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London Studies in the of

Series Editors: Jonathan Wolff, Tim Crane, M.W.F.Stone and Tom Pink

London Studies in the History of Philosophy is a unique series of tightly focused edited collections. Bringing together the work of many scholars, some volumes trace the history of the formulation and treatment of a particular problem of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, while others will provide an in-depth analysis of a period or tradition of thought. The series is produced in collaboration with the Philosophy Programme of the of London School of Advanced Study.

1 and Early Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone

Forthcoming

2 Proper Ambition of Edited by M.W.F.Stone and Jonathan Wolff

Humanism and

Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone

London and New York First published 2000 by 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

© 2000 Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Humanism and early modern philosophy/[edited by] Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone. p. cm.—(London studies in the history of philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Humanism. 2. Philosophy, Modern. I. Kraye, Jill. II. Stone, Martin W.F. (Martin William Francis), 1965– . III. Series. B821.H657 2000 99–34091 144–dc21 CIP

ISBN 0-203-01607-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-21104-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 186161 (Print Edition) Contents

List of Illustrations vii List of contributors viii Preface xi

1 The of Lorenzo Valla 1 JOHN MONFASANI

2 translations of the Greek commentaries on 24 CHARLES H.LOHR

3 From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi: Uses of the dialogue in Renaissance 41 LUCA BIANCHI

4 The adoption and rejection of Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 59 M.W.F.STONE

5 The relationship of and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 91 A.H.T.LEVI

6 ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot 107 JILL KRAYE

7 The myth of ’s ‘anti-humanism’ 135 BRIAN VICKERS

v vi Contents

8 ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and the enterprise of philosophy 159 J.R.MILTON

9 Grandeur and the mechanical philosophy 172 SUSAN JAMES

10 , lingering Aristotelianism and the new : Gassendi on final causes 193 MARGARET J.OSLER

11 Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance 209 JAMES HANKINS

12 Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century 238 CHRISTIA MERCER

Index 259 Illustrations

Figures 6.1 Title-page of Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis sive de eis qae ad se pertinere censebat libri XII, ed. and trans. Thomas Gataker, Cambridge, 1652 115

6.2 Frontispiece and title-page of Marcus Aurelius, Libri XII eorum quae de seipso ad seipsum scripsit, ed. Joannes Franciscus Buddeus, , 1729 121

12.1 Title-page of A.Scherzer, Vade mecum sive manuale philosophicum quadripartitum, Leipzig, 1686. (Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.) 241

Tables 2.1 Renaissance editions of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, in Greek and Latin translation 28–29

vii Contributors

Luca Bianchi is Professor of the History of at the University of Vercelli. His books include Il vescovo e i filosofi: la condanna parigina del 1277 e l’evoluzione dell’aristotelismo scolastico (1990); Le verità dissonanti: Aristotele alla fine del medioevo (1990; French translation, 1993), written jointly with Eugenio Randi; and a forthcoming monograph on Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris au Moyen Age. James Hankins, Professor of History at Harvard University, is the author of in the , 2 vols (1990) and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Susan James is a Fellow of Girton College and a Lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Cambridge. Her publications include The Content of Social Explanation (1984) and Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1997). Jill Kraye is Reader in the History of at the Warburg Institute, the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She was the associate editor of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988) and has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996; Spanish translation, 1998) and Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols (1997). A.H.T.Levi took early retirement after teaching at Oxford, Warwick and St Andrews, where he was professor of French. He studied philosophy in Munich and has a Roman degree in theology. His first book, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649 (1964), was based on his Oxford DPhil. He is currently writing a of .

viii Contributors ix

Charles H.Lohr is Professor Emeritus of the History of Medieval Theology in the . Trained in the United States and Germany, he was Director of the Raimundus-Lullus-Institut of the University of Freiburg from 1974 to 1990. In addition to numerous special studies, he is the author of an inventory of Latin Aristotle Commentaries (1988–95) and the editor of the latina of Raymond Lull and of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, versiones Latinae temporis resuscitatarum litterarum. Christia Mercer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She has recently published a monograph on the evolution of Leibniz’s philosophy, Leibniz’s : Its Origins and Development, and is presently working on a study of German conciliatory eclecticism and Platonism in the seventeenth century entitled Divine Madness: Metaphysics, Method, and in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. J.R.Milton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College, University of London. Most of his research has been on the history of early modern philosophy, and he is currently working on an biography of . John Monfasani is Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the Executive Director of the Renaissance Society of America. His publications include: the monographs : A Biography and a Study of His and (1976) and Fernando of Cordova: A Biographical and Intellectual Profile (1992); an edition, Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond (1984); and two volumes of collected essays, Language and Learning in Renaissance (1994) and Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy (1995). Margaret J.Osler is Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her most recent book is Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (1994). M.W.F.Stone is Lecturer in the Philosophy of , Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College, University of London. His main research interests are in late medieval philosophy, x Contributors

particularly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the continuation of the scholastic tradition in early modern times. He is the author of a two-volume study, The Subtle Arts of Casuistry, which is forthcoming from , as well as papers on medieval and early modern philosophy. Brian Vickers is Professor of English Language and Literature, Director of the Centre for , ETH, Zurich and a Corresponding Fellow of the British . His books include Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (1968) and In Defence of Rhetoric (1988; third edition, 1997). He has edited Francis Bacon (1996) for the ‘Oxford Authors’ series, Bacon’s History of King Henry VII (1998) and The Essays of Francis Bacon (1999). Preface

There are those who would have us believe that the study of the history of philosophy is enjoying something of a revival in English-speaking countries. Evidence for this view is not, on the face of it, that difficult to find. Looking at the state of the , one sees a robust and confident subject whose best practitioners combine philological expertise and historical sagacity with philosophical skill. Likewise, early modern philosophy reveals its house to be in good order. Those who work on the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, having liberated themselves from the anachronism so typical of post- war scholarship on Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant, are now far more aware of, and responsive to, the general intellectual context in which the canonical works of modern philosophy were composed and disseminated; the publication in 1998 of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy provides solid evidence of this new, more historical outlook. The general buoyancy of the history of philosophy in the Anglophone world can be illustrated still further by examining current practices in fields such as medieval and nineteenth-century philosophy. Even , the least historically minded of disciplines, is nowadays characterized by a greater awareness of its origins and development. Nevertheless, one major area of philosophy’s past remains neglected by the philosophical academy: the Renaissance. The appearance in 1986 of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, and in 1992 of Renaissance Philosophy, volume III in the Oxford University Press series ‘A History of ’, has made little impact on scholars based in departments of philosophy. The three centuries from the death of in 1347 to the publication of Descartes’s Meditations in 1641 are still treated as a ‘specialist subject’ and left, with a sigh of relief, to the attentions of intellectual historians and historians of science.

xi xii Preface

It is our hope that the articles in this volume will help to end the long-standing exclusion of the Renaissance from the standard philosophical curriculum. We aim to demonstrate that a distinctive element of the philosophical and intellectual of this period is very relevant to our understanding of the practice and development of philosophy in the early modern era. That element is humanism. Beginning in the fourteenth century as a movement which focused on the recovery, interpretation, assimilation and emulation of the writings and artefacts of ancient and, to a lesser extent, Greece, humanism soon broadened into a vigorous cultural programme which influenced almost every aspect of the culture of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philosophy, however, was an area which, so we are led to believe, fell outside the ambit of humanism, with the minor exception of moral philosophy, which was treated in a highly rhetorical manner. Humanists are traditionally portrayed as scholars obsessed with recherché points of and , scorning the works of the great scholastic philosophers, whose classical erudition and linguistic skills they found wanting. The supposedly produced narrow-minded pedants, more concerned with the style of a philosophical argument than with its substance and more interested in the classification of philosophical positions than in their concrete and detailed analysis. Not surprisingly, given the prevalence of this caricatured view of Renaissance humanism, the noteworthy contributions which it made to the whole range of philosophical disciplines have all too often been overlooked. Yet these contributions played a key role in early modern philosophy. The rigorous philological methods developed by humanists, for instance, resulted in a spate of new Latin translations and critical editions of ancient philosophical works. Virtually all our modern texts of the seminal works of ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Sextus Empiricus and , are profoundly indebted to the tireless endeavours of humanist editors. The appearance of new editions, based on solid philological argument and detailed of the original sources and traditions, served to stimulate deeper interest in the philosophical arguments contained in the works. The result was a proliferation of different exegetical approaches to philosophical texts, which, in turn, helped to determine the direction of early modern philosophy. The influence of humanism did not stop there. It can be seen in the rediscovery and revival of ancient philosophical traditions such as Scepticism, , Stoicism and which had either been lost or ignored for centuries. Many of the pivotal figures in Preface xiii seventeenth-century philosophy arrived at their distinctive views and theories as a result of direct engagement with these older traditions. Here one thinks of the relation of Hobbes and Gassendi to Epicurean , of Descartes and Spinoza to Stoic accounts of the passions and of Leibniz to Platonic metaphysics. Humanists were also responsible for continuing many medieval debates concerning and , especially when the concept of faith was informed and invigorated by advances in and a renewed attention to patristic sources. This last aspect was central to the attempt of many early modern thinkers to gauge the exact relations of their philosophical and scientific ideas to their religious beliefs. Various features of the new ‘mechanical philosophy’ also benefit from seen against the backdrop of the ideals and achievements of the humanist movement, which, contrary to , remained a powerful force throughout most of the seventeenth century. All the articles in this volume, except that of Brian Vickers, were first delivered as papers in the colloquium on ‘Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy’ held at the Warburg Institute, in collaboration with King’s College London, on 13–14 June 1997, at which Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and also spoke. We would like to acknowledge the generous support given to that colloquium from the Mind Association; the Philosophy Programme of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London; the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London; and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

JILL KRAYE M.W.F.STONE

1 The theology of Lorenzo Valla

John Monfasani

The Renaissance valued Lorenzo Valla primarily as a philologist, the author of the spectacularly successful Elegantie lingue latine.1 The philosophical and religious writings for which he is most studied today did not even begin to approach the popularity of the Elegantie. In talking about Valla, we should never forget that some works, such as De professione religiosorum and the Encomium Sancti Thome, had virtually no circulation in the Renaissance, and that others, such as the Dialectica, owed at least part of their Renaissance currency to the reflected glory of the Elegantie. Furthermore, though Valla was one of the most original and important of the humanists and though much of what he wrote had profound theological relevance, we should not presume that he himself had a theology or that he made an especially original contribution to theology. But to talk about Valla and religion is to enter into a historiographical thicket. Until the quadriennium mirabile, 1969–72, when Mario Fois,2 Giovanni Di Napoli3 and Salvatore Camporeale4 each produced a major book on Valla as a Catholic thinker,5 a large body of scholarly opinion viewed Valla, if not as an Epicurean neo- pagan, then as a deliberately subversive, anti-establishment Christian.6 Though there has been some criticism of aspects of this ‘Catholic’ Valla,7 I do not think any leading scholar today doubts that Valla honestly considered himself a Catholic. But what about the quality of his religious thought, Catholic or otherwise? It is with this question that I shall concern myself. Certainly, in terms of showing the of humanist historical knowledge and philology for scriptural studies, Valla’s Annotations on the broke fresh ground. But theologically they were weak soup. Valla deliberately stuck to his humanistic knitting, treating issues of grammar, translation, Latinity and history without attempting

1 2 John Monfasani to draw major theological conclusions from his data.8 So we shall begin our examination of Valla the theologian by looking at a neglected passage from the third, that is to say, the final recension of his Dialectica. While showing how the Aristotelian category of time can be reduced to the category of quality, Valla says:

This alone Aristotle denies that can do: that what has been done may be what has not been done,9 as if He can cause what must be done to have been done or to be done, and cannot cause the future to be the past or the present, and the present to be the past or what is yet to be—as if there were not even other things besides time and other things which are easier to do than these, such as having sweetness not be sweetness and bitterness not be bitterness and colour not be colour or colour be sound, and sound be colour and an of other things. God must not be said to be incapable of these things. Should he not be able to rescind, as bad, those things which in holiness and wisdom He wished to happen or to exist in such and such a way? For certainly God can do those things which belong to his very wisdom and goodness.10

In short, Valla contended that God could undo the past: God could erase something that happened in the past or make it other than it was as easily as He could transform sweetness into bitterness and colour into sound. Valla had taken sides in an old issue; but he had done so in the form of an obiter dictum, which he inserted sloppily into the Dialectica, twice dropping crucial words,11 and without taking any notice of the implications of his position. In Christian antiquity, Jerome12 and Augustine13 had specifically denied that God could undo the past. in the thirteenth century agreed with them.14 Ultimately, the issue resolved itself into what one understood by divine omnipotence. According to Thomas Aquinas, God’s omnipotence does not encompass doing what is contradictory; and for Thomas, undoing the past was making it cease to be the past, which is a contradiction. Already in the eleventh century, however, Peter Damiani15 and ,16 and then, in the twelfth, Gilbert of la Porrée,17 had all contended that God could undo the past. No less importantly, in distinctions 42–4 of Book I of his Sentences, defended God’s omnipotence against the condemned view of that the world God produced was the only one that in his wisdom and goodness He could have produced. This section of the Sentences became a locus classicus for theologians discussing God’s power, his The theology of Lorenzo Valla 3 potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata, and, in passing, the question of whether God could undo the past.18 Abelard himself denied that God could undo the past,19 as did almost all theologians through the fourteenth century, including William of Ockham.20 There were exceptions, such as Thomas Bradwardine21 and Gregory of Rimini22 in the fourteenth, and Peter of Ailly23 in the fifteenth. In the sixteenth century, Pietro Pomponazzi denied that by his potentia ordinata God could change the past, though to do so would not in itself contradict his potentia absoluta.24 Indeed, Pomponazzi’s position was similar to Gregory of Rimini’s since both spoke of God’s capacity to alter the past exclusively in the theoretical terms of God’s potentia absoluta, not his potentia ordinata. One can debate how much value this distinction had for some scholastics.25 But certainly in the case of Damiani, because he knew nothing of such a distinction, and Bradwardine, because he mistrusted it, the distinction between God’s potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata was irrelevant. Valla’s approach to this issue was, therefore, closer to the eleventh-century Damiani and the conservative fourteenth-century Bradwardine than it was to Ockhamists, Scotists or Thomists. Valla believed it to be ordinarily possible that God altered the past in accordance with his wisdom and goodness. But how did Valla understand God’s wisdom and goodness? He does not tell us in the Dialectica; but we get an indication from his dialogue on , where he argues for total predestination and where he says that God’s wisdom, will and power are inseparable.26 The latter statement could mean nothing more than the traditional assertion of God’s utter simplicity. But it could also mean the dissolution of the divine intellect into the divine will popular among Ockhamists, which led them to conclude that God could reward murder with heaven and charity with hell.27 Whether he intended it or not, given the fact that in the Dialectica passage on undoing the past Valla emphasized God’s ability to reverse totally the present order of things, the logic of his position would seem to argue for the view that God could reverse the present moral order. In the dialogue on free will, before discussing the divine will, Valla attended to another matter. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, scholastic discussion of predestination was tied closely to the question of future contingents.28 Valla apparently thought that he was settling the debate when he showed that divine foreknowledge of future events did not necessitate the events. In fact, he settled nothing. The scholastics wanted to establish not whether God’s omniscience impinged on future contingents (i.e., Valla’s concern), but the obverse, 4 John Monfasani whether future contingents impinged on God’s omniscience and thus made God dependent on creatures for his knowledge.29 What Valla actually did was to reinvent the wheel, i.e. after condemning for mixing philosophy with theology, Valla adopted the same argument that Boethius had made eight hundred years earlier, namely, that God’s sempiternity meant that his foreknowledge was really present knowledge and did not necessitate what it observed.30 This was also, I might add, the position of Thomas Aquinas.31 Valla’s solution was thus quite banal. Having disposed of the problem of divine foreknowledge, Valla came to the assertion he had wanted to make all along, namely, that free will was incompatible not with God’s omniscience, but with his omnipotence, and, more precisely, with his omnipotent will. Quoting from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Valla affirmed that God in his wisdom hardens the hearts of those whom He wishes to condemn and shows mercy to those whom He wishes to save, and it is not for us to know why.32 There is nothing exceptional in this assertion, and all the more so since he added that somehow we also retain free will. What gives the dialogue its special character is the way in which Valla said these things. Without any quotation of the or reasoned arguments, his defence of free will was so weak as to be inane. It amounts to nothing more that the bald assertion that: ‘[God] imposes no necessity, nor does He deprive us of our free will when He hardens this one and shows mercy to that one since He acts most wisely and with utmost holiness.’33 Since Valla also insisted that original sin did not change the vasa argentea of prelapsarian human , but rather filled it with ‘contumelia’, ‘damnatio’ and ‘mors’,34 he had no grounds except divine will for explaining how human go astray once they have been cleansed of original sin by baptism. Just as he could see no reason why Adam and the bad angels fell into sin save by divine choice, so too he could not but conclude that whether or not the baptized sin depends on God’s inscrutable will.35 He therefore condemned those theologians who fell under the influence of philosophy and dared to explain the mystery of free will. It is no wonder then that read Valla as a predestinarian,36 and that Leibniz criticized Valla for seeming to make God responsible for sin.37 Despite his assertion of free will, Valla’s limited amounted to predestinarianism. The predestinarianism of the De libero arbitrio, I might add, played no significant role in two related works of Valla: the ‘Christian’ Book III of the De vero bono and the De professione religiosorum. Indeed, if we had only read these last The theology of Lorenzo Valla 5 two works, we would think Valla was staunchly in favour of free will and somewhat Pelagian in his appreciation of human moral possibilities (as indicated by his suggestion in the De libero arbitrio that baptism restored to a prelapsarian state). Furthermore, Valla’s fideism did not deter him from theological speculation in the De libero arbitrio, in the De professione religiosorum, in the Dialectica or in the Sermo de mysterio Eucharistie. He used predestinarianism and fideism selectively, when they suited his arguments, but not as dominant themes informing a broad theological vision. Valla may have stressed God’s omnipotent will in one of his works, but that hardly made him a fellow traveller of the Ockhamists or the Scotists. His predestinarianism put him in fundamental opposition to their voluntarism38 and in approximate agreement with the ‘anti- Pelagians’ Gregory of Rimini,39 Thomas Bradwardine40 and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Aquinas.41 With regard to his relationship with contemporary theological schools, Valla’s Encomium S. Thome is especially relevant. He praised Thomas as the best of the medieval theologians (this opinion was no doubt the reason why the Dominicans asked him to speak). He also recorded those ‘recent’ theologians whose writings were meritorious. While he omitted Ockham, whom he had condemned by name years earlier in his Epistola apologetica to Juan Serra,42 he listed the three Franciscans—Alexander of Hales, and John Duns Scotus43—who were inimical to the Ockhamists, and one of whom, Bonaventure, was a leading proponent of Augustinian . In one would be hard put to think of a school more distant from the Ockhamists than the illuminationists. In what has become a well-known passage in the final redaction of the Dialectica, Valla said:

Just as the sun shows and exhibits the colours of bodies to the eyes, so too God shows and exhibits the qualities of things to the mind. Plato proposed this theory somewhat differently in the Republic, where he says that is like the sun, knowledge and cognition like authentic vision.44

Valla then goes on to say:

Thus, truth and falsity are in us, that is, in our ; but the source of our truth is in God, just as the source of light is in the sun. The source of falsity, however, is in the obstruction of the divine source, just as the source of obscurity is in the removal of the sun, 6 John Monfasani

as God is properly truth just as the sun is light, which is what Plato also held.45

Valla never explained exactly how God illumines our . But a number of things are clear. First, the possession of truth depends not on empirical , but on the influx of into the mind. Second, Valla adhered to a correspondence theory of truth, i.e. truth exists when what we think corresponds to what is truly out there. Third, it is divine illumination that makes our interior vision of things correspond to the things themselves. And, fourth, this interior light is God himself. What is not clear is whether the divine light provides the true concepts of things, i.e. reflections of the ideas in the mind of God, or whether it simply enables true judgements in us.46 The latter is probable, but Valla’s words do not rule out the former. In either case, not merely Ockhamist , but also Aristotelian and Thomist abstractionism would be difficult to square with this epistemology. But what about the clear nominalist statements of Valla? Although they lend themselves to a nominalist interpretation, I hope to show elsewhere that they were in fact quite innocent of a nominalist philosophy.47 In any , they are not relevant for Valla’s theology. The Christian God is, of course, a . Valla discussed the Trinity several times. Both in the Elegantie48 and in the first redaction of the Dialectica,49 he criticized Boethius for equating persona with substantia. Valla was tilling well-ploughed ground here. Theologians as illustrious as Richard of St Victor,50 Peter Abelard51 and John Duns Scotus52 had already criticized Boethius for the same reason, while others such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham had explicitly accepted Boethius’s definition.53 Valla’s solution, to define the divine personae as qualities (qualitates), is not especially satisfactory since it opens the gates to Sabellianism, i.e. the view that each person of the Trinity is merely a different facet or mode of the Godhead. Not unjustly, in the sixteenth century, Lelio Socino cited Valla’s critique of Boethius in the Elegantie as an argument for .54 This was not Valla’s intent. He specifically stated in the first redaction of the Dialectica that ‘the Father and the Son and the are not merely qualities, but are distinguished from each other by quality’.55 His comparison of the Trinity to the sun in the first redaction of the Dialectica did not, however, help matters, since by comparing the Father to ‘the sun as it glitters’, the Son to ‘the sun as it lights’ and the Holy Spirit to ‘the sun as it heats’, he was making a perfectly good Sabellian analogy.56 Wisely, in the second and third redactions of the The theology of Lorenzo Valla 7

Dialectica, Valla added that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were each what the Greeks called a hypostasis.57 The addition cleared Valla of Sabellianism; it also made a total hash of his attempt to argue that the persons of the Trinity were qualities. What in the event caused him the most problems was not his discussion of the qualities of the Trinity but the rejection of the which he inserted into the first recension of the Dialectica at about the time of the Council of -.58 He had no fresh arguments to make;59 and his attack was really gratuitous since it added nothing to his discussion of personhoods/qualities of the Trinity, which was ostensibly the issue at hand. So when he dropped it in the second and third recensions, he in no way impeded the flow of his argument. Doubtless Valla spoke out of intellectual conviction, but we should not discount as contributing motives vainglory and the desire to frustrate the plans of Eugenius IV, the opponent at that time of Valla’s patron, King Alfonso of Aragon. When brought up before the in a few years later, if the text of his Defensio60 and his Apologia to Pope Eugenius IV61 are any indication, he rebutted very forthrightly every charge laid against him except that concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Defensio is completely silent on this issue. And to Eugenius IV Valla was nothing short of incoherent and mendacious: first, he denied that he had ever affirmed anything against the Church concerning the Holy Spirit; then, he admitted that he had asserted something on the subject before or during the Council; and finally, he insisted that he had done so in order that he might be better armed (armatior) on behalf of the .62 I wonder if he was more honest with the Greek Cardinal , one of his patrons when he returned to Rome and someone who had staked his whole career on the that the Latin Filioque was a legitimate addition to the Creed.63 One contention concerning God that Valla defended vigorously64 was his assertion in the De vero bono65 and in the Dialectica66 that we love God not for his own sake, not propter se, but rather as an efficient cause, i.e. as the cause of the pleasure we experience in heaven. The issue goes to the heart of Valla’s Epicurean . Since at least the time of St Augustine, Latin theologians had distinguished between use and fruition in respect to the beatitude of heaven.67 We may love something for its usefulness in gaining something else. Such an object of love is a means to an end. It is an instrument of our desires. On the other hand, we may love something for itself. The object itself is our end, and our experiencing it, i.e., its fruition, is the final cause of our 8 John Monfasani actions. John Duns Scotus68 and William of Ockham,69 updating Augustine’s terminology, called the former concupiscent love and the latter the love from friendship. God, as our highest good, can only be loved for Himself and not as a means to an end. God is the end of all our actions and his fruition in heaven is our final cause. Such a theory would, however, reduce to rubble Valla’s De vero bono since its basic premise was that pleasure, not God, was our highest good. Consequently, to rescue his enterprise, Valla argued that even though God is our ultimate good and even though what we ultimately love is God, nonetheless, we love God not propter se as our final cause, but rather as the almighty provider of the pleasure of heaven, i.e., as an efficient cause. In short, to keep pleasure as the final cause of our actions, Valla rendered God a means to an end. He instrumentalized God. To use Ockham’s terminology, Valla made God a concupiscent object of our desires.70 Epicureanism allowed Valla to demolish Stoic ethics as a Christian option; but it put him into a terrible bind. To save his wonderfully effective and entertaining destruction of Pelagian Stoicism, he had in effect to reduce to an Epicurean standard. Less novel, but equally daring was Valla’s view of God in the Eucharist. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council had endorsed ‘’ as the proper term to describe the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Nonetheless, in his Sermo de mysterio Eucharistie, delivered at Rome in 1456 or 1457,71 Valla made bold to suggest consubstantiation or, to be more precise, impanation as equally plausible terms. After declaring that while only a very few could venture to explain the transformation that takes place in the Eucharist, we all can and should in faith give it praise, he continued:

But if I were also to explain it, I do not see why it seems so credible to some that the bread is converted into God, although I do not know whether the bread is converted into God or God into the bread while still being God. For it is said, ‘The Word was made flesh’ [John 1:14], but not however, ‘the flesh was made the Word’. And elsewhere it is said, ‘I am the bread of life who has descended from heaven’ [John 6:41]. Even before the of the Eucharist, he calls himself bread, as if he was about to turn himself into bread, that is, he was about to give himself in the place of bread. But listen to how this is to be understood. When the Son of God came into the world, he took—I am not sure whether I should say it—flesh from out the inviolate body of the Virgin (for what is The theology of Lorenzo Valla 9

not liquid is properly said to be flesh). But from the flesh [he took], as I would thus say, the most beautiful flower . …It was this flesh which plucked (delibavit) when he was incarnated. In equal measure he animated it with the soul of a man and filled it with divinity. By the same principle he converts the bread of the sacrosanct altar into himself, that is to say, he pours in man and God.72

And making sure that no one missed his point, Valla ended this part of the oration with the notice:

But so that I do not say more than I proposed, after showing as much as I could about how God is converted into bread or bread into God, I shall now fulfil my promise concerning the praise of this mystery.73

Valla’s phrase ‘God converted into bread’ could mean either consubstantiation, i.e., the coexistence of the substance of bread and God, or impanation, i.e., God contained in some way within the bread. John Wyclif had been condemned several times in the previous century and at the Council of Constance in 1418 for espousing a form of consubstantiation,74 just as Berengar had been in the twelfth century for his doctrine of impanation.75 At least one early sixteenth-century reader, the historian Sigismondo Tizio, expressed his unease with the possible heretical implications of this passage in Valla.76 What makes Valla’s oration especially interesting, however, is that he did not simply compare the mystery of the Eucharist with that of the Incarnation, as was common in the Latin West from St Ambrose onwards,77 but actually identified them. This identification is precisely what Monophysites had done in late antiquity, and to answer them and not fall into the trap of acknowledging that the divine substance always annihilates the non-divine substance, some orthodox authors, such as Pope Gelasius in his treatise The Two in Christ, declared that something of the bread and wine remained after consecration.78 Protestants later appealed to some of these patristic texts to defend the doctrine of consubstantiation.79 We have no way of knowing what Valla had read; but what is certain is that he considered the Incarnation to be the primordial form of the mystery of the Eucharist. And since in the Incarnation flesh remained flesh, one can understand why Valla toyed with the notion that Eucharistic bread and wine remained bread and wine, even though he believed by faith that Christ was now present in them. 10 John Monfasani

The Sermo de mysterio Eucharistie dealt with a theological topic in what was formally and substantively a rhetorical laudatio. But Valla did write what he considered to be an exclusively theological work, the dialogue De professione religiosorum, in the introduction to which he specifically stated that he was going to deal with theology and argue against theologians.80 He sent it to his friend Giovanni Tortelli as soon as he finished it, explaining in an accompanying letter that it was a ‘rem canonici iuris et theologie, sed contra omnes canonistas atque omnes theologos’.81 Many scholars think that the work Valla was referring to was his Declamatio on the , and not the Professio. I have shown elsewhere why they are wrong.82 But I would point out here that the little theology that the Declamatio does contain, i.e., the fictive speech of Pope Sylvester, cannot be called revolutionary or ‘contra omnes theologos’ since it repeats the very traditional medieval calls for an unworldly church.83 Indeed, some passages were lifted verbatim out of St Bernard of Clairvaux, as Antonazzi has shown.84 Rhetorically, the De professione is a tour de force. Valla demolishes his Franciscan interlocutor. As Mariarosa Cortesi’s annotations in the critical edition document, Valla artfully blended classical, biblical and patristic allusions in what seems a spontaneous flow of conversation. The theological rigour, however, of the De professione is another matter. Valla wanted to debunk the pretensions of the religious to superiority over the laity and even other clergy.85 Both at the start and the conclusion of the dialogue he attacked them for thinking that because they merited a greater penalty than the laity when they sinned in violation of their vows, they therefore also merited a greater reward when they acted in accordance with their vows.86 As Fois has shown,87 nowhere in the literature of the religious orders will one find this argument. In its literary form, it is purely Valla’s creation. It is a polemical straw man. It is true that the mendicants held both propositions, namely, that the violation of a vow increased the penalty of a sin and that a vow increased the merit of a good deed; but they never made one follow from the other. Valla himself actually agreed with the former proposition (that the violation of a vow increased the penalty of a sin), but to rebut the latter (that a vow increased the merit of a good deed) he linked the two together, and in doing so refuted a position that his opponents never held. Valla then moved on to deny that the vows of the regular clergy were actually vows.88 Vows, he said, in the biblical and classical traditions were contractual: they required a quid pro quo: one made a vow to do The theology of Lorenzo Valla 11 something on the condition that God would do something in return. The vows of the mendicants do not meet this requirement. But as Fois has shown,89 Valla was wrong here too. Many pagan Greek vows, many vows, Paul’s Nazarene vow in the New Testament and the patristic understanding of a vow all conformed to the mendicants’ understanding and not Valla’s. Valla next argued that mendicant vows had no value because they were sworn promises. After all, in the New Testament we are enjoined several times not to swear, least of all to God.90 Yet, as Fois points out,91 the religious did not swear an oath when they professed their vows. Oath-taking exists nowhere in the literature or in the ceremony itself. Valla once again attacked a straw man of his own making. Finally, Valla denied the religious value of each of the three vows the religious professed. On poverty, he argued that what mattered was to be poor in spirit, that wealth was necessary for the practical work of the mendicants as well as the Church in general and that the mendicants, for all their protestations of poverty, did not want for their daily necessities.92 But all this was exactly what the Church had declared in the battle with the radical Franciscans in the fourteenth century,93 and had continued to teach against the Fraticelli throughout the fifteenth century.94 Valla was again reinventing the wheel. His discussion of obedience was stranger still. He asked why, having promised in baptism to obey God and live a saintly life, does one have to do it all over again with a vow?95 Without condemning the rules of the religious, he rendered them superfluous by arguing: ‘To obey a rule is to obey God, not a man, which is what we too do; nor can any better rule be handed down than that which was handed down by Christ and the apostles.’96 With baptism and the Gospels, what good are the rules and vows of the religious? I hasten to add that Valla was no Martin Luther ante litteram. In complete contradiction to Luther, Valla wholeheartedly embraced a theology of merit. Indeed, he argued that reward was proportionate to temptation; and since the laity were exposed to more temptations than were the religious, they earned greater merit.97 Valla knew perfectly well that by their vow of obedience the religious were committing themselves to a discipline not required by baptism or the Gospels. For that reason they called their profession a second baptism.98 Valla’s real purpose in attacking the vow of obedience, as he quickly made clear, was to disparage it as a form of , not to God, but to other men.99 He himself glorified self-rule and capacity for leadership as proper to a soldier of Christ.100 In proto- Nietzschean tones, he explained: 12 John Monfasani

You understand therefore that men of leadership are called not to obedience, but to rule (imperium), while inferior men are called to obedience, provided, however, that we acknowledge that a greater reward is owed to those who lead best than those who obey best.101

As his Christian Epicureanism would suggest, Valla seems to have had a tin ear for some of the most profound harmonies of Christian piety. One wonders what he would have thought of Thérèse of Lisieux, whose sanctity was built on obedience to others in the humblest of ways. Valla was not any more sensitive in the matter of chastity. He had chosen a celibate life for himself as that most suitable to his professional goals. In fact, though not a priest, he ended his days as a canon of St John Lateran in Rome. Yet, when accused of licentiousness by Poggio, he defended himself by explaining that he had acted quite honourably, fathering three children with a servant girl and then giving them away to his sister, all in order to prove to his relatives that his celibacy was the result of moral and not physical vice.102 In the De professione, he actually rejected the need for celibacy in the priesthood;103 but his arguments were strange in the extreme. Completely ignoring the New Testament texts which urged virginity and celibacy for the sake of the Gospel, he cited instead only 1 Timothy 4:1–3, which warns against false teachers who would forbid marriage to everyone.104 He wished that bishops and priests would be ‘men of one wife’ (1 Timothy 3:12) instead of lovers of one prostitute; and then he denied that chastity added merit to the priesthood on the grounds that women, since they cannot be priests, would be in an inferior position to men. This contradicts Paul’s statement in Galatians that in heaven there is no distinction of male, female, barbarian or Greek.105 Valla’s logic argues for female priests, but proves nothing about priestly celibacy. Next, after averring that the priesthood is of no help to chastity,106 he closed with essentially an irrelevant argument: since a priest or a deacon or a monk is already committed to a celibate life, it makes no sense for him to make a vow of chastity; only for a married person would such an act have meaning.107 Valla brought the De professione to a close by contrasting the slavery, weakness and fear exhibited by those who take vows to the courage, self-control and genuine love of those who live without them.108 In , he never really argued theology. That is why his theological arguments were sophistical. Instead, he was giving rhetorical expression109 to an ethic and religious sensibility that was, to be sure, lay rather than clerical, but at a deeper level also Pelagian in its The theology of Lorenzo Valla 13 logic and, as I have said, proto-Nietzschean in its . None of this, of course, squares with the predestinarianism of the De libero arbitrio. Lorenzo Valla was no theologian. Nor do his theological pronouncements reflect a coherent new method of theology, whether rhetorical or philological. Rather, he raised theological issues ad hoc, sometimes gratuitously; and he could be inconsistent from work to work. The of his De vero bono and De professione does not accord well with the of his De libero arbitrio or with his assertion of God’s ability to undo the past in the Dialectica. His conception of God was strange indeed: a divinity capable of arbitrarily redoing the past and obliterating human free will, but also existing as a mere instrument of our pleasure. The sophisms of De professione, the quirkiness of De Eucharistia, the inconsistencies in his treatment of the Trinity in the Dialectica and the hypocrisy of his several defences of the De vero bono all suggest someone who had a serious purpose when swimming in theological waters, but not primarily a theological one. His aims, depending on which work is at issue, were rather primarily cultural, social, philosophical or even political. Valla was, if I may end with an oxymoron, a seriously flippant theologian.

Notes 1 We know at least 67 Renaissance of this work and 151 early printed editions, the latest dated 1688; see J.IJsewijn and G.Tournoy, ‘Un prime censimento dei manoscritti e delle edizioni a stampa degli Elegantiarum linguae latinae libri sex di Lorenzo Valla’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 1969, vol. 18, pp. 25–41; and their ‘Nuovi contributi per 1’elenco dei manoscritti e delle edizioni delle Elegantiae di Lorenzo Valla’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 1971, vol. 20, pp. 1–3. 2 M.Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico-culturale del suo ambiente, Rome, Università Gregoriana, 1969. Important also is Fois’s response, in Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 1977, vol. 31, pp. 183–203, to a hostile review by Franco Gaeta (see n. 7 below). 3 G.di Napoli, Lorenzo Valla: filosofia e religione nell’Umanesimo italiano, Rome, Storia e letteratura, 1971. 4 S.Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia, Florence, Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1972. Camporeale has continued to publish; see his ‘Lorenzo Valla tra medioevo e Rinascimento: Encomion s. Thomae-1457’, Memorie domenicane, 1976, n.s., vol. 7, pp. 11–194; ‘Lorenzo Valla e il “De falso credita donatione”: Retorica, libertà ed ecclesiologia nel ’400’, Memorie domenicane, 1988, n.s., vol. 19, pp. 191–293; ‘Renaissance humanism: The origins of humanist theology’, in J.W.O’Malley, T.M.Izbicki, and G.Christianson (eds), Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and 14 John Monfasani

Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, Leiden, E.J.Brill, 1993, pp. 101–24; and ‘Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and in Early Renaissance Humanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1996, vol. 57, pp. 9–26. 5 To these we should add from that period: E.Mühlenberg, ‘Laurentius Valla als Renaissancetheologe’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1969, vol. 66, pp. 466–80; C.Trinkaus, ‘In Our Image and Likeness’: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols, Chicago, , 1970, vol. I, pp. 103–70 and vol. II, pp. 633–50, 674–82; and A. Perosa’s edition of Valla’s Collatio Novi Testamenti, Florence, Sansoni, 1970. 6 Fois, Pensiero, pp. 100–3, gives a useful survey. 7 F.Gaeta especially criticized Fois in his review essay of Fois, Di Napoli and Camporeale in Rivista di storia della Mesa in Italia, 1974, vol. 29, pp. 559–77, because Fois rebutted so many of the interpretations upon which the traditional view of the heterodox Valla rested. This is ironic in that Fois also did not think Valla was an especially penetrating religious mind. More acutely, R.Fubini has opposed Camporeale’s attempt to make a profound Christian thinker out of Valla; see his ‘Lorenzo Valla tra il Concilio di Basilea e quello di Firenze, e il processo dell’Inquisizione’, in Conciliarismo, stati nazionali, inizi dell’umanesimo. Atti del XXV Convegno storico internazionale, Todi…1988, Spoleto, Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1990, pp. 287–318, where he denies that one can find ‘una dottrina teologia’ in Valla (p. 289) and, contra Camporeale, it ‘senz’altro errato’ to argue that Valla developed a large-scale rhetorical method to displace medieval speculative theology (p. 290); rather Valla’s stance was to de-authorize traditional religious (p. 306). In ‘Due contributi su Lorenzo Valla’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 1994, vol. 8 (=n.s., vol. 5), pp. 101–16, he concludes that only Valla’s belief in God as truth and in divine purpose saved his ‘empirismo radicale’ from a ‘puro scettismo’ and ‘un crudo utilitarismo’. 8 In responding to S.Garofalo’s well-known verdict that Valla merely ‘nibbled on the crust of the biblical text’ (‘Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia’, Biblica, 1946, vol. 27, pp. 338–75, at 352–3), the best J. H.Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 68, can say is that Valla ‘opened the door not on a new or theology so much as on a new brand of scholarship that stood prior to both exegesis and theology’. J.Chomarat, ‘Les Annotationes de Valla, celles d’Erasme et la grammaire’, in O.Fatio and P.Fraenkel (eds), Histoire de l’exégèse au XVIe siècle: textes du collogue international tenu à Genève en 1976, , Droz, 1978, pp. 202–28, rejects the dichotomy between Valla ‘pur grammarien’ and Erasmus ‘authentique théologien’, but concedes that theology ‘n’est pas l’objet de son travail [Valla’s Annotations]’ (p. 215) and contends only that Valla’s corrections of the had theological implications (p. 216). C.S.Celenza, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the New Testament: Lorenzo Valla’s Annotations to the Vulgate’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994, vol. 24, pp. 33–52, remarks (p. 40), apropos of Camporeale’s thesis, that Valla’s was paleo- Christian: ‘there may be an ecclesiology lurking somewhere in Valla, but it is never positively asserted’, and concludes (p. 51) that Valla’s annotations are The theology of Lorenzo Valla 15

more than simple philology if we assume a theological programme behind them, i.e. the annotations themselves do not present us with a theological vision. Finally, it is instructive that in using the Annotations to construct Valla’s theological thought, the closest Di Napoli, Lorenzo Valla, comes to a theological issue is when he rightly refutes (pp. 284–8) G.Zippel’s contention that Valla’s comment on 2 Corinthians 7:10 is a critique of the Church’s teaching on penance. 9 Zippel refers the reader to Physics II (198b18), which does not contain this assertion. Valla doubtless had in mind the verse of Agathon quoted by Aristotle in VI (1139b10–11): ‘This only is denied even to God,/ The power to make what has been done undone’ (trans. H. Rackham, Loeb edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1926). It was a commonly cited passage in the on the issue. Valla may have also known De caelo I (283b12–15). 10 Lorenzo Valla, Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. G.Zippel, 2 vols, , Antenore, 1983, vol. I, p. 153, lines 19–30 (=Book I, chap. 17). I have altered Zippel’s punctuation, and added ‘’ near the start. Zippel’s transcription is accurate; of his four manuscript sources for the last redaction, I have checked O and V, while Q is an apograph of O, and P ends defectively before this passage. Zippel himself correctly added ‘’ further on. Valla was careless either in writing this passage or in checking the transcription of his scribe. The passage as emended runs: ‘Hoc solum posse Deum negat Aristoteles, ut quod factum est non sit factum, quasi possit facere ut id quod faciendum est sit factum aut fiat, et futurum tempus sit preteritum aut presens preterierit aut nondum assit, quasi etiam non sint alia preter tempus faciliusque quam illa sit facere, ut dulcedo non sit dulcedo et amaritudo non sit amaritudo, colorque non sit color aut sit sonus, et sonus sit color et alia infinita. Hec non est dicendus Deus non posse. Que, cum ei sancte sapienterque placuerint ut fierent aut talia essent, non debent ab eo tanquam mala posse rescindi? Nam ea demum Deus potest que sunt ipsius sapientie atque bonitatis.’ 11 See the start of n. 10 above. 12 Jerome, Epistulae, 22.5. 13 Augustine, Contra Faustum, 26.5. 14 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 1, dist. 42, q. 2, art. 2.3; Summa theologiae 1, qu. 25, a. 4; cf. Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 1, dist. 44, art. 2; Summa theologiae 2:2, qu. 152, a. 3, ad. 3; Summa contra Gentiles 2, c. 25. 15 Peter Damiani, De divina omnipotentia in reparatione corruptae et factis infectis reddendis, in Patrologia Latina, vol. CXLV, cols 595–622; see also W.J.Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power, Bergamo, Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990, pp. 25–8. 16 Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo, 2.17, in his Opera omnia, ed.F. S.Schmitt, 6 vols, , Frommann, 1968, vol. I, p. 123, lines 4–8. But, in fact, Anselm took it as a given that the past was unchangeable; see ibid., p. 125, line 18: ‘Quidquid fuit, necesse est fuisse.’ See also his De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio, 1.2, in ibid., vol. II, p. 249, lines 30–1. Valla spoke well of Anselm in his Encomium 16 John Monfasani

S.Thome; see J.Vahlen, ‘Lorenzo Valla über Thomas von Aquino’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Kultur und Litteratur der Renaissance, 1886, vol. 1, pp. 384–96, at 395: ‘Anselmo, in primis acuto atque exculto.’ Vahlen’s article is reproduced in vol. II of Valla’s Opera omnia, ‘con una premessa di Eugenio Garin’, 2 vols, Turin, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1968. The text is also available in Lorenzo Valla, Oraciones y prefacios (por una renovación de los métodos de estudio), ed. F.Adorno, Santiago, Universidad de Chile, 1954, pp. 290–321. 17 See his on Boethius’s De trinitate in his The Commentaries on Boethius, ed. N.Häring, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1966, pp. 128–32, esp. 129, lines 25–8. 18 On the history of this concept see Courtenay, Capacity and Volition. 19 S.G.Sikes, Peter Abelard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932, p. 124. 20 See W.J.Courtenay, ‘John of Mirecourt and Gregory of Rimini on Whether God Can Undo the Past’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 1972, vol. 39, pp. 224–56, and 1973, vol. 40, pp. 147–74; on Ockham see M.McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols, Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame, 1987, vol. II, pp. 1214–28; and the indecisive P.Müller, ‘Necessity of the past and Potentia Dei in William of Ockham’, in B.C Bazán, E.Andújar, and L.G.Sbrocchi (eds), Les morales et politiques au Moyen Age. Actes du IXe Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, Ottawa…1992, 3 vols, Ottawa, Legas, 1995, vol. II, pp. 892–902. 21 See Courtenay, ‘John of Mirecourt’, pp. 149–54, 160–2; the issue is ignored by G.Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians: A Study of His ‘De Causa Dei’ and Its Opponents, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1957. 22 Gregory of Rimini, Lectura super Primum et Secundum Sententiarum, ed. A.D.Trapp and V.Marcolino, 7 vols, Berlin and New York, De Gruyter, 1981– 7, vol. III, pp. 355–89, esp. 362–84 in q. 1 in Sent. 1, d. 42–4. 23 See Courtenay, ‘John of Mirecourt’, p. 162; and esp. L.A.Kennedy, Peter of Ailly and the Harvest of Fourteenth-Century Philosophy, Queenston and Lewiston, Edwin Mellen, 1986, pp. 161–75; F.Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1964, is informative on Ockhamist thought in general, but does not touch on this issue. 24 See Pietro Pomponazzi, Libri quinque de fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione, ed. R.Lemay, Lugano, Thesaurus Mundi, 1957, pp. 412, lines 10–15; 421, lines 19–24; 422, lines 28–30. 25 Courtenay, ‘John of Mirecourt’, p. 166, argues that all the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century scholastics known to him agreed with Gregory of Rimini; he also maintains a generally benign interpretation of the medievals’ use of the concept of God’s potentia absoluta in his Capacity and Volition; however, Leonard, Peter of Ailly, pp. 199–213, makes a strong case for Peter of Ailly (and, implicitly, other late medieval theologians who stressed God’s potentia absoluta) not really treating, despite protestations to the contrary, the shocking conclusions they drew from the potentia absoluta as purely theoretical, i.e. as simply non-contradictory possibilities open to God before He chose the present dispensation which He governs by His potentia ordinata. In the case of Peter of Ailly, Oakley, Political Thought, pp. 27–33, 165–98, acknowledges The theology of Lorenzo Valla 17

that Peter’s radical voluntarism destroys ‘the idea that there is anything final about right reason. The ultimate priority lies with the divine will…’ (p. 189). See also T.Gregory, ‘La tromperie divine’, Studi medievali, 1982, ser. 3, vol. 23, pp. 517–27; reprinted in Z.Kaluza and P.Vignaux (eds), Preuve et raisons à l’Université de Paris: logique, ontologie et théologie au XIVe siècle, Paris, Vrin, 1984, pp. 187–95. 26 Lorenzo Valla, De libero arbitrio, ed. M.Anfossi, Florence, Leo Olschki, 1934, p. 38, lines 577–8: ‘cum sapientia Dei separari non possit a voluntate illius ac potentia…’ 27 G.Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic , Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1975, pp. 480–97; Kennedy, Peter of Ailly, pp. 83–107, and his ‘The Fifteenth Century and Divine Absolute Power’, Vivarium, 1989, vol. 27, pp. 125–53, at 132–41, where he shows that some Scotists as well as Ockhamists shared this view. 28 See C.Normore, ‘Future contingents’, in N.Kretzmann, A.Kenny, J. Pinborg, and E.Stump (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1982, pp. 358–81, esp. 375–6, 378. 29 E.g., this is precisely the reason why Pomponazzi opted for the rigid determinism of the Stoics: God would not be God if his knowledge was dependent on the contingent acts of creatures since He himself would then act contingently; see Book V of his De fato. See also Kennedy, Peter of Ailly, pp. 111–41, 157; Leff, Bradwardine, p. 137, and his William of Ockham, pp. 447– 54. 30 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, V.6. 31 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 14, a. 13; see B.Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 134–6, who quotes at length Book I, lect. 14 of Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretation. 32 Valla, De libero arbitrio, ed. Anfossi, pp. 41–3, quoting Romans 9:11–21 and 11:33. 33 Ibid., p. 43, lines 669–75: ‘Nos porro hoc solum quaerimus, quonam modo Deus bonus est, auferens arbitrii libertatem; auferret autem si non esset possibile aliter evenire quam praescitum est. Nunc vero nullam necessitatem affert, nec privat nos libertate arbitrii hunc indurans, illius miserans, cum sapientissime ac sanctissime hoc agat; cuius causae rationem in quodam arcano quasi aerario absconditam collocavit.’ 34 Ibid., ed. Anfossi, pp. 44–6, at 45; cf. Fois, Pensiero, pp. 190, 192–3; and Fubini, ‘Lorenzo Valla’, p. 296. 35 Hence, he sums up the section (De libero arbitrio, ed. Anfossi, p. 47, lines 738–9) by quoting Paul, Romans 9:16: ‘Non est volentis neque currentis hominis, sed miserentis Dei.’ 36 The assertion is reported three times in his Tischreden; see Fois, Pensiero, p. 192, n. 107. 37 See G.W.Leibniz, Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal, preface and III.404–17; at § 413, ed. J. Jalabert, Paris, Aubert, 1962, pp. 44, 370–8. 38 See P.Vignaux, Justification et prédestination au XIVe siècle: Duns Scot, Pierre d’Auriole, Guillaume d’Occam, Grégoire de Rimini, Paris, Leroux, 1934, pp. 18 John Monfasani

28–31, 129–40; E.Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales, Paris, Vrin, 1952, pp. 599–624; Leff, William of Ockham, pp. 473–74, 481–3, 541–3; J.B.Korolec, ‘Free Will and Free Choice’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, pp. 629–41, at 638. 39 Vignaux, Justification, pp. 152–65; Leff, Gregory of Rimini, pp. 168–85, 192–6. 40 See Leff, Bradwardine, pp. 87–109, 117–18, 151–64. 41 Thomas was staunchly predestinarian; but since he believed God’s eternal providence took into account human and the grace He has given all men as well as his answering of petitionary prayer, his predestinarian scheme is more generous in allowing for human cooperation than those of Bradwardine and Gregory; see Davies, Thought, pp. 174–84, 335–9. 42 L.Valla, Epistole, ed. O.Besomi and M.Regoliosi, Padua, Antenore, 1984, p. 150, lines 149–52. 43 Vahlen, ‘Lorenzo Valla’, p. 395. 44 Valla, Dialectica (third redaction), I.2 (ed. Zippel, vol. I, p. 19, lines 21–5; I have altered the punctuation slightly): ‘…ut sol oculis colores corporum, ita Deus menti rerum qualitates ostendit et exhibet. Hoc nonnihil diverse protulit Plato in libris De re publica [VI, 508C–509B], cum ait veritatem esse velut solem, scientiam notitiamque veluti sincerum aspectum.’ 45 Ibid. (ed. Zippel, vol. I, p. 20, lines 5–10; I have altered the punctuation slightly): ‘Itaque in nobis, idest, in animo nostro, est veritas et falsitas; sed fons veritatis nostre in Deo, sicut nostre lucis in sole; falsitatis vero in obstructione divini fontis, sicut obscuritatis in subductione solis, ut proprie Deus sit veritas sicut sol lux, quod Plato modo sentiebat.’ 46 Medieval illuminationism clearly opted for the Platonic realist solution, as did Augustine in his early works such as the De magistro; but this is not as obvious in his later De trinitate; see R.A.Markus, ‘Marius Victorinus and Augustine’, in A.H.Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 327– 419, at 366–7. 47 See my ‘Disputationes Vallianae’, forthcoming in F.Mariani Zini (ed.), Philosophie et philologie au XVe siècle, Lille, Presses du Septentrion. 48 Lorenzo Valla, Elegantie, VI.33, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 215–16. 49 Valla, Dialectica (first redaction), I.13 (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 404, lines 14–17). 50 See H.Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon, 1981, p. 194, citing Richard’s De trinitate IV:21–2. 51 Ibid., citing Peter’s Theologia Christiana, III. 52 See P.Minges, Ioannis Duns Scoti doctrina philosophica et theologica, 2 vols, Quaracchi, Collegium S.Bonaventurae, 1930, vol. II, p. 222, num. 9, citing ’s Opus Oxoniense, 1, d. 23, n. 4. 53 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, q. 29, a. 2; and William of Ockham, In quatuor libros Sententiarum, 1, d. 23, q. 1, in his Opera plurima, 4 vols, , 1494–6; reprinted London, Gregg, 1962, vol. III, sig. z8r. 54 See D.Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento: ricerche storiche, Florence, Sansoni, 1939, p. 239. The theology of Lorenzo Valla 19

55 Valla, Dialectica (first redaction), I.13 (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 406, lines 9–11): ‘non quod dicam Patrem Filiumque et Spiritum Sanctum tantum esse qualitates, sed distingui invicem qualitate.’ 56 Ibid. (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 406, lines 12–32); Dialectica (second and third redactions), I.8 (ed. Zippel, vol. I, p. 52, lines 6–25, and p. 53, lines 7–10); in the later redactions, having compared the Father to the ‘vibratus, potentia, et, ut sic dicam, “vita” ipsa solis’ (p. 52, lines 7–9), he speaks of the Father as ‘solem potentem vivumque’ (ibid., lines 16–17) and drops vibrans. C.Trinkaus, ‘Lorenzo Valla on the Problem of Speaking about the Trinity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1996, vol. 57, pp. 27–53, at 35–6 and 45, cites the same passages but sees no connection to Sabellianism. 57 Valla, Dialectica (third redaction), I.13 (ed. Zippel, vol. I, p. 52, line 25 to p. 53, line 6). 58 Ibid, (first redaction), I.13 (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 406, line 32 to p. 408, line 20). 59 One argument, in fact, was quite beside the point. He said (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 408, lines 15–20) that he was content to ally himself with the Law Code of Justinian. Even though St Augustine had argued for the dual procession of the Holy Spirit a century earlier, the Code quoted the creed of the Council of Constantinople without the Filioque. But unless Valla was prepared to argue that civil authorities were the arbiters of Christian belief, this argument proved nothing since the exact date when Rome accepted the Filioque was never a serious issue at the Council of Ferrara-Florence. 60 See G.Zippel, ‘L’autodifesa di Lorenzo Valla per il processo dell’Inquisizione napoletana (1444)’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 1970, vol. 13, pp. 59–94. 61 In Valla, Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 795–800a. 62 Ibid, p. 800a: ‘Nam illa quae de Spiritu Sancto obiecerunt respondi mentiri eos qui me affirmasse aliquid contra ecclesiam criminarentur, sed aliqua vel ante concilium Florentinum vel ipsius concilii tempore, ut armatior [ed. armarior] pro Latinis essem, disseruisse confessus sum.’ 63 See L.Mohler, Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann, 3 vols, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 1923–42, vol. I: Darstellung, pp. 95–8, 117–242. 64 Not in the Defensio, but in the Apologia (Opera omnia, vol. 1, p. 798b, line 6 to p. 799, line 20). 65 Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. M.de Panizza Lorch, Bari, Adriatica, 1970, p. 114, lines 6–24; lines 10–24 are not in the first two redactions (1431 and 1433), but were added in the last two (after 1444). M.Lorch, A Defense of Life: Lorenzo Valla’s Theory of Pleasure, Munich, Wilhem Fink, 1985, p. 274, notes the addition but ignores its significance. 66 Valla, Dialectica (second and third redactions), I.10 (ed. Zippel, vol. I, p. 89, line 24 to p. 91, line 5); Dialectica (first redaction), I.14 (ed. Zippel, vol. II, p. 417, line 25 to p. 418, line 3). 67 E.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2.1, q. 16, a. 3. 68 See Minges, Doctrina, vol. II, pp. 703–4. 69 See Leff, William of Ockham, pp. 353, 498, 516, 520, 522–3. 70 I obviously disagree with Fois, Pensiero, p. 610, who characterizes Valla’s ethics as ‘un utilitarismo più di lessico che di contenuto’; see also ibid., p. 158, 20 John Monfasani

and the comments of Fubini quoted in n. 7 above. Mühlenberg, ‘Laurentius Valla als Renaissancetheologe’, pp. 475–8, tries to rescue Valla from his view of God as causa efficiens by interpreting him to mean that the love of God is pleasure, which is fine except that this does not explain why we should love God and still leaves open the question whether we love God for himself or for the pleasure we derive from loving God. 71 For the date see Fois, Pensiero, pp. 448–9 n. 25. What Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, vol. II, pp. 633–8, has to say about this oration tends towards panegyric; his assumption of acuity in Valla is, as Fubini (‘Lorenzo Valla’, p. 288) says of Camporeale’s position, ‘un’aprioristica presupposizione’. Equally determined to find what he wanted to find was D.Cantimori, ‘Atteggiamenti della vita culturale italiana nel secolo XVI di fronte alla Riforma’, Rivista storica italiana, 1936, ser. 5, vol. 1, pp. 41–69, at 42–3, who sees Valla arguing ‘con la pura ragione, senza neppure un gran bagaglio di cultura religiosa scritturale’, even though Valla assumes the Incarnation, the virginity and sinlessness of Mary and the Real Presence. 72 Lorenzo Valla, Sermo de mysterio Eucharistie, in Opera omnia, vol. II, pp. 66–7 (I have modernized the punctuation and modified the orthography): ‘Verum ut rationem quoque reddam, non video cur quibusdam tantopere hoc videatur credibile, panem converti in Deum, quamquam nescio an in Deum panis an Deus convertatur in panem, Deus tamen existens. Dicitur enim “verbum caro factum est”. Non autem caro facta est verbum. Et alibi: “ego sum panis vitae qui de caelo descendi”. Iam ante Eucharistiae sacramentum se panem vocat, quasi se ipsum conversurus in panem, hoc est, pro pane se daturus. Sed accipite quonam modo id sit intelligendum. Filius Dei in mundum veniens sumpsit ex intemeratissimo Virginis corpore nescio an dicam carnem. Nam caro proprie dicitur quae liquida non est, sed ex carne ut sic dicam nitidissimum florem. Quid dicis? Nonne caro illa sanctissima ex cibo facta est? Ita opinor. Quo autem ex cibo? Nempe ex pane. Neque enim sanctissimam Virginem ex carne victitasse credibile est. Ita fit ut prius panis, deinde caro fuerit id quod Dominus, dum incarnatus est, delibavit, quod anima hominis animavit pariter et divinitate implevit. Eadem ratione panem sacrosancti altaris in carnem convertens se ipsum, idest, hominem Deumque infundit.’ 73 Ibid., p. 69: ‘Sed ne plura quam proposui loquar, postquam ut potui ostendi quo modo Deus in panem vel panis in Deum convertatur, respondeam nunc illud quod promisi de huius mysterii laudibus.’ 74 See E.Mangenot, ‘VI. Eucharistie du XIIe au XVe siècle’, in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 17 vols, Paris, Letouzey et Ané, 1923–72, vol. V, cols 1302–26, at 1320–4; and G.Leff, Heresy in the Later : The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent c.1250–c.1450, 2 vols., Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1967, vol. II, pp. 549–57. 75 Berengar seems to have coined the Latin verb impanari; see J.de Ghellinck, ‘V. Eucharistie au XIIe siècle en Occident’, in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. V, cols 1233–1302, at 1286–7. 76 In her edition of Valla’s De professione religiosorum, Padua, Antenore, 1986, M.Cortesi, p. xliii, quotes from manuscript II, V, 140 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, containing Tizio’s Historiae Senenses, The theology of Lorenzo Valla 21

called to her attention by R.Fubini; see his ‘Una sconosciuta testimonianza manoscritta delle “Annotationes in Novum Testamentum” del Valla’, in O.Besomi and M.Regoliosi (eds), Lorenzo Valla e l’Umanesimo italiano: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi umanistici (Parma…1984), Padua, Antenore, 1986, pp. 179–96, at 184. In vol. IV, pp. 314–15 (ad annum 1455), Tizio criticized two assertions of Valla. The second is relevant to us: ‘Alterum vero nobis ingratum a Laurentio in oratione De Sacramento Eucharistiae turn fuit, cum diceret: “Quamquam nescio an panis convertatur in Deum an Deus convertatur in panem.” Sed nostrum non est quemquam iudicare.’ 77 Fois, Pensiero, p. 450, speaks of Valla merely using a paragone after the manner of St Ambrose, De mysteriis, chap. 9; St Bonaventure, In quatuor libros Sententiarum, 4, d. 10, p. 2, a. 1, q. 2, ad 2.; Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologiae, 4, q. 10, m. 5, a. 2; and St Bernardino of Siena, Quadragesimale de Evangelio Aeterno, Sermo 54, in his Opera omnia, 8 vols, Quaracchi and Florence, Collegium S.Bonaventurae, 1950–63, vol. V, p. 14. He eventually concedes, however (p. 451): ‘Questo parallelo, indubbiamente difettoso in se stesso, è troppo legato all’Incarnazione e quindi conduce l’Autore a una concezione inesatta e anche falsa della trasformazione eucaristica, cioè quasi a una nuova Incarnazione del Verbo Incarnato.’ 78 See the article ‘Consubstantiation’ by J.H.Crehan in A Catholic Dictionary of Theology, 3 vols, London, Nelson 1967, vol. II, pp. 114–17. 79 Ibid., p. 115. 80 Valla, De professione, p. 8: ‘Atque, ut exempla infinita preteream et ad theologiam, de qua scripturus sum, descendam, quid tandem de illa non audet scribere?…Quod ille [Horatius] de poetis [Epistulae, II. 1.17], ego de theologis dico.’ 81 Valla, Epistole, p. 192, lines 15–16. 82 See my review of Zippel’s edition of the Dialectica in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 1984, vol. 2, pp. 177–94, at 187–9, and of Cortesi’s edition of the De professione, ibid., 1987, vol. 5, pp. 351–65, at 357–8; both reviews are available as articles VI and VII in my Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy, Aldershot, Variorum, 1994. I do not see how Lorenzo’s distinction between ‘apocryphal’ and ‘false’ ruins my argument as Fubini asserts (‘Lorenzo Valla’, p. 315, n. 69). 83 S.Camporeale, ‘Lorenzo Valla e il “De falso credita donatione”: Retorica, libertà ed ecclesiologia nel ’400’, Memorie domenicane, 1988, n.s., vol. 19, pp. 191–293, stresses Valla’s condemnation of the ‘Constantinian Church;’ but I do not see how that is especially novel. Fois, Pensiero, pp. 296–7, and ‘Ancora su Lorenzo Valla’, p. 196, calls into question the of Valla’s advocacy of a ‘poor’ Church because of his own desire for a benefice and his praise of St Thomas of Canterbury for defending clerical privileges; but, in fact, the two positions are compatible. Valla did not deny property to the Church (e.g. Lorenzo Valla, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, ed. W.Setz, Weimar, Bohlau, p. 80, line 23 to p. 81, line 3: ‘Num Eleazar, num Phinees, num ceteri pontifices ministrique aut tabernaculi aut templi quicquam, nisi quod ad rem divinam pertineret, administrabant?’); he could justify moderate property as the means for the Church to carry on its 22 John Monfasani

religious and charitable duties without vast wealth or political power. Valla considered the Declamatio a rhetorical work; so it is not unfair that more recently, M.Caleo, Verità e certezza: Della Donazione di Costantino (Polemica con Lorenzo Valla), Naples, LER, 1990, has launched a rhetorical attack on its logic, sincerity and evidence. 84 See G.Antonazzi, Lorenzo Valla e la polemica sulla Donazione di Costantino, Rome, Storia e Letteratura, 1985, pp. 86–7, n. 59. 85 R.L.Guidi, ‘Lorenzo Valla e la vita dei claustrali’, Studi francescani, 1990, vol. 87, pp. 71–124, attributes the ferocity of Valla’s attack in part to his arrogance (pp. 72–8) and political interests at the time of King Alfonso (pp. 77, 79). 86 Valla, De professione, p. 14, § 1; pp. 23–32; 44, § 14; p. 60, §§ 2–3; pp. 63–4, §§20–5. 87 Fois, Pensiero, pp. 272–4. 88 Valla, De professione, pp. 32–5. 89 Fois, Pensiero, pp. 275–7. 90 Valla, De professione, pp. 35–41. 91 Fois, Pensiero, pp. 277–81. 92 Valla, De professione, pp. 50–5. 93 This is why Pope John XXII’s refusal from 1323 on to have the papacy act as the owner of the goods the Franciscans used caused such a furore. If the Franciscans actually owned the goods they used, their claim to absolute poverty evaporated. See M.Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210– 1323, London, SPCK, 1961, pp. 230–42. 94 See my ‘The Fraticelli and clerical wealth in Quattrocento Rome’, in J. Monfasani and R.Musto (eds), Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F.Rice, Jr., New York, Italica, 1991, pp. 175–95 (reprinted as article XIV in my Language and Learning); and my Fernando of Cordova: A Biographical and Intellectual Profile, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 82.6, Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1992, pp. 38–40. 95 Valla, De professione, pp. 45–6, § 4: ‘Nonne ante promiseras Deo, dum baptismate initiatus es, te honeste sancteque victurum, omnibus mandatis eius obedientem futurum? Quid sibi vult secunda promissio?’ 96 Ibid., p. 49, § 23: ‘Parere regule Deo est parere, non homini, quod et nos facimus, neque alia melior tradi regula potest quam est tradita a Christo atque apostolis.’ 97 Ibid., p. 63, § 19: ‘Profecto non minor, immo et maior, quia difficilior virtus abstinentie in rege; et peccanti pena minor, quia facilius crimen in rege inferende iniurie quam in privato. Ita in rebus divinis.’ The same logic was at work when he argued that ‘tamen fateamur maius premium deberi iis qui optime presunt quam qui optime obediunt’ (ibid., p. 48, § 19). 98 See F.Vandenbroucke, ‘La profession, seconde baptême’, La vie spirituelle, 1947, vol. 76.2 [no. 315], pp. 250–63, esp. 259–60, for the name ‘second baptism’ in the West. 99 Valla, De professione, p. 46, §4: ‘Quid sibi vult secunda promissio? Quid hominibus spondes quod Deo spoponderas?’ The theology of Lorenzo Valla 23

100 Ibid., pp. 47–8, §§8–14; see Cortesi in her edition of the De professione, p. lxii; and Camporeale, ‘Encomion s. Thomae’, p. 31. 101 Valla, De professione, p. 48, § 19: ‘Intelligis ergo prestantes viros non ad obedientiam vocandos sed ad imperium, inferiores vero ad obedientiam, dum tamen fateamur maius premium deberi iis qui optime presunt quam qui optime obediunt.’ 102 Lorenzo Valla, Antidotum Quartum in Poggium, in his Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 362–3; cf. ibid., vol. II, p. 362 (=R.Sabbadini, Cronologia documentata della vita di Lorenzo della Valle, detto il Valla, in L.Barozzi and R.Sabbadini, Studi sul Panormita e sul Valla [Florence, 1891], p. 56). 103 Fois, Pensiero, pp. 285–6, misses this change in Valla’s argument. 104 Valla, De professione, p. 56, § 4. 105 Ibid., p. 57, §§11–12. 106 Ibid., p. 57, § 14. 107 Ibid., pp. 57–60, §§ 15–28; Valla’s logic is not easy to follow here. 108 Ibid., pp. 60–5; emblematic is the comparison he makes at the start between Demosthenes, who in his weakness had to bind himself to correct a deformity, and Marius, who in his strength chose to undergo surgery without being held down. 109 Cortesi rightly stressed the oratorical character of the De professione in her introduction; see pp. lxxv and lxxxvii. 2 translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle

Charles H.Lohr

In an inventory which was compiled at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, Tommaso Parentucelli—who later became the humanistically inclined —listed the Greek commentaries on Aristotle which were current about the middle of the fifteenth century. His inventory deserves to be cited at length:

Of the Greeks who wrote commentaries on Aristotle, we have only the following in Latin: Themistius wrote on the Posterior Analytics, and also on De anima; Johannes Grammaticus [i.e. Philoponus] on the third book of De anima; Simplicius on the Categories, and also on De caelo; Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Meteorology; Ammonius on De interpretatione; Eustratius [of Nicaea] on the Ethics.1

If one adds the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias on De sensu which had also been translated in the medieval period, Parentucelli’s inventory matches exactly the list of the medieval Latin translations of the Greek Aristotle commentaries which the editors of the Aristoteles Latinus compiled in our century. James of and Gerard of in the twelfth century and Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke in the thirteenth accomplished much with their Latin translations of the Greek commentaries from the Greek and the Arabic. But Parentucelli’s inventory reveals that the Latin Middle Ages had only a very thin selection of the Aristotle commentaries of the Greek tradition at its

24 Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 25 disposal. At the same time, Parentucelli’s complaint ‘we have only’ (‘non habemus nisi’) shows that around the middle of the fifteenth century it was realized just how thin the medieval selection was.

1. Ermolao Barbaro’s translation of the Paraphrases of Themistius Medieval philosophical speculation was dominated by Islamic Neoplatonism and, above all, by Averroës. The few Greek commentators who were translated were thought of as help for the comprehension—and later, the correction—of the Arabic ‘Commentator’. But in the century which followed the in the year 1453 almost the entire corpus of the Greek commentators on Aristotle was made available in Greek editions and Latin translations. The humanist movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made possible a completely new approach to Aristotle’s works. The earliest translations of the Greek commentators were made in Italy—in Padua and —around the end of the fifteenth century. Theodore Gaza turned the attention of the scholars of his time to the classical Greek commentators on Aristotle with his translation of the Problemata of Pseudo-Alexander of Aphrodisias (1452/3). Shortly thereafter and inspired by Gaza’s translation, Ermolao Barbaro published a version of the Paraphrases of Themistius on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Physics and De anima, which opened a new period in the interpretation of the Greek philosopher. Although the translation appeared only in 1481, the young Venetian patrician had completed it during the years of his study of philosophy in Padua in 1472/3.2 In the dedication of his translation Barbaro tells us that he was following in the footsteps of Gaza under whom he had studied Greek in Rome. Gaza had, in fact, translated not only the Problemata of Pseudo-Alexander, but also the Aristotelian works De animalibus and Problemata. The scholarly atmosphere of the time in Padua was very favourable to Barbaro’s project. During the period of his studies in Padua the Aristotelian was professor of philosophy in the university. Vernia was well known not only for his editions of Aristotle, Averroës and various scholastic authors, he was also a friend of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and highly regarded in humanistic circles. Vernia used Barbaro’s translation of Themistius in his interpretation of the Posterior Analytics and later also Donato’s new version of Alexander’s De anima. Barbaro praised Vernia as a commentator on Aristotle who not only rejected that ‘most abhorrent 26 Charles H.Lohr manner of philosophizing’ (‘scelestissimum genus philosophandi’) used by the scholastics, but also found a style which was acceptable to the literati. Barbaro’s own intention was to make Themistius available to the Latin world ‘in Roman dress’. In his dedication he tells us that this is the purpose of his translation: ‘I have not translated literally but freely; and in translating I have used figures and tropes—in the Roman manner, without altering the sense.’3 Barbaro’s translation was an immediate success. A second edition appeared in 1499, shortly after his death. In the next 70 years the translation was reprinted fifteen times.

2. The Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca of The publication of Barbaro’s translation of Themistius inaugurated a new period in the study of Aristotelian philosophy. In his version of Themistius’s Paraphrases we encounter not simply a translation occasioned by contemporary controversies, as was often the case in the Middle Ages. Rather Barbaro’s version brings together a corpus of the commentaries of Themistius on Aristotelian philosophy: the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De anima and Parva naturalia.4 The corpus reflects a tendency in Byzantium to bring together the works of different authors on the various parts of Aristotelian philosophy. After the end of the Latin domination in Byzantium in the late thirteenth century, interest in classical philosophical works enjoyed a renaissance in the Greek world. During this period, and up to the time of the Turcocracy, the number of the manuscripts of the ancient Aristotle commentators steadily increased. In the manuscripts we discover the intention to form corpora of the commentaries, either (a) of the works of an author on the different Aristotelian books (as in the case of the Paraphrases of Themistius), or (b) of the commentaries of different authors on an individual work (for example, Philoponus and Simplicius on the Physics) or (c) of the commentaries on the different parts of the logic or the natural philosophy (for example, Philoponus on the Physics and De generatione, Alexander on the Meteorology, Themistius on De anima). This effort of the Byzantines to collect their intellectual heritage found a strong echo in sixteenth-century Italy.5 At the end of the fifteenth century, the Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius sketched plans for a corpus of all the Greek commentaries on Aristotle.6 Although we are accustomed to think of Aldus as publisher of the classical , historians and orators, his publishing activity was not limited to the editions of Greek and Latin literature. He also undertook the publication of the Greek originals of works of ancient philosophy Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 27 and —works which formed the basis of the philosophical activity of the for a century. Following on his complete edition of the Opera graece of Aristotle, which was finished at the end of the fifteenth century, Aldus planned a corpus of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle. In the dedicatory epistle to of Carpi which precedes the Aristotle edition, Aldus describes his project of publishing the commentaries of Ammonius, Simplicius, Porphyry, Alexander, Philoponus and Themistius. The prince of Carpi was the well-known Alberto Pio, nephew of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and generous patron of the study of Aristotle in Italy.7 Through his patronage the first volume in the series was able to appear in 1503. It contains the Greek text of Ammonius Hermeae, In Categorias Aristotelis (actually by Johannes Philoponus), together with commentaries on De interpretatione by Ammonius, Michael Psellus and Leo Magentinus. The second volume of the series appeared a year later. It contains the Greek original of Johannes Philoponus, In Posteriora resolutoria Aristotelis commentaria. Shortly before Aldus’s death in 1515, Alexander’s commentary In Topica (1513) was published. Aldus’s heirs continued the project to 1551. Two other publishers helped complete Aldus’s project. Giovanni Antonio de Nicolinis, who was active in Venice and from 1521 to 1542, published in 1526 the Greek text of Johannes Philoponus, In De generatione animalium (which is actually the work of the Byzantine Aristotle commentator Michael of Ephesus). Ten years later Giovanni Francesco Trincavello edited in the house of Bartolomeo Zanetti the Quaestiones naturales et morales of Alexander of Aphrodisias as well as Johannes Philoponus’s commentaries In Analytica priora, In Physica and In De anima (of dubious authenticity). If we include the editions of de Nicolinis and Trincavello, the corpus of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle which the sixteenth century had at its disposal through the plan of Aldus Manutius can only be compared with the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (CAG) prepared by the Berlin Academy of in the nineteenth century. If we study this list closely, we observe that in comparison with the CAG only the commentaries of Syrianus and Asclepius on the Metaphysics and those of Olympiodorus, Elias and on the logic were not published in Greek during the Renaissance. If, on the other hand, we compare the editions of the Greek originals brought out by Aldus and others with the Latin versions that medieval scholars had at their disposal, we have to be impressed at the which the 28 Charles H.Lohr

Table 2.1 Renaissance editions of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, in Greek and Latin translation Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 29

Table 2.1 (continued) 30 Charles H.Lohr

Renaissance represents. The Middle Ages knew only Simplicius, In Categorias (printed in 1499); Ammonius, In Perihermenias (1503); Simplicius, In De caelo (1526); Alexander, In Meteora (1527); Themistius (1534); Philoponus (of dubious authenticity), In De anima (1535); and Eustratius et al., In Ethica (1536).

3. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca: Versiones Latinae

Aldus seems also to have planned a series of Latin translations which should accompany his corpus. In 1502 the Greek scholar Marcus Musurus, who was in Aldus’s employ, translated the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Topica (Books I–IV) into Latin: the translation appeared in 1513 together with the Greek original. In 1505 Musurus translated Johannes Philoponus, In De generatione et corruptione. The translation is preserved in a Vatican manuscript, but was never printed. The series of translations was not continued by Aldus’s heirs after his death. It was only in the fourth decade of the Cinquecento that the idea of a corpus of Latin translations was realized by a Venetian family of printers. Octavianus Scotus I (1440–98), a contemporary of Aldus Manutius, was active in Venice from 1479. His publishing house and that of his heirs is best known for their editions of the music of the period; but they also printed texts for use in the . With the brothers Octavianus II (d. c. 1552) and Hieronymus (d. 1572) (nephews of Octavianus I) the emphasis of the publishing house shifted to philosophical works, above all, to the Greek commentators on Aristotle in Latin translation. In the years between 1539 and 1546 the brothers published translations of almost all the commentaries which Aldus and his colleagues had made available in the Greek original. Especially Hieronymus Scotus seems to have made the plan of a Latin corpus of the Greek translations on Aristotle his own. In 1539 the book with which the corpus of the Latin translations was to begin was issued from his printing house. It contains the commentary of Johannes Philoponus on the Posterior Analytics.8 The translation was made by the physician Andreas Gratiolus on the basis of the Greek edition of 1504. The edition of Venice 1542 reprints Gratiolus’s translation of the commentary on the Posterior Analytics in the revised form which had been made by Philippus Theodosius of Macerata on the basis of the Greek original. In this form, Philoponus’s commentary was quickly disseminated; within twenty years it was reprinted six times in Venice and once in Paris. Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 31

4. The influence of the Latin translations Charles Schmitt, late of the Warburg Institute, published some years ago an important study of the influence of the Aristotle commentaries of Johannes Philoponus, particularly in connection with the development of physical theory in the sixteenth century.9 Here I can only indicate some avenues for further related research. The success of Gratiolus’s translation of Philoponus on the Posterior Analytics is certainly to be associated with the attempts which at the time were being made at the University of Padua to find a new concept of science—one which would free the Aristotelianism of the Renaissance from the idea which the medieval scholastics had inherited from Averroës, that Aristotle’s works offer a systematic presentation of scientific truth. Also in connection with the theory of science, Philoponus’s commentary In Analytica priora was rendered into Latin by the well- known translator of Greek philosophical works, Guglielmo Doroteo. The Greek text of the commentary had been published for the first time by Vittorio Trincavello in 1536 in Venice. It was printed together with the commentary of the Byzantine Aristotelian commentator Leo Magentinus on the Prior Analytics and a short anonymous tract De syllogismis. Doroteo’s Latin translation of the Prior Analytics was published in 1541. The work was very quickly disseminated, permitting Philoponus’s conception of the system of logic as divided into the doctrine of concept, judgement and reasoning to enjoy great influence.10 In the traditional logic of subsequent centuries, it became the principle in accordance with which numberless textbooks were written. The famous textbook, for example, of Port Royal, La logique ou l’art de penser by and Pierre Nicole (Paris, 1662), is organized in accordance with Philoponus’s view: the first three parts of the book are dedicated to ‘idées’, ‘jugements’ and ‘raisonnement’, in that sequence.

