the philosopher in early modern europe: the nature of a contested identity

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THE PHILOSOPHER IN EARLYMODERN EUROPE

In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophyappears in a new light, not as reason’s progressive discovery of itsuniversal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over theproper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focusfrom the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason tothe philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social officeand intellectual deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with adefinite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing,this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of bothphilosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key earlymodern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and tothe institutional and larger political and religious contexts in whichsuch disputes took place.

CONAL CONDREN is Scientia Professor Emeritus at the Universityof New South Wales, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academyof the Humanities and of the Social Sciences.

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

IAN HUNTER is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanitiesand a Research Professor in the Centre for the History of EuropeanDiscourses at the University of Queensland.

I D EA S IN CONTEXT 77

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions andof related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that weregenerated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within thecontemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studiesof the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences,it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in theirconcrete contexts. By this means, artifical distinctions between the history ofphilosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature maybe seen to dissolve.

The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation.

A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

THE PHILOSOPHER IN EARLY

MODERN EUROPE

The Nature of a Contested Identity

EDITED BY

CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER ANDIAN HUNTER

cambridge university pressCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

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Contents

395392

List of contributors page ixAcknowledgements xii

Introduction 1

1 The persona of the natural philosopherStephen Gaukroger 17

2 The university philosopher in early modern GermanyIan H unter 35

3 The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics of office inearly modern EnglandCo nal Co ndr en 66

4 From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: the laughingphilosopher in the early modern periodC ath eri ne C u rti s 90

5 Hobbes, the universities and the history of philosophyR. W. S erjeantson 113

6 The judicial persona in historical context: the case ofMatthew HaleDavid Saund ers 140

7 Persona and office: Althusius on the formation of magistratesand councillorsRobe rt von Fri edeb urg 160

8 Descartes as sage: spiritual askesis in Cartesian philosophyJo hn C ott ingh am 182

vii

9 The natural philosopher and the virtuesPe ter H arri son 202

10 Fictions of a feminine philosophical persona: Christinede Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and philosophia lostKaren Green and J acqueline B road 22 9

11 John Locke and polite philosophyRich ar d Yeo 254

Index 276

viii Contents

Contributors

JACQUELINE BROAD is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School ofPhilosophy and Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. Her mainresearch area is the history of early modern women’s philosophy. She isthe author of Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cam-bridge University Press, 2002). Together with Karen Green, she isworking on an Australian Research Council-funded project on thehistory of women’s political thought. They are currently preparing anedited collection of essays on political themes in women’s writings fromthe late medieval period to the Enlightenment.

CONAL CONDREN is Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of NewSouth Wales. His most recent book is Argument and Authority in EarlyModern England: The Presuppositions of Oaths and Offices (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006). His current historical research is on concep-tions of philosophy over the same broad period and on Shakespeare’suse of casuistry. His philosophical work is on metaphor and conceptformation in politics.

JOHN COTTINGHAM is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Research atthe University of Reading, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s CollegeOxford. He is co-translator of the standard Cambridge edition of thephilosophical writings of Descartes, and his many publications includeThe Rationalists (1988) and Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and thePassions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1998). His latest book is The Spiritual Dimension: Religion,Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

CATHERINE CURTIS is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University ofNew South Wales who works in the history of early modern politicalthought and literature. Her recent articles focus on Tudor humanismand pedagogy, the diplomat Richard Pace, and Quentin Skinner’s

ix

reading of Sir Thomas More on liberty. She is currently working onJuan Luis Vives, and a book-length study of Thomas More as satiristand philosopher.

ROBERT VON FRIEDEBURG is Chair of Early Modern History at theErasmus University, Rotterdam, and is co-founder of the ErasmusCenter for Early Modern Studies. He was Heisenberg Fellow, Fellowat the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, and member of theInstitute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His recent books include Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England andGermany, 1530–1680 (2002); (ed.) Murder and Monarchy: Regicide inEuropean History, 1300–1800 (2004); (ed.) Passions and the Legitimacy ofRule from Antiquity to the Early Enlightenment (Cultural and SocialHistory, vol. 2, no. 2, London 2005); and (ed.) Patrioten und Patriavor dem Patriotismus. Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben und die Rekonfigurier-ung europaeischer Gemeinwesen im 17. Jahrhundert (2005). He is cur-rently working on patriotism and the transformation of Germanprincely rule during the early modern period.

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

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

PETER HARRISON is Professor of History and Philosophy at Bond Univer-sity, Australia. His chief area of research is early modern thought, witha particular focus on philosophy, natural philosophy and religion. He isauthor of ‘Religion’ and Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cam-bridge University Press, 1990), and The Bible, Protestantism, and theRise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His book,Adam’s Encyclopaedia: Theology and the Foundations of Scientific Know-ledge, 1500–1700, will be published in 2006.

x List of contributors

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

DAVID SAUNDERS is Adjunct Professor in the Socio-Legal Research Centreat Griffith University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for theHistory of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He isalso visiting Research Professor in the Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the Open University, UK. Since Anti-lawyers: Reli-gion and the Critics of Law and State (1997), he has continued to publishregularly on the historical relations of law and the politics of religion,with a focus on the early modern period.

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

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

List of contributors xi

Acknowledgements353217

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

xii

Introduction

Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter430537

I

Individuals and the societies in which they live establish and maintainidentity in relationship to some sense of a past, principally of interest insofaras it is of practical relevance in the present. The relationship may be unreli-able: memories may be mischievous, a heritage fanciful, a history fabricated,or so brutally abridged as to be mythic. Regardless of the confidence withwhich a ‘past-relationship’1 is assumed, however, its disruption can be deeplydestabilising. These commonplaces about what Michael Oakeshott calledthe ‘practical past’ are no less pertinent to academic disciplines than they areto societies and individuals. The history of political theory, for example, stillsometimes presented as an on-going tradition of debate and dialogue reach-ing back to the ancient Greeks, was invented as an authenticating lineage forthe newly institutionalised university study of politics only around the end ofthe nineteenth century. Much the same might be said of the gatherings ofcanonic texts conventionally studied as histories of national literatures. In allthese cases, the posited history retains its shape, momentum and character bythe competing needs to affirm, reform or subvert a contemporary disciplin-ary activity. Such histories are often so present-centred as to be largelyconvenient lineages, anachronistic in predication of content and ‘whiggish’in narrative structure.In many ways the history of philosophy is at one with, and may have

been a model for, the patterns of these adjacent academic genealogies.Aristotle set a precedent in isolating his own metaphysical position incounterpoint to figures such as Empedocles and Plato. But somethingapproximating the modern history of philosophy was not born until theseventeenth century, when it appeared together with the history of the-ology, partly in an attempt to tame the incendiary absolute truths of

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

1

systematic theology and philosophy by treating them as opinions held byhistorical sects.2 While it remained associated with ‘eclectic’ philosophy,the history of philosophy retained this relativising and pluralising ten-dency. Once pressed into the service of a priori philosophy by Kant,however, it was transformed into an historical apologetics for modernphilosophical doctrine.3 It was Hegel, though, who showed just how farthe past could be captured in the interests of promoting a present identity.In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he provided the very dialecticalstructure that explained how what was worthy led to him.4

Since then, and irrespective of whether Hegel’s philosophy has itselfbeen found acceptable, the history of philosophy has remained largely inthe hands of philosophers as a tool of contemporary doctrinal explorationand justification. Certainly the difficulties in writing historically about aphilosophical past have generated a substantial methodological literaturefrom within philosophy; and in some defined sub-fields historical under-standing may be enhanced by the use of specific philosophical techniques,such as the use of modern notation to elucidate medieval logic.5 Yet evenhere, the main point seems to be to see how far the translation ofpropositions into modern notational form can help us assess contributionsto a discipline that have hitherto been obscured by the inadequacies ofLatin.6

Leaving to one side the exploration of the past as a source of propos-itional treasure, the attitude of philosophers to their history has beeninstrumentalist in two ways. It may be taken as a relatively neutralterritory on which they can meet ecumenically when otherwise divided.Most commonly, however, philosophy’s history may be used as a peda-gogical induction into the present, in much the same way that, accordingto Kuhn, histories of physics functioned in science education.7 Similarly,for many years post-Reformation German philosophers have had to

2 John Christian Laursen (ed.), Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and BeyondPersecution and Toleration (Houndmills: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002).

3 Donald R. Kelley, ‘History and/or Philosophy’, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Teaching New Historiesof Philosophy (Princeton N. J.: University Center for Human Values, 2004), 345–59.

4 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. Haldane and F. Simson (3 vols.,London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892–5).

5 See, for example, the journalHistory and Theory, an important repository of such arguments; alsoTheMonist 53 (1969), special issue; Giorgio Tonelli, ‘A Contribution Towards a Bibliography on theMethodology of the History of Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 10 (1974), 456–8.

6 Alexander Broadie, George Lokert: Late Scholastic Logician (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1983); D. P. Henry, Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 1–4.

7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962,1969), Preface and 1–9.

2 CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER

trudge their way to Kant in order to be blessed with metaphysicalrespectability.8 Yet, as Kuhn also remarked of histories of science, whena new orthodoxy is established or an emergent school vies for recognition,the history has to be re-written. Thus fifteenth-century Italian rhetoriciansare suddenly the precursors of structuralism;9 Hume the empiricist be-comes a pragmatist, an emblem of the importance of William James’sbattle with idealism.10 Shadowy or discounted figures are shifted into theglare of attention by the need to situate developing interests. The redis-covery of Hobbes as a philosopher of language had much to do with atwentieth-century ‘linguistic turn’. In the same present-centred idiom,lamentation can be as important as celebration. What might seem wrongnow can be articulated by blaming selective figures from the past. Thus,according to Richard Rorty, the whole of seventeenth-century epistemol-ogy put philosophy on the wrong track;11 and for others Cartesian dualismis still in need of exorcism.12

In some way, however, the history of philosophy is a little differentfrom the histories of other academic disciplines. The self-consciousnessand highly contested nature of modern academic philosophical enquiryhelps ensure particularly varied perceptions of what the relationshipbetween philosophy and its past amounts to. But there are two polarisedclaims between which it might seem all other positions must be located.At one extreme is the notion that philosophy is essentially an historicalactivity and therefore that philosophising well in ignorance of it isimpossible. As R. G. Collingwood famously argued, to understand theanswers philosophers have given, it is necessary to reveal the contingentand variable nature of their problems, even if history here is reallythe medium in which such problems are resolved.13 At the other extreme

8 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–29.

9 Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1970), 15, 43n, 184–5; Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1987), and on the debate it generated, Ian Maclean, Interpretation andMeaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–8.

10 Bruce Kuklick, ‘Seven Thinkers and How They Grew’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind andQuentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),125–40: on textbook histories of philosophy and the pragmatic lineage, 129–32.

11 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979,1980), e.g. 4–9.

12 Rorty, Philosophy, chs. 1–2; and for valuable discussion of much of the literature, Raia Prokhovnik,Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (London: Routledge, 1999), 50–90.

13 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, 1967), 29–43, 53–76. CharlesTaylor, ‘Philosophy and its History’, in Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 17–30.

Introduction 3

is the argument that a history of philosophy is impossible.14 For whereashistorians infer and reconstruct from surviving evidence a philosophicalproposition, the thought of a given philosopher is always in the present.The history of philosophy is always philosophy.

That philosophy cannot or must be historical are synoptic extremitiesthat would apparently demand a more reasonable position between thetwo, with scholars recognising history and philosophy to be differentactivities, yet holding that they can be mutually enlightening. Thus Rorty,Schneewind and Skinner argue that while entirely past-centred canons ofhistoricity lead towards a futile antiquarianism, a present-centred abridge-ment of earlier philosophical propositions results only in legitimatinganecdotalism. The first endeavour fails to distinguish philosophy fromintellectual quackery, the second reduces history to myth.15 All that seemsto be required is an avoidance of these excesses.

Up to a point, a position such as this is appealing, not least because itinvites an examination of evidence and cases of the interplay betweenhistorical knowledge and philosophical proposition. Yet, most broadly, itbegs the question of whose criteria are to be used in judging an accountof a philosopher from an earlier time insofar as philosophers and histor-ians have diverging interests. If it is likely that philosophers will continueto expect their own standards and priorities to take precedence in theirown history, it remains open to the historian to explore the linguisticand institutional means of asserting this precarious authority over aneighbouring discipline. What also remains unclear is the degree to whichit is possible to avoid difficulties associated with the specific genre ofphilosophical history.

As a mode of intellectual history, philosophical history is so structuredthat historical events unfold as the means of resolving present philosoph-ical problems. As Hegel put it: ‘The course of history does not show us theBecoming of things foreign to us, but the Becoming of ourselves and ourknowledge.’16 ‘Our knowledge’ is supposed to arise from human subjec-tivity’s on-going pursuit of self-clarification, and is in this sense timeless.Eighteenth-century Kantians were amongst the first to practise this kindof philosophical history. They treated the entire history of philosophy

14 Gordon Graham, ‘Can There be a History of Philosophy?’ History and Theory 21 (1982), 37–52; andJacques Derrida, ‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, in Jacques Derrida, Writing andDifference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 154–68.

15 Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 4–11.16 Cited in Kelley, ‘History and/or Philosophy’, 347.


prior to Kant as if it were an attempt to overcome the impasse between anidea-less empiricism and a sense-less rationalism, even if this impassewas in fact internal to the structure of Kant’s transcendental idealism.17

We can find the same basic approach in more recent histories thatassimilate the most diverse texts and contexts to a narrative leading toKant’s discovery of the transcendental structure of subjectivity18 or thetranscendent structure of a universal moral identity.19

A no less problematic feature of ‘presentist’ philosophical histories istheir presumption that we already know what philosophy is – typically,some combination of the disciplines of epistemology, metaphysics andmoral philosophy – such that its history is always a history of that whichwe call philosophy today. This is the presumption that all of the contri-butions to this book seek to question, by showing in different ways thatwe cannot read off early modern philosophies from current philosophicaldoctrines. What philosophy might be is a matter for historical investi-gation of the activities that have been called ‘philosophy’, regardless ofwhether to modern eyes these activities resemble post-Kantian epistemol-ogy, and regardless of whether they look more like theology, poetry,polemics or natural sciences.Viewed from a post-Kantian vantage, be it an analytic or a continental

one, the landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophyappears as a foreign country. Not only was there little interest in theproblems of epistemology, but the range of disciplines classified as phil-osophy was larger and more diverse than it became from the late eight-eenth century. After scanning a number of different classifications typicalof the European universities, Joseph Freedman concludes that ‘thenine disciplines which most frequently appeared . . . were metaphysics,physics, mathematics, ethics, family life, politics, logic, rhetoric, andgrammar’.20 Once we recall that physics typically comprised the mainAristotelian works of natural philosophy – The Heavens, On Generation

17 See, for example, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie fur denakademischen Unterricht (3rd edn, Leipzig, 1820). In English: A Manual of the History of Philosophy,trans. A. Johnson, ed. and rev. J. R. Morell (London: Bohn, 1852). For a helpful discussion, see T. J.Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), 213–19.

18 Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1969).

19 Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996).

20 Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Classifications of Philosophy, the Sciences, and the Arts in Sixteenth- andSeventeenth-Century Europe’, The Modern Schoolman 72 (1994), 37–65 at 43.

Introduction 5

and Corruption, Meteorology, On the World, and On the Soul – and thatmathematics included the musical and astronomical disciplines in additionto geometry and arithmetic, and that politics could embrace jurisprudence,the full diversity of the philosophical domain begins to appear. The factthat this array included all of the disciplines apart from theology, law andmedicine is a pointer to the degree to which the concept of philosophy wasdetermined by what was taught in university arts or philosophy faculties. AsIan Hunter shows, any such determination of philosophy’s scope could becontentious, often subject to the contingencies of overtly confessionaldispute.

The situation is complicated further if one turns to England, a countrywhose universities were quite often peripheral to what people saw asphilosophy and whose major figures worked outside a university environ-ment. In common usage ‘philosophy’ might not refer to any discipline atall, but to the ends or purposes of many jostling claimants to wisdom.Similarly, the increasing importance of natural philosophy during theseventeenth century could mean that there might be no stable distinctionto be drawn between medicine and philosophy, as was attempted withinthe context of university structures. The anatomist and physician WalterCharleton presented himself to his readers as a philosopher;21 WilliamHarvey was admired as a philosopher because of his work on circulation.22

Historically speaking, then, it becomes increasingly implausible to seeearly modern philosophy as a single discipline or intellectual endeavourexpressive of something like the human subject’s struggle to clarify itsconsciousness or conscience. Some philosophical disciplines were indeedmethods of self-clarification. Some, though, taught positive metaphysicalor natural philosophical doctrines, still others the arts of logic, grammarand rhetoric, or of memory, navigation or computation. In certain timesand places, a certain kind of philosophical persona could be cultivated byseeking self-clarification, yet other kinds of philosophical personae havebeen cultivated in other ways: by seeking union with God or knowledge ofcorpuscles, freedom from passion or the alphabet of all possible sciences,mastery of the classics or impartiality of legal judgment.

Such purposive and doctrinal diversity raises the question of whetherthe history of philosophy can be conceived as an object of enquiry withoutaccepting what philosophers are in the habit of taking for granted. There

21 See Emily Booth, A Subtle and Mysterious Machine (New York and Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).22 See, for example, Robert G. Frank Jr, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1980).


is a way out of this apparent impasse, however, namely for the history ofphilosophy to take as its object those doctrines and disciplines that havebeen accepted as philosophical across a range of historical settings. Bytreating this acceptance as an object of historical investigation, we shiftour focus from philosophical problems to the institutional contexts inwhich they are delimited, and from the subject of consciousness to thepersona of the philosopher that is cultivated in such contexts.

I I

In proposing to recover understandings of philosophy not easily assimi-lated to the current self-understanding of the discipline, this volume ofessays argues for a new and more thoroughly historical approach to thehistory of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the complementaryphenomena of the contested character of philosophy, and the personanecessary for its practice, that is, the purpose-built ‘self’ whose cognitivecapacities and moral bearing are cultivated for the sake of a knowledgedeemed philosophical.To take an interest in the persona of the philosopher requires that we

attend to the kind of intellectual work that individuals must perform onthemselves in order to conduct their minds and persons in a way that isaccepted as philosophical. By the same token it requires attention to themoral qualities needed for the education of others as philosophers. Thisinterest is not sociological, as it makes no general assumptions regardingthe organisation of societies in which philosophical personae are cultivated,or about the ‘structural’ functions this might serve. It is social, however, tothe extent that modes of intellectual conduct are only recognised asphilosophical in and for particular institutional settings: monasteries,seminaries, universities, courts, secret societies, epistolary networks, andso on. Further, this interest is historical, in the sense that the means ofcarrying out this intellectual and moral work – the modes of scepticism orassent, the forms of abstraction and argument, the image of the personone aspires to become by performing this inner labour – are historicallytransmitted and put to work under particular circumstances. These cir-cumstances are frequently focused in a highly distinctive institutionalmilieu where an ensemble of disciplines that determines what counts asphilosophy is taught, and where a particular philosophical persona iscultivated.A philosophical persona is thus not what one has to have in order to

solve problems universally recognised as philosophical. Neither is it a proxy

Introduction 7

for the philosophical ‘subject’, deduced, transcendentally or otherwise,from universal acts of cognition or judgment. Rather, recognition ofa problem as philosophical only takes place within the milieu where aphilosophical persona is cultivated, as a result of the intellectual andmoral means employed for this, and in accordance with the larger historicalcontext in which this milieu operates. To understand a philosophicalproblem thus means to engage in a process of self-presentation, an act ofself-problematisation, or to advocate an idealised character to which po-tential philosophers should aspire. This kind of process is as evident in theCartesian procedures for purging the mind as it is in the spiritual exercisesof the Jesuit philosophy course, where a whole class of scholars is requiredto doubt the adequacy of their intellect in the face of their corrupt desires, asa means of inducing their need for authoritative philosophical doctrine.23

The existence of a philosophical problem is integral to the institutedpractice in which the special kind of person who knows and resolves suchproblems – the philosopher – is groomed for office.

Any history of philosophy written from this perspective will not be anaccount of universal philosophical problems unfolding in time. It will notbe an account of how the dialectic of rationalism and empiricism eventu-ally resolved the relation between reason and the senses; or of how thediscovery of the transcendent structure of thought finally established thetrue relation between the metaphysical and physical worlds, a story, to putit bluntly, of how this or that was solved, how we learned to get it right.Rather, it will be a more local and contextual undertaking, focused onuncovering the circumstances in which these ostensibly universal prob-lems were posed for individuals in a manner that made their resolutioncontingent on the cultivation of a particular kind of philosophical persona.

For this reason, disputes over philosophical problems quickly becomedisputes over what is to count as philosophy and what it is to be aphilosopher. In this regard, early modern Europe witnessed a whole seriesof protracted border conflicts over the scope of philosophy and the dutyof philosophers. These included disputes between the scholastic logicianand the humanist rhetorician, the Aristotelian physicist and the Galileanastronomer, the philosopher and the jurist, the arts professor and themetaphysician, the court Neoplatonist and the university Aristotelian,and the philosopher and the theologian. Such disputes were in turninformed by the moral habitus of overlapping institutional environments

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


and by the larger political and religious conflicts in which these insti-tutions played their roles, especially those conflicts associated with theReformation and the Counter-Reformation and the building, or morehaphazard formation, of princely territorial states.

I I I

There are a number of broad points arising from this shift in perspec-tive. First, it has some precedent in recent scholarship on the history ofancient philosophy, in which attention to the presented way of life of aphilosopher, an exercise or activity of the psyche, has been shown to beintegral to what was specifically argued.24 Aristotle’s synoptic commentson the interrelationship between logos, the word or discourse, and ethos,the presentation of the speaker through these words, offers one kind ofsupport for the view that, in antiquity, the relation between the identity ofthe speaker and the standing of the discourse was not a contingent matter.The attention given to his own dress and comportment in explainingwhy he did not succeed Plato as scholarch at the Academy, for example,is another.25 The essays of this volume show a continuity of concernwith the nexus of persona and argument, highlighting the manner inwhich philosophical disputes could be about a way of life, and thequalities, aptitudes and education necessary for its conduct. During theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries ancient notions of philosophicalpersonae were preserved or recovered and made central to the elaborationof philosophical debate, a point illustrated, for example, in the chaptersby Hunter and Friedeburg. Issues of living a certain kind of philosophical

24 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Peter Brown, TheBody and Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in LateAntiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); JuliuszDomanski, La philosophie, theories ou maniere de vivre? (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires deFribourg, 1996); Ilsetraut Hadot, Seneca und die griechisch-romische Tradition der Seeleneitlung(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969); Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995);Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002);Dorothee Kimmich, Epikureische Aufklarungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1993); Anne Marie Malingrey, Philosophia (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961); Martha Nussbaum, TheTherapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie del’ame (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1981); Paul Rabbow, Seelenfuhrung (Munich: Kosel-Verlag, 1954);Andre-Jean Voelke, La philosophie comme therapie de l’ame (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires deFribourg, 1993).

25 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 1356a; Anton-HermannChroust, ‘Aristotle’s Alleged “Revolt” against Plato’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973),91–4 at 93–4.

Introduction 9

life and exhibiting a specific philosophical moral decorum persisted.Moreover, this authenticating dimension to the business of philosophis-ing could, as in antiquity, be displayed and advertised beyond words,through the semiotics of dress and cultivation. So the philosopher of theearly modern world was bearded and modestly if not shabbily dressed,a constellation of values and priorities.26 He, and it was nearly always ahe, was also likely to be afflicted or driven by a certain psychologicaldisposition, the tyranny even, of melancholia (see the essay by Curtis), orthe hubris of presuming to think like God.

Second, the way of life was held to involve responsibilities to somethingbeyond the interests of the individual philosopher. This locus of dutyvaried, as did the (sometimes interchangeable) terms used to express it.Philosophy involved responsibilities to truth, to Man, to God, to Nature,perhaps to a sovereign or else to God through a religious order; it couldtherefore be presented as an office. As a result, it was easy to assimilatenotions of philosophy as conduct and activity to adjacent intellectual andpractical offices understood through much the same moral vocabulary.The office of the philosopher was fashioned through the same generallanguage as that of the judge, the spiritual director, the counsellor orthe ruler (see the essays by Saunders and Friedeburg). Indeed, the lan-guage of office, inherited and augmented from antiquity – considerPlatonic analogies between the midwife and the true philosopher, orChristian-Aristotelian figurations of philosophy as theology’s handmaid– was pervasive or implied in disputing philosophical personae. This wassomething that helps explain what has been noted above, that the word‘philosophy’ had a range of use well beyond any putative coherentdiscipline. The long-standing topos for exploring the nature of the philo-sophical life, the choice between its active or contemplative modes as thebest means towards its ends, had implications for religion and civiccommitment. Arguments about the nature of philosophy could beconveyed through discussion of the responsibilities of institutionalisedoffices, and the model for the active philosophical life might be littledifferent from the office of civic counsel. Conversely, the paradigm ofthe contemplative life could be the monk or nun exercising offices toGod. Attention to the issue of religious character, as Harrison argues inhis essay, makes clear why post-Reformation denominational divisions

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


helped shape philosophical activity, rendering plausible the connectionbetween Protestantism and natural philosophy.Third, the very centrality of the issue of philosophical persona ensured

a tighter relationship between what was said and who said it than thatto which we are accustomed. This itself helps us understand the doxo-logical, and intellectually capacious, character of pre-modern histories ofphilosophy, as much concerned with the character, life, death, evenappearance, of philosophers and the schools that followed them, as withthe problems they addressed and the arguments they developed.27 Thiswas hardly accidental, for some presentation, display or affirmation of thepersona’s appropriate qualities and attitudes helped give an utteranceauthority. Matters of entitlement could even put propositional cogencyat a discount, a point central to understanding the force of MargaretCavendish’s frustrations over her exclusion as a woman from the active lifeand her extolling the contemplative philosophic ideal (see the essay byGreen and Broad). Eclecticism, which was a mainstream if not dominantmode of philosophy in early modern Europe, insisted on the philosoph-ical responsibility of exploring and incorporating all evidence even at theexpense of rigorous argumentation, and so the persona of the eclecticphilosopher helped compensate for a necessary doctrinal diversity.28 It ispartly against this background, and in reaction to it, as Serjeantson’s essayemphasises, that the Cartesian and Hobbesian image of the singular andsystematic philosophic persona should be understood.Fourth, notions of personae are likely to be explicit and themselves

matters of dispute where questions concerning the nature and direction ofphilosophy are important. If a community of scholars can work within theconfines of an established activity, it is likely that questions of intellectualpersonae can be taken for granted. This may help explain why an overtphilosophical persona is lacking in the writings of medieval logicians,Jesuit school philosophy, and nowadays those brought up in a strictlyanalytic tradition of academic philosophy (see the essay by Hunter). Butparticularly in early modern Europe, where the ends, direction, point andcontent of philosophy were matters of controversy, one central meansby which a distinct activity was defined and promoted was, as Gaukroger

27 Stanley, History of Philosophy, in which life and style of death, reminiscent of martyrology, is oftenimportant.

28 Ulrich Johannes Schneider, ‘Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy’, in D. R. Kelley (ed.),History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester,N. Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 83–101; Horst Dreitzel, ‘Zur Entwicklung und Eigenartder “Eklektischen Philosophie”’, Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281–343.

Introduction 11

demonstrates, through the specification of a distinct persona. Ironically, thosemost readily acclaimed as philosophers because of the significance of theirdoctrines – Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke – were also seriouslyengaged in the business of defending and instantiating a philosophicalpersona against others they regarded as inimical to true philosophy.

Fifth, and concomitantly, ad hominem argument, now consideredillegitimate because of a clear line to be drawn between the merits ofthe argument and those of its expositor, was a variable feature of philo-sophical debate: as doctrine expressed a persona’s claim on an intellectualoffice, so either was a potential casualty in the criticism of the other (seethe essays by Condren and Gaukroger). For this reason, the satire ofphilosophy and philosophers, also sidelined in histories of philosophy,was an idiom of philosophical presentation and subversion. Having amoral, satire, as Curtis and Serjeantson show, had a philosophical pur-pose. Hobbes was not therefore a satirist as well as a philosopher: satirewas an expressive idiom of his philosophical persona. In the same vein,early modern philosophy was characterised by a strong explanatory andpersuasive dimension now largely absent, at least in the self-representationof philosophers. As Gaukroger argues, Bacon’s account of nature and theprocedures for uncovering the fundamental principles of the natural realmcannot be separated from his image of the natural philosopher. Much thesame is argued by Cottingham about Descartes and Yeo about Locke.

The upshot of all this is to make the identity of philosophy much moreelusive and variable than it appears to philosophers whose interest lies inthe propositional convenience of exemplary doctrines rather than histor-ical truth, and who thus treat philosophy as a source of errors, achieve-ments, puzzles and problems yet to be solved in an on-going communalactivity. It is therefore important to try and recapture what was involvedin notions of philosophical identity and doctrinal integrity, for on theevidence of early modern debate about the word ‘philosophy’, the evoca-tion of a persona, the defence or promotion of the office, was ubiquitous.

IV

The essays in the collection range over a wide spectrum of questions, somebroaching general issues of the role of the philosopher, others looking atdistinct personae and their reform in detail. As the centrality of epistemol-ogy is now itself a function of how the history of philosophy has beenwritten, there is here a clear shift away from a history of epistemologicalissues. Conversely, political and social philosophy figure prominently, and


so do figures such as Shaftesbury and Boyle who were central to thephilosophical culture of their time, yet fail to fit at all into the epistemo-logical canon. Conal Condren discusses one such group, rhetoricians,asking how a history of Renaissance/early modern philosophy thatincorporates rhetoric as one of the contending streams might be used toopen up questions of the nature and standing of the philosopher.In particular, he examines the pervasive understanding of the persona asa manifestation and representative of an office, an embodiment of amoral economy, across a wide range of professions sharing a sanctioningvocabulary of intellectual identity, yet lacking the institutional environ-ment in which it could be solidified. If the philosopher can be promotedand defended as an office-holder, it becomes important to understandnot just the disputed duties of office, but the strategies used to promote aparticular style of philosopher over others.These debates employed various argumentative strategies, and Cather-

ine Curtis looks at a persistent and often a central one: satire. In particu-lar, she examines the way in which satire was used to cultivate thephilosophical persona in four cases – those of Richard Pace, ThomasMore, Erasmus, and Robert Burton – and at how the interaction betweensatire and the cultivation of the persona aided the communication ofphilosophical insight and the potential for problematic reception.A related theme is central to Serjeantson’s chapter exploring Hobbes’shostility towards the universities. Hobbes was concerned with the publicfunction of the universities as places where the minds of future elitesamong the ruler’s subjects were formed, where their personae were shaped.It is explicitly part of the sovereign’s ‘office’ to ensure that these insti-tutions are able to fulfil this function in an appropriate manner. In thisway, in a text such as Leviathan, there is an engagement with the questionof what is the right kind of philosophical education. We witness a shifthere from thinking of learning as a virtue to thinking of it as a duty,something that changes the nature and role of intellectual enquiry, and inthe process demands something new of the enquirer. This at least involvesa heightened awareness of the responsibilities of subjection, and sothrough a satiric parody we also witness a confrontation with the imageof philosophical and educational duty that Friedeburg argues was centralto Althusius’s sense of the polity.Yet another example of rethinking the persona of the philosopher by

placing him in the context of competitors is Saunders’ highly contextualcomparison of the philosopher and the judge. He focuses on the question ofimpartiality and objectivity of each persona. The judge in the Renaissance

Introduction 13

was seen very much on the model of the priest, but this changed in theseventeenth century, as the Roman iuris prudente or iuris consulti becamethemodel.MatthewHale, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, set out criteriaof objectivity and impartiality in making judicial decisions, and thesematch those devised by natural philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes.Gaukroger, in his essay, looks at the way in which three very influentialnatural philosophers of the first half of the seventeenth century – Bacon,Galileo and Descartes – each attempted to shape a new persona for thenatural philosopher. Focusing on the preoccuation with ‘intellectual hon-esty’, Gaukroger examines why this concern came to the fore in naturalphilosophy, and how, riding on notions of objectivity and impartiality, itenabled debate about the aims of natural philosophy to be resituatedaround the persona of the natural philosopher.

A similar argument is made in Cottingham’s chapter, which usesDescartes to explore the general question of the way in which the personaof the philosopher involves the development and expression of a distinct-ive identity or sense of self, something which gives intellectual shape andmoral significance to that individual’s life and work. But such a personamay be more exclusive than it at first seems, and Broad and Green argue,in a comparison of Christine of Pizan and Margaret Cavendish, that thevarious personae adumbrated for the natural philosopher, and the philoso-pher more generally, did not provide a model for women who aspiredto this role. By contrast with both traditional and new images, Cavendishsaw writing philosophy as akin to writing fiction, and, contrary to astrong current in English seventeenth-century thought, she defended thephilosophical life as one of contemplation.

One issue here, developed by Harrison, is the move in the modern erato the idea that the perceived reliability of scientific methods is theirinsensitivity to the personal qualities of those who employ them. This is incontrast to the earlier expectation that natural philosophers needed toconform to traditional models of the philosophical persona, in which themoral characteristics of the individual were the pledge of the truth of whatthey knew. Harrison argues that the shift is motivated largely by theProtestant view that, because human beings were constitutionally incap-able of the kinds of moral transformations required on the classical andscholastic models, reliable knowledge had to be grounded in other ways.As Harrison points out, central to Luther’s criticism of the ‘idle’ life of thecontemplative was a new conception of divine vocation. Rejecting thenotion that the spiritual estate of the clergy was superior to both ofthe temporal estates, he had regarded the clerical office as one calling


amongst others: all vocations, on this view, were equally spiritual. Such aview makes possible Locke’s conception of the philosopher as an ‘under-labourer’, examined in Yeo’s chapter. As Yeo points out, Locke managedto combine in the philosopher the qualities of under-labourer while at thesame time embodying a paradigm of polite culture carrying with it seriousreligious and moral implications.Not all forms of early modern philosophy are geared to the cultivation

of a specifically philosophical persona, however. In looking at the textbookphilosophy of the Jesuits in German universities, Hunter thus notes thatbecause Jesuits typically taught the three-year philosophy course onlyonce, before moving on to other religious duties, they neither saw them-selves as specialist philosophers, nor sought to cultivate the philosophicalpersona in their students. This raises the question of potential competitionbetween philosophical and non-philosophical personae. Hunter also ob-serves that the characteristic mode of expression of particular philosoph-ical schools varied, from commentary and disputation in the Catholic caseto the encyclopedia in the Calvinist case, with Lutherans retaining a strictseparation between natural and revealed knowledge. Freideburg pursuessome of these matters more closely in a study of the Calvinist politicaltheorist Althusius and his contemporaries. In particular, he shows how, ina practical political situation, the persona to be cultivated might notcorrespond to the material one teaches. Althusius thus argues that univer-sity-based teachers and councillors, although not themselves magistrates,nevertheless take part in government and therefore need abilities andvirtues making them fit for that office, an office seen under the auspicesof philosophy.If the concept of the philosophical subject focuses on the individual’s

inner relation to consciousness and conscience, then that of the philo-sophical persona points us in a different direction: to the nexus betweenspecifically cultivated moral and intellectual capacities, the distinctivecomportment of the philosopher as a recognised social personality, andthe institutional setting in and for which capacities were articulated tocomportment, often through the language and ritual of the philosopher’soffice. The essays in this volume begin to show the variety of philosoph-ical personae to be found across the intellectual terrain of early modernEurope. In other words, they begin to show the multiplicity of moral andintellectual abilities that were cultivated under the auspices of philosophy,the different and sometimes competing kinds of philosophical personae towhich those cultivating these capacities aspired, and the diverse andsometimes rival institutional contexts in which philosophical disciplines

Introduction 15

were elaborated and transmitted for various purposes. In showing howmuch is lost when the grid of epistemology is placed over the landscape ofearly modern philosophy, our Introduction has stressed the latter’s com-prehensive and scarcely disciplined diversity. On one side philosophycontinued to embrace the liberal arts, while on another it was not distinctfrom the natural sciences. If it reached upwards through metaphysics totheological insight, then it reached downwards through law and politics tothe needs of civil society. The present essays do not explore in any detailthe manner in which the (to modern eyes) wild landscape would be carvedup and transmitted into modernity via a diversity of paths. We can,however, glimpse this process in Gaukroger’s account of the psychologicaltransformation of natural philosopher that would issue in the naturalscientist. It is also visible in Hunter’s account of the way in which theJesuit universities restricted philosophy to logic, physics and metaphysics,even while Lutheran ones allowed it to sub-divide into such independentdisciplines as politics, history and natural law. But clarification of theseintimations of the diversity of modernity must await further research andwriting.


CHAPTER 1

The persona of the natural philosopher

Stephen Gaukroger430537

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

THE ORIGINS OF THE PHILOSOPHER

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

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

2 See Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 16.

17

characterising it in a way that marginalises its competitors.3 It did this in aparticularly successful way, to the extent that it is difficult for us even toreconstruct what the alternatives might have been.4

We can think of the origins of philosophy as lying in a particular kindof dispute resolution. There were a number of relatively independentdevelopments in the transition from archaic to classical Greece thattransformed the discourse by which problems were resolved from whatDetienne has called ‘efficacious speech’ to dialogue.5 ‘Efficacious speech’had traditionally been the preserve of the poet or orator in praising theking, and of magic and religion; in both cases the words themselves areoften taken to be endowed with causal powers. Take the case of law. Inpre-legal disputes, efficacious words and gestures were directed not to-wards a judge for the benefit of his assessment, but towards an opponentwho had to be overcome. With the emergence of the Greek polis, however,collective decisions gradually replaced straightforward commands, andthese could only be arrived at in a satisfactory way through dialogue inwhich orators sought to convince through argument. Similarly in the caseof law, use started to be made of witnesses who might produce proof, andjudges were called upon to assess the cases made by both parties and cometo a decision.6

There are two complementary features of the shift to dialogue: the useof argument and evidence to establish a case and, something which is aprecondition of this, the refusal to accept ambiguity, trying instead toresolve conflicting accounts into contradictions between purported facts.This new approach first becomes evident in a systematic way in Thucydi-des’ histories, where a new probing search for causes, replacing thetraditional narratives, requires an explicit resolution of factual questions.

3 See Walter Burkert, ‘Platon oder Pythagoras? Zum Ursprung des Wortes “Philosophie”’, Hermes88 (1960), 159–77, who shows that the crucial etymology of philosophos given in Diogenes Laertius,Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I.12–13, for example, cannot go back further than Plato and is rootedin Platonic thought. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, histoire desmots (4 vols., Paris: Klincksiek, 1968–80), is an invaluable source on etymologies. See also Hadot,What is Ancient Philosophy?, ch. 2.

4 For an attempt at such a reconstruction see Antonio Capizzi, The Cosmic Republic: Notes for a Non-Peripatetic History of the Birth of Philosophy in Greece (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1990).

5 See Marcel Detienne,Maıtres de verite dans la grece archaıque (Paris: Maspero, 1990). See also LouisGernet, Anthropologie de la Grece antique (Paris: Maspero, 1968), and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Laraison greque et la cite’, Raison Presente 2 (1967), 51–61.

6 See Detienne, Maıtres de verite, ch. 5; Douglas M. McDowell, The Law in Classical Athens(London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), ch. 14; and G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience:Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979), ch. 4.

18 STEPHEN GAUKROGER

It is made fully explicit, however, only in Aristotle’s syllogistic. Here, theresolution of ambiguities into contradictions – so prevalent in ordinarydiscourse, in drama, in poetry, in political speeches – is a precondition fortranslation of arguments into logical form. Moreover, the idea of contra-diction lies at the core of Aristotle’s understanding of logic, in the form ofthe justification of the principle of non-contradiction. This justification islinked closely with the nature of discursive argument, for, as he pointsout, anyone engaging in argument in the first place must assume the truthof the principle: if one is prepared to accept contradictions then anythingfollows from anything and argument is not possible.The shift to dialogue engages a new mode of dispute resolution, then,

in that it gives priority to argument, and resolves ambiguities into contra-dictions. This is reflected in notions of cognitive grasp as we move fromthe archaic to the classical period, for these are features reflected in thenotion of episteme (knowledge). But for episteme to become constitutive ofphilosophical activity, as Plato and his successors conceived of thatactivity, it needs more than just these two features. Plato is concernedto contrast what he considers to be genuine philosophical thought andsophistry. The sophist not only meets the criteria that philosophy bepursued in terms of arguments and that it resolve ambiguities intocontradictions, but appears to meet them in a paradigm way. But thesophist is not only not a paradigm philosopher for Plato, he is not aphilosopher at all. Why not?The key question here – one that will have fundamental ramifications

for early modern attempts to rethink the nature of natural philosophy – is:what is needed over and above a commitment to resolution of ambiguitiesand argument if one is to be a philosopher, as opposed to a sophist? Forboth Plato and Aristotle, the line falls between those who use argumentsto discover the truth of the matter, and those who use arguments simplyto show off their ingenuity and thereby enhance their reputation or toseek simply to win arguments.The early dialogues of Plato, for example, dominated as they are by

disputes with sophists, can be read as attempts to reconstrue argument as ameans, not of outwitting opponents, but of establishing the truth of thematter. It is important to remember that Plato’s early dialogues, where hisnotion of what it is to be a philosopher is forged, and where the basicnotions of philosophical argument are elaborated, work primarily in amoral context. The notion of truth as whatever survives the elenchosmightbe satisfactory in areas such as geometry, but in a moral context, whereone wants to establish one system of values over another, it is problematic.

The persona of the natural philosopher 19

For Plato, it is crucial in dealing with the sophists’ defences of moralrelativity, in particular, that the argument be directed uncompromisinglytowards the true system of moral values. The true system of values will benot just any set of values that emerges unscathed on some particularoccasion of argument, and this matters because fundamental questionsof morality are not the kinds of things one can disregard, or on which onecan suspend judgment. The problem with Parmenides’ construal ofargument, however, is not that it neglects to give argument a direction,but that he explicitly denies that it can have the direction Plato requires.For Parmenides, one simply cannot go beyond appearances to reality.Plato’s project is to show how argument can in fact do this, and heconstrues moral philosophy in these terms: as something that goes beyondthe conventional aspects of morality – which the sophists, as Platoportrays them, emphasise – to the underlying nature of morality.

The failing that Plato and Aristotle identify in the sophists is in animportant sense a moral one. In pursuing philosophical argument in asophistical way, one is not failing at the level of argument but at the levelof what motivates argument. Argument is being used for the wrongpurposes, and this is due not to an intellectual deficiency so much as amoral one. On the other hand, the virtue that is lacking is not one weassociate with some form of goodness but with an intellectual quality. It isa question of intellectual morality. I want to distinguish two very differentways of exploring this question. There is a tradition in antiquity, usuallyidentified as a rhetorical tradition, which focuses on the moral qualities ofthe philosopher, and this way of pursuing the question is also to be foundin the Hellenistic schools.7 We encounter a revival of this approach in theRenaissance. The early modern concern with the question of the personaof the natural philosopher (in Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and others) hasan explicit focus on questions of intellectual morality, and is a crucialingredient in the rethinking of the standing of natural philosophy. Weshall come to this tradition below. For the moment, I want to note thatPlato and Aristotle move in a different direction. The way in which theycharacterise the sophist clearly involves a moral condemnation, andsophistry is identified as a kind of moral failing. However, this moralfailing is countered primarily in epistemological terms rather than moralones. Justifications for particular doctrines, they argue, should not only

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


seek to convince on the basis of valid arguments and unambiguousevidence, but should also possess some extra quality which goes beyondthese and indeed is independent of them. For both Plato and Aristotle,what the sophist fails to do, and what the philosopher must do, is to useargument to uncover something not normally apparent. Yet what theyseek to uncover turns out to be very different. To highlight this difference,we can say that Plato seeks to uncover transcendent truth – transcendentin the sense that it is given independently of any means by which wemight establish it – whereas what Aristotle seeks to uncover are explan-ations which could not possibly be independent of the means by which weestablish them. This difference is of crucial importance in medieval andRenaissance thought, because the Platonist project is that which guidesChristian theology, whereas the Aristotelian project is that whichguides Aristotelian natural philosophy.8

The distinctive feature of the Platonist account of genuine philosoph-ical enquiry is that it seeks the reality underlying the appearances. Byengaging the world of appearances appropriately we can see throughthem to the world of forms, the realm of reality. Plato’s image of thecave, whereby there is a completely different world from that ofshadows, to which we have access, encourages such a view by suggestingparallel worlds of appearance and reality.9 One extreme version of thisconception of truth is the idea that we can transcend appearancescompletely and grasp reality directly. Neoplatonism comes close to thisnotion at times, but philosophical thought in the West generally doesnot encourage us to renounce appearances but to use them as a guide toreality. We see the world differently as a result of philosophical enlight-enment only in a metaphorical sense, not literally. Nevertheless, despitehis insistence on the idea that the path to reality is via reason, Plato’scave suggests the idea of a separate realm of truth existing independentlyof our cognitive life, and it is unclear why reason should provide theroute to this reality. The Neoplatonist movement had a commitment toreason, but it was a reason that one ultimately transcended once one hadreached reality. Indeed it is striking that those who take up the Platonistoption, both in late antiquity and in the Renaissance, see their project interms of an interpretation of nature. Their version of natural philosophy

8 There are parallels here with the distinction between Philosophenphilosophie and Schulphilosophie,which Ian Hunter discusses in chapter 2.

9 Plato, Republic, 514A–517C.


is more like the hermeneutic interpretation of a sacred text in which oneseeks to uncover a hidden and unique truth, than something to bepursued in terms of empirical investigation.10

In short, Plato’s notion of enquiry is designed to take us to somethingtranscendent, whereas Aristotle’s notion of enquiry places the outcomefirmly within our cognitive world. For the Neoplatonist, if not for Platohimself, once one had transcended sensory understanding, by whatevermeans, the world of appearances could be left behind. On the Aristotelianconception, to the extent to which we are concerned with genuinelyphilosophical – as opposed to mystical or theological – investigation, itis crucial that the point of the exercise not be seen as denying any reality toappearances. The reason why the philosophical approach retains a com-mitment to appearances is because that is what it sets out to explain.A successful explanation does not replace the explanandum: rather, itreveals to us why the explanandum has the features it has. A project thatseeks the truth per se might not take the form of attempting to provide anexplanation of something at all. For Aristotle, by contrast, philosophy ingeneral, and natural philosophy in particular, is designed to provide anaccount of something, an explanation or reason for it; it is concerned toidentify what causes it, or what rationale or grounds can be provided forit. Like Plato, Aristotle seeks a third ingredient to mark the philosopherout from the sophist and, like Plato, he identifies the failure of the sophistas a kind of moral failing, but offers an epistemological solution to thefailure. By contrast, in place of Plato’s search for truth, Aristotle seeksexplanations.

Aristotle’s search is systematic: it includes a formal element and a non-formal one. The formal element is syllogistic. One thing to be notedabout syllogistic is that it represents a radically adversarial procedure. Theaim is to get someone to accept or believe something that they would nototherwise accept or believe, and syllogistic constrains the valid ways inwhich this can be done, by confining arguments to those in which thetruth of the conclusion follows from the truth of the premisses. We cansee syllogistic as a particular form of dispute resolution: it shows why youshould believe something because it either follows from or underlies otherthings you believe. So far, however, this process is one which characterisesnot just genuinely philosophical arguments, but sophistical argumentalso. Like Plato, Aristotle distinguishes the sophistical from the genuinely

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


philosophical argument in terms of going beyond what emerges from theelenchos, but whereas Plato introduces something external to philosophicaldiscourse, Aristotle advocates procedures internal to it. Distinguishingsophistical knowledge from genuine knowledge he writes:

We suppose ourselves to have unqualified demonstrative knowledge of some-thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knowsit, when we think we know the explanation/cause on which it depends, as theexplanation/cause of that thing and of no other, and, further, that the thing couldnot be other than it is.11

The latter identifies those truths that spring from the nature of some-thing,12 and these are the object of philosophy, by contrast with thingswhich just happen to be true, which sophists do not distinguish fromthe former. The task of natural-philosophical demonstration is theunderstanding of phenomena in terms of their causes.The contrast here is captured in Aristotle’s theory of demonstration.

Scientific demonstrations proceed syllogistically, and he argued that someforms of demonstration provide explanations or causes, whereas others donot. This may occur even where the syllogisms are formally identical.Consider, for example, the following two syllogisms:

The planets do not twinkleThat which does not twinkle is nearThe planets are near

The planets are nearThat which is near does not twinkleThe planets do not twinkle

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

11 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 71b8–12.12 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1051b13–17.


however, to specify what exactly the difference between the two syllo-gisms consisted in, and when this account was developed futher, in theregressus theory of the sixteenth century, there was increasing scepticismas to whether there was in fact any difference at all.

THE MORALITY OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

Early modern conceptions of the natural philosopher are distinguishedfrom classical notions of the philosopher in two main respects. First, theytake up the option that Plato and Aristotle largely ignored, namely thatwhat marks out the natural philosopher is ultimately a question ofintellectual morality and needs to be treated as such. Second, the naturalphilosopher is now pitted against the scholastic, who takes on sometraditional qualities of the sophist.

The tendency to see philosophical failings along the lines of moral oneshas a long history and it is especially prevalent in the seventeenth century.A crucial part of Bacon’s project for the reform of natural philosophy, forexample, was a reform of its practitioners. One ingredient in this was theelaboration of a new image of the natural philosopher, an image thatconveyed the fact that the natural philosopher is no longer an individualseeker after the arcane mysteries of the natural world, employing anesoteric language and protecting his discoveries from others, but a publicfigure in the service of the public good: that is, the crown.13

Renaissance humanists raised the question of the responsibilities ap-propriate to the humanist, in particular whether the life of activity inaffairs of state (negotium) should be preferred to that of detachment andcontemplation (otium).14 What Bacon effectively does is to transformphilosophy into something that comes within the realm of negotium, assomething good and useful, and thus as intrinsic to the active life. This iscompletely at odds with the conceptions of philosophy of classical an-tiquity and the Christian Middle Ages. With Bacon, natural philosophystarts to become a paradigmatic form of negotium. One crucial factor in thistransformation is the self-fashioning of the natural philosopher, throughmastery of his passions.15This is a model inappropriate to the artisan, and it

13 This forms one of the central themes of Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformationof Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): see esp. chs. 2 and 4.

14 The antithesis between a quiet life of contemplation and public life can be traced back to Euripides’Antiope.

15 This is particularly evident in Bacon’s account of his scientific utopia, New Atlantis, where self-respect, self-control and internalised moral authority are central.


gives the new natural philosopher a dignity and standing that the collectivenature of his work would not otherwise suggest. Another crucial factor isthat, just as in Renaissance culture the moral philosopher had beenexpected to manifested his morality in his persona, so too the new naturalphilosopher manifested his worth through his persona. The aim of thenatural philosopher is not merely to discover truths, even informative ones,but to produce new works for the public good.The moral basis of Bacon’s conception is evident in his discussion of

the classical philosophers in Redargutio philosophiarum. We are told therethat there are three classes of philosopher.16 First, there are the sophists,who claimed to know everything and travelled around teaching for a fee.Second, there are those philosophers who, having a more exalted sense oftheir own importance, opened schools which taught a fixed system ofbeliefs, in which category Bacon includes Plato, Aristotle, Zeno of Citiumand Epicurus. Third, there were those who devoted themselves to thesearch for truth and the study of nature without fuss, without chargingfees, and without setting up a school, such as Empedocles, Heraclitus,Democritus, Anaxagoras and Parmenides. Regarding philosophers of thesecond category as no better than those of the first, he proceeds to look atindividuals, namely Plato and Aristotle. Rather than entering into contro-versy on points of doctrine, Bacon judges them by ‘signs’,17 that is, thedistinguishing characteristics of a doctrine, including the character ofthose who propound it and what its effects are. What follows is areflection on the personalities of Aristotle and Plato, in effect a reflectionon their personal worth. In the case of Aristotle, the exercise could bemistaken for one in character assassination. Aristotle, we are told, wasimpatient, intolerant, ingenious in raising objections, perpetually con-cerned to contradict, hostile to and contemptuous of earlier thinkers, andpurposely obscure.We need to ask what the point of these personal criticisms is. It is not as

if Bacon does not have specific objections to the content of Aristotle’sphilosophy. He mentions some of the major points on which he disagreeswith Aristotle here in Redargutio philosophiarum: Aristotle mistakenlyconstructs the world from categories, and no less mistakenly deals withthe distinctions between matter and void, and rarity and density, in terms

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

17 Bacon, Works, vol. III, 566.


of a distinction between act and potency. The personal attack on Aristotleseems both unnecessary to make his point, and counterproductive.

But I think that to see matters thus is to miss Bacon’s point. Thepersonal criticism is not an added extra; it is integral to his project. Heexplicitly tells us he is going to judge not by the content of particulardoctrines but by signs. Why, then, is the personal criticism so central towhat he wants to do? For Bacon, the natural philosopher is not simplysomeone with a particular expertise, but someone with a particular kindof standing, a quasi-moral standing. This results from the replacementof the idea of the sage as a moral philosopher with the idea of the sage as anatural philosopher. We expect the moral philosopher to act in a particu-lar way, like a sage, and this is an indication of the worth of his moralphilosophy. The shift from moral philosopher to natural philosopheras the paradigmatic sage means that the natural philosopher now takeson this quality. The worth of a natural philosophy is reflected in its prac-titioners, just as the worth of a moral philosophy is reflected in itspractitioners: or, perhaps, one should say embodied in its practitioners.

In his discussion of moral philosophy in book II of the Advancement ofLearning, Bacon remarks on the various ways in which reason can beaffected:

For we see Reason is disturbed in the administration thereof by three means; byIllaqueation or Sophism, which pertains to Logic; by Imagination or Impression,which pertains to Rhetoric; and by Passion or Affection, which pertains toMorality. And as in negotiation with others men are wrought by cunning, byimportunity, and by vehemency; so in this negotiation with ourselves men areundermined by Inconsequences, solicited and importuned by Impressions orObservations, and transported by Passions. Neither is the nature of man sounfortunately built, as that these powers and arts should have the force to disturbreason, and not to establish and advance it: for the end of Logic is to teach a formof argument to secure reason, and not to entrap it; the end of Morality is toprocure the affections to obey reason, and not to invade it; the end of Rhetoric isto fill the imagination to second reason, and not to oppress it: for these abuses ofarts come in but ex obliquo, for caution.18

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

18 Ibid., 409–10.


means of educating the mind so that it might aspire to and attain what isgood:

The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into theExemplar or Platform of Good, and the Regimen or Culture of the Mind; theone describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how to subdue,apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto.19

The first question, on the nature of the good, is divided into discus-sions of the various kinds of goods, and the various degrees of good. Wecan distinguish something that is good in itself – for example, fromsomething that is good as part of a greater whole – and the latter shouldhave priority over the former: ‘the conservation of duty to the publicought to be much more precious than the conservation of life and being’.It is on this basis that Bacon rejects Aristotle’s claims for the value of thecontemplative life over the active life. All the arguments Aristotle gives forthe contemplative life ‘are private, and respecting the pleasure and dignityof man’s self ’, where of course the contemplative life is pre-eminent, towhich Bacon responds with examples of the social harm that can comefrom ignoring civil life and using one’s own happiness as a criterion. Onthe question of the relative merits of active and passive good – to activelypropagate or to conserve – Bacon comes down firmly on the side of theformer.20

In discussing the second question, of how to inculcate morality,21

Bacon refers to ‘the Culture and Regimen of the Mind’. He quotesAristotle’s remark that we want to know what virtue is and how to bevirtuous: they are part of the same package, as it were. But he also pointsto Cicero’s praise of Cato the Younger, who took up philosophy not thathe might dispute like a philosopher, but that he might live like one. It isnot just the parallel between the moral life and the philosophical life thatis of interest here, but the fact that there is a particular persona associatedwith morality and with philosophy. It is not simply a question of having aparticular expertise. What we must understand from the outset is what iswithin our power and what is not. We are limited in what we can do bythe nature of the mind, and we need to ‘set down sound and truedistributions and descriptions of the several characters and tempers ofmen’s natures and dispositions, specially having regard to those differ-ences which are most radical in being the fountains and causes of the rest,or most frequent in concurrence or comixture’. In understanding these,

19 Ibid., 419. 20 Ibid., 424–8. 21 Ibid., 432–42.


we are discovering ‘the divers complexions and constitutions’ of the mind,but we also need to discover ‘secondly, the diseases, and lastly the cures’.The ‘diseases’ are the ‘perturbations and distempers of the affections’ thatdisturb the mind. The cure consists in setting before oneself ‘honest andgood ends’, and being ‘resolute, constant, and true unto them’. Thediseases and cure here have an importance that goes far beyond the moralrealm, however, and Bacon’s detailed account of the nature of the diseasesand the regimen required for their cure is developed not in the context ofmoral philosophy, but in that of natural philosophy.

This takes us to the question of how one becomes such a sage in theBaconian sense. In the most general terms, at least one ingredient in theanswer is a very traditional one: the purging of the emotions. But Baconputs a distinctive gloss on this. The sage for Bacon must purge not justaffective states but cognitive ones as well. This is the core of his doctrine ofthe ‘idols’ of the mind, the need for which he spells out in the Preface toNovum organum:

I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. I retain the evidence of thesenses, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction [reductio], butI shall reject, for the most part, the mental operation which follows the act ofsense; instead of it I open up and set out a new and certain path for the mind toproceed along, starting directly from simple sense perception. Those who attrib-uted so much importance to Logic no doubt felt the need for this; for theyshowed thereby that they were in search of aids for the understanding, and hadno confidence in the native and spontaneous process of the mind. But thisremedy comes too late to do any good, when the mind is already, through thedaily intercourse and conversation of life, occupied with unsound doctrines andbeset on all sides by vain idols. And therefore that art of Logic, coming (as I said)too late to the rescue, and no way able to set matters right again, has had theeffect of fixing errors rather than disclosing truth. There remains but one coursefor the recovery of a sound and healthy condition, namely, that the entire work ofthe understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself, right from the verybeginning, should not be left to take its own course, but should be guided atevery step; and the matter must be carried out as if by machinery.22

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

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


achieved since the Fall is possible in his own time because the distinctiveobstacles that have held up all previous attempts have been identified.This has been achieved in what is in many respects a novel elaboration ofthe traditional theory of the passions, one directed specifically at natural-philosophical practice.Bacon argues that there are identifiable obstacles to cognition arising

from innate tendencies of the mind (idols of the tribe), from inherited oridiosyncratic features of individual minds (idols of the cave), from thenature of the language that we must use to communicate results (idols ofthe marketplace), or from the education and upbringing we receive(idols of the theatre). As a result of these obstacles, we pursue naturalphilosophy with seriously deficient natural faculties, we operate with aseverely inadequate means of communication, and we rely on a hope-lessly corrupt philosophical culture. In many respects, these defects are aresult of the Fall and are beyond remedy. The practitioners of naturalphilosophy certainly need to reform their behaviour, overcome theirnatural inclinations and passions, and so on, not, however, in order torecover a prelapsarian state in which they might know things as they arewith an unmediated knowledge. This they will never achieve. Rather,the reform of behaviour is a discipline to which they must subjectthemselves if they are to be able to follow a procedure which is in manyrespects quite contrary to their natural inclinations. In short, the reformof one’s persona is needed because of the Fall, which has left it defectivein crucial ways. Whereas earlier philosophers had assumed that a certainkind of philosophical training would shape the requisite kind of charac-ter, Bacon argues that we need to start further back, as it were, with aradical purging of our natural characters, in order to shape somethingwholly new.

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Bacon’s understanding of the intellectual virtues of the natural philoso-pher centred around the notion of freedom from prejudice. This theme isreflected in a distinctive Baconian tradition in mid-century Royal Societyapologetics. In these, concerns regarding the usefulness of philosophy andintellectual honesty play a major role, and what underlies them is above allthe rejection of the idea of coming to natural philosophy with precon-ceived ideas. Bacon’s doctrine of idols is dedicated to removing suchpreconceived ideas, and this informs the whole outlook of the RoyalSociety. Robert Hooke, in his Preface to Robert Knox’s history of Ceylon,


for example, describes to the reader the qualities required in the idealreporter: ‘I conceive him to be no ways prejudiced or byassed by Interest,affection, hatred, fear or hopes, or the vain-glory of telling strange Things,so as to make him swarve from the truth of Matter of Fact.’23 In hishistory of the Royal Society, Sprat stresses that the ‘histories’ collected bythe Royal Society ‘have fetch’d their Intelligence from the constant andunerring use of experienc’d Men of the most unaffected, and most unarti-ficial kinds of life’24 and that:

If we cannot have sufficient choice of those that are skill’d in all Divine andhuman things (which was the antient definition of a Philosopher) it suffices, ifmany of them be plain, diligent, and laborious observers: such, who, though theybring not much knowledg, yet bring their hands, and their eyes uncorrupted:such as have not their Brains infected by false Images; and can honestly assist inthe examining, and Registring what the others represent to their view.25

The theme also occurs in Descartes, however, who is working in a verydifferent context. He attacks Gassendi, for example, for raising objectionswhich are not those that a philosopher would raise.26 Amongst otherthings, he charges Gassendi with using debating skills rather than philo-sophical argument; with being concerned with matters of the flesh ratherthan those of the mind; and with failing to recognise the importance ofclearing the mind of preconceived ideas. The dispute pits Descartes, theadvocate of a complete purging of the mind, against Gassendi, thedefender of legitimate learning. But in fact matters are not quite sosimple. If we distinguish the project for purging of the mind describedin works designed to legitimate his natural philosophy – such as theMeditationes and Principia philosophiae – from the discussion of thequalities required in the natural philosopher in La recherche de la verite,we see that, in the latter, Descartes’s concern is with the requisite state ofmind and character of the natural philosopher. This is a concern thatinvokes psychological and moral considerations as much as epistemo-logical ones.27

23 Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, in the East-Indies (London: RichardChiswell, 1681), Preface, xlvii.

24 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge(London: A. Millar, 1657), 257.

25 Ibid., 72–3.26 Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (2nd edn, 11 vols., Paris:

Vrin, 1974–86), vol. VII, 348–9.27 Ibid., 239–46.


The thrust of Descartes’s discussion is that the honnete homme has beencorrupted by book-learning, and so is trainable as the kind of naturalphilosopher that Descartes seeks. The honnete homme alone is identified asthe kind of person who uses his natural faculty of forming clear anddistinct ideas to the highest degree: or, at least, it is he who, when calledupon, uses it to the highest degree. This does not mean that the honnetehomme alone is able to put himself through the rigours of hyperbolicdoubt and discover the true foundations of knowledge. In theory everyoneis able to do this, scholastics included. But if the aim is to develop andrefine natural-philosophical skills as one progresses, then we requiresomething different, as we must recognise that some are more fitted thanothers to follow the path of instruction in natural philosophy. In Larecherche, Descartes realises, practically, that people come to naturalphilosophy not with a tabula rasa but with different sets of highlydeveloped beliefs which are motivated in different ways and developedto different degrees. These rest upon various things, and this is what leadshim to construct an image of the honnete homme as a model in which themoral sage and the natural philosopher meet,28 for, as he puts it in thePrefatory Letter to the French translation of the Principia, ‘the study ofphilosophy is more necessary for the regulation of our morals and ourconduct in this life than is the use of our eyes to guide our steps’.29

A similar concern can be found in Galileo, who uses the charge that hisopponents have preconceived ideas as a rhetorical ploy, and he links thiswith their failure to control their passions. This is clear in his attacks onGrassi in Il saggiatore,30 where Grassi’s failure to appreciate the novelhypotheses on the nature of comets that Galileo presents to him is takenas ‘a sign of a soul altered by some passion’.31 Preconceived ideas areconstrued here as a form of vested interests, and Grassi, as a supporter of

28 There can be little doubt that this was a radical move, especially in view of the association of thehonnete homme with a ‘scorn for religion’, as one contemporary put it: see Rene Pintard, Lelibertinage erudit dans la premiere moitie du XVIIe siecle (2 vols., Paris: Boivin, 1943), vol. I, 15.

29 Descartes, Oeuvres, vol. IXB, 3–4.30 Galileo Galilei, Il saggiatore (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623), trans. in Stillman Drake, The

Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 151–336.There is an excellent discussion of the controversy in Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practiceof Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 5. AsBiagioli notes, the situation is complicated, for Galileo’s argument in Il saggiatore is not anti-systemper se, but rather a response to the 1616 condemnation of the Copernican system. Worried that theTychonic system might replace the condemned Copernican one (as indeed it was doing amongJesuit astronomers), Galileo responds by trying to put the whole question of astronomical realityon hold, denying validity to any system.

31 Cited in Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, 308.


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

SYSTEMATIC UNDERSTANDING

In the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century, naturalphilosophy and philosophy more generally were seen as being in desperateneed of radical reform in several quarters. Bacon, Descartes and Galileosaw this reform as being carried out by a new kind of person: a philosopherquite unlike the clerical scholastics who wrote and taught philosophy.These new kinds of philosopher were not simply people who carried outinvestigations in a different way from their predecessors. To carry out suchinvestigations they needed to have a wholly different persona. The tech-niques of self-examination and self-investigation, encouraged both by thewholesale attempt to transfer monastic religious values to the populationat large, and by the sense that one was responsible for the minute details ofone’s daily life in the form of new norms of appropriate behaviour, openedup the possibility of a new understanding of one’s psychology, motivationand sense of responsibility, and shaped one’s personal, moral and intellec-tual bearing.32 By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a clear splitbetween those who advocated a systematic understanding of naturalphilosophy and those who rejected this.

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


The issues here turned largely on foundational versus experimentalapproaches to natural philosophy, and then helped refine the notion ofthe persona of the natural philosopher in regard to systems. By the thirdquarter of the seventeenth century, the dominant foundational approachwas Cartesian, and it was largely associated with two figures, Huygens andMalebranche. It hinged on the notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, and forHuygens and Malebranche this meant that natural philosophy was a formof kinematics. The doctrine of clear and distinct ideas had been part of theproject of undermining systematic approaches to natural philosophy,although, particularly in the hands of Malebranche, it became the basisfor a new kind of systematic approach to philosophy generally. Bycontrast, in the 1660s, in Boyle’s work on pneumatics,33 and in Newton’swork on the production of a coloured spectrum by refraction,34 a distinct-ive form of ‘experimental’ natural philosophy was being defended. Here,appeal to systematic natural philosophy was eschewed in favour of farmore localised explanations which were very secure but in conflict withthe available systematic mechanist accounts.Samuel Parker, for example, writing at the same time, sets out the

advantages of mechanism over Aristotelianism in a way that contrasts anexperimental approach with a speculative one, where the target is clearlybroader than just Aristotle, and also covers Cartesianism:

The chief reason, therefore, why I preferre the Mechanicall and ExperimentalPhilosophie before the Aristotelean, is not so much because of its much greatercertainty, but because it puts inquisitive men into a method to attain it, whereasthe other serves but to obstruct their industry, by amusing them with empty andinsignificant Notions. And therefore we may shortly expect a greater improve-ment of Natural Philosophie from the Royall Society, (if they pursue their design)then it has had in all former ages; for they having discarded all particularHypotheses, and wholly addicted themselves to exact Experiments and Observa-tions, they may not only furnish the world with a compleat History of Nature(which is the most useful part of Physiologie) but also lay firm and solid founda-tions to erect Hypotheses upon (though perhaps that must be the work of futureAges).35

33 New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of Air (1660), in Robert Boyle, The Worksof the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols., London: printed for J. and F. Rivington,1772), vol. I, 1–117.

34 The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall and Laura Tilling(7 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), vol. I, 92–9.

35 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: printed forW. Hall by Richard Davis, 1666), 46–8.


With the appearance of Locke’s Essay, ‘experimental’ natural philoso-phy was given a defence of some philosophical sophistication. As Lockemakes clear, this has radical implications for the understanding of what itis to be a philosopher:

The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders,whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting monumentsto the Admiration of Posterity: But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or aSydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great Huygenius,and the Incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain; ’tis Ambitionenough to be imploy’d as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, andremoving some of the Rubbish that lies in the Way to Knowledg.36

The view of the philosopher as under-labourer was not universallyaccepted in the wake of Locke, but it did form a very powerful currentof thought that had Voltaire and Hume among its major advocates. Whathad seemed one of the perennial and most secure features of philosophy,namely its proclivity for system-building, had become highly contentious,and with it the aims and aspirations of the philosopher had been trans-formed. Just how momentous this transformation was becomes evidentwhen one considers the original Platonic characterisation of a philoso-pher. Plato draws on the systematic nature of philosophical enquiry, forthe failing of the sophists lies in their seeking simply to win arguments orshow off their ingenuity, whereas the truth that the philosopher seeksrequires systematic connections. It is in part the systematic nature ofphilosophy that prevents the decontextualised form of argument forits own sake that characterises the sophists’ practice. Yet it is thisvery systematicity that is now called into question on the grounds ofintellectual honesty, as the persona of the philosopher is turned inside out.

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


CHAPTER 2

The university philosopher in early modern Germany

Ian Hunter430537

Until quite recently the history of early modern German academicphilosophy was written in terms of its relation to a problem whoseproper formulation is supposed to mark the autonomy of philosophy– its leap from the institutional constraints of church and state into thefreedom of reason – and whose resolution marks the advent of an undiv-ided modernity securely inhabited by all rational beings.1 Whether it isthe reconciliation of empirical experience and pure ideas, as in Kantianhistories of philosophy,2 or establishing the correct relation betweennaturalistic sciences and transcendent metaphysical concepts, as in Jesuithistories,3 the story is told in terms of a progressive development towardsthe resolution of such a problem.Drawing on an array of recent research, the present chapter departs from

this kind of philosophical history. It does so by investigating how a series ofimpassioned disputes as to what counted as a properly philosophicalproblem were carried out on the basis of rival programmes for cultivatinga proper philosophical persona. Far from being dissociated from church andstate, rival academic philosophies were driven by conflicting campaigns ofreligious confessionalisation and political state-building.4Universities were

1 This chapter has been improved as a result of discussions with participants in the workshop on the‘Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe’ held at the University of Queensland in July2004. It has also benefited from the comments of Knud Haakonssen, David Saunders and MichaelSeidler.

2 See Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1969).

3 See Charles H. Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in C. B. Schmitt (ed.), The Cambridge History of RenaissancePhilosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 537–636; and Charles H. Lohr,‘The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Natural Philosophy’, in E. Keßler,C. H. Lohr and W. Sparn (eds.), Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In memoriam Charles B. Schmitt(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), 89–99.

4 In this regard, I have learned much from the rich array of studies in Helmut Holzhey and WilhelmSchmidt-Biggemann, (eds.), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band IV: Das heilige RomischeReich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (2 vols., Basle: Schwabe, 2001).

35

central to these campaigns, for they were the principal source of teachers,clerics and officials with suitably formed personae and a proper sense ofoffice. Rather than the story of philosophy’s drive towards modernity andthe autonomy of reason – whether retarded or rapid, restrained by religiousaffiliation or impelled by philosophical genius – the picture that emerges isone of a contest between philosophical styles and personae so intense thatneither reason nor modernity would escape it.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SCHULPHILOSOPHIE

Philosophy in Germany during the seventeenth century was overwhelm-ingly academic. In other words, its forms, contents and purposes werelargely determined by the teaching programmes of the philosophy or artsfaculties of the Empire’s universities, and by the religious and politicalcontexts in which they operated.5 The sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswitnessed an unprecedented and still unmatched proliferation of univer-sities in continental Europe. This was driven not by humanism or the loveof learning, however, but by the twin forces of confessionalisation andstate-building.6 Breaking with the old model of the urban corporationfunded by religious endowments, the creation of the University of Wit-tenberg in 1502 provided the prototype of the new Lutheran university:founded and funded by a state-building prince, staffed by Lutheranreformers and, from the 1520s, organised around Philip Melanchthon’snew anti-scholastic curriculum.7 The Catholic Church’s response to suchdevelopments began in 1540 with the founding of the Society of Jesus, thereligious order that would be charged with staffing existing Catholicacademies and building new ones.8 Calvinist university-building beganin earnest with the so-called ‘Second Reformation’ that started in the

5 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Universitaten des Heiligen Romischen Reiches deutscher Nation als Ortder Philosophie des Barock’, Studia Leibnitiana 13 (1981), 242–66; Walter Sparn, ‘Einleitung’ [DieSchulphilosophie], in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts,vol. IV/1, 293–4.

6 For an overview of the interaction between confessionalisation and state-building in the drive tofound universities, see Anton Schindling, ‘Schulen und Universitaten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.Zehn Thesen zu Bildungsexpansion, Laienbildung und Konfessionalisierung nach Reformation’,in W. Brandmuller, H. Immenkotter and E. Iserloh (eds.), Ecclesia Militans. Studia zur Konzilien-und Reformationsgeschichte Remigius Baumer zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet (Paderborn: FerdinandSchoningh, 1988), 561–70.

7 Heinz Scheible, ‘Grundung und Ausbau der Universitat Wittenberg’, in P. Baumgart andN. Hammerstein (eds.), Beitrage zu Problemen deutscher Universitatsgrundungen der fruhen Neuzeit(Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 131–47.

8 Karl Hengst, Jesuiten an Universitaten und Jesuitenuniversitaten (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1981).

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1580s. This was a campaign in which Calvinist princes sought to harnessthe disciplinary powers of religion to ambitious programmes of socialreform inside their territories.9

The Calvinist ‘Second Reformation’ served to intensify rival pro-grammes in Lutheran and Catholic territories and led to an educationalarms race. During the seventeenth century, at least ten new Germanuniversities were added to the existing twenty-four and the number ofacademic gymnasiums swelled to over a hundred, during an expansion-ary period stretching from the 1580s to the 1690s.10 Most universitieswere small by modern standards – averaging around 200–300 students –and would typically be staffed by eight to ten philosophy or arts profes-sors, complemented by three or four professors for each of the threehigher faculties of theology, law and medicine.11 These institutions wereoften founded in direct response to the appearance of confessionallyopposed ones in neighbouring domains, or as the result of conquest orthe conversion of the prince.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries German philosophy or

arts faculties had two broad responsibilities: to prepare students for thetheology faculty, whose professors were responsible for maintaining doc-trinal purity and orthodoxy;12 and to prepare them for the study of lawand medicine, in accordance with the needs of city councils and princelycourts for jurists, politici and physicians.13 These tasks could be difficult toreconcile: sometimes they defined different kinds of university, and hadparted company in Protestant universities by the end of the seventeenthcentury. Charles Schmitt, however, has argued that in the late sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries the flourishing of Aristotelian philosophyin its late-humanist form provided a common philosophical language,not only for different faculties but also for the confessionally divided

9 Heinz Schilling, ‘The Second Reformation – Problems and Issues’, in his Religion, PoliticalCulture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden:E. J. Brill, 1992), 247–301.

10 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Die Universitaten: Geschichte und Struktur’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 295–301, at 295.

11 Ibid., 298; Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Philosophy Instruction within the Framework of CentralEuropean Schools and Universities during the Reformation Era’, History of Universities 5 (1985),117–66, at 130–6.

12 For the Lutheran case, see Thomas Kaufmann, Universitat und lutherische Konfessionalisierung. DieRostocker Theologieprofessoren und ihr Beitrag zur theologischen Bildung und kirchlichen Gestaltungim Herzogtum Mecklenburg zwischen 1550 und 1675 (Gutersloh: Gutersloher Verlaghaus, 1997).

13 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Universitaten – Territorialstaaten – Gelehrte Rate’, in R. Schnur (ed.), DieRolle der Juristen bei der Enstehung des modernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1986),687–735.

The university philosopher in early modern Germany 37

universities and their professors.14 The fact that most universities usedcommentaries on Aristotle’s key works as teaching handbooks meant thatAristotelianism provided a shared intellectual repertory for academicphilosophy – in the areas of logic, physics, metaphysics and, to a lesserextent, ethics and politics – even if the commentaries were developed indiverse and sometimes conflicting ways. Indeed, Schmitt concludes: ‘Thus,after the initial smoke caused by the confessional fragmentation had blownaway, all sides concentrated upon educational reforms whereby theologiansand polemicists could be trained in a new orthodoxy. The basis of allthese was one or another variety of Aristotelian-based philosophy.Thus, Aristotelianism continued as the foundation stone of philosophicaleducation.’15

This shared Aristotelianism, however, turns out to be less revealingthan it initially appears. In the first place, Aristotle’s works did notconstitute a philosophical system in the modern sense. Rather, theyformed a loose and variously useable encyclopaedia, comprising the bookson logic, physics and metaphysics, cosmology and meteorology, rhetoricand politics and the neglected texts on the ‘parts of animals’.16 Theological‘Jesuit Aristotelianism’, for example, oriented to the formation of priestsand theologians, had almost nothing in common – methodologically orsubstantively – with political ‘Protestant Aristotelianism’, designed for theeducation of politicians and jurists.17 Indeed, a single key Aristotelian textsuch as the De anima could be subject to radically incompatible construc-tions, depending on whether it was construed within the secular medicalfaculties of northern Italy – which interpreted the Aristotelian soul asmaterial and mortal – or in Jesuit philosophy faculties, where this soul wasimmaterial and immortal.18 Rather than speaking of Aristotelianism as if

14 Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Universities: Some PreliminaryComments’, in J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla (eds.), The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning:Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science, and Theology in the MiddleAges – September 1973 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), 485–537.

15 Ibid., 514.16 For discussions of this diverse use of the Aristotelian inheritance, see Keßler, Lohr and Sparn,

Aristotelismus und Renaissance, in particular Horst Dreitzel’s chapter, ‘Der Aristotelismus in derpolitischen Philosophie Deutschlands im 17. Jahrhundert’, 163–92.

17 Compare Charles H. Lohr, ‘Jesuit Aristotelianism and Sixteenth-Century Metaphysics’, in H. G.Fletcher and M. B. Schulte (eds.), Paradosis: Studies in Memory of Edwin A. Quain (New York:Fordham University Press, 1976), 203–20; and Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus undabsoluter Staat: Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca.1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner,1970). For more on the political and pedagogical role of the politica genre, see chapter 7 byRobert von Friedeburg in this volume.

18 See Stephen Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The CambridgeHistory of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33–86,

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this were a unified intellectual ideology comparable with Kantianism orHegelianism, it is more appropriate to refer to the widespread and varioususes of Aristotle’s texts, adopted on account of their practical availability.19

Secondly, if the dominant ‘scholastic’ Aristotelianism was so diverse, itwas also able to enter a variety of contextually specific transactions withexternal extra-scholastic ‘humanistic’ philosophies. These had their nat-ural institutional home not in the university philosophy faculty but in theprincely court where humanists enjoyed patronage as courtiers.20 Two ofthe most significant of these extra-academic non-Aristotelian forms ofRenaissance philosophy were Lullism and hermetic-Neoplatonic naturalphilosophy. Named after its progenitor, the Catalan thinker Ramon Lull(Raimundus Lullus) (c. 1232 – c. 1316), Lullism rejected the scholasticAristotelian conception of philosophy as a corporate ontological sciencecentred on the doctrine of causes and the composition of substances fromform and matter. Instead, it was centred in an ‘art’ or method, partmnemotechnique, part combinatoric. This could be practised by individ-ual philosophers and was understood as the means by which they couldparticipate in God’s thinking of the principles responsible for the entireorder of things in the world.21 It was taken up in a more prosaic way bythe French humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–72), however, who developedthe mnemotechnical and rhetorical aspects of Lullism into a multifacetedtopological method, suitable for arranging, storing and recovering topoiof widely different kinds.22 Ramist-Lullism aspired to be a confessionallyneutral super-philosophy – beyond both logic and metaphysics as theywere usually practised – but was excluded from Jesuit universities andtook on a decidedly eschatological aspect when taken up in Calvinistacademic philosophy, as we shall see below in the case of Johann Alsted.

at 51–3; and Alison Simmons, ‘Jesuit Aristotelian Education: The De anima Commentaries’, inJ. W. O’Malley SJ et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto:Toronto University Press, 1999), 522–37.

19 Joseph S. Freedman, ‘Aristotle and the Content of Philosophy Instruction at Central EuropeanSchools and Universities during the Reformation Era (1500–1650)’, Proceedings of the AmericanPhilosophical Society 137 (1993), 213–53, at 234–6.

