POLARITIES OF WESTERN CULTURE

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 the

early 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 greatest

philosophers 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 re-

sources 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 of

its 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, in

the 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 in

radical 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 in

the 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 vigorously

rejected 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 essential

to 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 systematic

study 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 or

another 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, proved

the 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 the

notion 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 body

achieved 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 that

a 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 to

reason 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 Fregoso

found 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 eternal

principle, 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 with

fortune, 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 up

the "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 dis-

tractability 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 higher

force, 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 instruc-

tive. 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 praise

him 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 under-

standing 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 , a

point 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 marriage

is 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 his

own), 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 universal

empire, 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 employed

the 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 in-

fallibly 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 hu-

manist 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 the

sage.^[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," so

that (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 in

the 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 by

a 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.

2
Changing Assumptions in Later Renaissance Culture

This paper was originally presented to the Central Renaissance Conference at the University of Missouri in the spring of 1974. In it I tried to discriminate stages in the development of Renaissance high culture and to explain them as responses to sorting social, political, and psychological needs. The implication of the paper that some among the cherished artifacts of that culture were less expressive of its central insights than others has met with some resistance. The paper was published in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1976), 421–440, and is reprinted here with the permission of the Regents of the University of California .

The familiar notion of a "later" Renaissance immediately presents itself as an innocent effort at chronological arrangement, as a convenience for determining relationships in time. But of course it is much more. It calls upon us to distinguish the differing characteristics of successive moments, to trace a process of development from inception to maturity and possibly on to decline; and it introduces the complicated problem of the relations between Italy and the Northern Renaissance.^[1] It is thus closely connected with one of the most fruitful tendencies in all aspects of modern Renaissance scholarship: the effort to distinguish stages in a larger movement which, without such analysis, is filled with an ambiguity that makes useful discussion almost impossible. This tendency is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the study of Renaissance humanism, a subject which, though by no means their only significant expression, brings into unusually clear relief the assumptions underlying what was most novel and creative in Renaissance culture. By the same token con-

centration on humanism is a convenient way to deal with the inner development of Renaissance culture.

The most persuasive attempts to work out the stages in the evolution of Renaissance humanism have concentrated on particular places, as, for example, the work of Baron on Florence, of Branca on Venice, or of Spitz on Germany.^[2] Such efforts have proved remarkably useful, but by their very nature they can be no more than suggestive about the development of humanism as a general phenomenon of Renaissance Italy or even of Renaissance Europe, responsive to more than local influences. In addition, what has so far been said on this subject is not very helpful for the problem of the later Renaissance. Students of humanism have been concerned chiefly with its earlier, formative stages, as though, once the movement were well established, its full story had been told. Here, as elsewhere in Renaissance scholarship, we can perhaps sense a reluctance to deal with the notions of maturation and then of decay, decline, and end. Back of this may lurk the old idea of the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern age—which, by definition, must still be with us.

I should like to approach the problem of the later Renaissance, then, by calling attention first to changing attitudes towards rhetoric, now generally recognized as the core of Renaissance humanism.^[3] The Renaissance humanist was first of all a rhetorician, concerned to perfect in himself and others the art of speaking and writing well. From this standpoint his interest in the classics was secondary and at any rate hardly a novelty; we are now fully aware of the deep classicism of medieval culture. What was significant in the Renaissance humanist was not his classical interests but the novelty of his preferences within the classical heritage. For him the most important classical writers were the Latin orators, the supreme teachers, by both precept and example, of the rhetorical art. It is now clear, therefore, that humanism must be understood initially as a movement in the history of education which proposed to substitute, for the philosophers beloved by the dialecticians, a new group of classical authors, the orators, and then their allies, the ancient poets, historians, and moralists, as the center of a new curriculum, the studia humanitatis .

For some scholars this conception of humanism makes it appear less serious. The reason is, perhaps, that in our own culture rhetoric is popularly regarded as an ambiguous art, and we try to protect ourselves from those who abuse it by attaching to it the adjective "mere," though the need for such protection suggests a fear hardly consistent with the adjective itself. The phrase "mere rhetoric" implies that a rhetorician is at

best only a frivolous and minor artist who does no more than decorate serious content with ultimately superfluous adornments; at worst he is a seducer. Back of the phrase "mere rhetoric" also lies, perhaps, a quasi-metaphysical assumption that form is distinguishable from substance, a conception that betrays the persistent influence of one important strand of ancient thought on the Western mind. But it seems to me the very essence of Renaissance humanism, insofar as it differed from the humanism of the Middle Ages, that it rejected this distinctions.^[4] It took rhetoric seriously because it recognized that the forms of thought are part of thought itself, that verbal meaning is a complex entity, like the human organism, which also cannot survive dissection. This, I think, is the significance of Lorenzo Valla's translation of logos not as ratio but as oratio , a conception which not only suggests the dynamism and the substantive importance of rhetoric but is also significantly closer to the biblical than to the philosophical world of thought.^[5] It is in this light that we must understand Valla's praise for the eloquence of Saint Paul.^[6] Rhetoric, rhetoric alone, seemed able to address man, every man, at the vital center of his being.

And there is a further profound implication of this position, which Valla, the deepest mind among the earlier humanists, did much to elucidate. Since the forms of thought can at any rate be perceived as historically determined, the indivisibility of form and content suggests that all intellectual activity is relative to its times. So Renaissance rhetoric opened the way to a denial of absolutes in favor of a novel cultural relativism.^[7] Man, for the rhetorician, not man as a species but man in a particular time and place, becomes the measure of all things, a conception that suggests a further element in the lineage of rhetoric, and also brings out the irony in the familiar humanist designation of the schoolmen as "sophists."^[8]

Thus there was nothing frivolous in the cult of rhetoric in the Renaissance, or at least in the early Renaissance in Italy. Nor was there anything trivial about its practical uses. As the art of effective communication, rhetoric was not only the instrument of divine revelation but also the essential bond of human community, and therefore of supreme value for an increasingly complex society struggling to develop more effective patterns of communal life. Enthusiasm for rhetoric was most intense among townsmen responsible for welding the inchoate mass of individuals thrown together within the urban walls into a genuine community. Rhetoric thus provided a natural foundation for the new urban culture of the Renaissance, and it operated at every level of human interaction, both private and public. Businessmen had to com-

municate persuasively with their customers, suppliers, and associates; lawyers had to argue conflicts of interest in the courts; citizens conversed and corresponded with their friends on personal matters or sought the agreement of their peers on questions of public policy; rulers had to maintain the support of their subjects; governments corresponded with each other, sent out embassies, courted foreign opinion.

Rhetoric therefore, because it gave form to every subject of human concern and made it communicable, was not on the periphery but at the very center of human existence. Accordingly a rhetorician could only be a generalist, and a rhetorical education became, in the Renaissance, the first truly general education in European history. A Florentine statute at the end of the fourteenth century, even before Poggio's discovery of Quintilian, justified the appointment of a public teacher of rhetoric on the ground that "the art of rhetoric is not only the instrument of persuasion for all the sciences but also the greatest ornament of public life." and that it "embraces the precepts for advocating or opposing anything we wish."^[9] Rhetoric brought into focus all knowledge and all experience.

This elevation of rhetoric also had other major ideological implications; thus if, as Kristeller has shown, it had no explicit philosophical substance, it had considerable significance, as he also recognized, for philosophy in a larger sense.^[10] Above all the new rhetorical culture rested on a novel conception of man. Rejecting the abstract man of classical anthropology with its separate, hierarchically distinguished faculties, rhetoric accepted and appealed to man as it encountered him in the individual moments of his existence. Man was no longer merely a rational animal but an infinitely complex being, a dynamic and unpredictable bundle of psychic energies, simultaneously sensual, passionate, intellectual, and spiritual; like the rhetoric he used, a mysterious unity. If his nature could be defined at all, he was a social and verbal animal who needed to share with others the whole range of his experience. As Leon Battista Alberti's Uncle Lionardo remarked, "Nature, the best of builders, not only made man to live exposed in the midst of others, but also seems to have imposed on him a certain necessity to communicate and reveal to his fellows by speech and other means all his passions and feelings."^[11]

But this position not only subverted the old hierarchy of the human personality; it also eroded the gradations of status in society corresponding to it. The broader function of speech meant that communication should not primarily serve the intellectual needs of the few but the general needs of many. The first requirement of speech was that it be commonly understood. Petrarch, himself no lover of crowds, pointed to

this perception early in the history of the movement. "The strongest argument for genius and learning is clarity," he declared. "What a man understands clearly he can clearly express, and thus he can pour over into the mind of a hearer what he has in the innermost chamber of his mind."^[12] Castiglione's Count Lodovico was only repeating an old humanist cliché when he urged the Courtier to employ "words which are still used by the common people."^[13] Language was the common property of men.

The tendency in rhetoric to break down the old barriers and divisions previously seen as inherent in the nature of man, society, and the cosmos itself, points to a further aspect of its deeper significance. Rhetoric was uniquely suited to reflect a world whose order was tending to escape objective comprehension. Its malleability, its adaptability to the nuances of experience, allowed it to mold itself flexibly around the infinitely varied and constantly shifting particularities of life,^[14] and at the same time it encouraged the conviction that reality could not be grasped by the fixed and general categories of rational and systematic thought. Rhetoric was agnostic in regard to general propositions; from its standpoint man could not hope to penetrate to the ultimate order of things but only make particular sense of his immediate experience. But the result was that rhetorical expression could be supremely creative, as language could not be if it aimed only to reflect an absolute and static reality. Language itself was a human creation, a point on which Valla rebuked the schoolmen, who, as though forgetting Genesis 2:19, seemed to believe that God Himself had invented words.^[15]

The apparently neutral rhetorical doctrine of decorum concealed another set of striking implications.^[16] Decorum meant simply that effective communication required the adaptation of a speaker's discourse to his subject and above all to his audience: to its special characteristics, its immediate circumstances of time and place, its mood, and the purpose of the speaker. It too suggests that language seeks man out as he is from moment to moment and addresses him not as the representative of a species, in the timeless language of absolute truth, but as an individual. When Petrarch declared, "I am an individual and would like to be wholly and completely an individual,"^[17] he was thus expressing one of the deepest impulses underlying Renaissance rhetoric. At the same time, decorum pointed to an attitude of complete flexibility in confronting the infinite variety of life.

Step by step, then, the humanists of earlier Renaissance Italy developed this new vision of man who, with all the resources of his personality, engages fully with the total range of experience. We can trace their

progress most vividly in their growing recognition of the role of the passions and the will in the human personality, which advanced into prominence as the intellect receded. Petrarch was still ambivalent and allowed Augustine, improbably disguised as a Stoic sage, to rebuke him for his attachment to love and glory, which Petrarch nevertheless insisted on regarding as "the finest passions" of his nature.^[18] But by the next generation Salutati was prepared to acknowledge that, however desirable, the suppression of feeling was impossible. "Indeed," he wrote, "I know not if any mortal ever attained to such perfection besides Christ."^[19] And by 1434 Alberti's Uncle Gianozzo was locating the essence of man precisely in his emotions. The first gift of nature to each of us, he declared, is "that moving spirit within us by which we feel desire and anger."^[20] Valla brought this motif to its climax in his De vero bono , which argued that even man's moral and spiritual life cannot be advanced by deliberate intellectual activity but only by surrender to the supreme pleasure of divine love.^[21]

Closely associated with the passions was the will, which translates the impulses of the passions into action. For in this new vision of man the will was no longer merely the servant of reason; it had replaced reason, in Nancy Struever's phrase, as the "executive power" of the personality.^[22] The quality of man's existence thus depended now not on the adequacy of his reason but on the strength and freedom of his will. For Salutati the will was a faculty "whose force . . . is so great and its hegemony over the other powers of the soul so large that even though the instruments of the senses receive the images of sensible things, the effect of such reception scarcely proceeds further without the commands of the will."^[23] The will represented the active power of the soul.

Thus its primacy pointed, finally, to a revised conception of the existence best suited to man in this life. Since man was no longer an intellectual being, he could no longer hope to fulfill himself through contemplation but only through active engagement with the demands of life, especially in society. Even the ambivalent Petrarch, though frequently lamenting the interruption of his repose, sometimes admitted that a life free from choice and struggle is unsuited to human nature,^[24] and his successors were steadily clearer on this issue. Alberti's dying father emphasized the point in his parting message to his sons. "Adversities are the material of which character is built," he declared. "Whose unshakeable spirit, constant mind, energetic intelligence, indefatigable industry and art can show its full merit in favorable and quiet situations?" Uncle Lionardo said this less solemnly: "Young men should not be allowed to remain inactive. Let girls sit and grow lazy."^[25]

I do not mean to offer the line of thought I have traced here as a balanced description of earlier Renaissance humanism; Petrarch's equivocations are also significant,^[26] and they were never fully overcome by his successors. I have simply tried to offer a brief sketch of the radical novelties implicit in the movement, in the hope that they may help us to assess the quality of the later Renaissance. For, beginning about the middle of the fifteenth century, humanism began subtly to change. The impulses we have just reviewed were still at work and capable of further development, as we are reminded by such figures as Machiavelli, Pomponazzi, and Guicciardini. Yet even in writers in whom we can still discern the earlier attitudes, the novelties of the earlier Renaissance were often being modified.

Once again we may conveniently begin with the problem of rhetoric, towards which attitudes were changing. We still can find, to be sure, enthusiastic celebrations of the power of words. Vives, for example, could describe language as more important for society than justice itself. "Words," he declared, "win the approval of others and control their passions and emotions. . . . I see nothing more relevant to society than the ability to speak properly and eloquently. Emotions can be set ablaze by the spark of words; reason is aroused and directed by language. There is no occasion in public or private life, at home or outside, where words can be left out. Words can be the cause of great evils and the beginning of incomparable blessings. It is very important, therefore, always to use a decent language adapted to the circumstances of time, place, and people . . . which will prove that eloquence is a most important part of prudence."^[27]

Yet even among the champions of eloquence one is aware of a growing sense of its limits. This is evident in a tendency, once again, to see eloquence as the mere embellishment of truth. Rhetoric no longer seemed to give access to the solid realities of life, which once more appeared to have some absolute and independent existence; and the relationship between eloquence and knowledge, form and content, once thought an indissoluble marriage, began to look like a passing affair.

