History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship held annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

OXFORD–WARBURG STUDIES General Editors

charles hope and ian maclean

Oxford–Warburg Studies comprise works of original research on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. They aim to bring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of medieval, renaissance, and early modern Europe, and in particular to explore both visual and literary aspects of the classical tradition.

O X F O R D –W A R BU R G ST U D I E S Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy SYDNEY ANGLO (Second edition) Giotto and the Orators Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 MICHAEL BAXANDALL (Paperback) Joseph Scaliger A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship I. Textual Criticism II. Historical Chronology ANTHONY GRAFTON The Palazzo Vecchio 1298–1532 Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic NICOLAI RUBINSTEIN The Government of Florence under the Medici 1434–1494 NICOLAI RUBINSTEIN (Second edition) The Apocryphal Apocalypse The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment ALASTAIR HAMILTON Children of the Promise The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence 1427–1785 LORENZO POLIZZOTTO Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century A. D. MOMIGLIANO (Re-issued ) Machiavelli—The First Century Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance SYDNEY ANGLO

History of Scholarship A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute Edited by

C. R. LIGO TA and

J.-L. QUANTIN

AC

AC

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York #

Oxford University Press 2006

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928431–8 978–0–19–928431–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Constance Blackwell

Acknowledgements The Editors wish to record their gratitude to the former Director of the Warburg Institute, Nicholas Mann, who initiated the project of the volume and presided over its early stages; to the present Director, Charles Hope, for his support in its final stages; to the Staff and Fellows of the Institute—especially Anna Akasoy, Jenny Boyle, Rembrandt Duits, Elizabeth MacGrath, Franc¸ois Quiviger, Jonathan Rolls, and Paul Taylor—for their unstinting, patient, and good-humoured help. A special word of thanks is due to Anne Ashby, of the Oxford University Press, for her kindness and patience in steering the volume towards the desired goal. The volume is dedicated to Constance Blackwell, whose support, intellectual and material, has sustained the Seminar on the history of scholarship from its inception. C. R. L. J.-L. Q.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

Introduction Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin The Colossus of Rhodes: Ancient Texts and Modern Representations Godefroid de Callatay¨ Renaissance Philology: Johannes Livineius (1546–1599) and the Birth of the Apparatus Criticus Luigi Battezzato The Measure of Rome: Andre´ Schott, Justus Lipsius and the Early Reception of the Res gestae divi Augusti Paul Nelles Critice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and the Rise of the Notion of Historical Criticism Benedetto Bravo Early Christianity in Michael Neander’s Greek–Latin Edition of Luther’s Catechism Irena Backus A Sixteenth-Century Hebraic Approach to the New Testament Joanna Weinberg Robert Bellarmine, Christian Hebraist and Censor Piet van Boxel Spencer, Maimonides, and the History of Religion Fausto Parente Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity Jean-Louis Quantin

ix xi 1

39

75

113

135

197

231 251 277

305

viii

Contents

10. A German Spinozistic Reader of Cudworth, Bull, and Spencer: Johann Georg Wachter and his Theologia Martyrum (1712) Martin Mulsow 11. Pierre Des Maizeaux: History, Toleration, and Scholarship Scott Mandelbrote 12. The Pre-adamites: An Abortive Attempt to Invent Pre-history in the Seventeenth Century? Alain Schnapp 13. Hamann and the History of Philosophy Denis Thouard 14. Theory and Methodology of History from Chladenius to Droysen: A Historiographical Essay Alexandre Escudier Index

357

385

399 413

437 487

List of Illustrations 1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5

1.6 1.7 1.8

1.9

1.10

1.11

The windrose of Timosthenes on Eratosthenes’ world map, reproduced from G. de Callatay¨, ‘Ofikoum
nh ˛pourniov: Re´flexions sur l’origine et le sens de la ge´ographie astrologique’, Geographia Antiqua, 8–9 (1999–2000), 68 The windrose and the zodiac in Ptolemy’s Geography: Claudius Ptolemaeus, Geographia (Strasburg: Ioannes Grieninger, 1522), sig. R3v (Bibliothe`que Nationale de Luxembourg, Re´serve pre´cieuse, L.P. 7023; courtesy of BNL) Map of Rhodes: C. T. Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, i (London, 1865), frontispiece Maryon’s fallen Colossus: H. Maryon, ‘The Colossus of Rhodes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 76 (1956), 76 Tempesta’s fallen Colossus, 1608: A. Tempesta, Septem orbis admiranda . . . ex antiquis monumentis collecta et . . . in aereas tabulas ab Antonio Tempesta relata, a Iusto Rychio versibus celebrata (Rome, 1608), pl. 2 Map of the city of Rhodes: Maryon, ‘Colossus’ (as for Fig. 1.4), 80 Engraving of the Colossus by Jean Cousin: A. Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant (Lyon, 1554), 104 Engraving of the Colossus and the Island of Rhodes by Jean Cousin: A. Thevet, Cosmographie universelle, ii (Paris, 1575), fo. 205v Engraving of the Colosseum by van Heemskerck, 1570: Maarten van Heemskerck, Amphitheatrum, Muse´e du Louvre (G. Brett, ‘The Seven Wonders of the World in the Renaissance’, Art Quarterly, 12 (1949), 342, fig. 4) Nero’s Colossus and the Colosseum: Coin of Gordian III (Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale di Roma, 1889–90, 357, fig.1) Engraving of the Colossus of Rhodes by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1570: Witt Collection, Courtauld Institute 1948, no. 168

56

57 58 59

59 60 61

62

63

63

64

x

List of Illustrations

1.12 The Colossus of Rhodes by Fischer von Erlach, 1725: J. B. Fischer von Erlach, Entwurff einer historischen Architektur (Vienna, 1725), pl. viii 65 1.13 A Rhodian coin with the head of Helios: A. Mu¨ller, The Seven Wonders of the World (London, 1969), 280 [copyright holder could not be contacted] 66 1.14 Rhodian didrachm with head of Helios in a rayed taenia: R. Ashton, ‘Rhodian Coinage and the Colossus’, Revue numismatique, 6th ser., 30 (1988), pl. 15, no. 19; courtesy of the Socie´te´ franc¸aise de numismatique 67 1.15 A. Gabriel’s reconstruction of the Colossus: A. Gabriel, ‘La Construction, l’attitude et l’emplacement du Colosse de Rhodes’, Bulletin de correspondance helle´nique, 56 (1932), 337 68 1.16 The Statue of Liberty: drawing by Luis Marı´a Lorente (courtesy of the artist) 69 1.17 Marble relief found in Rhodes: G. Jacopi, Monumenti di scultura del Museo Archeologico di Rodi, ii (Rhodes, 1932), no. 35 70 1.18 H. Maryon’s reconstruction of the standing Colossus: Maryon, ‘Colossus’ (as for Fig. 1.4), 72 71 1.19 Colossus of Rhodes, after a painting by Salvador Dalı´ at the Kunstmuseum, Bern: Drawing by Luis Marı´a Lorente (courtesy of the artist) 72 1.20 Gem with sun and zodiac: Geneva, Muse´e d’Art et d’Histoire, Inv. 20506; M.-L. Vollenweider, Muse´e d’art et d’histoire de Gene`ve: Catalogue raisonne´ des sceaux, cylindres, intailles et came´es, iii (Mainz, 1983), no. 228 [copyright holder could not be contacted] 73 13.1 Franc¸ois Girardon, Tomb of Cardinal Richelieu, Church of the Sorbonne, Paris (courtesy of Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art) 426

List of Contributors Irena Backus is Titular Professor of the History of the Reformation, Institut d’Histoire de la Re´formation, Universite´ de Gene`ve Luigi Battezzato is Professor of Greek Literature, Universita` del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli Benedetto Bravo is Professor Emeritus, Institute of History, University of Warsaw Godefroid de Callatay¨ is Professor of Islamic Studies, Institut Orientaliste, Universite´ catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve Alexandre Escudier docteur e`s letters, is charge´ de recherche at the Centre de Recherches Politiques (CEVIPOF) of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris Christopher Ligota is Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London Scott Mandelbrote is Official Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Peterhouse, Cambridge and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford Martin Mulsow is Professor of History, Rutgers University, New Jersey Paul Nelles is Associate Professor of History, Carleton University, Ottawa Fausto Parente is Professor Emeritus, Department of the History of Christianity, Seconda Universita` di Roma (Tor Vergata) Jean-Louis Quantin is Professor of the History of Early Modern Scholarship, E´cole Pratique des Hautes E´tudes (Sorbonne), Paris Alain Schnapp is Professor of Classical Archaeology, Universite´ de Paris I— Sorbonne Denis Thouard is Chercheur at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Lille)/Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Fru¨he Neuzeit’ (Munich) Piet van Boxel is at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies Joanna Weinberg is at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction The history of scholarship as a distinct pursuit, larger in scope than ‘reviews of scholarship’ ad hoc, and more specific in content than what ‘scholarship’ taken as a nomen actionis suggests, has had a somewhat marginal and ill-defined existence. There are grounds for thinking that, as a constituted branch of knowledge, an episteme, it has, until quite recently, hardly existed at all. This has begun to change, and Part I of the Introduction offers a brief survey of the new developments. The present volume may be seen as a contribution to them. What might be termed a negative history of scholarship—up to the nineteenth century, i.e. the chronological limit of the volume—is sketched out in Part II.

I The history of scholarship is both old and new. It is old as an epiphenomenon of scholarship itself, in the sense that early modern scholars were deeply concerned to preserve the memory of their mentors, friends, and associates in the Republic of Letters. Treasuring and trading papers and memorials, compiling literary biographies, editing scholarly correspondence were essential activities. The result was an impressive range of publications, some of which are still used today as reference works.1 The collections of letters that were printed in the last decades of The Editors planned the Introduction together but their contributions are distinct: JeanLouis Quantin is responsible for Part I and the section on France in Part II; Christopher Ligota for the rest of Part II, from Bacon to German historicism. 1 An obvious instance is Christian Gottlieb Jo ¨ cher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1750–11, repr. Hildesheim, 1961), continued and supplemented by Johann Christoph Adelung (Leipzig, 1784–1819, repr. Hildesheim, 1997–8). See also Melchior Adam, Dignorum laude virorum, quos Musa vetat mori, immortalitas, seu vitae theologorum, jure-consultorum & politicorum, medicorum atque philosophorum [this includes philologists, poets, mathematicians, and physicists] . . . , 3rd edn. (Frankfurt am Main, 1705),

2

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth, and which were meant to serve as major sources for historia literaria, are very useful to present-day historians of scholarship.2 Corporate or ‘patriotic’ pride made it a duty to immortalize authors of one’s city, one’s country, or one’s religious order.3 In the last-mentioned case this was quite often a task imposed upon the religious by their superiors: the Theatine Antonio Francesco Vezzosi studied physics and mathematics until he was ordered to edit the complete works of a Theatine star, the liturgical scholar Giuseppe Maria Tommasi. For that purpose he explored ‘libraries, Roman archives, the hiding-places of old parchments’. He subsequently compiled what is still the standard bibliography of his order.4 More generally, to evoke past scholarship was tantamount to celebrating scholarship and scholars in general. This is especially true of studies about ancient scholarship from the Alexandrians onwards— also a major topic with early modern scholars. Johannes Wower’s (Wowerius) research on the notion of grammatice in antiquity was meant as a reply to those who had dismissed him as a mere grammarian.5 combining five distinct parts of the original publication, which appeared in 1615–20. Robert Seidel (University of Heidelberg) gave a paper on Adam in the Seminar on the history of scholarship in 1997 (not included in this volume). 2 See e.g. Gerardi Joann. Vossii et Clarorum Virorum ad eum epistolae. Collectore Paulo Colomesio (London, 1690); Isaaci Casauboni Epistolae, insertis ad easdem responsionibus, quotquot hactenus reperiri potuerunt, secundum seriem temporis accurate digestae (Rotterdam, 1709), and especially Sylloges Epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum tomi quinque, collecti et digesti per Petrum Burmannum (Leiden, 1727): Burman complains in his preface that publishers are reluctant to print scholarly correspondence as not very saleable. On the preparation of such editions, see P. Dibon, ‘Les Avatars d’une e´dition de correspondance: Les Epistolae I. Casauboni de 1638’ (1981), repr. in id., Regards sur la Hollande du Sie`cle d’Or (Naples, 1990), 221–66. 3 See e.g. Thomas Smith, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium virorum (London, 1707); Johannes Moller, Cimbria Literata (Copenhagen, 1744); Dom Rene´ Prosper Tassin, O.S.B., Histoire litte´raire de la Congre´gation de Saint-Maur (Paris, 1770); Seraphinus Maria Cerva (Crijevic´), Bibliotheca ragusina: In qua ragusini scriptores eorumque gesta et scripta recensentur, ed. S. Krasic´, 3 vols. (Zagreb, 1975–80) (the work was compiled from 1726 to 1743). 4 See Vezzosi’s account of his ‘conversion’ in the notice he wrote about himself in I scrittori de’ cherici regolari detti teatini, ii (Rome, 1780, repr. Farnborough, 1966), 473–4. 5 Johannes Wower, De Polymathia tractatio. Integri Operis de studiis Veterum pospasmtion (Basle, 1603). See Jacob Thomasius’ preface to the edition of Leipzig, 1665. On Wower, see L. Deitz, ‘Johannes Wower of Hamburg, Philologist and Polymath: A Preliminary Sketch of his Life and Works’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), 132–51, and B. Bravo’s remarks in his contribution to this volume, pp. 171–6 below. In the preface to his Variarum Lectionum liber. In quo varia utriusque Linguae Auctorum loca emendantur, explicantur atque illustrantur, ritus prisci eruuntur, et multa non ubique obvia docentur (Amsterdam, 1676), the Dutch 17th-c. scholar Anthonij Borremans justifies his interests by invoking both ancient and Renaissance philologists.

Introduction

3

Even in our time it has been rightly observed that ‘scholars writing about scholarship are always tempted to exaggerate its importance’.6 Awareness of its loss of status in our contemporary Western divisions of knowledge must have played a part (along with more theoretical reasons: the reaction against positivism, the postmodernist deconstruction of traditional forms of historiography and their literary conventions) in the upsurge of interest in the history of scholarship in the last decades. It is, surely, more than coincidence that the concern of classicists with the historical reception and uses of Greek and Latin has developed at a time when the social relevance of classical studies can no longer be taken for granted.7 The desire to save past scholars and their work from oblivion may have even deeper roots, if one accepts that Western scholarship since the Renaissance, if not much earlier,8 has largely been an attempt to overcome time and, ultimately, mortality itself.9 Scholarship is by definition endless and the inability to finish one’s work before one is overtaken by illness and death has been, and will be, many a scholar’s fate. This is a central theme in Mark Pattison’s highly personal book on Isaac Casaubon. He has Casaubon die a martyr of scholarship, exhausted by his ‘Exercitations on Baronius’: ‘Thus it has been the fate of many men of learning to be crushed under the burden of their own accumulation’10—and Pattison himself, to use his own words, ‘only executed fragments’ of his over-ambitious project ‘to write the history of learning 6 As P. E. Easterling has observed a propos of Alexandrian scholarship, in ead. and B. M. W. Knox (eds.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature, i: Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1985), 29. 7 The connection is made by H. Lloyd-Jones in his introduction to U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, History of Classical Scholarship, trans. A. Harris (London, 1982), pp. xxix–xxxii. For a perceptive analysis, see A. Henrichs, ‘Philologie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Zur Krise eines Selbstverta¨ndnisses’, in H. Flashar (ed.), Altertumswissenschaft in den 20er Jahren: Neue Fragen und Impulse (Stuttgart, 1995), 423–57. 8 For an interesting psychoanalysis of Varro as a deeply anguished man, who took refuge in antiquarianism in order to escape the present, see Satires Menippe´es, ed. J.-P. Ce`be, i (Rome, 1972), 4–6; ii (1974), 277–83; xii (1998), 1905–6. 9 For antiquarianism ‘as a contest against time’, see the recent analysis by P. N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2000), 130– 54; also G. Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995). For conceptions of time among ecclesiastical scholars, see B. Neveu, ‘L’E´rudition eccle´siastique du xviie sie`cle et la nostalgie de l’antiquite´ chre´tienne’ (1981), repr. in id., E´rudition et religion aux XVII e et XVIII e sie`cles (Paris, 1994), 333–63; M. Fumaroli, ‘Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: Les deux Antiquite´s dans l’e´rudition je´suite franc¸aise du xviie sie`cle’, XVII e sie`cle, no. 131 (1981), 149–68. 10 Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1892), 421–4 and 435–40. The first edition appeared in 1875.

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

4

from the Renaissance downwards’.11 George Eliot’s Casaubon is the fictional incarnation of this failure.12 At a more utilitarian level, modern scholars in many fields are obliged to acquaint themselves with the work of their early modern forebears. Many manuscripts of ancient Greek and Latin authors still extant in the Renaissance have since been lost, and can only be reconstructed from early modern editions, collations, or transcriptions.13 In some cases (the epistle to Diognetus or Velleius Paterculus’ Roman History) no source prior to the sixteenth century has survived. In order to use such secondary materials it is essential to know as precisely as possible the working methods and also the vocabulary of Renaissance editors—a modern philologist unaware that codex in sixteenth-century parlance can often refer to a printed book would be liable to serious mistakes.14 The same is true of epigraphy, where many inscriptions from lost monuments are only known because they were copied more or less faithfully— or forged—by early modern archaeologists and travellers.15 Palaeography involves the study of copyists, patrons, and collections and, in the Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), 318–23. In Middlemarch (1872), Casaubon’s scholarly impotence encapsulates the failure, if not of scholarship in general, at least of a whole style and ideal of scholarship: gentlemanly, clerical scholarship in the 17th-c. tradition, which, it is implied, has been made hopelessly obsolete by the new, systematic Geschichtswissenschaft developed in German universities. As another character puts it: ‘If Mr Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble. . . . the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in the woods with a pocketcompass while they have made good roads.’ 13 See e.g. M. Reeve, ‘Beatus Rhenanus and the Lost Vormaciensis of Livy’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 25 (1995), 217–54; P. Petitmengin and J. P. Carley, ‘Malmesbury– Se´lestat–Malines: Les tribulations d’un manuscrit de Tertullien au milieu du xvie sie`cle’, Annuaire des amis de la bibliothe`que humaniste de Se´lestat (2003), 63–74. 14 This is how S. Rizzo justified her study (which is of interest also for an intellectual historian), Il lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome, 1973), p. ix: ‘Nella storia della trasmissione dei classici l’opera degli umanisti ha importanza fondamentale: pochi sono gli editori di testi greci e latini che non debbano fare i conti con documenti umanistici riguardanti la storia di codici tuttora conservati o perduti o non ancora identificati. Per una utilizzazione proficua di tali documenti si richiede una conoscenza quanto possibile esatta delle espressioni che gli umanisti usavano nel descrivere codici e per indicare le varie operazioni della loro attivita` filologica.’ 15 The most famous instance is Pirro Ligorio, recently studied by G. Vagenheim: see e.g. ‘La Falsification chez Pirro Ligorio: A la lumie`re des Fasti Capitolini et des inscriptions de Pre´neste’, Eutopia, 3/1–2 (1994) (¼ Atti del convegno internazionale ‘Vox Lapidum’: Dalla riscoperta delle iscrizioni antiche all’invenzione di un nuovo stile scrittorio), 67–113. See also The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonne´, A/vii, ed. W. Stenhouse (London, 2002). For an interesting 18th-c. example, see A. J. S. Spawforth, ‘Fourmontiana. IG V1 515: Another Forgery ‘‘from Amyklai’’ ’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 71 (1976), 139–45. 11 12

Introduction

5

last decades, important contributions to the history of Renaissance scholarship have come from that quarter—especially from Greek palaeography, which has now emerged as an autonomous discipline, dedicated to the study of handwriting as a cultural phenomenon.16 Lastly, for scholarly keepers of historic libraries, the history of their holdings has often been a natural extension of their interests.17 It is no surprise, therefore, that some degree of at least passive interest in the history of scholarship would seem to be a constant characteristic of scholars since the Renaissance. It has even been claimed that, since the nineteenth century, ‘there is almost no philologist of distinction who has not practised the history of scholarship in some form’.18 In the twentieth century, however, the history of scholarship was slow to become ‘professional’, that is to achieve recognition as a full academic subject and not merely a sideline for scholars with an interest in the history of their own discipline. Wilamowitz’s influential sketch of the history of philology was intended as a story of the progress of unsere Wissenschaft,19 and it was originally published as the introduction to a handbook of classical studies. Rudolf Pfeiffer—who thought that ‘only one who has practised scholarship all his life should dare to write about its history’—had no interest in ‘what is obsolete and past for ever’ but only in ‘the continuity of knowledge, the philologia perennis’.20 Arnaldo Momigliano’s life-long exploration of ‘the classical foundations of 16 A pioneering work was that by C. Graux, Essai sur les origines du fonds grec de l’Escurial: E´pisode de l’histoire de la Renaissance des lettres en Espagne (Paris, 1880; Spanish trans., Madrid, 1982). For more recent studies, see e.g. P. Canart, ‘Les Manuscrits copie´s par Emmanuel Provataris (1546–1570 environ): Essai d’e´tude codicologique’, Me´langes Euge`ne Tisserant, vi (Vatican City, 1964), 173–287; B. Mondrain, ‘Copistes et collectionneurs de manuscrits grecs au milieu du xvie sie`cle: Le cas de Johann Jakob Fugger d’Augsbourg’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 84–5 (1991–2), 354–90; the section ‘Copisti e comittenti di codici greci in Italia tra i secoli XV e XVI’, in G. Prato (ed.), I manoscritti greci tra riflessione e dibatito. Atti del V Colloquio internazionale di paleografia greca (Cremona, 4–10 ottobre 1998) (Florence, 2000) i, 333–441 (contributions by A. Cataldi Palau, M. Cortesi, B. Mondrain, E. Velkovska, R. Mouren). 17 See R. Devreesse in the foreword to his Le Fonds grec de la bibliothe `que Vaticane des origines a` Paul V (Vatican City, 1965), p. vii : ‘On n’a pas ve´cu pendant trente anne´es dans une Bibliothe`que tre`s riche de manuscrits grecs, ni examine´ feuillet par feuillet quelques centaines de ces volumes, sans avoir eu l’attention provoque´e par diverses notules et cotes latines inscrites a` leur de´but entre le milieu du xve et le tournant du xviie au xviiie sie`cle.’ 18 A. Henrichs, ‘Nachwort’ to U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Geschichte der Philologie, 3rd edn. (Stuttgart, 1998), 83. 19 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Geschichte der Philologie, 1. 20 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, 1968), pp. vii–x.

6

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

modern historiography’ did much to alert ancient historians to the relevance of the tradition of their studies. One of his most enduring contributions was to analyse the specificity of the antiquarian’s, as opposed to the historian’s, approach to the past, and to show how the Varronian idea of antiquitates was rediscovered in the Renaissance.21 Momigliano’s work has had a somewhat belated impact among specialists of early modern history, partly because of the unsystematic publication in the series of the Contributi.22 Only fairly recently have some academics made topics in the history of scholarship the centre of their work and career.23 The pace has quickened in the last decade or so. The succession of seminars, conferences, publications, and academic appointments attests that the theme is now in the air.24 Institutionalization has been accompanied by a fundamental change of perspective, which some have characterized as nothing less than a ‘Copernican revolution’: the work of early modern scholars is now ‘to be less scrutinized for what it may tell us about its object’—ancient inscriptions or the text of the classics—than ‘for what it tells us about the way they looked at the object’.25 In some cases, the shift can be precisely 21 A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), repr. in id., Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 67–106. See M. H. Crawford and C. R. Ligota (eds.), Ancient History and the Antiquarian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano (London, 1995). The subject has been further explored, e.g. by J.-L. Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquite´s romaines (Rome, 1996). 22 The first Contributo alla storia degli studi classici appeared in 1955, the posthumous Nono contributo in 1992. A tenth and final one, with a full bibliography, is yet to appear. Momigliano’s thought has become much more accessible with the publication of his Sather Classical Lectures (delivered in 1961–2), The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990). 23 The most influential figure in the English-speaking world being probably Anthony Grafton (on whom see his autobiographical sketch, ‘An Innnocent Abroad’, in id., Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 5–12, and the assessment by L. Deitz, ‘To Corinth and Back’, Arion, 9/3 (2002), 120–44). Cf. Grafton’s comments on the challenges facing the historian of scholarship, in Bring Out your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 278–9. One should also name Joseph Levine (on whose work see his selfpresentation, ‘Ancients and Moderns and the Origins of Modern Critical Historiography’, Intellectual News, no. 8 (Summer 2000), 83–91) and, for France, the late Bruno Neveu (see his collection of articles, E´rudition et religion (as in n. 9), with an important preface by M. Fumaroli). 24 The yearly seminar on the ‘History of scholarship’ at the Warburg Institute began in 1993. The Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes in Paris devoted its seminar for 2002–3 to the history of scholarship. The first chair in France devoted to the history of scholarship was created at the E´cole pratique des Hautes E´tudes (Sorbonne) in 2002. 25 Editors’ ‘Premessa’ to Atti del convegno ‘Vox Lapidum’ (as in n. 15), 3–4. They instance Giuseppe Billanovich’s work on humanist philology. For an introduction to his thought, see G. Billanovich, Dal medioevo all’umanesimo: La riscoperta degli classici, ed.

Introduction

7

dated.26 Research on the history of scholarship has become much more diverse than it used to be. Important and much-needed work has continued on scholarly correspondence, resulting in editions27 or at least calendars.28 ‘Traditional’ biographies are still being written.29 Conferences have been organized to commemorate the achievements of individual scholars.30 There have been doctoral dissertations in Classics on one great humanist’s work on one great classical text.31 Useful reference works have been published or are in course of publication.32 But new questions have emerged.33 Social values and practices of scholars have been examined. Controversies and quarrels have been studied, not only for their objects but also P. Pellegrini (Milan, 2001). Cf. Vestigia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, 2 vols. (Rome, 1984), with bibliography. 26 In Gibbon’s case it took place demonstrably between the two international conferences of 1976 and 1994: see D. Womersley’s preface to Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays (Oxford, 1997), pp. vii–viii. 27 See e.g. Correspondance inte ´grale d’Andre´ Rivet et de Claude Sarrau, ed. H. Bots and P. Leroy, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1978–82); Claude Saumaise and Andre´ Rivet, Correspondance ´echange´e entre 1632 et 1648, ed. P. Leroy and H. Bots (Amsterdam, 1987). A major project, directed by a group of scholars at La Sapienza University in Rome, is the series ‘Le corrispondenze letterarie, scientifiche ed erudite dal Rinascimento all’eta` moderna’, published by Olschki in Florence, which opened with Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, ed. M. G. and M. Sina, 4 vols. (Florence, 1987–97); see the presentation in Nouvelles de la Re´publique des Lettres (2000, no. 1), 129–48. 28 See e.g. G. A. C. Van der Lem and C. S. M. Rademaker, Inventory of the Correspondence of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (Assen, 1993). 29 See e.g. F. F. Blok, Isaac Vossius en zijn kring: Zijn leven tot zijn afscheid van koningin Christina van Zweden, 1618–1655 (Groningen, 1999: English trans. 2000: Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden 1618–1655): a useful and reliable study mainly based on Isaac’s unpublished correspondence. 30 See e.g. Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), lecteur et ´ editeur de textes anciens: Actes du Colloque International tenu a` Strasbourg et a` Se´lestat du 13 au 15 novembre 1998, ed. J. Hirstein (Turnhout, 2000). 31 See e.g. J. Hirstein, Tacitus’ Germania and Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). 32 For the reception of ancient Greek and Latin authors, the prime work of reference is the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Annotated Lists and Guides (Washington, DC, begun in 1960, eight vols. so far, vol. 9 in press), which its first director, Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘planned as a contribution to the history of classical scholarship’ (vol. i, p. ix). See also e.g. L’Europe des humanistes (XIV e–XVII e sie`cles), ed. J.-F. Maillard, J. Kecskeme´ti, and M. Portalier (Turnhout, 1995). The same team has now moved on to a further stage, the compilation of a corpus of humanist editorial prefaces: see La France des humanistes, i: Helle´nistes (Turnhout, 1999); La France des humanistes: Henri II Estienne ´editeur et ´ecrivain (Turnhout, 2003). 33 See e.g. the variety of themes in S. Neumeister and C. Wiedemann (eds.), Res Publica Litteraria: Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der fru¨hen Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1987).

8

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

for the socially ritualized forms in which they were conducted.34 A great deal of attention has been paid to the ideals and realities of the ‘Republic of Letters’—the transnational and transconfessional community of scholars35—and also, symmetrically as it were, to international power structures (dominance and resistance).36 The disciplines of ecclesiastical history and patristics—which had been comparatively neglected while the history of scholarship was primarily understood as the history of classical studies—have lately come to the fore.37 The crucial role they played in the elaboration of critical procedures and the epistemology of history has been recognized.38 But recent research has also shown how scholarship was remodelled and redirected after the Glaubensspaltung to suit confessional interests and priorities. Archbishop Parker would not have been so keen to inventory, collect, and edit medieval English texts if he had not believed that they provided evidence for the original freedom and doctrinal purity of the Church of England.39 The impact of censorship and what it tells us of the contemporary implications of scholarship have attracted notice. The recent opening of the archives of the Roman congregations of the Holy Office and the Index is likely to 34 See e.g. A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven and London, 1995). 35 Marc Fumaroli devoted a series of lectures over several years to the Re ´publique des lettres: see Annuaire du Colle`ge de France, 88–93 (1987–8 to 1992–3). For a convenient handbook (with international bibliography), see H. Bots and F. Waquet, La Re´publique des lettres (Paris, 1997). One of the first scholars to draw attention to this topic was P. Dibon: see his collection of articles, Regards sur la Hollande du Sie`cle d’Or (as in n. 2), and the proceedings of the conference dedicated to him: Il Vocabolario della Re´publique des Lettres. Terminologia filosofica e storia della filosofia. Problemi di metodo. Atti del Convegno internazionale in memoriam di Paul Dibon, Napoli, 1996, ed. M. Fattori (Florence, 1997). 36 F. Waquet, Le Mode `le franc¸ais et l’Italie savante: Conscience de soi et perception de l’autre dans la Re´publique des lettres (1660–1750) (Rome, 1989). 37 Important recent work includes M. Mulsow and others (eds.), Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693–1755): Theologie im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie, Philologie und Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 1997); I Padri sotto il torchio: Le edizioni dell’antichita` cristiana nei secoli XV–XVI. Atti del Convegno di Studi, 25–26 giugno 1999, ed. M. Cortesi (Florence, 2002); this was followed in Oct. 2003 by a conference on ‘Editiones principes delle opere dei Padri greci e latini’, forthcoming; I. Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003). 38 See e.g. F. Dolbeau, ‘Critique d’attribution, critique d’authenticite ´: Re´flexions pre´liminaires’, Filologia mediolatina, 6–7 (1999–2000), 33–61; J.-L. Quantin, ‘Document, histoire, critique dans l’e´rudition eccle´siastique des temps modernes’, Recherches de science religieuse, 92 (2004), 597–635. 39 T. Graham and A. G. Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1998).

Introduction

9

provide many revealing instances in the coming years.40 Much has been written on the political uses of antiquarianism and the role of historiographical constructions in the legitimation of princely power and state-building.41 The mechanisms of patronage have been scrutinized.42 Gender issues in scholarship have become a topic.43 It has been better understood that, in early modern times, ‘practices of scholarship’ were in no way confined to the disciplines and subjects we would today describe as scholarship.44 Undertaking ‘literary journeys’, engaging in learned correspondence, searching for manuscripts, compiling catalogues, building up collections, editing, commenting on, and excerpting ancient texts were activities of major relevance for jurisprudence, theology, or medicine as well as antiquarianism. The so-called ‘learned languages’ appeared as the key to all sorts of knowledge.45 ‘Humanism’, as Eugenio Garin and others have stressed, was not merely 40 For a presentation of these newly available sources, see L’apertura degli Archivi del Sant’Uffizio Romano (Rome, 1998); F. Beretta, ‘L’archivio della congregazione del Sant’Ufficio: Bilancio provvisorio della storia e natura dei fondi d’antico regime’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 37 (2001), 29–58. They have mainly been used so far for the history of theology and philosophy, rather than of scholarship, but see the important study by P. Vismara, ‘Muratori ‘‘immoderato’’: Le censure romane al De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio’ (1999), repr. in ead., Cattolicesimi: Itinerari seisettecenteschi (Milan, 2002), 29–61. See also G. Fragnito (ed.), Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, trans. A. Belton (Cambridge, 2001), and the forthcoming Dizionario dell’Inquisizione, directed by A. Prosperi and J. Tedeschi (to be published by Laterza). 41 See e.g. Les Princes et l’histoire du XIV e au XVIII e sie `cle: Actes du colloque organise´ par l’Universite´ de Versailles-Saint-Quentin et l’Institut Historique Allemand, Paris/Versailles, 13–16 mars 1996, ed. C. Grell, W. Paravicini, and J. Voss (Bonn, 1998); Fonder les savoirs, fonder les pouvoirs, XVe–XVIIe sie`cle: Actes de la journe´e d’e´tude organise´e par l’E´cole nationale des chartes, Paris, 8 avril 1999, ed. D. de Courcelles (Paris, 2000). 42 See e.g. D. R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993). 43 See the section ‘Die gelehrte Frau im 17. Jahrhundert’ in Res Publica Litteraria (as in n. 33), ii. 549–640; more recently Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes: Du cre´puscule de la Renaissance a` l’aube des Lumie`res. Actes du colloque de Chantilly, 22–24 septembre 1995, ed. C. Nativel (Geneva, 1999); P. Totaro (ed.), Donne, filosofia e cultura nel Seicento (Rome, 1999); Anne Marie de Schurman: Femme savante (1607–1678). Correspondance, ed. C. Venesoen (Paris, 2004). On male–male relationships, see A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997). 44 See H. Zedelmaier and M. Mulsow (eds.), Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Tu¨bingen, 2001), as well as the parallel volume which originated from the same group of German scholars, R. Ha¨fner (ed.), Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beitra¨ge zu Begriff und Problem fru¨hneuzeitlicher ‘Philologie’ (Tu¨bingen, 2001). 45 For the notion of ‘learned language’, see [Thomas Baker], Reflections upon Learning, 2nd edn. (London, 1700), 9–16, who instances Arabic and Greek, and comments ironically on ‘the French Tongue (which as yet is no Learned Language, tho’ it bids pretty fair for it)’.

10

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

a ‘literary’ movement. The aspiration was to recover the whole of ancient learning. Mathematics owed its renaissance to the work of Italian humanists on Greek mathematical texts.46 Even in Pascal’s day, ‘mathematical erudition’ was still a requisite for a mathematician.47 The rediscovery of Epicurus and Democritus was fundamental for the development of modern atomism. Pierre Gassendi’s own philosophical work emerged from his learned exploration of Epicurus’ biography and its sources.48 He regarded the writing of history as an integral part of the practice of science, although this connection was already challenged in his lifetime.49 Erudition could also have an ideological dimension. Gassendi was close to the libertins, for whom, in France and Italy, the recovery of past learning provided a code for non-conformity.50 In England, in the early eighteenth century, freethinkers like John Toland mounted their attack on religious orthodoxy in terms of biblical and patristic scholarship.51 As a result two different perspectives have now emerged in the history of scholarship. They overlap with the persistent coexistence of ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ (or full-time and part-time workers) in the field but also mirror the well-known duality of the internalist and externalist approach in the history of science. This distinction opposes ‘those concerned with the intellectual contents of science, with concepts, theories and ideas . . . [to] . . . those concerned with the non-cognitive, social, economic and institutional conditions, causes, constraints and (possibly) determinants of scientific theory and practice’.52 In the case of 46 See e.g. E. Garin, Il ritorno dei filosofi antichi (Naples, 1983); P. L. Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva, 1975); D. J. Geanakoplos, Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaeologan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman Churches (Madison, Wis., 1989). 47 See D. Descotes, Blaise Pascal: Litte ´rature et ge´ome´trie (Clermont-Ferrand, 2001), 311–17. 48 See B. Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Epicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658 (Paris, 1944). 49 L. Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge, 1987). 50 As was first shown by R. Pintard in his seminal dissertation, Le Libertinage ´ erudit dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVII e sie`cle (Paris, 1943, repr. with a new foreword, Geneva, 1983). 51 As has recently been stressed by J. Champion in his introduction to John Toland, Nazarenus (Oxford, 1999), esp. 49–67. 52 J. A. Schuster, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, in R. C. Olby and others (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London, 1990), 217–42 at 218–19. See also K. Olesko, ‘Historiography of Science’, in J. L. Heilbron (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford, 2003), 366–70.

Introduction

11

the history of scholarship some authors (typically with an initial training in Classics rather than in early modern history) have observed philologists and antiquaries at work, scrutinizing manuscripts, coins, or inscriptions. Exponents of this approach have called for the history of scholarship to be ‘understood as a series of strategies which have been developed to deal with what have been perceived as problems demanding solution’.53 They have thus been inclined to insist on the continuity of the ‘classical’ or the ‘antiquarian tradition’ from the Italian Renaissance onwards. They have even pointed to Alexandrian critics (or, in the case of the transmission of patristic literature, to medieval monastic librarians) as the first link in the chain.54 They have often been driven by a sense of justice: to give every scholar his due and to make up for unfair neglect.55 At its best, this perspective has resulted in admirably rigorous and lucid studies, written by people who know what manuscripts and collations are and can thus understand what sixteenth- or seventeenth-century scholars had actually been doing.56 There is a risk, however, of ignoring the broader historical context. And ignorance of the specificity of the past encourages pointless value judgements. The crudest varieties of anachronism can occur, especially among those specialists in ancient history who chance a hand in the history of scholarship for the sake of a conference. Some still treat early modern scholars like minors whose work they are happy to grade according to merit.57 53 G. W. Most’s preface to the first volume of the series Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte (Go¨ttingen, 1997). Cf. Momigliano’s definition of the object of his studies in the preface to the first Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (as in n. 21): ‘chiarire a me stesso e ai miei allievi come si siano originati certi problemi della disciplina che io professo’. 54 See e.g. the standard handbook by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1991). 55 See e.g. E. Heck, ‘ ‘‘Du sollst nicht zitieren aus zweiter Hand’’: Entdeckung und fru¨he Benutzung des Turiner Codex der lactanzischen Epitome divinarum institutionum’, Philologus, 137 (1993), 110–21; F. Heim’s introduction to Beatus Rhenanus, lecteur et ´editeur de textes anciens (as in n. 30); and M. Reeve’s pungent reflections on classicists’ attitudes to the history of scholarship in S. J. Harrison (ed.), Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory and Classical Literature (Oxford, 2001), 245–51. 56 For exemplary studies by modern philologists, see F. Dolbeau, ‘Les Travaux sur les manuscrits augustiniens de Saint-Remi de Reims’, in Troisie`me centenaire de l’e´dition mauriste de saint Augustin: Communications pre´sente´es au colloque des 19 et 20 avril 1990 (Paris, 1990), 123–55; P. Petitmengin, ‘Montfaucon, dom Le Maıˆtre et la Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum’, in D. Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda and J.-F. Genest (eds.), Du copiste au collectionneur: Me´langes d’histoire des textes et des bibliothe`ques en l’honneur d’Andre´ Vernet (Turnhout, 1998), 537–84. 57 For an especially naive example, see J.-M. Pailler, ‘L’Arche ´ologue par dela` les frontie`res, l’Antiquite´ explique´e’, in Dom Bernard de Montfaucon: Actes du colloque de

12

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

The externalist, or ‘contextualist’, approach, which is favoured by specialists in early modern history, is free from such defects. Its best exponents have been able to document the centrality of scholarship in the intellectual culture of early modern Europe and to analyse its significance. Rather than the continuity of the antiquarian tradition, they have typically stressed the singularity of a seventeenth-century antiquarian culture, the concerns and practices of which belong to a lost world and call for an imaginative effort of reconstruction.58 They were part of what Krzysztof Pomian has called ‘the culture of curiosity’, which ‘ruled ad interim between the age of theology and the age of science’.59 Putting scholarship in context has been a major achievement and it has resulted in the most promising developments in recent years. The danger here is neglect of the actual contents and modes of production of scholarly works. Scholarship had its own rhythms and codes, which channelled in a specific manner the constraints of ideology. Scholars wrote and published with a constituency in mind, not merely their patrons, ecclesiastical superiors, and censors, but their peers in the Republic of Letters. Some scholars were respected, admired, and feared, others despised. The criteria involved went beyond ideological or partisan affinities. That an edition of Augustine’s complete works in the seventeenth century could not be without theological implications does not mean that it should be considered in the same light as the odd antiJesuit pamphlet in the vernacular.60 It has also to be said that a number of those who have studied early modern scholarship from the point of view of, and with a training in, the history of ideas have not had the requisite grounding in classical languages. It is a melancholy fact that, ‘as countless examples show, scholars who are unfamiliar with the system of medieval abbreviations and MS ligatures often fail, at a very elementary level, to decipher what they see’ when they read a sixteenth-century Carcassonne, octobre 1996, ed. D.-O. Hurel and R. Roge´ (Saint-Wandrille, 1998), i, 225–41. Many contributions in Lenain de Tillemont et l’historiographie de l’antiquite´ romaine: Actes du colloque, 19–21 novembre 1998, ed. S.-M. Pellistrandi (Paris, 2002) tend likewise to assess Tillemont’s merits and weaknesses from the point of view of a modern specialist of the Roman Empire. 58 See Miller, Peiresc’s Europe (as in n. 9), and Zedelmeier and Mulsow’s foreword to Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit (as in n. 44), 7. 59 K. Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris–Venise: XVI e–XVIII e sie `cle (Paris, 1987), esp. 61–80. Eng. trans. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500– 1800 (Cambridge, 1990). 60 As B. Kriegel, ‘Le Complot janse ´niste dans la Congre´gation de Saint-Maur’, in Y.-M. Berce´ and E. Fasano Guarini (eds.), Complots et conjurations dans l’Europe moderne (Rome, 1996), 181, seems to imply.

Introduction

13

printed text.61 Of the many factual errors that spoil the philosopher Blandine Barret-Kriegel’s four-volume opus on seventeenth-century scholarship (perhaps the most widely read book on the topic in Frenchspeaking countries), several are simply due to inadequate Latin.62 Even fully-fledged translators of neo-Latin scholarly texts cannot always be trusted—especially when, as is often the case, the Latin is interspersed with Greek quotations.63 Relations between historians of science are occasionally tense.64 The nightmare scenario in the history of scholarship would be a dialogue of the deaf between classicists impervious to the historicity of their own procedures and intellectual historians with little notion of what they are talking about. Fortunately, there are historically aware philologists as well as historians who recognize that one cannot understand early modern scholarship without some degree of familiarity with the texts it undertook to retrieve.

II The explanation that suggests itself, obviously and faute de mieux, for the shadowy nature of the history of scholarship until recently is that scholarship itself failed to acquire a distinct epistemological profile. Such prospects as there may have been for one were undercut by the emergence of the view, in the early seventeenth century, that the retrieval of the monuments of the past as an end in itself was intellectually secondrate, that, precisely, it did not make the grade as an episteme. This did not kill off erudition, but repressed it as a Denkform.65 It flourished as a set of procedures—as often as not very sophisticated ones—deriving its raison 61 L. Deitz, ‘Editing Sixteenth-Century Latin Prose Texts: A Case Study and a Few General Observations’, in G. W. Most (ed.), Editing Texts: Texte edieren (Aporemata: Kritische studien zur Philologiegeschichte, 2; Go¨ttingen, 1998), 145. 62 To give only one example, Melanchthon’s Apologia confessionis Augustanae becomes ‘l’Apologie des Confessions de saint Augustin’ (B. Barret-Kriegel, Les Historiens et la monarchie (Paris, 1988), ii. 61). For a thorough discussion, see P.-F. Burger, ‘La Dispute entre Mabillon et Rance´’, Nouvelles de la Re´publique des Lettres (1999, no. 1), 109–42. 63 See O. Bloch’s devastating review of S. Taussig’s French translation of Gassendi, De vita et moribus Epicuri (Paris, 2001), XVII e sie`cle, no. 221 (Oct. 2003), 758–64. 64 As was shown by some reactions to M. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993). See the debate between the author and M. Shank in Early Science and Medicine, 1 (1996), 70–150. 65 Cf. E. R. Curtius, Europa ¨ ische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 4th edn. (Bern, 1963), 486–90, ‘Etymologie als Denkform’; Deitz, ‘Wower’ (as in n. 5), 150–1.

14

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

d’eˆtre from the cultural significance, taken as read, of its various fields of application. The two major names in this disqualification were Bacon and Descartes. Descartes’s rejection is the more uncompromising and thoroughgoing one. Reflecting on ‘the history of his mind’ in the opening pages of the Discours de la me´thode, he recalls that he was brought up according to humanist conceptions: he was told that erudition was the means of acquiring clear, certain, and useful knowledge. But, as soon as he finished his course of study, he realized that traditional, accumulative learning was failing to fulfil its promises.66 ‘The starting point of Cartesianism was the bankruptcy of a culture.’67 Descartes subsequently formalized the fundamental opposition of science, as he redefined it, and scholarship.68 History in general was denied the status of a science, whence its worthlessness as an object of philosophical reflection. The faculty it engages is memory, not reason, the material it offers is not susceptible of direct inspection or proof, is not reducible to clarity or distinctness, and above all, is incapable of certainty.69 A text which was found in Descartes’s papers after his death, La Recherche de la ve´rite´ par la lumie`re naturelle, is a dialogue between a character aptly named Epistemon, who has read all the books, and Eudoxe the philosopher. The latter insists on ‘the difference between sciences and simple attainments which do not require any use of reason, such as languages, history, geography, and generally everything that depends on experience alone’. In a provocative repudiation of the most basic conviction of Renaissance humanism, Eudoxe declares that ‘a gentleman is no more obliged to know Latin and Greek’ than any rustic dialect of modern Europe.70 At 66 Discours de la Methode [1637], I, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Adam-Tannery, 2nd edn., vi (Paris, 1965), 4–9. See the classic commentary by E. Gilson in Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1930), 100–42. 67 H. Gouhier, ‘Comment Descartes est devenu carte ´sien’, in id., Descartes: Essais sur le ‘Discours de la me´thode’, la me´taphysique et la morale, 3rd edn. (Paris, 1973), 14–22. 68 See Gilson’s commentary (as in n. 66), 123; H. Gouhier, Les Premie `res Pense´es de Descartes: Contribution a` l’histoire de l’Anti-Renaissance (Paris, 1958), esp. 142–9. 69 See C. Borghero, La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan, 1983), 24–35. 70 La Recherche de la ve ´rite´ par la lumie`re naturelle, in Œuvres de Descartes (as in n. 66), x (1966), 502–3: ‘Je desire que vous remarquie´s la difference qu’il y a entre les sciences et les simples connoissances qui s’acquierent sans aucun discours de raison, comme sont les langues, l’histoire, la geographie, et generalement tout ce qui ne depend que de l’experience seule. Car je suis bien d’accord que la vie d’un homme ne suffiroit pas, pour acquerir l’experience de toutes les choses qui sont au monde; mais aussy je me persuade que ce seroit folie de le desirer, et qu’un honeste homme n’est pas plus oblige´ de sc¸avoir le grec ou le latin, que le suisse ou le bas breton, ni l’histoire de l’Empire, que celle du

Introduction

15

the end of his life, when he was staying at the court of Sweden, Descartes deplored Queen Christina’s appetite for Greek, and ‘ancient books’ as diversions from philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ and ‘philology’ appeared to him and to his admirers as antithetical.71 It is interesting to note that ´erudition was still for him a positive term, without any of the negative connotations that later attached to it. He intended at one point to write a Traite´ de l’e´rudition72 and, in his 1643 letter to Voetius, he contrasted eruditio, the fruit of ‘the true use of reason’, to doctrina, undigested knowledge accumulated from books.73 Since the truly erudite ‘understand that true erudition does not depend solely on books, they strive to acquire it also by private meditation, or the various practices of business, and intercourse with eminent persons, and they do not spend all their time with books’.74 By the end of the seventeenth century, however, in a highly revealing semantic inversion, what Descartes called eruditio had become science in French, and what he denigrated as doctrina attracted the label ´erudition.75 The subsequent discrediting of ´erudition (in its double meaning of erudition and scholarship) in many circles, especially in France, is well known but its specific configuration less so. Contemporaries already commented on this change in cultural values. Gibbon dated its moindre estat qui soit en l’Europe; et qu’il doit seulement prendre garde a` employer son loisir en choses honnestes et utiles, et a` ne charger sa memoire que des plus necessaires.’ The date of the text is still in dispute (suggestions range from the early 1630s to Descartes’s last years: see the special issue of Nouvelles de la Re´publique des Lettres (1999, no. 1) on the question). S. Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), 362–4, assigns it tentatively to the early 1640s. 71 See letters exchanged by Princess Elizabeth and Descartes in Oct.–Dec. 1649, Œuvres (as in n. 66), v ( 1974), 430 and 452. It would be interesting, in this connection, to trace the fortuna of the Senecan tag ‘quae philosophia fuit, facta philologia est’ (Epp. ad Lucilium cviii. 23). For Lipsius’ use of it, cf. M. Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, 1991), 136–7. We owe this reference to Jill Kraye. 72 See Princess Elizabeth to Descartes, 5 Dec. 1647, and Descartes’s answer, 31 Jan. 1648, Œuvres, v (as in n. 71), 97 and 111–12. Commentators have assumed that this Traite´ de l’e´rudition would have been a treatise against erudition. This is true according to the present use of the word ´erudition, not Descartes’s. 73 Descartes, Epistola ad Voetium, in Œuvres (as in n. 66), viii/2 (1965), 42–6. 74 Ibid. 44: ‘hi quidem [vere eruditi] cum intelligant veram eruditionem non a solis libris pendere, illam etiam privata meditatione, vel vario negotiorum usu, et virorum praestantium familiaritate, sibi comparare satagunt, nec inter libros semper versantur’. 75 See [Adrien Baillet], La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (Paris, 1691), ii. 469–70. This substitution of science vs ´erudition for Descartes’s eruditio vs doctrina has been followed by all French translators of the Epistola ad Voetium (see most recently Descartes and Schoock, La Querelle d’Utrecht, trans. T. Verbeek (Paris, 1988), 351). A comparative study of the semantics of doctrina, eruditio, Gelehrsamkeit, learning, antiquarianism, etc. remains a desideratum.

16

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

beginning to Descartes but thought that ‘the mortal blow’ had been the French dispute of Ancients and Moderns.76 The study of classical literature lost henceforth its traditional name of Belles-Lettres and found itself designated by the new and derogatory word ´erudition.77 But the Cartesian contempt for the past had a paradoxical effect: it inspired the production of numerous histories ‘of the progress of the human mind’ that are so characteristic of the French Enlightenment, from Fontenelle to Condorcet.78 The hierarchy of knowledge was conceived in terms of its genealogy. Erudition had a place in it, as a necessary, though now superseded, stage, which humankind had to pass through in its ascent towards philosophy. The age of erudition had been the Renaissance.79 In the Encylope´die entry on ‘Erudition’, d’Alembert, while careful to give it its due, found that the preference for the exact sciences on the one hand, and matie`res de bel esprit (belles-lettres) on the other, had an objective reason: philological scholarship had achieved what it could (mainly in recovering monuments of classical Antiquity), and had run out of subjects—though he hastened to add that the large collection of Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Library still awaited expert linguists to read them.80 The activities of the Acade´mie Royale des Inscriptions et BellesLettres belied somewhat d’Alembert’s picture. Its members were far from impervious to Enlightenment values.81 They explored the classical world in a new spirit82 and also moved on to new territories: the Middle 76 Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’e ´tude de la litte´rature (London, 1761), 10; An Essay on the Study of Literature. Now first translated into English (London, 1764), 11. See J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, i: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737– 1764 (Cambridge, 1999). The dossier of the dispute has been put together by A.-M. Lecoq, La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, XVII e–XVIII e sie`cles (Paris, 2001), with an introductory essay by M. Fumaroli. 77 Gibbon, Essai (as in previous note), 12 n. Interestingly, this note was omitted in the 1764 English translation, which would seem to indicate that this use of ´erudition was specifically French. Later in the text, ‘sans crainte du nom fle´trissant d’e´rudit’ (p. 105) was rendered ‘without fear of incurring the contemptible name of a mere scholar’ (p. 110): an epithet was felt necessary to make the meaning clear to an English reader. Lord Chesterfield, Letters (Oxford, 1998), 94, wrote ironically in 1748 of ‘the erudite Germans’ but he was a very Frenchified English aristocrat. 78 See Y. Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes (Paris, 1960), 126–8. 79 See especially d’Alembert’s ‘Discours pre ´liminaire’ to the Encyclope´die, i (Paris, 1751), part II, pp. xix–xxi. ´ rudition’, in Encyclope´die, v (Paris, 1755), 915–17. 80 D’Alembert, ‘E 81 See e.g. Nicolas Fre ´ret, le´gende et ve´rite´: Colloque des 18 et 19 octobre 1991, ClermontFerrand, ed. C. Grell and C. Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford, 1994). 82 See C. Nicolet, ‘Des Belles-Lettres a ` l’e´rudition: L’antiquite´ gre´co-romaine a` l’Acade´mie au xviiie sie`cle’, Comptes rendus de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (2001), 1627–37, with bibliography. An interesting figure is Jean-Philippe de La

Introduction

17

Ages83 and non-European cultures.84 Its Me´moires had a European audience. But the young Gibbon, who bought the first twenty volumes in 1759, observed with dismay that ‘the Academy of Inscriptions was degraded to the lowest rank among the three Royal societies of Paris’.85 The case of Bacon, no less important a figure for the history of scholarship than Descartes—indeed more so—is rather different. Himself the author of at least one fully rounded historical work,86 he was not nearly as peremptory in his critique of what tradition had to offer. He rejected the idea of history as a repository of authoritative knowledge, but not as a source of worthwhile knowledge, subject to the judgement of reason. And even if the history of science and philosophy was for him, by and large, a history of error, the historical process, which Bacon objectifies under the figure of the births (and abortions) of Time,87 claimed attention, if only as a corrective of authorial hubris (morally reprehensible and, above all, intellectually damaging). Such truth as might occur was the daughter of Time, not of authority, Time being the author of authors, and so of all authority.88 Bacon had a keen Bletterie, whose dissertations on the nature of Roman imperial authority are referred to by Gibbon, Essai (as in n. 76), 29 and 154; see B. Neveu, ‘Un acade´micien du xviiie sie`cle, traducteur et biographe de l’empereur Julien: L’abbe´ de La Bletterie’, in Comptes rendus de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (2000), 93–111; J.-L. Ferrary, ‘La Ble´terie, Gravina et les pouvoirs de l’empereur’, in J.-L. Quantin and J.-C. Waquet (eds.), Papes, princes, et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Me´langes a` la me´moire de Bruno Neveu (Geneva, 2006). 83 L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore, Md., 1968). 84 See e.g. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754–1762: Relation de voyage en pre´liminaire a` la traduction du Zend-Avesta, ed. J. Deloche, M. Filliozat, and P. S. Filliozat (Paris, 1997). Anquetil Duperron, ‘the founder of Indianism’, became a member of the Acade´mie des Inscriptions in 1763. 85 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life, ed. G. A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 97–9. 86 Cf. J. F. Tinkler, ‘Bacon and History’, in M. Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge, 1996), 232–59. 87 Cf. F. Bacon, Redargutio philosophiarum, in Works, ed. J. Spedding and others (London, 1857), iii. 568; Instauratio magna, Praefatio, in The Oxford Francis Bacon [hereafter OFB], xi, ed. G. Rees (Oxford, 2004), 14, ll. 6–7. Another figure is ‘saeculorum circuitus et ambages’ (Novum Organum i, aphorism cix, ibid. 168, l. 3). History is not so much dead wood to Bacon: it can be productive (new discoveries), but it takes time and is unpredictable. Bacon wants to eliminate time and randomness by proposing a ‘way’ that will secure and/or anticipate results ‘quickly, suddenly and at once’ (ibid.). 88 Novum Organum i, aphorism lxxxiv, OFB xi. 132, ll. 30–1; cf. Cogitata et visa, in Works, iii. 612. Commentators have noted Bacon’s recourse to the commonplace without seeing that he in fact subverts it. Truth may be a product of time rather than of individual minds, but it is a matter of survival against the odds, not of purposeful protection. Bacon compares time to a river transporting ‘things which are light and blown up’ and drowning ‘that which is sad and weighty’; Of the interpretation of nature, in

18

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

sense of the pervasive contingencies of time. In the dedication of the Novum Organum to the King he presents his own work as a ‘partus temporis magis quam ingenii’—time not as a significant process coming to a head, or as significant moment (kairos), but as a congeries of accidents, here the unlikely accident of the entrenched falsehoods of science and philosophy coming under suspicion in someone’s mind, the someone happening to be himself, the king’s servant, stealing unredeemably his master’s time to write his work which, however, if it is worth anything, owes its coming about (it pleases him to think) to divine mercy and goodness, and to the felicity of the times, the reign of a most wise and most learned monarch, which the newly lit torch of philosophy will perhaps add lustre to in the time to come.89 Bacon declared programmatically that ‘knowledge should be sought from the light of nature, not retrieved from the obscurity of antiquity’.90 He repudiated ‘antiquities and citations, and authors’ testimonies; also, disputes and controversies and divergent opinions; in short, all matters philological’.91 But the past, especially the learning of the past, whatever its inadequacies, was not to be ignored. On the contrary, it was to be retrieved and carefully catalogued.92 Bacon demonstrated this both in theory and in practice. Laying it down that all philosophy—and it is mostly bad philosophy—comes from the Greeks, the Romans and the Arabs not having contributed anything of importance,93 he reconstructs the history of Greek philosophy according to a non-traditional scheme (i.e. not by Works, iii. 227; cf. Cogitata et visa, ibid. 599; Instauratio magna, Praefatio, OFB xi. 14, ll. 17–18. Mostly, truth perishes at the hands of time, or at least time overlays it with falsehood; cf. C. Zittel, ‘ ‘‘Truth is the daughter of time’’: Zum Verha¨ltnis von Theorie der Wissenskultur, Wisssensideal, Methode und Wissensordnung bei Bacon’, in W. Detel and C. Zittel, Wissensideale und Wissenskulturen in der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2002), 213–38, esp. 221–3. 89 OFB xi. 6–8. Admittedly, this can be seen as no more than a well-turned compliment, but it is Bacon’s temporal sensibility that shapes it. Tinkler, ‘Bacon’ (as in n. 86), 250–8, shows that in his History of Henry VII, Bacon, untypically for the humanist mode within which he remains, stresses fortuna as against virtus. 90 Temporis partus masculus, in Works, iii. 535; Redargutio philosophiarum, ibid. 574. 91 Parasceve ad historiam naturalem et experimentalem, aphorism iii, in OFB xi. 456, ll. 16–18. The context of this should be borne in mind: Bacon is sketching out a method for compiling a historia naturalis et experimentalis, and he is pointing out the irrelevancies to be avoided. Philological learning as such is not repudiated—see text below. 92 For both the rejection and the preservation of the learning of the past in Bacon, cf. P. Rossi, Francesco Bacone: Dalla magia alla scienza (Turin, 1974), 66–220. 93 Cf. Redargutio philosophiarum, in Works, iii. 561; Novum Organum i, aphorism lxxi, in OFB xi. 112, ll. 21–4.

Introduction

19

schools), the articulations of which are sufficiently formalized to be both adversarial and descriptive, allowing it to function as historiographical method and not merely as an instrument for demonstrating falsehood.94 Bacon approaches his subject indirectly, through what he calls signa quaedam externa, roughly, conditioning features and general characteristics:95 type of mentality, stage of historical development, modes of procedure, degree of productivity.96 This enables him to expose the radical flaws of Greek philosophy, but also to offer a structural account of it which, disregarding sect and doctrine, differentiates by style of philosophizing, focus of interest, and literary form. If there is anything in Greek philosophy that finds favour with Bacon, it is the Presocratics, whom he is the first, it seems, to identify as a distinct constellation,97 though, of course, he does not use the term.98 As against Plato and 94 Bacon distinguishes redargutio against confutatio. The former offers a typology of philosophical failure, whereas the latter engages in piecemeal argument, which presupposes some kind of common ground, a presupposition Bacon finds inapplicable for his argument—cf. Novum Organum i, aphorisms cxv and xxxv, in OFB xi. 172, ll. 20–3; 76, ll. 22–3; Redargutio, in Works, iii. 557. 95 Cf. Redargutio, in Works, iii. 558, 566, 576; Novum Organum i, aphorisms lxx–xci, in OFB xi. 112, ll. 16–148, ll. 4; cf. Editor’s Introduction, ibid., pp. lvii–lxi; Rossi, Bacone (as in n. 92), 82–6; J. C. Morrison, ‘Philosophy and History in Bacon’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), 585–606 at 598; M. Fattori, ‘Parole e storia della filosofia: Alcuni esempi del vocabolario filosofico del ’600’, in La filosofia e le sue storie: Atti del seminario . . . Lecce . . . 1995 (Lecce, 1998), 145–91 at 160–7 [the title in the table of contents and the running title are those of an earlier paper cited in n. 1]; ead., ‘Signum in Francis Bacon: Dal mondo del sacro al mondo degli uomini’, in Signum: IX colloquio internazionale, Roma . . . 1998 (Florence, 1999), 235–61. 96 Cf. Redargutio, in Works, iii. 562–3, 563, 581, 576; Novum Organum i, aphorisms lxxi–lxxv, in OFB xi. 112, ll. 20–120, l. 10. 97 Bacon’s vindication of the Presocratics against the murderous and appropriative tyranny of Aristotle—cf., e.g., De augmentis iii. 4, in Works, i. 548—is in the tradition of Renaissance Platonizing anti-Aristotelianism—cf. Rossi, Bacone (as in n. 92), 120 n. 46. His immediate source was probably Patrizi’s Discussiones Peripateticae . . . quibus Aristotelicae philosophiae universa historia atque dogmata cum veterum placitis collata . . . declarantur (Basle, 1581). What is new is the shedding of the context of prisca theologia. Bacon endows the Presocratics with an almost Heideggerian Uranfa¨nglichkeit, though he grants Democritus (his favourite philosopher) a proxime accedit to prisca sapientia—cf. De principiis atque originibus secundum fabulas Cupidinis et Coeli, in Works, iii. 110. However, prisca sapientia or sapientia veterum, in Bacon’s conception of it, differs substantially from prisca theologia: it has no biblical filiation and is more in the nature of a mythological repertory than a tradition of authors; cf. Rossi, Bacone, 130–220. For Bacon and Patrizi, cf. V. K. Whitaker, ‘Francesco Patrizi and Francis Bacon’, in W. A. Sessions (ed.), Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts (New York, 1990), 89–104. I owe this reference to Phillips Salman. Cf. n. 104 below. 98 Cf. Historisches Wo ¨rterbuch der Philosophie, xi. 2001, s.v. ‘Vorsokratisch’, ‘Vorsokratiker’: earliest occurrence in J. A. Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788); taken up by Schleiermacher and Hegel, and finally established as a historiographical category by E. Zeller in his Philosophie der Griechen, 1st edn.

20

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, the Presocratics did not teach or found schools,99 and were therefore innocent of ‘professorial pomp’ (one of Bacon’s signa) and its deleterious consequences. They conducted their investigations in private and recorded the results in writing, adopting the form not of the elaborately argued treatise with its tendency to foreclose further enquiry by confining debate within its own terms of reference— but of short, disconnected aphorisms, intended to convey the provisional and lacunary nature of their findings, and so inviting further enquiry.100 Bacon cast some of his own work in the form of aphorisms, and reflected on this.101 The half-title of the Novum Organum describes the subject of the work as ‘not embodied in a proper treatise but only summarily digested, in aphorisms’.102 The disjunction ‘proper treatise’/ ‘aphorisms’ echoes Bacon’s typology of the Presocratics. It reappears within the work as a methodological recommendation, the ‘earliest and most ancient investigators of the truth’, obviously the Presocratics, being offered as an example.103 In fact, Bacon’s evident intellectual sympathy with the Presocratics (especially Democritus) and their aphoristic ways lands him, if not in a contradiction, at least in an ambiguity. He does not seem to reflect on a possible overlap between fragment as literary form (aphorism) and fragment as accident of survival. He praises the former but deplores, and (Tu¨bingen, 1844). The OED s.v. ‘Pre-’ B. I, 1d, cites (as earliest occurrence?) A. C. Fraser’s Life of Berkeley, vii. 293 (1871); cf. also W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, ii (Cambridge, 1965), 345. The emergence of the term seems to have occasioned no special comment. The tendency has been, presumably, to take it as an ‘obvious’ by-product of the perception, present already in Antiquity, of Socrates’ shift of focus from nature to man as marking an epoch. Bacon refers to this; cf. Novum Organum aph. lxxix, in OFB xi. 124, ll. 30–6, but Socrates does not figure in his outline of the history of Greek philosophy. For a modern typology of the Presocratics as a stage in the history of philosophy, cf. A. Laks, ‘ ‘‘Philosophes pre´socratiques’’: Remarques sur la construction d’une cate´gorie de l’historiographie philosophique’ (2001), in A. Laks and C. Longuet (eds.), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie pre´socratique? (Cahiers de philologie, 20, se´rie Apparat critique; Lille 2002), 17–38. We owe this reference to Denis Thouard; we are also grateful to him for a number of other useful remarks. 99 On Bacon’s apparent ignorance of Democritus’ school at Abdera, and Parmenides’ at Elea, cf. B. Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on its Development from 1603 to 1609 (Chicago, 1966), 111 n. 1. In the reprise of the typology of Greek philosophy in Novum Organum (i, aphorism lxxi, in OFB xi. 112, ll. 20–114, l. 24), Bacon qualifies the statement that the Presocratics did not open schools with ‘quod novimus’. 100 Redargutio, in Works, iii. 565–6; 569–70; Cogitata et visa, ibid., iii. 593–4. 101 Cf. B. Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968), 60–95. 102 OFB xi. 48. 103 Novum Organum i, aphorism lxxxvi, in OFB xi. 138, ll. 13–17, a reprise, with slight variations, of Cogitata et visa (as in n. 100).

Introduction

21

wishes to remedy, the latter. The Presocratics cannot be read in their own writings, which have perished. Their views are accessible, if at all, ‘per internuntios quosdam [i.e. later authors] minime fidos, famas et fragmenta’.104 This calls for extra care in examining them, and extra fairness in judging them to compensate, as it were, for the ‘iniquity of fate’. Read at source, the views of these philosophers would have had greater solidity, for the ‘force of theories consists in an apt harmony of their parts sustained by the mutual relationships of these, and a kind of demonstration in the round (in orbem)’; ‘transmitted as [disjointed] parts, they are weak’.105 In Bacon’s ideal vision of the ‘Presocratics restored’, the disconnected aphorism, advancing knowledge as much by what it conveys as by what it leaves space for, seems to disappear in the shadow of the randomly and unreliably transmitted fragment, diminished in its import by lack of context. There is no need to press this. What is of interest is Bacon’s philological engagement with texts of the past. Moreover, his preoccupation with the Presocratics provides a transition from what he did himself to what he postulated as desiderata. He had, as he reports in Cogitata et visa and in Redargutio philosophiarum,106 hunted in the ancient authors— ‘Aristotle’s confutations and Cicero’s quotations’—for the slightest trace or echo of Presocratic opinions and he had examined his findings for insights into nature in which the Presocratics, especially Democritus, had advanced much further than Aristotle had ever done.107 But in the De augmentis Bacon calls for a similar operation to be undertaken, no doubt more systematically. A book, De antiquis philosophiis, is to come out of this—none like it exists. The material should not to be bundled under arbitrary heads as Plutarch did, but used to reconstruct each philosophy distinctly by itself. ‘For any philosophy that is entire supports itself, and its doctrines lend light and strength to each other; taken separately, they sound harsh and strange.’108 Various Presocratic 104 This quotation conflates Cogitata et visa, in Works, iii. 602 with Redargutio, ibid. 570. The principal ‘internuntius minime fidus’ is Aristotle, whose treatment of the Presocratics (mainly in Metaphysics 1) is castigated at length by Patrizi in his Discussiones peripateticae—cf. M. Muccillo, ‘La storia della filosofia presocratica nelle ‘‘Discussiones peripateticae’’ di Francesco Patrizi da Cherso’, La cultura, 13 (1975), 48–105; ead., Platonismo, Ermetismo e ‘prisca theologia’: Ricerche di storiografia filosofica rinascimentale (Quaderni di Rinascimento; Florence, 1996), 108–33. 105 Redargutio, in Works, iii. 570. 106 Works, iii. 602; 569–70. 107 Redargutio, ibid. 570. 108 De augmentis scientiarum iii. 4, in Works, i. 563–4; Bacon’s proposal for the retrieval of the Presocratics is quoted by Thomas Stanley as an epigraph to his chapter on Pythagoras in the first edition of his History of Philosophy, iii (London, 1660); cf. Models of the History of

22

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

philosophies offer many glosses on nature (Naturae glossas), which in their strengths and weaknesses to some extent complement each other, and which it is worth knowing.109 Bacon’s interest in the learning of the past was not confined to the Presocratics. In his well-known discussion, in De augmentis, of types of history, he posits, as a subgenre of historia civilis, historia literarum et artium, non-existent so far, the famous eye of Polyphemus, a statue of the giant can hardly do without. This new branch of history is to consist of elaborate accounts of the vicissitudes of the arts, sciences, and doctrines—of the circumstances of their origin, decay, and revival, of the manner of their transmission, of their migrations, of the controversies they gave rise to, of their institutional embodiment, etc., etc. Bacon goes on to indicate the scope of source material for such a history: not only histories and the writings of critics, but also the principal books written in each century,110 so that the genius of each age can be conjured up from the dead as if by incantation.111 The specifications of this project are given a trial run in book i of De augmentis, which Bacon sums up as a dissertatio de literarum excellentia.112 Elsewhere, he calls for the provision of good libraries, and critical, annotated editions of texts.113 Is Bacon, then, contrary to received opinion, not only not hostile to traditional knowledge, whether superseded or not, but the forgotten founder of the history of its elaboration, in a word of the history of scholarship ? He is not. Though his call for a historia literarum et artium did have a sequel in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Philosophy, i, ed. G. Santinello and others, English edn. by C. W. T. Blackwell (Dordrecht, 1993), 166. It is coupled with a quotation from Montaigne (Essais ii. 12) expressing a similar wish but in quite different, entirely conventional terms. 109 De augmentis ibid. 110 ‘ut materia et copia eius [sc. huiusmodi historiae] non tantum ab historiis et criticis petatur, verum etiam ut per singulas annorum centurias . . . seriatim . . . libri praecipui qui per ea temporis spatia conscripti sunt in consilium adhibeantur’ (Works, i. 503–4); the standard translation of criticis as ‘commentaries’ seems bizarre (Works, iv. 301); I take criticis as a masculine noun, i.e. ‘critics’, used metonymously for their writings. In the paragraph immediately preceding, a propos of causal explanation in civil history, Bacon recommends a plain historical narrative, sparing in judgement, as against what critics do, who spend their time bestowing praise and censure (‘criticorum more in laude et censura tempus teratur’). In the passage under consideration, the two divergent historiographical modes are jointly opposed to non-historiographical evidence—all this under correction. I am most grateful to Graham Rees for his generous help; the interpretation offered is my own. 111 De augmentis scientiarum ii. 4, in Works, i. 502–4; cf. Aduancement of learning [1605], sigs. 2B3v–2B4 þ [r], ed. M. Kiernan (Oxford, 2000), 62. 112 Works, i. 483. 113 Aduancement (as in n. 111), sig. 2A2 þ [v], ‘To the King’ 57; De augmentis ii, ‘Ad Regem suum’, in Works, i. 487.

Introduction

23

historia literaria in Germany, neither this enterprise (of which more anon) nor Bacon’s own project was sufficient to establish the history of past knowledge as an autonomous pursuit. The object of Bacon’s Instauratio magna is the knowledge of nature, not the knowledge of history. He sets out to overhaul the former; the latter he is, by and large, content to leave as he finds it. Not that—quite apart from being a practising historian—he was not passionately interested in history, or that he did not have very sophisticated things to say about it, both in respect of the genre and on specific topics.114 But he did not break the established, humanist mould. If anything, he reinforced it. This cannot be gone into in detail here. Let it suffice to point to his refinement of the theme of history as a treasury of examples: of greater profit when studied direct rather than through the systematization of a philosopher, as in the case of Roman history versus the constitutions collected by Aristotle;115 or when precepts of political and psychological prudence are derived from historians’ (and poets’) accounts of the conduct of eminent historical figures rather than such accounts used to illustrate conventional notions of virtue and vice.116 Moreover, for Bacon there is no structural difference between historical knowledge and the knowledge of nature.117 The findings of historical enquiry, just as those of an enquiry into natural phenomena, are of interest in so far as they yield worthwhile information, not for what they reveal of the facticity of the past, its having been so and not otherwise. The latter, in Bacon’s time (and for another century and a half), is inseparable from providential history, which Bacon recognizes but does not reflect on (as Vico will do) beyond placing it in his schema of historical genera and species.118 114 Cf. L. F. Dean, ‘Sir Francis Bacon’s Theory of Civil History-Writing’ (1941), in B. Vickers (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (London, 1968), 211–35; Morrison, ‘Philosophy’ (as in n. 95); D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto 1990), 145–58; Tinkler, ‘Bacon’ (as in n. 86). 115 Redargutio, in Works, iii. 568–9. 116 Aduancement (as in n. 111), sig. 2Y1r; De augmentis vii. 3, in Works, i. 733–4; cf. Dean, ‘Bacon’s Theory’ (as in n. 114), 219 ff. 117 This is implicit in his Aristotelian understanding of historia as a data-gathering enquiry preliminary to the constitution of a science, the enquiry not being a priori specific to any particular domain; cf. P. Louis, ‘Le Mot flstor‹a chez Aristote’, Revue de philologie, 29 (1955), 39–44. Bacon postulates the elaboration of an all-embracing ‘Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis ad condendam philosophiam’—Novum Organum, Address to the King, in OFB, xi. 8, ll. 2–9. For historia in Bacon, cf. A. Seifert, Cognitio historica: Die Geschichte als Namengeberin der fru¨hneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin, 1976), 116–38. 118 Cf. De augmentis ii. 11, in Works, i. 515–16. There is a hint, perhaps—within a firmly theological framework—of the interest in history for what it is rather than for what

24

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

It is the paradox (from a modern, or postmodern, point of view) of Bacon’s scholarly project that what appears as a highly developed sense of history—of the specificity of historical periods, of historical conditioning, historical change, the moment in time—is intended as the instrument of a thoroughly ahistorical procedure: scouring the records of the past for nuggets of useful information, useful in terms of a normative enterprise, such as Bacon’s Instauratio. Once what is useful has been extracted, the historical dimension falls away. It can have no intrinsic interest: the nuggets of truth were embedded in a mass of error.119 Bacon’s project of a universal history of learning was taken up, with emphatic acknowledgement, and put into effect both as a genre and as a teaching programme in Germany in the second half of the seventeenth century, under the name of historia literaria.120 The (unacknowledged) departure from Bacon consisted in the fact that, to the adepts of historia literaria, history was a storehouse of valid learning and wisdom, and not, as with Bacon, largely a story of error. The following summary remarks are merely intended to suggest that, whatever the claims and

it offers in the remark (Descriptio globi intellectualis ii, in Works, iii. 728–9) that manifestations of the divine occur both in nature and in history, but more in the latter, to the extent of constituting a separate species of history ‘which we call Sacred or Ecclesiastical’, and which Bacon classifies as a subdivision of civil history. 119 Cf. Bacon’s comparison of the various theories of Greek philosophy—including Presocratic ones, more likely than all the others to have some truth in them though these might be—to plots of theatre plays, some resembling reality more successfully than others, but all of them fables. All Greek philosophy sails as one ship whose errings are many, but the causes of them the same; Redargutio, in Works, iii. 570–1; Cogitata et visa, ibid. 602–3. Moreover, Bacon warns that the historia literarum should not be taken as an end in itself. Its purpose is not to satisfy the curiosity of the learned, but to ‘make [them] wise in the use and administration of learning’; Aduancement (as in n. 111), sigs. 2B3v– 2B4r, p. 62; fuller in De augmentis ii. 4, in Works, i. 504. Thus history as a treasury of serviceable items twice over. 120 In modern scholarship the phenomenon is of recent interest, and it is still imperfectly understood. The scholar who has done most to advance our understanding of ¨ ber den epistehistoria literaria is Helmut Zedelmaier—cf. his ‘ ‘‘Historia literaria’’: U mologischen Ort des gelehrten Wissens in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’ (with references to his earlier contributions), Das 18. Jahrhundert, 20 (1998), 11–21; ‘Aporien fru¨haufgekla¨rter Gelehrsamkeit: Jakob Friedrich Reimmann und das Problem des Ursprungs der Wissenschaften’, in M. Mulsow and H. Zeldermaier (eds.), Skepsis, Providenz, Polyhistorie: Jakob Friedrich Reimmann (1668–1743) (Tu¨bingen, 1998), 97–129; further bibliography in P. Nelles, ‘Historia litteraria and Morhof: Private Teaching and Professorial Libraries at the University of Kiel’, in F. Waquet (ed.), Mapping the World of Learning: The ‘Polyhistor’ of Daniel Georg Morhof (Wolfenbu¨tteler Forschungen, 91; Wiesbaden, 2000), 33 n. 5.

Introduction

25

achievements of historia literaria, its practice did not raise the status of erudition or produce a history of its methods. The inception of historia literaria can be dated with some precision: the late 1650s. In 1659 the Hamburg scholar Peter Lambeck, subsequently imperial librarian in Vienna, published his Prodromus historiae literariae, the earliest known work on the subject, and the baptism, as it were, of the term.121 In the Introduction, having quoted the programmatic chapter from Bacon’s De augmentis, Lambeck goes on to tell how, not finding any work sufficiently comprehensive to suit his requirements for teaching historia literaria at the Akademisches Gymnasium in Hamburg, he settled for Johann Jakob Frisius’ Bibliotheca philosophorum, classicorum authorum, chronologica, published in Zu¨rich in 1592, full of chronological errors, confusions, and misattributions though it was. Altering somewhat its arrangement,122 he had it reprinted in a hundred copies for his own and his students’ use. He then gave two courses of lectures on historia literaria with Frisius as the base text, correcting and supplementing as he went along.123 Lambeck’s Prodromus remained a torso: a general history of learning from the Creation to the present was not easily encompassed by one man—but the outline he had worked out (Skiagraphia) inspired his subsequent librarianship in Vienna. Lambeck’s career exemplifies the complex, and, for us, not easily definable nature of historia literaria. 121 Paul Nelles, whose contribution on a different subject appears in this volume, gave a paper on Lambeck and historia literaria to the Seminar on the history of scholarship in 1993; cf. his ‘Historia litteraria at Helmstedt: Books, Professors and Students in the Early Enlightenment University’, in Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit (as in n. 44), 147–76. 122 He divided the continuous chronological sequence into two parts, BC/AD, and inserted ecclesiastical authors, listed separately by Frisius, into the sequence of pagan/ secular ones; cf. P. Lambeck, Liber primus Prodromi historiae literariae . . . (Hamburg, 1659), sig. )()()([1v]. 123 Cf. Lambeck, ibid. The British Library holds a copy of the rejigged Frisius, shelfmark 11905.f.7. The title page is missing but the half-title has ‘iuxta exemplar impressum Tiguri anno 1592’, which helps to identify it. The catalogue dates it conjecturally to 1620, obviously in ignorance of the fact that the reissue was due to Lambeck. The copy has underscoring and MS marginal notes, and is interleaved with pages of MS notes. These are entitled ‘Excerpta ex Petri Lambecij dissertationibus privatis, quibus Joannis Frisii bibliothecam . . . partim supplevit partim correxit partim illustravit’ (roughly similar title for Part II). P. Nelles, ‘Historia litteraria’ (as in n. 121), 41, seems to conflate the reissue of Frisius with Lambeck’s own published scheme for a Philosophica et Historica Bibliotheca, praised as meeting Bacon’s postulates by D. G. Morhof in the chapter on historia literaria of his Polyhistor sive de notitia auctorum et rerum commentarii (Lu¨beck, 1688–92), 11–14, where he reproduces it on account of its rarity (and speaks of it separately from the Prodromus). It appears not to have survived. The matter requires further investigation.

26

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

The genre grew and ramified. In his Polyhistor, first published in 1688, Daniel Georg Morhof devoted a chapter to its history.124 Morhof’s Polyhistor was itself seen by many as a historia literaria.125 In his preface to the 1732 edition of the Polyhistor, Johann Albert Fabricius distinguished four previous types of historia literaria—‘chronological’, ‘lexical’ (i.e. alphabetical), ‘realis’ (enumerating classes of things by genre), and ‘geographical’ (by language and nation). Morhof was the first to have elaborated a fifth type, ‘critical’, an advance on the others. It offered a critical survey of authors ‘arranged by headings of things and classes of disciplines’, thus ‘introducing students to a universal knowledge of them’.126 The Polyhistor was enthusiastically greeted as a historia literaria by Christian Thomasius, who saw in it an antidote to the pedantry and ignorance (narrowness of the canon) of current university teaching, and a vindication of the idea that the history of any discipline is an essential component of it.127 This became received wisdom.128 But Morhof ’s idea of the history of a discipline as indispensable to its successful pursuit, for all its Momiglianesque echoes, is remote from any modern conception. The difference lies in the way the past is envisaged. For the modern practitioner of a discipline its history is a document to be read both in specialist and wider cultural terms, in order to make him/her aware of accumulated layers of interpretation and the consequent nonimmediacy of his/her own approach. Morhof, by contrast, saw the 124 Cf. Morhof, Polyhistor, Liber I, Bibliothecarius, cap. ii, 9–21. There were five subsequent editions, enlarged, all posthumous: 1695, 1708, 1714, 1732, 1747; from that of 1708 onwards, the title is Polyhistor, literarius, philosophicus et practicus. 125 Cf. Johann Andreas Fabricius, Abriss einer allgemeinen Historie der Gelehrsamkeit, i (Leipzig, 1752), 686. Morhof taught historia literaria at the University of Kiel; cf. Nelles, ‘Historia litteraria’ (as in n. 121). 126 Cf. Morhof, Polyhistor, i (Lu ¨ beck, 1732), sig. (a)v–(a)2r. 127 Cf. C. Thomasius, Freimu ¨ tige . . . Gedanken oder Monatsgespra¨che u¨ber allerhand, fu¨rnehmlich aber u¨ber neue Bu¨cher, ii (Halle, 1688, repr. Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 287; 661. Thomasius singles out for particular praise Morhof’s deduction from the general usefulness of history, of the constitutive role of history in any discipline: ‘Historiae tanta ad omnem doctrinam utilitas est, ut sine illa nihil plane effici possit. Eius plenior cognitio habenda est, non tantum illius, quae Politicae fundamenta substernit, sed et illius, quae ad Theologiam, et ad omnes scientias manuducit. Historiae omnia pene debemus, quae sciri possunt: nam qui flstoro¸mena cujuscunque doctrinae accurate novit, plus omnibus in illa magistris sapit’; Morhof, Polyhistor (as in n. 124), Liber II, Methodicus, cap. xi, 457. 128 J. H. Zedler, Grosses . . . Universallexicon, x (Halle, 1735), s.v. Gelehrten-Historie, 729: ‘es kommt in allen Wissenschaften hauptsa¨chlich auf derselben Historie an, und es ist eben so unmo¨glich, eine Wissenschaft ohne derselben Historie zu erkennen, als unmo¨glich es ist, einen Menschen recht zu erkennen, von dessen Lebens-Lauffe man nie etwas geho¨ret’.

Introduction

27

learning of the past, once it had been appropriately classified, and individual authors critically assessed, as a directly accessible resource, in respect of truth and value on a par with, if not superior to, the learning of the present.129 The result was that, in practice, historia literaria easily became no more than a glorified bibliography, though its claim to be a history, and to be critical was not entirely without effect. As regards the former, the chronological framework and the doxographical notices constituted at least a formal historicization as against the humanist method of loci communes for the retrieval of knowledge,130 and can be seen as a transitional stage towards the later evolutionary histories of individual disciplines. As for its being critical, historia literaria could, on occasion, undermine traditional accounts, for example that of the learning of Adam and the patriarchs: in his Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam literariam antediluvianam (Halle, 1709), Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, while not rejecting the idea out of hand, and making theological discriminations, showed that there were no sources (i.e. antediluvian writings) for it. Anything claiming to be such was fiction.131 One of the chief exponents of historia literaria, Christoph August Heumann, who taught the subject at the newly founded University of Go¨ttingen, pointed out that historia eruditionis is not the same as eruditio ipsa, and that someone who practises only the former can hardly be reckoned a scholar.132 This remark is interesting both as a distinction and as a value judgement. It suggests that the history of learning could be a discourse in its own right (and so itself an object of study), but also shows, with historia literaria in the part, its subordinate status. Historia literaria was, or became, an aid to scholarship. It may have prepared the ground conceptually for the conversion of antiquarian pursuits— numismatics, palaeography, genealogy, etc.—into auxiliary sciences of history which took place later in the eighteenth century. What it did not do was to provide an epistemological profile of erudition or a history of its methods. If the status of erudition continued to be depressed, it was not historia literaria that was going to raise it. 129 Cf. Morhof, Polyhistor (as in n. 124), Lib. I, Bibliothecarius, cap. ii, 19: ‘Sua est singulis aetatibus ingeniorum foetura, sunt artium temporarii proventus, quarum messem Historia velut in horreo quodam congerit, ne spicilegium quidem illarum rerum omissura.’ 130 Lambeck rejects the method of loci communes; Prodromus, Prolegomena ad . . . lectorem, fo. 2r. 131 Cf. Zedelmaier, ‘Aporien’ (as in n. 120), esp. 106–7. Lambeck had reached a similar conclusion in his Prodromus; cf. Zedelmaier, ibid. 120 n. 106. 132 Cf. C. A. Heumann, Conspectus Reipublicae Literariae, sive via ad historiam literariam iuventuti studiosae aperta . . . (Hannover, 1718), 3.

28

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

It was philology that achieved an epistemological breakthrough with Hamann’s challenge to Kant. It occurred in a theologico-philosophical, rather than a philological context, and had no direct bearing on scholarship. Hamann was learned and widely read, but his attitude towards philological scholarship was ambivalent: on the one hand he went along with it in so far as it historicized reason,133 but on the other, his fideistic enthusiasm made him impatient of contemporary biblical philology (Michaelis, Semler) which, subjecting the Word of God to a learned reading, entailed the hubristic assumption that man is capable of an authoritative interpretation of it, while also discrediting the personal experience of it as typologically relevant to any and every situation.134 Nevertheless, Hamann’s excursions against the sovereignty of reason proclaimed by Kant, even though conducted within a fideistic framework, stake out the ground for the autonomy of philological scholarship, and hence for any history of it. A brief outline may be in order. In the first two Critiques, Kant promulgates the absolute supremacy of reason, far more compelling and rigorous than anything Descartes or Bacon had ever thought of. It is a supremacy tinged by law: reason is the highest tribunal, its verdicts necessarily infallible, before which ‘all rights and claims of our speculation’ have to answer.135 This includes religion. 133 In his contribution to this volume Denis Thouard calls Hamann ‘a kind of enfant terrible of historia literaria’. Hamann’s conception of historia literaria, rather different in its emphases from that of its practitioners, shows reason as a product of learning but, typically, in terms of the Bible and of direct experience: ‘Was fu¨r ein Magazin macht die Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit aus! Und worauf gru¨ndet sich alle? Auf 5 Gerstenbrodte, auf 5 Sinne, die wir mit den unvernu¨nftigen Thieren gemeinschaftlich besitzen. Nicht nur das ganze Waarhaus der Vernunft sondern selbst die Schatzkammer des Glaubens beruhen auf diesem Stock’; Brocken, in J. G. Hamann, Sa¨mtliche Werke, i, ed. J. Nadel (Vienna, 1949), 298. 134 Cf. Hamann, Briefwechsel, iii, ed. W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel (Frankfurt am Main 1957), 89 (discussing with Kant Herder’s A¨lteste Urkunde der Menschheit): ‘Unter allen Secten . . . wa¨ren wir die elendste unter allen Menschen, wenn die Grundveste unsres Glaubens in einem Triebsande kritischer ModeGelehrsamkeit bestu¨nde. Nein, die Theorie der wahren Religion bleibt nicht nur jedem Menschenkinde angemessen und ist in seine Seele gewebt . . . , sondern bleibt auch eben so unersteiglich den ku¨hnsten Riesen und Himmelsstu¨rmern als unergru¨ndlich den tiefsinnigsten Gru¨blern und Bergleuten.’ Cf. S. A. Jørgensen, ‘Hamanns hermeneutische Grundsa¨tze’, in R. Roellner (ed.), Aufkla¨rung und Humanismus (Wolfenbu¨tteler Studien zur Aufkla¨rung, 6; Heidelberg, 1980), 219–29. 135 I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B697/A669, ed. I. Heidemann (Stuttgart, 1968), 696. The exaltation of reason as law, or as the lawgiver, is even more solemn in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (the famous conclusion: ‘Zwei Dinge erfu¨llen das Gemu¨t mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht . . . : Der bestirnte Himmel u¨ber mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir’; KpV 288, ed. J. Kopper (Stuttgart, 1966), 253); cf. O. Bayer, ‘Vernunftautorita¨t und Bibelkritik in der Kontroverse

Introduction

29

God is the only true exegete of the Bible. He conducts his exegesis outside history, since he speaks to us not as the Bible (unreliably) reports him, but ‘through our own (moral-practical) reason’, which enables us to extract a rational meaning from his Scripture, religion being wholly a matter of reason (‘reine Vernunftsache’).136 In his Metakritik u¨ber den Purismum der Vernunft,137 Hamann showed that Kant’s absolute reason, for all its claim to be critical, rested on the uncritical assumption—hence ‘Metakritik’, a neologism of Hamann’s—that it was free of all contingency, untainted by tradition,138 experience, or language.139 For Hamann, the three were interconnected and came together in the third. Regarding tradition, Kant himself admitted that his philosophy did not come from nowhere, that it had a pre-history, though he professed to survey it from a ‘transcendental point of view’, which opened on a landscape of ruins.140 It did not occur to him that his own philosophy too might be part of this landscape. Hamann seized on this: no Hume without Berkeley, and no Kant without Hume. ‘Everything in the end comes down to tradition ¨ berlieferung), as all abstraction to sense impressions.’141 (U zwischen Johann Georg Hamann und Immanuel Kant’, in H. Graf Reventlow and others (eds.), Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufkla¨rung (Wolfenbu¨tteler Forschungen, 41; Wiesbaden, 1988), 33. 136 Cf. Kant, Der Streit der Fakulta ¨ ten, in Werke (Akademie-Ausgabe, 7; Berlin, 1917), 67. Kant’s interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac (ibid. 63) is a telling example: (i) God’s voice as a sensory experience is a contradiction in terms: sense experience and the infinite are incommensurate, so how is one to tell God’s voice from any other? (ii) God could not possibly command anything contrary to the moral law. The moral law told Abraham that he must not kill his son: he could be certain of that; he had no means of being certain that ‘when God did tempt Abraham’, it was in fact God. The story as told in Genesis 22 is a myth; and Abraham must conclude that he was being deceived. 137 Cf. Hamann, Werke (as in n. 133) iii (1951), 281–9; Hamann, Briefwechsel, v, ed. A. Henkel (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 210–16; cf. G. Wohlfart, ‘Hamanns Kantkritik’, Kant-Studien, 75 (1984), 398–419. 138 For the first of the three ‘Purismen’—what Kantian reason claims to be pure of— ¨ berlieferung, Tradition und Glaube’; we use the English Hamann has the triad ‘U ‘tradition’, as an alternative to ‘transmission’ and arguably including belief, as a shorthand rendering of the three. 139 Cf. Hamann’s earlier attack on reason as an ‘anointed idol’: ‘Denn was ist die ¨ berschwenglichkeit, hochgelobte Vernunft mit ihrer Allgemeinheit, Unfehlbarkeit, U ¨ lgo¨tze, dem ein schreyender Aberglaube Gewissheit und Evidenz? Ein ens rationis, ein O der Unvernunft go¨ttliche Attribute andichtet’; Konxompax, in Werke (as in n. 133), iii. 225. 140 Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (as in n. 135), B880/A852–B884/A856, 856–60. 141 Hamann, Briefwechsel (as in n. 137), iv (1959), 376; Metakritik, in Werke (as in n. 137), 283; 211; cf. O. Bayer’s striking formula: ‘Die Geschichten der Vernunft sind die

30

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

But it was at the level of language, integrating tradition and experience, that Hamann delivered the most telling blows. How could reason discard language, ‘its only first and last organon and criterion, with ¨ berlieferung) and usage’?142 no other credentials than tradition (U Hamann’s conception of language was, of course, theological: God had created the world through his Word, and, at the Creation, everything man heard, saw, and touched was a living word, for ‘God was the Word’.143 God had humbled himself in his Word in order to communicate with man in all his abjectness—Scripture, just as much as the Creation and the coming of Christ, was an effect of divine condescension.144 God spoke to man not through reason but through Scripture. In the Metakritik Hamann’s theological passion for the Word is kept at bay, and the assertion of the priority of language over reason is justified by an analysis of the principal features of reason as specified by Kant. Hamann shows them to be reducible to elements of language. ‘Language is at the middle point of reason’s misunderstanding with itself.’145 Thus, it is sounds and letters that are the true pure forms a priori—nothing that belongs to the perception or the concept of an object is to be found in them. As for time and space, a priori intuitions for Kant, they derive from the earliest manifestations of spoken and Kritik ihrer Reinheit’ (title of a contribution on the Metakritik to Hamann; Kant- Herder: Acta des 4. Internat. Hamann-Kolloquiums zu Marburg/L, 1985, ed. B. Gajek (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 9–87). 142 Cf. Hamann, Briefwechsel (as in n. 137), v. 177: ‘Vernunft ist Sprache Lgov; an diesem Markknochen nag’ich und werde mich zu Tod dru¨ber nagen.’ Ibid. vi. 296: ‘Vernunft und Schrift sind im Grunde Einerley ¼ Sprache Gottes.’ 143 Hamann, Des Ritters von Rosenkreuz letzte Willensmeynung u ¨ ber den go¨ttlichen und menschlichen Ursprung der Sprache, in Werke (as in n. 133), iii. 32; German has the advantage (or disadvantage) of not having to decide whether ‘word’ in ‘living word’ should here be capitalized or not. For Hamann’s conception of the origin of language, ¨ ber den go¨ttlichen und both divine and human, i.e. christological, cf. E. Bu¨chsel, ‘U menschlichen Ursprung der Sprache’, Insel Almanach auf das Jahr 1988: Hamann, ed. O. Bayer and others (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 61–75. 144 Cf. Hamann, ‘U ¨ ber die Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift’, Werke (as in n. 133), i. 5: ‘Gott ein Schriftsteller! Die Eingebung dieses Buchs ist eben so grosse Erniedrigung und Herunterlassung Gottes als Scho¨pfung des Vaters und Menschwerdung des Sohnes.’; id., Kleeblatt Hellenistischer Briefe, in Werke, ii. 171: ‘Es geho¨rt zur Einheit der go¨ttlichen Offenbarung, dass der Geist Gottes sich durch den Menschengriffel der heiligen Ma¨nner, die von ihm getrieben worden, sich eben so erniedrigt und seiner Majesta¨t enta¨ussert, als der Sohn Gottes durch die Knechtsgestalt und wie die ganze Scho¨pfung ein Werk der ho¨chsten Demuth ist.’ Cf. Bayer, ‘Vernunftautorita¨t’ (as in n. 135), 41. For Hamann God is not, as he is for Kant, the supreme judge-exegete of the Bible, eliciting its only admissible meaning through the agency of human reason, but its author, composing it through the physical agency of human scribes. Kant’s God is dogmatic, Hamann’s 145 Metakritik, in Werke (as in n. 137), 286/213. hermeneutical.

Introduction

31

written language. Speech began as music: together with the perceptible rhythm of the pulse and of breathing, it was the embodied model of all time measurement and its numerical relationships. Writing began as painting and drawing, and so was concerned with the economy of space, its limitation, and definition through figures. The concepts of time and space established themselves in the understanding through the persistent influence of the senses of sight and hearing, and became so general and necessary, that space and time came to appear, if not as innate ideas, at least as matrices of all perceptual knowledge.146 Thus can the ‘magic castle’ of Kant’s critique, constructed unbeknownst to itself from language, be dissolved by language. Hamann’s achievement was a virtual one, and as such it belongs to our story of the non-coming-to-be of the history of scholarship. But it negotiated a major obstacle, and deserves notice also on that account. To conclude this highly selective overview of the negative fortuna of the history of scholarship, a brief comment on what one might call the silence of scholarship in the age of historicism is in order. This is a paradox only at first sight. Historicism may have dismissed Reason as a transhistorical supreme judge, done away with the idea of an unchanging human nature, and proclaimed the inalienable individuality of each and every historical epoch (Ranke’s ‘immediate to God’); the one element it showed little inclination to contemplate historically was its own technique. And, as history became a fully-fledged discipline with a complex internal articulation, it was at the level of technique that scholarship was accommodated. Though of basic importance (source criticism), it was hierarchically a humble level, ‘below stairs’, where good service was expected and little interest shown for the genealogy of the servants. Somewhat methodologically simple-minded in its Rankean stage, historicism became highly sophisticated in this respect with Droysen.147 But the elaborate articulation of historiographical procedures, the reflection on the ideological context of historical investigation, on the historian himself as a creature of history, is all at the level of what the historian does with the results of scholarship, not of scholarship itself. Even remoter from any concern with scholarship is the Neo-Kantian reflection on the epistemological status of history, conducted in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Windelband, Rickert), or Dilthey’s meditation on the specificity of 146 Metakritik, 286/213–214. G. Wohlfart, ‘Hamanns Kantkritik’ (as in n. 137), 417, has a felicitous formula: ‘Als sprachliche Wesen ra¨umen wir uns die Zeit ein.’ 147 See Alexandre Escudier’s contribution to this volume.

32

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

historical knowledge. It is only with the crisis of historicism, which showed up the positivist underpinnings of its methods, that scholarship began to emerge from a smothering embrace and attract attention as an object of study.

III The papers selected for this volume—perforce arbitrarily—illustrate a certain type of investigation. The collection is aphoristic in Bacon’s sense: discrete contributions by scholars from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines bringing to bear their expertise on topics of their own choosing, exploring them, and so raising new questions. If there is a common theme that runs through many, though not all, contributions, it is the interaction between religious belief and scholarly endeavour. No attempt was made to include recent trends and fields. Though the history of twentieth-century scholarship has been a major area of research in recent years,148 it is not represented here; the volume focuses on the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Of the two main strands of scholarship since the Renaissance, philology is more abundantly treated than antiquarianism, although the contributions by Godefroid de Callatay¨, Paul Nelles, and Alain Schnapp provide substantial excursions into iconography, epigraphy, and archaeology. Finally, sacred philology—biblical studies and patristics—has been privileged over classical studies. The volume opens with the Colossus of Rhodes, a remarkable instance of the working of the antiquarian imagination. It was built about 300 bc and ranked in antiquity as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. No ancient representation has been preserved and the only evidence available is a series of written statements which leave considerable room for speculation. Godefroid de Callatay¨ considers the succession of reconstructions that were based on that textual dossier, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Renaissance iconography was based on a medieval fable, according to which the statue bestrode the entrance of the main harbour—a technical impossibility. The idea was 148 See W. M. Calder III and Daniel J. Kramer, An Introductory Bibliography to the History of Classical Scholarship Chiefly in the XIXth and XXth Centuries (Hildesheim, 1992); W. M. Calder III and R. Scott Smith, A Supplementary Bibliography to the History of Classical Scholarship: Chiefly in the XIXth and XXth Centuries (Bari, 2000). German classical scholarship has been a major interest, with attention focusing on the towering figure of Wilamowitz, on the one hand, and the impact of Nazism on the other.

Introduction

33

abandoned in the nineteenth century but scholars still made bold attempts at visual reconstruction. This obstinacy testifies to the fascination exercised by the most famous statue of the ancient world. A major Renaissance interest was epigraphy. The inscription of the Res gestae divi Augusti was discovered and transcribed in Turkey in 1555 by Habsburg diplomats. It was published for the first time by Andre´ Schott in 1579. Paul Nelles traces the way this new source was identified, interpreted, and connected with literary texts, thereby shedding light on the modes of production and dissemination of antiquarian knowledge in early modern Europe. In Justus Lipsius’ hands, the Res gestae became a major piece of evidence for the reconstruction of the Roman empire as a functioning organism. Nelles’s contribution establishes a sharp focus for the further study of Lipsius as an antiquary and a historian. The intellectual milieu of Schott and Lipsius was also that of Laevinus Torrentius, bishop of Lie`ge, and of his nephew and prote´ge´, Johannes Livineius. Livineius worked on the text of several Greek and Latin authors, both secular and patristic, using manuscripts he had been able to study (especially in Rome, where he stayed from 1581 to 1584) as well as collations inherited from other scholars. As he published very little in his lifetime, his activities can only be assessed through the study of his Nachlaß. One of the striking features of his collations of variant readings is his use of sigla to key them to their sources, a method which, as Luigi Battezzato explains, was very slow to make its way into printed editions. Livineius’ notes on Arnobius of Sicca thus give us precious insights into new departures in the working methods of Renaissance philologists. They also show how incomplete the history of scholarship would be if it concentrated exclusively on achievements of polygraphic giants like Scaliger.149 Benedetto Bravo follows the vicissitudes of criticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. The word critice was barely used in antiquity and only gained currency after the Scaligers, father and son, had, between them, arbitrarily conflated several passages of Sextus Empiricus to manufacture the notion of an art concerned with ‘the nobler part of grammar’, i.e. the authentification of (ancient) authors—a nice irony, as Bravo suggests: a garbling of ancient texts designed to give a firm basis to scholarship on them, indeed to philological scholarship in general. In the seventeenth century, critice came to denote no longer a 149 See also Luigi Battezzato’s complementary study, ‘Livineius’ Unpublished Euripidean Marginalia’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 30 (2000), 323–48.

34

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

specific discipline but a discriminating approach to traditions and facts, from which the Bible itself could not stay immune. Eventually a ‘critical spirit’ acquired philosophical associations and the philological roots of the notion were more or less forgotten. Ancient texts were made to serve a wide range of purposes. Irena Backus examines the Lutheran schoolmaster Michael Neander’s edition of a corpus of ‘apocryphal’ texts as an appendix to his Greek–Latin edition of Luther’s Shorter Catechism (published for the first time in 1558 and in an expanded version in 1564). By ‘apocrypha’ Neander meant non-biblical accounts of the life of Christ derived from reputable Greek authors. His initial motivation was to provide suitable teaching materials for Christian pupils but he also selected and arranged texts (particularly extracts from the Sibylline oracles), which had a historical interest for the origins of Christianity and its relations with both Judaism and the pagan world. The Bible was a pre-eminent field for Renaissance scholarship. Joanna Weinberg dissects the efforts of sixteenth-century Christian Hebraists to make sense of non-Greek expressions of the New Testament. They recognized that these were not Hebrew but Aramaic, and they therefore tried to clarify the relation between the two languages. The Italian Hebraist Angelo Canini, who published an important Aramaic grammar in 1554, went further in his quest for the Jewish context of the Gospels. He explored rabbinic literature in order to find parallels for difficult expressions and parables, even in cases where Aramaic was subliminal rather than in the text. After the Council of Trent had decreed in 1546 that the Latin Vulgate should be considered ‘authentic’, its status in relation to the Hebrew original of the Old Testament was much debated within the Roman Catholic Church. In contrast to some extreme interpretations (which generated opposition to scholarly undertakings like the Antwerp Polyglot), Bellarmine was prepared to go back to the Hebrew against the Vulgate, at least when no dogmatic point was at stake. As Piet van Boxel demonstrates on the basis of Bellarmine’s manuscript notes on Genesis, this attitude originated in his formative years at Leuven, where theologians had come to accept humanistic methods. Bellarmine also made some use of Jewish exegesis, though not of the Talmud, which (as is made clear by his notes on Rashi) he condemned outright.150 150 It would be interesting to compare Bellarmine’s attitude with that of a fellow cardinal, Federico Borromeo: see P. F. Fumagalli, ‘Federico umanista e pastore alla ricerca della ‘‘hebraica veritas’’ dopo Trento’, Studia Borromaica, 16 (2002), 69–99.

Introduction

35

In 1685, John Spencer, the Cambridge Hebraist, published De legibus Hebraeorun ritualibus, a massively learned work in which he attempted to show that ancient Hebrew worship had Egyptian antecedents. This has tempted scholars to see in Spencer an early comparatist undermining the absolute historical primacy of the Bible. Fausto Parente contests this: Spencer’s agenda was theological, not historical, and the reflection of Egyptian rites in Hebrew ones, the function of which was to wean the Jews, homeopathically, as it were, from idolatrous practices, was for him an effect of divine condescension, not of human wisdom, with the human agent, Moses, acting solely as God’s instrument. On this view, the question of historical derivation has no meaning. Parente also suggests that the way Spencer plays down what he terms the ‘secondary purpose’ of Mosaic ritual, the typological adumbration of the New Testament, points to Socinian sympathies. Henry Dodwell was a formidable scholar with a theological agenda. He studied Christian antiquity in order to buttress the claims of the Church of England in so far as it laid claim to an episcopalian descent. Several of his theories were used by Toland and other freethinkers. Was it an instance of orthodoxy becoming the source of disbelief? JeanLouis Quantin’s re-examination of Dodwell’s career and work shows that—although Dodwell’s scholarly interests were in many respects typical of Restoration Oxford, and he was for years a prominent member of that milieu—his beliefs departed on several key issues from official Anglican formularies. His case suggests that relations between orthodoxy and scholarship in the seventeenth century should not be reduced to one-way dependence—as if the latter had simply been in the service of the former. What was at stake in Dodwell’s learned exploration of the first centuries was the very definition, or redefinition, of orthodoxy. The doctrine of the Trinity was the core of orthodoxy, as defined by the major confessions. The appeal to historical evidence, especially as to the doctrine of the primitive Church, played a key role in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century controversies on the Trinity. Martin Mulsow reconstructs the idiosyncratic position of Johann Georg Wachter, who claimed to have recovered a secret, Spinozistic, religious tradition which allegedly ran from ancient Egypt to the ante-Nicene Fathers via the cabbala. Wachter used scholarly works, in most cases by English authors (Cudworth, Bull, Spencer), which he interpreted so as to make them serve his own system. Mulsow documents an instructive example of the intersection of scholarship and ideology.

36

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

Wachter’s use of English scholarship highlights the importance of intellectual transfers between England and the Continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pierre Des Maizeaux, a French Huguenot living in England, may not have been a scholar in the usual sense of the word, but, as Scott Mandelbrote shows, his career was highly significant in view of the need for intermediaries occasioned by the enlargement of the Republic of Letters. Des Maizeaux transmitted English culture and ideas to this new, wider audience through his numerous contributions to Continental periodical publications. Taking Bayle as his model, he began to work at an English critical dictionary, which would have used the biographical form to promote his own, rather ambiguous, version of religious latitudinarianism. Popularizers like Des Maizeaux made use of what Mandelbrote calls ‘the rhetoric of erudition’—an essential notion, which calls for further investigation.151 Isaac Lapeyre`re is best known for his theory of the pre-adamites, the existence of human beings long before Adam. This a theological proposition, based on the exegesis of Romans 5: 12–14. Alain Schnapp investigates its geographical, ethnographic, and archaeological repercussions in Lapeyre`re’s oeuvre, which could have resulted, but did not, in the emergence of the idea of pre-history. Lapeyre`re investigated separate ethnic descent on geographical grounds and was keen on the view that protohistorical vases, shaped flints, and megaliths might be human artefacts rather than products of nature. What he did not achieve was some kind of unifying chronology for which fieldwork, not yet an option, would have been necessary. Schnapp offers us a fascinating view of the premature birth pangs of a new paradigm. Scholarship and religious belief are intertwined with particular intricacy in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, not least because the conditioning of the former by the latter is deliberately played on by the protagonist. Denis Thouard analyses Hamann’s attempt at a history of philosophy in his Socratic Memorabilia. Hamann was widely read, in the tradition of historia literaria, and fully conversant with the latest developments in the new discipline of the history of philosophy. He was critical of the Enlightenment assumption of reason as capable of 151 Historians of science have begun to attend to the rhetorical aspects of their subject; see e.g. P. Dear, The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies (Philadelphia, 1991); F. Hallyn, Les Structures rhe´toriques de la science: De Kepler a` Maxwell (Paris, 2004).

Introduction

37

producing easy comprehension with a wide appeal, whether through erudition (Heumann, Brucker) or an elegant synthesis (BoureauDeslandes). His own approach was biographical—hence Xenophon, rather than Plato, as his base text—but poles apart from any ‘common sense’ biographism. His Socrates is a dark, Heraclitean Socrates, interpreting and in need of interpretation, an indirection of God’s discourse to man. Hamann offers an original variation on the commonplace parallel between Socrates and Christ.152 It was long assumed that scientific (as opposed to merely rhetorical) history was a creation of nineteenth-century Germany. Only recently have Enlightement theories of history been rediscovered and scrutinized. Alexandre Escudier stresses the importance which Aufkla¨rung historians attached to source criticism as a preliminary to the writing of history. At the same time they rejected mere juxtaposition of events and aimed at organizing them in a systematic way, that is, ultimately to produce a universal history. That goal was afterwards rejected as unattainable by ‘historicist’ historians, from Ranke onwards. Historismus, however, was no homogeneous movement. Droysen’s methodology is markedly different from Ranke’s, particularly because of its insistence on ‘questioning’ as the starting point of all historical research. The papers in this volume originate from the seminar on the ‘History of scholarship’ held annually since 1993. Its venue has been the Warburg Institute, not inappropriately so. The Institute began as the library of one scholar with very specific (though exceptionally wide-angled) interests. In the hundred years of its existence it has outgrown these interests (though the original imprint remains), partly through its own momentum, partly through other eminent scholars having been associated with it. Soi-meˆme comme un autre: it is the capability of his books for what Bacon, speaking of books, calls iugis renovatio, constant renewal, that is perhaps Warburg’s most enduring monument.153 Let us conclude, therefore, on an Augustinian note (with a side glance at Hamann). Augustine says that, for the face of God which cannot be seen, one can substitute, for the time being, the writing of 152 For interesting comparisons see E. Lojacono (ed.), Socrate in Occidente (Florence, 2004), specially L. Jaffro’s contribution, ‘Le Socrate de Shaftesbury: Comment raconter aux modernes l’histoire de Socrate’, 66–90. 153 See M. Diers, ‘Portra ¨t aus Bu¨chern: Stichworte zur Einfu¨hrung’, in Portra¨t aus Bu¨chern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg 1933 London (Hamburg 1993), 9–27.

38

Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin

God, Scripture. It is not easy reading. The account of the Creation, for instance, has been interpreted in a variety of ways, each claiming to correspond to what Moses intended. But none does: what Moses intended, though, no doubt, the truth, is still beyond comprehension.154 One could derive from this a formula for a secular religion of scholarship: the transcendence of the text, inviting investigation but irreducible. 154

Sermo xxii. 7 and Confessions xii. 30. 41–2.

1 The Colossus of Rhodes: Ancient Texts and Modern Representations Godefroid de Callatay¨

My interest in the Colossus of Rhodes began, rather accidentally, a few years ago, when I was investigating what is usually referred to as astrological geography in Antiquity, that is, the division of the oikoumene into a certain number of regions and the relationships imagined by the ancients between these regions and heavenly realities such as zodiacal signs or planets.1 The lists we have diverge widely among themselves, so that one is tempted at first to disregard the whole topic as pure fantasy. Yet a closer look at some of these lists—especially Manilius, Dorotheos of Sidon, and the catalogue of nations in the Acts of the Apostles—revealed some resemblances. This suggested the existence of an earlier arrangement which had nothing to do with astrological speculation, but was nevertheless coherent and, indeed, very simple. In my view, only an artificial projection of the zodiacal circle on a world map This paper was read on 12 Jan. 2001 in the Seminar on the History of Scholarship organized by Dr Christopher Ligota at the Warburg Institute. I should like to express my gratitude to him for inviting me to give the paper, and for valuable comments. 1 My research on ancient astrological geography was conducted in 1997–8 at the Institut fu¨r Altertumskunde of the University of Mu¨nster, under the expert supervision of Professor Wolfgang Hu¨bner and thanks to a generous one-year fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It has resulted in four articles: ‘Ofikoum
nh ˛pourniov: Re´flexions sur l’origine et le sens de la ge´ographie astrologique’, Geographia Antiqua, 8–9 (1999–2000), 25–69; ‘La Ge´ographie zodiacale de Manilius (Astr., 4, 744– 817), avec une note sur l’E´ne´ide virgilienne’, Latomus, 60 (2001), 35–66; ‘Ge´ographies astrologiques et roses des vents’, in Tempus edax rerum: Le bicentenaire de la Bibliothe`que Nationale de Luxembourg (Luxemburg, 2001), 131–41; ‘Die astrologische Geographie in der Antike’, in J. Hahn (ed.), Religio¨se Landschaften (Vero¨ffentlichungen des Arbeitskreises zur Erforschung der Religions- und Kulturgeschichte des Antiken Vorderen Orients, 3; Alter Orient und Altes Testament, 301; Mu¨nster, 2002), 85–104.

40

Godefroid de Callatay¨

centred on the Isle of Rhodes could account for the kind of associations between earthly and heavenly regions that we find in our lists. The supposition seems to make sense in the general context of ancient geography. First, Rhodes was the centre-point of world maps at least from the beginning of the third century bc onwards and it remained so in Eratosthenes’ famous world map. Secondly, ancient sources attribute the invention of the first regular windrose with twelve winds to the admiral and geographer Timosthenes, who, a Rhodian himself, naturally centred the projection of his windrose on his native island. This can be inferred unambiguously from a passage of Timosthenes’ own work On Harbours, preserved by Agathemeros,2 in which the twelve winds are said to correspond to twelve regions of the oikoumene (see Fig. 1.1)—something that looks very much like the artificial projection of our zodiac. I found some confirmation of my hypothesis in a relatively late yet important source: a short paragraph of Ampelius’ Liber memorialis is devoted to the question ‘Quibus partibus sedeant XII signa duodecim ventorum?’3 There follow the twenty-four expected names, i.e. the twelve zodiacal signs and the twelve winds of Timosthenes’ rose in agreement with the artificial projection of our zodiac on Eratosthenes’ map. This I took as an indication that the two systems—the zodiac and the windrose—were once felt to be equivalent ways of keeping one’s bearings, at least for someone stationed in Rhodes. A woodcut in a sixteenth-century edition of Ptolemy’s Geography illustrates a rather peculiar combination of the two systems (Fig. 1.2). It has been said that, of the Seven Wonders of the World known in Antiquity, the Colossus of Rhodes is probably the one for which our documentation is the scantiest.4 In fact, not a single representation of the Colossus has come down to us from Antiquity, be it relief, coin, gem, or any other iconographical form in two or three dimensions. The only evidence we have is textual.5 Most of it is relatively late, summary, or 2 Agathemeros, Gewgraf‹av ˛pot¸pwsiv, Proem. 5 [ ¼ Dicaearchus, fr. 110 ed. 3 Ampelius, Liber memorialis, 4, ed. M.-P. Arnaud-Lindet (Paris, 1993). Wehrli]. 4 The general theme of the Seven Wonders will not be considered here. From a vast literature suffice it to mention the recent exhibition catalogue edited by M. Kunze, Die Sieben Weltwunder der Antike: Wege der Wiedergewinnung aus sechs Jahrhunderten. Winckelmann-Museum, Stendal (Mainz, 2003). Less explored has been the topic of the Seven Wonders in Arabic sources; see U. Marzolph, ‘Mirabilia, Weltwunder und Gottes Kreatur: Zur Weltsicht popula¨rer Enzyklopa¨dien des arabisch-islamischen Mittelalters’, in I. Tomkowiak (ed.), Popula¨re Enzyklopa¨dien: Von der Auswahl, Ordnung und Vermittlung des Wissens (Zurich, 2002), 85–101. 5 See J. Overbeck, Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Ku ¨ nste bei den Griechen (Leipzig, 1868), 291–4, now largely superseded by B. D. Hebert,

The Colossus of Rhodes

41

redundant: the number of useful sources comes down to a mere dozen. The most interesting piece of evidence regarding the technical problems involved in the construction of the Colossus is offered by a late ancient or early Byzantine writer, Philo of Byzantium, in his De septem orbis spectaculis. He is still often confused with the famous secondcentury bc mechanicus, one of Ctesibius’ pupils, and the text is sometimes believed to be the latter’s.6 But it seems more reasonable to date it five or six centuries later.7 An English translation of the main parts of Philo’s statement was provided by Reynold Higgins in a popular book on the Seven Wonders.8 Given the importance of this text it seems worth quoting it at some length: (1) At Rhodes was set up a Colossus seventy cubits high, representing the Sun; for the appearance of the god was made recognisable from his own attributes. The artist expended as much bronze on it as seemed likely to create a dearth in the mines; for the casting of this statue was an operation in which the bronze industry of the world was concerned . . . (2) The artist fortified the bronze from within by means of an iron framework and squared blocks of stone, whose tie-bars bear witness to hammering of Cyclopean force. Indeed, the hidden part of the labour is greater than the visible . . .

Schriftquellen zur hellenistischen Kunst: Plastik, Malerei und Kunsthandwerk der Griechen vom vierten bis zum zweiten Jahrhundert (Horn, 1989), 16–45. 6 See H. Maryon, ‘The Colossus of Rhodes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 76 (1956), 68–86 at 68: ‘Philo Byzantinos, a celebrated mechanicus, who flourished about the year 146 B.C.’; K. Brodersen, Reisefu¨hrer zu den Sieben Weltwundern: Philon von Byzanz und andere antike Texte (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 14–15: ‘Der griechische Ingenieur Philon von Byzanz schrieb um 200 v. Chr. ein großes Werk u¨ber Mechanik, das freilich weitgehend verloren ist . . . . Unter dem Namen dieses Philon ist auch die Rede u¨ber die Sieben Weltwunder erhalten . . . . War der hellenistische Ingenieur Philon wirklich deren Autor? Die detaillierten Angaben etwa u¨ber den Koloß von Rhodos ko¨nnten sein technisches Interesse spiegeln, die Tatsache, dass man vom Standpunkt des Verfassers aus zu allen Sieben Weltwundern reisen muß, wu¨rde zu seiner Herkunft aus Byzanz passen, und die Sprachform, die — dem genre einer Rede angemessen — natu¨rlich nicht so trocken wie ein Fachbuch, sondern eher prunkvoll wirkt, ist zumindest in der Vermeidung des Hiats des Mechanikers nicht una¨hnlich.’ 7 See e.g. W. Ekschmitt, Die Sieben Weltwunder: Ihre Erbauung, Zersto ¨rung und Wiederentdeckung (Mainz, 1984), 170: ‘Ein einziger Bericht u¨ber die technische Errichtung des Kolosses ist erhalten, der aber erst aus fru¨hbyzantinischer Zeit stammt und von der Epoche des Bauwerks selbst um 700–800 Jahre getrennt ist.’ Similarly, W. Kroll, ‘Philon von Byzanz’, in Real-Encyclopa¨die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xxA (1941), 54–5. 8 P. A. Clayton and M. J. Price (eds.), The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London, 1988). R. Higgins is the author of ch. 6 (‘The Colossus of Rhodes’, 124–37).