5. Translations of Byzantine Aristotle commentaries

The Berlin corpus of the CAG is limited to the ancient Greek commentaries on Aristotle. With the exception of Eustratius of Nicaea’s commentary In Ethicam (which includes parts which are ancient) and a commentary on the Sophistici elenchi ascribed to Alexander (which is actually the work of Michael of Ephesus), Byzantine works are excluded from the CAG. The Greek editions and Latin versions of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca of the sixteenth century know no such limitation. 32 Charles H.Lohr

The commentaries of Michael Psellus (d. c. 1087) on the logic and physics of Aristotle were translated in the Italian Renaissance into Latin as part of a vast effort to make the Greek tradition of Aristotle interpretation fruitful for Western speculation. Whereas the Latin Middle Ages knew only a few of Psellus’s works, from the middle of the fifteenth century they were highly regarded, particularly in connection with the revival of Platonism.11 In this context Psellus’s Aristotle commentaries were also made available to the Latins. Several of the commentaries concerned logic and influenced the sixteenth- century theory of science. The Greek text of Psellus’s Paraphrasis in librum De interpretatione appeared as early as 1503 in Venice. His Compendium quinque vocum and Compendium decem praedicamentorum were edited in Greek by Arsenius, the archbishop of Monemvasia. In the 1540s these texts were translated into Latin. Psellus’s commentary on Book II of the Posterior Analytics in the translation of Emmanuel Margunius appeared in 1574 at Venice. The of a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics by Michael Psellus was apparently known to the older Italian humanists through various manuscripts.12 The work was translated into Latin by Giovanni Battista Camozzi on the basis of a Paris manuscript. His translation appeared in 1554 at Venice as Psellus, In Physicen Aristotelis commentarii.13 Camozzi is best known as a translator of Greek commentaries on Aristotle. He produced Latin versions of Olympiodorus’s In Meteora Aristotelis commentarii, Johannes Philoponus’s Scholia in primum Meteororum Aristotelis (both 1551), as well as Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Commentaria in Aristotelis Meteorologica (1556). He was also the editor of the ‘Aldina minor’, the Greek edition of Aristotle’s Opera omnia which was printed in six volumes by the heirs of Aldus Manutius in 1551–3. The translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle which were made in the sixteenth century are witnesses to a profound change in the understanding not only of Aristotelian logic, but also of Peripatetic natural philosophy. Numerous humanistically minded translators undertook the task of liberating Aristotle’s natural philosophy from the one-sidedness of the Averroist-scholastic interpretation through the Greek tradition. As I have noted, Charles Schmitt underlined some years ago the importance of the commentaries of Johannes Philoponus in this movement. The translation of Psellus on the Physics was another step in this direction. A further step may be seen in the Latin translation of Theodorus Metochites’s fourteenth-century Paraphrasis in Aristotelis universam naturalem philosophiam. The translation is the work of the Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 33 well-known translator of Sextus Empiricus, Gentian Hervet.14 His translation, which appeared in in 1559, contains the works of Aristotle on natural philosophy. The Paraphrasis does not include Aristotle’s Metaphysics, since Metochites believed that it would have been better had this treatise never been written. Hervet’s Latin version represents the editio princeps of Metochites’s work; for although the Paraphrasis is preserved in a beautifully written manuscript which was prepared for a Medici prince in the fifteenth century, it was never published in Greek. Hervet’s translation was apparently occasioned by the sceptical movement of the sixteenth century. Metochites’s attitude to Aristotle’s Metaphysics seems also to have played a role. In his later years Hervet apparently saw a precursor for his own attitude regarding the ancient philosophers in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, nephew of Giovanni Pico, who had attempted ‘to protect Christian doctrine by demonstrating the uncertainty of the teaching of the pagan philosophers’.

6. The translation of the commentary on the Metaphysics ascribed to Philoponus Of the works of Johannes Philoponus the Latin Middle Ages knew only the Commentum super capitulum de intellectu in libro III Aristotelis De anima, which had been translated in 1268 by William of Moerbeke in connection with the controversies about Aristotle’s theory of intellect. The revolutionary reinterpretation of the Aristotelian natural philosophy from a Christian standpoint which Philoponus undertook in his works against Proclus and in his later Aristotle commentaries became known in the course of the sixteenth century as (almost) the entire corpus of Philoponus’s commentaries on the works of Aristotle was published.15 In the context of these publications the well-known philosopher Francesco Patrizi translated a commentary on the Aristotelian Metaphysics which was ascribed to Johannes Philoponus and published in Ferrara in 1583.16 The commentary appears to have interested Patrizi in connection with the question of the relative superiority of Plato over Aristotle. In 1571 he had published in Venice his Discussiones peripateticae in which he argued that Platonic philosophy was more open than Aristotelianism to Christianity. The commentary on the Metaphysics fitted into Patrizi’s anti- Aristotelian programme. It seems to have been above all the anti- Aristotelian positions which Philoponus took in his various works which drew Patrizi’s attention to the commentary. Philoponus claimed 34 Charles H.Lohr in his Contra Proclum to give ‘the true interpretation of Platonic thought’ and took clear positions against the Aristotelian conception of place, time, motion and the possibility of a vacuum. The fact that the commentary on the Metaphysics—like the pre-Plotinian commentators in general—leaves the differences between Plato and Aristotle untouched and does not attempt to harmonize them was possibly the immediate occasion of Patrizi’s translation.17 The commentary, which, as a matter of fact, belongs to the period before the Neoplatonic transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics, was in Patrizi’s view of great value, not only on account of its high philosophical level, but also because it explains the last two books which were unknown to the Latin Middle Ages.18 Through these Latin translations the Greek commentaries on Aristotle contributed to the Renaissance liberation of science from the one-sided interpretation of the Philosopher which the scholastics had inherited from Averroës.

Biographical appendix Barbaro, Ermolao (Barbarus, Hermolaus) Ermolao Barbaro was born in Venice in 1454 and died in Rome in 1493. He studied in Rome from 1460 to 1470 and in Padua from 1471 to 1474. From 1474 to 1476 he taught moral philosophy (Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics) at Padua. By 1477 he was artium et utriusque iuris doctor. In 1491 he was named Patriarch of Aquileia.

Camozzi, Giovanni Battista (Camotius, Johannes Baptista) Giovanni Battista Camozzi (d. 1581) studied medicine and then philosophy in Bologna under the famous Aristotelian, Lodovico Boccadiferro (Ludovicus Buccaferrea). In 1545 he delivered the funeral oration for Boccadiferro in Bologna. In 1549 he was teaching rhetoric in the university there. In 1550 Pope Julius III appointed him to the chair of philosophy in the Spanish College in Bologna. From 1555 he taught philosophy in the University of Macerata. About the year 1559 he was called to Rome by Pope Pius IV and commissioned to translate the Greek . In addition to his translations, Camozzi composed, in Greek, commentaries on the first book of Theophrastus’s Metaphysics and on Book M of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

Donato, Girolamo (Donatus, Hieronymus) , a Venetian noble, who had studied Latin and Greek in Venice before going on to theology in Padua, also shared the interest Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 35 of his friend Barbaro in the Greek text of Aristotle. It was to him that Barbaro dedicated his translation of Themistius’s commentary on De somno et vigilia. Some fifteen years later, Donato himself translated the first book of De anima by Alexander of Aphrodisias.

Doroteo, Guglielmo (Dorotheus, Guillelmus) Guglielmo Doroteo was born between 1500 and 1510 in Venice. After his entrance into the Order of Augustinian Hermits he was made baccalaureus in 1526 and taught in Rome. In 1539 he was promoted to magister theologiae. In the following year he returned to Venice where he taught in the Studium of the Order. He was regent there until 1564. From 1566 to 1571 Doroteo was lector in the monasteries of the Camaldoli and the Canons Regular of the Holy Spirit in Venice. In 1583 he was appointed to the public chair for philosophy in the University of Pavia. The year of his death is unknown. The translations which Doroteo published between 1539 and 1544 concerned above all Aristotelian logic. He translated not only Philoponus on the Prior Analytics (1541), but also Simplicius on the Categories (1540), Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Topics and (Pseudo-) Alexander on the Sophistici elenchi (all 1541), in addition to Philoponus’s In Physicam (1539) and Simplicius’s In De caelo (1544).

Graziolo, Andrea (Gratiolus, Andreas) Andrea Graziolo was active as a physician in different north Italian cities from 1552. He had studied philosophy and medicine at the . He seems to have been interested especially in the theory of what science is; he translated not only the work of Philoponus, but also Eustratius’s Commentaria in II librum Posteriorum resolutivorum Aristotelis (Venice, 1542). He also edited Avicenna, [Canonis] liber primus de universalibus medicae scientiae praeceptis (Venice, 1580).

Hervet, Gentian (Hervetus, Gentianus) Gentian Hervet (d. 1584) was a committed churchman, who after studies in the universities of Orleans and Paris lived in the household of Reginald Pole, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal, at first in then—as Pole had, because of the , to leave England—in Padua, Venice and Rome. Hervet took part with Marcello Cervini (later Pope Marcellus II) in the first sessions of the . He returned to in 1555 as vicar general to the bishop of Noyon and wrote pamphlets against the . In 1561 he entered the service of the Cardinal of Lorraine, 36 Charles H.Lohr

Charles de Guise, whom he accompanied to the third period of the Council of Trent (1562–3). In 1564 he took part as canon of the cathedral in the provincial council in Rheims, in which the cardinal published the decrees of the Council of Trent. About the time of his activity in the Council of Trent the focal point of Hervet’s translations shifted. He translated not only the Greek Fathers of the Church, but in addition, under the influence of academic scepticism as represented also by Reginald Pole, Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus mathematicos (Paris, 1569). He had long been active as translator of works connected with the Aristotelian philosophy. During an earlier sojourn in Rome, he published a number of philosophical texts which concerned the controversies surrounding Pietro Pomponazzi. In 1544 he translated into Latin Aristotle’s De anima, together with the commentary of Johannes Philoponus. There followed translations of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De fato (1544) and Quaestiones naturales et morales (1548) and of Zacharias Scholasticus’s Ammonius: Dialogus quod mundus non sit Deo coaeternus (1546). In these works Hervet described those who denied the immortality of the soul as atheists and as opponents of Aristotle and his commentators.

Patrizi, Francesco (Patritius, Franciscus) In 1571 Patrizi published in Venice his Discussiones peripateticae, in which, against the dominant position of Aristotle in , he argued that the Platonic philosophy was more conducive to Christianity. As professor of Platonic philosophy in the University of Ferrara (from 1577 on), Patrizi translated into Latin Proclus’s Elementa theologica et physica. As professor (from 1591) in the Sapienza in Rome, he published his Nova de universis philosophia of 1591 with various appendices of which one of the most important contained the so-called Theology of Aristotle. The work was printed under the title Mystica Aegyptiorum et Caldaeorum a Platone voce tradita, ab Aristotele excepta et conscripta philosophia, in a Latin translation which had been made as early as 1519.

Notes 1 ‘Graecorum, qui commentati sunt Aristotelem, latine non habemus nisi hos, qui sequuntur: Themistius scripsit in libros Posteriorum, item in libros De anima. Johannes Grammaticus in tertium De anima. Simplicius in librum Praedicamentorum, item in libros De caelo et mundo. Alexander Aphrodisaeus in libros Meteororum. Ammonius in librum Perihermenias. Eustachius [recte: Eustratius of Nicaea] in libros Ethicorum’: see G. Sforza, ‘La patria, la Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 37

famiglia e la giovinezza di papa Niccolò V, Atti della R.Accademia Lucchese, 1884, vol. 23, pp. 377–8; cited in Aristoteles Latinus, Rome, La libreria dello stato, 1939, Codices: I, ed. G.Lacombe, p. 95. 2 Barbaro’s project should be seen in the context of late fifteenth-century Padua, where Demetrius Chalcondyles, a pupil and friend of Gaza, had been appointed in 1463 the first professor of Greek in the university. As such he remained there until the year 1472. Chalcondyles’s emphasis on the importance of the for the understanding of Aristotle’s works amounted to a criticism of the medieval Latin versions of these works. 3 ‘In litteris vertendis…non expressimus verbum e verbo…sed libere, et translationibus et figuris et tropis usi sumus—ad morem Romanum, sensibus stantibus.’ 4 We should note that the commentaries on the Parva naturalia cannot be ascribed to Themistius himself. They are the work of a Byzantine author named Sophonias who flourished around the early fourteenth century. The inclusion of these commentaries was apparently meant to complete the coverage of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Barbaro’s translation was based on one of the late Greek manuscripts in which the De anima commentary of Themistius is joined with those of Sophonias on the Parva naturalia. 5 At the end of the fifteenth century, the two Venetian publishers, Aldus Manutius and Nicolaus Vlastos, sketched, independently of one another, plans for a corpus of all the Greek commentaries on Aristotle. The corpus of the house of Vlastos remained a torso. Zacharias Callierges from Crete edited for him the Greek originals of Simplicius, Hypomnemata in Aristotelis Categorias (1499) and Ammonius, Hypomnemata in quinque voces Porphyrii (1500). But the series was not continued. 6 In November 1495 Aldus wrote to his patron Alberto Pio, prince of Carpi and nephew of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the following letter: ‘Habes nunc a me libros Aristotelis logicae disciplinae. Habebis, Deo favente, et philosophicos—turn morales turn physicos—et quoscunque ille divinus magister legendos posteritati reliquit, modo extent. Erunt deinde a me tibi et ceteris studiosis commentatores Aristotelis: Ammonius, Simplicius, Porphyrius, Alexander, Philoponus, et Themistius paraphrastes’; printed in G.Orlandi (ed.), Aldo Manuzio editore: Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, 2 vols, Milan, Il Polifilo, 1975, vol. I, p. 7 [IIIB]; see also pp. 13–14 [VII], 14– 17 [VIII], 17–18 [IX], 77–8 [XLIX], 124–7 [LXXIX]). Although Aldus was able within a year of this letter to inform Pio that he had already collected copies of almost all of the Greek commentators on the Corpus aristotelicum, he published only the Greek texts of the commentaries of Ammonius, Philoponus and Alexander on Aristotle’s logic before his death in 1515. It was left to his heirs in the 1520s and 30s to complete his corpus with Aristotle’s natural philosophy: 1526 Simplicius on the Physics and De caelo; 1527 Philoponus on De generatione et corruptione, Alexander on the Meteorology, Simplicius on De anima, Alexander and the Byzantine Michael of Ephesus on the Parva naturalia; 1536 Eustratius of Nicaea on the Ethics. On Aldus see M.Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Oxford, Blackwell, 1979; M.Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice, London, British Library, 1995. 38 Charles H.Lohr

7 C.B.Schmitt, ‘Alberto Pio and the Aristotelian studies of his time’, in Società, politica e cultura a Carpi ai tempi di Alberto Pio, Padua, Antenore, 1981, pp. 43–64; reprinted in his book The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities, London, Variorum, 1984, ¶ VI. 8 The book appeared under the title: Expositiones dilucidae in primum et secundum Posteriorum, iam pridem latinitati donatae…cum textu ipsius Aristotelis. The phrase in the title, ‘iam pridem latinitati donatae’, refers most probably to the translation made in 1524 by Eufrosino Bonini (fl. 1497–1524), professor of Greek language and literature in the universities of Florence and Pisa, which is preserved in two manuscripts. 9 C.B.Schmitt, ‘Philoponus’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics in the sixteenth century’, in R.Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, London, Duckworth, 1987, pp. 210–30. 10 Doroteo’s translation of Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle’s Topics made available a work which was unknown in the Latin Middle Ages. Boethius’s adaptations of the Topics were based on Cicero. Alexander’s commentary appeared on the Western scene only in the Renaissance. In 1513 Aldus Manutius printed the Greek text in Venice as part of his project to produce a corpus of the Greek commentaries. Italian scholars showed great interest in the commentary. A translation of the first four books was completed by Marcus Musurus at the insistence of Alberto Pio; it is preserved in a Vatican manuscript. The whole commentary was translated in 1521 by Bartolomeo Zamberti and is found in a Munich manuscript together with the complete text of Aristotle’s work. In 1541 Doroteo’s translation of Alexander’s commentary on the Topics was published by Hieronymus Scotus. Doroteo translated the commentary shortly after he had come from Naples to Venice in 1540; he based his translation on the Aldine text and added the lemmata of the Aristotelian text. The translation appears to have been well received; a reprint appeared in Paris as early as 1542. In 1547 Hieronymus Scotus published in Venice an anonymous revision of Doroteo’s translation, in which the first chapters of the first books were completely revised. Marcus Antonius Muretus translated Book VII of the commentary (Venice, 1554), Petrus Gherardus Book III (Florence, 1569) and Johannes Baptista Rasarius the entire work (Venice, 1573). 11 Psellus’s commentaries on Aristotle were regarded as a possible alternative to the Averroist understanding of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, although the Renaissance associated Psellus above all with the Platonic tradition. Giovanni Tortelli (d. c. 1466) had turned the attention of the humanists to Psellus’s work with his translations (preserved in manuscript) of the Expositio in Chaldaica eloquia and Expositio Chaldaicorum dogmatum. In 1497 published in Venice a Latin translation of a (perhaps spurious) work De demonibus, which then was included in the editions of Ficino’s Opera. Almost 100 years later there appeared in Paris the Greek text of Psellus’s scholia on the Oracula magica Zoroastris with a Latin translation by Johannes Opsopaeus (d. 1596). Shortly thereafter (1591) the well-known philosopher Francesco Patrizi published in Ferrara a Latin translation of the Expositio Chaldaicorum dogmatum and the Expositio dogmatum Assyriorum under the title Zoroaster et eius Oracula Chaldaica in his Nova de universis philosophia. Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 39

In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scholarly interest in Psellus’s philosophical and theological works increased—especially in writings on alchemy and the occult sciences. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Johann Albert Fabricius published the important work, De omnifaria doctrina, with a Latin translation in his Bibliotheca graeca (Hamburg, 1712). 12 A manuscript of the Physics commentary, preserved in Paris, was copied in the years between 1455 and 1465 by Michael Apostolius (d. c. 1480), who had fled from Constantinople. The Greek text of the commentary is preserved in twelve manuscripts. 13 Among the tracts on logic which are ascribed to Psellus, one testifies—in an unexpected way—to the scholarly exchange between Greek and Latin Aristotelians. In a Munich manuscript a Greek tract with the title: is preserved, which claims to be a work of Psellus. The was published in Greek as a work of Psellus with a Latin translation in Augsburg in 1597. The translation was by Elias Ehinger (d. 1653), who was rector of the Gymnasium Portense in the same city. The fact that the manuscript ascribes the tract to Psellus gave rise to considerable confusion in the logic. The is a Greek translation, made in the fifteenth century by Georgius Scholarius, of a well-known medieval schooltext, the Summulae logicales of Petrus Hispanus. 14 The first edition of the translation which appeared in Basel in 1559 contains the works of Aristotle in the order in which they are found in the older manuscripts of Metochites’s Paraphrasis: Physica, De anima, De caelo, De ortu, Parva naturalia, Meteora. The tracts De animalibus and the commentary on De sensu, as well as the prooemium to the entire collection, are lacking. 15 The Greek originals of several of Philoponus’s commentaries were edited by Vittorio Trincavello. The leading translators of the period made the commentaries available in Latin. They were highly regarded by many contemporary philosophers. As noted, Charles Schmitt called attention to the importance of Philoponus’s commentary on the Physics for the development of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century (see n. 9 above). The success of Philoponus’s commentaries gave the occasion for editions and translations of other expressly anti-Aristotelian works of Philoponus. The work Contra Proclum De aeternitate mundi was edited in Greek by Vittorio Trincavello in Venice as early as 1535. Gaspar Marcellus (fl. 1525–50, professor of medicine in Padua) published in 1551 in Venice a Latin translation of the work. A second Latin translation was made by Johannes Mahotius (d. 1555/6, professor in Turin). His work appeared in 1557 in under the title In Procli XVIII Argumenta de mundi aeternitate. Balthasar Cordier (d. 1650, Jesuit and professor of theology in Vienna) published the Greek text of Philoponus’s commentary on Genesis, De opificio mundi, with a Latin translation. 16 The preface to the translation of the commentary on the Metaphysics ascribed to Johannes Philoponus informs the reader that Patrizi had found the Greek text of the commentary in a monastery in Cyprus. The manuscript was written on parchment, the script very old. The manuscript clearly ascribed the work as being ‘Johannis Philoponi’. Patrizi brought the manuscript with him to Italy where he translated the commentary into Latin. In 1575 King Philip II of 40 Charles H.Lohr

acquired the manuscript from Patrizi for the library of the Escorial; but it was destroyed in the fire of 1651 which caused great damage to that library. 17 To undermine the of the Aristotelian writings Patrizi proposed many doubts about the authenticity and integrity of some of the works which circulated under Aristotle’s name. The commentary on the Metaphysics gave him support, for it claimed that book a did not belong to Aristotle’s treatise; according to a note in the commentary which seems to go back to Asclepius, the book was ascribed in antiquity to Pasicrates, the nephew of Aristotle’s pupil, Eudemus. 18 At the same time, Patrizi seems to have had an intimation of the fact that the author of the commentary on the Metaphysics cannot have been identical with Johannes Philoponus. According to the foreword of his publisher, Patrizi held the mos commentandi to be quite different from the commentaries on Aristotle which were regarded as authentic works of Philoponus. 3 From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi Uses of the dialogue in Renaissance Aristotelianism*

Luca Bianchi

It is well known that the dialogue enjoyed an extraordinary success during the Renaissance. Many studies, especially in the past few decades, have tried to describe this phenomenon and understand its roots. It is generally agreed that this literary genre was preferred to others because it reflected the ideas, tastes and intellectual attitudes of humanists, in particular, their confidence in the persuasive power of the word, their understanding of the relationship between and rhetoric, their ‘amateurish’ view of learning as an informal exchange of ideas among free men and, finally, their desire to imitate those classical authors—both Greek (Plato, Xenophon, ) and Latin (Cicero)— who had favoured the dialogue as a genre.1 Certain Renaissance historians have, however, overestimated the merits of their particular period, producing incomplete and one-sided evaluations, which have, in turn, sparked off reactions on the part of medievalists. Recently, Peter von Moos has demolished the view, promoted by Bakhtin and his followers, that the dialogue-centred culture of the fifteenth century overcame ‘the authoritarian structure of monologue-based discourse’, which had supposedly reigned, without competition, for a thousand years. In fact, from Carolingian times onwards, it is easy to find dialogues on , pedagogical, political, philosophical and theological subjects. Furthermore, some of these dialogues are by no means merely vehicles of indoctrination, but are instead sophisticated and mature works, in both literary and intellectual terms.2 There is, however, at least one field (ironically, the least studied of all) in which the expression ‘renaissance of the dialogue’ can be used with full justification: the recovery of the dialogue as a means of explaining, interpreting, discussing and spreading Aristotle’s thought. This constitutes not only one of the most interesting contributions of humanism to Aristotelian studies, but also represents an important

41 42 Luca Bianchi transformation in the style of philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, this use of the dialogue seems to have gone virtually unnoticed, both by scholars who have studied the Aristotelian tradition,3 and by those who have analysed philosophical and scientific communication, whether from a theoretical,4 or a historical perspective.5 It has been equally neglected by the many historians of literature who have attempted to prove that the dialogue was the most characteristic literary genre of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the emblematic expression of a pluralistic culture devoted to conversation and reluctant to construct rigid theoretical systems.6 When Boethius introduced the dialogue into the Latin Aristotelian tradition, he found inspiration in the models provided by the Latin authors Cicero and St Augustine, on the one hand, and the Greek philosopher Porphyry, on the other. Boethius’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, in the Latin translation of Marius Victorinus, relates the explanations which he imagines himself giving to ‘Fabius’, a young man who spurs him on by asking questions or by quoting entire passages from the Isagoge that require explanation.7 The example of Boethius was not, however, followed by medieval Aristotelian commentators. True, there are some manuscripts (the oldest of which dates from the ninth century) containing the Disputatio Platonis et Aristotelis, a short dialogue on the nature of the soul with some Aristotelian elements; but this work is merely a Christian reworking of a spurious pagan text.8 The Excerpta Isagogarum et Categoriarum, from the first half of the eleventh century, constitute a sort of compendium of extracts from Boethius’s commentaries on the Isagoge and the Categories, supplemented by other late ancient and Carolingian sources. These Excerpta are arranged in an elementary dialogue format, with alternating questions and answers—a method that was popular in the and which was used by John Scotus Eriugena to explain the Aristotelian concept of categories.9 This text, however, is the exception that proves the rule: until the mid twelfth century, the exegesis of Aristotle’s works, or more precisely of the part of the Organon studied during that time, took the form of marginal and interlinear glosses, literal commentaries or the discursive treatment of specific problems.10 Nor was the dialogue used even after the reintroduction of virtually all Aristotle’s works and the development of the university system produced an impressive flourishing of writings dedicated to interpreting and discussing Peripatetic philosophy. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Aristotelian commentaries, which were mostly an outgrowth of an individual teacher’s lectures on a particular treatise, From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 43 reflect their ‘scholastic’ origin in their striking similarities of form and style, although the contents themselves differ markedly. The language, the formulas, the terminology and the authorities relied on were all common and shared features, as were the three main exegetical methods: the paraphrase, the literal exposition and the commentary by quaestiones.11 Beginning in the fifteenth century, however, when the university system was being thoroughly reorganized and faced competition from learned circles and , there was a proliferation of commentary techniques. Established hermeneutical principles were upset by various factors: an altered balance of power between the different disciplines; an interest in popularization promoted by the printing press; a developing view of reading as a private and silent ‘enjoyment’ of the written message; and, finally, a new attitude towards ancient texts. Apart from traditional commentaries, which continued to flourish, philological glosses increased because of a growing interest in . They were joined by more original types of commentary, using verse, syllogisms or diagrams.12 Commentaries were also now written in the form of dialogues, in which the exchange of ideas between two or more characters leads to a deeper study of a particular Aristotelian work or doctrine. Apart from this common feature, they differ so much in language, purpose and narrative structure that one must ask whether the dialogue constitutes an independent genre of Aristotelian literature or should instead be regarded as a method of interpretation that can be adapted to the most diverse situations and functions. We find, for example, dialogues both in Latin and in the vernacular; propaedeutic, popularizing and theoretically sophisticated dialogues; dialogues of a few pages or extending to lengthy volumes; dialogues with fictitious characters or with real ones who can be easily identified. The themes also differ considerably. While most dialogues are concerned with ethics,13 there are some which discuss other aspects of Aristotelian philosophy, including the most technical branches: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, for instance, wrote four dialogues on the Metaphysics and two on the Physics; Felice Figliucci discussed both the Ethics and the Politics in dialogues written in Italian;14 Vitale Zuccolo did the same with the Meteorology;15 Alonso López Pinciano wrote a compendium in Castilian of the Poetics using the dialogue form;16 and Nicolò Tartaglia dedicated the seventh book of his Quesiti to a discussion ‘sopra gli principij delle Questioni Mechanice di Aristotile’ between himself and the Spanish ambassador (Diego Hurtado de Mendoza).17 There is even an anonymous dialogue, preserved in a Viennese manuscript, in which 44 Luca Bianchi

Aristotle discusses the immortality of the soul with Alexander of Aphrodisias: Aristotle clarifies the exact meaning of certain controversial passages of De anima and sharply criticizes some Renaissance translations and interpretations of those passages.18 In the limited space available to me I cannot hope to provide an exhaustive survey of this rich and unexplored vein of philosophical literature. I shall therefore limit myself to a rapid presentation of the dialogues of two authors, attempting to answer two main questions. First, why did these writers decide to adopt this particular method of interpretation and how, precisely, did they employ it? Second, what relationship did they establish with the Aristotelian text they were interpreting? It was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples who gave the main impetus to the renewal of Aristotelian studies in France between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.19 His introduction to the Physics, first published in 1492 thanks to the editorial efforts of Josse Clichtove,20 one of Lefèvre’s most loyal disciples, is followed by two short dialogues, entitled Hermeneus, dialogus facilium physicalium introductorius and Enantius, dialogus introductorius difficilium.21 A single prologue for both works presents the characters in the dialogues, with Latin equivalents provided for the Greek names.22 I have already emphasized elsewhere the lexicographical interest of two of these names: ‘Hermeneus’/‘Interpres’ and ‘Noerus’/‘Intellectualis’; to the best of my knowledge, no Latin derivative of the Greek term had been previously used to designate the activity of interpreting a text, nor had the adjective intellectualis been used as a noun and applied to a person.23 But, apart from their interest as witnesses to the beginning of two developments which have been much discussed of late—the ‘prehistory of ’ and ‘the birth of ’24— Lefèvre’s dialogues Hermeneus and Enantius also provide some of the earliest evidence available for the revival of the dialogue as a means of explaining Aristotelian thought.25 The setting of the Hermeneus is as follows: accompanied by his father ‘Polipragmon’, the youth ‘Epiponus’, who desires instruction in philosophy, turns to ‘Hermeneus’, ‘Noerus’ and ‘Oneropoulos’. These men advise him to get a copy of Lefèvre’s introduction to the Physics, read it, memorize it and then explain what he has learned.26 An intense debate among the characters ensues; although it follows a mechanical pattern of ‘question and answer’, it introduces the main theses of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The same pattern is present in the four dialogues (without title) which follow Lefèvre’s introduction to the Metaphysics (published in 1493, also thanks to Clichtove).27 Here too From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 45 the purpose is exclusively explanatory and didactic. After a dedicatory letter to Germain de Ganay, an adviser to the king, Lefèvre states that he has written a dialogue because one of his young disciples, Guillaume Gontier,28 had persuaded him that it was the most effective format from a pedagogical point of view, since it allowed the simultaneous education of both teachers and students:

You asked me, most learned Germain, why I wrote the little commentaries I dedicated to you in dialogue form and not instead as continuous discourse. Here is the explanation. That worthy young man Guillaume Gontier, who accompanied me to Italy and performed many services for me there, easily convinced me to do it. He said: ‘If you do this, you will advise future teachers as to which questions they should ask and how they should teach what they have asked about; thus, you will give useful counsel at the same time to both the disciple and the master.’

Readers are then invited to identify with the appropriate characters:

Whoever takes upon himself the responsibility of teaching should think of himself as ‘Theoreticus’; while whichever honest young man is the disciple should think of himself as ‘Neania’ or ‘Eutycherus’.29

Conceived expressly as little commentaries (commentarioli), complementary to his introductiones, which are commentaries in the proper sense of the word, these dialogues of Lefèvre offer a rapid yet systematic presentation of the foundations of Aristotelian thought; they can thus be viewed as falling somewhere between a synopsis and a compendium. The use of questions does not reflect a understanding of philosophical enquiry, nor is the purpose to shed light on the heuristic process of reaching conclusions. The conclusions are already established, since they have been excavated from Aristotle’s text in the preceding introductiones. The dialogue, therefore, is little more than a dramatization of the pedagogical relationship between an ‘accomplished philosopher’ and a ‘philosopher in the process of formation’. Nonetheless, use of the dialogue format does represent an attempt to make this relationship more informal, freeing it from the rigid rules of scholastic disputations to which Lefèvre expressed outspoken opposition.30 Lefèvre’s desire to go beyond the scholastic method is even clearer in the Enantius, the second of his dialogues on the Physics. In this 46 Luca Bianchi work, in addition to presenting in detail some of the fundamental concepts of the treatise (dimension, quantity, continuum), he analyses phenomena such as rarefaction and condensation, and discusses the intension and remission of forms, a topic to which late medieval science had given great attention. Going beyond mere exposition, Lefèvre here attempts to contribute to the solution of complex and controversial theoretical problems. The choice of the dialogue format, therefore, is no longer justified on purely didactic grounds, but rather reflects a new concept of knowledge. The main character, ‘Enantius’/ ‘Contrarius’, is not (as might appear at first glance) a humanist version of the scholastic opponens, who according to was called upon to produce counter-arguments to be solved by the respondens. Instead, if he raises objections, he does so because he wishes to collaborate personally in the acquisition and expression of the truth. This dialogue is thus a conscious alternative to the quaestio disputata, the inconclusive battle of words beloved of the ‘’, who debate merely for the sake of the challenge rather than with any theoretical intent, and who are ready to defend any position, since they are more interested in overcoming their adversary than their ignorance.31 Not for nothing does Lefèvre insist at length on the Platonic topos of the spiritual ‘symposium’, a theme that writers of philosophical dialogues would continue to take up throughout the sixteenth century ( is just one example) in order to emphasize the collaborative and subjective character of knowledge.32 The contrast between disputes in which the participants aim only to win and show off, on the one hand, and the conversation between who sincerely desire to learn, on the other, is also developed at length in the beginning pages of the first volume of Le attioni morali,33 published in 1564 by Count Giulio Landi, a versatile writer, as well as a political figure from Piacenza.34 Landi has Lefèvre d’Étaples, an interlocutor in the dialogue, denounce the scholastic method,35 and also has him declare that it was only through the Italian humanists that he had become aware of its faults.36 But Landi’s work is important not only for its interesting testimony about Lefèvre and the origin and fortuna of his anti-scholastic .37 It is especially noteworthy that Lefèvre himself and some of his own disciples are called upon to give this information. In and of itself, the practice of using contemporary figures as characters in dialogues is by no means new. Virginia Cox has recently shown that this literary strategy is extremely common in Italian dialogues of the Cinquecento.38 Furthermore, even humanists of the Quattrocento (such as Bruni39 and Nesi40) had claimed that their Latin compendia reported conversations From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 47 between real people about Aristotle’s Ethics. The Landi gives for having settled on the dialogue format—the possibility of long digressions, of simplifying reading and making it more ‘enjoyable’41— are also unoriginal. The same reasons had been expressed in works published not long before his dialogue. Felice Figliucci, for instance, in the preface to the ten books of his De la filosofia morale, published in 1551, gave the following justification for his use of a typically Platonic argumentative procedure for the exposition of Peripatetic ethics:

Do not be surprised that I have used the dialogue format in this exposition, as Plato did. My entire aim was to make Aristotle easier to read and more expansive; and to accomplish this goal I found no better means than having several people talk together. Thus Plato, who had no desire to be brief and whose most elegant eloquence overflowed with words, used the dialogue format in almost all his books. And it seems to me that this form is extremely well suited to making a subject easier to understand, for it offers more opportunities to raise doubts and then resolve them. Furthermore, since the discourse is not continuous, one has more licence to enlarge on matters, as I have tried to do.42

Similarly, Galeazzo Florimonte, in his Ragionamenti sopra l’Ethica di Aristotile—printed in a complete version and correctly attributed only in 1567, but in circulation since 155443—expresses his desire, through the main speaker, Agostino Nifo, to explain the Aristotelian text, without following it ‘word for word’ but introducing digressions and examples or making reference to the interpretations of Greek and Latin commentators. Nifo concludes:

Nor do I wish to continue my argument to the end, as happens when one reads, since you might find this irksome. But I would like to have a discussion with Your Excellency [i.e. the Prince of Salerno] in the following manner: ask me whatever may occur to you as I am speaking; and, if something is not clear, do not let me go on; Florimonte too should interrupt from time to time, to force me to explain difficult matters.44

The fact that Figliucci, Florimonte and Landi all expressed the between the monologue and the dialogue as a contrast between continuous and discontinuous discourse, between a rigid and an elastic format, and between a difficult and an easy mode of presentation, shows how necessary it seemed at the time for 48 Luca Bianchi commentators to free themselves from direct reference to Aristotle’s text in order to make their works appear more lively, expressive and selective. This was especially the case for those who, around the mid sixteenth century, wished to spread Aristotle’s ethical ideas in the vernacular. The awareness that to reach a socially elevated (but not well educated) public it was necessary to find different communicative strategies and linguistic instruments from those in use in the schools and the universities led them to view the dialogue as the best solution. Its merits included the attempted reproduction (in idealized form) of the gentlemanly civile conversazione, even though in this was often a mere dramatic expedient used by pedantic teachers to indoctrinate all too docile pupils.45 What is innovative in Landi, however, is the number of digressions: the entire second book is dedicated to a theme of great contemporary interest: the conditions under which duels are permissible.46 Another original aspect is the use of the dialogue to disseminate in the vernacular a commentary on Aristotle rather than, as in the case of Figliucci and Florimonte, the text itself. In fact, Landi expressly presents his work as a translation of Lefèvre’s introduction to the Ethics.47 Furthermore, since the characters are ‘Fabro’ (i.e. Lefèvre), one of his eager pupils (i.e. Abbot Lorenzo Bartolini)48 and ‘Clitoveo’ (i.e. Clichtove, who wrote an influential commentary on Lefèvre’s introduction),49 the result is an intricate play of self- references, which deserves to be described in detail.50 Upon his arrival in Paris, Abbot Bartolini meets Fabro and asks him how he should go about studying ethics. Fabro invites him to use his own introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics, but also recommends that he get a tutor to help him understand it. He suggests his pupil Clitoveo. At first Clitoveo refuses; but he finally accepts once Fabro has specified the nature and limits of his duties:

Therefore [says Fabro], the Monsignor will not here require you to teach Aristotle’s books, but only my introduction to the Ethics, which you have briefly commented on. And, to tell the truth, I know no one who can do this better than you, especially since you can do it here by holding a conversation. This is how you shall proceed: Monsignor the Abbot will ask you questions based on the written text, and you shall answer in turn whatever is appropriate and required by the subject. Thus, in a few days, you shall be able to explain and clarify for him what he seeks to know. Moreover, by coming here at these times for the purpose of these discussions, you will make good use of the hot time of day, avoiding lazy and harmful sleep.51 From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 49

Clitoveo, offering an unusual application of the Alexandrian hermeneutical principle (resurrected by the humanists) that an author is his own best interpreter,52 answers Bartolini’s questions by reproducing orally in Italian what he had written in Latin in his commentary on Lefèvre’s introduction.53 Throughout, Lefèvre remains the constant point of reference of the discussion.54 Clitoveo clings so consistently to his role as ‘supercommentator’ that he invites Fabro to step in when issues (such as the duel) arise that are not discussed in his introduction,55 or when it becomes necessary to establish some distance from the Aristotelian teachings being explained.56 Thus, while Clitoveo explains his own commentary in Italian, Fabro, who is openly invited to give his opinion about this work,57 supplements the philosophical viewpoint expressed there by reconciling it with the Christian perspective.58 The dialogue format therefore allows Landi to give, through the interlocutor Clitoveo, a vernacular paraphrase of Clichtove’s supercommentary on Lefèvre’s exposition of Aristotle, and also to comment on it in turn through the character of Fabro, who at times expresses ideas actually held by Lefèvre,59 but at other times introduces issues, problems, and authors dear to the culture of the Counter-Reformation.60 In spite of the work’s declared aim of popularization, the exegetical levels multiply, so that each interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics (Lefèvre’s introduction, Clichtove’s commentary on this introduction) itself becomes an object of interpretation. Lefèvre’s arguments against the scholastics had derived from the need—also perceived by many humanists—to re-establish direct contact with the Aristotelian texts as historical documents that needed to be understood in their original meaning: to use his own metaphor, the waters of Aristotelianism needed to be drawn directly ‘from source’. The outcome is, therefore, rather disconcerting;61 nor is it easy to determine whether the responsibility should be assigned to Lefèvre himself, to his direct disciples such as Clichtove or to later descendants such as Landi. The point I would like to make, however, is that, while it is true that all commentaries, of whatever kind, are texts that talk about other texts, it would be wrong to think that those written in dialogue form necessarily present a less ‘bookish’ approach to the author. Ironically, the history of the Aristotelian tradition demonstrates the opposite. Some Hellenistic commentaries and the majority of the medieval commentaries are connected, more or less directly, to the practice of teaching; so, although they are presented as monologues, they often enable us to glimpse the intense dialogue that a teacher had held with his students, as he answered their requests for clarification, 50 Luca Bianchi replied to their objections or confessed to his own doubts and changes of mind.62 The Aristotelian dialogues of the Renaissance, by contrast, are very much literary productions, bearing the unmistakable marks of composition at the author’s desk. In spite of the device of questions and answers, and the participation of the various characters, we are never able to forget that the oral nature of the commentary is only a literary fiction, a merely verbal adornment of a hermeneutical experience originating in an individual’s reading of a text rather than in a group discussion of Aristotelian philosophy.

Notes * I wish to express my thanks to David A.Lines for his help in translating my Italian text into English. 1 Beginning with R.Hirzel, Der Dialog: Ein literarhistorischer Versuch, 2 vols, Leipzig, 1895, vol. II, pp. 385–90, the scholarly literature on the Renaissance dialogue is immense; among the most important studies are: G.Wyss Morigi, Contributo allo studio del dialogo all’epoca dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento, Monza, Artigianelli, 1950; F.Tateo, Tradizione e realtà nell’Umanesimo italiano, Bari, Dedalo Libri, 1967, pp. 221–421; D.Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: and Humanist Innovation, Cambridge, Mass, and London, Harvard University Press, 1980; M.T.Jones- Davies (ed.), Le Dialogue au temps de la Renaissance, Paris, J.Touzot, 1984; J.Ferreras, Les Dialogues espagnols du XVIe siècle ou l’expression littéraire d’une nouvelle , 2 vols, Paris, Didier, 1985; N.Ordine, ‘Il dialogo cinquecentesco italiano tra diegesi e mimesi’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 1988, vol. 37, pp. 155–79; P.Burke, ‘The Renaissance Dialogue’, Renaissance Studies, 1989, vol. 3, pp. 1–12; R.Girardi, La società del dialogo: retorica e ideologia nella letteratura conviviale del Cinquecento, Bari, Adriatica, 1989; J.R.Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance, Palo Alto, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1989; V.Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; C.Forno, Il ‘libro animato’: teoria e scrittura del dialogo nel Cinquecento, Turin, Tirrenia Stampatori, 1992. 2 P.I.von Moos, ‘Le dialogue latin au moyen âge: 1’exemple d’Evrard d’Yprès’, Annales ESC, 1989, vol. 44, pp. 993–1028. 3 C.H.Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Florence, Olschki, 1988–, vol. II: Renaissance Authors, pp. XIV–XV, makes no mention of dialogues in his typology of the various ‘forms of exegesis’ adopted in Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle. C.B.Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass, and London, Harvard University Press, 1983, ‘Appendix A’, classifies Lefèvre d’Étaples’s dialogues on the Metaphysics under the rubric ‘literary and poetic expositions’; but he does not mention anywhere the reintroduction of the dialogue. 4 See, e.g., A.Levi, ‘Philosophy as literature: The dialogue’, Philosophy and From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 51

Rhetoric, 1976, vol. 9, pp. 1–20; B.Lang, ‘Towards a poetics of philosophical discourse’, The Monist, 1980, vol. 63, pp. 445–64; M.D. Jordan, ‘A preface to the study of philosophic genres’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1981, vol. 14, pp. 199–211. 5 Among the studies which examine the forms of philosophical communication in the Renaissance and discuss the commentary and/or the dialogue, see A.Buck and O.Herding (eds), Der Kommentar in der Renaissance, Boppard, Boldt. 1975; M.Kemal Bénouis, Le Dialogue philosophique dans la littérature française du seizième siècle, and Paris, Mouton, 1976; J.Céard, ‘Les transformations du genre du commentaire’, in J.Lafond and A.Stegmann (eds), L’Automne de la Renaissance 1580–1630, Paris, Vrin, 1981, pp. 101–15; M.L.Altieri Biagi, ‘Forme della comunicazione scientifica’, in A.Asor Rosa (ed.), Letteratura italiana, Turin, Einaudi, 1984, vol. III.2: Le forme del testo: la prosa, pp. 891–947; D.Bigalli and G.Canziani (eds), Il dialogo filosofico nel ’500 europeo, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 1990. 6 See the works mentioned in n. 1 above. 7 Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta, ed. S.Brandt, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 48, Vienna and Leipzig, 1906. For the interventions by Fabius (which become progressively rarer, until they cease entirely around the middle of the second book) see pp. 4–5, 7–8, 12, 15–6, 24, 31–2, 44, 63, 75, 77, 85, 98, 100. On the date of this work seeL. M.De Rijk, ‘On the chronology of Boethius’ works on logic II’, Vivarium, 1964, vol. 2, pp. 127–9. Boethius’s Latin sources are discussed at length by S. Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 14–93 (see pp. 69–78 for his commentary on the Isagoge). It should be kept in mind, however, that, by commenting on the Isagoge in dialogue form, Boethius was merely applying to this work a method that Porphyry himself had adopted in the Isagoge, a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. 8 The dialogue form is less pronounced in the Christian version than in the original pagan redaction. For an edition and analysis of these texts see H. Normann, ‘Disputatio Platonis et Aristotelis: Ein apokrypher Dialog aus dem frühen Mittelalter’, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin, 1930, vol. 23, pp. 68–86. See also C.B.Schmitt and D.Knox, Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus, London, Warburg Institute, 1985, p. 28. 9 Excerpta Isagogarum et Categoriarum, ed. G.d’Onofrio, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 120, Turnhout, Brepols, 1995. The antecedents of the dialogue format adopted by the anonymous excerpter are discussed in the ‘Introduction’, pp. LVIII–LIX, n. 133. See also J.Marenbon, ‘Medieval Latin commentaries and glosses on Aristotelian logical texts, before c. 1150 AD’, in C.Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions, London, Warburg Institute, 1993, pp. 77–127, at 83–4. 10 Marenbon, ‘Medieval Latin commentaries and glosses’, pp. 85–90. 11 On scholastic Aristotelian commentaries see M.Grabmann, Methoden und Hilfsmittel des Aristotelesstudiums im Mittelalter, Munich, Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1939; and S.Ebbesen, ‘Medieval 52 Luca Bianchi

Latin glosses and commentaries on Aristotelian logical texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, in Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries, pp. 130–77. 12 On the extraordinary variety of Renaissance commentaries see Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 34–63; Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, vol. II, pp. XIII–XV; J.Kraye, ‘Renaissance commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in O.Weijers (ed.), Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, CIVICIMA: Études sur le vocabulaire du moyen âge, 8, Turnhout, Brepols, 1995, pp. 96–117. 13 See, e.g., the dialogues by , Giovanni Nesi, Felice Figliucci, Galeazzo Florimonte and Giulio Landi mentioned below. 14 Felice Figliucci, De la Politica, overo scienza civile secondo la dottrina d’Aristotile…, Venice, 1583. Neither this work nor his earlier dialogue on the Ethics (see n. 42 below), are included in the list of ‘Italian dialogues 1500– 1650’ in Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue, pp. 209–15. The ‘index chronologique des dialogues au XVIe siècle’ in Kemal Bénouis, Le Dialogue philosophique, pp. 212–17, is even more incomplete and does not include any of the Aristotelian dialogues mentioned in this article. 15 Vitale Zuccolo, Dialogo delle cose meteorologiche…, Venice, 1590. See Girardi, La società del dialogo, pp. 290–1, n. 30. 16 Alonso López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poetica, ed. A.Carballo Picazo, Madrid, 1953, 3 vols. On this work, whose editio princeps dates from 1596, see S.Shepard, El Pinciano y las teorias literarias del siglo de oro, Madrid, 1970; J.Ferreras, Les Dialogues espagnols du XVIe siècle, I, pp. 123–8. 17 See Nicolò Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse, , 1554, fols 78r–82r. On Book VII of the Quesiti (the editio princeps was published in 1546) see P.L.Rose and S.Drake, ‘The Pseudo-Aristotelian “Questions of mechanics” in Renaissance culture’, Studies in the Renaissance, 1971, vol. 18, pp. 65–104, at 87–9; A.De Pace, Le matematiche e il mondo: ricerche su un dibattito in Italia nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 1993, pp. 246–60; and Girardi, La società del dialogo, pp. 300–3. The dialogue is presented as a commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics, written by Tartaglia at the request of Hurtado de Mendoza; see fol. 78r: ‘N.Che cosa ha ritrovato uostra Signoria. S.A.Le Questioni Mechanice di Aristotile, Grece, et Latine. N.Egli è tempo assai che io le uidi, massime Latine. S.A.Che ue ne pare. N.Benissimo, e certamente le sono cose suttilissime, e di profonda dottrina. S.A: Anchora io le ho scorse, e inteso di quelle la maggior parte, nondimeno me resta molti dubbij sopra di quelle, li quali uoglio che me li dichiarati.’ 18 Dialogus inter Alexandrum et Aristotelem de animae immortalitate, in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 10358, fols 67r–90r; the anonymous author describes a dream in which he was present at a discussion between Aristotle and his commentator (‘in somniis uidi Alexandrum et Aristotelem ita inter se colloquentes’, fol. 67v). Among the criticisms expressed by Aristotle, his attack on the translating abilities of Theodore Gaza is of particular interest: ibid., fols 72r–73r. An earlier treatment in dialogue form of Aristotelian psychology is Ambrogio Flandino’s De animarum immortalitate contra Petrum Pomponatium, , 1519; Flandino later wrote De fato contra Petrum Pomponatium pro Alexandro Aphrodisio apologia, which also uses the dialogue format: see G.Di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento, From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 53

Turin, Società Editrice Internazionale, 1963, pp. 300–1; E.Garin, ‘Polemiche pomponazziane’, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 1972, vol. 27, pp. 225–7; R.Lemay, ‘The fly against the elephant: Flandinus against Pomponazzi on fate’, inE. P.Mahoney (ed.), Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, Leiden, Brill, 1976, pp. 70–99. 19 See R.Garcia Villoslada, La Universidad de Paris durante los estudios de Francisco de Vitoria O.P (1507–1522), Rome, Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1938, pp. 220–7; A.Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie (1494–1517), 2nd ed., Paris, Librairie d’Argences, 1953, pp. 130–59; Kraye, ‘Renaissance Commentaries’, pp. 104– 5. The judgements of his contemporaries on his innovative role are discussed by E.F.Rice, ‘Humanist Aristotelianism in France: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and his circle’, in A.H.T.Levi (ed.), at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1970, pp. 132–49, at 132–3, to which can now be added the testimony of Denys Lambin quoted in L.Bianchi, ‘Una caduta senza declino? Considerazioni sulla crisi dell’aristotelismo fra Rinascimento ed età moderna’, in F.Domínguez et al. (eds), Aristotelica et Lulliana magistro doctissimo Charles H.Lohr… dedicata, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1995, pp. 181–222, at 221–2. See also the texts published in Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, The Prefatory Epistles and Related Texts, ed. E.F.Rice, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1972. 20 Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Paraphrases…, Paris, 1492. I consulted the copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris [Inc. 700], which has numerous marginal glosses and recent numeration of the folios (followed here) in pencil. On Clichtove see J.P.Massaut, Josse Clichtove: l’humanisme et la réforme du clergé, 2 vols, Paris, 1968; and the list of ‘Further Reading’ appended to the partial translation of his De vera nobilitate in J.Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, vol. II, pp. 247–57, at 257. 21 The first dialogue is on fols 267r–286r; the second on fols 288r–309r; the titles of both are given on fol. 1v. They were reprinted several times during the sixteenth century: see F.E.Cranz and C.B.Schmitt, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501–1600, 2nd ed., Baden Baden, Valentin Koerner, 1984, nos 107.719, 107.794, 107.877; and Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, vol. II, p. 140. 22 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Paraphrases, fol. 266r–v. 23 L.Bianchi, ‘Fra lessicografia e storia delle tradizioni filosofiche: metamorfosi dell’interpretatio’, in G.Canziani and Y.C.Zarka (eds), L’interpretazione nei secoli XVI e XVII, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 1993, pp. 35–58, at 50–2. 24 On the ‘prehistory of hermeneutics’ see H.G.Gadamer, Wahreit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen, Mohr, 1986, pp. 177–88, and H.-E. Hasso Jaeger, ‘Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Hermeneutik’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 1974, vol. 18, pp. 35–84. Among the first to speak of the ‘birth of the intellectuals’ in later Midde Ages was J.Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge, Paris, Seuil, 1957. 25 There is no secondary literature to speak of on these dialogues of Lefèvre nor on those he did on the Metaphysics. A few references can, however, be found 54 Luca Bianchi

in Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme, pp. 147–8; G.Santinello, Studi sull’umanesimo europeo, Padua, Antenore, 1969, pp. 49, 56–60, 70–1; and B.Lawn, The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic ‘quaestio disputata’ Leiden, Brill, 1993, p. 113, where the method adopted in the dialogues is mistakenly connected with the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata. 26 Lefèvre, Paraphrases, fol. 269v (Hermeneus). 27 Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Introductio in Metaphysicorum libros Aristotelis…, Paris, 1493. I consulted the copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, which is bound with his introduction to the Physics (see n. 20 above); here too I follow the recent numeration of folios. The introduction to the Metaphysics, covering only Books I–VI, is very short (fols 2r–9r). For the four dialogues see fols 10r–21r, 21v–27r, 27v–39r, 39r–42r; they too were reprinted several times in the sixteenth century: see Cranz and Schmitt, Bibliography, nos 107.719, 107.794, 107.825, 107.877; and Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, vol. II, p. 140. 28 Guillaume Gontier was Lefèvre’s student, scribe and editor; see Lefèvre, Prefatory Epistles, ed. Rice, pp. 19, 25, 28, 39, 45. 29 Lefèvre, Paraphrases, fol. 9v: ‘Interrogasti me doctissime Germane, cur per dialogos et non potius oratione perpetuo discurrente commentariolos tibi dicatos composuerim. Hanc rationem accipe. Ad hoc faciendum honestus adolescens Guillermus Gonterius qui me per italicam oram comitatus multa officia prestitit, facile induxit. Si ita feceris inquit admonebis qui docturi erunt quo pacto interrogare debeant interrogataque docere et simul utiliter discipulo consules et docenti…et quicunque docendi munus provinciamque assumet, se putet Theoreticum; quicunque vero probus adolescens docebitur, se Neaniam putet aut putet Eutycherum.’ This passage is also printed in Lefèvre, Prefatory Epistles, ed. Rice, p. 22. 30 See the works cited in n. 19 above. 31 Lefèvre, Paraphrases, fol. 308r (Enantius): ‘Enantius. Probe ais O Homophron: ita plane respondere debui. Non enim certamus ut Gymnastici Sophiste vane altercantes, et nostram positionem siue iure et siue iniuria obseruantes. Hoc profecto nostra grandeuam etatem dedeceret et nobis pulchrius vinci, imo nos ipsi non vincimur, sed nostra ignorantia victa, manemus victores.’ 32 Ibid., fol. 299v (Enantius). On the fortuna of the topos of the symposium in sixteenth-century dialogues see Kemal Bénouis, Le Dialogue philosophique, pp. 176–7; and Forno, Il ‘libro animato’, pp. 292–7. 33 Giulio Landi, Le attioni morali, Venice, Gabriel Giolitto de’ Ferrari, 1564. I consulted the copy in the Biblioteca Braidense of Milan [25.15.O.19]. The second volume was printed in Piacenza in 1575. On the printing history see S.Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 2 vols, Rome, 1890–5, vol. II, pp. 198–200; and F.Lenzi, ‘I dialoghi morali e religiosi di Giulio Landi, Lefèvre d’Étaples ed Erasmo’, Memorie domenicane, 1973, vol. 4, pp. 195– 216, at 204 n. 30. On the limited diffusion of the 1564 edition see F.Erspamer, La biblioteca di Don Ferrante: duello e onore nella cultura del Cinquecento, Rome, Bulzoni, 1982, pp. 63, 122. Bongi (p. 200) seems to doubt the existence of the 1695 Piacenza edition; but I consulted a copy, in two volumes, in the Biblioteca Braidense of Milan [ZB.III.21]. From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 55

34 On Landi’s life see Lenzi, ‘I dialoghi morali’ and the bibliography cited there. According to Lenzi (p. 205) ‘il Landi deve aver conosciuto e frequentato, se non Clichtove, almeno Lefèvre’. 35 Landi, Le attioni morali, p. 17 (=1695 ed., vol. I, p. 17): ‘per antica institutione furono le disputationi introdotte a buon fine, cioè per essercitare gli scolari; ma si come ogni buona institutione co’l tempo s’altera, e guasta, in tutto, ò in parte, così il disputare scorse in mala maniera, et praua usanza: dico delle publiche disputationi, lequali per lo piu hanno non molto buon fine, cioè l’apparenza, e l’ostinatione, delle quali nasce poi una certa ambitione, la vanità, l’ingiurie, e la malevolenza ancora.’ 36 Ibid., p. 15 (=1695 ed., vol. I, pp. 14–15): ‘e allhora, a me, nella prima gioventù mia pareva bella cosa tale prontezza, et ostentatione nel disputare, di che io si era pur troppo vago. Ma il pratticar mio, ch’io feci nella vostra Italia, e gli huomini veramente scientiati Italiani, tra i quali il vostro Angelo Polittano [sic], e’l Ficino, e altri pur troppo chiaramente di tale inettie, e rozzezze mi fecero avertito. Onde chiaramente m’avvidi de gli errori delle nostre scuole.’ 37 The value of Le attioni morali for the information it provides on Lefèvre’s biography and his influence in Italy was recognized by E.Garin, ‘Echi italiani di Erasmo e Lefèvre d’Étaples’, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 1971, vol. 26, pp. 88–90, and better documented by Lenzi, ‘I dialoghi morali’. 38 Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, especially pp. 10–21. She never discusses Landi’s work, nor is it included in her list of ‘Italian dialogues 1500–1650’ (pp. 209– 15). 39 In his Isagogicon moralis disciplinae Leonardo Bruni offered a summary of Aristotelian ethics by telling Galeotto Ricasoli of a ‘conversation’ he had with his friend ‘Marcellinus’: see Leonardo Bruni, Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften, ed. H.Baron, Leipzig, Teubner, 1928, pp. 20–41, at 21–2. It is noteworthy that in most sixteenth-century editions (see Cranz and Schmitt, A Bibliography, e.g. 107.721, 107.896, 107.900, 107.924, 107.947, 107.983) the Isagogicon is entitled Dialogus de moribus. 40 According to Giovanni Nesi, his De moribus faithfully reflected the ‘disputa compendiaria’ on the Nicomachean Ethics held in 1477 by Donate Acciaiuoli and some Florentine youths: see R.Bonfanti, ‘Su un dialogo filosofico del tardo ’400: Il De moribus del fiorentino Giovanni Nesi (1456–1522?)’, Rinascimento, 1971, vol. 11, pp. 203–21. 41 See the passage quoted in n. 47 below. 42 Felice Figliucci, De la filosofia morale libri dieci…, Rome, 1551, sig. *4v (‘A li lettori’): ‘Ne ui sia marauiglia, se in questa dichiarazione si è usato il dialogo, come fece Platone, perche essendo tutto l’intento mio stato di facilitare, e allargare Aristotile, non ho trouato modo più atto à far questo, che introducendo più persone à ragionare. E però Platone, che non uolse esser breue, ma per la sua elegantissima eloquenza, abondantissimo di parole, usò in quasi tutti li suoi libri il dialogo, il quale à me pare attissimo à facilitare una materia, perche si da in esso più occasione di muouere dubij, e di risoluerli più facilmente. Dipoi perche non essendo l’orazione continuata, si può pigliare più licenza di allargarsi, come ho cercato di fare io.’ Figliucci also refers to the example of Plato in the preface to his De la Politica in order to justify his choice of the dialogue format: ‘Io adunque . …introdurrò il Torello, e in 56 Luca Bianchi

persona sua vi narrerò tutte quelle cose che egli disse, fingendo che M.Francesco lo dimandi, al quale M.Lelio risponda nel modo che il gran Platone suol fare ne’ suoi Dialogi, come tutti voi benissimo sapete.’ 43 Galeazzo Florimonte, Ragionamenti…sopra l’Ethica d’Aristotile…, Venice, 1567. The work had been printed at least twice before: Venice 1554 and Parma 1562; but these editions were apparently not authorized by the author. 44 Florimonte, Ragionamenti, fols 7v–8r: ‘Nè penso ancho di continuare il mio ragionamento insino al fine, come si fa leggendo, perche ui potrebbe rincrescere. Ma uoglio in questo modo ragionare con V.Eccell. che ella mi dimandi quello, che tra il mio dire le occorrerà; & quando non intende, non mi lasci passare oltre; & che il Florimonte alcuna uolta s’interponga ancor esso, per farmi meglio dichiarare le cose difficili.’ 45 It should be noted, however, that the choice of the dialogue format did not prevent Landi from using recent in philosophical communication: for example, in the first volume he not only reproduces some tables from Lefèvre’s introduction to the Ethics (Landi, Le attioni morali, pp. 32–3=ed. 1695, I, pp. 31–2), but also adds some of his own (pp. 266, 348 =ed. 1695, I, pp. 261, 342). 46 Landi, Le attioni morali, pp. 114–242 (=ed. 1695, I, pp. 85–237). This section of Landi’s work is analysed by F.Erspamer, La biblioteca di Don Ferrante, pp. 120–3. 47 Landi, Le attioni morali, pp. 2, 4 (=ed. 1695, I, pp. 2, 4): ‘E ciò sia una breue introduttione nell’Ethica d’Aristotele, gia buon tempo fa da Iacopo Fabro dottamente, & utilmente composta. Laqual parendomi utilissima a chiunque di si buono, & si necessario studio si dilettasse, ho uoluto, parte per mia esercitatione, & parte da un certo obligo sospinto, tradurla nella nostra lingua. Che poi che da M.Bernardo Segni è stata l’Etica istessa d’Aristotele eccellentemente tradotta, & commentata ancora, paruemi non essere disconueneuole, l’introduzione anche d’essa, render volgare.’ Landi later explains the method of ‘translation’ followed: ‘Vengo hora al modo da me tenuto nel tradurla, nel che io non ho cosi particolarmente tradotto come l’Auttore scrisse; ma accioche l’opera fosse piu facile, e piu intelligibile, ho lasciato quello perpetuo filo, e quella continuata, e brevissima tessitura dell’opera, di cui havendo io osservato i soggetti e i sensi, ho voluto con una utile libertà ridurli a ragionamento di tre persone, per dottrina, e per bontà di costumi gia nel mondo eccellentissimi a ciò invitandomi il soggetto, e l’ordine di questa introduttione, quando che il trattarla per Dialogo molto bene se le avviene. Ne parvemi sconvenevole cosa, haverci alcuna volta inestate alcune cose, lequali non furono dall’Auttore scritte, quando che fassi in cotal modo la materia più aperta, e anco perché fosse al lettore questa opera piu utile, e piu dilettevole: come meglio voi stesso leggendo potrete giudicare.’ 48 Lorenzo Bartolini, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Entremont in Haute- Savoie, became apostolic protonotary in 1519, at which time he went to Paris and came into contact with Lefèvre and his circle: see Lefèvre, Prefatory Epistles, ed. Rice, pp. 427–30 (on p. 427, Rice mentions the testimony of Landi and his ‘copious paraphrase of L.’s introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics in the form of a dialogue’); and Lenzi, ‘I dialoghi morali’, pp. 203–5. 49 Landi, Le attioni morali, pp. 4–5 (=ed. 1695, I, p. 4): ‘Havendo io adunque From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi 57

cosi fattamente scritta questa operetta, in guisa di Dialogo, li sono tre personaggi a ragionamento introdotti, l’uno è Iacopo Fabro, l’altro Giodoco Clitoveo, il terzo M.Lorenzo Bartolini; ne senza ragione questi tre sono qui posti a ragionare insieme, quando ch’il primo fu l’istesso Auttore, il secondo fu dell’Auttore creato, e discepolo, il terzo fu un gentilhuomo Fiorentino di casa Bartolini, ilquale per cagione delli studi di Filosofia stette in Parigi, là dove egli hebbe con l’Auttore, et col discepolo molta domestichezza.’ The Introductio in Ethicam of Lefèvre, first published in 1494, was reprinted 15 times from 1502 to 1559, together with Clichtove’s commentary (Lefèvre, Prefatory Epistles, ed. Rice, p. 25). 50 A fourth character (Count Claudio Landi, brother of Giulio, the author) enters the scene only in Book II of Volume I. He discusses with Fabro the permissibility of duelling. 51 Landi, Le attioni morali, pp. 27–31 (=ed. 1695, I, pp. 27–31): ‘Percioche non vi graverà Monsignore di volere intendere da voi i libri d’Aristotele, ma solamente quella mia introduttione dell’Ethica, che voi havete per sua brevità commentata, e in vero cotal’ufficio chi meglio di voi lo sappia fare, non so veruno, massimamente potendo voi ciò fare, qui per occasione di ragionamento, et faretelo in questo modo, che Monsignore l’Abate vi interrogherà et domanderà le cose per ordine scritte, et voi all’incontro risponderete, dichiarandoli quanto si conviene, e richiede il soggetto. Et così in pochi dì, venendo voi in questo luogo, a queste ore a’ ragionamenti disputate per passare honestamente il caldo della stagione, fuggendo l’otioso, e nocevol sonno, potrete voi quello che ei ricercherà da voi intendere, farli aperto, e chiaro.’ 52 On the use of this principle by Renaissance Aristotelians, and the theory underlying it, see L.Bianchi, ‘Interpretare Aristotele con Aristotele: percorsi dell’ermeneutica filosofica nel rinascimento’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 1996, vol. 51, pp. 5–27. 53 Landi’s Clitoveo paraphrases Clichtove’s commentary not only when he defines concepts, illustrates teachings and gives the rules of Aristotelian ethics, but also when he introduces literary allusions or comparisons: e.g. compare the metaphor of the sensitive appetite as an unbroken horse in Moralis Iacobi Fabri Stapulensis in Ethicen introductio, Iudoci Clichtouei Neoportuensis familiaris commentario elucidata, Paris, 1537, fol. 5v, with Le attioni morali, p. 50 (=ed. 1695, I, pp. 48–9). 54 There are also explicit references to Lefèvre’s text: see, e.g., Landi, Le attioni morali, p. 31 (=ed. 1695, I, p. 31): when Fabro, for the first time, leaves the scene, he says: ‘Ma non voglio perciò, che soprasediate, anzi egli è ben, che voi cominciate a ragionare della virtù; non perdete adunque il tempo. Eccovi il libro.’ Later, at p. 302 (=ed. 1695, I, p. 295), Clitoveo invites Bartolini to read Lefèvre’s work in order to identify obscure passages: ‘Andiamo dunque là sotto quello ombroso pergolato, e quivi assisi incomincieremo i nostri ragionamenti voi leggendo, e io quello, che difficile alquanto vi parrà, isponendo.’ 55 Landi, Le attioni morali, p. 114 (=ed. 1695, I, p. 112): ‘Questa quistione non ho io mai ueduta nella uostra introduttione.’ 56 This happens more often in Volume II: see, e.g., in the 1695 edition, II, pp. 14– 28, 54–62, 98–107, 126–62, 176–85, 204–32. 58 Luca Bianchi

57 A typical case is an exchange in Volume II (ed. 1695, II, p. 176): ‘AB. Poteua il Clitoueo trattenersi ancora con qualche bello Ragionamento, parendomi l’hora assai commoda; però se a voi [Fabro] paresse di dirmi qualche cosa sopra le cose già dal Clitoveo dettemi, lo potrete commodamente farlo.’ 58 In Volume II Clitoveo is openly identified with the philosophical viewpoint, whereas Fabro is identified with the Christian one: see ed. 1695, II, pp. 54, 126, 176. 59 See, e.g., the passages in which Fabro emphasizes the differences between Aristotelian ethics and the ‘filosofia evangelica’, as well as their complementary aspects: Le attioni morali, pp. 77–86 (=ed. 1695, I, pp. 75–84). 60 E.g., in the discussions on free will and grace, in the many quotations from St Paul and St Augustine, and in the use made of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. 61 Lefèvre wrote: ‘Nunc ergo O iuvenes ex Aristotelico opere ceu ex proprio fonte haurite, delibateque aquas’: see the frontispiece of the 1503 edition of the Organon, now in Lefèvre, Prefatory Epistles, ed. Rice, p. 87. Cf. Bruni, Isagogicon moralis discipline, ed. Baron, p. 22: ‘Tu, qui Graeco de fonte (ut ait Flaccus) hausisti, quaeso mihi expone, haec de moribus disciplina…’. Interestingly, at the beginning of his work (Le attioni morali, pp. 6–7=ed. 1695, I, p. 6), Landi is anxious to justify the fact that Lefèvre had written commentaries: ‘Scrisse poi le Parafrasi pur sopra la Logica, e la Filosofia d’Aristotele, non perch’ei non sapesse, che meglio fosse il leggere l’opre dell’istesso Filosofo, ma perche conosceua, ch’essendo quei maestri, e scolari auezzi di leggere simili logichette, e altri libretti di Filosofia abbreuiata, sminuita e imbrattata, suiamento delle buone scienze, troppo duro, e difficile sarebbe loro parso, l’entrare a un tratto nel largo pelago de gli scritti Aristotelici’; originating from the need to compensate for the bad habits of the scholastics, the paraphrase would therefore serve to stimulate and prepare a direct approach to the Aristotelian texts, an approach described through the repetition of the ‘source’ metaphor: ‘perciò accomodandosi al tempo, e a’ modi loro, e ritenendo quasi i medesimi progressi, e quasi il medesimo ordine, scrisse prudentemente quelle Parafrasi, lequali altro non contengono ch’il proprio sugo, e i ueri sensi dell’opre d’Aristotele, ma con ordine piu aperto, e piu facile, acciò che allettati gli scolari da quei chiari riui uenissero poi in desiderio di uedere, e gustare il proprio fonte.’ 62 This feature is particularly evident in the reportationes. Among many possible examples, see those noted by W.Dunphy in his introduction to Siger of Brabant, Quaestiones in Metaphysicam, Louvain-la-Neuve, Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1981, pp. 27–9. 4 The adoption and rejection of Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’*

M.W.F.Stone

What conscience dictates to be done, Or warns one not to do, This teach me more than Hell to shun, That more than heaven to pursue.

