Synopsis
The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history.
The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
William J. Bouwsma (1924-2004) was Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (California, 1968) and John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (1988).
From the Back Cover
"Together the articles form a substantial book which traces the antecedents, characteristics and impact of Renaissance thought and action 'beyond all schools,' with that combination of scholarly precision and personal style which has made Bouwsma one of the most highly respected historians on this continent."―Heiko A. Oberman, University of Arizona
From the Inside Flap
"Together the articles form a substantial book which traces the antecedents, characteristics and impact of Renaissance thought and action 'beyond all schools,' with that combination of scholarly precision and personal style which has made Bouwsma one of the most highly respected historians on this continent." Heiko A. Oberman, University of Arizona
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Usable Past
Essays in European Cultural HistoryBy William James BouwsmaUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1990 William James BouwsmaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520069909
1
The Two Faces of Humanism
Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought
Like a number of other essays in this volume, this piece was distilled from an otherwise unsuccessful—because excessively ambitious—effort to write a general book about the place of the Renaissance and Reformation in the context of the whole of Western culture. I regard this essay, however, as my most successful description of what seem to me that culture's perennial dichotomies. The essay also reflects my reliance on ideal types, although this strategy was not always recognized by reviewers. The essay was published in a Festschrift for Paul Oskar Kristeller, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, entitled Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, ed. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 3–60. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher .
Recent emphasis, stemming primarily from the work of P. O. Kristeller, on the central importance of rhetoric for Renaissance humanism, has enabled us to understand the underlying unity of a singularly complex movement; and it has proved singularly fruitful for Renaissance scholarship. At the same time, since this approach depends on the identification of a kind of lowest common denominator for humanism, it may also have the unintended effect of reducing our perception of its rich variety and thus of limiting our grasp of its historical significance. I should like, accordingly, to begin with Kristeller's fundamental insight, but then to suggest that rhetoric, for reasons closely connected with the circumstances under which the rhetorical tradition was appropriated in the age of the Renaissance, was also the vehicle of a set of basic intellectual conflicts crucial to the development of European culture in theearly modern period. For there were divisions within Renaissance humanism which, since they were perennial, seem hardly incidental to the movement and which can perhaps be explained more persuasively than by the familiar suggestion that, as "mere rhetoricians," humanists felt comfortable in invoking any set of ideas that seemed immediately useful for their purposes, a notion that is in any case psychologically not altogether persuasive. The humanists were not inclined, I think, to invoke simply any set of ideas but tended rather to be divided by a fairly constant set of issues.
From this point of view humanism was a single movement in much the sense that a battlefield is a definable piece of ground. The humanists, to be sure, were often engaged in a conscious struggle with the schoolmen, but this was an external conflict in which the opposing sides were more or less clearly separated. But the struggle within humanism which I shall discuss here, though related to that external struggle, was subtler, more confused, and more difficult, though possibly of greater significance for the future of European culture. Often scarcely recognized by the humanists themselves, more frequently latent than overt for even the most acutely self-conscious among them, and never fully resolved, this internal struggles also helps to explain the adaptability of Renaissance humanism to changing needs, and hence its singular durability.
The two ideological poles between which Renaissance humanism oscillated may be roughly labeled "Stoicism" and "Augustinianism." Both terms present great difficulties, and neither, as an impulse in Renaissance intellectual culture, is yet susceptible to authoritative treatment. I will employ them here in a rather general sense, to designate antithetical visions of human existence, though both are rooted in concrete movements of thought that invite more precise analysis. But any effort to deal with the ideological significance of Renaissance humanism must now grapple with their confrontation.
I. Stoicism and Augustinianism: The Ancient Heritage
It seems curious that historians have been so slow, until quite recently, to recognize the importance of the opposition between these impulses in humanist thought.1 One reason for this, perhaps, has been the persistent notion that Renaissance culture was centrally preoccupied with the recovery of an authentic classicism; and the classical world of thought has been ultimately brought into focus through the issues raised by ancient philosophy. Thus it has been assumed that the two greatestphilosophers of classical antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, must represent, however distantly, the essential options available to the thinkers of the Renaissance. This approach to the Renaissance problem may still be encountered in the familiar notion of a medieval and Aristotelian scholasticism confronted by a Platonic humanism.
Whether because or in spite of its neatness, almost everything in this formula is misleading, if not wrong. In the first place it is wrong in fact. Medieval philosophy, even in the thirteenth century, was by no means entirely Aristotelian, and on the other hand the culture of Renaissance humanism probably owed at least as much to Aristotle as to Plato. But it is equally wrong in principle, for it seeks to comprehend the eclectic and non-systematic culture of the Renaissance in overtly systematic terms. It seems to be based on the quaint but durable notion that every man must, in his deepest instincts, be either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. In fact the conflict between Plato and Aristotle is, for the understanding of the Renaissance, a false scent, especially if we are primarily concerned with the tensions within humanism. Neither Plato nor Aristotle was closely connected with the rhetorical tradition, for whose ancient sources we must look instead to the Sophists and the less overtly philosophical pronouncements of the Latin orators. Furthermore, though Renaissance thinkers (including some humanists) sometimes disputed the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, this rather academic debate was not a major or a regular concern of humanism; hence it can hardly be expected to illuminate its central concerns. More seriously, when compared with the humanists of the Renaissance Plato and Aristotle seem more to resemble than to differ from one another, not only because both were systematic philosophers but also because, however serious their disagreements, they came out of the same cultural world. By the later fifteenth century this was commonly observed by the humanists themselves, and Raphael, in an early representation of the division of labor, celebrated their complementarity by placing Plato and Aristotle side by side in the Stanza della Segnatura. Finally, the attempt to understand the polarities of Renaissance culture in terms of Plato and Aristotle seems to be based on the common but mistaken identification of antique thought with classical hellenism. It ignores the rich variety of the ancient heritage, and above all the significant fact that the earliest and probably the most influential ancient sources on which Renaissance humanism was nourished were not hellenic but hellenistic.
Thus although it is useful, both for the longer historical perspectives the exercise affords and for the deeper resonances it releases, to associate the impulses at work in Renaissance humanism with the various resources of the Western cultural tradition, we must locate these resources first of all in the hellenistic rather than the hellenic world of thought. Stoicism and Augustinianism both meet this requirement, but they are also closer to Renaissance humanism in other respects. Both were bound up with the ancient rhetorical tradition, Stoicism through the ethical teachings of the Latin orators and essayists particularly beloved by the humanists, Augustinianism through the rhetorical powers of Augustine himself and, more profoundly, the subtle rhetorical quality of his mature theology.2 Furthermore the tension between Stoicism and Augustinianism was a perennial element in the career of Renaissance humanism and indeed persisted well beyond what is conventionally taken as the end of the Renaissance; the ambiguous confrontation between the two impulses is still as central for Antoine Adam's distinguished Zaharoff lecture on the thought of seventeenth-century France as it is in Charles Trinkaus's rich studies of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian humanism.3 Finally, Stoicism and Augustinianism represented far better than Plato and Aristotle, genuine alternatives for the Renaissance humanist to ponder.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that neither Stoicism nor Augustinianism is easy to define with precision, and here may be another reason for our slowness to grasp their importance. In the case of Stoicism the difficulty arises from the singular complexity of the problem of isolating a pure body of thought from the tangled bundle of hellenistic ideas that were the common property of Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Neoplatonists, later Peripatetics, Gnostics, hellenized Jews, Christians, and other groups in later antiquity.4 Stoicism was itself eclectic in its sources and syncretise in its aims. It combined an Aristotelian (and perhaps pre-Socratic) materialism with Socratic ethical theory, the hint of an Asiatic passion for righteousness with, in its later stages, the severe moralism of Rome. Its sense of the unity and harmony of nature and its emphasis on the structural and dynamic affinities of macrocosm and microcosm readily fused with Babylonian astrology. Stoicism embraced the allegorical principle by which every philosophical and religious position in the hellenistic world could be perceived as a legitimate insight into the nature of things, and it popularized the notion that the various schools of ancient philosophy constituted, all together, a single Great Tradition of consistent, developing, and overlapping wisdom. Seneca himself, with Cicero the major source of Europe's early knowledge of Stoic teaching, frequently borrowed from non-Stoic sources. In addition Stoicism had a history. In its later, Roman form its physical, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations receded into the background, though these dimensions ofits influence continued to work more subtly; and the absolutism of its ethical demand was modified. It is thus hardly remarkable that Renaissance humanists were often far from clear about the precise lineaments of Stoicism, nor is it surprising that modern scholars who are not technical historians of philosophy more often refer to than try to define Stoic philosophy. Stoicism, for the humanist, was sometimes a fairly particular set of beliefs, but it was also the particular form in which the pervasive and common assumptions of hellenistic paganism presented themselves most attractively and forcefully to the Renaissance.
The definition of Augustinianism is at least equally difficult, partly because Augustine himself was a product of the same philosophically confused culture that produced Stoicism (with the difference that several additional centuries had made the spiritual atmosphere even more turgid), partly for other reasons. His Confessions , not to mention the markable eclecticism of the pagan culture reflected in his other works, provide in themselves a sufficient explanation for his vision of ancient philosophy as "the city of confusion."5 In addition Augustine was a singularly complex and unsystematic thinker who presents many different faces to his readers. He has been compared to a turbulent stream into whose rushing waters an abundance of silt has been washed, with the result that, although its waters are opaque, it deposits much rich nourishment along its banks for the support of a wide variety of life. A recent work, proceeding systematically, has identified some eleven distinct and in some respects incompatible types of "Augustinianism."6 Like a river, the mind of Augustine was in constant movement. His voluminous writings were evolved out of his rich and varied experience, the changing circumstances of his external life, and above all his inner development. His thought can therefore be apprehended fully only as a set of tendencies rather than a system; its coherence is biographical rather than structural. His successive works constantly combined and recombined old and new elements in his thought, in a constant struggle to discover where he stood and where he was moving. He saw this himself. "I am the sort of man," he wrote in a letter, "who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress—by writing."7 And he knew that he had, in some important respects, changed his mind; hence, late in his life, he felt compelled to correct, in his Retractions , the errors committed in his earlier works.
Nevertheless the direction of Augustine's movement is reasonably clear, and this may suggest that a useful and legitimate definition of Augustinianism, as a particular impulse in European thought, may be sought in the tendencies of his maturity or even, more profoundly, inthe vision he presents of a mind engaged in a certain kind of movement. That movement can be generally described as a slow, steady, though incomplete advance from a hellenistic understanding of Christianity, which sought to reconcile the Gospel with the commonplaces of later antique culture, toward an increasingly biblical understanding of Christianity. For it is now generally recognized that Augustine's conversion did not lead to an immediate break with his hellenistic heritage; for some time (like many, perhaps the majority, of the Christians of his age), he understood his new faith as a better statement of what he had previously believed. Christianity, from this standpoint, brought the Great Tradition of ancient philosophy to its culmination. Only gradually, particularly under the influence of the Pauline Epistles, did he become aware of the tensions within this mixture and seek to overcome them. Thus Augustinianism, like Stoicism, may be seen to have had, for the Renaissance, both a more precise and a more general significance. It can be taken to represent, at the same time, a set of propositions antithetical to those brought into focus by Stoicism, and the process by which some thinkers were freeing themselves from the old assumptions of hellenistic culture and moving toward a more specifically Christian vision of man and the human condition.
The notion of the compatibility and even the affinity between Stoicism and Christianity goes back to the yearning of early Christian converts for some bridge between the old word of thought and the new. Stoic elements in the expression (if not the thought) of the Apostle Paul tended to obscure their radical differences, and the apocryphal correspondence between Paul and Seneca confused the issue further.8 The affinities, indeed, might seem immediately impressive, as they did in the Renaissance. The Stoics were commendably pious; they spoke much about the gods and even about God, praising His wisdom, His power, and His love for mankind. Their emphasis on divine providence and its ultimate benevolence seemed a particular point of contact with Christianity, and the idea of a single providential order led in turn to an ostensibly Christian ethic of absolute obedience and acceptance of the divine will. The Stoics displayed a singular moral seriousness; and their emphasis on virtue, through their famous contrast between the things that are within and those that are not within human control, recognized its inwardness; they acknowledged the problem of sin and stressed man's moral responsibility. They preached the brotherhood of man as well as the universal fatherhood of God, and they had much to say about the immortality of the soul.
