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa, 108–9. See also Himmel, Idea, esp. 5. Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, 195. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632), ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), vol., I, 236. Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 72; Lawson, Examination, 76–7. See further W. Frijhoff, ‘What is an Early Modern University? The Conflict between Leiden and Amsterdam in 1631’, in H. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European universities in the age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 149–68, at 160. Bodin, Six livres, 645; Althusius, Politica, 184; Keckermann, Systema, 194–95; George Lawson, Politica sacra et civilis (1660), ed. C. Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 247. William Lucy, Observations, censures and confutations of notorious errours in Mr. Hobbes his Leviathan (London, 1663), 7; Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.

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such agreement over the question of who should have governance of such academies. For Hobbes, as we have seen, oversight of the universities is one of the duties of the sovereign. In holding this view he was not alone: John Prideaux was clear that the power to found and dissolve academies or schools was one of the ‘prerogatives of majesty’.48 There was, however, a notable tendency among certain Calvinist writers on politics to give a different account of where the authority over the schools should reside. These authors, usually Presbyterians and following the lead of Johannes Althusius above all, argued that the right of schooling belonged not to the civil, but to the ecclesiastical magistrate.49 According to Althusius, the justification for founding public schools was first and foremost a religious one. The schools ‘provide for the conserving of true religion and the passing of it on to later generations’; moreover, they are ‘the custodians of the keys of science and doctrine, by which the resolution of all doubt is sought and the way of salvation is disclosed’.50 Althusius’s view was rather influential.51 In particular, it made its way into the Giessen professor Christoph Scheibler’s Philosophia compendiosa (1628) – a book that seems to have been one of the principal textbooks for the undergraduate arts course in 1630s Oxford.52 As we shall see, this Presbyterian claim for the schools’ independence from the sovereign forms a crucial but – in Leviathan – also a rather covert target for Hobbes. III

Let me now turn, then, from considering the aspects of Hobbes’s treatment of the universities that remained constant throughout his works to those that changed significantly over the thirty years from 1640 to 1670. We have already seen that Hobbes regarded ‘the Instruction of the people’

48 49

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Prideaux, Hypomnemata, 339. See further H. Dreitzel, Absolutismus und sta¨ndische Verfassung in Deutschland (Mainz: Zabern, 1992), 26–8. Althusius, Politica, 184; Johannes Althusius, Politica: An Abridged Translation of Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples trans. F. S. Carney (3rd edn, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 76. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, rex (London, 1644). See also R. von Friedeburg, ‘Widerstandsrecht, Notwehr und die Repra¨sentation des Gemeinwesens in der Politica des Althusius (1614) und in der schottischen Althusius-Rezeption, 1638–1669’, in Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld, 291–314 (esp. 295–6). See Scheibler, Philosophia compendiosa, 108 (Oxford editions in 1628 and 1639). See also Letters and Papers of the Verney Family down to the End of the Year 1639, ed. J. Bruce (London: Camden Society, 1853), 154.

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as depending ‘wholly, on the right teaching of Youth in the Universities’.53 But according to him, the role of the universities in educating the subjects of commonwealths had generally been malign, not beneficial. Indeed, he came strongly to believe that the universities had been instrumental in helping to sow the seeds of rebellion in England. It is for this reason that he increasingly associated them with the causes of rebellion and ‘those things that Weaken . . . a Common-wealth’.54 The universities, in Hobbes’s view, had been guilty of encouraging false and seditious notions about conscience, law, property and tyranny, all of which presented significant dangers to the rightful sovereign power. Thus in the chapter of the Elements of Law on the preservation of the commonwealth, the opinions that Hobbes declares to dispose men to rebellion are said to have ‘proceeded from private and public teaching’, and their teachers are said to have received them ‘from grounds and principles, which they have learned in the Universities’. In the corresponding chapter of De cive, Hobbes likewise asserts that the political errors tending to sedition have ‘crept into the minds of uneducated people’ partly from ‘the pulpits of popular preachers’ and partly from conversation with the gentry. Both groups, he claims, imbibed these errors ‘from those who taught them in their young days at the Universities’.55 This kind of criticism may have encouraged Hobbes to think that ‘the people who hold sway in the universities’ (he does not specify which ones) might try to hinder the publication of the second edition of De cive, which came out nonetheless at Amsterdam in early 1647.56 It is in Leviathan that universities are attacked on the broadest range of fronts, yet the central charge remains: ‘From Aristotles Civill Philosophy’, Hobbes asserts, men educated in the schools ‘have learned, to call all manner of Common-wealths but the Popular, (such as was at that time in the state of Athens,) Tyranny’.57

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Hobbes, Leviathan, 180. Hobbes, Leviathan, 167. See also Hobbes, Elements of Law, part II, ch. ix; Hobbes, De cive, ch. XII. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, 138. Hobbes, De cive, 199: ‘& in animos horum a doctoribus adolescentiae suae in Academiis publicis’ (trans. from Hobbes, On the Citizen, 146). Thomas Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. I, 126 (trans. 127): ‘ij qui dominantur in Academijs’. Hobbes, Leviathan, 377; see also 111 and ch. XXIX, and compare also Hobbes, De homine, 75. See further M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3– 24, esp. 3–15; Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Proper Signification of Liberty’, in Visions of Politics, vol. III, 209–37, esp. 227.

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The English Leviathan thus has a special place in this account of Hobbes’s relations to the universities, since it was in this book that he first unleashed the full force of his criticisms upon them. The universities, and the philosophy and theology that they teach, are subjected to several passing attacks throughout Leviathan, but it is in the penultimate chapter of the book that Hobbes turns to consider them systematically. Chapter 58 XLVI of Leviathan, which has no counterpart in De cive, belongs to the fourth part of the book, notoriously entitled ‘Of the Kingdome of Darknesse’; and the darkness specifically treated in this chapter is the obscurity that arises ‘from VAIN PHILOSOPHY, and FABULOUS TRADITIONS’. Hobbes begins this chapter by giving a definition of philosophy that is in form Aristotelian: the knowledge of the effects of causes and the causes of effects; but he insists, polemically, upon a restriction to efficient (rather than formal, material or final) causation. More strikingly, Hobbes then turns to offer an account of the origins and history of philosophy. Hobbes’s deep and well-formed interest in history has attracted increasing attention from scholars.59 Less has been said, however, about Hobbes’s no less well-developed interest in the history of philosophy.60 Hobbes’s brief account of the history of philosophy at the beginning of chapter XLVI is, like Thomas Stanley’s much larger contemporary account and also like most other histories of philosophy at the time, doxographical.61 That is, it follows the lead of ancient historians of philosophy such as Diogenes Laertius in tracing philosophy not through the history of its ideas, but through its principal protagonists and the schools that followed them. Hobbes’s explanation for the origins of the subject is in content conventional, but in import satirical. At the beginning of the Metaphysics (982b11–28), Aristotle had argued that philosophy is not pursued for its utility, and had invoked in proof the ‘first philosophers’, who only began to pursue it once the necessaries and eases of life had been obtained. Hobbes similarly asserts that ‘Leasure is the mother of Philosophy ’; and 58

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See further K. Schuhmann, ‘Leviathan and De cive’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13–31, esp. 27. See esp. W. R. Lund, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Past: Hobbes on the Study of History’, Hobbes Studies 5 (1992), 3–22; L. Borot, ‘History in Hobbes’s Thought’, in T. Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 305–28; G. A. J. Rogers and T. Sorell (eds.), Hobbes and History (London: Routledge, 2000). But see T. Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, in Hobbes and History, 82–96. Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy (3 vols., London, 1655–60). See further L. Malusa, ‘The First General Histories of Philosophy in England and the Low Countries’, in G. Santinello et al., Models of the History of Philosophy: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’ (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 161–370, esp. 174.

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since ‘Common-wealth’ is ‘the mother of Peace, and Leasure’, philosophy first arose in ‘great and flourishing Cities’.62 It was only after the Greek cities, and above all Athens, had grown great enough to support a wealthy class of men ‘that had no employment’ that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle emerged. It is in having nothing else to do, too, that Hobbes finds the origin of the schools, since schola in Greek ‘signifieth leasure ’, and the disputations in which these philosophers engaged were called Diatribae, ‘that is to say, Passing of the time’. Hobbes’s joke becomes increasingly pointed as he tells us that the different schools of philosophy took their names from the places in which their masters taught, ‘as if we should denominate men from More-fields, from Pauls Church, and from the Exchange, because they meet there often, to prate and loyter’.63 Having baited his trap, Hobbes now springs it. Without any warning or preamble he turns to ask bluntly: ‘But what has been the Utility of those Schools? what Science is there at this day acquired by their Readings and Disputings?’64 According to Hobbes, the Greek schools neglected geometry, taught a natural philosophy that was ‘rather a Dream than a Science’, and inculcated specious and dangerous doctrines in moral and political philosophy.65 It is after this brief and defamatory history of the schools that Hobbes turns, without further warning, to give a formal definition of a university: ‘a Joyning together, and an Incorporation under one Government of many Publique Schools, in one and the same Town or City’. His account has taken him down to his own time, and was about to land him in some very hot water. The universities of Christendom, according to Hobbes, are irredeemably tainted by Roman Catholicism. The ‘principall Schools’ of the early modern universities ‘were ordained for the three Professions, that is to say, of the Romane religion, of the Romane law, and of the Art of Medicine’. ‘And for the study of Philosophy’, he continues with a notorious jibe, ‘it hath no otherwise place then as a handmaid to the Romane Religion: And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity’.66 The remainder of chapter XLVI 62

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On this point see also S. J. Pigney, ‘Seventeenth-Century Accounts of Philosophy’s Past: Theophilus Gale and his Continental Precursors’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis., University of London, 1999), 53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 368–9. On the scoffing significance of the figure of percontatio here, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 417–18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 369. Ibid., 370.

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consists of a polemical assault on the putative errors of the Aristotelian schools across all the philosophical disciplines. In the light of all this execration, we should not be surprised to find one of Hobbes’s earliest critics, Alexander Ross, writing in 1653 that: In his forty-sixth chapter he spurnes at all learning except his own, and that with such a magisterial spirit, and so supercilious scorn, as if Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, the Peripateticks, Academicks, Stoicks, Colledges, Schooles, Universities, Synagogues, and all the wise men of Europe, Asia, and Affrick hitherto, were scarce worthy to carry his books.67 IV

We need to remind ourselves of the structure and development of Hobbes’s argument in chapter XLVI if we are properly to understand the nature of the attack he is making.68 We might simply note, of course, that Hobbes is having a pointed joke at the expense of philosophers by accusing them of having too much time on their hands, and levelling the rather more serious charge at the English universities – made by others besides Hobbes – that they had failed to purge themselves sufficiently of their popish origins.69 Many of Hobbes’s targets in chapters XLVI and XLVII of Leviathan are specifically and unambiguously Roman Catholic. Hobbes criticises, for instance, the philosophical justification for ‘denying of Marriage to the clergy’; he gives the example of a Christian who may not preach to the unconverted until he has ‘received Orders from Rome’; and his first example of errors derived from tradition includes ‘all the Histories of Apparitions, and Ghosts, alledged by the Doctors of the Romane Church, to make good their Doctrines’.70 It may be appropriate to associate Hobbes’s critique of the doctrines taught in the Roman Catholic universities with the university of Paris in particular. Paris was where Hobbes had mostly been living since he had been ‘the first of all that fled’ England in 1640.71 The University of Paris was much more thoroughly committed to Aristotelianism in metaphysics and in natural philosophy than were the universities of Oxford and 67 68

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Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, 81. Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Politics, Language and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148–201, at 200. See also Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, 89. Hobbes, Leviathan, 376, 378, 379. Hobbes, Considerations, 6.

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Cambridge by 1651.72 It was in Paris in 1624 that the Faculty of Theology had formerly censured opponents of Aristotelian philosophy, in part in response to Pierre Gassendi’s Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos which had come out anonymously that same year.73 Indeed, Hobbes’s own attack on Aristotelianism may be regarded as owing something to his friend Gassendi’s book: Gassendi preceded Hobbes in describing Aristotelian natural philosophy as a ‘dream’ (insomnium) and in criticising the schools for neglecting geometry. Similarly, where Hobbes had complained that the schools brought philosophy in religion, Gassendi had previously made the parallel criticism that the schools have erred in deriving abstruse questions in philosophy from theology.74 The first position that the Parisian theologians had upheld in their censure of 1624 was one that Hobbes specifically attacks in Leviathan: the metaphysical doctrine of materia prima.75 Moreover, it was the University of Paris that had encouraged attacks such as Gabriel Cossart’s oration against the new philosophy in 1650, in which he argued that novelty of doctrine was the quickest means to destroy commonwealths.76 The irony that the University of Paris had thus become more, rather than less, committed to Aristotle since its founding was not lost on the theologian Jean de Launoy, who drew attention to it in his book De varia Aristotelis in Academia parisiensis fortuna (1653).77 Moreover, Hobbes would go on explicitly to attack the University of Paris for condemning Luther’s attack on ‘School-theology’ in the Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656).78 It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Hobbes is only or simply attacking Roman Catholicism here.79 In fact, we will not understand the force of Hobbes’s attack if we restrict our interpretation simply

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See further M. Feingold, ‘Aristotle and the English Universities in the Seventeenth Century: A Reevaluation’, in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, 135– 48, esp. 141; Morgan and Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II, 514–15. B. Rochot, ‘Introduction’, to Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristole´ciens, ed. and trans. B. Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959), vii–xv, at viii. Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (Amsterdam, 1649), 13, 10, 16. See Jean de Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in academica parisiensi fortuna (Paris, 1653), 125, 128. Gabriel Cossart, Adversus novitatem doctrinae oratio (Paris, 1650), 1. Launoy, De varia Aristotelis . . . fortuna, 139. See further A. C. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990– ), vol. I, 229. Thomas Hobbes, The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (London, 1656), 48. See further Leijenhorst, Mechanization of Aristotelianism, 31. Contrast H. W. Schneider, ‘Thomas Hobbes from Behemoth to Leviathan’, in C. Walton and P. J. Johnson (eds.), Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’ (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 219– 22, at 222; F. Lessay, ‘Hobbes’s Protestantism’, in Leviathan after 350 Years, 265–94, at 267.

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to Hobbes’s own writings.80 If we wish to understand the historical import of Hobbes’s attack we need to ask this question: where else had Hobbes’s contemporaries treated the topic of the history and purpose of the schools? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies with the schools themselves. The universities, academies and gymnasia of early modern Europe generated a flourishing literature on the history and uses of the schools.81 One genre in particular comes very close to what Hobbes is doing in chapter XLVI of Leviathan. This was the oration in praise of the schools, commonly pronounced by a rector or professor at a commencement ceremony or at the beginning of the academic year. The genre of the inaugural oration is principally associated with the universities and academies of the Low Countries and the Protestant German-speaking lands, which tended to be rather more forward about printing academic-related material than the English universities. Nonetheless, English examples of the genre by Samuel Fell and John Prideaux are also extant. Moreover, German specimens of the genre were also reprinted in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, such as the one by Philip Pareus.82 These orations are in the genus demonstrativum; that is to say, they employ the rhetoric of praise and blame.83 They came to praise the schools, as Hobbes came to blame them. Earlier seventeenth-century examples of these orations often follow a rather stereotyped arrangement. It was an arrangement that had been formalised by an author we have already encountered: the Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius. At the end of his widely read Politica (1603), Althusius published as an appendix a panegyric praising ‘the antiquity, utility, and necessity of the schools’.84 This oration, which in good Calvinist fashion emphasises the role of the schools in helping to restore fallen humanity, served as an 80 81

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Compare Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, 87–9. See further Martin Lipen, Bibliotheca realis philosophica (2 vols., Frankfurt am Main, 1682), vol. II, 1367–8. Samuel Fell, Primitiae, sive oratio habita Oxonia in schola theologica (Oxford, 1627); John Prideaux, Orationes novem inaugurales (Oxford, 1626); Philip Pareus, Oratio panegyrica pro musis Hanovicis instaurandis (London, 1641). On the rhetorical genera, see further Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 41–5, 373. This oration is not reprinted in either the abridged Latin edition of C. J. Friedrich (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1932) or in the further abridged English translation by F. S. Carney. On it, see further G. A. Benrath, ‘Johannes Althusius an der Hohen Schule in Herborn’, in K.-W. Dahm, W. Krawietz and D. Wyduckel (eds.), Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius (Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt, 1988), 99–107, and H. Dreitzel, ‘Politische Philosophie’, in H. Holzhey et al., (eds.), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts (4 vols., Basle: Schwabe, 2001), vol. IV, 607–748, at 629; and von Friedeburg’s chapter in this volume.

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implicit or explicit model for a number of later authors, including Johann Himmel in his Idea boni gymnasii (1614), Johann Heinrich Alsted in his Encyclopaedia (1630), and Theodore Schrevelius in his suggestively titled Diatribae scholasticae (1643).85 As Hobbes does in chapter XLVI of Leviathan, these orations commonly begin by discussing the question of the antiquity of the schools of learning.86 Several writers trace this history back beyond the Greeks to the schools of the Jews in the Old Testament. Hobbes too does this in Leviathan, although he is perhaps at slightly greater pains than his sources to point out that the Jewish schools did not teach philosophy, but law.87 The authors of these orations then commonly turn to praise the necessity of the schools, sometimes noting – as Alsted does – that knowledge of the arts and sciences is what separates social men from isolated beasts.88 But if these orations agree in regarding the schools as necessary, they are even more emphatic about their usefulness (utilitas).89 The schools are said to be useful because of the benefits that each of the disciplines they teach bring to human life. Indeed, to make this point, authors often ran through each of the disciplines taught in the schools – from grammar, logic and rhetoric, through moral and natural philosophy, to medicine, law and divinity – praising the profit that each of them brings.90 We are also told by these authors that the schools are useful because of the political function that we have already heard about. They are there to send forth ‘learned, wise, excellent, and erudite men’ for the ministry of the church and the governance of the commonwealth.91 For Calvinist authors such as Alsted and Althusius, the schools were above all useful in 85

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Himmel, Idea, 2. Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1505, 1544. Theodorus Schrevelius, Diatribae scholasticae sive orationes (Leiden, 1643), 15 (antiquity), 24 (necessity) and 26 (utility of the schools). On Alsted as a follower of Althusius, see H. Hotson, ‘The Conservative Face of Contractual Theory: The Monarchomach Servants of the Court of Nassau-Dillenburg’, in Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld, 251–89, at 255 and n. 18. Petrus Kirstenius, ‘Oratio de origine, successione, propagatione et perfectione scholarum’, in Johannes Scholtzius and Petrus Kirstenius, Orationes duae introductoriae in gymnasio Wratislaviensium (Breslau, 1650), esp. sigs. E3r–F2r; Georgius Stampelius, Historia scholastica (Lubeck, 1616); Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1525. Althusius’s ‘Oratio’ treats the utilitas and necessitas of the schools (970–85) before turning to their antiquitas (985–1003). See also Lawson, Politica, 247; Rudolphus Hospinianus, De templis (Zu¨rich, 1603), 413–35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 369. On the history of Jewish schools see also Thomas Goodwin, Moses and Aaron (5th edn, London, 1634), 81–3. Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1544. See esp. Schrevelius, Diatribae scholasticae, 26. See Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 43–70; Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 971–5. Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 979: ‘Ex scholis homines docti, sapientes, excellentes & eruditi sumuntur ad ministerium Ecclesiae & ad Reip. Gubernationem.’

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that they provided remedies for the intellectual defects that humans had acquired by the Fall.92 One retiring rector even allowed himself to develop the happy thought that life in the university was comparable to that in paradise.93 But the comparison with heaven was also matched by the invocation of hell. According to Althusius, the loss of the schools would lead to ‘atheism, Epicureanism, and the kingdom of darkness’.94 I trust that by this account the nature of Hobbes’s attack in this chapter of Leviathan has come into sharper focus. Where it had been conventional to praise the antiquity of the schools, he does so – although he ascribes their origin not to God, but to wealth and leisure. But where, by contrast, it had been conventional to praise the necessity of the schools, Hobbes suggests that they have only encouraged sedition, and fatally confused philosophy and theology.95 And where, above all, it had been conventional to praise the usefulness of the schools to the commonwealth, Hobbes asks simply what their utility has been, and asserts that their learning has been ignorant, captious, absurd and unprofitable. Finally, where it had been conventional to suggest that without the schools society would lapse into the kingdom of darkness, Hobbes suggests that they have already been instrumental in bringing it to pass. In short, I believe that we should regard chapter XLVI of Leviathan as a deliberately parodic inversion of many conventional sentiments about the value of the schools in general, and in particular about their antiquity and utility. In fact, I find the structural similarities to be so close that I think we must conclude that Hobbes had the Presbyterian Althusius or one of his imitators, such as Schrevelius, directly in his sights. V

The ambiguous religious politics of Hobbes’s attack on the universities, which confused both his contemporary and some of his more modern readers, was therefore clearly deliberately studied. Hobbes’s parody of a cherished genre of the Protestant schools helps make clearer that they were included in his ostensible critique of the Roman Catholic ones. For the 92

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Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 970–1. On the implications of this point, see H. Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000), 66–73. Johannes Scholtzius, ‘Oratio de allegorica comparatione Paradysi et scholarum’, in Scholtzius and Kirstenius, Orationes duae, sigs. A4v–C4r, esp. sig. C2r. Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 985: ‘atheismus, epicureismus, & regnum tenebrarum’. Compare N. Jolley, ‘The Relation between Theology and Philosophy’, in Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. II, 363–92, at 366.

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Aristotelians of the so-called ‘second Reformation’ there was no inherent conflict between philosophy and theology.96 Moreover, this message had been thoroughly well received in pre-civil war Oxford, where a number of their writings were reprinted. Among these writings were Christoph Scheibler’s defence of the use of philosophy in theology, edited by Thomas Barlow in 1637,97 and the Scottish loyalist Robert Baron’s Philosophia theologia ancillans (1621), which was reprinted at Oxford in 1641.98 When Hobbes accused Roman Catholic universities of treating philosophy as the handmaid of religion he also expected his readers to recall Protestant assertions to exactly the same effect. His suggestion that the universities pursued philosophy simply as an ancillary pursuit to religion was an attack on a subordinate and – in Hobbes’s view – seditious conception of philosophy common to universities on both sides of the confessional divide. Hobbes’s use of the present tense in Leviathan – his claim that philosophy ‘hath’ no place than as a handmaid to the Roman religion – particularly provoked his antagonists at Oxford in the 1650s. It is well known that one of the earlier responses to Leviathan came in the course of Seth Ward’s Vindiciae academiarum (1654), a book principally directed against John Webster, but with appendices taking on both William Dell – the anti-scholastic army chaplain who had found himself within the gates as Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge – and also Hobbes.99 This book helped to draw Hobbes in the 1650s into a quarrel – its recent historian has justly called it a war – with both Ward, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and with Ward’s colleague John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry.100 Ward found Hobbes’s suggestion that the philosophy pursued in the English universities was somehow ancillary to Roman Catholicism ‘so Barbarous an Assertion’ that nothing but the 96

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H. Schilling, ‘The Second Reformation: Problems and Issues’, in Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 247– 301, esp. 276, 297–9. See also Bartholomew Keckermann, ‘De pugna philosophiae et theologiae’ in Opera omnia (2 vols., Geneva, 1614), vol. I, cols. 68–74. Christoph Scheibler, ‘De usu philosophiae in theologia, & praetensa ejus ad theologiam contrarietate’, prefacing his Metaphysica (Oxford, 1637), 1–21. Robert Baron, Philosophia theologia ancillans (St Andrews, 1621; repr. Oxford, 1641, 1658), esp. 320–3 on the value of all the parts of philosophy to theology. On Ward’s Vindiciae, see A. G. Debus, Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: The Webster–Ward Debate (London: Macdonald, 1970), 33–56; J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), 206–33. D. M. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 293–339. See also P. Beeley and C. J. Scriba, eds., The Correspondence of John Wallis (1616–1703), vol. I: 1641–1659 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148, 187, 539.

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reverence owing to the already old man’s ‘Grey Haires’ restrained Ward ‘from speaking bluntly of him’. In his response – the Six lessons to the professors of the mathematiques (1656) – Hobbes claimed, with a rather contrived pique, that the present tense was simply a printer’s error or a slip of the pen: no one could believe that ‘after fifty years being acquainted with what was publicquely profest and practised in Oxford and Cambridge, I knew not what Religion they were of ’. This retraction in turn provoked Seth Ward into one of the more laboured jokes in the burlesque appendix to his In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (1656): punning on the Latin word tempus (both ‘time’ and ‘tense’), Ward exclaimed: ‘as if the whole controversy were not about tempus. O Tempora! o Mores! ’101 The provocation that Hobbes received from Ward and Wallis provoked him, in the Six lessons, into making explicit the implications of his argument that philosophy had been corrupted by theology in all spheres of human knowledge. The suggestion that he made was one that in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth century was still scarcely thinkable: that university education should cease to be in the hands of the clergy. ‘How would you have exclaimed’, he wrote, ‘if instead of recommending my Leviathan to be taught in the Universities, I had recommended the erecting of a New and Lay-University, wherein Lay-men should have the reading of Physiques, Mathematicks, Morall Philosophy, and Politicks, as the Clergy now have the sole teaching of Divinity?102 The dangerous force of this suggestion is indicated by the fact that after the founding of the Royal Society, early in the Restoration, one of the principal charges the fledgling and somewhat insecure institution felt it necessary to rebut was that it offered a threat to the functions and privileges of the universities.103 Yet it would be wrong to imagine that the intemperate nature of the Six lessons may give the impression that Hobbes had burnt his last boat with the universities. In fact it preceded a bid on his part, concerted by his young Oxford correspondent Henry Stubbe, to gain the favour of a number of people in a position of authority at Oxford.104 Hobbes sent 101

102 103

104

[Ward], Vindiciae academiarum, 58. Hobbes, Six lessons, 61. Ward, Exercitatio epistolica, 358: ‘quasi de Tempore non foret, omnis controversia, o Tempora! o Mores! ’ Hobbes, Six lessons, 60. Thomas Sprat, The history of the Royal-Society of London (London, 1667), 323–9. For the charge, see Anthony Wood, ‘Henry Stubbe’, in Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols., London: J. Rivington, 1813–20), vol. III, col. 1071. See also J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22.

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a copy of the English translation of De corpore (including the Six lessons) to Bodley’s Librarian, Thomas Barlow, with a conciliatory letter.105 He also cooked up with Stubbe a plan to praise Oxford in a way that would reflect well upon its vice-chancellor.106 This was Cromwell’s ecclesiastical righthand man, the Independent John Owen, whose attempts to reform the university were running into increasing difficulties at the time.107 In this piece of praise, published in Markes of the absurd geometry . . . of John Wallis (1657), Hobbes went so far as to call Oxford and Cambridge ‘the greatest and Noblest means of advancing learning of all kinds’.108 Hobbes’s rather unexpected praise of Oxford here can be seen as part of a longer-term campaign to encourage the claims of independency over those of Presbyterianism. It seems possible that Hobbes might have genuinely regarded England in the middle years of the 1650s as actually responding to his call for the subordination of ecclesiastical to civil power. Hobbes had ended Leviathan with a remarkable praise of Independency as ‘perhaps the best’ form of church government,109 and now Oxford was in the hands of England’s most prominent Independent, John Owen. Moreover, Owen was known to act with Cromwell’s authority, and was regarded by Stubbe as being hostile to Wallis (and also indifferent to Seth Ward).110 The controversy over the two commissions set up in 1654 for the Approbation of Godly Ministers (the ‘Triers’) and the Ejection of Scandalous Ministers (‘Ejectors’) – which Hobbes clearly alludes to in the Six lessons as a ‘Competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civill power’ that ‘hath manifestly enough appeared very lately’ – had been resolved in favour of the Commonwealth’s right to control the clergy and against the claims of classical Presbyterianism.111 Yet it was in this context that Wallis had published his claim that ministers of the gospel had been enjoined to their office by Christ – and not by the civil power.112 It was this claim that provoked Hobbes’s first absolutely explicit attack on 105 106 107

108

109

110 111

112

Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 420–2. Ibid., 384; N. Malcolm, ‘Biographical Register’, in Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. II, 900. B. Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV: SeventeenthCentury Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 733–72, at 744–6. Thomas Hobbes, Markes of the absurd geometry, rural language, Scottish church-politicks, and barbarismes of John Wallis (London, 1657), 19. Hobbes, Leviathan, 385. On Hobbes’s sympathy for independency see J. R. Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes’, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 217–31, at 227–8. J. P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and independency’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 56 (2004), 155–73, disagrees. Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 384. Hobbes, Six lessons, 60. J. R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87 (2002), 18–40. John Wallis, Mens sobria serio commendata (Oxford, 1657), 136.

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Presbyterian – or, as he put it, ‘Scottish’ – church politics. To be sure, a deliberately thinly veiled warning about the presbyterian claim to ‘have a Power . . . distinct from that of the Civill State’ had ended the final chapter of Leviathan,113 but in comparison with the vehement assault levelled against Presbyterians in Behemoth,114 his comments in Leviathan are in fact strikingly cautious. Presbyterianism is mentioned explicitly on only four occasions in the printed Leviathan, in each case rather guardedly and with only the last notice being directly related to England.115 This is one explanation for why the attack on Presbyterian histories of the schools that has been identified here should have been pursued indirectly, through parody. Yet as Henry Stubbe reported to Hobbes, it was Presbyterian antipathy towards him that prevented anyone in Oxford acknowledging his overtures.116 Owen, too, was perhaps rather less well disposed towards Hobbes than Stubbe would have liked Hobbes to think, and he continued to work together with Wallis in the university.117 After this missed step Hobbes would increasingly yoke Presbyterianism with the classical republican doctrines of the ‘democratical gentlemen’ when he attacked the seditious doctrines taught in the universities. VI

For if Hobbes’s attitude to the English universities thawed briefly in 1656–7, a deep and bitter frost set in with the Restoration. At several points in his later writings, Hobbes sharpened and developed his charge that the universities had been fundamentally to blame for the civil wars in England. Moreover, he continued to believe – if anything with increased conviction – that they posed a serious threat to peace in the commonwealth. Hence Hobbes used the opportunity presented by the translation of Leviathan into Latin in 1668 to make his attack on the universities more explicit. Where, for instance, he asks in his modified account of sovereign 113 114

115

116 117

Hobbes, Leviathan, 387. On this attack see A. P. Martinich, ‘Presbyterians in Behemoth’, Filozofski vestnik 24 (2003), 121–38, who wishes to argue that Hobbes’s account is ‘wrong’. Hobbes, Leviathan, 335, 341, 382, 385. There is a further reference to English Presbyterians in the scribal copy that Hobbes presented to Charles II: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 127, n. 1. Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 449. J. Rampelt, ‘Distinctions of Reason and Reasonable Distinctions: The Academic Life of John Wallis’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005), 179–85.

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duty in chapter XXX, did the seditious preachers who incited the people against Charles I obtain their authority? From the universities.118 He also sharpens his account of the essential function of the universities as formers of opinion. This point appears at the very end of the new conclusion he wrote for the final chapter of the Latin version. The ‘democratic ink’, he wrote there, ‘must be erased by preaching, writing and disputing. I cannot conceive that that can be done in any other way than through the Universities.’119 Nonetheless, it was in the dialogic history of the civil wars that Hobbes entitled Behemoth that his assault on the universities reached its most vehement heights – and caused him to depart most strikingly from the chronicle by James Heath that formed his source.120 The end of the first dialogue of Behemoth, in fact, constitutes a sustained assault on the role of the universities. Hobbes asserts there that ‘the coar of Rebellion, as you haue seen by this, and read of other Rebellions, are the Uniuersities’.121 (It is worth emphasising the scope of Hobbes’s attack here: he does not just have England in mind. We are possibly intended to think as well of the Low Countries, and the founding of the University of Leiden in particular, as a means of furthering the aims of the Dutch Revolt.122) Even this, however, is not Hobbes’s strongest charge: for that, he resorted to an epic simile: ‘The Uniuersities haue been to this Nation, as the woodden horse to the Troians.’123 Why have they been so dangerous? Again we encounter a development in Hobbes’s account, but by now not an unexpected one. The Presbyterian clergy are now for the first time explicitly joined to the ‘democratical gentleman’ as the joint instigators of the civil wars. Both had their opinions formed in the schools. The most immediate consequence of the hardening of Hobbes’s views was that he became increasingly explicit about calling for university reform. Despite their deep complicity in rebellion, the universities were still not to be wholly rejected. As he added to the Latin Leviathan, ‘before 118

119

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121 122

123

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Opera philosophica, quae latine scripsit, omnia (2 vols. Amsterdam, 1668) (henceforth cited as ‘Latin Leviathan’), vol. II, 161. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, 180. Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 327: ‘Itaque atramentum illud Democraticum, praedicando, scribendo, disputando eluendum est. Id qui aliter fieri possit, nisi ab Universitatibus, non intelligo.’ P. Seaward, ‘Chief of the Ways of God: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes’, Filozofski vestnik 24 (2003), 169–88, at 174, 183, 188. St John’s MS 13, fol. 28r. J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 569. St John’s MS 13, fol. 19v.

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everything else they must be reformed’.124 This was a note he struck repeatedly in Behemoth, asserting that the universities ‘are not to be cast away, but to be better disciplin’d’. In fact, he went on, ‘We neuer shall have a lasting peace till the Universities themselues be . . . reformed.’ The consequences of failing to carry through this reform would be dire; so dire, that Hobbes only alludes to them by the means – highly unusual for him – of a direct quotation from the classics: ‘unless the Preachers teach the people better, and our Universities teach those Preachers better, then perhaps mighty Achilles will again be sent to Troy’.125 As well as hardening his criticism of the role of the universities in the civil wars, Hobbes now also develops his long-term historical critique of the schools. The account of the origin and progress of the schools of philosophy in chapter LXVI of the Latin Leviathan is almost entirely rewritten, and it emerges with a notably different character from the English version.126 In the first place, Hobbes largely excises the allusions to a specifically English context. The jokes about the men who gather together in Moorfields or the Exchange, ‘to prate, and loiter’, disappear. The jibe about ‘Aristotelity’ is located in some unspecified past rather than the present. The deliberately contrived confusion – which had proved so contentious – between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant universities in respect of their use of philosophy as the handmaid of theology is also altered. The explanation for this phenomenon is given a much more historical emphasis, and the University of Paris is this time specifically mentioned. In fact, Hobbes’s account of the development of the schools, and their transformation into universities under (according to him) Charlemagne, is given greater historical specificity, and pays more attention to the relationship between philosophy and theology in the early Christian church.127 All these developments are paralleled in a new history of the pope’s design in ‘setting vp Vniuersities’ that Hobbes also gives in the first dialogue of Behemoth.128 How should we explain Hobbes’s shift in emphasis? One answer may lie in his reading of Johann Clu¨ver’s Historiarum totius mundi epitome, 124 125

126 127 128

Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 161: ‘Ante omnia ergo illae reformandae sunt’. St John’s MS 13, fol. 28r; ibid., fol. 28v; see also fol. 27r. Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 323: ‘nisi autem Praedicatores populum, & Vniversitates nostrae Praedicatores ipsos melius doceant, forte Iterum ad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles’ (Virgil, Eclogae, IV. 36). Hobbes justifies having ‘neglected the Ornament of quoting’ in Leviathan, 394–5. See further, Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 453, n. 1; 468, n. 1. Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 314–19. St John’s MS 13, fol. 20r (the quotation is an addition in Hobbes’s own hand to James Wheldon’s scribal copy).

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which similarly ascribes the founding of the first university (academia) in Paris to Charlemagne.129 Another may involve Hobbes’s response to his most dangerous encounter with a newly revived ecclesiastical authority in the Restoration. In 1662 it was rumoured that some bishops in the newly restored Church of England might try, as John Aubrey put it, ‘to have the good old gentleman burn’t for a heretique’; and in 1666 the Commons convened a committee to investigate Leviathan.130 Hobbes’s response to these threats was to pursue some extensive research into the history and legal status of heresy both in England and more generally.131 The fruits of this reading made their way into the Historia ecclesiastica.132 They also appeared in the newly added appendix to the Latin Leviathan,133 and in the late Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the common laws of England (dateable to the period after the Scargill affair in 1669).134 One of the central points in these works is that ‘heresy’ from its Greek origins signifies ‘singularity of Doctrine, or Opinion contrary to the Doctrine of another Man, or Men’, and, consequently, that the positions of the philosophical schools that arose in support of the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Zeno were, in effect, heresies.135 A perhaps unintended consequence of this historical research was that Hobbes felt obliged to develop his initially schematic and parodic account of the history of the schools, and their transformation into universities, into a more thoroughgoing argument about the history of the corruption of theology by philosophy (and vice versa). VII

Hobbes’s quarrel with the schools is, as I have suggested, an interesting and perhaps even an important episode in British as well as in European 129

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132 133 134

135

Johann Clu¨ver, Historiarum totius mundi epitome (6th edn, Leiden, 1657), 413; see more generally P. Springborg, ‘Hobbes and Cluverius’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 1075–8. But the point had been made elsewhere: see Herman Conring, De antiquitatibus academicis dissertationes sex (Helmstedt, 1651), 44, 74–5. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), vol. I, 339. See further P. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14 (1993), 516–21, esp. 521–4, 541–5. Thomas Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, carmine elegiaco concinnata (London, 1688). Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 346–59. A. Cromartie, ‘General Introduction’, to Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England, ed. A. Cromartie, and Questions Relative to Hereditary Right, ed. Q. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), xiii–lxv (at xiv, lviii, lxii–lxv). Hobbes, Dialogue, 92–3; Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 346–7. See further, P. Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Heresy and the Historia ecclesiastica’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 553–71, esp. 558.

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intellectual history. The 1651 Leviathan is, as Robert Payne reported Hobbes’s description of it, ‘Politiques in English’,136 and was explicitly intended for an English audience.137 Yet it is no doubt appropriate that in a chapter that fearlessly takes on the entire philosophical culture of the European universities Hobbes should have been engaging covertly with a body of literature and a political theory asserting the schools’ vital role in the commonwealth which was not itself English. Yet as we have seen, it was a view that had proved attractive in the pre-civil war English universities, and particularly in Oxford. The intellectual culture of the universities in the first half of the seventeenth century was still international (and Latinate) in nature. Yet the second implication precisely concerns the changing place of the schools in the intellectual and political life of the period more generally. Hobbes’s quarrel with the universities was a notable contribution to the death-knell that began to be sounded across Europe from the middle years of the seventeenth century for the unity of the university curriculum in general, and for the fruitful association of philosophy and theology in particular. This conception of unity and association was beginning to come under serious threat in these decades, fatally undermined by a combination of factors.138 These factors include: the growing prevalence of the vernaculars and the consequent increasing insularity of European intellectual cultures; the economic and social depredations of the Thirty Years War; the catastrophic decline in the confidence and reach of the learned book trade that centred around the annual Frankfurt book fair;139 and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the emergence of a range of institutions that competed with the universities.140 These included Jesuit colleges in the Catholic world; non-degree-granting academies such as that of Amsterdam in Protestant states; and the widespread emergence of anti-scholastic learned societies for the promotion of natural, literary and

136 137

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BL, MS Harley 6942, fol. 128v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 13 May [1650]). See Q. Skinner, ‘Introduction: Hobbes’s Career in Philosophy’, in Visions of Politics, vol. III, 1–37, at 19. See further M. Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV, 211– 357, esp. 218–42; R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Introduction’, to Meric Casaubon, Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar (Cambridge: RTM, 1999), 1–65. I. Maclean, ‘The Market for Scholarly Books and Conceptions of Genre in Europe, 1570–1630’, in Die Renaissance im Blick der Nationen Europas, ed. G. Kauffmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 17–31. P. F. Grendler, ‘The Universities of the Renaissance and Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004), 1–42, esp. 23–8.

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historical knowledge – such as the Royal Society, which Hobbes was never asked to join.141 These institutions, which were new and lay universities in their way, presented challenges to the existing European universities that they often failed to meet. Neither Hobbes himself nor the persona he had created was welcome in such institutions. But his attacks on the schools would become a powerful temptation for future philosophers to ignore their place in the history of European knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

141

R. Hahn, ‘The Age of Academies’, in Solomon’s House Revisited: The Organization and Institutionalization of Science, ed. Tore Fra¨ngsmyr (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1990), 3–13.

CHAPTER

6

The judicial persona in historical context: the case of Matthew Hale 497314

David Saunders

I

The persona of the jurist has a rich normative history, particularly in stories of God as the judge or the judge as God. Lowering our sights to the human forum, however, brings into view an attribute of the judicial persona – impartiality in adjudication – that is less a divine gift than an ethical capacity, laboriously acquired and unevenly distributed. To describe the history of the judicial persona, however, we need to consider a further dimension: the neutrality of the entire legal system within which that persona works. For its exercise, the office of judge presumes a jurisdiction, that is, a delimited ambit of adjudication that is inseparable from a definite historical scene and political setting. In an early modern scene scarred by confessional conflict, territorial state-building relied on two essential juridical activities: legislation and adjudication. Temporal jurisdictions emerged as boundaries were drawn between state and church, between civil laws and the powers of the papacy. Legal officers – jurists and judges – were at the epicentre of profound disputes over where to draw the boundaries, as territorial states sought to separate their administration from trans-territorial powers of church and empire. It was a question of fixing the locus and character of a power of final determination. Given territorial variations in religious, political and legal conditions, there was no one model or right answer. Any consideration of the judicial persona within its early modern setting therefore dictates an approach that is relativising, comparative and jurisdictionally specific. The attribute of impartiality in adjudication and the application of the law cannot be separated from the jurisdictional contexts of its exercise. In early modern Europe, some legal systems were more neutral with respect to religious norms; others that treated heresy, blasphemy and witchcraft as crimes less so. In the case of the latter – typically systems in which 140

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Romano-canon law formed a large part of the temporal jurisdiction – the conduct of a judge could still be impartial in the sense of faithfully applying existing law, even if the law itself was not neutral or indifferent to the question of true religion. In the case of a jurisdiction that was independent of religious norms, judicial impartiality would on the contrary reflect the religious neutrality of the legal system itself. Put in these ideal-typical terms, the contrast is no doubt too schematic. It serves, nonetheless, to underscore a fact: the character and content of what counted as judicial impartiality were contingent on the jurisdictional context of adjudication. This chapter begins by tracing the persona of a particular common-law judge, Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), viewed in the religious and political context of an emerging Anglican settlement. Having served on the Common Bench under Cromwell, Hale returned to office under Charles II as Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer (1660–71) and as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench (1671–6). Some comparisons will then be drawn with French and German settings. Though brief, especially with respect to Germany, these comparisons precede a return to the English scene and Hale’s Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe. The judge’s intervention in the Hobbesian polemic is considered in light of my principal theme: the judicial persona that was fashioned within the habitus of a common-law jurisdiction. II

Judicial impartiality is not an unconditional, free-floating capacity. What the judge is impartial towards depends on the orientation of the legal system more generally towards or away from neutrality with respect to religious criteria. It is such conditions – peculiar to the contingencies of a nation’s religious and political history – that orient the exercise of an ethical capacity, impartiality, attaching to the judicial persona. If, in early modern England, legal judgments were made on religious matters such as blasphemy and witchcraft, the character of these judgments was symptomatic of a legal system operating within a political state containing an established national church. The initial task, then, is to explore the interactions of the judicial persona with the history of the jurisdiction in which it came to operate. Conjoined instrumentally with the political programme of the Tudors, the English common-law system had distanced itself from rival canonist and papal jurisdictions. The schism with Rome curbed ecclesiastical

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jurisdiction from outside the prince’s territory, creating space for a native English law, the classic publicist of which was the Henrician jurist, Christopher St German. Disallowing any claim to independent powers in the territory of the English crown by a papal or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, St German advanced a position that was ‘radical and indeed Marsiglian’: that ‘all coercive and jurisdictional power . . . must be vested in the supremacy of the common law and all legislative authority in the sovereignty of the King in Parliament’.1 A tradition was being constructed that allowed the common law to assert a jurisdictional autonomy with respect to ecclesiastical authority and the spiritual courts. Imagery changed too, in the same direction. In the fifteenth century, English lawyers had been associated with the figure of the priest. A century later, no doubt thanks to humanistic modes of thought, a different figure of comparison had emerged: the Roman iuris prudente or iuris consulti. By the mid-1600s, the persona of the lawyer had thus acquired a distinctively secular model.2 Symptomatic of this shift in figuration is Matthew Hale’s commitment to translate Cornelius Nepos’s life of Pomponius Atticus, the Roman Stoic renowned for his ‘political neutrality by living through the Roman revolution on terms of friendship with all the major antagonists’.3 In this humanist undertaking, it is not too difficult to see Hale’s concern with techniques for achieving impartiality in adjudication, in times of civil conflict. As to his own religion, Hale stood on the side of Puritan piety coloured by a conviction of post-lapsarian humanity’s limited capacities, a conviction material to the cultivation of a specific religious persona. Hale shared the ‘awareness that only so much is possible within the structures provided by a working Christian’s place and opportunity; that nature is only impressible, never transformable by grace’.4 Viewing worldly life from this theological perspective, Hale could accept coercive laws as the more necessary to regulate dangerous religious impulsions in circumstances where ‘the concerns of religion and the civil state are so twisted one with another that confusion and disorder and anarchy in the former must of

1

2

3

4

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 58. Such shifts in personae are only one aspect of the complex phenomenon of legal secularisation. Unlike England with its Inns of Court, some countries lacked their own institutions of legal formation. In these circumstances, jurists travelled abroad to train in the canon law. Charles M. Gray (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Sir Matthew Hale. The History of the Common Law of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xiii–xiv. Gray, ‘Introduction’, xvi.