This is particularly evident in the attitude of later humanists to the Gospel, which for Valla had been, in the fullest sense, rhetorical communication.^[28] Now such a view hardly seemed serious; as ultimate truth, the Gospel could not be dependent on the contingencies of eloquence, and rhetoric could only be of incidental help for its communication. Thus the French scholar Gaguin commended eloquence in preaching to the young Erasmus only on the ground that "the memory of those who have an old-womanish, hesitating and stuttering style will truly last only

a few days," and that "only those who have combined eloquence and knowledge are respected and renowned among men of letters," a position that reduces rhetoric to a memory aid or an element in personal reputation. Erasmus agreed. "Religious matters," he responded, "can be made to shine more brightly with the aid of the classics, provided that only purity of style is sought." For Erasmus eloquence could not itself convey the Gospel into the heart; it merely put the reader into a hospitable mood.^[29] And Vives denied the universal competence of rhetoric. "Everyone can see clearly," he wrote against Quintilian, "that to speak of the heavens, the elements, and the angels is not the orator's concern."^[30]

A natural accompaniment of this separation of the form from the content of verbal expression was a growing emphasis on the value of literary refinement for its own sake, or at most for the esthetic satisfaction it could provide. Thus Castiglione's discussion of language in the Courtier suggests more concern with the propriety of language than with its deeper powers of communication. He devotes much attention to this subject, indeed, but the effect is largely to trivialize what had earlier been of profound human importance. There is no concern with virtue or duty in Count Lodovico's vision of the Courtier's literary education. He reviews the old curriculum; the Courtier is to acquaint himself with both the Greek and Latin classics "because of the abundance and variety of things that are so divinely written therein," and he is to pay particular attention to the poets, orators and historians. But the count's explanation lacks the old high seriousness: "besides the personal satisfaction he [the Courtier] will take in this, in this way he will never want for pleasant entertainment with the ladies, who are usually fond of such things." The humanities will, to be sure, also "make him fluent, and . . . bold and self-confident in speaking with everyone." But this contribution to the personal effectiveness of the Courtier seems something of an after-thought; after all, as the count remarks, arms are the chief profession of the Courtier, and all his other accomplishments are only "ornaments thereto." The Courtier is a specialist. Another of Castiglione's interlocutors drives the point deeper. For Federico Fregoso the Courtier "should be one who is never at a loss for things to say that are good and well-suited to those with whom he is speaking, he should know how to sweeten and refresh the minds of his hearers, and move them discreetly to gaiety and laughter with amusing witticisms and pleasantries, so that, without ever producing tedium or satiety, he may continually give pleasure."^[31]

One can observe of this ideal that at least it does not discriminate against women. Indeed it seems particularly suited to women; the old

curriculum of the rhetoricians here provides a culture for aristocratic ladies, but for men chiefly when they are in the company of ladies. By sixteenth-century standards nothing better illustrates the low estate to which the studia humanitatis had fallen. And decorum, which in the earlier Renaissance meant primarily the appropriateness of language to its audience or the intentions of the speaker, tended now to mean appropriateness to the speaker's status in life, and eventually what was appropriate to the upper classes. It was no longer the vehicle of a flexible attitude to existence but simply a virtue of the drawing room. Ficino, to be sure, defined decorum more grandly, but only to elevate it altogether above ordinary human life. "Decorum," he declared, "is God Himself, from whom and through whom all decorous things come to being."^[32]

But Ficino's conception was exceptional and perhaps only inadvertently applicable to rhetoric. In general rhetoric tended now to be seen as little more than embellishment and thus relatively frivolous; and so it became in some circles a kind of play, a source of pleasure and a form of self-display, but therefore for serious men an object of suspicion, as a distraction from the naked apprehension of truth. This concern seems to have some bearing on the Ciceronian controversy in the generation of Erasmus, who himself attacked a Ciceronian floridity in favor of the plain style. His preference, at least in principle, for "the sententious density of matter" over "the cadency and chiming of words" suggests a long step back from rhetoric to philosophy. "Farfetched conceits may please others," he wrote, but "to me the chief concern seems to be that we draw our speech from the matter itself and apply ourselves less to showing off our invention than to present the thing."^[33] Form and content have apparently become separable.

This divorce between eloquence and wisdom was, of course, nowhere more pronounced than among the Florentine Platonists. Ficino, concerned with truth, was troubled by the rhetorical enterprises.^[34] Pico distinguished sharply between truth and eloquence, which he thought likely only to obscure, distort, and taint truth.^[35] From their perspective the authentic task of language is simply to describe objective reality, and the fact that the majority of men lack the capacity to understand philosophical discourse suggested not the limitations but the distinction of philosophy. "What if," Pico wrote in defense of philosophers, "we are commonly held to be dull, rude, uncultured? To us this is a glory and no cause for contempt. We have not written for the many. . . . We are not unlike the ancients who by their riddles and by the masks of their

fables made the uninitiate shun the mysteries; and we have been wont by fright to drive them from our feasts, which they could not but pollute with their far more repulsive verbal inventions."^[36]

One result of this sentiment was a return to abstraction; another, more widespread but perhaps equally remote from daily life, was a new type of communication, both verbally and in the plastic arts, through a variety of cryptic devices: riddles, allegory, hints.^[37] This notion of communication was as applicable to reading as to writing; and it meant, among other things, a recovery of medieval ways of studying the classics, the discovery in ancient texts not simply of a noble but human communication from the past but of hidden insights into a perennial and ultimate truth. Landino made the point in his commentary on Horace's Art of Poetry: "When [poetry] most appears to be narrating something most humble and ignoble or to be singing a little fable to delight idle ears, at that very time it is writing in a secret way the most excellent things of all, which are drawn forth from the fountain of the gods."^[38] Erasmus, for all his evangelical impulses, preferred the allegorical to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.^[39]

But the familiar classics, already too widely known, were insufficiently esoteric to satisfy the longing for an exclusive wisdom by which aristocrats of the spirit could raise themselves above the corrupt and vulgar masses. The result was a turn to less accessible writings in Greek, Hebrew, and eventually other Semitic languages, to the Orphic hymns, the Hermetic corpus, the cabala. As Pico observed, the canonical scriptures could only meet the needs of "tailors, cooks, butchers, shepherds, servants, maids," persons whose "dim and owlish eyes could not bear the light."^[40] For superior souls some further revelation was required. Nor were such conceptions confined to a fringe of intellectual extremists. The eminently respectable General of the Augustinian Friars, Giles of Viterbo, one of the most influential figures at the Curia, shared Pico's conviction that the Gospel of Christ required cabalistic explication.^[41] We may also note in these interests the disappearance of the incipient cultural relativism of the earlier Renaissance.

In this new atmosphere classicism itself became increasingly academic. No longer an inspiration for the active life, it developed into a new and often less serious form of the contemplative life; a humanist was now less likely to be an orator than a philologist or a man of letters. The leading humanists of the later fifteenth century were men like Poliziano, who discovered the esthetic virtues of the Latin silver age; Merula, who edited texts and standardized spelling; and Ermolao Barbaro, who re-

stored the Greek text of Aristotle. We continue to call these men humanists, but it is sometimes hard to see them as more than superficially like Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, or Valla. They loved the classics, they knew them better than their predecessors, and they wrote better Latin. But earlier humanism, with its high seriousness about the tasks of rhetoric, had rebelled against the detachment of literature from life, the style from the substance of communication. Barbaro, Pico, and sometimes even Poliziano and Erasmus look increasingly like professional intellectuals.

But, as this account of the fate of rhetoric in the later Renaissance has at various points already suggested, these changing attitudes to language and communication were accompanied by, and gave expression to, a deeper set of cultural changes. If rhetoric in the earlier sense of the art of touching men in their hearts and so stimulating them to action was now declining, the reason was that man himself was increasingly perceived, once again, as essentially an intellectual being. Since intellect is a faculty man shares with other men, man was also beginning to lose some of his passionate individuality. And since the object of intellect is the general and rational order of reality itself, the decline of rhetoric signified too the recovery, albeit under somewhat new forms, of the old sense of the cosmos as a unity organized according to fixed patterns, accessible to the mind, which dictate the norms of man's individual and social existence. The attitudes of the earlier Renaissance, it is well to repeat, by no means disappeared. But a major shift in the intellectual climate seems to me unmistakable.

At the center of the change was a decline of the secular principle underlying the culture of the earlier Renaissance: the sense, to cite the typically Renaissance sentiment of a seventeenth-century Englishman, that man lives in divided and distinguished worlds, each of which operates in accordance with principles of its own.^[42] The movement of thought was now towards synthesis rather than analysis; men preferred the One to the many, simplicity to complexity.^[43] Thus if, in describing the assumptions of earlier Renaissance culture, we must begin with its anthropology, in dealing with those of the later Renaissance we must start with its cosmic vision.^[44] We are back in a world of thought in which the imagery of divine activity and human existence is once again cosmological. Colet recalls Dante in his description of "the uniting and all-powerful rays of Christ . . . streaming as it were from the Sun of Truth, which gather and draw together towards themselves and towards unity, those who are in a state of multiplicity."^[45] The aged Erasmus hinted at something very like the naturalism repudiated by earlier humanists in his explanation of man's yearning for rest:

Why is it that even in inanimate things you may see that each and every one is drawn to its own peculiar abode? As soon as a rock dropped from a height hits the earth, it comes to rest. How eagerly a flame is attracted to its own place! What is this which sometimes rocks the earth so hard it dislodges mountains and stones except the north wind struggling to break through to the place where it was born? Thus it is that a bladder full of air, when forcibly pressed down into water, springs back up. Now the human spirit is a flammable thing which, though hindered by this absurd little body of clay, still does not rest until it mounts up to the seat of its beginning. By nature, indeed, all men hunt for repose; they seek something in which the spirit can rest.^[46]

This impulse to imbed man once again in the objective order of the cosmos, from which earlier humanism had freed him, explains the popularity now of the notion of man as microcosm, a conception whose prominence in the later Renaissance hardly requires illustration. It is also closely related to the revival of various forms of occultism, both esoteric and popular, which sought, in Pico's words, to "wed earth to heaven."^[47] It nourished too the ideal of harmony (though this could be expressed in human as well as absolute terms) and above all the revival of the conception of hierarchy, which was, for Ficino, almost synonymous with order itself.^[48] Valla's doubts about the authenticity of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite^[49] were now forgotten; a new group of readers craved to believe in it. For Ficino, Dionysius rivaled Saint Paul as "the wisest of the Christian theologians"; Giles of Viterbo called him "the unique light of Greek theology"; Colet devoted a major part of his life to the study of his works; and Lefèvre d'Étaples edited his Celestial Hierarchies and described his writings as "most sacred" and "so eminent in dignity and excellence that no word of praise is adequate to describe them."^[50] Even Erasmus, though less enthusiastic, did not hesitate to apply the Dionysian hierarchical vision to both the ecclesiastical and political order.^[51] Thus we are once again back in a single holy order of reality whose principles are mandatory in every aspect of existence. It is true, of course, that something of the earlier Renaissance persists in the uses of hierarchy by the Neoplatonists. Ficino's hierarchy is not simply a static structure but a system for the transmission of vital influences; and Pico sought to protect human freedom by allowing man the liberty to ascend or descend "the universal chain of Being" and so freely to shape himself.^[52] But what is most significant here, it seems to me, is not the impulses retained from the

earlier Renaissance but the overwhelming presence of the hierarchy itself. For Pico man ought clearly to rise rather than to descend on the ladder of being; its existence prescribes the uses of human freedom.

But it is above all in the application of these conceptions to the understanding of man that we can best see the difference from the earlier Renaissance. Once again the human personality was conceived not as a dynamic unity but, reflecting the structure of the cosmos, as a set of distinct and graded faculties, properly ruled by reason, the soul, or the spirit; the terminology varied from thinker to thinker, depending somewhat on whether he wrote under Aristotelian, Stoic, or Platonic influence. Vives attached the idea directly to the larger order of things. "This is the order of Nature," he declared, "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. Whoever violates this order, sins."^[53] Men played changes on the general conception. In the Courtier , Ottaviano Fregoso noted that "even as our mind and body are two things, so likewise the soul is divided into two parts, one of which has reason in it, and the other has appetite."^[54] For Erasmus "the body or flesh is our lowest part. . . . The spirit represents in us the likeness of the divine nature. . . . Lastly, God founded the soul as the third and middle faculty between the other two, to hold the natural senses and impulses."^[55]

But the sovereignty of the highest part of man meant that the essence of man was once again seen to reside in his intellect, or, as sometimes in Ficino, something above the intellect, but always a high and separate faculty. Thus for Castiglione's Bembo (we may compare him with Petrarch or Valla on the point) knowledge is prior to love, for, "according to the definition of ancient sages, love is nothing but a certain desire to enjoy beauty; and, as our desire is only for things that are known, knowledge must precede desire, which by nature turns to the good but in itself is blind and does not know the good."^[56] This intellectual vision of man was also accompanied by a remarkable optimism; it agreed with the classical traditions by which it was nourished that to know the good is to do the good. Thus Erasmus remarked that it is fitting "for all to recognize the motions of the mind, then to know none of them to be so violent but that they can either be restrained by reason or redirected to virtue." This, he continued, "is the sole way to happiness: first, know yourself; second, do not submit anything to the passions, but all things to the judgment of reason."^[57] In his colloquy The Wooer and the Maiden , the maiden Maria tells her lover, a bit pompously, "What emotions decide is temporary; rational choices generally please forever"; and her

young man rather surprisingly agrees in what might be taken also, however, as a bit of Erasmian irony: "Indeed you philosophize very well, so I'm resolved to take your advice."^[58] Obviously the will remains an important element in this conception; every exhortation to choose the way of reason implies both its existence and its power. But the will is no longer at the center of the human personality; it has been reduced to servitude: if virtuous, to reason; if vicious, to the passions. Much of the educational thought of the later Renaissance rests on this conception.

Inevitably now the passions, identified with either the body or the lowest part of the soul, once again presented themselves rather as a problem than as a resource for good as well as evil. Even Erasmus, although a bit ambivalent, did not give them much praise. Indeed he applauded his own poems for their lack of passion: "There is not a single storm in them," he wrote, "no mountain torrent overflowing its banks, no exaggeration whatever." He preferred the poetry that seemed most like prose and disliked the choruses in Greek drama because of their violent emotionality.^[59] Vives similarly distrusted the passions, though technically admitting their ethical neutrality. "The more pure and lofty a judgment is," he declared, "the less passion it tolerates; such a judgment examines with much care the possible good aspects of each object and does not accept any excitement, except on rare occasions and with serene moderation." "Whenever a passion crops up with all its natural power," he wrote again, "the wise man represses it with the control of reason and forces it to withdraw in the face of a prudent judgment."^[60]

Nor is there much question, for the later Renaissance, of the vileness of the body, which was once again, as with Ficino, an "earthly prison" and the "dark dwelling" of the soul. Ficino excluded the body from his definition of man. "Man," he asserted, "is the soul itself. . . . Everything that a man is said to do, his soul does itself; the body merely suffers it to be done; wherefore man is soul alone, and the body of man must be its instrument."^[61] Erasmus could make the point lightly, as when his lovers agree that the soul is a willing prisoner of the body, "like a little bird in a cage."^[62] But at times he was in deadly earnest. "If there is any evil in the mind," he wrote in his Education of a Christian Prince , "it springs from infection and contact with the body, which is subject to the passions. Any good that the body possesses is drawn from the mind as from a fountain. How unbelievable it would be and how contrary to nature , if ills should spread from the mind down into the body, and the health of the body be corrupted by the vicious habits of the mind."^[63] Again we are reminded of the dependence of human existence on the larger order of nature. Vives was more violent: "Our souls carry the

heavy burden of bodies with great misery and pain; because of bodies, souls are confined to the narrow limits of this earth, where all filth and smut seem to converge."^[64] In this insistence on the separation and even antagonism between the higher and lower parts of man, between the rational soul or the spirit and the body and its passions, we can discern a significant counterpart to the distinction between the substance and form of verbal discourse, or between its rational content and its rhetorical embellishment, the soul and body of thought.