20 See, for example, the discussion of Galileo as a court philosopher in Mario Biagioli, GalileoCourtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993).

21 Thomas Leinkauf, ‘Der Lullismus’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17.Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 239–68; Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, 538–48; Charles H. Lohr, ‘Ramon Lull oderder Kampf um die Befreiung der Wahrheit’, in G. Hartung (ed.), Zwischen Narretei und Weisheit:Biographische Skizzen und Konturen alter Gelehrsamkeit (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), 125–38.

22 See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer undbarocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983).


Hermetic-Platonic natural philosophy could also be practised by indi-vidual court savants outside the corporate orthodoxy of the confessionalphilosophy faculty, not least because it was presented as an esoteric artknown only to initiates.23 This philosophy was transmitted in the so-called ‘Hermetic Corpus’, a mix of Neoplatonic, alchemical, kabbalistic,Neopythagorean, and Stoic doctrines attributed to the mythic HermesTrismegistes.24 Grounded in a mytho-philosophical account of God’screation of the ‘seed-forms’ of all future things from the primal chaos,hermetic Neoplatonism attributed the ordering of these forms to a worldsoul or world spirit. This conception was incompatible with Aristotelianand modern mechanical philosophy, as it rejected both conceptions ofnatural philosophy – the ontological and the experimental – in favour of aconception of philosophy as an essentially hermeneutic discipline.Through the great thought-figure of microcosm and macrocosm, thephilosopher’s mind could be envisaged as containing the seed-forms orideas of the entire cosmos, making it into the source of all magical andalchemical operations.25 Also central was the notion that the linkagesbetween the two worlds were accessible only to initiates of the esotericancient wisdom (prisca philosophia), but visible in the form of ‘signatures’carried by things themselves.26 These hieroglyphic signs could be inter-preted by the adept – the central image of the philosophical persona in thistradition – and could be represented in emblem books, which formed animportant part of the corpus of hermetic Neoplatonic nature philosophy.

During the seventeenth century, the ways in which Lullism and her-metic Neoplatonism interacted with German scholastic Aristotelianismdepended on the specific religious and political circumstances governingdifferent kinds of universities, intellectual networks and princely courts. IfJesuit universities remained impervious to such humanist philosophies,this was because in them the Aristotelian philosophy curriculum wasstabilised by the truth of Thomist theology, for which it was a prepar-ation, and by the religious and political authority of the Order.If, however, Ramist-Lullism found ready access to the philosophy

23 Bruce T. Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy in the Circle ofMoritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991).

24 Stephan Meier-Oeser, ‘Hermetisch-platonische Naturphilosophie’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. IV/1, 7–18.

25 For a good example of this form of thought, presented, characteristically, in the genre of theemblem book, see Martin Meyer, Homo microcosmus, hoc est: parvus mundus macrocosmo (Frank-furt, 1670).

26 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:Pantheon Books, 1971), 17–45.

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curriculum of the Calvinist academy at Herborn, this was in part becauseit suited the needs of a reforming Protestant prince for a cheap andeffective mnemotechnical pedagogy.27 It was also because the persona ofthe philosopher cultivated through Ramist-Lullism – that of the master ofan esoteric art promising universal knowledge – was suited to individualsoperating at the margins of the confessional university and in closerproximity to princely courts, where they could play the role of humanistsavants.In any case, these are lines of enquiry that we shall pursue below. For

the moment, it is enough to observe that, despite its shared Christian-Aristotelian inheritance, German academic philosophy evolved not on thebasis of the intrinsic universality of reason, but in accordance with a duallogic of division and distribution: into confessionally divided academic-intellectual forms, and into distinct geo-religious archipelagoes of univer-sities, forming and re-forming with the ebb and flow of religious conflict.28

Far from carrying the seeds of an autonomous rational-philosophicalmodernity, the German philosophers mentioned in the classic studies byBeck and Lohr – Alsted in Calvinist Herborn, Pereira in CatholicCologne, Scheibler in Lutheran Giessen – were participants in anintellectual civil war closely shadowed by the military one. Alsteddiscovered this to his cost in 1625–26, when imperial troops occupiedHerborn, unleashing a re-Catholicisation of the duchy of Nassau thatwould see the dissolution of the Calvinist academy and the opening ofa Jesuit one.29

In this historical setting, the form of philosophy was bound to thepersona of the philosopher by two distinct but overlapping factors. In thefirst place, this connection was secured by the philosopher’s office orformal academic duties. These typically determined not just the kind ofphilosophy he was required to teach, but also the textbooks and commen-taries he could read from, and even the times of day and year on whichthese ‘lectures’ had to take place.30 Such duties were laid out in thestatutes of early modern universities, either in the form of (medieval)

27 Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Uni-versal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 15–24.

28 See Notker Hammerstein, ‘Relations with Authority’, in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.),A History of the University in Europe, vol. II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800),(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114–54.

29 Howard Hotson, Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarian-ism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 117–19.

30 Peter A. Vandermeersch, ‘Teachers’, in Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe,vol. II, 210–55, at 210–18.


corporation law or (increasingly) in statutes decreed by territorialprinces.31 In the case of Germany’s Jesuit universities, they were prescribedin the Society’s Constitutions and Ratio studiorum (order of studies),which Jesuits accepted via the oath of unquestioning obedience requiredto enter the order. Philosophy was thus tied to the conduct of thephilosopher by the oath he swore on entering his office, whether thiswas to a confession, a sovereign or a religious order, even if the policing ofthese oaths varied a good deal.

Second, philosophy and persona were bound by an even more powerfuland intimate bond, namely, the ‘ascetic’ function of philosophical dis-course and philosophical pedagogy. By this we understand all of theexercises of thought and will carried in philosophical discourse – includ-ing discourse with oneself – and aimed at existential self-interrogation andself-transformation, typically with a view to forming the ‘higher self ’required by a particular philosophical office or milieu.32 Belying thetime-tarnished claims that philosophy is simply human reason reflectingon itself, and that the philosopher is everyman writ thoughtful, thesespiritual and cognitive exercises comprise an array of rare and distinctive‘practices of the self ’ whose outcome is the special and prestigious personaof the philosopher. Many of these exercises were inherited from pagan andChristian antiquity; most were governed by the telos of the philosophicalpersona as the higher self to which one aspires by studying philosophy; andall of them rendered access to specific objects of knowledge or contem-plation contingent on the performance of a particular ‘work of the self onthe self ’.33

These exercises varied with the spiritual and cognitive purposes theyserved. They included, for example, Ignatius Loyola’s exercises in self-abnegation, religious inwardness and devotional intensification, designedto form a cadre of disciplined religious militants;34 Francis Bacon’spurgation of the various mental ‘idols’ that stood in the way of formingnatural philosophers oriented to empirical knowledge and the welfareof the commonwealth;35 and Descartes’s exercise in hyperbolic doubtdesigned to purge the mind of everything except attention to its own

31 Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ‘Management and Resources’, in ibid., 154–209, at 164–7.32 See, in general, Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.33 The phrase is Foucault’s. See in particular Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley

(Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985), 25–32.34 Robert E. McNally SJ, ‘The Council of Trent, the Spiritual Exercises and the Catholic Reform’,

Church History 34 (1965), 36–49.35 Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Gaukroger’s chapter 1 in the present volume.

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operations, on the basis of which the entire edifice of science could berebuilt with new certainty.36 There were also the exercises in abstractionthrough which Aristotelian logicians arrived at the entia rationis of logic,and the ‘metaphysical abstraction’ through which Aristotelian metaphys-icians acceded to knowledge of immaterial essences (universals) or imma-terial substances (God, angels and separated souls).37 Further, there werethe Ramist-Lullist mnemotechnical ‘methods’ designed to achieve assimi-lation and recall of a whole encyclopaedia of sciences;38 and the exercisesin regression and composition through which Zabarella and the humanistAristotelians sought to provide a method for deriving the principlesneeded to construct the objects of an array of new sciences.39

If what it meant to be a philosopher varied across Germany’s rivaluniversities, this is because access to the cognitive and spiritual exercisesthat formed philosophical personae was controlled by a mix of academic,religious and civil authority and the larger purposes for which this authoritywas exercised: combative authorities made differing philosophical mindspossible as vanguards in confessional struggles. This, at least, is the hypoth-esis we can now explore in more detail by comparing Catholic, Calvinistand Lutheran Schulphilosophie in seventeenth-century Germany.

JESUIT SCHULPHILOSOPHIE : PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT PHILOSOPHERS

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

36 Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 309–21,337–46, 365–6; Catherine Wilson,Descartes’s Meditations: An Introduction (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003); and Bradley Rubidge, ‘Descartes’s Meditations and DevotionalMeditations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 27–49.

37 Paul Richard Blum, ‘Grundzuge der katholischen Schulphilosophie’, in Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, 302–30.

38 Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis.39 Nicholas Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua: Jacopo Zabarella and Francesco

Piccolomini on the Offices of Philosophy’, in D. A. Di Liscia, E. Kessler and C. Methuen(eds.), Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotelian CommentaryTradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 182–209.


tightened orthodoxy announced in the Tridentine decrees. Rather thanorganising and running teaching institutions as such, the purpose of thesociety announced in the Constitutions of 1550 was:

to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for theprogress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching,lectures, and any other ministration whatsoever of the word of God, and furtherby means of the Spiritual Exercises, the education of children and unletteredpersons in Christianity, and the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful throughhearing confessions and administering other sacraments.40

Initially at least, the Society was primarily concerned with missionarywork amongst the infidels of both the old and new worlds, and with theprovision of spiritual direction to Catholic rulers. It soon became clear,however, that such activities required the formation of educated anddisciplined defenders of the faith, both to staff the Society itself and toinfluence civil elites. In Germany, Jesuits thus gradually began to takeover the teaching of philosophy and theology in Catholic schools anduniversities, or else to build their own institutions, at the command oftheir General and at the behest of local Catholic princes and bishops.41

These were the circumstances in which Jesuits either entered or foundeduniversities at Ingolstadt (1556/76), Dillingen (1563), Cologne (1584),Mainz (1563), Wurzburg (1582), Graz (1586) and Freiburg (1620), in add-ition to a series of lesser institutions, at Molsheim (1618), Paderborn (1616),Osnabruck (1632), Bamberg (1648), Trier (1561) and Erfurt (1611/28).42

Philosophy teaching in these institutions was instrumentally derivedfrom its role in the defence and propagation of the one saving faith. It wasthus functionally subordinate to the teaching of (Thomist) theology, forwhich it provided the ‘natural’ preparation. Protestant and modernistprejudices notwithstanding, this does not mean that Jesuit philosophywas sterile or ossified hack work, as is shown by the production of thehighly sophisticated Aristotelian commentaries, particularly in the areas oflogic, physics and metaphysics that served as teaching handbooks forJesuit professors and missionaries.43 It does mean, though, that rather

40 Ignatius Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. G. E. Ganss (St Louis: Institute ofJesuit Sources, 1970), 66–7.

41 For a rich account of the circumstances in which the Jesuits set up grammar schools andestablished their philosophy and theology courses within a variety of institutional shells, seeHengst, Jesuiten.

42 See ibid.; and Blum, ‘Grundzuge’.43 For persuasive discussion, see Lohr, ‘Jesuit Aristotelianism’; Lohr, ‘Sixteenth-Century Transform-

ation’; and Simmons, ‘Jesuit Aristotelian Education’.

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than being conceived as a method by which individual philosophersdiscovered the truth, philosophy was understood as a body of doctrinethrough which a corps of philosophers taught truths that had already beendiscovered, mostly by Aristotle, or indeed revealed by God and preservedin the magisterium of the church. The Ratio studiorum of 1599, thatregulated teaching across the entire system of Jesuit universities, couldthus stabilise theological truth as the telos of the curriculum by declaringthat: ‘In scholastic theology, all members of our Order shall follow thedoctrine of St. Thomas, considering him their special teacher, andcentring all their efforts in him so that their pupils may esteem him ashighly as possible.’44 The propaedeutic role of philosophy is made clear inthe ‘Rules for the Professor of Philosophy’, which state that: ‘Since the artsand the natural sciences prepare the mind for theology, serving to perfectits knowledge and use, and themselves helping to reach this end, theteacher . . . shall treat them as preparing his hearers, especially ourmembers, for theology, inciting them to knowledge of their creator.’ Tothis end, ‘In matters of importance let him not deviate from Aristotle,unless something occurs that is foreign to the doctrine which academieseverywhere approve of; and much more if it contradicts orthodox faith.’45

Paul Blum has drawn a valuable distinction between Philosophenphilo-sophie and Schulphilosophie, or ‘philosophers’ philosophy’ and ‘schoolphilosophy’. Unlike philosophers’ philosophy, which treats truth as some-thing the individual philosopher arrives at through a ‘method’ of reflect-ing on his own thoughts or subjectivity, school philosophy treats truth asalready known and philosophy as the effective pedagogical transmission oftruths transcending individual subjectivity.46 As the ideal type of Schul-philosophie, Jesuit philosophy was characterised by unity of doctrine,authority and teachability. Like all religious orders, the Jesuit was consti-tuted in terms of a unified doctrine – here the combination of Thomisttheology and Aristotelian philosophy laid down in the Ratio – that wastaught as unchallengeable truth. This was in turn reciprocally related to theauthority of the Society itself, as admission to the office of Jesuit requiredswearing an oath of obedience to the Order’s superiors that included a

44 G. M. Pachtler SJ (ed.), Ratio studiorum et institutiones scholasticae Societatis Jesu (Berlin: Hof-mann, 1887), 300. English translation, Edward A. Fitzpatrick (ed.), St. Ignatius and the RatioStudiorum (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 160.

45 Pachtler, Ratio studiorum, 328; Fitzpatrick, Ratio Studiorum, 167–8.46 Paul Richard Blum, Philosophenphilosophie und Schulphilosophie. Typen des Philosophierens in der

Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 15–26, 117–18, 146–57.


pledge to teach in accordance with the (Aristotelian-Thomistic) authoritiesenshrined in the Constitutions.47 Finally, the propaedeutic role of Aristo-telian philosophy in relation to Thomist theology meant that philosophywas expounded only in a form able to be assimilated and repeated by theyoung scholars.

As prescribed by the Ratio studiorum, the content of the Jesuit philoso-phy curriculum consisted of logic, physics (with some mathematics) andmetaphysics (with some ethics), taught hierarchically, with one yeardevoted to each discipline over a three-year course. Where the full Jesuitsystem was in place, the philosophy course was preceded by a four- orfive-year arts course – Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammar, plus rhetoricand poetics – and succeeded by the four-year course in scholastic andpositive theology, where the students were taught via commentaries onAquinas’s Summa theologiae and Lombard’s Sentences.48 The identificationof philosophy with logic, physics and metaphysics, and the separation ofthis trio from the liberal arts – also known as philosophy – was a productof the theologically determined Jesuit curriculum itself, and was fre-quently resisted in universities oriented to the teaching of law and medi-cine, especially where the universities were Protestant.49 It was, however,the form and ordering of Jesuit logic, physics and metaphysics thatrendered them distinctive in relation to the parallel disciplines taught inCalvinist and Lutheran universities. As courses of instruction in progres-sive preparation for Thomist theology, each discipline was inflected bythose that succeeded it. This imbued the entire series with a metaphysical-theological character, permitting significant latitude in the reconstructionand distribution of Arisotle’s texts.50

Taught via commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon – the Categories,Interpretation and the Analytics in particular – Jesuit logic rejected boththe Ramist-Lullist conception of logic as an art or method for discoveringargumentational topoi, and the humanist-Aristotelian method of Zabar-ella focused in the analytic recovery of principles and the synthesis ofpropositional judgments. Rather, Jesuit logic was conceived as a quasi-ontological science whose objects were mental entities (entia rationis),while argumentation was taught separately, in a purely practical waythrough disputational exercises. Also typical was the transfer of part of

47 Loyola, Constitutions, 237–43.48 Paul Richard Blum, ‘Der Standardkursus der katholischen Schulphilosophie im 17. Jahrhundert’, in

Keßler, Lohr and Sparn, Aristotelismus und Renaissance, 127–48; Hengst, Jesuiten, 55–79.49 Freedman, ‘Philosophy Instruction’.50 In the following I rely in particular on Blum, ‘Grundzuge’, 313–30.

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Aristotle’s logic – the doctrine of universals – to the metaphysics course,where universals were treated within the category of being as real ‘natures’of things.51

The Jesuit physics or natural philosophy course was also heavilyinformed by metaphysics. The central Aristotelian doctrines of the fourkinds of causality, the form–matter relation, and the doctrine of sub-stances were thus taught across both courses, physics and metaphysics,with the location of certain key commentaries – on the De anima and OnGeneration and Corruption – being largely a matter of pedagogical con-venience. This is because in these texts theologically sensitive topics in thephysics curriculum – especially the immortality of the soul, the creation ofthe world ex nihilo, and the capacity of infinite immaterial substances tooccupy finite space and time – could only be resolved using Christianmetaphysical constructs not found in Aristotle’s texts. Suarez thus shiftedthe De anima into the domain of metaphysics so that he could undermineAristotle’s doctrine of three separate physical souls in man – vegetative,animal and rational – and treat the rational soul as the immaterial form ofthe body capable of existing separately from it.52 It was this metaphysical-theological disposition of the physics course that kept it at a distancefrom the new experimental sciences and atomistic philosophies, whichthreatened to collapse substance into matter, thereby precluding thedivine creation and the plasticity of substances and properties requiredby the Eucharist.53

Finally, Jesuit metaphysics too was conceived as a science of beingrather than as a method for discovering its principles. In keeping with itstheological purpose, metaphysics was held to accede to its object – ens quaens or being as being – through the action of ‘metaphysical abstraction’, aprocess of real abstraction from material things. The highest or mostperfect form of being – immaterial substance – was thus understood toreally exist in its abstracted form. This meant that God and the angelscould be incorporated in the science of being – as, respectively, infiniteimmaterial being and finite immaterial (intellectual) being – therebyallowing Jesuit metaphysics to function as a ‘natural’ or philosophical

51 See, for example, Suarez’s treatment of them in this way in Francisco Suarez, Disputationesmetaphysicae (2 vols., Paris: Vives, 1866; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), vol. I, Disputation VI,‘De unitate formali et universale’, sec. ii, 206–11.

52 Francisco Suarez, ‘De anima’, in Opera omnia (Paris: Vives, 1856), vol. II, 467–801, esp. 782–801.53 For a balanced account, see Marcus Hellyer, ‘“Because the Authority of my Superiors Com-

mands”: Censorship, Physics and the German Jesuits’, Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996), 318–54.


theology.54 One awkward consequence was that the substances or essencesof ordinary things themselves really existed independently of materialthings, and this threatened to turn metaphysics into a universal sciencegrounded in divine intellection of the substances. Leaving the attemptedresolutions of this issue aside,55 it is the theological genesis of the problemthat interests us – its emergence from the need to treat metaphysics as aunified science of real immaterial being – as this is something that theJesuits’ Lutheran counterparts could avoid. Working in universities wheremetaphysics was not required to lead into scholastic theology, and draw-ing on Zabarella’s method of organising sciences around the principlesrequired to construct particular scientific objects, the Lutherans couldseparate the science of being (ontology) from the science of God, angelsand man (pneumatology).

The content of Jesuit philosophy, however, was inseparable from theway in which it was taught, in the sense that philosophical knowledge wasacceded to through a particular pedagogy or psychagogy. The philosophystudents were not taught a method that they could then use for individualphilosophical reflection, but a body of doctrine in a corporate settingcharacterised by intense discipline and supervision. The intellectual tran-sition from logic through physics to metaphysics was thus grounded in adisciplinary pedagogy that made progress through the three classes de-pendent on the successful internalisation of stadial tasks of intellectualendeavour. For the boys who typically entered the logic class at aroundthe age of ten and graduated from the metaphysics class three years later,philosophical knowledge and psychological formation were reciprocallydependent.

Paul Blum provides striking evidence of the degree to which this wasthe case in discussing the Monita philosophiae tyronibus opportuna (1636),written by Julius Clemente Scotti SJ, teacher of physics in the Jesuitcolleges at Parma and Ferrara. In this we can see the theoretical spiritualhierarchy found in the De anima commentaries – the elevation of the‘noble’ active intellect over corrupt corporeal desires – mirrored in the‘ascetic’ relation that the philosophy students are required to establishbetween their own intellect and passions. Philosophy is a divine gift, saysScotti, yet the student is unable to receive this unaided, for ‘As long thewill is besieged by the perverse passions, the intellect conducts reasoning

54 See, for example, the treatment of God and the angels in Suarez’s disputation XXXV, ‘Deimmateriali substantia creata’, in Disputationes metaphysicae, vol. II, 424–77.

55 For further discussion, see Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’.

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corruptly.’ The student is ‘to trust therefore in authority, to always rely onthe reasoning of the learned, and on faith before everything else’.56 In thesame spirit he must eschew that which is ‘ingenious’ or original, listenassiduously to lectures, engage in frequent disputations, keep a diary ofexamples and arguments to be shown to his teacher, and avoid readingbooks, even philosophical ones.For Scotti, then, philosophical knowledge is dependent on the forma-

tion of a particular persona. Students could only accede to the sophisticatedintellectualist doctrines contained in the logic, physics and metaphysicscourses through the particular way of relating to themselves – as creatureswhose intellects are besieged by depraved passions – that they were requiredto adopt as philosophy students. This relation to the self permits externalsupervision to be internalised as self-watchfulness, and philosophy to beunderstood as a means of self-purification. The cultivated persona, how-ever, was not that of the philosopher but that of the lay ‘Christian soldier’ orthe novice of the Order itself, who learned to relate to themselves asphilosophers only as a stage in their psychagogical transformation intotheologians or Catholic militants.57

The tightly regulated propaedeutic and instrumental character of Jesuitphilosophy gave rise to two key features that distinguished it fromProtestant Schulphilosophie. First, as we have just seen, in Jesuit univer-sities knowledge of philosophy was not developed through cultivation ofthe distinctive persona of the philosopher. Jesuits thus typically taught thethree-year philosophy course only once, before being moved on to otherduties: theology teaching, missionary work, and the spiritual direction ofsecular notables.58 As a result, members of the Jesuit teaching corpstypically did not relate to themselves as specialist philosophers, and didnot govern the formation of their students in this persona. Second, as aresult of the clearly differentiated and hierarchically ordered relationbetween philosophy and theology – and due to the unified and centralisedtrans-territorial religious organisation that ensured its maintenance – theteaching of philosophy and theology in Germany’s Catholic universitieswas highly stable in comparison with Protestant institutions. This meantthat Catholic universities did not witness the multiplication of styles ofSchulphilosophie characteristic of the less tightly controlled Protestantacademies. It also meant that throughout the seventeenth century

56 Scotti in Blum, Philosophenphilosophie, 143.57 McNally, ‘Council of Trent’.58 Blum, ‘Grundzuge’, 307.


Catholic Schulphilosophie would remain resistant to new forms of phil-osophy – Galilean astronomy, mathematical-experimental physics, Carte-sian epistemology, Grotian-Hobbesian natural law and politicalphilosophy – even though individual Jesuits contributed to these fieldsin their extra-curricular personae.59

CALVINIST PANSOPHISM

Calvinist or Reformed academic philosophy emerged from a network ofuniversities and academies established in a number of north-west Germancities and territories as part of the ‘Second Reformation’.60 Beginning inthe 1580s this was a campaign to reform both church and society, led byactivist princes who had refused to subscribe to the definitive confessionof the Lutheran Church, the Formula of Concord of 1577. As with theCatholic Counter-Reformation, the twin goals of reforming the churchand confessionalising society impelled a reform of educational institutionsand the establishment of new academies, designed to form educated anddisciplined academics, school-teachers, politici and officials. In the Cal-vinist north, however, educational reform was not undertaken by a singlecentrally controlled religious order. Rather it emerged from particularalliances between religious reformers and reforming princes, the latterfinding in Calvinism a means of stripping their churches of ‘superstitious’sacraments and bringing them under territorial control, as part of a broaderprocess that included reform of their territory’s armies, land-tenuresystems, and feudal social relations.61 These were the broad circumstancesdriving the establishment of Calvinist universities or academies at Marburg(Calvinist in 1605), Heidelberg (Calvinist 1563/83), Steinfurt (1588/91),Bremen (1581), Herborn (1584), Duisburg (1636/55), and Frankfurt/Oder(mixed Calvinist and Lutheran since 1613). Often, as in the cases ofSteinfurt and Duisburg, these institutions were established to counter the

59 See Hellyer, ‘Censorship’; Marcus Hellyer, ‘Jesuit Physics in Eighteenth-Century Germany: SomeImportant Continuities’, in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits, 538–54; and Robert Bireley SJ, ‘Hof-beichtvater und Politik im 17. Jahrhundert’, in M. Sievernich SJ and G. Switek SJ (eds.),Ignatianisch: Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu (Freiburg: Herder, 1989), 386–403.

60 For a wide-ranging discussion, see the papers in Heinz Schilling (ed.), Die reformierte Konfessio-nalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ (Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn,1986).

61 For a helpful sketch of this process at work in Alsted’s county of Nassau-Dillingen, see Hotson,Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1–65. For a detailed discussion of the obstacles encountered by Calvinistreform in largely Lutheran electoral Brandenburg, see Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confes-sion: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1994).

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effects of rival Catholic or Lutheran institutions being built in neighbour-ing cities or territories.No less than its Catholic and Lutheran rivals, the objective of Calvinist

Schulphilosophie was to teach a unified body of doctrine and disciplines inwhich natural (philosophical) and revealed knowledge were harmonisedin accordance with overarching confessional imperatives. There was,however, no singular and obligatory Calvinist template for reaching thisobjective, analogous to the hierarchically ordered relations between Aris-totelian philosophy and Thomist theology mandated in the Jesuit Ratiostudiorum. Moreover, the complex interaction between university andcourt, academic employment and princely patronage in Calvinist statespermitted philosophers like Herborn’s Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) to draw on a more heterogeneous and heterodox array of philosoph-ical styles than their Catholic counterparts. This ensured that CalvinistSchulphilosophie would have greater internal diversity than its confessionalrivals, while nonetheless remaining distinguishable at its confessionalborders.Howard Hotson has shown that in the small and relatively weak county

of Nassau-Dillingen, the reforming Count Johann VI insisted on the useof Ramist philosophy in Alsted’s Herborn academy, largely becauseRamus’s topical logic functioned as a simple yet powerful mnemotechni-que.62 This permitted large amounts of knowledge to be organised,digested and transmitted to scholars, most of whom would be villageschool-teachers and would thus have no need of Aristotle’s more complexlogic, let alone its vast hinterland of physics and metaphysics. At the sametime, the patronage he found at the court of Duke Moritz of Hesse –whose reforming agenda stretched to the endowment of a well-equippedalchemical laboratory and the support of occult philosophers – allowedAlsted to incorporate heterodox Lullist, hermetic and Neoplatonic elem-ents in his philosophy.63 In the nearby Calvinist headquarters of Heidel-berg, such heterodoxy was much less visible, and Alsted’s colleagueBartholomew Keckermann (1572–1609) measured his distance fromRamism and taught more Aristotle.64 Defending Calvinism from theramparts of the leading university in Reformed central Europe, Heidel-berg’s philosophers could not do without the big Aristotelian guns,

62 Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 20–4.63 See Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court; and Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, ch. 2.64 Richard A. Muller, ‘Vera Philosophia cum sacra Theologia nusquam pugnat: Keckermann on

Philosophy, Theology, and the Problem of Double Truth’, Sixteenth Century Journal 15 (1984),341–65.


particularly when engaged in ideological battle with such formidableJesuit opponents as Robert Bellarmine.

Despite these internal variations, however, Calvinist academic philoso-phy was separated from its Jesuit rival by several key features. In the firstplace, it was treated not as a theological handmaid, but as an independentscience containing the principles of all the disciplines, including theology,but taught alongside law and medicine and a host of less importantdisciplines. Displaying a clear awareness of differences in what countedas philosophy, in his Philosophia digne restituta Alsted observes thatphilosophia can be used broadly to refer to the entirety of the liberal arts,while the Aristotelians use it narrowly as a synecdoche for metaphysics.Plato, he argues, is closer to the mark in understanding philosophy‘formally’, as the spark of divine knowledge present in man’s knowledgeof the pure ideas. For Alsted, however, philosophy pertains to this divineknowledge understood ‘subjectively’ – that is, as it has been diffusedthrough its reception in the finite human subject – as philosophy holdsthe key to the arts and disciplines whose role is to partially restore man’scapacity for divine intellection.65 Principles – and they vary from the self-evident law of non-contradiction to those that men have discovered as thebasis of particular disciplines – are the dimly apprehended forms of divinereasoning. Moreover, the philosopher accedes to them by reflecting on hisown mind, where God has placed them, rather than by learning tran-scendent truths guaranteed by faith and authority. Alsted thus calls thefundamental part of his philosophy the archelogia, treating it as the art ordiscipline whose object is the principles underlying all of the disciplines.66

This fundamental relocation of philosophy in relation to metaphysicsand theology gave rise to a different conception of ‘first philosophy’ and adifferent ordering of the disciplines. No longer serving as a step on theintellectual ladder leading to Aristotelian metaphysics and Thomist the-ology, philosophy in the Calvinist academy developed a univocal concep-tion of its object in terms of the principles underlying all objects ofknowledge. Clemens Timpler (1563–1624) of the Steinfurt gymnasiumcould thus declare that the object of ‘first philosophy’ is no longer ‘beingas being’ but ‘everything intelligible’ (omne intelligibile).67 In this way, a

65 Johann Heinrich Alsted, Philosophia digne restituta: libros quatuor praecognitorum philosophicorum(Herborn, 1612), 4–11.

66 Ibid., 13–16.67 See Joseph S. Freedman, European Academic Philosophy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth

Centuries: The Life, Significance, and Philosophy of Clemens Timpler (1563/4–1624) (Hildesheim:Georg Olms, 1988).

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new univocal metaphysics offering a single set of concepts or ‘intelligi-bles’, understood as divine concepts open to natural reason, could be usedto generate a single all-embracing system of knowledge, beginning withGod and extending to all of the arts and sciences.68

Given this rationalist dimension of Calvinist philosophy, it is notsurprising that post-Kantian philosophers should have seen it as pointingtowards modern epistemology and, more broadly, the modern autonomyof reason, contrasting it unfavourably with a supposedly more theologicalLutheran Schulphilosophie in these regards.69 It should already be clear,however, that the Calvinist elevation of philosophy remained intenselytheocentric, competing with the theological premisses of Jesuit and Lu-theran Schulphilosophie, even if it was enunciated in a form that allowedsecular philosophers to accede to the concepts presupposed in God’screation of the cosmos. From the Jesuit perspective, Calvinist philosophywas thus not so much a rival philosophical system as a part of the hereticalmovement that was contesting the Catholic Church’s magisterium, orapostolic authority to enunciate divine truth and organise human learningaround it. This helps to explain why one of the immediate consequencesof the Catholic imperial occupation of Nassau-Dillingen in 1625–6 wasthe dissolution of Alsted’s academy and the scattering of its professors.Secondly, to recall Blum’s distinction, philosophy becomes Philoso-

phenphilosophie, an art used by philosophers to illuminate their ownsubjectivity. For, if divine wisdom has been diffused and compromisedthrough its reception in a damaged human nature, then its philosophicalrestorationmust make use of artificial methods of knowledge. Keckermannthus departed from the Jesuit ontological conception of logic, defining itinstead as an ars recte de rebus cogitandi, or art for the correct thinking ofthings.70 Drawing on Zabarella’s conception of method as a regressionfrom the objective of a science to its principles, Keckermann was able totreat categories, causes, subjects and accidents as principles tied to the artof correct reasoning – rather than as metaphysical entities – allowing himto conclude his logic with syllogistic method. Operating towards the

68 For a helpful account of this development, see Charles H. Lohr, ‘Latin Aristotelianism and theSeventeenth-Century Calvinist Theory of Scientific Method’, in Di Liscia, Kessler and Methuen,Method and Order, 369–80.

69 For this argument, see Beck, Early German Philosophy, 127–31. Beck’s formulation of this themefinds an interesting precursor in Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhunderts(Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1939).

70 Bartholomew Keckermann, Systema logicae tribus libris, in J. H. Alsted (ed.), Systema systematum(Hanau, 1613), vol. I, 67–315, at 67.


Lullist end of the method spectrum, Alsted treated first philosophy itselfas an all-encompassing art, similar to the ars magna that Lull had perhapsreceived from God on a hilltop. In ‘explicating the universal and commonprinciples of the disciplines’, Alsted’s archelogia is thus the alphabet onwhich the languages of all the arts are based.71 It is through the completeorganisation of arts – the ‘system’ – that men can partially restore theirlost intellectual abilities and gain the capacity to perfect society, inaccordance with the divine cosmological order.

The result, then, was also a new ordering of the disciplines through thenotion of an encyclopaedia (circle of disciplines) or technologia (system ofsystems) – understood as a pansophic universal system of the arts. Thisbecame the defining genre for Calvinist academic philosophy. Keckermannpioneered the Calvinist encyclopaedia, but this genre was brought to itsomnibus perfection by Alsted. The Herborn polymath treated the Lullistconcepts underlying his encyclopaedic system – such things as goodness,magnitude, power, wisdom, will, truth, end – as both divine predicates andcombinatorial possibilities. This meant that he could treat the cosmos as atotality unfolding in accordance with a divine calculus. The encyclopaediawas man’s way of gradually restoring his lost knowledge of this totality inthe discursive manner suited to his damaged capacities, by unfolding thefoundational principles of the archelogia into a totality of disciplines.

In treating creation as already containing the complete course of natureand history, Alsted informed his encyclopaedia with a powerful eschat-ology.72 By elaborating the disciplines of the encyclopaedia, man isgradually restoring his damaged understanding and deciphering thedivine plan hidden in the course of nature, such that the completion ofthe encyclopaedia brings human history to a close and sets the scene forthe return of Christ.73 Alsted’s massive Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta(1630) thus unfolds as a vast branching concatenation of disciplines,beginning with the most general principles or praecognita (including thearchelogia) and descending through books on philology (grammar, rhet-oric, logic and poetics), theoretical philosophy (containing large parts ofAristotelian psychology and natural philosophy), practical philosophy(ethics, politics and oeconomics), and the higher faculties (theology, lawand medicine), then all the way to the mechanical arts of volume VI –agriculture, gardening, baking, brewing, pharmacology, metallurgy,

71 Alsted, Philosophia digne restituta, 48.72 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Apokalyptische Universalwissenschaft: Johann Heinrich Alsteds

“Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis”’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 14 (1988), 50–71.73 Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 78–82.

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typography – in an extraordinary effort to follow the divine intelligiblesdown to the capillary arts of living.The final distinguishing feature of Calvinist Schulphilosophie is the

shape that it gives to the persona of the philosopher. As in Jesuit so tooin Calvinist academic culture, philosophical understanding is tied to apsychagogy designed to form a particular way of relating to and conduct-ing the self. In the Calvinist case, though, this self is not that of theChristian militant, but a specifically philosophical self, understood as thesubject whose mastery of the philosophical arts will disclose hidden truth.It is striking that, in his discussion of the motivation for doing philoso-phy, Alsted invokes the weakness of the human intellect in a mannersimilar to Scotti’s opening problematisation of his Jesuit novices.74 But inAlsted’s case this is an act of philosophical self-problematisation, theinitiating device for the cultivation of arts whose role is to restore man’scapacity for universal knowledge – the imago Dei – in the illuminatedsubjectivity of the philosopher himself. In this figuration of the philoso-pher as an adept whose art restores man’s lost capacity for quasi-divineintellection, we find the characteristic persona of the Calvinist theosopher,possessing the spiritual qualifications needed to battle rival theologiansand to advise Calvinist princes on the best way to reform society.Given the eschatological current flowing through Alsted’s conception

of an encyclopaedic philosophy, it is perhaps not surprising that heexploited the capacity for prophecy latent in Calvinist rationalism.75 Inhis millenarian Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis (1627), he respondedto the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years War – especially the destruction ofthe Palatinate and the disappointment of his own plans for universalreform – by interpreting these events in terms of the apocalyptic rise ofthe Catholic anti-Christ that presaged the millennium, to begin in 1694.76

In transforming philosophy such that it could scan the entirety of theworld – divine and human – from within the single horizon of omniaintelligibile, Calvinist Schulphilosophie did indeed elevate the persona of thephilosopher that it groomed to occupy this pansophic vantage. Yet theeschatological intensity of Calvinist rationalism also awakened the figure

74 Alsted, Philosophia digne restituta, 94–5.75 See Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 109–20; and Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Apokalyptische Universalwis-

senschaft’.76 See the English version: Johann Heinrich Alsted, The Beloved City, or, the saints reign on earth a

thousand yeares asserted and illustrated from LXV places of Holy Scripture etc., trans. W. Burton(London, 1643), 34–7, 46–7.


of the apocalyptic prophet, giving rise to a persona foreign to Catholic andLutheran Schulphilosophie – the secular philosopher-prophet – but des-tined to reappear in Leibniz and his lineage.77

LUTHERAN SCHULPHILOSOPHIE : FROM METAPHYSICS TO

ECLECTICISM

As in the Catholic and Calvinist cases, so in the German Empire’sLutheran territories philosophy was shaped by the teaching programmesof the universities and by the movements of confessionalisation and state-building in which they were caught up. For Lutheran academic philoso-phy, the decisive event in this regard was the ratification of the Formula ofConcord by an alliance of Lutheran princes in 1577. Intended as thedefinitive formulation of the Lutheran articles of faith, it provided theLutheran Church with its first scholastic theology, in the form of a seriesof metaphysically charged articles dealing with Christ’s two natures andone person, the mode of his presence in the Eucharistic host, and therelated question of his ‘ubiquity’, or capacity to be simultaneously presentin diverse spatial and temporal locations.78 At the same time, it providedLutheran princes with the instrument required to exercise the jus refor-mandi awarded them by the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, enabling them toreform their churches and universities in accordance with the Formula’stheology and Augsburg’s principle of cuius regio eius religio.79

In combining a scholastic theology with a programme of politicallydriven confessional reform, the Formula of Concord had something incommon with the decrees of the Council of Trent. Mocking its title, itdefinitively excluded the Calvinists and provided an ideological battle-standard for use against the Empire’s Catholic estates and territories. Itdiffered from the Tridentine decrees, however, in part because the Lu-theran Church lacked instruments of trans-territorial control comparableto the Society of Jesus, and in part because a significant minority ofLutheran princes refused to ratify it.80 This meant that while the majority

77 Maria Rosa Antognazza and Howard Hotson (eds.), Alsted and Leibniz: On God, the Magistrateand the Millennium (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999).

78 For a modern English translation, see Theodore G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord: TheConfessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959).

79 Martin Heckel, ‘Religionsbann und landesherrliches Kirchenregiment’, in H.-C. Rublack (ed.),Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1992), 130–62.

80 See Inge Mager, ‘Aufnahme und Ablehnung des Konkordienbuches in Nord- Mittel- undOstdeutschland’, in M. Brecht, R. Schwarz and H. W. Krumwiede (eds.), Bekenntnis und Einheit

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of Lutheran universities fell within territories that subscribed to theFormula of Concord – Wittenberg, Leipzig, Jena, Tubingen, Giessen,Strasbourg, Rinteln, Kiel, Greifswald, and Rostock – a number of keyinstitutions did not. Lying outside the formal jurisdiction if not thetheological force-field of the Formula, were Altdorf, Konigsberg and,most significantly, Helmstedt.The implementation of the Formula of Concord had a profound effect

on a distinctively Lutheran style of academic philosophy during theseventeenth century. In developing its speculative Christology by drawingon the inheritance of metaphysical Aristotelianism – in particular thefundamental doctrine of the priority of transcendent substances in rela-tion to bodies in space and time – it created the pressure for philosophyfaculties to teach this kind of philosophy as a support for confessionaltheology. This brought to an end the century-long reign of Melanch-thon’s philosophy curriculum, whose non-metaphysical humanism hadembedded Aristotelian philosophy in a quasi-Ramist teaching of theliberal arts.81 It also signalled the return of metaphysics to a central placein the Lutheran curriculum. Metaphysics was the only discipline capableof reconciling natural philosophy and Christological doctrine, andthereby defending Lutheran scholastic theology against its Calvinist andCatholic rivals.82

It was the return of metaphysics in the service of the Formula ofConcord’s speculative Christology that increasingly distinguished Lu-theran academic philosophy from its Calvinist and Catholic competitors.On the one hand, the fact that Lutheranism continued to separatephilosophy and theology as distinct ways of knowing meant that Lutheranphilosophers rejected Calvinist constructions of a single universal philoso-phy as the foundation of all the disciplines, including theology. On theother, the separation of reason and faith also meant that Lutheran phil-osophy did not develop into a natural theology of the Jesuit kind, focusedin a metaphysics of immaterial substances, and subordinate to a separatescholastic theology. This was in part because there was room for Lutheran

der Kirche (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1980), 271–302; and Johannes Wallmann, ‘LutherischeKonfessionalisierung – ein Uberblick’, in Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 33–53.

81 On Melanchthon’s philosophy curriculum, see Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Law and Gospel: The Im-portance of Philosophy at Reformation Wittenberg’, History of Universities 11 (1992), 33–58; andSachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

82 The unsurpassed account of this development is given in Walter Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphy-sik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des fruhen 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart:Calwer Verlag, 1976).


metaphysics to develop as an ontological science relatively autonomouslyof theology. It was also for the associated reason that the existence ofLutheran universities outside the jurisdiction of the Formula of Concordmeant that Lutheran philosophy faculties remained open to a wider arrayof philosophical currents. In particular, the reception of Zabarella’s neo-Aristotelian humanistic method allowed Lutheran philosophers to con-struct academic sciences independently of their relation to metaphysicsand theology. Under these intellectual circumstances, the Lutheran cur-riculum had to perform a difficult balancing act: to maintain the relativeautonomy of philosophy without it swallowing theology; and to makephilosophy serve theology without it being transformed into naturaltheology or Christian philosophy. Lutheran academic philosophy wasthus not defined by a single curriculum but by a spectrum of programmesshifting in relation to this balance, and differentially distributed across itsarray of universities.83

Without attempting to cover the entirety of this spectrum, we canindicate its most important tendencies by arranging them in relation tothe Hofmann controversy that took place at the University of Helmstedtduring the 1590s. The university was founded by Duke Julius ofBrunswick-Wolfenbuttel (1529–89) in 1576 as an instrument for introdu-cing the Reformation to his territory, and as an institution that wouldhelp integrate the territory’s clerical and noble estates within a centralisedprincely territorial state.84 Despite the duke’s wishes to establish a moder-ate and irenic Lutheranism, the appointment of Daniel Hofmann (1538–1621) to the theology faculty signalled the arrival of a combative ‘Saxon’form of Lutheran orthodoxy. This was made all the more problematic byHofmann’s emergence as a rallying point for Lutheran nobles resistingJulius’s centralising measures.85 The controversy that erupted shows justhow difficult it was to integrate philosophy and theology in a Lutheran

83 For a remarkable overview of the spectrum of forms that made up Lutheran academic philosophy,see Walter Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien’, in Holzhey andSchmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. VI/1, 475–97.

84 Peter Baumgart, ‘Die Grundung der Universitat Helmstedt’, in P. Baumgart and N. Hammerstein(eds.), Beitrage zu Problemen deutscher Universitatsgrundungen der fruhen Neuzeit (Nendeln: KTOPress, 1978), 217–40.

85 For the relation between Hofmann’s academic resistance to Julius’s programme and the politicalresistance of the Lutheran nobility, see Luise Schorn-Schutte, ‘Lutherische Konfessionalisierung?Das Beispiel Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel (1589–1613)’, in Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionali-sierung, 163–94. For a more detailed treatment, revealing many new facets, see Markus Friedrich,Die Grenzen der Venunft: Theologie, Philosophie und gelehrte Konflikte am Beispiel des HelmstedterHofmannstreits und seiner Wirkungen auf das Luthertum um 1600 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck andRuprecht, 2004), 19–141.

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university. At Helmstedt the difficulty was magnified by Duke Julius’srefusal to subscribe to the Formula of Concord, which gave space toHofmann’s anti-metaphysical theology, and by his decision to staff thephilosophy faculty with a group of philosophers trained in the latestZabarellan humanist Aristotelianism. This was the humanist circle ofJohann Caselius (1533–1613) that would soon attract the brilliant youngmetaphysician Cornelius Martini (1568–1621).Hofmann’s theological polemics were as multifaceted as they were

pugnacious. In the late 1580s he had entered into a controversy with arepresentative of Calvinist pansophism, Rudolf Goclenius the Elder(1547–1628) of Marburg.86 Goclenius had made the mistake of seekingHofmann’s support for his characteristically Calvinist arguments forincorporating theology within philosophy and treating God andhis creatures under a single set of Ramist topological categories.87 ButHofmann rejected the very idea of applying philosophical categories toGod, who is the object of a distinct irreducibly theological knowledge.88

Hofmann’s position was also honed by specifically theological controver-sies – over the nature of conversion and the role of baptism – at whosecentre lay the polar opposition between ‘natural man’ and ‘man reborn’,and the theme of man’s absolute dependence on divine grace for therenewal of his corrupt nature.89 On the basis of a moral anthropologystressing the complete corruption of man’s faculties at the Fall, Hofmanndeveloped a conception of natural knowledge as sapientia carnis, carnalwisdom or wisdom of the flesh. He could use this to problematisephilosophical knowledge as such, as incapable of knowing divine thingsbecause philosophers were not ‘reborn man’.It was his intervention in the ubiquity controversy, however, that

brought the philosophical and theological aspects of Hofmann’s positionto a head. In a series of disputations, Hofmann attacked the metaphysical-theological doctrine of Christ’s ubiquity, based on the ‘abstract’ universalunion of Christ’s omnipresent spiritual substance and his locally presenthuman-corporeal nature. His favourite target in this regard was the

86 See Inge Mager, ‘Lutherische Theologie und aristotelische Philosophie an der Universitat Helm-stedt im 16. Jahrhundert. Zur Vorgeschichte des Hofmannischen Streites im Jahre 1598’, Jahrbuchder Gesellschaft fur Niedersachsische Kirchengeschichte 73 (1975), 83–98, at 91–3.

87 See, for example, Rudolf Goclenius, Isagoge in peripateticorum et scholasticorum primam philoso-phiam, quae dici consueuit metaphysica (Frankfurt, 1598), 1–21.

88 Daniel Hofmann, De usu et applicatione notionum logicarum ad res theologicas (adversus Rud.Goclenium) (Frankfurt, 1596).

89 See Friedrich, Grenzen, 241–53.


‘Swabian school’ theologian, Jacob Andreae (1528–90), who had writtenthis doctrine into the Formula of Concord itself. This doctrine, Hofmannargued, represented a heretical confusion of philosophical and theologicalknowledge. It is simply not true in philosophy that a body could appear indifferent places simultaneously, as this was a truth reserved for reborntheologians. In fact it was a truth inseparable from the performance of theEucharist itself, as the institution created by Christ in which his divineand human natures would be ‘concretely’ united.90 Perhaps it wasAndreae’s reliance on the metaphysics of Christian Aristotelianism thatled Hofmann to target metaphysics itself as the prime source of thisheretical confusion of the ‘two truths’, and thence to turn his fire onthe teaching of metaphysics in his own university. In any case, in hispreface to his student Pfaffrad’s disputation of 1598, Hofmann citedTertullian’s characterisation of the philosopher as the ‘patriarch of heret-ics’, leaving no doubt that he was referring to the Helmstedt philosophersand to Cornelius Martini in particular, whose metaphysics lectures hadstarted the year before.91

Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Martini’sconstruction of metaphysics itself sought to maintain a clear separationbetween philosophy and theology, and in so doing established one of themain lines of development followed by Lutheran philosophical culture.While successfully campaigning against the remnants of the ‘Philippo-Ramist’ curriculum – Ramism was effectively banned from the universityby ducal edict in 1597 – Martini did not introduce metaphysics on theJesuit model, with philosophy functioning as a propaedeutic for theology.Instead, his aim was to establish philosophy and theology as separate(Aristotelian) sciences by ordering them in accordance with Zabarella’shumanist-Aristotelian method of proof.92 Zabarella’s method was alsolinked to a particular conception of the office or persona of the philoso-pher, as it restricted philosophy and the philosopher to the task ofproviding a common method in the construction of the sciences, ratherthan a metaphysical foundation for them in the universal theory ofbeing.93

90 For a brief version of this argument, see Daniel Hofmann, Errores XVII Jacobi Andreae (Helm-stedt, 1588), Errors XI and XII.

91 Daniel Hofmann (praes.) and Caspar Pfaffrad (resp.), Propositiones de Deo, et Christi tum personatum officio (Helmstedt, 1598), fol. 2.

92 See the Prolegomena to Cornelius Martini, Metaphysica commentatio compendiose, succincte, etperspicue comprehendens universam metaphysicam doctrinam (Strasbourg, 1605).

93 Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua’.

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This method enabled Martini to reintroduce metaphysics to the Lu-theran philosophy curriculum, but in the limited form of a positiveanalytic ontology. Helmstedt metaphysics thus took shape as a Zabarellanscience of ‘being as being’. This included God but only in terms of hisbare ‘whatness’ or existence, leaving knowledge of his divine qualities forthe separate science of (revealed) theology. Of even more importance inthe long run, however, was the capacity of this organisation of thephilosophy curriculum to facilitate the construction of sciencesthat would eventually lead beyond the borders of Schulphilosophie itself.Martini’s student Henning Arnisaeus (1575–1636) could thus use Zabar-ellan method to construct a new discipline of political science, positingpolitical order as its object, and thence deriving the principles of politicsin terms of that which the prince must know and do in order to maintainpolitical order.94 Disconnected from the hierarchy of disciplines leadingup to theology and the hierarchy of being leading up to metaphysicalsubstances, Lutheran philosophy of the Helmstedt kind facilitated thebirth of autonomous sciences grounded in empirical objectives and obser-vations. It thereby pointed the way towards the philosophical eclecticismassociated with the notion of the Aufklarung.95

During the first half of the seventeenth century, however, it was notHelmstedt humanism that dominated the Lutheran philosophical land-scape, but the scholastic metaphysics developed in the heartlands of theFormula of Concord, at the universities of Wittenberg and Giessen inparticular. In these universities, where philosophy was under maximumpressure to support the metaphysical premisses of the Formula’s specula-tive Christology, no quarter could be given to Hofmann’s ‘two truths’doctrine, and metaphysics was pulled back in the direction of naturaltheology. Giessen’s Christoph Scheibler (1589–1653) thus begins his Opusmetaphysicum – perhaps the most comprehensive work of Lutheran scho-lastic metaphysics – with a dedication to the Duke of Hesse on the utilityof metaphysics for defending Lutheran Christology against Calvinistsubversion. This is followed by a lengthy preface in which Scheibler rebutsthe two truths doctrine, and displaces Hofmann’s anthropology of thephilosopher as the bearer of ‘fleshly wisdom’ with the following quitedifferent portrait of the philosophical persona, drawn from GregoryNazianzus: ‘Understanding these two – God and angel – is difficult,

94 Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat.95 Horst Dreitzel, ‘Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der “Eklektischen Philosophie”’, Zeitschrift fur

Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281–343.


and so too the third, the philosopher: in matter free of matter, in body notcircumscribed, on earth heavenly, in affections free of affect; in all thingseasily able to be conquered, apart from greatness of spirit.’96

This is an image of the philosopher as natural theologian who, unlikeCornelius Martini’s metaphysician, is called upon to provide a metaphys-ical defence of the Formula of Concord’s doctrines of the union ofChrist’s two natures and his ubiquity in relation to the Eucharist. Ratherthan drawing on Helmstedt’s Zabarellan construction of metaphysics as apositive ontology exclusive of the divine being, Scheibler has recourse tothe doctrine of ‘metaphysical abstraction’ as elaborated by Suarez, Fonsecaand Pereira – ‘abstraction from matter in accordance with the thing andreason’ – in order to arrive at the reality of immaterial substances.97 In thisway, as Scheibler explains, metaphysics can combat the Calvinist view thatChrist is not really present at the Eucharist by showing how infiniteimmaterial substance is present at all physical times and places.98 Thisof course is the metaphysical construction of ubiquity that Hofmann haddeclared heretical.

Despite developing his metaphysics as a natural theology drawing onSuarez’s doctrine of metaphysical abstraction, however, Scheiblerdiffered from the Jesuit both in significant details – in refusing to deriveessences from non-contradiction, for example – but above all in theordering of metaphysics in relation to theology. Scheibler’s metaphysicswas not an ensemble of philosophical commentaries serving as a prepar-ation for a culminating theology, as in the Ratio studiorum. It was a self-contained exposition of being in general and God, with the formerdiscussed in book I – dealing with the concept of being, the kinds ofbeing, and the doctrine of causes – and the latter in book II, focused onGod, the angels and separated souls, as kinds of immaterial substances.Nonetheless, Scheibler treats the entire domain of spatial bodies asdependent on and subordinate to the domain of immaterial substances.This made metaphysics foundational for all positive disciplines andthereby precluded the emergence of empirical and experimental scienceswithin the dominant form of Lutheran Schulphilosophie.

These disputes within Lutheran academic philosophy have often beentreated as exemplary intellectual divisions whose tensions impelled the

96 Christoph Scheibler, Opus metaphysicum, duobus libris universum hujus scientiae systema compre-hendens (Giessen, 1617), Proemium, ch. VIII, n.p.

97 See, for example, Scheibler’s appeal to metaphysical abstraction to explain why metaphysics dealswith immaterial being rather than bodies, which belong to physics. Ibid., 454.

98 Ibid., 418–19.

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evolution of an autonomous rational philosophy destined to overcomethem. Lewis Beck thus views Hofmann as one of the ‘anti-intellectualistfanatics’ whose ‘two truths’ doctrine helped to fuel the opposition be-tween philosophy and theology, and between empiricist and rationalistphilosophies, that would eventually be overcome through Kant’s discov-ery of the transcendental conditions of knowledge.99 In Charles Lohr’sversion of this history, Hofmann’s ‘irrationalism’ is a replay of the clashbetween secular naturalistic Aristotelianism and Christian doctrine, ex-acerbated by Hofmann’s extreme fideism, but still destined to be over-come through the recovery of Suarez’s doctrine of immaterial substancesby the Lutheran metaphysicians.100

Hofmann’s views, however, are not mistaken philosophical ideascapable of being resolved in this way. They are doctrines concerning therelation between the kind of person who thinks philosophical ideasand the kind of person who accedes to revealed Christian mysteries.Further, they are doctrines founded in a moral anthropology designedto ensure that university philosophers will be incapable of acceding totheological truths, whose knowledge is dependent on the piety and officeof the theologian.101 There is no higher-level evolutionary mediation ofHofmann’s pietistic theology and the kinds of philosophy elaborated byCornelius Martini and Christoph Scheibler, which simply turn away fromHofmann by constructing different philosophical personae organisedaround the cultivation of different spiritual and cognitive capacities.Martini’s positive ontologist thus cultivates a (Zabarellan) method thatrestricts him to the domain of non-theological being, while Scheibler’sexalted natural theologian practises metaphysical abstraction in order toaccede to the domain of immaterial substances that includes God, theangels and the separated souls of men.The conflict between these different elaborations of philosophy and the

philosopher was thus not resolvable from within philosophy itself, as theyconcern divergences between philosophy’s modes of (‘ascetic’, institu-tional) existence. Given the direct relation between the cultivation ofthe philosophical persona and the religious and political functions of thephilosophy curriculum in Lutheran universities, it should not come as a

99 Beck, Early German Philosophy, 117–31.100 Charles H. Lohr, ‘Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Philosophie in lutherischen Deutschland’, in

Brandmuller, Immenkotter and Iserloh, Ecclesia Militans, 179–92.101 For this point, see Walter Sparn, ‘Doppelte Wahrheit? Erinnerungen zur theologischer Struktur

des Problems der Einheit des Denkens’, in F. Mildenberger and J. Track (eds.), Zugang zurTheologie. Fundamentaltheologische Beitrage (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), 53–78.


surprise to learn that the Hofmann controversy was resolved not byphilosophical debate but by direct ducal invention.102 This resulted inHofmann’s house arrest, sacking, and eventual exile, even if his anti-metaphysical refusal to integrate philosophy and theology would returnto haunt Lutheran Schulphilosophie in late seventeenth-century Pietismand eclecticism.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We began this account by arguing that the history of early modernphilosophy should not be written as a series of attempted breakthroughsto a modernity characterised by the autonomy of reason and a universalphilosophical subject. In sketching an alternative understanding ofthe field, we found not the philosophical subject but a variety of waysof determining what was to count as philosophy, which were simultan-eously ways of grooming the philosopher. Working with the Christian-Aristotelian heritage and the recovered classical philosophies of theRenaissance, German Schulphilosophie represented a series of rival confes-sional attempts to transmit true doctrine, from across the entire field ofknowledge, to students whose comportment was bound to the offices theywould occupy in confessional societies. The bearer of this doctrine wasnot the subject of experience but the philosophical persona, which we canunderstand in terms of the cultivation of an intellectual deportmentrequired to accede to the truth, as this was variously understood in therival confessional cultures. Philosophy was of course understood as naturalor non-revealed knowledge, yet because this demarcation was itself deter-mined by theology, the place of philosophy in the curriculum wasdependent on instituted theological truths and their associated devotionalpractices. Unlike the English and French cases, the multiplication ofindependent confessional-political entities within the German Empiremeant that three rival university systems developed, each with its ownway of integrating philosophical knowledge and theological doctrine. Thethree kinds of university philosophy that emerged from this peculiar set ofcircumstances represented different institutional ways of determiningwhat should count as philosophy and what a philosopher should be.

Even if these philosophical institutions differed in their reception of thenew natural philosophy, and the new methods associated with Bacon,Descartes and Hobbes, it is unhelpful to see them as open or closed in

102 Friedrich, Grenzen, 52–69.

64 IAN HUNTER

relation to an agreed philosophical modernity. Similarly, when moderncommentators find modernity’s harbinger in one of these traditions, thisis almost always a sign of residual philosophical sectarianism. The differ-ent academic philosophies represented independent institutional order-ings of the truth which would be transmitted into chronologicalmodernity in diverse ways. This is particularly apparent in the case ofJesuit Schulphilosophie, whose armed integrity allowed it to pass intothe eighteenth century relatively untouched by the transformations thatdissolved its Protestant rivals.


CHAPTER 3

The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics ofoffice in early modern England

Conal Condren497314

Through the work of writers such as Marcel Mauss, Ernst Kantorowiczand more recently Erving Goffman, notions of personae and role-playhave become familiar as models for understanding society. What is meantby a persona, however, can be variable. At one extreme, it is little morethan a performed role and presupposes an inner but ultimately accessiblemoral and decision-making agent. This inner ‘self’ is thus a postulatedexplanans for conduct. By the same token, we can hypothesise patterns oftension and socialised pressure when society or a group expects a personato be adopted, and so compromises the moral integrity of the agent. AsMichael Sandel has expressed it in abridging a major focus of communi-tarian social theory, selves are always socially situated and partially definedby the roles they play.1 Such triadic models of inner self, role and societyhave been taken back into the early modern world, for example, byStephen Greenblatt in his influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Green-blatt sought to analyse, inter alia, More’s ‘Dialogue of Counsel’ in Utopia,seen as a debate between Hythlodaeus, an unencumbered Self,and Morus, the socially constructed role-player, the point being to illus-trate that the Renaissance self had been fully aware of the necessities ofrole-play and the constraints placed upon its freedom.

At another extreme, however, is the notion of a persona as a manifest-ation and representative of an office, an embodiment of a moral economy.It is this that Kantorowicz explored with respect to medieval kingship.The office is a whole sphere of responsibilities, rights of action for theirfulfilment, necessary attributes, skills and specific virtues, highlighted byconcomitant vices and failures. The persona is an authentic type carried bya physical body. Kantorowicz’s argument was devoted to one institution-alised and ceremonially proclaimed office; but in fact, medieval and earlymodern England was structured by networks of such offices into which

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

66

people were inducted with the solemn formality of oath-taking. The oathsoften elaborated in detail the duties defining the persona, advertising theresponsibilities that justified its liberties of office, thus arming others withcriteria to assess conduct.2 Such transformative and affirmative patterns ofinduction into office gave a religious dimension to identity, from midwifeto monarch. This was at once a blessing and a curse, should the personaabuse its position.The world of social offices has recently begun to receive the attention it

deserves, although the correlate that people in office were seen morally aspersonae, not as individuals or ‘selves’, has been less explored.3 I wish to notetwo things at this point. First, that a pervasive notion of office and personagave a particular structure and character to the vocabulary of moralapprobation and critique. The promotion of any persona was couchedin the same general terms of defence and commendation, a positiveregister of rights, liberties, duty, rule and service to the office and oftento those protected by it. Conversely, for those disappointed in theperformance in office, a negative register of terms was also available,imputing neglect, oppression, licence and tyranny – in sum passionateexcess. To claim an official persona was to gain access to these comple-mentary registers and so acquire a social voice.Second, the interplay of contested personae went well beyond institu-

tionalised social offices to the more elusive offices associated with theintellect. The concrete socialised offices of, say, monarch or mayor mayhave provided authenticating models for how people talked, but as I shallillustrate, in England the vocabulary of social office flowed through to theless obvious, though often emphatically asserted offices of poet, rhetorand philosopher. And it may be that people assuming such personae had towork harder to assure others that there was an office and that the personawas genuinely responsible to and representative of it. A contrast withGermany is instructive here. As Ian Hunter emphasises in his chapter,philosophy in early modern Germany was highly institutionalised, withuniversity professors assuming formal offices, marked by the solemnitiesof swearing oaths of induction. As I will suggest, the lack of an analogousintellectual formality in England has a relevance to understanding the

2 The most detailed examples are the oaths of midwife and counsellor in The Booke of Oathes (1649).3 On social office see, especially, Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early-Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Goldie,‘The UnacknowledgedRepublic: Office-Holding in Early-Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of theExcluded, c.1500–1850 (London: Palgrave, 2001), 1–37.

Persona and office in early modern England 67

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

I

The twin determinants of any office were its end, telos, and its limit;assertions as to end and limit thus were the axes for the definition of apersona, and the qualities that best fitted the end and recognised the limitsof the office. This notion of persona as an expression of office is, I believe,more appropriate to understanding the ancient and early modern world asa whole than is one of persona as self and role. It is also more closelyrelated to the original notion of a persona, from the stereotypical maskworn by an actor to manifest a type, such as the slave or warrior, a pointalso explored by John Cottingham in his chapter. Pierre Hadot has donemuch to alert us of the relevance of this to the philosopher in antiquity,for the philosopher, much like his intellectual companions or competi-tors, rhetors and poets, represented or manifested an activity. He mightnot wear a mask, but, like the poet or the rhetor who donned purplerobes, he might well dress in a way that advertised his life form. In thisway, as I will suggest, the question of wearing a beard was a semioticaspect of a philosophical identity, as was the affectation of unaffectedclothing, or habitation in a barrel.

To clarify the difference between role and office, it is worth noting thatthe actor was attacked as having no office, as exhibiting and encouragingthe protean irresponsibility of role-play.4 When defended, however, itwas argued that he had an office;5 the player’s persona lay not in anyspecific role, but in the duties to poet and audience, requiring judgmentand specific skill. The player could be defended as not unlike that

4 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), 64; John Rainolds, Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), gives a sense of university disputa-tion on the player as without or damaging to social offices; Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in FiveActions (1582), B4r–v, C1; William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (1633), at length, but see Actus secundus,34–42 (Prynne lifts Gosson’s conceit of acts for chapters); Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum triumphans(1670), 2.

5 Samuel Butler, Characters, (c. 1667–9), ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: Case Western ReserveUniversity Press, 1970), 300.

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paradigmatic socially instituted office-holder, the priest, in having amediator’s responsibility. All flexibility and interpretative licence servedthe theatre’s ‘end . . . [which] is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up tonature; to show virtue her own feature’.6 Role-play was the means offulfilling the requirements of persona in office.7 Vivid representation inplacing moral types before us is ‘the proper Office, and work of Plays’.8

In giving Hamlet such sentiments, Shakespeare was affirming a distinctconception of theatrical responsibility in the immediate context ofheated competition between theatres, adults’ and boys’ companies; headjusted his tragedy for performance in Cambridge, and so intervened ina lively university debate on office and the very legitimacy of the stage ina firmly reformed Protestant environment. The unmasking of villainythrough the play within the play was a vindication of the office of theactor. Almost a century later it still needed to be affirmed that it is the‘Office of the Stage to detect roguery’.9 The qualities of this personamight even be roguery in another.10

The most general notions under which the way of life of the philoso-pher might be understood were those of the active or contemplativeideals. It has, for example, been argued that Greek philosophy wascharacterised by giving greater weight and prestige to the contemplativelife, Roman philosophy to the vita activa. This may work as a generalisa-tion; Plato’s philosopher kings have as their reward a life of unalloyedcontemplation, after they have sullied their hands with the necessities ofruling. Contemplative philosophy is so important that it is doubtful if, inbeing kings, they can be happy, a problem for the perfect, happy polisPlato set out to describe. Yet, philosophers must rule. There is an impera-tive of office here that renders The Republic ambivalent in its priorities.Again, Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a celebration of the ultimate ideal ofphilosophic contemplation; but Aristotle’s greatest praise for Socrateswas that he brought philosophy down to the agora.Be this as it may, the counterpoint between a contemplative and an

active ideal of the philosophic office, between differing patterns of moralresponsibility towards the end of achieving wisdom, was crucially import-ant in medieval and early modern Europe. Italian literary culture gave it a

6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2.7 John Earl, ‘A Player’, in Micro-cosmographia, or a piece of the world discovered (1633).8 Baker, Theatrum triumphans, 110, 178, 133.9 Anon., The Immorality of the Pulpit (1698), 7.10 Butler, ‘A Player’, in Characters, 300.


particular prominence during the Renaissance. It became an accommo-dating, if contrived topos of intellectual display.11 It is, however, handledwith unusual skill by Thomas More and is the crux in his ‘Dialogue ofcounsel’, not a debate between a free self and a socialised role-player, butbetween contrasting personae claiming to represent wisdom, virtue andresponsibility: the ultimately Platonic theme of otium versus negotium.This too is ambivalent. For each vision of office there is a differentpersona, manifesting divergent qualities, as the character and physical,even semiotic, differences between Hythlodaeus and Morus make clear.12

For the caped and bearded one, the end of true philosophy is theuntrammelled pursuit of honestas, for Morus, utilitas. Each was an aspectof the ideal rhetorical synthesis in any argument. But the dramaticdelineation is well served by More’s resisting a resolution between hischaracters, and thus leaving in the air the question of what really is truewisdom.13

That indeterminacy, inviting the reader’s active engagement, however,is more congruent with the office of the rhetor, whose garb the authorMore was wearing, than with the philosopher about whom he waswriting. For the rhetor had perforce always to vary arguments accordingto audience and circumstances and it was, according to the ancientQuintilian and the modern Machiavelli, not always possible to arguefrom honestas, or to reconcile it with utilitas.14 The open hand of rhetoric,inviting the reader to engage and think, was to be preferred to the closedand dogmatic fist of dialectic.15 To replace this interplay between personi-fications of intellectual office with struggling individuality is to lose sightof a most prescient symbolic account of the complexities of philosophicalidentity and their ambivalent relationships with the socially instituted

11 See, for example, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, ‘On an Active and a Contemplative Life, andWhy One Ought to be Preferred Before the Other’ (c. 1670), in Essays Moral and Entertaining(London, 1815), vol.II, 209, notes the Italian lineage, and initially indicates the artificiality of thepolarity.

12 C. M. Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’, (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge Univer-sity, 1996), 277, a seminal study to which I am much indebted.

13 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George Logan, Robert Adams and Clarence Miller (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), bk. 1.

14 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1920–2), vol.III, 8, 30–7; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513), trans. Russell Price, ‘Introduction’Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xvii–xx; see also AndrewFitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 118–19.

15 Damian Grace, ‘Utopia: A Dialectical Interpretation’, in Claire Murphy, Henri Gibaud and MarioDi Cesare (eds.), Miscellanea Moreana, Essays for Germaine Marc’hadour, special issue of Moreana100 (1989), 273–302.

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office of ruling. As needs no labouring, More’s Utopia was an imaginativeif oblique commentary on Plato’s Republic. What greatly complicatedmatters by the time More wrote, however, was the entanglement ofconceptions of philosophic office with those of Christianity, which inturn informed the long-standing claims to wisdom made on behalf ofrhetoric and poetry.With respect to Christianity, true wisdom, thus true philosophy, was

found through Christ and could be argued to be best approached throughthe contemplative ideal. This in turn could be seen as being expressedthrough the highly visible and calibrated monastic way of life. In theRenaissance and through the Reformation, then, the notion of the con-templative life was as much a matter of religion as philosophy, as well itmight be, for each involved not just the dogmatics of propositional form,but offered consolation and therapy. Asserting the primacy of the activephilosophic life, and denigrating, or even denying, the legitimacy of thepurely contemplative could, as Peter Harrison makes clear, be as much amatter of attacking priests and Rome as it was of renegotiating thepurpose of and conditions for philosophy.Well before the Reformation, Lorenzo Valla, in a highly declamatory

dialogue between Lautentius and a Friar, argued vehemently that, even atits purest, the contemplative life was inferior to the active. In the earlystages, he has contemplative philosophy partially in mind, but soon theattention shifts relentlessly to an attack on monasticism as a life-form forChristianity.16 In a fashion the work complements the Dialecticarumdisputationem, an account of the structures and techniques of philosoph-ical dispute. This judges them very much in terms of practical efficacy,presupposing the primacy of an engaged rather than purely contemplativephilosophy, down-playing, for example, consistency of argument for thepersuasive dexterity usually associated with rhetoric.17 Well after theReformation, Clarendon, with a nod in the direction of the Italians(though he would not have known De professione), devoted one of hislongest essays to the topos, denigrating the contemplative ideal as incoher-ent, inferior for this world and the next, and providing us with hardly anyrecognisable models to follow. The great men from antiquity had thevirtue of experience, and the contemplative impulse, certainly to bevalued, was a form of other directed service, appropriate to the ethics of

16 Lorenzo Valla, De professione religiosorum, Opuscula tria, in Opera omnia (Turin: Bottegad’Erasmo, 1962), vol. II, 287–322 (foot of pages), 99–134 (top of pages).

17 Valla, Dialecticarum disputationum, liber tres, in Opera, vol. I, 759–60.


office. But in all this hardly a mention of philosophy. The contemplativelife is code for monkishness, and that is a synecdoche for the corruptions ofRome. Bacon had written in the same idiom, as a Protestant as well as aphilosopher. His image of the purely contemplative life is that of the monkin service to God. That this is explicitly an office erodes the firm distinctionbetween active and contemplative, as Clarendon would also recognise, andmade it easier to see all philosophy, directly or indirectly, as properly aidingthe commonwealth. This in turn helped Bacon present a highly developedsense of philosophy as an office: like ruling itself, it was a sphere of activitywith responsibilities, and requiring, as Stephen Gaukroger has argued, acertain sort of moral persona for its exercise. In this way, Bacon’s projectedreform of philosophy was also a Protestant reform, and a co-option of theview, espoused by Aristotle and then Marsilius, that religion properly hadthe function of supporting the office of rule.

Additionally to all this, the Christianisation of the contemplative idealcast the postulated human soul in the image of the inner, or the truephilosopher. The vocabulary of office was one dominant linguistic re-source for hypothesising the human soul, God and the relationshipbetween them. If, as was sometimes said, God’s office was to rule, rulingthe soul became an official relationship, and the soul’s understanding ofits subject status could be construed in terms of true wisdom. Metaphorsof social office could re-enforce and help shape that purely conjecturedinner ‘self-like’ identity. The soul could be a judge, a ruler, a philosopher,all without significant contradiction, for each was a variation upon andan attempt to grasp aspects of an inner office. On a range of issues,then, arguments about the ends or scope of philosophy could becomearguments about religious responsibility.

I want now to turn at greater length to the relationships betweenpoetry, rhetoric and philosophy, for each was re-asserted as an officeduring the Reformation, and each needed a new religious authentication.What I shall illustrate is that a common promotional rhetoric of office wasshared across contested intellectual activities. That is, the semantic con-tent of personae (the mix of moral values, skills, attitudes and aptitudes)exhibits a strong family resemblance between philosophy, poetry andrhetoric. At once this inhibited disciplinary insulation, and concomitantlyit means now that the differences have to be looked for in the pragmaticmix of how the shared semantic resources were employed and to whatpurposes.

Further, if philosophy was the love of wisdom, rhetors and poets mighteither claim to be superior to philosophers, or to be the true philosophers.

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The upshot is a little paradoxical: the one thing we do not need is anawareness of the current discipline philosophy to understand how peoplemade philosophical claims. To over-extend a distinctive discipline in time(assuming it now to have a stable identity) is actually to obscure thequestion of how it emerged. To put the matter another way, insofar as weassume that it is the present discipline of philosophy that needs explaininghistorically, contexts are likely to be narrowed to matters of doctrinalcontent to fit the end result. As Knud Haakonssen has shown, insofar asepistemology is central now, we are likely to abstract what seem to us asepistemological arguments and deem those context and content for thehistory of philosophy. The same point applies to privileging scientificactivity as epistemologically crucial to philosophical understanding.18 Thisproblem of what I have elsewhere called structural anachronism is en-demic to attempts to write the history of activities such as philosophy;but, equally, to rectify the imbalance by widening our notion of contextcan erode the explanatory value of any posited context.To focus on the persona and office of the philosopher – as opposed to

the doctrinal content of the activity that nowadays defines the discipline,that drives the history, that narrows the context, that obscures the ques-tion, that looks anachronistic – may minimise the hermeneutic difficulty.To focus on the claimed persona of the philosopher in the context ofbracing but sometimes confusing competition may also challenge theconceptual parochialism of genealogy, that narrowing of the past tointeresting intimations of the present.

I I

It must be stressed immediately that, in touching on the literature ofpoetics, we are confronting a world in which, as Samuel Daniel put it, ‘ofone science another may be born’.19 In the organised studies of theuniversities the parts of trivium and quadrivium were neither exhaustivenor incontestably distinct. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,the shifting domains of intellectual endeavour were variously mapped inorder to consolidate human knowledge. There was no certain place, forexample, for mathematics, touching music, magic, natural philosophy

18 This, for example, mars Popper’s accounts of Bacon’s theories; see Sir Karl Popper, Conjectures andRefutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963, 1972), 12–18, 137–8.

19 Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme (1603?), in English Critical Essays, ed. Edmund D. Jones(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956 edn), 63.


and the practicalities of navigation. It might be, as Galileo had put it, thelanguage of God, but He spoke in different tongues, deductive andprobabilistic: in the static certainties of geometry, in the mobile flexibilityof algebra. Richard Mulcaster saw logic as the grammar of mathematics,yet on the eve of Newtonian pre-eminence, John Eachard could see thetwo as combining no better than black pudding and anchovy sauce. Logicitself might be included and excluded from philosophy.20 There was noliterature, but there was a crucial but variable understanding of poetics.21

In post-Reformation England the poet sometimes needed defendingagainst the ancient accusation of lying, and of being a prop to purgatory,that most self-serving of the delusions of Catholicism.22 Just as negatively,the poet could also be associated with the undisciplined and propheticincantations of enthusiasm. The defence of poetry and of the poet, then,frequently had a theological point, or shifted into theology or philosophyon the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics.23 Not surprisingly, poetry alsoneeded to be circumscribed in tension with competing claimants towisdom, such as history, rhetoric and philosophy. Intellectual identitymight simply be assumed in re-characterising poetry;24 but invocations ofoffice were always available as introductory ploys, at once justifying andsituating the arguments to follow.25 They became most significant whenused to define the ends and limits of the activity, to proclaim a superiorityover competitors; or to allay suspicion and stabilise the contours ofdiscourse all too easily susceptible to accusations of irresponsibility.

Typically, however, the defence of poetry was a defence of its manifest-ing persona. This is particularly clear in a number of treatments of rhetoricand poetry, and in this limited context of discussion the two can betreated in tandem – for there was no less a theological edge given in the

20 Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined (1581), ch. 41, 246;John Eachard, Mr Hobbs State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue between Timothy and Philautus(1671), in John Eachard, Works, (1773), vol. II, 99; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning(1606), in Works, ed. Basil Montagu (London: Pickering, 1825), vol. II pt. 2. 125, 144–5.

21 For salutary comment, see Michael McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses and the Rise of Aesthetic inSeventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse:The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1987), 35–47.

22 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36–9; JohnDonne, The Pseudo-Martyr (1610), 115–19, on purgatory and priestly office; Sir John Harington, ‘Ofreeding poetry’ (1604), in The Sixth Book of Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. Simon Cauchi (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1991), 97–8, 99–100.

23 McKeon, ‘Politics of Discourses’, 44–5.24 For example, Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602), or John Dryden,

Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668).25 Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, 62.

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Reformation to suspicions of the rhetor’s irresponsible powers and boguswisdom. In the tragedy of the poet Collingbourne, gruesomely executedfor his lines ‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovel our Dog / Do rule al Englandvnder a Hog’,26 the argument is that under a tyranny the office of the poetis dangerous. If the office of rule sustains other offices, the ultimate formof misrule contaminates them. The voice of Collingbourne states that‘The Greekes do paynt a Poetes office whole’, but Collingbourne isjudiciously succinct. The poet must be chaste and virtuous, ‘nymble, freeand swyft’; in a tyranny decidedly swift.27 Mistakenly, he had thought thepoet’s ancient liberty to chastise and correct could be pleaded at any bar: ‘Ihad forgot howe newefound tyrannies / Wyth ryght and freedome were atopen warre’.28 The liberty of any office is predictably in tension with thelicence of tyranny. Yet, however circumspect, indirect or jesting the poetis advised to be, the office remains to trade in moral truths.For all its abstract economy and procedural emphasis, Bacon’s Ad-

vancement of Learning illustrates a similar point with respect to rhetoric.The principal distinctions between poetry, history and philosophy areprimarily related to, spring from, serve, or express (the relationships arenot uniform) a human faculty. Poetry expresses imagination, history ismemory and philosophy reason. A well-digested sense of office is there asan occasional point of reference. Throughout the text, Bacon occasionallyshifts from accounts of intellectual procedure to what the practitioneractually does, in order to clarify intellectual responsibilities, virtues andspheres or ends to be served. If a man, as rhetorician, speaks to differentpeople, he should do so in different ways, as he should not if the discourseis purely logical. Decorum and the liberties of speech, then, are functionsof persona, and personae are instantiations of officia. So rhetoric is placedwhere Bacon took Aristotle to have put it, between logic and civicknowledge: ‘the duty and office of Rhetoric is, to apply reason to theimagination for the better moving of the will’.29 Further, the comple-mentary scope of each sphere of learning is a way of insisting thatconversation between them makes the vita contemplativa as a whole anaid to the commonwealth. The Advancement is an elaborate defence ofwhat George Pettie, translating Stephano Guazzo, had put as a statement

26 William Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1938), 349, lines 69–70.

27 Ibid., 354, line 183.28 Ibid., 355, lines 198–200.29 Bacon, Advancement, 209.


of fact: all learning must be of use, the means to which is conversation.This has its own office in the perfection of learning.30

In other more clearly apologetic writers, the imagery of office andpersona is persistent as a mode of justification. The conventional earlymodern ideal of the poet was cloaked in the authority of antiquity. InGreece poets had been associated with divine inspiration, Homer’s blind-ness a gift of the gods that he might see further into people and the natureof things. Traditionally draped in purple, the poet was both a maker orcreator and a teacher, whose standing Plato in particular felt the need toconfront directly in asserting the primacy of philosophy. In lowland Scotsas well as English, the term maker could mean poet, and Sidney in hisApology and then Jonson in Timber drew on the philology of poietes toemphasise the poet’s creative capacities. Each elaborates on a pattern ofresponsibilities, Jonson explicitly approaching the critical ideal of a poemby detailing the qualities necessary for the poet: natural wit, a capacity toimitate nature, hard work and learning.31 Much the same pattern ofjustificatory moves is found in advancing rhetoric. As the sophists hadco-opted the purple cloaks of the poets by the fifth century BC, so there is asort of clothes-stealing between the theorists of poetry and rhetoric.32

Since antiquity poetry and rhetoric alike had pretensions to magicalpowers: the capacity to make and re-make social reality as the magiciancould re-make nature through appropriate incantation.33 To assuage fearof such Faustian ambition, the promoters of the activities laid a balancinginsistence on responsibility, the primacy of decorum and service tosomething greater. What, in a word, made something a liberty and nota licence, and made transformation and invention good things, was thetelos of the office served and the limit observed by the persona. Even Plato(as Sidney insisted) considered the powers of poetry and rhetoric permis-sible if subject to the end of philosophy, the love of wisdom. Cicero andQuintilian with respect to rhetoric, Longinus with respect to poetry, trodin his footsteps.