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necessity introduce confusion and dissolution of the latter’.5 At risk from spiritual enthusiasts was temporal order: ‘he that today pretends an inspiration or a divine impulse to disturb a minister in his sermon tomorrow may pretend another inspiration to take away his goods or his life’.6 Hale was as eminently clear on the public dangers of religion as on the civil benefits of law. Hale took literate steps towards impartiality in his judicial work, compiling a corpus of some eighteen rules governing a non-prejudicial adjudication. Like his devotional writings, these statements of judicial self-resolve were for Hale’s private reflection, not for publication. As guidelines for a desired persona, they might be termed an exercise of spirit, but for juridical purposes: that ‘in the execution of justice, I carefully lay aside my own passions, and not give way to them however provoked’. The concern is that the judge should deviate as little as possible from an ideal of dispassionate adjudication. Another resolution recognises the difficulty of judging impartially when personal religion was at issue: that ‘I be not too rigid in matters conscientious, where all harm is diversity of judgement’.7 It was a professional regimen for a judicial persona ideally capable of detachment and impartial judgment. Hence the further rules: that ‘I never engage myself in the beginning of any cause, but reserve myself unprejudiced till the whole be heard’ and that ‘in business capital, though my nature prompts me to pity, yet to consider that there is also pity due the country’.8 To formulate a rule is one thing; to hold to that rule is another. It is therefore notable that in 1668, while on the autumn circuit in the eastern counties, Hale reiterated his resolutions on moderation and his rules on dispassionate adjudication in a sixteen-page diary, superscribed with seventeen biblical citations in the spirit of Leviticus 19:15: ‘Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, thou shalt not respect [i.e. give particular favour to] the person of the poor nor honour the person of the mighty, but in righteousness shalt thou judge they neighbour.’9 The diary opens 5

6 7

8 9

Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3497, 26, in Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale (1606–1676). Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177. Ibid. These guidelines for judicial conduct, formulated in the years after Hale’s appointment as Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1654, were published in Sollom Emlyn’s ‘Preface’ to his 1736 edition of Hale’s Historia placitorum coronae. They are also cited in Edmund Heward, Matthew Hale (London: Robert Hale, 1972), 67. Heward, Matthew Hale. The diary is in the Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Its contents are published in Maija Jansson, ‘Matthew Hale on Judges and Judging’, Journal of Legal History 9 (1988), 201–13.

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with twelve observations that move from the necessity of the office of judge to the impossibility of final certitude in an earthly justice, God alone being all-knowing. With this framework in place, Hale then proceeds to identify nine attributes that ‘become a man of such employment’ as the judge. Then, on 6 September 1668, at Huntingdon, Hale records a providential event: a day of sickness that coincided with the day of rest, such that ‘relaxation from business has given me a hope and expectation of the declination of my distemper before I come to the business of the following day’.10 As things turned out, he then moved to Bury St Edmunds. Here, as he records on the thirteenth day of the month: ‘I found a jail filled with malefactors of the greatest kind: four murders, willful burning, theft. Some whereof were yesterday convicted, the rest reserved for trial tomorrow. So that, although I met with some offences, even of the highest nature, yet they equalled not the number of this one place.’11 This superlative horror does not go to waste in Hale’s ethical economy, serving as motivation for five final reflections on the activity of judging.12 It is worth considering the sixteen pages of this diary in more detail. The opening disposition is almost morose. As a ‘business that requires an entire absence of affection and passion which will easily occasion a wresting [i.e. a twisting] of judgment’, the judge’s office is onerous. This is not only because no man ‘in his right judgment should desire it or not desire to decline and be delivered from it’, but also because ‘it requires a mind constantly awed with the fear of almighty God and sense of His presence’.13 Thus ‘knowledge, memory and judgment of the laws whereby he is to judge’14 are necessary but not sufficient for a proper exercise of the judicial office. Impartiality is demanded, yet it remains elusive: ‘It is a business wherein a man shall be sure to displease some and many times all parties, and let him be never so justly yet he shall never escape the imputation of partiality and unjustice from some party.’15 That God is the ultimate arbiter is not in doubt, but this certainty of itself only intensifies the sheer difficulty of adjudicating ‘justly’, since the earthly judge cannot know for sure that ‘he do not either wilfully or by any gross neglect pervert that judgment wherein he does or should act as almighty God’s substitute’.16 10

11 Ibid., 208. Ibid., 209. In fact, Hale includes two sections numbered ‘2’, and so the diary ends with the ‘fourth’ of these reflections. 13 Jansson, ‘Matthew Hale’, 205. 14 15 16 Ibid., 205–6. Ibid., 206. Ibid. 12

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From this context of judging, Hale then derives a list of nine attributes appropriate to the persona of the judge. Along with the predictably generic invocations of modesty and piety, other attributes are more specific to the judicial office: 1. 5. That since [judging] is a business of that importance and yet difficulty a man may be careful to keep a temperate body, with great abstinence and moderation in eating and drinking, and a temperate mind totally abandoning all manner of passion, affection, and perturbation that so he may come to the business with clearness of understanding and judgment. 2. 6. That a man avoid all such temptations as may be an occasion of perverting his judgment, as solicitations, prepossessions, gifts, kindnesses, addresses for or against any cause or person. 3. 7. That he avoid all precipitancy and haste in examining, censuring, judging, pause and consider, turn every stone, weigh every question, every answer, every circumstance, follow the wise direction of Moses in a case of importance to inquire, ask, diligently inquire, behold if it be true and the thing be certain; all the senses, all the methods of disquisition are little enough in cases of great moment or difficulty, especially where a man can err but once.17

Cases arise where innocence and guilt, absolution and conviction, are evenly balanced. Now the convergence of bodily and mental disciplines with the technical demands of judging according to the norms of the English law does not resolve the dilemma of convicting the innocent or acquitting the guilty. Hale’s stance is unequivocal: ‘I had rather through ignorance of the truth of the fact or the unevidence of it acquit ten guilty persons than condemn one innocent.’18 But a caveat applies to this clear course of action. It concerns impartiality: ‘this must be intended where upon a sincere, judicious, impartial, inquiry the evidence is inevident, not where a man out of partiality or vain pity will render use to himself to ease himself of doing justice upon a malefactor’.19 The five reflections that complete Hale’s diary were composed midway through his duties at Bury St Edmunds where, as he records, he found a ‘jail filled with malefactors of the greatest kind’. In the first, he resolves to be ‘justly severe’ in punishing those guilty of bloodshed, even though his nature ‘inclines me much to compassion and lenity’. In the second reflection, Hale turns to the issue of impartiality in judgment: ‘[W]hile I exercise my office as a judge in punishment of the offense, yet I may not forget that common humanity that is fit to be shown to the offenders and, 17

Ibid., 207.

18

Ibid., 208.

19

Ibid.

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therefore, ever to avoid insolence, intemperance, or uneveness and unequality of mind or deportment in what I do herein.’20 Recognition of a ‘common humanity’ raises the question of what it is that enables the judge to judge. If judge and malefactors have the ‘same passions and lusts and corruptions’, what is it that has differentiated these persons? The answer is part providential and part pedagogic: [I]f [these passions] have not broken out in the same disorders, it is the goodness and the bounty of God that has prevented it either by the advantage of that education His providence has given me above them or by snatching, as it were, from me those apurtenances that my own lusts, passions and corruptions would have made use of to discover themselves by diverting or abating those temptations which might or did befall me.21

Yet, the exercise of judicial duty within the orbit of this life confronts an unavoidable dilemma: I have ever accounted the office of a judge the most difficult in the world for, on the one side it is impossible to find any person in the world but he has his sins and corruptions about him, though possibly restrained from actual exorbitances and, on the other side, there are many great offenses and exorbitances in the world that if they were not restrained and punished the world would come to confusion.22

The conclusion is immediate and stark: ‘of necessity, therefore, a human judge must be’. We are left in no doubt why the persona of Hale’s judge – for all his piety – cannot be purely other-worldly. Hale’s rules and resolutions on the activity of judging are far from being unremarkable. Despite a full acceptance that the earthly judge must work at God’s direction, at their heart is an incipient separation of personae: an impartial adjudication as is ‘due the country’ can – or, given contemporary circumstances, must – be something other than the pious faith that the believer owes to God. Such a separation is articulated in the final paragraph of Hale’s diary: Yet as I am a judge I am a person trusted, trusted by God as the avenger of offenses committed against Him so far forth as my prince’s commission extends, trusted by my prince forth for himself, and for the community, as a public avenger of injuries committed against him, his laws, and subjects, trusted by the community and society of men among whom I am to exercise this office.23 20

21 Ibid., 209. Ibid. Ibid., 210. Hale’s closing words in the diary are these: ‘The hearts of the children of men are fully set to do evil.’ Ibid., 212. 23 Ibid., 211. 22

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The malefactors are to be punished because they threaten the civil order. As such, their actions are not treated as an individual sin to be addressed by a canonical notion of punishment as penance. Once again, in accounting this task of the ‘public avenger’ that straddles divine and civil forms of trust, Hale signals the fact of impartial office and impersonal judgment. If ‘I am obliged to execute the laws with which I am trusted’, this is ‘because the interest in the punishment of these offences is in truth, not mine but others’’. To mark out a space of separation between the civil and the divine was quite compatible with the Protestant doctrine that fallen man’s imperfect capacities rendered spurious any human claim to know God’s will or – by extension – to construe such ‘knowledge’ as law. With this space of separation established, Hale could draw a line against granting supremacy in civil matters to inner conscience, since this would ‘utterly enervate all the power of [the] magistrate, for [conscience] sets up in every particular subject a tribunal superior to that of the magistrate’.24 The danger was double: not only would civil peace be threatened by those who claim to act in the name of an authority higher than the law of the civil sovereign; but also – as indicated by Hale’s statement that ‘all harm is the diversity of judgement’ – civil conflict was rendered the more likely because in circumstances of religious division no consensus was possible as to what the reasons and demands of the higher authority actually were. On church ceremonies as dangerously divergent expressions of the religious impulse, Hale’s disposition was therefore latitudinarian: It is pitiful to see men make these mistakes . . . one holding a great part of religion in pulling off the hat, and bowing at the name of Jesus; another judging a man an idolater for it; and a third placing his religion in putting off his hat to no one; and so like a company of boys that blow bubbles out of a walnut shell shall every one run after his bubble and call it religion.25

Did this cool view of religious sectarians as blind to seeing others’ ‘mistakes’ as adiaphora, or things indifferent, carry over into Hale’s adjudication of ‘offences’ against the religious codes of an established national church? Were acts related to religion – heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft – properly justiciable in the secular courts of law in circumstances where the Church of England was integral to the sovereign government? As Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench, Hale could 24 25

Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3507, 32, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 181. Matthew Hale, in Heward, Matthew Hale, 127.

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scarcely avoid this jurisdictional issue, as when the spirit had moved a man to tell the world that ‘Christ is a whoremaster, and religion is a cheat and [Protestant] profession a cloak, and all cheats, all are mine, and I am a King’s son and fear neither God, devil nor man’.26 Hale had no hesitation. This blasphemy – with its almost textbook terminology – was beyond question a matter for the civil laws of England: [S]uch Kind of wicked blasphemous words were not only an Offence to God and Religion, but a Crime against the Laws, State and Government, and therefore punishable in this Court. For us to say, religion is a Cheat, is to dissolve all those Obligations whereby Civil Societies are preserved, and that Christianity is Parcel of the Laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian Religion is to speak in Subversion of the Law.27

Such was the sure discourse of law in a state that remained confessional even if the established religion was latitudinarian. Fourteen years earlier, in 1662, Hale had conducted the trial for witchcraft of two East Anglian women at Bury St Edmunds.28 For bewitching girls whom they were found to have caused to vomit more than forty ‘crooked pins and one time a two-penny nail with a very broad head’, he sentenced the women to death by hanging. The secular law, by its action, furnished the sanction for a religious offence.29 At this juncture between the two personae – that of impartial judge and that of pious believer – something like a short-circuit occurred. It indicates both enduring adjacency and incipient separation. In a devotional essay composed on the eve of the execution, Hale sought to satisfy his conscience that the civil penalty for proven witchcraft was just, since ‘the instrument, without which [the devil] cannot ordinarily work, is within the reach of human justice and government’.30 Flowing

26

R. v. Taylor, 3 Keble 607 (1676), 84 E.R. 906. Taylor’s Case, 1 Ventris 293 (1676), 86 E.R. 189. The defendant was fined ‘1000 mark, imprisonment until securities for good behaviour for life, and pillory at Gilford [Guildford] where the words were spoken, and at Westminster, Cheapside and Exchange, with a paper for horrid blasphemy, tending to subvert all government’. 84 E.R. 914. 28 See ‘A Trial of Witches’, in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours, vol. VI (1809), 687–702 (hereinafter State Trials). 29 Gilbert Geis, ‘Lord Hale, Witches and Rape’, British Journal of Law and Society 5 (1978), 26–44, treats the 1662 trial and verdict in psycho-historical terms of a ‘misogynistic bias’ on the part of Hale and the common law regarding witchcraft and rape. The relation of law and religion in the times of confessional conflict is not mentioned. To discuss witchcraft without referring to religion is like discussing rape without referring to men. 30 Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3506, fol. 114, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 238. Printed as ‘Concerning the great mercy of God in preserving us from the power and malice of evil angels’, in A collection 27

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from an act of spiritual self-examination, this opinion sustained the advice he gave to the jury: that the existence of witchcraft and laws against it were affirmed in scripture, in the laws of other nations and in the laws of England ‘as appears by that Act of Parliament which hath provided punishments proportionable to the quality of the offence’.31 The judge had therefore applied the law impartially. Yet, to the extent that English law remained bound to a religious norm, Hale’s conduct of judicial office in the 1662 witchcraft trial – as in the 1676 blasphemy case – was not neutral in the sense of rendering judgments that were detached from religious criteria. He had asserted his belief to the 1662 jury: ‘That there are such creatures as witches I make no doubt at all . . . The Scriptures have affirmed so much’.32 For this judge, the existence of satanic spirits was indubitable and the precepts of scripture carried probative force. In these times, for the judge as much as for the jury and the larger population, magic and enchantment persisted. They could almost be relied on. As well as the statute book, Hale thus consulted the Bible and his private conscience in order to justify to himself that his legal judgment was correct and – in this sense – impartial. A religious conception of the English law provided him with the confirmation that he sought, allowing him to harmonise his legal decision-making and the religious persona that spoke through the voice of conscience. But in mid-century England was the matter quite so settled? Was there no evidence of a legal system shifting towards neutrality in respect of religious criteria? Was Hale’s own perspective completely static? He had, as already noted, his own concern lest the extra-judicial rule of conscience ‘set up in every particular subject a tribunal superior to that of the magistrate’.33 An even more remarkable thing is this: in the Historia placitorum coronae, the criminal law treatise of which Hale had drafted one of three projected books before his death in 1676, he proposes a different perspective. Here he records that the common law viewed witchcraft – along with ‘fascination’ or enchantment – as among those ‘secret things [that] belong to God’: If a man either by working upon the fancy of another, or possibly by harsh or unkind usage put another into such passion of grief or fear, that the party either of modern relations of matter of fact concerning witches and witchcraft (1693). Remarkably – at least from our incredulous perspective on these things – the bewitched girls ‘within less than half an hour after the witches were convicted, they were all of them restored’. See State Trials, vol. VI, 702. 31 State trials, vol. VI, 700–1. 32 Ibid. 33 Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3507, fol. 32, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 181.

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die suddenly, or contract some disease, whereof he dies, tho as the circumstances of the case may, this may be murder or manslaughter in the sight of God, yet in foro humano it cannot come under the judgment of felony, because no external act of violence was offerd, whereof the common law can take notice, and secret things belong to God.34

A previous certainty regarding the legal status of witchcraft and other ‘irreligious’ acts now appears more in the balance. Now, according to the Hale of the Historia, witchcraft was a matter of belief but not a physical act or felony. As such, though known to inner conscience, the foro divino and to God, witchcraft was not the concern of secular legality. Witchcraft and heresy had stood in the same historical series: ‘Witchcraft, Sortilegium was by the antient laws of England of ecclesiastical cognizance, and upon conviction thereof without abjuration, or relapse after abjuration, was punishable with death by writ de haeretico comburendo.’35 In jurisdictions other than the common law, the ancient error was intensified: [The Papal canonists] have by ample and general terms extended heresy so far, and left so much in the discretion of the ordinary to determine it, that there is scarce any the smallest deviation from them, but it may be reduced to heresy, according to the general generality, latitude, and extent of their definitions and descriptions.36

Hale ends the chapter on religion in Historia placitorum coronae by recording that in the England of Charles II the writ of de haeretico and ‘all capital punishments in pursuance of ecclesiastical censures are utterly abolished and taken away, so that heresy is now punishable only by excommunication . . . the civil effects of which are, that the party is disabled from making a will, or from suing for any debt or legacy’.37 The story is being told so as to disinculpate the common law from complicity with papal instruments of canon law and religious persecution. A major episode of England’s legal history thus resonates through Hale’s account: the sixteenth-century disengagement of the common law from a supra-national papal jurisdiction and a canon law that continued to 34

Matthew Hale, Historia placitorum coronae. The history of the pleas of the crown, vol. I, ed. Sollom Emlyn (London, 1736), 429. In a comparative note, Hale then adds that ‘before the statute of I Jac. cap. 12 witchcraft or fascination was not felony because it wanted [i.e. lacked] a trial, tho some constitutions of the civil law make it penal’. In the Historia placitorum – perhaps curiously, perhaps not – Hale makes no reference to the 1662 trial. 35 Ibid., 383. 36 Ibid., 383–4. ‘Ordinary’ here refers to the officer having immediate jurisdiction in an ecclesiastical court. 37 Ibid., 410.

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transmit the papacy’s separate powers. In his manuscript treatise on the royal prerogative, Hale depicts ecclesiastical laws as lacking binding force ‘till received and by usage incorporated into the laws and customs of the kingdom’.38 The apparatus of reception serves to quash any persisting canon-law endorsement of the papal claim to a separate jurisdiction. Hale was clearly suspicious of the illicit encroachment of ecclesiastical powers through the ‘reverence and respect which the Christian religion got in the hearts of men’: [W]hile in truth the civil right, viz. custom and admission, gave [priests] their power as a civil thing, lest it should be subject to the same power in its dissolution or diminution, they subrogated and interwove into men’s minds a pretence and opinion of a higher right, which did not only propagate the admission of their power, but did also fasten and establish it with the concurrence of a double principle, viz. the true and real civil right and admission, and the pretended and imposed divine authority.39

Whenever the civil magistrate had questioned their ‘higher right’, the ploy of the priests was ‘rather [to] choose to bestow it as a gift than lose its power’. By this device, they ‘would seem to give what they could not hold’. Whatever else might follow from these clerics’ claim dutifully to observe the ‘higher right’, their ‘last devotion was not to the king but the pope’. If by Hale’s time the English legal system was becoming more neutral towards religious matters, this was a symptom of political and religious mutations that were rendering the English state somewhat less confessional than it had been. Yet it had not been a question of an earlier state simply imposing a confessional regime upon a judiciary that had always sought to be free and impartial. Prior to the establishment of Protestant states, civil trial and sanctioning of religious breaches had been the responsibility of lawyers too, canonist and civilian. We are therefore seeing a change internal to the legal sphere itself. III

Comparison of English, French and German circumstances can sharpen the picture of an early modern judicial persona. Raoul van Caenegem, the

38 39

Matthew Hale, Prerogatives of the King, ed. D. E. C. Yale (London: Selden Society, 1976), 143. Ibid., 146.

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Belgian legal historian, has characterised the three jurisdictions in terms of their distinctive protagonists and structures of prestige: respectively, judges, legislators and professors.40 This is memorable enough, but it does not specifically address the English, French and German settings of the judicial persona. The similarities and differences are multiple. If England and France were nations outside an empire, a territorial state such as Brandenburg was fashioned within and against the terms of the German Empire.41 If France and Germany remained predominantly civilian law regimes, in England the common lawyers were succeeding in containing their own civilian rivals within a tightening noose as unpatriotic aliens to the local customs and political interests. If England became a more settled confessional state by the end of the seventeenth century with an established church, and France became one too (under Louis XIV), Brandenburg determined not to be one, preferring a sharp separation of state from church. If seventeenth-century England became a state of mixed constitution, France and Brandenburg went along the absolutist path. In France, however, religious peace was achieved through an enforced Gallican conformity, whereas the Brandenburg state made itself agnostic or indifferent towards the rival truth-claims of the three confessions that the Westphalian treaties of 1648 had recognised as legitimate public bodies. Though the German Peace of Augsburg (1555) is conventionally regarded as ending the first of the European ‘wars of religion’, Nancy Roelker terms sixteenth-century France the ‘crucible of Europe’.42 In this crucible, it was less the case that base matters were purified; rather, unprecedented political devices were implemented and urgent legal moves were improvised in response to conflicts generated by Christian disunion. For thirty-six years from 1562 France was engulfed by confessional 40

‘It is generally known that the English common law is a creation of the royal judges and that the role of professors of law and of theoretical study – “legal science” – has in the course of the centuries been marginal. No contrast could be greater than between this English development and its continental counterpart, for there the impact of “professors’ law” has been of the greatest importance. In fact, it is not too much to say that there are large and important fields of law which were created by continental jurists just as the English common law was the judges’ handiwork.’ Raoul C. van Caenegem, Judges, Legislators and Professors. Chapters in European Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53. 41 See D. Willoweit, ‘The Holy Roman Empire as a Legal System’, in Anthony Padoa-Schioppa (ed.), Legislation and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 123–30. 42 Nancy L. Roelker, One King, One Faith. The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 228. J. M. H. Salmon, Society in Crisis. France in the Sixteenth Century (London: E. Benn, 1975), 13, had previously adopted the same metaphor to characterise the French religious wars as ‘the crucible in which some of the competing

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conflict. By these times, the Reformed religion had some two million adherents in France. The Catholic massacre of Protestants – the Huguenots – on St Bartholomew’s Eve took place in 1572. Each of the eight wars of religion was concluded by an edict of pacification, the peace being brokered by the crown (that is, by Charles IX and Henri III, Catherine de’ Medici and Michel de L’Hospital, Chancellor of France from 1560 to 1568). In January 1562, during the first war of religion, Chancellor L’Hospital had put the crown’s case to an assembled peace ‘colloquium’: The King does not want you to engage in dispute as to which [religious] opinion is the best; for it is not a question of establishing the faith, but of regulating the state. It is possible to be a citizen without being a Christian. Even the excommunicate is nonetheless a citizen. And we can live in peace with those who do not hold to the same opinions.43

This appears, precisely, a ‘one-state’ political solution to the religious discord that had split the realm of France in two. If the sovereignty of the state were absolute and indivisible, an authority would exist capable of granting Protestants and Catholics identical status as citizens, equal before the law. Protestant would then not mean foreign. Pluralising the civil personae to differentiate ‘citizen’ from ‘Christian’ allows L’Hospital to put the point: ‘Even the excommunicate is nonetheless a citizen.’ Such a precept conceives shared citizenship as a supereminent domain, but it also presumes a measure of neutrality in the legal system, and a disengagement of the civil laws from matters of religion. In 1563, L’Hospital thus confronted the parlementaires of Rouen on the occasion of the formal majority of Charles IX with a political fact concerning the limits of their judicial office. Matters of state, he said, did not fall within their jurisdiction. The parlementaires were, he reminded them, judges ‘of the meadow and the field’, that is, of private forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds’. On the French wars and fundamental law, see Martyn P. Thompson, ‘The History of Fundamental Law in Political Thought from the French Wars of Religion to the American Revolution’, American Historical Review (1986), 1103. 43 Michel de L’Hospital, Oeuvres comple`tes de Michel de l’Hospital, vol. I, ed. P. J. S. Dufey (Paris: 1824– 5), 452: ‘Le roy ne veult point que vous entriez en dispute quelle opinion est la meilleure; car il n’est pas icy question de constituenda religione, sed de constituenda republica; et plusieurs peuvent eˆtre cives, qui non erunt christiani. Et peut-on vivre en repos avec ceux, qui sont de diverses opinions.’ 44 Translations can render L’Hospital’s 1563 address in rather plainer terms, but the point remains the same: ‘You are civil judges, not [judges] of life, morals or religion’. Sarah Hanley, The ‘lit de justice’ of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 168. Another rendering of L’Hospital’s admonition is equally plain: ‘Take

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property disputes, ‘but not of life and customs and not of religion’.44 Political action would here seem to create the possibility for a neutral law, housed in a civil order independent of confessionalised norms. Given such a framework, the laws would be administered by a judiciary capable of impartial adjudication. The foregoing depiction of L’Hospital projects the image of a judicial persona with a definite capacity for impartiality. Indeed, given his pacificatory imperative in a bipolar world split between Catholic and Protestant truths and powers, L’Hospital might even appear as claimant to the status of advance legal seculariser a century before Hale’s times, cutting the political-juridical order free from the meshes of religion, separating state from church and decoupling law from confession. Yet, if Denis Crouzet’s recent account of Michel de L’Hospital is granted credence, nothing could be more anachronistic than a retrospective secular colouring of the Chancellor.45 Crouzet allows that L’Hospital aimed to install ‘a mode of power grounded in a strategy of bypassing cleavages and opinions . . . a constant practice of depersonalisation of the magistrate, master of his passions and of the passions of men, a being without preferences’.46 ‘A being without preferences’ would seem an exemplary description of the confessionally impartial persona of the judge. To follow Crouzet, however, is to recognise that L’Hospital’s equal treatment of the Protestant and the Catholic camps involved no decoupling of the legal system from religion. To the contrary, this was a neutrality defined within the terms of ‘le christocentrisme de Michel de L’Hospital’.47 As such, it rested upon an unshakeable faith in the essential and charitable unity of Christianity. Operating within the bounds of the Ecclesia Christi, L’Hospital’s direction of the civil laws appears more a form of applied theology, an instrument of divine government, albeit directed to the temporal end of averting civil war and restoring civil peace. care not to bring enmity, favour or prejudice to your judgments. I see many judges who seek to judge in the cases of their friends or enemies. Daily, I see men who are involved as enemies or friends of persons, sects or factions, judging for or against without considering the equity of the case. You are judges of acts, not of lives, morals or religion. You think it good enough to award the case to the one you think the worthy man, the better Christian, as though it were a question between parties of which was the better poet, orator, painter, worker – in the end a master of art, doctrine, valour or whatever other quality – not of the matter that has caused the case.’ David Potter (ed.), The French Wars of Religion. Selected Documents (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 88 (emphasis added). 45 Denis Crouzet, La sagesse et le malheur. Michel de l’Hospital, Chancelier de France (Seysell: Champvallon, 1998). 46 Ibid., 324 (my translation in this and the following citations). 47 Ibid., 124.

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Viewing the jurisdictional scene and the judicial persona from Crouzet’s perspective, then, there is no question of a legal secularisation. We see, rather, a persona centred in a notion of men’s oneness in Christ, integral to a pacificatory politics of caritas and devoted to a supreme duty of benevolence.48 That said, we might still discern the opening of a certain space for political action and juridification, the space for a judicial persona equipped to judge citizens impartially, regardless of their confessional affiliation: ‘Even the excommunicate can be a good citizen’. Crouzet characterises L’Hospital’s irenic persona in terms of an ‘e´vange´lisme cice´ronianiste’. This dual disposition is indeed grounded in Christian love, but it also demands a Ciceronian-Stoic mastery of unbridled passions. The persona’s Ciceronian dimension of self-restraint – its ethos of mediocritas, a moral commitment always to find and follow the middle, moderate way – embraces the ambition of utilitas: the governance of the civil realm by a public law designed to safeguard the general good of the state. L’Hospital’s regime, arguably, gained a subsequent and enduring theoretical justification in Jean Bodin’s De la re´publique.49 Appearing in 1576, four years after the St Bartholomew massacre, Bodin’s treatise conceptualised sovereignty as absolute and indivisible in a manner that aligned him with the Chancellor’s peace-brokering politics. Given such a politics, a plurality of faiths need not be catastrophic if the will of the unified sovereign enjoyed the power of final determination as civil law. That good citizens need not be ‘Christians’ would be an exemplary politique axiom by the century’s end.50 Yet, in the years of L’Hospital’s chancellorship, an independent rule of law did not prevail. Peace with justice failed to materialise. An ‘evangelico-ciceronian’, L’Hospital could not override the closure of rival confessional interests that were beyond legal negotiation. As radically partisan forms of social belonging, confessional identities resisted being made subordinate to the neutral civility of citizenship envisaged by the Chancellor but rejected by the majority of Paris parlementaires. The established juridical order thus held firm to ancient sacral 48

Ibid., 323–4, discerns in Michel de L’Hospital’s caritas the signs of a French anti-Machiavellianism: that is, a politics which rejects recourse to fear and opacity as its primary instruments. 49 In the 1560s, Bodin was an avocat pleading cases at the bar of the Parlement of Paris. 50 See Crouzet, La sagesse, 456. Christopher Bettinson, ‘The politiques and the politique Party’, in Keith Cameron (ed.), From Valois to Bourbon. Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1989), 35, warns against reifying a diverse set of ideas, a variety of initiatives and some political episodes into a unified politique ideology with something like an epochal transformative power. As he reminds us, ‘politique’ was the preferred term of censure deployed by Catholic Leaguers to besmirch all those who would abandon religious truth and seek accommodation with known heretics and proven schismatics.

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duties: the protection of France’s Catholic mission and the ‘liberties’ of Gallicanism, along with protection of the judges’ political status as parties to the mystery of a divine monarchy. Martin Heckel has given us the legal history of how a ‘non-confessional order of co-existence’ was achieved within the territories of the German Empire.51 Robert von Friedeburg identifies an important aspect of this achievement: by the mid-1600s, ‘assessment of licit government had been separated from scripture and relocated in an entirely legal realm of thought, based on a historical assessment of the German constitution’.52 Separation of government from scripture prepared the ground for both a post-Westphalian jurisdiction neutral towards religion and a judiciary capable of impartial judgment. In the instance of Brandenburg, however, it did not entail judges’ independence from the sovereign political power. Unlike the quasiautonomous regime of the English common lawyers, judicial structure in Brandenburg allowed for little separation of political sovereign and judiciary such as would insulate the judge from the legislator. Nevertheless, the establishment of absolute sovereignty proved effective in rendering religious differences politically – and juridically – irrelevant (or, at least, less relevant), thereby serving the cause of peaceful coexistence between Brandenburg’s rival confessions. Yet absolutism was not a continental monopoly. The common lawyers had shown themselves quite capable of compliance with absolutism, when the Tudors’ political break with Rome allowed a native law in England to deny legitimacy to its rival jurisdictions: papal, canonist and civilian. IV

Matthew Hale’s Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe responded to the ‘wild propositions’ of the philosopher.53 In the context of the present discussion, it is appropriate to read Hale’s pages as a

51

Martin Heckel, ‘Das Sa¨kularisierungsproblem in der Entwicklung des deutschen Staatskirchenrecht’, in Gerhard Dilcher and Ilse Staff (eds.), Christentum und modernes Recht; Beitra¨ge zum Problem der Sa¨kularisation (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984), 50. 52 Robert von Friedeburg, Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 235–6. 53 Hobbes’s Dialogue was first published in 1681, two years after its author’s death and six years after the death of Matthew Hale. The Dialogue thus circulated in manuscript for some time before 1675, including among the common-law judiciary. It is not known if any other judge responded to Hobbes’s work as fully as Hale. The latter’s Reflections were not published until 1945.

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template for an English judicial persona that was consistent with the antiphilosophical perspective of an Inns of Court formation. To a significant extent, in the ‘Reflections’ this persona is configured in its counterpoint to the Hobbesian philosopher. For Hale, the latter is a persona marred by the excessive intellectual abstraction of those ‘that please themselves with a perswasion that they can with as much evidence and Congruitie make out an unerring systeme of Lawes and Politiques equally applicable to all States and Occasions, as Euclide demonstrates his Conclusions, deceive themselves with Notions which prove ineffectual, when they come to particular application.’54 Contrary to what their adherents believe, such universal ‘unerring systems’ in fact err, because of ‘the greate difference in most of the States and Kingdomes in ye world in their Laws administrations and measures of right and wrong, when they come to particulars’.55 By way of contrast, the persona of the Halesian judge therefore claims to be endowed with a superior virtue: the practical grasp of ‘particulars’, a capacity lacking in men who ‘are most Commonly the worst Judges that can be, because they are transported from the Ordinary Measure of right and wrong by their over fine Speculacons Theoryes and distinctions above the Common Staple of humane Conversations’.56 The distinction of the two personae – the judge and the philosopher – rests on the contrast between this ‘common staple’ and the exceptional. On the one hand: ‘as Lawes So the Method and Modelling of Governments are to be fitted to what is the Common and Ordinary State of thinges ad Plurimum, because mankind have most Ordinarily to do with Such Circumstances or affaires as most usually happen’.57 On the other hand, and more colourfully: ‘[I]t is a Madness to thinke that the Modell of Lawes or Government is to be formed according to Such Circumstances as very rarely occurre. Tis as if a Man should make Agarike and Rhubarb his Ordinary Dyett, because it is of use when he is sicke which may be once in 7 years.’58 Hale’s designated remedy for ‘Madness’ lies in ‘the habituateing and accustoming and Exercising that Faculty [of Reason] by readeing, Study

54

Matthew Hale, Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe, in S. W. Holdsworth (ed.), A History of English Law, vol. V (London: Methuen, 1945), 502. Ibid., 502–3. 56 Ibid., 503. 57 Ibid., 512. 58 Ibid. 55

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and observation’.59 Only by training in this way, according to Hale, could anyone acquire ‘Sufficient Knowledge’ of the common law. To know reason alone was not to know law. Yet Hale was not alone in rejecting the notion of reason as law.60 For Hobbes, the command of the sovereign was law, in contradistinction to what scholastic natural lawyers claimed on behalf of a higher-order theological or moral reason. Before subscribing to Hale’s view of the Hobbesian persona as abstracted from the real, then, we might ask the question: could his discourse be seen to parallel that of the Parisian parlementaires who resisted L’Hospital and Bodin? Without going too far down this counterfactual path, we might also speculate as follows: if French-style absolutism had taken hold in England, would a Hale have suffered the same marginalisation as Hotmann, left aside defending an ancient constitution and some customary indigenous laws? Conversely, in this circumstance, a Hobbes would share the status of Bodin, enjoying recognition as a hard-headed theorist of the sovereign state. In other words, it is the contingent facts of English political history – not the actual content of his political philosophy – that turn Hobbes into a hyper-normative other-worldly theorist. Counterfactuality aside, it remains misleading to take at face value Hale’s construction of an ideal common-law persona. As has been shown, rather than speaking with the neutral voice of an autonomous law, Hale’s persona is one that cannot be entirely separated from the religious pressures and political forces of his times. We see an English judge who would be balanced and impartial in the exercise of office; but we also see his historical context: an English legal system that had not definitively closed itself off from religious norms. It would therefore be more accurate to refer to Hale’s two personae – one legal, the other religious – and their interaction in a changing political environment. To recognise this enduring entanglement of law and religion in the early modern English context adds a dimension lacking in ahistorical treatments of judicial impartiality in today’s philosophical jurisprudence. In the currently dominant jurisprudential discourse, impartiality in judicial decision-making is defined in dualistic terms that oppose objectivity to subjective preference. For all their sophistication – for instance, having recognised that judges cannot but make preferential moral evaluations in 59

Ibid. As one now expects, the claim is immediately qualified by the additional comment that even such a man ‘cannot p’tend to Infallibilitie in his Judgement or to a full attainment of all that is attainable toucheing the Laws of England’. Despite this modesty, echoes of Coke are clear. 60 Hobbes shared with Hale the doctrine of fallen man’s limited capacities.

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reaching a legal determination, Ronald Dworkin would then rescue the matter by arguing that such ‘preferences’ finally resolve in a judgment that reflects the best understanding the judge can have of what the law is conceived to be, there being a ‘correct’ answer to every legal question61 – such theoretical terms impoverish the historical reality of judicial impartiality as the ethical achievement of a definite persona. Recourse to religious criteria in legal judgments was never just indicative of a subjective preference or judicial bias. It was a historical symptom of the ecclesiastical genealogy of European laws and their uncertain immunity to continuing interference from the clash of priorities of two rival, and perhaps incompatible, orderings of human life. We familiarly summarise these two competing systems of government under the names church and state.

61

Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (London; Fontana, 1986); Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 126.

CHAPTER

7

Persona and office: Althusius on the formation of magistrates and councillors 497314

Robert von Friedeburg

In recent years, the quest to identify the early modern ‘ego’ has led us to question the retrojection of modern conceptions of the ‘autonomous’ self into the past. In early modernity the idea of owning or having ‘dominium’ over oneself floated on the surface of a layer of fundamental duties, so qualifying the very notion of natural rights. Obligations to a common moral good specified in divine and natural law weighed much heavier than concerns about the autonomy of the individual, even in such writers as Locke or Grotius, once acclaimed as champions of individual liberty.1 The sphere of the self may need to be understood in more restricted terms: for example, through the search for signs of divine grace in the epistolary exchanges of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Protestant divines. Studies of the persona of eighteenth-century clergy have been particularly interesting in terms of the gradual elaboration of a sphere of introspection that took as its template something that increasingly resembled the autonomous self.2 As the protection of such an alleged autonomous personality became a token of the civilised state, ‘society was denied the right to subordinate a natural entelechy to a social objective’,3 and the ‘self ’ began its career. These later developments are, of course, only relevant for our present purpose to the degree they help to distinguish Althusius’s altogether 1

2

3

Janet Coleman, ‘Pre-Modern Property and Self-Ownership before and after Locke’, European Journal of Political Theory 4 (2005), 125–45; Knud Haakonssen, ‘The Moral Conservatism of Natural Rights’, in Ian Hunter and David Saunders (eds.), Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 27–42. Anthony J. H. La Vopa, Grace, Merit, and Talent. Poor Students, Clerical Careers and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Anthony J. H. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy 1762–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Frederick Barnard, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). La Vopa, Grace, Merit, and Talent, 266–7.

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different set of assumptions regarding duties, rights and their bearers. Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) is one of the very few German authors of the period between the Reformation and the early Enlightenment to have attracted the attention of modern historians of political thought. This is partly because his work was promoted during the nineteenth century by Otto von Gierke, who used it, however, anachronistically, to evidence modern ethical and political doctrines – corporate popular sovereignty and a state based on associations or Genossenschaften.4 What was largely overlooked by this older approach has been recovered during the last twenty years by a number of scholars who have focused research on the relation between the specific discourses to which Althusius contributed, in particular through his jurisprudence, ethics and religion, and his political theory and practice. Horst Dreitzel, for example, has emphasised the way in which Althusius, in his inaugural lecture at Herborn (Oratio Panegyrica, de necessitate, utitilitate & antiquitate scholarum), subsumed Christian doctrine under civic improvement, treated as a discipline of philosophy. In this discursive setting, Christ and the Apostles are portrayed as founders of institutions of erudition, while studying at such institutions is treated as a way of renovating the soul, almost to the point of recovering its pre-lapsarian perfection.5 For Althusius, government is inextricably linked to a particular way of leading the vita activa or engaged civic life, played out not least as rule over subjects. The exercise of government is tied to the particular kind of ethical training and cultivation required for ‘magistrates’ or those charged with the offices of government. Insight into the problems of human vices and passions, adequate control of them in others, and sufficient shaping of them in magistrates – not least through schooling at appropriate educational institutions – thus make the issue of the magistrate’s persona central to Althusius’s political, juristic and ethical thought. His Politica was very much a teaching tool of German Schulphilosophie,6 designed to groom students in the moral and intellectual deportment required for the active life of the magistrate.

4

5

6

Martin Peters, ‘Johannes Althusius (1557/63–1638) aus der Sicht Otto (v.) Gierkes (1841–1921)’, in Emilio Bonfatti et al. (eds.), Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld in der Politica Methodice Digesta des Johannes Althusius, Wolfenbu¨tteler Forschungen, vol. C (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 331–62. Horst Dreitzel, ‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Fo¨deralismus’, in Bonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe, 49–112. See Hunter, this volume, on variety hidden behind this term.

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‘POLITICA’

GENRE

As a Roman law jurist, Althusius was concerned in his Politica with religion and prudence. The laws, pre-eminently the Decalogue, were the ‘vinculum quo respublica cohaeret & spiritus vitalis’ (cohering bond and vital spirit of the republic, Politica ch. X, 4). But laws must be understood and applied by individuals possessing experience, specialised knowledge and self-control. These requirements need to be seen against a fraught state of affairs in which Europe was riddled by confessional civil war, when rulers and ruled alike seemed driven by passionate excess. Under these circumstances great demands were placed on the formation of lower magistrates and officials, who were required to execute government and even on occasion to constrain and punish the supreme magistrate. The personae of these inferior magistrates and of their counsellors had to be adapted to these responsibilities. The persona required by the lower magistrates, inclusive of both probity and technical (political-jurisprudential) expertise, sanctioned occupancy of a specific office and turned the holders into shrewd technicians of political life. In this context the philosopher is either the specialist teaching prospective specialists and inferior magistrates, or is himself active in administrative duties. The persona elaborated through Althusius’s Politica thus exemplifies what Conal Condren describes as a ‘manifestation and representation of an office, an embodiment of a moral economy . . . a whole sphere of responsibilities, rights of action for their fulfilment, necessary attributes, skills, specific virtues, and concomitant vices and failures’.7 This follows from the whole intention and structure of Althusius’s Politica. The work belongs to a genre arising in the 1590s in Germany and the Netherlands and growing out of the commentaries on Aristotle that mushroomed during the sixteenth century.8 These commentaries were transformed by the impact of Bodin and the experience of widespread confessional and political conflict, and also reflected changes in university culture throughout the Empire. Some of the authors working in the politica genre were Reformed (Althusius, Keckermann) and some Catholic (Contzen), but most were Lutheran.9 The Lutheran Reformation had 7 8

9

Conal Condren, contribution to this volume. This has long been recognised, but see Gu¨nter Frank, ‘Melanchthon’s Concept of Practical Philosophy’, in J. Kraye and R. Saarinen (eds.), Moral Philosophy at the Threshold of Modernity (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2005), 217–33, who even speaks of a ‘second Aristotelian reception’. From the 1590s to 1620 nearly every major German university had produced at least one Politica: see Horst Dreitzel, Absolutismus und sta¨ndische Verfassung (Mainz: von Zabern, 1992), 411–14; Horst

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already given the preoccupation with Aristotle’s Politics a new emphasis, beginning with Melanchthon’s refusal to find evidence for the organisation of the body politic in scripture and his 1530/1 Commentarii in aliquot politicos libros Aristotelis. From 1535, editions of Aristotle’s Politics enjoyed a resurgence.10 The Lutheran distinction between revelation and law encouraged the development of inquiry into the nature of politics that was neither directly dependent on the interpretation of scripture nor a challenge to Protestant concerns about grace, penance and free will. Neo-Aristotelianism did not so much provide a guideline determining argument – apart from general assumptions on the ethics and aims of government11 – but rather a set of questions, problems and organisational procedures helping to integrate a diversity of intellectual preoccupations. These concerns became part of the growing body of constitutional thought on the Empire developed in the context of the increasing streamlining of government in town and countryside. Moreover, from the 1570s the strain on practical politics caused by confessional tensions brought home to scholars the need for conscious repair and consolidation of the body politic.12 Theoretical and practical treatments concerning the origins and legitimacy of society and government had to engage with current legal procedure and sophisticated advice on the practicalities of maintaining order. These interests were gradually moulded into a new discipline

10

11

12

Dreitzel, ‘Die Staatsra¨son und die Krise des politischen Aristotelismus: Zur Entwicklung der politischen Philosophie in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert’, in A. Enzo Baldini (ed.), Aristotelismo politico e ragion di stato (Florence: Olscki, 1995), 129–56; Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des o¨ffentliches Recht in Deutschland (Munich: Beck Schlagwo¨rter (RSWK), 1988), 111; Wolfgang Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria: Studien zur Herrschaftslehre in der deutschen politischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhundert (Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 9–89; e.g. Arnold Clapmarius, De arcanis rerumpublicarum libri sex (Altdorf, 1605); Henning Arnisaeus, Doctrina politica in genuinam methodum, quae est aristotelis (Helmstedt, 1606); Adam Contzen, Politicorum libri decem (Mainz, 1620); Dietrich Reinkingk, Tractatus de regimine saeculari et ecclesiastica (1619); Johannes Limnaeus, Juris publici Imperii Romano-Germanici (1619–34); Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema politica (1607); Lambertus Danaeus, Politices christianae libri septem (1596); Hermann Kirchner, Res publica (Marburg, 1608). ¨ ffentliches Of his Politica at least twenty Greek and nine Latin editions appeared; see Stolleis, O Recht, 82–5; Martin Mulsow, ‘Die wahre peripatetische Philosophie in Deutschland’, in Helwig Schmidt-Glinzer (ed.), Fo¨rdern und Bewahren (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 49–78; Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat. Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca. 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1970), 96–7; Frank, ‘Melanchthon’s Concept’; on England see John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1586). Even this cautious attempt at definition does not hold for Arnisaeus’s Politica – despite its sub-title stressing Aristotelian methodology. See Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 174–5. For example, the forced re-Catholisation of Wu¨rzburg, the fruitless efforts to defend Protestantism in areas surrounded by Catholic imperial estates (1575–6) and the struggle for the Protestant administration of Magdeburg, to name but a few: see, recently, Dietrich Kratsch, Justiz – Religion – Politik (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1990); Eike Wolgast, Hochstift und Reformation (Stuttgart: Steiner 1995).