42

Godefroid de Callatay¨

(3) Having built a base of white marble, (the artist) first fixed upon it the feet of the Colossus up to the height of the ankle-joints, having worked out the proportions suitable to a divine image destined to stand to a height of seventy cubits; for the sole of the foot already exceeded (in length the height of) other statues. For this reason it was impossible to hoist up the rest (of the statue) and place it upon (the feet), but the ankles had to be cast upon the feet, and, as when a house is being built, the whole work had to rise upon itself. (4) And for this reason, while other statues are first modelled, then dismembered for casting in parts, and finally recomposed and erected, in this case, after the first part had been cast, the second was modelled upon it, and when this had been cast, the third was built upon it, and for the following part again the same method of working was adopted. For the individual metal sections could not be moved. (5) After the casting of the new course upon that part of the work already completed, the spacing of the horizontal tie-bars and the joints of the framework were looked to, and the stability of the stone blocks placed within the figure was ensured. In order to prosecute the plan of operations on a firm basis throughout, the artist heaped up a huge mound of earth round each section as soon as it was completed, thus burying the finished work under the accumulated earth, and carrying out the casting of the next part on the level. (6) So, going up bit by bit, he reached the goal of his endeavour, and at the expense of 500 talents of bronze and 300 of iron, he created, with incredible boldness, a god similar to the real God; for he gave a second Sun to the world.9

It is chiefly to Diodorus of Sicily that we owe a detailed account of the circumstances in which the Colossus was erected by the citizens of Rhodes.10 The events are well known and need no rehearsal. Suffice it to recall that in the year 305 bc a formidable siege was laid to the city by Demetrius Poliorcetes, son of Antigonus, and later king of Macedon. The Rhodians withstood it so bravely that in the end Demetrius and the Macedonian fleet were forced to withdraw, leaving their whole siegetrain behind them, including the giant device called Helepolis, ‘Taker of Cities’. Both to celebrate their victory and to manifest their indomitable spirit of independence, the Rhodians decided, most probably in the 9 Philo of Byzantium, De septem orbis spectaculis, 4. 1–6. I took the liberty to emend one phrase in the first paragraph, since Higgins’s ‘for the appearance of the God was known only to his descendants’, which makes no sense, is based on an old and very defective edition of the text. Higgins’s translation is in fact a conflation of two previous translations, that of H. Maryon, ‘Colossus’ (as in n. 6), 69, and that of D. E. L. Haynes, ‘Philo of Byzantium and the Colossus of Rhodes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 77 (1957), 311–12. For the edition of Philo’s text, see now Brodersen, Reisefu¨hrer (as in n. 6), 30–5, where a good German translation is also given. 10 Diodorus of Sicily, 20. 81–8 and 91–100.

The Colossus of Rhodes

43

immediate aftermath,11 to erect a gigantic bronze statue of Helios, the patron deity of both the isle and the city of Rhodes (Fig. 1.3).12 Another important statement about the city and the Colossus of Rhodes may be found in Strabo’s Geography, written in the first decades of the first century ad. The passage reads: The city of the Rhodians lies on the eastern promontory of Rhodes; and it is so far superior to all others in harbours and roads and walls and improvements in general that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it, much less superior to it. It is remarkable also for its good order, and for its careful attention to the administration of affairs of state in general; and in particular to that of naval affairs, whereby it held the mastery of the sea for a long time and overthrew the business of piracy, and became a friend to the Romans and to all kings who favoured both the Romans and the Greeks. Consequently it not only has remained autonomous, but also has been adorned with many votive offerings, which for the most part are to be found in the Dionysium and the gymnasium, but partly in other places. The best of these are, first, the Colossus of Helius, of which the author of the iambic verses says, ‘seven times ten cubits in height, the work of Chares the Lindian’; but it now lies on the ground, having been thrown down by an earthquake and broken at the knees. In accordance with a certain oracle, the people did not raise it again. This, then, is the most excellent of the votive offerings (at any rate, it is by common agreement one of the Seven Wonders).13

We have no other information about the oracle alluded to here, but Strabo’s statement seems to agree with a warning against the reconstruction of the Colossus that we find in a scholion to Plato’s Philebus.14 After Strabo comes Pliny the Elder, who in Book 34 of his Natural History refers to a certain number of famous statues, concluding with that of Rhodes: But that which is by far the most worthy of our admiration, is the colossal statue of the Sun, which stood formerly at Rhodes, and was the work of Chares the Lindian, a pupil of the above-named Lysippus, no less than 70 cubits in height. This statue, fifty-six years after it was erected, was thrown down by an 11 See P. Moreno, ‘Cronologia del Colosso di Rodi’, Archeologia classica, 25–6 (1973–4), 453–63. 12 Among countless ancient references on the link between the Sun and the island of Rhodes, see in particular Pindar, Olympian, 7. 100–40; Diodorus of Sicily, 5. 56; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7. 365; Hyginus, Fabulae, 223; Pliny, Nat. hist. 34. 63; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1. 17, 35. See also C. Letta, ‘Helios/Sol’, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, iv/1–2 (1988), 592–625, pl. 366–84. 13 Strabo, Geography, 14. 2. 5 (trans. H. L. Jones). 14 Schol. Plat. Phileb. 140 c ( ¼ Hebert, Schriftquellen (as in n. 5), Q. 49, 26).

44

Godefroid de Callatay¨

earthquake; but even as it lies, it excites our wonder and admiration. Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues. Where the limbs are broken asunder, vast caverns are seen yawning in the interior. Within it, too, are to be seen large masses of rock, by the weight of which the artist steadied it while erecting it. It is said that it was twelve years before the statue was completed, and that 300 talents were expended upon it; a sum raised from the engines of warfare which had been abandoned by King Demetrius, when tired of the long-protracted siege of Rhodes.15

These sources make it possible to reconstruct, at least approximately, the following chronology. The siege of Rhodes by Demetrius is dated around 305 bc. The erection of the Colossus must have taken place at the latest between 292 and 280 bc, but it seems more likely, as has already been noted, that work on the statue began immediately after Demetrius’ siege. If this was so, that is, if we accept 304 to 292 bc as the period of construction, Pliny’s statement that the Colossus stood on its feet for fifty-six years needs to be slightly corrected. For we know that the earthquake by which both the Colossus and the city of Rhodes were ruined occurred in 226 bc, which would give not fifty-six but sixty-six years between the completion of the work and its collapse.16 The date of 226 bc can be inferred with certainty from Polybius, who mentions the enormous gifts that were offered to the Rhodians by several of their allies to reconstruct the statue after the earthquake.17 That the Colossus was never rebuilt is in harmony with Strabo’s assertion that an oracle prevented the Rhodians from doing so. What happened to the Colossus once it had fallen is known primarily from much later statements, dating from the Byzantine period. Theophanes (d. 818 ad) speaks of the conquest of Rhodes by the Arabs under ‘Uthmaˆn ibn ‘Affaˆn, the third caliph of Islam (r. 644–56 ad): ‘In this year Mavius came to Rhodes and destroyed the Colossus of Rhodes 1360 years after it had been erected. A Jewish merchant of Edessa bought it and loaded 900 camels with the bronze of it.’18 Although the computation is clearly wrong, there is no doubt that the year referred to here is 652/3 and that Mavius (or Mavias) is Mu‘aˆwiya ibn Abıˆ Sufyaˆn, who in 661 would become the founder of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. Theophanes’ report was taken up with slight alterations by Pliny, Nat. hist. 34. 18 (trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley). For a discussion of this point, see R. Ashton, ‘Rhodian Coinage and the Colossus’, 17 See Polybius, 5. 88–9. Revue numismatique, 6th ser., 30 (1988), 75–90 at 87. 18 Theophanes, Chronographia, I, ed. C. de Boor (Leipzig, 1883; repr. Hildesheim, 1963), 345. 15 16

The Colossus of Rhodes

45

the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913–59), who wrote in his De administrando imperio: When he [Mavius] came to Rhodes he pulled down the Colossus that stood in it. It was a brazen statue of the Sun, gilded from head to foot, 80 cubits in height and broad in proportion, as witness the inscription written on the base of its feet, running like this: ‘The Rhodian Colossus, eight times ten/Cubits in height, Laches of Lindos made.’ He took the bronze of it and carried it over to Syria, and put it up for sale to any who wanted it; and a Hebrew of Edessa bought it and brought it up from the sea laden on 980 camels.19

Constantine seems to speak of the Colossus as if it were still standing when the Arabs took Rhodes. This is also suggested by the twelfthcentury chronicler Michael the Syrian (or Michael I Qıˆndasıˆ), who as Patriarch of Antioch wrote of the Saracens: They went to Rhodes and devastated it. The bronze Colossus—a fine monument and a work considered one of the great wonders of the world— they set out to demolish in order to take the bronze. It was made of Corinthian bronze and was erected as a standing man. When they set fire [to it] from below, they saw that it was fastened with huge bolts of iron to stones set in the ground. Many men pulled on it with thick cables, and all of a sudden it tipped over and fell to the ground. Its height, they say, was 107 feet: it came to 3000 loads of bronze, and this bronze was purchased by a Jew from the town of Emesa.20

These statements should not be regarded as irreconcilable with those of Strabo and Pliny. A possible explanation was suggested by Herbert Maryon, himself a sculptor and the author of an influential article on the Colossus to which I shall return in more detail: The stone and iron columns buckled at the knees. The upper part of the statue fell right over, and the head and shoulders reached the ground. But the marble base and the legs up to the knees still stood firmly, with the body and head half hanging from them, half lying on the ground. The iron supports had bent but had not broken, though the stone columns and the bronze sheathing had. The broken figure, supported at the knees, would be 50 or 60 feet high, as tall as a six-storey house. Mavias and his men had to pull it down before they could break it up.21 19 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 21, ed. G. Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins, rev. edn. (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, 1; Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 1; Washington, DC, 1967), 89. In the previous chapter, Constantine tells more or less the same story, but speaks of 900 camels. 20 Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche d’Antioche (1166–99), ed. J.-B. Chabot, 4 vols. (Paris, 1910; repr. Brussels, 1963), iv. 430a. English translation quoted from 21 Maryon, ‘Colossus’ (as in n. 6), 71. Conrad, ‘Arabs’ (as in n. 23), 167.

46

Godefroid de Callatay¨

He illustrates his explanation with a figure which, I think, makes this quite clear (Fig. 1.4). Several centuries before him, Antonio Tempesta had also represented this fallen colossus (Fig. 1.5). Only the feet of the giant still stand on the marble base; the other parts lie scattered on the ground. The Arabs are demolishing them and loading the bronze on their 900 camels. The whole scene is clearly inspired by Strabo, Pliny, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It is interesting to note that Tempesta portrays another Colossus in the background of his drawings, showing the giant still standing. Other artists, as we shall see, chose to represent the whole scene the other way round, that is, with the standing Helios at the centre and the fallen one on the side. The conquest and plunder of Rhodes by the Arabs dates from 653, which means that the remains of the Colossus would have been lying on the ground for a little less than a millennium, as was pointed out by Scaliger in his Thesaurus temporum.22 There are important reasons, however, to believe that the last trace of the Colossus had disappeared long before the Muslim conquest of the island. In a recent article on ‘The Arabs and the Colossus’, Lawrence Conrad makes it clear, through a detailed investigation of the extant sources for the destruction, that all of them, whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac, can be traced back to Theophanes.23 Regarding its attribution to the Arabs, Conrad observes: This would not have been the only time that such a stereotyped role as wanton destroyer was assigned to the Arabs; the famous legend of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria was another fairly typical case. But the destruction of the Colossus was in fact a powerful metaphor in a sense that has hitherto passed unnoticed. As practically any monk in the seventh-century Near East would have known, the immediate background for Daniel’s prophecy was Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the utter destruction of a great and awesome statue. Viewed against this background, the story of the Arabs and the Colossus in all probability originated as an apocalyptic metaphor: recalling the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the Arab reduction of the great monument to scrap for sale to a Jew illustrated, in the first instance, how utterly the vanities of man are cast down, but more importantly, served as evidence that the final course of years that would end with the destruction of the tormenters of God’s people was indeed under way.24

So much for the story of Chares of Lindos’ masterpiece. It is not worth quoting the other ancient sources about the Rhodian Colossus, for they do not provide us with anything important or new about it. Yet one J. J. Scaliger, Thesaurus temporum (Amsterdam, 1658), 137–8. L. I. Conrad, ‘The Arabs and the Colossus’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd 24 Ibid. 183. ser., 6/2 (July 1996), 165–87. 22 23

The Colossus of Rhodes

47

exception should be made for eight lines of poetry that we are lucky to possess and which some scholars have regarded as forming the genuine dedication of the Colossus itself.25 This text deserves to be quoted, especially on account of its influence on later representations of the statue: To you, o Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.26

This, together with the previous texts, is, more or less, all that was available to the erudite man of the Renaissance as evidence regarding the Colossus of Rhodes. It may be useful at this point to enumerate the main elements that could serve for an imagined reconstruction. The sources generally agree that the Colossus was seventy cubits high, i.e. something like 100 feet or thirty-three metres, thus no doubt one of the tallest statues ever erected, in Antiquity or later.27 Only Nero’s colossus, which gave its name to the Colosseum in Rome, may have been slightly taller than the Rhodian one, as the poet Martial would have us believe.28 Nearly all sources say that Chares’ statue represented Helios, patron deity of the Rhodians, although they do not indicate very explicitly how the god was made recognizable. Many of them attest that the statue was of bronze, with an inner structure made of iron tie-bars and filled up with blocks of stone. They generally tend to insist on the beauty of the work and on the extraordinary skills that were needed to achieve it. On the other hand, they leave considerable room for speculation regarding such important matters as the exact location of the Colossus, its posture, and, in spite of Philo’s technical report, the way it was actually built.29 25 See e.g. Ekschmitt, Weltwunder (as in n. 7), 177: ‘Durch einen besonderen Glu¨cksfall ist der Text der Weihinschrift erhalten, die sich auf dem Marmorsockel eingemeißelt fand’; Higgins, ‘Colossus of Rhodes’ (as in. 8), 134: ‘a poem preserved in the Greek Anthology which was, in all probability, the dedicatory inscription of the Colossus’. 26 Cf. Anthologia Graeca, 4. 171, ed. H. Beckby (Munich, 1957) (trans. R. Higgins). 27 See Higgins, ‘Colossus of Rhodes’ (as in n. 8), 130: ‘Statues of up to 10 metres (30 ft) were not unknown in ancient Greece, but nothing so large as the Colossus is recorded in antiquity before or after its creation.’ 28 Martial, Epigr., 1. 70. 7. On Nero’s Colossus, see M. Bergmann, Der Koloß Neros, die Domus Aurea und der Mentalita¨tswandel im Rom der fru¨hen Kaiserzeit (Mainz, 1994). 29 These matters will not be treated here. For different suggestions see above all A. Gabriel, ‘La Construction, l’attitude et l’emplacement du Colosse de Rhodes’, Bulletin

48

Godefroid de Callatay¨

No wonder, then, if in the course of time human imagination came to supply what the sources could not provide. At the end of the fourteenth century, Nicola Martoni, an Italian pilgrim who visited the isle of Rhodes on his way to the Holy Land, relates a popular tradition according to which the statue bestrode the entrance of the main harbour of the city: At the end of the pier is a church called Saint Nicholas. A great wonder was related to me and certified as true. In ancient times there was some figure, fashioned in such a wonderful way that it held one foot on the end of the pier mentioned above (where the church of Saint Nicholas is), and the other foot on the end of the other pier where the windmills are.30

Let us look at a map of the place (Fig. 1.6). The span between the two piers is more than 400 metres, which obviously poses a certain number of technical problems, but this did not prevent the medieval fable from gaining ever more credence during the Renaissance. Countless engravings from the sixteenth century onwards portray the Colossus as a tall young man bestriding the harbour of Rhodes. In the Lyon edition of Andre´ Thevet’s Cosmographie de Levant, dated 1554, we find a series of engravings ascribed to Jean Cousin. One of them represents our Colossus in the rather uncanny guise of a standing warrior holding a spear and a sword (Fig. 1.7). The drawing closely follows the text: ‘Il tenoit en la main dextre une espee, & en la senestre une pique, & avoit devant la poitrine un miroe¨r ardant, come pourrez voir par la figure precedente.’31 Of course, the entrance to the harbour is no longer thought to be more than 400 metres wide; yet, characteristically, a large—and very modern—galleon passing under the legs of the giant is designed to de correspondance helle´nique, 56 (1932), 331–59; E. Zervoudaki, ‘Helios kai Heleia’, Archaiologikon Deltion, 30 (1975), A1–20; Ekschmitt, Weltwunder (as in. 7), 170–81; J. and E. Romer, The Seven Wonders of the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (London, 1995), 25–47; K. Brodersen, Die Sieben Weltwunder: Legenda¨re Kunst- und Bauwerke der Antike (Munich, 1996), 84–91; W. Hoepfner, ‘Der Koloss von Rhodos’, Archa¨ologischer Anzeiger (2000), 129–53; U. Vedder, ‘Der Koloss von Rhodos als Wa¨chter u¨ber dem Hafeneingang’, in Kunze (ed.), Die Sieben Weltwunder (as in n. 4), 131–40. 30 Translated from the Latin text in ‘Pe `lerinage a` Je´rusalem de N. de Martoni’, Revue de l’Orient latin, 3 (1895), 585 ( ¼ Hebert, Schriftquellen (as in n. 5), Q. 102, 43). For other medieval statements on the Colossus of Rhodes, see H. Omont, ‘Les Sept Merveilles du monde au moyen aˆge’, Bibliothe`que de l’E´cole des Chartes, 48 (1882), 40–60. These Greek and Latin texts offer nothing new on the Colossus of Rhodes. 31 A. Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant, ed. F. Lestringant (Geneva, 1985), 106.

The Colossus of Rhodes

49

underline his almost incredible tallness. Another engraving by Cousin, illustrating Thevet’s Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), provides an even more spectacular view: the Colossus, seen in the distance, bestrides the harbour with the island, suitably Lilliputian, spreading out beside it (Fig. 1.8). Maarten van Heemskerck’s illustrations of the Wonders of the World are well known.32 He made a drawing of the Colosseum in Rome, which by his time had made its glorious entry into the series of Wonders (Fig. 1.9). The tall statue to the right clearly portrays Jupiter, not the original Phoebus Apollo mentioned by several Latin sources.33 This no doubt echoes the transformation of the statue ordained by Nero’s successors. Yet it has been argued that the location of the giant, right at the centre of the amphitheatrum—and not, as it should be, outside the building (Fig. 1.10)—could be regarded as a remnant of a very persistent confusion between the Rhodian Colossus and the Roman Colosseum. The successive versions of the Mirabilia urbis Romae document the process of fusion. The point, stressed by G. Brett in his article on the Seven Wonders of the World in the Renaissance,34 will not be pursued here. Let us now turn to van Heemskerck’s Rhodian Colossus (Fig. 1.11). It is a gigantic and rather pathetic Apollo carrying a bow, a quiver with arrows, together with a kind of sceptre. Here again, a large vessel entering the harbour is intended to make us realize how big the sculpture was. A similar hint is conveyed by the big head that lies in front—a reference to the plundering by the Arabs. Note, however, that the head is out of proportion: it is much too small. Perhaps the most interesting part of this composition is the big torch that the god raises in his left hand. It does not fit with the traditional representation of Apollo, not even if one admits, as seems natural here, that this Apollo and the god Helios are one and the same deity.35 But it makes a lot of sense if one is willing to attach to the Colossus of Rhodes the function of a lighthouse, at least metaphorically. The so-called dedication of the statue strongly supports this assumption by alluding, as we have seen, to ‘the lovely torch of freedom and independence’, and the 32 See e.g. L. Duclaux, ‘Dessins de Martin van Heemskerck’, La Revue du Louvre et des Muse´es de France (1981), 5/6, 375–80. 33 On these sources, see Bergmann, Koloß (as in n. 28), 7–8. 34 G. Brett, ‘The Seven Wonders of the World in the Renaissance’, Art Quarterly, 12 (1949), 349–51. 35 See e.g. Nicetas, T pt qa¸mata ( ¼ Hebert, Schriftquellen (as in n. 5), Q. 59, 30): ` n ‘Rd} kolossv, edwlon Apllwnov. ’

50

Godefroid de Callatay¨

statue may have served as a lighthouse, but we should not forget that no other ancient source confirms this. In fact, the very idea of representing the Colossus with one foot on each side of the harbour might well be the result of a misinterpretation of the same single source, as has been pointed out by several modern scholars. For twice in the dedicatory inscription there appears the proud assertion that the statue symbolizes the dominion of the Rhodians on both sea and land. This repeated assertion, which reminds us of the Latin slogan Terra marique,36 suggests how the notion could arise that the Colossus should have had at least one foot ‘in the sea’.37 Let us note in passing that Shakespeare must have had in mind something very similar to van Heemskerck’s engraving when he made Cassius say of Julius Caesar: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about38

Van Heemskerck’s example had a long sequel. We have ‘The Marvellous Colossus of Rhodes’ by Fischer von Erlach (Fig. 1.12) with a proud caption stating ‘that it was made by Chares the Lindian under the government of Theagones, Prince of Caria, in the year 3600 of the world’. This appears to be a confusion, together with a misreading, of several elements taken from Constantine Porphyrogenitus, referred to above.39 Of particular interest is the representation, in the upper left corner, of a typical Rhodian coin. Most Rhodian coins (Fig. 1.13) feature this kind of head surmounted by the Sun’s rays—an obvious reference to the specific connection of Helios with the island—and it has often been assumed, also by most modern scholars, that Chares the Lindian sculpted the head of his Colossus in this way. This idea, which has led to many unproven identifications in modern numismatics,40 was 36 See A. Momigliano, ‘Terra marique’ (1942), in Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1960), 431–46. 37 See e.g. T. Dombart, Die Sieben Weltwunder des Altertums (Munich, 1967), 71: ‘Freilich hat gerade dieser Schlußwortlaut mit Anlaß gegeben zu der Vorstellung, der Koloß mu¨sse spreizbeinig u¨ber der Hafeneinfahrt, von Festlandufer zu Festlandufer, von Mole zu Mole auch die Meereswogen u¨berspannt haben.’ 38 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, i. ii. 134–7. 39 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio (as in n. 19), 20; see also ch. 21, entitled ‘From the Chronicle of Theophanes: the year of the creation of the world 6171’. 40 Suffice it to mention the recent, and very unconvincing, attempt by G. M. Staffieri, ‘Il ‘‘Colosso di Rodi’’: Un nuovo riscontro numismatico’, Annotazioni numismatiche, 27 (Sept. 1997), 612–20.

The Colossus of Rhodes

51

obviously shared by the author of this engraving, as the caption under the coin reads: Caput Colossi Rhodis. Note that the type of coins used by von Erlach for his drawing, with the head of Helios in right profile in a rayed taenia, corresponds to the series of didrachms which, according to Richard Ashton’s chronology of Rhodian coins,41 are the most likely to portray the Colossus (Fig. 1.14). It seems that the van Heemskerck tradition continued to inspire artists. In many other engravings and, even more, in many tapestries one finds the giant depicted in the same position, without significant change in the god’s attitude or attributes. Innovations, if they are such, appear in the rest of the composition. Much more original is the description of the Colossus in John Lemprie`re’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788 and still in use. The entry reads: Its feet were on two moles which formed the entrance to the harbour, and ships passed full sail between its legs . . . . A winding staircase ran to the top from which could easily be discerned the shores of Syria, and the ships that sailed on the coast of Egypt, by the help of glasses, which were hung on the neck of the Statue.42

Very special glasses they must have been, for the distance between Rhodes and Egypt is clearly greater than a stone’s throw. But the eighteenth–nineteenth century is also a period in which many people tried to reconstruct the image of the Colossus on more scientific lines. Following a suggestion made in 1759 by the Comte de Caylus,43 scholars such as Rottiers, Hamilton, Newton, Lu¨ders, and Gue´rin all stressed the insurmountable difficulties that Chares the Lindian would have had to face in raising such a big statue with feet and arms widely outstretched.44 It became increasingly obvious that Chares, even though a pupil of the great Lysippus, could not have achieved anything more sophisticated than a rather stiff portrait of a standing Helios. 41 Ashton, ‘Coinage’ (as in n. 16), 75–90, pl. 15–18; see also his ‘Rhodian Bronze Coinage and the Earthquake of 229–226 bc’, Numismatic Chronicle, 146 (1986), 1–18 and pl. 1–4. 42 J. Lemprie `re, Lemprie`re’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors Writ Large, rev. and rewritten 1949, 3rd edn. (London, 1984), s.v. ‘Colossus’. 43 Comte de Caylus, in Me ´moires de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 25 (London, 1759), 360–7. 44 B. E. A. Rottiers, Descriptions des monuments de Rhodes (Brussels, 1830), 81–97; W. J. Hamilton, Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia, ii (London, 1842), 65–6; C. T. Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, i (London, 1865), 176–7; F. Lu¨ders, Der Koloß von Rhodos (Hamburg, 1865); V. Gue´rin, ˆIle de Rhodes (Paris, 1880), 111–23.

52

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Consequently, these scholars all abandoned the idea of a statue bestriding the harbour. Of course, they were far from agreeing as to the right way of representing the Colossus, but the general trend was to give it a more austere pose and, so to speak, a greater immobility: expansive gestures and attributes were banned. It was also felt that Philo’s technical treatise should be the starting point for any serious study of the question. The hypothesis of a lighthouse-statue, which is nowhere alluded to in Philo’s account, but which seems a reasonable inference from the so-called dedication, was still predominant. But how could the technical and the symbolic requirements have been met at the same time? Quite naturally, some people thought, for example Albert Gabriel in 1932: the Colossus stood legs together, the left arm flush with the body and the right, the one holding the torch, extended vertically upwards (Fig. 1.15). The gesture was elegant, and the allegorical function of the statue was preserved, at least in the mind of people like Gustave Eiffel and Fre´de´ric-Auguste Bartholdi. For it is well known that the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour (Fig. 1.16), dedicated in 1886 to commemorate the French and American Revolutions, was modelled on Chares’ masterpiece. The twentieth century has had its share of new theories and hypotheses. In a series of challenging but somewhat adventurous articles, Franc¸ois Pre´chac tried to demonstrate that the Colossus was not alone on its marble base. The giant, he contended, must have been driving a four-horse chariot.45 This fantastic idea turns out to depend entirely on a single ancient statement preserved in a very corrupt form. Ampelius’ Liber memorialis, a crucial source for us, lists a wide range of miracula mundi. On Rhodes, the text as we have it reads: ‘The Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze statue of the Sun; moreover (super), [there is] a marble column, with a copper quadriga; the column is 100 cubits high.’46 In other words, the Colossus and the column with the four horses had nothing whatever to do with one another. Still we may regret that Pre´chac did not add a drawing to his article: it would no doubt have been yet another intriguing specimen in our collection of modern illustrations of the Colossus. 45 F. Pre ´chac, ‘Le Colosse de Rhodes’, Revue arche´ologique, 9 (1919), 66–76; id., ‘Ampeliana’, Revue arche´ologique, 10 (1920), 236–70. 46 Ampelius, Liber memorialis, 8. 19 (as in n. 3), 8. 19: ‘Rhodi colossus: signum solis aeneum; super columna marmorea cum quadriga cupro; columna vero habet cubitus centum.’ The text is conjectural.

The Colossus of Rhodes

53

At the other extreme we find the study of Georges Roux, whose purpose was to draw attention, following Wilamowitz,47 to the fact that kolossos is a pre-Greek word, which originally did not convey the meaning of ‘large’ or ‘gigantic’, but rather that of anything raised or lifted vertically.48 Kolossos, which Roux regards as the exact equivalent of the Latin statua, may have applied, irrespective of size, to countless sculpted figures, including the small idols from the Greek archaic period. The term was applied to the Rhodian Helios in this wider sense but became specific to outsize statues in consequence of its association with Chares’ masterpiece. So far, so good. But the author goes on to maintain that the Colossus of Rhodes was actually an enlargement of an archaic idol, the body like a pillar or a column, with arms and feet ‘paralysed in some sort of sheath’.49 Let us now turn to a story which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been told so far. In the early 1930s Italian archaeologists working in Rhodes discovered a marble relief, dated to the second century bc, showing the upper part of a human body (Fig. 1.17). Since, apart from a small piece of drapery on the right side, the body is naked and since the figure appears to be raising its right arm above its head—as in the Renaissance engravings—some people thought that the first authentic, though incomplete, representation of the Colossus had been found at last. The identification was endorsed by the finders themselves and the relief was published under this designation.50 Herbert Maryon, the sculptor mentioned at the beginning of this paper, called this ‘a fortunate discovery, such as at times brings joy to the 47 U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ‘Heilige Gesetze: Eine Urkunde aus Kyrene’, Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Kl. (1927), 155–76 at 169. 48 G. Roux, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un ‘‘kolossv’’ ’, Revue des ´ etudes anciennes, 62 (1960), 5–18; see also M. W. Dickie, ‘What is a Kolossos and How Were Kolossoi Made in the Hellenistic Period?’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 37 (1996), 237–57. 49 Roux, ‘Kolossv’, 18. The idea of a column originates in a late statement about the Colossus preserved in Nicetas, qa¸mata (as in n. 35): tin v d
asi, k‹ona e nai to ton calko n. This statement contradicts all other ancient sources, but Roux justifies it as a lectio difficilior (p. 14): ‘Ainsi, a` l’e´poque de Nice´tas, une tradition survivait qui faisait du colosse un k‹wn, une colonne ou un pilier d’airain. Dira-t-on que cette tradition doit eˆtre rejete´e en raison de la date tardive a` laquelle elle nous est rapporte´e? Dans ce cas particulier, cependant, c’est justement parce que ce renseignement est tardif qu’il me paraıˆt digne de confiance. L’auteur l’a consigne´ a` une e´poque ou` il euˆt e´te´ naturel, normal, de se repre´senter le colosse, a` la fac¸on des graveurs du xviie et du xviiie sie`cle, sous les traits d’un simple ndr‹av athle´tique. Ce qu’il nous dit du colosse a donc pour nous la valeur d’une lectio difficilior qui se serait maintenue dans un manuscrit re´cent.’ 50 See G. Jacopi, Monumenti di scultura del Museo Archeologico di Rodi, ii (Clara Rhodos, 5; Rhodes, 1932), no. 35.

54

Godefroid de Callatay¨

heart of a hard-working antiquary’.51 Indeed he found the discovery so fortunate that in a very stimulating study he set about reconsidering the whole problem on the strength of it. What he suggested as a posture for the Colossus was simply something in which suitable legs could be attached to the upper part of the body as it appeared in the relief (Fig. 1.18). As for the piece of drapery, the explanation seemed obvious: ‘We realise at once’, he writes, ‘that, besides the legs, the sculptor would wish to provide the figure with a third point of support to ensure its stability.’52 Maryon’s other great idea, which was mainly based on the allegedly small figure of 500 talents of bronze as reported by Philo, was to argue that the Colossus had not been cast, as is usually assumed, but made of thin hammered bronze plates.53 Neither of Maryon’s suppositions proved to be truly convincing. In the following year, Denys Haynes demolished the hammered-plate theory by showing that it was incompatible in many respects with Philo’s report.54 And it was not long before the identification of the Colossus with the figure on the marble relief was also discarded. According to a recent statement, the figure ‘quite clearly portrays an athlete crowning himself and has nothing to do with Helios’.55 Maryon’s paper came out in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1956, but it was based on an account read to the Society of Antiquaries of London in December 1953. Dates are important here for it was in 1954 that Salvador Dalı´ painted his version of the Colossus (Fig. 1.19), a version which, all things considered, does not look extremely original. Not only the pose, but even the hammered plates of Maryon’s theory find here a clear and very powerful expression. Clearly Maryon’s contribution had made some impact. The Colossus of Rhodes is controversial, susceptible of an infinite number of interpretations. I have attempted to trace some of them.56 So many fragile hypotheses have been—and continue to be—put forward57 51

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 74–5. Maryon, ‘Colossus’ (as in. 6), 72. Haynes, ‘Philo of Byzantium’ (as in n. 9), 311–12. 55 Higgins, ‘Colossus of Rhodes’ (as in n. 8), 134. 56 Many others, such as the great variety of representations found in films and cartoons, have had to be omitted from the present enquiry. A glimpse of this impressive gallery may be easily obtained by consulting the Web. 57 The recently published study by W. Hoepfner, Der Koloß von Rhodos und die Bauten des Helios: Neue Forschungen zu einem der Sieben Weltwunder (Mainz, 2003), is worthless, except for the illustrations. Factual errors abound, and there is no serious atttempt to examine the sources. Hoepfner would have the reader believe that the Colossus was the replica of a small and rather misshapen bronze statuette found in Montdidier in the 54

The Colossus of Rhodes

55

that one more may perhaps be allowed. I began with the artificial projection of the zodiac on Eratosthenes’ world map, so remarkably centred on the isle of Rhodes. A people having the Sun as its patron deity shows itself to be indomitable and places itself at the centre of an immense windrose: was it not natural to draw a parallel with the place of the Sun at the centre of the zodiac, as it appears on several ancient artefacts, such as the second/first-century bc gem illustrated in Fig. 1.20?58 It would surely be a long shot to prove that the Colossus was part—in the flesh, so to speak—of that great project (or projection), and a longer shot still to demonstrate that Timosthenes of Rhodes, who lived at the time the Colossus was built, was the organizer of all this. But one may always dream, with Philo’s words in mind: So, going up bit by bit, he [Chares] reached the goal of his endeavour, and at the expense of 500 talents of bronze and 300 of iron, he created, with incredible boldness, a god similar to the real God; for he gave a second Sun to the world. Somme, and now at the Louvre. According to him, it is the laws of perspective that are responsible for the apparent deformity of the Colossus. The reconstruction he offers (p. 80)—a nude colossus with blond hair, dubious red lips, and a short rosy red chlamys—may amuse some. 58 On this gem see M.-L. Vollenweider, Muse ´e d’art et d’histoire de Gene`ve: Catalogue raisonne´ des sceaux, cylindres, intailles et came´es, iii (Mainz, 1983), 178–80; H. G. Gundel, Zodiakos: Tierkreisbilder im Altertum (Mainz, 1992), 249 n. 152.1. Note on the illustrations: for full references see List of Illustrations, pp. ix–x above.

56

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.1. The windrose of Timosthenes on Eratosthenes’ world map

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.2. The windrose and the zodiac in Ptolemy’s Geography, 1522

57

58

Fig. 1.3. Map of Rhodes

Godefroid de Callatay¨

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.4. Maryon’s fallen Colossus

Fig. 1.5. Tempesta’s fallen Colossus, 1608

59

60

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.6. Map of the city of Rhodes c.1500

The Colossus of Rhodes

61

Fig. 1.7. Engraving of the Colossus by Jean Cousin, in Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant (1554)

62

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.8. Engraving of the Colossus and the Island of Rhodes by Jean Cousin, in Thevet, Cosmographie universelle (1575)

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.9. Engraving of the Colosseum by van Heemskerck, 1570

Fig. 1.10. Coin with Nero’s Colossus and the Colosseum

63

Fig. 1.11. Engraving of the Colossus of Rhodes by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1570

Fig. 1.12. The Colossus of Rhodes by Fischer von Erlach, 1725

66

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.13. A Rhodian coin with the head of Helios, 380–340 bc

The Colossus of Rhodes

67

Fig. 1.14. Rhodian didrachm with head of Helios in a rayed taenia, early third century bc

68

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.15. A. Gabriel’s reconstruction of the Colossus

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.16. The Statue of Liberty

69

70

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.17. Marble relief found in Rhodes, second century bc

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.18. H. Maryon’s reconstruction of the standing Colossus

71

72

Godefroid de Callatay¨

Fig. 1.19. Colossus of Rhodes, after Salvador Dalı´

The Colossus of Rhodes

Fig. 1.20. Gem with sun and zodiac, late second/early first century bc

73

This page intentionally left blank

2 Renaissance Philology: Johannes Livineius (1546–1599) and the Birth of the Apparatus Criticus Luigi Battezzato

1. INTRODUCTION Some inventions look deceptively simple once they are made. Classical scholars are used to the concept of apparatus criticus, and are most annoyed when faced with the fact that Renaissance and seventeenthcentury scholars did not know of such a thing. Beatus Rhenanus, ‘in spite of his professions, . . . did not make clear to users of his edition [of Tacitus] the sources of his own innovations in the text’.1 Adrien de Tournebu (Turne`be), in his edition of Aeschylus (1552), emended the text using variant readings found in the scholia, and his own conjectures, but ‘he did not indicate the changes he had introduced; hence the reader could not know for certain the source of any given reading’.2 With Justus Lipsius’ editorial procedure for Tacitus, Brink complains, ‘a distinction between transmitted text, variants from manuscripts, and conjectures is hardly possible’.3 In Joseph Scaliger’s edition of Catullus ‘the procedure I thank B. Amata, H.-J. van Dam, R. Ferri, C. Ligota, and E. Stagni for their useful comments, corrections, and suggestions. S. Gysens offered detailed criticism of the paper and kindly sent me copies of his papers and of other relevant material. 1 E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley, 1974), 52. 2 A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, i (Oxford, 1983), 85. See now A. Galistu, ‘Le congetture eschilee di Adrien Turne`be, parte prima: L’Orestea’, Lexis, 17 (1999), 155–94; V. Citti and R. Dawe, ‘Congetture ad Eschilo dalle edizioni cinquecentine’, Lexis, 22 (2004), 249–60. 3 C. O. Brink, ‘Justus Lipsius and the Text of Tacitus’, Journal of Roman Studies, 41 (1951), 32–51 at 34.

76

Luigi Battezzato

is still correction of the current text codicum et ingenii ope: and the essential principle of scientific editing, enunciated and re-enunciated by Ernesti and Wolf and Sauppe, that the appeal to the MSS must be continuous, is, whether understood or not, neglected in practice’.4 Ernesti, Wolf, and Sauppe were all born long after Scaliger’s death, and Kenney seems at times to be judging Renaissance scholars by their ability to anticipate the standards of accuracy and the stemmatic method developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a method that Kenney considers of perennial value.5 Kenney himself later concedes, following Schwartz and Pasquali, that the stemmatic method, distilled by Paul Maas into his famous Textkritik, only applies to a small minority of classical texts,6 and that ‘a critic such as Cobet . . . will usually end by presenting a better text of his author, however slapdash his methodology [in selecting manuscripts], than the most painstaking but untalented drudge’.7 4 Kenney (as in n. 1), 56–7. Timpanaro’s judgement on Scaliger’s edition of Catullus is much more favourable: S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (3rd edn., Padua, 1985), 10 and 151; see also J. H. Gaisser, ‘Catullus, Gaius Valerius’, in Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, vii (Washington, DC, 1992), 197–292 at 267–71. See Timpanaro, Genesi, 30–4 and 58–60 on Ernesti, Wolf, and Sauppe. For a reassessment and a discussion of the different editions of Timpanaro’s work, see V. Di Benedetto, ‘La filologia di Sebastiano Timpanaro’ in R. Di Donato (ed.), Il filologo materialista: Studi per Sebastiano Timpanaro (Pisa, 2003), 1–89. 5 See A. Grafton’s review of Kenney’s book, in Journal of Roman Studies, 67 (1977), 171–6, esp. 171. Kenney restated his point of view in ‘A Rejoinder’, Giornale italiano di filologia, 32 (1980), 320–2. 6 Kenney (as in n. 1), 141. Timpanaro (as in n. 4), 84–103, 152 gives a more nuanced assessment of the application of Lachmann’s method in the 19th and 20th cc. See also G. Luck, ‘Textual Criticism Today’, American Journal of Philology, 102 (1981), 164–94, esp. 184–6; M. Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum? Recent and Future Editing’, Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000), 196–206, at 198; and especially G. Fiesoli, La genesi del lachmannismo (Florence, 2000), 360–461. 7 Kenney (as in n. 1), 119. For a masterly survey of Renaissance editorial techniques and the use of manuscripts see G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (Florence, 1952), 43–108. More recent case studies include J. F. D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus between Conjecture and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988); J. H. Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance Readers (Oxford, 1993); T. W. Richardson, Reading and Variant in Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and their Manuscript Sources (Toronto, 1993); E. Stagni, ‘Ricerche sulla tradizione manoscritta di Petronio: L’editio princeps dei ‘‘longa’’ e i codici di Tornesio’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, 30 (1993), 205–30; many papers by M. D. Reeve, esp. ‘The Rediscovery of Classical Texts in the Renaissance’ in O. Pecere (ed.), Itinerari di testi antichi (Rome, 1991), 115–57 (with a very useful introductory bibliography on pp. 115–23) and ‘Beatus Rhenanus and the lost Vormacensis of Livy’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 25 (1995), 217–54; L. Canfora, Il Fozio ritrovato: Juan de Mariana e Andre´ Schott (Bari, 2001). See also below, n. 50, on Carrion.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

77

In fact many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philologists prepared editions the same way they would have prepared manuscript books. They would copy the text from one source (occasionally changing model for some particular sections), inserting conjectures and variant readings from other witnesses; they would also add variant readings in the margins. Scaliger’s copy of Petronius is a good example of how humanists prepared their texts: he copied the Cuiacianus manuscript, which had large new sections of texts, but used the (vastly inferior) 1565 printed edition of Sambucus for the sections that were already known, recording variant readings from the Cuiacianus in the text or in the margins.8 Renaissance scholars often appear to be improving a classical text the same way they would improve a map or a catalogue.9 I want to argue that we should take into account some factors that explain why sixteenth-century editors seem so inconsistent: (i) finding and selecting manuscripts was extremely difficult, and it was not possible to form an idea of the whole manuscript tradition; (ii) scholars could not check the antiquity or value of the manuscript sources of the editio princeps, which was frequently regarded as deriving from a very authoritative manuscript;10 (iii) many editors were not aiming at producing a critical text, but a readable one, and their work should not be judged by the standards we use for a modern critical edition; (iv) modern apparatus critici use a concise system of sigla and abbreviations which did not exist, and would have been difficult to print. We shall see that this style of presentation made its first appearance in Renaissance collations, and we will examine some of the reasons why it took some time before it became standard in editions. These four points will be made clear also by examining the career and the works of a relatively little-known scholar who came very close to creating a veritable apparatus criticus. Johannes Livineius (Jan Lievens) was born in Dendermonde, near Ghent, in 1546–7 and died in Lie`ge in 1599. He published two short treatises by Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom and an edition of the Panegyrici Latini. Friends managed to publish posthumously his notes on the Latin elegists, and a couple of translations of Byzantine 8 Scaliger also included a number of old and new conjectures in the text, as well as new mistakes: Petronius, Satyrica: Schelmenszenen, ed. K. Mu¨ller, trans. W. Ehlers (Munich, 1983), 393–5 (MS Leidensis Scaligeranus 61). On Sambucus see below, n. 173. 9 On ‘improved’ editions see E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1979), i. 107–26; see also i. 80–1 on the process of standardization. 10 It is characteristic that Scaliger, who collated the Paris manuscript of Arnobius, failed to identify it with the manuscript used for the editio princeps: see below, n. 89.

78

Luigi Battezzato

authors that he had completed during a stay in Rome. His notes on Sophocles, Euripides, Arnobius, Minucius Felix, Silius Italicus, and other authors remained unpublished for centuries. This part of his Nachlass is now better known, and his philological abilities emerge as remarkable. H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson have shown that he often anticipated later scholars in his notes on Sophocles, and made some attractive conjectures.11 His notes on Euripides, Arnobius, and Minucius Felix are equally important.12 His collation notes resemble very closely a modern apparatus criticus. I shall use this evidence as a starting point for a discussion of philological methods and editorial techniques in the Renaissance (xx4 and 5).

2. LIFE AND WORKS OF LIVINEIUS Anthony Grafton has shown how sixteenth-century classicists divided along national and methodological lines. Italian scholars emphasized one side of Politian’s legacy: the study of manuscripts and the importance of a careful recording of scribal mistakes for establishing the true reading. This line of study was followed especially by Pier Vettori (1499–1585) and by people associated with him or sympathetic to his methods, such as Gabriele Faerno (1510–61), Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600), and Cardinal Sirleto (1514–85).13 French scholars were less interested in collating 11 Livineius wrote his notes in the margins of Sophoclis Tragoediae septem (Venice: Aldus, 1502), Trinity College Cambridge, Adv. d. 4.1; see H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson, Sophoclea: Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Oxford, 1990), 270. 12 See my earlier paper: L. Battezzato, ‘Livineius’ Unpublished Euripidean Marginalia’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 30 (2000), 323–49. Livineius wrote his notes in a copy of Euripidis tragoediae septendecim . . . (Venice: Aldus, 1503), British Library, C.45.b.23–24. R. Alston, Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library (London, 1994), 18 on Livineius’ Arnobius, 208 on his Euripides. I reported some readings from the notes on the first book of Arnobius in my earlier article, p. 328 n. 22; see my forthcoming ‘Congetture cinquecentesche inedite ad Arnobio e Minucio Felice’, Lexis, 24 (2006). 13 Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 45–70, 95–6. J. F. Maillard, J. Kecskeme ´ti, and M. Portalier (eds.), L’Europe des humanistes (XIVe–XVIIe sie`cles) (2nd edn., Paris, 1998), 422, 178, 329, 391 give concise information and bibliography on these scholars; I generally follow their indications for the non-Latinized forms of personal names of Renaissance scholars. On contacts between Orsini and scholars and printers in Antwerp (including Torrentius and Christophe Plantin) see P. de Nolhac, La Bibliothe`que de Fulvio Orsini: Contributions a` l’histoire des collections d’Italie et a` l’e´tude de la Renaissance (Paris, 1887), 57–9; W. Bracke, ‘Giusto Lipsio e Fulvio Orsini’, in M. Laurens (ed.), ‘The world of Justus Lipsius: A contribution towards his intellectual biography’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 68 (1998), 81–96, esp. 88.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

79

manuscripts, but developed a fashion (and a talent) for conjectural emendation,14 an enterprise that Vettori considered risky at best.15 Jean Dorat (1508–88), Adrien Turne`be (1512–65), and Marc-Antoine de Muret (1526–85)16 are among the most significant in this tradition. Their conjectures restored many corrupt passages of classical authors.17 Of course, there were French scholars who worked on manuscripts (e.g. Denis Lambin (1519–72) and Jacques Cujas (1522–90))18 and Italian scholars who made brilliant conjectures (including Vettori himself and Faerno).19 Grafton’s broad characterization, however, is a useful guide in analysing the method of sixteenth-century philologists. Livineius is a generation younger than Vettori or Turne`be. Coming from a Catholic family in the Low Countries, he was influenced by French textual criticism but was also exposed to the Italian tradition. He has many successful emendations to his credit, but his philological work was always spurred by access to new manuscript evidence. Livineius20 studied in Cologne and Leuven, and befriended Andre´ Schott (1552–1629),21 Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), and Willem Canter 14

Cf. Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 71–100. Cf. ibid. 184. 16 Dates and essential bibliography in Maillard, Kecskeme ´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 157, 412, 315. See also J. Lewis, Adrien Turne`be (1512–1565): A Humanist Observed (Geneva, 1998). 17 For instance Aeschylus: see M. Mund-Dopchie, La Survie d’Eschyle a ` la Renaissance (Louvain, 1984) and Aeschyli Tragoediae cum incerti poetae Prometheo, ed. M. L. West (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. xxii–xxiv. 18 See Maillard, Kecskeme ´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 258 and 139. 19 See G. P. Goold, ‘A New Text of Catullus’, Phoenix, 12 (1958), 93–116 at 99 for their conjectures on Catullus. Paolo Manuzio was on Muret’s side against Vettori: Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 89. Grafton himself is very careful to nuance his picture of scholarly trends: ibid. 45–100, esp. 69, 87–8, 99. 20 S. Gysens has recently written two excellent studies on the life and works of Livineius: a useful biographical entry ‘Livineius, Johannes (Jan Lievens)’, Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek (Brussels, 1990), xvi. 539–48 [hereafter Gysens, NBW], and a longer article ‘Johannes Livineius (1546/47–1599): Een minder bekend humanist uit Dendermonde’, Gedenkschriften van de Oudheidkundige Kring van het Land van Dendermonde, 4th ser., 21 (2002), 7–54 [hereafter Gysens, Gedenkschriften]. See also below, n. 24. Previous works include L. Roersch, ‘Lievens (Jean) ou Livineius’, in Biographie nationale (Brussels, 1892–3), xii. 124–8; J. N. Paquot, Me´moires pour servir a` l’histoire litte´raire des dix-sept Provinces des Pays Bas . . . (Louvain, 1765) [repr. Westmead, 1970], i. 350–1. For other bibliographical references and evidence on the manuscripts used by Livineius see Battezzato, ‘Livineius’ Unpublished Euripidean Marginalia’ (as in n. 12). 21 Schott was in contact with Livineius and Torrentius; he corresponded with the latter: see L. Torrentius, Correspondance, ed. M. Delcourt et J. Hoyoux (Paris, 1950–4), passim. Schott, after many travels, came back to the Jesuit Collegium in Antwerp in 1596: cf. A. Roersch, ‘Schott (Andre´)’, in Biographie Nationale (Brussels, 1914–20), xxii. 1–14 at 9; G. Tournoy, ‘Schott (Andre´)’, in C. Nativel (ed.), Centuriae Latinae: Cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance aux Lumie`res offertes a` J. Chomarat (Geneva, 1997), 749–53; 15

80

Luigi Battezzato

(1542–75).22 Livineius was made canonicus of Saint Peter’s in Lie`ge in 1573,23 and began working on Greek patristic texts. His first publication, the editio princeps of Gregory of Nyssa’s De virginitate (1574),24 includes conjectures by Canter and himself. His uncle, Laevinus Torrentius (Lieven Vander Beke) (1525–95), who was to become bishop of Lie`ge, and a very powerful man, supported his work.25 Livineius took advantage of his uncle’s trip to Rome to obtain readings from a Vatican manuscript of De virginitate against the sole manuscript he was working on.26 Torrentius was a classical scholar in his own right, in contact with both Sirleto and Faerno.27 Livineius’ second publication, the editio princeps of John Chrysostom’s De virginitate,28 presents a much smaller number of variant readings and conjectures than the Gregory. Livineius had shown good potential as an editor and textual critic, but his interest in Greek texts could not really flourish without access to new material. The turning point of his career was Torrentius’ offer of a trip to Italy. Livineius was in Rome in the period 1579–82.29 The stay in Rome was Canfora, Il Fozio ritrovato (as in n.7), passim. On Schott and Livineius see also Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 46. On Schott and Lipsius see also the contribution by Paul Nelles to this volume. 22 See L. Roersch, ‘Lievens (Jean) ou Livineius’ (as in n. 20), 124. W. Canter moved to Paris, where he studied with Dorat and met J. J. Scaliger (1540–1609). See R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976), 104, 106, 125; Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 104, 275 n. 21; G. Demerson, Dorat et son temps (ClermontFerrand, 1983), 173; 180–5; Mund-Dopchie, La Survie (as in n. 17), 239–42. 23 Cf. L. Roersch, ‘Lievens (Jean) ou Livineius’ (as in n. 20), 126. 24 Gregorii Nysseni De virginitate liber, Graece et Latine nunc primum editus, interprete Iohanne Livineio Gandensi (Antwerp: Plantin, 1574). On this work, see S. Gysens, ‘ ‘‘Libellus hic aureus est . . . ’’: Sur l’e´dition princeps du ‘‘De virginitate’’ de saint Jean Chrysostome (Anvers, 1575) et son manuscrit de base’, Sacris Erudiri, 41 (2002), 55–79. 25 On Torrentius see the concise biographies by A. Roersch, ‘Torrentius (Laevinus)’, Biographie nationale, xxv. 462–75; M. J. Marinus, ‘Torrentius (Beke) Laevinus’, Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, xiii. 779–85. The extant correspondence (years 1583–93) has been published (see n. 21). Other bibliography in Battezzato (as in n. 12), 325 n. 8. S. Gysens refers me also to M.-J. Marinus, Laevinus Torrentius als tweede bisschop van Antwerpen (1587–1595) (Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie¨—Klasse der Letteren, Jaargang 51 (1989), 131; Brussels, 1989) and J. van Damme (ed.), Laevinus Torrentius: Tweede bisschop van Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1995) (exhibition catalogue, with essays). 26 The manuscripts are now Vat. gr. 401 and Montepessulanus 122: Gregorii Nysseni opera ascetica, ed. W. Jaeger et al. (Leiden, 1952), 233–4 and 243–4. 27 Torrentius wrote poems praising Faerno’s philological work, and Sirleto’s learning: Laevini Torrentii Poemata Sacra (Antwerp: Plantin, 1594), 372–6. 28 Ioannis Chrysostomi De virginitate liber, Graece et Latine nunc primum editus, interprete Ioanne Liuineio Gandensi (Antwerp: Plantin, 1575). 29 The exact date of his arrival in Rome is not certain: see Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 540, Battezzato (as in n. 12), 326; see also Torrentius, Correspondance (as in n. 21), i. 128 (20 Mar. 1584), and 156 (3 May 1584).

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

81

very productive. He was introduced to Torrentius’ Roman friends and connections, especially the Cardinal Librarian, Guglielmo Sirleto. Sirleto, though very learned, was not too willing to give access to the treasures of the library. Montaigne notes with pleasure that he was allowed to see a manuscript of Seneca that Sirleto had previously refused to show to the French ambassador, Louis Chasteigner. Sirleto had also withheld from M. A. de Muret a manuscript of the historian Zosimus, alleging that it was ‘empio e scellerato’;30 and he burnt part of a Byzantine manuscript that contained anti-Western texts.31 The authors that interested Livineius were considered pious enough by Sirleto, who supplied him with manuscripts, and helped him with a number of philological and historical problems. He joined Antonio Carafa and Fulvio Orsini’s team in the revision of the Septuagint published in 1587.32 The support of Cardinal Sirleto gave Livineius access to a number of manuscripts: a manuscript of Sophocles, four of Euripides, and one of Propertius. Sirleto also provided Livineius with manuscripts of two Byzantine texts, which he translated into Latin: the Dialogus contra Iudaeos attributed to Andronicus Comnenus and the Sermones catechetici by Theodore the Studite (759–826). Livineius had access to new material, he made many conjectures, and gained invaluable experience in manuscript collation. He recorded variant readings and noted the most common types of error. For instance, he observed that lines were occasionally misplaced in manuscripts and suggested transpositions in Euripides.33 Sirleto probably supplied him with too many books, if it is true that, as a contemporary source tells us, Livineius studied far too much, to the detriment of his health.34 Livineius recovered, but did not bloom in the garden of Renaissance philology. The turning point was one in intellectual terms only. None of these Roman works was published in 30 Journal du Voyage du [sic] Michel de Montaigne, en Italie . . . , ed. A. D’Ancona (Citta ` di Castello, 1895), 274 n. 1. 31 Cf. A. Grafton, ‘The Vatican Library’ in A. Grafton (ed.), Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (Washington, DC, 1993), 3–45 at 43 on Vat. gr. 837; on Zosimus see also Canfora (as in n. 7), 135–6 and n. 2 (with bibliography). 32 Nolhac (as in n. 13), 50 n. 2; Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 540; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 20. On Carafa (1538–91) see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 99. 33 See Battezzato (as in n. 12), 345, 347–8. Finding manuscript evidence for disturbance in the order of lines confirmed the general plausibility of transpositions. W. Canter had suggested some; Scaliger’s Propertius, published in 1577, was notorious for similar, and bolder, suggestions: Kenney (as in n. 1), 55. 34 Cf. F. Modius, Novantiquae lectiones, tributae in epistolas centum . . . (Frankfurt: apud heredes A. Wecheli, 1584), 461–2.

82

Luigi Battezzato

Livineius’ lifetime. He wrote to Sirleto from Lie`ge (2 September 1584) telling him that he was trying to get the translation of Theodorus published by the Plantin press.35 He did not succeed. In the Low Countries, Protestants were in rebellion against Spain. The translations of Theodorus and Andronicus had to wait. They were published posthumously in 160236 and 1616,37 thanks to Andre´ Schott. Schott was promoting an important cultural project. He was trying to extend the canon of works that could interest scholars, giving special prominence to late antique and Byzantine texts. For his purpose, Latin translations of Greek authors were essential. In the course of a brilliant career that took him to France, Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries,38 he published the first editions of major late antique and Byzantine texts, such as Aurelius Victor (1579) and Proclus’ Chrestomathy (1587), and translated into Latin extensive works such as Photius’ Bibliotheca (1601).39 Justus Lipsius urged the editor, David Hoeschel, to publish Schott’s translation of Photius: ‘nosti quo ventum sit ignavia aevi: pauci haec [ ¼ Greek texts] legunt aut capiunt, et nisi Latina addantur, paene dicam non dedisse.’40 Latin translations of Sophocles and Euripides already existed, and Livineius concentrated on the textual criticism of these authors—with even worse publishing fortune than for his translations. His notes on Sophocles, preserved in the margins of a copy of the Aldine Sophocles,41 were published only in 1813.42 The material was not very extensive, but See Vat. lat. 6195, fo. 578r. See Theodorus Studita, Sermones catechetici CXXXIV (Antwerp: Erven J. Bellerus, 1602); reprinted in Magna Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum . . . (Cologne: Hierat, 1618), ix. 214–76. Livineius explains (Magna Bibliotheca, 214) that he used a manuscript provided by Sirleto, now Vat. Ottobonianus gr. 251. See E. Follieri, ‘Due codici greci gia` cassinesi oggi alla Biblioteca Vaticana: Gli Ottob. gr. 250 e 251’, Palaeographica, diplomatica et archivistica: Studi in onore di Giulio Battelli . . . (Rome, 1979), i. 159–221 at 207–11, 220–1; Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 543; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 23. Livineius also consulted Vat. gr. 634: cf. Battezzato (as in n. 12), 327 n. 13 with bibliography. The translation is reprinted in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 99: 506–687. 37 Cf. Andronicus Constantinopolitanus, Dialogus contra Iudaeos, in Tomus singularis insignium auctorum tum graecorum quam latinorum . . . , nunc primum in lucem prodire . . . iussit Petrus Stevartius . . . (Ingolstadt, 1616), 255–398. It was probably based on Vat. gr. 1204: Battezzato (as in n. 12), 326 n. 12. See also Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 543; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 23 n. 47. In his preface, Livineius mentions the opinion of Cardinal Sirleto on the chronology of the work. The translation is reprinted in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 133: 791–924. 38 He assembled an important collection of Greek manuscripts, now in the Bibliothe`que royale de Belgique: A. Roersch (as in n. 21), 13. 39 On the edition of Photius, see now Canfora, Fozio (as in n. 7), 105–33, 163–205. 40 Cf. ibid. 284; see also 176 and 169. 41 See n. 11 above. 42 ‘Ctesiphon’, ‘Collation of Two Mss. of Sophocles’, Classical Journal, 7 (1813), 428–36. 35 36

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

83

included many acute and sensible suggestions on the text.43 The notes on Euripides are much fuller, as Livineius collated four manuscripts, and made a number of original suggestions.44 Livineius became secretary and factotum to his uncle Torrentius. Busy with practical matters and church duties, he had less time to devote to his studies, and no chance to continue working on Greek authors, or to prepare editions of the authors he collated.45 In June 1588, Livineius was rewarded for his hard work: he became canonicus et cantor at Antwerp cathedral.46 His uncle also gave him more intellectually demanding tasks. He prepared a second edition of Torrentius’ commentary on Suetonius, published in 1592 by the Plantin press.47 As Torrentius himself admits, this second edition was ‘Livineius’ work more than mine’.48 It was difficult for Livineius to have access to Greek manuscripts in his homeland. In 1584 he worked on Athenaeus49 but nothing came of this. He wisely decided to focus on Latin authors, a field where he was in a position to exploit important manuscript discoveries by Louis Carrion (1547–c.1595) and Franc¸ois de Maulde (Franciscus Modius, 1556–97).50 43 Cf. Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (as in n. 11), 270–5, dating the work to 1589, but see 44 See Battezzato (as in n. 12). Battezzato (as in n. 12), 325–6 and n. 9. 45 See Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 544; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 29–40, 51–2. 46 Cf. Torrentius, Correspondance (as in n. 21), ii. 195–6 (8 Apr. 1588); ii. 205–6 (28 Apr.); ii. 219–20 (16 May); ii. 234–6 (2 June). See Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 541 and 544; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 29–40. Torrentius often helped his relatives to acquire good positions: S. Gysens refers to J. Hoyoux, La Famille de Torrentius, in Hommages a` Marie Delcourt (Collection Latomus, 114; Brussels, 1970), 361–7. 47 Laevini Torrentii in C. Suetonii Tranquilli XII. Caesares commentarii (Antwerp: Plantin, 1578; 2nd edn. 1592). See Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 544. 48 ‘Livineii magis opera quam mea’: Torrentius, Correspondance (as in n. 21), iii. 235 (20 Aug. 1591). Torrentius expected his nephew to prepare his edition of Horace for publication, which, however, appeared posthumously: Q. Horatius Flaccus cum erudito Laevini Torrentii commentario (Antwerp: ex officina Plantiniana, 1608). 49 Torrentius, Correspondance (as in n. 21), i. 181 (7 July 1584), in a letter to Lipsius: ‘Nunc totus in Athenaeo est’. The notes on Athenaeus, as well as others on Gregory of Nazianzus and Plutarch, were in Leuven, according to L. Roersch ‘Lievens’ (as in n. 20), 127–8. I have not been able to check whether these notes are still extant. 50 On Modius see P. Lehmann, Franciscus Modius als Handschriftenorscher (Munich, 1908). Pasquali, Storia (as in n. 7), 43–71 discusses the work of Carrion and Modius. W. Ehlers and G. Liberman have recently published a fragment of the important manuscript which Carrion used for his edition of Valerius Flaccus. This discovery confirms the general accuracy of his collations: see Valerius Flaccus, Argonautiques, ed. G. Liberman (Paris, 1997), i, pp. lxxi–xc, with bibliography; C. Valeri Flacci Argonauticon liber VII, ed. A. Perutelli (Florence, 1997), 71–81. On Carrion’s collations see also P. R. Taylor, ‘The Authority of the Codex Carrionis in the Ms-Tradition of Valerius Flaccus’, Classical Quarterly, ns 39 (1989), 451–71. F. Hurka, Textkritische Studien zu Valerius Flaccus

84

Luigi Battezzato

Modius collated several important manuscripts from the Cologne cathedral library, before they were dispersed or lost.51 His philological programme sounds very much like a continuation of Vettori’s, insisting on the importance of collations and mistrusting conjectural emendation.52 Livineius too, as far as we know, worked only on texts for which he had new manuscript evidence, either directly or through someone else’s collations. In his study of Propertius, he revised the notes he took from a Vatican manuscript of that author,53 made use of manuscript readings published by Modius,54 and collated a manuscript owned by Johannes Post(h)ius (1537–97).55 Livineius’ notes on the Latin elegists appeared only in 1621.56 For his work on Silius Italicus’ Punica, he made use of readings from the Cologne manuscript of Silius (C), now lost, relying on the accounts published by Carrion and Modius. The importance of Livineius’ work on Latin poetry received full recognition only recently.57 By using a siglum for the readings of the manuscript,58 Livineius is more accessible to a modern reader than Modius or Carrion.59 (Stuttgart, 2003), questions the validity of Carrion’s testimony, but see V. Roggen in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 18 March 2005 (http:ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2005-03-18 html) 51 Lehmann, Modius (as in n. 50), 93. 52 Modius, Novantiquae lectiones (as in n. 34), 119 vents his anger against those ‘qui sola ariolandi fiducia nitentes scriptorem aliquem in integrum restituendum suscipiunt’. I. Bisonneirus (quoted in Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 184) reports that ‘Vettori argued that one should rarely or never depart from authority. Conjectures, like false witnesses . . . should be completely abhorred.’ 53 Livineius calls the manuscript ‘nec antiquus nec probus’. The manuscript has not been identified. 54 Lehmann (as in n. 50), 137; cf. Modius, Novantiquae lectiones (as in n. 34), 80–6. Livineius worked on Propertius from 1582 until at least 1592: see Battezzato (as in n. 12), 327 n. 17; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 27–28. 55 The manuscript is now at Groningen, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit 159: J. L. Butrica, The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius (Toronto, 1984), 152–3 and 234–5. 56 See Caii Valerii Catulli, Albii Tibulli, Sexti Aurelii Propertii, quae extant, cum elegantissimis Joannis Livinei notis numquam antehac editis . . . [ed. J. Gebhardus] (Frankfurt: Wechel, 1621), and Gaisser, ‘Catullus’ (as in n. 4), 279–80. 57 See Silius Italicus, Punica, ed. I. Delz (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. lxii–lxiii. 58 Delz (ibid., p. lxii) reports Livineius’ note on Sil. It. 1. 1 from the 1543 edition, Wolfenbu¨ttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Gud. lat. 8: ‘C membranas notat quae Coloniae in aede summa, p. coniecturas, P editionem Parisiensem cum Marsi scholiis [S. Colinaeus, 1531], L Lugdunensem Seb. Gryphii [1547]’. Of C Livineius says: ‘citat Modius sparsim Novantiquis [ ¼ Novantiquae lectiones (as in n. 34)] et Emendat. libris Carrion [ ¼ L. Carrion, Emendationum et observationum liber primus ad V. Cl. Claudium Puteanum and Emendationum et observationum liber secundus ad V. Cl. Nicolaum Fabrum (Paris: apud Ae. Beysium, 1583)]’. Reconstructing the original collation of C is not an easy task: see H. Blass, ‘Die Textesquellen des Silius Italicus’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r classische Philologie, 8. Supplementband (1875–6), 159–250, at 187–216; Pasquali, Storia (as in n. 7), 68–70; Delz, Silius (as in n. 57), pp. liv–lxiv. 59 On the vague terminology of Carrion and Modius see Pasquali, Storia (as in n. 7), 70.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

85

It is not clear whether Livineius meant to publish the Latin elegists and Silius at that stage or whether he was planning to do more work on these authors. The extant material is detailed enough for printing a text with variant readings and short textual notes, but does not offer much in the way of exegesis. We have evidence that he worked on a number of other authors as well.60 The Plantin press had not published his translations of Byzantine authors, and Livineius might have lost the self-confidence that was needed to embark on a large research project. Be that as it may, he wrote a short funerary poem in Latin (22 lines) on the death of Christophe Plantin.61 Staying on good terms with the Plantin firm was a good idea. They published Livineius’ most important work: the Panegyrici veteres. Livineius had new manuscript evidence for this edition. Torrentius owned a manuscript of the work,62 as well as a copy of Beatus Rhenanus’ edition with collation notes made by Carolus Langius.63 Livineius also refers to a collation made by Franciscus Modius of a manuscript now lost.64 The manuscript evidence used by Livineius and his conjectures made this edition a standard text, still indispensable for modern editors. In these years, Livineius also had unexpected access to important sources for the text of Arnobius’ Adversus nationes. Carrion died in the summer of 1595,65 and Livineius inherited a collation of this very rare and very corrupt text. More importantly, Carrion also left him a manuscript of Arnobius. As Scaliger said, Carrion ‘est doctus sed 60 See Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 329, Gysens, NBW (as in n. 20), 543–4; Gysens, Gedenkschriften (as in n. 20), 44–5. H.-J. van Dam, ‘The Coming of the Silvae to the Netherlands’, in F. Delarue, S. Georgacopolou, P. Laurens, and A.-M. Taisne (eds.), Epicedion: Hommage a` P. Papinius Statius (Poitiers, 1996), 315–25 at 319–20 refers to Livineus’ notes on Statius (Bernaert’s 1595 edition, now Leiden, Leiden UL, Shelfmark 757 F 15) and on Seneca’s tragedies (edition of Fabricius, s.d., but preface dated 1565, Leiden UL, shelfmark 756 G 18). 61 See Ioannis Bochii urbi Antverpiensi a secretis Epigrammata funebria ad Christophori Plantini Architypographi Regii Manes (Antwerp: apud viduam et I. Moretum, 1590). 62 Torrentius, Correspondance (as in n. 21), i. 412–13 (8 Sept. 1585). This manuscript (‘V’ in Livineius’ edition) is now Bruxellensis 10026–32. For the identification, see Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 329 nn. 26 and 28. On the study of the Panegyrici in the 16th c. see also J. Delatour, Les Livres de Claude Dupuy: Une bibliothe`que humaniste au temps des guerres de religion (Paris, 1998), 75–6. 63 XII Panegyrici Veteres, ad antiquam qua editionem, qua scripturam infinitis locis emendati, aucti, Iohannes Livineius Belga Gandensis recensebat (Antwerp: ex officina Plantiniana apud I. Moretum, 1599), 6. 64 Livineius’ report is our only source: XII Panegyrici Latini, ed. D. Lassandro (Turin, 1992), p. xv and n. 32. 65 Cf. W. Po ¨ kel, Philologisches Schriftsteller-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1882), 42; Lehmann, Modius (as in n. 50), 131 (17 Aug. 1595).

86

Luigi Battezzato

summus fur librorum . . . Lipsius l’appelle Stellio.’66 Carrion had acquired the Arnobius manuscript from Modius, under the pretence of borrowing it. Modius, however, had obtained it in much the same way.67 Livineius was supposed eventually to return the book to Modius,68 but Modius died in 1597.69 Livineius finished collating the manuscript and wrote extensive notes on the text. His edition, had it been published, would have surpassed all previous ones for accuracy and completeness in reporting manuscript evidence.70

3. LIVINEIUS’ ARNOBIUS: SIGLA, COLLATIONS, AND CONJECTURES We shall now examine Livineius’ editorial practice and compare it with those of his contemporaries, focusing on his work on Arnobius and Minucius Felix. We should remember that the textual tradition of these two authors is identical. The Octavius happened to be copied after the seventh (and last) book of Arnobius, and became book 8 of Arnobius in the manuscripts. Neither Faustus Sabaeus (1543) nor Sigismundus Gelenius (1546) corrected this mistake, which was clarified only in 1560.71 66 J. Scaliger, Scaligerana, ou Bon Mots . . . de J. Scaliger, avec des notes de Mr. Le Fevre et de Mr. de Colomies (Cologne, 1695), 81–2. 67 Modius acquired the manuscript at some point after 1580: Lehmann (as in n. 50), 130. Carrion, Emendationum liber secundus (as in n. 58), 38 and 52 quotes readings 68 Cf. Livineius’ note reported below, n. 79. from it. 69 Cf. Lehmann, Modius (as in n. 50), 28. 70 L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (3rd edn., Oxford, 1991), 145 record a similar, earlier, case: Politian collated both the manuscripts on which the text of Apicius is based. 71 Cf. Arnobii Disputationum aduersus gentes libri octo, nunc primum in lucem editi [ed. F. Sabaeus] (Rome: F. Priscianese; dedication to Francis I dated ‘cal. Septembris MDXLIII’; papal privilege and colophon dated 1542); Arnobii Disputationum aduersus gentes libri VIII. nunc demum sic accurati, ut ab eruditis sine ulla offensatione et cum maiore lectionis operae pretio cognosci possint. Accessit index eorum quae notatu digna sunt [ed. S. Gelenius] (Basle: H. Froben and N. Episcopius, 1546); M. Minucii Felicis, Romani olim causidici, Octavius, . . . restitutus a Fr. Bald[uino] (Heidelberg: L. Lucius, 1560). Balduinus stresses his discovery in the preface. Other scholars had already suspected the truth in 1559: Minucius Felix, Octavius, ed. B. Kytzler (Leipzig, 1982), p. v. On Gelenius (Sigmund Gehlen/Zikmund Hruby´ z Jelenı´: 1498–1554) see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 201, and P. Petitmengin, ‘Un ami de Melanchthon: Sigismundus Gelenius, e´diteur et traducteur des textes classiques et patristiques’, in G. Frank, T. Leinkauf, and M. Wriedt (eds.), Die Patristik in der fru¨hen Neuzeit: Die Relektu¨re der Kirchenva¨ter in den Wissenschaften des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 2005), 65–92.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

3.1

87

Sigla and Collations

The use of sigla for designating manuscripts or editions dates back to the end of the eighth century72 and was common in the Renaissance.73 It is interesting to note that, in his collations of Euripides, Livineius used a single siglum for a group of manuscripts, as if they were a family. He used the siglum V when he only had one Vatican manuscript, but in the plays where he had two Vatican manuscripts, V indicated their agreement,74 and if a third manuscript was available, Livineius adopted a special symbol for it. In Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenissae the manuscripts designated by V share many readings,75 whereas the text of the third manuscript (Vat. gr. 909) is markedly different. This system had two drawbacks: the same symbol referred to different manuscripts in different tragedies;76 moreover, Livineius had to use Vy, and Vz to distinguish particular readings of the V manuscripts, and the similarity of the symbols caused some mistakes.77 He later abandoned this system, and resorted to the common practice of designating each manuscript with a single letter. He adhered to it in his notes on Propertius, Silius Italicus, Arnobius, and the Panegyrici.78 On the first page of his copy of Arnobius, Livineius states that he had three sources: manuscripts P and L, and the editio Romana R.79 72 See Pasquali, Storia (as in n. 7), 155 n. 2; M. Gorman, ‘Theodulf of Orle ´ans and the Exegetical Miscellany in Paris. lat. 15679’, Revue be´ne´dictine, 109 (1999), 278–323 at 279–82. On medieval editions see G. C. Alessio, ‘Edizioni medievali’, in G. Cavallo, C. Leonardi, and E. Menesto` (eds.), Lo spazio letterario del medioevo: 1. Il medioevo latino. III. La ricezione del testo (Rome, 1995), 29–58. 73 See S. Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome, 1973), 164, 168, and 177; Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 8; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes (as in n. 70), 145; Timpanaro, Genesi (as in n. 4), 24–5 n. 16; Delatour, Livies (as in n. 62), 70; for the 17 c. see e.g. Heinsius in F. Munari, ‘Manoscritti ovidiani di N. Heinsius’, Studi italiani di filologia classica, 29 (1957), 98–114. 74 Cf. Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, Sophoclea (as in n. 11), 274; Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 330–1. 75 Cf. Battezzato, ibid., 335. Both these manuscripts show affiliations with the x-class. 76 In Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae Vy ¼ Vat. gr. 52; Vz ¼ unidentified Vatican MS; V ¼ Vat. gr. 52 þ unidentified Vatican MS; special symbol ¼ Vat. gr. 909. In Medeia, Hippolytus: Vy ¼ Vat. gr. 910; Vz ¼ Vat. gr. 909; V ¼ Vat. gr. 909 and 910. In Alcestis, Andromacha, Rhesus, Troades: V ¼ Vat. gr. 909. 77 The mistakes often involve using V when only one manuscript had the reported reading: Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 338–9. 78 Cf. Delz, Silius (as in n. 57), p. lxii. 79 He writes in the margins of Gelenius’ edition (see the title in n. 71 above), kept in the British Library (C.61.d.5), on p. 7: ‘Decedens Lud. Carrio testamento mihi legauit / Arnobiu(m) suu(m) edit. Romanae cu(m) P collatu(m). Itaque / a pag. 44 uacabit hoc signu(m). A qua item / deinceps L citabimus fide nostra. na(m) id ipsi / diligenter

88

Luigi Battezzato

Manuscript P corresponds to Par. lat. 1661, and is given the siglum P in modern editions. Livineius reports P from Carrion’s collation.80 L corresponds to Brux. 10846–10847, and is called B in modern editions. Livineius reports the Bruxellensis in part from Carrion’s notes, and in part from his own collation.81 In 1598 Livineius restored the order of the sheets of the Bruxellensis.82 After his death, the Bruxellensis was bought by the Jesuits of Antwerp, along with Livineius’ book.83 Most scholars assume that the Bruxellensis is a copy of P.84 It is occasionally useful when P’s original readings have been altered; it also offers some easy corrections.85 Le Bonniec, in his edition of book 1 of Arnobius, systematically reports the readings of the Bruxellensis. A collation of the text of the Bruxellensis for the other books has not been published. tractauimus, sub/missu(m) ab executoribus iussu testato/ris, reddendum tamen ubi eo / usi essem(us) Fra(n)c. Modio, qui id / Carrioni procurauerat’. The sentence ‘Itaque / a pag. 44 uacabit hoc signu(m)’ is unclear. Livineius reports numerous readings from P for every book, and Carrion was his only source for them. I take the sentence to refer to Carrion’s collation of manuscript L: Carrion had collated L as far as page 44 of his copy of the ‘Roman edition’. Livineius, further down, adds: ‘R editionem Roma/na(m) p. coniecturas notat, / P Regiae prope Parisios / bibliothecae exe(m)plar / L Luneburgense / tractatu(m) a Carrio/ne cu(m) cura utru(m)que.’ 80 Manuscript P has notes in a 16th-c. hand which takes readings from the editions of Gelenius (as in n. 71) and that of Dirk Canter: Arnobii Disputationum aduersus gentes libri septem, recogniti et aucti. Ex bibliotheca Theodori Canteri, cuius etiam notae adiectae sunt (Antwerp: C. Plantin, 1582). Dirk (Theodorus Canterus, 1545–1617) was the brother of Willem Canter. The author of the notes on manuscript P has not been identified, but it is earlier than Scaliger’s collation of c.1598: Arnobii Adversus nationes libri 7, ed. A. Reifferscheid (CSEL 4; Vienna, 1875), pp. xi–xii; Arnobe, Contre les gentils. Livre I, ed. H. Le Bonniec (Paris, 1982), 98. It is also earlier than Carrion’s collation. At 4. 30. 5 Livineius reports the reading of the 16th-c. correction as coming from P (‘dissita distantiaque P, diis sit adstantia quae L’ ( ¼ Bruxellenis); P originally read diis sit adstantiaquae). Carrion already 81 See n. 79 above. found the correction when he collated the manuscript. 82 He wrote on the manuscript: ‘Iohannes Liuineius, cathedralis Antwerp. Can(oni)cus et Cantor, aliquot pagellis perturbatum codicem in ordinem componebat. M.D.XCVIII.’: cf. Le Bonniec, Arnobe (as in n. 80), 99; Y.-M. Duval, ‘Sur la biographie et les manuscrits d’Arnobe de Sicca’, Latomus, 45 (1986), 69–99 at 86. 83 For the story of the manuscript, cf. Lehmann, Modius (as in n. 50), 130–1 and Le Bonniec, Arnobe (as in n. 80), 100. 84 Reifferscheid, Adversus nationes (as in n. 80), p. viii; Duval, ‘Biographie’ (as in n. 82), 79–80; 85–9. 85 See the cases listed in Minucius Felix, Octavius, ed. J. Beaujeu (Paris, 1964), pp. xcix–cii; Le Bonniec, Arnobe (as in n. 80), 100. Le Bonniec, 99 (with bibliography) dates B to the 11th c., Lehmann, Modius (as in n. 50), 131 to the 12th. P is dated to the 9th c. Sabaeus, Adversus gentes (as in n. 71) sig. a iiv stated ‘iure belli meus est Arnobius, quem e media barbarie non sine dispendio, et discrimine eripuerim’. This means (Reifferscheid, Adversus nationes (as in n. 80), p. vii) that the manuscript came from Switzerland or Germany; B, a copy of P, was in Lu¨neburg, and it is likely that P was in Germany too, when Sabaeus found it (Lehmann, ibid.). B. Bischoff (apud Duval, ‘Biographie’ (as in n. 82), 84) states that P is written in a north Italian hand.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

89

The ‘editio Romana’ (R) probably corresponds to that published by Ursinus in 1583.86 I consider it certain that Livineius used Ursinus’ edition. He reports a large number of conjectures that are also found in the margins of Ursinus, marking them with the siglum ‘p.’.87 He makes no explicit reference to Ursinus, but it is unlikely that such a large number of identical conjectures could have been proposed independently.88 Sixteenth-century scholars were not aware that P was the manuscript used by Sabaeus for the editio princeps.89 Livineius relied on Carrion’s collation of P, and realized that it was important to record the differences of R against Gelenius, as the text of P was likely to be the same as that of R, if Carrion recorded no variant readings.

3.2

Conjectures

On the first page of his annotated Arnobius, Livineius tells us that ‘p. conjecturas notat’.90 The symbol ‘p.’ also appears in the notes on Sophocles, Euripides, and Silius Italicus. Lloyd-Jones and Wilson assumed that he meant ‘conjecture’ in the modern sense of the word.91 86 Arnobii disputationum adversus gentes libri septem, M. Minucii Felicis Octavius, Romana editio posterior et emendatior [ed. F. Ursinus ] (Rome: D. Basa, 1583). 87 See e.g. 2. 7. 1 primum aeque ipsi, 2. 10. 1 patres sectarum, 2. 10. 1 numeros coire, 2. 11. 2 Vos Plotino, vos Cronio, 2. 11. 7 scitis et praeceptionibus, 2. 12. 1 argutias profertis, 2. 16. 13 corporibus exemptae, 2. 17. 5 excudederent navitate. Et tamen. I would also like to draw attention to Min. Fel. 8. 3 consulte] inconsulte, a conjecture which is ignored by modern editors: the speaker is contrasting Protagoras, who is only ‘ill-advised’, with the atheists Theodorus and Diagoras, who are impious. 88 The main text of Ursinus is very similar to that of Sabaeus’ editio princeps (1543) (as in n. 71), and it is possible, but less likely, that Carrion had used Sabaeus for his collation. Ursinus occasionally prints conjectures in his main text (cf. below, x5.1), but I have not found cases where Livineius reports a reading of R that is compatible only with the text of Sabaeus. In some cases, Livineius reports the conjectural reading of the main text of Ursinus with the siglum ‘p.’, rather than with R (2. 15. 1 deo, rerum principi, 2. 16. 13 animantia dicimur, 6. 13.2 Cratinae meretricis), but he may simply have forgotten to add the siglum R. 89 Scaliger collated P and knew that it had been given to Franc ¸ois I by the Pope, but apparently did not realize that P had been used for the editio princeps. Cf. Scaliger, Scaligeriana (as in n. 66), 33: ‘Arnobii MS Sancti non boni. Unus Regius quem Papa misit, alter Romae, sed Romana editio est optima . . . . Le plus bel exemplaire est celuy que le Pape donna a` Franc¸ois Primier.’ Note that Sabaeus’ 1543 edition (as in n. 71) is dedicated to Franc¸ois I: ‘Arnobius ad te Rex Regum Maxime accedere festinat . . . qualem enim docti viri e manibus meis vix extorsere, sponte, et lubens maiestati tuae . . . dedico et dono’ (sig. aiir–v). The binding proves that Henry II (king from 1547) owned the manuscript (Le Bonniec, Arnobe (as in n. 80), 96; Duval, ‘Biographie’ (as in n. 82), 78– 9), but Scaliger’s testimony would date the gift of the manuscript to the years 1543–6. 90 Similarly in his notes on Silius Italicus: Blass (as in n. 58), 199; Delz (as in n. 57), p. lxii; Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 340. 91 Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, Sophoclea (as in n. 11), 275.

90

Luigi Battezzato

However, it can be shown that what Livineius meant by ‘conjecture’ is in fact ‘reading to be adopted as correct’. The symbol ‘p.’ is often used for readings which have manuscript support, according to Livineius’ collations, and in places where it would have been very difficult to suspect a corruption and guess the correct reading.92 The abbreviation ‘p.’ corresponds to ‘puto’ or ‘quod verum puto’. In his notes on Propertius Livineius uses these formulae, along with the simple ‘p.’, to approve either of a manuscript reading or of a conjecture by himself or other critics.93 Politian and other scholars used the abbreviations c’, co, ce ( ¼ corrigo, corrige) in their collations to mark a reading they approved of, irrespective of its origin or manuscript support.94 Livineius rarely records conjecturers’ names but refers to scholars who made conjectures on Arnobius in miscellaneous works, e.g. Lipsius and Gulielmus.95 He leaves nameless a large number of conjectures found in Ursinus’ edition. The same can be observed of his notes on Euripides. This was by no means unusual in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: if an emendation was printed in a previous edition, it was often considered unnecessary to record the name of its author.96 92 For all this see Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 339–43. Van Dam, ‘Coming’ (as in n. 60), 520, examined the possibility that the notes marked with ‘p.’ were readings taken from a manuscript or an early edition, but suggested as a ‘provisional conclusion’ that ‘ ‘‘p.’’ means puto or praefero, and that the conjectures are his [¼ Livineius’] own’. This is close to the interpretation I consider correct. S. Gysens, in a personal communication, notes that ‘in another book which L. annotated during his stay in Rome, we find the same system: see Claudii Claudiani carmina recensuit T. Birt . . . (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, 10; Berlin, 1892), p. lxxxv (this editor seems to consider the ‘p.’ variant readings as taken from a manuscript). One already finds this kind of sigla in a manuscript where L. marked variant readings shortly after he graduated from Leuven University; see J. van den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothe`que Royale de Belgique (Brussels, 1902), ii, no. 1197’. 93 See the examples collected in Battezzato, ‘Marginalia’ (as in n. 12), 341 n. 79. Cf. the instances of ‘puto legendum’ collected by Rizzo, Lessico (as in n. 73), 157 and 273. In the notes on Propertius, Livineius also occasionally uses ‘placet’ or ‘non placet’: see Battezzato, 94 Rizzo, ibid., 274. ibid., 342 n. 80. 95 On Arnobius 7. 40. 3 Livineius refers to Iani Gulielmi Plautinarum Quaestionum Commentarius . . . (Paris: Ae. Beysius, 1583), 99. Sabaeus, Gelenius, and Ursinus (in the text) read surrepto but Ursinus has the conjecture subrecto in the margin. Livineius writes ‘surrecto p.’. He later added a reference to the Bruxellensis, writing above the line, and using a different ink, and adding ‘Idem Gulielmio visum Plautinis quaest. 99’. surrecto is in fact the reading of P. See ‘Wilhelm, Johann’ (1555–84) in Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 429. This example shows that Livineius wrote his notes at different stages. 96 Brink, ‘Lipsius’ (as in n. 3), 35 has a similar observation about Lipsius’ edition of Tacitus, even if he means it sarcastically: ‘a correct or probable emendation in an earlier edition as a rule helped to disqualify, rather than qualify, its author for mention’.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

91

4. APPARATUS CRITICI , CR I TI CA L T EXT S, AN D EARLY EDITIONS What differentiates Renaissance editions from modern ones? Many modern editions of classical texts are designed for students or the general reader, and do not have the space or the need to inform on the sources of the text. Translators base their work on a critical edition, but occasionally depart from it, and do not always have a list of divergences. In this section, I will point out some of the ways in which modern editions resemble Renaissance ones, in spite of vast progress in methodology, accessibility of sources, and book production. Renaissance editions were in general quite reasonable and useful; what validates present-day non-scholarly editions is the reference to a true critical text—which is, however, a very rare event for many texts. In many cases the ‘critical text’ is a century old, or more.

4.1

Stemma and the Selection of Manuscripts

If we look at recent editions of classical texts, we will find that editors base their choices between readings on style, metre, and sense rather than on the stemmatic position of the witnesses that carry them. In his Texts and Transmission L. D. Reynolds presents a survey of ‘134 separate traditions’ of Latin authors (p. vii): the contributors offer only forty stemmata, plus one very tentative one,97 and some five others, suggested as alternatives.98 Even if we make allowance for traditions that have only one or two witnesses, and cases where a stemma is implied by what is said,99 very often stemmatic rules cannot be used to decide on a reading. G. B. Alberti has argued as much, showing that strict stemmatic rules apply to few manuscript traditions of Greek authors, and even fewer Latin ones.100 Not only that. Chance still plays a role in the selection of manuscripts. R. D. Dawe declares that his choice of manuscripts of Aeschylus to 97 L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 98 Ibid. 155, 166, and 295–8. 1983), 29. 99 Timpanaro, Genesi (as in n. 4), 69–73 pointed out that Lachmann’s presentation of the manuscript tradition of Lucretius was partly inconsistent precisely because he omitted to draw the stemma. 100 G. B. Alberti, Problemi di critica testuale (Florence, 1979), esp. 92–4. For a spirited defence of an aspect of the stemmatic method see M. D. Reeve, ‘Eliminatio codicum descriptorum: A Methodological Problem’ in J. N. Grant (ed.), Editing Greek and Latin Texts (New York, 1989), 1–35, and the bibliography in Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum?’ (as in n. 6), 196 nn. 6–7.

92

Luigi Battezzato

collate was based ‘partly on logic . . . but also partly on no more scientific principles than suspicion, caprice, and the attractiveness of the cities in which they were located’.101 The picture does not change for Sophocles. Out of circa 190 manuscripts only twenty or so have been collated in detail.102 Even if we have some information about the remaining 170,103 the importance of some neglected manuscripts has been recently made apparent,104 and there are at least ten other interesting ones that have never been collated in detail. ‘Here we are, 600 years after the Renaissance, and still so much to be done on a central author.’105 Contemporary editors, when faced with a large textual tradition, have to be pragmatic in their choices. In the Renaissance, chance played a larger part in the selection of manuscript sources, especially as many libraries did not give easy access to readers and almost no catalogues were available.106 What definitely differentiates contemporary ‘eclectic’ editions from Renaissance ones is the method of selecting manuscripts. Exhaustive lists of manuscripts, library catalogues, precise dating of manuscripts by palaeographical and codicological methods, examination of colometry for poetic texts: these are some of the factors that allow editors to choose the ‘best’ sources. Renaissance scholars were at the mercy of chance. If the manuscript used for the vulgate was ‘good’, their work was so much more likely to be of lasting value, and vice versa. Renaissance editors are 101 R. D. Dawe, The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 1964), 16. See also J. Diggle, The Textual Tradition of Euripides’ Orestes (Oxford, 1991), 66; Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum? ’ (as in n. 6), 201 and 203. 102 See mainly R. D. Dawe, Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Leiden 1973–8). 103 See A. Turyn, Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Sophocles (Urbana, Ill., 1952). 104 See Sophoclis Fabulae, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson (Oxford, 1990), p. viii on the manuscript K, and my contribution to F. Ferrari et al., ‘In margine al testo di Sofocle’, Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica, 120 (1992), 388–410, esp. 390–2; M. Papathomopoulos, ‘De quelques manuscrits de Sophocle revisite´s’, in A. Machin and L. Perne´e (eds.), Sophocle: Le texte, les personnages (Aix en Provence, 1993), 75–94; L. Battezzato, ‘I codici Laur. C. S. 66 þ C. S. 139, Urb. Gr. 141 þ Ambr. 441 (H 77 sup.) e la tradizione manoscritta di Sofocle’, Prometheus, 22 (1996), 29–34; on related problems in Sophocles see M. Hecquet-Devienne, ‘Une alternative au de´bat entre ‘‘stemmatistes’’ et ‘‘contaminationnistes’’: L’analyse arche´ologique des textes dans les manuscrits grecs de re´fe´rence’, Lexis, 19 (2001), 133–40. On Latin authors, see Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum? ’ (as in n. 6), 197 and 203. 105 M. L. West, ‘Tragica II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 25 (1978), 106–22 at 108, with a list of unexplored manuscripts—mostly still unexplored. 106 Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 75–6; Canfora, Fozio (as in n. 7), 138. Grafton, ‘The Vatican Library’ (as in n. 31), 38–42 stresses the positive role of the Vatican library. Canfora’s book narrates in detail the difficulties 16th-c. editors had in gaining access to manuscripts: scholars knew that the codices of Photius in the Marciana were the best, but these manuscripts were rarely available, and only through copies.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

93

at their best when the textual tradition is very narrow. In these cases, progress made in later editions is largely due to conjectural emendations, the field where Renaissance scholars excelled. In the last two centuries, new successful conjectures were due to the ingenuity of exceptional scholars, but they were also made possible by new and better understanding of metre and linguistics.107 For instance, Renaissance scholars made a greater contribution to the text of Euripides’ Helen than to that of Phoenissae. Diggle, in the apparatus to Helen 1–400, mentions 178 conjectures, eighteen of which were made before the eighteenth century (10%);108 in his apparatus to Phoenissae 1–400, the conjectures made before the eighteenth century are three out of 163 (2%).109 The Aldine text of the Helen was based on an apograph of the best (and probably unique) independent manuscript of the play.110 Early editions of Phoenissae were based on faulty manuscripts,111 and scholars had to work very hard to restore what was in fact transmitted by the ‘best’ sources.112 107 On the number of likely or successful conjectural emendations in Aeschylus and their chronological distribution over the centuries see the remarks by V. Di Benedetto, ‘Sul testo dell’Agamennone di Eschilo’, Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica, 120 (1992), 129–53 at 152–3. It is important to note that G. Hermann (1772–1848), one of the most successful conjecturers on tragic texts, did not have a clear concept of recensio, and based his work on the old-fashioned concepts of emendatio ope codicum and ope ingenii: Timpanaro, Genesi (as in n. 4), 35 and 42. On recensio and emendatio in Timpanaro’s work, and on his evaluation of conjectures see the important remarks by Di Benedetto, ‘Filologia’ (as in n. 4), 19–32. 108 See the following readings: Aldina 131, 179, 183, 283, 306; Hervagiana secunda 109; Commeliniana 282; Portus 48, 100; Muret 201; Scaliger 131, 277, 352; Sigonius 378; Stephanus 298, 302, 349, 389. Eleven of these conjectures are accepted by Diggle in his text. G. Hermann is mentioned four times. 109 See Brodaeus 308, W. Canter 226, Hemsterhuys 370. Diggle prints the last two in his text. G. Hermann is mentioned twenty times. 110 Kannicht, Euripides, Helena, ed. R. K. (Heidelberg, 1969) i. 110 argues, with Kirchhoff, that the Aldine text of Helen was based on Par. gr. 2817, a copy of manuscript L. M. Magnani, La tradizione manoscritta degli Eraclidi di Euripide (Bologna, 2000), 207–33 argues that the Aldine was not based directly on Par. gr. 2817, but on a copy of it, now lost. 111 Paris. suppl. gr. 212 and 393, with readings from at least three other manuscripts in Phoenissae, at least two in the Orestes: M. Sicherl, ‘Die Editio Princeps Aldina des Euripides und ihre Vorlagen’, in Rheinisches Museum, 118 (1975), 205–25; Euripides, Phoenissae, ed. D. J. Mastronarde (Leipzig, 1988), pp. xviii–xx, and Diggle, Tradition (as in n. 101), 72–3 with bibliography; at p. 159 Diggle lists the manuscripts that more often preserved the truth. 112 Mastronarde (as in n. 111), pp. xix–xx, lists the names of the scholars who first corrected some peculiar readings of the Aldine. Barnes and King have a large share of merit, primarily because they had access to new manuscript evidence. K. Matthiessen, Studien zur Textu¨berlieferung der Hekabe des Euripides (Heidelberg, 1974), 119 provides a similar, if more selective, list for Hecuba. Conjecturing what is transmitted is likelier when the manuscripts are very numerous, but it happens also in a very narrow manuscript tradition: cf. e.g. Brink, ‘Lipsius’ (as in n. 3), 37 n. 30.

Luigi Battezzato

94

4.2

The Veneration for the editio princeps

If a Renaissance editor printed a large number of conjectures in the text, his work found less favour with subsequent editors. Arnobius is a case in point. Gelenius’ heavily emended text made sense in many passages where the vulgate did not, but other scholars preferred the editio princeps. Only Rene´ Laurent de la Barre and Dirk Canter used Gelenius as the basis for an edition.113 With hindsight, we can say that sticking to the editio princeps was eminently sensible in this case. From the perspective of sixteenth-century scholars, it was not absurd to do the same in the case of other writers too. It was reasonable to assume that editiones principes, especially Italian editions, were based on good manuscripts. Italy had (and still has) the best or only manuscripts of many important classical works, for instance Aeschylus and Euripides, the Digest, Cicero’s Brutus, De oratore, Ad familiares, and Tacitus.114 In the fifteenth century, scholars from northern Europe were dependent on Italian editions.115 Greek manuscripts arrived from Byzantium in Italy, and were difficult to find elsewhere in Europe.116 Aldus Manutius ‘was responsible for the first printing of nearly all the Greek authors’.117 Note also that for some Greek and Latin authors the editio princeps is still the only witness, as all manuscripts have disappeared.118 In the case of Arnobius, even Reifferscheid, the best modern editor along with Marchesi, gives all the readings of the princeps in the apparatus, because he thought there was some small chance that the princeps was based on a lost manuscript.119 113 See Opera Tertulliani et Arnobii . . . studio . . . Renati Laurenti de la Barre (Paris: G. Iulianus, 1580), 133–232 (second pagination). For D. Canter’s edn. see n. 80 above. 114 See e.g. R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (Florence, 1905), 183–213; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes (as in n. 70), 137–9; Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 87; Lipsius as reported in Brink, ‘Lipsius’ (as in n. 3), 33 n. 9. Many of these important manuscripts came from libraries outside Italy (see e.g. Sabbadini, 211–13). 115 Cf. R. Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450–1550 (Wiesbaden, 1967), 138– 40 and 144, repr. in A. Petrucci (ed.), Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna (Bari, 1977), 25–7 and 34; see also J. M. Dureau, ‘Les premiers ateliers franc¸ais’, in H.-J. Martin, R. Chartier, and J. P. Vivet (eds.), Histoire de l’e´dition franc¸aise, i: Le livre conque´rant (Paris, 1982), 163–75 at 174; M. D. Feld, ‘The Early Evolution of the Authoritative Text’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), 81–111 at 89. 116 See in general N. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London, 1992); M. Cortesi, ‘Umanesimo greco’, in Cavallo, Leonardi, and Menesto` (as in n. 72), 457–507 at 484–503. 117 Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes, (as in n. 70), 155. 118 Pasquali (as in n. 7), 98–101. 119 Arnobius, Adversus nationes l. vii, ed. C. Marchesi (2nd edn., Turin, 1953). B. Amata bases his very useful annotated translation on a Latin text he has made available online, revising Marchesi’s edition: see Arnobio, Difesa della vera religione, ed. and trans.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

95

This was especially the practice of scholars in France, Germany, and the Low Countries, regions which in the sixteenth century rivalled Italy and eventually surpassed it in the number of books published.120 First editions, we now know, were ‘printed from current humanist copies, the text of which represented a chance mixture of traditional readings with conjectural emendations’,121 but most scholars then had no means of acquiring information on the age of the manuscripts used for first editions, and assumed they were old and reliable. Renaissance scholars, not unreasonably, were very cautious in rejecting readings that had found their way into an editio princeps in favour of those in some other manuscript.122 The vulgate method had practical reasons too. When Scaliger prepared his first edition of Manilius (1579), he gave the printer a corrected copy of the edition by Nicolaus Pru¨ckner (published in 1533); for the second edition (1600), he corrected a copy of his own first edition.123 This procedure was common, and was probably meant to avoid the mistakes that would have occurred if the editor himself prepared a new manuscript copy of the text to be printed. Scaliger’s edition was vastly superior to Pruckner’s, but his editorial technique was not original.

4.3

The Critical Text

As Kenney notes, ‘until an appropriate vehicle, with its own style and idiom, could be devised for reporting the readings of the MSS—for B. Amata (Rome, 2000), and http://geocities.com/arnobius/index.html.3. Amata’s translation includes an updated bibliography. I follow his paragraph division. 120 See in general L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L’Apparition du livre (2nd edn., Paris, 1971), 258–81; H.-J. Martin, ‘Renouvellements et concurrence’, in Martin, Chartier, and Vivet (as in n. 115), 379–404 at 396; H.-J. Martin, ‘Classements et conjonctures’, 121 So e.g. Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 4. ibid. 429–57 at 444. 122 A notable case where the princeps was superseded by a subsequent edition is Aeschylus. The 1557 edition by Victorius and Stephanus offered new material (a complete text of the Agamemnon), and a text based on ‘better’ manuscripts: see J. A. Gruys, The Early Printed Editions (1518–1664) of Aeschylus (The Hague, 1981), 77–96 and 229; Mund-Dopchie, Survie (as in n. 17), 124–49 and 425. On a similar process for Vergil, see M. Venier, Per una storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima eta` del libro a stampa (1469–1519) (Udine, 2001), 134–6. 123 See M. Manilii Astronomicon libri quinque, J. Scaliger recensuit ac pristino ordini suo restituit. Ejusdem J. Scaligeri commentarius in eosdem libros et castigationum explicationes (Paris: M. Patisson and R. Stephanus, 1579) and M. D. Reeve, ‘Scaliger and Manilius’, Mnemosyne, 33 (1980), 177–9 at 177. E. Stagni suggests to me that this choice, and the style of presentation of this edition, was determined by the typographer, M. Patisson, who also published Pithou’s editions of Petronius (see below, n. 165), and Scaliger’s Festus.

96

Luigi Battezzato

communicating systematically the evidence on which the text rested— confusion and obscurity were inevitable.’124 The concept of apparatus criticus, however, involves two things: a set of conventions for presenting data about manuscripts and conjectures (sigla, abbreviations, references to other scholars) and the concept of a critical text. Modern editors aim at ‘ascertaining as exactly as possible what the authors wrote and defining the areas of uncertainty’.125 I am not sure that every Renaissance editor had this aim. They thought in more practical terms, and aimed at offering a readable text, with minimal corrections of ‘obvious’ mistakes, and notes enabling the reader to judge the more controversial cases. Editors knew that the ‘areas of uncertainty’ were very large: many passages were not clear. Oporinus admits that he had to print a number of unintelligible passages in his edition of Euripides: ‘nonnulla etiam in medio relinquere, melioris uidelicet exemplaris ope destitutos oportuit’.126 Feld notes that Aldus felt secure in his command of Latin texts, but expressed doubts about the absolute correctness of his Greek editions.127 Editors constantly complain about the lack of ‘good manuscripts’, and this is not a rhetorical topos: new manuscripts were being found all the time, and a truly definitive edition was not possible with what was available. Even now few scholars aim at printing ‘what the author wrote’, and ‘limiting the areas of uncertainty’. Those who publish classical texts in series other than Teubner, Bude´, or OCT often have aims similar to those of Renaissance scholars. Take, for instance, David Kovacs’s Loeb edition of Euripides. Kovacs is well aware that he is not always printing what Euripides wrote, and that he is not defining all the areas of uncertainty. His aim has been ‘to produce a text that is continuously readable, even in places where we cannot be absolutely certain of the precise wording’. He fills extensive lacunae, knowing that he might at best be conveying the gist of the lost passage; he also avoids obeloi, and tacitly prints a number of conjectures where the change ‘is very slight’. Still, Kovacs’s edition presupposes the existence of a truly critical edition for more exigent readers to fall back on:128 Diggle’s edition functions as some sort of 124

Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 68. M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (Stuttgart, 1973), 8. 126 See Euripidis tragoediae octodecim (Basle: apud I. Hervagium, 1544), prefatory letter, fo. 3r. 127 See Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), 92 and 94. Some editors used an asterisk to mark corrupted passages: see W. Canter’s editions of Euripides (1571) and Aeschylus (1580); Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 155 and n. 2. 128 That is Diggle’s edition: see Euripides, Cyclops, Aclestis, Medea, ed. D. Kovacs (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 38. 125

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

97

vulgate text. The same criteria are used in Goold’s Loeb edition of Manilius. Goold presupposes Housman’s text, does not print conjecturers’ names, and does not note in the apparatus ‘minute and obviously correct conjectures, made not later than the sixteenth century and universally accepted’.129 The same can be said of other series that publish classical texts with facing translations. ‘Upon opening a book, we can almost immediately classify it as a popular, student, or advanced text, solely on the basis of its typography and layout.’130 This is less obvious for Renaissance editions, but there are some clues. Editors sometimes draw attention to what sort of text they are trying to produce. Gelenius, for instance, has no textual notes, and states on the front page of his Arnobius that the book contains ‘the Case against the Pagans by Arnobius, in eight books, now finally [printed] with such diligent care that scholars can get to know them without offence and with greater profit in the reading’.131 To achieve this goal, Gelenius emended the text very heavily. The editio princeps was very close to the manuscript P, and its text was often unintelligible. Gelenius wanted to provide readers with a text they could make sense of. It was more like a Loeb than an OCT. Scholars who wanted to work on the text of Arnobius consulted the editio princeps (D. Canter, G. Stewech, D. Heraldus), or at least tried to do so (J. Meursius) (see below, x5.1).

4.4

The Invention of the Critical apparatus

Dirk Canter tried to make a scholarly edition using Gelenius’ edition as base-text.132 Here is a sample of his critical notes:133 34 Et in gratiam cum hominibus remissis offensionibus redire opinatis. ] Temere hunc locum corrupit Gelenius, homo alioqui doctissimus, sed in emendando nimium quantum sibi licentiae sumens. Alio enim et longe meliori verborum 129 Manilius, Astronomica, ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass. etc., 1977), p. cxii; ‘obviously correct conjectures’ include a number of very clever and non-obvious sug130 Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), 84. gestions made by Scaliger. 131 Arnobii Disputationum aduersus gentes libri VIII. nunc demum sic accurati, ut ab eruditis sine ulla offensatione et cum maiore lectionis operae pretio cognosci possint. Note that Gelenius worked in printing firms correcting proofs: A. Grafton, ‘Correctores corruptores? Notes on the Social History of Editing’, in G. Most (ed.), Editing Texts. Texte edieren (Go¨ttingen, 1998), 54–76 at 61–3. Gelenius’ words can often be paralleled: most editions claim to be ‘more accurate’, ‘more correct’, or ‘fuller’ than earlier ones. Still, other editors are more cautious: see the titles of the editions by Ursinus (as in n. 86) and D. Heraldus: Arnobii disputationum adversus gentes libri septem, M. Minucij Felicis Octavius, editio noua, ad editionem Romanam expressa, quibusdam tamen in locis e ms. Reg. aucta et emendata, Desiderii Heraldi ad Arnobii libros VII animadversiones et castigationes (Paris: M. Orry, 1605). 132 See n. 80 above. 133 D. Canter, Arnobii (as in n. 80), 284–5.

98

Luigi Battezzato

ordine hic locus exaratus legitur in Romano codice, hoc modo: Et in gratiam cum hominibus remini offensionibus redire sopitis [7. 36. 3] 37 Vti ad consules suaderet praesulem sibi displicuisse. ] Recte Lipsius noster ad consules vaderet [7. 39. 3] 38 Est cur ignoscere debeamus. ] Melius in Romano, est ut ignoscere debeamus [7. 42. 2] 39 Auersabili corpora foeditate deoneratis. ] In Romano codice est, deonerans; quam scripturam sequor [7. 45. 1]

If we look at Livineius’ collations, made against Gelenius’ edition, we find a much more concise presentation of the same evidence. Livineius underlines the letters for which he has a variant reading. We find: text remissis offensionibus redire opinatis suaderet cur deoneratis

margin mini sopi RL egregium nec video cur mutatur. ua, p. P Idem Lipsio uisum Epist. Quaest. iii epist. xv. ut R L rans p. R L

Livineius includes information about manuscripts L ( ¼ Bruxellensis) and P (from Carrion’s collation), and about Ursinus 1583 (R).134 The collation is analytical, extensive, and concisely presented. These conventions appear to have been in use since the time of Politian.135 Had they been printed, these collations would have looked like an apparatus criticus. This style of presentation, however, is extremely uncommon in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century editions. This is so for both cultural and typographical reasons. Many Renaissance scholars perceived sigla and line numbers as inelegant in published books.136 They preferred less concise systems of reference. In most cases, humanistic notes were printed as endnotes, and were not confined to reporting manuscript readings or conjectures. They often constituted a cross-breed of scholarly genres: collations, philological letters, treatises about grammar and 134 The notes are from pp. 272, 275, 277, 281. It is an easy inference that MS P agrees with R when Carrion/Livineius do not report a reading for P. This is the case for the readings of R reported above. Livineius is apparently careful in reporting R, not P, in these cases. The explicit report of P’s reading at 7. 39. 3 is, however, wrong: P reads 135 See x3.1, and Delatour, Livres (as in n. 62), 73. suaderet. 136 Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 152–7.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

99

mythology. Hostility against an ‘algebraic’ system of reference was very pronounced in genres such as ‘philological letters’, the equivalent of modern articles and reviews.137 The rules of classical letter-writing dictated a certain disdain for minutiae, equated with elegance by Renaissance scholars. Some Plantin editions came very close to reproducing the appearance of collations138 but could not make full use of the margins, for reasons of space and typographical convenience. The mise en page of the editions was different from that of the collations. The ‘algebraic’ system of reference is not very practical unless the notes are printed on the same page as the text, and later editions, especially variorum editions, abandoned it. Endnotes were less practical for information in a compact form, while they gave scope for miscellaneous matter. 5. T HE EAR LY EDIT IO NS OF ARNO BIUS AND THE TYPOLOGY OF EARLY EDITIONS

5.1

Editions of Arnobius

We can see the different phases in the formation of an apparatus criticus if we look at the editions of Arnobius between 1543 and 1651. 1. Faustus Sabaeus publishes the editio princeps in 1543.139 He prints a text based on manuscript P. The editor states that he has corrected some passages with the help of H. Ferrarius and F. Priscianensis. Sabaeus did not include notes, but printed a list of errata. For the following editions, editors had no access to new manuscript evidence: 2. In 1546 Sigismundus Gelenius (Zikmund Hruby´ z Jelenı´) prints a ‘reading’ text, with some rewriting ope ingenii, to make difficult passages intelligible.140 He does not include textual notes of any sort, and inserts his conjectures directly in the text. The edition by La Barre141 is an in-folio reprint of Gelenius’ text, with some exegetical notes at the bottom of the page, but no comment on the text. 3. In 1582 Dirk Canter reprints Gelenius’ text with some modifications, inserting readings from the editio princeps.142 His textual and exegetical notes appear as endnotes. Marginal numbers signal the 137 139 142

138 Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), 104–8. Pasquali, Storia (as in n. 7), 76–7. 140 See n. 71 above. 141 See n. 113 above. See n. 71 above. See n. 80 above.

100

Luigi Battezzato

presence of a note. Canter claims not to have inserted any conjectures in the text. In his notes he draws attention to passages where his text departs from that of Gelenius. 4. Ursinus (Fulvio Orsini) based his 1583 text on the editio princeps, but used unpublished notes of other scholars, especially Pedro Chaco´n (1527–81),143 for conjectural emendations. He explains that he accepted in his text only the emendations ‘quae et multorum judicio probatae et sine ulla controversia verae visae essent’,144 relegating to the margins those that looked ‘non ita certae’. He does not give any indication about the authors of specific conjectures. Ursinus records far more suggestions than Canter. He also prints parallel passages in the margins. 5. In 1603 Elmenhorst (Geverhardus Elmenhorstius) prints the text of the princeps, ‘rarely’ (his word, in the preface) inserting readings from published collations or conjectures. He adds exegetical notes after the text, and then a section of variae lectiones. He gives sources for each reading (e.g. ‘R.C.’ ¼ Romanus Codex ¼ the editio princeps; ‘Gelenius’).145 For the following editions, the editors had access to new manuscript evidence, either directly, or through unpublished collations: 6. Stewech (Godescalchus Stewechius) had access to MS B.146 In the margins of his text he prints variant readings from it (siglum M.S.), and conjectural readings accompanied by scholars’ names (Ste(wech), Ursinus). He justifies his choices in a series of endnotes, reproduced in Salmasius’ edition (see below). 7. In 1605 Desiderius Heraldus makes it clear from the title that he is reproducing the text of the editio princeps, corrected with the help of readings from the Paris manuscript. Heraldus does not seem to have had direct access to the manuscript itself.147 143 Ursinus (as in n. 86). On Chaco ´ n see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 112. v 144 Ursinus (as in n. 86): sig. a4 ; Nolhac, Bibliothe `que (as in n. 13), 48. 145 See Arnobii disputationum adversus gentes libri septem, quibus accedit eiusdem argumenti dialogus M. Minutii Felicis Octavius, G. Elmenhorst recensuit et notis illustravit (Hanau: Wechel, 1603). 146 Arnobii Disputationum aduersus gentes libri septem. Cum Godescalci Stewechii electis (Antwerp: I. Trognaesius, 1604). Stewech finished his edition in 1587, but the book was not published until after his death. 147 See n. 131 above. On Heraldus (Didier He ´rault, 1575-c.1649), see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 232.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

101

After a period of competing editions, a summa of most of the important material published appeared: 8. Claudius Salmasius published a variorum edition in 1651. It includes a new text, and the notes of all the important commentators.148 Adversaria also appeared: 9. Some collections of textual notes were based on new manuscript evidence, and appeared in a miscellany.149 The first part of Joannes Meursius’ Criticus Arnobianus is a collection of textual notes, but it is not based on new manuscript evidence.150 In his Appendix, Meursius reports an extensive collation of manuscript P, with discussion of the text-critical implications of the new readings. The collation was made by Scaliger.151

5.2

Systems of Reference

We can see that many early editions of classical texts correspond to one or other of the types listed above. If we look at some other examples, we will see how accuracy in reporting variants is influenced by typographical conventions. The main problem was how to make precise reference to a word in the text.152 Prose texts were especially difficult. One possibility was to divide the text into small sections. This system was used for the 148 Arnobii Afri adversus Gentes libri VII. Cum recensione viri celeberrimi [i.e. Claude de Saumaise], & integris omnium commentariis [ed. Antonius Thysius] (Leiden: I. Maire, 1651). On Salmasius (1588–1653) see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 382. 149 See e.g. Carrion, Emendationum liber secundus (as in n. 58), 38 and 52. 150 See Ioannis Meursii Criticus Arnobianus tributus in libros septem, item Hypocriticus Minutianus et excerpta Ms. Regii Parisiensis (Leiden: ex officina L. Elzeviri, 1598); see also the ‘editio altera et melior’ (1599), with the same title. On Joannes Meursius (Jan de Meurs, 1579–1639) see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 304; V. Brown, ‘Cato, Marcus Porcius’, Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, iv (1980), 223–47 at 240; C. Ampolo, Storie greche (Turin, 1997), 21–2. On the scholarly genre adversaria and its vogue after the publication of Turne`be’s 1564 Adversaria see J.-M. Chatelain, ‘Les Recueils d’adversaria aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles: Des pratiques de la lecture savante au style de l’e´rudition’, in F. Barbier et al. (eds.), Le livre et l’historien: E´tudes offertes en l’honneur du Professeur Henri-Jean Martin (Geneva, 1997), 169–86. 151 From the 1609 auction catalogue of books owned by Scaliger we know that he annotated a copy of Gelenius’ 1546 edition: cf. R. Smitskamps, The Scaliger Collection . . . Supplement: Joseph Scaliger: A Bibliography 1850–1993, by A. Grafton and H. J. de Jonge (Leiden, 1993), 104. See also The Scaliger Collection, 19: Scaliger owned a copy of Elmenhorst’s edition (as in n. 145). See J. Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin, 1855), 187 on the quarrel between Elmenhorst and Wower on Arnobius. 152 On reference systems in modern editions see Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum?’ (as in n. 6), 202.

102

Luigi Battezzato

Bible, and for legal and theological texts in the Middle Ages.153 Aldus Manutius started the habit of leaving ‘white spaces’ in mid-line to mark sections in prose texts, a habit which later developed into paragraph divisions, especially under the influence of the editions published by Plantin.154 Aldus also experimented with a number of systems of reference for indexes and errata in his editions at a time when page numbering was not standard.155 In the sixteenth century, references to page and line number became standard, even for verse.156 This, however, meant that an editor preparing a manuscript for the press had no easy way of cross-referencing: in his 1554 edition of Catullus, Muret did not number the poems, or the lines, and had no way of referring to parallel passages, except by quotation, leaving it to the reader to locate the line.157 In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Plantin printing firm was at the forefront of innovation, introducing newer and more efficient systems of reference. There was an important field where a precise reference system was essential: censorship. The Index, published by Plantin in 1571,158 gives page references for the passages that are to be erased or blackened in printed books. If more than one edition of a book has appeared, the Index gives page numbers for all of them. It also transcribes the passage to be omitted, or, if this is too long, its incipit and explicit. The Plantin press was apparently the first to print continuous line 153 P. Stein, Regulae Iuris (Edinburgh, 1966), 115–16; M. A. and R. H. Rouse, ‘La Naissance des index’, in Martin, Chartier, and Vivet (as in n. 115), 77–85 at 80, and Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991), 192–201 and 222–46; A. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997), 30 n. 58; H.-J. Martin, Mise en page et mise en texte du livre franc¸ais: La naissance du livre moderne (XIVe–XVIIe sie`cles) (Paris, 2000), 104–6. 154 See the important discussion in Martin, Mise en page (as in n. 153), 301–11. 155 Cf. C. Vecce, ‘Aldo e l’invenzione dell’indice’, in D. S. Zeidberg (ed.), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture: Essays in Memory of Franklin D. Murphy (Florence, 1998), 109–41 with bibliography on early indexing techniques; p. 121 for indications of variant readings. 156 e.g. ibid. 123 on the index to Ovid. Scaliger (or his typographer, M. Patisson) uses this system in his edition of Manilius (1579: see n. 123 above). 157 Catullus et in eum commentarius M. Antonii Mureti (Venice: P. Manutius, 1554). Muret prints his notes at the end of each poem; this is rather inconvenient for the longer poems in the collection. See Gaisser, ‘Catullus’ (as in n. 4), 260–5 and Catullus (as in n. 7), 155–68. 158 Index expurgatorius librorum qui hoc seculo prodierunt . . . (Antwerp: Plantin, 1571) reprinted in J. M. De Bujanda (ed.), Index des livres interdits, vii: Index d’Anvers 1569, 1570, 1571 (Sherbrooke, 1988), 711–834. Arias Montano, the editor of Plantin’s polyglot Bible, was the head of the censorship committee (see Bujanda, p. 89). On the Plantin press see C. Clair, Christopher Plantin (London, 1960) and L. Voet and J. VoetGrisolle, The Plantin Press (1555–1589) (Amsterdam, 1980–3).

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

103

numbering in books of poetry: Kenney refers to an Ovid edition of 1575.159 The better the reference system, the easier it is to record variant readings and conjectures,160 or to indicate what is to be censored.

5.3

Types of Editions and Systems of Reference

5.3.1 The Bare Text The earliest type corresponds to what we see in the editio princeps of Arnobius, and in Gelenius’ edition: there are no textual notes indicating divergences from the manuscript(s) used, or from an earlier edition. This type is very common in the first part of the sixteenth century: no edition of Euripides until that of Gasparus Stiblinus (Caspar Stiblin) in 1562 has textual notes, even if there were instances of emendation by conjecture.161 In the preface to his edition of Silius, Franciscus Asulanus162 states that he added eighty-four lines ‘in principio octaui libri’,163 but does not think it useful to indicate which these, or any he may have emended, are. He has no notes of any sort. Examples can easily be multiplied.