The understandings and expectations of poetry and rhetoric throughmedieval times and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued

30 George Pettie, Civil Conversation (1586), fols. 15–16, esp. 16r.31 Ben Jonson, ‘What is a Poet’, in Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (1641), inWorks,

ed. W. Gifford (London: Bickers and Southeron, 1875), vol. IX, 210–12.32 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), in Jones, English Critical Essays, 50–1; Jonson,

Timber, 218.33 Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1975), 3–16.

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to move within this compass.34 This was to participate in a veritabletradition of discussion of Man as imago Dei, that perforce involved thecorrelates of an omnipotent voluntarist God and a responsible rationalcreator. Man as the image of God was wonderfully creative, but to apoint: even in its most hyperbolic celebrations, such as that put forth byMarsilio Ficino, it was an image of office.35 From the Reformation,however, as I have indicated, the stress on the persona of the goodrhetorician or poet became rich with confessional implications andcould sometimes be used to re-specify the nature and significance oftheology. Thus Richard Pace on the much cited opening of Cicero’s Deinventione: as eloquence founds cities and helps create all the arts, so itsrole in theology is central. The good man, rhetorician and Christian areone in creative responsibility; Christ is the perfection of great oratory,good rhetoric a form of imitatio Christi.36 The Protestant ThomasWilson later made similar claims on the authority of the same Cicero-nian text. The rhetor comes close to God in his capacity to make andcivilise, not because of any uncontrolled and limitless power, but be-cause he gives a wise ordering. Without him, duty, service, callings,vocations cannot be sustained. He is, in short, God-like, a microcosm ofGod’s own office of offices. The closer he is to God, the closer towisdom itself.37 As George Puttenham also argued, whisking away therhetor’s purple to re-adorn the poet, because of the ‘high charge andfunction’ of poetry, it was necessary for poets to live holy lives, deep instudy and contemplation. Virtue made poets fit for prophecy. Theywere the first lawmakers and philosophers, keeping the commonwealthin order.38 The poet is an epitome of decorum, of ‘seemliness’. Comeli-ness, discretion, decency, Puttenham’s terms of amplification for seem-

34 Dr. John O. Ward has brought to my attention a fragment of William of Chartres referring to theofficium of rhetoric and its end, finis, Bruges, Bibliotheque de la ville, MS 553.s.xiv.

35 Marsilio Ficino, Theologica Platonica, discussed at length in Charles Trinkhaus, In our Image andLikeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1970), vol. II, 483–4.

36 Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. Frank Manley and RichardS. Sylvester (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1967); see Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, 109–14;cf. Rudolf Agrippa on the same Ciceronian text,De inventione dialectica libri tres (1479); and Juan deGuzman, La primera parte de la rhetorica (1589), ‘Convivium’, partially re-printed in WayneA. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 233–43.

37 See, at length, both Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553, 1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1909); and Angel Day, The English Secretary (1586, 1592), ed. Robert O. Evans(Florida: Scholar’s Facsimiles, 1967).

38 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), Introduction Baxter Hatherway (Ohio: KentState University Press, 1970), ch. 3.


liness, all imply discipline and moderation as a control on the transgres-sions of figurative creativity.39 Decorum is the courtly poet’s sprezzatura,making him an honest man and not a mere cunning dissembler.40 Thiskind of argument would echo through the pages of Paradise Lost inwhich Christ, as for Pace, is the supreme rhetorician, Lucifer theinverted parody, whose eloquence can sustain only a travesty of aproperly ordered world.

Sidney’s Apology is perhaps themost famous exploration of these themes.Although an apology for poetry, his discourse is of poets in the dissonantcontext of historians and philosophers. The central claim is that, of these,only the poet is a second creator to ‘be counted supernatural’ and ‘rangingfreely within the zodiac of his own wit’.41 The poet is at once an imitatorand a maker.42 This ranging is never a matter of capricious invention orIcarian flightiness, let alone popish fantasy to serve the interests of priests.Even when trading in the comic, the poet is a figure of responsibility.43 Hewas neither eccentric nor an individual, questing after originality for itsown sake.44 He was more of a craftsman, tied to God’s creation and inservice to an ethical vision. All the intellectual arts, and poetry’s immediatecompetitors are, he argued, ‘serving sciences’.45 Their shared end is to drawus towards perfection. The poet serves this end best by providing perfectpictures transcending the precepts of philosophy and the examples ofhistory. At a meta-level, or viewed reflexively, this claim about poetrymakes it singularly decorous that Sidney attempts more than poetic pre-cept, but a perfect picture of the poetic persona whose office embraces theadvancement of reformed religion; poetry can be an idiom of properdevotion.46 This ethos of creative religious responsibility is re-enforcedby reference to Cicero and buttressed by alignment with the institutional-ised office of priest as a mediator and mentor. The poet is also likened tothose exemplary types of social office-holder, the lawyer, the physician, andabove all the monarch.47 Poetry, Sidney had remarked at the outset, is ‘myown elected vocation’.48

39 Ibid., ch. 23. 40 Ibid., ch. 25. 41 Sidney, Apology, 7. 42 Ibid., 643 Ibid., 26, on comedy.44 Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1972 edn), 245.45 Sidney, Apology, 11, 13.46 Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early-Modern England

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 73–4.47 Sidney, Apology, 15, 21.48 Ibid., 2.

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The terms office and vocation were generally used as rough synonyms,and in Timber Jonson was reflecting as much on his own chosen, ormanufactured, vocation of poetic critic as on poetry itself. Poetry is thequeen of the arts, supreme in status, above even oratory.49 This standinghad made sound criticism all the more important. It was Aristotle, thegreatest of philosophers, who had taught the offices of proper criticism,judgment and the imitation of virtue. This ‘office of a true critic’ is nomere tinkering, nor is it a matter of dictating strict laws for poets tofollow.50 It is, rather, a matter of sincere judgment of the poet andsubject.51 Effectively, the poetic critic is the mediator, the priest, or, toanticipate Locke, an under-labourer in the poet’s commonwealth ofletters.

I I I

I want now to turn directly to office and persona of the philosopher,because what I have so far sketched has been the use of contested resourcesthat were employed also to promote philosophy itself as an office. Thisshould not be surprising, for defences of poetry and rhetoric made specificclaims to wisdom, and as conventionally philosophy was love of wisdom,this could be to appropriate philosophy to other intellectual domains.This tactic can be found in the writings of Puttenham and Wilson whothus exploited the almost indiscriminate range that philosophy couldhave, even to the knowledge of all arts under heaven and on earth.52

Moreover, in whatever sense it had, philosophy, like its immediate neigh-bours in intellectual office, was itself subject to suspicion, not least forundermining true belief. ‘Philosophers’, wrote Sir John Harington, ‘arefor the moste part the patryarcks to heretykes.’53 Although Sidney sawphilosophy as a distinct serving science, he came perilously close toclaiming that the poet was the true philosopher. As a reminder of thecontinued disciplinary slipperiness that the vocabulary of office allowed,we will see that Thomas Hobbes does go this far, if only for an unlikelymoment.Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, philosophy

could quite properly refer not to any specific activity, but to the end of

49 Jonson, Timber, 218. 50 Ibid., 220. 51 Ibid.52 Laurentius Goslicius, De optimo senatore (1593), 107.53 Sir John Harington, ‘Of the sowl of man and the original thearof’, in The Sixth Book of Vergil’s

Aeneid, 83.


any of them. Philosophical eclecticism exacerbated the potential instabil-ity. The philosopher could be a hunter and gather of other people’s gemsof wisdom, so adhering to no stable propositional doctrine. And, thoughlargely filtered out of professional philosophy’s own sense of its past,during this period degrees of eclecticism were pervasive.54 So, in anothersense of the word philosophy, it could be all the more important toestablish the philosopher as someone with a specific identity, a personaof his own, or, just occasionally, her own. Karen Green and JacquelineBroad show howMargaret Cavendish attempted to exploit exclusion fromsocialised office in order to reaffirm the value of the contemplative ideal.

Plato had made the most ambitious claims for the intellectual authorityof the philosopher. Aristotle had in some ways muted them and Aquinashad argued explicitly that metaphysics in particular had an office, con-ceived of in virtually Platonic terms as a responsibility of the highestwisdom to rule other disciplines and lesser claims to knowledge.55 Sidney’spoetic office had a long-standing and formidable opponent. For others,philosophy, more or less coherently understood, offered a guide for life.The quintessence of the vita contemplativa, it could be promoted as amentor for the vita activa in its full and varied potential. This was the casefor Bacon: as the office of the stomach was to nourish the whole body, sophilosophy made sense of all other professions.56 At this level of generality,this was a restatement of ancient arguments presented by Cicero, out ofPlato and Aristotle, and Aquinas out of all three; it is the duty of philosophyto make other realms of duty clear. Additionally, this provided a rationalefor the most eclectic of philosophers. It modelled the office of the philoso-pher (like that of the rhetor or poet) on the metaphorical projection of theoffice of God, to create and order all subordinate offices in the natural andhuman world. Analogically, it was to make philosophers kings.

Philosophical identity, then, was doubly protean. It had an unstablerelationship with rhetoric and poetry, and for some writers it offered a

54 The label itself is a little eclectic, as ‘ism’ terms are apt to be, but there is a difference between theapparent magpie eclecticism of John Aubrey, and the empirical eclecticism of Robert Boyle, whosehostility to systematisation was to systems developed in advance of adequate data. See Peter Anstey,The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. There is a difference between bothand the eclecticism of Walter Charleton which extended to using different theories for differentproblems.

55 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. J. P. Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.:Dumbox, 1995), xxix–xxxi; Richard Johnson, ‘Early-modern Natural Law and the Problem of theSacred State’ (Ph.D. thesis Griffith University, 2002), 41; it was fairly conventional to claim thatphilosophy’s office was to serve theology.

56 Bacon, Advancement, 93; for a succinct discussion of Bacon’s counterclaims to Sidney’s poet, seeGaukroger, Francis Bacon, 48–57.

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vision of human potential not unlike the picture of invention painted bythe apologists of rhetoric. The most famous, and arguably the mostmisread example of this is Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignityof Man.57 Since Burckhardt’s search for nascent individualism in theRenaissance, Pico’s seminal image has commonly been taken as an unre-stricted argument about human individuality, a celebration of Man’sprotean capacity. Yet Pico uses the notion of man as a metaphor forphilosophic creativity.58 He claims for the philosopher what Wilson,Puttenham and Sidney would use to vindicate poets and orators. Weare to celebrate the protean nature of philosophy, which is to say itsextensive intellectual liberty, because the philosopher’s is an office of suchimportance.It is the shared vocabulary of office used to define differences and

priorities that does so much to confuse them. The philosopher as livingthe highest form of the vita contemplativa, or as the instrument of the vitaactiva, persistently treads on the toes of the poet and rhetor.59 What isneeded is constant reassurance or affirmation that the activity has arationale, that creative and intellectual liberty is not licence, and thisgradually gets re-specified. Directly or indirectly, he serves the common-wealth, although always the immediate end of his office is the quest fortruth and wisdom. For Bacon, adapting this shared rhetoric, it was bydiscovery and understanding that the philosopher was creative, in gener-ating new works and eudaimonia through control of nature. It was thespecific means to this end that did most to give the philosopher distinc-tion. He was obliged to pursue free and thorough enquiry, and this hadthe attendant duty of taking nothing on authority and dismissing even themost elevated quacks of antiquity.60 But again we are not dealing withanything that was decisively defined. This intellectual freedom was dir-ectly analogous to that claimed by the counsellor, and similarly wedded tosovereign power.What can be seen, then, from Bacon’s attempted reform of philosophy

is the continued frisson of association with other realms of office, evenintimations of invasion of other intellectual and socially established

57 W. G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Symbol of his Age: Modern Interpretations of aRenaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981), for an invaluable discussion.

58 Ibid., esp. ch. 2.59 Bacon, Advancement, 229ff; Goslicius, De optimo, 57–9.60 Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 105–10; Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural

Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147–50.


domains of responsibility: the philosopher is something of a priestlymediator and a counsellor. Quite independently, Althusius, as Robertvon Friedeburg shows in his chapter, was about to argue for much thesame nexus of responsibilities. As a corollary to positioning philosophy asa pre-eminent serving science to the public good of the commonwealth,Bacon insisted upon the discipline of practised scepticism as a precondi-tion for informed judgment and advice. In a further way, his character-isation of philosophy as an activity in and for the public benefit was anaffirmation of the philosopher as an office-holder. For, in early modernEngland, the distinction between the public and the private was not usedto refer to complementary spheres of activity, a public sphere in contrastto a personal, domestic or private domain. The public denoted or con-noted the moral legitimacy of office-holding wherever it was found; theprivate designated the absence of office or right of action, or outrightcorruption wheresoever it might lurk. The argument, then, that philoso-phy produced public benefit, was more ethically charged than the utili-tarian assurance that it would be beneficial. It was a proclamation of themoral responsibilities and consequences by which a persona should bejudged.

For philosophers in Bacon’s increasingly fashionable idiom, sectariandogmatism would be inimical to the public burdens of philosophy. It ledback to reliance on authority and discipleship, and therefore to a curtail-ment of the critical faculties, behind all of which lay the argumentumartificiale of Catholic dogma. Boyle, whose religious casuistry and experi-mental empiricism re-enforced each other, would have Carneades as hisspokesman in The Skeptical Chymist ; the true philosopher was as pious ashe was eclectic.61 So the philosopher ranged not unlike Hobbes’s (undog-matic) spaniel over all domains of knowledge. Just as with rhetoric,however, intellectual status was tied to the reassuring display of a social-ised and decorous persona, the peripatetic image of the office. Thephilosopher’s moral economy of intellectual virtue had to be symbolicallymade manifest in an exemplary way of life.62

These generalisations apply particularly to Hobbes, despite the fact thathe was at odds with the dedicated inductivism of Baconian method, andrather than an eclectic was a system-builder given to a faith in a priori

61 Robert Boyle, The Skeptical Chymist (1661); Michael Hunter, Scrupulosity and Science (Wood-bridge: Boydell, 2001), 68–71.

62 Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 50–1, 44–56; Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, (Oxford:Blackwell, 1995); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early-modern Germany, (Cambridge: University Press, 2001), are all studies recapturing this point.

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principles. It is true also that his claims to singularity, his dismissive andcavalier treatment of others, isolated him and he was further marginalisedby his enemies. Nevertheless, by employing the shared vocabulary ofintellectual office, and assuming a self-image appropriate to it, he blurredwhat were often polemically exaggerated differences with those aroundhim. After all, his vehement hostility to citation of authority, his beliefthat everything should be taken back to first reckonings, his hostility tothe purblind controversialism of philosophical discipleship (Greek dog-matism had wrecked Christianity), to the schools and ‘Aristotlty’, werethemselves but Baconian dicta writ loud. Indeed, as has recently beenrecognised, it is his not being elected to the Royal Society that needsexplaining.63

Hobbes was a most procedurally minded defender of a discipline ofphilosophy, which is to say that he also had a clear awareness of intellec-tual modality; what was forbidden the philosopher was permissible toothers. So too there was a style of life fit to the procedural calling. In hisself-defence, he claimed that he lived a life appropriate to his intellectualendeavours. ‘My Life and Writings speak one Congruous Sense’, a roughtranslation of ‘Nam mea vita meis non est incongrua scriptis.’64 In hisfamous aphorism that he and fear were born twins, a central explanatoryconcept of Hobbesian philosophy is given a poetically autobiographicalorigin.65 Hobbes’s critics saw this unity in a different light. He wasaccused of arrogance, perversity and libertine atheism, and in this wayhis philosophy was attacked through the persona; and Hobbes did seem tolack the modest and undogmatic disposition so often taken to be thedecorous sign of philosophy.I believe that Aubrey’s elaborate ‘Life’ took a cue from the asserted

unity of life and doctrine; it was itself ‘the last Office’ to his dear friend.66

Fittingly, the ‘Life’ was a defence of philosophy through exemplificationof virtuous conduct, a rebuttal of the indiscriminate accusations levelled atHobbes. As the philosopher of motion, Hobbes had a mind, remarkedAubrey, that was never still, but the movement was neither random norwanton. It was part of the perpetual quest to understand the causes of

63 Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, (Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 2002), 317–35.

64 Thomas Hobbes, The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury (1680), 18; cf. Thomae HobbesiiMalmesburiensis Vita (1679), 14.

65 Hobbes, Vita, 2.66 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), quoted

Introduction, 83.


things. Aubrey notes Hobbes’s melancholic temperament, for melancho-lia was the ague of the philosophic mind, a point most thoroughlyexplored in the labyrinthine analyses of Burton’s Anatomy. Melancholiawas a preoccupation with contemplation, doubt and perplexity which fewself-respecting philosophers wished to deny, or probably escape.67 Thepersonal qualities Aubrey attributed to his friend – his curiosity, openness,generosity and charity, his energy, enjoyment of good company, discip-line, consideration and abstemiousness – were all qualities echoing thoseattributed to Socrates. They were all singularly appropriate to the Epicur-ean persona Aubrey defends. He noted in his ‘Life’ that Hobbes would notwear a beard, wanting his reputation to depend upon his wit not the self-advertising symbol of the sage.68 This probably referred to the beard-wearers derided by Lucian and alluded to by More. And Hobbes certainlymade an appropriate Lucianic commitment explicit in De corpore, al-though, as Butler maintained, whether with Hobbes in mind or not,nowadays philosophers have to shave to maintain their reputations.69

The symbolic manifestations of paraded office could always be decodedin opposing ways, like the Quaker’s plain dress, an expression of humility,could be seen as a proof of hypocrisy. Irrespective of this, the juncture ofproposition and persona helps explain the ease with which philosopherslike Hobbes shifted into satire and ad hominem argument and could beattacked in the same fashion. Discrediting a persona was hardly the irrele-vance or exercise in indecorum it might now seem when doctrine wasfused with persona and occupation of the office was at issue.

More surprisingly, perhaps, Hobbes was capable of running poetry andphilosophy together in a way that Sidney had made thoroughly familiar.70

In praising Davenant’s Gondibert, he discussed the poet’s office, partly byelaborating on a counterpoint between the responsibilities of the ancientand the Christian poet, and partly by stressing the dangers in the abuse ofthe powers of eloquence and figurative creativity. At first he distinguishedthe requirements of poetry and philosophy. He discussed fancy, imagin-

67 Independently of Burton see, for example, Sir Thomas Overbury, His Wife with additions of NewCharacters (1622) (unpaginated), on the melancholy man as all contemplation and no action; JohnSharp, ‘About Religious Melancholy’, inWorks (1754), vol. III, 21–38. Writers like Walter Charletonwould announce their serious philosophical credentials by remarking on the tyranny of themelancholic spirit.

68 Aubrey, Brief Lives, 233.69 Thomas Hobbes, De corpore (1655), in Opera . . . latine, and English Works, ed. Sir William

Molesworth (1839–45), vol. I, ix; Butler, ‘A Philosopher’, in Characters, 95.70 For an astute intellectual association between Sidney and Hobbes, see Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric

and Philosophy in Hobbes’s Leviathan, (New York: Garland, 1991), ch. 3.

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

IV

By the end of the seventeenth century, the philosopher and the naturalphilosopher were partially distinct. Daniel superficially sounds like aprophet: ‘of one science’ another was indeed ‘born’.72 There was no singleor simple reason for this. Charles Schmitt, for example, has suggested indeflationary vein that it had much to do with the logistics of textbookproduction.73 But Bacon’s re-orientation of the office of the philosopher,and the momentous work in natural philosophy by figures such as Hooke,Boyle and Newton, are also crucial. Their work, together with theorchestrated energies and controlled image of the Royal Society (andothers of similar style and function established in France and Tuscany)could, retrospectively, be seen as vindications of Baconian procedure.Irrespective of achievements, Bacon’s image of natural philosophy as aninductive communal endeavour seemed to be transformed into praxisthrough the development of networks of scholars communicating prob-lems, experiments and discoveries in a way that distinguished them fromthe more isolated and text-based work of deductive metaphysics, theologyand logic. The Royal Society presented a public image that was almost aritualised application of Baconian expectations at odds with the evidenceof actual discovery, debate and proof.74 Of all people, Bacon could betaken as providing an authoritative text on the scope and value ofphilosophy; add to this Hobbesian excoriations of Schoolmen and hisrelated specifications of the necessary linguistic and political conditions

71 Thomas Hobbes, Answer to the Preface Before Gondibert (1651), in English Works, vol. IV.72 Daniel, Defence, 63.73 Charles B. Schmitt, ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin

Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988), 792–804.

74 I am indebted to Dr John Schuster for this point.


for any Baconian communal activity, and we find by the end of the centurya partial change of focus from the relationships between the offices of poet,rhetor and philosopher, to those between philosopher, natural philosopherand mathematician. Part of Richard Cumberland’s critique of Hobbes wasthat he had wrongly relied upon deductive mathematics to delineatephilosophy, when the empirically attuned mathematics of probability wasmore relevant to understanding the world.75

Stephen Shapin has gone so far as to suggest an intimate relationshipbetween the emerging image of natural science and the development ofmodern ‘selfhood’. Because the new science was a communal, publicenterprise among gentlemen, it required modesty and respect for thearguments and experiments of fellows, the openness to attend to allrelevant evidence, and for hypotheses to be tested in a public forum,sustained by the technologies of print.76 He is right to stress the relation-ship between proposition and persona, and that the shift away from thisconstitutes a change of ethical perspective.77 It is clear, however, that theconstruction or presentation of a persona was hardly a singular or novelachievement. In taking over the philosophical dialogue, for example,scientists like Boyle worked with canons of civility that had been charac-teristic of its functioning from antiquity to the Renaissance. In TheRepublic, even Thrasymachus is tamed. The significance of a figure likeJohn Wilkins, and the collaboration between Locke and the gardeners atOxford, would seem to suggest that natural philosophy was probably notexclusively the province of gentlemen, or if it was, we need to keep inmind how unusually open was the category of gentleman in seventeenth-century England.78 Neither was a gentlemanly preoccupation with civilconversation in any way new when Boyle emphasised its importance. Ithad been an aspect of aristocratic and courtly offices for sufficiently longfor the dueling provoked by its breakdown to be seen as native.79 Boylefurther adapted the aristocratic virtue of liberality to the ends of enquiry –it was an undogmatic generosity towards the work of others in thephilosophical community. His chastity, like that of Hobbes, was a virtue

75 Richard Cumberland, De legibus naturae (1672).76 Stephen Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).77 Ibid., e.g. 409–10.78 For Locke’s botanical interests and assistance to the Oxford gardeners, I have relied on Peter

Anstey’s exceptional paper, ‘Locke and Botany’, given at the John Locke Symposium, Brisbane,July 2004.

79 Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early-Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), 178–9.

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appropriate to the true Epicurean’s love of knowledge and finding truepleasure in the wisdom it gave. There was also an insistently Christiandimension to this. The Pauline injunction (2 Timothy 2:24, 25), was afamiliar text concerning heresy. Those in error should, as Hobbes hadreminded his critics in an attack on sectarian dogmatism, be treated withgentleness, patience and meekness.80 Here are dicta of the utmost civility,that are anything but the preserve of the new men of science, issuing fromthe mouth of one of the old, one too easily accused of incivility. In all, it ismisleading to construe the continuing vitality of a register as a newideology and to see a persona like Boyle’s as fashioning a modern self.81

It seems to me altogether more helpful to posit different inflections andcontextual applications of a shared and robust vocabulary, necessarily usedand adapted by any who wanted to claim the legitimacy of intellectualoffice. In this context, the establishment and organisation of the RoyalSociety under the aegis of the sovereign can be viewed as an attempt toaccommodate natural philosophy to the established expectations of socialoffice. It is not just that it provided, as it were, the institutional persona ofBaconian theory, but also that it required formalised oaths of initiation tomembership, and had a governing body and presidency. Above all, in theseventeenth century, as I have indicated, the licit oath initiated intoestablished office and announced a new persona whose qualities wereexpected to be appropriate to it. There was nothing quite like thissolidifying solemnity for poet, rhetor, philosopher or critic. By the endof the seventeenth century, natural science and philosophy might well bediverging activities geared to differing subject matters, but no more thanwith poetry or rhetoric at the end of the sixteenth century was one personaentirely denied the sanctioning, even sanctifying, clothing of the other.Robert Boyle lived the scientific persona with conspicuous success, to besure, and his critiques of Hobbes were an effective way of presenting theopenness of eclecticism, labouring in the interests of wisdom as analternative to the a prioristic over-reaching, the intellectual tyranny ofspeculative dogmatism. Hobbes, the unkindest cut of all, was too muchthe scholastic. Nevertheless, the contrast between Hobbes and Boyle onthe general character of philosophy would not seem as clear as it has if itwere not also informed by the knowledge that Hobbes was wrong andBoyle right about the vacuum.

80 Thomas Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresy and the Punishment thereof (c. 1668), inEnglish Works, vol. IV, 407–8.

81 See Shapin, A Social History, 160–8.


Locke went further in calling philosophy a matter of under-labouringfor natural philosophy in the commonwealth of letters.82 With thesemetaphors we have in some ways come a long way from the world ofPico and Sidney. There is something new and important to philosophiseabout, but Locke’s image of philosophy still draws on the promotionalrhetorics of office. The philosopher’s modesty is the humility of knowingan office and its limits, a point spelled out in Richard Yeo’s chapter. Lockecasts his argument in the language of duty and responsibility, of endsand functions and what has impeded their fulfilment. The answer is, ingeneral terms, cut and stitched with much the same materials of intellec-tual office and its abuse as Bacon and Hobbes had used: the over-reachingobfuscation of past philosophy and the delusions of rhetoric which areattacked tout court by ad hominem accounts of motivation, so stigmatis-ing the persona of the rhetorician as the enemy of the under-labouringphilosopher.

As Locke’s modest toil amounted to an argument about what and howanything in the world can be studied and knowledge communicated, hisvision of philosophy can be encompassed by Bacon’s analogy of thestomach. And for Locke also, this was not just a matter of dry doctrineor pure contemplation but of knowing enough to live as we should.83 Inthis way his revised image of philosophical responsibility is at one withShaftsbury’s reassuringly Augustan echo of Platonic eudaimonia: the pur-pose of philosophy is to make us happy, the contemplative still served theactive life, on the basis of which God would judge the soul. Philosophycan never be reduced to a matter of proposition and discipline; it is tied toand is an expression of character.84 The coalescence of doctrine andpersona comprising philosophical office took time to dissolve. How rele-vant this is to understanding even the most academic (and so superficiallyfamiliar) philosophy of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Germany canbe seen by Ian Hunter’s dramatic recapturing of the sense of office thatdivided the civil philosophies of writers like Pufendorf and Thomasiusfrom Kantian metaphysics. Kant can be construed as achieving adialectical resolution of his predecessors’ failures to reach his positiononly by reducing competing understandings of a way of life manifestedin doctrines to a set of metaphysical propositions; we begin by seeing

82 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Epistle.83 John Locke, ‘Thus I think’, in Peter King, The Life of John Locke (1830), vol. II, 126–7.84 Anthony Cooper, Lord Shaftsbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711), vol.

II, 207.

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things on his terms and, unsurprisingly, he provides a resolution.85 It is amicrocosm of the whole problem of writing a history of philosophy.Office, then, provided a currency of promotion, defence and critique

for intellectual activity, a vocabulary of ends, limits, essential liberties andattributes to be co-opted to the extent that it kept fluid, or could blursubstantively, different intellectual endeavours. Fuller disciplinary delin-eation perhaps required a diminution of the status of the language ofoffice; or perhaps an increasing differentiation in the minutiae of practiceaccompanied by institutional expression gradually over-stretched thecommon resources of advocacy and demonisation. Either way, we nowlive in a world in which the promotional rhetoric of office has a moreuncertain place and a lower threshold of plausibility when, to borrowPufendorf’s expression, it is applied to the entia moralia of the mind.

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


CHAPTER 4

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

Catherine Curtis497314

The serio-comic persona of the philosopher in the early modern periodwas adopted by many humanist authors with enormous enthusiasm. Inthe ancient satiric traditions of Old Comedy, Horatian and Juvenaliansatire, and Menippean and Lucianic satire, Italian and northern Europeanhumanists found a wealth of argumentative strategies that could bedeployed against rival schools of philosophy and theology. Such strategiesalso served to criticise abuses of power perpetrated by princes and popes,magistrates, councillors, scholastic theologians and lawyers. The satiricforms, adapted to contemporary circumstances, had as their fundamentalpurpose the censure of the guilty and the unmasking of truth. If the aimwas serious, the ludus guaranteed the effect.

But the use of such serio-comic forms of writing could be as dangerousto the humanist philosopher as to the ancient satirist, despite the distan-cing techniques of the mask. Juan Luis Vives, glossing Augustine’s Decivitate Dei on classical Greek and Roman satire, explained both the valueand the dangers posed by unfettered freedom of speech to the polis orrespublica, and to the satirist himself.1 Vives was friend to the DutchErasmus, and the English courtiers Sir Thomas More and Richard Pace,all associated with the English court of Henry VIII and all aware of thenecessity for liberty of speech in promoting a healthy and united Christiancommonwealth and of the constraints placed upon that liberty in the papaland secular monarchies of their time. A century later the Anglican clericand librarian of Christ Church College, Oxford, Robert Burton sat in theOxford libraries reading and annotating the writings of Vives, Erasmus,More and Pace. In The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton adopted the sameDemocritean persona or mask and for much the same reasons – so that he

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

90

might also ‘represent the city to the city’ without meeting the fate ofothers executed for allegedly treasonous words by English monarchs.2

It was Pace who first called Thomas More the son of Democritus andthe kin of Demonax, while Erasmus followed Pace’s characterisation ofMore shortly after.3 Erasmus adopted the mask of Folly in his Moriaeencomium (The Praise of Folly) which shares in the heritage of Democritus.The Cynic philosopher Diogenes is evoked by Pace and Erasmus, whileLucian’s Menippus informs the satire of More and Erasmus. These arenot the only personae – all three humanists assume multiple satiric perso-nae, themselves part of classical, particularly Greek, lineages that present acomposite, complex and flexible image to the world in their writings.What were they attempting to communicate about the life and office ofthe philosopher more generally, as exemplified by More, and the practiceof the related scientiae, philosophy, rhetoric and theology? Why create thisparticular Democritean genealogy and fashion it as a persona assumed notjust by an individual philosopher, but a group of philosophers?4 Howdoes a conception of office, civil and/or clerical, fare when it facesparrhesia modelled on classical forms of advice-giving and admonition?What reception did Pace, More and Erasmus receive? And more generally,does satire have a distinctive, but frequently unrecognised, place in theactivity of early modern philosophy? And does the use of multiple andmutable satiric personae shared by a group problematise the notion of astable philosophical persona as presented by other contributors to thisvolume?The following discussion seeks to consider these questions in its study

of the satiric fortunes of Richard Pace, Thomas More, Erasmus and, morebriefly, Robert Burton. My argument is that philosophy as an activityinvolved engagement with one’s critics and those peddling false opinion,in addition to the propagation of insight. It crossed national borders, wassituated in diverse settings and was expressed through many genres.

2 On Burton, see Introduction, The Anatomy of Melancholy ed. T. C. Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling andR. L. Blair with intro. by J. B. Bamborough (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon press, 1989–2000), vol. II;Angus Dowling, ‘Rhetorical Structure and Function in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Rhetorica 19(2001), 1–48. See chapter 3 by Conal Condren on the poet Collingbourne’s execution.

3 Erasmus’s famous letter to Ulrich von Hutten composed in 1519, with, I believe, some assistancefrom Pace, who apparently stayed with Erasmus in Antwerp in May 1519 on his way to Mainz.Collected Works of Erasmus (86 vols. planned, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974– ) (hereafterCWE), vol. VII, Eps. 986, 988, 999. Edward Surtz has compared the similarity of the portraits ofMore by Pace and Erasmus in ‘Richard Pace’s Sketch of Thomas More’, Journal of English andGermanic Philology 57 (1958), 36–50.

4 Cf. Stephen Gaukroger on the early to mid-seventeenth-century philosopher.

The laughing philosopher in the early modern period 91

Philosophical activity was conceived as an indispensable therapy to curethe distemper in Christian respublica and so reduce civil disharmony. Thesatiric philosopher needed to justify his methods, however, and had to bemindful of potential accusations of defamation and sedition.

The career of Thomas More is familiar – he occupied many roles andoffices as magistrate, councillor to Henry VIII, poet, orator, philosopher,Lord Chancellor and Catholic controversialist.5 Erasmus dedicated him-self to the contemplative life as a theologian, educator through textbookssuch as De copia and the Adagia, and more detached commentator onEuropean religious and political affairs. He sought patronage, oftenunsuccessfully, but was never directly attached to a court. He did putforward counsel in his Institutio principis Christiani which was dedicatedto Charles V, and in adages such as the anti-war Dulce bellum inexpertus.As a cleric he retained a certain independence from curial duties. LikeMore, the less well-known Richard Pace occupied multiple offices, manyconcurrently, and struggled to resolve the tension inherent in the oppos-ition of the active life and the contemplative life.6 Pace studied in theuniversities of Padua, Bologna and Ferrara under the supervision offamous humanist scholars and translators in the fields of Latin, Greek,rhetoric, medicine, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and the naturalsciences – such as Niccolo Leonico Tomeo of Padua,7 Paolo Bombace ofBologna8 and Leoniceno of Ferrara.9 Pace’s long-enduring friendshipwith Erasmus dates from these years. Pace was successively secretary to

5 John Guy structures his recent excellent biography as a series of questions around More’s variousprivate and public roles and offices. See Thomas More, (London: Arnold, 2000).

6 Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004).

7 Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University ofCambridge, 1996), ch.. 1. Jervis Wegg, Richard Pace: A Tudor Diplomatist, (New York: Barnes andNoble; London: Methuen, 1932), 9. For Leonico, see Daniela De Bellis, ‘La vita e l’ambiente diNiccolo Leonico Tomeo’, Quaderni per la storia dell’Universita di Padova 18 (1980), 36–75; and ‘Iveicoli dell’anima nell’analisi di Niccolo Leonico Tomeo’, Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia Universitadi Firenze, 3 (1981), 1–21. See also D. J. Geanakoplos, ‘The Career of the Little-Known RenaissanceScholar Nicholas Leonicus Tomaeus’, Byzantina 13 (1985), 355–72; and Contemporaries of Erasmus –A Biographical Register, ed. P. Bietenholz et al. (3 vols., Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985–7),vol. II, 323–4. Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603(Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1998), for Leonico’s relationship with English humanists at theUniversity of Padua. Pace, Latimer and Tunstall were the second generation of Englishmenconnected to the anglophile Leonico (the first comprising Linacre and Grocyn).

8 On Bombace, see Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. I, 163; Pierre de Nolhac, La bibliotheque de FulvioOrsini (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1887), 247, 395; D. J. Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 258–9; and Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, ed. A. M.Ghisalberti (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960– ).

9 For Leoniceno, see Daniela Mugnai Carrara, ‘Profilo di Niccolo Leoniceno’, Interpres 2 (1979) 169–212; and William F. Edwards, ‘Niccolo Leoniceno and the Origins of Humanist Discussion of

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Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge in Rome, First Secretary to Henry VIII,and Dean of St Paul’s. European contemporaries, notably the Venetians,thought Pace to be one of England’s most valued diplomats andgifted scholars and linguists, and, should Cardinal Wolsey become pope,a possible successor to him as chief counsellor to Henry VIII. A mediatingfigure between Italian and English humanism, Pace’s humanist andscriptural studies were circumscribed by his full and difficult diplomaticservice, and his mental health was further compromised by Wolsey’senmity. His mentors Erasmus and Leonico both lamented that the activelife robbed him of his health and time to devote to writing.Pace, More and Erasmus were mutually supportive in a number of

areas – Erasmian scriptural exegesis, the advocacy of Greek studies and theliberal arts and sciences (especially in England), the promotion of ecclesi-astical reform, and the ideal of peace in Christendom. They subscribed tothe philosophia Christi, and to the vital place of the arts of eloquencewithin it. They saw the need to educate others in the skills required todiscriminate between true and false teachings; and they each contributedto Erasmus’s dispute with the theologian Martin Dorp to this end.I wish to consider each in turn in these contexts and discover what theyconceived the role of philosophical satire to be.

RICHARD PACE’S ‘DE FRUCTU’

Pace reflected the interests of his teacher Leonico Tomeo in Plutarch andLucian as excellent means through which to teach Greek, ethics andrhetoric in his own published collections of translations.10 ThomasLinacre, who studied with Pace, cast Lucian as the purveyor of Greekwithout tears.11 The hybrid satirical forms and essays of the urbane andwitty writer of the Second Sophistic could also be accommodated tocomment on contemporary theological and philosophical conflicts, as

Method’, in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed.E. P. Mahoney (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 283–305.

10 The first published 1514 or 1515 is dedicated to Cardinal Bainbridge and addressed to students, andis only the third book by an Englishman ever to be printed at Rome (by Jacopo Mazzochi); itconsists of Plutarch’s Quomodo poterit quis ab inimicis aliquid commodi reportare and De modoaudiendi, Lucian’s Demonax and Apollonius of Tyrana’s Epistola consolatio. The translations werereprinted in editions of 1522 in Venice, with additional translations of Plutarch’sDe avaritia andDegarrulitate. De Bellis, ‘La vita’, 53.

11 Letter to John Claymond in Erasmus: Lectures and wayfaring sketches, ed. and trans. P. S. Allen(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 153. Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 26; Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influ-ence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), 81ff.


Erasmus and More were to explain in regard to their own desire totranslate Lucian’s comic dialogues.12 One of Pace’s published translationsfrom Greek to Latin was of Lucian’s Demonax. In Lucian’s treatise,Demonax the philosopher is presented as free of pomposity, and continu-ally laughing and jesting, while he challenges established authorities(religious sages, sophists, prophets, magicians and philosophers) andexposes the foolishness of the alazoneia. Gentler than misanthropic Cynicpreaching, much of the satiric humour is based on self-deprecating ironyas revealed in puns and other wordplay.13

Leonico Tomeo also drew on the psychological and atomistic theoriesof Democritus in, for example, his discussions of the senses and the causesof premonitions in the Parva naturalia. This famous Aristotelian transla-tion and commentary is dedicated to Pace, who presented it to theVenetian senate for publication in 1523.14 From classical sources Democri-tus, the Lawmaker and Recorder of Abdera (?460–357 BC), was known tothe Renaissance as the ‘laughing philosopher’. The most extensive devel-opment of the story of Democritus is found in the spurious Letters ofHippocrates, an epistolary novel in which the physician goes to Abdera tocure the laughing philosopher, whom he declares more sane than othermen.15 His treatise On Cheerfulness defined the moral ideal and psych-ology of moderation. In the constant combat between reason and passion,moderation is the only rational course since desires are permanent andrecurrent, and the corresponding pleasures fleeting. Democritus wascharacteristically praised for his keen powers of observation, excellentwit, and learning in philosophy, theology, astronomy, ethics, physicsand mathematics. Horace and Juvenal imagined him alive again, witness-ing and laughing at contemporary follies. Lucian represented Zeus asputting Democritus and the pendant figure of the weeping Heraclitus

12 CWE, Ep. vol. II 193, 115–16; The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (14 vols., New Haven, Conn.,and London: 1963– ) (hereafter CWM), vol. III, Part 1, Translations of Lucian, ed. C. R. Thompson,Letter to Ruthall, 2–8, 3–9 and xv–lv. R. Bracht Branham, ‘Utopian Laughter: Lucian and ThomasMore’, Moreana Miscellanea 22 (1985), 23–43.

13 On Demonax as a Lucianic type, see R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedyof Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 59.

14 Leonico Tomeo, Aristotelis stagiritae parva quae vocant naturalia (Paris: Simon Colinaeum, 1530),Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark Rel.a.533.

15 Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. Frank Manley and RichardS. Sylvester (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1967), 104, 105. Charles H. Kahn,‘Democritus and the Origins of Moral Psychology’, American Journal of Philology 106 (1985) 1–31;Z. Stewart, ‘Democritus and the Cynics’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958), 179–91.

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up for sale as examples of the philosophic creeds of smiles and tears,emphasising the Stoic affinities of the latter.Pace applied this anecdotal framework of Democritus/Demonax to

More in his De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, published within monthsof the third edition of Utopia in early 1518 and sharing the same editorsand printer, John Froben. More is cast by Pace as the philosopher of theserio-comic type descended from Socrates, who deflates the pretensions ofcritics and auditors with his sharp and self-deprecating wit. In order toappreciate the richness and meaning of More’s Democritean characterisa-tion, it is first necessary to understand more of Pace’s satire. De fructu wascomposed as a Stoic consolation during a most difficult diplomaticmission trying to raise mercenaries amongst the Swiss, and dedicated toJohn Colet and his students at the newly established St Paul’s School, aswell as to pedagogues and students more generally. I have argued else-where that this Menippean satire modelled on Martianus Capella andFulgentius was part of the Erasmian campaign to encourage the study ofGreek and the liberal arts and sciences in northern Europe, and inparticular England. Its presentation of the unity and hierarchy of the artsand sciences is Italian in conception. Theology is the highest scientia, andconnected with sacred law. Philosophy follows, being the contemplationof the human and divine and encompasses both ethics and metaphysics.16

The companions of philosophy are the branches of mathematics, whiledialectic is the third part of philosophy. The three philosophies employthe training of the quadrivium and the trivium. The De fructu concen-trates on the imperfect language arts of rhetoric, grammar and dialecticwhich are more elementary, but foundational, to the higher sciences. Theseven liberal arts and sciences are personified, and their serio-comicdeclamations dramatise current philosophical and theological debates.Pace developed what in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive

argument for the unity of theology, philosophy and rhetoric, and theirconnection to virtue. De fructu responds to the Chaucerian paradox that‘the more learned you are, the less wise you become’, with the desire toprove that learning is superior to all other human goods.17 According toCato, says Pace, the root of all virtue is bitter, but the fruit is sweet, andIsocrates had applied this notion to learning itself, so that all virtues

16 Pace, De fructu, 36, 37.17 Ibid., 14, 15. The proverb originates in Aesop’s Tale of the Wolf and the Mare; Aesop was a favoured

pedagogical text at the time and More was to draw upon it often in The Dialogue of Comfort.


originate in learning.18 Gaining an education may not always be withoutdifficulties, but as a boy matures he comes to appreciate that compen-sation comes in the form of increase in virtue and inner happiness.19 Pacesets out to survey the various sciences useful and pertinent to the organisa-tion of human life. Men cannot attain the three things on which all actionis based – justice, honesty and utility – without learning. ‘I speak of theutility which the Stoics regard as part of honour and which Christianscannot easily distinguish from it, unless they want to praise the utility offraud, deceit, greed, and innumerable evil arts.’20 In the course of the Defructu, as in these opening remarks, Pace repeatedly connects the fruits oflearning to the qualities of the beautiful (pulcher), the right (rectum), thelaudable (laudabile), the honourable (honestum) and the expedient(utile).21

While admitting that it is difficult to refute the case that prudentiawithout learning is preferable to learning without prudentia (Quintilian’sposition on the question), Pace argues that although the man character-ised by the former is capable of managing his business and domesticaffairs well, it is only when the two are joined that he is able to considerthe higher matters of nature and God, in whose image he is made.22 But a‘prudent’ world judges as foolish both learning for use in the temporalsphere and, particularly, theology – the highest of the sciences. Ridicule isreserved for those whose learning and preaching originate in Christ,spurning the Epicurean vita voluptuosa and directing all their energies to

18 Ibid., 14, 15. This sententia of Isocrates was set as an exercise in the chreia or anecdote in theProgymnasmata of Aphthonius, and Pace here provides a model chreia. R. F. Hock, The Chreia inAncient Rhetoric, vol. I:s The Progymnasmata (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), Chreia 43, 227–8:‘Isocrates said that education’s root / is bitter, its fruit sweet’. As George Kennedy explains,students were assigned a chreia to work out under the headings of ‘praise of the chreia;paraphrase; statement of the cause; example of the meaning; contrast and comparison; testimonyof others; epilogue’. Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983), 61.

19 Pace, De fructu, 122, 123.20 Ibid., 26, 27: ‘De illa autem utilitate loquor, quam ab honestate Stoici non separant, nec Christiani

commode separare possunt, nisi uolunt illam laudare utilitatem, quam fraus, dolus, auaritia, &aliae innumerabiles mala artes comparant’. Recognising the complexity of the issue, Erasmus’sEcclesiastes inquires whether honestum, which includes what is right, beautiful and decorous, can beseparated from utile. Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (10 vols., Amsterdam: NorthHolland, 1969– ) ord. 5, vol. IV, 312–16. Manfred Hoffman, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneuticof Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 205–8.

21 Pace, De fructu, 27, 26: ‘Igitur si omnem humanam uitam accurate & penitus introspicias, nihillaudabiliter, nihil bene, nihil recte fieri absque doctrina, liquido patebit’. cf. 30–2, 33–5.

22 Ibid., 16, 17. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (4 vols. London andCambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1920–2), VI.v.11.

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attaining eternity.23 As the much cited hornblower of the De fructucounters to Pace, overhearing guests at a banquet praising the benefitsof education, the learned are all beggars, and the most illustrious of them,Erasmus, is married to Lady Poverty, as Erasmus himself writes in one ofhis letters.24 Pace’s own situation has its paradoxes and tensions. He maybe free by nature but he is not by choice, as his own education hasrendered him of great service to Henry VIII as the servant of CardinalWolsey. But to serve one’s country exceeds all liberty.25 Learning is hisgreat consolation in adversity.26

Refuting an imaginary opponent in utramque partem in his prefatoryletter to Colet’s students, Pace declares that he would nevertheless preferto be the pagan Cynic Diogenes who sowed good rules and clear examplesthan a false Christian who engenders hatred, deception, enmity, discordand war.27 With his customary freedom of speech, Diogenes had con-demned what he saw was reprehensible and lauded and held up forimitation what was done well, and the students are informed that thekyrias doksas of the Cynics or select sententiae originated in this practice.28

In contrast the imaginary adversary is said to perpetually flatter, assentand adulate, praising to the heavens that which should excite the mostvituperation.29 This false and self-interested Christian perverts the sacred

23 Card and dice playing, the reading of pernicious romances, drinking and hunting are frivolous anddamaging pastimes. Cf. Erasmus on the perils of reading medieval chivalric romances. JamesD. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978), 59–66.

24 Pace, De fructu, 22, 23. Cf. CWE, vol. III, Ep. 421. Pace here draws attention to Erasmus’sprogramme of letter publication. See Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, The Construction ofCharisma in Print (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993) for Erasmus’s promotion ofan idealised image of the scholar-theologian.

25 Pace, De fructu, 12: ‘Liber sum, natura quidam, sed non voluntate . . .patriae etiam seruire omnemsuperat libertatem’. De copia recommended the invention of the student’s own sententiae to suit thematter at hand, as well as the appropriation of those of authors. CWE, vol. XXIV, 626–7.

26 Pace, De fructu, 124, 125.27 Ibid., 16, 17. In the Sileni Alcibiades, Erasmus saw Diogenes as a philosopher worthy to be placed

besides Epictetus, the first-century Stoic sage so honoured by the Christians for his resistance toNero, and Socrates – not as rival philosophical schools but collectively as Sileni, prefiguring thehidden wisdom of Christ. M. A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth,1980), 217. In a letter to the future Emperor Charles V in 1516, Erasmus describes Diogenes ashaving a lofty and unshakeable mind, superior to all mortal things, able to bear immense burdens.CWE, vol. III, Ep. 393, 249.

28 Pace, De fructu, 16, 17. A Cynic collection would contain a number of brief characterisations of the‘wise man’ and ‘the fool’. It has been suggested that the sayings attributed to Democritus were partof a common store of maxims preserved by the Cynics and probably adapted for more convenientuse. Stewart, ‘Democritus and the Cynics’, 184–5. In Erasmus’s De recta pronunciatione theinterlocutor ‘Lion’ states that ethics is taught by aphorisms, especially those which refer to theChristian religion and one’s duties towards society. CWE, vol. XXVI, 387.

29 Pace, De fructu, 16, 17.


religion of Christ and early Christianity, neglects sacred theology, andpursues wealth and sensual pleasures, is likened to those later Cynics whodid not imitate the good example of Diogenes but corrupted the sect.30 Itbecomes clear that Pace refers more specifically to the clergy here. Even so,the false Christian cannot fail to be attracted to the wise teaching of thegood and upright preacher who addresses the vulgus.31 Pace insists, there-fore, that the opponent changes his proverb and judge that no one is wiseunless learned. This discussion is an exemplary exercise in contentiodemonstrativa, an exercise of praise or blame of one through contrast withanother.32

Diogenes, then, is one model for Renaissance preachers and counsellorsto imitate in his uncompromising and courageous Cynic laudes andvituperationes which taught virtue from vice.33 Pace turns also to theclassical Greek and Roman orators to provide a comprehensive methodof advising, preaching, teaching and exegesis – a substitute for the arspraedicandi, the highly systematic manuals for thematic sermons.34 Para-phrasing Isocrates and Cicero in her declamation, the personified figure of‘Rhetoric’ describes eloquence as both the civilising force in human life,transforming beast into rational man, and the liberal scientia which isindispensable to all others because it communicates knowledge. As certainprudent men have written, Cicero amongst them, savage men left theirrustic ways and became civilised through the agency of eloquence and atrained voice alone. ‘They came together in groups called civitates onlywhen led by strong and forceful persuasion. They agreed upon just lawsand obeyed them only when they were moved to it by strong and validarguments.’35 Eloquence not only established cities and laws, but allowedfor the invention of the arts, ‘for just as the ancients taught that wisdom[sapientia] is the most important part of happiness [felicitas], I think that

30 In his preface to his Latin translation of Plutarch’s De avaritia dedicated to Cardinal Campeggio,Pace again cited Diogenes who spoke against the vice of avarice, and whose attitude was confirmedby the apostles and St Jerome. Richard Pace, Plutarchi cheronaei opuscula (Venice: Bernardino deiVitali, 1522), Cambridge University Library, Shelfmark Td.52.63, sig. E2v.

31 Pace, De fructu, 16, 17.32 De copia, CWE, vol. XXIV, 624–5.33 OnMenippus as a follower of Diogenes, see Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore and

London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 42–4. Diogenes often appears as a character inMenippean satire: for example, Lucian’s Sale of Diogenes.

34 Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhetorique chez Erasme (2 vols., Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), vol. I,1072ff.

35 Pace, De fructu, 90, 91: ‘Nam ut prudentissimi uiri scribunt, non aliter quam eloquentia & eruditauoce effectum est, ut illi primi incredibiliter rudes & agrestes homines, illis rusticis exutis moribus,induerent ciuiliores. non aliter, ut in coetus quae ciuitates uocantur, coirent, quam quum uehe-menti ducerentur persuasione. non alter, ut aequas leges abmitterent, eisque parerent, quam quum

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learning is the most important part of wisdom’. Hence learning, likeprudence and eloquence, is a necessary part of the wider sapientia. It isthe way not only to all other knowledge, but to salvation.36

In De fructu, Pace applied the anecdotal framework based on the chreiain Lucian’s Demonax designating More as a second Demonax/Democritusin his confrontation with two scholastic theologians.37 Challenging thetwo Scotists, More utters the words of Demonax in response to theirridiculous questions and irreligious answers: ‘When one of you milks abillygoat, the other stands by and catches it in a sieve. When he saw thatthey didn’t understand what he said, he went away smiling to himself andlaughing at them.’38 More/Demonax approves in part of all philosophicalschools and appreciates that which is excellent in them, but favours that ofDemocritus who laughed at all human affairs. More imitated him andeven surpassed him by one syllable. Just as Democritus thought every-thing that pertained to man was laughable (ridenda), More thought it wasworthy of ridicule (deridenda).39 ‘That’s why Richard Pace as a joke callshis dear friend More the son or successor to Democritus.’ When occasiongives cause, however, More imitates good cooks and pours vinegar overeverything. ‘And finally, More declared all-out war on those who don’ttell the truth, of things resembling the truth, but things foreign to theirown nature.’40

Another inner dialogue in De fructu is constructed as a defence ofErasmus’s Novum instrumentum41 by the characters Pace and his mentor

magnis ualidisque rationibus mouerentur’. De inventione, I.ii.2–3; De oratore, I.xliii. De legibus,XXIII.61: Lex for Cicero derived from the reason of prudent men because they had trained theirjudgment sufficiently to distinguish right from wrong. Eloquence persuades men to accept whatthe prudential man discovers as law.

36 Pace, De fructu, 28, 29.37 Pace compares the Scotists to those who attacked Colet for his statement in a sermon that an unjust

peace was preferable to the most just of wars. Richard Fitzjames, Edmund Birkhead and HenryStandish are the satiric targets.

38 Pace, De fructu, 106, 107. Cf. Lucian, Demonax (8 vols., London: Loeb Classical Library, 1913, repr.1961) vol. I, trans. A. M. Harmon XXVIII. The game of interpretation that Pace plays with his readersin such passages and colloquies is comparable in intention to that offered in Utopia. In the festivusdialogus at Morton’s table, for example, readers are invited to decipher the earnest jests of theparasite, the court satirist, and so to distinguish the serious matter from the ridiculous and trivial.The development of such skills in interpretation are crucial in political life. Argument and counseladvanced through humour may be more effective in many circumstances.

39 Pace, De fructu, 104, 105.40 The pun on nasus employed by Pace refers to More’s sarcasm, wit and derision and has an

equivalent use in More’s prefatory letter to Peter Giles in Utopia, The Complete Works, ed. EdwardSurtz and J. H. Hexter (14 vols., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963– ), vol. IV, 44, 45(hereafter CWM ).

41 Title of 1516 Froben edition of Erasmus’s New Testament. Pace’s defence issues from the sameprinter. Curtis, ‘Pace’, 100ff.


Bombace against a certain Italian archbishop. The archbishop is theLucianic theologus gloriosus, too cowardly to face Erasmus directly withhis tabulation of so-called errors, but wishing to call Erasmus before ageneral council as a heretic.42 Pace’s conception of the relationshipbetween God’s word, Christ’s eloquence, theology and preaching isremarkably similar to that of Erasmus, as expressed in the Paraphraseson the New Testament and other theological writings. Assuming a self-deprecating profession of ignorance for derisive purpose against a Scotist,the disingenuous Ambassador Pace claims to be no theologian or philoso-pher, and not even learned in fact, admitting only that he knows nothing.Under the aspect of Socratic humility, both sincerely and ironically used,Pace presents himself not as a theologian in the sense of one interested inspeculative, dogmatic and systematic theology, but rather as interestedin philology and the establishing of an authentic text and paraphrase ofthe New Testament.43 Erasmus is defended as adhering closely to thegospel, ‘that is Christ Himself and the church fathers’, and even includesthem in his Adagia.44 Ensnared by the cunning interlocutor, the enragedScotist finally insists that ‘words don’t matter’, to which Pace replies thatsince the Bible is the Word of God, and God Himself the Word, ‘if youneglect these, you are the heretic and not Erasmus. For he deals in nothingbut words.’45

Ironically addressed as o bone vir, the interlocutor Pace replies to thearchbishop (whose verba he despises) that he had done some reading ofErasmus as well as in theology and can find no errors of the nature he

42 In a letter to Paolo Bombace in March 1518, Erasmus speaks of mischievous divines in Italy whocondemn what they have not read, yet it is mostly for their benefit that he has laboured. CWE, vol.V, Ep. 800, 349. I have not discovered the identity of the archbishop. More had warned Erasmus inOctober 1516 that the English Franciscans had divided Erasmus’s work systematically between themto comb through it for errors. Erica Rummell, Erasmus and his Catholic Critics (2 vols., Nieuw-koop: De Graaf, 1989), vol. I, identifies Erasmus critics across Europe.

43 Chomarat, Grammaire et rhetorique, vol. I, 18–19, n. 27. In his letter to the theologian Martin Dorp,Erasmus had made the distinction between the real theologians and the moderni (a term Pace uses)who are so preoccupied with the science of theology and battles of words that they are ignorant ofsound learning and have no time to read the evangelists, prophets and apostles. CWE, vol. LXXI, 17.Pace composed a reply to Dorp which Erasmus suppressed. Cathy Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructuand Early Tudor Pedagogy’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke and New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2002), 56.

44 Pace, De fructu, 118, 119.45 Ibid., 120, 121. These are precisely the sentiments of Erasmus. See Manfred Hoffman, Rhetoric and

Theology: The Hermeneutic of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994), ch. 1. For Erasmusthe authorship of God and the real presence of Christ give sacred text the highest authority andrhetorical power. The Bible, when contaminated by errors, gives rise to misinterpretations andheresies.

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suggests. But as the archbishop is a professor of theology, Pace will piouslyfollow his teaching if he can offer something better than Erasmus. ‘And(to use your own words) “incited by true zeal,” we’ll damn Erasmus too,as friends not of Plato, nor of Socrates, but of truth.’46 It transpires thatthe Italian Scotist has never heard of the Adagia of Erasmus: ‘Adagijs,inquit, quid est hoc?’ But he now plans to buy a copy so as to tabulatemore Erasmian heresies. As Pace demonstrates in his satirical textbook,the use of adages and related forms (epigrams, maxims and apophthegms)enlivens teaching and by implication sermons as well.47 Erasmus held thatadages could also be deployed as proofs in argument, having morepersuasive value as ancient or common testimony than the syllogisms ofthe scholastics, so far removed from the vox populi.48 Pace of the colloquyjustifies his contentio with one so ignorant to his friend Bombace byarguing that the weapon of laughter was the most appropriate means ofengagement. Cicero had stated that the stultitia of the opponent orwitness often justifies witty attacks.49 The humanist liberal and didacticjest disarms the bitter, often personal and intemperate attacks of theslanderer. In the De fructu, as in Erasmus’s Colloquies, the friars andscholastic theologians revert to infantile or animalistic speech, cursing,muttering, blathering incoherently and retreating in anger to the risusand derisus of the common people who witness their encounters withunidentified jurists and humanists such as More and Erasmus.The internal colloquies of De fructu (as in Erasmus’s Colloquies) are

then not only exercises in a living Latin language for students to imitate,but also place theological and philosophical matters in the context of thevariety of everyday life rather than in strictly institutional settings. Theo-logians must acquire a persuasive rhetoric which is carried to the pulpits,

46 Pace, De fructu, 116, 117. The frequent parenthetical asides in this passage, feigned ignorance of theineptness of his interlocutor’s speech and the associated mock flattery are all characteristics ofRenaissance socratic ironia – defined as Socrates’ ironic self–deprecation or his profession ofignorance – designed to expose sophists and charlatans to ridicule. The Scotist becomes thelatter-day sophist. Such techniques also afforded the writer a cover for his/her real opinions.Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 28, 47, 110–25.

47 Pace uses here, for example, the adages I.iii.53 and I.ii.20. Erasmus in turn uses an adage which Pacehad taken from Lucian’s Demonax, 28. Erasmus employed the adage to express his suspicion ofthose who call themselves ‘theologians’. CWE, vol. VII, 49.

48 See Erasmus’s dedication to the 1500 Collectanea, in CWE, vol. I, Ep. 127, 258. Cf. CWE, vol. LXXI,68, 76 on the usefulness of rhetorical commonplaces compared to Scotist hair-splitting which doesnothing to arouse the emotions of a wider audience beyond the schools. Peter, the first of all theapostles to proclaim Christ to the ordinary people, used no philosophical concepts in his speeches.

49 Cicero, De oratore. ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackman, vol. I (London: Loeb ClassicalLibrary, 1942), II.229.


taverns, and secular and ecclesiastical courts from Rome to northernEurope.50 But rather than imitating the persuasiveness and learnednessof Christ’s discourse, or even that of the human orators who had drawnpeople together into communities, the language of many present-daytheologians, friars and grammarians is inarticulate, contentious and div-isive. The fructus studiorum of scholasticism is impoverished of persuasive,copious and extempore speech. In the mouths of the scholastics, alllearning is debased and they cling tenaciously to their errors and medievalgrammars.51 Opposed to the dissension of the scholastics and religiousorders and their inattention to teaching and preaching effectively to thepeople of the church is the exemplary friendship, amicitia, of the human-ists who are themselves preachers and educators, committed to theology,the acquisition of the classical languages and scriptural exegesis, andeloquent counsellors to kings and popes. The example of Linacre, Lati-mer, Tunstall, Leonico, Bombace, Bude, Ammonio and of the authorhimself is described in De fructu and is designed to inspire Colet’sstudents to emulation.52 Erasmus himself is cast by Pace as the newChrist-like theologian and vir bonus who surpasses the ancient and earlychurch orators as a model of eloquence uniting Christian Europe.

De fructu proved to be a highly contentious work. Erasmus suppressedthe potential for any further editions and censured Pace for irresponsi-bility in his portrayal of Erasmus’s clashes with the theologians. Under thecover of the Socratic mask, Pace aimed oblique but recognisable criticismat the papacies of Julius II and Leo X, endorsed a conciliarist constitutionfor the church, attacked clerical abuses, and painted Wolsey as alter rex inan ambivalent encomium as a warning to Henry VIII. Wolsey would notforget, and Pace’s final collapse into bipolar illness was hastened by histrial in Star Chamber and imprisonment in the Tower before he wasreleased after the cardinal’s fall from power. Surviving editions reveal closestudy, however, by students of theology, medicine, law, rhetoric and thenatural sciences. Copies were owned by Thomas Cranmer, Beatus Rhe-nanus and Martin Bucer, and the satire was favourably received by theFrench humanist Guillaume Bude.53

50 M. O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: Toronto UniversityPress, 1977), 73, 108. C. Curtis, ‘Pace’, ch. 5, concerning Pace’s exegesis as applied to Henry VIII’sdivorce and his linguistic skill in ancient languages. See Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 149–52, for Pace’s study of the Septuagint, hisPraefatio and his disagreement with Fisher over its status as directly inspired by God.

51 Pace, De fructu, 92, 93.52 CWE, vol. XXVI, 489.53 See Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’s De fructu’, 43–77, 63–4.


THOMAS MORE AND ERASMUS: THE MENIPPEAN MASK

Before turning directly to More’s Utopia and Erasmus’sMoriae encomiumit is necessary to outline something of the significance of Menippean andLucianic philosophic satire and what the form conveyed to More andErasmus about true and false philosophic personae.Pace, Erasmus and More imitated the literary habits of classical and

medieval authors who did not press satire into discrete categories, butrather acknowledged their predecessors and indicated a number of fea-tures to be exhibited. When Erasmus and More jointly published theirearly efforts to translate Lucian in 1506 they provided important prefatoryjustifications for their choice of the Menippean persona.54 In his dedica-tory epistle to Ruthall, More indicated that he had read many of theworks of Lucian but chose three dialogues to translate: the Cynicus, theNecromantia (also known as Menippus) and Philopseudes, and the declam-ation on tyrannicide. The basis of More’s admiration is outlined, and wesee that the bugbears of Menippean satire (which absorbed aspects of OldComedy and Cynicism) are his own targets. Lucian censures with suchhonest, clever and entertaining wit that the prick is sharply felt but noresentment follows.55 Lucian’s Philopseudes uses Socratic irony to reprovethe propensity to lie and to believe lies, teaching that no trust should beplaced in magic and that superstition which masquerades everywhereunder the guise of religion should be eschewed.56 The Necromantiarebukes the trickery of magicians, ridiculous fictions of poets and thefruitless contentions of philosophers, and Cynicus is endorsed as havingthe approval of St John Chrysostom – the Christian man should bedelighted with this dialogue that criticises enervating luxury while com-mending the severe life of the Cynics and thus the Christian values ofsimplicity, temperance and frugality.57

This particular satiric form employs marginal figures, such as the Cynicphilosophers Menippus and Diogenes, who exercise parrhesia in exposingthe hypocrisy, self-delusion and fallacious argument of philosophers andreligious figures. Both More and Erasmus showed a predilection fordialogues involving Menippus. More identified with him in his Epigram-mata, while Erasmus wrote in Adagia I.viii.89 that this Cynic preacher

54 Craig R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, N.Y.:Vail-Ballon Press, 1940), chs. 2 and 3. Duncan, Ben Jonson, 26–76.

55 CWM, vol. III, part I, 3. 56 Ibid., 6. 57 Ibid., 4–5.


pretended that he had returned from the lower world in order to havemore freedom to criticise the way men live.

Erasmus defended his translations of Lucian in similar terms to those ofMore, but with different emphases.58 The preface to the translation ofGallus of 1506, which appeared in the Luciani opuscula, justifies the valueof the incomparable Lucian who delights as he teaches, and who exposesfraud and hypocrisy through oblique and subtle attack.59 Philosophers area particular butt, including the Pythagoreans, the Platonists and the Stoicswho affect the sage’s beard – for what is more intolerable than rascalitywhich publicly masquerades as virtue? Lucian has been labelled a slan-derer, but by those whose sore spots he had touched. Lucian’s power liesin his ability to bring before the eyes, ‘as if with a painter’s vivid brush’,the customs, emotions and pursuits of men. His dialogues cannot bebettered by any works of comedy or satire.60

Lucian’s satires were not without their bite: in Lucian’s Bis accusatus thecharacter of Socratic Dialogue complains that Lucianic dialogue hasstripped philosophical discourse of its former dignity and respectabletragic mask, replacing it with that of Menippus, Jest, Satire, Cynicism,Eupolis and Aristophanes, and placing it on the level of the commonherd. In the preface to his translation of Lucian’s Convivium of 1517,Erasmus drew analogies between the time of Lucian and his own, insistingon the need to subject intellectual and theological schools to scrutiny.Others, however, have thought such satire ought to be suppressed, be-cause it attacks philosophies of every kind with such a carnivalesquefreedom. He considers it more proper to be indignant with present-dayschools of philosophers and theologians who squabble childishly and fighta no less internecine war than Lucian depicted in his banquet.61

58 Ibid., vol II, Ep. 193, 116–17. The preface to De mercede conductis points to the drawbacks of life atcourt, while that of the Pseudomantis enthuses that the work is most useful for the detection andrefutation of the impostures of those who cheat the populace into believing in miracles and feignedindulgences. The black wit of Momus, the archfrank, is combined with the fair wit of Mercury, thegod of profit. CWE, vol. II, Ep. 199.

59 Ibid., Ep. 193, 115.60 Ibid., 115–16.61 Ibid., vol. IV, Ep. 550, 282. More and Erasmus both underplay Lucian’s sceptical tendencies in their

prefaces for apologetic reasons. Many of Lucian’s works, especially those which are Menippean, doin fact question whether there is any possibility of ideal standards, and Cynic irony is directedagainst those who take any philosophy, religion or intellectual school too seriously, and with soledevotion, in a world governed by Fortune. More, imprisoned in the Tower, was to be taunted byJohn Frith as another Lucian who regarded neither God nor man. The epithet ‘Lucianist’ indeedcame to be a term of abuse in the history of controversy. CWM, vol. VIII, xxiv.


Erasmus’s dedicatory letter to More prefacing the editio princeps of theMoriae encomium of 1511 claimed that the satire was composed on hisreturn to England and that More’s surname was the first inspiration.More is cast as playing the part of Democritus in human life and Erasmusbelieved that he would appreciate such trifles.62 He suspects that somewrangling critics will loudly accuse him of imitating Old Comedy orsome kind of Lucianic satire, and of attacking the whole world with histeeth which does not befit the pen of a theologian.63 But such festivitas ismore effective than arid demonstration.64 Erasmus refers to the deliberateparadox of spoudogelion – just as there is nothing more frivolous than tohandle serious topics in a trifling manner, so there is nothing moreagreeable than to handle trifling matters in such a way that what you havedone seems anything but trifling.65 This justification is also encountered inPace’s prefatory letter to the De fructu.Apart from naming no names at all, Erasmus argues that he has

exercised such restraint that the intelligent reader will discern that hisaim was to amuse and not to criticise. He has never followed in thetradition of Juvenal who stirs up the hidden cesspool of iniquities; and hehas been mindful to examine practices which are to be laughed at ratherthan detested. Men’s intellects have always retained the freedom toexercise the play of wit upon human life at large with impunity, providedthat liberty is kept within reasonable bounds. Erasmus is therefore sur-prised at the lack of tolerance in present times for anything beyondhonorific titles; some hold such perverse religious conceptions that theywould sooner countenance abuse of Christ than the slightest jest at theexpense of a pope or prince. But in censuring lives without denouncing asingle person by name, the satirist offers advice and warning, rather than

62 Ibid., vol. II, Ep. 222, 161–3.63 Ibid., vol. II, Ep. 193, 116. The epistolary exchange between Erasmus and Bude in 1516 to 1517

reflects on the strategy of satiric indirection as a means of offering criticism, or counsel, to publicfigures, and the constraints of professional decorum. Erasmus informs Bude that he is fully awareof their differences in approach, marvelling at his truly French outspokenness, a kind of unbridledGallic wit which might be thought very close to insolence, which does not spare the pope himself.But Bude has two advantages in his De asse and Annotationes on the Pandects: it is less dangerous toattack the dead; and few appreciate the force of the attack, as it is directed beyond the grasp of thecommon audience. Erasmus continues that the De asse is so dense, deliberately elliptical andmetaphorical that it requires a well-informed reader with an open mind to interpret it. Erasmusconsidered that as a theologian he is allowed less liberty than Bude, although he writes with greatfreedom at times and had suffered for it. CWE, vol.IV, Eps. 480, 531.

64 Horace, Satires and Epistles: Persius: Satires, ed. and verse trans. Niall Rudd (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1979). Satire I.10. Humour is often more effective than sharpness in cutting knots.

65 CWE, vol. II, Ep. 222, 163–4.


indulging in sarcasm. Erasmus is his own self-critic on many of thecharges made.66 And if all types of persons are included, all vices aretherefore censured rather than any individual. If anyone does considerhimself injured, this merely reveals his apprehensive or guilty con-science.67 St Jerome is cited as employing more licence than Erasmus,sometimes even mentioning names. But why say all this to More, asksErasmus, a lawyer of such brilliance?68

THOMAS MORE’S ‘UTOPIA’

One of the most perplexing and imitated works of English philosophy,More’s Utopia owes much of its conception, generic form and satiric forceto Lucian’s Menippean and non-Menippean dialogues and essays, such asVera historia, Nigrinus and Necromantia. The conventions of Menippeansatire (such as the fantastic journey to Hades or to mythological universes)provide a vehicle for a philosophical comedy which questions notions ofthe ideal standard and encourages the capacity to discriminate betweenthe true and the false.69 More employs the form to raise insight into thehumanist preoccupation with the best state of the commonwealth and theexercise of constructing imaginary republics, of the problem of counseland vera nobilitas.

In More’s Utopia, Hythloday is cast as a European latter-day Menip-pus, caped and bearded, returned from nowhere, and insisting on unham-pered liberty of speech without any concession to time, place or person.The persona of More is the other exemplary type found in Menippeandialogue, pragmatic and bound to his offices of lawyer and counsellor,who advocates the indirect way (obliquo ductu) of advancing advice. Theirexchanges are based on the confrontation of conflicting sets of politicalperspectives and achieve no resolution or reconciliation. The historical

66 Certainly in Juvenal, Horace, Lucian, Seneca and Capella, displays of fallibility are common inuntrustworthy or self-defeating spokesmen who frequently lapse into the very faults they attack.This is a means of enhancing the didactic effect, as people are more willing to learn from a flawedman. James S. Tillman, ‘The Satirist Satirized: Burton’s Democritus Junior’, Studies in the LiteraryImagination 10 (1977), 89–96, at 89.

67 Burton cites the Moriae as a precedent for The Anatomy of Melancholy and paraphrases Erasmus’sresponse to Dorp on this very question – if anyone is displeased, let him not attack the author butbe angry with himself. vol. I, 111.

68 CWE, vol. II, Ep. 222, 164.69 On Menippean satire, see S. Blanchard, Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance

(London: Bucknell University Press, 1995); Joel Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); B. P. McCarthy, ‘Lucian and Menippus’, Yale ClassicalStudies 4 (1934), 3–55.


More has, of course, chosen the indirection of satire in Utopia to proffercounsel to kings, princes, popes and the clergy – and its fictionality affordsprotection against potential charges of defamation. More ironically claimsthat he had only to rehearse what Hythloday declared extempore, merelygathering and arranging his material. The complex and unstable elision ofauthor, author-persona and narrator allows his More the author not onlyscope in the rhetorical exercise of prosopopoeia, but legal defence againstany attempt to charge him with treasonous slander and sedition. Thecharacterisations of the interlocutors and their relative positions are fluid.At times the historical More seems to coincide with the author/personaand the character More. It has been suggested, however, that More andHythloday are two sides of the author, arguing in utramque partem onsome issues such as the treatment of thieves and the problem of coun-sel.70 Furthermore, the contributors to the parerga simultaneously andplayfully create and undermine More’s persona as the ideal statesman,the vir bonus dicendi peritus, casting doubt on his motives: has Moreperpetrated a fraud on his incredulous audience in the fashion of theclassical historians and poets whom Lucian attacked in his Vera historia?Did he steal the story from Hythloday, or has the author-persona beendeceived by a lying Hythloday? This articulates the dilemma recognisedby Socrates and Erasmus alike and which has always bedevilled defend-ers of the integrity of rhetoric: the best teller of the truth is also the bestteller of lies. This, coupled with a pervasive ironia, engendered even atthe syntactical level by the figure of litotes, confounds attempts to pindown the author’s opinions.71

As for Pace, the model of Lucianic stock types of philosophers andreligious frauds and pedants ensures that More need name no names in aderogatory manner. The council scene at the French court, which exposescorruption and warmongering amongst monarchs and counsellors, isconstructed as hypothetical, although the details are clearly taken fromcurrent French and papal policy. The politico-ecclesiastical Pisan Councilis never mentioned as part of Louis XII’s strategy, but readers would havesupplied the context of conciliarist argument; Hythloday is absent fromEurope precisely during the period 1510–15. The abuses of royal preroga-tive by past English kings to fill the treasury casts a negative light onHenry VIII, but offers no direct comparison. The cena at Cardinal

70 D. M. Bevington, ‘The Dialogue in Utopia: Two Sides to the Question’, Studies in the Renaissance58 (1961), 496–509.

71 Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘Denying the Contrary: More’s Use of Litotes in Utopia’, Moreana 31–2(1971), 107–21.


Morton’s table lambasts a stereotypical friar and lawyer (kin to Pace’scharacters in the De fructu) and is cast at a safe distance in a previousreign. In Utopia, as in Erasmus’s Colloquies and the De fructu, it is theopponents of the humanists who are depicted in internal dialogues asengaging in angry, slanderous attacks, but who are publicly reducedto laughing-stocks before their enemies. The humanist interlocutorcunningly allows the ignorant friar, lawyer or theologian to damn himself.

The paradoxical encomium which is one of the generic forms com-monly found in Menippean satire, and which constitutes Book II ofUtopia, renders the determination of the intention of the author acomplex task, and encourages the reader to an open-ended appreciationof knotty philosophical and constitutional problems. If Utopia is indeedMenippean satire, the praise of the island, its people and customs isparadoxical – the defence of the unexpected. This perspective explainsthe troubling flaws in paradise, the Utopian’s morally questionable warpractices, tolerance of slavery, and restrictions on the freedom of speechand travel. It also frustrates attempts to locate More’s voice behind thesatire itself. Agrippa understood this well in his Apologia adversus calum-nias, declaring that the declamation puts forward propositions alternatelyin a jocular or a serious form, in a deceptive or a straightforward way. Inthis undogmatic form, his opinions are sometimes expressed, as well asthose of others; ideas and arguments are brought forward for dispute onboth sides of the question.72

Given the elusive and doctrinally slippery character of More’s work, itis not surprising that, like Socrates, More enjoyed an ambivalent reputa-tion during the sixteenth century both as a witty and charming correctorof folly, arrogance and ignorance, and a deceitful mocker who prostitutedhis learning to the Catholic cause.73 Wooden has examined what heregards as the two facets of More’s reputation which persist in Elizabethanliterature. One is an extension of the early controversialists’ image ofMore as papal lackey, found in the portraits of Hall, Holinshed and Foxe.The other presents More as wit, ironist and ornament of English letters, ashad the earlier recusant biographies of Harpsfield and Stapleton. Thechroniclers, however, inverted the second tradition by amassing humor-ous anecdotes and examples of More’s ‘mocks’ in an attempt to discredithim as a serious figure. Furthermore, Protestant readers dismissed the

72 See M. van der Poel, ‘The Latin Declamatio in Renaissance Humanism’, Sixteenth Century Journal20 (1989), 471–8, at 477–8.

73 W. W. Wooden, ‘Thomas More in Hostile Hands: The English Image of More in the ProtestantLiterature of the Renaissance’, Moreana 19 (1982), 77–87, at 75–6.


‘feigned’ image of Utopia as specious poetry with no truth value. Tyndaleattacked More’s false wit and false logic as being one; More tries to ‘cavilCrystis clere wordis with sophistical sophisms, and to tryful out thetrouthe with tauntis and mockis’.74 Tyndale well understood, andresented, the force of More’s mocking laughter.

ERASMUS’S ‘PRAISE OF FOLLY ’

And what of Erasmus and his Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium)? Cer-tainly the satire proved to be both hugely popular and controversial.First published in 1511, it is a paradoxical declamation by the persona ofFolly on the subject of folly, as well as a praise of More under the ironicbanner of his name. It displays vertiginous shifts in subject, tone andattitude. Despite Erasmus’s attempts to fend off potential criticism inhis preface, the Folly received a mixed reception, and he was forced toarticulate more fully his position. The 1514 edition contained anti-scholastic satire in its additions. Despite his Lucianic indirection whicheschewed identifying individuals, but rather treated of types (and despitethe appreciation of Leo X and some eminent theologians),75 Erasmusbrought upon his head the fury of the theologians in Paris, Louvain andEngland who considered it irresponsible in its depiction of the folly ofmonks and theologians, and their ignorance of theology. This necessi-tated the enlargement of the preface of the 1514 edition, and the additionof a commentary to the 1515 Basle edition, ostensibly written by Listriusbut in which Erasmus had a large part.76 The revised preface listed moreexamples of Greek and Latin predecessors in the paradoxical encomium,such as Seneca’s Ludus de morte Claudii Caesaris and Lucian’s Parasi-tica.77 The commentary, very frequently printed with the satire until thenineteenth century, establishes the autonomy of Folly’s dramatic char-acterisation, pointing to the irony of the declamation which parodiesitself and provides a mask from behind which Erasmus could makeacerbic comments.78 It argues that Erasmus touches upon nothingoffensive, but only mentions some ridiculous foibles, his intention being

74 Cited in Sir Thomas More in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography, compiledJ. C. Campbell, intro. Anne Lake Prescott (Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Textsand Studies, 1994), xxv.

75 CWE, vol. V, Ep. 673.76 J. Austin Gavin and Thomas M. Walsh, ‘The Praise of Folly in Context: The Commentary of

Giardius Listrius’, Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971), 193–209.77 CWE, vol. III, Ep. 328, 81. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, 182–3.78 See notes on the commentary by Clarence H.Miller inOpera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi, ord. 4, vol. V.


to sport with lively wit, and he is careful not to mention the names ofthose he has satirised. Notes on particularly provocative sections seek toameliorate their stridency and also to defend Erasmus from charges ofheresy or blasphemy.