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stimulated by the seminal work of Bodin.13 Confessional strife continued to keep discussion urgent.14 Thus topics such as the philosophy of politics, guides to the developing imperial public law, and advice on maintaining order were merged into a new independent subject in the spectrum of the artes liberales. Its object was politics, and the standard form of publication highlighting its birth was the Politica, drawing together political philosophy, legal training and practical advice.15 Within this genre, various strands of thought are commonly distinguished. Lutheran work on the Monarchia christiana emphasised the independence of the church and the responsibility of lay authorities for the maintenance of a pious order, frequently making use of Lutheran ‘three estate theory’ (Reinkingk).16 It has been argued that Neo-Aristotelians – especially Arnisaeus – were particularly engaged in the methodical exploitation of the Aristotelian renaissance and the functionalist needs of the body politic as a hierarchy of order and subjection.17 Some accounts remained more indebted 13

14

15

16

17

Jean Bodin, Six livres de la re´publique (1576, Latin edition 1586); see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism or Constitutionalism?’, History of Political Thought 17 (1996), 506–14; Hans Ulrich Scupin, ‘Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der Theorien von Staat und Gesellschaft des Johannes Althusius und des Jean Bodin’, in Karl Wilhelm Dahm et al. (eds.), Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1988), 301–11. E.g. the conception of maiestas realis and personalis was first conceived by Kirchner, Res publica. See Thomas Klein, ‘Conservatio Reipublicae per bonam educationem – Leben und Werk Hermann Kirchners (1562–1620)’, in Walter Heinemeyer et al. (eds.), Academia Marburgensis (Marburg: Elwert, 1977), 181–230, 212–18, on the impact of the contemporary struggle between the imperial estates of Reformed Hesse-Cassel – for whom Marburg University-based Kirchner wrote – and Lutheran Hesse-Darmstadt over the Upper Hessian inheritance. Since Hesse-Cassel did expect more favourable treatment of its case before the Imperial Chamber Court than before the Imperial aulic court, scholars from Marburg University insisted on the shared sovereignty – maiestas realis and maiestas personalis – that would justify the responsiblity of the Imperial Chamber Court jurisdiction for the case in question. Topics included the treatment of religious minorities, the printing press, schooling, taxation, coinage, and so on; see Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria. Note that none of these issues can be directly related to what has been called the rise of modern monarchy with regard to England or France. Only the middling and small jurisdictions of the imperial estates provided the economy of scale to actually engage in the kind of detailed regulation of economy and society so typical for the advice of the Politica. Luise Schorn-Schu¨tte, ‘Obrigkeitskritik und Widerstandsrecht. Die politica christiana als Legitimita¨tsgrundlage’, in L. Schorn-Schu¨tte (ed.), Aspekte der politischen Kommunikation im Europa des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Beihefte der Historischen Zeitschrift XXXIX (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), 195–232. ‘Neo-Aristotelianism’ is a category attempting to distinguish a specific brand of political thought from other treatises also referring to Aristotle. Thus, Horst Dreitzel, ‘Krise des politischen Aristotelismus’, regards many of the works in the Politica genre as being inflected by the crisis of Aristotelianism. However, while the Politica genre comprised ‘Monarchomachist treatises’ such as Althusius’s Politica; ‘Thomist-Aristotelian’ tracts by Catholics like Contzen; and tracts orientated towards the Lutheran doctrine of three estates, such as Reinkingk’s; and authors interested simply in the development of imperial public law, only the ‘Political Aristotelians’ such as Arnisaeus are properly understood as Neo-Aristotelians.

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to Lipsius and the rhetoric of Tacitism, emphasising the specific needs of princes.18 Althusius is not easy to allocate to any sub-category, not least due to his terminology. But his suggestions regarding the possibility of punishing the supreme magistrate for tyrannical actions have resulted in his being characterised as a monarchomach.19 Despite significant differences among the Politica writers, all reflected the constitutional experience of the Empire and expressed a common concern for order. Political practice in the Empire was reinforced and enshrined in the treaties of Augsburg 1555 and Osnabru¨ck (Westphalia) 1648. It remained based on the achievement of imperial peace (Landfrieden) and the emergence of territorial sub-sovereignty (Landeshoheit) of the imperial estates.20 Within that framework, the Politica as a genre was meant to provide the arts of political preservation required by times perceived to be troubled. It took for granted that the body politic was a hierarchy of rulers and ruled, and that the civitas was thus in need of an institutionalised order, a res publica of magistrates responsible for and operating within an institutional structure distinguishable from the other associations of the civitas. The champion of monarchical absolutism Henning Arnisaeus was noted for promoting this view,21 but so too was his opponent Althusius.22 18 19

20

21

22

¨ ffentliches Rechts, 98–101. E.g. Clapmarius, De arcanis rerumpublicarum; Stolleis, O On the evolution of this terminology see now Merio Scattola, ‘Von der Maiestas zur Symbiosis’, in Bonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe, 211–50; Horst Dreitzel, Absolutismus und sta¨ndische Verfassung in Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zu Kontinuitaa¨t und Diskontinuita¨t der Politischen Theorie in der Fru¨hen Neuzeit (Mainz: Zabern, 1992), 23–35 offers as a compromise six roots or overlapping sets of influences characterising Althusius’s Politica literature: (a) the debate among reformed monarchomachists after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572; (b) the Dutch debate justifying the rebellion against Spain; (c) Spanish legal philosophy concerning both Roman law concepts of the corporation and its representation and the further development of the notion of natural law; (d) aspects of presbyterian ecclesiology; (e) Bodin’s notion of sovereignty; (f ) practical advice on achieving stability borrowed from Lipsius. Heinz Angermeier, Ko¨nigtum und Landfriede im deutschen Spa¨tmittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1966); Heinz Angermeier, Die Reichsreform 1410–1555 (Munich: Beck, 1984); on the interaction of imperial and constitutional law and confessionalisation, see Gerhard Mu¨ller, ‘Bu¨ndnis und Bekenntnis. Zum Verha¨ltnis von Glaube und Politik im deutschen Luthertum des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Martin Brecht and Reinhard Schwarz (eds.), Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche. Studien zum Konkordienbuch (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1980), 23–43; and summarising the constitutional and religious development, Heinz Schilling, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich’, Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), 1–45; Heinz Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise (Berlin: Siedler, 1988). Henning Arnisaeus, De republica seu relectionis politicae libri duo (Frankfurt 1615), ch. I, s. 1, n. 14: ‘Perfecta igitur definitio reipublicae est, quod sit ordo civitatis, tum aliorum imperium, tum praecipue summae potestatis, a quo profluit regimen per medios magistratus in universos subditos’; see Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 171–4, on his break with the received tradition by failing to mention the moral mission of the state. Christian Liebenthal, Collegium politicum (Amsterdam 1652), vol. VI, 185, quotes Althusius for ‘res publica constat ex imperantibus & obedientibus’, probably Johannes Althusius, Politica methodice

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Indeed, most authors preferred monarchy or aristocracy and identified democracy with turmoil and technical problems of government.23 Unity and the preservation of internal harmony for the common good were seen as key problems to be addressed by any magistrate.24 As a genre, therefore, and irrespective of constitutional form, politica writing was dedicated to the control of subjects and to the avoidance of turmoil.25 Within this pattern of similarities, important differences between writers like Arnisaeus and Althusius need to be kept in mind, for they also defined the place of the learned specialist in Althusius’s work. Three need special attention. First, ‘Neo-Aristotelians’, insofar as they remained constitutional relativists, accepted that the supreme magistrate could be an aristocracy or a monarchy, as long as superioritas remained in the sole possession of that magistrate. This was not the case with Althusius. He insisted that the kind of monarchy he envisaged – including the highly specific constitutional set-up that he devised – was the only true and truly useful form of government. Second, according to him, sovereignty belonged to the corporate body (universitas) of the kingdom (regnum) itself, not to the person or persons of the supreme magistrate. Sovereignty was exercised by magistrates representing the corporate whole of the commonwealth and thus acting on behalf of it. Magistrates had various functions, the most important of which belonged indeed to the supreme magistrate himself. But should he fail in his representational office, he could be constrained or punished by those magistrates whose office it was to secure the laws of the commonwealth. Althusius called these lower magistrates the ephors. The representation of the realm by the collectivity of the ephors and their ability to constrain and punish the supreme magistrate is undoubtedly one of the most obvious features of Althusius’s approach. In Germany, though, where the electoral princes did indeed share in the maiestas or sovereignty of the Empire, this design was much less conspicious than it would have been in England or France. Althusius, however, had devised his Politica to be an analytical description of the true nature of every society.

23

24 25

digesta (Herborn, 1614), ch. I, 36: ‘ita conventus & societas in Rep. imperantium & obedientium se habet’, but Althusius normally used the terms regnum or consociatio publica universalis (for res publica). Althusius’s chapter on democracy (XXXIX) is part of his appendix of special subjects treated in the last chapters. He stated his view on popular participation much earlier. To him, any kind of election by the common men is riddled with danger for the unity of the body politic and will trigger rebellion and sedition: Althusius, ch. XVIII, 56. E.g. on the need for harmony: Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 36. See Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria, 321–57.

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Third, Althusius differed from Arnisaeus with regard to the status of private rights and the source of social order. Arnisaeus did accept a notion of civil society as the domain of the private and pre-political rights of subjects distinct from the state. For Arnisaeus, though, this domain does not constitute a corporation capable of any legal action in its own right, nor can the state be represented by any agent other than the supreme magistrate.26 Closely following the influential translation of Aristotle by Petrus Victorinus that effectively rejected the notion of civitas or civil society as a body with political power, he wrote that ‘res publica est ordo totius civitatis consistens in regimine summae potestatis per medios magistratus’ (the state is the order of the civil community, an order that consists of the absolute power in government through the magistrate).27 According to Arnisaeus, the magistrate’s supreme power over subjects – possessed by virtue of conquest, inheritance or transferral – provided the very basis of hierarchy and subordination and thus the core vinculum or binding of society and state. Thus, to qualify the magistrate’s capacity or right to rule meant undermining the body politic fatally. Althusius, however, derives social hierarchy from Platonic ideas of a common goal of society and from his Christian conception of society as men bound together under the Ten Commandments. This does not mean that he failed to see the need for an institutional configuration of order to be impressed upon society. Indeed, there is hardly a better example for the distinction of society and state than Althusius’s own work. In contrast to Arnisaeus, however, Althusius refused to accept that the institutional order of the state sprang solely from the exercise of sovereignty. For this would be to deny the accountability of the supreme to the inferior magistrates, or to positive civil laws.28 Althusius also accepted the clear-cut distinction between the res publica, the institutional configuration of order headed by magistrates, and the

26

27

28

Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 336–57: The civitas provides the populus with a sphere of private property rights, but these do not carry public power. The restrictions of natural and fundamental law imposed on the monarch are primarily left to protect these private rights; see Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 202–26. Commentarii in VIII libro Aristotelis de optimo statu civitatis, 209 defines ‘Est autem res publica ordo civitatis, ceterorumque magistratuum, et maxime illius, qui summam potestatem habet’: see Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 344; Wolfgang Mager, ‘Res Publica und Bu¨rger’, in Res Publica. Bu¨rgerschaft in Stadt und Staat (Berlin: Humboldt, 1988), 67–94, at 78; on the underlying notion of the civitas being the materia, being given form by the res publica, (eds.), see Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca. 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970) 119; Wolfgang Mager, ‘Republik’, in Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gru¨nder Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Oldenbourg 1984), vol. VIII, 858–78, at 867. The locus classicus on Arnisaeus remains Dreitzel, Arnisaeus.

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notion of society as helpless without the order imposed by magistrates.29 But, in contrast to Arnisaeus, Althusius’s res publica rested on the legal person of the universitas or corporate commonwealth, regarded as the source of sovereignty. The commonwealth was represented by magistrates on various levels, rather than by the supreme magistrate alone. Therefore a specific group of magistrates, the ephors, could judge and punish the supreme magistrate according to the laws of the commonwealth. Althusius was just as hostile to any participation of subjects in government as Arnisaeus. He even abolished such elements of democratic participation as existed in Emden, the town where he served as syndic, because he argued that democratic government could not function and that aristocratic rule had to be restored.30 But he put the rights of sovereignty firmly in the hands of the universitas itself – the whole commonwealth, represented essentially by the magistracy as a collectivity – rather than into the hands of a single supreme magistrate. Magistrates thus ruled by possessing a representative office, standing for the corporate body politic, the universitas. As a result, Althusius’s world was divided into magistrates – including the lower magistrates – and subjects, rather than into the single exemplary division between the supreme magistrate and all the rest.31 It was for this reason that Arnisaeus attacked him as dangerous monarchomach.32 29

30

31

32

Johannes Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 11–13. Although Althusius began his book with a description of social life and families, households and guilds, and only later described the universitas (ch. V), even at the very beginning of his book this social life presupposes the existence of magistrates directing social life, who are later described as representing the universitas: See ch. V, 22–5, in particular ch. V, n. 25: ‘Hi superiores praesides ex consensu communi civium suorum constituuntur, & et constituti repraesentant ipsam civitatem, non aliter, quam syndicus universitatem’. Althusius’s description of the various communities that any society is made of – families and guilds, and urban and provincial societies having their own magistrates – must not allow us to overlook the fact that majesty is located in the regnum, not in society itself. See Hasso Hofmann, Repra¨sentation. Studien zur Wortund Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Dunckes und Humblot, 1974; fourth edn Berlin, 2003), 355–75. It is important to remember Hofmann’s insights into the meaning of representation here, taking the relation between a tutor and a minor as an example. The represented populus, that is, the minor, has, in general, no right whatsoever to interfere with the actions of the tutor. The term popular sovereignty is thus problematic, if not entirely erroneous, with respect to Althusius’s argument. Robert von Friedeburg, Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe, England and Germany, 1530–1680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 103–23; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Magdeburger Argumentationen zum Recht auf Widerstand gegen die Durchsetzung des Interim (1550–1551) und ihre Stellung in der Geschichte des Widerstandsrechts im Reich, 1523–1627’, in: Luise SchornSchu¨tte (ed.), Das Interim (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 389–437. See, on the broad strand of this theory in Germany, Horst Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fu¨rstengesellschaft (Cologne: Bo¨dlau, 1991), vol. II, 529–46, in particular on Althusius 531–532, only one member of this group. Henning, Arnisaeus, De auctoritate principum in populum semper inviolabili . . . (Strassburg 1635), ch. XXXVIII, n. 80.

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For Althusius, then, because it did not derive simply from a supreme magistrate, the co-ordination of rule required some degree of consent. This fundamental social consensus was suggestive of a Platonic harmony and expressed in laws, especially those of the Decalogue. This is why Althusius calls the laws the ‘vinculum quo respublica cohaeret & spiritus vitalis’ (ch. X, 4 – the republic’s cohering bond and vital spirit).33 In need of sociability, men are also united by common goals and potential insight into the requirements and goodness of Christian life. Good government could realise the potential of sociability, overcoming divergences among men (such as differences in riches or abilities) that might stir social unrest. From such government arose the consent that, in the final analysis, held human society and the commonwealth together.34 Althusius was acutely aware that, in practice, both subjects and magistrates did submit to their vices, and that realising the potential for harmony needed constant work – the continuous application of political prudence, as taught by the politica. To that end, magistrates, including university teachers, needed certain virtues and abilities. ‘ P E R S O N A ’,

SOUL AND OFFICE

Althusius’s approach to the subject must be understood in relation to his sources and contemporaries. Cicero had delineated four personae in his attempt to give a systematic account of appropriate actions, understood as fulfilling the rational abilities of human nature against the background of the dissolution of the republic and the problems of vice and ambition.35 These personae were, first, our common human rationality, allowing us to 33

34

35

See Michael Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion in den Lehren des Lipsius und Althusius’s, in Bonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe, 165–84., 171. Althusius, Politica, C1, 36: ‘Deinde conservatio & duratio omnium rerum consistit in illa ordinationis, & subjectionis concordia. Nam sicut ex diversi toni fidibus, ad symmetriam intensis, sonus dulcissimus oritur & melodia suavis, gravibus, mediis & acutis conjunctis: ita conventus & societas in Rep. imperantium & obedientium se habet, & ex divitum, pauperum, artificum, sedentatiorum & id genus diversorum graduum personarum statu, quam suavissima oritur & conveniens harmonia; & si ad concentum reducantur, efficitur concordia laudabilis, felix & pene divina, & durabilior. Quod si vero omnes aequales, singulique pro arbitrio vellent alios regere, & alii recusarent regi, hinc facilis esset discordia, & discordia dissolutio societatis: Nullus esset gradus virtutis, nullus meritorem, & sequeretur, ut ipsa aequalitas esset summa inaequalitas. . .Hinc inter signa irae divinae refertur, quando haec imperantium & obtemperantium symmetria, ejusque ministri, & duces non sunt’. Hierarchy and order are thus essentials of Althuius’s vision of harmony in society. Both inequality among men and the distribution of labour with its concomitant problems are recognised when it is concluded that lack of government and harmony makes ‘ut ipsa aequalitas esset summa inaequalitas’. See Willibald Heilmann, Ethische Reflexion und ro¨mische Lebenswirklichkeit in Ciceros Schrift De Officiis (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982); Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis (Ann

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identify the honest and the appropriate (ch. I, 107 honestum decorumque); Second, the specific mind or character (animus) of the individual, with Cicero listing happiness, misery, wit or cunning as attributes common to all. A third persona may have been developed by any extraordinary experience, leaving its mark on us. Finally, the fourth persona is the one that we ourselves wish or choose to adopt (ch. I, 115). All four personae need to be considered in understanding what it means to act appropriately in a chosen way of life (ch. I, 120 genus vitae). In general, we should strive to follow our ancestors, but take into account our nature (in the second sense), avoid vices (ch. I, 121), and live according to our limitations (ch. I, 110). With respect to the three latter personae, the specifics of our upbringing, age, duties as magistrate or as private person will determine fitting conduct. Perhaps it is this variety of possible situations for the individual that has prompted German translators of Cicero’s text to render persona as ‘role’. Modern sociologists like Shmuel Eisenstadt, however, argue that the concept of ‘role’ used in the discipline of sociology depends on a society of equal individuals with a considerable range of choice for them and for society. Here roles are assigned by society itself, understood as a functional totality, unlike the personae of early modernity, which depend upon statuses determined by birth or confession, and by the order of public and private offices that individuals occupy via a persona.36 In any case, the Christian reception of Cicero fundamentally reshaped his concept of persona, emphasising creation, original sin, justification and grace as prime concerns of the faithful. This emphasis received another twist during the Reformation. Here, as a result of the insistence on the corruption of the will and reason, and on the inability of human sinners to do good works, moral philosophy was kept distinct from theology, and this allowed scope for the reception of the pagan classics within philosophy without compromising the onslaught on the ‘theology of good works’. Hence Melanchthon’s separation of law and grace: the moral law as the eternal justice of God, and the gospel as the promise of grace.37 In trying to understand the notitiae or ideas of God’s creation planted in us, moral philosophy thus aimed at understanding God, with virtue

36

37

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Wilfried Nippel, ‘Klientel, Gesellschaftsstruktur und politisches System in der ro¨mischen Republik’, Humanistische Bildung 22 (2002), 137–51. I would like to thank Shmuel Eisenstadt for his time in Jerusalem in 2003 when he explained this point of view to me. See also Conal Condren’s parallel argument in this volume. Philipp Melanchthon, ‘Ethicae doctrinae elementa 1550’, in Melanchthon, Opera omnia in corpus reformatorum 16 ed. Heinrich Ernst Bindseil (Halle, 1850), cols. 166–8. See, for this, Frank, ‘Melanchthon’s Concept’, 217–33.

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always requiring obedience to Him. While some hold that philosophy thus lacks an independent basis for Melanchthon, others have emphasised the space opened up for an inquiry into secular affairs by distinguishing law and gospel, philosophy and theology.38 In any case, Melanchthon did accept the passions as part of our nature, some of them – such as love of the fatherland – implanted by God, in order to steer our will to good conduct in civil life.39 Melanchthon remained well regarded by Calvinists like Beza, particularly after he began to come under attack by his fellow Lutherans from 1547. Althusius’s main work on ethics was his Civilis conversatione libri duo of 1601 and 1611, printed in 1650 with only slight changes as Ethicus Althusianus. In the first edition of his Politica of 1603, however, he also emphasised the function of ethics for the working of social life. His remarks on the passions of magistrates and subjects – on their capacities for virtuous and vicious actions, and thus their capacity for offices – form part of the reflections on prudence and government in chapters XXI to 40 XXVII of the Politica. The main emphasis of his Civilis conversatione was on the disciplining of human relations to make them useful for society. In this respect, Catholic ideas on discipline like those of Giovanni della Casa were influential for Althusius. But, at the same time, he attempted to describe civility and its applicability with the help of scripture, using Benito Arias’s comments on the Antwerp Polyglott Bible of 1573. In strong contrast to Melanchthon, however, ethics is no longer moral philosophy based on divine law and natural law, but only an ars decore conversandi cum hominibus (the art of appropriate social interaction).41 Althusius relocated the various virtues to the ars most pertinent for them, ascribing the virtues accordingly to either theology, law or politics rather than keeping them together as part of a single art of ethics. Ethics remained only as the discipline of decorum, not of recte facere (to do the right thing), but only of rite facere (to do the appropriate thing).42 In 38 39

40

41 42

Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, pp. 87–95. Jill Kraye, ‘Stoicism in the Renaissance from Petrarch to Lipsius’ Grotiana, NS, 22/23 (2001–2), 21– 45; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘The Problems of Passions and of Love of the Fatherland in Protestant Thought: Melanchthon to Althusius, 1520s–1620s’, Cultural and Social History 2 (2005), 81–98. ¨ ber die Funktion praktischer See Paul Ludwig Weinacht, ‘Althusius – Ein Aristoteliker? U Philosophie im politischen Calvinismus’, in Dahm et al., Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius, 443–64. Johannes Althusius, Civilis conversationis (Hanover, 1601), 1. Althusius, Civilis conversationis, 9; see Emilio Bonfatti, ‘Die Rezeption von Johannes Althusius’s Civilis Conversationis Libri Duo durch Bartholomaeus Keckermann und Johann Heinrich Alsted’, in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 315–29.

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Althusius’s Politica, therefore, we find his reflections on the passions and virtues, and on the behaviour appropriate to an office, as these pertain to politics. Michael Behnen has pointed out that rights and obligations of Althusius’s symbiotici, or men bound together in society, are to be understood with regard to the establishment and upholding of social interaction – described in the Politica in terms such as ‘symmetria’, ‘concordia’, and the musical metaphors of ‘symphonia’ and ‘harmonia’ – for only then was the aim of politics achievable.43 Further, Behnen argues that Althusius depended on Cicero’s notion of ‘juris consensu’ (the consent to law) for his understanding of the multitude turning into a body politic.44 Consent, measured against the Decalogue, even if enforced by constraint, is at the core of this vision of the body politic.45 To make men actually achieve and keep this harmony, Behnen further argues that Althusius provided advice for magistrates on how to direct, discipline and manipulate the behaviour of subjects.46 Behnen views the middle parts of the Politica as being concerned, like other instances of the genre, with the practical problems confronting governments, and he has submitted these sections to a close scrutiny. Like Hasso Hofmann, Behnen argues that the Politica combines three accounts of the working of the body politic. There is a sociological account of the units of which each society is made, such as families, guilds, towns, provinces. These are the famous consociationes whose description have led to the (false) belief that Althusius is describing a federal state.47 There is a legal account of the representational relationships within state and society.48 And there is a political account of the office of the magistrates and counsellors in its fullest sense, including their dangerous vices and 43

44

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46 47 48

Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 30 ; Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion’; Michael Behnen, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftstechnik in der Politica des Johannes Althusius’, Zeitschrift fu¨r historische Forschung 11 (1984), 417–72. Behnen, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftstechnik’, quotes at 422; Althusius, Politica, ch. V, 4, ‘Homines congregati sine jure symbiotico, sunt turba, coetus, multitudo, congregatio, populus, gens (men gathered without symbiotic law are crowd, multitude, gathering, people) and hints at Cicero, De re publica, Liber primus, 25, and his definition of coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitate communione sociatus’. It is important, however, to remember that Cicero has Africanus to define ‘Est igitur, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis’, i.e. that this is Cicero’s definition of the res publica, while Althusius transfers it to a definition of the consociatio and the ius symbioticum. See Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158, similarly criticising Gierke’s interpretation. Behnen, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftstechnik’, 423. See, on this, Dreitzel, ‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Fo¨deralismus’. See Hofmann, Repra¨sentation.

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possible virtues, in order to prepare the students of the Politica for their future tasks and duties. It is here that the persona of the magistrate, and by this token of the university teacher, is described. THE

‘PERSONAE’

OF MAGISTRATE AND COUNCILLOR

Despite the primary importance of the Decalogue in its Calvinist interpretation as the prime law of the Althusian republic, theologians are not accorded superiority in the political hierarchy. Althusius’s Christian philosophy is most clearly expressed in his inaugural lecture at Herborn in 1603, on the value and importance of university education. Althusius’s Oratio does not work from the Lutheran distinction of law and gospel. Rather, it subsumes Christian doctrine within the compass of civic improvement and submits it to the regulation of civic magistrates. Christian doctrine is treated as a discipline of philosophy, in keeping with the more general tendency of Calvinist Schulphilosophie noted by Ian Hunter in his chapter. Studying is treated as a way of perfecting the soul to an almost prelapsarian condition. With regard to knowledge of God, emphasis is laid on physico-theology, which meant understanding the nature of God by studying the natural world as his creation, and addressing theology as the study of the deeds of God in nature. While all law had to be based on the Decalogue and the preservation of the commonwealth, law, ethics and religion were bound together by Althusius’s understanding of the law of nature, which he regarded as embodying both tables of the Decalogue: the ‘communio symbiotica universalis regni est ecclesiastica, vel secularis’ (the general symbiotic community of the kingdom is either ecclesiastical or secular, ch. IX, n. 31). Althusius’s account of the vices and virtues of magistrates and the people is embedded in this approach to Christianity and the constitutional arrangements described in the Politica. Consequent upon Althusius’s spreading the responsibilities of government to all magistrates is the wider distribution of necessary virtues. Good government demands that all magistrates be instructed in prudence, knowledge of how society works, and an understanding of the passions – their own and the people’s. Further, writing the Politica itself and teaching its substance to potential office-holders is understood as part of the active steering of society. Althusius’s account starts with the introductory chapter, ‘De generalibus affectionibus politicae’ (On the general characteristics of politics). In order to protect us from misery and to live justly and happily, we share a natural inclination to live together, and only then, in the exercise of this

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civil life, can we strive towards the exercise and practice of virtue (ch. I n. 4). As distinguished from the legal emphasis of his Dicaeologicae or his Jurisprudentia romana, politics in the Politica is defined in Ciceronian terms as the art of organising and keeping men in a ‘coetus juris consensus & utilitatis’ (a consensual and beneficial lawful union) (ch. I, 7).49 Chapter XXI addresses the supreme magistrate as ‘dux, pastor, pater patriae, rex, custos & salvator populi & corporis consociati’ (leader, pastor, father of the fatherland, king, tutor and saviour of the people and the social body), whose approach to the administration of the body politic must be prudential (ch. XXI, n. 6). This prudentia, in turn, is explained with direct reference to Lipsius and Seneca (ibid., n. 8).50 Prime importance is given to dealing with the vices of the people, with chapter XXIII providing a detailed account of the human passions, including their shaping according to region, climate and religion. The passions are described as ‘inconstans & mutabile, pronum in affectus’ (inconstant and changeable, susceptible to emotion) (ch. XXIII, 21). Central to these problems are social differences among men in their capacity as private members of the consociationes privatae, characterised in a rather negative fashion. Althusius, for example, reminds the reader of the dangers of luxury51 and of ambition, citing the rivalry between Ghibellines and Guelfs in Italian cities.52 The existing diversity of men and wealth, while accepted as a fact of life, threatens the harmony that is to be achieved through good government. Althusius thus envisages the prospective magistrate as sailing the ship of state through a stormy sea of human tempers and habits.53 It is important to remember that Althusius does not consider here the legal issue of the exercise of government, but the impact of passions on social interaction, which was for him the very basis of the working of the res publica (ch. XXIV, 1). The most relevant human propensities are of two 49

50

51

52 53

See also Althusius, Politica, V, 4 (‘Homines congregati sine jure symbiotico, sunt turba, coetus, multitudo, congregatio, populus, gens’) and hints at Cicero, De re publica, Liber primus, 25. See above, note 44. On the influence of Lipsius on Althusius’s description of the prince, see Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion’, 165–84, but mainly with reference to chapter XXIV. Althusius, Politica, ch. XXXI, 16. A positive evaluation of the wealth in cities such as Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 344–55, is anathema to this concept; see Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Conal Condren, Language of Politics in Early-Modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), 95–9 on the implications of talking about cities. Althusius, Politica, ch. XXXI, 8. On this see also ch. XXXII.

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kinds: those implanted by nature and possessed perpetually, and those acquired. Among the affectiones imperium or natural characteristics of rule are the superbia (rapacity) and insolentia (arrogance) brought about by its dulcedo and licentia (sweetness and licentiousness) and exhibited in tyrants like Croesus, Nebuchadnezzar, Tarquinius Superbus, Caligula and Nero (ch. XXIV, 4). To Althusius, these moral failings bring about novationes et mutationes periculosae (dangerous innovations and changes), as is shown by the history of rulers from Saul to Tiberius (ch. XXIV, 9–12), that in turn produce hate (odium) among the subjects toward their magistrates and then further disaster (12). In contrast, it is the willingness of magistrates to take good counsel that in turn stirs and keeps alive the affectiones benevolentiae & reverentiae (benevolent and respectful feelings) among subjects (15). Althusius describes here the mutual growth of social qualities by their actual exercise, a process in which office-holders and magistrates need to take the lead and that is subject to historic change. Benevolence (benevola affectio) among subjects is described as inclinatio & amor magistratum statum (inclination towards and love of the magistracy). Among the magistrates, it is complemented by lenitas (mercy) of the sort that led King David to call his subjects brothers (ch. XXIV, 18, 19). Yet vigilance and zeal remain crucial, as he remarks, referring to Lipsius; the people have to be governed like a wild horse (equus ferox). From chapter XXIV, 19 onwards, Althusius provides copious historical and scriptural examples of the ethical dynamics between magistrates and the people. The distinctive references to 1 Samuel 8–12 are cases in point. 1 Samuel 12 provides an example of the exercise of benevolence of a magistrate toward his subjects. In comparison to late medieval thought, this signifies the extent to which the virtues of magistrates had replaced the alleged exchange of office among citizens. For to Ptolemaeus of Lucca, Thomas’s student, 1 Sam. 12 had been proof of the beneficial effects of regimen politicum, understood by Ptolemaeus as a government characterised by the exchange of offices among some citizens. Such exchange, Ptolemaeus argued, was instrumental in fostering patriotic commitment and a widespread sense of official responsibility. Roman citizens thus exhibited ‘zelum iustitiae, zelum benevolentiae civilis and amor patriae’ (zeal for justice, zeal for civil benevolence and love of fatherland). To Althusius, the distinction of regimen politicum (involving the participation of some citizens or at least a government bound to certain procedures of law) and regimen regale (royal government) was plainly useless. Not only was the labour market for his students mainly made up of

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principalities, but as syndic he himself restored aristocratic rule to Emden by using mercenaries to crush the institutions of increased popular participation that had developed during the 1590s. Indeed, Althusius denounced these institutions, in particular the Council of the Forty, as mutations to popular rule, while aiming to restore the original aristocratic government.54 Chapter XXIV is thus an empirical sociological account of how, under varying circumstances, the performance of certain affectiones imperii has either brought havoc or harmony to the social union by triggering responses among the ruled. This triggering mechanism shows the crucial character of the distinction between the natural passions of power, superbia and insolentia, and the acquired prudential passions. Similarly, chapter XXV primarily addresses the authority of the prince and the need for him to possess piety, care, fortitude, faith, modesty, temperance, and moderation of passions (ch. XXV, n. 25).55 These virtues will move his subjects, and help to establish order (n. 26). Even though Althusius applied the term magistrate to anyone bearing office in the res publica – with terms such as magistratus summus, ephors and optimates and senators used to distinguish various officeholders – his writings addressed primarily inferior magistrates like himself. These were defined by the civic dignity of collective office far more than any inherited status.56 Coming from the social middle ranks, the large majority of Althusius’s readers as students or fellow magistrates had to study at the university of their own home territory. Few could afford to study anywhere but at one of the universities in the Empire, and a European tour or even attendance at a major foreign university were exceptional. Althusius himself did study at Basle, yet his family background was as modest as that of the majority of territorial officeholders.57 The difference between Althusius’s prime intended audience and, for example, that of Erasmus’s Institutio principis – intended for the education of princes – could hardly have been more clearly pronounced.58 Althusius paid particular attention to the formation of counsellors and men of specialised knowledge that needed to be heard. To Althusius, there 54

55 56

57

58

See his diary 1615, quoted after Heinz Antholz, Die politische Wirksamkeit des Johannes Althusius in Emden (Aurich: Verlag Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1955), 53. See Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion’, 173. Johannes Althusius, Dicaeologicae libri tres (Frankfurt, 1649), vol. I, 26, 14; see also Althusius, Politica, ch. XXV, 37, pt. 80 Howard Hotson, ‘The Conservative Face of Contractual Theory: The Monarchomach Servants of the Count of Nassau-Dillenburg’, in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 251–90. See now Jan van Herwaarden, ‘Erasmus en zijn Vorst’, unpublished ms.

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was hardly any difference between council and counsel, councillors and counsellors, for all government remained dependent on the professional counsel given in councils. Given the laws as the most important binding element of the republic (see above), knowledge of them was vital to government from its outset. Althusius compares wise counsellors to such leaders of the Israelites as Josiah.59 The necessary prudence is only exercised by men who are trained to have developed an understanding of politics (intellectus politicus). Althusius served as both: he was professor in Herborn and syndic in Emden. Educating the prince and counselling in various matters of expertise is the office of the magistrate as political expert. The requisite knowledge is acquired by learning and practice, which means that new counsellors need to study at university and acquire administrative experience. Drawing on the counsel of men possessing this knowledge is at least as important in defending the authority of the magistrate as are arms (consilia necessaria, quibus arma sunt temperanda, ch. XXV, 19). The practice of prudence even extends to the exercise of dissimulation and distrust (ch. XXVI, 5–9). We see here that Althusius’s reduction of ethics to rite facere (appropriate conduct) is important, because within the framework of rule and counsel otherwise morally dubious activities become entirely legitimate, as part of the necessary persona of the office-holder in the discharge of responsibility. The following chapter, XXVII, is thus specifically addressed to counsellors, considered as membra prudentiae.60 It opens with references to Lipsius and Cicero, stressing the need for sapientia, and mainly elaborates on the combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. It is this combination that makes it possible to instruct the magistrate (ch. XXVII, 2). Being loyal and experienced, the counsellors suggest healing means (salutaria) and indeed help to steer the rudder of government (ch. XXVII, 6), despite the fact that they, of course, lack power, command and jurisdiction. This is why the description of the affectiones imperantes had been so all-encompassing and the vocabulary to describe magistrates so wide-ranging. The difference between these counsellors and the princes or other noble members of the imperial estates directly subject only to the emperor is by no means ignored. In fact, however, and surely in Althusius’s own practice in Emden, a counsellor could have enormous influence. Counsellors did 59

60

See on this also Wolfgang E. Weber, ‘Potestas consilio & auxilio juvandi. Bemerkungen zu Beratungs- un Ra¨tetheorie bei Johannes Althusius’, in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 194–5. Althusius, Politica, ch. XXVII, 1.

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serve in their capacity as councillors as inferior magistrates themselves. They needed to love integrity and piety (ch. XXVII, 10). In describing the necessary range of knowledge, its development and application, Althusius is here falling back on the contemporary genre of descriptions of higher civil servants.61 In terms of the requisite moral qualities for office, the differences between counsellors and magistrates are barely visible. As councillors, counsellors served as magistrates themselves. Not predisposed to accepting or giving favours, counsellors may come from all walks of life – from the nobility, clergy, or the populus (34). In any case they must be men of well-attested good fame (bonus ex fama & plurimorum testimonio) (ch. XXVII, 14) and listening to their advice is part of the office of the prince, not simply a matter of choice.62 LEGAL

‘PERSONA’

AND RIGHTS

In Althusius’s discourses dedicated to law and jurisprudence, the issues were treated differently. Indeed, it is in this legal context, rather than in his Politica, that Althusius explicitly uses the term persona. Althusius’s Politica is not primarily interested in formal rights, to which the legal notion of persona is relevant. Instead, it is interested in the social dynamics of human interaction, from families to societies, and takes it that this interaction is governed by a fundamental consensus. This consensus is ultimately located in acceptance of the Decalogue but, given the sinfulness of human beings, has to be enforced by magistrates. The rights of individuals are therefore constantly overruled in the Politica up to and including the sequestration of property for the common good. The only exception to this is the traditional acceptance of self-defence as a law of nature, extended to that of children and family, even against magistrates. After emphasising that in general private subjects must not resist, and explaining that David fled from Saul rather than resisting him, Althusius repeats that ‘Verum quando notoria vis privato a magistratu infertur, cum in casu necessitatis & vitae suae defendendae, defensio ipsi est permissa’ (it is recognised that as self-defence private force against inferior magistrates is allowable in necessity) (ch. XXXVIII, n. 67). In the legal address of his Dicaeologica, however, influenced by Donellus, Althusius tried to describe the rights that are or can be given to the 61

62

See ibid., 201, n. 72, where he is referring to his current research project on early modern ideas on counsellors in Germany. Ch. XXVII, 42: ‘Princeps igitur, seu magistratus omnia negotia privata & Reipublicae cum senatus & consiliariis suis communicare debet.’

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individual over himself. In this context the liberty of the individual is defined in terms of dominium over oneself. Here, the individual is understood as a bearer of rights and obligations, and persona is the term used to denote the legal mode or capacity to which specific rights attach. Published in 1618 and reprinted in 1649, this work remains in the line of attempts to achieve a comprehensive system of law. Hugo Donellus is seen as taking a major step in developing the notion of subjective rights, mainly in his Commentariorum de iure civili libri viginti octo (used: Frankfurt 1594). His means of organising the material for this commentary was to distinguish what is given to the individual actor, and how to reach this. With regard to the person, Donellus explained (bk. I, ch. I) that among the rights of persons are life, safety of the body, liberty and reputation.63 Drawing on the authority of Ulpian (Digesta 1, 1, 10), he presents a conventional notion of justice as a matter of living honestly, doing no harm and giving each his due. This, combined with a concept of ius or right (bk. I, ch. III) enabled him to conclude that iura pertaining to the person are ‘ea quae sunt cuiusque privatim iure tamen illi tributa, or, facultas et potestas iure tributa’ (the abilities and the power given according to the law) (bk. I, ch. III). This argument supports Haakonssen’s point that we do not owe anything as such, but only what we owe justly.64 The reason for this becomes immediately apparent when looking at Donellus’s own attempt to define the distinction between public and private law. Again, he refers to Ulpian’s Digest (1,1,1,2) where public and private law are described as having different areas of reference. Thus, public law is that which looks to the condition of the concerns of Rome, private to individual benefit. Donellus then combines the definition of justice – as quoted above – and the distinction between public and private law to define private law as that law that looks at private uses and distributes what is due to private individuals (‘Ad privatorum utilitatem recta pertinere ius intelligitur, quod privatis et singulis, quae suum est, tribuit’) (bk. II, ch. VII). Althusius’s Dicaeologia works from these assumptions, but goes further in adumbrating a sphere of rights attributed to the ipse or individual over himself. Book 1, part 1, chapter 5 De hominibus natura distinctis (On natural distinctions) only describes the various ‘natural distinctions’ among people such as gender. Law and rights are only considered against the context of society itself linked to divine law. Within this framework, 63

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Manfred Herrmann, Der Schutz der Perso¨nlichkeit in der Rechtslehre des 16.- 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1968), 20–1. Haakonssen, ‘Moral Conservatism of Natural Rights’.

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book 1, part 2 describes fundamental concepts such as dominium, possession and liberty. Dominium is understood in terms of exercise and possession (chs. 18, 19). Liberty is defined as ‘potestas’, which is ‘dominatio cum iure imperandi & necessitate obtemperandi’ (domination with the right to rule and necessity to obey). This potestas of body or spirit is exercised as the right and authority to do what is licit (bk. I, ch. 25, n. 5). Althusius further distinguishes the ‘jus libertatis in ipsam personam liberam and res ipsius’ (the right of liberty in one’s own free person and possessions) (n. 9), and defines (ch. 25, n. 10) that ‘jus libertatis personam concernens est jus habendi & dimittendi sui ipsius’ (the right of liberty in one’s own person means the right to possess and abandon oneself ). And this ipse is then also the object of self defence against a magistrate, as granted by the law of nature (ch. 38, n. 67). None of this, of course, constitutes a system of natural rights, particularly when this is understood as a secure sphere for the development of one’s personality, as is supposed to have developed during the nineteenth century. Rather, the rights attached to the ipse and the persona of Althusius’s legal discourse are derived from what is justly and legally attached to them. The terms ipse and persona thus help to focus on the individual as a legal entity bearing legitimate authority and right over itself, although the legitimacy of what they actually control or possess is measured against the requirements of the public good – just as, one might add, the personae of the magistrates have to be shaped to meet these requirements. CONCLUSION

Persona thus appears explicitly in Althusius’s work only in the context of his efforts to give law a systematic shape. Here, persona appears to denote the bearer of the liberties or privileges that the individual may claim on his or her own behalf. As Janet Coleman and Knud Haakonssen have pointed out, however, such rights remained dependent on what was understood to be just in society. For Althusius, what was just in turn remained dependent on divine law as revealed in scripture, and in particular in the Decalogue. Moreover, for Althusius, ethics had been reduced to the decorum of office, while the virtues had been attached to the various arts necessary for the goals of conduct associated with specific spheres of life. Among these arts politics was meant to be the art of keeping men together in society, an enterprise of constant endeavour. In order to perform this task, magistrates had to know about the general vices of mankind resulting from the Fall, but also about the specific vices to which they as

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magistrates, and their subjects as subjects, were prone. They also had to know about the virtues necessary to carry out their task and the passions that could possibly be utilised to that end. Althusius wrote his Politica as a teacher of this specific political art to students intended for magistracy, yet in Emden he served as magistrate himself. The Spanish threat at the borders of the Empire and the constant conflicts with unruly subjects in Emden provided enough opportunities to test Althusius’s passions and restraint. The ultimate goal of the Politica was to groom students and fellow rulers to commit themselves to their offices in order to keep the commonwealth together and protect Reformed religion within it. Although they are not strictly speaking magistrates, university teachers and counsellors are treated by Althusius as participants in government and thus in need of its necessary qualities. They are not part of the vulgus, and they have the potential to be taught sufficient affectiones to render them fit for that work. Althusius’s point of departure, however, is not so much the persona of a member of the senatorial elite, as was the case for Cicero, but the office of the magistrate in its widest understanding. Here, a group of people is singled out that hopefully will serve for the bonum commune of all. Sixteenth-century German princes, listening to theologians about how to reform the church, had already made acquaintance with specialists of certain realms of knowledge who claimed an enormous degree of autonomy and authority in their respective subject areas. With the Althusian counsellor, specialists in politics also began to make their voices heard, above all as civic philosophers. Under the peculiar conditions of the nature of magistracy in Germany, and the objective importance of legal and political council in German government, large and small, Althusius’s account, no matter what the idiosyncrasies of his constitutional set-up, fits the more general development of a genre describing the role and importance of counsellors. The comparatively high political importance of German magistrates, defined by their civilis dignitas, a magistratu collocata – as opposed to seu natalium dignitas . . . ab intercessore parente65 – provides a background to the subsequent connection between specialised university knowledge, governing power, and reflections on the appropriate persona for men of learning in Germany.66 65

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Johannes Althusius, Dicaeologicae libri tres, vol. I, 26, 14; see also Johannes Althusius, Politica, ch. XXV, 37, pt. 80. See, for a later period, Wolfgang Mager and Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Learned Men and Merchants: The Rise of the “Bu¨rgertum”, 1648–1806’, in Sheilagh Ogilvie and Robert Scribner (eds.), Germany: A Social History 1300–1800, Bd. II (London, 1996), 164–95.

CHAPTER

8

Descartes as sage: spiritual askesis in Cartesian philosophy

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John Cottingham

INTRODUCTION: THE CARTESIAN MASK

In one of his earliest surviving writings Descartes says that just as actors put on masks (personam induunt), so he himself will enter the theatre of the world masked: larvatus prodeo.1 ‘Mask’ was, of course, the original meaning of the Latin term persona – in Greek prosopon: the false face of clay or bark that actors in the ancient world donned in order to come on to the stage. It is an odd figure of speech for a philosopher to adopt: both in classical philosophical thought (from Plato’s famous strictures against acting and role-playing),2 and also in the Christian gospels (from Jesus’ denunciation of those whose outward display did not match their inner thoughts),3 the connotations of the term ‘actor’ (hypocrites) were far from favourable. What persona did Descartes himself have in mind? We are apt, in the light of popular contemporary psychology, to think of a persona as some kind of false self-presentation;4 but the ancient theatrical persona was a 1

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Praeambula (1619), from Descartes’s early notebooks (later dubbed the Cogitationes privatae): AT, vol. X, 213: CSM, vol. I, 2. In this paper, ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes by C. Adam and P. Tannery, Œuvres de Descartes (12 vols.) revised edn, Paris: Vrin/ CNRS, 1964–76); ‘CSM’ refers to the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (2 vols.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and ‘CSMK’ to vol. III, The Correspondence, by the same translators plus A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Plato, Republic (c. 385 BCE), 392c–8b. Matthew (c. 60 CE), 6:2–5. One thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous account of how people wilfully imprison themselves in their official roles as a kind of escape from true self-realisation: ‘the waiter who tries to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker . . . playing at being a waiter in a cafe´ . . . There is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor.’ Being and Nothingness (L’eˆtre et le ne´ant, 1943) (London: Methuen, 1957), ch. 2, 59. As Carl Jung observes (writing a few years before Sartre), ‘the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas – the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the

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formal, stylised device, whose purpose was not so much simulation as dissimulation. Going on stage is a daunting business, and the mask conceals awkwardness and embarrassment (a point that Descartes himself makes quite explicitly).5 By hiding his nervousness, or simply the unprepossessing ordinary features that might be familiar to the audience, the actor could pronounce his lines with more confidence. So it may be that the young Descartes is simply recording his shyness – his reluctance to make a stir. We know that his favourite motto was the Ovidian tag bene vixit qui bene latuit, a variation on the Epicurean maxim lathe biosas: ‘get through life without drawing attention to yourself ’.6 And when he finally presented the public with an account of his ‘method of seeking the truth in the sciences’, together with some sample essays illustrating its results, he would not allow his name to appear on the title page.7 But there is more to it than this. Descartes may have been cautious and reticent, but he had a mission.8 If the mask was there, it was one he wanted ultimately to shed, like the sciences themselves, of which he remarked that in his own epoch they were still ‘masked’ (larvatae) – veiled or constricted, as it were, in the formal stylised apparatus of scholasticism – but ‘if the masks could only be shed’, their true nature would ‘appear in its full beauty’.9 So to have a clear picture of the inaugurator of the early modern age, we need to understand what Descartes saw himself as setting out to do, as he entered the world’s stage: what he took his distinctive contribution to be, or what was his true self-conception as a philosopher.