Alexander Pope, The Universal Prayer

In the popular mind, the application of the term ‘casuistry’ to certain genres of practical ethics that developed within early might appear rather odd. In the British Isles at least, casuistry has become associated with the verbal shenanigans and moral laxism of Roman Catholic theologians who, in response to Henry VIII’s establishment of the Church of England, sought to re-evangelize ‘virtuous Albion’ by means of equivocal statements and evasive pronouncements on moral duty. This highly colourful image—one which has found repeated expression in literary and theological works from the late sixteenth century onwards in the persona of the ‘scheming Jesuit’—is preserved within the English-speaking consciousness by Lord Macaulay’s oft-quoted description of the casuist as ‘one willing and competent to soothe with sophisms’.1 While Macaulay’s obiter dictum can be said to express a familiar enough attitude to the work of the Roman Catholic casuists in anglophone circles,2 it is interesting that something resembling the case method of the Roman theologians is to be found in the framework of practical ethics developed by some early modern British moral thinkers who looked to the events of the Reformation for intellectual guidance. Thus, we find a significant number of authors such as the English Puritans (1576–1633)3 and William Perkins (1558–

59 60 M.W.F.Stone

1602),4 and the Anglican divines Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)5 and Robert Sanderson (1587–1663),6 who composed works of so-called ‘casuistry’. Such ‘Protestant casuistry’ was by no means the preserve of the British. Continental theologians like the Lutheran Frederick Baldwin (d. 1627)7 and the Calvinist Johann Alsted (1588–1638)8 also contributed to the development of a practical divinity that aimed to resolve cases of conscience by making use of a method which had its origins in the penitential handbooks of medieval and the manuals of late scholastic moral theology.9 Appearances of similarity, however, can be deceptive. While Roman Catholic, Puritan, Anglican and Lutheran theologians and thinkers were all concerned with an analysis of the questions and quandaries that can beset the life of any pious Christian, this is where any point of genuine convergence in method and outlook can be said to stop.10 If one examines the work of most Protestant writers, especially those based in the British Isles, it is difficult to find much casuistry, at least as that method was practised by late medieval writers. For example, late medieval manuals of moral theology were typically arranged according to standard issues and questions concerning lies, deceptions and equivocations, usury and simony.11 Such arrangements of casus conscientiae into a taxonomy of dilemmatic experience were uncommon within Protestant practical divinity, which, with the sole exception of the work of the Anglican Jeremy Taylor,12 did not consider any standard cases at all. William Perkins, for instance, in his The Whole Treatises of Cases of Conscience (1606), did not consider typical casus conscientiae, but instead posed questions of the order: ‘What must a man doe, that findes himself hard hearted, and of dead spirit, so as he cannot humble himself as he would?’ or ‘How a man may be in conscience assured of his owne salvation?’13 The discernment of one’s moral station and its duties was a spiritual matter; it was not, as such, ‘casuistical’. Indeed, by their own admission and with further evidence from the contents of their libraries, ‘British casuists’, be they Puritan or Anglican, believed that there was little genuine casuistry in their practical divinity.14 For this reason, it is difficult to sustain the idea that the ‘casuistry’ of early modern times was a uniform intellectual movement. While there appears to be unity in the methods and approaches used by Catholic and Protestant writers in their studies of casus conscientiae, this simply serves to disguise the fact that such writers were motivated by very different philosophical and theological views and opinions. In so far as there is a homogeneous ‘casuistry’ in , it simply exists in the rather uninteresting sense Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 61 that both Catholic and Protestant were concerned with a host of practical issues which centred on the study of morally problematic cases. This chapter is part of a larger project in which I hope to present detailed and plausible arguments for the position outlined above.15 In what follows, I propose to concentrate on the development of a form of practical divinity by the early Reformers which came to influence a number of British theologians. I shall argue that the task of understanding the particularities of this form of practical ethics is best judged in terms of a general reaction to Aristotelian moral philosophy that occurred within Reformed circles. I shall advance the view that the effect of this reaction is to be seen in several attempts by Reformed writers to construct a distinctive ‘’, that is, an ethical theory that would derive its scope and point from the perceived requirements of Scripture rather than from any prior (Aristotelian) concern with a philosophical study of the conditions of human life. If this view is correct, it will help to show that the ‘casuistry’ of Reformed theologians was of an entirely different type and order to that advanced by Roman Catholic casuists: Reformed writers sought to articulate concerns which looked to the claims of Christian doctrine rather than a tradition of philosophia practica that was indebted to Aristotle and his medieval interpreters. In the Reformed tradition ethics was taught as a separate academic discipline almost from its very outset.16 This practice grew out of the medieval tradition of commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and developed in the matrix of a heightened Renaissance interest in ethics.17 The immediate background that was to inform subsequent writers in the Reformed tradition lies in the Lutheran treatment of ethics, especially that of Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1565). Faced with the pressing need for curriculum materials in the new Protestant schools and universities, Melanchthon wrote textbooks for many disciplines including ethics. These tended to be compendia of Aristotle’s works, corrected and supplemented at points by the assumed verities of biblical . During the course of his career, Melanchthon lectured on Aristotle’s Ethics at least eight times, beginning in 1527–28.18 In this period he produced his 1529 commentary on the first, second, third, and fifth books of the Nicomachean Ethics.19 Central to Melanchthon’s ethics was the distinction between Gospel and law. Ethics is part of the , not part of the Gospel. Philosophy deals with the divine law in the form of the law of nature inscribed in the human mind. Ethics explains the law of nature, and 62 M.W.F.Stone thus is a philosophical discipline, along with dialectic and physics, following the Platonic-Stoic division of philosophy. Melanchthon defines ethics as ‘that part of the divine law which concerns itself with external actions’.20 It deals with that reason understands and that are necessary for civil life. These moral virtues Melanchthon classifies according to the second table of the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. did not produce an independent moral philosophy. That discipline was simply an integral dimension of his whole theology.21 Because of this omission, it was left to Calvin’s successors to construct an ethics consistent with the aims of his theological programme. Following the pattern by Melanchthon, Reformed universities and academies taught ethics as a separate philosophical discipline within the context of the arts faculty, according to the medieval model. Here, ethics was taught alongside other philosophical disciplines such as physics and logic; and like them its teaching was based on classical authors and their works, almost invariably the writings of Aristotle. Thus, early Reformed universities did not treat ethics as a theological discipline or directly base the teaching of ethics on Scripture. An early example of this tendency can be seen in the lectures on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics delivered at the Marburg Academy by Andreas Hyperius (1511–64) and published in 1553.22 Like Melanchthon, Hyperius placed ethics within the Platonic-Stoic division of philosophy. He sought to acquaint theology students with Aristotle; and so, apart from some marginal references to Scripture and the Church Fathers, he closely followed the text of the Ethics in order to illuminate Aristotle’s argument. Hyperius’s allegiance to the role of faithful expositor even extended to his discussion of the highest good, which displays a remarkable reluctance to shed biblical light on the issue.23 Another example of the prominence of Aristotle among the early Reformers can be found in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Academy lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics of 1553–6. When Vermigli (1499–1562) left Strasbourg for Zurich in 1556, his detailed commentary on Aristotle remained incomplete, but later it was posthumously published in 1563.24 Like so many sixteenth-century thinkers, Vermigli thought that Aristotle was the best ancient philosopher who dealt with ethics; yet he held that his teachings needed to be judged and corrected by revelation, since Aristotle, as a pagan, had been ignorant of these . Vermigli explains this essential point when describing his method of commenting on Aristotle’s text: Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 63

First, I shall divide up the proposed text of Aristotle; second, I shall explain the intention and theme of the chosen passage with its proof; third, I shall examine its meaning and the words which seem to require explanation; fourth, I shall show what doubts there are about it; and last, in relation to commonplaces, I shall call attention to what agrees or disagrees with the biblical texts that are adduced.25

The trend set by Hyperius and Vermigli was continued down to the end of the sixteenth century, as can be seen in the work of Rudolphus Goclenius (1547–1628), who in 1598 edited and published an edition of Aristotle’s Ethics that not only included a commentary on the text but also a ‘supercommentary’ on the commentators, in this case Hyperius and Vermigli.26 This typical pattern of commenting on Aristotle’s ethics is also evident in three prominent Reformed universities: the Geneva Academy,27 Heidelberg University28 and .29 The effect of the institutionalization of the study of ethics within the Reformed academies was to secure Aristotle’s moral philosophy a privileged place within the university curriculum. The extent of the early Reformers’ general allegiance to the ethics of Aristotle can be briefly illustrated by reference to the 1588 statutes of , which were drawn up following guidelines laid down by Melanchthon and maintained even when the university went over to three years later. They listed an ethics chair among the five public professors of the arts faculty and required the professor ‘to make use of those who are the most distinguished such as Aristotle’.30 One of the more eminent scholars to occupy the Heidelberg chair was Victorinus Strigelius (1524–69), who held the post for the last two years of his life (1567–9).31 Strigelius produced a Latin translation of and commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, which appeared posthumously in 1572.32 It is also worth noting that Elector Friedrich III invited Peter Ramus (1515–1572) to fill the ethics chair in 1569 upon the death of Strigelius; however, the university authorities did not accept this appointment because of Ramus’s well- known hostility to Aristotle.33 The reliance on Aristotle among early Protestant moral thinkers is significant in that it gave little impetus to the development of a practical ethics which reflected the distinctive theological outlook of the Reformed tradition. In so far as a practical ethics existed, it was based on a conception of , a standard medieval taxonomy of the virtues and vices, and a series of action-guiding directives, all of which were proposed and defended along traditional Aristotelian lines. 64 M.W.F.Stone

This tendency is all too evident in the work of those professors who laboured in the early Reformed academies and universities. Under Melanchthon’s influence they argued that Aristotle’s moral philosophy was the best moral philosophy and that the Nicomachean Ethics only needed to be ‘corrected’ or ‘up-dated’ in order for it to be made consistent with the requirements of revealed teaching. Thus, in order for the seeds of a more theologically distinctive practical ethics to develop, Reformed writers had to cast aside familiar and received models of moral reasoning and instead construct something which was genuinely their own. The earliest phase in this development can be located in the writings of Lambert Daneau (1530–95), who was among the first Reformers to attempt to develop a systematic Christian ethics. While a lecturer in theology, and assistant to , Daneau published, in Geneva in 1577, the first independent Reformed ethics under the title Ethices Christianae libri III.34 The work consists of three parts. Book I lays the anthropological foundations for ethics and treats the principles and causes of human actions. Book II deals with the precepts that ought to govern human actions, as found in God’s law, the Decalogue. Book III examines the various virtues and vices that correspond to these precepts. While Books I and III show the influence of Aristotle, Book II synthesizes ideas from Aristotle with those of the Church Fathers and of St Bernard and with the Calvinist doctrines of liberum arbitrium and sanctification. In the first chapter of Book I Daneau presents a definition of ethics: ‘Christian ethics…as embraced in the Word of God, is the full and perfect instruction35 and doctrine of both our internal and external holiness, i.e. of the reformation of our whole life, such as it ought to be.’36 The important point to note here is that for Daneau, Christian ethics cannot be found in the writings, laws or precepts of any philosopher or human legislator, because human reason and judgement are blind when it comes to discerning the difference between and immorality, and because man’s will is averse to seeking virtue. For this reason ethics must be based on Scripture, the Word of God: God alone is the source of all holiness, and his will is the rule or standard of all rectitude. Though the doctrine of Christian ethics is found throughout the whole of the Bible, it is contained in its entirety in the law of the Ten Commandments.37 Nonetheless, for Daneau and his supporters in the Geneva Academy, ethics was to be ‘philosophical’, that is, independent of dogmatics, although answerable to action- guiding norms distilled from Scripture. There could be no moral law independent of the activity of consulting the Word of God as laid down Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 65 in Scripture. While Scripture may, from time to time, be imprecise, the Law of God is nevertheless the rule by which one must explain and assess all the virtues. Central to Daneau’s thought is the contrast he wants to make between the way in which pagan philosophers and medieval scholastics considered vice and virtue and the way in which Scripture dealt with these phenomena:

Scripture is not so precise in distinguishing virtues and vices that it does not often call the same virtue or vice by various names, corresponding, evidently, to the different feelings or effects of the soul which we feel or are produced externally by us. The philosophers and scholastics were, however, accustomed to be far more scrupulous in naming and distinguishing them, because they wanted to reduce them all to a certain theory (ars) or notion, and to a definite number, so that they might construct a certain science (scientia) of these things and of all the feelings of the soul (which, however, are infinite), embraced by a specific terminology and a definite number of virtues and vices. Nothing seems to have escaped their notice. Nevertheless, this is utterly impossible. For the motions, recesses and feelings of the human heart are infinite, and all of them can no more be restricted to a certain number than the sands of the sea. If, however, they are governed by the Spirit of God, they are moral and are virtues; but if they are guided by the sensation of our flesh, they are corrupt and are called vices or sins. Nevertheless, Holy Scripture, employing diverse names, enumerates certain types of virtues and vices, namely those which are more important, better known and commonly designated by certain words, so that from these we may make judgements about the others and understand what is required by God. Thus it is that Scripture embarks upon a way of rightly instructing our lives which is entirely different from the philosophers and scholastics.38

The via scripturae for Daneau is that which enables us to view the virtues and vices ‘in so far as they render what is due to God or to one’s neighbour’. All the virtues and vices that the philosophers and scholastics so copiously treated serve and are in alignment with what God commands in regard to himself and to other human beings. God’s Law, therefore, commands all virtues and forbids all vices. His Law alone is the rule by which moral rectitude must be explained; therefore, Christian ethics is solely preoccupied with God’s Law.39 66 M.W.F.Stone

The implications for practical ethics or casuistry are clear. By Daneau’s standards, in so far as Christian ethics deals with the conditions of human action, it will concern itself with a series of recommendations that certain acts be done or avoided by sole reference to the dicta of Scripture. Thus, whenever an agent is confronted with a genuine case of conscience, it can only resolved by the application to that case of moral precedents gleaned from Scripture. Such precedents will be drawn from the Decalogue, and these rules or counsels will govern human life. In cases where a scriptural precedent appears at first sight to give equivocal guidance, one is bound to check it against other morally similar precedents in order to establish frequency of use and divine intention. Through this process, a ‘right answer’ to a case of conscience will eventually emerge; for, it is impossible, Daneau argues, that God’s Law could ever fall short of providing unequivocal guidance at the level of action. We have no need of the traditional Aristotelian powers of discernment in order to recognize the binding force of God’s Law. One might have thought that with the decisive shift away from Aristotle and pagan philosophy occasioned by Daneau’s restatement in the context of moral philosophy of the ideal of sola Scriptura, Reformed thinkers would choose to build upon Daneau’s model rather than return to Aristotle. Given that Daneau was a rather extreme Calvinist, of the Genevan variety, it is perhaps not surprising that his radical model was not followed by more moderate theologians, especially those who worked in the tradition of Melanchthon, as can be seen in the very different stance on ethics adopted by Bartholomaeus Keckermann in his Systerna ethicae (1607),40 which was the product of his lectures at the Gymnasium Athenaeum of Danzig. Keckermann (1572–1609) taught Hebrew and theology in Heidelberg before ending his short but notable career by teaching philosophy in his native Danzig.41 It is significant that Keckermann, who studied at Wittenberg, follows Melanchthon in considering ethics to be a philosophical subject in its own right. It belongs, together with oeconomics (oeconomica) and politics (politico), to philosophia practica, which is composed of that group of practical disciplines by which the human will and feelings are brought to civil good in this human society.42 While oeconomics and politics deal with the family and the state, ethics focuses on the individual. Keckermann defines ethics as in governing the will and desires for the sake of acquiring civil good. Ethics thus deals with civil life. In all matters to do with moral philosophy it was Keckermann’s intention to follow Aristotle whom, with other early reformers like Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 67

Vermigli, he calls the first philosopher of ethics. He considers this appropriate since, on the basis of the law of nature, ethics can be constructed and taken over in large part from pagan writers. All philosophia practica proceeds from principles that form the law of nature, that is, ‘the precepts of the right and the just remaining in the consciences of men after the Fall’.43 Since the law of nature includes not only the ability to make general moral distinctions, such as those between right and wrong, but also the ability to formulate specific moral principles, Keckermann believes it possible to construct a comprehensive morality from the law of nature. Because God has preserved remnants (reliquiae) of his image in people’s minds after the Fall, Aristotle’s ethical precepts contain ‘knowledge of the law of nature; rivulets of divine wisdom and testimony about God; great aids in explaining heavenly doctrine and, indeed, the sinews of political society; equipment and support for all of life; and, finally, the next step to true godliness and religion’.44 Thanks to the remnants of God’s image, one is able to practise ethical, oeconomic and political virtues, even without the special grace of the Holy Spirit.45 That said, Keckermann does hold that the Fall caused some fundamental defect in the remaining image of God. The upshot of this is that all practical sciences, including ethics, ‘need to be reformed from pagan traditions and to be completed out of the Word of God’.46 He says:

I have willingly granted…that, to the doctrine which Aristotle and other pagans have taught about the virtues, very many things ought to be added from the Holy Scriptures, by which that doctrine taught by the pagans is completed and corrected. This is to be done not only in ethics but also in oeconomics, politics and even in physics and other disciplines because the Holy Scriptures contain not only theological, but also ethical, oeconomic, political, physical and astronomical theorems (theoremata).47

Though Keckermann follows Aristotle, his book is not a commentary on the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics. Rather, he has ‘systematized’ much of the content of Aristotle’s work according to a contrived logical method:

And so now we have prepared a system of ethical prudence, in which we have taught about the end, object and means of this discipline in such a way that at the same time we have explained the whole text of Aristotle and whatever is memorable in it, 68 M.W.F.Stone

reduced it to a certain method of precepts and distinguished the commentary from Aristotle’s precepts.48

Although he recommends the earlier works of Daneau, Scultetus and Goclenius, Keckermann sees himself as the first to produce a system of ethics:49

Because in good conscience I can affirm that I have seen no ethical system (systema ethicum) thus far prepared by others in the way required by both the art of logic and the nature of ethics, I cannot therefore name another systematic ethics which ought to be taught at beginning levels apart from the one I have lectured on in this school.50

As a practical discipline, ethics is structured according to the analytical method that he considers appropriate for all practical disciplines.51 Closely reflecting the methodological views of the Aristotelian logician Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89),52 Keckermann divides all sciences into theoretical and practical disciplines, each arranged according to its own method. Theoretical disciplines follow the synthetic method, practical disciplines the analytic. In his Systema logicae, Keckermann describes the analytic method as:

that by which the parts of a practical discipline are arranged, so that from a conception of the end progress is made towards a knowledge of the principles or means through which that end is established in its subject…There are three parts to this method: first, is the end (finis) to be established; second, the subject (subiectum) in which it is established; third, the principles or means (media) through which the end is established.53

The discipline of ethics is arranged according to the three parts of this method:

According to the dictates of the analytical method (methodus analytica), we have first learned (praecognovimus) about the end of ethics, that is, civil good, and also about the object (obiectum)54 in which that end is to be established; I now propose that the means leading to this end should be treated.55

Thus, he begins with a general prologomenal section (Praecognita generalia) dealing with the end and the object of ethics; then, in the three books of his ethics he elaborates on the means: moral virtue. Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 69

Keckermann interprets the Nicomachean Ethics in such a way that he sees Aristotle himself following the above method:

In his Ethics Aristotle observed the same method, because immediately from the beginning of the first book he treated the end of ethics, namely, happiness. Next, at the end of the Book I he dealt with the subject of happiness, to wit, the human will and desire. Then, in the remaining books he explains the means by which that end can be achieved. These means are either moral and intellectual virtue or the union of virtues, that is, friendship.56

He sharply distinguishes ethics from theology, giving five arguments:

That ethics is different is proved first from the different ends of ethics and theology…Moral good is distinct from spiritual good …The end of theology is the good of grace, but the end of ethics is moral or civil good. A second argument is added from the object. Theology deals with man’s internal state, which must be inwardly reformed according to the image of God, and so with inner worship of God; ethics deals with external conduct in human civil society, and so it is confined within the limits of this present life and teaches precepts according to the standard of this life…Likewise, it is proved from the subject; for the subject of the discipline of ethics is the upright man…The authority of the holy Apostle also provides an argument; in 1 Timothy 2:(2) he explicitly distinguishes between godliness and morality (pietas et honestas)…Another argument is from the distinction in friendship, since no one denies that civil friendship differs from spiritual and theological friendship.57

Though ethics is distinct from theology, Keckermann sees no conflict between the two. Good conduct does not conflict with goodness but rather prepares the soul for it. Related to the difference between ethics and theology is a distinction between moral and spiritual virtues. For Keckermann, ethics deals with moral virtues, theology with spiritual virtues. The former are external and incomplete, the latter internal and complete. Complete virtues are called good works. The distinction is one of degree, so that what is lacking in the ethical virtues is added and completed by theology. Theological virtue is the consummation and completion of moral virtue.’58 Moral virtue per se is true virtue and true good, even though it is incomplete and therefore not as virtuous nor as 70 M.W.F.Stone good as spiritual virtue.59 Unbelievers may also have moral virtues. Even among the Turks, Keckermann declares, there are ‘many good and moral (boni et honesti) men’ who practise temperance, fortitude and other ethical virtues, though spiritually they are without hope unless they are converted.60 Central to the difference between theology and ethics, between spiritual good and civil good, is the assumption that the former focuses on the inner life, the latter on the outer. Yet Keckermann seems to have some difficulty in maintaining such a sharp inner-outer distinction, since his ethics is more often than not concerned only with outward action. While Keckermann speaks of spiritual good and spiritual virtues, he does not conclude that there is a distinct theological ethics. He resists the view that ethics can or should be subsumed within the field of dogmatics. In his analysis of ethics, Keckermann first discusses its end or goal, which is a form of the highest good or happiness. He distinguishes between the highest good as absolute and as relative. The highest good for man is union with God, otherwise called eternal life or beatitudo. This is the domain of theology, not ethics. The relative highest good which pertains to the present life and civil happiness is either a matter of the intellect or of the will. Intellectual good is studied by philosophia speculativa, while the good in relation to the will is the domain of ethics. The highest good relating to the will consists of the exercise of moral virtues. For this reason, the end of ethics is moral good or the exercise of moral virtues, producing good and honourable behaviour. Because of the Fall, this civil good or happiness is imperfect compared to eternal beatitude. Certainly, no one can gain salvation by it. Yet it serves to preserve human society. In this connection Keckermann takes issue with well-known humanists such as Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and Omer Talon (c. 1510–1562) for condemning Aristotle’s view of the highest civil good or happiness. They confuse, he thinks, ethics and theology, moral and spiritual good. Keckermann explicitly points out that his own view of the civil good conforms with that of Aristotle, for whom civil happiness consists in the exercise of virtue.61 Next Keckermann considers the object (obiectum), in which the end, moral goodness, is to be realized. The primary object of ethics is the human will, or the desires (appetitus) of the rational soul, through which a person pursues the good known by the intellect and avoids evil.62 There are two distinct acts of the will: approval of the good and aversion from evil.63 Keckermann identifies three properties of the will. The first is uprightness (rectitudo), by which the will is led to the good Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 71 that is rightly known and by which it lawfully avoids evil. After the Fall, rectitudo in deed (actus) is often lost, but it remains in potency (potentia). The second is freedom (libertas), the innate capacity through which the will moves itself by its own inner principle to embrace the good and to turn away from evil. Here Keckermann opposes the idea (held by other Reformers, for instance, Daneau) that freedom of the will means that prelapsarian humanity was equally inclined to good and evil. If this were the case, Keckermann replies, then God would have no free will.64 The third property of the will is the power (potestas) by which it can apply itself to do something in such a way that it actually obtains its wishes.65 In this context Keckermann considers the relationship between this freedom of the will (libertas voluntatis) and free choice (liberum arbitrium). The two differ as a part to the whole, since free choice, as discussed by the theologians, is the broader concept and includes all three properties of the will.66 Keckermann suggests that free choice was more profoundly corrupted by the Fall than freedom of the will. After the Fall, the will lost its rectitudo because the good is no longer rightly perceived and pursued; but it does retain some freedom and power: just as in the intellect after the Fall there remained natural knowledge, the ability to distinguish what is moral (honestum) from what is immoral (turpe), so also in the human will some (aliqua) freedom and power remained after the Fall, by which it can embrace what is moral and flee from what is immoral.67 With a degree of freedom and power, the will remains an active faculty of the soul; but, Keckermann contends, a special grace from God is needed before an agent’s acts of will can be classified under the heading of moral virtue. On another level, agents can in no way perform spiritual virtues by liberum arbitrium. Having set down the foundations of this ethical system by dealing with the end and object of ethics in his prolegomenal section, Keckermann devotes the three books of his Systema ethicae to the means by which one secures this end. He identifies two means that lead to civil good: moral virtue and agreement in virtue, known as friendship.68 In this regard, the bulk of the Systema ethicae is devoted to explaining the virtues. The first book treats moral virtues in general, as well as the guiding virtues; the second examines particular virtues; and the third book covers the virtues by analogy, the heroic virtues and finally friendship. In Keckermann’s taxonomy of the virtues, moral virtues, the subject matter of philosophical ethics, are distinct from the spiritual virtues of theology as well as from the intellectual virtues of philosophia speculative Intellectual virtues perfect the intellect; moral virtues 72 M.W.F.Stone perfect the human will and desires. Among the moral virtues, he distinguishes between virtue simpliciter and heroic virtues. Among the virtues simpliciter, he distinguishes between virtues in the proper sense and virtues by analogy. As Keckermann has it, moral virtue in the proper sense is an active disposition (habitus), arising from ongoing moral (honesti) actions, suitably tempering and conforming the human will and desires to moderation for the sake of attaining civil good.69 It is noteworthy that he does not think that his definition is at odds with that of Aristotle, who had famously defined virtue in terms of moderation. Keckermann asserts that the essential and prime property of virtue is that it is found in the mean. As any mean lies between two extremes, so also virtue has its extremes, namely, the vices of excess and deficiency.70 After discussing virtue in general, Keckermann considers two species of proper moral virtue: the guiding or universal virtues, and the guided or particular virtues. The former, which include prudence and universal , function as a governing the particular virtues. The source and foundation of guiding moral virtues is love of God, oneself and one’s neighbour. But since such moral virtue is found in unbelievers—such as the aforementioned upright Turks—as well as believers, this is a general love or fear of God; it derives from a natural knowledge (notitiae naturales) of God, e.g. that He is all-knowing and just, and that He rewards good and punishes evil. When to this knowledge is added a full knowledge of God from his Word, a higher level is added to moral virtues, so that they become good works pleasing to God for salvation. This, however, moves us beyond ethics and into theology.71 In the second book of Systema ethicae, Keckermann analyses particular virtues, which are governed by prudence and justice. Unlike Melanchthon or Daneau, Keckermann does not classify the particular virtues according to the Decalogue but rather according to their object. Thus, he examines virtues in relation to oneself (e.g. temperance), virtues in relation to one’s neighbour (e.g. generosity) and virtues in relation to both oneself and one’s neighbour (e.g. truthfulness).72 Here one finds no virtues in relation to God, since ethics deals only with civil life and not with the . Finally, in the third book Keckermann examines virtues by analogy, the heroic virtues and friendship. Virtues by analogy rank below virtues in the proper sense; they are incomplete virtues that are merely moral dispositions agreeable with virtue. Keckermann again classifies these in relation to oneself (e.g. shame), to one’s neighbour (e.g. sympathy) and to both oneself and one’s neighbour (e.g. repentance).73 Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 73

Heroic virtues, on the other hand, stand higher than the usual virtues and so do not occur without divine inspiration. Lastly, friendship is a relationship born of mutual goodwill that fosters agreement in moral virtue, so that each person may lead a virtuous life. These points illustrate that Keckermann’s analysis of individual virtues reflects his allegiance to the Aristotelian view that virtue is to be found in the mean. Another attempt to use Aristotle as the basis from which a method of moral philosophy congenial to Christian teaching could be extracted can be found in the work of Antonius Walaeus (1573–1639). A leading theologian who won esteem for himself at the of Dort, Walaeus joined the theology faculty at Leiden. Thereafter, he published his Compendium ethicae Aristotelicae ad normam veritatis Christiane revocatum at Leiden in 1620. This work was the product of lectures on ethics Walaeus had given at the Middelburg , where he had previously taught. In the Compendium, Walaeus argued that Aristotle could not be neglected since his writings contained useful insights exhibiting remnants of God’s image; moreover, these insights were important to the task of imbuing the young with moral probity. Nevertheless, some of Aristotle’s teaching on moral practice needed to be rendered harmless for the tender minds of the young. Hence, the Nicomachean Ethics must be critically judged and corrected by the standards of the Christian religion, ‘which alone teach the true and perfect doctrine regarding morality’. Aristotelian ethics must always be supplemented by those action-guiding norms distilled from God’s Word.74 Walaeus makes this point in his ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to the Compendium:

I have tried in this little work both to present compendiously in almost the same order the matters chiefly treated by Aristotle in his Ethics to Nicomachus, compared also with opinions of other philosophers, and to correct the errors that I observed in these according to the norms of Christian truth.75

In keeping with these aims, Walaeus presents a point-by-point revision of Aristotle. Following what he considered to be the order of Aristotle’s work, his Compendium consists of two basic parts: the first dealing with the highest good as the end of all human actions, and the second with the means leading to the highest good, that is, the virtues. Correcting Aristotle’s view that the highest good is the perfect exercise of virtue in this life, Walaeus, along with countless other ‘Christian Aristotelians’ before him, identifies the highest good as the vision and 74 M.W.F.Stone enjoyment of God. The virtues and other good works are a simple means to our future beatitude.76 Interestingly, Walaeus follows Aristotle’s ten basic moral virtues as the norms of action, correcting them where he finds errors rather than making direct appeal to the Decalogue.77 Later on, he notes that although Daneau’s treatment of the virtues according to the praecepta of the Decalogue is the best way of dividing them, it is inappropriate to the concerns of his Compendium because Daneau’s method is theological rather than philosophical. This last remark might be said to present yet further evidence that even as late as 1620 some Reformed moral philosophers wanted their discipline to be independent of dogmatic theology. The work of Keckermann, and to a lesser extent Walaeus, might be said to represent the last systematic attempt in the period known as ‘the early orthodoxy’78 to work out an ethics and a theory of practical action along broad Aristotelian lines. In this respect, they might be said to be the true heirs to the project, originally set out by Melanchthon and continued by Vermigli and other professors at the Reformed academies and universities, to keep ethics within the purview of and aloof from the field of dogmatics.79 Thus, while it was thought imperative that Aristotle be ‘corrected’ by Scripture at those points where there were evident conflicts with revelation, Reformed moral thinkers in the tradition of Keckermann were of the view that Aristotle’s Ethics provided the standard by which all pagan ethical systems were to be judged. When we compare the two most significant moral systems from the period of early orthodoxy, those of Daneau and Keckermann, we can note an evident tension within the evolution of Reformed moral thought. Both Daneau and Keckermann recognized this tension and can be said to have addressed it in competing ways. For Daneau, one could by-pass both dogmatics and Aristotle if one advanced an independent Christian ethics. Such an ethics, he thought, would be philosophical, yet it would draw on Scripture. Keckermann pursued a very different direction and more closely followed the path laid down by Melanchthon, who had developed an ethics based on Aristotle and natural law. As a philosophical system, Keckermann’s ethics did not deal with the Decalogue as Daneau’s had done. It concerned itself with civil life and the virtues. Though Keckermann did not intend to base his philosophical ethics on Scripture and wanted to keep it distinct from theology, at crucial points it is clearly influenced by sacra doctrina, as in his argument that since ethics is imperfect it needs to be completed by theology. What is interesting is that the subsequent generations of moral Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 75 thinkers noted this tension and addressed it in ways that were eventually to lead to the decline of the strong Aristotelian influence within Reformed moral thought. The work of Antonius Walaeus in the 1620s provides one of the few exceptions to this trend. Keckermann’s approach, for instance, was subjected to continued criticism by English Puritan moralists such as William Ames, who in his Medulla theologiae (1627), took Keckermann to task for separating moral and spiritual good and for restricting ethics to the external life and theology to the internal. Daneau’s ‘Christian ethics’ remained slightly more attractive to later thinkers, but its philosophical character was ignored. The new trend in early seventeenth-century Reformed ethics was the development of a theological ethics which was suspicious of philosophy and which attempted to recommend itself by being ‘practical’. This emphasis on the application of indubitable Christian maxims to practical contexts was to be the defining feature of the case- reasoning of the Reformed tradition. Two main factors contributed to its development. The first was the appearance of Reformed works that divided dogmatics into two parts: faith and works, or what is to be believed (credenda) and what is to be done (facienda). Here ethical matters, such as the Law, good works and the virtues, are a distinct part of theology. This development was anticipated by the Huguenot Peter Ramus in his Commentariorum de religione Christiana libri quatuor (1576).80 He organized the customary catechetical materials according to a method that divided theology into doctrine and discipline, and doctrine, in turn, into faith (i.e. the Creed) and the actions (actiones) of faith (i.e. the Law, the Lord’s Prayer and the ). In 1589, the Basel theologian Amandus Polanus firmly established this trend when he divided into faith and good works, credenda and facienda.81 Similarly, Ames divided theology into faith and observance.82 In these writings, ethics remains part of dogmatics, though a very distinct part; it has not yet become a sub-discipline of theology. The second factor was the need for a theology that would address the actual spiritual and practical needs of daily life. In this context English Puritans such as Ames and Perkins emphasized the ‘practice of piety’ and inaugurated a tradition of Reformed case-reasoning that sought to apply ethical principles to particular cases. The first to do so was the Cambridge theologian William Perkins (1558–1602), who wrote two important books of practical ethics: A Discourse of Conscience (1596) and the aforementioned Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606). A penchant for case-reasoning was by no means the sole preserve of the English, as continental theologians such as 76 M.W.F.Stone

Johann Heinrich Alsted also tried their hand at this form of .83 Knowledge of case-reasoning was soon considered to be a necessary component of any pastoral education; and from this time onwards we see a number of calls within Reformed universities to institute chairs in practical theology within the theology faculty. An early instance of such a call came from the delegates of Zeeland at the in 1618. They called for the establishment of a chair in practical theology by bringing to bear the following arguments:

Until now in examinations before promotion attention has been paid only to doctrine…which we admit is primary; nevertheless, one can consider whether it is useful to establish also a practical examination in which (candidates) may be examined as to whether they are steadfast in the word which is according to godliness (pietas: cf. I Tim. 6:3) and are capable of teaching Christian Ethics (Ethica Christiana) and of forming the conduct of people in every kind of virtue…for it is desirable that the minds of young men in colleges and academies be trained in Practical Theology (Theologia Practica) and be instructed about various cases of conscience.84

An attempt from 1619 to 1623 to establish a post for a professor of ‘practical theology’ or ‘Christian ethics’ at Leiden University failed; but gradually theological ethics emerged as a distinct discipline. Already in 1611, Alsted had distinguished theologia theoretica and theologia practica as distinct fields, and divided the latter into soteriologia sive schola tentationum and casus conscientiae (i.e. casuistry), theologia prophetica (i.e. homiletics) and theologia acroamatica (a study of how to listen to sermons). This trend continued well into the 1640s as can be observed in the work of Gisbertus Voetius, who in 1646 held six academic disputations on ‘practical theology’ at the Utrecht Academy.85 He divided it into moral and casuistic theology (theologia moralis et casuistica), ascetics (which studies devotional practice) and church polity.86 Although philosophical ethics continued to be taught, theological ethics was becoming established as a sub-discipline within Reformed academies. It is in the practical ethics of Ames and Perkins that we can begin to discern some of the more distinctive features of a practical divinity that is exclusively indebted to the Reformed tradition. Both Cambridge theologians wrote in the vernacular (in this case English) in order to make their work accessible to the consciences of a new Protestant Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 77 reading public. Both argued in forceful terms that cases of conscience were to be resolved by sole reference to the pronouncements of Scripture (‘Holy Writ’) rather than by appeal to ecclesiastical authority, theological precedent or natural reasoning. God’s law as revealed by Scripture became the norm of human action and, as such, it was to assist individuals in all cases of moral uncertainty. Further to this, neither Ames nor Perkins indulged in elaborate discussions of standard cases of conscience, but instead devoted themselves to the articulation of ‘practices of piety’,87 that is, practices which were concerned with the spiritual amelioration of the whole human person and which looked to interior conversion of the human soul through the means of an ascetical theology.88 In these respects the treatises of Perkins, Ames and other Reformed theologians invite a pertinent contrast with works of Roman Catholic casuistry written at the same time. If we take as our point of comparison the Jesuit Juan Azor (1535–1603), whose Institutiones morales were published in Rome from 1600–11,89 we find a very different method of approaching cases of conscience (casus conscientiae), which has its origins in medieval Aristotelianism. Central to Azor’s casuistry, unlike the practical divinity of Ames and Perkins, is the methodological requirement of appreciating the importance of circumstances (circumstantiae)90 in the resolution of cases of conscience. Circumstances are of great importance in understanding human acts, he argues, because they can and often do change the very nature of an action. This is particularly revealed in law, Azor holds, and for this reason we have need of the Aristotelian notion of equity because ‘in law circumstances change everything, so that from these the equity of the case can be inferred’.91 Azor’s analysis of a host of moral problems, such as lying, usury and simony, under this neo-Aristotelian rubric provides us with an illustration of the method used by many casuists in the Roman Catholic tradition, particularly those who belonged to the Jesuit Order. First, a general maxim or value is shown to hold in an obvious case (e.g. one ought to return goods held in trust in ordinary circumstances); only then is it portrayed as having a more difficult application, as the circumstances of a related case become more complex (e.g. the owner of the goods will use them for an evil purpose once they are returned). Casuists like Azor claimed that in the initial case there is no room for serious disagreement as to what is to be done. As the subsequent case becomes more complex, however, the act of returning goods held in trust becomes more debatable, since it is not clear that the principle requiring us to return the borrowed goods really requires us to return 78 M.W.F.Stone them regardless of the actual situation in which they will be returned. So, if I borrow a friend’s gun to go on a hunting trip, I am duty bound to return the gun on my return. If, however, on returning, I find that my friend has become deranged and is not in a fit state to be in possession of a gun, then surely I ought not to return his gun to him despite the requirements of the original principle.92 This point serves to show that for many Roman Catholic casuists, Azor included, general moral principles can be defeated in their application by the specificity of particular cases; thus, moral principles can be said to only hold for the most part (ut in pluribus).93 This last point stands in stark contrast to the insistence of Ames and Perkins that the norms distilled from Scripture do not admit of exceptions and apply regardless of circumstances. It is important, however, that we understand that such an insistence did not derive from a misplaced enthusiasm for , but was rather predicated on the view that morality was but one facet in a process of individual spiritual reform. Central to this ideal of was the notion that the very practice of piety would not only remove any impediment that stood in the way of the realization of the Word of God, but would further provide assistance and assurance in the discernment of an individual’s faith. Thus, from a spiritual theology Ames, Perkins and their like developed a practical ethics. Such an ‘ethics’ would always be conditioned by a full understanding of the constraints and requirements of Christian piety, based on complete and willing obedience to the Word of God. And in so far as the Word of God was expressed in the form of moral principles, such principles were deemed to be without exception. The story narrated in this paper is one in which moral theorists in the Reformed tradition attempted to think their way out of an ethics which relied upon Aristotle and accepted philosophical traditions in order to develop an approach to the issues surrounding practical conduct which was fully informed by the theological inheritance of the Reformation. When we examine the development of case-reasoning within the Reformed tradition from Vermigli and Hyperius, through Daneau, Keckermann and Walaeus, to Ames, Perkins, Alsted and Polanus, we see a marked attempt made by each successive generation to highlight the fact that the problems occasioned by the vagaries of human action are best met by the application of preformed principles, in this case, the dicta of Scripture, to the problems in question. In this sense, our story starts from an ethics which emphasizes the philosophical independence of the discipline and ends with a conception of practical divinity which is concerned to articulate the view that the problems of human life can Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 79 always met by an appeal to the authority of Scripture. It is this idea which provides the case-reasoning of the Reformers with its distinctive characteristics, characteristics which separate it from other contemporary traditions of casuistry, particularly those of the Roman Catholic and certain elements of the Anglican tradition,94 and which locate its seminal importance in the development of that most modern of disciplines, ‘Christian ethics’. Perhaps the individual who would have taken most delight in these developments, had he lived longer, would be Peter Ramus. Denied a much prized chair in ethics by the Aristotelians in Heidelberg and a teaching position at the Geneva Academy by Beza on account of his antipathy to Aristotle, he would no doubt have enjoyed the delicious irony that future generations of ethical thinkers within the Reformed tradition would look, not to the Nicomachean Ethics, but rather to his own division of theology as a basis from which to construct a practical divinity.

Notes * I would like acknowledge the support of a British Academy Post-Doctoral Award (1995–6) during which the research for this paper was carried out. I am grateful to Jill Kraye and Charles Lohr for their comments on some of the issues raised by this paper, and to Paul Helm and Tony Lane for instructive advice on early modern Reformed philosophy and theology. More recently, I have learned a great deal from discussions with James Keenan and Toon van Houdt about many aspects of the casuistical tradition in early modern Europe. 1 T.B.Macaulay, History of England, 4 vols, London and New York, vol. IV, p. 219. Cf. the verdict of Viscount Bolingbroke that ‘casuistry…destroys by distinctions and exceptions all morality and effaces the essential difference between right and wrong’, in his Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism and on the Idea of a Patriot King, London, 1749, p. 170. Further evidence of a peculiarly English-speaking distaste for the seeming absurdities of casuistry can be found in the work of poets like Alexander Pope: see his Rape of the Lock (1704). For a helpful discussion of English antipathy towards (Jesuit) casuistry see Margaret Sampson, ‘Laxity and in seventeenth-century English political thought’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 72–118; and K.Thomas, ‘Cases of conscience in seventeenth-century England’, in J.S.Morrill, P.Slack and D.Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England. Essays presented to G.E.Aylmer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 29–56. 2 Such attitudes, it should be noted, were by no means the exclusive property of British Protestants. Perhaps the most damning and successful critique of casuistry, in particular that practised by members of the Jesuit Order, derived from the pen of a devout Roman Catholic, ; see his Lettres écrites 80 M.W.F.Stone

à un provincial (1657–9), in his Oeuvres completes, ed. L. Lafuma, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1963, pp. 371–468. On Pascal’s condemnation of casuistry see Jan Miel, Pascal’s Theology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970; and Pierre Cariou, Pascal et la casuistique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. 3 William Ames, De conscientia, ejus jure et casibus, Cambridge, 1603. 4 William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of Cases of Conscience, Cambridge, 1606. 5 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium or The Rule of Conscience in all her Measures Serving as a Great Instrument for Determination of Cases of Conscience, London, 1660; reprinted in The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor D.D, 10 vols, London, 1861, vols IX and X. 6 Robert Sanderson, De obligatione conscientiae, London, 1660, and De juramenti promissorii obligatione, London, 1647. 7 The most important proto-casuistical works of Baldwin (also known by his Latin name Balduinus) is Tractatus luculentus posthumus, toti republicae Christianae utilissimus, de materia rarissime antehac enucleata, casibus nimirum conscientiae, Wittenberg, 1628. 8 See Alsted’s Summa casuum conscientiae, nova methodo elaborata, Frankfurt a.M., 1628. On Alsted see below, p. 76. 9 For general discussions which claim that there is a strong methodological connection between the Catholic and Protestant ‘casuistries’ see Kenneth E.Kirk, Conscience and its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1927, pp. 202–7; H.R.McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1949, chap. 1; T.Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century With Special Reference to Jeremy Taylor, London, SPCK, 1952; and A.Jonsen and S.Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 158–64. 10 For a much more detailed and nuanced analysis of the historical context in which casuistry was practised see Leites, Conscience and Casuistry, and J. Keenan, S.J. and T.Shannon (eds), The Context of Casuistry, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1995. Such works call into question the view expressed by Kirk, McAdoo, Wood and Jonsen and Toulmin that the casuistry practised by Protestant and Catholic alike was rooted in the same theological and philosophical traditions. 11 The practice of dividing manuals of moral theology into sections devoted to the discussion of particular sins and cases of conscience was one which late medieval authors inherited from the summe confessorum of the thirteenth century. The most influential of these was the Summa de paenitentia (c. 1221) by the Dominican Raymund of Peñaforte (1175–1275). Raymund’s work was to prove very influential in the history of casuistry precisely because he divided his work into various categories—e.g. sins against God and sins against one’s neighbour—thereby breaking with the tradition of older penitential writers, who simply collected and then commented upon cases of conscience. A further innovation in Raymund’s work is that each section of his Summa commences with a proposal of how a particular case of conscience will be examined and resolved. This practice was to continue well into the sixteenth century and Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 81

beyond, as can be seen in such influential tomes of casuistry as the Summa angelica (1480) by Angelo Carletti, and the Summa summarum (1516) by Sylvester Mazzolini. For further discussion of these matters see my The Subtle Arts of Casuistry: An Essay in the History of Moral Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, vol. I: The Casuistical Tradition From Aristotle to Kant, especially chap. 5. 12 For discussions of Taylor which reveal him not only to be acquainted with the casuistical writings of a number of Roman Catholic theologians of the period, but also to have been influenced by trends within , especially voluntarism, see Robert Hoopes, ‘Voluntarism in Jeremy Taylor and the Platonic tradition’, Hunt ing ton Library Quarterly, 1950, vol. 12, pp. 341– 54; C.J.Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor, London, SPCK, 1952; Wood, English Casuistical Divinity, and R. Taylor, ‘Moral sources, ordinary life and truth-telling in Jeremy Taylor’s casuistry’, in Keenan and Shannon, Context of Casuistry, pp. 131–57. 13 William Perkins, ‘The whole treatise of cases of conscience’, in Thomas Merrill (ed.), William Perkins 1558–1602 English Puritan, Nieuwkoop, B. De Graaf, 1966, pp. 103 and 111. 14 Kirk, Conscience and its Problems, pp. 106–7, records that in 1672 it was noted that in the curricula followed by divines, English Protestants had only William Ames, the Wittenberg Lutheran professor Frederick Baldwin and Robert Sanderson to turn to for ‘casuistical advice’. Further to this, an inventory of British university libraries at this time reveals that the standard texts for casuistry were European and Roman Catholic, predominantly the work of members of the maligned Jesuit Order; seeJ. C.Aveling, ‘The English clergy, Catholic and Protestant, in the 16th and 17th centuries’, in W.Haase (ed.), Rome and the Anglicans, New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1982, pp. 55– 142, at 123. 15 See Stone, Subtle Arts of Casuistry. 16 Very general surveys of the development of Reformed ethics from the Reformation to the nineteenth century can be found in A.Schweizer, ‘Die Entwickelung des Moralsystems in der reformierten Kirche’, Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1850, vol. 23, pp. 5–78, 288–327, 554–80; W.Gass, Geschichte der Christlichen Ethik, Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1886, pp. 55–78, 117–52, 283–91, 344–59; T.Ziegler, Geschichte der Christlichen Ethik, Strasbourg, Karl Trubner, 1892, pp. 462–511. 17 For a helpful survey of these issues see J.Kraye, ‘Moral philosophy’, in Charles Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 303–86. 18 K.Hartfelder, Philipp Melanchthon als Praeceptor Germaniae, Berlin, A. Hoffmann, 1889, pp. 558–65. 19 It was entitled Enarrationes aliquot librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis, Wittenberg, 1529, with many editions thereafter. 20 In the Epitome, in his Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. C.G.Bretschneider and H.E.Bindseil, 28 vols, 1834–60, vol. XVI, p. 21. For a discussion of Melanchthon’s ethics see Hartfelder, Melanchthon, pp. 231–8; and Heinrich Maier, ‘Melanchthon als Philosoph’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 1898, vol. 11, pp. 213–32. For more recent accounts see G.Franck, Die 82 M.W.F.Stone

theologische Philosophie Philipp Melanchthons (1497–1560), Leipzig, Benno, 1995, pp. 17–19; S.Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; and importantly, J.Kraye, ‘Melanchthons ethische Kommentare und Lehrbücher’, in Jürgen Leonhardt (ed.), Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts, Rostock, Universität Rostock, 1997, pp. 195–214. 21 Calvin’s subsumimg of ethics within dogmatic theology did not preclude him from commenting on matters of ethical interest. For a discussion of his ‘social ethics’ see G.H.Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, Carlisle, Paternoster Press, 1997. 22 Andreas Hyperius, Ad X libros Ethicorum scholia, Marburg, 1553; later editions: Basel, 1586; Lich, 1600. For a discussion of Hyperius’s work see W.Spijker, Principe, methode en functie van de theologie bij Andreas Hyperius, Kampen, Kok, 1990. 23 See, especially, Hyperius’s comments on Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. 24 Peter Martyr Vermigli, In primum, secundum, et initium tertii libri Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum…commentarius, Zurich, 1563 and Zurich, 1582. 25 Vermigli, Commentarius (1582 ed.), p. 6: ‘Primum partiar propositum Aristotelis textum: secundo scopum et propositionem loci assumpti exponam cum eius probatione: tertio sensum et verba excutiam, quae visa fuerint expositione indigere: quarto quae dubia fuerint, ostendam, et ad extremum pro locis communibus admonebo quid cum divinis literis, quae allata fuerint consentiant vel dissentiant.’ For a discussion of Vermigli’s moral philosophy see J.P.Donnelly S.J., ‘The social and ethical thought of Vermigli’, in J.C.McLelland (ed.), Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980, pp. 107–19. 26 Meditationes ethicae sive Aristotelis Ethicorum Nikomacheion perspicua ac perquam erudita, cum moribus sacris, id est, in sacra pagina descriptis, collata explicatio per D.Petrum Martyr Vermilium…et D.Andream Hyperium…cum notis et lemmatibus logicis Rodolphi Goclenii, Lich, 1598 and Lich, 1602. 27 For information on the Geneva Academy see C.Borgeaud, Histoire de L’Université de Genève, Geneva, Georg, 1900. The statutes (probably drawn up Calvin himself, see Borgeaud, pp. 1–42) adopted in May 1559 specify that the professor of Greek shall ‘explain some book of philosophy concerning morals. It shall be a book of Aristotle or Plato or Plutarch or of some Christian philosopher’ (‘Que le professor grec le matin entre après l’hebrieu et expose quelque livre de philosophie qui concerne les meurs. Le livre sera Aristote ou Platon ou Plutarque ou de quelque philosophe crestien’): Le Livre du Recteur de L’ Académie de Genève (1559–1878), ed. S.Stelling-Michaud, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1959, p. 72. Of the first Greek professors at Geneva, (where he held the chair 1582–96) and Gaspard Laurent number among the more famous. Casaubon is well known for his bilingual Operum Aristotelis…nova editio Graece et Latine, Lyon, 1590, Laurent for his Miscellaneae theses in ethicis, Geneva, 1607. On these two teachers see Borgeaud, Histoire, pp. 209–20, and 638–9. 28 For information on the teaching of ethics and those individuals charged with this responsibility at Heidelberg see Johann F.Hautz, Geschichte der Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 83

Universität Heidelberg, Mannheim, 1864, vol. II, pp. 54, 56–9, 105, 123 and 139; Gustav Toepke, Die Matrikel der Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, 1886, vol. II, pp. 26, 44, 117, 464–76. Among the early Heidelberg ethics professors Abraham Scultetus (1556–1624) stands out; in the early 1590s he gave lectures on ethics, which he subsequently published under the title, Ethicorum libri duo methodice conscripti, Leiden, 1593 and Strasbourg, 1614; he later became a theology professor at Heidelberg and served as a delegate to the Synod of Dort (1618–19). 29 On ethics teaching at Leiden and its debt to Aristotle see P.Dibon, La Philosophie néerlandaise au siècle d’or, Paris, Elsevier, 1954, vol. I, pp. 9–20, 25–38, 59–64. Of the professors at Leiden, Petrus Bertius (1565–1629) is of particular interest; in 1601 he published a programme of ethical disputations that shows him to be adhering to the order of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics: ibid., pp. 59–60. After Bertius, subsequent Leiden professors (see pp. 73–4, below) tended to adopt a similar, although more critical, view of Aristotle. 30 See A.Thorbecke (ed.), Statuten und Reformationen der Universität Heidelberg vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1891, p. 99. 31 On Strigelius see Charler Lohr, ‘Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors So-Z’, Renaissance Quarterly, 1982, vol. 35, pp. 164–256, at 177–8. 32 Aristotelis ad filium Nicomachum, de vita et moribus scripti libri X, conversi de Graeco in sermonem Latinum et argumentis librorum atque capitum turn scholis quoque illustrati a Victorino Strigelio, Leipzig, 1572; and later editions: Frankfurt, 1583 and Basel, 1586. 33 On this incident see D.Sinnema, ‘Aristotle and early Reformed orthodoxy: Moments of accommodation and antithesis’, in W.Helleman (ed.), Christianity and the , Lanham, University Press of America, 1990, pp. 123–8. A year later in his attempt to secure a teaching position at the Geneva Academy Ramus was again thwarted, but this time by no less a figure than Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor as head of the Academy. While Beza recognized Ramus’s ‘superior qualities’ and ‘genius’, he declined to give him the position on the grounds that: (a) the Academy did not have the funds to appoint another professor; and (b) in Geneva they had a ‘determination to follow the position of Aristotle, without deviating a line, in logic or in the rest of our studies’. For a discussion of this episode see C.Waddington, Ramus, sa vie, ses écrits et ses opinions, Paris, 1855, pp. 228–30. 34 The full title of Daneau’s work is Ethices Christianae libri tres, in quibus de veris humanarum actionum principiis agitur, atque etiam legis Divinae, sive Decalogi explicatio, illiusque cum scriptis scholasticorum, iure naturali sive philosophico, civili Romanorum, et canonico collatio continetur; praeterea virtutum et vitiorum, quae passim vel in Sacra Scriptura, vel alibi occurrent, quaeque ad singula legis Divinae praecepta revocantur, definitiones, Geneva, 1577; later editions appeared in Geneva, 1579, 1582, 1583, 1588, 1601 and 1614, and in his Opuscula omnia theologica, Geneva, 1583. In 1581 Johannes Cherpontius included a compendium of Daneau’s ethics, Ethices Christianae compendium, in his Libelli aliquot formandis tum iuventutis moribus, tum linguae Graecae, Latinae, Gallicae et Germanicae utilissimi, Geneva, 1581. The compendium appears here in four languages in parallel columns; 84 M.W.F.Stone

Cherpontius’s work, which includes short treatises of Plutarch and Isocrates, was a textbook designed to teach primary level students languages and morality at the same time. 35 Daneau’s description of ethics as instruction (institutio) appears to be based on 2 Timothy 3:16, which speaks of Scripture as being profitable not only for doctrine and reproof, but also for correction and instruction in righteousness . Allusion to this passage again reflects Daneau’s conviction that ethics should be based on Scripture. 36 Daneau, Ethices Christianae libri III, I.1, in Opuscula omnia, pp. 42–4: ‘Est autem Ethice Christiana, qualem hic quaerimus, qualisque Dei verbo comprehensa est, tum internae, tum externae nostrae sanctitatis, i.e. totius vitae nostrae reformationis, qualis esse debet, plena perfectaque institutio et doctrina.’ 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., in Opuscula omnia, vol. I, p. 24: ‘Nec ita scrupulosa est in vitiis et virtutibus distinguendis Scriptura, ut non saepe eandem virtutem, idemque vitium variis nominibus appellet, pro diverse nimirum effectu, et affectu animi, qui sentitur a nobis, vel a nobis exterius producitur. Philosophi vero et Scholastici in his apellandis et distinguendis suerunt longe religiosiores, quod omnia ad certam suamque illam artem, captum, et ad certum definitumque numerum revocare voluerunt, ut facerent harum rerum et omnium animi affectuum (qui tamen sunt infiniti) certam quandam scientiam certis virtutum et vitiorum apellationibus, certoque numero comprehensam: in qua nihil eos effugisse videtur. Quod tamen est prorsus . Sunt enim cordis humani infiniti motus, recessus et affectus, qui certo numero omnes colligi non magis possunt quam arena maris: sed si illi a Spiritu Dei regantur, sunt honesti, et virtutes: sin carnis nostrae sensu ducantur, vitiosi: et vitia sive peccata dicuntur. Quaedam tamen tum virtutum, tum vitiorum genera suis diversisque nominibus enumerat Scriptura Sacra, nimirum ea quae sunt et potiora et notiora, et certis vocibus a vulgo designata, ut ex his aliquot de caeteris iudicemus, et quid a Deo sit petendum, intelligamus. Ex quo fit ut aliam vitae nostrae, sanctae instituendae omnino rationem ineat Scriptura, quam et philosophi, et scholastici.’ 39 Ibid. 40 The full title is Systema ethicae tribus libris adornatum et publicis praelectionibus traditum in gymnasio Dantiscano, Hanau 1607; later editions appeared in London 1607, Hanau 1610, Hanau 1613, Hanau 1619, and in his Opera omnia, 2 vols, Geneva, 1614. All references to the Systema will be to the Opera omnia. 41 An overview of Keckermann’s life and writings, including his ethics, is presented by W.H.van Zuylen, Bartholomäus Keckermann: Sein Leben und Wirken, Borna-Leipzig, Robert Noske, 1934. 42 See Keckermann, Opera omnia, vol. II, p. 251. For Keckermann, prudentia characterizes philosophia practica, while scientia characterizes philosophia speculativa. 43 Ibid., vol. II, p. 153. 44 Ibid., vol. II, p. 376: ‘Quod superest, Deo Opt. max. gratias agimus, quod in Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 85

mentibus hominum alias reliquias imaginis suae et hoc discrimen honesti et turpis conservaverit, et occasionem nobis dedit praecepta ethica methodice complectendi, in quibus continentur notitiae legis naturalis, et rivuli divinae sapientiae et testimonia de Deo, et magna adminicula ad explicationem doctrinae coelestis, immo et nervi politicae societatis, et ornamenta ac praesidia totius vitae, et denique propinquus gradus ad veram pietatem ac Religionem…’ 45 Ibid., vol. II, p. 156. 46 Ibid., vol. II, p. 230. 47 Ibid., vol. II, p. 255: ‘Et concesserim ultro…ad eam doctrinam, quam Aristotelis et alij Ethnici de virtutibus tradiderunt, plurima assumenda esse ex Sacris literis, per quae ista doctrina ab Ethnicis tradita completur, aut etiam corrigitur. Id quod non tantum in Ethicis faciendum est, sed etiam in Oeconomicis, Politicis, imo etiam Physicis et aliis disciplinis, siquidem in Sacris literis ut suo loco monuimus, non tantum continentur Theologica sed etiam Ethica, Oeconomica, Politica, Physica ac Theoremata.’ 48 Ibid., vol. II, p. 376: ‘Atque ita iam Systerna Ethicae prudentiae adornavimus in quo quidem de fine, obiecto, deque mediis disciplinae ita docuimus, ut simul Aristotelis textum omnem, et quicquid in eo memorabile est, explicaverimus, id ad certam praeceptorum methodum reduxerimus, et commentarium a praeceptis Aristotelis distinxerimus.’ 49 With his Systema logicae of 1600 Keckermann was the first to use in a book title the term systema in the sense of a logically organized discipline treated as an integral body of knowledge. For a discussion of this and other aspects of his work see O.Ritschl, System und systematische Methode in der Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Sprachgebrauchs und der philosophischen Methodologie, Bonn, A.Marcus und E.Webers Verlag, 1906, pp. 25–30. 50 Keckermann, Manuductio ad studium philosophiae practicae, in Opera omnia, vol. II, p. 129: ‘Sed quia bona conscientia affirmare possum, nullum me vidisse Systema Ethicum ita adornatum adhuc ab aliis, ut tum ars logica, tum natura Ethicae postulabat; iudico Systematicum aliam Ethicam, quae initio legenda sit, nominare non possum praeter eam, quam in hac schola praelegi…’ 51 A year after Keckermann had published his Systema ethicae, Clemens Timpler (1563/4–1624), a Calvinist philosopher at the Gymnasium Arnoldinum in Steinfurt, published another system of ethics, entitled: Philosophiae practicae systema methodicum, in tres partes digestum, in quo universa probe honesteque vivendi ratio tam generatim, quam speciatim per praecepta et quaestiones breviter ac perspicue explicatur et probatur, pars prima, complectens ethicam generalem, libris IV pertractatam, Hanau, 1608; and later editions: Hanau, 1612 and Frankfurt a.M, 1625. As with Keckermann, Timpler did not intend his work to be a commentary on Aristotle, though he frequently cites him. Timpler deals with moral virtue (Books 1–3) and moral actions (Book 4), and claims that he is original in treating ethics according to this distinction. Timpler is discussed, although unsatisfactorily, by J.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, esp. pp. 35–6, 326–50. 86 M.W.F.Stone

52 In his remarks on method Keckermann frequently cites Zabarella; see Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 121. Zabarella had presented his views in De methodis, which appeared in his Opera logica, Venice, 1578. One way in which Keckermann differs is that he calls ‘method’ what Zabarella calls ‘order’. Zabarella had distinguished between method, the procedure of discovering the unknown from the known, and order, the procedure of arranging the subject matter of a discipline. For him theoretical sciences must follow a compositive or synthetic order that proceeds from first principles to the things that depend on them. Practical sciences, however, must follow a resolutive or analytic order that begins with the end or goal of the discipline and proceeds through the means by which the end is achieved. See Jacopo Zabarella, De methodis libri quatuor, Venice, 1578; reprinted and edited by C.Vasoli, Bologna, Clueb, 1985, pp. xvi–xxiv. A full discussion of Zabarella’s work can be found in N.W.Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method, New York, Columbia University Press, 1960, chap. 7. For a discussion of the influence and legacy of Zabarella on Calvinist writers see C.H.Lohr, ‘Latin Aristotelianism and the seventeenth- century Calvinist theory of ’, in Daniel A.Di Liscia, Eckhard Kessler and Charlotte Methuen (eds), Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotle Commentary Tradition, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, pp. 369–80. 53 Keckermann, Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 829–30: ‘Methodus analytica est, quia disponuntur partes disciplinae operatricis, ita ut a notione finis fiat progressus ad notitiam principiorum, seu mediorum, per quae finis ille in subiectum suum introducitur…Partes methodi huius sunt tres, quarum prima est, finis introducendus: secunda, subiectum in quod introducitur: tertia, principia seu media per quae finis introducitur.’ 54 For Keckermann subject and object are interchangeable in this context; see Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 475: for instance, he holds that, as every end is attained by something, it is therefore proper in the method of practical disciplines also to learn first about the object or subject by which the end ought to be acquired. 55 Ibid., vol. II, p. 272: ‘…secundum praescripta Methodi Analyticae praecognovimus tum finem Ethice, nempe bonum civile: tum obiectum, in quod finis iste introducendus est: iam pono de mediis ad finem hunc ducentibus, nobis agendum est.’ See also p. 263. 56 Ibid., vol. I, p. 475: ‘Sic in Ethicis methodum Aristoteles observavit, quia ab initio…libri primi egit de fine Ethicae, videlicet felicitate. Sub fine libri 1. de felicitatis subiecto, nimirum voluntate et appetitu humano: reliquis deinde libris declarat media, per quae finis iste possit obtineri, quae media sunt vel virtus moralis et intellectualis, vel virtutum unio sive amicitia.’ See also vol. I, p. 830; vol. II, pp. 263 and 272. 57 Ibid., vol. II, pp. 253–4. The passage in full reads: ‘…quod nempe Ethica revera sit distincta a sacrosancta theologia. Quod probamus eo argumento, quia tota philosophia practica, a theologia distingui debet. Totam autem philosophiam practicam a theologia distingui, probamus ex eo; quia omnes partes philosophiae practicae a theologia distinguuntur, nempe non ethica tan turn, sed et oeconomica et politica. Ac primo quidem, quod ethicis distinguuntur, probatur a fine ethicae et theologiae, tali syllogismo: Quarum disciplinarum fines sunt distincti, eae ipsae distinctae sunt: Atqui ethicae et Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 87

theologiae fines sunt distincti: Ergo ipsae quoque sunt distinctae. Maior est principium logicum. Minor probatur, quia bonum morale est distinctum a bono spirituali, ipsis theologis ultro fatentibus; theologiae autem finis bona gratiae; finis autem ethicae est bonum morale sive civile. Accedit alterum argumentum ab obiecto: nam theologia versatur circa interiorem hominis affectum ad imaginem Dei penitus reformandum, atque adeo circa cultum Dei internum, ethica vero versatur circa mores externos in civili hominum societate, atque adeo concluditur terminus huius praesentis vitae, et tradit praecepta pro mensura huius vitae: Theologia autem neutiquam huius vitae terminis concluditur, sed rationem monstrat bene moriendo, et in aliam vitam ingredendi. Probatur idem a subiecto, nam subiectutm ethicae disciplinae est vir probus…. Et sunt multi viri boni et honesti etiam inter Turcas, qui temperantiam, fortitudinem et alias virtutes ethicas excercent, et coram mundo inculpate honesteque vivunt, qui tamen respectu theologiae, sunt desperati; et nisi convertantur, in aeternum infelices futuri; quales etiam suerunt heroes in Graeca et Romana historia, nempe Aristides, Scipio, et alij. Auctoritas etiam D.Apostoli pro argumento sit, qui I. Tim. 2 expresse discernit inter pietatem et honestatem, et ait precandum esse pro magistratu, ut sub ipso pie et honeste vivamus. Sed et aliud argumentum est a discrimine amicitiae: si quidem nemo negat differe amicitiam civilem ab amicitia spirituali, et theologica: si autem amicitia ethica differt ab amicitia theologica, utque etiam disciplina tractans de amicitia ethica, revera distinguitur ab ea disciplina, quae tractat de amicitia spirituali.’ 58 Ibid., p. 254. 59 Ibid., p. 255. 60 See n. 58 above. 61 See esp. the argument at Keckermann, Opera omnia, vol. II, pp. 255–6; cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.4–8. 62 See the argument at ibid., pp. 263–5. 63 Ibid., p. 264. 64 Ibid., p. 266. 65 Ibid., p. 269. 66 Ibid., p. 266. 67 See the argument at ibid., pp. 275–7. 68 Ibid., p. 273. 69 See the argument at ibid, pp. 273–5. 70 Ibid., pp. 284–6. 71 Ibid., p. 294 72 Ibid., pp. 310–11. 73 Ibid., p. 348. 74 Antonius Walaeus, Opera omnia, 2 vols, Leiden, 1643, vol. II, p. 262. For a partial translation of the Compendium see Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. J.Kraye, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, vol. I: Moral Philosophy, pp. 120–9, which includes a list of further reading on Walaeus (p. 129). 75 Ibid., p. 260 (Epistola dedicatoria): ‘Nos ergo conati sumus in hoc exiguo opere utrumque praestare, nempe materias ab Aristotele in Ethicis ad Nicomachum praecipue tractatas, collatis quoque caeterorum philosophorum 88 M.W.F.Stone

opinionibus, eodem fere ordine compendiose proponere, et errores in eis a me observatos ad veritatis Christianae normam corrigere.’ 76 Ibid., p. 266. 77 Ibid., p. 279. 78 This period is the subject of an extensive study by R.A.Muller, Post- Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Grand Rapids, Mich., Baker Book House, 1987, vol. I: Prolegomena to Theology. Other studies of ‘Reformed orthodoxy’ worth consulting are: H.E.Weber, Die philosophische Scholastik des deutschen Protestantismus in Zeitalter der Orthodoxie, Leipzig, Quelle und Meyer, 1907; P.Petersen, Geschichte der aristotelischen Philosophie im protestantischen Deutschland, Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1921; and M.Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Tübingen, J.C.B.Mohr, 1939. 79 That said, it should be noted that Walaeus, unlike Keckermann, did not think that Melanchthon’s work was very useful in understanding Aristotle because he had constructed a new work which drew mostly from theology and little from Aristotle. The same criticism, Walaeus thought, also applied to Daneau; see Opera omnia, vol. II, p. 260. 80 Peter Ramus, Commentariorum de religione Christiana libri quatuor, Frankfurt a.M., 1594, pp. 3 and 10. 81 Amandus Polanus, Partitiones theologiae…duobus libris, quorum primus est de fide, alter de bonis operibus, Basel, 1590, and more fully in his Syntagma theologiae Christianae, Hanau, 1610, col. 833. 82 William Ames, Medulla theologiae, Franeker, 1623, I.2.1. 83 , Theologia casuum, exhibens anatomen conscientiae et scholam tentationum, Hanau, 1612, and Summa casuum conscientiae, nova methodo elaborata, Frankfurt a.M., 1628; William Ames, De conscientia et eius iure casibus libri quinque, Amsterdam, 1630. That Alsted envisioned writing a theologia casuum is evident already in the title and preface of his Methodus sacrosanctae theologiae octo libris tradita, quorum I. II. Praecognita, III. Theologia naturalis, IV. Theologia Catechetica, V. Theologia scholastica, VI. Theologia casuum, VII. Prophetica, VIII. Acroamatica, Frankfurt, 1614. The preface also mentions that practical philosophy, which includes ethics, oeconomics and politics, is abundantly taught in Scripture. Thus, for Alsted, case-reasoning or casuistry broadly construed, which he considered to be part of practical theology, was not a part of ethics. He treated ethics in Book XVI of his Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia libris XXVII, Hanau, 1620. 84 Acta Synodi Nationalis…Dordrechti habita, Leiden, 1620, session 18. Many consider this to be the earliest known instance of the term ‘practical theology’ in its modern sense as a part of theology. There are earlier examples, however. In his Discourse of Conscience (1596), Perkins refers to ‘Popish books of practical or case-divinite’, and following such usage his own casuistical works became regarded as ‘practical divinity’. Also by 1611 Alsted had spoken of theologia practica as a distinct part of theology; see below. 85 These are published in Voetius’s Selectarum disputationum theologicarum pars tertia, Utrecht, 1659, pp. 1–59. 86 Ibid., p. 3. 87 For a discussion of piety in the thought of the Puritans see C.Hambrick-Stowe, Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 89

The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982; and N.Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life, 2nd ed., Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1989. 88 This element in the work of the British Puritans is convincingly brought out in a series of papers by James F.Keenan, S.J.: ‘William Perkins (1558–1602) and the birth of British casuistry’, in Keenan and Shannon, Context of Casuistry, pp. 105–30; and ‘How casuistic is early British Puritan casuistry? Or, what are the roots of early British practical divinity?’, which was read to the session on ‘Early Modern Casuistry’ at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Association annual conference in Toronto, Canada, October 1998. I am very grateful to Professor Keenan for many enlightening discussions on this and other subjects relating to the topic of this paper. 89 Juan Azor, Institutionum moralium in quibus universae quaestiones ad conscientiam recte aut prave factorum breviter tractantur, 2 vols, Rome, 1600–11; all references are to the Cologne edition of 1602. For one of the very few discussions of him see the article by J.Gury in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, Paris: 1899–1953, s.v. ‘Azor’. 90 In discussing the subject of voluntary action in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics (1110b30–1111a18), Aristotle noted that ‘ignorance of the particulars ( , viz., the circumstances) of an action and the objects with which it is concerned can render an action involuntary’. He enumerates these as: (i) a man may be ignorant of who he is, (ii) what he is doing, (iii) what or (iv) whom he is acting on, and (v) sometimes also what instrument he is doing it with, (vi) and to what end, (vii) in what manner and (viii) to whom he is doing it. Aristotle’s list of circumstances was later echoed in the rhetorical tradition that came to influence medieval canon law; here the relevant circumstances were listed as: quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando (who, what, where, by what means, why, how, when). Thus, two strands of thought about circumstances came to influence Roman Catholic casuistry of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the rhetorical tradition stressed the importance of detail for the description of a case of conscience, while the Aristotelian tradition, as it has come from Thomas Aquinas (see Summa theologiae, I–IIae, q. 18, aa. 10–11; cf. De malo, q. 2, a. 4), focused on the problem of demarcating the nature of the voluntary. For more on this issue see Stone, Subtle Arts of Casuistry, chaps 2 and 4. 91 Juan Azor, Institutiones morales, Cologne, 1602, pp. 43–4 (I.xviii): ‘circumstantiae injure variant omnia ut inde aequitas colligatur.’ 92 The example used here is one of the stock examples of Jesuit casuistry; it has its origins in Plato’s Republic 333C, but is also discussed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 94, a. 6ff. 93 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.3, 1094b12–22 for the view that moral principles, as they stand and as they are arrived at, hold , and Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia–IIae, q. 94, a. 6. For more on the Aristotelian-Thomist basis of Jesuit casuistry see Stone, Subtle Arts of Casuistry, chaps 3–8. 94 In another context, I have argued that the crucial differences between both traditions can also be explained in terms of a difference of philosophical 90 M.W.F.Stone

outlook. For most Roman Catholic writers, among whom one can include the Jesuits Francisco Suárez, Gabriel Vázquez, Franciscus Toletus and Leonhard Lessius and the Dominicans Bartolomé Medina and Domingo de Soto, casuistry was part of a general theory of practical reasoning which was Aristotelian-Thomist. The role of the casuist, it was contended, was not to apply preformed principles to particular cases but rather to assist an agent by a specificist method of reasoning which attempted to work out just what their antecedent moral commitments required of them in particular cases. In this sense, the casuistry of the Jesuits, Dominicans and other Roman Catholic theologians of the aimed to construct a dialectic between the principles which we bring to the consideration of particular cases and the facts of those cases as they are revealed to us through practical discernment. There are also crucial differences between the casuistry of Reformers and those of certain Anglican divines such as Jeremy Taylor; for a discussion of these crucial differences see Stone, Subtle Arts of Casuistry, chap. 1. 5 The relationship of Stoicism and scepticism Justus Lipsius

A.H.T.Levi

Justus Lipsius was born on 18 October 1547, which made 1997 the 450th anniversary of his birth, an occasion auspicious enough to have given rise to several attempts throughout Europe to reassess his significance, including important conferences at Rome and Louvain. Interest in Lipsius has increased following the colloquium organized by Aloïs Gerlo in 1987, with at least three major books and a number of articles having appeared in the wake of his publication of the colloquium papers.1 Five volumes of the critical edition of the Epistolae, covering Lipsius’s life from 1564 to 1592, have now appeared.2 Lipsius’s status as a great Renaissance scholar of the , second in interest only to Erasmus himself, is being actively promoted, above all in his native land, present-day Belgium. The editor of Tacitus and Seneca (1574 and 1605 respectively) and the author of the De constantia (1584), the Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam and the Physiologia Stoicorum (both 1604) is perhaps best known and most studied for his Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589), more a catena of quotations than a treatise, a cento of commonplaces on government, people, war and peace, concerned with the art of war as much as with statecraft. The Politica will not here greatly concern us, but it is important as a preliminary to note the work’s defence of monarchical government, which fits it into a particular tradition of constitutional thought, and its defence of the principle ‘cujus regio, ejus religio’, which governed Lipsius’s own life. A born Catholic, his three changes of religious allegiance—to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and finally back to Catholicism—on which accusations of scepticism are sometimes based, may have reflected genuine changes of conviction and, even if they did not, may have denoted no more than a generally accepted view that outward conformity to the religious rites and ceremonies of city or region took precedence over interior commitment to any creed.