But at a deeper level Stoicism and Augustinian Christianity were inradical opposition. The issue between them, in its most direct terms, was the difference between the biblical understanding of creation, which makes both man and the physical universe separate from and utterly dependent on God, and the hellenistic principle of immanence, which makes the universe eternal, by one means or another deifies the natural order, and by seeing a spark of divinity in man tends to make him something more than a creature of God.9
This fundamental difference has massive implications, and from it we may derive the major issues on which Stoicism and Augustinianism would be in potential opposition within Renaissance humanism. The anthropological differences between the two positions were of particular importance. The Stoic view of man attributed to him a divine spark or seed, identified with reason, which gave man access to the divine order of the universe, from which the existence, the nature, and the will of God could be known. Stoicism therefore pointed to natural theology; and since reason was seen as a universal human attribute, which meant that all men have some natural understanding of God, Stoic anthropology virtually required a religious syncretism. As the distinctive quality of man, reason also gave him his specifically human identity; a man was most fully human, best realized the ends of his existence, and became perfect through the absolute sovereignty of reason over the other dimensions of the human personality. Virtue consisted, accordingly, in following the dictates of reason, to which the rebellious body and its passions were to be reduced by the will. But the will was not perceived as an independent faculty; it was the faithful and mechanical servant of reason, and therefore Stoicism rested on the assumption that to know the good is to do the good. Through rational illumination and rational control man was capable of reaching perfection. The body presented problems, but these could be solved through a disciplined apatheia , a cultivated indifference to physical needs and impulses, to the affections, and to external conditions. But since only man's reason was divine, immortality was reserved for the soul. Conversely Stoicism had a typically hellenistic contempt for the body.
Augustinianism contradicted this view at every point. Seeing man in every part of his being as a creature of God, it could not regard his reason (however wonderful) as divine and thus naturally capable of knowing the will of God. Such knowledge was available to man only in the Scriptures, particular revelations from God himself, which spoke not to mankind as a general category but to the individual. And because neither reason nor any other human faculty was intrinsically superior to the rest, Augustinianism tended to replace the monarchy of reason inthe human personality with a kind of corporate democracy. The primary organ in Augustinian anthropology is not so much that which is highest as that which is central; it is literally the heart (cor ), whose quality determines the quality of the whole. And that this quality is not a function of rational enlightenment is seen as a matter of common experience. The will is not, after all, an obedient servant of the reason; it has energies and impulses of its own, and man is a far more mysterious animal than the philosophers are inclined to admit. Human wickedness thus presents a much more serious problem than the Stoics dream of, and the notion that man in his fallen condition can rely on his own powers to achieve virtue is utterly implausible. Nor, in any event, is there virtue in withdrawal from engagement with the nonrational and external dimensions of existence. The physical body and the emotional constitution of man were created by God along with man's intellectual powers, and their needs too have dignity and are at least equally worthy of satisfaction. For the same reason immortality cannot be limited to the soul; man must be saved, since God made him so, as a whole.
The contrasts are equally significant in respect to the position of man in society. Although the self-centeredness in the Stoic ideal of individual existence was often uneasily and joylessly combined with a Roman concern for civic duty, the Stoics generally left the impression that social existence was a distraction from the good life, which could be satisfactorily pursued only by withdrawal from the world of men. Despite his recognition of the basic equality of man, the Stoic was also persuaded that the good life based on the contemplation of eternal verities was possible only for a few select souls; he was therefore contemptuous of the vulgar crowd. By contrast the mature Augustine, though still yearning for a contemplative life, insisted unequivocally on the obligations of the individual to society, obligations at once of duty, prudence, and love; and at the same time the conception of the blessed life opened up by his less intellectual vision of man was not for the few but accessible to all.
Stoicism, again, had little use for history. Its conception of a rational and unchanging law of nature underlying all things led to a peculiarly rigid notion of cyclical recurrence that denied all significance to discrete events, which in any case belonged to the uncontrollable outer world irrelevant to the good life, just as it precluded the idea of a direction and goal for history. Its cultural values were not the products of particular experience in the world of time and matter but eternal, perennially valid, and so perennially recoverable. Thus its only remedy for present discontents was a nostalgic return to a better past. But Augustine vigorouslyrejected the eternal round of the ancients. He brooded over the mystery of time as a creature and vehicle of God's will and proclaimed that history was guided to its appointed end by God Himself and therefore, expressing His wisdom, must be fraught with a mysterious significance.
But underlying all these particular contrasts was a fundamental difference over the order of the universe. For the Stoics a single cosmic order, rational and divine, pervaded all things, at once static and, through a divine impulse to achieve perfection planted in everything, dynamic, its principles operative alike in physical nature, in human society, and in the human personality. The existence of this order determined all human and social development; and the end of man, either individually or collectively, could not be freely chosen but consisted in subjective acceptance and conformity to destiny. The perfection of that order meant that whatever is is right, however uncomfortable or tragic for mankind; at the heart of Stoicism is that familiar cosmic optimism which signifies, for the actual experience of men, the deepest pessimism. Against all this, Augustinianism, though by no means denying in principle the ultimate order of the universe, rejected its intelligibility and thus its coherence and its practical significance for man. The result was to free both man and society from their old bondage to cosmic principles, and to open up a secular vision of human existence and a wide range of pragmatic accommodations to the exigencies of life impossible in the Stoic religious universe. In this sense Augustinianism provided a charter for human freedom and a release for the diverse possibilities of human creativity.10
II. Stoicism and Augustinianism: The Medieval Heritage
I do not mean to imply that either Stoicism or Augustinianism presented itself to the Renaissance humanist with even the limited coherence of this short sketch, which is introduced here only to suggest the antithetical impulses in the two movements for the clarification of what follows. Earlier (and indeed much of later) humanism was afflicted with the same kind of ideological confusion that prevailed in the hellenistic world, and Stoic and Augustinian impulses were persistently intermingled and fragmentary. Their operation on the Renaissance mind also depended on the manner in which they were transmitted, their reception on the needs of a changing historical situation.
Obviously neither tradition was a complete novelty in the Renaissance. This is clearest in the case of Augustine, although it is essentialto recognize that the diversities and ambiguities in his thought require us to treat medieval Augustinianism with some precision. The earlier Middle Ages seems to have been attracted chiefly to the more hellenistic aspects of Augustinianism and generally resisted (though without altogether rejecting) the full implications of his theology of justification. It was largely oblivious to his secularism or to the problem of his personal development. And with the revival of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, the influence of Augustine (and indeed of the Fathers in general) suffered some decline. A strong loyalty to Augustine persisted among the Franciscans and above all among the Augustinian Hermits, whose claims to ancient origin were regarded with some reserve and who therefore needed to demonstrate their close affinities with their alleged founders.11 But Thomas, put off by Augustine's Platonism and troubled by the possibility that Augustine had changed his mind, recommended that his earlier writings be approached with caution; and Albertus Magnus rejected his authority in philosophy, though respecting it in theology.12 This more selective treatment of Augustine may well have prepared the way, by its recognition, however negatively, of his development, for the more personal Augustinianism of the Renaissance. At the same time the relative eclipse of Augustinianism made it possible for Renaissance Augustinianism to present itself as something of a novelty.
The decline of Augustinianism is vividly illustrated by the Divine Comedy , from which, in spite of deeper traces of Augustinian influence in Dante's thought, Augustine as a personality is strikingly absent. He does not appear among the representatives of sacred wisdom in Paradise, introduced by Saint Thomas in what may be interpreted as Dante's basic philosophical and theological bibliography,13 nor does he appear in the next group of cantos which deal with the theological virtues. He is not assigned to answer any of Dante's questions, or to explain to him any of the mysteries of Christian doctrine and human destiny. Indeed he can scarcely be said to appear at all; Saint Bernard merely mentions him in the course of explaining the order in which the souls of the blessed are grouped around Christ. And even at this point, although he is introduced in the estimable company of Saint Francis and Saint Benedict, both of whom do play didactic roles in other cantos, he seems of only historical interest, as marking off a phase in the evolution of the church.14 For Dante Augustine has almost literally disappeared. It is hardly surprising that Dante was unimpressed by the Confessions .15
Medieval Stoicism has received far less attention than medieval Augustinianism, possibly for the same reasons that account for the neglect of Stoicism in the Renaissance. But in spite of the absence of systematicstudy of this subject, it is not difficult to demonstrate the importance of a Stoic element in medieval thought, sometimes at the deepest level.16 Cicero and Seneca (along with Boethius who, as a transmitter, may have been at least as important for Stoicism as for Neoplatonism and for Aristotle) were favorite philosophical authorities during the entire Middle Ages; and, in contrast to Augustine's, their influence was not decreasing in the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon defended Seneca's "elegance of statement about the virtues which are commonly required for honesty of life and the community of human society";17 the Romance of the Rose is full of Stoic precepts;18 Thomas made heavy use of Cicero;19 and Dante cited Cicero many times, often linking his authority with Aristotle's.20 But this parallelism chiefly suggests the ambiguous place of Stoic influences in European thought, and their presence is often most powerful when it is not explicit. We may discern it in medieval preoccupation with the systematic and unitary order of the cosmos, which probably owes more, at least directly, to Stoicism and other hellenistic influences than to the great hellenic philosophers, and in the intellectual vision of man so often conveyed by the Ciceronian commonplace that the erect stature of the human body had been decreed by nature so that men "might be able to behold the sky and so gain a knowledge of the gods."21 We may see it again in medieval interest in the religious truths available to all mankind through reason alone, so important for missionary strategy;22 or, at another level, in the distinction between the things belonging to man and those in the domain of fortune,23 or in medieval debates over the character of true nobility, which so regularly invoked Stoic belief in the natural equality of man.24
The Stoic element in Renaissance humanism may thus represent more actual continuity with the Middle Ages than does Renaissance knowledge of Augustine. At any rate it is not clear, before the assimilation by later Renaissance humanists of Marcus Aurelius and the chief Stoic (or Stoicizing) Greek writers, Epictetus and Plutarch, that Renaissance thinkers knew significantly more about the Stoics than their medieval predecessors had known. But the men of the Renaissance had far more of Augustine. During the Middle Ages Augustine had been known, even to many of those who venerated him most deeply, chiefly through the Decretum of Yves of Chartres with its 425 extracts from Augustine, through Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences , so overwhelmingly based on Augustine, or through Robert Kilwardby's tabulae and capitulationes . Even Bonaventura knew Augustine at least partly from sources of this kind; he cited one of Augustine's early works eleven times, but ten of his citations were to the same text, presumably garnered from one oranother of the compendia available to him.25 But the fourteenth century saw a concerted effort, particularly among his followers in the Augustinian order, to recover the whole corpus of Augustine's works and, in a manner that would be characteristic of Renaissance scholarship, to develop a systematic acquaintance with his whole thought, not from the standard medieval proof-texts but from the direct study of his entire writings. For the first time a careful attempt was made to identify the exact location, by title, chapter, and verse, of quotations from Augustine, and to verify their accuracy. The great figure in this enterprise was Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358), who has been called the first modern Augustinian. Gregory not only knew the writings and followed the doctrines of Augustine more closely than any previous scholar; he also restored long-neglected works to circulation, in a movement that would result in the critical rejection of the substantial body of apocrypha from the Augustinian corpus and eventually culminate in the great critical editions of Augustine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 Already in the later fifteenth century a single series of sermons by the Augustinian friar Johann Staupitz contained 163 citations from 24 separate works of Augustine.27
But neither Stoicism nor Augustinianism was, in the Renaissance, primarily a function of the availability and transmission of literary sources. They were rather responses to the deep and changing needs of Renaissance society and culture. These needs had been created by the growing complexity of European life in the later Middle Ages and above all by the development of towns and the new vision of human existence towns increasingly evoked. For towns produced a set of conditions that made parts of Europe more and more like the hellenistic world in which both the Stoics and Augustine had been reared: the constant menace of famine and pestilence, urban disorders and endemic warfare in the countryside, incessant conflict among individuals, families, and social groups, a growing social mobility that left a substantial proportion of the urban population rootless and insecure, above all the terrible anxieties of a life in which the familiar conventions of a close and traditional human community had given way to a relentless struggle for survival in a totally unpredictable and threatening world.