This attitude to the body had its positive corollary in a peculiar emphasis on the immortality of the soul, a doctrine sometimes denounced by the Fathers because it appeared to contradict Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. The typical representatives of the later Renaissance occasionally defended the resurrection, and Ficino spoke of the natural desire of the soul to be reunited with the body, a desire that had in the nature of things eventually to be satisfied.^[65] But the true interests of the later humanists lay in another direction; and even when they discussed the subject, they emphasized not so much the glorification of the resurrection body as its transformation into something less bodily and more spiritual. They were preoccupied with the immortality of the soul. Ficino devoted most of his Platonic Theology to proving it; and there are echoes of the idea, on a more earthly level, in Gargantua's letter exhorting Pantagruel to virtue: "If, beside my bodily image, my soul did not likewise shine in you, you would not be accounted worthy of guarding the precious immortality of my name. In that case, the least part of me (my body) would endure. Scant satisfaction that , when the best part (my soul which should keep my name blessed among men) had degenerated and been bastardized."^[66] The proclamation of the immortality of the soul as an official dogma of the Church at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513 can perhaps be attributed to this interest of the later Renaissance.^[67]

This new tendency in the idea of man also helps to explain the revival of the contemplative ideal and the recovery of interest in philosophy. Pico was typical. "I have always been so desirous, so enamored of [philosophy]," he wrote, "that I have relinquished all interest in affairs private and public, and given myself over entirely to leisure for contemplation."^[68] Giles of Viterbo oddly thought of Jesus as a man who avoided cities, market places, and the company of men; "the happy man," he wrote a friend, "is he who, conscious of how short life is, lives for himself, apart from the tumult of human affairs."^[69] Even Castiglione's Ottaviano, confronted with the stock problem whether the active or contemplative life is to be preferred by a prince, could only offer the unlikely suggestion

that "princes ought to lead both kinds of life, but more especially the contemplative," which ought to be "the goal of the active as peace is of war and as repose is of toil."^[70] The persistent longing of Erasmus for peace devoted to study is not only a personal taste but the ideal of a generation, and the peace movement among the intellectuals of his time was no more simply a response to the political situation than was Dante's De monarchia .^[71]

In this atmosphere Scholasticism no longer appeared so distasteful. We have learned to take more seriously Erasmus's protestations that he attacked not the Schools but their abuses;^[72] and if he could not bring himself to praise the schoolmen, he sufficiently venerated the idea of philosophy to reunite it with theology in his philosophia Christi . Pico saw his mission in life as the renewal of philosophy after decades of attack;^[73] and Ficino, Lefèvre, and Vives were all eager to bring philosophy once again into the service of faith.^[74] Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, now no longer merely names to conjure with, all found ardent admirers and increasingly serious students. And even Thomas Aquinas began to develop a prestige he had never before enjoyed outside the Dominican Order.^[75] Erasmus himself admitted that Thomas had "a certain unction in his writings."^[76] Thus two cultural worlds, largely kept apart in the earlier Renaissance, were now converging. Raphael's great Stanza della Segnatura , with its effort to combine all culture, human and divine, under the parallel auspices of theology and philosophy, was a product of this movement.

Again, I must emphasize, there was here no absolute change, no total repudiation of the ideals of the earlier Renaissance. Yet it seems clear that a profound shift was under way, which calls for some explanation. Part of the explanation is probably to be found in a kind of dynamic within humanism itself. When men first sought to enlarge their powers of verbal expression by imitating the classics, they discovered not only the principles of classical expression but also new and undreamt-of potentialities within themselves. But as classical philology was more and more fully explored and objectively mastered, it could be submitted to general rules; and classicism became no longer liberating but confining. The feeling for propriety in the use of language was also nourished by the printing press, another major development of this period, which standardized every aspect of verbal expression and, as printed books poured off the presses by the millions, imposed its norms on a growing literate public.^[77] Yet, even if we do not look beyond humanism itself, I think we can see a deeper impulse at work, pushing the movement in the same direction. For implicit in the culture of the rhetoricians, with

its rejection of an objective cosmic order by which man could take his bearings, was not only liberation but also the danger of total anarchy and disorientation. From the beginning the more sensitive among the humanists had been aware of this problem and had tried to solve it by calling for the union of eloquence with wisdom. But there was no necessary reason, in the absence of an objective order accessible to philosophy, or of spiritual guidance supplied by faith, for such an alliance; and in fact the earlier humanists were themselves not only exuberant about the newly discovered freedom and creativity of the individual but also increasingly anxious about the uses men were likely to make of these gifts. Petrarch allowed Augustine to reproach Franciscus for glorying in his eloquence; Salutati was troubled by the fact that many orators were not good men; Poggio was increasingly depressed that rhetoric seemed rather a tool for the abuse than for the strengthening of human community.^[78] Thus, in spite of its attacks on philosophy, even early humanism recognized the need for something more than the power of rhetoric. From this standpoint the later Renaissance seems to have been seeking to supply a defect in the culture of the earlier Renaissance. At the same time we must ask whether this defect was not in fact a necessary element in its identity.

Yet I think that we must finally look beyond humanism itself to developments in the larger social and political world. We may point immediately to the deterioration of conditions in Italy. Centuries of internal conflict within the towns of Italy had produced, by the middle decades of the fifteenth century, a climate of intolerable insecurity; and this was aggravated by the long period of large-scale warfare and destruction initiated by the French invasion of 1494, which effectively destroyed the freedom of the Italian states. Order, not freedom, was the most urgent need of this new age; society became more rigidly stratified and governments more authoritarian; all change appeared increasingly terrifying. And in the same period too the papacy, at last fully recovered from the conciliar ordeal, was reasserting the authority of the medieval vision of reality.^[79] The general proposition that all things are part of a single holy order of reality at once objective, intelligible, hierarchically organized, and ruled from above was, under these conditions, not entirely anachronistic. It provided relief from the immediate and pressing dangers of the times. Its conception of government also bolstered the authority of princes, with whom the papacy was now prepared to come to terms by concordats. In Italy, with the exception of Venice, princes were everywhere in the ascendancy; and, whatever their particular differences with the pope, princes found the new hierarchical vision of

order congenial. Under these conditions rhetoric lost much of its public utility; social solidarity and social order were no longer created from below, by persuasion, but imposed from above, by force; and intellectuals, their own social roles reduced, were increasingly contemptuous of the masses, who corresponded socially to the doubtful passions of the body politic. By the same token the art of speaking well became a badge of social distinction, the peculiar property of a social and political aristocracy gathered in princely courts. And the image of man, which at least since Plato had been closely correlated with the image of society. once again reflected the perception of the general order of things.

This account of the changing assumptions of later Renaissance culture is obviously not a sufficient or balanced description of the later Renaissance. Just as, along with its novelties, the culture of the earlier Renaissance preserved some residues of medieval culture, itself not entirely homogeneous, much from the earlier Renaissance survived in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, often in uneasy tension with the tendencies I have described.^[80] And it is at this point in the argument that we must take cognizance of the relationship between the Italian Renaissance and cultural developments in other areas. The fact that Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Englishmen were nourished by Italian movements of thought largely in the period of this retreat from earlier novelties is worth some reflection. Thus it may be that the regressive tendencies in later Renaissance culture made Italian modes of thought more congenial than they would otherwise have been to Europeans elsewhere, who might have been put off by the less veiled novelties of earlier humanism. The modification of earlier Renaissance culture, as it was transposed from the urban republics of its birth into the milieu of the princely courts, doubtless also assisted its adaptation to the aristocratic circles of the northern monarchies, though these changes had a more ambiguous meaning for the free cities of the Empire, now under growing pressure from territorial princes.

But, as I have from time to time emphasized, the more vital impulses of the earlier Renaissance had not altogether disappeared from the culture of the later Renaissance even in Italy, however much they had been compromised; and these too were known beyond the Alps, where they nourished, if they did not precisely cause, the novelties in what, for all the ambiguities in the term, is conventionally described as the "Northern Renaissance." Northern Europeans, however equivocal their feelings about Italy, regularly admired her Renaissance achievement as a break with the medieval past; and the deepest assumptions of earlier humanist culture found theological expression in the Protestant Reformation.^[81]

Thus if the earlier Renaissance was an Italian affair, and the attitudes of the later Renaissance found expression, as the examples cited here reveal, in both Italy and the North, the later Renaissance seems to have had a very different significance outside of Italy, where it presents itself rather as the beginning of a new phase in cultural history than as the decline of a movement already well established. In the North, therefore, and perhaps most conspicuously in England, we can discern with increasing clarity much the same sense of the potentialities of human freedom, the same restless and creative exploration of the possibilities of individual existence as in earlier Renaissance Italy. And this too requires explanation.

The major cause for the continuation of the vital impulses of the Renaissance in Northern Europe after the first decades of the sixteenth century is to be found, I think, in its political pluralism. This, together with geographical and spiritual distance from Rome, the symbol and champion of universalism, posed an insuperable obstacle to the full recovery of any conception of a single, holy, and cosmic order. On this point the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism is largely irrelevant. France and Spain, the piety of Philip II notwithstanding, resisted papal influence as successfully as England or the Elector of Saxony; all together represented the secular principle of divided and distinguished realms that made any conception of a unified hierarchy embedded in an objective structure of reality ultimately implausible. And political particularity provided a foundation for the development of national cultures which, because of their secularity, also gave room for the same kind of personal individuality that had characterized the earlier Renaissance in Italy. Nowhere is this development more apparent than in the emergence of the great vernacular literatures, in which Northern Europeans discovered for themselves the creative and liberating power of language, much as the rhetoricians of Italy had begun to do two centuries before.

3
The Venetian Interdict and the Problem of Order

This essay explored the broader cultural significance of the confrontation between the papacy and the Venetian Republic during the interdict of 1606–1607. Viewing the transition from the medieval to the modern world as involving, among other things, a shift from a metaphysical to a practical conception of order, it brought into sharper focus one of the themes of my book Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, published by the University of California Press in 1968. During the years when I was working on that book, I was corresponding about scholarly matters with Lech Szczucki of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and he solicited from me an article for a volume of essays , Histoire—Philosophie—Religion, published by the academy's Institute of Philosophy and Sociology as volume 12 of the Archiwum Historii Filozofii i Mysli Spolecznej (Warsaw, 1966), pp. 127–140. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher .

Central to the great upheavals marking the transition between the medieval and the modern world were profound disagreements about the nature of order, whether in the social and political realm, in the church, in the cosmos, or in the exalted spheres of metaphysics. High medieval culture, broadly speaking, had tended toward a unified and hierarchical conception of order which assigned to all men, experiences, places, things, and ideas their appropriate positions in a vast, graded system of values. Conversely the attack on medieval civilization at its deepest level, operating simultaneously in both the material and ideal realms, was directed at this system and the general principles it incorporated. Their common participation in this attack is perhaps the primary link among the essential tendencies of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation,

and the scientific revolution. By the same token the Counter- Reformation was, at its center, an effort to reassert and reinvigorate a conception of political and cultural as well as ecclesiastical order that had been under long attack from many directions. This crucial impulse in Rome establishes the coherence of the various efforts on the part of ecclesiastical authority to obstruct the growing political particularism of the modern age, to control literary and artistic expression, to fight heresy, to centralize the loose administration of the church, and to restrain the new science. Each of these apparently disparate phenomena had expressed in a different area of human concern some parallel repudiation of the traditional vision of order.

Complex relationships of this sort among great historical movements, unless they are altogether obvious, can generally be established clearly only by elaborate demonstration and evidence drawn from numerous sources. But occasionally a concrete historical crisis forces a whole range of underlying issues to the surface and brings suddenly into clear focus the inner meaning of major historical developments. The Venetian interdict of 1606–1607 was a crisis of this useful kind. Ostensibly intended to force the defiant Venetian Republic to cease the punishment of criminal clergy in civil courts and to withdraw laws restricting clerical wealth and the building of churches, the interdict quickly became the occasion for fundamental discussion not only about the nature of Christendom and the church but also about the underlying principles of all order.^[1]

Even at the Curia preliminary interviews between Pope Paul V and the Venetian ambassador, Agostino Nani, quickly touched on fundamentals. Nani boldly defended Venetian policy by a direct appeal to "reason of state," and the pope denounced the Republic on precisely the same ground. For both sides the propriety of an autonomous and secular politics was clearly at stake.^[2] But the most penetrating discussion of basic issues was carried on by means of a massive exchange of writings which were, for both sides, directed to a European audience. The presses of Rome, Bologna, and other Italian cities poured out a flood of pamphlets and books, often of considerable length, against the stubborn Republic; and the best minds in the Catholic world (as well as some of the dullest) were pressed into this cause. Among the champions of the pope were Baronius, Bellarmine, Possevino, and even Campanella. Often tedious, repetitious, quite without intellectual distinction, and frequently merely hortatory or vituperative, the various compositions of the papal writers nevertheless provide an impressive collective statement of the deepest attitudes and convictions of the Counter-Reformation. Venice also found effective champions. Some, like the Servite monk Fra Paolo Sarpi, the

Franciscan Marc'Antonio Capello, and the lay patrician Antonio Quirino, were native Venetians. Others, like the Neapolitan Giovanni Marsilio, a former Jesuit, were outsiders resident in the city and enlisted in its defense. In Paris the Venetian ambassador, Pietro Priuli, managed to persuade the Gallican jurists Louis Servin and Jacques Leschassier to write in behalf of Venice. Like the writings composed in the Roman interest, those defending Venice also dealt with the most fundamental issues.

The confrontation between the two sides was not entirely direct. Much of their difference originated in attitudes and assumptions too deep and intimate for conscious recognition. Proceeding from different premises, the papal and Venetian writers often give the impression of writing in different languages that perversely insist on using the same vocabulary. The result was that each side triumphantly scored points against the other, chalked up favorable marks on its private boards, and felt a righteous indignation when the opposition refused to admit defeat. Charges of dishonesty accumulated, bad feeling mounted, and each side was increasingly inclined angrily to dismiss the arguments of the other. For Rome Venice was moved only by impious greed later compounded by rebellion. For Venice the lofty pretensions of Rome masked a lust for power.

The basic obstacle to their communication was a major difference in intellectual constitution. Roman discourse was rational and systematic in a style inherited from the high Middle Ages, while Venice represented the concrete and flexible political mentality of Renaissance republicanism. Thus Bellarmine and his colleagues attacked the Venetians as bad logicians,^[3] inundated the discussion with masses of authorities,^[4] and accumulated classifications and subtle distinctions. Bellarmine, for example, did not care to discuss liberty without distinguishing half a dozen senses of the term.^[5] The mental world of these men was fixed and certain, and they conceived of intellectual discourse as the task of revealing its firm, clear outlines.

But the works of Sarpi and his associates (though they frequently found it necessary to reply in kind) often display quite a different spirit. Sarpi ridiculed Bellarmine's distinctions as pedantic,^[6] and his own compositions are permeated with a sense of the relativity of human practice "to what the variety of the times may bring."^[7] As he remarked to his government at an early point in the struggle, he was convinced that "examples move more than reasons."^[8] He constantly preferred concrete data to speculative conclusions;^[9] he remarked in his first consulto that "it is not suitable to proceed in these cases by conjectures, deductions, or

syllogisms, but by explicit laws."^[10] By the same token the Venetian theologians were critical of their opponents' habit of pressing Scripture into a rigid dogmatic framework. "One ought not take refuge in allegory but stick to the proper and literal sense," Marsilio loftily informed Bellarmine;^[11] and Sarpi constantly insisted that a proper interpretation of Scripture always required a sense of context. "Sacred Scripture should be read as a whole, not in passages," he advised the most distinguished of the Roman theologians.^[12] Such minds were also little impressed by the familiar medieval arguments from analogy, to which the papal theologians still constantly referred. "Propositions that are to be estabished as dogmas should not be based on similitudes of similitudes," Sarpi observed stiffly in connection with the association of Peter and the rock;^[13] and Capello was not at all persuaded that the relationship between body and soul had any real bearing on the relations between Venice and the pope.^[14] Roman theologians appealed to historical precedent, and Venetians cited canons or exploited syllogisms where they were useful. But neither side was entirely comfortable with the weapons of the other.

But although issues could not always be joined directly, the basic character of the conflict is clear; and the clash was nowhere more fundamental than in the utterly different meanings the two sides assigned to the idea of order; on its deepest level the Venetian interdict was nothing less than a struggle over the nature of order. For the Roman theologians order implied a great system comprehending the entire natural and supernatural universe, organizing all its elements into a single all-inclusive scheme, imposing harmony and meaning on the whole and each of its parts. For the Venetians order had a limited and practical significance. Order was simply the necessary condition of social existence, and any attempt to fill it with a more sublime content could only subvert the true order relevant to the human situation.