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background of his own biography . . . One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.’ ‘Concerning ¨ ber Wiedergeburt’, 1939, rev. 1950), in Collected Works (London: Routledge, 1959), vol. Rebirth’ (‘U IX, part I, }221. ‘Comoedi, moniti ne in fronte appareat pudor, personam induunt.’ (‘Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask.) AT, vol. X, 212: CSM, vol. I, 2. Letter to Mersenne of April 1634: AT, vol. I, 285; CSMK, 43. Discours de la me´thode pour . . . chercher la ve´rite´ dans les science. Plus . . . des essais de ce me´thode. Leiden, 8 June 1637. The zeal and commitment is clearly apparent in, for example, the Discourse on the Method (especially throughout part VI), and seems to have dated right back to Descartes’s night of vivid dreams in November 1619, from which he awoke with the vision of inaugurating a comprehensive new scientific system, and made a vow of thanksgiving to visit the shrine of the Virgin at Loretto. Adrien Baillet, La vie de M. Des-Cartes (Paris, 1691), vol. I, 85–6 (cf. AT, vol. X, 180–8 and CSM, vol. I, 4–5). Larvatae nunc scientiae sunt: quae, larvis sublatis, pulcherrimae apparerent.’ Praeambula, AT, vol. X, 215: CSM, vol. I, 2.

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In asking about of the true self-conception of Descartes, or of any philosopher, we are moving to a richer and more positive sense of the term persona: one that takes us away from masks and acting towards something more ‘personal’, something connected not just with a ‘career’, but with the full moral and psychological dimensions of someone’s chosen form of life. For alongside its ancient theatrical connotations, the Latin concept persona also has deeper and more serious resonances, deriving in part from early Christian theology. Tres personae in una substantia (‘three persons in one substance’) was Tertullian’s formula in the third century for defining the unity and triplicity of God, persona being (in Hugh Pyper’s apt phrase) ‘a label for whatever accounts for the distinctive identity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.10 Without going into the intricate theological controversies surrounding the mystery of the Trinity, one way in which the individual divine personae have long been understood is by analogy with the way in which a human being forms a true self-conception of him or herself.11 For our present purposes, the persona of the philosopher may thus be said to involve the development and expression of a particular distinctive identity or sense of self – that which gives intellectual shape and moral significance to a given individual’s life and work. PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-CONCEPTIONS AND THEIR EVOLUTION

The self-conception of the philosopher in something like the above sense was, until our own time, a serious and important matter – something we tend to forget in our philosophically somewhat degenerate age. A culture manifests its degeneration in part by bad faith, a telling instance of which is the undertaking of some philosophical pursuit not for itself, but merely instrumentally, for the sake of the practitioner’s vanity or some other advantage. The sophists of ancient Greece, who claimed to teach virtue for money, were criticised by Socrates as a paradigm case.12 Contrasted 10

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Tertullian, Adversus praxeas (c. 213 CE). The gloss by Pyper (emphasis added) is from A. Hastings, A. Mason and H. Pyper (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 531, s.v. ‘person’. For this suggestion, deriving from St Thomas Aquinas, with earlier roots in Augustine, see B. Davies, Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2002), ch. 16, }2 (‘Three Persons and one God’), 167–8. The criticism is implicit in the heavy irony used by Socrates in his description of the sophists (in the course of his own defence against the accusation of corrupting the young): Apology (c. 390 BCE), 19d–e. For a more favourable interpretation of Plato’s attitude to the sophists, see T. H. Irwin, ‘Plato: The Intellectual Background’, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51–69.

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with this instrumental approach is the Platonic ideal of philosophia – love of wisdom for its own sake.13 Familiarity with the label has perhaps dulled us to the passionate seriousness it originally conveyed – the seriousness that led Socrates, threatened with the death penalty, to insist that ‘for a human being, the unexamined life [bios] is not worth living’.14 It is often assumed nowadays that the critical inquiry that is the hallmark of the socalled Socratic method is of a purely logical character, having to do merely with the examination of concepts and definitions. But the oft-quoted slogan just cited should remind us that philosophical ‘examination’, for Socrates, involves the entire character of someone’s life (bios). As Socrates goes on to explain in the Apology, his philosophical vocation was linked with unwavering allegiance to conscience, the ‘god’, as he put it, whose inner voice demanded his obedience.15 Contrast this moral seriousness with the climate inhabited by many of today’s practitioners of philosophy – a climate whose character is aptly indicated by the kinds of questions that seem to claim most attention. How do you know that you are really sitting in this lecture room, rather than being just a brain floating in a vat of nutrients somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy? May it not be, for all you know, that the planet Earth and all its inhabitants are not real, but mere fantasies produced in your mind by a group of mad scientists in Andromeda, who have stimulated the nerve inputs of your floating brain in such a way as to give you all the appropriate sensations so as to create the convincing illusion that you are sitting in a lecture on the planet Earth, when in reality you are light years away, and do not have a body at all, and therefore no posterior to sit on in the first place? Asking this sort of fantastic question might seem as silly a waste of time for grown people as one could imagine. Yet the present writer could testify (as no doubt could many other editors of mainstream anglophone philosophy journals) to receiving scores of submissions each year, highly intricate pieces of work, laboriously examining just one more variation on this ‘brain-in-vat’ scenario. Our philosophical culture, to be sure, perceives these inquiries as contributions to an important subject called 13

14 15

‘Although we say many things are loved [phila] for the sake of something that is loved, we are evidently using an inappropriate word in saying that. It seems that the thing that is really loved is that in which all these things called loves come to an end . . . Then what is really loved is not loved for the sake of anything.’ Plato, Lysis (c. 390 BCE), 220a7–b5. Cf. T. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 67ff. ‘Ho de anexestastos bios ou biotos’ (Plato, Apology, 38a5). Ibid., 40a2–c2.

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‘epistemology’. But on reflection one may wonder whether this kind of work can be pursued only at the cost of a certain fragmentation, a split between one’s job as a ‘philosopher’ and the more intimate concerns that structure the rest of one’s life. The instrumental value of the work is clear, for on it depend promotions and grants and research ratings, and all manner of other appurtenances of modern academic life. And, in fairness, the intellectual puzzles involved may have a certain engaging intricacy which can be stimulating in itself, as well as provoking wider reflection on the nature and justification of knowledge claims. Yet for all that, are we not left with a certain sense of disquiet at seeing so much philosophical energy expended on examining the epistemic credentials of a sciencefiction hypothesis that no human being, once they get outside the study or the seminar, could even begin to take seriously? One could of course pretend to care about it – pretend that one was passionately involved in making sure we know we are not on Alpha Centauri – but that would be hard to reconcile with the spirit of commitment and integrity which, since Socrates and Plato, has been thought of as fundamental to genuine philosophical inquiry. In Harold Pinter’s play, The Homecoming, a character called Teddy, who has escaped his East End working-class background to become a philosophy professor in the USA, returns home to London on a visit. On his arrival, Lennie, his clever younger brother, who has stayed at home to become an accomplished pimp and thug, insolently asks him: ‘What is a table, Teddy – philosophically speaking, I mean?’; and he proceeds to taunt his embarrassed elder brother with a barrage of questions about whether we should doubt the nature and existence of external objects.16 The moral is clear: these are the kinds of vacuous question that get philosophy a bad name. Many people might suppose that if this lamentable image of philosophy is to be laid at anyone’s door, it must be that of Rene´ Descartes. For the last fifty years or so, at least in the anglophone philosophical world, the persona of the ‘epistemologist’ has been retrospectively fitted on to Descartes so tightly as to condition, for a large number of people, how his philosophy is examined and interpreted. The outlines of the story are very familiar. At the start of Descartes’s most famous work, perhaps the most commonly used text in Introduction to Philosophy courses all over the world, the question of knowledge and its justification becomes the philosophical question par excellence; so the first steps in philosophy involve 16

Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (1965), act 2.

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raising doubts about everything – even the existence of an ‘external’ reality. Asserting that he ‘cannot possibly go too far in his distrustful attitude’, the meditator supposes that ‘the sky, the earth, and all external things’ are merely ‘delusions’, which a ‘malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning’ has implanted in his mind in order to deceive him.17 This last scenario is of course the precursor of today’s brain-in-vat obsessions – the only difference being that Descartes developed it in an incorporealist mode, with the demon directly generating the deceptive sensations in a supposedly bodiless subject, while today’s variant adopts the language of physicalism, with a story about the stimulation of brains and nerve fibres. So entrenched has our vision become of Descartes as the purveyor of elaborate sceptical scenarios, that the phrase ‘Cartesian doubt’ has passed into contemporary philosophical jargon as a shorthand for a whole mode of epistemological inquiry. There is someone called ‘the sceptic’, who has to be defeated; and although it has become unfashionable to accept Descartes’s weapons for the victory (weapons which invoke divine power and goodness), he is at least credited with taking doubt to its limits, and showing us just what the anti-sceptic has to overcome. Nor is this epistemological image of Descartes merely the creation of those contemporary analyticians who have scant regard for historical context: Richard Popkin, very much a historian’s historian of philosophy, takes a very similar line, observing that the introduction of Descartes’s malicious demon pushes ‘the crise pyrrhonienne’ [the crisis of extreme scepticism] ‘to its farthest limit’,18 and later defining the Cartesian revolution in terms of the centrality it accorded to the question ‘Where does our knowledge come from, and what can we know and how certain is our knowledge?’19 But a careful look at how Descartes himself presents the sceptical issues in the Meditations is enough to cast serious doubt on this image of him as

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Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641), First Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 18, 19, 22: CSM, vol. II, 17–15. Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 184. ‘In questioning all of the theories in philosophy, science and theology of the time, the sceptics made it crucial for thinkers to find a satisfactory justification for their knowledge claims. Hence, the question Where does our knowledge come from, and what can we know and how certain is our knowledge? became central. New theories of knowledge had to be offered to deal with the epistemological crisis brought on by the growth and spread of scepticism at the end of the Renaissance.’ R. Popkin, ‘Theories of Knowledge’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 684.

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preoccupied with abstract epistemology. He himself described the sceptical doubts of the First Meditation as ‘exaggerated’ or ‘hyperbolical’, and ‘deserving to be dismissed as laughable’ – explodendae (literally, ‘to be hissed or booed off the stage’).20 What is more, in the Synopsis, published as an introduction to the first edition of the Meditations in 1641, Descartes explicitly disavows the role of a champion epistemologist holding the line against some supposed21 ‘sceptical crisis’: The great benefit of these arguments is not, in my view, that they prove what they establish – namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on – since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things. The point is that in considering these arguments we come to realize that they are not as solid or as transparent as the arguments which lead us to knowledge of our own minds and of God.22

Descartes certainly wanted ‘solid’ and ‘transparent’ arguments; and certainly, like many of his immediate predecessors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, he wanted to expose the vanity of what had passed for knowledge in the culture in which he had grown up.23 But he was emphatically not playing the modern ‘epistemological’ game – inventing artificial positions (those of the ‘sceptic’, the ‘antisceptic’, the ‘realist’, the ‘antirealist’, and so on) to see whether one is ingenious enough to refute the latest ploy in an introverted academic debate. His philosophical concerns had a far greater integrity, a far closer link to the goals of his life. FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO SCIENCE?

In recent Cartesian scholarship, the long-dominant image of Descartes the epistemologist has gradually given way to that of Descartes the scientist. 20

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‘hyperbolicae superiorum dierum dubitationes ut risu dignae sunt explodendae’ (AT, vol. VII, 89: CSM, vol. II, 61). I have elsewhere expressed serious reservations about the account proposed by Popkin and others of a supposed crise pyrrhonienne in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; see J. Cottingham, ‘Why Should Analytic Philosophers Do History of Philosophy?’, in T. Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (eds.), Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 25–41. AT, vol. VII, 15–16: CSM, vol. II, 11 (emphasis supplied). Compare, for example, Francisco Sanches in Quod nihil scitur (1581), which provides a remarkably frank description of the rambling mixture of anecdote and pseudo-explanation that passed for knowledge in the Renaissance world: ‘Sufficiat nunc nosse nos nil plane nosse’ (‘Suffice it for now to know that we know nothing at all’); ‘Misera est conditio nostra. In media luce coecutimus’ (‘Wretched is our condition; in the midst of light we are blind’). In F. Sanches, That Nothing is Known, ed. D. F. S. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 57.

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In part, this is a reversion to an earlier view, held for example by the great Cartesian scholar and editor Charles Adam, that Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology are essentially subordinate to Cartesian science.24 According to an interesting study by Desmond Clarke,25 the key motivation behind Descartes’s research programme is the desire to provide a new style of explanation that would replace the scholastic approach that prevailed in the world in which he grew up. Much of this is uncontroversial: Descartes frequently complains of the explanatory vacuity of the ‘substantial forms and real qualities which many philosophers suppose to inhere in things’,26 objecting that they are ‘harder to understand than the things they are supposed to explain’.27 His own mechanistic accounts, by contrast, were supposed to have an immediate intelligibility, since they simply ascribed to the micro world exactly the same kinds of interactions with which we are familiar from ordinary middle-sized phenomena around us. If we understand the latter, then we already have a grasp of how the posited micro events operate (‘imperceptible simply because of their small size’); and Descartes’s key idea is that these give rise to the relevant explananda in a way that is (as he put it) ‘just as natural’ as explaining how a clock tells the time by reference to the little cogs and wheels inside it.28 There is no denying that a large proportion of Descartes’s writings (vastly larger than is suggested by those passages typically selected for study in today’s standard philosophy courses) is taken up with working out this mechanistic programme with respect to the animal and human nervous system. In Le monde and the Traite´ de l’homme (1633) and the Dioptrique (1637), what we would nowadays call ‘cognitive functions’, such as visual perception, are investigated by Descartes in terms of brain events of a certain kind (‘ideas as brain patterns’, as Clarke puts it). And the same corporealist strategy is used by Descartes in his accounts of imagination and memory, and of the passions – an approach that receives its fullest treatment in his last published work, Les passions de l’aˆme (1649). But is it right, in the light of these extensive writings, spread over many years, to construe Descartes’s primary role as that of the explanatory scientist?

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‘Descartes ne demande a` la me´taphysique qu’une chose, de fournir un appui solide a` la ve´rite´ scientifique’ (AT, vol. XII, 143). Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae, 1644), part IV, art. 198. 28 Ibid., art. 201. Ibid., art. 203.

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One qualm about this interpretation is that it leads to a curiously awkward view of Descartes’s notion of the res cogitans – the immaterial ‘thinking substance’ that he identifies in the central sections of his masterworks, the Discours and the Meditationes, as the indubitable subject of his metaphysical reflections. Construed as offering an explanatory theory of the mind, this notion of a ‘thinking thing’ tells us remarkably little; and indeed Clarke’s interpretative framework, giving primacy to the persona of the scientist, leads him to mount a complaint against Descartes on precisely these grounds – that the notion of the res cogitans has no explanatory force. For given that the Cartesian quest, on Clarke’s account, was for ‘genuine’ (i.e. mechanistic) explanations of seeing, hearing, remembering, imagining and so on, the programme ‘ran into apparently insurmountable obstacles’29 when it came to dealing with the perspective of the thinking subject; and the result, for Clarke, was a dead end. Descartes did not really have a ‘theory’ of an immaterial thinking substance; instead, his talk of a ‘thinking thing’ was ‘true [but] uninformative’, a ‘provisional acknowledgement of failure, an index of the work that remains to be done before a viable theory of the human mind becomes available’.30 The talk of ‘failure’ is appropriate, Clarke suggests, because the Cartesian claims about thinking substances ‘add nothing new to our knowledge’ of them. Descartes is ‘claiming no more than . . . that, if thinking is occurring, there must be a thinking thing of which the act of thinking is predicated’.31 So the attribute of thinking can no more be of explanatory value than the schoolmen’s attribute of gravitas or ‘heaviness’ was any use in explaining why heavy things fall. The charge of explanatory vacuity seems right in one way, but in my view it is nevertheless misleading in so far as it tacitly assumes that Descartes must have approached the phenomenon of consciousness with a view to seeing if it could be explained after the manner of his mechanistic programme for physics. This is indeed what his contemporary Pierre Gassendi thought he should be doing: it is no more use telling us you are a ‘thinking thing’, he objected, than it would be to tell us that wine is ‘a red thing’; what we are looking for is the micro-structure that explains the manifest properties.32 Descartes’s reply is instructive: he was utterly 29 30 31 32

Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of the Mind, 241. Ibid., 257, 258. Ibid., 221. Objectiones et Responsiones (1641), Fifth Objections, AT, vol. VII, 276: CSM, vol. II, 193.

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scathing about the very idea that one might produce some ‘quasichemical’ micro-explanation of thinking.33 In the context of the argument of the Meditations, which is the focus of this sharp exchange, we should recall that Descartes’s meditator has arrived at a self-conception of the mind which leads him directly forward to contemplate the ‘immense light’ of the Godhead, the infinite incorporeal being whose image is reflected, albeit dimly, in the finite created intellect of the meditator.34 So whatever else the notion of res cogitans was or was not intended to do, it clearly played a central role in the meditator’s journey towards awareness of God. Like Bonaventure before him, whose own Itinerarium mentis in Deum (the ‘Journey of the Mind towards God’) was profoundly conditioned by the contemplative and immaterialist tradition of Plato and Augustine, Descartes has a conception of ultimate truth that requires an aversio – a turning of the mind away from the world of the senses – in order to prepare it for glimpsing the reality that lies beyond the phenomenal world. Both Bonaventure and Descartes, following Augustine’s famous slogan ‘In interiore homine habitat veritas’ (‘The truth dwells within the inner man’),35 undertake an interior journey. ‘Go back into yourself’, says Augustine; ‘let us return to ourselves, into our mind’, says Bonaventure, that we may search for the ‘lux veritatis in facie nostrae mentis’ – the light of truth shining in our minds, as through a glass, in which the image of the Blessed Trinity shines forth.36 ‘I turn my mind’s eye upon myself’, says Descartes, and find the idea of God stamped there like the ‘mark the craftsman has set on his work’.37 Can this immaterialist metaphysics be merely a means to an end – a kind of propaedeutic to science in the way suggested by the thesis of Adam? Such a view is not, perhaps, beyond the bounds of possibility, though it would, I believe, be very difficult convincingly to explain the theistic reflections we find in the Third Meditation as simply part of an instrumental strategy; for it is striking that the style and flavour of the 33 34 35

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Fifth Replies, AT, vol. VII, 359: CSM, vol. II, 248. Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 51: CSM, vol. II, 35. ‘Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas’ (‘Go not outside, but return within thyself; in the inward man dwelleth the truth’). Augustine, De vera religione (391), ch. XXXIX, 72. ‘Ad nos reintraremus, in mentem scilicet nostram, in qua divina relucet imago; hinc. . . conari debemus per speculum videre Deum, ubi ad modum candelabri relucet lux veritatis in facie nostrae mentis, in qua scilicet resplendet imago beatissimae Trinitatis.’ Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259), ch. III, 1. Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 51: CSM, vol. II, 35.

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writing is often much closer to the language of devotion and worship than it is to the detached critical terminology of the analytician.38 But there is another and more fundamental reason for being wary of the image of Descartes the scientist as the key to understanding the Cartesian system, namely that the very notion of ‘the scientist’ is fundamentally anachronistic when we transpose it back from our own time to the world of the seventeenth century. Descartes was deeply interested in physics and mechanics, of that there can be no doubt. But his interests were the interests not of a scientist in the modern sense, but those of the natural philosopher. And unpacking the persona of the natural philosopher discloses a role that is far more structured and systematic, and far more widereaching in its scope, than is readily graspable from the perspective of the fragmented and compartmentalised contemporary culture within which modern ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ find their place. PHILOSOPHY, KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

The very term ‘natural philosophy’ immediately gives a strong clue to what the subject was in pre-modern times – not a separated discipline, in the manner of our contemporary academic and scientific specialisms, but rather a species of the genus philosophy. And philosophy, in the climate in which Descartes grew up, was by its very nature a synoptic or comprehensive enterprise.39 When he was a schoolboy of thirteen, there appeared a textbook that was rapidly to become a best seller, the Summa philosophiae quadripartita, a ‘Compendium of Philosophy in Four Parts’, which Descartes was later to describe as ‘the best its type ever produced’.40 Written by Eustachius, a Cistercian and professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, it covered dialectic, morals, physics and metaphysics. And in case we should think that the aim of this comprehensive summary was simply to impart to its readers an intellectual grasp of the essentials of each of the separate branches of philosophy, the object of the enterprise is

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Compare the following: Placet hic aliquamdiu in ipsius Dei contemplatione immorari . . . et immensi hujus luminis pulchritudinem . . . intueri, admirari, adorare (‘Let me here rest for a while in the contemplation of God himself and gaze upon, wonder at, and adore the beauty of this immense light’). Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 52: CSM, vol. II, 36. For more on this theme, see J. Cottingham, ‘Plato’s Sun and Descartes’s Stove: Contemplation and Control in Cartesian Philosophy’, Proceedings of the British Academy, forthcoming. For more on the ‘synoptic’ conception of philosophy, see J. Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 1. Letter to Mersenne of 11 November 1640, AT, vol. III, 232: CSMK, 156.

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stated very clearly: ‘universae philosophiae finis est humana felicitas’ (‘the goal of a complete philosophy is human happiness’).41 The two principal features of philosophy that are prominent here, its allencompassing character, and the link with how we can best live (‘philosophy as a way of life’, as Pierre Hadot has called it),42 are in both cases explicitly recognised and adopted by Descartes for his own system. The celebrated metaphor of philosophy as a tree, which he uses in the French preface to his own comprehensive textbook, the Principia philosophiae, captures both the integrated or organic nature of the subject (metaphysics the roots, physics the trunk, the more specific disciplines – medicine, mechanics and morals – the branches) and also its aspirations to yield fruit in our lives.43 This last aspect is sometimes presented by Descartes in terms of the practical benefits or pay-offs of his philosophy, in contrast to the ‘speculative’ philosophy of the schoolmen;44 in the Discourse and elsewhere, for example, he mentions the conquest of illness and the maladies of old age, and even the artificial prolongation of life.45 Here Descartes is adopting what is, to our ears, his most ‘modernistic’ persona – what we might almost now see as that of Descartes the ‘proto- Californian’.46 But if we bracket off these sometimes rather brash-sounding boasts about what 41

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Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae quadripartita (1609), Preface to part II. Translated extracts may be found in R. Ariew, J. Cottingham and T. Sorell (eds.), Descartes’ Meditations: Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–96. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Originally published as Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987). Principles of Philosophy, Lettre Preface a` l’e´dition Franc¸aise (1647), AT, vol. IXB, 14: CSM, vol. I, 186. ‘Au lieu de cette philosophie spe´culative, qu’on enseigne dans les e´coles, on en peut trouver une pratique, par laquelle, connaissant la force et les actions du feu, de l’eau, des astres, des cieux et de tous les autres corps qui nos environnent, aussi distinctement que nous connaissons les divers me´tiers de nos artisans, nous les pourrions employer en meˆme fac¸on a` tous les usages auxquels ils sont propres, et ainsi nous rendre comme maıˆtres et possesseurs de la nature.’ (‘Instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, we can find a practical one, whereby, knowing the force and actions of fire, water, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we could employ them in the same way for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus make ourselves as it were masters and possessors of nature.’) Discours de la me´thode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 61: CSM, vol. I, 142). In the continuation of the passage cited in the previous note, Descartes observes that the new knowledge he envisages is ‘desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the goods we find there, but also and most importantly for the maintenance of health . . . For whatever we now know in medicine is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known, and we might free ourselves from innumerable diseases, both of the body and of the mind, and perhaps even from the infirmity of old age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies which nature has provided.’ Discours de la me´thode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 62; CSM, vol. I, 142–3). See also Descartes, Conversation with Burman (1648), AT, vol. V, 178: CSMK, 353. Cf. J. Cottingham, ‘Spirituality, Science and Morality’, in D. Carr and J. Haldane (eds.), Essays on Spirituality and Education (London: Routledge, 2003), 40–54.

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the new mechanistic understanding of nature might achieve, Descartes’s general philosophical orientation, one directed not only towards increased knowledge but also to the goal of a better way of life, was in fact part of a much older tradition which linked him, rather than separating him, from the scholastic predecessors he hoped in many respects to supersede. Before exploring this further, we need first to be aware that even the contrast just made between knowledge on the one hand and one’s way of living on the other can be radically misleading. The Thomist tradition, which was an important element in the philosophical culture Descartes’s teachers at La Fle`che handed on to him, embodied a conception of knowledge that was much richer and less narrowly intellectualistic than our modern conception might suggest. Thomas Aquinas had divided the rational faculty into two categories, practical reason and speculative reason. The former involves the virtues of prudence and art (concerned respectively with doing and making what conduces to human good);47 the latter involves the three virtues of intellectus or ‘understanding’ (the grasp of first principles), scientia or ‘knowledge’ (comprehension of things and their causes), and sapientia or ‘wisdom’ (awareness of how everything is related to the highest or ultimate causes).48 But it is striking how far Aquinas departs from the original Aristotelian framework on which this classification is based; for although formally speaking these three virtues are excellences of speculative reason (which might suggest to us a certain neutrality and abstraction from the conduct of life), Aquinas’s account places them within a richly structured religious and moral framework. Excellence of intellect, for example, is, as Eleanore Stump acutely observes, ‘linked [by Aquinas] together with certain actions and dispositions in the will and also with certain states of emotion’.49 And it follows that on Aquinas’s view ‘all true excellence of intellect – wisdom, understanding and scientia – is possible only in connection with moral excellence as well’.50 The idea of a complex interrelation between moral and intellectual excellence is reinforced once we begin to delve into the theological context of Aquinas’s account of the virtues. There is explicit reference to the ‘seven gifts [septem dona] of the Spirit’, a doctrine based on the prophecy in

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Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1266–73) IaIIae, 57, 2. Ibid., IaIIae, 66, 5. Eleanore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 353. In what follows about Aquinas I am heavily indebted to Stump’s insightful and unusually wide-ranging treatment. Stump, Aquinas, p. 360.

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Isaiah: ‘And the spirit of God shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the sprit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and godliness, the spirit of the fear of God.’51 Aquinas observes that four of the gifts pertain to reason, namely wisdom (sapientia), knowledge (scientia), understanding (intellectus) and counsel (consilium); and three to the appetitive faculty, namely strength or courage (fortitudo), godliness or piety (pietas) and fear (timor).52 The result is that, despite Aquinas’s stress on their different origins (natural and supernatural respectively), his discussion involves a considerable overlap, or ‘twinning’53 between the list of intellectual excellences and the list of gifts of the Holy Spirit. And indeed Aquinas’s account constantly interweaves items from these lists, and also from other standard theological lists, including the famous enumeration in Paul’s letter to the Galatians of the nine fruits of the Spirit, namely ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance’.54 Aquinas also cross-refers us to the three great ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope and charity: two of the three intellectual virtues, scientia and intellectus are linked with faith, while sapientia is linked with charity. This interweaving is particularly striking in the case of sapientia or wisdom: although, if construed in purely secular or natural terms, it might be thought to be a ‘morally neutral’ virtue, and hence able to be present irrespective of the moral character of the agent, this ceases to be so if it is construed as a spiritual gift.55 What had in Aristotle been understood in terms of the mastery of the first principles of metaphysics becomes in Aquinas associated with knowledge of the ultimate first principle, God, knowledge of whom is linked in many biblical texts to charity or love (which of course is far from being a purely intellectual matter).56 Some of the ramifications of this are again brought out by Stump: On Aquinas’s account of wisdom . . . a person’s moral wrongdoing will produce deficiencies in both her speculative and her practical intellect. In its effects on her 51

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Isaiah 11:2, following the Greek text of the Septuagint version (LXX). The original Hebrew lists six gifts, and this is followed in the Vulgate: ‘et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini, spiritus sapientiae et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae et pietatis’. But the LXX version adds a gloss ‘the fear of God’, which some commentaries construed as a seventh gift; hence the standard doctrine of the ‘sevenfold gifts’ of the Holy Spirit, reflected in Thomas’s inclusion of timor. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IaIIae 68, 1. Cf. Stump, Aquinas, 350–1. Galatians 5:22–3: ‘fructus autem Spiritus est caritas, gaudium, pax, longanimitas, bonitas, benignitas, fides, modestia, continentia’ (Vulgate). Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIaIIae 45, 4. See, for example, 1 John 4:16.

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speculative intellect, it will make her less capable of understanding God and goodness, theology and ethics. It will also undermine her practical intellect, leaving her prone not only to wrong moral judgment in general, but also to wrong moral judgment about herself and particular actions of hers, and so will lead to self deception.57

The upshot of this is that although a certain image of Aquinas that is prevalent today sees him as a proto-analytic philosopher, concerned purely with abstract conceptual inquiries (together perhaps with certain quaint and abstruse theological puzzles, for example about the identity of angels), in reality his philosophy offers an integrated vision in which the pursuit of virtue and the cultivation of knowledge are closely interlinked, and in which even an abstract-sounding virtue like wisdom or sapientia (the successor to Aristotle’s sophia) emerges as central to a harmonious and integrated life. To quote from the Summa theologiae : It belongs to wisdom, as a gift, not only to contemplate Divine things, but also to regulate human acts. Now the first thing to be effected in this direction of human acts is the removal of evils opposed to wisdom: wherefore fear is said to be ‘the beginning of wisdom,’ because it makes us shun evil, while the last thing is like an end, whereby all things are reduced to their right order; and it is this that constitutes peace. Hence James said with reason that ‘the wisdom that is from above’ (and this is the gift of the Holy Ghost) ‘first indeed is chaste,’ because it avoids the corruption of sin, and ‘then peaceable,’ wherein lies the ultimate effect of wisdom, for which reason peace is numbered among the beatitudes.58 DESCARTES AS SAGE?

Given that this traditional model exemplified by Aquinas and others – the model of philosophy as contributing centrally to how we should live – would have been absorbed at some fairly deep level by Descartes as part of his educational and cultural background, how far can we say that Descartes himself aspired to make his philosophy conform to it? And if, as has recently been suggested, the traditional persona of the philosopher (that of the ‘philosopher as sage’, as we might call it for convenience) had begun to come under serious attack in the early modern period with the emergence of the new experimental science,59 should Descartes be seen as joining that attack, or as holding fast to the older conception? 57 58 59

Stump, Aquinas, 353–4. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIaIIae 45, 6 (English Dominican translation, 1947). See, for example, Stephen Gaukroger’s account of Francis Bacon in ‘The persona of the natural philosopher’, in the present volume.

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There is a certain amount in Descartes that may seem to point us towards the erosion (or indeed eradication) of the persona of the philosopher as sage, and its replacement by the harsher more modernistic persona of the technocrat – the controlling manipulator of nature, aiming to ‘deliver the goods’ as a result of the expertise provided by the new science. We have already mentioned the manifesto of the Discours, which offers the hope that the new philosophie pratique will deliver mankind from the obstacles of disease and infirmity and make us ‘masters and possessors of nature’.60 And the way this programme is worked out in the writings of Descartes’s later years seems at first to reduce morals to physiology and medicine: to use the new mechanistic knowledge to develop techniques to reprogramme the human affective system and thus, as it were, bypass the need for the traditional goals of spiritual discipline in the pursuit of the good. At the heart of this technological vision is Descartes’s idea of utilising the results of physiological science in a blueprint for ethics. He told a correspondent in 1646 that his results in physics had been ‘a great help in establishing sure foundations in moral philosophy’;61 and when he published his treatise on the Passions in 1649 he described it as breaking new ground by explaining the passions en physicien – from a physiological point of view, as we might say.62 The ultimate goal here is to develop a scientific programme for the re-training of our psycho-physical responses. Part of the background for this comes from ordinary observation: if the behaviour patterns of animals can be changed by training, might not human emotional responses, linked to similar types of physiological mechanism, be similarly altered? And if our early childhood experiences can set up automatic arousal or aversion mechanisms, might we not be able to delve back into these past causes, and learn how to overcome the conditioned patterns of response by restructuring them?63 Descartes’s scientific ethics thus takes the general aim, voiced in his early manifesto, of becoming ‘masters and possessors of nature’, and proceeds to apply it not just to the external environment but to the 60 61

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Discours de la me´thode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 61; CSM, vol. I, 142), quoted above, note 44. ‘la notion telle quelle de la Physique, que j’ai taˆche´ d’acque´rir, m’a grandement servi pour e´tablir des fondements certains en la Morale’ (letter to Chanut of 15 June 1646, AT, vol. IV, 441; CSMK, 289). Les passions de l’aˆme, prefatory letter of 14 August 1649, AT, vol. XI, 326; CSM, vol. I, 327. The details of Descartes’s programme are examined at length in J. Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 3. For animal training, cf. Passions of the Soul, art. 50; for patterns of emotional response acquired in early childhood cf. Letter to Chanut of 6 June 1647 (AT, vol. V, 57; CSMK, 323).

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internal world, to our own nature as human beings. Since the laws of operation of our bodies are no different from the mechanical principles operating everywhere else, and since the passions are intimately linked by bodily events in the nervous system, science can itself provide the solution to the ancient problems of how to achieve a virtuous life. The classical Aristotelian theory of virtue had had to rely on a large measure of luck: everything depended on being born into the right kind of ethical culture that would foster the right habits. But Descartes’s new programme of training – of what at the end of Les passions de l’aˆme he called ‘guiding and controlling the passions’ – envisages taking ingrained patterns of psychophysical response and re-directing them by the sheer application of technological know-how.64 All this might indeed seem to take us very far away from the search for wisdom and righteousness associated with the traditional persona of the philosopher as sage. But it is now time to notice that all these envisaged technical developments in the management of the passions have for Descartes an essentially subordinate role. For the passions are related to the good only, as it were, accidentally and contingently. Sometimes the objects which they incline us to pursue are indeed worthy of pursuit,65 but often they can mislead us into supposing that something’s value is vastly greater than it is: Often passion makes us believe certain things to be much better and more desirable than they are; then, when we have taken much trouble to acquire them, and in the process lost the chance of possessing other more genuine goods, possession of them brings home to us their defects; and thence arise dissatisfaction, regret and remorse.66

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‘Ceux meˆmes qui ont les plus faibles aˆmes pouraient acque´rir un empire tre`s absolu sur toutes les passions, si on employait assez d’industrie a` les dresser et a` les conduire.’ (‘Even those with the most feeble souls could acquire an absolute mastery over all the passions if enough effort was employed in guiding and controlling them.’) Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’aˆme, 1649), art. 50. This applies in particular to the legitimate pleasures which the soul has in common with the body: ‘L’aˆme peut avoir ses plaisirs a` part. Mais pour ceux qui lui sont communs avec le corps, ils de´pendent entie`rement des passions: en sorte que les hommes qu’elles peuvent le plus e´mouvoir sont capables de gouˆter le plus de douceur en cette vie’ (‘The soul can have its pleasures of its own. But those which it shares with the body depend entirely on the passions, so that those human beings whom the passions can most move are capable of tasting the greatest sweetness in this life’ Passions, art. 212). Letter to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1 September 1645. Descartes goes on to say that the passions often ‘represent the good to which they tend with greater splendour than they deserve’ and they make us ‘imagine pleasure to be much greater before we possess them than our subsequent experiences show them to be’ (AT, vol. IV, 284; CSMK, 264–5).

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This leads Descartes straight into an insistence on the ‘true function of reason in the conduct of life’, namely ‘to examine and consider without passion the value of all the perfections, both of the body and of the soul, which can be acquired by our conduct’.67 Is what is here envisaged a kind of utilitarian calculus – the kind of rational instrumentalism that we have seen in more modern times, namely one that cuts free from any substantive vision of the good, and simply aims to maximise the ‘preferences’ of the agent, or of the community at large? Emphatically not. For Descartes never abandoned his allegiance to a strongly theistic metaphysics of value, one that construes goodness as an objective supra-personal reality, constraining the rational assent of human beings just as powerfully as do the clearly perceived truths of logic and mathematics. At the centre of Descartes’s metaphysics, resonantly expressed at the climax of his philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations, lies a vision of the eternal and infinite divine source of truth and goodness: ‘Placet hic aliquamdiu in ipsius Dei contemplatione immorari . . . et immensi hujus luminis pulchritudinem . . . intueri, admirari, adorare’ (‘Let me here rest for a while in the contemplation of God himself and gaze upon, wonder at, and adore the beauty of this immense light’).68 This vision, it needs to be emphasised, involves contemplation of the good as well as the true: following the lead of the Platonists, Descartes draws a strong parallel between how the mind responds to the ratio veri and to the ratio boni.69 In the upward ascent of the mind from doubt and darkness to the light, whether of truth or of goodness, we first need to exercise our will to turn away from what is deceptive or unreliable. But once we free ourselves from illusion and focus on the objects revealed by the light of reason, then we arrive at our destination: the work of the will has been done, and it can now subside into automatic assent to what is revealed with the utmost clarity as good or as true: ‘from a great light in the intellect there follows a great propensity in the will’.70

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Ibid., AT, vol. IV, 287; CSMK, 265. Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 52; CSM, vol. II, 36. My spontaneous inclination to assent to the truth, or to pursue the good, is a function of my ‘clearly understanding that reasons of truth and goodness point that way’ (‘quia rationem veri et boni in ea evidenter intelligo’); Descartes suggests that this may also be thought of as resulting from a ‘divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts’ (Fourth Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 58; CSM, vol. II, 40). ‘ex magna luce in intellectu sequitur magna propensio in voluntate’ (Fourth Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 59; CSM, vol. II, 41).

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Once the importance of this powerful underlying metaphysics has been appreciated, we can see that Cartesian ethics, with its proposed techniques for the management of the mind–body complex, could not even get off the ground without the fundamental supporting role of reason. Philosophy can show us how to live because the divine light of reason, implanted in each of our minds, can, when used carefully and properly, make us aware of those genuine and lasting goods in the pursuit of which our true fulfilment lies. Because of the weakness of our nature (a recurring theme in Descartes),71 we can easily be led astray, failing to focus on the light of truth and goodness, and allowing the false allure of lesser or specious ‘goods’ to attract our attention. But as long as we are determined to hold the image of the good before our eyes ‘in so far as the eye of the darkened intellect can bear it’,72 then we can know the right way forward. And virtue follows in the wake of this, since its fundamental basis is a ‘firm and constant resolution to use our freedom well, that is, never to lack the will to undertake and carry out what we judge to be best’.73 This is the discipline, or askesis, that Descartes’s philosophical method requires, in morals as in metaphysics. And it is a discipline which, because of its theistically oriented character, and its fundamental integration of the moral and epistemic domains in the quest for truth and goodness, it seems not inappropriate to call a genuinely spiritual one.74 Descartes’s ambition for his own philosophy was for it to match the goals set by his scholastic predecessor Eustachius: ‘the aim of a complete system of philosophy is human happiness’. And in so far as his theistic metaphysics is the key to securing this goal, he follows in the tradition of Aquinas, for whom sapientia, the highest of the intellectual virtues, operates properly when it is directed towards knowledge of the highest and most exalted cause, that is, God.75 The key to discerning the persona 71

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Compare the last sentence of the Meditations: ‘Naturae nostrae infirmitas est agnoscenda’ (‘We must acknowledge the weakness of our nature’), AT, vol. VII, 90; CSM, vol. II, 62. AT, vol. VII, 52; CSM, vol. II, 36 (end of Third Meditation). Passions of the Soul, art. 153 (speaking of the master virtue of ‘generosity’). There are many aspects of the Meditations, for example, that call to mind the model of a set of spiritual exercises. For more on these similarities (and some differences), see J. Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 1. A recent most interesting study by Lilli Alanen has plausibly argued that ‘from the time of the correspondence with Elizabeth onwards’, Descartes became increasingly interested in the ‘practical, moral and therapeutic’ uses of reason: Descartes’s Concept of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 166. Earlier in her book, Alanen acutely observes that Descartes’s philosophical interests in scientia were closely connected to the traditional philosophical goal of sapientia (which, however, she glosses, somewhat narrowly, it seems to me, as ‘practical intelligence’ (7).

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of Descartes the philosopher has very often been understood in terms of his new vision of scientia. And that, of course, is a very important part of the story. But the full story discloses his even more important commitment to the ancient ideal of sapientia, with all the religious connotations that notion would have had for one brought up as he had been. We began by calling attention to Descartes’s earliest notebook, the Praeambula, where Descartes sees himself as entering the world stage masked, and goes on to describe the sciences themselves as masked. Peeling off the mask is no easy task when one is dealing with one of the most wary and private of the great philosophers. But if the argument of this chapter has been anywhere near the mark, Descartes’s true philosophical persona is already strongly prefigured in the verse from the book of Psalms that he chose to inscribe as his motto at the very front of that first notebook: ‘Initium sapientiae timor Domini’ – ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.76

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Psalm 110 (Vulgate); this corresponds to Psalm 111 in the numbering of the Hebrew Bible, which is followed by the ‘Authorised’ Version (1611) and the Book of Common Prayer (1550, rev. 1662).

CHAPTER

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The natural philosopher and the virtues 430537

Peter Harrison

One of the distinctive features of modern science – indeed some would say its defining characteristic – is its reliance on a set of clearly defined methodological prescriptions, known popularly as ‘the scientific method’. The much-vaunted objectivity of science is vested in the observance of this universal method and, despite the reservations of critics concerning the nature and existence of this supposedly unifying feature of the natural sciences, modern science draws much of its social legitimacy from the perceived reliability of its methods. Central to the prestige of scientific methods is their insensitivity to the personal qualities of those who employ them. The putative universality and objectivity of science are attributed to the fact that the production of dependable knowledge does not rely on its practitioners sharing a common set of personal characteristics, but rather on their observance of a common set of procedures. In this respect modern science differs radically from its medieval and early modern predecessor, natural philosophy. Natural philosophers, engaged as they were in a branch of philosophy, were expected to conform to traditional models of the philosophical persona, in which the moral characteristics of the individual were the pledge of the truth of what they knew. That said, the beginnings of a shift of focus from persons to methods was already in train in the seventeenth century. In this chapter I shall suggest that this development owed much to Renaissance and Reformation criticisms of the traditional ideal of the contemplative life and of Aristotelian notions of virtue. According to one prominent Protestant view, because human beings were constitutionally incapable of the kinds of moral transformations required on the classical and scholastic models, reliable knowledge had to be grounded in other ways. Francis Bacon’s influential new conception of the persona of the natural philosopher drew on these insights, specifying procedures for the acquisition of knowledge that in principle could be adopted by anyone, irrespective of their moral status. As modern science began its long development from 202

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natural philosophy, observance of an objectifiable ‘method’ came to replace the interior cultivation of virtue.1 VIRTUES, THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUEST

The early modern period inherited from antiquity a conception of philosophy as the contemplation of truth. As Pierre Hadot has recently argued, in the classical period and the Middle Ages philosophy was ‘a way of life’ rather than a body of philosophical doctrines. The goal of philosophy, Hadot writes, was ‘to provide a means for achieving happiness in this life, by transforming the individual’s mode of perceiving and being in the world’.2 The key elements of this conception of philosophical life are the achievement of happiness, the transformation of the individual, an emphasis on contemplation, and the union of the soul with God. In the Republic, for example, Plato contrasts the self-sufficient philosophical life oriented towards ‘divine contemplations’ with that devoted to ‘the petty miseries of men’.3 For Plato, ‘the lover of wisdom’, on account of an association with the divine order, ‘will himself become orderly and divine’.4 Aristotle agreed that contemplation is the activity of God and that the contemplative life was possible ‘in so far as something divine is present in [man]’.5 Almost as an afterthought in book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, he also points out that contemplation of truth is the single activity that is pursued for its own sake and hence the sole endeavour in which true happiness is to be found. Public duties – political or military – are ultimately devoted to this end. Thus, while the tasks of statesman and 1

2

3

4

5

‘Method’, it must be said, has unfamiliar connotations in the Renaissance and early modern periods. See Peter Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. I, 147–77. The current claim that there is such a thing as the ‘scientific method’ also remains problematic. Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). See also John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); H. Hutter, ‘Philosophy as Self-Transformation’, Historical Reflections 16 (1989), 171–98; R. Imbach, ‘La philosophie comme exercise spirituel’, Critique 41 (1985), 275–83. Plato, Republic, 517d, in Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 750. Plato, Republic, VI, 500d, in Collected Dialogues, 736. And elsewhere: ‘contact with divine goodness’ makes one ‘god-like’. Laws, X, 904d–e, in Collected Dialogues, 1460. On wisdom and becoming god-like, see also Laws, IV, 716a–d; Phaedrus, 246d, 248a; Timaeus, 47c; Theaetetus, 176a–d; Republic, X, 613b. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1177b, 1178b, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. II, 1861, 1862.