91 92 A.H.T.Levi

In the ancient world there had been no very close relationship between Stoicism and scepticism. On the whole they denoted reciprocally antipathetic modes of thought. The sceptical Carneades was frankly anti-Stoic, although the early scepticism of Pyrrho, proclaiming our inability to know the real world and our need therefore to suspend judgement about it, is logically related to Epictetus’s late practical Stoicism. The insistence of the first line of Epictetus’s Enchiridion that our true good must lie within our power can be seen as a defensive reaction against whatever ills an unknowable real world can inflict on us. Since we cannot know them, we can do nothing about them, and they are therefore, Epictetus optimistically thought, not able to damage our true good. In a late sixteenth-century context, it is important to notice as a preamble two important facts about ancient Stoicism and scepticism. They had, first, been transmitted inside defective traditions, and the meanings of all the key terms had, second, been altered by the scholastics. The existence of any possible relationship between Stoicism and scepticism in the late sixteenth century must therefore depend on an appreciation, first, of how the transmission of each of these philosophies had been contaminated and, second, of the way the scholastics had changed the meanings of the key terms. The contaminated transmission of ancient doctrine is not difficult to understand. Tenuous links between Stoicism and scepticism, sometimes discernible in antiquity, were strengthened by the fact that Pyrrho, although a sceptic, had defended the Stoic ethical ideal of apathy. He was known to the late sixteenth century through two main sources: Cicero and the ninth book of Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers. But whereas Diogenes Laertius emphasizes the scepticism of Pyrrho, mentioning his introduction of the , or suspension of judgement, every time Cicero mentions Pyrrho, he links him with the Stoic Aristo of Chios. His ideal is ‘apatheia’. The principal advocate of the suspension of judgement is therefore presented by Cicero as a Stoic. Cicero also understands Pyrrho as a Stoic for whom virtue is the only good and vice the only evil. The late sixteenth century was aware of the intrinsic connection between an epistemology denying knowledge of the real world and an ethic which insisted that therefore no change of fortune, however adverse, could affect our own ability to achieve our supreme good. Often enough, it understandably welded together Stoicism and scepticism. The second point about the transmission, how scholastic psychology modified the meaning of the principal terms, is a question which really Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 93 requires lengthier analysis. Crucially for later thought, Augustine, in pursuit of the image of God in man in the De trinitate, had introduced the concept of voluntas,3 for which, in the sense of the source of a desire directed towards a specific object, the Greeks had not had a word. The scholastics made the voluntas, together with the intellectus and the memoria, into ‘faculties’ of the soul, really distinct from the soul and from one another. Acts were specified by their objects, and faculties were specified by their acts. The acts of the intellectus were specified by the true, and those of the voluntas by the good. The resulting distinction between acts which were cognitive and those which were volitive still caused confusion both in Descartes, who was finally forced to place faith in the will, and in Pascal, who inconsistently tried to combine the soul’s cognitive and volitive operations in the heart. Unbelievably, from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, scholastic psychology could simply not account for any act which was both cognitive and volitive, like any act of rational choice or the act of faith. The problem is not solved by recourse to Boethius’s ‘liberum arbitrium’, which we normally translate as ‘free will’, but which means ‘free judgement’ and for which the French is still ‘libre arbitre’. Our judgements may be freely made, but their specification is not free. We are not free to judge that twice two is seventeen. Only the will can be free, and then only if, in Aristotelian terms, the underlying appetite is not natural but rational. It is because we can rationally control unfree appetites that the scholastic definition of man is ‘animal rationale’. By the late sixteenth century, the first sentence of Epictetus’s Enchiridion, by asserting that our true good was in our power, was being taken to imply that the human faculty of the will, still non-cognitive, was free to choose the sovereign good. The problem was to integrate acts of judgement about the good with the specification of the act of the will. If we buy a pair of shoes we normally make a series of intellectual judgements about suitability, colour, size, affordability, durability and so on. But the decision to buy is an act of the will, free even after the final judgement of the intellect. No scholastic solved the problem of integrating the acts of the intellect with those of the will.4 Thomas Aquinas held that there were three sorts of judgement: the speculative (‘This ring is valuable’); the judgement of conscience, which is a ‘dictamen rationis’ (‘I ought not to steal this ring’); and the ‘ultimo-practical’ judgement (‘I choose to take this ring’). The first two sorts of judgement are true or false. The ultimo- practical judgement always accords with the free specification of the object of the will’s act and is not true or false, but good or bad. 94 A.H.T.Levi

What was new for the generation of Lipsius was the importation into the equation of the Stoic doctrine that the passions were either based on or constituted by false judgements, and that the ‘ratio’ of the Stoics, necessarily right, because divine, had become in the scholastics subject to error. The Stoic ‘ratio’ was the scholastic ‘ratio recta’, which differed from ‘ratio humana’, the human power of judgement. Freedom from passion, the Stoic ethical ideal of ‘apatheia’, meant either making the exempt from the false judgement of passion, making the wise man omniscient, which was absurd, or positing in the sage recourse to the suspension of judgement, the Pyrrhonist , which was sceptical. By about 1580, the political conflicts in France and the Low Countries were generally provoking a deeper commitment than the religious differences, which sometimes provided little more than a pretext which helped to disguise the underlying struggles for power. It was perfectly normal to conform to the rites and ceremonies of the established religion of the region in which you resided. If you did not, and you were able to move, you sought to do so. William of Orange was himself born a Lutheran, but, as a condition for the ratification of his inheritance of the sovereign principality of Orange by Charles V, he was educated from the age of eleven as a Catholic in Brussels. His antipathy to Philip II from 1559, and to Margaret of Parma, Philip’s half-sister and regent in the Low Countries, led William to political protest well before his second marriage according to Lutheran rites in 1561 to Anne of Saxony. He still protested his Catholicism in 1564, when the decrees of the Council of Trent were promulgated, but referred to himself in a letter to the regent of 24 January 1564 only as a good Christian. By 1566 the regent’s secretary, Thomas Armenteros, noted that he had changed his religion; and later that year William, seeking to form a German league, wrote to the Landgrave of Hesse of his intention to declare himself a Lutheran. In March 1567 the Antwerp Calvinists regarded him as an enemy. He left the Low Countries in April; and, by the time of his disastrous invasion in the spring of 1568, he was counting on Huguenot support and was at least ostensibly a Calvinist. In the minds of nearly everybody, the political revolt against Spanish domination took precedence over credal affirmations and sectarian differences. The binding doctrine was ‘cujus regio, ejus religio’. In the minds of nearly everybody, notably including that of Lipsius, religious toleration was also a chimera. Lipsius devotes the third chapter of the fourth book of the Politica to asserting the necessity of eradicating at least public religious non-conformity. Civil government Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 95 was considered throughout Europe structurally dependent on unity of religion from the mid sixteenth century, and much earlier in Spain, to beyond the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes at the end of the seventeenth. Michel de l’Hôpital was dismissed by Catherine de’ Medici in 1568 for challenging the need to impose conformity of cult. ‘Toleration’ was at first always accorded only on the ghetto principle. The places where cults alien to the state religion might be practised were defined by localization, within a country, a region or even within a town. Changes of sectarian affiliation to accord with regional political allegiances were the norm in most of Europe well into the seventeenth century. The sixteenth-century schisms opened up while the new nation states were still consolidating or fighting for their national identities against the threat of a Habsburg hegemony in continental Europe. Both and Rousseau were still to take for granted the need for the imposition of a civic religion three centuries after the emergence in of the nation states. There is no need to have recourse to dissemblance or scepticism as an explanation of the adaptations in external religious observance of a William of Orange or a Justus Lipsius. From his published works, Lipsius’s intellectual preoccupations could easily appear to be a merely haphazard assortment of Renaissance interests in ancient history, Stoic moral and physiological teaching, the education of princes, instructions on how to fight battles and, most importantly of all, the textual emendation of ancient Latin texts, which was his real expertise. His religious affiliations appear to have changed with a frequency which has led some subsequent commentators to suggest that he allied his interest in Stoicism not so much with scepticism as with . Our concern is with the constraints in his personal life which led to his interest in the ancient Stoics, as well as with any scepticism to be discovered either in his personal life or in his theoretical writings, and any connection between them. Lipsius was born at Isque, midway between Brussels and Louvain, and baptized Joest; his father commanded the civil guard at Brussels. The female line had been noble. A great-uncle was a scholar, once close to Erasmus, and the family was comfortably off. Lipsius, an only child, was sent at six to a parish school in Brussels, at ten to the celebrated college at Ath and at twelve to the Jesuits at Cologne, where he stayed from 1559 to 1564. He tells us that he wished to become a member of the order. Much has been made of his subsequent changes 96 A.H.T.Levi of religion. Were the successive conversions to Lutheranism, Calvinism, and back to Catholicism authentic? Anthony Grafton builds on a tradition going back to a letter of Conrad Schlusselburg, quoted by , reporting Thomas Crenius, who was purported to have seen the text in which Schlusselburg narrated a conversation with Lipsius. Professor Grafton maintains that, in view of his association with the ‘Familia Charitatis’ or ‘Family of Love’,5 centred on Christophe Plantin’s printing shop in Antwerp, Lipsius was ‘a liar, and a heretic’, willing ‘to play the Lutheran in Jena, the Calvinist fellow-traveler in Leiden, and the Catholic once again in Louvain’, without actually being any of these things.6 Aloïs Gerlo, on the other hand, argues the sincerity of the conversion to Lutheranism, the probable authenticity of the conversion to Calvinism and the certain sincerity of the final return to Catholicism, but always with an attitude which attached more importance to a political view, which Lipsius thought should dictate the form of Christian observance.7 Léontine Zanta, in the early years of the twentieth century, thought that Lipsius stifled his religious scruples out of necessity;8 and Jason Saunders in the 1950s, quoting Schlusselburg from Bayle, and refuting Zanta, stated that Lipsius ‘remained quite indifferent to the various doctrines of religion, considering them all of equal value’.9 It is possible that publication of the critical edition of the relevant volumes of the Epistolae will solve the matter, but it is not certain that they will. It must, however, certainly be imprudent to attempt a definitive judgement before the letters are available. All we have to go on for the present is a celebrated letter written in 1608 by the Calvinist Adrianus Saravia to the Archbishop of Canterbury, two years after Lipsius’s death.10 According to Saravia, who appears to have been involved in a failed conspiracy to overturn the city authorities at Leiden, Plantin and Lipsius regarded rites and ceremonies as necessary elementary aids for the common people and for feeble minds. The ‘Family of Love’, with which they were associated, advised only, even before its 1573 schism and the break with Hendrik Niclaes, that its adherents were ‘not openly to oppose the religion established by public authority’. Guy du Faur de Pibrac, as later quoted by Montaigne in his chapter ‘De la vanité’ (Les Essais, III.9) and not to be linked to any secret cult, said just as much. Lipsius, even more than Erasmus, blatantly adjusted the picture he wanted to build up of himself, and used his letters in the process. He wrote an Epistolica institutio defining the letter as ‘a written report of Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 97 one’s mind to those who are absent or quasi-absent’.11 In other words, even theoretically, Lipsius’s letters were more an announcement intended for publication than a sincere intimacy. In a letter to Jan van de Wouwer (Woverius) of 1 October 1600, Lipsius wrote an account of his career, no doubt slanted to project an image of himself as a quiet scholar, with the text adjusted in 1605 to omit the phrase ‘calumniatores aut captores’ originally used of academic opponents. The painting of him in the ‘Four Philosophers’ by his friend Rubens projects a similarly studied image of tranquil philosophical contemplation.12 What we do know is that Lipsius’s father died while he was at Cologne, that his mother died shortly thereafter, that he spent twenty months in Rome, of which twelve were in the household of the Cardinal de Granvelle, whose Latin secretary Lipsius became, and that he studied with Marc-Antoine Muret, acquiring the extraordinarily brilliant Ciceronian style he was later to abandon. His Greek was never more than barely adequate. By 1566, when he was 19, he had finished his first work of textual criticism. From Rome, he returned to Louvain, where he says he indulged, ‘but not for long’, in the pleasures appropriate to his age, listing some of them. The date is uncertain, but it was before Granvelle left in 1570 to become Viceroy of Naples. In 1569 Lipsius prefaced his Variarum lectionum libri quattuor with a eulogy of Granvelle, to whom they were dedicated. He was 22. He travelled to Vienna, where he appears to have met with indifferent success at the imperial court, but heard in Thuringia, on his way home, that his estate had been confiscated by the Spanish. On the recommendation of Joachim Camerarius, the duke of Saxe-Weimar, from the senior Ernestine branch of the family, offered Lipsius the chair of history and eloquence at the recently founded Lutheran University of Jena in 1572. Lipsius almost certainly pronounced the funeral oration De duplici concordia on the duke’s death. It contained invective against both Catholicism and the duke of Alba, but was perhaps motivated by resentment at what was happening in the Low Countries and in Saxony, where Charles V had had the status of elector transferred to the younger, Albertine, branch of the ruling family. When Johann Wilhelm was succeeded by Augustus of Saxony, a less strict Lutheran who dismissed all but four of the professors, thereby lessening the institution’s strong religious colouring in 1573, Lipsius was retained. He resigned in 1574, having been controversially elected dean and married the committedly Catholic widow, Anna van der Calstere of 98 A.H.T.Levi

Cologne. She had refused to come to Jena. He left with a high academic reputation, and apparently popular with his students and colleagues. The same year, 1574, he published his Tacitus, then his commentaries on Plautus, the Antiquae lectiones; and he began to turn away from Cicero and to model his own prose style on Plautus and Seneca. He also became a doctor of laws in Louvain in 1576, publishing in the same year his Leges regiae et decemvirales, and in 1577 the Epistolicae quaestiones, a series of letters on philological matters. In 1578 he took refuge with Plantin in Antwerp, fleeing Louvain just in time to avoid the Spanish army of Lepanto’s victor, Don Juan of Austria, and no doubt frightened of reprisals for his overt Lutheranism at Jena. Fresh from victory at Gembloux on 31 January 1578, the Spaniards pillaged the house from which Lipsius had fled. Lipsius’s Jesuit friend, Martin Del Rio, now a member of Don Juan’s council, managed to have the books and papers saved. In the same year, protected by William of Orange, Lipsius was offered the chair of history at the infant University of Leiden in the United Provinces. He said he was taking it as a temporary measure, but stayed thirteen years. In 1582 he was made by the Dutch authorities a member of an eight-man commission charged to make recommendations on religious freedom. The report strongly contributed to the re-establishment of peace. He left Leiden in 1591, reconverting to Catholicism at Mainz, and unnecessarily emphasizing his commitment by ignoring advice not to glorify gratuitously in two works of 1604 and 1605 attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin. At Leiden, the stream of scholarly work continued. A revised Tacitus with commentaries appeared in 1581, then two books of criticism, the Electorum libri duo of 1582, a satire, works on Roman festivals and notes on Livy, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus and the of Seneca. The De constantia appeared in 1584, and the Politica in 1589. These were the works Lipsius himself most esteemed. The De constantia was the most intimate work he ever wrote, and he wrote it, he said, for himself. The epitaph Lipsius would have wanted to give it is surely the reversal of Seneca (Ep. CVIII.23) to be found in the letter of 1603 he was to write to Wouwer: ‘I have made philosophy out of philology.’13 In 1580 Montaigne had published the first edition of Les Essais. In 1584 came the De constantia of Justus Lipsius, and in 1585 Guillaume du Vair’s La Philosophie morale des Stoïques. Montaigne, even in his early chapters scarcely a Stoic, was never a sceptic, and never doubted Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 99 the normative function of raison, understood as a derivative of the divine essence by Stoics and scholastics alike. What he derided, as he makes clear in the chapter on Sebond’s Theologia naturalis, was the power of raison humaine to reach truth, unless it was aided by divine grace. Montaigne is using the common, if debased, sixteenth-century according to which supernature is added to nature as a tier to a wedding cake. grace justifies the soul and its presence is necessary and sufficient for eternal salvation. It illumines the intellect. By the sixteenth century, the capabilities of ‘pure’ nature and merely human reason were considered to be the human state after all supernatural elevation and support had been withdrawn. That paradigm ignored the fact that nature itself needed to have an aspiration to supernatural fulfilment if its supreme good was the beatifying knowledge of God. Montaigne read and admired Lipsius, but only the Politica, which he refers to as ‘ce docte et laborieux tissu’. Du Vair can be shown to have followed Lipsius only in De la Constance et consolation ès calamités publiques, probably written during or shortly after the siege of Paris in 1590. He takes from Epictetus the power of what he calls our will rationally to guide us towards our true end. Since du Vair regards the passions as false judgements, the correct direction of our will involves conducting our ‘opinion’ so that ‘elle adhère aux choses évidemment vraies, qu’elle se retienne et suspende ès douteuses, qu’elle rejette les fausses’.14 His Epictetan ethic, transposed into scholastic language, has ended up firmly linked to Pyrrho’s sceptical suspension of judgement. For du Vair, the will is the scholastic faculty; but, if it is a ‘vouloir bien réglé’, it is Stoic in seeking only the good it can achieve, which must be in our power. The suspension of judgement in all matters of doubt is Pyrrho’s . Half a century later, Descartes was to produce an intellectually rigorous synthesis of the relativist intellectual attitudes and conservative ethical outlook of the 1580s, taking his lead from du Vair in forging Pyrrho’s suspension of judgement into his methodical doubt and amalgamating it with the quasi-Stoic morale provisoire of the 1637 Discours de la méthode. The copious indebtedness of Descartes to Montaigne, Lipsius, and du Vair has long been established. There are almost tantalizing reminiscences of Epictetus in a series of sixteenth-century authors, not the least of them being Rabelais. Then in 1567 André de Rivaudeau published a translation of the Enchiridion, and in 1569 Gentian Hervet a translation of Sextus Empiricus. There was, however still no systematic attempt to adapt any authentic form 100 A.H.T.Levi either of Stoicism or of scepticism to Christianity before the De constantia. When, in 1580, Montaigne did allow elements of Stoic ethics and a strongly relativist outlook on cultural values to permeate at least the earlier chapters of Les Essais, he felt impelled to present his work as a self-portrait, which in 1588 it scarcely even pretended to be. In 1583 a spurious attributed to Cicero had appeared in Venice, and then in 1584 Lipsius’s Constantia, according to a letter of April 1584 to Laevinus Torrentius (Lieven van der Beke), to whom Plantin had sent a copy, an attempt to adapt ancient philosophy to Christian truth. The philosophical basis is the fundamentally Neoplatonist dualism of body and soul, but Langius argues throughout for moral values taken from Epictetus and Seneca. Here, too, Lipsius is mindful of Erasmus, but his thought is not rigorous. The De constantia is a dialogue between Lipsius and Charles de Langhe (Langius), the canon of Liège, whose garden is the stylized setting for the discussion. The text purports to report a conversation held during the course of Lipsius’s journey to Vienna and was an immediate success, translated into French in the year of its publication. Dedicated to the people of Antwerp, it was written, Lipsius claims, to clear the path to ‘sapientia’, the only path which, ‘cum divinis litteris conjuncta’, can lead to ‘tranquillitas et quies’. He also declares that the cult of ‘litterae amoeniores’ has not precluded his following of that more austere goddess, ‘Philosophia’, to whom from his early schooling he has been principally devoted. The philosophy which concerns him is practical, concerned with morality and the passions, with hope and fear, not quibbles. Not for the last time, he is echoing Erasmus. He goes on to claim originality. He may have drawn on Seneca and Epictetus, but who before him has sought the consolation to public ills? In the preface to his second edition, he goes on to justify his recourse to philosophy rather than to theology, protesting that it does not diminish his religious fervour ‘Philosophum ego agam: sed Christianum.’ The definition of reason is taken from Seneca, as it will be again in the Manuductio, the ‘pars in homine divini spiritus mersa’. How then can reason need divine guidance to lead to truth? In the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ (Les Essais, II.12), Montaigne invites the reader to consider the human mind without divine grace: ‘Considerons donq pour cette heure l’homme seul, sans secours estranger, armé seulement de ses armes, et despourveu de la grace et cognoissance divine…’ This is the view, quasi-universal among even the late sixteenth-century scholastics, which supposes that supernatural grace-given abilities can be added to natural ones like a tier to a wedding cake. That, as Michel Baius was already pointing out, and as was to Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 101 become the central contention of Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus, is a metaphysical impossibility. What is natural cannot aspire to, or be satisfied by that which belongs to a higher order of creation, like that which the scholastics called the supernatural, the realm of grace. But one wonders if Montaigne’s actual words, as well as his premise, were not in Lipsius’s mind when, in the preface to the second edition of the De constantia, he wrote: ‘Ratio ipsa, et suis viribus, non ducit nos ad Deum, non ad verum.’15 We study divine things reflected in reason as an eclipse of the sun reflected in water, but do not suppose that we can do it without divine aid. Divine things may be studied only ‘per Deum ipsum’. Constancy is defined as the strength required to be neither elated nor depressed by ‘externa’ and ‘fortuita’. Lipsius opposes the soul’s ‘opinio’, the source of the false judgement which is passion, and ‘recta ratio’ or ‘iudicium’. By 1584, the underlying psychology is commonplace. The relationship between intellect and will, or rational appetite, is echoed in a relationship between imagination and the sensitive appetite in which the passions reside. Such a relationship is not only impossible, because it does not admit of any explanation how the imagination could affect the will, but it coarsely caricatures authentic scholastic psychology. For the sixteenth-century moralists, however, the passions depend on a false judgement in the imagination about what is our true good, and this false judgement is the ‘opinio’. The system appears in this way in its full form at least as early as the 1538 De anima et vita of Juan Luis Vives, a text, incidentally, which was certainly used by Descartes. It derives from a simple misunderstanding of scholastic faculty psychology, and crucially makes the passions depend on the false judgements, the ‘opiniones’, of the imagination, which contrast with those of the ‘recta ratio’ which are virtuous, which follow nature, and which necessarily restore our harmony with God. But if the passions derive from false judgements, the wise man, endowed with the ‘apatheia’ which frees him from passion, must be free from the false judgements of the intellect embracing the ‘opiniones’ of the imagination. It follows that the wise or virtuous person must either be omniscient or, if not, must be able to suspend the judgement. Apparent scepticism, the Pyrrhonist , or suspension of judgement, is in this way an inevitable consequence of the Stoic conquest of passion and the ideal of ‘apatheia’. Right reason for Lipsius in the fourth chapter of the first book of the De constantia is defined as the ‘verum iudicium ac sensus’ of human and divine things. Opinion is the ‘futile iudicium ac fallax’. 102 A.H.T.Levi

The underlying psychology is explained at length by Lipsius in the fifth chapter of the first book. The origins of his view are Neoplatonist more than Neostoic, and Lipsius regards the soul as imprisoned in and contaminated by the body. Much of what he says might have been inspired by the Timaeus, but the Platonist and Stoic traditions had already been thoroughly confused in the Quattrocento treatises of Marsilio Ficino and in his commentaries on Plotinus; and they were very shortly to come together again, linked to the suspension of judgement, in du Vair. Lipsius does not regard his inspiration as sceptical, or advert to the sceptical implications of his Stoicism, but hammers home the Neostoic mantra about right reason as the image of God, the scintilla of the divinity in the human mind, and the following of nature. The four chief passions are those identified by the Stoics, mentioned in Virgil’s line:

Hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque,16 and transmitted by Augustine and Boethius. Lipsius here takes the view common in the Palace Academy of Henri III that the passions cannot be eradicated without the removal of the bodily organs on which they depend, but require rather to be moderated and controlled. In the De constantia, Lipsius is actually syncretist, seeking to elaborate the theoretical basis for the practical attitudes he required in view of the strife in his homeland. Liberty, for instance, consists in obedience to God. There is a long defence of the use of the word ‘fate’, inspired by the Corpus Hermeticum, Aristotle and Seneca, but the workings of fate are carefully reconciled with those of free will. Lipsius was four times rector of Leiden, but is thought by Gerlo to have been irked by the constraints of his Calvinist environment from 1583. His resignation from the university was refused in 1586, but he went on sick leave for half a year. In 1591 he took sick leave again, but this time did not return. He travelled to Hamburg, Frankfurt, Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne, before returning to Coblenz, Trier, Spa and Mainz, where he appears fully and interiorly to have reconverted to Catholicism. His state of mind is attested in an exchange of letters with his Jesuit friend Del Rio. By 1592, furnished with a certificate of orthodoxy by the Spanish court, Lipsius was teaching again in Catholic Louvain, where the conciliatory Torrentius obtained for him the chair of history in September and that of Latin in November. Torrentius, who also persuaded Plantin to leave Leiden ‘to serve Catholicism again’, had himself taken possession of the see of Antwerp after the city’s occupation by Parma in 1585 and had criticized Lipsius’s extensive Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 103 reliance on ancient moral philosophers. In December 1595 Lipsius became historiographer to the king of Spain, whose attempts to impose his authority throughout the Low Countries Lipsius had once strenuously opposed. Plantin seems to have broken with the ‘Family of Love’, the esoteric and secret spiritual circle of Hendrik Niclaes, around 1573. Lipsius, like the reconverted Catholic Plantin, committed himself to some sort spiritual allegiance to Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt, known as Hiël, or light of God. The circle, many of whose members seem to have returned to the Low Countries in 1585, attracted by the promise that Torrentius’s policy of pacification would be adopted, appears doctrinally compatible with a somewhat rarefied Catholicism, although it had socio-political affinities with . It retained some features, like fraternal correction, redolent of the old devotio moderna, and others adumbrating a freemasonry still a score of years off. Doctrinally it stood for an allegorical exegesis of the Bible which promoted a direct contact with God, possibly ending in mystical absorption, much as envisaged by the Rhineland mystics who so influenced Gert Groote, founder of the devotio moderna. Since even the scholastics saw that their concept of beatitude required the bestowal of ‘uncreated grace’, the strict doctrinal line between orthodoxy and may pardonably be regarded as wavy rather than thin. Saravia refers to Barrefelt’s reduction of Christian ethics to ‘some kind of Stoic philosophy’. Its ideals remained peace, mutual help, humanity and kindness; but there is some evidence that it sought to place its members in high places. In 1604 Lipsius published the Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam and its sequel, the Physiologia Stoicorum. The Manuductio carries a reference to Seneca in its sub-title, and the ‘ad lectorem’ immediately warns that when the end of man and his fulfilment are placed in nature, we must understand that to mean in God. He extends the names of the ancient authors he has followed along with Seneca, Cicero and Plutarch, to include Diogenes Laertius, a general handbook of ancient philosophy, as well as the source for the scepticism of Pyrrho. Diogenes is also quoted in favour of ranking philosophy above the liberal arts in the first ‘dissertatio’ of the first book of the Manuductio. The Manuductio does not systematically argue the Stoic position, but explains the Paradoxa, gives the history of the movement and provides a general survey. The Physiologia provides an extended and more closely argued exposition. The analysis is factitious, neither deep nor thought through. ‘Recta ratio’ is identified with nature, in whose 104 A.H.T.Levi study lies virtue. Lipsius builds on well-known affirmations of Cicero and to affirm that ‘sapientia’ is the human mind’s supreme good, and the liberal arts lead up to their mistress, philosophy, which consists in the love of ‘sapientia’. The ‘beata vita’ is life ‘secundum naturam’, understood as , and life according to nature is the ‘’. Lipsius is now above all attempting to show how the Stoic attitudes of the De constantia, adopted in personal despair at the conflict in the Low Countries, are indeed at the core of Christian ethics. The approbatio of the Manuductio in 1603 warns only that the reader must adhere to Augustine’s doctrine on beatitude, referring explicitly to Book XIX of the De civitate Dei, chapters 4 and 25. Lipsius gives Christian glosses even to the paradoxes that all sins are equal and that the ‘sapiens’ is equal to God. Although the adaptations of Stoic ideas had now been effected by du Vair and vulgarized by Charron,17 Lipsius’s texts retain their importance, in their insistence, for example, on the doctrine of innate ideas, especially of interest in view of Descartes’s known reliance on him. Lipsius’s text is no doubt based on his reading of Seneca and Epictetus; but, like the Discours de la méthode, it resonates with reminiscences of Charron, du Vair and Montaigne. Lipsius stays sufficiently near his Stoic sources to almost avoid using the term ‘voluntas’, but he is not totally consistent. Only in the Manuductio does he consider the passions to be false judgements, and therefore link their eradication to the Pyrrhonist . In the De constantia they had not yet been constituted by false judgements, and Lipsius had called only for their moderation. It is to be assumed that he had in the meanwhile read du Vair’s Philosophie morale des Stoïques. He avoids the confusion between Stoicism and scepticism created by Cicero. His Stoicism, while it may be neither profound, nor consistent, nor closely thought through, is not seriously linked to any doctrinal scepticism. It appears from the De constantia, in spite of the stylized setting, that the initial impetus to Stoicism was personal. Travel, Langius assures him, will not assuage his sadness. Ultimately Lipsius remains a brilliant philologist. He was a sceptic only on account of momentary recourse to the suspension of judgement as a way out of having to make the sage omniscient. His Christian Stoicism, although a defensive personal reaction taken to a serious, if not particularly thorough, philosophical reflection, is important chiefly on account of the insight it gives us into the reaction of a new class of educated bourgeois to the horrors of the wars fought in the name of religion to unify France and to consolidate Spanish Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 105 hegemony in the Low Countries. Personally, Lipsius’s cast of mind was not so relativist as that of Montaigne, and there are only unsubstantiated allegations that he was a religious sceptic. It is probable that his attitude to the doctrinal disputes was cavalier, and certain that he believed both in peace and in the need for civic harmony to be underpinned by the rites and ceremonies of a locally adopted civic religion. The final reconversion to Catholicism has every appearance of authenticity. For the rest, the impression generated by his career is primarily that he considered the doctrinal disputes nugatory, that he remained in search of a true piety which seemed to him independent of the difference in credal commitment between Christians, and that his most serious public interest was in the political order. Clarity of definition, even of categories like Stoicism and scepticism, necessarily invoked in the course of any attempt to trace patterns of cultural change and new intellectual explorations of values, is inevitably eroded as the contents of the categories are extended by historians and teachers. A brief examination of the career and works of Justus Lipsius suggests that, however attractive Stoic moral attitudes and relativistic intellectual considerations may have been to him, more care is needed than is usually taken in using the categories of ‘Stoicism’ and ‘scepticism’ to identify the most personal intellectual and moral commitments of writers and public figures in the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries in western Europe.

Notes 1 See A.Gerlo (ed.), Juste Lipse 1547–1606, Brussels, University Press, 1988; K.Beuth, Weisheit und Geistesstärke: Eine philosophiegeschichtliche Untersuchung zur ‘Constantia’ des Justus Lipsius, Frankfurt a.M, P.Lang, 1989; G.Oestreich, Antiker Geist und moderner Staat bei Justus Lipsius (1547–1606): Der Neustoizismus als politische Bewegung, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1989; and M.Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Justus Lipsius, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1991. 2 Justus Lipsius, Epistolae, Brussels, Paleis der Academien, 1978–. 3 Augustine is looking for an analogy within human experience to show how the relationships between the three persons in the Trinity distinguish them from one another, although they share the same substance (Book VII, chaps 1–2). He considers and rejects triads in human psychology, reflecting the image of God in man of Genesis 1:26, introducing the term voluntas at Book IX, chap. 9, ¶14, and settling on the triad memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas in Book X, chaps 11, ¶17 to 12, ¶19. 106 A.H.T.Levi

4 On their efforts see J.Lebacqz, Libre arbitre et jugement, Louvain, Museum Lessianum, 1960. 5 On the ‘Family of Love’ see principally B.Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), London and Leiden, Warburg Institute and E.J.Brill, 1972; H.de la Fontaine Verwey, ‘The Family of Love’, Quaerendo, 1976, vol. 6, pp. 219– 71; and A.Hamilton, ‘Hiël and the Hiëlists: The doctrine and followers of Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt’, Quaerendo, 1977, vol. 7, pp. 243–86. 6 A.Grafton, ‘Portrait of Justus Lipsius’, The American Scholar, 1987, vol. 56, pp. 382–90, at 382 and 389; see also A.Grafton and L.Jardine, From Humanism to the , London, Duckworth, 1986, pp. 197–8. 7 A.Gerlo, ‘Les études Lipsiennes: état de la question’, in Gerlo, Juste Lipse, pp. 9–24. 8 L.Zanta, La Renaissance du stoicisme au XVIe siècle, Paris, H.Champion, 1914. 9 J.L.Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism, New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1955, p. 19. 10 See Rekers, Arias Montano, pp. 101–4. 11 Lipsius, Epistolica institutio, chap. 2, in Opera omnia, 4 vols, Wesel, 1675, vol. II, p. 1068: ‘Definio…epistolam: scriptum animi nuntium ad absentes, aut quasi absentes.’ 12 For these details see Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, more reliable on biographical detail than Saunders, whose Justus Lipsius has now been overtaken. 13 Quoted in Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, p. 137: ‘ego e philologia philosophiam feci.’ 14 Guillaume du Vair, De la sainte philosophie; Philosophie morale des stoïques, ed. G.Michaut, Paris, Vrin, 1946, p. 73. On du Vair see A.H.T. Levi, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions: 1585–1649, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, pp. 74–95. 15 Lipsius, De constantia, in his Opera omnia, vol. IV, p. 514: ‘Reason itself, and its powers, do not lead us to God nor to the truth.’ 16 Virgil, Aeneid, VI.733: ‘Hence they fear and desire, they feel sorrow and joy.’ 17 Pierre Charron, De la sagesse livres trois, Bordeaux, 1601. 6 ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’ Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot

Jill Kraye

In a 1992 interview Gary Wills asked Bill Clinton what book had most profoundly influenced him. Clinton’s reply was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, an answer which amazed Wills; for, as he comments, the Meditations is a work ‘that turns its readers continually inward and warns against frittering oneself away in externals. This is not an easy influence to trace in Clinton’s career.’1 In a follow-up piece, written in the wake of the Starr report, Wills further points out that the author of Clinton’s favourite book ‘didn’t think much of sex’.2 The American president is by no means alone in his improbable appreciation of the moral and religious advice jotted down by a second-century Roman emperor for his own guidance. When Penguin Books recently celebrated its 60th anniversary by publishing 60 short books at 60p each, they included a selection from Marcus Aurelius which turned out to be one of the bestsellers on the list. The high regard in which the Meditations are now held has made it the most widely known document of ancient Stoicism in the modern world,3 outstripping both the Enchiridion of the former slave Epictetus and the moral treatises of Seneca, not to mention the many ancient Stoic works which survive only in fragments. But the Meditations did not achieve this prominent position among ancient Stoic writings until the second half of the seventeenth century. My aim in this article is to tell the story of Marcus Aurelius’s rise to philosophical fame. In keeping with the theme of the present volume, humanist erudition will be a crucial element in the plot. For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars the most important Stoic authors were Seneca and Epictetus—Cicero, though full of useful information about Stoicism, was regarded as a fellow-traveller rather than a paid-up member of the sect. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are noticeably absent from the Renaissance canon of Stoic authorities.

107 108 Jill Kraye

This is readily explained by the very different transmission of the three major Stoic authors. Seneca’s philosophical writings, particularly his letters, had been popular since the and circulated widely both in manuscript and, from 1475, in print.4 The Enchiridion of Epictetus was translated into Latin in the fifteenth century by both Niccolò Perotti and Angelo ;5 the latter version was printed by 1497 and was frequently republished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as were translations of the Enchiridion in vernacular languages.6 The of Epictetus reported by Arrian became available in print, both in Greek and in Latin translation, in the first half of the sixteenth century.7 In relation to the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, the Meditations made a comparatively late entry onto the scene. It was not until 1559 that they became known, in a printed edition containing the Greek text and a Latin translation, made by the Heidelberg professor Wilhelm Holtzmann, better known by the Greek form of his name, Xylander. Only a handful of mentions of the Meditations can be found before the appearance of this edition.8 This is not surprising given the work’s very thin manuscript tradition: the full twelve books of the Meditations are found in only two codices. There are, in addition, various collections of extracts; all of these, however, along with the two complete manuscripts, go back to a common archetype. This fact, combined with Marcus’s Greek style, which for all its poetic power can at times be grammatically awkward and compressed to the point of obscurity, present huge challenges to the textual critic and the commentator. Even today some passages remain hopelessly corrupt or unintelligible. Although the Meditations were effectively unknown before 1559, Renaissance readers were well acquainted with the life and character of Marcus Aurelius or, as he was more commonly called in this period, Marcus Antoninus. The main source used by scholars, from onwards,9 was the biography of the emperor attributed to Julius Capitolinus in the Historia Augusta. It not only gives high praise to his political and moral virtues but also stresses his devotion to philosophy : ‘If Plato himself returned to life, he would not be such a philosopher.’10 The biography also refers more than once to Marcus’s adherence to Stoic doctrines.11 Other Latin and Greek historians of the later , such as Herodian,12 Dio Cassius, Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, along with a variety of classical authors, from to Philostratus, paint a similar picture of him as a wise, virtuous and philosophically minded emperor. The Renaissance image of Marcus Aurelius can be seen in Sir Thomas Elyot’s statement of 1531: ‘by his actes he confirmed the sayeng of Plato, That blessed is that publicke Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 109 weale wherin either philosophers do reigne, or els kinges be in philosophie studiouse.’13 The appearance in print of the Meditations only reinforced this positive view of Marcus. It also brought into discredit, at least among scholars, the hugely popular Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, a crude forgery by Antonio de Guevara, first published in Spanish in 1528.14 But, rather more unexpectedly, it made no impact on discussions of Stoic philosophy. Justus Lipsius, for instance, certainly knew the book, which he cites very briefly in at least two of his works;15 but it does not figure as a source in his treatises on Stoicism, even though he includes Marcus Aurelius in his list of distinguished Roman Stoics.16 The reasons for this neglect are due, at least in part, to the limitations of Xylander’s edition. The problems start on the title-page, for Xylander called the book in Latin De vita sua.17 The literal meaning of the Greek title, however, which may not go back to Marcus himself but which accurately conveys the nature of the work, is ‘To Himself’.18 As we shall see, early modern scholars came up with a variety of Latin and vernacular equivalents of this title; but Xylander’s solution, which he unwisely based on a statement reported in the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda,19 was probably the worst of all, since it gave the misleading impression that the work was an autobiography—a description which, at best, fits only the first of the twelve books. There were also, as Xylander himself complained, grave difficulties with the Greek text in his manuscript: in his brief annotations he refers to passages so corrupt and obscure that they required a prophet rather than a translator to penetrate their meaning.20 As if this were not bad enough, his 1559 edition was disfigured by a large number of misprints, which Xylander of course blamed on the printers. He therefore brought out a second edition in 1568, which made the usual title-page boast that the text had been ‘purged of innumerable errors’.21 From the point of view of the history of philosophy, however, the real defect of both of Xylander’s editions was his failure to place the Meditations in the context of ancient Stoicism. The term ‘Stoic’ does not appear in either of his prefaces, nor in any of his annotations.22 True, he does assert in passing that Marcus’s manner of philosophizing is similar to that of Epictetus, but this comment is never followed up.23 While his annotations contain occasional references to Plato, Aristotle and Cicero,24 no passage from any other Stoic author is ever adduced. Xylander does quote passages from the Bible, on the other hand, chiefly to make linguistic points: comparing Marcus’s use of a Greek 110 Jill Kraye word to that of St Paul, for instance, or relating one of his metaphors to a similar phrase in the Psalms.25 In one case, however, Xylander uses a statement of Marcus about ‘returning to earth’ after death to demonstrate that ‘it is not only Holy Scripture which teaches that men were created from the earth and will return to it; ancient philosophers also record our origin in this way’.26 Xylander’s tentative attempt to relate the Meditations to the Bible was greatly built upon in later interpretations of the book. This was, of course, not an uncommon way to approach classical authors at the time. But Marcus Aurelius was, on the face of it, an unpromising candidate for such treatment since Christians were known to have been persecuted during his reign. Moreover, Marcus is one of the handful of ancient pagan authors who actually mentions the Christians, describing them, as one would expect, in far from favourable terms. In Meditations XI.3 he praises the soul which is ready and resolved to be released from the body, adding, however, that ‘this resolve must arise from a specific decision, not out of sheer opposition, like the Christians, but after reflection and with ’.27 Uncomfortable as these facts might be, they by no means deterred early modern scholars from interpreting the Meditations in a Christian light. The task of exploiting the Meditations as a source of Stoic philosophy, ignored by Xylander and Lipsius alike, was first undertaken by the great Genevan humanist Isaac Casaubon in the early years of the seventeenth century.28 In his edition of the Historia Augusta, published in 1603, Casaubon refers occasionally to the Meditations, describing them in his notes to the biography of Marcus Aurelius as ‘those divine books of his’.29 But it is in his famous 1605 commentary on Persius—about which his friend Joseph Scaliger said: ‘the sauce is better than the meat’30—that he draws extensively on the Meditations. Casaubon presents the Roman satirist as a thoroughgoing Stoic moralist and accordingly fills his commentary with citations from other Stoic authors.31 In these learned notes, the Meditations appear for the first time as a key source for Stoic philosophy, in the company of, and on a par with, the writings of Seneca and Epictetus. So, for example, both Seneca and Marcus are cited to illustrate the Stoic doctrine, invoked by Persius in Satire III, that human beings are an organic part of the whole universe controlled by nature.32 A revised and enlarged version of the Persius commentary was brought out in 1647 by Casaubon’s son Meric,33 whose own engagement with the Meditations—he produced both an English translation and a Greek-Latin edition of the work—was no doubt Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 111 inspired by his revered father’s interest in the text. Meric has received a fair amount of scholarly attention of late for his intelligent critique of the Royal Society’s cult of experimental science; his naturalistic account of enthusiasm as a form of pathological melancholy; and his rather bizarre publication of John Dee’s conversations with angels.34 His work as a classical scholar, on the other hand, has always been over-shadowed by the enormous reputation of his father. Sandys, in his History of Classical Scholarship, devotes seven pages to Isaac and only five lines to Meric.35 And more recent books on the subject do not even mention him.36 The Dictionary of National Biography states that the literary world is more indebted to Meric for preserving his father’s papers than for any or all of his own numerous works.37 As a final insult, the recent Teubner edition of the Meditations attributes the 1634 English translation of the text to Isaac Casaubon, who had died twenty years earlier after spending only the last four years of his life in England, rather than to his Eton and Christ Church educated son.38 Meric states in the introduction to his English translation of the Meditations: ‘The chiefest subject of the Booke is, the vanity of the world and all worldly things, as wealth, honour, life, etc.’ It was precisely because Marcus was such a great emperor that his beliefs in this matter were so persuasive. For while a poor man might sincerely inveigh against ‘the vanity of wealth and pleasures’, one might well suspect ‘that they make a vertue of necessitie’. But when a king such as Solomon says that ‘all was vanity and vexation of the spirit…is there any man so bewitched and besotted with worldly wealth and pleasure, whom such a confession from such a one, will not move…. And if this of Solomon…how much more should that confession of Antoninus move us,…as Lord and Master…of more great kingdoms, then Solomon was of great townes’.39 There was a political, as well as a moral and religious, dimension to this slant on Marcus Aurelius. The translation was issued in 1634, during the long run-up to the Civil War, and was dedicated to Casaubon’s patron, Archbishop William Laud. Casaubon suggests that these ‘writings of the wisest, the learnedest, the best that ever was among heathen kings’ will be particularly welcomed by Laud, since he is truly , ‘a friend to the king’, and accounts it no small happiness to serve so great and gracious a sovereign as Charles I.40 By the time that Casaubon’s Greek-Latin edition of the Meditations came out nine years later, Laud was imprisoned in the Tower—he was to be executed in 1645—and Casaubon’s new and more politically correct dedicatee was the scholar and parliamentarian .41 112 Jill Kraye

It was Meric who first gave the work of Marcus Aurelius the English title by which it is still known today, the Meditations, or as he put it: Meditations Concerning Himselfe, pointing out that by heautos the Stoics understood ‘a mans reason or intellectual part, and his opinions’, these being ‘(in their judgement)…the only thing, that every man in himself could properly call “Himselfe”.’42 Casaubon’s notes to his English translation of the Meditations are, like most of his writings, rather rambling and anecdotal. Take his comment on this reflection of Marcus on the transitory nature of human life (which I quote in Casaubon’s translation): ‘What is man? That which but the other day was vile snivell; and within few dayes shall be eyther an embalmed carkasse, or mere ashes.’ Meric uses the reference to ‘ashes’ as a prompt to embark on a lengthy account of a number of funerary urns recently uncovered in a Roman burial ground near Newington in Kent. Ironically, this digression, which has nothing to do either with the Meditations or with Marcus Aurelius, is the only part of Casaubon’s translation to have attracted scholarly interest, since it appears to be the earliest illustrated archaeological report published in Britain.43 Yet, even though it has not been recognized as such, Casaubon’s translation was a serious contribution to the study of ancient philosophy. The Stoic background to Marcus Aurelius’s thought is emphasized, and he is presented as a philosopher who, though ‘not a profest Stoick’, was nevertheless ‘much addicted unto’ the sect.44 Casaubon attempts to explain the Stoics’ ‘strange and unnatural tenets and paradoxes’ and frequently draws on Stoic writers to elucidate the obscurities of Marcus’s text, stating at one point: ‘a better interpreter of Antoninus his minde…we cannot desire then Epictetus’.45 He also singles out areas in which the Roman emperor modified and improved on views held by hardline Stoics. He thus praises Marcus for not indulging in the excessive exaltation of ‘humane power and libertie’ found in Seneca; and for hedging the Stoic case for suicide ‘with such limitations and restrictions, as might seeme in some manner equivalent to a plaine and direct opposition’.46 As an Anglican minister, Casaubon was naturally concerned not to endorse those aspects of Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism ‘which may give offence, as repugnant to our Christian faith and impious, as when hee seemeth…to ascribe all things to Fatall necessity’. But in his view it was sufficient in such cases simply to remind Christian readers not to ‘expect from any out of the Church and without Scriptures perfect sound knowledge in these high points’.47 Casaubon nevertheless praises ‘the marvellous of this Heathen mans philosophy with Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 113 the Holy Scriptures. That it doth in many things agree with the sacred word of God, any man that reades him will easily observe.’ The two great Christian commandments, ‘to love God with all our hearts, and our neighbours as our selves…be the very things which in these books are most pressed and stoode upon’.48 This agreement between the Meditations and the Bible was not undermined, in Casaubon’s eyes, by the fact that Christians were persecuted during Marcus’s rule; for, even though they had good cause to do so, no early Christians had spoken ill of the emperor or charged him with cruelty. He mitigates the offensiveness of criticism of Christians in the Meditations by citing passages from Epictetus, Pliny the Younger and Tertullian which showed that the willingness of ‘godly Christians to scale their profession with their blood’ was commonly ‘mistaken and misinterpreted’ by the pagans as having no ground in reason, ‘as Antoninus…doth here alleage’.49 Casaubon’s English translation of the Meditations was followed in 1651 by a French version of the text, entitled Pensées morales, which was made by a Swedish official who had worked for many years in France and who is identified solely by the initials B.I.K.50 Defending himself against any of his fellow countrymen who might feel that he should have turned the work into Swedish rather than French, the translator reminds Swedes that they should not feel envious since they had in Queen Christina, to whom he dedicated his translation, a living embodiment of that wisdom which other nations could only read about in the pages of Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations could therefore be made available to other nations without provoking resentment at home, in the same way that one might send them a portrait of the queen, in the knowledge that Sweden retained the original.51 These words, penned in 1650, were a hostage to fortune, for five years later, when the translation was going through its second edition,52 the female Marcus Aurelius was to abdicate her throne and abandon Sweden forever. These two translations did much to raise the popular profile of the Meditations. Progress in terms of textual criticism was achieved in more scholarly publications, such as Meric Casaubon’s 1643 Greek- Latin edition of the Meditations, entitled De seipso et ad seipsum, ‘On Himself and To Himself, in which he attempted to ameliorate Xylander’s Greek text by using new manuscript readings from a collection of extracts, and also by making conjectural emendations, some of which have been accepted by modern editors.53 As in his English translation, the annotations contain much philosophical as well as philological material,54 and here too there are occasional references 114 Jill Kraye to similarities between the Meditations and passages from both the Old and New Testaments.55 In the ‘Prolegomena’ Meric describes how, before embarking on this enterprise, he called on Thomas Gataker, ‘a man famous among the English for his erudition’, having heard that he too was working on an edition of the Meditations. When they met, Gataker showed Meric two fat notebooks—one containing a Greek text and Latin translation, the other a Latin commentary—both of which were ready to go to press. But Gataker despaired of finding a publisher for such a mammoth work in the turbulence of the early 1640s and encouraged Meric to go ahead with his own project.56 As Gataker explained in the preface to his edition, this work was a forty-year labour of love, compiled during the few moments he could spare from his parochial and preaching duties as minister of Rotherhithe in Surrey. In contrast to Horace’s wine jar, which had shrunk on the potter’s wheel to the size of a pitcher, Gataker’s edition had begun as a pitcher but swelled into a gigantic amphora, even though he was well aware how reluctant publishers were to take on even shorter works of this kind—plus ça change.57 The edition was not in fact published until 1652 (Fig. 6.1), nine years after Meric’s, and only then because Gataker’s powerful friends at Cambridge, all recent vice-chancellors, put pressure on the university press, thus bringing about what has been described in a recent history of CUP as ‘the single major scholarly achievement of the press’ during the entire Civil War and Interregnum period.58 As a humanist Gataker was in a different league from Meric Casaubon. In his 1894 inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Ingram Bywater described him as without doubt ‘the great Greek scholar of the Caroline age, whose Antoninus is to this day a book of unquestioned value and authority’,59 a judgement confirmed by recent editors such as A.S.L.Farquharson, who wrote: ‘Gataker’s edition has long been, and will always remain, the principal authority for any one undertaking to study or edit the Meditations.’60 While historians of classical scholarship, and even bibliographers, have taken on board the significance of Gataker’s edition, it has been sadly neglected by historians of early modern philosophy.61 So little known is Gataker that one historian of philosophy wrote in a 1991 article: ‘There was no major Stoic scholarship in Britain…before Samuel Clarke.’62 Yet Gataker’s edition of the Meditations, published some twenty years before Clarke was born, was in reality a far greater contribution to the study of ancient philosophy than the edition of Seneca by Justus Lipsius or that of Book X of Diogenes Laertius by . Lipsius and Gassendi, unlike Gataker, have earned a place in the Figure 6.1 Title-page of Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, sive de eis qae ad se pertinere censebat libri XII, ed. and trans. Thomas Gataker, Cambridge, 1652. 116 Jill Kraye history of philosophy because, in addition to their humanist scholarship, they also wrote philosophical treatises on Stoicism and Epicureanism respectively. But even though Gataker’s edition of the Meditations has been ignored by twentieth-century historians of philosophy, its importance was recognized by early modern scholars, upon whom it exerted, as will become apparent, a powerful influence. Thomas Gataker was that rarest of creatures, a very great scholar who was also a very good man, as his generous treatment of Meric Casaubon nicely illustrates.63 Educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, the young Gataker, according to his eulogist Simeon Ashe, was ‘a constant Auditor of that eminent Light of Learning Mr John Boys, who read a Greek lecture in his bed to certain young students who preferred antelucana studia’, that is, predawn studies, ‘to their rest and ease’.64 Although he was given a fellowship at the newly founded Sidney Sussex, Gataker decided to go London’, where for ten years he preached at Lincoln’s Inn, afterwards moving to Rotherhithe, where he remained as a hard-working pastor for the rest of his days. With characteristic modesty, he turned down the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, offered to him during the Interregnum by the Earl of Manchester, pleading his own unworthiness for such an honour, as well as his ill health.65 Gataker, who was a moderate Puritan, published various polemical works in English along with a number of sermons, with titles such as A Good Wife Gift and margins bulging with Latin, Greek and Hebrew quotations.66 Apart from his edition of the Meditations, he produced many other scholarly works in Latin, among them a treatise on diphthongs, which he wrote on his sickbed when recovering from a particularly severe attack of colick. This work, which is weighted down with humanist erudition, provides the solution to a puzzling problem: why does Gataker invariably leave out the u after q (as can be seen in Fig. 6.1)? In De diphthongis, he draws on the grammatical scholarship of the Dutch humanists Bonaventura Vulcanius and to demonstrate that in early Latin the letter q originally stood for a combination of c and u; it was therefore superfluous and redundant to place a u after it.67 This orthographical obsession—what we might term a spelling bee in his bonnet—is indicative of a pedantry which sometimes distorted Gataker’s judgement, as, for instance, when he cites a host of biblical and classical texts to defend his Latin translation of Marcus’s Greek title Ta eis heauton, not as the obvious Ad seipsum, which is used nowadays, but rather, the cumbersome and ungainly De rebus suis, sive de eis qae ad se pertinere censebat.68 Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 117

In his annotations to the Meditations Gataker follows in the footsteps of Casaubon, whom he cites frequently, by providing accounts of Stoic ethical and cosmological doctrines and by quoting from other Stoic authors in order to clarify the often obscure meaning of the text.69 The breadth and depth of Gataker’s knowledge of the entire gamut of classical literature is genuinely breathtaking. In addition to the standard authorities—Seneca, Epictetus, Cicero, Simplicius and Diogenes Laertius—there can be few relevant passages collected in the early twentieth century by von Arnim in his Stoicorum veterum fragmenta that are not cited in Gataker’s commentary. This was achieved, moreover, so his eulogist informs us, not by the use of commonplace books, the standard Renaissance research tool,70 but by memory alone.71 Gataker’s annotations are also a Who’s Who of early modern scholarship, containing references to the best recent editions and monographs, as well as personal communications on textual matters from Continental humanists such as Salmasius.72 Not even the medieval scholastics are neglected.73 Yet for all its profound philological and philosophical erudition, the really striking feature of Gataker’s edition of Marcus Aurelius, and no doubt the aspect of it that most concerned him, was his constant attempt to uncover parallels between the Meditations and the Bible. To give an idea of the balance of his citations, the index of classical sources is a page and a half long, while the index of biblical passages goes on for four and a half pages, with the Psalms and letters of St Paul having the largest entries. Gataker also makes extensive use of the Church Fathers and of some post-biblical Hebrew exegetical literature. Commenting, for example, on the pessimistic reflection on human life which had sparked off Casaubon’s archaeological excursus: ‘yesterday a drop of mucus, tomorrow ashes or a mummy’, Gataker quotes a parallel passage in Hebrew from Pirke Aboth, a set of Jewish ethical sayings preserved as a tractate in the Mishnah and roughly contemporary with the Meditations. In one of these aphorisms Rabbi Akiba, much like Marcus, says that human beings have come from a ‘fetid drop’.74 Gataker then recalls two similar images, one used by Tertullian, who states that Christian rebirth comes ‘not from the slime of a seed, nor from the mud of lust’;75 and the other from the Old Testament, where Job asks the Lord: ‘Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?’76 This note begins, by the way, with Gataker pointing out that Marcus’s uncommon Greek term , a drop of mucus, or, as Casaubon rendered it, ‘vile snivell’, had been mistranslated by Xylander, who thought it was some kind of fish. He was misled by the word which follows it and which means a 118 Jill Kraye body preserved by embalming but can also refer to a fish that is dried and cured with salt. So, in Xylander’s version, Marcus’s comment on the evanescence of man’s life reads: ‘yesterday a fish, tomorrow salted cod’.77 Like Casaubon, Gataker is careful to warn readers against those aspects of Marcus’s Stoic philosophy which are in conflict with Christianity, such as his ambiguity on the immortality of the soul.78 But these areas of conflict are so few in number that they are overwhelmed by the vast areas of agreement which Gataker identifies—aided, at times, by the eye of faith.79 The belief which underlies this attitude is expressed in his commentary on Marcus’s statement that there is one universe, one God and one truth. Gataker uses this passage to attack those who argue that there is one truth for theology and another for philosophy.80 A large part of his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ is devoted to proving that, of all philosophies, it was Stoicism, especially as reflected in the writings of Marcus Aurelius, which coincided most closely with the truths of Christianity. Thus, after listing a number of Christ’s teachings—about abstaining from evil, even in thought, turning the other cheek and so on—Gataker concludes:

These same precepts are to be found in Antoninus, just as if he were in the habit of reading them. They are interspersed throughout his collection of thoughts and meditations, and are repeatedly instilled with a remarkable strength and vigour that pierces to the bottom of the heart.

Yet why, he asks, read these precepts in the work of someone who was a stranger to, indeed an enemy of, Christianity?81 In the first place, Gataker maintains, because Marcus Aurelius provides fuller and more detailed explanations of Christ’s brief maxims than can be found in the Gospels; and, furthermore, because the Meditations allow us to discern the perfect agreement of Christian doctrine with reason.82 The concord of reason and faith was the theme of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Alnetanae quaestiones of 1690. A former Cartesian enthusiast now turned critic, he had six years previously been named a bishop, first of Soissons and later of Avranches. In this treatise he deploys all his formidable humanist erudition to illustrate ‘the agreement between human reason, which the pagans used as their sole guide to knowledge of the truth, and divine faith, by means of which those devoted to Christ grasp the truth’.83 Huet calls Marcus Aurelius ‘ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’, ‘holiest of all the heathens’;84 and the Meditations provide him with much valuable evidence for the consensus of pagan Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 119 and Christian doctrines on matters such as guardian angels and human free will. He also finds in the Meditations precepts which are in line with the Christian belief in humility and chastity and with Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemies.85 Huet does not mention any modern authorities in this treatise; but it is worth pointing out that there was a copy of Gataker’s edition of the Meditations in his library. The custom of not citing contemporary scholars was also followed by two of Huet’s former collaborators on the ad usum Delphini editions of the classics: the husband and wife team of André and Anne Dacier. It is clear, however, from the notes to their French translation of the Meditations, published 1690–91, that they were aware of Gataker’s edition,86 which was well known and highly regarded on the Continent. Francesco Barberini, in the preface to his 1675 Italian translation of the Meditations, had proclaimed that Gataker’s annotations left nothing to be desired—although the cardinal nipote of Urban VIII was offended by Gataker’s occasional Puritan swipes at the .87 And in 1697 Gataker’s edition of the Meditations was reprinted in Utrecht in his two-volume Opera critica et philologica. The Daciers, like Gataker and Huet, emphasized the closeness of Stoic ethics to the morality of the Gospels. Allowing that the Stoics were justly censured for a small number of their doctrines—their , ignorance of original sin and belief in the legitimacy of suicide—they nevertheless asserted that, after the Holy Scriptures, Stoic maxims were the most valuable reading matter for anyone seeking to live according to justice and make good use of his reason.88 And among Stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius held pride of place, being almost as superior to Seneca and Epictetus in the of his writings as he was in lineage and wealth.89 This was not least because his Reflexions morales, the title the Daciers gave to the Meditations,90 disproved many of the unfair criticisms which had been made of the Stoics. Marcus showed, for instance, that they did not want to eliminate but rather keep it within reasonable bounds; it was only excessive, useless and ineffective compassion which they condemned.91 His writings also proved that, far from being corrupted by amour propre, the Stoics held that man’s primary and principal responsibility was to love his neighbour.92 As for Marcus Aurelius himself, he had never been personally involved in the persecution of Christians during his rule;93 and his criticism of their irrational and obstinate desire for martyrdom was the result of his inability, as a pagan, to perceive the superhuman which moved them.94 The views of the Daciers and to a lesser extent those of Huet are 120 Jill Kraye quoted and endorsed by Joannes Franciscus Buddeus, a Lutheran professor of theology at Jena,95 in the preface to his Greek-Latin edition of the Meditations, published in 1729, and based on the 1704 Oxford reprint of Gataker’s text and translation. The frontispiece (Fig. 6.2) has a charming illustration of Marcus Aurelius in a military camp, sitting alone in his tent writing the Meditations. There are in fact indications in the text that some at least of the books were written while he was campaigning against the German tribes.96 The title of Buddeus’s preface, ‘Introduction to Stoic Philosophy according to the Thought of Marcus Antoninus’, reveals how important a document the Meditations had now become for the study of Stoicism. Buddeus, who in 1704, as a young professor of moral philosophy at Halle, had chosen to give his very first public lectures on the Meditations, states that he wrote this introduction because he noticed that Justus Lipsius and others who had written on Stoic philosophy had paid little or no attention to the work.97 Buddeus dwells considerably more than Gataker, Huet or the Daciers on the errors of the Stoics, particularly in relation to their religious views;98 but he finds much that agrees with Christianity in their ethics: Marcus Aurelius’s contempt for worldly glory,99 for instance, and his teaching that we should love even our enemies and those who have harmed us.100 Interestingly, Buddeus suggests that Marcus’s belief that the soul brings shame on itself when it succumbs to the passions of pleasure and is

not all that different from the views of certain recent thinkers, above all René Descartes, who thinks that there is no better remedy for the passions of the soul than generosity, which, since it is the key to all virtues, battles more forcefully against the vices of the emotions.101

Another thinker who is well known to historians of early modern philosophy now enters our story. Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and one of the central figures in the , brought out in 1742 an English translation of the Meditations, in collaboration with the Greek scholar James Moor. What Hutcheson described as the ‘pious and charitable meditations’ of Marcus Aurelius, who had recommended ‘not only forgiveness but the returning of good for evil’, provided more support than other Stoic works for the connection between virtue and benevolence, one of the central doctrines in Hutcheson’s moral sense theory.102 Marcus was also a classical author who was in fundamental agreement with Christianity, as Hutcheson indicated in his notes by Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 121

Figure 6.2 Frontispiece and title-page of Marcus Aurelius, Libri XII eorum quae de seipso ad seipsum scripsit, ed. Johannes Franciscus Buddeus, Leipzig, 1729.

pointing out frequent parallels with the New Testament.103 The Christian Stoicism promoted in this edition is greatly indebted to Thomas Gataker, who is cited in the notes and parts of whose ‘Preliminary Discourse’ are printed, in English translation, as an appendix to the text. The two sections of Gataker’s ‘Discourse’ selected for inclusion were his account of the ‘Maxims of the Stoics’ and what the editors refer to as his ‘Apology for employing, tho’ a Christian minister, so many year’s time and labour on these Meditations of a Heathen Emperor, under whose reign the Christians suffered persecution’.104 Hutcheson noted that since there was no evidence that Marcus personally gave any orders to persecute Christians, he was less guilty than ‘the apostle Paul, who himself persecuted with great fury’.105 An earlier translation of Gataker’s ‘Preliminary Discourse’ had already appeared in print, in Jeremy Collier’s English version of the 122 Jill Kraye

Meditations, first published in 1701 and given the title The Emperor Marcus Antoninus His Conversation with Himself. Collier, a former minister and outspoken Jacobite, had become notorious as the Mary Whitehouse of the Restoration era, on account of his attacks on the immorality of the plays of Dryden and Congreve.106 He apparently felt embarrassed by Gataker’s overtly Christian reading of the Meditations, for his translation of the ‘Discourse’ stops precisely at the point where the ‘Apology’ printed by Hutcheson and Moor begins. Explaining why he had done this, Collier wrote:

Thus far I have Translated the Learned Gataker, who proceeds in his Prolegomena, to draw a Parallel between the Doctrines of Our Blessed Saviour, and those of Marcus Antoninus in many considerable Instances, insomuch that one wou’d imagine the Emperor had Transcribed part of his Philosophy from the four Evangelists.

Believing that such matters were better discovered by readers for themselves, Collier resolved to leave this part of the preface out of his translation. A much less ambiguous rejection of Gataker’s Christian interpretation of the Meditations appeared in 1765 in that great monument of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. The article on Stoicism, which was written by Diderot himself, ends with an account of the revival of Stoic philosophy in the Renaissance. After discussing the contribution of Lipsius, Diderot mentions two Dutch scholars, Daniel Heinsius and Caspar Scioppius, who had each produced works on Stoicism.107 Diderot writes that Gataker:

showed himself to be much superior to both of them, in his commentary on the work of the Emperor Antoninus. One finds everywhere in this commentary a man who has deep knowledge of ancient orators, poets and philosophers. But he had his prejudices. He frequently sees Christ, St Paul and the Evangelists in the Stoa, and it does not bother him that they are taken to be disciples of Zeno. The Daciers are not far removed from the ideas of Gataker.108

Despite Diderot’s dismissal of the Christian interpretation of the Meditations, it was not abruptly abandoned but instead lingered on, only gradually fading away. As late as 1863, could still suggest that the ethics of Marcus Aurelius ‘reminds one of Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 123

Christian morality’.109 The image of Marcus Aurelius as ‘holiest of all the heathens’ would prove to be a long-enduring legacy of early modern scholarship.

Notes 1 Gary Wills, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, New York Review of Books, 3 October 1996, vol. 43, no. 15, pp. 16–22, at 22 n. 20. 2 Gary Wills, ‘Bill & the Emperor’, New York Review of Books, 8 October 1998, vol. 45, no. 15, p. 53, citing Meditations II.10. Wills adds, however, that: ‘Semen smears intrigued Marcus, since man begins as one—his life span takes him from “a bit of slime yesterday to a mummy’s dust tomorrow”’; for early modern interpretations of this passage (IV.48) see pp. 112, 117–18 below. 3 See D.A.Rees’s introduction to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, transl.A. S.L.Farquharson, London, Everyman’s Library, 1992, p. v. According to Matthew Arnold, ‘Marcus Aurelius’ (first published in the Victoria Magazine in November 1863), in his Essays Literary and Critical, London, 1914, pp. 186–209, at 193, 201, who described Marcus as ‘perhaps the most beautiful figure in history’: ‘The sentences of Seneca are stimulating to the intellect; the sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the character; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul.’ 4 See ‘The Younger Seneca’, in L.D.Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. 357–75, esp. 363–75. The editio princeps is Seneca, Opera philosophica. Epistolae, ed. Blasius Romerus, Naples, 1475. 5 Niccolò Perotti’s Version of the ‘Enchiridion’ of Epictetus, ed. R.P.Oliver, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1954; Perotti completed the translation in 1450. For the version of Angelo Poliziano, made in 1479 and dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, see Epitteto, Manuale, introd. di G. De Ruggiero, Milan, Garzanti, 1971. 6 See W.A.Oldfather, Contributions Toward a Bibliography of Epictetus, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1927, and A Supplement, ed. M. Harman, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1952. 7 The Greek editio princeps, printed in Venice in 1535, was edited by Vittorio Trincavello; the first Greek-Latin edition, printed in Basel in 1554, was edited by Jacob Schegk. 8 The first mention of the Meditations in the West occurs in Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica libri tres, Hagenau, 1517, fols xxxvv and xlviiiv, quoting IV.36 and IV.28, from a work he refers to as Liber ad se ipsum; see P.Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 22 and 321 n. 9, and L.Bergson, ‘Fragment einer Marc-Aurel Handschrift’, Rheinisches Museum, 1986, vol. 129, pp. 157–69. For other references see Conrad Gesner, , Zurich, 1545, fol. 53v: ‘Antonini Augusti itinerarium; ejusdem 124 Jill Kraye

liber , Romae servatum Graece’; and Lilius Gyraldus, Historiae poetarum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum dialogi decem, Basel, 1545, p. 603: ‘Dignus …Marcus Antoninus…philosophus [ut inter poëtas connumeretur], cuius licet versus non legerim, tantae tamen eruditionis et doctrinae fuit ut merito cum his laudandus sit. Eius certe librum Graece scriptum legi, cuius titulus, , ex quo variam et multiplicem illius sapientiam facile colligere possumus.’ The title cited by both Gesner and Gyraldus is found in the excerpts preserved in various Vatican manuscripts: see the introduction to Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, ed. A.S.L.Farquharson, 2 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1944, vol. I, pp. xxii n. 1 and xxxi; unless otherwise indicated, all English translations are taken from this edition. 9 Petrarch, De officio et virtutibus imperatoris, in his Opera, Basel, 1554, p. 438: ‘Adde his M.Aurelium Antoninum longe sapientissimum, eum dico qui Philosophicum maluit quam Caesareum cognomen.’ 10 Historia Augusta: Julius Capitolinus, ‘Marcus Antoninus Philosophus’ XIX; see also I–II, VIII and XXIII. 11 We are also told that many of Marcus’s teachers were Stoics (III); that, in accordance with Stoic principles, he did not allow emotions to alter his countenance (XVI); and that he could appear harsh in military discipline and in his life in general, due to his chosen system of philosophy (XXII). 12 See, e.g., Machiavelli’s account of Marcus Aurelius in chap. 19 of The Prince, ed. Q.Skinner and R.Price, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 63–72, which was closely based on Herodian, a work he read in Angelo Poliziano’s Latin translation. 13 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouvernour, ed. H.H.S.Croft, 2 vols, New York, Burt Franklin, 1967, vol. I, p. 104; see Plato, Republic V.18. 14 The Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio is largely based on the Historia Augusta but also contains entirely fanciful material, including nineteen letters of Marcus, five of them addressed to prostitutes. See R.Costes, Antonio de Guevara: sa vie, Paris, Champion, 1925; E.Grey, Guevara, a Forgotten Renaissance Author, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1973; A.Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (1480?–1545) et l’Espagne de son temps, Geneva, Droz, 1976, esp. pp. 465–522. Between 1535 and 1586 there were some thirteen editions of the English translation alone. 15 See Tacitus, Opera quae exstant, ed. and comment, by J.Lipsius, Antwerp, 1585, sig. a3r (ad Annales I.17), where he quotes Meditations I.17; and Saturnalium sermonum libri duo, II.24, in J.Lipsius, Opera omnia, 4 vols, Wesel, 1675, vol. III, p. 982, where he quotes Meditations I.5. 16 J.Lipsius, Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam I.18, in his Opera omnia, IV, p. 674: ‘Ipse M.Antoninus Imperator, quo nihil melius aut laudabilius, in hoc albo nomen signat’; see also p. 681 (I.19), where he discusses the Suda’s Statement that Epictetus lived into the era of Marcus Aurelius. See J.L.Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism, New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1955, p. 80 n. 44; and Farquharson’s introd. to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, vol. I, p. xlii. The one mention of Marcus Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 125

Aurelius in Francisco de Quevedo’s Stoic Doctrine of 1635 is based on Manuductio I.18: see J.Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, vol. I: Moral Philosophy, pp. 210–25, at 221. Lipsius also refers to Marcus Aurelius in Monita et exempla politica I.8, in his Opera omnia, vol. IV, sig. Aa8r (misnumbered p. 183): ‘M.Antonino Philosophi cognomen [haesit], quod supra alios in eo studio deditus esset, Stoicam etiam sectam professus; et quis tamen vita melior, imperio mitior aut felicior dabitur?’ 17 M.Antoninus, De seipso sen vita sua libri XII, ed. and trans. G.Xylander, Zurich, 1559. He refers to the book simply as De vita sua at the beginning of his annotations: sig. n5r. 18 On the title see Hadot, Inner Citadel, pp. 23–25 19 A.Adler (ed.), Suidae Lexicon, 5 vols, Leipzig, Teubner, 1928–38, III, p. 328, line 24: ylander translates this passage as: ‘Condidit hic Marcus de vita sua libros XII’: M.Antoninus, De seipso sen vita sua, p. 11.The Suda also cites a number of passages from the Meditations. See N.G.Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium, London, Duckworth, 1983, pp. 145–7. 20 M.Antoninus, De seipso seu vita sua, ed. and trans. Xylander, sig. A2v: ‘. …verum est, libellos hos ANTONINI (ut quidem in nostras ij manus pervenerunt) esse mutilos, misereque et maiore sui parte decurtatos…’; sig. A5r (signed B5 in error): ‘fateor, in quibusdam me vel ut divinarem opus habuisse, vel audacter a codice Graeco aut usu communi discessisse’; sig. n8v: ‘divinavi hoc loco…mutilus est locus’; sig. o3v: ‘locus est depravatus, atque ideo obscurus’. 21 M.Antoninus, De vita sua libri XII, ab innumeris quibus antea scatebant mendis repurgati et nunc demum vere editi, ed. and trans. G.Xylander, Basel, 1568, pp. 3–4: ‘Quae mea lucubratio, cum…foede esset incuria operarum typographicarum depravata, itaque plane edita, ut pro non edita censeri optimo iure posset, iampridem cogitaram de remedio ei malo faciendo.’ 22 The term occurs only once in the Meditations, at V.10 23 M.Antoninus, De vita sua, ed. and trans. Xylander, p. 157: ‘Nec absimile est nostri autoris genus philosophandi ei, quo usum esse Epictetum 24 See, e.g., ibid., p. 327, for a reference to Plato’s Timaeus; p. 333, for Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI; and pp. 338–9, for Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero, De finibus III. 25 See, e.g., ibid., p. 327, where Xylander compares Ephesians 4:14 to Meditations I.8; p. 330, where he compares Psalms 101:4, ‘sicut fumus dies mei’, to Meditations II.17, (dream and smoke); p. 332, where he compares II Timothy 2:16 to Meditations III.4; and p. 335, where he compares the use of the verb (to boast) in I Corinthians 13:4 and Meditations V.5. 26 Ibid., p. 340: Xylander’s annotation to Meditations VI. 10 27 The phrase ‘like the Christians’ was bracketed as a gloss by Eichstädt in 1821; he was followed by C.R.Haines in his edition of The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, London, 1906, who nevertheless states (pp. 382–3): ‘even if the words be omitted, Marcus may still have had the 126 Jill Kraye

Christians in mind when he wrote the passage’. J. Dalfen, in his edition of Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ipsum libri XII, Leipzig, Teubner, 1979, p. 106, follows Eichstädt and Haines in bracketing the phrase; Farquharson, however, argues that the text is correct as it stands: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, vol. II, pp. 859–90. See also E.Asmis, ‘The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius’, in W.Hasse (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Berlin and New York, De Gruyter, 1989, Teil II: Principal, vol. II.3, pp. 2228–52, at 2229 n. 2. 28 See the article on Casaubon by A.Grafton in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. I, pp. 270–1 and the bibliography cited there. 29 Historiae Augustae scriptores sex, ed. I.Casaubon, Paris, 1603, p. 174 (ad ‘Marcus Aurelius’ XXVIII): ‘Non ridere, sed rite ac suo pretio aestimare res humanas solitus vir hic sapientissimus. Hoc ille nos docet divinis suis libris, velut cum ait in secundo…’ (a quotation from Meditations II.17 follows). 30 Ep. 104, quoted by J.E.Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols, Cambridge, 1908–21, vol. II, p. 209. 31 Persius, Satirarum liber, ed. and comment. I.Casaubon, Paris, 1605, sig. &4r: ‘Persius…Stoïcum de ultimo fine ubique urget, ubique inculcat.’ 32 Ibid., pp. 290–2 (ad Satires III.72), where Casaubon cites Meditations II.4 and X.5 and Seneca, Epistulae XCV.52. See also pp. 36 (ad I.1), 70–1 (ad I.22), 90 (ad I.47), 224–5 (ad II.74), 259–60 (ad III.49), 263 (ad III.54–5), 274–6 (ad III.67), 286–7 (ad III.70–1), 290–2 (ad III.72), 436–7 (ad V. 128–9). 33 Persius, Satirarum liber, ed. and comment. I.Casaubon, 3rd ed. by M. Casaubon, London, 1647. Meric states that he did not revise or alter any of Isaac’s references to the Meditations: ‘De uno aut altero Marci Antonini Imperatoris loco qui aliter in his Commentariis vel scribuntur vel exponuntur quam nobis probatur, alibi proprio loco egimus, quae non putavimus hic repetenda…’ (sig. a3r). 34 See P.J.Korshin’s introd. to Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (1655), Gainesville, Florida, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970, esp. the bibliography on pp. xxiii–xxv; M.G.Spiller, “Concerning Natural ”: Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1980; M.Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1995, esp. chap. 11; M. Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries, Leiden, Brill, 1995, chaps 3 and 5; D.Fouke, The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion, Leiden, Brill, 1997, pp. 170–5; for his activities as prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral (a position first held by his father) see A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. P.Collinson et al., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 158, 187, 194, 206, 209–10, 220 and 232. 35 Sandys, History, vol. II, pp. 204–10 (Isaac) and 210 (Meric). 36 See, e.g., L.Reynolds and N.G.Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976; C.O. Brink’s English Classical Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 127

Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman, Cambridge, J.Clarke, 1985. 37 Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1885–1901, vol. III, pp. 1170–1. The article is by J.H.Overton. 38 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Ad se ipsum, ed. Dalfen, p. xxvii. Meric may not have minded, for, as he wrote to J.G.Graevius, 14 April 1660: ‘Mihi sane ad gloriam satis est, et plusquam satis, tali patre natum esse’: quoted in Spiller, “Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie”, p. 11. 39 Marcus Aurelius, His Meditations Concerning Himselfe…, trans. M. Casaubon, London, 1634, sigs D1r–D2v; see Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 2:26. 40 Ibid., sig. A3r–v. For Casaubon’s description of Laud as ‘my great friend and patron’ see Spiller, “Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie”, p. 3. 41 Marcus Aurelius, De seipso et ad seipsum libri XII, ed. and trans. M. Casaubon, London, 1643, sigs *3r–5r. 42 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Casaubon, sigs C1r–v, Kk2r–v. Casaubon stated that the Latin title De officio suo used by Gulielmus Canterus, Novarum lectionum libri octo, Antwerp, 1571, pp. 407–9, ‘comes neerer’ to the Greek than Xylander’s version. 43 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Casaubon, sigs. Nn4v–Oo3v (ad IV.48). See Hunter, Science, pp. 190–2. W.H.D.Rouse, who edited the 1899 London re-issue of Casaubon’s translation, omitted the notes ‘because for the most part they are discursive, and not necessary to an understanding of what is written’: p. 218. 44 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Casaubon, sigs MM4r and D4v. 45 Ibid., sigs L13r, Mm4r; see also sig. F2r: ‘If a man take but Arrianus, and Seneca, and compare them diligently with Antoninus, he will finde marvellous consent, and many obscure short places of Antoninus, illustrated and explained by their larger discourse.’ For further references to Epictetus as a means of explaining Marcus: sigs E2r, Kk4v, L11r, L12v and Nn1r. For discussions of Stoicism see sigs L13v and Mm4v. 46 Ibid., sigs F3v, Nn2v–Nn3r, Pp2v; see also Mm4r. 47 Ibid., sig. F3r. 48 Ibid., sig. MM1v–2v (ad Meditations II.1). See also Casaubon’s 1653 letter to Thomas Gataker, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Selden Supra 108, fols 176r– 179r, at 176r: ‘tam utilem et fructuosam eius [i.e. the Meditations] lectionem pridem expertus sim et quotidie experior, ut cum a sacris discessi, non alium temere librum reperiam, in quo magis animus meus, sive in rebus laetis componendus, sive in tristibus erigendus, acquiescat.’ 49 Ibid., sig. Pp4r–v (ad Meditations XI.3). Casaubon cites Epictetus, Discourses IV.7.6; Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Emperor Trajan, X.96; and Tertullian, Apologeticus 50.15 and Ad nationes I.18. 50 Pensées morales de Marc Antonin, trans. B.I.K., Paris, 1658, sig. v2v: ‘il ne paroist jusques icy que deux traductions. L’une en Anglois, mais faite par un François (Monsieur Meric Casaubon…). Et voicy l’autre en François; mais faite par un Suedois’. He was unaware of the earlier French translation by Pardoux Duprat, entitled Institution de la vie humaine, dressée par Marc Antonin, Lyon, 1570: see J.W.Legg, A Bibliography of the “Thoughts” of 128 Jill Kraye

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, London, 1910, p. 35; a copy of this rare edition is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 51 Pensées morales, trans. B.I.K., sig. a4r–v: ‘i’ay à leur répondre, qu’ils peuvent bien souffrir sans ialousie, que les autres peuples admirent dans les livres une partie de cette mesme sagesse qu’ils voyent brilliante et animée dans la conduite et les actions de vostre Maiesté…Et pouvons sans envie donner aux autres peuples la lecture de Antonin, de la mesme façon qu’on leur envoye les pourtraicts de vostre Maiesté, puis que nous en gardens l’original.’ 52 Ibid., sig. a–5v: the dedicatory preface to Queen Christina is signed: ‘B.I. K.De Paris le 15 Octob. 1650’. The translation was reprinted in 1655 and 1658, both times in Paris: see Legg, Bibliography, pp. 37–8. 53 See the introd. to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. and trans. Farquharson, vol. I, pp. xliv–xlv. The German humanist David Hoeschel collated for him a Munich manuscript, Cod. gr. Monacensis 529, which contains most of the ‘X’ excerpts: ibid., p. xxxii. See also Marcus Aurelius, De seipso et ad seipsum, ed. and trans. Casaubon, sig. Cc1r. In the ‘Prolegomena’, ibid., sig. A2r, Meric explains how he got hold of his father’s manuscript of the Meditations with the aid of the Royal Librarian Patrick Young, but found that the margins were filled, not with the emendations he had hoped for, but rather with and marking the corrupt passages; see, however, his use of one of Isaac’s marginal annotations: sig. Ff4v. 54 E.g. Marcus Aurelius, De seipso et ad seipsum, ed. and trans. Casaubon, sigs Dd8r, where he discusses the Stoic concept of fate, and Ee4v–5v, and gives an account of , in which he takes issue with Justus Lipsius, Physiologia Stoicorum III.6. For Meric’s cautiousness as a textual critic see Hh1v: ‘Nihil…temere mutandum censeo.’ 55 E.g., ibid., sigs Ee5v, where he compares Stoic cosmological doctrines with Genesis 1, John 1:1, Ephesians 1:10 and II Peter 3:5–7; Ff6v–7r: ‘Conferat…Lector pietatis studiosus haec Antonini [V.32]…cum sancti prophetae Jerem. cap. 9, 23, 24 verbis’; and Gg2r: ‘Confer, suadeo, cum Jobi cap. 28, cujus divini capitis summam paucis verbis hic expressam habes.’ 56 Ibid., sigs A2v–3r. 57 Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis sive de eis qae ad se pertinere censebat libri XII, ed. and trans. T.Gataker, Cambridge, 1652, sigs ****4v: ‘Huic conficiendo inter curas operasqe pastorales, qibus per annos ultra qadraginta…jugiter districtius insudavi…inter horas subsecivas, qae et rariores intervenerant, et per intervalla redierant, dum intendo, in molem eam opus istud excrevisse animadverteram, ut de evulgando spem omnem abjicerem; siqidem, contra qam in Flacciano illo [Ars poetica 21–2], urceus institui cum cepisset, rota currente amphora exiit; expertus utiqe, Bibliopolae et Typographi nostri, qam aegre aliqid etiam minoris negotii in hoc genere suscipiant.’ 58 D.McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992–, vol. I, p. 309. 59 I.Bywater, Four Centuries of Greek Learning in England, Oxford, 1899, p. 14. 60 See the introd. to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. and trans. Farquharson, vol. I, p. xlix. See also Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ipsum, ed. Dalfen, p. xxvii: Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 129