Lelio Medici, Inquisitor General in Florence, offered an unusually comprehensive exposition of the papalist vision of order. "Now it is very clear and a conclusion approved by all the theologians," he declared in a typical piece of exegesis, "that all the works of God have order in themselves." Thus in the story of the Creation the fact that "God saw all the things that he had made and they were very good" (Gen. 1:31) meant that they were ordered . It could not be otherwise, Medici declared, "because if they were not ordered, there would necessarily be confusion among them, which would mean imperfection in all things and especially in God." It was equally clear to this writer that order had a specific character. Its essential principle was hierarchy, the distinction between

higher things and lower, above all the due subordination of inferior to superior. "Order," Medici continued, "carries with it this condition, that lower things, being less perfect and noble, should be subordinated to higher, to the more perfect and noble, a point on which there is no difficulty."^[15] Possevino was both more specific and more complex: "In the world there are the elements and the higher spheres; but because the whole remains in order, they are conserved together. In man there are a soul and body of diverse natures, and God found a way to join them together. Nor, because the heart, the brain, the liver administer motion, heat, and life to the body, do they suffice to keep man alive, because the intellectual soul is necessary, without which, as without its proper form, the whole would remain a cadaver. . . . In heaven there are, equally, various hierarchies, nor does one prejudice another because, each power being subordinated to higher powers, they preserve that admirable union from which all stability and joy derive."^[16]

This general conception of order was central to the papalist view of all social organization. "The order which shines through in all the works of God," leaders of his own monastic group wrote against Sarpi, "is also found in every human congregation. For because order cannot exist without chief and head, since the principle of order consists in this, it happens that in every multitude gathered together, insofar as order exists, there is a chief and head on which the ordered multitude depends. This appears in families, in armies, and in all other regulated assemblies." Inherent in nature, the same principle of order also applies inevitably to the church: "In the same way the most beauteous order appears in this Holy Congregation of the faithful, which is the Christian Church, as in the family, or an army, or even, as Saint Paul suggests, a human body." Thus it was clearly necessary "that there should be one head and chief, and in consequence levels of authority and subjection. Because in every ordered assembly it is necessary that some should rule and others should be subject; some should command and others obey; some should give laws and others observe them, and with their observance direct and conduct themselves to the destined end."^[17]

Ventura Venturi, Olivetan abbot of Siena, made the system as a political conception particularly neat, at the same time suggesting how participation in the hierarchy meant the dignity and fulfillment of even its humblest members. "Nor are temporal princes and senators disunited from this hierarchy," he wrote, "but a part and principal member of it. For just as the celestial hierarchy consists of angels and archangels, thrones, principates, powers, dominions, so in the human hierarchy there correspond the thrones of the empires, of kingdoms, of princes; of

governments, of republics, and of all the other powers which, therefore, with just and harmonious proportion, are successively ordered by, disposed by, and finally depend on the supreme hierarch, the pope."^[18] But the principle of subordination above all required the obedience of the whole temporal order to spiritual direction and the discipline of all things to man's ultimate end. This meant that politics could never be self-contained and that secular government could never be a law unto itself. Giovanni Antonio Bovio made this point with particular clarity:^[19]

Politics and religion cannot rule in distinct countries separated by mountains, rivers, or other boundaries; because every community of men, like every man in himself, being made by God and subject to him, must have within itself religion, with which it renders to God due tribute of worship and adoration. Since, therefore, politics and religion must exist together in the same republic, it is necessary that they should not co-exist as equals, lest differences and discords be interminable; and hence one has to be subordinated to the other, since where there is no order there is confusion, and where all powers are not subordinated to one supreme power there cannnot be good government. . . . Now we see which of the two must be subordinated and subject to the other. Politics undertakes to procure the felicity of this earthly life, religion that of celestial life. Politics ordains the whole body of the republic under an earthly prince, religion orders both the entire republic and its head under the supreme Head and Lord God. Politics rules and governs earthly things, religion directs them to the eternal. Politics is occupied for the most part with what pertains to the body and to corporal things, religion with that which concerns the salvation of souls. Who does not see clearly, therefore, that just as man is subject to God and the body to the soul, and just as this life is ordained as the way to the heavenly fatherland and these earthly things as a stairway to celestial, so politics is subject and subordinate to religion, and the prince and temporal government to the head of religion and of the church?

Bovio thus presents us systematically with the case of the Counter-Reformation against Machiavelli and against Renaissance politics in general. His argument was of course by no means novel; novelty was precisely what Rome wished to avoid. But the emphatic articulation of the position here should make it quite apparent that general considerations of the most far-reaching significance were at stake in the papal indictment of Venice. The offense of the Republic did not consist simply of particular acts of disobedience to papal authority but set off a series

of wide reverberations. The real guilt of Venice lay in her rebellion against the principle of order implicit in the very nature of reality. Bellarmine equated Venetian defiance of the pope with the original sin of Eve.^[20]

The Venetian theologians made little effort to refute the papal conception of order directly. Indeed their indifference to this abstract challenge on its own sublime level is one of the clearest indications of the distance between the two antagonists. For Venice order posed a practical, not a speculative, problem; true order was precisely what her own admirable constitution had so effectively created, and the Venetian constitution required no sanction beyond its own perfection and success. Thus the real Venetian reply to the Roman conception of order was not a direct refutation but insistence on the familiar Renaissance conception of the liberty of states. The order of Venice depended not on her participation, as a subordinate member, in a monolithic and hierarchical system but on her detachment and independence from all systems. It was because Venice was free, because no alien power had the right to interfere with her genial political processes, that her government had become a model of stability for the rest of Europe.

The Venetian political ideal was not altogether secular; the theologians of the Republic derived its separate existence (and the existence of all other states) from God. But the relation of any particular state to the deity (like that of the Protestant believer) was direct; it was not mediated through a hierarchy of authorities. And God himself, as Sarpi insisted, required that the independence of states should be staunchly maintained: "Because the civil being of every republic or kingdom comes from God and is directed to his glory, therefore it is not permissible, without sin and offense to God, that its proper liberty, which is the civil being of every principate, should be taken away and usurped. Nor ought there to be any doubt that negligence in its defense is a grave offense against God, and most grave when it is voluntarily allowed to be usurped."^[21] It could hardly have been reassuring to Rome that Sarpi put the matter in such general terms. He not only clearly denied that Venice belonged to a system directed by the pope to supernatural and supranational ends; he also argued that such a system was directly contrary to the will of God.

But God's purposes in willing the existence of a political world of discrete states were not inscrutable and arbitrary; particular states were required because of their superior efficiency in maintaining the kind of order that the Venetians considered relevant to the human condition. This point emerges clearly in the theories of sovereignty that the Vene-

tian writers developed from their ideal of political liberty. Sovereignty, as the authority to govern effectively and without external interference, presented itself as the only guarantee of true order in human affairs. For Sarpi sovereignty meant first of all the comprehensive authority of rulers to take any action required by the common interest. "Nature," he wrote, "when it gives an end, also provides all those powers necessary to attain it." Would God, he inquired rhetorically, do less?^[22] He had already supplied his answer: "God, on whom the prince who is responsible for the public tranquility immediately depends, has also given him power to impede and to remedy all the things that disturb it."^[23] Therefore, he declared, "In a well-ordered republic this kind of sovereignty requires that the prince can dispose of any thing and person according to the necessity and utility of the public good."^[24] But the adequacy of sovereignty also implied its indivisibility and, once again, its independence. "I cannot refrain from saying," Sarpi advised his government at an early point in the struggle with Rome, "that no injury penetrates more deeply into a principate than when its majesty, that is to say sovereignty, is limited and subjected to the laws of another. A prince who possesses a small part of the world is equal in this respect to one who possesses much, nor was Romulus less a prince than Trajan, nor is your Serenity now greater than your forebears when their empire had not extended beyond the lagoons. He who takes away a part of his state from a prince makes him a lesser prince but leaves him a prince. He who imposes laws and obligations on him deprives him of the essence of a prince, even if he possessed the whole of Asia."^[25]

Sarpi's reference here to laws points to the fact that for the Venetians, as for Bodin, full legislative authority, the key to maintaining social order, was the heart of sovereignty. The right to do "anything needful" meant above all the right to make and enforce laws. By claiming comprehensive authority to interfere with the laws of Venice the pope had thus touched on the most sensitive nerve of the body politic. Princes, the Senate had reminded the French ambassador, "are necessarily deprived of sovereignty when they are subjected to the censures of popes, who can compel them with excommunications to adjust the laws in their way."^[26] The Venetian government had seen this issue clearly. At an early point it had insisted to the pope on its right to make laws, a right which "God gave to the first men who established the Republic and through them transmitted to the present and continuously exercised with moderation, never exceeding legitimate limits."^[27] Each of the particular Roman complaints against Venice was an attack on some aspect of the

legislative authority of the secular state, and therefore on its ability to maintain true order.

The more limited and practical Venetian conception of order also found expression in a conception of law far different from that of the Curia. For the Roman theologians law too was embedded in the general structure of reality; law was first of all an eternal principle of universal application. Particular laws, notably including the legislation of particular societies, were thus legitimate only when they reflected and conformed to the general principle of law, which also had its hierarchies. Certain authorities, certain kinds of law, were inevitably closer to the general source of law than others, reflected its substance more accurately, and therefore should take precedence over other authorities and other kinds of law. This meant that princes were never free to legislate arbitrarily, or simply on the basis of local need and conditions. Responsible only for an inferior level of the Christian Republic, itself a vast commonwealth in which local interests had always to be subordinated to universal, princes not only were required to adapt their enactments to divine and natural law; their laws were also subject to review by ecclesiastical authority. By the same token canon law in every state had always to take precedence over civil law.^[28] According to these criteria local custom was the poorest possible form of legal authority.^[29]

The Venetians did not deny the existence or even the priority of divine and natural law. Sarpi, indeed, was prepared on occasion to defend the "natural" rights of princes, and he acknowledged that certain acts, for example murder, were intrinsically contrary to the law of nature.^[30] But most human actions and situations could not, in his view, be treated in this categorical way. The majority of acts, he argued, are by nature neither just nor unjust but merely raise issues of convenience; and such matters were, he believed, precisely the concern of the civil law, which must therefore respond not to ultimate principles but to immediate conditions.^[31] But although it need not be referred to larger patterns of universal order, Sarpi did not mean that civil law was merely arbitrary; its true criterion, however, should be the interest of the immediate community it is designed to serve.

But, as the Venetians were well aware, communities differ and times change. Thus in connection with the regulation of clerical wealth Sarpi pointed out that "every prince can in such matters establish in his own state whatever the conditions of the times and places require, and also change things once constituted if changing conditions demand it."^[32] Capello made the point even more generally: "Laws are to behavior like

medicine to illnesses. Therefore, just as a different illness requires a different medicine, so different times, different customs, different conditions, require various, diverse, and sometimes contrary laws."^[33] On this basis the Venetians attached a high value to local custom.

The Venetian definition of order had particular consequences for the status of the clergy in the community. Rome had taken the position that the absolute priority of spiritual to temporal required for the clergy a special position, privileged and apart, within every secular state; the clergy were not properly citizens of any earthly community but only of the City of God. Possevino thought it monstrous "that the head should be subject to the feet, the greater to the less, those who are consecrated to the divine cult to profane men."^[34] Bellarmine argued that priests cannot be judged by laymen because in relation to the laity a priest is divine, and also that it is much worse for a layman to disobey a prelate than for a prelate to injure a layman.^[35] The Servite theologians agreed with him that although the clergy may normally live in conformity with the civil law, they do so only voluntarily rather than through any legal obligation.^[36] The hierarchical distinctions among men were thus as absolute as those in the heavens.

But for Venice just as sovereignty could not be shared, the needs of order required that the law be applied equally to all persons within the geographical limits of the state. Quirino was emphatic: "The Republic, as free and independent prince, has, by the nature of its principate, authority over all its subjects indifferently."^[37] For Sarpi the very survival of the state depended on the maintenance of this principle. "A natural body could not endure within itself one part not destined to belong to the whole," he wrote; "even less can a civil body endure that has in its midst a man who recognized others than the prince [as his superior] in human and temporal things."^[38] The authority of the Venetian state (or any other) to punish criminals of every description was, for the Venetians, an inevitable consequence of the purpose for which the state had been instituted. That the clergy should be exempted from an obligation not only common to all men but also finally a religious duty appeared to them particularly unseemly.^[39]

Behind the Venetian position on this matter was the conviction that a priest, whatever else he might be in addition, was in the first place a civil being, that he shared the common needs of men as citizens, and that he ought therefore to have some share in the common obligations of citizenship. Quirino was also clear on this point: "It suffices to say that a city is composed of citizens, and that citizens are those who enjoy the benefit of civil life through being preserved in peace among them-

selves, through being defended from foreigners, through experiencing the good care of their resources and possessions, and finally through enjoying those blessings and felicities to which the collectivity of the citizens has been directed. This is not possible to obtain without community in the laws and good public ordinances, and with common judges."^[40] Sarpi agreed, drawing the appropriate practical conclusion: "Ecclesiastics are citizens and parts of the republic; but the republic is governed with the laws of the prince. Therefore they are subject to him so that, resisting, they sin before God no less than laymen."^[41] Fom the Venetian standpoint this conception of ecclesiastics as citizens certainly implied no reduction in dignity. On the contrary, it opened up to the clergy an area of virtuous activity from which they would otherwise have been excluded; as Capello noted, it recognized their capacity for "civil felicity."^[42] But the "liberty" from the normal obligations of political life demanded for the clergy in Rome would have denied them the benefits of the only species of order relevant to the human condition. What Rome called liberty was for Sarpi only license .^[43]

The Venetian concern with civil order and the jurisdiction of the state over its clerical subjects as over other men seems finally to have serious ecclesiological overtones. The Venetian argument tended, practically if not out of logical necessity, to break down all distinctions between priest and layman; and this tendency too found explicit expression in the Venetian case against Rome. The theologians of the Republic indignantly rejected the inclination at the Curia to identify the church with its clerical officers. Sarpi described this as usurpation.^[44] Quirino insisted that the clergy were merely that segment of the church chosen to serve the rest.^[45] Another Venetian writer argued that since every Catholic Christian is equally a member of the church, he is equally entitled to call himself an ecclesiastic .^[46] Any true definition of the church, these men insisted, had to take into account its huge lay majority; the church, Sarpi maintained more than once, "is the congregation of the faithful diffused throughout the whole world."^[47]

Venetian reluctance to acknowledge special status for the clergy even in the church seems to derive ultimately from an obscure but deeply rooted tendency among the urban republics of the Renaissance to regard the church as an essentially spiritual body. Venetian theologians were inclined to think of the work of salvation as wholly spiritual and invisible, and they minimized the contribution to it of any institutional agent. As Sarpi insisted against Bellarmine, salvation depends more on "the interior motions of the soul" than on any means at the disposal of the pope.^[48] Hence ecclesiastical censure might be ignored with impunity;

Sarpi assured his countrymen that only their private deficiencies could truly exclude them from the church. "The theologians give as a certain and infallible rule," he wrote, "that when a man is certain in his own conscience that he has not sinned mortally in the matter for which he is excommunicated, he may be sure in his conscience that he has suffered no hurt to his soul and is neither excommunicated with God nor deprived of the benefits of the church."^[49] God, in this view, could be glorified properly only by the invisible works of the spirit performed by the individual believer. For Sarpi the Gospel was on this point unequivocal: "We see from the divine Scriptures that the glory of God consists in the propagation of the Gospel and the good life of Christians and in sum, as Saint Paul says, in the mortification of the outer man and the life of the inner, and in the exercise of works of love. . . . And finally, as even the ordinary man knows, travail and suffering are the marks and proofs of the friends of God; and no one, the Gospel says, follows Christ without taking his own cross on his shoulders." Under these circumstances the clergy were not properly rulers, administrators, and disciplinarians; their duty consisted solely in appealing to individual believers, in "preaching the Gospel, holy admonitions and instructions about Christian customs, the ministry of the most holy sacraments, the care of the poor, the correction of crimes which exclude from the kingdom of God" through pious and charitable example. These sentiments were the more remarkable because they are contained in an official document in which Sarpi was concerned not to argue theology but only to appeal to the common religious assumptions of the Venetian patriciate.^[50]

Thus in the Venetian conception of things the irrelevance to Venice and to political existence in general of any comprehensive schemes of metaphysical or cosmic order found a religious parallel in deep convictions about the position of the individual soul. Every believer, like every state, was seen to be related to God directly and individually, not through a system of visible hierarchical relationships in which the individual derived his position from membership in a general class. The Venetian challenge to the pope that reached its climax with the interdict of 1606 was thus analogous, at once spiritually and politically, to the Protestant challenge of the previous century. But it is peculiarly apparent in this case that the relationship between the religious and political dimensions of the confrontation went deep. The religious issue and the political issue must finally be seen as parallel expressions of a profound disagreememt about the ultimate structure of order in every aspect of the universe. That both sides recognized the gravity of their differences accounts for the extraordinary bitterness of their confrontation.