Erasmus defended the satire in his exchange with the theologian MartinDorp by contending that it was concerned, under the pretext of play, withthe same subject as the serious Enchiridion, to guide men to be better andnot to hurt them.79 Erasmus had only written to be useful and was almostsorry to have published the Moriae which had earned him a reputation,but one coupled with such ill-will. Explaining the psychological workingsof wit and satire, which hold and attract the attention of all alike, Erasmusclaims that he had worn the mask of Folly and acted his part in disguise,just as Socrates had covered his face before reciting an encomium on love.Augustine had pursued the idea that the gospel truth slips into our mindsmore agreeably and takes root more decisively when it has these kinds ofcharms to commend it. Plato, Horace and even Christ make the truthmore palatable with their dialogues and fables. Cannot Folly be allowedthe same liberty of speech conceded to popular comedies which jibe atmonarchs, priests, monks and wives, yet do not contain personalisedabuse, and causes all to laugh?

Erasmus’s attitude to efficacious satire accords well with the values ofmoderation in temperament and behaviour associated with Democritus.Laughter should be tolerant rather than sarcastic, in contrast to thepersonalised abuse of Aristophanes and Old Comedy or the indignatioof Juvenal or Persius. Erasmus prefers Menander, Lucian, Horace and theNew Comedians, Terence and Plautus.80 In Erasmus’s meditation on thediseases of the unbridled tongue in the Lingua, he held that the abuse ofOld Comedy was brought under the control of the law when its jestinghumour turned into savagery; the Cynic satirists were compared to dogsbecause although they rightly condemned vices, they paid no respect topropriety of persons, occasions or circumstances.81 Erasmus approximatesrather to the sentiments of Horace in Satire I.4, in which the persona of thesatirist refutes charges of malice by making the points that the Greekcomic writers and the Roman satirist Lucilius branded criminals, and thathe himself does not seek publicity or give public recitals, nor intend his

79 CWE, vol. II, Ep. 180, 80; Ep. 337, 114–15.80 D. Kinney, ‘Erasmus and the Latin Comedians’, in Actes Du Colloque International Erasme,

Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, ed. J. Chomarat, Andre Godin and Jean-Claude Margolin(Geneva: Droz, 1990), 57–70.

81 CWE, vol. XXIX, 295.


poems to be sold. Further, the innocent have nothing to fear since he isgood-natured, his writings are amusement to pass the time, and hisobservations are for his own improvement as well.82 Erasmus emphasisedthe qualities of facetus rather than dicax, that is, the pervasive and habitualwit and irony which excites laughter and is good-natured, rather than theoften bitter and personal attack of the type of witticism which drawsadmiration but not amusement.83 And certainly Erasmus did not identifyhis satiric targets in the Moriae encomium, Ciceronianus or Colloquies,although circumstantial evidence suggested real persons on occasions.84 Asthe Protestant Reformation increased in pace, Erasmus would increasinglyurge his humanist friends to desist from satire, which only inflamedpassions further.

ROBERT BURTON’S ‘THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY’

Like Pace, More and Erasmus, Robert Burton (1577–1640) was concernedwith peace. The Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in 1621 and hecontinued to work on it for the rest of his life. New editions appeared in1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and posthumously, in 1651. Burton’s annotations tohis copy of the Moriae encomium reveal his close attention to the preface,with a note on More playing Democritus; a note is similarly to be foundat the relevant section in Burton’s copy of the De fructu.85 In The Anatomyof Melancholy, a Menippean satire that chronicles the history of the genre,Burton assumes the name of Democritus Junior, or Democritus Chris-tianus. He refers explicitly to the issues raised by the Erasmus/Dorpdispute in his long entry to the text, the ‘Satyricall Preface of Democritusto the Reader’:

I did sometime laugh and scoffe with Lucian, and satirically taxe with Menippus,lament with Heraclitus, sometimes again I was bitterly mirthful, and then againburning with rage: I was so much moved to see that abuse which I could notamend. In which passion howsoever I may sympathise with him or them, ’tis forno such respect I shroud my selfe under his name, but either in an unknownhabit, to assume a little more liberty and freedom of speech.86

82 Horace, Satires and Epistles, 55–60.83 Mary A. Grant, The Ancient Theories of the Laughable: the Greek Rhetoricians and Cicero, University

of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature XXI (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1924), 116–18.

84 Such as the papal orator Inghirami in the Ciceronianus.85 Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘Burton and More’, Moreana 35 (1998), 135–6, 57–74. Pace, De fructu,

Bodleian Library, Oxford, Shelfmark 4.oB.16.(5)Th.86 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, 5.


Burton’s authorial voice reflects on the early modern satirists’ assump-tion of a complex and fluid persona in order to avoid charges of vindictivemalice and defamation, and of offending the decorum of office:

If I have overshot myselfe in this which hath beene hitherto said, or that it is,which I am sure some will object, too phantasticall, too light and Comicall for adivine, too Satyricall for one of my profession, I will presume to answere withErasmus, in like case ’tis not I but Democritus , Democritus dixit : you mustconsider what it is to speake in ones owne or anothers person, an assumed habitor name; a difference betwixt him that affects or acts a Princes, a Philosophers, aMagistrates, a Fooles part, and him that is so indeed; and what liberty those oldSatyrists have had, it is a Cento collected from others, not I, but they that say it.87

And without naming names but only castigating vices, Burton’s en-cyclopaedic satire meditates on the melancholic early modern world rivenby futile religious, philosophical and secular contention – the Wars ofReligion and the conditions which would give rise to the British civil wars.If man’s fallen nature and the need for sweeping institutional changeto secular and ecclesiastical realms was the preoccupation of the earlysixteenth-century humanists, conditions are certainly not improved, andmay even be worse, in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the Anatomyreaches its climax with its discussion of ‘Religious Melancholy’. Thepersona of Burton/Democritus Junior looks despairingly to every writerfrom Plato to Bodin, Aristotle to Justus Lipsius, Lucian to Botero to noavail, before declaring that he will make his own Utopia. He argues frombehind the mask of the detached observer Democritus that the only valueto adhere to is Christian moderation – of the passions, and so too indebate and language. Unlike Pace, Erasmus and More, Burton does notappear to have excited criticism with his analysis of the causes of discordin the Christian commonwealth.

For all these writers, the authority of ancient philosophy enhanced byChristian revelation gave licence to the use of laughter as a means ofmaking necessary and health-giving criticism. It gave a measure of protec-tion from allegations of defamation from adversaries cut down to size, andshowed the means to convey unpalatable truths. But even more than this,the cultivation of its techniques of provocation and the virtues that led toits appreciation amounted to a duty for the philosopher in the world.

87 Ibid., vol. I, 110.


CHAPTER 5

Hobbes, the universities, and the history of philosophy

R. W. Serjeantson430537

For some time now scholars have debated why Thomas Hobbes was nevermade a Fellow of the Royal Society.1 But about his relations with adifferent learned institution – Oxford University – there has been littledoubt. Hobbes had been a student at Magdalene Hall between 1602 and1608, but thereafter he was (one brief attempt at rapprochement aside)one of Oxford’s most inveterate enemies, and indeed an enemy of existinguniversities altogether.2 Few of the very many controversial things he saidin Leviathan (1651) aroused more immediate anger than his closing claimthat the book might be ‘profitably taught in the Universities’.3 Hobbes’searly readers reacted to this statement, as Hobbes himself subsequentlyacknowledged,4 with incredulity and disgust.5 Moreover, when members

1 See esp. Q. Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society’, HistoricalJournal 12 (1969), 217–39, revised and extended as ‘Hobbes and the Politics of the Early RoyalSociety’, in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),vol. III, 324–45; S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and theExperimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 139; M. Hunter, Science andSociety in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 178–9; N. Malcolm,‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (eds.), Perspectives on ThomasHobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43–66; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘The IntellectualRelationship between Hobbes and Locke – a Reappraisal’, in Locke’s Enlightenment: Aspects ofthe Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998), 61–77, at 65–70.

2 On Hobbes’s time at Oxford, see N. Malcolm, ‘A Summary Biography of Hobbes’, in Aspects ofHobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–26, at 3–5.

3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), 395.4 Thomas Hobbes, Six lessons to the professors of the mathematiques (London, 1656), 56–7; ThomasHobbes, Considerations upon the reputation . . . of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1680), 57–8.

5 British Library (BL), MS Harley 6942, fol. 132v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 6 May [1651]);Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook (London, 1653), 96; [Seth Ward], Vindiciaeacademiarum (Oxford, 1654), 52; Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica(Oxford, 1656), 11; George Lawson, An examination of the political part of Mr. Hobbs, his Leviathan(London, 1657), 145–6; John Bramhall, The catching of Leviathan (London, 1658), 549; EdwardHyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of . . . Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 319. But see alsoWilliam Rand to Samuel Hartlib, 18 July 1651 (Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers [CD-Romedition], 62/30/3B–4A): ‘I should conceive that man an excellent Councellour in the matter ofeducation’.

113

of the English universities were accused of professing Hobbes’s ideas, asDaniel Scargill was at Cambridge in 1668, they were liable to findthemselves in serious trouble.6

Yet, despite Hobbes’s hostility to them, the universities have a signifi-cant place in all of his major writings. They were a consistent componentof his systematic political philosophy between the Elements of Law of 1640and the Latin Leviathan of 1668. Hobbes regarded the universities ashaving a necessary ‘office in a Common-wealth’, and held that it was aduty of the sovereign representative to oversee what they taught.7 He wasalso, however, bitterly critical of the political role the universities hadplayed in the Civil Wars, and also critical more generally of the philoso-phy they taught. In the course of articulating this critique, the universitiesalso came to play an increasingly important role in Hobbes’s understand-ing of history: both the history of his own time, and also of Europeanhistory since classical antiquity.

Most importantly, perhaps, Hobbes’s relations with the universitiesconstitute a decisive moment in the development of the persona of the‘new philosopher’ or novator in the middle years of the seventeenthcentury. The Aristotelian philosophy of the schools had been attackedby Bernardino Telesio (1509–88) and his Italian followers, by FrancisBacon (1561–26), and by Paracelsians and alchemists. But it was thegeneration of Hobbes (1588–1679) and Descartes (1596–1650), above all,that ultimately succeeded in creating a view of the philosopher thatemphasised novelty, iconclasm and the necessity of rejecting the philoso-phy of the schools. The historical consequences of this development arehard to overemphasise: it gave rise to nothing less than what came to becalled ‘modern’ philosophy, which from the eighteenth century onwardscame to be sharply differentiated from what came to be known as‘scholasticism’, which was then associated with the Middle Ages.A consequence of this is that, until very recently, the philosophy of thelater sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries has suffered from persist-ent scholarly neglect.

Yet it has become increasingly clear that a much richer understandingof the significance of the philosophy of the novatores can be gained bystudying their relations to the philosophical perspectives of their immedi-ate predecessors.8 A number of recent studies of Descartes have brought

6 J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, Historical Journal 42(1999), 85–108, at 86–96.

7 Hobbes, Leviathan, 4, 179–80.8 T. Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

114 R. W. SERJEANTSON

this out strongly,9 and the same tendency is also evident in relation toHobbes. Brett has explored his relations to the writings of the Spanishsecond scholastic; Skinner to Renaissance rhetoric.10 Schuhmann empha-sised the importance of a broad Renaissance Aristotelian philosophicalculture for understanding Hobbes, and Schuhmann’s student Leijenhorsthas explored in some detail how the account of prima philosophia inHobbes’s De corpore can be regarded as being in some sense a ‘mechanisa-tion’ of contemporary Aristotelian natural philosophy.11 This revisionismhas had the salutary effect of reminding us that early modern philosopherswere speaking to their contemporaries and not to us, and that theproblems they addressed were those of their own philosophical milieu,and not of ours.It is true that these developments have been less evident in the history

of political thought. There are some good reasons for this. The history ofpolitical doctrines is one of the few fields within early modern intellectualhistory in which it does not immediately make sense to ground one’senquiries in the history of universities, broadly conceived. The study ofpolitics as a discipline (politica) was not quite so prominent in theuniversity curricula of early modern Europe as the study of logic ormetaphysics, or moral or natural philosophy. Moreover, the majority oftexts that now tend to be regarded as major contributions to the develop-ment of early modern political ideas were written outside the universities.For these and other reasons it is evidently not enough simply to re-

assimilate the novatores back into the milieu of the schools. We need toacknowledge the extent to which they emerged from that philosophicalworld. But we also need to understand, as precisely as possible, thepersonae that they created in order to escape from the schools.12 Thischapter is a contribution to this enterprise in the case of Hobbes. In it,I draw attention to the important place education held in the political

9 See esp. D. Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought(Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); R. Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca,N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

10 A. S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205–35; Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy ofHobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

11 K. Schuhmann, ‘Hobbes and Renaissance Philosophy’, in A. Napoli, Hobbes oggi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1990), 331–49; C. Leijenhorst, The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristoteliansetting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), esp. 219–22.

12 See also R. Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The CambridgeHistory of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),vol. I, 9–32.

Hobbes and the universities 115

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

I

Hobbes’s views on the universities developed in a number of importantways throughout his publications. In certain key respects, however, hisunderlying position remained constant, and it is with this consistentposition that I wish to begin. From the Elements of Law (1640) toBehemoth (1666–8) and the Latin Leviathan (1668), Hobbes’s view of theuniversities was characterised by a sense of their importance as places ofeducation and, above all, education in political ideas. It was in theuniversities that young men received their political opinions, and thesame young men then transmitted those opinions to the people by theirconversation and preaching. This view is present in the Elements of Law.13

It remains in the De cive (1642), in which Hobbes asserted that ‘anyonewho wants to introduce a sound doctrine has to begin with the Univer-sities’.14 And it was memorably reformulated in the review and conclusionof the English Leviathan (1651), in which Hobbes emphasised his pointwith a striking metaphor. ‘For seeing’, he wrote,

the Universities are the Fountains of Civill, andMorall Doctrine, fromwhence thePreachers, and the Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle thesame (both from the Pulpit, and in their Conversation) upon the People, thereought certainly to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from the Venime ofHeathen Politicians, and from the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits.15

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

13 Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural & Politic, ed. F. Tonnies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1928), 145–6.

14 Thomas Hobbes, De cive: The Latin version, ed. H. Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1983), 199: ‘si quis sanam doctrinam introducere voluerit, incipiendum ei est ab Academiis’; trans.Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck, trans. M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 146.

15 Hobbes, Leviathan, 395. Compare Hobbes, De cive, 198–9.16 V. Morgan and C. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II: 1546–1750 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–10.


Remonstrance of 1641 had spoken of Parliament’s intention to ‘purge thefountains of learning, the two Universities, that the streams flowing fromthem may be clear and pure’.17 The metaphor of the fountain in its turnalso picks up on the motto of the University of Cambridge: hinc lucem etpocula sacra (‘From here [flows] light and sacred draughts’) – strikinglyiconographically represented on a title page of 1671.18

Hobbes’s emphasis on the universities as the most effective means ofteaching civil doctrine stems from his more general conviction of humaneducability. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes spoke of the young menentering the universities as having minds ‘yet as white paper, capable ofany instruction’. In Leviathan, similarly, he spoke of the ‘Common-peoplesminds’ as being ‘like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by PubliqueAuthority shall be imprinted in them’. Hobbes gives a formal explanationfor his emphasis on human educability in the account of human nature inDe homine (1658), the second part of his tripartite treatment of the ‘elem-ents of philosophy’. Here he ascribes the various sources of human ingenia(‘wits’, defined as ‘the tendencies of men to certain things’) to tempera-ment, custom, experience, good fortune, self-regard and authorities.19 Ofthe last of these – authorities – Hobbes curtly noted that ‘if they are good,the wits of youths are formed well; if corrupt, then corruptly, whether theyare Magistrates, or Fathers, or any others of those whom they hear praisedby the people for their wisdom’.20 From which it follows, Hobbes con-tinues, that fathers, magistrates and tutors had better both impart goodprecepts and provide a good example in following them; and that the bookswhich are read be ‘healthful, chaste and useful’.21

A further explanation for Hobbes’s insistence on the educational im-portance of the universities arises from their legal status as public founda-tions. Unlike the first education that parents provided privately for theirchildren,22 the education that universities provided to their chargeswas licensed and authorised by the commonwealth itself by means ofprivileges, exemptions and laws specific to them – as a number of

17 Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1906), 230. See further C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicineand Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 115.

18 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor dubitantium (London, 1671), title page.19 Hobbes, Elements of Law, 146; Hobbes, Leviathan, 176; Hobbes, De homine (London, 1658), 72.20 Hobbes, De homine, 74: ‘Ab his si boni, Ingenia adolescentum formantur bona; prava si pravi, sive

Magistri ii sint, sive Patres, sive alii quicunque quos vulgo a sapientia laudari audiunt; namlaudatos reverentur & dignos existimant quos imitentur.’

21 Ibid., 75: ‘Secundo, quam, quos lecturi sunt libros, sunt sani, casti, & utiles.’22 As Hobbes noted in Leviathan, 178.


contemporary political writers pointed out.23 As we might expect, Hobbestook this ‘public’ aspect of the universities extremely seriously. Moreover,when he speaks – as he does in chapter XXIX of Leviathan – of seditiousbooks being ‘publikely read’, he means that they are lectured upon in theschools.24

At a more general level, Hobbes’s conviction about the importance ofthe universities is also related to his emphasis on the political importanceof opinion. In his later writings in particular, Hobbes increasinglystressed a view more commonly associated in the history of politicalthought with David Hume: that political power follows opinion.25 Since(in Hobbes’s view) the ‘common people’ derived their opinions frompreachers and the gentry, and since the preachers and the gentry learnttheir opinions in the universities, what the universities taught was offundamental importance.26

I I

Hobbes’s consistent emphasis on the public function of the universities asthe places where the blank paper of the ruling classes’ minds was im-printed with civil doctrine had an important consequence for his politicalphilosophy. In all his major political works, Hobbes asserts that a concernfor university education is a formal duty or ‘office’ of the sovereign.Hobbes first made this point in the Elements of Law. It is repeated inDe cive, where Hobbes writes: ‘I hold therefore that it is a duty ofsovereigns to have the true Elements of civil doctrine written and to orderthat it be taught in all the Universities in the commonwealth.’ It isemphasised again in the English Leviathan.27

When considered in the context of the formal political treatises of lateRenaissance Europe, Hobbes’s concern with the politics of education isentirely conventional. Leviathan is not often considered in the context ofthe systematic or encyclopaedic political philosophy that was largely

23 Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum (printed 1583), ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982), 87; Pierre Gregoire, De republica (2 vols., Lyons, 1609), vol. II, 72, col. 1;Christoph Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa (Oxford, 1639), 108–9.

24 Hobbes, Leviathan, 171.25 See David Hume, Essays, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), esp. 32, 51.26 See also G. M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education

(Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2002), 38.27 Hobbes, Elements, 146. Hobbes, De cive, 199: ‘Officii igitur summorum imperantium esse arbitror,

Elementa vera doctrinae civilis conscribi facere, & imperare ut in omnibus civitatis Academiisdoceantur’ (translation from Hobbes, On the citizen, 146–7). Hobbes, Leviathan, 4, 180–1.


generated by the schools in the period. Indeed, this is a body of literaturethat anglophone historians tend to disparage when they consider it at all.28

But although not in terms of its doctrines, then perhaps in terms of itsstructure and comprehensive scope, Leviathan may be regarded as com-parable with the ambitions of the encyclopaedic accounts of politicsproduced by authors such as Pierre Gregoire, Lambert Daneau, Bartholo-mew Keckermann and Johannes Althusius. More generally, in stressingthe responsibility of the magistrate to the schools, Hobbes was simplyendorsing a well-developed aspect of late Renaissance political philoso-phy.29 Several of these authors and their followers went so far as to regard‘scholastics’ (scholastica) as a subalternate discipline to politics.30 Oneconsequence of this can be seen in John Prideaux’s Lineamenta politica,a work treating education as one of the seven ‘parts’ of politics, alongsidetopics such as the best form of a commonwealth, laws, magistrates, thestatus of subjects and commerce.31

There was a wide variety of ways, though, in which the relationshipbetween the schools and the commonwealth was considered in lateRenaissance civil philosophy. A few authors of the period, such as JustusLipsius, still followed the earlier Renaissance tendency of treating politicsin terms of the virtues and hence the encouragement of education as aprincely one.32 By extension, for a prince to suppress the schools was – asthe English philosopher John Case argued, picking up on Aristotle – amark of tyranny. Such was the behaviour of Julian the Apostate, or of theTurks in Hungary, not of a virtuous Christian monarch.33

For most late Renaissance writers on politics, however, care for educa-tion was rather more than a virtue: it was, as Hobbes also thought, a duty.

28 See e.g. R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993), 158. But see H. Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: die “Politica” desHenning Arnisaeus (ca 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970), esp. 411–14; H. Dreitzel,‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Foderalismus’, in E. Bonfatti, G. Duso and M. Scattola (eds.),Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld in der Politica methodice digesta des Johannes Althusius(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 49–112, at 51–2; and Robert von Friedeburg’s chapter in thisvolume.

29 See also J. P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1992), 86.

30 J. H. Alsted, Encyclopaedia (2 vols., Herborn, 1630), 1505.31 John Prideaux, Hypomnemata (Oxford, [?1650]), 336, 356–61.32 Justus Lipsius, Sixe bookes of politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), 40.

See further Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978), vol. I, 234–6, 254; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 55.

33 John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588), 498. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, V.ix, and also JohannHimmel, Idea boni gymnasii (Speyer, 1614), 1; Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), trans. W. Walker(London, 1648), 107.


Hence Jean Bodin in the Six livres de la republique (1576) described thebringing up of youth as ‘l’une des principales charges d’une Republique’,albeit one that was unduly neglected.34 The Huguenot Lambert Daneauasserted that the magistrate ‘ought always to have the greatest care for theproper and pious education of his citizens’ children’.35 Similarly, forthe widely read Reformed philosopher, Bartholomew Keckermann, theeducation of his subjects was a formal responsibility of the prince, andsomething that he ought to keep directly under his own eye.36

All these authors drew, explicitly or implicitly, on the fundamentallyhumanist assumption that education plays a vital role in making goodcitizens. This point was made by numerous authors writing in the centurybefore Hobbes, and was fully shared by him.37 It was made particularlystrongly by Jacques Simanca, whose popular De republica (1569) is a centoof quotations from classical, medieval and Renaissance authors on acomprehensive range of political topics. Like numerous other late Renais-sance authors, the list of authorities that Simanca cites in support of hiscontention about the importance of education to the commonwealth isheaded by book VIII of Aristotle’s Politics, followed by Plato’s Republic andLaws, Plutarch’s Life of the Spartan founder Lycurgus, book I of Quinti-lian’s Institutio oratoriae, and the epistles of the imperial moralist Seneca,who had said that ‘education forms the morals’ of the citizen.38

These authors often argued that the schools were not only useful butalso actually necessary to a well-ordered commonwealth. For John Case,schools were necessary because they gave rise to amity and order in thecommonwealth. The French author Pierre Gregoire – whose book Derepublica (1596) seems to have been one of the most widely read politicalworks in the earlier seventeenth century after Bodin’s – followed Clementof Alexandria in asserting the necessity of schools to the commonwealth.39

The Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius wrote at length on thistheme in his Politica of 1603, arguing that ‘if we wish to have good leaders,

34 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la republique (Lyons, 1579), 590. See further Bodin, Oratio deinstituenda in repub. juventute (Toulouse, 1559).

35 Lambert Daneau, Politices Christianae libri septem ([s.l.], 1596), 129: ‘maximam semper esse debereoptimi magistratus curam de pueris civibus suis recte, pieque educandis’.

36 Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, 190–2.37 See e.g. Himmel, Idea, 1; Jacobus Gadebuschius, Aurea discendi triga (Magdeburg, 1623), sig. B3r;

Prideaux, Hypomnemata, 356.38 Jacobus Simanca, De republica recte institutenda, conservanda & amplificanda libri IX (Cologne,

1609), 587: ‘educatio mores facit’. On Hobbes’s view of the cento as a form of learned madness, seeSkinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 267.

39 Simanca, De republica, 587, 594. Case, Sphaera civitatis, 498. Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 71.


governors, and ministers in the Commonwealth and in the Church, it isnecessary that we guard the schools in which such people are moulded.’40

As Gregoire noted, the consequences of failing to do so could be serious,since it was from education that ‘prosperity or subversion (or at least greatcorruption) can appear in a commonwealth.’41

For all these reasons, a number of early seventeenth-century writers onthe role of the universities in the commonwealth set out what such schoolsrequired.42 One important condition was a suitable, permanent andhealthy location.43 (As Robert Burton suggested in the Anatomy of Melan-choly (1621–51), some special pleading had to be made in this respect forthe University of Cambridge.44) No less important were the privileges andimmunities proper to ancien regime corporations, whether granted by thepope (for Catholic authors) or the local prince, as well as the lawsspecifically pertaining to the schools.45 Pious and well-affected teachersand professors were naturally often also listed as a desideratum. Finally,not the least important consideration for these authors was that univer-sities be properly funded.46 These views are again quite consistent withthe ones Hobbes expresses in the Elements of Law, De cive and Leviathan.Even Hobbes’s fierce early Restoration critic William Lucy sarcasticallyacknowledged that, despite his criticisms of the universities, Hobbes didnot want to see an ‘utter extirpation’ of the schools, and that he did‘reserve a room and office for them in the Commonwealth’.47

Yet while late Renaissance political theorists tended to agree about thevalue of schools and universities to the commonwealth, they showed no

40 Althusius, ‘De utilitate, necessitate et antiquitate scholarum admonitio panegyrica’, in JohannesAlthusius, Politica methodice digesta (Herborn, 1614), 983: ‘Si igitur in Rep. & Ecclesia bonosduces, gubernatores & ministros cupimus, necesse est, ut scholas, in quib. Tales informantur,conservemus.’ On Althusius, see further H. Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Furstengesellschaft (2vols., Cologne: Bohlau, 1991), vol. II, 531–2, 1024–5.

41 Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 70: ‘salus, vel subversio aut saltem corruptio major, oriri potest inrepublica’.

42 For the points below, see especially Gregoire, De republica, lib. XVIII; Althusius, Politica, 586–87;Alsted, ‘Politica’, in his Encyclopaedia, 1417; Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa, 108–9. See alsoHimmel, Idea, esp. 5.

43 Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, 195.44 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632), ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., (6 vols., Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), vol., I, 236.45 Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 72; Lawson, Examination, 76–7. See further W. Frijhoff, ‘What is

an Early Modern University? The Conflict between Leiden and Amsterdam in 1631’, inH. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European universities in the age of Reformation and CounterReformation (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 149–68, at 160.

46 Bodin, Six livres, 645; Althusius, Politica, 184; Keckermann, Systema, 194–95; George Lawson,Politica sacra et civilis (1660), ed. C. Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 247.

47 William Lucy, Observations, censures and confutations of notorious errours in Mr. Hobbes hisLeviathan (London, 1663), 7; Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.


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

I I I

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

48 Prideaux, Hypomnemata, 339.49 See further H. Dreitzel, Absolutismus und standische Verfassung in Deutschland (Mainz: Zabern,

1992), 26–8.50 Althusius, Politica, 184; Johannes Althusius, Politica: An Abridged Translation of Politics Methodic-

ally Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples trans. F. S. Carney (3rd edn,Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 76.

51 Samuel Rutherford, Lex, rex (London, 1644). See also R. von Friedeburg, ‘Widerstandsrecht,Notwehr und die Reprasentation des Gemeinwesens in der Politica des Althusius (1614) und in derschottischen Althusius-Rezeption, 1638–1669’, in Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld, 291–314(esp. 295–6).

52 See Scheibler, Philosophia compendiosa, 108 (Oxford editions in 1628 and 1639). See also Letters andPapers of the Verney Family down to the End of the Year 1639, ed. J. Bruce (London: CamdenSociety, 1853), 154.


as depending ‘wholly, on the right teaching of Youth in the Universities’.53

But according to him, the role of the universities in educating the subjectsof commonwealths had generally been malign, not beneficial. Indeed, hecame strongly to believe that the universities had been instrumental inhelping to sow the seeds of rebellion in England. It is for this reason thathe increasingly associated them with the causes of rebellion and ‘thosethings that Weaken . . . a Common-wealth’.54

The universities, in Hobbes’s view, had been guilty of encouraging falseand seditious notions about conscience, law, property and tyranny, all ofwhich presented significant dangers to the rightful sovereign power. Thusin the chapter of the Elements of Law on the preservation of the common-wealth, the opinions that Hobbes declares to dispose men to rebellion aresaid to have ‘proceeded from private and public teaching’, and theirteachers are said to have received them ‘from grounds and principles,which they have learned in the Universities’. In the corresponding chapterof De cive, Hobbes likewise asserts that the political errors tending tosedition have ‘crept into the minds of uneducated people’ partly from ‘thepulpits of popular preachers’ and partly from conversation with thegentry. Both groups, he claims, imbibed these errors ‘from those whotaught them in their young days at the Universities’.55 This kind ofcriticism may have encouraged Hobbes to think that ‘the people whohold sway in the universities’ (he does not specify which ones) might tryto hinder the publication of the second edition of De cive, which came outnonetheless at Amsterdam in early 1647.56 It is in Leviathan that univer-sities are attacked on the broadest range of fronts, yet the central chargeremains: ‘From Aristotles Civill Philosophy’, Hobbes asserts, men edu-cated in the schools ‘have learned, to call all manner of Common-wealthsbut the Popular, (such as was at that time in the state of Athens,)Tyranny’.57

53 Hobbes, Leviathan, 180.54 Hobbes, Leviathan, 167. See also Hobbes, Elements of Law, part II, ch. ix; Hobbes, De cive, ch. XII.55 Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, 138. Hobbes, De cive, 199: ‘& in animos horum a doctoribus

adolescentiae suae in Academiis publicis’ (trans. from Hobbes, On the Citizen, 146).56 Thomas Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. I,

126 (trans. 127): ‘ij qui dominantur in Academijs’.57 Hobbes, Leviathan, 377; see also 111 and ch. XXIX, and compare also Hobbes, De homine, 75. See

further M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in D. Armitage, A. Himy andQ. Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3–24, esp. 3–15; Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Proper Signification of Liberty’, in Visions of Politics,vol. III, 209–37, esp. 227.


The English Leviathan thus has a special place in this account ofHobbes’s relations to the universities, since it was in this book that hefirst unleashed the full force of his criticisms upon them. The universities,and the philosophy and theology that they teach, are subjected to severalpassing attacks throughout Leviathan, but it is in the penultimate chapterof the book that Hobbes turns to consider them systematically. ChapterXLVI of Leviathan, which has no counterpart in De cive,58 belongs to thefourth part of the book, notoriously entitled ‘Of the Kingdome ofDarknesse’; and the darkness specifically treated in this chapter is theobscurity that arises ‘from VAIN PHILOSOPHY, and FABULOUS TRADITIONS’.

Hobbes begins this chapter by giving a definition of philosophy that isin form Aristotelian: the knowledge of the effects of causes and the causesof effects; but he insists, polemically, upon a restriction to efficient (ratherthan formal, material or final) causation. More strikingly, Hobbes thenturns to offer an account of the origins and history of philosophy.Hobbes’s deep and well-formed interest in history has attracted increasingattention from scholars.59 Less has been said, however, about Hobbes’s noless well-developed interest in the history of philosophy.60

Hobbes’s brief account of the history of philosophy at the beginning ofchapter XLVI is, like Thomas Stanley’s much larger contemporary accountand also like most other histories of philosophy at the time, doxographi-cal.61 That is, it follows the lead of ancient historians of philosophy suchas Diogenes Laertius in tracing philosophy not through the history of itsideas, but through its principal protagonists and the schools that followedthem. Hobbes’s explanation for the origins of the subject is in contentconventional, but in import satirical. At the beginning of the Metaphysics(982b11–28), Aristotle had argued that philosophy is not pursued for itsutility, and had invoked in proof the ‘first philosophers’, who only beganto pursue it once the necessaries and eases of life had been obtained.Hobbes similarly asserts that ‘Leasure is the mother of Philosophy ’; and

58 See further K. Schuhmann, ‘Leviathan and De cive’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds.), Leviathanafter 350 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13–31, esp. 27.

59 See esp. W. R. Lund, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Past: Hobbes on the Study of History’, HobbesStudies 5 (1992), 3–22; L. Borot, ‘History in Hobbes’s Thought’, in T. Sorell (ed.), The CambridgeCompanion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 305–28; G. A. J. Rogersand T. Sorell (eds.), Hobbes and History (London: Routledge, 2000).

60 But see T. Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, in Hobbes and History, 82–96.61 Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy (3 vols., London, 1655–60). See further L. Malusa, ‘The

First General Histories of Philosophy in England and the Low Countries’, in G. Santinello et al.,Models of the History of Philosophy: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 161–370, esp. 174.


since ‘Common-wealth’ is ‘the mother of Peace, and Leasure’, philosophyfirst arose in ‘great and flourishing Cities’.62 It was only after the Greekcities, and above all Athens, had grown great enough to support a wealthyclass of men ‘that had no employment’ that philosophers like Plato andAristotle emerged. It is in having nothing else to do, too, that Hobbesfinds the origin of the schools, since schola in Greek ‘signifieth leasure ’,and the disputations in which these philosophers engaged were calledDiatribae, ‘that is to say, Passing of the time’. Hobbes’s joke becomesincreasingly pointed as he tells us that the different schools of philosophytook their names from the places in which their masters taught, ‘as if weshould denominate men from More-fields, from Pauls Church, and fromthe Exchange, because they meet there often, to prate and loyter’.63

Having baited his trap, Hobbes now springs it. Without any warningor preamble he turns to ask bluntly: ‘But what has been the Utility ofthose Schools? what Science is there at this day acquired by their Readingsand Disputings?’64 According to Hobbes, the Greek schools neglectedgeometry, taught a natural philosophy that was ‘rather a Dream than aScience’, and inculcated specious and dangerous doctrines in moral andpolitical philosophy.65

It is after this brief and defamatory history of the schools that Hobbesturns, without further warning, to give a formal definition of a university:‘a Joyning together, and an Incorporation under one Government ofmany Publique Schools, in one and the same Town or City’. His accounthas taken him down to his own time, and was about to land him in somevery hot water. The universities of Christendom, according to Hobbes,are irredeemably tainted by Roman Catholicism. The ‘principall Schools’of the early modern universities ‘were ordained for the three Professions,that is to say, of the Romane religion, of the Romane law, and of the Artof Medicine’. ‘And for the study of Philosophy’, he continues with anotorious jibe, ‘it hath no otherwise place then as a handmaid to theRomane Religion: And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely currentthere, that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof depen-deth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity’.66 The remainder of chapter XLVI

62 On this point see also S. J. Pigney, ‘Seventeenth-Century Accounts of Philosophy’s Past: Theo-philus Gale and his Continental Precursors’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis., University of London,1999), 53.

63 Hobbes, Leviathan, 368–9.64 On the scoffing significance of the figure of percontatio here, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric,

417–18.65 Hobbes, Leviathan, 369.66 Ibid., 370.


consists of a polemical assault on the putative errors of the Aristotelianschools across all the philosophical disciplines. In the light of all thisexecration, we should not be surprised to find one of Hobbes’s earliestcritics, Alexander Ross, writing in 1653 that:

In his forty-sixth chapter he spurnes at all learning except his own, and that withsuch a magisterial spirit, and so supercilious scorn, as if Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, thePeripateticks, Academicks, Stoicks, Colledges, Schooles, Universities, Syna-gogues, and all the wise men of Europe, Asia, and Affrick hitherto, were scarceworthy to carry his books.67

IV

We need to remind ourselves of the structure and development of Hob-bes’s argument in chapter XLVI if we are properly to understand the natureof the attack he is making.68 We might simply note, of course, thatHobbes is having a pointed joke at the expense of philosophers byaccusing them of having too much time on their hands, and levellingthe rather more serious charge at the English universities – made by othersbesides Hobbes – that they had failed to purge themselves sufficiently oftheir popish origins.69

Many of Hobbes’s targets in chapters XLVI and XLVII of Leviathan arespecifically and unambiguously Roman Catholic. Hobbes criticises, forinstance, the philosophical justification for ‘denying of Marriage to theclergy’; he gives the example of a Christian who may not preach tothe unconverted until he has ‘received Orders from Rome’; and his firstexample of errors derived from tradition includes ‘all the Histories ofApparitions, and Ghosts, alledged by the Doctors of the Romane Church,to make good their Doctrines’.70

It may be appropriate to associate Hobbes’s critique of the doctrinestaught in the Roman Catholic universities with the university of Paris inparticular. Paris was where Hobbes had mostly been living since he hadbeen ‘the first of all that fled’ England in 1640.71 The University of Pariswas much more thoroughly committed to Aristotelianism in metaphysicsand in natural philosophy than were the universities of Oxford and

67 Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, 81.68 Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in

Politics, Language and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148–201, at 200.69 See also Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, 89.70 Hobbes, Leviathan, 376, 378, 379.71 Hobbes, Considerations, 6.


Cambridge by 1651.72 It was in Paris in 1624 that the Faculty of Theologyhad formerly censured opponents of Aristotelian philosophy, in part inresponse to Pierre Gassendi’s Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristote-leos which had come out anonymously that same year.73 Indeed, Hobbes’sown attack on Aristotelianism may be regarded as owing something to hisfriend Gassendi’s book: Gassendi preceded Hobbes in describing Aristo-telian natural philosophy as a ‘dream’ (insomnium) and in criticising theschools for neglecting geometry. Similarly, where Hobbes had com-plained that the schools brought philosophy in religion, Gassendi hadpreviously made the parallel criticism that the schools have erred inderiving abstruse questions in philosophy from theology.74 The firstposition that the Parisian theologians had upheld in their censure of1624 was one that Hobbes specifically attacks in Leviathan: the metaphys-ical doctrine of materia prima.75 Moreover, it was the University of Paristhat had encouraged attacks such as Gabriel Cossart’s oration against thenew philosophy in 1650, in which he argued that novelty of doctrine wasthe quickest means to destroy commonwealths.76 The irony that theUniversity of Paris had thus become more, rather than less, committedto Aristotle since its founding was not lost on the theologian Jean deLaunoy, who drew attention to it in his book De varia Aristotelis inAcademia parisiensis fortuna (1653).77 Moreover, Hobbes would go onexplicitly to attack the University of Paris for condemning Luther’s attackon ‘School-theology’ in the Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity andChance (1656).78

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Hobbes is only orsimply attacking Roman Catholicism here.79 In fact, we will not under-stand the force of Hobbes’s attack if we restrict our interpretation simply

72 See further M. Feingold, ‘Aristotle and the English Universities in the Seventeenth Century:A Reevaluation’, in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, 135–48, esp. 141; Morgan and Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II, 514–15.

73 B. Rochot, ‘Introduction’, to Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre lesAristoleciens, ed. and trans. B. Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959), vii–xv, at viii.

74 Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (Amsterdam, 1649), 13, 10, 16.75 See Jean de Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in academica parisiensi fortuna (Paris, 1653), 125, 128.76 Gabriel Cossart, Adversus novitatem doctrinae oratio (Paris, 1650), 1.77 Launoy, De varia Aristotelis . . . fortuna, 139. See further A. C. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990– ), vol. I, 229.78 Thomas Hobbes, The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (London, 1656), 48. See

further Leijenhorst, Mechanization of Aristotelianism, 31.79 Contrast H. W. Schneider, ‘Thomas Hobbes from Behemoth to Leviathan’, in C. Walton and

P. J. Johnson (eds.), Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’ (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 219–22, at 222; F. Lessay, ‘Hobbes’s Protestantism’, in Leviathan after 350 Years, 265–94, at 267.


to Hobbes’s own writings.80 If we wish to understand the historicalimport of Hobbes’s attack we need to ask this question: where else hadHobbes’s contemporaries treated the topic of the history and purpose ofthe schools?

The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies with the schools themselves.The universities, academies and gymnasia of early modern Europe gener-ated a flourishing literature on the history and uses of the schools.81 Onegenre in particular comes very close to what Hobbes is doing in chapterXLVI of Leviathan. This was the oration in praise of the schools, commonlypronounced by a rector or professor at a commencement ceremony or atthe beginning of the academic year. The genre of the inaugural oration isprincipally associated with the universities and academies of the LowCountries and the Protestant German-speaking lands, which tended tobe rather more forward about printing academic-related material than theEnglish universities. Nonetheless, English examples of the genre bySamuel Fell and John Prideaux are also extant. Moreover, Germanspecimens of the genre were also reprinted in England in the first halfof the seventeenth century, such as the one by Philip Pareus.82

These orations are in the genus demonstrativum; that is to say, theyemploy the rhetoric of praise and blame.83 They came to praise theschools, as Hobbes came to blame them. Earlier seventeenth-centuryexamples of these orations often follow a rather stereotyped arrangement.It was an arrangement that had been formalised by an author we havealready encountered: the Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius.At the end of his widely read Politica (1603), Althusius published as anappendix a panegyric praising ‘the antiquity, utility, and necessity of theschools’.84 This oration, which in good Calvinist fashion emphasises therole of the schools in helping to restore fallen humanity, served as an

80 Compare Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Uses of the History of Philosophy’, 87–9.81 See further Martin Lipen, Bibliotheca realis philosophica (2 vols., Frankfurt am Main, 1682), vol. II,

1367–8.82 Samuel Fell, Primitiae, sive oratio habita Oxonia in schola theologica (Oxford, 1627); John Prideaux,

Orationes novem inaugurales (Oxford, 1626); Philip Pareus, Oratio panegyrica pro musis Hanovicisinstaurandis (London, 1641).

83 On the rhetorical genera, see further Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 41–5, 373.84 This oration is not reprinted in either the abridged Latin edition of C. J. Friedrich (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press 1932) or in the further abridged English translation by F. S.Carney. On it, see further G. A. Benrath, ‘Johannes Althusius an der Hohen Schule in Herborn’,in K.-W. Dahm, W. Krawietz and D. Wyduckel (eds.), Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius(Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt, 1988), 99–107, and H. Dreitzel, ‘Politische Philosophie’, inH. Holzhey et al., (eds.), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts (4 vols., Basle: Schwabe, 2001),vol. IV, 607–748, at 629; and von Friedeburg’s chapter in this volume.


implicit or explicit model for a number of later authors, including JohannHimmel in his Idea boni gymnasii (1614), Johann Heinrich Alsted in hisEncyclopaedia (1630), and Theodore Schrevelius in his suggestively titledDiatribae scholasticae (1643).85

As Hobbes does in chapter XLVI of Leviathan, these orations commonlybegin by discussing the question of the antiquity of the schools oflearning.86 Several writers trace this history back beyond the Greeks tothe schools of the Jews in the Old Testament. Hobbes too does this inLeviathan, although he is perhaps at slightly greater pains than his sourcesto point out that the Jewish schools did not teach philosophy, but law.87

The authors of these orations then commonly turn to praise the necessityof the schools, sometimes noting – as Alsted does – that knowledge of thearts and sciences is what separates social men from isolated beasts.88 But ifthese orations agree in regarding the schools as necessary, they are evenmore emphatic about their usefulness (utilitas).89 The schools are said tobe useful because of the benefits that each of the disciplines they teachbring to human life. Indeed, to make this point, authors often ranthrough each of the disciplines taught in the schools – from grammar,logic and rhetoric, through moral and natural philosophy, to medicine,law and divinity – praising the profit that each of them brings.90 We arealso told by these authors that the schools are useful because of thepolitical function that we have already heard about. They are there tosend forth ‘learned, wise, excellent, and erudite men’ for the ministry ofthe church and the governance of the commonwealth.91 For Calvinistauthors such as Alsted and Althusius, the schools were above all useful in

85 Himmel, Idea, 2. Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1505, 1544. Theodorus Schrevelius, Diatribae scholasticaesive orationes (Leiden, 1643), 15 (antiquity), 24 (necessity) and 26 (utility of the schools). On Alstedas a follower of Althusius, see H. Hotson, ‘The Conservative Face of Contractual Theory: TheMonarchomach Servants of the Court of Nassau-Dillenburg’, in Politische Begriffe und historischesUmfeld, 251–89, at 255 and n. 18.

86 Petrus Kirstenius, ‘Oratio de origine, successione, propagatione et perfectione scholarum’, inJohannes Scholtzius and Petrus Kirstenius, Orationes duae introductoriae in gymnasio Wratisla-viensium (Breslau, 1650), esp. sigs. E3r–F2r; Georgius Stampelius, Historia scholastica (Lubeck,1616); Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1525. Althusius’s ‘Oratio’ treats the utilitas and necessitas of the schools(970–85) before turning to their antiquitas (985–1003). See also Lawson, Politica, 247; RudolphusHospinianus, De templis (Zurich, 1603), 413–35.

87 Hobbes, Leviathan, 369. On the history of Jewish schools see also Thomas Goodwin, Moses andAaron (5th edn, London, 1634), 81–3.

88 Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 1544.89 See esp. Schrevelius, Diatribae scholasticae, 26.90 See Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, 43–70; Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 971–5.91 Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 979: ‘Ex scholis homines docti, sapientes, excellentes & eruditi sumuntur ad

ministerium Ecclesiae & ad Reip. Gubernationem.’


that they provided remedies for the intellectual defects that humans hadacquired by the Fall.92 One retiring rector even allowed himself to developthe happy thought that life in the university was comparable to that inparadise.93 But the comparison with heaven was also matched by theinvocation of hell. According to Althusius, the loss of the schools wouldlead to ‘atheism, Epicureanism, and the kingdom of darkness’.94

I trust that by this account the nature of Hobbes’s attack in this chapterof Leviathan has come into sharper focus. Where it had been conventionalto praise the antiquity of the schools, he does so – although he ascribestheir origin not to God, but to wealth and leisure. But where, by contrast,it had been conventional to praise the necessity of the schools, Hobbessuggests that they have only encouraged sedition, and fatally confusedphilosophy and theology.95 And where, above all, it had been conven-tional to praise the usefulness of the schools to the commonwealth,Hobbes asks simply what their utility has been, and asserts that theirlearning has been ignorant, captious, absurd and unprofitable. Finally,where it had been conventional to suggest that without the schools societywould lapse into the kingdom of darkness, Hobbes suggests that they havealready been instrumental in bringing it to pass.

In short, I believe that we should regard chapter XLVI of Leviathan as adeliberately parodic inversion of many conventional sentiments about thevalue of the schools in general, and in particular about their antiquity andutility. In fact, I find the structural similarities to be so close that I thinkwe must conclude that Hobbes had the Presbyterian Althusius or one ofhis imitators, such as Schrevelius, directly in his sights.

V

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

92 Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 970–1. On the implications of this point, see H. Hotson, Johann HeinrichAlsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000), 66–73.

93 Johannes Scholtzius, ‘Oratio de allegorica comparatione Paradysi et scholarum’, in Scholtzius andKirstenius, Orationes duae, sigs. A4v–C4r, esp. sig. C2r.

94 Althusius, ‘Oratio’, 985: ‘atheismus, epicureismus, & regnum tenebrarum’.95 Compare N. Jolley, ‘The Relation between Theology and Philosophy’, in Cambridge History of

Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. II, 363–92, at 366.


Aristotelians of the so-called ‘second Reformation’ there was no inherentconflict between philosophy and theology.96 Moreover, this message hadbeen thoroughly well received in pre-civil war Oxford, where a number oftheir writings were reprinted. Among these writings were ChristophScheibler’s defence of the use of philosophy in theology, edited byThomas Barlow in 1637,97 and the Scottish loyalist Robert Baron’s Phi-losophia theologia ancillans (1621), which was reprinted at Oxford in 1641.98

When Hobbes accused Roman Catholic universities of treating philoso-phy as the handmaid of religion he also expected his readers to recallProtestant assertions to exactly the same effect. His suggestion that theuniversities pursued philosophy simply as an ancillary pursuit to religionwas an attack on a subordinate and – in Hobbes’s view – seditiousconception of philosophy common to universities on both sides of theconfessional divide.Hobbes’s use of the present tense in Leviathan – his claim that philoso-

phy ‘hath’ no place than as a handmaid to the Roman religion – particu-larly provoked his antagonists at Oxford in the 1650s. It is well known thatone of the earlier responses to Leviathan came in the course of SethWard’s Vindiciae academiarum (1654), a book principally directed againstJohn Webster, but with appendices taking on both William Dell – theanti-scholastic army chaplain who had found himself within the gates asMaster of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge – and also Hobbes.99

This book helped to draw Hobbes in the 1650s into a quarrel – its recenthistorian has justly called it a war – with both Ward, the SavilianProfessor of Astronomy, and with Ward’s colleague John Wallis, SavilianProfessor of Geometry.100 Ward found Hobbes’s suggestion that thephilosophy pursued in the English universities was somehow ancillary toRoman Catholicism ‘so Barbarous an Assertion’ that nothing but the

96 H. Schilling, ‘The Second Reformation: Problems and Issues’, in Religion, Political Culture and theEmergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 247–301, esp. 276, 297–9. See also Bartholomew Keckermann, ‘De pugna philosophiae et theologiae’ inOpera omnia (2 vols., Geneva, 1614), vol. I, cols. 68–74.

97 Christoph Scheibler, ‘De usu philosophiae in theologia, & praetensa ejus ad theologiam contra-rietate’, prefacing his Metaphysica (Oxford, 1637), 1–21.

98 Robert Baron, Philosophia theologia ancillans (St Andrews, 1621; repr. Oxford, 1641, 1658), esp.320–3 on the value of all the parts of philosophy to theology.

99 On Ward’s Vindiciae, see A. G. Debus, Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: TheWebster–Ward Debate (London: Macdonald, 1970), 33–56; J. Twigg, The University of Cambridgeand the English Revolution (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), 206–33.

100 D. M. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999), esp. 293–339. See also P. Beeley and C. J. Scriba, eds., The Correspondence ofJohn Wallis (1616–1703), vol. I: 1641–1659 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148, 187, 539.


reverence owing to the already old man’s ‘Grey Haires’ restrained Ward‘from speaking bluntly of him’. In his response – the Six lessons to theprofessors of the mathematiques (1656) – Hobbes claimed, with a rathercontrived pique, that the present tense was simply a printer’s error or aslip of the pen: no one could believe that ‘after fifty years being acquaintedwith what was publicquely profest and practised in Oxford and Cam-bridge, I knew not what Religion they were of ’. This retraction in turnprovoked Seth Ward into one of the more laboured jokes in the burlesqueappendix to his In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica(1656): punning on the Latin word tempus (both ‘time’ and ‘tense’), Wardexclaimed: ‘as if the whole controversy were not about tempus. O Tempora!o Mores! ’101

The provocation that Hobbes received from Ward and Wallis pro-voked him, in the Six lessons, into making explicit the implications of hisargument that philosophy had been corrupted by theology in all spheresof human knowledge. The suggestion that he made was one that inProtestant Europe in the seventeenth century was still scarcely thinkable:that university education should cease to be in the hands of the clergy.‘How would you have exclaimed’, he wrote, ‘if instead of recommendingmy Leviathan to be taught in the Universities, I had recommended theerecting of a New and Lay-University, wherein Lay-men should havethe reading of Physiques, Mathematicks, Morall Philosophy, and Politicks,as the Clergy now have the sole teaching of Divinity?102

The dangerous force of this suggestion is indicated by the fact that afterthe founding of the Royal Society, early in the Restoration, one of theprincipal charges the fledgling and somewhat insecure institution felt itnecessary to rebut was that it offered a threat to the functions andprivileges of the universities.103

Yet it would be wrong to imagine that the intemperate nature of the Sixlessons may give the impression that Hobbes had burnt his last boat withthe universities. In fact it preceded a bid on his part, concerted by hisyoung Oxford correspondent Henry Stubbe, to gain the favour of anumber of people in a position of authority at Oxford.104 Hobbes sent

101 [Ward], Vindiciae academiarum, 58. Hobbes, Six lessons, 61. Ward, Exercitatio epistolica, 358: ‘quaside Tempore non foret, omnis controversia, o Tempora! o Mores! ’

102 Hobbes, Six lessons, 60.103 Thomas Sprat, The history of the Royal-Society of London (London, 1667), 323–9. For the charge, see

AnthonyWood, ‘Henry Stubbe’, in Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols., London: J. Rivington,1813–20), vol. III, col. 1071.

104 See also J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22.


a copy of the English translation of De corpore (including the Six lessons) toBodley’s Librarian, Thomas Barlow, with a conciliatory letter.105 He alsocooked up with Stubbe a plan to praise Oxford in a way that would reflectwell upon its vice-chancellor.106 This was Cromwell’s ecclesiastical right-hand man, the Independent John Owen, whose attempts to reform theuniversity were running into increasing difficulties at the time.107 In thispiece of praise, published in Markes of the absurd geometry . . . of JohnWallis (1657), Hobbes went so far as to call Oxford and Cambridge ‘thegreatest and Noblest means of advancing learning of all kinds’.108

Hobbes’s rather unexpected praise of Oxford here can be seen as part ofa longer-term campaign to encourage the claims of independency overthose of Presbyterianism. It seems possible that Hobbes might havegenuinely regarded England in the middle years of the 1650s as actuallyresponding to his call for the subordination of ecclesiastical to civil power.Hobbes had ended Leviathan with a remarkable praise of Independency as‘perhaps the best’ form of church government,109 and now Oxford was inthe hands of England’s most prominent Independent, John Owen. More-over, Owen was known to act with Cromwell’s authority, and wasregarded by Stubbe as being hostile to Wallis (and also indifferent toSeth Ward).110 The controversy over the two commissions set up in 1654for the Approbation of Godly Ministers (the ‘Triers’) and the Ejection ofScandalous Ministers (‘Ejectors’) – which Hobbes clearly alludes to in theSix lessons as a ‘Competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civillpower’ that ‘hath manifestly enough appeared very lately’ – had beenresolved in favour of the Commonwealth’s right to control the clergy andagainst the claims of classical Presbyterianism.111 Yet it was in this contextthat Wallis had published his claim that ministers of the gospel had beenenjoined to their office by Christ – and not by the civil power.112 It wasthis claim that provoked Hobbes’s first absolutely explicit attack on

105 Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 420–2.106 Ibid., 384; N. Malcolm, ‘Biographical Register’, in Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. II, 900.107 B. Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV: Seventeenth-

Century Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 733–72, at 744–6.108 Thomas Hobbes, Markes of the absurd geometry, rural language, Scottish church-politicks, and

barbarismes of John Wallis (London, 1657), 19.109 Hobbes, Leviathan, 385. On Hobbes’s sympathy for independency see J. R. Collins, ‘Christian

Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes’,Historical Journal 43 (2000), 217–31, at 227–8. J. P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes and independency’,Rivista di storia della filosofia, 56 (2004), 155–73, disagrees.

110 Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 384.111 Hobbes, Six lessons, 60. J. R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87

(2002), 18–40.112 John Wallis, Mens sobria serio commendata (Oxford, 1657), 136.


Presbyterian – or, as he put it, ‘Scottish’ – church politics. To be sure, adeliberately thinly veiled warning about the presbyterian claim to ‘have aPower . . . distinct from that of the Civill State’ had ended the finalchapter of Leviathan,113 but in comparison with the vehement assaultlevelled against Presbyterians in Behemoth,114 his comments in Leviathanare in fact strikingly cautious. Presbyterianism is mentioned explicitly ononly four occasions in the printed Leviathan, in each case rather guardedlyand with only the last notice being directly related to England.115 This isone explanation for why the attack on Presbyterian histories of the schoolsthat has been identified here should have been pursued indirectly, throughparody.

Yet as Henry Stubbe reported to Hobbes, it was Presbyterian antipathytowards him that prevented anyone in Oxford acknowledging his over-tures.116 Owen, too, was perhaps rather less well disposed towards Hobbesthan Stubbe would have liked Hobbes to think, and he continued towork together with Wallis in the university.117 After this missed stepHobbes would increasingly yoke Presbyterianism with the classical repub-lican doctrines of the ‘democratical gentlemen’ when he attacked theseditious doctrines taught in the universities.

VI

For if Hobbes’s attitude to the English universities thawed briefly in1656–7, a deep and bitter frost set in with the Restoration. At severalpoints in his later writings, Hobbes sharpened and developed his chargethat the universities had been fundamentally to blame for the civil warsin England. Moreover, he continued to believe – if anything withincreased conviction – that they posed a serious threat to peace in thecommonwealth.

Hence Hobbes used the opportunity presented by the translation ofLeviathan into Latin in 1668 to make his attack on the universities moreexplicit. Where, for instance, he asks in his modified account of sovereign

113 Hobbes, Leviathan, 387.114 On this attack see A. P. Martinich, ‘Presbyterians in Behemoth’, Filozofski vestnik 24 (2003), 121–38,

who wishes to argue that Hobbes’s account is ‘wrong’.115 Hobbes, Leviathan, 335, 341, 382, 385. There is a further reference to English Presbyterians in the

scribal copy that Hobbes presented to Charles II: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (rev.edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 127, n. 1.

116 Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, 449.117 J. Rampelt, ‘Distinctions of Reason and Reasonable Distinctions: The Academic Life of John

Wallis’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005), 179–85.


duty in chapter XXX, did the seditious preachers who incited the peopleagainst Charles I obtain their authority? From the universities.118 He alsosharpens his account of the essential function of the universities as formersof opinion. This point appears at the very end of the new conclusion hewrote for the final chapter of the Latin version. The ‘democratic ink’, hewrote there, ‘must be erased by preaching, writing and disputing. I cannotconceive that that can be done in any other way than through theUniversities.’119

Nonetheless, it was in the dialogic history of the civil wars thatHobbes entitled Behemoth that his assault on the universities reachedits most vehement heights – and caused him to depart most strikinglyfrom the chronicle by James Heath that formed his source.120 The end ofthe first dialogue of Behemoth, in fact, constitutes a sustained assault onthe role of the universities. Hobbes asserts there that ‘the coar ofRebellion, as you haue seen by this, and read of other Rebellions, arethe Uniuersities’.121 (It is worth emphasising the scope of Hobbes’sattack here: he does not just have England in mind. We are possiblyintended to think as well of the Low Countries, and the founding of theUniversity of Leiden in particular, as a means of furthering the aims ofthe Dutch Revolt.122) Even this, however, is not Hobbes’s strongestcharge: for that, he resorted to an epic simile: ‘The Uniuersities hauebeen to this Nation, as the woodden horse to the Troians.’123 Why havethey been so dangerous? Again we encounter a development in Hobbes’saccount, but by now not an unexpected one. The Presbyterian clergy arenow for the first time explicitly joined to the ‘democratical gentleman’ asthe joint instigators of the civil wars. Both had their opinions formed inthe schools.The most immediate consequence of the hardening of Hobbes’s views

was that he became increasingly explicit about calling for universityreform. Despite their deep complicity in rebellion, the universities werestill not to be wholly rejected. As he added to the Latin Leviathan, ‘before

118 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Opera philosophica, quae latine scripsit, omnia (2 vols. Amsterdam,1668) (henceforth cited as ‘Latin Leviathan’), vol. II, 161. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, 180.

119 Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 327: ‘Itaque atramentum illud Democraticum, praedicando, scribendo,disputando eluendum est. Id qui aliter fieri possit, nisi ab Universitatibus, non intelligo.’

120 P. Seaward, ‘Chief of the Ways of God: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes’,Filozofski vestnik 24 (2003), 169–88, at 174, 183, 188.

121 St John’s MS 13, fol. 28r.122 J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995), 569.123 St John’s MS 13, fol. 19v.


everything else they must be reformed’.124 This was a note he struckrepeatedly in Behemoth, asserting that the universities ‘are not to be castaway, but to be better disciplin’d’. In fact, he went on, ‘We neuer shallhave a lasting peace till the Universities themselues be . . . reformed.’ Theconsequences of failing to carry through this reform would be dire; sodire, that Hobbes only alludes to them by the means – highly unusual forhim – of a direct quotation from the classics: ‘unless the Preachers teachthe people better, and our Universities teach those Preachers better, thenperhaps mighty Achilles will again be sent to Troy’.125

As well as hardening his criticism of the role of the universities in thecivil wars, Hobbes now also develops his long-term historical critique ofthe schools. The account of the origin and progress of the schools ofphilosophy in chapter LXVI of the Latin Leviathan is almost entirely re-written, and it emerges with a notably different character from the Englishversion.126 In the first place, Hobbes largely excises the allusions to aspecifically English context. The jokes about the men who gather togetherin Moorfields or the Exchange, ‘to prate, and loiter’, disappear. The jibeabout ‘Aristotelity’ is located in some unspecified past rather than thepresent. The deliberately contrived confusion – which had proved socontentious – between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant univer-sities in respect of their use of philosophy as the handmaid of theology isalso altered. The explanation for this phenomenon is given a much morehistorical emphasis, and the University of Paris is this time specificallymentioned. In fact, Hobbes’s account of the development of the schools,and their transformation into universities under (according to him)Charlemagne, is given greater historical specificity, and pays more atten-tion to the relationship between philosophy and theology in the earlyChristian church.127 All these developments are paralleled in a new historyof the pope’s design in ‘setting vp Vniuersities’ that Hobbes also gives inthe first dialogue of Behemoth.128

How should we explain Hobbes’s shift in emphasis? One answer maylie in his reading of Johann Cluver’s Historiarum totius mundi epitome,

124 Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 161: ‘Ante omnia ergo illae reformandae sunt’.125 St John’s MS 13, fol. 28r; ibid., fol. 28v; see also fol. 27r. Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 323: ‘nisi autem

Praedicatores populum, & Vniversitates nostrae Praedicatores ipsos melius doceant, forte Iterumad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles’ (Virgil, Eclogae, IV. 36). Hobbes justifies having ‘neglected theOrnament of quoting’ in Leviathan, 394–5.

126 See further, Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 453, n. 1; 468, n. 1.127 Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 314–19.128 St John’s MS 13, fol. 20r (the quotation is an addition in Hobbes’s own hand to James Wheldon’s

scribal copy).


which similarly ascribes the founding of the first university (academia) inParis to Charlemagne.129 Another may involve Hobbes’s response to hismost dangerous encounter with a newly revived ecclesiastical authority inthe Restoration. In 1662 it was rumoured that some bishops in the newlyrestored Church of England might try, as John Aubrey put it, ‘to have thegood old gentleman burn’t for a heretique’; and in 1666 the Commonsconvened a committee to investigate Leviathan.130 Hobbes’s response tothese threats was to pursue some extensive research into the history andlegal status of heresy both in England and more generally.131 The fruits ofthis reading made their way into the Historia ecclesiastica.132 They alsoappeared in the newly added appendix to the Latin Leviathan,133 and inthe late Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the common laws ofEngland (dateable to the period after the Scargill affair in 1669).134 One ofthe central points in these works is that ‘heresy’ from its Greek originssignifies ‘singularity of Doctrine, or Opinion contrary to the Doctrine ofanother Man, or Men’, and, consequently, that the positions of thephilosophical schools that arose in support of the doctrines of Plato,Aristotle, Pythagoras and Zeno were, in effect, heresies.135 A perhapsunintended consequence of this historical research was that Hobbes feltobliged to develop his initially schematic and parodic account of thehistory of the schools, and their transformation into universities, into amore thoroughgoing argument about the history of the corruption oftheology by philosophy (and vice versa).

VI I

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

129 Johann Cluver, Historiarum totius mundi epitome (6th edn, Leiden, 1657), 413; see more generallyP. Springborg, ‘Hobbes and Cluverius’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 1075–8. But the point hadbeen made elsewhere: see Herman Conring, De antiquitatibus academicis dissertationes sex (Helm-stedt, 1651), 44, 74–5.

130 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898),vol. I, 339.

131 See further P. Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought 14(1993), 516–21, esp. 521–4, 541–5.

132 Thomas Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, carmine elegiaco concinnata (London, 1688).133 Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 346–59.134 A. Cromartie, ‘General Introduction’, to Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a

Student, of the Common Laws of England, ed. A. Cromartie, and Questions Relative to HereditaryRight, ed. Q. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), xiii–lxv (at xiv, lviii, lxii–lxv).

135 Hobbes, Dialogue, 92–3; Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, 346–7. See further, P. Springborg, ‘Hobbes,Heresy and the Historia ecclesiastica’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 553–71, esp. 558.


intellectual history. The 1651 Leviathan is, as Robert Payne reportedHobbes’s description of it, ‘Politiques in English’,136 and was explicitlyintended for an English audience.137 Yet it is no doubt appropriate that ina chapter that fearlessly takes on the entire philosophical culture of theEuropean universities Hobbes should have been engaging covertly with abody of literature and a political theory asserting the schools’ vital role inthe commonwealth which was not itself English. Yet as we have seen,it was a view that had proved attractive in the pre-civil war Englishuniversities, and particularly in Oxford. The intellectual culture ofthe universities in the first half of the seventeenth century was stillinternational (and Latinate) in nature.

Yet the second implication precisely concerns the changing place of theschools in the intellectual and political life of the period more generally.Hobbes’s quarrel with the universities was a notable contribution to thedeath-knell that began to be sounded across Europe from the middle yearsof the seventeenth century for the unity of the university curriculum ingeneral, and for the fruitful association of philosophy and theology inparticular. This conception of unity and association was beginning tocome under serious threat in these decades, fatally undermined by acombination of factors.138 These factors include: the growing prevalenceof the vernaculars and the consequent increasing insularity of Europeanintellectual cultures; the economic and social depredations of the ThirtyYears War; the catastrophic decline in the confidence and reach of thelearned book trade that centred around the annual Frankfurt book fair;139

and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the emergence of a range ofinstitutions that competed with the universities.140 These included Jesuitcolleges in the Catholic world; non-degree-granting academies such asthat of Amsterdam in Protestant states; and the widespread emergence ofanti-scholastic learned societies for the promotion of natural, literary and

136 BL, MS Harley 6942, fol. 128v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 13 May [1650]).137 See Q. Skinner, ‘Introduction: Hobbes’s Career in Philosophy’, in Visions of Politics, vol. III, 1–37,

at 19.138 See further M. Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV, 211–

357, esp. 218–42; R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Introduction’, to Meric Casaubon, Generall Learning:A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar (Cambridge: RTM,1999), 1–65.

139 I. Maclean, ‘The Market for Scholarly Books and Conceptions of Genre in Europe, 1570–1630’, inDie Renaissance im Blick der Nationen Europas, ed. G. Kauffmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,1991), 17–31.

140 P. F. Grendler, ‘The Universities of the Renaissance and Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly 57(2004), 1–42, esp. 23–8.


historical knowledge – such as the Royal Society, which Hobbes was neverasked to join.141 These institutions, which were new and lay universities intheir way, presented challenges to the existing European universities thatthey often failed to meet. Neither Hobbes himself nor the persona he hadcreated was welcome in such institutions. But his attacks on the schoolswould become a powerful temptation for future philosophers to ignoretheir place in the history of European knowledge in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries.

141 R. Hahn, ‘The Age of Academies’, in Solomon’s House Revisited: The Organization and Institution-alization of Science, ed. Tore Frangsmyr (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1990), 3–13.


CHAPTER 6

The judicial persona in historical context: the case ofMatthew Hale

David Saunders497314

I

The persona of the jurist has a rich normative history, particularly instories of God as the judge or the judge as God. Lowering our sights tothe human forum, however, brings into view an attribute of the judicialpersona – impartiality in adjudication – that is less a divine gift than anethical capacity, laboriously acquired and unevenly distributed. To de-scribe the history of the judicial persona, however, we need to consider afurther dimension: the neutrality of the entire legal system within whichthat persona works. For its exercise, the office of judge presumes ajurisdiction, that is, a delimited ambit of adjudication that is inseparablefrom a definite historical scene and political setting.

In an early modern scene scarred by confessional conflict, territorialstate-building relied on two essential juridical activities: legislation andadjudication. Temporal jurisdictions emerged as boundaries were drawnbetween state and church, between civil laws and the powers of thepapacy. Legal officers – jurists and judges – were at the epicentre ofprofound disputes over where to draw the boundaries, as territorial statessought to separate their administration from trans-territorial powers ofchurch and empire. It was a question of fixing the locus and character of apower of final determination. Given territorial variations in religious,political and legal conditions, there was no one model or right answer.Any consideration of the judicial persona within its early modern sett-ing therefore dictates an approach that is relativising, comparative andjurisdictionally specific.

The attribute of impartiality in adjudication and the application of thelaw cannot be separated from the jurisdictional contexts of its exercise. Inearly modern Europe, some legal systems were more neutral with respectto religious norms; others that treated heresy, blasphemy and witchcraftas crimes less so. In the case of the latter – typically systems in which

140

Romano-canon law formed a large part of the temporal jurisdiction – theconduct of a judge could still be impartial in the sense of faithfullyapplying existing law, even if the law itself was not neutral or indifferentto the question of true religion. In the case of a jurisdiction that wasindependent of religious norms, judicial impartiality would on the con-trary reflect the religious neutrality of the legal system itself. Put in theseideal-typical terms, the contrast is no doubt too schematic. It serves,nonetheless, to underscore a fact: the character and content of whatcounted as judicial impartiality were contingent on the jurisdictionalcontext of adjudication.This chapter begins by tracing the persona of a particular common-law

judge, Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), viewed in the religious and politicalcontext of an emerging Anglican settlement. Having served on theCommon Bench under Cromwell, Hale returned to office under CharlesII as Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer (1660–71) and as ChiefJustice of the King’s Bench (1671–6). Some comparisons will then bedrawn with French and German settings. Though brief, especially withrespect to Germany, these comparisons precede a return to the Englishscene and Hale’s Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe. Thejudge’s intervention in the Hobbesian polemic is considered in light of myprincipal theme: the judicial persona that was fashioned within the habitusof a common-law jurisdiction.

I I

Judicial impartiality is not an unconditional, free-floating capacity. Whatthe judge is impartial towards depends on the orientation of the legalsystem more generally towards or away from neutrality with respect toreligious criteria. It is such conditions – peculiar to the contingencies of anation’s religious and political history – that orient the exercise of anethical capacity, impartiality, attaching to the judicial persona. If, in earlymodern England, legal judgments were made on religious matters such asblasphemy and witchcraft, the character of these judgments was symp-tomatic of a legal system operating within a political state containing anestablished national church. The initial task, then, is to explore theinteractions of the judicial persona with the history of the jurisdiction inwhich it came to operate.Conjoined instrumentally with the political programme of the Tudors,

the English common-law system had distanced itself from rival canonistand papal jurisdictions. The schism with Rome curbed ecclesiastical

The judicial persona in historical context 141

jurisdiction from outside the prince’s territory, creating space for a nativeEnglish law, the classic publicist of which was the Henrician jurist,Christopher St German. Disallowing any claim to independent powersin the territory of the English crown by a papal or ecclesiastical jurisdic-tion, St German advanced a position that was ‘radical and indeed Mar-siglian’: that ‘all coercive and jurisdictional power . . . must be vested inthe supremacy of the common law and all legislative authority in thesovereignty of the King in Parliament’.1 A tradition was being constructedthat allowed the common law to assert a jurisdictional autonomy withrespect to ecclesiastical authority and the spiritual courts.

Imagery changed too, in the same direction. In the fifteenth century,English lawyers had been associated with the figure of the priest.A century later, no doubt thanks to humanistic modes of thought, adifferent figure of comparison had emerged: the Roman iuris prudenteor iuris consulti. By the mid-1600s, the persona of the lawyer had thusacquired a distinctively secular model.2 Symptomatic of this shift infiguration is Matthew Hale’s commitment to translate Cornelius Nepos’slife of Pomponius Atticus, the Roman Stoic renowned for his ‘politicalneutrality by living through the Roman revolution on terms of friendshipwith all the major antagonists’.3 In this humanist undertaking, it is not toodifficult to see Hale’s concern with techniques for achieving impartialityin adjudication, in times of civil conflict.

As to his own religion, Hale stood on the side of Puritan piety colouredby a conviction of post-lapsarian humanity’s limited capacities, a convic-tion material to the cultivation of a specific religious persona. Hale sharedthe ‘awareness that only so much is possible within the structures providedby a working Christian’s place and opportunity; that nature is onlyimpressible, never transformable by grace’.4 Viewing worldly life fromthis theological perspective, Hale could accept coercive laws as the morenecessary to regulate dangerous religious impulsions in circumstanceswhere ‘the concerns of religion and the civil state are so twisted one withanother that confusion and disorder and anarchy in the former must of

1 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. II: The Age of Reformation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 58.

2 Such shifts in personae are only one aspect of the complex phenomenon of legal secularisation.Unlike England with its Inns of Court, some countries lacked their own institutions of legalformation. In these circumstances, jurists travelled abroad to train in the canon law.

3 Charles M. Gray (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Sir Matthew Hale. The History of the Common Law ofEngland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xiii–xiv.

4 Gray, ‘Introduction’, xvi.

142 DAVID SAUNDERS

necessity introduce confusion and dissolution of the latter’.5 At risk fromspiritual enthusiasts was temporal order: ‘he that today pretends aninspiration or a divine impulse to disturb a minister in his sermontomorrow may pretend another inspiration to take away his goods orhis life’.6 Hale was as eminently clear on the public dangers of religion ason the civil benefits of law.Hale took literate steps towards impartiality in his judicial work,

compiling a corpus of some eighteen rules governing a non-prejudicialadjudication. Like his devotional writings, these statements of judicialself-resolve were for Hale’s private reflection, not for publication. Asguidelines for a desired persona, they might be termed an exercise ofspirit, but for juridical purposes: that ‘in the execution of justice,I carefully lay aside my own passions, and not give way to them howeverprovoked’. The concern is that the judge should deviate as little as possiblefrom an ideal of dispassionate adjudication. Another resolution recognisesthe difficulty of judging impartially when personal religion was at issue:that ‘I be not too rigid in matters conscientious, where all harm is diver-sity of judgement’.7 It was a professional regimen for a judicial personaideally capable of detachment and impartial judgment. Hence the furtherrules: that ‘I never engage myself in the beginning of any cause, butreserve myself unprejudiced till the whole be heard’ and that ‘in businesscapital, though my nature prompts me to pity, yet to consider that there isalso pity due the country’.8

To formulate a rule is one thing; to hold to that rule is another. It istherefore notable that in 1668, while on the autumn circuit in the easterncounties, Hale reiterated his resolutions on moderation and his rules ondispassionate adjudication in a sixteen-page diary, superscribed withseventeen biblical citations in the spirit of Leviticus 19:15: ‘Ye shall dono unrighteousness in judgment, thou shalt not respect [i.e. give particu-lar favour to] the person of the poor nor honour the person of the mighty,but in righteousness shalt thou judge they neighbour.’9 The diary opens

5 Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3497, 26, in Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale (1606–1676). Law,Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177.

6 Ibid.7 These guidelines for judicial conduct, formulated in the years after Hale’s appointment as Justice ofthe Court of Common Pleas in 1654, were published in Sollom Emlyn’s ‘Preface’ to his 1736 editionof Hale’s Historia placitorum coronae. They are also cited in Edmund Heward, Matthew Hale(London: Robert Hale, 1972), 67.

8 Heward, Matthew Hale.9 The diary is in the Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of YaleUniversity. Its contents are published in Maija Jansson, ‘Matthew Hale on Judges and Judging’,Journal of Legal History 9 (1988), 201–13.


with twelve observations that move from the necessity of the office ofjudge to the impossibility of final certitude in an earthly justice, Godalone being all-knowing. With this framework in place, Hale then pro-ceeds to identify nine attributes that ‘become a man of such employment’as the judge. Then, on 6 September 1668, at Huntingdon, Hale records aprovidential event: a day of sickness that coincided with the day of rest,such that ‘relaxation from business has given me a hope and expectationof the declination of my distemper before I come to the business ofthe following day’.10 As things turned out, he then moved to BurySt Edmunds. Here, as he records on the thirteenth day of the month:‘I found a jail filled with malefactors of the greatest kind: four murders,willful burning, theft. Some whereof were yesterday convicted, the restreserved for trial tomorrow. So that, although I met with some offences,even of the highest nature, yet they equalled not the number of this oneplace.’11 This superlative horror does not go to waste in Hale’s ethicaleconomy, serving as motivation for five final reflections on the activity ofjudging.12

It is worth considering the sixteen pages of this diary in more detail.The opening disposition is almost morose. As a ‘business that requires anentire absence of affection and passion which will easily occasion awresting [i.e. a twisting] of judgment’, the judge’s office is onerous. Thisis not only because no man ‘in his right judgment should desire it or notdesire to decline and be delivered from it’, but also because ‘it requires amind constantly awed with the fear of almighty God and sense of Hispresence’.13 Thus ‘knowledge, memory and judgment of the laws wherebyhe is to judge’14 are necessary but not sufficient for a proper exercise of thejudicial office. Impartiality is demanded, yet it remains elusive: ‘It is abusiness wherein a man shall be sure to displease some and many times allparties, and let him be never so justly yet he shall never escape theimputation of partiality and unjustice from some party.’15

That God is the ultimate arbiter is not in doubt, but this certainty ofitself only intensifies the sheer difficulty of adjudicating ‘justly’, since theearthly judge cannot know for sure that ‘he do not either wilfully or byany gross neglect pervert that judgment wherein he does or should act asalmighty God’s substitute’.16

10 Ibid., 208. 11 Ibid., 209.12 In fact, Hale includes two sections numbered ‘2’, and so the diary ends with the ‘fourth’ of thesereflections.

13 Jansson, ‘Matthew Hale’, 205.14 Ibid., 205–6. 15 Ibid., 206. 16 Ibid.

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From this context of judging, Hale then derives a list of nine attributesappropriate to the persona of the judge. Along with the predictably genericinvocations of modesty and piety, other attributes are more specific to thejudicial office:

1. 5. That since [judging] is a business of that importance and yet difficulty aman may be careful to keep a temperate body, with great abstinence andmoderation in eating and drinking, and a temperate mind totally abandoningall manner of passion, affection, and perturbation that so he may come to thebusiness with clearness of understanding and judgment.

2. 6. That a man avoid all such temptations as may be an occasion of pervertinghis judgment, as solicitations, prepossessions, gifts, kindnesses, addresses for oragainst any cause or person.

3. 7. That he avoid all precipitancy and haste in examining, censuring, judging,pause and consider, turn every stone, weigh every question, every answer, everycircumstance, follow the wise direction of Moses in a case of importance toinquire, ask, diligently inquire, behold if it be true and the thing be certain; allthe senses, all the methods of disquisition are little enough in cases of greatmoment or difficulty, especially where a man can err but once.17

Cases arise where innocence and guilt, absolution and conviction, areevenly balanced. Now the convergence of bodily and mental disciplineswith the technical demands of judging according to the norms of theEnglish law does not resolve the dilemma of convicting the innocent oracquitting the guilty. Hale’s stance is unequivocal: ‘I had rather throughignorance of the truth of the fact or the unevidence of it acquit ten guiltypersons than condemn one innocent.’18 But a caveat applies to this clearcourse of action. It concerns impartiality: ‘this must be intended whereupon a sincere, judicious, impartial, inquiry the evidence is inevident, notwhere a man out of partiality or vain pity will render use to himself to easehimself of doing justice upon a malefactor’.19

The five reflections that complete Hale’s diary were composed midwaythrough his duties at Bury St Edmunds where, as he records, he found a‘jail filled with malefactors of the greatest kind’. In the first, he resolves tobe ‘justly severe’ in punishing those guilty of bloodshed, even though hisnature ‘inclines me much to compassion and lenity’. In the secondreflection, Hale turns to the issue of impartiality in judgment: ‘[W]hileI exercise my office as a judge in punishment of the offense, yet I may notforget that common humanity that is fit to be shown to the offenders and,

17 Ibid., 207. 18 Ibid., 208. 19 Ibid.


therefore, ever to avoid insolence, intemperance, or uneveness andunequality of mind or deportment in what I do herein.’20

Recognition of a ‘common humanity’ raises the question of what it isthat enables the judge to judge. If judge and malefactors have the ‘samepassions and lusts and corruptions’, what is it that has differentiated thesepersons? The answer is part providential and part pedagogic:

[I]f [these passions] have not broken out in the same disorders, it is the goodnessand the bounty of God that has prevented it either by the advantage of thateducation His providence has given me above them or by snatching, as it were,from me those apurtenances that my own lusts, passions and corruptions wouldhave made use of to discover themselves by diverting or abating those tempta-tions which might or did befall me.21

Yet, the exercise of judicial duty within the orbit of this life confrontsan unavoidable dilemma:

I have ever accounted the office of a judge the most difficult in the world for, onthe one side it is impossible to find any person in the world but he has his sinsand corruptions about him, though possibly restrained from actual exorbitancesand, on the other side, there are many great offenses and exorbitances in theworld that if they were not restrained and punished the world would come toconfusion.22

The conclusion is immediate and stark: ‘of necessity, therefore, ahuman judge must be’. We are left in no doubt why the persona of Hale’sjudge – for all his piety – cannot be purely other-worldly.