5.3.2 Textual Endnotes Dirk Canter printed a relatively small number of critical notes at the end of his edition of Arnobius: little more than one per page (297 notes for 249 pages of text). The same system, with a similarly small number of notes, had been used by his brother Willem Canter.164 The editions of Petronius published by Pierre Pithou (1539–96) in 1577 and 1587 are Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 153. The standardization of line numbers and paragraphs is a consequence of the cultural status of a given text, as reflected by the number of editions. It was Ovid, a widely read author, who was one of the first to be honoured by ‘continuous’ numbers; the Gospels were divided into verses from as early as 1551: Kenney (as in n. 1), 152; Martin, Mise en page (as in n. 153), 298. A relatively obscure writer like Arnobius does not have a standard division into sub-paragraphs, unlike e.g. Tacitus or Herodotus. 161 See the list in Kannicht, Euripides (as in n. 110), i. 112–14; Euripides poeta . . . in latinum sermonem conuersus, adiecto e regione textu Graeco. cum annotationibus et praefationibus in omnes eius tragoedias, autore Gasparo Stiblino, accedunt . . . Ioannis Brodaei . . . annotationes . . . (Basle: I. Oporinus, 1562). 162 i.e. Giovan Francesco Torresani (c.1480–c.1557): Maillard, Kecskeme ´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 408. 163 Silii Italici De Bello Punico libri septemdecim (Lyon: S. Gryphius, 1547), 3. 164 For instance, in Aeschyli tragoediae vii . . . opera G. Canteri . . . (Antwerp: Plantin, 1580), the reader finds forty-nine textual notes (mostly conjectures) on Agamemnon, only five on Prometheus, eight on Persians, and so on. Canter’s edition of Euripides is similar in this respect. 159 160

104

Luigi Battezzato

notable for their reasonably systematic use of sigla in reporting variant readings. Pithou uses endnotes, keyed to the page, and includes a lemma. The manuscripts are designated by abbreviations, which get shortened from time to time (e.g. Autissiodurensis can be Autis or Aut.).165 The 1587 edition has an appendix with notes by other scholars, keyed to page and line. Scaliger’s 1579 edition of Manilius is a more elaborate version of this type. He did not look for new manuscript evidence,166 but emended a large number of passages by conjecture. He numbered the lines in each page and keyed his Commentarius (which was provided with its own line numbers as well) to page and line of the text. What is interesting is that in the Commentarius he gave as lemma the vulgate reading (Pru¨ckner’s edition), and then added his emendation.167 This correction of Pru¨ckner’s text was not always thorough, and in some cases the emendation is only found in the commentary,168 but the system is applied with reasonable consistency. This looks like an inversion of the system used in most modern apparatus, where the text printed by the editor comes as lemma, and is followed by the reading of the manuscript. The style of presentation chosen by Scaliger is counterintuitive, and impractical if several manuscript sources are used: which reading should be selected as lemma? Scaliger aimed at maximizing the impact of his innovations by referring to a generic vulgate text. No wonder that very few scholars dared follow his example. In his edition, ‘text and commentary are coupled in two distinct, equal, and concurrent editions, each with its title page and colophon, and each with a congruent system of marginal notation’; ‘the contribution of the critic is presented on terms of equality with the actual text’.169

5.3.3

Textual Notes in the Margin

A more modest, and more concise, style of presentation consists in printing variant readings in the margin. There are drawbacks: little space 165 See Petronii Arbitri Satyrica, ex veteribus libris emendatius . . . [ed. P. Pithou] (Paris: M. Patisson, 1577) and Petronii Arbitri Satyricon . . . . Cum notis doctorum virorum [ed. P. Pithou] (Paris: M. Patisson, 1587). Both editions have a section of varietas lectionum, after the text, and with separate pagination. The readings are keyed to the page, but not to the line. On these editions see Mu¨ller (as in n. 8), 397–8 and Richardson (as in n. 7), 40–62. 166 See Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 190–2. 167 See e.g. the Commentarius in Scaliger’s Manilius (as in n. 123), p. 140, discussing p. 65 of the text, l. ‘15 Omniaque intrantum) Lege infantum’ (¼ Man. 3. 133). For another example, see Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), pl. VII. 168 For instance the Commentarius in Scaliger’s Manilius (as in n. 123), 19, on Man. 1. 228 (Scaliger’s Manilius, p. 8 of the text, l. 15). 169 Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), 102–3.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

105

is left for explaining the origin of the readings. Ursinus’ edition of Arnobius is still noteworthy for the conjectures it includes, but we do not know which of the scholars he names in the preface suggested which conjecture. The result, flattering to Ursinus’ fame, is that the conjectures all go by his name in modern apparatus. The marginal notes are keyed to the text by symbols or numbers. The technique used in Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Cornelius Gallus (Lyon: A. Gryphius, 1573) was a little better.170 The editors (V. Giselinus and T. Pulmannus) printed variant readings in the margins, using asterisks to mark the corresponding word in the text. The readings are attributed to scholars, referred to by abbreviations (for instance Stat. ¼ Achilles Statius, Car. ¼ L. Carrion). The notes rarely make it clear whether the readings were found in manuscripts or are conjectural. In the Propertius section the editors give only W. Canter’s notes, without sigla, and do not even differentiate between variant readings and explicative glosses, a confusing presentation.171 Marginal notes do cause confusion, but this system forced editors and printers to unusual conciseness, and to resort to sigla.

5.3.4 Textual Notes in the Margin and at the End In the preface to his 1566 edition of Plautus,172 C. Plantin explains to the reader that marginal readings accompanied by the siglum ‘S.’ indicate ‘Sambuci lectiones’;173 the siglum ‘L.’ means that the manuscript of Langius agrees with ‘S.’. This rudimentary apparatus is supplemented by an appendix which lists all the readings of Langius’ manuscript, and the observations of other scholars. The main text has 170 This edition is little more than a reprint, in a compact format, of the notes of famous scholars. Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115) shows that editors with no scholarly pretensions often resort to more effective ways of presenting the evidence. 171 In Latino-Attici Oratores sive Panegyrici diversorum, cum veterum, tum recentiorum scriptorum (Douai: B. Bellerus, 1595), variant readings are printed in the margins accompanied by al., videtur legendum, opinor legendum, melius, forte, without explanation as to their origins. 172 M. Accii Plauti Comoediae viginti, . . . opera . . . Ioannis Sambuci . . . , aliquot eruditae C. Langij, Adr. Turnebi, Hadr. Iunij, et aliorum doctorum virorum, partim margini adscriptae, partim in calcem reiectae, observationes (Antwerp: Plantin, 1566). The line numbers start from 1 on each page. In Petronii Arbitri Massiliensis Satyrici fragmenta, restituta et aucta, e Bibliotheca Iohannis Sambuci (Antwerp: Plantin, 1565), marginal notes report variant readings taken from an edition (Paris 1520: ‘vulg(ata)’) and a manuscript (‘v.c.’, now Vindob. lat. 3198): Mu¨ller, Petronius (as in n. 8), 389. 173 The manuscript used by Sambucus (Ja ´nos Zsa´mboki, 1531–84: Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 436) is Vindob. lat. 3168: see F. Ritschl, Opuscula philologica (Leipzig, 1868), ii. 27 and 155–6; C. Questa, Parerga plautina: Struttura e tradizione manoscritta delle commedie (Urbino, 1985), 234–6.

106

Luigi Battezzato

line numbers starting on each page, and the endnotes refer to these numbers. The readings of Langius are printed at the end ‘quod ora libri eas non caperet’ (the book is in 16
). This is as close as we get to the admission, by a scholarly printer, that an apparatus criticus was typographically impossible. Plantin was doing his best to give all the relevant data to his readers in the most compact format. It also shows that in many cases it was up to the printer to decide how to present textual notes. Some editors did not like having endnotes. In his 1575 edition of Petronius, Tornaesius had to resort to endnotes to report readings because he received an interesting manuscript (the lost Cuiacianus) too late, when pages 1–67 (approximately) had already been composed (prioribus foliis iam formis excusis). For the remaining pages he incorporated some of its readings in the main text, and others in marginal notes, making it difficult to discriminate the Cuiacianus from the other sources, to the frustration of Petronian scholars.174 It is clear that he preferred marginal notes, and used endnotes in an emergency, at the cost of exactness and clarity. The limits of the marginal note system were soon apparent: if the sources were too numerous, there was not enough space for them. Stewech, in the edition of Vegetius that he completed in 1584,175 made use of nine sources (editions, manuscripts, or collations). He prints summary information about variant readings in the margin of his text: e.g. at p. 4 (Veg. 1. 3) in his marginal note to parco victu utantur he writes ‘omnes optimi libri, parvo’. If we look at the commentary on the same passage (p. 8) the picture changes dramatically: ‘parco victu utantur, et rustico] in aliis exemplaribus M(anu). S(criptis). N. H. et Susij, reperi parvo victu.’ A list of abbreviations (sig. y4v) explains what these sigla refer to.176 The marginalia simply draw attention to 174 Petronii arbitri Satyricon (Lyon: I. Tornaesius, 1575): see Mu ¨ ller, Petronius (as in n. 8), 396; Richardson, Reading (as in n. 7), 24–39 and 122–5; Stagni, ‘Ricerche’ (as in n. 7), 207–11 and 218–23. 175 See Flavi Vegeti Renati De re militari libri quatuor . . . ope veterum librorum correcti, a Godescalco Stewechio Heusdano. . . . Accessit seorsum eiusdem G. Stewechi in Fl. Vegetium Commentarius . . . (Leiden: F. Raphelengius, 1592). Cf. J. A. Wisman, ‘Flavius Renatus Vegetius’, Corpus translationum et commentariorum, vi (Washington, DC, 1986), 175–84 at 183. 176 In the list we see the problems an early editor faced: most of the manuscripts were owned by private individuals, including Stewech himself, and it would have been difficult to trace them after a generation. Modern editors have not been able to identify them all; see Flavi Vegeti Renati epitoma rei militaris, ed. C. Lang (2nd edn., Leipzig, 1885), p. xlvi. In the 17th c., Heinsius could refer to catalogue numbers for Vatican manuscripts: see Munari, ‘Manoscritti’ (as in n. 73); Reeve, ‘Cuius in usum?’ (as in n. 6), 201 on problems with shelfmark changes in modern libraries.

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

107

a problem, and make use of sigla, but most of the evidence is to be found in the commentary. Stewech uses a coherent system of sigla, and the text is divided into small chapters, so that it is easy to find the reference.177 The Plantin press did better with Livineius’ edition of the Panegyrici Latini.178 Livineius (p. 6) lists six sources (manuscripts, collations, and editions) for his text and gives them sigla. He then prints the variant readings in the margins, accompanied by sigla, and marks his conjectures by ‘f.’ ( ¼ fortasse). Extensive endnotes supplement the information given in the margins, and explain his reasoning and textual choices. Endnotes are keyed to the text by reference to page and line number. It is characteristic of the age that Livineius does not always print in the text the reading he considers right.179 However, the format of the edition is similar to that of a modern book: critical edition of the text with information on the manuscript evidence, followed by notes which discuss textual problems in detail and offer comments on difficult passages. It is interesting to note that the system of marginal notes with sigla reproduces the format of Livineius’ collations. Marginal notes were used in the seventeenth century too (for instance in Barnes’s edition of Euripides), but they were not the solution and had to be abandoned.

5.3.5 Variorum Editions A variorum edition presupposes the existence of many previous editions. Variorum editions of widely read works such as Ovid’s Heroides appeared as early as 1501. Arnobius had to wait until 1651. These early variorum editions are inconvenient to use. The difficult problem is the synchronization of text and several commentaries. In the 1501 Heroides,180 the text is centred, flush with the internal margin, with commentaries on the remaining three sides.181 The margins are used 177 Stewech combined marginal notes and endnotes in his edition of Arnobius too, but here he only had one manuscript source (‘M.S.’ ¼ the Bruxellensis). 178 See above, nn. 62–3, for references. 179 See e.g. crimen p. 16 ¼ 1. 11. 1. 180 Epistole Heroides Ovidii diligenti castigatio(n)e . . . figuris ornate. Commentantibus Antonio Uolsco Ubertino Crescentinate et Omnibono . . . (Venice: I. Tacuinus de Tridino, 1501). 181 This corresponds to Powitz, type 2: G. Powitz, ‘Textus cum commento’, Codices manuscripti, 5, H. 3 (1979), 80–9. Powitz primarily discussed medieval manuscripts and incunabula. See now L. Holtz, ‘Glosse e commenti’, in Cavallo, Leonardi, and Menesto` (as in n. 72), 59–111. For the transition to the printed book see A. Labarre, ‘Les incunables: La pre´sentation du livre’, in Martin, Chartier, and Vivet (as in n. 115), 195–215 at 200–1; R. Laufer, ‘L’espace visuel du livre ancien’, ibid. 479–97 at 495–6; Martin, Mise en page (as in n. 153), 219, 245 (with illustrations from Lyon editions of Ovid and Sallust of 1519 and 1526), and 292 (R. Stephanus 1545 Latin Bible). See also Kenney, Text (as in n. 1), 63–4.

108

Luigi Battezzato

for giving the names of the commentators, who mostly deal with mythological questions, and gloss difficult words. The 1554 variorum of Cicero’s letters182 has the text centred with commentaries all round it.183 The text section also includes re´sume´s of each letter, and other introductory material. Variant readings are printed in the margins of this internal section. The external margins of the commentary are used for indicating the author of each section of the commentary. The notes of each commentator on each letter are printed together. Some commentators, for instance Pier Vettori, discuss variant readings. The book includes commentaries by about twenty scholars. Finding what each commentator had to say about a particular passage is not very difficult if the letters are short, but it becomes problematic when the letters are many pages long. The complex typographical presentation chosen by the printer loses its meaning when the commentary is not level with the text. The book looks like a manuscript with scholia written in wide margins, but in manuscripts scholia refer to what is contained in the page. They assemble what commentators have to say on a particular passage, usually without individual attributions, though there may be indications that different sources have been used. In the Cicero variorum the printer rightly decided that it was important to identify such authors. However, he did not reorganize the commentary into small sections, nor could he use page and line numbers to refer to the text. This problem could only be solved by printing the commentary either as endnotes or as footnotes. Printing critical notes at the bottom of the page was difficult. It could be done for texts that were expected to sell very well. Robertus Stephanus’ 1557 edition of the Latin Bible reports the Variae interpretum lectiones cum hebraismorum explicatione at the bottom of the page,184 which looks neat and clear. In the seventeenth century we find footnotes in variorum editions of classical authors: a 1669 edition of Petronius has footnotes keyed to passages in the text by means of numbers.185 Pieter Burman the elder’s Petronius adopts a different solution: the amount of text per page is so small and the notes so extensive that the lemmata are enough to identify the passage. 182 Marci Tullii Ciceronis Epistolarum Familiarium libri XVI, cum commentariis Iodoci Badii Ascensii . . . et aliorum . . . annotationibus . . . (Venice: H. Scotus, 1554). 183 This corresponds to Powitz, type 4 (as in n. 181). 184 See Martin, Mise en page (as in n. 153), 280. 185 Titi Petronii Arbitri . . . Satyricon, cum Fragmento nuper Tragurii reperto . . . omnia commentariis, et notis Doctorum virorum illustrata, concinnante M. Hadrianide (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1669).

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

109

The longer collections of notes printed at the end of the text are only keyed to chapter and lemma, not to page and line.186 Other systems were impractical. Numbering endnotes would be confusing if different sets of notes had to be referred to. Endnotes were easier for poetry, as it was possible (even if by no means standard) to refer to continuous line numbers. This gave rise to a more or less standard system of reference,187 which made it easier to assemble the various notes. In the Stephanus variorum of Euripides, the editor converted Stiblinus’ marginal notes into endnotes by adding line numbers.188 In the 1821 variorum edition of Euripides189 the editors conveniently assembled the observations of the most important scholars, and printed them as footnotes. Why this was not done by Stephanus is apparent as soon as we look at the Greek text in his edition. Stephanus had trouble paginating the main section so as to keep the Greek text, the Latin translation, and the relevant scholia together. He could not fill the pages evenly and had to leave blanks.

6. CON CLU SI O N ¨ bung der Kra¨fte fu¨hrt zwar das Individuum unausbleiblich Einseitigkeit in U zum Irrtum, aber die Gattung zur Wahrheit. (F. Schiller)190 Textual criticism, like most other sciences, is an aristocratic affair, not communicable to all men, nor to most men. (A. E. Housman)191 In the past, historians and philosophers of science have attributed much of the growth of science to the work of the average scientist who, it is suggested, has 186 Titi Petronii Arbitri Satyrico ˆn quae supersunt cum integris doctorum virorum commentariis . . . curante P. Burmanno (Utrecht: G. vande Water, 1709). 187 Not always: in the case of Greek tragedy, lyric passages could be divided by editors into lines in a number of different ways. It is only since the 19th c. that editors adopt standard line numbers regardless of changes in the colometry of lyric passages. 188 Euripidis tragoediae quae extant cum latina G. Canteri interpretatione, Scholia doctorum virorum in septem Euripidis tragoedias, ex antiquis exemplaribus ab Arsenio Monembasiae archiepiscopo collecta. Accedunt . . . I. Brodaei, G. Canteri, G. Stiblini, Ae. Porti in Euripidem annotationes ([Geneva]: P. Stephanus, 1602), taking over Stiblinus (as in n. 161). 189 Euripidis opera omnia, ex editionibus praestantissimis fideliter recusa . . . (Glasgow and London, 1821). 190 U ¨ ber die a¨sthetische Erziehung der Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1794), in F. Schiller, Werke in drei Ba¨nden, ed. H. H. Go¨pfert (Munich, 1966), ii. 445–520 at 458 (letter 6). 191 A. E. Housman, ‘The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism’ (1922), in id., Classical Papers (Cambridge, 1972), iii. 1058–69 at 1059.

110

Luigi Battezzato

paved the way with his ‘small’ discoveries for the men of genius—the great discoverers. (J. R. and S. Cole)192

J. R. and S. Cole argue that the more widely cited scientists form an elite, and that they are more likely to cite other elite scientists; non-elite scientists are largely ‘redundant’ to scientific progress.193 Housman’s point is very similar. It appears to be vindicated when we look at the splendid achievement of Scaliger, whose editions still strike readers by their self-confidence and their ability to make sense, by way of conjectural emendation, of the countless absurd readings printed by his predecessors, which he unmercifully reprints and criticizes. Housman’s aristocratic view is also vindicated if we look at how frequently Scaliger is cited in modern apparatus critici, in comparison with other scholars of his age. However, this is true only for some authors: Euripides, Catullus, Propertius, Festus, Manilius, and a few others—not countless authors. Moreover, Scaliger was not always so patient with manuscripts. In Mynors’s edition of Catullus, the much less famous Achilles Statius194 scores a higher number of successful emendations (17 against 14).195 How did this happen? Statius ‘presented careful collations of large numbers of manuscripts’196 and ‘put his manuscripts to good use’.197 Meursius’ name is not famous, but he restored countless corrupt passages in Arnobius, using only D. Canter’s edition: Scaliger did not make a big contribution to the text of Arnobius, even if he collated the only source for this text. Classical texts are too numerous, and ‘elite’ philologists too few. More modest, but competent scholars can make important contributions198 and ‘lead the species to truth’ thanks to their collective effort and specialized competence. Scaliger praised the least creative and most informative editions of Arnobius: ‘Arnobius Heraldi est bon’; ‘celuy qui a fait sur Arnobe . . . c’est Elmenerst [sic]’.199 Livineius too, ‘cui judicii 192

J. R. Cole and S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science (Chicago, 1973), 216. They call the opposite view the ‘Ortega Hypothesis’, from a passage by Ortega y Gasset. H. L. Hoerman and C. E. Nowicke, ‘Secondary and Tertiary Citing: A Study of Referencing Behavior in the Literature of Citation Analysis Deriving from the Ortega Hypothesis of Cole and Cole’, Library Quarterly, 65 (1995), 415–34 show that (ironically) Cole and Cole misinterpreted and miscited Ortega y Gasset. 194 On Aquiles Estac ¸o (1524–81) see Maillard, Kecskeme´ti, and Portalier (as in n. 13), 173 and Gaisser, ‘Catullus’ (as in n. 4), 265–7 and Catullus (as in n. 7), 168–78. 195 See Goold, ‘Text’ (as in n. 19), 99. 196 Grafton, Scaliger (as in n. 2), 95. 197 Gaisser, Catullus (as in n. 7), 175. 198 Feld, ‘Evolution’ (as in n. 115), 107 and Grafton, ‘Correctores corruptores?’ (as in n. 131), 54 discuss the importance of ‘invisible technicians’, printers, and correctors in 199 Scaliger, Scaligerana (as in n. 66), 33 and 265. the history of scholarship. 193

Renaissance Philology: Livineius

111

plus quam ingenii praesto erat’,200 made a very valuable contribution to the text of Arnobius. His edition of the Panegyrici was another useful piece of work. He simply had his collations reproduced in printed form, giving marginal notes with sigla. This did not become standard for a number of practical reasons that were already apparent in the edition of Stewech (Vegetius) and Sambucus (the 1566 Plantin Plautus), but this system was the closest thing to a true apparatus criticus. The effort of these scholars and printers was important for the progress of classical editions. After these attempts, standards of accuracy improved. Variorum editions became common in the seventeenth century, and they had to match the best standards found in the editions they reprinted and conflated. References to page and line number became standard. Scaliger’s system of reference, giving the vulgate reading as lemma, followed by his correction, could not work in editions that made use of several manuscript witnesses, or that were based on the work of several scholars. It was designed for following a single printed vulgate. It was a clever system, invented by a very clever man, but it was not designed to include other people’s contributions: Scaliger, the would-be aristocrat and exceptional scholar, aimed at the sharpest contrast with all previous editors, but did not manage to impose his referencing system on the republic of colleagues. 200

Sex. Aurelii Propertii Carmina, ed. C. Lachmann (Leipzig, 1816), p. xvii.

This page intentionally left blank

3 The Measure of Rome: Andre´ Schott, Justus Lipsius and the Early Reception of the Res gestae divi Augusti Paul Nelles

In 1555 Ferdinand of Hungary sent a delegation to meet with Sulaima¯n I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The delegation was composed of the neophyte Flemish negotiator Augier Busbecq, the seasoned Hungarian diplomat Antonio Veranzio, and the wary Francis Zay, admiral of the Danube fleet. Sent bearing the olive branch of peace, Busbecq and his party returned with a six-months’ truce, the lily, and the tulip. Yet the posy of botanical discoveries was not the only souvenir the mission carried back to Europe. Veranzio and Busbecq were also keen epigraphers. En route to Amasia to meet with Sulaima¯n, the three travellers passed through Ankara. Entering the city they found a large Roman inscription on the exterior fac¸ade of a crumbling building, certainly not the first the diplomats had encountered on their voyage through Asia Minor. Worn and difficult to decipher, the inscription filled six full columns each containing around fifty lines of text. The party was halted, and Busbecq and Veranzio set secretaries to copying the inscription. ‘Rerum gestarum Divi Augusti . . . exemplar subjectum’ read the title of the inscription. Even the old salt Zay must have realized that this was not just another Roman monument. The inscription promised to retail the I would like to thank Will Stenhouse for his comments on this paper. It also gives me great pleasure to record two debts to Christopher Ligota: first for providing an opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper to the History of Scholarship Seminar at the Warburg Institute in February 2000; and second for the great generosity with which he has shared his erudition, intelligence, and wit during the course of the Friday evening seminar since its inception in 1993.

114

Paul Nelles

achievements of the emperor Augustus: this was the first modern encounter with the Res gestae divi Augusti. Having made very incomplete copies of their chance discovery, the diplomats continued on their journey. Once they returned to Europe, the transcriptions were tucked into the private papers of the delegation members and promptly forgotten. The inscription would wait another twenty-four years to be published. Hailed as the ‘Queen of Imperial inscriptions’ by Mommsen, the Ankara monument remains an invaluable source for study of the reign of Augustus and a unique piece of evidence from the early empire.1 Written by Augustus himself around ad 14 when the emperor was 76 years old, the Res gestae was intended to stand as a posthumous digest of his accomplishments. The text recapitulates most of the major events of Augustus’ career, and falls into three main parts. The first section records the various honours, titles, and offices received by Augustus; the second reviews impensae—money spent from Augustus’ private coffers on public projects such as buildings, games, gifts to the treasury, and financial subventions to the populace. Finally come the more meaty res gestae: expeditions, conquest, achievements of war. After Augustus’ death, the text of the Res gestae was duly inscribed on two bronze columns erected in front of his mausoleum in the Campus Martius at Rome. No trace remains of this bronze copy. But in addition to its publication in Rome, the Res gestae was very likely widely copied in the provinces. Versions are known to have existed at Apollonia (probably in a Greek translation alone) and Antioch in Pisidia, and at Ankara in Galatia. The Ankara version, the Monumentum Ancyranum, is the best preserved of the Latin inscriptions. It originally graced the temple of Rome and Augustus on six columns, accompanied by a Greek translation for the benefit of the local population. The copy made by Busbecq was a partial transcription of the Latin text. The third and fourth columns alone were transcribed in their entirety, while the four remaining columns were only partially deciphered. Veranzio’s copy was slightly better. The party was entirely unaware of the Greek translation of the text filling twenty columns of what was originally the cella of the temple. The Greek inscription was blocked by a neighbouring building until the eighteenth century and was entirely inaccessible to the party of Western diplomats. 1 See Res gestae divi Augusti, ed. J. Gage ´ (3rd edn., Paris, 1977); E. S. Ramage, The Nature and Purpose of Augustus’ ‘Res Gestae’ (Historia-Einzelschriften, 54; Stuttgart, 1987), esp. 117–57 for a review of 19th- and 20th-c. scholarship on the Res gestae.

The Measure of Rome

115

The copies of the Latin text made on the 1555 expedition furnished European scholarship with its main source for the Res gestae until further copies were made in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The last of these, the 1705 transcription of all six columns of the Latin text made by Paul Lucas, would remain authoritative for the next century and a half. It was not until 1882 that the Greek text was copied in its entirety and a full study of the Latin text made possible. This was due to plaster casts procured by Carl Humann, the German consul at Smyrna, and dispatched to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. The result was Mommsen’s 1883 edition of the inscription, the second and last prepared by him.2 The fortune of the Ankara monument from its discovery in 1555 to the plaster casts used by Mommsen now out-housed in a depot of the Berlin Stadtmuseum is a long and unusually interesting one. Due to the monument’s remote geographical position in the Ottoman heartland, the history of its exploitation by Western scholars is as much one of derring-do and diplomatic strong-arming as one of careful epigraphical scholarship. While the details of the 1555 expedition and the transcription of the monument are well known,3 the story of the immediate reception of the Res gestae in early modern scholarship remains untold. In the half century following its discovery, it was published on at least five separate occasions: first in 1579 by Andre´ Schott; twice in 1588, by Justus Lipsius and Joannes Leunclavius; again by Lipsius in 1598; and finally in 1605 by Isaac Casaubon.4 What did early modern scholars make of their find? 2 Res gestae Divi Augusti, ed. Th. Mommsen (Berlin, 1883). References to the Res gestae are to this edition. Mommsen also conveniently publishes an edition of the transcription made on the 1555 expedition, the ‘Busbequianum Exemplum’, pp. xviii–xxiii, with numbered pages and lines corresponding to the columns and lines of the Ankara inscription. References here to the Res gestae include page and line numbers as well as the more usual chapter divisions in order to facilitate consultation of Mommsen’s edition of Busbecq’s transcription. Mommsen furnishes the essential starting point for the study of the early reception of the Res gestae; see his review of the early evidence in Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, iii (Berlin, 1873), 769–72; 1054. 3 Z. R. W. M. von Martels, ‘The Discovery of the Inscription of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti’, Respublica litterarum, 14 (1991), 147–56; D. French, ‘Busbecq and Epigraphic Copyists’, in E. Ploeckinger et al. (eds.), Lebendige Altertumswissenschaft: Festgabe zur Vollendung des 70. Lebensjahres von Hermann Vetters (Vienna, 1985), 366–70. 4 Early editions of the Monumentum Ancyranum: (1) De vita et moribus imperatorum Romanorum [ ¼ Epitome de caesaribus] ed. Andre´ Schott (Antwerp, 1579), ‘Scholia’, 69–77. (2) Justus Lipsius, Auctarium, in Martin Smetius, Inscriptionum antiquarum liber, ed. Justus Lipsius (Antwerp, 1588), 19–22. (3) Joannes Leunclavius, Pandectes historiae Turcicae . . . ad illustrandos annales, in Annales sultanorum Othmanidarum (Frankfurt, 1588), 205–10. (4) Lipsius again published part of the inscription, RG 14–15 (3, 7–21),

116

Paul Nelles

Though complex, the early fortune of the Res gestae is well worth exploring. Study of Rome in the late sixteenth century was at its most intense, carrying in its wake a flurry of discoveries, editions, and interpretation which in some cases would endure for three centuries and more.5 Tracing the reception of the most significant of imperial monuments in one of the brightest periods of Roman scholarship, therefore, offers a unique perspective on late Renaissance study of ancient Rome. Methodologically, the early reception of the Res gestae was shaped by the Renaissance historical school of Roman Law and the editorial scholarship of the Latin historiographical tradition. Yet it was also driven by a deep cultural fascination with imperial administration and what can only be described as the general mechanics of empire. And finally, the history of the early identification and analysis of the Res gestae exposes the convoluted nature of the production and dissemination of antiquarian knowledge in early modern Europe, and reveals paths of interpretation and communication seemingly at odds with the sober face of modern classical scholarship. Two worldly Low Countries humanists, Andre´ Schott and Justus Lipsius, are among the most important figures for apprehending the early reception of the Res gestae. Both were excited by the possibilities the Res gestae offered for the study of Rome at source. The Res gestae detailed an unequalled measure of Rome under the early empire: reams of information, all within a concise overview of Augustus’ career. It was immediately seized upon by both scholars as a precise accounting of imperial resources. As an ‘index’ of the achievements of Augustus the Res gestae was appreciated for its brevity and for its systematic review of a crucial period of Roman history. To late Renaissance eyes, the concision and factuality of the Res gestae embodied many of the implicit in his Admiranda, sive de magnitudine Romana (Antwerp, 1598), with extensive commentary. The Admiranda was reprinted several times (1598, 1599, 1600, 1605, 1617, 1630) and with all subsequent editions (1607, 1637, etc.) of Lipsius’ Opera. (5) Isaac Casaubon published Lipsius’ 1588 text in the Animadversiones to his edition of Suetonius, C. Suetonii Tranquilli de XII caesaribus libri VIII (Geneva, 1605), [pt. iii], 192–204, with many subsequent editions. Cf. Mommsen, Res gestae (as in n. 2), pp. xviii–xix. In addition, the Res gestae found a more or less permanent home with the Epitome well into the 18th c. 5 For specific examples of how early modern antiquarian scholarship was conducted, see in particular J.-L. Ferrary, Onophrio Panvinio et les antiquite´s romaines (Rome, 1996); W. McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, 1989); P. Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, 1993); and above all A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983–93).

The Measure of Rome

117

assumptions of contemporary antiquarian endeavour.6 Yet, perhaps most striking from the standpoint of modern interpretation of the Res gestae, Renaissance scholars never subjected the inscription to a political analysis. The Res gestae was first published in a highly unlikely location. Working in Paris, the young Andre´ Schott published Busbecq’s transcription of the Res gestae in the notes to his 1579 edition of the Epitome de caesaribus. This was not Schott’s first venture with late Latin historical texts. His edition of the De viris illustribus appeared in 1577, published by Plantin in his native Antwerp. Having fled Antwerp after the sack of 1576, Schott travelled first to Douai and then to Paris.7 He was at the beginning of a scholarly career which eventually took him to Spain, where he would be befriended by the legal antiquarian Antonio Agustı´n. In Spain Schott entered the Society of Jesus, under whose aegis he would journey to Rome to teach at the Collegio Romano before returning permanently to Antwerp. But it was in Paris that he prepared his edition of the Epitome de caesaribus as part of the Corpus Aurelianum, and where he gained access to Busbecq’s transcription of the Res gestae. Busbecq had resided in Paris since 1574, informally overseeing imperial affairs as ‘Court Prefect’ to Isabelle of Austria. When Schott arrived in Paris in 1578, he was quickly absorbed within his countryman’s household. Once he had gained a foothold in one of the most interesting intellectual and cultural circles of the period, Schott was admitted to Busbecq’s learned gatherings and given the run of his scholarly collections. The latter included not only Busbecq’s books, but a gamut of rare and exotic marvels gathered on Busbecq’s travels— manuscripts, coins, and inscriptions of all kinds.8 It was while rooting through Busbecq’s collections that Schott encountered the transcription of the Res gestae. The Ankara inscription obviously held considerable interest for Schott as an editor of imperial biographical texts. It provided 6 A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 67–106; and especially Ferrary, Onophrio Panvinio (as in n. 5). 7 On Schott, see G. Tournoy, ‘Schott (Andre ´) (S.J.) (1552–1629)’, in C. Nativel (ed.), Centuriae Latinae (Geneva, 1997), 749–53; on Schott’s antiquarian scholarship, see P. Nelles, ‘Historia magistra antiquitatis: Cicero and Jesuit History Teaching’, Renaissance Studies, 13 (1999), 130–72. 8 Schott, ‘Ep. ded.’ to Busbecq, in De vita et moribus imperatorum, 6: ‘Deinde quia bibliothecam tuam patere mihi, libris meis domi relictis, voluisti; omniaque quae ex longa et diutina peregrinatione collegisses, magnisque sumtibus parasses, libenter communicasti; monumenta rarissima, numismata, et inscriptiones. Quis enim nescit studium in raris et exoticis conquirendis tuum?’

118

Paul Nelles

testimony for the life of Augustus independently of the ancient historiographical tradition, and what was more, it was written by Augustus himself. Schott’s encounter with the Res gestae was thus largely serendipitous. Preparing an edition of the Epitome when he stumbled across Busbecq’s copy of the inscription, he found it convenient to include it in his notes to the Epitome’s treatment of Augustus. Yet, as with most discoveries, this was more than sheer coincidence. Schott’s ability to recognize the significance of the Res gestae was closely related to his editorial scholarship, at that time entirely given over to late Latin historical texts. His understanding of the Latin historiographical tradition was forged within the context of contemporary Parisian legal and antiquarian scholarship. In assessing Schott’s thinking on the Res gestae, we should first consider the purpose of his edition of the Epitome. Though the Epitome was well known to sixteenth-century readers, Schott’s publication fundamentally changed its status within the Latin historiographical tradition. This was due to the fact that Schott’s edition was a mere coda to his capolavoro of 1579: the publication of the editio princeps of the Caesares of Aurelius Victor and the Origo gentis Romanae. Schott had both texts from a single manuscript, the so-called corpus tripartitum, which also included a further version of the well-known De viris illustribus sandwiched between the Origo and the Caesares. The Origo was entirely unknown. Scholars had known of the Caesares through its putative Epitome, but had long thought it lost for good. Drawing on an entirely separate manuscript tradition, Schott published a new edition of the Epitome de caesaribus along with his recent discoveries. Employing the tools of source criticism, Schott was in a position to show that the Epitome was not in fact an abbreviated version of Aurelius Victor. The problem of sources was thus very much at the forefront of Schott’s thinking when he encountered the Res gestae. Schott did not undertake all of this in isolation. He had obtained the text of the corpus tripartitum from Theodore Poelmann before leaving Antwerp in 1576. He complained openly about the manuscript’s difficulty and his own inexperience. In Douai, Schott drew upon the expertise of the jurist Joannes Olivarius. And in Paris he was aided by some of the finest humanist legal scholars in Europe. Claude Dupuy, Nicolas Le Fe`vre, and Pierre and Nicolas Pithou all helped Schott as he set about the task of editing his texts. In addition, formidable collectors such as Jacques Cujas, Pierre Daniel, and Pierre Pithou all supplied manuscripts—and no doubt advice—for his edition of the Epitome. And

The Measure of Rome

119

Schott had access to some of the best private libraries in Paris, including the collections of Claude Dupuy and Nicolas Pithou.9 Schott duly recorded the assistance of these scholars and acknowledged their ideas in his commentary to the Caesares. While the degree to which Schott’s broader insights and arguments were influenced by Dupuy and particularly Pithou is impossible to determine, the Paris milieu was undoubtedly of considerable importance for Schott’s understanding of his task. Why then did Schott publish the Res gestae in his commentary to the Epitome rather than in his commentary to the Caesares? His edition of the Caesares, after all, was by far the more important work. An entirely unknown text, it was sure to garner the most attention. As the two editions were readied and published almost simultaneously, there is no reason to believe that the inscription was unknown to Schott when editing the Caesares. The decision to publish it with the Epitome instead lies in the nature and purpose of Schott’s commentaries to the two texts. To begin with, they are very differently titled. The commentary to the Caesares bears the title of Notae, that to the Epitome of Scholia. The notae to the Caesares are rather circumspect, and for the most part justify Schott’s editorial position: emendations, decisions not to emend, and the like. The scholia to the Epitome achieve something quite different. First, it is here that Schott proves that the Epitome is not an abbreviation of Aurelius Victor. By carefully comparing the two texts, he demonstrates that the Epitome contains information which is not in the Caesares. Further, he shows where he believes the Epitome to have drawn on other Latin historical writers such as Suetonius, Eutropius, and Ammianus Marcellinus. In this application of source criticism to editing historical texts Schott would be followed by scholars such as Joseph Scaliger, who would employ Schott’s technique and use Schott’s findings in his De emendatione temporum.10 Further, Schott considered the scholia form more discursive and miscellaneous in nature than the philological notes which accompanied his edition of the Caesares. The purpose of his commentary, Schott 9 Schott in Sexti Aurelii Victoris historiae Romanae breviarium (Antwerp, 1579), 14–15. On Dupuy’s library, rich in classical texts, see J. Delatour, Une bibliothe`que humaniste au temps des guerres de religion: Les livres de Claude Dupuy (Paris, 1998). 10 See Grafton, Scaliger, ii. 514–91; on Scaliger’s use of Schott’s edition of the Epitome, see P. Nelles, ‘Lipsius, Scaliger and the Historians’, in M. Laureys (ed.), The world of Justus Lipsius: A contribution towards his intellectual biography (Brussels, 1998) ¼ Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome, 68 (1998), 233–54, esp. 248–50.

120

Paul Nelles

stated, was both to explain his editorial method and to illustrate general points of Roman history—‘emendationum ratio explicatur, et historia illustratur’.11 As his editorial technique included source criticism, this double preoccupation with sources and historical subject matter made the scholia to the Epitome the more appropriate place for publishing the Res gestae. Though not a source for the Epitome, the Res gestae was nonetheless a unique witness to the reign of Augustus, including much information not available elsewhere. Schott introduced the inscription as an unpublished ‘fragmentum breviarii imperii Augusti’. In identifying the Monumentum Ancyranum as a breviarium, what did Schott think he had found? The opening lines of Busbecq’s copy of the inscription read as follows: ‘Rerum gestarum Divi Augusti quibus orbem terrarum imperio populi Romani subjecit et impensarum quas in rempublicam populumque Romanum fecit incisarum in duabus aheneis pilis quae sunt Romae positae exemplar subjectum.’ ‘The deeds of the divine Augustus, by which he brought the world under the rule of the Roman people, and the expenses which he bore for the Roman state and people, engraved on two bronze pillars erected in Rome, are here copied below.’ Schott’s evidence in support of his use of the term breviarium to describe the Res gestae was derived from Suetonius. In his life of Augustus (Aug. 101), Suetonius mentions three documents prepared by the emperor: the first consisted of instructions for his funeral; the second was an ‘index rerum a se gestarum’ to be posted in bronze tablets in front of his tomb; the third was a ‘breviarium totius imperii’, containing the number of soldiers in active service throughout the empire, the amounts in the aerarium and the fiscus, and what revenues were owed.12 The inscription copied by Busbecq, argued Schott, was nothing less than the ‘breviarium’ of Augustus mentioned by Suetonius. To be sure, Suetonius’ testimony is still adduced in discussions of the inscription. But the inscription has long been considered a copy of the second rather than the third text mentioned by Suetonius—a copy of the ‘index rerum a se gestarum’ rather than the ‘breviarium’. ‘Res gestae’, after all, are the very first words of the inscription. What accounts for Schott’s misidentification of the Res gestae? His starting point was again Suetonius. Suetonius mentioned other, similar breviaria from which Schott was able to provide a fuller picture of the use and function of breviaria in antiquity. Much of Schott’s work had 11 12

Schott, ‘Scholia’, De vita et moribus imperatorum, 63. Suetonius, Aug. 101. 4.

The Measure of Rome

121

already been done for him by Laevinus Torrentius, another Low Countries antiquarian on close terms with members of the circle of Schott and Lipsius such as Theodore Poelmann and Charles Lang. Torrentius had commented extensively on Augustus 101 in his edition of Suetonius published the previous year, like Schott’s texts a Plantin edition. Torrentius adduced a further instance of breviarium— ‘breviarium rationum’ or summary of accounts—at Galba 12. The main significance of this testimony was that it provided a fiscal context for understanding the function of breviaria. Torrentius also read two references to a ‘rationarium Imperii’ (Aug. 28 and Cal. 16) or financial survey as referring to much the same thing, a document he defined as ‘quo Imperii rationes continebantur’, that is, containing imperial financial accounts.13 Indeed he glossed ‘breviarium rationum’ at Galba 12 as ‘breviarium Imperii’.14 He went on, however, to define the genre of breviaria and rationes as ‘tale aliquid liber ille, qui Notitia Imperii Romani inscribitur: rectius fortassis Formula appellaretur’.15 Thus, breviaria and rationes were not restricted to fiscal functions alone, but designated any survey of the empire, including provincial or military lists. In discussing the meaning of breviarium when he introduced the Res gestae, Schott evidently drew on Torrentius when he defined ratio imperii (Suetonius, Aug. 28) as formula Imperii.16 Thus Torrentius and, by extension, Schott used breviarium to designate not so much a historical survey in the style of Eutropius or Festus, as an empirical survey in the mode of the Notitia Dignitatum—a text well known to late sixteenth-century students of the Roman world. As far as Schott was concerned, he now had the document in question in front of him. This is where the text of the Ankara inscription available to Schott is crucial. First, he had its title, providing him with a limited description of its contents: res gestae on the one hand and impensae on the other. He had only the last part of the first section of the text (titles and honours) and the first part of the last section (deeds of war and conquest). His main text was the middle section of the Res gestae appearing on the third and fourth columns of the Ankara monument, the survey of expenses. This he had in its entirety, the only coherent portion of the Res gestae available to him. While Schott knew he had a lacunose text, he had no means of knowing just what was missing. The title’s reference to 13 Laevinus Torrentius, Commentarii in C. Suetonii Tranquilli XII. Caesares (Antwerp, 14 Ibid. 480. 1578), 217. 15 Ibid. 217. 16 Schott, ‘Scholia’, De vita et moribus imperatorum, 69.

122

Paul Nelles

impensae and the long middle section documenting Augustus’ expenses must have dominated Schott’s thinking on the Res gestae. Schott also brought testimony to bear upon the publication of the Monumentum Ancyranum. He knew from Suetonius (Aug. 101) and from the inscription’s use of the first person that the ‘breviarium’ had been written by Augustus himself. But how had it come to be inscribed on a monument at Ankara? Suetonius again furnished a partial answer. His reference to ‘rationes imperii’ at Caligula 16 informed Schott that though the rationes were proposed by Augustus, they were only published under Tiberius. From Tacitus Schott was able to introduce testimony bearing on a libellus proclaimed and published by Tiberius (Annales 1. 11). Tacitus clearly states that it was written in Augustus’ own hand. Schott inferred that it was similar in nature to both the rationes imperii mentioned by Suetonius and the Ankara inscription. Tacitus even provided a summary of the contents of the libellus: ‘opes publicae continebantur, quantum civium sociorumque in armis, quot classes, regna, provinciae, tributa aut vectigalia, et necessitates ac largitiones. Quae cuncta sua manu perscripserat Augustus addideratque consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii.’ ‘It contained an assessment of the strength of the state: the number of citizens and allies in arms, the number of the fleets, protectorates, and provinces, taxes direct and indirect, the amount of necessary expenses and largess. All drafted by Augustus in his own hand and appended with an instruction to confine the empire to its present limits.’ Schott conjectured that the libellus had originally been erected in the Forum (of Augustus) at Rome and had been carried off elsewhere, namely Asia Minor, in consequence of the barbarian invasions.17 The libellus thus provided an important example of a text which appeared to parallel Schott’s inscription. More directly, he used Tacitus’ testimony on the libellus to illustrate the meaning of breviarium: a document bearing the stamp of imperial authority, containing an inventory of provinces, the strength and position of the army, public acts, imperial largesse, taxes, and civil and military offices. The wealth of testimony amassed by Schott was more than enough to confirm the text before him as a fragment of the breviarium mentioned by Suetonius at Augustus 101. By and large, this is how the Res gestae would be viewed by all who followed in Schott’s footsteps: as an important piece of imperial accounting. 17 Schott, ‘Scholia’, De vita et moribus imperatorum, 69: ‘Haec in foro proposita fuisse verisimile est: post Gothica direptione urbis Romae alio translata.’

The Measure of Rome

123

Though mistaken, Schott’s identification of the Res gestae set the tone for its later reception. The Res gestae offered facts and figures in abundance: what more could be desired of any historical source? Yet, whereas Schott was content to identify and publish the Res gestae, Justus Lipsius put it to work. Lipsius was more interested in what the inscription revealed about Rome than in what light it might shed on the career and personality of Augustus. Later, Lipsius gained access to copies of the inscription independently of Schott’s printed text. He had Busbecq’s transcription directly, and Veranzio’s as well. The latter was procured by the botanist Carolus Clusius, a colleague at the University of Leiden, from Veranzio’s nephew. Lipsius had his copy from Clusius at a relatively late date, 1587 or early 1588. Veranzio’s transcription took account of line divisions, character form, word separation, and other epigraphic characteristics of the original. It had been compared by Clusius with a transcription of the Res gestae at Vienna in the possession of Sambucus, and it had also been compared by Joannes Leunclavius with another transcription at Constantinople made at Ankara around 1584 by two German nobles. Lipsius would eventually publish the Ankara Res gestae in the Auctarium to his 1588 edition of Smetius’ Inscriptiones, rendering it not only more generally accessible but much improved as well. He illustrated the inscription with brief notes. Curiously, in the Auctarium he did not mention Suetonius’ testimony on the Res gestae.18 Lipsius studied the Monumentum Ancyranum well before he published it. He used the inscription—the year following its publication by Schott—as evidence in his Electa of 1580, a miscellany of short ‘select’ or ‘choice’ essays on the legal, political, social, religious, and literary history of Rome. In form the Electa bears more than a passing resemblance to the Essais of Montaigne published the same year. And as a piece of antiquarian scholarship the Electa represents an important break with the tradition of variae lectiones represented by the Adversaria of Adrien Turne`be, the last instalment of which also appeared in 1580. The variae lectiones genre consisted of a hotchpotch of passages from classical texts, suggested emendations, and assaults of varying sophistication upon the edifice of classical culture. Lipsius’ Electa, by contrast, was ordered topically and tackled specific problems encountered not in classical texts, but in the study of ancient history. It represents his first sustained foray into Roman studies after his 1574 edition of Tacitus. In it, Lipsius 18

Lipsius, Auctarium (as in n. 4), 19–22.

124

Paul Nelles

clearly signals the degree to which study of the Roman past was bound up with contemporary legal scholarship. Many of the individual books of the Electa are dedicated to members of the French legal and antiquarian circles frequented by Schott, such as Claude Dupuy, Pierre Pithou, Jacques Cujas, and Joseph Scaliger. In 1580 Lipsius considered the Res gestae an important imperial source. Unlike Schott, he used the Res gestae as evidence. At this point Lipsius appears to have known the Res gestae through Schott’s edition alone. He confirmed Schott’s identification of the Res gestae as the Suetonian ‘breviarium’, referring to it as either ‘Breviarium rerum gestarum Augusti’ or simply ‘Breviarium Augusti’. Lipsius made no appeal to Suetonius’ description of the text (Aug. 101. 4) in assessing the inscription in the Electa. Within the context in which he used the Res gestae, Lipsius’ identification of the monument—breviarium Augusti— can be rendered either ‘a review of the acts of Augustus’ or ‘the accounts of Augustus’.19 Both are consonant with the context in which he uses the inscription: in discussion of the frumentatio and census. One of the longer essays in the Electa is devoted to a discussion of Roman corn distribution, the frumentatio, for which the Res gestae continues to furnish valuable evidence. Lipsius had the main passages of the inscription bearing on the frumentatio, though in his version he lacked the testimony bearing on Augustus’ acceptance of the cura annonae (RG 5, 1–2) in 22 bc. The Monumentum Ancyranum augmented and confirmed the literary evidence on the problem Lipsius gleaned from Suetonius and Cassius Dio. Given the modern consensus that ‘the evidence for the administration of the distributions under the Empire . . . is by no means full and has to be interpreted’,20 Lipsius’ attempt to provide a coherent account of Roman corn distribution is of considerable interest. He related the origins and fortune of the frumentatio under kings, consuls, and emperors, arguing that it had always been used as a political tool to manipulate the plebs.21 He charted its evolution from a sporadic practice to its enshrinement in law, and he described the distribution of the frumentatio by aediles in the ‘ancient republic’ and subsequently by aediles cereales under Caesar.22 He covered 19 Lipsius, Electa, in Iusti Lipsii Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Antwerp, 1637), i. 246. Cf. 287: ‘Quod non condiderit lustrum: testis mihi extra suspicionem omnem et calumniam lapis, in quo Breviarium Augusti. Ibi sic de se Augustus [quoting RG 8 ( ¼ 2, 8)].’ 20 G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1980), 158. 21 Electa, 244: ‘Frumentaria largitio antiquissima apud Romanos; et fere semper conciliandae plebi.’ 22 Ibid. 247–8. Lipsius’ sources are Pomponius, De orig. juris; Dio 43.

The Measure of Rome

125

the system introduced by Augustus whereby four ex-praetors were chosen to supervise the distribution of grain, later known as praefecti frumenti dandi, though called by Lipsius curatores.23 Lipsius argued that the creation of the Praefectus annonae was due to political pressures encountered during the famine of 23–22 bc.24 He also discussed the tesserae frumentariae which entitled the bearer to free corn—the curatores could not be expected to hand out corn directly, Lipsius pointed out, a base and moreover annoying task. They merely checked the tesserae which were then taken to the horrea or granaries to be exchanged for corn. Lipsius conjectured that the tickets were either of wood or lead, inscribed with some sort of symbol.25 And he also explored the function of the frumentarii or secret police, who terrorized those in receipt of subsidized corn, the plebs frumentaria. Lipsius began his essay on corn distribution by stating that one of the most important aspects of the frumentatio was its use in estimating the greatness and wealth of Rome.26 He differentiated between the census and the recensus, or evaluation of means. The frumentatio was based on the recensus, defined as an ‘examen et disquisitio brevis’ of the plebs frumentaria, first undertaken by Caesar.27 The Ankara inscription offered a key piece of evidence. There, Augustus states that in his thirteenth consulate he had made cash disbursements to the plebs frumentaria, and that he had raised the number of the plebs frumentaria to some two hundred thousand.28 Though this was not an inconsiderable Electa, 248; cf. Rickman, Corn Supply (as in n. 20), 179–80. Electa, 248. The first Praefectus annonae was appointed sometime between 8 and 14 bc; see Rickman, Corn Supply, 63–4, 74, 80. 25 Electa, 248: ‘Ratio distribuendi per tesseras erat. Non enim frumentum ipsum a curatoribus (vile et magnarum molestiarum munus fuisset), sed tesseras frumentarias sive symbola quaedam in ligno aut plumbo capiebant: quibus acceptis, ire iis licebat ad horrea publica petitum frumentum.’ Cf. Rickman, Corn Supply, 186, 244–9. 26 Electa, 244: ‘Siqua res alia, ex qua intellegi magnitudo et opes populi Romani possit: ea, me iudice, frumentatio est.’ 27 Ibid. 246: ‘Non enim censum aut lustrum egit Caesar, . . . sed recensum, id est, examen et disquisitionem brevem in eos qui iure aut iniuria capiebant publicum frumentum.’ Cf. Rickman, Corn Supply, 181. 28 Electa, 246: ‘Ita Augustus, qui inter firmamenta imperii habuit Annonam . . . auxit numerum eorum qui frumentum caperent, et reduxit ad millia ducenta. Id, praeter in Dione, diserte scriptum aut scalptum in lapidibus priscis qui Ancyrae conspiciuntur in Asia minori: quibus comprehensum Breviarium rerum gestarum Augusti. Ait ibi de se Augustus [quoting RG 15 (3, 19–21)]: ‘‘consul tertium decimum sexagenos denarios plebi que tum frumentum publicum acce dedi ea millia hominum paullo plura quam ducenta fuerunt.’’ Vide quam haec convenienter ad Dionem, etiam in pecuniae summa, quam tamen ut ambiguam ponit Dio. Tempus etiam eius recensus ex lapide clarum, videlicet in XIII. consulatu Augusti: at Dio aliquot annis ante posuit, C. Antistio 23 24

126

Paul Nelles

figure, Lipsius was able to point out that well under one-tenth of the Roman population was in fact in receipt of free grain. Lipsius had also learnt from the Res gestae that in the census taken in Augustus’ sixth consulate (28 bc) some four million people had been registered, and he cited this figure here in estimating the percentage of the population in receipt of the frumentatio.29 This part of the Res gestae was quoted again by Lipsius in a separate discussion of the census.30 The Res gestae was not simply another ancient text for Lipsius. While he had other sources for Augustus’ census figure of four million, the confirmation found in the Res gestae placed the figure beyond all suspicion.31 In his discussion of the frumentatio Lipsius was careful to compare the evidence of the Res gestae with Cassius Dio. While the inscription amplified the information available in Dio, significantly Dio did not contradict it. The inscription furnished some scarce figures. Dio on the other hand provided independent confirmation of a source suspect due to the identity of its author and the circumstances of its composition. As the population numbers in Augustus and Dio are in agreement, Lipsius suggested, there was no reason not to accept Augustus’ claim of giving 60 denarii to each, a figure not mentioned by Dio. In the Electa and elsewhere, Lipsius’ use of the Res gestae was strictly antiquarian. That is, he nowhere appears to have reflected on the possible political significance of the inscription. The absence of a political analysis of the Res gestae is thrown into relief by Lipsius’ 1581 Commentarius to Tacitus. Already by 1581, Lipsius had changed his mind on the status of the Res gestae as a breviarium. In his commentary to the passage from Tacitus adduced by Schott (Annales 1. 11)—‘cum proferri libellum recitarique iussit’—Lipsius noted that the libellus published by Tiberius is the same little book which Suetonius called a ‘rationarium imperii’. It had contained, he explained, ‘rationes publicae’. He added that Suetonius elsewhere called it a ‘breviarium imperii’, and he quoted Vetere, et D. Laelio consulibus. Mirum, nisi Augusto de se credendum, prae Dione.’ The conjecture for the lacuna in the passage from the Res gestae is Lipsius’. Cf. Dio 55. 10. 1. 29 Electa, 246–7: ‘Ducenta igitur millia frumentantium sub Augusto. Ingens numerus: nec tamen in eo omnes cives. multum abest; vix, inquam, decima civium pars. Nam census illa aetate ordinarius, ad quadragiens centum millia civium.’ Cf. RG 8 (2, 4). 30 Ibid. 287, quoting RG 8 (2, 4). 31 Ibid.: ‘Reipsa quam grandis numerus civium illa aetate fuerit: facile coniicimus vel ex censibus Augusti; qui omnes ultra quadragies centena millia, ut ex lapide illo clarum, quem publicavit amicus noster A. Schottus, suggerente Augerio Busbequio legato olim Byzantino.’

The Measure of Rome

127

the entire passage at Augustus 101 bearing on the three Augustan texts. He further suggested that the publication of the libellus by Tiberius amounted to a statement of the condition of the empire as inherited from Augustus, almost a receipt. Lipsius’ purpose here is to distinguish the Ankara inscription as a text distinct from the libellus. Having introduced the testimony from Suetonius, he cited the title of the Ankara inscription, and compared Suetonius’ description of the ‘index rerum gestarum’ as ‘in aheneis tabulis’ to the ‘in duabus ahenis pilis’ of the Monumentum Ancyranum. On the basis of this testimony Lipsius argued that Suetonius’ ‘index rerum gestarum’ was identical to the monument discovered by Busbecq.32 Here he referred neither to Schott’s identification of the monument, nor to his publication of the inscription. Nonetheless, Schott stood corrected: the Monumentum Ancyranum did not correspond to Suetonius’ breviarium. The title of the inscription, as well as the testimony bearing on its disposition in Rome, corresponded rather more closely to Suetonius’ ‘index’. Lipsius nowhere comments on the status of the Res gestae as a piece of imperial autobiography. The Res gestae does not loom large in the Tacitus, to be cited only once again in a comparison with Cassius Dio. There is nothing of the heavy use made of it in the Electa or in the later 1598 Admiranda, which we will turn to shortly. Of course, the noninclusion of the Res gestae in Lipsius’ edition of Tacitus might be explained by the lack of opportunity to do so: Tacitus does not discuss Augustus in any detail. Yet given the disparate views of empire furnished by Tacitus and the Res gestae and the fact that both texts were popularized largely through Lipsius’ own efforts, it is worth exploring their relationship to wider currents of Lipsius’ Roman scholarship. Lipsius’ rather enthusiastic handling of the Res gestae in the Electa and Admiranda illuminates several neglected aspects of his edition of Tacitus and raises further, more general questions regarding his antiquarian scholarship. To begin, what was the purpose of the Commentarius? Lipsius first published his text of Tacitus in 1574, accompanied by textual notes to 32 Justus Lipsius in C. Cornelii Taciti Opera quae exstant (Antwerp, 1607), 12 n. 84 (to Annales 1. 11, ‘cum proferri libellum’): ‘Libellum eumse, quem Suetonius Rationarium imperii non incommode adpellat. scilicet quia rationes eo publicae continebantur. Videbatur autem prolatione libelli flexus paullum Tiberius, et imperium accepturus, cum curas susciperet. Vocat idem auctor etiam Breviarium imperii, cap. ultimo: ‘‘De tribus . . . residuis’’. Ubi nota mihi etiam, Indicem hunc rerum Augusti, certo illum esse cuius exemplar Ancyrae positum, et curante nobilissimo Busbequio, excriptum. Nam titulus in ea ipsa tabula iste: ‘‘rerum gestarum diui Augusti . . . ’’. De eadem re loqui utrumque, id quidem clarum est.’

128

Paul Nelles

both the Annales and the Historiae. The Liber commentarius finally appeared in 1581, and covers only the Annales. His commentary to the Annales was expanded in subsequent editions, while his notes to the Historiae remained brief ‘notae’ through to his last reworking of 1607. The 1581 Commentarius should thus be considered as distinct from the notae to Lipsius’ first Tacitus edition of 1574, which were entirely devoted to textual matters.33 While the Liber commentarius absorbed the earlier notae on the Annales, Lipsius’ reworking of his material was not simply of greater bulk, but of an entirely different order. As we have seen with Schott’s very different approaches to the Epitome and the Caesares, the purpose of commentaries to classical texts varied, depending on the status of the text and the intentions of its editor. Lipsius’ Commentarius is commonly, and correctly, considered an historical commentary to the Annales. Yet given the acknowledged importance of Tacitus in Lipsius’ political philosophy, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the Commentarius. Momigliano observed long ago that Lipsius’ commentary was, quite pointedly, not political in nature:34 there is little tacitismo in Lipsius’ Tacitus. Study of the place of Tacitus in Lipsius’ political and moral thought tends to look outside his Tacitus, for the most part to the Politica.35 Lipsius was not the first to publish a commentary on Tacitus. A few clues to his purpose can be gleaned by considering the character of previous commentaries. Apart from textual notes supplying variants and explaining conjectures, only three major commentaries had appeared before 1581. All were written from the perspective of Roman Law: the first, by Andrea Alciato, appeared in 1517; another, by Emilio Ferretti, who taught law at various French institutions, in 1551; and a third in 1569, by the Lyon antiquarian Marcus Vertranius. The commentaries of Alciato and Vertranius were probably more influential. Alciato’s is characteristic: his first two notes, both lengthy, are devoted to aspects of the Roman monetary system. The remaining notes comb Tacitus for nuggets of antiquarian lore and use him to explain points of Roman Law. Vertranius, on the other hand, had an extensive knowledge of inscriptions, and he employed them profusely in annotating the text of 33 On the evolution of Lipsius’ Tacitus, see M. Morford, Stoics and Neostoics (Princeton, 1993), 143–55; Nelles, ‘Lipsius’ (as in n. 10), 240–4. 34 A. Momigliano, ‘The First Political Commentary on Tacitus’ (1947), in Contributo (as in n. 6), 37–59. 35 See M. Morford, ‘Tacitean Prudentia and the Doctrines of Justus Lipsius’, in T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (eds.), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton, 1993), 129–51.

The Measure of Rome

129

Tacitus.36 In his own commentary Lipsius made use of many of the inscriptions introduced by Vertranius. As a whole, the legal commentaries do not pretend to explain the text of Tacitus: these are not schoolroom asides. This trait is shared by Lipsius, who only very occasionally condescends to provide the sense of a passage. Yet neither do the legal commentaries expand upon, still less contest, Tacitus’ historical narrative. Like the legal commentators, Lipsius did not look at Tacitus as a historian of the Roman empire. Rather, he viewed the text of Tacitus as a source dating from the empire which could be used to illuminate the Roman world. The legal humanists sought to understand Roman Law in a new way by apprehending how law functioned within the society it was meant to regulate. This was the point of view seized upon by Lipsius and inverted: how did Roman society actually work? The laws of Rome—to which Lipsius devotes a considerable amount of space in the Commentarius—thus become one kind of source among others to be brought to bear on the study of Rome as a historical entity. Lipsius’ commentary was more detailed and more comprehensive than any of its predecessors. Its coverage of the Roman world was extensive: legislative and fiscal matters, topics in civil and military organization (including the frumentatio), brief disquisitions on more recondite areas of Roman life such as the prison system and public games. Much of Lipsius’ subsequent antiquarian scholarship can be traced to his early work on Tacitus. Even his 1594 De cruce, with its riveting illustrations of crucifixion techniques, has its origin in his discussion of crux and patibulum at Annales 14. 33 in the Commentarius.37 However, the Commentarius was not simply bread and circuses. It was meant to aid the wider moral, social, and cultural instruction of the reader. It was one thing to turn to Tacitus, as Lipsius did in his Politica, for guidance through the moral maze of the politics of court and empire. It was quite another, as he did in the Commentarius, to use Tacitus as a belvedere from which to view with enormous energy and 36 The three legal commentaries mentioned here are conveniently gathered in the variorum edition published by Janus Gruter, C. Cornelii Taciti Opera quae extant ex recognitione Iani Gruteri (Frankfurt, 1607). On Alciato’s commentary, see the very limited discussion available in K. C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago, 1976), 84 ff. 37 Lipsius, Tacitus (Antwerp, 1614), 252 n. 100, where he refers the reader to De cruce. The note originated in a much longer discussion (absorbed in part by the De cruce) in the Curae secundae; cf. Lipsius, Tacitus (Leiden, 1588), 72–4. On the De cruce see J. De Landtsheer, ‘Justus Lipsius’s De cruce and the Reception of the Fathers’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 2 (2000), 97–122.

130

Paul Nelles

enthusiasm—not traits generally associated with Tacitus—the civil and military apparatus of the early empire. It is not simply that Tacitus, in Mommsen’s dictum, was the most unmilitary of historians, or, as Lipsius himself pointed out, that Tacitus had little to say on the waging of war or agrarian and grain laws.38 Quite simply, Lipsius’ commentary flies in the face of the tone and purpose of almost every page of the Annales. The key to Lipsius’ commentary perhaps lies in the first pages of Tacitus. While nominally beginning with the death of Augustus, the Annales undertake a brief evaluation of the Augustan achievement which, Tacitus grudgingly admitted, brought peace and stability to Rome. Tacitus’ purpose, of course, was to contrast the calm surface of Augustan Rome with the innate instability and inevitable moral corruption of the Principate instanced in the faction and fighting which erupted after Augustus’ death, and which Tacitus minutely chronicled. This was by no means lost on Lipsius. He arguably took Tacitus very seriously: if the outcome of Augustus’ state-building was a long period (by both ancient and modern standards) of peace, stability, and prosperity, the key to maintaining these public goods lay not in cultivating a nostalgia for republican times and values, but in fostering the civil and military administration which had made the Augustan state a success. Thus in the first pages of the Annales and for almost the only time in Lipsius’ Tacitus, Lipsius and Tacitus shared a common purpose: a survey of the Augustan achievement. Why then did Lipsius fail to use the Res gestae in his Tacitus? It is quite possible that he chose to ignore the inscription on the grounds that the monument was open to a cynical, ‘Tacitean’ analysis. And in general, Lipsius veered away from Tacitus’ ad hominem approach: Lipsius knew that to make his point stick, he would need to be a historian of empire, not emperors. He thus set out to document what made the early empire a success; again and again in the Commentarius, it is the Rome of Augustus and, to a lesser extent, Tiberius to which he recalls the reader. Lipsius’ commentary thus stands as a positive historical evaluation of the Roman imperial state in the shadow of a narrative that was positively scathing on the subject. This perhaps explains his silence on the personal lives of the emperors and Tacitus’ account of the moral decay of Roman life and society: these are simply not relevant to his purpose. And this feature of 38 Lipsius, Tacitus (Antwerp, 1585), sig.  2r–v: ‘Non adfert ille [i.e. Tacitus] vobis speciosa bella aut triumphos, quorum finis sola voluptas legentis sit; non seditiones aut conciones tribunicias; agrarias frumentariasve leges; quae nihil ad saeculi huius usum.’

The Measure of Rome

131

Lipsius’ commentary is what most clearly distinguishes it from earlier commentaries. Where the legal commentaries are entirely casual and remain detached from the text of Tacitus, taking much from Tacitus but adding little to him, Lipsius engages Tacitus on the fundamental issue raised in the Annales: the condition of Rome under the empire. Tacitus addressed this problem in moral terms; Lipsius in terms of the state administrative apparatus. Further, Lipsius’ primary interest in the early empire might also explain the absence of an extended commentary to the later Historiae. Lipsius did not so much take Tacitus to task as, like the modern bureaucrat (or social historian), bury him under a minor avalanche of facts and figures. Though the Res gestae remained mute in Lipsius’ Tacitus, it was given a full hearing in his most popular antiquarian work, the Admiranda, sive de magnitudine Romana of 1598. Here, Lipsius returned to the kind of direct use of the Res gestae he had initiated in his 1580 Electa. The Admiranda was an intentional vulgarization in popular dialogue form of much of Lipsius’ earlier work. Though appreciated by G. Oestreich for what it was—a fine piece of cultural history—it is easily overlooked as containing work presented much more exactly elsewhere.39 It was dedicated to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Albert of Austria—as ‘Imperatoris filius’. In the Admiranda Lipsius sought to expound the administrative principles and the general mechanics of the Roman empire for the benefit of the modern statesman and his advisers, much as he had done in a slightly different vein in his popular political manual, the Politica. In so doing, he lays bare many of the unstated presuppositions of much of his earlier antiquarian scholarship. Roman studies for Lipsius had a serious moral purpose: it was through emulation of the Roman state that peace and stability could be achieved in the modern world. The Admiranda surveys five aspects of the Roman empire: its fines and copiae, or geographical limits, civil and military installations, and the number of its population, the subject of Book 1; its opes or financial resources, documented in Book 2; its opera or buildings, fora, roads, acquaducts, and bridges, enumerated in Book 3; and the virtutes of 39 Lipsius, Admiranda, sive de magnitudine Romana, in Opera, iii. 373, ‘Ad lectorem’: ‘Admiranda in Imperiis, Lector, quae olim colligere coepimus, nunc disponere, ut vides, et vulgare. Orsi sumus a Romano, quod quattuor his libellis damus: an totum? negabit aliquis, et scio esse quae possint addi.’ Cf. G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. B. Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, trans. D. McLintock (Cambridge, 1982), 61.

132

Paul Nelles

its people (though not, significantly, its rulers), studied in Book 4. More than this, in the Admiranda Lipsius presents the empire as something a good deal greater than the sum of its parts. The miscellaneous and eclectic format of the Electa and the Commentarius to Tacitus is here transformed into a systematic measure of Rome. Can it simply be a matter of coincidence that in its structure the Admiranda so closely resembles the Augustan libellus detailing opes publicae described by Tacitus? If not, this is ‘imperial’ history on a grand scale. Organized under five comprehensive headings, the Admiranda undertakes an inventory of the human and financial resources of Rome. Though a popular work, it managed to convey a good deal of information to the reader. The title was an ironical allusion to the ‘greatness of Rome’ retailed in popular handbooks of the mirabilia of the ancient and medieval Urbs.40 On Lipsius’ telling, Rome’s greatness, the very marvel of Rome, was subject to empirical measure. It was to be found in such humdrum matters as corn distribution, stable finance, an efficient civil administration, a disciplined army, and widespread patronage. To a greater degree than in any of his other works, Lipsius placed Augustus at the head of this achievement. This was the Augustus of the Res gestae. Lipsius put the Res gestae to work twice in Book 2 of the Admiranda. The first instance is found in a discussion of the aurum coronarium or coronary gold customarily offered to the emperor. Lipsius explained how the practice, probably imported to Rome from Greece, had originated in the presentation of a crown of gold to a victor by comrades and allies. The crown was gradually replaced by a cash tribute.41 Lipsius quoted the Res gestae to show that Augustus in his fifth consulate had refused the aurum coronarium from Italian municipia and coloniae, as he subsequently did as emperor whenever it was offered. As he had done in the Electa, Lipsius confirmed Augustus’ testimony with that of the supposedly impartial Greek witness Cassius Dio.42 40 On the place of the Admiranda within the early modern literature on Rome, see M. Laureys, ‘ ‘‘The Grandeur that was Rome’’: Scholarly Analysis and Pious Awe in Lipsius’ Admiranda’, in K. Enenkel et al. (eds.), Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2001), 123–46. 41 Ibid. 401–2: ‘Origo eius [sc. auri coronarii], ut socii et amici, victori Imperatori Coronas aureas offerrent, quasi gratulantes, et meritum ei caput cingentes. Itaque primo quidem Coronae ipsae datae, aut missae: postea invaluit, ut pro iis pecunia offerretur. . . . Mos plane vetus, et a Graecis, nisi erro, ad Romanos imitatione translatus.’ 42 Ibid. 402–3, quoting RG 21 (3, 27–9).

The Measure of Rome

133

The second occurrence of the Monumentum Ancyranum in the Admiranda is more revealing. Lipsius uses it extensively in documenting Augustus’ largesse in a chapter devoted to Augusti Principis dona. Though in Busbecq’s transcription Lipsius had an extremely lacunose text, he had more or less intact Augustus’ enumeration of his periodic and not inconsiderable cash payments and corn distribution to the plebs.43 In the Admiranda, Lipsius offered a coherent reading of the record of Augustus’ disbursements in what amounts to a point-by-point commentary on this section of the Res gestae. He acknowledged that many of the resources at Augustus’ disposal were supplied from civil war booty. Countering the objection that Augustus’ vast accumulation of wealth must have ruined the towns and provinces, Lipsius used the testimony of the Res gestae to argue that in the peace and accompanying prosperity which ensued after the war, Augustus was careful to repay and restore what, in more unfortunate times, had been seized by force of arms.44 The lesson for the modern ruler could not be more plain. What remains a puzzle, of course, is the absence of any attempt to subject the Res gestae to a political interpretation. It cannot have been the case that the political character of the Res gestae was simply lost on Lipsius. Who better than Tacitus, after all, to have woken Lipsius to the political and historical significance of the Res gestae, a text bound up with Augustus’ self-presentation and containing a rather unambiguous apology for empire? Yet as we have seen, Lipsius’ use of the Res gestae is entirely consonant with his antiquarian use of Tacitus. Lipsius was a serious student of the Roman state, and much of his antiquarian work was given over to an elucidation of the workings of Roman civil and military administration, of which the Admiranda is only the most egregious example. What then is the relationship between Lipsius’ antiquarian scholarship and his political thought? This is perhaps the most serious question raised by the early reception of the Res gestae. Certainly he did not hesitate to interpret the evidence on the Roman past available to him to its furthest limits. His achievement, both in his use of the Res gestae and more generally, lies in the great leap of historical imagination which allowed him to apprehend and even more 43

Ibid. 411–12, quoting RG 15 (3, 1–21). Ibid. 411: ‘Haec praemia in civili bello iis sunt: cum homines ut ad imperium veniant, imperium paene ipsum donant. Quid donant? perdunt volui dicere: et quomodo tot isti pecuniarum cumuli, sine aperta pernicie provincialium civiumque, colligi potuere? Sane id factum est: sed Pax postea, cum copiae suo cornu, reposuit omnia et reparavit. Enimvero Augustus, ut coeperam dicere, in Principatu quoque perliberalis.’ 44

134

Paul Nelles

remarkably recreate for his readers the complex mechanics of Roman life and society. For Lipsius the Res gestae served above all as a signal post of the greatness of Rome and may well have been intended to provide, along with Cassius Dio and Velleius Paterculus,45 an antidote to Tacitus’ view of the empire. Yet the Augustus of the Res gestae is not in conflict with the pessimistic tone of the Annales, and it was certainly not Lipsius’ intention to suppress or deny the vicissitudes of Roman history. He did, after all, choose Tacitus for a reason. But the Roman state Lipsius excavated from the Res gestae might serve as a counter-model. From the messy standpoint of northern Europe in the late sixteenth century— war-torn, brutalized, and in political turmoil—the society described by Tacitus was a looming reality. Lipsius extended an alternative—one which was to be found not so much in the person of Augustus as in the state he created. 45 On Lipsius’ use of Velleius Paterculus, printed with the 1600 and 1607 editions of Tacitus, see Nelles, ‘Lipsius’ (as in n. 10), 243–4.

4 Critice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and the Rise of the Notion of Historical Criticism Benedetto Bravo

The purpose of this essay is to call attention to one of the components of the multifarious cultural process that engendered the notion of criticism as an intellectual approach or an intellectual operation indispensable for any kind of knowledge aspiring to objective validity. I shall try to show how scholars professionally studying ancient (Greek and Latin, pagan and Christian) texts in the last quarter of the sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century used the word critice (or critica), how its meaning and function changed during that time, and how, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century (during the great mutation that Paul Hazard called ‘the crisis of European consciousness’), the rather confused conglomerate of notions that had formed around the term critice as a result of the efforts and aspirations of viri docti of that craft, influenced Much of the research embodied in the present paper was done in the spring and summer of 1981, when I was in Wolfenbu¨ttel as a Stipendiat of the Herzog August Bibliothek. The idea that I then formed of the history of the term and of the notion of critice went into hibernation, wrapped up in the sheets of a Stipendiaten-Referat, while I worked on subjects remote from this one. An invitation from Christopher Ligota to speak about critice in his History of Scholarship seminar at the Warburg Institute, and subsequently to contribute to the present volume, encouraged me to go back to my unfinished research. I did what I could to collect more material on critice and to think over the whole question afresh. I know that I have not done enough. I am grateful to both editors for their scrutiny of my text, help with the English, and bibliographical assistance. I profited from the criticisms of the anonymous readers of Oxford University Press. I dedicate this paper to the memory of Sebastiano Timpanaro, a scholar whom I met more than fifty years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Pisa, and whose books and conversation stimulated my interest in the history of classical studies.

136

Benedetto Bravo

other strands of European culture, contributing to the rise of a new notion, that of historical criticism, for denoting which the old term critice (usually in the guise of critique, criticism, Kritik, etc.) turned out to be convenient. I have concentrated on those scholars of the period 1575–1650 who called themselves critici, and their professional activity critice, and who tried—with varying degrees of success—to build a theory of critice. I have left out those scholars who called themselves, or whom we call, antiquarians, and who professed to study antiquitas or antiquitates of the ancient and/or medieval world.1 This does not mean that I have forgotten them. I know, having learnt this from Krzysztof Pomian long ago, that the ideal of objective historical knowledge and writing—of which the notion of historical criticism is an essential element—was born in the respublica litteraria of the seventeenth century, mainly as a result of the work of antiquarians and of historians of the erudite kind.2 The rise of the notion of literary criticism and of art criticism will remain outside the scope of this paper. This may seem surprising and suspect, especially as regards literary criticism, for a great many of the texts making up ancient Greek and Latin litterae fall within our notion of literature. However, the scholars I am particularly interested in (above all Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon) worked not only on such texts, but also, and far more often, on texts to which our notion of literature applies only partially, if at all: Varro, Festus, Jerome’s Chronicon, Strabo, Athenaeus, etc. This holds true for many of their predecessors too. Politian, for instance, was certainly a respectable poet, but as a scholar, he worked on ancient philosophical, juridical, philological, antiquarian texts at least as much as on ancient poetry. Rudolf Pfeiffer maintained that classical scholarship was born twice, in the third century bc and in the 1 A classic study is A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), in id., Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 67–106. See also Momigliano’s The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, published posthumously (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), ch. 3, esp. pp. 54–8. A partly different approach has been proposed by G. Salmeri, ‘L’arcipelago antiquario’, in E. Vaiani (ed.), Dell’antiquaria e dei suoi metodi: Atti delle giornate di studio, Pisa 1998 (published in 2001) ( ¼ Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ser. 4, Quaderni, 2 (1998)), 256–80. 2 In 1966, or 1967, I read in typescript K. Pomian’s doctoral dissertation ‘Przeszłos ´c´ jako przedmiot wiedzy’ [‘The past as an object of knowledge’]. It was ready for the press in March 1968—but this was the ‘Polish March’, a catastrophe for thousands of Poles and for Polish culture; the book was not published until 1992. Pomian’s dissertation, together with Momigliano’s ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ and S. Timpanaro’s Genesi del metodo del Lachmann, are at the origin of my excursion into the world of early modern viri docti.

Critice and Historical Criticism

137

fifteenth century ad, and that on both occasions it was engendered by the love of poetry.3 I should rather say that in both instances it was engendered by the desire for an accurate reading and understanding of ancient texts of all kinds and for accurate knowledge about ‘the ancients’ (ofl palaio‹, veteres). Anyway, as regards scholarly ‘critici’ of the period 1575–1650, even if they considered ‘judgement’ (‘iudicium’) concerning the poetic or rhetorical quality of individual passages or of entire works to belong to critice, this was in their opinion just one of its tasks. Moreover, what scholars did in this respect had no appeal for those among their contemporaries who rated specialized and professional learning lower than general, non-professional education of the kind that equipped one for intelligent and pleasant conversation: these people considered taste, and therefore literary judgement, to be their prerogative. In his book on the ‘history of literary criticism from Quintilian to Thomasius’, H. Jaumann devotes a chapter to ars critica and critique mondaine, in which he discusses the work of classical scholars of the sixteenth and of the first half of the seventeenth century as a pattern of intellectual activity characteristic of the period preceding the rise of the notion and practice of literary criticism.4 His topic is critice in relation to literary criticism, just as mine here is critice in relation to historical criticism. This complementarity is welcome but, unfortunately, Jaumann’s work is marred by imperfect knowledge of ancient grammatice, which these scholars were constantly confronting;5 in particular, he tends to blur the distinction between ancient grammatice and ancient rhetoric. I tacitly dissent from Jaumann on many points. Interested readers can compare and form their own opinion. The topic I am going to discuss is, as far as I know, largely unexplored. In work done so far on the history of the term criticism (critique, Kritik) 3 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, 1968) (hereafter Pfeiffer, History I); id., History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976) (hereafter Pfeiffer, History II). The excellent quality of these two books, especially of the first, which is certainly the better, is not in doubt. But the masterly and incredibly rich sketch by U. von WilamowitzMoellendorff, Geschichte der Philologie, 3rd edn. (1927, repr. Leipzig, 1959) (which draws not only on his reading and immense scholarly experience, but also on his Nachschrift of Otto Jahn’s lectures, which he had attended as an undergraduate in Bonn), seems to me more thought-enhancing. 4 H. Jaumann, Critica: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Literaturkritik zwischen Quintilian und Thomasius (Leiden, 1995), ch. 3 (‘Ars critica, critique mondaine: Spa¨thumanistische Krise und die Wendung der Kritik zur Aktualita¨t’), 158–226; see esp. the first section, pp. 158–81. 5 This shortcoming is particularly clear in a crucial passage, pp. 165–7.

138

Benedetto Bravo

little or no attention seems to have been paid to the aspect of late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century scholarship I am interested in.6 As to research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars and scholarship— let me single out honoris causa the admirably broad, thorough, and penetrating study by A. Grafton7—the meaning of critice or critica (ars critica) or critique in these centuries has been taken for granted,8 which does not seem to me to be justified; in particular, the question has not been asked in what relation the use of the term stood to the terminology and theory of scholarship that the scholars concerned could find in ancient texts. Nor is this terminology and this theory as well known as one would expect, considering that the subject has never ceased to interest classical scholars since the last quarter of the sixteenth century.9 I think it would not be useless to discuss it anew, but this cannot be fully done here.10 6 This is at any rate the impression I get from reading C. von Bormann’s and G. Tonelli’s contributions to the article ‘Kritik’ in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, iv (Basle, 1976), esp. cols. 1249–63, and K. Ro¨ttgers’ article ‘Kritik’ in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, iii (Stuttgart, 1982), 651–75. Exaggerated importance has been attached to the appearance of the term of critice, denoting the function of judging whether a sentence is true or false, in the anti-Aristotelian logic of Petrus Ramus. H. Jaumann’s book just cited does not even mention the problem of whether or how the notion of critice could have contributed to the rise of the notion of historical criticism. 7 A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, i: Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford, 1983) (hereafter Grafton, Scaliger I); ii: Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993) (hereafter Grafton, Scaliger II). At i. 6–7 and 181–2 he passes the problem by without seeing it; see also ii. 687–8 n. 18, where he quotes a crucial text but does not consider it in relation to Scaliger’s notion of critice. 8 In addition to A. Grafton’s work just cited, see especially J. Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique (Saint E´tienne, 1976); Pfeiffer, History II. The old handbook by J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, ii, 3rd edn. (New York, 1921, repr. New York, 1958), is indispensable for factual information on the life and work of individual scholars, but has not much to do with the history of ideas. 9 See e.g. K. Lehrs, Herodiani scripta tria emendatiora (Ko ¨ nigsberg, 1848), 377–401 (ch. ‘De vocabulis fillogov, grammatikv, kritikv’); the articles ‘Grammatikv’ and ‘Kritikv’ in the most recent, revised edition of the Thesaurus Graecae linguae (Paris, 1831–65); the articles concerning the same words, by A. Gudeman, in Real-Encyklopaedie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft; Pfeiffer, History I, passim; C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, iii (Cambridge, 1982), 414–91. As regards the kritiko‹ mentioned in several ¨ ber die Gedichte: fragments of Philodemus’ works, see especially Chr. Jensen, Philodemos U Fu¨nftes Buch (Berlin, 1923), esp. 136–40, 147–74; M. Pohlenz, ‘T¿ pr
pon: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des griechischen Geistes’, in Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Go¨ttingen (1933), 53–92, esp. 80–1; H. Gomoll, ‘Herakleodoros und die kritiko‹ bei Philodem’, Philologus, 91, nf 45 (1936), 373–84, esp. 380–4; D. M. Schenkeveld, ‘Ofl kritiko‹ in Philodemus’, Mnemosyne, 21 (1968), 176–214; J. I. Porter, ‘Ofl kritiko‹: A Reassessment’, in J. G. J. Abbenes (ed.), Greek Literary Theory after Aristotle: A Collection of Papers in Honour of D. M. Schenkeveld (Amsterdam, 1995), 83–109. 10 Apart from remarks in the present essay, see my ‘Felix Jacoby, Arnaldo Momigliano e l’erudizione antica’, in C. Ampolo (ed.), Aspetti dell’opera di Felix Jacoby: Atti del Seminario Arnaldo Momigliano, 20–21 dicembre 2002 (Pisa, 2006).

Critice and Historical Criticism

139

I am aware that the results of the research presented here are far from sufficient. However, what I have found seems to me to be worth communicating. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the best scholars professionally studying ancient Greek and Latin texts viewed their work as a continuation of the work of those ancient scholars who had been called, in their own time, grammatiko‹ or grammatici, only occasionally kritiko‹ or critici. This is particularly clear in the case of Politian: his two collections of Miscellanea were modelled on Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae.11 The model of scholarly research that Politian and other scholars of his time took over from Antiquity and that was handed down to the scholars I shall be concerned with, was centred on the literal interpretation of texts, and accorded little or no place to allegorical interpretation. It was the model established by Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries bc who chose to call themselves grammatiko‹ and were not interested in the allegorical interpretation practised by contemporary Stoic philosophers and Stoic scholars. This is all the more remarkable as in Politian’s time the theory of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture still flourished, and he certainly knew plenty of texts from Late Antiquity (Latin and Greek, pagan and Christian) representing an allegorical, directly or indirectly Neoplatonic, mode of interpretation. Though continuing the work of ancient grammatiko‹ early modern scholars did not apply to themselves the title grammatici, nor did they call their profession grammatice (grammatica). These terms were unwelcome to them, as they were currently applied (as they had been since Late Antiquity) to elementary teaching and teachers of Latin. As for the term kritikv, criticus, it took a long time before scholars accepted it as a title. This happened when they began to attribute to the word kritik a meaning and a function that it had probably never had in Antiquity. It is important to notice that in so far as it is used as an ellipsis not for kritik d¸namiv (‘critical faculty’),12 but for kritik t
cnh or t
cnh 11 See S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Padua, 1990), 5. Alessandro Perosa, lecturing on Politian’s first Centuria at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 1953, pointed to Aulus Gellius as Politian’s model. 12 Outside this domain  kritik (scil. t
cnh) occurs in Plato, Politicus, 260 b–c, where it refers to t¿ kritik¿n m
rov of  gnwstik ; but this is just an ephemeral improvisation. On the other hand, the adjective kritikv, meaning ‘capable of discerning’, is fairly frequent; for t¿ kritikn as ‘the power of discerning’, cf. Aristotle, De anima, 432a16. See moreover Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis in Opera (ed. Ku¨hn), 7. 1, p. 13: d¸namin . . . tn logik n te ka› kritikn nomazom
nhn, ‘the so-called power of

140

Benedetto Bravo

kritik (‘critical craft/art’),  kritik occurs only twice in what sixteenth-century scholars could read of ancient Greek literature: in a not very clear—indeed, I should think, a partly corrupt—passage of Sextus Empiricus’ Adversus mathematicos (1. 248; cf. 1. 79) reporting that a particular group of scholars had ‘subordinated’ grammatik to kritik ,13 and in a passage of Dio Chrysostom equating grammatik with what was earlier called kritik (On Homer, Or. 53. 1). The term t
cnh kritik in full is attested only once, and in a rather obscure place at that, a notice in the Suda concerning a grammatikv ‘of the Aristarchean school’, Pamphilus of Alexandria, otherwise unknown, to whom a T
cnh kritik is ascribed without further detail. We know today another text attesting kritik t
cnh, but this is a medieval scholion which, if I am not mistaken, was not known to the scholars I shall be dealing with: it is one of the Scholia Vaticana (cod. C) edited by A. Hilgard, Scholia in Dionysii Thracis artem grammaticam, in Grammatici Graeci, i, pt. 3 (Leipzig, 1901), 161, ll. 20–3 (about grammatik ): kritik d l
getai t
cnh k to kall‹stou m
rouv, ‘ kton’ gr sti ‘kr‹siv poihmtwn, ˜ d kllistn sti pntwn tØn n ti t
cnhi’, ‘it [i.e. grammar] is called kritik t
cnh from its finest part, for ‘‘the sixth part is the judgement of pieces of poetry, which is the finest part of all those of which this art is composed’’ ’ (a quotation from Dionysius Thrax). It is the medieval scholiast who says that grammar is called kritik t
cnh; Dionysius Thrax says no such thing. As for ancient Latin texts, one would expect to find critice or critica or ars critica, but none of these appears.14 The extraordinary career of the term kritik or critice, which, in its vernacular offspring critique, criticism, Kritik, critica, came to express a key notion in modern European culture, started from a largely arbitrary treatment of a handful of ancient Greek texts by Joseph Justus Scaliger about 1575. The arbitrariness of the philological operation by which this reasoning and of discerning’. Also of interest, Athenaeus, Dipnosoph., 1. 4 Kaibel (2 b): o˝k basan‹stwv o˝d’ k to paratucntov tv zht seiv poio¸menov ll’ v ni mlista met kritikv tinov ka› Swkratikv pist mhv. 13 For an emendation of this passage see Bravo, ‘Felix Jacoby’ (as in n. 10). 14 We cannot infer the existence of critice from Petronius, 58. 7, where Trimalchio says: ‘non didici geometrias, critica et alogias, þ menias’. (A number of conjectures have been proposed: ‘alogias, naenias’; ‘alogas naenias’; ‘alogias meras’; ‘alogas menias’. I think the first is the best.) We are expected to understand that Trimalchio has heard something about the critici, but does not know that the discipline they practise is called grammatice. Trimalchio’s use of the substantivized adjective ‘critica’ (neuter plural: ‘critical things’) has to be perceived as a manifestation of his lack of, and contempt for, culture, like his use of the plural ‘geometrias’ instead of the singular ‘geometriam’.

Critice and Historical Criticism

141

great scholar launched the word kritik or critice as a term applying to the very core of the kind of scholarship practised by him, and, even more, the willingness with which it was accepted by his contemporaries—in particular by another great scholar, Isaac Casaubon, who was more careful and conscientious than J. J. Scaliger—suggests a need felt at the time for a word that would help to conceptualize a more exacting approach to the study of the past. Let us begin by looking at a much earlier scholar, Politian. A. Wesseling has pointed out that in the first ‘centuria’ of his Miscellanea, published in 1489, Politian ‘still uses the term ‘‘grammaticus’’ in the narrow, and in his day usual, sense of ‘‘elementary schoolmaster’’—a usage which later, in the Lamia, he censures’.15 Lamia, Praelectio in Priora Aristotelis Analytica was published in 1492. The passage Wesseling is referring to is worth quoting at length. Politian declares that though he is not a philosopher, he is, and is entitled to be, an interpreter of Aristotle, just as Donatus, Servius, Aristarchus, and Zenodotus interpreted poets, though they were not poets themselves.16 He then gives other examples: Is not Philoponus, the disciple of Ammonius and fellow student of Simplicius, an adequate interpreter of Aristotle? Yet nobody calls him a philosopher, and everybody a grammarian. Indeed, the famous Xenocritus of Cos, the two Rhodians, Aristocles and Aristeas, the two Alexandrians, Antigonus and Didymus, and the most celebrated of them all, Aristarchus—are they not all grammarians? And they all, as Erotian reports, expounded the writings of Hippocrates, as did others whom Galen enumerates. Yet nobody takes them to 15 Politian, Lamia: Praelectio in Priora Aristotelis Analytica, crit. edn., introd., and comm. by A. Wesseling (Leiden, 1986), 100. 16 Ibid. 16–17: ‘An non Philoponus ille Ammonii discipulus Simpliciique condiscipulus idoneus Aristotelis est interpres? At eum nemo philosophum vocat, omnes grammaticum. Quid? Non grammaticus etiam Cous ille Xenocritus et Rhodii duo Aristocles atque Aristeas et Alexandrini item duo Antigonus ac Didymus et omnium celeberrimus idem ille Aristarchus? Qui tamen omnes, ut Erotianus est auctor, Hippocratis interpretati sunt libros, sicut alii quoque, quos Galenus enumerat. Nec eos quisquam medicos esse ob id putat. Grammaticorum enim sunt haec partes, ut omne scriptorum genus, poetas, historicos, oratores, philosophos, medicos, iureconsultos excutiant atque enarrent. Nostra aetas parum perita rerum veterum nimis brevi gyro grammaticum sepsit. At apud antiquos olim tantum auctoritatis hic ordo habuit ut censores essent et iudices scriptorum omnium soli grammatici, quos ob id etiam criticos vocabant, sic ut non versus modo—ita enim Quintilianus ait—censoria quadam virgula notare, sed libros etiam qui falso viderentur inscripti tamquam subditicios submovere familia permiserint sibi, quin auctores etiam quos vellent aut in ordinem redigerent aut omnino eximerent numero. Nec enim aliud grammaticus Graece quam Latine litteratus. Nos autem nomen hoc in ludum trivialem detrusimus tanquam in pistrinum.’ See also Wesseling’s commentary on this passage.

142

Benedetto Bravo

be physicians on that account. The role of grammarians is to examine and interpret all kinds of writers: poets, historians, orators, philosophers, physicians, jurists. Our age, insufficiently conversant with ancient matters, has confined the grammarian in too narrow a circle. With the ancients the profession had such authority that grammarians were the sole censors and judges of all writers and were, on account of this, also called critics. They felt free—as Quintilian puts it—not only to mark individual verses with a censorial stroke, but also to expel from the family, as supposititious, books they found to be falsely attributed, and further, to include in the canon, or exclude from it, authors as they saw fit. Grammaticus in Greek means the same as litteratus in Latin; we, however, have driven the term into the slavish grind of ordinary school.

In this passage Politian intelligently uses what he has read in Quintilian (especially 1. 4–9) and in other ancient authors. The statement that ‘grammatici’ in Antiquity were ‘iudices scriptorum omnium’, and that this is why they were called ‘critici’, is not based on any explicit statement of Quintilian (who does not use the term criticus at all in his description of grammatice) or of any other ancient author, but it is perfectly in keeping with the ancient idea of grammatik and with the way the ancients used the term kritikv. Grammatiko‹ grammatici could be called kritiko‹ critici in so far as they judged the quality of passages or works and, by so doing, identified spurious material and determined which authors were worthy of inclusion in the list of classics (ofl gkrinmenoi) in any given literary genre. A famous work that does not belong to the main stream of scholarship cannot be left aside in this inquiry: Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetice, posthumously published in 1561.17 Its fifth book, entitled ‘Criticus [scil. liber Criticus], De imitatione et iudicio’, compares and judges Greek and Latin poems in order to establish which of them are to be ‘imitated’. Book 6, entitled ‘Hypercriticus, Iudicium de Aetatibus Poeseos Latinae; Iudicium de Poetis’, has a long chapter (4) on modern Latin poets. They are treated in the same way as ancient Latin or Greek poets. Of course, the standards of iudicium are conceived of by the author as founded on the timeless nature of things. Against the opinion of the ancients, Julius Caesar Scaliger does not think that the task of judging the quality of poems and poets ought to be reckoned as a part of grammatice. He writes (1. 5, p. 11; 2nd edn., p. 26; L. Deitz’s edn., i, p. 126): verum nihil non audent iudicare Grammatici: postquam arti suae tertiam partem kritikn adieceˆre. Non enim tanquam Grammaticis iudicium illud esse 17 J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (Geneva: Petrus Santandreanus, 1561; 2nd edn., 1581). See also the recent edition by L. Deitz and G. Vogt-Spira (Stuttgart, 1994).

Critice and Historical Criticism

143

potest attributum: sed existimandum est primi Philosophi officium: penes quem unum ius est omnium scientiarum. Quare stultissime` nobis Grammatici nomen imponunt ex libro nostro De causis linguae Latinae. Omnia enim illa ad libellam Philosophiae appensa sunt. Nam quemadmodum probare potest artifex principia sua? Atqui probamus ibi nos, quaecunque a` Grammaticis pro notis accipiuntur.

This is rather idiosyncratic language, mixing the literary Latin of the humanists with the spoken Latin of university teaching; I am not sure that I understand it completely; here is a translation: However, there is nothing the grammarians will not presume to judge ever since they added kritik as a third part to their art. Indeed, the right of pronouncing judgement in this domain cannot be given to them in so far as they are grammarians (?); it has to be considered as an office of the metaphysician (?),18 who alone has jurisdiction over every science. So it is very foolish to call me grammarian on the strength of my book De causis linguae Latinae. For everything in that book has been weighed according to the rules of philosophy. How can the practitioner of an art account for his own principles? But I account for everything the grammarians assume as known.

The idea that the task of judging the quality of poems and poets ought to belong to the philosopher, and not to the grammaticus, is a development of J. C. Scaliger’s view of grammatica stated long before in the opening pages of De causis linguae Latinae, where he maintains that the interpretation of texts does not belong to the grammaticus.19 What is interesting 18 I take ‘primus Philosophus’ to mean adept of ‘prima philosophia’, i.e. metaphysics, the part of philosophy that is neither logic nor ethics, nor ‘philosophia naturalis’— admittedly, a strange way of expressing the idea. It could also mean ‘a first-class philosopher’, but this would be even stranger, for the relative clause ‘penes quem . . . ’, etc., seems to suggest that the author is thinking not of ‘a philosopher’, but of ‘the philosopher’. Bormann, ‘Kritik’ (as in n. 6), 1257–8, understands the passage to refer to the threefold division of Ramus’ dialectic, ‘deren dritter Teil 1543 noch als exercitatio angeha¨ngt wurde—eben ‘‘die Interpretation von Dichtern, Rednern, Philosophen und allen Ku¨nsten’’.’ He may be right, but I suspect he is not. 19 J. C. Scaliger, De causis linguae Latinae libri tredecim (Geneva: Petrus Santandreanus, 1534), 2–3: ‘Itaque orationem eiusque partes duo artifices diversis modis contemplantur. Dialecticus sub ratione veritatis, tanquam sub fine: grammaticus sub figurationis et compositionis modo, quam vocarunt constructionem, tanquam materiam. Nam tamenetsi grammaticus etiam considerat significatum, qui quasi forma quaedam est, non tamen propter se id agit, sed ut veritatis indagatori subministret . . . Postremo` quo`d officium interpretandorum autorum annumerarunt [as belonging to the grammaticus], id sane` grammatici non est, sed sapientis pro cuiusque rei captu. Est enim Oratorum Poe¨tarumque, atque Historicorum lectio differta variis artibus, atque scientiis: non ad ipsos literatores potius qua`m ad veros artifices pertinens. Nam quod ad interpretationem ipsam attinet: eadem ratio est, et componendi, et composita cognoscendi . . . ’. By ‘veros artifices’ Scaliger means orators, poets, and historians: orators are competent at

144

Benedetto Bravo

for my purpose is that in the treatise on poetice judging poems and poets is not presented as related to the discernment of the spurious from the authentic: the aim of the criticus is just to offer literary judgement and thereby to point out what deserves to be ‘imitated’. J. C. Scaliger’s notion of criticus has much more to do with Aristotle’s Poetics (where kritikv and kritik do not occur) and with the tradition of ancient ł torev (who were not called kritiko‹)20 than with the tradition of ancient kritiko‹. It is probably from his treatise that the use of critique, criticism, etc. to express the modern notion of literary criticism ultimately derives.21 Another point worth noticing is J. C. Scaliger’s statement that grammatici added to their ‘art’ a ‘third part’, called kritik . Who are these grammatici? To none, either ancient or modern, that I know of, could the statement really apply. It looks as though J. C. Scaliger arbitrarily combined the following data: (1) the notion of grammatica that was current at his time; (2) two passages of a text still unpublished at the time, Sextus Empiricus’ Adversus mathematicos (1. 79; 248–9),22 reporting the theory of Crates of Mallus and of his pupil Tauriscus, according to which grammatik is different from kritik and subordinate to it (however, I do not know how he interpreted 1. 248, where the text of the MSS seems to me absurd: instead of tv kritikv e nai I propose to read tv grammatikv e nai);23 (3) two other passages in Sextus Empiricus (Adv. math. 1. 91–5; 252–3), of which the first reports the division of grammatik that seems to Sextus to be the most reasonable, the second mentions the same division as belonging to Asclepiades of Myrleia: grammatik is composed of three parts (m
rh), namely tecnikn, flstorikn, and grammatikn or fidia‹teron, of which the last studies poets and prose writers. interpreting orations, poets at interpreting poems, historians at interpreting histories; ‘literatores’, i.e. ‘grammatici’, cannot interpret any text. This paradoxical opinion has something in common with the opinion of Chares (Per› grammatikv) reported by Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 1.76–8. It is the opposite of what Politian says in the passage from Lamia quoted above. 20 e.g. Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Let us remember that Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime, edited by F. Robortello in 1554, was not yet known to the author of the Poetice. 21 R. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), ch. 2, rightly sees the difference between Julius Caesar Scaliger’s critice and what critici of his time did; but he does not see that these critici did not use the term critice to speak of their work. 22 Editio princeps of Sextus, 1621; first Latin translation 1569. 23 See Bravo, ‘Jacoby’ (as in n. 10), 250 and n. 36.

Critice and Historical Criticism

145

It was, I think, from this arbitrary combination of data that J. C. Scaliger drew the conclusion that ancient grammatiko‹ added to their t
cnh a third part, called kritik . This conclusion was, of course, completely wrong. J. C. Scaliger’s construction could be dismissed as the fancy of a man who, though very learned, was a dilettante in philological scholarship (he considered himself a philosopher and a physician), were it not that it stimulated his son and pupil, Joseph Justus Scaliger,24 who was anything but a dilettante, to build up, in a not very different way, a different conception, which turned out to be very attractive for his contemporaries. In the Prima Scaligerana,25 recorded by Franciscus Vertunianus,26 J. J. Scaliger at one point speaks of Grammatica, meaning scholarship: ‘If only I were a good grammarian, for it is enough for whoever wants to have a firm understanding of all the authors to be a good grammarian. Those who, speaking of learned men, say that they are ‘‘mere grammarians’’, are very unlearned themselves, you will always find. Quarrels in matters of religion stem from nothing so much as ignorance of grammar.’27 Elsewhere he says: Kritik is the principal and the nobler part of grammar, indeed it is grammar absolute. Whoever has it, will be able to interpret all the authors. Its task is to On this scholar see especially Grafton’s two volumes cited above, n. 7. Prima Scaligerana, nusquam antehac edita, cum praefatione T. Fabri; quibus adjuncta et altera Scaligerana qua`m antea emendatiora, cum Notis cujusdam V.D. Anonymi (Groningen, 1669). Tanaquil Faber (Le Fe`vre) writes in the preface that he is publishing the Prima Scaligerana on the basis of a copy of the ‘Schedae et adversaria Vertuniani’—a copy that had been made and sent to the printer for publication by F. Sigonius, ‘Iurisconsultus apud Augustoritenses [i.e. at Limoges] celeberrimus’. He explains his choice of the title Prima Scaligerana by pointing out that ‘altera illa Scaligerana, quae abhinc duobus tribus-ve annis prodiere, recentiora sunt’. (He is referring to the Scaligerana published at The Hague in 1666 and based on materials from Isaac Vossius’ library.) I do not know what to think of the editor’s declaration: ‘Rogavit [scil. F. Sigonius] porro ut inspicerem; Inspexi; et quaedam sane ad ea [scil. Scaligerana] parabam scribere, quae non omnibus fortasse nota sunt, sed totum id consilii ut abiicerem multa fecere.’ In fact, these Scaligerana are printed together with numerous and sometimes extensive additions by the editor, which are unambiguously distinguished from Scaliger’s words. I was not able to see the collection of Scaligerana published in Cologne in 1595. 26 Franc ¸ois de Saint-Vertunien or simply Vertunien, a physician with whom Joseph Justus Scaliger was in close contact in the 1570s, and who in 1578 published a translation of Hippocrates’ De capitis vulneribus, based on a text critically established by Scaliger. See Grafton, Scaliger I, 180–4. 27 Prima Scaligerana, 86: ‘Utinam essem bonus Grammaticus; sufficit enim ei qui auctores omnes probe vult intelligere esse bonum Grammaticum. Porro quicunque Doctos viros Grammaticos pour tout potage vocant, sunt ipsi indoctissimi, idque semper observabis. Non aliunde dissidia in Religione pendent, quam ab ignoratione Grammaticae.’ 24 25

146

Benedetto Bravo

emend corruptions, to restore falsely attributed works to their true authors, to examine and discuss every kind of poet, orator, and philosopher: for critics were like censors in respect of books. Varro’s critica showed that out of many comedies only twenty-one were genuinely Plautus’, which were later called Varronianae; only such of Homer’s verses were admitted as had been approved by Aristarchus, only such of Terence’s comedies as had been approved by Calliopius.28

The same view is presented more amply in a letter to Vertunianus,29 dated ‘VIII. Kalend. Ianuarias’, that is—in the language of the pe´dants— 25 December, Christmas Day. The year is not indicated. Since in the collection of Scaliger’s Latin letters, published in 1627 and 1628 by Daniel Heinsius, all the other letters to Vertunianus (nos. 17–19 and 21–2) range from 3 December 1574 to 12 February 1576,30 and since the letter here quoted is printed in the middle of this group, it is very likely that the editor thought, or knew, that that letter belonged chronologically with the others, i.e. to one of the years 1574–6. More than that one cannot say, for the editor was not very accurate in ordering the letters of this group: no. 21 is earlier than nos. 18 and 19. A. Grafton dates no. 20 to 25 December 1574, without any explanation, as though the year was certain;31 he may well be right, but it is not clear on what 28 Prima Scaligerana, 67: ‘Kritik Grammaticae pars principalis et nobilior est, imo Grammatica absolutissima; quam qui tenet, omnes auctores interpretabitur. Eius est depravata emendare, falso attributa suis auctoribus asserere ac vindicare, omne genus Poe¨tarum, Oratorum, et Philosophorum recensere atque excutere: nam Critici erant velut Censores librorum. Varronis Critica docuit ex multis fabulis unam tantum et viginti Plautinas esse, quae postea Varronianae dictae sunt. Versus Homeri illi tantum admissi sunt, quos Aristarchus probavit: Comoediae Terentii, quas Calliopius.’ 29 Iosephi Scaligeri Epistolae (edited by D. Heinsius, as one can gather from the editor’s preface, though the name does not appear; he is named as the author of the long poetic elogium of Scaliger), no. 20 (Leiden 1627), 117–20, or (Frankfurt 1628), 106–9. 30 No. 17 is dated 3. Non. Decembr. ( ¼ 3 Dec.) 1574, and judging by its content, it is the earliest of the letters to Vertunianus printed in this collection, probably the first or one of the first letters Scaliger wrote to him; no. 18 is dated Malavallae, IV. Non. Februar. (¼2 Feb.) 1575; no. 19, Malavallae in limite Lemovicano. VI. Nonarum Mart. ( ¼ 2 Mar.) 1575; no. 20, VIII. Kalend. Ianuarias ( ¼ 25 Dec.); no. 21, Malavallae in Limite Lemovicano. V. Kalend. Februar. ( ¼ 28 Jan.) 1575; no. 22, Prid. Id. Febr. ( ¼ 12 Feb.), no year, but it must be 1576, for the author reminds Vertunianus of what he had written to him ‘a year ago from the Limousin’ (‘Verum est quod e` limite Lemovicano anno tibi scribebamus, non intellexisse Plinium quae scriberet’), which we find in letter no. 18. Since the date of no. 20 does not include the indication ‘Malavallae’ or ‘Malavallae in Limite Lemovicano’, which appears in the letters to Vertunianus of 28 Jan. (no. 21), 2 Feb. (no. 18), and 2 Mar. 1575 (no. 19), I think it was not written during Scaliger’s stay in the Limousin. However, the exact dates of his stay are not known. 31 Grafton, Scaliger I, 317 n. 7.

Critice and Historical Criticism

147

grounds.32 An argument in favour of 1574 rather than 1575 might be the fact that the remarks on the word macte contained in this letter are obviously connected with Scaliger’s work on Festus, which was published in 1575, with the preface dated 24 October 1574.33 Scaliger declares that he is going to answer two of the questions that Vertunianus had asked him in the last three letters: (i) what is a criticus? (ii) what does the word macte mean? I wonder whether Vertunianus had really asked him these questions, not very likely ones to occur to a layman. Perhaps they were Scaliger’s own and he wanted to write about them. Answering the first question, he begins by pointing out the worth of grammatice: ‘Those who wrote books concerning this discipline were very great men, also in other domains: Crates, Aristophanes, Nicander, Callimachus, the famous Apollonius of Rhodes, Chrysippus, and other great heroes.’ After this enumeration, which is fanciful and serves the rhetorical purpose of enhancing the worth of the subject, he goes on: They have bequeathed to us in their works the idea that there are three parts of grammatice. The first they called tecnik , the second flstorik , the third fidiait
ra. They call tecnik pragmate‹a the part that concentrates on the elements [i.e. vowels and consonants] and their compounds [i.e. syllables and words]. They call flstorik the one that relates to the mythical stories of poets and to descriptions occurring in orators and in histories, sites, mountains, rivers, and to other matters of this kind. By the term fidiait
ra they mean the part that does not keep within these limits but goes beyond them and penetrates into the innermost recesses of philosophy [sapientia], which it does when it distinguishes spurious verses of poets from authentic ones, when it corrects corrupt readings, when it assigns falsely attributed works to their real authors, when it examines and discusses the many kinds of poets, orators, and philosophers. Therefore they gave to this part the name of kritik . And as the ancient Romans divided each of the four seasons into three parts, so that they were in the habit of saying ‘ver primum’, ‘ver adultum’, and ‘ver praecipitatum’, in the same way they rightly decided that the fillogov should arrive at the perfect knowledge of filolog‹a through these grades. That is why the first part, the tecnik , is the daily practice among the rabble of schoolteachers—or so they think.34 But very famous men 32 Jehasse, Renaissance (as in n. 8), 295 n. 15, dates the letter to 1575, on the mistaken assumption that all the other letters of this group belong to 1575. 33 On this work see the very interesting pages by Grafton, Scaliger I, 145–60. 34 Cf. Scaliger’s letter to Claude Dupuy, dated 7 July 1580, Lettres franc ¸aises ine´dites de Joseph Scaliger, ed. Ph. Tamizey de Larroque (Agen, 1879), no. 33, pp. 109–10: ‘Certainement je prevois que les petitz grammatics seront cause que non seullement les critiques, mais aussi la critique mesmes sera expose´e en rise´e.’ By ‘les petitz grammatics’ Scaliger obviously means those among the grammatici who do not rise above the ‘faex paedagogorum’. According to Jehasse, Renaissance (as in n. 8), 200–1, this is the earliest

148

Benedetto Bravo

of Antiquity excelled in it: Herodian, Tryphon, Apollonius of Alexandria among the Greeks; among the Romans, Scaurus, Donatus, Caesar himself, and Pliny [the Elder]. The third part, i.e. the noblest of the three, really worthy of a philosopher, was practised by the Greeks Crates, Aristophanes [of Byzantium], Aristarchus, who for this reason was generally known under the name of kritikv; and by an endless number of Romans, among whom Varro, Sisenna, Aelius Iurisconsultus, and others. The intermediate part, i.e. the second one, was cultivated in particular by Hyginus, Palaephatus, Stephanus, and also Caesar. How much more they [i.e. the ancients] appreciated the third part than the other two, you can gather from its name: they did not give it a name taken from its function, as in the case of the other two, the first tecnik because it practises an art, and the second flstorik because it explains stories. But because the third part is not for everybody, only for the few, and does not deal with ordinary authors, but the noblest ones, they called it fidiait
ra, as it were private.35 occurrence, in a French text, of the feminine noun critique (‘criticism’) and of the masculine noun critique (‘critic’). As to ‘les petitz grammatics’, the editor writes (109 n. 4): ‘Grammatic (de Grammaticus) est dit ici par de´nigrement, comme nous disons aujourd’hui grammatiste. Le mot se´rieux au xvie sie`cle e´tait de´ja` grammairien que l’on trouve dans les Essais de Montaigne. Grammatic manque a` nos recueils lexicographiques anciens et modernes.’ I am not sure that to Scaliger grammatic was disparaging: he may have used it as a Latinism, because he was certainly thinking of the relationship between the notion of criticus and that of grammaticus in Antiquity. It is rather the adjective ‘petitz’ that is disparaging. 35 ‘Qui enim de ea [he refers to grammatice] libros reliquerunt, maximi viri, etiam in aliis studiis, fuerunt, Crates, Aristophanes, Nicander, Callimachus, Apollonius ille Rhodius, Chrysippus, alii heroes magni. Illi igitur in monumentis suis reliquerunt nobis, Grammatices tres partes esse. Quarum primam tecnikn vocarunt, secundam flstorikn, tertiam fidiait
ran. Tecnikn pragmate‹an vocant eam, quae in elementorum et syntaxeos disciplina tota est. ‘Istorikn, eam quae in mythologiis poe¨tarum, in Oratorum et Historiarum descriptionibus, locis, montibus, fluminibus versatur, et si quid simile. ’Idiait
ran intelligi volunt, quae non illis finibus contenta est, sed ulterius evagatur, et in abditiora sapientiae penetralia se insinuat: cum scilicet spurios versus poe¨tarum a` veris et legitimis discernit, depravata emendat, falso attributa suis auctoribus asserit ac vindicat: omne genus Poe¨tarum, Oratorum, Philosophorum recenset, atque excutit. Hanc partem propterea kritikn vocarunt. Atque ut veteres Romani quatuor partes anni singulas in tres alias diviserunt, ut de vere dicerent, ver primum, ver adultum, ver praecipitatum: ita etiam jure merito per illos gradus voluerunt fillogon ad perfectissimam filolog‹av cognitionem pervenire. Itaque primam illam tecnik n omnes vulgo de faece paedagogorum quotidie tractant, ut sibi videntur. In ea tamen excelluerunt clarissimi viri veteres, Herodianus, Tryphon, Apollonius Alexandrinus apud Graecos: apud Romanos autem Scaurus, Donatus, Caesar ipse et Plinius Secundus. Illam tertiam, id est, nobilissimam omnium, ac vere Philosopho digna, tractarunt Graeci, Crates, Aristophanes, Aristarchus. qui propterea et vulgo kritik¿v dictus est. Romani autem infiniti, inter quos Varro, Sisenna, Aelius Iurisconsultus et alii. Mediam, quae secunda est, inprimis Hyginus, Palaephatus, Stephanus, et Caesar etiam, coluerunt. Quanto tertiam illam quam alias pluris fecerint, ex nomine intelligere potes. Non enim ab officio vocarunt. Ut a tractanda arte primam tecnikn, secundam, ab enarratione historiarum flstorikn. Sed quia non omnium est, sed pauciorum, neque in quibusve auctoribus, sed in nobilissimis versatur, fidiait
ran, quasi peculiarem, vocarunt.’ Cf n. 28 above.

Critice and Historical Criticism

149

All this is an amazing misinterpretation and transformation of Sextus Empiricus Adv. mathem. 1. 91–5; 252–3, reporting Asclepiades’ division of grammatik . Sextus, i.e. Asclepiades, does not say that the third part (m
rov) of grammatik , the grammatikn or fidia‹teron, can be called kritikn (or kritik pragmate‹a). Moreover, by calling that part fidia‹teron he does not mean that it is suitable only for the few, nor that it covers only the noblest authors: he simply means that it is more properly grammatikn than the two other parts taken together, for it consists in the study of poets and prose writers (which is the main object of grammatik ). There is no suggestion that the third part ‘penetrates into the innermost recesses of philosophy’, or that it is ‘really worthy of a philosopher’, or, indeed, that the three parts are three degrees of an ascent to the full possession of filolog‹a, i.e. of learning. Scaliger accomplished this transformation by using two other passages of Sextus Empiricus (Adv. mathem. 1. 79; 248–9), which report (inaccurately, if one does not correct the transmitted text at 248) a theory of Crates and of his pupil Tauriscus that is clearly incompatible with the theory of Asclepiades. In arbitrarily combining these heterogeneous passages J. J. Scaliger walks in the footsteps of his father; however, he does not conclude, as his father had done, that kritik originally was not a part of grammatik and that it ought to belong not to that humble discipline, but to philosophy. On the contrary, he concludes that kritik is the third gradus or the noblest part of grammatik and ‘penetrates into the innermost recesses of philosophy’—words vaguely reminiscent of what Varro (De lingua latina 5. 7–8) had said of the third gradus of etymology (‘tertius gradus, quo philosophia ascendens peruenit’). This conclusion probably owes something to Crates’ statement (reported by Sextus) that the kritikv must possess psa logik pist mh, which I take to mean ‘all rational knowledge’. How are we to justify this operation, which does not seem to conform with the highest standards of scholarly work in the late sixteenth century? The answer seems to me obvious: Scaliger did not aim merely at discerning the character of ancient scholarship. His ultimate purpose was to establish what true scholarship was. It went for him without saying that in this, as well as in any other kind of intellectual activity, the texts of the ancients, expertly investigated, could reveal the general rules according to which the moderns had to work and possibly strive for further progress. Interpretation of texts was in this case an ambiguous matter: it was an effort at historical understanding, but even more, an attempt to enlist the texts in the construction of a theory of scholarship.

150

Benedetto Bravo

The consequence of Scaliger’s transformation of Asclepiades’ theory was to link together more closely the functions that made up the third part of grammatik in that theory. Two of them, dirqwsiv (emendatio) of corrupt passages of the textus vulgatus (emendation based either on manuscript evidence or on conjecture)36 and x ghsiv (enarratio) of difficult passages, had never before—either in Antiquity or in modern times—been attributed to the grammatikv in his capacity as kritikv. It well may be that in the theory of kritik of Crates of Mallus and his disciples the function of evaluating literary works and that of detecting spurious passages were considered to be connected with emendation and explanation; but this is not what Scaliger could read in Sextus Empiricus, the only evidence he had for Crates’ theory of kritik . Let us remember that Politian—a pioneer of modern textual criticism37—did not connect the title criticus with the task of emendatio. In 1557 Francesco Robortello, a distinguished scholar, published a small treatise on the ‘art of emendation’38—an ‘art’ which he claimed to have invented (an unjustified and typically humanist boast, for his ‘art’ consists of a few rules and pieces of reasonable advice). In this treatise the term critice (or ars critica) does not occur. By putting for the first time emendatio and enarratio under the heading kritik , critice, together with the functions that had hitherto been considered characteristic of the kritikv, Scaliger placed all these functions in a new perspective. This soon turned out to be an important step. Another aspect of the operation must also be noticed: the ‘third part’, which Scaliger calls kritik (kritik pragmate‹a), is the only one that seems really to interest him. The way he describes the first and the second part of grammatik suggests that he does not treat them very seriously, in spite of Sextus Empiricus’ remark (Adv. mathem. 1. 94–5) that the three parts are interdependent. I have the impression that Sextus’ and Asclepiades’ theory of grammatik was for him a useful, but provisional and not really adequate frame within which he tried to articulate the confused idea that he had of the scope, the aim, and the method of his own work. 36 On emendatio in Antiquity and in modern times before the necessity of a systematic recensio was universally recognized, see Timpanaro, Genesi (as in n. 11), 4. 37 On Politian’s textual criticism see Timpanaro, Genesi, 4–6. 38 Franciscus Robortellus Utinensis, De arte sive ratione corrigendi antiquorum libros dissertatio (Padua, 1557), reprinted in J. Gruter’s Lampas, sive Fax artium liberalium, ii (Frankfurt, 1604), 14–28; also together with a reprint of C. Schoppius’ De arte critica (Amsterdam 1662); most recently, with an Italian translation and a commentary by G. Pompella (Naples, 1975; I have only seen this reprint; it reproduces the pagination of the original edition).

Critice and Historical Criticism

151

This impression is confirmed by what he writes in the same letter to answer Vertunianus’ second question, the one about macte. He begins as follows: ‘As to what you want from me concerning macte, I must, of course, treat the matter neither kritikØv, nor flstorikØv, but tecnikØv.’39 In fact, he treats the matter in a way that does not correspond at all to the notion of tecnik pragmate‹a described by him a few lines above, or to that of tecnikn (t¿ tecnik¿n m
rov) described by Sextus Empiricus/Asclepiades. His remarks on macte constitute a brilliant and admirable piece of philologico-historical research. This is history of words and of religious notions and rites, something that no ancient grammaticus could have done or thought of, and for which no convenient name existed in ancient terminology. I think Scaliger was not quite serious when he wrote that he was going to treat the matter tecnikØv: in this passage he used the ancient classification quite artificially, as an intellectual pastime. Many years after writing these remarks on grammatik and kritik , Scaliger came back to the subject in an undated letter to Petrus Scriverius (Schryver) which was first published as a pamphlet in 1619, based on a copy from the private archive of Ioachim Morsius,40 and later republished, without the first two paragraphs, among Scaliger’s Epistolae,41 probably on the basis of the first edition.42 It was probably written in 1595.43 The addressee (born in 1576) was one of the young men studying in Leiden and seeking instruction and advice through conversation with Scaliger. In this letter the three ‘parts of grammatik ’ are surprisingly described as ‘types of grammarians’: The types of grammarians are three. Some are called tecniko‹, some flstoriko‹, and those of the third type kritiko‹. The tecniko‹ teach the letters of the 39 Epistolae (as in n. 29), no. 20, Leiden edn., 119; Frankfurt edn., 108: ‘De Macte quod petis, plane tractandum est nobis non kritikØv neque flstorikØv sed tecnikØv.’ 40 J. Scaliger, Diatriba de critica, ad V. Cl. P. Scriverium, Nunc primum in lucem edita, Ex Musaeo Ioachimi Morsii (Leiden, 1619)—at present inaccessible to me. The text of this edition, without the first two paragraphs (which are also lacking in Scaliger’s Epistolae), has been reproduced by H. Jaumann, Critica (as in n. 4), ‘Textanhang’, 402–3. 41 Letter no. 451 in J. J. Scaliger, Epistolae (as in n. 29), Leiden edn., 824–6; Frankfurt edn., 755–7. 42 This is—in the collection of Scaliger’s Latin letters published by D. Heinsius—the only letter to P. Scriverius that does not belong to the ‘Epistolarum Appendix. Ex Musaeo Petri Scriverii’ printed at the end of the book (nos. 455–85; P. Scriverius is the addressee of no. 458, undated; no. 459, of 21 Nov. 1602; no. 460, of 28 Nov. 1602; no. 461, undated); the appendix contains those letters of Scaliger (with a few official letters to Scaliger or concerning him) that P. Scriverius transmitted to the editor for publication when the volume (comprising 454 letters) was already in press (see preface). It is therefore likely that letter no. 451 was not printed from the original, but from the pamphlet 43 See Jehasse, Renaissance (as in n. 8), 676. published in 1619.