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soldier are attended with nobility, to ‘the philosopher’ alone is accorded ‘self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness . . . and all the other attributes ascribed to the supremely happy man’.6 While the earliest Christian writers tended to be ambivalent about the merits of Greek philosophy, they nonetheless embraced the classical conception of the merits of the contemplative life. The distinction between action and contemplation was introduced into the Judeo-Christian tradition by Philo (c. 20 BC – c. AD 50), and was subsequently adopted by the fellow Alexandrian, Origen (c. 185 – c. 254).7 It was Augustine (354– 430), however, who provided the most influential early treatment of the distinction, linking scientia with the active life and sapientia with the contemplative.8 This identification would suggest the superiority of the contemplative life, and it is significant that for Augustine contemplation ‘lays peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of the truth’.9 Elsewhere, however, when discussing the allegorical representation of the two modes of life in the gospel figures of Mary and Martha, Augustine invests the distinction with an eschatological dimension: ‘in these two women two kinds of life are represented: present life and future life, toilsome and restful, miserable and beatific, temporal and eternal life’.10 This would imply that pursuit of the active life is entirely appropriate in the present world. Overall, Augustine seems to suggest the desirability of achieving a balance between action and contemplation, insisting, for example, that ‘No man has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own ease the service due to his neighbour.’11 Such a reading is consistent with Augustine’s distinction between ‘use’ (uti) and ‘enjoyment’ (frui) – ‘we enjoy that thing which we love for

6 7

8 9

10

11

Aristotle, NE, 1177b, in Works, vol. II, 1860; Cf. Politics, 1333a–b; Plato, Republic, 357b. Philo, De vita contemplativa, passim; De migratione Abrahami, 9. On Origen, and the history of the distinction, see M. E. Mason, Active Life and Contemplative Life: A Study of the Concepts from Plato to the Present (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961), 25 and passim; Anne-Marie La Bonnardie`re, ‘Les deux vies. Marthe et Marie (Luc 10, 38, 42)’, Anne-Marie La Bonnardie`re (ed.), in Saint Augustin et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986). Augustine, The Trinity, XIII.vi.20, 25; XIV.v.26; De animae quantitate 33.74; Ad Simplicianum, 2.3. Augustine, City of God, VIII.iv, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Random House, 1950), 247. Cf. Soliloquies 1.12.21; De sermone Domini in monte, 1.3.10; Contra Faustum Manicheum, 22.52; De consensu Evangelistarum, 2.13.36. Augustine, Sermon 104, ‘Discourse on Martha and Mary, as Representing Two Kinds of Life’, in Works of St. Augustine, ed. John Rotelle (20 vols., New York: New City Press,1991– ), vol. III/4, 83. These two figures are also discussed in The Trinity, I.iii.20–1. For Philo’s likely influence, see David Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 330. Augustine adds: ‘nor has any man a right to be so immersed in active life as to neglect the contemplation of God’. City of God, XIX.19 (698).

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its own sake . . . while everything else is simply to be used’.12 Citizens of the ‘heavenly city’ thus use things and enjoy God; citizens of the ‘earthly city’ seek to use God and enjoy things.13 For Augustine, the appropriate response to the disordering of human desires that had resulted from the Fall is not to ignore the lower things in the creation, but to use them. Almost two centuries later, Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), an enthusiastic advocate of monasticism, eschewed Augustine’s even-handedness and argued for the superiority of the contemplative life.14 The trajectory of the distinction from Gregory to Aquinas saw the gradual accommodation of the classical notion of the contemplative philosophical life to the monastic ideal. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) devoted four questions of the Summa theologiae to the issue before concluding that on balance the contemplative life is superior to the active.15 While making reference to the patristic writers, he essentially relied on the Aristotelian argument that contemplation tends to the perfection of the intellect, which is the most excellent part of the soul.16 More important than this measured endorsement of the contemplative life, however, was Aquinas’s openness to other important aspects of the classical ideal of the philosopher. It is highly significant that he opens his Summa contra gentiles with an extended discussion of ‘the office of the wise man’.17 In this major apologetic work Aquinas argued that while pagan authors had rightly discerned the true end of the philosophical life, that goal was attainable only within the Christian religion. Christianity, in short, was the realisation of the unfulfilled goals of pagan philosophy.18 This appropriation of the central features of the classical philosophical quest is further reflected in the 12

13 14

15

16 17

18

Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, 1.31; Works, 11, 121. See also W. R. O’Connor, ‘The Uti-frui Distinction in Augustine’s Ethics’, Augustinian Studies 14 (1983), 45–62. Augustine, City of God, XV.vii. Gregory, Moralia, 6, 61. For a comparison of Augustine and Gregory, see D. C. Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life (2nd edn, New York: Haskell House, 1966). Cf. Mason, Active Life and Contemplative Life, 64–71. Gregory’s teaching was influential throughout the Middle Ages. Thus Walter Hilton, in his classic Scale of Perfection (1494): ‘Thou must understand that there are in the holy Church two manner of lives (as saith St Gregory) in which a Christian is to be saved. The one is called Active, the other Contemplative; without living one of these two lives no man may be saved’ (I, ii). Aquinas, Summa theologiae (ST), Blackfriars edn. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964–76) 2a2ae. 179–82. Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 182, 2. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles (SCG), I.1 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1924) 1–17. Cf. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Prologue, trans. J. Rowan (Chicago: Regnery, 1961), 1f. A similar strategy had been adopted by Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho. Augustine also described Christianity as the ‘one true philosophy’. Contra Academicos, III.ixx.42; Contra Julianum, IV.72; Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, IV.22; De vera religione, I.i.5.

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way in which Aquinas takes up Aristotle’s organisation of the sciences. Aquinas preserves Aristotle’s classification of the sciences as speculative, practical and productive, and the further division of the speculative sciences into natural philosophy, mathematics and the ‘divine science’ or metaphysics.19 The last of these, however, was now identified with Christian theology and thus came to assume the status that Aristotle had accorded metaphysics as the most excellent science of all.20 Thus not only does Christianity provide answers to the questions posed by pagan philosophy, but its theology satisfies the criteria of the highest science according to the standards of the classical tradition itself. On Aquinas’s analysis, while the pagan philosophers had sought wisdom, they had succeeded only in gaining a modicum of earthly wisdom. Heavenly wisdom could be attained only by those familiar with a divine science informed by revelation.21 Natural philosophy, however, contributes to this goal, inasmuch as it is a treatment of ‘lower causes’ that should inevitably lead to a consideration of the first cause.22 Pagan metaphysics also makes a contribution because it identifies a first cause, even though it fails to provide it with sufficient content. For these reasons, human philosophy is the ‘hand-maiden’ to divine philosophy (i.e. theology). The pursuit of philosophical wisdom was not simply to do with the accumulation of knowledge of the particular subject matter of the various sciences. Rather more importantly it entailed becoming a particular kind of person. The attainment of wisdom, as Aquinas noted at the very beginning of the Summa contra gentiles, relates to a specific office, where ‘office’ is related to the possession of certain virtues. Aquinas explains, again on the authority of Aristotle, that to discharge one’s office is simply

19

20

21 22

Aristotle, Topics, 157a6–157a13; Metaphysics, 1025b–6a. Cf. Plato, Republic, 509–11. Aristotle’s division of the sciences was widely adopted in the Middle Ages. See e.g. Boethius, De Trinitate, 2; Thomas Aquinas, Expositio supra librum Boethii De Trinitate, trans. The Division and Methods of the Sciences (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), Q.5 A.1; Robert Kilwardby, De ortu scientiarum, ch. 5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982a–b, 996b. Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, Q. 5 A. 1 Obj. 1 (9). The specific content of ‘metaphysics’ is not entirely clear even in Aristotle. It becomes even more complex when the issue of its relation to sacred theology is introduced. See e.g. Charles Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in C. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 537–638. Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 9, 2; ST, 1a. 1, 6. ‘For wisdom is twofold: mundane wisdom called philosophy, which considers the lower causes, causes namely that are themselves caused, and bases its judgements on them: and divine wisdom or theology, which considers the higher, that is the divine, causes and judges according to them.’ Aquinas, On the Power of God, bk. 1, Q. 1 A. 4, Body (London: Burns and Oates, 1932), 24.

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to act virtuously.23 Moreover, for Aquinas, the process of knowing calls for the mind of the knower to become conformed to that which is known. Knowledge of the truth, ultimately identified with contemplation of God himself, thus entails growing into conformity with the divine nature. ‘The rational creature’, as Aquinas puts it, ‘is made deiform’.24 As one progresses in knowledge of the first cause, of necessity one acquires ‘a certain rectitude’.25 Again, this is consistent with Plato’s assertion that the lover of wisdom will become ‘orderly and divine’.26 Most important of all, Aquinas considers science (scientia) to be one of the intellectual virtues. In the Thomist understanding of the virtues, the traditional cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude) are supplemented by the theological virtues (faith, hope and love) and the intellectual virtues (wisdom, science, and understanding).27 Understanding (intellectus) is the habit concerned with the grasp of self-evident principles; science (scientia) is concerned with truths derived from those principles; wisdom (sapientia) with the highest causes, including the first cause – God.28 If we consider the intellectual virtues, it can be seen that both science and wisdom refer not merely to knowledge of sets of propositions, but to particular mental habits.29 Strictly speaking, then, scientia is not merely, or even primarily, an organised body of knowledge, but rather an acquired habit of mind. Together, the intellectual habits perfect the intellect, in much the same way that the moral habits perfect the will.30 While the intellectual, moral 23

24

25 26

27

28

29

30

‘To say that a man discharges his proper office is equivalent to saying that he acts virtuously’. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, trans. C. Vollert (St Louis: Herder, 1948), I.i.172, 186f. The passage from Aristotle cited in support of this definition is NE, 1106a15. Aquinas, ST, 1a. 12, 5. More specifically, ‘when any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect.’ Ibid. Thomas’s emphasis on deification is owing partly to the influence of the Neoplatonised Aristotelianism found in medieval Arab sources. See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). This notion of an inner transformation was reinforced by Thomas’s understanding of the tranformative power of the mass: ‘The difference between corporeal and spiritual food lies in this, that the former is changed into the substance of the person nourished . . . but spiritual food changes man into itself.’ ST, 3a. 73, 3. Ibid., 1a2ae. 113, 1. Although Plato’s assertions about ‘becoming god-like’ do not have the same spiritual overtones. See e.g. Daniel C. Russell, ‘Virtue as “Likeness to God” in Plato and Seneca’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004), 241–60. Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 60, 5; 1a.2ae. 57, 2. Aristotle distinguished intellectual from moral virtues, and classified prudence (phronesis) as an intellectual virtue. NE, 1103a, 1143b. Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 57, 2; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, book VI, lectures III, V–VI; Aristotle, NE, 1139. Aquinas, ST, 1a. 89, 5; 1a2ae. 50, 4; 52, 2; 53, 1; SCG, I.61 (130); SCG, II.60 (156); SCG, II.78 (216); On the Virtues in General, A. 7 Obj. 1. Aquinas, ST 1a. 82, 3; 1a2ae. 57, 1; Disputed Questions on Truth, III, Q. 22 A. 11 OTC 1 (73). Elsewhere Aquinas expands on this: ‘when, through the habit of wisdom there arises in our

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and theological virtues have distinct domains, they are nonetheless linked by practical wisdom (phronesis, prudentia), the possession of which is one of the defining characteristics of the philosopher. In providing this role to wisdom, Aquinas is able to conform to the classical model of the ultimate unity of the virtues.31 From the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, this Thomist understanding of the philosophical quest, with its powerful synthesis of classical and Christian elements, predominated. The Renaissance witnessed a further modification of the models of the ancient sage and the scholastic philosopher. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) taught in his Theologia platonica that the human soul naturally desires to become like God. A God-like state is achieved, Ficino thought, when the human soul lives a life that includes all stages of being, including the angelic. When it reaches its full potential the soul attains both knowledge of the laws of the universe and a creative capacity virtually equivalent to that of the deity.32 This emphasis on the acquisition of creative power gave shape to a new Renaissance category (or perhaps better a newly recovered category) – the magus. But Ficino also retained significant elements of the purely contemplative ideal. Michael Allen and James Hankins suggest that in fact Ficino resurrected two ancient types: ‘that of the magus with his power over a nature dominated by sympathies and hidden ciphers and signs and in pursuit of the secrets of macrocosmic transformation’. The other was the ‘ideal of the daimonic soul in search of poetic, amatory, prophetic and even priestly ascent into the realm of pure Mind and Will, of Knowledge and Love – the soul, that is, in search of interior transformation and illumination both in the traditional terms of faith and belief, and in the necessarily more elite terms of understanding, of

31

32

intellect an idea of divine things, this very idea or inward word is wont to be called wisdom’ (SCG, IV.xii (59)). One who has the habit of wisdom of knowledge is able to contemplate without difficulty.’ ST, 2a2ae. 180, 7. The habit of wisdom perfects higher reason, the habit of science perfects lower reason. Disputed Questions on Truth, II, Q. 17 A. 1 Body (319). Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 57, 4–6. Cf. ST, 1a2ae. 47–9, 51; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, book VI, lecture X. Cf. Aristotle, NE, 1144b–5a. On the unity of the virtues see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73–84. For accounts of the development of conceptions of practical wisdom to the time of William of Ockham, see Mary Ingham, ‘Practical Wisdom: Scotus’s Presentation of Prudence’, in L. Honnefelder, R. Wood and M. Dreyer (eds.), John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 551–71; Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Scotus and Ockham on the Connection of the Virtues’, in ibid., 499–522. Paul Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 117–18. Pico della Mirandola spoke in similar terms of an inherent human capacity for deification. Conclusiones, ed. B. Kieszkowski (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 34, 84. This capacity typically remained latent because individuals turned away from the life of contemplation that would lead to their apotheosis.

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intellectual consciousness’.33 Ficino also stresses the divinity of the human mind, and the goal of contemplation of the divine nature. ‘My intention in writing’, he announces, is this: ‘that in the divinity of the created mind, as in a mirror at the centre of all things, we should first observe the works of the Creator, and then contemplate and worship the mind of the Creator’. In order to carry this out, the individual must be morally pure, for we must separate ‘true understanding from the will to do right’. There is, in short, a connection between ‘our whole perception of the world, the way we lead our lives, and all our happiness’.34 Finally, Ficino’s Platonic Theology is elitist in its orientation, being directed towards the ingeniosi – the intellectuals and the governing elite of the Florentine republic.35 A more explicitly manipulative conception of philosophy may be found in the work of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libri tres (‘Three Books of Occult Philosophy’, 1531). Agrippa affirms the Aristotelian division of the sciences: ‘all regulative Philosophy is divided into Naturall, Mathematicall, and Theologicall’.36 Later in the work he shows how these three faculties are related to the virtues which are also ordered hierarchically to the end of personal transformation. Contemplation of divine things, Agrippa writes, is a mental exercise that brings the philosopher closer to God and confers godliness upon him. The investigation of the creatures is an integral part of this process, inasmuch as the study of the inferior things leads inevitably to a contemplation of heavenly things. While the state of contemplation purges the mind of error, it also restores a dominion and ability to command the creatures that were lost at the Fall.37 Agrippa was thus convinced that there was an important link between the processes that perfect nature and those that perfect the human soul. The goal of philosophical self-transformation was intimately linked to the physical processes by which natural bodies were transformed, as, for example, in the case of the transmutation of metals. As Agrippa explained: no man can come to the perfection of this art [alchemy], who shall not know the principles of it in himself, but by how much the more every one shall know himself, by so much he obtaineth the greater power of attracting it, and by so much operateth greater and more wonderfull things, and will ascend to so great 33

34 35 36 37

Michael Allen and James Hankins, ‘Introduction’, in Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) vol. I, x–xi. Ibid., Proem (I, 11). Ibid, ‘Introduction’, ix, xiii. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy(London, 1651), I.ii (3). Ibid., dedication to book III (341–2). For more on the recovery of dominion, see III.40 (471–2).

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perfection, that he is made the Son of God, and is transformed into the Image which is God, and is united with him.38

This attempt to link the interior improvement of the philosopher’s soul to the manipulation and improvement of elements of the external world was typical of much of the magical and alchemical discourse of the Renaissance, and permeates the thought of such figures as Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), a close friend of Agrippa, and the English magus John Dee (1527–1609).39 In sum, both medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism witness significant modifications of the classical philosophical persona – some of which will be considered in more detail in the following section. Nevertheless, philosophy is still understood within the basic framework of ‘a way of life’. These models remain largely elitist in orientation; they are to a considerable degree individualistic; they focus on the importance of self-transformation and deification; they emphasise the priority of contemplation. Some of the Renaissance models, it must be conceded, do emphasise the manipulation of nature, and some (which we shall consider briefly in a moment) speak of the importance of the active life, or the need to balance action and contemplation. The model of natural philosophy that we encounter in Francis Bacon, however, goes one step further and represents a challenge to many of the key priorities of the traditional model. Bacon is not only the herald of a new philosophical persona, but in his approach to natural philosophy we see the beginnings of the separation of ‘science’ from philosophy and the origins of the modern view of philosophy as a theoretical discipline. REFORMING THE PHILOSOPHICAL

‘PERSONA’

Early modern attempts to challenge aspects of the traditional models of philosophy were by no means unprecedented. Already in the late Middle Ages, some had challenged the classifications of knowledge or the taxonomy of the virtues upon which these models rested. Responding to Aquinas’s appropriation of Aristotelianism, a number of Franciscan theologians – most notably Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) – suggested that theology was not a speculative science, but a practical one, since its aim was to grow to love 38 39

Ibid., III.36 (460). For a discussion of these issues in relation to John Dee, see Ha˚kan Ha˚kansson, Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2001), esp. 223–30. On Trithemius, see Noel Brann, Trithemius and Magical Theology (Albany, N. Y.: SUNY, 1999), esp. 114–16.

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God.40 It would follow that theology ought to be classified with ethics, the other science whose goal was action rather than contemplation. William of Ockham (c. 1288–1347) was to go further, denying that theology was a science at all, at least in the Aristotelian sense.41 This would imply a much more significant division between faith and reason than the hierarchical arrangement proposed by Aquinas. It would also follow that natural philosophy would be more independent of theology than in Aquinas’s scheme of things. Ockham did concede, however, that the mental disciplines involved in philosophy could help provide the theologian with the mental habits requisite for arriving at Christian wisdom. Renaissance humanists also questioned various aspects of the traditional understanding of the philosophical quest, many of them addressing their criticisms directly to Aristotle. It was common to question Aristotle’s inclusion of prudence among the intellectual rather than the moral virtues. This, in turn, raised the question of the relationship between the moral and intellectual virtues. Was attainment of the former a prerequisite for the latter, or were moral and theoretical human ends distinct? Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and, after him, Sebastian FoxMorcillo (1526/8–60), argued that the search for truth would ultimately end in complete frustration rather than happiness, reasoning that it was simply not possible to understand the ultimate causes of things in the present life.42 Others pointed to the exclusive nature of the philosophical office, suggesting that it was unfortunate that the ultimate goal of human life could be accomplished by so few. More prosaically, Felice 40

41

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John Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, ed. C. Balı´c et al. (Vatican City: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1950– ) vol. I, 207–8, 217. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8f. Fernando Inciarte, ‘Scotus’ Gebrauch des Begriffs der Praktischen Wahrheit im Philosophiegeschichtlichen Kontext’, in John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics, 523–33; C. Harris, Duns Scotus (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), vol. I, 90–100. Whether this difference ultimately amounted to much is a matter of discussion. Other theologians took a conciliatory position. Another Franciscan, Bonaventure, suggested theology was both speculative and practical: ‘Theological science is an affective habit and the mean between the speculative and practical, and for [its] end it has both contemplation, and that we become good, and indeed more principally, that we become good.’ Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum, opera omnia S. Bonaventurae, Ad Claras Aquas, 1882, vol. I, 13. Cf. William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea, vol. III, iii, 8, and the discussion in Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 8, 6. See also the Coimbra commentators, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Disp. III, quest. 3, in Jillkraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. I, 83f.; Coluccio Salutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. E. Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947), 164. On Salutati, see Kahn’s article in B. Vickers (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zur Vita Activa und Vita Contemplativa (Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, 1985), 153–79. See Alfred Freddoso, ‘Ockham on Faith and Reason’, in Paul Spade (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 326–49, esp. 345–6. Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 303–86.

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Figliucci (c. 1524 – c. 1590) complained, presumably on the basis of personal experience, that while contemplation might be the most sublime of human pastimes, it caused health problems, particularly in those prone to digestive disorders.43 The application of the philosophical ideal to holders of political office was also challenged. Aquinas had defined ‘office’ in terms of the expression of particular virtues, and this applied no less to political offices: ‘To discharge well the office of a king is therefore a work of extraordinary virtue.’44 In the sixteenth century, Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) was notoriously to argue that the discharging of one’s political office should not be thought as equivalent to ‘acting virtuously’. On the contrary, responsible conduct for one who assumes political office may well call for actions that lie well beyond the bounds of virtuous behaviour, traditionally understood. Machiavelli thus opened up the question of whether offices were related to the cultivation and expression of personal virtues or the attainment of specific social ends. Machiavelli’s preference for the latter was linked to his rejection of the contemplative ideal, which he shared with a number of Renaissance thinkers. Not surprisingly, those who had found fault with the Aristotelian understanding of the virtues and their relations often had difficulty with the elevation of the life of contemplation. Discussions of the relative merits of the two lives frequently surfaced in the context of political philosophy.45 The rediscovery of Roman republicanism and the accompanying ideal of the participation of citizens in government necessitated a reassessment of the common devaluation of the active life. As early as the fifteenth century, Florentine Leonardo Bruni (c. 1369–1444) rejected the contemplative ideals of a previous generation of humanists, and stressed the need for all citizens to be actively involved in the affairs of the republic. In the second half of the century the pendulum swung back, as supporters of the Medici suggested that the prince alone could vicariously discharge the civic duties of his subjects, freeing them for the vita contemplativa.46 The founder of Florence’s Platonic Academy, Marsilio

43 44

45

46

Ibid., 337. Aquinas, On Kingship, trans. G. Phelan, revised I. Eschmann (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), I.ix.68, 39. On the distinction during this period, see P. O. Kristeller, ‘The Active and Contemplative Life in Renaissance Humanism’, in Vickers, Arbeit, Musse, Meditation, 133–52. Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmidt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 76–84; Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 418–21, 426–30.

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Ficino (1433–99), personified this priority, excused as he was from mundane affairs on account of the generous sponsorship of the Medici. Subsequently, Machiavelli, who had a rather more complicated relationship with the Medici, would add another layer to the debate, identifying the Christian endorsement of monastic withdrawal from public life as a major source of political instability.47 The other great Italian republic, Venice, saw a parallel discussion, but one focused more on the university curriculum – specifically the ordo doctrinae and the officium of the philosopher.48 In the late sixteenth century, Padua was the official university of the Venetian republic, and it was here that a major disagreement developed between the professors Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607) and Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89). The latter subscribed to the traditional view that the office of the philosopher calls for a purely contemplative natural philosophy. The active and operative disciplines – ethics, law, medicine and mechanics – were regarded as distractions from the true philosophical life. Piccolomini, by way of contrast, insisted that active and contemplative lives could not be sundered, and that while the spiritual perfection of man did indeed lie in contemplative philosophy, the perfection of society required a philosophical engagement with civil science that could bring about a corresponding perfection of society.49 More important for our present purposes were the criticisms of Machiavelli’s late contemporary, Martin Luther (1483–1546). This erstwhile Augustinian monk was far less sanguine about the prospects of reconciling Christianity and pagan philosophy than his Dominican predecessor. The ‘Church of Thomas’, Luther insisted, was in reality the Church of Aristotle. This was not a good thing, for Aristotle’s ‘unchristian, profane, meaningless babblings’ had corrupted the pure

47 48

49

Ibid., 389–452 at 439. Jacopo Zabarella defines ordo doctrinae as ‘an instrumental habitus through which we are prepared so to dispose the parts of each discipline that that discipline may be taught as well and as easily as possible’. Opera logica, col. 154, cited in Nicholas Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua’, in Eckhard Kessler, Daniel Di Liscia and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), Method and Order in the Renaissance Philosophy of Nature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 183–209 at 186. See Heikki Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism: Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of the Arts and Sciences (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1992), ch. 2; Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua’. Padua plays an important role in the history of early modern science because the demonstrative method taught here is often assumed to have had a formative influence on the young Galileo. See e.g. J. H. Randall, ‘The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940), 177–206; William A. Wallace, Galileo’s Logic of Discovery (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).

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gospel message.50 As could be expected from his general rejection of the Aristotelian contribution to Christian theology, Luther was strongly critical of Thomist claims about the ultimate convergence of the pagan philosophical quest and Christianity. A particular point of contention was the Aristotelian–Thomist understanding of the virtues which, on Luther’s analysis, was responsible for the erroneous scholastic teaching on merit. This was the view according to which one might gain genuine moral credit before God on account of the acquisition of the virtues and the performance of good deeds. A basic contention of the Nicomachean Ethics was that virtues are acquired as the result of continued practice – as Luther himself characterised it: ‘Aristotle taught that he who does much good will thereby become good.’51 This was the very notion of habitus, which Thomas had uncritically accepted: ‘Here Thomas errs in common with his followers and with Aristotle who say, ‘Practice makes perfect’: just a harp player becomes a good harp player through long practice, so these fools think that the virtues of love, chastity, and humility can be achieved through practice. It is not true.’52 The prevailing view of the gradual moral improvement of individuals on account of their own efforts – central to the classical conception of the philosophical persona – was rejected by Luther as inconsistent with the Pauline position that human beings cannot become righteous on account of their own activity. Being made right before God – the process of justification – is not an internal change in the person, but rather a change in their situation or status.53 Righteousness, Luther insisted, ‘is not in us in

50

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Martin Luther, ‘Sermon for Epiphany’, in Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. John N. Lenker et al. (7 vols., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), vol. I, 331–2. Cf. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, 25, in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 93; Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in ibid., 144; Emser, Reply to the Answer of the Leipzig Goat, in Works of Martin Luther, ed. H. E. Jacobs (6 vols., Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915), vol. III. See also G. Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought (London: Collins, 1970), 86–9. Luther, ‘Sunday after Christmas, 6’, in Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. III, 226. Cf. Aquinas: ‘A human virtue is one “which renders a human act and man himself good” [*Ethic. ii, 6]’ (ST, 2a2ae. 58, 3). Cf. ST, 1a2ae. 55, 3 and 4; ST, 2a2ae. 58, 3. In Luther’s assessment, the Nicomachean Ethics was ‘the worst of all books’. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, 25, in Three Treatises, 93. Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Hermann Bo¨hlaw, 1883–1948), 39r, 278, trans. in Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 156, n. 71. For Aquinas’s explicit appropriation of the Aristotelian idea of habit, see Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, I, bk. 1, lecture 20, section 244 (105). A similar Aristotelian view of merit was also promoted by some Humanist scholars. Thus, Francesco Piccolomini: ‘Since this is Aristotle’s position, he is to some extent in agreement with our theologians . . . Merits, as they pertain to us, proceed from our virtuous actions, for faith alone is not sufficient.’ A Comprehensive Philosophy of Morals, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. I, 74. For Luther’s criticism of the Aristotelian notion of habitus, see Ebeling, Luther, 150–8.

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a formal sense, as Artistotle maintains, but is outside us’.54 Such a view was summed up in Luther’s maxim simul iustus et peccator – simultaneously justified and a sinner.55 It followed, of course, that the knowledge of God per se, does not make the knower God-like or ‘deiform’ as Thomas had suggested.56 The position espoused by Luther lay at the core of the well-known Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith. This was the central theological issue of the Protestant Reformation and was opposed to the Catholic position, characterised by its opponents as a doctrine of justification through the performance of good works. The other major reformer, John Calvin (1509–64), was in complete agreement with Luther on this issue: There can be no doubt that Paul, when he treats of the Justification of man, confines himself to the one point – how man may ascertain that God is propitious to him? Here he does not remind us of a quality infused into us; on the contrary, making no mention of works, he tells us that righteousness must be sought without us.57

The general contours of the Reformation controversy about the nature of justification are well known and need not be further laboured here. It must be said, however, that little if any attention has been paid to the ways in which criticisms of the Aristotelian–Thomist conception of virtue had an impact on the understanding of intellectual virtues such as scientia. Admittedly, the reformers had focused primarily on the moral and theological virtues. But it was inevitable that the intellectual virtues would suffer collateral damage, if for no other reason than that Aquinas had so carefully brought the three kinds of virtue together under the general superintendence of wisdom. The contentious mechanism of habit, moreover, was common to both moral and intellectual virtues.58 This threat to 54

55 56

57

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Luther, Lectures on Galations, in Luther’s Works (LW), ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehman (55 vols., St Louis: Concordia, 1955–75), vol. XXVI, 234. See Luther, Lectures on Galatians, in LW, vol. XXVI, 232 and passim. Some recent interpretations of Luther, however, contest this standard reading. See Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998); William T. Cavanaugh, ‘A Joint Declaration? Justification as Theosis in Aquinas and Luther’, Heythrop Journal 61 (2000), 265–80. John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Reformation of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge, (3 vols., Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), vol. III, 247. Cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. McNeill, trans. F. Battles (2 vols., Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), vol. I, 797–820. James Sadolet, ‘Letter to the Senate and People of Geneva’, in Calvin, Tracts and Treatises, vol. I, 9; and vol. III, 117, 153. The theological virtues were, according to the scholastic tradition, ‘infused’ – a contention that also came in for considerable criticism. See Calvin, Tracts and Treatises, vol. III, 247. Such criticism

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the unity of the virtues brought a need to re-evaluate the relations between the various sciences which, in the standard scholastic understanding, were closely linked with the different categories of virtues. In all of this, the conception of the Christian contemplative as exemplifying both classical and Christian philosophical ideals became more difficult to sustain – at least for many Protestants. As for the intellectual virtue scientia, in the developments outlined above we see the beginnings of a process in which ‘science’ ceases to be a mental habit and becomes something like the more familiar modern notion: a body of knowledge or set of practices aimed at bringing about a particular outcome.59 Science, like the reformers’ ‘righteousness’, also becomes something ‘outside us’ (Luther), ‘without us’ (Calvin). This reification of scientia was part of a process that saw the modern reconceptualisation of natural philosophy, increasingly thought of in terms of the observance of specified practices, rather than the cultivation of certain virtues. This trend is most conspicuous in those seventeenth-century figures influenced by Lutheran and Calvinistic thought. Intimately related to the Reformers’ criticisms of Catholic–Aristotelian conceptions of moral progress and perfectibility were their related views of vocation, the medieval ‘estates’, and the relative merits of the active and contemplative lives. Luther, for example, insisted on the importance of exercising an earthly vocation within the sinful realities of the present world. The Christian is warned against attempting to escape the evils of the world ‘by donning caps and creeping into a corner, or going into the wilderness’ as the papists do. Harking back to Augustine’s distinction between things that are to be loved for their own sake and things that are to be used, Luther asserted that the true Christian is to ‘use’ the world: ‘to build, to buy, to have dealings and hold intercourse with his fellows, to join them in all temporal affairs’.60 Against a common view that the imperative to work was God’s curse for Adam’s sin (Genesis 3: 17–19), Luther insisted that ‘Man was created not for leisure, but for work, even in

59

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was not exclusive to the reformers. Thomas Hobbes, to take a single example, observed that the very notion of ‘infused virtue’ was an oxymoron: ‘if it be false to say that virtue can be poured, or blown up and down, the words in-poured virtue, in-blown virtue, are as absurd and insignificant as a round quadrangle’. Hobbes, Leviathan ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), I.4.21/24, 108. Charles Lohr captures something of this transition when he observes that: ‘Writers of the Reformed Confession broke with this [Aristotelian] conception. In their approach science was understood not as a habit but as a body of knowledge.’ ‘Metaphysics’, 632. Luther, ‘Sermon for the Third Sunday After Easter’, 18, 16, in Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. IV, 281–2.

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the state of innocence.’ It followed that ‘the idle sort of life, such as that of monks and nuns, deserves to be condemned’.61 This view is explicitly opposed to a medieval supernaturalism that identifies the perfection of human nature with the contemplative life of the monastery.62 Central to Luther’s criticism of the ‘idle’ life of the contemplative was a new conception of divine vocation. Throughout the Middle Ages the clergy occupied one of three ‘estates’, the other two being the aristocracy and the rest of the laity. The spiritual estate of the clergy was held to be superior to both of the temporal estates.63 Moreover, the clergy were considered to be ontologically different from the laity, because their special status was confirmed sacramentally. Luther described this hierarchical arrangement as a ‘pure invention’, insisting that ‘all Christians are of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office’.64 In Protestant territories the clerical office thus came to be regarded as one calling amongst others. All vocations, on this view, were equally ‘spiritual’.65 This understanding of a priesthood of all believers informs the claims of some Protestant natural philosophers to be ‘priests of nature’.66 Calvin followed Luther in condemning the notion that the clergy enjoyed a unique status. The erroneous assumption of the clerical estate was that ‘a more perfect rule of life can be devised than the common one committed by God to the whole church’.67 It is important to understand 61

62

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64

65

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Luther, Lectures on Genesis 2:15–17, in LW, vol. I, 103. Cf. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, in Three Treatises, 12. See Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung u¨nd Verso¨hnung (Bonn, 1882–9) vol. III, 308. See e.g. Rosemary O’Day, ‘The Clergy of the Church of England’, in Wilfred Prest (ed.), The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 25–63. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, in Three Treatises, 12. Cf. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. I, 502; vol. II, 1473. See also Protestant confessional statements, e.g. ‘Second Helvetic Confession’ (1566), ch. XVII. The classic account of Luther’s concept of vocation is Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957). For further discussions see John S. Feinberg, ‘Luther’s Doctrine of Vocation: Some Problems of Interpretation and Application’, Fides et Historia 12 (1979), 50–67; Karlfried Froelich, ‘Luther on Vocation’, Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999), 195–207; Kenneth Hagen, ‘A Critique of Wingren on Luther on Vocation’, Lutheran Quarterly, NS, 3 (2002), 249–73. On the significance of this for early modern natural philosophy, see Peter Harrison, ‘“Priests of the Most High God, with Respect to the Book of Nature”: The Vocational Identity of the Early Modern Naturalist’, in Angus Menuge (ed.), Reading God’s World (St Louis: Concordia, 2004), 55–80. See e.g. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum trans. A. M. Duncan (Norwalk, Conn.: Abarus, 1999), 53; Robert Boyle, Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols., Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), vol. II, 31f., 62f. For an early account of Boyle’s notion of the priestscientist, see H. Fisch, ‘The Scientist as Priest: A Note on Robert Boyle’s Natural Theology’, Isis 44 (1953), 252–65. Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1266.

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that Calvin’s criticism cut two ways. On the one hand, the clerical office was not inherently superior. On the other hand, the moral standard aspired to by clerics, and the monastic orders in particular, was affirmed as appropriate for everyone. Calvin thus sought to bring the spiritual life practised by the few into the mundane lives of all. Calvin also held up the example of Adam in Eden as a standing reproach to the religious institutions of cloister and convent. Commenting on the fact that God had placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to ‘tend it and keep it’ (Genesis 2:15), he argued that ‘men were created to employ themselves in some work, and not to lie down in inactivity and idleness’. Natural objects were there to be used and all men were enjoined to exercise ‘economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy’.68 Again, this active appropriation of material things was directly opposed to the monastic life. ‘Our present-day monks’, Calvin remarked, ‘find in idleness the chief part of their sanctity.’69 In all of this Calvin drew upon the authority of Augustine, insisting that for the church father the monastic life was ‘an exercise and aid to those duties of piety enjoined upon all’ and that brotherly love was its ‘chief and almost its only rule’.70 Here he echoes Augustine’s insistence that contemplation must always be attended by love of neighbour. The consecration of mundane work reappears in Calvin’s exegesis of the parable of the talents (Mat. 25:14–39, Lk. 19:11–27). Calvin argues that God bestows his gifts upon those whom he chooses – not, as the papists believed, according to individual merit. The recipients of God’s gifts have a duty to exercise them in the service of the common good: Those who employ usefully whatever God has committed to them are said to be engaged in trading. The life of the godly, is justly compared to trading, for they ought naturally to exchange and barter with each other, in order to maintain intercourse; and the industry with which every man discharges the office assigned him, the calling itself, the power of acting properly, and other gifts, are reckoned to be so many kinds of merchandise; because the use or object which they have in view is, to promote mutual intercourse among men. Now the gain which Christ mentions is general usefulness, which illustrates the glory of God.71 68

69

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John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis 2:15, in Calvin’s Commentaries (22 vols., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), vol. I, 125; cf. Commentary on the Psalms 127:1–2, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. VI, 1045. Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1264. Whether Calvin was influenced by Augustine in his understanding of the ‘use’ of material things I have not been able to determine. Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1264f. Cf. Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church, xxxiii.73. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, Matt. 25:15, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XVII; cf. Commentary on the First Epistle to Timothy, 4:14, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XXI, 115.

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Calvin never tires of pointing out that the earthly life should be directed towards ‘utility’, ‘profit’ and ‘advantage’, and that these accrue not to oneself, but to society.72 While Luther had mounted similar arguments, Calvin was even more strongly oriented towards the present world. He differed from the earlier reformer not only in his approval of trade and the charging of interest, but in his insistence on the need for Christians to be actively engaged in useful worldly affairs so that society could be transformed and restored.73 While the sinful condition of the present world was permanent, it was not simply to be endured until the advent of the world to come. Effort was to be expended in ameliorating the losses that had followed the Fall. This Calvinist conception of the sanctity of work and of its transformative effects have unmistakable echoes in Francis Bacon’s new conception of the vocation of the natural philosopher and in his ‘utilitarian’ justifications for a new scientific programme.74 FRANCIS BACON AND THE ‘PERSONA’ OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

While Francis Bacon has often been lauded as a seminal figure in the development of modern science, the centuries since his death have witnessed a protracted debate over the precise nature of his legacy. Certainly, he made no substantive contributions to science in the fashion of a Boyle or a Newton. The much-vaunted inductive method, in spite of the extravagant praise of prominent nineteenth-century figures, bears little resemblance to the way science has been conducted in any era. Indeed, in the pessimistic assessment of one commentator, ‘Bacon’s instauratio went to a dead end, as early as the first progress of science in the seventeenth century.’75 What, then, was the nature of Bacon’s achievement? One answer to this puzzle is that in Bacon’s work we encounter, in the words of Stephen Gaukroger, ‘the first systematic comprehensive attempt to 72

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On this notion and its influence in early modern England, see David Little, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), esp. 60. For differences between Luther and Calvin on these issues, see Ian Hart, ‘The Teaching of Luther and Calvin about Ordinary Work’, Evangelical Quarterly 67 (1995), 35–52, 121–35. This is not necessarily to say that Bacon was a Calvinist, but that at the very least he was strongly influenced by Calvinist conceptions. On Bacon’s religious commitments, see Steven Matthews, “Apocalypse and Experiment: The Theological Assumptions and Motivations of Francis Bacon’s Instauration’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Florida, 2004); John Henry, Knowledge is Power (London: Ikon Books, 2002), 90–1; Benjamin Milner, ‘Francis Bacon: The Theological Foundations of Valerius Terminus’, Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), 245–64. Michel Malherbe, ‘Bacon’s Method of Science’, in Markku Peltonen (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75–98 at 75.

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transform the early modern philosopher from someone whose primary concern is with how to live morally into someone whose primary concern is with the understanding of and reshaping of natural processes’.76 In sum, Bacon seeks the transformation of the traditional philosophical persona. How, then, does Bacon seek to revise the philosophical persona, and in what ways is it related to earlier Renaissance and Reformation critiques? First, it is clear that Bacon rejects the idea that philosophical knowledge is primarily to do with contemplation that is removed from action and production: ‘as if there were to be sought in knowledge a couch, whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect . . . and not a rich store house, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate’.77 Elsewhere he insists that knowledge be sought not for ‘the quiet of resolution’ but for ‘a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power . . . which he had in his first state of creation’.78 Knowledge is thus to be pursued for the purposes of action and production. However this does not necessarily entail a preference for the active life over the contemplative. Rather, Bacon insists that contemplation should not be sundered from action. ‘If contemplation and action may be more nearly and straightly conjoined and united together than they have been’, this will ‘dignify and exalt knowledge’.79 This insight is expressed in two of Bacon’s classic formulations: ‘the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing’, and his contention that knowledge and power ‘meet in one’.80 In conformity with the tradition, he thus allows that ‘the contemplation of truth is a thing worthier and loftier than all utility and magnitude of works’, noting that ‘works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life’.81 The same point is made with a religious

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Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5. Cf. Antonio Pe´rez-Ramos, ‘Bacon’s Legacy’, in Peltonen, Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 311–34. Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (14 vols., London: Longman, 1857–74), vol. III, 294. Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works, vol. III, 222. Cf: ‘For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation.’ Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 32. Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 294. Bacon, Novum Organum, I, }3, in Works, vol. IV, 47; cf. I, }124, in Works, vol. IV, 110. And elsewhere ‘assuredly the very contemplation of things, as they are . . . is itself more worthy than all the fruit of the inventions.’ I, }129, in Works vol. IV, 115. Ibid. I, }124, in Works, vol. IV, 110.

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analogy: ‘as in religion we are warned to show our faith by works, so in philosophy by the same rule the system should be judged of by its fruits’.82 As with the Protestant reformers, Bacon’s reading of the Genesis narrative is an important consideration in his understanding of the nature of the earthly vocation. In The Advancement of Learning, he explains how Adam was originally placed in the garden to work. His work consisted of contemplation, exercise and experiment.83 Following the Fall, however, a dichotomy arose between the active and contemplative lives, the two estates represented, respectively, by Cain and Abel. (In keeping with his acknowledgement of the importance of contemplation, Bacon makes the point that God’s favour fell upon the contemplative Abel.84) As is well known, a key element of Bacon’s conception of natural philosophy is that it restores, at least in part, what was lost to humanity as a result of the Fall.85 In keeping with this general vision of a restoration of prelapsarian conditions, Bacon urges the reuniting of the two forms of life in the practice of science. Bacon, then, does not take the side of proponents of the active life in the Renaissance debate, but rejects the terms of the question: neither the active nor the contemplative life, but both. Bacon also challenges the exclusive nature of traditional philosophical vision. Science is not a rare virtue, attainable only by the talented few, but a body of knowledge. ‘The course I propose for the discovery of science’, Bacon announces, ‘is such as leaves little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level’.86 With these words, Bacon sets out his philosophical equivalent of the Protestant priesthood of all believers. This approach to science, as one commentator has suggested, ‘is the epistemological mirror of men’s equality before God’.87 As a body of knowledge, rather than a virtue possessed only by 82

83 84

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86 87

Ibid., I, }73, in Works, vol. IV, 74. Mention of works may seem redolent of Pelagian or Catholic emphasis on works but Bacon’s emphasis was consistent with Protestant teaching. Thus Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession – ‘It is also taught among us that such faith should produce good fruits and good works’, VI.1; and the Westminster Confession – ‘good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith’, XIV.ii. Both in Creeds of the Churches, ed. John Leith (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 69, 210. Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 296. ‘To pass on: in the first event or occurrence after the fall of man, we see . . . an image of the two estates, the contemplative state and the active state, figured in the two persons of Abel and Cain.’ Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 297. ‘For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.’ Bacon, Novum organum, II, }52, in Works, vol. IV, 247. Ibid., I, }61, in Works, vol. IV, 62. Antonio Pe´rez-Ramos, ‘Bacon’s Legacy’, in Peltonen, Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 311–34 at 315. See also Paolo Rossi, ‘Thus Bacon implicitly refuted the traditional image of the enlightened

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exceptional minds, science can now also be augmented incrementally. The Baconian method thus calls for ‘progressive stages of certainty’.88 What might be lost in terms of individual quality is compensated for by quantity – science ceases to be the purview of the elite individual and becomes the corporate activity of many. The ‘perfection of the sciences’ will come ‘not from the swiftness or ability of any one inquirer, but from a succession [of them]’.89 And what now guides the acquisition of knowledge is not a set of internalised mental habits formed by practice, but an objectively identifiable scientific regimen or method: ‘the whole way, from the very first perception of the senses must be laid out upon a sure plan’.90 This publicly available method – and on this point the Baconian model differs from that of the magus – can in principle be followed by anyone.91 As for the benefits of science, these are no longer seen as contributing to the moral perfection of the individual mind, but rather accrue to society. This social utility arises out Bacon’s distinctive combination of contemplation and action. In order to make this point, Bacon draws on the Pauline maxim that ‘knowledge puffs up’, while ‘charity edifies’. The key virtue in the philosophical quest is thus not wisdom, but charity. On Bacon’s analysis, scholastic philosophy had succeeded only in producing ‘proud knowledge’ to the exclusion of charitable acts.92 The goal of science, the ‘legitimate end of learning’, was for Bacon ‘the glory of the creator and the relief of man’s estate’.93 In this reworked moral vision of the true end of philosophy, charity replaces wisdom as the key virtue. Charity is ‘the bond of perfection, because it comprehendeth and fasteneth all the virtues together’.94 Bacon was also sceptical of the assumption of moral perfectibility present in both classical and, to a lesser extent, scholastic anthropology. The heathen, he complains, had ‘imagined a higher elevation of man’s

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sage and the conception of scientific collaboration as a meeting of illuminati jealously guarding their precious, mysterious discoveries. The distinction between ordinary mortals and enlightened genius is prevalent in all European cultures’: Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 27. Cf. Plato: ‘Philosophy, then, the love of wisdom, is impossible for the multitude.’ Republic 494a, in Collected Dialogues, 730. Bacon, Novum organum, Preface, in Works, vol. IV, 40. Bacon, De sapientia veterum, in Works, vol. IV, 753. Bacon, Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 18. Bacon, Novum organum, I, }85, in Works, vol. IV, 84. 1 Corinthians 1.8 (Vulgate); Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works, vol. III, 221–2. Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 294. Ibid., 442. Admittedly, Bacon also provides wisdom (‘sapience’) with a unifying role, arguing that wisdom can unite divine, natural and human philosophy. Works, vol. III, 346; vol. IV, 337.