It was this situation to which scholastic culture seemed irrelevant, and which conversely Stoicism and Augustinianism sought, in their different ways, to interpret and remedy; and the needs of this grim predicament primarily explain why men sought and read Stoic and Augustinian writings. Paradoxically Stoicism, though pagan in a Christian culture, provedthe more traditional and conservative of the two prescriptions; Augustinianism, though it appealed to the most authoritative of the Latin Fathers, was at least potentially the more novel. But the conservatism of the Stoic adaptation to a new situation—certainly an element in its attraction—was disguised by the graceful and unsystematic form of the sources in which it was chiefly available: dialogues, personal letters, pensées, essays filled with memorable sayings and concrete examples.28 Stoicism could therefore present itself as an alternative to scholastic habits of thought.
III. The Stoic Element in Humanist Thought
Stoicism addressed itself to the problems of modern Europe, as to those of later antiquity, by reaffirming the divine, harmonious, and intelligible order of nature and drawing appropriate conclusions, practical as well as theoretical. The Stoicism of the Renaissance, perhaps especially when it was least aware of its Stoic inspiration, was based, like ancient Stoicism, on natural philosophy and cosmology, a point of some importance in view of the common supposition that Renaissance thinkers only drew isolated, practical ethical precepts from Stoic sources. Valla's Epicurean (in this case made, perhaps deliberately, to sound like a Stoic) declared nature virtually identical with God.29 Vives from time to time elaborated on the meaning of this proposition. The universe, he wrote, was governed "by the divine intelligence which commands and forbids according to reason."30 Calvin, for all his concern to maintain the distinction between God and nature, drew on the same conception. "This skillful ordering of the universe," he argued, "is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible."31 For Charron nature was "the equity and universal reason which lights in us, which contains and incubates in itself the seeds of all virtue, probity, justice."32
And man is also a part of this rational order of nature. Montaigne found this humbling: "We are neither superior nor inferior to the rest. All that is under heaven, says the sage, is subject to one law and one fate. . . . Man must be forced and lined up within the barriers of this organization."33 Others saw in it some justification for glorifying man. "This is the order of nature," wrote Vives, "that wisdom be the rule of the whole, that all creatures obey man, that in man the body abides by the orders of the soul, and that the soul itself comply with the will of God."34 Another way to coordinate man with the universe was thenotion of man as microcosm in Pomponazzi and even Calvin.35 Calvin was willing, too, to acknowledge the influence of the rational order of the heavens on the human body.36
Implicit in these passages, and sometimes more than implicit, is the assumption that this divinely ordered universe is accessible to the human understanding, that man's perception of the rational order of the universe tells him a good deal about the nature and will of God, and that man's reason is thus the link between himself and God. This conception of nature leads us accordingly to the notion of man as essentially an intellectual being. As Aeneas Sylvius declared, the mind is "the most precious of all human endowments";37 and Petrarch's definition of man as a rational animal is enthusiastically developed, in the Secretum , by Augustinus: "When you find a man so governed by Reason that all his conduct is regulated by her, all his appetites subject to her alone, a man who has so mastered every motion of his spirit by Reason's curb that he knows it is she alone who distinguishes him from the savagery of the brute, and that it is only by submission to her guidance that he deserves the name of man at all. . . . when you have found such a man, then you may say that he has some true and fruitful idea of what the definition of man is."38 As this passage suggests, this view of man requires the sovereignty of reason within the personality. For Pomponazzi human freedom depended on the subservience of will to intellect,39 and for Calvin this had been the situation of Adam in Paradise, the consequence of his creation in God's image: "In the mind [of Adam] perfect intelligence flourished and reigned, uprightness attended as its companion, and all the senses were prepared and molded for due obedience to reason; and in the body there was a suitable correspondence with this internal order." Before the Fall, apparently, Adam had been a model of Stoic perfection.40 "The understanding," he wrote more generally, "is, as it were, the leader and governor of the soul" and the instructor of the will.41
On the other hand this elevation of reason was often likely to be accompanied by a denigration of other dimensions of the personality, especially the passions and the body with which they were regularly associated, which threatened to challenge the sovereignty of reason. From this standpoint the body and the rational soul could be seen as radically opposed. Petrarch claimed to have learned from his own body only "that man is a vile, wretched animal unless he redeems the ignobility of the body with the nobility of the soul." He saw his soul as imprisoned in and weighed down by the body, the one "an immortal gift, the other corruptible and destined to pass away."42 With Vives, attack on the bodyachieved an almost pathological intensity.43 But happily the rational soul, however threatened by the body and the affections, was in the end clearly superior to them. As Lipsius remarked, "For although the soul is infected and somewhat corrupted by the filth of the body and the contagion of sense, it nevertheless retains some vestiges of its origin and is not without certain bright sparks of the pure fiery nature from whence it came forth."44
Reason, in any case, because of its access to the divine order of the universe, is a legitimate source of religious insight, a point exploited at some length by Calvin, who quoted Cicero that "there is no nation so barbarous, no race so savage that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God." In sound Stoic fashion Calvin found the order of the heavens, but also the wonders of the human body, a natural witness to the greatness of God. "The natural order was," he declared, "that the frame of the universe should be the school in which we were to learn piety, and from it pass over to eternal life and perfect felicity."45 Because the religious insights from nature are the common possession of mankind, it must also be true that all peoples may be expected to reveal some knowledge of God; and this belief contributed heavily to the study of the classics. Petrarch, thinking of himself as following Augustine, was deeply impressed by Cicero's Stoic arguments for the providential order of the world, phrased, as he thought, "almost in a Catholic manner."46 Aeneas Sylvius maintained that Socrates had taught the Christian way of salvation and recommended "the poets and other authors of antiquity" because they were "saturated with the same faith" as the Fathers of the church.47 Erasmus saw various values in classical education, among others the fact that Plato "draws the reader to true knowledge by similes."48 His follower Zwingli placed a number of the ancients among the elect.49 Through all of this we may discern traces of the hellenistic idea of a great tradition of developing and coherent wisdom, with its corollary that, properly understood, all schools of philosophy are in agreement and that philosophy itself is consistent with and complementary to Christian truth. Thus Bruni had argued for the essential agreement of all the philosophers,50 a conception of which Pico's Theses was a kind of reductio ad absurdum .
But rational knowledge was also a resource in a more practical sense. From an understanding of the general rationality of nature, man could discover the rational laws of his own nature and, by following them, variously perfect himself. Augustinus advised Franciscus "to order your life by your nature,"51 and this principle was basic to much humanist thought about education. Alberti's Uncle Lionardo recommended thata child be formed by encouraging the best elements in his nature, on the general principle that "excellence is nothing but nature itself, complete and well-formed."52 Erasmus made the point broadly: "All living things strive to develop according to their proper nature. What is the proper nature of man? Surely it is to live the life of reason, for reason is the peculiar prerogative of man."53 Calvin, who in his youth had identified the injunction to follow nature as Stoic doctrine,54 did not hesitate in his maturity, like Boccaccio and Valla, to exploit the principle as an argument against celibacy.55 Charron repeated the general point: "the doctrine of all the sages imports that to live well is to live according to nature."56
But clearly the formation men most required in a brutal and disorderly world was training in morality, and it was in this area that Stoic doctrine seemed most relevant to contemporary needs, most immediately prescriptive. The rational order of nature was to be the foundation for the orderly behavior of men; this was its practical function. Stoic moralists were attractive then, because of their emphasis on the supreme value of virtue, sometimes, as Augustinus tells Franciscus, because it is the only basis for human happiness, sometimes, as Petrarch wrote elsewhere, because virtue, "as the philosophers say" is "its own reward, its own guide, its own end and aim."57 Pomponazzi, who had clearer reasons, agreed that virtue could have no higher reward than itself and praised it as the most precious quality in life;58 and Calvin recognized the peculiar emphasis of the Stoics on virtue.59 Guarino applied the conception directly to education, seeing "learning and training in virtue" as the peculiar pursuit of man and therefore central to humanitas .60
This concern with virtue reflects also the persistence of the intellectual conception of man so closely bound up with the rational order of the Stoic universe. This is apparent in two ways. In the first place Stoic virtue is acquired through the intellect; it is a product of philosophy, absorbed from books. Thus Erasmus believed that even small children could absorb it through beginning their education by reading ancient fables. He particularly recommended the story of Circe, with its lesson "that men who will not yield to the guidance of reason, but follow the enticements of the senses, are no more than brute beasts." "Could a Stoic philosopher," he asked rhetorically, "preach a graver truth?"61 But in the second place, as this passage also suggests, the practice of this Stoic virtue depended on the sovereignty of reason and its powers of control over the disorderly impulses arising out of other aspects of the personality. Alberti's Uncle Lionardo made the point clearly. "Good ways of living," he declared, "eventually overcome and correct every appetite that runs counter toreason and every imperfection of the mind."62 Vives identified this ethics of rational control with the teaching of Christ:
Our mind is a victim of its own darkness; our passions, stirred by sin, have covered the eyes of reason with a thick layer of dust. We need a clear insight, serene and undisturbed. . . . All the precepts of moral philosophy can be found in the teachings of Christ. In his doctrine, and in his words, man will find the remedy to all moral diseases, the ways and means to tame our passions under the guidance and the power of reason. Once this order has been secured man will learn proper behavior in his relations with himself, with God, and with his neighbor; he will act rightfully not only in the privacy of his home but also in his social and political life.63
And in this emphasis on rational control we may perhaps discern an important clue to the attraction of Stoic ethical doctrine for the age of the Renaissance. It presented itself as an antidote for a terrible fear of the consequences of the loss of self-control. Montaigne suggested this in his ruminations over the perils of drunkenness, which may cause man to spill out the secrets on which his survival and dignity depend. "The worst state of man," Montaigne concluded, "is when he loses the knowledge and control of himself."64 And the ability of men to control their lower impulses with the help of philosophy gave some hope for a better and more orderly world. So it seemed to Aeneas Sylvius: "Respect towards women, affection for children and for home; pity for the distressed, justice towards all, self-control in anger, restraint in indulgence, forbearance in success, contentment, courage, duty—these are some of the virtues to which philosophy will lead you."65
The Stoic model for the order of society, like its model for the order of the individual personality, was also derived from the order of the cosmos. An authentic and durable social order that would properly reflect the stability of the cosmos had thus to meet two basic requirements. It had to be a single order, and it had to be governed by reason. This meant in practice that the human world must be organized as a universal empire, and that it must be ruled by the wise, by men who are themselves fully rational and in touch with the rational principles of the cosmos.