‘eam editionem insignem usque ad nostram aetatem locum obtinere eumque editorem de Marci libris edendis emendandis explicandis optime meritum esse nemo est qui neget’; G.Zuntz’s review of Farquharson’s edition in Journal of Theological Studies, 1946, vol. 47, pp. 85–7, at 85: ‘Thomas Gataker’s commentary (1652)…is the lasting monument of its author’s brilliant scholarship and open-minded humanity’; and Brink, English Classical Scholarship, chap. 1. 61 Gataker has earned a small place in the history of probability theory through his treatise of 1619 On the Nature and Use of Lots, in which he argued that profane lotteries, used with due caution, were legitimate: see L.Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 155. 62 M.A.Stewart, ‘The Stoic legacy in the early Scottish Enlightenment’, in M.J.Osler (ed.), Atoms, pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 273–96, at 289. 63 Though Casaubon was later irritated by what he regarded as Gataker’s cavalier treatment of him in the notes to his 1652 edition. 64 S.Ashe, Gray Hayres Crowned with Grace. A Sermon preached…Aug. 1. 1654. at the Funeral of…Thomas Gataker, London, 1655, p. 43. See also T.Gataker, Opera philologica et critica, 2 vols, Utrecht, 1697–8, vol. II, cols 401–8, ‘Thomae Gatakeri vita, propria manu scripta’, a brief autobiography which he wrote for the seventeenth-century equivalent of an alumni magazine of his alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which is followed by a further account of his life written by his son Charles. On Gataker see Dictionary of National Biography, X, pp. 938–41; on the Greek scholar John Bois, ibid., II, pp. 773–5 65 Ashe, Gray Hayres, p. 52. 66 See the following pamphlets and sermons of Gataker, all published in London: On the Nature and Use of Lots, 1619; A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion, 1621; A Good Wife Gods Gift: and, A Wife Indeed, 1623; The Ioy of the Iust, 1623; Noah His Obedience, 1623; True Contentment in the Gaine of Godliness, with its Self-Sufficiencie, 1624; Christian Constancy Crowned by Christ, 1624; Antinomianism Discovered and Confuted, 1652. In his last years Gataker got involved in a controversy with the astrologer William Lillie: see his Vindication of the Annotations by him…against that Grand Imposter Mr. William Lillie, London, 1653. 67 T.Gataker, De diphthongis (1646), in his Opera, vol. I, cols 4–23, at 20–2; he quotes from Gerardus Vossius, De arte grammatica, Amsterdam, 1635, and Bonaventura Vulcanius, De literis et lingua Getarum sive Gothorum, Leiden, 1597. 68 Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, p. 1, where he cites Acts 2:5, Ephesians 5:32, Plautus, Aulularia III.5 and Symmachus, Epistolae IV.56. 69 Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, pp. 139 and 343 (mentions Lipsius); p. 138 (ad IV.19: discussion of the Stoic doctrine of 130 Jill Kraye

adiaphora); p. 145: ‘Mundus autem Stoicis deus ipse’; p. 270 (Stoic views on compassion); p. 282 (Stoic style of writing); p. 293 (Stoic view on anger). He also points to views of Marcus, such as his belief in compassion, which go against Stoic doctrine: e.g. p. 270 (ad VII.26). 70 A.Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. 71 Ashe, Gray Hayres, p. 55: ‘The strength of his memory was extraordinary …though he used no Common-place book; yet he had in readiness whatsoever he had read, as his manifold quotations do manifest.’ 72 For Salmasius see Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, sigs ****3v–4r, p. 266: ‘[Salmasius], cui non magis debeo, qam Marcus ipse.’ See Salamasius’s use of the Meditations in his notes to his edition of Historiae Augustae scriptores VI, 3 vols, Paris, 1620, vol. II, p. 77–8; and his edition of Simplicius, Commentarius in Enchiridion Epicteti, Leiden, 1640, pp. 2–3. Gataker also records communications from the Royal Librarian Patrick Young, who helped Meric Casaubon as well, and the learned Dutch physician Arnoldus Bootius: Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, sig. ****4r. 73 Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, p. 264 (Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas), p. 286 (Thomas Aquinas). 74 The Ethics of the Talmud: Sayings of the Fathers, transl. R.Travers Herford, New York, Schocken Books, 1962, p. 63 (III.1). For other references to Pirke Aboth see, e.g., Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, pp. 149, 192. 75 Tertullian, De pudicitia 6.70. 76 Job 10:10. 77 M.Antoninus, De vita sua, ed. and trans. Xylander, p. 214: ‘quod heri fuit piscis, eras erit salsamentum’; in his note on this passage, Xylander writes (p. 334): ‘In Graeco est , piscem aliquem innui, ex eo quod sequitur, conjicio; certi nihil habeo.’ See Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, p. 174, where Gataker points out that Henricus Stephanus ‘eundem errorem erraverit. Qi in Thesauro suo apud M.Aurelium nomen piscis esse pronunciavit, “saperdam” forsan vel ichthyocollam.’ At the end of the note Gataker notes that the Stoics were fond of diminutives and gives a long list of them to be found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. 78 Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, pp. 141–5 (ad IV.21). See also Gataker, Sorrow for Sion, pp. 31–2: ‘Christianitie alloweth no such Stoicisme, as strippeth men of humanitie, and bringeth in a kinde, either of brutish immanitie, or doggish stupiditie.’ 79 E.g. Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, ed. and trans. Gataker, p. 130 (ad IV.4), pp. 146–7 (ad IV.23), p. 148 (ad IV.24), p. 261 (ad VII.5), p. 267 (ad VII.21 and 22), p. 275 (ad VII.39), p. 291 (ad VII.70): ‘Efficacissimum sane et Christiano qovis dignum ad pravorum hominum tolerantiam suadendum’. 80 Ibid., pp. 263–4 (ad VII.9). He quotes Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I.13 and 20. 81 Ibid., sig. ***4v: ‘apud nostrum hunc eadem, perinde ac si illa lectitasset ipse, in dissertationum commentationumqe harum congerie inspersa passim, nec Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 131

sine vehementia et vivacitate insigni, qae in praecordia ipsa penitius penetret…inculcata subinde…. Sed ista forsan dixerit qis, qorsum aliunde, ab extero praesertim, eoqe fidei Christianae adverso, petantur?’ See pp. 386–7 for Gataker’s comments on Marcus’s criticism of the Christians in Meditations XI.3. He quotes many of the same passages as Casaubon, to whom he refers in the note. 82 Ibid., sigs ***4v–****1r. ‘Primo, qod qae in Sermonibus Dominicis… summatim fere proposita habemus, istic latius diducta, fusius explicata, magna argumentorum insignium varietate firmata, illustrata, ingesta, inculcata…habeantur. Turn nec illud levis est momenti, qod dogmatis Christiani aeqitas rationi etiam ipsi consentanea deprehendatur…’ The Cambridge Platonist was also keenly interested in demonstrating the compatibility of human reason with Christian dogma. He cited Marcus Aurelius in his True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols, London, 1678, vol. I, p. 427 (I.4), to show that, despite the apparent polytheism of the Stoics, ‘they worshipped…one supreme, that is, universal numen’. 83 Pierre-Daniel Huet, Alnetanae quaestiones de concordia rationis et fidei, Paris, 1690, p. 93: ‘illa rationis humanae, qua una duce ad veri cognitionem usi sunt Ethnici, et fidei divinae, qua veritatem assequitur Christo dicata gens, convenientia’. See also S.Guellouz (ed.), Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), Actes du Colloque de Caen (12–13 novembre 1993), Paris, Biblio 17, 1994. 84 Ibid., p. 169. 85 Ibid., p. 135 (guardian angels), p. 169 (free will), p. 335 (humility), p. 357 (chastity), p. 417 (love of one’s enemies). See, e.g., Meditations V.27, where Marcus refers to ‘the deity , the portion of himself which Zeus has given to each man to guard and guide him’. 86 Compare Gataker’s comments on the title of the treatise (Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, p.1), with those of the Daciers quoted in n. 90 below. 87 I dodici libri di Marco Aurelio Antonino imperadore di se stesso ed a se stesso, [trans. F.Barberini], Rome, 1675, sig. R2v: ‘documenti e notizie così poste dall’istesso M.Aurelio, le annotazioni et illustrazioni delle quali, chi le brami, le troverà portate si estattamente nell’ultima edizione fatta in Cantabrigia, che non resta, che desiderare, se non l’emendazione delle studiate punture, e con poca occasione adotte, dall’heretica superbia, lesiva della purità Cattolica, et altrettanto biasimevoli quanto per altro degne sarebbono di lode.’ For Gataker’s attacks on Catholic dogma see, e.g., Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis, p. 423 (ad Meditations XII.5). See also the article on Francesco Barberini in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960–, vol. VI, pp. 172–6. 88 Reflexions morales de l’Empereur Marc Antonin avec des remarques, [transl. by André and Anne Dacier], 2 vols, Paris, 1690–1, vol. I, sig. e2r–v: ‘Les reproches qu’on peut faire justement aux Stoïciens, c’est d’avoir cru la pluralité des Dieux; c’est d’avoir enseigné que l’ame étoit une partie de la Divinité; c’est d’avoir ignoré le peché originel, et ses funestes suites; c’est d’avoir soûtenu que le Sage pouvoit disposer de luy-même, et se donner le 132 Jill Kraye

mort, quand il le jugeoit à propos. Si on excepte ces erreurs… il n’y a rien de plus parfaits que leurs maximes; et aprés l’Ecriture sainte, rien ne merite davantage d’être entre les mains des hommes qui veulent suivre la justice, et faire un bon usage de leur raison.’ See F.Farnham, Madame Dacier, Scholar and Humanist, Monterey, Calif, Angel Press, 1976, esp. pp. 97–101. 89 Reflexions morales, vol. I, sig. e2v: ‘Nous n’avons des Stoïciens que les ouvrages de Seneque, ce qu’Arrien a conservé d’Epictete, et les livres d’Antonin. Mais ce dernier est presque autant au dessus des deux autres par la beauté de ses écrits, qu’il étoit par la naissance, et par la fortune.’ 90 Ibid., vol. I, p. 25: ‘On a expliqué en vingt manieres le Titre de ce Livre, mais il me parent qu’elles sont toutes mauvaises. Le Grec dit, “Douze livres de l’Empereur Marc Antonin à soy-même, , ce qui ne peut jamais signifier icy ni “de soy-même”, ni “pour son usage”. Ce sage Empereur a voulu marquer par ce titre, que ces douze livres ne sont qu’un recuëil de reflexions qu’il faisoit en se parlant à luy-même, en s’addressant à luy. En effect Antonin ne parle jamais qu’à luy dans tout l’ouvrage…’ 91 Ibid., vol. II, pp. 414–15: ‘On reprochait aux Stoïciens qu’ils faisoient une passion vicieuse de la compassion…Mais ce reproche…n’a pas tant de solidité que de vraisemblance…leur desseign étoit de le [i.e. ce sentiment] retenir dans ses bornes…. Ce n’est done pas la compassion que les Stoïciens condamnoient, mais la compassion outrée, inutile, et infructueuse.’ 92 Ibid., vol. I, sig. e1r: ‘Il [i.e. Antonin] nous exhorte à resister à ce malheureux penchant d’une ame corrumpuë en nous convainquant, que la premiere et la principale condition de l’homme c’est d’aimer son prochain…’ 93 Ibid., vol. II, p. 673: ‘luy qui ne persecuta jamais les Chrêtiens’. 94 Ibid., vol. II, p. 674: ‘Il y avoit de la raison dans cette fermeté des Martyrs; mais c’estoit une raison plus qu’humaine que des Payens n’étoient pas capables d’apercevoir.’ 95 See the articles on Buddeus in Neue Deutsche Biographie, Berlin, Duncker & Humbolt, 1953–, vol. II, p. 715; Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1977–, vol. VII, pp. 316–17; and G.Santinello (ed.), Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, 3 vols, Brescia, La Scuola, 1979–88, vol. II, pp. 373–406. One of his students at Jena was Jakob Brucker (see Storia, vol. II, pp. 527–635, at 529), who cites Buddeus’s introduction to the Meditations in the account of Marcus Aurelius in his Historia critica philosophiae, 2nd ed., 6 vols, Leipzig, 1766, vol. II, p. 597, where (note b) he also writes: ‘Thomam Gatakerum luculento doctoque commentario has institutiones morales Stoicas illustrasse notum est’; see also p. 578 note e: ‘Ipse vero Antoninus studiorum suorum historiam… nobis tradit, quam doctis observationibus illustravit Thomas Gatakerus.’ After citing a letter of Marcus Aurelius to the Common Assembly of Asia, preserved by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History IV.13 and now regarded as a forgery, in which the emperor contrasts the Christians favourably with their pagan persecutors and orders that they were not to be harried unless they appeared to be plotting against the Roman government, Brucker writes (ibid., p. 588): ‘Pervenisse hac occasione in manus Marcus libros quosdam Christianos, quos inspexit…putamus. Nec dubitamus asserere, Marcus Aurelius and his ‘Meditations’ 133

transtulisse ex scriptis Christianorum in suam rem quaedam Antoninum, quae cum placitis porticus conspirare credebat: id enim loca quaedam eius in commentariis ad se ipsum occurrentia valde persuasit’; and in note n he cites Meditations III.2, VIII. 15, IV.23, XI.8, VIII.10. 96 See the beginning of Book II of the Meditations: ‘Written among the Quadi on the river Gran’ and of Book III: ‘Written in Carnuntum’. 97 Marcus Antoninus, Libri XII eorum quae de seipso ad seipsum scripsit, ed. J.F.Buddeus, Leipzig, 1729, pp. 4–5: ‘Mihi isti [libri] semper magno fuere in pretio, saepiusque eos summa cum voluptate legi. Hinc et ad eorum ductum primas meas recitationes publicas in academia Hallensi anno MDCXCIII institui et in prolusione, qua eadem academia munus moralem civilemque philosophiam docendi, me suscepturum, eodem anni significavi, de M.AURELIO ANTONINO hocce verba feci. Deinde etiam summam quamdam doctrinae moralis ex isto auctore concinnare in animum induxi, praesertim quum animadverterem IUSTUM LIPSIUM aliosque, qui de philosophia stoica commentati sunt, pauca admodum ex eodem adtulisse.’ 98 Ibid., pp. 26, 34–5 (where he refers to Jakob Thomasius, Exercitatio de Stoica mundi exustione, Leipzig, 1676). 99 Ibid., p. 112: ‘MARCUS AURELIUS noster…in suprema dignitate summaque gloria summam gloriae despicientiam dictis, factis, scriptis prae se ferens’. 100 Ibid., p. 124: ‘et illos, qui nobis inimici sunt, iniuriasque intulere, diligere doctrina Stoica iubet…[N]on fuisse [divinam scripturam] incognitam Stoicis…vel ANTONINI nostri infinitis prope testimoniis demonstrari posset.’ 101 Ibid., p. 75, discussing Meditations II.12: ‘si haec paullo adcuratius tecum reputaveris, haud adeo longe imperatorem nostrum ab recentiorum quorumdam, praesertim RENATI CARTESII decretis recedere deprehendes, qui utique non praestantius remedium animi passionibus opponi posse censet, quam generositatem, quae cum sit omnium virtutum clavis, ita, ut putat, fortius adfectuum vitiis reluctatur.’ 102 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, [transl. F.Hutcheson and J.Moor], 2nd ed., 2 vols, Glasgow, 1749, vol. I, pp. 67, 205 n. 1, 243 n. 1; see also p. 69: ‘he keenly embraced the scheme of philosophy most remarkable for piety, austerity and disinterested goodness.’ The translation went through four editions: 1742, 1749, 1752 and 1764; see P.Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964, pp. 75, 131, 168 and 255; for the attribution of the translation to Hutcheson and Moor see the index under their names. See also Stewart, ‘Stoic legacy’, pp. 290–2; D. Carey, ‘Method, moral sense and the problem of diversity: Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1997, vol. 5, pp. 275–96, at 278; and J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 333–9. 103 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, transl. Hutcheson and Moor, vol. I, pp. 98– 9 n. 2; vol. II, pp. 277 n. 1, 286 n. 1, 299 n. 1, 326 nn. 1–2, 332 n. 1, 337–8 nn. 1–3, 344 n. 1, 374 nn. 1–2. 104 Ibid., II, pp. 343 n. 1, 348 n. 2, 374 n. 1, 378 n. 3, 461–70 (‘Maxims of the Stoics’), 470–80 (‘Apology’). 134 Jill Kraye

105 Ibid., vol. I, p. 60; see also p. 65: ‘But, what shall we say of Christians persecuting each other, who yet believe in the same God, and the same Saviour…let none make this objection to Antoninus, but those who, from their hearts, abhor all Christian persecutions’; this was clearly directed against the fanatical sectarianism of Hutcheson’s own day. 106 J.Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, London, 1698, p. 2, presents a list of practices adopted by contemporary playwrights which he finds intolerable: ‘Their Smuttiness of Expression; Their Swearing, Prophaneness, and Lewd Application of Scripture; Their Abuse of the Clergy, their making their top Characters , and giving them Success in their Debauchery’; see also p. 6: ‘The Modern Poets seem to use Smut, as the Old Ones did Machines, to relieve a fainting Invention.’ See the article on Collier in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. IV, pp. 797–803. 107 Caspar Scioppius, Elementa philosophiae Stoicae moralis, Mainz, 1606; Daniel Heinsius, ‘De Stoica philosophia’, in his Orationum editio nova, Leiden, 1642, pp. 386–427. 108 [D.Diderot], ‘Stoicisme’, in Encyclopédie, Neufchâtel, 35 vols, 1751–80, vol. XV, pp. 525–33, at 533. 109 M.Arnold, ‘Marcus Aurelius’ (1863), in his Essays Literary and Critical, pp. 186–209, at 201. See also L.Alston, Stoic and Christian in the Second Century: A Comparison of the Ethical Teaching of Marcus Aurelius with That of Contemporary and Antecedent Christianity, London, 1906. 7 The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’

Brian Vickers

A curious phenomenon in the history of philosophy is the emergence of myths about philosophers or philosophical schools, ‘received ideas’ which bear little relation to reality, but which persist for many years and prove hard to eradicate. One such myth is that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was hostile to Renaissance humanism, both as a discipline and as a body of studies, and that he was in particular a foe of and rhetoric. The erroneous conceptions of his attitude to these two branches of the studia humanitatis have been exposed,1 although scholars ignorant of this literature continue to repeat them. As for the general misconception of Bacon being an enemy of humanism itself, that seems to be spreading steadily, unchallenged and uncorrected. Thus, in a recent and valuable Companion to Renaissance Humanism, one reads the pronouncement by Anthony Grafton that: ‘Bacon treated Renaissance humanism…as a fatal disease of learning.’2 Four sentences follow, purportedly summarizing Bacon’s attitude to humanism, including the criticism that: ‘The philology of the humanists, with its obsessive citation and imitation of authorities, had been an intellectual distraction from the thinker’s true mission of extending man’s empire.’ No texts by Bacon are quoted, and no critical discussions are cited.3 In the same volume we read Joseph Loewenstein’s considered opinion that Bacon represents ‘anti-’, is indeed ‘the most famous and, ultimately, the most influential’ exponent of this— doubtfully existing—movement. Loewenstein does quote and discuss passages from Bacon, namely his account of the three ‘distempers of learning’ from Book One of the Advancement of Learning (1605), which I shall consider below. But he draws from it the further negative formulations that Bacon exerted an ‘“anti-humanist” influence’, that he made an ‘assault on humanist rhetoric’ and was also ‘one of the leading importers of…anti-Ciceronianism’.4 I shall return to these wider, but no less misleading claims.

135 136 Brian Vickers

That passage from the Advancement of Learning is also quoted by Neil Rhodes in a stimulating study of rhetoric in the , according to which it provides ‘the most famous disparagement of Humanist rhetoric’, in which ‘the Humanist ideal of copia is most effectively challenged’.5 Rhodes, unlike Bacon’s other detractors, shares the negative attitude ascribed to Bacon, affirming that ‘there is a good deal of truth in Bacon’s caustic summary of the Humanist enterprise as being a programme for excessive verbal dilation’—hardly a fair characterization, one might feel. Bacon’s ‘own preference’, Rhodes tells us, ‘was for the laconic’.6 If we turn back to the 1970s, we find similar pronouncements. Charles Webster, in his admirable study of Bacon’s effect on science, medicine and reform from 1626 to 1660—which, for all its detail, fails to register the full weight of Bacon’s influence, even in the texts actually quoted—writes that the

Advancement of Learning had dwelt prophetically on the weaknesses of humanism. Excessive admiration for classical authors, reaction against the barbarism of the schoolmen, concentration on the study of languages and a taste for elaborate preaching had resulted in ‘an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech’. As this grew to excess, ‘men began to hunt more after words than matter’. Thus the great humanist educational theorists, such as Sturm and Ascham, were accounted responsible for enticing intellectuals into an idolatrous worship of the linguistic arts (grammar, rhetoric and logic), and away from the more profitable sciences, which represented the true springs of human knowledge.7

Webster attributes to Bacon some opinions that he really did hold, as does Grafton more recently, but on the issue of his ‘anti-humanism’ they are both misinformed. The myth of Bacon’s hostility to Renaissance humanism is, no doubt, more widely diffused than this brief survey can show. It occurs in books of all sizes, from Charles Webster’s massive tome down to Anthony Quinton’s slim volume on Bacon in the ‘Past Masters’ series, which says of Bacon’s attack on ‘delicate learning’ in the Advancement of Learning that: ‘This, in effect, is humanism.’ Having made this misidentification, Quinton objects that: ‘Humanism as a general movement is far more than the kind of gentlemanly dilettantism and preoccupation with style…that Bacon attacked.’8 Humanism was indeed more than that, as Bacon would have been the first to assert. The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 137

Equally misguided, and equally dogmatic, is Douglas Bush’s judgement in his volume for the ‘Oxford History of English Literature’ (published in 1945, reissued in 1962). Here Bacon is characterized as ‘a destructive critic, a mouthpiece for the modern world’s declaration of independence’. Among the loci classici that Bush indicates is that passage in Book I of the Advancement of Learning defining ‘the three principal vanities or distempers of learning’, where, we are told, ‘Bacon arraigns’, among other targets, ‘the rhetorical discipline of medieval and Renaissance humanism, the study of words instead of matter…’9

I This passage having been the object of so many partial commentaries, it may be worth quoting it in extenso, in order to see what Bacon says and what he does not say. After all, it is an established principle in the analysis of any text, philosophical or literary, that meaning can only be reliably obtained from the full context. At this point in his Two Bookes of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, to give its original title, Bacon is working through a strategy derived from epideictic rhetoric, with its opposed of praise and blame, laus and vituperatio. He first deals with the negative pole, considering ‘the discredits and disgraces which [learning] has received; all from ignorance’, taking various forms, ‘appearing sometimes in the zeal and jealousy of divines, sometimes in the severity and arrogance of politiques [politicians], and sometimes in the errors and imperfections of learned men themselves’.10 Under this third heading Bacon discusses ‘those errors and vanities which have intervened amongst the studies themselves of the learned’, itemizing three major forms—this is the passage mistaken as an attack on humanism—and eleven ‘peccant humours’.11 Having dismissed ignorant criticisms and added his own critique, Bacon shifts to the positive pole, arguing for the dignity of learning, seen both by divine testimony and from many human proofs.12 This concludes his plan to show ‘the excellency of knowledge’ in Book I, and he can devote Book II to reviewing ‘what has been done for the advancement of learning with the defects of the same’.13 Bacon’s intention in discussing these ‘errors and vanities’ in the way knowledge has been pursued is not to justify them, ‘but, by a censure and separation of the errors, to make a justification of that which is good and sound, and to deliver that from the aspersion of the other’. This is how he sets about it: 138 Brian Vickers

There be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words. So that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second, contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason finding what a province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time; so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, ‘Execrabilis ista turba, quae non novit legem’), for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 139 matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Carr of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; ‘Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone’, and the echo answered in Greek, , Asine. Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight. Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter: whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be ‘secundum majus et minus’ in all time. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture. But yet notwithstanding it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use; for surely to the severe inquisition of truth, and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hinderance; because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search, before we come to a just period; but then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, , discourse, or the like; then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible that

140 Brian Vickers

as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’ minion, in a temple, said in disdain, ‘Nil sacri es’, so there is none of Hercules’ followers in learning, that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.14

As readers can now see, Bacon never attacks ‘Renaissance humanism’—if, indeed, such a category were even available to him. His critique is directed against the excessive imitation of Cicero’s Latin style and forms part of a well-documented episode within humanism, stretching from the quarrel between and Lorenzo Valla in 1452, through the later disputes between Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi, between Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro, between Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and , culminating in the whole series of literary quarrels sparked off by Erasmus’s Ciceronianus (1528). This was essentially a dispute about imitatio, a basic process in the training of an orator (and hence of any educated person). The formulaic Rhetorica ad Herennium had laid down that the faculties needed by the orator (, , elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio) could be acquired by three means: using ars, imitatio, exercitatio.

By theory is meant a set of rules that provide a definite method and system of speaking. Imitation stimulates us to attain, in accordance with a studied method, the effectiveness of certain models in speaking. Practice is assiduous exercise and experience in speaking.15

The discussion of imitatio in classical rhetoric and literary criticism was familiar to Petrarch and to all Renaissance scholars worthy of that name, who would have known the relevant passages in Cicero (De oratore II.21.89–23.98), Seneca (Epistulae morales LXXXIV) and (Institutio oratoria X.1.20–131). Petrarch showed his knowledge of these texts in at least three of his Familiares (I.8; XXII.2; XXIII. 19); and whoever follows out this debate through the sixteenth century will see the well-known passages emerging like familiar faces in a crowd. Anyone seeking guidance can draw on older and still useful studies, such as that by Izora Scott,16 or benefit from the recent work by Martin L.McLaughlin,17 which sums up and valuably extends a well- documented debate. It is strange that scholars who have pronounced on Bacon’s The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 141 supposed anti-humanism should fail to recognize that he was merely intervening in a debate over imitatio carried out within humanism, especially since such scholars must know that learning to write and speak by imitating the relevant models was a major element in humanist educational theory. Bacon’s discussion offers both a history of the rise of Ciceronianism, tallying in some features with contemporary accounts, but with its own idiosyncrasies, and an analysis of its consequences for literary language, brilliantly exploiting rhetorical resources in order to mimic the fault attacked.18 Far from being an assault on humanism, or on rhetoric, Bacon’s critique subscribes to a main tenet of humanist rhetoric: the need for a functional correspondence between the res or subject-matter of a discourse and its verba, with priority always to be given to the former. For the historical part, Bacon is idiosyncratic in ascribing the revival of learning—when ‘the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved’, necessitating intensive work ‘in the languages original’—to Martin Luther, in the early sixteenth century, rather than to Petrarch in the fourteenth, or to the recovery of Greek at Florence in the fifteenth century. Nor can the Reformation leaders be given sole credit for the Renaissance hostility to scholastic Latin, which we would also date from the time of Petrarch and Valla. Nor, finally, would we connect either of these trends with a need of ‘winning and persuading’ the people through ‘the efficacy of preaching’, developing ‘eloquence and variety of discourse’ directed to their limited ‘capacity’. Neither the revival of learning nor the concern for a properly Latin style had any populist appeal; indeed, the world of Poggio, Valla, Poliziano and the other actors in this dispute was that of an intellectual élite, learned, touchily self- conscious about what constituted correct or authentic Latin. Although no previous commentator seems to have noticed it, Bacon’s opening historical account is idiosyncratic in several respects; and it is hard to know what his sources were, or what he was trying to achieve. His account of the later stages of Ciceronianism (Osorio, Sturm, Carr, Ascham) is more accurate, but even here there are strange omissions. His marvellously polemical Erasmus quotation comes not, as we might expect, from the Ciceronianus, but from the colloquy Echo,19 first printed in 1526. Punning on the ending of ‘Cicerone’ rhyming with , the Greek vocative of ‘ass’, Erasmus makes Echo endorse the words of the other speaker, ‘Youth’, namely, that ‘I shouldn’t pore over Cicero so much that I neglect all the rest’, and that ‘you don’t approve of a man’s tormenting himself all his life long for the sole purpose of becoming a Ciceronian’. In Dialogus cui titulus, 142 Brian Vickers

Ciceronianus, sive De optimo genere dicendi (a title deliberately echoing that of Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum), Erasmus richly elaborated these criticisms through the wonderful persona of Nosoponus (Mr Workmad), who explains the laborious principles and methods by which dedicated Ciceronians could only use words authenticated by Cicero himself (in some cases only in the inflected forms he had used). Nosoponus also unwittingly exposes the total unsuitability of Ciceronian Latin for the writings of a Christian world. Despite his mocking tone, Erasmus’s critique of the neopaganism implicit in Ciceronianism was fully serious, as was his anger with those exponents of this cult who rejected all other Latin styles as incorrect.20 Erasmus’s attack was directed partly against Longolius (Christophe de Longueil), whose biographer recorded that he had for five years confined his reading to the works of Cicero, in order not to contaminate his Latin style. But since Longueil had a great following in Italy, Erasmus hit a sensitive nerve among Italian and French humanists, including Guillaume Budé and his supporters, Etienne Dolet, Ortensio Lando, J.C.Scaliger and others who rose to the defence of Ciceronianism. Bacon shows no sign of acquaintance with these events of the , nor does he refer to other prominent Ciceronians of that period, such as Mario Nizolio, whose Thesaurus Ciceronianus (1535) could be misused as a guide to exclusively Ciceronian style. Humanists writing later in the century could deplore these excesses, as did Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poetry (written c. 1580; published 1595):

Truly I could wish [that] the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes (most worthy to be imitated) did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs. For now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table…21

Sidney’s metaphor (‘devour…make them wholly theirs’) goes back to Seneca’s instancing of the bees’ ability to transform ‘the juice which they obtain from flowers’ into a unified substance, as an injunction to those practising imitatio to use models but develop their own individuality.22 Failure to do so, Sidney and other humanists warned, would result in a superficial borrowing, a patina of style lacking substance. Bacon endorses this judgement. Bacon seems to know the later phases of Ciceronianism, referring to four representative figures: Jeronimo Osorio (1506–80), a theologian The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 143 known as ‘the Portuguese Cicero’; Johannes Sturm (1507–89), head of the Strasbourg Gymnasium, nicknamed ‘the German Cicero’, who published numerous commentaries on the rhetorical works of Cicero and Hermogenes,23 and whose own publications include De periodis (Strasbourg, 1550), and De imitatione oratoria (Strasbourg, 1574); Nicholas Carr (1524–68), who succeeded Sir as Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge in 1547 and made Latin versions of Eusebius and Demosthenes; and Roger Ascham (1515–68), Reader in Greek at Cambridge and tutor to Queen Elizabeth I from 1548 to 1549, who praised Cicero in The Scholemaster (1570) as the ideal model for Latin prose and who was a friend of both Osorio and Sturm. All four figure in a work which Bacon might have known, the Ciceronianus (London, 1577) of Gabriel Harvey. Indeed, since Bacon was at Trinity College, Cambridge between April 1573 and March 1575, he may have heard some lectures by Harvey, who was University Praelector in Rhetoric between April 1574 and February 1577.24

II Harvey’s Ciceronianus is revealing both of the late stage of the dispute over Ciceronianism and of the quarrels leading up to it. Amusingly, Harvey presents himself in his youth as an exemplar of the worst kind of narrow imitator of Cicero:

I readily acquiesced with the idea of certain , that all the others should be neglected and Cicero alone kept in one’s hands. Neither Bembus, nor Sadoletus, nor Longolius, nor Riccius the trumpeter of Longolius thought of Cicero with more respect than I nor magnified him more in words.

Harvey records how he had proudly aligned himself with these and other followers of Cicero: ‘Pontanus, Cortesius,…Nizolius too, and Naugerius’.

As for Erasmus and those who clove to his views, Budaeus, More, Aegidius, Glareanus, Vives, and all the others who were not considered Ciceronians, I not only scorned them as perfectly infantile, but even pursued them with hate as utter enemies,25

—a reaction that can be found even in Ascham’s otherwise urbane Scholemaster.26 The consequences of this one-sided for Harvey’s Latin style were equally extreme: 144 Brian Vickers

Why should I tell how great and simon-pure a Ciceronian I was at that time in the choice of every single word, in the composition and structure of sentences, in the discriminating use of cases and tenses, in the symmetry of cut-and-dried phrases, in the shaping of sentence-divisions and clauses, in the rhythmical measuring of periods, in the variety and smoothness of clausulae, in the careful and elaborate multiplication of all sorts of refinements?…I am compelled by a sense of shame to omit mention of those curls and curling-irons, with which my whole style was elegantly frizzed in every part,27 using such Ciceronian tricks as Quanquam, Etsi, Cogitanti mihi saepenumero, and above all ‘that most blessed clausula of them all, Esse videatur’—already singled out by Quintilian (Institutio oratoria X.2.18) as an instance of superficial imitation. In other words, Harvey presents himself as having violated some of the basic precepts in classical and Renaissance humanist rhetoric: he has based his imitatio on one sole author, from whom he has taken over merely superficial features of style, rather than any thoughts or matter of substance. As he puts it, in the appropriate terms:

Summa erit haec. Pluris verba, quam res; linguam, quam mentem; vnam dicendi artem, quam mille intelligendi doctrinas faciebam; solam M.Tullij elocutionem omnibus philosophorum, atque Mathematicorum postulatis anteferebam: in eo esse neruos, atque artus imitationis credebam, si verba quam plurima eligerem illuminata, atque nitida: eaque in quadrum redacta, numerosa comprehensione deuincirem.28

But Harvey gives us not only a self-accusation, presenting his juvenile follies: this is also a conversion narrative, for two books totally transformed his attitude to imitatio. The first was the ‘Ciceronianus of Ioannes Sambucus’29—that is, De imitatione a Cicerone petenda dialogi tres (Paris, 1561; rev. edn. Antwerp, 1563), which took a more balanced view of imitation as a wider process, properly involving several authors, basing itself on thought and argument, not just on verbal features. Sambucus also referred Harvey to the text that made the greatest impression on him, Peter Ramus’s Ciceronianus. Harvey’s own copy (Paris, 1557) survives in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, with a note at the end ‘in his beautiful Italian hand: “I redd over this Ciceronianus twise in twoo deyes, being then Sophister in Christ’s College. Gabriel Haruey”’,30 that is, in 1569. From Sambucus The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 145 and Ramus, Harvey finally learned the correct practice of imitatio: to borrow things that are ‘excellent and in conformity with the most careful usage of speech and thought’, avoiding ‘the warts and, so to speak, the ulcers and scars of diction’.31 He followed Ramus’s advice by imitating ‘“not only [Cicero’s] Latinity but his resources of wisdom and factual knowledge, and most of all his virtues of conduct and character”’.32 Further enlightenment came from Johannes Sturm’s edition of Cicero’s Orations (1563), from whose praise of Erasmus Harvey regained his respect for that scholar.33 He even learned to appreciate his Ciceronianus, with its mockery of the fanatic ‘fowler after Ciceronian words,…childishly gathering a few posies from Cicero like pebbles on a beach, while trampling under foot the most precious gems of argument and pearls of philosophy’.34 Finally, Harvey came to know the Ciceronianus (1575) by Joannes Thomas Freigius, a professor of humanist studies at Freiburg and a disciple of Ramus. (Harvey’s copy of this book is also in Worcester College Library.)35 Freigius confirmed him in the correct attitudes taught by Erasmus and Ramus:

In Cicero I began to observe not only the oratorial eloquence of which I have spoken but also consular and senatorial wisdom; and from his pleasant gardens I began to pluck the fruits of reason as well as the flowers of oratory…In short, now for the third time I detected the error of the Italians in imitating his ornamental speech and not his momentous subject matter.36

III Reading Gabriel Harvey’s account of how imitatio should be practised one has the feeling, as so often in Renaissance rhetoric, that a modern writer is recapitulating in his own experience some fundamental teachings of antiquity. It is impossible not to be reminded of the injunctions of Cicero himself, that the orator should ‘show the student whom to copy, and to copy in such a way as to strive with all possible care to attain the most excellent qualities of his model’ (De oratore II.22.90), or Quintilian’s urging that while he ‘should read none save the best authors’, the reader should not assume

that anything which he finds in them may be taken as a canon of style, with the result that he imitates their defects (and it is always easier to do this than to imitate their excellences) and thinks 146 Brian Vickers

himself a perfect replica if he succeeds in copying the blemishes of great men (Institutio oratoria X.1.20, 25)

Modern, like Renaissance, readers will recall the elder Seneca’s warning that: ‘You should not imitate one man, however distinguished: for an imitator never comes up to the level of his model. This is the way it is; the copy always falls short of the reality’ (Controversiae 1, Pref. 6), a warning enlarged on by Quintilian (Institutio oratoria X.2.10–18, 23– 6). Quintilian’s final advice is especially relevant to sixteenth-century Ciceronianism:

But imitation (for I must repeat this point again and again) should not be confined merely to words. We must consider the appropriateness with which those orators handle the circumstances and persons involved [in rebus atque personis] in the various cases in which they were engaged, observe their judgement, powers of arrangement, ability to arouse the audience’s feelings, all the procedures by which an orator makes his case persuasive.

If we have thoroughly appreciated all these points, we shall be able to imitate our models with accuracy. But the man who to these good qualities adds his own, that is to say, who makes good deficiencies and cuts down whatever is redundant, will be the complete orator of our search (X.2.27–8)

The major rhetorical category running through this whole debate, from classical antiquity to Harvey’s Ciceronianus, as through Bacon’s briefer critique of Ciceronianism, is the conjunction of res and verba, the subject-matter and its verbal expression. The traditional teaching was that the two were to be properly correlated; that res or thought was the more important partner, to which words were subordinate; and that an excess of verba over res would make for bad writing. Every Renaissance rhetorician knew Cato’s saying, ‘rem tene, verba sequentur’,37 and similar utterances by Cicero: ‘rerum enim copia verborum copiam gignit’,38 Horace: ‘verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur’39 and Quintilian: ‘Paulatim res facilius se ostendent, verba respondebunt’.40 The Institutio oratoria provides us with the fullest account of this topic, often echoed in the Renaissance. Quintilian The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 147 regularly describes speeches as having both res and verba,41 and unfailingly gives the priority to res. Although elocutio is the orator’s chief resource, and hardest art to master, it does not depend on ‘the study of words alone’ [‘Non…sola est agenda cura verborum’], and Quintilian denounces those who, ‘disregarding the subject-matter which, after all, is the backbone of any speech, devote themselves to the futile and crippling study of words in a vain desire to acquire the gift of elegance…’ (VIII pr.18). ‘Curam ergo verborum, rerum volo esse sollicitudinem’:

Therefore I would have the orator, while careful in his choice of words, be even more concerned about his subject matter. For, as a rule, the best words are essentially suggested by the subject-matter and are discovered by their own intrinsic light (20–1).

To collect single words and waste time over their ‘elaborate weighing and measurement’ would be to hunt ‘not for the true ornaments of speech, but for meretricious finery, as though there were any real virtue in words save in their power to represent facts’ (26–7). While ‘elocutio calls for the utmost attention, we must always bear in mind that nothing should be done for the sake of words only, since words were invented merely to give expression to things…’ (32). Later in this book Quintilian describes a form of amplification which resembles emphasis but exceeds it in power: ‘but emphasis derives its effect from the actual words, while in this case the effect is produced by from the facts, and is consequently far more impressive, inasmuch as facts are more impressive than words’ (VIII.4.26). Equally, there are some perversions of style, such as the affectation of archaic expressions, which will make a speaker or writer invert the true priority of res over verba: ‘the man who catches the infection will not choose his words to suit his facts, but will drag in irrelevant facts to provide an opportunity for the use of such words’ (VIII.3.30). In an emergency, such as having to plead a case at short notice, orators will need ‘to develop special mental agility, to give all our attention to the subject [rebus], and to make a temporary sacrifice of our care for the niceties of language [cura verborum], if we find it impossible to secure both’ (X.7.22). The goal of the orator, in Quintilian’s well-known formulation, was to accumulate a store of resources, copia rerum ac verborum,42 where the verbal sequence expresses an actual priority. These terms regularly recur in the Renaissance, as in Erasmus’s famous treatise De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (1512; three times enlarged by 148 Brian Vickers

1534), and the De ratione studii ac legendi interpretandique auctores (1512), which begins with the bold statement that: ‘In principle, knowledge as a whole seems to be of two kinds, of things and of words. Knowledge of words comes earlier’—presumably, as a child learns to speak—‘but that of things is more important.’43 Of the hundreds of writers who followed Quintilian and Erasmus in reiterating the greater importance of the subject-matter, let us just recall Sir Philip Sidney’s letter to his younger brother Robert on 18 October 1580, advising him on his studies. ‘For the method of writing Historie’, Sidney tells him, ‘Bodin hath written at large; you may reede him and gather out of many wordes some matter’—a fatal sign of verbosity.44 That was obviously a current danger for a young student, given the stylistic fashions then in vogue: ‘So you can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in Ciceronianisme, the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt.’45 It is from this basis that Gabriel Harvey compared the style of Osorio’s oration De gloria unfavourably with that of Cicero’s De amicitia, bringing out

the difference between the redundancy of Osorius and the copiousness of Cicero. Both men have fluent diction, to be sure; but whereas Cicero’s flows without any ripples, like a smooth and quiet river, Osorio’s sometimes overflows its banks, like a swollen, hurrying torrent, too impatient to be confined within the bounds set by the other.46

In ascribing copia to Cicero, redundantia to Osorio, Harvey was doubtless aware that Quintilian described the latter as a vice of style (Institutio oratoria VIII.3.57; XII.10.12–19). Harvey’s criticism of Osorio was reinforced in the prefatory epistle to his Ciceronianus by William Lewin, a fellow of Christ’s College and perhaps Harvey’s tutor, who judged it ‘a little more copious and overflowing than was proper’ (‘magis, quam par fuit, redundans & circumfluens oratio’).47 Returning to Bacon’s critique of Ciceronianism we can now see that it is entirely typical of Renaissance rhetorical humanism in its conceptual categories and in the judgements resulting. His characterization of Osorio—‘Then grew the flowing and watery vein of… the Portugal bishop to be in price’—might have come straight from the pages of Harvey’s Ciceronianus. At all events J.W.Binns, in his recent study of ‘Ciceronianism in sixteenth-century England: The Latin debate’, finds that Bacon’s account of ‘the growth and progress The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 149 of a Ciceronianism which paid more attention to style than to matter…is just and perceptive’, while his ‘use of the term “watery” to describe [Osorio’s style] is thus in the mainstream of ’.48 In evoking this fashion of writing Bacon perhaps echoes Harvey’s self-mocking description of the care for superficial qualities of style that marked his juvenile flirtation with Ciceronianism (quoted above at page 144), but he goes one further in juxtaposing both the vices and virtues of style. He begins with a plain statement of the disease, in the appropriate language, when care for verba exceeds that for res. Then he enlarges this simple distinction into two unequal parts, first showing how the mimicry of Ciceronian Latin developed a self-propagating power (redundantia), proliferating before our eyes:

men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument life of invention, or depth of judgement.

Those bare, unadorned symmetries in the second part of the sentence sum up pages of teaching from the rhetoric-books on the main virtues of style for which the orator should strive: ‘weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment’. That is surely the definitive expression of what the distinction between res and verba really implied. Bacon’s concluding antithesis, then—‘the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight’—is not an attack on copia, tout court, but describes what happens when writers cultivate copia verborum in separation from copia rerum, resulting in that disordered condition ‘when men study words and not matter’. The terms in which Bacon formulates his critique of Ciceronian imitatio are not critical of, but derive from the rhetorical tradition, from Cato to Quintilian. His dismissive flourish, comparing their enamoration with words to Pygmalion’s madness in falling in love with the statue he had made, 150 Brian Vickers unites a story from ’s Metamorphoses with part of Aristotle’s definition of language,49 an unlikely combination for a modern, perhaps, but wholly typical of humanist eclecticism, where all quotations are equally useful.

IV If Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ turns out to be a myth based on the misreading of a single passage in the Advancement of Learning, in ignorance of the historical context behind it, the related charges that he was ‘anti-rhetorical’ are equally insubstantial. As I have recently shown,50 Bacon used and recommended rhetoric throughout his life. As can be seen from the recorded book-purchases made for him and his brother Anthony by their tutor, John Whitgift, Master of Trinity and future Archbishop of Canterbury, they worked on the standard humanist texts, blending philosophy, rhetoric and history. The books bought for them to use included substantial editions of Aristotle and Plato, ‘tullies workes’, ‘ciceronis rheto’ (the rhetorical works, probably including Rhetorica ad Herennium), ‘one commentarie of tullis orations’, the Orations of Demosthenes, ‘hermogenes in greke and laten’, and historical works by Caesar, Sallust and Xenophon.51 Bacon’s training as a involved him in the proto-rhetorical exercises of the moot and the bolt, while his forty years as an MP gave rise to a great number of parliamentary speeches, constructed on the best rhetorical principles, displaying a clarity of outline and forcefulness of expression. His many letters of advice to Queen Elizabeth, King James, Buckingham and others high in government show his mastery of deliberative rhetoric, adjusting argument to the context, time available and nature of the person addressed. As a professional lawyer who rose to the highest legal offices, Bacon practised as a courtroom advocate in full awareness of the great classical models, Demosthenes and Cicero. His several treatises on education show a complete adherence to classical and Renaissance principles and methods. He advised students to keep a notebook as they read, recording arguments, phrases, observations from their reading, organized according to ‘heads’ or topics, a method far superior to epitomes, as he believed, with many other educationalists.52 His early work Of the Colours of Good and Evil, added to the 1597 Essays, was a specimen collection of sophisms to be used in teaching argument and its fallacies.53 His discussion of rhetoric in the Advancement of Learning included many traditional emphases, such as the need for speakers to make ‘Provision or The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 151

Preparatory store for the furniture of speech and readiness of invention’, which he divided into two main categories: Antitheta Rerum, groups of theses arranged pro et contra (a collection which shows many overlaps with the Essays);54 and Formulae, sentences or phrases to be used as openings, conclusions and linking passages.55 Bacon himself compiled two exemplary notebooks during his vacation leisure time: the Promus of Formularies and Elegances (Christmas, 1594–5); and the Commentarius Solutus (summer, 1608).56 As for Bacon’s attitude to rhetoric, he fully endorsed the importance ascribed to it in the vita activa by Cicero, the Florentine humanists and many writers in the sixteenth century, acknowledging that

although in true value it is inferior to wisdom,…yet with people it is the more mighty: for so Salomon saith [“the wise in heart shall be called prudent, and the sweetness of the lips increaseth learning”],57 signifying that profoundness of wisdom will help a man to a name or admiration, but that it is eloquence that prevaileth in an active life.58

Bacon knew well the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian, but the key model for this discussion is Aristotle. He draws on the Rhetoric for its defence of rhetoric against Plato’s reduction of it, in the Gorgias, to ‘a voluptuary art, resembling it to cookery’. Where Aristotle had argued that ‘Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites’,59 Bacon stated that ‘speech is much more conversant in adorning that which is good than colouring that which is evil; for there is no man but speaketh more honestly than he can do or think’.60 Bacon shared Aristotle’s ethical optimism, but he gave it a more convincing elaboration, as I have shown,61 by fusing Aristotle’s De anima with faculty psychology in order to give rhetoric a key role in the internal workings of the human mind in the process of moral choice. ‘The duty and office of Rhetoric’, he wrote, ‘is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will.’62 Well aware that rational processes can be disturbed, Bacon declares that ‘the end of Rhetoric is to fill the Imagination to second Reason, and not to oppress it’. Its role is corrective, supportive, protecting reason from disturbance and forming a channel for the passage of virtue. For, Bacon argues (turning the tables on Plato by appropriating a famous saying from the Phaedrus):

152 Brian Vickers

as Plato said elegantly, that ‘virtue, if she could be seen, would move great love and affection’;63 so seeing that she cannot be shewed to the sense by corporal shape, the next degree is to shew her to the Imagination in lively representation, an ability given to rhetoric, denied to the dry processes of logic. If the affections ‘were pliant and obedient to reason’, Bacon continues:

there should be no great use of and insinuations to the will, more than of naked proposition and proofs; but in regard of the continual mutinies and seditions of the Affections… Reason would become captive and servile, if Eloquence of Persuasions did not practise and win the Imagination from the Affection’s part, and contract a confederacy between the Reason and Imagination against the Affections.64

The proper ‘force of eloquence and persuasion’, then, is to attack the affections, which think only of present gratification, by drawing on reason’s awareness that every act has its consequence in the future. This brief exposition may suffice to show that Bacon was not only not hostile to rhetoric but that he gave it a positively benign role in social life and individual psychology, one unmatched, to my knowledge, by any other Renaissance theorist of knowledge. His conception of the imagination was also far more positive than many of his contemporaries, conceding its dangers but giving it a legitimately creative power. His attitude to poetry, and literature in general, was equally positive, sharing with Sidney and other Renaissance theorists the belief in literature as having great freedom, being linked (like rhetoric) to the imagination, ‘which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined’. Poetry, which he valued as ‘one of the principal portions of learning’, he defined as essentially fiction, a ‘Feigned history’ (so agreeing with both Aristotle and Sidney).

The use of this Feigned History hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it; the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.

So poetry goes beyond history by feigning ‘acts and events greater and more heroical’, but also ‘more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence’, always enduing events with ‘more rareness’ The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 153 and variety, a focus on the ideal and potential, rather than the actual, which brings its readers great benefits.

So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.65

No one reading these passages receptively is likely to agree with Rhodes that Bacon’s ‘preference was for the laconic’, or with Loewenstein that ‘The Baconian aesthetic was, above all, prosaic’. Such misrepresentations of Bacon can only derive from an inadequate knowledge of his works and of the relevant modern secondary literature. Loewenstein, for instance, although failing to realize that Bacon’s so-called ‘anti-humanism’ was part of the humanists’ attack on Ciceronianism, repeats the glib identification of Bacon with a philosophico-stylistic movement invented by Morris W.Croll (in essays published between 1914 and 1929), known as ‘Anti-Ciceronianism’. Croll’s thesis, which posited a unified sixteenth-century movement against Cicero on the level both of thought and style, resulting in a non- symmetrical, short-breathed, so-called ‘Senecan style’, was an uneasy mixture of history of ideas with the history of style, neither historically documented; its deficiencies were made clear Some thirty years ago.66 Loewenstein’s further identification of Bacon with the supposedly anti- rhetorical plain style of the Puritans and the Royal Society seems unaware that neither of those groups was opposed to rhetoric. The Puritan educational reformers in Samuel Hartlib’s circle—William Dell, John Dury and others—all tolerated the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, including them in their schemes for new curricula and new institutions. Greek, Hebrew and rhetoric received increased emphasis in the Puritan revival of Trinity College, Dublin, in the 1650s, while Cromwell’s plan (1657) for a newly founded University of Dublin included a professorship of rhetoric. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) includes an oft-quoted attack on the deceits of metaphor, but any analysis of that work which attends to its social and intellectual context will show that Sprat was really attacking nonconformists and enthusiasts, in religion and the occult. Sprat himself believed that the new science would actually provide richer material for figurative language. Other leading lights of that institution—John Wilkins, , William Petty—not only 154 Brian Vickers recommended rhetoric in education but used it in their own writings.67 It is an easily verifiable historical fact that rhetoric lost no popularity in the seventeenth century, that it continued to hold a high esteem in school and university education, and that publications of rhetorical texts, both new and old, did not diminish.68 That rhetoric maintained its prestige is perhaps due in some part to Bacon’s advocacy of it.

V If Bacon’s anti-humanist, anti-rhetorical attitudes can be shown to be a myth, we are left with a matching mystery: Why is it that so many otherwise learned and well-informed scholars feel confident about ascribing opinions to Bacon without troubling to find out what he actually thought and wrote?69

Notes 1 See J.L.Harrison, ‘Bacon’s view of rhetoric, poetry, and the imagination’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1957, vol. 20, pp. 107–25, reprinted in B. Vickers (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972, pp. 253–71; B.Vickers, ‘Bacon’s use of theatrical imagery’, in W.A.Sessions (ed.) Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, New York, AMS Press, 1990, pp. 171–213; B.Vickers, ‘Bacon and rhetoric’, in Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 200–31. 2 Anthony Grafton, ‘The new science and the traditions of humanism’, in J. Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 203–23, at 205. 3 Ibid., p. 205. The only supporting reference is R.F.Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1953, p. 221 n. 5. 4 J.Loewenstein, ‘Seventeenth-century English literature’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion, pp. 269–93, at 283–4. 5 N.Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English , London and New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, p. 61. See my review in Modern Philology, 1995, vol. 92, pp. 508–13. 6 Rhodes, Power, p. 182. 7 C.Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626– 1660, London, Duckworth, 1975, p. 105. 8 A.Quinton, Francis Bacon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 23, 13. 9 D.Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660, 2nd ed., revised, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, p. 276. 10 References to this text will be in two forms: first, to the standard edition, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J.Spedding et al., 14 vols, London, 1857–74, in the form S.3.344; secondly, to the recent annotated anthology, Francis Bacon, The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 155

ed. B.Vickers, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, in the form V.137. For this opening sequence see S.3.264–82; V.122–37, 586–94 (notes). 11 S.3.282–95; V. 137–48, 594–600. 12 S.3.295–319; V.148–68, 600–10. 13 S.3.321–491; V. 169–299, 610–76. 14 S.3.282–5; V. 138–40. 15 [Cicero], Ad C.Herennium De ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), trans. H.Caplan, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass. and London, William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1954, pp. 6–8 (I.2.3), with useful references to the older literature. 16 I.Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero as a Model for Style and Some Phases of Their Influence on the Schools of the Renaissance, New York, 1910. It includes translations of the letters between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico (part II, pp. 1–18), and the whole of Erasmus’s Ciceronianus (ibid., pp. 19–130). The latter is also available in an excellent annotated translation by B.I.Knott in the Collected Works of Erasmus, Toronto and Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1974–, vol. XXVIII. 17 M.L.McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995; see my review in Modern Language Review, 1998, vol. 93, pp. 850–2. Of the secondary literature cited by McLaughlin, one could profitably consult the writings of H.Gmelin, G. W.Pigman III, H.C.Gotoff, J.F.D’Amico, D.A.Russell and E. Fantham. 18 See B.Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 111–13, 121–30, 160–4. On Bacon and Renaissance Ciceronianism see ibid. pp. 96–106. The author records his disappointment that none of the commentators who label Bacon an anti- humanist show any knowledge of these discussions. But contemporary criticism seems to have an increasingly short memory. 19 See The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. C.R.Thompson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 373–7, at 376. 20 See the introduction to Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. XXVIII, pp. 327–30. 21 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. G. Shepherd, London, T.Nelson, 1965, pp. 138, 227–8. 22 Seneca, Epistulae morales LXXXIV.3–4; trans. R.M.Gummere, 3 vols, Loeb Classical Library, London and Cambridge, Mass., 1962, vol. II, pp. 276–9. 23 See C.Schmidt, La Vie et les travaux de Jean Sturm, Strasbourg, 1855; reprinted Nieuwkoop, B.De Graaf, 1970; and J.J.Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue of Works on Rhetorical Theory from the Beginning of Printing to A.D. 1700, New York, Garland, 1981, pp. 277–9. For some caveats on this pioneering bibliography see my review in Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1983, vol. 69, pp. 441–4, and 1984, vol. 70, pp. 335–8. 24 See Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Ciceronianus’, trans. C.A.Forbes, with an introduction and notes by H.S.Wilson, Lincoln, Neb., University of Nebraska, 1945, pp. 2– 10. Harvey delivered his Rhetor (London, 1577) as two orations during the spring of 1575, and the first version of the Ciceronianus in the Easter term, 1576. 156 Brian Vickers

25 Ibid., p. 61. 26 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. W.A.Wright, Cambridge, 1904, p. 271: ‘Erasmus, beyng more occupied in spying other mens faultes, than declaryng his own advise, is mistaken of many, to the great hurt of study, for his authoritie sake. For…he and Longolius onelie differing in this, that the one seemeth to give over much, the other over little, to him [Cicero] whom they both best loved and chiefly allowed of all other.’ 27 Harvey’s ‘Ciceronianus’, p. 63. 28 Ibid., p. 69: ‘This will give the sum of the matter: I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of the philosophers and mathematicians; I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible, to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.’ 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 124. 31 Ibid., p. 71 (my italics). 32 Ibid., p. 73; Harvey is quoting from Ramus, Ciceronianus, sig. Bijv. 33 Harvey’s ‘Ciceronianus’, pp. 75–6. 34 Ibid., p. 77. 35 Ibid., p. 128. 36 Ibid., p. 79. 37 Cf. C.Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, ed. R.Giomini and M.S.Celentano, Leipzig, Teubner, 1980, p. 3 (374). 38 Cicero, De oratore III.21.125 (‘for a full supply of facts begets a full supply of words’). See also III.5.19, the opening of Crassus’s discussion of rhetoric, where he complains that when Antonius arranged ‘our shares in the debate…[he] took for himself the subject of the proper topics of oratory and left it to me to expound the proper method of embellishing them, he separated from one another things that cannot really stand apart. Every speech consists of matter and words, and the words cannot fall into place if you remove the matter, nor can the matter have clarity if you withdraw the words.’ 39 Horace, Ars poetica 311 (‘and when matter is in hand words will not be loath to follow’). 40 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria X.3.9, advice to the orator ‘to write as well as possible; speed will come with practice. Gradually thoughts will suggest themselves with increasing readiness, the words will answer to our call…’ Earlier he had urged the orator to ‘first form a true conception of the principles of eloquence’, read widely and ‘develop the strength to use his acquisitions, so that every word is ready at hand and lies under his very eyes…the man who follows these instructions will find that facts and words appropriate to their expression will present themselves spontaneously’ (VIII pr.28–9). 41 See, e.g., Quintilian, Institutio oratoria II.21.1–4; III.3.1; III.5.1; VI.3.22; VIII pr.6; VIII.3.55–8 (itemizing the recurring faults in each domain). 42 Ibid., X.1.5 (‘a copious supply of matter and words’). 43 See the Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. XXIV, which contains both these texts; my quotation is from p. 666. The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 157

44 Sidney is referring here to , Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1556). 45 The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. A.Feuillerat, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1912, vol. III, pp. 130, 132. 46 Harvey’s ‘Ciceronianus’, p. 57. It is worth quoting the Latin for the wordplay on fluit/diffluit, ibid., p. 56: ‘Id eo feci, non quod Ciceronem improbarem, probarem Osorium, set ut Osorianam redundantiam a Ciceronis copia internoscerem. Fluit quidem utriusque sermo: sed alterius, sine vllis salebris, ut liquidus, & sedatus amnis, fluit: alterius, nonnunquam extra ripas, vt turgidus, atque rapidus torrens, nec illis se cohiberi septis patitur, quae videbat ab altero praestituta.’ Harold Wilson appositely cites Cicero’s account of how he went to Rhodes to study with Molo, a distinguished teacher of oratory: ‘Is dedit operam, si modo id consequi potuit, ut nimis redundantis nos et supra fluentis iuvenili quadam dicendi impunitate et licentia reprimeret et quasi extra ripas diffluentis coerceret’ (Cicero, Brutus 91.316; ‘He made it his task to repress if possible the redundance and excess of my style, which was marked by a youthful impetuousness and lack of restraint, and to check it so to speak from overflowing its banks’). 47 Harvey’s ‘Ciceronianus’, p. 40. 48 J.W.Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age, Leeds, Francis Cairns, 1990, chap. 15 (pp. 270–90), at 272–8. Binns also discusses Harvey’s Ciceronianus, along with other works by Laurence Humphrey and Bartholomew Clerke. 49 Cf. ‘For words are but the images of matter’ with Aristotle, De interpretatione 1 (16a4–8): ‘written marks are…signs of affections of the soul [which]…are likenesses of actual things’, trans. J.L.Ackrill in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J.Barnes, 2 vols, Princeton, Princeton University Press, vol. I, p. 25. 50 Vickers, ‘Bacon and rhetoric’. 51 V.xxxviii. 52 See Advice to the Earl of Rutland on His Travels (S.9.12–13; V.73–4); Advice to Fulke Greville on His Studies (S.9.23–5; V.103–4); A Letter and Discourse to Sir Henry Savile, Touching Helps for the Intellectual Powers (S.7.102–3; V. 118–19). 53 See S.7.77; V. 97, and the later comments in the Advancement of Learning (S.3.412; V.240) and De augmentis scientiarum (S.4.459–72). 54 See S.4.472–92, and V. 713–14. 55 See S.3.412–13; V.240–1. 56 See S.7.197–211 and 11.18–95; V.xlii–xliv. 57 Proverbs 16:21. 58 S.3.409; V.237–8. 59 Aristotle, Rhetoric I.1 (1355a22). 60 S.3.410; V.238. 61 Vickers, ‘Bacon and rhetoric’, pp. 210–22. 62 S.3.409; V.238. 63 Plato, Phaedrus 250D. 64 S.3.410–11; V.238–9. 65 S.3.343–4; V. 186–7. 158 Brian Vickers

66 See Vickers, Bacon and Renaissance Prose, pp. 106–11, 284–6; and R.M. Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1968. 67 See B.Vickers, ‘The Royal Society and English prose style: A reassessment’, in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth Century, Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985, pp. 1– 76. This essay also includes a critical evaluation of the pioneering work of R.F.Jones, especially his two earlier books, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, St Louis, Missouri, Washington University, 1936; and the essays collected in The Seventeenth Century, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1951, showing how Jones tended to take seventeenth-century pronouncements on language, science, and prose-style at face value, unaware of their polemical context in several highly contested political and religious controversies. 68 See L.D.Green, ‘Rhetoric’, in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3rd ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, vol. II: 1500–1700, ed. D.Sedge. This, the first adequate modern survey, will list 485 entries on rhetoric from 326 authors. 69 The misconceptions discussed are not the only ones to have pestered Bacon studies in recent years. For further discussion see the following articles by B. Vickers: ‘ and the writing of History’, Journal of Modern History, 1979, vol. 51, pp. 287–316; ‘Bacon among the literati: Science and language’, Comparative Criticism, 1991, vol. 13, pp. 249–71; and ‘Francis Bacon and the progress of knowledge’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, vol. 53, pp. 495–518. The fact is that the secondary literature on Bacon is of extremely variable quality. 8 ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and the enterprise of philosophy

J.R.Milton

It has long been apparent, indeed notorious, that the word ‘humanism’ has come to be used in too many different ways—something which a computer-aided search of my own university’s library amply confirmed. Some initial attempt at precision may therefore not be out of place.1 In undertaking this one is certainly not supposing that one can isolate the true meaning of the word, still less that by doing so one can thereby reveal the essence of the entity being defined. The aim is much more modest: to produce a (provisional) definition that is historically useful—not so broad as to be vague or largely empty, but not so narrow as to focus on only one strand of a historical phenomenon which is more varied and complex. As a philosopher rather than a historian I shall not attempt one myself, but instead take over from Peter Burke what he has described as ‘a middle-of-the-road definition of humanism, neither too wide nor too narrow to be useful, as the movement to recover, interpret and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of and Rome’.2 If we look at this movement we can distinguish two components, or aspects. One was a desire to imitate the practices of the ancients: to build, or paint, or write as the Greeks or the Romans, but more especially the latter, had once done. Such imitation was inevitably more feasible, and safer, in some areas than others: no one attempted to worship like the Romans, and any desire to dress like them was normally suppressed until after one’s death: in funerary sculpture comfort and practicality no longer mattered. Those aspects of humanistic culture that appeared free of any taint of religious or political subversiveness were the most widely diffused, and the most easily imported into the school curriculum. An admirer of the Jesuits would probably regard as unfair Macaulay’s explanation of the Order’s

159 160 J.R.Milton success as educators by their ‘appear[ing] to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation’,3 but I suspect it would have seemed at once accurate and reassuring to many seventeenth-century parents. Jesuit churches were designed in accordance with the latest architectural fashions; Jesuit schools passed on to their pupils, including Descartes, an ability to write correct Latin and a solid grounding in the less dangerous parts of classical literature. Imitation requires knowledge, but the kind of knowledge it requires can become an end in itself, as from the time of Petrarch onwards it very rapidly did. The recovery of lost works was only a start: once recovered, they needed to be interpreted and understood, and in order for this to be done in the way that now seemed necessary a series of new disciplines had to be founded—chronology, epigraphy, numismatics.4 Almost anything could become an object of enquiry, from weights and measures to the workings of the Roman imperial administration. The aim was to turn the past from legend—the region in which King Arthur has so obstinately remained, but from which Alexander the Great has been rescued—to history, in something like the sense that we ourselves now understand it. Since in what follows I shall need a label for this whole massive programme, it can be referred to as erudition. The importance of imitation and erudition for many areas of European culture right down to the twentieth century, notably the visual arts, literature and historical enquiry, hardly needs emphasis. What is much less clear, and this of course is our present concern, is their significance for philosophy. There is always something potentially paradoxical about imitation. The more closely one attempts to imitate the ancients, the more one’s activity becomes (in one respect at least) quite unlike theirs, since they were not themselves engaged in imitating anybody.5 Like many paradoxes this one can be stated formally and generally, but the amount of ‘bite’ it has depends very much on the area to which it is applied. There seems (to an admittedly inexpert eye) nothing very paradoxical about imitating Roman coins or medals: the historical resonance achieved, and indeed aimed at, by doing this necessarily had no ancient counterpart, but this hardly subverted the activity or made it problematic—indeed quite the contrary. In philosophy the paradoxes are more severe. Plato, for example, was not engaged in imitating any earlier thinker: he was attempting kinds of enquiry that had no real precedent. Anyone attempting a really close imitation of Plato would have to engage in a mode of activity that was necessarily quite different from anything that Plato himself had undertaken. ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 161

The programme of erudition also posed problems for philosophy, albeit of a rather different kind. To most of its practitioners, past and present, philosophy has not appeared as an erudite activity.6 ‘A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar. And to speak of a philosopher as ignorant is to commit an ignoratio elenchi; a historian or scientist may be ignorant, philosophers merely stupid.’7 Though these not altogether reassuring words were written by someone well outside the analytic tradition—Michael Oakeshott—most contemporary analytic philosophers would certainly agree with them: not only is philosophy not an activity that requires erudition, it is one that is likely to be quite seriously impeded by it. Whether or not this is right is too large and complex a question to be pursued here; what we can say is that those thinkers whom posterity has concurred in regarding as major philosophers have not for the most part been remarkable for their erudition, and that when on occasion they have been, their learning has played little part in their philosophy. It is therefore unsurprising that though the myth of the Renaissance—the rebirth of art and science from ignorance and barbarism—is still quite potent in the popular imagination, one area where it has not flourished is philosophy. The founding myth of modern philosophy is altogether different: the discipline is seen not as a revival or rebirth of something that had once flourished but had since decayed, but rather as a new growth.8 Given such a picture, the identity of the new Prometheus, albeit bringing light rather than fire to mankind, can hardly be in doubt.

I Descartes’s calmly disdainful account in the Discourse on Method of his progressive disillusion with the greater part of what his Jesuit mentors had attempted to instil in him is one of the most familiar narratives in European philosophy. On the surface at least classical literature gets off pretty lightly: the charm of the fables it contains stimulate the mind, and the memorable actions recorded by historians exalt it, so that reading the best books is like having a conversation with the noblest minds of past ages.9 This compares quite favourably with the extraordinarily perfunctory commendation of theology as teaching us the way to heaven (in five words: ‘enseigne à gaigner le ciel’),10 and with the frankly derisive recommendation of philosophy, as furnishing us with the means of talking plausibly about any subject and thereby winning the admiration of the less well informed. 162 J.R.Milton

All the same, Descartes saw the benefits conferred by the study of ancient literature as being quite limited; and by the end of his schooling he was clear in his own mind that he had already given enough time to the ancient languages, and to the reading of old books.

This is why, as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers I abandoned the study of letters, and resolved to seek no knowledge other than that which I could find in myself, or else in the great book of the world.11

The uselessness of erudition for anything that really mattered could hardly be made clearer. The precise extent to which Descartes actually held in 1614 or thereabouts the sentiments which twenty years later he was to ascribe to his younger self is far from easy to determine; fortunately we need not attempt to do so. It is beyond dispute that attitudes like those in the Discourse appear throughout his writings, from the earliest to the latest. In the third of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, perhaps written as early as 1619,12 we find a view very close to that of the Discourse: though we ought to read the writings of the ancients, we should have no illusions as to what we can, and cannot, learn from them:

even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.13

By the end of Descartes’s life even the veneer of respect towards antiquity had been abandoned: Part I of the Passions of the Soul opens with the uncompromising statement that ‘The defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions’.14 Further light on Descartes’s attitude towards the past can be found in another late work, the unfinished dialogue known as the Search after Truth. This begins with Polyander, the ordinary man-in-the- street, congratulating Epistemon, the spokesman for traditional learning, on his good fortune in having been able to read so many Greek and Latin books, rather than having been sent into the army, and then to court. Descartes, who had himself received such an education, evidently did not agree: his spokesman Eudoxus responds to ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 163

Polyander’s opening in crushing terms: ‘The body of a person suffering from dropsy is no further removed from its proper condition than is the mind of someone tormented by an insatiable curiosity.’15 Eudoxus himself no longer feels any passion to learn about anything at all, and is as content with his meagre knowledge as Diogenes the Cynic had been with his tub. Any lingering hopes that a defender of erudition might have retained that these remarks were directed at another target are quickly dispelled. It is not long before Eudoxus makes his meaning entirely clear: A gentleman (honnête homme) is not required to know Greek or Latin any more than the languages of Switzerland or Brittany, or the history of the Empire any more than that of the smallest state in Europe.’16 The disdain for erudition could hardly be made clearer. Descartes was not of course the first writer to express reservations about some aspects of the humanist programme. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon had made trenchant criticisms of what he called the ‘delicate learning’ of certain humanists, listing it as ‘the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter’.17 Galileo was characteristically uninhibited in making clear his contempt for those who sought to approach nature through the interpretation of texts. As his spokesman Salviati put it in the Dialogue concerning the Two Great World Systems (1632):

What is more revolting in public dispute, when someone is dealing with demonstrable conclusions, than to hear him interrupted by a text (often written to some quite different purpose) thrown into his teeth by an opponent? If, indeed, you wish to continue in this method of studying, then put aside the name of philosophers, and call yourself historians.18

It is the same contrast that Descartes had already drawn in the Regulae. There is nevertheless a manifest difference between Descartes and his predecessors, one that reflects the distinctive of Descartes’s intellectual personality. Just as Descartes’s version of the mechanical philosophy differs from that found in Galileo partly in respect of its clarity of formulation, but above all in its unrestricted universality of application, so also his rejections of erudition and of the appeal to antiquity are more uncompromising than anything advocated by his predecessors. Such intellectual ruthlessness was an integral part of the Cartesian style, and, as events were to show, it would prove to have considerable appeal. 164 J.R.Milton

Though present-day philosophers are generally agreed in seeing Descartes as the founder of modern philosophy, very few would describe themselves as Cartesians. This is not merely because they reject such central Cartesian doctrines as mind/body dualism. Descartes is seen rather as the originator of a particular way of doing philosophy, one that begins with external-world scepticism and not merely makes epistemology the central discipline in philosophy but requires it to be undertaken in a first-person manner: my starting point in all my enquiries must be with how things appear to me. In this respect is routinely contrasted with the semantic, logic- based approach initiated by Frege and dominant in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Such a contrast is undoubtedly a legitimate one, but it can also obscure one fundamental area where the two philosophers were wholly in agreement. In many respects one can regard Frege’s programme as a continuation of Cartesianism in a different idiom: out go clear and distinct ideas, fatally contaminated with psychologism, and in their place we have an artificial, symbolic language, with explicit axioms and rules of inference, and clear . Superficially the execution of Descartes’s project looks much more humanistic than Frege’s—one glance at the Begriffsschrift,19 with its tracery of lines and plethora of Gothic letters, would have convinced Vives or Erasmus that the age of the barbarians really had returned. Descartes’s adherence to the humanist style is however at bottom superficial, a matter of good form. He would of course no more have deliberately written inelegant Latin than he would have chosen to appear in public improperly dressed; but just as the res cogitans does not require even a body, let alone clothing, in order to perform its operations, so the requirements of polite culture are not essential. ‘Those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton and have never learned rhetoric.’20 Skill in the procedures of classical rhetoric, perhaps the central discipline in the humanistic educational curriculum, is dismissed as unimportant: clarity and intelligibility were what mattered. In order to achieve the requisite degree of clarity it is necessary to lay aside everything of whose truth we have been persuaded merely, in Descartes’s own phrase, ‘by custom and example’21—that is, by growing up within the confines of a particular culture. Beyond providing us with evidence of the variety and frequent absurdity of human belief, history can teach us nothing. ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 165

II No one else among the major seventeenth-century philosophers who came after Descartes went quite as far as he did on these matters. Malebranche came closest, though his against what he saw as pointless erudition—against those who ‘hardly know the names of garments used in their own times, but amuse themselves in finding out the names of those used by the Greeks and the Romans’22—appear to owe at least as much to an Augustinian rejection of idle curiosity as they do to Descartes’s more secular objections. Leibniz and Locke were more friendly. Leibniz was persuaded to use at least a part of his apparently inexhaustible energy in enterprises of a very un-Cartesian character, mostly connected with the early history of the House of Brunswick, but including an attempt to sort out the chronology of ninth-century Europe, and a demolition of the legend of Pope Joan.23 Locke would not have been tempted by this: in contrast with associates such as James Tyrrell he exhibited a consistent lack of interest in early English history, even at a time of heated political controversy when it was being appealed to by Whig and Tory alike.24 He did nevertheless have interests of an equally un-Cartesian type. These were not for the most part in the classics: though Locke spent some years teaching Greek and Latin at Oxford, and though he continued for the remainder of his life to buy (and at least in some cases read) works by classical authors, he never seems to have ventured at all far into the more technical areas of classical scholarship, let alone make any attempt to contribute to them. were another matter. Locke’s commonplace books provide evidence of a sustained interest in quite technical issues of biblical chronology, and such esoteric issues as Jewish weights and measures.25 These were concerns which Locke shared with Newton, and it is interesting to note that when the two of them were together it was matters of biblical interpretation that they chose to discuss, and not anything in either the Principia or the Essay.26 It is, however, significant that one has to look at Locke’s unpublished manuscripts in order to get an adequate understanding of this part of his activity. Admittedly the Essay does not quite achieve the near solipsistic isolation from tradition exhibited by Descartes’s Meditations—a book in which no earlier philosopher is even mentioned27—but it can hardly be described as a work of conspicuous erudition. Locke was well aware that some of his predecessors, notably Gassendi and Cudworth, had chosen to approach philosophical questions armed with all the tools of humanistic learning, but it is clear 166 J.R.Milton that he himself saw the deployment of their kind of scholarship as irrelevant to the kind of question that he wished to answer. Locke never argued for this—he took it for granted. By 1700 therefore the Cartesian conception of philosophy had triumphed: the measure of its triumph was that it had been adopted without apparent hesitation by philosophers like Locke and Leibniz who had a genuine taste for erudite studies and who were quite happy to engage in them elsewhere.

III The Cartesian style of philosophy, with its disdain for erudition and its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, has been immensely influential, but its intellectual hegemony has never been total. It is, therefore, worth looking briefly—much too briefly—at some of the alternatives: not only those visible in 1700, but also others which have only subsequently become apparent. If we look at the Cartesian programme for reform, we can distinguish two different though closely related targets: one is the grounding of knowledge on anything culturally specific—on custom and example; the other is any appeal to history. From a strictly Cartesian viewpoint history appears as a rather low-grade intellectual activity, one that makes no really severe demands on the intellect and is for that reason best left to those whose intellects are (for whatever reason) incapable of meeting such demands. It is a view maintained politely but without substantial modification by many of the inheritors of the Cartesian tradition in both the natural sciences and mainstream analytic philosophy. Of course not everyone shared these sentiments. The erudite studies disparaged by Malebranche continued to attract devotees, and philosophy continued to be written in the old learned manner, notably by Ralph Cudworth in the True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). In the seventeenth century there was, however, no philosophical response to the Cartesians that had anything like the depth and originality of Descartes’s original attack. Such a response undoubtedly can be seen in Vico,28 but the Scienza nuova (1725) had little if any effect on the main current of eighteenth-century philosophy, up to and including Kant. probably spent more time working on the History of England than on all his philosophical works put together, and he had moreover an impressive knowledge of ancient literature, as his essay ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’,29 the longest of all his essays, bears witness; ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 167 nevertheless, his philosophical method owed nothing to such erudition. The view that philosophical thought, or at least worthwhile philosophical thought, is necessarily culture-bound has two main varieties. The first holds that philosophy is only possible, or at least can only have any real value, when it is rooted in and arises out of a particular culture, but nevertheless makes no attempt to give to any one culture a privileged status denied to any other. Here the emphasis is on a familiar, and recognizably modern, set of values—pluralism, authenticity and so on. It is not a view that can be traced back much before the Romantic era, and is extremely inconspicuous, if not altogether absent, in the seventeenth century. The second view, by contrast, very definitely can be found in the early modern period. To use admittedly anachronistic language, this sees philosophical enquiry as rooted in culture, but most certainly does not suppose all to be equal. The writings of the ancients provide us either with an irreplaceable source of wisdom, or with equally irreplaceable models for imitation, or indeed both. The appeal to antiquity took two rather different forms, depending on whether the past appealed to was fabulous or genuinely historical. The pursuit of ancient wisdom led its devotees back to what they supposed to be the remotest past—certainly pre-Homeric, perhaps even pre-Mosaic.30 The justification for such a manner was expressed with characteristic clarity by perhaps the only major philosopher to abandon the Cartesian approach and return to the wisdom of the ancients:

There are traces of profound thought as well as primeval tradition in the Platonic, Pythagorean, Egyptian, and Chaldaic Philosophy. Men in those early days were not so overlaid with languages and literature. Their minds seem to have been more exercised, and less burdened, than in later ages; and, as so much nearer the beginning of the world, to have had the advantage of patriarchal lights handed down through a few hands.31

Thus Berkeley, near the end of his life, in Siris. Such an outlook was vulnerable in a variety of ways. The re-dating of Hermes Trismegistus and the other prisci theologi was extremely damaging, though not as fatal as one might initially suppose (Berkeley knew about this, and seems to have been unworried by it).32 One should not, however, overlook the erosion of the metaphysical foundations on which the entire approach rested. Very often, like many of the most basic assumptions of all, they are implicit; but statements of them can 168 J.R.Milton nonetheless be found. Near the start of one of the great monuments of seventeenth-century erudition, the Geographia Sacra of the French Calvinist scholar Samuel Bochart, we find the following remark: ‘Tertullian justly states that all that is first is true, and all that follows after it is corrupt.’ Tertullian had presumably been thinking of the history of Christian doctrine, but Bochart made the principle an entirely general one: ‘It is in fact necessary that truth comes before falsehood, given that falsehood is the corruption of truth.’33 Like the more well-known axiom that a cause must have at least as much reality as its effect, this is a principle whose credibility steadily trickled away during the two centuries after 1600. It might be supposed that someone who chose to appeal to the historical rather than the fabulous past would have been presented with fair room for choice; in reality the options were more limited. Periclean Athens had much less allure during the Renaissance than it has since acquired. The Athenian empire was too small and its period of flourishing too brief, and it had existed in the wrong place. Its most serious defect was however that it had used the wrong language. No one in Western Europe contemplated discarding Latin in favour of Greek, and this meant that the prime model for imitation, both linguistic and cultural, had to be Rome—the Rome of the late republic and the early empire. Unfortunately the omens this presented for a reinvigoration of philosophy were not particularly auspicious. , Cicero and Seneca were indisputably capable of high literary art, but in philosophy at least none of them can be said to be remarkable for originality of thought. The imitation of models that are themselves derivative is not incompatible with philosophical innovation, but it is more likely to lead to Bacon’s delicate learning, the state in which

men begin to hunt more for words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement.34

Another effect of this kind of humanism was to elevate the status of ordinary language: not of course any ordinary language (certainly not Descartes’s low Breton), but rather that of the best authors in the best period, what Lorenzo Valla called the ‘consuetudo eruditorum atque elegantium’.35 Patterns of Latin usage which deviated from this were ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 169 defective, and as such deserved to be disregarded; examples are the kind of propositions with negative terms that appear in scholastic logic textbooks, such as the (admittedly bizarre) ‘non est non iustus non ’.36 Using Valla’s logic it would be difficult if not impossible to state Hempel’s Raven Paradox,37 a fact which one can be fairly confident would not have worried him in the slightest. Valla was of course by no means typical of Renaissance philosophers, and his work on logic had much less influence than either his unmasking of the Donation of Constantine or the Elegantiae linguae Latinae. He remains nevertheless a striking figure, as far out on one wing as Descartes two centuries later was to be on the other; for that reason the contrast between them is all the more instructive. Descartes’s philosophy is founded on a rejection of custom and example, Valla’s on an enthronement of it, as the arbiter not merely of elegance but of intelligibility. Valla disliked scholastic philosophy intensely, but he was far less successful in discrediting and displacing it than Descartes was to be. The reasons for this are no doubt complex, but the involvement of Cartesianism with the new heliocentric world-picture was surely crucial; on one central issue the ancients had been shown to have been wrong. Classical culture continued to be admired, investigated and imitated, but it steadily ceased to be regarded as normative; the fact that something had once been done in a certain way in the past was not in itself a reason for doing it in the present. When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some philosophers began to reject the Cartesian ideal of ahistorical, culture-free knowledge, they chose instead either an evolutionary account, as in Hegel, or the kind of relativistic, anthropological account anticipated by Herder. The former gave a role to history, but not as an archaeological recovery of lost knowledge. The latter shared with Valla a rejection of artificial languages and symbolism, but the practices valued were those of communities as functioning wholes, not the usage of the erudite and elegant.