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nature than it is really capable of ’.95 To the extent that the scholastics had adopted significant aspects of Aristotelian philosophy – including a relatively uncritical epistemology – they too had become unwitting heirs to an over-optimistic anthropology that had underestimated the difficulties in acquiring knowledge. Impediments to the acquisition of knowledge were taken seriously by the Protestant reformers, who attributed them to the fallen condition of the human race – a condition of which pagan writers were unaware.96 On account of original sin the mind was disqualified from acquiring true knowledge. Calvin thus argued that the fallen mind ‘wanders through various errors and stumbles repeatedly’ and thus ‘betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth’.97 Bacon agreed, contesting the Aristotelian/Thomist assumption that the mind is naturally oriented towards the acquisition of knowledge. ‘The human intellect left to its own course is not to be trusted’, he warned, and ‘the light of the sense’ is ‘uncertain’. Knowledge was to be ‘discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it’.98 It must be said that there remain significant elements of a moral programme in Bacon’s natural philosophy, and he thus allows that the mind must be ‘purified and purged’ if it is to become a receptacle for knowledge.99 Yet, since discovery in the sciences was something that was ‘open to almost every man’s industry’, success ultimately did not depend solely, or even principally, on the virtues of the investigator.100 Rather, the key to success in the sciences lay in following a procedure or method. In certain respects this development is consistent with a tendency amongst some Renaissance thinkers to reconceptualise philosophy as method, although ‘method’ in this context was more to do with the organisation of knowledge than, as for Bacon, with its attainment.101 Bacon’s methodological prescriptions, then, render unnecessary to a large degree the inner transformation of the philosopher. What is now required is strict adherence to an externalised philosophical regimen.102 In a sense, then, 95 96

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Bacon, Works, vol. V, 5. See Peter Harrison, ‘Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002), 239–59. Calvin, Institutes, vol. I, 271. Cf. Commentary on Romans 1:21, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XIX, 72. Bacon, Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 17, 18, 20. Ibid., 20. Bacon, Parasceve, in Works, vol. IV, 252. Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, pp. 153–6. Cesare Vasoli, ‘The Renaissance Concept of Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 57–74. Vasoli notes that this tendency was ‘particularly favoured by Protestants’ (72). Stephen Gaukroger thus suggests that Bacon’s account of method can be seen ‘either as elaborating stringent procedures that individual scientists should follow, or as setting out the rules governing a

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what we see in Bacon are the beginnings of the separation of wisdom and science, and of transformation of the inner virtues of the philosopher into the outer methodological prescriptions of modern science. Part of the burden of this chapter has been to suggest that Bacon’s new conception of the philosophical enterprise was influenced by the Protestant reformers’ critique of scholastic and classical models of the philosopher and of a related Aristotelian conception of the virtues. If this were true, it might be expected that there would be differences between Bacon’s prescriptions and those of a Catholic natural philosopher such as Descartes. Indeed, Descartes provides what is perhaps the best contrast, and arguably his conception of the philosophical persona retains more elements of the conventional model than does Bacon’s. A brief comparison reveals some interesting differences. In his chapter in this volume John Cottingham has shown how the Cartesian project may be understood as consistent in many respects with a tradition of theistic metaphysics, the ultimate aim of which is contemplation of God. A number of previous commentators have similarly drawn attention to parallels between Descartes’s Meditations and the traditional contemplative literature.103 Admittedly, some of these connections are overstated, and in any case if the Meditations was intended to provide legitimacy for Descartes’s natural

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new elite community subject to stringent measures designed to organise the investigation of nature at a social level’. S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998), 5–6; cf. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 11–12, 160–5; J. Leary, Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), 218. See e.g. Pierre Mesnard, ‘L’arbre de la sagesse’, in Descartes, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957), vol. II, 366–49, and discussion, 350–9; L. J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 28– 38; Matthew Jones, ‘Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exercise’, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001), 40–72; Ame´lie Rorty, ‘The Structure of Descartes’ Meditations’, in Ame´lie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2. In the same volume see also Gary Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’, 45–79. Others who have drawn attention to the formally meditative mood of the Meditations include Walter Stohrer, ‘Descartes and Ignatius Loyola: La Fle`che and Manresa Revisted’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979), 11–27; Arthur Thomson, ‘Ignace de Loyola et Descartes: l’influence des exercises spirituels sur les oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes’, Archives de philosophie 35 (1972), 61–85; Beck, Metaphysics of Descartes, 28–38; Z. Vendler, ‘Descartes’ Exercises’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989), 193–224; Dennis Sepper, ‘The Texture of Thought: Why Descartes’ Meditationes is Meditational, and Why it Matters’, in Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster and John Sutton (eds.), Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London, Routledge, 2000), 736–50. More sceptical about the link between Descartes’s work and the traditional spiritual exercises is Bradley Rubidge, ‘Descartes’s Meditations and Devotional Meditations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 27– 49. Descartes’s own explanation of his title is that he wished to avoid the more common title ‘Disputations’. Objections and Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and Douglas Murdoch (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), (CSM), vol. II, 112.

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philosophical enterprise a degree of conformity to the existing models is to be expected. Nonetheless, Descartes does seem to have stronger affinities to the contemplative tradition than Bacon. The Third Meditation, for example, contains a classic Thomist account of human ends in relation to contemplation: ‘the supreme happiness of the next life consists solely in the contemplation of the divine majesty, so experience tells us that this same contemplation, albeit much less perfect, enables us to know the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life’. Descartes goes on to announce that the process of meditation proceeds from ‘contemplation of the true God, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and the sciences lie hidden . . . to the knowledge of other things’.104 In a similar vein, the title originally proposed for the Discourse is suggestive of the transformative nature of philosophy. Descartes spoke here of ‘a universal science which is capable of raising our nature to its highest degree of perfection’.105 The Principles of Philosophy begins by explaining that philosophy is the study of wisdom, and that those who follow Cartesian principles will achieve ‘the highest degree of wisdom which constitutes the supreme good of human life’.106 These assertions suggest a far more optimistic outlook than Bacon’s, implying that human knowledge can be perfected in the present life, perhaps by single individuals. Those who follow Cartesian principles will ‘discover many new truths’ and ‘may in time acquire a perfect knowledge of all philosophy, and reach the highest level of wisdom’.107 The ‘democratic’ element of the Baconian method is also absent, for while the ‘intellectually backward’ may achieve wisdom ‘according to their lights’, they will be left far behind by those possessed of ‘the sharpest intelligence’.108 The philosophical quest, moreover, remains the most excellent of human pursuits.109 Descartes does allow that philosophy brings public benefits: ‘a nation’s civilization and refinement 104 105 106 107

108 109

Descartes, Meditations, in CSM, vol. II, 35. Descartes, Discourse and Essays, translator’s preface, in CSM, vol. I, 109. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in CSM, vol. I, 179–83, 188, 192. Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 188. Similar expressions abound in Descartes’s writings: ‘true and certain knowledge’ (CSM, vol. ii, 48); ‘perfect knowledge’ (CSM, vol. II, 49, CSM, vol. II, 111); ‘true knowledge’ (CSM, vol. II, 101); ‘certain science’ (CSM, vol. I, 197); ‘perfect knowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing’ (Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 179); ‘perfect scientific knowledge’ (Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 201); ‘the highest and most perfect science of material things which men can ever attain’ (to Mersenne, 10 May 1632, in CSMK, 38). On Descartes’s conception of certainty, however, see Desmond Clarke, ‘Descartes’ Philosophy of Science’, in John Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 258–85. Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 191. Descartes, Discourse, in CSM, vol. I, 123.

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depends on the superiority of the philosophy that is practised there. Hence the greatest good that a state can enjoy is to possess true philosophers.’110 This is partly because wisdom now extends not only to ‘the conduct of life’ but to ‘the preservation of health and the discovery of all manner of skills’.111 Yet mastery of one’s own desires seems more important than mastery over nature.112 These brief considerations, while falling somewhat short of a conclusive demonstration of the significance of certain Protestant ideas on Bacon’s conception of philosophy, are at least consistent with the general thesis outlined in this chapter. CONCLUSION

One of the background concerns of this chapter has been the genealogy of modern science and the beginnings of the independence of natural philosophy from philosophy proper. In Francis Bacon’s novel prescriptions for natural philosophy, I have suggested, we can see a new emphasis on methods for the investigation and mastery of nature that can be deployed without requiring that the investigator be in prior possession of particular moral, or even intellectual, virtues. It is important, however, when looking back with the present state of the natural sciences and their methods in mind, that we do not lose sight of the fact that in Bacon and other seventeenth-century natural philosophers we are witnessing only the beginnings of that transition through which some aspects of philosophy become something akin to modern science. To put it another way, if it is possible to identify in Bacon’s philosophy concerns that will become central to the practices of the natural sciences in the modern era, we can also find many of the traditional elements of the conception of the philosophical life, including the retention of an emphasis on the importance of the moral propriety of the knower. Bacon continually asserts, for example, that the truth is to be cultivated in charity, and the knowing mind must be purged of the corrupting influences of pride.113 Later in the seventeenth century, Bacon’s heirs in the Royal Society would also emphasise the connection between natural philosophy and moral edification. Thomas Sprat argued that experimental philosophy, as practised by fellows of the Royal Society, would achieve ends similar to those of moral 110 111 112 113

Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 180. Ibid., 179. Descartes, Discourse, in CSM, vol. I, 123. Bacon, Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 20; Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works, vol. III, 221–2.

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philosophy.114 Joseph Glanvill agreed that experimental philosophy yields ‘practical knowledge’ that ‘will assist and promote our Vertue, and our Happiness; and incline us to imploy our selves in living according to it’.115 In the following century Newton famously observed that if natural philosophy was pursued according to his methodological prescriptions ‘the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged’.116 Some of these assertions are undoubtedly attempts to establish the moral credentials of the new experimental philosophy and to show that it could meet the criteria traditionally associated with the philosophical enterprise. Yet it does not necessarily follow that these claims were disingenuous. Apologists for the new philosophy were no doubt sincere in their conviction that experimentalism would confer moral benefits. What was new in all of this, however, was the belief that those benefits would be conferred by adopting particular material practices (such as the methods of experimental philosophy), rather than observing, say, spiritual exercises. Over time, the moral justifications of the natural sciences would become less relevant than their apparent capacity to confer material benefits and to contribute to the general welfare. To add a further constraint to the thesis outlined in this chapter, there is no reason to insist that the kinds of developments witnessed in Bacon’s England were exactly duplicated elsewhere in Europe. As we have already seen, Descartes departs far less from the classical model of the philosopher than does Bacon. It is also clear from other contributions to this volume that in some of the continental universities during this period there remained a considerable emphasis on the philosopher as the embodiment of certain virtues. Robert von Friedeburg thus demonstrates that in the German universities magistrates and university teachers were expected to exemplify particular virtues and to exert moral influence on their respective charges. Ian Hunter likewise suggests that the teaching of philosophy was intended to cultivate in students ‘a distinctive inner deportment, or array of ethical and intellectual dispositions (habitus)’.117 The persistence of this understanding of the virtues in the Lutheran universities can be 114 115

116 117

Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London (London: A. Millar, 1667), 26–7, 34, 65, 341–2. Joseph Glanvill, ‘Usefulness of Real Philosophy to Religion’, 5, in Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), 25. Cf. Philosophia Pia; or, A Discourse of the Religious Temper, and Tendencies of the Experimental Philosophy, which is profest by the Royal Society (London, 1671), 46. Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31 405 (New York: Dover, 1979). There was room, in these contexts, for debate over the nature of the virtues and the conception of the philosophical life. See e.g. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205–6.

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explained in part by Philipp Melanchthon’s enthusiasm for aspects of Aristotle’s ethics. This residual fondness for Aristotle, which contrasts sharply with the critical stance of Luther and Calvin, was an integral part of Melanchthon’s response to the problem of the maintenance of social order, and in particular the need to counter the anomic tendencies of deep confessional divides of early modern Europe. But neo-scholasticism was also a feature of Calvinist institutions on the continent. It is important, then, that in stressing the novel aspects of Bacon’s prescriptions we do not fall back on a standard reading of the history of philosophy in which, in light of subsequent historical developments, and in particular Kantian philosophy, the place of moral formation in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophy is routinely overlooked. That said, it is not insignificant that Bacon concerns himself with natural philosophy rather than philosophy per se, and it may be that this makes an important difference to the issue of the role of the virtues. These caveats notwithstanding, Bacon does seem to be attempting something quite new, as a consequence of which natural philosophy begins to distinguish itself from philosophy proper. Bacon and Baconianism, on this account, make an important contribution to the process that eventually, in the nineteenth century, led to the emergence of the sciences as independent disciplines characterised by objective ‘scientific’ methods. In Bacon’s programme it is possible to discern the beginnings of a divorce between morality and knowing, between wisdom and science, between sapientia and scientia. One possible and partial explanation for this divorce was the Protestant reformers’ doubts about the moral perfectibility of human beings and the impossibility of ever achieving the goals of the traditional philosophical life. Given the inherent unreliability of human minds, the mental disciplines of the medieval contemplative were, in Bacon’s hands, externalised into a methodological regimen, the observance of which was ultimately not reliant upon the moral or intellectual excellence of the individual. In sum, it could be said that in the methods of the modern sciences we see vestiges of the reified virtues of the early modern philosopher.

CHAPTER

10

Fictions of a feminine philosophical persona: Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and philosophia lost 564091

Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy has tended to gloss over historical research into the late medieval period and to accept with little criticism an Enlightenment account of the history of ideas. This history posits an uninterrupted progress in ideas from the Enlightenment to the present, with each step representing an advance toward the modern ideal of philosophical inquiry. Analytic feminist philosophers have not been immune to this worldview. In the 1970s, feminism was at first represented as a completely new progressive phenomenon. Soon, however, research into the nineteenth-century women’s movement led to it being called ‘second-wave feminism’. Further research pushed our knowledge of women’s engagement with issues such as women’s rights and women’s exclusion from education back to before the French Revolution. But the assumption remained that feminism had its intellectual origins in the progress of men’s ideas – in liberalism or socialism or at least in Enlightenment thought.1 The history of feminism, in other words, was interpreted teleologically in terms of an advance toward our current philosophical concerns, such as abstract individualism, rights-based theory, contractarian ethics, and so on. The modern focus on women’s equal rationality, in particular, is thought to have originated with Cartesian philosophy. After Descartes, a common story goes, the doors of our minds were opened to a new critical spirit that spelled the death of Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s dictum that women were ‘monsters in nature’ – defective men who could never attain the rational excellence necessary to be philosophers – thus fell, like belief in witches, crystalline spheres and Ptolemaic astronomy, before the advance of reason. 1

See, for example, Alison M. Jaggar’s influential Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983). This work is, however, critical of many streams of feminist thought because of their adoption of male ideas.

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But the historical evidence belies this optimistic story of an uninterrupted progress in feminist thought, piggy-backing on developments in men’s ideas. The history of women’s ideas, of which feminism is an important part, has followed its own trajectory, or so we will argue, and this is not one that can easily be interpreted in terms of a smooth progress toward modern or ‘enlightened’ concepts. Other scholars have proposed that the twelfth century was a ‘golden age’ of women’s intellectual engagement, followed by a deterioration in their access to education.2 We propose, more modestly, to show how changes to the persona of the philosopher, from the late medieval to the early modern period, were not necessarily advantageous for women. Progress was patchy and, occasionally, earlier conceptions of the philosopher’s role were more congenial to women’s participation than later ones. We demonstrate this thesis by comparing the varying fortunes of two women thinkers: Christine de Pizan and Margaret Cavendish. The persona of the philosopher has not been constant throughout history: as the historical landscape changes, so too does the philosopher’s conception of self and office – those personal qualities and the roles and duties that accompany being a philosopher. And as the persona changes, so do the possibilities for women adopting it and thus participating in the philosophical enterprise. If we were blindly to accept the standard accounts, we might think that those changes to the philosophical persona heralded by Cartesian philosophy were unequivocally positive for women and the origins of feminist thought. But the available evidence leads us to voice some scepticism concerning the liberating potential of the new persona in the early modern period. Christine de Pizan (1364–1430?) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), each wrote texts in which they self-consciously presented themselves as philosophers with specific aims and agendas. They represent striking historical instances of women who deliberately fashioned a philosophical persona in their works: de Pizan in her L’advision Cristine or Christine’s Vision (1405–6), and Cavendish in her Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666).3 2

3

See, for example, Sister Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation 1250–1500 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Erdmans Publishing, 2002), vol. II, 32. Many years ago Joan Kelly also questioned the applicability of a progressive history to women, but her concern was women’s legal and social status rather than their place in intellectual affairs; see Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). There is a slight awkwardness in calling Christine ‘de Pizan’ which arises from the differing conventions of the various disciplines. Philosophers are inclined to refer to other philosophers by

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A discussion of these two texts thus provides an apt starting point for a critical analysis of the so-called liberating impact of changes in philosophical personae on women. We highlight, in particular, the marked differences in the contemporary receptions of each author. While de Pizan ultimately managed to achieve considerable respect, Cavendish’s philosophical ambitions were severely belittled. These differences may have been the result of differences in their writings. They may also have been geographic.4 But two other connected hypotheses suggest themselves. The first is audience. De Pizan’s audience was mixed, but her patrons included the French queen, Isabeau de Bavie`re, and the queen’s sister-in-law, Valentina Visconti. She was thus able to develop an office for herself, in relation to these noble women, similar to that of a male secretary and propagandist for a king or prince.5 Cavendish, however, courted neither patrons nor proselytes, and she criticised the views of her male contemporaries with reckless abandon. Though her works had the public support of her husband, William Cavendish, most independent commentators on her texts tended to be advocates of the very experimental science she ridiculed. Not surprisingly, their responses were negative. The second, closely related, hypothesis is persona or office. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the philosopher’s role changed from that of a courtly moral adviser, patronised by a prince, towards that of proselytiser for a new scientific attitude, increasingly distanced from theology. In the early modern period, philosophy ceased to be a courtly or clerical activity alone, and gradually moved into the civil domain. While philosophers were still expected to contribute to the common good, their activities – the activities of the natural philosopher, in particular – became distinctly secular. De Pizan, for example, identifies the

4

5

their surnames, whereas medievalists prefer to call Christine by her first name. Those who are working largely in the French language might prefer ‘Pizan’ to ‘de Pizan’ on the model of ‘Beauvoir’ who is variously referred to as ‘de Beauvoir’ by anglophones and ‘Beauvoir’ by francophones. It seems odd to us to refer to our pair as Christine and Cavendish, or Christine and Margaret, and de Pizan sounds more natural to our anglophone ears than Pizan, so we have opted to refer to their real selves as de Pizan and Cavendish, while reserving ‘Christine’ for the character who appears in de Pizan’s works, and ‘the Duchess’ for Cavendish’s fictional persona. Cavendish was a rather isolated figure in England, but at the same time there were a significant number of French women intellectuals who ran salons and possessed considerable authority; see John J. Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France (Ithaca, N. Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 2002). Karen Green argues for this interpretation of de Pizan’s relationship with Isabeau de Bavie`re in ‘Isabeau de Bavie`re and the Political Philosophy of Christine de Pizan’, forthcoming in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques (2006).

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pursuit of knowledge with the contemplation of God; while Cavendish conceives of natural philosophy (or the study of nature) as independent of theology. ‘Faith and reason’, Cavendish says, ‘are two contrary things, and cannot consist together.’6 In what follows, we show that the diverging cultural contexts of their texts, their differing philosophical personae, and their modes of cultivating those personae, are important for understanding why one woman philosopher was embraced, the other neglected. BACKGROUND

Some scholars argue that changes in the popular conception of philosophy had profound implications for women’s participation in seventeenthcentury intellectual discourse. Ruth Perry, Katharine Rogers, Hilda Smith and Margaret Atherton all suggest that the Cartesian conception of reason, in particular, was tremendously inspirational for women thinkers.7 On their account of the history of women’s ideas, Christine de Pizan was an anomaly for her time: not only was she proficient in Latin and a well-trained copyist, she also had access to numerous manuscripts, and was an associate of many notable male intellectuals. But it is commonly thought that, prior to the sixteenth century, philosophy was practised in an institutional setting among male scholars versed in the scholastic tradition. According to this chronology, the early seventeenth century marked a shift in the popular conception of the philosopher, and this shift opened the way to philosophy for those individuals who had never received a traditional education. Cartesian method, it is argued, popularised an egalitarian conception of reason and challenged ancient authority. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), Descartes emphasises that God has given all human beings

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Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, Maintained By several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters: By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: privately published, 1664), 210. Margaret Atherton, ‘Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason’, in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder, Colo., and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993); Ruth Perry, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’, Eighteenth Century Studies 18/4 (1985), 472–93; Katharine M. Rogers, ‘The Liberating Effect of Rationalism’, in Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); and Hilda L. Smith, ‘Intellectual Bases for Feminist Analyses: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Kathleen Okruhlik (eds.), Women and Reason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

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the power to distinguish between truth and falsity. There is nothing exceptional about the philosopher in this respect: anybody can attain clear and certain knowledge, so long as they purge themselves of all preconceived notions, begin with clear and distinct ideas in the mind, and proceed from simple to complex ideas in an orderly, unbiased fashion. In this way, Descartes says, ‘I made perhaps more progress in the knowledge of the truth than I would have if I had done nothing but read books or mix with men of letters.’8 This new, non-elitist persona liberated the philosopher from the schools. The best philosopher, according to Descartes, has a mind unencumbered by learned languages, the works of the ancients, or the art of syllogism – educational baggage that women lacked anyway. In her article, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’, Ruth Perry thus asserts that ‘Cartesian assumptions and Cartesian method . . . liberated women intellectually and thus psychically, by making it possible for numbers of them to participate in serious mainstream philosophical discourse.’9 Although Perry does not explicitly make the point, her words support the notion that the new philosophical persona was a significant step forward for women. Through their own efforts, women could cultivate those newly valued characteristics of the philosopher, such as ‘intellectual honesty’ and independence of thought. The new emphasis on natural reason was thus a feminist advance: in their writings, women were able to demonstrate that they were equal to men in terms of this rationality, despite the disadvantages of their formal education. But the popular account of the liberating effect of Cartesian philosophy can be challenged on at least two counts. First, contrary to scholarly opinion, women had discovered the emancipatory potential of reason long before the rise of Cartesianism. Two hundred years prior to Descartes, Christine de Pizan began her Book of the City of Ladies (1404–5) with a dialogue between the author and three personifications of the virtues, Reason, Righteousness and Justice. Christine questions Reason concerning the almost universal misogyny of the male satirists and philosophers that she has read; and Reason, in response, urges Christine to use her own senses and intelligence. To accept the testimony of male authorities, Reason suggests, would be to act like the fool who, having been 8

9

Rene´ Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), vol. I, 126. Perry, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’, 475.

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dressed in women’s clothes while asleep, becomes convinced that he has turned into a woman.10 De Pizan was part of a vibrant early Renaissance culture which, while it continued to rely heavily on argument by authority, was well aware that, since the authorities often disagree, one also has to rely on sense and reason. Modern scholars must be careful, therefore, to avoid misrepresenting the late medieval period as an age dominated by a moribund scholasticism – a mythical conception to which Descartes himself contributes in his Discourse. Descartes’s narrow conception of medieval thought fails to take into account the vibrancy of philosophical culture during the late medieval period, manifest both in the ‘philosophical poets’, Petrarch and Dante Alighieri (who directly inspired de Pizan), and in secretaries and other courtly writers patronised by princes, some of whose works de Pizan knew. One such was Nicholas Oresme, who both translated Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics into French and wrote important scientific and economic treatises.11 Second, the popular account of the Cartesian influence on women promotes a rather simplistic view of the philosophical scene in seventeenth-century England. Although seventeenth-century English women were inspired by a popular form of Cartesianism, textual evidence suggests that they were much more directly influenced by their fellow countrymen. Without great proficiency in Latin and French, these women were often reliant on English texts, English translations, or the commentaries of their English peers. Margaret Cavendish is a notable case in point: her numerous works reveal that her nearest influences were men such as her husband, William, as well as Thomas Hobbes, Walter Charleton and Joseph Glanvill – Englishmen who were intimately associated with the new

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Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Picador, 1983), vol. I, ch. 2, section 2 6; La citta` delle dame, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards, trans. Patrizia Caraffi (Milan and Trento: Luni Editrice, 1997), 46–8. The somewhat complex question of de Pizan’s knowledge of Oresme’s translations of Aristotle is discussed in Sylvie Lefe`vre, ‘Christine de Pizan et l’Aristote Oresmien’, in Au champ des escriptures, ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2000), and Karen Green, ‘On Translating Christine de Pizan as a Philosopher’, in Karen Green and Constant Mews (eds.), Healing the Body Politic: The Political Philosophy of Christine de Pizan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). The influence of Dante on de Pizan is attested in Arturo Farinelli, Dante e la Francia dall’eta` media al secolo di Voltaire, (2 vols., Milan: Hoepli, 1908; reprint ed Geneva: Slatkine, 1971); Earl Jeffrey Richards, ‘Christine de Pizan and Dante: A Reexamination’, Archiv fu¨r das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 222 (1985), 100–11; M. E. Temple, ‘Paraphrasing in the Livre de la Paix of Christine de Pisan of the Paradiso Iii–Iv’, PMLA 37 (1922), 182–6; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Literary Genealogy and the Problem of the Father: Christine and Dante’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993), 365–8; Anna Slerca, ‘Le livre du chemin de long estude (1402–03): Christine au pays des merveilles’, in Bernard Ribe´mont (ed.), Sur le chemin de longue ´etude (Paris: Champion, 1998).

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scientific advances in England and the advent of the Royal Society.12 On the one hand, these men embraced the new philosophical persona promoted in the works of Descartes: they were opposed to assertions of authority, and they valued the natural intellect over book learning. John Aubrey reports that Hobbes, for example, ‘had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have knowne no more then other men.’13 But, on the other hand, English natural philosophers, such as Charleton and Glanvill, upheld a different conception of the philosopher to that of their continental peers. While the French Cartesians were devoted to the pursuit of clear and certain knowledge, the English natural philosophers dedicated their studies to the empirical, the hypothetical and the probable.14 The Englishmen rejected the language of certainty and the search for axioms so typical of Cartesian philosophy. As Charleton says in a letter to Cavendish: ‘the Virtuosi of our English Universities . . . have proclamed open War against the tyranny of Dogmatizing in any Art or Science’.15 The English natural philosopher is characterised by his anti-dogmatism, open-mindedness, and willingness to accept probabilities rather than certainties. If we are to understand Cavendish’s conception of herself as a philosopher, we must pay careful attention to this English philosophical background. For one thing, the evidence suggests that amidst the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth century, the persona of the philosopher was in fact multifaceted – such that it would be more accurate to talk about philosophical personae in this period, rather than a single dominant persona. To interpret Cavendish’s philosophy solely in light of the Cartesian persona would therefore be misleading or inadequate.

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14

15

On Cavendish and these figures, see Stephen Clucas, ‘Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 199– 209. Though Hobbes was never a member of the Royal Society, Cavendish would have been aware of his keen interest in the new science. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, edited with an introduction by Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), 154. For an overview of this topic, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Walter Charleton to Margaret Cavendish, 7 May 1667, in A Collection of Letters and Poems: Written by Several Persons of Honour and Learning, Upon divers Important Subjects, to the Late Duke and Duchess of Newcastle (London: Langly Curtis, 1678), 112.

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‘SELF-FASHIONINGS’

OF DE PIZAN AND CAVENDISH

In what follows, we examine the ways in which de Pizan and Cavendish imagine themselves as philosophers with the help of literary devices such as fiction and allegory. This analysis of de Pizan’s Christine’s Vision and Cavendish’s Blazing World provides a basis for our discussion about why one philosopher found acceptance and the other did not. Of key interest here is the kind of persona each woman cultivated, and how these were likely to be received in their differing historical-cultural contexts. On the surface, although these works are separated by more than two centuries, they share a remarkable number of similarities. Christine’s Vision is an allegorical tale of the misfortunes that have plagued both France and Christine. In her allegory, de Pizan uses the popular device of a ‘dream vision’ to offer advice to rulers and to console the afflicted. Cavendish’s Blazing World is the story of a young woman who becomes the powerful empress of an imaginary world. Like Christine’s Vision, this fictional tale also serves a partly political purpose: while de Pizan exploits a Boethian allegory to urge French princes to pursue virtue, Cavendish uses her utopian fantasy to present a defence of monarchy as the best form of government. In both works, the author appears as herself in a semifictional guise. In her allegory, ‘Christine’ is the philosopher who, like Boethius, receives spiritual encouragement from Philosophy herself; whereas the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is employed by the Empress as her personal scribe and counsellor. In their fictions, de Pizan and Cavendish also position themselves among the philosophers, while at the same time demonstrating an ambivalent attitude toward ancient and modern philosophy in general. They present their heroines as solitary figures on the margins of traditional philosophy, whose pursuit of knowledge is nevertheless legitimised by a sympathetic female authority figure: Philosophia in the case of de Pizan, the Empress in the case of Cavendish. Cavendish was most likely acquainted with a famous volume of de Pizan’s writings. The collected works that de Pizan prepared for Isabeau de Bavie`re in 1414 (now Harley MS 4431 in the British Library) are inscribed with the signature of Henry, Duke of Newcastle, 1676. In a recent paper, Cristina Malcolmson argues that Cavendish’s husband, William, may have brought back a copy of de Pizan’s City of Ladies, among other works, from Europe.16 So despite the fact that Margaret 16

Cristina Malcolmson, ‘Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England’, in Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (eds.), Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700

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Cavendish did not speak French, she may well, with her husband’s assistance, have gained some familiarity with de Pizan’s texts. Nevertheless, the superficial similarities between the two texts cannot mask the fact that de Pizan and Cavendish have radically different conceptions of the philosopher’s role. In her texts, de Pizan incorporates excerpts from Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and she follows his characterisation of metaphysics as the study of being and hence as encompassed by the study of the highest being, God.17 She also sees philosophy as close to prophecy, her father having been a philosopher/ astrologer in the court of Charles V, and she is able to exploit the tradition of the sibyls to authorise her prophetic voice. Drawing on a tradition of prophetic biblical interpretation, which looks to the Bible for universal laws of justice, de Pizan warns that God will punish the vices of princes as he punished Nebuchadnezzar. In Christine’s Vision, she uses various devices to authorise her prophecies. As well as mentioning the sibyls, thus underscoring the appropriateness of female prophecy, she represents herself as being called to write by Libera, a crowned lady who personifies France. Libera praises Christine’s aptitude for intellectual study and says: Friend, to whom God and Nature have conceded the gift of a love of study far beyond the common lot of woman, prepare parchment, quill, and ink, and write the words issuing from my breast; for I wish to reveal everything to you. And I am pleased that you, following your wise good will, should henceforth present the written memories of my worthiness.18

17

18

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–35. This tempting hypothesis appears, however, to be impossible to substantiate. The last known owner of Harley 4431 was Louis of Bruges who may have acquired it during his stay in England in 1472–3. His Flemish library was acquired by Louis XII of France and was housed at Blois by 1518, but Harley 4431 was not then included among his books. (See Maureen Cheney Curnow, ‘The “Livre de la cite´ des dames” of Christine de Pisan: A Critical Edition’ (Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1975), 377 and 431–2). It is therefore possible that the manuscript was never taken out of England, and there is no reason to assume that it was in Flanders during the Cavendishes’ exile, as Malcolmson proposes. St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowman, (2 vols., Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1961); Liliane Dulac and Christine M. Reno, ‘L’humanisme vers 1400, essai d’exploration a` partir d’un cas marginal: Christine de Pizan traductrice de Thomas d’Aquin’, in Monique Ornato and Nicole Pons (eds.), Pratiques de la culture ´ecrite en France au XV e sie`cle: Actes du Colloque international du CNRS, Paris, 16–18 mai 1992, organise´ en l’honneur de Gilbert Ouy par l’unite´ de recherche ‘Culture ´ecrite du Moyen Age tardif’ FIDEM, Textes et e´tudes du Moyen Age II (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fe´de´ration internationale des instituts d’e´tudes me´die´vales, 1995), 161–78, and ‘Traduction et adaptation dans L’advision Cristine de Christine de Pizan’, in Charles Brucker (ed.), Traduction et adaptation en France a` la fin du Moyen Age et a` la Renaissance: Actes du Colloque organise´ par l’universite´ de Nancy II (23–24 mars 1995) (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1997). Christine de Pizan, Christine’s Vision, trans. Glenda K. McLeod (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993), 15; Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2001), 17.

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Libera chooses Christine to be her scribe or clerk. As Glenda McLeod observes, this relationship between Libera and Christine models the relationship between a sovereign and secretary, and thus functions to promote de Pizan’s own authority and stature as a writer.19 In The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish’s fictional counterpart is also employed as a scribe to a sovereign. Cavendish originally published this short fictional piece together with a work on natural philosophy entitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). Few scholars have examined the significance of this joint publication.20 Why, we might ask, does Cavendish append a work of fiction and fancy to a serious philosophical treatise? One explanation is that The Blazing World serves a strategic purpose: Cavendish uses this fictional tale to promote an image of herself as a legitimate philosopher. In one key scene, the soul of the Duchess is recommended to the Empress as non-dogmatic and rational compared to the souls of other well-known philosophers: Then I will have, answered she [the Empress], the soul of some ancient famous writer, either of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Epicurus, or the like. The spirit said, that those famous men were very learned, subtle, and ingenious writers, but they were so wedded to their own opinions, that they would never have the patience to be scribes. Then, said she, I’ll have the soul of one of the most famous modern writers, as either of Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont, Hobbes, H. More, etc. The spirit answered, that they were fine, ingenious writers, but yet so selfconceited, that they would scorn to be scribes to a woman. But, said he, there’s a lady, the Duchess of Newcastle, which although she is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet is she a plain and rational writer, for the principle of her writings, is sense and reason, and she will without question, be ready to do you all the service she can.21

The Duchess subsequently becomes the Empress’s ‘favourite’. Like de Pizan, Cavendish draws on an imagined female authority figure in order to affirm her status as a philosopher, and to promote those characteristics that she sees as worthy of philosophers. As part of their self-presentation as philosophers, both Cavendish and de Pizan present a brief survey of the history of philosophy in order to

19 20

21

De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 46, n. 16. One exception here is Rosemary Kegl, ‘“The World I Have Made”: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism and the Blazing World’, in Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, in Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 67–8.

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contrast the ‘mistaken’ views of other thinkers with their own ‘enlightened’ views of the present. Out of their critical responses to the male tradition, there emerge two very different personae. In Cavendish’s Blazing World, the Empress’s spiritual advisers tell her that ‘your ancient and modern philosophers . . . endeavoured to go beyond sense and reason, which makes them commit absurdities; for no corporeal creature can go beyond sense and reason’.22 When the fictional Cavendish begins to construct a ‘new world’ of her own (in her head), she considers and then rejects the views of past and present thinkers, including Pythagoras, Epicurus, Descartes and Hobbes. Above all, the Duchess scorns those writers who hold inflexible opinions: The truth is, said she, wheresoever is learning, there is most commonly also controversy and quarrelling; for there be always some that will know more, and be wiser than others; some think their arguments come nearer to truth, and are more rational than others; some are so wedded to their opinions, that they never yield to reason; and others, though they find opinions not firmly grounded upon reason, yet for fear of receiving some disgrace by altering them, will nevertheless maintain them against all sense and reason, which must needs breed factions in their schools, which at last break out into open wars, and draw sometimes an utter ruin upon a state or government.23

When the fictional Cavendish has completed her examination of the history of philosophy, she resolves to create a world ‘of her own invention’, a world ‘composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter’.24 This new world, a world that conforms to Cavendish’s own materialist conception of nature in the Observations, was ‘so well-ordered and wisely governed, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words’.25 The Empress expresses her strong admiration: ‘Her Majesty was so ravished with the perception of it, that her soul desired to live in the Duchess’s world.’26 In The Blazing World, Cavendish thus dramatises the philosophical explorations of her serious companion piece, the Observations. But while Cavendish merely expounds her theory in the larger work, in her fantasy fiction her general attitude and approach to philosophy wins support and approval from a royal audience. What, then, is distinctive about the philosophical persona that is affirmed in this discourse? First, Cavendish’s Duchess displays those character traits typical of the seventeenth-century philosopher: she is hostile toward ancient authorities, she promotes a reliance upon the self 22 24

Cavendish, The Blazing World, 60. 25 Ibid., 75. Ibid.

23 26

Ibid.

Ibid., 88.

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as a source of knowledge, and places a high value on reason and rationality. In her other works, Cavendish uses these attributes to justify being both a woman and a philosopher. In the preface to the Worlds Olio (1655), she says that ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as the Men, being of the Effeminate Sex.’27 Yet, she points out, some women might be wiser than some men, if only they would make the effort: Women can have no excuse, or complaints of being subjects, as a hinderance from thinking; for Thoughts are free, those can never be inslaved, for we are not hindred from studying, since we are allowed so much idle time that we know not how to pass it away, but may as well read in our closets, as Men in their Colleges; and Contemplation is as free to us as to Men to beget clear Speculation.28

A woman might achieve ‘clear speculations’ by spending her free time in contemplation, rather than trivial pursuits. Adopting a similar stance in a preface to the Observations, Cavendish says ‘That I am not versed in learning, nobody, I hope, will blame me for it, since it is sufficiently known, that our sex being not suffered to be instructed in schools and universities, cannot be bred up to it.’29 But she dismisses her lack of education by saying that she would rather prove ‘naturally wise’ than learned and foolish.30 Cavendish thus embraces the persona of the ‘unlearned thinker’ to legitimise her endeavours as a woman philosopher. Cavendish also appeals to those character traits typical of the English natural philosopher: a lack of pride or conceit in one’s opinions, and a commitment to finding the most probable theory, rather than holding dogmatically to one’s viewpoint. In The Blazing World, the Duchess criticises those philosophers ‘who are so wedded to their opinions, that they never yield to reason’.31 In her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), Cavendish defends herself against her ‘Condemning Readers’, by arguing that although her theories are only probable, all natural philosophy is built upon probabilities; ‘and until probabilities be condemned by absolute and known truth’, she says, her own theories ought to ‘have a place amongst the rest of probabilities’.32 Cavendish advises that natural 27

28 29

30 31 32

Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio. Written by the Right Honorable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), sig. A4r. Ibid., sig. A5r. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11. Ibid., 12. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 88. Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Written by her Excellency, the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastle (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 27.

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philosophy does not ‘binde a man to strickt rules as other Sciances do, it gives them an honest liberty’.33 Then, in her Philosophical Letters (1664), Cavendish says that ‘I love Reason so well, that whosoever can bring most rational and probable arguments, shall have my vote, although against my own opinion.’34 Cavendish presents herself, in other words, as a ‘philosophical libertine’, an individualist thinker who is not tied to one theory or another, but free to follow her own sense and reason.35 Her main criticism of her fellow natural philosophers is that they stray from their commitment to philosophical liberty, and become enamoured of their own opinions. This ‘libertine’ persona enables Cavendish to claim some legitimacy for her own original theories, without displaying an unfeminine confidence or arrogance in her own work. Christine de Pizan also presents a survey of past philosophy in order to define the merits of her own viewpoint. But her chosen persona is notably different to that of Cavendish. In the second book of Christine’s Vision, Christine meets Dame Opinion. She is a huge vague form, made up of a multitude of moving coloured shadows. Christine sees these shadows floating around the heads, in through the ears, and all about a multitude of debating ‘clerks’ whose disputes seem to be determined by the multitude of variegated shadows that surround them. Turning to her, this great shadowy Opinion informs Christine that she (Opinion) is the cause of men’s disputes and that: From the earliest times, there were a few clever men whom I incited to such inquiry that they discovered philosophy; all the arts and sciences were thus investigated – and the way to reach them was found – because of me. If I had not existed, Philosophy would never have been discovered, as I will explain to you more plainly hereafter. Notwithstanding that Philosophy and her daughters existed before me and that she is the daughter of God, I was created as soon as human understanding was; and she and I (understanding first and then myself ) opened the way for clear-witted men to discover her.36

Dame Opinion warns Christine that because she is built on the imagination, she often produces erroneous judgments.37 To show ‘that there is no person so wise that I do no cause him to err’,38 Opinion 33 34 35

36 37 38

Ibid., sig. A1v. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, sigs. B1r–v. On this topic, see Clucas, ‘Variation, Irregularity, and Probabilism’, 207; and Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 63. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 61, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 54–5. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 63, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 56. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 65, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 57.

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critically assesses the early ancient philosophers, Thales, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Pythagoras. Basing her account closely on Aquinas, de Pizan has Dame Opinion inform her that all these philosophers erred because they inquired into material causes alone: ‘All these proposed a body as the first principle and element; and so by what has already been said, everyone previously discussed seems to have proposed only the material cause.’39 Aristotle, however, enjoyed a more noble mind and understanding than the other philosophers: he was the ‘prince of philosophy’.40 ‘He did not attack the ancient ones as poets’, according to de Pizan, ‘but because they resembled philosophers and were without truth.’41 The true philosopher, on de Pizan’s view, never settles for mere opinion. ‘Oh what folly in man’, says Dame Opinion, ‘whose mind should be governed by reason, to base his understanding on me and decide with surety through me about uncertain and unknown matters!’42 De Pizan thus conceives of her role as a philosopher as that of a searcher after truth. Dame Opinion says to Christine, Dear Friend, be at peace . . . there is no fault in your works, even though because of me, many people variously argue about them. For some say that students or monks forged them for you and that they could not come from the judgment of a woman. But those who say this are ignorant, for they do not know the written accounts that mention so many valiant and educated women of the past – wiser than you – and especially the prophets, and since Nature is not diminished in her power, this can even yet be so. Others say that your style is too obscure and that they cannot understand it, so it is not very enjoyable. Thus I variously cause some to praise and others to repress praise. But as nothing can possibly please everyone, I tell you this much: truth, by the testimony of experience, does not let censure affect reputation. I advise you then to continue in your work, for it is valid, and do not suspect yourself of failing because of me. When I am based on law, reason, and true judgment in you, you will not err in the foundations of your work.43

Dame Opinion says that she cannot exist ‘within intelligences that see the truth and understand the nature of all things’.44 Truth and opinion, on her view, are antithetical. Like Aquinas, de Pizan regards philosophy as ultimately inseparable from theology, and this is the note on which her allegory ends. But since 39 40 41 42 43 44

De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 72, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 69. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 73, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 70. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 69, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 64–5. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 81, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 81. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 87, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 88–9. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 63–4, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 57.

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God has created women as well as men in the image of God, worship and understanding are as much within a woman’s reach as a man’s. De Pizan thus lays claim to the status of philosopher. She says to Dame Philosophy, To me, a simple woman, you have shown yourself by your noble grace in the form of Holy Theology to nourish my ignorant spirit most wholesomely for my salvation. Have you not treated me as your handmaiden, but better than you promised, that is, have you not served me from your most advantageous and worthy dishes which come from the table of God the Father, for which I thank you (which is to say God, who is you) more than I would know how to express? Truly you are all science. You are the true physics, which is theology inasmuch as you are about God, for the causes of all of nature are in God the Creator. You are ethics because you teach the good and honorable life, or loving what should be loved, which is God and one’s neighbor. These things, Theology, you yourself reveal in the sciences of ethics and physics. You are logic because you demonstrate the light and truth of the just soul. You are the study of politics because you teach the virtuous life, for no city is better protected than by the foundation and water of the faith and by the firm agreement to love the common good, which is true and supreme. It is God you discuss in the science in which you have revealed yourself to me, that is, in theology. Oh theology, the supreme philosophy, which I long to praise, Lady, in you!45

For de Pizan, then, following the well-worn synthesis of Platonism and Christianity crafted by Augustine and Aquinas, opinion is the shadowy knowledge available to the soul that has not yet been graced by true philosophy – the understanding of theology and Christian truth. Christine establishes her claim to be a philosopher on argument, her membership of the human race, and the fact that, as a woman, ‘she is not another species than man’.46 The persona of the philosopher as the wise prophet of a truth that is both rational and revealed is associated with a set of images that de Pizan is not slow to exploit. Her rhetoric builds on the Boethian image of Philosophia as a woman who comes to console the unjustly despised. In Christine’s Vision, Philosophia is represented as speaking as directly to her daughter Christine as she once spoke to Boethius, underscoring her daughter’s claim to participate in philosophical wisdom. The image of the philosopher presented by Boethius is one of truth spurned by corrupt powers that is able to take solace in inner virtue and a direct relation to divine truth. De Pizan found in this image a powerful endorsement of her own struggle for wisdom. She also wrote at a period 45 46

De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 142, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 140–1. De Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, II.54.1 (187), La citta` delle dame, 376–8.

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when Boethius’s vision coincided with Christian sensibility. Although women were represented as weak, their weakness could also be represented as a strength. In L’advision, Christine ends her account of the prophecies of Daniel to Nebuchanezzar with the comment, ‘thus will be confirmed the prophecy of the Virgin which says: “Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles [the powerful will be cast down and the humble raised]”’. This text can be read as a warning to corrupt princes, but it can also be interpreted as holding out hope for women.47 Within this Christian mentality, with its emphasis on the Virgin Mary and the virtues of chastity, humility and grace, women, as nuns, abbesses and anchorites, could operate with considerable authority.48 Occasionally, as in a manuscript copied for John Fastolf in Rouen between 1430 and 1450, de Pizan is represented as a nun in a black habit. Yet de Pizan was fundamentally a secular writer, who promoted the active life and argued that women have as great a capacity for prudence as men. She transformed the active life of practical phronesis, extolled by Aristotle as a model for men, to include women. But, as is evident in the quotation above, she saw the divide between the secular and sacred realms as permeable. Practical philosophy is subsumed within theology, and a woman’s practical engagement in the management of the household, estate or state can be interpreted as as much a form of charity or love of God as the devotion and prayers of a nun. These two critical surveys of past philosophy underscore the differences in the way these two thinkers conceive of philosophy and the philosopher’s role. Margaret Cavendish wrote at a time when a Thomist epistemology was no longer dominant. She does not observe a sharp distinction between truth and opinion but supports the common view of her fellow Englishmen according to which the philosopher can only ever put forward provisional claims. In Probability and Certainty in the Seventeenth Century, Barbara Shapiro observes that in Cavendish’s time knowledge came to be seen as a continuum: ‘The lower reaches of this continuum were characterised as “fiction”, “mere opinion”, and “conjecture”; its middle and high ranges as “probable”, “highly probable”; and its apex as “morally certain”.’49 Knowledge, on this view, was a matter of degree, 47 48

49

De Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, xiv, n. 17. For a discussion of the importance of Marian imagery in de Pizan, see Louise D’Arcens, ‘Petit estat vesval: Christine de Pizan’s Grieving Body Politic’, in Karen Green and Constant Mews (eds.), Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 201–26. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 4.