152

Benedetto Bravo

alphabet and the rudiments of reading and writing, also the parts of speech, the structure of words, etc. The Greeks call them grammatista‹ rather than grammatiko‹, and the Latins litteratores rather than litterati . . . The flstoriko‹ deal with names of rivers, mountains, regions; they explicate recondite stories or mythical narratives or poetic discourses about the gods; they diligently investigate the genealogies of gods, of heroes, and of men of the oldest times. Clearly they are those whom Juvenal means [Scaliger quotes Sat. 7. 231–6, where Juvenal mocks people interested in futile and ridiculous problems]. Similar pursuits of a grammarian-flstorikv are satirized in Lucian’s On salaried posts in great houses. But, though ridiculed by the authors just mentioned, these are the problems of the part of grammar called flstorik . Nobler than either is kritik . For critics act like censors: they can draw up the list of the senate of old books . . . and remove bad books from their tribes.44

As an account of ancient grammatik , Scaliger’s description is tendentious and mistaken: in Antiquity grammatik could be divided into ‘parts’, but grammatiko‹ were never divided into classes (the four classes of grammatiko‹ of which some of the scholia to Dionysius Thrax speak45 are a medieval fancy). Moreover, it is not true that the term grammatista‹ could be used instead of grammatiko‹. Lastly, the way Scaliger uses (without citing it) a passage of Suetonius concerning the terms litteratus and litterator, namely De grammaticis et rhetoribus 4, is arbitrary. In so far as Scaliger intended to present his own idea of the nature of scholarship, it is obvious that, at the time of writing, he took scholarly research to consist exclusively of kritik . 44 ‘Tria genera Grammaticorum: alij tecniko›; alij flstoriko›; tertium genus kritiko› vocantur. tecniko› elementa et primores literas docent; item partes orationis, structuram verborum, et similia. eos Graeci grammatistv potius, quam grammatikov; et Latini litteratores, non litteratos vocant. . . . Historici in fluminum, montium, regionum nominibus occupati sunt: abstrusas historias, aut muqologo¸mena, aut poihtikØv qeologo¸mena explicant: genealogias Deorum, Heroum ac priscorum diligenter rimantur. Plane sunt quos indicat Iuvenalis [quoting Sat. 7. 231–6]. Eadem quoque in Historico Grammatico ridet Lucianus n t per› tØn p› misq sunntwn. Sed quanquam haec ridentur ab illis, tamen propria sunt huius partis Grammaticae, quae flstorik vocatur. Nobilior utraˆque kritik . Nam Critici tanquam censores quidam, et veterum librorum Senatum legere possunt . . . et non probos tribu movere . . . ’ (I follow Jaumann’s reprint of the 1619 edn., correcting Greek accents and two misprints. It is interesting to note that D. Heinsius’ edition does not give ‘genealogias Deorum, Heroum ac priscorum’, but ‘genealogias Deorum ac priscorum Heroum’; and that it does not give ‘tribu movere’, but ‘tribu amovere’. In both cases Heinsius’ edition is obviously wrong; in the first case we have certainly to do with a bad conjecture, either of Heinsius or of the printer; in the second it is not clear whether we have to do with a conjecture or with an unconscious change, substituting for an uncommon word a trivial one). 45 Scholia in Dionysii Thracis artem grammaticam, ed. A. Hilgard, in Grammatici Graeci, i, pt. 3 (Leipzig 1901), ‘Commentarius Melampodis seu Diomedis (cod. C)’, 12, ll. 3–13; ‘Scholia Vaticana (cod. C), 115, ll. 8–9; 164, ll. 9–11; 170, ll. 17–20.

Critice and Historical Criticism

153

In the last part of the letter he enumerates the tasks he thought belonged to the sphere of ancient critici. He relies to a considerable extent on a passage of Diogenes Laertius (3. 66) concerning the critical signs employed in editions of Plato. Scaliger does not acknowledge this or any other source, but this is not surprising. What is surprising is that he distorts part of the information given by Diogenes Laertius. After quoting, not quite accurately, Ausonius on Aristarchus marking spurious lines with marginal signs,46 he goes on: quia pareggegramm
na, mbolima·a, noqe¸onta, et similia deculpare, ut eorum verbo utar, solent, et nota culpae apposita damnare: neque tantum quae perperam ab auctoribus dicta, scripta, pronunciata sunt, qete·n, bel‹zein: sed et aliorum Criticorum temere scita notare ac castigare, quam kr‹sin efika‹ouv qet seiv vocabant. Iidem etiam duplices et ambiguas lectiones recensebant, quas dittv cr seiv dixerunt. Nam cr seiv, oratorum, poetarum, historicorum sunt auctoritates et scita. Sed praecipua huius studij pars, transposita in auctoribus suis sedibus vindicare, ut fecit ille, qui sacri lacerum collegit corpus Homeri. quo nomine metaq
seiv tØn grafØn valde celebrarunt. Et conciliatio sententiarum etiam in Philosophis ad eos pertinebat, ejusmodi sunt sum wn‹ai tØn dogmtwn in Platone a` veteribus Criticis notatae. Sunt et eorum kloga› kalligraf‹av, quae sunt ab illis in quodam auctore venuste novata: hujus enim artis et haec pars est. Criticae principes apud Graecos sunt Aristophanes, Crates, Aristarchus, Callimachus. Apud Hebraeos Masoritae sunt, qui apud Graecos Critici . . . [there follow details on the Masoretes]. Denique  kritik apud eos Masoreth vocatur. apud Latinos nobilissimi Critici sunt Varro, Santra, Sisenna: sed omnium princeps Varro.

This piece of prose is not smooth or free of ambiguity. I understand it as follows: for they [i.e. the ancient critici] are in the habit of incriminating (to use their term) interpolated, substituted, spurious passages, etc. and of condemning them by a sign indicating the fault, moreover of rejecting and marking with an obelus what has been wrongly said, written, or pronounced by the authors, as well as of marking and castigating unfounded decisions of other critici—decisions that they called efika·oi qet seiv [arbitrary rejections]. They also examined divergent and dubious readings, to which they gave the name of ditta› cr seiv. For cr seiv [without the adjective] are authoritative opinions expressed by orators, poets, historians. But the main part of this study consisted in restoring to their proper place transposed lines in authors, as did he ‘who put together the dismembered body of sacred Homer’ [Ausonius, ep., 18, 28]; that is why they very much 46 Scaliger quotes ‘Quique notas spurijs versibus addiderat’ (‘and he who had added marks to spurious lines’). Ausonius, ep. 18. 29, has ‘quique notas spuriis versibus imposuit’. Scaliger is probably quoting from memory.

154

Benedetto Bravo

practised metaq
seiv tØn grafØn [transpositions of readings]. Moreover, showing how opinions [expressed in different passages] in the works of philosophers could be reconciled with each other was also one of their tasks: such are the sumfwn‹ai tØn dogmtwn [concordances of propositions], marked by ancient critici in Plato’s works. To them belonged also the making of kloga› kalligraf‹av [samples of fine writing],47 which are passages in an author elegantly rewritten:48 for this role too belongs to this art. The chief representatives of critice among the Greeks are Aristophanes, Crates, Aristarchus, Callimachus. Among the Jews, the Masoretes, who correspond to critici among the Greeks . . . In short,  kritik is called among them [scil. the Jews] masoreth.49 Among the Latins, the most distinguished critici are Varro, Santra, Sisenna, but the most eminent is Varro.

What Scaliger says here about the use of the belv (bel‹zein) finds no support in Diogenes Laertius—who says: ‘bel¿v pr¿v tn q
thsin the obelus is used for rejecting spurious passages’—or in any other ancient testimony. It is clear that he was only superficially interested in the ancient critical signs, which were no longer used in his time. He was more interested in making out what it was that ancient critici did, and still more in attributing to them what seemed to him to belong to scholarship in general. He was right in thinking that ancient critici criticized ‘quae perperam ab auctoribus dicta, scripta, pronunciata sunt’. This he had learnt not from Diogenes, but by observing the practice of ancient grammatiko‹. However, when he speaks of the ‘kloga› kalligraf‹av, quae sunt ab illis in quodam auctore venuste novata’, he distorts the meaning of a sentence in Diogenes’ passage: c· periestigm
non pr¿v tv klogv ka› kalligraf‹av, ‘the letter chi with two dots is used for indicating select passages and pieces of fine writing 47 I take ‘Sunt et eorum kloga› kalligraf‹av’ to be an inversion of ‘Eorum sunt et kloga› kalligraf‹av’, but I am not sure this is right. If one assumes that the word order is not inverted, the sense will be: ‘The making of kloga› kalligraf‹av belonged to them too [and not only to others]’; the author would thus seem to oppose tacitly kritiko‹ to ł torev. However, this is not satisfactory, for there is no mention of ł torev earlier in the letter. 48 I thank Ilse Reineke for help with ‘quae sunt ab illis in quodam auctore venuste novata’. 49 Compare this with Scaliger’s letter to Casaubon of 27 Oct. 1601 ( Julian calendar), Epistolae (as in n. 29), no. 62, Leiden edn., p. 197, Frankfurt edn., 180: ‘Quando tuum opus de Critica prodibit? Laudo consilium de Critica Masoritica. Nam nullam aliam habent Iudaei, et posterior est editione Talmudis. Delirant, qui puncta vocalia simul cum lingua nata esse putant: quos ratio, vetustas, ka› fqalmofneia ipsa insanire vincit. Nihil de ea Critica reliquum hodie est, praeter Magnam Masoram, quae cum libris sive Bibliis sacris edita est. Eam recte` exponit Elias, unicus hujus aevi Criticus, et Aristarchus Hebraismi.’

Critice and Historical Criticism

155

[in Plato]’. Scaliger probably suppressed the ka‹ and took kalligraf‹av to be a genitive singular and not an accusative plural. I cannot say whether he was right to change the transmitted text (in favour of his conjecture it must be said that kalligraf‹a in plural would be a hapax). In any case he was certainly wrong in thinking that Diogenes meant by kalligraf‹a passages of an author rewritten by a kritikv trying to improve on the author’s style. Scaliger probably had in mind Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ De Thucydide, where many passages of Thucydides that seemed to Dionysius ill-written are rewritten. But Dionysius was a learned rhetor, not a professional scholar; and, though he did judge writers, there is nothing to suggest that he considered himself, or was considered in Antiquity, a kritikv (or a grammatikv). It was, as we shall see, a contemporary of Scaliger, Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne), who, in a book published in 1587, placed Dionysius of Halicarnassus among the kritiko‹. Scaliger probably followed him, although he did not attribute to the term kritiko‹ quite the same meaning as Stephanus. Anyway, to my knowledge no ancient kritikv did anything similar to what Dionysius does in De Thucydide. On the other hand, Scaliger at least once rewrote a passage of an ancient poet, seeking to outdo him.50 This makes the mention of kloga› kalligraf‹av all the more significant. Of course, neither this enumeration of the tasks of ancient critice, nor the one in the letter to Vertunianus examined above, can be considered as an exhaustive description of the aims that Scaliger pursued in his own practice of what he called critice. Let us note in particular that it does not comprise the kind of scholarly pursuit that constituted Scaliger’s main occupation in the last forty years of his life, the study of the remains of ancient, pagan and Christian, chronography, and the reconstruction of ancient chronological systems. If anybody had asked Scaliger where this study belonged, he would probably have answered that it belonged to critice. The title of one of his works, De emendatione temporum, seems to me to confirm this, even though the word critice does not occur in it. Scaliger did not confine himself to applying the ordinary methods of scholarship to the remains of ancient chronographical literature: he went further, applying emendatio to the chronological data they contained. It was because of his exuberant confidence in the powers of critice and in his own mastery of it that he believed he was better equipped than 50 See Grafton, Scaliger I (as in n. 7), 112–13: Scaliger wanted to show how one could improve on Ennius’ rendering of a passage of Euripides.

156

Benedetto Bravo

Kepler and Tycho Brahe for solving calendrical problems, as appears from his discussions with these astronomers.51 One can safely assume that Scaliger called critice any serious research on, or based upon, ancient texts. The use of the allegedly ancient term critice, which meant to him ‘art of judging’, made it possible for him to emphasize the kind of approach that he considered essential to any such research—an approach that we can call critical, provided we do not forget the peculiar traits of this criticism. Antiquity as a whole was for him, as well as for his contemporaries, a normative world, and not—as it began to be for classical scholars and historians two hundred years later—a distant and dead world that philologico-historical research could try to ‘make present’ (vergegenwa¨rtigen) and to understand as a living socio-cultural totality.52 However, no single text belonging to that normative world was to be passively accepted as an authority. Each had to be subjected to a critical reconstruction, interpretation, and evaluation. The aim of these operations was to recover the original shape of the text and the meaning of those of its passages that time had rendered obscure, to gain from it information on ancient knowledge, beliefs, rites, customs, laws, institutions, techniques, etc., and to assess its value on the basis of standards of truth or beauty that seemed a-temporal. Of course, the status of the Holy Books was different from that of any other text: their divine inspiration was not questioned. But faith in divine inspiration certainly was no obstacle, in Scaliger’s eyes, to applying textual criticism and philological interpretation, therefore critice, to the Bible. He planned—obviously with Origen’s Hexapla as a 51 On Scaliger vs. Kepler and Tycho Brahe, see the impressive study by Grafton, Scaliger II, esp. 145–209; 457–88; 497–8. On Scaliger’s discussion of mathematical problems, see ibid. pp. 378–85. 52 Grafton, Scaliger I, 154, is quite right in thinking that ‘[Scaliger] had no interest in bringing a dead world back to life in its entirety. Indeed, there is little evidence to suggest that Scaliger thought of the early Romans as three-dimensional, historical individuals, or of their culture as a single, coherent organism that ought to be resurrected as a whole . . . ’. However, Grafton seems to imply that a different approach to Antiquity was possible in the 16th c. Immediately before the passage just quoted, he writes: ‘Scaliger, certainly, did not produce in the end a comprehensive reconstruction of Roman life like that provided in Sigonio’s De antiquo iure civium Romanorum’. Here I cannot agree. It is true that Sigonius’ work is marvellously compact and organic, which cannot be said of Scaliger’s writings; however, Sigonius (like Lipsius) aimed at a systematic reconstruction of certain notions, norms, and institutions of the Roman state machinery, and not at a reconstruction of ‘Roman life’—if we mean by that the life of a socio-cultural totality. Sigonius’ (and Lipsius’) perspective had probably something in common with that of Varro, when he wrote De uita populi Romani, and with that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Antiq. Rom. 1. 8), when he took into account the b‹ov tv plewv (but Dionysius excluded the polite‹a from the notion of b‹ov: this comprised only qh and nmoi).

Critice and Historical Criticism

157

model—an edition of the Psalms in five languages;53 the project was never carried out, but its existence is significant. The two letters discussing grammatik and kritik examined above are likely to have been intended not only for their addressees, but also, perhaps primarily, for informal publication through circulation among scholarly acquaintances of both author and addressee, and, more widely, among acquaintances of acquaintances. Presenting a rapid sketch of new ideas in the form of a letter addressed to a younger friend asking for instruction would have been a convenient literary device, conforming to an illustrious ancient tradition. When he wrote the letter to Vertunianus (1574 or 1575 or 1576), Scaliger was already one of the most famous scholars in Europe: he could certainly expect widespread interest in whatever he wrote. By the time of the letter to Scriverius, his fame had grown yet further. It can be assumed that many people, especially in France, in the Netherlands, and in Germany, read copies of the two letters in question, or at least heard about the idea of critice they expounded.54 I have no direct evidence to support this hypothesis. But it helps to explain both the singular way in which, in 1604, Ioannes Wowerius used Scaliger’s letter to Scriverius (I discuss this below), and the results of J. Jehasse’s inquiry on the occurrence of critice, critica, and criticus in the sixteenth century. It appears that the regular use of these terms in scholarly contexts set in after 1575.55 I suggest that this fact, and particularly the use of critice, which looked like an ancient Greek technical term, but began to serve in a way for which there was no real ancient 53 See I. Casaubonus, Epistolae . . . , curante Th. Janson. ab Almeloveen, 3rd edn. (Rotterdam, 1709), no. 600, p. 314, to Joannes Deodatus (Giovanni Diodati), 11 June 1608: ‘Josephus Scaliger . . . libri gemmei Psalmorum pentaplam editionem erat pollicitus; qui utinam vel nunc posset impelli, ut priora sua in Rempublicam literariam merita hac ingenti accessione cumularet. Saltem daret nobis vir summus tres illas inter se diversas Paraphrases Arabicas, quas in scriniis cimeliorum suorum multos jam servat annos.’ 54 Unfortunately, I do not know what terms were used by Gian Vincenzo Pinelli of Padua, who—according to Grafton, Scaliger I, 3 and nn. 5 and 6 at p. 230 (with references to the manuscripts in the Bibliothe`que nationale de France)—wrote in 1578 and 1579 to his correspondents in Paris, Claude Dupuy and Jacopo Corbinelli, begging them—as Grafton puts it—‘to obtain for him a statement of Scaliger’s views on the nature of philology and the duties of the critic’. Did Pinelli use the words philologia and criticus (whether in Latin or in Italian), as Grafton’s paraphrase suggests? And how had he come to know that Scaliger, this ‘Aristarco di tutti’, had some novel views on the nature and the tasks of scholarship? 55 Jehasse, Renaissance (as in n. 8), 674–7. At pp. 200–1 he states that the earliest occurrence of critique ‘critic’ and of critique ‘criticism’ is to be found in a letter of J. J. Scaliger of 1580: see above, n. 34.

158

Benedetto Bravo

parallel, is traceable to the idea launched by Scaliger in the letter to Vertunianus. Of course, the idea will also have spread through conversation with visiting scholars and, from 1593 onwards, with pupils, at Leiden. Further promotion for critice came in Scaliger’s ‘Castigationum in Hippocratis libellum explicatio’, published in Paris in 1578 as an introduction to Hippocratis Coi de capitis vulneribus liber, Latinitate donatus a Francisco Vertuniano.56 Scaliger attacked previous translators and commentators of this treatise, none of whom, he claimed, had spotted its many spurious passages. He added: ‘From this the studious reader will understand how vain are the promises to achieve anything in literary matters of those who lack this one part [of learning] called critice. For it was this one part that the aforesaid scholars, great men in every other respect, lacked.’57 This was echoed by Vertunianus in his prefatory letter: he spoke of errors committed by previous translators ‘Critices ignorantia’. This taunt had a polemical sequel, which is recounted by Grafton. I find it significant that, in his monumental Thesaurus Graecae linguae, published in 1572 (just a few years before Scaliger wrote the letter to Vertunianus discussed above), Henricus Stephanus is apparently unaware that the discipline he is practising could be called critice: this is clear from entries for grammatikv and kritikv;58 kritik as a designation of a branch of scholarship does not figure. Stephanus registers i.a. the iunctura d¸namiv kritik from Lucian’s Hermotimus 68 (kritikn tØn toio¸twn d¸namin porismenon, ‘having acquired the ability to judge matters of this kind’); he explains it as follows: ‘the critical ability, i.e. the competence or skill in judging, possessed by those who are called critici’.59 This explanation is symptomatic, for Lucian does not speak of critics at all; it is clear that Stephanus is particularly interested in the notion of criticus. But facultas critica is not the same as Scaliger’s critice or ars critica. 56 I have not seen this book; I am borrowing the quotations from Grafton, Scaliger I (as in n. 7), 317–18. On Scaliger’s and Vertunianus’ work on the De capitis vulneribus and on the polemic that ensued on the publication of the book, see Grafton, ibid. 180–4. 57 ‘Quare hinc potest colligere studiosus Lector, quam frustra aliquid in literis tractandis promittunt illi, qui huius unius partis, quae Critice vocatur, expertes sunt. Haec enim una pars illis ad perfectionem defuit, cum in caeteris magni viri essent.’ 58 H. Stephanus, Thesaurus Graecae linguae, 1572 (‘excudebat Henr. Stephanus’, n. p.), i, s.v. grfw, col. 862; ii, s.v. kr‹nw, cols. 428–9. 59 Thesaurus, i, col. 429: ‘Dicitur autem et d¸namiv kritik , q.d. Facultas critica, id est Peritia iudicandi seu solertia, qualis inest iis qui critici appellantur. Luc. in Hermot.’.

Critice and Historical Criticism

159

Did Stephanus know Scaliger’s letter to Vertunianus when he wrote his ‘dissertation’ on ‘Ancient critics, Greek and Latin, and their various strictures, especially concerning poets’, published in 1587?60 Anyway, the idea of critice sketched out by Scaliger does not appear in Stephanus’ book. He is interested in ancient grammatici or critici as literary critics. He produces evidence in order to show that the term kritikv (criticus) properly applied to those among the grammatiko‹ (grammatici ) who were particularly learned and whose main concern was to judge literary works, especially poems (see especially pp. 17–18, a passage closely related to Thesaurus, i, cols. 428–9; cf. also p. 244). At the same time, he uses the term without much regard for its use in Antiquity. By ‘critici’ he in fact means literary critics, irrespective of whether they belonged or not to the profession of grammatice. The following passage (p. 18) is particularly significant: ‘just as many grammatici were called critici without exercising that function [i.e. the function of judging literary works] . . . so, conversely, many who laid no claim to being grammatici played that role, applying their censorial authority both to prose and verse’.61 Here he cites Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, and the Elder Seneca; the last-mentioned ‘inserted in his Controversiarum libri numerous remarks belonging to the critical faculty’ (‘ad criticam facultatem’). Of the Greeks he mentions Dionysius of Halicarnassus, pseudo-Longinus, and Hermogenes. As far as I know, none of these writers was ever called criticus or kritikv in Antiquity. In the dissertation there occur phrases like ‘censuram suam exercebant’ (p. 17), ‘kritikn quandam . . . exercere censuram’ (p. 207); also ‘critica sententia’, ‘critica reprehensio’, ‘critica censura’ (p. 295). In at least one passage (p. 158) kritik occurs as a noun, but the context suggests that it is used as an equivalent of critica facultas, i.e. kritik d¸namiv, and not of ars critica, kritik t
cnh. After quoting a difficult sentence in a philosophical Greek text and enumerating various possibilities of interpreting it, Stephanus concludes the discussion by 60 De criticis vet(eribus) gr(aecis) et latinis eoru ´ mque variis apud poetas potissimu`m reprehensionibus, Dissertatio Henrici Stephani . . . Restitutionis Comment(ariorum) Servii in Virg(ilium) et magnae ad eos accessionis Specimen (Paris, 1587). I could do no more than glance at this book, but Christopher Ligota kindly supplied photocopies of relevant passages. Pfeiffer, History II, 110, amazingly calls it ‘the first modern history of classical scholarship’. 61 ‘hoc certe ` constat: quemadmodum multi grammatici criticorum nomen habuerunt, qui tamen eo munere non fungerentur, (ad eo ut honorarium tantu`m non etiam onerarium illis esse nomen dici posset) ita vicissim has partes suscepisse multos, qui se grammaticos minime` profiterentur: nec minus adversus orationem solutam qua`m poemata censurae suae autoritatem usurpasse’.

160

Benedetto Bravo

a Graeco-Latin hexameter: ‘O quae tot kritik diakr‹nein ne‹kea possit’, i.e. ‘Oh, what sort of critical ability could decide so many disputes?’ After which he writes: ‘Ab his igitur ad poetas nostros (in quos kritikn exercere posse, satis supe´rque etiam to·v kritikwttoiv esse debet) refugiamus’. I think that here kritik has the same meaning as in the hexameter; I translate: ‘Let us therefore escape from these difficulties and take refuge with our poets (for even the most critical men should be content with the possibility of exercising the critical faculty on poets)’. In 1595 Justus Lipsius ( Joest Lips) published at Leiden a collection of some of his printed works. Its title deserves attention: Opera omnia quae ad Criticam proprie spectant. The preface begins as follows: ‘Ecce tibi, Lector, Criticos meos omnes libellos: quos sparsos antea` collegimus et composuimus tibi in hunc fascem.’ What was implied by proprie in the title? Presumably, that such works as De constantia (1584) and Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589) had been left out. In any case, it is interesting to see that the notion of critice applies here to studies that are partly philological, partly antiquarian, and have all to do with Antiquity.62 The collection comprises Antiquarum lectionum libri quinque (pp. 1–97); Epistolicarum quaestionum libri quinque (pp. 199–452); Electorum libri duo (pp. 453–782); Variarum lectionum libri tres (pp. 783–949); and finally a pamphlet, dedicated to Scaliger, on bad and good ‘correctores’ (i.e. on the bad and good use of emendation), Satyra Menippaea, Somnium. Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos (pp. 951–76). As D. G. Morhof rightly remarked in his Polyhistor, ‘Justus Lipsius’ Opera critica . . . present a variety of learning: he offers both antiquarian studies and textual emendations’.63 This is particularly true of the two 62 Not much later, between 1602 and 1612, a pupil of Scaliger’s, Jan Gruter, published in six volumes a collection of scholarly contributions by various authors under the title Lampas, sive Fax Artium Liberalium, hoc est Thesaurus Criticus e Bibliothecis erutus. Here again studies of a philological and antiquarian character concerning Antiquity are assembled under the notion of critice. 63 Daniel Georgius Morhofius, Polyhistor, in tres tonos, Literarium . . . Philosophicum et Practicum . . . divisus. Opus posthumum . . . (Lu¨beck, 1708), t. 1, lib. 5, cap. 1, 221–2: ‘Justi Lipsii Opera Critica . . . variae sunt eruditionis: nam et antiquaria multa habet, et emendat in Auctoribus.’ Books 4–7 of vol. 1 of the Polyhistor belong to the posthumous part. They include material added by Johann Frick with no indication to that effect (as the editor, Johannes Moller, informs us), so the observation about Lipsius might be Frick’s rather than Morhof ’s. It is worth noting that book 5, captioned ‘Criticus’, consists of two chapters, captioned respectively ‘De scriptoribus criticis’ and ‘De scriptoribus antiquariis’. Chapter 2 opens as follows (p. 226): ‘Subjungimus Antiquarios Criticis, ut qui inter se sunt quam maxime cognati: in eadem enim aurifodina laborant, Graecis scilicet et Latinis Auctoribus, et utplurimum fit, ut, qui antiquitates scribunt, iidem krhthk [an obvious misprint for kritikn corrected in the next edition, 1714] in Auctores varios

Critice and Historical Criticism

161

books of Electa: Book 1 bears the title Electorum liber primus. In quo, praeter censuras, varii prisci ritus; Book 2, Electorum liber secundus. In quo mixtim Ritus et Censurae. In the Somnium, which was first published in 1581, the term critice does not appear. The term critici occurs twice: in the subtitle and in the speech that one of the characters of the ‘dream’, Varro, delivers in the Senate in order to oppose an indiscriminate condemnation of the ‘correctores’ (p. 972). The latter occurrence is significant: ‘Veros quidem germanosque Criticos magno opere suadeo ut retineatis.’ Those of the ‘correctores’ who emend texts reasonably are ‘true, genuine critici’.64 In the preface opening the whole collection Lipsius maintains that all the ‘critici libelli’ that he has put together, though different ‘facie et formaˆ stili’, are homogeneous in respect of their aim (‘fine’) and of their subject (‘argumento’). He explains: ‘Finis iis, illustrare, emendare: argumentum, genus omne veterum scriptorum.’ This obviously implies a sort of theory of critice, but it must have been a very sketchy one: we may assume that critice consisted in his mind of two kinds of activity, elucidation and emendation (i.e. x ghsiv and dirqwsiv) of any ancient writer (or writing?) that had survived. He must have regarded his own studies on Roman political institutions, on the Roman army, or on Roman amphitheatres as belonging to one of the two aspects of critice, elucidation of ancient texts. In 1597 Gasper Schoppius (later Scioppius—de domo Casper or Kaspar Schoppe), who was then not quite 21,65 published Suspectae exerceant. Intellectos igitur hic praecipue Graecarum Latinarumque antiquitatum Collectores atque vindices volumus, cum Septentrionalium populorum antiquitates proprie huc non spectent, utpote quae parum ad elegantiam literarum conferunt.’ Thus ‘critici’ and ‘antiquarii’, distinct but related, are subsumed under the general heading ‘Criticus’. For the editorial history of Morhof ’s Polyhistor, see F. Waquet, ‘Le Polyhistor, de Daniel Georg Morhof, lieu de me´moire de la Re´publique des Lettres’, in Les Lieux de me´moire et la fabrique de l’oeuvre: Actes du 1er colloque du Centre International de Rencontres sur le XVIIe sie`cle (Kiel . . . 1993), ed. V. Kapp (Biblio 17, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature; Paris, 1993), 47–60, esp. 52–5. 64 The ‘senatus consultum’ at the end of the pamphlet establishes the following rules concerning emendation (p. 974): ‘Siquis e` libris bonis fidisque correxerit, laudi semper esse. siquis e` coniecturis, noxae. Nisi eae clarae, liquidae, certae sint.’ Here Lipsius rejoins Politian, taking up a definite position in a discussion that had been going on for a hundred years: see the first chapter of Timpanaro’s Genesi del metodo del Lachmann (as in n. 11). 65 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Geschichte (as in n. 3), 23, says of this scholar: ‘er war ein Talent, aber die Charakterlosigkeit hat es zersto¨rt’. On Scioppius’ important edition of Varro’s De lingua latina (1605) see L. Spengel’s preface to his and his son’s (A. Spengel’s) edition of the same work, Berlin 1885, pp. xxviii–xxxiii. L. Spengel points out Scioppius’ ingenuity as well as his dishonesty. For biographical information, see

162

Benedetto Bravo

lectiones in the form of a series of letters addressed to Scaliger and Casaubon, as well as a short treatise, entitled De arte critica, et praecipue de altera eius parte emendatrice.66 Schoppius says: those who are at present called critici have but one task (munus et officium unicum), that of improving the text of the writers ‘utriusque linguae’, i.e. Greek and Latin, and this can be done in two ways, (i) by elucidating ‘quae in illorum scriptis obscura sunt’, (ii) by correcting errors in the transmitted text—errors due either to ‘vetustas’ or to deliberate distortion. In other words: critice or ars critica is composed of two parts: explanation of obscure passages and emendatio. I think that Schoppius took these general ideas from Lipsius.67 It was probably about 1595 that Isaac Casaubon,68 an original and immensely learned scholar, began to reflect on the notion of critice.69 He was on excellent terms with Scaliger since the end of 1592, when he first wrote to him (they never met). He recognized Scaliger’s superiority but was quite capable of dissent. Casaubon does not seem to have felt it necessary to justify the term critice as a designation of the profession to which he was devoting all his energies. Presumably, he either knew Scaliger’s letter to Vertunianus on critice or had heard about it, and accepted Scaliger’s interpretation of the ancient evidence. He was, rather, keen on showing the functions and importance of critice. Jaumann, Critica (as in n. 4), 163–4 n. 17. See also A. Grafton, ‘Kaspar Schoppe and the Art of Textual Criticism’, in H. Jaumann (ed.), Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649): Philologe im Dienst der Gegenreformation. Beitra¨ge zur Gelehrtenkultur des europa¨ischen Spa¨thumanismus (Franfurt am Main,1998) ¼ Zeitspru¨nge. Forschungen zur fru¨hen Neuzeit, 2/3– 4 (1998), 231–43. 66 Gasper Schoppius Francus, De arte critica, et praecipue de altera eius parte emendatrice, quae ratio in Latinis scriptoribus ex ingenio emendandis observari debeat, commentariolus. In quo nonnulla nove` emendantur, alia prius emendata confirmantur . . . (Nuremberg, 1597). See especially the introduction (‘commentatiuncula’) under the title ‘De Criticis et Philologis veteribus et recentioribus’. Jaumann, Critica (as in n. 4), ‘Textanhang’, 399–402, reproduces extracts from the 1662 edition. 67 As regards ancient critici, Schoppius states that, in addition to what Quintilian says about them (at 1. 4. 3), they expounded old writers of various kinds and corrected the received text by means of ‘meliores codices’. This might be an echo of what Lipsius had written in his Somnium: corrections should be made ‘e` libris bonis fidisque’. 68 On Casaubon, see M. Pattison, Isaac Casaubon 1559–1614 (2nd edn., Oxford, 1892; 1st edn. 1875). This otherwise admirable book tends to overlook the intrinsic, specifically scholarly motivation of Casaubon’s investigations. On the religious, cultural, and political background of Casaubon’s work see C. Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento (Turin 1963); this very rich book has good remarks also on Casaubon himself and his work on the ancient Church, passim, esp. 253–4, 342–5. 69 I. Casaubonus, Epistolae (as in n. 53), no. 8, p. 5, letter dated ‘Genevae, a.d. XVIII. Kal. Jan. 1593’, i.e. 15 Dec. 1592.

Critice and Historical Criticism

163

For many years Casaubon continued to collect material for a book to be called De critica, but he never published such a book. In the preface of his Animadversiones on Athenaeus, published in 1600, and in a number of letters dating from the years 1600–5, he says that he has written a ‘commentarius’ De critica, or that it is almost finished (‘affectus’), or that he has still to finish it, or that its completion is a difficult task that requires leisure.70 However, a survey of the detailed modern catalogue of Casaubon’s manuscripts kept at the Bodleian Library,71 the detailed catalogues of his manuscripts compiled by his son Me´ric, now also at the Bodleian (MSS Casaubon 22 and 44, 4
), and some of the numerous 70 I. Casaubonus, Epistolae, no. 215, to Scaliger (23 Sept. 1600), p. 111 (‘Commentarium de Critica pridem affectum habemus, sed labore isto [on the Historia Augusta] prius defungamur necesse est, qua`m aliud quid suscipimus. De illo igitur alia`s tecum plura: neque enim leviter praeclaram illam hypothesin [ ¼ subject] sumus tractaturi, si dabitur o˝ranqen perficere quod instituimus’); no. 247 (to Scaliger, 8 Sept. 1601, PS), p. 127 (‘Cu`m in eo libro, quem de Critica fecimus, omnem Hebraeorum Kritikn explicare sit animus . . . ’); no. 311 (to Geverhartus Elmenhorstius, 7 Nov. 1602), p. 165 (very busy editing the Historiae Augustae Scriptores, ‘neque de poliendo commentario, quem scripsimus de Critica vel cogitare’; and further on: ‘multa, ut spero, quae habemus non inchoata, sed affecta, brevi edemus. In his est prope jam absolutus commentarius de Lectis et Stragula Veterum Veste . . . Sequetur postea is, de quo nuper scripsisti [certainly the Commentarius de Critica], nescio an accuratior, sed prolixior certe`, nisi fallor, expectatione tuaˆ futurus. Est enim pulcherrimum argumentum, et cujus notitia omnibus, qui in literis serio versantur, sit necessaria. Veru`m ista, quoniam tempore opus est, Deo permittamus’); no. 329 (to Joannes Porthaesius, 30 Jan. 1603), p. 174 (‘Qui existimant, Massoram corruptorum librorum qeopne¸stwn esse argumentum, nae illi magni criminis se obligant; cu`m potius certae fidei et integrae testimonium divino Verbo haec ars praebeat. Quod aliquando . . . nostro quodam exactae diligentiae commentario sumus probaturi.’ There follow some remarks on the signs used in the Hebrew Bible published in Venice; then: ‘Speramus non mediocrem aliquando lucem operaˆ nostraˆ accessuram huic studiorum generi: verum hoc Qeo n go¸nasi ke·tai, crnou gr de· ka› scolv’); no. 400 (to Petrus Scriverius, 29 June 1604), p. 213 (‘Quod me adeo` obnixe` rogas, ut de Critica quae polliciti sumus, publicemus, agnosco etiam in eo affectuˆs tui vehementiam . . . Illa autem lucubratio peculiarem habet difficultatem, cu`m et spinosa sit tota, et quaedam in eo [ea?] contineantur adversus eos disputata, qui scelere immani de Sacra Pagina audent detrahere. Adde quo`d otium desiderat adhuc is noster foetus, si volumus ˛phn
mion eum non esse. Laetatus sum nuper, cum viderem Joannem Wouwerium, juvenem eruditissimum, ex parte idem argumentum suscepisse tractandum: magis vero` laetatus essem, si, quae paramus omnia, essent ab illo occupata, ut legitimam occasionem haberemus supersedendi ab eo labore; quod quia ab eo factum non est, dabimus . . . operam, ut tuo desiderio qua`m primum satisfaciamus’); no. 439 (to Carolus Labbaeus, 11 Mar. 1605), p. 235 (‘Pythagoream legem, de qua alicubi mentionem fecimus, . . . in nostro de Critica tractatu fuse` exponimus’). 71 Casaubon’s papers as well as a few printed books that belonged to him and a number of papers which, rightly or wrongly, were added to his Nachlass, are catalogued in the Quarto Catalogues, i: Greek Manuscripts, by H. O. Coxe, reprinted with corrections from the edition of 1853 (Oxford, 1969).

164

Benedetto Bravo

volumes of his manuscript notes (Adversaria), has yielded no trace of anything remotely like a De critica of book size. One of the volumes of Adversaria, a thick pocket-size codex (MS Casaubon 60, 16mo), contains miscellaneous notes on a number of subjects, one of which is critice. The notes consist of excerpts from, or references to, ancient authors, and of short remarks.72 As regards critice, the material comes from Greek and Latin, pagan and Christian, authors ranging from Cicero to Late Antiquity. Plato and Aristotle appear sporadically. There are also some rare references to major modern scholars (L. Valla, G. Bude´’s De asse, J. J. Scaliger); more frequent are references to C. Baronius. Some notes are about Jewish critice. When were the notes for De critica compiled? One of the authors whom Casaubon draws upon is Athenaeus; at least one reference to this author comes (as is clear from the pagination) from Casaubon’s edition, which was printed in 1597, but at least two derive from an earlier edition; this suggests that the notes were written partly before 1597, partly after. On the other hand, there are references to Casaubon’s commentary on Suetonius, first published in 1595. I am inclined to think that none of the notes is much earlier than that year. In another, much larger volume (MS Casaubon 23, 4
), one single leaf (fo. 71r–v) contains notes on critici and critice (the modern catalogue describes the content of this leaf as follows: ‘Excerpta de philologiae seu Critices utilitate in veterum Conviviorum ratione’).73 This leaf, I think, might be the place Casaubon refers to in a note entitled Critici and written on one of the first leaves (fo. 7r) of the pocket-size codex 72 Notes on a given subject are not grouped together in a continuous series; they are mostly grouped in small ensembles, chaotically mixed with analogous groups belonging to other subjects. On many pages the place some notes occupy and the colour of the ink show that Casaubon often came back to what he had written and inserted new material. A subject index compiled by Casaubon himself and placed at the beginning of the codex was obviously intended to organize the chaotic content, but it is far too incomplete for the purpose. There are a few instances of cross-referencing. Notes, or groups of notes, manifestly or even explicitly concerning critice occur very frequently in the first forty-six leaves of the codex: fos. 4v; 7r; 8r; 9r; 18v; 19r; 20v; 21r; 23r; 24r–v; 25r–v; 26r–v; 37v; 38r–v; 39r; 40r–v; 44r; 46r. Further on they are very rare. The subject index registers the following leaves for Critice: ‘7 etc. 19. et p. 23. 37 al. 46. 211. cœ(tera)’. 73 Among other things, this leaf contains a list of major Critici (praecipui auctores) and examples of men of action who practised Critice (Alexander the Great, Cassander, ‘Alphonsus rex Lusitaniae’); moreover, an interesting remark on ‘Critici primi Italorum versati literis’: ‘Observatu dignum est, Domitium Calderinum Veronensem et alios Italos renascentibus literis Criticam flagitiosiss(ime) exercuisse: ut quidlibet mutaret supponerent falsa pro veris impune assererent . . . vidit hoc Angelus Politianus divino vir ingenio: qui in admirabili praefatione Miscellaneorum fuse` de hoc queritur . . . ’.

Critice and Historical Criticism

165

(MS Casaubon 60): here, immediately under the title Critici, Casaubon notes: ‘Fuse notamus ex multis in altero libro ms.’ I suspect moreover that the notes of MS Casaubon 23, fo. 71, are his earliest notes on critice. I have not seen MS Casaubon 13, fo. 53, which, according to the modern catalogue, contains ‘Grammaticae observationes ex scriptoribus antiquissimis’.74 That is all I have found. Given Casaubon’s character, his earnestness, and his modesty, it is not likely, though not impossible, that his declarations concerning the projected De critica were false. An incomplete manuscript may have existed and have disappeared through accident or design (authorial dissatisfaction?) before his son Me´ric made the catalogues. Casaubon’s notes for De critica contain no definition of critice, no general statement about its field or method or aims or relationship to other disciplines. Two categories of notes are prominent. One, the fuller of the two, concerns the scholarship of the ancients together with the ancient educational system as well as ancient book production, book trade, and libraries. The notes belonging to this category make it evident that Casaubon (probably stimulated by his work on Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus and on Athenaeus) had entered on a path which was leading him to a vast and accurate study of ancient scholarship and ancient education. The second category of notes is concerned with examples illustrating errors or deliberate alterations in the tradition of all kinds of texts, among others the Bible (Hebrew Old Testament, Septuagint, Greek New Testament) and texts relating to Church history, as well as false attributions of texts.75 These examples are meant to illustrate at the same time the need for critice, which detects and corrects distortions of the authentic text. There are also examples intended to show how critice is not to be used. The fact that the two categories of notes are intermingled and treated jointly as material for a book De critica is significant. It suggests that, for Casaubon, his own and his contemporaries’ scholarly practice was not a distinct topic, separable from research on ancient scholarship. 74 I have also not seen MS Casaubon 27, fo. 177, which, according to the catalogue, contains ‘Excerpta e Criticis quibusdam, Hartungo, Robortello et Victorio’. 75 It was in the name of critice that Casaubon, as early as 1603, refused to believe that the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus came ‘ab antiquissimo illo Aegyptio’: see his letter to Scaliger of 28 Aug. 1603 (Epistolae [as in n. 53], no. 349, p. 186): ‘tu`m credam, cu`m t' kritik' nuntium remisero’. On Casaubon and the Corpus Hermeticum see Grafton, Scaliger II, 684–5; 70 n. 29, where Grafton lists his earlier studies on the subject.

166

Benedetto Bravo

A small proportion of the notes refers to Jewish biblical scholarship, especially to the Masoretes. Casaubon’s interest in this subject is confirmed by his preface to his Animadversiones on Athenaeus (1600), and by two of the letters cited above: the letter to Scaliger of 8 September 1601, where he says that he intends to ‘explain’, in his De critica, ‘the whole Kritik of the Jews’,76 and the letter to J. Porthaesius of 30 January 1603, where he writes: ‘Those who think that the Masora is evidence that the inspired books are corrupt, do indeed involve themselves in a great crime, for this art provides the divine word with testimony that it has been transmitted in a wholly reliable way. I hope I shall prove this sometime, Qeo didntov, in a dissertation of painstaking exactitude’77—by which he means, of course, his future book De critica. Casaubon’s interest in the Masora78 is connected with a problem that was essential for him: to what extent is the transmitted text of the Scriptures to be considered reliable according to the standards of critice? The passage of the letter to Porthaesius just quoted must be read alongside a manuscript note of Casaubon, published by J. Chr. Wolf: The sacred letters, that is the tenor (no v) of the Old and the New Testament, are indeed incorruptible, proof against any deformation; but that the language, which is their vehicle, has, over so long a stretch of time, suffered blemishes or minor deformations, though without damage to the meaning, cannot, I think, be doubted. In the case of the Greek the situation is clear: many things have been slightly changed, some more seriously impaired, but in such a way that the truth has remained unshaken. As for the Hebrew, why should we doubt it? Does not the whole Masora give a most sure testimony to this? See Augustine, De civitate Dei, p. 825 [i.e. 15. 11].79

The problem of the reliability of the transmitted text of the Scriptures seems to have contributed to the difficulty of completing De critica. In his letter to P. Scriverius of 29 June 1604 (quoted above) Casaubon 76

77 Text in n. 70 above. For Scaliger’s reply see n. 49 above. MS Casaubon 10 seems to have something about ‘Massora Rabbi Eliae Levitae’— cf. Quarto Catalogues (as in n. 71), 827 (I have not seen this volume of Adversaria). On Elias Levita cf. also Casaubon’s letter to Porthaesius of 1603: Epistolae (as in n. 53), no. 329, pp. 173–4. 79 Casauboniana sive Isaaci Casauboni Varia de scriptoribus librisque judicia . . . , ed. J. Chr. Wolf (Hamburg, 1710), 67: ‘Literae quidem sacrae h.e. ` no v utriusque testamenti fqarta sunt, et nulli depravationi obnoxia; at lingua, quae literarum illarum veluti frhma est, quin aliquam labem aut labeculam sed sine detrimento to no acceperit longi temporis tractu, non est, ut puto, dubitandum. In Graeco res manifesta: multa leviter immutata, quaedam gravius tentata, sed sic, ut veritas inconcussa maneret. In Hebr. cur dubitemus? Nonne tota Masora certissimum ejus rei testimonium praebet? Vid. Augustin. de C. D. p. 825.’ 78

Critice and Historical Criticism

167

writes, ‘This work is particularly difficult: it is full of thorns, and it contains a polemic against those who, guilty of a heinous crime, dare detract from the Sacred Page.’ Who the ‘detractors’ are is not clear, perhaps the same person or persons he refers to in his letter to Porthaesius: ‘Qui existimant, Massoram corruptorum librorum qeopneustwn esse argumentum, nae illi magni criminis se obligant’. However, Casaubon did not devote much energy to applying critice to the Bible. Problems of textual criticism and philological interpretation of biblical passages appear rather sporadically in the manuscript notes published by J. Chr. Wolf, or in the codex I have studied. Reading biblical commentaries by the Church Fathers was for him edifying, although he recognized freely that, technically, modern interpreters could be superior to the ancients.80 It is not clear how aware he was that allegorical interpretation of Scripture, as it was practised by the Church Fathers, was hardly compatible with his idea of critice. Many of Casaubon’s notes in the codex under discussion (almost every page of which begins with the invocation Sn Qe), as well as his 80 Ibid. 7: ‘Tomum I. Commentar(iorum) Chrysostomi qui desinit in Jesaiam, absolvi, opus vere aureum, et quod imperfectum esse majori ex parte sit dolendum . . . . Tanta pietas, tanta in Sac(ra) Scriptura eruditio, quam in illo Viro animadverto et in nonnullis aliis veterum, non sinit me iis adsentiri, qui neoterica atque adeo unum e neotericis toti vetustati anteponunt’. Ibid.: ‘Ambrosii in Psalmos interpretatio omnis vel vocum est, et quaerit sensum ac veram lectionem, vel sensus ac Doctrinae, verbis comprehensae. Utrumque genus interpretationis desiderat S(acra) Scriptura, et utrumque adhibuerunt fere Patres. Idem subinde interpretationes expendit Graec(am) et Latin(am). Denique familiare ipsi est, digredi ad tractationem locorum Sac(rae) Scripturae satis remotorum, ut in Psal. CXIX. passim. Observa etiam, multa pr¿v filolog‹an posse disci a magno illo Viro.’ Answering a letter from Scaliger which contained a sharp censure of John Chrysostom’s arithmetical speculations about the ages of the world ( J. Scaliger, Epistolae, no. 84, Leiden edn., 236–40, Frankfurt edn., 216–19; cf. no. 87, Leiden edn., 243–4, Frankfurt edn., 222–5), Casaubon writes on 27 Mar. 1604, Epistolae (as in n. 53), no. 389, p. 206: ‘Omnino . . . verum est tuum de optimo illo Patre judicium. Nos sane` multa in ejus scriptis adnotavimus, quae tn o˝k mpeir‹an a˝to tv filosof‹av te ka› tv filolog‹av manifesto` arguant: ut de Historia nihil dicam, in qua pene puer aliquando possit videri. Sed nos in viro sanctissimo hos naevos facile` ferimus, qui sciamus, omne illius studium in eo positum fuisse, ut sine jactantia, ka› neu pshv perpere‹av t¿n staurwq
nta to ksmou Swtra praedicaret. Longe` diversis moribus coaxatores isti sunt, quorum tribuniciae conciones plenae ostentationis quotidie audiuntur.’ Scaliger’s answer, dated 16 Apr. 1604 of the Julian calendar, Epistolae, no. 93, Leiden edn., 258–9, Frankfurt edn., 236, is also worth quoting: ‘de quo scriptore idem sentio, quod tu. Nullius veterum Patrum lectione magis afficior, tum propter inaffectatum dicendi characterem semper sibi similem; tum quia unicus est omnium veterum, cui probe nota fuerit mens totius Novi Testamenti: in quo genere solus regnum obtinet. Nam in Veteris Instrumenti sensibus ut plurimum longe a` recta veri regione vagari cogit Hebraismi inscitia et LXX interpretum editio, quae quum sit longe mendosissima, tamen eam omnes veteres, quae illorum sinistra fuit kakozhl‹a, non dubitant archetypis Hebraicis anteferre.’

168

Benedetto Bravo

last work, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI ad cardinalis Baronii prolegomena . . . (London, 1614), show that the role he assigned to critice in the domain of religion consisted mainly in the correct reading and interpretation of the writings of the Church Fathers and of ancient texts concerning the Church. This fervent, but irenically minded Calvinist was in fact fairly close to the Erasmian attitude to religion and scholarship (which explains the fact that he felt at home among Anglicans and approved of the ideas of Hugo Grotius on ecclesiastical matters).81 In his letters he blames those Calvinist theologians who presume to reject all tradition and to interpret the Bible solely by their own lights, introducing dangerous novelties.82 He thought the tradition of the ancient Church to be an indispensable guide in the search for truth, provided it was the real, authentic tradition, recognized and correctly interpreted by means of solid eruditio and critice, and not the adulterated tradition imposed by the ‘tyranny’ of the Pope and of the ‘papists’. He often complained that circumstances had prevented him from concentrating all his powers on the study of the Church Fathers and the history of the early Church, for the glory of God.83 In spite of his critical alertness and immense knowledge he shared the illusion, frequent at that time among learned and irenically minded members of different churches, that ancient Christianity was free of violent struggles and hatreds bred by theological controversy.84 Apart from the notes in the codex discussed above,85 Casaubon’s view of critice reveals itself in his Animadversionum in Athenaei Dipnosophistas 81 Casaubon, letter to H. Grotius written from London on 27 Jan. 1612, Epistolae (as in n. 53), no. 772, p. 448. Here Casaubon is acting as an intermediary between King James and Grotius. 82 See e.g. his letter to Johannes Drusius, 27 Dec. 1600, Epistolae, no. 221, p. 113; letter to Cornelius van der Myle, 14 July 1612, Epistolae, no. 813, p. 474. 83 See especially a number of letters from the years 1595–6 (first from Geneva, then from Montpellier), nos. 42; 50; 51; 60; 63; 64; 66; 77; 103. Moreover, a number of letters from the years 1600–5 (from Paris), nos. 213; 281; 380; 419; 426; 433. Lastly, a most interesting autobiographical letter written from London on 7 Apr. 1613, no. 879. 84 A good example of this illusion can be found in the treatise of a Calvinist aiming at the reconciliation and reunion of the churches in conflict, especially of Calvinists and Catholics in France: Jean de Serres, Apparatus ad fidem catholicam (Paris, 1597), fo. 5v: ‘Ecquos autem meliores et aptiores illorum [scil. the Sacred Books] interpretes agnoscere possumus quam orthodoxos illos Doctores Ecclesiae Catholicae, qui ante natas controversias vixerunt, in Europaeis, Asianis, Africanis Ecclesiis illustres: Irenaeum puta, Athanasium, Gregorium Nazianzenum, Basilium, Chrysostomum, Ambrosium, Augustinum, Hieronymum caeterosque illos viros augusto Patrum nomine apud omnes maxime reverendos?’ Quoted by Vivanti, Lotta (as in n. 68), 261–2 n. 1. 85 See also a short remark on critice in Casaubon’s Animadversiones in Suetonium: C. Suetonii Tranquilli de xii Caesaribus libri VIII, I. Casaubonus rec. et animadversionum

Critice and Historical Criticism

169

libri XV, published in Lyon in 1600 (three years after his edition of that author). In the preface Casaubon writes: It is an old complaint of learned men . . . that the texts of the ancients are full of disfiguring errors . . . This is certainly unfortunate and must be deplored with real tears by lovers of wisdom. For, whence can we obtain learning, whence knowledge of the sciences, whence acquaintance with the entire past, if not from the books of the ancients? . . . Therefore those who think that it makes no difference whether they use an emended book or an unemended one, are quite ridiculous. These people are in part Democritus’ fellow countrymen [i.e. Abderites, simpletons] and acorn-eating Arcadians, in part ill-intentioned fault-finders, perverse in their learning, enemies and despisers of the divine critice (I mean the true one, not one that is promiscuous, and, as Tertullian says, all over the place). The fatuousness and malignity of these people was frequently attacked by the great Galen. And I have proved, in my De critica, which I have written with a most exact diligence, that it is from this source that very many errors have come and gained currency in social life. The teachers of the Jews have a word to designate the need for this study: they say no less truly than elegantly that critice is the fence of divine Law, and does this not apply all the more to human writings?86

Critice is here obviously viewed as textual criticism and text interpretation, applied to the writings of the ancients. Another passage in the Animadversiones sheds light on Casaubon’s idea of ancient critice and, indirectly, on the nature and the present tasks libros adiecit ([Geneva], 1605), sep. pag., 8: he denounces an ‘illness’ frequent among ‘critics’ of his time (‘hodie solemnis et pid miov nostrorum Criticorum morbus’): as soon as they notice in an author something ‘nove et inusitate dictum’, they try to introduce it into other authors, or into another passage of the same author. ‘Hac ratione integerrimi atque incorruptissimi auctorum loci, ceu corrupti et depravati, corriguntur. T¿ d ¯lon, peri
sth  n n kritik efiv kris‹an,  tØn palaiØn xuggraf
wn dirqwsiv efiv paradirqwsin,  swthr‹a efiv pleian.’ This Greek sentence is not a quotation: Casaubon here finds it easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin. The sentence means: ‘And, in a general way, nowadays criticism has turned into lack of judgement, emendation of ancient writers into pseudo-emendation, healing into destruction.’ 86 ‘Vetus est eruditorum querela . . . mendis deformibus antiquorum scatere monumenta. Misera profecto` res, et sapientiae studiosis vel veris lacrymis deflenda. Unde enim nobis eruditio parabilis, unde cognitio disciplinarum, unde totius praeteriti temporis notitia, nisi ex libris antiquorum? . . . Ut plane` ridiculi sint, qui emendato´ne an inemendato libro utantur, sua nihil putant interesse. Isti sunt, partim Democriti populares et Arcades balanhfgoi, partim vitiligatores literas perverse docti, divinae Critices (legitimam intelligo, non istam volgivagam, et ut loquitur Tertullianus, passivam) hostes et contemtores: quorum fatuitatem et kako qeian tot locis magnus Galenus acriter est insectatus. Nos autem in eo libro quem accuratissima diligentia de Critica fecimus, plurimos in vitam errores ab hoc fonte manasse, vero vicimus. Sed studij huius necessitatem Hebraeorum doctores verbo indicant, qui Legis divinae, (quanto igitur meliore iure humanorum scriptorum?) sepem esse Criticam non minus vere` qua`m eleganter pronunciant.’

170

Benedetto Bravo

of critice. Discussing the title of Aristotle’s lost work Per› didaskaliØn [i.e. On dramatic performances], he writes: It is an aberration, commonly found, to translate (this title) by De doctrinis. For it was not on philosophy or the artes liberales that the criticus [i.e. Aristotle!] wrote in this work, but on what is proper to his profession. The knowledge of it is very delightful and most useful for clarifying history [i.e. historiographical narratives]. The matter is little understood today, and I take the opportunity to explain it briefly. The system of studies in the past [i.e. in Antiquity] was based mainly on the reading and understanding of dramatic poets, especially comic poets. They were drawn on for purity of language, for information about political events, for knowledge of the life and habits of the foremost citizens of Athens. Hence great scholars have vied with each other in expounding ancient works of this kind, and this from the very beginnings of the profession of critice, or grammatice, or however you like to name that discipline whose task is the correct interpretation of ancient writers and whose founder, as I show elsewhere [obviously an allusion to De critica], is the divine Aristotle.87

A little further on (p. 261) Casaubon points out the utility of the lists of dramatic performances for chronology: ‘How much the critici, by their diligence, helped the ancient chronologers, only those can tell who know how feeble and slender were the means at the disposal of those who were the first to undertake the calculation of fleeting time.’88 Behind these words there is, of course, Casaubon’s acquaintance with Scaliger’s chronological studies. What Casaubon says here of Aristotle is interesting. The idea that Aristotle had practised kritik could be found in Dio Chrysostom (On Homer, Or. 53. 1), a passage Casaubon mentions in his manuscript notes. However, Dio refers exclusively to the fact that Aristotle, in his dialogues, discussed and praised Homer. Casaubon 87 Animadvers. in Athen., 260: ‘Magna sane interpretum hallucinatio, qui vertunt ubique De doctrinis. Non enim de philosophia aut artibus liberalibus tractaverat eo in opere criticus sed de professionis suae proprio argumento: cuius cognitio et iocundissima, et ad historiae lucem utilissima. Rem hodie non vulgo` cognitam, lubet paucis, quando oblata est occasio, explicare. Studiorum ea fuit quondam ratio, ut maxima eruditionis pars in dramaticorum poe¨tarum, ac praesertim comicorum lectione et intelligentia poneretur. Inde puriorem Hellenismum, inde notitiam eorum quae in Rep. erant gesta, inde vitam et mores primorum civitatis Atheniensium hauriebant. Itaque ad illustranda huius generis veterum scripta, certatim viri magni contenderunt, iam inde ab incunabulis criticae professionis, sive grammaticae, aut quocumque modo appellare volueris, eam disciplinam quae rectam veterum scriptorum interpretatione profitetur, et divinum Aristotelem, ut docemus alibi, auctorem habet primum.’ 88 Ibid. 261: ‘Quantum critici hac diligentia veteres chronologos adiuverint, soli aestimabunt illi, qui norunt qua`m infirma et tenuia praesidia habuerint, qui ad ineundam fugacis temporis rationem primi animum appulerunt.’

Critice and Historical Criticism

171

refers to something completely different, namely to Aristotle’s research on Athenian dramatic performances of the past and his publication of the official records concerning them. It is because of this work (antiquarian we would call it) that Aristotle becomes, in Casaubon’s eyes, the founder of critice. Rudolf Pfeiffer would not have been happy with this opinion. In the study of the writings of the ancients, as the passages just quoted and, more clearly, many of his letters prove,89 Casaubon sees the foundations of literae, i.e. of culture, particularly of scientific disciplines and of the knowledge of ‘the entire past’, in what was for him the really significant past, pagan and Christian Antiquity. That is why critice is, in his opinion, essential both for the Respublica literaria and for religion. And this implies, of course, that it is essential for the order and the welfare of the state as well.90 In 1604 Joannes a Wower (or Wowerius, or Wowerus), having studied at Leiden from 1592 to 1597 and met Casaubon at Montpellier (probably in 1597 or 1598),91 published a book on polymathia,92 presenting it as a ‘fragment’ (pospasmtion) of a work he was writing de studiis veterum, i.e. ‘on the intellectual pursuits of the ancients’, or ‘on the studies to which the ancients devoted themselves’—by which he meant the artes liberales, as appears from the plan of the work printed at 89 See e.g. the following letters (Epistolae [as in n. 53]): to J. A. Thuanus, 21 Mar. 1597, no. 124, p. 68; to J. Gillottus, the same day, no. 125, p. 69; to J. Scaliger, 7 June 1597, no. 143, p. 77; to J. Gruterus, 22 Mar. 1601, no. 226, p. 116; to C. Rittershusius, 5 Sept. 1604, no. 409, p. 218. 90 Casaubon’s idea of the role of critice has a deep connection with the use that the noblesse de robe, precisely in the years of his residence in France, were making of their historico-juridical learning in an attempt to promote a new political and religious order. (On these endeavours of the noblesse de robe at the turn of the 16th and the 17th c., see Vivanti, Lotta [as in n. 68], esp. 136–62). Though himself without any political ambition, Casaubon had contacts with some of the political elite supporting Henri IV and found in Henri IV a protector. He thought, for a moment, that his scholarly activity could serve the French monarchy. He was working on a commentary on Polybius (never completed), ‘un ouvrage de ce temps’, as he called it in a letter to Scaliger (exceptionally, and therefore significantly, in French). In the preface to his edition and Latin translation of Polybius, he recommended the historian to the French nobility. He was obviously thinking of J. Lipsius’ De militia Romana libri quinque. Commentarius ad Polybium (1596). Lipsius had tried to draw military instruction from Polybius, useful for the Dutch army. On Scaliger’s attitude to these efforts, see Grafton, Scaliger II, 376–7; 618. 91 The date can be deduced from information given by his friend Geverhartus Elmenhorstius in his ‘Vita Joannis Wowerii’, published in Joh. a Wower, De Polymathia tractatio. Editio nova (Leipzig, 1665); see sig. b 2v–b 3r. 92 In Greek, Wower varies between polumqeia and polumaq‹a.

172

Benedetto Bravo

the beginning of the ‘fragment’.93 The studia veterum are of course, in Wower’s eyes, the model and the point of departure for any studia of the moderns. The published ‘fragment’ concerns one of the artes liberales, namely grammatice. Wower tries to extract a theory of grammatice out of a staggering number of ancient testimonies (from the third century bc to the end of Antiquity), as though they were all compatible with each other, which they are not. In fact he harmonizes them according to his own ideas on the subject. There is no need here to analyse this construction at length. Two points will suffice. Wower merges two parts or functions of grammatik that figure in different ancient divisions of this discipline: t¿ xhghtikn or x ghsiv, and t¿ flstorikn or l
xewn ka› flstoriØn pdosiv. This merger rests on a misinterpretation of ancient terminology (particularly of the term flstor‹ai as used within the discipline of grammatik ) and serves to separate out, as a part of grammatik , something not envisaged by any ancient theorist: xhghtik or filolog‹a, which according to him consists of two interdependent activities, interpreting difficult passages and acquiring knowledge of a variety of facts pertaining to Antiquity. Of course, filolog‹a is an ancient word, but Wower uses it in a new way, as a technical term designating a part of grammatik . (He thinks he is following Seneca, Ep. ad Lucilium, 108, but he is mistaken, for Seneca distinguishes between the ‘grammaticus’ and the ‘philologus’: by the latter term he means the kind of scholar we would call an antiquarian.) Beside xhghtik or filolog‹a Wower distinguishes two other parts of grammatik : tecnik , placed on a lower level, and kritik , the ‘noblest’ of the three. He says (p. 123) that kritik was defined by Sextus Empiricus as follows: fidia‹teron d t¿ m
rov tv grammatikv, kata t¿ [sic] tov poihtv ka› suggrafe·v skopo si [sic], kaq¿ t safØv legmena xhgo ntai, t te ˛gi ka› t m toia ta kr‹nousi, t te gn sia p¿ tØn nqwn dior‹zousin. This is partly a paraphrase, partly a literal quotation of Sextus Empiricus, Adv. mathem. 1. 91 and 1. 93. The text of 1. 93 is corrupt in all our manuscripts; I do not know 93 Ioan. a Wower, De polymathia tractatio. Integri operis de studiis veterum pospasmtion, Ex Bibliopolio Frobeniano ([Hamburg], 1603). See the valuable article by L. Deitz, ‘Ioannes Wower of Hamburg, Philologist and Polymath: A Preliminary Sketch of his Life and Works’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), 132–51. Deitz takes de studiis veterum to mean ‘on the studies concerning the ancients’. I think this is wrong—see text.

Critice and Historical Criticism

173

what Wower read in the manuscript he used; anyway, what he quotes is impossible Greek. Presumably, he took kata t¿ . . . skopo si to be equivalent to kaq’ ˜ . . . skopo si—which, of course, is impossible— and took the whole passage to mean: ‘The proper part is that part of grammar in which poets and prose writers are examined, what is said obscurely is explained, the sound distinguished from the unsound, and the genuine separated from the spurious.’ Whatever he might have thought about the exact form and meaning of Sextus’ passage, it is certain (and interesting) that he distorted Adv. mathem. 1. 91 and 93, for Sextus Empiricus does not speak of kritik at all, but simply of the ‘third part’. Wower does in an overt way what J. J. Scaliger had done without mentioning any author: he combines Sextus Empiricus’/ Asclepiades’ definition of the ‘third part’ of grammatik with Sextus Empiricus’ witness on Tauriscus (Adv. mathem. 1. 248, cf. 1. 79); this appears from what he says a few lines before (p. 122): ‘The third part of grammar is kritik , the noblest of all; that is why Tauriscus subordinated the whole of grammar to it, as Sextus Empiricus reports in Adversus mathematicos; it is for this very reason that [Sextus] calls kritik the proper part of grammar.’94 Of course, being distinct from what he calls xhghtik or filolog‹a, Wower’s kritik is not identical with Scaliger’s. It consists mainly of two functions: emendatio and iudicium. Wower writes (p. 123): I find that the main parts of critice are two. One of them is that in which they [i.e. ancient scholars] were like censors judging authors, deciding on attributions, separating the true and the genuine from the spurious, and registering all authors in a kind of census. This part you could correctly call iudicium, the other emendatio. For even though the main role in emendatio is played by judgement, yet, as the former part is concerned with correctly judging authors, so the latter with emending them.95

Wower’s divergence from Scaliger is all the more interesting as it can be shown that, at the time of writing, he had before him Scaliger’s letter to Scriverius. (He might have obtained it from Scriverius, whose 94 ‘Tertia Grammaticae pars kritik, quae omnium nobilissima; ideoque huic totam Grammaticam subiecit Tauriscus, ut refert Sextus Empiricus adversus Mathematicos, qui eaˆdem ratione tn kritikn t¿ fidia‹teron m
rov tv grammatikv vocat.’ 95 ‘Duas Criticae partes praecipuas reperio, quarum haec est, qua velut Censores de auctoribus iudicabant, sua cuique opera vindicabant, vera et germana a suppositiciis discernebant, et omnium scriptorum quasi quendam censum agebant. Hanc itaque partem recte iudicium dixeris, alteram emendationem. Nam licet etiam in emendatione potiores iudicii sint partes, tamen ut illa [printed illud: certainly a misprint] in recto de auctoribus iudicio, ita haec in eorum emendatione tota est.’

174

Benedetto Bravo

contemporary he was in Leiden.) At the beginning of chapter 17 (p. 134) he describes one of the two partes of critice, namely emendatio: The second part of critice is complex, but concentrates, as I have said, on emending authors. They [i.e. ancient critici] were in the habit of rejecting and marking with an obelus authors’ mistakes; of condemning spurious passages by adding a mark in the margin; of emending corrupt and faulty passages; of registering variants (that is why the readings adopted by old critici were reported: they are often mentioned by Apollonius [the Homeric lexicon of Apollonius Sophista]); of marking and castigating ill-founded decisions of other critici—decisions they called efika·oi qet seiv; of restoring to their proper place transposed lines in authors (that is why metaq
seiv tØn grafØn were often practised; Isidorus writes that Aristarchus ‘applied an asterisk with an obelus to displaced lines’); of dividing works into sections; and of showing how divergent opinions of the authors could be reconciled (the sumfwn‹ai tØn dogmtwn indicated by ancient critici in philosophical texts belong here). All this is mentioned by Diogenes Laertius in his section on Plato.96

It is obvious that Wower here modifies—by variation, omission, or addition—and uses for his own purpose the main passage (quoted above, p. 153) of Scaliger’s letter to Scriverius on grammatici and critici, without citing his model. This is presumably one of the reasons why Scaliger, in private conversation, called Wower ‘un grand plagiaire’.97 Let us go back to the passage where Wower writes: ‘Duas Criticae partes praecipuas reperio’, after which he states that the two principal parts are emendatio and iudicium. What does he mean by ‘reperio’? That he had found in ancient authors an explicit statement to that effect? But no ancient text says this; and, if Wower had mistakenly thought the opposite, he would not have failed to cite it. Therefore, he must mean that what he asserts is an inference from ancient evidence. He had 96 ‘Altera Criticae pars varia, sed tota, ut dixi, in Auctorum emendatione, qua ˆ solebant perperam ab Auctoribus scripta qete·n ka› bel‹zein, t pareggegramm
na, mbolima·a, noqe¸onta notaˆ apposita damnare, corrupta et vitiosa emendare, ambiguas lectiones recensere, inde laudabantur veterum Criticorum nagnamata [sic! ], quorum saepe meminit Apollonius Grammaticus, aliorum Criticorum temere` scita notare ac refutare, quam kr‹sin efika‹ouv qet seiv appellabant, transposita in auctoribus suis sedibus reponere, quo nomine celebrabantur metaq
seiv tØn grafØn, et Isidorus scribit Aristarchum ‘‘Asterisco obelato usum in iis versibus, qui non erant positi suo loco’’. Opera Auctorum in certas partes distinguere, et eorum sententias conciliare, quo` pertinent sumfwn‹ai tØn dogmtwn in Philosophis a` veteribus Criticis notatae, quorum meminit Diog. Laert. in Platone.’ 97 I know this Scaligeranum from Grafton, Scaliger II, 494 n. 14; Grafton (492–4) has some interesting remarks on Wower as a pupil of Scaliger; his opinion is perhaps too harsh.

Critice and Historical Criticism

175

probably drawn it from Varro’s division of grammatice as reported by Diomedes, Ars grammatica, Book 2, chapter ‘De grammatica’ (Grammatici Latini i, Keil, 426): ‘Grammaticae officia, ut adserit Varro, constant in partibus quattuor, lectione enarratione emendatione iudicio.’ Wanting to reduce these four officia to the tripartite division that was for him fundamental,98 being, moreover, persuaded that Varro could not have left out critice, and, lastly, remarking that neither lectio nor enarratio could have been considered as a function of critice, he concluded that critice consisted of emendatio and iudicium. His reasoning was, of course, completely arbitrary, but what matters to us is that there appears here a notion of critice which bears some resemblance to the one nineteenth-century classical scholars have made us familiar with: I am referring to the idea that critice (Kritik), as a component of philologia, consists of two parts, (i) textual criticism operating through recensio and emendatio, (ii) ‘higher criticism’ (ho¨here Kritik, Kritik des Echten und des Unechten), i.e. detecting interpolated passages present in all manuscripts, identifying fakes, and testing traditional attributions. (I do not know when these terms were first employed.)99 Writing to his friend D. Baudius in 1605,100 Wower rejected a rumour, of uncertain origin, reported to him by Baudius, that he had plagiarized Casaubon (i.e., probably, Casaubon’s virtual book on 98 Cf. what Wower writes before, in chapter 8, pp. 52–3: he first reports Marius Victorinus and Diomedes on the officia of grammatice, then adds: ‘ex IV. eius officiis, quae Marius Victorinus et Diomedes referunt, tres illius partes constituam: tecnikn sive meqodikn, xhghtikn et kritikn. Ad hanc divisionem praeit [ ¼ shows the way] Varro apud Diomedem lib. II. cujus haec verba: ‘‘Grammaticae officia, ut adserit Varro, constant in partibus quattuor, lectione enarratione emendatione iudicio’’ . . . Lectio et enarratio sunt tv tecnikv [here the printed text must be incomplete; add: et tv xhghtikv?]. Emendatio et iudicium tv kritikv.’ 99 Bormann, ‘Kritik’ (as in n. 6), 1263, quotes the following definition, allegedly from Ambrosius Calepinus’ Lexicon of 1502: ‘Critica, Philologiae pars est, quae in emendatione auctorum et in judicio consistit.’ Similarly, Ro¨ttgers, ‘Kritik’ (as in n. 6), 653, who states that the definition is to be found in Calepinus’ Lexikon, seu dictionarium XI linguarum (Reggio, 1502), s.v. Criticus. Both are mistaken, Ro¨ttgers doubly so, in that he attributes to the 1502 edition of Calepinus a title that did not appear until the Basle edition of 1590 (the title of the 1502 edn. is simply ‘Calepinus’). There is no mention of critica (or critice) in Calepinus. A. Labarre, Bibliographie du Dictionarium d’Ambrogio Calepinus (1502–1779) (Baden Baden, 1975), describes 211 editions, reprints, and adaptations of this popular work. Christopher Ligota and I have, between us, inspected Reggio, 1502; Venice, 1506; Strasbourg, 1510; Paris, 1518; Cologne, 1534; Basle, 1544 and 1553. I strongly suspect that the passage attributed by Bormann and Ro¨ttgers to Calepinus comes from a text later than Wower’s De polymathia and is influenced by it. 100 Ioannes Wowerus, Epistolarum centuriae II (Hamburg, 1619), letter to Dominicus Baudius of 1 July 1605, Centuria I, nos. 127–8.

176

Benedetto Bravo

critice).101 Wower admitted that concerning critice he had learnt ‘haud pauca’ from Casaubon at Montpellier. There is, as far as I can see, no way of determining what precisely the ‘haud pauca’ were, but, considering what we have seen of Casaubon’s conception of critice, I would say that the separation of kritik from xhghtik and its division into emendatio and iudicium were not part of them. Ten years after the publication of Wower’s De polymathia the subject ‘grammatice and critice’ was again discussed in print by Philippus Jacobus Maussacus (de Maussac) in the second part of a Dissertatio critica appended to his edition of Harpocration’s Lexicon (Paris, 1614).102 Maussac attacks Wower (‘autor Polymathiae’, as he regularly calls him) as often as he can, but in fact follows him. His Dissertatio seems to me important only in so far as it constitutes yet another testimony of the interest the subject was arousing at that time. In 1627 Daniel Heinsius, a scholar and a poet who had been a favourite pupil of Scaliger, published, under the significant title Aristarchus Sacer, a book on Nonnus’ poetical paraphrase of the Fourth Gospel, with a long introduction (‘Prolegomena’) on ‘the birth and progress of true critice among the ancients and its utility in all disciplines, especially in divinity’; a new edition followed in 1639.103 He takes over (see p. 647) the division of grammatik introduced by Wower (whom he does not mention): tecnik at a lower level, and, at a higher level, xhghtik (vel flstorik ) and kritik . However, this division is by no means at the centre of his attention; he gives it en passant. Nor is he interested in neatly subdividing critice. What matters to him is to show 101 Wower suspected that the rumour had originated with Casaubon himself. He was certainly wrong, as appears from Casaubon’s letter to P. Scriverius of 29 June 1604, quoted above, n. 70. 102 Dictionarium in decem rhetores, Phil. Iacobus Maussacus supplevit et emendavit . . . (Paris, 1614), 334–6, 346–55, 376–98. 103 D. Heinsius, Aristarchus Sacer, sive ad Nonni in Iohannem Metaphrasin exercitationes. Quarum priori parte Interpres examinatur, posteriori Interpretatio ejus cum Sacro Scriptore confertur: in utraque S. Evangelistae plurimi illustrantur loci (Leiden, 1627). The introduction bears the title: Prolegomena ad Aristarchum, sive De verae Criticae apud veteres, ortu, progressu, usuque, cum in caeteris disciplinis, tum, in Theologia praesertim, Dissertatio. I shall quote from the second edition of the Aristarchus Sacer, which goes together with another work by D. Heinsius: Sacrarum exercitationum ad Novum Testamentum libri XX. In quibus Contextus Sacer illustratur, S.S. Patrum aliorumque sententiae examinantur, Interpretationes denique antiquae aliaeque ad eum expenduntur [¼ lastly, the ancient translations and other translations are evaluated through confrontation with it (i.e. the Sacred Text)]. Quibus Aristarchus Sacer, emendatior nec paulo auctior, Indicesque aliquot uberrimi accedunt (Leiden, 1639). In the title of the ‘dissertatio’ the second edition has in Sacris instead of in Theologia praesertim.

Critice and Historical Criticism

177

the importance of critice. This he does in accord with both J. J. Scaliger and Casaubon, but in a partly new way. Speaking of the ‘disciplines’ of the ancients, Heinsius maintains (p. 639) that ‘there was one (discipline) to which they subordinated, not some one matter, not a particular discipline, but the entire range of disciplines. They called it Critice or the art of judging.’104 He then follows Scaliger for a while (pp. 639–40) in reporting what the activities of ancient critici were, but soon goes beyond his teacher. He maintains (ibid.) that Aristotle was ‘the first to deserve and to bear the name of criticus, as rightly remarked by Dio Chrysostom and others’, because ‘he applied this art [i.e. critice] to all philosophers of his own time and of earlier times . . . [here a long list of names, from Pythagoras to Speusippus] in the divine and human sciences’, and especially because ‘in the second book of his Politics he scrutinizes all the constitutions of the ancients according to the rules of this art’. After examining the constitutions and the laws of Minos, Lycurgus, Solon, Hippodamus, Phaleas, etc., Aristotle ‘allows none of them to pass without a critical note’.105 Heinsius creates here a bold metaphor: the technical term ‘nota critica’, referring to the critical signs written by ancient scholars in the margins of texts, is here used to denote a judgement pointing out what is defective in a constitution or a law. Immediately after this, Heinsius presents Aristotle as one who ‘emended’ Homer’s text for his pupil Alexander, as one who expressed ‘judgements about all poets (of which there remain some traces in his de Poetica)’, who ‘examined and emended’ the texts of comedies (‘qui et Comicorum fabulas cum cura recensuerat ac emendaverat’: I do not know what Heinsius is referring to), and who, as ‘the great Casaubon’ has shown, put the comedies into chronological order in his work Didaskal‹ai, by which he contributed to ‘rescuing chronology from error’. A few pages further on (p. 644), after saying that Aristotle united ‘Dogmatica’ (neuter plural), i.e. the statement of his own views, with the 104 ‘Una fuit, cui nullum certum argumentum, nullam disciplinam, propriam aut unam, sed in universum omnes subjecerunt.’ 105 ‘diu ante Aristarchum, par naturae rerum et scientiarum omnium fatali quadam lege capax Aristotelis extiterat ingenium, qui, ut primus nomen Critici, quod vere a` Dione Chrysostomo ac aliis notatum est, meruit ac tulit, ita artem hanc adversus omnes sui ac superiorum temporum Philosophos, . . . in divinis ac humanis exercuit scientiis. Nihil tamen majus est augustiusque, quam cum magnus eruditionis ille ac Criticorum Princeps, libro Politicorum secundo, omnes veterum Respublicas, ex artis hujus legibus examinat: omnes censor illustrissimus ad disquisitionem vocat: non Minois, non Lycurgi, non Solonis, non Hippodami, non Phaleae, legislatoris antiquissimi, non ullas caeterorum vel Respublicas vel leges, sine nota Critica dimittit.’

178

Benedetto Bravo

‘soliditas eruditionis ac judicii’ (‘solidity of learning and judgement’—a iunctura dear to Heinsius), he describes Julius Caesar Scaliger as a pupil of Aristotle, almost equal to his teacher, and the ‘divine’ Joseph Justus Scaliger as not inferior to his father. He recalls that the elder Scaliger employed the same ‘soliditas eruditionis ac judicii’ ‘in the disciplines of poets, of grammatici, of philosophers, disputing with [Theodore] Gaza, Cardanus, Plato, Theophrastus, sometimes, as for instance in the inquiry on animals, even with Aristotle’; and that the younger Scaliger employed it partly ‘in recensendis, emendandis, transponendis . . . autorum scriptis’ (we would say ‘in textual criticism’), partly, when he was older, ‘in emendando tempore’, i.e. in emending chronology by censuring ‘historians, chronologers, astronomers, astrologers, and other mathematici ’, in which activity he ‘followed the usage of Eratosthenes, Callimachus, Eudoxus, and others’. ‘For, as all disciplines are linked together and constitute a whole, so this discipline [i.e. critice], being cognizant of all the disciplines, judges all or any of them, and sits on the tribunal as the chief of all.’106 The assertion that critice is the chief and the judge of any other discipline might seem amazing, but it becomes understandable if we take into account that Heinsius, like Casaubon (and doubtless also Scaliger), was persuaded that no discipline—neither critice nor any other, from natural philosophy and medicine to mathematics and astronomy, from jurisprudence and rhetoric to logic, metaphysics, and theology—could progress without an intimate and solid knowledge of, and a continuous discussion and competition with, the works of the ancients, pagan and Christian alike. These were envisaged and interpreted as works belonging to a definite time and place, but temporal distance was not felt to be important in so far as the value of these works for the literature, science, and religion of the present was concerned: the patterns of thought embodied in them were felt to be valid beyond the confines of their original historical setting. Given the normative status of Antiquity, critice, which reconstructed, interpreted, and evaluated ancient texts critically, was to D. Heinsius not only a specialized discipline, but also the right approach—namely the rational, critical approach—to the foundations of any discipline. Of course, Heinsius could not be entirely unaware that in his time there existed a kind of physics and a kind of philosophy that was not 106 p. 644: ‘Nam ut omnium disciplinarum, unum quoddam vinculum ac corpus est, ita haec de omnibus, aut una aliqua quam sibi sumit, omnibus instructa, judicat, ac, quasi princeps omnium, pro tribunali sedet.’

Critice and Historical Criticism

179

interested in conversing with ancient texts. (Galilei had indeed conversed with Aristotle and Ptolemy, but only in order to show how useless this was). Heinsius’ position in the culture of his time was undoubtedly conservative. However, within the limits of a scholarship based on the traditional view of Antiquity, he participated in the general movement of European culture by contributing to form the notion of criticism. The idea that critice was a distinct, homogeneous, and autonomous discipline, entitled to exercise hegemony over other disciplines, was rejected by Gerardus Ioannes Vossius.107 I do not think he was aware that that conception was incompatible with the new trends in scientific thought; more probably he had but a dim feeling of this; in any case he was certainly not capable of criticizing intelligently Scaliger’s and Casaubon’s conception, let alone proposing a more up-to-date one. The pedantic classification of disciplines he elaborated was as much entangled in discussions of the opinions of ancient authors as Scaliger’s and Casaubon’s theory of critice had been, while it lacked the latter’s stimulating and organizing force. According to G. I. Vossius grammatice is a discipline procuring the kind of knowledge that is necessary for ‘speaking well’; judicium or critice should not be considered as part of grammatice, but as ‘a part or product’ (‘partem, vel partum’) of many sciences; there does not exist a special discipline for interpreting every kind of text. G. I. Vossius is interesting as an example of the taste for all-embracing classifications of knowledge, characteristic of his age, and still more as an example of how the great conglomerate that had been Scaliger’s and Casaubon’s critice was dissolving in the intellectual atmosphere of the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Another sign of this process can be found in the Epistolae philologicae of Rolandus Maresius (Desmarets), written for publication and published in Paris in 1650 (Book 1) and 1655 (Book 2, posthumous: the author died in 1653; the two books were re-edited together in Germany in 1687). Though writing in the language of scholars, and not in French, and though addressing many of his ‘epistolae’ to known scholars, Maresius looks at critice or grammatice from outside, taking his stance within a tradition of rhetoric that sees its main models in Cicero, 107 Gerardus Ioannes Vossius, Ars historica (Leiden, 1623), 9–11; id., De arte grammatica, Book 1, ch. 6 (1635), repr. in his Opera, ii (Amsterdam, 1695), 9–10; id., De philologia, published as Book 2, but with independent pagination, of De quatuor artibus popularibus, de philologia, et scientiis mathematicis, cui operi subjungitur chronologia mathematicorum, libri tres (Amsterdam, 1650), 1; 20; 22–7; 29–30; 51–2; id., De philosophia et philosophorum sectis Libri II, ch. 21, ‘De critice’ (The Hague, 1658), 170.

180

Benedetto Bravo

Quintilian, and Pliny the Younger. (In respect of literary genre, the Epistolae philologicae are modelled mainly on Books 1–9 of Pliny’s Epistolae). For him critice is just emendation—‘ope codicum’ and ‘ope ingenii’—of ancient texts, which have come down to us disfigured because of the ‘Gothica barbaries’ of the Middle Ages. During the last two hundred years critici have been working to restore them. This work is now done. No important manuscripts lurk in libraries, for these have been thoroughly searched. Maresius advises his readers not to waste their time and intelligence pursuing this kind of work and to turn to other things, for instance history.108 As regards himself, he says that he has turned, ‘for his own pleasure’, to ‘another kind of critice’. This consists in writing ‘about intellectual occupations, especially in the domain of literae humaniores’. He gives advice on ‘the reading of authors’ (probably: on the choice of the authors and the way of reading them) and on the style one should use; he expresses his opinion on certain authors, ancient and modern.109 This different ‘kind of critice’ obviously has as its ancestor Quintilian, not Aristarchus. However, at the time when Maresius wrote, views partly resembling those put forward by D. Heinsius were still held by an acquaintance of his, Henricus Valesius (Henri de Valois), a scholar mainly interested in editing texts (especially of Late Antiquity), to which he added concise, precise, strictly relevant notes, contrasting with the baroque prolixity and messiness of the scholarly literature of his time. At his death in 1676 he left an unfinished treatise De critica. It was published by Peter Burman in 1740. It must have been written not much later than 1651.110 Being incomplete, it is not likely to have circulated in the 108 R. Maresius, Epistolarum philologicarum libri duo . . . (Leipzig, 1687), Book 1, no. 4 (to Aegidius Menagius), 14–17 (a letter in hexameters); Book 2, no. 1 (to the same), 230–1; no. 49 (to Nicolaus Heinsius), 487–91. 109 Ibid., Book 2, no. 7 (to Fridericus Gronovius), 268–72. He says that long before he had made and sent to Gronov a number of emendations ‘in primum et secundum T. Livii librum’, but that he repents doing so; he writes (p. 269): since that time ‘animi causa alii Criticae generi me dedi . . . Criticum igitur ago, non quidem manuscriptos codices excutiendo, ex iisque antiquos scriptores emendando: sed de ratione studiorum, circa literas praesertim humaniores scribendo: nempe quid in illis sequendum putem, tum quod ad auctorum lectionem, tu`m quod ad stylum attinet: quid de scriptoribus quibusdam antiquis, et novis sentiam: denique caetera de genere hoc persequendo, qualia et hic libellus continet, aliique quos eadem de re, Deo favente, editurus sum, complectentur.’ 110 Henricus Valesius, Emendationum libri quinque et De Critica libri duo. Numquam antehac typis vulgati. . . . Edente Petro Burmanno . . . qui praefationem, notas, et indices adjecit (Amsterdam, 1740). The De Critica is not dated by the editor; but at p. 172 the

Critice and Historical Criticism

181

author’s lifetime; and by the time it came to be published cultural conditions had changed so much that it can hardly have had any influence. Nevertheless it deserves to be taken into account as an illuminating testimony. Valesius explains why critica is necessary.111 (He uses the Latin form even in the nominative, not the Greek critice or kritik , probably because the term is for him already traditional). First he declares that critica is necessary to everybody because it is ‘the art of forming correct judgements about writings and speeches [scriptis et orationibus] of both the ancients and the moderns’. (What exactly does he mean by orationes as distinguished from scripta? Perhaps extempore speeches taken down by stenographers, such as the homilies of the Church Fathers?) He continues: Another circumstance must be taken into account: there occur in old manuscripts a very great number of errors, which, as though they were reefs, cannot but delay the course of reading. Moreover, there occur many variant readings, the so-called dittograf‹ai, from which it is very difficult to choose the best one. Lastly, there arise many difficulties from obscure words as well as from obscurity of matter and thought. So that one can never easily extricate author refers to Claudius Sarravius ‘qui nuper magno omnium eruditorum damno vita defunctus est’; according to Jo¨cher’s Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, iv (Leipzig, 1751), col. 152, Claude Sarrau died on 30 May 1651. 111 De Critica (in Emendationes, as in n. 110), 151–2: ‘Usus quidem per se manifestus est. Nam cum Critica ars sit bene judicandi de scriptis et orationibus cum veterum tum recentiorum, quis est tandem qui hujus artis praesidio non egeat? Huc accedit quod in veteribus libris menda plurima occurrunt, quae lectionis cursum tanquam scopuli morentur necesse est. Multae quoque variae lectiones, quas dittograf‹av vocant, sese offerunt, e quibus optimam eligere perquam difficile est. Multae denique difficultates tum ex obscuris vocibus, tum ex rerum ac sententiarum obscuritate nascuntur. Adeo ut nemo unquam ex tantis salebris expedire se facile possit, nisi Criticae auxilio tanquam Ariadnae filo adjuvetur. Polybius gravis auctor inprimis alicubi monet, sic nos ad Historiae lectionem accedere oportere, ut meminerimus nos eorum, quae legimus, judices esse ac censores. Idem in lectione Poe¨tarum et Oratorum et cujusque generis scriptorum, a nobis faciendum est, cavendumque praecipue est, ne animo praeoccupato atque addicto, ac prae verecundia submisso, ad legendum accedamus: neve auctoritatem ac vetustatem scriptoris nobis imponere atque illudere patiamur. Solis Divinis libris hic honos habeatur, ut animo quasi in servitutem redacto, et judicii nostri libertate abjecta eos perlegamus. De caeteris vero omnibus assuescamus inter legendum judicium ferre: quoniam hic praecipuus lectionis fructus est, animadvertere quid commode, quid perperam dictum sit, ut hoc fugere, illud vero imitari possimus. Equidem Criticam appellare soleo facem ac lampadem reliquarum artium, quam qui semel est adeptus, hic non modo tutius per omnes disciplinas incedit, sed etiam longe majores facit progressus quam caeteri. Quod si maximos et celeberrimos tum antiquitatis tum recentioris memoriae scriptores percensere velimus, inveniemus profecto neminem eorum absque hujus artis subsidio ad doctrinarum apicem et ad tantam gloriam pervenisse.’

182

Benedetto Bravo

oneself from such obstacles, unless critice, like Ariadne’s thread, comes to one’s help.

Here we have obviously to do with critice as textual criticism and as enarratio of obscure passages, activities in which Valesius himself excelled. Without any transition, but in fact turning to a quite different aspect of critica, Valesius goes on: Polybius, a most serious author, warns somewhere [i.e. at 3. 9. 5] that we should approach the reading of histories as judges and censors. The same applies to reading poets, orators, and any other kind of writer; and we have most of all to be careful that we do not set out to read with the mind prejudiced and dependent and submissive out of respect, and that we do not allow the authority or the antiquity of the writer to deceive us. It is only towards the divine books that we have to show respect, reading them with a mind as if enslaved, the freedom of our judgement renounced. As regards all other books, we have to acquire the habit of pronouncing judgement as we read, for the main profit of reading consists in noticing what has been said appropriately and what has been said badly, so that we may avoid the latter and imitate the former. I habitually call critica the torch and lamp of the other arts:112 once in its possession, not only does one find one’s way more securely through all the disciplines, but one makes much greater progress than those who do not have it. If we wanted to review the greatest and most famous writers of antiquity as well as of modern times, we should certainly find that none of them attained the summit of the sciences and great glory without the help of this art.

Several points are worthy of notice here. The notion that our judgement on the value of whatever we read must not succumb to the ‘authority’ any given author may carry is certainly present, but not explicit in earlier descriptions of critica. But there is some ambiguity. Taken by themselves, Valesius’ words (‘commode dictum’ and ‘perperam dictum’, ‘fugere’ and ‘imitari’) would suggest that he has in mind judgement on the literary and/or moral quality of what we read. He probably does mean this, but at the same time he means something different. The stress laid on independence from ‘auctoritas’, the use of the phrase ‘animo praeoccupato’ (‘with the mind prejudiced’), and the reference to Polybius 3. 9. 5113 clearly indicate that what really counts for Valesius is judgement concerning the question: ‘is this true or false?’ 112 Compare the title of the collection of learned works published by J. Gruter in 1602–12: Lampas, sive Fax Artium Liberalium. 113 ‘As for me, I say that readers should give no little credence to the authority [p‹stiv] of the historian, but not consider it as sufficient, and that they should test his statements against the events themselves.’

Critice and Historical Criticism

183

Another interesting point is the exclusion of the Bible from the competence of critica. This follows from the previous point. Since Valesius thinks that one of the main tasks of critica is to ask whether what the author writes is true or false, he concludes that applying critica to the Sacred Books would be impious. P. Burman, editing Valesius’ De critica in Amsterdam about ninety years after it had been written, added a long editorial note to this passage, suggesting that Valesius’ statement about the Bible did not correspond to his real thinking, but was a piece of opportunism. Burman was probably wrong. Anyway, irrespective of whether Valesius was sincere or not, the fact that he envisaged (only to reject it) the possibility of submitting the Sacred Books to a test of their truth value is very significant. Casaubon does not seem to have ever thought of such a possibility. Applying critice to the Bible meant to him discussing problems of textual criticism and/or literal interpretation of difficult passages. The same can be said of Louis Cappel, a Calvinist, who wrote a big book bearing the title Critica sacra, sive De variis quae in sacris Veteris Testamenti libris occurrunt lectionibus libri sex: In quibus ex variarum lectionum observatione quamplurima S. Scripturae loca explicantur, illustrantur, atque adeo` emendantur non pauca. Cui subiecta est ejusdem criticae adversus iniustum censorem iusta defensio . . . The book was published in Paris, in 1650, by the author’s son (who had converted to Catholicism) but the main part (i.e. the Critica sacra without the Defensio) had been written much earlier, as appears from the author’s preface, which hints at difficulties with publication.114 In a letter sent from Paris in October 1635 and quoted by Cappel in the Defensio (p. 634), Hugo Grotius says that he has read Critica sacra in manuscript and he praises it.115 As the title suggests, Cappel’s Critica sacra intended to apply to the Holy Writ two kinds of approach that were traditional in the study of the profane writings of the ancients: literal explanation (‘explicare, illustrare’) and textual criticism (‘emendare’). 114 Ad lectorem, sig. e ˜iiijr: ‘At last, after grave perturbations which it suffered for many years on land and sea, the omens being favourable, with Christ as guide and under his auspices, I bring it out.’ According to R. Simon (preface to Histoire critique du Vieux Testament), Cappel’s book did not find a publisher for ten years, whether in Geneva or in Sedan or in Leiden, because of strong Calvinist opposition; finally, D. Petau (a Jesuit), J. Morin (of the Oratoire), and M. Mersenne (a Minim) obtained a royal ‘privilege’ for its publication; the Roman Curia, opposed at first, came round to the view that the book could be a useful weapon against heretics relying on ‘sola Scriptura’. 115 It is worth noticing that Grotius himself practised textual criticism and philological interpretation of the Old Testament—see his Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum, 3 vols. (Paris, 1644); he was a pupil of J. J. Scaliger.

184

Benedetto Bravo

A radically new approach to the Bible was proposed in 1670 by a man who was not a criticus, but a learned philosopher, well acquainted with the way of thinking and working of scholars studying ancient Greek and Latin texts (though he confessed to an inadequate knowledge of Greek): Spinoza. The leading idea of the ‘theological’ part of his Tractatus theologico-politicus, published anonymously in that year, can be summarized as follows:116 we are to approach Scripture ‘with a mind unhampered and free’ (‘animo integro et libero’: a striking contrast with Valesius’ words, which Spinoza could not have known: ‘animo quasi in servitutem redacto, et judicii nostri libertate abjecta’); interpreting the Sacred Books should not be based on the assumption that they are divinely inspired and that therefore their meaning must be such as to convey truths valuable for us; we should not treat them as though they had been written for us, but recognize the fact that they were written at different periods of the past, by authors who addressed their contemporaries and wanted to be understood by them. Before using these writings for our theological purposes, we should interpret them in order to establish their true meaning (‘verus sensus’), without confusing it with factual truth (‘rerum veritas’); and this we can do if we eliminate our ‘prejudices’ (‘praejudicia’, i.e. pseudo-judgements, judgements that do not originate in our own reason) and follow a rational ‘method’ (‘methodus’). ‘True meaning’ can be established by examining ‘linguistic usage’ (‘linguae usus’, i.e. ‘the nature and the peculiarities of the language in which Scripture was written and which its authors were accustomed to speak’) and of ‘context’ (‘contextus orationis’), or through reasonings based exclusively on Scripture itself (‘vel ex ratiocinio, quod nullum aliud fundamentum agnoscit, quam Scripturam’), i.e. by comparing various passages of the Bible to each other. Once the ‘verus sensus’ has been established, we are to decide whether we can give it our ‘assensus’, i.e. whether or to what extent what is said in the Sacred Books can be accepted as true. It is obvious that Spinoza applies to the study of Scripture some of the ‘rules’ of critice elaborated in the study of ancient writings other than the Sacred Books. New, however, is the distinction between true meaning and factual truth. New also is the statement that interpretation should be 116 [B. Spinoza], Tractatus theologico-politicus continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur libertatem philosophandi non tantum salva pietate, et reipublicae pace posse concedi: sed eandem nisi cum pace reipublicae, ipsaque pietate tolli non posse (Hamburg, apud Henricum Ku¨nraht [sic; obviously Ku¨nrath], 1670 [in fact: Amsterdam, Jan Rieuwertsz, 1669/1670]. I refer mainly to the preface and to chapters 7 (esp. pp. 84–7), 9, 10, 15.

Critice and Historical Criticism

185

free of ‘praejudicium’. (Remember, however, that Valesius, who had written before Spinoza, had warned against reading ‘animo praeoccupato’). Moreover, it should be noted that for speaking of his ‘methodus interpretandi Scripturam’, Spinoza does not use the term critice, but historia. The word is not unambiguous, but just for this reason it serves him well. Historia can denote the inquiry into ‘linguae usus’ and ‘contextus orationis’, aiming at establishing the ‘verus sensus’, but also something that has no exact analogy in critice practised before him: the reconstruction of the history of the biblical text. He writes: Lastly, this historia relates the vicissitudes of all the extant books of the prophets [i.e. the biblical authors], that is the life, character, and pursuits of the author of each book, who he was, on what occasion, when, for whom, and in what language he wrote. Then the fortunes of each book: how it was first received, into whose hands it fell, how many its variants were, by whose decision it was received among the sacred books, and lastly how all the books that everybody today recognizes as sacred coalesced into one corpus.117

Historia is also used by Spinoza to denote the scientific account or description of natural phenomena; applying historia both to this and to the study of the Bible leads him to suggest—in a somewhat confused manner—an analogy between the two.118 It was not in the perspective of Spinoza’s philosophy, nor with his polemical intention, but nevertheless following a ‘method’ not very 117 Tractatus, p. 87: ‘Denique enarrare debet haec historia casus omnium librorum Prophetarum, quorum memoria apud nos est; videlicet vitam, mores, ac studia authoris uniuscujusque libri, quisnam fuerit, qua occasione, quo tempore, cui, et denique qua lingua scripserit. Deinde uniuscujusque libri fortunam: nempe quomodo prius acceptus fuerit, et in quorum manus inciderit, deinde quot ejus variae lectiones fuerint, et quorum concilio [read consilio?] inter sacros acceptus fuerit, et denique quomodo omnes libri, quos omnes jam sacros esse fatentur, in unum corpus coaluerint.’ Cf. pp. 135–6: ‘His ea quae circa historiam Librorum Veteris Testamenti notare volueram absolvi.’ It seems to me that this sentence cannot be interpreted otherwise than thus: ‘With these remarks I have come to the end of what I had proposed to write about the history of the Books of the Old Testament.’ 118 Tractatus, 84: ‘Nam sicuti methodus interpretandi naturam in hoc potissimum consistit, in concinnanda scilicet historia naturae, ex qua utpote ex certis datis, rerum naturalium definitiones concludimus: sic etiam ad Scripturam interpretandam necesse est ejus sinceram historiam adornare [ ¼ to construct, to put together], ut ex ea tanquam ex certis datis et principiis mentem authorum Scripturae legitimis consequentiis concludere . . . ’. And again (p. 85): ‘Denique Scriptura rerum, de quibus loquitur, definitiones non tradit, ut nec etiam natura. Quare quemadmodum ex diversis naturae actionibus definitiones rerum naturalium concludendae sunt, eodem modo hae [i.e. ‘the definitions of the things of which Scripture speaks’] ex diversis narrationibus, quae de unaquaque re in Scriptis occurrunt, sunt eliciendae.’

186

Benedetto Bravo

different from Spinoza’s, that Richard Simon, a Catholic priest,119 studied the Bible in a series of works of which the most important are the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, printed first in Paris in 1678, then, after most of the copies had been destroyed at the request of Bossuet, in Amsterdam in 1680,120 and the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689). He declares that the Sacred Books are divinely inspired, but he delimits the field of his research in such a way as to be able to dispense with this assumption. The theological use of Scripture he leaves respectfully to the authorities of the Roman Church; nor does he ask questions about the truth or untruth of biblical narratives and doctrinal statements. What he is interested in are the biblical texts as products of human activity. He asks: when, by whom, for whom, in what language, on the basis of what information were the narratives of the Old and of the New Testament written? Were the originals transmitted without substantial changes or were they at some point rewritten? When, by whom, and how were they rewritten? When was the Jewish canon of the Sacred Books established? When was the canon of the New Testament established? Are the texts entirely genuine or do they contain interpolations? Which are the best extant manuscripts? What is the worth of the ancient translations as witnesses of the text? etc. All these questions clearly correspond to a part of the programme that Spinoza had assigned to ‘historia’ of the Sacred Books. But in Simon’s language histoire is not so ambiguous as historia is in Spinoza’s: its meaning seems to be fairly close to that which the word has today, though we should not forget that in the title of the journal edited by 119 On R. Simon see J. Le Brun, in J.-P. Schobinger (ed.), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahhunderts, 2/2. Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie begru¨ndet von F. Ueberweg, . . . neubearb. Ausgabe (Basle, 1993), 1013–18; id., ‘Simon (Richard)’, in Supple´ment au Dictionnaire de la Bible, xii, fasc. 71 (Paris, 1996), 1353–83. In the latter article (p. 1371) Le Brun writes: ‘il paraıˆt certain qu’au point de de´part l’entreprise de Simon et ses intuitions les plus neuves, en particulier le dessein d’e´laborer une histoire ‘‘litte´raire’’ de la Bible, ne devaient rien a` Spinoza: ce n’est que dans une seconde e´tape qu’il a reconnu en lui son adversaire le plus important.’ If Le Brun is right, the analogy between Simon and Spinoza becomes even more significant. 120 According to the frontispiece, this edition was made ‘suivant la Copie, imprime ´e a` Paris’; no place is indicated. It was not supervised by the author. The book was promptly translated into Latin (Historia critica Veteris Testamenti (Amsterdam, 1681)) and English (A Critical History of the Old Testament (London, 1682)). A new edition of the French text, supervised by the author, appeared in Rotterdam in 1685 (non vidi). The title page of the copy of the Latin translation in Warsaw University Library gives false information, obviously intended to deceive the customs and the censor: Historia religionis Judaeorum eorumque demigrationis in Hispaniam aliasque Europae partes, in quas sese post destructionem Hierosolymae receperunt. Per Rabbinum Mosen Levi conscripta (Amsterdam: Petrus de la Faille, 1681).

Critice and Historical Criticism

187

H. Basnage de Beauval in the years 1687–1709, Histoire des ouvrages des sc¸avans, histoire means ‘review’, ‘account’, ‘description’, and not ‘history’. Simon wants to give a historical account of the Old and the New Testament—of the individual books and of the corpus they make up.121 This use of histoire is a striking novelty, for the object of this ‘history’ is literary events, events concerning texts, and not political acts. Still more interesting for us is the adjective critique added to histoire. It serves to indicate that this histoire is a historical account based on research conducted according to the rules of critice.122 Simon is careful to stress that he uses the adjective and the noun critique as a technical and traditional term. In the preface to the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament he recalls the example of Origen and Jerome: Origen and Jerome, who found an infinite number of mistakes in the ancient Greek copies of the Septuagint translation, did not, on that account, reject it. They only attempted to restore it according to the common rules of critique. I have followed the example of these two great men and, as there is nothing on the subject, so far, in French, it should not be surprising that I have on occasion used turns of phrase which are not entirely good French. Every art has its own terms which are peculiar to it. It is in this sense that the word critique will often be found in this work, as well as some others which I have had to use in order to express myself in the terms of the art I was concerned with. Moreover, learned persons are already accustomed to the use of these terms in our language. When, for instance, one speaks of the book that Cappelle has published under the title Critica Sacra, or of the Commentaries on Scripture printed in England under the name of Critici Sacri, one says in French, la Critique de Cappelle, les Critiques d’Angleterre.123 121 The insertion of ‘texte’ in the title of the work on the New Testament hints at a distinction between the original and its translations, on which Simon was planning a separate work—Histoire critique des versions du Nouveau Testament, published eleven years later (Rotterdam, 1690). 122 The collocation appears in 18th-c. titles, e.g. J. Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae. 123 Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 1680, preface (unpaginated): ‘Origene et S. Jeroˆme qui ont reconnu une infinite´ de fautes dans les anciens Exemplaires Grecs de la Version des Septante, ne l’ont pas pour cela rejete´e, ils ont tache´ seulement de la re´tablir selon les regles ordinaires de la Critique. J’ay suivi l’exemple de ces deux grands hommes, et comme il n’a encore rien paru en Franc¸ois sur ce sujet, on ne doit pas trouver e´trange que je me sois servy quelquefois de certaines expressions qui ne sont pas tout a` fait du bel usage; chaque art a des termes particuliers et qui luy sont en quelque maniere consacre´s. C’est en ce sens qu’on trouvera souvent dans cet ouvrage le mot de Critique, et quelques autres semblables dont j’ai e´te´ oblige´ de me servir afin de m’exprimer dans les termes de l’art dont je traittois. De plus les personnes sc¸avantes sont de´ja accouˆtume´es a` l’usage de ces termes dans noˆtre langue. Quand on parle par exemple du livre que Cappelle a fait imprimer sous le titre de Critica Sacra, et des Commentaires sur l’e´criture imprime´s en Angleterre sous le nom de Critici Sacri, on dit en Franc¸ois la Critique de Cappelle les Critiques d’Angleterre.’

188

Benedetto Bravo

It was certainly not a literary scruple that led Simon to write these lines. This is confirmed by what he says in the preface to the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament: ‘It is unnecessary to repeat here what has already been said elsewhere concerning the word critique, which is a technical term and which is in a way reserved for works that deal with variant readings in order to re-establish the true ones. The object of those who exercise this art is not to destroy but to restore.’124 The way Simon justifies his use of the term critique is significant. Two observations can be made. First, that the author considers his investigations to be closely connected with the tradition of critice concerning the texts of the ancients, which is universally accepted and respected. Second, that he knows that applying critice to the Bible is bound to arouse misgivings or hostility both in his own and in other churches. In fact he was publicly criticized by people of different confessions, even by such learned and open-minded men as E´ze´chiel Spanheim and Jean Le Clerc. This is not surprising. Not only did the ‘critical history’ of the Sacred Books deliberately shake ingrained certitudes concerning the origin of these texts; it also made it possible, against the author’s intention, to ask a question that he had evaded, but that Spinoza had already asked: what are the Sacred Books worth from the point of view of reason? Simon is the main target of the polemical treatise by the Jesuit Ignace de Laubrussel, on ‘the misuses of criticism in religious matters’ (1710–11).125 This treatise is as penetrating as it is tendentious and obscurantist; let me point out a few interesting details. Laubrussel mocks the passionate efforts and debates that ‘critics’ devote to the dating of insignificant events, to inquiries on the chronology of distant ages (here he mentions Petau, Scaliger, Saumaise, Bayle—a mixed company!), to the deciphering of old inscriptions and coins (here he mentions Spanheim), to the establishing of the date and utility of some manuscripts found in the rubbish where ‘our ancestors’ had wisely let them lie.126 124 Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament, Ou ` l’on ´etablit la ve´rite´ des actes sur lesquels la religion chreˆtienne est fonde´e (Rotterdam, 1689), preface (unpaginated): ‘Il seroit inutile de repeter icy ce qu’on a deˆja` dit ailleurs touchant le mot de Critique, qui est un terme d’art, et qui est en quelque fac¸on consacre´ aux Ouvrages ou` l’on examine les diverses lec¸ons, pour re´tablir les ve´ritables. Le dessein de ceux qui exercent cet art n’est pas de de´truire, mais d’e´tablir.’ 125 I. de Laubrussel, Traite ´ des abus de la critique en matiere de religion, 2 vols. (Paris 1710–11). 126 He is probably using here for his purpose the criticism of critice by R. Maresius (Desmarets), but he extends it to the entire field of erudite studies.

Critice and Historical Criticism

189

Such occupations are not so useful as ‘critics’ think, but they do no harm. Unfortunately, some ‘critics’ have crossed the boundaries of what is permitted, have fallen into ‘libertinage de l’esprit’.127 Indeed, ‘have they not considered the re´publique des lettres as a privileged zone, where one is free to say anything, and their profession as an established right to pronounce on any question and to subject, if it were possible, common opinion to their private opinion, or religion to their doubts?’128 Dominated by the ‘esprit de critique’, those ‘critics’ have dared to tackle matters that the Church alone is entitled to interpret and judge.129 They have undertaken to discuss the Bible ‘sans aveu ni vocation’,130 i.e. as individuals belonging to no institution and not endowed by any institution with the function and the right of doing what they do. The 1680s and 1690s—the time when the main works of Richard Simon appeared—saw a rapid expansion both of the esprit de critique and of the use of the term critique. I have not read enough to be able to document this process as it deserves. I will content myself with the observation that Jean Le Clerc in his Sentimens de quelques the´ologiens de Hollande (1685) and Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–7) use the noun critique, the adjective critique, and the verb Laubrussel, Traite´, i, preface, pp. xxi–xxii. Ibid., p. xvii: ‘Quelques-uns [of the critics] n’ont-ils pas regarde´ la Republique des lettres comme un pays de franchise, ou` l’on se permet de tout dire; et leurs me´tiers comme un droit acquis de trancher sur tout, et d’assujettir, s’il se pouvoit, le sens commun a` leur sens particulier, ou la Religion a` leurs doutes?’ 129 Ibid. 151: ‘la Critique, qui, autrefois renferme ´e dans des minuties de Grammaire, n’alloit que terre a` terre, et ne s’occupoit que de diverses et d’antiques lec¸ons a` la maniere des Turnebes, des Lambins, des Manuces, des Gruters, des Murets; enhardie depuis par l’exemple des Centuriateurs et d’Erasme, n’a-t-elle pas e´leve´ son vol jusqu’au troˆne de Dieu, pour lui demander compte des faits de sa re´ve´lation, et des miracles ope´rez par la vertu de son bras?’ And pp. 159–60: ‘On l’a dit cent fois, chaque particulier a l’Ecriture en main; mais l’expe´rience des dissensions de tous les sie´cles, fait voir que la suˆre intelligence n’en a e´te´ re´serve´e qu’a` l’Eglise, a` qui le Saint-Esprit a e´te´ promis et donne´.—Sur ce principe si peu gouˆte´, et si mal entendu par plusieurs Critiques, mettons a` la teˆte des erreurs, qu’il nous faut de´plorer, celles qui roulent sur l’Ecriture, a` laquelle il semble que plusieurs d’entre eux n’ayent touche´ que pour la profaner. Certainement de´s qu’on re´fle´chit sur la parole de Dieu qui y est contenue¨, et qu’on est pe´ne´tre´ d’un vrai sentiment de Religion, le nom seul de Critique de la Bible [here a reference to Simon’s preface to the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament] a je ne sc¸ai quoi de choquant, qu’on pardonne a` peine a` la tyrannie de l’usage qui l’a e´tabli: et il paroıˆt honteux a` un Chrestien de se livrer tellement a` cet esprit de critique dans ses recherches sur la Bible, qu’il ne songe ni a` s’y e´difier, ni a` s’y re´gler par la tradition, ni a` y sauver l’analogie de la foy en l’interpretant.’ 130 Ibid. 166. According to Laubrussel, Simon has no right to invoke the example of Origen and Jerome: Jerome had a ‘vocation’, having received it from pope Damasus; Simon has none. 127 128

190

Benedetto Bravo

critiquer as if they were current terms in philosophical and learned discourse.131 In 1691 Jean Mabillon opens the chapter on critique in his Traite´ des ´etudes monastiques as follows: Nothing is today more fashionable than criticism. Everybody meddles in it, even women profess it. It is indeed necessary in many matters, and truth would very often be confused with error, if one did not take care to distinguish them by means of the rules of criticism. But criticism is often misused, and liberties are taken that are no less prejudicial to the mind than error and ignorance. One decides boldly, according to one’s caprice and fancy, without due examination. The use of this liberty is not confined to ordinary subjects that are dealt with in the sciences concerning human affairs. Even dogmas of faith are not secure from it. Points of religion are pronounced upon with greater assurance than a Council’s. This is perhaps one of the diseases of our century. The former centuries erred by excessive simplicity and credulity, but in the present one the self-styled esprits forts do not accept anything that has not passed through their own court. There is, then, a good and a bad criticism.132

Mabillon says that criticism is bad whenever it presumes to pronounce on theological questions, which are the preserve of the Church: Christians should always approach matters of faith ‘with trembling’. Was Simon’s ‘histoire critique’ of the Bible comprised in the category of ‘bad criticism’ for Mabillon? I think not, for Simon carefully distanced himself from theological questions and treated his subject in a scholarly manner to which Mabillon could hardly have been insensitive. Mabillon was not Laubrussel. But in discussing ‘bad criticism’, Mabillon quotes approvingly a passage from A. Godeau’s Histoire eccle´siastique (non vidi) 131 The ‘Avertissement au Lecteur’ added by whoever saw through the press the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1680, says: ‘Comme c’est un Ouvrage de Critique et d’une Critique extraordinaire et hardie, l’on a, ce semble, quelque droit de le censurer et de le Critiquer avec la mesme liberte´ qu’il fait la Critique des autres.’ 132 J. Mabillon, Traite ´ des ´etudes monastiques (Paris, 1691, repr. Farnborough, 1967), 290–1: ‘Rien n’est aujourd’huy plus a` la mode que la critique. Tout le monde s’en meˆle, et il n’y a pas jusqu’aux femmes qui n’en fassent profession. Elle est en effet necessaire en beaucoup de choses, et la verite´ bien souvent se trouveroit confondue¨ avec l’erreur, si on n’avoit soin d’en faire le discernement par les regles de la critique. Mais souvent on en abuse, et on se donne des libertez, qui ne sont guere moins prejudiciables a` l’esprit, que l’erreur ou l’ignorance. On de´cide hardiment suivant son caprice et sa fantaisie, sans examiner les matieres. On ne se contente pas d’user de cette liberte´ a` l’e´gard des choses communes, qui se traitent dans les sciences humaines. Les dogmes de la foy meˆme n’en sont pas a` couvert, et on prononce sur un point de religion avec plus d’assurance que ne feroit un Concile. C’est la` peut-estre une des maladies de nostre siecle. Les siecles pre´cedens ont pe´che´ par un exce`s de simplicite´ et de credulite´: mais dans celui-cy les pre´tendus esprits forts ne rec¸oivent rien qui n’ait passe´ par leur tribunal.—Il y a donc une bonne et une mauvaise critique.’

Critice and Historical Criticism

191

indicating the boundaries beyond which ‘grammaire’ (i.e. what Mabillon calls ‘critique’) must not stray: it may not ‘enter the sanctuary of the Sacred Books and of ecclesiastical authors’. To what extent, or in what sense, does Mabillon really accept Godeau’s warning? It is certainly not his view that ‘criticism’ should not apply to the writings of ‘ecclesiastical authors’. This would be incompatible with what he writes elsewhere in this chapter and in the chapter ‘De l’e´tude de l’histoire sacre´e et profane’. What is more, it would be very strange, for much of his work and of that of his brethren at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s and of other scholars whom he held in high esteem (in particular Le Nain de Tillemont, ‘one of the most accurate critics today’, as he says in a letter), concerned the writings of medieval and/or ancient ‘ecclesiastical authors’. Mabillon obviously thinks that ‘criticism’ is illegitimate and dangerous if it is applied to the writings of ‘ecclesiastical authors’ in connection with theological issues. He considers it legitimate and necessary if it is applied to them in order to establish facts in the history of the Church. In matters concerning faith our critical study should have no purpose other than to ‘receive and faithfully preserve the deposit of tradition, recorded for us in ancient ecclesiastical monuments. The Church alone pronounces and decides; our duty is to listen to her, and not to set ourselves up as censors of its decisions.’133 This position might seem, and probably did seem to Mabillon, unambiguous, but it is not. ‘Receiving the deposit of tradition’ by means of a ‘critical’ study of ‘ancient ecclesiastical monuments’ was not, for a Catholic, a theologically neutral activity. It implied the belief that the Roman Church as ‘Ecclesia docens’ was not in possession of the ‘deposit of tradition’, and that this ‘deposit’ could be known only through learned and responsibly ‘critical’ study, which any citizen of the Re´publique des lettres could undertake.134 Mabillon’s conception of ‘critique’ is set forth not only in the chapter ‘De la Critique, et des regles qu’il y faut observer’ (Part II, ch. 13), but also, and even better, in the one entitled ‘De l’e´tude de l’histoire sacre´e et profane’ (Part II, ch. 8). He does not treat ‘critique’ as a discipline. 133 Ibid. 293–4: ‘Il ne s’agit que de recueillir et de conserver fidelement le de ´post de la Tradition, qui nous est marque´e dans les anciens monumens Ecclesiastiques. C’est a` l’Eglise qu’il appartient de prononcer et de de´cider, et a` nous a` l’e´couter, et non pas a` nous e´riger en censeurs sur ses de´cisions.’ 134 On the renovation of the Catholic Church as a driving force in the immense work done by Catholic, especially French Gallican, scholars on the ancient Church during the 17th and 18th cc., see B. Neveu, E´rudition et religion aux XVII e et XVIII e sie`cles (Paris, 1994). On the normative role of the utopia of the re´publique des lettres see K. Pomian, Przeszł os´´c jako przedmiot wiedzy (Warsaw, 1992), 102–59, 213–30.

192

Benedetto Bravo

He does not define it: he obviously supposes his readers to know, more or less exactly, what it is.135 For him the task of ‘critique’ is to analyse, compare, and evaluate evidence—literary works, especially historical accounts, as well as documents—according to methodical rules, in order to gain a true picture of the past. In other words, he treats ‘critique’ as a set of methodical procedures, indispensable to the study of the past. We can reasonably call it historical criticism, without forgetting that Mabillon himself viewed his researches on the past partly as history and partly (for instance much of his work on ‘res diplomatica’) as ‘antiquaria ars’.136 It is important to add that Mabillon’s historical criticism takes for granted that true cognition of the ‘deposit of tradition’ is cognition of religious truth. When he speaks of ‘bad criticism’, Mabillon has certainly in mind—though he does not clearly say so—a criticism that does not accept this assumption, but places the ‘deposit of tradition’ itself before the court of individual reason. ‘Bad criticism’ is for him most of all criticism as conceived by the ‘libertins’. The ‘esprit de critique’ characteristic of many people, devout or not, of the last quarter of the seventeenth century led, within the domain of professional studies of ancient Greek and Latin texts, to a significant modification of the conception of critice as a discipline, built up by Scaliger, Casaubon, Heinsius et al. The handbook of Jean Le Clerc,137 entitled Ars critica (Amsterdam, 1697; vol. 3, 1700), opens with the 135 Giuseppe Porta of Asti (P. D. Josephus Porta Astensis), who translated the Traite ´ des ´etudes monastiques into Latin, did not know. He rendered Mabillon’s sentence ‘Rien n’est aujourd’huy plus a` la mode que la critique’ as: ‘Nihil nostra hac tempestate celebrius, qua`m aliorum censurae vacare’; and he added his own definition of critice: ‘Sed in primis operae pretium videtur exactam Critices notitiam tradere, quae sic definiri potest: Scientia conjecturalis, docens modum recte judicandi de quibusdam operibus, praesertim Authorum, eorumque scriptis’ (Tractatus de studiis monasticis, 2nd edn. (Venice, 1745), 193–4). Sic! Porta may not have been very bright, but he was not illiterate, and his misunderstanding of Mabillon shows that the idea of criticism as an intellectual approach and a method of inquiry was unknown in his milieu. On the cultural situation in Italy towards the end of the 17th and at the beginning of the 18th c. and on the efforts of the leading Italian antiquarii of the time to attain the level of the Benedictines of SaintGermain-des-Pre´s, see A. Momigliano, ‘Mabillon’s Italian Disciples’ (1958), id. Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1966), 135–52. 136 Cf. the enumeration in the title: De re diplomatica libri VI. In quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem [ ¼ age], materiam, scripturam, et stilum; quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones, ac notas chronologicas; quidque inde ad antiquariam, historicam, forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur et illustratur (Paris, 1681). The first chapter begins (p. 1): ‘Novum antiquariae artis genus aggredior, in qua [read quo?] de veterum instrumentorum ratione, formulis et auctoritate agitur.’ In the preface Mabillon speaks of ‘antiquitatis scientia’, i.e. antiquarian knowledge. 137 On Le Clerc see A. Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la Re ´publique des Lettres (Paris, 1938); Le Brun, Philosophie (as in n. 119), 1019–24.