4
The Secularization of Society in the Seventeenth Century

This essay was my response to an invitation from the Organization Committee for the Thirteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Moscow in the summer of 1970. The invitation gave me an opportunity to think about the meaning of secularization within a society that remained still, for the most part, profoundly Christian. The paper also required some extension of my range as a historian, both topically and chronologically.

The paper was published with others prepared for the congress; I have added, however, notes omitted from its original printed version.

The subject of this report may, on first inspection, have an excessively familiar look. Secularization, like the rise of the middle class with which it is often associated,^[1] has served for generations to describe a process perceived as crucial to the emergence of the modern world. It has not, however, occupied a very prominent or general place in studies dealing with the seventeenth century; hence this paper may be an opportunity to take a fresh look at a number of problems, among them the place assigned to the seventeenth century in recent historical thought. On this point I will observe in general that the seventeenth century has not managed to assume any very specific or commonly accepted identity as a European phenomenon, and the habit of asking questions or even of making pronouncements about it usually depends more on the apparently irresistible fascinations of the decimal system than on any strong sense of the coherence of these hundred years. The earlier part of the century is usually perceived (depending on the purposes of the historian) as an appendix to the age of the Renaissance or as the concluding phase

of a longer period of religious conflict, the latter part (though perhaps with greater difficulty) as the prelude to the Enlightenment or, with a special eye to the civilization of France, as a unique moment by itself.^[2] The century as a whole has largely defied broad generalization, and in a historiographical sense it remains an underdeveloped borderland between two overdeveloped areas.^[3]

The conception of secularization itself also presents problems. Like other abstractions employed in historical discourse, it has tended, with little perception of what might be at stake, to grow in implication and, in the process, to become increasingly elusive.^[4] Thus it is now regularly employed to signify a process of dissociation (as though there were no essential difference) from control by the clergy as a social group, from control by the church as an institution or moral force, or from religious influence altogether; and it is likely to be used interchangeably with laicization, worldliness , and irreligion . Some of our difficulties with the term may come from a tendency to lump all these matters together and to attribute to the whole, somewhat heterogeneous, bundle a species of teleological authority; it thus functions not merely as a description of particular developments, which can be fairly precise, but also as explanation, which is often less so. In this way secularization and the secular spirit that gives birth to it have been made to seem inexorable and irreversible forces shaping modern culture and society. The absence of any obvious antonym for secularization may be suggestive in this connection.

When our professional vocabulary is debased, the wisest course might well be to change it. But past experience along this line is not encouraging, and in any case I think that, pruned of its excrescences, the conception of secularization may still prove useful for our general understanding both of European development and of the place of the seventeenth century within larger patterns of change. I should like, therefore, to try to restore its value by offering an example, from the seventeenth century itself, of what I take to be a secular society and therefore of proper use of this language: the Republic of Venice.^[5]

Venice has the special advantage for this purpose that for some months during 1606 and 1607 she was under an interdict imposed by the pope. Since the purpose of an interdict is to compel secular authority to bow to the will of the church, this event precipitated what might be described as a crisis of secular values, and the Venetian interdict set off a broad discussion that reveals what was involved in the process of secularization as it was perceived in the seventeenth century itself. Venice may conveniently serve, therefore, both as a touchstone for identifying other

manifestations of secularization and as a starting point for tracing its career in the seventeenth century.

Rome had many grievances against Venice. She was immediately provoked by the Venetian habit of submitting criminal clergy to the judgment of secular courts and by Venetian laws limiting bequests by laymen to the church and regulating the construction of church buildings. Thus secularization has as its first and most limited meaning the imposition of lay control over matters previously regarded as belonging to the church. But these complaints were primarily pretexts for dealing with more general offenses of which, in the view of Rome, they were only symptoms. The Curia was profoundly antagonized by the persistent refusal of Venice to participate in crusades against the infidel, by her insistence on maintaining diplomatic and commercial relations with the non-Catholic and even the non-Christian world, by her exclusion of clergy and clerically oriented families from the councils of her government, by the moral and philosophic license of the Venetian printing industry, by the refusal of Venetian authorities to impose a rigid theological orthodoxy at Padua.

And here we may begin to discern a larger meaning in the process of secularization: Venice evidently represented for the papacy an insistence in principle on the autonomy of various realms of human concern, and particularly of politics, economic life, and culture. This, for contemporaries, was the crux of the matter: whether it was permissible to conduct the various affairs of this world in accordance with principles derived only from the human ends they served, or, on the contrary, whether they must be controlled by and made to serve larger spiritual ends. If the latter were true, Venice would be expected to obey the pope; but in fact the Venetian leaders insisted that they had no superior in temporal things. Thus secularization threatened the traditional vision of society both as a structural unity under a single head and as a functional unity in which all activity must be subordinated to ultimate goals.

But even more than this was at stake. Beyond the repudiation of traditional relationships, priorities, and goals in society was the repudiation of a vision of the universe and its structure, and thus of a traditional mode of organizing the human understanding. Secularization rested on a deep conviction that eternal truths are inaccessible to the human intellect, and that only the limited insights afforded by experience in this world are relevant to the earthly career of the human race. Thus the secularization of society also pointed to the radical subversion of any comprehensive vision of cosmic and metaphysical order, of the perception of all reality as a single system governed by common principles,

in which human society finds its duly appointed place and its ultimate meaning. For Rome the secular claims of Venice made of her, from this standpoint, a rebel against the divinely constituted order of reality in general. The secularization of society was part of a larger process, and it cannot be fully assessed without some attention to Galileo's demand for an autonomous science and the vigorous controversies of the seventeenth century about the possibility and the validity of metaphysics.

The champions of Rome in the bitter war of words that accompanied the interdict understood very clearly that all these lofty issues were at stake, but the spokesmen for Venice seem to have understood it as well. When the pope first made known his grievances to the Venetian ambassador in Rome, the latter did not hesitate to defend the actions of his Republic by appealing explicitly to reason of state; and his government insisted repeatedly that since the matters over which the pope professed outrage were merely political, they did not properly concern him at all. In Venice it was obvious that reason of state had no basis in Eternal Reason, and therefore that it was unnecessary for the laws of any state to conform to a universal principle of law. The Venetians did not deign, therefore, to reply to papal invocations of a universal order. It seemed clear enough that the only order that mattered was the immediate and very secular order of the Venetian state. Thoroughly at home in the practical world of affairs, the Venetians found abstract and systematic argument utterly unpersuasive, and calculated indeed to destroy such order as human beings can attain in this world.

But although the Venetian position reveals the intimate connection between secularization in society and hostility to certain kinds of thought, it also makes quite evident that the question of secularization is by no means the same as the religious question, the question of the existence and intensity of piety. The problem was not with the degree of piety but rather with its kind. For although Rome, committed to religious formulations inextricably bound to universal principles of order and unwilling to recognize the validity of an alternative type of religion, felt some compulsion to represent the position of Venice as impious, in fact the interdict coincided with a renewal of Christian devotion among the patricians of Venice; and her leaders insisted, with a fervor that cannot be dismissed as cynical, on their attachment to the Christian faith. Their commitment, however, was to a version of Christianity that rested on a profound conviction of the inadequacy of the human mind to grasp final truth and thus to discern the orderly unity of the universe, a problem which was regarded as in any case irrelevant to the spiritual condition of human beings. Venetian piety was a matter of faith and

will rather than of intellectual appropriation. This type of Christianity not only acknowledged that man lives, to quote a great seventeenth-century writer, "in divided and distinguished worlds,"^[6] but implied that there could be no alternative. And thus, by accepting the incongruity between earthly and heavenly things and at the same time prepared to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, this type of piety was consistent with a high degree of secularization. It obviously did not exclude the need to express Christian virtue in the world, but it perceived this not so much systematically, based on the application of general principles, as practically and almost incidentally, through the particular acts of sanctified individuals. It should also be observed that this type of piety had flourished with special vigor since the fourteenth century and was to be found among both Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is especially important to recognize the distinction between secularization and the decline of piety in approaching the seventeenth century, a peculiarly devout age, if those who see in it the advancement of secularization and those who emphasize its piety are not to appear utterly at cross-purposes.^[7] Indeed the importance of the distinction is increasing with the tendency of recent scholarship to emphasize the religious sincerity and even the religious inspiration of many of those seventeenth-century figures who have long been considered major champions of a new, secularized view of man and the universe: of Sarpi and Galileo, of Descartes, Locke, Bayle, and Newton, perhaps even of Bacon and Hobbes.^[8] Although such revisionism may owe a good deal to some obscure zeitgeist of our own, it is at any rate more plausible to interpret these figures in terms of the general preoccupations of their age than as eccentric "forerunners" of the future. And this perception can lead, in turn, to a clearer understanding of secularization itself.

The case of Venice should also remind us of one further point: that secularization did not begin with the seventeenth century; in fact it was well advanced when the century opened. The position represented by Venice was rooted in the values and attitudes of the Renaissance in Italy; Rome identified it with Machiavellianism. And the major steps in the practical secularization of Europe had for the most part been taken earlier: the replacement of clergy by laymen in governmental agencies, the transfer of jurisdictional authority of various kinds from ecclesiastical to secular courts,^[9] the seizure of ecclesiastical lands in Protestant areas. Hospital administration in France^[10] and philanthropy in England^[11] largely passed from clerical to lay administration during the sixteenth century in a development based on the conviction that these matters

had more to do with public order in this world than, as an opportunity for good works, with the salvation of souls in the next. Education too had for some time tended to be withdrawn from clerical direction for comparable reasons.^[12] And, in a parallel development, the sixteenth century began a movement away from Roman law, with its universalistic overtones, toward reliance on particular bodies of local law.^[13]

Thus much that seems most secular in the life of the seventeenth century must be seen as a continuation or consolidation of an impulse already long at work. This is notably true of the peace of Westphalia and the eclipse of the Empire, full acceptance of balance of power as the most likely guarantor of political survival, and the full laicization of the European diplomatic corps.^[14] It is also true of mercantilism, peculiarly secular in its rejection of universal good in favor of particular benefits;^[15] the antecedents of seventeenth-century mercantilism can be discerned at least as early as the fifteenth century in France, and navigation acts were already an important instrument of royal policy in early sixteenth-century England. The real problem for the historian of the seventeenth century is whether this impetus from the past was sustained.

On this question, in spite of the fact that the Venetian interdict ended in a defeat for the papacy, which never again dared to challenge the secular world in so overt a way, the evidence is ambiguous, and even on a practical level rather different from what might be expected from a secularizing movement of such obvious vigor. What had previously seemed a general movement no longer appears so comprehensive, and it becomes necessary to make both chronological and geographical distinctions.^[16] Venice herself was compelled to readmit the Society of Jesus, which she had expelled as a source of danger to her secular values, and in 1684 she was persuaded to join the great crusade organized by Pope Innocent XI to expel the infidel from Europe, although this enterprise promised little benefit to herself.^[17] If the policies of Richelieu rigorously distinguished the interests of the faith from those of the French state,^[18] those of Louis XIV, in the closing years of his reign, are less clear; his revocation of the Edict of Nantes challenged the secularity of politics accepted, at least practically, by Henry IV; and his later wars took on some of the enthusiasm and savagery that had characterized the religious conflicts of the previous century.^[19] The synods of Dort, not only in 1619 but again in 1686, were much concerned with the religious obligations of rulers, especially in the Netherlands;^[20] and even in England the religious profession of the ruler was increasingly a focus of concern. There was no general retreat from the secular constructions of an earlier time, but one has an impression of the deceleration and occasional fal-

tering of the secularizing process as a practical matter, perhaps especially after the middle of the century.

Secularization is as much a matter of the values attached to human activity as of the concrete forms of activity itself, and it is easier to trace what was occurring in the thought of the seventeenth century than in its institutions, which, being more inert, better preserved the character they had taken on in the previous period. And what must be recognized in the thought of the seventeenth century is a persistent tension between the pragmatic attitudes represented by secular Venice, based on an extremely modest estimate of the generalizing intellect, and the systematic impulse represented by Rome. Both types of intellectual orientation may be found at any time during the century, and few groups or individuals did not in some measure participate in both and feel the common tensions of the age; neither secularism nor its opposite can often be encountered in a pure form. One can discern, nevertheless, a gradual shift in the balance between these antithetical positions during the course of the century; and it seems likely that by 1700 a smaller proportion of Europeans organized their perceptions of life, society, and the world like Venetians at the time of the interdict than had been the case a century earlier. The seventeenth century saw a decline in the secularizing mentality that is related, in a manner probably more profound than that of either cause or effect, to the weakening of secularization in society.

It is true that in important ways secular attitudes intensified during the earlier seventeenth century, allied with and encouraged by the ascendancy of a skeptical and fideistic piety that rejected the possibility of authentic systems of abstract thought. It remained both common and respectable to insist on the gulf between faith and reason, and in this period the sense of the ultimate helplessness and irrationality of the human race reached a kind of climax.^[21] Much of the intellectual leadership of Western Europe now shared a deep antipathy to system building and attacked metaphysics with a holy zeal.^[22] Galileo's insistence that theology is queen of the sciences only through the special dignity of its subject and not through any right to govern what occurs in the other sciences, and that religion teaches "how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes,"^[23] reflects an attitude that he shared with Bacon, Gassendi, Mersenne, and Pascal.^[24] But the principle applied equally to matters other than natural philosophy; it pointed to the autonomy of all aspects of human experience insofar as they are objects of human thought. The secularization of science, with its substitution of efficient for final causes and of a mechanical for an organic and animistic model of physical reality, was symptomatic of a more general development.