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rather than an all-or-nothing affair. Contrary to de Pizan, Cavendish maintains that the ideal philosopher can no longer aspire to attain absolute truth. In The Blazing World, the Empress asserts that ‘No particular knowledge can be perfect’;50 only God is capable of having an absolute and perfect knowledge of all things.51 In her other philosophical works, Cavendish provides a metaphysical basis for this view: as finite creatures in an infinite universe, she says, humans can have no vantage point from which to judge that their particular theories are correct. On the true nature of the natural world, ‘we are all but guessers’.52 For similar reasons, Cavendish is opposed to de Pizan’s conception of philosophy as the study of God. For our limited intellects, according to Cavendish, God’s nature is utterly incomprehensible: we can never possess ‘a finite idea of an Infinite God’.53 DE PIZAN AND CAVENDISH: THE PROBLEM OF REPUTATION

In their fictional personae, both de Pizan and Cavendish appeal to conceptions of the philosopher that enjoyed prominence in their respective historical periods. Although they are highly critical of their male counterparts, they base their criticisms on received notions of philosophical ‘truth’ and the valued characteristics of the philosopher. Cavendish criticises modern philosophers for being conceited and rigid in their opinions, but she criticises them according to their own anti-dogmatic ideals. De Pizan likewise condemns philosophers for being duped by opinion, instead of pursuing truth in the form of theology – the true vocation of the philosopher according to Aquinas. It is curious, however, that while de Pizan was respected as a philosopher in her lifetime, Cavendish failed to find support and acceptance among her intellectual peers. In her day, Cavendish’s philosophical works were roundly condemned for having ‘neither ground [n]or foundation, nor method’.54 Even intellectual women, such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (the sister of Robert Boyle) and Mary Evelyn (the wife of John Evelyn), were quick to dismiss Cavendish as mad or nonsensical. Upon meeting Cavendish, Mary Evelyn remarked that

50 51 52 53 54

Cavendish, Blazing World, 48. Ibid., 56. Cavendish, Observations, 269. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 139. Cavendish, Observations, ‘To the Reader’, 21.

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Her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is as airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity.55

Similarly, in a letter to her brother Richard Boyle, Katherine Jones claimed that Cavendish had barely escaped the lunatic asylum. In April 1667, England had just begun peace talks with Holland to bring an end to the Second Anglo-Dutch War. But Jones reports that ‘the Duchess of Newcastle is more discoursed of than the Treaty, and by all the Characters I hear given her I am resolved she escapes Bedlam only by being too rich to be sent thither’. Cavendish was, however, ‘mad enough to convey that title to the place of her Residence’.56 Male philosophers were only slightly more accommodating. Her friend and correspondent, Walter Charleton, praised Cavendish for being ‘above her sex’.57 But even Charleton thought that there was little to approve in her natural philosophy. ‘I have not yet been so happy’, he says, ‘to discover much therein that is Apodictical, or wherein I think my self much obliged to acquiesce.’58 Another fellow of the Royal Society, the Platonist Henry More, assured his friend Anne Conway that no one would bother replying to Cavendish’s arguments;59 and Samuel Pepys – another Society man – rudely dismisses her as a ‘mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he [William Cavendish] an asse to suffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.60 De Pizan’s own account of her troubles show that, for her too, philosophical acceptance was by no means a given. Nevertheless, she clearly managed to establish a considerable reputation. In Christine’s Vision, she tells how the Count of Salisbury, who had been sent to France in relation to the marriage of Isabelle of France to Richard II, was aware of her skill as 55

56

57 58 59

60

Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohun, April 1667, in Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (4 vols., London: Henry Colburn, 1857), vol. IV, 8–9. Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, to Richard Boyle, 13 April 1667, in the British Library, Althorp B4 (item 30). For the sake of uniformity, we have modernised the spelling. On Jones, see Lynette Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 178–97. Charleton to Cavendish, 3 May 1663, in Collection of Letters and Poems, 92. Charleton to Cavendish, 7 May 1667, in ibid., 111. More to Conway, [undated] 1665; in Marjorie Hope Nicolson (ed.), The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684, revised with an introduction and new material, ed. Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 237. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (11 vols., London: Bell, 1976), vol. IX, 123.

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a poet and consequently invited her son to accompany him on his return to England, to be a companion to his own son. Salisbury soon afterwards lost his life attempting to oppose Henry IV’s usurpation of Richard’s throne; but Henry IV was no less impressed by de Pizan, and invited her to the court of England (an invitation that de Pizan declined after some dissimulation). Not long afterwards, she was invited to the court of JeanGaleas Visconti at Milan, an offer which tempted her more, but which she was unable to take up because of the duke’s death.61 These invitations came quite early on in de Pizan’s career and we know of them through her own account. By the time she died, which was around 1430, she was a well-known figure. In a 1434 description of the town of Paris, Guillebert de Mets mentions her as having written many treatises in Latin and French.62 In his 1441 poem, The Ladies’ Champion, Martin le Franc uses de Pizan as the most notable local example of a woman whose capacities show that women are capable of all the excellences of men. Le Franc claims that her name will be celebrated endlessly, by trumpet and horn, and her death is fulsomely lamented. She is described as valiant, virtuous, versed in Latin and letters, a Tully for eloquence, and a Cato for wisdom.63 So how might we explain the negative reception of Cavendish as a philosopher? One explanation might be found in Cavendish’s contemporary audience (or lack thereof). In many of her works, Cavendish imagines herself as separate and apart from the general intellectual community. This separateness is dramatised in The Blazing World, when the Empress rejects everyone but the Duchess on account of the conceit and rigidity of their opinions. Only the Duchess, it is suggested, is a truly worthy philosopher, relying as she does on her innate sense and reason, and nothing else. But while de Pizan depicts herself in a courtly office, in relation to a queen she actually served, the Duchess’s royal supporter is merely imaginary. In reality, in Cavendish’s time, the society of natural philosophers extended far beyond the court, to include a number of amateurs of different religious and political persuasions. The chief audience for developments in natural philosophy could be found in the kitchens and distillation rooms of common households, as well as the 61 62

63

De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 109–24, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 97–117. Guillebert de Mets, Le Paris de Charles V et de Charles VI vu par des ´ecrivains contemporains (Caen: Paradigme, 1992), partial re-edition of Le Roux de Lincy and L. M. Tisserand, Description de la ville de Paris au XVe sie`cle by Guillebert de Mets (Paris, 1855), 234. Martin le Franc, Le champion des dames, ed. Robert Deschaux (5 vols., Paris: Champion, 1999), vol. IV, 178–9.

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more formal meetings of the Royal Society.64 Natural philosophy ceased to be the activity of isolated, privileged individuals, and became instead the communal activity of many. To be welcomed into this scientific community, Cavendish needed to be accepted by the generality of her peers; but far from trying to win them over, she set herself apart and courted their hostility through ridicule. Another closely connected explanation might be found in the way in which Cavendish’s persona diverges from the more general persona of the natural philosopher in the early seventeenth century. Although Cavendish cultivates the persona of a philosophical libertine, she also demonstrates a profound scepticism toward a principal aspect of natural philosophy in England – the new experimental method. Cavendish’s Observations includes an extended critique of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1663) – two key items of propaganda for the newly established Royal Society. In the Observations, Cavendish scorns experimental philosophy, and microscopy in particular: ‘most of these arts are fallacies, rather than discoveries of truths’, she says, ‘for sense deludes more than it gives true information, and an exterior perception through an optic glass is so deceiving, that it cannot be relied upon’.65 In The Blazing World, Cavendish’s critique takes the form of satire.66 Of telescopes, the Empress says that ‘these telescopes caused more differences and divisions . . . than ever they had before’.67 The Empress commands the experimenters to break their instruments because ‘nature has made your sense and reason more regular than art has your glasses, for they are mere deluders, and will never lead you to knowledge of truth’.68 In response, the experimenters (represented as ‘bear-men’) plead with the Empress, claiming that ‘we shall want employment for our senses, and subjects for arguments; for were there nothing but truth, and no falsehood, there would be no occasion for to dispute, and by this means we should want the aim and pleasure of our endeavours in confuting and contradicting each other’.69 The supposed rationale for the new technology, in other

64 65 66

67 68

See Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society’, 182–4. Cavendish, Observations, 9. On this topic, see Sarah Hutton, ‘Science and Satire: The Lucianic Voice of Margaret Cavendish’s Description of a New World Called the Blazing World’, in Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Madison, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003; London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 161–78. Cavendish, Blazing World, 26. 69 Ibid., 27–8. Ibid., 28.

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words, is to provide subject matter for dispute and disagreement – to promote elitism rather than a new egalitarianism. This satirical representation of experimental philosophy was hardly likely to appeal to supporters of the new experimentalism –figures such as Katherine Jones, Mary Evelyn, Walter Charleton, Henry More and Samuel Pepys.70 Cavendish’s alternative, solitary, philosophic ideal puts her at odds with her empiricist-driven contemporaries. In midseventeenth-century England, a vital part of the new scientific enterprise was the compilation of masses of empirical data with the assistance of new instruments such as microscopes and telescopes. There was an expectation that the new philosopher would roll up his sleeves, abandon his armchair, and venture out into the world in a quest to find new facts. The natural philosopher could no longer rely on the word of established authority or expect to claim certainty for his results; the best he could settle for was ‘high probability’. To claim this degree of probability, as Barbara Shapiro observes, it was necessary to avoid error and fallibility in one’s findings.71 One way to do this was to conduct experiments and to invite others to witness the verification of one’s hypotheses. The Royal Society played a vital role in the public staging of experiments: in Joseph Glanvill’s opinion, reports of their trials could ‘be received as undoubted Records of certain events . . . Which advantage cannot be hoped from private undertakers, or Societies less qualified and conspicuous’.72 With formal public approval, one could then legitimately represent one’s findings as ‘highly probable’. Science, for the English natural philosopher, had thus become a collective enterprise. The philosopher/counsellor whose role was to offer moral and political advice was replaced by the communal ideal of the scientist. Cavendish spurned the new scientific persona that accompanied this intellectual upheaval. Philosophy, for Cavendish, is closely related to fiction writing: it is an activity of the individual’s mind, something dependent on one’s internal sense and reason, rather than practical experiment and collective investigation. In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish

70

71 72

On Katherine Jones’ involvement in the new science, see Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society’; and on Mary Evelyn’s part, see Frances Harris, ‘Living in the Neighbourhood of Science: Mary Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites’, in Hunter and Hutton, Women, Science and Medicine, 198–217. See Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 5. Joseph Glanvill, ‘An Address to the Royal Society’, in Scepsis Scientifica, or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science, facsimile reprint of 1665 edition (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985), sig. C1r.

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boasts that her theories ‘did merely issue from the Fountain of my own Brain, without any other help or assistance’.73 This conception of philosophy is also affirmed in a key scene of The Blazing World, when Cavendish’s fictional persona and the Empress start ‘creating new worlds’ from their fancy. Elsewhere, the Empress is told that ‘every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull’.74 By contrast, Joseph Glanvill warns that ‘while we frame Scheames of things without consulting the Phaenomena, we do but build in the Air, and describe an Imaginary World of our own making’.75 For the English natural philosopher, such purely mental constructs were dangerous and likely to lead to mistaken dogma. But Cavendish openly supports the contemplative life: again, she consciously represents herself as a solitary thinker, rather than part of a co-operative, collective enterprise. We have suggested two hypotheses to explain the different fortunes of our two women philosophers: one a difference in audience, and the other related to developments in the office of the philosopher. These are interconnected, because a fifteenth-century aristocratic audience was largely interested in moral edification, presented in an entertaining format. By contrast, the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century wished to collaborate on the new enterprise of uncovering the secrets of nature. The persona of the philosopher in the early fifteenth century was more literary than scientific, more theological than empirical. De Pizan, echoing Dante, explains how she pursued the ‘long path of learning’ and discovered the beautiful style of the philosopher-poets which was natural to her.76 It was as a poet that she made her early reputation, but this was poetry and rhetoric put to service in the pursuit of moral and religious truth. The female allegorical figures who peopled the moral universe of Dante, Petrarch and, most importantly, Boethius, allowed themselves to be transformed into allegories of wisdom that could serve as images of de Pizan herself. Thus, in the Epistre Othea, one of de Pizan’s most widely copied works (dating from 1400), Othea, goddess of prudence and wisdom, looks down from the clouds, in the illuminated versions of the

73 74 75 76

Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 3. Cavendish, Blazing World, 72. Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, sig. B4r. De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 119, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 110.

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text supervised by de Pizan, looking not unlike de Pizan herself, who in other miniatures offers her work to a patron, Louis of Orle´ans.77 Like Cavendish, de Pizan saw a connection between fiction, or poetry, and philosophy. In doing so, however, de Pizan was not out of step with her male contemporaries, but very much one among them. In the letters that make up the debate over the Romance of the Rose, de Pizan forcefully puts forward the view that poetry and rhetoric have their place as a means of engagement whereby higher moral and theological truth is illuminated. She criticises the moral ambiguities of Jean de Meun’s development of the poem, and compares him unfavourably with Dante.78 De Pizan’s imagination did not have to represent itself as a mere ‘fancy’, but could build on a well-established allegorical tradition to represent itself in the most serious terms as a literary path to philosophical illumination. De Pizan consciously, and often quite brilliantly, exploited the philosophical conventions of her time to construct for herself a female philosophical persona which drew its authority as much from Boethius’s Dame Philosophy as from the Virgin Mary. Having gained as much access to the works of the established authorities as was available to the average clerk, she was able to construct a philosophical persona on nothing more than literary style, reason, sense and a judicious mining of the established texts for material that suited her purposes. CONCLUDING REMARKS

On the surface, the seventeenth century seemed to offer a favourable environment for women philosophers such as Cavendish. In the early modern period, Descartes and his followers popularised a new egalitarian conception of reason that inspired women to engage in the intellectual enterprises of their time. Cavendish openly embraces the persona of the ‘unlearned thinker’ in her Blazing World and in the prefaces to her other philosophical works: although she is an uneducated woman, she says, she is capable of using her natural intellect to develop rational and probable theories. On closer analysis, however, the ‘new philosophy’ was not so 77

78

This observation was first made by Sandra Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othea’ Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986). See Eric Hicks (ed.), Le de´bat sur Le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1977), 141–2, and Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La Querelle de la Rose. Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978), 138. De Pizan’s critique of morally ambiguous poetry is developed at length by Rosalind Brown-Grant in Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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easily appropriated by women in early modern England. To become a successful natural philosopher in England, one increasingly needed to be accepted as an equal among a group of peers. One also needed expertise in experimental mechanics, experimental method and mathematics. These forms of expertise had to be acquired in an institutional or group setting. Women, however, were not permitted to attend ‘public’ institutions such as the Royal Society; and nor did they have easy access to expert training. Although Cavendish attended a Royal Society meeting in 1667, the invitation was at her own behest, and it was not until 1945 that women were permitted to become official fellows of the Society. Indeed, the early Royal Society prided itself on being an exclusively masculine environment. In a verse in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, Abraham Cowley writes that Philosophy ‘whatsoe’re the Painters Fancy be’ is indisputably a ‘Male Virtu’.79 Like Aristotle before them, the Society men associated the feminine with everything that philosophy was not. Thus, despite the received view of the earlier period as one in which an ageing scholastic institution militated against women philosophers, the example of de Pizan suggests that the first flush of the Renaissance offered a philosophical persona – the courtly ‘philosopher poet’ – that was rhetorically congenial for a woman with literary skill and philosophical aspirations. An enterprising woman could also win a courtly audience and elicit patronage. With hindsight, it is not surprising that Cavendish’s selffashioning as a philosopher failed to find acceptance. For one thing, Cavendish did not have a receptive audience to her ideas in the form of royal patrons; and her conception of herself as a solitary, self-reliant thinker was inimical to natural philosophy in her time. Like de Pizan, Cavendish emphasised the connections between philosophy and fiction – an enterprise that relied on the imagination, rather than external proofs and collective endeavours. In her works, Cavendish appropriates the solitary ideal of the philosopher in order to justify her intellectual efforts as a woman. Unfortunately for Cavendish, this was the very persona that empiricist philosophers defined themselves against, and that would later – with the rise of the literary novel – be disparagingly associated with the feminine. Far from encouraging women, these further developments in the persona of the philosopher – the evolution of the philosopher into a scientist or experimenter – facilitated women’s exclusion from yet another

79

Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: J. Martyn, 1667), sig. B1r.

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intellectual sphere. For de Pizan, by contrast, the persona of the philosopher that she found in Boethius was a mantle as easily worn as that marvellously figured cloak in which Philosophy appeared when she came to console him. This is the persona of the philosopher aloof from the crowd, who looks within the self, and is consoled by love of wisdom and the doctrine that virtue is the highest good. For de Pizan, as for her peers, the virtue of philosophy was no painter’s fancy, but an allegorical depiction of the deepest truth. In conclusion, one might say that ultimately the contrasting reception of Cavendish and de Pizan was a case of philosophia lost.

CHAPTER

11

John Locke and polite philosophy 430537

Richard Yeo

The inscription on the bust of John Locke in the Temple of British Worthies in Stowe, Buckinghamshire, describes him as the ‘best of all philosophers’.1 When Voltaire discussed An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) he declared that past thinkers, including Rene´ Descartes, had written ‘the Romance of the Soul’, but now ‘a Sage at last arose, who gave, with an Air of the greatest Modesty, the History of it’.2 Voltaire thus ensured that Locke’s reputation extended throughout Europe.3 However, such fame came only towards the end of his life, because his major works did not begin to appear until 1690. Moreover, although the Essay carried his name (in the first edition only in the dedication, not the title page), the Two Treatises of Government (1690) and A Letter Concerning Toleration (first appearing as Epistola de tolerantia in 1689) were both published anonymously, and not owned by Locke until he bequeathed books to the Bodleian Library in a codicil to his will. After his death in 1704, Locke’s friends and admirers fashioned his status as a philosopher. By sampling these portraits we can see that writers who contributed to the making of his image regarded the identity of the philosopher as one that had to be defined in relation to other identities, offices or commitments. It is useful to distinguish this public identity 1

2

3

The bust of Locke was placed there in the 1740s by Lord (Richard Temple) Cobham. See Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke. Selected Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xxviii. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English nation (London: C. Davis, 1733) in letter no. XIII, 94–108, at 97–8. Voltaire drew on Pierre Des Maizeaux, A collection of several pieces of Mr. John Locke, never before printed, or not extant in his works (London: J. Bettenham for R. Francklin, 1720). See also C. Mallet, ‘John Locke’, in Nouvelle biographie ge´ne´rale (46 vols., Paris: Firmin Didot fre`res, 1853– 66), vol. XXXI, 434–47; Gabriel Bonno, ‘The Diffusion and Influence of Locke’s Essay. . .’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947), 421–5. Leslie Stephen, ‘John Locke’, in Dictionary of National Biography (21 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885–90), vol. XII, 27–36, at 35: ‘Locke’s reputation as a philosopher was unrivalled in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, and retained great weight until the spread of Kantian doctrines.’ See also Hans Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’, in Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 252–89.

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from the persona that Locke might have struggled to find during his lifetime.4 Locke began the Essay in 1671 and carried a draft of it wherever he went, adding significantly to it in France between 1675 and 1679, and completing it during his political refuge in the Netherlands, most likely by the end of 1686.5 Since this was his major life’s work, we might expect it to be related to some sense of vocation.6 Did Locke find a philosophical vocation before one was constructed for him after his death? I consider first the ways in which he might have been able to imagine an appropriate persona for such a vocation. An influential version of the expectations of a ‘modern’ philosopher is found in the assessments of Locke’s closest friends. In praising his moral tone and civil conduct, these encomiums give the philosopher a part in polite conversation. We can see this in the remarks of Damaris Masham (1659–1708), the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth (1617–88).7 Here, roughly extracted, are her main observations: Mr. Locke . . . was a profound Philosopher: he was a man every way fitted for the greatest Affairs: He had Polite Learning: He was a well bred man: He understood more, or less, of almost every thing that was usefull to mankind, and yet he himself was superiour to all this . . . No man was (as I think you know) less Magisterial, or Dogmatical than he . . . Mr. Locke was alike conversable with all sorts of People. . .He had no Melancholie in his Constitution.8

In a later account, we have the public persona of Locke as a polite philosopher who encouraged good manners in intellectual inquiry: 4

5

6

7

8

Compare the fabrication of Isaac Newton as an Enlightenment hero. See Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860’, Science in Context 2 (1988), 257– 84. See James Hill and J. R. Milton, ‘The Epitome (Abre´ge´) of Locke’s Essay’, in Peter R. Anstey (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), 2–25. For commentary on the category of persona, I am relying on the editors’ introduction to this volume. I have linked persona to the notion of vocation in Locke’s case, without fully analysing that relationship. For relevant approaches, see John Dunn, ‘Individuality and Clientage in the Formation of Locke’s Social Imagination’, in Reinhard Brandt (ed.), John Locke Symposium, Wolfenbuttel 1979 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 43–73; Ame´lie Rorty, Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), chs. 1–2. From 1791 until his death on 28 October 1704, Locke lived with Damaris and her husband, Sir Francis Masham, in their house in Oates, Essex. On 12 January 1704/5, Damaris answered an inquiry from Jean le Clerc (1657–1736), who was composing an e´loge. Le Clerc translated part of this letter in his account published in Bibliothe`que choisie 6 (1705), art. 5, 342–411. The full version is [Jean Le Clerc], An account of the life and writings of Mr. John Locke . . . second edition, enlarged (London: John Clarke, 1713). Damaris Masham to Jean Le Clerc, 12 January 1704/5, quoted from the transcription of MS J 57a in the Universiteitsbibliotheek, Amsterdam; published by Roger Woolhouse in Locke Studies 3 (2003), 167–94, at 186–9. The predisposition to melancholy was identified as the scholars’ disease: see, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628).

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He was a Man of the most extensive Knowledge . . . No Man understood Business, Books, and Men better than Mr. Locke. He was a true Philosopher, ie a lover of Wisdom, and no less a Despiser of Cunning. He was obliging, affable, and facetious. The Gentleman appeared as beautiful in him as the Philosopher.9

As various chapters in this volume show, the resources for crafting the persona of the philosopher on moral foundations were ancient ones. Stephen Gaukroger reminds us that Plato attacked the sophists, not primarily for intellectual errors but rather for moral failings: the willingness to make ‘weak arguments appear better than strong ones’.10 By the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon included character assessments in his criticism of Aristotle’s legacy; in natural philosophy, Cartesians and Newtonians traded ad hominem invectives. On the constructive side, promoters of the ‘new philosophy’, such as the leaders of the Royal Society of London, affirmed their possession of certain methods, rules of thinking and, to various extents, suitable habits of behaviour. The glowing portraits of Locke drew on this legacy. If he sought to find a persona that expressed a philosophical vocation, Locke did not need to start from scratch. The leitmotif of these portraits of Locke was that he was a Christian philosopher, and also a scholar and a gentleman. Writing in 1714, one author improvised on the theme introduced by Masham and Le Clerc: ‘in short, he was as well a Good-natur’d and Well-bred Gentleman, as a finish’d Scholar, and profound Philosopher’.11 In using these three terms, however, we should be careful not to conflate categories: the title of ‘gentleman’ referred to a member of the gentry, a social status with an economic (though flexible) basis; ‘scholar’ indicated a profession within the university. There was no similar economic or institutional anchorage for the ‘philosopher’. Rather, this was an identity, or a persona, that certain gentlemen or scholars might choose to adopt. Here there was a

9

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Memoirs of the Life of Mr. John Locke (London: F. Noble, 1742), 10–11. This anonymous work draws on Le Clerc, and also on Pierre Coste, ‘The character of Mr Locke’, in The works of John Locke. A new edition, corrected (10 vols., London: T. Tegg, 1823; reprint by Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963), vol. X, 161–74. This originally appeared in Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, February 1705. Coste translated the Essay into French; he lived in the Masham household from 1696 to 1706. See Stephen Gaukroger’s chapter in this volume. The Remains of John Locke (London: E. Curll, 1714), 27–8. For extracts from Locke’s works, assembled as a manual of moral and intellectual conduct, see Philosophical Beauties selected from the Works of John Locke, Esq . . . to which is prefixed, Some Account of His Life (London: J. Cundee for T. Hurst, 1802).

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problem of conflicting identities since, as Steven Shapin has argued, in seventeenth-century English parlance scholars were regarded as potential pedants, and were usually contrasted with gentlemen.12 In another twist, Robert Boyle, Locke’s influential aristocratic mentor, confided to his sister in 1646 that he regarded philosophy as a virtuous refuge from the superficiality of polite society: ‘You can Your Selfe, Philosophy, bear me witnesse, how frequently and Studiously I have declin’d all other Companys, to enjoy the Blessings of Yours.’13 These complications are worth noting because some later affirmations of polite philosophy seem comparatively relaxed. From the early 1700s, Joseph Addison in The Spectator announced the desirability of emulating Socrates, or at least bringing ‘Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses’.14 In his Essays Moral and Political (1741–2), David Hume suggested that this relationship ‘betwixt the learned and conversable worlds’ was now assured: no longer was philosophy ‘shut up in colleges and cells, and secluded from the world and good company’. He defined a new office, to which he appointed himself: ‘I cannot but consider myself as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation’.15 In fact, Locke’s pupil, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), the third Earl of Shaftesbury, had already incorporated this notion of a reformed philosophy into his views on ‘politeness’ – as influentially sketched in his Characteristicks (1711).16 Indeed, in a letter of 1707 he acknowledged that Locke had rescued philosophy from scholasticism: I am not sorry, that I lent You Mr. Locke’s Essay of Humane Understanding ; which may as well qualify for Business and the World, as for the Sciences and a University. No one has done more towards the Recalling of Philosophy from

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13

14

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Steven Shapin, ‘“A Scholar and a Gentleman”: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England’, History of Science 29 (1991), 279–327; and his A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 170–5. Cited in Shapin, Social History of Truth, 173, from the Boyle Papers, Royal Society, vol. XXXVII, ff. 166–7. [ Joseph Addison], The Spectator, 12 March 1710/11, ed. Gregory Smith (4 vols., London: Dent, 1970), vol. I, 31–2. David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Selected Essays ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–5, at 2, 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). It first appeared in three vols. (London, 1711); a revised second edition appeared in 1714.

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Barbarity, into Use and Practice of the World, and into the Company of the better and politer Sort, who might well be ashamed of it in other Dress.17

However, as I note below, Shaftesbury disagreed strongly with his tutor about the nature of the philosopher’s office. In contrast, the young Locke, as an undergraduate in the 1650s, did not have this luxury of dissent within broad agreement. At Christ Church, Oxford, Locke faced the choice of a vocation – a career in the university, the church, the law or medicine. Although the title of philosopher was bestowed on him from 1690, his own acceptance of this identity, and any persona that expressed it in public, only became an issue after he chose not to elect any of these usual professions. In any case, Locke rejected the current model of the philosopher, which he took to be exemplified in ‘the Schools’, as institutionalised in the universities. In addition, he was perturbed by the ways in which habits of thinking, engendered by scholastic training, affected polite conversation, turning gentlemen into ciphers for words and phrases they had not properly scrutinised. I argue that Locke worked towards his own intellectual vocation by rejecting impolite learning and philosophy, in the various guises that I will specify; and that this involved a criticism of what he saw as improper intellectual conduct, as much as substantive erroneous doctrines. This gave his philosophical identity a negative, or at least preparatory, disposition – one famously epitomised in his characterisation of his role as that of a humble ‘under-labourer’ (to which I shall return). However, there was also a positive aspect, since Locke believed that God had bestowed rational and linguistic faculties suitable for the improvement of human life in this ‘State of Mediocrity’. There was thus a moral duty for every person, not only philosophers, to cultivate the proper use of these capacities.18 A VOCATION AS A PHILOSOPHER?

In a letter addressed to the examiners at Westminster School who determined places at Christ Church, Oxford, the twenty-year-old Locke penned a short Latin statement of his hopes, as they stood in May 1652.

17

18

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Several letters written by a noble lord to a young man at the university (London: J. Roberts, 1716; 2nd edn, 1732), 4. This remark is from the first letter of 24 October 1706/7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), IV.xiv.2. John Dunn has stressed this point in his writings; for a summary, see his Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 3.

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This showed off his reading of Homer’s Odyssey: he assumes the role of Ulysses striving to reach Ithaca, that is, the university, where he wants to ‘court Philosophy, assuredly a more desirable Penelope’.19 It would, however, be nonsensical to take this as a clear commitment to the kind of philosophical inquiries we now associate with the Essay. Until he published the Essay, it is difficult to characterise Locke’s activities under a single label. Maurice Cranston, Locke’s twentieth-century biographer, notes that before he returned to England in 1689 Locke might have been fairly described as ‘a minor Oxford scholar, and exdiplomatist of small experience, an amateur scientist, an unpublished writer and unqualified physician’.20 Of course, in the absence of welldefined careers for men of learning, it was not unusual for them to adopt a variety of occupations. Thomas Hobbes, for example, pursued philosophy as a tutor and secretary in the households of the Cavendish family (earls of Devonshire). It is therefore important to appreciate the intellectual and institutional conditions within which Locke could have developed the concept of a vocation in philosophy. Locke might have become a cleric, or pursued a life of learning within the university. After graduating BA in February 1656, MA in June 1658, and being appointed tutor in 1661, he was on both these paths.21 In English Protestantism, the notion of a particular ‘calling’, in addition to the general calling of all men to follow Christ, was well accepted. The former, as Robert Sanderson (1587–1663) expressed it in 1621, was one ‘wherewith God enable us, and directeth us, and putteth us on to some special course and condition of life, wherein to employ our selves, and to exercise the gifts he hath bestowed on us’.22 For a university graduate, this could be a calling to a profession or to secular study more generally, which might include classical, philological, historical or mathematical scholarship. However, divinity was the subject normally expected to occupy the attention of the graduate, leading to

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Locke to ___, [May 1652?], in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–9), vol. I, no. 5. Hereafter cited as Correspondence. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 113. The most reliable account is J. R. Milton, ‘John Locke’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. XXXIV, 216–29. He was admitted to Gray’s Inn on 10 December 1656 but did not then take up legal studies. See Correspondence, vol. I, p. 42, n. 2. Robert Sanderson, XXXVI Sermons (London: Joseph Hindmarsh, 1689), 205, cited in Mordechai Feingold, ‘Science as a Calling? The Early Modern Dilemma’, Science in Context 15 (2002), 79–119, at 81.

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service in the church. In the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, continued membership as a fellow required ordination, except in the case of a small number of fellowships designated for physicians and lawyers. There was also the notion of the ‘general scholar’ versed in the encyclopaedic circle of the arts and sciences, the fundamentals of which were represented by the seven liberal arts that comprised the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music) of the curriculum. This training was regarded as preparatory to traditional branches of philosophy, such as ethics and metaphysics. However, the entire enterprise was seen to be in the service of theology – the queen of the sciences and the ‘professional’ requirement of a cleric.23 Thus Locke’s unpublished Latin essays on natural law, composed shortly after 1660, qualified as an acceptable study for a Master of Arts at Christ Church, even though they had little bearing on his formal college positions as praelector (lecturer) in Greek (1661–2) and in rhetoric (1663).24 In November 1663, Locke seems first to have confronted the possibility of finding a vocation outside the university and the church. He consulted a friend, John Strachey (1634–75), about whether to take holy orders, as was expected of the ‘senior Philosophus’.25 In view of Locke’s position, John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, had begun to solicit character reports.26 However, Strachey counselled him to choose between ordination and ‘your Genius and Studies’. Interestingly, he referred to Locke’s versatile intellect and passion for reading in medical terms: it would be wise, he said, ‘not to meddle with your owne Genius and inclination which is as bad as Helmonts Archeus’. For the Dutch physician and chemist, Jan Baptista van Helmont (1580–1644), this ‘Archeus’ was the

23

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See Richard Serjeantson (ed.), General Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar by Meric Casaubon (Cambridge: R. T. M. Publications, 1999), esp. 131–58; Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 211–357. J. R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Life and Times’, in Chappell, The Cambridge Companion to Locke, 5–25, at 7–8. As Censor of Moral Philosophy, Locke was required to perform on formal occasions. See his ‘Valedictory Speech as Censor of Moral Philosophy, (1664), in John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 218–43. There were three classes of students at Christ Church – forty discipuli, forty philosophi, and twenty theologi. When a vacancy occurred among the latter, all of whom had to be in holy orders, the senior philosophus was promoted to their rank. See J. R. Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, in G. A. J. Rogers (ed.), Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 29–47; also Correspondence, vol. I, 3–4. On Boyle’s decision against a clerical vocation, see Shapin, Social History of Truth, 168–71. Correspondence, vol. I, 214; Cranston, Locke, 74–5.

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vital force that controls the working of the body; residing in the stomach, it caused diseases if irritated or thwarted.27 On this account, Locke’s penchant for study was not trivial; it was physiologically rooted. Locke and his friend were not talking about a persona to be lightly performed, an outward set of behaviours consciously adopted. Yet the two concepts – a talent or genius implying a particular vocation, and a persona – are not necessarily incompatible. A certain persona, or mask, might well be worn in order to announce one’s chosen vocation. In Locke’s case, however, nothing was yet settled.28 Locke managed to get a dispensation from Charles II allowing him to remain at Christ Church as a don without taking orders.29 Medicine was another option he was already exploring: his notebooks show extensive extracts from medical and chemical texts, made from the late 1650s. In November 1665, he had another chance to choose a vocation. At the intervention of Sir William Godolphin, Locke was made secretary to Sir Walter Vane, the leader of an English diplomatic mission to Cleves (or Cleve, in Locke’s usage) to meet the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederic William of Hohenzollern.30 Locke left Oxford on 13 November 1665. While in Cleves he wrote to Boyle, and also to Strachey. The third of five letters to Strachey is of interest. It opens thus: The old opinion that every man had his particular Genius, that ruled and directed his course of life, hath made me sometimes laugh, to thinke, what a pleasant thing it would be, if we could see little Sprites bestride men, (as plainely as I see here women bestride horses) ride them about, and spur them on in that way, which they ignorantly thinke they choose themselves . . . To what purpose this from Cleve? I’ll tell you; if there be any such thing (as I can not vouch the contrary) certainly mine is an Academick goblin.31

Locke reports, with some irony, that as soon as he was away from Oxford he found himself witnessing a philosophical disputation, either at a Franciscan or Capuchin monastery: ‘The truth is here hog-sheering is much in its glory, and our disputeing in Oxford comes as short of it, as 27

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Strachey to Locke, 18 November 1663, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 163. On van Helmont, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 53–4. In this context, ‘genius’ was a talent or predisposition, perhaps conveyed by a divine afflatus, not a ‘personality’ in the post-nineteenth-century sense of the term. See Yeo, ‘Genius, Method and Morality’. This was granted on 16 September 1666. It was arranged through the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury. The Hohenzollerns had acquired the duchy of Cleves in 1609. On this mission, see Correspondence, vol. I, 225–7; and Cranston, Locke, ch. 7. Locke to John Strachey, early January 1666, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 182.

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the Rhetorick of Carfax does that of Belings gate. But it behoves the Moncks to cherish this art of wrangeling in its declineing age.’32 Although Locke’s ‘Academick goblin’ was active, the prospect of traditional university philosophy, either in Oxford or Brandenburg, quite simply appalled him. Upon his return from Cleves in February 1666, Godolphin offered Locke another diplomatic post with the ambassador to Spain, Edward Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich. Writing to Strachey from London, he acknowledges that this was a crossroad moment, saying that ‘if I imbrace it I shall conclude this my wandering yeare’.33 Six days later he wrote again, reporting that: ‘those faire offers I had to goe to Spaine have not prevaild with me, whether fate or fondnesse kept me at home I know not or whether I have not let slip the minute that they say everyone has once in his life to make himself I cannot tell’.34 Within a year, however, one of those minutes arrived again. In July 1666, Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper (created first Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672), the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1661, and future Lord Chancellor.35 The (then) Lord Ashley was visiting his son in Oxford, and Locke arranged for some medicinal water from Astrop to be brought to him. By April 1667, Locke had left Oxford to join Ashley’s household in Exeter House, The Strand, London.36 He lived there for the next eight years. Locke therefore joined the ranks of early modern thinkers, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz, who pursued philosophy outside the universities.37 LOCKE IN THE

1670 S :

SEARCHING FOR POLITE PHILOSOPHY

The Essay was begun in 1671 while Locke was a member of Shaftesbury’s household, chiefly acting as his secretary. In the ‘Epistle to the Reader’, he 32

33 34 35 36

37

Ibid. Both H. R. Fox Bourne and de Beer note that Locke says ‘monks’ when he means friars, and Carthusian when he probably means Capuchin. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (2 vols., London: H. S. King, 1876), vol. I, 109; Correspondence, vol. I, 246, n. 2 and 255. Locke to Strachey, 22 February 1666, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 186. Locke to Strachey, 28 February 1666, in ibid., no. 187. K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), ch. 11. Their relationship was strengthened when Locke correctly diagnosed Ashley’s long-term illness as due to a cyst on the liver and, on 12 June 1668, supervised (but did not perform) a risky operation that saved his patron’s life. See Locke to de Briolay de Beaupreau, 20 January 1671, in Correspondence, vol. I, no. 250 for an account of the post-operative treatment. Locke did not take the Bachelor of Medicine degree at Oxford until February 1675. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, intro. by A. I. Donaldson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 270–1. Hadot does not mention Hobbes or Locke.

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says that the occasion for this work was conversation among ‘five or six Friends meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that arose on every side’. Locke recalls that he then suggested they ‘examine our own Abilities, and see what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with’. He brought some ‘some hasty and undigested thoughts’ to the next meeting.38 One friend, James Tyrrell, later made a marginal note next to the relevant passage in the ‘Epistle’ in his copy of the Essay: ‘This was in winter 1673 as I remember being myself one of those that met there when the discourse began about the Principles of morality, and revealed Religion.’39 Tyrrell’s recollection of the date must be mistaken if the date given in Draft A is correct, but the subjects are certainly of the kind likely to have brought the ‘Difficulties’ mentioned. Of course, Locke did think that such caution applied only to moral and religious subjects. In the Essay he reports on his presence ‘in a Meeting of very learned and ingenious Physicians’ at which he suggested that they consider ‘what the Word Liquor signified’.40 This was an instance of a more general desideratum – to avoid the ‘unintelligible Terms’ that rendered ‘Philosophy . . . unfit, or uncapable, to be brought into well-bred Company, and polite Conversation’.41 On this basis, the Essay can be placed in the context and conventions of polite company – as Locke effectively does in his ‘Epistle’. However, I want to consider the way in which Locke defined his intellectual attitudes and methods against impolite philosophy. I suggest that some of the crucial developments occurred in the years after the first draft of his work. On 14 November 1675 Locke left England for France; he did not return until April 1679. Just prior to his departure he began to keep a journal. A journal entry for Saturday 2 July 1678 lists two manuscripts in an inventory of possessions he left with Madame Herinx in Paris – given as ‘Essay de Intellectu’ and ‘Essay de Morale’. The first of these was a draft of 38

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Locke, Essay, 7. The earliest surviving draft (Draft A) of the Essay is entered in a folio-size commonplace book under the marginal heading ‘Intellectus’; the ‘title’ at the top of the page reads: ‘Sic Cogitavit de Intellectu humano Jo.Locke an[no] 1671’. See ‘Adversaria 1661’, 56–89, 94–5. This manuscript is in private ownership; microfilm copies are held in the Bodleian and the Houghton Library, Harvard (MS Eng860.1). Draft A cannot be the first rough notes Locke describes in his ‘Epistle’; but it is one of the stages of composition of a work ‘continued by Intreaty; written by incoherent parcels’ (Essay, 7). See John Locke, Essay (London: Eliz. Holt for Thomas Bassett, 1690), marginalia in ‘Epistle to the Reader’, at 2. This copy is in the British Library, Shelfmark C. 122. f 14. Locke, Essay, III.ix.16. More generally, see J. R. Milton, ‘Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001), 221–43. Locke, Essay, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, 10.

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the Essay.42 The second item, completed after 1676, was his translation of three essays from Pierre Nicole’s Essais de morale (1671–9).43 When he returned to England, Locke dedicated these to the Countess of Shaftesbury, acknowledging his boldness in attempting a translation when he ‘had but begun to learne French’.44 He played on the conceit that the Countess was ‘constantly humble in a high station’, thus personifying the moral tone of Nicole’s writing.45 However we interpret these remarks, the importance of Nicole’s views on the limits of human intellectual capacities for Locke should not be underestimated.46 Once the context of these moral concerns about why, and how, individuals should pursue knowledge are recognised, we can understand Locke’s caution about the office of philosopher. Pierre Nicole’s essays represent Locke’s exposure to Jansenism. With Blaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld, Nicole thought within a Cartesian framework, but departed radically from Descartes’s confidence in our ability to make our minds transparent to ourselves, and hence clear instruments for seeking truth.47 For Nicole, there was a deep-seated weakness in the heart and will, and a natural inclination to pride that always worked against true knowledge. This sensibility is palpable in the 42

43

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47

Journal for 1678, MS Locke, f. 3, 183–4. This ‘Essay de Intellectu’ was not the manuscript now known as Draft A; this was entered in ‘Adversaria 1661’ (see footnote 38), which remained in England. See J. R. Milton, ‘The Dating of “Adversaria 1661”’, Locke Newsletter 29 (1998), 105–17 at 114. Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale, contenus en divers traittez sur plusiers devoirs importans (4 vols., Paris, 1672–8). See John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), no. 2040a for the earliest (1671) of several editions he owned. There are references to this translation in Locke’s journal for August 1676 (MS Locke f. 1, 402–6), which may comprise a draft of its preface. W. von Leyden surmised that if the translation was near completion in August, then Locke may have begun it early in 1676. See von Leyden, Laws of Nature, 253. The original manuscript (M.A. 232) is held in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; a microfilm is in the Bodleian (film 70). ‘To the Right Honorable Margaret Countesse of Shaftesbury’, cited in Fox Bourne, Locke, vol. I, 296–7. Fox Bourne supposed that Locke had done the translation mainly to improve his French, but also admitted that he engaged with the text, and that the second essay was ‘more in harmony with Locke’s general line of thought’ (294–305, at 300). One of the two English editions of Locke’s translation suggested that it might have been part of larger project, a translation of ‘the Port Royale Essays’. See Discourses . . . Being some of the Essays written in French by Messieurs du Port Royal. Render’d into English by the late John Lock, Gent. (London: J. Downing, 1712), ‘Advertisement’. I hope here to add to what has been noted as neglect of Locke’s translation and its clues to his thinking in the mid-1670s. See John Marshall, John Locke. Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), vxii; and 178–94, on the importance of the third of Nicole’s essays (‘the way of preserving peace with men’) for Locke’s ethical thought. See also Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; rev. edn, 1998), 282–4, 287–8, for reference to Nicole in the context of Locke’s educational views. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 356–7.

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second of the three essays translated by Locke – ‘Traite´ de la faiblesse de l’homme’ (‘Discourse on the Weakness of Man’).48 Here Nicole (in Locke’s translation) refers to Descartes, although not by name, as ‘a litle fellow in a corner of the world’, and says ‘that this new Philosopher gives us more light, into naturall things, then all the others together’.49 However, Nicole uses this point not to celebrate Descartes’s achievements but rather to indicate that ‘three thousand years’ of so-called knowledge can be challenged, and perhaps debunked, overnight. The vanity of human intellectual pretensions is thus exposed, and Nicole alleges ‘that philosophy is a vain amusement, and that men know almost noething’.50 Behind this pessimism was the conviction that passion controls reason: ‘We flote in the Ocean of this world, under the conduct of our passions, with which we drive, some times this way, sometimes that way, as a vessell, without compasse, without pilot.’51 If we ask how the philosopher can rise above these human frailties, Nicole’s final words are not encouraging: men must acknowledge that there is ‘noe thing but darknesse in their understandings; weaknesse, and inconstancy in their wills; and that their life is but a shadow, that passes, a vapor that flies away’.52 As we know, Locke took a different, far less pessimistic, stance in the Essay, maintaining that we have a duty to seek knowledge, and a fair chance of achieving it, providing that our aims match our limited capacities. It is possible that Locke regarded Nicole’s outlook as one that he had to confront and reject. During the period in which he worked on the translation, his journals contain material bearing not only on the eventual

48

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51 52

See E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist. A Study of his Thought (The Hague: Nijhof, 1973). More generally, see Gabriel Bonno, Les relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955). For Nicole’s Augustinian starting point, and his debt to Hobbes, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 508–10, 517. Discourses: Translated from Nicole’s Essays, by John Locke, with important variations from the original French. Now first printed from the autograph of the translator, in the possession of Thomas Hancock (London: Harvey and Darton, 1828). I use the recent edition of this translation in Jean Yolton (ed.), John Locke as Translator: Three of the essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), para. 33, 56–8. Hereafter I cite this as Nicole, Discourses. Nicole, Discourses, para. 33. In the original French, the description of Descartes is simply ‘un homme’; Locke adds the word ‘litle’ [sic], although this apparent denigration is at odds with reports that Descartes gave him ‘a relish for Philosophical studys’. See Masham to Le Clerc, 12 January 1704, 173 (see note 8 above); also Charlotte S. Ware, ‘The Influence of Descartes on John Locke. A Bibliographical Study’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1950), 210–30. Nicole, Discourses, para. 48. Ibid., para. 67. Of course, negative assessments of human intellectual achievement were not new to Locke: for example, he owned H. C. Agrippa’s The Vanity of the Sciences (Latin edition of 1568); Harrison and Laslett, Library of John Locke, no. 39.

