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STOICISM AND ANTI-STOICISM IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1640-1795
A thesis presented by Christopher Robert Brooke to The Department of Government in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science
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© 2003 Christopher Robert Brooke All Rights Reserved
This 2004 copy of the 2003 thesis is not strictly identical with the submitted version: a handful of typos have been corrected, and the formatting and pagination have been considerably altered.
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Christopher Brooke Stoicism and Anti-Stoicism in European Philosophy and Political Thought, 1640-1795
Dissertation Advisers: Advisers: Professor Richard Tuck (Harvard University) Professor Pratap Mehta (Jawaharlal Nehru University) Professor Patrick Riley (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Abstract:
Both the sixteenth and the eighteenth century uses of Stoic ideas have been objects of close study in recent years. This dissertation builds an historical br between these two bodies of work, describing the contours of the ongoing argum about the interpretation and assessment of Roman and Greek Stoicism during a pe of crucial importance for the development of modern European philosophy political thought, form the emergence of the new philosophies of Grotius, Desc and Hobbes to the High Enlightenment.
The dissertation argues that distinctive Catholic and Protestant traditions of Stoic traditions developed over the course of the seventeenth century in response t popularity of Neo-Stoic ideologies. French Augustinians, including Jansen, Sen Pascal and Malebranche, concentrated on the moral psychology of the Stoics argued that Stoicism was an erroneous – indeed, heretical – philosophy of free rooted in pride; the Protestant critics from Bramhall and Cudworth to Bayle contrast, tended to focus their arguments on topics in Stoic physics, and argued Stoicism presented a pernicious philosophy of determinism. The thesis argues tha Sign up to vote on this title second ha increasing philosophical interest in Marxus Aurelius’s Stoicism in the Usefulimmunity Not useful the seventeenth cenutry in part owes to its relative from the ce arguments of the Augustinian anti-Stoic critique; and shows how the controve surrounding Spinoza’s philosophy at the end of the century helped to generate
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments, p.7 Dedication, p.9 A Note on the Notes, p.10 Prologue: Paris, Year III, p.12 Introduction, p.20 Part One, p.33
Lipsius and Neo-Stoicism: the State of the Question in the Historiography of Political Thought I: Lipsius, p.33 II: Grotius and Descartes, p.49 Part Two, p.58
Augustinian Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth-Century France: Jansen to Malebranche I: Stoicism in Book XIV of City of God , p.62 II: The Two Faces of Renaissance Humanism Revisited, p.77 III: Four French Augustinians Against the Stoics, p.84 IV: An Acceptable Alternative? The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, p.112 Part Three, p.123
From the Dictionary the Dictionary to the Encyclopaedia: Encyclopaedia: Sign up to vote on this title Stoicism in Protestant Europe from Bayle to Brucker Useful p.123 Not useful I: Protestant Anti-Stoicism in the Seventeenth Century, II: Stoicism in Bayle’s Dictionary Bayle’s Dictionary,, p.133 III: How the Stoics became Atheists, p.145
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Acknowledgments
To Arash Abizadeh, Arthur Applbaum, Daniel Butt, Giovanni Capoccia, Kath Ibbett, Nany Kokaz, Tony Long, Patchen Markell, Pratap Mehta, Tamara Metz, Muirhead, Sankar Muthu, Martin O’Neill, Raj Patel, Jennifer Pitts, Patrick R Oxana Shevel, Naunihal Singh, David Siu, Travis Smith, Stewart Wood, Richard T – friends, colleagues, flatmates, supervisors, and quite often occupying more than of these roles simultaneously – my thanks.
All these people deserve more than a mention, but only a few will get it reasons of space. Michaele Ferguson put up with me in the same apartment – 6 M Avenue #2 – for four years. John Michael Parrish and I spent years of our lives wr our dissertations on early modern political thought side by side, talking at equal le about the Boston Red Sox and the Jansenists (though he stresses the first syllable m than I do). We both enjoyed these conversations, but I think we are both quite glad they are over. And Josephine Crawley Quinn not only married me in 2001, but provided some helpful translations from Brucker’s eighteenth century Latin and very useful comments on my draft.
Political Science at Harvard taught me that institutions matter. Thanks, the Harvard’s Department of Government and its Center [sic [ sic]] for Ethics and Professions; to the Classics Department of the University of California, Berkele the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford; and, most recently, to staff and scholars of The British School at Rome.
Money may or may not be the sinews of war, but it does make dissertation-wr easier, and I owe thanks to those who provided financial support along the way parents, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Harvard’s Center for Ethics and Professions, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Program [sic [ sic Constitutional Government, which paid for me to learn some more Greek in Signpast up tosupport vote on this Summer of 1999. I should also acknowledge here the oftitle the UK Fulb Usefulin useful Commission, which helped to fund my first twoyears theNotUS, 1995-7, and ongoing support provided by Magdalen College, which pays me to talk about po with interesting people.
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I should note, finally, that material that appears in this thesis has appeared in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, Rousseau , ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Camb University Press, 2000) and in Grotius and the Stoa, Stoa , ed. Hans W. Blom (Assen: Gorcum, 2003), fine volumes both. Dedication
This dissertation is for my friends, some of whose names appear in the Acknowledgments, and against the warmongers who govern the United States of America and the United Kingdom at the present time. A Note on the Notes
In this dissertation I have often used contemporary translations of the various aut from whom I quote, checking the translations for accuracy against the originals ( Lipsius, Senault, Bayle). At other times I have used recent translations ( Malebranche, Rousseau). I have on occasion made my own translations, or used t provided by colleagues (and where this happens, it is noted). A small numbe remarks have been left in the original French.
To avoid cluttering the notes, I use standard references for ancient authors. For ea reference, quotations from Greek and Latin texts that are not otherwise specified taken from the volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, and these are not separately in the Bibliography at the end. (This is true, for example, in the case Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca, Diogenes Laertius and others). In the case of Augus some standardised references are given (e.g., to On Christian Doctrine Confessions, Confessions, etc.), though references to The City of God are to Book and Cha followed by a page reference to the recent edition the Signin up to voteCambridge on this title Texts in History of Political Thought series: The City of God theNotPagans Useful useful , translate against R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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•
“Long & Sedley” refers to A. A. Long and David Sedley, eds., The Hellen Philosophers (2 Philosophers (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
•
“Search” Search” refers to Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, Truth , translate Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980).
•
References to passages from Rousseau are generally keyed to the Ple Oeuvres completes, completes , given as OC , as well as to convenient English editions
Bibliographical references follow the practice of what my copy of EndNote takes EndNote takes the style of the Journal the Journal of the History of Philosophy . A full reference is given the time a source is cited, and in the Bibliography; thereafter the author and short title is presented.
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Prologue: Paris, Year Three
On 29 Prairial, An III – 17 June 1795, according to the once and future Grego Calendar – the French revolutionist Gilbert Romme, five of his fellow Montag deputies, and various others, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal that been appointed to restore order to Paris after the popular uprisings of 12 Germina 1 Prairial. Shortly after the sentence was handed down, the six deputies attempte kill themselves with two concealed knives and a pair of scissors, in order to pres their liberty to dispose of their own lives rather than submit to the violence of the p Thermidorian state. Four succeeded, and thereby avoided death on the guillotine. T language was thoroughly Stoic: Romme had told the court that although “mon c est à la loi, mon âme reste indépendante et ne peut être flétrie”; 1 his colleagues P Amable Soubrany, Jean-Marie Goujon and Pierre Bourbotte similarly used the rhe of Epictetus and Seneca and invoked the example of the Younger Cato to explain resolve and their actions to posterity. 2 The dramas of the French Revolution, Karl M memorably noted, were often played out “in Roman costume and with Ro phrases”, 3 and these Montagnards’ suicides were exemplary in this regard, ear them the unofficial title of “the last of the Romans”. 4
The Montagnards’ debt to the Romans was indeed many-sided. Miriam Griffin isolated three features which several well-attested Roman suicides shared. F theatricality, theatricality, the suicides being elaborate, drawn out performances. Second, they h social character , and she mentions in particular the frequent physical presenc friends at Roman suicides, in contrast to the general practice of modern suicides, tend to die alone. Third, the suicide remains calm, calm, having resolved to die after ca 5 deliberation.
The Roman “cult of suicide” was not exclusively Stoic: one of Griffin’s exam 6 is Cicero’s correspondent Atticus, who aligned himself with the Epicureans. Bu up to vote on thisboth title contribute reasonable to assert that the dominant philosophicalSign current which Not useful Useful was Stoic, and was popularly associated with this Roman ideology with all thre Griffin’s motifs clearly present in Stoic texts on suicide. Epictetus’s language example, is shot through with theatrical metaphors (“Remember that you are an
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wishes the play to be short, it is short; if long, it is long” 7). In discussing the rea that could legitimate suicide, the social nature of the act was often foregrounded: t in his doxography of the Stoics, Diogenes Laertius reported that “the wise man wil reasonable cause make his own exit from life, on his country’s behalf or for the sa his friends, friends , or if he suffer intolerable pain, mutilation, or incurable disease”. while the Stoics provided more arguments in favour of suicide than the philosophical schools, theirs was not a blanket defence of the practice in any circumstances. The Stoic discussions of suicide set out the appropriate reasons choosing a rational exit from one’s own life, so Cicero, for example, could report Cato was “delighted at having a reason for dying”, because “the god who rules w us forbids us to depart hence without his orders”. 9 Having made the decision to there was no need for histrionics, and the Stoic suicide could remain compo Epictetus again: “Do not become a greater coward than the children, but just as they say, “I won’t play any longer,” when the thing does not please them, so do you also, when things seem to you to have reached that stage, merely say, “I won’t play any longer,” and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting.” 10
When we make allowances for the extraordinary circumstances of the Montagna suicide, all three of these characteristics – theatricality, sociality and resolve – ca discerned, and their courtroom rhetoric advertised their stance as specifically Sto addition to being generically Roman.
Two additional aspects of the Romme suicide that further emphasised its Ro Stoic character are also worthy of note. In the first place, the suicide was a decisi pagan gesture, pagan gesture, owing to the long tradition of opposition on the part of the Chri Church to the practice. There is no explicit condemnation of suicide in the B whose suicides include Samson, Saul and Judas Iscariot, 11 nor in the early Chri Sign upconsistently to vote on this title tradition. Thereafter, however, the Church has been hostile. The Not usefulfour chapte Usefulwhodevoted significant Christian critic of self-killing was Augustine, the first book of City of God to to the matter, with particular attention to the suicid women who killed themselves rather than suffer the shame of living on as the vic
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form of murder;12 Lucretia was therefore guilty of the murder of an innocent and c woman.13 Augustine’s assertion in the following chapter, that “the words ‘Thou not kill’ refer to the killing of a man – not another man; therefore, not even thys [f]or he who kills himself, kills nothing else than a man”, 14 later became authoritative sentence for Thomas Aquinas in his own criticism of suicide in Summa Theologica, Theologica , which subsequently became canonical within the Church. suicide taboo remained in place throughout the centuries that followed, and significant that the authors who attacked it in the eighteenth century were among t most celebrated for their lack of orthodox religion, including “that well-known at Mr. Hume” in an essay of 1757, and the Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, w character Usbek mounted a defence of the practice of suicide in one of the Pe Letters. Letters.16
The second additional respect in which the Montagnards sought to invoke a Ro Stoic past was in their political commitment to an idealised version of the actu existing, though thoroughly debased, res publica. publica . The imaginative association betw Stoicism and a nostalgic republicanism had been forged above all by the Stoic C suicide at Thapsus, after the victory of Julius Caesar, 17 and the mythology w became attached to Cato’s death (and, though to a lesser extent, to that of Brutu important, as mainstream Stoic doctrine did not in itself provide much explicit sup for republican politics. It is true that the Stoics had recommended that the wise engage in the life of his political community ( politeuesthai ( politeuesthai), ),18 and, alone of the an philosophical schools, they upheld the practical life of the wise citizen over contemplative life of philosophical reflection (bios ( bios theoretikos) theoretikos ) preferred 12
City of God , I.16-17, pp.26-7. Augustine attacks the Roman idolisation of Lucretia, summing up his criticism in the po question, “If she was an adulteress, why is she praised? If she was pure, why was she sl City of God , I.19, pp.29-31. (This opinion of Augustine’s is attacked at length by B Dictionary, Dictionary, “Lucretia”, note D). Sign up to vote on this title 14 While suicide suicid e falls under the th e prohibition of the sixth commandment co mmandment (Exodus 20 Useful Not useful God Augustine is quick to deny that the slaughter of “beasts and cattle” does, too. City of God p.32. 13
15
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Aristotle,19 or over the quiet apolitical life enjoyed in the company of one’s friend Epicurus had recommended.20
But a robust link between Stoic philosophy Stoic philosophy and and republican politics is harder to for there is no obvious statement of a democratic or republican political theory in surviving fragments of Stoic political theory. 21 The most radical Stoic text is Ze fragmentary Republic fragmentary Republic,, though it would be hard to describe this straightforwardly democratic or republican manifesto, and its influence on later Greek, Roman and Roman political thinking is hard to ascertain. 22 Although the Stoics denied Aristot doctrines of the natural slavery of some human beings, their thinking was inegalitarian, celebrating the “liberty” of the sage in contrast to the “slavery” o foolish multitude of men. 23 Diogenes Laertius reports the Stoics’ bland preference mixed regime incorporating democratic, monarchical and aristocratic elements gives no further details. 24 Insofar as there was a developed republican political th presented in Stoic terms, it i t was the work of a non-Stoic, for Cicero was a follow 25 the New Academy, yet his De Officiis was one of his most markedly philosophical texts, and his central argument that only what was honestus honestus cou 26 utile utile certainly strikes a specifically Stoic chord. On the other hand, Stoics w textbooks on kingship, 27 Seneca wrote to legitimate the Principate, 28 and Aurelius was Emperor of Rome. Nevertheless, the Roman Stoics did become pow symbols of resistance to imperial tyranny. In the second half of the first century Seneca and Thrasea Paetus were two of the most celebrated Stoic suicides, Helvidius Priscus, whose courage was celebrated by Epictetus, was executed on orders of Vespasian.29 Yet we should hesitate again before interpreting these epis as supporting a republican politics: opposition to the Emperors did not necess follow from a commitment to Stoicism, as the career of Seneca again makes clear
19
Ethics, 1178b. Aristotle, Nicomachean Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Diogenes Laertius, X.119-120, 131-2. Sign up to vote on this title 21 Patricia Springborg, Sp ringborg, “Republicanism, “Rep ublicanism, Freedom Fr eedom fromUseful Domination, Do mination, and the Camb Not useful Studies 49, no. 5 (2001), pp.857-9. Contextual Historians,” Political Studies 49, 22 Republic and lengthy discussion o For contrasting views on the interpretation of Zeno’s Republic and 20
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the once-popular notion of a coherent “Stoic opposition” to the Emperors has overstated.30
The links between a professed Stoicism and republican politics, then, are ofte from clear. But it is important to see that an act of aristocratic Stoic self-sacrific self-killing could easily be - and often was - recoded in a republican fashion, owin the centrality of the values of freedom and freedom and the common good in in both Stoic ethics republican political thought, both ancient and modern. Seneca in particular m something of a fetish of the act of self-killing, and his rhetoric certainly yoked sui to a certain idea of freedom: See you that precipice? Down that is the way to liberty... Do you ask what is the highway to liberty? Any vein in your body! 31
The good of the whole, furthermore, provides sufficient reason for action in traditions, and while the Stoic is chiefly concerned with his position in the kosmo its political analogue, the kosmopolis) kosmopolis) rather than in the more mundane body po yet, as Diogenes Laertius noted, a Stoic might reasonably choose to die “on country’s behalf” (huper ( huper patridos), patridos ), a claim which bridges the gap between Stoi and republicanism to a considerable extent. 32
With regard to these matters of religion and politics, therefore, Gilbert Rom credentials were secure. He had certainly managed to politeuesthai, politeuesthai, having serv the revolutionary Convention as a deputy from Puy-de-Dôme and having bee particular one of the chief architects of the new Calendar. 33 This work abov secured for him a set of unimpeachable pagan and republican credentials, for Calendar transformed the representation of the passage of time itself into a perma celebration of the Revolution’s triumph over monarchical tyranny in France. abolishing the seven-day week and replacing it with a Sabbath-less dé furthermore, the Calendar stood as one of the most impressive products of Sign up to vote on this title Revolution’s dechristianising zeal. Finally, the political degeneration of the Revolu
30
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represented by the Jacobin Terror and the Thermidorian reaction set the stage fo drama of Romme’s political suicide. Cato had killed himself rather than submit to other great reformer of the Calendar, Julius Caesar. Romme likewise killed himse a protest against the increasingly tyrannical government of the French Republic – one which would itself be supplanted in the not-too-distant future by the emergenc a new Caesar in the shape of General Bonaparte and the inauguration of a new Fr Empire.35
These parallels between the terminal crisis of the Roman Republic on the one h and the Paris of Year Three on the other with the careful reconstruction of a Ro suicide drama are sufficiently striking to make Romme’s inheritance of the mant Roman Stoicism seem reasonably uncomplicated. Yet when we think about the w which Stoicism is thus triply coded as pagan, patriotic and republican in this mo context, we ought to be puzzled. For the most authoritative and the most pop version of Neo-Stoicism which had been articulated to an early modern audience, of Justus Lipsius in the late sixteenth century, had drawn heavily on Roman Stoi in general and on Seneca in particular in order to fashion a doctrine which was compatible (so he argued) with Christian orthodoxy, which condemned suici which presented patriotic sentiment as the result of an intellectual mistake, 37 and w opposed Renaissance republicanism, advocated absolutist rule and denied authori representative assemblies on the terrain of politics.38
Between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, then, the mean understanding and implications of Stoic philosophy were the subject of substa disagreements and reinterpretations which arose in a variety of sites of theolog philosophical and political political contestation across Western Europe. Yet while each of sites can be investigated with an eye to a deeper understanding of the local intelle context in which an argument about Stoicism took place, it is possible also to ta step back and ask whether we can identify a broader pattern in the ways in which S arguments were both advocated and criticised over these two centuries, to see whe Sign up to vote on thisnational title a coherent historical narrative can be constructed which cuts across frontie
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order to help us illuminate a passage from the Neo-Stoicism of Justus Lipsius to th Gilbert Romme.
As we have already seen, the Stoic Epictetus was fond of comparing human li a theatrical performance: we learn our role, we act it out, and, when the time come willingly leave the stage. A Stoic would have understood perfectly well contemporary cliché that the best kind of acting is that which looks most natural which is in fact the most artfully contrived. The suicides of Gilbert Romme and associates were presented to the world as the recreation r ecreation of an archetypal Roman dr The argument of this dissertation will show how two centuries of prece philosophical argument helped to make make this striking performance possible. possible.
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Introduction
The project that culminated in this dissertation began, once upon a time, w rather banal observation, that there was a set of academic studies which dealt with Neo-Stoicism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and a gro academic literature about the “Stoicism” of various figures of the Euro Enlightenment, but there seemed to be comparatively little academic discussio what intellectuals were doing with and against Stoic philosophy in the interve period, roughly speaking from the time of Thomas Hobbes to that of Jean-Jac Rousseau.
The literature of Neo-Stoicism is now well developed, and now includes studi diverse as – to select a few, not quite at random - Richard Tuck’s Philosophy Government , Anthony Levi’s French Moralists, Moralists , William J. Bouwsma’s recent Wa of the Renaissance Renaissance or Adriana McCrea’s Constant Minds, Minds , and the range of specified in the subtitles of these books indicates the general agreement as to relevant time period for considering the impact of the revival of Stoic idea European writing: 1572-1651, 1572-1651, 1585-1649, 1585-1649, 1550-1640 1550-1640 and 1584-1650 1584-1650 respective respectiv Turning to the eighteenth century, Peter Gay’s classic interpretation of Enlightenment as the triumph of a certain kind of modern paganism pushed the S thematic into the foreground and drew attention to the enthusiasm for Stoic aut shared by Montesquieu, Diderot and others; 40 and there has been an especial con with the Stoicism of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment in recent years, wheth Richard Sher’s social history of the Edinburgh intellectuals or amidst the rich sea writing on Adam Smith.41
39
1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: (Ox passions 1585-1649 1585-1649 (Ox Press, 1993); Anthony Levi, French Moralists: the theory Signofupthe to vote on this title of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 Clarendon Press, 1964); William J. Bouwsma, The waning Useful Not useful Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: political virtue an Lipsian paradigm paradigm in England, England, 1584-1650 1584-1650 (Toronto: (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 40
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So the large question I became interested in was in how Europeans got here there, there, or, to be more precise, whether there was an historical story to be told w might connect or build some kind of bridge between the early Neo-Stoicisms o late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the one hand and these q Stoicisms of the High Enlightenment on the other. In particular, what, if anyth could we learn from a study of a time in which Stoicism was relatively unfashion the object principally of criticism rather than adherence or positive inspiration? ***
Of the various problems inherent in any attempt to write a history of controversies surrounding Stoicism in modern European philosophical discourse chief among them is that of determining just what is to be considered as “Stoicism the first place. For Stoicism not some kind of transhistorical universal, and important not to reify it as such. There is and there can be no “litmus test” crite which can be applied to separate real from merely apparent Stoics at any point in and it would be a bad history which set out to attempt to isolate instantiation “authentic” Stoicism across great swathes of space and time. In any case, the an Stoics modified their own teaching over time, hence the conventional and conve division into Early, Middle and Late Stoas. The school in Athens may have been home of Stoic orthodoxy, but it is a significant fact that no text written within and the use of the school itself has survived in more than fragmentary form. The an Stoics acquired a reputation for monolithic dogmatism, but - by a happy iron history - this has been undermined by the multiple voices of the surviving texts w express Stoic teachings most fully, for the Stoic books we do still possess by Cic Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are diverse in terms of both philosop content and literary form.
The most recent generation of contemporary scholarship associated with A Long, Brad Inwood, Julia Annas, Malcolm Schofield, Michael Frede and others Sign up to vote of on this title done much to transform the understanding and appreciation technical, system useful Useful has Not Stoic philosophy. In so doing, this tradition of scholarship emphasised the ce role of Chrysippus, the head of the school 232-206 BCE and the creator of much o logic and physics, in defining the structure and philosophical content of what has c
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practice of Diogenes Laertius, whose doxography of Stoicism is attached to the se on Zeno, treating the founder of the school as ipso facto the chief representative thought. 42 On the other hand, and more interestingly, some writers display considerable hostility to Chrysippus, treating him more as a deviant or heterodox S than as any kind of exemplar. Lipsius is typical of this line of argument, for exam when he mentions “Chrysippus, who first corrupted that grave sect of philosop with crabbed subtleties of questions”. 43
A further difficulty standing in the way of being able to write a history of thin about Stoicism is the lack of the right kind of institutional continuity. institutional continuity. A history o development of Stoic doctrine in antiquity is at least in part a history of the S school itself, and vice versa. versa. By contrast, there is no comparable single institu which presides over Stoic studies in modern Europe, and which might be ab provide a coherent structure and a degree of content to a modern narrative. There w distinctive Neo-Stoic movement centred around the life and writings of Justus Lip and the University of Leiden, and this has been the object of detailed histo studies. 44 Yet this dissertation is chiefly concerned with the period after this Stoicism, from 1640 or so until the time of the high Enlightenment, during whic particular institution, whether political, academic or ecclesiastical, ever achieved kind of generally-recognised hegemony over the legitimate interpretation of Stoi in Europe.
Shifting attention from institutions to individuals, it is important, as always, al recognise the perennial problems of tracing intellectual “influence”. In T Hochstrasser’s words, “When the notion of ‘influence’ is applied to a long span of and to a large number of writers it can easily deteriorate into nothing more than correlation of superficially similar doctrines.” 45 On the one hand, it would clearly pedantic and substantially pointless exercise to wade through the corpus of modern philosophical writing looking for any or every moment at which the argum that are deployed seem to bear a resemblance to Stoic theses. Nor is it helpful to Sign up to vote on or thisimperturbabili title anything that smacks of self-fashioning, self-discipline, fatalism, Useful of Not useful philosop property Stoic in its inspiration, for these themes are the joint various schools and religious traditions, both ancient and modern. 46 On the other
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however, it is equally important not to understand Stoicism so narrowly – as conscious endorsement, perhaps, of however many specific and carefully deline philosophical propositions – that we refuse to acknowledge the substantial presenc Stoic ideas in any any modern modern philosopher’s thinking or the productive consequences can flow from a constructive engagement with Stoic philosophy. 47
But if this kind of hunt for “objective” evidence of influence is fraught difficulty, it cannot be set aside entirely in favour of locating those moments w authors self-identify with Stoic ideas and arguments and expressly identify the such. For, as we shall see repeatedly in what follows, there is a politics attached t uses of Stoic label, and writers only advertise themselves as being or doing somet Stoic in particular and varying circumstances. Then again, while there is somethin be learned from a study of the conditions under which writers both embrace repudiate the term “Stoic”, there is more to the study of early modern Stoicism simply tracking the way that the label functions in argumentative discourse. Guilla Du Vair advertises his thinking as Stoic in inspiration in a way that Jean-Jac Rousseau does not, for example, yet the latter’s engagement with the legacy o Stoics is of considerably more interest than that of the former.
Hochstrasser is able to address the problem of determining intellectual “influe in more than an arbitrary manner through the study of “a range of contempo sources which discuss self-consciously the relation of contemporary practice to achievement”, in his case the “histories of morality” which were written in, especi Germany in the century following Pufendorf’s “ De “ De Origine et Progressu Discip 48 Juris Naturalis” Naturalis” in 1678. No single genre of philosophical writing serves comparable backbone for this study, but it is fortunate in this regard that those wh write about or indeed against Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth cent often make it clear what their contemporary concerns are which lead them to en with the ancient arguments. An elucidation of these links between contempo philosophical disputation and the legacy of the Stoics, I contend, provides the Signand up to“past vote onachievement” this title kind of connection between “contemporary practice” to m Useful Not useful the enterprise worthwhile.
This work, therefore, is driven by the belief that a history of philosophy ca
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that the “timelessness” of philosophical problems is sufficiently self-evident that can be usefully studied ahistorically (Straussianism, according to its critics); on other hand, that practices of philosophical writing are so firmly embedded in partic discourses and local traditions that the attempt to reach beyond their narrow con must be self-defeating (the “Cambridge school”, according to its).
There is, of course, a danger that a thesis which covers a lengthy stretch of t around one hundred and fifty years, and which cuts across national, confessional other frontiers will fail to be sufficiently well grounded in a determinate intellec context. The danger is unavoidable, but here I draw attention to two general featur the argument which help the different strands of the discussion about Stoicism to together across the period discussed in the pages that follow. First of all, at var points in the dissertation I pay attention to the changing understanding of philosophy in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe as this is expressed in kinds of works. There are the new editions and vernacular translations of Stoic au which were produced in several countries in every new generation, and which pro useful information, especially in their Prefaces, about the ways in which early mo scholars of the classics were approaching Stoic philosophy. Second, there are the m books on the history of ancient philosophy, a discipline which develops with rapidity over the period. These are important not only as a store of factual inform and diverse opinions on ancient authors but also as contributions to a long-run argument about the relationship of philosophy to its past. 49 Third, and par overlapping with this second category, are the classic reference books of Enlightenment, for Bayle’s Dictionary Dictionary (1697) and the Encyclopaedia Encyclopaedia of Didero d’Alembert (1751-1772) were for many readers the basic sources of information a the Stoic philosophers, as they were about so much else. These three kinds of w taken together provide a valuable contemporary scholarly infrastructure, a framew within which particular lines of argumentation about the Stoics can be cohere elaborated.
to vote on title more, on In the second place, the narrative concentratesSign asupmuch, orthis even Not useful Stoic writing as it does on the more constructive andUseful sympathetic engagements Stoic ideas. This owes in part to a decision to focus on the period between the fadin the Neo-Stoic movement in the first part of the seventeenth century and the rene
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upheavals occasioned by the introduction of the new philosophies of Descartes, Gr Hobbes and others; and in this sense the dissertation offers a prismatic perspectiv the development of modern philosophy itself. In considering the breadth and dep the best anti-Stoic writings, furthermore, we also become better placed to unders the tasks of those who later sought to revive or restate portions of Stoic theor effective prior criticism of the Stoics’ major arguments moulded the intelle possibilities open to such such attempts.
The dissertation presents itself as a history of arguments about Stoicism seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, but it is important to note its partial incomplete character, and in particular the way in which several different and eq plausible narratives could have been offered in its place. The three figures dominate the structural and thematic organisation of the present work, for example Justus Lipsius, Pierre Bayle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Alternative historie Stoicism in early modern Europe could by contrast have passed from Miche Montaigne via Benedict Spinoza to Immanuel Kant, or from Hugo Grotius thr Samuel Pufendorf to the Adams Smith and Ferguson, and rival accounts of engagements of the philosophers with the Stoa could be imagined which would c much of the same ground, yet end up with significantly different emphases substantially different content. Were we to map the concerns of the dissertatio spatial terms, inspired by Franco Moretti’s example, we would find that France and Low Countries stand at the centre of the work; there is a significant amount of atten to England, though much less to Scotland; Germany is comparatively neglected Italian and Iberian peninsulas and Eastern Europe and Russia entirely so. 50
There is also, furthermore, a degree of disciplinary indeterminacy. The proje principally intended as a contribution to the history of political thought; it is offere a thesis in political science to a Department of Government; and it opens and close familiar political terrain. Yet much of the middle of the essay concerns itself metaphysics, theology or classical scholarship, and often the sources u Sign to vote psychology on this title investigation do more obviously belong to the world ofupmoral or relig Useful understood. Not usefulOnly at the controversy than to political theory as it is conventionally of the dissertation, in the sections on Rousseau, do I deal directly with what generally taken to be “mainstream” or “canonical” texts in the history of pol
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literature on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy and presence of Stoicism within it. There is, as mentioned earlier, a considerable expanding literature which engages the topic of the Stoicism of the Sco Enlightenment, both with respect to individual thinkers and to the movement whole, and I have only touched on this briefly while my attention is largely eng elsewhere. There is also much good recent work on the Stoic thematics of lea seventeenth century poets, which usefully addresses the political implications commitment to Stoicism, and while this literature is of very great interest, it is one I avoid altogether. 51 Other subjects have simply proved too large adequately t addressed in these pages, such as that of Kant’s relationship to the Stoic traditio light of the present research.
Three recent books require particular mention. The first is Giovanni Bonac 1996 volume on the use of the Hellenistic philosophical schools in the Enlightenm itself a reworking of his own 1993 doctoral dissertation presented to the philos faculty of the University of Turin. 52 To a considerable extent, the concerns of the and this dissertation are similar: Bonacina traces the presence of Stoicism in mo philosophical texts in a survey which covers much of the eighteenth-century landsc ranging widely across authors and national contexts. Some of the same topics discussed in these two works, both of which provide a treatment of the Stoic them Bayle, for example, together with a discussion of the historiography of philosoph the German Enlightenment.53 But in general the emphases of Bonacina’s book and dissertation are quite different. Over two thirds of the present study, for exam address the period before Bayle, with whom Bonacina begins; and the Enlightenment thinker discussed in significant detail in the pages that follow Rousseau, whom Bonacina substantially ignores, as his narrative concentrate providing background to Kant and Hegel in particular, the two philosophers dominate the second half of his book. I am chiefly interested in examining how au from Bayle to Rousseau address a legacy bequeathed to them by the seventee century debates canvassed in the earlier part of the study; Bonacina’s work sp Sign up to vote on this title more directly to specifically eighteenth-century concerns.
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The second recent volume worthy of note is J. B. Schneewind’s book on Invention of Autonomy, Autonomy , a comprehensive history of the development of Euro
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organises his history in four sections: the rise and fall of modern natural law development of a perfectionist ethic, the search for a moral theory that would s independently of the truth of particular religious claims, and the elaboration of a m ideal of autonomy. Although Schneewind discusses Grotius’s relationship to the S briefly in the account of the origins of modern natural law theory, the bulk remarks about the modern legacy of Stoicism are reserved for his presentatio Lipsius, Pierre Charron and Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the second section, on m perfectionism. But what is striking, setting his study alongside this one, is how ce themes from Stoic philosophy cut across all four of his chosen areas of st Schneewind’s Part Three discusses the contributions of both the Jansenists and P Bayle to the development of a secular ethic, while the work of Parts Two and Thr this thesis brings out the extent to which these authors were concerned to fashi sharp critique of Stoic arguments and attitudes; on the matter of autonomy, finally, readily apparent that the ancient sect who made the most of an ideal of m independence was that of the Stoics, and that Kant and Rousseau’s writing is heavily inflected with Stoic language and other Stoic tropes when they turn to med on their not-so-different conceptions of moral autonomy. In this sense, rather offering a narrative to compete with, still less to contradict Schneewind’s, this s should be read as a modest companion piece. His general conclusions about the his and character of modern moral philosophy are ones which I am very happy to acc
Finally, I should note that I did not encounter Hans W. Blom’s impressive stud naturalism in seventeenth-century Dutch political thought until I was polishing final version of this thesis. Had I done so earlier in the project and thought care about some of the questions which it raises, I imagine that this dissertation might become something quite different. It would certainly, for example, have had about Dutch writers in it. 55 Overview of the Argument
up to vote on thisof titlethe most vib To identify as a Stoic around the year 1600 wasSign to embrace one Useful doctrines Not usefulthat were b currents in late Renaissance humanism. The Neo-Stoic elaborated at this time offered a set of personal therapies for troubled times, a poli teaching to strengthen the civil government of a virtuous prince, a public philos
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dissertation anatomise the movement from Neo-Stoicism to anti-Stoicism mainstream Western European intellectual culture across the course of the sevente century. With a neat symmetry, exactly one hundred years separate the births deaths of the two most significant writers for and against Stoic philosophy in e modern Europe, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) and Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) respect
Why this transition? The dominant narrative of seventeenth-century histor philosophy emphasises the rise of the new philosophies of Grotius, Descartes Hobbes in opposition to the older established scholasticism, and it is initially temp to surmise that the displacement of Aristotelianism in turn prompted a rejectio other ancient modes of thought, including those derived from Stoicism. But this w be to get things somewhat back to front. For the Neo-Stoics of the late sixteenth early seventeenth centuries were themselves in what might be termed the vangua early modernity, and their doctrines formed a constituent part of the collective effo displace the hegemony of scholasticism: Lipsius, for example, declared a prefer for Seneca and even Epicurus, whose “writings seem rosebeds to me, in compar with the thickets of the Lyceum”. 57 Stoicism also helped to furnish the philosophies of the seventeenth century with some of their most characte arguments. Like Grotius, the Stoics taught that a natural instinct towards preservation, which they called oikeiosis, oikeiosis, was an important component of a pr understanding of ethics. Like Hobbes, furthermore, the Stoics set forth an accoun ethics that was held to depend on a particular account of a deterministic physics. A quite like Descartes, finally, the Stoics taught that certain sense-impressions wer vivid that they necessarily contained a criterion of their own truthful corresponden reality, and could therefore be used to set limits to what it was possible for a sce reasonably to doubt.