Hale’s rules and resolutions on the activity of judging are far frombeing unremarkable. Despite a full acceptance that the earthly judge mustwork at God’s direction, at their heart is an incipient separation ofpersonae : an impartial adjudication as is ‘due the country’ can – or, givencontemporary circumstances, must – be something other than the piousfaith that the believer owes to God. Such a separation is articulated in thefinal paragraph of Hale’s diary:

Yet as I am a judge I am a person trusted, trusted by God as the avenger ofoffenses committed against Him so far forth as my prince’s commission extends,trusted by my prince forth for himself, and for the community, as a publicavenger of injuries committed against him, his laws, and subjects, trusted by thecommunity and society of men among whom I am to exercise this office.23

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

23 Ibid., 211.

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The malefactors are to be punished because they threaten the civilorder. As such, their actions are not treated as an individual sin to beaddressed by a canonical notion of punishment as penance. Once again,in accounting this task of the ‘public avenger’ that straddles divine andcivil forms of trust, Hale signals the fact of impartial office and imper-sonal judgment. If ‘I am obliged to execute the laws with which I amtrusted’, this is ‘because the interest in the punishment of these offences isin truth, not mine but others’’.To mark out a space of separation between the civil and the divine was

quite compatible with the Protestant doctrine that fallen man’s imperfectcapacities rendered spurious any human claim to know God’s will or – byextension – to construe such ‘knowledge’ as law. With this space ofseparation established, Hale could draw a line against granting supremacyin civil matters to inner conscience, since this would ‘utterly enervate allthe power of [the] magistrate, for [conscience] sets up in every particularsubject a tribunal superior to that of the magistrate’.24 The danger wasdouble: not only would civil peace be threatened by those who claim toact in the name of an authority higher than the law of the civil sovereign;but also – as indicated by Hale’s statement that ‘all harm is the diversity ofjudgement’ – civil conflict was rendered the more likely because incircumstances of religious division no consensus was possible as to whatthe reasons and demands of the higher authority actually were.On church ceremonies as dangerously divergent expressions of the

religious impulse, Hale’s disposition was therefore latitudinarian:

It is pitiful to see men make these mistakes . . . one holding a great part ofreligion in pulling off the hat, and bowing at the name of Jesus; another judging aman an idolater for it; and a third placing his religion in putting off his hat to noone; and so like a company of boys that blow bubbles out of a walnut shell shallevery one run after his bubble and call it religion.25

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

24Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3507, 32, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 181.25 Matthew Hale, in Heward, Matthew Hale, 127.


scarcely avoid this jurisdictional issue, as when the spirit had moved a manto tell the world that ‘Christ is a whoremaster, and religion is a cheat and[Protestant] profession a cloak, and all cheats, all are mine, and I am aKing’s son and fear neither God, devil nor man’.26 Hale had no hesita-tion. This blasphemy – with its almost textbook terminology – wasbeyond question a matter for the civil laws of England:

[S]uch Kind of wicked blasphemous words were not only an Offence to God andReligion, but a Crime against the Laws, State and Government, and thereforepunishable in this Court. For us to say, religion is a Cheat, is to dissolve all thoseObligations whereby Civil Societies are preserved, and that Christianity is Parcelof the Laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian Religion is tospeak in Subversion of the Law.27

Such was the sure discourse of law in a state that remained confessionaleven if the established religion was latitudinarian.

Fourteen years earlier, in 1662, Hale had conducted the trial forwitchcraft of two East Anglian women at Bury St Edmunds.28 Forbewitching girls whom they were found to have caused to vomit morethan forty ‘crooked pins and one time a two-penny nail with a very broadhead’, he sentenced the women to death by hanging. The secular law, byits action, furnished the sanction for a religious offence.29 At this juncturebetween the two personae – that of impartial judge and that of piousbeliever – something like a short-circuit occurred. It indicates bothenduring adjacency and incipient separation.

In a devotional essay composed on the eve of the execution, Halesought to satisfy his conscience that the civil penalty for proven witchcraftwas just, since ‘the instrument, without which [the devil] cannot ordinar-ily work, is within the reach of human justice and government’.30 Flowing

26 R. v. Taylor, 3 Keble 607 (1676), 84 E.R. 906.27 Taylor’s Case, 1 Ventris 293 (1676), 86 E.R. 189. The defendant was fined ‘1000mark, imprisonmentuntil securities for good behaviour for life, and pillory at Gilford [Guildford] where the words werespoken, and at Westminster, Cheapside and Exchange, with a paper for horrid blasphemy, tendingto subvert all government’. 84 E.R. 914.

28 See ‘A Trial of Witches’, in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for HighTreason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours, vol. VI (1809), 687–702 (hereinafter State Trials).

29Gilbert Geis, ‘Lord Hale, Witches and Rape’, British Journal of Law and Society 5 (1978), 26–44,treats the 1662 trial and verdict in psycho-historical terms of a ‘misogynistic bias’ on the part of Haleand the common law regarding witchcraft and rape. The relation of law and religion in the times ofconfessional conflict is not mentioned. To discuss witchcraft without referring to religion is likediscussing rape without referring to men.

30Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3506, fol. 114, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 238. Printed as ‘Concern-ing the great mercy of God in preserving us from the power and malice of evil angels’, in A collection

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from an act of spiritual self-examination, this opinion sustained the advicehe gave to the jury: that the existence of witchcraft and laws against it wereaffirmed in scripture, in the laws of other nations and in the laws ofEngland ‘as appears by that Act of Parliament which hath providedpunishments proportionable to the quality of the offence’.31 The judgehad therefore applied the law impartially. Yet, to the extent that Englishlaw remained bound to a religious norm, Hale’s conduct of judicial officein the 1662 witchcraft trial – as in the 1676 blasphemy case – was notneutral in the sense of rendering judgments that were detached fromreligious criteria. He had asserted his belief to the 1662 jury: ‘That thereare such creatures as witches I make no doubt at all . . . The Scriptureshave affirmed so much’.32 For this judge, the existence of satanic spiritswas indubitable and the precepts of scripture carried probative force. Inthese times, for the judge as much as for the jury and the larger popula-tion, magic and enchantment persisted. They could almost be relied on.As well as the statute book, Hale thus consulted the Bible and his

private conscience in order to justify to himself that his legal judgmentwas correct and – in this sense – impartial. A religious conception of theEnglish law provided him with the confirmation that he sought, allowinghim to harmonise his legal decision-making and the religious persona thatspoke through the voice of conscience. But in mid-century England wasthe matter quite so settled? Was there no evidence of a legal systemshifting towards neutrality in respect of religious criteria? Was Hale’sown perspective completely static?He had, as already noted, his own concern lest the extra-judicial rule of

conscience ‘set up in every particular subject a tribunal superior to that ofthe magistrate’.33 An even more remarkable thing is this: in the Historiaplacitorum coronae, the criminal law treatise of which Hale had draftedone of three projected books before his death in 1676, he proposes adifferent perspective. Here he records that the common law viewedwitchcraft – along with ‘fascination’ or enchantment – as among those‘secret things [that] belong to God’:

If a man either by working upon the fancy of another, or possibly by harsh orunkind usage put another into such passion of grief or fear, that the party either

of modern relations of matter of fact concerning witches and witchcraft (1693). Remarkably – at leastfrom our incredulous perspective on these things – the bewitched girls ‘within less than half an hourafter the witches were convicted, they were all of them restored’. See State Trials, vol. VI, 702.

31 State trials, vol. VI, 700–1.32 Ibid.33 Matthew Hale, Lambeth MS 3507, fol. 32, in Cromartie, Matthew Hale, 181.


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

A previous certainty regarding the legal status of witchcraft and other‘irreligious’ acts now appears more in the balance. Now, according to theHale of the Historia, witchcraft was a matter of belief but not a physicalact or felony. As such, though known to inner conscience, the foro divinoand to God, witchcraft was not the concern of secular legality.

Witchcraft and heresy had stood in the same historical series: ‘Witchcraft,Sortilegium was by the antient laws of England of ecclesiastical cognizance,and upon conviction thereof without abjuration, or relapse after abjur-ation, was punishable with death by writ de haeretico comburendo.’35 Injurisdictions other than the common law, the ancient error was intensified:

[The Papal canonists] have by ample and general terms extended heresy so far,and left so much in the discretion of the ordinary to determine it, that there isscarce any the smallest deviation from them, but it may be reduced to heresy,according to the general generality, latitude, and extent of their definitions anddescriptions.36

Hale ends the chapter on religion in Historia placitorum coronae byrecording that in the England of Charles II the writ of de haeretico and‘all capital punishments in pursuance of ecclesiastical censures are utterlyabolished and taken away, so that heresy is now punishable only byexcommunication . . . the civil effects of which are, that the party isdisabled from making a will, or from suing for any debt or legacy’.37

The story is being told so as to disinculpate the common law fromcomplicity with papal instruments of canon law and religious persecution.A major episode of England’s legal history thus resonates through Hale’saccount: the sixteenth-century disengagement of the common law froma supra-national papal jurisdiction and a canon law that continued to

34 Matthew Hale, Historia placitorum coronae. The history of the pleas of the crown, vol. I, ed. SollomEmlyn (London, 1736), 429. In a comparative note, Hale then adds that ‘before the statute of I Jac.cap. 12 witchcraft or fascination was not felony because it wanted [i.e. lacked] a trial, tho someconstitutions of the civil law make it penal’. In the Historia placitorum – perhaps curiously, perhapsnot – Hale makes no reference to the 1662 trial.

35 Ibid., 383.36 Ibid., 383–4. ‘Ordinary’ here refers to the officer having immediate jurisdiction in an ecclesiasticalcourt.

37 Ibid., 410.

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transmit the papacy’s separate powers. In his manuscript treatise on theroyal prerogative, Hale depicts ecclesiastical laws as lacking binding force‘till received and by usage incorporated into the laws and customs of thekingdom’.38 The apparatus of reception serves to quash any persistingcanon-law endorsement of the papal claim to a separate jurisdiction. Halewas clearly suspicious of the illicit encroachment of ecclesiastical powersthrough the ‘reverence and respect which the Christian religion got in thehearts of men’:

[W]hile in truth the civil right, viz. custom and admission, gave [priests] theirpower as a civil thing, lest it should be subject to the same power in its dissolutionor diminution, they subrogated and interwove into men’s minds a pretence andopinion of a higher right, which did not only propagate the admission of theirpower, but did also fasten and establish it with the concurrence of a doubleprinciple, viz. the true and real civil right and admission, and the pretended andimposed divine authority.39

Whenever the civil magistrate had questioned their ‘higher right’, theploy of the priests was ‘rather [to] choose to bestow it as a gift than lose itspower’. By this device, they ‘would seem to give what they could nothold’. Whatever else might follow from these clerics’ claim dutifully toobserve the ‘higher right’, their ‘last devotion was not to the king but thepope’.If by Hale’s time the English legal system was becoming more neutral

towards religious matters, this was a symptom of political and religiousmutations that were rendering the English state somewhat less confes-sional than it had been. Yet it had not been a question of an earlier statesimply imposing a confessional regime upon a judiciary that had alwayssought to be free and impartial. Prior to the establishment of Protestantstates, civil trial and sanctioning of religious breaches had been theresponsibility of lawyers too, canonist and civilian. We are thereforeseeing a change internal to the legal sphere itself.

I I I

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

38 Matthew Hale, Prerogatives of the King, ed. D. E. C. Yale (London: Selden Society, 1976), 143.39 Ibid., 146.


Belgian legal historian, has characterised the three jurisdictions in terms oftheir distinctive protagonists and structures of prestige: respectively,judges, legislators and professors.40 This is memorable enough, but itdoes not specifically address the English, French and German settings ofthe judicial persona. The similarities and differences are multiple. IfEngland and France were nations outside an empire, a territorial statesuch as Brandenburg was fashioned within and against the terms of theGerman Empire.41 If France and Germany remained predominantlycivilian law regimes, in England the common lawyers were succeedingin containing their own civilian rivals within a tightening noose asunpatriotic aliens to the local customs and political interests. If Englandbecame a more settled confessional state by the end of the seventeenthcentury with an established church, and France became one too (underLouis XIV), Brandenburg determined not to be one, preferring a sharpseparation of state from church. If seventeenth-century England became astate of mixed constitution, France and Brandenburg went along theabsolutist path. In France, however, religious peace was achieved throughan enforced Gallican conformity, whereas the Brandenburg state madeitself agnostic or indifferent towards the rival truth-claims of thethree confessions that the Westphalian treaties of 1648 had recognised aslegitimate public bodies.

Though the German Peace of Augsburg (1555) is conventionallyregarded as ending the first of the European ‘wars of religion’, NancyRoelker terms sixteenth-century France the ‘crucible of Europe’.42 In thiscrucible, it was less the case that base matters were purified; rather,unprecedented political devices were implemented and urgent legal moveswere improvised in response to conflicts generated by Christian disunion.For thirty-six years from 1562 France was engulfed by confessional

40 ‘It is generally known that the English common law is a creation of the royal judges and that therole of professors of law and of theoretical study – “legal science” – has in the course of the centuriesbeen marginal. No contrast could be greater than between this English development and itscontinental counterpart, for there the impact of “professors’ law” has been of the greatest import-ance. In fact, it is not too much to say that there are large and important fields of law which werecreated by continental jurists just as the English common law was the judges’ handiwork.’ RaoulC. van Caenegem, Judges, Legislators and Professors. Chapters in European Legal History (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53.

41 See D. Willoweit, ‘The Holy Roman Empire as a Legal System’, in Anthony Padoa-Schioppa (ed.),Legislation and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 123–30.

42Nancy L. Roelker, One King, One Faith. The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformation of theSixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 228. J. M. H. Salmon, Society inCrisis. France in the Sixteenth Century (London: E. Benn, 1975), 13, had previously adopted the samemetaphor to characterise the French religious wars as ‘the crucible in which some of the competing

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conflict. By these times, the Reformed religion had some two million adher-ents in France. The Catholic massacre of Protestants – the Huguenots – onSt Bartholomew’s Eve took place in 1572. Each of the eight wars ofreligion was concluded by an edict of pacification, the peace beingbrokered by the crown (that is, by Charles IX and Henri III, Catherinede’ Medici and Michel de L’Hospital, Chancellor of France from 1560 to1568).In January 1562, during the first war of religion, Chancellor L’Hospital

had put the crown’s case to an assembled peace ‘colloquium’:

The King does not want you to engage in dispute as to which [religious] opinionis the best; for it is not a question of establishing the faith, but of regulating thestate. It is possible to be a citizen without being a Christian. Even the excommu-nicate is nonetheless a citizen. And we can live in peace with those who do nothold to the same opinions.43

This appears, precisely, a ‘one-state’ political solution to the religiousdiscord that had split the realm of France in two. If the sovereignty of thestate were absolute and indivisible, an authority would exist capable ofgranting Protestants and Catholics identical status as citizens, equal beforethe law. Protestant would then not mean foreign. Pluralising the civilpersonae to differentiate ‘citizen’ from ‘Christian’ allows L’Hospital toput the point: ‘Even the excommunicate is nonetheless a citizen.’ Such aprecept conceives shared citizenship as a supereminent domain, but it alsopresumes a measure of neutrality in the legal system, and a disengagementof the civil laws from matters of religion.In 1563, L’Hospital thus confronted the parlementaires of Rouen on the

occasion of the formal majority of Charles IX with a political factconcerning the limits of their judicial office. Matters of state, he said,did not fall within their jurisdiction. The parlementaires were, hereminded them, judges ‘of the meadow and the field’, that is, of private

forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into newcompounds’. On the French wars and fundamental law, see Martyn P. Thompson, ‘The History ofFundamental Law in Political Thought from the French Wars of Religion to the AmericanRevolution’, American Historical Review (1986), 1103.

43 Michel de L’Hospital,Oeuvres completes de Michel de l’Hospital, vol. I, ed. P. J. S. Dufey (Paris: 1824–5), 452: ‘Le roy ne veult point que vous entriez en dispute quelle opinion est lameilleure; car il n’est pasicy question de constituenda religione, sed de constituenda republica; et plusieurs peuvent etre cives,qui non erunt christiani. Et peut-on vivre en repos avec ceux, qui sont de diverses opinions.’

44Translations can render L’Hospital’s 1563 address in rather plainer terms, but the point remains thesame: ‘You are civil judges, not [judges] of life, morals or religion’. Sarah Hanley, The ‘lit de justice’of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual and Discourse (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983), 168. Another rendering of L’Hospital’s admonition is equally plain: ‘Take


property disputes, ‘but not of life and customs and not of religion’.44

Political action would here seem to create the possibility for a neutral law,housed in a civil order independent of confessionalised norms. Given sucha framework, the laws would be administered by a judiciary capable ofimpartial adjudication.

The foregoing depiction of L’Hospital projects the image of a judicialpersona with a definite capacity for impartiality. Indeed, given his pacifi-catory imperative in a bipolar world split between Catholic and Protestanttruths and powers, L’Hospital might even appear as claimant to the statusof advance legal seculariser a century before Hale’s times, cutting thepolitical-juridical order free from the meshes of religion, separating statefrom church and decoupling law from confession. Yet, if Denis Crouzet’srecent account of Michel de L’Hospital is granted credence, nothingcould be more anachronistic than a retrospective secular colouring ofthe Chancellor.45 Crouzet allows that L’Hospital aimed to install ‘a modeof power grounded in a strategy of bypassing cleavages and opinions . . . aconstant practice of depersonalisation of the magistrate, master of hispassions and of the passions of men, a being without preferences’.46 ‘Abeing without preferences’ would seem an exemplary description of theconfessionally impartial persona of the judge. To follow Crouzet, however,is to recognise that L’Hospital’s equal treatment of the Protestant and theCatholic camps involved no decoupling of the legal system from religion.To the contrary, this was a neutrality defined within the terms of ‘lechristocentrisme de Michel de L’Hospital’.47 As such, it rested upon anunshakeable faith in the essential and charitable unity of Christianity.Operating within the bounds of the Ecclesia Christi, L’Hospital’s directionof the civil laws appears more a form of applied theology, an instrumentof divine government, albeit directed to the temporal end of averting civilwar and restoring civil peace.

care not to bring enmity, favour or prejudice to your judgments. I see many judges who seek tojudge in the cases of their friends or enemies. Daily, I see men who are involved as enemies orfriends of persons, sects or factions, judging for or against without considering the equity of thecase. You are judges of acts, not of lives, morals or religion. You think it good enough to award the caseto the one you think the worthy man, the better Christian, as though it were a question betweenparties of which was the better poet, orator, painter, worker – in the end a master of art, doctrine,valour or whatever other quality – not of the matter that has caused the case.’ David Potter (ed.),The French Wars of Religion. Selected Documents (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 88 (emphasisadded).

45 Denis Crouzet, La sagesse et le malheur. Michel de l’Hospital, Chancelier de France (Seysell:Champvallon, 1998).

46 Ibid., 324 (my translation in this and the following citations).47 Ibid., 124.

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Viewing the jurisdictional scene and the judicial persona from Crouzet’sperspective, then, there is no question of a legal secularisation. We see,rather, a persona centred in a notion of men’s oneness in Christ, integral toa pacificatory politics of caritas and devoted to a supreme duty ofbenevolence.48 That said, we might still discern the opening of a certainspace for political action and juridification, the space for a judicial personaequipped to judge citizens impartially, regardless of their confessionalaffiliation: ‘Even the excommunicate can be a good citizen’. Crouzetcharacterises L’Hospital’s irenic persona in terms of an ‘evangelisme cicer-onianiste’. This dual disposition is indeed grounded in Christian love, butit also demands a Ciceronian-Stoic mastery of unbridled passions. Thepersona’s Ciceronian dimension of self-restraint – its ethos ofmediocritas, amoral commitment always to find and follow the middle, moderate way –embraces the ambition of utilitas: the governance of the civil realm by apublic law designed to safeguard the general good of the state.L’Hospital’s regime, arguably, gained a subsequent and enduring the-

oretical justification in Jean Bodin’sDe la republique.49 Appearing in 1576,four years after the St Bartholomew massacre, Bodin’s treatise conceptual-ised sovereignty as absolute and indivisible in a manner that aligned himwith the Chancellor’s peace-brokering politics. Given such a politics, aplurality of faiths need not be catastrophic if the will of the unifiedsovereign enjoyed the power of final determination as civil law. Thatgood citizens need not be ‘Christians’ would be an exemplary politiqueaxiom by the century’s end.50 Yet, in the years of L’Hospital’s chancellor-ship, an independent rule of law did not prevail. Peace with justice failedto materialise. An ‘evangelico-ciceronian’, L’Hospital could not overridethe closure of rival confessional interests that were beyond legal negoti-ation. As radically partisan forms of social belonging, confessional iden-tities resisted being made subordinate to the neutral civility of citizenshipenvisaged by the Chancellor but rejected by the majority of Paris parle-mentaires. The established juridical order thus held firm to ancient sacral

48 Ibid., 323–4, discerns in Michel de L’Hospital’s caritas the signs of a French anti-Machiavellianism:that is, a politics which rejects recourse to fear and opacity as its primary instruments.

49 In the 1560s, Bodin was an avocat pleading cases at the bar of the Parlement of Paris.50 See Crouzet, La sagesse, 456. Christopher Bettinson, ‘The politiques and the politique Party’, in KeithCameron (ed.), From Valois to Bourbon. Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter:Exeter University Press, 1989), 35, warns against reifying a diverse set of ideas, a variety of initiativesand some political episodes into a unified politique ideology with something like an epochaltransformative power. As he reminds us, ‘politique’ was the preferred term of censure deployedby Catholic Leaguers to besmirch all those who would abandon religious truth and seek accommo-dation with known heretics and proven schismatics.


duties: the protection of France’s Catholic mission and the ‘liberties’ ofGallicanism, along with protection of the judges’ political status as partiesto the mystery of a divine monarchy.

Martin Heckel has given us the legal history of how a ‘non-confessionalorder of co-existence’ was achieved within the territories of the GermanEmpire.51 Robert von Friedeburg identifies an important aspect of thisachievement: by the mid-1600s, ‘assessment of licit government had beenseparated from scripture and relocated in an entirely legal realm ofthought, based on a historical assessment of the German constitution’.52

Separation of government from scripture prepared the ground for both apost-Westphalian jurisdiction neutral towards religion and a judiciarycapable of impartial judgment.

In the instance of Brandenburg, however, it did not entail judges’independence from the sovereign political power. Unlike the quasi-autonomous regime of the English common lawyers, judicial structurein Brandenburg allowed for little separation of political sovereign andjudiciary such as would insulate the judge from the legislator. Neverthe-less, the establishment of absolute sovereignty proved effective inrendering religious differences politically – and juridically – irrelevant(or, at least, less relevant), thereby serving the cause of peaceful coexist-ence between Brandenburg’s rival confessions. Yet absolutism was not acontinental monopoly. The common lawyers had shown themselvesquite capable of compliance with absolutism, when the Tudors’ politicalbreak with Rome allowed a native law in England to deny legitimacy toits rival jurisdictions: papal, canonist and civilian.

IV

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

51 Martin Heckel, ‘Das Sakularisierungsproblem in der Entwicklung des deutschen Staatskirchen-recht’, in Gerhard Dilcher and Ilse Staff (eds.), Christentum und modernes Recht; Beitrage zumProblem der Sakularisation (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984), 50.

52 Robert von Friedeburg, Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England andGermany, 1530–1680 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 235–6.

53 Hobbes’s Dialogue was first published in 1681, two years after its author’s death and six years afterthe death of Matthew Hale. The Dialogue thus circulated in manuscript for some time before 1675,including among the common-law judiciary. It is not known if any other judge responded toHobbes’s work as fully as Hale. The latter’s Reflections were not published until 1945.

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template for an English judicial persona that was consistent with the anti-philosophical perspective of an Inns of Court formation. To a significantextent, in the ‘Reflections’ this persona is configured in its counterpoint tothe Hobbesian philosopher. For Hale, the latter is a persona marred bythe excessive intellectual abstraction of those ‘that please themselves with aperswasion that they can with as much evidence and Congruitie make outan unerring systeme of Lawes and Politiques equally applicable to allStates and Occasions, as Euclide demonstrates his Conclusions, deceivethemselves with Notions which prove ineffectual, when they come toparticular application.’54

Contrary to what their adherents believe, such universal ‘unerringsystems’ in fact err, because of ‘the greate difference in most of the Statesand Kingdomes in ye world in their Laws administrations and measures ofright and wrong, when they come to particulars’.55 By way of contrast, thepersona of the Halesian judge therefore claims to be endowed with asuperior virtue: the practical grasp of ‘particulars’, a capacity lacking inmen who ‘are most Commonly the worst Judges that can be, because theyare transported from the Ordinary Measure of right and wrong by theirover fine Speculacons Theoryes and distinctions above the CommonStaple of humane Conversations’.56

The distinction of the two personae – the judge and the philosopher –rests on the contrast between this ‘common staple’ and the exceptional.On the one hand: ‘as Lawes So the Method and Modelling of Govern-ments are to be fitted to what is the Common and Ordinary State ofthinges ad Plurimum, because mankind have most Ordinarily to do withSuch Circumstances or affaires as most usually happen’.57 On the otherhand, and more colourfully: ‘[I]t is a Madness to thinke that the Modellof Lawes or Government is to be formed according to Such Circum-stances as very rarely occurre. Tis as if a Man should make Agarike andRhubarb his Ordinary Dyett, because it is of use when he is sicke whichmay be once in 7 years.’58

Hale’s designated remedy for ‘Madness’ lies in ‘the habituateing andaccustoming and Exercising that Faculty [of Reason] by readeing, Study

54 Matthew Hale, Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe, in S. W. Holdsworth (ed.),A History of English Law, vol. V (London: Methuen, 1945), 502.

55 Ibid., 502–3.56 Ibid., 503.57 Ibid., 512.58 Ibid.


and observation’.59 Only by training in this way, according to Hale, couldanyone acquire ‘Sufficient Knowledge’ of the common law. To knowreason alone was not to know law.

Yet Hale was not alone in rejecting the notion of reason as law.60 ForHobbes, the command of the sovereign was law, in contradistinction towhat scholastic natural lawyers claimed on behalf of a higher-ordertheological or moral reason. Before subscribing to Hale’s view of theHobbesian persona as abstracted from the real, then, we might ask thequestion: could his discourse be seen to parallel that of the Parisianparlementaires who resisted L’Hospital and Bodin? Without going toofar down this counterfactual path, we might also speculate as follows: ifFrench-style absolutism had taken hold in England, would a Hale havesuffered the same marginalisation as Hotmann, left aside defending anancient constitution and some customary indigenous laws? Conversely, inthis circumstance, a Hobbes would share the status of Bodin, enjoyingrecognition as a hard-headed theorist of the sovereign state. In otherwords, it is the contingent facts of English political history – notthe actual content of his political philosophy – that turn Hobbes into ahyper-normative other-worldly theorist.

Counterfactuality aside, it remains misleading to take at face valueHale’s construction of an ideal common-law persona. As has been shown,rather than speaking with the neutral voice of an autonomous law, Hale’spersona is one that cannot be entirely separated from the religious pres-sures and political forces of his times. We see an English judge who wouldbe balanced and impartial in the exercise of office; but we also see hishistorical context: an English legal system that had not definitively closeditself off from religious norms. It would therefore be more accurate torefer to Hale’s two personae – one legal, the other religious – and theirinteraction in a changing political environment.

To recognise this enduring entanglement of law and religion in theearly modern English context adds a dimension lacking in ahistoricaltreatments of judicial impartiality in today’s philosophical jurisprudence.In the currently dominant jurisprudential discourse, impartiality in judi-cial decision-making is defined in dualistic terms that oppose objectivityto subjective preference. For all their sophistication – for instance, havingrecognised that judges cannot but make preferential moral evaluations in

59 Ibid. As one now expects, the claim is immediately qualified by the additional comment that evensuch a man ‘cannot p’tend to Infallibilitie in his Judgement or to a full attainment of all that isattainable toucheing the Laws of England’. Despite this modesty, echoes of Coke are clear.

60Hobbes shared with Hale the doctrine of fallen man’s limited capacities.

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reaching a legal determination, Ronald Dworkin would then rescue thematter by arguing that such ‘preferences’ finally resolve in a judgment thatreflects the best understanding the judge can have of what the law isconceived to be, there being a ‘correct’ answer to every legal question61 –such theoretical terms impoverish the historical reality of judicial impar-tiality as the ethical achievement of a definite persona. Recourse to reli-gious criteria in legal judgments was never just indicative of a subjectivepreference or judicial bias. It was a historical symptom of the ecclesiasticalgenealogy of European laws and their uncertain immunity to continuinginterference from the clash of priorities of two rival, and perhaps incom-patible, orderings of human life. We familiarly summarise these twocompeting systems of government under the names church and state.

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


CHAPTER 7

Persona and office: Althusius on the formation ofmagistrates and councillors

Robert von Friedeburg497314

In recent years, the quest to identify the early modern ‘ego’ has led us toquestion the retrojection of modern conceptions of the ‘autonomous’ selfinto the past. In early modernity the idea of owning or having‘dominium’ over oneself floated on the surface of a layer of fundamentalduties, so qualifying the very notion of natural rights. Obligations to acommon moral good specified in divine and natural law weighed muchheavier than concerns about the autonomy of the individual, even in suchwriters as Locke or Grotius, once acclaimed as champions of individualliberty.1 The sphere of the self may need to be understood in morerestricted terms: for example, through the search for signs of divine gracein the epistolary exchanges of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Prot-estant divines. Studies of the persona of eighteenth-century clergy havebeen particularly interesting in terms of the gradual elaboration of asphere of introspection that took as its template something that increas-ingly resembled the autonomous self.2 As the protection of such an allegedautonomous personality became a token of the civilised state, ‘society wasdenied the right to subordinate a natural entelechy to a social objective’,3

and the ‘self ’ began its career.These later developments are, of course, only relevant for our present

purpose to the degree they help to distinguish Althusius’s altogether

1 Janet Coleman, ‘Pre-Modern Property and Self-Ownership before and after Locke’, EuropeanJournal of Political Theory 4 (2005), 125–45; Knud Haakonssen, ‘The Moral Conservatism ofNatural Rights’, in Ian Hunter and David Saunders (eds.), Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty:Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002),27–42.

2 Anthony J. H. La Vopa, Grace, Merit, and Talent. Poor Students, Clerical Careers and ProfessionalIdeology in Eighteenth Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); AnthonyJ. H. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy 1762–1799 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001); Frederick Barnard, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau andHerder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

3 La Vopa, Grace, Merit, and Talent, 266–7.

160

different set of assumptions regarding duties, rights and their bearers.Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) is one of the very few German authors ofthe period between the Reformation and the early Enlightenment to haveattracted the attention of modern historians of political thought. This ispartly because his work was promoted during the nineteenth century byOtto von Gierke, who used it, however, anachronistically, to evidencemodern ethical and political doctrines – corporate popular sovereigntyand a state based on associations or Genossenschaften.4

What was largely overlooked by this older approach has been recoveredduring the last twenty years by a number of scholars who have focusedresearch on the relation between the specific discourses to which Althusiuscontributed, in particular through his jurisprudence, ethics and religion,and his political theory and practice. Horst Dreitzel, for example, hasemphasised the way in which Althusius, in his inaugural lecture at Her-born (Oratio Panegyrica, de necessitate, utitilitate & antiquitate scholarum),subsumed Christian doctrine under civic improvement, treated as adiscipline of philosophy. In this discursive setting, Christ and the Apostlesare portrayed as founders of institutions of erudition, while studying atsuch institutions is treated as a way of renovating the soul, almost to thepoint of recovering its pre-lapsarian perfection.5

For Althusius, government is inextricably linked to a particular way ofleading the vita activa or engaged civic life, played out not least as ruleover subjects. The exercise of government is tied to the particular kind ofethical training and cultivation required for ‘magistrates’ or those chargedwith the offices of government. Insight into the problems of human vicesand passions, adequate control of them in others, and sufficient shaping ofthem in magistrates – not least through schooling at appropriate educa-tional institutions – thus make the issue of the magistrate’s persona centralto Althusius’s political, juristic and ethical thought. His Politica was verymuch a teaching tool of German Schulphilosophie,6 designed to groomstudents in the moral and intellectual deportment required for the activelife of the magistrate.

4 Martin Peters, ‘Johannes Althusius (1557/63–1638) aus der Sicht Otto (v.) Gierkes (1841–1921)’, inEmilio Bonfatti et al. (eds.), Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld in der Politica MethodiceDigesta des Johannes Althusius, Wolfenbutteler Forschungen, vol. C (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,2002), 331–62.

5 Horst Dreitzel, ‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Foderalismus’, in Bonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe,49–112.

6 See Hunter, this volume, on variety hidden behind this term.

Persona and office in Althusius 161

THE ‘POLIT ICA’ GENRE

As a Roman law jurist, Althusius was concerned in his Politica withreligion and prudence. The laws, pre-eminently the Decalogue, were the‘vinculum quo respublica cohaeret & spiritus vitalis’ (cohering bond andvital spirit of the republic, Politica ch. X, 4). But laws must be understoodand applied by individuals possessing experience, specialised knowledgeand self-control. These requirements need to be seen against a fraughtstate of affairs in which Europe was riddled by confessional civil war,when rulers and ruled alike seemed driven by passionate excess. Underthese circumstances great demands were placed on the formation of lowermagistrates and officials, who were required to execute government andeven on occasion to constrain and punish the supreme magistrate. Thepersonae of these inferior magistrates and of their counsellors had to beadapted to these responsibilities.

The persona required by the lower magistrates, inclusive of both probityand technical (political-jurisprudential) expertise, sanctioned occupancy ofa specific office and turned the holders into shrewd technicians of politicallife. In this context the philosopher is either the specialist teaching pro-spective specialists and inferior magistrates, or is himself active in adminis-trative duties. The persona elaborated through Althusius’s Politica thusexemplifies what Conal Condren describes as a ‘manifestation and repre-sentation of an office, an embodiment of a moral economy . . . a wholesphere of responsibilities, rights of action for their fulfilment, necessaryattributes, skills, specific virtues, and concomitant vices and failures’.7 Thisfollows from the whole intention and structure of Althusius’s Politica.

The work belongs to a genre arising in the 1590s in Germany and theNetherlands and growing out of the commentaries on Aristotle thatmushroomed during the sixteenth century.8 These commentaries weretransformed by the impact of Bodin and the experience of widespreadconfessional and political conflict, and also reflected changes in universityculture throughout the Empire. Some of the authors working in thepolitica genre were Reformed (Althusius, Keckermann) and some Catholic(Contzen), but most were Lutheran.9 The Lutheran Reformation had

7 Conal Condren, contribution to this volume.8 This has long been recognised, but see Gunter Frank, ‘Melanchthon’s Concept of PracticalPhilosophy’, in J. Kraye and R. Saarinen (eds.), Moral Philosophy at the Threshold of Modernity(Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2005), 217–33, who even speaks of a ‘second Aristotelian reception’.

9 From the 1590s to 1620 nearly every major German university had produced at least one Politica:see Horst Dreitzel, Absolutismus und standische Verfassung (Mainz: von Zabern, 1992), 411–14; Horst

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already given the preoccupation with Aristotle’s Politics a new emphasis,beginning with Melanchthon’s refusal to find evidence for the organisa-tion of the body politic in scripture and his 1530/1 Commentarii in aliquotpoliticos libros Aristotelis. From 1535, editions of Aristotle’s Politics enjoyeda resurgence.10 The Lutheran distinction between revelation and lawencouraged the development of inquiry into the nature of politics thatwas neither directly dependent on the interpretation of scripture nora challenge to Protestant concerns about grace, penance and free will.Neo-Aristotelianism did not so much provide a guideline determiningargument – apart from general assumptions on the ethics and aims ofgovernment11 – but rather a set of questions, problems and organisationalprocedures helping to integrate a diversity of intellectual preoccupations.These concerns became part of the growing body of constitutional

thought on the Empire developed in the context of the increasing stream-lining of government in town and countryside. Moreover, from the 1570sthe strain on practical politics caused by confessional tensions broughthome to scholars the need for conscious repair and consolidation of thebody politic.12 Theoretical and practical treatments concerning the originsand legitimacy of society and government had to engage with current legalprocedure and sophisticated advice on the practicalities of maintain-ing order. These interests were gradually moulded into a new discipline

Dreitzel, ‘Die Staatsrason und die Krise des politischen Aristotelismus: Zur Entwicklung derpolitischen Philosophie in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert’, in A. Enzo Baldini (ed.), Aristotelismopolitico e ragion di stato (Florence: Olscki, 1995), 129–56; Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des offentlichesRecht in Deutschland (Munich: Beck Schlagworter (RSWK), 1988), 111; Wolfgang Weber, Prudentiagubernatoria: Studien zur Herrschaftslehre in der deutschen politischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhundert(Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 9–89; e.g. Arnold Clapmarius, De arcanis rerumpublicarum libri sex(Altdorf, 1605); Henning Arnisaeus, Doctrina politica in genuinam methodum, quae est aristotelis(Helmstedt, 1606); Adam Contzen, Politicorum libri decem (Mainz, 1620); Dietrich Reinkingk,Tractatus de regimine saeculari et ecclesiastica (1619); Johannes Limnaeus, Juris publici ImperiiRomano-Germanici (1619–34); Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema politica (1607); LambertusDanaeus, Politices christianae libri septem (1596); Hermann Kirchner, Res publica (Marburg, 1608).

10 Of his Politica at least twenty Greek and nine Latin editions appeared; see Stolleis, OffentlichesRecht, 82–5; Martin Mulsow, ‘Die wahre peripatetische Philosophie in Deutschland’, in HelwigSchmidt-Glinzer (ed.), Fordern und Bewahren (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 49–78; HorstDreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat. Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus(ca. 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1970), 96–7; Frank, ‘Melanchthon’s Concept’; on England seeJohn Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1586).

11 Even this cautious attempt at definition does not hold for Arnisaeus’s Politica – despite its sub-titlestressing Aristotelian methodology. See Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 174–5.

12 For example, the forced re-Catholisation of Wurzburg, the fruitless efforts to defend Protestant-ism in areas surrounded by Catholic imperial estates (1575–6) and the struggle for the Protestantadministration of Magdeburg, to name but a few: see, recently, Dietrich Kratsch, Justiz – Religion– Politik (Tubingen: Mohr, 1990); Eike Wolgast, Hochstift und Reformation (Stuttgart: Steiner1995).


stimulated by the seminal work of Bodin.13 Confessional strife continuedto keep discussion urgent.14 Thus topics such as the philosophy ofpolitics, guides to the developing imperial public law, and advice onmaintaining order were merged into a new independent subject in thespectrum of the artes liberales. Its object was politics, and the standardform of publication highlighting its birth was the Politica, drawingtogether political philosophy, legal training and practical advice.15

Within this genre, various strands of thought are commonly distinguished.Lutheran work on theMonarchia christiana emphasised the independence ofthe church and the responsibility of lay authorities for the maintenance ofa pious order, frequently making use of Lutheran ‘three estate theory’(Reinkingk).16 It has been argued that Neo-Aristotelians – especiallyArnisaeus – were particularly engaged in the methodical exploitation of theAristotelian renaissance and the functionalist needs of the body politic as ahierarchy of order and subjection.17 Some accounts remained more indebted

13 Jean Bodin, Six livres de la republique (1576, Latin edition 1586); see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘The Legacyof Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism or Constitutionalism?’, History of Political Thought 17 (1996),506–14; Hans Ulrich Scupin, ‘Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der Theorien von Staat undGesellschaft des Johannes Althusius und des Jean Bodin’, in Karl Wilhelm Dahm et al. (eds.),Politische Theorie des Johannes Althusius (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1988), 301–11.

14 E.g. the conception of maiestas realis and personalis was first conceived by Kirchner, Res publica. SeeThomas Klein, ‘Conservatio Reipublicae per bonam educationem – Leben und Werk HermannKirchners (1562–1620)’, in Walter Heinemeyer et al. (eds.), Academia Marburgensis (Marburg:Elwert, 1977), 181–230, 212–18, on the impact of the contemporary struggle between the imperialestates of Reformed Hesse-Cassel – for whom Marburg University-based Kirchner wrote – andLutheran Hesse-Darmstadt over the Upper Hessian inheritance. Since Hesse-Cassel did expectmore favourable treatment of its case before the Imperial Chamber Court than before the Imperialaulic court, scholars from Marburg University insisted on the shared sovereignty – maiestas realisand maiestas personalis – that would justify the responsiblity of the Imperial Chamber Courtjurisdiction for the case in question.

15 Topics included the treatment of religious minorities, the printing press, schooling, taxation,coinage, and so on; see Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria. Note that none of these issues can bedirectly related to what has been called the rise of modern monarchy with regard to England orFrance. Only the middling and small jurisdictions of the imperial estates provided the economy ofscale to actually engage in the kind of detailed regulation of economy and society so typical for theadvice of the Politica.

16 Luise Schorn-Schutte, ‘Obrigkeitskritik und Widerstandsrecht. Die politica christiana als Legiti-mitatsgrundlage’, in L. Schorn-Schutte (ed.), Aspekte der politischen Kommunikation im Europa des16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Beihefte der Historischen Zeitschrift XXXIX (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004),195–232.

17 ‘Neo-Aristotelianism’ is a category attempting to distinguish a specific brand of political thoughtfrom other treatises also referring to Aristotle. Thus, Horst Dreitzel, ‘Krise des politischenAristotelismus’, regards many of the works in the Politica genre as being inflected by the crisisof Aristotelianism. However, while the Politica genre comprised ‘Monarchomachist treatises’ suchas Althusius’s Politica; ‘Thomist-Aristotelian’ tracts by Catholics like Contzen; and tracts orientatedtowards the Lutheran doctrine of three estates, such as Reinkingk’s; and authors interested simplyin the development of imperial public law, only the ‘Political Aristotelians’ such as Arnisaeus areproperly understood as Neo-Aristotelians.


to Lipsius and the rhetoric of Tacitism, emphasising the specific needs ofprinces.18Althusius is not easy to allocate to any sub-category, not least due tohis terminology. But his suggestions regarding the possibility of punishingthe supreme magistrate for tyrannical actions have resulted in his beingcharacterised as a monarchomach.19

Despite significant differences among the Politica writers, all reflectedthe constitutional experience of the Empire and expressed a commonconcern for order. Political practice in the Empire was reinforced andenshrined in the treaties of Augsburg 1555 and Osnabruck (Westphalia)1648. It remained based on the achievement of imperial peace (Land-frieden) and the emergence of territorial sub-sovereignty (Landeshoheit) ofthe imperial estates.20 Within that framework, the Politica as a genre wasmeant to provide the arts of political preservation required by timesperceived to be troubled. It took for granted that the body politic was ahierarchy of rulers and ruled, and that the civitas was thus in need of aninstitutionalised order, a res publica of magistrates responsible for andoperating within an institutional structure distinguishable from the otherassociations of the civitas. The champion of monarchical absolutismHenning Arnisaeus was noted for promoting this view,21 but so too washis opponent Althusius.22

18 E.g. Clapmarius, De arcanis rerumpublicarum; Stolleis, Offentliches Rechts, 98–101.19 On the evolution of this terminology see now Merio Scattola, ‘Von der Maiestas zur Symbiosis’, in

Bonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe, 211–50; Horst Dreitzel, Absolutismus und standische Verfassung inDeutschland. Ein Beitrag zu Kontinuitaat und Diskontinuitat der Politischen Theorie in der FruhenNeuzeit (Mainz: Zabern, 1992), 23–35 offers as a compromise six roots or overlapping sets ofinfluences characterising Althusius’s Politica literature: (a) the debate among reformed monarch-omachists after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572; (b) the Dutch debate justifying therebellion against Spain; (c) Spanish legal philosophy concerning both Roman law concepts of thecorporation and its representation and the further development of the notion of natural law;(d) aspects of presbyterian ecclesiology; (e) Bodin’s notion of sovereignty; (f ) practical advice onachieving stability borrowed from Lipsius.

20 Heinz Angermeier, Konigtum und Landfriede im deutschen Spatmittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1966);Heinz Angermeier, Die Reichsreform 1410–1555 (Munich: Beck, 1984); on the interaction of imperialand constitutional law and confessionalisation, see Gerhard Muller, ‘Bundnis und Bekenntnis.Zum Verhaltnis von Glaube und Politik im deutschen Luthertum des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in MartinBrecht and Reinhard Schwarz (eds.), Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche. Studien zum Konkordien-buch (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1980), 23–43; and summarising the constitutional and religiousdevelopment, Heinz Schilling, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich’, Historische Zeitschrift 246(1988), 1–45; Heinz Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise (Berlin: Siedler, 1988).

21 Henning Arnisaeus, De republica seu relectionis politicae libri duo (Frankfurt 1615), ch. I, s. 1, n. 14:‘Perfecta igitur definitio reipublicae est, quod sit ordo civitatis, tum aliorum imperium, tumpraecipue summae potestatis, a quo profluit regimen per medios magistratus in universos subditos’;see Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 171–4, on his break with the received tradition by failing to mention themoral mission of the state.

22 Christian Liebenthal, Collegium politicum (Amsterdam 1652), vol. VI, 185, quotes Althusius for ‘respublica constat ex imperantibus & obedientibus’, probably Johannes Althusius, Politica methodice


Indeed, most authors preferred monarchy or aristocracy and identifieddemocracy with turmoil and technical problems of government.23 Unityand the preservation of internal harmony for the common good were seenas key problems to be addressed by any magistrate.24 As a genre, therefore,and irrespective of constitutional form, politica writing was dedicated tothe control of subjects and to the avoidance of turmoil.25

Within this pattern of similarities, important differences betweenwriters like Arnisaeus and Althusius need to be kept in mind, for theyalso defined the place of the learned specialist in Althusius’s work. Threeneed special attention. First, ‘Neo-Aristotelians’, insofar as they remainedconstitutional relativists, accepted that the supreme magistrate could be anaristocracy or a monarchy, as long as superioritas remained in the solepossession of that magistrate. This was not the case with Althusius. Heinsisted that the kind of monarchy he envisaged – including the highlyspecific constitutional set-up that he devised – was the only true and trulyuseful form of government.

Second, according to him, sovereignty belonged to the corporate body(universitas) of the kingdom (regnum) itself, not to the person or personsof the supreme magistrate. Sovereignty was exercised by magistratesrepresenting the corporate whole of the commonwealth and thus actingon behalf of it. Magistrates had various functions, the most important ofwhich belonged indeed to the supreme magistrate himself. But should hefail in his representational office, he could be constrained or punished bythose magistrates whose office it was to secure the laws of the common-wealth. Althusius called these lower magistrates the ephors. The represen-tation of the realm by the collectivity of the ephors and their ability toconstrain and punish the supreme magistrate is undoubtedly one of themost obvious features of Althusius’s approach. In Germany, though,where the electoral princes did indeed share in the maiestas or sovereigntyof the Empire, this design was much less conspicious than it would havebeen in England or France. Althusius, however, had devised his Politica tobe an analytical description of the true nature of every society.

digesta (Herborn, 1614), ch. I, 36: ‘ita conventus & societas in Rep. imperantium & obedientium sehabet’, but Althusius normally used the terms regnum or consociatio publica universalis (for res publica).

23 Althusius’s chapter on democracy (XXXIX) is part of his appendix of special subjects treated in thelast chapters. He stated his view on popular participation much earlier. To him, any kind ofelection by the common men is riddled with danger for the unity of the body politic and willtrigger rebellion and sedition: Althusius, ch. XVIII, 56.

24 E.g. on the need for harmony: Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 36.25 See Weber, Prudentia gubernatoria, 321–57.


Third, Althusius differed from Arnisaeus with regard to the status ofprivate rights and the source of social order. Arnisaeus did accept a notionof civil society as the domain of the private and pre-political rights ofsubjects distinct from the state. For Arnisaeus, though, this domain doesnot constitute a corporation capable of any legal action in its own right,nor can the state be represented by any agent other than the suprememagistrate.26 Closely following the influential translation of Aristotle byPetrus Victorinus that effectively rejected the notion of civitas or civilsociety as a body with political power, he wrote that ‘res publica est ordototius civitatis consistens in regimine summae potestatis per mediosmagistratus’ (the state is the order of the civil community, an order thatconsists of the absolute power in government through the magistrate).27

According to Arnisaeus, the magistrate’s supreme power over subjects –possessed by virtue of conquest, inheritance or transferral – provided thevery basis of hierarchy and subordination and thus the core vinculum orbinding of society and state. Thus, to qualify the magistrate’s capacity orright to rule meant undermining the body politic fatally. Althusius,however, derives social hierarchy from Platonic ideas of a common goalof society and from his Christian conception of society as men boundtogether under the Ten Commandments. This does not mean that hefailed to see the need for an institutional configuration of order to beimpressed upon society. Indeed, there is hardly a better example for thedistinction of society and state than Althusius’s own work. In contrast toArnisaeus, however, Althusius refused to accept that the institutionalorder of the state sprang solely from the exercise of sovereignty. For thiswould be to deny the accountability of the supreme to the inferiormagistrates, or to positive civil laws.28

Althusius also accepted the clear-cut distinction between the res publica,the institutional configuration of order headed by magistrates, and the

26 Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 336–57: The civitas provides the populus with a sphere of private property rights,but these do not carry public power. The restrictions of natural and fundamental law imposed onthe monarch are primarily left to protect these private rights; see Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, 202–26.

27 Commentarii in VIII libro Aristotelis de optimo statu civitatis, 209 defines ‘Est autem res publica ordocivitatis, ceterorumque magistratuum, et maxime illius, qui summam potestatem habet’: seeDreitzel, Arnisaeus, 344; Wolfgang Mager, ‘Res Publica und Burger’, in Res Publica. Burgerschaftin Stadt und Staat (Berlin: Humboldt, 1988), 67–94, at 78; on the underlying notion of the civitasbeing the materia, being given form by the res publica, (eds.), see Horst Dreitzel, ProtestantischerAristotelismus und absoluter Staat: Die ‘Politica’ des Henning Arnisaeus (ca. 1575–1636) (Wiesbaden:Franz Steiner, 1970) 119; Wolfgang Mager, ‘Republik’, in Joachim Ritter and Karlfried GrunderHistorisches Worterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Oldenbourg 1984), vol. VIII, 858–78, at 867.

28 The locus classicus on Arnisaeus remains Dreitzel, Arnisaeus.


notion of society as helpless without the order imposed by magistrates.29

But, in contrast to Arnisaeus, Althusius’s res publica rested on the legalperson of the universitas or corporate commonwealth, regarded as thesource of sovereignty. The commonwealth was represented by magistrateson various levels, rather than by the supreme magistrate alone. Therefore aspecific group of magistrates, the ephors, could judge and punish thesupreme magistrate according to the laws of the commonwealth. Althusiuswas just as hostile to any participation of subjects in government asArnisaeus. He even abolished such elements of democratic participationas existed in Emden, the town where he served as syndic, because he arguedthat democratic government could not function and that aristocratic rulehad to be restored.30But he put the rights of sovereignty firmly in the handsof the universitas itself – the whole commonwealth, represented essentiallyby the magistracy as a collectivity – rather than into the hands of a singlesupreme magistrate. Magistrates thus ruled by possessing a representativeoffice, standing for the corporate body politic, the universitas. As a result,Althusius’s world was divided into magistrates – including the lowermagistrates – and subjects, rather than into the single exemplary divisionbetween the supreme magistrate and all the rest.31 It was for this reason thatArnisaeus attacked him as dangerous monarchomach.32

29 Johannes Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 11–13. Although Althusius began his book with a description ofsocial life and families, households and guilds, and only later described the universitas (ch. V), evenat the very beginning of his book this social life presupposes the existence of magistrates directingsocial life, who are later described as representing the universitas: See ch. V, 22–5, in particular ch. V,n. 25: ‘Hi superiores praesides ex consensu communi civium suorum constituuntur, & et constitutirepraesentant ipsam civitatem, non aliter, quam syndicus universitatem’. Althusius’s description ofthe various communities that any society is made of – families and guilds, and urban and provincialsocieties having their own magistrates – must not allow us to overlook the fact that majesty islocated in the regnum, not in society itself. See Hasso Hofmann, Reprasentation. Studien zur Wort-und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Dunckes und Humblot, 1974;fourth edn Berlin, 2003), 355–75. It is important to remember Hofmann’s insights into the meaningof representation here, taking the relation between a tutor and a minor as an example. Therepresented populus, that is, the minor, has, in general, no right whatsoever to interfere with theactions of the tutor. The term popular sovereignty is thus problematic, if not entirely erroneous,with respect to Althusius’s argument.

30 Robert von Friedeburg, Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe, England andGermany, 1530–1680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 103–23; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘MagdeburgerArgumentationen zum Recht auf Widerstand gegen die Durchsetzung des Interim (1550–1551) undihre Stellung in der Geschichte des Widerstandsrechts im Reich, 1523–1627’, in: Luise Schorn-Schutte (ed.), Das Interim (Gutersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 389–437.

31 See, on the broad strand of this theory in Germany, Horst Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in derFurstengesellschaft (Cologne: Bodlau, 1991), vol. II, 529–46, in particular on Althusius 531–532, onlyone member of this group.

32 Henning, Arnisaeus, De auctoritate principum in populum semper inviolabili . . . (Strassburg 1635),ch. XXXVIII, n. 80.


For Althusius, then, because it did not derive simply from a suprememagistrate, the co-ordination of rule required some degree of consent.This fundamental social consensus was suggestive of a Platonic harmonyand expressed in laws, especially those of the Decalogue. This is whyAlthusius calls the laws the ‘vinculum quo respublica cohaeret & spiritusvitalis’ (ch. X, 4 – the republic’s cohering bond and vital spirit).33 In needof sociability, men are also united by common goals and potential insightinto the requirements and goodness of Christian life. Good governmentcould realise the potential of sociability, overcoming divergences amongmen (such as differences in riches or abilities) that might stir social unrest.From such government arose the consent that, in the final analysis, heldhuman society and the commonwealth together.34 Althusius was acutelyaware that, in practice, both subjects and magistrates did submit to theirvices, and that realising the potential for harmony needed constant work –the continuous application of political prudence, as taught by the politica.To that end, magistrates, including university teachers, needed certainvirtues and abilities.

‘PERSONA’ , SOUL AND OFFICE

Althusius’s approach to the subject must be understood in relation to hissources and contemporaries. Cicero had delineated four personae in hisattempt to give a systematic account of appropriate actions, understood asfulfilling the rational abilities of human nature against the background ofthe dissolution of the republic and the problems of vice and ambition.35

These personae were, first, our common human rationality, allowing us to

33 See Michael Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion in den Lehren des Lipsius und Althusius’s, inBonfatti et al., Politische Begriffe, 165–84., 171.

34 Althusius, Politica, C1, 36: ‘Deinde conservatio & duratio omnium rerum consistit in illa ordina-tionis, & subjectionis concordia. Nam sicut ex diversi toni fidibus, ad symmetriam intensis, sonusdulcissimus oritur&melodia suavis, gravibus, mediis& acutis conjunctis: ita conventus& societas inRep. imperantium & obedientium se habet, & ex divitum, pauperum, artificum, sedentatiorum &id genus diversorum graduum personarum statu, quam suavissima oritur & conveniens harmonia;& si ad concentum reducantur, efficitur concordia laudabilis, felix & pene divina, & durabilior.Quod si vero omnes aequales, singulique pro arbitrio vellent alios regere, & alii recusarent regi, hincfacilis esset discordia,& discordia dissolutio societatis: Nullus esset gradus virtutis, nullus meritorem,& sequeretur, ut ipsa aequalitas esset summa inaequalitas. . .Hinc inter signa irae divinae refertur,quando haec imperantium & obtemperantium symmetria, ejusque ministri, & duces non sunt’.Hierarchy and order are thus essentials of Althuius’s vision of harmony in society. Both inequalityamong men and the distribution of labour with its concomitant problems are recognised when it isconcluded that lack of government and harmonymakes ‘ut ipsa aequalitas esset summa inaequalitas’.

35 See Willibald Heilmann, Ethische Reflexion und romische Lebenswirklichkeit in Ciceros Schrift DeOfficiis (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982); Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis (Ann


identify the honest and the appropriate (ch. I, 107 honestum decorumque);Second, the specific mind or character (animus) of the individual, withCicero listing happiness, misery, wit or cunning as attributes common toall. A third persona may have been developed by any extraordinary experi-ence, leaving its mark on us. Finally, the fourth persona is the one that weourselves wish or choose to adopt (ch. I, 115).

All four personae need to be considered in understanding what it meansto act appropriately in a chosen way of life (ch. I, 120 genus vitae). Ingeneral, we should strive to follow our ancestors, but take into accountour nature (in the second sense), avoid vices (ch. I, 121), and live accordingto our limitations (ch. I, 110). With respect to the three latter personae, thespecifics of our upbringing, age, duties as magistrate or as private personwill determine fitting conduct. Perhaps it is this variety of possiblesituations for the individual that has prompted German translators ofCicero’s text to render persona as ‘role’. Modern sociologists like ShmuelEisenstadt, however, argue that the concept of ‘role’ used in the disciplineof sociology depends on a society of equal individuals with a considerablerange of choice for them and for society. Here roles are assigned by societyitself, understood as a functional totality, unlike the personae of earlymodernity, which depend upon statuses determined by birth or confes-sion, and by the order of public and private offices that individuals occupyvia a persona.36

In any case, the Christian reception of Cicero fundamentally reshapedhis concept of persona, emphasising creation, original sin, justification andgrace as prime concerns of the faithful. This emphasis received anothertwist during the Reformation. Here, as a result of the insistence on thecorruption of the will and reason, and on the inability of human sinnersto do good works, moral philosophy was kept distinct from theology, andthis allowed scope for the reception of the pagan classics within philoso-phy without compromising the onslaught on the ‘theology of goodworks’. Hence Melanchthon’s separation of law and grace: the morallaw as the eternal justice of God, and the gospel as the promise of grace.37

In trying to understand the notitiae or ideas of God’s creation planted inus, moral philosophy thus aimed at understanding God, with virtue

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Wilfried Nippel, ‘Klientel, Gesellschaftsstruktur undpolitisches System in der romischen Republik’, Humanistische Bildung 22 (2002), 137–51.

36 I would like to thank Shmuel Eisenstadt for his time in Jerusalem in 2003 when he explained thispoint of view to me. See also Conal Condren’s parallel argument in this volume.

37 Philipp Melanchthon, ‘Ethicae doctrinae elementa 1550’, in Melanchthon, Opera omnia in corpusreformatorum 16 ed. Heinrich Ernst Bindseil (Halle, 1850), cols. 166–8. See, for this, Frank,‘Melanchthon’s Concept’, 217–33.


always requiring obedience to Him. While some hold that philosophythus lacks an independent basis for Melanchthon, others have emphasisedthe space opened up for an inquiry into secular affairs by distinguishinglaw and gospel, philosophy and theology.38 In any case, Melanchthon didaccept the passions as part of our nature, some of them – such as love ofthe fatherland – implanted by God, in order to steer our will to goodconduct in civil life.39 Melanchthon remained well regarded by Calvinistslike Beza, particularly after he began to come under attack by his fellowLutherans from 1547.Althusius’s main work on ethics was his Civilis conversatione libri duo of

1601 and 1611, printed in 1650 with only slight changes as Ethicus Althu-sianus. In the first edition of his Politica of 1603, however, he alsoemphasised the function of ethics for the working of social life. Hisremarks on the passions of magistrates and subjects – on their capacitiesfor virtuous and vicious actions, and thus their capacity for offices – formpart of the reflections on prudence and government in chapters XXI toXXVII of the Politica.40 The main emphasis of his Civilis conversatione wason the disciplining of human relations to make them useful for society. Inthis respect, Catholic ideas on discipline like those of Giovanni della Casawere influential for Althusius. But, at the same time, he attempted todescribe civility and its applicability with the help of scripture, usingBenito Arias’s comments on the Antwerp Polyglott Bible of 1573. Instrong contrast to Melanchthon, however, ethics is no longer moralphilosophy based on divine law and natural law, but only an ars decoreconversandi cum hominibus (the art of appropriate social interaction).41

Althusius relocated the various virtues to the ars most pertinent for them,ascribing the virtues accordingly to either theology, law or politics ratherthan keeping them together as part of a single art of ethics. Ethicsremained only as the discipline of decorum, not of recte facere (to dothe right thing), but only of rite facere (to do the appropriate thing).42 In

38 Dreitzel, Arnisaeus, pp. 87–95.39 Jill Kraye, ‘Stoicism in the Renaissance from Petrarch to Lipsius’ Grotiana, NS, 22/23 (2001–2), 21–

45; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘The Problems of Passions and of Love of the Fatherland in ProtestantThought: Melanchthon to Althusius, 1520s–1620s’, Cultural and Social History 2 (2005), 81–98.

40 See Paul Ludwig Weinacht, ‘Althusius – Ein Aristoteliker? Uber die Funktion praktischerPhilosophie im politischen Calvinismus’, in Dahm et al., Politische Theorie des Johannes Althu-sius, 443–64.

41 Johannes Althusius, Civilis conversationis (Hanover, 1601), 1.42 Althusius, Civilis conversationis, 9; see Emilio Bonfatti, ‘Die Rezeption von Johannes Althusius’s

Civilis Conversationis Libri Duo durch Bartholomaeus Keckermann und Johann Heinrich Alsted’,in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 315–29.


Althusius’s Politica, therefore, we find his reflections on the passions andvirtues, and on the behaviour appropriate to an office, as these pertain topolitics.

Michael Behnen has pointed out that rights and obligations of Althu-sius’s symbiotici, or men bound together in society, are to be understoodwith regard to the establishment and upholding of social interaction –described in the Politica in terms such as ‘symmetria’, ‘concordia’, and themusical metaphors of ‘symphonia’ and ‘harmonia’ – for only then was theaim of politics achievable.43 Further, Behnen argues that Althusiusdepended on Cicero’s notion of ‘juris consensu’ (the consent to law) forhis understanding of the multitude turning into a body politic.44 Con-sent, measured against the Decalogue, even if enforced by constraint, is atthe core of this vision of the body politic.45 To make men actually achieveand keep this harmony, Behnen further argues that Althusius providedadvice for magistrates on how to direct, discipline and manipulate thebehaviour of subjects.46

Behnen views the middle parts of the Politica as being concerned, likeother instances of the genre, with the practical problems confrontinggovernments, and he has submitted these sections to a close scrutiny. LikeHasso Hofmann, Behnen argues that the Politica combines three accountsof the working of the body politic. There is a sociological account of theunits of which each society is made, such as families, guilds, towns,provinces. These are the famous consociationes whose description haveled to the (false) belief that Althusius is describing a federal state.47 Thereis a legal account of the representational relationships within state andsociety.48 And there is a political account of the office of the magistratesand counsellors in its fullest sense, including their dangerous vices and

43 Althusius, Politica, ch. I, 30 ; Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion’; Michael Behnen, ‘Herrscherbildund Herrschaftstechnik in der Politica des Johannes Althusius’, Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung11 (1984), 417–72.

44 Behnen, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftstechnik’, quotes at 422; Althusius, Politica, ch. V, 4,‘Homines congregati sine jure symbiotico, sunt turba, coetus, multitudo, congregatio, populus, gens(men gathered without symbiotic law are crowd, multitude, gathering, people) and hints at Cicero,De re publica, Liber primus, 25, and his definition of coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitatecommunione sociatus’. It is important, however, to remember that Cicero has Africanus to define‘Est igitur, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modocongregatus, sed coetus multitudinis’, i.e. that this is Cicero’s definition of the res publica, whileAlthusius transfers it to a definition of the consociatio and the ius symbioticum.

45 See Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993), 158, similarly criticising Gierke’s interpretation.

46 Behnen, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftstechnik’, 423.47 See, on this, Dreitzel, ‘Althusius in der Geschichte des Foderalismus’.48 See Hofmann, Reprasentation.


possible virtues, in order to prepare the students of the Politica for theirfuture tasks and duties. It is here that the persona of the magistrate, and bythis token of the university teacher, is described.

THE ‘PERSONAE’ OF MAGISTRATE AND COUNCILLOR

Despite the primary importance of the Decalogue in its Calvinist inter-pretation as the prime law of the Althusian republic, theologians are notaccorded superiority in the political hierarchy. Althusius’s Christian phil-osophy is most clearly expressed in his inaugural lecture at Herborn in1603, on the value and importance of university education. Althusius’sOratio does not work from the Lutheran distinction of law and gospel.Rather, it subsumes Christian doctrine within the compass of civicimprovement and submits it to the regulation of civic magistrates. Chris-tian doctrine is treated as a discipline of philosophy, in keeping with themore general tendency of Calvinist Schulphilosophie noted by Ian Hunterin his chapter. Studying is treated as a way of perfecting the soul to analmost prelapsarian condition. With regard to knowledge of God, em-phasis is laid on physico-theology, which meant understanding the natureof God by studying the natural world as his creation, and addressingtheology as the study of the deeds of God in nature. While all law had tobe based on the Decalogue and the preservation of the commonwealth,law, ethics and religion were bound together by Althusius’s understandingof the law of nature, which he regarded as embodying both tables of theDecalogue: the ‘communio symbiotica universalis regni est ecclesiastica,vel secularis’ (the general symbiotic community of the kingdom is eitherecclesiastical or secular, ch. IX, n. 31).Althusius’s account of the vices and virtues of magistrates and the

people is embedded in this approach to Christianity and the constitu-tional arrangements described in the Politica. Consequent upon Althu-sius’s spreading the responsibilities of government to all magistrates is thewider distribution of necessary virtues. Good government demands thatall magistrates be instructed in prudence, knowledge of how societyworks, and an understanding of the passions – their own and the people’s.Further, writing the Politica itself and teaching its substance to potentialoffice-holders is understood as part of the active steering of society.Althusius’s account starts with the introductory chapter, ‘De general-

ibus affectionibus politicae’ (On the general characteristics of politics). Inorder to protect us from misery and to live justly and happily, we share anatural inclination to live together, and only then, in the exercise of this


civil life, can we strive towards the exercise and practice of virtue (ch. I n. 4).As distinguished from the legal emphasis of his Dicaeologicae or hisJurisprudentia romana, politics in the Politica is defined in Ciceronianterms as the art of organising and keeping men in a ‘coetusjuris consensus & utilitatis’ (a consensual and beneficial lawful union)(ch. I, 7).49

Chapter XXI addresses the supreme magistrate as ‘dux, pastor, paterpatriae, rex, custos & salvator populi & corporis consociati’ (leader,pastor, father of the fatherland, king, tutor and saviour of the peopleand the social body), whose approach to the administration of the bodypolitic must be prudential (ch. XXI, n. 6). This prudentia, in turn, isexplained with direct reference to Lipsius and Seneca (ibid., n. 8).50 Primeimportance is given to dealing with the vices of the people, with chapterXXIII providing a detailed account of the human passions, including theirshaping according to region, climate and religion. The passions aredescribed as ‘inconstans & mutabile, pronum in affectus’ (inconstantand changeable, susceptible to emotion) (ch. XXIII, 21). Central to theseproblems are social differences among men in their capacity as privatemembers of the consociationes privatae, characterised in a rather negativefashion. Althusius, for example, reminds the reader of the dangers ofluxury51 and of ambition, citing the rivalry between Ghibellines andGuelfs in Italian cities.52 The existing diversity of men and wealth, whileaccepted as a fact of life, threatens the harmony that is to be achievedthrough good government. Althusius thus envisages the prospectivemagistrate as sailing the ship of state through a stormy sea of humantempers and habits.53

It is important to remember that Althusius does not consider here thelegal issue of the exercise of government, but the impact of passions onsocial interaction, which was for him the very basis of the working of theres publica (ch. XXIV, 1). The most relevant human propensities are of two

49 See also Althusius, Politica, V, 4 (‘Homines congregati sine jure symbiotico, sunt turba, coetus,multitudo, congregatio, populus, gens’) and hints at Cicero, De re publica, Liber primus, 25. Seeabove, note 44.

50 On the influence of Lipsius on Althusius’s description of the prince, see Behnen, ‘Herrschaft undReligion’, 165–84, but mainly with reference to chapter XXIV.

51 Althusius, Politica, ch. XXXI, 16. A positive evaluation of the wealth in cities such as Robert Burton,The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),pp. 344–55, is anathema to this concept; see Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1976); Conal Condren, Language of Politics in Early-Modern England (NewYork: St Martin’s Press, 1994), 95–9 on the implications of talking about cities.

52 Althusius, Politica, ch. XXXI, 8.53 On this see also ch. XXXII.


kinds: those implanted by nature and possessed perpetually, and thoseacquired. Among the affectiones imperium or natural characteristics of ruleare the superbia (rapacity) and insolentia (arrogance) brought about by itsdulcedo and licentia (sweetness and licentiousness) and exhibited in tyrantslike Croesus, Nebuchadnezzar, Tarquinius Superbus, Caligula and Nero(ch. XXIV, 4). To Althusius, these moral failings bring about novationes etmutationes periculosae (dangerous innovations and changes), as is shownby the history of rulers from Saul to Tiberius (ch. XXIV, 9–12), that in turnproduce hate (odium) among the subjects toward their magistrates andthen further disaster (12).In contrast, it is the willingness of magistrates to take good counsel that

in turn stirs and keeps alive the affectiones benevolentiae & reverentiae(benevolent and respectful feelings) among subjects (15). Althusius de-scribes here the mutual growth of social qualities by their actual exercise, aprocess in which office-holders and magistrates need to take the lead andthat is subject to historic change. Benevolence (benevola affectio) amongsubjects is described as inclinatio & amor magistratum statum (inclinationtowards and love of the magistracy). Among the magistrates, it is comple-mented by lenitas (mercy) of the sort that led King David to call hissubjects brothers (ch. XXIV, 18, 19). Yet vigilance and zeal remain crucial, ashe remarks, referring to Lipsius; the people have to be governed like a wildhorse (equus ferox).From chapter XXIV, 19 onwards, Althusius provides copious historical

and scriptural examples of the ethical dynamics between magistrates andthe people. The distinctive references to 1 Samuel 8–12 are cases in point. 1Samuel 12 provides an example of the exercise of benevolence of amagistrate toward his subjects. In comparison to late medieval thought,this signifies the extent to which the virtues of magistrates had replacedthe alleged exchange of office among citizens. For to Ptolemaeus of Lucca,Thomas’s student, 1 Sam. 12 had been proof of the beneficial effects ofregimen politicum, understood by Ptolemaeus as a government charac-terised by the exchange of offices among some citizens. Such exchange,Ptolemaeus argued, was instrumental in fostering patriotic commitmentand a widespread sense of official responsibility. Roman citizens thusexhibited ‘zelum iustitiae, zelum benevolentiae civilis and amor patriae’(zeal for justice, zeal for civil benevolence and love of fatherland). ToAlthusius, the distinction of regimen politicum (involving the participa-tion of some citizens or at least a government bound to certain proced-ures of law) and regimen regale (royal government) was plainly useless.Not only was the labour market for his students mainly made up of


principalities, but as syndic he himself restored aristocratic rule toEmden by using mercenaries to crush the institutions of increasedpopular participation that had developed during the 1590s. Indeed,Althusius denounced these institutions, in particular the Council ofthe Forty, as mutations to popular rule, while aiming to restore theoriginal aristocratic government.54

Chapter XXIV is thus an empirical sociological account of how, undervarying circumstances, the performance of certain affectiones imperii haseither brought havoc or harmony to the social union by triggeringresponses among the ruled. This triggering mechanism shows the crucialcharacter of the distinction between the natural passions of power,superbia and insolentia, and the acquired prudential passions. Similarly,chapter XXV primarily addresses the authority of the prince and the needfor him to possess piety, care, fortitude, faith, modesty, temperance, andmoderation of passions (ch. XXV, n. 25).55 These virtues will move hissubjects, and help to establish order (n. 26).

Even though Althusius applied the term magistrate to anyone bearingoffice in the res publica – with terms such as magistratus summus, ephorsand optimates and senators used to distinguish various officeholders – hiswritings addressed primarily inferior magistrates like himself. These weredefined by the civic dignity of collective office far more than any inheritedstatus.56 Coming from the social middle ranks, the large majority ofAlthusius’s readers as students or fellow magistrates had to study at theuniversity of their own home territory. Few could afford to study any-where but at one of the universities in the Empire, and a European tour oreven attendance at a major foreign university were exceptional. Althusiushimself did study at Basle, yet his family background was as modest asthat of the majority of territorial officeholders.57 The difference betweenAlthusius’s prime intended audience and, for example, that of Erasmus’sInstitutio principis – intended for the education of princes – could hardlyhave been more clearly pronounced.58

Althusius paid particular attention to the formation of counsellors andmen of specialised knowledge that needed to be heard. To Althusius, there

54 See his diary 1615, quoted after Heinz Antholz, Die politische Wirksamkeit des Johannes Althusius inEmden (Aurich: Verlag Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1955), 53.

55 See Behnen, ‘Herrschaft und Religion’, 173.56 Johannes Althusius, Dicaeologicae libri tres (Frankfurt, 1649), vol. I, 26, 14; see also Althusius,

Politica, ch. XXV, 37, pt. 8057 Howard Hotson, ‘The Conservative Face of Contractual Theory: The Monarchomach Servants of

the Count of Nassau-Dillenburg’, in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 251–90.58 See now Jan van Herwaarden, ‘Erasmus en zijn Vorst’, unpublished ms.


was hardly any difference between council and counsel, councillors andcounsellors, for all government remained dependent on the professionalcounsel given in councils. Given the laws as the most important bindingelement of the republic (see above), knowledge of them was vital togovernment from its outset. Althusius compares wise counsellors to suchleaders of the Israelites as Josiah.59 The necessary prudence is only exer-cised by men who are trained to have developed an understanding ofpolitics (intellectus politicus). Althusius served as both: he was professor inHerborn and syndic in Emden. Educating the prince and counselling invarious matters of expertise is the office of the magistrate as politicalexpert. The requisite knowledge is acquired by learning and practice,which means that new counsellors need to study at university and acquireadministrative experience. Drawing on the counsel of men possessing thisknowledge is at least as important in defending the authority of themagistrate as are arms (consilia necessaria, quibus arma sunt temperanda,ch. XXV, 19). The practice of prudence even extends to the exercise ofdissimulation and distrust (ch. XXVI, 5–9). We see here that Althusius’sreduction of ethics to rite facere (appropriate conduct) is important,because within the framework of rule and counsel otherwise morallydubious activities become entirely legitimate, as part of the necessarypersona of the office-holder in the discharge of responsibility.The following chapter, XXVII, is thus specifically addressed to counsellors,

considered as membra prudentiae.60 It opens with references to Lipsiusand Cicero, stressing the need for sapientia, and mainly elaborates onthe combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. It isthis combination that makes it possible to instruct the magistrate (ch. XXVII,2). Being loyal and experienced, the counsellors suggest healing means(salutaria) and indeed help to steer the rudder of government (ch. XXVII,6), despite the fact that they, of course, lack power, command and juris-diction. This is why the description of the affectiones imperantes hadbeen so all-encompassing and the vocabulary to describe magistrates sowide-ranging.The difference between these counsellors and the princes or other noble

members of the imperial estates directly subject only to the emperor is byno means ignored. In fact, however, and surely in Althusius’s own practicein Emden, a counsellor could have enormous influence. Counsellors did

59 See on this also Wolfgang E. Weber, ‘Potestas consilio & auxilio juvandi. Bemerkungen zuBeratungs- un Ratetheorie bei Johannes Althusius’, in Bonfatti et al. Politische Begriffe, 194–5.

60 Althusius, Politica, ch. XXVII, 1.


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

LEGAL ‘PERSONA’ AND RIGHTS

In Althusius’s discourses dedicated to law and jurisprudence, the issueswere treated differently. Indeed, it is in this legal context, rather than inhis Politica, that Althusius explicitly uses the term persona. Althusius’sPolitica is not primarily interested in formal rights, to which the legalnotion of persona is relevant. Instead, it is interested in the social dynamicsof human interaction, from families to societies, and takes it that thisinteraction is governed by a fundamental consensus. This consensus isultimately located in acceptance of the Decalogue but, given the sinfulnessof human beings, has to be enforced by magistrates. The rights ofindividuals are therefore constantly overruled in the Politica up to andincluding the sequestration of property for the common good. The onlyexception to this is the traditional acceptance of self-defence as a law ofnature, extended to that of children and family, even against magistrates.After emphasising that in general private subjects must not resist, andexplaining that David fled from Saul rather than resisting him, Althusiusrepeats that ‘Verum quando notoria vis privato a magistratu infertur,cum in casu necessitatis & vitae suae defendendae, defensio ipsi estpermissa’ (it is recognised that as self-defence private force againstinferior magistrates is allowable in necessity) (ch. XXXVIII, n. 67).

In the legal address of hisDicaeologica, however, influenced byDonellus,Althusius tried to describe the rights that are or can be given to the

61 See ibid., 201, n. 72, where he is referring to his current research project on early modern ideas oncounsellors in Germany.

62 Ch. XXVII, 42: ‘Princeps igitur, seu magistratus omnia negotia privata & Reipublicae cum senatus &consiliariis suis communicare debet.’


individual over himself. In this context the liberty of the individual isdefined in terms of dominium over oneself. Here, the individual is under-stood as a bearer of rights and obligations, and persona is the term used todenote the legal mode or capacity to which specific rights attach. Publishedin 1618 and reprinted in 1649, this work remains in the line of attempts toachieve a comprehensive system of law. Hugo Donellus is seen as taking amajor step in developing the notion of subjective rights, mainly in hisCommentariorum de iure civili libri viginti octo (used: Frankfurt 1594). Hismeans of organising the material for this commentary was to distinguishwhat is given to the individual actor, and how to reach this.With regard to the person, Donellus explained (bk. I, ch. I) that among

the rights of persons are life, safety of the body, liberty and reputation.63

Drawing on the authority of Ulpian (Digesta 1, 1, 10), he presents aconventional notion of justice as a matter of living honestly, doing noharm and giving each his due. This, combined with a concept of ius orright (bk. I, ch. III) enabled him to conclude that iura pertaining to theperson are ‘ea quae sunt cuiusque privatim iure tamen illi tributa, or,facultas et potestas iure tributa’ (the abilities and the power given accordingto the law) (bk. I, ch. III). This argument supports Haakonssen’s point thatwe do not owe anything as such, but only what we owe justly.64 Thereason for this becomes immediately apparent when looking at Donellus’sown attempt to define the distinction between public and private law.Again, he refers to Ulpian’s Digest (1,1,1,2) where public and private law aredescribed as having different areas of reference. Thus, public law is thatwhich looks to the condition of the concerns of Rome, private to individualbenefit. Donellus then combines the definition of justice – as quoted above– and the distinction between public and private law to define private law asthat law that looks at private uses and distributes what is due to privateindividuals (‘Ad privatorum utilitatem recta pertinere ius intelligitur, quodprivatis et singulis, quae suum est, tribuit’) (bk. II, ch. VII).Althusius’s Dicaeologia works from these assumptions, but goes further

in adumbrating a sphere of rights attributed to the ipse or individual overhimself. Book 1, part 1, chapter 5 De hominibus natura distinctis (Onnatural distinctions) only describes the various ‘natural distinctions’among people such as gender. Law and rights are only considered againstthe context of society itself linked to divine law. Within this framework,

63 Manfred Herrmann, Der Schutz der Personlichkeit in der Rechtslehre des 16.- 18. Jahrhunderts(Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1968), 20–1.

64 Haakonssen, ‘Moral Conservatism of Natural Rights’.


book 1, part 2 describes fundamental concepts such as dominium, posses-sion and liberty. Dominium is understood in terms of exercise andpossession (chs. 18, 19). Liberty is defined as ‘potestas’, which is ‘dom-inatio cum iure imperandi & necessitate obtemperandi’ (domination withthe right to rule and necessity to obey). This potestas of body or spirit isexercised as the right and authority to do what is licit (bk. I, ch. 25, n. 5).