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content of the Essay, but also on the way Locke thought about the pursuit of knowledge as a moral duty. The entry of 15 August 1676 summarises his concerns. Locke says that Nicole’s account of ‘the shortness of our lives and the weakness of our understandings’ gives us ‘reason enough to desire all needless difficulties should be removed out of the way’.53 In fact, Locke is talking about reform of spelling as a way of improving communication; but he relates even this issue to Nicole’s stress on fundamental human weakness. Other responses to this theme occur in various entries of 1677, on topics such as ‘Understanding’, ‘End of Knowledge’, ‘Knowledge’, and ‘Error’.54 One long entry under the heading ‘Of Study’, written between 26 March and May 1677, is pertinent.55 In what amounts to a short essay, Locke decides that there are assumptions and practices that must be challenged if improvement in the use of reason is to be achieved. ‘Of Study’ betrays three preoccupations: first, to dismiss unreachable goals, such as that of polymathic, or encyclopaedic, knowledge; second, to condemn formal disputations as part of university education; and third, to criticise certain features of the humanist tradition of commonplaces. Locke does not concern himself here with erroneous doctrine, but rather with intellectual demeanour. His three examples of impolite philosophy are cases of ‘men behaving badly’ – to borrow the title of the BBC TV comedy series! These cases are polymathic hubris, wrangling and commonplacing. The salient theme is that the weaknesses diagnosed all fall short of the high expectations that should attach to the pursuit of knowledge: It is a duty we owe to God as the fountain and author of all truth, who is truth itself, and ’tis a duty also we owe our own selves if we will deal candidly and sincerely with our own souls, to have our minds constantly disposed to entertain

53

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55

MS Locke, f. 1, 404–5. This passage is in a shorthand entry of 15 August 1676 under the head of ‘Speling’ (402–6). For the transcription, see von Leyden, Laws of Nature, 256–7; also cited in Marshall, John Locke, 134. Another journal entry for 29 July 1676 (f. 1, 367–70), under the heading ‘Essay Morall’, concerns Nicole’s proof of the existence of God, as treated in the first of the essays Locke translated. See reprint in Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke. Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 245–6 (under ‘Atheism’). MS Locke, f. 2, 42–54. Some of these entries of 1677 are reprinted, not always with accuracy, in Peter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke: With Extracts from his Journals and Common-Place Books (London: Bell, 1884), 86–110. For more reliable reprints of some of these entries, see R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds.), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, Together with Excerpts from his Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 77–125; and Goldie, Locke, 260–5. MS Locke, f. 2, 85–140. On this, see Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s “Of Study” (1677): Interpreting an Unpublished Essay’, Locke Studies 3 (2003), 147–66.

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and receive truth wheresoever we meet with it, or under whatsoever appearance of plain or ordinary, strange, new, or perhaps displeasing, it may come in our way.56

In reality, as Locke explains, most individuals grow up with ‘opinions planted in him by education time out of mind’. Although such views are often merely ‘oracles of the nursery’, they come to be ingrained in ‘the very constitution of the mind’. He believes that education and study should equip a person to assess such opinions, especially those that divide the world into ‘bands and companies’, as in ‘matters of religion’.57 The three instances of impolite learning fail to do this. Firstly, the ambition of encyclopaedic, or universal, knowledge entertained by Renaissance polyhistors (Locke may have been thinking of Isaac Casaubon, or his son Meric) succumbs to hubris. Against this, he declares that ‘the extent of knowledge of things knowable is so vast, our duration here so short, and the entrance by which the knowledge of things gets into our understanding so narrow, that the time of our whole life would be found too short’ to attain such a goal.58 The second and third targets overlap. ‘Bookish men’, says Locke, read certain books and authors very intently, lodging ‘arguments pro and con’ in their memories to serve them on various occasions. But this makes a man a good talker not a good thinker: ‘it teaches a man to be a fencer; but in the irreconcilable war between truth and falsehood, it seldom or never enables him to choose the right side, or to defend it well being got of it’.59 Locke is referring to the Latin disputations that were central to the curriculum of the universities. Topics for disputation – on questions of moral or natural philosophy – were presented in the lectures and coached by the tutors. Students rehearsed both sides of these questions in their colleges before performing on special public occasions throughout the academic year.60 The negative comments in Locke’s journals support the

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Locke, ‘Of Study’, in James L. Axtell (ed.), The Educational Writings of John Locke. A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 405–22, at 415. Ibid. Ibid., 407. See also MS Locke, f. 2, 42–54 for journal, 8 February 1677, under the heading ‘Understanding’: ‘Our minds are not made as large as truth nor suited to the whole extent of things.’ See reprint in Goldie, Locke, 260. Compare Locke, Essay, IV.iii.6: ‘the extent of our Knowledge comes not only short of the reality of Things, but even of the extent of our own Ideas’. Locke, ‘Of Study’, 418. This passage resurfaces in John Locke, Of the Conduct of the understanding, in Works, vol. III, 205–89 at 236. See also Essay, IV.xvii.6 for the fencing metaphor. William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 14–31, 52–8.

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recollections of his friends, Masham and Le Clerc, about his aversion towards ‘the Public Disputations’ at Oxford.61 The third target is implicated here: Locke indicts the way in which superficial glossing and commonplacing of authors produces ‘a stock of borrowed and collected arguments’. Of course, Locke himself kept commonplace books – a habit recommended by humanists such as Erasmus – but here he objects to the lazy use of this method in which students memorised arguments they had not properly analysed, and so did not come to trust their own judgments.62 In this way, individuals fail to attain ‘a true and clear notion of things as they are in themselves’. Locke believed that there was complicity between improper use of commonplacing and scholastic wrangling. Armed with a toolbag of quotations, students produced these in the disputations as arguments for and against the standard questions. This kind of education produced the worst possible result – ‘the topical man, with his great stock of borrowed arguments’, constantly in danger of contradicting himself.63 In his journal, Locke does not attack specific doctrines (such as innate ideas), but rather loose intellectual behaviour which (and here he agrees with Nicole) is also bad moral behaviour.64 However, against Nicole’s pessimism, Locke came to assert that there could be improvement in our knowledge, in this earthly state; and, furthermore, that all people were duty bound to use the God-given capacity of reason to the best of their abilities. No man could attain universal knowledge; nor did the collective knowledge of humanity transfer in any simple fashion to particular individuals. Each person must seek out his or her own knowledge of the world, as well as of good conduct within it. Assistance might be sought from the teachings of great authors and philosophers, but doctrines and 61

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Jean Le Clerc, An account of the life and writings of Mr. John Locke (2nd edn, London: John Clarke, 1713), 4–5. See also Coste, ‘The character of Mr. Locke’, 170. For relevant published comments, John Locke, Some thoughts concerning education (London: A. and J. Churchil, 1693), ed. John and Jean Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), sections 97, 189 for the contrast between ‘Disputing’ and polite conversation. When in Leiden, Locke took a more benign view of the disputations in the medical faculty, as he noted in his journal for 31 October 1684 (MS Locke, f. 8, p. 207): ‘And those I saw dispute that they may not mistake had their arguments writt downe. I suppose their studys tend most to practice for in disputeing noe one that I heard urged any argument beyond one or 2 syllogisms.’ See Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s “New Method” of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004), 1–38. Locke, ‘Of Study’, 418–19. See the antithesis in Locke, Conduct, in Works, vol. III, 241: ‘it is thinking makes what we read ours’. For his first published attack on innate ideas, see ‘Extrait d’un livre Anglois’, Bibliotheque universelle 8 (1688), 49–142. This French abstract was the first appearance of the Essay, but the attack on innate ideas (i.e. Book I) was condensed to the first two pages.

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theories should not be received passively as opinions, on authority. This was not justified assent. I think the position Locke worked through in these journal entries – arguably in response to Nicole – informed his reflections on the limits and scope of understanding. What does Locke do with these points in the Essay and in Of the Conduct of the Understanding? Does he use them as the basis for a statement about the office of the philosopher – one which he might assume? A PUBLIC

‘ P E R S O N A ’?

If by publishing the Essay Locke entered the public sphere as a philosopher for the first time, the work itself shows him to be reluctant to accept this office. At the end of the chapter ‘Of Power’ he makes this restrained comment: And thus I have, in a short draught, given a view of our original Ideas, from whence all the rest are derived, and of which they are made up; which if I would consider, as a Philosopher, and examine on what Causes they depend, and of what they are made, I believe they all might be reduced to these very few primary, and original ones.65

The use of the conditional here suggests something less than eager adoption of an office, although it does indicate that the ‘way of ideas’ is what a philosopher might offer.66 Yet one of the seven uses of the word ‘philosopher’ (singular) in the Essay refers to ‘the inspired Philosopher St. Paul ’.67 Most of the references in the Essay to ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosopher(s)’ are occasions for attacks on scholastics (usually unnamed), and some moderns, such as Descartes. As far as I can tell, Locke does not contrast philosophers with scholars, lawyers or historians. More often, philosophers come off badly in comparison with other, less learned, occupations. In the chapter on ‘Our Ideas of Substances’, he declares: ‘I appeal to every one’s own Experience.’Tis the ordinary Qualities, observable in Iron, or a Diamond, put together, that make the true complex Idea of those Substances, which a Smith, or a Jeweller, commonly knows better than a Philosopher’ (Essay, II.xxiii.3). One of the main grounds of such denigration 65 66

67

Locke, Essay, II.xxi.73. The ‘way of ideas’ was coined as a derogatory epithet by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester. See Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’, 261–2. Locke, Essay, II.xiii.26. See also Victor Nuovo (ed.), John Locke. Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), xv–lvii.

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is that scholastic philosophers deal in names rather than things. Gardeners, artisans and other craftsmen also use specialist terminology, but Locke implies that they are able to explain what these words signify.68 If the demeanour and errors of impolite philosophy are discernible, what is the constructive role of the new philosopher? Two obvious possibilities – already foreshadowed in Locke’s earlier complaints – are the tasks of monitoring the language of learning, and that of guiding the use of reason. On the former, Locke is quite forthright: ‘Language, which was given us for the improvement of Knowledge, and bond of Society, should not be employ’d to darken Truth, and unsettle Peoples Rights; to raise Mists, and render unintelligible both Morality and Religion’ (III.x.13). The doctrines of the scholastics, he protests, are guarded by ‘Legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefined Words. Which yet make these Retreats, more like the Dens of Robbers, or Holes of Foxes, than the Fortresses of fair Warriours’ (III.x.9). This attack is not surprising given the targets Locke identified in the 1670s. His prime example of impolite learning is ‘Bookish Men’ wrangling and speaking only in the terms of their sect or school (II.xiii.27). This might not matter if the disease remained in the closet, but Locke argues that it has spread and threatens to corrupt polite conversation: ‘Nor hath this mischief stopped in logical Niceties, or empty curious Speculations; it hath invaded the great Concernments of Humane Life and Society’ (III.x.12). It is striking that when he comes to describe pain and pleasure, this kind of impoliteness features in his operational definition: ‘The pain of tender Eyes, and the pleasure of Musick; Pain from captious uninstructive wrangling, and the pleasure of rational conversation with a Friend, or of well directed study in the search and discovery of Truth’ (II.xx.18). On this topic, Locke does accept, at least by implication, the office of the philosopher as a mediator between civil and philosophical language (Essay, III.ix.3). On the second topic – the use of reason – Locke again castigates the schoolmen. Although these philosophers claimed to teach methods of reasoning, they offered nothing useful. He ridicules their recitation of Aristotelian rules of argument: ‘But God has not been so sparing to Men to make them barely two-legged Creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them Rational’ (IV.xvii.4). His most explicit advice occurs in the Conduct (begun in 1697), which at one point he intended to include as a chapter of 68

Note this contrast: ‘the admired art of Disputing’ has confused ‘the signification of Words’; whereas in ‘ordinary Conversation’ this is less likely to be so (Essay, III.x.6). On the ease with which Locke talked ‘with all sorts of men’, see Coste, ‘The character of Mr. Locke’, 165.

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the Essay.69 Here Locke champions ‘native rustick Reason’ against syllogistic reasoning. He distinguishes between two kinds of error: those stemming from false premises, alleged facts and obscure confused ideas; and those deriving from poor reasoning. The former constitute the greatest potential source of error, but Locke is more optimistic on the second count, believing that native reasoning would not usually lead us astray if the starting principles were solid: ‘The faculty of reasoning seldom or never deceives those who trust it.’70 There were of course pitfalls here too, and Locke offers some practical hints. Some of his admirers saw these observations as tantamount to a new method, replacing the scholastic obsession with syllogistic reasoning.71 Yet, unlike Bacon and Descartes, Locke prescribes no formulaic rules of method, urging instead each person ‘to seek in their own Thoughts, for those right Helps of Art, which will scarce be found, I fear, by those who servilely confine themselves to the Rules and Dictates of others’.72 It is feasible to interpret Locke’s position on the use of both language and reason as part of a notion of polite philosophy, liberated from the obfuscation and arrogance of the ‘Schools’. Indeed, his famous casting of himself as an ‘under-labourer’ has often been read in this light. As Locke explains it, this task consists in clearing ‘the Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’.73 One sort of rubbish was the accumulated jargon and terminology generated by inquiries that did not produce new knowledge. In this sense, Locke’s job description for the new philosopher might be regarded as a subordinate one, serving the new scientific enterprise and, as Conal Condren suggests, displaying ‘the humility of knowing an office and its limits’.74 The four names Locke mentions as ‘Master-Builders’ include two stellar natural philosophers (Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens), a chemist or natural historian (Robert Boyle), and a reforming empirical physician (Thomas Sydenham). Indeed, Locke’s position has been equated with the moderate 69 70 71

72 73 74

See MS Locke, e. 1 (drafts of additions to the Essay), 62. Locke, Conduct, 209. James G. Buickerood, ‘The Natural History of the Understanding: Locke and the Rise of Facultative Logic in the Eighteenth Century’, History and Philosophy of Logic 6 (1985), 157–90. John Boswell, A method of study: or, an useful library (2 vols., London: printed for the author, 1738, 1743), vol. I, 8–9, challenged Locke to provide an alternative, non-scholastic, form of logical training. Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.7 and Conduct, 207. Locke, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Essay, 10. See Conal Condren’s chapter in this volume. See also John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 48–51.

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ambitions of the Royal Society – compared with the aspirations of both scholastics and Cartesians to ground all inquiries, including science, on metaphysical first principles. However, in another sense, Locke’s notion of this ‘under-labourer’ is more audacious than it seems. For example, it can be distinguished from the apparently similar formulations about the mode of scientific progress put about by Royal Society members, such as Thomas Sprat and Joseph Glanvill. Their focus was on the need to gather empirical observations in the early stages of a grand scheme, even before clear patterns had emerged. In anticipating criticism of this approach, Bacon had explained that he could not be expected to do this empirical work any more than an Architect could be asked to ‘be a Work-man, and a Labourer; and to dig the Clay, and burn the Brick’.75 When Glanvill took up this theme, he stressed that humble fact-gathering was necessary now: this was ‘what one Age can do in so immense an Undertaking as that, wherein all the generations of Men are concerned, can be little more than to remove the Rubbish, lay in Materials, and put things in order for the Building’.76 In another variation, Boyle said that he was willing to ‘not only be an Underbuilder, but ev’n dig in the Quarries for Materials towards so useful a Structure, as a solid body of Natural Philosophy, than not do something towards the Erection of it’.77 I suggest that Locke’s ‘under-labourer’ is cast in a bolder role: it is not the task of piecemeal empirical gathering but rather that of radical conceptual scrutiny, the inspection and authorisation of terminology, and ruling on what natural history and natural philosophy (as contrasted with scientia) can hope to achieve. One of the features of the Essay is the discrimination between different kinds of knowledge – between mathematics, philosophy, natural science, theology, history, and ‘common-sense acquaintanceship with the world around us’.78 From this perspective, we might say that Locke’s profession of humility disguises quite strong claims about the office of the ‘modern’ philosopher.

75

76

77

78

Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum: or, a natural history, in ten centuries. Published by William Rawley (8th edn, London: J. F. and S. G. William Lee, 1664), ‘To the Reader’ (by the editor, Rawley), no pagination. Joseph Glanvill, Plus ultra: or, the progress and advancement of knowledge since the days of Aristotle (London: James Collins, 1668), 91. Robert Boyle, Certain physiological essays and other tracts (2nd edn, London: Henry Herringman, 1669), 18. Gilbert Ryle, ‘John Locke on the Human Understanding’, in John Locke. Tercentenary Addresses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 15–38 at 38. See Locke, Essay, IV.xi.10 on degrees of assent.

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At least one well-placed commentator regarded Locke’s conception of philosophy as anything but humble or polite. This rebuke came from close quarters, namely from the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson of Locke’s patron, and also Locke’s pupil. Shaftesbury promoted the view that polite philosophy, freed of technical language and bookish pedantry, should be a fit subject for conversation among social elites.79 But in letters to his former tutor, in 1689 and 1694, Shaftesbury wrote that: Itt is not with mee as with an Empirick, one that is studdying Curiositys, raising of new Inventions that are to gain credit to the author, starting of new Notions that are to amuse the World . . . Itt is not in my case as with one of the men of new Systems, who are to build the credit of their own invented ones upon the ruine of the Ancienter and the discredit of those Learned Men that went before. Descartes, or Mr Hobbs, or any of their Improvers have the same reason to make adoe, and bee Jealouse about their notions, and Discovery’s, as they call them . . . I am so far from thinking that mankind need any new Discoverys . . . What I count True Learning, and all that wee can profitt by, is to know our selves.80

Lawrence Klein interprets Shaftesbury as attempting to establish ‘a philosophic identity distinct from Locke’.81 For Shaftesbury, Locke represented the scientific and Epicurean project, embarked on by the Royal Society, aiming at the control of nature. He demarcated this from his own quest, which was the Stoic study of ethics, conduct and the self – in short, the pursuit of wisdom, not science. Another key part of this letter (not quoted by Klein) argues that philosophy lost its true purpose after Socrates, when it became possible to believe, as Shaftesbury writes, that to Profess Philosophy, was not to Profess a Life; and that it might bee said of one, that Hee was a great Man in Philosophy; whilst nobody thought it to the purpose to ask how did Hee Live? what Instances of his Fortitude, Contempt of Interest, Patience, etc? – What is Philosophy, then, if nothing of this is in the case?82

79 80

81

82

His views were brought together in Characteristicks. . . (3 vols., London, 1711). See note 16 above. Shaftesbury to Locke, 29 September 1694, in Correspondence, vol. V, no. 1794. De Beer retains the original spelling. The earlier letter is August 1689, in Correspondence, vol. III, no. 1169. For a direct attack on Locke, see Shaftesbury to ___?, in Rex A. Barrell (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le refuge Franc¸ais’ - correspondence (Queenstown, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 239–45. Barrell suggests Pierre Coste was the recipient. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–8. See also Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. ch. 4. Shaftesbury to Locke, in Correspondence, vol. V, no. 1794 (italics in original). But compare Locke, Essay, I.i.6.

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Shaftesbury was not satisfied by Locke’s account of the key issues of morals and conduct of life; he judged the positive side of his tutor’s philosophy as too narrowly weighted towards the empirical sciences. Another early critic found the Essay alarming on issues where philosophy touched on matters of faith. The Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, drew Locke into an exchange that lasted eighteen months, trading argument and rebuttal on subjects including the concepts of substance, ideas, personhood, immaterialism and the doctrine of the Trinity. In Stillingfleet’s opinion, the insistence on the limits of understanding – the posture of the ‘under-labourer’ – looked like scepticism: for example, when Locke warned that on orthodox definitions of substance and person, the ‘doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation are past recovery gone’.83 CONCLUSION

Locke’s vocation as a philosopher was one that emerged gradually, after the 1670s. He acknowledged a passion for study soon after graduation at Oxford; but he could not at first find his vocation in philosophy because the models available were unacceptable to him. He was clearer about what a philosopher should not be. I have argued that these evaluations were influenced by his preoccupation in the mid-1670s with the manifestations of impolite study, learning and philosophy. In his journal (and later in his published works), Locke criticised wrangling and cavilling scholastics, polymathic scholars with unrealistic encyclopaedic ambitions, and pedantic university graduates tossing around names and quotations they did not properly understand. For Locke, the scholastic philosopher was the most odious of these types. The intellectual training of ‘the Schools’ produced the worst example of ‘ill-breeding’ – something Masham named as most likely to incite anger in her friend. Such behaviour was exhibited by individuals who spoke only the jargon of their sect and engaged in meaningless verbal debate and ill-directed logical sophistry. This rendered them unfit for polite conversation that might feasibly include nobles and gentlemen, refined ladies, and even humble gardeners and artisans. In other words, this training was inimical to the kind of wide-ranging and tolerant conversation among a small group of friends, in which the questions of the Essay were initially posed and clarified. 83

Locke, Works, vol. IV. 338, cited by M. A. Stewart, ‘Stillingfleet and the Way of ideas’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 245–80, at 280. Locke’s petulant tone in the four long letters suggests the limits to his politeness in philosophical controversy. I cannot take up this theme here.

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In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke mentions four things that a person should strive to attain: virtue, wisdom, breeding and learning: ‘You will wonder, perhaps, that I put Learning last, especially if I tell you I think it the least part. This may seem strange in the mouth of a bookish Man.’ He then explains that that learning does not produce ‘well dispos’d Minds’, although it adds greatly to those already possessing the other qualities.84 In the case of scholars and philosophers, this was a warning that knowledge did not automatically bestow virtue on the individual. At least one implication was that the persona of the modern philosopher could not be that of the sage from whom others might passively imbibe doctrines, opinions, or methods of reasoning. On a severe reading, we might say that, for Locke, each person must be his or her own philosopher, in ‘this State of Mediocrity’: For, I think, we may as rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings . . . The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true . . . And if the taking up of another’s Principles, without examining them, made not him a Philosopher, I suppose it will hardly make any body else so. In the Sciences, every one has so much, as he really knows and comprehends: What he believes only, and takes upon trust, are but shreads; which however well in the whole piece, make no considerable addition to his stock, who gathers them. Such borrowed Wealth, like Fairy-money, though it were Gold in the hand from which he received it, will be but Leaves and Dust when it comes to use.85

If Locke was reluctant to proclaim himself unreservedly as a philosopher, others soon spoke for him. In a letter of 9 October 1703, an Anglican clergyman, Richard King, told Locke that ‘the experience of many years and the knowledge of men and things have made you the perfect Socrates of the Age’.86 Notwithstanding what I have said about Locke’s own struggle for a vocation, and his heavily qualified remarks about what a philosopher could offer, his acolytes soon made him the quintessential English sage who had no need of a mask.87

84 85 86 87

Locke, Some thoughts, section 147; also 134. Locke, Essay, I.iv.23. Richard King to Locke, 9 October 1703, in Correspondence, vol. VIII, no. 3346. I thank Daniel Carey, John R. Milton, and Victor Nuovo for their very helpful suggestions. The research for this chapter was made possible by an Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council. I am grateful to the Keeper of Modern Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford, for access to the Lovelace Collection.

Index

academic philosophy, 52, 53, 54–6; Calvinist, 50–6; English, 114–16; European, 227; German, 64, 88, 161, 173; Jesuit, 43–50; Lutheran, 56–64; see also universities active/contemplative life, as philosophical ideal, 10–11, 14, 69–72, 75, 80–2, 161, 202, 212–13, 220–1; and Christianity, 14, 92–3, 204–5, 213, 216–19, 244; and natural philosophy, 24–5, 221, 250; see also counsel; public/private actor, persona/office of, 68–9, 182–3 Adam, Charles, 189, 191 Addison, Joseph, 257 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, von Nettesheim, 209–10 alchemy/magic, 76, 208–10, 222 allegory, 236, 250–1 Allen, Michael, 208 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 51–6, 129–30; archelogia, 52–5; Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 54–5 Althusius, Johannes, 15, 82, 120, 122, 128–30, 160–81; Christian philosophy of, 173; life of, 176–7; as teacher, 181; Works: Civilis conversatione…, 171; Dicaeologicae, 174, 178–80, term persona in, 178, 179–80; Oratio at Herborn University, 173; Politica, 161–2, 166–9, 171–3, counsel in, 177–8, passions in, 174–6, structure of, 173–8, supreme magistrate in, 174–6 Andreae, Jacob, 60 Aquinas, St Thomas, 80, 200, 205–8, 237, 242–3; and rationality, 194–6; and virtue, 194–6, 207–8, 215; theology of, 210–11, 213–15; and wise man, 205–8; Summa Theologiae, 196 argument, as dialogue, 18–21; as dispute resolution, 17–24; ad hominem, 12, 25–6, 84, 256; in utramque partem, 97–8, 107, 108

Arias, Benito, 171 Aristotle, 1, 5, 9, 17, 19, 20–1, 25, 27, 75, 80, 195; as critic, 79; and enquiry, 22–4; and ethics, 203–4, 228; and explanation, 21; as foundation of all philosophy, 37–41; Hobbes attack on, 125–6; Locke’s rejection of, 270; and science, 206–8, 210–11; syllogistic of, 19, 22–4, 37–41; Victorinus’ translation of, 167; and women, 229; and virtue, 202–4, 211–12, 215–16; Works: De Anima, 38; Metaphysics, 69; Poetics, 74; Politics, 162–3, Rhetoric, 9 Arnisaeus, Henning, 61, 164, 165–8 Aubrey, John, 83–4, 137, 235 Augsburg, Treaty of, 56, 165 Augustine, St, of Hippo, 191, 204–5, 218 Bacon, Sir Francis, 14, 72, 80, 114, 202, 256, 272; and charity, 203; good, in, 26–7; mind, in 27–9; and morality of knowledge, 226–7; and philosophic persona, 12, 210, 219–28, 223, 224; and reason, 26; and reform of philosophy, 24–9, 42, 81–2, 85–6; and science, 219–24; Works: Advancement of Learning, 26–8, 75–6, 221; Novum organum, 28–9; Redargutio philosophiarum, 25 beards, 10, 68, 84, 104 Beck, Lewis White, 63 Behnen, Michael, 172–3 Beza, Theodore, 171 Blum, Paul, 45, 48 Bodin, Jean, 120, 155, 158, 162, 164 Boethius, 236, 243–4, 250, 251 Bonaventure, St, 191 Boyle, Sir Robert, 33, 82, 85, 86–7, 257, 271, 272 Broad, Jacqueline, 14, 80 Bruni, Leonardo, 212 Burckhardt, Jacob, 81

276

Index Burton, Robert, 90, 111–12, 121; Anatomy of Melancholy, 84, 111–12, Democritus as persona in, 111–12 Butler, Samuel, 84 Caenegem, Raoul von, 151 Calvin, John, 215–19 Cambridge University, 113, 117 Casa, Giovanni della, 171 Case, John, 119, 120 Caselius, Johann, 59 Cato the Younger, 27 Cavendish family, Devonshire branch of, 259 Cavendish, Margaret, 1st Duchess of Newcastle, 11, 80, 234–7, 244–6, 251–3; and de Pizan, 230–2, 236–7; and fiction, 14, 249–50; reception and reputation of, 245–6, 247–50; and role of philosopher, 238–41; Works: The Blazing World, 236–9, 248, 250, 251; Observations on Experimental Philosophy, 238–40, 248; Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 240–1; Philosophical Letters, 241, 249; Worlds Olio, 240 Cavendish, William, 1st Duke of Newcastle, 231, 234 Charles II, of England, 141, 261 Charles V, of France, 237 Charleton, Walter, 6, 234–5, 246 church and state, 142–3, 146–7, 159, 164 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 77, 78, 80, 169–70, 177 Civil Wars – British, 112, 114 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of, 71–2 Clarke, Desmond, 189–90 Coleman, Janet, 180 Colet, John, 95, 97, 102 Collingbourne, William, 75 Collingwood, R. G., 3 conciliarism, 107 Condren, Conal, 13, 162, 271 confessionalism, 35–64, 162–5 consent, 169, 172, 178 Contzen, Adam, 162 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury Cossart, Gabriel, 127 Cottingham, John, 14, 68, 224 counsel, 10, 106–7, 162, 175, 181; office of, 176–7, 178 courts, see philosophy, institutional settings for Cranston, Maurice, 259 Crouzet, Denis, 154–5 Cumberland, Richard, 86 Curtis, Catherine, 13 Cynicism, 97–8, 103–5, 110

277 Daneau, Lambert, 120 Daniel, Samuel, 73 Dante Alighieri, 234 David, King of Israel, 175, 178 Dee, Dr John, 210 democracy, 166, 168, 175–6 Democritus, 90–1, 94–5, 99; Erasmus’s attitude to, 110–11 Descartes, Rene´, 14, 30–1, 42, 114, 193, 229, 232–3, 251; as epistemologist, 186–8; and God, 224–5; honneˆte homme, 31; imagination and ˙ life and education of, 192–6; memory, 189; persona of, 182–3, 224–6; as scientist, 188–92, 197–201; metaphysics of, 190–2, 199–201; and ‘res cogitans’, 190–1; tree metaphor of, 193–4; and ultimate truth, 191; Works: Dioptique, 189; Discours, 190, 197; Le Monde, 189; Les passions de l’aˆme, 189, 197–8; Meditationes, 187–8, 190, 191–2, 199; Praeambula, 201; Principia philosophiae, 193; Traite´ de l’homme, 189 Detienne, Marcel, 18 Diogenes, see Cynicism discipline, 171, 200 Donellus, Hugo, 178–9 Dorp, Martin, 93, 110 doxology, 11 Dreitzel, Horst, 161 Duns Scotus, 210 Dworkin, Ronald, 159 Eachard, John, 74 eclecticism, 2, 11, 61, 80 education/knowledge, 95–7, 120–1, 161, 244, 264–9; and philosophy, 13, 79, 185 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 170 Emden, 168, 176, 181 epistemology, 3, 5, 12, 16, 185–8 Erasmus, Desiderius, 90–3, 97, 103–6, 111, 176; censure of Pace, 102; In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium), 105–6, More as persona in, 105, 109, as Lucianic satire, 109–10, reception and defence of, 109–10 Eustachius, 192–3, 200 Evelyn, Mary, 245–6 Fall, the, 29, 130, 180 and human nature, 59, 112, 128, 147, 161 Fell, John, Dean of Christ Church, 260 Fell, Samuel, 128 Ficino, Marsilio, 77, 208–9, 212 Figliucci, Felice, 211 Florence, 212–13 Formula of Concord, 50, 56–9, 60, 61

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Index

Fox-Morcillo, Sebastian, 211 France, 152–6, 263 Freedman, Joseph, 5 freedom of speech, 90–1, 97, 105–6, 111–12 Friedeburg, Robert von, 15, 82, 156, 227 Galileo Galilei, 14, 31–2, 74 Gassendi, Pierre, 30, 127, 190 Gaukroger, Stephen, 12, 14, 219, 256 German Empire, 156, 165–6, 181 Gierke, Otto von, 161 Glanvill, Joseph, 227, 234–5, 249, 250, 272 Goclenius, Rudolph, the older, 59 God, 80, 144, 173, 188, 191, 203, 221, 237, 245; as Christ, 182; and faith vs. works, 214–15; as first cause, 195–6, 206, 210; as Holy Spirit, 194–6; imago Dei, 77–8, 96, 191, 208–10, 243; as judge, 140, 144, 170; as beyond philosophy, 59, and human reason, 199–201, 258, 266, 268; as Trinity, 184, 274; see also theology Godolphin, Sir William, 261–2 Goffman, Irving, 66 Grassi, Orizio, 31–2 Green, Karen, 14, 80 Greenblatt, Stephen, 66 Gregoire, Pierre, 120–1 Gregory the Great, St, 205 Haakonssen, Knud, 73, 179, 180 Hadot, Pierre, 68, 203 Hale, Sir Mathew, 14, 141, 142–51, 158; writings: ‘Diary’ of 1668, 143–6; 18 Rules, 143; Historia placitorum coronae, 149–50; treatise on prerogative, 151; see also judicial persona Hankins, James, 208 Harington, Sir John, 79 harmony, 166, 169, 172, 173–6, 180 Harrison, Peter, 10, 14–15, 71 Harvey, Sir William, 6 Heath, James, 135 Heckel, Martin, 156 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 4 Helmont, Jan Baptista van, 260–1 Helmstedt, University of, 58–61 Henry VIII of England, 90, 92, 93, 97, 102, 107 history of philosophy, 1–7, 73, 187, 229; feminist, 229–30; German 35–43, Jesuit, 35; Kantian, 35, 53, 228; as philosophical history 4–6, 35–6; revision of, 7–12, 15–16, and contestation, 8–9, 11–12; Thomist, 194–6 Hobbes, 3, 12, 79, 85, 87, 114, 117, 141, 234–5; heresy, accused of, 137; life of, 259; and

philosophy, 115, 124–6, 136; philosophical persona of, 82–4; and poetry, 84–5; religious politics of, 130–4; and universities, 13, 113–14, 122–30; Works: Behemoth, 134, 135–6; De cive, 123; De homine, 117; Dialogue between a philosopher and a student…, 137, 156–8; Elements of Law, 123; Leviathan, 13, 113, 118–19, 132, 134–6, 138; Six Lessons…, 132; Vita, 83 Hofmann, Daniel, 58–64 Hofmann, Hasso, 172 Hooke, Robert, 29–30, 85, 248 Hotman, Franc¸ois, 158 Hotson, Howard, 51 humanism, 24, 39–41, 90–2, 102, 106, 108, 120, 211; Erasmian, 93, 95 Hume, David, 3, 118, 257 Hunter, Ian, 6, 15, 67, 88, 173, 227 Huygens, Christian, 33, 271 Hythlodaeus, see More identity, see self Ignatius Loyola, 42 intellectual morality, 14, 20–1, 24–34 Isabeau de Bavie`re, Queen of France, 231 Isabelle of France, Queen Consort of Richard II of England, 246 Jansenism, 264–5 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus Jones, Katherine, nee Boyle, Lady Ranelagh, 245–6 Jonson, Ben, 76, 79 judicial persona, 13, 140–51, 151–5, 157–8; see also law Julius II, Pope, 102 Juvenal, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 5, 88 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 66 Keckermann, Bartholomew, 53, 120, 162 King, Richard, 275 Klein, Lawrence, 273 Kuhn, Thomas, 2–3 L’Hospital, Michel de, 153–6, 158 law, English common, 141–2; canon, 150–1; divine, 180; and jurisprudence, 6, 158–9; legal systems, 140–1, 146, 147, 152; natural, 160, 173; neutrality of, 140–51; and religion, 140–1, 147, blasphemy, 141, 148, heresy, 87, 100–1, 110, 140–51; Roman, 162; universal vs. particular, 157–8; see also judicial persona

Index Le Franc, Martin, 247 Leiden, University of, 135 Leo X, Pope, 102 Linacre, Thomas, 93 Lipsius, Justus, 119, 165, 174, 175, 177 Locke, John, 34, 86, 88; ‘academick goblin’ of, 261–2; Homer, knowledge of, 259; ‘polite and impolite philosophy’, 15, 258, 261–2, 266–9, 271–5; and language, 270–2; life and reputation of, 254–8, 260–2, 274–5; philosophic persona of, 254, 258, 269, as under-labourer, 15, 88, 271–4; reason, use of, 270–2; Works: Essay de Morale, 263–5; Essay of Human Understanding, 255, 257, 259, 262–4, 269–75; ‘Journal’, 263–9; Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 270–1; ‘Of Study’, 266–8; Thoughts concerning Education, 275 Lohr, Charles, 63 Louis XII, of France, 107 Lucian, 84, 93–4, 103–12; see also satire Lucy, William, 121 Lullism, 39–41, 53; see also Ramus Luther, Martin, 14, 213–19 lying, 74, 103–4, 107–8 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 212–13 magistrate, persona/office of, 161–9; lesser, 15, 162, 166–8, 176–7, 180–1; supreme, 166–8; see also rule, office of Malcolmson, Cristina, 236 Malebranche, Nicholas, 33 Martini, Cornelius, 59, 60–1, 63 Masham, Damaris, 255–6, 274 masks, 68, 182–3, 275 mathematics, 6, 73 Mauss, Marcel, 66 Mcleod, Glenda, 238 melancholia, as mark of philosopher, 10, 84, 112 Melanchthon, Philip, 36, 57, 163, 170–1, 228 metaphysics, 80, Jesuit, 47–8; Calvinist, 52–3; Lutheran, 57–8; and ubiquity controversy, 59–63; see also Descartes; Formula of Concord; Helmstedt, University of; Hofmann, Daniel Milton, John, 78 More, Henry, 246 More, Sir Thomas, 84, 103–4, 111; reputation of, 108–9; Utopia, 66, 70–1, 106–8, Morus/ Hythlodaeus as personae in, 66, 70, 106–7 Mulcaster, Richard, 74

279 natural philosopher, persona/office of, 14, 17, 20–1, 24–34, 85–7, 192, 202–3, 247–50 natural philosophy, 6, 33–4, 64, 192, 202–3, 211, 271–2; and civility, 86–7; as communal, 85–7; 220, 222, 248–50, 252; and English women, 234–5; Hermetic/Platonic, 40–1; and medicine, 6; reform of, 32–4 Nazianzus, Gregory, 61 Neoplatonism, 21–2, 39, 40 Nepos, Cornelius, 142 Newton, Sir Isaac, 33, 85, 227, 271 Nicole, Pierre, 264–6, 268–9, and Descartes 264–5 Oakeshott, Michael, 1 oath-taking, 41–2, 45, 66–7 Ockham, William of, 211 office, 66–89; ethics of, 66–7, 177, 180, 212–13; language of, 10, 67–8, 72–3; semiotics of, 10, 68, 84; social, 78; vocabulary of, 89; see also persona; vocation Old Comedy, 90, 103–5, 110 Oresme, Nicholas, 234 Owen, John, 133–4 Oxford University, 113, 131–4, and Locke, 258–62; see also Hobbes Pace, Richard, 77, 90–102; De fructu, 95–102, personae in: Erasmus, 99–101, 102, false Christian, 97–8, More, 95, 99, Pace, 99–101 Padua, University of, 213 Parable of the Talents, 218 Pareus, Philip, 128 Paris, University of, 126–7, 136 Parker, Samuel, 33 Parliament, Commissions of 1654, 133 passions, 48–9, 94, 161, 171, 265 Paul, St, 214–15, 269 Pepys, Samuel, 246 Perry, Ruth, 232–3 persona, 6, 7–12, 13, 15–16, 66–9, 184; see also specific personae/offices Petrarch, 234 Pettie, George, 75 philosopher, persona/office of, 64, 72–89, 211; changing role of, 26–9, 114–16, 196–201, 208–10, 230–5, 270–4; confessional forms of, 6–7, 49, 55–6, 60–1, 62; moral qualities of, 7–9, 250–1, 256, 275; and pedagogy, 41–3, 162

280

Index

philosophy, contemporary, 184–6, 255; and the divine, 52, 64, 131–2, 170–2, 205–8, 241, 242–4; and human perfectibility, 209–10, 222–3, 225; institutional settings of, 7–9, 39, 40–1, 231–2, 247–8, 252–3, see also universities; legitimacy/morality of, 17, 19–34, 184–6, 203–4, 253; methodology of, 32–4, 45, 193–201, 252; origins of, 17–24; as way of life, 9–11, 193–201, 255–6, 263, 273; see also academic philosophy; natural philosophy Piccolomini, Francesco, 213 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 81 Pinter, Harold, 186 Pizan, Christine de, 14, 236–7, 245, 250–1, 252–3; and Cavendish, 230–4, 236; reputation of, 246–7; role of philosopher in, 237–8, 241–2; as secular, 244; Works: Book of the City of Ladies, 233; Christine’s Vision, 236–8, 244, ‘Dame Opinion’ in, 241–2, ‘Dame Philosophy’ in, 243; Epistre Othea, 250 Plato, 9, 17–22, 25, 80, 167, 182, 191, 207; early Dialogues of, 19–21; hostility to poetry, 76; Republic, 69, 71, 203; and Sophists, 17, 34, 256; and transcendent truth, 21–2 poet, persona/office of, 68, 72–81, 84–5 political thought, history of, 1, 115, 161, as genre, 162–6 Popkin, Richard, 187 Power, Henry, 248 Presbytarianism and Independency, 133–4, 135 Prideaux, John, 119, 122, 128 priest, persona/office of, 69, 78, 160, 217–18; civil power of, 151; estate of, 14, 216–19; lawyer as, 14, 142 prophecy, 55–6, 237, 243 public/private, 82, 117–18, 179; see also active/ contemplative life Pufendorf, Samuel, 88 Purgatory, 74 Puttenham, George, 77–8, 79 Ramus, Peter, 39; Ramist philosophy, 51; Ramist/Lullist philosophy, 43, 46 reality, 21–4, 187–8 reason, Cartesian conception of, 199–201, and women, 232–5 Reformation, 9, 10, 71–2, 74, 77, 111, 161, 162–3, 170, 215; Counter-Reformation, 43; Second Reformation, 37, 50 Renaissance, 70, 71, 81, 210, 234 rhetoric, 13, 20, 88, 98–9, 101–2, 107, 251; efficacious speech as, 18; rhetor, persona/ office of, 68, 70–1, 72–81

rights, 178–80, private, 167; and self-defence, 178 role-play, see self Rorty, Richard, 3, 4 Ross, Alexander, 126 Royal Society, 139, 248, 252, 273; and Cavendish, 246; foundation of, 132, 235; and Hobbes, 83, 113; and morality, 226–7; oath of, 87; as office-holding, 67, 87; philosophic method of, 29–30, 33, 85, 249, 256, 272 rule, office of, 69, 71, 72, 161–9; and counsel, 177–8; and education, 13, 117–20; and monarchy, 166, 169; and sovereignty, 166–8; and tyrants, 175; see also magistrate St German, Christopher, 142 Salisbury, John Montacute, Earl of, 246–7 Salutati, Collucio, 211 Sandel, Michael, 66 Sanderson, Robert, 259 satire, 12, 13, 90–2, 112, 233, 248–9; Hobbes’ use of, 124–5; see also Lucian; Old Comedy Saunders, David, 13 scepticism, 187–8 Scheibler, Christoph, 61–2, 63, 122, 131 Schneewind, J. B., 4 scholastics/scholasticism, 17, 24, 99, 114, 189; Locke’s attack on, 269–72 science, 14, 202–3, 210, 226–8; as reified knowledge, 216; scientist, persona/office of, 202; as technocrat, 197–8 Schmitt, Charles, 37–8, 85 Scotti, Julius Clemente, SJ, 48–9 sectarianism, Protestant, 65, 82 self, 66, 81, 86–7, 160, 184 Serjeantson, Richard, 13 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of, 262 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 88, 257–8, 273–4; and Stoicism, 13, 273 Shaftesbury, Margaret Cooper, 1st Countess of, 264 Shakespeare, William, 69 Shapin, Stephen, 86, 257 Shapiro, Barbara, 244, 249 Sidney, Sir Philip, 76, 78, 79 Simanca, Jacques, 120 Skinner, Quentin, 4 Society of Jesus, 36, 43–4, 53; pedagogy of, 48–9; see also metaphysics Socrates, 95, 103–4, 184–5, 257, 273, 275 Sophists, 17, 19–21, 22–4, 34, 76, 184

Index soul, 72, 161, 173, 208–10, 254; see also philosophy and human perfectibility Sprat, Thomas, 30, 226, 252, 272 Stanley, Thomas, 124 state-building, 9, 35–64 Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of Worcester, 274 Strachey, John, 260, 261–2 Stubbe, Henry, 132–4 Stump, Eleanor, 194, 195–6 Sua´rez, Francisco, 47, 62–3 Sydenham, Thomas, 271 Telesio, Bernadino, 114 Ten Commandments, 162, 172, 173 theology, 1, 71–2, 77–8, 161, 260; Althusius’s view of, 173; as practical 210–11; Thomist, 40, 44–8; see also God; metaphysics; philosophy Thucydides, 18 Timpler, Clemens, 52 Tomeo, Niccolo` Leonico, of Padua, 92, 93, 94 Trithemius, Johannes, 210 Tyrrell, James, 263 Ulpian, 179 universities, 35–41, 121, 122, 138–9, 176–7, 181; and civil philosophy, 118–22; and clerical office, 259–60; confessional forms of, 44, 50, 57, 122, 125, 126–7, 138–9; culture of, 162–4;

281 curriculum of, 5–6, 115, 138–9, 260; and Civil Wars, 134–5; history and purpose of, 116–18, 128–30; and orations, 128–30; reform of, 135–6; see also academic philosophy; and specific foundations by name Valla, Lorenzo, 66 Venice, 213 Virgin Mary, 244, 251 Vives, Juan Luis, 90 vocation/calling, 216–19, 259–60; see also office Voltaire, 254 Wallis, John, 131, 133–4 Ward, Seth, 131–2 Wars of Religion – European, 112, 152–6 Westphalia, Treaty of, 165 Wilkins, John, 86 Wilson, Thomas, 77, 79 witchcraft, 141, 148–50 Wittenburg, University of, 36 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 93, 97, 102 Yeo Richard, 15, 88 Zabarella, Jacopo, 43, 46, 48, 53, 58, 60–1, 213

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

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