The critics who attacked the new philosophies were therefore among the fie critics of the Stoic currents in European philosophy and culture. In particular sharpest religious critics of Stoic philosophy included the leading spokesmen up to vote on this title writers, distinctively Augustinian versions of Christianity.Sign French Augustinian Not useful Useful Jansenist and Oratorian, worried that the oikeiosis oikeiosis which underpinned the mo natural rights theory was the foundation of sinful pride rather than of univ morality, and the second Part of the dissertation examines the anti-Stoic writing
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turning to the anti-Stoic arguments developed by the Huguenot controversialist P Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, Dictionary , which rejected the Stoic/Cart epistemology of the “clear and distinct idea” and attacked Stoic cosmology as pa his onslaught against the Spinozist philosophy.
The Christian writers of the seventeenth century may therefore be said to succeeded in breaking apart the alliance between Stoicism and Christianity and, sense, forcing a choice between the two standpoints. Yet in the context of the e Enlightenment, the victory was not quite as complete as they would have wanted be, and this for two closely related reasons. On the one hand, the strongly August theologies of the seventeenth century were themselves in decline in both Catholic Protestant Europe, and as they lost their grip on the European imagination particular anti-Stoic moment correspondingly passed from the philosophical scene the other hand, the proliferation of new kinds of religious practice and beli including forms of pantheism and deism, as well as outright atheism – opened space for a set of constructive engagements with parts of the Stoic legacy. The fo Part of the thesis therefore surveys some of the ways in which Stoic ideas transmitted across the Early Enlightenemnt, with the final sections considering political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in light of the preceding preceding argument.
For whereas his Enlightenment predecessors had by and large accepted the obvious conclusion of the arguments of the previous century – that there w fundamental gulf between Stoic and Augustinian philosophy which could no bridged – and then worked within the intellectual space defined by this opposition hallmark of Rousseau’s approach is to find ways of refusing this choice. Rousse distinctive in the ways in which he returns to the battlefield of the seventeenth-cen arguments, especially to those considered in Part Two, and thinks both with against the Stoic and Augustinian traditions in order to fashion a new kind of th which incorporates the key insights of both parties, transcends the antagonism betw them, and issues in an argument for a radical democratic republican politics. W Sign upbrings to vote on thishistorical title call Rousseau’s secular Augustinian Stoicism therefore the narr Useful Not useful to a close, setting the scene for the radical Stoicrepublicanism of the great Fr Revolution in order to bring us back to where we began, in 1795.
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Part One: Justus Lipsius and Neo-Stoicism: The State of the Question in the Historiography of Political Though
I: Lipsius
In 1914, Léontine Zanta published La renaissance du stoïcisme au XVIe The significance of the event was twofold, for not only did this book help to inaug the study of the cultural and intellectual movement which is often called “N Stoicism”, a tradition of research which continues to this day, but Zanta was a significant first-wave French feminist and the book was based upon her doc dissertation, which had earned her the first Ph.D. degree to be awarded to a woma a French university. 1 In the first place, Zanta’s book drew attention to the grow interest in ancient Stoicism over the course of the sixteenth century, which manife itself in a variety of different ways, whether through the translation and dissemina of classical texts or the increasing use of Stoic tropes, arguments and values in m and political writings. She then presented, second, an anatomy of the main ideas o Stoic “triumvirate” of Justus Lipsius, Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron, w books did much to systematise and popularise this Stoic current around the turn o seventeenth century.
That the early modern Neo-Stoics were a significant group of thinkers had alr been argued by Wilhelm Dilthey, who had argued (in Larry Frohman’s words) “the recovery of Stoic philosophy in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth cent played a central – in fact, nearly constitutive – role in the formation of the mo individual and, more generally, in the transition to modernity”. 2 Dilthey, however mostly concerned with understanding the changing conceptions of rationality transformation of individual consciousness and the development of the mo scientific world-view. Zanta’s survey of the sixteenth century moralists, by con forged a path along which students of ethics and historians of political thought c follow. It still took some time, however, for this “Stoic revival” to find a plac SignJ. up W. to vote on this title general textbooks on the history of political thought. Allen’s 1928 textboo useful Useful, for Not History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century example, contain mention of Lipsius or any of the other major Neo-Stoic authors, and no consider of the influence of Stoicism on the thought of the period at all. 3 Even when the m
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Constantia, Constantia, the Manuductionis and the Physiologiae Stoicorum, Stoicorum , passing ove 4 explicitly political writings altogether.
Exactly fifty years after the publication of Allen’s book, things were quite diff The second volume of Quentin Skinner’s magisterial 1978 treatment of Foundations of Modern Political Thought gave Thought gave a detailed account of important as of Neo-Stoic political thought. In common with Zanta, to whom Skinner referred w writing these pages, a trio of modern Stoics was given prominence, but this around we find Michel de Montaigne considered alongside Lipsius and Du Vai place of the later Charron. The central theme that bound these writers together, Ski asserted, was their stress on “the need to remain steadfast in the face of Fortu changeability” in the age of the bloody civil wars of religion that tore apart both Fr and the Low Countries. This late Renaissance troika troika all recommended an attitud Stoical forbearance and insisted upon submission to the existing order of things, to the established religion of their country and to the political authorities, with all being “vehemently opposed to any attempt to vindicate the lawfulness of pol resistance”, the central theme in the writings of both the Huguenot theorists and political and religious religious opponents, as well as of Skinner’s second second volume as a whole
Yet if Skinner’s book successfully integrated the leading thinkers of the S revival which Zanta had chronicled into a general narrative of the developmen European political thought, it also served to highlight some of the difficulties w surround the attempt to write about the continuing influence of Stoic ideas on mediaeval and early modern authors. In his Preface, Skinner presented the boo “exemplify[ing] a particular way of approaching the study and interpretatio historical texts” which he had laid out in “a series of articles published over the twelve years”. 6 In a famous passage Skinner wrote that “The reader may wo whether I have any new findings to report as a result of applying this methodolo and, with reference to the originality of his first volume, he answered in affirmative: Sign up to vote on this title
Useful Not I have sought to emphasise the remarkable extent touseful which the vocabulary of Renaissance moral and political thought was derived from Roman stoic sources. A great deal of work has been done – for
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Baron and Pocock – on the contribution of Aristotelian doctrines to the formation of ‘civic’ humanism. But I do not think it has been fully appreciated how pervasively the political theorists of Renaissance Italy I taly and of early modern Europe in general were also influenced by stoic values and beliefs. Nor do I think it has been fully recognised how far an understanding of this fact tends, amongst other things, to alter our picture of Machiavelli’s relationship with his predecessors, and in consequence our sense of his aims and intentions as a political theorist.7
Whereas Zanta had dated the Stoic revival to the sixteenth century, Skinner here m a claim for the significance of Roman Stoicism in understanding the political tho of the quattrocento. quattrocento.
Yet despite his trumpeting of this theme in his Preface, it is never very clear his book just what Skinner took these “stoic values and beliefs” to comprise. In discussion of the trecento republican trecento republican Alberto Mussato, for example, Skinner notes he “draws extensively on stoic authorities in seeking to account for the final ‘capit and death’ of the Paduan Republic at the hands of Can Grande in 1328”, but the cl to which he draws our attention are republican commonplaces: While he does not underestimate the contribution made by ‘internal faction’ and ‘lethal ambition’, he mainly follows Sallust in emphasising the baleful effects of ‘morbid cupidity’, ‘the lust for money’, and the accompanying accompany ing loss of civic responsibility... 8
What Skinner labelled “stoic” often seemed little more than traces of the contin popularity and influence of Sallust and Cicero, neither of whom was profe Stoicism (though Cicero was of course an important source for Stoic doctrine). 9 respect, Skinner’s work was vulnerable to the same criticism which has been adva up to words) vote on this title “was a pio against Zanta’s own book, for (to borrow Anthony Sign Levi’s hers Useful Not useful work, but its assumptions about the stoicism of themoralists have today sometim 10 be questioned”. A further piece of evidence that Skinner’s account of Stoicism not terribly precise came in the second volume, when he referred to Montaig
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Skinner’s Foundations did Foundations did not, then, provide the kind of authoritative treatme the relationship between Stoicism and Renaissance political thought which the Pre might have led the reader to expect – the kind of treatment, for example, w Anthony Levi had offered concerning the French debate over the theory of the pass or which William Bouwsma had contributed in his survey of the Stoic “face humanist culture. 12 One contemporaneous academic project, however, which provide such a treatment with respect to the political thought of Dutch Neo-Stoic at least, was that of Gerhard Oestreich. He had died in 1978, the year of Skin Foundations; Foundations; his final book, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State posthumously published in in 1982. 13
For Oestreich, the importance of Lipsius and the Neo-Stoic “Netherl movement” was many-sided. Lipsius’s books – above all his De Constantia Politicorum – provided the definitive statement of a developing ideology which f inspiration in Greek and (mostly) Roman texts and which foregrounded theme power, self-inspection, discipline, toleration toleration and moderation. As well as helping helping to a definitive shape to this ideology, Lipsius was also a very significant progagandis it, and Oestreich stressed his role as a popular teacher, especially during his perio the new university college at Leiden. Not insignificant either were his seven hun correspondents, scattered all over Western Europe, and the fact that his books sixteenth-century bestsellers, going rapidly through many editions, and being trans into all the major European languages. 14
Oestreich’s claims for the historical significance of Lipsius’s project were small. The new emphasis on discipline and organisation on the part of the writers contributed to the “Netherlands movement” played a key role in the military revolu that transformed European warfare, and this in turn worked to reshape the wa which the European states themselves were organised. Oestreich credited Neo-Stoi as being one of the main forces behind the consolidation of absolutist ideology, so Signwhen up to vote this title security this Neo-Stoicism might be said to mark the moment theonnational useful attention Not came to supplant the free city republic as the focusofUseful political theorists’ loyalties. Oestreich further emphasised the contribution of the Netherlands movem to the long-run secularisation of European philosophy. 15 And if his claims abou
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impact and importance of Lipsius’s work were large, his own book was itse significant, and modestly understated intervention into one of the classic debate European historical sociology. Max Weber had famously drawn attention to importance of a “Protestant Ethic” associated above all with Calvinism understanding the increasing intensification of processes of rationalisation in e modern Europe, and his argument was a contribution to a non-Marxist explanatio the development and solidification of capitalist relations of production. 16 While Hintze had subsequently suggested that there was an affinity between Calvinism modern raison d’état arguments, 17 Oestreich went further and suggested that it Neo-Stoic ideology that helped to propagate an ethic of duty that bordere asceticism. In the context of the early modern absolutist monarchies, furthermo made more sense to ascribe significant social and economic effects to this se ideology rather than to a specific religious doctrine. 18
If Oestreich’s work on Neo-Stoicism increased scholars’ interest in a conce early modern social discipline (Sozialdisziplinierung (Sozialdisziplinierung), ), it also came to intersect partially overlap with the historical researches of Michel Foucault. 19 For while ne Lipsius nor Neo-Stoicism are specifically mentioned in Discipline and Pu Foucault did locate the origins of the disciplinary model of social institutions in military manuals of the early seventeenth century, and the writers he discus including Louis Montgommery and Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen, themse strongly influenced by – if not plagiarists of – Lipsius’s military writings. 20
The new histories of political theory published in the wake of Foundations – Foundations – m of which were substantially shaped by Skinner’s historical and methodological pro – began to explore the complexities of Neo-Stoic political thought, and to situa carefully in its European context. In America, Nannerl O. Keohane traced the rece r ece of Lipsian ideas in France in her justly celebrated study of early modern Fr 16
of Capitalism, Capitalism Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit Sign trans. up to vote on, this title Talcott Pa (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930). Useful Not useful 17 Hintze (New York: Oxford University Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New 1975), pp.88-154, cited in Oestreich, Neostoicism Oestreich, Neostoicism,, p.69. 18
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political thought.21 In England, there was a series of books and articles emanating what increasingly came to be referred to as the “Cambridge school”. Martin Gelderen provided the first detailed comparison of Florentine republicanism and Neo-Stoic political thought of the Dutch Revolt, and argued that while Machiavell Lipsius agreed that “the essence of the art of politics was to establish how virtue c conquer fortune in order to realise a vivere civile”, civile”, their divergent views on the dan of civil discord underpinned Lipsius’s preference for “unified, virtuous princely against Machiavelli’s vision of a vigorous, participatory republic. 22 Peter Bu chapter in the Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 stressed the ideo of detachment (apatheia (apatheia or or ataraxia) ataraxia) shared by both the “Stoics” and the “Sceptic the later sixteenth century, for although they would disagree about, for example existence and authority of the natural law (which Carneades considered oxymoro the reaction of Sceptics like Montaigne was “not so different from that of Stoics as Lipsius and Du Vair who expressed their desire for a quiet life in a more h language”.23 Most recently of all, in his elegant apology for ideologies of repub patriotism, Maurizio Viroli gave a prominent place to Lipsius’s attack assumptions of the earlier republican theories and to his argument which sough assimilate patriotic sentiment to the Stoic theory of the passions with a claim that i mistake to mistake to get excited about one’s patriotic identification. (As Viroli is careful to p out, however, this argument is above all an attack on pointless patriotic pointless patriotic lamentat rather than a theory in any way designed to undermine citizens’ loyalties to political regimes in which they happen happen to find themselves resident.) 24
Two of the more recent contributions, those of Richard Tuck and Robert Bir require a lengthier comment. In Tuck’s Philosophy and Government , the signific of Lipsius lay in his and Montaigne’s decisive contribution to the development of w Tuck called the “new humanism”. Whereas the earlier Renaissance humanism been generally Ciceronian C iceronian in orientation, this movement by contrast looked to Ta for inspiration, and Lipsius’s credentials as a Tacitist had been secured in 1574 thr the publication of his authoritative text of Tacitus’s major works. But whatLipsius up to vote on this title Montaigne added to the popular Tacitism of theSign time, according to Tuck, w useful Useful and Not powerful argument inspired by the confluence of Sceptical Stoic philosophy. moved beyond Burke’s observation that the Stoics and Sceptics of the period shar common goal, that of living a quiet life, by focusing on the structure and content o
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arguments originally developed by the Hellenistic philosophers in antiquity. characterising Renaissance Scepticism as chiefly psychological psychological rather epistemological, epistemological, Tuck brought out what the two doctrines had in common, which w similar approach to eudaimonistic ethics. The Stoics believed that the wise man the man who had purged himself of his error-inducing passions; the Sceptics beli that the wise man was the man who could suspend judgment concerning the conte his harm-inducing beliefs; and the connection between the two was secured by “cognitive element in most emotions” together with the reasonable supposition “passion can in the end only be controlled or eliminated by the control of belie Lipsius, then, was no simple Stoic, and Tuck highlighted those moments in his wr where he is sympathetic to the Sceptics: the attack on science in De Constantia the remark in the Manuductionis the Manuductionis that that “even Seneca regretted the disappearance o Sceptics”, whose goal of ataraxia had ataraxia had been “a high and laudable one” is another.
Oestreich had both stressed the commitment of Neo-Stoicism to the promotion stern self-discipline through intensive work on the individual’s passions and identified Lipsius’s arguments in the Politicorum on the subject of “mixed prude ( prudentia prudentia mixta) mixta) as a part of the raison d’état tradition.27 Tuck’s further sugge was that it was the Sceptical argument that provided the link between the Stoic m theory on the one hand and raison d’état political d’état political theories on the other (theories w were often to be found articulated in the writings of the more conventional Tacitis the time). A major part of the narrative of Philosophy and Government , then, wa story of how the major arguments of this “new humanism” ended up being transp
25
Tuck, Philosophy and Government , p.xiii. Gordon Braden presents an alternative view o similarities obtaining between the early modern Stoic and sceptical stances: “Between the and the Skeptic there is not always that much distance. The self aspires to be an imitation o cosmos, but it might as well be an arbitrary stand taken against a meaningless Sign up to vote on this titlereality...” Go Privilege (New Privilege (New Haven: Braden, Renaissance Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Useful Not useful Literature, p.4. University Press, 1985), quoted in Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature, 26 Tuck, Philosophy and Government , pp.50-51. In a recent paper, Anothny Levi agrees
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by Thomas Hobbes into the language and argumentative forms of the jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius28, for as Tuck summarised, The political analogue of this kind of self-discipline was naturally going to be a kind of raison d’état theory, theory, in which a population had to be disciplined and manipulated manipulated in the interests of its security. 29
The second work to consider here is Robert Bireley’s study of The Cou Reformation Prince. Prince . Bireley contends that Lipsius was, along with Giovanni Bo the founder of a specifically Catholic “anti-Machiavellian” tradition of Bar political thought. Lipsius’s chief concern, according to this author, was to “elabor vision of practical politics, in response to Machiavelli, that would be moral, Chris and effective in the circumstances of the late sixteenth century”. 30 To read Tuck Bireley on Lipsius side by side, therefore, is to be confronted immediately wit interpretive puzzle. For whereas Tuck described a Lipsius who moved from bei radical critic of the fashionable Tacitism of his time in 1572-4 to someone much c to the Italian Tacitists in the 1580s – and therefore much closer to Machiavellianism – and ends his presentation with a brief discussion of Lips alleged membership of the secretive and nonsectarian “Family of Love” gr Bireley’s Lipsius by contrast is squarely located in a Roman Catholic tradition a explicitly presented as an anti-Machiavellian anti-Machiavellian political theorist.
On the face of it we might prefer Tuck’s argument, for to treat Lipsius distinctively Catholic thinker is clearly problematic, given his successive switche religious allegiance from Catholicism to Lutheranism to Calvinism and bac Catholicism. Bireley is quite clear in his own mind at least about the primac Lipsius’s Catholic identity: Lipsius claimed to regret his conversion to Lutheranism tells us, and he notes that Lipsius “later claimed that during his years in Leide never actually departed from the Catholic faith and never participated in here services or in any form of political activity”, which Bireley considers “may very 31 Signpublished up to vote onin this title when Li have been the case”. Although the Politicorum was Politicorum was 1589, Not useful Useful Catholicism was a Calvinist teaching at Leiden, Bireley saves this work for by poi out that he had been keen to leave Leiden “as early as 1586”. Bireley’s strategy, t is to take at face value whatever Lipsius said about the history of his relig
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sincerity of his return to Catholicism” 32 – but this is not obviously the most sen way of determining the truth of the matter.
When it comes to the content of the political thought itself, Bireley shows him to be as keen to save Lipsius on behalf of anti-Machiavellianism as he has been Roman Catholicism. His Lipsius is certainly “uneasy” about the tradeoffs betw political utility and morality, and he notes Lipsius’s willingness to license breaches of conventional morality on the part of the prince. But the dominant them the presentation is the repudiation of Machiavelli, so he draws attention those mom when Lipsius denies that the prince should simulate virtue, for example; or whe rules certain kinds of action as being beyond the bounds of his “mixed prudence”; his angry response in De Una Religione to Coornhert’s allegation “Machiavellizing”.33
But as with Lipsius’s Catholicism, the evidence can be read both ways. perfectly plausible that Lipsius should have wanted publicly to deny allegation “Machiavellizing”, whatever the nature of his relationship to the political thoug the Florentine. Tuck finds two very striking affinities with Machiavelli’s controversial positions, first in that although Lipsius did not join his predecesso expressing sympathy with pagan religion, he did repeat Machiavelli’s mov subordinating religion to political considerations; 34 second, in Lipsius’s endorseme the Machiavellian view that “necessitie, which is the true defender of the weaknes man, doth breake all lawes”. 35 Bireley himself is aware of the limitations of his argument. He writes that Lipsius’s pragmatism “brought him perilously clos Machiavellism himself”, 36 and that with respect to the discussion of prudentia of prudentia mixt mix At first blush he might seem to approve what could be understood as Machiavellian procedures. But careful analysis combined with a look at his later statements seems to preclude this conclusion except perhaps in one or two instances instances..37 Sign up to vote on this title
Useful Notarguments: useful It is clear that Lipsius was not simply repeating Machiavelli’s he i defender of classical republican liberty for a start, and it is easy to find o
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disagreements that obtain between the pair. But to organise the analysis of Lips political thought around the the banner of “anti-Machiavellian” statecraft is too too crude.
To examine Bireley’s work through the lens provided by Philosophy Government is is to highlight its weaknesses, but to scrutinise Tuck’s book in light of Counter-Reformation Prince is also a valuable critical exercise, especially w Bireley insists that “Lipsius’s doctrine on providence is most important if he is t understood as an anti-Machiavellian”. 38 Tuck addressed the argument about provid in De Constantia, Constantia, calling it “the most commonly alluded-to feature of the wor modern literature”, but he went on to note that “it is in fact dependent in some way the notion of self-interest”, for it is the “combination of unalterable fate and the protect oneself” which necessitates the performance of certain actions. 39 We m however, want to question this interpretation of Lipsius’s argument. The “Lipsius the dialogue of De of De Constantia C onstantia begins begins as someone whose concern for self-preserv has induced him to leave the war-torn Low Countries for the safety of Vienna. argument of his interlocutor, “Langius”, aims to persuade him that self-mastery, an particular the control of the passions and the cultivation of the virtue of constanc more important than mere considerations of bodily self-preservation. In addition gives prominence to a much more conventional Christian argument about G providence: That the earth has opened her mouth and swallowed vp some townes, came of Gods providence. That otherwhere the plague hath consumed many thousandes of people, proceedeth of the same cause. That slaughters, war and tyranny rage in the Low-countries the Low-countries,, therehence also cometh it to passe... Against whom doest thou fret? I feare to speak it, euen against GOD. 40
Tuck was right to detect an affinity between Lipsius’s arguments and the traditio the Sceptics. But to take the theism intrinsic to his argument here seriouslybrings Sign drew up to vote this title argumen things into focus. First, that Lipsius characteristically ononSceptical useful Useful Not those moments when he wanted to downplay or deny the most obviously un-Chri parts of Stoic philosophy, concerning the omnipotence of the wise man, for exam or the impossibility of his sinning. 41 Second, that the emphasis on divine providen
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in an understanding of the world as a deterministic, providentially-ordered wh physics and ethics are inextricably linked. linked.
Lipsius was certainly enough of a Stoic to argue that the physics and the e marched hand in hand, and his most striking anticipation of Hobbes’s system m very well be his presentation of a system whose constituent parts included interrelated absolutist political theory and a deterministic physics. But the trouble Lipsius’s physics, which he presented above all in his Physiologiae Stoicorum that, as A. A. Long has explained, they were neither especially Stoic nor espec interesting. Unfortunately, for Stoicism as systematic philosophy, Lipsius’ works were a disaster. This is so for three main reasons. First, in spite of his command of the ancient sources, he did not know or did not use that evidence of Galen, Sextus Empiricus, the Aristotelian commentators or Marcus Aurelius, and even his citations of Cicero are few compared with what he drew from Seneca and Epictetus. Thus he bypasses much of the more technical material on Stoic cosmology. Second, he tends to confirm or correct the sources that he does cite by additional reference to Platonist and Christian writers, so blurring or distorting the original Stoic doctrines. Third, and most damaging, he accepts Christianity as the criterion by which to judge the meaning and propriety of Stoicism.42
In the crucial discussion in the Physiologiae Stoicorum, Stoicorum , for example, on fate the freedom of the will, Lipsius twice modified Stoic doctrine. First, he insisted tha Stoics addressed the problem of evil by locating its origin not in God, but in matter... And so when God made man and the other things, he formed all things good and all things for good; but in matter up to vote on this there was some kind of opposing force andSign wickedness, andtitleit is this Useful Not useful which dragged them elsewhere.
Second, he claimed that Stoic fate is fully compatible with the Christian teachin
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In the earlier De earlier De Constantia C onstantia,, Lipsius had distinguished between “Providence” “Destinie”, asserting that the former was “a power and facultie in God of see knowing and governing all things” and the latter was the concatenation of phy causes which the Stoics called fate. On Lipsius’s view, this destiny was itself dec by a providential God and its operations remained subject to his will; another God’s decree was that men should themselves possess free will, and so the operat of destiny were willed in such a way as not to impinge upon this freedom of the a striking formulation from from De De Constantia, Constantia, Lipsius asserted that God would that men should vse deliberation and choyse. So do they, without force, of their free-will. And yet, whatsoeuer they were in mind to make choyse of, God forsaw from all eternitie. He fore-saw it (I say) not forced it: hee knewe it, but constrayned not: he fore-told it, but not prescribed it.44
Lipsius was distinctive among the Renaissance Stoics for his view tha Bouwsma’s phrase, “the heart of Stoicism is not its ethics but its philosoph nature”,45 but a part of his achievement was also to have presented that philosoph nature to his contemporaries not as as a pantheistic determinist materialism – as had taught by the ancient Stoics themselves – but as compatible with a bland, non-sect Christian orthodoxy.
In a way, then, Tuck was right. Insofar as Lipsius was original, it was becaus his use of arguments indebted to Hellenistic philosophy, which put a set of cl about human psychology to work in the construction of a powerful and distin political theory. We do, however, also need to recognise that as a part of this argum Lipsius leant quite heavily on a received Christian conception of providence, whic presented as being more Stoic than it in fact was – and in which the traditio political thought that followed him (the main subject of the rest of Philosophy Government ), ), was strikingly uninterested. It is with Grotius’s famous etiamsi dar to vote on this moment title argument, and not in the works of Lipsius, thatSign weup reach the when Useful useful see Not argument about self-preservation (which, as we shall below, is deliberately cas Stoic manner as a rejoinder to Scepticism) is carefully severed from considera about the divine ordering of the universe, and in a manner which both the Stoics
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What Lipsius presented, was a doctrine that he attempted to pass off as Christian and Stoic, and which could be used to authorise a substantially Machiave or Tacitist political theory. Roughly speaking, Stoicism did for Lipsius what Aris had previously done for Aquinas, providing a comprehensive philosophical stru on which to hang theories about politics and ethics that could both coexist with lend philosophical support to traditional Christian claims. As with Aqu furthermore, this structure drew legitimacy from its being rooted in one of the m philosophical traditions of classical antiquity while simultaneously serving to the more radical elements of the challenge of pagan antiquity, associated above all a Ciceronian tradition of moderate Scepticism, republican politics and atheism. 46 Lipsius’s case, this was an attempt to mark out philosophical space in very uns intellectual territory, and it faced a double challenge, as we shall see in the pages follow. For on the one hand, the attempt to present Christianity as harmonious with kind of Stoicism was to prove anathema to some of the sharpest religious apologis the seventeenth century. On the other hand, it was through subsequent scholarshi the Stoic authors and other ancient sources of Stoic doctrine, which Lipsius himself done much to promote, that the academic scholars of Stoicism would com understand the extent to which the more orthodox varieties of Christianity and S doctrine were mutually incompatible. II: Grotius and Descartes
The wideranging impact of the Neo-Stoics on late sixteenth- and early seventee century European culture is by now extensively documented. In addition to the w on the history of political thought discussed above, scholars in a number of other f have recently been building on the classic works of Zanta, Oestreich and, for lite studies, M. W. Croll, in order to chart the diverse aspects of the European encou with Neo-Stoicism. 47 There have been works more narrowly focused on Lipsius an immediate environment,48 as well as those more broadly concerned with what Wil Bouwsma has called the “high culture” of late Renaissance humanism and of the Sign uptracked to vote onthe this title half of the seventeenth century. 49 Older studies have reception of
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Stoicism in France in the works of religious, political and philosophical authors, there is now a considerable literature on the reception of Lipsius and the interpret of Stoic values produced by scholars of English poetry from Shakespeare to Milt The variety of contexts in which Neo-Stoic discourse has been profitably stu continues to grow: one recent study discusses the Neo-Stoic contribution to the po of the Silesian Baroque, and Peter Miller has written a fine article, “Stoics who Si on the libretti written for the opera in seventeenth-century Lucca. 52
Before moving on to consider the developing philosophical criticism of these S currents, however, the two most significant uses of Stoic concepts in Euro philosophy from the first half of the seventeenth century need to be mentioned. T came in the work of Hugo Grotius and René Descartes, and the significance of arguments lurks in the background of many of the claims about and against Stoi that we will encounter in the pages to come. Grotius
If writers like Lipsius or Du Vair had tried to repackage and defend a whole s Stoic positions, Grotius by contrast was chiefly interested in one particular con which the Stoics had developed and with which they were associated. This was b on the rather simple thought, which would become the basis of Grotius’s theor natural rights, that all living creatures have a natural instinct towards self-preserva and that in pursuit of this self-preservation their behaviour is naturally guided tow the appropriate kinds of goods which will help them to secure their contin existence. He invoked this Stoic concept in response to a hypothetical objection p by an imaginary Carneadean Sceptic in the “Preliminary Discourse” to The Righ War and Peace, Peace, that there is no such thing as justice, and that individuals only their private advantage: But what is here said by the Philosopher [Carneades], and by the Poet Sign up to vote this title after him [Horace] must by no Means be admitted. ForonMan is indeed Useful Not useful an Animal, but one of a very high Order, and that excells all the other Species of Animals much more than they differ from one another; as the many Actions proper only to Mankind sufficiently demonstrate.
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Now amongst the Things peculiar pec uliar to Man is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any Manner whatever, but peaceably, and in a Community regulated according to the best of his Understanding; which Disposition the Stoicks termed Οικειωσιν. Therefore the Saying, that every Creature is led by Nature to seek its own private Advantage, expressed thus universally, must not be granted. 53
Here his focus is on Stoic oikeiosis as oikeiosis as the basis of a natural sociability among men later in the same work, he returns to the same concept, this time laying emphasis o idea of self-preservation that it encompasses: Marcus Tullius Cicero, both in the third book of his treatise On Ends and in other places, following Stoic writings, learnedly argues that there are certain first principles of nature – “first according to nature”, as the Greeks phrased it – and certain other principles which are later manifest but which are to have the preference over those first principles. He calls first principles of nature those in accordance with which every animal from the moment of its birth has regard for itself and is impelled to preserve itself, to have zealous consideration for its own condition and for those things which tend to preserve it, and also shrinks from destruction and things which appear likely to cause destruction...54
The passage to which Grotius referred is from the speech Cicero put into the mou Cato, his mouthpiece for the Stoics’ arguments: It is the view of those whose system I adopt [i.e. the Stoics], that immediately upon birth, for that is the proper point to start from, a living creature (animal (animal)) feels an attachment for itself and an impulse to up toconstitution vote on this titleand for preserve itself and to feel affection for itsSign own Useful Not useful those things which tend to preserve that constitution ( ipsum sibi conciliari et commendari ad se conservandum et ad suum statum eaque quae conserventia sunt eius status diligenda ); while on the other
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feel desire at all unless they possessed self-consciousness, and consequently felt affection for themselves. This leads to the conclusion that it is love of self (se ( se diligendo) diligendo ) which supplies the primary impulse 55 to action.
Grotius thus followed the Stoics in arguing that both both the natural inclination to preservation and the the natural disposition to a social existence have a common sourc this concept of oikeiosis. oikeiosis. Oikeiosis is Oikeiosis is a term that, like many technical terms from G philosophy, is hard to render well in translation: Liddell and Scott give “a takin one’s own, appropriation”, and what we appropriate are precisely those things w are appropriate to the particular kind of creature we are. 56 This impulse to preservation is shared by all animals (“impulse”, or horme, horme, is what distingu 57 animals from plants in Stoic philosophy ) and the same impulse is at the root parent’s natural affection for its offspring. This impulse, according to Cicero (and is a point which is emphasised by Grotius), is “the starting-point of the univ community of the human race” and of our being naturally suited “to form un societies and states (coetus, ( coetus, concilia, civitates)”. civitates )”.58
Grotius was more than a generation younger than Lipsius, writing at a time w the restatement of arguments drawn from ancient Scepticism was popular, and t arguments were being formulated with great skill and devastating results. particular, the discovery, exploration and settlement of large parts of the non-Euro world together with the conquest and dispossession of its peoples was helpin nurture the varieties of moral relativism which historically tend to accompany serious contemplation of cultural difference. Grotius’s distinctive – indeed, constitu – contribution to modern moral philosophy, which was to be hailed in the eighte century by Jean Barbeyrac as his “breaking [of] the ice” of mediaeval m philosophy,60 was to claim that the natural instinct towards towards self-preservation serv ground a natural right of of self-preservation, and that this natural right could be use the foundation of a universally valid, non-relativistic moral code. Sign up to vote on this title
Useful Not usefulof the resu We ought not, nevertheless, to exaggerate the Stoic character theory.61 As Schneewind warns,
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Cicero had sketched a Stoic theory of natural law in two works whose influence was not lessened by the fact that they were preserved only in fragmentary form. Since Grotius of course knew these fragments, it is tempting to think that he was developing a Stoic doctrine of natural law for modern times. Yet I think this would be a serious mistake. We do not see him appealing to any of the metaphysics behind Stoic ethics. He refuses to say anything, in the development of his theory of natural law, about the relation of our reason and the divine mind. He sets aside, as I have noted, questions of the highest good and of the best form of the state, both of which Cicero discusses at length. He does not assure us that all apparent evils are truly goods or at least matters of indifference to us; he offers no therapy; and he says nothing about individual perfection... 62
Indeed, since the point of Grotius’s enterprise was to develop a theory which c command general acceptance, he was careful to note that his argument was sectarian. Despite the Stoic foundation of his central argument, he considered that of the ancient schools would have objected to his emphasis on the right of preservation, “For on this point, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Peripatetics complete agreement, and apparently even the Academics have entertained no doub The theory could, he thought, even stand independently of the truth of revealed reli and he became notorious for his claim that the argument would remain v “[T]hough we should even grant (etiamsi ( etiamsi daremus), daremus ), what without the gre Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God, or that he takes no Care of hu Affairs”.64
Gloria Vivenza criticises those writers who, she thinks, have been too quick to judge Sm “Stoic” based on his use of the argument about “concentric circles” associated Sign up to vote on this title with the oikeiosis oikeiosis Not Hierocles. She notes, for example, that “the well-knownUseful came to be attribut useful Stoicism mainly as a result of Max Pohlenz’s great authority in the twentieth century” and “it is therefore unlikely that Smith could have interpreted it as such as early as the sevente
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Descartes
The other philosopher who deployed a version of a distinctive Stoic concept crucial moment in his construction of an original and important body of modern th was René Descartes. In this case the concept was the Stoic phantasia kataleptik “cataleptic impression”, 65 and this appeared in his writing as the “clear and dis idea”, the concept which was used in the Third Meditation and afterwards in ord reconstruct the body of knowledge about the external world which had been thr into question by the hyperbolical doubt of the First F irst Meditation. 66 In Stoic and Cart epistemology, the “cataleptic impression” or the “clear and distinct idea” is somet apprehended by the mind that contains a criterion of its own truthfulness correspondence with reality – a guarantee that it is as it appears to be. For the Stoi for Descartes, the chief way to avoid falling into error is to give one’s assent onl those propositions which can ultimately be traced back to such an impression or an idea, with the difference between the Stoics and Descartes on the one hand and Sceptics on the other turning on the question of whether there are in fact any idea perceptions which are sufficiently “clear and and distinct” so as to warrant such such assent.