Althusius further distinguishes the ‘jus libertatis in ipsam personamliberam and res ipsius’ (the right of liberty in one’s own free person andpossessions) (n. 9), and defines (ch. 25, n. 10) that ‘jus libertatis personamconcernens est jus habendi & dimittendi sui ipsius’ (the right of liberty inone’s own person means the right to possess and abandon oneself ). Andthis ipse is then also the object of self defence against a magistrate, asgranted by the law of nature (ch. 38, n. 67). None of this, of course,constitutes a system of natural rights, particularly when this is understoodas a secure sphere for the development of one’s personality, as is supposedto have developed during the nineteenth century. Rather, the rightsattached to the ipse and the persona of Althusius’s legal discourse arederived from what is justly and legally attached to them. The terms ipseand persona thus help to focus on the individual as a legal entity bearinglegitimate authority and right over itself, although the legitimacy of whatthey actually control or possess is measured against the requirements ofthe public good – just as, one might add, the personae of the magistrateshave to be shaped to meet these requirements.

CONCLUSION

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


magistrates, and their subjects as subjects, were prone. They also had toknow about the virtues necessary to carry out their task and the passionsthat could possibly be utilised to that end.Althusius wrote his Politica as a teacher of this specific political art to

students intended for magistracy, yet in Emden he served as magistratehimself. The Spanish threat at the borders of the Empire and the constantconflicts with unruly subjects in Emden provided enough opportunities totest Althusius’s passions and restraint. The ultimate goal of the Politicawas to groom students and fellow rulers to commit themselves to theiroffices in order to keep the commonwealth together and protectReformed religion within it.Although they are not strictly speaking magistrates, university teachers

and counsellors are treated by Althusius as participants in government andthus in need of its necessary qualities. They are not part of the vulgus, andthey have the potential to be taught sufficient affectiones to render them fitfor that work. Althusius’s point of departure, however, is not so much thepersona of a member of the senatorial elite, as was the case for Cicero, butthe office of the magistrate in its widest understanding. Here, a group ofpeople is singled out that hopefully will serve for the bonum commune of all.Sixteenth-century German princes, listening to theologians about how

to reform the church, had already made acquaintance with specialists ofcertain realms of knowledge who claimed an enormous degree of autonomyand authority in their respective subject areas. With the Althusian counsel-lor, specialists in politics also began to make their voices heard, above all ascivic philosophers. Under the peculiar conditions of the nature of magis-tracy in Germany, and the objective importance of legal and politicalcouncil in German government, large and small, Althusius’s account, nomatter what the idiosyncrasies of his constitutional set-up, fits the moregeneral development of a genre describing the role and importance ofcounsellors. The comparatively high political importance of Germanmagistrates, defined by their civilis dignitas, a magistratu collocata – asopposed to seu natalium dignitas . . . ab intercessore parente65 – provides abackground to the subsequent connection between specialised universityknowledge, governing power, and reflections on the appropriate personafor men of learning in Germany.66

65 Johannes Althusius, Dicaeologicae libri tres, vol. I, 26, 14; see also Johannes Althusius, Politica,ch. XXV, 37, pt. 80.

66 See, for a later period, Wolfgang Mager and Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Learned Men and Merchants:The Rise of the “Burgertum”, 1648–1806’, in Sheilagh Ogilvie and Robert Scribner (eds.),Germany: A Social History 1300–1800, Bd. II (London, 1996), 164–95.


CHAPTER 8

Descartes as sage: spiritual askesis in Cartesianphilosophy

John Cottingham497314

INTRODUCTION: THE CARTES IAN MASK

In one of his earliest surviving writings Descartes says that just as actorsput on masks (personam induunt), so he himself will enter the theatre ofthe world masked: larvatus prodeo.1 ‘Mask’ was, of course, the originalmeaning of the Latin term persona – in Greek prosopon: the false face ofclay or bark that actors in the ancient world donned in order to come onto the stage. It is an odd figure of speech for a philosopher to adopt: bothin classical philosophical thought (from Plato’s famous strictures againstacting and role-playing),2 and also in the Christian gospels (from Jesus’denunciation of those whose outward display did not match their innerthoughts),3 the connotations of the term ‘actor’ (hypocrites) were far fromfavourable.

What persona did Descartes himself have in mind? We are apt, in thelight of popular contemporary psychology, to think of a persona as somekind of false self-presentation;4 but the ancient theatrical persona was a

1 Praeambula (1619), from Descartes’s early notebooks (later dubbed the Cogitationes privatae): AT,vol. X, 213: CSM, vol. I, 2. In this paper, ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition ofDescartes by C. Adam and P. Tannery, Œuvres de Descartes (12 vols.) revised edn, Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76); ‘CSM’ refers to the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D.Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (2 vols.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1985); and ‘CSMK’ to vol. III, The Correspondence, by the same translators plus A. Kenny (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

2 Plato, Republic (c. 385 BCE), 392c–8b.3 Matthew (c. 60 CE), 6:2–5.4 One thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous account of how people wilfully imprison themselves intheir official roles as a kind of escape from true self-realisation: ‘the waiter who tries to imitate in hiswalk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessnessof a tight-rope walker . . . playing at being a waiter in a cafe . . . There is the dance of the grocer, ofthe tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they arenothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor.’ Being and Nothingness (L’etre et le neant, 1943)(London: Methuen, 1957), ch. 2, 59. As Carl Jung observes (writing a few years before Sartre),‘the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas – the professor with his textbook,the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the

182

formal, stylised device, whose purpose was not so much simulation asdissimulation. Going on stage is a daunting business, and the maskconceals awkwardness and embarrassment (a point that Descartes himselfmakes quite explicitly).5 By hiding his nervousness, or simply the unpre-possessing ordinary features that might be familiar to the audience, theactor could pronounce his lines with more confidence.So it may be that the young Descartes is simply recording his shyness –

his reluctance to make a stir. We know that his favourite motto was theOvidian tag bene vixit qui bene latuit, a variation on the Epicurean maximlathe biosas: ‘get through life without drawing attention to yourself ’.6 Andwhen he finally presented the public with an account of his ‘method ofseeking the truth in the sciences’, together with some sample essaysillustrating its results, he would not allow his name to appear on the titlepage.7

But there is more to it than this. Descartes may have been cautious andreticent, but he had a mission.8 If the mask was there, it was one hewanted ultimately to shed, like the sciences themselves, of which heremarked that in his own epoch they were still ‘masked’ (larvatae) –veiled or constricted, as it were, in the formal stylised apparatus ofscholasticism – but ‘if the masks could only be shed’, their true naturewould ‘appear in its full beauty’.9 So to have a clear picture of theinaugurator of the early modern age, we need to understand whatDescartes saw himself as setting out to do, as he entered the world’sstage: what he took his distinctive contribution to be, or what was histrue self-conception as a philosopher.

background of his own biography . . . One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona isthat which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.’ ‘ConcerningRebirth’ (‘Uber Wiedergeburt’, 1939, rev. 1950), in Collected Works (London: Routledge, 1959), vol.IX, part I, }221.

5 ‘Comoedi, moniti ne in fronte appareat pudor, personam induunt.’ (‘Actors, taught not to let anyembarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask.) AT, vol. X, 212: CSM, vol. I, 2.

6 Letter to Mersenne of April 1634: AT, vol. I, 285; CSMK, 43.7 Discours de la methode pour . . . chercher la verite dans les science. Plus . . . des essais de ce methode.Leiden, 8 June 1637.

8 The zeal and commitment is clearly apparent in, for example, the Discourse on the Method(especially throughout part VI), and seems to have dated right back to Descartes’s night of vividdreams in November 1619, from which he awoke with the vision of inaugurating a comprehensivenew scientific system, and made a vow of thanksgiving to visit the shrine of the Virgin at Loretto.Adrien Baillet, La vie de M. Des-Cartes (Paris, 1691), vol. I, 85–6 (cf. AT, vol. X, 180–8 and CSM,vol. I, 4–5).

9 Larvatae nunc scientiae sunt: quae, larvis sublatis, pulcherrimae apparerent.’ Praeambula, AT, vol.X, 215: CSM, vol. I, 2.

Spiritual askesis in Cartesian philosophy 183

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

PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-CONCEPTIONS AND THEIR EVOLUTION

The self-conception of the philosopher in something like the above sensewas, until our own time, a serious and important matter – something wetend to forget in our philosophically somewhat degenerate age. A culturemanifests its degeneration in part by bad faith, a telling instance of whichis the undertaking of some philosophical pursuit not for itself, but merelyinstrumentally, for the sake of the practitioner’s vanity or some otheradvantage. The sophists of ancient Greece, who claimed to teach virtuefor money, were criticised by Socrates as a paradigm case.12 Contrasted

10 Tertullian, Adversus praxeas (c. 213 CE). The gloss by Pyper (emphasis added) is from A. Hastings,A. Mason and H. Pyper (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), 531, s.v. ‘person’.

11 For this suggestion, deriving from St Thomas Aquinas, with earlier roots in Augustine, seeB. Davies, Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2002), ch. 16, }2 (‘Three Persons and one God’), 167–8.

12 The criticism is implicit in the heavy irony used by Socrates in his description of the sophists (in thecourse of his own defence against the accusation of corrupting the young): Apology (c. 390 BCE),19d–e. For a more favourable interpretation of Plato’s attitude to the sophists, see T. H. Irwin,‘Plato: The Intellectual Background’, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51–69.

184 JOHN COTTINGHAM

with this instrumental approach is the Platonic ideal of philosophia – loveof wisdom for its own sake.13 Familiarity with the label has perhaps dulledus to the passionate seriousness it originally conveyed – the seriousnessthat led Socrates, threatened with the death penalty, to insist that ‘for ahuman being, the unexamined life [bios] is not worth living’.14 It is oftenassumed nowadays that the critical inquiry that is the hallmark of the so-called Socratic method is of a purely logical character, having to do merelywith the examination of concepts and definitions. But the oft-quotedslogan just cited should remind us that philosophical ‘examination’, forSocrates, involves the entire character of someone’s life (bios). As Socratesgoes on to explain in the Apology, his philosophical vocation was linkedwith unwavering allegiance to conscience, the ‘god’, as he put it, whoseinner voice demanded his obedience.15

Contrast this moral seriousness with the climate inhabited by many oftoday’s practitioners of philosophy – a climate whose character is aptlyindicated by the kinds of questions that seem to claim most attention.How do you know that you are really sitting in this lecture room, ratherthan being just a brain floating in a vat of nutrients somewhere in theAndromeda galaxy? May it not be, for all you know, that the planet Earthand all its inhabitants are not real, but mere fantasies produced in yourmind by a group of mad scientists in Andromeda, who have stimulatedthe nerve inputs of your floating brain in such a way as to give you all theappropriate sensations so as to create the convincing illusion that you aresitting in a lecture on the planet Earth, when in reality you are light yearsaway, and do not have a body at all, and therefore no posterior to sit on inthe first place?Asking this sort of fantastic question might seem as silly a waste of time

for grown people as one could imagine. Yet the present writer could testify(as no doubt could many other editors of mainstream anglophone phil-osophy journals) to receiving scores of submissions each year, highlyintricate pieces of work, laboriously examining just one more variationon this ‘brain-in-vat’ scenario. Our philosophical culture, to be sure,perceives these inquiries as contributions to an important subject called

13 ‘Although we say many things are loved [phila] for the sake of something that is loved, we areevidently using an inappropriate word in saying that. It seems that the thing that is really loved isthat in which all these things called loves come to an end . . . Then what is really loved is not lovedfor the sake of anything.’ Plato, Lysis (c. 390 BCE), 220a7–b5. Cf. T. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1995), 67ff.

14 ‘Ho de anexestastos bios ou biotos’ (Plato, Apology, 38a5).15 Ibid., 40a2–c2.


‘epistemology’. But on reflection one may wonder whether this kind ofwork can be pursued only at the cost of a certain fragmentation, a splitbetween one’s job as a ‘philosopher’ and the more intimate concerns thatstructure the rest of one’s life. The instrumental value of the work is clear,for on it depend promotions and grants and research ratings, and allmanner of other appurtenances of modern academic life. And, in fairness,the intellectual puzzles involved may have a certain engaging intricacywhich can be stimulating in itself, as well as provoking wider reflection onthe nature and justification of knowledge claims. Yet for all that, are wenot left with a certain sense of disquiet at seeing so much philosophicalenergy expended on examining the epistemic credentials of a science-fiction hypothesis that no human being, once they get outside the study orthe seminar, could even begin to take seriously? One could of coursepretend to care about it – pretend that one was passionately involved inmaking sure we know we are not on Alpha Centauri – but that would behard to reconcile with the spirit of commitment and integrity which, sinceSocrates and Plato, has been thought of as fundamental to genuinephilosophical inquiry.

In Harold Pinter’s play, The Homecoming, a character called Teddy,who has escaped his East End working-class background to become aphilosophy professor in the USA, returns home to London on a visit. Onhis arrival, Lennie, his clever younger brother, who has stayed at home tobecome an accomplished pimp and thug, insolently asks him: ‘What is atable, Teddy – philosophically speaking, I mean?’; and he proceeds to taunthis embarrassed elder brother with a barrage of questions about whetherwe should doubt the nature and existence of external objects.16 The moralis clear: these are the kinds of vacuous question that get philosophy a badname.

Many people might suppose that if this lamentable image of philoso-phy is to be laid at anyone’s door, it must be that of Rene Descartes. Forthe last fifty years or so, at least in the anglophone philosophical world,the persona of the ‘epistemologist’ has been retrospectively fitted on toDescartes so tightly as to condition, for a large number of people, how hisphilosophy is examined and interpreted. The outlines of the story are veryfamiliar. At the start of Descartes’s most famous work, perhaps the mostcommonly used text in Introduction to Philosophy courses all over theworld, the question of knowledge and its justification becomes the philo-sophical question par excellence; so the first steps in philosophy involve

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

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raising doubts about everything – even the existence of an ‘external’reality. Asserting that he ‘cannot possibly go too far in his distrustfulattitude’, the meditator supposes that ‘the sky, the earth, and all externalthings’ are merely ‘delusions’, which a ‘malicious demon of the utmostpower and cunning’ has implanted in his mind in order to deceive him.17

This last scenario is of course the precursor of today’s brain-in-vatobsessions – the only difference being that Descartes developed it in anincorporealist mode, with the demon directly generating the deceptivesensations in a supposedly bodiless subject, while today’s variant adoptsthe language of physicalism, with a story about the stimulation of brainsand nerve fibres.So entrenched has our vision become of Descartes as the purveyor of

elaborate sceptical scenarios, that the phrase ‘Cartesian doubt’ has passedinto contemporary philosophical jargon as a shorthand for a whole modeof epistemological inquiry. There is someone called ‘the sceptic’, who hasto be defeated; and although it has become unfashionable to acceptDescartes’s weapons for the victory (weapons which invoke divine powerand goodness), he is at least credited with taking doubt to its limits, andshowing us just what the anti-sceptic has to overcome. Nor is thisepistemological image of Descartes merely the creation of those contem-porary analyticians who have scant regard for historical context: RichardPopkin, very much a historian’s historian of philosophy, takes a verysimilar line, observing that the introduction of Descartes’s maliciousdemon pushes ‘the crise pyrrhonienne’ [the crisis of extreme scepticism]‘to its farthest limit’,18 and later defining the Cartesian revolution in termsof the centrality it accorded to the question ‘Where does our knowledgecome from, and what can we know and how certain is our knowledge?’19

But a careful look at how Descartes himself presents the sceptical issuesin the Meditations is enough to cast serious doubt on this image of him as

17 Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641), First Meditation, AT, vol.VII, 18, 19, 22: CSM, vol. II, 17–15.

18 Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York: Harper and Row,1968), 184.

19 ‘In questioning all of the theories in philosophy, science and theology of the time, the scepticsmade it crucial for thinkers to find a satisfactory justification for their knowledge claims. Hence,the question Where does our knowledge come from, and what can we know and how certain is ourknowledge? became central. New theories of knowledge had to be offered to deal with theepistemological crisis brought on by the growth and spread of scepticism at the end of theRenaissance.’ R. Popkin, ‘Theories of Knowledge’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner(eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), 684.


preoccupied with abstract epistemology. He himself described the scep-tical doubts of the First Meditation as ‘exaggerated’ or ‘hyperbolical’, and‘deserving to be dismissed as laughable’ – explodendae (literally, ‘to behissed or booed off the stage’).20 What is more, in the Synopsis, publishedas an introduction to the first edition of theMeditations in 1641, Descartesexplicitly disavows the role of a champion epistemologist holding the lineagainst some supposed21 ‘sceptical crisis’:

The great benefit of these arguments is not, in my view, that they prove what theyestablish – namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodiesand so on – since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things. Thepoint is that in considering these arguments we come to realize that they are notas solid or as transparent as the arguments which lead us to knowledge of ourown minds and of God.22

Descartes certainly wanted ‘solid’ and ‘transparent’ arguments; andcertainly, like many of his immediate predecessors in the late sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries, he wanted to expose the vanity of whathad passed for knowledge in the culture in which he had grown up.23 Buthe was emphatically not playing the modern ‘epistemological’ game –inventing artificial positions (those of the ‘sceptic’, the ‘antisceptic’, the‘realist’, the ‘antirealist’, and so on) to see whether one is ingeniousenough to refute the latest ploy in an introverted academic debate. Hisphilosophical concerns had a far greater integrity, a far closer link to thegoals of his life.

FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO SCIENCE?

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

20 ‘hyperbolicae superiorum dierum dubitationes ut risu dignae sunt explodendae’ (AT, vol. VII, 89:CSM, vol. II, 61).

21 I have elsewhere expressed serious reservations about the account proposed by Popkin and others ofa supposed crise pyrrhonienne in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; seeJ. Cottingham, ‘Why Should Analytic Philosophers Do History of Philosophy?’, in T. Sorell andG. A. J. Rogers (eds.), Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press,2005), 25–41.

22 AT, vol. VII, 15–16: CSM, vol. II, 11 (emphasis supplied).23 Compare, for example, Francisco Sanches in Quod nihil scitur (1581), which provides a remarkably

frank description of the rambling mixture of anecdote and pseudo-explanation that passed forknowledge in the Renaissance world: ‘Sufficiat nunc nosse nos nil plane nosse’ (‘Suffice it for nowto know that we know nothing at all’); ‘Misera est conditio nostra. In media luce coecutimus’(‘Wretched is our condition; in the midst of light we are blind’). In F. Sanches, That Nothing isKnown, ed. D. F. S. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 57.

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In part, this is a reversion to an earlier view, held for example by the greatCartesian scholar and editor Charles Adam, that Cartesian metaphysicsand epistemology are essentially subordinate to Cartesian science.24

According to an interesting study by Desmond Clarke,25 the key motiv-ation behind Descartes’s research programme is the desire to provide anew style of explanation that would replace the scholastic approach thatprevailed in the world in which he grew up. Much of this is uncontro-versial: Descartes frequently complains of the explanatory vacuity of the‘substantial forms and real qualities which many philosophers suppose toinhere in things’,26 objecting that they are ‘harder to understand than thethings they are supposed to explain’.27 His own mechanistic accounts, bycontrast, were supposed to have an immediate intelligibility, since theysimply ascribed to the micro world exactly the same kinds of interactionswith which we are familiar from ordinary middle-sized phenomenaaround us. If we understand the latter, then we already have a grasp ofhow the posited micro events operate (‘imperceptible simply because oftheir small size’); and Descartes’s key idea is that these give rise to therelevant explananda in a way that is (as he put it) ‘just as natural’ asexplaining how a clock tells the time by reference to the little cogs andwheels inside it.28

There is no denying that a large proportion of Descartes’s writings(vastly larger than is suggested by those passages typically selected forstudy in today’s standard philosophy courses) is taken up with workingout this mechanistic programme with respect to the animal and humannervous system. In Le monde and the Traite de l’homme (1633) and theDioptrique (1637), what we would nowadays call ‘cognitive functions’,such as visual perception, are investigated by Descartes in terms of brainevents of a certain kind (‘ideas as brain patterns’, as Clarke puts it). Andthe same corporealist strategy is used by Descartes in his accounts ofimagination and memory, and of the passions – an approach that receivesits fullest treatment in his last published work, Les passions de l’ame (1649).But is it right, in the light of these extensive writings, spread over manyyears, to construe Descartes’s primary role as that of the explanatoryscientist?

24 ‘Descartes ne demande a la metaphysique qu’une chose, de fournir un appui solide a la veritescientifique’ (AT, vol. XII, 143).

25 Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).26 Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae, 1644), part IV, art. 198.27 Ibid., art. 201. 28 Ibid., art. 203.


One qualm about this interpretation is that it leads to a curiouslyawkward view of Descartes’s notion of the res cogitans – the immaterial‘thinking substance’ that he identifies in the central sections of hismasterworks, the Discours and the Meditationes, as the indubitable subjectof his metaphysical reflections. Construed as offering an explanatorytheory of the mind, this notion of a ‘thinking thing’ tells us remarkablylittle; and indeed Clarke’s interpretative framework, giving primacy to thepersona of the scientist, leads him to mount a complaint against Descarteson precisely these grounds – that the notion of the res cogitans has noexplanatory force. For given that the Cartesian quest, on Clarke’s account,was for ‘genuine’ (i.e. mechanistic) explanations of seeing, hearing, re-membering, imagining and so on, the programme ‘ran into apparentlyinsurmountable obstacles’29 when it came to dealing with the perspectiveof the thinking subject; and the result, for Clarke, was a dead end.Descartes did not really have a ‘theory’ of an immaterial thinking sub-stance; instead, his talk of a ‘thinking thing’ was ‘true [but] uninforma-tive’, a ‘provisional acknowledgement of failure, an index of the work thatremains to be done before a viable theory of the human mind becomesavailable’.30

The talk of ‘failure’ is appropriate, Clarke suggests, because the Carte-sian claims about thinking substances ‘add nothing new to our know-ledge’ of them. Descartes is ‘claiming no more than . . . that, if thinkingis occurring, there must be a thinking thing of which the act of thinking ispredicated’.31 So the attribute of thinking can no more be of explanatoryvalue than the schoolmen’s attribute of gravitas or ‘heaviness’ was any usein explaining why heavy things fall.

The charge of explanatory vacuity seems right in one way, but in myview it is nevertheless misleading in so far as it tacitly assumes thatDescartes must have approached the phenomenon of consciousness witha view to seeing if it could be explained after the manner of his mechanisticprogramme for physics. This is indeed what his contemporary PierreGassendi thought he should be doing: it is no more use telling us youare a ‘thinking thing’, he objected, than it would be to tell us that wine is‘a red thing’; what we are looking for is the micro-structure that explainsthe manifest properties.32 Descartes’s reply is instructive: he was utterly

29 Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of the Mind, 241.30 Ibid., 257, 258.31 Ibid., 221.32 Objectiones et Responsiones (1641), Fifth Objections, AT, vol. VII, 276: CSM, vol. II, 193.

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scathing about the very idea that one might produce some ‘quasi-chemical’ micro-explanation of thinking.33

In the context of the argument of the Meditations, which is the focusof this sharp exchange, we should recall that Descartes’s meditator hasarrived at a self-conception of the mind which leads him directly forwardto contemplate the ‘immense light’ of the Godhead, the infinite incorpor-eal being whose image is reflected, albeit dimly, in the finite createdintellect of the meditator.34 So whatever else the notion of res cogitanswas or was not intended to do, it clearly played a central role in themeditator’s journey towards awareness of God. Like Bonaventure beforehim, whose own Itinerarium mentis in Deum (the ‘Journey of the Mindtowards God’) was profoundly conditioned by the contemplative andimmaterialist tradition of Plato and Augustine, Descartes has a conceptionof ultimate truth that requires an aversio – a turning of the mind awayfrom the world of the senses – in order to prepare it for glimpsing thereality that lies beyond the phenomenal world. Both Bonaventure andDescartes, following Augustine’s famous slogan ‘In interiore hominehabitat veritas’ (‘The truth dwells within the inner man’),35 undertakean interior journey. ‘Go back into yourself’, says Augustine; ‘let us returnto ourselves, into our mind’, says Bonaventure, that we may search for the‘lux veritatis in facie nostrae mentis’ – the light of truth shining in ourminds, as through a glass, in which the image of the Blessed Trinity shinesforth.36 ‘I turn my mind’s eye upon myself’, says Descartes, and find theidea of God stamped there like the ‘mark the craftsman has set on hiswork’.37

Can this immaterialist metaphysics be merely a means to an end – akind of propaedeutic to science in the way suggested by the thesis ofAdam? Such a view is not, perhaps, beyond the bounds of possibility,though it would, I believe, be very difficult convincingly to explain thetheistic reflections we find in the Third Meditation as simply part of aninstrumental strategy; for it is striking that the style and flavour of the

33 Fifth Replies, AT, vol. VII, 359: CSM, vol. II, 248.34 Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 51: CSM, vol. II, 35.35 ‘Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas’ (‘Go not outside, but return

within thyself; in the inward man dwelleth the truth’). Augustine, De vera religione (391),ch. XXXIX, 72.

36 ‘Ad nos reintraremus, in mentem scilicet nostram, in qua divina relucet imago; hinc. . . conaridebemus per speculum videre Deum, ubi ad modum candelabri relucet lux veritatis in facie nostraementis, in qua scilicet resplendet imago beatissimae Trinitatis.’ Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis inDeum (1259), ch. III, 1.

37 Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 51: CSM, vol. II, 35.


writing is often much closer to the language of devotion and worship thanit is to the detached critical terminology of the analytician.38 But there isanother and more fundamental reason for being wary of the image ofDescartes the scientist as the key to understanding the Cartesian system,namely that the very notion of ‘the scientist’ is fundamentally anachron-istic when we transpose it back from our own time to the world of theseventeenth century. Descartes was deeply interested in physics andmechanics, of that there can be no doubt. But his interests were theinterests not of a scientist in the modern sense, but those of the naturalphilosopher. And unpacking the persona of the natural philosopher dis-closes a role that is far more structured and systematic, and far more wide-reaching in its scope, than is readily graspable from the perspective of thefragmented and compartmentalised contemporary culture within whichmodern ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ find their place.

PHILOSOPHY, KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

The very term ‘natural philosophy’ immediately gives a strong clue towhat the subject was in pre-modern times – not a separated discipline, inthe manner of our contemporary academic and scientific specialisms, butrather a species of the genus philosophy. And philosophy, in the climate inwhich Descartes grew up, was by its very nature a synoptic or comprehen-sive enterprise.39 When he was a schoolboy of thirteen, there appeared atextbook that was rapidly to become a best seller, the Summa philosophiaequadripartita, a ‘Compendium of Philosophy in Four Parts’, whichDescartes was later to describe as ‘the best its type ever produced’.40

Written by Eustachius, a Cistercian and professor of philosophy at theSorbonne, it covered dialectic, morals, physics and metaphysics. And incase we should think that the aim of this comprehensive summary wassimply to impart to its readers an intellectual grasp of the essentials of eachof the separate branches of philosophy, the object of the enterprise is

38 Compare the following: Placet hic aliquamdiu in ipsius Dei contemplatione immorari . . . etimmensi hujus luminis pulchritudinem . . . intueri, admirari, adorare (‘Let me here rest for a whilein the contemplation of God himself and gaze upon, wonder at, and adore the beauty of thisimmense light’). Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 52: CSM, vol. II, 36. For more on this theme, seeJ. Cottingham, ‘Plato’s Sun and Descartes’s Stove: Contemplation and Control in CartesianPhilosophy’, Proceedings of the British Academy, forthcoming.

39 For more on the ‘synoptic’ conception of philosophy, see J. Cottingham, Philosophy and the GoodLife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 1.

40 Letter to Mersenne of 11 November 1640, AT, vol. III, 232: CSMK, 156.

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stated very clearly: ‘universae philosophiae finis est humana felicitas’ (‘thegoal of a complete philosophy is human happiness’).41

The two principal features of philosophy that are prominent here, its all-encompassing character, and the link with how we can best live (‘philoso-phy as a way of life’, as Pierre Hadot has called it),42 are in both casesexplicitly recognised and adopted by Descartes for his own system. Thecelebrated metaphor of philosophy as a tree, which he uses in the Frenchpreface to his own comprehensive textbook, the Principia philosophiae,captures both the integrated or organic nature of the subject (metaphysicsthe roots, physics the trunk, the more specific disciplines – medicine,mechanics and morals – the branches) and also its aspirations to yield fruitin our lives.43 This last aspect is sometimes presented by Descartes in termsof the practical benefits or pay-offs of his philosophy, in contrast to the‘speculative’ philosophy of the schoolmen;44 in theDiscourse and elsewhere,for example, he mentions the conquest of illness and the maladies of oldage, and even the artificial prolongation of life.45 Here Descartes isadopting what is, to our ears, his most ‘modernistic’ persona – what wemight almost now see as that of Descartes the ‘proto- Californian’.46 But ifwe bracket off these sometimes rather brash-sounding boasts about what

41 Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae quadripartita (1609), Preface to part II. Translatedextracts may be found in R. Ariew, J. Cottingham and T. Sorell (eds.), Descartes’ Meditations:Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–96.

42 Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Originally published asExercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).

43 Principles of Philosophy, Lettre Preface a l’edition Francaise (1647), AT, vol. IXB, 14: CSM, vol. I, 186.44 ‘Au lieu de cette philosophie speculative, qu’on enseigne dans les ecoles, on en peut trouver une

pratique, par laquelle, connaissant la force et les actions du feu, de l’eau, des astres, des cieux et detous les autres corps qui nos environnent, aussi distinctement que nous connaissons les diversmetiers de nos artisans, nous les pourrions employer en meme facon a tous les usages auxquels ilssont propres, et ainsi nous rendre comme maıtres et possesseurs de la nature.’ (‘Instead of thespeculative philosophy taught in the Schools, we can find a practical one, whereby, knowing theforce and actions of fire, water, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment,as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we could employ them in the same wayfor all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus make ourselves as it were masters andpossessors of nature.’) Discours de la methode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 61: CSM, vol. I, 142).

45 In the continuation of the passage cited in the previous note, Descartes observes that the newknowledge he envisages is ‘desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which wouldfacilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the goods we find there, but also and mostimportantly for the maintenance of health . . . For whatever we now know in medicine is almostnothing in comparison with what remains to be known, and we might free ourselves frominnumerable diseases, both of the body and of the mind, and perhaps even from the infirmity ofold age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies which nature hasprovided.’ Discours de la methode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 62; CSM, vol. I, 142–3). See also Descartes,Conversation with Burman (1648), AT, vol. V, 178: CSMK, 353.

46 Cf. J. Cottingham, ‘Spirituality, Science and Morality’, in D. Carr and J. Haldane (eds.), Essays onSpirituality and Education (London: Routledge, 2003), 40–54.


the new mechanistic understanding of nature might achieve, Descartes’sgeneral philosophical orientation, one directed not only towards increasedknowledge but also to the goal of a better way of life, was in fact part of amuch older tradition which linked him, rather than separating him, fromthe scholastic predecessors he hoped in many respects to supersede.

Before exploring this further, we need first to be aware that even thecontrast just made between knowledge on the one hand and one’s way ofliving on the other can be radically misleading. The Thomist tradition,which was an important element in the philosophical culture Descartes’steachers at La Fleche handed on to him, embodied a conception ofknowledge that was much richer and less narrowly intellectualistic thanour modern conception might suggest. Thomas Aquinas had divided therational faculty into two categories, practical reason and speculativereason. The former involves the virtues of prudence and art (concernedrespectively with doing and making what conduces to human good);47 thelatter involves the three virtues of intellectus or ‘understanding’ (the graspof first principles), scientia or ‘knowledge’ (comprehension of things andtheir causes), and sapientia or ‘wisdom’ (awareness of how everything isrelated to the highest or ultimate causes).48 But it is striking how farAquinas departs from the original Aristotelian framework on which thisclassification is based; for although formally speaking these three virtuesare excellences of speculative reason (which might suggest to us a certainneutrality and abstraction from the conduct of life), Aquinas’s accountplaces them within a richly structured religious and moral framework.Excellence of intellect, for example, is, as Eleanore Stump acutelyobserves, ‘linked [by Aquinas] together with certain actions and dispos-itions in the will and also with certain states of emotion’.49 And itfollows that on Aquinas’s view ‘all true excellence of intellect – wisdom,understanding and scientia – is possible only in connection with moralexcellence as well’.50

The idea of a complex interrelation between moral and intellectualexcellence is reinforced once we begin to delve into the theological contextof Aquinas’s account of the virtues. There is explicit reference to the ‘sevengifts [septem dona] of the Spirit’, a doctrine based on the prophecy in

47 Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1266–73) IaIIae, 57, 2.48 Ibid., IaIIae, 66, 5.49 Eleanore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 353. In what follows about Aquinas I am

heavily indebted to Stump’s insightful and unusually wide-ranging treatment.50 Stump, Aquinas, p. 360.

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Isaiah: ‘And the spirit of God shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdomand understanding, the sprit of counsel and strength, the spirit of know-ledge and godliness, the spirit of the fear of God.’51 Aquinas observes thatfour of the gifts pertain to reason, namely wisdom (sapientia), knowledge(scientia), understanding (intellectus) and counsel (consilium); and three tothe appetitive faculty, namely strength or courage (fortitudo), godliness orpiety (pietas) and fear (timor).52 The result is that, despite Aquinas’s stresson their different origins (natural and supernatural respectively), hisdiscussion involves a considerable overlap, or ‘twinning’53 between thelist of intellectual excellences and the list of gifts of the Holy Spirit. Andindeed Aquinas’s account constantly interweaves items from these lists,and also from other standard theological lists, including the famousenumeration in Paul’s letter to the Galatians of the nine fruits of theSpirit, namely ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,meekness, temperance’.54 Aquinas also cross-refers us to the three great‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope and charity: two of the three intellectualvirtues, scientia and intellectus are linked with faith, while sapientia islinked with charity.This interweaving is particularly striking in the case of sapientia or

wisdom: although, if construed in purely secular or natural terms, it mightbe thought to be a ‘morally neutral’ virtue, and hence able to be presentirrespective of the moral character of the agent, this ceases to be so if it isconstrued as a spiritual gift.55 What had in Aristotle been understood interms of the mastery of the first principles of metaphysics becomes inAquinas associated with knowledge of the ultimate first principle, God,knowledge of whom is linked in many biblical texts to charity or love(which of course is far from being a purely intellectual matter).56 Some ofthe ramifications of this are again brought out by Stump:

On Aquinas’s account of wisdom . . . a person’s moral wrongdoing will producedeficiencies in both her speculative and her practical intellect. In its effects on her

51 Isaiah 11:2, following the Greek text of the Septuagint version (LXX). The original Hebrew lists sixgifts, and this is followed in the Vulgate: ‘et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini, spiritussapientiae et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae et pietatis’. But the LXXversion adds a gloss ‘the fear of God’, which some commentaries construed as a seventh gift; hencethe standard doctrine of the ‘sevenfold gifts’ of the Holy Spirit, reflected in Thomas’s inclusion oftimor.

52 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IaIIae 68, 1.53 Cf. Stump, Aquinas, 350–1.54 Galatians 5:22–3: ‘fructus autem Spiritus est caritas, gaudium, pax, longanimitas, bonitas, benigni-

tas, fides, modestia, continentia’ (Vulgate).55 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIaIIae 45, 4.56 See, for example, 1 John 4:16.


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

The upshot of this is that although a certain image of Aquinas that isprevalent today sees him as a proto-analytic philosopher, concernedpurely with abstract conceptual inquiries (together perhaps with certainquaint and abstruse theological puzzles, for example about the identity ofangels), in reality his philosophy offers an integrated vision in which thepursuit of virtue and the cultivation of knowledge are closely interlinked,and in which even an abstract-sounding virtue like wisdom or sapientia(the successor to Aristotle’s sophia) emerges as central to a harmoniousand integrated life. To quote from the Summa theologiae :

It belongs to wisdom, as a gift, not only to contemplate Divine things, but also toregulate human acts. Now the first thing to be effected in this direction of humanacts is the removal of evils opposed to wisdom: wherefore fear is said to be ‘thebeginning of wisdom,’ because it makes us shun evil, while the last thing is like anend, whereby all things are reduced to their right order; and it is this thatconstitutes peace. Hence James said with reason that ‘the wisdom that is fromabove’ (and this is the gift of the Holy Ghost) ‘first indeed is chaste,’ because itavoids the corruption of sin, and ‘then peaceable,’ wherein lies the ultimate effectof wisdom, for which reason peace is numbered among the beatitudes.58

DESCARTES AS SAGE?

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

57 Stump, Aquinas, 353–4.58 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIaIIae 45, 6 (English Dominican translation, 1947).59 See, for example, Stephen Gaukroger’s account of Francis Bacon in ‘The persona of the natural

philosopher’, in the present volume.

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There is a certain amount in Descartes that may seem to point ustowards the erosion (or indeed eradication) of the persona of the philoso-pher as sage, and its replacement by the harsher more modernistic personaof the technocrat – the controlling manipulator of nature, aiming to‘deliver the goods’ as a result of the expertise provided by the new science.We have already mentioned the manifesto of the Discours, which offersthe hope that the new philosophie pratique will deliver mankind from theobstacles of disease and infirmity and make us ‘masters and possessors ofnature’.60 And the way this programme is worked out in the writings ofDescartes’s later years seems at first to reduce morals to physiology andmedicine: to use the new mechanistic knowledge to develop techniques toreprogramme the human affective system and thus, as it were, bypass theneed for the traditional goals of spiritual discipline in the pursuit of thegood.At the heart of this technological vision is Descartes’s idea of utilising

the results of physiological science in a blueprint for ethics. He told acorrespondent in 1646 that his results in physics had been ‘a great help inestablishing sure foundations in moral philosophy’;61 and when he pub-lished his treatise on the Passions in 1649 he described it as breaking newground by explaining the passions en physicien – from a physiologicalpoint of view, as we might say.62 The ultimate goal here is to develop ascientific programme for the re-training of our psycho-physical responses.Part of the background for this comes from ordinary observation: if thebehaviour patterns of animals can be changed by training, might nothuman emotional responses, linked to similar types of physiologicalmechanism, be similarly altered? And if our early childhood experiencescan set up automatic arousal or aversion mechanisms, might we not beable to delve back into these past causes, and learn how to overcome theconditioned patterns of response by restructuring them?63

Descartes’s scientific ethics thus takes the general aim, voiced in hisearly manifesto, of becoming ‘masters and possessors of nature’, andproceeds to apply it not just to the external environment but to the

60 Discours de la methode, part VI (AT, vol. VI, 61; CSM, vol. I, 142), quoted above, note 44.61 ‘la notion telle quelle de la Physique, que j’ai tache d’acquerir, m’a grandement servi pour etablir

des fondements certains en la Morale’ (letter to Chanut of 15 June 1646, AT, vol. IV, 441; CSMK,289).

62 Les passions de l’ame, prefatory letter of 14 August 1649, AT, vol. XI, 326; CSM, vol. I, 327.63 The details of Descartes’s programme are examined at length in J. Cottingham, Philosophy and the

Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 3. For animal training, cf. Passions ofthe Soul, art. 50; for patterns of emotional response acquired in early childhood cf. Letter to Chanutof 6 June 1647 (AT, vol. V, 57; CSMK, 323).


internal world, to our own nature as human beings. Since the laws ofoperation of our bodies are no different from the mechanical principlesoperating everywhere else, and since the passions are intimately linked bybodily events in the nervous system, science can itself provide the solutionto the ancient problems of how to achieve a virtuous life. The classicalAristotelian theory of virtue had had to rely on a large measure of luck:everything depended on being born into the right kind of ethical culturethat would foster the right habits. But Descartes’s new programme oftraining – of what at the end of Les passions de l’ame he called ‘guiding andcontrolling the passions’ – envisages taking ingrained patterns of psycho-physical response and re-directing them by the sheer application oftechnological know-how.64

All this might indeed seem to take us very far away from the search forwisdom and righteousness associated with the traditional persona of thephilosopher as sage. But it is now time to notice that all these envisagedtechnical developments in the management of the passions have forDescartes an essentially subordinate role. For the passions are related tothe good only, as it were, accidentally and contingently. Sometimes theobjects which they incline us to pursue are indeed worthy of pursuit,65 butoften they can mislead us into supposing that something’s value is vastlygreater than it is:

Often passion makes us believe certain things to be much better and moredesirable than they are; then, when we have taken much trouble to acquirethem, and in the process lost the chance of possessing other more genuinegoods, possession of them brings home to us their defects; and thence arisedissatisfaction, regret and remorse.66

64 ‘Ceux memes qui ont les plus faibles ames pouraient acquerir un empire tres absolu sur toutes lespassions, si on employait assez d’industrie a les dresser et a les conduire.’ (‘Even those with the mostfeeble souls could acquire an absolute mastery over all the passions if enough effort was employedin guiding and controlling them.’) Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’ame, 1649), art. 50.

65 This applies in particular to the legitimate pleasures which the soul has in common with the body:‘L’ame peut avoir ses plaisirs a part. Mais pour ceux qui lui sont communs avec le corps, ilsdependent entierement des passions: en sorte que les hommes qu’elles peuvent le plus emouvoirsont capables de gouter le plus de douceur en cette vie’ (‘The soul can have its pleasures of its own.But those which it shares with the body depend entirely on the passions, so that those humanbeings whom the passions can most move are capable of tasting the greatest sweetness in this life’Passions, art. 212).

66 Letter to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1 September 1645. Descartes goes on to say that thepassions often ‘represent the good to which they tend with greater splendour than they deserve’ andthey make us ‘imagine pleasure to be much greater before we possess them than our subsequentexperiences show them to be’ (AT, vol. IV, 284; CSMK, 264–5).

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This leads Descartes straight into an insistence on the ‘true function ofreason in the conduct of life’, namely ‘to examine and consider withoutpassion the value of all the perfections, both of the body and of the soul,which can be acquired by our conduct’.67

Is what is here envisaged a kind of utilitarian calculus – the kind ofrational instrumentalism that we have seen in more modern times, namelyone that cuts free from any substantive vision of the good, and simplyaims to maximise the ‘preferences’ of the agent, or of the community atlarge? Emphatically not. For Descartes never abandoned his allegiance toa strongly theistic metaphysics of value, one that construes goodness as anobjective supra-personal reality, constraining the rational assent of humanbeings just as powerfully as do the clearly perceived truths of logic andmathematics.At the centre of Descartes’s metaphysics, resonantly expressed at the

climax of his philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations, lies a vision ofthe eternal and infinite divine source of truth and goodness: ‘Placet hicaliquamdiu in ipsius Dei contemplatione immorari . . . et immensi hujusluminis pulchritudinem . . . intueri, admirari, adorare’ (‘Let me here restfor a while in the contemplation of God himself and gaze upon, wonderat, and adore the beauty of this immense light’).68 This vision, it needs tobe emphasised, involves contemplation of the good as well as the true:following the lead of the Platonists, Descartes draws a strong parallelbetween how the mind responds to the ratio veri and to the ratio boni.69

In the upward ascent of the mind from doubt and darkness to the light,whether of truth or of goodness, we first need to exercise our will to turnaway from what is deceptive or unreliable. But once we free ourselvesfrom illusion and focus on the objects revealed by the light of reason, thenwe arrive at our destination: the work of the will has been done, and it cannow subside into automatic assent to what is revealed with the utmostclarity as good or as true: ‘from a great light in the intellect there follows agreat propensity in the will’.70

67 Ibid., AT, vol. IV, 287; CSMK, 265.68 Third Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 52; CSM, vol. II, 36.69 My spontaneous inclination to assent to the truth, or to pursue the good, is a function of my

‘clearly understanding that reasons of truth and goodness point that way’ (‘quia rationem veri etboni in ea evidenter intelligo’); Descartes suggests that this may also be thought of as resulting froma ‘divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts’ (Fourth Meditation, AT, vol. VII, 58;CSM, vol. II, 40).

70 ‘ex magna luce in intellectu sequitur magna propensio in voluntate’ (Fourth Meditation, AT, vol.VII, 59; CSM, vol. II, 41).


Once the importance of this powerful underlying metaphysics has beenappreciated, we can see that Cartesian ethics, with its proposed techniquesfor the management of the mind–body complex, could not even get offthe ground without the fundamental supporting role of reason. Philoso-phy can show us how to live because the divine light of reason, implantedin each of our minds, can, when used carefully and properly, make usaware of those genuine and lasting goods in the pursuit of which our truefulfilment lies. Because of the weakness of our nature (a recurring themein Descartes),71 we can easily be led astray, failing to focus on the light oftruth and goodness, and allowing the false allure of lesser or specious‘goods’ to attract our attention. But as long as we are determined to holdthe image of the good before our eyes ‘in so far as the eye of the darkenedintellect can bear it’,72 then we can know the right way forward. Andvirtue follows in the wake of this, since its fundamental basis is a ‘firm andconstant resolution to use our freedom well, that is, never to lack the willto undertake and carry out what we judge to be best’.73 This is thediscipline, or askesis, that Descartes’s philosophical method requires, inmorals as in metaphysics. And it is a discipline which, because of itstheistically oriented character, and its fundamental integration of themoral and epistemic domains in the quest for truth and goodness, itseems not inappropriate to call a genuinely spiritual one.74

Descartes’s ambition for his own philosophy was for it to match thegoals set by his scholastic predecessor Eustachius: ‘the aim of a completesystem of philosophy is human happiness’. And in so far as his theisticmetaphysics is the key to securing this goal, he follows in the tradition ofAquinas, for whom sapientia, the highest of the intellectual virtues,operates properly when it is directed towards knowledge of the highestand most exalted cause, that is, God.75 The key to discerning the persona

71 Compare the last sentence of the Meditations: ‘Naturae nostrae infirmitas est agnoscenda’ (‘Wemust acknowledge the weakness of our nature’), AT, vol. VII, 90; CSM, vol. II, 62.

72 AT, vol. VII, 52; CSM, vol. II, 36 (end of Third Meditation).73 Passions of the Soul, art. 153 (speaking of the master virtue of ‘generosity’).74 There are many aspects of the Meditations, for example, that call to mind the model of a set of

spiritual exercises. For more on these similarities (and some differences), see J. Cottingham, TheSpiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005), ch. 1.

75 A recent most interesting study by Lilli Alanen has plausibly argued that ‘from the time of thecorrespondence with Elizabeth onwards’, Descartes became increasingly interested in the ‘practical,moral and therapeutic’ uses of reason: Descartes’s Concept of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), 166. Earlier in her book, Alanen acutely observes that Descartes’s philo-sophical interests in scientia were closely connected to the traditional philosophical goal of sapientia(which, however, she glosses, somewhat narrowly, it seems to me, as ‘practical intelligence’ (7).

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of Descartes the philosopher has very often been understood in terms ofhis new vision of scientia. And that, of course, is a very important part ofthe story. But the full story discloses his even more important commit-ment to the ancient ideal of sapientia, with all the religious connotationsthat notion would have had for one brought up as he had been.We began by calling attention to Descartes’s earliest notebook, the

Praeambula, where Descartes sees himself as entering the world stagemasked, and goes on to describe the sciences themselves as masked.Peeling off the mask is no easy task when one is dealing with one of themost wary and private of the great philosophers. But if the argument ofthis chapter has been anywhere near the mark, Descartes’s true philosoph-ical persona is already strongly prefigured in the verse from the book ofPsalms that he chose to inscribe as his motto at the very front of that firstnotebook: ‘Initium sapientiae timor Domini’ – ‘the fear of the Lord is thebeginning of wisdom’.76

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


CHAPTER 9

The natural philosopher and the virtues

Peter Harrison430537

One of the distinctive features of modern science – indeed some wouldsay its defining characteristic – is its reliance on a set of clearly definedmethodological prescriptions, known popularly as ‘the scientific method’.The much-vaunted objectivity of science is vested in the observance of thisuniversal method and, despite the reservations of critics concerning thenature and existence of this supposedly unifying feature of the naturalsciences, modern science draws much of its social legitimacy from theperceived reliability of its methods. Central to the prestige of scientificmethods is their insensitivity to the personal qualities of those whoemploy them. The putative universality and objectivity of science areattributed to the fact that the production of dependable knowledge doesnot rely on its practitioners sharing a common set of personal characteris-tics, but rather on their observance of a common set of procedures. In thisrespect modern science differs radically from its medieval and earlymodern predecessor, natural philosophy. Natural philosophers, engagedas they were in a branch of philosophy, were expected to conform totraditional models of the philosophical persona, in which the moralcharacteristics of the individual were the pledge of the truth of what theyknew. That said, the beginnings of a shift of focus from persons tomethods was already in train in the seventeenth century. In this chapterI shall suggest that this development owed much to Renaissance andReformation criticisms of the traditional ideal of the contemplative lifeand of Aristotelian notions of virtue. According to one prominent Prot-estant view, because human beings were constitutionally incapable of thekinds of moral transformations required on the classical and scholasticmodels, reliable knowledge had to be grounded in other ways. FrancisBacon’s influential new conception of the persona of the natural philoso-pher drew on these insights, specifying procedures for the acquisition ofknowledge that in principle could be adopted by anyone, irrespective oftheir moral status. As modern science began its long development from

202

natural philosophy, observance of an objectifiable ‘method’ came toreplace the interior cultivation of virtue.1

VIRTUES, THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE AND THE

PHILOSOPHICAL QUEST

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

1 ‘Method’, it must be said, has unfamiliar connotations in the Renaissance and early modernperiods. See Peter Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), TheCambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), vol. I, 147–77. The current claim that there is such a thing as the ‘scientific method’also remains problematic.

2 Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004);Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).See also John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998); H. Hutter, ‘Philosophy as Self-Transformation’, Historical Reflections 16 (1989), 171–98;R. Imbach, ‘La philosophie comme exercise spirituel’, Critique 41 (1985), 275–83.

3 Plato, Republic, 517d, in Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1963), 750.

4 Plato, Republic, VI, 500d, in Collected Dialogues, 736. And elsewhere: ‘contact with divine goodness’makes one ‘god-like’. Laws, X, 904d–e, in Collected Dialogues, 1460. On wisdom and becominggod-like, see also Laws, IV, 716a–d; Phaedrus, 246d, 248a; Timaeus, 47c; Theaetetus, 176a–d;Republic, X, 613b.

5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1177b, 1178b, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. JonathanBarnes (2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. II, 1861, 1862.

The natural philosopher and the virtues 203

soldier are attended with nobility, to ‘the philosopher’ alone is accorded‘self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness . . . and all the otherattributes ascribed to the supremely happy man’.6

While the earliest Christian writers tended to be ambivalent about themerits of Greek philosophy, they nonetheless embraced the classicalconception of the merits of the contemplative life. The distinction be-tween action and contemplation was introduced into the Judeo-Christiantradition by Philo (c. 20 BC – c. AD 50), and was subsequently adopted bythe fellow Alexandrian, Origen (c. 185 – c. 254).7 It was Augustine (354–430), however, who provided the most influential early treatment of thedistinction, linking scientia with the active life and sapientia withthe contemplative.8 This identification would suggest the superiorityof the contemplative life, and it is significant that for Augustine contem-plation ‘lays peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of thetruth’.9 Elsewhere, however, when discussing the allegorical representa-tion of the two modes of life in the gospel figures of Mary and Martha,Augustine invests the distinction with an eschatological dimension: ‘inthese two women two kinds of life are represented: present life and futurelife, toilsome and restful, miserable and beatific, temporal and eternallife’.10 This would imply that pursuit of the active life is entirely appro-priate in the present world. Overall, Augustine seems to suggest thedesirability of achieving a balance between action and contemplation,insisting, for example, that ‘No man has a right to lead such a life ofcontemplation as to forget in his own ease the service due to his neigh-bour.’11 Such a reading is consistent with Augustine’s distinction between‘use’ (uti) and ‘enjoyment’ (frui) – ‘we enjoy that thing which we love for

6 Aristotle, NE, 1177b, in Works, vol. II, 1860; Cf. Politics, 1333a–b; Plato, Republic, 357b.7 Philo, De vita contemplativa, passim; De migratione Abrahami, 9. On Origen, and the history ofthe distinction, see M. E. Mason, Active Life and Contemplative Life: A Study of the Concepts fromPlato to the Present (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961), 25 and passim; Anne-Marie LaBonnardiere, ‘Les deux vies. Marthe et Marie (Luc 10, 38, 42)’, Anne-Marie La Bonnardiere (ed.),in Saint Augustin et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986).

8 Augustine, The Trinity, XIII.vi.20, 25; XIV.v.26; De animae quantitate 33.74; Ad Simplicianum, 2.3.9 Augustine, City of God, VIII.iv, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Random House, 1950), 247. Cf.Soliloquies 1.12.21; De sermone Domini in monte, 1.3.10; Contra Faustum Manicheum, 22.52; Deconsensu Evangelistarum, 2.13.36.

10 Augustine, Sermon 104, ‘Discourse on Martha and Mary, as Representing Two Kinds of Life’, inWorks of St. Augustine, ed. John Rotelle (20 vols., New York: New City Press,1991– ), vol. III/4, 83.These two figures are also discussed in The Trinity, I.iii.20–1. For Philo’s likely influence, seeDavid Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 330.

11 Augustine adds: ‘nor has any man a right to be so immersed in active life as to neglect thecontemplation of God’. City of God, XIX.19 (698).

204 PETER HARRISON

its own sake . . . while everything else is simply to be used’.12 Citizens ofthe ‘heavenly city’ thus use things and enjoy God; citizens of the ‘earthlycity’ seek to use God and enjoy things.13 For Augustine, the appropriateresponse to the disordering of human desires that had resulted from theFall is not to ignore the lower things in the creation, but to use them.Almost two centuries later, Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), an enthusi-

astic advocate of monasticism, eschewed Augustine’s even-handednessand argued for the superiority of the contemplative life.14 The trajectoryof the distinction from Gregory to Aquinas saw the gradual accommoda-tion of the classical notion of the contemplative philosophical life to themonastic ideal. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) devoted four questions ofthe Summa theologiae to the issue before concluding that on balance thecontemplative life is superior to the active.15 While making reference tothe patristic writers, he essentially relied on the Aristotelian argument thatcontemplation tends to the perfection of the intellect, which is the mostexcellent part of the soul.16 More important than this measured endorse-ment of the contemplative life, however, was Aquinas’s openness to otherimportant aspects of the classical ideal of the philosopher. It is highlysignificant that he opens his Summa contra gentiles with an extendeddiscussion of ‘the office of the wise man’.17 In this major apologetic workAquinas argued that while pagan authors had rightly discerned the trueend of the philosophical life, that goal was attainable only within theChristian religion. Christianity, in short, was the realisation of the unful-filled goals of pagan philosophy.18 This appropriation of the centralfeatures of the classical philosophical quest is further reflected in the

12 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, 1.31; Works, 11, 121. See also W. R. O’Connor, ‘The Uti-fruiDistinction in Augustine’s Ethics’, Augustinian Studies 14 (1983), 45–62.

13 Augustine, City of God, XV.vii.14 Gregory, Moralia, 6, 61. For a comparison of Augustine and Gregory, see D. C. Butler, Western

Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory and Bernard on Contemplation and the ContemplativeLife (2nd edn, New York: Haskell House, 1966). Cf. Mason, Active Life and Contemplative Life,64–71. Gregory’s teaching was influential throughout the Middle Ages. Thus Walter Hilton, in hisclassic Scale of Perfection (1494): ‘Thou must understand that there are in the holy Church twomanner of lives (as saith St Gregory) in which a Christian is to be saved. The one is called Active,the other Contemplative; without living one of these two lives no man may be saved’ (I, ii).

15 Aquinas, Summa theologiae (ST), Blackfriars edn. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964–76)2a2ae. 179–82.

16 Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 182, 2.17 Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles (SCG), I.1 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1924) 1–17. Cf. Commen-

tary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Prologue, trans. J. Rowan (Chicago: Regnery, 1961), 1f.A similar strategy had been adopted by Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho.

18 Augustine also described Christianity as the ‘one true philosophy’. Contra Academicos, III.ixx.42;Contra Julianum, IV.72; Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, IV.22; De vera religione, I.i.5.


way in which Aquinas takes up Aristotle’s organisation of the sciences.Aquinas preserves Aristotle’s classification of the sciences as speculative,practical and productive, and the further division of the speculativesciences into natural philosophy, mathematics and the ‘divine science’or metaphysics.19 The last of these, however, was now identified withChristian theology and thus came to assume the status that Aristotle hadaccorded metaphysics as the most excellent science of all.20 Thus not onlydoes Christianity provide answers to the questions posed by pagan phil-osophy, but its theology satisfies the criteria of the highest scienceaccording to the standards of the classical tradition itself. On Aquinas’sanalysis, while the pagan philosophers had sought wisdom, they hadsucceeded only in gaining a modicum of earthly wisdom. Heavenlywisdom could be attained only by those familiar with a divine scienceinformed by revelation.21 Natural philosophy, however, contributes tothis goal, inasmuch as it is a treatment of ‘lower causes’ that shouldinevitably lead to a consideration of the first cause.22 Pagan metaphysicsalso makes a contribution because it identifies a first cause, even though itfails to provide it with sufficient content. For these reasons, humanphilosophy is the ‘hand-maiden’ to divine philosophy (i.e. theology).

The pursuit of philosophical wisdom was not simply to do with theaccumulation of knowledge of the particular subject matter of the varioussciences. Rather more importantly it entailed becoming a particular kindof person. The attainment of wisdom, as Aquinas noted at the verybeginning of the Summa contra gentiles, relates to a specific office, where‘office’ is related to the possession of certain virtues. Aquinas explains,again on the authority of Aristotle, that to discharge one’s office is simply

19 Aristotle, Topics, 157a6–157a13; Metaphysics, 1025b–6a. Cf. Plato, Republic, 509–11. Aristotle’sdivision of the sciences was widely adopted in the Middle Ages. See e.g. Boethius, De Trinitate,2; Thomas Aquinas, Expositio supra librum Boethii De Trinitate, trans. The Division and Methods ofthe Sciences (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), Q.5 A.1; Robert Kilwardby,De ortu scientiarum, ch. 5.

20 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982a–b, 996b. Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, Q. 5 A. 1Obj. 1 (9). The specific content of ‘metaphysics’ is not entirely clear even in Aristotle. It becomeseven more complex when the issue of its relation to sacred theology is introduced. See e.g. CharlesLohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in C. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of RenaissancePhilosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 537–638.

21 Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 9, 2; ST, 1a. 1, 6.22 ‘For wisdom is twofold: mundane wisdom called philosophy, which considers the lower causes,

causes namely that are themselves caused, and bases its judgements on them: and divine wisdom ortheology, which considers the higher, that is the divine, causes and judges according to them.’Aquinas, On the Power of God, bk. 1, Q. 1 A. 4, Body (London: Burns and Oates, 1932), 24.

206 PETER HARRISON

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

23 ‘To say that a man discharges his proper office is equivalent to saying that he acts virtuously’.Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, trans. C. Vollert (St Louis: Herder, 1948), I.i.172, 186f.The passage from Aristotle cited in support of this definition is NE, 1106a15.

24 Aquinas, ST, 1a. 12, 5. More specifically, ‘when any created intellect sees the essence of God, theessence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect.’ Ibid. Thomas’s emphasis ondeification is owing partly to the influence of the Neoplatonised Aristotelianism found in medievalArab sources. See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Thisnotion of an inner transformation was reinforced by Thomas’s understanding of the tranformativepower of the mass: ‘The difference between corporeal and spiritual food lies in this, that theformer is changed into the substance of the person nourished . . . but spiritual food changes maninto itself.’ ST, 3a. 73, 3.

25 Ibid., 1a2ae. 113, 1.26 Although Plato’s assertions about ‘becoming god-like’ do not have the same spiritual overtones.

See e.g. Daniel C. Russell, ‘Virtue as “Likeness to God” in Plato and Seneca’, Journal of the Historyof Philosophy 42 (2004), 241–60.

27 Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 60, 5; 1a.2ae. 57, 2. Aristotle distinguished intellectual from moral virtues, andclassified prudence (phronesis) as an intellectual virtue. NE, 1103a, 1143b.

28 Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 57, 2; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, book VI, lectures III, V–VI;Aristotle, NE, 1139.

29 Aquinas, ST, 1a. 89, 5; 1a2ae. 50, 4; 52, 2; 53, 1; SCG, I.61 (130); SCG, II.60 (156); SCG, II.78 (216);On the Virtues in General, A. 7 Obj. 1.

30 Aquinas, ST 1a. 82, 3; 1a2ae. 57, 1; Disputed Questions on Truth, III, Q. 22 A. 11 OTC 1 (73).Elsewhere Aquinas expands on this: ‘when, through the habit of wisdom there arises in our


and theological virtues have distinct domains, they are nonetheless linkedby practical wisdom (phronesis, prudentia), the possession of which is oneof the defining characteristics of the philosopher. In providing this role towisdom, Aquinas is able to conform to the classical model of the ultimateunity of the virtues.31 From the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, thisThomist understanding of the philosophical quest, with its powerfulsynthesis of classical and Christian elements, predominated.

The Renaissance witnessed a further modification of the models of theancient sage and the scholastic philosopher. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99)taught in his Theologia platonica that the human soul naturally desires tobecome like God. A God-like state is achieved, Ficino thought, when thehuman soul lives a life that includes all stages of being, including theangelic. When it reaches its full potential the soul attains both knowledgeof the laws of the universe and a creative capacity virtually equivalent tothat of the deity.32 This emphasis on the acquisition of creative power gaveshape to a new Renaissance category (or perhaps better a newly recoveredcategory) – the magus. But Ficino also retained significant elements of thepurely contemplative ideal. Michael Allen and James Hankins suggest thatin fact Ficino resurrected two ancient types: ‘that of the magus with hispower over a nature dominated by sympathies and hidden ciphers andsigns and in pursuit of the secrets of macrocosmic transformation’. Theother was the ‘ideal of the daimonic soul in search of poetic, amatory,prophetic and even priestly ascent into the realm of pure Mind and Will,of Knowledge and Love – the soul, that is, in search of interior trans-formation and illumination both in the traditional terms of faith andbelief, and in the necessarily more elite terms of understanding, of

intellect an idea of divine things, this very idea or inward word is wont to be called wisdom’ (SCG,IV.xii (59)). One who has the habit of wisdom of knowledge is able to contemplate withoutdifficulty.’ ST, 2a2ae. 180, 7. The habit of wisdom perfects higher reason, the habit of scienceperfects lower reason. Disputed Questions on Truth, II, Q. 17 A. 1 Body (319).

31 Aquinas, ST, 1a2ae. 57, 4–6. Cf. ST, 1a2ae. 47–9, 51; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, bookVI, lecture X. Cf. Aristotle, NE, 1144b–5a. On the unity of the virtues see Julia Annas, The Moralityof Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73–84. For accounts of the development ofconceptions of practical wisdom to the time of William of Ockham, see Mary Ingham, ‘PracticalWisdom: Scotus’s Presentation of Prudence’, in L. Honnefelder, R. Wood and M. Dreyer (eds.),John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 551–71; Marilyn McCord Adams,‘Scotus and Ockham on the Connection of the Virtues’, in ibid., 499–522.

32 Paul Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943),117–18. Pico della Mirandola spoke in similar terms of an inherent human capacity for deification.Conclusiones, ed. B. Kieszkowski (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 34, 84. This capacity typically remainedlatent because individuals turned away from the life of contemplation that would lead to theirapotheosis.

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intellectual consciousness’.33 Ficino also stresses the divinity of the humanmind, and the goal of contemplation of the divine nature. ‘My intentionin writing’, he announces, is this: ‘that in the divinity of the created mind,as in a mirror at the centre of all things, we should first observe the worksof the Creator, and then contemplate and worship the mind of theCreator’. In order to carry this out, the individual must be morally pure,for we must separate ‘true understanding from the will to do right’. Thereis, in short, a connection between ‘our whole perception of the world, theway we lead our lives, and all our happiness’.34 Finally, Ficino’s PlatonicTheology is elitist in its orientation, being directed towards the ingeniosi –the intellectuals and the governing elite of the Florentine republic.35

A more explicitly manipulative conception of philosophy may be foundin the work of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occultaphilosophia libri tres (‘Three Books of Occult Philosophy’, 1531). Agrippaaffirms the Aristotelian division of the sciences: ‘all regulative Philosophyis divided into Naturall, Mathematicall, and Theologicall’.36 Later in thework he shows how these three faculties are related to the virtues whichare also ordered hierarchically to the end of personal transformation.Contemplation of divine things, Agrippa writes, is a mental exercise thatbrings the philosopher closer to God and confers godliness upon him. Theinvestigation of the creatures is an integral part of this process, inasmuch asthe study of the inferior things leads inevitably to a contemplation ofheavenly things.While the state of contemplation purges themind of error,it also restores a dominion and ability to command the creatures that werelost at the Fall.37 Agrippa was thus convinced that there was an importantlink between the processes that perfect nature and those that perfect thehuman soul. The goal of philosophical self-transformation was intimatelylinked to the physical processes by which natural bodies were transformed,as, for example, in the case of the transmutation of metals. As Agrippaexplained:

no man can come to the perfection of this art [alchemy], who shall not know theprinciples of it in himself, but by how much the more every one shall knowhimself, by so much he obtaineth the greater power of attracting it, and by somuch operateth greater and more wonderfull things, and will ascend to so great

33 Michael Allen and James Hankins, ‘Introduction’, in Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) vol. I, x–xi.

34 Ibid., Proem (I, 11).35 Ibid, ‘Introduction’, ix, xiii.36 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy(London, 1651), I.ii (3).37 Ibid., dedication to book III (341–2). For more on the recovery of dominion, see III.40 (471–2).


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

This attempt to link the interior improvement of the philosopher’s soulto the manipulation and improvement of elements of the external worldwas typical of much of the magical and alchemical discourse of theRenaissance, and permeates the thought of such figures as JohannesTrithemius (1462–1516), a close friend of Agrippa, and the English magusJohn Dee (1527–1609).39

In sum, both medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism wit-ness significant modifications of the classical philosophical persona – someof which will be considered in more detail in the following section.Nevertheless, philosophy is still understood within the basic frameworkof ‘a way of life’. These models remain largely elitist in orientation; theyare to a considerable degree individualistic; they focus on the importanceof self-transformation and deification; they emphasise the priority ofcontemplation. Some of the Renaissance models, it must be conceded,do emphasise the manipulation of nature, and some (which we shallconsider briefly in a moment) speak of the importance of the active life,or the need to balance action and contemplation. The model of naturalphilosophy that we encounter in Francis Bacon, however, goes one stepfurther and represents a challenge to many of the key priorities of thetraditional model. Bacon is not only the herald of a new philosophicalpersona, but in his approach to natural philosophy we see the beginningsof the separation of ‘science’ from philosophy and the origins of themodern view of philosophy as a theoretical discipline.

REFORMING THE PHILOSOPHICAL ‘PERSONA’

Early modern attempts to challenge aspects of the traditional models ofphilosophy were by no means unprecedented. Already in the late MiddleAges, some had challenged the classifications of knowledge or the taxonomyof the virtues upon which these models rested. Responding to Aquinas’sappropriation of Aristotelianism, a number of Franciscan theologians –most notably Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) – suggested that theology was nota speculative science, but a practical one, since its aim was to grow to love

38 Ibid., III.36 (460).39 For a discussion of these issues in relation to John Dee, see Hakan Hakansson, Seeing the Word:

John Dee and Renaissance Occultism (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2001), esp. 223–30. On Trithemius,see Noel Brann, Trithemius and Magical Theology (Albany, N. Y.: SUNY, 1999), esp. 114–16.

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God.40 It would follow that theology ought to be classified with ethics, theother science whose goal was action rather than contemplation. William ofOckham (c. 1288–1347) was to go further, denying that theology was ascience at all, at least in the Aristotelian sense.41 This would imply a muchmore significant division between faith and reason than the hierarchicalarrangement proposed by Aquinas. It would also follow that naturalphilosophy would be more independent of theology than in Aquinas’sscheme of things. Ockham did concede, however, that the mental discip-lines involved in philosophy could help provide the theologian with themental habits requisite for arriving at Christian wisdom.Renaissance humanists also questioned various aspects of the trad-

itional understanding of the philosophical quest, many of them address-ing their criticisms directly to Aristotle. It was common to questionAristotle’s inclusion of prudence among the intellectual rather than themoral virtues. This, in turn, raised the question of the relationshipbetween the moral and intellectual virtues. Was attainment of the formera prerequisite for the latter, or were moral and theoretical human endsdistinct? Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and, after him, Sebastian Fox-Morcillo (1526/8–60), argued that the search for truth would ultimatelyend in complete frustration rather than happiness, reasoning that it wassimply not possible to understand the ultimate causes of things in thepresent life.42 Others pointed to the exclusive nature of the philosophicaloffice, suggesting that it was unfortunate that the ultimate goal ofhuman life could be accomplished by so few. More prosaically, Felice

40 John Duns Scotus, Opera omnia, ed. C. Balıc et al. (Vatican City: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1950– )vol. I, 207–8, 217. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8f.Fernando Inciarte, ‘Scotus’ Gebrauch des Begriffs der Praktischen Wahrheit im Philosophie-geschichtlichen Kontext’, in John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics, 523–33; C. Harris, DunsScotus (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), vol. I, 90–100. Whether this difference ultimatelyamounted to much is a matter of discussion. Other theologians took a conciliatory position.Another Franciscan, Bonaventure, suggested theology was both speculative and practical: ‘Theo-logical science is an affective habit and the mean between the speculative and practical, and for [its]end it has both contemplation, and that we become good, and indeed more principally, that webecome good.’ Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum, opera omnia S. Bonaventurae, AdClaras Aquas, 1882, vol. I, 13. Cf. William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea, vol. III, iii, 8, and thediscussion in Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae. 8, 6. See also the Coimbra commentators, Commentary on theNicomachean Ethics, Disp. III, quest. 3, in Jillkraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of RenaissancePhilosophical Texts (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. I, 83f.; ColuccioSalutati, De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. E. Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947), 164.On Salutati, see Kahn’s article in B. Vickers (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zurVita Activa und Vita Contemplativa (Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, 1985), 153–79.

41 See Alfred Freddoso, ‘Ockham on Faith and Reason’, in Paul Spade (ed.), Cambridge Companionto Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 326–49, esp. 345–6.

42 Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philoso-phy, 303–86.


Figliucci (c. 1524 – c. 1590) complained, presumably on the basis ofpersonal experience, that while contemplation might be the most sub-lime of human pastimes, it caused health problems, particularly in thoseprone to digestive disorders.43

The application of the philosophical ideal to holders of political officewas also challenged. Aquinas had defined ‘office’ in terms of the expres-sion of particular virtues, and this applied no less to political offices: ‘Todischarge well the office of a king is therefore a work of extraordinaryvirtue.’44 In the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) wasnotoriously to argue that the discharging of one’s political office shouldnot be thought as equivalent to ‘acting virtuously’. On the contrary,responsible conduct for one who assumes political office may well callfor actions that lie well beyond the bounds of virtuous behaviour, trad-itionally understood. Machiavelli thus opened up the question of whetheroffices were related to the cultivation and expression of personal virtues orthe attainment of specific social ends. Machiavelli’s preference for thelatter was linked to his rejection of the contemplative ideal, which heshared with a number of Renaissance thinkers.

Not surprisingly, those who had found fault with the Aristotelianunderstanding of the virtues and their relations often had difficulty withthe elevation of the life of contemplation. Discussions of the relativemerits of the two lives frequently surfaced in the context of politicalphilosophy.45 The rediscovery of Roman republicanism and the accom-panying ideal of the participation of citizens in government necessitated areassessment of the common devaluation of the active life. As early as thefifteenth century, Florentine Leonardo Bruni (c. 1369–1444) rejected thecontemplative ideals of a previous generation of humanists, and stressedthe need for all citizens to be actively involved in the affairs of therepublic. In the second half of the century the pendulum swung back,as supporters of the Medici suggested that the prince alone could vicari-ously discharge the civic duties of his subjects, freeing them for the vitacontemplativa.46 The founder of Florence’s Platonic Academy, Marsilio

43 Ibid., 337.44 Aquinas, On Kingship, trans. G. Phelan, revised I. Eschmann (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of

Mediaeval Studies, 1982), I.ix.68, 39.45 On the distinction during this period, see P. O. Kristeller, ‘The Active and Contemplative Life in

Renaissance Humanism’, in Vickers, Arbeit, Musse, Meditation, 133–52.46 Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmidt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992), 76–84; Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, CambridgeHistory of Renaissance Philosophy, 418–21, 426–30.

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Ficino (1433–99), personified this priority, excused as he was from mun-dane affairs on account of the generous sponsorship of the Medici.Subsequently, Machiavelli, who had a rather more complicated relation-ship with the Medici, would add another layer to the debate, identifyingthe Christian endorsement of monastic withdrawal from public life as amajor source of political instability.47

The other great Italian republic, Venice, saw a parallel discussion, butone focused more on the university curriculum – specifically the ordodoctrinae and the officium of the philosopher.48 In the late sixteenthcentury, Padua was the official university of the Venetian republic, andit was here that a major disagreement developed between the professorsFrancesco Piccolomini (1523–1607) and Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89). Thelatter subscribed to the traditional view that the office of the philosophercalls for a purely contemplative natural philosophy. The active andoperative disciplines – ethics, law, medicine and mechanics – wereregarded as distractions from the true philosophical life. Piccolomini, byway of contrast, insisted that active and contemplative lives could not besundered, and that while the spiritual perfection of man did indeed lie incontemplative philosophy, the perfection of society required a philosoph-ical engagement with civil science that could bring about a correspondingperfection of society.49

More important for our present purposes were the criticisms ofMachiavelli’s late contemporary, Martin Luther (1483–1546). This erst-while Augustinian monk was far less sanguine about the prospects ofreconciling Christianity and pagan philosophy than his Dominicanpredecessor. The ‘Church of Thomas’, Luther insisted, was in realitythe Church of Aristotle. This was not a good thing, for Aristotle’s‘unchristian, profane, meaningless babblings’ had corrupted the pure

47 Ibid., 389–452 at 439.48 Jacopo Zabarella defines ordo doctrinae as ‘an instrumental habitus through which we are prepared

so to dispose the parts of each discipline that that discipline may be taught as well and as easily aspossible’. Opera logica, col. 154, cited in Nicholas Jardine, ‘Keeping Order in the School of Padua’,in Eckhard Kessler, Daniel Di Liscia and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), Method and Order in theRenaissance Philosophy of Nature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 183–209 at 186.

49 See Heikki Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism: Jacopo Zabarella on theNature of the Arts and Sciences (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1992), ch. 2; Jardine, ‘KeepingOrder in the School of Padua’. Padua plays an important role in the history of early modernscience because the demonstrative method taught here is often assumed to have had a formativeinfluence on the young Galileo. See e.g. J. H. Randall, ‘The Development of Scientific Method inthe School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940), 177–206; William A. Wallace,Galileo’s Logic of Discovery (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).


gospel message.50 As could be expected from his general rejection of theAristotelian contribution to Christian theology, Luther was stronglycritical of Thomist claims about the ultimate convergence of the paganphilosophical quest and Christianity. A particular point of contentionwas the Aristotelian–Thomist understanding of the virtues which, onLuther’s analysis, was responsible for the erroneous scholastic teachingon merit. This was the view according to which one might gain genuinemoral credit before God on account of the acquisition of the virtues andthe performance of good deeds. A basic contention of the NicomacheanEthics was that virtues are acquired as the result of continued practice –as Luther himself characterised it: ‘Aristotle taught that he who doesmuch good will thereby become good.’51 This was the very notion ofhabitus, which Thomas had uncritically accepted: ‘Here Thomas errs incommon with his followers and with Aristotle who say, ‘Practice makesperfect’: just a harp player becomes a good harp player through longpractice, so these fools think that the virtues of love, chastity, and humilitycan be achieved through practice. It is not true.’52

The prevailing view of the gradual moral improvement of individualson account of their own efforts – central to the classical conception of thephilosophical persona – was rejected by Luther as inconsistent with thePauline position that human beings cannot become righteous on accountof their own activity. Being made right before God – the process ofjustification – is not an internal change in the person, but rather a changein their situation or status.53 Righteousness, Luther insisted, ‘is not in us in

50 Martin Luther, ‘Sermon for Epiphany’, in Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. JohnN. Lenker et al. (7 vols., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), vol. I, 331–2. Cf. Luther, Letter tothe Christian Nobility, 25, in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 93; Babylonian Captivityof the Church, in ibid., 144; Emser, Reply to the Answer of the Leipzig Goat, in Works of MartinLuther, ed. H. E. Jacobs (6 vols., Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915), vol. III. See also G. Ebeling,Luther: An Introduction to his Thought (London: Collins, 1970), 86–9.

51 Luther, ‘Sunday after Christmas, 6’, in Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. III, 226. Cf. Aquinas: ‘Ahuman virtue is one “which renders a human act and man himself good” [*Ethic. ii, 6]’ (ST, 2a2ae.58, 3). Cf. ST, 1a2ae. 55, 3 and 4; ST, 2a2ae. 58, 3. In Luther’s assessment, the Nicomachean Ethicswas ‘the worst of all books’. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, 25, in Three Treatises, 93.

52 Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaw, 1883–1948), 39r, 278, trans. in PaulAlthaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 156, n. 71. For Aquinas’sexplicit appropriation of the Aristotelian idea of habit, see Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicoma-chean Ethics, I, bk. 1, lecture 20, section 244 (105). A similar Aristotelian view of merit was alsopromoted by some Humanist scholars. Thus, Francesco Piccolomini: ‘Since this is Aristotle’sposition, he is to some extent in agreement with our theologians . . . Merits, as they pertain to us,proceed from our virtuous actions, for faith alone is not sufficient.’ A Comprehensive Philosophy ofMorals, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. I, 74.

53 For Luther’s criticism of the Aristotelian notion of habitus, see Ebeling, Luther, 150–8.

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a formal sense, as Artistotle maintains, but is outside us’.54 Such a viewwas summed up in Luther’s maxim simul iustus et peccator – simultan-eously justified and a sinner.55 It followed, of course, that the knowledgeof God per se, does not make the knower God-like or ‘deiform’ asThomas had suggested.56

The position espoused by Luther lay at the core of the well-knownProtestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith. This was thecentral theological issue of the Protestant Reformation and was opposedto the Catholic position, characterised by its opponents as a doctrine ofjustification through the performance of good works. The other majorreformer, John Calvin (1509–64), was in complete agreement with Lutheron this issue:

There can be no doubt that Paul, when he treats of the Justification of man,confines himself to the one point – how man may ascertain that God is propi-tious to him? Here he does not remind us of a quality infused into us; on thecontrary, making no mention of works, he tells us that righteousness must besought without us.57

The general contours of the Reformation controversy about the natureof justification are well known and need not be further laboured here. Itmust be said, however, that little if any attention has been paid to the waysin which criticisms of the Aristotelian–Thomist conception of virtue hadan impact on the understanding of intellectual virtues such as scientia.Admittedly, the reformers had focused primarily on the moral andtheological virtues. But it was inevitable that the intellectual virtues wouldsuffer collateral damage, if for no other reason than that Aquinas had socarefully brought the three kinds of virtue together under the generalsuperintendence of wisdom. The contentious mechanism of habit, more-over, was common to both moral and intellectual virtues.58 This threat to

54 Luther, Lectures on Galations, in Luther’s Works (LW), ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehman (55 vols., StLouis: Concordia, 1955–75), vol. XXVI, 234.

55 See Luther, Lectures on Galatians, in LW, vol. XXVI, 232 and passim.56 Some recent interpretations of Luther, however, contest this standard reading. See Carl E. Braaten

and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (GrandRapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998); William T. Cavanaugh, ‘A Joint Declaration? Justification asTheosis in Aquinas and Luther’, Heythrop Journal 61 (2000), 265–80.

57 John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Reformation of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge, (3 vols.,Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), vol. III, 247. Cf. John Calvin, Institutes of theChristian Religion, ed. J. McNeill, trans. F. Battles (2 vols., Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960),vol. I, 797–820. James Sadolet, ‘Letter to the Senate and People of Geneva’, in Calvin, Tracts andTreatises, vol. I, 9; and vol. III, 117, 153.