Critice and Historical Criticism

193

following definition (p. 1–2): ‘We call CRITICE the art of understanding the writings of the ancients, both poets and prose writers, and of discerning which writings are genuine and which spurious. It is called KRITIKH because with its help we judge the meaning of what is said and the date of the writers.’ In this definition the traditional ‘ars judicandorum veterum scriptorum’ has been replaced by ‘ars intelligendorum veterum scriptorum’: the ‘judgement’ is confined to establishing the ‘sensus dictorum’ and the ‘aetas scribentium’. The direct influence of Spinoza’s Tractatus is obvious. It is still more obvious a little further on (pp. 2–3): Critica, which we are going to expound, does not concern grammatical rules, which are the basis of language, but takes them to be known to readers. Nor does it supply the knowledge of things themselves, but only opens the way for understanding the discourse of those who wrote about things. Nor is it asked here what is true, what is false, that is, whether what we read does or does not conform to truth. The question is only how we can understand what those, whose writings we read, meant to say. In a word, the inquiry is about the true meaning of what is said, not about the truth of what is said, although the former often carries the torch before the latter, namely in those cases in which the writer, whom we understand, has attained truth.

He then warns his readers against a ‘bad habit’ frequent among critici: ‘we ought not to assume that, when learning the meanings of words or becoming acquainted with the opinions of ancient writers, we are always directing our efforts to truth itself and to the knowledge of things’. He concludes: ‘Critice opens and builds the road towards true learning (‘eruditio’), i.e. to the certain knowledge of things, of which, however, it is not itself a part.’138 138 J. Clericus, Ars Critica, In qua ad studia linguarum Latinae, Graecae, et Hebraicae via munitur; veterumque emendandorum, et spuriorum scriptorum a` genuinis dignoscendorum ratio traditur, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1697); Epistolae Criticae, et Ecclesiasticae, in quibus ostenditur usus Artis Criticae, cujus possunt haberi Volumen Tertium (Amsterdam, 1700), i. 1–2: ‘CRITICEN vocamus Artem intelligendorum Veterum Scriptorum, sive numeris adstrictaˆ, sive solutaˆ oratione utentium; et dignoscendi quaenam eorum genuina scripta sint, quae spuria. Dicitur KRITIKH, quo`d ejus ope judicemus de sensu dictorum, de´que aetate scribentium.’ i. 2–4: ‘Critica, quam sumus tradituri, non attingit Grammaticas Regulas, quae sunt sermonis elementa; sed eas jam notas esse legentibus statuit. Neque etiam rerum ipsarum cognitionem suppeditat, sed viam tantu`m aperit, ad intelligendum eorum sermonem, qui de rebus egerunt. Haud magis quaeritur hıˆc quid verum sit, quid falsum, seu an id quod legimus veritati consentaneum sit, ne´cne; sed tantum quıˆ possimus intelligere quid sibi velint ii, quorum scripta legimus. Uno verbo, quaeritur dictorum sententia, non veritas eorum quae dicuntur, licet huic illa facem saepe praeferat; cu`m, nempe, Scriptor, quem intelligimus, veritatem assequutus est.—Itaque, quod solenne Criticorum vitium est, cavendum ne, dum verborum significationes discimus, aut

194

Benedetto Bravo

As we see, Le Clerc has not yet completely rid himself of the idea of critice as the art which leads to truth concerning extra-textual reality (to ‘rerum veritas’, as Spinoza said), but at the same time he wants to combat it: remembering what Spinoza had said about the task of historia applied to the Bible, he states that critice aims at understanding texts independently of the question whether what they say is true or not. What Le Clerc calls critice or ars critica will later split into critice (i.e. textual criticism) and hermeneutice. I do not exactly know when this happened. I would guess that it happened in German Protestant universities during the eighteenth century; at any rate, at the beginning of the nineteenth century F. D. E. Schleiermacher took the distinction of Kritik, in the sense of ‘textual criticism’, from Hermeneutik to be traditional and generally accepted.139 In the age of Enlightenment critique began to be associated with the esprit philosophique. In 1724 Nicolas Fre´ret, one of the main French sc¸avans of the first half of the eighteenth century, describes ‘true critique’ as the ‘esprit philosophique’ applied to the examination of ‘faits’, i.e. of evidence concerning human affairs:140 There is no need today, I think, to beware of a confusion between the esprit de syste`me and the esprit philosophique, which makes us discuss, examine, and compare everything, draw only natural conclusions, weigh scrupulously the force of each proof in order to assign to every proposition the degree of certainty or probability it truly deserves. We know today how to distinguish the esprit de syste`me from the esprit philosophique: true critique is nothing else than this esprit philosophique applied to the discussion of facts [ ¼ historical facts]; in examining these it follows the same procedure that philosophers use in inquiring into truths Scriptorum veterum sententias cognoscimus, putemus nos semper veritati ipsi, rerumque cognitioni operam dare; ne´ve postqua`m multa talia memoriter tenemus, res ipsas ideo` cognitas habere nos existimemus. Viam aperit ac munit Critice ad veram eruditionem, hoc est, rerum certam notitiam; cujus tamen ipsa pars non est. Qua de causa Thebanus Cebes in septo, cujus ostio Yeudopaide‹a adstabat, collocat Criticos; qui nisi ulterius contendant, in septum Verae Eruditionis numquam perveniunt.’ 139 A little later A. Bo ¨ ckh accepted the distinction, but gave to the term Kritik a much wider meaning, which made for confusion. Did he perhaps want to combine philological Kritik with F. Schlegel’s all-embracing Kritik? His notion of Kritik, as far as I know, had no impact. At any rate, his pupil J. G. Droysen ignored it. 140 See N. Fre ´ret, ‘Re´flexions sur l’e´tude des anciennes histoires et sur le degre´ de certitude de leurs preuves’ (read to the Academy on 17 Mar. 1724), Me´moires de Litte´rature tire´s des Registres de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 6 (1729), 146–89, quotation at p. 152; see Ch. Grell, ‘Nicolas Fre´ret, la critique et l’histoire ancienne’, in Ch. Grell and C. Volpilhac-Auger (eds.), Nicolas Fre´ret, le´gende et ve´rite´, Colloque . . . 1991, Clermont-Ferrand (Oxford, 1994), 58–9; ead., L’Histoire entre ´erudition et philosophie: E´tude sur la connaissance historique a` l’aˆge des Lumie`res (Paris 1993), 84–98.

Critice and Historical Criticism

195

of nature. Correctness of reasoning applies to every kind of fact; it is not confined to natural phenomena.141

Of course, ‘true critique’ is here implicitly opposed to a kind of critique that Fre´ret considers as less valuable. This is probably the kind of critice that was practised by sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholars. Eighteenth-century philosophes, at least in France, did not hold that kind of study in high esteem. The opinion expressed by Jean Franc¸ois Marmontel in the article ‘Critique’ of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclope´die,142 coincides substantially with what R. Maresius (Desmarets) had said in 1653.143 According to Marmontel, we should be grateful to the ‘critics’ of old, who ‘died in the mines’ doing for us a necessary job, that of restoring, editing, and explaining the works of ancient literature; now the job is done. The esprit philosophique of the Enlightenment could easily breathe new life into the tradition of antiquarian studies and transform them, but did not favour the tradition of critice, at least in France. It was much later, in the very different cultural milieu of the German universities of the early nineteenth century, that that tradition was creatively transformed. Joseph Scaliger was then hailed as a precursor—a judgement we can obviously not endorse.

141 Fre ´ret, ‘Re´flexions’ (as in n. 140), 151–2: ‘Je ne crains donc point que l’on confonde aujourd’hui l’esprit de systeˆme avec cet esprit philosophique, qui nous porte a` tout discuter, a` tout examiner, a` comparer tout, a` ne tirer que des conse´quences naturelles, a` peser scrupuleusement la force de chaque preuve, pour assigner a` chaque proposition le ve´ritable de´gre´ de certitude, et meˆme de probabilite´ qu’il doit avoir. On sc¸ait aujourd’hui distinguer l’esprit de systeˆme, de l’esprit philosophique: la vraie critique n’est autre chose que cet esprit philosophique applique´ a` la discussion des faits: elle suit dans leur examen le meˆme proce´de´ que les Philosophes employent dans la recherche des ve´rite´s naturelles. La justesse du raisonnement s’applique a` toutes sortes de faits, elle n’est point borne´e aux seuls phe´nome`nes de la nature.’ 142 Encyclope ´die, iv (Paris, 1754), 489–97, esp. 490: ‘Les restituteurs de la Litte´rature ancienne n’avoient qu’une voie, encore tre`s-incertaine; c’e´toit de rendre les auteurs intelligibles l’un par l’autre, et a` l’aide des monumens. Mais pour nous transmettre cet or antique, il a fallu pe´rir dans les mines. Avouons-le, nous traitons cette espece de critique avec trop de me´pris, et ceux qui l’ont exerce´e si laborieusement pour eux et si utilement 143 See pp. 179–80 above. pour nous, avec trop d’ingratitude.’

This page intentionally left blank

5 Early Christianity in Michael Neander’s Greek–Latin Edition of Luther’s Catechism Irena Backus

MICHAEL NEANDER Michael Neander, who to this day has not been the subject of an in-depth study, is generally considered to be one of the most eminent educators of his day.1 Born Michael Neumann in 1525 in Sorau, he began studying in Wittenberg in 1543. We know that he attended Luther’s lectures and those of Justus Jonas and that he came to know Luther personally. His special mentor, however, was the ‘praeceptor Germaniae’ himself, Philip Melanchthon. Thus, as Neander had to leave Wittenberg in 1547 after the battle of Mu¨hlberg, Melanchthon and Jonas recommended him as collaborator to the school at Nordhausen, where he was soon promoted to the post of co-rector. In 1550 he became rector of the school at Ilfeld (again thanks to Melanchthon’s recommendation), a post he was to occupy practically until 1595, the year of his death. The school at Ilfeld had been founded around 1200 as a monastery for Premonstratensian Canons. By the sixteenth century the monastery had largely fallen into disuse and the canon Thomas Stange, after converting to Luther’s doctrines himself, turned it into a school. 1 He was the subject of a Vita in the 1730s. Cf. Gottfried Keyselitz, Vita Michaeli Neandri (Sorau, 1736). Cf. also Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, xxiii (Berlin, 1886), 341–5, s.v.; F. W. Bautz, Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vi (Herzberg, 1993) 526–7, s.v. The author of the entry ‘Neander’ in the latter work comments as follows: ‘Neben Trotzendorf und Sturm ist er als einer der grossen evangelischen Schu¨lma¨nner des 16. Jahrhunderts in die Geschichte der Theologie und Philologie eingegangen.’

198

Irena Backus

Neander would have been in charge of anywhere between twelve and forty boys at any given time. During those years his literary output was very considerable. As we shall see, it followed a certain pattern, within which his collection of New Testament Apocrypha can be fitted. As a Christian newly converted to Luther’s doctrines and as an excellent Greek scholar (also a more than passable Hebraist), Neander and his literary output can be characterized by two conflicting tendencies: the need to make his students familiar with the Greek language and its culture and the awareness that several Greek authors contradicted the very Christian principles that he was trying to inculcate. Admittedly, there was no conflict as long as he stuck to writing grammars such as Sanctae linguae Hebraeae erotemata (Basle, 1567), Graecae linguae tabulae (Basle, 1553), Graecae linguae erotemata (Basle, 1561), or indeed Grammatica Latina Philippi Melanchthonis . . . (with Locutionum Latinarum formulae secundum trium causarum genera as an appendix) (Leipzig, 1579). However, at the same time as his grammatical works, Neander produced a fair number of excerpts from classical authors as well as a bilingual edition of the Paraeneseis by Pseudo-Nilus,2 which excited his admiration because it was composed entirely of short (and therefore easy to memorize) sentences. Practically at the same time (1557) as his translation and edition of the Paraeneseis or Praeceptiones, Neander was working on a bilingual anthology of pagan authors in five fascicles, entitled T crus kalo¸mena Puqagrou ph . . . Id est Pythagorae carmina aurea. Phocylidae poema admonitorium. Theognidis Megarensis poetae Siculi gnomologia. Coluthi Lycopolitae Thebaei Helenae raptus. Tryphiodori poetae Aegyptii de Troiae excidio.3 The work was situated, to all intents and purposes, at the antipodes of the didactic and pious ascetic Nilus, whoever he was. Neander was fully aware of this, which is no doubt why the prefaces to the Pythagorae carmina go to some lengths to emphasize the close links between pagan and Christian elements,4 as indeed do 2 Ne‹lou piskpou keflaia . . . Nili Episcopi et martyris capita, seu praeceptiones de vita pie, Christiane ac honeste exigenda graeco-latine. A Michaele Neandro Sorauiense conuersae et expositae (Basle, 1559). Cf. Frank Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen (Basle, 1992), no. 315, pp. 468–70. Neander is aware of the existence of several Niluses and finally attributes it hesitatingly to a Nilus born in 309. 3 Omnia Graecolatina, conuersa simul et exposita a Michaele Neandro Sorauiense . . . (Basle, 1559). I shall be referring to the Leipzig 1577 edition, which does not differ in content from the first edition. 4 Each of the five parts initially constituted a separate publication with its own preface. The structure of the work is described very well in Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist (as in n. 2), no. 314, pp. 464–8.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

199

Neander’s marginal remarks intended for students. Those links concern form rather than content, the short pithy formula or apophthegm being considered by the Ilfeld schoolmaster to be the most appropriate for expressing wisdom, be it Christian or pagan. In his preface to the first part of the work Pythagorae et Phocylidae poemata antiqua Neander stresses the apophthegmatic character of Sapiential literature, notably Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus, and does not seem worried in the slightest by questions of canonicity of books such as Ecclesiasticus. As these books are to be found both in the Hebrew Old Testament and in the Septuagint, it is no wonder, he says, that the Greek Fathers modelled themselves on the Prophets and on the ‘veteris primaeque eccclesiae doctores’ and produced collections of pithy sayings. The most notable examples of the genre among the Greeks are Maximus the Confessor’s De charitate quatuor centuriae, [Pseudo-]Nilus’ Paraeneseis, the Carmina of Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Asceticon Magnum of Basil of Caesarea, which Neander considers (not altogether mistakenly) as a compilation of extracts from the New Testament.5 It is in this tradition that the moral dicta of Pythagoras and others are to be firmly situated. The Prophets, the Apostles, and indeed Christ himself did not despise this method of teaching as useful and good. To sum up, Neander’s attitude to moral literature can be characterized by his desire to impose Christian literary forms on pagan Antiquity. This is easy to accomplish if one presents selections of short sayings from the Bible, be it canonical or apocryphal, from the Church Fathers, and from some pagan writers, the last mentioned being thus automatically slotted into a Christian framework which was finally to prevail in Neander’s educational method. Gradually, excerpts from pagan writers gave way to short edifying extracts from Christian literature, including Apocryphal literature. Indeed, by the time he came to publish the moral extracts from ‘Pythagoras’ and other pagan poets, Neander had already seen the interest of teaching Greek via Christian extracts. 5 Pythagorae carmina (Leipzig, 1577), 9–10: ‘Eam docendi breuem et succinctam rationem a Prophetis et veteris primaeque ecclesiae doctoribus acceptam, Patres deinde et Theologi graeci sequuti sunt. Hoc enim genere orationis scriptae sunt Maximi seu Episcopi seu Confessoris seu quicunque tandem fuerit de charitate quatuor Centuriae . . . Nili praeterea Episcopi et Martyris parain
seiv de pietate et honestate praescriptae . . . Eo loco habendus etiam est Nazianzeni, per excellentiam Theologi cognominati, liber Carminum . . . Qualis etiam is est quem Basilius Caesariensis Episcopus . . . ex Noui Testamenti sententiis confecit et sub titulo Moralium summarum cum reliquis eius operibus graecis coniunctus est.’

200

Irena Backus

In 1557 the Sorau schoolmaster had brought out from the presses of Johannes Oporinus in Basle a small 8vo entitled Catechesis Martini Lutheri parua Graeco-Latina. The Catechism was accompanied by ‘diverse other texts, pious, useful and pleasant in content, from which young boys can learn piety as well as the Greek language’.6 In the preface to the Catechism, addressed to Thomas Stange, Neander complains (paradoxically, given that he would have been translating ‘Pythagoras’ and other pagan authors at the time) that too much attention is paid to translation and publication of pagan authors whereas youth would profit infinitely more from reading about God’s love for his creatures than, for example, about the adulterous relationship between Venus and Mars. It was with this in mind that Neander asked a pupil, Johannes Mylius, to translate Luther’s Shorter Catechism into Greek. The translation was checked by several Greek scholars, including Neander himself, who also added the Latin version commonly used in schools. Furthermore, he added some biblical verses, three Creeds, and extracts from several Greek histories (the Suda, Eusebius, Theodoret, Sozomen, Nicephorus, Josephus, Philo, and Epiphanius) and Greek authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘little known among young people as their works are expensive and difficult to obtain’.7 At no point 6 Accesserunt et alia quaedam varia, argumenti pii, vtilis et iucundi, vnde et pietatem et linguam Graecam adolescentes discere possunt (Basle, [1557]). 7 Katechesis Martini Lutheri parua Graecolatina [1558], 8–10: ‘Recte, pie etiam et laudabiliter facere non dubitandum est illos qui aliquid operae et temporis ponunt non in Ethnicis scriptis transferendis sed iis potius libris qui nobis recitant non raptus seu puellarum seu puerorum, adulterianae Iouis Venerisue cum Marte concubitum aliaque id genus nefanda et flagitiosa scelera . . . sed quae erudiunt nos sancte, pie atque reuerenter: pios docentes de Dei patris nostri in coelis clementis et misericordis erga nos, miseras ipsius creaturas, propitia, paterna atque beneuola voluntate . . . [12–14]. Eum libellum scholae tuae alumnus Ioannes Mylius Gerenrodensis, adolescens pius et modestus . . . Graece a se conuersum nobis exhibuit, quem emendatum correximus . . . Quem cum ostendissemus . . . clarissimo viro D. Antonio Nigro medicinae doctori vere erudito linguaeque Graecae peritissimo . . . tum etiam aliis quibusdam . . . eam conuersionem non tantum probare sed etiam communem faceremus aliis, nobis hortatores esse coeperunt . . . Addidimus etiam singulis partibus, in quas libellus diuisus est, praecipua sacrae Scripturae dicta ac testimonia de praecipuis capitibus doctrinae Christianae . . . Symbola etiam tria, Nicenum, Athanasii et quod sub Ambrosii et Augustini nomine in ecclesiis canitur, omnia Graecolatina similiter adiecimus. Ad finem quoque appendimus alia quaedam argumenti similiter pii et vtilis, ex Suidae philologia, Eusebio, Theodoreto, Sozomeno, Nicephoro, Iosepho, Philone et Epiphanio, historiae ecclesiasticae scriptoribus, Clementis quoque Alexandrini et Gregorii Nazianzeni scriptis, authoribus graecis, quemadmodum non vulgaribus et vetustis, ita quoque non ita pridem ex bibliothecis, in quibus hactenus sepulti longo tempore delituerant, in conspectum hominum graece productis talibusque qui et apud paucos inueniantur et a paucioribus propter precii magnitudinem comparari possint.’

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

201

in his 1558 edition does Neander mention the word Apocrypha, yet his selection contains Apocryphal pieces which will resurface in 1564 and 1567 when the word Apocrypha begins to figure in his title. In the Catechism Neander sought to recover early Christianity via Apocryphal material which circulated often but not exclusively in the writings of reputable Greek authors such as Flavius Josephus, Eusebius, Theodoret, and others. THE C AT E C HI S M AND THE APOCRYPHA We shall now examine the Apocryphal pieces in Neander’s 1557 Catechism and then show how the Apocryphal corpus is expanded in the 1564 and 1567 editions. The Catechism of 1557 is accompanied by fifteen ‘pious’ extracts. Of those only two, the article Jesus from the Suda and the Abgar story taken from Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 1. 13, can be qualified as Apocrypha. Of the other extracts two have to do with the person of Christ: De Christo Jesu ex Iosepho and the acrostic De Iesu Christo Dei Filio, Saluatore crucifixo (i.e. chapter 18 of Constantine’s Oratio ad sanctorum coetum, which functioned as Book 5 of Eusebius’ Vita Constantini); others are intended as examples of Christian fortitude such as Historia de Basilii Magni constantia from Theodoret 4. 19, Historia de Edessenorum constantia from Sozomen 6. 18; others still are simply pieces of Christian poetry such as a hymn attributed to Clement of Alexandria, some hymns of Gregory of Nazianzus, two odes by Prodromus, an extract from Nonnus’ Paraphrasis in Ioannem (in the edition of Philip Melanchthon), a Latin prayer by Neander’s contemporary Victorinus Strigel, and finally an extract on the Essenes from [Pseudo-]Philo, and a Forma Confessionis fidei from the Ancoratus of Epiphanius of Salamis. The Prodromus pieces and the Nonnus extract are not accompanied by a Latin translation; together with Strigel’s prayer they were not incorporated by Neander into the subsequent editions of his compilation, which by 1564 was to lose its characteristic features of an anthology of apophthegmata drawn from a variety of sources, with a view to improving the knowledge of Greek and the mores of schoolboys. Admittedly, Neander appended a long section of extracts from the Fathers to his second and third editions of the Catechism. However, the title page of the second edition indicates quite clearly that at some point between 1557 and 1563 (the date of the preface) Neander’s focus had shifted from short Sapiential, pagan, and patristic pieces, to the historical

202

Irena Backus

and didactic value of what we call nowadays Christian Apocrypha. Moreover, he had developed a particular conception of what the term Apocrypha should cover. Given the importance of the 1564 title, I provide an English translation: The short Catechism of Martin Luther in Greek and Latin, newly revised. To it are added some selected sayings of the Fathers and also apocryphal accounts of Christ, Mary, etc. and of Christ’s relatives and family, non-biblical, but found in the works of ancient approved authors, Church Fathers, historians, philologists, and sundry other Greek writers.8

Non-biblical accounts to do with the human Jesus and his family which have the support of reputable ancient Greek authors—this is Neander’s general definition of Apocrypha in 1564. This definition was further refined on the separate title page of the second part of the Catechism, which contained the Apocryphal texts: Apocrypha, that is accounts of Christ, Mary, Joseph, Christ’s relatives and family, not in the Bible, but found in the works of ancient Greek authors, Church Fathers, historians, and philologists (including also the Protevangelion of James, recently discovered in the East and hitherto unpublished), copied from the words of the Oracles and the Sibyls, also from pagan testimonies and from books of many ancient authors, set forth and published in Greek and Latin by Michael Neander of Sorau.9

The value of Apocrypha was not only pedagogical but also historical. Having defined the genre and considerably increased the Apocryphal content of his appendix to Luther’s Catechism, Neander expounds the nature and value of Apocryphal literature in his preface of 10 April 1563, addressed to Syphard von Promnitz. He begins by openly accepting oral 8 Catechesis Martini Lutheri parua, Graecolatina, postremum recognita. Ad eam vero accesserunt sententiae aliquot Patrum selectiores Graecolatinae. Narrationes item apocryphae de Christo, Maria, etc. cognatione ac familia Christi, extra Biblia, sed tamen apud veteres probatos autores, Patres, historicos, philologos et multos alios Scriptores Graecos repertae. Omnia Graecolatina, descripta, exposita et edita studio et opera Michaelis Neandri Sorauiensis (Basle, 1564). 9 Apocrypha, hoc est narrationes de Christo, Maria Ioseph, cognatione et familia Christi extra Biblia; apud veteres tamen Graecos scriptores, patres, historicos et philologos reperta (inserto etiam proteuangelio Iacobi grece, in Oriente nuper reperto, necdum edito hactenus) ex Oraculorum ac Sibyllarum vocibus, gentium etiam testimoniis denique multorum veterum autorum Libris descripta, exposita et edita Graecolatine, a Michaele Neandro Sorauiense. In the 1567 edition, the title page contains the following addition: His nunc primum accessit, praeter alia diui Prochori (qui ex septem ministris unus fuit et Stephani protomartyris consobrinus) de Ioanne Euangelista et Theologo historia Graecolatina, nunquam antea in lucem edita, Sebastiano Castalione interprete. The Acts of Prochorus indeed constituted the sole addition to Neander’s 1567 edition of Luther’s Catechism with its Apocrypha.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

203

tradition and saying that all the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets as well as Christ and his disciples actually said and did much more than any written account (biblical or not) would lead us to believe.10 If we consider Neander’s elaboration on extra-biblical data concerning Christ, what interests him particularly are first the signs and portents accompanying his birth not found in the Gospel accounts but present in works of history, ancient and medieval, and secondly pagan announcements of Christ’s birth such as the Pythia’s prophecy, which is to be found in the Suda under Augustus.11 It is important to note that the links between Christian and pagan elements remain of central importance to Neander’s concept of education and that these links are to be found in Apocryphal accounts of Christ’s and his family’s acts and sayings. Unlike Lef e`vre d’E´taples, who before Neander was the sole major figure to publish New Testament Apocrypha in any quantity, the Sorau schoolmaster is not at all interested in establishing a hierarchy of sacred texts. Apocryphal texts are of purely historical interest and are to be read in a pagano-Christian or a Judaeo-Christian context. They are, moreover, to be kept apart from the Bible and are to be sharply divided into ‘good Apocrypha’, written down ‘pio studio’ by the Apostles or their disciples, and ‘bad Apocrypha’, written down by heretics to legitimize their errors in the hope of seeing them defended.12 So far as the New Testament is concerned, Neander does not seem to be at all interested in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles collection, although he must have known the Basle editions of the Pseudo-Abdias. That he did not include them suggests that he did not find them edifying enough. This could be due either to the absence of the Greek text or to his sympathy with Luther’s view that there was no need to expand the biographies of the Apostles over and above what was available in the 10 I shall be referring to the 1567 (Basle) edition, which reproduces the content of the 1563 preface unchanged. Catechesis (1567), 323: ‘Nullum est dubium, multa plura dixisse, docuisse et egisse in vita patres, Adam, Seth, Nohe, Abraham, Isaac, Iacob, Ioseph, Mosen et Iosue, Iudices postea et reges in populo Israelitico, sacerdotes ac prophetas, Christum quoque ac huius discipulos, quam literarum monumentis annotata legimus.’ 11 Ibid. 326: ‘Multa vero etiam acciderunt signa et prodigia, quae non referuntur ab Euangelistis, Christo nascente, sed ab aliis autoribus—Eutropio, Paulo Diacono, Orosio, Commestore in Scholastica Historia, Hermanno ac Martino in Chronicis, vndecunque etiam commemorantur. Quo tempore Pythia etiam de Christo, Augusto Caesari oraculum reddidit aliquot versibus.’ 12 Ibid. 327: ‘Horum vero libri Apocryphi alii pio studio vere sic scripti fuerunt: siue ab ipsis patribus, apostolis seu horum discipulis; alii etiam ab haereticis, hostibus doctrinae conficti sunt ad errores suos stabiliendos, quos defensos cupiebant.’

204

Irena Backus

canonical accounts.13 Indeed the list of the New Testament Apocrypha he gives on pp. 328–30 of his collection is far more extensive than what he actually published and he tends to privilege Gospel accounts, including the Euangelium Nicodemi, which he admits ‘adhuc hodie extat’. Why did he not publish it? Perhaps because there was no Greek text. The historically useful Apocrypha for Neander were Greek and he included only a few non-Greek pieces which had either become a part of tradition about Christ (such as Lentulus’ letter) or which possessed equivalents in Greek (such as the Sibylline Oracles). Although limited in his conception of Apocrypha which could be published as an appendix to Luther’s Catechism, Neander had, in general, a more favourable attitude to New Testament Apocrypha than the Pseudo-Gelasian Decree14 or indeed the early medieval Canonists.15 He therefore compiled his list of what he considered as ‘good’ New Testament Apocrypha from a variety of sources, only one of which was the chapter Romana ecclesia of Gratian’s Decretum.16

THE LIST OF APOC RYPHA As might be expected, it is the Greek ecclesiastical histories, and the Panarion of Epiphanius, which serve as the chief source. The list itself, obviously intended as a sort of Lutheran counterpoint to the canon Romana ecclesia—albeit on a smaller scale, in a strictly didactic context, and not at all normative—has one striking characteristic: despite its author’s protestations, it does not distinguish clearly between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Apocrypha, so that several Apocryphal Gospels which Neander’s sources acknowledge as of heretical origin are listed by him without any caveats. Only a few texts are openly condemned as Gnostic or heterodox. The list is interesting enough to be discussed here in full. Neander introduces it by a simple statement: ‘In the New Testament the following spurious writings and Apocryphal books deserve a mention.’17 13 See I. Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003), 292–324. 14 Decretum Gratiani 1a pars, dist. 15, c. 3, ed. A. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i (Leipzig, 1878; repr. Graz, 1959), 34–40. 15 Cf. ibid. 38–9. The list of N.T. Apocrypha, according to Friedberg, is not to be found in the earlier manuscripts of the Decree but does figure with some variants in Yvo of 16 Cf. note 14. Chartres, Burchard of Worms, and other canonical collections. 17 Catechesis (1567), 328: ‘In Nouo [Testamento] Scripturae spuriae et libri Apocryphi isti memorantur.’

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

205

He puts the Gospel of Nicodemus at the top of the list. Although he does not cite his source, his remark that the text is still extant (‘Euangelium Nicodemi quod adhuc exstat’) suggests that he would have seen one of its numerous manuscripts or editions. However, he does not seem to be aware that the Gospel of Nicodemus is identical with the Acta Pilati, which he mentions further on in a short list of Acts, where he calls it Liber Acta Pilati dictus, referring to Epiphanius, Panarion haer. 50 and Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 9. 5.18 Although Epiphanius overtly condemns the Acta Pilati as the text on which the Quartodecimans base their mistaken celebration of Easter on the 14th day of the month Nisan, Neander does not class the text as pernicious. Equally non-judgemental seems to be his listing of the other Apocryphal Gospels which he obviously had not seen himself but had only read about, chiefly in Epiphanius’ Panarion: ‘Euangelium secundum Syros (meminit huius Egesippus apud Eusebium, lib. 4, cap. 22)’.19 A brief mention of a Syriac Gospel is indeed made by Eusebius: he says that Hegesippus knew the Evangelium Hebraeorum and a Syriac gospel, thus showing that ‘he had come to the Christian faith from Judaism’. The context is not heretical and the reader can take it that this is definitely one of the ‘good’ Apocrypha. However, Neander gives neither Eusebius nor any other source for either the ‘Euangelium Nazareorum’ or the ‘Euangelium ad Hebraeos’, which he lists slightly further on. Yet he could easily have referred to the same passage of Eusebius or indeed to Epiphanius’ Panarion 29. 9. 4 (MPG 41, 405) where the sect of the Nazarenes is discussed at some length together with their Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew. The ‘Euangelium Thaddaei’, which is next on the list, is cited by Neander, as he admits, from the first part of the Decree of Gratian (dist. 15, c. 3),20 and represents no doubt a confusion with the Abgar legend. There follows the equally unclear ‘Euangelium Barnabae’ (also mentioned by the Decree of Gratian), with no reference. It probably represents a conflation of the Epistle of Barnabas mentioned by Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3. 25. 4, and the Acts of Barnabas mentioned by Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2. 31. 2. Both works were familiar to Neander. Why did he not check his sources more carefully? 18 Ibid. 330. For Acta Pilati/Euanglium Nicodemi cf. Gli Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento, ed. Mario Erbetta, 4 vols. (Turin, 1975–81), i/2, 231–87. 19 Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 4. 22. 8, PG 20: 384. Cf. Gli Apocrifi, ed. Erbetta, i/1, 20 Decretum Gratiani, ed. Friedberg, i. 38. 114–19.

206

Irena Backus

Lack of time or a desire to present the Apocryphal Gospels in a particular way?21 For the ‘Euangelium Petri’, which comes next on the list, Neander cites Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3. 25. 6–7 as his source, omitting to mention that Eusebius condemns the text as non-apostolic, absurd, and heretical. Similarly, he omits to mention that the ‘Euangelium Mathiae’ and the ‘Euangelium Thomae’, both given with no reference, were considered heretical, a fact he could have easily picked up from his reading of Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3. 25. 5. The ‘Euangelium Philippi’ is cited with a reference to Epiphanius (‘Epiphanius in Gnosticis’: Pan. haer. 26. 13. 2),22 but again without a single caveat. The same goes for the ‘Euangelium secundum Aegyptios’ mentioned by Neander with a reference to Clement of Alexandria’s Strom. 3. 9. 63 but without any allusion to Clement’s condemnation of the text.23 Four Gnostic Gospels—‘Euangelium Euae’, ‘Quaestiones Mariae magnae et paruae’, ‘Reuelationes Adae’, ‘Liber de stirpe Mariae’ are next cited, equally with no caveats and no reference although it is obvious that Neander’s source here would have been Epiphanius’ chapter on Gnosis in the Panarion.24 This neutral attitude contrasts strangely with Neander’s invectives against the ‘Euangelium Perfectionis’,25 mentioned immediately after the ‘Liber de stirpe Mariae’. His invectives are no more and no less than a summary of the corresponding passage in Epiphanius, who this time is mentioned.26 Neander particularly attacks the Gnostic Eucharist or ‘synaxis’ prepared out of a ‘diabolical substance, wicked enough to make the sun, the moon, and the stars go pale with horror’.27 Along with the ‘Euangelium Perfectionis’ the ‘Gospel of Judas’ is singled out for special condemnation also on the basis of Epiphanius.28 Irenaeus’ testimony 21

Cf. also Apocrifi (as in n. 18), ii. 595–600; iii. 11–36. Cf. also ibid., i/1, 213–413. For the Gospel of Mathias and the Gospel of Thomas cf. ibid 288–90 and 253–82 resp. 23 Cf. also ibid., i/1, 147–53. 24 Pan. 26. 2. 6–3.1; Pan. 26. 8. 1–3; Pan. 26. 8. 1–3; Pan. 26. 8. 1; Pan. 26. 12. 1–4. 25 Cf. Apocrifi, i/1, 534. Cf. Apocrifi (as in n. 18), i/1, 537, 292, 206, 297. 26 Catechesis (1567), 328: marginal note: ‘Gnostici turpissimi haeretici. Epiphanius in Gnosticis.’ 27 Ibid. 328: ‘Euangelium Perfectionis habebant Gnostici, haeretici turpissimi, foedissimo errori honestum nomen praetexentes. Cohorresco, cogitans spurcissimam ac abominabilissimam ipsorum synaxin, quam praeparare solebant ex horribili plane ac atroci materia, monstrata ipsis a diabolo, qui fons est et fuit omnis impuritatis a mundi exordio. Ad eam vero coenam non dubium est solem, lunam ac stellas expallescere . . . ’. 28 Ibid. 329: ‘Epiphanius in Cainitis. Euangelium Iudae se habere dicebant Cainitae haeretici. Profitentur autem isti cognatos se esse Cain; Sodomitas vero, Esau ac Core, vt viros sanctos admirantur. O caecitatem immensam, o vim et potestatem tenebrarum . . . ’. Cf. Epiphanius, Panarion haer. 28. 3. 3–5; Apocrifi (as in n. 18), i/1, 291. 22

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

207

was either unknown to our schoolmaster or of no particular interest to him.29 It is obviously the titles of the two lost Apocryphal texts more than anything else that incite Neander to stop all pretence at neutrality and to condemn them. While it could be assumed that a text entitled e.g. ‘Quaestiones Mariae’ would, if found, do a schoolboy no more harm than a non-licentious pagan poem, the same could not be said for pieces entitled ‘the Gospel of Perfection’ or the ‘Gospel of Judas’, which were overtly anti-Christian and not merely pagan. The five Gospel titles that follow were all found by Neander in the Pseudo-Gelasian Decree and therefore receive no adverse comment. These are simply the Latin infancy Gospels:30 ‘Liber Joachim siue de natiuitate Mariae, translated out of the Hebrew language into Latin by Saint Jerome’,31 ‘Liber de infantia Saluatoris, Liber de S. Maria, Liber de obstetrice Saluatoris’. Neander cites the Pseudo-Gelasian Decree verbatim. Before going on to list assorted apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, he mentions the ‘Liber puericiae Jesu’ with a reference to Epiphanius’ heresy 51, ‘which does not accept the Gospel of John’ (Panarion, haer. 51. 20). Obviously it is the Ta paidika tou kyriou32 that is meant but, despite the context in which he found the mention of the Gospel, Neander does nothing to put his pupils on guard against it, should they ever come across it. There follows a brief list of Acts, all mentioned by Epiphanius or Eusebius and, incongruously, one Apocalypse, that of Paul, mentioned by Sozomen.33 This is followed by a condemnation of the Severians, singled out by Epiphanius as a most wicked heretical sect that produced several Apocryphal books. Needless to say, Neander published none of these texts. The list is simply a guide to what in the schoolmaster’s eyes is a vast store of lost texts, particularly Gospels, some of which were written down with good will by men who were pious while others were set down by foes with intent to corrupt. A great deal of literature has been lost, continues 29

Irenaeus, Adu. haer. 1. 31. 1. also condemns the Gospel as a Gnostic fabrication. Cf. Decretum Gratiani, (as in n. 14), i. 38. On the Latin Infancy Gospels cf. JeanDaniel Kaestli, ‘Le Prote´vangile de Jacques en latin: E´tat de la question et perspectives nouvelles’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 26 (1996), 41–102 and the literature cited there. Cf. also Apocrifi (as in n. 18), i/2, 206–8. 31 Catechesis (1567), 329: ‘Liber Ioachim siue de natiuitate Mariae, quem diuus Hieronymus ex sermone Hebraeo Latinum fecit.’ 32 Cf. Apocrifi (as in n. 18), i/2, 78–101. 33 Catechesis (1567), 329–30: ‘Liber Actorum Pauli, Apocalypsis Pauli, Liber Actorum Petri, Liber Apostolorum Constitutiones dictus, Circuitiones Petri, Liber Actorum Andreae, Liber Actorum Ioannis, Liber Actorum Thomae, Liber Acta Pilati dictus.’ 30

208

Irena Backus

Neander, not just in theology but in all disciplines, through wars and other catastrophes: it is thought not without God’s special counsel, for, given that in many books there was much that was unnecessary, He wanted to relieve us of the great burden of referring to, reading, and becoming familiar with so many authors (for in all of them what would you have found other than the corrupt and depraved intention of human reason and flesh?) so that all those authors, for the most part useless, would not knock out of our hands books that are more useful and so that they would not distract us from matters of greater necessity. Thus only a few things pertaining to the life of Christ, the Prophets, and the Apostles were set down by the Holy Spirit, whilst their teachings were expounded at length, because the former are neither necessary nor profitable to our salvation.34

Neander’s apparently tolerant attitude to New Testament Apocryphal literature is thus based on the safe assumption that most, if not all of it, is lost. He also makes it clear that it constitutes a parallel source for our knowledge of early Christianity as its object is not doctrine, which should be every Christian’s main concern, but the biographies of Christ, the Apostles, etc., which are of secondary importance. Acutely aware of the significance of the recent discovery of the Proteuangelion,35 the Greek text of which appeared for the first time in his own collection, in 1564, Neander could not close off the possibility of further, similar discoveries. Indeed, his attitude to the Proteuangelion is very positive, leaving his readers in no doubt that it is to be classed among the more pious Apocryphal texts, without being accorded any particularly elevated status: There exists also the Gospel of James, which we are publishing here in both Greek and Latin. It was found among Christians in the East by Guillaume 34 Catechesis (1567), 330–1: ‘Ac fuerunt forte multa alia aliorum Euangelia et piorum virorum studio et praua hostium voluntate conscripta quae periere quemadmodum innumeri alii libri in omnibus linguis, artibus, disciplinis ac facultatibus, temporum iniquitatibus, incendiis, bellorum motibus, similiter intercidere, non sine singulari Dei consilio vt existimatur, cum in plerisque libris multa non essent necessaria, qui nos magno fasce leuare voluit euoluendi, legendi ac cognoscendi tot autores, in quibus fere cunctis quid inuenisses aliud quam humanae rationis ac carnis sensum corruptum et deprauatum, ne tot autores, plerique inutiles, e manibus nobis excuterent vtiliora et a magis necessariis abducerent. Ac eo nomine, quae ad vitam Christi, Prophetarum et Apostolorum pertinent, parce admodum videmus descripta a Spiritu sancto, doctrinam vero horum pluribus exponi, quod ea res ad salutem nihil sit necessaria nec proficua.’ 35 On this cf. Irena Backus, ‘Guillaume Postel, The ´odore Bibliander et le Prote´vangile de Jacques: Introduction historique, e´dition et traduction franc¸aise du MS. Londres, British Library, Sloane 1411, 260r.–267r.’, Apocrypha, 6 (1995), 7–65.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

209

Postel, a Frenchman by nationality, Royal Reader of Foreign Languages in Paris, who wandered through many lands and crossed the sea more than once in his enthusiasm for discovering as much as possible and for tracing books which could be used to better propagate the kingdom of Christ. We leave it to the reader to judge whether this text should be classed with some of the other Apocrypha that we have mentioned. Postel himself asserts that this book is read publicly in the Eastern Christian Churches and the same Postel considers it a jewel among theological texts and a basis or a foundation of the entire Gospel story, indeed a chapter of the Gospel according to Mark.36

Neander implies, however, that his primary intention in publishing his Apocrypha had nothing to do with the recent discovery of the ProtoGospel. ‘But’, he says ‘the Apocryphal accounts contained in our book have been collected by us with pious zeal from the entire Greek antiquity, from historians, philologists, and theologian fathers, also from the sayings of the Sibyls who are the residue of the Patriarchs, of the Church, and of Oracles.’37 He concludes that, although none of these accounts is to be found in the orthodox, holy, and canonical Scriptures, nonetheless they will be read with far greater profit than the more lascivious and disgraceful works of Homer, Apollonius, Ovid, and many others about the adulterous and incestuous affairs of Jupiter.38 In other words, Neander seems to attribute far greater importance to the indirect tradition of New Testament Apocrypha as testimonies of 36 Catechesis (1567), 331–2: ‘Extat autem et Iacobi Euangelium quod Graece et Latine vna nunc damus. Id vero Guilhelmus Postellus, natione Gallus, professor linguarum peregrinarum regius Parisiis, studio cognoscendi plurima et inuestigandi libros, quibus regnum Christi posset commodius propagari, multas regiones peragrauit, etiam mare non semel transgressus, in Oriente apud Christianos reperit. An vero ipsum quoque debeat censeri cum caeteris aliquot Apocryphis, quae commemorauimus, lectoribus iudicium relinquimus. Postellus certe testatur hunc libellum in Ecclesiis orientalibus Christianorum publice legi, ac aestimat ipse Postellus vt gemmam inter libros theologicos et basim atque fundamentum totius historiae Euangelicae et caput Euangelii secundum Marcum.’ 37 Ibid. 332: ‘Porro quae in hoc nostro libello Apocryphae narrationes continentur, pio studio a nobis collectae sunt ex vniuersa Graeca antiquitate, historicis, philologis et Patribus theologis, Sibyllarum etiam quae reliquiae fuerunt Patrum, Ecclesiae et Oraculorum, vocibus.’ 38 Ibid.: ‘Ea[e] vero tametsi in Scriptura, quam Orthodoxam, Sacram et Canonicam, nuncupamus, non reperiantur, tamen sine fructu et voluptate non legentur, ne nos tempus perdidisse videbimur, quod huic opellae tribuimus, cum legantur magno studio ac maiori cura, labore et temporis melioris iactura, non sine sumptu, multa alia foediora etiam et turpiora cum his nostris nullo modo conferenda, quae inquam poetae, Homerus . . . Apollonius, Ouidius et caeteri innumeri propemodum scripserunt de Iouis adulteriis, de stupris et aliis eius nefandis ac incestis concubitibus, qui ne a sorore quidem abstinet.’

210

Irena Backus

early Christianity than to the direct tradition, of which the Proteuangelion provides an excellent example. The list of contents of Neander’s Apocrypha merits a brief analysis before we go on to discuss the pieces individually, notably the Sibylline Oracles and texts to do with the life of Jesus, some of which had already appeared in various collections earlier in the century.

CONTENTS 340–57: Greek–Latin with annotations, Historia de Iesu Christo Filio Dei, mundi Saluatore (Latin text of Basle edition by M. Cromer and Vitus Amerbach, 1552, Greek text from the Suda). Latin inc. Temporibus maximae pietatis imperatoris Iustiniani; des. quod apud Iudaeos occultatum est credidisse. N 1558: 168–87; N 1564: 340–57.39 356–93: Greek–Latin. Proteuangelion siue de natalibus Iesu Christi et ipsius matris virginis Mariae sermo historicus diui Iacobi Minoris, consobrini et fratris Domini Iesu, Apostoli primarii et episcopi Christianorum primi Hierosolymis. Greek–Latin with annotations, a few from Bibliander’s Latin ed. of 1552, others from Neander’s own. Latin inc. In historiis duodecim tribuum; des. bono viuificoque Spiritu sancto, nunc et semper et in secula seculorum. Amen. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 356–93. 392–7: Greek–Latin. De Christo et Abgaro toparcha Edessenorum (based on Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 1. 13). Latin inc. Postquam Domini ac Seruatoris nostri Iesu Christi diuinitas; des. et tibi et iis qui tecum sunt praestet. N 1558: 188–95; N 1564: 392–7. 396–9: Greek–Latin. De Abgaro Edessenorum rege et de imagine Christi impressa in panno linneo (from John of Damascus, De fide orth. 4. 17). Latin inc. Fertur autem et quaedam historia; des. et sicut tradidi vobis traditiones tenetis. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 396–9. 398–403: Greek–Latin. De imagine Christi iterum (from Evagrius, Hist. eccl. 4. 27). Latin inc. De Edessa quoque et Abgaro; des. ad sua cum ignominia discedit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 398–403. 39 N 1558 and N 1564 refer respectively to Neander’s 1558 and 1564 editions of Luther’s Catechism. The number of Apocrypha Neander published increased very considerably between 1558 and 1564.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

211

402–3: Greek–Latin. De Christo Iesu ex Iosepho (from Josephus, Antiq. iud. 18. 63–4). Latin inc. Eodem tempore fuit Iesus vir sapiens; des. ab hoc denominatum non deficit. N 1558: 194–7; N 1564: 402–3. 402–7: Greek–Latin. Pilati ad Tiberium de Christo (from Eusebius– Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 2. 2). Latin inc. cum iam admirabilis Seruatoris nostri resurrectio; des. vniuersum orbem percurreret. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 402–7. 408–9: Greek–Latin. Effigies formae Domini nostri Iesu Christi (from Nicephorus Callistus, Hist. eccl. 1. 40). Latin inc. Porro effigies formae Domini nostri Iesu Christi; des. et immaculatae suae genitrici. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 408–9. 410: Latin only. Pontii Pilati Epistola ad imperatorem Tyberium (from ‘Hegesippus, Anacephaleosis’). inc. Nuper accidit et quod ipse probaui; des. et se a Iudaeis pecuniam accepisse. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 410. 410–11: Latin only. Lentuli epistola ad Imperatorem Tiberium (from ‘Eutropius, Annales Romanorum’). inc. Apparuit his temporibus et adhuc est; des. in colloquio rarus et modestus, speciosus inter filios hominum. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 410–11. 411–13: Latin only. De miraculis et prodigiis tempore natiuitatis Christi (from various sources: Petrus Comestor, Orosius, etc.). inc. Solent autem res miraculosae quae circa natiuitatem; des. indesinenter orate, in omnibus gratias agite. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 411–13. 414–15: Greek–Latin. De eclipsi quae accidit tempore passionis Christi (from the Suda, s.v. Dionysius). inc. Quae vero per traditionem non scriptam; des. sermo de eo prodigio allaturus esset. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 414–15. 414–17: Greek–Latin. De eadem iterum (from [Ps.-]Dionysius, Epist. ad Polycarpum). inc. Ab eo autem quaere quid sentiat de defectione solis; des. Dionysii diuinarum rerum vicissitudines. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 414–17. 418–37: Greek–Latin. Sibyllarum de Christo ac primum Eusebii de Sibyllis sententia (source(s) not specified except for Eusebii narratio De vita Constantini, lib. 5 [i. e. Constantine’s Oratio ad sanctorum coetum 18–19]; direct source: Castellio’s edn. of the Sibylline Oracles (1555), 263–83). inc. Subit autem animum meum; des. ab omnimodo opere et verbo repurgare satagunt. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 418–37.

212

Irena Backus

436–7: Greek–Latin. Clementis Alexandrini de iisdem sententia (from Castellio’s edn. of 1555, 282–5). inc. Neque vero solus hic sed et Sibylla; des. Lupercum nuncupatur. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 436–7. NB. Neander’s note on p. 437: ‘Romae feruntur adhuc extare quatuordecim libri Oraculorum Sibyllinorum in bibliotheca pontificis Vaticana. Octo vero libros Oporinus iam olim edidit, a Castalione conuersos ac expositos. N 1564: ibid. 436–9: Greek–Latin. Lib. 1 Oraculorum Sibyllinorum (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555). inc. Tum ad mortales veniet, mortalibus ipsis; des. Non oculis cernet, non auribus audiet ipsis. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 436–9. 438–41: Greek–Latin. Lib. 2 Oraculorum Sibyllinorum (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555). inc. Sed postquam Roma Aegyptum reget imperioque; des. Omnia seclorum per tempora sceptra tenebit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 438–41. 440–1: Greek–Latin. Lib. 6 Oraculorum Sibyllinorum (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555—paraphrase). inc. Flos autem purus florebit, cuncta serenans; des. O lignum foelicissimum, in quo Deus extensus est. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 440–1. 442–4: Latin. Latina Sibyllarum de Christo oracula. Twelve sextets entitled respectively: Persica, Libyca, Delphica, Cimmeria, Samia, Cumana, Hellespontica, Phrygia, Europaea, Tyburtina, Agrippa, Erythraea (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555, 291–4). N 1558 om.; N 1564: 442–4. 444–5: Latin. Acrosticis reddita a Ioanne Lango Silesio (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555, 290–1). inc. Iudicii metuet sudans praesagia tellus; des. Seruator rex aeternus Deus ipse patescit. The acrostic reads: ‘Iesus Christus, Dei Filius, Seruator, Crucs [sic]’. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 444–5. 446–7: Greek–Latin. Mercurii ter maximi de Christo (source unspecified). inc. Accedo ego mens ad sanctos et bonos; des. et omnia in ipso et sub ipsum sunt. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 446–7. In a long marginal note N. concludes ‘Lactantius autem illum [Hermem Trismegistum] inter Sibyllas ac prophetas numerare non dubitat.’ 448–9: Greek–Latin. Pselli de Christo (source: Psellos, Expositio in oracula Chaldaica (Paris, 1538)). inc. Vniuersam rerum conditionem molitus primum in Trinitate Pater; des. Filius autem ipse per se operatur. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 448–9. 448–51: Greek–Latin. [Quatuor] Oracula de Christo (source: Lactantius, Inst. 4. 13). inc. Mortalis erat secundum carnem; des. Modulamina coelestis reuolutionis concinnaui. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 448–51.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

213

450–7: Greek–Latin. [Decem] Sibyllae de Deo (source: Castellio’s edn., 1555). inc. Vnus qui solus regnat Deus atque supremus; des. solis lux grata aspectu clarissima fulget. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 450–7. 456–63: Greek–Latin. [Duodecim] oracula de Deo (source: Lactantius, Inst. 1. 7). inc. Ex sese constans, sine matre; des. finem vitae exigens obscurum. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 456–63. 462–5: Greek–Latin. De diabolis oraculum (source: unspecified). inc. Natura suadet vt credas esse daemonas puros; des. Et male materiae germina pulchra et bona. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 462–5. 464–5: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de homine (source: Castellio’s edm. of 1555, lib. 8). One line: Effigies mea homo est, rectae rationis alumna. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 464–5. 464–5: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de vita ante lapsum (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 1). Four lines, inc. Nec enim tum sollicitudo; des. rex et Seruator amauit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 464–5. 464–5: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de turri Babylonica (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 2, paraphrase based on Josephus, Antiq. iud. 1. 6). inc. Cunctis mortalibus vna voce; des. Babylonem contigit vocari vrbem. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 464–5. 464–7: Greek–Latin. [Duae] Sibyllae de Iudaeis (sources: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 5, Justin, Eusebius of Caesarea, etc.). [1] Three lines, inc. Hanc etenim primam; des. Deo praecellere dante; [2] Two lines, inc. Soli Chaldaei sapientiam; des. genitum sancte colentes. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 464–7. 466–7: Greek–Latin. [Duo] oracula de Iudaeis (source: Lactantius, de ira Dei). [1] Three lines, inc. Et Deum regem (colunt Iudaei); des. et daemones exhorrescunt; [2] Octet, inc. Dura via illa nimis; des. nouit notamque recepit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 466–7. 466–71: Greek–Latin. [Septem] Sibyllae de Christianis (sources: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, Lactantius, etc.). inc. [1] Foelices famuli, Dominus; des. [7] qui laudauere Tonantem. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 466–71. 470–1: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de Antichristo (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 2). Five lines, inc. Fallaces aderunt in terris; des. quos saeuior impetet ira. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 470–1. 470–3: Greek–Latin. [Duae] Sibyllae ad idololatras (source: Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, lib. 2). [1] 13 lines, inc. Stulticiae dignam accipietis mercedem; des. in praecordiis vestris; [2] 14 lines, inc. Homines quid

Irena Backus

214

frustra exaltamini; des. et incorrupta sempiternaque lux. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 470–3. 474–5: Greek–Latin. Oraculum de idololatris (source: ‘refertur a Stephano in Lexico geographico, sub nomine Sybaris),40 inc. Foelix omnino, foelix Sybarita futurus des. tibi atque domestica turba. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 474–5. 474–9: Greek–Latin. [Sex] Sibyllae de Roma (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 5, 8). inc. [1] Deque polo veniet sidus magnum; des. [6] Fiet arena Samus. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 474–9. 480–1: Greek–Latin. [Tres] Sibyllae de Deo puniente peccata (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 2. 3; Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, lib. 2). inc. [1] Pestes atque fames Deus; des. [3] pestem et dolores lugubres. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 480–1. 480–1: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de inuidia (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 3). One line: Inuidia nihil est peius mortalibus aegris. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 480–1. 480–1: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de auaricia (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 8). Ten lines, inc. Nam fallacis aeui, auri; des. auro praesente manebit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 480–1. 482–3: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae concio poenitentiae (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 4). Ten lines, inc. Ah vos resipiscite stulti; des. illi, pietatis amorem. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 482–3. 482–3: Greek–Latin. Sibyllae de vltima mundi senecta (source: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 2). One line: O nimium praui quos vltima proferet aetas. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 482–3. 482–5: Greek–Latin. [Quatuor] oracula de animae immortalitate (source: Psellos). inc. [1] Anima quidem quoad vinculis; des. [4] seruabis et fragile corpus. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 482–5. 484–9: Greek–Latin. [Septem] Sibyllae de resurrectione, de extremo iudicio et de vita aeterna (sources: Castellio’s edn. of 1555, lib. 1, 2, 8; Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, lib. 2, etc.). inc. [1] At a quibus colitur Deus atque perennis; des. [7] dulcem panem a coelo stellato. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 484–9. 488–91: Greek–Latin. De posteritate Christi et Domitiano Caesare (main source: Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 3. 20). inc. Superarent autem 40

St
fanov per› plewn. Stephanus de urbibus (Venice, 1502), sig. kK1v.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

215

adhuc quidam de genere; des. tempora in vita superstites fuisse. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 491. 490–49[3]: Greek–Latin. De muliere sanguinis fluxu laborante ac sanata a Christo (source: Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 7. 18). inc. Quandoquidem autem in ciuitatis; des. ad hunc modum honorare soliti fuerint. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 490–3. 492–7: Greek–Latin. De Iuliano Caesare, apostata, statuam Christi ab haemorrhousia sibi positam tollente ac suam substituente (source: Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 5. 21). inc. Cum in Caesarea Philippi; des. quod apud ipsos contigit testes sunt. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 492–7. 496–9: Greek–Latin. Amelii Philosophi Platonici de verbis primi capitis Ioannis Euangelistae: In principio erat Verbum (source: Eusebius, Praep. eu. 11. 10). inc. Amelius quoque illustris inter iuniores Platonicos; des. carnem et hominem deduceretur. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 496–9. 500: Latin. Effigies formae Mariae Deiparae (source: Nicephorus Callistus, Hist. eccl. 2. 23). inc. Mores autem formaeque et staturae eius; des. multa diuinitus inerat gratia. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 500. 500–1: Latin. Forma corporis diui Petri et Pauli Apostolorum (source: Nicephorus Callistus, Hist. eccl. 2. 37). inc. Staturam autem et corporis formam diui Apostoli; des. conformarent et in melius conuerterent. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 500–1. 502–3: Greek–Latin. De Ioanne Baptista (source: Josephus, Antiquitates iud. 18. 116–119; Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 1. 11). inc. Videbatur autem quibusdam ex Iudaeis; des. Machaerunta mittitur ibique occiditur. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 502–3. 502–5: Greek–Latin. De Pilato ex Suidae Nerone. inc. Nero adhuc iuuenis existens; des. ausus fuisset, sine regio mandato. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 502–5. 506–7: Greek–Latin. De obitu Pilati aliter (main source: Eusebius– Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 2. 7). inc. Fuerit autem operae precium; des. simul temporibus gesta commemorant. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 506–7. 506–11: Greek–Latin. De obitu Arii blasphemantis filium Dei et turbantis ecclesias (main source: Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 1. 14). inc. Ego Constantinopoli non fui; des. ipse impietatem supplicio accusauit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 506–11. 510–15: Greek–Latin. Historia de Edessenorum constantia (source: Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 6. 18). inc. Imperator vero cum Antiochiam

216

Irena Backus

venisset; des. in confessione dogmatis perstitit. N 1558: 206–11; N 1564: 510–15. 514–21: Greek–Latin. De obitu miserando Herodis Magni (sources: Josephus, Antiq. iud. 17. 183–91; Eusebius–Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 1. 8). inc. Fuerit autem praeterea operae precium; des. Seruatori nostro insidias tendens occidit. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 514–21. 520–5: Greek–Latin. De obitu similiter tristi Herodis Agrippae (source: unnamed). inc. Conatus vero regis contra Christi apostolos; des. quartum, regni vero septimum. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 520–5. 526–663: Greek–Latin. Prochori, qui fuit vnus de septem ministerio praefectis, consobrinus Stephani protomartyris, de Iohanne theologo et Euangelista historia, S. Castalione interprete. (Latin translation by Sebastian Castellio not extant except in N’s 1567 collection of Apocrypha. Cf. Acta Ioannis, ed. Theodor Zahn (Erlangen, 1880; repr. Hildesheim, 1975), I–IX). inc. Accidit vt postquam sublatus est; des. et in omnem seculorum perpetuitatem. Amen. N 1558 om.; N 1564 om. 664: Latin. Epistola Plinii Secundi ad Traianum Caesarem pro Christianis (source: Pliny’s Letters). inc. Solenne est mihi domine omnia; des. emendari possit, si sit poenitentiae locus. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 526–8. 666: Latin. Epistola Traiani responsoria ad Plinium (source Pliny’s Letters). inc. Actum quem debuisti; des. nam et pessimi exempli nec nostri saeculi est. N 1558 om.; N 1564: 528. With the exception of the Proteuangelion and the Acta Ioannis, all the pieces are short and arranged by their editor in historical order, from the birth of Jesus until the persecution of Christians under Trajan, and in several categories. Moreover, the amount of space given over to the Sibylline Oracles, or rather extracts therefrom, bears witness to Neander’s constant interest in combining pagan and Christian elements of Antiquity. The pieces selected thus constitute a whole destined to convey a particular message about the life of the human Christ, his Passion, the way he was viewed by the pagans and the Jews, the events that occurred shortly after his Passion, and the way that Christians generally should follow the example set by Christ and not that set by his persecutors. Significantly, the account of Arius’ death is juxtaposed against the account of the sad end of Pontius Pilate. The first set of the Apocrypha are the article Jesus from the Suda, the Proteuangelion, all the pieces to do with Christ and Abgar, the letters of Pontius Pilate to Tiberius, Lentulus’ letter likewise to the ‘emperor

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

217

Tiberius’, and the two pieces having to do with miracles surrounding Christ’s birth and death. It is important to note that the Abgar correspondence, the ‘Testimonium Flauianum’, the Letter of Lentulus, and Pilate’s ‘Third Letter’ to Tiberius (inc. Nuper accidit) had all been published in the Centuria prima (lib. 1, cap. x) of the Centuries of Magdeburg and thus constituted an authorized corpus of early Christian testimonies about Christ, his appearance, and his death.

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES The extracts from the Sibylline Oracles are largely (but by no means exclusively) drawn from Sixt Birck’s and Sebastian Castellio’s Greek– Latin edition printed in Basle by Oporinus in 1555.41 In order to assess the nature and method of Neander’s selection, it is necessary first to say something about the nature and origins of the Sibylline Oracles, a title intended as an allusion to the long lost Roman libri sibyllini. The similarity, however, stopped there. The Oracles were compiled by Jewish and Christian authors and attributed to the Sibyls in order to serve as an external witness to Judaeo-Christianity as the only true religion. The dates of the Jewish portion of the collection (twelve books in all, numbered 1–8 and 11–14, only eight of which were known in Neander’s time) range from the Macchabean period (c.170 bc) to the time of Hadrian. The material was freely used by the Christian Apologists of the second century. The Christian additions seem to date from the late second century onwards.42 Books 1 and 2 constitute a unity, originally of Jewish composition, from the time of the birth of Christ, with Christian additions dating from around ad 150. They give an account in prophetic form of the history of the world from the beginning to the fall of Rome. Book 3, also of Jewish origin, contains a defence of Jewish monotheism together with another history of the world and apocalyptic prophecies. Books 4 and 5 are an amalgam of Jewish and pagan elements and deal with Roman history in Nero’s time from a Jewish point of view. Book 6 41 Sibyllinorum Oraculorum libri VIII. Addita Sebastiani Castalionis interpretatione Latina, quae Graeco e regione respondeat. Cum Annotationibus Xysti Betuleij in Graeca Sibyllina oracula et Sebastiani Castalionis in translationem suam . . . Cf. Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist (as in n. 2), no. 462, p. 774. 42 Cf. Apocrifi (as in n. 18), iii. 491–540 and the literature cited there. See also JeanMichel Roessli, ‘Les Oracles sibyllins: Origines paı¨ennes et appropriations chre´tiennes’ (doctoral thesis, Paris, E´cole pratique des Hautes E´tudes, 2004).

218

Irena Backus

is a second-century hymn to Christ. Book 7 is of Judaeo-Christian origin; it contains several Gnostic elements and is an intentionally obscure conglomeration of eschatological prophecies and moral and ritual precepts. It is thought to date from the late second century. Book 8 (from c. ad 170) is a valuable witness to the sufferings of second-century Christians with a strong eschatological accent. Particular emphasis is placed on the fall of Rome, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgement. This apparently providential concurrence of pagan and Christian testimony suited Neander’s purpose admirably. He was very careful to choose extracts that contained pagan predictions of the birth of Christ, moral precepts, and prophecies of the Last Judgement. He did his best to make such oracles as he selected seem self-explanatory and devoid of any Gnostic or Jewish elements. In order to justify his choice of Sibylline Oracles as literature for schoolboys, Neander cites the testimony of Eusebius’ De vita Constantini, 5. 18–19 (in fact Constantine’s Oratio ad sanctorum coetum 18–19), where it is noted inter alia that the acrostic ‘Jesus Christus Dei Filius Saluator Crux’ was part of the prophecy of the Erythrean Sibyl and that it had been translated into Latin by Cicero. Eusebius’ testimony is followed by the shorter testimony of Clement of Alexandria. The modern reader cannot but be struck by Neander’s able exploitation of the Sibylline Oracles, which were after all initially written with a view to converting the pagan world to Jewish or Christian doctrines. The two testimonies are followed by lengthy extracts from books 1 and 2. Unaware of their Jewish origins, Neander entitles them quite unequivocally De Christo. These are followed immediately by excerpts from the hymn to Christ contained in book 6. The Christological unity of the prophecies is thus complete. The Greek–Latin excerpts are followed by the Latin Sibyllina concerning Christ taken by Neander wholesale from Castellio’s edition of 1555. As well as some nonSibylline oracles, Neander then inserts excerpts from the Sibyls on God, the devil, man, life before the Fall, the Tower of Babel, Jews, Christians, the Antichrist, idolatry, Rome, God’s punishment, envy, avarice, penance, the end of the world, the immortality of the soul, the Resurrection, the Last Judgement, and eternal life. Although it cannot be said that the extracts set out in this way present the basic tenets of Christian dogma (no mention is made, for example, of the Trinity, the sacraments, or the Church) they do attempt to inculcate a Christian way of life which had been foreseen by the pagan Oracles as becoming possible through the Incarnation, which (Neander implies) had always been the ultimate

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

219

object of prophecy because of the ever-present belief in God, even among non-Christians. Neander stresses the role of Eusebius, Clement, and other Fathers as purveyors of the Oracles. Making no secret of the fact that his main source is Castellio’s edition, he also cites a number of Sibylline extracts from Lactantius’ Institutiones diuinae or De ira Dei, Theophilus’ Ad Autolycum, and the writings of Justin and Pseudo-Justin. The extracts are chosen so as to convey particular moral and doctrinal points. Those from Theophilus are meant as a terrible warning to idolaters who neglect the worship of the one true God for the benefit of images, statues and other human artefacts—a veiled allusion to Roman Catholic practices. The extracts from Lactantius’ Institutiones 4. 13 are intended to convey the doctrine of the two natures of Christ and those from Institutiones 1. 17 the Nicene doctrine of consubstantiality. After taking his pupils through the history of salvation as depicted in the Oracles, Neander reverts to pieces having to do with the life of Christ and his disciples. This category being self-explanatory and drawn from ecclesiastical histories, we shall now analyse Neander’s use of the more specifically Apocryphal (by modern criteria) pieces having to do with the life and Passion of Christ, that is the article Jesus in the Suda, the Proteuangelion, the Abgar legend, the letters from Pilate to Tiberius, and Lentulus’ letter.

J E S US FROM THE S U D A As Neander admits in a marginal note on page 340,43 his source for the Latin text of Jesus was the edition of Martin Cromer and Vitus Amerbach, published in Basle by Oporinus in 1552.44 He does not say where he found the Greek text, but we can safely assume that it came from one of the many editions of the Suda, the editio princeps of which had appeared in Milan in 1499. As well as referring his reader to the Preface of Vitus Amerbach, he mentions Bibliander’s Preface to his 1552 43 Catechesis (1567), 340: ‘Vide de hac historia iudicium Amerbachii, quod est in epistola quae adhaeret quibusdam orationibus Chrysostomi a se in Latinum conuersis. Item praefationem Theodori Bibliandri, quam praefixit Euangelio Iacobi a Gulielmo Postello in Oriente inuento et ex Graeco in Latinum conuerso.’ 44 Aliquot orationes D. Chrysostomi Graecae et Latinae ante hoc tempus Graece nunquam editae, Latine tantum semel cum Epiphanii quadam oratione ac Historia de Iesu Christo. Interpretibus Martino Cromero et Vito Amerpachio (Basle, 1552).

220

Irena Backus

Latin edition of the Proteuangelion. For Bibliander, the text of Jesus contained the decisive proof of the Jewish custom of the test of the waters of malediction45 and thus constituted supporting evidence for the historical veracity of the Proteuangelion. The Suda story is simple: Theodosius, a pious Jew, was exhorted by a Christian named Philip to adopt the Christian faith. He politely declined, but let Philip into the secret of an ancient document held by the Jews, which showed that they knew that Jesus Christ was the Messiah promised by the Law and the Prophets. According to the document, on the death of one of the twentytwo high priests, it was decided that Jesus should succeed him. Because the names of the parents of all the high priests had to be written down on a scroll, Mary, Jesus’ mother, was summoned. On hearing that the father was God himself, the priests subjected Mary to various tests, and had the midwives make sure that she was a virgin. Finally, they became fully convinced that she was telling the truth. (Contrary to Bibliander’s intimations, however, the text contains no mention of the test of the waters of malediction). The codex containing proof of Jewish recognition of Jesus as the Messiah was to be found in Tiberias, according to Theodosius, the Jewish patriarch who told the story. But when Philip wanted to ask the emperor Justinian to send to Tiberias for the codex, Theodosius advised him against it, saying that nothing but wars and disasters would ensue. The truth of the story, concludes the article, is attested by Flavius Josephus. The story is dubious, to say the least, and Bibliander’s attachment to it is difficult to explain. Vitus Amerbach (1503–57), dean of the Arts Faculty at Wittenberg (1532–1), later to become a bitter opponent of the Reformation and professor of rhetoric at Ingolstadt,46 took a much more sceptical view. Curiously enough, Neander, although he mentions Amerbach in his marginal note, makes no mention either of his confessional sympathies, diametrically opposed to Neander’s own, or of the doubts he cast on the truth of the Jesus entry in the Suda. Yet in his preface addressed to Philip Padniefski, Amerbach, while expressing his respect for the authority of the account, says that he cannot help but wonder at three particular details. First, he asks (and would appreciate Padniefski’s opinion on the matter) how could God allow that the Holy Virgin be subjected to 45

See Numbers 5: 16–28. Cf. ‘Amerbach’ in Neue Deutsche Biographie, i (Berlin, 1953), cols. 248–9 and the literature cited there. 46

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

221

ignoble tests by midwives, normally only carried out on women of dubious virtue? While Amerbach’s doubt on this point is a function of his confessional stance, the other doubts he voices are simply commonsensical. How could it be, he asks, that the Jewish priests accepted Jesus so readily as the Messiah when the entire Jewish race rejected him? And why is it that the Christian, Philip, was asked by Theodosius not to say anything about the codex to Justinian on the unlikely ground that wars would ensue?47 After all, he points out not unjustly, given that the Jews were Roman subjects, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to transmit the codex to Justinian in secret, especially as its existence was barely known. Amerbach’s questions, although no doubt motivated partly by a certain anti-Jewish feeling, are quite pertinent. Neander, who must have read his preface, obviously did not share his doubts, which allows us to assume that, like Bibliander, he thought of the piece as constituting a proof of the Virgin’s submission to the test of the waters of malediction. This would suggest that Neander, despite the fact that he used Amerbach’s Latin translation, had a more positive interest than his Roman Catholic counterpart in the historical details of Christ’s birth and that he saw Jewish rejection of Christ’s status as an important component of that history. As a Lutheran he would not have seen the test as a sign of disrespect for the Virgin, any more than Bibliander would have. Thus his very desire to authenticate the historical background of the New Testament inclined him to accept what was obviously a dubious text. Amerbach for his part adduced perfectly cogent historical and textual arguments showing the text to be dubious, even though his real reasons for rejecting it were of a doctrinal nature. 47 Aliquot orationes (1552): Vitus Amerpachius Philippo Padniefskio, 189–90: ‘Etsi enim liber hic vnde historia sumpta est, magnam habet auctoritatem apud eruditos ac factum sic et narratum vt nemo non videat magnam hoc in se continere speciem veritatis, ego tamen haec duo miror non leuiter: quomodo potuerit a Deo permitti vt beata virgo sic tractaretur ab obstetricibus vt solent nonnunquam tractari de quarum integritate ambigitur, cum non putem ex intuitu solo in eius rei certam cognitionem veniri posse, cumque vt summum Iudaei scelus et blasphemiam semper detestati sint eo tempore, Messiam etiam credere natura Deum esse ac id ipsi Christo, quod non obscure Dei se filium esse dixisset publice obiecerint vt non ferendum flagitium, quomodo sibi sacerdotes illi, a quibus hic scribitur vni ex eis mortuo suffectum esse, tam certo persuadere potuerint Iesum esse Dei filium vt etiam hoc in tabulas publicas referrent. Accedit huc etiam aliud quod non minus pene mouet me cum scribitur Philippum illum Christianum absterritum esse a Theodosio ne rem de codice patefaceret Imperatori, tantum ideo quod non metuerent bellum, caedes et ignominiam cum nihil efficeretur, sed pro certo habuerunt haec futura esse.’

222

Irena Backus P R OT E U A N G E L I O N

Neander’s reticence about the origin of the Greek text of the Proteuangelion (of which he published the editio princeps) is difficult to explain. As I have shown elsewhere,48 Neander’s Greek text of the Proteuangelion is remarkably similar to the Greek text copied by Guillaume Postel in 1553 (i.e. after the appearance of Bibliander’s edition of the Latin version). The most interesting similarity I have noted is the omission by both of the passage on Mary’s submission to the test of the waters of malediction, which figures in Bibliander’s Latin version, in Postel’s Latin translation of 1551 (preserved in manuscript),49 and, indeed, in Bibliander’s Latin version as reproduced by Neander,50 who either failed to or chose not to notice the discrepancy between the Greek and the Latin text he was putting at the disposal of his students. However, the similarity between Neander’s and Postel’s Greek text tells us very little, if anything, about the relationship between the manuscript copied by Postel in 1553 and the source used by Neander. Although the two do belong to the same family of texts, generally known as Fa, they are by no means identical. Thus in Anne’s lamentation in Proteuangelion Jacobi (PJ) 3. 2 Neander’s Greek omits the phrases where Anne compares herself unfavourably with the birds and the waters that produce fish. Yet, the corresponding phrases are to be found in Postel’s manuscript Latin version, in Bibliander’s printed version, and in the Greek of MS Sloane 1411 (fo. 253v) copied by Postel.51 Again, Neander, who reproduces Bibliander’s Latin version, makes no mention of the discrepancy between the Greek and the Latin here. This casual attitude is very surprising, given that one of the avowed aims of his Apocrypha was to serve as a Greek reader. As for the origin of the Greek text, we would be tempted to say that Neander or his printer Oporinus simply used Postel’s copy and made some omissions and errors. This hypothesis, however, cannot be tested until a new critical edition of the Cf. Backus, ‘Guillaume Postel’ (as in n. 35), esp. 52–4. Postel’s Latin version in London, British Library, MS Sloane 1411, fos. 260r–267r, obviously served as the basis for Bibliander’s Latin. Postel’s Latin was published for the first time by Backus, ‘Guillaume Postel’, 38–51. 50 Catechesis (1567), 378. Cf. Proteuangelion Jacobi 16. 2. The Latin phrase is: ‘Potauit et Mariam ipsam et misit eam etiam ad montana et rediit incolumis.’ 51 Cf. Backus, ‘Guillaume Postel’ (as in n. 35), 52. 48 49

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

223

Proteuangelion is available, which would take the Greek text of MS Sloane 1411 into account. Be that as it may, it is obvious that his Greek text (whatever its origin) was not of the slightest interest to Neander, seeing that, contrary to his usual practice, he did not annotate it at all. He did, however, put extensive annotations in the margins of the Latin version, expanding considerably Bibliander’s more succinct annotations, which were themselves partly based on Postel’s notes, lost no doubt because of the heretical doctrine they expounded.52 Although Bibliander’s borrowings from Postel do not in any way reflect the latter’s heterodoxy,53 it is legitimate to suppose that Postel’s lost notes emphasized his doctrine of the Restitution in two kinds (masculine and feminine), with the Virgin Mary acting as both a recapitulation of Eve and the female equivalent of God, giving birth to the new Adam, the Saviour, while remaining a virgin. The Proteuangelion was from Postel’s point of view the ideal biblical text. This, coupled with his knowledge of the high respect in which the Eastern Church held it, was sufficient to convince him of its canonicity. Needless to say, nothing of this transpires in Neander’s notes. What interests him, as has been seen from his treatment of the Jesus text, are the supplementary details on the circumstances of Christ’s birth provided by the Proteuangelion. The other concern brought to light by his marginalia is to put an end to legends surrounding the birth of Christ found in medieval church histories and other dubious sources. I shall confine myself to citing one or two examples of each type of note. Commenting on Joachim’s sterility, Neander notes that it was part of God’s design that Mary—just like her Son—should bear the cross, even before she existed, by way of her kinfolk, as later her Son, the Saviour, would bear it on his own limbs.54 The crucifixion of Jesus is thus prefigured in the suffering of his human mother’s Jewish parents. In the same spirit, Neander (ignoring, as we saw, the fact that his Greek text makes no mention of Mary being subjected to the test) insists on the Old Testament source of the test of the waters of malediction.55 He thus makes the point that the coming of Christ was prefigured in the Old 52

For Postel’s doctrines see ibid. 24–30 and the literature cited there. Full list of Bibliander’s notes in Backus, ibid. 52–4. 54 Catechesis (1567), 357: ‘vt etiam ad instar filii sui ipsa Maria antequam esset, crucem in suis ferret parentibus vt postea filius eius mundi Saluator in propriis membris’. 55 Ibid. 379: ‘De aquis redargutionis, de iudicio suspectae de adulterio, de ratione item explorandi ac probandi virginitatem vide cap. 5 Numer., cap. 22 Deutero.’ 53

224

Irena Backus

Testament. Commenting on the arrival of the magi, the Sorau schoolmaster warns his pupils against Comestor’s ill-founded invention of the three magi called Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar.56 Finally, Neander supports and expands on Bibliander’s annotation on the death of Zechariah in the Temple at the hands of Herod’s soldiers, agreeing that Postel is wrong to assert (autumat) that the Lord refers to Zechariah’s death in his invective against the Pharisees in Matthew 23: 30–1.57 T H E A B GA R S T O R Y , P IL AT E ’S L E T T E R S A N D LENTULUS’ LETTER In contrast to the Proteuangelion, there is nothing mysterious about the origin of the Greek texts of the Abgar story. Neander uses Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 1. 13, John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa 4. 17, and Evagrius Scholasticus, Hist. eccl. 4. 27. Two questions occur: first, how does Neander justify devoting so much attention to a story that was used throughout the Middle Ages and in the Reformation to defend image worship? Secondly, how does his presentation of the Latin text compare to that of the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century NT Apocrypha compilers, whose work Neander apparently ignores completely? In other words, do the Abgar pieces reproduced by Neander suggest a particular tradition? Fully in keeping with the Lutheran stance, Neander neither advocates nor forbids image worship. His aim seems to be to seek in the Apocryphal pieces a historical foundation for allowing religious art and images of the saints, though not as objects of worship. Thus, commenting on the Abgar story in John of Damascus’ De fide orthodoxa, he notes that John uses the story to support image worship, and then adds: Saint Augustine gives his assent to this story in his work De doctrina christiana where he also notes that there is an oral tradition according to which Luke the Evangelist painted our Lord, Jesus Christ, and his mother, Mary.58 The Hebrew book, Aemuna, that is the Book of Faith,59 chapter 2, recounts that Christ allowed his picture to be painted prior to the Crucifixion.60 56 Catechesis (1567), 387: ‘Autor Historiae scholasticae Petrus Comestor sine ratione, sine veris testimoniis tres venisse magos prodidit quorum nomina fuerint, Gaspar, Melchior ac 57 Ibid. 391. Balthasar.’ 58 Augustine’s De doctrina christiana says nothing about this! 59 By ‘the Hebrew Book of Faith’ Neander means most probably Joseph Jabez, Yesod ha- Emunah (Ferrara, 1554). 60 Catechesis (1567), 396: ‘Astipulatur eidem historiae beatus etiam Augustinus lib. De doctrina christiana vbi etiam adducit memoriae proditum esse, quod Lucas Euangelista

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

225

Referring to the Hebrew Book of Faith, Neander, once again, insists on Christ’s presence in Jewish tradition. All other marginal notes in the three versions of the Abgar story are merely references. Neander seems almost deliberately to ignore any polemic that might have surrounded the text. His students, it is tacitly implied, will certainly not suffer from reading the legend, which is reduced to the status of a teaching aid— suitable for turning young minds away from lascivious stories to more edifying matters. In setting the Abgar Legend in the context of Lutheran education, Neander sharply distances himself from the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century reception of the text, which was mainly devotional, as I have shown elsewhere.61 It is also worth noting that Neander, unlike his predecessors, gives his sources with some precision, thus stressing that his concerns are scientific rather than devotional. However, he does not break with late medieval tradition in one important respect: like his (mainly anonymous) ‘predecessors’, he sees the Abgar Legend as one in a group of texts which includes Lentulus’ letter as well as Pilate’s letters to Tiberius. Similarly, the Libellus de infancia Saluatoris (Ps.-Mat.) a beato Hieronymo translatus, published anonymously, probably by Joannes Fabri in Turin around 1475,62 contained the following in an appendix: 1. Epistolam hanc scripsit Lentulus Romanus praeses in Iudea de Christo Iesu Saluatore nostro ad Romanos tempore Octauiani Caesaris. 2. Poncii Pillati ad Claudium Caesarem de Iesu Christi virtutibus, morte et resurrectione Epistola [inc. Nuper accidit in Iherusalem; des. honorifice Romam conducat]—a particularly fanciful variant of Pilate’s first/third letter to Tiberius, i.e. chapter 29 in recension A of the Acta Pilati. 3. The Abgar Legend. More importantly, the mini-collection of Apocryphal pieces published by the German humanist Christoph Scheurl in 1506, 1513, and 1515 (under the general title of Epistola) for Charitas Pirckheimer, abbess of the convent of the Poor Clares at Nuremberg, with a view to dominum nostrum Christum et matrem eius Mariam depinxerit. Liber Hebraeus Aemuna, hoc est fidei, refert Christum suam effigiem depingi passum esse antequam crucifigeretur, cap. 2.’ 61 Cf. Irena Backus, ‘Christoph Scheurl and his Anthology of New Testament Apocrypha’, Apocrypha, 9 (1998), 133–56. 62 8vo. London, British Library, IA 32417.

226

Irena Backus

encouraging monastic piety, contained in its final edition two of Pilate’s letters, the Abgar Legend, and the letter of Lentulus. Unlike Scheurl, however, Neander avoided conflating the Abgar and the Veronica Legends. Scheurl had added, at the end of the Eusebius– Rufinus extract, a paragraph from the thirteenth-century Catholicon of the Dominican Joannes Balbus of Genoa, available in print from c.1470. Balbus’ text of the Abgar Legend was a curious mosaic composed of fragments from the Legenda aurea, John of Damascus, and other, unidentified, sources, all combined to show how Abgar, unable to come to Jesus, sent a painter to paint him. The painter, however, could not accomplish his task because the light from Jesus’ face dazed him. The Lord then took a piece of cloth and impressed his image on it to give to Abgar.63 Not content with this elaboration on Eusebius–Rufinus, Scheurl added the following observation: ‘this image or imprint or veronica is nowadays to be found in Genoa in a certain venerable monastery of San Bartolomeo degli Armeni’.64 The conflation was thus complete. Scheurl, like all late medieval writers, confused the Abgar and Veronica Legends. Writing a generation later for a Lutheran public, Neander had purified the Abgar Legend of all medieval accretions and decided to adhere to, and not go beyond, the stories of the life of Christ which figured in works of reputable ancient authors, preferably in Greek. Neander does not include Pilate’s so-called second letter to Tiberius (inc. De Jesu Christo quem tibi; des. pati et venundari, vale Quinto Calendas Aprilis/Quarto Nonas Aprilis), probably because it did not figure in the work of a reputable author. The letter had been circulating in print since the last quarter of the fifteenth century, particularly among literature published for the conversion of the Jews.65 It is extremely late, has nothing to do with the Acta Pilati (unlike the first/third letter) and puts the blame of Jesus’ death entirely on the Jews, with Pilate confessing that he ordered the crucifixion only because of fear of popular rebellion. Neander does, however, include Pilate’s first/third letter (inc. Nuper accidit; des. a Iudaeis pecuniam accepisse) which, at least in his eyes, figured in the work of a reputable Greek author. It was of no importance 63 Cf. E. von Dobschu ¨ tz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zu der christlichen Legende (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 18; Leipzig,   1899), 242 –3 . 64 Ibid. 191–2, 241 –3 : ‘Hec autem imago seu effigies aut veronica nunc est Jenue in quodam venerabili monasterio sancti Bartholomei de Ermineis.’ 65 Cf. e.g. Epistola quam misit Poncius Pilatus Tiberio Imperatori Romano in [Samuel Marochitanus] inc. Epistola quam misit Rabi Samuel Israhelita oriundus de ciuitate regis Morochorum ad Rabi Isaac [1474]. London, British Library, IA 30945. 8vo.

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

227

that the original version was lost so that only the Latin survived, given that the translator was believed to be Ambrose of Milan in person. This is Neander’s account of what he thought was the original source of the letter: It is to be found in the Anacephaleosis of Hegesippus, that is a summary of the history of the war of Jerusalem. Hegesippus was a Jew converted to Christianity who wrote five books in the Greek language on the war of Jerusalem. They survive in Latin only, translated, it is thought, by Ambrose of Milan. Hegesippus flourished around ad 160.66

This is naturally no more than a repetition of the confusion between Hegesippus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Flavius Josephus. The confusion was common in the sixteenth century. The second-century Church historian Hegesippus, a converted Jew and probably a native of Palestine, with whom, as we have seen, Neander was familiar,67 came to be identified with a Ps.-Hegesippus, invented to be the author of the (non-existent) Greek original of a fourth-century Christian reworking in Latin of Josephus’ De bello Iudaico which paraded as the translation of Josephus, with Ambrose of Milan as the putative translator, until the appearance, sometime in the ninth century, of a philological translation of De bello which led to the fourth-century work being attributed to a different author, one Hegesippus (probably a corruption of Josephus).68 The Anacephaleosis was a summary, yet more pointedly Christian, of the Latin Ps.-Hegesippus, of a later date. The association with Ambrose carried such authority that Neander copied out word for word the recension of Pilate’s letter found in the Anacephaleosis (together with other apocryphal material) and did not so much as refer to other recensions of the letter,69 including the one in the Acta Pilati which had been printed by Scheurl in 1515. The letter of Lentulus to the emperor Tiberius, although one of the most widely circulating forgeries throughout the Middle Ages, was included by Neander for similar reasons. The letter itself, dating from 66 Catechesis (1567), 410: ‘Extat apud Egesippum in Anacephaleosi, hoc est summaria repetitione historiae belli Hierosolymitani. Fuit autem Hegesippus Iudaeus ad fidem christianam conuersus ac scripsit libros quinque Graeco idiomate de bello Hierosolymitano, qui Latine solummodo extant, conuersi a diuo Ambrosio Mediolanense, vt 67 See p. 211 and note 66 above. putatur. Claruit anno 160.’ 68 Cf. Fausto Parente, ‘Sulla doppia trasmissione, filologica ed ecclesiastica, del testo di Flavio Giuseppe: Un contributo alla storia della ricezione della sua opera nel mondo cristiano’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 26 (2000), 3–51, esp. 39 ff. 69 Cf. Apocrifi (as in n. 18), iii. 131–2.

228

Irena Backus

about the thirteenth century, was no more than a physical description suitable for either hagiographic accounts or religious painting. It breathed ‘superstitious practices’ to any self-respecting reformer, even a fairly tolerant one, and there was naturally no Greek version. The reason why Neander included it in his anthology was that it figured in the Centuries of Magdeburg and that it bore the necessary stamp of Christian antiquity. As he says in his marginal note: This letter is extant in the Annals of the Roman Senators by Eutropius. Eutropius himself was a monk and a priest who flourished around the year 370. He wrote several works, including a remarkable volume in which he set down the entire history of Rome compiled from the writings of various authors. Oporinus printed it in Basle in octavo format with the most learned annotations by Glareanus.70

Eutropius, as is well known, was indeed a fourth-century Roman historian who wrote inter alia a compendium entitled Breuiarium ab vrbe condita in ten concise books. This work was indeed published in 1546 and in 1559–61 by the Protestant Basle printer Joannes Oporinus, with notes by Henricus Glareanus. However, Eutropius was by no means a Christian, let alone a monk. According to Dobschu¨tz,71 the pagan historian had been confused (and continued to be well into Neander’s time) with a Christian priest also called Eutropius, mentioned by Gennadius, in De viris illustribus 50, as the author of two letters written ‘eleganti et aperto sermone’. Dobschu¨tz lists only one manuscript of Eutropius’ Breuiarium (London, BL: MS Harl. 2729 (XII), fo. 1), dating from the fifteenth century, into which Lentulus’ letter was incorporated. It certainly was not incorporated into the Oporinus/ Glareanus edition of Eutropius. However, as Dobschu¨tz has shown, it frequently circulated with the mention ‘extat apud Eutropium in Annalibus Romanorum’. Neander found the letter with this mention in the Centuries of Magdeburg and then, without consulting the Oporinus edition, assumed that it must also figure there. The letter thus acquired a certain respectability. Had Neander read Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declaratio (available from 1540 in Valla’s 70 Catechesis (1567), 411: ‘Extat haec epistola apud Eutropium in Annalibus Romanorum senatorum. Eutropius autem monachus fuit ac presbyter qui claruit anno Domini 370. Scripsit tum alia, tum insigne volumen quo Romana historia vniuersa describitur ex diuersorum autorum monumentis collecta, quam Oporinus Basileae 8vo excudit cum doctissimis in eum Glareani scholiis.’ He is referring to Eutropii Breuiarium historiae Romanae libris X . . . published by Johannes Oporinus in Basle in 1546 and in 1559–61. Both editions were in octavo format. 71 Cf. Dobschu ¨ tz, Christusbilder (as in n. 63), 308 –330 .

Neander’s Edition of Luther’s Catechism

229

Opera omnia published in Basle72), he would have seen that the letter had been dismissed as a forgery in one brief sentence. CONCLUSION Neander is very careful to portray Christianity as having always been prefigured by the Old Testament and by pagan Oracles. However, he is also very careful not to overemphasize the importance of ‘prisca theologia’. He obviously does not share Postel’s conviction that the Proteuangelion is the only true Gospel and he refuses to relate Jesus’ accusation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23: 30–1 to the murder of Zechariah in the Proteuangelion. At no time does he suggest that he thinks that the Old Testament patriarchs or pagan philosophers were the first theologians and he does not attempt to imitate the Christian cabbalists. What emerges is the author’s interest in the way that paganism and Judaism prefigured Christianity, his wish to make some ante-Nicene Fathers (such as Lactantius) into purveyors of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, and his desire to recapture the historical details of Jesus’ birth and the aftermath of the Passion. At no stage does he seek to reduce the Jews’ responsibility for Jesus’ death. His sources, as we have seen, are the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius–Rufinus, the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, the Ecclesiastical Histories of Sozomen, Theodoret, and others. Most importantly, he seems to be the first Lutheran theologian to make systematic use of what is nowadays called Christian Apocryphal Literature to throw light on the beginnings of Christianity. No doubt owing to his desire to make the appendix serve as a textbook of Greek, Neander’s emergent Christianity is Greek and untouched by any heresy, as he makes very sure that he tells his readers the very minimum about the Gnostics. He does, however, constantly put his readers on guard against the Arian heresy, which, he implies, was to mark the decline of early Christianity. The apocryphal accounts selected by Neander had the advantage of putting schoolboys in touch with the texture of early Christianity in a way that doctrinal writings of ante-Nicene Fathers could not. Moreover, they provided a way of reconstructing the Centuria prima of the Church as defined by the Centuriators. The authenticity of the documents 72 Lorenzo Valla, Opera (Basle, 1540), 786: ‘Vtinamque tam vera esset epistola nomine Lentuli missa de effigie Christi quae non minus improbe ementita est quam priuilegium quod confutauimus.’

230

Irena Backus

Neander published was not an issue. They were apocrypha, useful but not normative. Working from that perspective, Neander, although he would have been aware of at least some of the strictures passed on the Apocrypha by Valla, Erasmus, and others, was not interested in the fact that some early Christian documents that he put at the disposal of his students went back no further than the fourteenth century.

6 A Sixteenth-Century Hebraic Approach to the New Testament Joanna Weinberg

The Jews suffer from a singular misfortune: even when their writings are not read, they meet with displeasure; and while they are considerably reviled by those who have read them, receive much greater abuse by those who have not . . . . They [i.e. the Jews] are the most strident enemies of the doctrine of the Gospel, and yet the text of the Gospel has no clearer interpreters. To say all in a word, to their own Jewish coreligionists they recommend nothing but frivolities, destruction, and poison. But with skill and industry Christians may apply them most usefully and serviceably to their studies and adapt them most satisfactorily for the interpretation of the New Testament.1

With this exhortation to his colleagues at Catherine Hall, Cambridge, John Lightfoot embarked on his commentary to Matthew, which was published in 1658 and comprised the second volume of the Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae, a work impregnated with rabbinic learning, or rather, with ‘the beloved writings of the ill-beloved Authors’.2 Lightfoot’s endeavour, which required coming to grips with ‘their [i.e. the Rabbis’] barbarous and difficult style and the great store of trifles I am grateful to Christopher Ligota, Giulio Lepschy, and Piet van Boxel for their useful comments on this paper. 1 John Lightfoot, In Evangelium sancti Matthaei Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae (Cambridge, 1658): ‘atque hoc laborant infortunio nescio quo singulari, ut etiam non lecta displiceant, et vituperata satis ab iis qui legerunt, ab iis qui non legerunt vituperentur multo magis . . . . Acriores hostes, quam istos non habet doctrina Evangelica; et tamen planiores interpretes quam istos non habet textus Evangelii. Verbo omnia. Judaeis suis nihil nisi nugas propinant, et perniciem et venenum; at Christiani arte et industria sua eos sibi reddere possunt studiis suis utilissime famulantes, atque inservientes commodissime interpretationi Novi Testamenti’ (sig. A3v–4r ). 2 The Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot (London, 1684), i, preface, p. xiii.

232

Joanna Weinberg

wherewith they abound’, was motivated by the conviction that ‘an insight into their language and customs was the best way to a safe and sure understanding of the New Testament’.3 Lightfoot’s collation of parallels between the New Testament and rabbinic sources is usually represented as a landmark in Christian Hebraism—‘si Lightfootus non lyrasset, multi non saltassent’.4 And yet the seeds of his method had already been sown by the Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth century, who also grappled with the Hebraic content of their Scriptures by means of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages with which they had become familiar, and which, with varying degrees of expertise, they applied in their reading of the Gospels. True, over the preceding centuries, exegetes had noted the alien or rather non-Greek terms, and had commented on them. But it was in the sixteenth century that philologists partially equipped with the necessary linguistic resources, with or without a mystical slant, made a special study of these ‘Jewish’ expressions and phrases. Interestingly, this subject was not the exclusive domain of Christian Hebraists; a Jewish Hebraist, admittedly a rather exceptional one, Azariah de’ Rossi (1511?–1577), joined the fray and brought his superior command of those same Hebrew and rabbinic sources to bear on the subject.5 This is only a partial description of the quest for the authentic text of the New Testament. I shall not be discussing the Greek text from the perspective of Valla and Erasmus, who examined it with reference to readings in patristic literature and compared the Greek and Latin versions.6 Nor shall I focus on the great philologists of the end of the 3

Works (as in n. 2), i, preface, p. xiii. This Latin saying is a play on Julius Pflug’s adage about Luther, ‘Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset’, which went back to Alain of Lille’s saying, ‘Si Lyra non lyrasset, totus mundus delirasset’; see the texts cited by Henri de Lubac in Exe´ge`se me´die´vale: Les quatre sens de l’E´criture, ii/2 (Paris 1964), 353. I am grateful to Joseph Sievers for drawing my attention to this reference. Lightfoot’s enterprise is not without its chronological and contextual pitfalls, as is patently attested by the Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, which was written nearly three hundred years later by Lightfoot’s most illustrious successor, Paul Billerbeck. 5 De’ Rossi’s work on the Syriac version of the Gospels written in Ferrara for Giacomo Boncompagni and Giulio Antonio Santoro, Cardinal Santa Severina, was never printed. His discussion of the Hebraisms of the Vulgate on the basis of the Syriac version (first printed in Vienna, 1555) is an attempt on the part of a Jew to participate in the current quest for the authentic text of the Gospels. See my edition of the text, Azariah de’ Rossi’s Observations on the Syriac New Testzment. A Critique of the Vulgate by a Sixteenth-Century Jew (London, 2005). 6 See J. H. Bentley, Humanists and the Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1982). 4

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

233

sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, notably Salmasius, Heinsius, and Scaliger, who tried to identify the nature of Hellenistic Greek and its users, although they, too, were not averse to discussing a Hebrew or Aramaic term when necessary.7 But I am concerned with language and theories about language, which, as is well known, abounded in the sixteenth century, some ideological, some intelligible, and others belonging more or less to the realm of fantasy. It was at this time in Italy that the notion of dialect became widespread with the use of the Greek term dilektov rather than the Latin designations such as lingua, sermo, loquela, or idioma. With the entrance of Greek into the humanist system, as Carlo Dionisotti has shown,8 the monopoly of Latin was broken. The five dialects of Greek became the mirror of Italian vernaculars.9 Besides Hebrew, which was the obvious candidate for the Ursprache, another language claimed special attention, namely Aramaic. In an attempt to bypass Latin, it was suggested that Tuscan derived from Etruscan, which was Aramaic, the language introduced by Noah. This was one of the aberrations of Annius of Viterbo, which was developed by Pierfrancesco Giambullari, through whom it acquired political significance.10 The writing of Hebrew and related languages was also commended because, unlike Greek and Latin, they conformed to the natural movement of the first sphere.11 These were just some of the theories that were being proposed in the first half of the sixteenth century. They are not unconnected to our subject. Christian Hebraists who had learnt Hebrew, and progressed to Aramaic and sometimes also to Syriac, had to confront similar questions. 7 See H. J. De Jonge, ‘The Study of the New Testament’, in Th. H. Lusingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden, 1975), 65–109. 8 C. Dionisotti, ‘Il Fortunio e la filologia umanistica’, in V. Branca (ed.), Rinascimento europeo e Rinascimento veneziano (Florence, 1967), 21; id., Gli umanisti e il volgare fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence, 1968), 23. 9 On this and Renaissance linguistics in general, see M. Tavoni, ‘Renaissance Linguistics’, in G. Lepschy (ed.), History of Linguistics, iii: Renaissance and Early Modern Linguistics (London, 1998), 1–108. 10 See G. Cipriani, Il mito etrusco nel Rinascimento fiorentino (Florence, 1980), ch. 4 and passim. 11 See e.g. Robert Wakefield, On the Three Languages (1524), ed. and trans. G. Lloyd Jones (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies; 68; Binghampton, NY, 1989), 96–7: ‘Hebrew language follows the example of nature by moving from the right to left. For according to Aristotle, in nature it is a fixed rule that a movement which starts from the right should proceed to the left. This is evident in the daily movement of the primal and mobile heaven which gives life to all.’ Similarly, Postel argues that Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic follow the movement of the sun and planets.

234

Joanna Weinberg

Although the Annian discussion about Aramaic had a particular Tuscan flavour, Chaldaic or Syriac, as they liked to call it,12 was in the air. The status of Aramaic and its relation to the holy tongue was a current issue.13 In his introduction to his commentary on the Psalter, the fifteenth-century Augustinian Perez de Valentia had put forward the view that Aramaic was the first language of the world. He then tempered this position by suggesting that the two languages were identical.14 There were not so many who subscribed to these ‘preposterous views’, as Sebastian Mu¨nster called them. More dominant, not surprisingly, was the view of the Jewish master of the Hebraists, Elijah Levita. Although he begins his Aramaic lexicon, the Meturgeman (1541), with a citation from the Midrash Genesis Rabbah (74: 14), where R. Samuel bar Nahmani states: ‘Do not despise the Aramaic language for the Holy One blessed be He paid tribute to it in the Pentateuch, Prophets, and Hagiographa’ (and then quotes the three standard Aramaic passages, Genesis 31: 47, Jeremiah 10: 11, and Daniel 11: 4), Levita assesses Aramaic as a corruption of Hebrew that occurred after the departure of Abraham from Aram, which was also the name of the youngest son of Shem. The different forms of Aramaic, the Palestinian and the Babylonian (the term dialect is not used), however, are described in terms of their purity; that is to say, their purity is judged by Levita in relation to the extent to which the language has been contaminated by other languages. Had the sack of Rome not occurred, we might have been in the possession of an Aramaic grammar by the foremost Jewish grammarian of the period. But as he himself tells us, all his manuscripts were lost during that time of upheaval. It was therefore his ‘disciple’, Sebastian Mu¨nster, who first put the language in the public eye by producing his Chaldaic grammar ‘a nemine antehac attentata’ in 1527. Despite his inadequacies as an Aramaic teacher, Mu¨nster’s preliminary discussions of the language 12 The word Syriac was used because the Hebrew word Aramit (2 Kings 18: 26; Ezra 4: 7; Dan. 2: 4) is translated by Syriace or sermo Syriacus in the Vulgate; but in his commentaries Jerome uses sermo Chaldaicus. In the LXX (Dan. 2: 26) the word Chaldaisti is used. Thus arose an erroneous use of the word Chaldaean by Christian Hebraists in reference to the Aramaic translations of the Bible. See G. Tamani, ‘Gli studi di aramaico giudaico nel sec. XVI’, in M. Tavoni (ed.), Italia ed Europa nella linguistica del Rinascimento: Confronti e relazioni, ii (Ferrara, 1996), 503–15. 13 For a discussion of earlier Jewish views on Aramaic and the relationship between Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, see I. Zwiep, Mother of Reason and Revelation: A Short History of Medieval Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam, 1997), 165–70; 200–5. 14 Jacobus Perez de Valentia, Expositiones in centum et quinquaginta psalmos Davidicos (Paris, 1518), tractatus sextus: ‘Et sic patet quod lingua Hebraea nil aliud est nisi lingua Chaldaica quam Abraham duxit in terram Chanaan sive Palaestinam’ (fo. 17v).

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

235

paved the way for the proper descriptions and definitions of the Hebrew and Aramaic. As I have shown elsewhere,15 it was Mu¨nster who distinguished between ‘lingua Hebraica’, Hebrew, and ‘lingua Hebraeorum’, ‘Jews’ language’, which may signify Hebrew, or any Jewish vernacular. The implication of this definition was that ‘Jews’ language’ when applied to Jews living in Palestine after the Babylonian exile signified Aramaic rather than Hebrew. To illustrate the situation of the Jews who returned to the land of Israel after the Babylonian exile Mu¨nster makes the hypothetical comparison with German Jews who, given the possibility of regaining possession of the Holy Land, would continue to speak German.16 So, too, he argues, the majority of Jews whose vernacular had become Aramaic during the seventy years of exile on Babylonian soil did not know Hebrew and continued to speak Aramaic. Such was the linguistic situation in the days of Jesus. As he writes: ‘This language was still the vernacular in Jesus’ time even though practically 515 years had elapsed since the return from exile.’17 Accordingly, it was obvious that the expressions in the New Testament which the ignorant assumed to be Hebrew were actually Aramaic.18 While previous Christian scholars had some primitive idea of the Chaldaic or Syriac language, there were few who were in a position to distinguish it from Hebrew in any informed way. True, Robert Wakefield had some years earlier (1524) written an oration in praise of See my article, ‘Azariah de’ Rossi and Septuagint Traditions’, Italia, 5 (1985), 30–2. Sebastian Mu¨nster, Chaldaica grammatica (Basle, 1527), 4: ‘non secus quam si Iudaeis nostris Germanis facultas daretur adeundi et possidendi terram sanctam, Germanorum utique linguam in ea facerent vernaculam, quum paucissimi eorum sciant Hebraice loqui’. 17 Ibid. 5: ‘Non enim sunt Hebraea ut indoctiores aestimant, sed fere omnia Chaldaica sive Syriaca, quae lingua Christi tempore Iudaeis adhuc fuit vernacula quandoquidem a captivitatis relaxatione ad Christum natum vix 515 anni intercesserint.’ 18 More information about his method of tackling the Aramaic expressions in the Gospels is to be found in his annotated Hebrew translation of Matthew, Evangelium secundum Matthaeum in lingua Hebraea cum versione Latina atque annotationibus Sebastiani Munsteri (Basle, 1537). He gives some philological comments, and references to rabbinic sources; but since his purpose is primarily polemical—the text is full of citations from anti-Christian works such as Toledot Yeshu and Sefer-ha-Nizzahon with his refutations—there is a pointed theological dimension to most of his comments. See e.g. his discussion of Matt. 3: 7, 9: ‘O generation of vipers’ blood . . . and do not say within yourselves, ‘‘We have Abraham to our father’’ ’. This is John the Baptist’s observation on the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism. Mu¨nster senses that the rabbinic idea of zekhut avot (ancestral merit) is somehow criticized in these verses and quotes the talmudic story (B. Eruvin 19a) about Abraham standing at the gate of Gehinnom to prevent wicked Israelites from entering its portals (but he fails to recognize those Jews who had concealed the sign of their circumcision in order to have intercourse with heathen women). 15 16

236

Joanna Weinberg

Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and also some vague reflections on the Aramaic expressions in the New Testament.19 Mu¨nster, on the other hand, provides a brief but correct list of some of these Aramaic expressions, and refers fleetingly to the corrupt readings of these passages in the more recent Greek and Latin codices. According to Mu¨nster’s reconstruction, therefore, Hebrew had been replaced by Aramaic, a situation reflected in Acts 21, where Paul has to address the people in Aramaic in order to communicate his message. This (simple) fact is presented in all the works of the Christian Hebraists who touch on our theme. Jesus and Paul, when speaking to the Jews, used their vernacular, namely Aramaic. Their use of this language rather than the holy tongue was only in deference to their audience. What was paramount was that their message should be effectively transmitted. (The people were ignorant, not the preachers of the Gospel.)20 One of the most engaging orientalists of the sixteenth century who also set his hand to the question of the Hebraisms of the New Testament was Guillaume Postel. It is difficult to assess his true contribution to our subject. On occasion he assumes the role of the irate pedagogue, castigating scholars for their ignorance of languages, and exposing and ridiculing their distorted pronunciation of the holy words of the liturgy. This apparent scholarly rigour, however, is combined with an unflinching advocacy of the most preposterous linguistic theories. In one passage Postel could argue that Hebrew is the first language, but in another that Hebrew and Chaldaic are one and the same language because the Chaldeans and the Hebrews were the first people to use writing. According to Postel, traces of the first language can be found in all languages, and they are all interrelated. Postel’s genealogy of languages is not easy to elucidate. Hebrew is certainly given precedence, but French or Gallic is not far down in the hierarchy: the people of Gaul, according to Postel, boast a great antiquity, for, as their name demonstrates, they were saved from the waves (galim), their ancient ancestor being Gomer the eldest son of Japhet.21 Postel must have felt a little 19 For Wakefield’s discussion of Hebraisms in the New Testament, see On the Three Languages (as in n. 11), 134–47. 20 Cf. e.g. Mu ¨ nster, Chaldaica Grammatica (as in n. 16), 6: ‘Quod autem Paulus inducitur Act. 21 vulgaribus hominibus respondisse Hebraica lingua, necesse est ut intellegas Hebraeorum lingua, non Hebraica, quippe quam docti tantum intelligebant et non vulgares . . . ’. 21 See Tavoni, ‘Renaissance Linguistics’ (as in n. 9), 53, and extensive reference to these ideas of Postel in recent bibliography, particularly J. Ce´ard, ‘Le ‘‘De originibus’’ de Postel et la linguistique de son temps’, in M. L. Kuntz (ed.), Postel, Venezia e il suo tempo (Florence, 1988), 19–43.

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

237

uneasy with regard to his thesis about French. For in his De originibus seu de affinitate linguarum et Hebraicae linguae antiquitate (Paris, 1538), he produces a hypothetical critic who challenges his circuitous quest for Hebrew words in the French language. Thereby he gives himself the opportunity to put forward one of his inimitable arguments. What is surprising, he claims, is that French does not contain more Hebrew words given the size of the Jewish population in France before they were expelled in 1220;22 after all, their Hebrew commentaries are replete with Gallic words.23 The affinity between the two languages is thus, in Postel’s view, clearly attested: and he nonchalantly suggests that he could add two hundred more examples to the list he had compiled in order to illustrate the connection.24 This discussion leads directly to his treatment of the Hebrew/Aramaic expressions of the New Testament. His explanation for the word for Christmas, ‘Noe¨l’, is a classic example of his harmonizing procedures. Interestingly, he treats the word twice within two pages. On the first occasion, he states that the meaning of the word, which is repeated often, and sung by many, is not understood. It means ‘our god’, or ‘let God come to us’, and is sung by the people before Christmas with a certain longing. This interpretation appears in his list of ‘certain words that have been mysteriously preserved’.25 He returns to Noe¨l in his discussion of New Testament expressions. The first word on the list is Emanuel, whose component parts he correctly explains, ‘God is with us’. The word is then directly attached to the French word Noe¨l, a form of the same word, with the first letter truncated. As he puts it, the first letter suffered elision through the repeated singing or recitation of the word during Advent.26 And his etymology transforms the Gallic celebration of Christmas into a mystical Hebraic experience. Onomatopoeic fantasy is not always Postel’s mode of interpreting New Testament expressions. In his discussion of Jesus’ Aramaic words on the cross, ‘eli eli lema sebachthani’ (which mirror the Hebrew words 22 I am not sure to which of the various expulsions of the Jews from France Postel is 23 An obvious reference to the commentaries of Rashi. referring. 24 Guillaume Postel, De originibus seu de Hebraicae linguae et gentis antiquitate, deque variarum linguarum affinitate, Liber (Paris, 1538), sig. E IVv: ‘Unde sane mihi admiratio nulla subit huius affinitatis, cui potuissem ultra ducenta alia vocabula olim observata adiungere.’ 25 Ibid., sig. E3v: ‘Sunt quaedam voces in omnibus linguis quodam mysterio ab illa servatae.’ 26 Ibid., sig. Fr: ‘Noel viginti aut triginta dies ante natalia Christi saepius repetendo efferunt.’

238

Joanna Weinberg

of Psalm 22: 2), he combines a more scholarly approach with linguistic theory.27 He compares Matthew (27: 46) and Mark (15: 33). He notes that in Matthew, only the last word, sebachthani, is Aramaic,28 whereas in Mark, the entire saying, ‘elohi elohi lamah sebactani’, represents a Greek version of the Aramaic29—he claims that this can be proved by examining the Aramaic translation of Psalm 22.30 He returns to the theme of Aramaic as lingua franca in Jesus’ time. The integrity of Hebrew was retained only by the wise and schooled. Languages mature, stabilize, and grow old through popular use. Thus Hebrew, like Greek and Latin, became corrupt in the hands of the people. As opposed to the straightforward philological method with which he approaches his discussion of ephphatha (Mark 7: 34) and hakal dema (Acts 1: 19), Postel’s treatment of the expression maranata in 1 Corinthians (16: 22), with a transformation of anathema into maranatha, is set in a different exegetical mode.31 Postel’s real philological achievement cannot be assessed in categorical terms. It is indeed telling that after listing a number of Chaldaic expressions in the New Testament, he comes to a halt on the ground that he does not wish to divert the attention of his reader, which has been ‘alerted to higher matters’ (ad maiora).32 The higher matters relate to the affinity of Hebrew idioms with other languages. The subject of the Hebraisms and Aramaisms of the New Testament was also treated by Postel’s contemporary, and more sober scholar, the Italian Christian Hebraist Angelo Canini,33 often described as an early

Postel, De originibus (as in n. 24), sig. Fr-v. Postel actually reads ‘eli eli lamma tsebactani’, apparently reading ‘sebactani’ with the letter tsade instead of sin. 29 Interestingly, Postel’s comment is reflected in the commentary by B. Metzger on Mark (London, 1971), 119, who states that the reading eloi represents the Aramaic elahi, ‘the o for the a sound being due to the influence of the Hebrew elohai’. See also Mu¨nster’s comment on this passage in his Hebrew rendering of Matthew (see above, n. 18): that Jesus expressed the words in Aramaic: ‘sic enim habent omnia vetusta Latina exempla una cum Graecis codicibus’. 30 Postel’s reading for the Aramaic Targum on Psalms is not entirely attested in any of the versions that I have consulted. See L. Diez Merino, Targum de Salmis (Madrid, 1982). 31 At 1 Cor. 16: 22 Paul states: ‘If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be an outcast maranata’ (come Lord); in Postel’s version, maran atha (the Lord has come). Postel correctly translates the words which he recognizes to be Aramaic, and then proposes an interpretation of the text. ‘If anyone does not love our lord Jesus Christ, let there be an 32 Sig. Fiir. anathema maranatha [upon him].’ 33 The most extensive modern biography of Canini is that of R. Ricciardi, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, xviii. 27 28

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

239

comparative linguist.34 He was accorded a place in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire,35 where he is heralded as one of the most learned grammarians of the sixteenth century. This may be an exaggeration, but there is no question that Canini had some interesting contributions to make. Little is known about his life. He was born in Anghiari near Arezzo in 1521, spent five years in Spain, and then went to the Auvergne where, with the help of Simon Guichard, he came under the protection of Guillaume du Prat, bishop of Clermont,36 who facilitated his move to Paris in 1553. He lived in the Colle`ge des Lombards and then the Colle`ge de Cambrai in 1555, where Postel had earlier taught oriental languages. (Postel taught him Arabic.) Canini is not listed as a teacher at the Colle`ge de France, but his name is invoked as that of a revered teacher in the prefaces of several sixteenth-century scholars resident in Paris, such as Bonaventura Corneille Bertram37 and Andreas Dudith, the so-called Hungarian Erasmus.38 He died in 1557, but reports about the place of his death vary: according to de Thou, his final days were spent in the Auvergne in Du Prat’s entourage,39 but according to one of his students, the Spanish Dominican Francisco Foreiro, he died in Seville: ‘my teacher Angelus Caninius, who seemed to have been born to teach languages, and died in Seville . . . ’.40 The enigmatic terms in which the 34 See D. Droixhe, ‘Le Comparatisme linguistique europe ´en d’Ange Canini (1554– 1555): Un transfert de rationalite´’, in Italia ed Europa (as in n. 12), ii. 319–32. For a nuanced assessment of Canini’s contribution to semitic linguistics, see R. Contini, ‘I primordi della linguistica semitica comparata nell’Europa rinascimentale: Le Institutiones di Angelo Canini (1554)’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 33/3 (serie orientale, 25) (1994), 39–55, who discusses Canini’s innovations in morphology. 35 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1715), i. 808–10. 36 Du Prat had represented France at Trent until 1547 and was involved in combating Protestantism. He had erected the Colle`ge de Cambrai in Paris and supported the Jesuits, and erected another building for their benefit in Paris. Canini came to know him through the Minim friar Simon de Guichard, who became the superior of the Convent of Minims in Beauregard. Du Prat also supported other scholars, such as Gabriele Simeoni, who lived for some time in his chaˆteau at Beauregard. 37 Bertram was a professor of theology and oriental languages at Geneva and Lausanne. In his prefaces to his grammatical works, he refers to Canini together with Mercerus as his teacher in Hebrew and Aramaic. For example, in his comparative grammar of Hebrew and Aramaic, entitled Galed (1574), he states ‘ad eam rem manu ductus ante octodecim annos ab Angelo Caninio, deinde post Caninium a Mercero’. 38 Canini refers to Dudith, whom he taught Greek at the Colle `ge de Cambrai, as ‘adolescens moribus amabilissimus’. Dudith wrote a dedicatory poem to Canini, published in the Hellenismos (1555). 39 Jacques Auguste de Thou, Historiarum sui temporis tomus primus, lib. XIII (Paris, 1606), 373: ‘vir linguarum non solum Graecae et Hebraicae, sed Syriacae et aliarum orientalium rara et exquisita cognitione insignis . . . et in Arvernis finem studiis et vitae fecit’. 40 Praefatio in Francisco Foreiro, Iesaiae prophetae vetus et nova ex Hebraico versio (Venice, 1563).

240

Joanna Weinberg

testimony of Canini’s student is couched undermine the credibility of his evidence about Canini’s death. Like his contemporary Franc¸ois Vatable,41 Canini was truly trilingual. He translated Book 2 of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on Aristotle’s De anima (with the De mixtione) into Latin (Venice, 1546), edited the comedies of Aristophanes (Venice, 1548), and revised Politian’s translation of Simplicius’ commentary on Epictetus’ Enchiridion (Venice, 1546). He wrote a Greek grammar.42 Scaliger suggests that he had used the best parts of Francisco Vergara’s Greek grammar (1537),43 although he does admit that ‘il a mis aussi quelque chose du sien.’44 But the grammar enjoyed a fairly wide dissemination—it was reprinted several times, as were all his works—and was described as a ‘golden book’ by Gaspar Bellerus.45 Particularly intriguing is Canini’s Latin translation of a Hebrew letter written by a Jewish convert to Christianity, Ludovicus Carretus, alias Todros Hacohen, who has been identified as the brother of the noted Jewish chronicler Joseph Hacohen.46 In Paris (1554) Canini published the Hebrew text of the Epistola Ludovici Carreti ad Iudaeos quae inscribitur Liber visorum divinorum: Qua eos ad resipiscentiam invitat, validissimisque rationibus Christianam asserit veritatem, added vocalization, and translated it into Latin. In his address to the pious reader dated 1553, Canini claims that he came across the work a few days ago (‘pervenit superioribus diebus ad manus nostras Epistola’) and gave it his highest recommendation not only for Jews to whom it was addressed, but also for Christians. What is curious, as F. Secret has pointed out,47 is Franc¸ois Vatable (1493–1547) was lecteur royal in Hebrew at the Colle`ge de France. The Greek grammar Hellenismos was first printed in Paris in 1555 and reprinted in Paris, 1578; London, 1613 and 1624; Amsterdam, 1700. The grammar treated morphology, prosody, and syntax and was said to have aided in the establishment of the Erasmian system of Greek and Latin pronunciation. 43 Franciscus Vergara, De Graecae linguae grammatica libri quinque (Alcala ´, 1537). 44 Scaligerana (Cologne, 1667), 42: ‘iuvenis doctissimus, qui hellenismum bonum fecit. Il a pris tout le meilleur de Vergara, et de tous, et a mis aussi quelque chose du sien.’ This comment is ambiguous: Canini is a good grammarian, but his expertise is partly due to his recourse to the best exponents of the subject. 45 This description is found in Bellerus’ letter to Balthasar Suniga in the Antwerp edition (1600) of Canini’s De locis sacrae Scripturae, about which see below. 46 For a definitive identification of the author, see R. Bonfil, ‘Who was the Convert Ludovico Carreto?’ [in Hebrew], in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1988), 437–50. The identification of Todros was tentatively offered by D. A. Gross in his edition of the third part of Joseph Hacohen’s Emeq ha-Bakha (Jerusalem, 1955), 81 n. 56. 47 F. Secret, Les Kabbalistes chre ´tiens de la Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Neuilly-sur-Seine and Milan, 1985), 242–5. See also Secret, ‘Notes sur les he´braisants chre´tiens et les Juifs en 41 42

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

241

that the letter, which recounts Ludovico’s visions that led to his conversion, is permeated with typical Christian cabbalistic manipulation of the name of Jesus, which Canini was to combat most vehemently in the work that is the focus of this article. Furthermore, like Postel, Carretus quotes the description, attributed to the eleventh-century authority Hai Gaon (but probably written in about 1230), of the three hidden lights48 that flow without distinction and without beginning into the substance of the deity. As Gershom Scholem noted,49 this idea caught the attention of Christian cabbalists. Of course Canini was not the author of the text, but simply the translator; and yet the mere fact of approving the text by bringing it to print is indicative of a somewhat inconsistent stance on his part. As will be shown, when Canini speaks as a New Testament philologist, he holds his ground, even if this implies rejection of established ecclesiastical opinion, though in other respects he shows deference to theology and theologians.50 It may be that the purpose of his sponsorship of the convert’s work in this bilingual edition was to demonstrate his linguistic expertise and his contempt for Jews and Judaism, a position which would safeguard him from attack. Of particular significance to our enquiry is Canini’s Aramaic grammar, which was published in Paris in 1554.51 Like many others, he complains of the inadequacies of Mu¨nster’s effort, and furthermore has no compunction in criticizing Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Se’adiah for some of their interpretations of Aramaic words. In fact, Canini was the first scholar to discern correctly that the participle with the personal pronoun enclitic rather than the perfect tense was the basis of the conjugation of France’, Revue des ´etudes juives, 126 (1967), 417–33 at 418, who cites an eyewitness account of the baptism of one of Carretus’ sons by Nicholas Wotton, who writes: ‘The father [i.e. Ludovicus] being now called Ludovicus Carettus hath made a little book in Hebrew, turned into Latin.’ 48 Epistola, CI: ‘ut dixit Magister noster Hai Gaon, tres luces sunt, lux antiqua, lux pura, et lux purificata, omnes tamen unus Deus . . . ’. 49 Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. Allen Arkush (New York, 1987), 350–4, and particularly n. 308. As both Scholem and Secret mention, the idea of the three lights is also quoted by Postel in his translation of the Zohar on Genesis (London, BL, MS Sloane 1410, fo. 9). 50 e.g. he speaks about the various names of God, while asserting that it is impossible to grasp the essence of God, and states that one can only understand God ‘per signa’. Finally, he writes: ‘Nos theologorum prudentum iudicio rem totam committimus’ (Loci, as in n. 57, 17). 51 Institutiones linguae Syriacae Assyriacae atque Talmudicae una cum Aethiopicae atque Arabicae collatione. The work received its imprimatur from Thomas Papillon and Franciscus Ioverius Valentinus (Iover), author of Sanctiones ecclesiasticae tam synodicae quam pontificiae . . . (Paris 1555), in 1553.