Notes 1 For a recent and judicious survey, see C.G.Nauert Jr, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. 2 P.Burke, ‘The spread of Italian humanism’, in A.Goodman and A. MacKay (eds), The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, London, Longmans, 1990, p. 2. 170 J.R.Milton

3 T.B.Macaulay, The History of England, London, Routledge, 1907, p. 187. 4 On epigraphy and numismatics see R.Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969, chaps 11–12. 5 On some of the paradoxical aspects of literary imitation see T.M.Greene, The Light in Troy, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1982, especially chap. 2. 6 Aristotle and Theophrastus were admittedly concerned with the past of their discipline, but in Aristotle at least the material unearthed was employed in an essentially propaedeutic manner, to illustrate how the principles of the Aristotelian system had been imperfectly grasped by his predecessors. There was neither need nor opportunity for the kind of erudition displayed by the humanists of the Renaissance. 7 M.Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1933, p. 8. 8 Few if any present-day philosophers would of course deny that something recognizably ancestral to modern philosophy had been practised in the ancient world; but Cartesianism is not seen as a revival of methods or doctrines, unlike medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance Platonism or Gassendi’s Epicurean . 9 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I, in J.Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D.Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, vol. I, p. 113; French text in René Descartes, Oeuvres, ed, C.Adam and P.Tannery, rev. ed., 11 vols, Paris, Vrin, 1964–76, vol. VI, p. 5. 10 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 113; and Oeuvres, vol. VI, p 6; Descartes repeats the phrase two pages later. 11 Descartes, Discourse, Part I, in Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 115, translation modified; and Oeuvres, vol. VI, p. 9. 12 On the dating of the Regulae see J.Schuster, ‘Descartes’s Mathesis Universalis, 1619–28’, in S.Gaukroger (ed.), Descartes: Philosophy, , Physics, Brighton, Harvester, 1980, pp. 41–96. 13 Descartes, Regulae, III, in Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 13; and Oeuvres, vol. X, p. 367. 14 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 328; and Oeuvres, vol. XI, p. 327. 15 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 402; and Oeuvres, vol. X, p. 500. 16 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. II, p. 403, translation modified; and Oeuvres, vol. X, p. 503. 17 Francis Bacon, The Works, ed. J.Spedding, R.L.Ellis and D.D.Heath, 14 vols, London, Longmans, 1859–74, vol. III, p. 284. For the argument that Bacon was attacking only a certain type of humanist see Chapter 7 above. 18 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican, Second Day, trans. S.Drake, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, p. 113. 19 G.Frege, Conceptual Notation and other Related Articles, ed. T.W.Bynum, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 101–203. 20 Descartes, Discourse, Part I, in Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 114; and Oeuvres, vol. VI, p. 7. ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and philosophy 171

21 Descartes, Discourse, Part II, in Philosophical Writings, vol. I, p. 119; and Oeuvres, vol. VI, p. 16. 22 , Recherche de la verité, Book IV, chap. 7; translation from The Search after Truth, trans. T.M.Lennon and P.J.Olscamp, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1980, p. 298; and his Oeuvres completes, ed. A.Robinet, 21 vols, Paris, Vrin, 1958–84, vol. II, pp. 62–3. 23 Leibniz to Des Bosses, 30 April 1709; in his Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L.E.Loemker, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1969, p. 597. 24 M.P.Thompson, ‘Significant silences in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: Constitutional history, contract and law’, Historical Journal, 1988, vol. 31, pp. 275–94. 25 The main commonplace books are Bodleian Library, MSS Locke, d.10, f.14, f.30, f.32; MS Film77. 26 Notes in Newton’s hand can be found in Locke’s interleaved 1648 Bible, now in the Locke Room in the Bodleian Library, shelf-mark 16.25; they are most frequent on Daniel and Revelation. 27 Archimedes, Apollonius and Pappus are mentioned in the Dedication, and the Bible is quoted twice. 28 On Vico’s rejection of Descartes, see I.Berlin, Vico and Herder, London, Hogarth Press, 1976, pp. 8–12. 29 David Hume, The Philosophical Works, ed. T.H.Green and T.H.Grose, 4 vols, London, 1882; reprinted Aalen, Scientia Verlag, 1964, vol. III, pp. 381–443. 30 D.P.Walker, The Ancient Theology, London, Duckworth, 1972. 31 Siris, §298, in , The Works, ed. A.A.Luce and T.E. Jessop, 9 vols, London, Nelson, 1948–57, vol. V, p. 138. 32 On the effects of Casaubon’s re-dating of Hermes, see Anthony Grafton, ‘The strange death of Hermes and the Sibyls’ in his Defenders of the Text, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 162–77. 33 Quoted by P.Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 153. 34 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in his Works, vol. III, p. 283. 35 P.Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden, Brill, 1993, p. 95. 36 Ibid., p. 94. 37 This is a paradox in confirmation theory which uses the logical equivalence of ‘All ravens are black’ and ‘All non-black things are non-ravens’ to draw the conclusion that the observation of non-black non-ravens (say, red roses) provides support for the second generalization, and hence also for the first. For a succinct account see R.M.Sainsbury, Paradoxes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 78–81. 9 Grandeur and the mechanical philosophy

Susan James

There is an ancient and commonplace view that governments need to manifest their power in order to sustain it. By representing themselves as powerful, rulers impress both their competitors and their subjects, and create the submissiveness on which their positions depend. One way to produce this effect, it has long been assumed, is to symbolize the extent and scale of temporal power in monuments that are physically large. The vast temples and pyramids built by the Egyptian pharaohs signified, among other things, the supremacy of the pharaohs themselves. And when Egypt was eventually conquered and colonized, the Greek king Ptolemy II depicted the might of his own dynasty, at a ceremony dedicated to the memory of his father, by parading a golden phallus 120 cubits long, topped by a golden star.1 As this example indicates, power can be represented not only by the dimensions of a symbolic object but also by its brilliance; and throughout much of the history of the West, splendour and size have been deployed, singly or together, to portray political authority and make its claims persuasive. During the Renaissance, questions about the way in which the power of institutions should be represented formed part of a broad debate about the character of greatness. The devices exploited by the Egyptians and Greeks were still in play, so that rulers continued to rely on size and magnificence to promote themselves. At the same time, however, the techniques they used were scrutinized by a range of humanist writers who asked what the greatness of states consists in, how it should be manifested, and how its manifestations induce submission and respect. Their conflicting pronouncements were subsequently taken up by seventeenth-century philosophers, who incorporated some of them into more systematic accounts of the emotions. The affects evoked by scale, such as scorn for the small and

172 ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 173 esteem for the large, were given a primary place in the of the passions, and the conditions in which they arise were catalogued and analysed. In consequence, respect for a ruler or official, evoked by the size or brilliance of her person or accoutrements, came to be regarded as just one effect of a disposition which shapes many of our responses to the world, and runs through a host of attitudes to other people, objects and states of affairs. While greatness or grandeur, and its opposite petitesse, retained their political connotations, they also came to be seen as properties which could be predicated of apolitical objects. In particular, grandeur could be attributed to the natural world, or to the natural philosophers who investigated it. Once established as a singularly potent, normative property, the notion of greatness was again modified and manipulated, the better to legitimate emerging forms of scientific power.

I For humanist writers, greatness can be a property of individuals or of social entities such as states, and in each case its character is problematic. Discussion turns around the question of whether noble birth, virtuous character or political adroitness makes a man great; debate rages as to whether states possess greatness by virtue of their size, their wealth, their ability to protect themselves or their internal political arrangements.2 Related to these issues is the further problem of how greatness is best expressed, a question which is particularly pressing in relation to individuals who personify the state, such as rulers or ambassadors. Should such figures aim to manifest the greatness of the states they represent by wearing luxurious clothes and jewellery, adopting a proud and impressive bearing, and surrounding themselves by bedecked attendants? Or should they shun such paraphernalia? Because opinion is divided on this issue it is the subject of a long-standing debate; and although the writers who contribute to it are all aware that magnificence can be carried to excess, they nevertheless disagree about the efficacy of displays of grandeur. Sir Thomas Elyot argues in 1531 that it is appropriate to manifest greatness in apparel and manners, particularly in the presence of strangers who need to be impressed3—a judgement evidently put into practice by the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, who had his portrait painted by Holbein.4 This view was, however, contested at around the same time by authors who believed that such displays were laughable. Erasmus, for instance, claimed that they make a prince ridiculous;5 and in ’s , the bejewelled Anemolian 174 Susan James ambassadors are met with contempt, because the Utopians use gold and jewellery to make saucepans and chamber pots, to chain slaves, to stigmatize criminals and to amuse children.6 These arguments for and against displays of magnificence are grounded on a pair of shared assumptions. First, even if it is not easy to define, there is such a thing as true greatness, and esteem or admiration is the proper response to it. Secondly, these passions are often aroused by ornate and magnificent trappings, which are regularly, though sometimes mistakenly, taken to be marks of greatness itself. This latter assumption stands in need of explanation: why do people interpret elaborate trappings as a sign of grandeur? In so far as humanist writers address this question, they implicitly assume that ordinary people are relatively unconcerned with the distinction between greatness and true greatness, and are content to identify as great those who possess social power. The association of magnificence and social power is then explained by appeal to convention. Once ordinary people have learned that certain styles of dress, bearing and so on are generally affected by the great, and have also learned that the great are proper objects of esteem, they are liable to feel esteem for anyone who looks like one of the grandi. Moreover, the connection between a particular style of self- presentation and the esteem it arouses is entirely arbitrary. The malleability of the association is evident, for example, in More’s description of Utopia, where gold is used to forge the chains of criminals, so that the signs of esteem and contempt are straightforwardly reversed.7 Montaigne makes a comparable point in a discussion of sumptuary laws, where he proposes that the expensive crimson, gold and ornaments now worn by courtiers should be forbidden to everyone except mountebanks and courtesans, and courtiers should be ordered to wear plain black clothes instead. By means of this legal reform, modes of dress that currently excite esteem will come to evoke contempt and the exorbitant expenditure of the aristocracy will be reduced.8 Both these writers assume that there is no intrinsic connection between magnificence and esteem, and that, because the link between the two is socially constructed, people can be taught to feel just as much admiration for a prince plainly attired in black as for one dressed up to the nines in velvet, fur and gold. The greatness that arouses esteem does not have to be symbolized or manifested in any one way. But this is not to say that it does not have to be manifested at all. When Montaigne playfully suggests that courtiers should get rid of their codpieces he does not entirely dispense with the idea that they should be identifiable by their dress. Equally, Erasmus’s view that the clothes ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 175 of princes should be relatively austere is designed in part to allow people to recognize their moderation.9 Greatness, then, still needs to be displayed if it is to arouse submissiveness and respect. To Renaissance authors, the reason for this is so obvious that they do not pause to spell it out. Passions such as esteem or contempt are principally aroused by features of the world that we are able to perceive with our senses, either directly, as when we see a prince and his retinue go riding by, or indirectly, as when we remember or imagine such an experience. While certain aspects of greatness may be perceptible (one can see that a palace or a territory is large) others are not (a prince need not wear his power or wisdom on his sleeve). The latter therefore need to be made sensible by means of symbols. The power of a ruler, for example, can be symbolized by his or her clothes because they can be seen and touched, or by trumpet calls because these can be heard; and it is perceptions like these which work most effectively on our passions. The conviction that people’s emotions are most easily stirred by what they perceive or imagine comes easily to many humanist writers because it is deeply embedded in the rhetorical tradition which formed part of their education. Influenced by authorities such as Cicero and Quintilian, they tend to take it for granted that a skilled orator describes a scene in such a way as to conjure up a picture in the minds of his listeners, and that it is by getting people to entertain a mental image that he arouses their passions.10 The orator usually works on the imaginations of his audience; but it is also possible to achieve the same effects by means of perceptible objects. This device is exemplified, for instance, by the Christian view that at the birth of Christ, God became perceptible. As Malebranche explains it in the second half of the seventeenth century: ‘the Word had to be made flesh, and hidden and inaccessible wisdom had to be taught to carnal man in a carnal manner’,11 which would intensify religious emotions such as humility or devotion. Equally, the sight of symbols of temporal power was held to strengthen the emotional component of political obligation. Humanist analyses of the ways in which greatness could be manifested therefore fitted into a broader account of the role of symbolic representation in the processes by which emotion is evoked. They paid comparatively little attention, however, to the particular symbols associated with greatness and regarded it as simply a matter of social convention that large buildings or gleaming jewellery happened to arouse esteem. This was among the conclusions that left some seventeenth-century theorists dissatisfied when they reflected on their humanist heritage, and which they set out to transcend in their theories of the passions. 176 Susan James

II For early modern philosophers interested in the emotions, the phenomenon of greatness and the character of our responses to it proved deeply absorbing. Raising a problem which ran deeper than those posed by their humanist predecessors, some of them wanted to know what it is about objects possessing grandeur that makes us esteem them, and what is it about objects with the property of petitesse that makes us feel scorn or contempt. In the works of Descartes and Malebranche we find two somewhat divergent answers to these questions, which offer ways to incorporate the affections associated with grandeur and its opposite into an overarching theory of the passions, and make them central to our grasp of the perceptible world. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes distinguishes six principal passions,12 the first of which is wonder or admiration, the emotion we feel for things which are unfamiliar and which strike us as surprising. Wonder enables us to extend our knowledge by arresting our attention and fixing it on unexpected features of our experience.13 It does not always occur in its pure form, however, and its two main species are esteem—the inclination of the soul to represent to itself the value of an object—and contempt—its inclination to consider an object’s baseness or insignificance.14 As Descartes puts it: ‘Wonder is joined to esteem and contempt, depending on whether we wonder at the grandeur of an object, or at its petitesse.’15 This analysis suggests that esteem and contempt are part of our response to novelty. In a few cases, we may be so astonished by an unfamiliar object or state of affairs that we simply wonder at it, unable to evaluate it in any way; but more often our surprise already embodies a judgement that the object in question possesses grandeur or petitesse, and is accordingly deserving of esteem or scorn. For instance, a peasant who is straightforwardly amazed at the sight of a queen riding by in the midst of a glittering retinue will wonder at it; but if, in addition to being surprised, he recognizes the queen’s grandeur, he will esteem her. This interpretation suggests that, in order to sustain esteem, one must be continually inventive in creating an element of surprise. The usual trappings of grandeur may astonish people who rarely encounter them, but greater ingenuity will be needed to impress experienced citizens, while those close to grandeur are unlikely to be moved by its outward manifestations. Descartes thus captures the widespread assumption that displays of grandeur are mainly for the populace and makes sense of the view that, if respect for a ruler is to endure, ever ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 177 more remarkable representations of his or her greatness will have to be devised. There is, however, a further aspect of the Cartesian account, deriving from the contribution of partisan judgements of value to the passions of contempt and esteem. Usually, Descartes explains, ‘we use these terms to signify only our dispassionate opinions concerning the value of each thing’;16 but we can also aptly apply them to cases where the soul is inclined to represent to itself, on the one hand, the value or grandeur of an object and, on the other, its petitesse.17 At least some of the time, our feelings of approbation or scorn are based on estimations of worth which, as Descartes’s overall account of the passions makes clear, are part of a general disposition to seek out the things that nature deems useful to us.18 We esteem objects that we regard as in the broadest sense beneficial to us, and dismiss as insignificant those for which we have no use, always basing our judgements on our own sense of our well-being. This strand of argument suggests that the admiration of which estime and mépris are species is more than an intermittent surprise at the unfamiliar; instead, it is a pervasive passion which runs through much of our experience. Descartes reinforces this view when he proposes that the various kinds of love are best distinguished in terms of esteem: love for an object that we esteem less than ourselves is simple affection; love for someone we regard as an equal is friendship; and love for an object that we esteem above ourselves is devotion.19 Here, once again, we find the assumption that many of our judgements of esteem are relative to ourselves (does this person or thing possess more or less grandeur than I do?), together with the conviction that such judgements are sufficiently fundamental to serve as a basis for classifying other primary passions.20 A disposition to assess objects for their grandeur or petitesse, and to esteem or scorn them accordingly is, in this Cartesian picture, part of our nature. To be sure, the judgements made by individuals are nuanced and diverse, reflecting as they do both a person’s particular circumstances and experience, but underlying them is a shared bodily mechanism which gives rise to a common pattern of emotion, designed to protect and increase our well-being. Moreover, because this mechanism is continually at work, assessments of comparative grandeur, and the passions that accompany them, are common features of our mental life. These aspects of Descartes’s position are taken up by Malebranche, who uses them to provide a more elaborate analysis of our sensitivity to grandeur. Emphasizing the usual view that the perceptible properties of the world generally excite our strongest passions, Malebranche reminds his readers that we are inclined to 178 Susan James admire things that strike us as large, such as the night sky or monumental buildings, and scorn those that are small, such as insects. Equally, when grandeur manifests itself as social power, we naturally tend to esteem people whose power exceeds our own and spurn the powerless. Having set this Cartesian theory in place, he goes on to explain in considerable detail how such passions, particularly those relating to other people, function for our good. Starting at an individual level, we can imagine a petitioner and a prince whose affections fit neatly into the Cartesian mould. The petitioner feels approbation for the prince, while the prince scorns the petitioner. How do these emotions benefit them? Malebranche’s view of the matter depends on the claim that we express our passions in our facial expressions, posture and movements, and that when other people perceive these bodily signs they experience certain answering emotions: ‘For we cannot see a man moved by a passion without receiving an impression of it, and without entering in some way into his feelings.’21 Sometimes such transmissions of feeling are mimetic; for example, if the prince perceives the petitioner’s desperation, he too may become distressed. In other cases, including the one that concerns us here, the connection is more complex. When the petitioner perceives the prince’s grandeur and judges that it is superior to his own, he feels himself to be base and a kind of humility: ‘The perception of one’s petitesse produces abasement; the perception of one’s weakness, timidity; and the perception of any disadvantageous quality naturally produces another kind of passion that will always be a kind of humility.’22 Moreover, he gives his passions bodily expression. Malebranche is quite clear that this largely involuntary response is to the petitioner’s advantage:

It is necessary…to be humble and timid, and even to express these feelings in a modest countenance and a respectful or timid air, when one is in the presence of a person of quality, or a man who is proud and powerful; for it is almost always advantageous to the body’s welfare that the imagination should prostrate itself at the sight of sensible grandeur and should give external expression to its submission and internal veneration.23

In addition, however, the petitioner has an effect on the prince. He observes the petitioner’s petitesse, and feels contempt for it; but at the same time he recognizes the petitioner’s submissive air as a response to his own grandeur. The petitioner’s countenance and bearing provide the prince with sensible evidence of his comparative greatness, and ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 179 upon perceiving this he feels pride and self-esteem: ‘Perceiving the perfection of one’s being, or of something that belongs to it, naturally produces pride or self-esteem, contempt for others, joy and various other passions.’24 Moreover, he in turn expresses these passions in his bearing, thus making it more likely that other people will perceive and respond to his grandeur. Malebranche emphasizes that this self-reinforcing dialogue is mechanical, by which he means that our bodies are structured in such a way that we express our passions and are moved by those of others without having to think about it. To some extent, we can learn to control and modify these reactions; but the ones God has equipped us with are, Malebranche believes, sufficient to promote our individual and well-being. The instant expression and communication of fear, for example, helps a society to respond rapidly to danger; the corporeal manifestations of despair can save our lives by provoking pity; and the bodily enactment of scorn and esteem sustains differences of rank and status:

Nothing is more marvellous than this economy of our passions and the disposition of our bodies in relation to the things surrounding us. Everything which occurs in us mechanically is very worthy of the wisdom of him who created us; and as God has made us capable of all the passions that move us principally in order to link us to sensible things so that society and our sensible being may be preserved, he has executed his design so faithfully in creating his works that we cannot fail to admire its ingenuity and powers.25

Unsurprisingly, this vision of functional harmony is marred by human error; and in cataloguing the types of mistake to which we are prone, Malebranche explores still further the social effects of grandeur. To return to our example, when the petitioner sees the prince, he feels, alongside the baseness we have already examined, a kind of self- esteem. Some of the prince’s grandeur rubs off on him, so to speak, and his connection with a person greater than himself increases his sense of his own worth. There exists, therefore, a three-part process, each stage of which can be construed as beneficial to someone. The petitioner’s expressions of humility serve to protect him from any harm the prince might do him, and at the same time contribute to the prince’s emotional well-being by strengthening his self-esteem. In addition, the petitioner’s proximity to the prince makes him feel more important than before and increases, even if only by a little, his self-approbation. 180 Susan James

In Malebranche’s view, the mutual dependence bred by our disposition to admire people for their grandeur is a fundamental feature of social life which affects communities of scholars, courtiers, officials and soldiers. At one end of the scale,

the general of an army depends on all his soldiers because they hold him in regard. It is often this slavery which produces his générosité, and the wish to be esteemed by all those who see him frequently causes him to sacrifice other desires that are more pressing and more rational.26

At the other end, courtiers are slaves to the opinions of a prince, and ‘pass from an inclination to philosophy to an inclination to debauchery, and from a horror of debauchery to a horror of philosophy’, as his whims dictate.27 The craving for recognition which lies at the heart of these relationships is perhaps even more vividly presented in a thought experiment envisaged by Malebranche’s contemporaries, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. Imagine a world in which there was only one person, and in which every other creature that appeared to be human was in fact a mechanical statue:

Suppose further that this lone individual knew perfectly well that all these statues which resembled him outwardly were entirely devoid of reason and thought, and also knew the secret of moving them by various inner springs and obtaining from them all the services we obtain from people.

Such an individual, Arnauld and Nicole suggest, might amuse himself with the statues, but his pleasure and self-esteem would never depend on the external respect he could make them show him.28 The ways in which people respond emotionally to us, not their behaviour, are what sustain our passions. More specifically, our passions are forged in the process of mutual recognition and dependence that stems from our susceptibility to grandeur and our quest for self-esteem.

III The fact that human beings are able to recognize passion in each other means that the emotions we feel for people are singularly effective in creating or undercutting self-esteem. Our affections for objects can also, however, feed into the dynamics of grandeur and petitesse; and, ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 181 along with a number of seventeenth-century writers, Malebranche is interested in the character and implications of our emotional responses to the natural world. As we have seen, feelings of esteem and scorn for perceptible objects are grounded on individual or social norms: a petitioner may admire a prince because he recognizes that the latter’s grandeur is greater than his own; but equally, a palace may excite approbation because, by comparison with accepted scales and styles of , it is large and magnificent. These emotional responses to comparative scale are not, however, confined to human artefacts, and vast or magnificent natural objects such as the night sky may also possess grandeur. As Malebranche explains, the imagination attaches a certain idea of grandeur to astronomy because this science studies objects that are great and brilliant, and are infinitely elevated above everything surrounding us.29 This passage describes the first of a sequence of transfers of feeling comparable to those we have already explored. Esteem for the stars is extended to astronomy, the study of what is great and brilliant; and astronomers extend this esteem for their subject to themselves, regardless of the fact that they spend their lives, as Malebranche dismissively expresses it, hanging from the end of a telescope.30 Finally, people who admire and associate with astronomers transfer to themselves some of the esteem they feel for them. Like the relations between the prince and petitioner, those between scientists and a scholarly community promote self-esteem; but whereas in the first case the prince himself possesses the grandeur around which the other relations revolve, this time it is the grandeur of the stars and planets which set the social dynamic in motion. The process by which astronomy gains and spreads its social standing is part of a more general phenomenon. Various types of enquiry attract esteem because the objects they investigate are held to possess grandeur, but the grandeur in question is not always a matter of scale or brilliance. Take, for example, the study of ancient or distant societies. Malebranche’s analysis of their appeal rests on a wholeheartedly Cartesian reading of admiration, according to which it is the surprisingness of the objects concerned that causes us to esteem them:

Rare and extraordinary things produce greater and more perceptible motions of the [animal] spirits than things we see every day; we admire them and as a result attach some idea of grandeur to them, and they thus excite in the spirits the passions of esteem and respect…. Many people are so full of respect and curiosity for everything that remains of antiquity, for everything which comes 182 Susan James

from far away or is rare and extraordinary, that their minds are enslaved to them, because the mind does not dare to judge or place itself above that which it respects.31

Scholars enmeshed in these passions become deeply fascinated by old medals, maps of , and other exotica, and also by the works of ancient philosophers who are portrayed or imagined as such exceptional men that they excite a degree of admiration far beyond that accorded to anyone living. Malebranche is convinced that these passionate engagements with the natural and social worlds, which masquerade under the title of science, are pernicious and misguided. In investigating perceptible objects, and attributing to them the property of grandeur, human beings manifest both their fallen condition and the power of their senses to overrule reason. Our reverence for the large, the brilliant and the surprising is a distorted expression of our search for God, who alone possesses true greatness.32 Our fascination with perceptible things reflects the natural but inferior pleasure that we take in the sensible realm.33 The faux savants who study this realm do so not from an unimpeachable love of knowledge, but out of a self-centred disposition to increase their own grandeur. All these faults cause people to fritter away their time as astronomers, chemists or historians, making discoveries which, while not completely without value, fail to make humanity happier or more wise.34 And in devoting their energies to such comparatively trivial topics, they distract themselves from the only forms of enquiry capable of yielding real and unqualified benefit. On the one hand, they neglect ‘the most beautiful, the most pleasant and the most necessary of all kinds of knowledge’, knowledge of ourselves:

Of all the human sciences, the science of man is the most worthy of man. This science is not, however, the most cultivated, nor the most advanced of those we have. Most men entirely neglect it. Even among those who take pride in their scientific enquiries very few apply themselves to it, and very few of these apply themselves successfully.35

On the other hand, our passionate involvement with sensible things stands between us and a proper approach to scientific investigation. To acquire knowledge of ourselves and the world we must strive to discount the evidence of our senses in favour of intelligible ideas, and we must learn to replace inductive inference based on observation by ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 183 incontrovertible deductive reasoning.36 But our passions undermine this project; and as long as the faux savants hold sway, the learned community will remain trapped in a misguided but self-reinforcing counterpoint of scorn and esteem. As well as lamenting the lost, prelapsarian condition of humanity, Malebranche is here developing one of two strategies he employs to legitimate Cartesian philosophy and discredit investigators who do not adhere to its principles. Cartesian philosophers who explain the world by appealing to the clear and distinct relations between intelligible ideas provide theories guaranteed to persuade all rational people. Moreover, as we now see, they exhibit a certain strength of character. Their ability to concentrate on intelligible ideas suggests, first of all, that they are capable of overcoming the powerful pull of the perceptible world and of resisting the passions associated with grandeur. They are unimpressed by scale or novelty, and their self-esteem does not derive from the grandeur of the objects they study, which for the most part are small, imperceptible and insignificant. Furthermore, because these objects fail to arouse admiration, other people cannot sustain a sense of their worth by associating with Cartesian scientists, who are consequently unable to bask in the approbation of crowds of hangers on. Such philosophers must be dedicated and self-sufficient, since, as Malebranche explains: ‘Knowledge of opinions is more useful for conversation and for astounding ordinary people than knowledge of true philosophy.’37 This line of argument draws attention to the epistemic and moral virtues required of mechanists, and implies that people who are emotionally susceptible to grandeur and petitesse are both guilty of a moral failure, although a common one, and vulnerable to error. In this respect at least, goodness and knowledge coincide. We also, however, find in the works of Malebranche and several other philosophers of the late seventeenth century a second and more radical attempt to legitimate the New Science. Rather than representing mechanist philosophers as resistant to the contaminating influence of the passions, this approach aims to redescribe grandeur in such a way as to make it applicable to the New Science, and portrays the latter and its findings as worthy of admiration and esteem.

IV Judgements of grandeur and petitesse are, as we have seen, relative to a standpoint. From the point of view of a courtier, for example, a prince is worthy of esteem, while a petitioner is contemptible. From the point of view of human beings, a colossus possesses grandeur and a beetle 184 Susan James petitesse. Many seventeenth-century writers take this latter reference point for granted; after all, when talking about the features of the world that excite human passions, what could be more natural than to assume a human perspective? Nevertheless, their confident attitude is challenged in a series of arguments which aim to unsettle any secure or easy sense of scale, and to force a reconsideration of the relations that constitute grandeur. Some of these argument have a religious purpose, namely to make people alive to the power of God by bringing home to them the puniness of their own understanding. Pascal, for instance, aims to destabilize our conception of ourselves by portraying humans first as minute specks in a universe so large as to be beyond our comprehension, then as giants unable to conceive or appreciate the microstructure of the world:

What, after all, is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, a whole in relation to nothing, a mid-point between nothing and everything, infinitely far from comprehending these extremes; the purpose and principles of things are for him irretrievably hidden in impenetrable secrecy.38

Deprived of any privileged position from which to make judgments, we are condemned to a condition of perpetual uncertainty from which we long in vain to be delivered.39 Pascal’s argument plays on the imagination: by asking us to try to envisage either the limitless extent of the universe or the minute complexity of the world around us; by this means we can come to appreciate our true worth.40 Some of the same effects are also achieved, however, by appealing to more scientific devices—the microscope and telescope. For certain writers, these instruments offer another way to suggest that the point of view vouchsafed by our senses is in no way privileged. To the naked eye, insects, for example, are small and nondescript, possessed of the petitesse that breeds contempt. But as Malebranche and others argue, size is a relational property which we mistakenly treat as monadic: ‘Because these animals are small in relation to our bodies, we are led to regard them as absolutely small, and consequently as despicable on account of their smallness, as if bodies could be small in themselves.’41 By viewing an insect through a microscope we can mitigate its petitesse; it appears larger than before, and larger than objects which previously appeared larger than it, so that we can ask ourselves whether it is the naked eye or the microscope which provides the proper standard for judging scale. As before, one of the common- ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 185 sense criteria by which we assess grandeur is put in question. Magnification, however, alters more than apparent size, and looking at an insect through a microscope also reveals a host of hitherto unexpected properties. In particular, it reveals that insects possess features which are generally taken to be marks of grandeur, and these creatures consequently come to be described in terms usually reserved for powerful rulers or officials. Malebranche, for instance, extols the beauty and perfection of gnats:

Their members are as justly proportioned as those of other animals, and it even seems that God has wanted to provide them with ornaments to recompense them for the petitesse of their bodies. They have crowns, plumes and other decorations on their heads, which outstrip anything invented in the name of human luxury; and I can confidently say that all those who have only used their eyes have never seen anything so handsome, so fitting, nor even so magnificent in the residences of the greatest princes as one can see with a magnifying glass on the head of a simple fly. Man, for example, has only one lens in each eye, while the fly has more than a thousand, marvellously arranged in perfect order.42

Accounts like this are not uncommon, nor are they exclusively reserved for insects. Extending the same trope, Walter Charleton compares the parts of animals, viewed under a microscope, to the most gorgeous and elaborate palaces:

Since the heart of a pismire hath more of magisterial artifice than the Escorial; the proboscis or trunk of a flea more industry in its delicate and sinuous perforation than all the costly aqueducts of Nero’s Rome [or] the arsenal at Venice; since the breast or laboratory of a bee contains more anfractuous convolutions than the Labyrinth of Daedalus, and more cellules than the famous monastery of Saint Lawrence in Spain, for bravery and amplitude of architecture reputed the eighth wonder of the world; and since the skull of a louse hath more ventricles or receptaries for the numerous swarms of animal spirits than the spacious amphitheatre of Rome had seats for spectators; in fine, since the meanest piece of nature throws disparagement and contempt upon the greatest masterpieces of art; how can it be that man can…admit the managery of an architect or knowing principle in the structure of a house, and yet determine the more magnificent creation of the universe upon the blind disposal of Fortune?43 186 Susan James

In these descriptions, and in illustrated books such as Hooke’s Micrographia which reveal the microscopic world to a less specialist audience,44 aspects of nature which had traditionally been seen as insignificant are presented as possessing grandeur. Despite the fact that they are small when viewed with the naked eye, they are nevertheless brilliant, elaborate and extremely surprising, and as such are worthy of admiration or esteem. Malebranche is quite explicit about this. The disdain that people usually feel for insects and other small animals is, he asserts, ill-judged and founded on ignorance; in truth, there is nothing despicable in nature, and even the tiniest gnats are worthy of admiration.45 Similarly, Charleton’s remark that the meanest piece of nature throws disparagement and contempt upon the greatest masterpieces of art draws our attention to his view that nature, being the opposite of contemptible, is to be admired. The view that small natural things and their parts are to be wondered at is commonly expressed by advocates of the New Science. To take another example, Boyle remarks that he finds the caterpillar more worthy of admiration than the vast, exotic animals which the multitude flocks to see;46 and, generalizing the point, he comments that his wonder dwells not so much on nature’s clocks as on her watches.47 Judgments like these retain a theological motivation, and the writers quoted here appeal to the newly visible wonders of nature as evidence of divine omnipotence. For Malebranche, the microscope helps us to realize that everything God has created is worthy of admiration; for Charleton, it strengthens the Argument from Design; and Boyle holds that, in little creatures, God draws traces of his omniscience too delicate to be ascribed to any other cause. At the same time, however, something else is going on. When mechanist philosophers claim that perceived scale is not a reliable indicator of grandeur or petitesse, they offer an argument which serves to legitimate their own fascination with the shapes and motions of the minute components of the universe. If such entities were distinguished primarily by their petitesse, studying them might be thought a contemptible, undignified and even ridiculous occupation. But if in fact they possess grandeur, they will be worthy of esteem and thus attention. In addition, their grandeur will transfer to the scientists who study them, whose social status will in turn attract admiration, so that rather than being marginal eccentrics, mechanist philosophers will come to be seen as great and will acquire the power and influence that grandeur brings. The success of this line of argument obviously depended on the judgement that animals viewed through a microscope are indeed astonishing and admirable. But not everyone found this claim ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 187 persuasive. Margaret Cavendish, who was familiar with Micrographia and whose husband owned a collection of microscopes, describes the images they produce as distorted, mixed and hermaphroditic. A magnified louse, for example, looks like a lobster, and each joint appears diseased and swollen. Advocates of microscopy were, in her view, intoxicated by superficial wonders and, like boys who play with watery bubbles or fling dust into each other’s eyes, deserved to be reproved for wasting their time in useless sports.48 Cavendish was not the only philosopher to be unimpressed by this aspect of the New Science; but she belonged to a minority whose opposition did not gravely undermine the claim of mechanism to grandeur. A more serious difficulty lay in the limited application of the argument we have been examining. Although certain insects may prove to be magnificent when we look at them closely, the same cannot be said for all parts of nature; and in any case, the features of the world that mechanists regarded as fundamental are not visible at all. Atoms cannot excite our passionate admiration. Faced with this objection, exponents of the New Science were always free to retreat to the view that sensible things do not possess true grandeur, which belongs instead to intelligible entities and, above all, to God. As the basic components of creation, intelligible atoms partake of God’s greatness and are fit objects of study and admiration. Alongside this traditional argument, however, we find a more audacious attempt to vindicate the grandeur of the mechanical philosophy by redescribing the properties of the world with which it is primarily concerned. In the sixth of Bernard Lamy’s Entretiens sur les sciences, his spokesman, Theodose, explains that a large group of sciences are united by the fact that they study grandeur. The first of these is mathematics, ‘which has as its object grandeur, that is to say, everything which can be augmented or diminished’;49 however, this property is, in fact, the basic element of all the sciences, ‘because one can mean by this word, grandeur, not only bodies, but also movements, sounds (which are only the movements of the air), times and in general anything that can be augmented or diminished’.50 Grandeur is thus the property studied by geometers, astronomers, geographers, students of optics, students of the art of building and sailing ships, musicians, architects, people who build fortifications, students of physics and students of mechanics.51 By his key term, Lamy presumably means quantity. Like the Cartesians, he holds that the sciences are mathematical in so far as they deal with properties that can be quantified; but unlike the Cartesians he makes quantity the very subject matter of science. While Descartes does not include mathematics in his 188 Susan James celebrated list of the sciences, Lamy classifies many sciences as branches of mathematics and makes mathematics the foundation of philosophy.52 Furthermore, extension, which for a Cartesian is the essential and defining property of matter, becomes just one kind of quantity or grandeur. Lamy’s transformation relies on the fact that one of the senses of grandeur is mathematical. But the term also retains its normative connotations, so that the subject matter of science, as he describes it, is simultaneously presented as worthy of esteem. Once again, we encounter a subtle means of presenting the New Science in a favourable light, which will also reflect well on its practitioners and enhance their authority. The ways in which grandeur is reinterpreted in the second half of the seventeenth century form part of a wide-ranging struggle for recognition by advocates of the mechanical philosophy. At a practical level these philosophers worked, in their various national contexts, to get their theories taught in universities and to form societies through which they could propagate their views. But before these approaches could be successful, they had to discredit their rivals and win for themselves the esteem and trust of an educated audience. One means to this end was to borrow and subvert the values of the people they wished to persuade. Grandeur, it was generally agreed, was a powerful force which provoked strong passions and created influence and power. What better, then, than to ride under its banner and to establish the New Science as an exemplum of greatness?

Notes 1 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, V (201e). 2 M.Peltonen, Classical Humanism and in English Political Thought, 1570–1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 190– 228. 3 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke named the Governour, London, Dent, 1962, pp. 102–3. 4 , The Ambassadors, National Gallery, London. The figure on the left of the painting is Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England in 1533. 5 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. L.Jardine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 14–16. 6 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. G.M.Logan and R.M.Adams, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 62–5. 7 Ibid., p. 63. 8 , ‘Of sumptuary laws’, in The Complete Essays, trans. M.A.Screech, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987, pp. 300–2 (I.43). 9 Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, p. 16. ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 189

10 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. H.E.Butler, 4 vols, London, Heinemann, 1920–2, vol. II, pp. 432–4 (VI.2.29–30). 11 Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, ed. G.Rodis Lewis, 3 vols, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. A.Robinet, 2nd ed., Paris, Vrin, 1972, vol. II, p. 8. ‘…il fallait que la Verbe se fit chair, et que la sagesse cachée et inacessible aux hommes charnels les instruisit d’une manière charnelle… .’ Malebranche attributes this view to St Bernard: see Sermon 39. 12 René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, ed. G.Rodis Lewis, Paris, Vrin, 1988, p. 115 (II.69). 13 Ibid., pp. 116–21 (II.70–8). On Descartes’s account of wonder see K.Park and L.Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750, New York, Zone Books, 1998, pp. 13, 304, 311, 316–17. On the relation between admiratio and curiositas see N.Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: World , Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 81, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1998, pp. 134–8. 14 Descartes, Passions de l’âme, pp. 175–6 (III.149–50). 15 Ibid., p. 109 (II.54): ‘A l’Admiration est jointe l’Estime ou le Mépris, selon que c’est la grandeur d’un objet ou sa petitesse que nous admirons.’ 16 Ibid., p. 175 (III. 149): ‘Car bien que nous ne signifient ordinairement que les opinions qu’on a sans passion de la valeur de chaque chose…’ 17 Ibid. See also p. 109 (II.54). 18 Ibid., p. 108 (II.52). 19 Ibid., pp. 124–6 (II.83). 20 Love is one of the six basic passions distinguished by Descartes: ibid., pp. 121–7 (II.79–85). 21 Malebranche, De la recherche, vol. II, p. 122: ‘Car,…l’on ne peut voir un homme passionné sans recevoir l’impression de sa passion, et sans entrer, en quelque manière, dans ses sentiments…’ 22 Ibid., vol. II, p. 120: ‘La vue de sa petitesse produit la bassesse; la vue de sa faiblesse la timidité; et la vue de quelque qualité désavantageuse produit naturellement une autre passion, qui sera toujours une espèce de humilité.’ 23 Ibid., vol. II, p. 121: ‘Il est nécessaire…d’être humble et timide, et même de témoigner au dehors la disposition de son esprit par un contenance modeste et par un air respectueux ou craintif, lorsqu’on est en presence d’une personne de haute qualité ou d’un homme fier et puissant; car il est presque toûjours advantageux pour le bien du corps que l’imagination s’abatte à la vûë de la grandeur sensible, et qu’elle lui donne des marques extérieures de sa soumission et de sa vénération intérieure.’ 24 Ibid., vol. II, p. 120: ‘La vue de la perfection de son être ou de quelque chose qui lui appartient produit naturellement l’orgüeil, ou l’estime de soimême, le mépris des autres, la joie, et quelques autres passions.’ 25 Ibid., vol. II, p. 122: ‘Il n’y a rien plus merveilleux que cette oeconomie de nos passions et que cette disposition de nôtre corps par rapport aux objets qui nous environnent. Tout ce qui passe en nous machinalement est tres digne de la sagesse de celui qui nous a faits; et comme Dieu nous a rendu capables de toutes les passions qui nous agitent, afin principalement de nous Her avec toutes les choses sensibles pour la conservation de la société et de nôtre être sensible, son dessein s’execute si fidèlement par la construction de son ouvrage, qu’on ne peut s’empêcher d’en admirer l’artifice et les ressorts.’ 190 Susan James

26 Ibid., vol. II, p. 84: ‘Un général d’armée tient à tous ses soldats, parce que tous les soldats le considèrent. C’est souvent cet esclavage qui fait sa générosité, et le desire d’être estimé de tous ceux à qui il est en vue l’oblige souvent à sacrifices d’autres désirs plus sensibles et plus raisonnables.’ 27 Ibid., vol. I, p. 336: ‘Ils passent de l’inclination pour la philosophie à l’inclination pour la débauche, et de l’horreur de la débauche à l’horreur de la philosophie.’ 28 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de penser, ed. P. Clair and F.Girbal, 2nd ed., Paris, Vrin, 1981, p. 79: ‘C’est proprement ce fantôme composé de tous les admirateurs des riches et des grands que l’on conçoit environner leur trône et les regarder avec des sentimens interieurs de crainte, de respect, et d’abaissement, qui fait l’idole des ambitieux; pour lequel ils travaillent toute leur vie, et s’exposent à tant de dangers. Et pour montrer que c’est ce qu’ils recherchent, et qu’ils adorent, il ne faut que considerer, que s’il n’y avoit du monde qu’un homme qui pensât, et que tout le reste de ceux qui auroient la figure humaine ne fussent que des statues automates, et que de plus, ce seul homme raisonnable sachant parfaitement que toutes ces statues qui lui ressembleroient exterieurement, seroient entierement privées de raison et de pensées, sût neanmoins le secret de les remuer par quelque ressors, et d’en tirer tous les services que nous tirons des hommes; on peut bien croire qu’il se divertiroit quelquefois aux divers mouvemens qu’il imprimeroit à ces statues: mais certainement, il ne mettroit jamais son plaisir et sa gloire dans les respects exterieurs qu’il se feroit rendre par elles; il ne seroit jamais flaté de leurs reverences…’ 29 Malebranche, De la recherche, vol. I, p. 22: ‘Car, quoique l’imagination attache une certaine idée de grandeur à l’Astronomie, parce que cette science considère des objets grands, éclatans, et qui sont infiniment élevez au dessus tout ce qui nous environne…’ 30 Ibid., vol. I, p. 21. 31 Ibid., vol II , p. 128: ‘Les choses rares et extraordinaires produisent dans les esprits des mouvemens plus grands et plus sensibles que celles qui se voyent tous les jours; on les admire, on y attache par consequent quelque idée de grandeur, et elles excitent ainsi dans les esprits des passions d’estime et de respect…. [I]l y a beaucoup [de gens] qui sont si respectueux et si curieux pour tout ce qui nous reste de l’antiquité, pour tout ce qui vient de loin ou qui est rare et extraordinaire, que leur esprit en est comme esclave, car l’esprit n’ose juger ou se mettre au-dessus de ce qu’il respecte.’ 32 Ibid., vol. II, p. 5. 33 Ibid., vol. II, p. 102. 34 Ibid., vol. I, p. 21. 35 Ibid., vol. I, p. 20: ‘La plus belle, la plus agréable, et la plus nécessaire de toutes nos connoissances, est sans doute la connoissance de nous-mêmes. De toutes les sciences humaines, la science de l’homme est la plus digne de l’homme. Cependant cette science n’est pas la plus cultivée, ni la plus achevée que nous ayons: Le commun des hommes la néglige entiérement. Entre ceux mêmes qui se piquent de science, il y en a très peu qui s’y apppliquent, et il y en a encore beaucoup moins qui s’y appliquent avec succés.’ 36 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 488–91. ‘Grandeur’ and the mechanical philosophy 191

37 Ibid., vol. I, p. 282: ‘La connoissance des opinions est bien plus d’usage pour la conversation et pour étourdir les esprits du commun, que la connoissance de la véritable philosophie qu’on apprend en méditant.’ 38 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. L.Lafuma, in his Oeuvres complètes. Edition intégrale, Paris, Seuil, 1963, p. 525 (XV.199): ‘Car enfin qu’est ce que l’homme dans la nature? Un néant à l’égard de l’infini, un tout à l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et tout, infiniment éloigné de comprendre les extrêmes; la fin des choses et leurs principes sont pour lui invinciblement cachés dans un secret impénétrable.’ 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. The inefficacy of this device is ironically described by , in Zadig (1747), in Oeuvres complètes, 70 vols, Paris, 1785–9, vol. XLIV, p. 38: ‘Zadig dirigeait sa route sous les étoiles…Il admirait ses vastes globes de lumière qui ne paraissent que de faibles étincelles à nos yeux, tandis que la terre, qui n’est en effet qu’un point imperceptible dans la nature, paraît à notre cupidité quelque chose de si grand et de si noble. Il se figurait alors les hommes tels qu’ils sont en effet des insectes se dévorant les uns les autres sur un petit atome de boue. Cette image vraie semblait anéantir ses malheurs en lui retraçant le néant de son être…Son ame s’élançait jusque dans l’infini, et contemplait, détachée de ses sens, l’ordre immutable de l’univers. Mais lorsque ensuite, rendu à lui-même et rentrant dans son coeur, il pensait qu’Astarté était peut- être morte pour lui, l’univers disparaissait à ses yeux, et il ne voyait dans la nature entière qu’Astarté mourante et Zadig infortuné.’ 41 Malebranche, De la recherche, vol I, p. 91: ‘…à cause que ces animaux sont petits par rapport à nôtre corps, elle nous fait les considérer comme petits absolument, et ensuite comme méprisables à cause de leur petitesse, comme si les corps pouvoient être petits en eux-mêmes’. 42 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 90–1: ‘Les proportions de leurs membres sont aussi juste que celle des autres; et il semble même que Dieu ait voulu leur donner plus d’ornemens pour récompenser la petitesse de leur corps. Ils ont des couronnes, des aigrettes, et d’autres ajustemens sur leur tête, qui effacent tout ce que le luxe des hommes peut inventer; et je puis dire hardiment, que tous ceux qui ne se sont jamais servi que de leurs yeux, n’ont jamais rien vû de si beau, de si juste, ni même de si magnifique dans les maisons des plus grands princes, que ce qu’on voit avec des lunettes sur la tête d’une simple mouche. L’homme, par example, n’a qu’un cristallin dans chaque oeil, la mouche en a plus de mille, mais rangez avec un ordre et une justesse merveilleuse.’ 43 Walter Charleton, The Darkness of dispelled by the Light of Nature, London, 1652, pp. 66–7. 44 , Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, London, 1665. 45 Malebranche, De la recherche, vol. I, pp. 90–1. 46 Robert Boyle, Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of the Experimental Philosophy, Oxford, 1664, p. 36. 47 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 48 Margaret Cavendish, Observations on Experimental Philosophy, 2nd ed., London, 1668, p. 11 (II.3). 49 Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences, ed. F.Girbal and P.Clair, Paris, 192 Susan James

Presses Universitaires de France, 1966, p. 217: ‘Les mathematiques, dit Theodose, ont pour objet la grandeur, c’est à dire, tout ce qui peut être augmenté ou diminué.’ 50 Ibid., pp. 218–19: ‘…car par ce mot de grandeur on peut entendre non seulement les corps, mais encore le mouvement, les sons qui ne sont que des mouvemens de l’air, les tems et generalement tout ce qui peut être augmenté ou diminué’. 51 Ibid., pp. 220–35. 52 Ibid., p. 235: ‘On est convaincu à present qu’il est necessaire d’être bon mathematicien pour être bon philosophe.’ 10 Renaissance humanism, lingering Aristotelianism and the new natural philosophy Gassendi on final causes*

Margaret J.Osler

…and therefore one must acknowledge the assiduous craftsman rather than the rash hand of fortune.1

A common assertion in traditional historiography is the claim that an important aspect of the was the demise of Aristotelianism, which was characterized by a change in the concept of , a change which eliminated final causes from science. Two claims are embedded in this view: first, that natural philosophy completely abandoned Aristotelianism; and, second, that consequently final causes were eliminated from explanations of the natural world. Both of these claims must be seriously qualified. Close analysis of the thought of some of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution reveals that many aspects of Aristotelianism continued to play a role in seventeenth-century natural philosophy and, in particular, that many natural philosophers of the period believed that final causes have an important role in the explanation of natural phenomena. Earlier natural philosophy had rested on Aristotelian assumptions about causality and explanation. According to Aristotle, knowledge consists of understanding ‘the “why” of a thing’.2 A complete explanation involves understanding all four causes—the material, formal, efficient and final. Aristotle had believed that every natural process acts towards an ‘end or that for the sake of which a thing is done’.3 Depending on the nature of the thing to be explained, the end may be the actualization of a form, or it may be the deliberate goal of an intelligent agent, in which case it is imposed on something from outside.4 The finality of natural processes was a crucial part of scholastic natural philosophy and is the intellectual context within which early modern discussions of the role of final causes in physics took place.5

193 194 Margaret J.Osler

Final causes, at least immanent final causes, were problematic for the mechanical philosophy for several related reasons. The mechanical philosophy, as conceived in the programmatic writings of a number of its adherents, reduced all causality to the impact of particles of matter, that is, to the efficient cause.6 Accordingly, mechanical philosophers interpreted all causal action as external to the material particles. This view of causality was consistent with their almost universal adoption of Galileo’s new science of motion, which was based on the principle of inertia. An important of both the mechanical understanding of causality and the principle of inertia was a rejection of Aristotelian and scholastic substantial forms.7 Scholastic natural philosophers believed that these essences and substantial forms endow the substances possessing them with their causal efficacy.8 For example, the form of heaviness endows heavy bodies with the innate tendency to move downwards toward their natural place; and the substantial form of man endows him with thinking, or of horses with whinnying, or of fire with heating.9 Material substances thus possess their own principles of activity which were crucial to understanding their causal .10 Although most seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers rejected immanent final causes—in the sense of the actualization of forms—they accepted an idea of finality as imposed on nature from without. They did not reject final causes per se, but reinterpreted them within a new concept of nature. With the mechanical reinterpretation of final causes, the idea of individual natures that possess immanent finality was replaced with the idea of nature as a whole which is the product of the divine artificer. Nature becomes a work of art.11 One aspect of the mechanical philosophy that seventeenth-century natural philosophers found unacceptable was the Epicurean idea that the world resulted from the random collision of atoms. In one way or another, most mechanical philosophers rejected any cosmogony based on mere chance and insisted on the action of divine providence in the world.12 An important way of demonstrating the existence of providence was appeal to an argument from design which they interpreted as evidence of divine purpose in the created world. This divine purpose endowed natural processes with finality. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), along with other seventeenth-century natural philosophers, including William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, argued that final causes play an important role in physics. Gassendi’s discussion of final causes forms part of his project to Christianize Epicurean atomism. He intended his reworking of Epicureanism to serve as a complete Gassendi on final causes 195 philosophy to replace Aristotelianism. To this end, he devoted much of his writing to the articulation of a revised version of Epicurean atomism. Writing in a humanist mode, Gassendi sought an ancient model on which to build a new philosophy of nature.13 The classical options available to him included Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics and the Epicureans. One might well ask why Gassendi, a Catholic priest, undertook the task of reviving and Christianizing the most flagrantly pagan of the ancient philosophies, that of . Gassendi’s own writings are not very helpful on this score. The first indications of his interest in restoring Epicurus come from the early 1620s. In his earliest preserved letter, he mentions that he possesses a copy of Lucretius, Epicurus’s Roman expositor, although he says nothing about having read the book.14 His first published work, the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), reveals not only his acquaintance with Epicureanism, but also his desire to expound it, at least in ethics, in proposed future writings.15 The reasons for this interest, however, remain somewhat obscure. One possible explanation for Gassendi’s choice of Epicurus lies in the seemingly paradoxical fact that he found it easier to accommodate Epicureanism than any other ancient philosophy to his voluntarist theology and providential ethics:16 ‘I seemed to observe that many more difficulties are far more easily explained from his [Epicurus’s] physics of atoms and the void and from his morality of pleasure than from the positions of the other philosophers.’17 But Gassendi’s humanism was not the whole story. It was mitigated by his theological . Gassendi did not approve of all of Epicurus’s propositions and regarded even those he approved of as merely probable;18 he did, however, think that they could be modified to conform to the truths of religion. In this paper, I consider Gassendi’s relationship to his ancient authority, by examining the voices of Gassendi and Epicurus—usually as conveyed by Lucretius—in the text of the Syntagma philosophicum, focusing on the question of whether there is a role for final causes in physics. What emerges is Gassendi’s deep ambivalence towards his ancient model. Gassendi’s humanist style is clear in his use of classical authors to lend authority to his own ideas. In addition to citing classical authors as authorities, Gassendi masked his debates with his contemporaries in dialogues between the ancients. For example, in Book III of the ‘Ethics’, Gassendi argued against Hobbes’s determinism in a passage which is a virtual dialogue between Democritus, who represented Hobbes, and Epicurus, who spoke for Gassendi.19 Unlike his fellow mechanical philosopher Descartes, Gassendi did not attempt to construct absolute foundations from which 196 Margaret J.Osler to derive a consistent and complete philosophy. Instead, he wrote as a participant in a dialogue with all the canonical figures of ancient philosophy.20 Advocating atomism as a philosophy of nature, Gassendi invoked the authority of Lucretius, whose book-length epic poem, , is the most exhaustive ancient account of Epicureanism. Many of the double-columned pages of the Syntagma philosophicum contain more verses from Lucretius than sentences by Gassendi. In this respect, he wrote as a typical Renaissance humanist, seeking to invoke ancient authority as support for his own philosophical position.21 Even when he used Lucretius to bolster his position, however, Gassendi frequently added his own arguments, often drawn from observation and even experiment. When Lucretius endorsed positions inimical to his theological presuppositions, Gassendi spoke in his own voice, freely criticizing, arguing against and modifying the views of his ancient authority. Furthermore, despite his passionate rejection of Aristotelianism, which was evident in the Exercitationes, Gassendi drew on scholastic Aristotelianism, as well as incorporating many results of the natural philosophy of his own day. The result was a Christianized Epicureanism, an eclectic philosophy which can rightly be called Gassendi’s. Most of the changes Gassendi introduced into atomism reflected his theological concerns, particularly his insistence on the fact that God created the world, that he rules it providentially and that his wisdom can be discerned in the signs of design in the world. These concerns were reflected in the following modifications of Epicurean atomism: Gassendi believed that God created the atoms and set them into motion, therefore they are not eternally existent and self-moving as Epicurus had maintained; he claimed that although the number of atoms is very large, it is not infinite as Epicurus had maintained; he objected to the Epicurean swerve or clinamen as not adequately explaining free will, replacing it with a doctrine of human free will and God’s freedom to intervene in the world he created; he set definite boundaries on the extent to which the world could be understood mechanically, arguing that the rational human soul is immaterial and therefore immortal. These points are well known and have been thoroughly discussed in a number of important studies.22 Gassendi’s atoms are perfectly full, solid, hard, indivisible particles.23 Because they are so small that they fall below the threshold of sense, he had to argue for their existence and for their indivisibility indirectly by appealing to commonly observed phenomena from which he reasoned to the unobserved properties of atoms. Closely following Lucretius in this transdictive manoeuvre, Gassendi noted that various Gassendi on final causes 197 commonly observed phenomena lend support to the existence of atoms.24 Wind is evidence that invisible matter can produce visible, physical effects. So is the fact that paving stones and ploughshares gradually wear away because of constant rubbing even though individual acts of rubbing produce no discernible change. Similarly, the passage of odours through the air can be explained in terms of tiny particles travelling from the original body to the nose.25 How do we know that the tiny particles which constitute the paving stones and odours are actually indivisible atoms? If such indivisible atoms did not exist, it would be necessary to postulate the infinite divisibility of matter. Infinite divisibility seemed to Gassendi, as it had to Epicurus, to lead to a host of absurdities, including Zeno’s paradoxes.26 Therefore, there must be a finite limit to the process of dividing matter. Indivisible atoms must exist.27 They are indivisible because they are perfectly full and contain no void. In all these arguments, Gassendi follows his ancient model and cites him freely. What are the properties of these atoms? Magnitude and shape, resistance or solidity, and heaviness are the properties Gassendi ascribed to atoms.28 He extrapolated from a number of observed phenomena to argue for the extreme smallness of atoms. Going beyond Lucretius, he utilized new empirical evidence, noting that the complex world revealed by the microscope, the recently invented instrument which Gassendi, like Fabio Colonna, called the ‘Engyscopius’, lent credence to his claim that atoms are minute.29 Microscopic observation reveals that particles of flour are complex, consisting of diversely shaped parts and that the tiny mite possesses a number of distinct organs. The dispersion of a small quantity of pigment in a large quantity of water leads to the conclusion that the pigment is composed of minute particles. Gassendi drew a similar conclusion from the fact that a smouldering green log will continue to issue smoke for over eight hours. The microscope also reveals that small particles of things possess a great diversity of shapes. These facts, coupled with the observation that no two grains or leaves or hands are precisely the same shape, led him to conclude that the atoms themselves are variously shaped.30 Indeed, the fact that crystals of different substances are differently, but regularly shaped—the crystals of salt being cubical, those of pure alum being octahedral—and the fact that these crystals grow from smaller crystals of the same shape, seem to justify the transdictive conclusion that the tiniest particles of salt or of pure alum have the same shape as the macroscopic crystals.31 Although atoms come in a variety of shapes, he thought that there were only a finite number of such shapes. Following Lucretius, he argued that the 198 Margaret J.Osler multitude of things in the world can be produced from a finite number of kinds of atoms in the same combinatorial way that the complexities of language can be produced from only twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet.32 In addition to the geometrical properties of size and shape, atoms possess two properties necessary for them to be the material principle of things, resistance or solidity and weight. Solidity or resistance, which is really the impenetrability of matter, is necessary in order for atoms to be material and to act by contact.33 Their resistance or solidity, along with their magnitude, distinguishes them both from mathematical points and from incorporeal entities—God, angels and the human soul. Atoms also possess an innate weight (pondus) or heaviness (gravitas). He considered this weight to be a natural or internal faculty or force by which the atoms can move. Unlike Epicurus, who had considered the propensity for motion to be innate to atoms, Gassendi believed that atoms are mobile and active because of the power of moving and acting that God instilled in them at their creation. If their mobility and activity were innate, atomism might well lead to materialism. Rather, their mobility and activity function only with divine assent, ‘for just as he conserves everything, so he acts together with all things’.34 Although motion is imposed on atoms by God, their motion persists perpetually. Atoms, Gassendi concluded, must be accepted as the material principle of things. God created them at the beginning, and then he fashioned the first things he created from atoms. All subsequent generation and corruption and all change result from the motion, impact, and rearrangement of the original atoms.35 Since atoms constitute the material principle of the natural world, questions about causality were transformed into questions about the interaction of atoms. According to Gassendi, the activity of atoms lies in their motion. Hence, the action of causes is simply the motion of atoms.36 Although God, the first cause, does not act by any motion of his own but rather by his mere command, by his command he instills motion and hence activity into the atoms.37 Gassendi thus reduced all physical change to the local motion of atoms. Where Aristotle in the Physics had enumerated several kinds of change—growth, decay, generation, corruption and qualitative change—Gassendi reduced them all to the motions of atoms.38 Atoms communicate their motions to each other by contact and collision, thus making impact the primary agent of change in the physical world. In some instances, contact between the mover and the moved is not evident, for example, in the case of magnetic attraction or the transmission of heat from fire. Nevertheless, contact Gassendi on final causes 199 does occur, at the invisible, atomic level.39 There is no action at a distance in the world that Gassendi conceived. Although Epicureanism was the primary source of Gassendi’s philosophy of nature, at least in his programmatic writings,40 his atomism was in fact marked by other, non-Epicurean philosophies of nature. The picture of Gassendi that emerges from a consideration of his natural philosophical writings is more complex than simply that of the reviver and baptizer of Epicurus. There is no doubt that the restoration of Epicureanism as a replacement for Aristotelianism was his central project; but it turns out that remnants of Aristotelianism continued to influence his thinking. Gassendi devoted the first section of the ‘Physics’, entitled ‘De rebus naturae universe’, to an exposition of the general principles upon which his natural philosophy was to be established: his theories of time and space, the material principle of things, the efficient principle of things, motion and change, and qualities. In this theoretical or programmatic part of the Syntagma philosophicum, he attempted to translate the fundamental components of Aristotelian physics into the language of atomism. In this way, Aristotelianism continued to set the agenda for Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurus. This fact signals the need for a serious reconsideration of the role of lingering Aristotelianism in the Scientific Revolution. In the section entitled The Efficient Principle or The Causes of Things’, particularly in the chapter on the kinds of causes necessary for physics, Gassendi gives his account of causality.41 Beginning with an account of Aristotle’s four-fold analysis of causation, Gassendi states that Aristotle himself defined nature by the word ‘efficient’, since it is the principle of motion and rest.42 Form and matter, Gassendi argues, do not suffice to explain why things happen, but efficient causes do. Thus, it is efficient causes with which natural philosophers must be concerned. Now, some philosophers have tried to remove all final causes from nature. Empedocles, Democritus and Epicurus are examples of philosophers who claimed that nature acts blindly, driven by the necessity of either matter or form. Their denial of finality cannot be right, he argues, because everything in nature proclaims the of the first cause, God.43 Comparing the intelligence with which nature has been created with the skill embodied in the design of a clock, Gassendi points to the perfect design of the parts of animals as exhibiting the wisdom and purpose with which the world has been created. Thus, some of God’s ends can be known by observing the creation.44 In a chapter entitled ‘On the Use of the Parts in Animals’, Gassendi argues that the exquisite manner in which the parts of animals are 200 Margaret J.Osler suited to their functions can only be understood as the product of .45 After summarizing Epicurus’s denial of finality in nature,46 Gassendi enlists the arguments of (who directly countered Epicurus in On the Workmanship of God, or the Formation of Man), Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Galen to support his rejection of Epicurus.47 Gassendi insists that the world is the product of intelligent design rather than the chance collision of atoms.48 Drawing heavily on Aristotle and Galen to demonstrate the usefulness of the parts of animals, he states that: There is no [part of an animal] to which, if you gave it a tongue, would not proclaim the providence by which it was formed and appointed for such a use.’49 Gassendi had explicitly claimed a role for final causes in physics in the context of his criticisms of Descartes in the ‘Objections and Replies’, following the publication of the Meditations in 1641. The particular context of the discussion was their disagreement about how to prove the . Gassendi criticized the logic of Descartes’s proof in great detail, his fundamental objection being that one cannot validly argue from the idea of a thing to its existence.50 In rejecting Descartes’s a priori proof for the existence of God, Gassendi emphasized that he rejected neither the existence of God nor the possibility of proving his existence. He affirmed the existence of God and supported his belief with the argument from design.51 Descartes’s rejection of final causes in physics seemed to Gassendi to pose the danger of rejecting

the principal argument by which the wisdom, providence, power and even the existence of God can be established by the light of nature. For leaving aside the entire universe, as well as the heavens and its other principal parts, from what are you better able to argue than from the parts of plants, animals, men and of yourself (or your body), in which you bear the likeness of God?52

Gassendi noted further

that several great men, by considering the of the human body, not only rose to a knowledge of God, but also sang a hymn to his glory, because he has accommodated and placed all the parts according to their use in such a way that we must admire absolutely his incomparable ingenuity and providence.53

Replying to Descartes’s insistence that we must consider only the physical causes and that ‘it is rashness to investigate God’s ends’, Gassendi on final causes 201

Gassendi asserted that we can observe that the end of the valves in the heart is to ensure one-way flow of blood, even though no one can understand, let alone explain, ‘the anterior condition of the matter out of which he constitutes them, or from where he obtains it’.54 Recognizing their ends, even without understanding how they were formed, induces us to admire the providence of the creator. Descartes was not convinced. ‘Whatever you adduce in favour of the final cause’, he said,

must refer to the efficient cause. Thus, from the use of the parts in plants, animals, etc., it is reasonable to admire God, who made them, and from inspection of his works to recognize and glorify the workman, but not to divine for what end he created each thing.55

Descartes concluded that all divine ends are ‘hidden in the inscrutable abyss of his wisdom’.56 Did Gassendi contradict himself by reducing all causes to efficient causes while simultaneously arguing that there is an important role for final causes in physics? I think not. Note that Gassendi, who explicitly rejected both the Aristotelian metaphysics of matter and form, which he replaced with a mechanical explanation of natural processes, and Epicurean chance as the cause of the world, considered finality to be imposed supernaturally by a providential God:

…we agree that atoms are indeed the matter of things, in whatever manner the earth is first constituted from them… Nevertheless, we declare that such atoms were not uncreated but rather created by the most powerful Author; that neither the earth nor anything else was constituted and formed from the concourse of their fortuitous collision but rather according to the design of the Author, who most wisely brought them together into a single mass; nor was it by chance that other things such as animals were created throughout the earth and seeds were scattered, but rather by the blessing of the Author, as when he commanded the earth to produce plants and animals; nor did the structure of their parts come about fortuitously, but rather they were created as the Author wanted and acquired such parts as he ordained for the condition of each seed.57

Finality does not come from the nature of any created thing since there are no such natures or essences in Gassendi’s world.58 The purpose 202 Margaret J.Osler evident in natural processes is divine purpose, imposed from without. Descartes’s criticism—that what Gassendi called final causes are really just efficient causes—was, in a sense, on the mark. Although this move may seem to contradict Gassendi’s stated position, it does not because the final causes of which he wrote were not immanent final causes. Rather, they were God’s purposes, imposed on nature from without, and can therefore be understood as efficient causes.59 Gassendi wrote: ‘We see in the animal, in the plant and in other things that all parts are…appropriately accommodated to certain ends.’60 Hence, the natural world really contains only efficient causes, even if some of them express divine purpose. Descartes’s assertion—and Gassendi’s assent—that the claim to know final causes implies a claim to know God’s purposes reflected the late scholastic view that ‘final causality is…always dependent on rational cognition, human, angelic or divine’.61 How does God impress his purposes onto nature? The answer to this question lies in important modifications that Gassendi made to Epicurean atomism. Gassendi’s matter theory was based on the Epicurean idea that the physical world consists of perfectly solid atoms moving in void space. He modified the Epicurean theory to render it compatible with his theological presuppositions. Accordingly he denied the eternity of the world, declaring instead that God had created the atoms, that he had impressed motion upon them, that he rules the universe providentially, that the human soul is immaterial and immortal, and that his wisdom and goodness can be discerned in the design of plants and animals.62 In addition to these global modifications to Epicureanism, Gassendi introduced more detailed changes into the theory of matter in order to account for such phenomena as the formation of crystals and the generation of plants and animals. Specifically, he introduced a notion of seminal forces or seeds drawn from the chemical writers Petrus Severinus, Étienne de Clave and J.B.van Helmont.63 Developing classical atomism, Gassendi elaborated a hierarchical theory of matter according to which sensible bodies (res concretae) are formed from clusters of atoms which he called ‘corpuscles’ (corpusculae) or ‘molecules’ (moleculae). He stated that these corpuscles or molecules are ‘the seeds of things’ (semina rerum).64 According to Bloch, Gassendi originally used the terms ‘molecules’ and ‘seeds’ as synonyms, endowing them with a strictly mechanical nature. But later (after 1644), he attempted to derive their activity solely from gravitas, the apparently innate mobility of atoms. He did not regard these seeds as living things, just as he denied life to the Gassendi on final causes 203 atoms themselves. But he did endow them with finality and thus introduced elements of into his atomism.65 Gassendi rejected Epicurus’s claim that the mobilitas of atoms is innate. Instead, he argued that God had created this mobilitas when he created the atoms, thus endowing them with the energy that permits them to produce all the effects observed in the world. Similarly, in order to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals by means of generation, God had created the first semina of all things, clusters of atoms endowed with mechanical properties enabling them to subsist and to assimilate exterior atoms and thus to reproduce themselves in such a way that they bring about generation.66 These semina explain the finality manifest in the biological process of reproduction and the intelligent design evident in the parts of plants and animals.67 In order to explain how God imposes his design on the creation, Gassendi appropriated ideas from the chemists and Paracelsians, and translated them into terms apparently consistent with his atomism. Appealing only to the properties of atoms and the laws governing their motions—both of which God created in the beginning—he explained the finality he perceived in the phenomena of the natural world. Gassendi’s ideas about final causes reveal him to be a mitigated humanist. On the one hand, he used Lucretius as his ancient model; on the other, this model was not beyond criticism. Despite Gassendi’s use of humanist methods, he advocated an empiricist for natural philosophy.68 He often appealed to empirical and even experimental results to support his arguments.69 Although he used an ancient model, in terms of which he worked out his philosophical position, he was not simply a humanist. He was a powerful advocate of post-Copernican natural philosophy; he was also deeply educated in scholastic philosophy and held thoroughly articulated theological views. Despite the humanist appearance of his text, his own voice can be heard judging the very classics he cited to lend authority to his views. In this way he was transitional—not wholly a reviver of ancient texts, but not quite cutting ‘the cord that tied philosophy to humanism’.70

Notes * I am grateful to Margaret G.Cook for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Jill Kraye’s careful editing saved me from some serious linguistic errors. Portions of the research for this paper were supported by a Fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 204 Margaret J.Osler

1 Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, 6 vols, Lyon, 1658; facsimile reprint Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, Friedrich Frommann, 1964, vol. II, p. 234: ‘…agnoscendumque idcirco esse industrium potius artificem, quam temerariam fortunae manum’. 2 Aristotle, Physics, 194b19, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1984, vol. I, p. 332. 3 Ibid., 194a33; p. 332. 4 Ibid., 192b9–194b15; p. 332. 5 For an account of the Aristotelian concept of final cause, the distinction between ends and final causes, and the history of these concepts in late , see D.Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought, Ithaca, N.Y., and London, Cornell University Press, 1996, chap. 6. 6 Although the mechanical philosophers’ reduction of all causality to the efficient causality of impact seems like an obvious point (what else could the mechanical philosophers have possibly intended?), this is a point worth restating. For an analytic treatment of the concepts involved, see A.Pyle, Atomism and Its Critics, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1995, pp. 640–50. 7 See M.J.Osler, ‘Galileo, motion, and essences’, Isis, 1973, vol. 64, pp. 504–9. 8 Des Chene, Physiologia, p. 66: ‘[The substantial form] is…the principle . …of all the active powers of a thing, and thus of its operations.’ 9 Ibid., p. 72. 10 J.A.Van Ruler makes the point that it was the absence of this internal source of activity which made Cartesianism seem so implausible to Descartes’s late scholastic critics, Gisbertus Voetius and Martin Schoock; see his The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes, on God, Nature, and Change, Leiden, Brill, 1995. 11 For a fuller discussion of these points see M.J.Osler, ‘From immanent natures to nature as artifice: The reinterpretation of final causes in seventeenth-century natural philosophy’, The Monist, 1996, vol. 79, pp. 388–407. 12 For different approaches to providence in seventeenth-century natural philosophy see M.J.Osler, ‘Triangulating divine will: Henry More, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes on God’s relationship to the Creation’, in M. Baldi (ed.), Stoicismo e Origenismo nella filosofia del seicento inglese, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 1996, pp. 75–87. 13 I follow P.O.Kristeller, here, in defining Renaissance humanism, not in terms of a particular philosophical view, but in terms of the regard for the authors of classical Greece and Rome; see his Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. M.Mooney, New York, Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 24–5: ‘It was the novel contribution of the humanists to add the firm belief that in order to write and to speak well it was necessary to study and to imitate the ancients.’ See also his ‘Humanism’, in C.B.Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 113–37. On the interpretation of Renaissance humanism see W.K.Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948. For the various historical interpretations of humanism in modern scholarship see D.Weinstein, ‘In whose image and likeness? Interpretations of Renaissance humanism’, Gassendi on final causes 205

Journal of the History of Ideas, 1972, vol. 33, pp. 165–76. See also J.Kraye, ‘Philologists and philosophers’, in J.Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 142–60. On Gassendi’s humanism and its difference from the earlier humanism of Lorenzo Valla see L.S. Joy, ‘Epicureanism in Renaissance philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, vol. 53, pp. 573–83, and her Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, chaps 1–4; and B.Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1987, pp. 48–51. 14 Gassendi to Pybrac, April 1621, in Opera omnia, vol. VI, p. 1. 15 B.Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Epicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619– 1658, Paris, Vrin, 1944, pp. 2, 22–5 and 34–40. Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens (Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos) [Books I and II], trans. and ed. B. Rochot, Paris, Vrin, 1959, pp. 14–15; and Opera omnia, vol. III, pp. 103–4. 16 L.T.Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe, Ithaca, N.Y., and London, Cornell University Press, 1996. See also G. Paganini, ‘Epicurisme et philosophie au XVIIème siècle: convention, utilité et droit selon Gassendi’, Studi filosofici, 1989–90, vol. 12–13, pp. 5–45. 17 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 30: ‘Et videri quidem potest Epicurus arridere prae caeteris, quod illius mores purgare aggressus, deprehendere mihi visus fuerim posse ex Physica eius positione de Inani et Atomis, et ex Morali de Voluptate, difficultates longe plureis, longeque expeditius, quam ex aliorum Philosophorum positionibus explicari…’ 18 Ibid.: ‘…at non idcirco aut probo omnia, quae illius sunt, etiam Religionem non attinentia Placita; aut quae probo non sic amplector, ut indubia, certaque habeam, et non consistere ea potius intra limites verisimilitudinis ducam’. 19 Ibid., vol. II, pp. 830–2. See Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, pp. 136–41. 20 See Joy, Gassendi the Atomist. 21 A.Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 26–7: ‘One set of humanists seeks to make the ancient world live again, assuming its undimmed relevance and unproblematic accessibility; another set seeks to put the ancient texts back into their own time, admitting that reconstruction of the past is difficult and that success may reveal the irrelevance of ancient experience and precept to modern problems.’ 22 See O.R.Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; Brundell, Pierre Gassendi; Joy, Gassendi the Atomist; Rochot, Travaux de Gassendi; M.J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, chaps 2 and 3. 23 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 257–8. 24 Lucretius presents his arguments for the existence of atoms in De rerum natura, I. 265–328. 25 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 259. 26 On Epicurus’s arguments see A.A.Long and D.N.Sedley, The Hellenistic 206 Margaret J.Osler

Philosophers, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, vol. I, pp. 41–2. See also Lucretius, De rerum natura, I.615–27. 27 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 258 and 263–6. Joy discusses the issue of infinite divisibility at some length in Gassendi the Atomist, chap. 7. 28 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 266. 29 Ibid, p. 269. Gassendi’s reasoning here was typical of seventeenth-century arguments in defence of the corpuscular theory and atomism. See C.H. Lüthy, Atomism, Lynceus, and the fate of seventeenth-century microscopy’, Early Science and Medicine, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 1–27, at 4. 30 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 268. 31 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 270–1. 32 Ibid., vol. I, p. 272. The analogy between atoms and letters of the alphabet goes back at least to Lucretius, De rerum natura, I.823–7, 912–14; II.688–94, 1013–18. 33 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 232. 34 Ibid., p. 280: ‘ut omnia conservat, ita coagit rebus omnibus.’ The activity of Gassendi’s matter is discussed by M.Messeri, Causa e spiegazione: la fisica di Pierre Gassendi, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 1985, pp. 74–93, and by Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, pp. 210–229. I disagree with Bloch, who argues (p. 214) that Gassendi favoured the activity of matter, finding in it the basis for materialism on which he superimposed a creationist theology. Even Bloch allows that in the chapter ‘De motu et mutatione rerum’ Gassendi returned to a Galilean, inertial concept of motion. I think that it is truer to the texts to interpret Gassendi as taking theological matters very seriously and modifying classical atomism to meet theological demands rather than to see him—as Bloch does—as a closet materialist. 35 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 280. 36 Ibid., pp. 336–8. 37 Ibid., p. 334. 38 Ibid., pp. 362–4. 39 Ibid. 40 Mainly Part I of the ‘Physics’ of the Syntagma philosophicum: ibid., pp. 133– 94. 41 Ibid., pp. 283–337. 42 Citing Aristotle’s Physics, II.1 and 3, Gassendi wrote: ‘Ex quo obiter intelliges, quamobrem Aristoteles iisdem verbis Efficiens, Naturamque definiat, ut utrumque nempe sit motus, quietisque principium; quippe cum Efficiens idem sit cum Forma, quae Natura est, et quam quod obtinet (ac simul materiam) dicitur naturam habere’: ibid., p. 285. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 286. This use of the argument from design—that the observed orderliness of the world could not have come about by efficient causes alone— was commonly used by the late Aristotelian natural philosophers; see Des Chene, Physiologia, p. 178. 45 Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. II, pp. 226–36. 46 Ibid., pp. 226–8. 47 Ibid., pp. 229–35. Gassendi on final causes 207

48 Ibid., pp. 234–5. 49 Ibid., p. 235: ‘Quippe nullum est, cui si linguam dones, non clamat Providentiam, qua formatum fuerit, destinatumque ad talem usum.’ 50 Pierre Gassendi, Disquisitio metaphysica seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa, ed. and trans. B. Rochot, Paris, Vrin, 1962, pp. 468–9; see also Gassendi, Opera omnia, vol. III, pp. 326–7. 51 Ibid., pp. 302–3; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, p. 337. 52 Ibid., pp. 396–7, in Opera omnia, vol. III, p. 358: ‘…ne praecipuum argumentum rejicias, quo divina Sapientia, Providentia, Potentia, atque adeo exsistentia lumine naturae stabiliri potest. Quippe ut Mundum universum, ut Caelum et alias ejus praecipuas partes praeteream, undenam, aut quomodo melius argumentari valeas, quam ex usu partium in plantis, in animalibus, in hominibus in teipsa [te ipso in Opera omnia] (aut corpore tuo) quae similitudinem Dei geris.’ 53 Ibid.; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, pp. 358: ‘Videmus profecto, magnos quosque viros ex speculatione Anatomica corporis humani non assurgere modo ad Dei notitiam, sed hymnum quoque ipsi canere, quod omnes patres ita conformaverit, collocaveritque ad usus, ut sit omnino propter solertiam atque providentiam incomparabilem commendandus.’ 54 Ibid.; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, pp. 358–9: ‘Dicis temeritatem esse investigare fines Dei’ ‘Sed cum nemo mortalium possit intelligere, nedum explicare, quod agens formet collocetque, eo quo observamus modo, valvulas illas, quae ad vasorum orificia in sinubus cordis constitutae sunt; cujus conditionis aut unde mutuetur materiam ex qua illas elaborat…’ 55 Ibid., pp. 398–9; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, p. 359: ‘Quaecumque deinde affers pro causa finali, ad efficientem sunt referenda; ita ex usu partium in plantis, in animalibus, etc. effectorem Deum mirari, et ex inspectione operum cognoscere, ac glorificare opificem par est, non autem quo fine quidque fecerit divinare.’ See also René Descartes, Principia philosophiae, in his Oeuvres, ed. C.Adam and P.Tannery, 11 vols, Paris, Vrin, 1897–1983, vol. VIII, 1, pp. 80–1; vol. IX, 2, p. 104. 56 Gassendi, Disquisitio metaphysica, pp. 398–9; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, p. 359: ‘…omnes enim in imperscrutabili ejus sapientiae abysso sunt. …reconditi’. 57 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. II, pp. 234–5: ‘Utcumque enim materiam rerum Atomos esse concedamus…declaravimus tamen taleis Atomos neque fuisse ingenitas, sed a potentissimo Authore creatas; neque terram, quidpiamve aliud ex concursu earum fortuito coaluisse, constitisseque; sed pro Authoris consilio, qui illas sapientissime in unam molem conduxerit; neque fuisse casu, ut aliarum rerum, ita Animalium per terram creata, et respersaque semina, sed Authoris benedictione, tum cum iussit Terrae, ut Plantas, et Animalia produceret; aut sortita fuisse membrorum conformationem fortuitam; sed procreata fuisse qualia Author voluit; ac taleis parteis obtinuisse, qualeis pro seminis cujusque conditione ille disposuit.’ 58 Gassendi, Exercitationes, pp. 280–1; see also Opera omnia, vol. III, p. 159. 59 According to Des Chene, Physiologia, p. 187, Gassendi’s argument follows the same line earlier laid out by Ockham and Buridan ‘that the final cause acts 208 Margaret J.Osler

only by virtue of existing in the intellect of an agent’ and ‘that when it acts thus, it acts as an efficient cause, and that where the agent is not such as to conceive the ends by which it acts, there is no final cause at all, only efficient causes’. 60 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 285–6. ‘Videmus certe in Animali, in planta, in caeteris rebus, parteis omneis ad certos fineis…congrue accommodari…’ 61 Des Chene, Physiologia, p. 200. 62 For a complete exposition of Gassendi’s atomism see Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, chap. 8. 63 See Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, chaps 8 and 14; and A.Clericuzio, ‘A redefinition of Boyle’s corpuscular philosophy’, Annals of Science, 1990, vol. 47, pp. 561–89. 64 He stated that the atoms constitute ‘corpuscula quaedam composita subtilissima, moleculasve tenuissimas, ac infra sensus consistenteis, quae sint quasi semina rerum’: Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, p. 472. See also Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, p. 252 n. 75. 65 Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, pp. 267–8; Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. II, p. 114. On other elements of animism in his natural philosophy see M.J.Osler, ‘Fish lines, sky hooks, and vapor trails: Non-Epicurean themes in Gassendi’s atomism’, in J.Murdoch and W.R.Newman (eds), Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theory, forthcoming. 66 Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, pp. 447–8; Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 485, 488, 493. 67 Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, p. 448; Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 315–17. 68 Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, chap. 4. 69 For example, in his argument for the existence of the void he made extensive use of recent experiments with the mercury barometer; see Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, vol. I, pp. 185–228. 70 B.P.Copenhaver and C.B.Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 285. 11 Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism

James Hankins

The great astronomer and physicist mentions Plato many times in his writings, but the most famous passages are undoubtedly those in his two major works, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and Two New Sciences (1638), where he makes Plato the inspiration of his own, Galilean, cosmogony. In the Dialogue, speaking through his interlocutor Salviati, he writes:

We may therefore say that straight motion serves to transport materials for the construction of a work; but this, once constructed, is to rest immovable—or if movable, is to move only circularly. Unless we wish to say with Plato that these world bodies, after their creation and the establishment of the whole, were for a certain time set in straight motion by their Maker [Fattore]. Then later, reaching certain definite places, they were set in rotation one by one, passing from straight to circular motion, and have ever since been preserved and maintained in this. A sublime concept, and worthy indeed of Plato, which I remember having heard discussed by our friend, the Lincean Academician [i.e., Galileo himself].