Thus the Stoic type of humanist tended, from Petrarch in some moods to Lipsius in the waning Renaissance, to admire imperial Rome. The conquest of the Roman Empire, Petrarch once remarked, had been "actuated by perfect justice and good will as regards men," however defective it may have been in regard to God.66 Castiglione's Ottaviano Fregosofound an earlier example of the universal model to admire; he praised Aristotle for "directing Alexander to that most glorious aim—which was the desire to make the world into one single universal country, and have all men living as one people in friendship and in mutual concord under one government and one law that might shine equally on all like the light of the sun."67 Erasmus decried any attachment to a particular community; he had succeeded himself, he said, in feeling at home everywhere.68 Lipsius similarly attacked love of country as an expression of the lower demands of the body and of custom rather than nature, which commands us to regard the whole world as our true fatherland.69
But the sovereignty of reason in the cosmos also required that the world be governed by the wise. All political disorder, Erasmus argued, was the result of stupidity; hence, he declared, "You cannot be a prince if you are not a philosopher."70 Vives saw the ruler as simply a sage with public authority.71 There was some discrepancy between this ideal and political actuality, but it could be remedied; since it was rarely possible to elevate sages into kings, it was necessary to convert kings, by education, into sages. This was the aim of Erasmus's Institutio principis Christiani , and Rabelais presented Grangousier as a model philosopherking. Properly educated, the ruler might be made to excel all other men in wisdom and therefore in virtue, and his central duty was then to instruct his subjects in virtue.72 But always, in this conception of kingship, the Stoicizing humanist kept in mind the ultimate source of wisdom and virtue. The philosophy of the prince, for Erasmus, was the kind that "frees the mind from the false opinions and the ignoble passions of the masses, and following the eternal pattern laid up in heaven points the way to good government."73 It is not (too much has been made of the point) just a practical moral wisdom, despite its disclaimer of metaphysics, but an application to human affairs of the general principles of order in the cosmos. "As the sun to the sky," Erasmus wrote, in what was no mere figure but the reflection of a whole world of thought, "so is the prince to the people; the sun is the eye of the world, the prince the eye of the multitude. As the mind is to the body, so is the prince to the state; the mind knows, the body obeys."74
The idealism in this conception of govermnent generally makes it appear singularly unsuited to the actualities of political life, but in at least one respect it helped to meet genuine practical needs. By its conception of a rational law of nature, it assisted in the rationalization of law and social relations. The problem is suggested by Salutati's confrontation between law and medicine, in which the latter offers a kind of diagnosis of the human scene: here, without the stability of some eternalprinciple, all things would belong "to the realm of the accidental." Law, "based upon eternal and universal justice," placed government upon a more secure foundation than the whims of the ruler or the accidents of custom.75 It seems likely that the Stoic conception of a natural law governing all human intercourse and authenticating all particular laws gave some impetus, perhaps most powerful when the cosmic vibrations in the conception were least felt, to the systematic codification of the chaos of existing legislation, to the general rule of law, and to more equal justice. Yet we may sense something equivocal, however opportune, even here. This is apparent in the impersonal rationality in the Stoic idea of social virtue based on law, which corresponded to the increasing legalism and impersonality of the new urban scene. It tended to base social order not on the unreliable vagaries of personal ties, personal loyalties, and personal affection, but on abstract and general social relationships: in a word, on duty rather than on love. The social thought of Stoic humanism thus reflected and probably helped to promote the rationalization of society on which large-scale organization in the modern world depended. But it also made the human world a colder place.
On the other hand the Stoic conception of social improvement was diametrically opposed to the actual direction in which European society was moving. Its ideal, like Seneca's, was nostalgic. As the retrospective prefix in the familiar Renaissance vocabulary of amelioration attests—renascentium, reformatio, restoratio, restitutio, renovatio , etc.—it could only look backward for a better world. Petrarch chose deliberately to live in spirit in the ancient past; one of the participants in an Erasmian colloquy deplored the disappearance of "that old time equality, abolished by modern tyranny,"76 which he also associated with the Apostles; Castiglione thought men in antiquity "of greater worth than now."77 Even the improvement Renaissance writers occasionally celebrated was regularly conceived as the recovery of past excellence, and hope for the future usually was made to depend on some notion of revival. Petrarch found strength in the greatness of Rome. "What inspiration," he exclaimed, "is not to be derived from the memory of the past and from the grandeur of a name once revered through the world!"78 Lorenzo de Medici's motto in a tournament of 1468 was le tems revient .79 Machiavelli's chief ground for hope, when he deplored the decadence of contemporary Italy, was that "this land seems born to raise up dead things, as she has in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture."80 Giles of Viterbo applied the conception to ecclesiastical renewal: "We are not innovators. We are simply trying, in accordance with the will of God, to bring back to life those ancient laws whose observance has lapsed."81 All of this suggests the lack of a sense of the positive significance of change in Stoic humanism. Since excellence was associated with the divine origins of all things, change could only mean deterioration; and improvement necessarily implied the recovery of what was essentially timeless. The static character of this ideal was reflected in its vision of the good society which, once it had achieved perfection, could not be permitted to change. So Erasmus hoped that the conflicting interests of human society might "achieve an eternal truce" in which proper authority and degrees of status would be respected by all.82 One of the essential duties of the Erasmian ruler is to resist all innovation.83 The central virtue in the Stoic ideal of society is thus peace, which is not simply the absence of war but ultimately dependent on the correspondence of social organization to the unchanging principles of universal order. This is a dimension of the humanist peace movement that it is well to remember in assessing the significance of the pacifism of Petrarch, the emphasis on peace in the circle of Erasmus, or Lipsius's peculiar admiration for the pax romana . Peace, too, for the Stoic humanist, required the strong rule of a single "head." And again Stoicism can be seen to supply, at least in theory, a remedy for one of the most glaring defects of Renaissance Europe.
One service performed by Stoic humanism was, then, to supply a foundation for personal and social order in the very nature of things. But this was only one, and perhaps not the major, dimension of its significance. For there was a crucial ambiguity in its moral thought, and indeed in its understanding of virtue, which pointed not to the improvement of the conditions of life but rather to acceptance of the necessary and irremovable discomforts of existence. If the rationality of the universe could be regarded as a resource for a better order, it could also be taken to imply that in some sense the structure of the universe is already perfect and so beyond improvement. From this standpoint Stoicism became a strategy by which, through a combination of enlightenment and disciplined accommodation, the individual could come to terms with the humanly pessimistic implications of a cosmic optimism. It was a strategy of protection for the isolated self in a thoroughly unsatisfactory world. Virtue, in this light, was the ultimate resource by which the ego could minimize its vulnerability to adversity. And this represented a very different kind of adaptation to the changing patterns of European life.
This application of Stoicism was based on the crucial Stoic distinction between those external elements of existence, generally identified withfortune, that are not absolutely within the control of the individual, and the inner world that belongs entirely to himself, the realms, respectively, of necessity and freedom. The inner world alone is the area in which the highest dimension of the personality, man's reason, can exercise total sovereignty, and therefore in which alone man can realize his highest potentialities and attain the ends of his existence; thus it is also the only realm in which he can hope to achieve total happiness. For this is where man discovers the laws governing the universe. As Salutati declared, "They inhere in our minds as of nature. Thus we know them with such certainty that they cannot escape us and that it is not necessary to seek them among external facts. For, as you see, they inhabit our most intimate selves."84 Lipsius outlined the ideal: "I am guarded and fenced against all external things and settled within myself, indifferent to all cares but one, which is that I may bring in subjection this broken and distressed mind of mine to right reason and God and subdue all human and earthly things to my mind."85
The ideal had various implications, notable among them the definition of virtue as that self-sufficiency which, by freeing the individual from all dependence on things external to himself, makes him invulnerable to fortune and so supplies him with inner freedom, the only freedom to which man can aspire. This is the burden of Augustinus's injunction to Franciscus in the Secretum: "Learn to live in want and in abundance, to command and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend your neck wholly to the rule of virtue. Then you will be free, wanting nothing, then you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a king, truly powerful and perfectly happy."86 Virtue in this sense was the power to raise the mind above all the external accidents of existence in order to dwell securely in the realm of the eternal. It enabled man to identify himself subjectively with the divine order of the universe, and accordingly a special kind of numinous awe surrounded it, of a sort that could hardly adhere to the more practical virtues of social existence. So this species of virtue meant at once identification with higher and separation from lower things, especially from all those dimensions of existence that distracted or troubled the mind and threatened the self-sufficiency of the discrete individual. Franciscus confessed to Augustinus that his dependence on others was, in his life, "the bitterest cup of all";87 and Petrarch, who periodically longed for a Stoic repose, reproached Cicero for betraying his own best convictions by giving upthe "peaceful ease" of his old age to return to public service.88 The Stoic impulse in Renaissance humanism favoring such contemplative withdrawal would find regular expression among later writers, from Salutati to Montaigne.89
In view of the importance of the city as a stimulus to Renaissance moral reflection, it is also of some interest that it was, for Petrarch, a peculiar threat to his inner freedom; and he gave vivid articulation to the historical implications of these Stoic sentiments. "I think of liberty even while in bonds," he wrote, "of the country while in cities, of repose amidst labors, and finally . . . of ease while I am busy." A pattern of concrete associations emerges here. The modern world, with its greed, bustle, and conflict, means bondage to demanding work in the city; but against this is the vision of freedom, simplicity, and solitary repose in an idealized rural world. We may find here, therefore, some hint of the social realities underlying this discussion.90
A more positive dimension of this emphasis in Stoic humanism was its contribution to that inwardness which, with its genuine affinity to one aspect of Augustinianism, deepened consciences and provided one source for the moral sensitivity of the Catholic as well as the Protestant Reformation. Inwardness pointed to the role of conscience in the moral life, the inner voice which is concerned rather with motives than with outward acts and results. The young Calvin recognized this element in Stoicism. "Nothing is great for the Stoics," he wrote, "which is not also good and inwardly sound"; and he attacked "monsters of men, dripping with inner vices , yet putting forth the outward appearance and mask of uprightness." In his maturity he noted that men can discover some ideas of God within themselves and denounced the indolence of those who refused this inward search.91 Montaigne's habitual self-examination also owed much to Stoicism. "For many years now," he declared, "my thoughts have had no other aim but myself, I have studied and examined myself only, and if I study any other things, it is to apply them immediately to, or rather within myself." Only by looking within, rather than at his deeds, could he discover his "essence," for here resided his "virtue."92 The Stoic pursuit of truth within would also leave a fundamental mark on the thought of Descartes.
And from this source also came the remedy for the disagreeable agitation of mind resulting from the trials of modern life. The Stoic humanist recognized that perturbation of mind was a response to external stimuli; but he also saw that, since it was in the mind, it was potentially subject to rational control. Augustinus criticized Franciscus for his distractability and called on him to concentrate his attention, with the clear implication that this was within his power.93 Philosophy, then, could quiet the wars of the self and induce a genuine and reliable tranquility of mind, as Pico argued.94 Vives identified this belief with the Gospel: "The immediate and direct goal of Christianity is to calm down the storm of human passions, thus to provide the soul with a joyful serenity which makes us similar to God and to the angels."95 It was in this sense that, for Pirckheimer, philosophy "[in Cicero's words] heals souls, dispels needless care, and banishes all fear."96 Calvin recognized the attractions of this Stoic teaching. "Peace, quiet, leisure especially serve pleasure and usefulness," he wrote, and identified Stoic tranquility with what "the theologians almost always call 'peace.'"97 Lipsius emphasized the intellectuality of the conception, the opposition it posited between reason and the affections. "Constancy," he declared, "is a proper and immovable strength of mind which is neither elevated nor depressed by external or casual accidents."98
At times the Stoic remedy for the evils of modern life found concrete application. Augustinus saw in it a better antidote for the problems of Franciscus than flight to the country; Stoic discipline would make it possible for him to live happily even in the city. "A soul serene and tranquil in itself," he observed, "fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world"; and he cited Seneca and Cicero to make the point that if "the tumult of your mind should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul."99 Lipsius turned to Stoic doctrine specifically as consolation for the disruption of his personal life by the wars in the Low Countries, which had forced him to flee from place to place.100 Stoicism was thus a doctrine of consolation not only for adversity in general; it was called forth by the particular troubles of the contemporary world, the chronic annoyances and indignities of urban life, and the acute dangers of war.
But it was also a regular and conscious feature of the Stoic prescription for human trouble that it was available only to the few; in practice Stoic humanism consistently rejected the implications of that vision of human brotherhood which had been one of the most genial features of ancient Stoicism. The aristocratic impulses in Renaissance society therefore found support in the powerful analogy between the order of the universe, the order of the human personality, and the social order, which suggested that society too must consist of both a higher rational principle and a lower, duller and less reliable component to which the higherforce, personified by an elite, was in the nature of things superior. The blessedness to which the Stoic aspired was available only to a select few capable of the rational enlightenment and self-discipline of the wise; the masses were condemned to the external and turbulent life of the body, the passions, the senses. And one of the marks of the Stoic humanist was his constant, rather nervous concern to differentiate himself from the vulgar crowd and to reassure himself, somewhat in the manner at times discerned in the Protestant elect, of his spiritual superiority.