In general, and with justice, contemporary commentators have pointed out there are significant differences between the Stoic and the Cartesian concepts. Ste Gaukroger, for example, writes that Descartes may have been familiar with this [Stoic] doctrine, and if he was it would have been from Book 7 of Diogenes Laertius... from Cicero’s Academica, Academica, or from the very critical treatment in Sextus Empiricus. But I think it unlikely that he was simply taking over the Stoic doctrine, or even that he was influenced by the doctrine in its specifically Stoic form. For one thing, the Stoic doctrine is restricted in its application in the first instance to perceptual cognitive impressions, other cognitive impressions deriving their guarantee from these, up to vote on this title whereas Descartes’ paradigm case is that ofSign a nonperceptual cognitive useful to the Useful itisNot impression par excellence, excellence, namely mathematics: crucial Stoic doctrine that the fact that our impressions have an external source be taken into account, whereas in Descartes’ version of the
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empirical reasoning, and then uses this belief in a beneficent, non-deceiving Go order to reestablish confidence in his perceptual perceptual impressions in the Sixth and 68 Meditation.
It is true that the Stoic and the Cartesian concepts are distinctively tailored operate in different ways as constituent components of their respective philosop systems. But in addition to these differences it is important to register the similar of function function that these concepts serve, which we can trace by noting the para between the ways in which Grotius and Descartes construct their respective argum Both accepted that the Aristotelian scholasticism that had dominated Euro philosophy since the time of Aquinas had no adequate response to the Scep objections that were being pressed upon it. Both sought to overcome this Scepticis Sce pticis pushing a certain kind of Sceptical objection as far they thought it could reasonab pushed. Finally, both used a recognisable variant of a Stoic concept both to both to mar limits of plausible Scepticism and as a foundation for the reconstruction of a developed ethical or epistemological system. That Stoic concepts, or adaptation Stoic concepts, could fill this role should not perhaps be surprising, for the Stoics been the most sustained opponents of the ancient Sceptics in the epistemolo debates among the Hellenistic philosophers, debates which had run on for genera by the time of Cicero, whose Academica whose Academica and and De De Finibus were Finibus were two of the major so of information about these debates for the generation of Grotius and Descartes.
Grotius and Descartes, finally, were not just interested in Stoicism for t arguments. Grotius had compiled an anthology of texts on the Stoics’ fate for use i controversies surrounding the theology of Arminius, 69 and Descartes drew substan on Stoic ethical theory and on Epictetus in particular in the construction of his par provision provision in the Discourse on the Method . In this text, it is the “Third Ma which is most clearly Stoic in inspiration. John Marshall has shown how established through a very different chain of reasoning from the one Epictetus employed, but its content is unmistakable, and could have come straight from the p 70 Sign up to vote on this title of the Discourses the Discourses::
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My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world. In general I
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Despite this interest in other Stoic arguments, however, there would be no poi an attempt to assimilate Grotius and Descartes to the earlier Neo-Stoic tradition. was a substantially more original philosopher than Lipsius, for example, and ne sought to derive any legitimacy for their philosophical constructions by associ them with Stoic philosophy in the way that their predecessor had done; ind Descartes, in the manner of both Hobbes and Spinoza, was quite reticent abou philosophical sources, even when he drew on writers, such as Cicero, whose texts arguments would have been quite familiar to his contemporary audience. But i Grotian and Cartesian traditions went substantially beyond the Stoicism they inherited and transformed, they could never entirely sever themselves from it, an criticise the Stoics’ oikeiosis oikeiosis or the phantasia kataleptike kataleptike was implicitly, somet explicitly, to strike at the foundation of the new philosophies. The sections that fo chart some of the ways in which this was done.
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Part Two: Augustinian Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth-Century France Jansen to Malebranche
The Stoic last in philosophic pride, By him called virtue, and his virtuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing, Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer, As fearing God nor man, contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life Which, when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can; For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, Or subtle shifts conviction to evade. Alas! what can they teach, and not mislead, Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, And how the World began, and how Man fell, Degraded by himself, on grace depending? Much of the Soul they talk, but all awry; And in themselves seek virtue; and to themselves All glory arrogate, to God give none; Rather accuse him under usual names, Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite Of mortal things. John Milton, Paradise Regain’d (1671) (1671) 4.300-318.
Introductory Remarks: Augustine and the Stoa Sign up to vote on this title
NotStoics, useful an influe Usefulandthe As in the case of the relationship between Montaigne view among scholars has been to ascribe a distinctively Stoic phase to Augustin which the early dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will is Will is held to be the central
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Stoic concepts in some of his later writings, and in doing so it constructs more dichotomy between the “young” and the “mature” Augustine than is warran Happily, there is now a considerable scholarly literature on the presence of Stoicis Augustine’s thought throughout his career, and within this body of work, M Colish’s volume on Stoicism in the Christian Latin Fathers stands out, with alm hundred copiously documented pages given over to the careful elucidation of the of Stoic arguments in Augustine’s writings. 3 Hand in hand with the increasing int of scholars of ancient philosophy in the Hellenistic schools over the last generatio is now also increasingly common for books on the development of philosop doctrine to include, and often enough to conclude, with discussion of the relation of the Saint of Hippo to what has gone before. 4
When early modern authors tried to understand the relationship that obta between Augustine and the Stoics, on the other hand, they were engaged in different kind of enterprise from that of late twentieth-century scholars. For while major texts of Augustine, Cicero, Seneca and others were well known to seventee century scholars, there had been no kind of the systematic work on the tex fragments of Stoic philosophy which is so important to modern researchers, who heavily on the edition of von Arnim or the compilation of Long and Sed Montaigne recognised a part of what his era lacked, when in a discussion of the conceptions of the sovereign good in antiquity he expressed the hope that in his lifetime “someone like Justus Lipsius” (whom he called “the most learned man l polished and judicious mind”) would put together a compilation of the ethical opin of the ancient philosophers, “listed by class and by category”, and exclaimed, “Wh beautiful and useful book that would would be!” 6
The limited source material available to the early moderns certainly crippled understanding of Stoic logic, for example, which was usually dismissed throughou seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as being of no value. (An important exceptio Sign up to vote on this title
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this rule is Pierre Gassendi, who was sympathetic. 7) But a still more significant f shaping the appreciation of the early moderns for the Stoics – and one which ma virtually impossible for them to understand what Augustine was doing in doing in his wri on Stoic thought - was the striking lack of interest in or attention to the histo development of ancient philosophical doctrine. The doxographical template w Diogenes Laertius had employed persisted into modern times, being employe Thomas Stanley, the major English scholar of the history of philosophy in seventeenth century, 8 as it was by many other writers before the emergence o modern “eclecticism” which sought to understand how new and significant argum developed out of the criticisms of the philosophical status quo ante ante (and whi discussed in Part Three Section Three and Part Four Section One below). The set-p debates between the ancient schools which Cicero presented in De Finibus elsewhere were, of course, well known to the scholars of the Renaissance afterwards, and seventeenth-century scholars were adept at the critical compariso the arguments of one text or author with those of another, but there was very interest in the questions which command the attention of contemporary historian why the various ancient philosophers made the arguments they did, and in respon what, and of how these arguments then changed the terms of the philosop questions which their successors inherited from them. Contemporary scholar ancient philosophy are only now beginning to address the question of how Augu recasts and transforms Stoic doctrine; it is, to say the least, an exciting fiel enquiry.9
The discussion that follows is not concerned with Augustine’s transmogrificat of Stoic doctrine, however, but with the tradition of anti-Stoic criticism whic inaugurated, and how it was then appropriated and developed in the work seventeenth-century French Augustinian authors. It therefore begins with a det exposition of Augustine’s important presentation of arguments from Stoic philoso in Book XIV of The City of God against the Pagans , in order to show how August critical engagement with Stoicism sits right at the heart of his political theology Sign upin to vote this title treatment important point which is not sufficiently emphasised the onexisting Not useful Augustine and the Stoics, and which is crucial to Useful the concerns of this Part. argument then moves forward to the world of the Renaissance, with Section
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presenting a critical account of William J. Bouwsma’s classic article on the “two f of humanism”, a treatment which incorporates discussion of a different August text, the early and aforementioned dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will . The work of the chapter appears in Section Three, which is an account of the contou the Augustinian anti-Stoicisms developed in particular by Cornelius Jansenius (1 1638), Jean-François Senault (1601-1672), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and Nic Malebranche (1638-1715), an ideology which revisits some of the themes outline Part One and responds to the more immediate context sketched in the opening Sec of this Part. The concluding fourth section considers the increasingly frequent reco to Marcus Aurelius over the second half of the seventeenth century, and argues th part this is to be explained by this Stoic author’s comparative immunity to the kin criticisms being developed in the Augustinian literature, whose major targets wer contemporary varieties of Stoicism which drew most heavily on Seneca. I: Stoicism in Book XIV of City of God
In significant ways, Book XIV is the pivot on which the rest of The City of Against the Pagans turns, for it contains Augustine’s analysis of the situation of A and Eve in Eden and of their subsequent Fall. This is an episode central not only to theological project, for Augustine single-handedly created the doctrine of Origina which dominated the thinking of the Church for so long, but also to his political the th owing to the work it performs in constructing the central categories of the argume the work as a whole. It is no accident, for example, that the most succinct summa Augustine’s political teaching belongs right at the end of Book XIV, for the fam passage which begins “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves” ( fec itaque ciuitates duas amores duo ) is Augustine’s summary presentation of the pos won by the argument of Book XIV, and which the remaining books will expand u at very great length. 10 The Book opens with the theme of the existence of two cities, earthly and heavenly, already richly elaborated; but it is only in the cours Book XIV that the origins and nature of each city – the core theme of the work up to vote on this whole – are properly established, the one rooted in Sign disobedience, or title in pride roote Useful Not useful self-love, the other in charity, or love of God “extending to contempt of self”. 11
The origins of the cities lie in different kinds of love, and these loves are ce
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at least two reasons: first because the love of self is rooted in the nature of things, what is natural is created by God and is for that reason good; second because of divine commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, which implies the prop of a certain kind of self-love. 12 The object of love is significant, but more importa the ordering ordering of one’s loves, and the quality of one’s loving, concerning w Augustine deploys a vocabulary of charitable loving on the one hand and passio loving or lust on the other. The trouble with self-love is not intrinsic to it, but relat the fact that in practice it so often issues in contempt of God, or pride, a misorderin our loves and a denial of the love we owe our Creator. “Love”, wrote Augustine in of his commentaries on the Psalms, “but take care what it is that you love... Bridle passion, stir up your charity!” 13 Given this centrality of love to Augustine’s et theory in general and to the political argument of City of God in particular, therefore a striking and an important fact about The City of God that these chapte Book XIV also contain by far the most sustained rumination upon Stoic philosoph be found in the entire work.
Book XIV does not by any means, however, mark the first appearance of the S in the City of God . In Book V Augustine considered the Stoic account of fate example, arguing with and against the Ciceronian account presented in De Fato Book IX he addressed various topics in Stoic ethics. But neither of these i especially significant episode in the structure of the work. Insofar as Augustine critical of the Stoics’ fate, it was (reasonably enough) to attack their fondness astrology, and is best understood as a component part of the more general attac pagan superstition which dominates so much of the first ten Books; insofar as sympathetic, it was to uphold the notion of a universe under the benign governanc an omnipotent Deity in possession of perfect foreknowledge against both Cicero the Pelagians who worried that the chains of causation which God therefore forek were incompatible with the possession of a truly free will by human beings. 14 Augustine considered the ethics of the Stoics in Book IX, furthermore, he was con to repeat Cicero’s criticism from De Finibus Finibus about the disagreements between 15 Sign substantial, up to vote on this a title Stoics and the Peripatetics being linguistic rather than complaint w
12
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echoes a familiar trope in Christian writings about the endless capacity of philosophers for meaningless disputation. 16 In Book XIV, by contrast, Augu expounds a set of Stoic ethical doctrines in order to introduce his analysis of the n of the original sin, and while his verdict on the Stoics in the end is damning – ind he really does demonise them, as we shall see – this judgment is passed only afte has signalled his agreement with a very substantial part of the Stoics’ approac moral theory.
As is well known, City of God is divided into two unequal halves. The firs books were written against the Romans and their religion; the latter twelve presen history of the citizens of the City of God on their pilgrimage through historical and a little beyond. These twelve books are further subdivided into four groups of on the origin, and end of of the heavenly city, so that Book XIV is the origin, development and book of the first part of the second half, bringing the analysis of the origin of the of God to a close. 17 The discussion of the Fall is spread over two books, XIII and but the main argument which engages the Stoics is entirely confined to Book Book XIII considers the nature of death, death, which is, so Augustine contends, the d punishment justly incurred for the sin in the Garden; and it presents analyses of of the metaphysics which arise from thinking about the separation of the soul and body or the flesh of the saints. This Book ends with a discussion of the nature of in the absence of the “shameless stirrings of those parts which were not subject to control of the will”, how would men “have begotten offspring if they had remaine they were created, without sin?” 18 Augustine announces that “so large a subject ca be treated in so narrow a compass”, and that he will end Book XIII at this poin order that this important issue can be “treated more appropriately” in the pages follow. As promised, Book XIV does indeed answer the question Augustine has posed to himself, but only in its second half. The discussion of lust begins in XI and dominates the rest of the Book, 19 but these passages on lust, however, only ap after a lengthy discussion of Stoic philosophy, which in turn introduces August presentation of the actual Fall of Adam itself, and it is these chapters that Sign up to vote on this title considered in most detail in this section.
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Book XIV opens with a reiteration of the claim, familiar from XII.22 and fro many other Augustinian texts, that “the individual members of this [human] race w not have been subject to death, had not the first two... merited it by their disobedien But for the unmerited grace of God, Augustine comments that all men would been “driven headlong, as their due punishment, into that second death to which is no end”, and that it is the existence of this redeeming grace which has led to the orders” of human society, or to the “two cities”. So far, so familiar, until Augu appeals to a Biblical distinction, for of the two cities, “The one is made up of men live according to the flesh (secundum ( secundum carnem), carnem ), and the other of those who according to the spirit (secundum ( secundum spiritum)”. spiritum )”.20 XIV.2 clarifies this distinction. O one hand Augustine is quite clear that the Epicureans recommended a life accordin the flesh, “for they place man’s highest good in the pleasure of the body”. Augustine also and immediately insists that the Stoics also belong also belong on the fleshly of this binary, even though, as he admits, they present virtue as the summum bo and understand it to be a property of the mind: In fact, however, it is clear that all of these [i.e. the Stoics] live according to the flesh in the sense intended by Divine Scripture when it uses the expression.
The distinction between the flesh and the spirit is not identical with that between body and the mind, and Augustine provides several examples from Scripture wher word flesh is not used “to mean only the body of an earthly or mortal creature”. text that provides him with his interpretive key is from Paul, at Galatians 5:19: The works of the flesh are manifold, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like. 22
Sign up to vote on this observes title Although Paul described these as the works of the flesh, Augustine that Useful body”, are all clearly “vices of the mind rather than of the andNottouseful clinch his cas imagines a man who “tempers his desire for bodily pleasure out of devotion to an or because of some heretical error”. This man is nevertheless
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This is the first step in his argument, for having established that the domain of the extends beyond the realm of the body to include what goes on in people’s mind remains for Augustine to show why the Stoics’ account of virtue should virtue should be catego alongside wrath, heresy, drunkenness and these other sins of the flesh.
Two new elements are therefore introduced in XIV.3. First, Augustine begin consideration of the “disturbances ( perturbationes ( perturbationes)) of the mind”, and while he 24 his typology from Virgil, the disturbances are the standard Stoic quartet of d (cupiditas), cupiditas), fear (timor (timor ), ), joy (laetitia (laetitia)) and grief (tristitia (tristitia). ). Augustine departs Virgil’s Platonic interpretation of the perturbationes perturbationes as having their origins in 25 body, asserting as an article of “our faith” that “the corruption of the body, w presseth down the soul, was not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment”. 26 Se Augustine for the first time in Book XIV introduces the figure of the Devil, who continue to be a felt presence for the rest of the Book. If the Platonic teaching right, he observes, there would be a problem, for then “we should absolve the D from all such vices, since he has no flesh”. Worse still, [W]e cannot say that the devil is a fornicator or a drunkard, or that he commits any other such vice pertaining to the pleasures of the flesh, even though it is he who secretly tempts and incites us to such sins. He is, however, supremely proud and envious (maxime ( maxime superbus atque invidus); invidus); and these vices of pride and envy have so possessed him that he is doomed by them to eternal punishment in the prison of this murky air of ours.
Augustine concludes that “It is not then, by having flesh, which the devil does not that man has become like the devil. Rather, it is by living according to his own that is, according to man.” Thus the operative dichotomy in the Book shifts yet ag the classical dualism classical dualism of body and mind was replaced by the Biblical binary Biblical binary of the and the spirit, and this binary is now transposed into a distinctively Augustinian to vote on this that between living according to man, or to self on Sign the up one hand, andtitleliving accor Useful Not useful to God on the other.
This opposition is further elaborated in XIV.4, where Augustine represents li
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and in locating vice in the mind , and identifying it with both passion and passion and falseho falseho the second, Augustine is, as he recognises, in agreement with the Stoics and oppos both the Platonists and the the Manichees. 27
The critique of the Stoics finally begins to take shape at XIV.6. Augustine’s line of attack is to insist that there are good as well as bad emotions (and in X Augustine follows with a battery of Scriptural S criptural citations to reinforce the point): What is important here is the quality of a man’s will ( interest autem qualis sit voluntas hominis). hominis ). For if the will is perverse, the emotions will be perverse; but if it is righteous, the emotions will be not only blameless, but praiseworthy.28
Although Augustine’s insistence on the importance of will might seem to mark a s departure from Stoic theory, as indeed with all earlier Greek ethics, interpretive ca is required. When the need to make some allowances for a necessarily shi terminology is recognised, as Augustine transforms a technical Greek vocabulary his own distinctive Latin, his claim here still bears the traces of two very distin Stoic claims: on the one hand, of Chrysippus’s argument that the passions consequent on poor judgment, rather than vice versa; versa; on the other hand, of Epicte emphasis on the importance of the correct use of the will (or faculty of choice prohairesis) prohairesis) in determining right action. 29
There is of course a well-rehearsed Stoic response to this kind of objection, a is one that Augustine acknowledges in XIV.8, which is that the sage indeed does s emotion, but that these are eupatheiai or constantiae rather constantiae rather than pathe than pathe,, or “pass 30 constituted by error. Augustine’s response to this objection contains four signif elements. First, in XIV.8 he peppers his text with a large number of citations, m Scriptural but some also drawn from Cicero and (oddly) Terence, to reach the (per unsurprising) conclusion that in the most authoritative literature the distinction Sign up to vote this purposes, title Stoics insist upon is not upheld. 31 Second, and importantly foronhis he n Not useful Useful that Paul praised the Corinthians for having felt grief “after agodly manner”, altho the Stoics not only denied that the wise man feels grief but also refused to supp corresponding eupatheia as eupatheia as a substitute to describe what he does feel. 32 In respon
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miserable because he was foolish, the Stoics had an example of this kind of grief; b is a grief that the wise man can never experience, precisely because he is wi (Augustine can allow this response to stand, since the Stoics’ dogma that the wise does not sin is a part of the rope with which he will hang them a little later in Book.) Third, in XIV.9 Augustine argues that the citizens of the heavenly city do the four perturbationes four perturbationes,, but this is in a manner consistent with the Holy Scripture and wholesome doctrine; and because their love is righteous, all these emotions are righteous in them. 34
They may even desire temptation, desire temptation, saying “Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try reins and my heart”, and with reference to the many occasions on which Paul wep rejoiced and experienced longing, suffering and jealousy he proclaims that if these emotions and affections, which come from the love of the good and form holy charity, are to be called vices, then let us allow that real vices should be called virtues. 35
Finally, Augustine reminds his reader that Christ also experienced pathe pathe on se 36 occasions. In this final section, he also rejects the Stoics’ contention that pity w vice, agreeing with Paul that we should denounce those who are “without na affection”, and with Cicero that to be entirely free of pain in this world would req the cultivation of “savagery of mind and stupor of body”. 37
These last observations pave the way for Augustine’s analysis of the ce category in Stoic ethics, that of apatheia. apatheia. If, then, we are to understand this ‘impassibility’ ( impassibilitas) impassibilitas) to mean a life without those emotions which arise contrary to reasonand to vote on this title which disturb the mind, it is clearly a goodSign andupdesirable condition. It 38 Useful Not useful does not, however, belong to this present life. The saints may enjoy apatheia in apatheia in a world to come, but for the moment,
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the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would not judge insensitivity to be the worst of all vices? 39
The fact that apatheia is apatheia is depicted as a life without fear reinforces the claim that unsuited to this world, for on earth we rightly fear God if we wish to live rightly only in “that life of blessedness which, it is promised, is eternal” will that fear com an end.40
Christians need not worry therefore that they are fearful, and that they experi the various other perturbationes, perturbationes, for “a righteous life will exhibit all these emo righteously, whereas a perverse life exhibits them perversely”. 41 The Stoics, on o other hand, are citizens of the earthly city, as the following passage makes clear: The city, that is, the fellowship of the ungodly consists of those who live not according to God, but according to man: who, in worshipping false gods and despising the true Divinity, follow the teachings of men or of demons. This city is convulsed by those emotions as if by diseases and upheavals. And upheavals. And if it has any citizens who seem to control and in some way temper those emotions, they are so proud and elated in their impiety that, for this very reason, their haughtiness increases even as their pain diminishes. diminishes . Some of these, with a vanity as monstrous as it is rare , are so entranced by their own self-restraint that they are not stirred or excited or swayed or influenced by any emotions at all. But these rather suffer an entire loss of their humanity than achieve a true tranquillity. tranquillity . For a thing is not right merely because it is harsh, nor is stolidity the same thing as health. 42
This, then, is the characteristic vice of the Stoics, that their pride leads them to bel that it is in their power to control their emotions. This is impious on two levels. F in that it triply fails to recognise that the passions are inevitable (because they are to vote on of the divine punishment for original sin), that thereSign is aupproper usethisoftitle the passions useful Useful righteous way to experience them, and that the correct wayofNot handling the pass comes through a recognition of dependence on God rather than through a doo attempt to insist that humans can through their own efforts overcome them. Secon
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In XIV.10, Augustine returns to the First Couple. The chapter title asks “Whe we are to believe that the first human beings were subject to emotions of any when they were placed in Paradise, and before they sinned?”, and the body of the poses the question this way: did they feel “in their animal bodies the kind of emo which we shall not feel in our spiritual bodies when all sin has been purged ended”? His answer is that they did not: The love of the pair for God and for one another was undisturbed (inperturbatus), inperturbatus), and they lived in a faithful and sincere fellowship which brought great gladness to them, for what they loved was always at hand for their enjoyment. There was a tranquil avoidance of sin (erat devitatio tranquilla peccati ); and, as long as this continued, no evil of any kind intruded, from any source, to bring them sadness. 43
They had been forbidden to eat from the tree, but Augustine is clear that they did desire the fruit against God’s decree and abstain from it “merely from fea punishment”. Nor was theirs a righteous fear of the kind discussed in the prev chapter: they abstained out of righteousness pure and simple, and they lived wit the perturbationes the perturbationes of of fear and desire. How happy, then, were the first human beings, neither troubled by any disturbance of the mind nor pained by any disorder of the body! 44 Is this a description of Stoic apatheia? apatheia? Marcia Colish thinks not: Not even Adam and Eve before the Fall possessed apatheia, apatheia, Augustine maintains, otherwise they could not have felt the desire for the forbidden fruit. It is only in the next life, in which the saints will be free from the capacity to sin, that apatheia will apatheia will be possible for man. 45
Sign up to voteColish on this title But is this correct? Augustine does not make the point which ascribes to hi Useful useful by her den XIV.10, to which her footnote refers; and it is not clear whatisNot gained that Adam and Eve lived in a state of apatheia; apatheia; on the other hand, as we have see is quite clear that they lived without any kind of emotional disturbance, the defi
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a woman, the Lord said, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” 46
Augustine certainly draws a distinction between the situation of the First Couple the eternal blessedness of the saints, which is that the latter enjoy the “ce assurance that no one would sin and no one would die”, 47 but he does not sugges this is a reason for affirming that the saints enjoy apatheia in apatheia in a way that the first hu beings do not. Given Augustine’s repeated and deliberate use of Stoic categories vocabulary to describe the predicament of Adam and Eve – though, admitt without using the word apatheia or impassibilitas itself impassibilitas itself – it would be odd to conc that he was here trying to deny that this was a genuine example of Stoic apat indeed, the only instance there will ever be of human beings in such a state. In XIV.11 Augustine turns to the Fall itself. God had made man with a good and “a good will is the work of God, since man was created with it by God”. On the other hand, the first evil act of the will, since it preceded all other evil acts in man, consisted rather in its falling away from the work of God to its own works than in any one work. And those works of the will were evil because they were according to itself and not according to God... 48
The will which Adam and Eve possessed was genuinely free, for “the choice o will... is truly free only when it is not the slave of vices and sins”, and theirs was n They lived in a corporeal and spiritual paradise. But then came that proud angel, envious by reason of that same pride which had induced him to turn away from God and follow himself... (Postea vero wuam superbus ille angelus ac per hoc invidus per eandem superbiam a Deo ad semet ipsum conversus... ) Sign up to vote on this title
Usefulalways was Not Even if Eve’s status as a kind of Stoic sage – which a useful masculine ideal thrown into doubt by her inability to resist the serpent’s temptation, Adam’s was for Augustine makes it clear that he sinned knowingly. knowingly. He had not been deceive
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beginning of their evil will?” ( Porro, male voluntatis initium quae potuit esse superbia?) superbia?) And what is pride but an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation? For it is a perverse kind of elevation indeed to forsake the foundation upon which the mind should rest, and to become and remain, as it were, one’s own foundation. This occurs when a man is too pleased with himself ( Hoc ).51 Hoc fit cum sibi nimis placet placet ). And then, a little later, It is clear, therefore, that the Devil would not have been able to lure man into the manifest and open sin of doing what God had prohibited had not man already begun to be pleased with himself. That is why Adam was delighted when it was said, ‘Ye shall be as gods’. 52
The origins of sin lie therefore in Adam and Eve becoming pleased with themse This is the beginning of self-love, self-love, which is the root of pride, pride, which in turn i fountainhead of sin. sin.
We have seen how Augustine’s descriptions of the Stoics in Book XIV con them to membership of the earthly city. They live “according to the flesh” and pri their defining vice. The Devil also concentrates on the works of the flesh, an supremely proud. To live according to the flesh is to live according to man or to and not according to God; the original sin was itself a choice to live according to and was rooted in being “pleased with oneself”, in self-love, or in pride. In Augustinian schema, therefore, to bring to mind the pride of the Stoics with their valuations of self-sufficiency and autonomy is to be reminded immediately o Devil on the one hand, and of Adam’s transgression on the other. In one sense the nothing remarkable about this. Any this. Any sin sin can swiftly be related to the originalsin – th up to vote on this after all, a part of the point of the latter category.Sign But Stoicism istitle more thorou Useful the usefulmake from Not implicated in original sin than this. The obvious mistake Stoics Christian point of view is to think that post-lapsarian humans can live without b troubled by the perturbationes, perturbationes, and therefore without sin. Christians have it a
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it was this which this which led to his disobedience of the divine command not to eat the fru the tree. It is clear that humans cannot enjoy Stoic apatheia apatheia in this life becau original sin; it is not too fanciful to think that Augustine is here suggesting that orig sin was incurred in part because Adam had lived in a state of apatheia, apatheia, which prec helped to induce and then to nurture this feeling of pride. For Augustine, this apa isn’t quite the same as the truly utopian state the saints will enjoy – concerning w he stresses their unshakable love of God even more than their freedom of the wi their lack of troubling perturbationes troubling perturbationes..53 The apatheia of apatheia of Eden doesn’t solve – it do even address – the question of the possible perversity of the will; yet the contr their wills which the First Couple enjoyed, fostered, like Scarpia confronted by To a forgetfulness of God — and in Book XIII Augustine is emphatic that Adam for God before God forsook Adam.54
We have to be cautious here. Augustine is careful not to make a causal argume any kind about the effects upon Adam and Eve which their environment or predicament might have had. As with the theft of the pears in Book II Confessions, Confessions, which is closely modelled on the episode in the Garden, he deliber strips away any rational or explicable motive for the sin, until only the fac transgression undertaken for its own sake remains. 55 But as in the case of the e Fall, that of the Devil, the set of associations Augustine constructs between apat becoming “pleased with oneself” or proud, and Fall through the perpetration of unmistakable, as is the way these in which these associations are subsequently ec in a shadowy and erroneous fashion in the vanity of the Stoics of the civitas terren
There is, then, a significant philosophical critique of the Stoics in these pages it is less important when set aside the ideological or polemical work which the B has performed upon them. Far from the Stoics being in any way preferable to Epicureans owing to their agreement with the Christians that virtue properly belon the mind, their philosophy has been relegated to the realm of the flesh, implicate original sin, and found guilty of the same sins as those perpetrated by theDevil, vote onreasons. this title The fam which were committed, furthermore, for exactlySign theup tosame useful Useful Ciceronian objections to Stoic apatheia are apatheia are repeated (that it is Not both an impossible an undesirable state of affairs at which to aim), but they are given new force thro the way Augustine situates them in his broad – indeed, vast - theological canvas. F
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described by William J. Bouwsma in his 1975 article on the “two faces Renaissance humanism. His distinctive interpretation of humanism was a “singularly complex movement”, but one with its own “underlying unity”. 56 It w single movement, he claimed, “in much the sense that a battlefield is a definable p of ground”, and he suggested that the “two ideological poles between w Renaissance humanism oscillated may be roughly labeled ‘Stoicism’ ‘Augustinianism’”.57 Bouwsma was swift to concede that these were rather impr labels, but he emphasised that they did usefully serve to “designate antithetical vis of human existence” which were peculiarly relevant to the understandin humanism. 58 For too long, he contended, scholars had thought of humanism a attempt to recover an authentic classicism embodied in Plato or Aristotle, where was the rival philosophies of the Stoics and of Augustine which represented “gen alternatives for the Renaissance humanists to ponder”.59
This opposition between “Stoicism” and “Augustinianism” had m dimensions.60 A Stoic, for example, “deifies the natural order” and emphasises tha human being partook of the substance, rather than the image of God; whereas fo Augustinian it is the other way around. A Stoic would insist that careful study o natural world would render it intelligible to us, and would be optimistic about possibilities of a natural theology. But for the Augustinian the truths of religion revealed in Scripture, not discovered in Nature. A Stoic would hold to the Soc teaching that it is impossible to know the know the good and not to do do it, it, that virtue is a kin knowledge and knowledge and that we come to virtue through reason. reason. But an Augustinian would s the frailty of human reason, and its capacity to be led astray in the absence of d illumination. Not only the weakness but also the corruption corruption of the will mak straightforward for an Augustinian that one can know what the right thing to do is why it ought to be done, and yet still be unable to perform the required action. Stoics taught that it is wholly in our power to determine whether we lead a just virtuous life, thereby achieving a state of apatheia, apatheia, or of philosophical detachm passionless existence and, therefore, of constant happiness. From the August Sign upatoview vote on this titleour depend perspective, as we have seen, this was absurd, for such denies Useful Not useful upon God; the only tranquillity we will ever enjoywill be -might be - in a wor come.
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availability of the more technical Greek Stoic sources, the sharp polarity w Bouwsma described between Stoic and Augustinian points of view was not perce especially clearly. As Bouwsma observed of the Renaissance, “Its Augustinia consisted of a bundle of personal insights that had, indeed, legitimate affinities Augustine himself...; but its Stoicism was singularly confused”. 61 Yet even a humanists did come to understand some of the distinctive complexities of S philosophy, and of how it differed on the one hand from its rival systems of philosophy and on the other from the claims of mainstream Christian theology, writers continued to draw selectively on Stoic doctrines to in pursuit of some kin syncretism.62
In a final section, “From Ambiguity to Dialectic”, Bouwsma considered the tu the seventeenth century, and the essay ended with a glance at two late Renaiss developments. One the one hand, there was the Neo-Stoic project of Lipsius and o which combined scholarship and advocacy to present Stoicism as “an increasi articulated system”, and one to which these “Neostoic writers even assimi Augustine, whom they often quoted”. 63 On the other hand, Bouwsma detect different “species of Stoicism”, responsible for the attempt by such figures as Charron and Grotius in a time when religious passion was a source of general disturbance, to base ethics on the laws of nature...64 This attempt to build a secular system of ethics, Bouwsma thought, represented a of Stoicism that could be reconciled with Augustinian Christiainty. His conclusion, then, was that The two could be seen to complement each other, as law is complemented by grace, or the earthly city by the heavenly city. But such a reconciliation, which depended on the deracination of Stoicism, Sign up to vote onAnd this title was obviously a reconciliation on Augustinian terms. Stoicism Not usefulbetween Useful had a peculiar facility for growing new roots; thus thetension the two old antagonists was never fully resolved. 65
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There was, as we saw at the end of Part One, an important connection betwee development of the new secular ethical theory and the legacy of the Stoics, tho perhaps not the one Bouwsma had in mind. For when he alluded to the developme an “ethics based on the law of nature”, the obvious link to the doctrine of the Stoi provided by the perennial association between Stoicism and natural law theory, its classic formulation by Cicero’s spokesman for Stoic opinions in his dialogue Publica, Publica, “Laelius”, when he proclaimed that “True law is right reason in agree with nature” (est (est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens ). 66 Natural theories of the kind which might quote this line approvingly had, of course, around for generations; one of the major achievements of Thomas Aquinas had be build a Christian philosophy out of the systematic philosophy of Aristotle on the hand and the various strands of mediaeval natural law theory on the other.
The natural jurisprudence of the seventeenth century represented some different, however, and the contrast between the older theories and the new propounded by Grotius and his followers is well captured by the simple shi nomenclature, from theories of natural law to theories of natural rights. As with older theories, the new theory had a Stoic foundation, in the presentation of Stoi something like Stoic, at any rate) oikeiosis, oikeiosis, which Grotius had offered at the origi this tradition. To link the new theories with Stoicism therefore, as Bouwsma doe not unreasonable. But to call it a “reconciliation” between Stoicism Augustinianism “on Augustinian terms” is problematic, because of a signif disagreement that obtained between the natural rights theory and the doctrin Augustine right at the heart of the theoretical edifice. For modern natural rights th turned on the thought that action undertaken purely for the sake of self-preserva cannot incur just censure, and that is an opinion which Augustine challenged hea in his early dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will, Will , in his treatment of the possib 67 of a defensible killing.