58 The theological virtues were, according to the scholastic tradition, ‘infused’ – a contention thatalso came in for considerable criticism. See Calvin, Tracts and Treatises, vol. III, 247. Such criticism


the unity of the virtues brought a need to re-evaluate the relations betweenthe various sciences which, in the standard scholastic understanding, wereclosely linked with the different categories of virtues. In all of this, theconception of the Christian contemplative as exemplifying both classicaland Christian philosophical ideals became more difficult to sustain – atleast for many Protestants. As for the intellectual virtue scientia, in thedevelopments outlined above we see the beginnings of a process in which‘science’ ceases to be a mental habit and becomes something like the morefamiliar modern notion: a body of knowledge or set of practices aimed atbringing about a particular outcome.59 Science, like the reformers’ ‘right-eousness’, also becomes something ‘outside us’ (Luther), ‘without us’(Calvin). This reification of scientia was part of a process that saw themodern reconceptualisation of natural philosophy, increasingly thoughtof in terms of the observance of specified practices, rather than thecultivation of certain virtues. This trend is most conspicuous in thoseseventeenth-century figures influenced by Lutheran and Calvinisticthought.

Intimately related to the Reformers’ criticisms of Catholic–Aristotelianconceptions of moral progress and perfectibility were their related views ofvocation, the medieval ‘estates’, and the relative merits of the active andcontemplative lives. Luther, for example, insisted on the importance ofexercising an earthly vocation within the sinful realities of the presentworld. The Christian is warned against attempting to escape the evils ofthe world ‘by donning caps and creeping into a corner, or going into thewilderness’ as the papists do. Harking back to Augustine’s distinctionbetween things that are to be loved for their own sake and things that areto be used, Luther asserted that the true Christian is to ‘use’ the world: ‘tobuild, to buy, to have dealings and hold intercourse with his fellows, tojoin them in all temporal affairs’.60 Against a common view that theimperative to work was God’s curse for Adam’s sin (Genesis 3: 17–19),Luther insisted that ‘Man was created not for leisure, but for work, even in

was not exclusive to the reformers. Thomas Hobbes, to take a single example, observed that thevery notion of ‘infused virtue’ was an oxymoron: ‘if it be false to say that virtue can be poured, orblown up and down, the words in-poured virtue, in-blown virtue, are as absurd and insignificantas a round quadrangle’. Hobbes, Leviathan ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1982), I.4.21/24, 108.

59 Charles Lohr captures something of this transition when he observes that: ‘Writers of theReformed Confession broke with this [Aristotelian] conception. In their approach science wasunderstood not as a habit but as a body of knowledge.’ ‘Metaphysics’, 632.

60 Luther, ‘Sermon for the Third Sunday After Easter’, 18, 16, in Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. IV,281–2.

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the state of innocence.’ It followed that ‘the idle sort of life, such as that ofmonks and nuns, deserves to be condemned’.61 This view is explicitlyopposed to a medieval supernaturalism that identifies the perfection ofhuman nature with the contemplative life of the monastery.62

Central to Luther’s criticism of the ‘idle’ life of the contemplative was anew conception of divine vocation. Throughout theMiddle Ages the clergyoccupied one of three ‘estates’, the other two being the aristocracy and therest of the laity. The spiritual estate of the clergy was held to be superior toboth of the temporal estates.63 Moreover, the clergy were considered to beontologically different from the laity, because their special status wasconfirmed sacramentally. Luther described this hierarchical arrangementas a ‘pure invention’, insisting that ‘all Christians are of the spiritual estate,and there is no difference among them except that of office’.64 In Protestantterritories the clerical office thus came to be regarded as one calling amongstothers. All vocations, on this view, were equally ‘spiritual’.65 This under-standing of a priesthood of all believers informs the claims of someProtestant natural philosophers to be ‘priests of nature’.66

Calvin followed Luther in condemning the notion that the clergyenjoyed a unique status. The erroneous assumption of the clerical estatewas that ‘a more perfect rule of life can be devised than the common onecommitted by God to the whole church’.67 It is important to understand

61 Luther, Lectures on Genesis 2:15–17, in LW, vol. I, 103. Cf. Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, inThree Treatises, 12.

62 See Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versohnung (Bonn, 1882–9)vol. III, 308.

63 See e.g. Rosemary O’Day, ‘The Clergy of the Church of England’, in Wilfred Prest (ed.), TheProfessions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 25–63.

64 Luther, Letter to the Christian Nobility, in Three Treatises, 12. Cf. Calvin, Institutes of the ChristianReligion, vol. I, 502; vol. II, 1473. See also Protestant confessional statements, e.g. ‘Second HelveticConfession’ (1566), ch. XVII.

65 The classic account of Luther’s concept of vocation is GustafWingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. CarlC. Rasmussen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957). For further discussions see John S. Feinberg, ‘Luther’sDoctrine of Vocation: Some Problems of Interpretation and Application’, Fides et Historia 12 (1979),50–67; Karlfried Froelich, ‘Luther on Vocation’, Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999), 195–207; KennethHagen, ‘A Critique of Wingren on Luther on Vocation’, Lutheran Quarterly, NS, 3 (2002), 249–73.On the significance of this for early modern natural philosophy, see Peter Harrison, ‘“Priests of theMost High God, with Respect to the Book of Nature”: The Vocational Identity of the Early ModernNaturalist’, in Angus Menuge (ed.), Reading God’s World (St Louis: Concordia, 2004), 55–80.

66 See e.g. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum trans. A. M. Duncan (Norwalk, Conn.:Abarus, 1999), 53; Robert Boyle, Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of ExperimentalNatural Philosophy, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols.,Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), vol. II, 31f., 62f. For an early account of Boyle’s notion of the priest-scientist, see H. Fisch, ‘The Scientist as Priest: A Note on Robert Boyle’s Natural Theology’, Isis44 (1953), 252–65.

67 Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1266.


that Calvin’s criticism cut two ways. On the one hand, the clerical officewas not inherently superior. On the other hand, the moral standardaspired to by clerics, and the monastic orders in particular, was affirmedas appropriate for everyone. Calvin thus sought to bring the spiritual lifepractised by the few into the mundane lives of all. Calvin also held up theexample of Adam in Eden as a standing reproach to the religious insti-tutions of cloister and convent. Commenting on the fact that God hadplaced Adam in the Garden of Eden to ‘tend it and keep it’ (Genesis 2:15),he argued that ‘men were created to employ themselves in some work, andnot to lie down in inactivity and idleness’. Natural objects were there to beused and all men were enjoined to exercise ‘economy, and this diligence,with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy’.68

Again, this active appropriation of material things was directly opposed tothe monastic life. ‘Our present-day monks’, Calvin remarked, ‘find inidleness the chief part of their sanctity.’69 In all of this Calvin drew uponthe authority of Augustine, insisting that for the church father themonastic life was ‘an exercise and aid to those duties of piety enjoinedupon all’ and that brotherly love was its ‘chief and almost its only rule’.70

Here he echoes Augustine’s insistence that contemplation must always beattended by love of neighbour.

The consecration of mundane work reappears in Calvin’s exegesis ofthe parable of the talents (Mat. 25:14–39, Lk. 19:11–27). Calvin argues thatGod bestows his gifts upon those whom he chooses – not, as the papistsbelieved, according to individual merit. The recipients of God’s gifts havea duty to exercise them in the service of the common good:

Those who employ usefully whatever God has committed to them are said to beengaged in trading. The life of the godly, is justly compared to trading, for theyought naturally to exchange and barter with each other, in order to maintainintercourse; and the industry with which every man discharges the office assignedhim, the calling itself, the power of acting properly, and other gifts, are reckonedto be so many kinds of merchandise; because the use or object which they have inview is, to promote mutual intercourse among men. Now the gain which Christmentions is general usefulness, which illustrates the glory of God.71

68 John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis 2:15, in Calvin’s Commentaries (22 vols., Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1985), vol. I, 125; cf. Commentary on the Psalms 127:1–2, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol.VI, 1045.

69 Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1264. Whether Calvin was influenced by Augustine in his understandingof the ‘use’ of material things I have not been able to determine.

70 Calvin, Institutes, vol. II, 1264f. Cf. Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church, xxxiii.73.71 Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, Matt. 25:15, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XVII; cf. Commentary on

the First Epistle to Timothy, 4:14, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XXI, 115.

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Calvin never tires of pointing out that the earthly life should bedirected towards ‘utility’, ‘profit’ and ‘advantage’, and that these accruenot to oneself, but to society.72 While Luther had mounted similararguments, Calvin was even more strongly oriented towards the presentworld. He differed from the earlier reformer not only in his approval oftrade and the charging of interest, but in his insistence on the need forChristians to be actively engaged in useful worldly affairs so that societycould be transformed and restored.73 While the sinful condition of thepresent world was permanent, it was not simply to be endured until theadvent of the world to come. Effort was to be expended in amelioratingthe losses that had followed the Fall. This Calvinist conception of thesanctity of work and of its transformative effects have unmistakableechoes in Francis Bacon’s new conception of the vocation of the naturalphilosopher and in his ‘utilitarian’ justifications for a new scientificprogramme.74

FRANCIS BACON AND THE ‘PERSONA’ OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

While Francis Bacon has often been lauded as a seminal figure in thedevelopment of modern science, the centuries since his death have wit-nessed a protracted debate over the precise nature of his legacy. Certainly,he made no substantive contributions to science in the fashion of a Boyleor a Newton. The much-vaunted inductive method, in spite of theextravagant praise of prominent nineteenth-century figures, bears littleresemblance to the way science has been conducted in any era. Indeed, inthe pessimistic assessment of one commentator, ‘Bacon’s instauratio wentto a dead end, as early as the first progress of science in the seventeenthcentury.’75 What, then, was the nature of Bacon’s achievement? Oneanswer to this puzzle is that in Bacon’s work we encounter, in the wordsof Stephen Gaukroger, ‘the first systematic comprehensive attempt to

72 On this notion and its influence in early modern England, see David Little, Religion, Order, andLaw: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), esp. 60.

73 For differences between Luther and Calvin on these issues, see Ian Hart, ‘The Teaching of Lutherand Calvin about Ordinary Work’, Evangelical Quarterly 67 (1995), 35–52, 121–35.

74 This is not necessarily to say that Bacon was a Calvinist, but that at the very least he was stronglyinfluenced by Calvinist conceptions. On Bacon’s religious commitments, see Steven Matthews,“Apocalypse and Experiment: The Theological Assumptions and Motivations of Francis Bacon’sInstauration’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Florida, 2004); John Henry, Knowledge is Power(London: Ikon Books, 2002), 90–1; Benjamin Milner, ‘Francis Bacon: The Theological Founda-tions of Valerius Terminus’, Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), 245–64.

75 Michel Malherbe, ‘Bacon’s Method of Science’, in Markku Peltonen (ed.), Cambridge Companionto Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75–98 at 75.


transform the early modern philosopher from someone whose primaryconcern is with how to live morally into someone whose primary concernis with the understanding of and reshaping of natural processes’.76 In sum,Bacon seeks the transformation of the traditional philosophical persona.

How, then, does Bacon seek to revise the philosophical persona, and inwhat ways is it related to earlier Renaissance and Reformation critiques?First, it is clear that Bacon rejects the idea that philosophical knowledge isprimarily to do with contemplation that is removed from action andproduction: ‘as if there were to be sought in knowledge a couch, where-upon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or terrace, for a wandering andvariable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect . . . and not a richstore house, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate’.77

Elsewhere he insists that knowledge be sought not for ‘the quiet ofresolution’ but for ‘a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of manto the sovereignty and power . . . which he had in his first state ofcreation’.78 Knowledge is thus to be pursued for the purposes of actionand production. However this does not necessarily entail a preference forthe active life over the contemplative. Rather, Bacon insists that contem-plation should not be sundered from action. ‘If contemplation and actionmay be more nearly and straightly conjoined and united together than theyhave been’, this will ‘dignify and exalt knowledge’.79 This insight is ex-pressed in two of Bacon’s classic formulations: ‘the improvement of man’smind and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing’, and hiscontention that knowledge and power ‘meet in one’.80 In conformity withthe tradition, he thus allows that ‘the contemplation of truth is a thingworthier and loftier than all utility and magnitude of works’, noting that‘works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contrib-uting to the comforts of life’.81 The same point is made with a religious

76 Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Natural Philosophy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5. Cf. Antonio Perez-Ramos, ‘Bacon’s Legacy’, inPeltonen, Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 311–34.

77 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding,Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (14 vols., London: Longman, 1857–74), vol. III, 294.

78 Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works, vol. III, 222. Cf: ‘For the matter in hand is no mere felicity ofspeculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation.’Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 32.

79 Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 294.80 Bacon,Novum Organum, I, }3, inWorks, vol. IV, 47; cf. I, }124, inWorks, vol. IV, 110. And elsewhere

‘assuredly the very contemplation of things, as they are . . . is itself more worthy than all the fruit ofthe inventions.’ I, }129, in Works vol. IV, 115.

81 Ibid. I, }124, in Works, vol. IV, 110.

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analogy: ‘as in religion we are warned to show our faith by works, so inphilosophy by the same rule the system should be judged of by its fruits’.82

As with the Protestant reformers, Bacon’s reading of the Genesisnarrative is an important consideration in his understanding of the natureof the earthly vocation. In The Advancement of Learning, he explains howAdam was originally placed in the garden to work. His work consisted ofcontemplation, exercise and experiment.83 Following the Fall, however, adichotomy arose between the active and contemplative lives, the twoestates represented, respectively, by Cain and Abel. (In keeping with hisacknowledgement of the importance of contemplation, Bacon makes thepoint that God’s favour fell upon the contemplative Abel.84) As is wellknown, a key element of Bacon’s conception of natural philosophy is thatit restores, at least in part, what was lost to humanity as a result of theFall.85 In keeping with this general vision of a restoration of prelapsarianconditions, Bacon urges the reuniting of the two forms of life in thepractice of science. Bacon, then, does not take the side of proponents ofthe active life in the Renaissance debate, but rejects the terms of thequestion: neither the active nor the contemplative life, but both.Bacon also challenges the exclusive nature of traditional philosophical

vision. Science is not a rare virtue, attainable only by the talented few, buta body of knowledge. ‘The course I propose for the discovery of science’,Bacon announces, ‘is such as leaves little to the acuteness and strength ofwits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level’.86 Withthese words, Bacon sets out his philosophical equivalent of the Protestantpriesthood of all believers. This approach to science, as one commentatorhas suggested, ‘is the epistemological mirror of men’s equality beforeGod’.87 As a body of knowledge, rather than a virtue possessed only by

82 Ibid., I, }73, in Works, vol. IV, 74. Mention of works may seem redolent of Pelagian or Catholicemphasis on works but Bacon’s emphasis was consistent with Protestant teaching. Thus Melanch-thon’s Augsburg Confession – ‘It is also taught among us that such faith should produce goodfruits and good works’, VI.1; and the Westminster Confession – ‘good works, done in obedience toGod’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith’, XIV.ii. Both in Creedsof the Churches, ed. John Leith (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 69, 210.

83 Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 296.84 ‘To pass on: in the first event or occurrence after the fall of man, we see . . . an image of the two

estates, the contemplative state and the active state, figured in the two persons of Abel and Cain.’Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 297.

85 ‘For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion overcreation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former byreligion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.’ Bacon,Novum organum, II, }52, inWorks, vol. IV, 247.

86 Ibid., I, }61, in Works, vol. IV, 62.87 Antonio Perez-Ramos, ‘Bacon’s Legacy’, in Peltonen, Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 311–34 at

315. See also Paolo Rossi, ‘Thus Bacon implicitly refuted the traditional image of the enlightened


exceptional minds, science can now also be augmented incrementally. TheBaconian method thus calls for ‘progressive stages of certainty’.88 Whatmight be lost in terms of individual quality is compensated for byquantity – science ceases to be the purview of the elite individual andbecomes the corporate activity of many. The ‘perfection of the sciences’will come ‘not from the swiftness or ability of any one inquirer, but froma succession [of them]’.89 And what now guides the acquisition of know-ledge is not a set of internalised mental habits formed by practice, but anobjectively identifiable scientific regimen or method: ‘the whole way,from the very first perception of the senses must be laid out upon a sureplan’.90 This publicly available method – and on this point the Baconianmodel differs from that of the magus – can in principle be followed byanyone.91

As for the benefits of science, these are no longer seen as contributing tothe moral perfection of the individual mind, but rather accrue to society.This social utility arises out Bacon’s distinctive combination of contem-plation and action. In order to make this point, Bacon draws on thePauline maxim that ‘knowledge puffs up’, while ‘charity edifies’. The keyvirtue in the philosophical quest is thus not wisdom, but charity. OnBacon’s analysis, scholastic philosophy had succeeded only in producing‘proud knowledge’ to the exclusion of charitable acts.92 The goal ofscience, the ‘legitimate end of learning’, was for Bacon ‘the glory of thecreator and the relief of man’s estate’.93 In this reworked moral vision ofthe true end of philosophy, charity replaces wisdom as the key virtue.Charity is ‘the bond of perfection, because it comprehendeth and faste-neth all the virtues together’.94

Bacon was also sceptical of the assumption of moral perfectibilitypresent in both classical and, to a lesser extent, scholastic anthropology.The heathen, he complains, had ‘imagined a higher elevation of man’s

sage and the conception of scientific collaboration as a meeting of illuminati jealously guardingtheir precious, mysterious discoveries. The distinction between ordinary mortals and enlightenedgenius is prevalent in all European cultures’: Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 27. Cf. Plato: ‘Philosophy, then, the love of wisdom, isimpossible for the multitude.’ Republic 494a, in Collected Dialogues, 730.

88 Bacon, Novum organum, Preface, in Works, vol. IV, 40.89 Bacon, De sapientia veterum, in Works, vol. IV, 753.90 Bacon, Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 18.91 Bacon, Novum organum, I, }85, in Works, vol. IV, 84.92 1 Corinthians 1.8 (Vulgate); Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works, vol. III, 221–2.93 Bacon, Advancement, in Works, vol. III, 294.94 Ibid., 442. Admittedly, Bacon also provides wisdom (‘sapience’) with a unifying role, arguing that

wisdom can unite divine, natural and human philosophy. Works, vol. III, 346; vol. IV, 337.

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nature than it is really capable of ’.95 To the extent that the scholastics hadadopted significant aspects of Aristotelian philosophy – including a rela-tively uncritical epistemology – they too had become unwitting heirs to anover-optimistic anthropology that had underestimated the difficulties inacquiring knowledge. Impediments to the acquisition of knowledge weretaken seriously by the Protestant reformers, who attributed them to thefallen condition of the human race – a condition of which pagan writerswere unaware.96 On account of original sin the mind was disqualifiedfrom acquiring true knowledge. Calvin thus argued that the fallen mind‘wanders through various errors and stumbles repeatedly’ and thus‘betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth’.97 Bacon agreed,contesting the Aristotelian/Thomist assumption that the mind is naturallyoriented towards the acquisition of knowledge. ‘The human intellect leftto its own course is not to be trusted’, he warned, and ‘the light of thesense’ is ‘uncertain’. Knowledge was to be ‘discharged of that venomwhich the serpent infused into it’.98

It must be said that there remain significant elements of a moralprogramme in Bacon’s natural philosophy, and he thus allows that themind must be ‘purified and purged’ if it is to become a receptacle forknowledge.99 Yet, since discovery in the sciences was something that was‘open to almost every man’s industry’, success ultimately did not dependsolely, or even principally, on the virtues of the investigator.100 Rather, thekey to success in the sciences lay in following a procedure or method. Incertain respects this development is consistent with a tendency amongstsome Renaissance thinkers to reconceptualise philosophy as method,although ‘method’ in this context was more to do with the organisationof knowledge than, as for Bacon, with its attainment.101 Bacon’s meth-odological prescriptions, then, render unnecessary to a large degree theinner transformation of the philosopher. What is now required is strictadherence to an externalised philosophical regimen.102 In a sense, then,

95 Bacon, Works, vol. V, 5.96 See Peter Harrison, ‘Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’,

Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002), 239–59.97 Calvin, Institutes, vol. I, 271. Cf. Commentary on Romans 1:21, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XIX, 72.98 Bacon, Great Instauration, in Works, vol. IV, 17, 18, 20.99 Ibid., 20.100 Bacon, Parasceve, in Works, vol. IV, 252.101 Dear, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, pp. 153–6. Cesare Vasoli, ‘The Renaissance Concept of

Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 57–74. Vasolinotes that this tendency was ‘particularly favoured by Protestants’ (72).

102 Stephen Gaukroger thus suggests that Bacon’s account of method can be seen ‘either as elaboratingstringent procedures that individual scientists should follow, or as setting out the rules governing a


what we see in Bacon are the beginnings of the separation of wisdom andscience, and of transformation of the inner virtues of the philosopher intothe outer methodological prescriptions of modern science.

Part of the burden of this chapter has been to suggest that Bacon’s newconception of the philosophical enterprise was influenced by the Protest-ant reformers’ critique of scholastic and classical models of the philoso-pher and of a related Aristotelian conception of the virtues. If this weretrue, it might be expected that there would be differences between Bacon’sprescriptions and those of a Catholic natural philosopher such as Des-cartes. Indeed, Descartes provides what is perhaps the best contrast, andarguably his conception of the philosophical persona retains more elem-ents of the conventional model than does Bacon’s. A brief comparisonreveals some interesting differences. In his chapter in this volume JohnCottingham has shown how the Cartesian project may be understood asconsistent in many respects with a tradition of theistic metaphysics, theultimate aim of which is contemplation of God. A number of previouscommentators have similarly drawn attention to parallels between Des-cartes’sMeditations and the traditional contemplative literature.103 Admit-tedly, some of these connections are overstated, and in any case if theMeditations was intended to provide legitimacy for Descartes’s natural

new elite community subject to stringent measures designed to organise the investigation of natureat a social level’. S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the SeventeenthCentury (London: Routledge, 1998), 5–6; cf. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 11–12, 160–5; J. Leary,Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), 218.

103 See e.g. Pierre Mesnard, ‘L’arbre de la sagesse’, in Descartes, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957), vol. II, 366–49, and discussion, 350–9; L. J. Beck, TheMetaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 28–38; Matthew Jones, ‘Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exercise’, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001), 40–72;Amelie Rorty, ‘The Structure of Descartes’Meditations’, in Amelie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’Meditations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2. In the same volume see also GaryHatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’, 45–79.Others who have drawn attention to the formally meditative mood of the Meditations includeWalter Stohrer, ‘Descartes and Ignatius Loyola: La Fleche and Manresa Revisted’, Journal of theHistory of Philosophy 17 (1979), 11–27; Arthur Thomson, ‘Ignace de Loyola et Descartes: l’influencedes exercises spirituels sur les oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes’, Archives de philosophie 35(1972), 61–85; Beck, Metaphysics of Descartes, 28–38; Z. Vendler, ‘Descartes’ Exercises’, CanadianJournal of Philosophy 19 (1989), 193–224; Dennis Sepper, ‘The Texture of Thought: Why Descartes’Meditationes is Meditational, and Why it Matters’, in Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster and JohnSutton (eds.), Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London, Routledge, 2000), 736–50. More scepticalabout the link between Descartes’s work and the traditional spiritual exercises is Bradley Rubidge,‘Descartes’s Meditations and Devotional Meditations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 27–49. Descartes’s own explanation of his title is that he wished to avoid the more common title‘Disputations’. Objections and Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans.J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and Douglas Murdoch (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984), (CSM), vol. II, 112.

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

104 Descartes, Meditations, in CSM, vol. II, 35.105 Descartes, Discourse and Essays, translator’s preface, in CSM, vol. I, 109.106 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in CSM, vol. I, 179–83, 188, 192.107 Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 188. Similar expressions abound in Descartes’s writings:

‘true and certain knowledge’ (CSM, vol. ii, 48); ‘perfect knowledge’ (CSM, vol. II, 49, CSM, vol.II, 111); ‘true knowledge’ (CSM, vol. II, 101); ‘certain science’ (CSM, vol. I, 197); ‘perfectknowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing’ (Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 179);‘perfect scientific knowledge’ (Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 201); ‘the highest and most perfectscience of material things which men can ever attain’ (to Mersenne, 10May 1632, in CSMK, 38).On Descartes’s conception of certainty, however, see Desmond Clarke, ‘Descartes’ Philosophyof Science’, in John Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992), 258–85.

108 Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 191.109 Descartes, Discourse, in CSM, vol. I, 123.


depends on the superiority of the philosophy that is practised there. Hencethe greatest good that a state can enjoy is to possess true philosophers.’110

This is partly because wisdom now extends not only to ‘the conduct of life’but to ‘the preservation of health and the discovery of all manner of skills’.111

Yet mastery of one’s own desires seems more important than mastery overnature.112 These brief considerations, while falling somewhat short of aconclusive demonstration of the significance of certain Protestant ideas onBacon’s conception of philosophy, are at least consistent with the generalthesis outlined in this chapter.

CONCLUSION

One of the background concerns of this chapter has been the genealogy ofmodern science and the beginnings of the independence of naturalphilosophy from philosophy proper. In Francis Bacon’s novel prescrip-tions for natural philosophy, I have suggested, we can see a new emphasison methods for the investigation and mastery of nature that can bedeployed without requiring that the investigator be in prior possessionof particular moral, or even intellectual, virtues. It is important, however,when looking back with the present state of the natural sciences and theirmethods in mind, that we do not lose sight of the fact that in Bacon andother seventeenth-century natural philosophers we are witnessing only thebeginnings of that transition through which some aspects of philosophybecome something akin to modern science. To put it another way, if it ispossible to identify in Bacon’s philosophy concerns that will becomecentral to the practices of the natural sciences in the modern era, we canalso find many of the traditional elements of the conception of thephilosophical life, including the retention of an emphasis on the import-ance of the moral propriety of the knower. Bacon continually asserts, forexample, that the truth is to be cultivated in charity, and the knowingmind must be purged of the corrupting influences of pride.113 Later in theseventeenth century, Bacon’s heirs in the Royal Society would also em-phasise the connection between natural philosophy and moral edification.Thomas Sprat argued that experimental philosophy, as practised byfellows of the Royal Society, would achieve ends similar to those of moral

110 Descartes, Principles, in CSM, vol. I, 180.111 Ibid., 179.112 Descartes, Discourse, in CSM, vol. I, 123.113 Bacon, Great Instauration, inWorks, vol. IV, 20; Bacon, Valerius Terminus, inWorks, vol. III, 221–2.

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philosophy.114 Joseph Glanvill agreed that experimental philosophy yields‘practical knowledge’ that ‘will assist and promote our Vertue, and ourHappiness; and incline us to imploy our selves in living according to it’.115

In the following century Newton famously observed that if naturalphilosophy was pursued according to his methodological prescriptions‘the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged’.116 Some of theseassertions are undoubtedly attempts to establish the moral credentials ofthe new experimental philosophy and to show that it could meet thecriteria traditionally associated with the philosophical enterprise. Yet itdoes not necessarily follow that these claims were disingenuous. Apolo-gists for the new philosophy were no doubt sincere in their conviction thatexperimentalism would confer moral benefits. What was new in all of this,however, was the belief that those benefits would be conferred byadopting particular material practices (such as the methods of experi-mental philosophy), rather than observing, say, spiritual exercises. Overtime, the moral justifications of the natural sciences would become lessrelevant than their apparent capacity to confer material benefits and tocontribute to the general welfare.To add a further constraint to the thesis outlined in this chapter, there

is no reason to insist that the kinds of developments witnessed in Bacon’sEngland were exactly duplicated elsewhere in Europe. As we have alreadyseen, Descartes departs far less from the classical model of the philosopherthan does Bacon. It is also clear from other contributions to this volumethat in some of the continental universities during this period thereremained a considerable emphasis on the philosopher as the embodimentof certain virtues. Robert von Friedeburg thus demonstrates that in theGerman universities magistrates and university teachers were expected toexemplify particular virtues and to exert moral influence on their respect-ive charges. Ian Hunter likewise suggests that the teaching of philosophywas intended to cultivate in students ‘a distinctive inner deportment, orarray of ethical and intellectual dispositions (habitus)’.117 The persistenceof this understanding of the virtues in the Lutheran universities can be

114 Thomas Sprat,History of the Royal Society of London (London: A. Millar, 1667), 26–7, 34, 65, 341–2.115 Joseph Glanvill, ‘Usefulness of Real Philosophy to Religion’, 5, in Essays on Several Important

Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), 25. Cf. Philosophia Pia; or, A Discourse of theReligious Temper, and Tendencies of the Experimental Philosophy, which is profest by the Royal Society(London, 1671), 46.

116 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31 405 (New York: Dover, 1979).117 There was room, in these contexts, for debate over the nature of the virtues and the conception of

the philosophical life. See e.g. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophyin Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205–6.


explained in part by Philipp Melanchthon’s enthusiasm for aspects ofAristotle’s ethics. This residual fondness for Aristotle, which contrastssharply with the critical stance of Luther and Calvin, was an integral partof Melanchthon’s response to the problem of the maintenance of socialorder, and in particular the need to counter the anomic tendencies of deepconfessional divides of early modern Europe. But neo-scholasticism wasalso a feature of Calvinist institutions on the continent. It is important,then, that in stressing the novel aspects of Bacon’s prescriptions we do notfall back on a standard reading of the history of philosophy in which, inlight of subsequent historical developments, and in particular Kantianphilosophy, the place of moral formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy is routinely overlooked. That said, it is not insignifi-cant that Bacon concerns himself with natural philosophy rather thanphilosophy per se, and it may be that this makes an important differenceto the issue of the role of the virtues.

These caveats notwithstanding, Bacon does seem to be attemptingsomething quite new, as a consequence of which natural philosophybegins to distinguish itself from philosophy proper. Bacon and Baconian-ism, on this account, make an important contribution to the process thateventually, in the nineteenth century, led to the emergence of the sciencesas independent disciplines characterised by objective ‘scientific’ methods.In Bacon’s programme it is possible to discern the beginnings of a divorcebetween morality and knowing, between wisdom and science, betweensapientia and scientia. One possible and partial explanation for this divorcewas the Protestant reformers’ doubts about the moral perfectibility ofhuman beings and the impossibility of ever achieving the goals of thetraditional philosophical life. Given the inherent unreliability of humanminds, the mental disciplines of the medieval contemplative were, inBacon’s hands, externalised into a methodological regimen, the obser-vance of which was ultimately not reliant upon the moral or intellectualexcellence of the individual. In sum, it could be said that in the methodsof the modern sciences we see vestiges of the reified virtues of the earlymodern philosopher.

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CHAPTER 10

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

philosophia lost

Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad564091

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy has tended to gloss over historicalresearch into the late medieval period and to accept with little criticism anEnlightenment account of the history of ideas. This history posits anuninterrupted progress in ideas from the Enlightenment to the present,with each step representing an advance toward the modern ideal ofphilosophical inquiry. Analytic feminist philosophers have not beenimmune to this worldview. In the 1970s, feminism was at first representedas a completely new progressive phenomenon. Soon, however, researchinto the nineteenth-century women’s movement led to it being called‘second-wave feminism’. Further research pushed our knowledge ofwomen’s engagement with issues such as women’s rights and women’sexclusion from education back to before the French Revolution. But theassumption remained that feminism had its intellectual origins in theprogress of men’s ideas – in liberalism or socialism or at least in Enlight-enment thought.1 The history of feminism, in other words, was inter-preted teleologically in terms of an advance toward our currentphilosophical concerns, such as abstract individualism, rights-based theory,contractarian ethics, and so on. The modern focus on women’s equalrationality, in particular, is thought to have originated with Cartesianphilosophy. After Descartes, a common story goes, the doors of our mindswere opened to a new critical spirit that spelled the death of Aristote-lianism. Aristotle’s dictum that women were ‘monsters in nature’ –defective men who could never attain the rational excellence necessaryto be philosophers – thus fell, like belief in witches, crystalline spheresand Ptolemaic astronomy, before the advance of reason.

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

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But the historical evidence belies this optimistic story of an uninter-rupted progress in feminist thought, piggy-backing on developments inmen’s ideas. The history of women’s ideas, of which feminism is animportant part, has followed its own trajectory, or so we will argue, andthis is not one that can easily be interpreted in terms of a smooth progresstoward modern or ‘enlightened’ concepts. Other scholars have proposedthat the twelfth century was a ‘golden age’ of women’s intellectualengagement, followed by a deterioration in their access to education.2

We propose, more modestly, to show how changes to the persona of thephilosopher, from the late medieval to the early modern period, were notnecessarily advantageous for women. Progress was patchy and, occasion-ally, earlier conceptions of the philosopher’s role were more congenial towomen’s participation than later ones. We demonstrate this thesis bycomparing the varying fortunes of two women thinkers: Christine dePizan and Margaret Cavendish.

The persona of the philosopher has not been constant throughouthistory: as the historical landscape changes, so too does the philosopher’sconception of self and office – those personal qualities and the roles andduties that accompany being a philosopher. And as the persona changes, sodo the possibilities for women adopting it and thus participating in thephilosophical enterprise. If we were blindly to accept the standard ac-counts, we might think that those changes to the philosophical personaheralded by Cartesian philosophy were unequivocally positive for womenand the origins of feminist thought. But the available evidence leads us tovoice some scepticism concerning the liberating potential of the newpersona in the early modern period.

Christine de Pizan (1364–1430?) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess ofNewcastle (1623–73), each wrote texts in which they self-consciouslypresented themselves as philosophers with specific aims and agendas.They represent striking historical instances of women who deliberatelyfashioned a philosophical persona in their works: de Pizan in herL’advision Cristine or Christine’s Vision (1405–6), and Cavendish inher Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666).3

2 See, for example, Sister Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation1250–1500 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Erdmans Publishing, 2002), vol. II, 32. Many years ago Joan Kellyalso questioned the applicability of a progressive history to women, but her concern was women’slegal and social status rather than their place in intellectual affairs; see Joan Kelly, ‘Did WomenHave a Renaissance?’ in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

3 There is a slight awkwardness in calling Christine ‘de Pizan’ which arises from the differingconventions of the various disciplines. Philosophers are inclined to refer to other philosophers by

230 KAREN GREEN AND JACQUELINE BROAD

A discussion of these two texts thus provides an apt starting point for acritical analysis of the so-called liberating impact of changes in philosoph-ical personae on women.We highlight, in particular, the marked differencesin the contemporary receptions of each author. While de Pizan ultimatelymanaged to achieve considerable respect, Cavendish’s philosophicalambitions were severely belittled.These differences may have been the result of differences in their

writings. They may also have been geographic.4 But two other connectedhypotheses suggest themselves. The first is audience. De Pizan’s audiencewas mixed, but her patrons included the French queen, Isabeau deBaviere, and the queen’s sister-in-law, Valentina Visconti. She was thusable to develop an office for herself, in relation to these noble women,similar to that of a male secretary and propagandist for a king or prince.5

Cavendish, however, courted neither patrons nor proselytes, and shecriticised the views of her male contemporaries with reckless abandon.Though her works had the public support of her husband, WilliamCavendish, most independent commentators on her texts tended to beadvocates of the very experimental science she ridiculed. Not surprisingly,their responses were negative.The second, closely related, hypothesis is persona or office. From the

fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the philosopher’s role changed fromthat of a courtly moral adviser, patronised by a prince, towards that ofproselytiser for a new scientific attitude, increasingly distanced fromtheology. In the early modern period, philosophy ceased to be a courtlyor clerical activity alone, and gradually moved into the civil domain.While philosophers were still expected to contribute to the commongood, their activities – the activities of the natural philosopher, in par-ticular – became distinctly secular. De Pizan, for example, identifies the

their surnames, whereas medievalists prefer to call Christine by her first name. Those who areworking largely in the French language might prefer ‘Pizan’ to ‘de Pizan’ on the model of‘Beauvoir’ who is variously referred to as ‘de Beauvoir’ by anglophones and ‘Beauvoir’ byfrancophones. It seems odd to us to refer to our pair as Christine and Cavendish, or Christineand Margaret, and de Pizan sounds more natural to our anglophone ears than Pizan, so we haveopted to refer to their real selves as de Pizan and Cavendish, while reserving ‘Christine’ for thecharacter who appears in de Pizan’s works, and ‘the Duchess’ for Cavendish’s fictional persona.

4 Cavendish was a rather isolated figure in England, but at the same time there were a significantnumber of French women intellectuals who ran salons and possessed considerable authority; seeJohn J. Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France (Ithaca, N. Y.and London: Cornell University Press, 2002).

5 Karen Green argues for this interpretation of de Pizan’s relationship with Isabeau de Baviere in‘Isabeau de Baviere and the Political Philosophy of Christine de Pizan’, forthcoming in HistoricalReflections/Reflexions Historiques (2006).

Fictions of a feminine philosophical persona 231

pursuit of knowledge with the contemplation of God; while Cavendishconceives of natural philosophy (or the study of nature) as independent oftheology. ‘Faith and reason’, Cavendish says, ‘are two contrary things, andcannot consist together.’6 In what follows, we show that the divergingcultural contexts of their texts, their differing philosophical personae, andtheir modes of cultivating those personae, are important for understandingwhy one woman philosopher was embraced, the other neglected.

BACKGROUND

Some scholars argue that changes in the popular conception of philosophyhad profound implications for women’s participation in seventeenth-century intellectual discourse. Ruth Perry, Katharine Rogers, Hilda Smithand Margaret Atherton all suggest that the Cartesian conception ofreason, in particular, was tremendously inspirational for womenthinkers.7 On their account of the history of women’s ideas, Christinede Pizan was an anomaly for her time: not only was she proficient in Latinand a well-trained copyist, she also had access to numerous manuscripts,and was an associate of many notable male intellectuals. But it is com-monly thought that, prior to the sixteenth century, philosophy waspractised in an institutional setting among male scholars versed in thescholastic tradition. According to this chronology, the early seventeenthcentury marked a shift in the popular conception of the philosopher, andthis shift opened the way to philosophy for those individuals who hadnever received a traditional education.

Cartesian method, it is argued, popularised an egalitarian conception ofreason and challenged ancient authority. In his Discourse on the Method(1637), Descartes emphasises that God has given all human beings

6 Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in NaturalPhilosophy, Maintained By several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way ofLetters: By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle(London: privately published, 1664), 210.

7 Margaret Atherton, ‘Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason’, in Louise M. Antony and CharlotteWitt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Boulder, Colo., andOxford: Westview Press, 1993); Ruth Perry, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’,Eighteenth Century Studies 18/4 (1985), 472–93; Katharine M. Rogers, ‘The Liberating Effect ofRationalism’, in Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1982); Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth Century English Feminists (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1982); and Hilda L. Smith, ‘Intellectual Bases for Feminist Analyses: TheSeventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Kathleen Okruhlik (eds.),Women and Reason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).


the power to distinguish between truth and falsity. There is nothingexceptional about the philosopher in this respect: anybody can attainclear and certain knowledge, so long as they purge themselves of allpreconceived notions, begin with clear and distinct ideas in the mind,and proceed from simple to complex ideas in an orderly, unbiasedfashion. In this way, Descartes says, ‘I made perhaps more progress inthe knowledge of the truth than I would have if I had done nothing butread books or mix with men of letters.’8 This new, non-elitist personaliberated the philosopher from the schools. The best philosopher,according to Descartes, has a mind unencumbered by learned languages,the works of the ancients, or the art of syllogism – educational baggagethat women lacked anyway. In her article, ‘Radical Doubt and theLiberation of Women’, Ruth Perry thus asserts that ‘Cartesian assump-tions and Cartesian method . . . liberated women intellectually and thuspsychically, by making it possible for numbers of them to participate inserious mainstream philosophical discourse.’9 Although Perry does notexplicitly make the point, her words support the notion that the newphilosophical persona was a significant step forward for women. Throughtheir own efforts, women could cultivate those newly valued characteris-tics of the philosopher, such as ‘intellectual honesty’ and independence ofthought. The new emphasis on natural reason was thus a feminist ad-vance: in their writings, women were able to demonstrate that they wereequal to men in terms of this rationality, despite the disadvantages of theirformal education.But the popular account of the liberating effect of Cartesian philosophy

can be challenged on at least two counts. First, contrary to scholarlyopinion, women had discovered the emancipatory potential of reasonlong before the rise of Cartesianism. Two hundred years prior to Des-cartes, Christine de Pizan began her Book of the City of Ladies (1404–5)with a dialogue between the author and three personifications of thevirtues, Reason, Righteousness and Justice. Christine questions Reasonconcerning the almost universal misogyny of the male satirists and phil-osophers that she has read; and Reason, in response, urges Christine to useher own senses and intelligence. To accept the testimony of male author-ities, Reason suggests, would be to act like the fool who, having been

8 Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. JohnCottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985–91), vol. I, 126.

9 Perry, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’, 475.


dressed in women’s clothes while asleep, becomes convinced that he hasturned into a woman.10 De Pizan was part of a vibrant early Renaissanceculture which, while it continued to rely heavily on argument by author-ity, was well aware that, since the authorities often disagree, one also hasto rely on sense and reason. Modern scholars must be careful, therefore, toavoid misrepresenting the late medieval period as an age dominated by amoribund scholasticism – a mythical conception to which Descarteshimself contributes in his Discourse. Descartes’s narrow conception ofmedieval thought fails to take into account the vibrancy of philosophicalculture during the late medieval period, manifest both in the ‘philosoph-ical poets’, Petrarch and Dante Alighieri (who directly inspired de Pizan),and in secretaries and other courtly writers patronised by princes, some ofwhose works de Pizan knew. One such was Nicholas Oresme, who bothtranslated Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics into French and wrote importantscientific and economic treatises.11

Second, the popular account of the Cartesian influence on womenpromotes a rather simplistic view of the philosophical scene in seven-teenth-century England. Although seventeenth-century English womenwere inspired by a popular form of Cartesianism, textual evidence suggeststhat they were much more directly influenced by their fellow countrymen.Without great proficiency in Latin and French, these women were oftenreliant on English texts, English translations, or the commentaries of theirEnglish peers. Margaret Cavendish is a notable case in point: her numer-ous works reveal that her nearest influences were men such as her hus-band, William, as well as Thomas Hobbes, Walter Charleton and JosephGlanvill – Englishmen who were intimately associated with the new

10 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Picador,1983), vol. I, ch. 2, section 2 6; La citta delle dame, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards, trans. Patrizia Caraffi(Milan and Trento: Luni Editrice, 1997), 46–8.

11 The somewhat complex question of de Pizan’s knowledge of Oresme’s translations of Aristotle isdiscussed in Sylvie Lefevre, ‘Christine de Pizan et l’Aristote Oresmien’, in Au champ des escriptures,ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris: Honore Champion, 2000), and Karen Green, ‘On Translating Christinede Pizan as a Philosopher’, in Karen Green and Constant Mews (eds.),Healing the Body Politic: ThePolitical Philosophy of Christine de Pizan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). The influence of Dante on dePizan is attested in Arturo Farinelli, Dante e la Francia dall’eta media al secolo di Voltaire, (2 vols.,Milan: Hoepli, 1908; reprint ed Geneva: Slatkine, 1971); Earl Jeffrey Richards, ‘Christine de Pizanand Dante: A Reexamination’, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 222(1985), 100–11; M. E. Temple, ‘Paraphrasing in the Livre de la Paix of Christine de Pisan of theParadiso Iii–Iv’, PMLA 37 (1922), 182–6; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Literary Genealogy and the Problem ofthe Father: Christine and Dante’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993), 365–8;Anna Slerca, ‘Le livre du chemin de long estude (1402–03): Christine au pays des merveilles’, inBernard Ribemont (ed.), Sur le chemin de longue etude (Paris: Champion, 1998).


scientific advances in England and the advent of the Royal Society.12 Onthe one hand, these men embraced the new philosophical persona pro-moted in the works of Descartes: they were opposed to assertions ofauthority, and they valued the natural intellect over book learning. JohnAubrey reports that Hobbes, for example, ‘had read much, if one con-siders his long life; but his contemplation was much more than hisreading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men,he should have knowne no more then other men.’13 But, on the otherhand, English natural philosophers, such as Charleton and Glanvill,upheld a different conception of the philosopher to that of their contin-ental peers. While the French Cartesians were devoted to the pursuit ofclear and certain knowledge, the English natural philosophers dedicatedtheir studies to the empirical, the hypothetical and the probable.14 TheEnglishmen rejected the language of certainty and the search for axioms sotypical of Cartesian philosophy. As Charleton says in a letter to Cavend-ish: ‘the Virtuosi of our English Universities . . . have proclamed openWar against the tyranny of Dogmatizing in any Art or Science’.15 TheEnglish natural philosopher is characterised by his anti-dogmatism,open-mindedness, and willingness to accept probabilities rather thancertainties.If we are to understand Cavendish’s conception of herself as a philoso-

pher, we must pay careful attention to this English philosophical back-ground. For one thing, the evidence suggests that amidst the intellectualupheavals of the seventeenth century, the persona of the philosopher wasin fact multifaceted – such that it would be more accurate to talk aboutphilosophical personae in this period, rather than a single dominant persona.To interpret Cavendish’s philosophy solely in light of the Cartesian personawould therefore be misleading or inadequate.

12 On Cavendish and these figures, see Stephen Clucas, ‘Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism:Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A PrincelyBrave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 199–209. Though Hobbes was never a member of the Royal Society, Cavendish would have been awareof his keen interest in the new science.

13 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, edited with an introduction by Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker andWarburg, 1949), 154.

14 For an overview of this topic, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

15 Walter Charleton to Margaret Cavendish, 7May 1667, in A Collection of Letters and Poems: Writtenby Several Persons of Honour and Learning, Upon divers Important Subjects, to the Late Duke andDuchess of Newcastle (London: Langly Curtis, 1678), 112.


THE ‘SELF-FASHIONINGS’ OF DE PIZAN AND CAVENDISH

In what follows, we examine the ways in which de Pizan and Cavendishimagine themselves as philosophers with the help of literary devices suchas fiction and allegory. This analysis of de Pizan’s Christine’s Vision andCavendish’s Blazing World provides a basis for our discussion about whyone philosopher found acceptance and the other did not. Of key interesthere is the kind of persona each woman cultivated, and how these werelikely to be received in their differing historical-cultural contexts.

On the surface, although these works are separated by more than twocenturies, they share a remarkable number of similarities. Christine’sVision is an allegorical tale of the misfortunes that have plagued bothFrance and Christine. In her allegory, de Pizan uses the popular device ofa ‘dream vision’ to offer advice to rulers and to console the afflicted.Cavendish’s Blazing World is the story of a young woman who becomesthe powerful empress of an imaginary world. Like Christine’s Vision, thisfictional tale also serves a partly political purpose: while de Pizan exploits aBoethian allegory to urge French princes to pursue virtue, Cavendish usesher utopian fantasy to present a defence of monarchy as the best form ofgovernment. In both works, the author appears as herself in a semi-fictional guise. In her allegory, ‘Christine’ is the philosopher who, likeBoethius, receives spiritual encouragement from Philosophy herself;whereas the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is employed by the Empress as herpersonal scribe and counsellor. In their fictions, de Pizan and Cavendishalso position themselves among the philosophers, while at the same timedemonstrating an ambivalent attitude toward ancient and modern phil-osophy in general. They present their heroines as solitary figures on themargins of traditional philosophy, whose pursuit of knowledge is never-theless legitimised by a sympathetic female authority figure: Philosophiain the case of de Pizan, the Empress in the case of Cavendish.

Cavendish was most likely acquainted with a famous volume of dePizan’s writings. The collected works that de Pizan prepared for Isabeaude Baviere in 1414 (now Harley MS 4431 in the British Library) areinscribed with the signature of Henry, Duke of Newcastle, 1676. In arecent paper, Cristina Malcolmson argues that Cavendish’s husband,William, may have brought back a copy of de Pizan’s City of Ladies,among other works, from Europe.16 So despite the fact that Margaret

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


Cavendish did not speak French, she may well, with her husband’sassistance, have gained some familiarity with de Pizan’s texts.Nevertheless, the superficial similarities between the two texts cannot

mask the fact that de Pizan and Cavendish have radically differentconceptions of the philosopher’s role. In her texts, de Pizan incorporatesexcerpts from Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and shefollows his characterisation of metaphysics as the study of being and henceas encompassed by the study of the highest being, God.17 She also seesphilosophy as close to prophecy, her father having been a philosopher/astrologer in the court of Charles V, and she is able to exploit the traditionof the sibyls to authorise her prophetic voice.Drawing on a tradition of prophetic biblical interpretation, which

looks to the Bible for universal laws of justice, de Pizan warns that Godwill punish the vices of princes as he punished Nebuchadnezzar. InChristine’s Vision, she uses various devices to authorise her prophecies.As well as mentioning the sibyls, thus underscoring the appropriateness offemale prophecy, she represents herself as being called to write by Libera,a crowned lady who personifies France. Libera praises Christine’s aptitudefor intellectual study and says:

Friend, to whom God and Nature have conceded the gift of a love of study farbeyond the common lot of woman, prepare parchment, quill, and ink, and writethe words issuing from my breast; for I wish to reveal everything to you. AndI am pleased that you, following your wise good will, should henceforth presentthe written memories of my worthiness.18

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–35. This tempting hypothesis appears, however, to beimpossible to substantiate. The last known owner of Harley 4431 was Louis of Bruges who mayhave acquired it during his stay in England in 1472–3. His Flemish library was acquired by LouisXII of France and was housed at Blois by 1518, but Harley 4431 was not then included among hisbooks. (See Maureen Cheney Curnow, ‘The “Livre de la cite des dames” of Christine de Pisan:A Critical Edition’ (Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1975), 377 and 431–2). It is thereforepossible that the manuscript was never taken out of England, and there is no reason to assume thatit was in Flanders during the Cavendishes’ exile, as Malcolmson proposes.

17 St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowman, (2 vols.,Chicago:Henry RegneryCompany, 1961); LilianeDulac andChristineM. Reno, ‘L’humanisme vers1400, essai d’exploration a partir d’un cas marginal: Christine de Pizan traductrice de Thomasd’Aquin’, in Monique Ornato and Nicole Pons (eds.), Pratiques de la culture ecrite en France au XV e

siecle: Actes du Colloque international du CNRS, Paris, 16–18mai 1992, organise en l’honneur de GilbertOuy par l’unite de recherche ‘Culture ecrite du Moyen Age tardif’ FIDEM, Textes et etudes du MoyenAge II (Louvain-la-Neuve: Federation internationale des instituts d’etudes medievales, 1995), 161–78,and ‘Traduction et adaptation dans L’advision Cristine de Christine de Pizan’, in Charles Brucker(ed.), Traduction et adaptation en France a la fin du Moyen Age et a la Renaissance: Actes du Colloqueorganise par l’universite de Nancy II (23–24 mars 1995) (Paris: Honore Champion, 1997).

18 Christine de Pizan, Christine’s Vision, trans. Glenda K. McLeod (New York and London: GarlandPublishing Inc., 1993), 15; Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno andLiliane Dulac (Paris: Honore Champion, 2001), 17.


Libera chooses Christine to be her scribe or clerk. As Glenda McLeodobserves, this relationship between Libera and Christine models therelationship between a sovereign and secretary, and thus functions topromote de Pizan’s own authority and stature as a writer.19

In The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish’s fictional counterpart isalso employed as a scribe to a sovereign. Cavendish originally publishedthis short fictional piece together with a work on natural philosophyentitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). Few scholarshave examined the significance of this joint publication.20 Why, we mightask, does Cavendish append a work of fiction and fancy to a seriousphilosophical treatise? One explanation is that The Blazing World serves astrategic purpose: Cavendish uses this fictional tale to promote an imageof herself as a legitimate philosopher. In one key scene, the soul of theDuchess is recommended to the Empress as non-dogmatic and rationalcompared to the souls of other well-known philosophers:

Then I will have, answered she [the Empress], the soul of some ancient famouswriter, either of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Epicurus, or the like. The spirit said,that those famous men were very learned, subtle, and ingenious writers, but theywere so wedded to their own opinions, that they would never have the patience tobe scribes. Then, said she, I’ll have the soul of one of the most famous modernwriters, as either of Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont, Hobbes, H. More,etc. The spirit answered, that they were fine, ingenious writers, but yet so self-conceited, that they would scorn to be scribes to a woman. But, said he, there’s alady, the Duchess of Newcastle, which although she is not one of the mostlearned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet is she a plain and rational writer, forthe principle of her writings, is sense and reason, and she will without question,be ready to do you all the service she can.21

The Duchess subsequently becomes the Empress’s ‘favourite’. Like dePizan, Cavendish draws on an imagined female authority figure in orderto affirm her status as a philosopher, and to promote those characteristicsthat she sees as worthy of philosophers.

As part of their self-presentation as philosophers, both Cavendish andde Pizan present a brief survey of the history of philosophy in order to

19 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 46, n. 16.20 One exception here is Rosemary Kegl, ‘“The World I Have Made”: Margaret Cavendish, Femi-

nism and the Blazing World’, in Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna CallaghanFeminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996).

21 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, in Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Textsin the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 67–8.


contrast the ‘mistaken’ views of other thinkers with their own ‘enlight-ened’ views of the present. Out of their critical responses to the maletradition, there emerge two very different personae.In Cavendish’s Blazing World, the Empress’s spiritual advisers tell her

that ‘your ancient and modern philosophers . . . endeavoured to gobeyond sense and reason, which makes them commit absurdities; for nocorporeal creature can go beyond sense and reason’.22 When the fictionalCavendish begins to construct a ‘new world’ of her own (in her head), sheconsiders and then rejects the views of past and present thinkers, includ-ing Pythagoras, Epicurus, Descartes and Hobbes. Above all, the Duchessscorns those writers who hold inflexible opinions:

The truth is, said she, wheresoever is learning, there is most commonly alsocontroversy and quarrelling; for there be always some that will know more, andbe wiser than others; some think their arguments come nearer to truth, and aremore rational than others; some are so wedded to their opinions, that they neveryield to reason; and others, though they find opinions not firmly grounded uponreason, yet for fear of receiving some disgrace by altering them, will neverthelessmaintain them against all sense and reason, which must needs breed factions intheir schools, which at last break out into open wars, and draw sometimes anutter ruin upon a state or government.23

When the fictional Cavendish has completed her examination of thehistory of philosophy, she resolves to create a world ‘of her own inven-tion’, a world ‘composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter’.24

This new world, a world that conforms to Cavendish’s own materialistconception of nature in the Observations, was ‘so well-ordered and wiselygoverned, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words’.25 The Empressexpresses her strong admiration: ‘Her Majesty was so ravished with theperception of it, that her soul desired to live in the Duchess’s world.’26 InThe Blazing World, Cavendish thus dramatises the philosophical explor-ations of her serious companion piece, the Observations. But whileCavendish merely expounds her theory in the larger work, in her fantasyfiction her general attitude and approach to philosophy wins support andapproval from a royal audience.What, then, is distinctive about the philosophical persona that is

affirmed in this discourse? First, Cavendish’s Duchess displays thosecharacter traits typical of the seventeenth-century philosopher: she ishostile toward ancient authorities, she promotes a reliance upon the self

22 Cavendish, The Blazing World, 60. 23 Ibid., 88.24 Ibid., 75. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.


as a source of knowledge, and places a high value on reason and rational-ity. In her other works, Cavendish uses these attributes to justify beingboth a woman and a philosopher. In the preface to theWorlds Olio (1655),she says that ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily asthe Men, being of the Effeminate Sex.’27 Yet, she points out, some womenmight be wiser than some men, if only they would make the effort:

Women can have no excuse, or complaints of being subjects, as a hinderancefrom thinking; for Thoughts are free, those can never be inslaved, for we are nothindred from studying, since we are allowed so much idle time that we know nothow to pass it away, but may as well read in our closets, as Men in their Colleges;and Contemplation is as free to us as to Men to beget clear Speculation.28

A woman might achieve ‘clear speculations’ by spending her free timein contemplation, rather than trivial pursuits. Adopting a similar stance ina preface to the Observations, Cavendish says ‘That I am not versed inlearning, nobody, I hope, will blame me for it, since it is sufficientlyknown, that our sex being not suffered to be instructed in schools anduniversities, cannot be bred up to it.’29 But she dismisses her lackof education by saying that she would rather prove ‘naturally wise’than learned and foolish.30 Cavendish thus embraces the persona of the‘unlearned thinker’ to legitimise her endeavours as a woman philosopher.

Cavendish also appeals to those character traits typical of the Englishnatural philosopher: a lack of pride or conceit in one’s opinions, and acommitment to finding the most probable theory, rather than holdingdogmatically to one’s viewpoint. In The Blazing World, the Duchesscriticises those philosophers ‘who are so wedded to their opinions, thatthey never yield to reason’.31 In her Philosophical and Physical Opinions(1655), Cavendish defends herself against her ‘Condemning Readers’, byarguing that although her theories are only probable, all natural philoso-phy is built upon probabilities; ‘and until probabilities be condemned byabsolute and known truth’, she says, her own theories ought to ‘have aplace amongst the rest of probabilities’.32 Cavendish advises that natural

27 Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio. Written by the Right Honorable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle(London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), sig. A4r.

28 Ibid., sig. A5r.29 Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill, Cambridge

Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11.30 Ibid., 12.31 Cavendish, The Blazing World, 88.32 Margaret Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Written by her Excellency, the Lady

Marchionesse of Newcastle (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 27.


philosophy does not ‘binde a man to strickt rules as other Sciances do, itgives them an honest liberty’.33 Then, in her Philosophical Letters (1664),Cavendish says that ‘I love Reason so well, that whosoever can bring mostrational and probable arguments, shall have my vote, although against myown opinion.’34 Cavendish presents herself, in other words, as a ‘philo-sophical libertine’, an individualist thinker who is not tied to one theoryor another, but free to follow her own sense and reason.35 Her maincriticism of her fellow natural philosophers is that they stray fromtheir commitment to philosophical liberty, and become enamoured oftheir own opinions. This ‘libertine’ persona enables Cavendish to claimsome legitimacy for her own original theories, without displaying anunfeminine confidence or arrogance in her own work.Christine de Pizan also presents a survey of past philosophy in order to

define the merits of her own viewpoint. But her chosen persona is notablydifferent to that of Cavendish. In the second book of Christine’s Vision,Christine meets Dame Opinion. She is a huge vague form, made up of amultitude of moving coloured shadows. Christine sees these shadowsfloating around the heads, in through the ears, and all about a multitudeof debating ‘clerks’ whose disputes seem to be determined by the multi-tude of variegated shadows that surround them. Turning to her, this greatshadowy Opinion informs Christine that she (Opinion) is the cause ofmen’s disputes and that:

From the earliest times, there were a few clever men whom I incited to suchinquiry that they discovered philosophy; all the arts and sciences were thusinvestigated – and the way to reach them was found – because of me. If I hadnot existed, Philosophy would never have been discovered, as I will explain toyou more plainly hereafter. Notwithstanding that Philosophy and her daughtersexisted before me and that she is the daughter of God, I was created as soon ashuman understanding was; and she and I (understanding first and then myself )opened the way for clear-witted men to discover her.36

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

33 Ibid., sig. A1v.34 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, ‘A Preface to the Reader’, sigs. B1r–v.35 On this topic, see Clucas, ‘Variation, Irregularity, and Probabilism’, 207; and Shapiro, Probability

and Certainty, 63.36 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 61, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 54–5.37 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 63, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 56.38 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 65, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 57.


critically assesses the early ancient philosophers, Thales, Anaxagoras,Empedocles and Pythagoras. Basing her account closely on Aquinas, dePizan has Dame Opinion inform her that all these philosophers erredbecause they inquired into material causes alone: ‘All these proposed abody as the first principle and element; and so by what has already beensaid, everyone previously discussed seems to have proposed only thematerial cause.’39 Aristotle, however, enjoyed a more noble mind andunderstanding than the other philosophers: he was the ‘prince of philoso-phy’.40 ‘He did not attack the ancient ones as poets’, according to dePizan, ‘but because they resembled philosophers and were withouttruth.’41

The true philosopher, on de Pizan’s view, never settles for mereopinion. ‘Oh what folly in man’, says Dame Opinion, ‘whose mindshould be governed by reason, to base his understanding on me anddecide with surety through me about uncertain and unknown matters!’42

De Pizan thus conceives of her role as a philosopher as that of a searcherafter truth. Dame Opinion says to Christine,

Dear Friend, be at peace . . . there is no fault in your works, even though becauseof me, many people variously argue about them. For some say that students ormonks forged them for you and that they could not come from the judgment of awoman. But those who say this are ignorant, for they do not know the writtenaccounts that mention so many valiant and educated women of the past – wiserthan you – and especially the prophets, and since Nature is not diminished in herpower, this can even yet be so. Others say that your style is too obscure and thatthey cannot understand it, so it is not very enjoyable. Thus I variously cause someto praise and others to repress praise. But as nothing can possibly please everyone,I tell you this much: truth, by the testimony of experience, does not let censureaffect reputation. I advise you then to continue in your work, for it is valid, anddo not suspect yourself of failing because of me. When I am based on law, reason,and true judgment in you, you will not err in the foundations of your work.43

Dame Opinion says that she cannot exist ‘within intelligences that seethe truth and understand the nature of all things’.44 Truth and opinion,on her view, are antithetical.

Like Aquinas, de Pizan regards philosophy as ultimately inseparablefrom theology, and this is the note on which her allegory ends. But since

39 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 72, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 69.40 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 73, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 70.41 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 69, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 64–5.42 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 81, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 81.43 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 87, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 88–9.44 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 63–4, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 57.


God has created women as well as men in the image of God, worship andunderstanding are as much within a woman’s reach as a man’s. De Pizanthus lays claim to the status of philosopher. She says to Dame Philosophy,

To me, a simple woman, you have shown yourself by your noble grace in theform of Holy Theology to nourish my ignorant spirit most wholesomely for mysalvation. Have you not treated me as your handmaiden, but better than youpromised, that is, have you not served me from your most advantageous andworthy dishes which come from the table of God the Father, for which I thankyou (which is to say God, who is you) more than I would know how to express?Truly you are all science. You are the true physics, which is theology inasmuch asyou are about God, for the causes of all of nature are in God the Creator. You areethics because you teach the good and honorable life, or loving what should beloved, which is God and one’s neighbor. These things, Theology, you yourselfreveal in the sciences of ethics and physics. You are logic because you demon-strate the light and truth of the just soul. You are the study of politics because youteach the virtuous life, for no city is better protected than by the foundation andwater of the faith and by the firm agreement to love the common good, which istrue and supreme. It is God you discuss in the science in which you have revealedyourself to me, that is, in theology. Oh theology, the supreme philosophy, whichI long to praise, Lady, in you!45

For de Pizan, then, following the well-worn synthesis of Platonism andChristianity crafted by Augustine and Aquinas, opinion is the shadowyknowledge available to the soul that has not yet been graced by truephilosophy – the understanding of theology and Christian truth. Chris-tine establishes her claim to be a philosopher on argument, her member-ship of the human race, and the fact that, as a woman, ‘she is not anotherspecies than man’.46

The persona of the philosopher as the wise prophet of a truth that is bothrational and revealed is associated with a set of images that de Pizan is notslow to exploit. Her rhetoric builds on the Boethian image of Philosophiaas a woman who comes to console the unjustly despised. In Christine’sVision, Philosophia is represented as speaking as directly to her daughterChristine as she once spoke to Boethius, underscoring her daughter’s claimto participate in philosophical wisdom.The image of the philosopher presented by Boethius is one of truth

spurned by corrupt powers that is able to take solace in inner virtue and adirect relation to divine truth. De Pizan found in this image a powerfulendorsement of her own struggle for wisdom. She also wrote at a period

45 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 142, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 140–1.46 De Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, II.54.1 (187), La citta delle dame, 376–8.


when Boethius’s vision coincided with Christian sensibility. Althoughwomen were represented as weak, their weakness could also be repre-sented as a strength. In L’advision, Christine ends her account of theprophecies of Daniel to Nebuchanezzar with the comment, ‘thus will beconfirmed the prophecy of the Virgin which says: “Deposuit potentes desede et exaltavit humiles [the powerful will be cast down and the humbleraised]”’. This text can be read as a warning to corrupt princes, but it canalso be interpreted as holding out hope for women.47 Within this Chris-tian mentality, with its emphasis on the Virgin Mary and the virtues ofchastity, humility and grace, women, as nuns, abbesses and anchorites,could operate with considerable authority.48 Occasionally, as in a manu-script copied for John Fastolf in Rouen between 1430 and 1450, de Pizan isrepresented as a nun in a black habit. Yet de Pizan was fundamentally asecular writer, who promoted the active life and argued that women haveas great a capacity for prudence as men. She transformed the active life ofpractical phronesis, extolled by Aristotle as a model for men, to includewomen. But, as is evident in the quotation above, she saw the dividebetween the secular and sacred realms as permeable. Practical philosophyis subsumed within theology, and a woman’s practical engagement in themanagement of the household, estate or state can be interpreted as asmuch a form of charity or love of God as the devotion and prayers of anun.

These two critical surveys of past philosophy underscore the differencesin the way these two thinkers conceive of philosophy and the philoso-pher’s role. Margaret Cavendish wrote at a time when a Thomist episte-mology was no longer dominant. She does not observe a sharp distinctionbetween truth and opinion but supports the common view of her fellowEnglishmen according to which the philosopher can only ever put for-ward provisional claims. In Probability and Certainty in the SeventeenthCentury, Barbara Shapiro observes that in Cavendish’s time knowledgecame to be seen as a continuum: ‘The lower reaches of this continuumwere characterised as “fiction”, “mere opinion”, and “conjecture”; itsmiddle and high ranges as “probable”, “highly probable”; and its apexas “morally certain”.’49 Knowledge, on this view, was a matter of degree,

47 De Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, xiv, n. 17.48 For a discussion of the importance of Marian imagery in de Pizan, see Louise D’Arcens, ‘Petit estat

vesval: Christine de Pizan’s Grieving Body Politic’, in Karen Green and Constant Mews (eds.),Healing the Body Politic: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005),201–26.

49 Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 4.


rather than an all-or-nothing affair. Contrary to de Pizan, Cavendishmaintains that the ideal philosopher can no longer aspire to attainabsolute truth. In The Blazing World, the Empress asserts that ‘Noparticular knowledge can be perfect’;50 only God is capable of having anabsolute and perfect knowledge of all things.51 In her other philosophicalworks, Cavendish provides a metaphysical basis for this view: as finitecreatures in an infinite universe, she says, humans can have no vantagepoint from which to judge that their particular theories are correct. Onthe true nature of the natural world, ‘we are all but guessers’.52 For similarreasons, Cavendish is opposed to de Pizan’s conception of philosophy asthe study of God. For our limited intellects, according to Cavendish,God’s nature is utterly incomprehensible: we can never possess ‘a finiteidea of an Infinite God’.53

DE PIZAN AND CAVENDISH: THE PROBLEM OF REPUTATION

In their fictional personae, both de Pizan and Cavendish appeal to con-ceptions of the philosopher that enjoyed prominence in their respectivehistorical periods. Although they are highly critical of their male counter-parts, they base their criticisms on received notions of philosophical‘truth’ and the valued characteristics of the philosopher. Cavendish criti-cises modern philosophers for being conceited and rigid in their opinions,but she criticises them according to their own anti-dogmatic ideals. DePizan likewise condemns philosophers for being duped by opinion,instead of pursuing truth in the form of theology – the true vocation ofthe philosopher according to Aquinas. It is curious, however, that whilede Pizan was respected as a philosopher in her lifetime, Cavendish failedto find support and acceptance among her intellectual peers.In her day, Cavendish’s philosophical works were roundly condemned

for having ‘neither ground [n]or foundation, nor method’.54 Even intel-lectual women, such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (the sister ofRobert Boyle) and Mary Evelyn (the wife of John Evelyn), were quick todismiss Cavendish as mad or nonsensical. Upon meeting Cavendish,Mary Evelyn remarked that

50 Cavendish, Blazing World, 48.51 Ibid., 56.52 Cavendish, Observations, 269.53 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 139.54 Cavendish, Observations, ‘To the Reader’, 21.


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

Similarly, in a letter to her brother Richard Boyle, Katherine Jonesclaimed that Cavendish had barely escaped the lunatic asylum. In April1667, England had just begun peace talks with Holland to bring an end tothe Second Anglo-Dutch War. But Jones reports that ‘the Duchess ofNewcastle is more discoursed of than the Treaty, and by all the CharactersI hear given her I am resolved she escapes Bedlam only by being too richto be sent thither’. Cavendish was, however, ‘mad enough to convey thattitle to the place of her Residence’.56 Male philosophers were only slightlymore accommodating. Her friend and correspondent, Walter Charleton,praised Cavendish for being ‘above her sex’.57 But even Charleton thoughtthat there was little to approve in her natural philosophy. ‘I have not yetbeen so happy’, he says, ‘to discover much therein that is Apodictical, orwherein I think my self much obliged to acquiesce.’58 Another fellow ofthe Royal Society, the Platonist Henry More, assured his friend AnneConway that no one would bother replying to Cavendish’s arguments;59

and Samuel Pepys – another Society man – rudely dismisses her as a ‘mad,conceited, ridiculous woman, and he [William Cavendish] an asse tosuffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.60

De Pizan’s own account of her troubles show that, for her too, philo-sophical acceptance was by no means a given. Nevertheless, she clearlymanaged to establish a considerable reputation. In Christine’s Vision, shetells how the Count of Salisbury, who had been sent to France in relationto the marriage of Isabelle of France to Richard II, was aware of her skill as

55 Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohun, April 1667, in Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. WilliamBray (4 vols., London: Henry Colburn, 1857), vol. IV, 8–9.

56 Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, to Richard Boyle, 13 April 1667, in the British Library, Althorp B4(item 30). For the sake of uniformity, we have modernised the spelling. On Jones, see LynetteHunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh’, in LynetteHunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997),178–97.

57 Charleton to Cavendish, 3 May 1663, in Collection of Letters and Poems, 92.58 Charleton to Cavendish, 7 May 1667, in ibid., 111.59 More to Conway, [undated] 1665; in Marjorie Hope Nicolson (ed.), The Conway Letters: The

Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684, revised withan introduction and new material, ed. Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 237.

60 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (11 vols.,London: Bell, 1976), vol. IX, 123.


a poet and consequently invited her son to accompany him on his returnto England, to be a companion to his own son. Salisbury soon afterwardslost his life attempting to oppose Henry IV’s usurpation of Richard’sthrone; but Henry IV was no less impressed by de Pizan, and invited herto the court of England (an invitation that de Pizan declined after somedissimulation). Not long afterwards, she was invited to the court of Jean-Galeas Visconti at Milan, an offer which tempted her more, but which shewas unable to take up because of the duke’s death.61 These invitationscame quite early on in de Pizan’s career and we know of them through herown account. By the time she died, which was around 1430, she was awell-known figure. In a 1434 description of the town of Paris, Guillebertde Mets mentions her as having written many treatises in Latin andFrench.62 In his 1441 poem, The Ladies’ Champion, Martin le Franc usesde Pizan as the most notable local example of a woman whose capacitiesshow that women are capable of all the excellences of men. Le Francclaims that her name will be celebrated endlessly, by trumpet and horn,and her death is fulsomely lamented. She is described as valiant, virtuous,versed in Latin and letters, a Tully for eloquence, and a Cato forwisdom.63

So how might we explain the negative reception of Cavendish as aphilosopher? One explanation might be found in Cavendish’s contem-porary audience (or lack thereof). In many of her works, Cavendishimagines herself as separate and apart from the general intellectual com-munity. This separateness is dramatised in The Blazing World, when theEmpress rejects everyone but the Duchess on account of the conceit andrigidity of their opinions. Only the Duchess, it is suggested, is a trulyworthy philosopher, relying as she does on her innate sense and reason,and nothing else. But while de Pizan depicts herself in a courtly office, inrelation to a queen she actually served, the Duchess’s royal supporter ismerely imaginary. In reality, in Cavendish’s time, the society of naturalphilosophers extended far beyond the court, to include a number ofamateurs of different religious and political persuasions. The chief audi-ence for developments in natural philosophy could be found in thekitchens and distillation rooms of common households, as well as the

61 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 109–24, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 97–117.62 Guillebert de Mets, Le Paris de Charles V et de Charles VI vu par des ecrivains contemporains (Caen:

Paradigme, 1992), partial re-edition of Le Roux de Lincy and L. M. Tisserand,Description de la villede Paris au XVe siecle by Guillebert de Mets (Paris, 1855), 234.

63 Martin le Franc, Le champion des dames, ed. Robert Deschaux (5 vols., Paris: Champion, 1999), vol.IV, 178–9.


more formal meetings of the Royal Society.64 Natural philosophy ceasedto be the activity of isolated, privileged individuals, and became insteadthe communal activity of many. To be welcomed into this scientificcommunity, Cavendish needed to be accepted by the generality of herpeers; but far from trying to win them over, she set herself apart andcourted their hostility through ridicule.

Another closely connected explanation might be found in the way inwhich Cavendish’s persona diverges from the more general persona of thenatural philosopher in the early seventeenth century. Although Cavendishcultivates the persona of a philosophical libertine, she also demonstrates aprofound scepticism toward a principal aspect of natural philosophy inEngland – the new experimental method. Cavendish’s Observations in-cludes an extended critique of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) andHenry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1663) – two key items of propa-ganda for the newly established Royal Society. In the Observations,Cavendish scorns experimental philosophy, and microscopy in particular:‘most of these arts are fallacies, rather than discoveries of truths’, she says,‘for sense deludes more than it gives true information, and an exteriorperception through an optic glass is so deceiving, that it cannot be reliedupon’.65 In The Blazing World, Cavendish’s critique takes the form ofsatire.66 Of telescopes, the Empress says that ‘these telescopes caused moredifferences and divisions . . . than ever they had before’.67 The Empresscommands the experimenters to break their instruments because ‘naturehas made your sense and reason more regular than art has your glasses, forthey are mere deluders, and will never lead you to knowledge of truth’.68 Inresponse, the experimenters (represented as ‘bear-men’) plead with theEmpress, claiming that ‘we shall want employment for our senses, andsubjects for arguments; for were there nothing but truth, and no falsehood,there would be no occasion for to dispute, and by this means we shouldwant the aim and pleasure of our endeavours in confuting and contradict-ing each other’.69 The supposed rationale for the new technology, in other

64 See Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society’, 182–4.65 Cavendish, Observations, 9.66 On this topic, see Sarah Hutton, ‘Science and Satire: The Lucianic Voice of Margaret Cavendish’s

Description of a New World Called the Blazing World’, in Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (eds.),Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Madison, N. J.:Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003; London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 161–78.

67 Cavendish, Blazing World, 26.68 Ibid., 27–8. 69 Ibid., 28.


words, is to provide subject matter for dispute and disagreement – topromote elitism rather than a new egalitarianism.This satirical representation of experimental philosophy was hardly

likely to appeal to supporters of the new experimentalism –figures suchas Katherine Jones, Mary Evelyn, Walter Charleton, Henry More andSamuel Pepys.70 Cavendish’s alternative, solitary, philosophic idealputs her at odds with her empiricist-driven contemporaries. In mid-seventeenth-century England, a vital part of the new scientific enterprisewas the compilation of masses of empirical data with the assistance of newinstruments such as microscopes and telescopes. There was an expectationthat the new philosopher would roll up his sleeves, abandon his armchair,and venture out into the world in a quest to find new facts. The naturalphilosopher could no longer rely on the word of established authority orexpect to claim certainty for his results; the best he could settle for was‘high probability’. To claim this degree of probability, as Barbara Shapiroobserves, it was necessary to avoid error and fallibility in one’s findings.71

One way to do this was to conduct experiments and to invite others towitness the verification of one’s hypotheses. The Royal Society played avital role in the public staging of experiments: in Joseph Glanvill’sopinion, reports of their trials could ‘be received as undoubted Recordsof certain events . . . Which advantage cannot be hoped from privateundertakers, or Societies less qualified and conspicuous’.72 With formalpublic approval, one could then legitimately represent one’s findings as‘highly probable’. Science, for the English natural philosopher, had thusbecome a collective enterprise. The philosopher/counsellor whose role wasto offer moral and political advice was replaced by the communal ideal ofthe scientist.Cavendish spurned the new scientific persona that accompanied this

intellectual upheaval. Philosophy, for Cavendish, is closely related tofiction writing: it is an activity of the individual’s mind, somethingdependent on one’s internal sense and reason, rather than practical experi-ment and collective investigation. In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish

70 On Katherine Jones’ involvement in the new science, see Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society’; andon Mary Evelyn’s part, see Frances Harris, ‘Living in the Neighbourhood of Science: Mary Evelyn,Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites’, in Hunter and Hutton, Women, Science and Medicine,198–217.

71 See Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 5.72 Joseph Glanvill, ‘An Address to the Royal Society’, in Scepsis Scientifica, or, Confest Ignorance, the

Way to Science, facsimile reprint of 1665 edition (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg OlmsVerlag, 1985), sig. C1r.


boasts that her theories ‘did merely issue from the Fountain of my ownBrain, without any other help or assistance’.73 This conception of phil-osophy is also affirmed in a key scene of The Blazing World, whenCavendish’s fictional persona and the Empress start ‘creating new worlds’from their fancy. Elsewhere, the Empress is told that ‘every human creaturecan create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, andpopulous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within thecompass of the head or scull’.74 By contrast, Joseph Glanvill warns that‘while we frame Scheames of things without consulting the Phaeno-mena, we do but build in the Air, and describe an Imaginary World ofour own making’.75 For the English natural philosopher, such purelymental constructs were dangerous and likely to lead to mistaken dogma.But Cavendish openly supports the contemplative life: again,she consciously represents herself as a solitary thinker, rather than partof a co-operative, collective enterprise.

We have suggested two hypotheses to explain the different fortunesof our two women philosophers: one a difference in audience, and theother related to developments in the office of the philosopher. These areinterconnected, because a fifteenth-century aristocratic audience waslargely interested in moral edification, presented in an entertainingformat. By contrast, the natural philosophers of the seventeenth centurywished to collaborate on the new enterprise of uncovering the secrets ofnature. The persona of the philosopher in the early fifteenth century wasmore literary than scientific, more theological than empirical. De Pizan,echoing Dante, explains how she pursued the ‘long path of learning’ anddiscovered the beautiful style of the philosopher-poets which was naturalto her.76 It was as a poet that she made her early reputation, but this waspoetry and rhetoric put to service in the pursuit of moral and religioustruth. The female allegorical figures who peopled the moral universe ofDante, Petrarch and, most importantly, Boethius, allowed themselves tobe transformed into allegories of wisdom that could serve as images of dePizan herself. Thus, in the Epistre Othea, one of de Pizan’s most widelycopied works (dating from 1400), Othea, goddess of prudence andwisdom, looks down from the clouds, in the illuminated versions of the

73 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 3.74 Cavendish, Blazing World, 72.75 Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, sig. B4r.76 De Pizan, Christine’s Vision, 119, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, 110.


text supervised by de Pizan, looking not unlike de Pizan herself, who inother miniatures offers her work to a patron, Louis of Orleans.77

Like Cavendish, de Pizan saw a connection between fiction, or poetry,and philosophy. In doing so, however, de Pizan was not out of step withher male contemporaries, but very much one among them. In the lettersthat make up the debate over the Romance of the Rose, de Pizan forcefullyputs forward the view that poetry and rhetoric have their place as a meansof engagement whereby higher moral and theological truth is illuminated.She criticises the moral ambiguities of Jean de Meun’s development of thepoem, and compares him unfavourably with Dante.78 De Pizan’s imagin-ation did not have to represent itself as a mere ‘fancy’, but could build ona well-established allegorical tradition to represent itself in the mostserious terms as a literary path to philosophical illumination. De Pizanconsciously, and often quite brilliantly, exploited the philosophical con-ventions of her time to construct for herself a female philosophical personawhich drew its authority as much from Boethius’s Dame Philosophy asfrom the Virgin Mary. Having gained as much access to the works of theestablished authorities as was available to the average clerk, she was able toconstruct a philosophical persona on nothing more than literary style,reason, sense and a judicious mining of the established texts for materialthat suited her purposes.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

On the surface, the seventeenth century seemed to offer a favourableenvironment for women philosophers such as Cavendish. In the earlymodern period, Descartes and his followers popularised a new egalitarianconception of reason that inspired women to engage in the intellectualenterprises of their time. Cavendish openly embraces the persona of the‘unlearned thinker’ in her Blazing World and in the prefaces to her otherphilosophical works: although she is an uneducated woman, she says, sheis capable of using her natural intellect to develop rational and probabletheories. On closer analysis, however, the ‘new philosophy’ was not so

77 This observation was first made by Sandra Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othea’ Paintingand Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986).