From this standpoint one's opponents, whoever they might be, could represent the mob. Petrarch seems variously to have identified the crowd with the enemies of the poetic way to truth (presumably the schoolmen), with vulnerability to the blandishments of the more disreputable rhetoricians, and with popular piety, as well as (more conventionally) with "the rank scum that pursues the mechanic arts."101 Aeneas Sylvius, as Pius II, associated it with disrespect for the pope, in a passage that also invokes the Stoic longing for repose. "Some," he wrote of his enemies in Siena, "as is the way of the populace, even hurled abuse at him, and the ruling party actually hated him. The way of the world is certainly absurd with nothing about it fixed or stable." "Eloquence, like wisdom, like nobleness of life," he had written earlier, "is a gift of the minority."102 Pico feared that access to philosophy by the commonality would contaminate it.103 Erasmus made separation from the crowd one of his "General Rules of True Christianity": "This rule is that the mind of him who pants after Christ should disagree first with the deeds of the crowd, then with their opinions"; the mark of the philosopher is his contempt for "those things which the common herd goggles at" and his ability "to think quite differently from the opinions of the majority." That this was not altogether metaphorical is suggested by his indignation at Luther for "making public even to cobblers what is usually treated among the learned as mysterious and secret."104 Calvin, too, was impressed by the dangers of the crowd. "These are the unchanging epithets of the mob: factious, discordant, unruly , and not groundlessly applied!" he commented in connection with Seneca; and he proceeded to illustrate the point copiously from Roman history.105 For Montaigne dissociation from the crowd was an essential condition of intellectual freedom.106 The general ideal of the intellectual life in this tradition was well expressed by Charles de Bouelles: "The wise man who knows the secrets of nature is himself secret and spiritual. He lives alone, far from the common herd. Placed high above other men, he is unique, free, absolute, tranquil, pacific, immobile, simple, collected, one. He is perfect, consummated, happy."107
IV. The Augustinian Strain in the Renaissance
Stoicism, then, had both attractions and weaknesses as the basis for accommodation to the conditions of Renaissance life, and these were not unrelated to one another. It identified the major problems of modern existence, often vividly and concretely, as the schoolmen did not. It reaffirmed in a new form a traditional vision of universal order which seemed an attractive prescription for the practical evils of a singularly disorderly society. It affirmed personal responsibility, its inwardness corresponded to the growing inwardness of later medieval piety, and it promised consolation for the tribulations of existence. But the structure of assumptions that enabled Stoic humanism to perform these services was not altogether adequate to the changing needs of a new society. Its conception of a universal order was singularly contradicted by the concrete world of familiar experience, and its idealism, however plausible in theory, ran the risk of seeming as irrelevant to life as the great systems of the schoolmen. Its intellectual vision of man was hardly adequate to a world in which men constantly encountered each other not as disembodied minds but as integral personalities whose bodies could not be ignored, whose passions were vividly and often positively as well as dangerously in evidence, and whose actions were profoundly unpredictable. The Stoic idea of freedom was too elevated to have much general application, and also severely limited by the large area of determinism in Stoic thought. And Stoicism appeared often to ignore or to reason away rather than to engage with and solve the practical problems of life; its disapproval of cities, of political particularity and individual eccentricity, of change, demonstrated the high-mindedness of its adherents, but it did not cause these awkward realities to go away. And it was scarcely helpful, especially since even the Stoic had no remedy for the misery of the overwhelming majority of mankind, to deny that suffering was real because it belonged to the lower world of appearances, or to direct the attention of wretched men from mutable to eternal things, or to insist that the world ought to be one and to be ruled by the wise. Like ancient Stoicism, therefore, the Stoic humanism of the Renaissance was ultimately hopeless. It is thus hardly surprising that, like the Stoicism of the hellenistic world, it was contested, within humanism itself, by another and very different vision of man, his potentialities, and his place in the universe. The great patron of this vision was Saint Augustine.
Here too Petrarch's Secretum , which I have frequently exploited to illustrate the Stoic elements in humanist thought, is singularly instructive. For, despite the ambiguities of this work, which foreshadow the perennial tension between the Stoic and Augustinian impulses in the Renaissance, it makes one clear point. It calls back to life the great Latin father who had virtually disappeared from Dante's intellectual universe, and it recalls him, however dimly realized, as a person. The personal appearance of Augustine in Petrarch's world of thought, only a generation after the completion of the Divine Comedy , may thus be taken as a kind of watershed between medieval and Renaissance culture. But it also suggests the crucial polarities within humanism itself.
For although Petrarch often makes Augustine into an ancient sage, a spokesman for the commonplaces of hellenistic moral thought who repeatedly quotes Cicero, Seneca, and other Latin writers, the Scriptures hardly at all, and although the Franciscus of the dialogues often seems more truly Augustinian than Augustine himself, the work gives eloquent testimony to the need of an anguished man of the fourteenth century not only for abstract wisdom but for a direct encounter with another human being in the past whose spiritual experience, as an individual, might be a source of nourishment for himself. Petrarch's Augustinus, however equivocal, is in the end not Truth itself, for a direct encounter with truth, Petrarch suggests, is more than man can bear.108 He is a man, however venerable, who performs the role of one man with another. He listens and reacts to the confession of Franciscus, argues with him, not always successfully, and compels him to look more deeply and honestly into himself.
This humanization of Augustine, however incomplete, was a notable achievement. Because Augustine was a Christian, a saint, and still the most venerated source of religious wisdom in the West outside of Scripture itself, he provided the ultimate test for a typically Renaissance impulse, which Petrarch applied more successfully to such pagan worthies as Cicero or Seneca, and even to Aristotle. That he could manage it at all with Augustine testifies to the intensity of a new vision of existence even in its earliest stages. A fresh breeze had begun to blow in the old European atmosphere.
The uses of Augustine in the Renaissance did not always reflect this new awareness of his personality. He continued, with some regularity, to be cited in the old way as a guarantor of the highest truths. The later fifteenth-century Roman humanist Benedetto Morandi, for example, thought it "not only wicked but foolhardy" to oppose him;109 and Melanchthon generally thought (though he did not always adhere to this opinion) that agreement with Augustine was virtually identical with Christian orthodoxy.110 But it became increasingly common to praisehim for his eloquence,111 a human competence in which Renaissance rhetoricians might aspire to emulate him, or to call attention to dimensions of his personality or his earthly life, a tendency not confined to humanists. Gerson described his own mother as a "Saint Monica,"112 and Vives observed that "if Augustine lived now, he would be considered a pedant or a petty orator."113 And it became possible to take issue with Augustine, at least by implication; Poggio testifies to this in his attack on the presumption of Valla in implying that "the blessed Augustine also (such is the pride of this man, or rather of this brute) would have fallen into error about fate, the Trinity, and divine providence."114 So thoroughgoing an Augustinian as Staupitz thought that Augustine "had no idea of the depths of the mystery of the Incarnation."115
But the humanization of Augustinianism has a larger significance for our purposes. It directs us to a crucial difference between Stoic and Augustinian humanism and helps to explain the very different order in which it is necessary, in the following pages, to analyze the latter. With Stoicism we must begin with the cosmos, and this in turn implies a certain view of man. But with Augustinianism we must begin with man, and from here we reach a certain view of the cosmos.116 In Augustinian humanism the nature and experience of man himself limit what can be known about the larger universes to which man belongs and how he can accommodate to them.
Thus Augustinian humanism saw man, not as a system of objectively distinguishable, discrete faculties reflecting ontological distinctions in the cosmos, but as a mysterious and organic unity. This conception, despite every tendency in his thought to the contrary, is repeatedly apparent in Petrarch, in the Secretum and elsewhere, and it explains Melanchthon's indifference to the value of distinguishing the various faculties of the human personality.117 One result was a marked retreat from the traditional sense of opposition between soul and body. Bruni found support for the notion of their interdependence in Aristotle,118 and Valla, as Maffeo Vegio, vigorously rejected the possibility of distinguishing the pleasures of the soul from those of the body;119 Pomponazzi's notorious refutation of the soul's immortality must be understood against this background. A corollary of this position is that the soul cannot be seen as a higher faculty in man, a spark of divinity which is intrinsically immune from sin and can only be corrupted from below. Petrarch confessed that, in the end, his troubles came rather from his soul than his body;120 and Calvin was only applying this insight in his insistence that the Fall of Adam had its origins in deeper regions of the personality. "They childishly err," he wrote against a hellenistic understanding of Christianity, "who regard original sin as consisting only in lust and in the disorderly motion of the appetites, whereas it seizes upon the very seat of reason and upon the whole heart."121 It follows, therefore, that the distinctive quality of man cannot be his reason. Valla identified it with his immortality,122 Calvin with his capacity to know and worship God.123 It also follows that the abstract knowledge grasped by reason is not sufficient to make men virtuous and therefore blessed, a point made with considerable emphasis by Petrarch in praising oratory above philosophy; thus Aristotle suffered as a moralist in comparison with Cicero, whom Petrarch now exploited in his less Stoic mood.124 Since to know the good could no longer be identified with doing the good, it might also now be necessary to make a choice between knowledge and virtue, and the Augustinian humanist regularly came out on the side of virtue.
Despite their underlying belief in the integral unity of the personality, the Augustinian humanists accepted and argued in terms of the old vocabulary of the faculties; but the faculties they chose to emphasize implied a very different conception of the organization of man from that of the Stoics. They spoke above all of the will. Petrarch recognized clearly that Augustine's own conversion had been a function of his will rather than his intellect,125 and Calvin was similarly Augustinian in recognizing the crucial importance of the will in the economy of salvation.126 But the essential point in this conception of the will was its separation from and its elevation above reason. "It is safer," Petrarch declared, "to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. . . . It is better to will the good than to know the truth."127 Melanchthon was developing the implications of this view in saying that "knowledge serves the will. . . . For the will in man corresponds to the place of a despot in a republic. Just as the senate is subject to the despot, so is knowledge to the will, with the consequence that although knowledge gives warning, yet the will casts knowledge out and is borne along by its own affection."128 One consequence was a new degree of freedom for the will, always severely restricted by the Stoic conception of the will as the automatic servant of reason. Salutati recognized this with particular clarity. Nothing, he wrote, could "even reach the intellect without the consent or command of the will," and once knowledge had penetrated the intellect, the will could freely follow or disregard it.129 Valla saw in the freedom of the will the only conception of the matter consistent with the evident reality of sin, which would be impossible, and man would be deprived of responsibility and moral dignity, if reason in fact ruled will.130 The will, in this view, is seen to take its direction not from reason but from the affections, which are in turn not merely the disorderly impulses of the treacherous body but expressions of the energy and quality of the heart, that mysterious organ which is the center of the personality, the source of its unity and its ultimate worth. The affections, therefore, are intrinsically neither good nor evil but the essential resources of the personality; and since they make possible man's beatitude and glory as well as his depravity, they are, in Augustinian humanism, treated with particular respect. Thus even when Augustinus recommended Franciscus to meditate on the eternal verities, he called on him to invest his thought with affect, as a necessary sign that he has not meditated in vain.131 Valla was especially emphatic about the positive quality of the passions, a primary consideration both in his perception of the particular importance of oratorical as opposed to philosophical communication and in the understanding of Christianity. "Can a man move his listeners to anger or mercy if he has not himself first felt these passions?" he asked. "It cannot be," he continued; "So he will not be able to kindle the love of divine things in the minds of others who is himself cold to that love."132 For Valla religious experience was not intellectual but affective; the love of God is to be understood as man's ultimate pleasure. Calvin was working out the same line of thought in arguing, against the schools, that "the assent which we give to the divine word . . . is more of the heart than the brain, and more of the affections than the understanding. . . . faith is absolutely inseparable from a devout affection."133 Prayer, he observed in the Geneva Confession, "is nothing but hypocrisy and fantasy unless it proceed from the interior affections of the heart";134 and because of its power to rouse the heart he vigorously supported congregational singing.135 Melanchthon remarked on the irrepressible power of the affections: "When an affection has begun to rage and seethe, it cannot be kept from breaking forth."136 Against the scholastic view of the affections as a "weakness of nature," he argued that, on the contrary, "the heart and its affections must be the highest and most powerful part of man." Thus he saw that the consequence of control over the affections (if such control were truly possible) would be not rationality but insincerity, the presentation not of a higher and rational self to the world but of an inauthentic self.137 We may find in this psychological discussion, therefore, a shrewd contribution to Renaissance concern, another reflection of social disruption, with the problems of friendship and hypocrisy.