In the first book of that work “Augustine” and his interlocutor “Evodius” Signbehind up to votean oninstance this title of evildo established that “inordinate desire” or “cupidity” lies Notone useful and a distinction has been drawn between cupidity andUseful “fear”:the desires its o 68 the other flees from it. The way seems to be open for f or one of the pair to make a rights-style argument – that killing someone else because you fear that otherwise
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“Evodius” insists that this man does desire does desire something, namely to live without fear “Augustine” responds that this is not a blameworthy blameworthy desire, and that it is ther outside the domain of cupidity. “Augustine” then takes a different example. consider someone who kills his master because he fears severe torture. Do you t that he should be classed among those who kill a human being but do not deserve t called murderers?” “Evodius” first replies that “No law approves of the deed in example,” but “Augustine” denies that an appeal to authority will suffice, as they trying to find out how it is that the law can be said to be just. 70 Both initially agree the killing is unjust, and it is in order to establish why it is unjust that “Augus makes his key move: Augustine: It follows that, since the master is killed by the slave as a result of this desire [to be free from fear], he is not killed as a result of a blameworthy desire. And so we have not yet figured out why this deed is evil. For we are agreed that all wrongdoing is evil only because it results form inordinate desire, that is, from blameworthy cupidity. Evodius: At this point it seems to me that the slave is unjustly condemned, which I would not dream of saying if I could think of some other response. Augustine: You have let yourself be persuaded that this great crime should go unpunished, without considering whether the slave wanted to be free of the fear of his master in order to satisfy his own inordinate desires. All wicked people, just like good people, desire to live without fear. The difference is that the good, in desiring this, turn their love away from things that cannot be possessed without the fear of losing them. them . The wicked, on the other hand, try to get rid of anything that prevents them from enjoying such things securely. Thus they lead a wicked and criminal life, which would better be called Sign up to vote on this title death.71
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Instead of an appeal to a Stoic principle of a natural inclination to self-preservatio the ground of a lawful killing, “Augustine” appeals to another principle, familiar a
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“Evodius” likes this distinction very much, and seems to embrace it more stro than “Augustine” himself. For the newly-enlightened “Evodius”, killing in orde preserve “the things that one can lose against one’s will” – one’s life, for exam can not now be justified in any circumstances. He is unfazed by “Augustin objection that if this is so then the law is unjust that allows a traveller to k highwayman, for he confidently asserts that the law permits lesser evils among the people that it governs in order to prevent greater evils... The law does not force them to kill; it merely leaves that in their power. They are free not to kill anyone for those things which can be lost against their will, and which they should therefore not love... I don’t blame the law that allows such people to be killed; but I can’t think of any way to defend those who do the killing.73
“Augustine’s” reply is weak, given his previous comment about the appeal to authority: “And I can’t think why you are searching for a defense for people whom law condemns”.74 It is here that “Evodius” draws a distinction between the domain divine law and the law of what Augustine will later call the “earthly city”: It seems to me, therefore, that the law written to govern the people rightly permits these killings and that divine providence avenges the,. The law of the people merely institutes penalties sufficient for keeping the peace among ignorant human beings, and only to the extent that their actions can be regulated by human government. 75
“Augustine” applauds the conclusion that the hidden divine law may exist to pu those who act wrongly yet who remain unpunished by human law, though he “Evodius’s” formulation “tentative and incomplete”. (The rest of the dialogue, on nature of the good will, fills out the picture somewhat). But what is striking abou Sign up to vote thiskeeping title opinions voiced here is that while Augustine’s conclusion – on that the p Not useful Useful tothat ought to be the goal of the secular authority – is identical of Thomas Hob the argument the two interlocutors develop precisely denies the validity of what i Hobbes and for other rights-theorists the basic building-block of their argument
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justification, and to which they should submit in accordance with God’s decree. they submit to that law because it is the temporal, positive law, which they must pu with during their pilgrimage on earth, and not because it is thought to have any spe rational, valid authority of its own. The natural rights theory might provide a mor but it cannot be considered the highest morality morality there can be, in which those ma which pertain to grace always trump considerations of mere nature. We can cert carve out a space for a truce truce between an Augustinian political theory and a S derived natural rights jurisprudence, and the different domains of the earthly and heavenly city do provide for the possibility of a coexistence of sorts. But to say tha two cities “complement” one another, or that this is some kind of “reconciliat between them, let alone one “on Augustinian Augustinian terms”, is too strong.
On the other hand, this contradiction, though real, was never the focu controversy. In part, confrontation was avoided for geographical reasons seventeenth-century neo-Augustinianism was strongest in France, where Grotius few disciples. 76 The Augustinians themselves were not much preoccupied with possibility of establishing a natural rights theory. 77 It was Pascal, unsurprisingly, was most keenly aware of the tension between the ethics of the earthly and heavenly cities, as we shall see below; the contradiction only became decisi important in the case of an eighteenth-century writer who was profoundly ambiv about both the both the natural rights theory and the the Augustinian tradition, and the final se of this dissertation will consider the significance of these legacies in the work of J Jacques Rousseau. III: Four French Augustinians Against the Stoics
The influence of the Stoic revival of the sixteenth century continued to be felt variety of spheres in seventeenth-century France. In addition to the dissemination translation of Lipsius’s works, there had been a French variation on the Dutch N Stoic theme in the books of Guillaume du Vair. His Traité de la constance Sign up toisvote on thisatitle inspiration from Lipsius’s work of the same name, and given distinctly Fr Not useful Useful setting, purporting to be the report of a conversation taking place during the sieg 78 Paris in 1590. It was an immensely popular work: Wade reports that it went thr fifteen editions before 1641. 79 Du Vair also published a short handbook on
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of his doctrine. This was a Neo-Stoicism which departed in some ways from previously-established Lipsian paradigm: it is striking, for example, that he dro Lipsius’s scepticism about patriotic identification in favour of a very strong patr ideology, which he expressed in almost Ciceronian terms; 80 and in general the much more use of the maxims of Epictetus’s Encheiridion, Encheiridion, which he was one o 81 first to translate into French, than is to be found in the Stoic works of Lipsius, barely drew on Epictetus at all. 82 If it is misleading to characterise them as b straightforwardly Stoic, Montaigne’s Essais nevertheless Essais nevertheless helped to keep many o leading ideas of the Hellenistic philosophers before a wide reading public; and t who wrote in his wake, especially Pierre Charron, the author of the best-selling sagesse, sagesse, would do the same. Stoic texts remained extremely popular in France, b translated and re-edited often. In the case of Seneca, to take the most promi example, there were several Latin editions of his works in circulation, including t edited by Erasmus and Lipsius, with new French editions appearing in 1595, 1604 1659, in addition to numerous editions and translations of individual texts. 83 Nann Keohane and Anthony Levi have documented the significant impact of Neo-Stoi in French debates on early seventeenth-century political thought and m psychology.84 Neo-Stoic texts were widely used in the Jesuit academies; and P Corneille put Stoic heroes onto the French stage.
The impact of Stoicism on French intellectual culture gave rise to a varieg landscape: in his detailed surveys of the uses of Stoicism in the writings of (mo French humanists and apologists in the first half of the seventeenth century, Julien-Eymard d’Angers distinguished six basic orientations towards the Stoics, w he labelled “un stoïcisme christianisant” (e.g. Jean-Pierre Camus, Joseph Hall), Christianisme stoïcisant” (Etienne Binet, Nicolas Caussin), “un humanisme chré (François de Sales, Jean-François Senault), “un humanisme cartésien”, “une do attitude des libertins” and, finally, “un anti-stoïcisme naissant”, dating from the 16 which will be considered in detail below. 85 That this anti-Stoicism cam Sign up to vote on this title 80
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“For good cause we owe of dutie more love unto our countrie, then unto al other t contained in the world... Out of the fountaine of this worthie affection, what a numb
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principally Augustinian form should not be surprising, given Bouwsma’s argu about the “two faces of humanism”, and while the new anti-Stoicism took o distinctive form in the pages of Augustinus, Augustinus, it quickly demonstrated that it was no any means confined to narrow Jansenist circles. Jansen
Cornelius Cornelius Janseniu Jansenius, s, the Catholi Catholicc bishop bishop of Ypr ès, died died of the plague plague in in 1 the controversy which was to bear his name began with the posthumous publicatio his Augustinus first Augustinus first at Louvain in 1640 and then again in Paris the following ye Convinced that much Catholic teaching on the key questions of grace and free wil strayed too far from its Augustinian origins, and in particular that the free will teac espoused by the Jesuits, who followed the doctrine of Luis Molina, was both false dangerous, Jansen presented what he argued was the authentic and authorit teaching of the Saint of Hippo on these important matters. Predestination reasserted; the role that divine grace played as a necessary cause of right action emphasised, 87 as was the (apparently) arbitrary distribution of this grace across human species. Jansen’s strategy was to argue that the views he opposed were var of the Pelagianism which Augustine had strenuously opposed in the last theological controversy of his life, which began in 411 and continued until his dea 430 - encompassing, therefore, the entire period during which he was writing God - and which the Church had officially decreed as heretical in two condemna of 416 and 417. Pelagius had taught that sin was in its essence voluntary, and, rela that Adam’s disobedience could not have resulted in an inherited original sin w would afflict all of his descendants. In opposition to this view, Augustine had defe the reality and heritability of original sin, arguing that (among others things) Church’s practice of infant baptism would otherwise be unintelligible. F Augustine’s point of view, Pelagianism raised the logical possibility of a life led person who consistently chose not to sin and for whom Christ’s redeeming sacr was therefore in vain. If such a person then could not with justice be damned to H Sign upyet to vote on this title this in turn restricted the absolute sovereignty of God, it was axiomatic that Useful or, Not useful could not be beholden to any part of His creation, to borrow the title of Le
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Kolakowski’s recent study of Pascal’s Jansenism, that God owes us nothing. 88 Ra the spectre of Pelagianism in the way that he did was bound to provoke int controversy: Jansen was not just accusing the Jesuit Molinists of a grave heres doing so he also appeared to many Catholics to be defending Calvinist posi against the orthodoxies of Rome. (Both the Jansenists and the Calvinists insiste course, that they were simply being good Augustinians in arguing as they did, nor clear that either party was wrong to do so).
Given the foregoing, it should not be altogether surprising that Jansen fou place for a critical treatment of Stoicism in his book. Since grace was the central si theological controversy, any attack on Pelagianism from an Augustinian standp would have to give an account of the nature of the Fall – as Augustinus certainly Augustinus certainly d great length – and we have seen that Augustine’s own narrative of the Fall is intim tied to his presentation and critical dissection of the Stoics’ ethics. In an impo respect, however, Jansen went beyond Augustine’s own account, being much m explicit about identifying Stoicism as a stage in the genealogy genealogy of Pelagianism Augustine had been in any of his anti-Pelagian writings, in which his comment Stoic philosophy are few and far between. 89
The most significant references to the Stoics in Augustinus Augustinus appear in the volume, spread over the end of the fourth and the start of the fifth books. nineteenth chapter of the fourth is devoted to the topic of apatheia, apatheia, which he defin “an incapacity for suffering the perturbationes the perturbationes or or passions by which the human 91 accustomed to being disturbed”, and goes on to argue that the Pelagians ta something equivalent, with their notion of the man without sin. A little later, in Ch XXII, Jansen asserts a link between Pelagianism and the Stoic claim that the wise is in the relevant respects the equal of God, in evidence of which he cites pass from Seneca and Epictetus which compare the sage to the gods, as well as the v from Genesis (3:5) in which the serpent offers the First Couple the chance to be the gods (sicut (sicut Dii). Dii).92 The fifth book of the first volume is given over to a treatme Sign Abercrombie up to vote on this title three stages in the development of Pelagianism, which glosses as rou
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corresponding to Paganism, Semipaganism and Judaism, asserting that this divisi original to Jansen. 93 In the brief treatment of the first stage (Ethnicismus ( Ethnicismus), ), or se philosophy entirely uninformed by grace, all all of Jansen’s citations are from sources, and are mostly taken from Seneca.
The criticism of Stoicism was an incidental rather than central componen Janesn’s theological project, and nothing in the ensuing controversy between Jans party and the representatives of a more orthodox Catholicism which produced official Papal condemnations of Jansen’s heterodox theology in 1653 with encyclical Cum Occasione and Occasione and - much later - in the 1713 bull Unigenitus focuse Unigenitus focuse his treatment of the Stoics. But three interrelated aspects of Jansen’s treatment o Stoics were important in shaping the way in which the Augustinian anti-Stoics wrote in his wake, Jansenist or otherwise, developed their critique. In the first p the decision to bypass much more recent Catholic teaching in order to concen directly on Augustine’s own texts helped to draw attention to the original categori the argument of Book XIV of City of God and and to encourage an engagement wit Stoics on something like Augustine’s original terms. Second, the link betw Stoicism and Pelagianism which Jansen explicitly suggested gave contempo Augustinianism a powerful ideological charge, yoking together French Neo-S intellectual and political culture on the one hand and Jesuit theology on the othe objects of a common and scathing attack. In the third place, finally, while Jansen roughly equal attention to the Epicureans and the Stoics in his book, it was the S who were presented as the school of pagan philosophers with which to reckon account of their role in paving the way for the Pelagian heresy; and the role he assi to Seneca as the representative Stoic, made this philosopher function in tur something of a synecdoche for pagan wisdom in the pages of his book. Jean-François Senault
Jansen’s argument was quickly taken up by other Augustinian writers,in the Sign up to vote on this title who was instance by the Oratorian father, Jean-François Senault (1601-1672), Not useful Useful of Augustinus 1662 General of the order. Whereas the anti-Stoicism came formidably abstruse context, buried inside a dense, scarce and controversial b Senault presented a variation on Jansen’s Augustinian anti-Stoic theme to his rea
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important contribution to the wideranging debates in French moral psychology a the nature of the passions and the book for which he is best known today; it was al popular book, with fourteen editions being published in eight years. 96 This book followed later in the decade with a pair of works of Augustinian theology, L’Ho criminel in criminel in 1644, and its companion volume, L’Homme volume, L’Homme chrestien in chrestien in 1648, which d as their titles suggest, with the fall of man through original sin and the foundation the Christian theology of grace respectively. 97 Senault’s anti-Stoicism is present three main passages in these books: in the Preface to De l’Usage des Passions opening chapter, “An apology for passion against the Stoics”; and in its comprehensive form, in the Preface to L’Homme to L’Homme criminel. criminel.98
In the Preface to De to De l’Usage des Passions, Passions , a string of stock Christian objectio Stoicism are presented in polemical fashion, but they are now organised in ideological edifice structured by a series of stark Augustinian binaries: “Man freedom enough to undo himself, by his own proper motion; but he had not eno thereof to save himself by his own strength: his ruine came from his will, and welfare could proceed from nothing but from Grace”. The Stoics “thought virtu only happiness”, “fill the soul with arrogance” and “imitate the pride of Dev whereas Christians “allow of no felicity but Grace”, “acknowledg their weakness” “implore ayd from Grace”. The beliefs of the Stoics “do infinitely differ from the b of Christians”, but this fundamental divergence does not owe to errors of reasonin the part of the Stoics, for Senault concedes that the ancient philosophers “had a more light then others”. On the contrary, the mistake the Stoics make is not to re the limits of philosophical reason itself, and the root cause of this is their pride same pride which led to the Fall, and, as in the Book XIV of City of God motivates behaviour in accordance with principles of self-love. Fallen man who without the intercession of grace is “possesst with self-love” and “could propos other end to himself, but himself: He laboured either after Glory, or Pleasure”, with result that “in all his actions [he] raised himself no higher than his own interests the case of the Stoic philosophers, “whatsoever names they gave unto their Ver up toby votethe on this title of Hono one might easily finde, that they were animated Sign onely desire 99 Useful Not useful Voluptuousness”.
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In this Preface (and this is also true of that to L’Homme criminel) criminel ) “the Stoics treated generically: there is no significant effort to differentiate Stoic philosop from one another or to ground the argument in the texts of specific Stoic auth Senault’s “Stoics” are chiefly an ideological construct against which to juxtapos Augustinian orthodoxy. Senault does draw frequently on one Stoic, Seneca particular, so that Levi reports, for example, that of 370 quotations from Latin au to be found in the book 151 are from Seneca, whose accounts of the passions and regulation are, by and large, treated quite favourably. 100 But Seneca’s account o passions is not regularly identified as Stoic in this text, and while his doctrine ma doctrine ma treated sympathetically, the man himself is the target of Senault’s ad hominem at for example in this passage from L’Homme from L’Homme chrestien: chrestien: Reason without Grace hath hitherto brought up none but proud Scholars... Whatever is rumored of the Letters and Conferences between Seneca and Saint Paul Saint Paul,, I have always believed the conversion of that Stoick harder than that of the Covetous and most imprudent Lascivious. The Pride that animated his spirit, was so strong a bulwark against grace, that he had never stoopt to the Maximes of Christianity, if that Conqueress of hearts had not employed all her charms and all her forces to bring him under... This Philosopher, had he kept his opinions, had been the first Authour of Pelagianisme in Pelagianisme in the world; and his pride making him the capital enemy of grace, had obliged him to side with reason against her... But not to combat Heresie, the Church hath triumphed over so many ages since; nor to condemn Seneca whom she hath anathematized in the person of Pelagius; Pelagius; It contents me to say, that vertue to the end it may be solid, must be the gift of God...101
Augustine, too, had been chiefly interested in a generic presentation of S Sign up to vote this title doctrine, but the style of his exposition was quite different: heonhad came to the s Not useful Useful the verdict - that Stoicism imitated the pride of the Devil - during course of a len and sometimes surprisingly sympathetic examination of the central categoriees of ethics. Senault by contrast leads off with a blunt condemnation of “the Stoics”, lac
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respective arguments address different moments in the Augustinian grand narra For Augustine, the arguments of the Stoics are best employed to understand M predicament in Paradise: Adam-as-Stoic was the master of his passions and freely in everything he did, but he ended up becoming “pleased with himself”, an consequence was the Fall from grace. Senault’s account, by contrast, treats Stoicis strictly postlapsarian terms, above all presenting it as a philosophy which de humanity’s fallen state and to which people subscribe because of the delusions ind by their self-love, which makes them think that they can be sagelike and, there Godlike, by virtue of their own efforts. 103 Armed with a set of radically false be about both human and cosmic nature, the inevitable result of the encounter betwee Stoic and the world is failure: the world does not cooperate with the Stoics’ ambiti nor indeed does the Stoic’s own human nature, and the result is a misery w provokes ridicule: These reasons so eloquently expresst by the Stoicks, have as yet framed a wiseman onely in Idea. Their admirers have reaped nothing but confusion; after having courted so Proud and so Austere a vertue, they are become ridiculous to all ages. And the wisest amongst them have found, that whilst they would go about to make so many Gods, the Product hath been so many Idols. 104 Or, elsewhere: Amongst so many Impieties and Blasphemies which Pride extorted from out their mouthes, they forbare not sometime to betray their owne cause, and publiquely to acknowledge their owne Misery: For Nature, which cannot lye long, made them find her disorders, and forced them to confesse, that Faults were learnt without Teachers, that we are
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Senault has more to say on the subject of self-love, and the extent to which these come Useful Not useful to Nicole’s Augustinian formulations in his famous essay “De la Charité et de l’amour-pro chrestien, pp.5, 7, 8, 172-3 (on the “the lost resemblance bet is striking. See L’Homme chrestien,
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Borne out of Order, and that wee have much Stronger inclinations to Vice then to Vertue. 105
In the Preface to L’Homme criminel, criminel, the link between Stoicism and Pelagia which Jansen had posited is made stark: the text opens with assertions about centrality of pride to the lives of fallen man; the Stoics are introduced in the paragraph as a s a group of philosophers who, “enlivened by vain-glory”, make the that “if man were irregular, ‘twas only because he Would be be so”; and in the sent which follows, Senault remarks that “[D]iverse ages before Pelagius Pelagius his birth, and Seneca Seneca had tane upon them the Defence of Corrupted Nature”. Nature”. Whereas Ja presented a developmental account, in which Stoicism featured as one stage genealogy of Pelagianism, Senault by contrast keeps things relatively simple, and f that the Stoics taught the same errors as the Pelagians - and he even associates disappearance of the Stoa with the appearance of the Pelagian heresy itself, for “T Sect was borne down when the Pelagians raised Pelagians raised up their heresie upon its ruines”. S Augustine “hath triumphed over this proud and learned heresie”, but “hath it out-l that defeat”. Even today, Senault warns, “we speak the Language of the Pelagi attributing “more to Liberty or Free-will then Free-will then to Grace” Grace” as if “we will be Our Se 106 the Authors the Authors of of our Salvation”. Salvation”.
Senault was an able rhetorician and propagandist on behalf of his cause, rather a particularly incisive or original philosophical writer, yet in these texts he neverth showed himself to be an author well able to position his arguments so as to speak number of contemporary philosophical and theological concerns. Like Jansen, Se constructed an argument which could be deployed against both contemporary Sen Neo-Stoicism and the suspected “Pelagian” tendencies of much contemp theology; but whereas Jansen chiefly built his case on his rejection of Stoic/Pelagian conception of a man without sin, Senault organised his sharp oppos between Stoicism and Christianity on the straightforwardly Augustinian terrain problematic of charity and self-love. In renewing - and drastically simplifyi Sign to up to vote on this and title to popul Augustine’s critique of the Stoics, he helped both elaborate Useful Not useful Jansen’s original template for anti-Stoic criticism -and also helped to open the wa
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the considerably more imaginative criticisms of Stoicism in the later philosop interventions of two other French Augustinians, Blaise Pascal and Nic Malebranche. Blaise Pascal
In the document known as the “Discussion with M. De Saci”, which presen oral report of Pascal’s visit to Port-Royal in January 1655, we find the most ele statement of the Jansenists’ suspicion of Stoicism. 107 In this text, Pascal stresse virtues of Epictetan ethics: the focus on the centrality of God for thinking about e is salutary, he maintains, and Epictetus’s account of our duties is unrivalled emphasises man’s dignity; he tells us what God would have us do with great cl and power. Pascal continues, however, by outlining the dangers of this ethics: Our spirit cannot be forced to believe what is false, nor our will to love something which makes it unhappy. These two powers are, therefore, free, and it is through them that we can become perfect; man through these powers can know God perfectly, love, obey, and please him, cure him of all his vices, acquire virtue, and thereby become saintly and God’s friend. These wickedly proud principles lead man into other errors, such as that the soul is part of the divine being, that pain and death are not evils, that we can commit suicide when we are so afflicted that we have to believe God is calling us, and there are still more.108
Epictetus is praised for his clear-sighted recognition of one half of human nature dignity of humankind, but this comes at the cost of obscuring a clear view of its o half, a profound wretchedness and inability to function without God. Montaigne contrast, is the other philosopher discussed by Pascal in this passage, a philoso who understands the limitations of the human intellect very well, and whose scepti on this title is a useful antidote against many errors; yet in the Sign endupheto vote is unable to do much m Not useful Useful life than tolerate present practices and search for a comfortable within them. If Stoicism of Epictetus leads to pride, pride, Pascal suggests, the scepticism of Monta leads to laziness; laziness; and since Epictetus and Montaigne are the most eloquent spokes
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in no simple sense merely a position midway between two erroneous extremes. Ar with a living Augustinianism, furthermore, the believing Christian is able to embar a careful reading of both Epictetus and Montaigne for the sake of the instruction are able to provide, while their errors will cancel each other out and do no real harm
A similar pattern of argument can be reconstructed from the fragments of Pensées -and Pensées -and has to be reconstructed given the radically incomplete nature of this w Only a handful of Pascal’s remarks address the Stoics, both in the “classified” an the unclassified portions of the surviving text, but it is possible to see reason clearly how the Stoics function within the economy of the text as a whole. The gen tone is set early on, in an isolated pensée isolated pensée from from the first liasse. liasse. The stoics say: ‘Go back into yourselves. There you will find peace’. And it is not true. Others say: ‘Go out, look for happiness in some distraction.’ And that is not true. Illness is the result. Happiness is neither outside us nor within us. It is in God, and both outside and within us. 110
This pattern is then repeated, in diverse fragments. Some aspect of Stoicis identified, it is then juxtaposed against a rival and competing philosophical th (usually Epicurean, though not in the above example), whereupon either (as in case) both are presented as instructively false, and a contrasting Christian tru enunciated, or the the rival philosophical claims are treated as in some sense both true incompatible, and so a Christian dogma is deployed as a way of making sense o paradox or riddle of human affairs.111
The most detailed commentary on Stoicism belongs in the liasse liasse on Sign upthe to vote on this titlebegins with “philosophers”, which is almost entirely concerned with Stoics and Useful Not useful remark: Even if Epictetus saw the way perfectly well he said to us: ‘You are
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Although other philosophical “sects” are alluded to in the remaining fragments in section, the Stoics are the only ones mentioned by name, and a series of charges elaborated against them, explicitly or implicitly, concerning their inability to prov pathway to God, the foolishness of their goal (“What ( “What the stoics propose is so diff and worthless”), and the famous criticism that “They conclude that you can alway what you can sometimes do...” which leads Epictetus to conclude (so Pascal ass that “because there are resolute Christians, everyone can be one.” 113
The discussion begun in “philosophers” continues into the next liasse liasse on sovereign good”, owing to the centrality of the disagreements about the nature o sovereign good, or summum bonum in bonum in the arguments of the various sects. But as i come down to us, this section of Pascal’s work contains only two fragments. The is a short and bleak remark, directed against Seneca, who teaches his reader t content with himself and “end[s] up advising suicide”. 114 The second is a far elaborate, wideranging and obviously unfinished fragment, in which the Platonist singled out among the pagan philosophers as having come closest to the nature o good, the decisive role played by God in any adequate account of the good is reiter and, as in the previous fragment, it is the Stoics’ endorsement of suicide which is against their own lofty ideals: He alone [ = God] is our true good. From the time we have forsaken him, it is a curious thing that nothing in nature has been capable of taking his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, snakes, fever, plague, war famine, vice, adultery, incest. From the time he lost his true good, man can see it everywhere, even in his own destruction, though it is so contrary to God, reason, and nature, all at once. 115
Here it is instructive to compare Pascal's approach to the Stoics with tha SignStoicism up to vote on title in pride, Senault. Both shared the diagnostic foundation that isthis rooted Useful usefulan idea" an both agreed that Stoicism fails in its own terms: thewise manisNot "only would-be sage becomes a miserable, ridiculous figure for Senault; for Pascal, the is built on a lie ("and it is not true"). But whereas Senault's technique is to cons
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the errors of the Stoics are not simple errors, but seductive and ultimately instru errors.116
Just as Pascal presented Stoicism as (to use the later Hegelian jargon) a one-s philosophy, however, so too his reading of Stoicism was quite one-sided itself Pascal proceeds from Augustinian premisses and never allows his examination o Stoics to call these premisses themselves into question. The best example of th encapsulated in one remark in the Pensées, Pensées, “Thus we are born unjust, for each inc 117 toward himself”. This claim straightforwardly functions as an Augustinian reje of the whole of the modern natural rights tradition, since it picks up on the Gro premiss of an instinct towards self-preservation, whose Stoic ancestry Grotius him had acknowledged, and squarely identifies it with the Augustinian account of the of sin in self-love. Yet Grotius also understood that the oikeiosis that oikeiosis that he invoked also the foundation of human sociability (see above, Part One Section Two “Grotius”) as much as of the drive to preserve oneself, and the Stoic presentatio oikeiosis aimed oikeiosis aimed to explain altruistic as well as egoistic behaviour: this principle of regard was intrinisically bound up with an account of the development of na affection towards others, and this twofold aspect of oikeiosis needed oikeiosis needed to be kept in at all times. Pascal’s argument therefore works better as a criticism of the natural r doctrine in its Hobbesian incarnation, in which sociability has been jettisoned, th does as a critique of Stoicism itself. All Pascal is willing to find in the Stoics is e dogmatism and vice, owing to his refusal to attempt to understand the Stoic anything like their own terms, but only through the lens of his Augusti commitment.
Any treatment of Pascal's thinking about the Stoics remains tentative. Th necessarily the case when the two key texts under examination are a report o conversation and the incomplete manuscript of the Pensées. Pensées. These texts certainly us understand how Stoicism was being discussed in the Jansenist circle in the l part of Pascal's life, but we need to be cautious before doing much more with them them Sign up to vote on with this titleand agains a example of an Augustinian philosopher creatively working useful we need to Not Stoics in the second half of the seventeenth centuryinUseful published work, to Nicolas Malebranche.
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We must speak to men as Jesus Christ did, and not as the Stoics, who knew neither the nature nor the malady of the human mind. Men must be told unceasingly that it is in a sense essential for them to hate and despise themselves, and that they must not search for settlement and happiness here below; that they must carry their cross... 118
Scholars are interested in Malebranche these days as a major figure in the hi of seventeenth-century post-Cartesian metaphysics and the chief exponent of remarkable doctrine of “occasionalism” on the one hand, 119 or as a controversialist in debates about the theology of grace on the other. 120 The approa his work here comes at a different angle, in order to complete this survey of four m figures in the tradition of seventeenth-century Augustinian anti-stoicism. Augustinian, though never a Jansenist, Malebranche spent his working life at Oratory in Paris - indeed, he served his novitiate when Senault was its General. major work, The Search After Truth, Truth , contains several passages which discuss Stoics, from Book One, Chapter Seventeen, where he makes many of the same m that Pascal had made with respect to mounting parallel criticisms of the Stoics and Epicureans regarding the nature of the Sovereign Good ( le souverain bien) bien )121, thr to Book Five, Chapter Four, in which he criticises the Stoics for their “conf understanding of the disorders caused by Original Sin”. 122 This discussion concentrate, however, on Malebranche’s longest engagement with a Stoic au which comes in Book Two, Part Three, Chapter Four, in a discussion of imagination of Seneca”.123
Two ways of thinking about the imagination should at this point be juxtapo One strand of thinking about the imagination in the seventeenth century desce from the arguments of the Neo-Stoics. In a standard Stoic presentation, it is imag future or present goods and bads which give rise to the erroneous passions of joy, and so on.124 Among the techniques taught by Stoic exercises, therefore, are a s Sign up to vote on this title 118
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Search, Search, p.310. 119 A good recent treatment of Malebranche on human emotion, relating it to Cartesian
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ways of disciplining the imagination, of learning how to refuse to assent t appearances, and – thereby – of making accurate judgments about the w clearheadedly perceived. Stoic therapy performs a kind of critique of the imagina and in teaching the proper handling of the imagination, Stoicism shows a pathwa the extirpation of the passions.
The second, separate strand of thinking about the problem of the imagin centred around the elaboration of a notion of “vainglory”. Francis Bacon’s essay, Vain-Glory” is one important source, but for my purposes here Thomas Hobbes i decisive figure in this tradition. 125 Four short extracts from Leviathan from Leviathan give give the ge idea of his concept of vainglory: 1) Joy, Joy, arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability, is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING: ... but if grounded on the flattery of others; or onle supposed by himself, for delight in the consequences of it, is called VAINE-GLORY. The vain-glory vain-glory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of abilities in ourselves, which we know are not, is most incident to young men, and nourished by the Histories and Fictions of Gallant Persons; and is corrected oftentimes by Age, and Employment. 126 2) The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madness, is either great vaine-Glory; vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, Pride, and 127 self-conceipt ; or great Dejection great Dejection of of mind. 3) Vainglorious men, such as estimate their sufficiency by the flattery of other men... are enclined to rash engaging; and in the approach of danger, or difficulty, to retire if they can: because not seeing the way of safety, they will rather hazard their honour, which may be salved with an excuse, than their lives, for which no salve is 128 Sign up to vote on this title sufficient.
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4) Of the Passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one, is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth... 129
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foolish and dangerous actions. Indeed, one of the three causes of war in the sta nature, according to the analysis of Leviathan of Leviathan,, is Glory, which makes some “inva 130 for reputation” . The proud - Aristotle, for example 131 - think themselves t superior to their fellow men, when in fact they are not (and, even if they are, should refuse to recognise themselves as such for the sake of the preservation of pe and this can also provoke war. The vainglorious likewise misestimate their own w and abilities, and this error is also likely to lead them into situations which will en violence.
In these related cases, the solution to the problem lies in good politics. The p are humbled by the might of the Sovereign, who is, following the original Leviatha the Book of Job, “king of the proud” or “king of all the children of pride” 132); and political world in which the only violence is that authorised by the Sovereign problem of those who invade for Reputation will have been satisfactorily addresse the vainglorious are still afflicted by their malady in civil society, there are at relatively safe outlets for it there (in reading novels, for example). Hobbes ag therefore, with the Stoics, that those who do not know how to address the disord their own imaginations will do badly in life; but, characteristically, the Hobbe solution lies in the imposition of a central authority which will solve the social prob rather than through the serial transformation of individual consciences thr philosophical instruction and exercises. The Stoic philosopher teaches an indiv techniques of self-discipline; the Leviathan prince disciplines an entire population.
In the passages of Senault, above, there are indications that something like Baconian or Hobbesian analysis of vainglory could be put to work in a decid Augustinian context. 133 In L’Homme In L’Homme criminel, criminel, whose English translation was publi in 1651, the same year as Leviathan, Leviathan, Senault’s Stoics are “enlivened by vain-glo and we get a fuller account of the nature of this vice in L’Homme chrestien (publ chrestien (publ 1648, English’d 1650), in which Senault presented vain-glory as a kind of pride w stokes ambition, embraces risk and is closely bound up with the concern forreputa Sign up to vote on this title
Notis useful Useful The Ambitious have no other spirit but vaine-glory; This that proud passion which inanimates all their designs, inables them to surmount all difficulties, engages them in conflicts where the successe is doutfull,
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This isn’t quite the same theorisation which Hobbes provides, as Senault’s ambi man tends to end up dead, whereas the vainglorious in Hobbes prefer to sacrifice honour than risk their lives, but, these details aside, the core concept clearly funct in a similar manner for both authors.