242

Joanna Weinberg

the verb in Aramaic.52 In the preface, Canini treated the various forms of Aramaic—the Syriac and the Babylonian—which he differentiated according to their antiquity. He argues that the Aramaic spoken by Jesus (equivalent to that of Aquila, Joseph the Blind (a sage of the Babylonian Talmud), and the translators of the Targums of the Hagiographa) began to flourish slightly prior to Jesus’ age. The Aramaic spoken by Jesus to ensure the effective transmission of his message was interspersed with Greek and Latin words. Not unlike Mu¨nster, Canini describes the diglossic situation in Jesus’ time and draws an analogy with the contemporary use of Latin, known only to an educated elite, who use French or Italian in addressing their congregations. Canini dedicated the entire work to his patron, Guillaume du Prat, bishop of Clermont. Although it is unwise to take the rhetorical declarations of dedicatory prefaces too much at face value, it is nevertheless worthy of note that Canini justifies his gift of Aramaic and Talmudic disquisitions as something ‘which befits a Bishop, certainly a Bishop who desires the enhancement of the church of Christ, which many have so vehemently attacked in these days’.53 Knowledge of Aramaic, it would appear, has a role to play in religious controversy.54 In his treatment of these languages Canini combines various concepts and commonplaces. Hebrew is the most ancient language of the world, but the inscription on the cross, written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, points to triads and tetrads. Hebrew gave rise to three dialects, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic; Greek consists of four dialects, and Latin gave rise to Italian, French, and Spanish. The triad and tetrad combine to make a sabbath’s rest.55 This is the closest Canini will go to making a comment of a spiritual nature. As he asserts time and time again, philology is not concerned with the mysteries of the faith. But like all scholars who assert separation of religion from scholarship, he must also justify his undertaking. 52

See Contini, ‘I primordi’ (as in n. 34), 36. Institutiones (as in n. 51), dedicatory preface: ‘Quod argumentum non dedecere Episcopum arbitrati sumus, eumque Episcopum qui Christi ecclesiam quam multi hodie oppugnant vehementissime, auctam atque ornatam cupiat.’ 54 On Du Prat’s involvement in religious controversy, see above, n. 36. Reformers did not have a monopoly of the teaching of Hebrew. At the Colle`ge de France, for example, although Vatable was part of the circle of Meaux, and Mercier was exiled between 1567 and 1570, the other royal readers of Hebrew were Catholics, and Genebrard, for example, was very active in polemics. See S. Kessler Mesguich, ‘L’Enseignement de l’he´breu et de l’arame´en a` Paris (1530–1570) (d’apre`s les oeuvres grammaticales des lecteurs royaux)’, in Les Origines du Colle`ge de France (1500–1560) (Paris, 1998), 359. 55 Institutiones (as in n. 51), ‘Hic tetradem in triade nemo non videt e quibus hebdomas et sabbatum quietis conficitur’ (Praefatio). 53

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

243

Canini’s comparative approach to linguistic matters comes to the fore in the appendix to the Aramaic grammar.56 Entitled Novi Testamenti multorum locorum historica enarratio, it consists of fourteen sections on various obscure passages, names, and words in the New Testament expounded by means of Hebrew, Syriac (i.e. Aramaic), Arabic, and Ethiopic.57 Without underplaying the importance of being able to appreciate the dulcet tones of Homer and Demosthenes, Canini insists that a Christian worthy of the name should be able to read and interpret the words of Jesus, an endeavour that does not require deference to any authority or suspension of reason.58 Such a study, he argues somewhat apologetically, enhances understanding of certain passages in the New Testament without affecting the mysteries and dogmas of faith, for which linguistic expertise is not required. What distinguishes Canini’s treatment of this subject is his recourse to Jewish texts and history; his interpretation is not exclusively philological, although as a grammarian, he tends to accord pride of place to philological questions. Consequently, apart from the obvious Aramaic expressions such as ‘raca’, he also discusses the problematic use of Hebrew words such as ‘hosanna’59 and the use of Micah 5: 2 in Matthew (2: 6).60 Like Postel, he discusses the differences between the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.61 Taking his cue from the final disquisition ‘on the daily bread’, he concludes his work with an Aramaic rendering of the ‘precatio dominica’. The work begins with various disquisitions on divine names. Like many others before him, Canini dwells on the name of Jesus.62 His approach is that of a historian (and indeed he explicitly addresses his 56

The appendix is actually of nearly the same length as the Aramaic grammar. In the appendix, it is entitled Loci aliquot Novi Testamenti cum Hebraeorum originibus collati atque historice explicati. (All references here are to this edition.) It was republished several times: as De locis S. Scripturae Hebraicis Angeli Caninii Commentarius (Antwerp, 1600) and in vol. 9 of the Critici sacri (London, 1660, cols. 3687–712) as Disquisitiones in locos aliquot Novi Testamenti obscuriores quibus illi ex Hebraicae Syriacae, Arabicae, et Aethiopicae linguarum originibus quam accuratissime explicantur. 58 Loci (as in n. 57), 2–3: ‘cum enim sacris scriptoribus ea deferenda sit authoritas, ut quanvis ratio non constet, verissima tamen esse quae dixerint, credamus: sic caeteris tantum habendum est fidei quantum rationibus et argumentis probare atque efficere 59 Ibid. 26–9. potuerint’. 60 Ibid. 20–5. 61 Thus e.g. (Loci, 45) he discusses ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me’ and its origin in Psalm 22 and notes that ‘elohi’ given in Mark is Aramaic, but that the word ‘el’ could be used in Aramaic as well as in Hebrew. He therefore suspects that Jesus said ‘Eli’, which would have given rise to the mistaken impression that Jesus was calling for 62 Ibid. 3–14. Elijah (Matt. 27: 47). 57

244

Joanna Weinberg

work to those who examine origins). He scrutinizes Hebrew literature from the Bible to the Mishnah for occurrences of the name, concluding that ‘Iesu’ is just a form of the name Joshua or Jeshua, an appropriate name, given that it was the leader Joshua and the high priest Jeshua who had been anointed (i.e. mashiah). Rationalist philologist that he is, he has no time for ‘cabbalistic nonsense’.63 He inveighs against Osiander64 and others like him who had committed a grammatical travesty by spelling the name of Jesus with the letters of the tetragrammaton. Canini continues his attack on the cabbalists by turning to other Jewish sources. He argues that Jews of his own time, not to speak of the ancients, commonly used the name Judah, which contains the letters of the tetragrammaton. In other words, the letters were not sacred or mysterious in themselves. Canini’s familiarity with the Talmud is manifested on several occasions. In this context he refers to the passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Qama 80a) which uses the word yeshua in reference to the ritual of the ‘redemption of the first-born’ (Num. 18: 16). He points to the explanatory note of the scholiast (presumably Rashi), who explains that the word yeshua is equivalent to pidyon, the more usual term. Perhaps the most striking element in his discussion is his introduction of a quotation from the Palestinian Talmud to prove his point. He quotes a passage from tractate Sota (7, (1) 21b) about the recitation of the shema65 in which the opinion of Rabbi [Judah the patriarch] that the shema should be recited in the holy tongue is disputed. The story is told of R. Levi ben Haita,66 who went to Caesarea and tried to silence the congregation who were reciting the shema in Greek. R. Yose became 63 Canini’s denunciation of the ‘cabbalistic nonsense’ is problematic if considered in the light of his translation of the letter of the convert Ludovico Carreto discussed above. 64 Andreas Osiander, Annotationum in harmoniam Evangelicam liber unus (Paris, 1545). In a long excursus on chapter 6 of his harmony, following Reuchlin, Osiander repeats the view that the letter shin added to the tetragrammaton forms the name of Jesus. He claims (sig. bbVr) that the three-letter name, Jeshu, according to Jewish commentators, is an acronym for ‘yitaleh shemo u-malkhuto’ (may his name and his kingdom be exalted). Canini attacks Osiander on this point and cites Ibn Ezra, who always uses the name Yeshua (with the letter ayin) and Levita’s statement in his Tishbi (Isny, 1541) that the letter ayin at the end of the word is elided. Canini writes: ‘Sed ex usu linguae Syriacae atque Thalmudicae quas ignorare videtur Osiander, docebimus literas gutturis ut Hebraei vocant, praecipue Aain quae omnium crassissima est, absorberi vel potius excidere’ (p. 11). But see Wakefield, On the Three Languages (as in n. 11), 92–3, who states that the Jews call him Jesu in order to avoid calling him ‘saviour’. 65 Loci (as in n. 57), 12–13. The shema, which consists of three paragraphs—Deut. 6: 4–9; 11: 13–21; Num. 15: 37–41—is the central prayer in the Jewish liturgy. 66 The name Haita is spelt variously, but not ‘Hazota’, as transcribed by Canini.

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

245

angry and stated that the obligation to recite the shema may be fulfilled in any language.67 Canini’s citation of the Palestinian Talmud is remarkable on various counts. First, one cannot help but wonder why he does not simply refer to the Mishnah Sota (7: 1), which states unequivocally that the shema may be recited in any language,68 rather than turn to the more complex discussion of the Talmud. I would suggest that there may be two reasons for Canini’s use of this Jewish source. First, it is written in Aramaic, and he is intent on demonstrating the use of Aramaic in New Testament expressions. But secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, there is the mention of Greek in the story. Canini is discussing a Greek text in its Hebraic framework. The Talmudic text is set in a Judaeo-Hellenistic context; thus in both cases, Jewish and Greek elements are combined. At the same time, the story demonstrates that Jews could recite their most sacred daily prayer—Canini compares it to ‘our Lord’s prayer’—in any language; the search for esoteric meaning in the letters and combination of letters is thereby rendered futile.69 The derivation of names and words, in Canini’s view, is to be established by means of proper philological analysis—accordingly, the name of Jesus is to be connected with the Hebrew word for salvation.70 The Jewish context of the New Testament was also to be sought in passages in which there was no ostensible use of Hebrew or Aramaic. Canini comments on Matthew 19: 24.71 Jesus addresses his disciples and states: ‘I repeat, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ The key to the interpretation of this and many other strange sayings in the New Testament, he states, is not to be found in Hellenistic writings. He had done his homework and had scanned the literature for similar adages with no success. He had taken on board the suggestion that the word should read ‘rope’ not ‘camel’ (kmilon not kmhlon) and (like Erasmus) had consulted Athenaeus and the second-century Onomasticon of Julius 67 In a comment that betrays a certain degree of familiarity with the Talmudic text, Canini correctly states that Rabbi Yose was a greater authority than Rabbi Levi. 68 The Mishnah was redacted at the end of the second century and is therefore relatively closer in time to the Gospels than the Talmud. 69 Loci (as in n. 57), 14: ‘multo igitur consultius ac magis pium est mysteria non in litteris quod Iudaicum est sed in spiritu quod veri faciunt Christiani vestigare’. 70 See also his interesting study of Amen, ibid., 29–30, with recourse to the Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 47a, for description of three kinds of wrong Amens: he sees the rabbinic disapproval of thoughtless Amens reflected in 1 Cor. 14: 16. 71 Loci (as in n. 57), 39–42.

246

Joanna Weinberg

Pollux, but the expression was not to be found. The suggestion of Nicholas of Lyra that it referred to a gate in Jerusalem was treated with complete disdain by him. The source and significance of the adage had to be discovered. Once again he turns to Talmudic material and this time he finds two expressions in the Babylonian Talmud to suit his purpose. In the course of the discussion of dreams and their interpretation in tractate Berakhot (55b), it is stated that dreams can only reflect what is suggested by one’s own thoughts. To illustrate the point, an adage is quoted: ‘A person is not shown a golden palm-tree or an elephant going through the eye of a needle.’ An aphorism of a similar nature is produced from another tractate (Bava Metsia 38b), in which R. Sheshet disputing with R. Amram states: ‘Perhaps you are one of those of Pumpeditha who can make an elephant go through the eye of a needle.’ The only problem for Canini is that the Talmudic texts speak of elephants not camels. But he comes up with an easy solution: Jesus was sensitive to his audience’s ignorance of elephants, so he spoke of a camel instead, a more familiar sight in the landscape of the ‘Syria’ of his time. That the Talmudic evidence post-dated the Gospel text and issued from a different (that is, Babylonian not Palestinian) context did not concern Canini, nor, for that matter, Lightfoot, who commenting on the same verse remarkably cites the very same two sayings that Canini had brought to light.72 A notable expression that received constant attention from exegetes is effaqa (Mark 7: 34), when Jesus restores hearing to the deaf man: ‘Looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephphatha which means be opened.’ Discussion of the expression usually revolved around the apparent omission of the letter het (from the root pth), and the use of a double f in Greek to represent the aspirate ph. Canini refers to all these matters, but brings in another dimension, which he claims as his own particular contribution.73 Once again a trip into rabbinic literature enables him to clarify the word (oddly, however, he treats the story as a case of blindness rather than deafness).74 He cites a passage from the Midrash Leviticus Rabba (22: 4)75 which recounts a series of miracle stories about snakes and herbs. The story he selects is about two men walking ‘through the paths of Tiberias’, one blind?, same, the other 72 Lightfoot, In Evangelium (as in n. 1), 222–3. Interestingly, modern commentators 73 Loci (as in n. 57), 42–4. on the Gospels also refer to these Talmudic sayings. 74 I am unable to account for this strange discrepancy. 75 Leviticus Rabba 22: 4 (ed. Margulies, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem, 1953–5), 508). This is a 5th-c. Palestinian homiletic midrash.

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

247

possessed of sight, mefatah.76 The man who could see supported the blind man. ‘They sat down to rest on the road and it happened that they partook of a certain herb. The one who had been blind regained his sight, while the one who had possessed his eyesight became blind; thus before they left that place the one who had been blind was supporting the one who had been able to see.’77 Canini’s use of this Midrash is fascinating. Dissatisfied with the Greek term diano‹cqhti and the Latin adaperire used in the Gospel to express the opening or retrieval of the person’s hearing (he says sight), he once again seeks an Aramaic parallel. His purpose is to find a term that would correspond to the standard word by which Greeks denote ‘someone who possesses sight’, bl
pwn. The Midrash contained one such expression. But it is clear that this is not simply a search for a verbal parallel. Canini appears to have chosen his Aramaic example also with a view to its context. Like the Gospel, it describes miraculous and supernatural happenings. Moreover, the story in the Midrash took place ‘on the paths of Tiberias’. According to the narration in Mark, Jesus is on his way to the Sea of Galilee. Thus the two stories have several elements in common: vocabulary, miracles, and location. Canini’s purpose is ostensibly to explain what to him appears to be an anomalous expression in the Gospel; but the parallel text which he retrieved from rabbinic literature in order to prove his point might suggest that more critical questions underlie his philological exercise. A wonder herb took away and restored sight. Jesus performed similarly wondrous feats. Canini ends his discussion by disclaiming all knowledge of the miracle drug. Whether it exists or not, he states, is something only physicians can say.78 Such restraint makes it impossible to deduce Canini’s attitude towards the supernatural, and in particular, towards the miracles recounted in the Gospels. To a modern reader, the parallels between these two texts indicate that the author of the Midrash may have known the Gospel miracle stories in some form. Wittingly or not, Canini had based his philological investigation on two texts which appear to have more than mere verbal elements in common. 76

The word petiha is also used. Canini mistranslates one word in the story, gadesh, as ‘ridicule’. It is an uncommon word for ‘lead’. He could also have dwelt on the use of the verb itpetach instead. Cf. the Syriac etpatah (and W. Jennings, Lexicon to the New Testament (Peshitta), rev. edn. (Oxford, 1962), 182, who also refers to the Midrash). 78 Loci (as in n. 57), 44: ‘Porro an herba illa extet vel cheldonium vel alia quae hac vi praedita sit medici viderint.’ 77

248

Joanna Weinberg

Canini’s observations on some of the expressions in the Lord’s prayer would meet with the approval of modern exegetes.79 He discusses the different readings of the phrase ‘forgive us our debts’, which he categorizes as one of the many Aramaic phrases that had not been changed either by the apostles or by the translators such that its meaning was obscured. In Matthew (6: 12) ‘illa nobilis phrasis’, as he calls it, is ka› fev m·n t feil mata mØn, v ka› me·v f‹emen to·v feil
taiv mØn80 (‘Et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris’). He discusses the Matthean rendering of the remittance of debts and points to its Aramaic origin as exemplified by the expression shevaq hova, which literally means ‘to remit debts’ but signifies ‘forgive sins’ as opposed to the Hebrew terms, selah ‘forgive’ or nasa avon ‘to forgive sin’ or hata ‘to sin’. Canini notes that Luke ‘who was learned in Greek’ gives mart‹av (peccata), that is ‘sins’, in his version (11: 4) instead of ‘debts’. The continuation of the text ‘as we forgive those that trespass against us’ (v ka› me·v f‹emen to·v feil
taiv mØn)—and here he refers to the Latin word debitores—contains an idea that could not be expressed in Greek. Luke thus had to retain the term feil
taiv. Finally, Canini reconciles the two renderings by the general observation that sin is nothing but a debt that needs to be returned by the tears of penitence. In this comparison between the two Gospels, Canini is suggesting that both texts reflect the original Aramaic. According to his reconstruction, Luke, unlike Matthew, does not give a slavish rendering of the Aramaic except in those cases in which the Greek cannot express the required meaning. Implicitly, therefore, Canini is becoming involved in modern questions of translation and redaction. As a finale to his short work, Canini applies his linguistic skills to the knotty problem of the daily bread in the Lord’s prayer ‘in order to delight pious souls’.81 He is familiar with Jerome’s well-known comment that the original Hebrew/Aramaic of the word pio¸siov was mahar, that is ‘tomorrow’82—Jerome states that he saw this reading in 79

Loci (as in n. 57), 46–7. This is the reading in the Greek editions of Erasmus and Stephanus. 81 Loci (as in n. 57), 53–7. 82 Jerome, Comm. in Math., ed. D. Hurst and M. Adriaen, I, ad 6: 11 (Corpus Christianorum, series Lat., 77; Turnhout, 1969), 37. 778–83: ‘In evangelio quod appellatur secundum Hebraeos pro supersubstantiali pani, maar repperi quod dicitur crastinum, ut sit sensus: Panem nostrum crastinum, id est futurum da nobis hodie. Possumus supersubstantialem panem et aliter intelligere qui super omnes substantias ut et universas superet creaturas.’ 80

A Hebraic Approach to the New Testament

249

the so-called Hebrew Gospel. From this starting point, Canini plies his linguistic trade and proceeds to discuss the grammatical questions surrounding the word.83 He asserts that quotidianus and supersubstantialis, the usual translations of pio¸siov, do not correspond to the Hebrew mahar or dimahar ([bread] of tomorrow). The meaning of pio¸siov had to be understood as a neologism. Despite its rich and felicitous vocabulary, the Greek language did not possess a word that could signify ‘tomorrow’s’. Thus, here, as in other cases, a new word had to be invented.84 The neologism, in this case, was, according to Canini, constructed on the basis of the expression t' pio¸s| [m
r{], equivalent to postridie. Canini then reflects on the strange idea of asking ‘today for tomorrow’s bread’. Conscious that he is straying into theologians’ territory, he nevertheless proceeds to analyse the statement. He understands it as an expression of divine providence over fallible human beings, an idea that was likewise manifested in the biblical account of the double portion of manna collected on the day before the Sabbath.85 Likewise, the notion of the sabbatical year and the Jubilee, with the land lying fallow, remittance of debts, and restoration of land prefigured the re-establishment of the heavenly Jerusalem. The foregoing examples of Canini’s disquisitions on the New Testament are representative of his method throughout his ‘aureus libellus’, as Bellerus called it.86 There is a genuine attempt to set the Gospels in their historical and linguistic context. In his discussion of Matthew 5: 22, he observes the triadic nature of the verse: ‘Whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother ‘‘raca’’ shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.’ He then compares it to the different responsibilities and tasks of the three types of Jewish Sanhedrin as described in Jewish sources, thus offering a real contribution to the exegesis of the verse. He was probably the first to dispense with speculative explanations of the unusual name of Iscariot by analysing it in terms of its two Hebraic components ish Carioth 83 His discussion bears remarkable affinity with that of W. Foerster’s entry on pio¸siov in Theologisches Wo¨rterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. G. Kittel (Stuttgart, 1935), ii. 587–95. 84 Ibid. 55: ‘Ea enim est vis Hebraici et Syriaci sermonis ut linguae Graecae ubertas atque felicitas inopiam suam agnoscere et nova fingere nomina cogatur.’ 85 A similar remark was also made by Tertullian in Adversus Marcionem, 4. 26. 4. 86 See n. 45.

250

Joanna Weinberg

(a man of Cariot).87 His reflection on the neologism in the Lord’s prayer mentioned above is certainly an approach to the question of the nature of Hellenistic Greek, which became so lively an issue at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century in the work of Scaliger, Salmasius, and Drusius.88 Whatever his motivation for publishing the visions of the converted Jew Ludovico Carreto with their mystical manipulation of language, in his New Testament observations Canini promotes rational exegesis which takes Jewish views into account. In this endeavour, not unlike Lightfoot and indeed the majority of Christian Hebraists, he availed himself of, and manifested considerable familiarity with, Jewish writings but without abandoning the standard apologetic framework, which tended to favour negative stereotypical assessments of Jews and Judaism. Loci (as in n. 57), 52. Apart from De Jonge, ‘Study’ (as in n. 7), see A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, ii: Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 416–18. 87 88

7 Robert Bellarmine, Christian Hebraist and Censor Piet van Boxel

A list of Christian hebraists compiled by Raphael Loewe1 includes the name of Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). At first glance, the inclusion of Bellarmine seems puzzling. After all, it is usually not with Hebrew studies, but rather with the Counter-Reformation that Bellarmine is associated. Indeed, he is regarded as the architect of controversy theology. A chair was already established in 1561 at the Collegio Romano, the most prestigious college of the Jesuits founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1551. But a coherent theological system as an adequate tool in the controversies with the heretics was not produced until Bellarmine was appointed professor at the College, holding the chair from 1576 until 1586. The fruit of his teaching at the Collegio Romano was his magnum opus De controversiis christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos Disputationes.2 Despite occasional criticism by his contemporaries,3 Bellarmine was undoubtedly one of the main players in the fight against reformers and heresy. Raphael Loewe had little evidence of Bellarmine’s activity as a Christian hebraist: a small Hebrew grammar which, as Bellarmine himself states, was written ‘in order to understand Hebrew books with

Encyclopaedia Judaica ( Jerusalem, 1971), viii. 25. The first volume, treating subjects such as Scripture and tradition, the Church, and the status of the pope, was published in 1586. The second volume, on the sacraments, was completed in 1588. The last volume, which appeared in 1592, deals with theological notions such as grace, free will, and justification. See further J. J. I. von Do¨llinger and F. H. Reusch, Die Selbstbiographie des Cardinals Bellarmin, lateinisch und deutsch mit 3 Ibid. 96–9. geschichtlichen Erla¨uterungen (Bonn, 1887), 93. 1 2

252

Piet van Boxel

the help of a dictionary’,4 and a commentary on the Psalms.5 His exercise on Psalm 33—an explanation of the Hebrew text—is not mentioned in biographical dictionaries. However, apart from these published documents, there are two manuscripts, both autograph, which have been ignored in biographical studies of this illustrious protagonist of the Counter-Reformation. Scrutiny of these texts sheds more light on Bellarmine as a Christian hebraist.

BELLARMINE’S TRAINING Born on 4 October 1542 in Montepulciano, Bellarmine received his first training in his hometown at a Jesuit school, devoting much of his time to Latin. He read Vergil at night and wrote poems in hexameters with Vergilian vocabulary.6 In 1560 he entered the Society of Jesus and moved to Rome to the Collegio Romano, where in 1563 he graduated in Aristotelian philosophy. After his philosophical studies he taught in Florence and Mondovı`, teaching himself Greek. He was sent to Padua in 1567 for his theological training.7 After one year his superiors decided that he should complete his studies in Louvain,8 the main reason being that the city needed someone to give weekly sermons in Latin, a task which according to his superiors suited nobody better than Bellarmine.9 He arrived in Louvain in the summer of 1569 and stayed until 1576; these years were to be decisive for his intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political life. Louvain was a key location in the struggle against the Reformation. The university had taken the lead in countering Luther and had already condemned several of his propositions in 1519. In 1546, censorship of Do¨llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2), 34. There are a few traces of Jewish exegesis in his commentary on the Psalms (Rome, 1611). He took the greater part of his grammatical and critical remarks in this work from Genebrard’s commentary (Paris, 1581); thus Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Paris, 1678), 527. 6 See Giacomo Fuligatti, Vita del Cardinale Roberto Bellarmino (Rome, 1624), 14. 7 Ibid. 27–37. Since all biographies of Bellarmine have strong hagiographical tendencies they should be used with great reserve; see, however, J. Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine 1542–1621, 2 vols. (London, 1928), i. 32–60; A. Fiocchi, S. Roberto Bellarmino della Compagnia di Gesu`, Cardinale di S. Romana Chiesa (Isola del Liri, 1930), 51–86. 8 See L. Ceyssens, ‘Bellarmin et Louvain’, in M. Lamberigts (ed.), L’Augustinisme a ` l’ancienne faculte´ de the´ologie de Louvain (Louvain, 1994), 179–205, esp. 184–5. 9 See Fuligatti, Vita (as in n. 6), 38–43. 4 5

Robert Bellarmine

253

books, Bible editions, and translations was initiated, and led to the first index to be issued with the sanction of the Church. In his The Censorship of the Church of Rome, G. H. Putnam considers it ‘quite fitting that the first official protest of the Church should be made from a place like Louvain, the university of which stood like a picket-post of orthodoxy confronting the perilous heresies advancing from the North and from the East’.10 In 1572 Gregory XIII issued a Bull directing the production of an Index expurgatorius. The index was supposed to be produced on the lines of the one published in 1571 in Antwerp, of which the larger part was prepared by the theological faculty of Louvain.11 There is no indication that Bellarmine was involved in the preparation of the Antwerp Index expurgatorius, but one should not underestimate the impact that such a major theological undertaking must have had upon the young theologian. Less than a decade later Bellarmine himself would play a key role in the censorship of Hebrew literature. The heretics were not only beyond the gates of Louvain. Doctrinal divergences became a threat within the university when Baius (Michel De Bay) put forward his dissenting view on free will and grace.12 After, and probably in consequence of, his (implicit) condemnation by Rome, which, however, did not undermine his position in the university, the Jesuits of Louvain opened a public theological course at their own house of studies in 1570 with the consent of the university. Bellarmine became the first professor of theology in the new school.13 Apart from theological contention in this stronghold of orthodoxy, Bellarmine encountered the followers of the Reformation in person. In his autobiography he describes how at the end of August 1572,14 when the Prince of Orange was advancing on Louvain with a big army, almost all the clergy left, because the city could not be defended easily and the heretic 10 G. H. Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome and its Influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1906), i. 143. 11 See F. H. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bu ¨ cher: Ein Beitrag zur Kirchen- und Literaturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1883–5), i. 427–8. The index, which was planned by Gregory XIII, was never published. 12 See Ceyssens, ‘Bellarmin’ (as in n. 8), 190 ff. Bellarmine opposed Baius in his Louvain lectures; see M. Biersack, ‘Bellarmin und die ‘‘Causa Baii’’ ’, in L’Augustinisme (as in n. 8), 167–78. 13 See X. M. Le Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son Cardinalat 1542–1598: Correspondance et documents (Paris, 1911), 73 n. 1. T. Dietrich, Die Theologie der Kirche bei Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621): Systematische Voraussetzungen des Kontroverstheologen (Paderborn, 1999), 31–2, questions whether Bellarmine’s position was formally acknowledged by the university. 14 See Le Bachelet, Bellarmin (as in n. 13), 78 n. 1.

254

Piet van Boxel

Calvinists, of whom the Prince’s army was full, were particularly hostile to the religious.15 Since the enemy had arrived much earlier than expected, the Rector of the college told those present to change clothes and to comb their hair in such a way that the tonsure was not visible. He then divided between them the little money there was in the college and sent them away two by two to seek safety from the imminent danger. N. [i.e. Bellarmine] walked for many days with a confrere in the direction of Artois in difficult and dangerous circumstances, until he came to Douai, where, fleeing from the war, he encountered the plague which was sweeping the city. But God saved them from many perils.16

In the autumn of 1572 the Duke of Alba recaptured Louvain and Bellarmine returned. This experience had a great impact on him. It was during the Louvain years that the foundation was laid for his magnum opus, which he wrote in Rome. He states in his introduction to the Disputationes that, while in Louvain, he started to make notes ‘in order to write books on controversial issues’.17

HEBREW Thus it was in Louvain that Bellarmine’s profession as a theologian and defender of the Catholic faith was established. But his stay there also provided him with the opportunity to study Hebrew and Jewish exegesis and thus to become a Christian hebraist. As will be demonstrated, for Bellarmine the two professions were intimately related. He was taught biblical exegesis at the Jesuit school by Johan Willems of Haarlem, a former student at the Collegium Trilingue.18 In 1566 Willems (Harlemius) had entered the Society of Jesus, but taught at the Trilingue until 1569 as the successor of Andreas van Gennip, and was one of the collaborators of Arias Montanus for the Biblia regia (Antwerp 1569–72).19 In Bellarmine’s days the Collegium Trilingue was a respected institution. The opposition to the use of Greek and Hebrew in biblical exegesis had weakened considerably. For many theologians in Louvain Erasmus’ ideal—that texts should be studied in the original language and in their historical and cultural context, so that no allusion, 15 See E. de Moreau, ‘Pre ˆtres tue´s par les gueux, 1566–1582’, Nouvelle revue the´ologique, 69B (1947), 712–85. 16 Do ¨ llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2), 34–5. 17 See Ceyssens, ‘Bellarmin’ (as in n. 8), 201; Do ¨ llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie 18 See Ceyssens, ‘Bellarmin’, 186 ff. (as in n. 2), 93. 19 See H. de Vocht, History of the Foundation and the Rise of the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense 1517–1550 (Louvain, 1955), iv. 156–7.

Robert Bellarmine

255

no detail should fail to produce in the reader all that the sacred author meant by what he wrote20—had become exegetical practice in Louvain. The study of Greek and Hebrew was no longer suspect, as it had been in the days of Latomus, ‘the instigator of most of the animosity against the Trilingue’ from its very beginning.21 Slowly accepting humanistic ideals, the theologians adapted them, however, to their own purposes. Latomus’ student Clenardus strongly opposed his De trium linguarum et studii theologici ratione dialogus, in which he had rejected the requirement for the theologian to know languages. In several letters written between 1535 and 1541 Clenardus expressed the conviction that only through the knowledge of languages could heresy be halted and people brought back to the Church: ‘Without the help of languages one cannot wage war against error.’22 From being a threat to orthodoxy languages had become a tool in the fight against heresy. Versed in Latin and with a good knowledge of Greek, Bellarmine had never been trained in Hebrew. At age 71, now a cardinal, he wrote about his time at the Jesuit school: In those days N [Bellarmine] considered the Hebrew language very useful for the understanding of the Holy Scriptures and decided to study it. After having been taught the alphabet and some basic grammatical rules by somebody who knew the language, he himself wrote a Hebrew grammar according to a simpler method than that used by the rabbis and in a short time he learned the Hebrew language as far as seemed sufficient for a theologian. He then established an academy and studied Hebrew and Greek with some friends. In order to prove that his grammar was easier than others, he promised one of his students of the theological school, who knew no Hebrew at all, that if he were to teach him for eight days, he would be able to understand Hebrew books with the help of a dictionary, as he himself had managed to do.23

It is unlikely that, as a former student of the Trilingue, Johan Willemsz did not include Hebrew in his teaching of biblical exegesis at the Jesuit school. He certainly taught Bellarmine more than ‘the alphabet and some basic grammatical rules’.24 To what extent Bellarmine devoted 21 Ibid. 326. See further pp. 327–48. 22 Ibid. 341. Ibid., i. 305. Do¨llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2), 34. His claim to be able to teach a student Hebrew within eight days is clearly inspired by the legend that Jerome taught his spiritual daughter Blesilla the Hebrew language in a few days; see N. Frizon, La Vie du Cardinal Bellarmin, de la Compagnie de Jesus (Nancy, 1708), 78. 24 Le Bachelet, Bellarmin (as in n. 13), 68 n. 3, takes Bellarmine’s account at face value and does not consider Willems to have been his teacher. According to Frizon, La Vie, Harlemius taught him the basic principles. See further Do¨llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie, 80. 20 23

256

Piet van Boxel

himself as a student to the study of Hebrew remains unclear. However, from 1574 onwards, when he was the only professor at the Jesuit school, he taught biblical exegesis, for which knowledge of Hebrew was, according to the exegetical tradition in Louvain, essential.25 It is probable that in those years he wrote his Exercitatio grammatica in Psalmum XXXIII,26 a word-for-word explanation of the Hebrew text of the psalm. Jean Cinquarbres’s Hebrew grammar27 served as an essential reference book in this early work. In the meantime he prepared his own Hebrew grammar, which was published in Rome in 1578.28 In the second edition (Rome, 1580) the Exercitatio grammatica was included. In this combined edition the references in the Exercitatio are no longer to Cinquarbre’s grammar, but to his own Institutiones linguae Hebraicae. The grammars appear to be interchangeable and either one could be used for the Exercitatio grammatica in Psalmum XXXIII.29 In fact, the similarity between the two is so great that it is difficult not to assume that Bellarmine made more than ample use of Cinquarbre’s Institutiones. His user-friendly grammar for Christian hebraists was apparently a success, judging by the number of reprints.30 The grammar published by his confrere and student Georg Mayr in 161631 shows, however, the limitations of Bellarmine’s Institutiones. In his introduction, Mayr refers to Bellarmine’s ‘intention to write a more elaborate grammar so seriously needed, given the lack of good Hebrew books’. He defends Bellarmine for not achieving his aim on the ground that he had been called to more important responsibilities in the Jesuit order and in the Church (he became cardinal in 1599). Thus Mayr had been requested to 25 See Le Bachelet, Bellarmin, 86–7. At the start, in 1570, there were three professors, Harlemius [ Johan Willems] reading Scripture: ‘Lovanii coeptus est cursus Theologiae tribus professoribus, et P. Robertus quidem habet auditores fere centum; P. Joannes Harlemius vero qui legit Scripturam circiter sexaginta et P. Edmundus [Edmond Tenerus] in lectione primae secundae [of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae] circiter quadraginta’; ibid. 75. 26 His first edition has no place of publication, publisher, or date. 27 Joannes Quinquarboreus, Institutiones in linguam Hebraicam (Paris, 1559). 28 Robert Bellarmine, Institutiones linguae Hebraicae ex optimo quoque auctore collectae; et ad quantam maximam fieri potuit brevitatem, perspicuitatem, atque ordinem revocatae (Rome, 1578). 29 Later editions of Cinquarbres’s grammar include also Bellarmine’s Exercitatio (Paris, 1582, 1609, 1619, and 1621). 30 Rome, 1578, 1580, and 1585; Antwerp, 1596; Lyon, 1596; Venice, 1606; Antwerp, 1606 and 1616; Cologne, 1616 and 1618; Geneva, 1619; Paris, 1622; Naples, 1622. 31 Georg Mayr, Institutiones linguae Hebraicae in sex partes distributae (Augsburg, 1616).

Robert Bellarmine

257

complete Bellarmine’s work and to provide a more elaborate grammar based on the Institutiones.32 From the Exercitatio grammatica in Psalmum XXXIII it becomes clear that Bellarmine considered Hebrew indispensable for the understanding of the biblical text. The statement in his autobiography that a theologian should have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to read Hebrew books is therefore primarily to be understood as referring to the Hebrew Bible. The importance of Hebrew is highlighted in a small manuscript (an octavo of 120 pages) of the Gregorian University in Rome, which contains Bellarmine’s notes on Genesis (MS 385b). Since Bellarmine’s copy of the Nuremberg edition of the Vulgate (1529) containing his annotations was destroyed by fire in the library of the University of Louvain in 1914,33 the Gregorian manuscript is a precious document which sheds light on Bellarmine’s exegetical methods. Apart from a preliminary study by Alberto Vaccari,34 it has not received the attention it deserves. A certain number of notes in the manuscript relate to rather elementary grammatical and semantic matters, demonstrating Bellarmine’s role as a teacher of Hebrew. Various readings and different meanings of Hebrew words, their roots, and derivations are given, for which Bellarmine refers to Kimhi’s Sefer ha-Shorashim. Thus in Genesis 1: 1 he gives the different meanings of the verb bara, which, apart from ‘to create’, also means ‘to destroy’ and ‘to divide’. This is followed by the remark that contrary to Jerome’s understanding of the verb in his Quaestiones Hebraicae, the verb cannot mean ‘to divide’ since division presupposes existence. In another note on Genesis 1: 1 he writes out the complete conjugation of the verb haya (to be). In a note on the word ruah (spirit) in Genesis 1: 2 he adds: ‘explain why there is a patah at the end?’ This is apparently meant to be taken up in class, as is the conjugation of haya, for which our teacher of Hebrew apparently needed a mnemonic. Apart from this type of annotation Bellarmine concentrates on the much-debated issue of the authentic text of the Bible and on Jewish 32 Mayr was in regular correspondence with Bellarmine, who on several occasions asked for his advice on philological questions; see Laetitia Boehm et al. (eds.), Biographisches Lexikon der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t Mu¨nchen (Berlin, 1998), i. 260 f. The correspondence is in the archives of the Pontificia Universita` Gregoriana in Rome. In 1622 Simeon de Muis published a revised edition of Bellarmine’s grammar, Roberti Bellarmini Institutiones linguae Hebraicae. Eiusdem exercitatio in Ps. 33. Una cum Simeonis Muisii Aurelianensis . . . annotationibus (Paris, 1622). 33 See Le Bachelet, Bellarmin (as in n. 13), 94 n. 1. 34 ‘Note del Bellarmino al Genesi’, Gregorianum, 2 (1921), 579–88.

258

Piet van Boxel

biblical exegesis. But it was not only during his stay in Louvain that Bellarmine occupied himself with these questions. In later years, after he had left Louvain for Rome in 1576, he was involved in the new edition of the Vulgate and in the censorship of Hebrew books, activities which cannot be dissociated from his search for the authentic text of Scripture and his appraisal of Jewish exegesis. The groundwork for all his activities after 1576 had been laid in Louvain.

THE B IBLICAL TEXT Of special interest is Bellarmine’s approach to the biblical text, and in particular the limited authority he assigns to the Vulgate. His position vis-a`-vis the Vulgate should be assessed in the light of the Council of Trent. Defending the Latin translation against the unrestricted emphasis on the Hebrew text by humanists and reformers, the Council had declared ‘that this old and common (vulgata) edition, which has been approved by the long use of so many centuries in the Church, should be considered authentic in public reading, disputations, sermons and explanations . . . ’.35 The authenticity of the Vulgate as claimed by the Council was interpreted in three different ways. There were those who considered it authentic in the sense that not a single word was corrupt and that therefore any other text, be it Hebrew or Greek, was of secondary importance. For others the authenticity of the Vulgate operated only in relation to other Latin translations. A third group restricted the authority of the Vulgate to matters of faith and morals. The different interpretations of the Council’s declaration found their fiery supporters in the Collegium Trilingue. One of the most respected lecturers in Latin at the Trilingue, Peter Nannius, had concluded from his work on the Bible after the method introduced by Erasmus, comparing the text of the Vulgate in various copies with Greek codices, that the Vulgate often represented a far better text than the Greek. Bellarmine considered the Vulgate text a highly important witness of a lost original.36 A slightly stricter position was held by Willem van der Linden (Lindanus), who devoted himself to a rational method of biblical exegesis. From a comparison of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin he concluded that the 35 Sessio IV (8 Apr. 1546), see H. Denzinger and A. Scho ¨ nmetzer, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th edn. (Freiburg im 36 De Vocht, History (as in n. 19), iv. 297. Breisgau, 1976), no. 1506.

Robert Bellarmine

259

Vulgate, although containing many obscure and bad renderings of the original, was the most authoritative text.37 Lindanus’ view was openly challenged by John Isaac Levita, lecturer in Hebrew at the Trilingue, as well as by Harlemius and Arias Montanus, all fervent advocates of the importance of the Hebrew for the reconstruction of the biblical text. Direct evidence that Bellarmine shared the view of his teacher Harlemius appears from his Notae in Genesim. AUTHENTICITY OF THE HEBREW TEXT In a number of cases Bellarmine stresses the reliability of the Hebrew, which he is not prepared to change to confirm to the Latin. One such example is Genesis 8: 7, about the raven that Noah sent out in order to discover whether the waters of the flood had subsided. Both the Septuagint and the Vulgate read: ‘it went and did not come back until the waters were dried up from the earth’. According to the Hebrew, however, the raven went and did come back.38 Bellarmine defends the Hebrew against alleged corruption39 by a careful reading of the context. For after Noah had sent the raven, he sent a dove ‘but the dove found no place to rest her foot, and returned to him to the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth (v 9)’. From this context it seems plausible that the raven too returned. Furthermore, had the raven not returned, Noah would have concluded that the flood had come to an end and would not have sent the dove. Instead of changing the Hebrew to accord with the Septuagint, the Vulgate, Josephus, and all the Church Fathers,40 Bellarmine prefers to reconcile the Vulgate with the Hebrew Ibid. 379. In the Antwerp edition of the Vulgate (1574) it is indicated in the margin that in various manuscripts the Hebrew text and the Targum say that the raven did return. Bellarmine was certainly familiar with this edition. 39 He refers to Francisco Melchor Cano, De locis theologicis libri duodecim . . . II. 13 (Louvain, 1564; 1st edn., Salamanca, 1563). 40 Cano refers to Jerome, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Isidore, Chrysostom, Eusebius, and all the ‘doctores catholici tam Graeci quam Latini, tum vetusti, tum iuniores ex LXX Interpretibus’, but he does not mention Josephus. According to the Greek edition of the Jewish Antiquities (i. 91) (Basle, 1544) and the Latin translation by S. Gelenius (Basle, 1548 and Lyon, 1566), the raven did return. The Latin translation by R. Goullet (Paris, 1513) and earlier editions of S. Gelenius (Basle, 1534 and 1540) were emended according to the Vulgate and read: ‘misit corvum . . . Qui cuncta reperiens inundantia, non regressus est ad Noe’. The Latin translation attributed to Rufinus (Flavii Josephi Hebraei antiquitatum Iudaicarum libri XX (Cologne, 1534) ad loc.) indicates the discrepancy between the Hebrew text and the Vulgate: ‘[non] regressus est ad Noe’. 37 38

260

Piet van Boxel

by stating that the raven, according to the Hebrew, did return, but did not enter the ark, circling around it until the waters had dried up.41 For the meeting between Laban and the servant of Abraham in Genesis 24: 32 the Hebrew, followed by the Septuagint and the Targum, has: ‘And he [Laban] gave him [Abraham’s servant] straw and provender for the camels, and water to wash his feet and the feet of the men who were with him.’ Bellarmine notices that according to the Vulgate Laban gave water [to the servant] to wash the feet of the camels, which rendering he rejects, ‘since reason amply confirms that this (i.e. the Hebrew) is more correct’.42 The discrepancy between the Vulgate (which follows the Septuagint) and the Hebrew in Genesis 3: 17 is, according to some commentators, due to the fact that the Septuagint and the Latin reflect a different Hebrew text. In order to harmonize it with the Vulgate the Hebrew baavureha ‘because of you (the ground is cursed)’ should be changed to bavodeha ‘in your (Adam’s) work (the ground is cursed)’. Bellarmine rejects the idea of correcting the Hebrew, and obviates the discrepancy by considering the Latin as a rendering quo ad sensum.43

41 ‘Egrediebatur et non revertebatur. Melchior Canus liber 2 de locis c. 13 putat ex hoc loco convinci, corruptum esse hebraeum textum, quoniam quidem 70, Hieronymus et Josephus liber 1 antiquitatum c. 1 et omnes patres legunt non revertebatur, cum tamen hebraeus codex habeat revertebatur. Sed vero non contradicit hebraeus textus graeco; non enim dicit revertebatur, sed egrediebatur egrediendo et redeundo donec siccarentur aquae, quibus verbis non significatur quod redierit in arcam, ut Canus putat, sed quod volitaverit prope arcam eundo et redeundo. Et quod re vera corvus non abierit procul et quod redierit non quidem intrans in arcam, sed prope, vel supra arcam, ita ut a Noe videretur, patet ex duobus: primo quia adhuc tota terra erat cooperta aquis, ut infra dicetur, et sicut columba non invenerit ubi requiesceret, ita nec corvus invenisset. 2o. quia si corvus non rediisset, Noe putasset finitum esse diluvium, et non mississet columbam, nisi prius ipse respexisset. Nam hoc erat signum cessationis diluvii, si avis missa non rediret. Nam cum columba emissa bis rediret, intelligebat diluvium non cessasse, et ideo misit eam tertio, et cum non rediret intellexit finitum diluvium’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 42 ‘dedit aquam pedibus camelorum. Graeca, chaldea et hebraea habent pedibus eius id est viri non camelorum et hoc esse verius ratio ipsa ample confirmat’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. The variant mentioned by Bellarmine is found in the margin in the Antwerp edition (1574) of the Vulgate. In the Vulgata Sixtina (1590) Gen. 24: 32 (there 24: 25) has been emended according to the Hebrew. In the Sixto-Clementina edition (1592) it reads again ‘the feet of the camels’. 43 ‘baavureha quidam existimant Hieronymum et ante eum LXX interpretes legisse bavodeha nam verterunt ‘‘in opere tuo’’ et ideo vellent corrigere hunc locum. Sed audiendi non sunt. Nam Hieronymus in quaestionibus in Genesim dicit in hebraeo esse ‘‘propter te’’, non ‘‘in opere tuo’’. Tamen recte vertit ‘‘in opere tuo’’ quo ad sensum, nam ‘‘propter te’’ significat propter peccatum tuum id est propter opus tuum malum’; Notae in Genesim ad loc.

Robert Bellarmine

261

In his attempts to reconcile the Vulgate with the Hebrew Bellarmine did not question the authenticity of the latter, although he does entertain the possibility of scribal error. He considers the Hebrew of Genesis 6: 3, which reads jadon, corrupt, and prefers the rendering in the Septuagint and the Vulgate, ‘My Spirit will not always remain in man’, that reflects the Hebrew jalon. This translation makes ample sense according to Chrysostom.44

T H E T R AN SL AT I O N S In order to establish a reliable text for his exegesis, Bellarmine carries out a careful comparison of the various translations, including the heavily criticized Latin translation by Pagninus, which had been included in the Antwerp Polyglot. Here, too, he is protective towards the Vulgate,45 although his assessment is, by and large, balanced. It is obvious that when the Vulgate, the Septuagint, and the Targum agree, their rendering of the Hebrew takes precedence over all other translations. Thus Genesis 1: 1 can be translated either as ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ or as ‘in the beginning, when God created heaven and earth’. The last rendering, which is Pagninus’ translation, is rejected, since the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Targum translate ‘In the beginning God created’.46 When translations differ, Bellarmine often gives reasons as to why a translation should be rejected. Thus in Genesis 1: 2 ‘And the world was tohu wabohu’, the Septuagint renders tohu as aoratos (invisibilis), deriving tohu from tehom (abyss) in the sense that the earth was in an abyss and therefore invisible. Bellarmine rejects this derivation and refers 44 ‘Meo iudicio textus hebraeus est corruptus vitio librariorum, et est jadon pro jalon nam graeci verterunt ‘‘non permanebit’’ ut etiam Hieronymus in vulgata editione. Et sensus est ut exponit Chrysostomos ‘‘non permanebit spiritus meus’’ id est vis mea qua homines rego et conservo longo tempore, sed perdam illos quia toti sunt facti carnales’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 45 In Gen. 26: 17 he defends the Latin translation ‘Isaac encamped in the torrent of Gerar’ against the Septuagint ‘in the valley’ by suggesting that Jerome meant to say that Isaac encamped next to the torrent: ‘habitavit in torrente. LXX habent vallem. Verbum nahal utrumque significat. Forte Hieronymus vult dicere ‘‘in torrente’’ id est ‘‘iuxta torrentem’’ ’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 46 The same in Gen. 4: 13: ‘Pagninus et alii recentiores vertunt ‘‘maior est poena mea quam ut ferre possim’’. At LXX, Hieronymus et Chaldeus concorditer vertunt ‘‘maior est iniquitas mea, quam ut remitti possit’’. Et quamquam verba hebraea utrumque sensum ferre possunt, tamen nonnisi temere in re ambigua receditur a tanta auctoritate’; Notae in Genesim ad loc.

262

Piet van Boxel

to the Targum, Pagninus, Ibn Ezra, and David Kimhi, who give it the meaning ‘solitude’ or ‘desert’. He then approves of Jerome’s translation inanis (void), indicating that grass, flowers, and other things which were the purpose of the world’s creation were lacking.47 When no decision can be made on the basis of semantic, grammatical, or Scriptural arguments, the Vulgate does not hold a privileged position and is not automatically considered to give the correct reading. Thus in Genesis 21: 7 Sarah’s question, ‘who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would suckle children?’, is open to various interpretations. The Targum translates: ‘Who other than God said to Abraham that Sarah would suckle a son, for nobody apart from God could have told such a miraculous thing.’ In the Septuagint ‘who’ refers to the man who announced to Abraham that Sarah would give birth. The Vulgate takes into account the miraculous nature of the event, and reads: ‘To whom would Abraham have said, that Sarah would suckle a child.’48 Since all three interpretations are justifiable, no decision is made as to which translation should be considered the correct one. It would appear that only when the Vulgate supports the doctrine of the Church is it given precedence. Such is the case with Genesis 4: 7, where, according to the Septuagint, Abel will turn to Cain, who will rule over him. Although such an understanding is sustainable, one should keep to the Vulgate, which says that sin’s desire will be towards Cain, but that he will rule over it, since this rendering is proof of man’s free will.49

THE ANTWER P POL YGL OT It is difficult to dissociate Bellarmine’s approach to the biblical text from the heated discussions about the Antwerp Polyglot, to which his teacher 47 ‘erat igitur terra inanis quia carebat herbis, floribus aliisque rebus ad quas producendas creata est’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 48 ‘Quis auditurum crederet Abraham quod Sara lactaret filium. Hebraea verba Mi milel le-Avraham tribus modis exponuntur a chaldeo, graeco et latino interprete. Chaldeus illud Mi refert ad Deum in hunc sensum, quis fuit nisi Deus qui dixit Abrahae, lactabit Sara filium, nec enim poterat nisi Deus rem tam prodigiosam narrare. Graecus retulit ad hominem, qui nunciavit Abrahae partum Sarae, in hunc sensum quis nunciabit Abrahae rem tam novam quod Sara lactaret filium. Latinus contrario modo exponit quis credet dicenti Abrahamo. Legit enim Latinus pro Mi non quis sed cui, hoc modo cui dicet Abraham lactat Sara filium, quasi dicat cui hoc dicere audebit Abraham, cum incredibile videatur’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 49 ‘ ‘‘nonne si bene feceris, recipies’’. Graeci vertunt nonne si bene obtuleris, et non recte diviseris (id est meliora tibi quam Deo dederis) peccasti. Sed quiesce (id est ne timeas

Robert Bellarmine

263

Harlemius’ comparisons of the various versions with the Hebrew Bible had made such an important contribution.50 The initial approbation by Pope Gregory XIII,51 after his predecessor’s rejection of this scholarly masterpiece, did not prevent the Biblia regia becoming a controversial issue within the Church. The spokesman for the opposition was Leon de Castro, of the University of Salamanca. He opposed the inclusion in the Polyglot of the Hebrew text and the Latin translation by Pagninus.52 Invoking the decree of the Tridentine Council, he advocated the exclusive authority of the Vulgate.53 In a letter of 1 April 1575, Bellarmine asked Cardinal Sirleto, whose support had been crucial in obtaining papal approbation of the Polyglot,54 what the Council of Trent exactly meant when attributing authority to the Vulgate. He furthermore wanted the Cardinal’s opinion about the integrity of the Hebrew codices.55 The two questions were intimately interrelated. It is most unlikely that Bellarmine was not acquainted with Sirleto’s opinion that the revision of the Vulgate should be entrusted to experts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and that authority should be ascribed to the Vulgate only in matters of faith and morals.56 His letter may well be seen as a reaction to propterea amittere primogenituram) nam ad te erit conversio eius (Habel) et tu dominaberis illius. Et vere, litera hebraea sine punctis hanc lectionem ferre patet. At Hieronymus in quaestionibus hebraicis exponit ut nos habemus, et hinc deducit optime liberum arbitrium’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 50 J. Harlemius, ‘Lectiones in Latinis Bibliis editionis Vulgatae ex vetustissimis Manuscriptis exemplaribus collectae, et ad textum hebraicum, chaldaicum, graecum et syriacum examinatae, opera et industria aliquot Theologorum in Academia Lovaniensi’, in Biblia Sacra, Hebraice, Chaldaice, Graece et Latine . . . [ed. Benedictus Arias Montanus], 8 vols. (Antwerp, 1569 [1571]–1573), vii. 51 At the Council of Trent it was decided that in future all versions of the Bible would have to be approved by the Church; see Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, Actorum, Epistularum, Tractatuum nova collectio (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1901 ff.) i. 36 ff.; H. Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 5 vols. (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1951–75), ii. 57; G. Denzler, Kardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–1585): Leben und Werk (Munich, 1964), 119. The universities of Louvain and Paris had already given their consent; see M. Rooses, Christophe Plantin imprimeur anversois (Antwerp, 1890), 131–3. 52 See H. Ho ¨ pfl, Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Sixto-Klementinischen Vulgata (Freiburg53 Ibid. 30–2. im-Breisgau, 1913), 107. 54 See Denzler, Sirleto (as in n. 51), 136. 55 Le Bachelet, Bellarmin (as in n. 13), 92–3. 56 Sirleto’s esteem for the Hebrew text is clearly expressed in a letter to Cardinal Cervini, whose personal adviser he was during the Council, referring to what Hermann Lethmathius had said: ‘nemo hoc ita intelligat, ut putet hanc LXX versionem sufficere, et propterea hebraicam originem rejiciendam, sed, ut teste Tertulliano Ptolomeus fecit, potius utramque conjugi debere, quod illa huic nostrae translationi auctoritatem, haec vero hebraicae veritati multum addat lucis et perspicuitatis’; quoted by X. M. Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible Sixto-Cle´mentine (Paris, 1911), 7.

264

Piet van Boxel

Castro’s attack on the Polyglot, which he considered an important tool for biblical exegesis. It is more than likely that he therefore appealed to one of the most respected experts on the subject to pronounce once again on the matter.57 Sirleto, however, did not answer Bellarmine’s letter. That he apparently had lost control over the issue becomes clear from a declaration of the Congregation of the Council dated 17 January 1576, which stated that the mere change of a sentence, a word, a syllable, an iota of the Vulgate text would suffice to call forth the punishment laid down in the decree Insuper.58 With regard to the Antwerp Polyglot, the Congregation stated that the Biblia regia would have been condemned, had it not been published.59 This explicit statement, which did not exclude a revision on the basis of Latin printed editions and manuscripts but ruled out a text-critical function of the Hebrew text, determined the course of events. Sirleto’s role was played out and Bellarmine’s text-critical rules were implicitly questioned. Why Gregory XIII assigned Cardinal Carafa the task of a critical edition of the Septuagint instead of resuming the revision of the Vulgate is not clear.60 But perhaps the Pope, who certainly did not share the view of the Congregation of the Council, wanted to avoid further dissension. During the whole pontificate of Gregory XIII, who died in the same year as Sirleto (1585), no discernable activity with regard to the revision of the Vulgate can be reported.

D I S P UT A T I O N E S During the turbulent years between the declaration of the Congregation of the Council (1576) and the final revision of the Vulgate (1592) 57 That in the same year Lindanus, a supporter of the authority of the Vulgate stricte dictum, addressed Sirleto on the subject, shows the authority attributed to him; see Ho¨pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 34. 58 Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 8; G. Bedouelle and B. Roussel, (eds.), Le Temps des re´formes et la Bible (Paris, 1989), 266–8; Ho¨pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 35–6. Le Bachelet as well as Ho¨pfl reject any relationship between Bellarmine’s letter and the declaration of the Congregation. 59 In various studies it is claimed that at the time Bellarmine presided over the Congregation of the Council, which assessed the Antwerp Polyglot; see B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598) (London, 1972), 61; Temps des re´formes (as in n. 58), 268. However, in view of his own interpretation of the decree and the corroboration expected from Sirleto, it is very unlikely that he would have supported such a declaration. 60 Although he courteously mentions Sirleto’s linguistic expertise, to which he had recourse, Carafa did not include him in his commission. See Ho¨pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 121–2.

Robert Bellarmine

265

Bellarmine kept to his views regarding the limited authority of the Vulgate and the role of the Hebrew. In 1576 he went from Louvain to Rome, where he was appointed professor at the Collegio Romano. In the first volume of his Disputationes (1586) he touches upon the emendation of the Vulgate, positing four cases where the Hebrew should take precedence: whenever the Latin has obvious scribal errors, divergent readings from which the Vulgate reading cannot be retrieved, or unclear words or incomprehensible meanings, and when the Hebrew contributes to a better understanding of an expression.61 These text-critical rules, which attribute only a very limited role to the Hebrew, seem to contradict the central position it is given in the Notae in Genesim. They should, however, be understood as an answer to the Congregation of the Council, which had excluded the Hebrew Bible from any role in the revision of the Vulgate. First of all it should be noted that the text-critical rules as laid down in the Disputationes do not exclude the Hebrew. Furthermore, more importantly, Bellarmine makes it unequivocally clear that these guidelines serve the reconstruction of the ‘vera vulgata lectio’. In order to legitimize the preferential position of the Vulgate vis-a`-vis other Latin translations,62 the most reliable Vulgate text based upon the oldest witnesses should be produced and the Hebrew should only be brought in when Latin witnesses do not suffice to provide an acceptable and readable text.63 Despite the declaration by the Congregation of the Council in 1576, Bellarmine asserts that the Council of Trent had never excluded the Hebrew as primary source, which he considers to be largely reliable.64 61 De controversiis christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos disputationes (Ingolstadt, 1586), i, De verb Dei, 2. 11. 62 ‘nec enim Patres fontium ullam mentionem fecerunt, sed solum ex tot latinis versionibus quae nunc circumferuntur, unam delegerunt, quam caeteris anteponerent’; De verbo Dei, 2. 10. 63 ‘Quando latini codices variant ut non possit certo statui quae sit vera Vulgata lectio, possumus ad fontes recurrere et inde iuvari ad veram lectionem inveniendam’, De verbo Dei, 2. 11. 64 According to Bellarmine the errors in the Hebrew text are of minor importance; see De verbo Dei, 2. 2. Bellarmine’s view of the authority of the Vulgate comes also to the fore in his activity as censor. In a review of Carlo Sigonio’s De republica Hebraeorum (Bologna, 1582) he corrects the censor of the work, stressing that the Council of Trent did not oppose the Vulgate to the Hebrew or the Greek: ‘Falso asserit censor, prohibitas esse alias editiones praeter vulgatam. Concilium enim non opponit vulgatam latinam hebraicis, et graecis editionibus, sed solum aliis latinis, etc.’; Biblioteca Fabroniana (Pistoia), MS 15, p. 486.

266

Piet van Boxel

That Bellarmine’s view as proposed in the Disputationes does not basically differ from the text-critical methods he advocated in Louvain is proved by his quotations from his Notae in Genesim, which in the Disputationes serve as illustrations of the primary importance of the Hebrew. He reverts to the subject in connection with Genesis 8: 7 about the raven that returns to the ark,65 and reinforces his position by remarking that some Latin codices conform to the Hebrew.66 As in the Notae in Genesim, he gives priority to the Hebrew in Genesis 3: 17, although he also suggests that scribal error in the Hebrew may have caused the discrepancy between the original and the Vulgate.67 Although the two additional remarks are again a sign of his favourable attitude towards the Vulgate, it appears from the Disputationes that his view on the status of the Hebrew as against the Greek and the Latin has remained unchanged.

THE SIXTINE R EVISION After the death of Sirleto in 1585, Pope Sixtus V made Cardinal Antonio Carafa the head of the commission for the revision of the Vulgate. The death of Sirleto and the initiative of Sixtus V may have been a coincidence, but they certainly helped to bring the endeavour to a conclusion. The emendation took as its base text the Antwerp Bible printed by Plantijn in 1583. This, in turn, was based upon the edition revised in 1574 by the theologians of the University of Louvain, who had taken the Louvain Bible of 1547 as their starting point.68 In the various earlier revisions a number of Vulgate editions and many Latin manuscripts had been taken into account.69 The task of the commission was to emend the Vulgate according to the manuscripts, in particular the codex Amiatinus (early eighth century). The role attributed to the Hebrew was rather limited. As long as the Latin manuscripts gave concordant readings, the Vulgate was given precedence over the Hebrew. Given the interpretation of the Tridentine decree regarding the Vulgate by its chairman Cardinal Antonio Carafa, it is not surprising that the commission proceeded in this way. The criterion for eliminating interpolations, which appears to 65

See n. 41. ‘adde quod etiam non desunt latini codices qui habeant ‘‘egrediebatur et revertebatur’’ ut ex variis lectionibus ad Biblia Lovaniensia annotatis cognosci potest’; De verbo 67 See n. 43. Dei, 2. 2. 68 See Ho 69 See ibid. 56. ¨ pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 106. 66

Robert Bellarmine

267

have been the main task of the revisers, was the absence of a given passage in both early Latin witnesses and the Hebrew.70 The emendations, and in particular the elimination of interpolations, aroused the indignation of the Pope, who felt that, by admitting that modern editions were permeated with errors, one was giving in to the Reformation. He therefore took the revision into his own hands. In the Sixtina Vulgata published in May 1590, the proposals of the commission were largely ignored. The edition, which was emended according to the Pope’s own criteria, without consultation of Latin manuscripts or of the Hebrew text, and was very close to the Louvain text of 1547, met with severe criticism.71 After his death it was withdrawn, and a new edition prepared under Gregory XIV.

THE EDITIO SIXTO-CLEMENTINA In the preparation of this last edition Bellarmine played a prominent role. According to his proposal a new revision was carried through, in which the omissions, additions, changes, and the punctuation of the editio Sixtina were to be discussed.72 In order not to put any blame on Sixtus V, the new edition was to be published as soon as possible.73 However, the diversity of opinion of the many experts involved slowed down the proceedings of the commission. Bellarmine suggested that their number should be reduced and that the revision should be governed by agreed text-critical rules. The questions to be answered were the following: 1. Is the Latin text to be corrected when the various copies accord with each other, but differ from the Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldaic manuscripts? 70 For the revision under Sixtus V see further Ho ¨ pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 128–58 and Anhang A, 240–77. 71 See Do ¨ llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2) 112–16; Temps des re´formes (as in n. 58), 350–4. 72 ‘ut ablata restituantur, ut adjecta removeantur, immutata considerentur vel corrigantur, ut punctationes perpendantur’; Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 42; see also Ho¨pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 160–1. 73 Do ¨ llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2), 38. In the preface to the new edition Bellarmine even states that Sixtus V had withdrawn his own edition because of the many errors made by the printer, and had made arrangements for a new one; ibid. 118 f.

268

Piet van Boxel

2. Is it to be corrected when there is no divergence in the Vulgate and the text accords with the Greek, but differs from the Hebrew and the Chaldaic? 3. Where there is divergence between various copies of the Vulgate, should the printed text be corrected from the manuscripts, if these differ from the Hebrew, the Chaldaic, and the Greek? 4. Where there is divergence, should the printed text be corrected from the manuscripts if it differs from the Hebrew and the Chaldaic, but accords with the Greek? 5. In the third and the fourth cases, should one have recourse to manuscript evidence if only one manuscript is extant, even though a very early one? 6. When correcting the Vulgate from manuscripts or sources, should one neglect minor variants that do not alter authorial intention or make the text more obscure or awkward?74 One wonders why Bellarmine formulated these text-critical questions and did not refer to his own elaborate discussions of the Vulgate in the Disputationes and the criteria for emending the Vulgate as drawn up there. The answer to this question can only be tentative. My suggestion is that he considered these criteria not appropriate for the task the commission had to accomplish. The criteria formulated in the Disputationes were intended for the reconstruction of the ‘vera vulgata lectio’, and not a text that could be considered as authoritative. For such an endeavour the Hebrew and all existing renderings should be taken into account, as he himself had shown in his Notae in Genesim. It is exactly this concern that comes to the fore in the six text-critical questions.75 74 ‘De ratione servanda in bibliis corrigendis’, published by Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 40 f., 126 ff. 75 Bellarmine’s own position vis-a `-vis the Vulgate is firmly stated in a manuscript entitled De editione latina vulgata, quo sensu a Concilio Tridentino definitum sit, ut pro authentica habeatur, first published in 1748. In addition to his own argument, Bellarmine quotes eleven theologians in support of his interpretation of the Tridentine decree on the Vulgate, that its authority concerns only Christian faith and morals, and that it takes precedence only over other Latin translations. Five years later the authenticity of this small document was questioned by the Jesuit Charles-Joseph Frevier in an anonymous work, entitled La Vulgate authentique dans tout son texte; plus authentique que le texte he´breu, que le texte grec qui nous restent. The´ologie de Bellarmin; son apologie contre l’e´crit annonce´ dans le Journal de Tre´voux. Article LXXXV, juillet 1750 (Rome 1753). In his rejection of Bellarmine’s authorship Frevier contends that if Bellarmine did write this document, it reflected his ideas as a young man in Louvain, before ordination, ideas which he later completely retracted. Le Bachelet, however, gives convincing evidence that Bellarmine wrote the piece while a member of the Sixto-Clementina commission; see

Robert Bellarmine

269

However, from the notes of the commission in a copy of the Editio Sixtina it appears that the Editio Sixto-Clementina accords to a large extent with the edition prepared under Sixtus V, which was basically emended from Latin witnesses. Although some comparisons between the Hebrew, Greek, and the Latin were made,76 the substantial difference between the two editions was that the changes made by Sixtus V were, on Bellarmine’s advice, annulled.77 In other words, the commission virtually took over the revision presented to Sixtus V by the Carafa commission. One of the commissioners, Valverde, proposed changes to conform to the Hebrew in over two hundred passages. The fact that this proposal was rejected shows the little regard for the original text.78 The reason why Bellarmine accepted the Carafa commission’s preference for the Latin and its neglect, by and large, of the Hebrew and the Greek must have been his concern, already mentioned, that a long revision procedure would be damaging to the Church and the papacy. The Editio Sixto-Clementina had to be produced as rapidly as possible.79 The only way to achieve this was to accept for the most part the revision prepared by the Carafa commission. Thus pastoral and Church-political motives prevailed over exegetical criteria. And yet, the preface of the first edition (Rome, 1592) shows that he had not renounced his principles. He repeats his firm belief that an authentic text of the Bible should be based upon careful comparison of translations with the originals, which, he claims, is the case for the SixtoClementina. At the same time, probably nearer the truth, he explicitly states that the new edition, though certainly better than earlier editions and other translations, should not be considered as perfect, and that not all the errors have been corrected.80 Aware of the many deficiencies of the revised text, he opposed a possible ban on the use of any other Latin translation and advocated an edition with text variants and notes.81 Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 26–34. For the text of De editione latina vulgata see ibid. 107–25. 76 ‘Loca praecipua in bibliis Sixti V mutata’; see Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible, 77 See Do ¨ llinger and Reusch, Selbstbiographie (as in n. 2), 117. 130–4. 78 Ibid. 118. 79 Owing to Bellarmine the whole undertaking was carried through in nineteen days; see Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 43. 80 ‘Et vero quamvis in hac Bibliorum recognitione in codicibus manuscriptis, Hebraeis, Graecisque fontibus, et ipsis veterum Patrum commentariis conferendis non mediocre studium adhibitum fuerit; in hac tamen pervulgata lectione sicut nonnulla consulto mutata, ita etiam alia, quae mutanda videbantur, consulto immutata relicta 81 See Ho ¨ pfl, Beitra¨ge (as in n. 52), 167–8. sunt.’

270

Piet van Boxel

In this context it should be noted that at the time of the revision of 1591 the general of the Jesuits, Aquaviva, asked Bellarmine’s advice as to whether the professors of the Collegio Romano should be forced to accept the unrestricted authority of the Vulgate and to reject any textual contribution of the Hebrew and the Greek. The answer of the former professor at the Collegio Romano to his superior was that they should not, as this would be contrary to everything written on the subject.82 However, within the Jesuit order Bellarmine remained rather isolated in his view of the relationship between the Hebrew and the various renderings. In a study on the Bible in the Counter-Reformation Victor Baroni devoted a whole chapter to ‘the exegesis in the hands of the Jesuits’, which shows them as rather conservative.83 The only exception is Juan Mariana (1536–1624), who as a member of the Spanish Inquisition had to review the Antwerp Polyglot. To the chagrin of his confreres, Mariana did not condemn Montano’s masterpiece. Dedicating his Scholia in vetus et novum testamentum (1619) to Bellarmine, Mariana seems to regard him as an illustrious companion in his respect for the Polyglot.84 J EWIS H EXEGES IS Apart from valuable information about his unchanging position on the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the limited authority of the Vulgate, the Notae in Genesim provide a unique insight into Bellarmine’s exegetical methods as learnt and taught in Louvain. His mode of teaching does not seem polemical and is sometimes remarkably impartial. In order to establish the correct meaning of a text he refers to a wide range of ancient writers, such as Solinus, Josephus, Philo, and the Church Fathers. He often disagrees with Cajetan,85 but sometimes cites him as an ally. But, over the heads of his students, he is also addressing the reformers who, in his view, were undermining the Vulgate and the vital elements of Catholic tradition and doctrine. The most appropriate answer to their attacks was an exegesis based upon the Hebrew text in its 82

See Le Bachelet, Bellarmin et la Bible (as in n. 56), 24–5. V. Baroni, La Contre-Re´forme devant la Bible: La question biblique. Avec un sup84 Ibid. 275–6. ple´ment: Du XVIII e sie`cle a` nos jours (Lausanne, 1943), 245–87. 85 The two basic principles of Cajetan’s exegesis were that the Vulgate was a fallible translation that needed to be checked against the original and that the biblical text should be explained according to its literal meaning. See J. Wicks, Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Washington, DC, 1978), 34–8. 83

Robert Bellarmine

271

context, and in line with the tradition of the Church Fathers. Bellarmine is a Christian Hebraist, relying when appropriate, like his opponents, on Jewish tradition. Apart from the Targum as an important text witness, he turns more than once to ‘the Hebrews’, whom he uses mainly because of their knowledge of the Hebrew language. As in matters of translation, Bellarmine uses Jewish exegesis in semantic, grammatical, and Scriptural terms. At Genesis 2: 6 he notices the Vulgate rendering ‘there went up a vapour86 from the earth’ of the Hebrew future tense ‘and a vapour will go up from the earth’. His comment makes clear that the future tense is the correct reading: according to Jewish commentators rain will come down after the creation of the herbs on the third day so that herbs may grow in the future. Only if one wants to defend the Vulgate will one keep to the past tense, and take the meaning to be that it did not rain when the herbs were created because rain comes from vapour raised by the sun, and the sun was not created until the fourth day. But in his comment Bellarmine does not show any determination to defend the Vulgate.87 On grammatical and contextual grounds Bellarmine rejects Cajetan’s translation of Genesis 19: 17, which he had been given by the rabbi he usually consulted.88 Lot was told by the angels not to look behind him when he and his family were fleeing from Sodom. Cajetan, however, translates ‘do not make [them] look behind you’ in the sense that his wife and daughters should not fall behind, so that they would see his Bellarmine understands ‘fons’ as ‘vapour’; see n. 87. ‘Et fons ascendebat e terra. Duplex hic difficultas est. Una quod vox ed nusquam in scriptura significat fontem, sed vaporem, aut nubem, vel inundationem. Altera quod quidquid haec significat, videtur falsum quod hic dicitur, nam immediate antea Moses dixit, primas herbas a Deo solo creatas fuisse, et probavit quia tunc neque Deus pluerat super terram ut possent herbae per se generari; neque homo erat, qui eas serere potuisset. At si fons, vel nubes tunc ascendebat de terra et irrigabat universam superficiem terrae falsa est prima illa ratio, nam irrigatio er nubes est pluvia, et irrigatio per fontes aequivalet pluviae. Ad primam dico Hieronymum vocasse fontem non fontem proprie dictum, sed vapores aut nubes propter similitudinem ad fontes; ut enim origo fluminorum dicitur fons ita etiam origo pluviarum dici potest fons. Ad secundum vel dicendum cum hebraeis doctoribus, hic loquitur scriptura de pluviis, quia postea sequutae sunt, ut nimirum explicetur quomodo deinceps nascantur herbae. Nam in hebraeo est verbum futuri temporis weed jaaleh et vapor ascendet, nimirum deinceps. Vel si volumus Vulgatam defendere, quae habet ascendebat, dicendum est hic reddi rationem cur non pluerit initio super terram, cum primae herbae nascerentur, quia nimirum pluviae orientur ex terra per elevationem vaporum a sole; tunc autem sol nondum erat, nam herbae natae sunt tertio die, et sol creatus est quarto die. Hic ergo erit sensus. Nondum pluerat dominus super terram etc. Nam quando coepiunt pluviae fons seu vapor ascendebat e terra et irrigabat omnem superficiem terrae. Quod enim litera vav accipiatur pro enim notum est’; Notae 88 See Wicks, Cajetan Responds (as in n. 85), 34. in Genesim ad loc. 86 87

272

Piet van Boxel

back.89 Occasionally he refers to important Jewish commentators like Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Baal ha-Turim [ Jacob b. Asher], whose explanations he uses alongside other sources in his defence of the Catholic tradition.90 But his perusal of Jewish commentators is critical: some interpretations are inadmissible. Thus Genesis 7: 23, ‘Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark’, can only mean that nobody else survived the flood. Bellarmine therefore rejects the tradition, found in some Greek codices, that Methuselah survived as well, or, ‘as the Jews fabulate’, that Og lived through the disaster.91 At the beginning of chapter 10 he asks why no more children were born to Noah after the flood. He refers to Rashi’s explanation that Noah had been castrated by Ham, which he qualifies as nonsense.92 In chapter 11: 31, on the meaning of Ur, he rejects Jerome for following the fabula hebraeorum, who interpret it as fire.93 Remarks like fabulantur, nugae fabula, are characteristic of Bellarmine’s appraisal of Jewish exegesis. Examining the rabbinic commentaries he encountered many explanations that he found not to accord with the literal meaning of the text or with Christian doctrines or morals. Whether he collected these passages while preparing his classes on Genesis cannot be established, but that his attention was drawn to such matters during the Louvain period is most likely. The inclusion of Levi ben Gershom’s explanation of Genesis 18: 21 in his notes points in this direction. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah opens with: ‘I [God] will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the 89 ‘ne respicias post te. Cajetanus quia audivit a suo rabino tabith esse in hifil putat vertendum ‘‘ne facias respicere post te’’ ut sensus sit ut uxor tua et filiae non maneant retro respiciantque tergum tuum. At illud verbum etiam in hifil significat respicere ut patet Gen 15 respice caelum et quod Angelus hic praecepit ne respiceret Sodomam patet ex poena uxoris’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 90 This seems to indicate his use of the Biblia rabbinica of 1524 or 1547, since it is only in these editions that all three commentaries on Genesis are included. 91 ‘Et remansit solus Noe. Hinc apparet non remansisse virum Methusalem ut ex graecis codicibus colligitur neque Og ut fabulantur Hebraei’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. The tradition that Og was saved from the flood by Noah on the promise that he and his descendants would serve him for ever is found e.g. in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 23. 92 ‘Quaeritur primo cur non nominentur filli Noe nati post diluvium. R. Salomon dicit Noe fuisse castratum a Cham. Nugae. Vera ratio est Augustini liber 16 civit cap 3 ubi dicit quod solum nominantur singulares viri, qui dederunt nomina regionibus; et quia tales non fuerunt nisi isti’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 93 ‘Hieronymus in Quaestionibus hebraicis videtur sequi fabulam Hebraeorum qui per Hur intelligunt ignem. Tamen Josephus dicit esse urbem et LXX verterunt chora regione et nostra versio habet in Hur.’ For the tradition about the furnace from which Abraham was rescued, see Gen. 11: 28 in Targum Neofiti and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and Genesis Rabbah 38: 13.

Robert Bellarmine

273

outcry which has come to me.’ According to Bellarmine Levi ben Gershom concludes from this verse that God does not know the future.94 Bellarmine did not include this comment in his notes for exegetical purposes. The only reason must have been that such a blatant contradiction of Christian doctrine should not go unnoticed. In Louvain, Bellarmine was already on the path to becoming a censor of Hebrew literature.

ERRORS OF R ABBI SALOMON IN THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES An extensive collection of inadmissible passages of Jewish exegesis is preserved in another unpublished manuscript,95 held in the Biblioteca Fabroniana in Pistoia. The library owes its name and holdings to the legacy of cardinal Carlo Augusto Fabroni (1651–1727), who bequeathed his books to his native town. Various unpublished autographs of Bellarmine came into Fabroni’s possession through his involvement in Bellarmine’s beatification. The manuscript96 is entitled ‘Errors of Rabbi Salomon in the five books of Moses’,97 with the subtitle for the book of Genesis ‘Places in Rabbi Salomon’s commentary on Genesis which appear to need emendation’.98 The frontispiece shows the gematria on names in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin such as Messias, Soter, Ben David, Israel, Melchisedech, and Martinus Luther. The remaining thirty-five pages consist of a selection from Rashi’s commentary on the Torah in Latin relating to a number of biblical verses cited in their Vulgate version, with an occasional remark or short comment. Rashi’s text is sometimes fully translated, but often only summarized.99 The manuscript is not dated. 94 ‘descendam et videbo. Hinc deducit R. Levi Gerson Deum non scire futurum’; Notae in Genesim ad loc. 95 Le Bachelet mentions the manuscript, but considering it of secondary importance, does not print it; see X. M. Le Bachelet, Auctarium Bellarminianum: Supple´ment aux Oeuvres du Cardinal Bellarmin (Paris, 1913), 658 n. 2. It will be included in my forthcoming book Conversion and Censorship under Pope Gregory XIII, to be published in the 96 Biblioteca Fabroniana, MS 15. series Studi e Testi [2007] p. 275. 97 ‘Errores R. Salomonis in quinque libros Mosis’. 98 ‘Loca quae in commentariis R. Salomonis in Genesim emendanda videntur’. 99 Conrad Pellican translated Rashi’s commentary on the Old Testament (Commentaria in vetus testamentum, tam hebraice, quam latine per Conradum Pellicanum translata). See Le Bachelet, Auctarium (as in n. 95), 658 n. 2. It was never published and there is no indication that Bellarmine used it.

274

Piet van Boxel

On the whole Bellarmine’s Latin is an accurate rendering of the Hebrew, but occasionally it reveals the weakness of his knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish tradition.100 On the story of the maltreatment of Jethro’s daughters by the shepherds Exodus 2: 17 says: ‘And the shepherds came and drove them [Jethro’s daughters] away.’ Rashi comments on the phrase ‘drove them away’ by alluding to a Midrash and states: because of the banishment (niddui) into which their father had been driven. Not knowing the difference between nidduj and niddah, Bellarmine makes a rather unfortunate mistake: taking the subject to be the menstruation of Jethro’s daughters, he writes: ‘Thus Rabbi Solomon as always is philosophizing about obscenities.’101 Numbers 11: 16 recounts the induction of the seventy elders. Rashi refers to an earlier group of seventy elders who had functioned as judges in Egypt (Exodus 3: 16). But they had been struck dead because they appeared before God with a light head (nahagu kalut rosh), meaning that they had behaved irreverently towards God, as Exodus 24: 11 says: ‘they beheld God and ate and drank’. Bellarmine, however, misunderstands the expression ‘with a light head’ and includes the passage in his collection of inadmissible passages ‘because it seems to mean that they were punished because they prayed to God with uncovered head, which refers to their (the Jews’) castigation of the way Christians pray’.102 Apart from passages included because of a misreading of the Hebrew, it is rather obvious why Bellarmine opposed certain interpretations. Only occasionally does he give an explicit reason as to why he included a particular passage in his collection. Such is the case with Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 1: 26 God said, ‘Let us make man.’ Rashi states that God said to the angels ‘let us make man’ and goes on to say that the heretics claimed this text, but in vain, since Scripture says ‘and God created’, and not ‘Gods created’. This comment, according to Bellarmine, clearly impugns the mystery of the Trinity and calls the Christians ‘heretics’.103 In the many cases where no reason is given, it is 100 Richard Simon, discussing Bellarmine’s commentary on the Psalms, notices his mediocre knowledge of Hebrew; see Simon, Histoire critique (as in n. 5), 527. 101 ‘ita semper de obscenitatibus philosophatur R. Salomon’. 102 Biblioteca Fabroniana, MS 15, ad loc.: ‘congrega mihi septuaginta senes: quia antea in Exodo inveniuntur septuaginta senes, quaerit R. Salomon cur nunc iterum congregentur septuaginta senes. Respondit quia illos priores Deus occidit, quia incedebant coram Deo levi capite. Qua voce videtur intelligere, quod aperto capite Deum orarent, quod pertinet ad reprehensionem modi orandi christianorum.’ 103 Ibid.: ‘Faciamus hominem: vult R. Salomon Deum angelis dixisse, faciamus hominem et addit haereticos hunc locum pro se arripere, sed frustra, cum scriptum sit,

Robert Bellarmine

275

because of blasphemy, obscenities, offences against Christians, and errors against reason and natural law that passages are included.104 However, one particular group of texts, over fifty of them, is included not because of their blasphemous or offensive content, but merely because they are based on the Talmud. Bellarmine apparently considered the Talmud an inappropriate source for the understanding of Scripture. He must have shared the view of Church authorities that the Talmud was the symbol of Jewish stubbornness and the main obstacle to the conversion of the Jews. No recognition, in his view, should be given to the Talmud as a tool for biblical exegesis. This verdict on the Talmud should not be seen in isolation. During the pontificate of Gregory XIII a major attempt was made to revise Hebrew books, in particular Jewish commentaries on the Bible. In this endeavour Bellarmine was assigned the task of reviser of collections of inadmissible passages, one of the criteria being the use of the Talmud. His collection of passages from Rashi’s commentary on the Torah served this unique enterprise of censorship.105 It is here that the Christian Hebraist Bellarmine, who had clearly acknowledged the Jewish contribution to the understanding of Scripture, manifests himself undeniably as a censor. creavit Deus, non creaverunt Dii. Quibus verbis satis aperte Trinitatis mysterium oppugnat, et christianos haereticos vocat.’ 104 For a detailed description of the criteria of censorship applied by Bellarmine see Le Bachelet, Auctarium (as in n. 95), 658–60. 105 See my forthcoming Conversion and Censorship [2007].

This page intentionally left blank

8 Spencer, Maimonides, and the History of Religion Fausto Parente

S P E N C ER ’ S D E L E G I B U S H E B R A E O R U M RITUALIBUS AND ITS MODERN EVALUATION John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus was published in Cambridge in 1685 in three books. It set out to demonstrate that the majority of Jewish ritual laws were of Egyptian origin.1 A second, expanded edition with an additional fourth book was brought out posthumously in 1727 by Leonard Chappelow.2 It contained, among other material, a dissertation on the origins of phylacteries, which Spencer wrote shortly before his death in 1693. In 1732 the German theologian Ch. M. Pfaff (the author of the famous forgery of the Irenaeus fragments) republished it with a Dissertatio praeliminaris in which he set out at length his own and others’ criticism of the book.3 1 De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus et earum rationibus, Libri tres. Primo, Fuse agitur de Rationibus Legum Judaicarum Generalibus. . . . Secundo, De Legibus Mosaicis quibus Zabiorum Ritus occasionem dedere fuse disseritur. . . . Tertio, De iis Hebraeorum Legibus & Institutis agitur, quibus Gentium usus occasionem praebuit. . . . Authore Johanne Spencero (Cambridge, 1685; all references to this edition). 2 De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus . . . libri quattuor . . . Quarto: De Ritibus & Institutis Hebraeorum a Gentium usu desumptis, nullibi vero (quod scimus) a Deo praeceptis aut ordinatis. Huic accessit Dissertatio de Phylacteriis Judaeorum auctore J.S . . . Editos, MSS cum testimoniis auctorum laudatis recensuit, & indices adjecit Leonardus Chappelow . . . (Cambridge, 1727). 3 Johannis Spenceri . . . De Legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus earumque rationibus, libri quattuor. Ad nuperam Cantabrigiensem, in qua liber quartus, varia capita & dissertationes aliaque autoris supplementa, accessere accurate efformata. Praemittitur Christoph. Matthaei Pfaffii . . . dissertatio praeliminaris, qua de vita Spenceri, de libri pretio & erroribus quoque disseritur, autoresque, qui contra Spencerum scripsere, enarrantur (Tu¨bingen, 1732).

278

Fausto Parente

Thereafter it was never reprinted, and was virtually forgotten. There is justification for this: Spencer’s work, despite the opinion, even now, of a number of scholars, is not, as its subject and the reactions to it would imply, a break with tradition and a pre-empting of historical issues; it is purely theological in nature, and makes no contribution to the question of the development of the Jewish religion and its documentation. Spencer is no easy read. He is the product of an age in which great erudition co-existed with the full acceptance of the principle of God’s intervention in history, particularly in the history of a people considering itself the recipient of his direct revelation. Hence the isolation and the perceived self-sufficiency of the Jewish people and their religion with regard to neighbouring peoples, in the light of which the suggestion that the rituals of the ancient Hebrews were in fact appropriated Egyptian rites could not but appear scandalous. Inevitably, a number of modern historians have seen Spencer’s work as historical rather than theological. But it is not that, and the misconception needs clarifying: Spencer is not a forerunner of modern theory, and if his work has not advanced historical investigation it is not because he was ahead of his time, but because his work is theological, not historical. This is not to detract from his erudition or from the interest of his comparisons between Jewish and Egyptian rites, even if his material was limited to classical sources. His Egypt could only be that of Herodotus and Plutarch, with the result that this aspect of his work was also destined to diminish in importance and interest when indigenous sources became available. The person mainly responsible for the misunderstanding is William Robertson Smith, whose authority secured automatic endorsement for his views. In the Preface to his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) he writes: The value of comparative studies for the study of the religion of the Bible was brought out very clearly, two hundred years ago, by one of the greatest of English theologians, Dr. John Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, whose Latin work on the ritual laws of the Hebrews may justly be said to have laid the foundations of the science of Comparative Religion, and in its special subject, in spite of certain defects that could hardly have been avoided at the time when it was composed, still remains by far the most important book on the religious antiquities of the Hebrews. But Spencer was so much before his time that his work was not followed up; it is often ignored by professed students of the Old Testament, and has hardly exercised any influence

Spencer and Maimonides

279

on the current ideas which are the common property of educated men interested in the Bible.4

Robertson Smith’s evaluation is wrong for two major reasons. First, it is incorrect to speak of a comparative history of religion before Max Friedrich Mu¨ller had formulated the principles of the science, based on the recognition of the basic affinity of languages such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit as established by William Jones and grammatically illustrated by Franz Bopp.5 Secondly, Spencer does not compare the Jewish and Egyptian religions, but states (for reasons which have no historical basis, as we shall shortly see) that Jewish ritual laws were those the Jews observed during their Egyptian exile, and continued to observe thereafter. What is ground-breaking in it, at first sight, is the abandonment of the concept of revelation and, consequently, of Jewish ‘self-sufficiency’ mentioned above, derived from the inspired nature of the Scriptures, the base and foundation of the whole Hebraic-Christian tradition.6 This is the position of Hans-Joachim Kraus in the third edition of his authoritative Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments. Kraus considers Spencer to be indebted to Herbert of Cherbury, who, in distinguishing between ‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ religion, is in fact denying the very concept of revelation. Kraus defines Spencer’s work as a blow ‘at the very heart of the supernatural conception of religion’ since Hebrew ritual, i.e. in traditional terms, the concrete enacting of the divine commandments, is that of a people and civilization with which the Hebrews were in long-standing contact.7 4 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series. The Fundamental Institutions by . . . W. Robertson Smith, new edn. (London, 1907; 1st edn. 1889), p. vi. See: H. P. Smith, Essays in Biblical Interpretation (Boston, 1921), 106 ff.; E. J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn. (London, 1986; 1st edn. 1975), 17. Robertson Smith’s judgement is endorsed by R. Buddensieg in Realencyklopu¨die fu¨r die protestantische Theologie, 3rd edn., xviii (1906), 608; ‘nicht mit Unrecht ist er der Begru¨nder der vergleichenden Religionsgeschichte gennant worden’. 5 Sharpe, Comparative Religion, 22, 35–46. F. Max Mu ¨ ller, Comparative Mythology (Oxford, 1856); id., Introduction to the Science of Religion (London, 1873); W. Jones, Discourses Delivered before the Asiatic Society, i (London, 1821), 28 (Discourse iii); F. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1833–52). On the intellectual context of Robertson Smith’s view of Spencer as a major figure in the development of critical thought see J. Sutherland Black and G. Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London, 1912), 512 ff.: ‘In following the comparative and historical method which had now for the first time been made possible, Smith from the beginning laid down the principle that it is the ritual, and not the myths or the dogmas, of primitive religions that must, in the first instance, be regarded.’ 6 L. Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche (Jena, 1869). 7 H.-J. Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments, 3rd edn. (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1982), 94: ‘Langsam wirkte es sich aus, daß J. Spencer in

280

Fausto Parente

But the filiation is misconceived because, whereas for Herbert the notiones communes behind ‘natural religion’ are innate ideas, and not the result of divine revelation which he, therefore, rejects, for Spencer it is God who produces an adapted version of the rituals the Hebrews had practised in Egypt in consideration of their inability, coarse and uneducated as they still were, to follow less material forms of worship.

T H E PR IM AR Y AN D S E C O N D A R Y P U R P O SE O F T H E MO SA I C L A W Despite the size of Spencer’s work (some one thousand pages in the first edition alone) and its enormous erudition it is, I think, possible to discern its conceptual framework, to trace its sources, and to grasp the doctrine behind it. The first edition consists of an introduction (Prolegomena) and three books. In the introduction Spencer observes that a number of Hebrew laws have no immediately obvious justification, and seem to prescribe, and proscribe, things which are essentially unimportant. He rejects the argument sometimes offered, that the laws should be taken simply as an expression of divine will, arguing that one cannot attribute to God acts that have no intelligible purpose. It is therefore legitimate and necessary to posit a purpose behind each single law and try to account for it. In Book 1, Spencer lists the topics dealt with and the sections in which they are discussed. His basic theme is the overall purpose of the Law: it is to wean the Hebrews from idolatry to which, after years of slavery in Egypt, they were firmly attached. This idolatry had two distinct origins: 1. At the time of the Hebrews’ departure from Egypt, the whole world was under the influence of the cult of the stars. The pagans (the ‘Sabians’—see below) practised a variety of superstitious and immoral rites. God was thus obliged to ban many seemingly innocuous procedures because of their links with pagan superstitions which were far from innocuous. These links and the way God went about neutralizing them—by enacting quite specific laws—is what needs elucidating, and what Spencer sets out to do in Book 2, which is entitled De legibus Mosaicis quibus Zabiorum Ritus occasionem dedisse fuse disseritur. seinem Buch De legibus Hebraeorum . . . das Herzstu¨ck des supranaturalen Religionsversta¨ndnisses, das go¨ttliche Gesetz des Alten Testaments, angegriffen hatte.’

Spencer and Maimonides

281

2. In Egypt the Hebrews had absorbed ‘lethalem superstitionis Aegiptiacae succum’: they had long practised Egyptian rites and were quite unable to adapt without transition to new and superior religious practices. To avoid their relapsing into idolatry the deity wisely allowed them to continue with a censored version of a number of rites such as sacrifice, purification, temple worship, observation of lunar festivals, etc. This would explain why Hebrew rites and observances are so similar to their Egyptian counterparts, as so many commentators had noted, contending, however, that it was Egypt which followed Israel and not vice versa.8 This is the content of Book 3, comprising eight dissertations, the first of which deals with the question in general terms (Generalius agitur de Ritibus e Gentium moribus in Legem translatis), while the remaining seven analyse individual religious practices or cultual institutions (II De origine sacrificiorum; III De purificationibus; IV De Neomeniis; V De Arca et Cherubinis; VI De Templo; VII De Urim et Thummim; VIII De Hirco emissario). In each case God imposed the law neither to promote piety nor to impose his will, but solely to eradicate practices absorbed from Israel’s pagan neighbours. Revelation is thus essentially a question of accommodatio: God—not a human legislator—enacted ordinances suited to the condition of ignorance and immaturity of his people. For a Christian, Christ’s advent automatically abolished these laws, their only significance lying in their having allegorically or typologically announced the truth of the Gospel. Spencer defines this as the secondary purpose of the law, discussing it in Chapter 2 of the first book: De legum rituumque Mosaicarum fine secundario.

MAIMONIDES’ M O R E H N E B U K I M A S T H E M A I N S O U R C E O F S P ENC ER’ S D E L E G I B U S With the obvious exception of this last, all the elements comprising the argument are to be found in a number of chapters in the third section of Maimonides’ Moreh Nebukim, Spencer’s primary source, a fact commentators have insufficiently understood. In his Fremantle Lectures of 1973, Frank E. Manuel, after mentioning Edward Pococke’s translation 8 See e.g. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio Evangelica ad serenissimum Delphinum 8th edn. (Venice, 1783), 72a–76b; Herman Witsius, Aegyptiaca . . . , 3rd edn. (Herborn, 1717), 193–291.

282

Fausto Parente

of part of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, continues: ‘and the substance of the rest of his vast body of work was communicated to the learned world by John Spencer in a magnificent, 500-page analytic compendium of Maimonides’ writings in Latin, which bore a title that had best be translated as Explanation of the Laws of the Hebrews’.9 Having announced the connection so enigmatically, however, Manuel has nothing more to say on the matter. The problem has recently been addressed again by Jan Assmann in a book which constitutes an important contribution to the history of European thought and erudition. Assmann traces the ‘Egyptian’ interpretation of the figure of Moses, from Manetho to Sigmund Freud.10 Spencer appears as a major figure and as the initiator of the ‘modern’ phase; once again, he ‘erweist sich als ein Vorla¨ufer des Historismus und der vergleichenden Religionsgeschichte’.11 Assmann recognizes Spencer’s indebtedness to Maimonides, discusses it at length, but, in my opinion, the exact nature of it escapes him. It may, therefore, be advisable to examine carefully what Maimonides says in those parts of Moreh Nebukim which constitute the conceptual basis of Spencer’s De legibus.12

MAIMONIDES ON THE PURPOSE OF DIVINE LAWS Maimonides was a rationalist. He challenged the position of those who ‘consider it a grievous thing that causes should be given for any law; what would please them most is that the intellect would not find a meaning for the commandments and prohibitions’.13 His response is clear and 9 F. E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (The Fremantle Lectures 1973; Oxford, 1974), 87. On Maimonides as a source of Spencer, see J. Guttmann, ‘John Spencers Erkla¨rung der biblischen Gesetze in ihrer Beziehung zu Maimonides’, in Festskrift i anledning af Professor David Simonsen 70-aarige fødselsdag (Copenhagen, 1923), 258–76. According to Guttmann, Robertson Smith saw Spencer as a rationalist and a ‘historian of religion’, a view that in Guttmann’s opinion ‘wird unter diesem Gesichtspunkt auf dem More Nabuchim des Maimonides angewendet werden du¨rfen’. 10 The book was first published in English: J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), and afterwards, considerably modified, in German: Moses der A¨gypter: Entzifferung einer Geda¨chtnisspur (Munich, 1998; 2nd edn., 2000). All quotations are from the 2nd German edition. 11 Assmann, Moses, 111. 12 I have used Shlomo Pines’s translation: Moses ben Maimun, The Guide of the Perplexed . . . translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 13 Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 31; 523 Pines. 1963).

Spencer and Maimonides

283

simple: ‘It is, however, the doctrine of all of us—both of the multitude and of the elite—that all the Laws have a cause, though we ignore the causes for some of them and we do not know the manner in which they conform to wisdom.’14 He quotes the midrash to Genesis (Bereshit Rabbah 44: 1 on Genesis 15: 1): ‘what does it matter to the Holy One, blessed be He, that animals are slaughtered by cutting their neck in front or in the back? Say therefore that the commandments were only given in order to purify the people. For it is said: ‘‘the word of the Lord is purified’’.’15 He observes, as can be deduced from a number of passages in the Pentateuch, that ‘the first intention of the Law as a whole is to put an end to idolatry, to wipe out its traces and all that is bound up with it, even its memory’.16 Now, Maimonides argues, if we require to know the reasons for the promulgation by God of rules on altogether secondary matters, ‘the knowledge of these opinions and practices is a very important chapter in the exposition of the reasons for the commandments. For the foundation of the whole of our Law and the pivot around which it turns, consists in the effacement of these opinions from the minds and of these monuments from existence’.17 Consequently, Assmann states: ‘In diesem Sinne wandte sich also schon Maimonides, fu¨nfhundert Jahre vor Spencer, auf der Basis seiner Theologie der List genuiner religionsgeschichtlicher Forschung zu.’ ‘So kam Maimonides zu seiner Entdeckung (oder Erfindung) der Sabier’18—a somewhat contentious statement, given that Maimonides can hardly be considered a historian of religion. The converse is more likely to be true: Maimonides considered he had found in the books of the ‘Sabians’ (particularly in the Nabataean Agriculture, as we shall see below) the practices and rites targeted by the Law, and had constructed his argument on this basis. To state that ‘Maimonides’ Sabier sind eine imagina¨re Kultur, die er durch die konsequente Anwendung von Manethos Prinzip der normativen Inversion konstruierte’19 is to misread Maimonides, since the Sabian civilization can only be deemed ‘imaginary’ if is traced back to the time of Abraham. Maimonides had no sense of history, and in his opinion the Sabians’ religious beliefs (astrolatry) and practices (soothsaying and magic) were manifestations of an idolatry that knew no 14 15 16 18 19

Ibid., ch. 26; 507 Pines. 2 Sam. 22: 31 ¼ Ps. 18: 31. Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 26; 508 Pines. 17 Ibid. 521 Pines. Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 29; 517 Pines. Assmann, Moses (as in n. 10), 92. Ibid. 90. On Manetho see Josephus, Contra Apionem, 1. 249

284

Fausto Parente

change. Like Shahrasta¯nı¯, he used the term sa¯bi’a as synonymous with ˙ of paganism as an ori‘pagan’ in general, accepting Mas‘u¯dı¯’s theory ginally astral religion, subsequently transformed by false prophets into idolatry in the true sense of the word, the worship of statues claimed to represent stars and planets.20 According to the Qur’a¯n the religion practised in Abraham’s original milieu, against which he rebelled, was a form of paganism consisting in star worship.21 Maimonides concluded from this that ‘our father Abraham was raised in the religion of the Sabians who believe in no other God except the stars’ and that this religion, which he rejected, continued to prevail so that ‘such opinions developed among them that some of them became soothsayers, enchanters, sorcerers, charmers, consulters with familiar spirits, wizards, and necromancers’ (Deut. 18: 10–11).22 The errors of the Sabians, i.e. pagans, thus explain a number of biblical commandments: ‘as you will hear when I explain the reasons for the commandments that are considered to be without cause’:23 there follow examples mainly from the Nabatean Agriculture, al-Filaha al-Nabatiyya, a geoponic compilation attributed to a Chaldaean sage, Kotha¯mi, and translated from Syriac into Arabic by Abu¯-Bakr A’hmed ben ’Ali Ibn Wa’hshı¯ja in 291 of the hidjra (ad 904). Before 1835, when E´tienne Quatreme`re described it on the basis of an incomplete Paris manuscript, the work had been known only through these quotations in Maimonides. That Maimonides considers the text to belong to remote antiquity is hardly surprising: in the nineteenth century both Quatreme`re and Daniel Chwolson still believed its original nucleus to date from some centuries before the Christian era. It was Ernest Renan who finally laid to 20 Tadj al Din Abu l-Fath Muhammad ash Shahrastanı ¯ ¯ ¯, Kitab al Milal wa ’l Nihal [‘book of religious and philosophic sects’], ed. W. Cureton (London, 1846), ii. 203–52; German trans. Religionspartheien und Philosophen-Schulen zum ersten Male . . . u¨bersetzt von Th. Haarbru¨cker, 2 vols. (Halle, 1850–1), ii. 4–77 ¼ D. A. Chwolson, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus (St Petersburg, 1856), ii. 415–50. Shahrasta¯nı¯ distinguishes between the Sabians who pray beneath the stars, called ‘temples’, and those who represent the stars in the form of temples. See Al-Mas‘u¯dı¯, Mu¯rug˘ al Dahab [‘the golden meadows’], ed. Ch. Pellat, ii (Beirut, 1966), 379 ff. and Ch. Genequand, ‘Idolaˆtrie, astrolaˆtrie et sabe´isme’, Studia Islamica, 89 (1999), 109–20, where the passage is translated on p. 110. 21 Abraham is not a pagan but a hanif, neither Jewish nor Christian (2. 135; 3. 67), as against his father, Azar, for whom he˙ prays that he may abandon idolatry (9. 114; 26. 86), identified as a cult of the stars (6. 75–8), but involving the worship of idols which Abraham destroys (21. 52–70). See R. Paret, Encyclopaedia of Islam, iii (1971), 980–1, 22 Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 29; 514, 517 Pines. s.v. Ibra¯hı¯m. 23 Ibid. 518 Pines.

Spencer and Maimonides

285

rest the myth of its antiquity, preceded by Spencer himself, who, however, was unable (or unwilling) to draw the logical conclusions.24 T H E ‘ S A B IA N S ’ OF TH E Q U R ’ A¯ N A ND T HE ‘ S A BI A N S ’ O F H A R R A¯ N ˙ But who were the ‘Sabians’?25 The Qur’a¯n (2. 62, 5. 69, and 22. 17) uses the term sa¯bi’a, a phonetic modification of the root sb‘, ‘to wet’, ‘to immerse ˙[in water]’, and, as a secondary meaning,˙ ‘to baptize [by immersion]’, and thus, ‘baptists’, to indicate a religious community, which, together with Jews, Christians, and, in the last-mentioned verse, Zoroastrians ( ¼ magicians), comprises the ‘people of the book’, who are thus tolerated in Islam: ‘nothing need they fear nor shall they be grieved’ (Qur’a¯n, 5. 69). Chwolson, and many others before him, identified them with the Mandeans, members of a baptist sect who claimed John ´ . Quatreme`re, ‘Me´moire sur les Nabate´ens’, Nouveau Journal asiatique, 2nd ser. 24 E 15 (1835), 5–55; 97–137; 209–71. On the date, pp. 230–40: ‘on peut . . . admettre, comme une opinion fort probable, que la composition du livre de l’Agriculture nabate´enne remonte a` une e´poque tre`s ancienne’, pp. 231–2. Chwolson, Ssabier (as in n. 20), i. 711–12: ‘Die Hauptquelle des Maimonides u¨ber die Ssabier und den Ssabismus ist also ein ohne Zweifel lange vor Christus in Babylonien abgefasstes und spa¨ter am Ende des 9. Jahrhunderts von einem chalda¨ischen Hexenmeister und Alchymisten bearbeitetes Buch, welches von der Agricultur handelt, die mit dem babylonischen Heidenthum, mit Astrologie, und mit verschiedenen Arten von Zauberei eng verbunden war. Dieses Buch hat nichts mit unsern nordmesopotamischen jungen Harraniern zu thun, und M. gab es nur deshalb fu¨r ein ssabisches Buch aus, weil es vom Heidenthum und von Zauberei handelt; diese beiden sind bei ihm mit Ssabismus vo¨llig identisch.’ Chwolson discusses ¨ ber die U ¨ berreste der altbabylothe dating of the Nabatean Agriculture also in his ‘U ¨ bersetzungen’, Me´moires des savants ´etrangers de l’Acanischen Literatur in arabischen U de´mie Impe´riale de St. Petersburg, 8 (1859), 331–523, esp. 362 ff. E. Renan, ‘Me´moire sur l’aˆge du livre intitule´ Agriculture Nabate´enne’, Me´moires de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 24 (1861), 139–90 ¼ ‘Sur les de´bris de l’ancienne litte´rature babylonienne conserve´s dans les traductions arabes’, Revue germanique, 10 (1860), 136–66; Eng. trans., An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture (London, 1862), and ‘Me´moire sur le traite´ de l’Agriculture nabate´enne’, Comptes rendus de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 4 (1860), 47–59. Spencer, De legibus, 242–3: ‘Conjicerem autem (si res tam obscura conjecturam pateretur) eos sub expirantis Judaismi tempora primitus in lucem irrepsisse . . . Sed quocumque demum seculo Sabiorum libri scripti fuerint, id pro certo habendum Arabes non ante seculum septimum aut octavum eos in linguam Arabicam transtulisse.’ Cf. the interesting observations by Johann Christoph Wolf, Dissertatio de hypotesi spenceriana de Zabiis (Wittenberg, 1706), summed up in Manichaeismus ante Manichaeos, et in Christianismo Redivivus . . . (Hamburg, 1707), 85–91. 25 B. Carra de Vaux, Enzyklopaedie des Isla ¯ m, iv (1934), 22b–23b s.v. sa¯bi’a; T. Fahd, ˙ Encyclopaedia of Islam, viii (1995), 675–8 s.v. sa¯bi’a. ˙

286

Fausto Parente

the Baptist as their prophet, and who live to the present day along the banks of the Lower Tigris and Euphrates: the ‘St. John Christians’, called by the Arabs subba or subbi, ‘baptists’. This theory seems no longer ˙ of the sources, and recent commentators tenable after J. Hja¨˙rpe’s survey tend to identify the Qur’a¯n Sabians either with a Judaeo-Christian gnosticizing sect mentioned by Epiphanius26 (M. Tardieu) or with Manicheans (F. C. de Blois).27 To confuse matters, the term is used by Arab writers to indicate a people who lived in the early centuries of the hidjra in Northern Mesopotamia, in Harra¯n (the ancient Carrhae), and practised an astral ˙ cult. Sabians are frequently mentioned by Arab writers: Muhammad ben ˙ Isha¯q al-Nadı¯m recounts that, when the caliph al-Ma’mu¯n visited ˙ Harra¯n in ad 830, the local population escaped the accusation of ˙ paganism by referring to themselves as sa¯bi’a, thus presenting themselves ˙ acceptable to Islam. They were as hunafa¯’, ‘monotheists’, and therefore ˙ apparently believed, even though Arab sources refer to them sometimes as sa¯bi’at H arra¯n in the sense of ‘those who bow down (to the stars)’.28 ˙The story ˙ is certainly plausible: a group of Harra¯n intellectuals in ˙ Islamic sympathies conflict with their compatriots on account of their had already moved to Baghdad, creating a composite cultural movement based predominantly on astrological motifs. They also translated into Arabic a number of treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum (hence the expression ‘Arabic hermeticism’).29 The Arabic translation of Nabataean Agriculture belongs to this cultural climate. Epiphanius Const., Haereses 29. 7. 7; 40. 1. 5. For a history of the arguments surrounding the ‘Sabians’, see Chwolson, Ssabier (as in n. 20), i. 100–38; J. Hja¨rpe, Analyse critique des traditions arabes sur les sabe´ens H arraniens (typescript, Uppsala, 1972); C. Buck, ‘The Identity of the Saˆbi’un: An ˙ Historical Quest’, Muslim World, 74 (1984), 97–186; M. Tardieu, ‘Saˆbiens coraniques et ‘‘Saˆbiens’’ de Harraˆn’, Journal asiatique, 276 (1986), 1–44; S˛. Gu¨ndu¨z, The Knowledge of Life: The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans in their Relation to the Sabians of the Qur’an and the Harranians ¼ Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 3 (Oxford, 1994); Gu¨ndu¨z’s conclusions are as follows: ‘Besides these vitally important points there are also many other differences between the religion of Harranians and that of the Mandaeans, such as in prayers, fasts, feasts and sacrifices. It should therefore be accepted without any hesitation that Mandaeism and Harranian religion are two completely different traditions’, p. 236; F. C. de Blois, Encyclopaedia of Islam, viii (1995), 672–5, s.v. sa¯bi’. 28 In the opinion of Genequand, ‘Idola ˆtrie’ (as in n. 20), 126–7, ‘le nom˙ de´rive du verbe saba’a ila¯ (ou: saba¯ ila¯) dans le sens de ‘‘incliner vers’’, ‘‘de´vier’’, et de la` ‘‘changer de religion’’ ’. ‘Cette interpre´tation est donne´e par de nombreux auteurs et lexicographes arabes, ce qui lui confe`re de´ja` une certaine autorite´’, and only this etymology ‘peut rendre compte de l’ensemble des te´moignages et des faits conteste´s’. 29 The account of the caliph Ma’mun’s visit to H arran (in Muhammad ben Ishaq ¯ ¯ ¯ ˙ al-Nadı¯m, Kita¯b al-Fihrist, book 9, ch. 1) was translated into Latin˙ and published˙by 26 27

Spencer and Maimonides

287

MAIMONIDES AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ‘ N O R M A T I V E I N V E R S IO N’ As Assmann points out, to account for laws the purpose of which was otherwise obscure, Maimonides drew on the principle of ‘normative inversion’: ‘Wenn das Gesetz eine Ta¨tigkeit ‘‘x’’ verbietet, dann muß es eine heidnische Gruppe gegeben haben, die ‘‘x’’ praktiziert hat.’30 This must indeed have been the historical reason behind the formulation of so many prohibitions. One of the clearest cases is that regarding the cooking of the flesh of a kid in its mother’s milk (Exodus 23: 19; 24: 26 and Deuteronomy 14: 21), frequently explained as an Arab rite,31 while Ugaritic texts make it unequivocally clear that it was Cananaean.32 Maimonides applied the principle since he believed that the main purpose of the Law was to eradicate various idolatrous practices even if in some instances no exact correspondence existed between the offending pagan practice and the provisions of the law. Let me give two examples. In Moreh Nebukim 3. 30, Maimonides states that ‘among all men it was an accepted view that through the worship of stars the earth becomes populated and the soil fertile’; should the stars be provoked by human disobedience, ‘the land will become barren and devastated’. God, however, wishing ‘in His pity for us to efface this error from our minds. . . . through the abolition of these tiring and useless practices and to give us Laws through the instrumentality of Moses our Master, the latter informed us in His name. . . . that if the stars

Johann H. Hottinger, Historia Orientalis (Zu¨rich, 1651), 165–9. It is quoted by Spencer, De legibus, 241. Cf. Chwolson, Ssabier (as in n. 20), ii. 14–19 (text and translation of the passage in al-Nadı¯m) and i. 28–30. The theology and philosophy of the Harra¯nians of ˙ Chwolson, Baghdad have been illustrated in numerous works by Tha¯bit ibn Kurra (see Ssabier, ii., pp. i–iv). On ‘Arabic hermeticism’, see L. Massignon’s appendix, ‘Inventaire de la litte´rature herme´tique arabe’, in A.-J. Festugie`re, La Re´ve´lation d’Herme`s Trisme´giste, i: L’Astrologie et les sciences occultes (2nd edn., Paris, 1950), 384–400; J. Doresse, ‘L’Herme´tisme e´gyptianisant’, Encyclope´die de la Ple´iade. Histoire des Religions, ii (Paris, 1972), 431–97 at 478–93, ‘L’Herme´tisme arabe’. 30 Assmann, Moses (as in n. 10), 90. 31 M. Haran, ‘Seething a Kid in Mother’s Milk’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 30 (1979), 23–34; O. Keel, Das Bo¨cklein in der Milch seiner Mutter und Verwandtes (Go¨ttingen, 1980). See E. Firmage in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vi (1992), 1128a–b. 32 Ch. Virolleaud, ‘La Naissance des dieux gracieux et beaux: Poe `me phe´nicien de RasShamra’, Syria, 14 (1933), 128–51 at 130 (text); 133 (trans.); 140 (comm.), on the rites required to ensure the fecundation of a freshly tilled and sown field.

288

Fausto Parente

and the planets were worshipped, their worship would be a cause for the rain ceasing to fall, for the land being devastated. . . . ’.33 This is summed up with the words ‘These are the intentions of the words of the covenant, which the Lord made’ (Deuteronomy 28: 69),34 which undoubtedly refers to Deuteronomy’s curses on the violators of the law. The exact words, however, are ‘If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God. . . . the Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed’ (28: 15 and 23), and not, as Maimonides states, ‘if the stars and the planets were worshipped, their worship would be a cause for the rain ceasing to fall, for the land being devastated’. Maimonides’ justification for the prohibition of grafting is also significant in this context. Quoting a passage from Nabataean Agriculture which states that to facilitate the union of two plants any graft has to be accompanied by sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, he comments: ‘Therefore the mingling [of diverse species], I mean the grafting of one tree upon another, is forbidden . . . ’.35 Scripture (Leviticus 19: 19 and Deuteronomy 22: 9–11) prohibits coupling between animals of different species, sowing with different kinds of seed, and weaving cloth with different threads, prohibitions almost certainly echoing Cananaean practices to be eliminated. But a prohibition of grafting is not among them. It is a rabbinical ruling deduced from the Leviticus passage, as Maimonides himself states in the Book on agriculture of his Mishneh Torah.36 All the above is expounded by Spencer in the second book of De legibus and commented on by Assmann, who analyses the ‘normative inversion’ which Spencer himself, as stated above, had perceptively grasped.37 33 Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 30; 522–3 Pines. Yahweh’s wrath ‘shut up the heaven, that there be no rain’ (Deut. 11: 17 and 1 Kings 8: 35); He will send the rain ‘in due season’ or make the ‘heaven as iron’ (Lev. 26: 4 and 19). 34 Lit.: ‘These are the words of the covenant which Yahweh has commanded Moses to make with the sons of Israel.’ 35 Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 37; 548 Pines. 36 The Book of Agriculture, trans. I. Klein (The Code of Maimonides Book 7) (New Haven, 1978), 5 ff. 37 De legibus, 235. ‘Cum autem Zabiorum plerique cum idolatria ˆ & magiaˆ proxime conjungerentur, & Mosis aetate passim increbescerent; Deo visum est Legem tradere, cujus praecepta plurima [affirmativa, cumprimis autem negativa] rituum Zabiorum nt‹qesin continerent, ne mores consimiles idolatriae contagionem inter Israe¨litas tandem importarent.’

Spencer and Maimonides

289

M A I M O N I D E S A N D T H E R A T I O N A L I T Y O F G O D’ S BEHAVIOUR IN REVELATION In the Moreh Nebukim, Maimonides has more things to say on the subject of Hebrew ritual related to revelation and its modus operandi. These chapters constitute Spencer’s source for his third book. The way he uses Maimonides shows differences between the two which help to explain the rationale of Spencer’s work. The principle of ‘normative inversion’ adopted by God to neutralize pagan superstition is explained by Maimonides in terms of divine providence. Revelation does not occur through the communication of abstract principles but is a process of adaptation (an accommodatio) to a given reality in order to overturn it (as in the case of pagan superstition) or modify it (as in the case of the Egyptian rites and practices adopted by the Hebrews). In Moreh Nebukim 3. 21 Maimonides returns to the problem of apparently pointless prescriptions and prohibitions, citing the very interesting argument of those who considered it illegitimate to seek a rational explanation. If, they argued, we were to assume that every law had a discernible purpose, we might conclude that it was enacted not by God but by a wise legislator. It is the absence of such a purpose that obliges us to conclude that the enactment is divine and not that of man, a rational animal. Maimonides’ answer is that this would make man appear more perfect than his creator, and that, by prohibiting acts that cause man no harm, God would be acting pointlessly. The opposite must be true, he concludes, ‘since God always seeks our good’. In the following chapter, he deals with divine providence. He begins with medical matters, showing how the rational workings of the human organs are ordained by divine wisdom and foresight. He uses the example of mammals unable to feed on solid substances immediately after birth—they are provided with milk, the perfect nourishment for their condition. He builds on this example to enter into general considerations on the nature of divine revelation: Many things in our Law are due to something similar to this very governance on the part of Him who governs . . . For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossibile. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed.

Fausto Parente

290

There existed at the time of the revelation on Sinai a world-wide custom—practised also by the Jews, who had spent a long time in Egypt, and had been brought up in this ‘universal cult’—which consisted ‘in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up, in worshipping the latter and in burning incense before them’. God’s wisdom ‘did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed’. Thus God allowed the various forms of worship to remain, ordering that none of them should henceforward be addressed to created objects and imaginary and unreal entities. He ordered the building of a temple, and the offering of sacrifices, but with the proviso that they be made to Him alone: ‘thou shalt worship no other god’ (Exodus 34: 14). Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory of idolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief—namely, the existence and oneness of the deity—was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance and were not repelled because of abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed and than which no other mode of worship was known at that time.38

These passages show Maimonides’ total rationalism: he refuses to accept that the Law contains precepts and prohibitions that do not have a precise reason; he feels the need to explain why the Jews, the recipients of God’s special revelation, should have religious institutions and ceremonial laws which hardly differ from those of other peoples.

M AR SH AM : A S TEP FO RW A R D TOW AR DS HISTORY The last of these problems came to the fore when the question of possible contacts between Israel and neighbouring peoples, not least Egypt, began to be considered in a quasi-historical perspective, subverting the traditional theological thesis that it was other peoples who imitated Israel, and not vice versa. This transition from a theological to a basically historical perspective is already clear in John Marsham’s Chronicus Canon Aegyptiacus, Ebraicus, Graecus, published in London in 38

Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 32; 525–7 Pines.