This sense of the power and positive value of the passions was frequently the basis of an explicit attack on the Stoic ideal of apatheia , apoint on which Stoicism seemed peculiarly unconvincing. Salutati doubted that "any mortal ever attained to such perfection besides Christ."138 Brandolini denied that Stoic virtue could be truly divine because of its rejection of feeling, "for whoever lack affects necessarily lack virtues."139 Erasmus denounced Stoic apathy in the Praise of Folly ,140 as did the young Calvin, citing Augustine; the older Calvin also attacked "the foolish description given by the ancient Stoics of 'the great-souled man'" and also denounced "new Stoics who count it depraved not only to groan and weep but also to be sad and care-ridden." We, he declared, citing Christ's tears, "have nothing to do with this iron-hearted philosophy."141
This same vision of man relieved the body of its old responsibility for evil and dignified its needs. Calvin particularly emphasized the error of associating sin primarily with the body; this mistake tended to make men "easily forgive themselves the most shocking vices as no sins at all." He traced the growth of this error historically, from the philosophers of antiquity, "till at length man was commonly thought to be corrupted only in his sensual part, and to have a perfectly unblemished reason and a will also largely unimpaired."142 Such a view required a fresh understanding of the Pauline meaning of "flesh." It had to be construed, not narrowly as the physical body, but more broadly as those tendencies that alienated every part of man from God.143 Melanchthon thought that "flesh" must especially signify reason, the site of unbelief.144
At the same time the impulses of the body could be viewed more tolerantly. Augustinus waived, for Franciscus, the strict Stoic doctrine regarding man's physical needs in favor of the golden mean,145 and Calvin argued that "God certainly did not intend that man should be slenderly and sparingly sustained; but rather . . . he promises a liberal abundance, which should leave nothing wanting to a sweet and pleasant life."146 He insisted on the legitimacy of pleasure, at least in moderation; severity on this score would lead to "the very dangerous error of fettering consciences more tightly than does the word of the Lord." Calvin was thinking of the monks, but the point applied equally to Stoic moralism.147 It applied especially to sex, so often the special worry of traditional moralists because of its association with the body. Civic humanism had long applauded the family as the source of new citizens, and Valla had suggested a positive view of sex because it gave pleasure. But the sense, among the Augustinian humanists, of the integrity of the personality also provided a deeper foundation for the value of the sexual bond. As Bucer declared, "There is no true marriage without a true assent of hearts between those who make the agreement," and marriageis accordingly "a contract not only of body and of goods but also of the soul."148 Calvin praised marriage, attributing disapproval of it to "immoderate affection for virginity."149 A higher estimate of the body and of sex led also to some perception of the dignity of women.150
This better view of the body had even wider ramifications. It was related to Renaissance debate over the value of the active life, for the alleged inferiority of activity to contemplation assumed the inferiority to the mind of the body, which does the active business of the world. It also had deep theological significance, for it redirected attention from the immortality of the soul to the resurrection of the body; the more Augustinian humanist was likely to emphasize the central importance of the resurrection. Thus, although Petrarch often spoke of the soul, he had also learned "the hope of resurrection, and that this very body after death will be reassumed, indeed agile, shining, and inviolable, with much glory in the resurrection."151 Calvin saw with particular clarity (and here his relation to Pomponazzi is evident) that "the life of the soul without hope of resurrection will be a mere dream."152 And this Augustinian anthropology also posed the question of human freedom and man's need for grace in a new way. If it freed the will from obedience to reason, it perceived that this only meant the bondage of the will to the affections of the heart. And this meant that man can only be saved by grace, not by knowledge; for knowledge can at best reach only the mind, but grace alone can change the heart.153
It thus precluded the natural theology towards which Stoic humanism tended; its theology regularly opposed the folly of the cross to the rational wisdom of the philosophers.154 Augustinus thus urged on Franciscus the irrelevance to his own deepest needs of that knowledge of nature on whose religious significance the Stoic set so much store.155 In reply to his own more Stoic vision of the order of the universe, Calvin insisted on the actual inability of men, as the vain and contradictory speculations of the philosophers clearly demonstrated, to discover religious truths from nature.156 Valla had argued that philosophy was the mother of heresy.157 The Augustinian humanist was clear that, however valuable they might be for other purposes, the classics, based on reason alone, were valueless for Christianity. There was, Petrarch suggested, a qualitative difference between knowledge and faith, which he saw as something like the difference between seeing and listening: the difference, that is to say, between learning by means of one's own natural powers and learning directly, and so with peculiar certainty, from God.158 Thus an Augustinian anthropology was fundamental to the new emphasis among humanists on the Bible, on the "school of the Gospel,"
which Budé contrasted with the Stoa as well as the Academy and the "subtle debates of the Peripatetics."159
Ultimate truth, then, is mysterious, beyond rational comprehension, and therefore first planted in the heart by grace, not discovered by the mind. "It is not man's part to investigate the celestial mystery through his own powers," Petrarch declared after emphasizing the gulf between God the creator and man his creature;160 and Petrarch's sense of the incalculability of the world was carried by Salutati to a more general skepticism. "Every truth which is grasped by reason," Salutati wrote, "can be made doubtful by a contrary reason"; consequently man's rational knowledge cannot be absolute but, at best, is "a kind of reasonable uncertainty."161 Valla humanized knowledge by representing truth as a matter not of objective certainty but of believing and feeling "concerning things as they themselves are."162 And this notion of truth was hardly appropriate to the kind of conviction required by the Gospel. Accordingly philosophy, when it approached religious questions, was, for Melanchthon, a "chaos of carnal dreams"; the sacred mysteries, he insisted, should be adored, not investigated.163 Calvin, since "human reason neither approaches, nor strives, nor takes straight aim" toward religious truth, suggested that a skeptical agnosticism was the best posture for men without revelation: "Here man's discernment is so overwhelmed and so fails that the first step of advancement in the school of the Lord is to renounce it."164 This skepticism is obviously fundamental to the humanist case for the superiority of rhetoric to philosophy; like Scripture, rhetoric recognized the weakness of reason and spoke to the heart.
The Augustinian humanist recognized a very different tendency in Stoicism and occasionally displayed some insight into the affinities of Stoicism with medieval intellectuality. Valla sometimes used "Stoicism" to represent philosophy in general, by which he meant both ancient and medieval philosophy;165 and Brandolini pointed to the rational (and for him specious) methodology which the Stoics shared with "almost all the philosophers and theologians of our time."166 Calvin noted the "Stoic paradoxes and scholastic subtleties" in Seneca.167 Here, then, is another area in which the tensions between Stoic and Augustinian humanism were threatening to break out into the open.
But all this was evidently the reflection of a more general insistence, within Augustinian humanism, on man's absolute dependence on his creator, which contrasted sharply with the Stoic tendency to emphasize man's sufficiency. This sense of human dependence is especially apparent in the Augustinian attitude to virtue, the supreme good of the Stoic.
Valla thought the Stoic ideal of the sage a contradiction in terms, if only because the triumph of virtue implied constant struggle; Stoic serenity was therefore unattainable.168 Brandolini doubted that virtue could overcome suffering.169 The examples of ancient virtue adduced as models by the Stoic humanist thus required some analysis. It might be remarked in general, as Petrarch and Erasmus did, that "true" virtue could not be attributed to any pagan, since his actions were obviously not done in the love of Christ.170 Valla went beyond such generality to suggest that pagan virtue was vitiated by its concern for glory,171 a point the young Calvin also emphasized. "Remove ambition," he wrote, "and you will have no haughty spirits, neither Platos, nor Catos, nor Scaevolas, nor Scipios, nor Fabriciuses." He saw the Roman Empire as "a great robbery," a notion also bearing on the Stoic ideal of a universal state.172 Melanchthon viewed the virtues that enabled Alexander to conquer an empire simply as evidence that he loved glory more than pleasure.173 These humanists did not deny the practical value of the alleged virtues of the pagans, but they insisted on distinguishing between the restraint of human nature and its purification, which only grace could accomplish. From this standpoint the Stoic ideal was shallow and therefore, in the end, unreliable. Christianity, as Melanchthon remarked, was not primarily concerned with virtue, and the pursuit of instruction on this topic in the Scriptures "is more philosophical than Christian."174
In fact a deeper knowledge of the self revealed that, like his knowledge of God, man's virtue and happiness also come entirely from God. To realize this was the goal of self-knowledge. Such knowledge, Calvin declared, "will strip us of all confidence in our own ability, deprive us of all occasion for boasting, and lead us to submission";175 and Petrarch's own spiritual biography may be understood as a prolonged search for this kind of knowledge. It taught man, for example, the precise opposite of Stoic wisdom. Against the Stoic notion that blessedness can be founded only on the things that are man's own, Petrarch argued directly that in fact the only things that are a man's own are his sins; thus "in what is in one's own power" there is chiefly "matter of shame and fear."176 There is an obvious connection between this interest in self-knowledge and the Pauline teaching on the moral law as the tutor of mankind, a conception again quite at odds with the Stoic notion of the function of law. If Petrarch's self-knowledge brought him to despair, he could take hope if only "the Almighty Pity put forth his strong right hand and guide my vessel rightly ere it be too late, and bring me to shore." God was the only source of his virtues (these are clearly not hisown), of his blessedness, of his very existence: "In what state could I better die than in loving, praising, and remembering him, without whose constant love I should be nothing, or damned, which is less than nothing? And if his love for me should cease, my damnation would have no end."177 Peace itself, the essence of Stoic beatitude, could only be the consequence, not of "some human virtue," Brandolini contended, but of grace.178
But there are, for the general development of European culture, even broader implications in the sense, within Augustinian humanism, of man's intellectual limitations. It pointed to the general secularization of modern life, for it implied the futility of searching for the principles of human order in the divine order of the cosmos, which lay beyond human comprehension. Man was accordingly now seen to inhabit not a single universal order governed throughout by uniform principles but a multiplicity of orders: for example, an earthly as well as a heavenly city, which might be seen to operate in quite different ways. On earth, unless God had chosen to reveal his will about its arrangements unequivocally in Scripture, man was left to the uncertain and shifting insights of a humbler kind of reason, to work out whatever arrangements best suited his needs. Hence a sort of earthy practicality was inherent in this way of looking at the human condition.
Indeed it is likely that the sharp Augustinian distinction between creation and Creator, since it denied the enternity of the universe, also promoted that secularization of the cosmos implicit in the Copernican revolution. If human order no longer depended on the intelligible order of the cosmos, the motive for discerning any such order was seriously weakened; conversely much of the resistance to Copernicanism stemmed from a concern, so strong in Stoic humanism, to protect a universal order that supplied mankind with general guidance for its earthly arrangements. Galileo relied heavily on Augustine to support his argument that the proper concern of religion is how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.179
If Machiavelli is the most famous example of the secularizing tendency in the Renaissance, he also had predecessors among earlier humanists of an Augustinian tendency. But the secularism implicit in Augustinian humanism achieved its clearest articulation in figures connected with the Reformation, not because Protestantism originated the secular impulse, but because, since Stoic arguments had been a major resource to support the old order, they now required a more direct attack. Calvin distinguished with particular clarity between the heavenly and earthly realms and the kinds of knowledge appropriate to each:There is one understanding of earthly things; another of heavenly ones. I call those things earthly which do not pertain to God and his kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life, and are in some sense confined within the limits of it. Heavenly things are the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom. The first class includes government, domestic economy, all the mechanical skills and the liberal arts. In the second are the knowledge of God and of his will, and the rule by which we conform our lives to it.