It is notably evident during the earlier seventeenth century in attitudes to man and society. A sense of the spiritual incommensurability of heaven and earth could produce a sharper conviction, of course, as among some Jansenists, of the need to impose spiritual direction on the secular world, and the effect of earlier seventeenth-century pessimism was not unambiguously secular.^[25] But it was more likely to result in a belief that the corrupt world should be ignored because it is both unintelligible and irredeemable, a view in which other Jansenists^[26] were joined by some of the new partisans of both Epicureanism^[27] and Stoicism,^[28] or, among minds more engaged with the life around them, a conviction that although the civitas terrena had nothing in common with the civitas dei , it nevertheless operates according to identifiable principles of its own. Thus, as with the influential Charron, just because behavior could not manifest eternal wisdom, ethics might be treated as a secular science;^[29] and for the same reason some French libertines developed a hedonistic conception of art.^[30] The principle also had implications for the writing of history; with Paolo Sarpi, precisely because the true church is an utterly spiritual body existing beyond the world of time, the career of the institutional church could be described in completely secular terms.^[31]

The same sense of the separateness and thus the independence of the secular is also in evidence in much of the political thought of this period, and the persistent attacks on the "Machiavellianism" of the age are a tribute to its continuing vitality in theory as well as practice. While Francis Bacon praised Machiavelli for describing "what men do, and not what they ought to do,"^[32] an influential Frenchman (possibly Père Joseph himself) began a general treatise on European politics by remarking that "the best advice one can give in matters of state is based on special knowledge of the state itself."^[33] Such attitudes were dominant in the circle of Richelieu, whose successes seemed to certify to the validity of the secular principles identified by Machiavelli and his followers.^[34] But the secular principles underlying human society were also being elaborated in other quarters: by those who idealized non-Christian polities, that of the Turks or the Chinese, for example,^[35] and possibly even through the naturalistic contract theory promoted (though for quite other than secular motives) by Jesuit theorists.^[36]

Even the divine-right theory of this period, which was employed to bolster the position not only of kings but of all governments, as its application to the Venetian and Dutch republics reveals, seems to me to have been equivocal in respect to secularization. On the one hand it supplied a religious base to governments and spiritual sanctions to rulers.

But it served also as a justification for the compartmentalization of life in the kind of language that had now become most persuasive, and thus it protected the autonomy of politics. In addition, by accepting the actual fragmentation of the political world, divine-right theory confirmed one of the aspects of secularization that was most abhorrent to its foes. Divine right thus suggests the general ambiguity of the seventeenth century.

And indeed, even as the secularizing currents flowing out of the past were rushing more and more frantically, they were being compressed into an increasingly narrow channel. A reaction, whose sources may also be traced back through the sixteenth century to the age of the Renaissance, was gathering force. It found general expression in the recovery everywhere of the systematizing mentality, which rested on a positive estimate of man's intellect very different from the view that underlay the secularizing movement, and which insisted on relating all aspects of human experience to a central core of universal and therefore abstract truth. Thus it renewed not only a sense of the priority of eternal values, but above all a confidence in their general applicability to the secular world; and in this way it pointed to the destruction of the autonomy which, in the seventeenth century, was at the heart of the secularizing process.

This tendency is apparent everywhere: in the massive renewal of scholastic theology in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, but also (and perhaps even earlier) in the Protestant world, in a movement that justifies our speaking of a Protestant Counter-Reformation.^[37] The recovery of metaphysics made philosophy almost as interchangeable with theology among Protestants as among Catholics; Aristotle became as important in the universities of Germany and England as in those of Spain or France; and some Protestants went as far as the authorities in Rome in reviving the spiritualized cosmology of the Ptolemaic universe, which could not be challenged without attacking Christianity itself.^[38] Seventeenth-century Calvinism was meanwhile experiencing a parallel transformation. Though less hospitable to Aristotle than Lutheranism, it found in the logic of Ramus grounds of its own for a more optimistic view of the human intellect, its theology became increasingly speculative and systematic, it discovered that the medieval schoolmen were more respectable than it had supposed, and it began to take a growing interest in identifying general laws of nature.^[39]

The most influential expression of this resurgence of the systematizing mentality was, of course, the method of Descartes. It is doubtless important for some purposes to distinguish between retrospective and innovative system building. But here their differences are less important

than what they have in common: the conviction that an intellectual construction can be something more than the product of a particular culture, and that it is possible for human beings to attain certain knowledge. Both pre- and post-Cartesian rationalism represented the impulse toward the systematic integration of all experience. Both therefore tended in principle to reject the autonomy of the secular. The significance of Descarte's own dualism may still be debatable, but his followers found the Cartesian method useful rather for establishing relationships than for preserving distinctions; in the hands of a Malebranche, Cartesianism seemed as suitable as Aristotelianism to reconstitute a philosophy of universal order on Christian principles.^[40]

In a climate characterized by an increasing penchant for system building, the autonomy of the secular came under increasing attack. This is obvious enough in the theory and practice of Counter-Reformers in Rome; we have already noticed the offensive against Venice. Bellarmine had laid down, as a general principle, that "all order consists in this, that some should command and others should be subjugated";^[41] and there was no doubt among the authorities of the Counter-Reformation what this meant in practice and to what purposes the obedience of mankind should be directed. For Bellarmine the temporal and spiritual powers were still "united so that they compose one body," a body in which "spirit rules and moderates, and sometimes restrains, sometimes stimulates as it judges expedient for its own ends."^[42] The enunciation of correct principles was also accompanied by a general offensive against a secularized politics, to which the label "false reason of state" was regularly applied, following Botero.^[43]

The significance of the seventeenth century may be seen in the fact that such conceptions were probably more popular and more widely diffused as it ended than when it began.^[44] Instead of assuming the autonomy of politics like Machiavelli, the men of the later seventeenth century, for example that weather vane of opinion Pufendorf, or the influential Seckendorf, were preoccupied with (to cite one of Pufendorf 's own titles) "the relation of the Christian religion to civil life."^[45] In France earlier concern to recover for use the specific and practical mos gallicus gave way to the efforts of jurists like Jean Domat, who sought to derive the laws of the state from the eternal principles supremely represented by Christian morality.^[46] And while Massillon and others celebrated the revocation of the Edict of Nantes as a decisive blow against "false reason of state,"^[47] a generation of reformers began to attack mercantilism as a violation of the universal concern for mankind taught by the Christian faith.^[48] Meanwhile the quality, and perhaps also the quan-

tity, of historical composition, that most secular activity of the previous century, declined, under pressure for the subordination of historiography to religion or to a political science or an ethics based on universal principles. Even the most notable histories of the seventeenth century, for example Clarendon's History of the Rebellion , gave to providential explanation an importance that Sarpi would have found remarkable.^[49] And the moral doctrines central to seventeenth-century classicism were acceptable largely on the ground that their universal validity gave them a unique capacity for the expression and support of Christian morality.^[50] As in other matters, the fact that truths could be derived from sources other than the Scriptures or the authoritative teaching of the church did not imply that a secularizing process was at work. It pointed not to a larger area of autonomy for the secular world but to the systematic coherence of all aspects of experience.

These considerations may also suggest that the contribution of natural law theorists to the political speculation of the seventeenth century was, like divine-right theory, equivocal from the standpoint of secularization. Like the proponents of divine right, the advocates of natural law recognized the sovereignty of particular states,^[51] and they combined the idea of natural law with an individualistic contract theory that seemed to deny any ultimate source of political authority. But theories of natural law also expressed a very different impulse. If they were intended to serve a practical purpose, it was above all to restrain an excessively secular politics rather than as a positive contribution to the process of secularization. Thus Grotius can hardly be considered a "secularizer" because he argued from reason rather than from revelation. Scholars familiar with Scholastic thought find it difficult to detect much difference between Grotius and Thomas Aquinas on this point;^[52] and although it might be argued that Thomas, too, was in some sense a secularizer, it seems more useful here to compare Grotius with Machiavelli. In this perspective it should be apparent that Grotius represented precisely the tendency in political discussion that Machiavelli most abhorred: Grotius was finally concerned not with how men act but rather with how they should act. He aimed to substitute a prescriptive and deductive politics based on universal principles for a descriptive and inductive politics based on experience a politics of abstract intelligence and generalized morality for a politics of will and power. The effect was to fit politics once again into a general system of values consistent with, if not actually derived from, the revealed will of God. The tendency of some scholars to minimize the importance of God for Grotius himself may express more about their anticipation of what lay ahead than about their understanding of

what was central for Grotius, and the importance of God as the ultimate source of law and morality may have been greater among later natural law theorists such as Pufendorf.^[53]

At the same time I do not wish to leave the impression that the seventeenth century saw a complete retreat from the insistence on the separateness of realms basic to secularization. The satires of Molière in France,^[54] the comedies of manners in later seventeenth-century England, and the hedonistic ethics of a few worldly aristocrats in both countries^[55] suggest that the old impulses were still alive. And several major thinkers—Hobbes, Locke, and Bayle—reveal that the conviction of human inadequacy to grasp ultimate truths could still nourish a vigorous and ultimately influential vision of man and society. It is no accident, I think, that these men came out of a tradition that had been peculiarly emphatic about the distance between this world and the world beyond.

Neither Hobbes nor Locke, at any rate, was altogether immune from the systematic contagion of the age. Both sought to establish as much coherence as the human mind could manage, and the similarities between Hobbes and Descartes are obvious; of the two, Hobbes may indeed have been the more purely deductive.^[56] But both Hobbes and Locke, in the end, seem to have staunchly resisted that philosophical conjunction of realms characteristic, for example, of the natural law theorists on the Continent and of the century in general; neither equated man's access to the workings of nature with God's;^[57] and Bayle's sense of the limits of human understanding went much farther. This position led to a vision of political order that is reminiscent once again of the position of Venice at the beginning of the century: politics became again a practical affair, not an earthly projection of cosmic order but a construction by men on the basis only of as much as they could understand of themselves and their position in a purely natural universe. And it was devised not for the expression of eternal principles theoretically convenient for humankind, but to serve immediate and thoroughly practical human needs.^[58]

Hobbes, Locke, and Bayle also had this in common: that to varying degrees all three were immediately regarded as dangerous.^[59] They were dangerous because they undermined the systematic rationality of the universe that other men of the century were desperately seeking to reconstruct. To understand this more general concern, which the occasional truly secular thinker of the seventeenth century apparently threatened, we must doubtless go back to the material conditions of the age: to the prolonged depression of the century, to its social dislocation, its wars and revolutions. But by the end of the century the grimmest part of the

general crisis was over, and men could increasingly relax. This is perhaps why Hobbes and above all Bayle and Locke, the transmitters of an attitude toward human existence more common in the previous age than in their own century, would seem more and more like the voices of the future.

5
Lawyers and Early Modern Culture

Like the previous paper, this essay deals with the transition to modern culture, but this time as it found expression in the experience and attitudes of a strategically important profession. I also argue here that it is a mistake to confuse the secular practicality of lawyers with hostility to Christianity; it should be rather understood as a function of an Augustinian distinction between the earthly city and the City of God. In an earlier form this essay was presented at the annual luncheon meeting of the Modern European Section of the American Historical Association in New York in 1971. It was published in the American Historical Review 78 (1973), 303–327, and is reprinted here by permission of the editor .

Although European historians have increasingly recognized the impact of large-scale change or significant events on human culture, they have paid little attention to the importance of the less dramatic aspects of social experience for shaping the attitudes of men. The result has been, for most of us, a schism between social and intellectual history that has impoverished both. As Frederic C. Lane has reminded us, the routine tasks of daily life are likely to impress those engaged in them with a profound sense of what the world and especially men are like and to produce patterns of expectation and systems of value—dimensions of culture in its larger meaning.^[1] Eventually these impressions are likely to find explicit formulation in philosophy, science, theology, and literature and the other arts—in culture in a narrower sense. But since the work by which men support their needs tends, particularly in the modern world, to be highly differentiated, it is difficult to treat the relation of work to culture in general terms. To get at this relationship, the historian

must examine the experience of particular occupational groups that have held a position of strategic importance both in movements central to their social universe and in the articulation of its vision of the human condition. The rise and development of groups of this kind, especially where they have not previously been prominent, gives the historian an opportunity, unique in its concreteness, to study the sources and the nature of social change. In addition, such groups may be especially useful for identifying the sources in social experience of fundamental shifts in attitudes and values. Scientists and technologists invite this kind of study in our own time. So, for early modern Europe, do lawyers.

In view of the attention recently directed to social history, it is remarkable that so little study of occupational groups has been done. One reason, I take it. is the tendency of many social historians to rely for most purposes on the categories of social class, which, though only imperfectly related to occupational differences, can usually be made to absorb them. From this standpoint occupations are interesting chiefly because they help in the assignment of individuals to their appropriate classes, and small attention is given to the often rather different functions of men who are seen as members of the same class, or to the possibility of contrasting perceptions of life arising out of the quite different ways men spend their working days. Lawyers can doubtless be generally identified with the middle class or some rank above it, though precision on this matter has often proved difficult: in societies sensitive to social gradation, men of the law regularly presented problems, a fact that might well alert us to their special significance. But the mind of a lawyer was also shaped by a professional experience that made him rather different from most merchants or landed gentlemen.^[2]

A second obstacle to the fruitful study of occupations has been our tendency to leave them to specialists concerned primarily with disciplines abstracted from their human and social meaning. Thus we have histories of theology but few of theologians, with the result that theology presents itself chiefly as an evolving set of disembodied ideas rather than as a response to human needs perceived through some kind of experience with life. We have histories of science but few of scientists considered as a group, and histories of law—indeed great classics on this formidable subject—but very little on lawyers as a profession characterized by a certain social role and a particular perspective on life and the world. What we have is useful and often admirable; we need not go all the way with Christopher Hill's somewhat imperial assertion that "it is time to take legal history out of the hands of the lawyers, as religious history has been taken away from the theologians, and to relate both to social developments."^[3] Yet the general point is valid enough, even though—as

revealed by recent works of Gilmore and Martines for Italy, of Franklin, Kelley, and Huppert for France, and, among others, of Thorne, Pocock, and Little for England—a broader interest in lawyers and their activity is now stirring.^[4] This article is concerned to call attention to some of the larger possibilities in the subject and thus to the need for further work that, with proper respect for differences among societies and legal traditions, will permit a higher level of generalization.

The history of lawyers is peculiarly adapted to display connections among various dimensions of human activity, but it also bears on fundamental controversies about the nature of the law itself. In the long history of speculation on the law, lawyers of the Renaissance were the first theorists since the Sophists to argue that legal systems should not be required to reflect the will of God in any direct way or to mediate between eternal reason and the practical needs of men;^[5] the law functions best, some Renaissance lawyers maintained, as a response to the concrete needs of particular societies and in fact can be shown to have evolved in this way.^[6] Ever since the Renaissance, men have divided over this issue or, like Sir Edward Coke, uneasily straddled it; and the same disagreement, or at any rate the profound psychological differences it may be taken to represent, underlies much contemporary dispute about the law, perhaps including recent debate over strict construction.^[7] A more comprehensive study of the historical relations between law and social experience might also contribute something to this perennial issue; our subject may thus have some practical importance.