Salviati then goes on to report Galileo’s cosmogonic theory in detail, ending thus:

This assumed, let us suppose God to have created the planet Jupiter, for example, upon which He had determined to confer such-and-such a velocity, to be kept perpetually uniform forever after. We may say with Plato that at the beginning He gave it a straight and accelerated motion; and later, when it had arrived at that degree of velocity, converted its straight motion into circular motion whose speed thereafter was naturally uniform.1

209 210 James Hankins

In Two New Sciences he gives a similar account (the interlocutor Sagredo is speaking):

Pause, I pray you, because it seems to me proper to adorn the Author’s [Galileo’s] thought here with its conformity to a conception of Plato’s regarding the determination of the various speeds of equable motion in the celestial motions of revolution. Perhaps entertaining the idea that a movable cannot pass from rest to any determinate degree of speed, in which it must then equably perpetuate itself, except by passing through all the other lesser degrees of speed (or let us say of greater slowness) that come between the assigned degree and the highest [degree] of slowness, which is rest, he said that God, after having created the movable celestial bodies, in order to assign to them those speeds with which they must be moved perpetually in equable circular motion, made them depart from rest and move through determinate spaces in that natural straight motion in which we sensibly see our movables to be moved from the state of rest, successively accelerating. And he added that these having been made to gain that degree [of speed] which it pleased God that they should maintain forever, He turned their straight motion into circulation, the only kind [of motion] that is suitable to be conserved equably, turning always without retreat from or approach toward any pre-established goal desired by them. The conception is truly worthy of Plato, and is to be the more esteemed to the extent that its foundations, of which Plato remained silent, but which were discovered by our Author in removing their poetical mask or semblance, show it in the guise of a true story [‘con levargli la maschera o sembianza poetica, lo scuoprono in aspetto di verace istoria’].2

Galileo’s conception seems to be that God, after creating the six planets at a place some distance from the sun, let them fall with a straight and accelerating motion towards the sun, until they each reached a point where their several velocities of fall equalled that of their eventual orbital motions; at that point the Creator converted their motion from accelerating rectilinear motion to circular, uniform motion. The theory, as Newton and others pointed out already in the seventeenth century, does not work. For this reason it was long doubted that Galileo’s ‘Platonic’ cosmogony could have been based on actual calculations, as he claimed; but it was shown by Stillman Drake some years ago that the Florentine scientist had worked on this problem Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 211 perhaps as early as 1596, when it was suggested to him by a reading of the Prodromus of the Neoplatonic astronomer .3 In reflecting on the means by which the circular motion of the planets could be mathematically reduced to the rectilinear motions of the sublunary world, he hit on the idea of conceiving the planetary orbits as parabolic functions derivable from a composition of uniform horizontal and accelerated vertical motion. The theory is essentially an attempt to explain how God could have created circular motion (or, according to another interpretation, why certain cosmic motions cannot be explained without appeal to divine intervention); it aims to show, for reasons to be explained in due course, how circular motion can be derived from rectilinear motions. Though these are the most famous references to Plato in Galileo’s works, they are by no means the clearest. Indeed, they are notoriously obscure. Already in 1634, two years after the Dialogue was published, Abbé Mersenne and his friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc were scratching their heads, wondering where in the works of Plato Galileo had found such a conception.4 It may be the case that the failure of his readers to discover any text of Plato behind the cosmogony of 1632 was what led Galileo, in his later work, to add the remark that Plato had hidden it under ‘a poetical mask or semblance’. At any rate, the question of Galileo’s source has continued to baffle scholars down to the present day. The reigning view is perhaps most fully expressed in an article by Samuel Sambursky which appeared in Isis in 1962. Sambursky assumes (like all other students of the problem) that the text behind Galileo’s theory is Plato’s Timaeus. He argues that Galileo put together several passages of the latter work, the most important being the passage at 38C–39A describing the creation of the planets and the origin of their motion:

When the beings jointly needed for the production of time [i.e., the planets and sun] had been given their appropriate motion and had become living creatures with their bodies bound by the ties of soul, they started to move with the motion of the Different, which traverses that of the Same obliquely and is subject to it, some in larger circles, some in smaller, those with the smaller circles moving faster, those with the larger moving more slowly.5

According to Sambursky, Galileo must have combined this passage with a later one (at 43B) where Plato describes the confusion experienced by human nature at its creation owing to the combination of the circular motions of soul with the rectilinear motions of the body.6 212 James Hankins

At the same time he admits that, even in combination, these passages from the Timaeus are rather remote from the actual cosmogony described by Galileo and concludes that he simply resorted to invention: ‘Carried away by his enthusiasm for the idea that the laws of falling bodies may have been instrumental in the creation of the solar system he took the same of exegesis in interpreting a Platonic text [as he had when using] his ingenuity as an exegete of Scripture to read the Copernican theory into the Bible.’7 I mention what has become known as the ‘Galileo-Plato problem’ because it provides an interesting test case for the study of Galileo’s ‘Platonism’. The extent of the great astronomer’s debt to Platonism is, of course, a venerable problem in the historical scholarship on early modern science, one which now boasts a sizeable bibliography. In the older literature (as exemplified by Sambursky) there is a tendency to approach the problem unhistorically. Writers such as E.A.Burtt, Alistair Crombie and even , not to mention a host of lesser mortals, take the comparandum to be the writings of Plato as interpreted by the not-always-bright lights of modern scholarship. They try to estimate Galileo’s debt to Plato by finding in the former doctrines attributed to the latter by modern scholarship. The same approach has marked the work of the numerous writers who have tried to deny the influence of Platonism on Galileo.8 Since the work of Eugenio Garin in the 1960s and Paolo Galluzzi in the 70s, however, the approach has been more contextual. Galluzzi, in particular, urges that we should assess Galileo’s Platonism in terms of what Platonism meant in Galileo’s day, not in our own. We need to understand Platonism as an and a scientific subculture characteristic of a given historical moment, not just as a set of doctrines. We should study how Galileo used Plato to legitimate his own theories, procedures and assumptions, not simply trace sources and influences.9 Galluzzi’s contextual approach, of course, is nowadays standard operating procedure for intellectual historians in all fields, but it has yet to be fully exploited for the study of Galileo’s Platonism. In his own admirable study, Galluzzi shows how late Renaissance Platonism came to stand, in a certain ambiente, for an anti- Aristotelian tendency in the philosophy of mathematics. Renaissance Aristotelians dismissed the importance of mathematics for physical science, seeing mathematical demonstrations as a reductive abstraction of one aspect only of physical reality, namely, the quantitative. In terms of the modern philosophy of mathematics theirs might be described as a moderate realist or structuralist position. Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 213

Professors of mathematics and Platonic philosophers, combining theses from Plato, and the ancient atomists, advocated by contrast an extreme realist position in which mathematica not only exist as objects of thought, but causally underlie sensible experience. We come closer to primary reality by redescribing the plenum of qualitative sensible experience in terms of the number, figure, magnitude, position and motion, i.e. bodies considered in their quantitative aspect. In so doing, we think the way God thinks, mutatis mutandis. God’s creative activity is fundamentally mathematical; the quantitative is the cause of the qualitative. This extreme realism was used before and during Galileo’s time to justify the study of physics by mathematicians. Mathematicians possessed a logic which had no less right—indeed, more right—to analyse the natural world than did the syllogistic logic of the Aristotelian professors. So it is clear that Galileo, a professional mathematician and mathematical physicist, would find late Renaissance Platonism a ‘nurturing environment’, as they say in the helping professions. It is equally clear that Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities was quite possibly derived from, and could certainly be defended by, appeal to the Timaean view of reality as constituted by geometrical principles.10 But let us return to the ‘Galileo-Plato problem’. If we wanted to approach it contextually, one obvious strategy would be to see how Plato’s Timaeus was interpreted by Renaissance scholars and philosophers. But this is easier said than done. A good deal is now known about the study of the Timaeus in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but the later Renaissance remains largely unexplored.11 From the work that has been done, however, it is clear that Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus, first published in 1484 and republished in enlarged form in 1496, represents a major watershed in the expository history of the dialogue. Before Ficino, study of the Timaeus had remained largely within the orbit of the commentary tradition founded by Chalcidius in late antiquity and elaborated in the twelfth century by Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches. The chief sources in this tradition were Latin authors indebted to Middle Platonism or academic scepticism: Cicero, Apuleius, Augustine, Boethius and Macrobius. With the Aristotelian revolution of the thirteenth century, Plato was expelled from philosophy courses in universities and became primarily a literary author. The early Renaissance revived interest in Plato, but the study of the Timaeus continued to use medieval materials and methods. Ficino changed all that. His commentary on the Timaeus introduced 214 James Hankins the Latin West to a whole range of new sources.12 These exhibited a more varied range of hues along the philosophical spectrum. They included the eclectic Middle Platonist Galen; Philo; Plutarch, De fato and De animae procreatione in Timaeo; the Stoicizing pseudo-Plutarch [Aëtius], De placitis philosophorum; Theon of Smyrna, Expositio rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilium; the eclectic Diogenes Laertius; Plotinus, Enneads; Augustine, Confessions; the first part of Proclus’s Neoplatonic Timaeus commentary; and the Neopythagorean , a work falsely attributed to Timaeus of Locri, the main interlocutor of Plato’s Timaeus. The latter work, composed in pseudo-Doric dialect, is now considered a first-century AD forgery based on the Platonic Timaeus. Ficino, gullible in such matters, believed the work to be a genuine opusculum of Timaeus of Locri and the main source for Plato’s dialogue. This in turn led him to classify the Timaeus as one of Plato’s ‘Pythagorean’ works, i.e. a work which reports Pythagorean doctrine but which does not necessarily represent Plato’s own settled views.13 Ficino’s Compendium in Timaeum was also a watershed because, along with his other writings, it helped set the terms of debate about Platonic philosophy for a century and a half. It was a central contention of Ficino’s philosophical writings, and the justification for his life’s work, that Plato’s philosophy offered a more adequate basis for Christian theology than did Aristotle’s. Whether this was in fact the case would become a major subject of controversy during the sixteenth century among Italian and northern European philosophers. The Timaeus was, of course, a key text for this debate as it afforded grist for all the main philosophical mills: Platonists, integral Aristotelians, ‘progressive’ Aristotelians, Thomists, concordists and ‘pious philosophers’ (i.e. philosophers who tried to construct a natural philosophy from the Bible).14 Platonists naturally felt that Plato’s doctrine of creation brought him closer to Christian truth than Aristotle’s had, as the latter had been ambiguous about the immortality of the soul, had asserted the eternity of the world and had denied the role of providence in the sublunary world. But the matter was hardly simple. In fact, the Timaeus, read closely, contained a whole syllabus of errors that critics of Plato could gleefully point to. Plato’s seeming belief in the eternal recurrence of the ages, in an historical chronology which conflicted with biblical chronology, in polytheism, in the indirect creation or subcreation of the physical world by lower divinities (a heterodox solution to the ), in the transmigration of , in salvation through the rational control of appetites (a doctrine close to ), in the Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 215 uniqueness of the universe (arguably a limitation on God’s absolute power), in the extradeical existence of the Ideas, in the eternity of the ‘receptacle’ ( , identified with or silva), pre-existing the act of creation and thus challenging creation ex nihilo—all of these Timaean doctrines threw down a formidable challenge to would-be Christianizing interpreters of Plato.15 Ficino’s Compendium in Timaeum offered exegetical solutions to many of these problems (some more plausible than others); and it thus became the point of departure for many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century partisans of Plato’s . But the Compendium in Timaeum not only defended Plato’s account of creation. It also, as we shall shortly see in detail, contained powerful criticisms of Aristotelian natural philosophy. A number of themes found in Ficino’s critique reappeared, too, in the anti-Aristotelian controversies of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Though his own position in the Plato-Aristotle controversy was officially concordist—he believed Aristotle as well as Plato should be part of the formation of Christian thinkers and theologians16—Ficino did not hesitate to criticize Aristotelian physics in order to demonstrate the superiority of Plato. This, again, was a new departure in the commentary tradition. Chalcidius and some later medieval commentators were conscious that Plato’s theory of matter implicitly challenged Aristotle’s; and the minor humanist commentator Antonius de Romagno at the end of the fourteenth century actually sided with Plato against Aristotle on this subject.17 But it was not until Ficino that the West possessed a commentator of sufficient learning and philosophical acumen to use Plato’s elemental theory and Plotinus’s theory of celestial motion to mount a full-scale assault on Aristotelian physics. Ficino’s Compendium in Timaeum thus provided many new sources and themes which would be taken up by students of Plato’s natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. That century produced four printed commentaries on Plato’s text to compete with Ficino: one by the Spanish humanist Sebastian Fox-Morcillo (1554); another by the Parisian arts master Matthaeus Frigillanus of Beauvais (1560); the summaries, notes and analyses of Jean de Serres, which appeared in the famous Stephanus edition of Plato (1578); and the enormous commentary of Paolo Beni, of which less than a third was ever printed (1594).18 In print, we also have a few pages of philological notes (‘Eclogues’) on the Timaeus accompanying the translation of (1560); Louis Le Roy’s translation ‘avec l’exposition des lieux plus obscurs et difficiles’ (1551, 1582); and a couple of dozen 216 James Hankins pages of Annotationi in Sebastiano Erizzo’s Italian translation of the dialogue (1558, 1574).19 In manuscript, there survive another three commentaries: those of the Augustinian hermit Ambrogio Flandino (1523); anonymous lecture notes from a mid-century course on the Timaeus (tentatively attributed to scholastic philosopher Lodovico Boccadiferro); and some lecture notes from a course on the Timaeus given in the early seventeenth century by Cosimo Boscaglia, a humanist, and professor of Platonic philosophy at the University of Pisa.20 There is also much discussion of the Timaeus scattered about in books of nature, such as those by Francesco Giorgi, Sebastian Fox- Morcillo, Francesco II de’ Vieri (Verino) and Francesco Patrizi;21 in compendia such as those of the Bavarian humanist Georgius Acanthius or Giovanni Battista Bernardo;22 in the comparatio literature, such as the In universam Platonis et Aristotelis philosophiam praeludia of Galileo’s teacher, Jacopo Mazzoni,23 as well as in numerous scholastic commentaries on works of Aristotle, especially De caelo (particularly at 360a) and De generatione et corruptione (particularly at 315b– 325b). Close study of all this literature would no doubt yield a much finer sense of how Plato’s physics was seen in the various philosophical subcultures of the late Renaissance and the issues and stakes involved for the natural philosophers who defended or attacked him. This is work that should be done for its own sake as well as in order to illuminate Galileo’s Platonism; but I freely confess I have not done it, at least not yet. For present purposes, however, it may be sufficient to examine more closely the fountainhead for the study of Platonic natural philosophy in the late Renaissance, namely, Ficino’s Timaeus commentary. This was, after all, a work that Galileo had in his own library, which he cited in his early Tractatio de caelo,24 which was well known in Florence and which was widely used in the lectures and writings of the ‘Platonic professors’ at the University of Pisa. Ficino’s was in any case by far the best known interpretation of Plato in the later Renaissance. So there is prima facie a high probability that what Galileo knew about Platonism came filtered through the translations and commentaries of Ficino. Does Ficino give us any help in understanding Galileo’s ‘Platonism’—or rather, the use Galileo made of Plato? It will be remembered that one of the chief theoretical concerns of Galilean science was to break down the sharp distinction made in the Aristotelian between the physics of the celestial and the sublunary regions of the universe. Galileo’s main line of assault on this principle was to trace the distinction back to Aristotle’s fundamental Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 217 assumptions about motion. Aristotle thought, of course, that there were two species of motion, circular and rectilinear, the former characteristic of the celestial world, the latter of the sublunary world. In the first day of the Dialogue the Galilean interlocuter Salviati describes this as:

the cornerstone, basis, and foundation of the entire structure of the Aristotelian universe, upon which are superimposed all other celestial properties—freedom from and levity, ingenerability, incorruptibility, exemption from all mutations except local ones, etc. All these properties he [Aristotle] attributes to a simple body with circular motion. The contrary qualities of gravity or levity, corruptibility, etc., he assigns to bodies naturally movable in a straight line.25

Such a conception of motion, naturally, is incompatible with the Copernican heliocentrism Galileo wishes to defend. So against Aristotle Galileo argues that the only truly natural, ordered motion is circular, and that rectilinear motion in the natural world should be interpreted as bodies attempting to recover their ordered movement and natural state ‘by the shortest path’ (not necessarily rectilinear in a strict sense). Rectilinear motion, if natural, would have to exhibit infinite acceleration in a straight line; but this is impossible in an ordered cosmos (though possible, Galileo thinks, in the precosmic world before God’s final act of ordering nature):

I therefore conclude that only circular motion can naturally suit bodies which are integral parts of the universe as constituted in the best arrangement, and that the most which can be said for straight motion is that it is assigned by nature to its bodies (and their parts) whenever these are found to be outside their proper places, arranged badly, and are therefore in need of being restored to their natural state by the shortest path (‘bisognose di ridursi per la [via] più breve allo stato naturale’).26

Since rest and circular motion can by themselves account for the order of nature, it becomes conceivable that other ‘world bodies’ (such as the planets) can be goals of rectilinear motion as well as in circular motion themselves around some other centre (such as the sun). Where could Galileo have derived such a conception, which most commentators consider his own invention? In Ficino’s Compendium we find the following passage (Ficino is defending Plato’s view that the heavens are made of fire): 218 James Hankins

But we should not be upset by those who do not believe that the heavens are fiery because the motion of the heavens is circular while that of fire is straight. For any given portion even of the heavens, if by chance it were placed in the centre, will immediately ascend rectilinearly, that is, by the shorter path (‘breviori… tramite’), in order to seek its homeland, yet celestial motion is properly circular; and earth, if it is separated from the centre, will descend, and yet it is proper to earth to be at rest. Surely, any given mobile sphere, elemental or celestial, naturally moves in a circle in accordance with its pattern; for thus it will enjoy its place more fully. Rectilinear motion everywhere is not so much natural motion as a return to nature. But if this circular motion is appropriate to any body, it is most appropriate to fire. Since it, too, by nature is far distant from the earth, just as earth is always immobile, so it is always mobile. If it is always mobile, then it moves in a circle; for what is moved rectilinearly finishes its motion when it has crossed space, which is finite. That both air and fire are moved in a circle is shown by the circuits of comets. The circular motion of water is demonstrated by the perpetual flux and reflux of water. But it was necessary for earth to be at rest in order that it might be more similar to an indivisible and stable centre, and thus more readily enjoyed.27

For Ficino, indeed, all motion, whether in the heavens or in the sublunary world, is ultimately circular and continuous because all motion is caused by soul; and the cosmic motion of soul is itself circular and continuous.28 (More of this shortly.) The three ‘higher’ elements are in circular motion around earth, which remains at rest; rectilinear motions are interpreted as effects of the natural desire of the elements to return either to their natural circular motion or to rest. (In the Platonic tradition, the force with which an object returns to its natural circular orbit in accelerating rectilinear motion became known as ‘momentum’.)29 In Galileo’s case, the reduction of rectilinear motion to circular motion makes it possible to argue against Aristotle’s elemental theory and the two-sphere universe: ‘None of the conditions by which Aristotle distinguishes celestial from elemental bodies has any other foundation than what he deduces from the difference in natural motion between the former and the latter.’30 Aristotle had supposed the heavens to be composed of a simple substance, called quintessence (‘quinta essentia’ or fifth essence), distinct from the other four elements found in the sublunary regions. The natural movement of the former is Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 219 circular, of the latter rectilinear. Since change is a result of contrary motion, and there is no motion contrary to the circular, no change is possible in the heavenly regions. But having disproved all that, Galileo is free to argue that the heavens and the sublunary world are also homogeneous from the point of view of elemental theory. Since the elements that exist beneath the moon behave similarly to those that exist in the heavens, they must have similar natures. Change is found in both regions, as Galileo is able to demonstrate massively using the empirical evidence he has assembled with his telescope. Ficino’s Compendium in Timaeum, too, argues against Aristotle’s elemental theory and in favour of a view of celestial matter that emphasizes the homogeneity of the elemental and celestial regions and allows for the possibility of change in the latter. In chapter XXIV of his commentary (edited and translated in the Appendix below), Ficino defends the ‘Pythagorean and Platonic’ theory that the celestial regions of the cosmos are composed of the same four elements as exist in the sublunary region. Against ‘some natural philosophers’, i.e. the Aristotelians in their serried ranks, Ficino offers various proofs— metaphysical, astrological, biblical and physical—that the elemental natures exist in the heavens. Some argue that above the moon exist merely the causes of the elements, not their natures; but Ficino shows that the powers (‘virtutes’) of the various elements (density, heat, light, coldness, wetness, etc.) are manifested in celestial activity and argues that elemental powers could not so manifest themselves unless they subsisted in elemental natures. Ficino holds, to be sure, that the elements exist in a more excellent, harmonious and unified way in the heavens than they do in the sublunary sphere, and are therefore less corruptible than elements in our sphere. He inserts the celestial elements into a metaphysical hierarchy, declaring that they form a link in the causal change extending from the ideas of the elements in the Divine Mind to the sublunary elements.31 He also makes a concordist gesture in the direction of the Aristotelians by stating that celestial fire is so superexcellent that it might be called a fifth element. This is all foreign to Galileo’s thought (so far as we know). But it is clear that, even so, Ficino’s elemental theory is much closer to Galileo’s than to Aristotelian elemental theory. Ficino’s importance in the history of elemental theory has not, I think, been fully appreciated by historians of science. Plato’s theory that the heavens were composed of celestial fire and (to a lesser degree) of the other three elements was well known in antiquity and elaborated by a number of late antique writers, including Christian authors such as 220 James Hankins

John Damascene and Augustine. Ficino’s own account is based largely on Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus and to a lesser extent on Philoponus (apud Simplicium) and Plotinus.32 But from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, the theory of celestial matter in the universities was dominated by Aristotle’s De caelo.33 It is true that Giles of Rome and William of Ockham, working within the Aristotelian tradition, took an initial step towards breaking down the two-sphere cosmos by arguing for the identity of celestial and terrestrial matter. But this was a rather limited move that maintained the fundamental distinction of corruptibility and incorruptibility between elemental and celestial spheres. Giles’s scholastic epigoni saw the unity of celestial and terrestrial matter merely in terms of the pure potentiality of matter, whereas Ficino went much further by arguing that the heavens contained the fully actualized natures of the elements. This was a decisive step. As Edward Grant writes in a recent study:

A dramatic conceptual change occurred only when part or all of celestial and terrestrial matter was made identical in more substantial ways than in Aegidius’s [Giles of Rome’s] widely held theory, where the two matters were considered identical only as pure potentialities but otherwise radically different, the one incorruptible, the other corruptible.34

For Grant, this transition away from Aristotle towards the ‘terrestrialization of celestial matter’ happened mostly in the late seventeenth century, largely in response to ‘the newly emerging cosmology… based on the consequences of the Copernican theory and the particular celestial discoveries of Tycho and Galileo’.35 But, in fact, it had begun a century and a half before, with Ficino’s revival of Platonic cosmology. The revival of Platonic elemental theory was a precondition of, not a response to, the new cosmologies.36 This brings us, at long last, to Galileo’s famous ‘Platonic’ cosmogony. Here, too, I believe, Ficino can give us some understanding of Galileo’s ‘Platonism’: specifically, why Galileo thought of his theory of the genesis of planetary motion as ‘embellishing a Platonic conception’ (‘adornare un concetto platonico’). To understand Ficino’s account of the generation of circular motions in the heavens one must first be aware of certain assumptions. The most important is that Ficino, like other Neoplatonists (and like Plato himself, one might add), saw all motion in the world and in thought as a manifestation or effect of soul. The heavens are alive; and when they move, they move because of psychic activity. Then, too, one must Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 221 understand that Ficino, like most ancient interpreters of Plato, thought that the account of creation in the Timaeus was essentially mythical, and that his creation story was only a device to describe the modes of ontological dependence of derivative (‘lower’) forms of being on the sources of being.37 Creation did not take place in time; creation (or rather the ontological process of differentiation in the universe) created time itself. Whatever is begotten is eternally begotten; cosmic and precosmic processes can be separated conceptually but not temporally. Finally, it should not be forgotten that Ficino, like Aristotle and medieval physical theorists in general, believed that rectilinear motion naturally accelerated as a body approached its ‘goal’.38 That understood, we can better appreciate Ficino’s discussion of the generation of circular motion in the heavens, in chapter XXXIII of his Compendium in Timaeum, ‘On the Harmonic Composition of the Soul’. The chapter is devoted to Ficino’s explication of Plato’s account of the generation of the World Soul. In the passage quoted here, Ficino is describing how the soul’s circular motion, which moves the planets, is not native to it but is derived from an ‘intelligence’ bestowed upon it by Nous, or the Divine Mind:

In the other two powers of the soul there are, in all, four circles of a similarly temporal kind, two in each. The first is a natural reversion on its own cause. The second is a kind of fixed and perpetual turning at fixed intervals from the same forms to the same, through which there comes a fixed temporal revolution of configurations in the heavens and of transformations beneath the moon. Thus, the circuit of generation necessarily follows the circuit of the heavens. But this is the circuit of the soul. The revolution of the soul keeps company with the orb of intelligence [i.e., nous]. Indeed, the motion of soul, if it were entirely abandoned by intelligence, would at once convert to straight [motion] both in perception and in action. But when it turns back on itself again and accumulates similar turnings through its other [motions], it is picked up by a certain higher mind which, while remaining in itself and turning immediately towards [its] cause [i.e. God], bestows a mind [or intelligence] on soul. Through this mind, like a hand stretching out, it stops the soul, which by its own nature wanders, and wrenches its [the soul’s] unquiet motion, which is naturally more prone to external rectilinear [movement], into an orbit, a mean between straight motion and rest. Hence, the soul, in returning on itself, moves, and it circles the deep mind and turns the heavens with a similar figure [my emphasis].39 222 James Hankins

Here we learn that the ‘primary’, ‘innate’ or precosmic motion of soul is rectilinear; but that its motion becomes circular at the point of creation (or cosmic ordering) by the intervention of the Divine Mind, which stops its rectilinear motion and confers upon it a circular motion, a motion which the World Soul then communicates to the heavens. The passage reminds us that in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in the paragraph immediately preceding the ‘Platonic cosmogony’, Galileo also sees precosmic motion as rectilinear:

But someone might say nevertheless that although a straight line (and consequently the motion along it) can be extended in infinitum (that is to say, unending), still nature has, so to speak, arbitrarily assigned to it some terminus, and has given her natural bodies natural instincts to move toward that. And I shall reply that this might perhaps be fabled to have occurred in primordial chaos, where vague substances wandered confusedly in disorder, to regulate which nature would very properly have used straight motions. By means of these, just as well-arranged bodies would become disordered in moving, so those which were previously badly disposed might be arranged in order. But after their optimum distribution and arrangement it is impossible that there should remain in them natural inclinations to move any more in straight motions, from which nothing would now follow but their removal from their proper and natural places; which is to say, their disordering [my emphasis].40

The ‘Platonic cosmogony’ then continues, explaining how God in ordering creation imposed circular motions on the precosmic rectilinear motions of the planets. Galileo’s account, of course, at no point mentions the motions of soul as intermediary between God’s activity and the motion of the planets. But the doctrine of the animation of the heavens for centuries had been considered heterodox by the Church; and Galileo, who had attracted the Inquisition’s notice even before publishing the Dialogue, would not have been eager to put weapons into the hands of his enemies.41 In any case, it would not have been necessary to posit prior psychic motions to account for the movement of the planets. Galileo could have turned to another account, also in Ficino, of the transformation of precosmic rectilinear motion into cosmic circular motion which involved only elements and not souls. Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 223

Ficino’s exegesis of the Timaeus in the passage just quoted is in fact an elaboration of Plotinus, Enneads II.2, ‘On the Movement of Heaven’.42 If we turn to Ficino’s commentary on Plotinus in that place, we find a similar analysis: the Divine Mind alters a primary, precosmic nature exhibiting rectilinear motion, adding, as part of His providential cosmic activity, a secondary nature which imparts a circular motion. But this time the Divine Activity intervenes, not to change the motion of the World Soul, but to alter the movement of celestial fire:

Plotinus would have circular motion be appropriate to fire because of providence, nature and necessity. For the Divine Mind, foreseeing that fire would be a body, and that body, since through its substance it is extended into parts [and beyond its parts], was thus going to move by means of action in prior and posterior moments (which is what it means to be moved, and, indeed, what it means to be moved in a straight line from the first nature of the body)—recognizing that for this reason the fiery body would be susceptible to dissipation, in order to avoid its being destroyed, [that Mind] with good cause next added to the first nature of the body, i.e. its naturally mobile dimension, a kind of second nature, that is, a spherical pattern, to its dimension. Providence therefore gave a complete nature to fire, so that if fire should ever be found outside its natural place, through its first nature it would return to its proper position by a straight path (as the shorter path), and through its second nature, simultaneously with the first, it would willingly come to rest after returning to its proper position. Since while it remains in its proper place, it remains also in its nature, which is to be moved, it is right that it comes to rest there in motion. This [rest-in-motion] is nothing other than to revolve about the same centre and orbit. Its very nature, which is to be moved and to rest in movement in its proper place, contributes to this, as well as its circular pattern. Necessity itself, following nature and providence, contributes to the same outcome: for surely, since it desires naturally to be moved there, or even if by chance it wishes to be moved in a straight line because of its first nature, and is not however able to move in a straight line, it slips back because of the same necessity…. Its first motion will not therefore be uniform and continuous, but deformed and interrupted. Celestial fire, therefore, when put in its proper place, always rotates in a perfect and continuous orbit, especially since to be moved in this place is nothing other than to be moved in itself.43 224 James Hankins

To sum up, in Ficino’s view, derived from various Neoplatonic sources, the circular motion of the planets is a composite of precosmic rectilinear motion (which naturally accelerates) and a circular motion imposed by the Divine Mind in its cosmic (or creative) activity. It is clear, surely, that this interpretation brings us much closer to Galileo’s cosmogony than does the bare text of Plato’s Timaeus. * * * Enough has been said, I believe, to show the strong possibility (to put it no higher) that Galileo derived some key features of his elemental theory, his theories of motion and his ‘Platonic’ cosmogony from the scientific subculture of Renaissance Platonism. Ficino may well be an important direct influence; but it will be impossible to say for certain without some serious study of what might be called the ‘scientific Platonism’ of the later Renaissance. Intermediate sources, especially Francesco Patrizi and Jacopo Mazzoni, are far from being out of the question.44 There are also a number of other themes and assumptions in Galileo’s works for which one might seek Platonic antecedents. Galluzzi has explored Galileo’s debts to late Renaissance philosophers of mathematics in the Platonic tradition; but other subjects are still open to research, such as Galileo’s use of Platonist versions of the history of philosophy, his ‘Platonic’ biblical and patristic hermeneutics, and his anti-Aristotelian and pro-heliocentric rhetoric, which is heavily indebted to late Renaissance Platonism.45 Whether one might go so far as to say that Galilean science represents a radicalization of elements in late Renaissance Platonism is a question that as yet has no definitive answer. Galileo, to be sure, will never be ‘reduced’ to his Platonic sources, nor to any other set of sources for that matter: ‘Procul absit gloria vulgi.’ But it is doubtful whether his achievement can be rightly evaluated without a fuller understanding of the culture of Renaissance Platonism that so powerfully shaped the globus intellectualis of the great scientist and his contemporaries.

Appendix

Ficino on the Celestial Elements

Chapter XXIV of his Compendium in Timaeum The Latin text is taken from the Commentaria in Platonem, Florence, 1496, sig. m6r–v (F), collated with the text in Plato, Opera, Venice, 1491, fol. 245rb–va (V). I have also recorded the variants of the text in Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 225

Ficino, Opera omnia, vol. II, pp. 444–5 [=pp. 1448–9] (B). The orthography follows that in F; punctuation and are those of the editor.

QUOD TOTUS MUNDUS EX QUATTUOR COMPONITUR ELEMENTIS, ET QUOMODO HAEC ALIAa RATIONE SUNT IN COELO, ALIA INFRA LUNAM. CAPITULUM XXIV Ex his quattuor elementis geometrica et musica inuicem ratione coniunctis universum mundum esse compositum Pythagorici Platonicique omnes existimant, ita tamen vt consonantia horum in coelo nullam unquam dissonantiam patiatur. Sub coelo autem dissonantia quedam alicubi oririb uideatur interdum, sed statim per superiorem concentum in formam consonantem mirabiliter redigatur.c Esse utique elementa haec sub luna, nemo negabit. Esse uero in coelo physici nonnulli negabunt. Sed isti audiantd methaphysicos, precor, probantes elementa per ideas suas esse in ipso mundi opifice, esse inde in anima mundi per rationes suas, esse in natura per semina, ergo et in coelo per uirtutes et sub coelo per formas. Quo enim pacto a causis coelo superioribus elementorum naturae transeunt infra coelum et hice quidem protinus nutature,f nisi uirtutes horum moderatrices coelo interim infundantur?46 Quinimo sicut agricola quidem non regit architectum, quoniam architecture nullas continet rationes, geometra vero has possidens regit ilium, sic et coelum nisi elementorum elementaliumque comprehendat uires, haec gubernabit numquam, gubernans vero complectitur, immo complectendo gubernat. Audiant et astronomos tam in signis quam in planetis naturas designantes elementorum et effectu probantes. Audiant denique sacras litteras ponentes saepe in coelis aquas, ponentes terram quoque uiuentium.47 Quod si duo haec ibi coelestium dissimiliora ponuntur, multo magis ignis et aer coelestium similiores ibidem a sacris literis collocantur. Respondebunt, ut arbitror, aliqui uires illic quidem elementorum excellentissimas per modum cause ponendas esse; in spheris autem elementorum sub luna naturas eorum secundum formam; in compositis tandem participatione quadam. Sed naturas ipsas elementorum in coelo esse negabunt. aalia] aliter BV boriri] priori B credigantur B daudiunt B ehic] ibi BV fnutature] naturae B 226 James Hankins

Ad haec adducent Platonici uirtutes ubique proprias in propria natura fundari. Itaque si sunt horum uirtutes in coelo, esse quoque naturas, sed quemadmodum uirtutes illic in genere quodam longe his excellentiore consistunt, ita naturas in excellentiore—immo, vt rectius loquar—excellentissimo.48 Et naturam illam ignis eminentissimam praebere coelo sensibile lumen, uiuificum calorem motumque promptissimum.49 Naturam terrae largiri solidam firmamque stabilitatem. Item et stellis densitudinem qua uideri possint, lune qua radios repellat solares. Naturam aeris praestare perspicuam qualitatem quam nominant translucentem.50 Naturam aquae afferre delicatissimam et equabilissimam lenitatem. Et quod maximum est, ipsis spherarum labiis, quibus seseg contingunt, inserere uirtutem illam frigoris et humoris: per quam fiat, vt quamuis ex uelocissimo motu rapidissime et uehementissime se contingant, estus tamenh illic resolutioque non accidat.i Has quidem in coelis aquas Ebrei ualde probabunt. Probabunt etiam, vt arbitror, si audiuerint per naturam illic terrae uiuentium fieri, vt materiae alioquin tenuissime ex tanto motu non dissipentur. Meminisse veroj oportet, tantam esse in coelesti substantia uirtutem tamque ad conciliandum efficacem, vt qualitates et motiones que apud nos sunt inter se repugnantes, ibi non pugnent. Item, vt reliqua illic elementa statim a prima genitura mundi in formam praestantissimi, id est ignis, redacta fuerint, quemadmodum per motum coelestem elementa quatuor apud nos, in quauis genitura ad unam reducuntur mixti formam. Neque miraberis in unum illic elementa constari, sik cogitabis etiam infra lunam in unaml molem esse compacta et ignem esse soliditatis terrenae participem, ne ob tenuissimam mobilissimamquem naturam continue dispergatur; terram quoquen per se torpentem ignis consortioo actionem uitamque nancisci.p Quod si extrema miscentur, nimirum et media mediis extremisqueq misceri. Item si tanta est infra lunam unio, super lunam esse multo maiorem, sed terre soliditatem gse B htamen] autem B iaccedat B jvero om. B ksic B lin unam om. B mnobilissimam V nquoque om. B oconsortionem B pnon ante nancisci V q-que om. B Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 227 siue stabilitatem illic absque crassitudine in uaporea quasi forma regnare. Rursus equibilitatem lenitatemque aquae procul a lapsu, agilitatem aeris ab effluxur seorsum, efficaciam ignis in lumine salubrique calore intelligentiae vitaeque persimili dominari, seorsum ab ea combustione ad quam efficiendam apud nos cogitur, tum lumen inter concaua repercussum, tum calor igneus aspera quadam materia et mordaci conclusus, qui certe quatenus a terrena crassitudine soluitur, eatenus lucet purius caletque salubrius. Ergo una cum Heraclito et Empedocle dicemus ignis ipsius qui in idea est intellectuale lumen, in coelo quidem uisibile lumen ad oculos emicare, sub coelo autem in ethere puram ipsius et innoxiam vigere flammam, in terras vero carbonem in aspera materia comburentem. Dicemus postremo cum Orpheo esse insuper apud inferos quatuor elemental Pyriphlegetontem, Acherontem et Occeanum et Cocytum.51 Dicemus cum Platone, quemadmodum in archetipo mundo omnia sunt in omnibus, ita in hoc imaginario mundo omnia in omnibus esse, sed pro natura suscipientium ubique singula suscipi, vt coelestia in elementis elementalia sint, elementa in caelo coelestia, atque tantam esse coelestis regionis super alias excellentiam, vt coelestis ignis, praeter elementalem ignem triaque reliqua elementa, dici quintum valeat elementum.52 Hinc mundos quinque appellari posse ait, siquidem omnia rerum genera in quolibett horum quinque sintu pro sua cuiusque natura. Concludemus denique concordiam inter Mosem et Platonem, quem Numenius alterumv cognominat Mosem.53 Quod enim Moses ait: in principio fecit Deus coelum et terram,54 Plato ait: Deus primo ignem fecit acw terram, ignem intelligens praecipue coelum.55 Principio enim in sphera mundi centrum considerauit et ambitum; reliqua horum gratia interiecit.

THAT THE WHOLE COSMOS IS COMPOSED OF FOUR ELEMENTS, AND HOW THESE EXIST IN ONE WAY IN THE HEAVENS, AND IN ANOTHER WAY BENEATH THE MOON. CHAPTER XXIV All Pythagoreans and Platonists think that the whole cosmos is composed of four elements joined together according to a geometrical refflexu V sin terra] interea F tquodlibet B usunt B valteram B wac] et B 228 James Hankins and musical ratio, yet in such a way that their consonance in the heavens never allows any dissonance. Beneath the heavens, dissonance appears occasionally to arise here and there; but it is at once restored to a harmonious form by the higher concord in a marvellous way. That these elements exist throughout the sublunary region no one denies. Some natural philosophers, however, deny that they exist in the heavens. But let them listen, please, to the metaphysicians who prove that the elements exist in the very Maker of the cosmos through their ideas, and thence exist in the World Soul through their reasons, and exist in nature through seeds. Therefore, they exist both through their powers in the heavens and through their forms beneath the heavens. For how do the natures of the elements pass from causes higher than the heavens beneath the heavens and there immediately begin to incline, unless they had meanwhile imparted their moderating powers to the heavens? Indeed, just as the farmer does not direct the activities of the architect, since he is not in possession of the rules of architecture, but the geometer, who does possess them, does direct his activities, so also the heavens, unless they include the powers of the elements and elementals, will never govern them; a governor encompasses, indeed he governs by encompassing. Let them also listen to the astronomers who trace the natures of the elements in the signs as well as in the planets, proving [their existence] by their effects. Let them listen, finally, to the Bible, which often posits waters in the heavens, also ‘the earth of living creatures’. But if these two things are posited there, which are very different from celestial things, then a fortiori fire and air, which are very similar to celestial things, are located in the same place by the Bible. Some people will answer, I think, that the most excellent powers of the elements there are to be posited causally; in the sublunary elemental spheres, however, their natures are [present] formally; and, finally, in composites [they are present] by a kind of participation; but they will deny that the natures themselves of the elements are in the heavens. In response, the Platonists will adduce that everywhere proper powers are based on a proper nature. Thus, if there are [elemental] powers in the heavens, there are also elemental natures; but just as the powers there belong to a certain genus far more excellent than these [elements in the sublunary region], so too the natures [belong to] a more excellent [genus], indeed—to speak more correctly—to the most excellent genus. And [they will say] that most excellent nature of fire gives the heavens a sensible light, a life-giving warmth and an extremely quick motion. The [most excellent] nature of earth bestows a Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 229 solid and durable stability. It also gives the stars a density by which they can be seen and the moon [a density] by which it reflects solar rays. The [most excellent] nature of air grants a perspicuous quality, which they call translucence. The nature of water brings a most delicate and most even softness. And, most importantly, [they will say] that that power of cold and wet is sown into the very edges of the spheres where they touch, and this power explains why heat and loosening do not occur even though they touch very rapidly and energetically owing to [their] extremely swift motion. The Hebrews will strongly commend these ‘waters in the heavens’. They, too, [i.e. the critics of the Platonists] will commend this, I think, if they hear that there, through the nature of ‘the land of the living’, it comes about that [celestial] materials, which are otherwise very fine, do not disintegrate from such rapid motion. It should be remembered that there is such power in celestial substance, such conciliatory efficacy, that qualities and motions which in our sphere would be mutually repugnant are not in conflict there. Again, [this power and efficacy caused] the rest of the elements there to be immediately ordered, from the first engendering of the world, into the form of the most excellent [of them], namely, fire, just as the four elements in our sphere in every act of generation are reduced by celestial motion to a single form of the mixture. Nor will you be surprised that the elements there collect into a unity, if you consider that even below the moon they are compacted into a single mass, and fire participates in earth-like solidity, so that it is not immediately dispersed on account of its extremely fine and mobile nature; earth, too, which in itself is torpid, acquires activity and life by consorting with fire. But [they will say] that if extremes may be mixed, surely also the mean [elements] may be mixed with means and extremes. Again, [they will say] that if there is such a degree of unity beneath the moon, above the moon there is much more; but the solidity or stability of earth reigns there [in the heavens] without density like a vaporous form. Again, [they will say, that in the heavens] the evenness and smoothness of water is far from flowing, the nimbleness of air far from dispersal, the efficacy of fire in light and healthful heat, in a way very similar to intelligence and life, rules separately from the combustion it is compelled to bring about in our sphere: light bounces around within concave surfaces; fiery warmth is shut up in a certain rough and abrasive matter and, surely, in so far as it is freed from earthly density, shines more purely and warms more salubriously. Therefore, together with and Empedocles, we shall say of the fire which in Idea is intellectual light, that in heaven it is a visible 230 James Hankins light striking our eyes, beneath the heavens in the aether it thrives as a pure and harmless flame, while on earth it is a coal burning in rough matter. Then we shall say with Orpheus that there are, in addition, four elements in the underworld: Pyriphlegethon, Acheron, Ocean and Cocytus. We shall say with Plato that, just as in the archetypal cosmos all things are in all things, so in this world of images all things are in all things, but each thing is received everywhere according to the nature of the receiver. So celestial things in the elements are elemental, elements in the heavens are celestial; and so great is the excellence of the celestial region over all others that celestial fire may be called a fifth element beyond elemental fire and the other three elements. Hence, [Plato] said that he could speak of five worlds, seeing that all the genera of things in each of these are five [in number], according to the nature of each one. We shall conclude, finally, that there is harmony between Moses and Plato (whom Numenius called ‘another Moses’); for what Moses said—‘in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth’—Plato said: ‘God first made fire and earth’, understanding by ‘fire’ the heavens in particular. For, in the beginning, in the sphere of the cosmos, He took thought for the centre and the circumference; the other things He placed in between for their sake.

Notes

1 Galileo Galilei, Opere, ed. A.Favaro, Edizione nazionale, 20 vols, Florence, Barbera, 1890–1990, vol. VII, p. 44; the English translation is from Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. S.Drake, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 20–1. 2 Galileo, Opere, vol. VIII, pp. 283–4; the English translation is from Galileo, Two New Sciences, trans. S.Drake, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1974, pp. 232–3. The statement that Galileo’s theory was a ‘verace istoria’ is probably meant to contrast with Plato’s statement in the Timaeus (29D) that his cosmology was merely an , a ‘likely account’. 3 S.Drake, ‘Galileo’s Platonic cosmogony and Kepler’s Prodromus’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1973, vol. 4, pp. 174–91. 4 Marin Mersenne, Correspondance, ed. P.Tannery and C.de Waard , 17 vols, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1955, vol. IV, pp. 403–4: ‘Si vous pouvez sçavoir de Mr Gassendi ou d’ailleurs si Platon dit ce que Galilee luy fait dire dans ses Dialogues du mouvement de la Terre. C’est dans son premier Dialogue, assez près du commencement, où il dit que, selon Platon, Dieu laissa tomber droit les planettes, et qu’estant tombees jusqu’à ce qu’elles allassent de la vitesse qu’il avoit ordonnee, il changea leur mouvement droit en circulaire qu’elles ont maintenant. Je vous prie done de me mander le lieu, où Platon dit Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 231

cela, car je n’en trouve rien dans le Timee. Et si vous ne le pouvez sçavoir de Mr Gassendi ou d’ailleurs, pour me le faire sçavoir promptement, si vous escriviez à Galilee, il vous obligeroit de vous le dire, et de vous envoyer un petit filet de la longueur de la brasse dont il parle tant en ses livres.’ 5 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. H.D.P.Lee, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, p. 53. In Ficino’s Latin version, which Galileo probably used (see below), the passage is translated as follows: ‘Postquam vero singula quae ad seriem temporis pertinebant conuenientem sibi progressum sortita sunt corporaque nexibus compacta vitalibus animalia euaserunt, prescriptum tenorem et institutum ordinem tenuerunt, ut videlicet secundum alterius diuerseque nature obliquam agitationem eiusdem ipsius agitationi subiectam orbes illi, partim ampliorem partim angustiorem, circulum peragant, et quae minorem uelocius, quae maiorem tardius revolvantur’: Plato, Opera, Venice, 1491, fol. 255ra. 6 Sambursky, in fact, misreads this passage as a description of the ‘primordial state of the world-soul,’ whereas Plato was describing the creation of the human soul by the secondary gods. 7 S.Sambursky, ‘Galileo’s attempt at a cosmogony’, Isis, 1962, vol. 53, pp. 460– 4, at 464. 8 E.A.Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, 2nd ed., New York, Harcourt Brace, 1932; E.W.Strong, Procedures and Metaphysics, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1936; E.Cassirer, ‘Mathematische Mystik und mathematische Naturwissenschaft: Betrachtungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der exacten Wissenschaft’, Lychnos, 1940, vol. 5, pp. 248–65 (published in an English translation by E.W. Strong in E.McMullin, Galileo, Man of Science, New York, Basic Books, 1967, pp. 338–51); A.Koyré, ‘Galileo and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1943, vol. 4, pp. 400–28 (reprinted in Koyré’s Metaphysics and Measurement, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 16–43); E.Cassirer, ‘Galileo’s Platonism’, in M.F.Ashley Montagu (ed.), Studies and Essays in the History of Science and Learning, New York, Henry Schuman, 1946, pp. 277–97; A.Crombie, ‘Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Principal Systems of the World’, Dominican Studies, 1950, vol. 3, pp. 105–38; C.Maccagni, ‘Riscontri platonici relativi alla matematica di Galileo e Torricelli’, in Convegno di studi torricelliani, Faenza, Fratelli Lega, 1959, pp. 65–76; A.Koyré, ‘Newton, Galilée et Platon’, in Actes du IXe Congrès international d’histoire des sciences, Barcelona-Madrid…1959, Paris, Hermann et Cie, 1960, pp. 165–97 (reprinted, in English translation, as ‘Newton, Galileo and Plato’, in Koyré’s Newtonian Studies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 201–20); T.P.McTighe, ‘Galileo’s “Platonism”: A reconsideration’, in McMullin (ed.), Galileo, pp. 365–87; E.W.Strong, ‘The Relationship between metaphysics and scientific method in Galileo’s work’, ibid., pp. 352–64; I.B.Cohen, ‘Galileo, Newton, and the divine order of the solar system’, ibid., pp. 207–32; T.R.Girill, ‘Galileo and Platonistic methodology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1970, vol. 31, pp. 501–20; D.Shapere, Galileo: A Philosophical Study, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974, esp. pp. 129–40; W.R.Shea, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610–1632, second edition, New York, Science History Publications, 1977, esp. pp. 127, 130, 150–5; 232 James Hankins

B.T.Vinaty, O.P., ‘La formation du système solaire d’après Galilée’, Angelicum, 1983, vol. 60, pp. 333–85. 9 E.Garin, Scienza e vita civile nel Rinascimento italiano, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 1965, esp. chaps 5 and 6; P.Galluzzi, ‘Il “platonismo” del tardo cinquecento e la filosofia di Galileo’, in P.Zambelli (ed.), Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 1973, pp. 39–79, at 79: ‘Può darsi che da questo lavoro, che rimane da compiere, quello che è stato definito il “platonismo” di Galileo finisca per resultare, in parte non piccola, piuttosto un’ “ideologia” che una “filosofia”.’ 10 The distinction is more usually linked with the contemporaneous revival of atomism, but can as easily be associated with Timaean doctrine. As Gregory Vlastos points out in Plato’s Universe, Seattle, Washington, University of Washington Press, 1975, chap. 3, Plato’s theory of matter is an attempt to incorporate the atomic theories of the physiologoi into his theological conception of nature; like theirs, Plato’s theory embraces the principle underlying the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, namely, that ‘the unobservables we postulate to account for properties of observables need not themselves possess those same properties’ (p. 68). 11 See P.E.Dutton, ‘Material remains of the study of the Timaeus in the later Middle Ages’, in C.Lafleur and J.Carrier (eds), L’Enseignement de la philosophie au XIIIe siècle: autour du ‘Guide de l’étudiant’ du ms. Ripoll 109, Turnhout, Brepols, 1996, pp. 203–30; and my article, ‘The study of the Timaeus in early Renaissance Italy’, forthcoming in N.Siraisi and A. Grafton (eds), Renaissance Natural Philosophy and the Disciplines. The second volume of my Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols, Leiden, Brill, 1990, contains bibliographical information on sixteenth-century translations of the Timaeus and editions of several prefaces to the dialogue. 12 For the textual history and sources of the commentary see M.J.B.Allen, ‘Marsilio Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus and its myth of the demiurge’, in J.Hankins, J.Monfasani and F.Purnell, Jr. (eds), Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, Binghamton, New York, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987, pp. 399–440. The Compendium in Timaeum is probably the least well known of Ficino’s major works. 13 See Hankins, Plato, vol. II, pp. 339–40. 14 For the philosophical landscape of the later sixteenth century see now S. Menn, ‘The intellectual setting’, in D.Garber and M.Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, vol. I, pp. 33–86; and A.Blair, ‘Natural philosophy’, forthcoming in K.Park and L.Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. III: Early Modern Science; the latter is particular useful for the concept of ‘pious philosophy’. 15 For a kind of summa of Platonic heresies see Joannes Baptista Crispus, De ethnicis philosophis caute legendis disputationum…quinarius primus, Rome, 1594; most of the first ‘quinary’, some 500 pages worth, is devoted to rooting out Plato’s errors, many of them found in the Timaeus. 16 See J.Hankins, ‘Marsilio Ficino as a critic of scholasticism’, Vivens Homo, 1994, vol. V, pp. 325–34. Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 233

17 See Hankins, ‘The study of the Timaeus’. 18 Sebastian Fox-Morcillo, In Platonis Timaeum commentarius, Basel, 1554; Matthaeus Frigillanus, In Timaeum Platonis ex mediis philosophorum et medicorum spatiis scholia, Paris, 1560; Plato, Opera quae extant omnia, ex nova Ioannis Serrani interpretatione, perpetuis eiusdem notis illustrata… eiusdem annotationes in quosdam suae illius interpretationis locos, Geneva, 1578; Paolo Beni, In Platonis Timaeum sive in naturalem omnem atque divinam Platonis et Aristotelis philosophiam decades tres, Rome, 1594. On the unpublished parts of Beni’s commentary see P.B.Diffley, Paolo Beni: A Biographical and Critical Study, Oxford, Clarendon, 1988, pp. 43–8. 19 Plato, Opera quae ad nos extant omnia, per Ianum Cornarium…latina lingua conscripta; eiusdem Iani Cornarii eclogae decent breviter et sententiarum et genuinae verborum lectionis locos selectos complectentes, Basel, 1561; Le Timée de Platon, traittant de la nature du monde… translaté de grec en françois avec exposition des lieux plus obscurs et difficiles, par Loys le Roy, Paris, 1551; this was reprinted, with Le Roy’s translation of Plutarch’s De animae procreatione in Timaeo, in Parisian editions of 1582 and 1582; Il dialogo…intitolato il Timeo…tradotto di lingua greca in italiana da M.Sebastiano Erizzo…et dal medesimo di molte utili annotationi illustrato, et nuovamente mandato in luce da G. Ruscelli, Venice, 1558, reprinted in I dialoghi di Platone intitolati l’Eutifrone…, l’Apologia di Socrate, il Critone…, il Fedone…, il Timeo, tradotti da lingua greca in italiana da M.Sebastiano Erizzo e del medesimo di molte utili annnotationi illustrati, con un comento sopra il Fedone, nuovamente mandati in luce, Venice, 1574. The work of Antonio Telesio, De coloribus libellus ex Timaeo Platonis de coloribus, Marsilio Ficino interprete, n.d., n. pl. [copy at the Vatican Library, Pal. V.431, int. 1], is a philological work discussing words for the colours in Latin. 20 Ambrogio Flandino, Annotationes in Timaeum, in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 12948; Lodovico Boccadiferro (attrib.) , fragmentary, in Fermo, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 80 (coll. 4 E 4), fols 99r–102v, and Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS Aldovrandi 56, vol. II, fols 270r–7v, incipit: ‘Nescio sane qua de causa’; Cosimo Boscaglia, In Timaeum Platonis, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Palat. 1025, vol. II, fols 4r–39r, incipit: ‘Antequam hunc nobilissimum Platonis dialogum’. Boscaglia is mentioned in a letter to Galileo from his student Benedetto Castelli: see Galileo, Opere, vol. XI, pp. 605–6. 21 Francesco Giorgi, De harmonia mundi totius, Venice, 1525, reprinted Paris, 1545 and in French translation, Paris, 1579; Sebastian Fox-Morcillo, De naturae philosophia; Francesco Verino, Libro della natura dell’Universo (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. XII, 11); Francesco Patrizi, Nova de universis philosophia, Ferrara, 1591 and Venice, 1593. 22 Acanthius’s work was printed in Basel without a date, but the preface is dated to 1554. Giovanni Battista Bernardo, Seminarium totius philosophiae aristotelicae et platonicae, 3 vols, Geneva, 1599–1605. 23 Published in Venice in 1597. On Mazzoni and the comparatio tradition see F.Purnell, Jr., Jacopo Mazzoni and His Comparison of Plato and Aristotle, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1971. This literature is rich and almost completely unexplored. Some examples: Bernardino Donati, De platonicae 234 James Hankins

atque aristotelicae philosophiae libellus, Paris, 1541; Federicus Pendasius, Lectiones de differentiis Platonis et Aristotelis (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS S 87 sup.); Stefano Conventi, Discorsi peripatetici e platonici, n. pl., 1565; Gabriele Buratelli, O.E.S.A., Praecipuarum controversiarum Aristotelis et Platonis conciliatio, Venice, 1573; Jacobus Carpentarius, Platonis cum Aristotele in universa philosophia comparatio, Paris, 1573; Stefano Tiepolo, Academicarum contemplationum libri decem in quibus Plato explicatur et peripatetici refelluntur, Venice, 1576, reprinted Basel, 1590 (according to Purnell, Jacopo Mazzoni, pp. 76–7, this treatise was probably the work of Francesco Piccolomini); Francesco Verino, Vere conclusioni di Platone conformi alla dottrina Christiana et a quella di Aristotele, Florence, 1590; Vincentius Raffarius, De Platonicae atque Aristotelicae philosophiae coniunctione oratio, in Alcinoum philosophum de Platonis doctrina praefatrix, Paris, 1604; L.Galante, Christianae theologiae cum Platonica comparatio, Bologna, 1627. 24 See W.A.Wallace, Galileo’s Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions, Notre Dame, Ind. and London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, pp. 83, 266. For the presence of Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Opera omnia in Galileo’s library see A.Favaro, ‘La libreria di Galileo Galilei, descritta ed illustrata’, Bolletino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche, 1886, vol. 19, pp. 219–90, cited in Garin, Scienze, p. 138; Galileo also possessed Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus and the works of the Venetian Platonist Niccolò Leonico Tomeo. 25 Galileo, Opere, vol. VII, p. 42; Dialogue, trans. Drake, p. 18. 26 Galileo, Opere, vol. VII, p. 56; Dialogue, trans. Drake, p. 32. Compare also p. 45: ‘As to motion by a straight line, I do not see how it can be of use for anything except to restore to their natural location such integral bodies as have been accidentally removed and separated from their whole, as we have just said.’ 27 Ficino, Opera omnia, 2 vols, Basel 1576; reprinted Turin, 1959, vol. II, p. 445 [=p. 1449], corrected against Ficino’s edition of Plato, Opera, Venice, 1491, fol. 245v, and Ficino, Commentaria in Platonem, Florence, 1496, sig. m6v: ‘Sed neque nos turbent qui coelum iccirco igneum esse diffidunt, quia coeli quidem motus sit circularis, ignis vero sit rectus. Nam etiam coeli portio quelibet, si forte ponatur in medio, repente ascendet in rectum breviori videlicet tramite patriam petitura, et tamen coeli motus proprius est circuitus, et terra, si separetur a centro, descendet, et tamen eius proprium est quiescere. Profecto quelibet sphera mobilis tam elementalis quam coelestis pro figura sua naturaliter movetur in orbem: sic loco suo plenius fruitura. Motus autem rectus ubicunque est, non tam naturalis est quam reditus in naturam. Si cui vero corpori circuitus conuenit, maxime [maximae 1496 ed.] convenit igni. Cum enim a terra distantissimus sit etiam per naturam, sicut terra est semper inmobilis, ita ille [illae 1496 ed.] semper est mobilis. Si semper mobilis, ergo in orbem. Quod enim mouetur in rectum, peracto spatio quod finitum, finit et motum. Moueri vero in circulum tam ignem quam aerem ostendit circuitus cometarum. Circuitum quoque aque testatur influxus perpetuus et effluxus. Manere vero oportuit terram ut indiuisibili et stabili centro foret similior, eoque commodius frueretur.’ Ficino’s exposition is an elaboration of the Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 235

account in Proclus’s Timaeus commentary: see Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum commentaria, ed. E.Diehl, 3 vols, Leipzig, Teubner, 1903–6, vol. III, p. 130; Proclus, Commentaire sur le Timée, trans. A.-J.Festugière, 5 vols, Paris, Vrin, 1960–8, vol. IV, p. 167. 28 See, generally, Book IV of Ficino’s Theologia platonica, in his Opera, vol. I, pp. 152–64 [=pp. 122–34], and the Compendium in Timaeum, ibid., vol. II, p. 448 [=p. 1452]. 29 See, e.g.: pseudo-Plutarch [i.e. Aëtius], De placitis philosophorum, in Plutarch, , Paris, 1526, fol. 94v: ‘Plato quod nec grave natura nec leve in suo quidem loco situm, in alieno autem statutum continue nutum habet, ex nutuque momentum aut ad gravitatem aut ad levitatem.’ On the whole problem see P.Galluzzi, Momento: Studi galileiani, Rome, Ateneo e Bizzari, 1979. 30 Galileo, Opere, vol. VII, p. 61; Dialogue, trans. Drake, p. 37. 31 Galileo himself is not entirely free of hierarchical attitudes about the heavens; see Galileo, Opere, vol. VII, p. 62; Dialogue, trans. Drake, p. 37: ‘[Salviati] As for the earth, we seek rather to ennoble and perfect it when we strive to make it like the celestial bodies, and, as it were, place it in heaven, from which your philosophers have banished it.’ 32 See the Appendix and nn. 46–50 below. Plotinus, Enneads II.2.3, also denies the immutability of heavens. 33 E.Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 189–91. 34 Ibid., p. 262. 35 Ibid. 36 Grant admits (ibid., pp. 267–8) that ‘the eventual transition to the concept of celestial corruptibility was probably aided in no small measure by a widespread belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Plato, Scripture, and many Church Fathers were agreed that the heavens were composed of one or more terrestrial elements and that the heavens were therefore capable of substantial change…. Scholastics who found the celestial discoveries of Tycho and Galileo compelling could justify support for celestial corruptibility by direct appeal to Plato and, more significantly, to the Church Fathers.’ 37 See Ficino, Opera, vol. II, pp. 439–40 [=pp. 1443–4]. Ficino reviews the various ancient opinions about the degree of literalness with which the Timaeus should be read, and he tries to distinguish between what may be said with and what is conjecture. What may be said with certainty is that ‘the world does not exist by itself, but from a cause; it does not exist from a fortuitous cause, but from a certain one; not merely from a natural cause, but from an intellectual one; not from an intellect determined naturally, but from a voluntary intellect; not from a will compelled by a kind of natural instinct, but from a free will’. On other matters, Ficino says, we must yield to the ‘divine oracles’, i.e. revelation; but it is clear from the rest of the commentary that he assumes creation to be a supratemporal, i.e. eternal, activity. 38 See, e.g., Ficino’s Theologia platonica, Book IV, in Opera, vol. I, pp. 158–9 [=pp. 128–9]: ‘Unde fit etiam ut motus lapidis descendentis ab alto, quo magis 236 James Hankins

terrae propinquat, eo fiat velocior, et flammae motus similiter ascendentis, quo fit coelo propinquior, eo evadit rapidior.’ 39 Ficino, Opera, vol. II, pp. 455–6 [=pp. 1459–60], corrected against Ficino’s edition of Plato, Opera, Venice, 1491, fol. 249vb, and Ficino, Commentaria in Platonem, Florence, 1496, sig. o1v: ‘In reliquis duabus anime viribus omnino sunt circuli quatuor similiter temporales, in utraque bini. Primus ad causam suam reflexio naturalis. Secundus ab eisdem formis ad easdem certa quaedam intervallis certis et perpetua revolutio, per quam et in celo configurationum et sub celo transformationum temporalis et certa revolutio provenit. Itaque circuitus generationis necessario celi circuitum sequitur. Hic vero circuitum anime. Revolutio anime orbem intelligentie comitatur. Motus quidem anime si ab intelligentia penitus deseratur, statim tam in percipiendo quam in agendo solum transibit in rectum. Quod autem repetat semet ipsam similesque per alia giros glomeret, sortitur ab intellectu quodam superiore qui et manens in se et subito conversus in causam, largitur intelligentiam anime per quam quasi porrectam manum sistit animam natura propria vagabundam, motumque eius irrequietum et ad rectam extra lineam naturaliter proniorem, retorquet in orbe, medium inter motum rectum atque quietem. Hinc anima in semet reditura meat mentemque profundam circuit et simili convertit imagine celum.’ 40 Galileo, Opere, vol. VII, p. 43; Dialogue, trans. Drake, pp. 19–20. The ‘fable’ again recalls Plato’s (see n. 2 above); the rectilinearity of disordered precosmic motions is probably based on Timaeus 42E–44D. 41 On the articles in the Condemnation of 1277 against the animation of the heavens see Grant, Planets, pp. 528–35, 545–7. Galileo himself in his early scholastic work De caelo (c. 1590) rejected the animation of the heavens, but did not rule out the motive force of acting as external ‘assisting forms’; see ibid., p. 486n. The unorthodox status of celestial animation continued to be emphasized down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; see, e.g., the remarks of Fox-Morcillo, De naturae philosophia, p. 68: ‘Coelum atque adeo mundum universum anima carere Christiana nos docet religio…’; and Crispus, De ethnicis philosophis, pp. 103–10 (Book VI). 42 See Plotinus, [Enneads], ed. and trans. A.H.Armstrong, 7 vols, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1966–88, vol. II, p. 43: ‘Body is naturally transported in a straight line and soul’s natural tendency is to contain, and from both of them together there comes to be something which is both carried along and at rest. If circular motion is to be attributed to body, how can it be when all body, including fire, moves in a straight line? It moves in a straight line till it comes to its ordained place, for as it is ordained, so it appears both to rest naturally and to be conveyed to the place where it was ordained to be…. So if it does not move in a circle, going on in a straight line will dissipate it; so it must move in a circle. But this is the doing of providence.’ 43 Ficino, Opera, vol. II, p. 606 [=pp. 1605–6], corrected against the editio princeps, Plotinus, Opera, Florence, 1492, sig. i3r: ‘Vult autem Plotinus circuitum igni ex prouidentia natura necessitate competere. Mens enim divina praevidens ignem fore corpus, et corpus, quia per substantiam in partes extenditur extra partes, ideo per actionem in momenta secundum prius atque posterius processurum, quod quidem est moved, et id quidem ex prima corporis natura recte moveri: et iccirco igneum corpus dissipabile fore cognoscens, merito ut caveret interitum, Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 237

primae corporis naturae, id est, dimensioni naturaliter mobili, mox quasi secundam adiunxit naturam, id est, sphaericam dimensioni figuram. Tota igitur igni natura a providentia tributa est per primam, si quando extra naturalem locum fuerit constitutus, recto uelut breuiori tramite sedem propriam repetit, per secundam simul et primam, postquam in sedem propriam se recipit, libentissime conquiescit. Cum vero dum in loco proprio permanet, permaneat etiam in natura, quae quidem est moveri, merito illic quiescit in motu. Quod sane nihil est aliud, quam circa idem centrum ambitumque revolvi, conferente videlicet ad hoc tum hac ipsa natura quae est moveri et in loco proprio in motu quiescere, tum etiam circulari figura. Ad idem praeterea confert ipsa necessitas naturam et providentiam sequens: nempe cum ibi quoque moveri appetat naturaliter, vel etiam si forte velit in rectum ex natura videlicet prima, neque tamen possit in rectum, per eadem necessitate relabitur…. Primus itaque motus non uniformis perpetuusque foret, sed difformis statim et interruptus. Ignis ergo coelestis in loco proprio positus perfecto semper perpetuoque orbe rotatur, praesertim quoniam moveri huic in loco non est aliud quam in seipso moveri.’ 44 To take a single example, Patrizi’s Nova de universis philosophia: (1) reports the Platonic view that the heavens are made of fire (fols 88r–9r, 97r); (2) provides details of Ficino’s argument for the existence of the elements in the heavens (fols 88v–9r; this differs somewhat from Patrizi’s own views); (3) reports approvingly the ancient and Copernican theories about the motion of the earth and presents a sophisticated mathematical argument for the diurnal motion of the earth (fol. 103r–v); (4) accepts that the natural motion of all nature is circular because of the circular motion of Mind and Soul (fol. 104r–v); and (5) praises the usefulness of mathematics against the criticism of Aristotle (fol. 68v). 45 On Platonist histories of philosophy see G.Santinello (ed.), Models of the History of Philosophy, Dordrecht, Boston and London, Kluwer, 1993, vol. I: From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’. For Galileo’s ‘solar rhetoric’ see especially his letter to Mons. Piero Dini of 23 March 1615, in Opere, vol. V, pp. 297–305; and E.Garin, ‘La rivoluzione copernica e il mito solare’, in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturale dal XIV al XVII secolo, Bari, Laterza, 1990, pp. 255–95. 46 Cf. Proclus, In Timaeum IV.4, ed. Diehl, vol. III, p. 113. 47 Genesis 1:6–7; Jeremiah 10:13, 51:16; Isaiah 40:22. 48 Cf. Plotinus, Enneads II. 1.4; Proclus, In Timaeum IV.4, ed. Diehl, vol. III, p. 115; Philoponus, Contra Aristotelem apud Simplicium, Commentaria in Aristotelis De caelo, ed. J.L.Heiberg, Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca, VII, Berlin, 1894, p. 84, lines 15–22; Plethon, De differentiis, in B.Lagarde, ‘Le “De differentiis” de Pléthon d’après l’autographe de la Marcienne’, Byzantion, 1973, vol. 43, pp. 312–43, at 322–3 (chap. VI). 49 Plotinus, Enneads II.1.7. 50 Proclus, In Timaeum IV.4, ed. Diehl, vol. III, p. 128. 51 Plato, Phaedo 112E–13C. 52 Plato, Timaeus 30D. 53 Numenius apud Clementem Alexandrinum, Stromateis I.150.1–4 et apud Eusebium, Praeparatio Evangelica IX.6.6–9. 54 Genesis 1:1. 55 Plato, Timaeus 31B. 12 Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany

Christia Mercer

Historians have recently begun to recognize that the history of early modern Aristotelian thought is both more complicated and more interesting than was previously believed. Thanks to the ground- breaking work of Charles Lohr, Edward Cranz and especially Charles Schmitt, we have begun to distinguish between the various ‘Aristotelianisms’ of the seventeenth century.1 It is now possible to reevaluate the use and abuse of Aristotle’s philosophy in this period. The subtle but important manner in which even our philosophical heroes employed Aristotelian ideas has come to be documented.2 We have begun to understand, for example, that progressive philosophers, such as Descartes, Galileo and Leibniz, criticized the scholastics, while at the same time making important use of Aristotelian ideas.3 In other words, we are slowly coming to terms with the complicated history of Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century and are beginning to evaluate properly its genuine contribution to many of the most -looking elements in early modern thought.4 The same is not true of seventeenth-century Platonism. While there is no question that ‘a good deal has been written on Renaissance Platonism, its qualities and influences’,5 seventeenth-century Platonism, especially on the Continent, has not been thoroughly explored. In the literature to date, only four areas are designated on the seventeenth-century philosophical map, and some of these are only vaguely drawn: there is the humanist Platonism that spilled over from the Renaissance; the tainted Platonism that rode into the period on the back of scholasticism; the pansophism of the Herborn encyclopedists; and, of course, the up- dated Platonism of the Cambridge group. That scholars perceive these to be the only options in the period is nicely documented by a puzzle that persists in Leibniz scholarship. Commentators have long noticed the Platonist elements in Leibniz’s works.6 Some have speculated about their source. Each of the four options listed above has been identified by more

238 Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 239 than one scholar as the source of Leibniz’s Platonism. For those few historians who have noticed the Platonism in Leibniz’s early works, the source had to be one widely available in Germany in the 1660s. Some have insisted that Leibniz drank from the Platonism that flowed north from sixteenth-century Italy;7 others have maintained that he imbibed his Platonism along with his scholasticism;8 and still others have pointed to the Herborn pansophists as the main source of his Platonist ideas.9 For those scholars who have not noticed the Platonism of Leibniz’s early works, the assumption has been that he acquired his Platonist leanings from the Cambridge group. For such commentators, the only question has been which Cambridge Platonist? Almost every major figure has been proposed: Ralph Cudworth, Anne Conway, Francis Mercury van Helmont and so on.10 As I argue elsewhere in detail, however, the primary source for Leibniz’s Platonism was neither the Renaissance Platonists, nor the tainted Platonism of the scholastics, nor the Herborn pansophists, nor any member of the Cambridge group, although Leibniz read and took seriously all of these sources. Rather, Leibniz’s Platonic roots extend only as far as his own backyard.11 Although standard intellectual histories of seventeenth-century Germany do not acknowledge their existence, there was a group of well-respected Protestant German Platonists who energetically lectured on Platonism and furiously published books in which it played a major role.12 These philosophers constitute an unnoticed area of humanist Platonism. It is this group that I shall discuss briefly here. But let me make one point clear: the philosophers who concern me were first and foremost conciliatory eclectics, who saw Platonism as just one component (although a major one) of their eclectic system. While they shared some of the fundamental assumptions of earlier humanists, they transformed those assumptions into a philosophy which differs importantly both from their Platonist contemporaries and from their humanist predecessors. In short, I believe that these German eclectics formed a fairly well-defined philosophical school. In an attempt to characterize this school, I have chosen to focus on Johann Adam Scherzer and Erhard Weigel, partly because they are so different from one another and partly because so little is known about them. Scherzer embraced elements of the Kabbalistic tradition and avoided any significant use of ‘modern’ ideas. Weigel was a committed Aristotelian, while proposing a wholly modern (i.e. mechanical) physics. Despite their genuine differences, Scherzer and Weigel shared a philosophical goal and a methodological strategy. As a pair they neatly represent both the fundamental features of the group in question and the full range of its philosophical options. 240 Christia Mercer

Johann Adam Scherzer (1628–1683) As professor of theology and Hebrew at the Lutheran university in Leipzig, Scherzer was widely known and highly respected in Germany.13 His colleagues proclaimed his virtues, and Leibniz spoke well of him. One of his most interesting textbooks, the Vade mecum sive manuale philosophicum quadripartitum, went through at least five editions from 1654 to 1704 (Fig. 12.1).14 In the ‘Dedicatio’, Scherzer explains that the present state of philosophy is one of complete confusion, with ‘as many definitions as definers’ and ‘as many philosophies as philosophers’.15 The underlying question in this and other works by Scherzer is: from what source may we derive a method that will provide us with the tranquillity we seek?16 In the ‘Dedicatio’ of the Vade mecum, he offers two answers, which are not obviously related. On the one hand, he recommends that we return to ‘sacred theology’ and claims that his proposals flow ultimately from the Hebrews;17 on the other, he says that he intends to forge agreement among philosophers by means of an accurate method and careful definition.18 This sounds very much like a version of the syncretism practised by Renaissance thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agostino Steuco. In particular, Scherzer’s comments suggest that he accepted the complicated historiography, usually called the prisca theologia or ancient theology, which cleverly sanctified non-Christian texts. The story runs roughly as follows: Moses did not write down all the wisdom bestowed on him by God, but transmitted it in an oral tradition that continued until it found its way into the writings of Plato, Pythagoras and other non- Christians. These authors, moreover, intentionally obscured these divine truths because they were not appropriate for the uninitiated. The major characters in this drama included Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster and Pythagoras.19 Syncretists like Pico and Steuco believed that the greater learning of their own period would help to uncover this ancient wisdom, so that the single unifying philosophy that had lain hidden in the ancient texts could finally be brought to light.20 For committed Christians like Pico, this true philosophy would be consistent with Christianity.21 For our purposes, it is important that Pico extended his syncretism to include Jewish theology in general and the in particular.22 According to Pico, both Jewish and pagan texts, when read in the proper ‘divine light’, would be seen to contain Christian truths.23 The ‘Dedicatio’ of Scherzer’s Vade mecum suggests the same general strategy: although he places greater emphasis on terminological precision than had Figure 12.1 Title-page of A.Scherzer, Vade mecum sive manuale philosophicum quadripartitum, Leipzig, 1686. (Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.) 242 Christia Mercer earlier humanist proponents, he appears to embrace their basic assumption that syncretism was the means to truth and harmony. Nor does a quick survey of the Vade mecum disappoint. Scherzer insists at the outset that his definitions are consistent with the expositio of the Kabbalists;24 and throughout the book he makes thorough use of the major texts and figures of the prisca theologia. We find references to ancient theologians such as Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, whose Pimander is often cited, and to Renaissance students of the ancient wisdom, including Pico, Steuco and especially Marsilio Ficino, whose Theologia Platonica is an important source for Scherzer. Although these references are interspersed with citations of sundry scholastics, the conception of God and the relation between the divine and the created world are thoroughly Platonist. For example, Scherzer says that he is following Plato in the second book of the Republic when he states that God ‘always remains most beautiful and simply the best that it is possible to be’.25 He cites Ficino in describing God as ‘the clearest truth, the most truthful clarity, or the perfection, the light which sees itself,…the source of light,…the reason of reasons, the source and maker of everything, the uniform and omniform form,…the unity in the multitude’.26 The mind of God contains the Platonic Ideas or archetypes, and the created entities of the world are manifestations of these Ideas.27 The former are perfect, the latter are imperfect; yet the perfection of God is evident in the composition and harmony of created things.28 Embracing the doctrine of emanation, Scherzer describes God as the unchanging principle of all things and their constant source.29 Thus, on the face of it, the Vade mecum looks very much like a syncretist text in the tradition of Renaissance thinkers like Pico and Steuco. The salient features of many of Scherzer’s other publications seem to confirm this general impression: they contain references to the most important representatives of the ancient wisdom and are scattered with Hebrew quotations. Like Pico and Steuco, Scherzer includes Aristotelian philosophy within his eclectic net and is prepared to draw on Jewish sources as a means to Christian truth. Scherzer’s texts are, however, more complicated than they first appear. On more careful analysis, he is neither a syncretist nor a strict believer in the genealogy of the ancient wisdom. His true intellectual character is something both more difficult to discern and historically more interesting. Let us consider his writings in more detail. In the preface to the Collegium Anti-Socinianum, Scherzer explains that many false and misleading claims have been made about the most important matters. For example, there has been a long debate about the Trinity and how it is to be understood. In his view, the problem has Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 243 gone unsolved for a number of reasons: the scholastics used too many words imprecisely; philosophers have been too ignorant about important philological matters; and theologians have too often simply misread the Bible. Against this background, it is appropriate to ask how we can uncover ‘the naked truth without disguise’.30 Scherzer intends to solve the problem of the Trinity by means of a proper interpretation of the words of Scripture. In constructing this accurate understanding of the relevant biblical texts, he emphasizes the need for a correct use of reason; but he acknowledges that human reason must at times be aided by divine revelation. Scherzer warns readers of the Collegium Anti-Socinianum that, while it is necessary to be divinely enlightened in order to read Scriptures properly, we must not be seduced by the syncretists who open the door to heresy by shrouding the Bible in mystery. He rejects ‘the most wicked syncretism’,31 along with any other interpretative approach that denies the importance of reason and clarity. Instead, he recommends that we follow the example of Augustine, Ambrose and others who allow Scripture to speak for itself.32 Scherzer’s strategy is to apply reason and careful argumentation to ‘the words of Scripture’.33 In the remaining 1,323 pages of very small print, he takes on a variety of theological topics: the Eucharist, Baptism, the Trinity, the tension between human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and so on. Although he makes fullest use of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and especially Augustine, he refers to a wide range of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and early modern thinkers. In his range of sources, Scherzer is very like Pico: he states that we must make good use of all the best thinkers, whether Jews or ancient wise men.34 Scherzer, however, parts ways with Pico in his relation to these sources. Unlike the syncretists who, according to Scherzer, cast the ideas of their predecessors into mysterious shadows, he intends to place them under the intense light of philosophical scrutiny and Christian doctrine. While Scherzer is content to borrow from any intellectual tradition that will aid in his pursuit of the truth, he takes only what he considers to be clear and orthodox, happily discarding the rest. His Trifolium orientate is an enlightening example of the use he made of his sources. The book contains three commentaries: all on biblical texts; all originally written in Hebrew by Jewish scholars; and all translated into Latin.35 Scherzer offers these commentaries on the Hebrew Bible in pursuit of a true and accurate understanding of the text. Such philosophical and philological commentaries were supposed to help the thoughtful Christian grasp the Christian truths. While he thinks that Jews, along with pagan philosophers, have much to offer, he 244 Christia Mercer believes that one must discriminate carefully among their interpretations. It is in this sense that he is neither a syncretist nor a proponent of the ancient wisdom. Rather, he is a critical and discerning conciliatory eclectic, who hopes to reconcile the great systems of thought and religion, but not at the expense of the imprecision and forced compromises of his predecessors. Only by means of such discrimination could pernicious religious controversies be avoided and peace among the faithful be attained. In the Vade mecum, Scherzer insists that his goal is intellectual peace and personal tranquillity; and he claims that clarity is the means to the goal. Once we take seriously his commitment to forging philosophical agreement by these means, we are able to see that text as a practical guide to achieving this goal. The Vade mecum is divided into five parts. Part I contains a long list of definitions in alphabetical order and Part II a list of philosophical distinctions; in the remaining three parts, Scherzer uses this material in an attempt to solve a number of philosophical and theological problems. For example, he insists that the difficult issue of how God can be regarded as the cause of sin will be resolved once the correct definitions and distinctions have been made.36 The clarity which is supposed to bring about peace and tranquillity begins with careful definitions. In the ‘Dedicatio’, he writes: ‘it seems to be necessary above all to maintain the received and common definitions of things, so that we may philosophize with one voice and one mind’.37 After the definitions are clearly laid out, the appropriate distinctions must be made.38 According to Scherzer, his definitions and distinctions are the basic tools with which to solve all philosophical problems. Scherzer’s conciliatory eclecticism is especially apparent in his definitions. He proudly proclaims that his proposals did not spring from him, already perfect and mature, like Athena from the head of Zeus.39 His definitions and distinctions are instead borrowed from the best of his predecessors. Although he claims that his definitions are consistent with the teachings of the Kabbalists,40 in fact, most are drawn directly from scholastic sources. He relies heavily on the work of certain celebrated schoolman, although he sometimes edits and supplements their definitions.41 There are two striking features of Part I of the Vade mecum. First, Scherzer cites an enormous range of sources, displaying an impressive erudition. From the Greek commentators on Aristotle (e.g. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius) to late scholastics (e.g. Pedro Fonseca, Francisco Suárez), from the late ancient Platonists (e.g. Plotinus, Proclus) to Hebrew and Protestant theologians (e.g. , Luther). Second, there is a clear Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 245 division of labour between Aristotle and Plato. For his definitions of corporeal matters, Scherzer makes full use of the Aristotelian tradition, quoting most frequently from Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle himself. In his definition of prime matter, for example, he states that it ‘lacks all forms’;42 in his account of an accident, he draws on the notion of quidditas;43 and in his discussions of form, he turns to the whole battery of Aristotelian-scholastic distinctions between complete and incomplete substance, between per se and per accidens being, and so on.44 When it comes to incorporeal matters, however, both the definitions and sources are entirely Platonist.45 As noted above, his account of God and the relation between the divine and the created world stands firmly in that tradition. These two features of Part I of the Vade mecum make it perfectly clear that Scherzer took his definitions from among the most important texts in the history of philosophy. He did not gloss over the differences between philosophical systems, but rather selected those elements from each which could be fit together into a coherent and precisely drawn plan. Once the definitions have been carefully laid out and the distinctions properly made, Scherzer believes that the thoughtful student will be able to resolve disputes. For example, once we have a clearer understanding of the notions of Deus and causa, we can better decide whether the divine being can be the cause of itself.46 Moreover, the very process of using these definitions and distinctions will elicit understanding. In Part I, he explains that the organization of a discipline derives from ‘method’, which he defines as a judgement of the mind, correctly and carefully ordering everything that pertains to the discipline.47 In Part IV, Scherzer claims that, once everything has been clearly defined, properly distinguished and thoroughly ordered, the human intellect will be able to understand the essence of things.48 Because God is ‘the goodness itself of intelligible things’,49 one becomes good through the acquisition of knowledge. The basic assumption underlying the Vade mecum is that the truth will set its readers free of controversy and incline them towards peace. His contemporaries apparently agreed. According to one of his colleagues, Scherzer had offered the lost youth of his day a thread of Ariadne to guide them out of the labyrinth of philosophical and theological dispute. According to another, his work showed the path to a serene mind.50 To summarize briefly, Scherzer sought wisdom and the peace that comes from its acquisition. The primary means to this goal was, in his view, to construct a true and precisely articulated philosophy composed of the best elements of the great philosophical systems. He wanted to 246 Christia Mercer achieve concord, but not at the expense of imprecision and obscurity. For Scherzer, as for other members of the group, the Platonic tradition constituted a major part of the true philosophy.