He was emphatic about the separation between the two, whose correspondence had been so long cited in support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. There was no basis, he declared, "to philosophize subtly over a comparison of the heavenly and earthly hierarchies," thus challenging not only the Neoplatonism of Dionysius but also the fundamental principles of Stoic world order.180 By the same token he had no use for idealistic prescriptions for earthly order; he dismissed utopia as "a foolish fantasy the Jews had."181 For Melanchthon "the civil and external dispensation of things has nothing to do with the Spirit's righteousness, no more than do plowing a field, building, or cobbling shoes."182 This was not to deny the utility of humbler things but rather to assert that they worked best when it was recognized that they belong to a sphere of their own.
The pragmatic secularism to which Augustinian humanism pointed opposed the political idealism of Stoic humanism in all its dimensions: its belief in the universal principles needed to validate all government, its universalism, its insistence on the rule of the wise, its indifference to changing circumstance, its pacifism. Bruni gave concrete expression to the secularist mood in his own acceptance, without setting them in a larger framework of objective justification, of the common political values of Florence. "I confess that I am moved by what men think good," he wrote in his Florentine Histories: "to extend one's borders, to increase one's power, to extol the splendor and glory of the city, to look after its utility and security."183 Here is the Machiavellian principle that the affairs of this world should be based on the dynamic interplay of earthly interests whose sordid realities are honestly faced; in short, the eternal reason of the Stoics must, for the practical good of men on earth, give way to reason of state.
This signified that laws and institutions must be accommodated to the variety of the human condition, and thus the desirability of many states with various kinds of government. This, rather than a universalempire, was, for Calvin, what God had intended. "If you fix your eye not on one city alone he wrote, "but look round and glance at the world as a whole, or at least cast your sight upon regions farther off, divine providence has wisely arranged that various countries should be ruled by various kinds of government. For as elements cohere only in unequal proportion, so countries are best held together according to their own particular inequality." By the same token civil laws are not primarily the reflection of eternal law but should vary according to practical circumstance. "Every nation," Calvin declared, "is left free to make such laws as it foresees to be profitable for itself."184 Melanchthon carried this relativism to extremes, finding in it the most likely guarantor of earthly order:
Indeed, the political art covers external action in life. concerning possessions, contracts, and such like, and these are not the same among all nations. Laws are of one kind among the Persians, of another in Athens, or in Rome. Accordingly a Christian dresses differently in one part of the world than in another, reckons days differently in one place than he does in another. Whatever the policy of the place, that he uses; as Ezra judges cases according to Persian law when in Persia, so in Jerusalem he judges according to Jewish law. These things do not belong to the Gospel, any more than do clothes or the spacing of days. This distinction between the Gospel and political affairs is conducive to maintaining tranquility and increasing reverence for the magistrates.185
Augustinian humanism was thus closely related, as Stoic humanism was not, to the political realities of contemporary Europe.
In the same way Augustinian humanism attacked the spiritual elitism of the Stoic tradition, both in its loftier forms and in its application to government; and it was thus more sympathetic to those populist movements that found religious expression in the dignity of lay piety, political expression in the challenge of republicanism to despotism. For it was obvious that if rational insight into cosmic order could not supply the principles of either religious or political life, neither the church nor civil society could be governed by sages. This conviction had deep roots in Italian humanism. Charles Trinkaus has presented at least one group of humanists as lay theologians who were concerned to assert the religious competence of ordinary men by their emphasis on Christianity as a religion of grace accessible to all.186 Valla contrasted the exclusiveness of Stoicism with the popularity of Epicureanism,187 and he rested his case for eloquence against philosophy largely on the fact that it employedthe language of ordinary men rather than the specialized vocabulary of an elite who "teach us by an exquisite sort of reasoning both to inquire and answer, which illiterates and rustics do better than philosophers."188 There is a hint of this attitude even in Castiglione, who was willing to leave the evaluation of his Courtier to public opinion "because more often than not the many, even without perfect knowledge, know by natural instinct the certain savor of good and bad, and, without being able to give any reason for it, enjoy and love one thing and detest another."189 Augustinian humanism denied any privileged position to a philosophically enlightened class. Calvin attacked the monks on the basis of the equality of all callings before God and broke with traditional humanist elitism by praising the manual as well as the liberal arts.190 For the church this tendency would culminate in the priesthood of all believers. Melanchthon minimized the specialized competence of the clergy,191 and Calvin insisted on the popular election of ministers "so as not to diminish any part of the common right and liberty of the church."192 For civil society this impulse meant the rejection of theocracy, and a fully secular government. "Just as Socrates, at the beginning of the Republic , sent poets out of the state," Melanchthon asserted, "so we would not eject the theologians from the state but we would remove them from the governing group of the commonwealth,"193 a principle also applied in the Italian republics. Calvin's preference for a republic over other forms of government is well known. "This is the most desirable kind of liberty," he wrote, "that we should not be compelled to obey every person who may be tyrannically put over our heads, but which allows of election, so that no one should rule except he be approved of us."194 This position did not preclude social hierarchy, but it meant that differences in status among men could only be seen as an accident of history; they are not rooted in the order of the universe, and accordingly social structures can be modified as needs change.
So the willingness to accommodate human institutions to the varieties of circumstance also implied a willingness to acknowledge the significance of change in human affairs. "Now we know," Calvin declared, "that external order admits, and even requires, various changes according to the varying conditions of the times."195 The historicism of the Renaissance, to which recent scholarship has given much attention, was distinctly not a function of the Stoic tendencies in humanism, which could only view mutability with alarm, but rather of the Augustinian tradition, in which God's purposes were understood to work themselves out in time. Thus for Salutati God "foresaw all that was and will be in time entirely without time and from eternity, and not only did he infallibly foresee and wish that they occur in their time, but also that through contingency they should be produced and be."196 Contingency was no longer a threat to order but the fulfillment of a divine plan, and discrete events thus acquired meaning. This repudiation of Stoic stasis opened the way to the feeling for anachronism that we encounter not only in Valla's analysis of the Donation of Constantine and Guicciardini's attack on Machiavelli's rather Stoic application of the repetition of analogous situations but also in a more general relativism that left its mark on Calvin's understanding of church history and on his exegetical methods. He saw the rise of episcopacy, for example, as a practical response to the problem of dissension in the early church, an "arrangement introduced by human agreement to meet the needs of the times"; and he noted that there are "many passages of Scripture whose meaning depends on their [historical] context."197 For Calvin fallen man seems to confront God in history rather than in nature.
At the same time these tendencies in Augustinian humanism also suggest the repudiation of the Stoic vision of peace as the ideal toward which man naturally aspires. This too was an expression of the greater realism in the Augustinian tradition; it had no conflict in principle with the acceptance by Renaissance society of warfare as a normal activity of mankind.198 Within the Renaissance republic conflict had been institutionalized by constitutional provisions for checks and balances among competing social interests;199 the Stoic ideal, on the contrary, would have sought to eliminate conflict by submitting all interests to the adjudication of reason, settling for nothing less than final solutions to human problems. And the restlessness of human society was paralleled, in the vision of Augustinian humanism, by the inescapable restlessness of individual existence. The Augustinian conception of man as passion and will implied that he could only realize himself fully in activity, which inevitably meant that life must be fraught with conflict, an external struggle with other men, but also an inner struggle with destructive impulses in the self that can never be fully overcome. For Valla virtue was only ideally a goal; practically it was an arduous way.200 And the Calvinist saint, unlike the Stoic sage, could by no means expect a life of repose; on the contrary he must prepare himself "for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with numerous and various calamities. . . . in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle."201 The ideal of earthly peace, from Calvin's standpoint, was a diabolical stratagem in which the struggle with sin was left in abeyance and God's will went undone. Here too it was apparent that Stoicism tended to confuse earthly with heavenly things.
Yet, far less equivocally than Stoic humanism, the vision of Augustinian humanism was social; and, based on the affective life of the whole man, its conception of social existence was animated not by abstract duty but by love. Augustinus reproved the anti-social sentiments of Franciscus by pointing out that life in society is not only the common lot of mankind but even the most blessed life on earth: "Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others."202 Salutati found in charity, understood in an Augustinian sense as a gift of divine grace, a way to reconcile—that there should have been a problem here testifies to the strength of the contrary Stoic impulse—his religious values with his love of Florence and his other attachments to the world. Love alone, he wrote, "fosters the family, expands the city, guards the kingdom, and preserves by its power this very creation of the entire world."203 Thus Stoic withdrawal was countered by Augustinian engagement, which offered not the austere satisfactions of Stoic contemplation but the warmer and more practical consolations of a love applied to the needs of suffering mankind. Zwingli was writing in this tradition in describing the moral ends of education. "From early boyhood," he declared, "the young man ought to exercise himself only in righteousness, fidelity, and constancy: for with virtues such as these he may serve the Christian community, the common good, the state, and individuals. Only the weak are concerned to find a quiet life: the most like to God are those who study to be of profit to all even to their own hurt."204 Calvin, who was explicit that man is by nature a social animal, saw in the limitations of individual knowledge a device by which God sought to insure human community. "God" he wrote, "has never so blessed his servants that they each possessed full and perfect knowledge of every part of their subject. It is clear that his purpose in so limiting our knowledge was first that we should be kept humble, and also that we should continue to have dealings with our fellows." Because of the needs of social existence he early rejected Stoic contempt for reputation; conscience was by itself an insufficient guide for human conduct, he argued, because, strictly a private and individual faculty, it was likely, operating in a social void, to cut man off from his neighbor. For Calvin the struggles of the Christian life were above all required by loving service to the human community.205 Augustinian humanism sought to meet the crisis of community in the age of the Renaissance not by protecting the individual from destructive involvement with the social world but by full engagement, if possible out of love, in meeting its deepest and most desperate needs.
V. Stoic and Augustinian Humanism: From Ambiguity to Dialectic
At least two general conclusions emerge from this contrast between Stoic and Augustinian humanism. The first comes out of the fact that we can illustrate either with examples drawn indiscriminately from anywhere in the entire period of our concern, and this suggests that the tension between them found no general resolution in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. But it is equally striking that we have often cited the same figures on both sides. Neither pure Stoics nor pure Augustinians are easy to find among the humanists, though individual figures may tend more to one position than the other. Erasmus, for example, seems more Stoic than Augustinian; Valla appears more Augustinian than Stoic. A closer study of individuals may reveal more personal development, from one position to another, than it has been possible to show here. Petrarch, Erasmus, and Calvin may especially invite such treatment. But the general ambivalence of humanists makes clear the central importance for the movement of the tension between the two positions. It was literally in the hearts of the humanists themselves. At the same time this ambiguity also reveals that Stoicism and Augustinianism do not represent distinguishable factions within a larger movement but ideal polarities that help us to understand its significance as a whole.
Yet I suggest that we can discern in this confrontation, if not a clear resolution, at least some instructive patterns of development. The humanism of the earlier Renaissance uneasily blended Stoic and Angustinian impulses which it neither distinguished clearly nor, in many cases, was capable of identifying with their sources. Its Augustinianism consisted of a bundle of personal insights that had, indeed, legitimate affinities with Augustine himself, as Petrarch vaguely sensed; but its Stoicism was singularly confused. Whatever Stoicism may have meant to Valla, his Cato Sacco, who probably is intended to represent the contemporary understanding of Stoicism, offers little more than a set of clichés about the misery of man and the malevolence of nature, hardly a legitimate Stoic idea; it is chiefly his emphasis on virtue that stamps him as a "Stoic." Conversely there is more genuine Stoicism in Maffeo Vegio, Valla's Epicurean, who defends the rational order of nature.206 This seems to suggest that earlier Renaissance humanism, until the middle decades of the quattrocento, was profoundly confused about the variety in hellenistic thought, and confused as well about the gulf between antique paganism and the biblical world of ideas represented by the mature Augustine. Its historical sense was not yet adequate to sort out basic polarities.