Turning at last to Malebranche, then, we find here an account that seems to d from both Hobbes and Senault. Malebranche deploys Hobbes’s distinctive con with the imagination, but merges it with an Augustinian criticism of sinful pride. subject of Book Two of The Search After Truth is the imagination; Part Three of book addresses the subject of the contagious contagious nature of the strong imagina Malebranche begins his account by setting out the general problem of people who strong imaginations: Strong imaginations are extremely contagious: they dominate weaker ones, gradually giving them their own orientation, and imprinting their own characteristics on them. Therefore, since those who have a strong and vigorous imagination are completely unreasonable, there are few more general causes of men’s errors than this dangerous communication of the imagination. 134
The imagination is dangerous, but it is not entirely bad; indeed, as with everythin fashioned by God, it serves a useful purpose, and it will be no surprise to learn tha purpose is one which speaks to the perennial Augustinian problematic of charity self-love: To understand what this contagion is, and how it is transmitted from one person to another, it is necessary to know that men need one another, and that they were created that they might form several bodies, all of whose parts have a mutual correspondence. To maintain this union God has commanded us to have charity for one another. But Sign upand to vote on thisthe titlebond of because self-love can gradually destroy charity, break Useful Not useful civil society, it was appropriate for God topreserve it by also uniting men through natural ties, which subsisted without charity and appealed to self-love.135
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the workings of divine charity. 136 Malebranche’s answer, by contrast, takes the s Augustinian elements - God, self-love and imitation - and puts them back toge again in a different configuration: in this version God has created the world and natures in such a way that our self-love leads us to imitate one another , and tha works to bring about a certain kind of social uniformity: These natural ties ... consist in a certain disposition of the brain all men have to imitate those with whom they converse, to form the same judgments they make, and to share the same passions by which they are moved. And this disposition normally ties men to one another much more closely than charity founded upon reason, because such charity is very rare. 137
There are two chief causes of our disposition to imitate others. One is found in the is closely related to what Hobbes and others described under the heading of “glo and is described as follows: The inclination all men have for grandeur and high position, and for obtaining an honourable place in others’ minds. For this is the inclination that secretly excites us to speak, walk, dress, and comport ourselves with the air of people of quality. This is the source of new styles, the instability of living languages, and even of certain general corruptions of mores. In short, this is the principal source of all the extravagant and bizarre novelties founded not upon reason, but only upon men’s fantasies. 138
But it is the second which engages his attention over the following chapters, whic “a certain impression made by persons of strong imagination upon weak minds, upon tender and delicate brains”. 139 A strong imagination is “that constitution o brain which renders it capable of having very deep vestiges and traces that so Signits up attention to vote on this the soul’s capacity that they prevent it from focusing ontitle things other 140 Not useful the first ar Useful those represented by these images”, and these come in twovarieties: insane (who “receive these deep traces from an involuntary and disordered impres of the animal spirits” 141); the second “receive them from the disposition found in
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to have a strong imagination, as long as “the soul always remains the master o imagination”. It can be a very good thing indeed, and it is the “origin of subtlety strength of mind”.143 But when the imagination dominates the soul, and when without attention to the direction of will these traces are formed because of the disposition of the brain and by the action of objects and the animal spirits, it is clear that this is a very bad quality and a sort of madness.144
People with strong imaginations of this kind, Malebranche claims, display abov two defects: in the first place, they are unable to make “sound judgements a difficult and intricate things”. 145 Secondly, they are “visionaries, though in a del way that is rather difficult to recognise”, and prone to exaggeration and disto perceptions: They are vehement in their passions, biased in their opinions, and always conceited and very self-satisfied.... They do not walk, they bound... They ordinarily stop at the surface of things, and are completely occupied with visible ceremonies and rituals of little importance.146
Furthermore, and this is something that can be an advantage to them, but which also be extremely dangerous, people like this can be quite persuasive. Thus, in Ch Three, Malebranche turns to the trio of Tertullian, Seneca and Montaigne, three wr who suffer in different ways from an excess of imagination.
In contrast to Senault, then, or Augustine for that matter, who attacked “the Sto generically (as we have seen), Malebranche concentrates on one Stoic in particula in the case of Jansen, Seneca provides the most suitable target, being themost e Signthe up to vote oninspiration this title available Stoic author in contemporary France, and major behind Not useful Useful earlier Neo-Stoic current, so that, as with his subsequent attack on Montaigne dissection of Seneca can be read as an intervention in the cultural politics of the While Malebranche agrees with Senault (and the other Augustinian authors) that
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corrupt human nature on the other. Malebranche’s Seneca, on the other hand, rhetorician who does not reason clearly enough: 147 As long as he makes great strides, designed strides in a precise cadence, he imagines he has made great progress, but in truth he is like a dancer who always ends up where he begins. He convinces because he arouses the emotions and because he pleases, but I do not believe he can persuade those who can read him calmly, who are prepared against surprise, and who are accustomed to yield only to the clarity and evidence of arguments. 148
Seneca’s depiction of the wise man is “magnificent and pompous”, but also “vain imaginary”: Malebranche observes that “Cato had neither the hardness of a diam unbreakable by iron nor the solidity of rocks immovable by floods, as Se pretends...” 149 It is in his comparison of Cato with Christ, St Paul and other e Christians that we see how the errors of the Stoics cash out in concrete ethical cont The virtue of the Stoics could not render them invulnerable, since true virtue does not prevent one from being miserable and worthy of compassion when one suffers some evil. St Paul and the first Christians had more virtue than Cato and the Stoics. They nevertheless admit that they were wretched because of the pain they endured, although they were made happy by the hope of eternal reward. 150
Cato’s celebrated patience, on the other hand, “was only blindness and pride Seneca tells us that he regarded his enemies as beasts, against whom it woul shameful to become angry, but this is not admirable at all. How dangerous it is, especially to Christians, to instruct themselves in Sign up to vote on this title morality from an author so injudicious as Seneca, whose imagination useful Useful Notdistracts is so strong, so lively, and so imperious that it dazzles, and carries away those with but little firmness of mind and much sensibility for all that flatters the concupiscence of pride? 152
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Christ, on the other hand, when he was struck by an officer, was wounded but bec neither angered nor vengeful: he pardoned he pardoned his his assailant, an action which presupp an acceptance of the fact that he had been wronged. 153
Following in Jansen’s footsteps, Malebranche explicitly compares the Stoic p that makes men want to become God – or, godlike, in the form of the sage - with serpent tempting Adam and Eve by telling them they could become like God, fo serpent knew “that the desire for independence was the weakness through which had to be taken”.154 The serpent, like Cato, tends to be believed, because “when a liar lies with great assurance, he often causes the most unbelievable things t believed, for the assurance with which he speaks is a proof that affects the senses consequently is exceedingly strong and quite persuasive to most men”. 155 All this shows that few errors are more dangerous, or more easily communicable, than those with which Seneca’s books are filled. For these errors are refined, suited to man’s nature and similar to that in which the demon engaged our first parents. They are clad in these books with pompous and splendid ornaments, which gain entry for them into most minds. They enter, grasp, stun, and blind them. But they blind them with a proud blindness... not a humiliating blindness full of shadows that makes one aware that one is blind and force one to admit it to others... Thus, nothing is more contagious than this blindness, because the vanity and sensibility of men, the corruption of their senses and passions, dispose them to search after it, to be struck by it, and excite them to impress others with with it. 156
Not all of Seneca is false and dangerous, Malebranche conceded, for, echoing Pas argument about Epictetus and Montaigne, he “can be read with profit by those who things correctly and know the foundation of Christian morality”, (the same is also of the Qu’ran and the works of Nostradamus), and a keen awareness of ourinescap Signcountry up to vote on title dependence on dependence on our body, parents, friends, prince and is this sufficient “to de 157 Useful Not useful the Stoic wisdom completely”.
Having dealt almost exclusively with Seneca up to this point, Malebranche cl
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God, but that in accordance with God’s command, we are dependent on every li thing in His Creation: Hence, this magnificent division of all things not dependent on us and upon which we ought to depend is a division that seems consistent with reason, but that is inconsistent with the disordered state to which sin has reduced us. We are united to all creatures by God’s order, and we depend upon them absolutely because of the disorder of sin. 158
In the 1684 Treatise on Ethics, Ethics , Malebranche presented a condensed version o fundamental criticism of the Stoics. “We must love God”, he insisted, “not only m than the present life, but more than our own being. Order requires that it be so.. cannot find our happiness and perfection outside ourselves. We can only find the God, since only God is capable of acting in us and making us happy and perfect.” then turned his attention to the Stoics, in order to flesh out his charge that “it i ultimate of crimes to place our end in our selves”: That was the folly of the Stoic’s Sage, for whom happiness did not in the least depend upon God. Convinced of our powerlessness and of that of creatures, we must incline toward the Creator with all our strength. We must do everything for God. We must trace back all our actions to the One from whom alone we have the strength to do them. Otherwise we injure Order, we offend God, we commit injustice. This is incontestable. But we must search, in the invincible love which God gives us, for our happiness and for motives which could make us love Order. For, finally, God being just, we cannot be solidly happy if we are not submissive to Order, and he hates his soul, who loves iniquity [Psalms 10:5]. Psalms 10:5].160
The same text, finally, insisted upon the crucial difference between theChristi Sign up to vote this title Logos duty of acting in accordance with universal Reason and theondivine Logos and Not useful Stoic’s insistence on “following God or nature”. AtUseful I.I.22,Malebranche sets ou important part of his doctrine concerning God’s “general laws” - so importan Patrick Riley has shown, in laying the ground for Rousseau’s theorisation of
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resisting their designs. But when we resist God’s actions, we do not in the least offend Him, and often we even promote His designs. For since God constantly follows the general laws which He has set for Himself, the combination of effects which are necessary consequences therefrom cannot always be conformed to Order or suited to the execution of the most excellent work... 162
He then proceeds to attack the Stoics once more, undermining the central notio Stoic ethics that we should somehow choose to “follow nature”, where natu understood in term’s of God’s decree. On the one hand, “It is not a question of d however, but of necessity for us to submit to His [i.e., God’s] absolute power”; the other hand, even if it were a matter of moral duty, unfailingly to “follow Go nature” would be impossible, for the Stoics’ ethics fails to acknowledge unknowability and inscrutability of God’s decree for the world: By contrast, we are able to know Order by way of our union with the Eternal Word, with universal Reason. Therefore it can be our law, and can lead us. But the Divine Decrees are absolutely unknown to us. Let us not in any way make them into rules for ourselves. Let us leave to the sages of Greece and to the Stoics that chimerical virtue of following God or nature. nature . For us, let us consult Reason, let us love and follow Order in all things. To submit ourselves to the law God invincibly loves and which He inviolably follows is truly to follow him...164
In many ways, therefore, Malebranche’s critique of the Stoics represents culmination of the tradition of French Augustinian anti-Stoicism. More sophistic than that of Senault and far more attuned to issues and controversies in contempo philosophy than Jansen had been, Malebranche’s arguments against the the Stoics are systematic and sustained than those found in Pascal - inevitable, perhaps, given on this title predeces state of Pascal’s text. In common with all threeSign of uphisto vote Augustinian useful to presen Notwhich considered above, Malebranche used the Stoics asa Useful foil against account of Christian truth. Yet while he followed the tradition in deploying the mo less familiar criticisms of the Stoics (concerning the denial of human dependenc
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IV: An Acceptable Alternative? The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius
The Augustinian anti-Stoicism went mostly, but not entirely, unanswered i own day. In part, as is its habit, this particular owl of Minerva spread its wings sh after the falling of the dusk, for French Senecan Neo-Stoicism flourished in to the half of the seventeenth century, and this sustained Augustinian critique largely d from the 1640s, by which time the genre of French Neo-Stoic treatises on the pass had largely run its course. But the criticism did call forth a certain pattern of respon and this fourth section will bring Part Two to a close by considering what som these were.
The major reply from the French Senecan camp came from Antoine Le G whose 1662 book on Le on Le Sage des Stoiques set Stoiques set out a restatement of a Neo-Stoic th 165 of the passions. The details of that theory are not especially interesting from point of view of the philosophy of the passions; more significant from the poi view of this discussion is a passage at the end of the second discourse in his b which explicitly engages the developing Augustinian critique. With reference to God XXII.24 XXII.24 (“Of the blessings which the Creator has filled this life, even though subject to condemnation”), 166 Le Grand picked up on the peculiar way in w contemporary Augustinians were using an exaggerated binary of God – Na presenting the latter category in excessively negative terms, even from a Augustinian perspective: And even St Austin, though an Enemy to the Vertues of the Heathen, attributing (with much heat) all to Grace, and seeming to grant Nature nothing, that all might be owed to the assistance of Jesus Christ, is astonished that Sin which brought all our Senses into a Cloud of Error, darkened our minds, depraved our Wills, and poured into our Souls the Seeds of all Vice, could not choak the inclination we have for that Sign up to voteArguments, on this title which is good... Some of his Disciples doubted his they Useful the Not useful of our fountain could hardly comprehend how that whichmakes Crimes, should be the Original of our good Deeds, and that, against those inclinations which he maintains, she often brings forth perfection perfe ction
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Works, or that he knew Nature potent enough to do well, without the aid of written Laws. 167
Le Grand ended this passage with a caution to anyone tempted by the rigour o Augustinian critique: If to augment the guilt of the first Man; or diminish the rigor of his punishment, you represent God infinitely offended; who justly denies his assistance to Adams Descendants, be careful that you do not equally question both his providence and his Mercy, and remember, that you cannot take from him the Care of his Creatures without offending his Bounty. 168
Le Grand’s Neo-Stoicism failed ultimately to secure his own philosophical allegia however, and he ended up renouncing Stoicism for Cartesianism, on behalf of w he wrote a long and unsophisticated defence. 169
Among those writers anxious to defend the moral probity of Stoic ethics who not attracted by the prospect of simply repeating Senecan pieties, the character move, frequently reiterated after 1640, was to make a deliberate move away Seneca in order to embrace the Meditations Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as an accep alternative source for Stoic moral theory. The story of the career of Marcus Aureli European letters from the time of his first modern editor, Wilhelm Holtzmann (b known as “Xylander”), down to the publication of the Encyclopaedia has been nar by Jill Kraye in an important recent article which is always erudite and entertaining. 170 Kraye begins with the observation that the Meditations becam best-known Stoic text “in the second half of the seventeenth century”, 171 and whil does an excellent job of describing successive editors’ increasingly nuanced grip o Stoic philosophy expounded by Marcus Aurelius in his book, it is when we exa the increasing popularity of the Meditations in Meditations in light of the contemporarycriticis up to vote on this titlethis text c Senecan Neo-Stoicism that it becomes easier to Sign explain just why useful Useful after Not become so attractive for readers and editors in the the decades 1640.
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The remarks that follow discuss four editions of Marcus Aurelius published in period: those of Meric Casaubon, Thomas Gataker, André and Anne Dacier, Jeremy Collier.172 Isaac Casaubon had been the first modern scholar to understand significance of the Meditations Meditations as a significant source of Stoic philosophy in commentary on Persius of 1605; his son Meric published the first English translati 1634 and a Greek-Latin edition in 1643, and was the first editor to give the wor modern title, Meditations concerning Himself .173 Thomas Gataker’s edition of 1 also a Greek-Latin edition, was a remarkable feat of scholarship: 174 his extensive n covered a far wider range of sources in technical Stoic philosophy than Lipsius examined in his Stoic textbooks, and - most significantly for our purposes - the ed was introduced with a preface, or Praeloquio, Praeloquio, generally known in either of its En translations as the “Preliminary Discourse”, which was by far the most authorit treatment of Stoicism for at least a century after its publication, and was w recognised as such. 175 The husband and wife team of André and Anne Dacier prod a major edition and French translation of the Meditations the Meditations in in 1691.176 Less scholarly less significant but not wholly uninteresting is Jeremy Collier’s edition of 1701, w presented an accessible English translation, translation, which was reprinted down to to 1726 at le
It is not surprising that these various editors all have praise for the Stoic Emp prominently displayed near the start of their volumes, since they are trying to inter reading public in the edifying content of their books and simultaneously tryin persuade some members of it to buy it. More striking, then, is the fact that all of t 172
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, His Meditations concerning Himself , trans. Meric Casa Suis , 2nd ed. (Lo 3rd ed. (1663), Thomas Gataker, Marci Gataker, Marci Antonini Imperatoris De Rebus Suis, Edward Millington, 1697), Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions Antoninus, Réflexions morales avec des rema de Mr. & de Mad. Dacier , 2e ed. (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1691), Jeremy Collier Emperor Marcus Antoninus his Conversation with Himself , (London: R. Sare, 1701). 173 Casaubon was clearly tacking with the prevailing political winds: Kraye notes tha edition translation was dedicated to the royalist Archbishop William Laud, theonGreek-Latin Sign up to vote this title contrast - to the parliamentarian John Selden. See Kraye, “'Ethnicorum omnium sanctissim Useful Not useful pp.110-1. 174 Kraye reports the verdict of a recent history of Cambridge University Press, that it was
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editors take potshots at Seneca in the course of establishing Marcus Aurel credentials as the more admirable representative of the Stoics’ philosophy. M Casaubon touched on one central concern of the Augustinian critics of Stoicism w he remarked that, “Yet shall you not find in him [= Marcus Aurelius] t blasphemies, in exaltation of this humane power and libertie, which you sha Seneca, and other Stoics”. 177 Gataker’s edition discussed the three surviving S authors - Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca - and opined that, “Of these th Seneca is the first in Time, but in my Opinion, the least in Value, and Merit”. conceded that Seneca has his strong points (“He has a great many shining Senten his Precepts are admirable, his Manner noble, and his way of arguing very acu many places...”179), but these are considered to be outweighed by his vices (flattery hypocrisy with respect to the Emperors, inconsistency of attitude with respect to Epicureans), and Gataker dislikes aspects of his philosophical style: And lastly, he is sometimes guilty of the same Trifling, which he finds fault with in Zeno and Chrysippus. He is Gay sometimes when he should be Solemn, and Flourishes when he should strike home... He gives you sometimes a turn of Fancy, instead of Solid Proof... [His notions] have generally a Point, but no Weight of Body for Execution.180
The Daciers in turn suggested that “Seneca has combined the virtues of the ear Stoics with all the pride of their disciples”; 181 whilst for Jeremy Collier, Ma Aurelius’s style of argument was to be preferred to that of Seneca, who “moves m by start and sally”.182
Writing in a context in which a serious question mark had been raised ove compatability of Stoic ethics with Christian theology, these editors drew attentio those aspects of the Emperor’s thought which seem most congruent with Chri morality. For Casaubon, Sign up to vote on this title
Usefulof useful and all The chiefest subject of the Book, is, the vanity theNotworld worldly things, as wealth, honour, life, &c. and a nd the end and scope of it, to teach a man ma n how to submit himself wholly to God’s providence, and
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Aurelius’s Stoicism and Christian teaching. With respect to the ethical teaching Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, he comments: I think it may be boldly asserted, there are no remaining monuments of the ancient strangers, which none nearer to the doctrine of CHRIST, than the writings and admonitions of these two; Epictetus and Antoninus. ‘Tis certain, whatever precepts our Lord himself has given, in those sermons and conversations of his, ... of abstaining from evil, even in thought, of suppressing vicious affections, of leaving off all idle conversation; of cultivating the heart with all diligence; and fashioning it after the image of God; of doing good to men from the most single disinterested view; of bearing injuries with contentment: of using moderation and strict caution, in our admonitions and reproofs: of counting all things whatever and even life itself, as nothing, when reason and the case demand them: and of undertaking and performing almost all the other duties of Piety. Affection, Equity and Humanity, with the greatest diligence and ardour: All these same precepts are to be found in Antoninus, just as if he had habitually read them; they are everywhere interspersed through this collection of his thoughts and meditations; and continually inculcated with a surprising strength and life, which pierces to the bottom of the heart, and leaves the dart deep fixed in the soul. This every attentive reader will perceive; every honest one confess...184
Asking why Christians should take instruction from this pagan author, Gataker re that, “A careful perusal and serious reflection on these Meditations of Antoninus several ways useful”, before presenting the remarkable reply that what is “summ proposed” in the New Testament is “more extensively applied” and “more explained” in the works of Marcus Aurelius.
up to vote on this Further, in these following books, the goodSignProvidence andtitle kindness Useful Not useful of God shines forth; and He did not sufferhis own image to be quite 185 worn out and lost in man who had fallen off from him.
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Christian faith, and impious, as when he seemeth to speak doubtfully of God, an Providence, and to adscribe all things to Fatal necessitie, and the like”; but he urge reader not to judge Marcus Aurelius only by reference to isolated passages, and in discussion of the Emperor’s treatment of Providence he cites groups of passages w lend themselves to libertarian and determinist readings of the text respectively, g on to argue in a somewhat Lipsian fashion that what Marcus Aurelius calls “Fat Destiny” is “no other than God’s soveraign power and providence in ordering matters of the world”; and he ends his discussion by insisting that Marcus Aur uses the vocabulary of providence, fortune and chance in a manner “allowed by best Schoolmen”.186 Gataker passes very swiftly indeed over the Stoic Emperor’s Christian opinions; 187 and Collier follows in the footsteps of the Daciers by noting familiar charges that the Stoics “believ’d a Plurality of Gods, that the Soul was a of the Deity, and that their Wise Man might dispose of himself, and make his Li short as he pleas’d”. 188
It should come as no surprise that the most explicit attempt to depict Ma Aurelius as a Stoic author unperturbed by the Augustinian critique of the Stoics sh be presented in the major French edition of the Meditations Meditations to be published in second half of the seventeenth century. The Daciers’ introductory essay to translation addresses this theme early on, when they contend that the Stoics prese their ethics “car connoissaint la faiblesse qui est naturelle à l’homme”, pushing devoirs plus loin que la nature ne peut aller”, treating their readers in the manner o arbre à qui on veut faire perdre son pli, & qui l’on courbé du côté opposé”, an appr which seeks to turn on its head the Augustinian argument that the Stoics were radi deficient in their understanding of human nature in general and human weakne particular.189 But the full presentation of their anti-anti-Stoicism came a few pages in a central section of their Preface which sets out in schematic form a set o Augustinian objections to Stoic ethics which they propose to address: first, tha Stoics do not teach that one is required to love God; second, that they do not as Him the power to follow Him; third, that they do not teach man to hate himself, as up to vote this title ought; fourth, that they do not establish that man Sign is both the on most excellent and Useful humility; teach Not useful most wretched of all creatures; fifth, that they do not and sixth that do not point out that the tendency to place ourselves above everything else is a which comes naturally to us, and is one against which they provide no remedy. 190
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repeatedly enjoins his reader to love and praise God, for example – but other atte to fit the Meditations the Meditations to an Augustinian template are more surprising. Il prouve en beaucoup d’endroits que l’homme est la plus excellente de toutes les creatures à cause de son origine, & des perfections que Dieu a daigné luy communiquer, & qu’en même tems il en est la plus miserable à cause de ses vices qui luy sony perdre tous ses avantages, & qui le rendent esclave en le separant de Dieu. 191
The Stoics did not clearly teach the Christian virtue of humility, the Daciers conc and neither the Academy nor the Stoa had a word for it, Mais si cette vertue consiste à connoître son neant devant Dieu, à croire que c’est luy-seul qui est l’auteur de tout le bien, & qui ne fait point de mal; & à enseigner qu’il n’y a de véritable être que Dieu, & que toutes les autres choses sonts viles, perissable, momentanées, & sujette à corruption, ils l’ont connuë, & ce livre d’Antonin en est plein.192
The Daciers ended their response re sponse to the Augustinian objections with their most stri claims: they first sought to meet the Augustinian argument about self-love head on insisting that Marcus Aurelius follows Socrates in agreeing “que l’amour propre porte l’homme a rompre les liens de la societé”, and that “à voulouir fare comm tout à part est une revolte contre Dieu”; and they go on to maintain that the core et teaching of the Gosepls is, in fact, found in Marcus Aurelius, for whom “la premiè la principale condition de l’homme c’est d’aimer son prochain”. 193 They conc therefore, that the Augustinian critique “est donc inutile” and the Stoic argumen contrast, “tres-solide, tres-vray” and “tres-conforme” to St Paul’s teachin Philippians 4.13 that “ Je “ Je puis tout par la vertu de celuy qui me soûtient ”. ”.194
up to voteAurelius on this title is rhetori The Daciers’ presentation of an AugustinianSignMarcus useful Useful Not attractive but unconvincing as a terribly serious interpretation of his philosophy. one thing to argue that the Meditations are Meditations are much better able to resist the charges o Jansenists and the Oratorians than the essays of Seneca and perhaps even the wor
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had done before them, deliberately overshooting the mark in the way they pack their teaching, in order to correct for an existing bias in general perception of S moral psychology. ***
By the second half of the seventeenth century, the French Senecan Neo-Stoi which had been so popular in earlier decades was on the way out, a cultural mo which had passed its zenith. These Augustinians’ critique was formidable, certainly helped to dispose of a certain kind of Stoicism, that represented by attempt pioneered by Justus Lipsius to produce a Senecan Neo-Stoicism which c assimilate itself to and in turn work to support a traditional ecclesiastical Christia But this Augustinian critique never carried all before it. First, there were alw alternative Stoicisms available, chiefly that of Marcus Aurelius, and to some ex that of Epictetus, too, depending on how one read him. Second, the Augustinia which generated the critique was itself becoming weaker as time passed, and less to enforce its orthodoxy. Not only were the Jansenists themselves persecuted marginalised from mainstream French intellectual culture, but Augustinianism w established Roman Catholicism was on the decline. Third, and relatedly, the desi European authors to produce a defensible version of Stoic ethics that would confor the canons of orthodox ecclesiastical Christianity also grew weaker over time. Stoi never reappeared in European ethics in anything quite like the Senecan aspect it taken on in the early seventeenth century, it is true. But reappear it would, fir Spinozist and then in an Enlightenment guise. The Augustinian critique of selfwhich had done so much work in the attack on Neo-Stoicism was not without its secular consequences in the work of first Mandeville and then Adam Smith. And it Jean-Jacques Rousseau who would be bringing it all back home, with his distinctive blend of elements drawn from Stoicism and Augustinianism, which wi addressed in Part Four, below. Sign up to vote on this title
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Part Three: From the Dictionary the Dictionary to the Encyclopaedia the Encyclopaedia:: Stoicism in Protestant Europe from Bayle to Brucker
The French Augustinians criticised Stoicism above all for its exaggeratio human powers in general, and for the robust free will teaching of autonomy which found in Seneca and Epictetus in particular. Among Protestant critics, in stri contrast, the criticism of Stoicism tended to focus on its physics and, physics and, in particula its determinism. determinism. The first section of this Part will outline the contours of this Prote tradition of criticism, drawing attention to some of the major interventions encounters, before presenting and discussing in the second section the anti-S criticism mounted by Pierre Bayle in the pages of his Dictionnaire historiqu critique, critique, the most impressive statement of this critical tradition. The third section turns to the controversy over Benedict Spinoza, and shows how the Stoics - previo commended for their piety by Catholic and Protestant admirers alike transformed into atheists with the assistance of the prevailing anti-Spinozist disco before discussing how this argument was intertwined with the developments historiography of philosophy, which in turn prepared the way for the most influe textbook descriptions of the Stoics for the European Enlightenment in the works of Brucker on the one hand and the pages of the Encyclopaedia on Encyclopaedia on the other. I: Protestant Anti-Stoicism in the Seventeenth Century Ce ntury
The origins of the Protestant engagement with Stoic physics go back to the or of the Calvinist Reformation. Jean Calvin had himself once been sympathetic certain kind of Stoicism, fashionable at the time; indeed, he composed a ra Erasmian commentary on Seneca's Seneca's De Clementia Clementia before his break with the Ro 1 church. But following that break, he always maintained that his theology had not to do with Stoicism, and he was especially concerned that nobody should think tha doctrine of predestination had any kind of elective affinity with the Stoics’accou Sign up to vote on this title fate: predestination was an authentically Augustinian doctrine, he argued, Useful Not useful Augustine was no friend of the Stoics.
Calvin’s concern with Stoicism wasn’t entirely focused on the problemat
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that ‘instead of our souls... it is God who lives in us’. These libertines not only underestimate the power of sin; they also participate in the tradition of a few ‘ancient philosophers... who were fantastic enough to think that there was only one spirit, extended everywhere, and that all living creatures having movement and feeling were part of it, from which they had come and to which they would return’. 2
Indeed, one way of seeing the extent to which the early Protestants were not espec concerned by the Roman Stoics’ account of the freedom of the will is to note the e to which interest in Epictetus in the sixteenth century was concentrated among sch who were, or who would become, Protestants in general and Calvinists in particula that there does seem to have been a small theologico-political impulse behind decision to do work on the texts of the philosopher-slave. 3 As in the case of M Aurelius, considered above, many of the early translators and editors of Epic professed to being impressed by his piety his piety,, and in their prefaces or epistles dedicato their editions often commented upon the ways in which Epictetan doctrine was clo that of mainstream Christianity; 4 and it is easy to see why Calvinists would have attracted by the teaching of a philosopher who shared their emphasis on the leadin an intense and focused inner life. Had these writers taken the physics implic Epictetan Stoicism seriously, of course, it would have been much harder to presen philosophy as complementary to Christianity, but sixteenth-century interes Epictetus was almost entirely focused on the ethical maxims of the Encheiridion than the longer and more technical Discourses technical Discourses,, and the contemporary understandin Stoicism was largely filtered through the relatively unsystematic Latin presentation Seneca and Cicero, rather than any Greek source. 5
This background, then, suggests one way of reading Lipsius’s project, a attempt to produce a variety of Stoicism which softened the the determinism and 2
, quo andonthe Libertines The quotation is from Calvin, Treatise Calvin, Treatise against the Anabaptists Sign up to vote thisLibertines, title Stoics, p.211. Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, Useful Not useful 3 Rudolf Kirk notes, for example, that there were no editions of Stoic works publish England during the reign of the Catholic queen Mary, and that all of the scholars in sixte
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the pantheism altogether, in order to assuage the kinds of doubts about S philosophy which earlier Calvinist critics had articulated. Whatever the plausibili this approach to his texts, it does seem to be the case that it was in the wak Lipsius’s work that Stoic ideas were used most constructively in the theolo debates which arose within and against the tradition of Dutch Calvinism, in partic at the 1619 Synod of Dort, which condemned the doctrines of the Arminians on one hand;6 and at the 1626 York House conference in London on the other.
With regard to the latter debate, Reid Barbour has presented a lucid account o role played by Stoic physics. On the one hand, the Calvinists had been working fifty years to “sever the predestinarian God, celebrated in the 17th article of the En church, from the determinism and pantheism of the Stoics”, a separation which “necessary for Calvinists largely because the association between Stoic fate and notion of irrespective decree seems so natural to many enemies of Geneva”. On other hand, the language of the Stoics provided all sides to the controversy wit fresh terminology in which to articulate the basis of their opposition, the possibil for their consensus, and withal their uncertainties over the doctrinal commitmen the national church”. 7 Indeed, in the face of the libertarian Arminian challe Calvinists could relax their own criticisms of Stoic physics, so that at the se session of the conference, “[Richard] Montagu's critics condemned his rejectio Stoic theology as one of his heresies”, 8 and Barbour notes that in Cosin’s “slan record of the proceedings [t]he Calvinists proceed as if Stoicism approximated their own version of orthodoxy, even though article seventeen, invoked as their standard, has more to do with God's decrees and their spiritual effects than it does with the mixture of God with the world. 9
The debate between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall (at the time the Bisho Derry and one of the leading spokespersons for English Arminianism) on the subje Signbefore up to vote this title of Newc liberty and necessity began as an oral disputation held theonMarquis Useful of Not useful in the exiles’ community in Paris in the second half the 1640s, and entered pri 1654, apparently against the wishes of both parties, the pirate publication provoking a further round of increasingly polemical public exchange between
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reasons, not least as an exemplary confrontation between the scholastic orthod represented by Bramhall and the spirit of the new kind of philosophy aggress deployed by Hobbes, 11 but it is also the case that in the pages of the debate we good view of the rhetoric surrounding the use of Stoic arguments in mid-seventee century English philosophical discourse.
Bramhall was keen to establish a connection between Hobbes's mechan determinism and Stoic doctrines of fate: in his introductory remarks to the publi version of his own contribution he referred to Hobbes's argument as "this rare piec sublimated Stoicism", 12 and the Stoic motif was introduced early into the discussio the third section, Bramhall presented four reasons as to why he found Hobb account of liberty and necessity to be false, the fourth being that This necessity which TH hath devised, which is grounded upon the necessitations of a mans will without his will, is the worst of all others and is so far from lessening the difficulties and absurdities which flow from the fatal destiny of the Stoicks that it increaseth them, and rendereth them unanswerable. 13
As with the Jansenists' charge of Pelagianism against the Stoics, Bramhall consid Hobbes's position a to be a deeply subversive one: I hate this doctrine, which destroys liberty and dishonours the nature of man. It makes the second causes and outward objects to be the rackets, and man to be but the Tenis-balls of destiny. It makes the first cause, that is, God Almighty, to be the introducer of all evil, and sin into the world... It were better to be an Atheist... or be a Manichee... or with the
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same subject (London, (London, Printed by W.B. for F. Eaglesfield,Useful 1654); John Bramhall, A defen Not useful true liberty from antecedent and extrinsecall necessity, being an answer to a late book o Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, intituled, A treatise of liberty and necessity (London, necessity (London, Printe
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Heathens... than thus to charge the true God to be the proper cause, and true Author of all the sins and evils which are in the world. 14
Bramhall insisted that physical determinism must lumber God with responsibilit sin, so that “Notwithstanding any thing which is pleaded here, this Stoical opinion stick hypocrisy and dissimulation close to God, who is truth it self”, 15 and he warn the dangers to piety if liberty were to be set aside. 16 In the numbered sections o argument, part 18 is the setting for the most focused comments on the Stoics’ Bramhall began when he set out the charges against the Stoic argument in more d closely following Lipsius’s presentation in De Constantia: Constantia: the “Patrons of necess have certain retreats of distinctions which they fly unto for refuge”, and Bram identified and denied three different ways of distinguishing between “Stoical” “Christian” necessity: First, say they, the Stoicks did subject Jupiter to destiny, but we subject destiny to God; I answer, that the Stoical and Christian destiny are one and the same fatum same fatum quasi effatum Iovis ... Next, they say, that the Stoicks did hold an eternal flux and necessary connexion of causes; but they believe that God doth act, praeter & contra naturam, naturam , besides and against nature. I answer, that it is not much material whether they attribute necessity to God or to the Stars, or to a connexion of causes, so as they establish necessity. Lastly, they say, the Stoicks did take away liberty and contingence, but they admit it; I answer, what Liberty or contingence is it they admit, but a titular Liberty and an empty shadow of contingence who do profess stiffly that all actions and events which either are or shall be cannot but be nor can be otherwise, after any other manner, in any other place, time, number, order, measure, nor to any other end than Sign up tothem vote ontothis title what a they are, and that in respect of God, determining one; 17 Useful Not useful poor ridiculous liberty or contingence contingence is this?