The legal profession of early modern Europe was a somewhat diverse body, and I shall define it rather loosely to include all those who supplied legal or quasi-legal services. At its highest and most broadly influential level of eminence it included judges and magistrates, sometimes with little or no formal education, who applied the law to the various needs of government. In addition it included juridical scholars with varying degrees of practical experience, practicing lawyers—among them canonists as well as civilians and common or customary lawyers—and also, in this period, notaries. Sometimes organized with lawyers in a single guild as in Renaissance Florence, notaries supplied various legal services to a far larger body of clients than their less numerous and more prestigious colleagues. Because the task of providing written legal instruments merged into the work of public secretary and scribe, notaries were important in relating law to literature and scholarship. They were therefore of special importance in mediating between the broader and the narrower meanings of culture.^[8]

It is, at any rate, evident that men somehow connected with the law

occupy a remarkable and disproportionate place among those prominent in European culture expression.^[9] The connection was sometimes a matter of degree, and in particular cases it was clearly ambiguous. Many young men destined for fame in other connections studied law but failed or refused to complete the course or in the end made no professional use of their legal training. Among these were Petrarch, Luther, both Calvin and his victim Servetus, the satirist Samuel Butler (so widely read in his own time), Voltaire, Diderot, and David Hume, who eventually became librarian of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. Although students of Calvin have never doubted the influence of the law on his formation, others mentioned above reacted violently against the law, though this, too, may testify to its importance. Such names also leave us with an impression of the extent to which ambitious fathers regarded a career in the law as an avenue of worldly success for gifted sons who might have had other views for themselves.^[10] In still other cases the influence of the law was rather a matter of family background, with its subtle impressions, and of milieu, than of direct professional engagement. Machiavelli, for example, was the son of a lawyer who—we may surmise—might, had he been more prosperous, have sent the boy to study law, then an expensive affair. At any rate young Niccolò found a type of employment in the Florentine government usually reserved for lawyers or notaries, and he was deeply concerned throughout his life with the social function of law. The dramatist Beaumont was son of a justice of common pleas. Pascal and Racine were both sons of lawyers and magistrates and spent much of their lives close to the legal circles of Paris.^[11]

But in many cases the relation to law was close and direct. Guicciardini had a flourishing legal practice in Florence for many years. La Boétie and Montaigne, before he retired to devote himself to letters, were judges in the Parlement of Bordeaux. John Donne attended Lincoln's Inn and served as a law clerk before taking orders. Corneille was an avocat and magistrate, like his father before him, and Molière studied and may even have practiced law before turning to the stage. La Fontaine was a magistrate. Leibnitz finished law school to become a professor of law at the age of twenty-three. Giambattista Vico, though he never achieved the professorship to which he aspired, saw himself primarily as a student of civil law. The career of Montesquieu followed the pattern of Montaigne. Henry Fielding was a lawyer and magistrate in London.^[12] And other great figures combined government service as lawyers with historical composition or religious and philosophical reflection: Thomas More, Paolo Sarpi, and Francis Bacon. Such an enumeration is, to be sure, impressionistic; but it could be carried much farther, and it has a

certain cumulative impact, which is strengthened when we look at movements rather than men.

Thus the culture of Renaissance humanism, especially in its earlier stages, was largely a creation of lawyers and notaries.^[13] Salutati was a notary, Bruni went from the study of law into the Florentine chancery, and Poggio and Flavio Biondo were notaries, as was Lorenzo Valla, the most original mind among the humanists of Italy. The son of a lawyer at the Curia, Valla felt enough confidence in his own understanding of the law to challenge the methods of its contemporary practitioners.^[14] And the relations between humanism and the law were even closer in the French Renaissance. The great scholars and historians of sixteenth-century France were jurists, from Budé to Pasquier, Bodin, and Jacques de Thou. Most of the libertins of the earlier seventeenth century were lawyers. Lawyers played a large part in public support for the scientific movement of the seventeenth century in both France and England—the membership lists of the Royal Society, for example, are filled with their names—and the so-called Scottish Renaissance of the eighteenth century was dominated by lawyers.^[15]

This is to say nothing of those great figures who devoted themselves primarily to juridical thought: Coke, Selden, Grotius, Pufendorf, Beccaria, and Bentham. The point is important, for it should be recognized that jurisprudence was not, in these centuries, only an esoteric and highly specialized discipline. Some knowledge of the law was essential equipment for the landed gentry of Britain in an age of lively litigation over titles to real property and of the gentry's general responsibility, as justices of the peace, for the preservation of local order. In addition some acquaintance with the philosophical principles of the law was a part of the culture of every educated man. Laymen like Hobbes had an extensive knowledge of the law and felt competent to write on the subject; and the young Gibbon in Lausanne, who considered attending courses in law, was probably not unusual in the time he devoted to reading great legal treatises, refusing to be put off, as he noted in his autobiography, "by the pedantry of Grotius or the prolixity of Pufendorf."^[16]

The prominence of lawyers in the formation of modern culture, with its characteristic attention to the workings of this world, is in some respects not altogether surprising. Lawyers were members of an articulate as well as a learned profession in which success required some discipline of mind and was likely to bring the wealth and leisure to support general reflection. Lawyers often had, too, the social status and influence needed to make their views heard. But I would suggest that something more was involved: that men of the law were uniquely fitted by their

social role and the nature of their experience with the world to interpret it plausibly to contemporaries. Engaged to a special degree in the task of meeting the essential needs of a changing society, they were in a better position than other groups in Europe to give expression to society's changing perceptions. It is therefore necessary to look briefly at what these men were called upon to do and at what their function represented at the level of values.

That lawyers contributed substantially to the slow transition from medieval forms of political and social organization has long been recognized in a general way, and some description of this contribution in detail is now possible. As in so much else, precedents were supplied by the medieval church, which, from the time of the investiture struggles, was increasingly administered by lawyers concerned to define its rights.^[17] In the later Middle Ages most bishops, including those of Rome, were lawyers rather than theologians;^[18] and the litigiousness of early modern Europe was prefigured by the litigiousness of the medieval church,^[19] where a sense of the inappropriateness of domination by lawyers nourished generations of reformers.^[20] Two points may be made about the rise of lawyers in the church. In the first place their emergence into positions of power corresponded to the increasing importance of institutional controls accompanying the centralization of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the evolution of the church into a mechanism for government. Here as elsewhere law became significant in direct proportion to the growth of social and institutional complexity. At the same time the prominence of lawyers reflected the growing acceptance of the inevitability of conflict even in the Body of Christ. For canon lawyers—and it should be noted that they were not necessarily ecclesiastics—were divided, both ideologically and practically, into antagonistic schools that represented conflicting principles and interests, and litigation in the church regularly involved canonists on both sides of a dispute. The establishment of lawyers in the church consecrated professional representation in adversary proceedings and accustomed men to rely on the expert services of the legal profession.

From the twelfth century, as towns grew in size and their societies, too, became more complex, the legal profession became increasingly important in the secular world, with the competence and respectability of lawyers nourished by the revival of Roman law. In the governments of the Italian towns, lawyers and notaries assumed responsibilities out of all proportion to their numbers, precisely because they possessed skills essential to the development of a more complicated social order. They drafted legislation in an age remarkably confident in the regulatory and

reformatory value of laws, they participated in all public commissions, they staffed agencies of state, they went on embassies and prepared treaties, and they formulated and administered policy for republics and despotisms alike. Their interpretations of Roman law legitimized the sovereignty and independence of states.^[21] And lawyers achieved equal prominence elsewhere in Europe, if somewhat more gradually, as societies beyond the Alps also grew more complex. The feudal conception of the king as dispenser of justice made his employment of lawyers appear natural even when their activities were resented. In France the administrative competence of lawyers was extended by the familiar institutional ambiguities of the Old Regime, in which, just as administrative agencies regularly performed some judicial'tasks and thus needed lawyers, so the sovereign courts steadily expanded their administrative responsibilities in the name of the king. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Parlement of Paris took over hospital and university administration and also supervised the administration of the city. As maîtres des requêtes , lawyers were indispensable to the councils of the king and managed a wide range of his affairs. Meanwhile lawyers supported royal authority by historical and constitutional argument and attacked the feudal establishment by both their studies and their service in the courts.^[22] In Spain, in the Netherlands, and in the Empire lawyers dominated royal councils and administration. Lawyers also ran colonial empires, both in bureaucracies at home and in the new societies developing overseas. A similar situation prevailed in England. Common lawyers molded the Star Chamber, promoted the Tudor revolution in government, and supplied personnel for every kind of administrative post. From Bosworth Field to the accession of Elizabeth, every chancellor of the exchequer was a lawyer. So was every one of the twenty-two speakers of the House of Commons.^[23]

The activity of lawyers in the construction of a new political order is well known. We know less, unfortunately, about the part played by lawyers in the shaping of social and economic life and about their representation of private clients. But it is clear that, on the Continent, lawyers had early developed the legal basis for the corporate structure of the society that persisted through the Old Regime out of the resources of Roman law.^[24] As judges, lawyers enforced the harsh demands of the criminal law; they stood for law and order and above all for the protection of property. Lawyers and notaries served the material security and perpetuation of families by drawing up marriage agreements and wills. They also ensured the performance of business agreements by contracts, deeds, and bills of sale; here they both met a practical need

and provided the psychological prerequisite for economic activity. And eventually the common lawyers of England, some of them heavy investors in the great trading companies, were instrumental in freeing economic life from royal control.^[25]

It is evident, at any rate, that lawyers were essential in developing the institutions and the conventions of early modern Europe. This was their peculiar task, and we can usefully linger for a moment on what this meant. Lawyers were needed to deal with the most urgent problems of their societies, not only incidentally and occasionally, like the majority of men, but in the most concentrated form imaginable, at every moment of their working lives. As private practitioners, they saw and represented clients who were in trouble, feared trouble, sought the clarification of some ambiguous situation, or aimed to twist the social system in some novel and advantageous way. As servants of government, lawyers were concerned to enforce and extend the rights of central authority or to shape institutions that could do so more effectively, usually in an abrasive struggle with a hostile adversary; the personal costs of failure could be high. As judges, they were compelled to scrutinize and weigh evidence, often of a disheartening and usually of an equivocal nature. Their role, in short, was to man the frontiers between the safe and familiar on the one hand, the dangerous and new on the other; between the tolerable and the intolerable; between the conventional world and the chaos beyond it. They constituted a kind of civil militia whose difficulties were compounded by the fact that the precise location of the frontiers to which they were assigned was rarely clear, and these frontiers were constantly changing. We may well ask what kind of men these were.

It is hardly remarkable that a special and rather unattractive temperament has been conventionally attributed to the lawyer.^[26] He was, like Guicciardini, a skeptic and a cynic; like Bacon, cold and crafty; or, like Bacon's great rival Coke, mean and harsh, a bully and a coward, a man of whom even his widow, after thirty-six years of marriage, remarked at his death, "We shall never see his like again—praises be to God." From the lawyer's exposed position on the frontiers of behavior he saw the world, like Montaigne, at its most irrational, most selfish, venal, and hypocritical. The lawyer knew the small practical worth of ideals and fine principles, and he knew also the humiliations and indignities that were the price of success in the world of men, a price that, like Bacon or Coke, even the best of lawyers was nevertheless prepared to pay.^[27] The degradation that ended Bacon's public career nicely illustrated his own melancholy reflection on the hazards of success: "The rising into place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is

sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing."^[28] In short, the lawyer knew the world. His mind and character were shaped to a unique degree by contact with its changing pressures and brutal realities, its dangers and uncertainties; and it is for this reason that he was peculiarly fitted to play so large a role in forming the culture of worldliness and vigilant individualism to which the more optimistic and trusting culture of the preceding period gradually gave way.

At any rate the lawyer commanded vast, if sometimes equivocal, respect. In Florence the guild of lawyers and notaries ranked first on all ceremonial occasions, and its chief officer was honorary head of the whole guild system. As individuals, doctors of law in Renaissance Italy ranked with knights.^[29] Traiano Boccalini, a kind of Art Buchwald of the later Renaissance, argued that lawyers better deserved the title of Excellency than the nobles who complained of the lawyers' presumption.^[30] In France the lawyer's profession was considered—except by some nobles—as honorable as bearing arms: La Bruyère described both functions as equally sublime and useful. The great Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, a devotee of law in a grander sense, declared that "soundly to judge of law is the weightiest thing which any man can take upon him."^[31] Even the hatred and scorn for lawyers so frequently encountered in every age in which they have been numerous are a tribute to their importance, if only through their capacity to threaten others; lawyers represented the omnipresent danger inherent in the increasingly complex and increasingly mysterious machinery of social organization, before which the individual felt more and more helpless. They clearly endangered the self-esteem of old nobles like Saint-Simon.^[32] The deliberate exclusion of lawyers from More's Utopia only suggests their central place in the real world for one who understood it well.^[33] And an oblique tribute of a similar kind may be discerned in Luther's frequent expressions of hostility to lawyers. One of the young men who sat at his table reported an incident of particular interest in this connection: "The doctor took his child in his hands and said, 'If you should become a lawyer, I'd hang you on the gallows. You must be a preacher and must baptize, preach, administer the sacrament, visit the sick and comfort the sorrowful.'"^[34] The episode suggests the celebrated guilt of the youth who had abandoned law school, sold his lawbooks, and entered a monastery against the wishes of his own father. For Luther the law continued to represent the world and its spiritual dangers, which he had forsaken to pursue his salvation; lawyers remained, in his mind, at the center of this world's

concerns. But this view was more than a private eccentricity. Luther's attitude also pointed to the degree to which the figure of the lawyer persisted in haunting the European religious consciousness. Indeed, this may have had as much to do with his unpopularity as the inconveniences he represented. The lawyer was an obvious scapegoat for the general guilt of a world in transition, made anxious not only by the immediate insecurities of life in society but also by the abandonment of old ways and values.

The significance of lawyers in European life depended on more than the importance of their practical role or the respect in which they were held. It rested on the deeper needs they satisfied. And here, to make the point more concrete, I will give particular attention to the period between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries. If the transition from the medieval to the modern world was generally characterized by a crisis of both social order and belief, this phase of the transition was peculiarly troubled by their convergence in religious wars, by international conflict of particular intensity, by inflation and depression, and by mounting social tension and dislocation.^[35]

One consequence of the peculiar difficulties of this period was a singular exaltation of law as an antidote to disorder. The value attached to law now went far beyond the traditional and more measured confidence, as in the generation of Erasmus and Machiavelli, in the capacity of legislation to regulate and improve human conduct. In the frustrated Italian states of this period law presented itself as the only means to discipline the violent passions of mankind that had so obviously destroyed the freedom of Italy, and as the only instrument to control the wanton masses. To this tendency both the mood and the intellectual resources of the Counter-Reformation contributed. In France law, beginning with Bodin, was now first clearly perceived as the essence of sovereignty, Gallican jurists dominated political discussion, reformers saw law as the solution to every moral and religious problem, and the high magistracy at last completed its slow evolution into a new nobility of the robe. In England men were finally compelled by rapid social and institutional change and the accompanying growth in legal business to take a fresh look at the common law, to adapt a legal system based on the needs of an older agrarian society to new social and political uses, and to reduce that legal system to some kind of order.^[36] This was the greatest age of the common lawyers, whose numbers multiplied. Admissions to the Inns of Court generally doubled; Gray's Inn saw as much as a fivefold increase.^[37] The printing press helped in all this, supplying

uniform editions of laws that made legal systems everywhere more reliable, systematic, and effective.^[38] During the same period the polity most admired in the whole of Europe was Venice, primarily because she gave the impression of an order based on sound and equitably administered laws.^[39] In addition this period is of unusual interest for the comparative study of lawyers because lawyers were often peculiarly conscious of themselves as an international community of professional men that transcended political and confessional boundaries and was held together by common goals and ideals, common problems, and a common intellectual culture. An international correspondence among the lawyers of this age included the exchange of views on religious, literary, historical, and scientific topics as well as on the events of the day and discussion of legal questions of mutual concern.^[40]

Much in the special importance attached to law in this period was a response to the unusual intensity of disorder in a Europe whose growing social complexity meant a new degree of vulnerability to dislocation and thus a growing need for regulation. The primary source of disorder was patently the conflict of human interests; and, as in the church, the rise of the legal profession in secular society signified a concern for the peaceful resolution of conflict. Lawyers started to work when conflict loomed. A legal system may therefore be described as a means for institutionalizing conflict, but there was a crucial difference, at first subtle and disguised but increasingly radical and explicit, between medieval and modern assumptions about this process. Litigation in secular courts had been forbidden by the early church; Augustine, who knew the courts well, had pointed to lawsuits to illustrate the persistent sinfulness of earthly society.^[41] The notion of a relative natural law appropriate to man's fallen state had resolved the practical problems of life in a society that, although professedly Christian, remained imperfect.^[42] But the acceptance of conflict was, in this view, also relative; it could never be tolerated as normal and inevitable. Justice was itself finally an absolute; and this meant that a legal decision was ideally concerned not so much to resolve conflict as to transcend and abolish it by resort to ultimate principles. In this light coercion by legal authority was an effort to bend the refractory wills of men into conformity with a final vision of justice. But increasingly the lawyers of early modern Europe, whatever the formulas to which they sometimes still appealed, disregarded such conceptions. Their task was practical and limited; they aimed not to transcend conflict but to manage it. In their world the essential tensions were not between sin and ultimate justice but between antithetical human interests that generally seemed morally ambiguous on both sides. Their ac-

tivity was directed to the effective resolution of conflict, not to the realization of a lofty vision; their rise signified and accelerated the breakdown of a traditional view in which social values were defined in accordance with final ends. As early as the thirteenth century it was a commonplace that a good jurist made a bad Christian.^[43]

Lawyers were thus central to the cultural transformation that marks the end of the Middle Ages, and they took a leading part in the articulation of a novel set of empirical, pragmatic, and secular attitudes in which the orderly administration of this world's affairs was seen to depend on practical principles of its own. This new vision, which reached reasonable clarity only in the sixteenth century and still encountered deep resistance, was based on a perception of the world as an infinitely complex population of forces in conflict that, though ceaseless and terrifying, was nevertheless not altogether maleficent. A lawyer knew from experience that, in this world, constructive results sometimes came from the clash of forces and that to avoid conflict might, in social terms, invite worse consequences than to accept it. Like Paolo Sarpi, legal adviser to the Venetian Republic, he might therefore deplore an excessive pacifism, either in James I or at home.^[44] As Sarpi wrote to a French lawyer, in one of the international exchanges now characteristic of the legal profession, the times needed a Democritus or a Heraclitus, a remark equally applicable to metaphysics and to politics in its sense of the world as a dynamic flux of particular entities in incessant interaction.^[45] The positive value of confrontation between opposing forces is suggested at another level by Bacon's observation that "truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."^[46] Sarpi, who was also in touch with Bacon's circle, would have agreed with this early hint of the liberal principle that truth may be better conceived as a pursuit than as a discovery and that it may be preferable to take a doubtful position than none at all.^[47] Also suggested was the active life in which men are willing to engage with an adversary, however dubious the battle; and we are reminded again of the original connections between the law and the social vision of Renaissance humanism.