But there were also resources within the Petrarchan tradition for overcoming this confusion. They are suggested by Petrarch's recall of Augustine in the Secretum as a vital personality whose personal experience and peculiar mode of thought can be apprehended in all their particularity by the philological imagination. Petrarch himself gave a large impetus to the novel tendency of Renaissance humanism to associate schools of thought with individual personalities, to dissolve the identity of ancient philosophy as a whole with a perennial wisdom and thus up to a point with Christianity itself, to sort out one school from another, and so to see every set of ideas, individually identified, as a product of the human mind at work under the limitations of historical circumstance. On this basis Petrarch was compelled to recognize (quoting Augustine) that no ancient philosopher, not Aristotle or even Plato, could be fully trusted for the truth; and he laid down an important principle for clarifying the understanding of the ancient philosophers, whom he characteristically insisted on regarding as men. "Far be it from me," he wrote, "to espouse the genius of a single man in its totality because of one or two well-formulated phrases. Philosophers must not be judged from isolated words but from their uninterrupted coherence and consistency. . . . He who wants to be safe in praising the entire man must see, examine, and estimate the entire man."207
We can begin to discern something of the implications of this principle in Salutati. "To harmonize Aristotle with Cicero and Seneca, that is the Peripatetics with the Stoics, is," he observed, "a great deal more difficult than you think."208 But the point had a larger resonance; it tended to dissolve not only the bonds that hellenistic syncretism had forged among the various schools of philosophy but also those between philosophic and Christian wisdom. It may also be observed that this impulse to sort out one strand of thought from another came not from the Stoic strain in the European inheritance, which was itself permeated by an opposite motive, but from an Augustinian recognition of the conflict between the pagan (and clearly human) and the Christian worlds of thought. In the early Renaissance this impulse was most fully developed by Valla, who recognized the eclectic confusion in Stoicism itself and thus significantly reduced its authority.209 Valla defended eclecticism, but he did so playfully, in full awareness of its philosophical deficiencies, and on behalf of the rhetorician rather than the philosopher. His treatment of Stoicism and Epicureanism was designed primarily to demonstrate the peculiar identity of Christianity, not its affinities with the rational systems of antiquity. And his own philological acumen provided the instrument for a further development of the historical sensitivity that made it increasingly difficult for the Renaissance humanist to persist in the confusions of the earlier stages of the humanist movement.
We encounter evidence of greater sophistication about ancient philosophy and its bearing on Christianity in various places after Valla, some of them unexpected. Later humanists increasingly perceived the differences rather than the agreements among the various schools of antiquity.210 Savonarola, who as a Dominican could hardly have been expected to look kindly on Plato, protested against the effort to make either Plato or—more surprisngly—Aristotle into a Christian. "It is to be wished that Plato should be Plato, Aristotle Aristotle, and not that they should be Christian. . . . Let philosophers be philosophers and Christians Christians."211 Erasmus, at other moments something of a Platonist, similarly protested the notion that Plato (or any other pagan writer) could have written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He also denied the authenticity of the letters between Seneca and Paul, on which some part of the affinity between Stoicism and the Gospel was thought to depend; and he insisted, though venerating him still, that Seneca be read as a pagan who, if this were not clearly recognized, might otherwise mislead the Christian reader.212 Here Erasmus displayed a concern for the individuality of the historical personality that was also reflected in the first volume of his edition of Augustine, in which he began with the Confessions and Retractions , on the ground, so alien from medieval thought, that it is necessary, in order to comprehend a writer, to have some preliminary knowledge of his biography and the general scope of his work.213
But the perception of differences did not automatically lead to the elimination of pagan elements from what was taken as the Christian tradition. Sometimes, as with Pico, it resulted in a more self-conscious and enthusiastic acceptance of the syncretist principle, which was given new life in the Neoplatonism of the later Italian Renaissance. And while Neoplatonism continued to reflect impulses central to the Stoicism of the earlier Renaissance, Stoicism itself remained attractive, with the possible difference that it could now be appropriated more consciously and deliberately. Traversari was attracted to the Stoic notion of virtue because he believed that it reinforced monastic life,214 and Pico supported the Gospel with precepts from Seneca.215 Pomponazzi underwent a late conversion from Aristotelianism to Stoicism, Stoic elements in the thought of Machiavelli were prominent enough to stimulate refutation by Guicciardini (himself not untouched by Stoicism), Erasmus and above all Vives were heavily influenced by the Stoics, and Clichetove's ideal for the priesthood resurrects something of the Stoic conception of thesage.216 Meanwhile in Italy, Augustinianism, or at least the kind of Augustinianism that had attracted the earlier Renaissance, seems to have undergone some decline. Augustine was of major importance for Ficino, as he was for Giles of Viterbo, but chiefly because he seemed helpful to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. He was also more generally important to support the notion of a perennially valid "ancient theology," one of the less "Augustinian" uses to which he could have been put.217 The reasons for this shift must be sought in the growing insecurity and disorder of later fifteenth-century Italy, which at once increased the attractions of Stoic consolation and Stoic emphasis on order and control, and at the same time decreased opportunities for the individual activity and social engagement called for by the mature Augustine.
But not all of Europe felt similarly damaged, and the Protestant Reformation stimulated some humanists to resume the debate between Augustinianism and Stoicism. The link between this tendency in Protestantism and Renaissance humanism may be discerned in the high degree of philological and historical sophistication in the thought of the Reformers. Melanchthon was peculiarly sensitive to the infiltration of Christian doctrine by Greek philosophy, and he traced the process from the Fathers (with the partial exception of Augustine) to the contemporary schoolmen. Though, like most subsequent historians of medieval philosophy, he discerned in it first a Platonic and then an Aristotelian phase, the essential elements of his indictment apply equally to the central assumptions of Stoicism: to its emphasis on the power of reason and accordingly on the self-sufficiency of man, especially man's ability to procure his own salvation.218 On the other hand he humanized Augustine, whom he could perhaps admire precisely because Augustine had been aware of his own fallibility, recognized his mistakes, and changed his mind. Melanchthon recognized the relation between Augustine's opinions and the concrete historical circumstances that had produced them. Augustine was for Melanchthon, as Petrarch had tried to see him, not the personification of reason, but a person.219
The same point can be made even more strongly about Calvin. Augustine had helped him, even as a youth, to recognize the vanity in ancient disputes about the supreme good.220 And his instincts for distinguishing between the philosophical residues in the thought of Augustine and the biblical dimensions of his thought were unusually sound. He paid small attention to Augustine's earlier, more philosophical compositions, though he otherwise drew massively on the works of Augustine; he disliked his allegorizing and his more speculative flights; and he thought him "excessively addicted to the philosophy of Plato," sothat (for example) he had misunderstood the Johannine Logos.221 But if Augustine did not interest him as a philosopher, Calvin was profoundly impressed by him as a theologian—and as a person. His respect for Augustine as a historical personality compelled him to insist on absolute fidelity—again we hear the authentic Renaissance note—to the intentions, and so to the full context, of any pronouncement of Augustine. "If I pervert his words into any other sense than Saint Augustine intended in writing them," he declared against his opponents, "may they not only attack me as usual but also spit in my face."222 His sensitivity to what was authentically Augustinian made him particularly effective in sorting out genuine from pseudo-Augustinian writings, an exercise in which he made some improvement over Erasmus. He exploited his knowledge of Augustine's changes of mind against his Catholic enemies who still, apparently, thought an Augustinian pronouncement from any period in the saint's life equally representative of his views.223 But above all Augustine was for Calvin a model of the open, developing spiritual life, of the mind in movement which we have seen as perhaps the central feature in Augustine's significance for the Renaissance. In the 1543 edition of the Institutes he included the quintessentially Augustinian motto: "Ie me confesse estre du reng de ceux qui escrivent en profitant, et profitent en escrivant."224
Although this study is not generally concerned with the problem of the connections between Renaissance humanism and the Reformation, it may thus be of some help in explaining why some humanists, but not others, turned to Protestantism. Humanists of more Stoic tendencies, like Erasmus, seem to have been less likely to become Protestants than those of the more Augustinian kind. But the more Augustinian humanist might end up in either the Protestant or Catholic camp.
For Augustine was also an important figure, though in a more complex way, in the Catholic Reformation. The reaffirmation of the authority of tradition at Trent guaranteed to the Fathers collectively an essential place, linking the apostolic to the medieval church, in the historical continuity of the faith; and Augustine shared in a general patristic flowering. He received extensive treatment in Bellarmine's De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis ;225 and his works went through numerous printings in Catholic countries, culminating with the authoritative Benedictine edition of Saint Maur (1679–1700).226 But Augustine had many uses. The thought of the mature Augustine was of fundamental importance for the circle of Bérulle, who, in the tradition of Augustinian humanism, opposed it to Stoic tendencies in Catholic thought.227 The significance of this species of Augustinianism for the Catholic world is evident inthe deep influence of Augustine at Louvain, where it found expression in the works of Baius and Jansen, and in the controversy De auxiliis . Since Thomist theology was so deeply rooted in Augustine, the growing influence of Thomism also operated to keep Augustine alive as a theologian of grace. But the condemnations of Baius and of Jansenism and the inconclusiveness of the dispute De auxiliis indicate the reserve of ecclesiastical authority toward this kind of Augustinianism; and meanwhile the Platonic Augustine of the Florentine Platonists, who could be invoked to support the old mixture of philosophy with Christianity, was still very much alive. Some of the opponents of Jansenism also exploited the authority of Augustine to support a heavily moralistic and rather arid scholasticism from which Augustine himself seems strikingly absent.228
At the same time Stoicism was becoming stronger than ever in later sixteenth-century Europe, once more presenting itself as both a source of personal consolation and a force for order in a period when religious wars were creating general anarchy, when the challenge to ecclesiastical authority threatened to produce a deeper kind of disorder, when the ruling classes were made profoundly insecure by what they discerned as the danger of mass uprising from below, and when all the world seemed in the grip of unrestrained passion. Under these conditions both the moral disciplines and the larger theories of control advanced by the Stoics once more appeared singularly attractive, and Stoicism reinforced the more general impulse of the Catholic Reformation to discipline every dimension of life.229 This period saw, with Lipsius, the first fully systematic presentation of Stoicism; Lipsius was perhaps the first modern European to recognize clearly, though earlier Stoic expression often gave inadvertent testimony to it, that the heart of Stoicism is not its ethics but its philosophy of nature.230
Lipsius, and to a lesser extent Charron and Du Vair, therefore mark the beginning of a new phase in the influence of Stoicism. Since it was now an increasingly articulated system, it was more successful than the eclectic bits and pieces gleaned from Seneca and Cicero not only in establishing the cosmic foundations of order but also in promoting the peace of the contemplative life. Lipsius recognized a number of Christian objections to Stoicism in his De constantia , but it is significant that the ideal of apatheia was not among them; indeed, his own ideal of constancy explicitly includes freedom from hope and fear.231 And the recovery of a more consistent Stoic anthropology, in which reason was seen as the essential faculty of man and thus capable of imposing order on the passions and finally on society, was supplemented in this movement bya renewal of the effort of Stoic humanism to join philosophical with Christian wisdom. Neostoic writers even assimilated Augustine, whom they often quoted.232
On the other hand Stoic doctrine was also popular, among Protestants as well as Catholics, in a more secular form. It is worth remembering that even those Augustinian humanists who had rejected the mixture of philosophy with religion recognized the value of rational insight for the humbler business of this world; and it was therefore entirely consistent with a fundamentally Augustinian position to draw on isolated Stoic maxims for their relevance to practical situations. Calvin himself continued to exploit Seneca for his sermons and elsewhere.233 In this form Stoicism nourished the secularization of morality and the discovery of principles of social order independent of religion. This species of Stoicism was 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. Eventually this would lead to the notion that the principles of human behavior might be based solely on the knowledge of human nature.234
In this secularized form Stoicism could be reconciled with Augustinianism. The two could be seen to complement each other, as law is complemented by grace, or the earthly by the heavenly city. But such a reconciliation, which depended on the deracination of Stoicism, was obviously a reconciliation on Augustinian terms. And Stoicism had a peculiar facility for growing new roots; thus the tension between the two old antagonists was never fully resolved.
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