In his reply, Hobbes denied that he had ever distinguished between Stoic and Chri
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themselves."18 Bramhall in turn then noted, again correctly, that the two disputants different motives for their similar denials of this Lipsian distinction: My reason is, because I acknowledge no such necessity... But yet he likes not the names of Stoical and Christian destiny: I do not blame him, though he would not willingly be counted a Stoick... If he had been as careful in reading other men's opinions, as he is confident in setting down his own, he might have found not onely the thing, but the name it self often used. But if the name of fatum Christianum do offend him, let him call it with Lipsius Lipsius fatum verum verum who divides destiny into four kinds: Mathematical or Astrological destiny, Natural destiny, Stoical or violent destiny, and true destiny... and defines it just as TH doth his destiny; to be a series or order off causes depending upon the Divine Council... TH saith, he had not sucked his answer from any sect; and I say, so much the worse; It is better to be the disciple of an old Sect, than the ringleader of a new. 19
On this point, at least, both men understood one another well. When Hobbes cam write his ‘Animadversion’ to this section of the debate, he wrote that Bramh mistake was to suppose that he “had taken my opinion from the authority of the S philosophers, not from my own meditation”, with the result that he “falleth into dis against the Stoics: whereof I might, if I pleased, take no notice, but pass over to XIX.” But then Hobbes admitted that he found the Stoics’ doctrine accurate i substance, and that their mistake “consisteth not in the opinion of fate, but in feig of a false God”, since their Jupiter was not the true God; and in the same passag agrees further that Lipsius was right to identify fate as “a series or order of ca depending upon the Divine Counsel”. 20 And in his ‘Castigations’ - his own parting since his own death brought an end to the exchange - Bramhall reiterated in §§6 an the ways in which the position Hobbes was adopting was more extreme than t staked out by Lipsius on the one hand and the Stoics on the other: Lipsius, because Sign up to vote on thisof title was no such friend of any sort of destiny, as to abandon the Liberty the Will”, w Useful had Not useful Hobbes Bramhall insisted (not without justification) that denied; the S because they,
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To what extent did Hobbes understand his own system as being similar to th the Stoics? One place to look is in a text not intended for publication, for in the th fifth chapter of his critique of Thomas White’s De Mundo, Mundo, Hobbes returned to question of the Stoics’ fate, again with Cicero’s De Fato as Fato as the chief text, and he employed a very similar argumentative style to that he had employed against Bram and with reiterations of some of the same key moves. First, he implied that far f copying the arguments of the Stoics, that the Stoics themselves probably arrive their understanding of determinism through the same chain of reasoning which he employed, through the careful study of definitions; 22 second, that White’s us meaningless jargon vitiated his own attempt to restate a viable determinism; 23 and that his own determinism did not result in his making God responsible for sin and On this last point, however, Hobbes was more explicit about the theological pos that underpinned his argument than he had been in the debate with Bramhall, elsewhere: Personally, while I hold that the nature of God is unfathomable, and that propositions are a kind of language by which we express our concepts of the natures of things, I incline to the view that no proposition about the nature of God can be true save this one: God exists, and that no title correctly describes the nature of God other than the word ‘being’ [ens [ens]. ]. Everything else, I say, pertains not to the explanation of philosophical truth, but to proclaiming the states of mind that govern our wish to praise, magnify and honour God. ... Christians say of God that He is the author of every act, because it is honourable to do so, but to say ‘God is the author of sin’ is sacrilegious and profane. There is no contradiction contradiction in this matter, however, for, as I said, the words under discussion are not the Sign up to vote on this title 22
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“First of all, he [White] fixes the basis of the Stoics’ ‘fate’ as follows: Two proposition affirmative and a negative, to do with the future are contradictory; therefore one of the
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propositions of people philosophising but the actions of those who pay homage.24
Reviewing the controversy between Hobbes and Bramhall, the Cambr Platonist Ralph Cudworth considered that Bramhall’s critique had misfired: he argued against Hobbes “like a Scholastick Divine”, and through his focus on poin detail had lost sight of the big picture, not fully appreciating that Hobbes’s doctrin “physickall fatalism is really one and the same thing with Saddiceism and Athei and that to refute Hobbes it was necessary to show that self-moving spirit did ex One part of Cudworth’s attack on Hobbes exists in the Treatise on Freewill, Freewill , but his argument ran along the same lines as that of Bramhall earlier: Hobb determinism was assimilated to Stoic fate, which was then rejected with referenc the kinds of categories and distinctions Hobbes himself had chosen to abando Hobbes pretended to be original, Cudworth insisted, “and yet this childish ridiculous nonsense and sophistry of his was stolen from the Stoics, too, who pl the fools in logic after the same manner”, and he persisted in calling this a “ridicu sophistry” even though he himself conceded that the Stoics were persuaded by it that it also puzzled not only “Cicero but also Aristotle himself, so much as to m them hold that propositions concerning future contingents were neither true false.”27
A more substantial engagement with Stoics ancient and modern was planned i vast True and Intellectual System of the Universe which was, he tells us in its Pre originally planned as a refutation of determinism, and which only later became a m larger-scale treatise. 28 Three varieties of determinism were singled out for refuta “Democritic fate”, also called “physiological fate” or “atheistic fate”; “divine
24
Ibid., p.434. p.434 . This opinion of Hobbes’s does not no t seem to be very ver y well known am that seventeenth and eighteenth century critics. Cudworth ascribed opinion Hobbes Sign upthe to vote on thisto title attributes of God signify not true nor false, nor any opinionUseful of our brain, but the reverence Not useful devotion of our hearts; and therefore they are not sufficient premises to infer truth, or con falsehood”. Mosheim, in the notes to his edition of Cudworth, claimed that he has been un
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immoral and violent”, or strong versions of what Schneewind terms voluntarism; “divine fate moral and natural”, which Cudworth introduced with these words, sa that God suffers other things besides itself to act, and hath an essential goodness and justice in [His] nature, and consequently, that there are things just and unjust to us naturally, and not by law and arbitrary constitution only; and yet [these Fatalists] take away from men all such liberty as might make them capable of praise and dispraise, rewards and punishments, and objects of distributive justice; they conceiving necessity to be intrinsical to the nature of every thing, in the actings of it, and nothing of contingency to be found anywhere... 30
Cudworth noted that this third position was held by “the Stoics, but also of lat divers modern writers”, but in the end this section of the True Intellectual System never written, as the book itself was never completed, and “divine fate moral natural” remained unrefuted. I will return to Cudworth below, for further discussio the Stoics’ God.31 Before then, however, it remains to consider the most origina most interesting writer in this Protestant anti-Stoic tradition, Pierre Bayle. II: Stoicism in Bayle’s Dictionary Bayle’s Dictionary
Although there is no article devoted to “Stoicism” or “The Stoics” in Ba Dictionary of 1697, this does not mean a great deal: there are no entries for Pla 29
Autonomy, passim, passim, but esp. pp.8-9, 21-5, 250-1. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, Cudworth, TIS , vol.1, Preface, xxxiv. 31 There are other interesting discussions of Stoicism in the pages of TIS which which Cudworth able to complete. In the first volume, for example, he draws on Stoic arguments prosecuting prosecuting his case against the “Democritical “Democritical atomists.Sign Against the on widespread widesprea up to vote this title d contem belief that atomism entailed atheism - articulated by William Harvey and Meric Casa Useful Not useful among others - Cudworth here asserts that “there is not only no inconsistency betwix atomic physiology and theology, but... there is, on the contrary, a most naturall cogn 30
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Descartes, either, in his notoriously idiosyncratic selection of articles. 32 In articles where we might expect to find discussions of Stoicism, furthermore, we none: indeed, in the article “Lipsius” the only opinion about the Hellen philosophers which is cited is Dr. Conradus Schlusselburgius’s opinion that he wa Epicurean! (“Lipsius”, note A.) 33 Yet Stoicism is by no means absent from Dictionary. Dictionary. The article on “Chrysippus” contains Bayle’s major critical discussio Stoic philosophy, and he makes important observations on Stoicism in “Arcesila “Heracleotes”, “Hipparchia”, “Ovid”, “Jupiter”, in the famous articles on Paulicians” and “Spinoza”, and elsewhere.
An Augustinian Calvinist, Bayle was the heir of both Catholic and Prote traditions of anti-Stoic criticism. In general, Bayle seems more indebted to Protestant critique than to that of the French Augustinians, for he is usually m interested in the cosmological, metaphysical, theological and epistemolo arguments of the Stoics than in their treatments of ethics and human psychology discussions of Stoicism barely mention Seneca or Epictetus, the most impo authors for the French critics. Yet there are also places where Bayle directly draw this French tradition. He repeats, for example, the chief complaint of the Augustin in his most extended comment on the figure of the Stoic sage, when he remarks tha “capital error” of the Stoics was their “supposing that it was in the power of ma root out every vicious passion”, a mistake which demonstrated their “ignorance regard to the state and condition of man” (“Ovid”, note H).
Beyond this commonplace, however, there is a deeper and more interesting de the Augustinian anti-Stoic tradition. For these writers were distinctive in their ref to treat Stoicism as mere doxography as they attempted to diagnose the spir Stoicism, to identify its inner principle or fundamental motivation. Bayle follows i footsteps of this tradition by presenting Stoicism in the Dictionary as something distinctive world-view, a set of philosophical doctrines and arguments insepar from a particular philosophical style, and one which possesses its own character Signare up to vote on this title vices of the intellect. The false doctrines of the Stoics generated, so Bayle seem Useful Not useful claim, by their erroneous approach to philosophical disputation. Form and con philosophical substance and method method are closely tied to one another.
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It is this double concern, both with the content of several Stoic arguments and a certain philosophical style, which overdetermines the centrality of Chrysippu Bayle’s engagement with Stoic philosophy. On the one hand, while the work Chrysippus are, of course, all lost, it is clear from the discussions of his view especially, Cicero and Plutarch, that he was the most significant Stoic thinker on philosophical topics that interested Bayle the most, including fate and free will an basis of perceptual knowledge. On the other hand, Bayle was also both inheriting recasting a tradition, both ancient and modern, of denigrating the characte Chrysippus to an often extreme degree.
The ancient criticisms of Chrysippus are familiar enough: Plutarch in parti took great delight in finding flawed arguments in the works of Chrysippus in his b On Stoic self-contradictions. self-contradictions .34 But the seventeenth-century critics of Chrysippus h distinct motivation. These were writers who wanted to defend Stoic or Neo-Stoic e against some of the contemporary criticisms of Stoic philosophy, and, exploiti murky knowledge of the earliest development of Stoic philosophical doctrine, t writers ascribed all that they found admirable in Stoic doctrine to Zeno and ascr the least defensible arguments, or the arguments which they were, at least, unwillin defend, to a kind of rogue Stoicism elaborated by Chrysippus. On this view, Ze pure doctrine came to be corrupted by the pedantic, systematising spirit of Chrysip Kaspar Scioppius may have been the first to go down this road in his 1606 Elem philosophiae stoicae moralis (“Chrysippus”, moralis (“Chrysippus”, note E); André and Anne Dacier follo explicitly pursuing the strategy in order to try to rebut Jansenist criticism of Stoic so that their Chrysippus is one who wholly misunderstands the spirit of Stoicism. Daciers tell us, for example, that whereas Zeno had taught that “all sins are equa order to insist that small transgressions still mattered morally, as well as great cri but that this was transformed in the hands of Chrysippus into the odious doctrine there was no difference between acts of sacrilege and the theft of a cabbage. 35
That Bayle belongs to this tradition is clear enough. In “Chrysippus”, to vote this title elsewhere, the Stoic is criticised for a multitude of Sign sins.upHe is on slated, for example Useful to Not useful his inconsistency - the way in which he did not stick his principles “but altered t daily” - for his “unintelligible Jargon”, the “ill use” he made of his wit, and fo “hunting after idle subtleties”. Bayle also criticised him for his inability to see w
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the Science of Morality”, as we shall see, below - treat the morally repro Chrysippus as a heterodox deviant from the Stoic mainstream, in order to celebrat contributions of other Stoic philosophers, Bayle’s near-silence about Zeno, Epic and others focuses our attention entirely on the deficiencies of the Stoic philosophy of its chief representative, Chrysippus. 36 Thus, when Bayle makes remarks about Stoics” in general, they are almost always highly critical. They are called Pharisees of Paganism” for their unfair campaign of vilification against Epic concerning which Bayle writes that “The Stoics professed a great severity in morals: to contend with these people was almost as dangerous as it is at this day t at variance with Bigots” (“Epicurus”, main text and note N). Elsewhere, he rem that The Stoics, who applied themselves more than any other Philosophers, to to moral philosophy and Ethics, approved Diogenes’s imprudent obscenities; so that we may apply to them particularly St. Paul’s general affirmation against the Heathens, professing themselves to be wise, they become foolish. foolish . (“Hipparchia”, note D).
Why was it so important for Bayle to criticise the Stoics? Stoicism mattere Bayle because he took it to be the archetypal philosophy of constructive rationa which not only sought to establish rational grounds for perceptual knowledge thro its epistemology, but which also claims through its physics to elucidate the structu the universe and to describe the nature of God. Yet philosophical reasoning was al for Bayle a critical, rather than a constructive tool. E. D. James drew attentio Bayle’s simile in “Acosta”: Philosophy can be compared, says Bayle, to those caustics which clear up sores, but which would go on to destroy sound flesh and bones if allowed to do so. The simile is helpful in that by attributing to philosophy a therapeutic function it claims for it a positive value. Its to vote this if title value lies in correcting errors. Its danger liesSign inupthe factonthat it be not Usefulthemselves... Not useful37 limited to the correction of errors it attacks truths
The Stoics attempted to deploy philosophical reason well outside safe boundaries,
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contemporary theologians to use Stoic modes of reasoning in their enqu concerning God.
Three aspects of Stoic philosophy are therefore discussed in particular in Dictionary. Dictionary. First, the methods of the Stoics are presented as objectionably dogm and rooted in vice, promoting obfuscation and error rather than helping to bring tru light. Second, the failure of Stoic epistemology to provide an adequate criterio truth is held to undermine a variety of arguments that purport to demonstrate existence of God or the truth of religious conviction. Third, the theological cosmo of the Stoics is deplored: their doctrine of the soul of the world is atheistic and returned in the form of modern Spinozism; their determinism fails to absolve Go responsibility for evil in the world.
Bayle agreed with Scioppius that the root cause of Chrysippus’s defe philosophy was his desire for victory rather victory rather than truth in truth in philosophical argument he therefore continues to agree with the Augustinian critics who located a mome pride at the heart of the problem with Stoicism (“Chrysippus”, note E). Descr Chrysippus’s style of arguing, Bayle draws on Plutarch ( On Stoic self-contradict 1035F) to tell us that he does not absolutely condemn the method of arguing pro and con upon the same subject; but he advises us to do it cautiously, as the Lawyers do. They can only act otherwise, says he, who pretend to doubt of everything; for their arguing with the same strength pro and con serves their turn, as it is proper to show that everything is uncertain. But he who intends to establish a true knowledge, according to which we ought to regulate our conduct, must indeed lay the whole subject before us from the beginning to the end, and as occasion offers he may mention the adversary’s objections, but only in order to weaken and confute them. (“Chrysippus”, note G38) Sign up to vote on this title
Usefulargument: Not useful Bayle strongly condemned this approach to philosophical
Let us explore here the falsity of Chrysippus’s maxims. He pretended,
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odious, and which was, to make the best cause of that which was the worst...(Ibid. worst...(Ibid.).
In part the trouble was that in his desire for victory, Chrysippus unwittingly aided Sceptical opponents. On the one hand, his vanity led him to “collect... so m arguments in favour of the Sceptical Hypothesis”, in order to refute them all toge but “he could not afterwards confute them himself” (“Chrysippus”, main text), “thus furnished Carneades with weapons against them” (“Chrysippus”, note F, quo Cicero, Academica Cicero, Academica,, 4.27). On the other hand, Chrysippus employed whatever wea were to hand in attacking sceptical arguments, with the result that he was frequ led into the self-contradictions celebrated by Plutarch, who is quoted repeatedly an length by Bayle throughout these pages.
The deeper problem that Bayle associates with the “Dogmatick” style, howev summed up in the tag that Bayle quotes from Scioppius, “ nimium altercando ve amittitur ”, ”, that “truth is lost by too much argument”. 39 The pedantry encourage strenuous argument on one side of a proposition has quite the reverse effect to wh intended: [T]he disputes between Philosophers produce quite another effect; they make both the spectators of the battle and the champions lose the truth; no body does nor can seize upon it in the sequestration in which it is put, while the suit is depending. depending. (“Chrysippus”, note E)
Bayle continues with this theme, cross-referencing his discussion to its continuatio note E of “Euclid” and, from there, to note S of “Loyola”, recruiting Seneca, Augu Montaigne and other authorities to support his claim about the pernicious resul there being too much heated philosophical debate. His criticisms of the dogmatic prompt his more general reflections on philosophical philosophical method.
up to vote ontwo this title Observe that there were amongst theSignAncients sorts of Useful Not Philosophers; some were like the Pleadingcounsellors, anduseful the others, like a Recorder or Judge, who sums up the evidence on both sides... The latter were the Scepticks or the Academicks. (“Chrysippus”, note
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Religion does not suffer that academical or sceptical humour: it requires that we absolutely deny or affirm. (Ibid. (Ibid .)
One who acts the Sceptic, presenting arguments on both sides of the case on quest of theology “becomes odious and suspected, and is in danger of being treated lik infamous prevaricator who betrays his own party” (Ibid.).
Although he never makes the connection explicit, Bayle does implicitly sug that the Stoic style of philosophy generates certain patterns of disreputable behav on the parts of its practitioners. The faults which Bayle criticises in Lipsius archetypal modern Stoic, for example, closely parallel his condemnation Chrysippus. Lipsius behaves badly in philosophical disputations: rather than te what Lipsius argued in his debate concerning toleration with Koornhert, Bayle tel how Lipsius tried to get Koornhert's pamphlets suppressed (“Lipsius”, note C). men are also criticised for their silences: Chrysippus when confronted by the prob of the Sorites (“Chrysippus”, note O) and Lipsius when challenged by the accusa in the anonymous tract Idolum Hallense (“Lingelsheim”, note A). Both furthermore, are accused of producing bogus philosophical solutions to cl problems: Bayle reports that Carneades found a Sorites paradox embedde Chrysippus’s attempted solution to the problem (“Chrysippus”, note O; see Ci Academica, Academica, 2.92-6), and Lipsius’s attempt to solve the problem of evil by distinction between two kinds of souls displaces rather than resolves the problem theodicy (“Chrysippus”, note H).
While the use of the Stoics’ dogmatic method m ethod in theological controversy is per more excusable than in the philosophical realm, Bayle is here concerned to comba use of specific Stoic arguments. Bayle’s hostility to rational theology, or the attem vindicate positive theological claims through the use of philosophical argumen well known. In a few examples here we can see how Bayle specifically criticise attempt to use Stoic theses in theological debates. Sign up to vote on this title
Useful between Not useful When Bayle returned to the epistemological debates the Stoics and Sceptics in the pages of the Dictionary, Dictionary, he emphasises precisely those scep objections which can be brought to bear bea r against the modern Cartesians. In “Arcesil
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form as that which does exist; but he denied that there could be that conformity of ideas betwixt that which is and that which is not. Arcesilaus on the other hand insisted upon this conformity. (“Arcesilaus”, note E)
The mistake the Stoics make is to insists that there is necessarily a phenomenolo distinction between what is true and what is false. And as we might expect, given affinities between the Stoic notion of the phantasia kataleptike and the Cartesian and distinct idea discussed in Part One Section Two above, this sceptical objection at the heart of Bayle's anti-Cartesianism, too: the clear and distinct idea cannot b basis of indubitable knowledge, since it does not carry a guarantee of its own vera The proofs of God’s existence presented by Descartes in the third and fifth o Meditations Meditations cannot be granted, and nor can any other theological proof that res what is considered évident (the word which is used for the standards of cl demanded by the Cartesians in a philosophical proof).
In the article on “Heracleotes”, a Stoic philosopher better known as Diogene Heraclea (a man who abandoned the Stoic school to embrace the more hedon lifestyle of the Cyrenaics), Bayle radicalises this attack on the philosop theologians. Since Heracleotes professed Stoicism, and then professed something Bayle asserts, he [O]ught to believe that falsehood presents itself to our minds, and impresses itself there under the same characteristic or image under which truth exhibits itself; and consequently that this distinguishing characteristic of truth and falsehood, which you trust to in affirming or denying, is deceitful and illusive. Bayle goes on to comment:
Sign up to voteas onassert this titlethat the This objection may puzzle such modern Protestants, Useful Not of useful truths of the Gospel do not enter the mind by way evidence [évidence], évidence], but by that of sense [sentiment [ sentiment ]. ]. What will they say should they be shewed some Christians, who change their religion, and who
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that there can be no criterion to determine the truth of religious belief, and tha philosophers’ search for such a criterion is misplaced.
Bayle, finally, argues that the Stoics’ theological cosmology is useles pernicious as an aid to thinking about God’s relationship to the world. On the one he rejects the arguments of the Spinozists that conflate God with Nature, insisting this is a “real Atheism” (“Jupiter”) and pouring scorn on the arguments which adduced to illuminate “the doctrine of the soul of the world” which made “a prin part of the system of the Stoics” (e.g. “Spinoza”, note A). And on the other hand B follows the Calvinist anti-Stoic tradition when he insists that the Chrysippan doc of fate, defended by Lipsius (at Physiologiae Stoicorum 1.14), Stoicorum 1.14), for example, must m God responsible for sin. [Lipsius] only winds and turns himself about... He says that there are some minds, which having been well framed from the beginning, go without any hurt thro’ the storm, which falls upon them from fate; and that there are others, which are so ill-framed, that if fate hits them ever so little, or even not at all, they fall into sin by a voluntary motion. This is owing to a natural imperfection, which is in the cause... In order to clear his Chrysippus [Lipsius] supposes, that the Stoicks ascribed the defects of the soul of man not to God, but to a real and unconquerable imperfection of matter... But hark you, Chrysippus, if this constitution and deviation be from Nature, how can you avoid making God the author of evil? How is it possible that the Author of Nature, who is nature herself, should not have produced evil, and bad men, if he made them as they are? (“Chrysippus”, note H).
The Stoics’ attempt to carve out a space for human freedom fails to address problem of evil adequately, and Bayle insists that one who uses Stoic arguments not be able to hold onto both their claim that God is good and that He controls Sign up to vote on this title parts (“The Paulicians”, note G).
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Bayle’s rejection of Stoicism operates on several levels: whether we employ S methods (the dogmatic style), Stoic concepts (the clear and distinct idea) or S
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On this account, Bayle’s presentation of Chrysippus is almost unrelenti negative, so that it is not unreasonable to see Bayle as trying to construct himself a anti-Chrysippus, a philosophical writer who will depart from the Chrysippan mou almost every particular. Ira O. Wade, by contrast, preferred to stress what he tho Bayle and Chrysippus had in common, for he discerned in Bayle’s “pen portrai Chrysippus a certain “warmth”, a recognition of a kindred philosophical spirit. are his words: [Bayle noted] that “it is a great misfortune for a sect to have a writer for their apologist, who has a vast, quick, ready and proud wit, and who does not only aspire to the glory of a fine, but also of a fruitful pen.” Still, he draws a careful c areful pen-portrait of this kind of philosopher, and one suspects that Bayle may be talking here more about himself than about the stoic Chrysippus, whom he undoubtedly admired. The main and only aim of such a writer, he begins, is to confute any adversary he undertakes to oppose. He labors more for his own reputation than for the interest of the cause. He attends chiefly to the particular thoughts which his imagination suggests to him. He regards r egards but little whether they are agreeable to the principles of his party. He is well enough pleased if they serve to elude an objection, or to tire out his adversaries. Dazzled with his inventions, he does not see the wrong side of them. He is for a present advantage and unconcerned with things to come. He cannot avoid contradicting himself. “By this means,” Bayle concludes, “he betrays the interest of his party and runs from one extreme to another.” In this delineation of the philosopher, there is certainly a bit of a confession. 40
This seems to me to be as uncharitable to Bayle as Bayle has doubtless bee Chrysippus. But there is, nevertheless, an even deeper parallel between the philosophers which goes unremarked unremarked upon here. Sign up to vote on this title
Not useful to haunt m Useful Large questions about Bayle’s own beliefs and motivescontinue writing about the Dictionary. Dictionary. Did he believe in God? To what extent was Dictionary intended to subvert religious orthodoxy? How badly did the eightee
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strenuously against one another’s systems, producing thousands of carefully ar pages against their rivals’ proofs of the proposition that God exists. “Refutation proofs of the existence of God”, writes Kors, “abounded by the late sevente century, not because of the emergence of actual atheists, but because of theolo polemic on the issue of the proper proper philosophical structure for Christian Christian doctrine”.
It is tempting to surmise that Bayle himself perceived what Kors has detected feared, rightly, that the result of this torrent of “atheistic” literature from the pens o orthodox would be to promote atheistic tendencies in Europe. On this view, then endless theological controversies pursued in the Dictionary Dictionary have an almost sat intent; Bayle does, as Wade indicates, seek to tire out his adversaries by showing t again and again, and at inordinate length, exactly how all attempts to employ the of rationalist philosophy in theological debate must fail. And so, just as Chrysi collected together the arguments of the sceptics into one place, in order to refute all at once, failed, and thereby performed a service for the very sect he aime combat, so too Bayle’s attempt to bring an end to the debates of the ration theologians by beating them at their own game ended in ironic failure. Following appearance in significant numbers of eighteenth-century atheists, Bayle’s Dictio inevitably became itself viewed as an extended manifesto for all varieties of relig heterodoxy and even atheism. Just as Carneades could remark that he found al arguments he needed in the works of Chrysippus, so too the dialectic of uninte consequences ensured that the Dictionary would become the “arsenal” o “Enlightenment” which Bayle himself would, in important respects, have loathed. III: How the Stoics became Atheists
Jonathan Israel’s massive Radical Enlightenment presents an important interpretation of European philosophical culture in the period 1650-1750 with w this study is strongly sympathetic. 42 In contrast to the familiar, old-fashioned vie the Enlightenment as a chiefly French phenomenon centred on the Parisof the Sign upthe to vote on this title eighteenth century, or the more recent view that depicts Enlightenment in term useful Useful Noton a wave of eighteenth-century continental Anglomania centred reverence fo achievement of the troika of troika of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, or the recent view of J. G. A. Pocock which insists on a plurality of “Enlightenmen
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this account, therefore, the 1750s - traditionally conceived of as the decade o “High Enlightenment” in the Paris of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia now presented as something of a coda to the drama of Enlightenment. Indeed, to Israel’s own words, “even before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s real business was already over”. 44
As to the best way of describing the structure of the arguments of this un Enlightenment, Israel agrees with one contemporary observer, the Genose sch Paolo Mattia Doria, who considered his era to be dominated by a five-corn struggle between the conservative Aristotelian scholasticism (still offic propounded in many of the continent’s universities and smiled upon by its crow heads and ecclesiastics) and three groups of moderni, moderni, made up of the Lochisti Cartesiani-Malebranchisti Cartesiani-Malebranchisti and the Leibniz-Wolffians, all of whose divisions op the way to “the awesome fifth column” (those are Israel’s words) of the radical p or the “Epicurei-Spinosisti “Epicurei-Spinosisti”” (those are Doria’s) 45. Israel’s central argument, run throughout his many pages, is that it was this fifth column of the “Ra Enlightenment” of Spinoza and his often clandestine followers which was the c impetus driving the most far-reaching transformations of European intellectual li all parts of the continent, including those, like England, often thought to have substantially unaffected by the dissemination of Spinozist ideas, and where the gro of philosophic radicalism in the later seventeenth century has traditionally presented as a homegrown phenomenon.46
As the remark from Doria suggests, the Spinozist spectre haunting Europe from time of the anonymous appearance of the Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus in Theologico-Philosophicus in was often understood as a new form of Epicureanism - and, as in the case of Tho Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century, the Epicurean label was quickly slappe their critics onto a host of writers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centu who scandalised respectable opinion, including Anthonie van Dale (1638-17 Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), 47 Bernard de Mandeville, and other radicals. Sign up to voteas on this title always interesting, of course, when writers get denounced Epicureans, but Useful to Not useful especially interesting in the case of Spinoza, owing the extent to which he ca understood as mounting a sustained argument in defence of a series of Stoic posit Stoic posit In recent years, it is Susan James who has set out at greatest length the reasons
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positions which his seventeenth-century audience would have immediately assoc with the Stoics, including, among others, the identification of God with Nature ( sive Natura), Natura), the equation of the passions with false judgements, and that of virtue happiness; but also to a considerably less obviously aspect of his thinking, when argues that “Spinoza displays an awareness of the objections to which the S account of virtue was habitually subjected, and that in responding to them he d still further on the resources of Stoic philosophy”. 49 In particular, James demonst the manner in which Spinoza rebuts contemporary objections to the Stoic insist that virtue was incompatible with passion by restating a Stoic account of rational a which insists that it is the rational person who acts, whereas the passionate perso merely acted upon upon by external things. 50 This opinion, that Spinoza is a sophistic kind of modern Stoic, is not one, furthermore, which is confined to late mo commentators such as James or Long: during the Spinozist controversy itself, Bayle (as we have already seen, above) and Buddeus (as we shall see, below) foun Stoic label an appropriate one to use when considering the content and structu Spinoza’s arguments, and the ever-perceptive Giambattista Vico was clear abou continuities, referring at one point in The New Science to Science to the Stoics, “in this respec 51 Spinozists of their day”.
The disputes of the Early Enlightenment, it seems, could have been articulat been articulat terms of an ongoing critical engagement with Stoicism, but most of the time were not . Striking in this regard is Leipzig professor Carl Günther Ludovici’s ve on Christian Wolff’s 1737 edition of the Theologia Naturalis, Naturalis , describing it as his devastating assault on the Radical Enlightenment of “atheism, fatalism, de Naturalism, materialism, Spinozism and an d Epicureanism”.52 In this litany of heterod isms, “Stoicism” is conspicuous by its absence - yet to the Moderately Enlight party of Ludovici and Wolff, it would not have been at all unusual to conside arguments of the Stoics as constituting yet another variety of atheism, de naturalism, materialism and Spinozism (though not, of course, of Epicureanism).
Sign up to vote on this title that is stri While in general it is the reluctance explicilty to engage the Stoics Not in these debates of the Early Enlightenment, there wasUseful one site of useful debate in partic around Spinoza’s “pantheism”, which did have important repercussions for the wa which Stoicism was interpreted and understood. For it is as a result of this controv
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***
As noted in the previous section, Bayle, in his Dictionary entry on “Spin observed that the Stoic doctrine of “the soul of the world” was the same as Spino argument, and in “Jupiter” he described the pantheism of the Stoics as “a “ a real Athe From the standpoint of a present in which atheism is usually taken to be the deni the proposition that God exists, it might seem odd to describe a form of panth which argues that God exists, but is physically coextensive with the universe (and fact, identical with it) as a variety of atheism, but as Israel makes clear, the stan discourse of anti-Spinozism branded as atheist any opinion which sought (or w seemed) to deny the existence either of divine Providence or of punishment and re in the hereafter.53
Bayle’s opinion is, of course, a judgment which stands in conflict with that o earlier generation of Christian Neo-Stoic apologists: Lipsius - who had effect possessed a monopoly over the interpretation of systematic Stoic physics, owing authorship of the standard textbook on the subject - had denied that the Stoics taug pantheist materialism, arguing that “God is contained in things but not infused them”, refusing to follow the Stoic texts in understanding God in material terms. Vair, by contrast, whose preferred Stoic text was the Encheiridion Encheiridion of Epictetus, able to get away with exalting the piety and the monotheism of the Stoics, an present the God of the Stoics as identical with the God of the Christians, maxims of this short compilation stick to moral exhortation, and avoid the ree theological controversy. 55 Clearly, therefore, problems were going to arise for t syncretist understandings of Stoicism when the conditions which made t interpretations plausible no longer obtained: on the one hand, a more assid investigation of the sources for Stoic physics would inevitably undermine Lips arguments; on the other hand, a broader understanding of the systematic natur Epictetan Stoicism would undermine Du Vair’s, in a world in which scholars wer longer satisfied with basing their understanding of the philosophy of Epictetus on Sign up to vote on this title maxims of the Manual the Manual..
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In this context, it is clear that Thomas Gataker’s presentation of Stoicism occu a radically unstable position. In spite of his sophisticated knowledge of Stoic phy
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They hold that God Almighty governs the Universe; that his Providence is not only General, but Particular, and reaches to Persons and Things: That he presides over Humane Affairs; that he assists Men not only in the greatest Concerns, in the Exercise of Virtue, but also supplies them with the Conveniencies of Life. And therefore that God ought to be Worship’d above all Things, and applied to upon all Occasions; that we should have him always in our Thoughts, acknowledge his Power, resign to his Wisdom and adore his Goodness for all the satisfactions of our Being. To submit to his Providence without Reserve. To be pleased with his Administration; and fully persuaded that the Scheme of the World could not have been mended, nor the Subordination of Things more suitably adjusted, nor all Events have been better timed for the common Advantage; and therefore that ‘tis the duty of all Mankind, to obey the Signal, and follow the Intimations of Heaven, with all the Alacrity imaginable: that the Post assign’d us by Providence must be maintained with Resolution; and that we ought to die a thousand times over, rather than desert it. 56
It is in the arguments of Gataker’s Cambridge contemporary Ralph Cudworth we can begin to see how anxieties about Stoic theology began to be articul Cudworth ultimately followed Gataker, Lipsius and Du Vair in accepting that Stoics were theists - theirs, as mentioned earlier, is presented as a teaching of “ fate, morall and naturall” - but the discussion of Stoic cosmology in the second vol of The True Intellectual System of the Universe is the major discussion in seventeenth-century English tradition which seriously raises the question as to whe the Stoics’ physics should allow their philosophy to be interpreted as a form of the In a lengthy discussion, Cudworth aims at refuting the charge that, though they w in his own well-chosen words, “sottish corporealists” 57, the Stoics were not thems atheists; though, as he remarked casually in the third volume, they were“imper Sign up to vote on this title of Creatio mongrel and spurious theists”. 58 In his account, the decisive issue is that
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[A]s to that controversy so much agitated amongst the ancients, whether the world were made by chance, or by the necessity of
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Furthermore, Cudworth has some praise for the way in which Cicero had se the Stoics’ arguments for the existence of God under three headings at De Deorum, Deorum, using first an argument from design, second an argument from “univ harmony”, and third an argument from the “scale of nature“, all adding up to a s reasons which was not “at all contemptible, or much inferior to those which have used in these latter days.” 60 And while he acknowledged and copiously docume evidence of the Stoics’ polytheism, he concluded these passages of exposition w stress on Epictetus’s and Cleanthes’s invocations of a single deity, “because many so extremely unwilling to believe that the Pagans ever made any religious addre the supreme God as such”, and he reprinted the famous hymn of Cleanthes both i original Greek and in a Latin translation by “my learned friend Dr. Duport”. 61
The appearance of Spinoza’s major works, however, gave those who might been unsure as to just how to categorise the Stoics with an incentive to adjus criteria as to what was to count as theism, until the Stoics could be presented as no atheists, but the worst kind, Spinozist atheists. For although the most det arguments about the nature of Spinoza’s God were elaborated in the First Part o Ethics, Ethics, first published as a part of the Opera Postuma in Postuma in 1687, the notorious argu against the possibility of miracles in chapter 6 of the Tractatus Theologico-Polit which ignited the controversy in 1670, deployed an account of the nature of th which touched on Stoic cosmology in important ways. Spinoza’s argument agains possibility of miracles was premissed, in the first instance, on the identification laws of nature with the decrees of God, and on a very general level an ‘intellectua conception of God’s role and function in the universe of this kind cannot but evoke kind of language deployed by the Stoics which has always led to their being associ with development of Christian natural law philosophies. More particularly, howe the violence which Spinoza’s account of God in the Tractatus Tractatus performed on traditional Christian notions of Providence immediately conjured into view all o anxieties and objections which had been expressed against Lipsius’s arguments a Stoic fate and divine Providence in De Constantia. Constantia. For Spinoza to assertthat “G SignProvidence up to vote on this titlein truth, no decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s are, Useful Not useful but Nature’s order” was unflinchingly to proclaimthe truthabout Stoic determi which Lipsius had endeavoured to deny, and which had made his various critic intensely suspicious of his Stoic thought. 62
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Jonathan Israel identifies Jakob Thomasius - the father of the more em philosopher Christian, and the tutor of Leibniz - as the first scholar to publi refutation of the argument of the Tractatus: Tractatus: Spinoza’s book was first publishe Amsterdam in January 1670 (though the title page said Hamburg), and Thomasius his own Adversus own Adversus anonymum, de libertate philsophandi published philsophandi published at Leipzig in M 63 the same year. And, interestingly, Thomasius was also the first author to wor length about the atheistic implications of the materialist cosmology found in the St physics: he published a neo-Aristotelian attack on Lipsius’s ambition to reco Christian theology and Stoic physics in his 1676 treatise, Exercitatio de stoica m exustione, exustione,64 and claimed that “Nothing has more disgracefully corrupted the histo philosophy than the attempt to reconcile rec oncile the Christian faith, now with Plato, now Aristotle, now with the Stoics or other pagan groups”. 65 In particular, first, he criti Lipsius’s interpretation of the inseparability of the two principles (active and pass which the Stoics argued structured the universe; second, he identified and criticised Stoics’ conflation of God and the world, which Lipsius had endeavoured to deny; t he insisted that Lipsius’s attempt to deny that God was responsible for evil, give Stoic premisses, had to fail. 66
When Bayle presented the Stoics’ view of the “soul of the world” as “a Atheism”, then, he was serving up a version of Thomasius’s argument to the reade the Dictionary the Dictionary.. The writer who was most interested in investigating, elaborating u and continuing to denounce the axis of Stoic-Spinozist-atheist evil, however, Bayle’s near-contemporary Johann Franz Buddeus, professor at the new foundati Halle, who devoted a series of studies over the length of his academic caree different aspects of this matter. The first was a short work on the errors of the Sto which was followed by a treatise on “Spinozism before Spinoza”, 68 a widely treatise on Atheism and Superstition, Superstition ,69 an edition of Marcus Aurelius, with a det Sign up to vote on this title
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Israel, Radical Enlightenment , pp.281-2. See also p.32 for the claim that Thomasius
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introductory essay, 70 and his important volumes on the history of philosophy, which I shall now turn.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the standard approach to writing history of philosophy - which at this time still almost universally meant the histo what we now think of as ancient philosophy philosophy - was still closely modelled on Diog Laertius’s book on the Lives the Lives and Opinions of the Greek Philosophers. Philosophers . A typical on the subject would be organised by sect, each section being subdivided by au with a doxography of the sect’s distinctive arguments presented in the section dev to its founder. 72 Passages on later philosophers belonging to the particular would follow the treatment of the founder, in broadly chronological order. W mention would often be made of particular specialisms or idiosyncracies w appeared in the work of these later adherents, there would not be any detailed treat of what we would today recognise as the basic stuff of the history of philosoph discussion of how the course of philosophical argument over time might have le modifications in the doctrines maintained by the schools. To take one example, which we have already encountered in the pages above, modern authors could attr Chrysippus’s modifications of Zeno’s doctrine to his failure to understand his mas teaching or to personal vice, but not to his attempt to work out the logic of Ze ideas as he fashioned a comprehensive system of Stoics philosophy. Those who w on the history of philosophy could discuss whether theses were true or false, in lig the best philosophical accounts of their own age, or of revealed religion, but they no doctrine of how progress how progress could could be made in philosophy.