Spencer and Maimonides

291

1672.39 This is a chronographic work in which the history of Egypt, Israel, and Greece involves an evaluation of the contacts between the different civilizations, particularly between Egypt and Israel. Marsham quotes Maimonides at length, while not sharing his opinions.40 On the question of sacrifices Marsham writes: ‘The differentiation of cattle and of gender, and the rationale of bodily defects became part of the Hebrew religion after the exodus from Egypt. Nor was Moses the first to institute sacrifices, he merely prescribed ways of performing them’41—i.e. after the departure from Egypt Mosaic Law accepted sacrifices as a fact and merely prescribed what animals were to be chosen and that they should be whole (tamim) and male (Exodus 12: 5). As to the fact that the immediate purpose of various commandments and prohibitions was less than clear, he writes: ‘The law prescribes many things and prohibits many. Moses is silent on the causes. This baffles the mind, unless it is permissible to have recourse to the earliest customs.’42 After citing Maimonides, according to whom there is no known reason why hyssop twigs should be used for sprinkling the lintel and the sideposts of doors with the blood of the paschal Lamb (Exodus 12: 22),43 he writes: ‘But the Egyptians attribute a purifying effect to hyssop’, with a reference to Porphyry, De abstinentia 4. 6. 9.44 In his Quaestiones conviviales (IV, quaest. 6; 669 f), Plutarch says that the pig was 39 John Marsham, Canon Chronicus Ægyptiacus, Ebraicus, Graecus, et disquisitiones. Liber non Chronologicae tantum, sed et Historicae Antiquitatis reconditissima complexus; Londini primum A. 1672 editus; Deinde in Germania recusus, nunc vero longe emendatior typis expressus . . . (Franequer, 1696) (all references are to this edn.). 40 Marsham, Canon, 202–3: ‘Dicit [sc. Maimonides] gentem Zabiorum implevisse totum Orbem: id est, Superstitiones Aegyptias longe lateque fuisse propagatas’; 162: ‘Zabiorum autem nomine, Aegyptios, maxime Mendesios, intelligere videtur.’ For Marsham, the Sabeans are, in fact, Egyptians. 41 Ibid. 201: ‘Pecudum sexusque discrimen, & vitii corporalis ratio, post exitum ex Aegypto in religionem Ebraicam recepta sunt. Neque Moses primus Sacrificia instituit sed sacrificandi modum praescripsit.’ Marsham corroborates his statement with passages from Jerome, Theodoret, and Chrysostom (these are also cited by Spencer—see n. 49); he also quotes Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 32. 42 Marsham, Canon, 212: ‘Multa jubet lex, multa vetat; quorum causas non tradidit Moses. Haeret in his ingenium humanum; nisi ad consuetudines pristinas concedatur 43 Maimonides, Moreh Nebukim 3. 47; 597 Pines. refugium.’ 44 Marsham, Canon, 212. Hyssop, in Hebrew ’ezob, Greek ˇsswpov, is used for puri¯ ficatory sprinkling: Lev. 14: 6, 49, 51–2 (against leprosy); Num. 19: 6, 18 (sacrifice of the red heifer); 1 Kings 4: 33; Ps. 51: 7: ‘Purge me with hyssop’; Mishnah Nega’im 14: 6; Pesahim 9: 5; Parah 3: 10; 11: 6–9; 12: 1, 3, 5, 11. For its purifying power in the pagan ˙ see W. Dittenberger, Sylloge inscriptionum Graecarum, 4th edn., no. 1218, 16 [5th c. world, bc]; Chaeremon, Frag. 10 (reported by Porphyry, loc. cit. in text) 44. 6 Schwyzer; L. Baldensperger and G. M. Crowfoot, ‘Hyssop’, Palestine Exploration Fund (1931), 89–98.

292

Fausto Parente

considered impure by the Jews. But, Marsham observes, in De Iside et Osiride (353 f) he says that this was equally the opinion of Egyptian priests.45 Marsham quotes Philo (De specialibus legibus 1. 5) to the effect that the purpose of circumcision among the Jews was to keep the body clean, and that it was practised for the same reason by Egyptian priests who, in addition, shaved their bodies.46 Marsham’s distance from Maimonides, on whom he draws, will be clear from these few examples. On the question of Egyptian–Jewish relations and the possibility that Jewish religious rites and institutions derive from the Egyptians, he enunciates no general (theological) principles, suggesting that each instance must be considered individually: ‘Moses plerosque Aegyptiorum ritus abrogavit, quosdam immutavit, quosdam pro indifferentibus habuit, quosdam permisit, imo & iussit.’47 Marsham’s Canon was published, as mentioned above, in 1672; Spencer’s De legibus in 1685. So Spencer knew Marsham, but if Marsham had taken one step forward towards history, Spencer remained within the confines of theology.

THE OLD TESTAMENT ANNOUNCES THE NEW: SO CINO ’S OPINIO N ON T HE SUBJECT As stated above, Book 3 of De legibus is composed of eight dissertations on Hebrew rites learnt in Egypt. The first examines the problem in general terms, and it merits some analysis. The origin of these rites, Spencer affirms, is enveloped in mystery; a number of them derived from rules instituted by the patriarchs in an attempt to cope with the difficulty of adoring an invisible god. These rules were few in number, but men, desirous of novelty and inspired by the devil, soon instituted many 45 Marsham, Canon, 213. On the ban of pork and pigs in Egypt, see Herod. 2. 47; Plut. de Iside et Osir. 353 f; Athen. Deipnos. 7. 300 A; Sextus Emp. Pyr. Hypoth. 3. 223. 46 Marsham, Canon, 215–16. Philo states: ‘Secondly, it promotes the cleanliness of the whole body as befits the consecrated order, and therefore the Egyptians carry the practice to a further extreme and have the bodies of their priests shaved. For some substances which need to be cleared away collect and secrete themselves both in the hair and the foreskin’ (translation by F. H. Colson). On circumcision in Egypt, see the Suda s.v. Ywlv (4. 849–50 Adler): ofl d Afig¸ptioi ywlo› l
gontai e nai tout
sti peritetmhm
noi and P. Wendland, ‘Die hellenistischen Zeugnisse u¨ber die a¨gyptische Beschneidung’, Archiv fu¨r Papyrusforschung, 2 (1903), 22–31. 47 Marsham, Canon, 154–5.

Spencer and Maimonides

293

more: hence the devil’s absolute sway over humanity and its lapse into every imaginable kind of wickedness. Seeing this, God decided to intervene and restore the Israelites to the original piety of their fathers, forbidding idolatry by eradicating several pagan practices and superstitions (this is the subject of Book 2) and allowing the Hebrews to continue to observe a reformed version of the rites they had practised in Egypt provided He was their sole object.48 So far Spencer is simply reiterating what Maimonides had written in Moreh Nebukim 3. 32. It was inevitable, however, that they should part company since in the opinion of the Hebrew philosopher, Jewish rites had lost none of their validity even if the destruction of the Temple had made some of them impracticable. Even laws prescribed in order to eradicate a specific idolatrous practice remained valid long after the practice had ceased. For Christians, all ritual laws had been superseded by the coming of Christ, their only significance lying in their representing ‘typus et umbrae rerum futurarum’: i.e. of announcing, like the words of the prophets, Christ’s advent.49 In consequence, accepting or rejecting the prophetic import of a rite radically affected its meaning: in the first case, God’s work is seen as revelation, a typological annunciation of Christ; in the second, it was a providential measure, an accommodatio De legibus, 519–20. The Christian understanding of prophecy distinguishes between prophecy as the announcement of a future event contained in the writings of Old Testament prophets and fulfilled in the New Testament—e.g. Isa. 7: 14 (LXX) / Matt. 1: 23 (the coming of the Emmanuel)—and typological prophecy, the foreshadowing or prefiguration in Old Testament figures and events of New Testament figures and events—e.g. Rom. 5: 14: Adam is the t¸pov of the Adam who is to come, i.e. Christ; Esau and Jacob are not only the sons of Joseph, but also t¸poi of Hebrews and Christians (Augustine, De civ. Dei 16. 42). The Jewish ceremonial laws are interpreted in this sense: the pascal lamb is the t¸pov of Christ par excellence. The school of Antioch (Theodore of Mopsuestia in particular) strongly opposed this kind of interpretation; the Reformers accepted it, although some considered the mystico-typological sense as an ‘accommodatio sensus litteralis ad aliam rem spiritualem’ (Abr. Calov, Systema locorum theologicorum, i (Wittenberg, 1655), 663); the Socinians (see below) and Arminians (Grotius, Limborch) rejected it totally; while Christian Thomasius defined it as ‘atheistis larga ridendi occasio’ (quoted by Diestel, Geschichte [as in n. 6], 477). This anti-typological tendency was widely resisted (see e.g. S. Deyling, De amplitudine sensus biblici non coarctanda, in Observationum sacrarum pars quinta . . . (Leipzig, 1747), 235–47). For Pfaff’s views see Appendix; Diestel, Geschichte, 83 ff.; 131–6; 268 ff.; 377 ff.; 477 ff.; 531 ff.; 699 ff.; 752 ff.; A. Blumenthal, ‘t¸pov und pardeigma’, Hermes, 63 (1928), 391–414; L. Goppelt, Typos: Die typologische Deutung des AT im Neuen (Beitra¨ge zur Fo¨rderung christlicher Theologie, 2/43; Gu¨tersloh, 1939:); R. Bultmann, ‘Ursprung und Sinn der Typologie als hermeneutischer Methode’, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 75 (1950), 205–12 ¼ his Exegetica . . . (Tu¨bingen, 1967), 369–80; Goppelt, in Theologisches Wo¨rterbuch des Neuen Testaments, viii (1965), 246–60, s.v. t¸pov. 48 49

294

Fausto Parente

for the exclusive use of the Hebrews, who were unable to grasp higher truths. Both the ecclesiastical tradition and the Reformers had maintained that the Old Testament announced the New, and that, prophetically or typologically, Christ was prefigured and announced in the Hebrew Scriptures, though a number of theologians stressed the Law’s specific and limited significance, given that its essential purpose was to eradicate idolatry. Eusebius, for example, read the Prophets and the Psalms as the true prophetic core of the Old Testament. Moses’ aim in revising earlier ritual was twofold: not only to restore the Hebrews to the patriarchal virtues, banishing idolatry and curing them of the ‘Egyptian illness’ (Dem. ev. 1. 6; 27. 32 Heikel), but also to prefigure the coming of Christ. In any case, in Dem. ev. 1. 2 (9. 2–3 Heikel) Eusebius gives a decidedly negative reading of Mosaic Law, defining it as an qeloqrhske‹a (literally, ‘self-chosen worship’, ‘superstition’), the term used by Paul (Colossians 2: 23) to indicate the precepts (‘thou shalt not take’, ‘thou shalt not eat’, ‘thou shalt not touch’) that he dismissed as the ‘prescriptions and teachings of men’ (the expression is found in Mark 7: 7 and in Matthew 15: 9). The passage is ambiguous, and it is far from certain that Paul was referring to Hebrew laws, but this is Eusebius’ interpretation, which amounts to a denial of the prophetic value of Hebrew ritual. Spencer quotes this passage together with others from the Church Fathers, medieval and modern theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, who, without denying its prophetic value, interpreted Hebrew law as essentially a ‘cure’ for a primitive people otherwise in danger of returning to idolatrous ways.50 Spencer’s citations are certainly not 50 De legibus, 524–7. Among the Church Fathers, he cites Jerome, who, in his Commentarium in Mattheum (ad 5. 34), states that ‘hoc quasi parvulis fuerat lege concessum ut quo modo victimas immolabant Deo ne eas idolis immolarent, sic et jurare permitterentur in Deum, non quo recte hoc facerent, sed quo melius esset Deo id exhibere quam daemonibus’ (ed. D. Hurst and M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum, series Latina, 77; Turnhout, 1969, 32) and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Graecarum affectionum curatio, 7. De sacrificiis, 16, ed. P. Canivet (Sources chre´tiennes, 57; Paris, 1948), 300, according to whom, after their long exile in Egypt, the Hebrews were so steeped in local rites that God, in his desire to purge them, ‘permitted them to make sacrifices, though not of every kind and not to the false gods of Egypt, but to sacrifice solely to himself’. Among medieval authors, Spencer cites William of Auvergne, Liber de legibus, in Opera (Venice, 1591), i. 31, who observes that the offering of shewbread on the table within the Temple (Exod. 25: 30) was reserved for priests alone (the only ones allowed entrance), and was intended to eradicate the use Jeremiah mentions (7: 18 and 44: 19), of making cakes for the ‘queen of heaven’. Among modern commentators he cites Conrad Pellicanus, Commentaria Bibliorum, i (Zurich, 1538), fol. 100r, who, in his note on Exod. 25: 6

Spencer and Maimonides

295

exhaustive but one omission is perhaps significant. In his Introductio ad utilem lectionem librorum Novi Testamenti Johann Ludwig von Wol(l)zogen states: It is obvious that a prudent legislator will prescribe such laws to his people as best suit that people’s nature, customs, and circumstances. One people will require a harsher and stricter, another a more lenient and relaxed rule. Thus God, as a most wise legislator, gave the Israelites such laws as fitted perfectly with that people’s stubborn and servile nature, and the not yet adult age of the world in which they lived.51

Wolzogen was a Socinian, and, as such, an opponent of typological prophecy. Socinus holds that it is impossible to make inferences from the Old Testament to the New, but only from the New to the Old, the latter being a carrier of revelation only in so far as it is cited in the New, and only in the passages cited. Old Testament prophecies refer to the facts and situations of their own time, and it is only New Testament citations of them that allow reference to the advent of Christ.52 Wolzogen means something very different from seemingly analogous statements in other theologians. In his conception, the accommodatio embodied in the laws God gave to the Hebrews through Moses concerns the Hebrew people alone and in no way constitutes a revelation.53 How is one to account for Spencer’s failure to call on an apparent ally? To observes that by the offering of spices for annointing oil ‘non tam Deus delectabatur, quam populus’, but God allowed it ‘ne diffluerent ad idolorum sacrilegia’, and Alfonso Tostado, Opera, vi (Cologne, 1613), 225–6, who, in his commentary on 1 Kings 8 points out that ‘si voluisset Deus arctare eos negando quaedam quae Gentilibus licebant, non sustinerent Judaei legem tam arctam & recederent’. Of Hebrew texts, he quotes Moreh Nebukim 3. 32 and the re´sume´ by Paolo Riccio in De coelesti agricultura (Basle, 1587), 73: ‘Dicit [Maimonides] plurimas leges cerimoniales magis propter hominum hebetudinem & consuetudinem idolatricam traditas esse, quam quod legislator cuperet.’ 51 ‘Notum est, quemvis prudentem legislatorem id spectare, ut populo suo tales praescribat leges, quae naturae eius, moribus ac conditioni quam optime conveniant. Alii severiori & adductiori, alii mitiori ac remissiori imperio indigent. Ita Deus quoque utpote sapientissimus legislator, tales Israe¨litico populo tradidit leges, quae in ipsius contumacem et servilem naturam, & in illam nondum adultam mundi aetatem apprime quadrabant.’ Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum (Irenopoli [ ¼ Amsterdam], IX, post a.D. 1656), 243, in part quoted in L. Diestel, ‘Die socinianische Anschauung vom Alten Testament in ihrer geschichtlichen und theologischen Bedeutung’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r deutsche Theologie, 7 (1862), 709–77 at 755. 52 Diestel, ‘Die socinianische Anschauung’; Geschichte (as in n. 6), 534–9. 53 According to the Socinians, in the Old Testament revelation ‘reducirt sich auf go¨ttliche Mittheilung: der Begriff ist rein formal, der Inhalt der Offenbarung selbst steht mit dem tiefsten Wesen des offenbarenden Gottes in keinem genuinen Zusammenhange’; Diestel, ‘Anschauung’, 745. For Wol(l)zogen, see P. Tschakert in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, xliv (1898), 551–2.

296

Fausto Parente

answer this question, it is necessary to elucidate the theological import of De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus.

SPENCER AND THE SECONDARY PURPOSE OF TH E HEBR EW L AW In the first chapter of Book 1, Spencer distinguishes between a primary and a secondary purpose of Hebrew law. God gave the laws to Israel primarily to wean it from idolatry; secondarily ‘to serve as figurations of certain aspects of the Gospels and of certain moral requirements’.54 De legum rituumque Mosaicorum fine secundario is the title of chapter 11. It merits particular attention in that it allows us to infer Spencer’s basic purpose. His first observation is that the interpretations of ‘allegorist’ exegetes are often absurd and almost always contradictory: ‘many [sc. exegetes], intent on fathoming the mysteries of the Law, stray into divergent pursuits and meanings, treating the Law of Moses like a wax nose, shaping it this way or that, according to the fancies of their minds’.55 It is true that the New Testament contains passages which carry a prophetic reading of Hebrew law, such as, for example, John 1: 17 and 4: 27; Hebrews 8: 5, 9: 24, and 10: 1, but the Talmud equally states that God prescribed the form of the Tabernacle as an image of ‘higher things’.56 A number of Church fathers, such as Origenes and Epiphanius, similarly affirmed that Hebrew ritual was but the figuration and image of a future reality, and modern theologians have followed suit to excess, ‘reading frigid and jejune allegories into the smallest points of the Law’.57 Spencer finds further possible indications of a second meaning in Hebrew law in the veil covering Moses’ face (Exodus 34: 33); in the need for a gradual revelation, and in Moses’ ‘Egyptian education’, which 54 De legibus, 21 : ‘ut . . . rebus quibusdam Evangelicis & officiis moralibus, tanquam in imagine repraesentandis, inservirent’. 55 Ibid. 179: ‘plerique vero, Legis mysteriis indagandis occupati, in studia sensusque discrepantes abeunt, legem Mosaicam tamquam nasum cereum, in hanc vel illam formam, pro varia cerebri sui figura, convertentes’. 56 Ibid. 180. The indication Berakhot, 5 in fine is wrong: see Exodus Rabbah 35: 6 (on Exod. 26: 15); Num. R. 12.13 (on Num. 7: 1). 57 Ibid. 181: ‘Quaslibet pene Legis apiculas ad allegorias frigidas & exangues trahere solent, & ad omnia Mosis verba et instituta accedere, certi mysteria vel invenire vel facere.’

Spencer and Maimonides

297

Philo mentions.58 On this last, Spencer writes: ‘God conveyed in the Law many things enveloped in types and figures, perhaps in order to adapt the Law to Moses’ own mind and education’:59 a conclusion indirectly endorsed not only by Philo, but by the frequent observation of various commentators that the Holy Spirit, speaking through the prophets, ‘accommodated its outpourings very much to their individual minds, customs, and functions’.60 It is thus possible to maintain (quidni itaque credamus) that in making his revelation to Moses and in electing him as his prophet, God took into account Moses’ ‘Egyptian education’, especially his acquaintance with hieroglyphics, which would enable him to record the Law as an encoding of higher truths. In antiquity, Spencer observes, ‘hardly any precepts of religion, politics, or philosophy presented themselves openly; important matters were, in one way or another, veiled’.61 Thus the Hebrew idea of the secret significance of the law was common to the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and even the Greeks, as is affirmed e.g. by Francesco Patrizi.62 If we accept that an ulterior truth is encoded in Hebrew law, it is logical to ask which laws encode what higher truths. But the interpretations offered by the ‘allegorists’ are so many and so discordant, Spencer concludes, that they can only be the product of less than sound minds.63 However, he goes on, it is easy to object that allegories in the New Testament, such as the tripartite division of the Temple in the image of 58 Ibid. 182. Philo, De vita Mosis, 1. 23: ‘These [the Egyptian priests] further instructed him [sc. Moses] in the philosophy conveyed in symbols as displayed in the socalled holy inscriptions and in the regard paid to animals, to which they even pay divine honours’ (trans. F. H. Colson). This is the only reference to an initiation of Moses into the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics. All others (Acts 7: 22; Ezekiel the Tragic, 438b; Clement Alexandr. Strom 1. 15) derive from it; Ecclus. 45 says nothing on the matter and there is nothing on it in either Jewish-Hellenistic or Rabbinic literature. 59 De legibus, 182: ‘Deus multa in lege typorum & figurarum tegumentis involuta tradidit, forsan ut lex Mosaica cum ipso Mosis ingenio et educatione consensus coleret.’ 60 Ibid.: ‘afflatum suum ad varia eorum ingenia, mores & officia civilia plurimum accommodasse’. 61 Ibid.: ‘vix ulla religionis, politiae vel philosophiae dogmata apertam gestabant faciem, sed res quaeque praeclarae velo aliquo tegebantur’. 62 Ibid. 184; Francesco Patrizi, Discussionum peripateticarum tomi IV quibus Aristotelicae Philosophiae universa Historia atque Dogmata cum Veterum Placitis collata, eleganter & erudite declarantur (Basle, 1581), t. 3, lib. 1, pp. 293–4: ‘Hunc morem Moses est secutus, cum legum libros solis sacerdotibus, & aperuit et custodiendos commendauit, cum omnia eius scripta figuris ac velaminibus adumbrauit, unde Cabala illa secretissima orta. Hunc eundem morem Prophetae omnes sanctissimi obseruarunt: non nisi sub figuris ac aenigmatibus sunt locuti. Hinc ergo fabulae Orphei ortae sunt, aenigmata, figurae, hinc initio poematis sui profanos ab intelligentia arcet . . . ’ 63 De legibus, 185–7.

298

Fausto Parente

the heavens (Hebrews 8: 5 and 9: 24), belong conceptually to the late Hebrew world (Wisdom 9: 8) which in its turn took them from Greek philosophy, particularly Plato and his theory that all reality is the image of a transcendent archetype. Justin (Dial. cum Tryph. 261) declares everything ordered by Moses to be a prefiguration of all that would be fulfilled in Christ, although Philo, in De fuga et inventione 108, had already affirmed that ‘the High Priest is not a man, but a Divine Word, immune from all unrighteousness whether intentional or unintentional’.64 The chapter, then, as shrewd as it is ironic, offers the following considerations: 1. Spencer never rejects an allegorical interpretation explicitly, but for every argument in favour, offers a counter-argument. 2. The symbolic value of Hebrew rites and institutions as affirmed in the New Testament and the Church Fathers derives, he argues, from a similar interpretative line found in Jewish-Hellenistic writers, particularly Philo, but also Josephus, the Letter of Aristeas, etc. It is the effect of the absorption of elements of Greek philosophy into Hebrew culture. 3. The many contradictions in the more recent allegorists’ interpretations of the Scriptures (many of them arbitrary) are evidence of an unsound mind. 4. The fact that Moses’ ‘Egyptian education’, in particular his knowledge of hieroglyphics, enabled him to encode in the Law higher and secret meanings is taken into account by Spencer only as one indication among several of a possible ‘secondary purpose’ of the Law. 5. The accommodatio by virtue of which the Hebrews could continue to practise rituals they had become used to in Egypt was God’s doing, not Moses’, the latter being merely God’s instrument in bringing it about; consequently it had nothing to do with Moses’ ‘Egyptian education’. This last remark takes us back to Assmann’s study. Moses is its undisputed hero, and, by a kind of metonymous displacement, becomes the hero of Spencer’s De legibus. By isolating and, in my opinion, decontextualizing what little Spencer has to say about Moses, Assmann is able to affirm that, according to Spencer, ‘Moses lernte dieses Prinzip einer doppelten Kodierung von seinen a¨gyptischen Lehrern’ and that 64

Trans. G. H. Whitaker (Loeb; London, 1934).

Spencer and Maimonides

299

‘aus diesem Grund hat Gott ihn zu seinem ersten Propheten erwa¨hlt’.65 Those reading only Assmann might well conclude that Spencer holds the ‘secondary purpose’ of the Law to be connected to the ‘dual codification’ of hieroglyphics, which Moses learnt from his Egyptian masters. One comment of Assmann’s on this point is extremely interesting, and goes a long way towards accounting for the erroneous view of Spencer held by most scholars. Assmann finds Spencer’s position on the ‘secondary purpose of the Law’ ‘nu¨chtern und zuru¨ckhaltend’, but can only explain this coolness with the help of Bayle’s Dictionnaire,66 interpreting it as a rationalist position. This could not be further from the truth. While rationalist currents were undoubtedly present in seventeenth-century England, both among historians (e.g. Marsham) and religious polemicists (the Deists, not least Charles Blount), Spencer is most certainly not of their number. Even if a Socinian in petto, his line of argument is marked by extreme prudence—for cogent reasons. Spencer was a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England (and a pluralist at that). Having subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles according to law, he could not openly express Socinian beliefs.67

ANTITRINITARIANS AND HISTORICAL ENQUIRY IN SUPPORT OF THEOLOGICAL POSITIONS As the Dissertatio praeliminaris prefixed by Pfaff to his edition of Spencer68 shows, contemporary and slightly later critics had fully understood the theological import of the work. I discuss this in the Appendix. Among modern scholars the first to recognize Spencer’s crypto-Socianism was Ludwig Diestel.69 Recently, Martin Mulsow has given substance to the hypothesis by citing a letter of the royal librarian Assmann, Moses (as in n. 10), 116. Ibid. 115 and 304 n. 231: ‘Spencers Spott u¨ber das Allegorisieren entspricht einem allgemeinen Trend zur De-Allegorisierung und zur Wahrnehmung des Gewo¨hnlichen, wo a¨ltere Generationen geheime Konnotationen gesucht hatten, der fu¨r das spa¨te 17. Jahrhundert und besonders fu¨r Pierre Bayle typisch ist, dessen Dictionnaire historique et critique 1697 erschien.’ 67 For an account of Socinianism in England see St. Kot, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); H. J. MacLachlan, 68 Cf. n. 3 above. Socinianism in 17th Century England (Oxford, 1951). 69 Diestel, Geschichte (as in n. 6), 543: ‘Verfehlt ist freilich seine [sc. Spencers] Meinung von der Verwandtschaft der hebr. Riten mit den a¨gyptischen (der indess ja heute die meisten Aegyptologen huldigen), sowie die Zuru¨ckfu¨hrung alles streng Verbotenen auf den Dienst der Zabier. Seinen etwa a¨usserlichen Supranaturalismus 65 66

300

Fausto Parente

in Berlin, Mathurin Veyssie`re La Croze, to Johann Christoph Wolf which offers a specific pointer to Spencer’s sympathies.70 Mulsow reconstructs the web of relationships between the various exponents of English Antitrinitarian thought in the early eighteenth century and shows the importance of Spencer’s work for them. Newton planned a new edition of De legibus, accumulating a great deal of material, partly used by Chappelow in his edition of 1727.71 What Mulsow does not perhaps sufficiently bring out is the fact that, at this time, especially in England, Antitrinitarianism called forth a number of investigations designed to establish historically the truth of certain theological positions. The five volumes of Primitive Christianity Reviv’d, which William Whiston published in 1711 and 1712, were intended to show on the basis of the earliest Christian documents that the doctrine of the Trinity was but an ‘Athanasian forgery’. By virtue of such discoveries, for which he was violently attacked, Whiston believed himself to be an instrument of God for the re-establishment of authentic Christianity.72 In 1726 Samuel Crell published in England, under a pseudonym, a book on the prologue of the Fourth Gospel in which he mantained that John had in fact written not ‘Et Deus erat verbum’, but ‘Et Dei erat Verbum’.73 It is to this kind of historical literature that Spencer’s De legibus belongs. His was not a rationalist investigation, as most modern scholars have thought, but a strictly religious one. Spencer, then, was unwilling to entschuldigt reichlich der theologische Zeitgeist und erkla¨rt die Beru¨hrung mit socianischen Ideen.’ 70 M. Mulsow, ‘Orientalistik im Kontext der sozinianischen und deistischen Debatten um 1700: Spencer, Crell, Locke und Newton’, Scientia Poetica: Jahrbuch fu¨r Geschichte der Literatur und Wissenschaft, 2 (1998), 27–57. The letter, dated 4 Aug. 1718, now at the Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Hamburg (Sup. Epist. Uffenbachi et Wolfiorum, 115, 364) reports what Samuel Crell, grandson of Johann Crell, told him about a visit to Spencer: ‘Cum nuper inter nos familiariter de sectae illius rebus ageremus, non sine stupore audivi narrantem se a Joanne Spencero cum in Anglia esset ut fratrem acceptum fuisse, & cum his verbis valedictoriis dimissum, quae fideliter memoriae mandavi: ‘‘Ego calidis votis causam vestram Deo commendo’’ ’, as quoted by Mulsow, ‘Orienta71 Cf. n. 2 above. listik’, 28 n. 5. 72 Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston containing Memoirs of Several of his Friends also. Written by Himself (London, 1749), 198: ‘In the Proposal whereof to the Christian World, the Providence of God has been pleased to make use of me, as an Instrument, and for my Faithfulness to which Trust all this Hardship has befallen me’; 358: ‘In the Year 1736, I published Athanasian Forgeries, Impositions, and Interpolations, under the title of, A Lover of Truth, and of true Religion’. On Whiston, see J. E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985). 73 Initium Evangelii S. Joannis Apostoli ex Antiquitate Ecclesiastica restitutum, indidemque Nova ratione illustratum. In isto Opere ante omnia probatur, Joannem non scripsisse,

Spencer and Maimonides

301

destroy the idea of revelation by affirming that the Hebrew laws were in fact Egyptian, or by setting Mosaic law against natural law. If he does not give Moses’ Egyptian education as an explanation, it is because he believes it was the action of God, and not of Moses. He wanted to use erudition to prove that the Mosaic laws were dictated to Israel solely to combat idolatry, since, in Wolzogen’s words, he believed ‘among the many errors that have crept into the Christian religion, not the least is the failure to understand and expound correctly the difference between the Old and the New Covenant or between the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the two are confused with one another, so that it is almost impossible to know whether Christians should be called Jews, or Jews Christians’.74 Appendix: Pfaff on Spencer The judgement of Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff on John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus is expounded in his De recta theologiae typicae conformatione (1727) and in the Dissertatio praeliminaris prefixed to the 1732 edition of Spencer. Between 1723 and 1729 Pfaff, at that time professor of theology and chancellor of the university in Tu¨bingen, published three commentationes academicae on the theological problems involved in the relationship between the Old and the New Testament. The first is concerned with typology (De recta theologiae typicae conformatione, Tu¨bingen, 1723), the second with prophecy (De recta theologiae propheticae conformatione, Tu¨bingen, 1728), the third with allegory and parable, analysing at length the use of the latter in both Testaments (De recta theologiae parabolicae et allegoricae conformatione, Tu¨bingen, 1729). It is the first of the three that is relevant to our purpose. Pfaff made a reputation for himself by his learning and his balanced views. A moderately rationalist Lutheran with a tincture of pietism, he worked for a rapprochement between Lutherans and Calvinists. The views expressed in the treatise on typology reflect this. The commentatio is divided into two chapters: Et Deus erat verbum, sed, Et Dei erat Verbum. Tum etiam tota 18. prima eius Evangelii commata, & alia multa dicta Scripturae S. illustrantur: & non pauca antiquorum Ecclesiasticorum ac Hereticorum loca ventilantur ac emendantur. Per L.M. Artemonium Anno Domini 1726. 74 ‘Inter plurimos errores qui in Christianam religionem irrepserunt, haud exiguus est, quod discrimen inter Vetus ac Novum Foedus seu inter legem Mosis et Evangelium Jesu Christi non recte intelligatur et explicetur, sed utraque ita confundantur, ut paene sciri nequeat, Christianine Judaei an Judaei Christiani dicendi sint.’ Joh. Lud. Wolzogen, Introductio, Bibl. Fratr. Pol. IX, 1, quoted by Diestel, Anschauung (as in n. 51), 747 n. 1.

302

Fausto Parente

primum idque theticum [qetikv expounding the various arguments]; secundum idque polemicum [expounding the refutations]. The second chapter opens with a programmatic statement: We suggested above that, in typological theology, Scylla should be avoided, as well as Charybdis. We prefer the middle way, which is the royal way. Types should not be multiplied beyond reason, but neither should they be removed altogether. The extremes of excess and deficiency should be avoided. Theologians who follow Jo[hannes] Coccejus are said to sin by excess, whereas deficiency is the mark of Socinians, Remonstrants, Marsham, Spencer, Joncourt, Poiret.75

But not even the Socinians, Pfaff observes, reject typology entirely, as Spencer maintains, since Socinus himself considers that the high priest was a t¸pov of Christ. Among the Remonstrants, Grotius, Episcopius, and Limborg recognize the existence of t¸poi, though they limit them to instances of explicit enunciation (‘qui kat r
75 ‘Supra innuimus, in Theologia Typica vitandam esse Scyllam, vitandam & Charybdin. Media hic via nobis placet, quae regia est. Non cumulandi praeter rem typi sunt, ast nec tollendi plane. Fugienda igitur hic sunt duo extrema, excessus & defectus. Ajunt in excessu peccare Theologos illos, qui Jo. Coccejum sequuntur, in defectu peccare autem Socinianos, Remonstrantes, Marshamum, Spencerum, Joncourtium, Poiretum’ 76 Pp. 28–9. (pp. 19–20). 77 ‘Ritus & instituta quaedam legalia mysteriis adumbrandis inserviisse & instituta Mosaica skiagraf‹an, umbram evanidam Evangelii & lineas quasdam rudiores bonorum caelestium exhibuisse . . . ’ (pp. 29–30). 78 ‘Cur nullibi istos typos, quos statuere videtur, explicat? . . . Cur rationem sacrificiorum typicam haud explanat?’ (p. 30). 79 ‘Neque enim, si excessum saltem in typicis reprehendat, nos refragaremur. Sed, ut hoc faceret, non necessarium erat, tantam typorum paucitatem fingere atque dicere, significationem typicam legum ceremonialium finem saltem secundariam fuisse’ (p. 30).

Spencer and Maimonides

303

Thus Pfaff sees Spencer as admitting the possibility, in a limited number of cases, of Hebrew ceremonial laws ‘foreshadowing’ higher truths, if only as a secondary function, but is then surprised to find that Spencer never actually discusses this function. Pfaff ’s surprise stems from the fact that, like many after him, he does not realize that, in chapter 11 of book 1, De legum rituumque Mosaicarum fine secundario, Spencer notes the existence of arguments in support of a ‘secondary purpose’ of the Mosaic law but does not himself assert the existence of such a purpose. Pfaff ’s observation that Spencer never enters into the subject confirms this. The attacks against Spencer centred on the thesis of the Egyptian derivation of the ceremonial laws without, however, the theological consequences of this being drawn. Pfaff does examine the matter in its theological aspect but, again, the implications of his analysis remain unstated. This cannot be said of the Dissertatio praeliminaris which Pfaff wrote for his edition of De legibus. The fact that he decided to bring Spencer’s work again to the attention of the learned public shows his high regard for its erudition but not for its doctrine, which the Dissertatio condemns in a way that, as I have suggested, the earlier commentatio does not. Spencer’s thesis about the Egyptian derivation of Hebrew ritual laws, Pfaff now says, is logically at fault. ‘In regulas logicas peccaverit, qui sic argumentari sustinuerit.’80 Pfaff does not, be it said, suggest, as most of Spencer’s other critics do, that the contrary is true, i.e. that it is the Egyptians who took their rites from the Hebrews. Without specific grounds nothing can be said about the matter. Parallels between the rites of various peoples can be coincidental,81 though this is not the case for the Hebrews since God commanded them, on pain of excommunication, to reject Egyptian rites. God did not adapt the Hebrew cult to the cults of the Gentiles: he ordained it in opposition to such cults.82 It is Spencer’s position on this that has provoked the many confutations that Pfaff cites, argument by argument, as he also cites the writings of those ‘whose own studies have received no little light by drawing on Spencer’.83 Spencer’s logic is also at fault in another respect. If, as Spencer seems to admit, at least in theory and in a limited number of cases, the Hebrew ritual laws foreshadow higher truths, this can certainly not be, as he affirms, their

80

sig. c 1v. ‘In affines ritus diversi labi possunt populi, fortunaˆ et casu. Nulla hic sine proprioribus rationibus conclusio manere potest ritus consimiles hos ab illis, vel ab his illos esse mutuatos’ (ibid.). 82 ‘Non ad imitanda gentium sacra, quod imprimum et profanum dictu, sed potius ritum eundem aliter inflexum suo adaptavit cultui ut cultui gentium illum opponerent’ (c 1r). 83 ‘argumentis a Spencero evolutis suis quoque studiis lucem haud vanam affundere’ (c 1v). 81

304

Fausto Parente

‘secondary purpose’.84 This much Pfaff had said in the commentatio on typical (or typological) theology. Here he goes a step further and claims that the derivation of Hebrew rites from the Egyptian and the reference in every law to an idolatrous practice which it is designed to eliminate, serves to undermine the credibility of a possible typological reference in these rites and laws. Pfaff draws this conclusion in connection with what was considered the typological prophecy par excellence: the slaughter of the paschal lamb as a prefiguration of the death of Christ. ‘Spencer’s error on the slaughter of the paschal lamb which, with the help of some extravagant hypotheses, he accounts for solely in terms of an opposition to the rites of the Sabians, in order the better to undermine the typological reference, has been confuted by [Johannes] Meyer in De origine et causis festorum . . . etc.’85 Thus, according to Pfaff, Spencer’s intention is to undermine (‘enervare’) the credibility of all typological interpretation: not only does he dismiss it as ‘frigid’ but contends against it, without, however, explicitly stating his position in the matter. Nonetheless, the De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus belongs to a particular theological current, which Pfaff, as he recalls here, had spoken about in the ‘Theologia typica’: ‘One can compare what has already been said against Spencer in. . . . De recta theologiae typicae conformatione cap. I par. 3 and cap. II par. 5 ff., where the discussion is about Socinians, Remonstrants, Thomasius, Joncourt and Poiret, i.e. those who have sounded the same flute as Spencer.’86 This was a current which was moving towards Socinianism, and which gained a wide footing in English intellectual circles in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. 84 ‘Ast nec recte quoque ponuntur, quae de finibus istis legum ritualium, primario et secundario dicuntur. Neque enim ratio harum legum mystica et typica secundaria saltem fuit’ (c 2r). 85 ‘Errorem Spenceri de Paschate, quod totum ritibus Zabiorum oppositum esse miris conjecturis conijcit ut rationem typicam eo magis enervaret, refutarunt Meyerus de origine et causis festorum etc.’ (d 1v). 86 ‘eandem cum Spencero tibiam inflantes’ (d 1r).

9 Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity Jean-Louis Quantin

None of Henry Dodwell’s contemporaries would have denied that he was extremely learned: indeed he was usually spoken of as ‘the learned Mr Dodwell’. Most would also have granted that he was a deeply religious man: ‘the learned and pious Mr Dodwell’ is also a well-attested phrase. The two traits went together. In many respects Dodwell’s life and work could be considered exemplary of the close association between scholarship and religion that is characteristic of the confessional age.1 When he died in 1711, however, after having propounded so many Unless otherwise indicated, manuscripts quoted are at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Like all who have worked there, I am indebted to the staff of Duke Humfrey for constant and efficient help. I should also like to thank the Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford, for permission to quote from manuscripts in their library. I am grateful to my co-editor, Christopher Ligota, for stylistic improvements. Dates are old style throughout, but the year has been deemed to begin on 1 January. Abbreviations for patristic collections and reference works are those of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1997). 1 There is no satisfactory account of Dodwell’s career. Canon J. H. Overton’s summaries in his The Nonjurors: Their Lives, Principles and Writings (London, 1902) and in the old DNB, xv. 179–81, used to be the best available. They have been superseded by T. Harmsen’s entry in the Oxford DNB, xvi. 445–8, which provides accurate biographical data but misses the theological significance of Dodwell’s scholarship. Both Harmsen and Overton are heavily indebted to Francis Brokesby, The Life of Mr Henry Dodwell; with an Account of his Works, and an Abridgment of them that are Published, and of several of his Manuscripts (London, 1715), a useful work by an eyewitness of Dodwell’s last years (Brokesby had been Dodwell’s and his friend Francis Cherry’s non-juring chaplain at Shottesbrooke) but too hagiographical in character to be fully reliable and demonstrably misleading on Dodwell’s early career. As for making sense of Dodwell’s books, some

306

Jean-Louis Quantin

theories deemed both extravagant and offensive to Christian orthodoxy, few could share the confidence of Thomas Hearne, his great admirer, that his name ‘will be always mention’d with respect as long as there is any due regard for Religion, Virtue and Learning’.2 Harsh judgements on Dodwell are everywhere to be met with in those years. Just before his death, he had returned to the pale of the Established Church, after having been for years the major thinker and spokesman of the tiny group of nonjurors (the separate communion of those Anglican bishops who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary after the Revolution of 1688–9 and who had therefore been deprived of their sees by the civil power). Members of his new and of his old communion alike condemned him.

T HE S E L F -DEFEA T O F H IGH CH UR C H PATRISTICS? The only point of disagreement was whether the sentence was to be extended to the whole of Dodwell’s career or only to his latest and allegedly most errant writings. Low Churchmen unhesitatingly took the former view. Bishop Burnet lamented that Dodwell’s exalted notions of Church authority, the priesthood, and the sacraments, ‘which have been too much drunk in by the clergy’ and brought many near to ‘popery’ and away from Reformed principles, had actually fostered violent anticlericalism as a reaction.3 A few months before Dodwell’s death, the bishop told him bluntly: ‘I would rather wish that I could neither read nor write, than to have read or writ to such Purposes, as you have been pursuing now above 30 Years.’4 High Churchmen and nonjurors tended to be more discriminating, but their overall conclusion was hardly more lenient. After Dodwell’s death, the nonjuror Hilkiah Bedford commented tersely on the loss to Religion and Learning: ‘I cannot forbear considered at the time that it was above Brokesby’s abilities (see Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv (Oxford, 1898), 386 and 423; D. A. Brunton’s valuable entry on Brokesby in the Oxford DNB is more generous). 2 Thomas Hearne, The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary. Published from the Original Manuscript in the Bodleian Library, v (Oxford, 1711), 109. 3 Bishop Burnet’s History of his own Time (Oxford, 1833), vi. 194. 4 Gilbert Burnet to Henry Dodwell, no date (c. Feb. 1711), in Four Letters which pass’d between the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Sarum and Mr Henry Dodwell, Printed from the Originals (London, 1713), 19.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

307

thinking that it had been better for both, and more for his own reputation, that they had suffered that loss some years since.’5 For the great majority, the last straw had been Dodwell’s view, propounded in his Epistolary Discourse of 1706 and buttressed with an array of patristic testimonies, that immortality did not belong naturally to the soul but was preternaturally conferred on it by God, either as a reward for members of the Church, or to make it possible to damn eternally those who had refused to join it.6 The theory caused an outcry and most of Dodwell’s friends deserted him.7 Even his great admirer Brokesby was embarrassed and tried to say as little as possible about the whole affair in his biography.8 Dodwell had at last (none too soon in the view of some old opponents) irretrievably destroyed his reputation.9 That new outrage made people remember all the other blows he had previously dealt to orthodox religion. In 1706 Oxford was reminded by a University preacher, Richard Smalbroke, that Dodwell had made uncertain the Canon of Scripture in his Dissertationes in Irenaeum (in which he declared that apocryphal gospels had had equal currency with the present canonical ones up to the beginning of the second century), that he had considerably reduced the number of martyrs in his Dissertationes Cyprianicae, thereby taking away ‘one of the greatest Confirmations of the Christian Religion’, and that in his Paraenesis he had made ‘some dangerous Concessions about Episcopacy’ (which, in its Bedford to Hearne, 19 June [1711] (MS Rawl. Lett. 2, fo. 346r ). Henry Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse, Proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal; but Immortalized Actually by the Pleasure of God, to Punishment; or, to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal Spirit. Wherein is Proved, that None have the Power of Giving this Divine Immortalizing Spirit, since the Apostles, but only the Bishops (London, 1706). 7 See Dodwell’s own complaint on that score, The Scripture Account of the Eternal Rewards or Punishments of all that hear of the Gospel, without an Immortality necessarily resulting from the Nature of the Souls themselves that are concerned in those Rewards or Punishments (London, 1708), 291. 8 Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 502 and sig. 2O1r. 9 See the gloating comments of Edmund Chishull, A Charge of Heresy, Maintained against Mr Dodwel’s late Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Mortality of the Soul. By Way of Address to the Clergy of the Church of England. Laying open his Opposition to the receiv’d Creeds, and his Falsification of all Sacred and Profane Antiquity (London, 1706), 2–3: ‘I ever thought that his dark, abstruse, unintelligible way of Reasoning, was an Argument of a very unsound Judgment: I was indeed, always of Opinion, that whenever he should desert his wonted course of heaping up Chronological matters, sometimes to good, sometimes to bad purposes, and sometimes to no purpose at all; That he would then make a Discovery wherein his great strength lay: and convince the World, that he had a larger Talent of Memory and Imagination, than of the nobler Faculties of the Mind.’ 5 6

308

Jean-Louis Quantin

ordinary diocesan form, he held to be contemporary with the Canon of the New Testament and to have only been settled at the beginning of the second century).10 One had to confess that ‘sometimes the Errors of Pious Men are capable of doing greater Disservice to Religion, than the most furious Attacks of the inveterate Enemies of common Christianity’.11 Indeed Dodwell’s writings demonstrably provided ammunition to freethinkers and deists. As early as 1699, John Toland translated three pages from the Dissertationes in Irenaeum on the late date of the Canon.12 Throughout the eighteenth century, reference on that point to Dodwell (‘the most learned chronologist of our times’) was standard in anti-Christian writings, both in England and on the Continent.13 Burnet professed to ‘have good Reason to believe’ that Toland’s long quotation ‘fortify’d the Infidelity of the Age with relation to the Canon of the Scripture more than any one thing I know’.14 Dodwell’s writings on the soul were made widely known even on the Continent by reviews in learned periodicals, and his patristic quotations were plundered by irreligious writers.15 The freethinker Anthony Collins also entered the controversy and used Dodwell’s name to publicize his own materialist positions.16 As to the paucity of victims of persecutions in the Roman Empire, Voltaire appealed repeatedly in the 1760s to ‘our learned countryman Dodwell’, as he had his mouthpiece Bolingbroke declare.17 10 Richard Smalbroke, The Doctrine of an Universal Judgment Asserted. In a Sermon Preach’d before the University at St. Mary’s in Oxford, June the 9th 1706. In which the Principles of Mr. Dodwell’s Late Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Natural Mortality of the 11 Ibid. 29. Soul, are Consider’d (London, 1706), 28. 12 [John Toland], Amyntor: or, a Defence of Milton’s Life (London, 1699), 69–78 (includes a translation of Dodwell’s Dissertationes in Irenaeum, 66–8). 13 For examples in England, see [George Reynolds?], A Dissertation: or, Inquiry concerning the Canonical Authority of the Gospel according to Matthew . . . (London, 1732), 11–12; A Defence of the Dissertation or Inquiry concerning the Gospel according to Matthew (London, 1732), 62 and 64. In France, see both ‘clandestine manuscripts’, like ‘Examen critique du Nouveau Testament’, Paris, Bibliothe`que nationale de France (hereafter BNF), MS fr. 13213, pp. 8 and 13, and printed works like [Jean Le´vesque de Burigny?], Examen critique des Apologistes de la Religion chre´tienne, par M. Fre´ret (no pl., 1766), 18, and Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Histoire critique de Je´sus-Christ, ou Analyse raisonne´e des ´evangiles, ed. A. Hunwick (Geneva, 1997), 632. 14 Burnet to Dodwell, no date (c. Feb. 1711), in Four Letters (as in n. 4), 15. 15 See A. Niderst (ed.), L’A ˆ me mate´rielle (Rouen, 1969), 40–1. 16 [Anthony Collins], A Letter to the Learned Mr Henry Dodwell; Containing Some Remarks on a (pretended) Demonstration of the Immateriality and Natural Immortality of the Soul, in Mr Clark’s Answer to his late Epistolary Discourse, etc. (London, 1707). 17 See Voltaire to Pastor Paul Claude Moultou (who had lent him the Dissertationes Cyprianicae), 25 Dec. 1762, in Correspondence, ed. T. Besterman, xxv (Banbury, 1973), D 18057, 358; Traite´ sur la tole´rance, in Complete Works, 56C (Oxford, 2000), 171–2;

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

309

In his Oxford sermon Smalbroke conceded that Dodwell’s earlier writings had served the Restoration Church well against Dissenters and that, even in his later pernicious views, he had been moved all along by his ‘extraordinary zeal’ for the cause of episcopacy. But that cause, he protested, should not be defended by such means nor its triumph ‘founded on the Ruines of the most Important Articles of Religion’.18 A widespread opinion held indeed that Dodwell had only been taking to extreme lengths the principles (episcopacy jure divino, sacerdotalism, the appeal to antiquity) that Archbishop Laud and his followers had done their best to infuse into the Church of England. This was High Church theology self-confuted. In a time of bitter strife within the Church, Low Church divines and bishops were wont to quote Dodwell to expose what they perceived as the Romanizing tendencies of their opponents.19 Whig anticlericals did the same.20 Some thought that the paradoxes of that ‘great Oracle of the High-Flyers’21 exemplified the ‘folly and danger’ of too fervent an admiration for the Church Fathers. ‘Under their Patronages he presents us with some of the most Heterodox Sentiments that this Age hath known.’22 Dodwell’s ‘enthusiasm’, in fact, mirrored that of many of the Fathers themselves. He had especially drawn ‘his wild and extravagant Conceits’ from ‘the Writings of Tertullian, whilst he was a High-Flown Montanist, and of other Fanciful Writers Dictionnaire philosophique, in Complete Works, 35 (Oxford, 1994), 574; L’Examen important de milord Bolingbroke, in Complete Works, 62 (Oxford, 1987), 289 (‘notre savant compatriote Dodwell’). 18 Smalbroke, The Doctrine of an Universal Judgment Asserted (as in n. 10), 29–30. 19 See [John Turner], A Defence of the Doctrine and Pratice of the Church of England, against some Modern Innovations with respect to I. The Supremacy of the Crown. II. The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a Sacrifice. III. Baptism administer’d by Lay-Men Invalid. IV. The Necessity and Authority of Sacerdotal Absolution. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1712), 44–5; Charles Trimnell, A Charge Deliver’d to the Clergy of the Diocess of Norwich. At the Visitation of that Diocess, in the Year 1709 (London, 1710), 20–1; G. Burnet, Two Sermons Preached in the Cathedral Church of Salisbury: The First, on the Fifth of November, Gun-powder-Treason Day; The Second, on the Seventh of November, Being the Thanksgiving-Day: In the Year 1710 (London, 1710), 23. 20 See [Ambrose Philips, ed.], The Free-Thinker, no. 40, 8 Aug. 1717. 21 John Edwards, ‘A Discourse of Episcopacy’, in Remains of John Edwards, D.D. sometimes Fellow of St. John’s College in Cambridge (London, 1731), 220. 22 J. Edwards, ‘Patrologia: or, a Discourse concerning the Primitive Fathers and Antient Writers of the Christian Church. Designed to undeceive Those who have entertained wrong Apprehensions concerning Them and their Writings’, ibid. 113. Edwards had already made this point in a milder way, and without naming Dodwell, in A Free Discourse concerning Truth and Error, especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701), 235 and 379.

310

Jean-Louis Quantin

among the Ancients’.23 The Bible alone was definitely the religion of Protestants. The prestige attached to learning had long shielded Dodwell; in 1689, for example, after he had spoken against the Revolution in a public place in London, ‘a gentleman threatned to bring him into danger were it not for his learning’.24 It was unavoidable, though, in the age of the battle of the books, that his vagaries should eventually bring into disrepute, not only the Fathers, but also patristic scholarship. The post-Cartesian contempt for antiquarian learning is very visible in the fierce attack launched on Dodwell in 1706 by a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Edmund Chishull. According to Chishull, Dodwell belonged to ‘that lower Class of Learned Men, who are indeed fitted for the collecting of Materials, but are unqualified to judge rightly of, and to reason upon what they shall collect’, and who have ‘a larger Talent of Memory and Imagination, than of the nobler Faculties of the Mind’.25 John Edwards (who was a staunch champion of the moderns against the ancients) ridiculed Dodwell’s stores of learning and dearth of judgement.26 Another opponent commented ironically on his ‘Solitary, Recluse, Monkish Life’ among his books.27 Even Dodwell’s former friends among the nonjurors, fond as they 23 J. Edwards, The Preacher. The Third Part. Containing Farther Rules and Advices, for the Right Discharging of the Sacred Office of Preaching. With Animadversions on some Passages in the Book Entituled, The Whole Duty of Man, and in the late Writings of Dr Hickes, Dr Nichols, Mr Bennet, Mr Clark, and Mr Dodwell (London, 1709), p. v. 24 Anthony Wood, Life and Times, ed. A. Clark, iii (Oxford Historical Society; Oxford, 1894), 309. 25 Chishull, A Charge of Heresy, Maintained against Mr Dodwell (as in n. 9), sig. A3v and pp. 2–3. The same idea is more mildly expressed in Samuel Clarke, A Letter to Mr Dodwell; Wherein all the Arguments in his Epistolary Discourse against the Immortality of the Soul are particularly answered, and the Judgment of the Fathers concerning that Matter truly represented (London, 1706), 2. 26 J. Edwards, Some New Discoveries of the uncertainty, deficiency, and corruptions of human knowledge and learning. With particular Instances in Grammar and the Tongues, Poetry, Criticism, History and Antiquity, Chronology, Philosophy, Medics, Polity, Mathematics, Rabinical Learning; and more especially in the study of Theology (as it is consider’d as an Art or Science): With Large Remarks and Animadversions, occasion’d by the late Writings of some Divines, relating to the last (London, 1714), 142–4. 27 John Turner, Justice done to Human Souls, in a short view of Mr Dodwell’s late Book, Entitul’d, An Epistolary Discourse; Proving from the Scriptures and the first Fathers, that the Soul is a Principle Naturally Mortal, etc. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1706), 104. See also in the same vein Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of my own life, with some Reflections on the times I have lived in (1671–1731) (London, 1829), 281–3 (‘as great a master of the historical part of learning as most men’, ‘no great reasoner’).

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

311

usually were of scholarship, had recourse to similar disparagement after he had deserted them.28 This line of criticism came to a climax in the nineteenth century when Macaulay, in the course of his serial execution of the nonjurors, depicted Dodwell as one who ‘had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seem to have been written in a madhouse.’29 Dodwell’s career, it seems, was not only the self-confutation of High Church theology, it should also be interpreted as an instance of that ‘defeat of scholarship’ that the beginning of the eighteenth century is often said to have witnessed. Was not his very last writing, which he left uncompleted at his death, a dissertation on Dr Woodward’s shield, that target of the wits and apt symbol, in their eyes, of the ‘false taste in learning’?30

DODWEL L A ND OXF ORD PATRISTIC SC HOLARSH IP A full reconstruction of Dodwell’s theological system would require much more than a single article, but it may be worthwhile to examine whether he did indeed exemplify the self-defeat of confessional scholarship. His life and works certainly illustrate in many respects the combination of fierce high churchmanship and deep patristic learning which had been first promoted by Laud, and which was eagerly pursued in the Restoration Church, more particularly at Oxford. Dodwell was admittedly not trained in England. He was Anglo-Irish, and his oscillation between England and Ireland inevitably reminds one 28 See [Henry Gandy], A Conference between Gerontius and Junius. In which Mr Dodwell’s Case in View, and Case now in Fact are consider’d (London, 1711), 2 (‘others, who have not read so much as you have done, but have well digested what they have read’); [Francis Lee], Memoirs of the Life of Mr John Kettlewell; Sometime Fellow of Lincoln College in Oxford, and Vicar of Coles-Hill in Warwickshire, in the Diocess of Litchfield. Wherein is contained some Account of the Transactions of his Time. Compiled from the Collections of Dr George Hickes, and Robert Nelson, Esq; With several Original Papers (London, 1718), 318 (‘conversing with few but Scholars, and Studying Books more than Men’). 29 T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (London, 1914), iv. 1724. 30 Henry Dodwell, De Parma equestri Woodwardiana Dissertatio, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1713). See J. M. Levine, Dr Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley, 1977), esp. 200–37.

312

Jean-Louis Quantin

of that model of Anglo-Irish ambiguity, Jonathan Swift. Part of his family on his mother’s side was Roman Catholic, notably his uncle, Sir Henry Slingsby, whose son Dodwell converted to the Established Church, at the price of a family break.31 His formative years, however, were even more conducive than an Oxford education to utter loyalty to the Church of England. He was born in Dublin in October 1641, at the time of the Irish rebellion, an event which was to prove so durably traumatic in Irish Protestant consciousness.32 He was sent to school in England but returned subsequently to Ireland, and enrolled at Trinity College Dublin in September 1655, when Cromwell’s power was at its height. He became a fellow of the college in 1662, under Charles II.33 Thus he had ample time to meditate, first on the destruction of the episcopal Church during the Interregnum and then, after the Restoration, on its structural frailty in Ireland, as a minority establishment confronted both by Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. But it was in England that Dodwell passed the greater part of his life. In 1666, after resigning his Dublin fellowship, he stayed for a time in Oxford and acquired his first connections in the university.34 He continued to cultivate them after he had returned to Dublin (where he was apparently allowed to keep his rooms in college). He contributed from there to John Fell’s edition of the New Testament, sending collations of two Trinity manuscripts.35 In 1672, he published two letters of advice for students of divinity in which he exhorted them to study the ‘Fathers of the first and purest Centuries, . . . before the Empire turned William Lloyd to Archbishop Sancroft, 15 June 1686 (MS Tanner 30, fo. 61r ). See T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641–1685’, Past and Present, no. 127 (May 1990), 39–83. 33 G. D. Burtchaell and T. U. Sadleir, Alumni Dublinenses (Dublin, 1935), s.v. 34 The date is provided by Anthony Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (London, 1820), ii, col. 404 (Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 38, mentions this first English trip without assigning any date to it). Dodwell also met Thomas Barlow, Provost of Queen’s College (his first letter to Barlow, 26 Feb. 1671, Queen’s, MS 279, fo. 177r, thanks him ‘for your favours to me, during my residence at Oxford’) and Edward Bernard, Savilian professor of astronomy and one of Fell’s trusted collaborators (see Dodwell’s Dublin letters to Bernard, dated from 1 June 1670 to 12 July 1673, MS Smith 45, pp. 1–13). According to Brokesby, Life of Dodwell, 38, he also got acquainted then with George Hickes. 35 Dodwell’s letters of that period are regularly addressed from Trinity. His first letter to Thomas Smith, whom he had met at Oxford, written ‘after my return to our Colledg’, is dated 23 May 1667 (MS Smith 49, pp. 43–5). For his assistance to Fell, see Novi Testamenti Libri Omnes. Accesserunt Parallela Scripturae Loca, nec non Variantes Lectiones ex plus 100 MSS. Codicibus, et Antiquis Versionibus Collectae (Oxford, 1675), sig.  4r–v. The intermediary between Fell and Dodwell was Edward Bernard: see two letters of Dodwell to Bernard, 30 Apr. and 12 July 1673, MS Smith 45, pp. 8 and 13. 31 32

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

313

Christian’.36 To make such a study easier he added a catalogue with brief critical notations and advice as to the best editions.37 The work must have been thought useful since it was twice reprinted in London, in 1680 and 1691. Dodwell settled permanently in England in 1674.38 There is no evidence that he had to leave Dublin because he had become in any way undesirable. He appears on the contrary to have been highly considered by his contemporaries at Trinity and remained on friendly terms with many of them, including several who became bishops in the Church of Ireland, long after he had departed. In 1682 there was even quite a serious project to get him back to Trinity as Provost, although this would have been contrary to the statutes.39 Once in England, Dodwell developed a close friendship with Fell’s nephew William Lloyd, first a canon of Salisbury and then, in 1680, bishop of St Asaph.40 Dodwell and Lloyd helped with Fell’s edition of Cyprian, going to Salisbury in 1676 to collate a manuscript in the cathedral library.41 The Cyprian, eventually published in 1682, was a masterpiece of Oxford patristic scholarship, with the collateral aim of exalting the restored order in Church and State.42 Fell was eager to point 36 Henry Dodwell, Two Letters of advice. I. For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational (Dublin, 1672), 41. 37 ‘A Catalogue of the writings of such Christian Authors as flourished before the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity’, ibid. 135–61. 38 Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 38. 39 See letter of Anthony Dopping, bishop of Mead, to Dodwell, 24 Mar. 1682, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 50r: ‘I have written to the Duke of Ormond to recommend you to his Majesty for the Provostship of our College.’ The post was soon to be vacant as a result of Provost Narcissus Marsh’s having been appointed bishop of Ferns (A. R. Winnett, Peter Browne Provost, Bishop, Metaphysician (London, 1974), 117–18). A royal dispensation would have been needed since the Laudian statutes specified that the Provost had to be in holy orders and ‘Professor in sacra Theologia, vel ad minimum Baccalauraeus in eadem Facultate’ (Chartae et statuta Collegii Sacrosanctae et Individuae Trinitatis, Reginae Elizabethae, juxta Dublin (Dublin, 1768), 28). 40 A. Tindal Hart, William Lloyd 1627–1717: Bishop, Politician, Author and Prophet (London, 1952), has devoted an appendix, pp. 153–6, to Lloyd’s relations with Dodwell, dealing mainly with the post-1688 period. Their acquaintance dates from 1676. In a letter of 13 Jan., Lloyd tells Dodwell that he looks forward to meeting him soon (MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 72r ). Their friendship soon became close enough for them to live together: see letters of Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 21 Apr. and 1 Aug. 1676, MS Smith 49, pp. 126 and 129. 41 See letter of Daniel Whitby, precentor of Salisbury, to Thomas Smith, 6 July 1676, MS Smith 54, p. 127. 42 Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera Recognita . . . per Joannem Oxoniensem Episcopum. Accedunt Annales Cyprianici, sive Tredecim Annorum, quibus S. Cyprianus inter Christianos versatus est, brevis historia Chronologice delineata per Joannem Cestriensem (Oxford, 1682).

314

Jean-Louis Quantin

out that Papists as well as Presbyterians were ‘innovators’ against the principles of ancient, Cyprianic episcopacy.43 At Fell’s request, Dodwell supplemented the edition with his Dissertationes Cyprianicae.44 The first of these proved that, contrary to the claims of ‘rebellious lay-men and schismatics’, the word ‘clerus’ had always been proper to ‘the sacred order’; the seventh dissertation was devoted to the bishop as ‘the principle of unity’ in each local church and the equivalent of the High Priest of the Old Testament.45 Lloyd thought that the work was ‘excellent good’ and ‘will be of very great use to Religion and learning’.46 It certainly made Dodwell’s name in the international Republic of Letters: although he utterly disagreed with Dodwell’s sacerdotalist theology, Jean Le Clerc felt that ‘there had never been so far anyone among Protestants who could be compared to him in ecclesiastical learning’.47 The longest dissertation, and the one that became the most famous, was the eleventh, ‘on the paucity of martyrs’.48 Dodwell quoted ‘the express testimony of Origen, which I wonder that nobody, to my knowledge, has ever noticed’, that only ‘few’ had died for the faith.49 He See P. Petitmengin, ‘Un monument controverse´, le ‘‘Saint Cyprien’’ de Baluze et Dom Maran (1726)’, Revue d’histoire des textes, 5 (1975), 99–102; R. Beddard, ‘Tory Oxford’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv (Oxford, 1997), 874–5; Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press, i (Oxford, 1975), 113–16. 43 Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera, 108, note : ‘Perinde peccant, utriusque partis Novatores; nimirum qui pro Episcopatu uno, unum in orbe terrarum Episcopum ; et qui nullum volunt.’ 44 Dissertationes Cyprianicae. Ab Henrico Dodwello . . . [Oxford, 1682], printed in folio in order to be bound with Fell’s edition (subsequently reprinted in octavo, Oxford, 1684). See Dodwell’s dedication to Fell, sig. a2r, and Fell’s letter to Dodwell, 22 Aug. 1682, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 55r. 45 ‘Dissertatio Cyprianica I. Ad Epistolam Ordinis Pameliani III. De voce Cleri Sacri Ordinis propria’, in Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), 1–4; ‘Dissertatio Cyprianica VII. Ad epistolam XXVII. De Episcopo Unitatis principio, et S. Petri in Apostolos primatu unitatis exemplari: Et quam solide utrobique argumentetur Cyprianus’, 34–47. 46 Lloyd to Fell, 9 May 1682, London, British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 4274, fo. 38r. 47 Jean Le Clerc to Jacques Lenfant, 21 Jan. 1687, in Epistolario, ed. M. Sina, i (Florence, 1987), no. 122, p. 447: ‘non credo ullum hactenus inter Protestantes vixisse quem illi in Eruditione Ecclesiastica conferre possimus’. 48 ‘Dissertatio Cyprianica XI. Ad Epistolam XXXIV. De Martyrum commemoratione, eaque occasione, de Martyrum paucitate in primaevis Christianorum persecutionibus, deque fide Actorum atque Martyrologiorum’, in Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), 56–90. 49 Ibid. 58: ‘Sed de paucitate primaevorum martyrum disertissimum habemus Origenis testimonium, quod miror hactenus a nemine, quod sciam, esse animadversum.’ See Origen, Contra Celsum, 3. 8 [GCS ii. 209]. On the importance of that text for Dodwell, see letter to Thomas Hearne, 18 Oct. 1709, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 493r.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

315

rejected the martyrologies and other inventions of ‘otiose monks’,50 while asserting that the repudiation of such late legends did not at all affect the glory of the primitive confessors: ‘the extraordinary courage of Christians was the very thing which contained most of the time the fierceness of persecutors’.51 Heterodox as it might seem retrospectively, the theory fitted in with the climate of the Tory reaction in Church and State. Dodwell, who had apparently first developed it in England,52 later claimed that he had propounded it with a practical purpose in mind: ‘in a Prospect of the Succession of King James the Second. I am sure with a Design of advancing, not of undervaluing Martyrdoms.’53 But in 1682, in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, the High Church party did not present martyrdom as the likely fate of English Protestants under a Popish king. They rather exalted non-resistance as the safer course, even humanly speaking, and stressed that the bloodiest persecutions of the heathen emperors had caused far fewer victims than civil wars and revolutions.54 Now Dodwell’s downplaying of the persecutions and his insistence that most of them had not been ordered by the emperors but had been spontaneous outbursts of mob violence implied that, even before Constantine, the relations between Church and crown had been almost harmonious, and that the primitive Christians had been right not to revolt. Fell, a Tory bishop if ever there was one, who was anxious in those years that no occasion should be missed ‘of representing to the nation the detestable effects of sedition and discontent’,55 saw nothing objectionable in Dodwell’s views. Two years earlier, in his edition of 50

‘Dissertatio Cyprianica XI’ (as in n. 44), 58. Ibid. 87: ‘Neque est quod Christianorum gloria quippiam propterea detrahamus, quod pauciores fuerint, quam putant, martyres. Ipsa Christianorum illa monstrosa fortitudo persecutorum fregit plerunque ferociam, ne ultra saevire auderent.’ 52 In his Two Letters of advice (as in n. 36), 49, Dodwell exalted in the most traditional manner the Christians ‘blunting their Executioners Axes, with the multitude of such as, without any enquiry, offered themselves, crowding and thronging to the Catastae, the Ungulae, the stakes and gridirons, and other the most terrible executions that were ever heard of ’. In the letter he sent to Baxter from Trinity College on 26 June 1673, he insisted on the great number of martyrs under Diocletian. See A Reply to Mr Baxter’s Pretended Confutation of a Book Entituled, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, etc. proved Schismatical. To which are added, Three Letters written to him in the Year 1673, concerning the Possibility of Discipline under a Diocesan Government, (which though relating to the Subject of most of his late Books, have never yet been Answered) (London, 1681), Letter II, 238. 53 Dodwell to Burnet, 5 Mar. 1711, in Four Letters (as in n. 4), 28 (original in MS St Edmund Hall 14, pp. 50–1). 54 See J.-L. Quantin, ‘Patristique et politique dans l’Angleterre de la Restauration’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 36 (2000), 415–48. 55 Fell to Sancroft, 26 June 1683, MS Tanner 34, fo. 55v. 51

316

Jean-Louis Quantin

Lactantius’ De mortibus persecutorum, he had himself exposed ‘spurious martyrdoms’.56 The dissertation on the paucity of martyrs is actually said to have been suggested to Dodwell by Bishop Lloyd, whose churchmanship would prove of quite a different stamp after the Glorious Revolution, but who, in those years, displayed much zeal against Dissenters in his diocese.57 An eminent contributor to Fell’s Cyprian was his fellow bishop John Pearson of Chester, who compiled the Annales Cyprianici for the edition. Although one cannot tell exactly how and when Dodwell met Pearson, they were certainly very close in the last years of Pearson’s life.58 After the bishop’s death in 1686, Dodwell edited his posthumous chronological works with additions of his own, thus appearing as his scholarly heir.59 He also gave assistance and encouragement to William Cave, one of his oldest English acquaintances, for his Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria. This sum of patristic scholarship aimed at providing, on a much larger scale, the same services to theologians as Dodwell had done in the catalogue attached to his Two letters of advice. It came out in 1688 and proved very influential as a reference work, even in Roman Catholic Europe.60 After the Dissertationes Cyprianicae Dodwell began to prepare an edition of Irenaeus.61 His interest in that Father was of long standing. 56 Lucii Caecilii Firminiani Lactantii De Mortibus Persecutorum Liber. Accesserunt Passiones SS. Perpetuae et Felicitatis. S. Maximiliani. S. Felicis (Oxford, 1680), unnumbered preface. 57 Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 102–3; Hearne’s preface to Dodwell, De Parma equestri (as in n. 30), p. xv. On Lloyd’s action against Dissent, see J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven and London, 1991), 212. 58 See Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 132–3. In a curious anecdote on Pearson’s dotage just before his death, White Kennett calls Dodwell ‘his great friend and fellow labourer’ (Restituta; or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of old Books in English Literature revived, ed. E. Brydges, i (London, 1814), 53). 59 V. Cl. Johannis Pearsonii, S. T. P. Cestriensis nuper Episcopi, Opera posthuma Chronologica, etc. viz. de serie et successione Primorum Romae Episcoporum dissertationes duae: Quibus praefiguntur Annales Paulini, et Lectiones in Acta Apostolorum. Singula praelo tradidit, edenda curavit et Dissertationis novis Additionibus auxit H. Dodwellus, A. M. Dubliniensis: Cujus etiam accessit de eaˆdem Successione usque ad Annales Cl. Cestriensis Cyprianicos, Dissertatio singularis (London, 1688). 60 See William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria, a Christo nato usque ad saeculum XIV (London, 1688), p. vii. Pirated editions of the work were published in Geneva in 1693, 1705, and 1720. For its circulation in Italy, see Angelo Maria Quirini, Commentarii de rebus [ad se] pertinentibus pars prima (Brescia, 1749), 56 (‘vix alium librum sua illa Historia notiorem esse Florentiae’). On Dodwell’s friendship with Cave, see Dodwell to Smith, 17 Apr. 1675, MS Smith 49, p. 115. 61 On his progress and resources see letter of Lloyd to Pagi, 27 May 1686, BL, Add. MS 21082, fos. 6v–7r.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

317

While at Dublin, he had already made a copy of unpublished Greek fragments which Ussher had transcribed from a manuscript catena on the Acts of the Apostles at New College, Oxford.62 Like many English scholars Dodwell turned for help to Isaac Vossius, who had settled in England to become a canon of Windsor, and who was generous with the resources of his vast library.63 Vossius was able to provide Dodwell with a Latin manuscript of Adversus haereses, of which the latter made a complete collation,64 and also with a list of variant readings from two manuscripts compiled by Josias Mercier, which Dodwell copied (he later passed on his materials to Grabe for the Oxford edition of 1702).65 Fell, who was now ageing and professed to be eager to see the edition published before he died, also put all his resources at Dodwell’s disposal.66 Through the bishop, Dodwell was offered the use of the Arundelianus, now at the British Library, which was then in the library of the Royal Society, although he does not seem to have done any work on it.67 He was especially keen to find further fragments from the lost Greek original,68 and to that purpose Fell activated in vain his networks both 62 The catena, in New College MS 58, was edited by J. A. Cramer, Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum, iii (Oxford, 1844). See pp. 78–9. Ussher had transcribed the fragments (of Adversus haereses, 3. 12) in his copy of Irenaeus, which passed to the library of Trinity College, Dublin. See Dodwell’s letter to Fell, 29 Jan. 1685, BL, Stowe MS 746, fo. 93r. The fragments were first published by Johann Ernst Grabe in his edition, S. Irenaei Episcopi Lugdunensis Contra omnes Haereses libri Quinque (Oxford, 1702), 224–33. Grabe mentioned the catena to Johann Christoph Wolf, who worked on it when in Oxford: see the dissertation which Wolf presided over after his return to Germany, Catenas Patrum graecorum . . . (Wittemberg, 1712), 34–8. 63 A library which Vossius had partly formed by plundering that of his former patron, Queen Christina of Sweden (who admittedly owed him money). See K. A. de Meyı¨er, Paul en Alexandre Petau en de geschiedenis van hun handschriften (voornamelijk op grond van de Petau-handschriften in de Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden) (Leiden, 1947), 130–1, 136–7; F. F. Blok, Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1618–1655 (Groningen, 2000), 459–63 and 480–3. For Vossius’ help to English scholars, see for instance Fell’s preface to his editio princeps of Origen’s De oratione:’Wrig
nouv per› e˝cv s¸ntagma. m
cri to de to crnou n
kdoton (Oxford, 1686), sig. a2r–v. 64 The manuscript is the present Leidensis Vossianus lat. F
33. See K. A. de Meyı ¨er, Petau (as in n. 63), 201–3; id., Codices Vossiani Latini, i (Leiden, 1973), 73–5. 65 See S. Irenaei Contra omnes Haereses (as in n. 62), p. xx. Mercier had originally recorded these readings in the margins of his copy of Erasmus’ edition, now in Leiden Library (see B. Hemmerdinger’s introduction, SC 100, p. 39). 66 See Fell to Dodwell, 20 Mar. 1686, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 58r. 67 Thomas Gale to Fell, 24 Jan. 1685, BL, Add. MS 4275, fo. 230r. The reason for Dodwell’s neglect of that manuscript was probably Gale’s poor opinion of it (‘I have some reason to thinck, that it will help but little’). It was collated by Grabe for the Oxford edition (as in n. 62, p. xx). 68 See Dodwell to Isaac Vossius, 29 Dec. 1687, Amsterdam, UB, RK, III E 10 (6) (copy, MS D’Orville 470, p. 212).

318

Jean-Louis Quantin

in England and abroad.69 Lloyd made similar demands, likewise to no avail, of his correspondents in France.70 John Mill, principal of St Edmund Hall from 1685 and one of Fell’s most trusted collaborators in Oxford, was only marginally more successful, and mainly rediscovered the New College fragments which Dodwell already had.71 On the whole Dodwell had at his disposal all the resources which Grabe later used for his edition. His own design, however, was more ambitious, since he believed that an editor ought to devote notes, not only to the ‘words’ of his author, but to the ‘things’ that we are to learn from the text.72 In Irenaeus’ case (and here again the idea goes back to Dodwell’s time in Dublin) it was essential to sort out the mythologies of the Gnostics confuted by Irenaeus, in order to understand precisely what he and the other Fathers had been aiming at.73 That part of the project was never completed. Overwhelmed by other work, Dodwell eventually decided to publish separately what he had managed to do.74 Vast as it was, the undertaking was not enough to exhaust Dodwell’s energies. He simultaneously embarked on other projects, this time in association with John Mill. One was an edition of all the pieces and fragments which went under the name of Hippolytus of Rome. The idea had been in the air in the Republic of Letters for some years,75 although the task was so difficult that it was only completed by Fabricius in 69 See Fell to Dodwell, 17 Dec. 1684, 20 Mar. 1686, 22 Jan., 4 Feb., 17 Feb. [1685 or 1686], MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fos. 56r, 58r, 63r, 65r, 71r. 70 Lloyd to Pagi, 27 May 1686, BL, Add. MS 21082, fo. 7r and again fo. 28r; Pagi to Lloyd, 7 Aug. and 29 Aug. 1686, fos. 47v and 50r. 71 Mill to Dodwell, 4 Aug. 1689, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 21r; Lloyd to Dodwell, 22 Apr. 1688, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 102r. 72 Dodwell, Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), sig. a2r: ‘Optime Auctoribus a se edendis, optime sibi consulent, optime lectorum illi fastidio, qui cum verborum explicationibus, res etiam putent esse permiscendas.’ 73 See letter of Dodwell to Edward Bernard, 19 June 1671, MS Smith 45, p. 9. Bernard, among so many other things he never completed, had apparently been considering at the time an edition of Irenaeus. Cf. Dodwell’s announcement in his Two Letters of advice (as in n. 36), 141: ‘I hope we may, ere long expect a better Edition [of Irenaeus] from Oxford.’ The sentence was significantly dropped in the second edition (London, 1680), 114. 74 Dodwell to Isaac Vossius, 20 July 1688, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 90r (original draft; copy, MS Cherry 23, pp. 27–9; Amsterdam, UB, RK III E 10 (277) is the letter eventually sent, with some interesting omissions). 75 See E. Hulshoff Pol, ‘Membra disiecta d’un manuscrit d’Anastase le Sinaı ¨te contenant des fragments d’Hippolyte de Rome’, Scriptorium, 6 (1952), 33–8, and letter of Evaldus Rulaeus to Bernard, 9 Apr. 1681, MS Smith 5, p. 288, for projects on the Continent.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

319

1716.76 A breakthrough had been achieved in 1661, when the young Lutheran Marquardus Gudius published in Paris the genuine text of Hippolytus’ treatise On the Antichrist—which had so far been known only in a greatly interpolated version77—but much remained to be done. Fell had considered at one point using some texts of Hippolytus for his ‘New Year book’ (the little volume he used to print every year as a gift to his students at Christ Church and to a few chosen friends) for 1686. He did some preliminary research but soon gave up.78 The initiative of the new undertaking seems to have been Dodwell’s and, thanks to the resources of the Bodleian, the project was well advanced by the beginning of 1688.79 Mill took on the bulk of the textual 76 For sources available in Dodwell’s time, see Se ´bastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Memoires pour servir a` l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers sie`cles, iii (Paris, 1695), 238–49. On the critical problems involved, concerning which there is still no scholarly consensus today, see CPG, no. 1870; V. Saxer, DHGE, 24 (1993), cols. 627–35; M. Simonetti’s reviews of two recent studies, Augustinianum, 43 (2003), 501–20. 77 ‘Ippol¸tou piskpou ka› mrturov pdeixiv per› to $ Anticr‹stou k tØn g‹wn grafØn. Marquardus Gudius ex duobus MSS. codicibus nunc primum in lucem edidit (Paris, 1661) ( ¼ CPG 1872). On this edition, see Leibniz’s letter to Prince Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, 4/14 Aug. 1683, Sa¨mtliche Schriften und Briefe, 1. Reihe, iii (Leipzig, 1938), no. 246, pp. 309–10. It appears to have been quite scarce in England (Fell still had no copy in 1685 and asked Prideaux to buy one for him in London; letter of 27 Jan. 1685, Tanner MS 32, fo. 204r; the only copy today in Bodley must have been acquired at a later date, since it belonged to Guy Patin and then E´tienne Baluze). Dodwell and Mill failed to obtain it through Vossius (see Dodwell to Mill, 14 June 1687, Queen’s College, MS 186, fo. 2v) and had therefore to work on the Paris edition of 1556, which gave the interpolated text (see below, n. 80). Dodwell had no doubt that this De Antichristo of 1556, which had been regularly reprinted in the Bibliothecae Patrum, was spurious (see A Discourse concerning the Use of Incense in Divine Offices. Wherein it is Proved, that that Practice, taken up in the Middle Ages, both by the Eastern and Western Churches, is, notwithstanding, an Innovation from the Doctrine of the first and purest Churches, and the Traditions derived from the Apostles. Serving also to Evince, that even the Consent of those Churches of the Middle Ages, is no certain Argument, that even the Particulars, wherein they are supposed to Consent, were faithfully derived from the Apostles, against the modern Assertors of the Infallibility of Oral Tradition (London, 1711), 100–7). It is a compilation of the genuine De Antichristo and of homilies of Ephrem Syrus, not prior to the 9th c. (CPG 1910). See H. Achelis, ‘Hippolytstudien’, Texte und Untersuchungen, 16/ 4 (Leipzig, 1897), 69–71 and 79. 78 Choosing instead to print Origen’s De oratione when he found out that it had never been published. See his two letters to Humphrey Prideaux, 27 and 29 Jan. 1685, Tanner MS 32, fos. 204r and 206r. It may well be that Fell had also realized the difficulty of the undertaking. He certainly did not get very far in his work on Hippolytus: see letter of Mill to Arthur Charlett, 27 Feb. [no year], MS Rawlinson lett. 108, fo. 94r. 79 On the progress so far, see Mill to Isaac Vossius, 10 Feb. 1688, Amsterdam, UB, RK, III E 10 (2) (copy, MS D’Orville 470, pp. 221–3) and note his precision: ‘Nostra haec, siqua alia amicorum ope comparari poterant, sive genuina, sive etiam spuria, qualia pleraque sunt, ut in vulgus ederem autor erat amicus ille noster [Dodwell].’ On Mill’s notes on Hippolytus, to which Fabricius failed to gain access, see the latter’s

320

Jean-Louis Quantin

work.80 Dodwell introduced him to Vossius, who provided him with fragments of the Commentary on Genesis.81 True to his conviction that ‘things’ ought not to be neglected for ‘words’, Dodwell intended for his part to preface the edition with a dissertation.82 He was well aware of the critical problems involved. At the end of his life, in one of his very last works, he was still complaining that ‘the Name of that Blessed Martyr has been so abused by Impostors, that it is not easy to distinguish what is his’.83 He even had doubts about the famous statue which had been discovered in Rome in 1551 and which all his contemporaries considered a genuine effigy of Hippolytus—it took Margareta Guarducci to demonstrate, two hundred and fifty years after Dodwell, that it was a fabrication by Pirro Ligorio.84 True to his interest in chronological questions, Dodwell was especially anxious to reconstruct the original of Hippolytus’ lost Chronicle and to distinguish it from the homonymous work by the Byzantine Hippolytus Thebanus.85 prefaces to S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Opera, i (Hamburg, 1716), p. v, and ii (Hamburg, 1718), sig.)(1v 80 Collating for instance the 1556 edition of De Antichristo with three Bodleian manuscripts (MS Baroccianius 93, MS Selden 36, MS Cromwell 18). Mill inserted the variant readings in his copy, 8
Rawl. 284, which also includes some notes in Dodwell’s hand. He later transcribed both his notes and Dodwell’s in another copy, which he gave to Grabe (today MS Grabe 26). 81 See Dodwell to Vossius, 24 Sept. and 29 Dec. 1687, Amsterdam, BU, RK, III E 10 (6 and 7) (copies, MS D’Orville 470, pp. 211–12); Mill to Vossius, 7 Feb. and 10 Feb. 1688, Amsterdam, UB, RK, III E 10 (2 and 3) (copies, MS D’Orville 470, pp. 221–3). Mill later communicated the fragments to Grabe: see Georgii Bulli Opera omnia, quibus duo praecipui Catholicae fidei Articuli, de S. Trinitate et justificatione, orthodoxe, perspicue, ac solide explanantur, illustrantur, confirmantur; nunc demum in unum Volumen collecta . . . Subnexa insuper pluribus singulorum Librorum Capitibus prolixa quandoque Annotata Joannis Ernesti Grabe (London, 1703), 103. Mill also found and transcribed, in Queen’s College, MS 189, p. 14, the Greek fragment from Hippolytus’ commentary on the Song of Songs ( ¼ CPG 1871). 82 See Thomas Hearne’s preface to his edition of Walteri Hemingford, Canonici de Gisseburne, Historia de rebus gestis Edvardi I, Edvardi II et Edvardi III (Oxford, 1731), 83 Dodwell, A Discourse concerning the Use of Incense (as in n. 77), 107. p. xxxiii. 84 Ibid.: ‘Nor can I see how that Monument wherein so many of his Matters are recounted, together with his Effigies, could be erected in the Age wherein he suffered.’ It was placed at the time in the entrance to the Vatican Library (where it stands again today): see e.g. Jean Mabillon and Michel Germain, Museum Italicum, i (Paris, 1687), ‘Iter Italicum’, 63. See M. Guarducci, ‘La statua di ‘‘Saint’Ippolito’’ ’, Ricerche su Ippolito, Studia ephem. ‘Augustinianum’, 13 (Rome, 1977), 17–30; A. Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop (Leiden, 1995). For conjectures by Anglican scholars on the list of literary works inscribed on the statue, see William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Historia literaria . . . Pars altera (London, 1698), 45–7. 85 See Dodwell’s letter to Mill, 14 June 1687, Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 186, fo. 2v: ‘I am glad Mr Carter has made such a progress in Hippolytus, and hope that by

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

321

He thought that it had been partly preserved in an anonymous chronicle written under the emperor Alexander Severus.86 The same conclusion was reached independently at the same time by Du Cange: a quite interesting instance of the community of curiosities and methods between Gallican and Anglican scholars.87 The most difficult questions were raised by the work whose title had been preserved on the statue as Apostolical Tradition and whose only version known so far was that of the Apostolical Constitutions, Book 8. Pearson had drawn attention to the variety of texts under the name of Teaching of the Apostles, from which the Apostolical Constitutions had later been compiled with interpolations.88 He had mentioned that there was one ascribed to Hippolytus in the Bodleian89—in the Barocci collection, which Archbishop Laud had secured for the Bodleian Library in 1629 and which had since proved a major resource for English scholars. Patrick Young, who worked extensively on Barocci manuscripts in the 1630s and 1640s, had already discovered that text, Ordinances of the holy Apostles on ordinations through Hippolytus.90 Mill’s rediscovery of it in 1687 was hailed by Bishop Lloyd as sensational in a letter to Dodwell: ‘This cannot be but a very rich Jewell which God seems to have reserved for these times. Never could any thing have come more the assistance of the Anonymus sub Alex. and the Paschal of St Cyprian, and other quotations from the true Hippolytus, there may be krit ria found for retrieving the true Hippolytus’s Chronicon, and detecting the forgeryes of Thebanus.’ Dodwell transcribed himself extracts of Hippolytus Thebanus from a Bodleian manuscript (BL, Add. MS 21078, pp. 193–201; MS St Edmund Hall 19, fos. 21r–23r). In a letter of 20 Dec. 1687 (MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 16r–v), John Edwards also sent him a fragment of Hippolytus Thebanus transcribed from a manuscript in Cambridge University Library. 86 The ‘Collectio Historica Chronographica ex anonymo qui sub Alexandro Severo imperatore vixit’ had first been published by Henricus Canisius, Antiquae lectionis tomus II (Ingolstadt, 1602), 579–600. On its relation to Hippolytus, see Dodwell, ‘Dissertatio singularis’, in Pearson, Opera posthuma Chronologica (as in n. 59), sep. pagination, 200–2. 87 Pasclion seu Chronicon Paschale a mundo condito ad Heraclii Imperatoris Annum vicesimum . . . . cura et studio Caroli Du Fresne, D. Du Cange (Paris, 1688), praefatio pp. xiv–xv and appendix no. IV, 413–21. 88 John Pearson, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (Cambridge, 1672), 60–3. 89 Ibid. 60: ‘didaskal‹a di < Ippol¸tou nondum a quopiam observata, quam in Codice MSo Bibliothecae Oxoniensis latere testamur’. The text (CPG 1741) is to be found in MS Baroccianus 26, no. 15 (see H. O. Coxe, Bodleian Library. Quarto Catalogues. I Greek manuscripts, corrected edn. (Oxford, 1969), col. 38). One recent interpretation of di < Ippol¸tou is that ‘Hippolytus’ had simply become ‘a cipher for traditions’: see Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church (as in n. 84). 90 Young’s partial transcription of MS Baroccianus 26, no. 15, with notes on the text, is in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.2.36, fo. 13r.

322

Jean-Louis Quantin

seasonable unto the world and I doubt not it will be much the more usefull for your Observations.’91 Yet another project related to those Fathers of the first and early second centuries who were soon to be called Apostolic.92 The rediscovery of their genuine writings, after these had for so long been ignored (in the case of Barnabas), or read in a heavily interpolated version (Ignatius), or even supplanted by pure forgeries (Clement of Rome), had been a scholarly event of the first magnitude in the 1630s and 1640s, brought about largely by English scholars. The editiones principes of the epistle of Clement of Rome, of the Greek text of Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, of the Epistle of Barnabas, of the old uninterpolated Latin version of Ignatius’ Epistles and subsequently of their Greek original, of the Martyrdoms of Polycarp and Ignatius had all appeared in just fifteen years, between 1633 and 1647.93 A collected edition was published by Jean-Baptiste Cotelier in Paris in 1672, but it soon became very rare, particularly outside France.94 Dodwell was eager that it should be reprinted. He first tried, in 1685, to entrust the task to a small society for theological studies which had begun to form in Dublin to match the Lloyd to Dodwell, 2 Aug. 1687, MS Eng. lett. c. 29, fo. 99r. See also on this discovery Mill to Vossius, 10 Feb. 1688, Amsterdam, UB, RK, III E 10 (2) (copy, MS D’Orville 470, p. 222); Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 69 (who announces Mill’s edition as forthcoming). 92 The term was apparently introduced by William Wake in his English translation of 1693. See H. J. de Jonge, ‘On the Origins of the Term ‘‘Apostolic Fathers’’ ’, Journal of Theological Studies, ns 29 (1978), 503–5. 93 See Illustrium Ecclesiae Orientalis Scriptorum, qui sanctitate iuxta et eruditione, primo Christi saeculo floruerunt, et apostolis convixerunt, vitae et documenta, ed. Pierre Halloix (Douai, 1633), 525–32 (Polycarp); Clementis ad Corinthios epistola prior, ed. Patrick Young (Oxford, 1633); Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae: Una cum vetere vulgata interpretatione Latina, ex trium manuscriptorum codicum collatione, integritati suae restituta. Accessit et Ignatianarum Epistolarum versio antiqua alia, ex duobus Manuscriptis in Anglia repertis, nunc primum in lucem edita. Quibus praefixa est . . . Iacobi Usserii Archiepiscopi Armachani Dissertatio, ed. James Ussher (Oxford, 1644); < H ferom
nh to g‹ou Barnab postlou pistol kaqolik . Sancti Barnabae Apostoli (ut fertur) epistola catholica. Ab antiquis olim Ecclesiae Patribus, sub eiusdem nomine laudata et usurpata, ed. Hugues Me´nard (Paris, 1645); Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii martyris; quae nunc primum lucem vident ex bibliotheca Florentina. Adduntur S. Ignatii epistolae, quales vulgo circumferuntur. Adhaec S. Barnabae epistola, ed. Isaac Vossius (Amsterdam, 1646); Appendix Ignatiana, ed. James Ussher (London, 1647). 94 H. Hurter, Nomenclator literarius theologiae catholicae, iv, 3rd edn. (Innsbru ¨ ck, 1910), col. 478, declares the edition ‘admodum rara’. In his Two Letters of advice. I. For the Susception of Holy Orders. II. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational. The Second Edition Corrected and Improved (London, 1680), 109, Dodwell mentions that it is difficult to find. 91

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

323

Philosophical Society, and which had turned to him for advice.95 The society, however, did not prosper; its members were afraid of the magnitude of the undertaking, and it achieved next to nothing.96 A new project was then put forward by Mill, apparently on his own initiative and on a rather less ambitious scale. It was not to be a collected and necessarily expensive folio edition like that of Cotelier, but rather a set of ‘separate volumes with all the notes for the use of young students’.97 The aim was to encourage Oxford divinity students to study the Fathers.98 The textual work, and also the task of correcting the Latin translations and of compiling notes (the work was meant to be an editio variorum) was primarily entrusted to Mill.99 Dodwell, however, did his part, collating anew the codex Alexandrinus in the Royal Library for the Prima Clementis.100 The problem with Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas, as opposed to Clement, of course, was that no ancient manuscript was available in England, and Mill and Dodwell (neither of whom seems to have considered a trip to Italy) were reduced to using contemporary transcriptions. Dodwell gained access to both Vossius’ and Philippus Rulaeus’ copies of Polycarp and Barnabas, and eventually rightly recognized that they derived from the same model: a manuscript in the Laurentian library in Florence, where Vossius had worked in 1642 and Rulaeus in 1674.101 Dodwell valued highly the Epistle of Barnabas, 95 See letters of St George Ashe to Dodwell, 1680–5, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fos. 2r–8r. On the Dublin Philosophical Society and the intellectual milieu of Trinity College, see Winnett, Peter Browne (as in n. 39), esp. 115–16. 96 See St George Ashe’s rather unenthusiastic reaction in his letter to Dodwell of 24 Sept. 1685, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 8r (‘I am desired also to inquire in what time it wou’d be expected such a work shou’d be finish’d’). In his letter of 18 Feb. 1686 he explains that ‘severall are engag’d to bring in their observations’ for the edition but ‘I fear my frequent indispositions will not permit me to contribute much towards it’ (fo. 11r ). When the project was eventually taken over by Mill, Ashe told Dodwell that ‘we dare not promise any thing towards the advancement of so usefull a work’ (letter of 29 May 1687, fo. 12r ). 97 Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 15 June 1698, MS Smith 49, p. 157. 98 See letter of Dodwell to Mill, dated 1691, MS St Edmund Hall 32, first, unnumbered, folio. 99 Mill’s materials for the edition are preserved in Queen’s College, MSS 183 (Ignatius’ letters), 184 (Martyrium Ignatii), 186 (Polycarp), 328 (Clement), and in St Edmund Hall, MSS 28–30. 100 Dodwell’s collation is preserved among his collectanea graeca, BL, Add. MS 21081, fos. 114r–116v. 101 See Dodwell to Mill, 14 June 1687, Queen’s College, MS 186, fo. 2v: ‘I have collated Dr Vossius’s MSS of Barnabas with his Menardus [i.e. Me´nard’s editio princeps, as in n. 93] which he was pleased to lend me to Cookham. I believe his first was the same with the Florentine transcribed by Rulaeus and printed by Lemoyn. It had also Polycarp in the beginning continued with Barnabas, and so by the Doctors account one would

324

Jean-Louis Quantin

which, after some hesitation, he eventually recognized for a genuine work of the apostle, a view he developed in a dissertation to be published in the edition.102 He also began and half-finished a ‘paraphrastical commentary’ on the text.103 Dodwell also closely studied two newly discovered ante-Nicene texts, the publications of which had been international scholarly events, the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (printed from Holstenius’ Nachlab in 1663) and Lactantius’ De mortibus persecutorum (published by Baluze in 1679).104 think the other two had, one of the Vaticane, and the other of the Theatines.’ For Vossius’ work on Barnabas, see O. von Gebhardt’s Prolegomena to Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, ed. id. and A. Harnack, 2nd edn., i/2 (Leipzig, 1878), pp. x–xi and xiv; J.-L. Quantin, ‘L’Orthodoxie, la censure et la gloire: La difficile e´dition princeps de l’e´pıˆtre de Barnabe´, de Rome a` Amsterdam (vers 1560–1646)’, in M. Cortesi (ed.), Editiones principes delle opere dei Padri greci e latini (Florence, forthcoming). Dodwell had asked Vossius for his manuscripts of Barnabas, through William Cave, as early as 1678: see Cave’s letter to Vossius, 28 May 1678, Amsterdam, UB, RK, III E 10 (99) (copy, MS D’Orville 470, p. 136). Vossius had actually only one, i.e. his transcription of Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana, MS 7, 21, which he had collated with two Roman manuscripts. It is today Leiden, Cod. Voss. Gr. O. 16, fos. 17r–64r (see K. A. de Meyı¨er, Codices Vossiani Graeci et miscellanei (Leiden, 1955), 219). On Philippus Rulaeus’ work (and depredations) in the Laurentian library, see Hulshoff Pol, ‘Membra disiecta’ (as in n. 75), and K. A. de Meyı¨er, Codices bibliothecae publicae Graeci (Leiden, 1965), 177, 183–5, 191. For his transcription of Laurenziana MS 7, 21, see E´tienne Le Moyne, Varia sacra seu Sylloge variorum opusculorum Graecorum ad rem ecclesiasticam spectantium (Leiden, 1685), i, sig.  2v– 1r. Philippus Rulaeus had died in 1677, and Dodwell must have obtained a copy through Edward Bernard, who was a friend of Philippus’ brother, Evaldus. There is a transcription by Dodwell of Polycarp’s Epistle ‘ex eodem Cod. Florentino e quo edidit Barnabam Cl. Vossium’, in BL, Add. MS 21078, pp. 117–27, and also a collation of Vossius’ edition of the Ignatian Epistles with two Florentine manuscripts, BL, Add. MS 21081, fos. 108v–112r (‘haec a D. Rulaeo D. Bernardus’). 102 Henry Dodwell, ‘Dissertatio. De vero hujus Epistolae, quae Barnabam Auctorem praefert, Auctore Barnabaˆ. Ad Cl. Virum Joannem Millium S.Th. Prof. Aulae SanctEdmondianae Principalem’ [1691], MS St Edmund Hall 32. His opinion had fluctuated: see Two Letters of advice, edn. of 1672 (as in n. 36), 136; edn. of 1680 (as in n. 94), 110; The Third edition Corrected and Improved (London, 1691), 110–11. 103 Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 15 June 1698, MS Smith 49, p. 157 (‘almost to the end of the first part’). This is no doubt the commentary (up to ch. 15) extant in MS St Edmund Hall 31, at the bottom of the page: Dodwell’s manner is easily recognizable and he makes several references, pp. 18, 45, etc., to the Dissertationes in Irenaeum as to his own work; the last part, pp. 147–60, is in his own hand (the remaining in Mill’s, and in some passages, a copyist’s). Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 505, mistakenly states that the paraphrase ‘was never done’. 104 Passio Sanctarum Martyrum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Prodit nunc primum ex MS. Codice Sacri Casinensis Monasterii. Opera et studio Lucae Holstenii Vaticanae Basil. Canon. et Bibliothecae Praefecti. Notis eius Posthumis adiunctis (Rome, 1663) (part of Opuscula tria veterum autorum prolata nunc primum ex Museo Lucae Holstenii); ‘Lucii Caecilii Firmiani Lactantii liber de persecutione, sive de mortibus persecutorum’, in Miscellaneorum liber secundus, hoc est, collectio veterum monumentorum quae hactenus latuerant in variis codicibus ac bibliothecis, ed. E´tienne Baluze (Paris, 1679), 1–46.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

325

The two pieces had been reprinted together by Fell in 1680.105 Dodwell contributed to the new Oxford collected edition of Lactantius in 1684, producing a fifteen-page dissertation, replete with recondite references, to try to make sense of a geographical indication which had so far puzzled interpreters.106 He collated the printed text of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis with a transcription made by Thomas Gale from a manuscript in the Cottonian library.107 Dodwell also did much work on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a text as yet unpublished in its original Greek but preserved in two ancient manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge. Anglican scholars of the late seventeenth century suddenly developed an interest in a text which had long been dismissed as a worthless forgery. Several transcriptions were taken from both manuscripts.108 Thomas Smith was considering a Greek–Latin edition as early as 1686.109 Dodwell took a transcript of the Cambridge manuscript and collated it entirely with the Bodleian one and with Grosseteste’s Latin translation.110 He also compiled a chronological table of the patriarchs and a short dissertation on the puzzling ‘celestial tables’ mentioned in the Testaments. He later gave both texts to Grabe, who published them in 1698 in the editio princeps of the Testaments.111 Dodwell also devoted Lucii Caecilii Firminiani Lactantii De Mortibus Persecutorum Liber (as in n. 56). ‘Dissertatio de Ripa Striga. Ab Henrico Dodwello A. M. Dubliniensi’, in Lucii Caecilii Lactantii Firminiani Opera quae extant, ad fidem MSS. recognita et commentariis illustrata, ed. Thomas Spark (Oxford, 1684), sep. pagination. This is a commentary on De mortibus persecutorum, c. 17, ed. J. L. Creed (Oxford, 1984), 26. Baluze wondered whether the text was not faulty: see his note, Miscellaneorum liber secundus (as in n. 104), 388. 107 Dodwell wrote the variant lessons in a copy of Henri de Valois’s (Valesius) edition (Paris, 1664), subsequently bought by Rawlinson (8
Rawl. 215). Dodwell also copied on the front page all the passages in Tertullian regarding the Passio. See Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. i, ed. C. J. M. J. van Beek (Nijmegen, 1936), 25 –27 . 108 See The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text, ed. M. de Jonge (Leiden, 1978), pp. xi–xiii and above all H. J. de Jonge, ‘Die Patriarchentestamente von Roger Bacon bis Richard Simon’, in M. de Jonge (ed.), Studies on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Text and Interpretation (Leiden, 1975), 3–33 (a valuable study, which should, nevertheless, be supplemented). The text was obviously well known in Robert Grosseteste’s Latin translation, which was regularly reprinted in the editions of the Bibliotheca Patrum. For the contempt in which it was held in the first half of the 17th c., see e.g. Me´ric Casaubon’s note in his edition of Optati Afri Milevitani episcopi De Schismate Donatistarum contra Parmenianum Donatistam libri septem (London, 1631), 277. 109 Letter of Daniel Larroque to Pierre Bayle, 12 July 1686, in Choix de la correspondance ine´dite de Pierre Bayle 1670–1706, ed. E. Gigas (Copenhagen, 1890), 433. See also Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 52. 110 BL, Add. MS 21081, fos. 1–77 (there is a copy in MS Cherry 15, apparently in Cherry’s hand). See also Add. MS 21079, p. 18. 111 Spicilegium SS. Patrum, ut et haereticorum, Seculi post Christum natum I. II et III. Quorum vel integra monumenta, vel fragmenta, partim ex aliorum Patrum libris jam 105 106

326

Jean-Louis Quantin

some attention to the problems raised by the Letter of Aristeas.112 Here again, his endeavours were typical of the scholarly milieu of Restoration Oxford. Nor was he isolated in his interest in later, Byzantine, texts, particularly for the light they were likely to shed on earlier periods. Many rare and yet unpublished ones were to be found in the Barocci collection. Dodwell’s appearance (‘a man built and dressed like a peasant . . . handling so many Greek manuscripts, from which he drew extracts’) did not pass unnoticed in the Bodleian.113 Among the manuscripts that he explored was the Barocci codex 142, a historical compilation which Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopulus had used to write his own Church history in the early fourteenth century.114 It had already attracted the attention of Gerard Langbaine, provost of Queen’s College, who had gone methodically through all Oxford Greek manuscripts in the 1640s and 1650s.115 It was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered only in the 1880s, when Carl de Boor had it sent to Berlin and recognized its importance for the history of the textual transmission of ancient ecclesiastical historians.116 It included a fragment from the lost Christian history of Philip Sidetes, on the succession of teachers in the catechetical school of Alexandria—a topic which, as will be seen, was bound to be of great interest to Dodwell. He transcribed it,117 communicated it to impressis collegit, et cum Codicibus Manuscriptis contulit, partim ex MSS nunc primum edidit, ac singula illustravit Joannes Ernestus Grabe, i (Oxford, 1698), 339–43 and 366–74. The original of the chronology is in British Library, Add. MS 21081, fos. 81–3. 112 See Humphrey Hody, Contra Historiam Aristeae de LXX Interpretibus dissertatio. In qua probatur illam a Judaeo aliquo confictam fuisse ad conciliandam authoritatem Versioni Graecae (Oxford, 1684), 45. 113 Larroque to Bayle, 12 July 1686, in Correspondance de Bayle, ed. Gigas (as in n. 109), 432. 114 See A. Diller, ‘A Greek Manuscript Strayed from the Vatican Library’, Bodleian Library Record, 7 (1962–7), 39–42. 115 See MS Langbaine 8, pp. 16–20. 116 C. de Boor, ‘Zur Kenntnis der Handschriften der griechischen Kirchenhistoriker: Codex Baroccianus 142’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte, 6 (1884), 478–94; id., ‘Neue Fragmente des Papias, Hegesippus und Pierius in bisher unbekannten Excerpten aus der Kirchengeschichte des Philippus Sidetes’, Texte und Untersuchungen, 5/2 (Leipzig, 1889), 165–84. See also G. Gentz and K. Aland, ‘Die Quellen der Kirchengeschichte des Nicephorus und ihre Bedeutung fu¨r die Konstituierung des Textes der a¨lteren Kirchenhistoriker’, Zeitschrift fu¨r die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 42 (1949), 104–41 (this is Aland’s summary of Gentz’s dissertation; Gentz died in 1942); Theodore the Lector, Kirchengeschichte, ed. G. C. Hansen, 2nd edn. (GCS, nf 3; Berlin, 1995), introduction, pp. xxvii–xxviii and xxxiii–xxxiv. 117 MS Baroccianus 142, fo. 216r, copied by Dodwell, MS St Edmund Hall 19, fo. 53r–v.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

327

scholars such as Cave and Vossius,118 and eventually published it, with a Latin translation and abundant notes, as an appendix to his Dissertationes in Irenaeum.119 Together with Lloyd, with whom he shared a keen interest in the chronology of the first centuries, Dodwell scrutinized closely for indications in that regard the Historia chronica of John Malalas, as yet unpublished, the only manuscript of which was in Oxford. Dodwell and Lloyd provided extracts to the Continental scholars Pagi and Noris.120 The editio princeps was a long-standing project of Anglican scholars (the University of Oxford had decided to print it as early as 1633),121 but it had failed to materialize. Publication was finally achieved in 1691, with contributions by Humphrey Hody and the young Richard Bentley, both Dodwell and Lloyd having played a key role in the undertaking.122 Dodwell also discovered and transcribed from two Baroccian manuscripts the original of Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre’s Synopsis of the life of the seventy disciples. The text, purporting to derive from the fourthcentury bishop and martyr Dorotheus, had been known previously only in a Latin translation. The Greek text discovered by Dodwell possessed a lengthy postscript which provided the key to its origin: it was a forgery 118 See Dodwell to Isaac Vossius, 20 July 1688, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 90r (draft) and Amsterdam, UB, RK III E 10 (277); Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 306. 119 Henry Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (Oxford, 1689), 488–514. See de Boor, ‘Zur Kenntnis der Handschriften der griechischen Kirchenhistoriker’ (as in n. 116), 487; ODCC (3rd edn.), s.v. ‘Catechetical School of Alexandria’. Dodwell’s edition was for a long time the only one available; see now Theodore the Lector, Kirchengeschichte, ed. G. C. Hansen (as in n. 116), appendix, 160. On the importance of successions in Dodwell’s thought, see below. 120 See Dodwell’s extracts from Malalas, MS St Edmund Hall 19, fos. 73v–57v (starting backwards). The correspondence exchanged between Lloyd and Pagi and Noris, from 27 May 1686 to 3 July 1687, is among Dodwell’s Collectanea, BL, Add. MS 21082 (copies, partly in Dodwell’s own hand; a transcription by George Harbin from Dodwell’s collection is in BL, Harleian MS 6196; other copies, MS Cherry 1, fos. 171r–203v; MS Cherry 29). Dodwell went to Oxford and checked the manuscript of Malalas to answer Noris’s queries (see Dodwell to Lloyd, 10 Jan. 1687, Add. MS 21082, fos. 59v–60v). See also Antoine Pagi, Critica historico-chronologica in Annales ecclesiasticos Baronii (Paris, 1689), Seculum II, 12–13. 121 J. Johnson and S. Gibson, Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Publication of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 7; Oxford, 1946), 12–14. 122 Joannis Antiocheni Cognomento Malalae Historia Chronica, e Manuscripto Cod. Bibliothecae Bodleianae nunc primum edita. Cum Interpret. et Notis Edm. Chilmeadi. Praemittitur Dissertatio de Autore, per Humfredum Hodium. Accedit epistola Richardi Bentleii ad Cl. V. Jo. Millium (Oxford, 1691). See letters of Lloyd to Dodwell, 29 Nov. 1686, 12 Apr. 1687, 16 Sept. 1690, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fos. 95v, 97r, 106r. Cf. M. L. Clarke, ‘Classical Studies’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v (Oxford, 1986), 525–6; J. M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca and London, 1991), 50–1, 76, 90.

328

Jean-Louis Quantin

intended to enhance the apostolicity of the see of Constantinople. It was also the earliest occurrence of the legendary Byzantine catalogues of the bishops of Constantinople, from Andrew onwards.123 Dodwell gave his transcription to William Cave, who published it, with a commentary, in his Historia literaria of 1688.124 The complete text was simultaneously published in Paris by Du Cange from a manuscript in the library of the King of France. Du Cange yet again propounded conclusions very close to those of his Anglican counterparts.125 Although Dodwell in those years made regular visits to Oxford (‘once in a yeare . . . for a month or 6 weeks at a time’, according to Wood) and had become a familiar figure not only in the Bodleian but also in clerical coffee houses,126 he still had no official connection with the University. His election in April 1688 as Camdenian Lecturer in History came as a solemn recognition of the extent to which the man from Dublin had become part of the place. The idea was Mill’s and the election was carried against a powerful local rival, the Warden of All Souls, by the Church party. It was an Anglican demonstration at a time when James II’s Romanizing policy was provoking increasing worry in Oxford.127 Mill affirmed that Dodwell would ‘inspirit the University to great and good things’ and ‘be our constant Guide, Genius, and Oracle upon all Occasions’.128 Lloyd told him that his nomination had been supported 123 For Dodwell’s transcript, from MSS Baroccianus 142, no. 23, and Baroccianus 206, no. 5, see MS St Edmund Hall 19, fos. 23r–29r. It comprises the introduction and the postscript, leaving aside the list of the seventy disciples, as already known in Latin. For a modern edition, see Prophetarum vitae fabulosae, indices apostolorum discipulorumque Domini Dorotheo, Epiphanio, Hippolyto aliisque vindicata, ed. T. Schermann (Leipzig, 1907), 132–4 and 143–60. On Pseudo-Dorotheus, see Schermann’s preface, pp. xli–xlv; T. Schermann, ‘Propheten- und Apostellegenden nebst Ju¨ngerkatalogen des Dorotheus und verwandter Texte’, Texte und Untersuchungen, 31/3 (Leipzig, 1907); F. Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), esp. 178–80. The text appears to have been compiled by an anonymous forger of the 9th c. 124 Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 114–25. Cave mistakenly dated the text to 525. 125 Du Cange, Pasclion seu Chronicon Paschale (as in n. 87), 426–36, with explanatory note pp. 524–5: ‘Hos vero qualescunque ac supposititios Scriptores in publicum interdum efferri interest, ne ii in posterum giogrfoiv, vel Ecclesiasticis tam temere accenseantur.’ 126 Wood, Life and Times, iii (as in n. 24), 263 (2 Apr. 1688). 127 On Dodwell’s election and University politics, see M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast and Religious Toleration 1688–1692’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c. 1689–c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 149; William Lloyd to Archbishop Sancroft, 13 Apr. 1688, MS Tanner 28/1, fo. 15r; undated letter of Mill to Francis Turner, bishop of Ely, MS Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r; Lloyd to Dodwell, 22 Apr. 1688, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 102r. 128 Mill to Turner, Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

329

by all men who ‘thought of nothing more than the promoting of Religion and Learning in the University’ (the same pair yet again) and unfolded grandiose perspectives. His friend was truly ‘ordained for the Reformation of this University. And that in Order to a greater work that is to follow.’129 Dodwell had not even been a candidate and there were fears that he might decline the appointment. Archbishop Sancroft was therefore desired to command him to accept it ‘virtute sanctae obedientiae’:130 yet another striking instance of the interrelation between scholarship and religion in Dodwell’s career. The appointment, however, was rather an obstruction to his work on Christian antiquity, since Camden’s regulations confined the lectures to profane history. Dodwell was thus prevented from fulfilling his initial design of giving ‘the Annals of the Church from our Saviour’s Passion to the end of the four first general Councils’.131 Dodwell had already compiled such a chronology for the New Testament period,132 and Mill had no doubt that its continuation ‘would certainly have been the most useful work he could have undertaken’.133 He resolved instead to deal with the chronology of the Historia Augusta.134 The Revolution of 1688–9 and its aftermath took Dodwell even further away from patristic scholarship. His uncompromising stance against the oaths now required to be sworn to William and Mary obliged him to leave Oxford in August 1689. He was deprived of his University chair in November 1691.135 Dodwell’s only comment on that forced interruption, inserted in the edition of his lectures the following year, was a verse from Job: ‘the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so it has been done; blessed be the name of the Lord’.136 He subsequently found his way back to Oxford, both to transcribe Greek manuscripts in the Bodleian137 and to launch out Lloyd to Dodwell, 22 Apr. 1688, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 102r. Lloyd to Sancroft, 7 Apr. 1688, MS Tanner 28/1, fo. 12v. It is not clear whether Sancroft actually wrote, but Francis Turner certainly did, perhaps in the archbishop’s name as well as his own: see Mill to Turner, MS Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r. 131 Mill to Turner, MS Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r. On Dodwell’s regret that the statutes should prevent him from reading ecclesiastical history, see Brokesby (as in n. 1), 221. 132 The manuscript was lent to Cave, who mentions it, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 133 Mill to Turner, MS Rawlinson Lett. 94, fo. 160r. sig. b2v. 134 See the published text of his lectures: Henry Dodwell, Praelectiones Academicae in Schola Historices Camdeniana (Oxford, 1692). Cf. M. Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, History of the University of Oxford, iv (as in n. 42), 350–1 and 356–7. 135 Wood, Life and Times, iii (as in n. 24), 309 and 375. 136 Dodwell, Praelectiones Academicae (as in n. 134), 529. Job 1: 21 (according to 137 See below, n. 149. the Vulgate). 129 130

330

Jean-Louis Quantin

into counter-revolutionary tirades and theological lectures at coffee houses,138 but he now spent most of his time with his friend Francis Cherry, also a non-juring layman, at the latter’s place at Shottesbrooke. His relations with John Mill, who, after much conscientious probing, had accepted the new regime and stayed in Oxford, became much more distant, although the two men do not seem to have ever completely fallen out,139 and Mill was receiving materials on Barnabas on behalf of Dodwell from the Bollandist Daniel Papebroch as late as 1692.140 Mill was concentrating anyway on his edition of the New Testament,141 and much of Dodwell’s time and energy now went into defending the non-juring bishops. The remainder was partly devoted to his monumental work on the chronology of ancient Greece and Rome, De cyclis,142 partly expended on minor and disparate pieces. On the strength of his Camdenian lectures, Dodwell had become a sort of universal expert on chronological questions and was in demand for all sorts of scholarly undertakings. He thus wrote ‘Velleian Annals’ and ‘a Graeco-Roman chronology according to Dionysius Halicarnassus’ for John Hudson’s editions of Velleius Paterculus and Dionysius, and a ‘Xenophontean chronology’ for Edward Wells’s edition of Xenophon.143 138 For Dodwell’s Jacobite expostulations at the coffee house in 1694, see Wood, Life and Times, iii (as in n. 24), 448; for a theological lecture there in 1702 on the nature of the soul, see the letter of William Smith to a cousin of his, Palm Sunday 1702, BL, Add. MS 4276, fos. 124r–125v. 139 Mill tersely mentions their dissenting views on the oath in his letter to Dodwell of 4 Aug. 1689, MS Eng. lett. c. 28, fo. 21r. 140 See letters of Papebroch to Mill, 28 May 1691 and 10 June 1692, Queen’s MS 336, fo. 61v and unnumbered folio facing fo. 90r. 141 A. Fox, John Mill and Richard Bentley: A Study of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1675–1729) (Oxford, 1954). 142 Henry Dodwell, De Veteribus Graecorum Romanorumque Cyclis obiterque de Cyclo Judaeorum aetate Christi, Dissertationes decem, cum Tabulis necessariis. Inseruntur Tabulis Fragmenta Veterum inedita, ad rem spectantia Chronologicam (Oxford, 1701). 143 M. Velleii Paterculi Quae supersunt. Cum Variis Lectionibus Optimarum Editionum; Doctorum Virorum Conjecturis et Castigationibus; et indice locupletissimo. Praemittuntur Annales Velleiani (Oxford, 1693); ‘Henrici Dodwelli Chronologia Graeco-Romana pro hypothesibus Dionysii Halicarnassei’, in Dionysii Halicarnassensis quae extant rhetorica et critica (Oxford, 1704); Edward Wells (ed.), Xenophontis Opera quae extant Omnia; una cum Chronologia Xenophontea Cl. Dodwelli, et quatuor Tabulis Geographicis (Oxford, 1703). See Wells’s preface, sig. a4r: ‘At tandem maximum hujus Editionis Ornamentum jure censenda est Chronologia Xenophontea, quam contexuit et amice communicavit Cl. Dodwellus, Vir rei Chronologicae peritissimus, et Literis promovendis natus.’ Dodwell also contributed to Hudson’s edition of the Greek geographers, Geographiae Veteris Scriptores Graeci Minores. Cum Interpretatione Latina, Dissertationibus, ac Annotationibus, i (Oxford, 1698). He wrote a chronology of Caesar’s Commentaries and a ‘Dissertatio de Julii Caesaris in Britanniam nostram exscensione’ for Henry Aldrich’s aborted edition (see the bibliography prefixed by Hearne to Dodwell, De Parma equestri (as in n. 30), p. xxii).

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

331

It is noteworthy that both Hudson and Wells were suspected of cryptoJacobitism and missed regius professorships at Oxford on that account.144 Dodwell also contributed a preliminary text to Samuel Parker’s translation of Cicero and a few notes to L’Estrange’s Josephus: both works were of a more popular character but the authors were ‘fellow-sufferers’, that is nonjurors.145 He was still closely associated with a number of works on Christian antiquity, giving advice to Thomas Smith for his Ignatius146 and, as has been seen, helping Grabe both with his Spicilegium and his Irenaeus.147 Smith was also one of the nonjurors and Grabe was very close to them. The tradition of High Church patristics was certainly kept alive in that milieu well into the eighteenth century. None of Dodwell’s own great patristic projects of the 1680s, however, came to completion. He was now more concerned to build on the materials he had accumulated. The controversy over the deprived bishops in the 1690s was largely conducted by Anglican clergy in the language that they shared, that of antiquarianism. It involved texts from Barocci 142.148 Dodwell followed his adversaries in that field, which he knew so well.149 For his part, he preferred to produce testimonies from the ante-Nicene 144 On Hudson’s failure to be appointed Regius Professor of Greek, see Feingold, ‘The Humanities’ (as in n. 134), 269 n. 157; on Wells’s attempt at the Hebrew professorship, see letter of White Kennett to S. Blackwell, 21 Aug. 1714, in E. Brydges, Restituta, iv (London, 1816), 69: ‘It is certain that Dr. Wells has preached ever since the demise [of Queen Anne] with a double entendre, and with an eye directly on another king.’ 145 Tully’s Five Books de Finibus ; or, concerning the last Object of Desire and Aversion. Done into English by S[amuel] P[arker] Gent. Revis’d and Compar’d with the Original, with a Recommendatory Preface. By Jeremy Collier, M.A. Together, with an Apology for the Philosophical Writings of Cicero, in a Letter to the Translator. By Mr Henry Dodwell (London, 1702): the ‘Apology’ is signed ‘the most unworthy of your Fellow-sufferers’; The Works of Flavius Josephus: Translated into English by Sir Roger L’Estrange, Knight (London, 1702), 2 (notes, signed ‘H. D.’), on which see Hearne, Remarks and Collections, x (Oxford, 1915), 416–17. 146 S. Ignatii epistolae genuinae, juxta exemplar Mediceum denuo recensitae, una cum veteri latina versione: annotationibus D. Joannis Pearsoni nuper episcopi Cestriensis, et Thomae Smithi S.T.P. illustratae. Accedunt acta genuina martyrii S. Ignatii, epistola S. Polycarpi ad Philippenses, et Smyrnensis Ecclesiae epistola de S. Polycarpi Martyrio; cum veteribus latinis versionibus, et annotationibus Thomae Smithi (Oxford, 1709). See letters of Dodwell to Smith, 15 June and 4 Aug. 1708, MS Smith 49, pp. 157 and 173. 147 For Dodwell’s high opinion of Grabe, see letter to Godofred. Christianus Goetzius, 6 Nov. 1699, MS Cherry 23, p. 111. 148 For an overview, see M. Goldie, ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 15–35. 149 The initiator was Humphrey Hody with his Anglicani novi Schismatis Redargutio seu Tractatus ex Historiis ecclesiasticis quo ostenditur episcopos, injuste licet depositos, Orthodoxi Successoris Communionem nunquam refugisse. Graece et Latine ex Cod. MS
(Oxford, 1691), simultaneously published in an English translation (London, 1691).