78 See Eric Hicks (ed.), Le debat sur Le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Honore Champion, 1977), 141–2, andJoseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La Querelle de la Rose. Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill:North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978), 138. De Pizan’s critique ofmorally ambiguous poetry is developed at length by Rosalind Brown-Grant in Christine de Pizanand the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).


easily appropriated by women in early modern England. To become asuccessful natural philosopher in England, one increasingly needed to beaccepted as an equal among a group of peers. One also needed expertise inexperimental mechanics, experimental method and mathematics. Theseforms of expertise had to be acquired in an institutional or group setting.Women, however, were not permitted to attend ‘public’ institutions suchas the Royal Society; and nor did they have easy access to expert training.Although Cavendish attended a Royal Society meeting in 1667, theinvitation was at her own behest, and it was not until 1945 that womenwere permitted to become official fellows of the Society. Indeed, the earlyRoyal Society prided itself on being an exclusively masculine environ-ment. In a verse in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, AbrahamCowley writes that Philosophy ‘whatsoe’re the Painters Fancy be’ isindisputably a ‘Male Virtu’.79 Like Aristotle before them, the Societymen associated the feminine with everything that philosophy was not.

Thus, despite the received view of the earlier period as one in which anageing scholastic institution militated against women philosophers, theexample of de Pizan suggests that the first flush of the Renaissance offereda philosophical persona – the courtly ‘philosopher poet’ – that wasrhetorically congenial for a woman with literary skill and philosophicalaspirations. An enterprising woman could also win a courtly audience andelicit patronage. With hindsight, it is not surprising that Cavendish’s self-fashioning as a philosopher failed to find acceptance. For one thing,Cavendish did not have a receptive audience to her ideas in the form ofroyal patrons; and her conception of herself as a solitary, self-reliantthinker was inimical to natural philosophy in her time. Like de Pizan,Cavendish emphasised the connections between philosophy and fiction –an enterprise that relied on the imagination, rather than external proofsand collective endeavours. In her works, Cavendish appropriates thesolitary ideal of the philosopher in order to justify her intellectual effortsas a woman. Unfortunately for Cavendish, this was the very persona thatempiricist philosophers defined themselves against, and that would later –with the rise of the literary novel – be disparagingly associated with thefeminine. Far from encouraging women, these further developments inthe persona of the philosopher – the evolution of the philosopher into ascientist or experimenter – facilitated women’s exclusion from yet another

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


intellectual sphere. For de Pizan, by contrast, the persona of the philoso-pher that she found in Boethius was a mantle as easily worn as thatmarvellously figured cloak in which Philosophy appeared when shecame to console him. This is the persona of the philosopher aloof fromthe crowd, who looks within the self, and is consoled by love of wisdomand the doctrine that virtue is the highest good. For de Pizan, as for herpeers, the virtue of philosophy was no painter’s fancy, but an allegoricaldepiction of the deepest truth. In conclusion, one might say thatultimately the contrasting reception of Cavendish and de Pizan was acase of philosophia lost.


CHAPTER 11

John Locke and polite philosophy

Richard Yeo430537

The inscription on the bust of John Locke in the Temple of BritishWorthies in Stowe, Buckinghamshire, describes him as the ‘best of allphilosophers’.1 When Voltaire discussed An Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding (1690) he declared that past thinkers, including ReneDescartes, had written ‘the Romance of the Soul’, but now ‘a Sage at lastarose, who gave, with an Air of the greatest Modesty, the History of it’.2

Voltaire thus ensured that Locke’s reputation extended throughoutEurope.3 However, such fame came only towards the end of his life,because his major works did not begin to appear until 1690. Moreover,although the Essay carried his name (in the first edition only in thededication, not the title page), the Two Treatises of Government (1690)and A Letter Concerning Toleration (first appearing as Epistola de tolerantiain 1689) were both published anonymously, and not owned by Lockeuntil he bequeathed books to the Bodleian Library in a codicil to his will.

After his death in 1704, Locke’s friends and admirers fashioned hisstatus as a philosopher. By sampling these portraits we can see that writerswho contributed to the making of his image regarded the identity of thephilosopher as one that had to be defined in relation to other identities,offices or commitments. It is useful to distinguish this public identity

1 The bust of Locke was placed there in the 1740s by Lord (Richard Temple) Cobham. See MarkGoldie (ed.), John Locke. Selected Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xxviii.

2 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English nation (London: C. Davis, 1733) in letter no. XIII, 94–108, at97–8. Voltaire drew on Pierre Des Maizeaux, A collection of several pieces of Mr. John Locke, neverbefore printed, or not extant in his works (London: J. Bettenham for R. Francklin, 1720). See alsoC. Mallet, ‘John Locke’, in Nouvelle biographie generale (46 vols., Paris: Firmin Didot freres, 1853–66), vol. XXXI, 434–47; Gabriel Bonno, ‘The Diffusion and Influence of Locke’s Essay. . .’,Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947), 421–5.

3 Leslie Stephen, ‘John Locke’, in Dictionary of National Biography (21 vols., Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1885–90), vol. XII, 27–36, at 35: ‘Locke’s reputation as a philosopher was unrivalledin England during the first half of the eighteenth century, and retained great weight until thespread of Kantian doctrines.’ See also Hans Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’, in Vere Chappell (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 252–89.

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from the persona that Locke might have struggled to find during hislifetime.4 Locke began the Essay in 1671 and carried a draft of it whereverhe went, adding significantly to it in France between 1675 and 1679, andcompleting it during his political refuge in the Netherlands, most likelyby the end of 1686.5 Since this was his major life’s work, we might expectit to be related to some sense of vocation.6 Did Locke find a philosophicalvocation before one was constructed for him after his death? I considerfirst the ways in which he might have been able to imagine an appropriatepersona for such a vocation.An influential version of the expectations of a ‘modern’ philosopher is

found in the assessments of Locke’s closest friends. In praising his moraltone and civil conduct, these encomiums give the philosopher a part inpolite conversation. We can see this in the remarks of Damaris Masham(1659–1708), the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth(1617–88).7 Here, roughly extracted, are her main observations:

Mr. Locke . . . was a profound Philosopher: he was a man every way fitted for thegreatest Affairs: He had Polite Learning: He was a well bred man: He understoodmore, or less, of almost every thing that was usefull to mankind, and yet hehimself was superiour to all this . . . No man was (as I think you know) lessMagisterial, or Dogmatical than he . . . Mr. Locke was alike conversable with allsorts of People. . .He had no Melancholie in his Constitution.8

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

4 Compare the fabrication of Isaac Newton as an Enlightenment hero. See Richard Yeo, ‘Genius,Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860’, Science in Context 2 (1988), 257–84.

5 See James Hill and J. R. Milton, ‘The Epitome (Abrege) of Locke’s Essay’, in Peter R. Anstey (ed.),The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), 2–25.

6 For commentary on the category of persona, I am relying on the editors’ introduction to thisvolume. I have linked persona to the notion of vocation in Locke’s case, without fully analysing thatrelationship. For relevant approaches, see John Dunn, ‘Individuality and Clientage in the Forma-tion of Locke’s Social Imagination’, in Reinhard Brandt (ed.), John Locke Symposium, Wolfenbuttel1979 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 43–73; Amelie Rorty,Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophyof Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), chs. 1–2.

7 From 1791 until his death on 28 October 1704, Locke lived with Damaris and her husband, SirFrancis Masham, in their house in Oates, Essex. On 12 January 1704/5, Damaris answered aninquiry from Jean le Clerc (1657–1736), who was composing an eloge. Le Clerc translated part ofthis letter in his account published in Bibliotheque choisie 6 (1705), art. 5, 342–411. The full version is[Jean Le Clerc], An account of the life and writings of Mr. John Locke . . . second edition, enlarged(London: John Clarke, 1713).

8 Damaris Masham to Jean Le Clerc, 12 January 1704/5, quoted from the transcription of MS J 57a inthe Universiteitsbibliotheek, Amsterdam; published by Roger Woolhouse in Locke Studies 3 (2003),167–94, at 186–9. The predisposition to melancholy was identified as the scholars’ disease: see, forexample, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628).

John Locke and polite philosophy 255

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

As various chapters in this volume show, the resources for crafting thepersona of the philosopher on moral foundations were ancient ones.Stephen Gaukroger reminds us that Plato attacked the sophists, notprimarily for intellectual errors but rather for moral failings: the will-ingness to make ‘weak arguments appear better than strong ones’.10 Bythe seventeenth century, Francis Bacon included character assessmentsin his criticism of Aristotle’s legacy; in natural philosophy, Cartesiansand Newtonians traded ad hominem invectives. On the constructiveside, promoters of the ‘new philosophy’, such as the leaders of the RoyalSociety of London, affirmed their possession of certain methods, rules ofthinking and, to various extents, suitable habits of behaviour. Theglowing portraits of Locke drew on this legacy. If he sought to find apersona that expressed a philosophical vocation, Locke did not need tostart from scratch.

The leitmotif of these portraits of Locke was that he was a Christianphilosopher, and also a scholar and a gentleman. Writing in 1714, oneauthor improvised on the theme introduced by Masham and Le Clerc: ‘inshort, he was as well a Good-natur’d and Well-bred Gentleman, as afinish’d Scholar, and profound Philosopher’.11 In using these three terms,however, we should be careful not to conflate categories: the title of‘gentleman’ referred to a member of the gentry, a social status with aneconomic (though flexible) basis; ‘scholar’ indicated a profession withinthe university. There was no similar economic or institutional anchoragefor the ‘philosopher’. Rather, this was an identity, or a persona, thatcertain gentlemen or scholars might choose to adopt. Here there was a

9 Memoirs of the Life of Mr. John Locke (London: F. Noble, 1742), 10–11. This anonymous work drawson Le Clerc, and also on Pierre Coste, ‘The character of Mr Locke’, in The works of John Locke.A new edition, corrected (10 vols., London: T. Tegg, 1823; reprint by Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963),vol. X, 161–74. This originally appeared in Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, February 1705. Costetranslated the Essay into French; he lived in the Masham household from 1696 to 1706.

10 See Stephen Gaukroger’s chapter in this volume.11 The Remains of John Locke (London: E. Curll, 1714), 27–8. For extracts from Locke’s works,

assembled as a manual of moral and intellectual conduct, see Philosophical Beauties selected fromthe Works of John Locke, Esq . . . to which is prefixed, Some Account of His Life (London: J. Cundeefor T. Hurst, 1802).

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problem of conflicting identities since, as Steven Shapin has argued, inseventeenth-century English parlance scholars were regarded as potentialpedants, and were usually contrasted with gentlemen.12 In another twist,Robert Boyle, Locke’s influential aristocratic mentor, confided to hissister in 1646 that he regarded philosophy as a virtuous refuge from thesuperficiality of polite society: ‘You can Your Selfe, Philosophy, bearme witnesse, how frequently and Studiously I have declin’d all otherCompanys, to enjoy the Blessings of Yours.’13

These complications are worth noting because some later affirmationsof polite philosophy seem comparatively relaxed. From the early 1700s,Joseph Addison in The Spectator announced the desirability of emulatingSocrates, or at least bringing ‘Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries,Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables,and in Coffee-Houses’.14 In his Essays Moral and Political (1741–2), DavidHume suggested that this relationship ‘betwixt the learned and conver-sable worlds’ was now assured: no longer was philosophy ‘shut up incolleges and cells, and secluded from the world and good company’. Hedefined a new office, to which he appointed himself: ‘I cannot butconsider myself as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominionsof learning to those of conversation’.15 In fact, Locke’s pupil, AnthonyAshley Cooper (1671–1713), the third Earl of Shaftesbury, had alreadyincorporated this notion of a reformed philosophy into his views on‘politeness’ – as influentially sketched in his Characteristicks (1711).16

Indeed, in a letter of 1707 he acknowledged that Locke had rescuedphilosophy from scholasticism:

I am not sorry, that I lent You Mr. Locke’s Essay of Humane Understanding ;which may as well qualify for Business and the World, as for the Sciences and aUniversity. No one has done more towards the Recalling of Philosophy from

12 Steven Shapin, ‘“A Scholar and a Gentleman”: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practi-tioner in Early Modern England’, History of Science 29 (1991), 279–327; and his A Social History ofTruth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1994), 170–5.

13 Cited in Shapin, Social History of Truth, 173, from the Boyle Papers, Royal Society, vol. XXXVII, ff.166–7.

14 [ Joseph Addison], The Spectator, 12 March 1710/11, ed. Gregory Smith (4 vols., London: Dent,1970), vol. I, 31–2.

15 David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Selected Essays ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–5, at 2, 4.

16 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). It first appeared in three vols. (London, 1711); arevised second edition appeared in 1714.


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

However, as I note below, Shaftesbury disagreed strongly with his tutorabout the nature of the philosopher’s office. In contrast, the young Locke,as an undergraduate in the 1650s, did not have this luxury of dissentwithin broad agreement. At Christ Church, Oxford, Locke faced thechoice of a vocation – a career in the university, the church, the law ormedicine. Although the title of philosopher was bestowed on him from1690, his own acceptance of this identity, and any persona that expressed itin public, only became an issue after he chose not to elect any of theseusual professions. In any case, Locke rejected the current model of thephilosopher, which he took to be exemplified in ‘the Schools’, as institu-tionalised in the universities. In addition, he was perturbed by the ways inwhich habits of thinking, engendered by scholastic training, affectedpolite conversation, turning gentlemen into ciphers for words and phrasesthey had not properly scrutinised. I argue that Locke worked towards hisown intellectual vocation by rejecting impolite learning and philosophy, inthe various guises that I will specify; and that this involved a criticism ofwhat he saw as improper intellectual conduct, as much as substantiveerroneous doctrines. This gave his philosophical identity a negative, or atleast preparatory, disposition – one famously epitomised in his character-isation of his role as that of a humble ‘under-labourer’ (to which I shallreturn). However, there was also a positive aspect, since Locke believedthat God had bestowed rational and linguistic faculties suitable for theimprovement of human life in this ‘State of Mediocrity’. There was thus amoral duty for every person, not only philosophers, to cultivate the properuse of these capacities.18

A VOCATION AS A PHILOSOPHER?

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

17 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Several letters written by a noble lord to a young man at the university(London: J. Roberts, 1716; 2nd edn, 1732), 4. This remark is from the first letter of 24 October1706/7.

18 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 1975), IV.xiv.2. John Dunn has stressed this point in his writings; for a summary, seehis Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 3.

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This showed off his reading of Homer’s Odyssey: he assumes the role ofUlysses striving to reach Ithaca, that is, the university, where he wants to‘court Philosophy, assuredly a more desirable Penelope’.19 It would,however, be nonsensical to take this as a clear commitment to the kindof philosophical inquiries we now associate with the Essay.Until he published the Essay, it is difficult to characterise Locke’s

activities under a single label. Maurice Cranston, Locke’s twentieth-cen-tury biographer, notes that before he returned to England in 1689 Lockemight have been fairly described as ‘a minor Oxford scholar, and ex-diplomatist of small experience, an amateur scientist, an unpublishedwriter and unqualified physician’.20 Of course, in the absence of well-defined careers for men of learning, it was not unusual for them to adopt avariety of occupations. Thomas Hobbes, for example, pursued philosophyas a tutor and secretary in the households of the Cavendish family (earls ofDevonshire). It is therefore important to appreciate the intellectual andinstitutional conditions within which Locke could have developed theconcept of a vocation in philosophy.Locke might have become a cleric, or pursued a life of learning

within the university. After graduating BA in February 1656, MA inJune 1658, and being appointed tutor in 1661, he was on both thesepaths.21 In English Protestantism, the notion of a particular ‘calling’, inaddition to the general calling of all men to follow Christ, was wellaccepted. The former, as Robert Sanderson (1587–1663) expressed it in1621, was one ‘wherewith God enable us, and directeth us, and puttethus on to some special course and condition of life, wherein to employour selves, and to exercise the gifts he hath bestowed on us’.22 For auniversity graduate, this could be a calling to a profession or to secularstudy more generally, which might include classical, philological, his-torical or mathematical scholarship. However, divinity was the subjectnormally expected to occupy the attention of the graduate, leading to

19 Locke to ___, [May 1652?], in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (8 vols., Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1976–9), vol. I, no. 5. Hereafter cited as Correspondence.

20 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 113. Themost reliable account is J. R. Milton, ‘John Locke’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. XXXIV, 216–29.

21 He was admitted to Gray’s Inn on 10 December 1656 but did not then take up legal studies. SeeCorrespondence, vol. I, p. 42, n. 2.

22 Robert Sanderson, XXXVI Sermons (London: Joseph Hindmarsh, 1689), 205, cited in MordechaiFeingold, ‘Science as a Calling? The Early Modern Dilemma’, Science in Context 15 (2002), 79–119,at 81.


service in the church. In the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge,continued membership as a fellow required ordination, except in thecase of a small number of fellowships designated for physicians andlawyers. There was also the notion of the ‘general scholar’ versed in theencyclopaedic circle of the arts and sciences, the fundamentals of whichwere represented by the seven liberal arts that comprised the trivium(grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (geometry, arith-metic, astronomy and music) of the curriculum. This training wasregarded as preparatory to traditional branches of philosophy, such asethics and metaphysics. However, the entire enterprise was seen to bein the service of theology – the queen of the sciences and the ‘profes-sional’ requirement of a cleric.23 Thus Locke’s unpublished Latin essayson natural law, composed shortly after 1660, qualified as an acceptablestudy for a Master of Arts at Christ Church, even though they hadlittle bearing on his formal college positions as praelector (lecturer) inGreek (1661–2) and in rhetoric (1663).24

In November 1663, Locke seems first to have confronted the possibilityof finding a vocation outside the university and the church. He consulteda friend, John Strachey (1634–75), about whether to take holy orders, aswas expected of the ‘senior Philosophus’.25 In view of Locke’s position,John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, had begun to solicit characterreports.26 However, Strachey counselled him to choose between ordin-ation and ‘your Genius and Studies’. Interestingly, he referred to Locke’sversatile intellect and passion for reading in medical terms: it would bewise, he said, ‘not to meddle with your owne Genius and inclinationwhich is as bad as Helmonts Archeus’. For the Dutch physician andchemist, Jan Baptista van Helmont (1580–1644), this ‘Archeus’ was the

23 See Richard Serjeantson (ed.), General Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation ofthe General Scholar by Meric Casaubon (Cambridge: R. T. M. Publications, 1999), esp. 131–58;Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford,vol. IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 211–357.

24 J. R. Milton, ‘Locke’s Life and Times’, in Chappell, The Cambridge Companion to Locke, 5–25, at7–8. As Censor of Moral Philosophy, Locke was required to perform on formal occasions. See his‘Valedictory Speech as Censor of Moral Philosophy, (1664), in John Locke, Essays on the Law ofNature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 218–43.

25 There were three classes of students at Christ Church – forty discipuli, forty philosophi, and twentytheologi. When a vacancy occurred among the latter, all of whom had to be in holy orders, thesenior philosophus was promoted to their rank. See J. R. Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, in G. A. J.Rogers (ed.), Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 29–47; alsoCorrespondence, vol. I, 3–4. On Boyle’s decision against a clerical vocation, see Shapin, Social Historyof Truth, 168–71.

26 Correspondence, vol. I, 214; Cranston, Locke, 74–5.

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vital force that controls the working of the body; residing in the stomach,it caused diseases if irritated or thwarted.27 On this account, Locke’spenchant for study was not trivial; it was physiologically rooted. Lockeand his friend were not talking about a persona to be lightly performed, anoutward set of behaviours consciously adopted. Yet the two concepts – atalent or genius implying a particular vocation, and a persona – are notnecessarily incompatible. A certain persona, or mask, might well be wornin order to announce one’s chosen vocation. In Locke’s case, however,nothing was yet settled.28

Locke managed to get a dispensation from Charles II allowing him toremain at Christ Church as a don without taking orders.29 Medicine wasanother option he was already exploring: his notebooks show extensiveextracts from medical and chemical texts, made from the late 1650s. InNovember 1665, he had another chance to choose a vocation. At theintervention of Sir William Godolphin, Locke was made secretary to SirWalter Vane, the leader of an English diplomatic mission to Cleves (orCleve, in Locke’s usage) to meet the Elector of Brandenburg, FredericWilliam of Hohenzollern.30 Locke left Oxford on 13 November 1665.While in Cleves he wrote to Boyle, and also to Strachey. The third of fiveletters to Strachey is of interest. It opens thus:

The old opinion that every man had his particular Genius, that ruled anddirected his course of life, hath made me sometimes laugh, to thinke, what apleasant thing it would be, if we could see little Sprites bestride men, (as plainelyas I see here women bestride horses) ride them about, and spur them on in thatway, which they ignorantly thinke they choose themselves . . . To what purposethis from Cleve? I’ll tell you; if there be any such thing (as I can not vouch thecontrary) certainly mine is an Academick goblin.31

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

27 Strachey to Locke, 18 November 1663, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 163. On van Helmont, see RoyPorter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 53–4.

28 In this context, ‘genius’ was a talent or predisposition, perhaps conveyed by a divine afflatus, not a‘personality’ in the post-nineteenth-century sense of the term. See Yeo, ‘Genius, Method andMorality’.

29 This was granted on 16 September 1666. It was arranged through the influence of the Earl ofShaftesbury.

30 The Hohenzollerns had acquired the duchy of Cleves in 1609. On this mission, see Correspondence,vol. I, 225–7; and Cranston, Locke, ch. 7.

31 Locke to John Strachey, early January 1666, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 182.


the Rhetorick of Carfax does that of Belings gate. But it behoves theMoncks to cherish this art of wrangeling in its declineing age.’32 AlthoughLocke’s ‘Academick goblin’ was active, the prospect of traditional univer-sity philosophy, either in Oxford or Brandenburg, quite simply appalledhim.

Upon his return from Cleves in February 1666, Godolphin offeredLocke another diplomatic post with the ambassador to Spain, EdwardMontagu, the Earl of Sandwich. Writing to Strachey from London, heacknowledges that this was a crossroad moment, saying that ‘if I imbraceit I shall conclude this my wandering yeare’.33 Six days later he wroteagain, reporting that: ‘those faire offers I had to goe to Spaine have notprevaild with me, whether fate or fondnesse kept me at home I know notor whether I have not let slip the minute that they say everyone has oncein his life to make himself I cannot tell’.34

Within a year, however, one of those minutes arrived again. In July1666, Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper (created first Earl of Shaftesburyin 1672), the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1661, and future LordChancellor.35 The (then) Lord Ashley was visiting his son in Oxford, andLocke arranged for some medicinal water from Astrop to be brought tohim. By April 1667, Locke had left Oxford to join Ashley’s household inExeter House, The Strand, London.36 He lived there for the next eightyears. Locke therefore joined the ranks of early modern thinkers, includ-ing Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz, who pursued philosophyoutside the universities.37

LOCKE IN THE 1670S : SEARCHING FOR POLITE PHILOSOPHY

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

32 Ibid. Both H. R. Fox Bourne and de Beer note that Locke says ‘monks’ when he means friars, andCarthusian when he probably means Capuchin. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (2 vols.,London: H. S. King, 1876), vol. I, 109; Correspondence, vol. I, 246, n. 2 and 255.

33 Locke to Strachey, 22 February 1666, Correspondence, vol. I, no. 186.34 Locke to Strachey, 28 February 1666, in ibid., no. 187.35 K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), ch. 11.36 Their relationship was strengthened when Locke correctly diagnosed Ashley’s long-term illness as

due to a cyst on the liver and, on 12 June 1668, supervised (but did not perform) a risky operationthat saved his patron’s life. See Locke to de Briolay de Beaupreau, 20 January 1671, in Correspond-ence, vol. I, no. 250 for an account of the post-operative treatment. Locke did not take the Bachelorof Medicine degree at Oxford until February 1675.

37 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, intro. by A. I.Donaldson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 270–1. Hadot does not mention Hobbes or Locke.

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says that the occasion for this work was conversation among ‘five or sixFriends meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a subject veryremote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficultiesthat arose on every side’. Locke recalls that he then suggested they‘examine our own Abilities, and see what Objects our Understandingswere, or were not fitted to deal with’. He brought some ‘some hasty andundigested thoughts’ to the next meeting.38 One friend, James Tyrrell,later made a marginal note next to the relevant passage in the ‘Epistle’ inhis copy of the Essay: ‘This was in winter 1673 as I remember being myselfone of those that met there when the discourse began about the Principlesof morality, and revealed Religion.’39 Tyrrell’s recollection of the datemust be mistaken if the date given in Draft A is correct, but the subjectsare certainly of the kind likely to have brought the ‘Difficulties’ men-tioned. Of course, Locke did think that such caution applied only tomoral and religious subjects. In the Essay he reports on his presence ‘in aMeeting of very learned and ingenious Physicians’ at which he suggestedthat they consider ‘what the Word Liquor signified’.40 This was aninstance of a more general desideratum – to avoid the ‘unintelligibleTerms’ that rendered ‘Philosophy . . . unfit, or uncapable, to be broughtinto well-bred Company, and polite Conversation’.41 On this basis, theEssay can be placed in the context and conventions of polite company – asLocke effectively does in his ‘Epistle’. However, I want to consider theway in which Locke defined his intellectual attitudes and methods againstimpolite philosophy. I suggest that some of the crucial developmentsoccurred in the years after the first draft of his work.On 14 November 1675 Locke left England for France; he did not return

until April 1679. Just prior to his departure he began to keep a journal.A journal entry for Saturday 2 July 1678 lists two manuscripts in aninventory of possessions he left with Madame Herinx in Paris – given as‘Essay de Intellectu’ and ‘Essay de Morale’. The first of these was a draft of

38 Locke, Essay, 7. The earliest surviving draft (Draft A) of the Essay is entered in a folio-sizecommonplace book under the marginal heading ‘Intellectus’; the ‘title’ at the top of the pagereads: ‘Sic Cogitavit de Intellectu humano Jo.Locke an[no] 1671’. See ‘Adversaria 1661’, 56–89,94–5. This manuscript is in private ownership; microfilm copies are held in the Bodleian and theHoughton Library, Harvard (MS Eng860.1). Draft A cannot be the first rough notes Lockedescribes in his ‘Epistle’; but it is one of the stages of composition of a work ‘continued byIntreaty; written by incoherent parcels’ (Essay, 7).

39 See John Locke, Essay (London: Eliz. Holt for Thomas Bassett, 1690), marginalia in ‘Epistle to theReader’, at 2. This copy is in the British Library, Shelfmark C. 122. f 14.

40 Locke, Essay, III.ix.16. More generally, see J. R. Milton, ‘Locke, Medicine, and the MechanicalPhilosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001), 221–43.

41 Locke, Essay, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, 10.


the Essay.42 The second item, completed after 1676, was his translation ofthree essays from Pierre Nicole’s Essais de morale (1671–9).43 When hereturned to England, Locke dedicated these to the Countess of Shaftes-bury, acknowledging his boldness in attempting a translation when he ‘hadbut begun to learne French’.44 He played on the conceit that the Countesswas ‘constantly humble in a high station’, thus personifying the moraltone of Nicole’s writing.45 However we interpret these remarks, theimportance of Nicole’s views on the limits of human intellectual capaci-ties for Locke should not be underestimated.46 Once the context ofthese moral concerns about why, and how, individuals should pursueknowledge are recognised, we can understand Locke’s caution about theoffice of philosopher.

Pierre Nicole’s essays represent Locke’s exposure to Jansenism. WithBlaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld, Nicole thought within a Cartesianframework, but departed radically from Descartes’s confidence in ourability to make our minds transparent to ourselves, and hence clearinstruments for seeking truth.47 For Nicole, there was a deep-seatedweakness in the heart and will, and a natural inclination to pride thatalways worked against true knowledge. This sensibility is palpable in the

42 Journal for 1678, MS Locke, f. 3, 183–4. This ‘Essay de Intellectu’ was not the manuscript nowknown as Draft A; this was entered in ‘Adversaria 1661’ (see footnote 38), which remained inEngland. See J. R. Milton, ‘The Dating of “Adversaria 1661”’, Locke Newsletter 29 (1998), 105–17 at114.

43 Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale, contenus en divers traittez sur plusiers devoirs importans (4 vols., Paris,1672–8). See John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (2nd edn, Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1971), no. 2040a for the earliest (1671) of several editions he owned. There arereferences to this translation in Locke’s journal for August 1676 (MS Locke f. 1, 402–6), which maycomprise a draft of its preface. W. von Leyden surmised that if the translation was near completionin August, then Locke may have begun it early in 1676. See von Leyden, Laws of Nature, 253.

44 The original manuscript (M.A. 232) is held in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; amicrofilm is in the Bodleian (film 70).

45 ‘To the Right Honorable Margaret Countesse of Shaftesbury’, cited in Fox Bourne, Locke, vol. I,296–7. Fox Bourne supposed that Locke had done the translation mainly to improve his French,but also admitted that he engaged with the text, and that the second essay was ‘more in harmonywith Locke’s general line of thought’ (294–305, at 300). One of the two English editions of Locke’stranslation suggested that it might have been part of larger project, a translation of ‘the Port RoyaleEssays’. See Discourses . . . Being some of the Essays written in French by Messieurs du Port Royal.Render’d into English by the late John Lock, Gent. (London: J. Downing, 1712), ‘Advertisement’.

46 I hope here to add to what has been noted as neglect of Locke’s translation and its clues to histhinking in the mid-1670s. See John Marshall, John Locke. Resistance, Religion and Responsibility(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), vxii; and 178–94, on the importance of the thirdof Nicole’s essays (‘the way of preserving peace with men’) for Locke’s ethical thought. See also IanHarris, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; rev. edn, 1998),282–4, 287–8, for reference to Nicole in the context of Locke’s educational views.

47 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), 356–7.

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second of the three essays translated by Locke – ‘Traite de la faiblesse del’homme’ (‘Discourse on the Weakness of Man’).48 Here Nicole (inLocke’s translation) refers to Descartes, although not by name, as ‘a litlefellow in a corner of the world’, and says ‘that this new Philosopher givesus more light, into naturall things, then all the others together’.49 How-ever, Nicole uses this point not to celebrate Descartes’s achievements butrather to indicate that ‘three thousand years’ of so-called knowledge canbe challenged, and perhaps debunked, overnight. The vanity of humanintellectual pretensions is thus exposed, and Nicole alleges ‘that philoso-phy is a vain amusement, and that men know almost noething’.50 Behindthis pessimism was the conviction that passion controls reason: ‘We flotein the Ocean of this world, under the conduct of our passions, with whichwe drive, some times this way, sometimes that way, as a vessell, withoutcompasse, without pilot.’51 If we ask how the philosopher can rise abovethese human frailties, Nicole’s final words are not encouraging: men mustacknowledge that there is ‘noe thing but darknesse in their understand-ings; weaknesse, and inconstancy in their wills; and that their life is but ashadow, that passes, a vapor that flies away’.52

As we know, Locke took a different, far less pessimistic, stance in theEssay, maintaining that we have a duty to seek knowledge, and a fairchance of achieving it, providing that our aims match our limited capaci-ties. It is possible that Locke regarded Nicole’s outlook as one that he hadto confront and reject. During the period in which he worked on thetranslation, his journals contain material bearing not only on the eventual

48 See E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist. A Study of his Thought (The Hague: Nijhof,1973). More generally, see Gabriel Bonno, Les relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955). For Nicole’s Augustinian startingpoint, and his debt to Hobbes, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press,2002), 508–10, 517.

49 Discourses: Translated from Nicole’s Essays, by John Locke, with important variations from the originalFrench. Now first printed from the autograph of the translator, in the possession of Thomas Hancock(London: Harvey and Darton, 1828). I use the recent edition of this translation in Jean Yolton (ed.),John Locke as Translator: Three of the essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English (Oxford: VoltaireFoundation, 2000), para. 33, 56–8. Hereafter I cite this as Nicole, Discourses.

50 Nicole, Discourses, para. 33. In the original French, the description of Descartes is simply ‘unhomme’; Locke adds the word ‘litle’ [sic], although this apparent denigration is at odds withreports that Descartes gave him ‘a relish for Philosophical studys’. See Masham to Le Clerc, 12January 1704, 173 (see note 8 above); also Charlotte S. Ware, ‘The Influence of Descartes on JohnLocke. A Bibliographical Study’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1950), 210–30.

51 Nicole, Discourses, para. 48.52 Ibid., para. 67. Of course, negative assessments of human intellectual achievement were not new to

Locke: for example, he owned H. C. Agrippa’s The Vanity of the Sciences (Latin edition of 1568);Harrison and Laslett, Library of John Locke, no. 39.


content of the Essay, but also on the way Locke thought about the pursuitof knowledge as a moral duty. The entry of 15 August 1676 summarises hisconcerns. Locke says that Nicole’s account of ‘the shortness of our livesand the weakness of our understandings’ gives us ‘reason enough to desireall needless difficulties should be removed out of the way’.53 In fact, Lockeis talking about reform of spelling as a way of improving communication;but he relates even this issue to Nicole’s stress on fundamental humanweakness. Other responses to this theme occur in various entries of 1677,on topics such as ‘Understanding’, ‘End of Knowledge’, ‘Knowledge’, and‘Error’.54

One long entry under the heading ‘Of Study’, written between 26March and May 1677, is pertinent.55 In what amounts to a short essay,Locke decides that there are assumptions and practices that must bechallenged if improvement in the use of reason is to be achieved. ‘OfStudy’ betrays three preoccupations: first, to dismiss unreachable goals,such as that of polymathic, or encyclopaedic, knowledge; second, tocondemn formal disputations as part of university education; and third,to criticise certain features of the humanist tradition of commonplaces.Locke does not concern himself here with erroneous doctrine, but ratherwith intellectual demeanour. His three examples of impolite philosophyare cases of ‘men behaving badly’ – to borrow the title of the BBC TVcomedy series! These cases are polymathic hubris, wrangling and com-monplacing. The salient theme is that the weaknesses diagnosed all fallshort of the high expectations that should attach to the pursuit ofknowledge:

It is a duty we owe to God as the fountain and author of all truth, who is truthitself, and ’tis a duty also we owe our own selves if we will deal candidly andsincerely with our own souls, to have our minds constantly disposed to entertain

53 MS Locke, f. 1, 404–5. This passage is in a shorthand entry of 15 August 1676 under the head of‘Speling’ (402–6). For the transcription, see von Leyden, Laws of Nature, 256–7; also cited inMarshall, John Locke, 134. Another journal entry for 29 July 1676 (f. 1, 367–70), under the heading‘Essay Morall’, concerns Nicole’s proof of the existence of God, as treated in the first of the essaysLocke translated. See reprint in Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke. Political Essays (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), 245–6 (under ‘Atheism’).

54 MS Locke, f. 2, 42–54. Some of these entries of 1677 are reprinted, not always with accuracy, inPeter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke: With Extracts from his Journals and Common-PlaceBooks (London: Bell, 1884), 86–110. For more reliable reprints of some of these entries, seeR. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds.), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, Together with Excerpts fromhis Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 77–125; and Goldie, Locke, 260–5.

55 MS Locke, f. 2, 85–140. On this, see Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s “Of Study” (1677): Interpreting anUnpublished Essay’, Locke Studies 3 (2003), 147–66.

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and receive truth wheresoever we meet with it, or under whatsoever appearanceof plain or ordinary, strange, new, or perhaps displeasing, it may come in ourway.56

In reality, as Locke explains, most individuals grow up with ‘opinionsplanted in him by education time out of mind’. Although such views areoften merely ‘oracles of the nursery’, they come to be ingrained in ‘thevery constitution of the mind’. He believes that education and studyshould equip a person to assess such opinions, especially those that dividethe world into ‘bands and companies’, as in ‘matters of religion’.57 Thethree instances of impolite learning fail to do this. Firstly, the ambition ofencyclopaedic, or universal, knowledge entertained by Renaissance poly-histors (Locke may have been thinking of Isaac Casaubon, or his sonMeric) succumbs to hubris. Against this, he declares that ‘the extent ofknowledge of things knowable is so vast, our duration here so short, andthe entrance by which the knowledge of things gets into our understand-ing so narrow, that the time of our whole life would be found too short’ toattain such a goal.58

The second and third targets overlap. ‘Bookish men’, says Locke, readcertain books and authors very intently, lodging ‘arguments pro and con’in their memories to serve them on various occasions. But this makes aman a good talker not a good thinker: ‘it teaches a man to be a fencer; butin the irreconcilable war between truth and falsehood, it seldom or neverenables him to choose the right side, or to defend it well being got of it’.59

Locke is referring to the Latin disputations that were central to thecurriculum of the universities. Topics for disputation – on questions ofmoral or natural philosophy – were presented in the lectures and coachedby the tutors. Students rehearsed both sides of these questions in theircolleges before performing on special public occasions throughout theacademic year.60 The negative comments in Locke’s journals support the

56 Locke, ‘Of Study’, in James L. Axtell (ed.), The Educational Writings of John Locke. A Critical Editionwith Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 405–22, at 415.

57 Ibid.58 Ibid., 407. See also MS Locke, f. 2, 42–54 for journal, 8 February 1677, under the heading

‘Understanding’: ‘Our minds are not made as large as truth nor suited to the whole extent ofthings.’ See reprint in Goldie, Locke, 260. Compare Locke, Essay, IV.iii.6: ‘the extent of ourKnowledge comes not only short of the reality of Things, but even of the extent of our own Ideas’.

59 Locke, ‘Of Study’, 418. This passage resurfaces in John Locke, Of the Conduct of the understanding,in Works, vol. III, 205–89 at 236. See also Essay, IV.xvii.6 for the fencing metaphor.

60 William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 14–31, 52–8.


recollections of his friends, Masham and Le Clerc, about his aversiontowards ‘the Public Disputations’ at Oxford.61

The third target is implicated here: Locke indicts the way in whichsuperficial glossing and commonplacing of authors produces ‘a stock ofborrowed and collected arguments’. Of course, Locke himself kept com-monplace books – a habit recommended by humanists such as Erasmus –but here he objects to the lazy use of this method in which studentsmemorised arguments they had not properly analysed, and so did notcome to trust their own judgments.62 In this way, individuals fail to attain‘a true and clear notion of things as they are in themselves’. Locke believedthat there was complicity between improper use of commonplacing andscholastic wrangling. Armed with a toolbag of quotations, students pro-duced these in the disputations as arguments for and against the standardquestions. This kind of education produced the worst possible result –‘the topical man, with his great stock of borrowed arguments’, constantlyin danger of contradicting himself.63

In his journal, Locke does not attack specific doctrines (such as innateideas), but rather loose intellectual behaviour which (and here he agreeswith Nicole) is also bad moral behaviour.64 However, against Nicole’spessimism, Locke came to assert that there could be improvement in ourknowledge, in this earthly state; and, furthermore, that all people wereduty bound to use the God-given capacity of reason to the best of theirabilities. No man could attain universal knowledge; nor did the collectiveknowledge of humanity transfer in any simple fashion to particularindividuals. Each person must seek out his or her own knowledge of theworld, as well as of good conduct within it. Assistance might be soughtfrom the teachings of great authors and philosophers, but doctrines and

61 Jean Le Clerc, An account of the life and writings of Mr. John Locke (2nd edn, London: John Clarke,1713), 4–5. See also Coste, ‘The character of Mr. Locke’, 170. For relevant published comments,John Locke, Some thoughts concerning education (London: A. and J. Churchil, 1693), ed. John andJean Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), sections 97, 189 for the contrast between ‘Disputing’and polite conversation. When in Leiden, Locke took a more benign view of the disputations in themedical faculty, as he noted in his journal for 31 October 1684 (MS Locke, f. 8, p. 207): ‘And thoseI saw dispute that they may not mistake had their arguments writt downe. I suppose their studystend most to practice for in disputeing noe one that I heard urged any argument beyond one or 2syllogisms.’

62 See Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s “New Method” of Commonplacing: Managing Memory andInformation’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004), 1–38.

63 Locke, ‘Of Study’, 418–19. See the antithesis in Locke, Conduct, inWorks, vol. III, 241: ‘it is thinkingmakes what we read ours’.

64 For his first published attack on innate ideas, see ‘Extrait d’un livre Anglois’, Bibliothequeuniverselle 8 (1688), 49–142. This French abstract was the first appearance of the Essay, but theattack on innate ideas (i.e. Book I) was condensed to the first two pages.

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

A PUBLIC ‘PERSONA’?

If by publishing the Essay Locke entered the public sphere as a philosopherfor the first time, the work itself shows him to be reluctant to accept thisoffice. At the end of the chapter ‘Of Power’ he makes this restrainedcomment:

And thus I have, in a short draught, given a view of our original Ideas, fromwhence all the rest are derived, and of which they are made up; which if I wouldconsider, as a Philosopher, and examine on what Causes they depend, and ofwhat they are made, I believe they all might be reduced to these very few primary,and original ones.65

The use of the conditional here suggests something less than eageradoption of an office, although it does indicate that the ‘way of ideas’ iswhat a philosopher might offer.66 Yet one of the seven uses of the word‘philosopher’ (singular) in the Essay refers to ‘the inspired PhilosopherSt. Paul ’.67

Most of the references in the Essay to ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosopher(s)’are occasions for attacks on scholastics (usually unnamed), and somemoderns, such as Descartes. As far as I can tell, Locke does not contrastphilosophers with scholars, lawyers or historians. More often, philoso-phers come off badly in comparison with other, less learned, occupations.In the chapter on ‘Our Ideas of Substances’, he declares: ‘I appeal to everyone’s own Experience.’Tis the ordinary Qualities, observable in Iron, or aDiamond, put together, that make the true complex Idea of those Sub-stances, which a Smith, or a Jeweller, commonly knows better than aPhilosopher’ (Essay, II.xxiii.3). One of themain grounds of such denigration

65 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.73.66 The ‘way of ideas’ was coined as a derogatory epithet by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester.

See Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’, 261–2.67 Locke, Essay, II.xiii.26. See also Victor Nuovo (ed.), John Locke. Writings on Religion (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2002), xv–lvii.


is that scholastic philosophers deal in names rather than things. Gardeners,artisans and other craftsmen also use specialist terminology, but Lockeimplies that they are able to explain what these words signify.68

If the demeanour and errors of impolite philosophy are discernible,what is the constructive role of the new philosopher? Two obviouspossibilities – already foreshadowed in Locke’s earlier complaints – arethe tasks of monitoring the language of learning, and that of guiding theuse of reason. On the former, Locke is quite forthright: ‘Language,which was given us for the improvement of Knowledge, and bond ofSociety, should not be employ’d to darken Truth, and unsettle PeoplesRights; to raise Mists, and render unintelligible both Morality and Reli-gion’ (III.x.13). The doctrines of the scholastics, he protests, are guarded by‘Legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefined Words. Which yet makethese Retreats, more like the Dens of Robbers, or Holes of Foxes, than theFortresses of fair Warriours’ (III.x.9). This attack is not surprising giventhe targets Locke identified in the 1670s. His prime example of impolitelearning is ‘Bookish Men’ wrangling and speaking only in the terms oftheir sect or school (II.xiii.27). This might not matter if the diseaseremained in the closet, but Locke argues that it has spread and threatensto corrupt polite conversation: ‘Nor hath this mischief stopped in logicalNiceties, or empty curious Speculations; it hath invaded the great Con-cernments of Humane Life and Society’ (III.x.12). It is striking that whenhe comes to describe pain and pleasure, this kind of impoliteness featuresin his operational definition: ‘The pain of tender Eyes, and the pleasure ofMusick; Pain from captious uninstructive wrangling, and the pleasureof rational conversation with a Friend, or of well directed study in thesearch and discovery of Truth’ (II.xx.18). On this topic, Locke does accept,at least by implication, the office of the philosopher as a mediator betweencivil and philosophical language (Essay, III.ix.3).

On the second topic – the use of reason – Locke again castigates theschoolmen. Although these philosophers claimed to teach methods ofreasoning, they offered nothing useful. He ridicules their recitation ofAristotelian rules of argument: ‘But God has not been so sparing to Mento make them barely two-legged Creatures, and left it to Aristotle to makethem Rational’ (IV.xvii.4). His most explicit advice occurs in the Conduct(begun in 1697), which at one point he intended to include as a chapter of

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

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the Essay.69 Here Locke champions ‘native rustick Reason’ against syllo-gistic reasoning. He distinguishes between two kinds of error: thosestemming from false premises, alleged facts and obscure confused ideas;and those deriving from poor reasoning. The former constitute thegreatest potential source of error, but Locke is more optimistic on thesecond count, believing that native reasoning would not usually lead usastray if the starting principles were solid: ‘The faculty of reasoningseldom or never deceives those who trust it.’70 There were of coursepitfalls here too, and Locke offers some practical hints. Some of hisadmirers saw these observations as tantamount to a new method, re-placing the scholastic obsession with syllogistic reasoning.71 Yet, unlikeBacon and Descartes, Locke prescribes no formulaic rules of method,urging instead each person ‘to seek in their own Thoughts, for those rightHelps of Art, which will scarce be found, I fear, by those who servilelyconfine themselves to the Rules and Dictates of others’.72

It is feasible to interpret Locke’s position on the use of both languageand reason as part of a notion of polite philosophy, liberated from theobfuscation and arrogance of the ‘Schools’. Indeed, his famous casting ofhimself as an ‘under-labourer’ has often been read in this light. As Lockeexplains it, this task consists in clearing ‘the Ground a little, and removingsome of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’.73 One sort ofrubbish was the accumulated jargon and terminology generated by in-quiries that did not produce new knowledge. In this sense, Locke’s jobdescription for the new philosopher might be regarded as a subordinateone, serving the new scientific enterprise and, as Conal Condren suggests,displaying ‘the humility of knowing an office and its limits’.74 The fournames Locke mentions as ‘Master-Builders’ include two stellar naturalphilosophers (Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens), a chemist or naturalhistorian (Robert Boyle), and a reforming empirical physician (ThomasSydenham). Indeed, Locke’s position has been equated with the moderate

69 See MS Locke, e. 1 (drafts of additions to the Essay), 62.70 Locke, Conduct, 209.71 James G. Buickerood, ‘The Natural History of the Understanding: Locke and the Rise of

Facultative Logic in the Eighteenth Century’, History and Philosophy of Logic 6 (1985), 157–90.John Boswell, A method of study: or, an useful library (2 vols., London: printed for the author, 1738,1743), vol. I, 8–9, challenged Locke to provide an alternative, non-scholastic, form of logicaltraining.

72 Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.7 and Conduct, 207.73 Locke, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Essay, 10.74 See Conal Condren’s chapter in this volume. See also John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke,

Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 48–51.


ambitions of the Royal Society – compared with the aspirations of bothscholastics and Cartesians to ground all inquiries, including science, onmetaphysical first principles.

However, in another sense, Locke’s notion of this ‘under-labourer’ ismore audacious than it seems. For example, it can be distinguished fromthe apparently similar formulations about the mode of scientific progressput about by Royal Society members, such as Thomas Sprat and JosephGlanvill. Their focus was on the need to gather empirical observations inthe early stages of a grand scheme, even before clear patterns had emerged.In anticipating criticism of this approach, Bacon had explained that hecould not be expected to do this empirical work any more than anArchitect could be asked to ‘be a Work-man, and a Labourer; and todig the Clay, and burn the Brick’.75 When Glanvill took up this theme, hestressed that humble fact-gathering was necessary now: this was ‘what oneAge can do in so immense an Undertaking as that, wherein all thegenerations of Men are concerned, can be little more than to remove theRubbish, lay in Materials, and put things in order for the Building’.76 Inanother variation, Boyle said that he was willing to ‘not only be anUnderbuilder, but ev’n dig in the Quarries for Materials towards so usefula Structure, as a solid body of Natural Philosophy, than not do somethingtowards the Erection of it’.77

I suggest that Locke’s ‘under-labourer’ is cast in a bolder role: it is notthe task of piecemeal empirical gathering but rather that of radicalconceptual scrutiny, the inspection and authorisation of terminology,and ruling on what natural history and natural philosophy (as contrastedwith scientia) can hope to achieve. One of the features of the Essay is thediscrimination between different kinds of knowledge – betweenmathemat-ics, philosophy, natural science, theology, history, and ‘common-senseacquaintanceship with the world around us’.78 From this perspective, wemight say that Locke’s profession of humility disguises quite strong claimsabout the office of the ‘modern’ philosopher.

75 Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum: or, a natural history, in ten centuries. Published by William Rawley(8th edn, London: J. F. and S. G. William Lee, 1664), ‘To the Reader’ (by the editor, Rawley), nopagination.

76 Joseph Glanvill, Plus ultra: or, the progress and advancement of knowledge since the days of Aristotle(London: James Collins, 1668), 91.

77 Robert Boyle, Certain physiological essays and other tracts (2nd edn, London: Henry Herringman,1669), 18.

78 Gilbert Ryle, ‘John Locke on the Human Understanding’, in John Locke. Tercentenary Addresses(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 15–38 at 38. See Locke, Essay, IV.xi.10 on degrees of assent.

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At least one well-placed commentator regarded Locke’s conception ofphilosophy as anything but humble or polite. This rebuke came fromclose quarters, namely from the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson ofLocke’s patron, and also Locke’s pupil. Shaftesbury promoted the viewthat polite philosophy, freed of technical language and bookish pedantry,should be a fit subject for conversation among social elites.79 But in lettersto his former tutor, in 1689 and 1694, Shaftesbury wrote that:

Itt is not with mee as with an Empirick, one that is studdying Curiositys, raisingof new Inventions that are to gain credit to the author, starting of new Notionsthat are to amuse the World . . . Itt is not in my case as with one of the men ofnew Systems, who are to build the credit of their own invented ones upon theruine of the Ancienter and the discredit of those Learned Men that went before.Descartes, orMrHobbs, or any of their Improvers have the same reason tomake a-doe, and bee Jealouse about their notions, and Discovery’s, as they call them . . .I am so far from thinking that mankind need any newDiscoverys . . .What I countTrue Learning, and all that wee can profitt by, is to know our selves.80

Lawrence Klein interprets Shaftesbury as attempting to establish ‘aphilosophic identity distinct from Locke’.81 For Shaftesbury, Locke repre-sented the scientific and Epicurean project, embarked on by the RoyalSociety, aiming at the control of nature. He demarcated this from his ownquest, which was the Stoic study of ethics, conduct and the self – in short,the pursuit of wisdom, not science. Another key part of this letter (notquoted by Klein) argues that philosophy lost its true purpose afterSocrates, when it became possible to believe, as Shaftesbury writes,

that to Profess Philosophy, was not to Profess a Life; and that it might bee said ofone, that Hee was a great Man in Philosophy; whilst nobody thought it to thepurpose to ask how did Hee Live? what Instances of his Fortitude, Contempt ofInterest, Patience, etc? – What is Philosophy, then, if nothing of this is in thecase?82

79 His views were brought together in Characteristicks. . . (3 vols., London, 1711). See note 16 above.80 Shaftesbury to Locke, 29 September 1694, in Correspondence, vol. V, no. 1794. De Beer retains the

original spelling. The earlier letter is August 1689, in Correspondence, vol. III, no. 1169. For a directattack on Locke, see Shaftesbury to ___?, in Rex A. Barrell (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl ofShaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le refuge Francais’ - correspondence (Queenstown, Ontario: EdwinMellen Press, 1989), 239–45. Barrell suggests Pierre Coste was the recipient.

81 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics inEarly Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–8. See alsoDaniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment andBeyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. ch. 4.

82 Shaftesbury to Locke, in Correspondence, vol. V, no. 1794 (italics in original). But compare Locke,Essay, I.i.6.


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

CONCLUSION

Locke’s vocation as a philosopher was one that emerged gradually, afterthe 1670s. He acknowledged a passion for study soon after graduation atOxford; but he could not at first find his vocation in philosophy becausethe models available were unacceptable to him. He was clearer about whata philosopher should not be. I have argued that these evaluations wereinfluenced by his preoccupation in the mid-1670s with the manifestationsof impolite study, learning and philosophy. In his journal (and later in hispublished works), Locke criticised wrangling and cavilling scholastics,polymathic scholars with unrealistic encyclopaedic ambitions, and pedan-tic university graduates tossing around names and quotations they did notproperly understand. For Locke, the scholastic philosopher was the mostodious of these types. The intellectual training of ‘the Schools’ producedthe worst example of ‘ill-breeding’ – something Masham named as mostlikely to incite anger in her friend. Such behaviour was exhibited byindividuals who spoke only the jargon of their sect and engaged inmeaningless verbal debate and ill-directed logical sophistry. This renderedthem unfit for polite conversation that might feasibly include nobles andgentlemen, refined ladies, and even humble gardeners and artisans. Inother words, this training was inimical to the kind of wide-ranging andtolerant conversation among a small group of friends, in which thequestions of the Essay were initially posed and clarified.

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

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In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke mentions fourthings that a person should strive to attain: virtue, wisdom, breeding andlearning: ‘You will wonder, perhaps, that I put Learning last, especially ifI tell you I think it the least part. This may seem strange in the mouth of abookish Man.’ He then explains that that learning does not produce ‘welldispos’d Minds’, although it adds greatly to those already possessing theother qualities.84 In the case of scholars and philosophers, this was awarning that knowledge did not automatically bestow virtue on theindividual. At least one implication was that the persona of the modernphilosopher could not be that of the sage from whom others mightpassively imbibe doctrines, opinions, or methods of reasoning. On asevere reading, we might say that, for Locke, each person must be his orher own philosopher, in ‘this State of Mediocrity’:

For, I think, we may as rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know byotherMens Understandings . . . The floating of otherMensOpinions in our brainsmakes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true . . . And ifthe taking up of another’s Principles, without examining them, made not him aPhilosopher, I suppose it will hardly make any body else so. In the Sciences, everyone has so much, as he really knows and comprehends: What he believes only, andtakes upon trust, are but shreads; which however well in the whole piece, make noconsiderable addition to his stock, who gathers them. Such borrowedWealth, likeFairy-money, though it were Gold in the hand from which he received it, will bebut Leaves and Dust when it comes to use.85

If Locke was reluctant to proclaim himself unreservedly as a philoso-pher, others soon spoke for him. In a letter of 9October 1703, an Anglicanclergyman, Richard King, told Locke that ‘the experience of many yearsand the knowledge of men and things have made you the perfect Socratesof the Age’.86 Notwithstanding what I have said about Locke’s ownstruggle for a vocation, and his heavily qualified remarks about what aphilosopher could offer, his acolytes soon made him the quintessentialEnglish sage who had no need of a mask.87

84 Locke, Some thoughts, section 147; also 134.85 Locke, Essay, I.iv.23.86 Richard King to Locke, 9 October 1703, in Correspondence, vol. VIII, no. 3346.87 I thank Daniel Carey, John R. Milton, and Victor Nuovo for their very helpful suggestions. The

research for this chapter was made possible by an Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded by theAustralian Research Council. I am grateful to the Keeper of Modern Western Manuscripts,Bodleian Library, Oxford, for access to the Lovelace Collection.


Index

academic philosophy, 52, 53, 54– 6; Calvinist,50 –6; English, 114–16; European, 227;German, 64, 88, 161 , 173; Jesuit,43 –50; Lutheran, 56–64 ; see also universities

active/contemplative life, as philosophicalideal, 10–11 , 14, 69–72 , 75, 80 –2, 161,202 , 212–13, 220–1 ; and Christianity, 14,92– 3, 204–5 , 213, 216– 19, 244; andnatural philosophy, 24–5 , 221, 250;see also counsel; public/private

actor, persona/office of, 68–9, 182–3Adam, Charles, 189, 191Addison, Joseph, 257Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, von Nettesheim,

209–10alchemy/magic, 76, 208–10, 222allegory, 236, 250–1Allen, Michael, 208Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 51–6, 129–30;

archelogia, 52–5; Encyclopaedia septem tomisdistincta, 54–5

Althusius, Johannes, 15, 82, 120, 122, 128–30,160–81; Christian philosophy of, 173; life of,176–7; as teacher, 181; Works: Civilisconversatione…, 171; Dicaeologicae, 174,178–80, term persona in, 178, 179–80;Oratio at Herborn University, 173;Politica, 161–2, 166–9, 171–3, counsel in,177–8, passions in, 174–6, structure of,173–8, supreme magistrate in, 174–6

Andreae, Jacob, 60Aquinas, St Thomas, 80, 200, 205–8, 237, 242–3;

and rationality, 194–6; and virtue, 194–6,207–8, 215; theology of, 210–11, 213–15;and wise man, 205–8; SummaTheologiae, 196

argument, as dialogue, 18–21; as disputeresolution, 17–24; ad hominem, 12, 25–6,84, 256; in utramque partem, 97–8,107, 108

Arias, Benito, 171Aristotle, 1, 5, 9, 17, 19, 20–1, 25, 27, 75,

80, 195; as critic, 79; and enquiry, 22–4;and ethics, 203–4, 228; and explanation, 21;as foundation of all philosophy, 37–41;Hobbes attack on, 125–6; Locke’srejection of, 270; and science, 206–8,210–11; syllogistic of, 19, 22–4, 37–41;Victorinus’ translation of, 167; and women,229; and virtue, 202–4, 211–12, 215–16;Works: De Anima, 38; Metaphysics,69; Poetics, 74; Politics, 162–3,Rhetoric, 9

Arnisaeus, Henning, 61, 164, 165–8Aubrey, John, 83–4, 137, 235Augsburg, Treaty of, 56, 165Augustine, St, of Hippo, 191, 204–5, 218

Bacon, Sir Francis, 14, 72, 80, 114, 202,256, 272; and charity, 203; good, in,26–7; mind, in 27–9; and morality ofknowledge, 226–7; and philosophicpersona, 12, 210, 219–28, 223, 224; andreason, 26; and reform of philosophy, 24–9,42, 81–2, 85–6; and science, 219–24; Works:Advancement of Learning, 26–8, 75–6, 221;Novum organum, 28–9; Redargutiophilosophiarum, 25

beards, 10, 68, 84, 104Beck, Lewis White, 63Behnen, Michael, 172–3Beza, Theodore, 171Blum, Paul, 45, 48Bodin, Jean, 120, 155, 158, 162, 164Boethius, 236, 243–4, 250, 251Bonaventure, St, 191Boyle, Sir Robert, 33, 82, 85, 86–7, 257, 271, 272Broad, Jacqueline, 14, 80Bruni, Leonardo, 212Burckhardt, Jacob, 81

276

Burton, Robert, 90, 111– 12, 121; Anatomy ofMelancholy, 84 , 111 –12, Democritus aspersona in, 111–12

Butler, Samuel, 84

Caenegem, Raoul von, 151Calvin, John, 215–19Cambridge University, 113 , 117Casa, Giovanni della, 171Case, John, 119 , 120Caselius, Johann, 59Cato the Younger, 27Cavendish family, Devonshire branch of, 259Cavendish, Margaret, 1st Duchess of

Newcastle, 11, 80, 234–7 , 244–6, 251–3;and de Pizan, 230–2 , 236–7 ; andfiction, 14, 249–50; reception andreputation of, 245–6, 247– 50;and role of philosopher, 238–41; Works:The Blazing World, 236–9 , 248, 250, 251;Observations on Experimental Philosophy,238–40, 248; Philosophical and PhysicalOpinions, 240– 1; Philosophical Letters, 241,249; Worlds Olio, 240

Cavendish, William, 1st Duke of Newcastle,231, 234

Charles II, of England, 141, 261Charles V, of France, 237Charleton, Walter, 6, 234–5 , 246church and state, 142–3 , 146 –7, 159, 164Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 77, 78 , 80 ,

169 –70, 177Civil Wars – British, 112, 114Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of, 71–2Clarke, Desmond, 189–90Coleman, Janet, 180Colet, John, 95, 97, 102Collingbourne, William, 75Collingwood, R. G., 3conciliarism, 107Condren, Conal, 13, 162, 271confessionalism, 35–64 , 162–5consent, 169 , 172 , 178Contzen, Adam, 162Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see ShaftesburyCossart, Gabriel, 127Cottingham, John, 14, 68, 224counsel, 10, 106–7 , 162, 175, 181 ; office of,

176 –7 , 178courts, see philosophy, institutional settings forCranston, Maurice, 259Crouzet, Denis, 154 –5Cumberland, Richard, 86Curtis, Catherine, 13Cynicism, 97– 8, 103–5 , 110

Daneau, Lambert, 120Daniel, Samuel, 73Dante Alighieri, 234David, King of Israel, 175, 178Dee, Dr John, 210democracy, 166, 168, 175 –6Democritus, 90 –1, 94 –5, 99; Erasmus’s attitude

to, 110–11Descartes, Rene , 14, 30–1, 42, 114, 193 , 229 , 232–3 ,

251; as epistemologist, 186–8; and God,224–5 ; honne

˙ˆte homme, 31; imagination and

memory, 189; life and education of, 192–6 ;persona of, 182 –3, 224–6 ; as scientist,188–92, 197–201; metaphysics of, 190 –2,199–201; and ‘res cogitans’, 190–1 ; treemetaphor of, 193 –4; and ultimatetruth, 191; Works: Dioptique, 189; Discours,190, 197; Le Monde, 189; Les passions del’a me, 189, 197–8; Meditationes, 187–8,190, 191–2, 199; Praeambula, 201;Principia philosophiae, 193; Traite del’homme, 189

Detienne, Marcel, 18Diogenes, see Cynicismdiscipline, 171, 200Donellus, Hugo, 178–9Dorp, Martin, 93, 110doxology, 11Dreitzel, Horst, 161Duns Scotus, 210Dworkin, Ronald, 159

Eachard, John, 74eclecticism, 2, 11, 61, 80education/knowledge, 95–7 , 120–1 , 161, 244,

264–9; and philosophy, 13, 79 , 185Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 170Emden, 168, 176, 181epistemology, 3, 5, 12, 16, 185–8Erasmus, Desiderius, 90–3, 97, 103–6, 111, 176;

censure of Pace, 102; In Praise of Folly(Moriae encomium), 105–6, More as personain, 105, 109, as Lucianic satire, 109–10,reception and defence of, 109–10

Eustachius, 192–3, 200Evelyn, Mary, 245–6

Fall, the, 29, 130, 180 and human nature, 59, 112,128, 147, 161

Fell, John, Dean of Christ Church, 260Fell, Samuel, 128Ficino, Marsilio, 77, 208–9, 212Figliucci, Felice, 211Florence, 212–13Formula of Concord, 50, 56–9, 60, 61

Index 277

Fox-Morcillo, Sebastian, 211France, 152–6 , 263Freedman, Joseph, 5freedom of speech, 90–1 , 97, 105 –6 , 111 –12Friedeburg, Robert von, 15, 82, 156, 227

Galileo Galilei, 14, 31–2 , 74Gassendi, Pierre, 30, 127, 190Gaukroger, Stephen, 12 , 14, 219, 256German Empire, 156, 165–6 , 181Gierke, Otto von, 161Glanvill, Joseph, 227, 234–5 , 249, 250, 272Goclenius, Rudolph, the older, 59God, 80, 144, 173 , 188, 191 , 203, 221, 237, 245; as

Christ, 182; and faith vs. works, 214–15; asfirst cause, 195 –6 , 206, 210; as Holy Spirit,194–6 ; imago Dei, 77 –8, 96, 191 , 208–10,243; as judge, 140 , 144, 170; as beyondphilosophy, 59 , and human reason,199–201, 258, 266, 268; as Trinity, 184, 274;see also theology

Godolphin, Sir William, 261–2Goffman, Irving, 66Grassi, Orizio, 31–2Green, Karen, 14, 80Greenblatt, Stephen, 66Gregoire, Pierre, 120–1Gregory the Great, St, 205

Haakonssen, Knud, 73, 179, 180Hadot, Pierre, 68, 203Hale, Sir Mathew, 14, 141, 142– 51, 158; writings:

‘Diary’ of 1668, 143 –6; 18 Rules, 143 ;Historia placitorum coronae, 149– 50; treatiseon prerogative, 151; see also judicial persona

Hankins, James, 208Harington, Sir John, 79harmony, 166, 169 , 172 , 173–6 , 180Harrison, Peter, 10, 14– 15, 71Harvey, Sir William, 6Heath, James, 135Heckel, Martin, 156Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 4Helmont, Jan Baptista van, 260–1Helmstedt, University of, 58–61Henry VIII of England, 90, 92, 93 , 97,

102 , 107history of philosophy, 1–7 , 73, 187, 229 ; feminist,

229 –30; German 35–43, Jesuit, 35; Kantian,35 , 53, 228; as philosophical history 4 –6 ,35 –6; revision of, 7 –12 , 15–16, andcontestation, 8–9, 11–12 ; Thomist,194–6

Hobbes, 3, 12 , 79 , 85, 87 , 114, 117, 141, 234–5 ;heresy, accused of, 137 ; life of, 259; and

philosophy, 115, 124 –6, 136; philosophicalpersona of, 82–4 ; and poetry, 84–5 ; religiouspolitics of, 130–4 ; and universities, 13,113–14, 122–30; Works: Behemoth, 134,135 –6; De cive, 123; De homine, 117; Dialoguebetween a philosopher and a student…, 137 ,156 –8; Elements of Law, 123; Leviathan, 13,113, 118–19, 132, 134–6 , 138; Six Lessons…,132; Vita, 83

Hofmann, Daniel, 58–64Hofmann, Hasso, 172Hooke, Robert, 29–30, 85 , 248Hotman, Franc ois, 158Hotson, Howard, 51humanism, 24, 39 –41, 90–2 , 102, 106 , 108, 120,

211; Erasmian, 93, 95Hume, David, 3 , 118 , 257Hunter, Ian, 6, 15, 67, 88, 173 , 227Huygens, Christian, 33, 271Hythlodaeus, see More

identity, see selfIgnatius Loyola, 42intellectual morality, 14, 20–1 , 24–34Isabeau de Bavie re, Queen of France, 231Isabelle of France, Queen Consort of Richard II

of England, 246

Jansenism, 264–5Jesuits, see Society of JesusJones, Katherine, nee Boyle, Lady Ranelagh,

245–6Jonson, Ben, 76 , 79judicial persona, 13, 140–51, 151– 5, 157 –8;

see also lawJulius II, Pope, 102Juvenal, 105

Kant, Immanuel, 2 , 5 , 88Kantorowicz, Ernst, 66Keckermann, Bartholomew, 53, 120, 162King, Richard, 275Klein, Lawrence, 273Kuhn, Thomas, 2–3

L’Hospital, Michel de, 153– 6, 158law, English common, 141 –2; canon, 150–1;

divine, 180; and jurisprudence, 6 , 158–9 ;legal systems, 140– 1, 146 , 147, 152;natural, 160 , 173; neutrality of, 140–51;and religion, 140– 1, 147,blasphemy, 141, 148, heresy, 87 ,100 –1, 110, 140–51; Roman, 162;universal vs. particular, 157 –8; see alsojudicial persona

278 Index

Le Franc, Martin, 247Leiden, University of, 135Leo X, Pope, 102Linacre, Thomas, 93Lipsius, Justus, 119, 165, 174, 175, 177Locke, John, 34, 86 , 88; ‘academick

goblin’ of, 261–2; Homer, knowledge of,259; ‘polite and impolite philosophy’, 15,258, 261–2 , 266–9, 271–5 ; and language,270–2; life and reputation of, 254–8,260–2, 274–5 ; philosophic persona of, 254,258, 269, as under-labourer, 15, 88,271– 4; reason, use of, 270–2; Works:Essay de Morale, 263–5 ; Essay of HumanUnderstanding, 255, 257, 259, 262–4 ,269–75; ‘Journal’, 263–9 ; Of theConduct of the Understanding, 270–1;‘Of Study’, 266–8; Thoughts concerningEducation, 275

Lohr, Charles, 63Louis XII, of France, 107Lucian, 84 , 93–4 , 103 –12; see also satireLucy, William, 121Lullism, 39–41, 53; see also RamusLuther, Martin, 14, 213–19lying, 74, 103 –4 , 107– 8

Machiavelli, Niccolo , 212–13magistrate, persona/office of, 161–9 ; lesser, 15,

162, 166–8, 176 –7 , 180–1; supreme,166 –8; see also rule, office of

Malcolmson, Cristina, 236Malebranche, Nicholas, 33Martini, Cornelius, 59, 60 –1, 63Masham, Damaris, 255–6 , 274masks, 68, 182–3 , 275mathematics, 6 , 73Mauss, Marcel, 66Mcleod, Glenda, 238melancholia, as mark of philosopher,

10, 84 , 112Melanchthon, Philip, 36 , 57, 163 , 170 –1, 228metaphysics, 80, Jesuit, 47– 8; Calvinist, 52–3 ;

Lutheran, 57 –8; and ubiquity controversy,59–63 ; see also Descartes; Formula ofConcord; Helmstedt, University of;Hofmann, Daniel

Milton, John, 78More, Henry, 246More, Sir Thomas, 84 , 103–4 , 111 ; reputation of,

108–9 ; Utopia, 66, 70–1 , 106–8, Morus/Hythlodaeus as personae in, 66 , 70,106 –7

Mulcaster, Richard, 74

natural philosopher, persona/office of, 14, 17,20–1, 24– 34, 85– 7, 192 , 202–3 ,247–50

natural philosophy, 6 , 33–4 , 64 , 192,202–3 , 211, 271– 2; and civility, 86–7 ; ascommunal, 85–7 ; 220, 222, 248–50,252; and English women, 234–5 ;Hermetic/Platonic, 40 –1; andmedicine, 6 ; reform of, 32–4

Nazianzus, Gregory, 61Neoplatonism, 21– 2, 39, 40Nepos, Cornelius, 142Newton, Sir Isaac, 33, 85, 227, 271Nicole, Pierre, 264–6 , 268–9, and Descartes

264–5

Oakeshott, Michael, 1oath-taking, 41– 2, 45, 66–7Ockham, William of, 211office, 66–89 ; ethics of, 66–7 , 177, 180, 212–13;

language of, 10, 67 –8, 72–3 ; semiotics of,10, 68, 84; social, 78; vocabulary of, 89 ; seealso persona; vocation

Old Comedy, 90, 103–5 , 110Oresme, Nicholas, 234Owen, John, 133– 4Oxford University, 113, 131–4 , and Locke,

258–62; see also Hobbes

Pace, Richard, 77, 90 –102; De fructu, 95 –102,personae in: Erasmus, 99 –101, 102, falseChristian, 97–8, More, 95, 99, Pace,99–101

Padua, University of, 213Parable of the Talents, 218Pareus, Philip, 128Paris, University of, 126–7 , 136Parker, Samuel, 33Parliament, Commissions of 1654, 133passions, 48 –9 , 94, 161, 171, 265Paul, St, 214– 15, 269Pepys, Samuel, 246Perry, Ruth, 232–3persona, 6 , 7 –12 , 13, 15–16, 66–9 , 184; see also

specific personae/officesPetrarch, 234Pettie, George, 75philosopher, persona/office of, 64,

72–89, 211; changing role of, 26–9,114–16, 196–201, 208–10, 230–5, 270–4;confessional forms of, 6–7, 49, 55–6,60–1, 62; moral qualities of,7–9, 250–1, 256, 275; and pedagogy,41–3, 162

Index 279

philosophy, contemporary, 184–6 , 255; and thedivine, 52, 64, 131–2 , 170 –2, 205–8,241 , 242–4 ; and human perfectibility,209–10, 222–3 , 225; institutional settings of,7 –9 , 39, 40–1, 231–2, 247–8, 252– 3, see alsouniversities; legitimacy/morality of, 17,19– 34, 184–6 , 203–4 , 253; methodology of,32–4 , 45 , 193– 201, 252; origins of, 17–24; asway of life, 9– 11, 193 –201, 255–6, 263, 273;see also academic philosophy; naturalphilosophy

Piccolomini, Francesco, 213Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 81Pinter, Harold, 186Pizan, Christine de, 14, 236–7 , 245, 250–1,

252 –3; and Cavendish, 230–4 , 236;reputation of, 246–7 ; role of philosopherin, 237–8, 241–2 ; as secular, 244; Works:Book of the City of Ladies, 233; Christine’sVision, 236–8, 244, ‘Dame Opinion’ in,241 –2, ‘Dame Philosophy’ in, 243; EpistreOthea, 250

Plato, 9 , 17–22, 25, 80, 167, 182 , 191, 207; earlyDialogues of, 19–21 ; hostility to poetry, 76;Republic, 69, 71, 203; and Sophists, 17, 34 ,256; and transcendent truth, 21 –2

poet, persona/office of, 68 , 72–81, 84 –5political thought, history of, 1, 115, 161 , as genre,

162 –6Popkin, Richard, 187Power, Henry, 248Presbytarianism and Independency, 133–4 , 135Prideaux, John, 119, 122, 128priest, persona/office of, 69, 78 , 160, 217 –18; civil

power of, 151; estate of, 14, 216–19; lawyeras, 14, 142

prophecy, 55–6 , 237, 243public/private, 82 , 117–18, 179; see also active/

contemplative lifePufendorf, Samuel, 88Purgatory, 74Puttenham, George, 77–8, 79

Ramus, Peter, 39 ; Ramist philosophy, 51;Ramist/Lullist philosophy, 43 , 46

reality, 21– 4, 187–8reason, Cartesian conception of, 199–201, and

women, 232–5Reformation, 9 , 10, 71–2 , 74, 77 , 111 , 161, 162 –3,

170 , 215; Counter-Reformation, 43 ; SecondReformation, 37 , 50

Renaissance, 70 , 71, 81, 210 , 234rhetoric, 13, 20, 88, 98 –9, 101–2, 107 , 251;

efficacious speech as, 18; rhetor, persona/office of, 68 , 70–1 , 72–81

rights, 178–80 , private, 167; andself-defence, 178

role-play, see selfRorty, Richard, 3 , 4Ross, Alexander, 126Royal Society, 139 , 248, 252 , 273; and Cavendish,

246; foundation of, 132, 235; andHobbes, 83, 113; and morality, 226–7 ;oath of, 87; as office-holding, 67 , 87;philosophic method of, 29–30, 33, 85,249, 256, 272

rule, office of, 69, 71, 72, 161–9 ; and counsel,177–8; and education, 13,117 –20; and monarchy, 166 , 169 ; andsovereignty, 166– 8; and tyrants, 175; seealso magistrate

St German, Christopher, 142Salisbury, John Montacute, Earl of, 246–7Salutati, Collucio, 211Sandel, Michael, 66Sanderson, Robert, 259satire, 12, 13, 90 –2, 112, 233, 248–9 ; Hobbes’ use

of, 124–5 ; see also Lucian; Old ComedySaunders, David, 13scepticism, 187–8Scheibler, Christoph, 61– 2, 63, 122, 131Schneewind, J. B., 4scholastics/scholasticism, 17, 24, 99 , 114, 189;

Locke’s attack on, 269– 72science, 14, 202– 3, 210 , 226–8; as reified

knowledge, 216; scientist, persona/office of,202; as technocrat, 197–8

Schmitt, Charles, 37 –8, 85Scotti, Julius Clemente, SJ, 48 –9sectarianism, Protestant, 65, 82self, 66, 81 , 86–7 , 160 , 184Serjeantson, Richard, 13Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1 st

Earl of, 262Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3 rd

Earl of, 88, 257–8, 273–4 ; andStoicism, 13, 273

Shaftesbury, Margaret Cooper, 1st Countessof, 264

Shakespeare, William, 69Shapin, Stephen, 86, 257Shapiro, Barbara, 244, 249Sidney, Sir Philip, 76, 78 , 79Simanca, Jacques, 120Skinner, Quentin, 4Society of Jesus, 36, 43–4 , 53 ; pedagogy of, 48–9 ;

see also metaphysicsSocrates, 95, 103–4, 184–5, 257, 273, 275Sophists, 17, 19–21, 22–4, 34, 76, 184

280 Index

soul, 72, 161, 173 , 208–10, 254; see also philosophyand human perfectibility

Sprat, Thomas, 30, 226 , 252, 272Stanley, Thomas, 124state-building, 9 , 35–64Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of Worcester, 274Strachey, John, 260, 261–2Stubbe, Henry, 132–4Stump, Eleanor, 194, 195 –6Sua rez, Francisco, 47 , 62–3Sydenham, Thomas, 271

Telesio, Bernadino, 114Ten Commandments, 162, 172 , 173theology, 1, 71– 2, 77– 8, 161, 260; Althusius’s

view of, 173; as practical 210–11 ; Thomist,40, 44–8; see also God; metaphysics;philosophy

Thucydides, 18Timpler, Clemens, 52Tomeo, Niccolo Leonico, of Padua, 92, 93 , 94Trithemius, Johannes, 210Tyrrell, James, 263

Ulpian, 179universities, 35–41, 121, 122, 138–9, 176– 7, 181; and

civil philosophy, 118 –22; and clerical office,259–60; confessional forms of, 44, 50, 57,122, 125, 126–7 , 138–9; culture of, 162–4 ;

curriculum of, 5 –6 , 115, 138–9 , 260; andCivil Wars, 134 –5 ; history and purpose of,116–18, 128–30; and orations, 128 –30;reform of, 135 –6; see also academicphilosophy; and specific foundations byname

Valla, Lorenzo, 66Venice, 213Virgin Mary, 244, 251Vives, Juan Luis, 90vocation/calling, 216–19, 259–60;

see also officeVoltaire, 254

Wallis, John, 131, 133–4Ward, Seth, 131–2Wars of Religion – European, 112, 152–6Westphalia, Treaty of, 165Wilkins, John, 86Wilson, Thomas, 77, 79witchcraft, 141, 148–50Wittenburg, University of, 36Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 93, 97, 102

Yeo Richard, 15, 88

Zabarella, Jacopo, 43, 46, 48, 53, 58,60–1, 213

Index 281

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by QUENTIN SKINNER and JAMES TULLY

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45 Stewart J. Brown (ed.)William Robertson and the Expansion of Empirehb: 0 521 57083 2

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52 Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison (eds.)Models as Mediatorshb: 0 521 65097 6 pb: 0 521 655714

53 Joel MichellMeasurement in PsychologyA Critical History of a Methodological Concepthb: 0 521 62120 8

54 Richard A. PrimusThe American Language of Rightshb: 0 521 652502

55 Robert Alun JonesThe development of Durkheim’s Social Realismhb: 0 521 65045 3

56 Anne MclarenPolitical Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth IQueen and Commonwealth 1558–1585hb: 0 521 65144 1

57 James Hankins (ed.)Renaissance Civic HumanismReappraisals and Reflectionshb: 0 521 78090X pb: 0 521 54807 1

58 T. J. HochstrasserNatural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenmenthb: 0 521 661935

59 David ArmitageThe Ideological Origins of the British Empirehb: 0 521 590817 pb: 0 521 789788

60 Ian HunterRival EnlightenmentsCivil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germanyhb: 0 521 792657

61 Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.)The History of Political Thought in National Contexthb: 0 521 782341

62 Ian MacleanLogic, Signs and Nature in the RenaissanceThe Case of Learned Medicinehb: 0 521 806488

63 Peter MackElizabethan RhetoricTheory and Practicehb: 0 521 812925

64 Geoffrey LloydThe Ambitions of CuriosityUnderstanding the World in Ancient Greece and Chinahb: 0 521 815428 pb: 0 521 894611

65 Markku PeltonenThe Duel in Early Modern EnglandCivility, Politeness and Honourhb 0 521 820626

66 Adam SutcliffeJudaism and Enlightenmenthb 0 521 820154

67 Andrew FitzmauriceHumanism and AmericaAn Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625hb 0 521 822254

68 Pierre ForceSelf-Interest before Adam SmithA Genealogy of Economic Sciencehb 0 521 830605

69 Eric NelsonThe Greek Tradition in Republican Thoughthb 0 521 835453

70 Harro HopflJesuit Political ThoughtThe Society of Jesus and the state, c1540–1640hb 0 521 837790

71 Mikael HornqvistMachiavelli and Empirehb 0 521 839459

72 David ColcloughFreedom of Speech in Early Stuart Englandhb 0 521 847486

73 John RobertsonThe Case for the EnlightenmentScotland and Naples 1680–1760hb 0 521 847877

74 Daniel CareyLocke, Shaftesbury, and HutchesonContesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyondhb 0 521 845025

75 Alan CromartieThe Constitutionalist Revolution in EnglandCommonwealth, Common Law and Reformationhb 0 521 782694

76 Hannah DawsonLocke, Language and Early Modern Philosophyhb 0 521 852714

77 Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter (eds)The Philosopher in Early Modern EuropeThe Nature of a Contested Identityhb 0 521 866464