The leading English work in this vein was Thomas Stanley’s compendious Hi of Philosophy, Philosophy , first published in 1655 (when the author was twenty eight): 73 as m be expected from this discussion, in this work he treated the Stoics in isolation other philosophical schools and followed the lead set by Diogenes by following hi of Zeno with a comprehensive doxography of the Stoic school. He has little to specifically about Stoics after Zeno. 74 When it came c ame to the theism ofthe St Sign up to vote on this title
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philosophiam stoicam ex mente M. Antonini Antonini (Le J. F. Buddeus, Introductionem ad philosophiam
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discussed in Part VIII, Chapter XVII, he noted that the historical record report variety of opinions about the Stoics’ God, 75 and the problem with treating the Stoi simple monotheists is clearly in view, given the way in which Stanley tacks back forth between the “God” and the “Gods” of the Stoics in his reports of the teach found in his various ancient authorities (in this section, Plutarch, Diogenes Lae and Cicero). The closest he comes to resolving this tension is by suggesting that “ is a Spirit, diffused through the whole World, having several denominations, accor to the several parts of the matter through which he spreadeth, and the several effec his power shewn therein”, before rattling off a variety of these names (Dia, Min Neptune, etc.).76
In the latter part of the seventeenth century, a revolution in writing the histor philosophy pioneered by Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) and Christian Thom (1655-1728), associated with a new understanding of “eclecticism” in philoso paved the way both for a coherent notion of philosophical progress and for the multivolume histories of philosophy written in the eighteenth century. 77 But an development in the technique of writing the history of philosophy pioneered in early eighteenth century, associated in particular with Buddeus, was the ambitio identify the “nuclear” principles of the ancient philosophical doctrines, from which other doctrines could be said to follow, as a way of distinguishing the core from peripheral arguments of the various schools, and of coping with the fact - quit obvious fact in the case of the Stoics, as we have seen - that a number of the so materials for the study of especially the Hellenistic schools were self-contradictory
Given Buddeus’s triple preoccupation with atheism, Stoicism and Spinoza, perhaps not surprising that his methodological innovation in the historiograph philosophy had a specific application to precisely this polemic. Indeed, this distin historiographical method seems to have been developed out of Buddeus’s exten reflections on Stoicism:
up to vote onof thisSeneca title Buddeus was initially attracted by the manySign statements and
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Marcus Aurelius, so many of which were recalled by Lipsius, which seemed to make Stoicism easily assimilable to Christian truth. But investigating the system closely he noticed that it was nothing but another form of Spinozism. Holding onto this supposition, he could understand the significance of the morals of the Stoics, apparently so noble and rational, in their deceitful and empty reality. 78
Thus, in Buddeus’s presentation, the most important dogma of the Stoics was identification of God with the world, and the various other principles ultimately from this one. 79 In the realm of Stoic moral philosophy, the contradiction between admirable individual maxims of the Stoics and the impious premisses by which are generated seems to find its expression in the hypocrisy of individual S philosophers, a subject in which which Buddeus was quite interested. 80
Thus, in the work on atheism, Buddeus distinguishes between two varietie atheists: Je mets dans la prémière, Ceux qui nient effrontément & sans détour, l’existence de Dieu, ou Ceux, qui étant de mauvaise foi, ne peuvent nier, ni ignorer que l’Athéisme suit necessairement de leurs principles. Je mets dans la deuxième Classe, Ceux qui établissent des principes, dont l’on peut tirer par la voie d’une bonne conséquence des conclusions ou préjudiciables ou injurieses à la Providence & à la liberté de Dieu.81
Buddeus assigns the Epicureans to the first, and the Stoics and Aristotle to the sec category, but then he distinguishes between the latter two, in order to mak argument as to why the latter are closer to Spinoza than the former:
Sign up&to ils votel’unissoient on this title Ils regardoient Dieu comme l’ame du Monde, à la useful Useful Matière par un lien indissoluble. Et comme AristoteseNotcontentoit de dire que Dieu étoit la forme assistante du Monde, les Stoïciens soutenoient qu’il étoit une forme informante, informante, comme la clairement
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In this text, we can see the distinctive Buddean move in two places, both with rega the supposed “piety” of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Early in his study, he n that many readers have found in the Stoics “leurs belles sentences touchant la Reli la vertu, &c.”, and he comments, “Mais elles ne servent qu’à montrer que l’on tirer de véritables conclusions, de faux principes, ou du moins que les Stoïc n’avoient pas toujours raisonné conséquemment”. 83 And a little later he observes he doesn’t intend to say anything specific about Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, yet while no one objects to their atheism, their cases are covered by the earlier ge treatment of the Stoics. 84
Buddeus is not well known today, but he remains an important figure understanding the presentation of Stoicism in the early eighteenth century, and t are two Enlightenment sites in particular at which we can discern the distinctive im of his arguments about the Stoics. The first is in academic writing on the proble understanding the Stoics, and one place where we can see the implications of this approach to the history of philosophy being followed through very clearly is in extensive commentaries prepared by another German Moderate Enlighten academic, Johann Laurenz Mosheim (1694-1755) for his edition of Cudworth’s Intellectual System, System, published in 1733. 85 Methodologically, Mosheim clearly a himself with Buddeus’s approach when he wrote that The discipline of this sect is not to be learned from the magnificent phrases of this or that Stoic, but the whole of it ought to be placed before our view as a system, and afterwards a judgment formed as to the utility and excellence of the several dogmas... Wherefore, if the dogmas or sayings of this or that Stoic be considered in themselves, we shall never be at a loss for arguments to justify and uphold the cause of this sect. For my part, I consider that the goodness and badness of any doctrine should be judged of from its fundamental principles, and from its general tenor and context, and that we should up to vote on thisor titlewritten, take into especial consideration, not what Sign some have said Useful Not useful but what they ought to have said or written written consistently with the rest of 86 their opinions.
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ancient and modern and discusses at length any number of topics in metaphysics theology.87
On the face of it, Mosheim and Cudworth might not seem to be very far apa their interpretations of Stoic theology. Cudworth labelled the Stoics “spurious the but refused to categorise them alongside other ancient atheists; Mosheim, too, unwilling to use the atheist label. But the different reasons each author leans on w drawing their similar conclusion are decisive in indicating their general attitud Stoic theology. Cudworth’s interest in Creation, intelligent design and monoth ultimately inclined him to a generous judgment concerning Stoic theology; Moshe concerns, by contrast, were those dictated by the Buddean anti-Spinozist polemic invited a harsher verdict. So, for example, while he refrained from calling the S atheists (“That the Stoics professed a certain God or fiery nature, eternal, wise provident, admits of no controversy” 88), the two particular features of Stoic theolog which he drew attention in the ensuing exposition were precisely those canvasse Buddeus when he was expounding the distinction between the two different kind atheists. The first of these was the question of God’s freedom freedo m of action on the one for the Stoics “openly acknowledged, that this God was unable to accomplish all he wished, and that he did not possess the power of free agency, being bound dow the fate inherent in the very nature of matter”, 89; and the second was the matt “external justice”, or the divine justice of punishing and rewarding, which the S denied, “[B]y doing which they extinguish in mankind all motive for the practic virtue and destroy the very foundations of divine worship”. 90 Mosheim and Bud may not have agreed on the appropriate label to be deployed, therefore, but certainly were of one mind when it came to the substance of Stoic cosmology.
The second place to look in order to find the influence of Buddeus’s analys Stoicism is in the works of his most illustrious student Johann Jakob Brucker, w massive, multivolume Historia critica philosophiae philosophiae became the standard wor reference on the history of philosophy before first the Kantians and then the Hege Sign up to vote this title got to work on rewriting that history in order to foreground theonachievements of t 91 NotBuddeus, useful Useful latter day masters. Brucker is a far more significant figure than consid
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both in terms of his own historiographical achievement and of his influence academic posterity, but when it came to writing about the Stoics, Brucker was lar content to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor. 92 Thus, the passages on the S in the Historia the Historia critica philosophiae contained philosophiae contained a series of clearly Buddean observat as when Brucker observed that we should not judge the Stoics from words sentiments “detached from the general system” but rather should “consider the they stand related to the whole train of premisses and conclusions”. 93
Following Buddeus again, Brucker’s judgment on Stoicism was resolutely ho and, despite his “critical” method, his discussion is couched in familiar terms Stoics wasted much time and threw away much ingenuity “upon questions o importance”, 94 they “largely contributed towards the confusion, instead improvement of science, by substituting vague and ill-defined terms in” in plac “accurate conceptions”;95 with respect to their moral philosophy, Brucker found th was “an ostentatious display of words, in which little regard was paid to nature reason”,96 which, while it aimed at raising “human nature to a degree of perfec before unknown” in fact served “merely to amuse the ear” with “fictions which never be realised”. His conclusion was that “a system of philosophy, which attemp raise men above their nature, must commonly produce either wretched fanatic artful hypocrites.” 97 Turning then from the ethics to the physics, he resisted the m of those apologists for the Roman Stoics, who tried to equate Stoic fate with di Providence: This doctrine, according to Zeno and Chrysippus (who herein meant to combat Epicurus’s doctrine of the fortuitous concourse of atoms) implies an eternal and immutable series of causes and effects, within which all events are included, and to which the Deity himself is subject: whereas the later Stoics, changing the term Fate into the Providence of God, discoursed with great plausibility on this subject, but still in reality retained retained the antient doctrine of universal fate. 98 Sign up to vote on this title
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And in his discussion of the modern authorities who had written on the Stoics, Bru consistently criticises the syncretist ambitions of Lipsius, Heinsius, Schioppius Gataker, appealing to the scholarship of Thomasius and Buddeus in support o opinions.99
Brucker drew heavily on Buddeus when writing his account of Stoicism, Brucker was, in turn, the chief source for Diderot when he was compiling the art on the history of philosophy for the Encyclopaedia. Encyclopaedia. Indeed, many articles on subject essentially consist of lengthy passages from Brucker’s work, translated French and lightly edited, and the article on “Stoicisme” is a very good examp this.100 In this way, therefore, Buddeus’s anti-Spinozist, Moderate Enlightenment v on the nature of Stoicism ended up being presented substantially intact befo substantial new reading public in the pages of the Encyclopaedia. Encyclopaedia. Presenting in ou form the basic principles of the Stoics, Diderot worked closely with Brucker agreed with Buddeus when he wrote that, “il n’est pas difficile de conclure de principes, que les sto ïciens étoient matérialistes, fatalistes, & à proprement athées”. The difference this time around, of course, was that in Diderot’s presenta to be a materialist, fatalist atheist was no bad thing at all.
On Gataker, Brucker wrote: “I think it is clear enoughSign from the above up to vote on thisthat titlethis most er man was deceived by his study of the Stoa and did not hypotheses o Useful tothe Notreal useful attend Stoics accurately enough and without prejudice. He was surely in the grip of emotion and h through which he persecuted the Epicurean philosophy, even tacitly attacking Gassendi him 99
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Part Four: Aspects of Stoicism in Enlightenment Europe
In the final section of the previous Part, I noted the surprising reticence to con the new philosophy associated with Spinoza and his followers and widely consid subversive under the banner of Stoicism: new movements were more often attack Epicurean, even though in important ways their ancestry was Stoic. But this section also charted the elaboration of a specific academic discourse, centered aro the German historiography of philosophy of the period, which sought to depic Stoics as Spinozist atheists, and vice versa. versa. In assessing the roles and function Stoicism in the early decades of the eighteenth century, it is worth keeping this perspective in mind, because it helps us to identify two processes at work amids rival and competing uses of the Stoics in these years. On the one hand, paralleling articulation and growing popularity of an “eclectic” style in philosophy, there wa ongoing selective appropriation and integration of arguments deriving from the S into the rapidly developing body of contemporary moral theory. On the other han tradition of Stoic radicalism persisted throughout the period. This tradition was only kept alive through the interest in Stoicism of a small number of members o Radical Enlightenment. The possibility of a Stoicism that would be both politically theologically radical Stoicism also existed in virtue of the fact that some of arguments being anathematised in anti-radical literature were themselves recognis Stoic (even if they were not being called that). Thus, in a world in which pe continued to read Stoic authors and in the context of the loosening grip of ecclesias religion on Europeans’ minds, it always remained possible to assemble a radical or pantheist position, which owed much to the arguments of the Stoics (and wh later in the century, could adopt the political vocabulary of Ciceronian politics transmuted itself into the discourse of radical republicanism). 1
This fourth Part makes no claim to any kind of comprehensive coverage o various uses of Stoicism in eighteenth century politics and philosophy: with SignRousseau, up to vote on this exception of the argument which I make below about for title example, I do UsefulEnlightenment, Not useful although consider the place of Stoicism in the culture of the French is clearly an extremely important subject; and there will be nothing else about Ger scholarship in the remainder of this dissertation. The work of this Part is rath
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absence of Augustinian anxieties. An eclectic or integrative approach to the Stoics possible, however, only for those who were no longer troubled by some questions that haunted the seventeenth century controversies. The second sectio this final Part by contrast then concentrates on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rival competing approach to the legacies of the seventeenth century confrontation betw Stoicism and the Augustinians and argues that the general architectonic of his s and political thought can be plausibly regarded as having been very consider shaped by his own distinctive and transformative response to this intellectual heri I - Eclectic Uses of Stoicism in Theory and Practice Jean Barbeyrac and the Historiography Historiography of Eclecticism
The academic work of discrediting systematic Stoicism associated above all Buddeus opened the way for more sophisticated and often quite open appropriatio parts of parts of the Stoics’ philosophy. Indeed, it is in one of the most important texts fo development of philosophical eclecticism itself that we can see this approac Stoicism quite clearly. Jean Barbeyrac’s “Historical and Critical Account of Science of Morality” was published as a preface to his celebrated editio Pufendorf’s treatise Of the Law of Nature and Nations of Nations of 1706. This essay presente account of the history of moral philosophy which was organised around a ce argumentative thread, and which linked together ancient and modern et culminating in his account of the natural law system of Pufendorf as the one which uniquely able to come to grips with the problems bequeathed by the Grotian sys which itself had, in his famous phrase, “broken the ice” of the scholastics’ m thought. In chapter XXVII of this work, Barbeyrac discussed the Greek Stoics. 2
In contrast to many of the Stoic and anti-Stoic writings of the seventeenth cen Barbeyrac’s style is analytical rather than either apologetical or polemical. His p are backed up with precise references to both ancient texts and modern scholar SignThomasius up to vote on this and he generally follows the best authorities: Bayle, andtitleBuddeus fe Useful sure make Not repeatedly in his apparatus. He was also careful to hisuseful observations relevant to the philosophical subject matter under discussion. When he referred to accusations of hypocrisy and vice which attend the lives of various Stoics, for exam
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The distinctive move that Barbeyrac wanted to make was to divide Stoic phy from its ethics. With regard to the former, he wrote: “These principles, I must own monstrous; and the several philosophers of that Sect have, each in particular, a thereto some new Absurdities.” 4 With regard to the latter, his opinion was different: “However, except a few things, nothing can be more beautiful than Morality, very near approaching that of the Gospel, which alone is ent conformable to the Dictates of right Reason.”5 In contrast, therefore, to the argume Buddeus (and, later, Brucker), which sought to yoke the Stoics’ ethics to the physi order to condemn the seemingly attractive ethics by highlighting its basis in defective physics, or to that of Pascal and the other French Augustinians, who argued that the various errors of Stoicism were rooted in its animating spirit of p Barbeyrac’s aim was to break the Stoics’ system apart, and to examine their ethics respect to the rest of the history of moral philosophy, rather than with respect to other part of the Stoics’ system.
Considering the basis of Stoic ethics, therefore, Barbeyrac was careful to give of its central claims, the notion of a life according to nature, a rather vague read which has the effect of relaxing the notorious rigour of the Stoics’ system: By this Nature, some of them meant directly the Constitution of the Human Nature; or that light of Reason by the help of which we discern what is truly suitable to our state, and condition; others meant universal Reason or the will of God... and others again meant both these things.
The ethics of Marcus Aurelius are presented (following Gataker, to some extent, w he cites as “learned Englishman” 6) as an example of how far natural reason can le sincere enquirer after truth, an account which presupposes that Marcus Aurelius engaged in the kind of moral theory which aims to contribute to a “scienc morality”. 7 Barbeyrac, who was himself attempting to contribute to the scienc up to vote thisall titleits fine con morality, draws these conclusions concerning the Sign Stoics: thatonfor useful did not pre Usefulfor Stoic virtue cannot be a complete account of the matter, theNot Stoics any hope of another life; the Stoics did not properly acknowledge the immortali the soul; and they failed to appreciate that “rigid and over-strained maxims are n
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all proper to inspire virtue”, or that there ought to be no place for the use of parad in moral philosophy.8
In this light it is perhaps not surprising that the ancient ethical writer for w Barbeyrac professes most admiration is Cicero, and he praises De praises De Officiis in partic presenting its author as himself a kind of eclectic, who borrowed as he saw fit from various doctrines of the sects. 9 On the face of it, this might seem to mark a retreat kind of Renaissance Ciceronianism, with Barbeyrac holding up Cicero’s Stoic moral doctrine as the one to be preferred, whilst disdaining interest in the Sto philosophy of nature, but it is important to see that it is not. Barbeyrac’s bro argument is that it is the modern natural rights tradition in general and the syste Pufendorf in particular which provides the right account of the proper justificatio the content of ethics; and from this standpoint, the Ciceronianism of the Renaiss represents the last appearance of the ancient doctrines, before they were swept awa the Grotian revolution in the post-sceptical “science of morality”, a revolution w gave rise to the modern natural law theory which was able to fashion an adequate r to the sceptical criticisms of Cicero’s ethics which had been formulated Montaigne.10
On one level, therefore, Barbeyrac agreed with Buddeus: Stoic physics is fu error, and when the Stoic system is fully understood, it has to be rejected. Bu contrasts in their respective styles and approaches are dramatic. Budd historiography was one in which Stoicism as a system appeared in both ancient modern contexts, substantially unaltered, whether in the theory of Chrysippu Spinoza; 11 Barbeyrac’s presentation has no time for this kind of transhisto arguments: the true scientists of morality learn from one another’s mistakes, ne simply replicating nor anathematising the Stoics’ ethics. By breaking up the uni the Stoics’ system, furthermore, Stoicism becomes a series of philosophical resou or arguments that can be drawn upon selectively, indeed, eclectically. And in mo to insulate the Stoics’ ethics from their physics, finally, we find that Barbeyrac m up to vote on this title an important move, and one which Adam Smith willSignsubsequently reiterate later in 12 Useful Not useful century.
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Stoicism and the British Moralists: Shaftesbury and Butler
Significant borrowings from the Stoics had been taking place from the midd the seventeenth century in the tradition of British moral theory. Nathaniel Culver for example, had drawn on notions found in the Stoic authors when setting out his version of classic (i.e. Suarezian) natural law theory; 13 and in Part Two, I attention to a part of Cudworth’s engagement with the physics of the Stoics. And i significant feature of this tradition, observable from the time of Cudworth to the of Adam Smith, that many of the leading participants in this ongoing argument a moral theory turn to specific parts of Stoicism to make some of their most distin arguments. If Mandeville and Hobbes are the leading “Epicureans” in this discour is quite striking that Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson and Smith all re-theorise por of Stoic ethics, often in the course of constructing replies to predecessors’ argum themselves often Stoic-inflected to a quite considerable degree. The remarks follow will concentrate on the cases of Shaftesbury and Butler, where the use of S arguments is most pronounced, and most central to their own theoretical contributi c ontributi
Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, drew on the resources of Cambridge Platonist tradition when he was fashioning his response to the moral th of his tutor, John Locke - for although much of what Shaftesbury wrote functions challenge to Hobbesian theory, it seems clear that he chiefly had Locke’s philosop his sights. 14 Three key areas of agreement that obtain between Shaftesbury’s theory that of the Cambridge Platonists stand out. First, Shaftesbury agreed on the nee resist what Cudworth had called “divine fate immoral”, that is to say, those varieti determinism and materialism that seemed to issue in atheism. Second, there is a sh insistence that divine sanction sanction - the threat of punishment, or the inducement of rew after death - does not provide the motive for distinctively moral action, an opi which derives from their shared (and deep-rooted) rejection of theological voluntar Third, both Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists devoted themselve up to vote ontheory this title of the will developing what Stephen Darwall helpfully labels aSign “normative Useful they useful Not order to produce an account of self-determination,which considered a neces element in a non-voluntarist theory of morals.
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Three disagreements with the Cambridge Platonists also need to be noted. F Shaftesbury’s religion was clearly far less orthodox than theirs, and this is br discussed below. Second, as Schneewind describes, Shaftesbury’s account of passions broadly descends from the anti-Stoic theory developed by Locke, argued that the passions have neither a common origin nor a common objec opposition to the “Socratic” or “neo-Stoic” theory of the passions employed by Cambridge Platonists (and also, Schneewind notes, by Spinoza, Leibniz Malebranche).15 Third, and this is the point of disagreement which Darwall empha and which I take as my point of departure for highlighting Shaftesbury’s reworkin Stoic ethical theory, Cudworth’s interest in theorising the self-determining will a to produce a theory of accountability, accountability, whereas Shaftesbury’s theory did not.
In his unpublished Treatise on Free Will, Will , as Sarah Hutton efficiently explains recent article, Cudworth had argued that the responsibility for an action lies with originating intention (he uses the example of the clock-maker, not the bell-ham being responsible for the clock striking the hour). Considering the ascriptio responsibility for moral action, Cudworth turned to two pieces of Epictetan langu first, to the distinction between what is and what is not in our power; second, to Epictetan notion of the hegemonikon, hegemonikon, or (to use Hutton’s gloss) “an internal princi which performs the function of the will in directing the soul how to act”. Cudw ascribed to this hegemonikon both hegemonikon both the function of directing the soul towards the g and the power of initiating actions with this end in view, with the consequence persons are reasonably held responsible for their actions which flow from such determination, both by their fellow persons and by God on the day of judgment. 16
Shaftesbury’s theory of the will was developed along similar, Epictetan l Although Cudworth’s Treatise on Free Will remained Will remained unpublished, it may (as H suggests) have had an important influence on Locke’s theory of the will; Darwall n that Shaftesbury may have read the Cudworth manuscripts when visiting Dam Masham, Locke and Oates. 17 But whereas Cudworth had worked on developi Sign up to vote on this title theory of accountability or moral responsibility, Shaftesbury was principally intere useful Useful Not in the question of the generation of internal obligation. Darwall elucidates the diff standpoints well:
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skeptical of ethical systems in which these ideas figure prominently. He is, however, very much concerned to work out the necessary conditions of an enduring will or will or practical self , as well as their relation to the ability to author a life. These conditions include, he argues, that the agent have available a critical standpoint on her own life which she regards as practically authoritative authoritative and thereby obligating. The recognition of this internal ‘ought’ is, Shaftesbury claims, a condition of the very possibility of a practical self. 18
The Epictetan hegemonikon, hegemonikon, then, is understood as providing this critical standp that of what Darwall calls “reflective moral agency”, which enables a genuine government to be carried on. 19
The most radical and remarkable expression of Shaftesbury’s commitmen Stoicism, however, was presented not in anything he ever intended for publication in his private notebooks, which were composed around 1698. 20 In these pages, we see how a Roman Stoicism, made available in part through the scholarship of seventeenth century, was deployed for a genuine experiment in living, the so political and biographical context of which Lawrence Klein describes well. 21 M Aurelius and Epictetus were the two dominant influences on the construction of text: quotations from their writings, in both Greek and English, fill the notebo giving it to some extent the appearance of a commonplace book. What is most stri about these writings, however, is Shaftesbury’s interest in deploying the tech vocabulary vocabulary of Epictetan Stoicism, rather than in the content of the ethical ma themselves; the overall sense is of a writer who intuitively understands Ma Aurelius’s Meditations Aurelius’s Meditations in in the way expounded above all in our era by Pierre Hadot, set of philosophical exercises written as part of an project of self-fashioning, ra than as part of a search for philosophical truth.
In place of the ecclesiastically mainstream Cambridge Platonists’ personal Go Sign up positing to vote on this noted above, Shaftesbury’s theology was unorthodox, thetitleexistence o
18
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impersonal God, whose presence was felt in the contemplation of the natural orde an extent, this theology was simply an extension of the growing interest in Ma Aurelius: we saw above both how this text provided an attractive version of Stoi which seemed less vulnerable to anti-Senecan objections, and also how limited major attempt had been — that of the Daciers — to present this presentatio Stoicism as compatible with Christian orthodoxy. A Deism which drew on S sources was a part of the Radical Enlightenment; and if Shaftesbury’s moral th was his contribution to the Moderate, and often academic Enlightenment, his theo put him on the side of the radicals. ra dicals. In particular, as we have seen, it was the deni punishment and reward in the hereafter which was regarded by critics of the Stoi the turn of the seventeenth century as being the constitutive element of their athe and Shaftesbury was definitely not interested in defending the existence of a punis God.
We should not overstate, however, the radicalism implicit in this Stoic-D position. For while it might seem that the appeal to the Stoics contains a radical moment which embraces the denial of providence, which was key to the charge Stoic atheism, the Deist discourse also contained a moderating moment, too. F moral theory which insisted on the separation of concerns about divine sanction questions of moral motivation in fact permitted the godliness of the Stoics t restated, this time as a counter to the supposed godlessness of Epicureans past present. Thus, in Anthony Collins’s work, we have an example of a radical who so to dissociate his own necessitarian position from Epicurean materialism, preferrin adopt a Stoic label in his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty of 1 Israel has drawn attention to Collins’s insistence that his argument be understoo descending from the Stoics rather than the Epicureans, for (he maintained) not were the Epicureans on the side of the libertarians in this controversy but their “ab principles” could not be used to ground anything at all. 22 The key issue in this se of his argument in fact turned on a question of religiosity: Collins distanced him from the “Epicurean “Epicurean Atheists, Atheists , who were the most popular and most numerous se Signasserters up to vote on title the Atheists the Atheists of of antiquity”, as well as being “the great ofthis Liberty” Liberty ” in ord useful Useful Not identify his argument with that of “the Stoicks, Stoicks, who were the most popular and numerous sect among the religionaries of antiquity” and “the greater asserters of and necessity”.23
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severed, for “[T]he greatest degree of scepticism [concerning virtue’s promoting own good] which he thought possible will still leave men under the strictest m obligations.” 25 On Butler’s account, therefore, both self-love and benevolence desires for one’s own or others’ happiness, but, in Darwall’s words, “neither invo any conception of its own deliberative authority”, authority”, which is what, Butler arg “autonomous agency requires and the principle of reflection or conscience provide
Butler therefore developed two separate strands of theoretical argument to pro the account of the authority of conscience which he considered to be lackin Shaftesburean ethics, and it is noteworthy that both of these drew substantially on S ethical resources. The first set of arguments worked to develop a naturalistic e with a strong functional bent to them. His famous watch analogy was deploye suggest that “our nature, i.e. constitution, is adapted to virtue”, as a watch’s natur adapted to measure time”. As Long notes, the reference which follows to “the an moralists”, who had argued that injustice and pain were contrary to nature and “inward feeling” or “inward perceptions” were required to establish a sense of and make possible self-government, is to the Stoics — and the references to Epict Marcus Aurelius and Cicero which recur throughout the Sermons Sermons strengthen 27 identification.
Long in particular emphasises Butler’s use of the teleological argument abou human constitution presented in Book III of Cicero’s De Cicero’s De Finibus when Finibus when he was fles out his account of the ways in which self-love and benevolence, properly underst do not come into conflict with one another at all, but are mutually complementary: Butler and the Stoics, then, agree to the following theses: 1. Nature, with respect to human beings, is a term that has multiple reference. It is natural for us to seek to fulfil those appetites that are conducive to the material well-being of ourselves and our fellow human beings. But “following nature”, as a moral principle, refers to our uniquely Sign up vote on thisactions, title human capacity to reflect on our thoughts ortopossible to Useful Not useful approve or disapprove of them as morally appropriate, and to treat conformity to this faculty as our sovereign good and virtue. 2. There is no basis in our given nature for any necessary conflict between
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Stoics’ own theorisation of the development of natural affection than anything we hitherto encountered in either the natural rights or the Augustinian traditions.
In addition to this portion of Stoic theorising, Butler also supplied a Stoic argument for the authority of conscience. As Darwall puts it, Butler “holds tha authority of conscience is a condition of the very possibility of an agent’s ha reasons to act at all, since only a being who has the capacity for maintaining a regulated constitutional order can have reasons for acting, and this capacity depend the agent’s taking her conscience to be authoritative”. 29 Butler’s concept of consci was clearly Epictetan in its origin, given the latter’s interest in the “approving disapproving faculty” which is so important in Butler’s presentation.
Butler was no thoroughgoing Stoic. He was working to modify an inherited m discourse rooted in the Lockean account of the passions, which (like Shaftes before him) he broadly accepted, far more than he was trying to replace that disco with a full-blooded return to Stoic ethics. But in both of his most distinctive line argument, we can discern a careful, measured reworking of significant Stoic argum which highlight the extent to which the Stoic problematic could appeal to and reso within this particular branch of Enlightenment moral theory. Butler’s is also, importantly, a decidedly post-Augustinian moment in the history of moral psychol he staked out his position with respect to the French debates in the Preface to Sermons, Sermons, advertising the eleventh sermon on the subject of self-love, wi straightforward attack on the Augustinian tradition: There is a strange affectation in many people of explaining away all particular affections, aff ections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continued exercise of self-love. Hence arises that surprising confusion and perplexity in the Epicureans of old, Hobbes, the author of Reflexions, Sentences, et Maximes Morales, Morales , and this whole set of 30 writers... Sign up to vote on this title
useful Useful Notby This English tradition of moral theory was never dominated the categorie Augustinian ethics in the way that the French discourse had been: Cudworth’s e struck a somewhat Pelagian chord, given its insistence on the reality of free will an
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philosophy on the Continent. 31 One paradoxical result of this process was that the striking presentation of the Jansenist moral psychology of self-love in the eighte century came in a thoroughly secular guise, in the (im)moral philosophy of Bernar Mandeville (and, later, in the pages of Adam Smith). 32 Elizabeth Carter’s Epictetus
One signpost of the extent to which the English discourse surrounding Stoi had emancipated itself from the theological anxieties of the previous century is vi in the story of Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) and her 1758 English translation o extant works of Epictetus, the Discourses as Discourses as well as the Encheiridion. Encheiridion.33 Carter w friend of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury and himself a schoolfriend theological ally in church politics of Butler. One of Carter’s correspondents note her edition: Many people would study Mrs. Carter’s translation who would scorn to look in a Bible; fine gentlemen would read it because it was new; fine ladies because it was Mrs. Carter’s; critics because it was a translation out of the Greek; and Shaftesburian heathen because Epictetus was an honour to heathenism and an indicator of the beauty of virtue.34
In the Preface to her edition, Carter presented an overview of Epictetan Stoicism. saw that there was far more to the Discourses than Discourses than a collection of edifying hom and anecdotes, and that the teaching rested upon a distinctive philosophical sys The bulk of the Preface, therefore, was given over to a lucid and accurate outline o major technical vocabulary and conceptual structures of Epictetan Stoicism witho knowledge of which, it was suggested, the Discourses the Discourses would would not make much sense
Carter found much to criticise in Stoicism, especially its logic, which, Sign up to vote ontothis suggested, contained “tedious and perplexed arguments” taken “atitle trifling degr
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subtilty”. Stoic theology was “strangely perplexed and absurd”, and its deviations Christian teaching, such as the acceptance of suicide, were denounced not mere being against Christian morality but also as bad Stoicism, for “It is remarkable, th Sect of Philosophers ever so dogmatically prescribed, or so frequently comm Suicide, as those very Stoics, who taught that the Pains and Sufferings, which strove to end by this Act of Rebellion against the Decrees of Providence, wer Evils”. On the other hand, the Stoics’ piety towards a single God was commende was their belief in providence and rejection of Epicurean chance: they possessed ab all, “excellent rules of self-government” and “of social behaviour”, and they ha noble reliance on the aid and protection of heaven”. These are familiar enough ver on Roman Stoicism which had been restated in every generation treated in dissertation; what is significant here is that it is the systematic element of Epic Stoicism which was being emphasised, in a best-selling work of the eighteenth cen (for Carter’s Epictetus earned Epictetus earned her £1,000 and enabled her to buy a London prope In common with Pascal in the previous century, but still working with the teno eighteenth-century eclecticism, Carter considered that the individual conclusion Stoic moralists might be endorsed, but that to endorse a conclusion was not necess to endorse the philosophy that generated it. Also striking in Carter’s presentation i way in which praise and blame is meted out in a not at all urgent manner. Stoicis here discussed not as a philosophy which we might be thinking about embracin toto, toto, as a “live option” by which to live. Carter was neither interested in patchin the deficiencies she detected in the Stoic edifice, nor in condemning Stoicism as a of Spinozism before its time. A great deal of distance stands between this Preface the heated debates of the previous century, to say the least.