Erhard Weigel (1625–1699) Erhard Weigel, professor of mathematics and astronomy at the Lutheran university in Jena, was an important and controversial figure. Students from all over Germany came to study with him, including well-known philosophers such as Leibniz, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Wolff. While his influence on the development of Leibniz’s logic has been discussed,51 his attempt to combine the new mechanical physics with his own version of Aristotelian metaphysics has not received the attention it deserves.52 In his most important work, Analysis Aristotelica ex Euclide restituta of 1658, Weigel proposes a new philosophy built with ancient tools on ancient foundations. In the ‘Praefatio’, he makes vivid use of architectural metaphors, arguing that he and his contemporaries must restore the edifice which, though well constructed by the ancients, has fallen into utter disrepair. According to Weigel, the ancient philosophers were able to build ‘so great a monument in such a splendid and magnificent manner’ on account of their ‘tireless zeal and ingenuity’. Yet while the atrium and vestibule remained in good condition, the interior rooms were threatened with ruin because of the inadequate philosophical tools of the scholastics.53 Assigning to himself the job of architectural surveyor, Weigel explains that once he became aware of ‘the unfortunate ruin of this most valuable structure’, he began to search for someone ‘to fill the gaping cracks in the walls and to restore the original splendour of the building’. He then realized that the appropriate person to do this was none other than Aristotle, ‘the most brilliant Philosopher’, who had not only laid the foundations of the original building but had also devised the tools for its maintenance and repair.54 In Weigel’s opinion, he and his contemporaries were uniquely well situated to repair and restore the full magnificence of the ancient edifice because they had rediscovered those tools—that is, they had recognized the importance and power of mathematical demonstration. With such mathematical skills, the true sophistication of Aristotle’s thought could now be recovered and the fundamental truths of the Aristotelian system brought to light.55 For all his proclamations of the brilliance of Aristotle, Weigel denies that he is a sectarian philosopher. He insists that he follows the ancients generally in their search for clarity and truth.56 He desires ‘first and Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 247 foremost’ to prove that valid, real and most accurate demonstrations are found and employed not only in mathematics but also in other branches of philosophy.57 Like Scherzer, he seeks to combine a conciliatory eclecticism with a commitment to methodological precision. Rejecting the disputational style of the scholastics, Weigel says that he will use his non-sectarian, eclectic approach to ascend to the true philosophy; he will then apply the Euclidean method to all its parts so as to make them into a single coherent system.58 Through the careful use of this Euclidean or mathematical method, philosophers will be able to resolve disagreements and decide between conflicting hypotheses.59 Although Weigel’s methodological programme is more thoroughly articulated than Scherzer’s, the two philosophers are strikingly similar: both present careful definitions which have been borrowed from a variety of philosophical sources; both use these definitions in an attempt to solve key philosophical problems; both believe that their own proposals will diminish philosophical conflict and encourage intellectual peace. By such means, each hopes to lead wayward souls to the truth. Nor does Weigel disagree with Scherzer about the division of labour between Plato and Aristotle. Weigel wholeheartedly accepts the account of science and demonstration proposed in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and intends to use it along with the Euclidean method as a cornerstone of his philosophy. Otherwise, he generally restricts his use of the Aristotelian philosophy to corporeal matters and turns for inspiration concerning the incorporeal realm to Plato and the Platonists. It is significant that Weigel, like Scherzer, distinguishes between what he refers to as the mysterious philosophy of the Platonists and the thought of Plato.60 Although he was familiar with the key figures of the prisca theologia, he rejects that historiography and embraces the Platonist tradition as only one among many sources of the truth. He says at the outset of the Analysis Aristotelica that, following Plato, we must proceed by clear and accurate steps to the first causes and absolute truths, finally ascending to God, who is the ‘purest source of Truths’.61 According to Weigel, although Plato’s dialogues show this to be an arduous journey, the mathematical approach of Pythagoras and the Platonists will help us on our way.62 He insists that the first truths, on which all other truths are based, are ultimately the divine attributes which continually emanate from God to the created world.63 These attributes are like Platonic Ideas,64 which can be grasped by our intellect with the aid of the divine light.65 For Weigel, ‘the Axioms’ of the true philosophy ‘are strictly speaking nothing other 248 Christia Mercer than the first truths’,66 and they derive from the divine attributes. As he explains:

Not only has our intellect, by the grace of the one Divine Power, always known, from within its own self, these [first] truths themselves in the most perfect manner, but it first of all understands [these] most directly as they are in themselves; and from there it begins, and ultimately ends, its entire learned discourse in them; and from these [first truths], it deduces by means of demonstration all real demonstrative Propositions, especially those which are eternal…67

Like Scherzer, when Weigel turns his analysis from God, knowledge and truth to corporeal topics, he makes more thorough use of Aristotelian ideas. But it is enormously important that, unlike Scherzer, Weigel does not restrict the main ingredients of his eclectic mixture to ancient sources. A major part of his philosophical concoction comes from the new mechanical physics. In fact, he embraces the moderns and credits them with having put mathematics in its proper place. He explains that we owe ‘great thanks’ to our new philosophical leaders— such as Copernicus, Gassendi and Descartes—for helping us to see the important use to which mathematics can be put. In his view, although these new systems are merely extensions of older forms of knowledge, they are important for having revealed the correct way to complete ancient philosophy. By combining the old philosophy with the new and sorting out the true from the false, we shall be able to arrive at the true philosophy.68 Weigel begins the chapter ‘De philosophia naturali’, by explaining that natural entities are constituted of matter and form.69 He goes on to offer what on the surface looks like an Aristotelian account of the principles of nature. This part of Weigel’s book nicely exemplifies his conciliatory approach. He turns the Aristotelian notion of prime matter into res extensa, so that all corporeal properties are reducible to the arrangement of matter. According to Weigel, matter, which is ‘pure potentiality’, is indeterminate, while form ‘consists in the substantial determination’ of this matter. Each determination of matter is a kind of natural body. Furthermore, once res extensa or matter is made determinate, the affections of the body ‘flow’ from it.70 Elsewhere in the book, Weigel explains that there are two kinds of being (Ens): substance and mode, with the latter existing in the former;71 moreover, he claims that all the modes of corporeal substances can be reduced to quantity.72 Natural philosophy thus consists in the study of the various Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 249 determinations of res extensa. By demoting the Cartesian notion of res extensa to the passive principle in a ‘natural body’ and by turning the Aristotelian notion of form into the organization or determination of that principle, Weigel has developed an account of body that is a neat melding of Peripatetic and Cartesian physics. The terminology remains recognizably Aristotelian, while the explanatory model is wholly mechanical: the nature of a body, which is constituted of matter and form, can serve as the cause and explanation of all its corporeal properties.73 With impressive subtlety, Weigel has constructed a philosophy from parts of the Aristotelian, Platonic and mechanical traditions.

General remarks A summing up is in order. For Scherzer, Weigel and the other German eclectics who interest me—Johann Christoph Sturm,74 Jakob Thomasius75 and Leibniz himself76—philosophy must be commandeered from the hands of the (mostly) incompetent scholastics and set on the correct, non-sectarian and conciliatory course. There is a truth whose foundations are discoverable with divine help, whose basic elements are grasped with the aid of the great philosophical systems of the past and whose individual parts will create a coherent, persuasive and peace-inducing whole. These philosophers use elements of Platonism and sometimes of Kabbalism; but they adhere strictly to neither tradition. They reject the esoteric and historiographical core of the ancient theology, while nevertheless making frequent use of the thought of Ficino and other major proponents of that tradition. They reject the pansophism (and the millenarianism that often motivated it) of their earlier German colleagues in Herborn. They reject the methodology of the scholastics, although they borrow heavily from scholastic sources. They emphasize the need for clarity and precision, especially when it comes to the definitions of philosophical and theological terms, but they claim that reason by itself is insufficient to attain genuine knowledge. With regard to their philosophical method, they are very similar to Renaissance eclectics such as Pico in their general assumptions. In his ‘Oration on the Dignity of Mankind’, Pico declares: ‘I have resolved not to accept anyone’s words, but to roam through all the masters of philosophy, to investigate every opinion and to know all the schools.’ He insists that we should not devote ourselves to any one particular philosophical sect, noting that ‘it was a practice of the ancients to study every school of writers, and if possible, not to pass over any treatise’.77 250 Christia Mercer

But our German conciliatory eclectics are unlike Pico both in their attitude to historical texts and in their specific methodological concerns. They do not share his belief, and that of other concordists, that all the great philosophical systems could eventually be made to cohere. According to Pico, each philosophical tradition has a share of the truth, which flowed from a single source, so that, once the truths in each were discovered, they could easily be harmonized into a single comprehensive and true philosophy. Pico is genuinely committed to the compatibility of the major philosophical schools and especially to the fundamental agreement between the philosophy of Plato and that of Aristotle. He expects his ‘comparison of very many sects’ to yield ‘that radiance of truth…like the sun rising from the deep’. In his opinion, while others had understood ‘that the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is the same’, he is the first to demonstrate the ‘concord’ between them. He declares, moreover, ‘the thoughts of Scotus and Thomas, of Averroës and Avicenna, which are considered to be discordant,…to be in concord’.78 One of the main points of his project was to make this concord evident. Our seventeenth-century Germans are both more discriminating and more critical. They do not think that the basic doctrines of all the major philosophical systems can be brought into line. They assume at most that some parts of one system can be made to agree with some parts of another. In other words, they do not believe that the ancients were fundamentally in agreement, but rather that one philosopher had an insight into a certain aspect of the truth and another into a different aspect. A second important difference between our early modern Germans and their Renaissance predecessors is their obsession with precision. For the Germans, precision and clarity were more important than concordism. And this is closely related to their desire to construct a coherent and carefully wrought metaphysics on which to ground their theology. They wanted the pieces to fit neatly together so as to form a thoroughly secure foundation. They thought that human reason when aided by divine illumination could gain access to the truth. While ancient authors may have had important philosophical insights, it was impossible for them to grasp the complete truth because they lacked divine illumination. As Jakob Thomasius was in the habit of emphasizing—even with reference to his beloved Aristotle—however brilliant the ancients may have been, they were pagans who had not benefited from the full power of divine light.79 It was the responsibility of the properly educated Protestant thinker to identify individual truths and then fit them together into a meticulously constructed system. Platonism was crucial to their system because it tied the pieces Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 251 together: God made rational beings and the world in such a way that, through the contemplation of the products of divinity and the divinely arranged harmony among them, humans could ascend to the truth and thereby acquire wisdom, virtue and peace. While these German philosophers accept many of the same Platonist assumptions of earlier thinkers, they situate these assumptions in a philosophy that differs in important respects both from their Platonist contemporaries and from their humanist predecessors. It is this approach to Platonism that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves.

Notes 1 See especially C.B.Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983. For the most important works of Lohr, Cranz and Schmitt see the bibliography in B.P.Copenhaver and C. B.Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; and in C.B.Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 2 In my ‘The vitality and importance of early modern Aristotelianism’, in Tom Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tensions between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 33–67, especially sections I and II, I argue that for too long we have assumed that the criticisms which most early modern philosophers level against scholasticism indicate that they were wholly anti-Aristotelian. In fact, seventeenth-century philosophers were happy to criticize some scholastics severely and to borrow heavily from others. 3 Historians of philosophy are slowly beginning to document the subtle ways in which the moderns use the traditional Aristotelian philosophy. For a recent excellent example of the scholarly excavation of the traditional sources for early modern ideas, see D.Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1996. For essays on the use of traditional philosophical ideas by other apparently ‘modern’ thinkers see Sorell, Rise of Modern Philosophy. 4 In ‘Vitality and importance’, in Sorell, Rise of Modern Philosophy, I present some Aristotelian philosophers who contributed to the progressive movements in early modern thought and cite other literature on the topic; see especially sections III and IV. 5 Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, p. 8. 6 I use the term Platonist, instead of Neoplatonist, advisedly. As R.T.Wallis explains in his Neoplatonism, London, Duckworth, 1972, p. 1: ‘“Neoplatonism” is a term coined in modern times to distinguish the form of the tradition inaugurated by Plotinus (204–70) and lasting in its pagan form down to the sixth century A.D. from the teaching of Plato’s immediate disciplines (the “Old Academy”) and from Platonism of the earlier Roman Empire (“Middle Platonism”).’ I agree both with P.Merlan, in his ‘Greek philosophy from Plato to Plotinus’, in A.H.Armstrong, (ed.), The Cambridge 252 Christia Mercer

History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 10–38, at 14, who claims that Neoplatonism as a term is ‘misleading, in that to some it may suggest a more radical difference between the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus than is warranted’, and with P.O.Kristeller, who in discussion has encouraged me to refrain from using the term. There seems no more reason to refer to Plotinus, Proclus, Ficino and others as Neoplatonists than to refer to scholastics like Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and others as Neoaristotelians. The latter bear the same relation to Aristotle’s thought and writings as the former do to Plato’s: both groups see the ancient author as a source of profound philosophical truth which they intend to interpret and use. Stephen Menn, in his Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. xii–xiii, distinguishes between a Platonic doctrine, which is one found in Plato’s dialogues, and a Platonist doctrine, which is one extracted from the texts of the Platonists. This distinction seems exactly right, and I follow it here. 7 Some studies have taken seriously the relation between Leibniz and ancient Platonists like Plotinus, but they have focused on Leibniz’s later thought and have not acknowledged the role Platonism played in his philosophical development. The best of these are still: J.Politella, ‘Platonism, Aristotelianism, and cabalism in the philosophy of Leibniz’, unpublished dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1938; and R.Meyer, ‘Leibniz und Plotin’, Studia Leibnitiana. Supplementa, 1971, vol. 5, pp. 31–54. 8 For example, Daniel Fouke proposes that Leibniz acquired his Platonic tendencies from the Platonism inherent in scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas; see his ‘Emanation and the perfections of being: Divine causation and the autonomy of nature in Leibniz’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 1994, vol. 76, pp. 168–71. 9 For the influence of the Herborn school see L.Loemker, ‘Leibniz and the Herborn encyclopedists’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1961, vol. 22, pp. 323–38; and D.Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 36–44. Loemker argues that the Herborn philosophers as a group were a major source of Leibniz’s Platonism, while Rutherford maintains that the Herborn pansophist Johann Bisterfeld may have been a source for Leibniz’s early conception of harmony. 10 Among those scholars who have noticed Leibniz’s Platonism, most have thought that it derived from one or another of the so-called Cambridge Platonists, but they have disagreed as to which member of the group most influenced Leibniz and when this influence occurred. To cite three examples: A.Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1995, maintains that the relationship between van Helmont and Leibniz became important in the late 1680s and that the former was the major source of Leibniz’s Platonism; C.Merchant, ‘The vitalism of Anne Conway: Its impact on Leibniz’s concept of the monad’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1979, vol. 17, pp. 255–69, thinks that Anne Conway had the most significant impact and that it took place in the 1690s; while C.Wilson, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Manchester, Manchester University Press, Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 253

1989, pp. 160–2, claims that Ralph Cudworth began to have a strong influence on Leibniz in 1689. 11 None of the standard accounts of Leibniz’s early thought recognize the Platonism of his intellectual culture. See, e.g., G.E.Guhrauer, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz: Eine Biographie, Breslau, 1846; W.Kabitz, Die Philosophie des jungen Leibniz, Heidelberg, 1909; K.Moll, Der junge Leibniz, Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1978, vol. I; E.Aiton, Leibniz, Bristol, Adam Hilger, 1985; and Y.Belaval, Leibniz: Initiation à sa Philosophie, Paris, Vrin, 1962. Although Belaval is aware of Leibniz’s early Platonist leanings, he identifies neither its source nor its important role in his early thought. In my forthcoming book, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, New York, Cambridge University Press, especially chaps 5 and 6, I argue that the Platonism which he learned as a young man strongly influenced the development of his philosophy. 12 The standard histories include: M.Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Tübingen, J.C.B.Mohr, 1939; J.Bohatec, Die cartesianische Scholastik in der Philosophie und reformierten Dogmatik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1912; S.Wollgast, Philosophie in Deutschland zwischen Reformation und Aufklaerung, 1550–1650, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1988; U.G.Leinsle, Reformversuche protestantischer Metaphysik im Zeitalter des Rationalismus, Augsburg, Maro, 1988. 13 I have not been able to find any accurate account of Scherzer and his work in the secondary literature. Wundt offers a brief account, but like Fischer incorrectly places him squarely among the Protestant Aristotelians. See M. Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik, pp. 141–2; and K.Fischer, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Leben, Werke, und Lehre, Heidelberg, 1920, pp. 38–9. Leinsle, Reformversuche, pp. 20–6, notes that Scherzer borrows ideas from Plato and Aristotle but does not explore this conciliatory aspect of his thought. In fact, Scherzer was more interested in Kabbalistic and Platonic doctrines than those of Aristotle. 14 In the introduction to the fourth edition of A.Scherzer, Vade mecum sive manuale philosophicum quadripartitum, Leipzig, 1686 (which is the edition cited here), there appear a number of reviews which proclaim the book’s importance. One of these is by Jakob Thomasius, the mentor of Leibniz and father of . The elder Thomasius was himself a member of the German conciliatory school to which I call attention here. For more on the conciliatory eclecticism of Jakob Thomasius see below, esp. n. 75. For Leibniz’s positive comments see G.W.Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin, Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1966, Series VI, Vol. II, pp. 15, 310. 15 Scherzer, Vade mecum, ‘Dedicatio’, [p. iii]: ‘tot habemus definitiones, quot definitores, tot capita et sensus, quot cudones, tot Philosophias, quot Philosophos’. 16 Apart from the ‘Dedicatio’ of the Vade mecum, [p. vi], see also A.Scherzer, Collegium Anti-Socinianum, 3rd ed., Leipzig, 1702, ‘Praefatio’, especially sigs. c4r–d2v. 17 Scherzer, Vade mecum, ‘Dedicatio’, [pp. vi–viii]. 18 Ibid., [p. iii]. 19 See D.P.Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from 254 Christia Mercer

the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972. Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 146–8, also summarize the tradition and cite more recent studies. As they note, the theory that Plato was heir to an esoteric theology existed before the Renaissance, but it became ‘a major element in Western historiography only in the later fifteenth century’ when Marsilio Ficino and Pico made it famous (p. 136). There were various elaborations on the story just given. For example, some humanists maintained that Plato had acquired his esoteric wisdom during travels to Egypt where he met and conversed with Jewish wise men. 20 In his famous ‘Oratio’ of 1486, Pico gives a concise version of the story of the ancient wisdom: see Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate; Heptaplus; De ente et uno; e scritti vari, ed. E.Garin, Florence, Vallecchi, 1942, pp. 154–62. Agostino Steuco, Vatican librarian and bishop of Gubbio, was the author of De perenni philosophia libri X, Lyon, 1540; see M.Crociata, Umanesimo e teologia in Agostino Steuco, Rome, Città nuova editrice, 1987. 21 Some early modern syncretists were more committed to harmony among and radical ecumenism than to Christianity, though this was a fairly dangerous position to maintain. One of the better known is the French philosopher Jean Bodin, who seems to argue in his Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis that the major religions are fundamentally the same; see J.Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime, ed. M.L.D.Kuntz, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975; and Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres, ed. G. Gawlick and F.Niewöhner, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1996. Leibniz took copious notes from an unpublished manuscript of this work: see Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Series VI, Vol. II, pp. 126–144. 22 Pico insists that God ordered Moses to write down the law but not the related wisdom which God had given him, so that the latter might remain hidden until the appropriate time; see, e.g., Pico, De hominis dignitate, p. 156: ‘Ergo haec clam vulgo habere, perfectis communicanda,…non humani consilii sed divini praecepti fuit.’ For Pico, the teachings of ‘the Hebrews’ offered a key to much of that wisdom, which he was now prepared to explain. 23 I have left out many important details in this brief account of the ancient theology. One of these is worth noting because it has some bearing on my discussion. An important piece of evidence for the genealogy of prisci theologi was the , a collection of texts believed to be contemporary with Moses, which appeared to foreshadow many Christian doctrines. When Isaac Casaubon argued persuasively in 1614 that these texts were post-Christian, the defenders of the ancient theology lost ground that was never regained. See A.Grafton, ‘Protestant versus prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, in his Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991, chap. 5. Scherzer, Thomasius and Weigel were aware of Casaubon’s attack on the Hermetica; Thomasius believed that it discredited the theory. 24 Scherzer, Vade mecum, ‘Dedicatio’, [p. vii]: ‘quae non adeo incongrua est expositioni Cabbalistarum’. 25 Ibid., Part I, p. 52: ‘Deus semper pulcherrimus, et optimus quantum fieri potest manet simpliciter, in sua forma.’ Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 255

26 Ibid., Part I, p. 52: ‘Deus est perspicacissima veritas, et verissima perspicacia, sive perfectio, lux seipsa videns,…luminisque fons… Ficinus Platon. Theol lib. 1, cap. 6. Deus est ratio rationum, fons rerumque artifex omnium, forma uniformis, et omniformis,…in multitudine unitas …Ficinus. Epist. lib. 2.’ 27 Ibid., pp. 110, 137. 28 Ibid., pp. 29, 52, 100. 29 Ibid., p. 52. 30 Scherzer, Collegium, ‘Praefatio’, sig. d2v: ‘nudam sine fuco veritatem’. 31 Ibid., sig. d2v: ‘Et hoc est grande Mysterium illud nefandissimi Syncretismi’. 32 Ibid., sig. d2r: ‘Hinc porro fulget, SCRIPTURAE luce nitente, Unica Christicolis gloria, vita, salus.’ 33 E.g., ibid.: ‘[verba Scripturae] non nisi ex judicio per limitationem ac determinationem Rationis humanae sint intelligenda…’ 34 At Collegium, ‘Praefatio’, sig. c4r, he expresses his dismay that, in the name of orthodoxy, some of his contemporaries wanted to silence ‘Judeos, …Philosophos,…et Doctos 35 A.Scherzer, Trifolium orientate, continens commentarios R.Abarbenelis… R.Sal.Jarchi…et R.Mos.Maimonidae…cum versione, notis philologico- philosophicis et appendice speciminis theologiae mysticae Ebraeorum, junctis Autoritatum SS Scripturae, Leipzig, 1663. 36 Scherzer, Vade mecum, Part II, p. 25 37 Ibid., ‘Dedicatio’, [p. iv]: ‘maxime necessarium esse videtur, receptas et communes Rerum Definitiones retinere, ut uno ore et una philosophemur mente.’ 38 See, e.g., ibid., ‘Dedicatio’, [p. vi]: ‘Desideravi enim adhuc viam aliquam de vero Distinctionum usu, nondum, quod sciam, expositam.’ 39 Ibid., ‘Dedicatio’, [p. vii]. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., Part I, p. 29. 42 Ibid., Part I, p. 126: ‘Materia prima est primum subjectum, ex quo aliquid sit, in quod insit, et si quid corrumpitur, ultimo resolvitur…. Est substantia incompleta, ex se omni forma carens…’ 43 Ibid., Part I, p. 3: ‘Accidens est, quod est extra rationem quidditatis.’ 44 Ibid., pp. 67, 90, 126, 195. 45 One is reminded of Augustine, who in Confessions VII.xx explains: ‘Sed tunc, lectis Platonicorum illis libris, posteaquam inde admonitus quaerere incorpoream veritatem, invisibilia tua per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspexi…’ Cf. Pico, De hominis dignitate, p. 142: ‘Quid erat cum Peripaticis egisse de naturalibus, nisi et Platonicorum accersebatur academia, quorum doctrina et de divinis semper inter omnes philosophias—teste Augustino (De civitate Dei IX.1)—habita est sanctissima…’ 46 Scherzer, Vade mecum, Part IV, p. 25, concludes that the answer to this question is no. 47 Ibid., Part I, p. 131, he writes: ‘Methodus est animi judicium, apte riteque ordinantis ea omnia, quae ad universam aliquam scientiam pertinent, ex quo totius illius scientiae ordo nascitur.’ 48 Ibid., Part IV, pp. 3–5. 49 Ibid., Part I, p. 53: ‘Deus est…ipsa rerum intelligendarum bonitas…’ 256 Christia Mercer

50 These congratulatory comments, along with various poems celebrating the book, are published in the fourth edition of the Vade mecum. 51 For his influence on Leibniz’s logic, see Kabitz, Philosophie des jungen Leibniz; Guhrauer, Leibniz: Eine Biographie; Belaval, Leibniz; and especially Moll, Der junge Leibniz. For a brief discussion of Weigel’s metaphysics see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, chaps 1 and 2. 52 The most thorough account of Weigel appears in Leinsle, Reformversuche, pp. 63–87, where there is also a list of earlier literature. Lewis White Beck makes some interesting biographical remarks about Weigel and cites more thorough accounts of his life, but seriously miscategorizes him; see Beck’s Early , Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1996, pp. 194–5. For a brief account of Weigel, as well as of Leibniz’s stay in Jena, see Aiton, Leibniz, pp. 15–16. Despite Leinsle’s helpful overview of Weigel’s thought, he misdescribes Weigel’s methodology (as ‘mathematical pansophism’, p. 66) and does not recognize the similarity between Weigel’s thinking and that of his Lutheran countrymen in Leipzig. 53 For his complaints about the scholastics see E.Weigel, Analysis Aristotelica ex Euclide restituta, Jena, 1658, ‘Praefatio’, [pp. iii], 89, 94–5. Nevertheless, he is sometimes prepared to use scholastic terminology and distinctions: see, e.g., pp. 175, 181, 194–6. 54 Ibid., ‘Praefatio’, [p. iv]: ‘Mirabar primum indefessam veterum Philosophorum, in extruendo tanto, tam magnifice, tam splendide, monumento, sedulitatem et sollertiam. Postmodum, cum Vestibulum quidem et Atrium Mathematicorum, veteris quippe Architectonicae peritissimorum, cura non solum sarta tecta semper servata; sed etiam magis magisque in dies exculta esse et exornata: caetera, ex adverse, penetralia et intimiora conclavia singulis, post priscos istos ipsorum fundatores, temporibus ruinam minitata, observarem, coepi dolere vicem eius, et intolerabilem tanti thesauri jacturam animatus deplorare: tandem vero scrutari, numquis esset, qui praevisa miserabili pretiosissimae structurae ruina, hiantes parietum fissuras obturare, pristinumque splendorem operi reddere animum induxisset. Quo facto, non absque summa exultatione deprehendi, Aristotelem, Philosophum acutissimum, non solum modum et artificium ruinas istas praecavendi, mechanasque ad reparationem necessarias, (Demonstrationes dico) conficiendi tradidisse, sed etiam non exigua ad operis perfectionem jecisse fundamenta.’ 55 Ibid., ‘Praefatio’, [pp. iv–vii]. 56 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 2, 94–6, 184–5. 57 Ibid., ‘Praefatio’, [p.i], he explains: ‘id te scientem fieri praeprimis necessarium duxi, quod ista, quaeserunt hae paginae, ea primum et praecipue…sint exarata, ut veras, reales, easque accuratissimas demonstrationes in Mathesi non minus ac in aliis Philosophici Systematis scientiis reperiri et adhiberi ad oculum demonstrarem.’ See also pp. 96, 101, 139–40. 58 Ibid., pp. 1–3. 59 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 82–4. 60 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 3–5. 61 Ibid., p. 1: ‘purissimo fonte Veritatum’. 62 Ibid., p. 3. Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 257

63 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 109, 177–8, 183. 64 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 178, 181–3. 65 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 179–80. 66 Ibid., p. 109: ‘Sunt igitur Axiomata stricte loquendo nihil aliud quam veritates primae…’ 67 Ibid., p. 108: ‘Et has ipsas veritates intellectus noster singularis Divini Numinis indulto non tantum ex semetipso perfectissime semper novit, sed et primo et prout in se sunt directissime cognoscit indeque tum omnem suum discursum scientificum inchoat, eumque in iis ultimate terminat; tum ex iis omnia Effata demonstrativa realia, cum primis aeterna, demonstrando deducit…’ 68 Ibid., pp. 93–6. 69 Ibid., p. 193. 70 Ibid., pp. 193–4: ‘Haec vero nempe Forma consistit in substantiali determinatione tum ipsius extensionis et repletionis, tum praecipue mobilitatis, qua determinata constituitur corporis naturalis species…nos Actum corporis naturalis dicere solemus, cuius respectu Materia sit instar purae potentiae, de se indeterminatae, sed ad quamcunque speciem determinabilis. Et ab hoc principio, corporis naturalis determinativo, determinatae quoque fluunt affectiones…’ For a more thorough account of extension and related matters see E.Weigel, Idea Matheseos universae, Jena, 1687, esp. pp. 34–49. 71 Weigel, Analysis Aristotelica, p. 181. 72 Ibid., p. 196. 73 Ibid., pp. 192, 196. Leibniz’s early conception of the relation between substance and matter has much in common with Weigel’s. I discuss the views of Weigel and Leibniz in greater detail in Leibniz’s Metaphysics, chaps 1 and 3. 74 See especially Johann Christoph Sturm, Philosophica eclectica, Altdorf, 1686. 75 See especially his Exercitatio de Stoica mundi exustione: cui accesserunt argumenti varii, sed inprimis ad historiam Stoicae philosophiae facientes, dissertationes XXI, Leipzig, 1676. For a more complete account of Thomasius’s views see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, especially chaps 1 and 3; and also my forthcoming article, ‘The young Leibniz and his teachers’, in S.Brown (ed.), The Philosophy of the Young Leibniz, Dordrecht, Kluwer. 76 For an account of Leibniz’s conciliatory eclecticism and Platonism see my Leibniz’s Metaphysics, especially chaps 1, 4, 5 and 6. 77 Pico, De dignitate hominis, pp. 138–40: ‘ego ita me institui ut in nullius verba iuratus, me per omnes philosophiae magistros funderem, omnes schedas excuterem, omnes familias agnoscerem…Fuit enim cum ab antiquis omnibus hoc observatum, ut omne scriptorum genus evolventes, nullas quas possent commentationes illectas praeterirent.’ For the English translation see Pico della Mirandola: On the Dignity of Man, On Being and One, Heptaplus, trans. C.G.Wallis et al., Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, pp. 21–2. 78 Pico, De dignitate hominis, pp. 142–6: ‘…omnigenae doctrinae placita in medium afferre volui, ut hac complurium sectarum collatione ac multifariae discussione philosophiae, ille veritatis fulgor, cuius Plato meminit in Epistulis [VII.341D] animis nostris quasi sol oriens ex alto clarius illucesceret…Proposuimus primo Platonis Aristotelisque concordiam a multis 258 Christia Mercer

antehac creditam, a nemine satis probatam… Addidimus autem et plures locos in quibus Scoti et Thomae, plures in quibus Averrois et Avicennae sententias, quae discordes existimantur, Concordes esse nos asseveramus.’ For the English translation see Pico, On the Dignity of Man, pp. 23–5. 79 J.Thomasius, Schediasma historicum…, Leipzig, 1665, p. 13. Index

Abelard, Peter 2–3, 6 Antonius de Romagno 215 absolutism, moral 78 Antwerp 94, 96, 98, 100, 103 abstractionism 6 ‘apatheia’ 92, 101 Acanthius, Georgius 216 Apollonius of Perge 171 n. 27 Acciaiuoli, Donato 55 n. 40 Apostolius, Michael 39 n. 12 Adam 4 Apuleius 213 Adonis 140 Archimedes 171 n. 27 Aegidius, Petrus (Pierre Gillis) 143 Aristo of Chios 92 affections, see passions Aristoteles Latinus 24 Agathon 15 n. 9 Aristotelianism 2, 6, 31, 33, 36, 41–90, Akiba, Rabbi 117 93, 170 n. 8, 193–208 passim, Alba, Duke of 97 213–14, 219, 238, 242, 245–9, alchemy 39 n. 11 253 n. 13; anti-Aristotelianism Alexander of Aphrodisias 24–32, 35–6, 33–4, 36, 39 n. 15, 63, 79, 212, 215, 37 n. 6, 38 n. 10, 44, 244 224 Alexander of Aphrodisias, pseudo-25, Aristotle 24–40, 47–8, 61–3, 66–9, 72, 28, 35 78, 82n.27, 85 n. 51, 102, 109, Alexander the Great 160 150–2, 162, 170n. 6, 195, 200, Alexander of Hales 5, 130 n. 73 214–16, 218–19, 221, 243, 246–7, Alfonso, King of Aragon 7 250, 253 n. 13; Greek commentators Alsted, Johann Heinrich 60, 76, 89 n. 24–40, 47, 244; works of and 84 attributed to: De anima 36, 44, 151; Ambrose, St 9, 243 De animalibus 25; De caelo 216; De Ames, William 59, 75–8, 81 n. 14 generatione et corruptione 216; De Ammonius 24, 27–30, 37 nn. 5–6 interpretatione 157 n. 49; Anabaptism 103 Mechanics 43; Metaphysics 34, analytic philosophy 161, 164, 166 43–4; Meteorology 43; ancient theology, see prisca theologia Nicomachean Ethics 15 n. 9, 34, 46, angels, guardian 119 48–9, 61–4, 67, 69, 73–4, 79, 89 n. Anglicanism 59–60, 112 90, 90 n. 93, 125 n. 24; Organon animism 203 42; Physics 43–5, 198, 206 n. 42; Anne of Saxony 94 Politics 34, 43; Posterior Analytics Anselm of Canterbury 2 247; Problemata 25; Rhetoric 151 Antonazzi, Giovanni 10 Armenteros, Thomas 94 Antoninus, Marcus, see Marcus Arnauld, Antoine 31, 180 Aurelius Arnold, Matthew 122

259 260 Index

Arnim, H.F.A. von 117 Beza, Theodore 64, 79, 83 n. 33 Arrian 108, 127 n. 45 Bible xiii, 1, 4, 61–7, 74, 77–9, 84 n. Arsenius of Monemvasia 32 35, 88 n. 83, 103, 109–10, 112–13, Arthur, King 160 117, 119, 134 n. 106, 165, 171 n. Ascham, Roger 136, 139, 141, 143 27, 212, 214, 228, 235 n. 36, 243; Asclepius 27, 40 n. 17 New Testament 1, 11–12, 114, 121 Ashe, Simeon 116 (Acts 129 n. 68; Corinthians 15 n. Asolanus, Andreas 28 8, 125 n. 25; Ephesians 125 n. 25, astronomy 181, 187, 211, 228, 246 128 n. 55, 129 n. 68; Galatians 12; atheism 36 Gospels 11, 118–19, 122; John 8, Athena 244 128 n. 55; Peter 128 n. 55; Romans Athens 168 4; Timothy 12, 69, 84 n. 35, 125 n. atomism 170 n. 8, 187, 194–203, 213, 25); Old Testament 11, 114, 117, 232 n. 10 243 (Genesis 39 n. 15, 105 n. 3, 128 Augustine, St 2, 7–8, 18 n. 46, 19 n. n. 55, 237 nn. 47 and 54; Isaiah 237 59, 42, 58 n. 60, 93, 102, 104, 165, n. 47; Jeremiah 128 n. 55, 237 n. 213–14, 220, 243, 255 n. 45 47; Job 117, 128 n. 55; Psalms 110, Augustinian Hermits 35, 216 117, 125 n. 25); Vulgate 14 n. 8 Augustus, Duke of Saxony 97 Binns, J.W. 148 Aurelius Victor 108 Bisterfeld, Johann 252 n. 9 Averroës 25, 31, 34, 250 Bloch, O.R. 202 32, 38 n. 11 Boccadiferro, Lodovico 34, 216 Avicenna 35, 250 Bochart, Samuel 168 Avranches 118 Bodin, Jean 148, 254 n. 21 Azor, Juan 77–8 Boethius 4, 6, 38 n. 10, 42, 93, 102, 213 Bacon, Anthony 150 Bois, John 116 Bacon, Francis 135–58 passim, 163, Bologna 25; University of 34 168 Bonaventure, St 5 Baius, Michel 101 Bonini, Eufrosino 38 n. 8 Bakhtin, M.M. 41 Bootius, Arnoldus 130 n. 72 Baldwin, Frederick 60, 81 n. 14 Boscaglia, Cosimo 216 baptism 4–5, 11, 243 Boyle, Robert 153, 186, 194 Barbaro, Ermolao 25–6, 29, 34–5, 140 Bradwardine, Thomas 3, 5 Barberini, Francesco, Cardinal 119 Brahe, Tycho 220, 235 n. 36 barometer 208 n. 69 Britain 59–60, 112, 114 Barrefelt, Hendrik Jansen van (Hiël) Brucker, Jakob 132 n. 95 103 Bruni, Leonardo 46 Bartolini, Lorenzo, Abbot 48–9 Bruno, Giordano 46 Bayle, Pierre 96 Brussels 94–5 Belgium 91 Buckingham, Duke of (George Villiers) Bembo, Pietro 140, 143 150 benevolence 120 Buddeus, Joannes Franciscus 120–1 Beni, Paolo 215 Budé, Guillaume 142–3 Berengar 9 Buridan, Jean 207 n. 59 Berkeley, George 167 Burke, Peter 159 Bernard of Chartres 213 Burtt, E.A. 212 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 10, 64 Bush, Douglas 137 Bernardo, Giovanni Battista 216 Bywater, Ingram 114 Bessarion, Cardinal 7, 28 Byzantium 26 Index 261

Caesar, Julius 150 chronology 160; biblical 165, 214, 214 Callierges, Zacharias 37 n. 5 Church Councils: Constance 9; Calstere, Anna van der 97 Constantinople 19 n. 59; Ferrara- Calvin, John 82 n. 27, 83 n. 33 Florence 7, 19 n. 59; Fourth Lateran Calvinism 60, 63–4, 66, 91, 94, 96, 8; Trent 35–6, 94 102, 168 Church of England, see Anglicanism Camaldoli Order 35 Church Fathers 34, 36, 62, 64, 117, 235 Cambridge, University of 114, 143 n. 36 (Christ’s College 148; St John’s Cicero 38 n. 10, 41–2, 92, 98, 100, College 116; Sidney Sussex College 103–4, 107, 109, 117, 125 n. 24, 116, 129 n. 64; Trinity College 116, 139, 142–6, 148, 150–1, 168, 175, 143, 150) 213 Camerarius, Joachim 97 Ciceronianism 97, 141–4, 149; anti- Camozzi, Giovanni Battista 29, 32, 34 Ciceronianism 98, 135, 140–2, Camporeale, Salvatore 1 144–6, 148–9, 153 Canons Regular of the Holy Spirit 35 civic religion 95, 105 Canterus, Gulielmus 127 n. 42 Civil War, English 111 Carletti, Angelo 81 n. 11 Clarke, Samuel 114 Carneades 92 classical scholarship 111, 114, 165; see Carr, Nicholas 139, 141, 143 also philology; textual criticism Cartesianism 118, 164, 166–7, 169, 170 Clave, Etienne de 202 n. 8, 178, 181, 183, 187, 204 n. 10, Clement of Alexandria 104, 130 n. 80, 249 237 n. 53 Casaubon, Isaac 82 n. 27, 110–11, Clerke, Bartholomew 157 n. 48 171n. 32, 254 n. 23 Clichtove, Josse 44, 48–9 Casaubon, Meric 110–14, 116–18, 127 clinamen (swerve) 196 n. 50 Clinton, Bill 107 cases of conscience, see casuistry Coblenz 102 Cassirer, Ernst 212 Collier, Jeremy 121–2 casuistry 59–90 passim Cologne 95, 97–8, 102 categories 2, 42 Colonna, Fabio 197 Catholicism, Roman 1, 59–61, 77–9, 81 Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca nn. 12 and 14, 89 n. 90, 90 n. 94, (CAG) 27–31 91, 94, 96–8, 102–3, 105, 119, 195 Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Cato the Censor 146, 149 versiones Latinae (CAGL) 28–30 cause 193, 198–9, 245; and effect 168; commonplace books 117, 150–1, 165 efficient 7–8, 20 n. 70, 193–4, 201– concordism 214–15, 219, 250; see also 2; final 8, 193–208 passim; first syncretism 199; formal 193; material 193 Congreve, William 122 Cavendish, Margaret 187 Constantinople 25, 39 n. 12 Chalcidius 213, 215 consubstantiation, see Eucharist Chalcondyles, Demetrius 37 n. 2 contingents, future 3–4 Chaldean Oracles 38 n. 11 Conway, Anne 239 Chaldean philosophy 167 Copernicanism 203, 217, 220, 237 n. Charles I, King of England 44; see also heliocentrism Charles V, Emperor 94, 97 Copernicus, Nicolaus 248 Charleton, Walter 185–6 copia 136, 138, 147, 149 Charron, Pierre 104 Cordier, Balthasar 39 n. 15 Cheke, Sir John 143 Cornarius, Janus 215 Cherpontius, Johannes 84 n. 34 Corpus Hermeticum 102, 254 n. 23 262 Index

Cortesi, Mariarosa 10 dogmatics 70, 74–5 Cortesi, Paolo 140, 143 5, 90 n. 94 cosmogony, Platonic 210–12, 222, 224 Don Juan of Austria 98 Counter-Reformation 49 Donation of Constantine 10, 13–14 n. Cox, Virginia 46 4, 169 Cranz, Edward 238 Donato, Girolamo 25, 29, 34–5 creation 206 n. 34, 215, 221–4 Doroteo, Guglielmo 28, 31, 35, 38 n. Crenius, Thomas 96 10 Crispus, Joannes Baptista 232 n. 15, Dort, Synod of 73, 76, 83 n. 28 236 n. 41 Drake, Stillman 210 Croll, Morris W. 153 Dryden, John 122 Crombie, Alistair 212 dualism, mind/body 100, 164 Cromwell, Oliver 153 Dublin, Trinity College 153 Cudworth, Ralph 131 n. 82, 165–6, 239 duels 48 Cyprus 39 n. 16 Duns Scotus, John 5–6, 8, 252 n. 6; see also Dacier, André and Anne 119–20, 122 Duprat, Pardoux 127 n. 50 Daedalus 185 Dury, John 153 Damiani, Peter 2–3 du Vair, Guillaume 98–9, 102, 104 Daneau, Lambert 64–6, 68, 72, 74–5, 78, 88 n. 79 eclecticism, conciliatory 239, 242, 244, Danzig, Gymnasium Athenaeum 66 247–8, 250, 253 nn. 13–14, 257 n. David (Aristotelian commentator) 27 76 Decalogue 62, 64, 66, 72, 74 Edict of Nantes 95 deduction 183, 248 education 150, 154, 160, 164, 175; of Dee, John 111 princes 95 Dell, William 153 Egypt 167, 172, 254 n. 19 Del Rio, Martin 98, 102 Ehinger, Elias 39 n. 13 Democritus 195, 199 elemental theory 218–30 passim Demosthenes 23 n. 108, 139, 142–3, Elias 27 150 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 143, Descartes, René xiii, 93, 99, 101, 104, 150 120, 160–6, 168–9, 176–7, 188, Elyot, Sir Thomas 108, 173 195, 200–2, 238, 248; see also emanation 242, 247 Cartesianism emotions, see passions design, argument from 186, 194, 196, Empedocles 199, 229 199–200, 202–3 203 determinism 13, 17 n. 29, 195; see also Encyclopédie 122 fate encyclopedists 238 devotio moderna 103 Enlightenment 122; Scottish 120 dialectic, see logic Epictetus 92–3, 99–100, 104, 107–8, dialogue 41–58 passim 110, 112–13, 117, 119, 123 n. 3, Diderot, Denis 122 124 n. 16, 130 n. 77 Di Napoli, Giovanni 1 Epicureanism xiii, 1, 7–8, 12, 116, 170 Dini, Piero 237 n. 45 n. 8, 194–7, 199, 201–2 Dio Cassius 108 Epicurus 195, 197–200, 203 Diogenes the Cynic 163 epigraphy 160 Diogenes Laertius 92, 103, 114, 117, epistemology 5–6, 92, 164 214 equity 77 diphthongs 116 Erasmus, Desiderius 14 n. 8, 91, 95–6, Index 263

100, 139–43, 145, 147–8, 164, friendship 8, 69, 71–3, 177 173–4 Frigillanus, Matthaeus 215 Erizzo, Sebastiano 215 Escorial 40n. 16, 185 Galen 108, 200, 214 eternity of the world 202, 214 Galilei, Galileo 163, 194, 206 n. 34, ethics 7–8, 43, 47–8, 59–90, 117, 120, 209, 216, 218–20, 222, 224, 235 n. 122, 151, 195; Christian 61, 64–6, 36, 238 74–6, 79, 103–4 Galluzzi, Paolo 212, 224 Eton College 111 Ganay, Germain de 45 Eucharist 8–10, 243 Garin, Eugenio 212 Eudemus 40 n. 17 Gassendi, Pierre xiii, 114, 165, 170 n. Eugenius IV, Pope 7 8, 193–208 passim, 248 Eusebius 132 n. 95, 143, 237 n. 53 Gataker, Charles 129 n. 64 Eustratius of Nicaea 24, 29–31, 35, 37 Gataker, Thomas 114–22 n. 6 Gelasius I, Pope 9 Eutropius 108 Geneva Academy 63–4, 79 Excerpta Isagogarum et Categoriarum geography 187 42 geometry 187, 213, 227–8 extension 188, 248–9 Gerard of Cremona 24 Gerlo, Aloïs 91, 96, 102 Fabricius, Johann Albert 39 n. 11 Germany 238–58 passim faith and reason 118 Gesner, Conrad 123–4 n. 8 Family of Love 96, 103 Gherardus, Petrus 38 n. 10 Farquharson, A.S.L. 114 Gilbert of la Porrée 2 fate 102, 112, 128 n. 54; see also Giles of Rome 220 determinism Giorgi, Francesco 216 Ferrara, University of 36 Glareanus, Henricus (Heinrich Loriti) Ficino, Marsilio 38 n. 11, 102, 213–30, 143 242, 249, 252 n. 6, 254 n. 19 Glasgow, University of 120 fideism 4–5 Goclenius, Rudolphus 63, 68 Figliucci, Felice 43, 47–8 grace, divine 18 n. 41, 69, 71, 99–101, Flandino, Ambrogio 52 n. 18, 216 103 Florence, 141, 151; University of 38 Graevius, J.G. 127 n. 38 n. 8 Grafton, Anthony 96, 135–6 Florimonte, Galeazzo 47–8 grammar 1, 136, 153 Fois, Mario 1, 11 grandeur 172–92 passim Fonseca, Pedro 244 Grant, Edward 220 foreknowledge, divine 3–4, 243; see Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, also omniscience, divine Cardinal 97 form, substantial 194 Gratiolus, Andreas 28–31, 35 Fortune 185 Greece 159 Fox-Morcillo, Sebastian 215–16, 236 Gregory of Rimini 3, 5 n. 41 Groote, Gert 103 France 35, 44, 94, 105, 113 Grosseteste, Robert 24 Franciscan Order 5, 22 n. 93 Guevara, Antonio de 109 Frankfurt 102 Guise, Charles de, Cardinal of Lorraine freemasonry 103 35–6 Frege, Gottlob 164 Gyraldus, Lilius 123–4 n. 8 Freiburg, University of 145 Friedrich III, Elector 63 Habsburg dynasty 95 264 Index

Halle, University of 120 illuminationism 5–6 Hamburg 102 imagination 101, 151–2, 175, 184 happiness 69–70 imitation 140–6, 149, 159–60, 167–8 Hartlib, Samuel 153 immortality, see under soul Harvey, Gabriel 143–6, 148 impanation, see Eucharist Harvey, William 194 Incarnation 9, 20 n. 71, 21 n. 77, 175 Hebrew Bible, see Bible, Old induction 182 Testament inertia 194, 206 n. 34 Hegel, G.W.F. 169 Inquisition 7, 222 Heidelberg, University of 63, 66, 79, 83 Isocrates 84 n. 34 n. 28, 108 Isque 95 Heinsius, Daniel 122 Italy 25, 27, 45, 142 heliocentrism 169, 217, 224; see also Copernicanism James I, King of England 150 Helmont, Francis Mercurius van 239 James of Venice 24 Helmont, J.B.van 202 Jena, University of 96–8, 246, 256 n. Hempel, Carl Gustav 169 52 Henri III, King of France 102 Jansen, Cornelius 101 Henry VIII, King of England 173 Jerome, St 2 Heraclitus 229 Jesuit Order 59, 77, 80 n. 2, 81 n. 14, Herborn 238–9, 249 89 n. 92, 90 nn. 93–4, 95–6, 159–61 Hercules 140 Joan, Pope 165 Herder, J.G 169 Johann Wilhelm, Duke of Saxony 97 hermeneutics 44 Johannes Grammaticus, see Hermes Trismegistus 167, 240, 242; Philoponus, Johannes see also Corpus Hermeticum John XXII, Pope 22 n. 93 Hermetica, see Corpus Hermeticum John Damascene 220 Hermogenes 139, 150 Julius Victor, Gaius 156 n. 37 Herodian 108 justice 72 Hervet, Gentian 33, 35–6, 99 Justinian, Emperor 19 n. 59 highest good, see supreme good Historia Augusta 108, 110 K., B.I. 113 Hobbes, Thomas xiii, 195 Kabbalism 239–40, 242, 244, 249, 253 Hoeschel, David 128 n. 53 n. 13 Holbein, Hans, the Younger 173 Kant, Immanuel 166 Holy Spirit 7, 19 n. 59, 67 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus 66–75, Hooke, Robert 186 78, 88 n. 79 Horace 114, 146 Kepler, Johannes 211 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 118–20 Huguenots 35, 94 labyrinth 185 Hume, David 166 Lactantius 200 Humphrey, Laurence 157 n. 48 Lamy, Bernard 187–8 Hutcheson, Frances 120–2 Landi, Claudio, Count 57 n. 50 Hyperius, Andreas 62–3, 78 Landi, Giulio, Count 46–9 Lando, Ortensio 142 ideas, clear and distinct 164, 166, 183; Langhe, Charles de (Langius) 100 extradeical existence of ideas; 214; Laud, William, Archbishop 111 innate ideas 104; Platonic ideas 229, Laurent, Gaspard 82 n. 27 242, 247 law 150; divine 61, 64–6, 75, 77; moral Index 265

64; natural 61, 63, 67, 74; of falling Malebranche, Nicolas 165–6, 175–86 bodies 212 Manutius, Aldus 26–8, 30, 32, 37 n. 5, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques 43–6, 48–9 38 n. 10 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm xiii, 4, Manutius, Paulus 29 165–6, 194, 238–9, 246, 249, 253 n. Marburg Academy 62 14, 254 n. 21, 257 n. 73 Marcellus II, Pope (Marcello Cervini) Leiden, University of 63, 73, 76, 96, 35 98, 102 Marcellus, Gaspar 39 n. 15 Leipzig, University of 240, 256 n. 52 Marcus Aurelius 107–34 passim Leonico Tomeo, Niccolò 234 n. 24 Margaret of Parma 94 Lepanto 98 Margunius, Emmanuel 32 Le Roy, Louis 215 Marius, Gaius 23 n. 108 Lessius, Leonhard 90 n. 94 Marius Victorinus 42 Lewin, William 148 materialism 198 l’Hôpital, Michel de 95 mathematics 187–8, 212, 212–13, 224, Liège 100 237 n. 44, 246–8 Lincoln’s Inn 116 matter and form 248–9; matter/words, Lipsius, Justus 91–106, 109–10, 114, see res/verba; prime matter 245, 120, 128 n. 54 248; theory of matter 215, 220, 232 Livy 98 n. 10; see also elemental theory Locke, John 165–6 Mazzolini, Sylvester 81 n. 11 Loewenstein, Joseph 135, 153 Mazzoni, Jacopo 216, 224 logic 26–7, 31–2, 35, 37 n. 6, 39 n. 13, mechanical philosophy xiii, 163, 41, 62, 68, 136, 152–3, 169, 213 172–208 passim, 239, 246, 248–9; Lohr, Charles 238 see also New Science London 116 Medici, Catherine de’ 95 Longueil, Christophe de (Longolius) Medici, Cosimo de’ 24 142–3 medicine 35, 136 López Pinciano, Alonso 43 Medina, Bartolomé 90 n. 94 Lord’s Prayer 75 Melanchthon, Philipp 61, 63, 72, 74, 88 Louvain, University of 96–8, 102 n. 79 love 7–8, 12, 119–20, 177; mendicants 10–11 concupiscent 8; of God 20 n. 70, 72 Mersenne, Marin, Abbé 211 Low Countries, see Netherlands metaphysics xiii, 34, 201, 246, 250 Lucian 41 method 68, 239, 247, 249–50; Lucretius 168, 195–8, 203 Euclidean 247 Luther, Martin 4, 11, 138, 141, 245 Metochites, Theodorus 32 Lutheranism 60–1, 91, 94, 96–8, 120, Michael of Ephesus 27–8, 31, 37 n. 6 240, 246, 256 n. 52 microscope 184–7, 197 lying 77 Middelburg 73 mind/body dualism, see dualism, mind/ Macaulay, T.B. 59, 159 body Macerata, University of 34 Mind, Divine (Nous) 221–4 Machiavelli, Niccolò 124 n. 12 monarchy 91 McLaughlin, Martin L. 140 Monophysites 9 Macrobius 213 Montaigne, Michel de 96, 98–101, 105, Magentinus, Leo 27–9, 31 174 Mahotius, Johannes 39 n. 15 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Maimonides, Moses 245 Baron de 95 Mainz 98, 102 Moor, James 120, 122 266 Index

Moos, Peter von 41 potentia absoluta 3, 214; potentia moral philosophy 34, 59–90, 120; see ordinata 3 also ethics omniscience, divine 3–4; see also moral sense theory 120 foreknowledge, divine More, Thomas 173–4 Opsopaeus, Johannes 38 n. 11 Moses 230, 240, 254 nn. 22–3 optics 187 motion 194, 199, 206 n. 34, 216, 224; orders, religious 10–11 circular and rectilinear 209–11, ordinary language 168 216–24; of atoms 196, 198, 202–3; original sin 4, 119 of soul 211, 218, 220–1 Orleans, University of 35 Muret, Marc-Antoine 38 n. 10, 97 Orpheus 230 Musurus, Marcus 30, 38 n. 10 Osorio, Jeronimo 139, 141–2, 148–9 Naples 7 Ovid 150 natural philosophy 26, 32–3, 37 n. 4, 38 Oxford, University of 165 (Christ n. 11, 44, 173, 187, 193–208 Church 111; Worcester College passim, 216, 219, 228, 248 144–5) nature 101, 104, 110, 186–7, 194, 199– 200, 202, 221, 223, 232 n. 10 Padua 25; University of 27, 31, 34, 37 Navagero, Andrea (Naugerius) 143 n. 2 Neoplatonism 34, 100, 102, 211, 214, pansophism 238–9, 249 220, 224; Islamic 25 pantheism 103 214; see also Pappus 171 n. 27 Paracelsianism 203 Nero, Emperor 185 Paris 48, 99; University of 35, 215 Nesi, Giovanni 46 Pascal, Blaise 80 n. 2, 93, 184 Netherlands 94, 97, 103–5 Pasicrates 40 n. 17 New Science 153, 183, 186–8, 193– passions 94, 100–2, 104, 120, 152, 162, 208, 216, 224; see also mechanical 173–83 philosophy; Scientific Revolution Patrizi, Francesco 33–4, 36, 38 n. 11, New Testament, see under Bible 216, 224 Newington, Kent 112 Paul, St 4, 11–12, 58 n. 60, 110, 117, Newton, Sir Isaac 165, 194, 210 121–2 Nicholas V, Pope (Tommaso Pavia, University of 35 Parentucelli) 24 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 211 Niclaes, Hendrik 96, 103 Pelagianism 5, 8, 13, 214 Nicole, Pierre31, 180 Perkins, William 59–60, 75–8, 88 n. 84 Nicolinis, Giovanni Antonio de 27–8 Perroti, Niccolò 108 Nizolio, Mario 142–3 Persius 110 nominalism 6 Peter of Ailly 3 Numenius 230 Peter Lombard 2, 58 n. 60 numismatics 160 petitesse 173, 176–8, 180, 184–6 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 108, Oakeshott, Michael 161 140–1, 160 oaths 11 Petrus Hispanus 39 n. 13 occult sciences 39 n. 11, 153 Petty, William 154 Ockhamism 3, 5, 17 n. 27 Philip II, King of Spain 40 n. 16, 94 oeconomics 66–7, 88 n. 83 Philo 214 Olympiodorus 27, 29, 32 philology 1, 15 n. 8, 98, 104, 113, 117, omnipotence, divine 2, 4–5, 186; 135; see also textual criticism Index 267

Philoponus, Johannes 24, 26–36, 37 n. Pope, Alexander 59, 79 n. 1 6, 39 n. 15, 220, 237 n. 48 Porphyry 27, 42 Philostratus 108 Port Royal 31 physics, see natural philosophy practical philosophy 66, 74 Piacenza 46 predestination 3–5, 13, 18 n. 41 Pibrac, Guy du Faur de 96 prisca theologia 167, 240, 242, 247, Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 249 33, 140 probability theory 129 n. 61 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 25, 27, Proclus 33, 214, 220, 234 nn. 24 and 33, 140, 240, 242–3, 249, 254 n. 19, 27, 237 nn. 48 and 50, 244, 252 n. 6 255 n. 45 Prometheus 161 Pio, Alberto, Prince of Carpi 27, 38 n. Protestantism 9, 58–90, 239, 244, 250, 10 253 n. 13 Pirke Aboth 117 providence, divine 18 n. 41, 138, Pisa, University of 38 n. 8, 216 194–6, 200–2, 214, 223 Plantin, Christophe 96, 98, 100, 102–3 Psellus, Michael 27–8, 32 Plato 5–6, 34, 41, 47, 82 n. 27, 108–9, Ptolemy II, King of Egypt 172 139, 150–2, 160, 162, 195, 200, Pufendorf, Samuel 246 209–37 passim, 240, 242–3, 247, Puritanism 59–60, 75, 89 nn. 87–8, 250, 252 n. 6, 253 n. 13, 254 n. 19; 116, 119, 153 works of: Gorgias 151; Letters 257 Pygmalion 139, 149 n. 78; Phaedo 237 n. 51; Phaedrus Pyrrho 92, 99, 103; see also scepticism, 151; Republic 5, 89 n. 92, 242; Pyrrhonist Timaeus 102, 125 n. 24, 211–16, Pythagoras 212, 240, 247 221, 223–30, 237 n. 55 Pythagoreanism 167; 214, 219, 227; Platonism xiii, 18 n. 46, 32–4, 36, 38 n. see also Neopythagoreanism 11, 46–7, 62, 102, 167, 170 n. 8, 209–58 passim; Cambridge quaestiones 43; quaestiones disputatae Platonism 131 n. 82, 238–9; see 46 also Neoplatonism Quevedo, Francisco de 124 n. 16 Plautus 98, 129 n. 68 quintessence (fifth element) 218, 230 pleasure 7–8, 13, 20 n. 70, 120, 180, Quintilian 140, 144–9, 151, 175 195 Quinton, Anthony 136 Plethon, George Gemistus 237 n. 48 Pliny the Younger 113 Rabelais, François 99 Plotinus 102, 214–15, 220, 237 nn. 48– Ramus, Peter 63, 75, 79, 144–5 9, 243–4, 252 nn. 6–7 Rasarius, Johannes Baptista 38 n. 10 Plutarch 82 n. 27, 84 n. 34, 103, 139, ratio recta 94, 101–2, 104 214 Ravens Paradox 169 Plutarch, pseudo- 214 Raymond of Peñaforte 80–1 n. 11 poetry 152–3 realism 213 Poggio 12, 140–1 Reformation 59, 141 Polanus, Amandus 75, 78 res extensa, see extension; res/verba Pole, Reginald 35–6 (matter/words) 141, 144, 146, politics 66–7, 88 n. 83 148–9, 163, 168 Poliziano, Angelo 108, 124 n. 12, Reuchlin, Johannes 123 n. 8 140–1 Rheims 36 polytheism 119, 131 n. 82, 214 rhetoric 41, 136–7, 140–54, 164, 175 Pomponazzi, Pietro 3, 36 Rhetorica ad Herennium 140, 150 Pontano, Giovanni 143 Rhodes, Neil 136, 153 268 Index

Ricasoli, Galeotto 55 n. 39 Scotus, Octavianus I 30 Ricci, Bartolomeo 143 Scotus, Octavianus II 28–30 Richard of St Victor 6 Scotus Eriugena, John 42 right reason, see ratio recta Scripture, see Bible Rivadeau, André de 99 Scultetus, Abraham 68, 83 n. 28 Rome 7, 25, 34–6, 97; ancient 159–60, Sebond, Raimond 99–100 168, 185; St John Lateran 12; Selden, John 111 University of (Sapienza) 36 Seneca the Elder 146 Rotherhithe, Surrey 114, 116 91, 98, 100, 102–4, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 95 107–8, 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 123 Royal Society 111, 153 n. 3, 127 n. 45, 139–40, 142, 153, Rubens, Peter Paul 97 168 Serra, Juan 5 Sabellianism 6–7 Serres, Jean de 215 sacraments 75 Severinus, Petrus 202 Sadoleto, Jacopo, Cardinal 143 Sextus Empiricus 33, 36, 99 Sallust 150 Sidney, Sir Philip 142, 148, 152 Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise) 117 Sidney, Robert 148 Sambucus, Ioannes 144 simony 77 Sanderson, Robert 60, 81 n. 14 Simplicius 24, 26–8, 30, 35, 37 nn. Sandys, J.E. 111 5–6, 117, 130 n. 72, 220, 237 n. 48 Saravia, Adrianus 96, 103 Socino, Lelio 6 Saunders, Jason 96 Soissons 118 Saxony 97 Solomon 111, 151 Scaliger, Joseph 110 Sophonias 37 n. 4 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 142 Soto, Domingo de 90 n. 94 scepticism 33, 164; academic 36, 213; soul 42; immortality of 36, 43–4, 118, Pyrrhonist 91–106 196, 202, 211, 214; transmigration Schegk, Jacob 123 n. 7 of 214; see also World Soul Scherzer, Johann Adam 239–49 sovereign good, see supreme good Schlusselburg, Conrad 96 Spa 102 Schmitt, Charles 31–2, 39 n. 15, 238 Spain 95 Scholarius, Georgius 39 n. 13 speculative philosophy 70, 72 scholasticism 3, 16 n. 25, 26, 31–2, 34, Spinoza, Benedict xiii 43, 45–6, 60, 64, 92–4, 99, 101, Sprat, Thomas 153 103, 193–4, 196, 202–3, 216, 220, Steinfurt, Gymnasium Arnoldium 85 n. 235 n. 36, 236 n. 41, 238–9, 242–5, 51 249, 252 n. 8; anti-scholasticism 46, Steuco, Agostino 240, 242 49, 136, 138–9, 141, 169, 246–7, Stoicism xiii, 8, 17 n. 29, 62, 91–134 249 passim, 195, 200, 214 Scholasticus, Zacharias 36 Strasbourg Academy 62, 143 Schoock, Martin 204 n. 10 Strigelius, Victorinus 63 science 27, 32, 35, 46, 111, 136, 162, studia humanitatis 135 166, 181–3, 188, 212, 219; see also Sturm, Johann Christoph 249 New Science Sturm, Johannes 136, 139, 141, 143, Scientific Revolution 193 145 Scioppus, Caspar 122 Suárez, Francisco 90 n. 94, 244 Scotism 3, 5, 17n. 27 Suda 109, 124 n. 16 Scott, Izora 140 Suetonius 98 Scotus, Hieronymus 28–30, 38 n. 10 suicide 112, 119 Index 269 summum bonum, see supreme good 120–1; French 113, 119, 215; Italian supreme good 8, 70, 73–4, 93, 104 215; Latin xii, 24–40, 108, 114, 116 suspension of judgement 92, 94, 99, transmigration, see under soul 101, 104; see also scepticism, transubstantiation, see Eucharist Pyrrhonist Trier 102 Sweden 113 Trincavello, Giovanni Francesco 27 Sylvester I, Pope 10 Trincavello, Vittorio 31, 39 n. 15, 123 Symmachus 129 n. 68 n. 7 syncretism 102, 240, 242–4; see also Trinity 6–7, 13, 105 n. 3, 243; pagan concordism 243 Syrianus 27 trivium 153 Turks 70, 72 Tacitus 91, 98 Tyrrell, James 165 Talon, Omer 70 Tartaglia, Nicolò 43 Unitarianism 6 Taylor, Jeremy 59–60 Urban VIII, Pope 119 telescope 181, 184 usury 77 temperance 72 Utrecht Academy 76 Ten Commandments, see Decalogue Tertullian 117, 168 Valerius Maximus 98 textual criticism 95, 97, 113; see also Valla, Lorenzo 1–23, 140–1, 168–9 philology Vázquez, Gabriel 90 n. 94 Themistius 24–7, 29–30, 35, 244 Venice 30, 34; Arsenal 185 Theodosius, Philippus 30 Venus 140 theology 1–23, 34, 59, 62, 66, 69–72, Vermigli, Peter Martyr 62–3, 67, 74, 78 74–5, 78, 117, 161, 186, 195–6, Vernia, Nicoletto 25 202–3, 215, 240, 243–4, 250; Vico, Giambattista 166 creationist 206 n. 34; Jewish 240; Vienna 97, 100 moral 60; practical 76, 89 n. 84; Vieri, Francesco II de’ (Verino) 216 voluntarist 195 Virgil 102 Theon of Smyrna 214 virtues 62, 64–5, 67, 71–5, 104, 120, Theophrastus 34, 170 n. 6 151–2; and vices 63, 65; as a mean Thomas Aquinas 2, 5–6, 89 nn. 90 and 72–3; by analogy 71–2; epistemic 92, 90 n. 93, 93, 130 n. 73, 245, 183; guided or particular 72; 250, 252 nn. 6 and 8 guiding or universal 72; heroic 71– Thomas of Canterbury, 22 n. 83 3; intellectual 69, 71–2; moral 68– Thomasius, Christian 253 n. 14 73, 85 n. 51, 183; spiritual 69–71; Thomasius, Jakob 133 n. 98, 249–50, theological 69, 72 253 n. 14, 254 n. 23 Vives, Juan Luis 70, 101, 143, 164 3, 6, 90 nn. 93–4, 214 Vlastos, Nicolaus 28, 37 n. 5 Timaeus of Locri, pseudo- 214 Voetius, Gisbertus 76, 204 n. 10 Timpler, Clemens 85 n. 51 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 191 Tizio, Sigismondo 9 n. 40 toleration, religious 94–5 voluntarism 5, 13, 81 n. 12, 195; see Toletus, Franciscus 90 n. 94 also will Torrentius, Laurentius (Lieven van der voluntas, see will Beke) 100, 102–3 Vossius, Gerardus 116 Tortelli, Giovanni 10, 38 n. 11 vows 10–11 translations 1, 216; English 110–1, Vulcanius, Bonaventura 116 270 Index

Walaeus, Antonius 73–5, 78, 88 n. wonder (admiration) 176–7, 181, 79 186–7 Webster, Charles 136 World Soul 221–3, 228 Weigel, Erhard 239, 246–9, 254 n. Wouver, Jan van de (Woverius) 97 23 Wyclif, John 9 weights and measures 165 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Xenophon 41, 139, 150 Canterbury 150 Xylander (Wilhelm Holtzmann) Wilkins, John 153 108–10, 113, 117–18 will 64, 69–72, 93–4, 101, 104, 151; divine 3–5, 17 n. 25; free 3–5, 13, Young, Patrick 128 n. 53, 130 n. 72 71, 93, 102, 119, 196, 235 n. 37; see also voluntarism Zabarella, Jacopo 68 William of Conches 213 Zamberti, Bartolomeo 38 n. 10 William of Moerbeke 24, 28, 33 Zanetti, Bartolomeo 27, 29 William of Ockham 3, 5–6, 8, 207 n. Zanta, Léontine 96 59, 220, 252 n. 6; see also Zeno of Citium 122 Ockhamism Zeno of Elea 197 William of Orange 94, 98 Zeus 244 Wills, Gary 107 Zoroaster 38 n. 11, 240, 242 Wittenberg, University of 66 Zuccolo, Vitale 43 Wolff, Christian 246 Zurich 62