A lawyer's experience with the real world of unpredictable and hostile forces was likely to make him suspicious of those great systems of thought which, by presuming to take general account of all possibilities in advance, inhibited adaptation to changing circumstance and interfered with meeting the daily need for practical order. He needed first of all to sort out and scrutinize the discrete data in a case; his mind was characterized by what a distinguished modern jurist has ruefully defined as the capacity to "think about a thing inextricably attached to something

else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to."^[48] Thus the lawyers of our critical period were notable for their repudiation of systems and their preference for such limited sense as could be constructed from particular phenomena. Guicciardini's famous rejection of abstract speculation and generalization^[49] found a parallel in Sarpi's contrast between dialectic and law, in the emphasis of such French jurists as Pithou and Pasquier on the particularities of time, place, and circumstance, and in Bacon's contempt for Scholasticism and his opposition to the systematization of the law itself, except in chronological terms that would respect its particularity.^[50] This helps to explain why the law, which the notary Salutati had championed against the deductive and humanly irrelevant science of the fourteenth century,^[51] converged in the seventeenth with the new empirical science. Important lawyers in both France and England were fascinated, perhaps as much as physicians, by the achievements of scientists.^[52] The same flexible and practical attitudes allied law with the—from another point of view lawless—doctrine of reason of state, which suggested the changing uses of the law, without regard to more ultimate considerations, in accordance with the changing needs of states.^[53]

Similar attitudes informed the political vision of lawyers and shaped their loyalties; their rejection of the unworkable and irrelevantly general in favor of the immediately practical for their particular societies made them patriots. The lawyers of Venice resisted the interference of Rome, an interference that followed from a quite different conception of law, on the ground that the good order of Venice sufficiently demonstrated the excellence of her laws; these lawyers argued that the virtue of law was not absolute but relative to the needs of a particular society. Similarly French jurists from the time of Budé rejected the familiar claims of Roman superiority and insisted on the perfection of French law because it was so well adapted to French needs, and this legal nationalism was the point of departure for a more general cultural nationalism. In the same fashion the common lawyers of England praised English ways and the admirable consequences for England of the independence of English law from that of the Continent.^[54]

This position led to general praise of custom as the only satisfactory basis for law. So Pasquier made the case: "Since customs were formed gradually in each province according to the diversity of our characters, it seems appropriate in case of obscurity or doubt to have recourse to people close to us, who by their proximity would seem to conform to our manners and character and so to our customs."^[55] The meaning of this proposition, for which there are analogues in the legal discourse of

other places, was that custom best represented the proper particularity of the law, its necessary correspondence to the concrete and differing needs of peoples. The same point could be made about vernacular languages, and it is hardly surprising to find lawyers among their champions. Latin was customarily employed in a legal tradition that, whatever its practical tendencies, still professed to appeal to universal principles. The language of eternal Rome could always be counted on to give a subliminal ring of ultimate authority to a legal pronouncement: it implied finality where none could be claimed. Hence it is of particular significance that Pasquier advocated the use of French in the law as in other serious subjects, and Coke, though on occasion still inclined to take shelter in Latin, for the most part abandoned the tradition of earlier commentators on the law of his country to write in English.^[56] Through changes in language, too, law was taking on a more practical and particular quality, and more was at stake than the greater ease of communication.

These various tendencies may be summarized in one word that will relate them to a development fundamental to every dimension of early modern European life: secularism—in the sense of a growing acceptance of the autonomy of the various aspects of human concern. Lawyers represented the growing assumption that life in the world is only tolerable when it is conceived as a secular affair and that the world's activities must be conducted according to manageable principles of their own rather than in subordination to some larger definition of the ultimate purpose of existence. By applying this assumption to solve the constantly changing problems of their societies, lawyers were, in a manner far more effective than that of any abstract philosopher, the supreme secularizers of their world. By imposing their own secularism on the machinery of social life they helped to accustom their contemporaries to think in secular terms, thus contributing in a fundamental way to the secularization of every other dimension of human concern: to the secularization of politics and economic life, of science, philosophy, and literature and the other arts.

At the same time it is important to recognize that secularism in this sense is not synonymous with unbelief. Some lawyers, like occasional members of other groups, may have been unbelievers; but more characteristic of the profession was, I think, a preference, shared by both Catholic and Protestant lawyers, for a kind of piety that stressed the spiritual and inward quality of the faith, contrasted it sharply with the world and its ways, and by emphasizing the incongruity liberated secular life from direct religious control. The lawyers and notaries of Renaissance Italy, the Gallican (and later Jansenist) magistrates of Paris, and the

lawyers of early Stuart England, both Puritan and Anglican, all tended to an Augustinian spirituality.^[57] Some of them doubtless felt a personal affinity to Augustine—himself the product of a legal culture—whose influence was so powerful in this period generally.^[58] But this only suggests a deeper community arising, once again, out of a peculiar experience with life. A serious-minded lawyer was forced to recognize that the earthly city for whose affairs he was responsible could at best achieve only a contingent order quite different from that of the heavenly city, and in addition he was constantly reminded of the unregenerate state of humanity and the need for divine assistance. He knew, in short, the difference between law and grace.

For if the lawyer, as secularizer, was in some sense an agent of change, he also represented the need for order and gave expression to the conservative impulses of his age. In a period singularly troubled by the collapse of traditional ways of life and yearning for stability, he promised a measure of security, both for individuals and for society as a whole. His services gave a sense of security to his client; even as he threatened the security of his client's adversary he compelled him to have recourse to the law. The lawyer also supplied security for the future; his role was to foresee and provide against as many as possible of the dangers that might lie ahead, and thus it reflected both distrust of the future and, at the same time, some confidence in the ability of men to plan ahead and to control the unfolding of their earthly lives. Dependence on lawyers has, therefore, some value in revealing attitudes fundamental to changing cultural patterns exhibited in such comprehensive matters as trust, time, and human freedom; resort to lawyers implied the reverse of fatalism.

But legal systems functioned above all as a source of order for society in general. While they did so in an obvious sense through the punishment of wickedness and vice, I would suggest—though it would be difficult to demonstrate concretely—that they also performed a larger service for the vast majority who were disposed to obey the law. Legal systems contributed subtly, in this way, to ending the peculiar restlessness of European society that had come to a climax in the earlier seventeenth century. By defining what was socially intolerable and by reshaping the official forms of social intercourse, laws and the men who worked with them must have gradually renewed that sense of limit in the social universe, so profoundly threatened by the crumbling of established conventions, without which life had become not only practically hazardous but in a deeper sense unsatisfactory. The "crisis in Europe" of Trevor Aston's title was also a crisis of mind and spirit, of which we may take as typical symptoms Don Quixote's disorientation, Mersenne's anxieties

about the fifty thousand atheists in Paris, The Anatomy of Melancholy , the moral anarchy of the Jacobean stage, and the prosecution of witches, in which lawyers also had their part to play. Lawyers helped to relieve the terrors in this world by supplying a social foundation on which some sense of the order and meaning of life could be reconstructed. Through the orientation of the masses of the law-abiding, they enabled their contemporaries once again to feel at home in a familiar world.^[59]

Indeed, even the contribution of the lawyer to change was largely a consequence of his conservatism, of his acceptance of the established order of society and his determination to achieve his purposes within it. Whether in the maintenance of public order or in resolving conflicts of interest, he was above all concerned to make the social system work.^[60] Yet this was likely to make him a conservative with a difference. For, since cases frequently failed to conform exactly to type and in fact often presented novel and ambiguous features, a lawyer's concern with workability was likely to operate against a complete rigidity of mind. If they respected the structures within which they worked, lawyers also required those structures to be flexible, responsible, and continuously useful. Like Montaigne, Montesquieu, Selden, Fielding, or Beccaria, lawyers sometimes presented themselves as reformers.

The attitudes of lawyers also underwent a gradual change as circumstances and demands on the law shifted; the later seventeenth century was to see some modification of the pragmatic and relativistic tendencies that had characterized the profession during the previous hundred years, but here, too, the law is revealed as a sensitive and leading participant in the larger movement of European culture. Thus the legal speculation of France in the classic age displayed a growing tendency to appeal once again to the timeless sanctions of reason and religion;^[61] the idea of a general and prescriptive natural law came to dominate the law schools of Germany and the Netherlands; and even in England efforts were made to systematize the common law on philosophical principles, though Matthew Hale's great History of the Common Law of England (1713) also suggests the limits of English participation in this European movement.^[62] But such changes suggest, too, how the legal mind was constantly prepared to mediate between the general and the particular, the ideal and the concrete, order and energy, ideas and life itself. The life of the law is potentially fraught with tension between these poles; and this also helps to explain the regular prominence of lawyers in the creation of modern culture.

Among the polarities with which lawyers had to live, one proved singularly fruitful for the transition from medieval to modern concep-

tions of the world and is also of particular interest from the standpoint of the historian: the tension between continuity and novelty, between the need of traditionalistic societies to feel at one with the past and the practical requirements of adaptation to change. Such tension, which may account for the prominence, from an early point, of men connected with the law in the composition of history, may be discerned as early as the thirteenth century, in the chronicle of the Paduan notary Rolandino, and in the fourteenth century in the work of the early humanist Albertino Mussato, another Paduan notary, and in the interests of the Venetian doge Andrea Dandolo, who collected legal and political documents and wrote a history of his republic.^[63] In their writings we may already find hints of the secular emphasis, the cool political analysis, and the consciousness of change in human affairs that distinguish the great Florentine histories of Bruni, Poggio, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini, again men all more or less associated with the law. When we add the names of Sarpi, Bacon, and Clarendon to this list of lawyer-historians and note the role of the Scottish bar in establishing the great tradition of historical study in eighteenth-century Scotland,^[64] it should be clear that we are in the presence of some special affinity. Law formed men with broad interests in human affairs who were skilled in the examination of evidence, experienced in the difficult task of sorting out what might be germane to a problem from the irrelevant detail surrounding it, and trained to reconstruct events, as well as close to the constantly changing social and political scene.

But the most important consequences for historiography resulted from the application of historical interests to the law itself, a process that began with the notary Lorenzo Valla, whose close philological researches revealed that the Roman law was a product of time and circumstance, a historical artifact rather than a body of universally valid legal wisdom. And this vision, transmitted to a generation of French jurists by the teaching of Jacques Cujas, stimulated a national school of medieval studies with a novel interest in the development of law and institutions rather than in the wars and royal actions of traditional historical writing. Though this school produced no individual masterpieces, it extended the range of historical scholarship and displayed both a new methodological rigor and above all that secular feeling for the particulars of human experience otherwise characteristic of the legal mind.^[65]

At the same time the lawyer-historians of the later Renaissance in France were no mere érudits . They intended the vision of the past constructed by their scholarly work to be useful; and in the peculiar nature of their historicism they were at one with Sarpi's researches in church history and the English common lawyers' study of the medieval consti-

tution. Lawyer-historians resembled each other in their common contribution to reconciling the conservative instincts of an age desperately concerned with order to the adjustments demanded by the times, through myths supported by the most sophisticated research Europe had yet witnessed. In this way lawyer-historians made a new order palatable and historical study attractive. Thus Venice defended her ecclesiastical and political independence against the pressures of the Counter-Reformation by arguing that her admirable society rested on law and custom going back to the origins of the Republic; by contrast, lawyer-historians maintained, the juridical and administrative centralization demanded by Rome was of recent origin. Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent (1619) was a sustained demonstration of this essentially juridical point.^[66] The lawyers of France employed similar arguments in defense of French customary law against imperial Roman law and of the Gallican liberties against ecclesiastical Rome. In both the underlying issue was the right of self-determination, a matter made subjectively important with the emergence of national feeling and of immediate practical significance, since public order seemed to depend on the exclusion of any kind of foreign interference. Thus the researches of French lawyers demonstrated the value of custom for the particular needs of France and the thesis that the canons of the ancient church had guaranteed the autonomy she now required. The study of history, especially legal history, revealed the subversion in the Middle Ages of a system admirably suited to contemporary needs.^[67]

Much the same argument defended the English common law against the challenge of the royal prerogative. For Sir Edward Coke, too, the problems of contemporary society were to be solved by the recovery of an ancient heritage. "No subject of this realm," he wrote,

but being truly instructed by the good and plain evidence of his ancient and undoubted patrimony and birth-right (though he hath for some time by ignorance, false persuasion, or vague fear been deceived or dispossessed) but will consult with learned and faithful councillors for the recovery of the same. The ancient and excellent laws of England are the birth-right and the most ancient and best inheritance that the subjects of this realm have, for by them he enjoyeth not only his inheritance and goods in peace and quietness, but his life and his most dear country in safety. (I fear that many want true knowledge of this ancient birth-right.)^[68]

The defects in the scholarship supporting this vision were not difficult to identify; Hobbes was critical of Coke on this score,^[69] and by the later

seventeenth century men were casting about for a better foundation for the social order than this mythical past. But Coke was psychologically on sounder ground than Hobbes in his sense of the kind of argument required by the times; like Sarpi, like the lawyers of France, Coke helped contemporaries to accept change by representing it as continuity. Serious consideration of some other basis for law and order, and therefore for human liberty and human rights, depended on a new political and cultural climate.

Nevertheless the myth of a recovered past proved a perennial resource of European culture, and it should be of particular interest to those who think of themselves as historians of modern Europe. The lawyers did not create the myth themselves; they merely applied to their own discipline a notion common to reformers of every kind for centuries. It is, of course, the myth of renewal that is at the heart of both the Renaissance and the Reformation. But because of the central importance of the law in the development of modern European society, the application of the idea in this domain gave to the conception of an initial perfection, decay, and recovery the broadest possible social resonance. It could now serve as the organizing principle for understanding the whole process of secular history. In dealing with lawyers, therefore, we are also looking at the origins of the idea of modern history itself.