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II: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: With and Against Stoicism and Augustinianism Yet if Rousseau’s philosophy proved vastly more attractive and influential, and was deeper and more original than that of most other philosophes invoked philosophes invoked by the Revolution, it is no more true of him than of such derivative (and, in some cases, hack) utopians, proto-socialists, and atheistic materialists as Morellet, Mably, Mirabeau, d’Holbach, Naigeon, Maréchal, Saint-Just, and Babeuf that the core radical ideas arose, or were principally shaped in the later eighteenth century. Nor, any more than the others, does Rousseau represent a basically new set of concepts and approaches. On the contrary, any proper appreciation of Rousseau’s role and greatness has to concede that his thought springs from a long, and almost obsessive dialogue with the radical ideas of the past ... ...
Jonathan Israel, Radical Israel, Radical Enlightenm “Epilogue: Rousseau, Radicalism, Revolut p.718. [Emphasis ad
It is well established that the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau significantly shaped by his critical engagement with themes and arguments from Stoic and Augustinian traditions. Although Alasdair MacIntyre could write in 1 that a “general blindness to the importance of the continuing influence Augustinianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” had meant that “book the highest importance about Rousseau tend with few exceptions to ignore importance of any any reference to Augustine”, 35 the situation is considerably cha today. MacIntyre’s words served to introduce Ann Hartle’s study of Rousse Confessions, Confessions, in which she systematically compared the autobiographical techni Rousseau employed with those in Augustine’s work of the same name; Patrick Ri subsequent volume on The General Will Before Rousseau showed inexhaus Sign uppolitical to vote on theory this title had first splendid detail how the central concept in Rousseau’s Not useful elaborated for use in the theological arguments of Useful the previous century by Fr Augustinian writers. These included the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (who may coined the term), the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche and the Calvinist Pierre Bay
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Jean Starobinski’s classic study, for example, 37 and Kennedy Roche attempted a on the subject;38 among the more recent important work on the subject are two articles by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.39
Given the tasks Rousseau set himself, an engagement with certain aspects of S and Augustinian philosophy was inevitable. On the one hand, as part of his proje improve upon the political science he had inherited from Grotius and Hob Rousseau was taking part in a discourse partially shaped by Stoicism, for it was S philosophy which had provided Grotius and his followers with the richest acco the natural inclination to self-preservation which they used as the basis for theories of natural rights. On the other hand, as part of his project to describe the m psychology of his contemporaries, Rousseau gave a prominent place to the patholo produced through amour-propre, amour-propre, or self-love, a concept which had hitherto been g most prominence with an Augustinian tradition that offered a powerful accoun humans’ prideful self-love as the fundamental vice that was responsible for actu existing human misery. ***
The seventeenth-century French Augustinians had not themselves been espec concerned with the question of the viability of a natural rights theory, but in seekin establish a set of sound “principles of political right” Jean-Jacques Rousseau in eighteenth century certainly was. For although Rousseau denounced the principl Grotius and his followers as false, 40 declared Grotius to be a “child in bad faith” i field of “the science of political right”, and denounced Hobbes for “bas[ing] himse sophisms”,41 he showed himself to be an exceptionally careful student of the na rights and related social contract traditions, and his own political theory present radical and sophisticated development of these traditions rather than a fundam alternative.42 Sign up to vote on this title
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obstruction (Chi Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction
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Given his reputation as the most effective Enlightenment critic of the clas Augustinian doctrine of original sin, we might therefore expect to find Rousseau embracing the dichotomies proposed by the seventeenth century Augustinians an take sides against them alongside the Stoics, the Pelagians and the modern na rights theorists. Yet this would be much too simple. For while Rousseau did in reject the central planks of Augustine’s theology of grace and original sin, his arguments retained deeply Augustinian elements with respect to both content structure, and it is in the way in which he synthesised and thereby transformed Stoic and Augustinian traditions that his philosophy is at its most creative and origi
On matters concerning grace, Rousseau opposed the Augustinian claims o Jansenists. Where Augustine had argued that divine grace was not and could nev merited by human action but was instead distributed across the human species in a that could only seem arbitrary and mysterious to human intelligence, Rous presented a radically different doctrine. It was most dramatically expressed in in the sixth part of the epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise in which Julie’s St. Preux repudiates, piece by piece, Augustine’s teachings on grace and free will: In creating man he [= God] endowed him with all the faculties needed for the accomplishment of what he required of him, and when we ask him for the power to do good, we ask him for nothing he has not already given us. He has given us reason to discern what is good, conscience to love it, and freedom to choose it. It is in these sublime gifts that divine grace consists, and since we all have received them, we are all accountable for them. ... I do not therefore believe that after having provided in every way for man’s needs, God grants to the one and not to the other exceptional assistance, of which he who abuses the assistance common to all is unworthy, and of which he who makes good use of it has no need. This respect of persons is prejudicial to divine justice. 43 Sign up to vote on this title
useful turned on Useful The arguments between the Jansenists and their opponents hadNotalways precise interpretation of a small number of verses in the letters of St. Paul, Preux breaks with this method of conducting theological dispute by rejecting
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me thus? That is all very well if the potter demands nothing more of the vessel than services he has made it capable of rendering; but if he rebuked the vessel for not being suited to a use for which he had not made it, would the vessel be wrong to say to him, why didst thou make me thus?44
It was these passages that led Rousseau to his celebrated exchange with the off French censor Malesherbes, who rightly declared this to be “A most daring doctrin grace, a revolt against the authority of holy scripture, an ad hominem argument hominem argument ag St. Paul” and, therefore, “more than is needed to require... excision”. 45 Rouss response, that “If St. Preux wants to be a heretic concerning grace, that is business...”, was disingenuous insofar as there were no strong reasons r easons for thinking the opinions put into the mouth of St. Preux were not the author’s own. When it c to the privileged position of Biblical texts in theological argument, Rousseau dro this insistence on the separation of author and his fictitious character: As for what M. de Malesherbes calls revolt against the authority of Scripture, I call it submission to the authority of God and of reason, which must take precedence over the Bible’s, and serves as its foundation: and as for St. Paul, if he does not admit of counterargumentation, he ought not to argue himself, or at least he should do it better.46
Yet even as he asserted this heterodox theology Rousseau was not wholly abando Augustine, but rather marking a retreat from the older Augustine’s obsession grace to the younger Augustine’s account of the nature of the free will, which had given its definitive incarnation in the dialogue On the Free Choice of the W section of which was examined above. For where this “young” Augustine, Stoi (especially in its presentation by Epictetus) and Rousseau most strikingly conve with intimations, furthermore, of the Kantian revolution in philosophy to come up genuinely to vote on thisunqualified title their shared belief that a rightly-directed will is theSign only hu Useful love Not good. Augustine’s bona voluntas, voluntas , directed to theproper ofuseful God; the Epic hegemonikon, hegemonikon, which learns to distinguish between that which is and that which i
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truly under our control; and Rousseau’s volonté générale, générale, whereby the indiv citizen enjoys freedom by living in accordance with the shared civic will of political community. In each case the right kind of will is the one which transcend narrow horizons of the self-centered agent to find fulfillment through aligning with something of universal, infinite, or general value.
Augustine ascribed significant enough powers to the rightly-directed fr choosing will in On the Free Choice of the Will that his Pelagian opponents quote own words back at him during their long-running polemic many years later. In Retractationes, Retractationes, compiled at the end of his life, Augustine insisted not that the account was wrong, but that it was incomplete: 47 In these and similar statements of mine, because there was no mention of the grace of God which was not the subject under discussion at the time, the Pelagians think or may think that we held their opinion. But they are mistaken in thinking this. For it is precisely the will by which one sins and lives rightly, a subject we discussed here. Unless this will, then, is freed by the grace of God from the servitude by which it has been made - ‘a servant of sin’ - and unless it is aided to overcome its vices, mortal men cannot ca nnot live rightly and devoutly.
One of Augustine’s main worries in his dispute with the Pelagians was that seemed to deny the Fallen state of humankind, making nonsense of the Chu claims about the post-lapsarian need for redemption through Christ. And if the e Augustine’s account of the will is not coupled with his much later account of grac suggested, we may be very close indeed to Pelagianism.
As we have seen, Rousseau did indeed combine a strong account of the freedo the will with a denial of Augustinian grace, but he joined to this “Pelag combination a secular narrative of Fall which provided a functional equivalent fo Signin upthe to vote on this title Augustinian account of original sin which is lacking Pelagian schema. Lik Useful usefulemergence Augustinian alternative, Rousseau’s conjectural history ofNotthe entrenchment of inequality in human society, presented in the Discourse the Discourse on the Or of Inequality, Inequality, sought to explain how humankind passed from an original sta
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Book XIV of the City of God , presented an account of human life in its pre-laps state, told a story of how that state came to be abandoned, and in so doing ta something about the contours of any possible redemption. Second, the sto presented was one in which self-reinforcing patterns of behaviour were attendant the original corruption which served to mire humankind ever deeper in its probl foreclosing any non-radical solution to the problem presented by the Fall. T Rousseau’s narrative agreed with Augustine’s in having as its pivot a distin account of the nature and malign consequences of self-love, or, to use the w extensively discussed by the seventeenth-century French Augustinians, of propre. propre.
According to Rousseau’s narration, primitive humans originally lived prepolitical, presocial state of nature in which “the produce of the earth furnished with all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it”. But as these primitives b to encounter difficulties - whether they took the form of other animals, variable “ climates and seasons” - and opportunities, such as the chance discovery of fire example, then the way these different beings and phenomena impinged on him and on each other must naturally have engendered in man’s mind the awareness of certain relationships... which we denote by the terms great, small, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and the like... 49
They began to understand the ways in which they are superior to animals - they k how to catch them, for example - and they began to feel a certain pride. 50 As societies formed and humans interacted one with another, and did things together, learned how to make comparisons, and to form judgments about what is better worse, and to acquire preferences. This was very bad, for as “each one bega consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn... thus a value became attach public esteem”. A reflexive characteristic entered human thinking for the first Signthought up to vote themselves on this title they came to think more highly of themselves if they to be hi Usefulfirst Not useful step thought of by others, and this, says Rousseau, was“the towards inequa 51 and at the same time towards vice”. Comparative judgments, a sense of superio the desire for the approval of others: all are aspects of amour-propre, amour-propre, the self
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of the Augustinian critique, especially in its strict Jansenist interpretation, as we seen, is that self-love is always and everywhere bad, that the principle of self-love the natural instinct towards self-preservation could not serve as an adequate founda of a natural rights theory. And it is this thought that brings us to the famous distinc between self-love as amour-propre amour-propre and self-love as amour de soi in Rouss thought, and also brings us back to Stoicism. In the Preface to the Second Discourse, Rousseau wrote: [C]ontemplating the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles, prior to reason, one of them [self-love as amour de soi] soi ] deeply interesting us in our own welfare and preservation, and the other [pity, pitié ] exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain or death. 52
The famous distinction between self-love as amour de soi and as amour-pr appears in other books by Rousseau, notably Émile, Émile, and in important res Rousseau’s amour de soi closely soi closely resembles Stoic oikeiosis. oikeiosis. For the Stoics as well a Rousseau, for example, this principle had more content than merely being a mecha instinct towards bodily self-preservation. Stoic oikeiosis helps to explain the care parents have for children and the affection that the children have for them Rousseau’s Emile, Emile, also, we are told that “we have to love ourselves in order to pres ourselves”, and that it therefore “follows from the same sentiment that we love preserves us. Every child is attached to his nurse”. 53 Amour de soi is soi is presented as 54 source of all our passions”, but Rousseau quickly qualifies this to note that wher “gentle and affectionate passions are born of amour de soi... soi... the hateful and iras passions are born of amour-propre”, amour-propre”, reminding us of the distinction the Stoics between the harmful passions and the benign eupatheiai which eupatheiai which would come to re 55 them. (Rousseau often use the word “sentiment” to refer to the affectionate Sign up to vote on thisfor title example, desirable passions). The fit is not perfect: the Stoics would not, Not useful judgmen Useful considered oikeiosis oikeiosis a principle “prior to reason”, but oneinvolving mental assent, however instinctive it might seem to be.
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argument, that the baneful effects of self-love can serve as an indictment of a na rights theory resting upon a principle of self-preservation. What the Fr Augustinians found to condemn in self-love only speaks to the domain of propre, propre, and this amour-propre, amour-propre, we might say, doesn’t go all the way down. It is most fundamental principle of post-lapsarian human nature, in the way that Augustinians alleged. Oikeiosis Oikeiosis - or, here, amour de soi soi - can still serve perfectly as the foundation of a natural rights philosophy, as well as serving as the ground Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of humankind.
There is an obvious objection to this line of argument. In the passage immedi following the one cited above from the Preface to the Discourse on Inequ Rousseau remarks that It is from the agreement and combination which the understanding is in a position to establish between these two principles [ amour de soi and pitié ] without it being necessary to introduce that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right appear to me to be derived. 56
At first glance, it looks as if Rousseau is here repudiating the Stoic foundatio natural rights theory altogether. Grotius’s approving discussion of Cicero sociabilitas formed sociabilitas formed a part of the demonstration that there was a significant appe Stoic philosophy in the argument for natural rights. Yet what is going on in passage is that Rousseau is denying a principle of the natural sociability of beings that could be used to defend the naturalness of political society. political society. Here, Rous follows Hobbes, whose contract theory is premissed upon the artificiality of poli community, which has to be a radical construction of human will. In denying principle of human sociability in the way that he does, Rousseau is not abando Stoic principles: his account of amour de soi soi might generate certain kinds of o regarding activity, as it does in Emile, Emile, but it cannot generate the thicker accou 57 human sociability which Hobbes’s natural lawyer critics were keen to defend. Sign up to vote on this title
Useful Not usefulabandoning In positively valuing some form of self-love, was Rousseau Augustinian tradition decisively? It is not clear that he is, for the French Augustin of the seventeenth century often deployed more rigid distinctions than those w
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negatively-valued concept of amour-propre. amour-propre.58 Rousseau’s whole argument is basi secular, and it is this feature of his argument which most clearly marks a break wit Augustinian tradition, not his positive valorisation of self-love as amour de soi. soi .
It seems also that Rousseau developed this theory in opposition to an altern Augustinian social theory, which was presented by the Jansenist Pierre Nicole, w argument we have touched upon from time to time above. A natural question to po strict Augustinians is to ask how human society is able to function in any toler well-ordered way if humanity is as Fallen as they maintain. Nicole had famo argued that although self-love - amour-propre amour-propre - was indeed depraved, the ties of interest that bound one person to another worked to produce a kind of s cohesion. 59 These ties were generated by a disreputable cupidity, not by a wo charity, to be sure, but the resulting society could look very very similar to what a so might look like, if all its inhabitants were to have been motivated by true chari love of God and neighbour. On this account, it is when we begin interacting with o people, generating ties of interdependency through the exchange of goods and serv adjusting our behaviour to fit the expectations of others, that the depraved effec self-love begin to be redeemed, in an earthly register, at least. Human action rem motivated by a sinful self-love, and is to that extent deplorable, but a trick of di providence brings about a certain kind of social harmony. har mony.60 Rousseau’s account i Discourse on Inequality thus Inequality thus reverses Nicole’s at a crucial moment. While human substantially independent of one another, living in the state of nature, with their de soi guarding soi guarding over their self-preservation, amour-propre is barely existent and p no particular problem. But when early societies begin to develop, the interac among people provoke and inflame amour-propre, amour-propre, and it is these repeated s interactions which quickly translate into relations of dependency, inequality oppression. For Nicole it is social existence that corrects some of the bad effec self-love; for Rousseau it is the social existence that produces these bad effects in first place, perverting natural amour de soi into soi into the potentially awful amour-propre
Sign up to vote on The problem facing Rousseau’s political philosophy, then, isthis thattitleof discoveri Useful minimising Not useful the influen way in which amour de soi can soi can be preserved and nurtured, amour-propre as amour-propre as much as is possible, disciplining it and channeling it into produ outlets. This problem is structurally analogous to the problem facing Stoic philoso
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most suitable means of attaining their goal, Rousseau turns to democratic pol instead.
The democratic citizen republic of The Social Contract describes the institu within which a people may live together without inflaming their amour-propre rough economic equality of citizens prevents the development of hierarchies an certain forms of dependence and oppression. So does the transparency of majoritarian political process, which insists upon the equal status of all citiz Rousseau attacks oratory or partial associations - interest groups, factions and part both of which are ways for individuals and groups to acquire more significance in i common life than they deserve to possess. A citizen’s life under the general will disciplined life, as is the life of the Stoics’ sage, lived in accordance with the univ law of the cosmos, but in both cases the discipline provides, paradoxically enough best chance of being able to live in accordance with nature, or of living in free Stoicism brings about the moral transformation of an individual; Rousseau’s po deals with the collective moral transformation through politics of an entire peop with the role of the Stoic philosopher being played from time to time either by Legislator, “beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them” by the Tutor, whose pupil tells him at the end of Emile that Emile that he has chosen ”to re what you have made me and voluntarily to add no other chain to the one with w nature and the laws burden me”. 63 Just as Augustine himself once found S philosophical vocabulary helpful for describing the condition of Unfallen Rousseau’s Stoic democracy aims to preserve an entire people in a certain kin Unfallen condition, safe from the miseries induced by too much unrestrained propre. propre. It’s not too much, perhaps, to call Rousseau’s political theory a striki original piece of secular Augustinian Stoicism.
Although the historical record itself is mixed on this point, as we saw in Preface above, the Roman Stoics acquired for themselves a reputation for being pi of republican virtue, and enemies to those who sought or occupied the Imperial thr up to vote this title Priscus, This Stoic pantheon included Cato of Utica, MarcusSign Brutus, or on Helvidius Not useful Justus Lip Usefultheyopposed. steadfastly refused to submit to the dictators or tyrants and the early modern Neo-Stoics, by contrast, had been theorists of a central
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absolute monarchy; they opposed representative assemblies, and they denied pop sovereignty. Not the least part of Rousseau’s Stoic achievement is to have articula theory of a participatory republican politics, a theory that many people through ages had often felt was somehow implicit in the Stoics’ philosophy of freedom.
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Concluding Unscientific Postscript
This dissertation began with the Montagnards’ suicide in the Paris courtroo Year III; its historical narrative ends a little over thirty years earlier, with Rousse near simultaneous publication of Emile Emile and The Social Contract , the argumen which help to set the stage for the republican Stoicism of the radical French revolu after 1789. For if Lipsian Neo-Stoicism had provided an influential theorisatio what we might usefully call the national security state, state , a theory of politics give definitive presentation in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, one of Rousseau’s m achievements was to turn the social contract tradition he inherited inside recuperating the language and emphases of Stoic philosophy for an older repub tradition of the free the free republic which republic which looked back to Cicero and Machiavelli, but w Hobbes had decisively repudiated.
The free republic and the national security state are still the state forms w dominate the world of feasible political choices today, in the absurd world of Ashcroft, the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security; and Rousse reminder that freedom is a product of democratic discipline, rather than anything can be imposed by bureaucratic fiat resonates through the politics of the pre Rousseau reclaimed the language of Stoicism for radical democratic republican and that tradition is still the one best placed to hold onto it, if it chooses to do so.
Nor are the concerns of this thesis irrelevant to to the period bookended by the Fr Revolution on the one hand and President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” on other. For two distinctive and alternative Augustinian social theories were introd into the discussion of Rousseau, above. On the one hand, there was Pierre Nic argument, about the unintended consequences of self-love, which is more familiar in Adam Smith’s later version, where it became known as the Invisible Hand argum If everyone’s behaviour is motivated by narrow self-interest - the secular versio Sign up to votetend on this Augustinian self-love 1 - then the aggregate outcomes can still totitle the benefit o Useful useful would lea Nottheory including the poorest members of the society (who later political call “the least well off”). 2 As Smith secularises the Augustinian argument, interest enough, he also Stoicises it, too, for he was concerned with Stoic moral philoso
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is the basis of the rational choice theory that is still popular among political scien the Nicole-Smith argument was still retained right at the heart of the new econ science. On the other hand, there was Rousseau’s argument - also a form of se Augustinian Stoicism, as I’ve suggested - that human society is corrupted and div most severely by the results of precisely the kind of social and economic interac that are valued on the Nicole-Smith approach. In unequal societies where propre propre runs rampant, people are alienated from their authentic or natural se appearance and reality diverge. As Rousseau writes, it “became the interest of me appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally diffe things.” 3 On his account, furthermore, human society was divided into brutal entrenched class hierarchies: the poor are exploited by the rich, and the rich own property, but their title to this property is despicable, despicable, for it rests ultimately on crim the seizure and private appropriation of the common land. 4 In Rousseau’s pol theory, only a rather severe form of democratic action can bring an end to alienation and exploitation, holding open the possibility of a society in which the development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
I’ve just redescribed Rousseau’s ideas, of course, in the language of alienation exploitation, terms made familiar to us above all from the writings of Karl M Rousseau’s great successor in the tradition of European radical democracy and, lik predecessor, a stinging critic of the social division of labour and a thinker fie aware of the necessity for a far-reaching social equality as an essential condition liberty in modern societies. The occasional references to Rousseau in Marx’s wri exhibit a variety of attitudes: there is the famous sneer of the Critique of the G Programme: Programme: “In short, one could just as well have copied the whole of Roussea there is the approving quotation from the Discourse on Political Economy in Economy in the volume of Capital: Capital: ‘I will allow you’, says the capitalist [Marx’s replacement for Rousseau’s ‘rich man’], ‘to have the honour of serving me, on to vote on this title condition that, in return for the pains I takeSign inupcommanding you, you 6 Useful Not useful give me the little that remains to you.’
And there is his most persistent note, sounded both in the essay On the Je
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spirit and substance of the Second Discourse Discourse properly acknowledged, thoug 8 remained both deep and lifelong.
If this is a plausible sketch of the passage from Rousseau to Marx, then question of whether one is an apologist for liberal capitalism on the one hand sympathetic to the claims of radical socialism on the other, comes to turn in par which secularising and Stoicising transformation of the Augustinian problem original sin one comes to prefer. And if that is the case, to conclude, then the lega of the Stoic and Augustinian traditions are of critical importance not just for political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, but political and social theories of of the twenty-first.
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Epictetus. Les Epictetus. Les morales d'Epictete de Socrate de Plvtarqve et de Seneqve . Translate Desmarets de Saint Sorlin. Paris: Av Chasteav de Richeliev; De l'imprim d'Estienne Migon, 1653. Epictetus. All the works of Epictetus, which are now extant; consisting Discourses, preserved by Arrian, in four books, the Enchiridion, Enchiridion, and fragm Elizabeth Carter, trans. London, Printed by S. Richardson, 1758. Erskine, Andrew. The Hellenistic Stoa. Stoa . London: Duckworth, 1990. Evans, Robert C. Jonson, C. Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism . Wake NH: Longwood Academic, 1992. Farnham, F. Madame F. Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist Humanist . Monterey: Angel Press, 1976 Fitzgerald, Allan, and John C. Cavadini. Augustine Cavadini. Augustine through the Ages: an encyclop Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999. Fitzgibbons, Athol. Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue. Virtue . Ox Clarendon Press, 1995. Forman-Barzilai, Fonna. “Adam Smith as Globalization Theorist.” Critical Review no. 4 (2002): 391-419. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison . Translated by Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Frohman, Larry. “Neo-Stoicism and the Transition to Modernity in Wilhelm Dilt Philosophy of History.” Journal History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 2 (1995): 87. Gassendi, Pierre. Opera Omnia. Omnia. Lyons, 1658. Gataker, Thomas. Marci Thomas. Marci Antonini Imperatoris De Rebus Suis. Suis . 2nd ed. London: Ed Millington, 1697. Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: an intellectual biography. biography . Oxford: Clarendon P 1995. Gaussen, Alice C. C. A woman of wit and wisdom; a memoir of Elizabeth London: Smith, Elder & co., 1906. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: an interpretation . 2 vols. London: Weidenfe Nicolson, 1967-70. Sign up to voteYork: on this title Gilbert, Felix, ed. The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze . New Oxford Unive Useful Not useful Press, 1975. Goodman, Anthony, and Angus MacKay, eds. The Impact of Humanism on We Europe. Europe. London: Longman, 1990.
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———. The Rights of War and Peace. Peace . London: Printed for W. Innys and R. Manb and P. Knapton, et al., 1738. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrate Foucault . Translated by Arnold Davidson. Oxford: Blackwells, 1995. ———. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius . Translate Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Halsted, David G. Poetry and politics in the Silesian Baroque: neo-Stoicism in work of Christophorus Colerus and his circle . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1 Hartle, Ann. The Modern Self in Rousseau's Confessions: a reply to St. Augus Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. 1983. Hobbes, Thomas. Of libertie and necessity. A treatise, wherein all controv concerning predestination, election, free-will, grace, merits, reprobation, is fully decided and cleared, in answer to atreatise written by the Bisho London-Derry, on the same subject : London, Printed by W.B. fo Eaglesfield, 1654. ———. Thomas White's De Mundo Examined . Translated by Harold Whitmore Jo London: Bradford University Press, 1976. ———. Leviathan ———. Leviathan.. Richard Tuck, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19 Hobbes, Thomas, and John Bramhall. An answer to a book published Bramhall ... called, The Catching of the Leviathan. Together with an histo narration concerning heresie, and the punishment thereof , thereof , Pt. 2 of his Tr London, Crooke, 1682. Hochstrasser, T. J. Natural Law Theories in the early Enlightenment . Cambr Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hume, David. Essays Moral, Political and Literary . Eugene F. Miller ed. Indianap Liberty Classics, 1987. Hundert, E. J. The Enlightenment's Fable. Fable . Cambridge: Cambridge University P 1994. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Moder 1650-1750. 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. to vote onNijhoff, this title 1972. James, E. D. Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and humanist . humanist .Sign TheupHague: Useful French Not useful ———. “Scepticism and fideism in Bayle’s Dictionnaire.” Studies XVI, Studies XVI, (1962). James, Susan. Passion and Action: the emotions in seventeenth-century philoso
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Klein, Lawrence E. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness . Cambridge: Camb University Press, 1994. Kolakowski, Leszek. God Owes Us Nothing. Nothing . Chicago: University of Chicago P 1995. Kors, Adam Charles, and Paul J. Korshin, eds. Anticipations of the Enlightenm Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Krailsheimer, A. J. Studies in Self-Interest: from Descartes to La Bruyère . Ox Clarendon Press, 1962. Kraye, Jill. “'Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus': Marcus Aurelius and his Medita from Xylander to Diderot.” In Humanism and Early Modern Philoso edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone. London: Routledge, 2000. Kraye, Jill, and M.W.F. Stone, eds. Humanism eds. Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. Philosophy . Lon Routledge, 2000. Lagrée, Jacqueline. “La critique du stoïcisme dans le Dictionnaire Dictionnaire de Bayle.” I l'Humanisme aux Lumières, Bayle et le protestantisme: Melanges en l'hon d'Elisabeth Labrousse, Labrousse , edited by Michelle Magdelaine, Maria-Cristina Pi Ruth Whelan and Antony McKenna, 581-93. Oxford: Voltaire Founda 1996. Le Grand, Anthony. Man Anthony. Man without Passion. Passion. London: C. Harper and J. Amery, 1675 Le Grand, Antoine. The Entire Body of Philosophy. Philosophy . London: Samuel Roycroft, 169 Leibniz, G. W., and ed. Gaston Grua. Textes inédits. inédits . Presses Universitaires de Fra Paris, 1948. Leigh, R.A. Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: edition crit Genève: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1965-1995. Lennon, Thomas M. “The Contagious Communication of Strong Imaginations: Hi Modernity, and Scepticism in the Philosophy of Malebranche.” In The Ri Modern Philosophy, Philosophy, edited by Tom Sorrell, 197-211. Oxford: Clarendon P 1993. Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: the theory of the passions 1585-1649 . Ox Clarendon Press, 1964. Sign uplibri vote on this title Lipsius, Justus. Manuductionis Justus. Manuductionis ad stoicam stoicam philosophiam lto ibri tres . Antwerp, 1604. Useful Not useful 1604. ———. Physiologiae Stoicorvm Libri tres . Antwerp, ———. Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine . Translated by William J London: Printed by Richard Field for William Ponsonby, 1594.
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O'Donovan, Oliver. The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine. Augustine . New Haven: University Press, 1980. O’Hagan, Timothy. Rousseau Timothy. Rousseau.. London: Routledge, 1999. Oestreich, Gerhard. Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates . Berlin: Dunck Humblot, 1969. ———. Neostoicism ———. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. State . Cambridge: Cambridge Unive Press, 1982. Outram, Dorinda. The Body and the French Revolution: sex, class and political cu New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 1989. Parrish, John Michael. “From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand: Paradoxes of Pol Ethics.” Ph.D., Harvard University, 2002. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Pensées. Translated by Léon Brunschvicg. Paris: Éditions Hach 1976. ———. Pensées and other writings. writings . Translated by Honor Levi. Oxford: Ox University Press, 1995. Pasquino, Pasquale. “Michel Foucault (1929-84): the will to knowledge.” Econ and Society 15, Society 15, no. 1 (1986): 97-101. Pocock, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion. Religion . 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge Unive Press, 1999. Popkin, Richard. The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle . Oxford: Ox University Press, 2003. Pugh, Anthony R. The Composition of Pascal's Apologia . Toronto: Universit Toronto Press, 1984. Rand, Benjamin, ed. The life, unpublished letters and Philosophical Regime Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury Shaftesbury.. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1900. Riley, Patrick. The General Will before Rousseau: the transformation of the divine the civic. civic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau . Cambridge: Camb University Press, 2001. Roche, Kennedy F. Rousseau: F. Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic Romantic.. London: Methuen, 1974. Sign up7e to vote on this title Rodis-Lewis, G. “L'anti-stoïcisme de Malebranche.” Congres de l'Associ Useful Not useful Guillame Budé, Aix-en-Provence, 1963 (1964): 1963 (1964): 302-4. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud.” Journ the History of Philosophy 34, Philosophy 34, no. 3 (1996): 335-56.
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Rowe, Christopher, and Malcolm Schofield, eds. The Cambridge History of Greek Roman Political Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Santinello, Giovanni, ed. Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker . Vol. 2, Storia delle s generali della filosofia. filosofia . Brescia: La Scuola, 1979. ———, ed. Models ed. Models of the History of Philosophy Philosophy.. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer, 1993 Saunders, Jason Lewis. Justus Lewis. Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955. Schneewind, J. B. The Invention of Autonomy. Autonomy . Cambridge: Cambridge Unive Press, 1998. ———, ed. Moral ed. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant . 2 vols. Cambridge: Camb University Press, 1990. Schofield, Malcolm. The Stoic idea of the city. city . Second ed. Chicago: Universi Chicago Press, 1999. Senault, Jean-François. The Christian Man: or, The reparation of nature by gr London: Printed for M.M. G. Bedell, and T.C., 1650. ———. De ———. De l'Usage des Passions. Passions. Paris, 1641. ———. L'Homme ———. L'Homme chrestien, ou la reparation reparation de la nature par la grace grace . Paris, 164 ———. L'Homme criminel, ou la corruption de la nature par le péché, selon sentimens de S. Augustin. Paris: Augustin. Paris: Jean Camus and Pierre Le Petit, 1644. ———. Man ———. Man become Guilty, or, The corrruption of nature by sinne, according Augustines sense. sense . Translated by Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth. Lon Printed for William Leake, 1650. ———. The Use of Passions. Passions . Translated by Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth. Lon Printed for J.L. and Humphrey Moseley ..., 1649. Sher, Richard B. Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment . Enlightenment . Edinb Edinburgh University Press, 1985. Shifflett, Andrew Eric. Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton: war peace reconciled . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Shklar, Judith N. “Book Review: Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic.” American Histo Review 81, Review 81, no. 1 (1976): 156-7. Sign up to vote on e this title Simonutti, Luisa, ed. Dal necessario al possibile: determinismo libertà nel pen Useful 2001. Not useful anglo-olandese del XVII secolo. secolo . Milan: F. Angeli, Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought . Thought . 2 vols. Cambr Cambridge University Press, 1978.
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Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction. obstruction . Chic University of Chicago Press, 1988. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Letters Pierre. Letters to Léontine Zanta. Zanta. London: Collins, 1969. Thom, Martin. Republics, Martin. Republics, Nations and Tribes. Tribes . London: Verso, 1995. Thomasius, Jacob. Exercitatio de Stoica mundi exustione: cui accesserunt argum varii, sed inprimis ad historiam Stoicae philosophiae facientes, dissertati XXI . Lipsiae: Sumptibus haeredum Friderici Lanckisii, 1676. Tuck, Richard. Hobbes Richard. Hobbes.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. “The Modern Theory of Natural Law.” In The Languages of Political Th in Early Modern Europe, Europe , edited by Anthony Pagden. Cambridge: Camb University Press, 1987. ———. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development . Development . Cambr Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651. 1572-1651 . Cambridge: Cambridge Unive Press, 1993. ———. The Rights of War and Peace: political thought and the international o from Grotius to Kant . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tully, James, ed. Meaning ed. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics . Cambr Polity Press, 1988. Van Gelderen, Martin. The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt . Cambr Cambridge University Press, 1992. Verbeke, Gérard. “Augustin et le stoïcisme.” Recherches augustiniennes, augustiniennes , no. 1 (1 67-89. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Vico . Translated by Bergin Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Viroli, Maurizio. For Love of Country. Country . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Vivenza, Gloria. Adam Gloria. Adam Smith and the Classics Classics.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 Wade, Ira O. The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment . Enlightenment . Princ Princeton University Press, 1971. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Translated by Ta Sign up to vote on this title Parsons. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930. Useful of Not useful from the Reason Wood, Neal. Reflections on Political Theory: AVoice Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Zanta, Léontine. La Léontine. La renaissance du stoïcisme stoïcisme au XVIe siècle. siècle . Paris, 1914.
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