332

Jean-Louis Quantin

Fathers, particularly Cyprian.150 He did much to popularize the adjective ‘Cyprianic’ (‘Cyprianic age’, ‘Cyprianic principles’), which soon became a trademark of non-juring literature.151 Most importantly, the dispute was the occasion of his writing his Paraenesis ad exteros. The non-juring bishops had commissioned the work as an advertisement for their cause abroad but, as will be seen, what Dodwell actually produced was a history of the institution of episcopacy. His patrons were aghast at the result, and the work was not published until 1704,152 Dodwell answered him in A Vindication of the Deprived Bishops, asserting their Spiritual Rights against a Lay-Deprivation, against the Charge of Schism, as managed by the late Editors of an Anonymous Baroccian MS. In Two Parts. I. Shewing, that though the Instances Collected in the said MS. had been pertinent to the Editors Design, yet that would not have been sufficient for obtaining their Cause. II. Shewing, that the Instances there Collected are indeed not pertinent to the Editors Design, for vindicating the validity of the Deprivation of Spiritual Power by a Lay-Authority. To which is subjoyned the latter End of the said MS. omitted by the Editors, making against them and the Cause espoused by them. In Greek and English (London, 1692). The manuscript involved was MS Baroccianus 142, nos. 17–18—a list of wrongfully deposed patriarchs, probably compiled by Nicephorus Callistus (see Gentz and Aland, ‘Quellen’ (as in n. 116), 114–15). For Dodwell’s subsequent researches, see James Eckersall to Thomas Smith, 10 Oct. 1693, MS Smith 49, p. 196: ‘since his return out of the country, Mr. D—ll has discover’d, and lately transcribed another Baroccian manuscript (number the 25) de Episcopis CP. sede sua injuste deturbatis.’ Dodwell’s transcription of this text (MS Baroccianus 25, no. 10) is in BL, Add. MS 21080, pp. 345–64 (‘Alia forma Operis Barocciani a Domino Hodio editi, . . . antiquior pariter atque accuratior’). Cf. letter of Nathaniel Foy—bishop of Waterford and an old Irish friend of Dodwell’s—to Archbishop King, 19 May 1693, HMC. Second Report (London, 1874), 232: ‘Mr Dodwell is rummaging the manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and sifting the most usefull of them for the press, and he with Mr Kettlewell, has wrote two books to prove us all schismaticks.’ 150 See e.g. Dodwell, A Vindication of the Deprived Bishops (as in n. 149), 22: ‘I have purposely selected the Instances of St. Cyprian’s Age rather than any other, not only because they are the ancientest, indeed the first we know of, of one Bishop’s invading another’s Chair not vacant; but because we have withal in him the most distinct account of the Sense of the Church in his Age of such Facts, and of the Principles on which they proceeded in condemning them.’ 151 See e.g. [Henry Dodwell], A Defence of the Vindication of the Deprived Bishops. Wherein the Case of Abiathar is particularly considered, and the Invalidity of LayDeprivations is further proved, from the Doctrine received under the Old Testament, continued in the first Ages of Christianity, and from our own fundamental Laws. In a Reply to Dr Hody and another Author (London, 1695), 11 (‘the Cyprianick and purest Ages’). 152 Henry Dodwell, De Nupero Schismate Anglicano Paraenesis ad Exteros tam Reformatos quam etiam Pontificios Quaˆ Jura Episcoporum vetera, eorundemque a Magistratu Seculari Independentia Omnibus asserenda commendantur (London, 1704). For Dodwell’s difficulties in getting the work published, see his letter to Charles Leslie, 1 July 1699, MS Cherry 23, p. 157; Francis Turner to Dodwell, 10 Feb. 1700, MS St Edmund Hall 10, pp. 11–20; Dodwell to Eric Benzelius the younger, 28 Aug. 1701, MS Cherry 23, p. 69.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

333

meeting general hostility.153 George Hickes, who had been clandestinely consecrated bishop among the nonjurors and who eventually ensured the survival of the little Church, declared Dodwell’s scheme ‘new and false’, and ‘contrary to the accounts which all Antient Writers give of the first bishops’.154 It has already been said that Dodwell’s book on the soul claimed to represent the genuine faith of the primitive Christians. There is certainly a good case to be made from the Fathers, if not for the whole of his system, at least for some form of conditional immortality. Dodwell demonstrated yet again his impressive scholarship in the subsequent controversy. He argued consistently in the learned and punctilious way which was typical of seventeenth-century theologians, pausing for instance to construe a sentence of Tertullian,155 discussing variant readings in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament,156 or proposing emendations in the text of Justin Martyr.157 The problem was that his critics were by now too outraged to listen. Dodwell was so dismayed by the violence of the attacks launched against him, even from his beloved Oxford,158 that he considered returning to Ireland.159 But he was told by Archbishop William King of Dublin, his former pupil at Trinity College, that he had now burnt his vessels.160 In his last years he had some design of resuming his work on Barnabas. John Hudson, by now Bodley’s librarian, hoped in 1707 that it could be published ‘in the same volume’ with Smith’s Ignatius, thus partly 153 For adverse comments, see Le Clerc to Archbishop Sharp, 1 Mar. 1704, and Sharp’s answer, 31 Mar. 1704 (‘those of his own party here liked it so little, that they did all that they could to hinder him from publishing it’), in J. Le Clerc, Epistolario, ii, ed. M. G. and M. Sina (Florence, 1991), no. 358, p. 431, and no. 360, p. 434. 154 George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church, and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, set forth in a Collection of Papers (no pl., 1716), 267. 155 Dodwell, The Scripture Account (as in n. 7), 248. 156 Henry Dodwell, A Preliminary Defence of the Epistolary Discourse, concerning the Distinction between Soul and Spirit (London, 1707), 93. 157 Henry Dodwell, An Explication of a Famous Passage in the Dialogue of S. Justin Martyr with Tryphon, concerning the Immortality of Humane Souls (London, 1708), 71–6. 158 Dodwell to Hearne, 22 Oct. 1706 (on Chishull), MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 439r: ‘I could not have thought that an Oxford Man could have treated me with so much rancor quite through his Book.’ 159 Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv (Oxford, 1898), 282. 160 King to Dodwell, 17 May 1709, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 126v: ‘I believe I shall surprise you when I tell you that your Epistolary Discourse [on the natural mortality of the soul] has got you more odium amongst all sober men in Ireland, than your adhereing to King James and all your principles about government and yet this is the truth of the fact.’

334

Jean-Louis Quantin

fulfilling the initial idea of an Oxford Cotelier,161 but nothing came of it.162 In 1711, a few months before his death, in a letter to the Lutheran scholar Christoph Mattha¨us Pfaff, whom he had met at Oxford and who was then making (and also faking) important patristic discoveries in Turin,163 Dodwell mentioned his plan for Barnabas as a thing of the past.164 He wrote at that time a dissertation to propound his new dating for the treatise Ad Autolycum, which, according to him, was not by Theophilus of Antioch but by another and later Theophilus, at the time of Septimius Severus’ persecution.165 He entrusted this work to another Lutheran visitor at Oxford, Gottlieb Schelwig (of the eminent clerical and academic family of Danzig), for inclusion in the latter’s planned new edition of Theophilus. Schelwig, however, soon gave up the project after returning to the Continent and was careless enough to mislay the dissertation. As his was the only copy, Dodwell’s work came to naught and could not even be used by Johann Christoph Wolf (yet another Lutheran acquaintance) in his 1724 edition.166 The only scholarly work in the field of patristics which Dodwell managed to see through the press after the Revolution concerned the Instructiones by the early Christian poet Commodian. This had been published for the first time by the French scholar Nicolas Rigault John Hudson to Thomas Smith, 5 July 1707, MS Smith 50, pp. 153–4. According to Hearne (letter to Thomas Smith, 31 Jan. 1708, MS. Rawlinson lett. 38, fo. 160r ) Dodwell refused because he was dissatisfied with the way Hudson had printed his contributions to the edition of the Greek geographers, but it is clear that Dodwell was diverted by other work from completing his Barnabas (see Dodwell to Hearne, 13 Nov. 1708, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 471r ). 163 See A. Harnack, ‘Die Pfaff ’schen Irena ¨us-Fragmente als Fa¨lschungen Pfaffs nachgewiesen’, Texte und Untersuchungen, 20/3 (Leipzig, 1900), 1–69; P. Batiffol, ‘Le Cas de Pfaff d’apre`s des pie`ces nouvelles’, Bulletin de litte´rature eccle´siastique (1901), 189–200; E. Heck, ‘ ‘‘Du sollst nicht zitieren aus zweiter Hand’’: Entdeckung und fru¨he Benutzung des Turiner Codex der lactanzischen Epitome divinarum institutionum’, Philologus, 137 (1993), 110–21. 164 Dodwell to Pfaff, 22 Feb. 1711, MS St Edmund Hall 14, p. 46. Dodwell blames the practical difficulties of printing in wartime (‘Editionem olim meditatus sum, si per bella licuisset’), but the explanation is not quite convincing. 165 The new dating had first been advanced by Dodwell in an addition to Pearson, ‘Dissertatio prior’, Opera posthuma Pearsonii (as in n. 59), 11, and had been fiercely attacked by Tillemont, Memoires, iii (as in n. 76), 612. 166 See letters of Schelwig and Wolf to Dodwell, 1708–9, MS St Edmund Hall 31, 59–79; Dodwell to Hearne, 24 Jan. 1709, 15 Feb. 1709, 13 Apr. 1709, 2 Sept. 1710, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fos. 475v, 477r–v, 479v, 507r; Schelwig to Hearne, 5 Apr. 1709, and Wolf to Hearne, no date, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fos. 516r, 520r–521r; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ix (Oxford, 1914), 292; Theophili, Episcopi Antiocheni, Libri III ad Autolycum Graece ad fidem Codicis MS. Bodleiani et ex parte Regii Parisiensis denuo recogniti, et pluribus in locis castigati, versione latina, frequenter emendata, notisque tum aliorum tum suis instructi a Jo. Christoph. Wolfio (Hamburg, 1724), sigs. a3v–b2r. 161 162

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

335

in 1649, and republished by himself with corrections and notes the following year, but became widely known outside France only when it was reprinted as an appendix to the Paris 1666 edition of Cyprian.167 Rigault’s edition was based on a single faulty manuscript, which he had not even seen himself (he had been given a transcription by the famous Jesuit Jacques Sirmond). Since the case was ‘desperate’, he felt free to introduce conjectural emendations.168 One of these conjectures, perhaps the most audacious, had huge implications. Nothing is known of Commodian, not even his dates (already Gennadius had no information apart from the Instructiones itself ), but Rigault thought that a decisive indication was provided by a rather obscure verse, if only it was correctly read. Sirmond’s transcription had ‘Intrate stabilis silvestri ad praesepia tauri ’, but Rigault printed in his edition ‘Intrate stabiles Silvestri ad praesepe pastoris’, as if Commodian had exhorted the heathen to enter the fold headed by Pope Sylvester.169 On the sole basis of this verse thus emended, Rigault unhesitatingly inferred, and even put in the title of his edition as an indubitable fact, that Commodian had flourished in Rome, ‘or at least in Italy’, at the time of Sylvester and Constantine.170 The conclusion was surprisingly rash, all the more so since Rigault had immediately drawn attention to the stylistic similarities between Commodian and African writers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, and Minucius Felix,171 and subsequently, in his annotated edition, had remarked upon several 167 Commodiani Instructiones per literas versuum primas tempore Silvestri P.R. sub Constantino Caes. compositae. Nunc primum typis mandatae (Toul, 1649); Commodiani Instructiones adversus Gentium Deos. Pro Christiana disciplina. Tempore Silvestri P.R. sub Constantino Caes. compositae. Nunc primum typis mandatae (Toul, 1650); Sancti Caecilii Cypriani opera . . . Accedunt Marci Minutii Felicis Octavius de Idolorum vanitate. Arnobii Afri adversus Gentes Libri VII. Iulii Firmici Materni V.C. de Errore profanarum Religionum. Commodiani Instructiones adversus Gentium Deos (Paris, 1666), sep. pagination, 21–60. 168 Commodian, Instructiones (1649), 5. On the manuscript, then in Angers and now in Berlin, which Sirmond transcribed and which is still the only authority for the text, see J. Martin, ‘Commodianus’, Traditio, 13 (1957), 2; Commodian, Instructiones, ed. A. Salvatore, i/1 (Naples, 1965), 8–9. 169 Instructio XXXIII, 5, in Commodian, Instructiones (1650), 52. The same text is reprinted in Instructiones (1666), 38. It is remarkable that Rigault’s first edition had actually given a better text, correcting stabilis to stabulis, an emendation which later found its way into all modern editions (Instructiones (1649), 32). 170 ‘Nicolai Rigaltii De Commodiano eiusque opusculis’, in Commodian, Instructiones (1649), 4: ‘Huncce igitur Commodianum aevo Silvestri primi, Ecclesiae Romanae Pontificis, vixisse, satis ipse Commodianus significat, opusculo, quo Gentiles invitat sive compellit ad illius Pastoris praesepe. adeoque, verisimile videatur, ipsum opusculum Romae, aut certe in Italia, fuisse compositum.’ 171 Commodian, Instructiones (1649), 4–5.

336

Jean-Louis Quantin

allusions to the problems of the Church of Carthage under Cyprian: the situation of fallen Christians and the Novatian schism.172 Rigault’s dating held sway for a remarkably long time, probably because one had to read his edition very carefully, text and notes, to discover on how slender a foundation it rested. Cave followed it unreservedly in his Historia literaria of 1688 (in which he declared the Instructiones ‘a remarkable monument of ancient piety’).173 Dodwell was the first to reopen the question in an elaborate dissertation. He pointed out that everything that Commodian said about his own times, especially as to the threat of persecution, was foreign to those of Sylvester. The numerous parallels with Cyprian, which Dodwell developed at length, pointed rather to Commodian’s being a countryman and contemporary of the bishop of Carthage.174 As for the famous verse emended by Rigault, Dodwell rightly saw that its reference was to the gentiles as stray cattle (a metaphor used again in the next poem), and that silvestris was an epithet of tauri.175 Except that purist scruples made him correct too much, he restored the correct reading: ‘Enter the stalls, o bulls of the forest, come to the trough.’176 He had communicated his dissertation to Cave as a draft, and Cave followed its conclusions closely, retracting his former views, in the supplement of his Historia literaria, published in 1698.177 Dodwell’s dating remained unchallenged until the beginning of the twentieth century.178 172 Notes to Instructiones XLII, LXI, LXVI, in Commodian, Instructiones (1650), 64, 94–95, 101. 173 Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 148 (‘egregium, mihi crede, antiquae pietatis monumentum’). 174 Henry Dodwell, Annales Velleiani, Quintilianei, Statiani. Seu Vitae P. Velleii Paterculi, M. Fabii Quintiliani, P. Papinii Statii, (obiterque Juvenalis) pro tempore ordine, dispositae (Oxford, 1698), Appendix II, sigs. 2T1v–2X1r. 175 Cf. Commodian, Instructio XXXIV, 5–8 (ed. A. Salvatore, i/1, 104): ‘Gens, homo, tu frater, noli pecus esse ferinum, . . . Tu te ipse doma sapiens et intra sub antra.’ 176 Commodian, Instructio XXXIII, 5 (ed. A. Salvatore, i/1, 102): ‘Intrate stabulis silvestris ad praesepia tauri.’ Dodwell, Annales (as in n. 174), sig. 2X2r, actually proposed ‘Intrate stabula silvestres ad praesepia tauri’, which has the same meaning. But the construction of intrare with dative, although very rare, is attested in Christian Latin (see Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, vii/2, col. 58, s.v., which quotes this very passage of Commodian). As to the termination -is instead of -es, see Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik, i, x357, C3, Zusatz. In any case there can be no doubt that silvestris tauri is an apostrophe to the Pagans, and J. Durel’s French translation ‘entrez dans les e´tables, a` la cre`che du taureau rustique’ (Les Instructions de Commodien. Traduction et commentaire (Paris, 1912), 54) is indefensible. 177 Cave, Historia literaria . . . Pars altera (as in n. 84), 55–7 (‘Observationes nonnullas hac de re, necdum tamen absolutas, in schedas suas conjecerat, mecumque pro sua humanitate communicavit V.C. et nunquam sine honoris praefatione nominandus, H. Dodwellus, quae me ad hanc rem denuo excutiendam, haud leviter permovebant’). 178 Martin, ‘Commodianus’ (as in n. 168), 51–2.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

337

The work had theological implications. Had not Rigault (quite surprisingly for someone who was otherwise a staunch Gallican and who, only two years before, in his edition of Cyprian, had asserted that the ‘primacy text’ of De Unitate Ecclesiae was an ‘absurd’ interpolation)179 pronounced that Commodian’s appeal to join Sylvester ‘argued not a little for the pre-eminence of the Roman Church’?180 Dodwell firmly reminded his readers that all bishops were of equal dignity.181 THE LIM ITS O F ORTHODOX Y There are, however, many aspects of Dodwell’s career and thought which hardly fit into the pattern of High Church scholarship and which would seem to call for reconsideration. The reason for resigning the Dublin fellowship in 1666 was his refusal to take Holy Orders as the statutes required.182 Paradoxically enough, the great champion of the rights of the priesthood remained a layman all his life. The explanation given by Brokesby and piously copied, with suitably admiring comments by subsequent writers, is, apart from the standard reason of modesty, that Dodwell hoped to do more service to the Church, ‘in that whilst he continued a Laick, and as such, vindicated the sacred Ministry, and became the Champion of Religion and the Priesthood’, he could not be accused of pleading pro domo.183 The true reason was actually very different, as appears in a letter of Dodwell to Thomas Barlow, which is worth quoting at some length: You may be pleased then to understand that notwithstanding that favourable regard which I think I have deservedly alwayes entertained for my dear Mother 179 ‘Nic. Rigaltii Observationes ad Caecilii Cypriani Epistolas et Tractatus’, in Sancti Caecilii Cypriani opera (Paris, 1648), sep. pagination, 162–4. 180 Commodian, Instructiones (1650), 52, note: ‘Quae verba ad Ecclesiae Romanae praestantiam faciunt non mediocriter.’ 181 Dodwell, Annales (as in n. 174), Appendix II, sig. 2X2r: ‘Quis enim Christianus, cujuscumque demum fuisset et quantumvis ignobilis Civitatis, Gentilem non fuisset ad sui Episcopi Communionem hortaturus?’ 182 Chartae et statuta Collegii Sacrosanctae Trinitatis (as in n. 39), 37. 183 Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 24–5. Cf. J. H. Overton, The Nonjurors (as in n. 1), 230 (‘it was not because he had doubts, but because he had so intense a belief in all the doctrines of Christianity that he shrank from ordination’); G. Every, The High Church Party 1688–1718 (London, 1956), 11; and the useless study by R. D. Cornwall, ‘Divine Right Monarchy: Henry Dodwell’s Defense of the Nonjuring Bishops’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 68 (1999), 41. This is still echoed by Harmsen in the Oxford DNB, xvi. 445: ‘Though he always revered the priesthood, he felt personally insecure about ordination and more confident about serving the church as a lay scholar.’

338

Jean-Louis Quantin

the Church of England in which I have been borne and educated; yet partly through the imprudence of my education, wherein I have imbibed quaestionable doctrines with an equall degree of confidence with such as are unquaestionable, and the unquaestionable ones themselves upon weak and precarious motives; partly through the natural inquisitiveness of my genius; and partly through the course of my scholastick life; I have unhappily been tempted to doubt of many of her doctrines. And though in many of them I have by Gods blessing atteined some tolerable satisfaction; yet there is one wherein I would humbly implore your assistance; both because I perceive it has troubled many others as well as my self, and because it is very momentous, as being such which seems hardly capable of those mollifying reservations, which are conceived sufficient in other cases to reconcile an internall dissent with an externall peaceable communion.184

That stumbling-block was the Athanasian Creed, adhesion to which had to be sworn before ordination.185 Dodwell objected that its damnatory clauses turned the formulations of the post-Nicene fathers into fundamentals and conditions of communion, though they were not to be found ‘at least, not in those terms, either in the Scriptures, or the earlyer Fathers’. Now, to profess to believe the Creed while not being able to give an internal assent to all its clauses would be to deceive the Church.186 It is not clear whether Dodwell’s dissent from orthodoxy went no further than that, or whether he may even have disagreed with some positive teachings of the Athanasian Creed. Neoplatonic speculations on the Trinity, especially when they equate the Son with the Platonic Logos, are obvious gateways to some form of subordinationist christology.187 Now Dodwell, as will be seen, was convinced that the Christian revelation had been accommodated to the notions prevalent Dodwell to Barlow, 26 Feb. 1671, Queen’s MS 279, fo. 177r. Irish ordinands, like their English counterparts, had to subscribe to the ThirtyNine Articles, the eighth of which stated: ‘The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’ Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed; for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture’ (E. Bullingbrooke, Ecclesiastical Law; or, the Statutes, Constitutions, Canons, Rubricks, and Articles, of The Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1770), i. 210). The recitation of the Athanasian Creed was also prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, and assent and consent to its use therefore had to be declared by all incumbents according to the English Act of Uniformity of 1662, the provisions of which were reproduced in the Irish Act of 1666 (ibid., i. 354–5). The oath required to become a fellow of Trinity, which Dodwell swore, was quite vague in its formulation and could not have offered him any difficulty, even supposing that his views were already formed at the time (Chartae et statuta Collegii 186 Queen’s MS 279, fo. 177r–v. Sacrosanctae Trinitatis (as in n. 39), 37). 187 See D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972), 39–40, and M. Mulsow’s contribution in this volume. 184 185

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

339

at that time among Hellenistic Jews, for whom ‘the true Messias was to be the lgov’,188 and that the Apostles had recognized Christ as the Platonic Logos.189 Although he attacked Socinians in many of his writings and believed in ‘the Doctrine of the Trinity’,190 a profession of faith in the consubstantiality of the three persons of the Trinity is (to the extent that it is possible to make a definitive statement on so prolific a writer) nowhere to be found in his work. Dodwell’s scruples on subscription were the first instance of that uncompromising notion of the meaning and implications of oaths that later led him to refuse those required to be sworn to William and Mary. The exchanges with Barlow continued for several years, but neither Barlow nor any one else whom Dodwell may have consulted was able to satisfy him.191 As late as 1675, when he had already moved to England, Dodwell was still hoping he might eventually reconcile himself to going back to Ireland and being ordained,192 but there is no evidence that he ever managed to overcome his difficulties with the Creed.193 Several 188 Henry Dodwell, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, as practised by the present Non-Conformists, proved Schismatical from such Principles as are least controverted, and do withal most popularly explain the Sinfulness and Mischief of Schism. In this Treatise the Sin against the Holy Ghost, the Sin unto Death, and other difficult Scriptures are occasionally discoursed of, and some useful Rules are given for Explication of Scripture 189 Dodwell, Paraenesis (as in n. 152), 12. (London, 1679), 241. 190 Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 17 Apr. 1675, MS Smith 49, p. 115. See also the letter of Dodwell to Smith of 3 July 1675, ibid. 121, on the danger of Socinianism. 191 Barlow’s solution was to distinguish in the Creed between the Symbolum Fidei (the articles proper) and the Judicium Athanasii. See his unfinished dissertation on those lines, Queen’s MS 279, beginning fo. 170r, paginated 1–77; Dodwell’s letters to Barlow of 26 July and 2 Sept. 1672 (fos. 176r and 179r) and especially of 29 Apr. 1674 (fos. 180r– 181v ); Barlow to Dodwell, 13 Mar. 1673 (fo. 193r ). Dodwell then planned to consult Bishop Gunning of Ely, to whom he had his friend Pierce recommend him. See Pierce to Dodwell, 15 Mar. 1675 (MS Cherry 23, p. 316) and cf. Dodwell to Smith, 22 June 1675 (MS Smith 49, p. 119). 192 See Dodwell’s letters to Smith, 8 June and 3 July 1675 (MS Smith 49, pp. 117 and 121). 193 Hearne denies this but clearly upon no better ground than Brokesby’s alternative explanation. See Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, i (Oxford, 1885), 7 (15 July 1705): ‘I have heard that the reason why Mr Dodwell would not go into orders was some objection he made relating to the Athanasian creed. Ask him about it.’ Hearne subsequently added this note ad loc.: ‘This is a false Report as I have been well assur’d. Tis nevertheless certain from a Letter or two that he writ to Dr Thomas Smith, that he had some scruples upon that score’ (Hearne had inherited Dodwell’s letters to Smith with the rest of Smith’s papers). But, just after Dodwell’s death, Hearne only knew that he had left his fellowship ‘that he might avoid entering into Holy Orders’ (Itinerary of John Leland, as in n. 2, 110). Only subsequently, clearly after he had read Brokesby’s biography, did he add a manuscript note to his copy of his own book (Mus. Bibl. II. 28): ‘The reason was because he thought he could do more true and real service to the Church as a Lay-Man than if he was a Clergy-Man.’

340

Jean-Louis Quantin

years afterwards he was publicly denounced by Richard Baxter, who had seen a manuscript of Barlow’s answer to him, and who derided this ‘strange kind of Nonconformist’.194 The failure must have been traumatic. Trinity College’s primary function was to train a learned clergy for the Established Church in Ireland. The steps which Dodwell had taken there had already committed him to the Church: when elected fellow, he had sworn to direct his studies towards a doctorate in divinity, ‘in order to be able to serve the Church of God, unless God should afterwards dispose my mind otherwise’.195 He must have heard that ‘Call from God’ which he made a necessary condition for an ecclesiastical career.196 His Irish acquaintances, including the friend of his younger days at Trinity College, Anthony Dopping,197 all rose to prominent positions in the Church. After he had settled in England, he lived constantly among clergymen. In the 1680s, he assisted his friend Lloyd in his diocesan duties and even wrote sermons for him.198 In a significant slip of the pen, a letter of Bishop Fell from these years is addressed ‘for the reverend Mr Dodwell’.199 Only in the latter part of his life, in his non-juring days, did he develop a close friendship with another layman, Francis Cherry. Becoming a champion of the priesthood was the best way of making up for one’s failure to be ordained. Dodwell may indeed have succeeded in persuading himself that his remaining a layman had been providential. Brokesby’s explanation in terms of religious mission, if false as to fact, accurately expresses the way Dodwell felt when he spoke in 1701 of ‘that Holy Order whose Honour I have made it the study of my Life to 194 Richard Baxter, An Answer to Mr Dodwell and Dr Sherlocke; Confuting an Universal Humane Church-Supremacy, Aristocratical and Monarchical, as Church-Tyranny and Popery: And defending Dr Isaac Barrow’s Treatise against it. Preparatory to a fuller Treatise against such an Universal Soveraignty, as contrary to Reason, Christianity, the Protestant Profession, and the Church of England; though the Corrupters usurp that Title (London, 1682), 139. 195 Chartae et statuta Collegii Sacrosanctae Trinitatis (as in n. 39), 38: ‘Studiorum Finis erit mihi Theologiae Professio, ut Ecclesiae Dei prodesse possim, nisi aliter Deus Mentem meam deinceps inclinaverit . . . ’. 196 Dodwell, Two Letters of advice (as in n. 36), 5. 197 Dopping, then bishop of Mead, wrote to Dodwell of ‘that friendship that we contracted in our youth’ (letter of 6 June 1682, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 52br ). The two had been contemporaries at Trinity, both becoming fellows in 1662 (see S. J. Connolly’s entry, Oxford DNB, xvi. 563). 198 Tindal Hart, William Lloyd (as in n. 40), 45; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, i (as 199 MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 62v. in n. 193), 207.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

341

promote’.200 His sort of vicarious priesthood accounts for the ambiguity as well as for the abstract extremism of his position. There is certainly an emotional base to his exaltation of bishops as High Priests. The affair also shows his determination to adhere at all costs to what he held to be primitive doctrine and the sharp distinction in status and authority he made between the ante-Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers. Compared with standard Anglican arguments in favour of the authority of the Church Fathers,201 Dodwell’s position was, in fact, very idiosyncratic. It was based on a fully articulated theory of revelation, which he expounded in his very first work, the prolegomena to his former Dublin tutor John Stearne’s posthumous De obstinatione.202 These prolegomena, which were a book in themselves, may be considered as the foundation of all Dodwell’s subsequent writings. For Dodwell, revelation is economical. There is no use for it when the truths to believe can be equally well, or even better, known by natural reason203 (thus, in natural theology, reason is the ordinary means, revelation the extraordinary, as it cannot be attested without miracles, that is without a disruption of the ordinary course of providence, and God does not indulge in useless miracles204). Moreover, even in its proper sphere, revelation was adapted to the sense of the age in which it was first given: ‘the primary intention of the Holy Ghost was that Scripture should be understood by those to whom it was first delivered’,205 and through whom the right interpretation would then be transmitted to all subsequent ages. If these first ages could have misinterpreted Scripture, this would imply that it was not clear even then and we could not expect to fare better now.206 200 ‘Mr Dodwell’s Letter’ in John Richardson, The Canon of the New Testament vindicated; in Answer to the Objections of J. T. in his Amyntor. The Second Edition Corrected with several Additions. To which is now added a Letter from the Learned Mr. Dodwell, concerning the said J. T. (London, 1701), sig. K3r. 201 As developed notably by Matthew Scrivener, Apologia pro S. Ecclesiae Patribus, adversus Joannem Dallaeum De Usu Patrum, etc. Accedit Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana adversus nuperum schisma (London, 1672). 202 On John Stearne, who had been professor of medicine at Trinity and the founder of the Dublin College of Physicians, see T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds)., A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1991), iii. 450–1. 203 Henry Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena Apologetica, In quibus Usus Philosophicorum, Stoicorum praecipue, dogmatum in Theologia asseritur; firmissima Traditionis Ecclesiasticae in dogmatibus fidei adversus modernos Socinianos, aliosque fundamenta stabiliuntur; Stoica de Obstinatione sententia a Novatianismi et Pelagianismi suspicione vindicatur; quid senserint etiam Stoici de doloris simulatione, explicatur’, prefixed to John Stearne, De Obstinatione. Opus Posthumum, Pietatem Christiano-Stoicam, Scholastico 204 Ibid. 65–72. more, suadens (Dublin, 1672), 21. 205 Ibid. 85: ‘Primariam Spiritus Sancti intentionem fuisse ut intelligeretur Scriptura 206 Ibid. 87–8. ab iis quibus primum est tradita.’

342

Jean-Louis Quantin

Since Scripture was meant to be understood by the first Christians, providence made sure that they should be in possession of various resources, both ordinary and extraordinary, in order to discern the true sense of it. The theme recurs constantly in Dodwell’s writings but receives its fullest treatment in the first two Dissertationes in Irenaeum, in which are expounded, first the ordinary, and then the extraordinary resources of the Fathers of the second century, the generation of Irenaeus, to know apostolic Traditions. The pivotal point is the reign of Trajan, when heretics began to separate overtly from the Church. They then began to circulate traditions under the Apostles’ names, causing the Church to investigate which traditions were genuinely apostolical.207 Now the end of Trajan’s reign marked the end of the generation of the a˝tptai, those who had seen Christ, whom Dodwell also calls ‘the primary disciples’.208 Some longaevissimi among them had been kept alive by divine providence to give unexceptionable witness.209 The next generation was that of their disciples, the a˝toptØn maqhta‹, like Polycarp and Papias, who are ‘the first succession’.210 Then came the generation of Irenaeus, which received, in turn, the testimony of the men of the first succession (‘the old men of Irenaeus’).211 Tradition was thus conveyed by the natural succession of generations,212 and Dodwell emphasized the importance, in this process, of longevity, in a way that strikingly parallels the classic apologetic argument from the long life of the Old Testament patriarchs.213 It was an effect of God’s providence, ‘when the dispute against heretics concerned the genuine tradition of the 207 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), ‘Dissertatio prima. Qua fide dignus in Apostolicarum Traditionum memoria conservanda Irenaeus, et coaevi Irenaeo Secundi Seculi Patres, quoad Media cognoscendi traditiones Ordinaria’, 19. 208 Ibid. 45, from Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3. 27. 1 (GCS ix/1, 280–2). See 209 Ibid. 37. also 64. 210 Ibid. 50 and 60. 211 Ibid. 65 (‘Irenaei senes’). See 12. Dodwell, following Pearson, understands the presbyteri in Irenaeus, 5. 33. 3 (SC 153, p. 414) as referring to age, not to function. See Pearson, Vindiciae (as in n. 88), part 2, p. 167. 212 Cf. ibid. 221: ‘generationes, quae quidem ad Traditionis conservandae causam imprimis faciebant’. 213 See e.g. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae, or A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the matters therein contained (5th edn., London, 1680), Book 2, ch. 2, 132–3: ‘in Moses his time it was a very easie matter to run up their lineal descent as far as the flood, nay up to Adam: for Adam conversed sometime with Lamech Noahs Father; . . . and Mathusela his Grandfather who was born A.M. 687 dyed not till A.M. 1656 . . . , i.e. was 600 years co-temporary with Noah. Sem his Son was probably living in some part of Jacobs time, or Isaac’s at least; and how easily and uninterruptedly might the general tradition of the ancient History be continued thence to the time of Moses . . . ’.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

343

Church, that the Church should never have lacked extremely old, and therefore utterly trustworthy, witnesses’.214 This is why Dodwell took such pains to recalculate the whole chronology of Irenaeus and to show that that Father had been born as early as 97, two decades earlier than usually believed (Dodwell’s dating was adopted by Cave, to whom it had been communicated while still unpublished).215 Grabe, who refused to follow Dodwell on this point, protested that this would imply that Irenaeus was nearly 90 and ‘already decrepit’ when he wrote his last books, such as his treatise On the ogdoad against Florinus.216 In Dodwell’s eyes, however, it was precisely this old age that conferred on Irenaeus an exceptional authority, when he ‘thus opposed in his old age his own testimony concerning the Polycarpian traditions to the testimony of old Florinus’.217 Doctrine had been conveyed orally until the time of the emperor Decius, after which the writings of the ancients became the only source for apostolic traditions218—in the same way as Moses was supposed to have put in writing the ancient tradition of the world.219 This conveyance of tradition by human agency was guaranteed at the same time by an extraordinary assistance of the Holy Ghost. Dodwell’s second dissertation on Irenaeus, which built on an earlier essay in the Dissertationes Cyprianicae,220 was an unsurpassed history of charisms 214 Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 281: ‘Singulari enim Dei Providentia effectum est ut cum esset, adversus Haereticos, de illibata Ecclesiae Traditione disputandum, ne deessent unquam Ecclesiae testes admodum longaevi, omnique adeo fide dignissimi.’ 215 Ibid., ‘Dissertatio tertia. Quo tempore natus, quo item mortuus, fuerit Irenaeus’, 219–85, and ‘Synopsis Chronologica’, sig. 3T1v. Cf. Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 40–1. Dodwell had previously redated the death of the martyrs of Lyon to 167 instead of 177: see Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), 66. The Jesuit Pierre Halloix, Illustrium Ecclesiae Orientalis Scriptorum, qui sanctitate iuxta et eruditione, secundo Christi saeculo floruerunt, vitae et documenta (Douai, 1636), 406, dated Irenaeus’ birth to about 120. He was followed by Tillemont, Memoires, iii (as in n. 76), 79. Louis Ellies du Pin, Nouvelle Bibliotheque des Auteurs Ecclesiastiques, i (Paris, 1686), 190 and 201, note c, went as low as 140. 216 S. Irenaei Contra omnes Haereses, ed. Grabe (as in n. 62), p. xiii: ‘Quis autem illum adeo senem demum scribendo manum admovisse, et jam decrepitum tot tantosque libros elaborasse, facile sibi persuaserit?’ Grabe thought that Irenaeus had been born in 108. 217 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 434: ‘Sic Florini senis Testimonio suum de Traditionibus Polycarpianis senile etiam Testimonium opposuit.’ 218 Ibid. 285: ‘Nec inde legimus qui Apostolorum Traditiones non scriptas aliunde quam e` Vetustiorum Scriptis in Testimonium adducat.’ 219 Cf. Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (as in n. 213), 107–8: ‘It stands to the greatest reason, that an account of things so concerning and remarkable, should not be alwayes left to the uncertainty of an oral tradition; but should be timely entred into certain Records, to be preserved to the memory of posterity.’ 220 ‘Dissertatio Cyprianica IV. Ad Epistolam VIII. De visionibus’, Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), 10–18.

344

Jean-Louis Quantin

and miraculous gifts in the Christian Church (Le Clerc recommended it to John Locke as full of ‘very remarkable things’221). Dodwell put special stress on the testimony of Irenaeus, which attested that Christian Churches in his time were still enjoying the miraculous powers of the apostolic age, including the supreme one of raising the dead.222 The principle of economy according to which, as has been seen, God acts consistently, made them gradually disappear afterwards.223 The earliest attestation of this process was to be found in the Ad Autolycum. The heathen Autolycus challenged his Christian friend Theophilus to show him but one person raised from the dead, and Theophilus used various arguments to prove that the demand was unreasonable.224 Dodwell had no doubt that Theophilus had recourse to these evasions only because he could not produce someone raised from the dead. Now, whereas Ad Autolycum and Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses had been previously regarded as more or less contemporary, Dodwell allowed for an interval of forty years between them (we see clearly here how Dodwell’s every assertion, in this case his ascription of Ad Autolycum to another Theophilus, gratuitous as it might seem, fitted into his system). It was then easy to conclude that persons raised from the dead in Irenaeus’ time had in the meantime died again and that the power itself had been lost. Other charisms, especially the power of exorcising devils, survived longer, but all were withdrawn in the course of the fourth century, as Chrysostom testified on many occasions. A number of true miracles had still been performed at this late date, but it was very difficult to distinguish them from false ones. Fourthcentury writers had been ‘much addicted to fables’ (Dodwell instanced no lesser authors than Athanasius in his Life of Antony, Jerome in his Life of Paul the Hermit, Palladius in his Historia lausiaca, Sulpicius Severus in his Dialogues).225 After the empire had become Christian under Constantine, witnesses could not have the same authority anyway: it now became advantageous to claim a power to work miracles. Moreover, pre-Constantinian miracles were performed only in the case of necessity 221 See letter to John Locke, 11 Apr. 1692, Epistolario, ii (as in n. 153) no. 196, pp. 70–1. 222 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 2. 31. 2 (SC 294, pp. 328–9); 2. 32. 4 (SC 294, pp. 340–2); 5. 6. 1 (SC 153, p. 74). All three texts are quoted in the original Greek by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5. 7 (GCS ix/1, pp. 440–2). 223 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 116–17: ‘ut enim Deus non solet Ecclesiae suae deesse in necessariis, sic nec redundare in superfluis.’ 224 Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, l. I, n. 13 [PG 6, cols. 1041–4]. 225 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 195.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

345

whereas more recent ones had allegedly been worked for the slightest reasons.226 Dodwell’s sacralization of the primitive old men as providential carriers of the truth is reminiscent of Roman Catholic arguments.227 It should be stressed, however, that for him, contrary to post-Tridentine doctrine, the apostolic traditions thus preserved did not amount to a second source of revelation alongside Scripture. They concerned firstly the Canon of Scripture, that is the distinction between genuine and apocryphal writings under the name of the Apostles,228 and secondly the interpretation of Scripture. The controversy with heretics in Irenaeus’ time focused on the meaning of words. Both sides agreed that the words Aeons, Word, Life, Truth, and so on were to be found in St John’s writings; the question was whether St John had meant by them the same thing as Valentinus. Now such a debate could best be settled by recourse to tradition.229 Later, Dodwell introduced yet another component of these traditions, the mystical senses of the Old Testament. The ability to understand these had been an extraordinary gift of the Holy Spirit to the first believers, and Irenaeus had received some of these mystical senses, for instance the interpretation of Isaiah 42: 5 as relating to the Christians, from the oral teaching of ‘old men’: And if so, these Interpretations must have had more Authority than that of being meerly Interpretations. Like that of a Letter from the Author discovering his own Meaning of Phrases otherwise dubious, above that of the Sense of the same Letter collected only from the Importance of the Phrases themselves alone by the most sagacious Grammarian, but unassisted by the Author whose Phrases they were. Thus such Interpretations as these must have had a Divine Authority, not only of the Spirit which had suggested them, but also of the Persons who were known to have had that particular Gift of the Spirit for the Discovery of such Mystical Senses of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, attested by their own Credentials, and by the Judges of the Prophets, and by the Judgment of those who had the Gift of discerning Spirits, and the Consent of the Spirit of the whole Body, which, all put together, amounted to an Evidence of the highest Kind that could be expected, even in that happy Age of Extraordinaries.230 226

Ibid. 208–11. For the theme of providential longevity, see e.g. Baronius, Martyrologium Romanum (Rome, 1586), 457: ‘cum divina quadam dispensatione factum sit, ut complures ex his, qui Apostolorum temporibus vixerint, ad longissimam aetatem pervenirent; nempe ut ea, quae oculis aspexissent, certa scientia testarentur; ut inter alios Symeon Episcopus Hierosolymitanus, qui centesimum vigesimum attigit annum . . .’. 228 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 61–75. 229 Ibid. 283. 230 Dodwell, Scripture Account (as in n. 7), 78. See Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 5. 12. 2 (SC 153, p. 144). 227

346

Jean-Louis Quantin

In ‘that age of Extraordinaries . . . things were to be prov’d which were afterwards to be believ’d on the Credit of the Proofs then given in that first Age’.231 The essential character of the first three centuries was thus their having witnessed the transition from the extraordinary to the ordinary state of Christianity. The key element of that ordinary or settled condition was none other than diocesan episcopacy. Dodwell’s almost life-long endeavour was to chronicle, and at the same time to legitimate, the formation of episcopal government. His views were highly original and some of them appear today as striking anticipations of recent research—especially his insistence that first-century Christians were still part of Judaism.232 But Dodwell’s perspective was theological. He wrote the history of episcopacy in order to prove that contemporary English dissenters ought to submit to contemporary English bishops. Here again, many of his contributions to scholarship, marginal as they might seem in his career (for instance his work, mentioned above, on the spurious episcopal lists of Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre), make sense as part of this undertaking. His last word on the question is to be found in his Paraenesis ad exteros. In the earliest apostolic times, Christians were as one body with Jews. Only gradually did they secede and establish distinct communities with their own clergy,233 and even at that stage there were no diocesan bishops. All the local Christian churches submitted to the primacy of the bishop of Jerusalem, the Christian equivalent of the Jewish High Priest. He was thus the only bishop properly so called. The office was the preserve of Christ’s family, whose members succeded to it on a hereditary basis. The Jerusalem primacy ended together with hereditary episcopacy when the Lord’s family became extinct, that is in 104 or 105.234 The last surviving members of the apostolic college then transferred to Ephesus, under the presidency of John, who wore the petalon of the High Priest.235 Ultimately, on the very eve of their disappearance, they gave the title of bishop to the presidents of the clergy in each local church:236 this was the foundation of diocesan episcopacy, 231 Henry Dodwell, Occasional Communion Fundamentally Destructive of the Discipline of the Primitive Catholick Church, and Contrary to the Doctrine of the Latest Scriptures, concerning Church-Communion (London, 1705), 139. 232 Cf. e.g. S. C. Mimouni, Le Jude ´o-christianisme ancien: Essais historiques (Paris, 233 Dodwell, Paraenesis (as in n. 152), 56. 1998). 234 Ibid. 61–5. 235 Ibid. 79–81, after Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3. 31. 3 (GCS ix/1, p. 264). 236 Ibid. 88–90 (quoting Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 3. 3. 4 (SC 211, p. 38) on Polycarp). In previous versions of his theory, Dodwell omitted the Ephesus stage and extended the Jerusalem primacy until 116, diocesan episcopacy immediately taking its place by ‘right of devolution’: see De Jure Laicorum Sacerdotali, ex sententia Tertulliani

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

347

which was to be afterwards continued in all generations as the ordinary government of the Church. What should be stressed is that Dodwell unhesitatingly gave up the traditional Anglican case for episcopacy, which was based on Scripture (primarily on the Acts of the Apostles and on Paul’s pastoral letters).237 His system cut short the stale debates as to whether Timothy and Titus had been bishops, or even archbishops. In fact, Scripture offered no more basis for episcopacy than for presbytery, and ‘the Government intended for the Ordinary use of the Church as distinguished from the Extraordinaryes which were to expire with the Apostles, is not to be known but by the last Acts of the Apostles, long after the History of the Acts of the Apostles and St Pauls Epistles, and that of St Clement to the Corinthians’.238 The importance of such an admission can hardly be overemphasized. Indeed, Le Clerc, who had read Dodwell closely and was both awed by his learning and appalled by his doctrine, thought that all his paradoxes resulted from his having given up the scriptural basis of episcopacy.239 By historicizing Anglican apologetics, Dodwell radically altered its balance. In his eyes ante-Nicene Christianity was the standard of truth for all subsequent ages and the means to decide all the controversies of modern Christendom. Original truth, however, had been progressively obliterated in the Church. Oral tradition, which had been of such authority ‘in the happy age of extraordinaries’, became unreliable, as it usually is in ordinary contexts, and gave rise to many fables as early as the fourth century.240 ‘Your lower Monks knew nothing from Originals, but took aliorumque Veterum Dissertatio, in Hugo Grotius, De Coenae Administratione, ubi Pastores non sunt, Item An Semper Communicandum per Symbola? Dissertatio. Cum diversorum Responsionibus (London, 1685), sep. pagination, 266–71 (‘Series Chronologica Regiminis Ecclesiastici Ordinarii’); Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), sig. 3T2r, and for more details J.-L. Quantin, ‘Apocryphorum nimis studiosi ? Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le proble`me du canon ne´o-testamentaire au tournant du xviie et du xviiie sie`cle’, in S. C. Mimouni (ed.), Apocryphite´: Histoire d’un concept transversal aux religions du livre (Turnhout, 2002), 285–306. 237 See especially the standard exposition written by Joseph Hall at Laud’s instance on the eve of the Civil War, Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted (London, 1640). 238 Letter of 19 June 1703 to Benjamin Hoadly, MS Cherry 23, p. 120. 239 Jean Le Clerc, Historia ecclesiastica duorum primorum a Christo natu saeculorum, e veteribus monumentis depromta (Amsterdam, 1716), 521 n. 2: ‘Atqui multo satius erat Episcopalem Ordinem e` Novo Testamento probare, ut alii fecerant, hujusque divinam auctoritatem tueri.’ 240 See Dissertationes Cyprianicae (as in n. 44), ‘Dissertatio IV’, 13, and ‘Dissertatio XI’, 73, on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus. For Dodwell’s suspicion of oral transmission in general, see De Cyclis (as in n. 142), 675–7, on the origins of

348

Jean-Louis Quantin

all things on trust, as the Papists do now.’241 As for doctrine, Augustine (a regular target of Dodwell) ‘did not so concern himself to enquire into Original Tradition . . . , but contented himself with present Authorities and received Opinions’.242 Later ages ‘took for their norm of orthodoxy the Fathers of the fourth and subsequent centuries’, who followed exactly new conciliar formulations, and ‘the ancients who had spoken with more freedom and simplicity’ became suspect. Greek councils adduced Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, but not Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Ignatius, or Justin; Latin councils Hilary, Jerome, Ambrose, ‘above all others Augustine’, together with the subsequent writers, but not Irenaeus, Tertullian, Arnobius, or Lactantius, and ‘very rarely Cyprian’. Instead of ‘framing their decrees after the old ante-Nicenes’, as they ought to have done, later generations criticized them in the name of newly received doctrines.243 As for discipline and ceremonies, people rashly ascribed to the apostolic age everything they found to have been practised for a long time in the Church. This was the axiom of Augustine (‘whatever is held by the universal Church and has not been instituted by any council but has always been preserved, is rightly believed to be of apostolic authority’), which had been abundantly used by Anglican divines from the Laudians onwards to buttress the rites and usages of the Church, the Apostle’s Creed, and even episcopacy itself,244 Rome, and also Exercitationes duae: Prima, de Aetate Phalaridis; Secunda, de Aetate Pythagorae Philosophi (London, 1704), 1. 241 Dodwell to Hearne, 18 Oct. 1709, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 493r. 242 Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse (as in n. 6), 303. See also 250 (‘St Augustine, who rather pleased himself in Reasoning from received Opinions, than in consulting Originals’) and 306. Cf. e.g. De Jure Laicorum Sacerdotali (as in n. 236), 39. 243 Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (as in n. 119), 408–9: ‘Sic illi nimirum recentiores pro norma Orthodoxiae habebant Quarti, et deinceps, Seculi Patres, quod nimirum sermonem ipsum et phrases Conciliorum observarint accuratius qui post Concilia vixissent; veteres licentius simpliciusque locutos, adeo testes advocare non solebant, ut suspectos potius habuerint, siquas alienas a recepto suorum Seculorum sermone voces admisissent . . . . Nec enim solebant illi (quod factum tamen oportuit) Decreta sua ad Veteres Anti-Nicaenos exigere, sed contra e Decretis recentiorum receptisque dogmatibus duram ipsi in vetustissimos Patres censuram exercere.’ 244 Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas, 4. 24 (PL 43, col. 174): ‘quod universa tenet Ecclesia, nec conciliis institutum, sed semper retentum est, nonnisi auctoritate apostolica traditum rectissime creditur’. For the use of the text by 17th-c. Anglicans, see P. Lake, ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, in B. Young Kunze and D. D. Brautigan (eds.), Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honour of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, NY, 1992), 159 and 164; Peter Heylyn, Theologia veterum (London, 1654), 13; Peter Gunning, The Paschal or Lent-Fast Apostolical and Perpetual. At first Deliver’d in a Sermon preached before His Majesty in Lent, and since

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

349

but which Dodwell, at least at the end of his life, felt no qualms about repudiating openly: ‘Those Presumptive Reasons, however well intended for promoting a Reverence and Acquiescence in present received Customs, yet I cannot take them sufficient to assure of the Facts’.245 Original truth had been lost and needed to be recovered. To achieve that goal, one had to replace both the New Testament and the writings of the Fathers in their cultural context. ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost was that Scripture should be adjusted to the understanding of the age in which it was written’.246 The customs and notions of the Apostles’ age were ‘the matter of their Revelations’, to be corrected or clarified as necessary.247 Now, the understanding of the age which received the Gospel revelation was modelled by philosophy,248 more specifically by the eclectic, but primarily Platonic, philosophy of the Hellenists of the Jewish Diaspora. The great design of the Apostles, and especially of John, was ‘to reconcile Christianity with this Cabalistical Mystical Scheme of Notions which then prevailed among the Hellenists’,249 and which therefore provides the key to the understanding of the New Testament. Philo was here of the utmost importance since he ‘has preserved to us the best Vocabulary of the Terms, and the completest Collection of the Notions of the Jews, alluded to in the Canonical Writers of the New Testament’.250 That ‘Hellenistical Greek Hebrew style’ passed ‘out of use as early as the beginning of the second century’, enlarged. Wherein the Judgment of Antiquity is laid down (London, 1662), 134–5; Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right asserted (as in n. 237), Part i, 41–9. 245 Dodwell, A Discourse concerning the Use of Incense in Divine Offices (as in n. 77), 10 and again 165. At an earlier stage, Dodwell had, however, considered that way of arguing valid, and precisely in the case of incense (see A Treatise concerning the Lawfulness of Instrumental Musick in Holy Offices. The Second Edition, with large Additions (London, 1700), 121–5). 246 Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena Apologetica’ (as in n. 203), 85: ‘ex intentione Spiritus Sancti accommodata fuerit Sacra Scriptura captui aevi quo scripta est.’ 247 Dodwell, Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 464–5. 248 Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena Apologetica’ (as in n. 203), 88: ‘captus illius aevi, quo tradita est a Spiritu Sancto Sacra Scriptura, Philosophicus fuerit, ad normam Philosophorum eo aevo celebrium’. 249 Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 300. Cf. 394 on John ‘who of all the New Testament Writers seems to have been most punctually observant of this Mystical style’. 250 Dodwell, Preliminary Defence (as in n. 156), 33. See also A Discourse Concerning the One Altar and the One Priesthood insisted on by the Ancients in their Disputes against Schism. Wherein the Ground and Solidity of that Way of Reasoning is Explained, as also its Applicableness to the Case of our Modern Schismaticks, with particular Regard to some Late Treatises of Mr Richard Baxter. Being a Just Account concerning the true Nature and Principles of Schism according to the Ancients (London, 1683), 206.

350

Jean-Louis Quantin

which proves that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which are entirely written in it, belong to the first century.251 The organizing structure of Hellenistic philosophy was the correspondence it established between the Logos, who is the Archetypal world and seal, and the multitude of his imprints, ‘ectypes’, in the sensible world.252 The principle was first propounded by Dodwell in his Treatise of schism,253 with references to Philo254 and to the various philosophers, especially Arius Didymus, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his report on Platonic Ideas.255 Archetypes were the only true realities,256 and union with the archetypal Logos the only way to Life and to deliverance from the material world.257 What was proper to the New Testament was to apply these notions ‘to Christ, not to unrevealed Philosophy’.258 Under the Christian dispensation, they underpinned both ecclesiology and sacramental teaching. Sacraments were the only ordinary means to achieve union with the Logos, and they were only valid if authorized 251 Dodwell, A Defence of the Vindication of the Deprived Bishops (as in n. 151), 43–4, and letter summarized by Grabe, Spicilegium (as in n. 111), i. 132–3. 252 The pair Archetype/ectype recurs constantly in Dodwell’s writings. For a definition, see Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 349: ‘in this Mystical way of arguing from Archetypal to Ectypal Beings so frequently used in the Scripture in allusion to the Platonick Notions then received among the Hellenists, the Archetypes are supposed to be not only like Copies in imitation whereof the resemblances in the Ectypa were made, but as Seals to produce their own similitudes, as Seals do by application to the wax’; Dodwell’s commentary on the epistle of Barnabas, St Edmund Hall, MS 31, p. 59: ‘Erat nimirum hoc e receptissima tum temporis Platonicorum doctrina de Ideis exploratissimum. Ectypa enim sensibilia illi corruptibilia crediderunt, aeternas autem sensibilium illorum archetypas Ideas, essentiasque ipsas.’ Dodwell’s use of the words parallels that of his contemporary Ralph Cudworth. See The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), reprinted in Collected Works of Ralph Cudworth, i (Hildesheim and New York, 1977), 155, 527, 733–4, 853; A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. S. Hutton (Cambridge, 1996), 131. Cf. A. Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (6th edn., Paris, 1951), s.v. ‘Ectype’, cols. 264–5; Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter, ii (Darmstadt, 1972), s.v. ‘Ektypus’, cols. 436–7. 253 Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 240 and 394. 254 Philo, De opificio mundi xx17–22 (Opera, ed. L. Cohn and P. Wendland, i (Berlin, 1896), 5–7); Quod deterius potiori insidiari soleat xx75–8 (ibid. 275–6). 255 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, 11. 22–5 (esp. 23, which is a quotation from Arius Didymus’ De placitis Platonis) and 15. 44 (Pseudo-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, on matter). Dodwell used the edition of the French Jesuit Franc¸ois Viger and referred to two of the latter’s notes on the various senses of the word kmage·on. See Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 394; E˝s
biou to Pamf‹lou piskpou tv n Palaist‹n| Kaisare‹av, Proparaskeu e˝aggelik . Eusebii Pamphili Caesareae Palaestinae episcopi, Praeparatio evangelica (Paris, 1628), 545–6 and 845, and notes, sep. pagination, 50 (on 11. 11) and 81–2 (on 15. 44). This edition is reprinted in PG. 256 Dodwell’s note on the Testamenta in Grabe, Spicilegium (as in n. 111), i. 339. 257 Dodwell, Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 238. 258 Dodwell, Occasional Communion (as in n. 231), 164.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

351

by the bishop, who, as the High Priest of the ‘ectypal’, visible Church, corresponded to the Logos, who is the archetypal and invisible High Priest.259 This dualism, now forgotten, was implicit throughout the writings of the apostolic Fathers, which could not be understood without reference to it. Dodwell’s ‘paraphrastical commentary’ on Barnabas was meant to explain ‘the reasoning and connexion in allusion to the notions of those times’.260 If Barnabas, for instance, asserts the sacrifices of the Law to have been figures of Christ,261 the reason is that the Logos, as the archetypal priest, offers archetypal sacrifices.262 Philo, who is a ‘contemporary of Barnabas’,263 writes of the ‘Logos High Priest’.264 Ignatius needed such a commentary ‘almost as much as Barnabas’,265 and Dodwell gave a sample of it in his Paraenesis. The expression ‘Catholic Church’ in the celebrated passage of the epistle to the Smyrnaeans did not refer to the agreement of all the particular Churches (it was too early for the question to arise), but ‘our Ignatius calls the invisible and archetypal Church Catholic under Christ the archetypal and invisible bishop, in as much, that is, as it was opposed to the ectypal and visible bishop and to the people congregated under him. And this was perfectly right according to the style and reasonings of that age.’266 Dodwell’s Platonic interpretation of Christianity may be regarded as a late version of the ‘Ancient Theology’,267 but it was a completely refashioned one. He fully accepted the conclusions of Casaubon and his 259 Dodwell, Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 349 (‘our rising out of the water represents the Resurrection of Christ, and does not only represent, but apply the merits and efficacy of his Resurrection to us, so that it must produce in us a like signature, (kmage·on is the Platonical term,) first of a Mystical Resurrection from sin and a wordly Life, and then of our corporal Resurrection from the grave’); A Discourse Concerning the One Altar and the One Priesthood (as in n. 250), esp. 204–41; Occasional Communion (as in n. 231), 156–64. 260 Dodwell to Smith, 15 June 1698, MS Smith 49, p. 157. 261 Epistle of Barnabas, 8. 1–2 (ed. Gebhardt-Harnack (as in n. 101), 36–8). 262 St Edmund Hall, MS 31, p. 59. 263 Ibid. 96. 264 Philo, De somniis, 1, x215 (Opera, ed. L. Cohn and P. Wendland, iii (Berlin, 1898), 251). For other references to archetypes in Dodwell’s commentary, see St Edmund Hall, MS 31, pp. 13–14, 29, 48, 115, 122. 265 Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 15 June 1698, MS Smith 49, p. 157. 266 Dodwell, Paraenesis (as in n. 152), 152–9 (quotation, 153–4): ‘Ignatius noster Ecclesiam Invisibilem et Archetypam CATHOLICAM appellat sub Christo Archetypo et Invisibili EPISCOPO. Qua scilicet Episcopo Ectypo et Visibili et pl qei sub eo congregato opponebatur. Idque sane, pro illius Seculi sermone Ratiociniisque rectissime’ (capitals are Dodwell’s). See Ignatius, epistle to the Smyrneans, c. 8 (The Apostolical Fathers, ed. J. B. Lightfoot (London, 1889–90), ii/2, 311). 267 See the classic study by D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (as in n. 187).

352

Jean-Louis Quantin

successors as to the apocryphal character of the Corpus Hermeticum.268 He quoted it only as the work of a Christian author who probably ‘intended to deliver the Principles of the Aegyptian Philosophy, which pretended to Hermes as its first Author’, that is ‘that Scheme of it which prevailed in his own time at Alexandria, which was the Elective’.269 Similarly, the author of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs ‘personated very ably the Patriarchs, according to the reasonings of his own age’ when he made them quote the ‘celestial tables’, that is ‘the Archetypal Law in Heaven’, since the ‘ectypal law’, that of Moses, had not yet been promulgated.270 The work is therefore ‘fit to be considered, as another Testimony of the Sense of the Jews in the Ages of the Apostles’.271 As to the Corpus Dionysianum, Dodwell gave it a much later date than any other critic. He thought that it had been forged at the time of Gregory the Great, perhaps by that pope himself and certainly by a Latin writer.272 This was a rather extraordinary surmise given the poor state of the knowledge of Greek in the West at that time (even Cave refused to follow Dodwell on this point) but it confirms that Dodwell’s Christian Platonism was thoroughly historical in character.273 His scheme only involved authors whom we would call today Middle Platonists, who were more or less contemporary with Christ and the Apostles, who could not claim any extraordinary divine assistance but whose writings could be supposed to have shaped the culture in which the Christian revelation was first received. Platonic philosophy had itself to be reconstructed by scholarship. In his last letter to Hearne, exactly one month before his death, Dodwell expressed the hopes that Platonic authors like Numenius could be recovered. Proclus was valuable because he ‘gives an account of the sense of many Platonists more antient than himself now lost’.274 The same interest in the cultural context of Christianity explains why 268 See A. Grafton, ‘Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 46 (1983), 78–93. 269 Dodwell, Separation of Churches (as in n. 188), 335. 270 Dodwell’s note in Grabe, Spicilegium (as in n. 111), i. 339–40: ‘Egit ergo noster Patriarcharum personas, pro Seculi sui ratiociniis peritissime, dum Legem hanc Archetypam ab illis lustratam agnoscit, cum nondum Ectypa in lucem prodiisset.’ See Test. Levi 5. 4, in Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ed. de Jonge (as in n. 108), 30. Dodwell proposes a different interpretation in Paraenesis (as in n. 152), 163. 271 Dodwell, A Defence of the Vindication of the Deprived Bishops (as in n. 151), 44. 272 See De Jure Laicorum Sacerdotali (as in n. 236), 389, and Cave, Historia literaria (as in n. 60), 178, who summarizes a letter from Dodwell. 273 It is significant that Dodwell, who constantly uses the pair archetype/ectype, never quotes Pseudo-Dionysius, although a text like De divinis nominibus, c. 2, x5 (PG 3, col. 644) would have been a very appropriate reference. 274 Dodwell to Hearne, 7 May 1711, MS Rawlinson lett. 25, fo. 511r.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

353

Dodwell should have begun a dissertation on the Septuagint, which he dated to the end, instead of the first half, of the third century bc.275 Dodwell’s case against English dissenters in England was based on the correspondence between archetype and ectype. To be separated from one’s bishop was to be in the very condition of the damned, ‘disunited from Christ’276 and subject to the Devil.277 According to Dodwell’s theory of the soul, it was even to be literally in a state of death. Neither the soul nor the body has any right to immortality but by their union with the Spirit, and ‘the conveying it by a Covenanting Symbol to be received by every particular Member, and as a Principle of Divine Life, is the peculiar Prerogative of the Gospel’.278 That symbol was the ‘Baptism of the Spirit’, which Dodwell eventually located, not in water baptism, but in confirmation, a strictly episcopal function.279 Plato had believed the soul to be naturally immortal, but this was an instance in which the revelations of the New Testament ‘over-ruled the Notions, not only of the Platonists, but of the Hellenists also’.280 The Christians ‘were for the Elective Sect, of choosing what was confirmed by their own Revelations, out of all the several Sects of the Philosophers; not for confining themselves to any one Sect, of how great authority soever’.281 At first sight it would seem that Dodwell had been carried away in his old age by his zeal for episcopacy, but there are actually few ideas to which he held as tenaciously as to that of the natural mortality of the soul. He had at least hinted at it in his Dublin writings,282 and made it known to some at the time: in 1709, Archbishop King could write to Dodwell that he had been aware of his views ‘above 36 years ago’.283 Nor did he, once settled in England, hide them from his friend William Lloyd, had it not been for whom he would have published them ‘above twenty years agoe’.284 This was common knowledge in Oxford about 1690.285 275 To the reign of Ptolemy Philopator instead of Ptolemy Philadelphus: see Brokesby, Life of Dodwell (as in n. 1), 504. 276 A Discourse Concerning the One Altar and the One Priesthood (as in n. 250), 397–8. 277 Dodwell, Occasional Communion (as in n. 231), 170. 278 Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse (as in n. 6), 50 and 163. 279 Dodwell to Burnet, 10 Feb. 1711, in Four Letters (as in n. 4), 11. 280 Dodwell, Scripture Account (as in n. 7), 95–6. Cf. 45–6 and 49. 281 Ibid. 48. 282 See Dodwell, ‘Prolegomena Apologetica’ (as in n. 203), 133, and also Two Letters of advice (as in n. 36), 209–12. 283 William King to Dodwell, 17 July 1709, MS Eng. Lett. c. 29, fo. 126v. 284 Hearne, Remarks and Collections, i (as in n. 193), 211. 285 See Andreas Adam Hochstetter’s journal of his literary journey in England, Stuttgart, Wu¨rttembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Cod. hist. 8
8, fo. 182v, entry for

354

Jean-Louis Quantin

All over Europe since the Reformation the Churches had made the study of Christian antiquity into a weapon to advance their rival claims. As time went by, scholars began to change the agenda. Instead of defending contemporary confessional positions en bloc, they endeavoured to bring to light an original purity, doctrines and practices which, they claimed, had long been obscured, if not utterly lost. Primitive Christianity had now to be rediscovered and restored. In many cases, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholarship was threatening the orthodoxy it had been meant to strengthen. The problem was especially acute in those Churches which had, so to say, invested most in patristics and ecclesiastical history. Such was the Gallican Church in France, where the passionate exploration of the first Christian centuries was a potent factor in the Jansenist crisis.286 Such was also the Church of England, and Dodwell’s work is to be understood in this context. What makes Dodwell unique is his radicalism. He openly declared ‘the Consent of the present Churches’ of no authority against ‘the Original Traditions of the Primitive Church’.287 Whereas scholars usually tried to avoid too direct a clash with received opinions and practices, he felt it a religious duty to present his views in the most unmitigated manner. To the end of his life he proved as adverse to compromise as he had been in his youth, when he had sacrificed his career, his tastes, his vocation rather than submit to the post-Nicene orthodoxy embodied in the Athanasian Creed. He professed to be ‘in hopes that God will not suffer his own Cause of retrieving Primitive Doctrine and Discipline . . . to be overborn with Popular Clamors and Prejudices’.288 The danger for orthodoxy was all the greater since Dodwell was not merely collecting facts or collating texts: he was building a rival orthodoxy of his own, a complete system of primitive Christianity, into which data were made to fit. It is no accident if 4 Feb. 1691: ‘Clarissimus Derrius in novo Collegio secum memorabat, istam H. Dodwelli coniecturam esse, quod Gentiles isti, ad quos cognitio religionis Christianae non pervenit qui tamen honeste vixerunt, temporaneum bonorum suorum operum praemium sunt accepturi, postea annihilandi. Solos vero fideles Christianos immortales futuros, unde Paulus dicat Christum istis per Evangelium vitam et immortalitatem attulisse.’ I should like to thank Scott Mandelbrote for telling me about Hochstetter’s diary and his references to Dodwell. ´ rudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles (Paris, 1994); 286 B. Neveu, E J.-L. Quantin, Le Catholicisme classique et les Pe`res de l’Eglise: Un retour aux sources (1669– 287 Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse (as in n. 6), 54. 1713) (Paris, 1999). 288 Dodwell, Scripture Account (as in n. 7), 293.

Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad?

355

Le Nain de Tillemont, that most moderate and self-denying of scholars, wrote so emphatically of Dodwell’s ‘rashness’: he had clearly recognized an incompatibility.289 Le Nain de Tillemont’s Me´moires, of course, are still useful today as a reference work, whereas Dodwell’s books, in which facts are interwoven with reasonings, are dead and buried. They failed to restore primitive Christianity but provided ammunition to deists and freethinkers. It would not be quite accurate to present Dodwell as the suicide of Anglican scholarship. He certainly attempted to use scholarship to restate a number of doctrines which were under threat in his time—the divine right of episcopacy, the absence of salvation outside the Church, Christian Platonism—in new, more historical, terms. If, however, we define Anglicanism by its official profession of faith, the Thirty-Nine Articles, Dodwell had already ceased to be an orthodox Anglican when he arrived in England from Dublin. Nor was he a scholar, at least not a mere scholar: he was first and foremost a systematic thinker, determined to push principles to their extreme consequences. How then could High Churchmen mistake him for one of their own and give him entrance to their stronghold at Oxford? It may well be that we should correct the too simple view of seventeenth-century Oxford as an institution which ‘accepted the impress of Laud’s character, and exchanged the doubtful prospect of disorderly originality for the staid antiquarian learning of a rich clerical foundation. It became the University of Sheldon and Fell, that burnt Leviathan, expelled Locke, and censured Hearne’s Camden and Wood’s Athenae’.290 The case of Dodwell would suggest that antiquarian learning was not always staid. And the institution which printed ‘at the Theatre’ both his Dissertationes Cyprianicae and his Dissertationes in Irenaeum, with the vice-chancellor’s imprimatur, cannot have been so afraid of originality, at least not of learned originality. We need to know more about Bishop Fell, whose role was decisive in launching Dodwell’s career.291 Dodwell clearly benefited from the prestige attached to learning. There were also his devotion to

289 See J.-L. Quantin, ‘Lenain de Tillemont et l’historiographie anglicane de son temps’, in S.-M. Pellistrandi (ed.), Lenain de Tillemont et l’historiographie de l’antiquite´ romaine (Paris, 2002), 129–58. 290 H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573–1645 (London, 1940), 117. 291 The volume devoted to the 17th c. in The History of the University of Oxford (as in n. 42) has very little to say on patristic scholarship, and is quite disappointing in this respect.

Jean-Louis Quantin

356

episcopacy and his passion against schism. Looking back on Dodwell’s career, the Dissenter Edmund Calamy commented tersely: ‘the time has been when any thing would pass, that was levelled at the Dissenters’.292 If not the suicide of High Church patristics, Dodwell may well have been its nemesis. 292

Calamy, An Historical Account of my own life (as in n. 27), 285.

10 A German Spinozistic Reader of Cudworth, Bull, and Spencer: Johann Georg Wachter and his Theologia Martyrum (1712) Martin Mulsow

I In his Persecution and the Art of Writing published in 1952, Leo Strauss propounded the view that, until the seventeenth century, high philosophy had a double nature: an exoteric side, devotional and educational, for the ordinary reader; and an esoteric one, concealing the truth between the lines, as it can be beneficial only to the select few. He based his theory mainly on the medieval Jewish tradition of Maimonides and Halevi, as well as on Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus.1 He could have found further support for this view in a period some time after Spinoza, the early eighteenth century. For in that period a new way of thinking unfolded which combined such different elements as Cosmotheism, Egyptianism, Cabbalism, and a theory of the Trinity with the idea of the necessarily esoteric character of philosophy. Usually it is the name John Toland that can be heard in this context. John Toland combines anti-Trinitarian, indeed deistic views with a Versions of this paper were presented in Jan Assmann’s Religionswissenschaftliches Colloquium (Heidelberg, 21 Nov. 2001), and in the Seminar on the history of scholarship at the Warburg Institute (London, 25 Jan. 2002). It is a first sketch of a complex subject, preliminary to my forthcoming critical edition with commentary of J. G. Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum. 1 L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill., 1952; Chicago, 1988).

358

Martin Mulsow

political interpretation of the Egyptian Moses. He also combines Spinozism with Hermeticism, the Enlightenment with prisca sapientia, and in Clidophorus (1720), subtitled Of esoteric and exoteric philosophy, the double nature of philosophy is itself a topic.2 The purpose of this essay is to extend the field by discussing the case of a German thinker, Johann Georg Wachter, who also believed in the double nature of philosophy.3 The components of his thought—the proportions might be different—were exactly as those of Toland’s, with one crucial difference: he was not, as the deists were, anti-Trinitarian, but, surprisingly, stood with the Trinitarians, and in a way that was essential to his philosophical position. This calls for an explanation. Around the year 1700 there were bitter controversies about the Oneness of God, in which anti-Trinitarians and Trinitarians opposed each other. The anti-Trinitarians argued in the tradition of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Socinians, claiming that the Bible does not furnish any evidence for the Trinity and that the idea of three persons in one substance is logically contradictory. The early Enlightenment called for a ‘reasonable’ Christianity (Locke) or for a ‘Christianity not mysterious’ (Toland).4 Since 1644, when the second volume of Denis Petau’s Opus de theologicis dogmatibus was published, this debate had assumed a historical dimension, apart from the exegetical and the logical dimensions. Petau was the first to describe the 325 Nicene dogma of the Trinity as the result of a long process of discussion, that is, as a dogma preceded by 2 On Toland see J. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992); J. Toland, Clidophorus, or, of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy, that is, Of the External and Internal Doctrine of the Ancients: The one open and public, accomodated to popular prejudices and the RELIGIONS establish’d by Law; the other private and secret, wherin, to the few capable and discrete, was taught the real TRUTH stript of all disguises, part II of Tetradymus (London, 1720), 61–100. See also n. 51 below. 3 There is no monograph on Wachter. But see W. Schro ¨ der, Spinoza in der deutschen Fru¨haufkla¨rung (Wu¨rzburg, 1987), 59–123; D. Do¨ring, ‘Johann Georg Wachter in Leipzig und die Entstehung seines Glossarium Etymologicum’, in R. Bentzinger and U. D. Oppitz (eds.), Fata Libellorum: Festschrift fu¨r F. J. Pensel zum 70. Geburtstag (Go¨ppingen, 1999), 29–64; M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Fru¨haufkla¨rung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (Hamburg, 2002), passim. 4 For these debates (their European interconnections have not been studied), see J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660– 1750 (London, 1976), ch. 7; Ph. Dixon, ‘Nice and Hot Disputes’. The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2003); H. MacLachlan, Socinianism in SeventeenthCentury England (London, 1951); M. Wiles, The Rise and Fall of British Arianism (Oxford, 1996); J. C. Van Slee, De Geschiedenis van het Socinianisme in de Nederlanden (Haarlem, 1914). For Locke and Toland see M. Sina, L’avvento della ragione (Milan, 1976).

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

359

other views.5 These views were, roughly speaking, subordinationist. They did not put Father and Son (and the Holy Spirit) on one level but subordinated the Son to the Father. This was mainly due to the influence of Middle Platonism, in which the Nous (or Logos) is subordinate to the One. Socinians or Neo-Arians like Daniel Zwicker and Christoph Sand applied this line of the Jesuit Petau to their own ideas. Petau provided them with evidence that the second- and third-century Church had been subordinationist and therefore not Trinitarian in the sense of the Nicene Creed.6 They took up the approach of Michael Servetus, who had based his anti-Trinitarianism on Nominalist arguments and on Ficino’s Platonism, from which he had developed his own subordinationist ideas.7 For the later Socinians, who rejected all speculation beyond God’s oneness, subordinationism was not an issue. But, after 1644, the subordinationist or ‘Arianist’ position became topical again, causing the Socinians to join the historical discussion about ‘genuine’ early Christianity rather than confine themselves to biblical exegesis. The ante-Nicene Fathers had become allies of the anti-Trinitarians.8 5 D. Petau, Opus de theologicis dogmatibus, 6 vols. (Paris, 1640 ff.). For Petau see M. Hofmann, Theologie, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung im theologischen Werk Denis Petau’s (Frankfurt am Main, 1976). 6 [D. Zwicker], Irenicum Irenicorum (Amsterdam, 1658); C. Sand, Nucleus Historiae Ecclesiasticae exhibitus in Historia Arianorum ([Amsterdam], 1668). See P. G. Bietenholz, Daniel Zwicker 1612–1678: Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only (Florence, 1997); W. Glawe, Die Hellenisierung des Christentums in der Geschichte der Theologie von Luther bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1912; repr. Aalen, 1973); W. Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Die philologische Zersetzung des christlichen Platonismus am Beispiel der Trinita¨tstheologie’, in R. Ha¨fner (ed.), Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beitra¨ge zu Begriff und Problem fru¨hneuzeitlicher ‘Philologie’ (Tu¨bingen, 2001), 265–301. On Zwicker’s attitude towards ‘philosophia perennis’ see M. Mulsow, ‘The Trinity as Heresy: Socinian CounterHistories of Simon Magus, Orpheus, and Cerinthus’, in J. C. Laursen (ed.), Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration (New York, 2002), 161–70. 7 For the Servetus–Ficino connnection see W. Emde, ‘Michael Servet als Renaissancephilosoph und Restitutionstheologe’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte, 60 (1941), 96–131; C. Manzoni, ‘La cosmologia della ‘‘Christianismi restitutio’’ di Michele Serveto e l’influsso del neoplatonismo di Ficino’, La Cultura, 9 (1971), 314–41. Wachter possessed a manuscript copy of Servetus’ Dialogus de trinitate: Stadt- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, MS lat. oct. 281. 8 See e.g. Lucas Mellier [¼ S. Crell], Fides primorum Christianorum ex Barnaba, Herme, et Clemente Romano demonstrata (London, 1697); [id.?], Tractatus tres, quorum qui prior Ante-Nicenismus dictitur; is exhibet testimonia patrum Ante-Nicenorum: In quibus elucet sensus Ecclesiae Primaevo-catholicae, quoad articulum de Trinitate. In secundo brevis responsio ordinatur, ad D. G. Bulli defensionem Synodi Nicenae . . . (n.p., 1695); [Th. Smalbroke], The Judgement of the Fathers concerning the doctrine of the Trinity: opposed to Dr. G. Bull’s Defence of the Nicene Faith (London, 1695); [J. Souverain], Le Platonisme

360

Martin Mulsow

Between 1677 and 1685, when these debates were running high, three works apppeared, taking up various positions on subordinationism: Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678); George Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685); and, in Germany, the Kabbala denudata (1677–84), a collection of partly Lurianic, cabbalistic works in a first Latin translation, together with texts by Henry More. All three were important for the Trinity dispute. Cudworth actually refutes Arianism, but his return to Platonic triads as an early form of the Trinity, and to ‘heathen’ traces of the Trinity in Orphism, the Cabbala, and the Hermetic works, amounts in fact to near-subordinationism.9 Thus Crypto-Socinians such as Charles Le Ce`ne or Jacques Souverain in London had Cudworth’s writings in their libraries and used them in their works.10 The situation is different with Bull. Bull’s Defensio is explicitly directed against the usurpation of Petau by Zwicker and Sand, and tries to demonstrate that ante-Nicene positions are tenable for the orthodox side. But Bull is honest enough as a philologist to accept that subordinationism played a central role in the early Church. So the problem for him is, above all against Christoph Sand, to produce a narrow definition of Arius’ rejected doctrine and save somehow the ante-Nicene positions. Bull did this by showing Arianism to imply the temporal creatureliness of the Logos and hence the non-divinity of Christ.11 Subordinationism as such was not problematic: the Father was father devoile´ (‘Cologne’ [Amsterdam], 1700). See further S. Nye, Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity by Dr Wallis, Dr Sherlock, Dr S th [sic], Dr Cudworth and Mr Hooker; and also of the Account given by those who say, the Trinity is an Unconceivable and Inexplicable Mystery (London, 1693). 9 See S. Hutton, ‘The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale’, in L. Szczucki (ed.), Socinianism and its Role in the Culture of XVIth to XVIIIth Centuries (Warsaw, 1983), 139–45; D. Hedley, ‘The Platonick Trinity: Philology and Divinity in Cudworth’s Philosophy of Religion’, in Ha¨fner (as in n. 6), 247–63; J.-L. Breteau, ‘Orige`ne e´tait-il pour Cudworth le mode`le du philosophe chre´tien?’, in M. Baldi (ed.), ‘Mind senior to the World’: Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica inglese (Milan, 1996), 127–48. 10 See E. S. Briggs, ‘Les Manuscrits de Charles Le Ce `ne (1647?–1705) dans la Bibliothe`que de la Huguenot Society of London’, Tijdschrift van de Verlichting, 5 (1977), 358–78; see especially vol. 5 of Le Ce`ne’s manuscripts. For crypto-Socinians see M. Mulsow, ‘Jacques Souverain, Samuel Crell et les cryptosociniens de Londres’, in J. Souverain, Lettre a` Mr touchant l’apostasie, ed. S. Matton and E. Labrousse (Paris, 2000), 49–63. 11 G. Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (Oxford, 1685). See Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Philologische Zersetzung’ (as in n. 6), 286–92; R. Nelson, The Life of Dr. George Bull (London, 1714).

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

361

through engendering the Son, and the Son is son through the Father. Only the Father originates in himself. In this sense, writes Bull, all Trinitarian theology—including Nicene theology—is subordinationist.12 Bull’s strategy was to deny the Unitarians’ patristic foundations. This resulted in an enhancement of Origenism (analogously to the Cambridge Platonists’ latent Origenism13) against Athanasian theology. Finally, the Kabbala denudata and its editors and interpreters Knorr von Rosenroth, Henry More, and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont.14 At first sight the collection seems to stand outside the Trinitarian controversy. But, especially in one of its texts, it offers new perspectives. This text is the epitome of Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo, an early seventeenth-century work, based on the rationalism of the Spanish scholastics, which gives a very philosophical formulation of the Lurianic theory of the infinite God, the En-Sof, and its emanations. It also includes the doctrine of ‘Adam Kadmon’, the celestial Adam, created by God before all other creatures. This Adam is a mediator, because, Herrera states, the one perfect Being, as the cause of all things, can bring forth only one perfect caused being. The latter is, in turn, the cause of everything else that is caused.15 That Herrera was, at least indirectly, influenced by Philo’s speculations on the Logos, is not entirely a recent insight.16 Apparently, this was seen, though in reverse, by people associated with the editors of the Kabbala denudata: Anne Conway, who was familiar with the texts of the Kabbala through van Helmont and More even before its publication, described in her Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae a connection between what she considered to be very old cabbalistic 12 See Bull, Defensio, 280 ff.: ‘Proponitur Thesis tertia, qua usus doctrinae de Subordinatione Filii explicatur.’ I cite from the edition in the Opera omnia, ed. J. E. Grabe 13 See the volume ‘Mind senior to the World’ (as in n. 9). (London, 1703). 14 Kabbala denudata (Sulzbach, 1677/84; repr. Hildesheim, 1974). See A. P. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden, 1998). 15 Abraham Cohen Herrera, Liber Scha’ar Haschamajim seu Porta Coelorum, in quo dogmata cabbalistica de En-Soph, Adam Kadmon, Zimzum . . . philosophice proponuntur et explicantur, cumque Philosophia Platonica conferuntur, edited in the Kabbala denudata (as in n. 14), vol. 1. See the German translation: Pforte des Himmels, trans. F. Ha¨ußermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1974); 2nd dissertation, pp. 107 ff. See also the important introduction by Gershom Scholem, pp. 7–67. On the Lurianic Cabbala in general see G. Scholem, Die ju¨dische Mystik in ihren Hauptstro¨mungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 267–314, and M. Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, 1988). 16 A. Horodezky, Hamistorin be-Jisrael, Ginsei Seter I (Tel Aviv, 1951), 74, has argued for a direct impact; but Scholem, Mystik, 37, shows that the impact was transmitted indirectly through Ps.-Dionysius and Ficino.

362

Martin Mulsow

thought and Philo: The ancient Kabbalists have written many things about this, namely, how the son of God was created; how his existence in the order of nature preceded all creatures; how everything is blessed and receives holiness in him and through him, whom they call in their writings the celestial Adam, or the first man Adam Kadmon, the great priest, the husband or betrothed of the church, or as Philo Judaeus called him, the first-born son of God.17

Philo did indeed, as did other exegetes before him, interpret Genesis 1: 27 as the creation of the celestial human being, and Genesis 2: 7 as the creation of the earthly human being. From this point of view, the celestial human being could be related to what Philo says, especially in De confusione linguarum 146 f., about the high priest (Leviticus 16: 17) as a God-man, who is named first-born Logos, oldest among the angels, archangel with many names, and Israel and human being in God’s own image.18 Thus, the biblical references were interpreted in the sense of the 17 [A. Conway], Principia Philosophiae Antiquissimae et Recentissimae de Deo, Christo et Creatura, id est de Spiritu et Materia in genere. Quorum beneficio resolvi possunt omnia problemata, quae nec per Philosophiam Scholasticam, nec per communem modernam, nec per Cartesianam, Hobbesianam, vel Spinosianam resolvi potuerunt. Opusculum Posthumum e Lingua Anglicana Latinitate donatum, cum Annotationibus ex antiqua Hebraeorum Philosophia desumtis (Amsterdam, 1690), c. V, x1, p. 31. This translation from Conway’s (now lost) English manuscript was brought out by van Helmont as part of a collection of Opuscula Philosophica, but the treatise was written most probably long before Conway’s death in 1679; see S. Hutton, ‘On an Early Letter by Anne Conway’, in P. Totaro (ed.), Donne, filosofia e cultura nel Seicento (Rome, 1999), 109–15. An English edition, translated back from the Latin, appeared in 1692. New edn. of the Latin text (with mistakes), together with the 1692 translation, by P. Loptson (The Hague, 1982); new English trans. by A. P. Coudert and T. Corse: The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996). This translation, p. 23, used in text and, at greater length, hereafter: ‘By the Son of God (the first born of all creatures, whom we Christians call Jesus Christ, according to Scripture, as shown above) is understood not only his divinity but his humanity in eternal union with the Divinity; that is, his celestial humanity was united with the Divinity before the creation of the world and before his incarnation. The ancient Kabbalists have written many things about this, namely, how the son of God was created; how his existence in the order of nature preceded all creatures; how everything is blessed and receives holiness in him and through him, whom they call in their writings the celestial Adam, or the first man Adam Kadmon, the great priest, the husband or betrothed of the church, or as Philo Judaeus called him, the first-born son of God.’ Conway’s interest in Philo was probably instigated by More; but perhaps also George Keith had a role here. 18 Philo, Conf. 146 f. On Philo’s doctrine of the Logos see G. D. Farandos, Kosmos und Logos bei Philo von Alexandrien (Amsterdam, 1976); G. Sellin, ‘Gotteserkenntnis und Gotteserfahrung bei Philo von Alexandrien’, in H.-J.Klauck (ed.), Monotheismus und Christologie: Zur Gottesfrage im hellenistischen Judentum und im Urchristentum (Freiburg, 1992), 17–40; see in general M. Pohlenz, Philon von Alexandrien (Berlin, 1942); H. A. Wolfson, Philo, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); J. Danie´lou, Philon d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1958).

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

363

Middle Platonic problem of conveying the idea of oneness and manyness, as Philo had learnt from Eudorus of Alexandria.19 So the connection between the ‘celestial human being’ (Adam Kadmon) and ‘first-born Logos’ seems to be recognized by Anne Conway, who formulated it in a systematic, philosophical context. Outdoing the formula of ‘Philosophia nov-antiqua’ with the title of her book, Conway was firmly convinced, just as More was, that it was possible to enunciate the truths of prisca sapientia more precisely in a postCartesian terminology.20 This also applies to the term ‘first-born Son’. She made it the mid-point between two extremes which, by nature, is nothing but a mediator. Although God is directly present in his Creation, he nevertheless makes use of a mediator in his actions. The mediator, however, originates by emanation from God rather than by creation.21 I should like to suggest that this reminiscence of Philo’s Logos theory played a role in the controversy over the Trinity. The theory was the starting point of Patristic subordination theologies and, in this respect, relevant for all subordinationist viewpoints. Further research is needed on the question of how far Conway herself was familiar with the Trinitarian controversy. Did she read Petau? Did she know of Christoph Sand, who in 1668 drew on Philo’s speculation on the Logos for his reconstruction of Arianism?22 When she points out that mediatorship implies both time and eternity because it has a part both in the changeability of creatures and the unchanging nature of God,23 it sounds like a compromise between the orthodox position that Christ has been with God from all eternity (prerequisite for the Immanent Trinity) and the Arian theory of the creatureliness of the Logos, created before other creatures, but in time. Philo speaks of a first-born son, but not of an only-begotten one. The first to speak of the latter is Justin,24 obviously in connection with the 19 See J. M. Dillon, ‘Eudorus und die Anfa ¨nge des Mittelplatonismus’, in C. Zintzen (ed.), Der Mittelplatonismus (Darmstadt, 1981), 3–32. 20 The background of this conviction was More’s definition of spirit as an extended, indivisible, and permeating being; see H. More, Enchiridion metaphysicum, in Opera omnia (London, 1679; repr. Hildesheim 1966), ii. 1. For More see A. P. Coudert, ‘Henry More, the Kabbalah, and the Quakers’, in R. Ashcraft, R. Kroll, and P. Zagorin (eds.), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England (1640–1700) (Cambridge, 1992), 31–67. 21 Conway, Principia (as in n. 17), 25. 22 See Sand, Nucleus (as in n. 6). All one can say is that More mentions Sand’s De origine animae in connection with a judgement on the Quakers, in a letter to Anne Conway of 14 July 1671. See The Conway Letters, ed. M. Hope Nicolson, rev. S. Hutton (Oxford, 1992), 342. Philo is not mentioned in the correspondence, Petau only 23 Conway, Principia (as in n. 17), 26. incidentally. 24 Justin Martyr, Dial 105. 1; 1 Apol 33. 6.

364

Martin Mulsow

prologue of John, followed by his disciples, in particular Athenagoras and Theophilus of Antioch, who focused on the tension between the prologue of John, which could be interpreted in the light of Philo’s speculations on the Logos, and the rest of the Gospel, with its Monarchianist tendencies. Having recourse again to Philo,25 they posited a two-stage Logos—logos endiathetos and logos prosphorikos.26 This made it possible to speak, on the one hand, of the eternal unity of the Father and the Son, of God and his Logos, and, on the other, of the effectiveness of the Logos in time and history. In retrospect, from the viewpoint of the Trinitarian controversy which was taken up again in early modern Europe, such a differentiation, whether in terms of the internal and external Logos or of the first-born and the only-begotten son, made it possible to admit the philosophoumenon of mediatorship without undermining the theological requirement of intra-Trinitarian consubstantiality. To put it differently, philosophers were free to ponder, as Platonists, sub specie rationis, on the relation of the One to the cosmos, without endangering the faith in the Trinity. This was a compromise that went far beyond Bull’s strategy of internalization, because it opened up a philosophical perspective on the relationship of God to the world beyond the position of the Fathers. Perhaps Anne Conway and the Cambridge Platonists had begun to envisage such a perspective. But it was not until Wachter that it was fully articulated and considered in all its consequences.

II In these crucial years of the Trinitarian controversy—John Pocock is right to consider it as a key pre-Enlightenment issue27—Wachter grew up in Memmingen, a ‘Freie Reichsstadt’ in the south of Germany, in a provincial intellectual environment. He studied theology in Tu¨bingen 25

On the two Logoi in Philo see Farandos, Kosmos (as in n. 18), 243 ff. I follow P. Hofrichter, ‘Logoslehre und Gottesbild bei Apologeten, Modalisten und Gnostikern: Johanneische Christologie im Lichte ihrer fru¨hesten Rezeption’, in Monotheismus (as in n. 18), 186–217. On the doctrine of the two Logoi see further H. Hegermann, Die Vorstellung vom Scho¨pfungsmittler im hellenistischen Judentum und Urchristentum (Berlin, 1961); M. Mu¨hl, Der Logos endiathetos und prosphorikos in der a¨lteren Stoa bis zur Synode von Sirmium 351 (Bonn, 1962). 27 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in R. D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 33–53. 26

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

365

and Frankfurt-on-Oder. But it was not until he was 25, that is in 1698, that he transferred from a cultural backwater to Amsterdam, where he came into contact with the new trends and the current debate on the Trinity. In Amsterdam Wachter seems to have quickly updated his philosophical education. As early as 1699, he was involved in a controversy with the ‘Moses Germanus’, Johann Peter Speeth, a man who, after an odyssey through Christian heterodoxy, Socinianism, and Quakerism, had converted to Judaism.28 The reason why such odysseys were possible at that time may well have been the ambiguous status of subordinationism as between the Unitarian and the Trinitarian positions. The Socinians could claim it as being virtually Unitarian, and Trinitarians, such as Bull, could maintain that it was an antecedent stage for the Nicene Creed. Speeth’s conversion to Judaism was an ultimate profession of Unitarianism. Converts like him sought in Judaism the oldest and at the same time simplest way of worshipping God. Wachter attacked Speeth in Der Spinozismus im Ju¨denthumb.29 It was a cunning double take: Judaism was Spinozistic, that is to say pantheistic (atheistic) and, conversely, Spinoza had been inspired by the Jewish Cabbala. Speeth had fallen into fatal error. Wachter’s brief self-education, probably set in train by the chapter on Cabbala in Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae philosophicae,30 was still evolving in 1699. This can be inferred from the fact that three years later at most, in 1702, he reversed his position while using the same arguments. In Elucidarius cabalisticus (published in 1706), the equation between Spinozism and (Lurianic) Cabbala is retained, but now both are considered good and worth defending.31 All this is well known. What is less well known is that Wachter’s interpretation continued to evolve after 1702. His writings from the following years have never been published, a consequence of his being 28 For Speeth see H. J. Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock (Tu ¨ bingen, 1952), 67–81; A. P. Coudert, ‘Judaizing in the Seventeenth Century: Francis Mercury van Helmont and Johann Peter Spaeth (Moses Germanus)’, in M. Mulsow and R. H. Popkin (eds.), Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2004), 71–122. 29 J. G. Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Ju ¨ denthumb/ Oder/ die von dem heutigen Ju¨denthumb/ und dessen Geheimen Kabbala Vergo¨tterte Welt/ an Mose Germano sonsten Johann Peter Speeth/ von Augsburg gebu¨rtig/ Befunden und widerlegt (Amsterdam, 1699), reprint ed. W. Schro¨der (Stuttgart, 1994). 30 T. Burnet, Archaeologiae philosophicae (London, 1692). See Wachter, Spinozismus, 20. 31 Wachter, Elucidarius Cabalisticus sive Reconditae Hebraeorum Philosophiae Brevis & Succincta Recensio (‘Romae’ [Halle], 1706), reprint ed. W. Schro¨der (Stuttgart, 1995).

366

Martin Mulsow

considered a heretic in Germany. These writings are, for example, the now lost Philosophia antiquo-christiana and the Theologia Martyrum, extant in a single copy, and never, so far, examined.32 Wachter was a born polemicist, and so in 1712, as earlier for Spinozismus im Ju¨denthumb, it took an adversary to provoke Wachter into taking further some ideas of the Elucidarius and writing a new book. The opponent was Johann Wilhelm Petersen, a radical pietist from the north of Germany, professing a spiritualist doctrine of universal reconciliation. In 1711 Petersen published a small pamphlet titled Geheimnis des Erstgeborenen aller Creatur, in which, without mentioning his source, he took up Helmont’s and Conway’s revival of the distinction between the only-begotten and the first-born son, and incorporated it into his spiritualistic world-view.33 Wachter attacked him for this, because he deplored the irrationalist and philologically naive use of what was for him an important doctrine. Thus in Theologia Martyrum, he first refutes Petersen’s ‘enthusiastic’ reductions and then sets out to reconstruct the Logos theory as described by Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen.34 But what was this doctrine that Petau had mentioned before it was philosophically ennobled in Conway’s Principia philosophiae and in Helmont’s Seder Olam? How and why was it possible to reconstruct rationally the ‘mystery of the first-born of all creatures’? Here again Wachter discovered astonishing parallels, as he had done in 1699 for Spinoza and the Cabbala. Now, following Conway’s ideas, he saw parallels between the cabbalistic ‘celestial Adam’ and Philo’s and the Christian Apologists’ ‘God’s first-born Son’. In doing so, he expanded his equation of Spinozism and Cabbala to include a third element: Logos theology. All three were to be seen as part of the same tradition. Even the Logos theory of the early Fathers could be considered in the light of Spinoza. But to which passages of Spinoza’s Ethics was Wachter referring? He was thinking of the distinction between the one substance, the 32 Theologia Martyrum oder Der heiligen Alt-Va ¨ ter geheime Lehre vom Erst-Gebohrnen aller Creatur, Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Hamburg, MS theol. 1876. The copy surfaced about ten years ago in the war booty returned from Russia. 33 J. W. Petersen, Geheimnis des Erstgeborenen aller Creatur (Frankfurt, 1711). 34 Theologia Martyrum (as in n. 32), ch. 9: ‘Vom Ursprung der Welt aus Dionysio Areopagita, Justino Martyro, Irenaeo und Theophilo Antiocheno’; ch. 10: ‘Vom Ursprung der Welt aus Tatiano, Athenagora, Clemente Alexandrino und Tertulliano’; ch. 11: ‘Vom Ursprung der Welt aus Maximo, Hippolyto, und Origene’.

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

367

modes of the first kind, and the modes of the second kind.35 The modes of the first kind mediate between God and things. According to Wachter, Spinoza, analogously to the theory of two Logoi, assumed the existence of two intellects: first thought as an attribute, which corresponds to the only-begotten son; second the infinite intellect as a mode, which corresponds to the first-born son. It seems extremely daring of Wachter to establish a connection between such abstract definitions and first the cabbalistic Adam Kadmon and then the Logos theology. But, at least as far as the Christological element is concerned, some Christian Cabbalists had preceded him. In the missionary endeavour to discover hints in cabbalistic theory about Christ as the Messiah, Knorr von Rosenroth had pointed out parallels to Christ wherever he could, e.g. in Herrera’s Adam Kadmon.36 So, in fact, Wachter did no more than continue this tracking down of parallels: first in the Christian Cabbalists, but also in heresy hunters, who managed to find Spinoza in any suspect philosophy. Wachter’s decisive insight (from his own perspective) was to combine Knorr’s, Helmont’s, and Conway’s identifications of Cabbala and Christology with his own identification of Cabbala and Spinoza. At that point he must have considered himself capable of establishing a connection with the orthodox Trinitarian theology. If it was possible to rely on Christian patristics and to agree with Bull’s view of early patristic doctrine as compatible with the Nicene Creed, did Spinoza’s rationalism not begin to appear in a new, positive light? This reasoning landed Wachter in a strange position between Trinitarians and the Anti-Trinitarians, indeed betwixt and between all other current schemes of theological controversy. Quite naturally, Lutherans such as the philosopher and theologian Johann Franz Budde, of Halle, to 35 Spinoza, Ethica, 1, propositio 28 Scholium: ‘Cum quaedam a Deo immediate produci debuerunt, videlicet ea, quae ex absoluta ejus natura necessario sequuntur, et alia mediantibus his primis, quae tamen sine Deo nec esse, nec concipi possunt . . .’, and 2, propositio 11: ‘Primum, quod actuale Mentis humanae esse constituit, nihil aliud est, quam idea rei alicuius singularis actu existentis. [Corollarium:] Hinc sequitur Mentem humanam partem esse infiniti intellectus Dei; ac proinde cum dicimus, Mentem humanam hoc, vel illud percipere, nihil aliud dicimus, quam quod Deus, non quatenus infinitus est, sed quatenus per naturam humanae Mentis explicatur, sive quatenus humanae Mentis essentiam constituit, hanc, vel illam habet ideam; & cum dicimus Deum hanc, vel illam ideam habere, non tantum, quatenus naturam humanae Mentis constituit, sed quatenus simul cum Mente humana alterius rei etiam habet ideam, tum dicimus Mentem humanam rem ex parte, sive inadaequate percipere.’ See Wachter, Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 49. Cf. Schro¨der, Spinoza (as in n. 3), 95 ff. 36 See Knorr von Rosenroth in Kabbala denudata (as in n. 14).

368

Martin Mulsow

whom Wachter referred,37 felt obliged to consider him a ‘false friend’ and an unwanted ally. Here, two points need attention: first, Wachter’s connection with the Trinitarian controversy via his borrowings from Cudworth, Bull, and even John Spencer, something that is not often mentioned; second, Wachter’s construction, in keeping with his theory of the Trinity, of an esoteric tradition extending from the Egyptians to Spinoza.

III We shall begin by investigating Wachter’s sources. One clue, pointing to Cudworth, is the subtitle of Spinozismus im Ju¨denthumb: Oder die von dem heutigen Ju¨denthumb und dessen Geheimen Kabbala Vergo¨tterte Welt. The taint of idolatry was the main point of Wachter’s interpretation of Spinoza and the Cabbala against Johann Peter Speeth. But what does ‘idolized world’ mean? It seems to me to reflect Cudworth’s ‘World Idolatry’. In the fourth book of his True Intellectual System, Cudworth had combined two topics: the debate on idolatry since Selden and Vossius,38 and the debate on the Trinity. So it is not surprising that in his attack on the Cabbala he made use of the arsenal of the critique of idolatry.39 The depraved theory of the Trinity of the ‘original Kabbalah’, 37 Budde had reviewed Wachter’s Spinozismus im Ju ¨ denthumb anonymously in Observationes selectae for 1701; this review, followed by Budde’s book, Introductio ad historiam philosophiae Hebraeorum (Halle, 1702), was one cause for Wachter’s revising his position. 38 On this debate see M. Mulsow, ‘John Seldens De Diis Syris: Idolatriekritik und vergleichende Religionsgeschichte im 17. Jahrhundert’, Archiv fu¨r Religionsgeschichte, 3 (2001), 1–24. 39 R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 557 f.: ‘This is therefore that Platonick Trinity, which we oppose to the Christian, not as if Plato’s own Trinity in the very Essential Constitution thereof, were quite a Different Thing from the Christian; it self in all probability having been at first derived from a Divine or Mosaick Cabbala; but because this Cabbala, (as might well come to pass in a thing so Mysterious and Difficult to be conceived) hath been by divers of these Platonists and Pythagoreans, Misunderstood, Depraved and Adulterated, into such a Trinity, as Confounds the Differences between God and the Creature, and removes all the Bounds and Land-marks betwixt them: sinks the Deity lower and lower by Degrees; (still multiplying of it, as it goes) till it have at length brought it down to the Whole Corporal World, and when it hath done this, is not able to stop there neither, but extends it further still, to the Animated Parts thereof, Stars and Demons. The Design or Direct Tendency thereof, being nothing else but to lay Foundation, for Infinite Polytheism, Cosmolatrie (or World-Idolatry) and Creature-Worship.’ 560: ‘when those Platonists and Pythagoreans, interpret their Third God or Last Hypostasis or their Trinity to be either the

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

369

Cudworth wrote, had led the Platonists and the Platonizing Cabbalists with their subordination of the hypostases to so low a third hypostasis (yuc as the Holy Spirit), so close to the world, that they had laid the groundwork for cosmolatry. It was not difficult for Wachter to identify this cosmolatry with Spinoza’s pantheism. The background of the Trinitarian controversy was thus virtually disguised by his basic equation of Spinoza with the Cabbala. Concentrating on the theology of the Trinity, Theologia Martyrum only made the hidden visible again. But, apart from the re-evaluation of Cudworth after his volte-face, is there any evidence for Wachter’s high esteem for the Egyptians? Is there any source for his conviction that Egyptian wisdom has priority over Jewish Cabbalistic wisdom? I would argue that there is. Wachter had read John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus. We can infer this from several passages of Spinozismus im Ju¨denthumb, where, in a polemical exchange with Moses Germanus, Wachter rejects the latter’s thesis that the heathen had taken their ritual from the Jews. The judaizing Speeth had drawn on Huet, but above all on Edmund Dickinson, who, in an early work, Delphi Phoenicizantes (Oxford, 1655), had advanced the theory of the Hebrew origin of all culture, claiming that the ‘worship of the heathen’ was ‘aping the Jews’, with Delphic ceremonies as an example. Wachter is against this: ‘You refer to Dickinson, but in vain. I could likewise refer to other authors.’40 He seems to intimate that he has authors such as Spencer up his sleeve. Reversing the derivation, he says: ‘for the most part, your Torah is a heathen Egyptian law’.41 World, or else a yuc gksmiov, such an Immediate Soul thereof, as together with the World is Body, makes up One Animal and God; as there is plainly too great a Leap here betwixt their Second and Third Hypostasis, so do they Debase the Deity therein too much, confound God and the Creature together, laying Foundation not only for CosmoLatry or World-Idolatry in general, but also for the grossest and most sottish of all Idolatries, the worshipping of the Inanimate Parts of the World themselves, in pretence as Parts and Members of this great Mundane Animal, and Sensible God.’ 40 Wachter, Spinozismus (as in n. 29), 57. ‘Ihr beruffet euch auf Dickinson, aber vergeblich. Ich ko¨nnte mich hinwiederumb auf andere Autores beruffen.’ 41 Ibid. 65: ‘ist der gro ¨ ste Theil ewer Thora, ein Heydnisch-Egyptisches Gesetz’. 40 f.: ‘Nun mercket (1.) daß dieses neue Ceremonial-Gesetz/ wo es Israel angenehm seyn sollte/ nothwendig ein Auszug von Egyptischen Ceremonien seyn muste. Dann Israel war der Abgo¨tterey in Egypten gewohnt/ wie aus Josua Cap. 24.14. Ezech. 20.5.7.8. Cap. 23.8. erhellet/ und konnte dannenhero auf keine andere weise/ im Dienst des wahren Gottes erhalten werden/ es wu¨rde dann erlaubet/ daß es den wahren Gott mit eben den Ceremonien anbetten mo¨chte/ mit welchen es in Egypten die Teuffel angebettet hat. Besihe Lev. 17.17. Aus welchen orth erscheinet/ daß an den Egyptischen Opffern meistens nur

370

Martin Mulsow

Wachter could not have been expected to know that even on this point there was a latent link with the Trinitarian controversy, though at this stage it concerned only the Unitarian side. For Spencer was in fact not as orthodox as he pretended to be. The Socinian Samuel Crell mentions a meeting with Spencer and informing him, in a guarded and roundabout way, of Unitarian activities. Spencer’s reaction was to wish Crell all the best with his ‘cause’, a hint that he, like Newton, was inclined to regard the Dogma of Trinity as idolatrous, since it was tritheistic.42 Wachter would not have liked this anecdote. For his philosophical position, the ternary structure of origin, mediatorship, and a sensory cosmos was indispensable. That is why it was with great interest that he read Bull’s book, which laid out the problems of the Logos theory in minute detail. His positive reading of Cudworth certainly helped him to appreciate Bull. After all, Bull’s way of speaking against Arianism was quite similar to Cudworth’s, and possibly even inspired by him. On the other hand, Bull’s approval of early subordination theologies helped Wachter to reinterpret Cudworth and to deny any danger of Arianism in Platonizing models. Reading Cudworth, Spencer, and Bull against authorial intention made Wachter become aware of a tradition that seemed to extend from the earliest origins of wisdom to the pre-Nicene Fathers. Let us now turn to this historical narrative of Wachter. First, we shall consider the historical dimension which the Trinitarian controversy assumed after Petau. It could be extended right back to the time before das objectum cultus sey gea¨ndert worden. Mercket (2.) daß dieses neue Gesetz wu¨rcklich ein Widerruf des vorigen war/ so mit in dem Bund eingeschlossen war. Vor dem Bund muste der Altar von Erden/ sonder Messer und sonder Stuffen gemacht werden/ aber nach dem Bund und nach der Su¨nde des Kalbs muste mann flug einen Altar machen/ nicht von Erden/ sondern von Holz und Ertz/ nicht sonder Messer/ auch nicht sonder Stuffen/ und so wurde das vorige Gesetz plo¨tzlich aufgehoben. Welche plo¨tzliche Vera¨nderung des unvera¨nderlichen Gottes auf seiten der Menschen damahls keine andere Ursache haben konnte/ als das Abgo¨ttische Ingenium des Volcks/ denen die vorigen Ceremonien zu simpel und zu einfa¨ltig waren/ und dannenhero ein gro¨sserer apparat von Ceremonien muste gegeben werden.’ See J. Spencer, De legibus Haebreorum ritualibus et earum rationibus (Cambridge, 1685); I cite from The Hague edn. of 1686: Book 2, ch. 5, 249 ff.: ‘De lege altare terreum statuente’, and ch. 7, 259 ff.: ‘Praeceptum, quo cautum est, ne ad altare gradibus ascenderetur’. 42 Mathurin Veyssie `re La Croze to Johann Christoph Wolf, 4 Aug. 1718, Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Hamburg, Sup. ep. Uffenbachi et Wolfiorum, 115, 364. See M. Mulsow, ‘Orientalistik im Kontext der sozinianischen und deistischen Debatten um 1700: Spencer, Crell, Locke und Newton’, Scientia Poetica, 2 (1998), 27–57. On Newton’s Arianism see S. Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7 (1999), 381–419.

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

371

Christianity, so that it ran from the earliest evidence of wisdom to the present day. John Toland considered this dimension from an antiTrinitarian perspective. The narrative he composed had its roots in the Egyptian Moses, and in the Hermetic writings. It led from the time of Jesus and the Jewish Christians—in his Nazarenus Toland referred to the freshly discovered apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas—to the Ebionite roots of Islam and from Islamic Unitarianism to the Socinians and deists of the present.43 Wachter’s narrative, as it can be reconstructed from both his published and unpublished writings, reads almost like a Trinitarian mirror image of Toland, an alternative outline pointing in the opposite direction. After his volte-face, Wachter could take Egyptian cosmotheistic wisdom as a positive starting point. The writings of Spencer and Marsham gave him a basis for connecting with this esoteric religion of reason the Jewish Cabbala, which he saw as Jewish in its oral transmission, but deriving ultimately not from an original Jewish revelation, but from secret Egyptian doctrine. In De primordiis Christianae religionis, Wachter links the Cabbala with the sect of the Essenes, and the Essenes with Christianity.44 43

See Champion, Pillars (as in n. 2), 99 ff. See Wachter, De primordiis Christianae religionis libri duo: quorum prior agit de Essaeis, Christianorum inchoatoribus, alter de Christianis, Essaeorum posteris, edited from the manuscript by W. Schro¨der, included in the reprint edition of the Elucidarius (as in n. 31) i. 37–114, here 62 f., x16: ‘Philo de Essaeis: Summa religione Deo serviunt; x7. Per Deum autem intelligunt ens, quod cetera entia creavit per emanationem juxta x sup., quod bono melius, uno simplicius et unitate antiquius est, x13.’ Wachter refers to Philo, De vita contemplativa, 2 ff.; see the version of Wachter, De primordiis, Frankfurt am Main, Stadt- und Universita¨tsbibliothek, Ms. lat. oct. 85 (Schro¨der’s edn., p. 83 n. 33): ‘Jessaeos Cabalisticum philosophandi genus secutos, supra demonstravimus, x16. Eosdem multas praeclaras sententias de Deo et rebus divinis, et universi creatione, in gente sua habuisse, nemo dubitare potest, qui Sapientiae Cabalisticae reliquias ex Cabala Denudata consideraverit. Namque verae et germanae Cabalae officium ab initio nullum aliud erat, quam ut doceret, quod sit omnium rerum principium sine Principio et quomodo universa ex illo sine ulla deminuatione profluxae sint. Et quamvis haec Cabala lapsu temporis innumeris humanae imaginationis assumentis et infinitis quoque allegoriis, vel conspurcata, vel omnino obscurata sit, hoc tamen non obstante multas adhuc particulas aeternae veritatis e Theologia Verbi avulsas (quae antiquissimis temporibus per omnes Barbaros erat diffusa) in illa hodie[r]num agnoscere licet, quarum haeredes et possessores sine dubio nostri Jessaei fuerunt, qui tempore Evangelicae Praedicationis floruerunt. Verum haec Sapientia Jessaeo-Cabalistica multos habuit defectus. Deum quidem ejusque cultum, et Providentiam et Fatum, recte agnovit. Sed Essentiam divinam ab omni corporea contage remotam, per varios lucis divinae fluxus et refluxus in Mundos et Orbes formavit. Ipsum vero Patrem et Filium et Spiritum S. et Mediam illam Naturam, quam nos Primogenitum dicimus, quaeque ex Deo sicut splendor e Luce emanavit, plurimum ignoravit. Quibus tamen ignoratis Philosophiam in ipso limine deficere 44

372

Martin Mulsow

Thus, via the Cabbala, Egyptian wisdom is present in the patristic tradition. Jesus is seen as a teacher who restored this wisdom to its original form, which the Essenes had somewhat obscured, by teaching his disciples the formula of the Trinity, or at least what was interpreted as such by the Trinitarians, that is the words of Jesus’ commission to his disciples in Matthew 28: 19. Handed down orally, this theory became the foundation of Logos theology. ‘The ante-Nicenes were the true and original owners of this theory. They received it from Jesus and his disciples, passed it on orally, and concealed it in their writings in order to prevent infidel people from reading it, and knew so much more about it than all of us.’45 Thus, Wachter established a connection which, in his view, was continued by Christian Cabbalists from Pico and Reuchlin onwards, as well as via the reception of the Cabbala in Amsterdam, in particular by Spinoza.46 necesse est. Pendet enim ab ipsis praecognitionibus totius universi et ipsius quoque hominis ejusque officiorum notitia. Hanc igitur scientiam Jesus mortalibus tradidit, et per Discipulos suos in toto terrarum orbe disseminavit: Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes, baptizantes eos in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, Matth. 28, vers. 19. Idque non tantum ex Evangeliis, sed praecipue ex antiquissima Martyrum traditione, ab Apostolis usque, et viris apostolicis derivata, cognoscimus, quorum constans et unanimis Sententia est, Jesum et Discipulos Philosophiam Antiquo-Barbaricam perfecisse, et instaurasse, prout in Philosophia Antiquo-Christiana demonstravimus.’ 45 Theologia Martyrum (as in n. 32), 25: ‘Die Ante-Nicaeni sind die wahren und eigentlichen Besitzer dieser Lehre gewesen, welche sie von Jesu und seinen Aposteln empfangen, welche sie mu¨ndl[ich] fortgepflantzet, aber in den Schrifften versteckt, dar mit es kein Unwu¨rdiger sehen soll, und in der sie unendl[ich] mehr als wir alle gewust haben.’ 46 See Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 7 f.: ‘Verum haec Philosophia ab Hebraeis accepta, & Sacris Ecclesiae Patribus tantopere commendata, post tempora Nicaena mox exspiravit, coepitque in locum ejus surrogari alia, quae publicae Religioni videbatur accommodatior. Donec praeterlapso temporis plusquam millenari spatio, cum bonae literae universe inciperent restaurari, & Ecclesia ad Reformationem jam esset matura, Viri Illustrissimi, PICUS Mirandulanus, & REUCHLINUS Phorcensis, uterque nomine JOHANNES, sed reipsa uterque novae lucis praecursor, antiquissimam Philosophiam e lacunis Hebraeorum aliarumque gentium renovarent. Et jam tum omnium oculos converterant in se isti VIRI, praecipue Caesaris & Pontificis. Verum quia interventu LUTHERI, non Philosophia, sed Religio publica coepit oppugnari, quae res videbatur periculi plenissima, tanquam ad novum incendium confluxerunt omnes, quaestione de PHILOSOPHIA HEBRAEORUM, quae antea in summis Reip. Christianae Aulis, Caesarea & Pontificali, pertractabatur, domi relicta, & altissima oblivione in hunc usque diem sepulta. Non defuerunt tamen Viri Docti, qui posthabita Philosophia vulgari, reconditam & antiquissimam Hebraeorum sectarentur. Quos inter memorandus mihi est Benedictus de SPINOZA, e gente Lusitana Judaeus, qui ex Philosophiae hujus rationibus DIVINITATEM CHRISTI, atque una veritatem universae Religionis Christianae agnovit, exemplo utique admirabili & nunquam satis depraedicando, quodque pignoris loco est, non mentiri Scriptores Ecclesiasticos, quoties ab illis proditum legimus, ab initio nascentis Ecclesiae plurimos ejusdem Patres solius Philosophiae antiquo-barbaricae rationibus permotos ut Christo nomen darent.’

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

373

Spinoza, however, represents not so much a point of arrival as a distinct, rational stage of interpretation.47 But one thing is still unclear. Why is the tradition reconstructed by Wachter regarded as esoteric, as, in Leo Strauss’s sense, a hidden theory of truths not beneficial to the masses? This seems plausible as far as Egyptian and Cabbalistic wisdom is concerned, and these were in fact mostly so regarded. But what about patristics? How could pre-Nicene theology be understood as an esoteric tradition? A theory of Isaac Casaubon’s made it possible. In Casaubon’s view, Trinitarian doctrine was in the early centuries both a secret and a mystery.48 This was an 47

See L. Meyer, Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (‘Eleutheropoli’, 1666). See I. Casaubon, Exercitationes sacrae et ecclesiasticae (London, 1614), 562; see K. L. Haugen, ‘Transformations of the Trinity Doctrine in English Scholarship: From the History of Beliefs to the History of Texts’, Archiv fu¨r Religionsgeschichte, 3 (2001), 149–68, esp. 152 f.; Casaubon’s theory had considerable influence in the 17th c.; see e.g. J. Daille´, De scriptis quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae nomine circumferuntur (Geneva, 1666); J. Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1991), 54 ff.; G. N. Bontwetsch, ‘Wesen, Entstehung und Fortgang der Arkandisziplin’, Zeitschrift fu¨r die historische Theologie, 43 (1873), 203–13; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6. 7. 61, on an oral transmission of Christian wisdom from the time of the Apostles onwards: ‘If, then, we assert that Christ Himself is Wisdom, and that it was His working which showed itself in the prophets, by which the gnostic tradition may be learned, as He Himself taught the Apostles during His presence then it follows that the gnosis, which is the knowledge and apprehension of things present, future and past, which is sure and reliable, as being imparted and revealed by the Son of God, is wisdom. . . . And the gnosis itself is that which has descended by transmission to a few, having been imparted unwritten by the apostles’ (tr. W. Wilson, The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, ii (Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 12; Edinburgh, 1869), 339). Toland mentions in the Clidophorus (as in n. 2), 79, a possible secret doctrine of Jesus, but then speaks only of baptism and the Last Supper as mysteries introduced by the early Fathers, in connection with the corruption and mystification of Jesus’ originally simple and intelligible doctrine. This essentially Socinian conception cannot accommodate the doctrine of the Trinity as a positive mystery, which could find parallels in contemporary Greek pagan esotericisms: ‘Tis not a thing therefore either so strange or wonderful, that it shou’d be eagerly controverted on every side, that it shou’d be a matter of the nicest inquiry, and a question agitated with no small concern among so prodigious a variety of sects, what was in reality the original and genuin Institution of JESUS? and this whether it be, that at the beginning it was involv’d in such sacred obscurity; or rather that it was afterwards thus perplext, by the inventions of the wily or the imaginations of the weak. But in whatever manner it so happen’d, I am downright asham’d of those Fathers, who made such ordinary actions as eating bread, drinking wine, and dipping in water, or washing with it, to pass for tremendous and inutterable Mysteries. Very intelligible and apposite figures we grant ’em to be, very significative of the things they represent and exhibit; but containing nothing terrible or abstruse, much less inutterable or inconceivable. Nevertheless, what these Fathers onely feign’d to be MYSTERIES, that they might in nothing come short of the Heathenism they had quitted; their successors took care shou’d become unintelligible to some purpose, and tremendous in more senses than one, or in any sense except that of the Gospel.’ 48

374

Martin Mulsow

inference from the absence of any mention of the Trinity in the early sources. So the theory of the internal and the external Logos was, according to Wachter, the ‘mystery’—the term Petersen used in the title of his book—with which early Christian theologians used to conceal the secret of the Trinity by using the metaphor of the two ‘Sons’. The mystery was familiar in learned circles, because it was, as Wachter says, ‘communicated to nobody except to the noble minds who were gifted and capable of receiving it. Those, on the contrary, who, apart from a gross imagination, had nothing in their souls to enable them to understand it, were excluded.’49 Thus learned early Christian culture is supposed to be the environment where Jewish doctrines of infinite fervour and its temperance were adopted and made intelligible. They developed the theory of the two Sons of God that helped them conceal the theory of the Trinity which the common people might not grasp. Wachter borrows Cudworth’s wording, ‘theologia recondita, allegorica et traditiva’.50 Cudworth, following Selden, used the formula to designate Egyptian secret monotheism in opposition to the idolatrous polytheism reserved for the common people.51 But Cudworth’s theory of an all-embracing monotheistic tradition which these words imply, is to a certain extent ‘secularized’ by Wachter. Cudworth was careful to make a distinction between the heathen forms of ternary thinking and Christian Trinitarian theory. Wachter does away with this distinction. ‘Theologia recondita’ is for him merely a veiled theory of reason, 49 Theologia Martyrum (as in n. 32), 106: ‘niemand als den erhabenen Gemu ¨ thern communiciret worden, welche der gleichen Weisheit fa¨hig und be[gabt] waren. Im Gegentheil sind davon aus geschloßen worden, alle diejenigen, die außer der groben Imagination sonst keinen fond in der Seelen hatten wodurch sie etwas begreiffen ko¨nten.’ 50 De primordiis (as in n. 44), 62; see Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 20. 51 J. Selden, De Diis Syris (London, 1617), Prolegomena; see Mulsow, ‘Seldens De Diis Syris’ (as in n. 38). Cudworth’s addition in The True Intellectual System (as in n. 39), 314, where he points out the difference between the idolatrous, polytheist religion of the people and the monotheist ‘theologia recondita’ of the few in Egypt (‘These Two Theologies of theirs differing, as Aristotle’s Exotericks and Acroamaticks’), reveals the possible origin of Selden’s differentiation: in the late 16th c. there had been discussions among Aristotle scholars as to which of Aristotle’s writings were ‘esoteric’ and which ‘exoteric’. These debates arose out of Petrus Ramus’ re-evaluation of the Corpus aristotelicum; see esp. O. Ferrari, De sermonibus exotericis liber ad Bartholomaeum Capram (Venice, 1575). Selden seems to have gained from these debates, together with the many references from Neoplatonic authors like Clement of Alexandria and Synesius, a certain sensibility for the esoteric/exoteric dualism of the great ancient religions. Toland’s historical account of esotericism refers already in the preface of the Tetradymus (as in n. 2), p. vi, to Synesius of Cyrene’s Encomium Calvitiae, which Selden had used for reconstructing the ‘esoteric religion’ of the Egyptians. Likewise, in Toland’s Clidophorus, 96–100, the history of ancient esotericism culminates in Synesius.

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

375

analogous to what Bishop Warburton was to see as the core sense of the Isis mysteries: a Spinozistic doctrine of reason and the n ka› pn (all-in-one).52 There is further evidence that Wachter was offering a radicalized and secularized German variant of Cudworth. In the Elucidarius cabalisticus he had justified the need for occultation by fear of the superstitious masses and the danger of political abuse.53 To this reasoning he adds further material in a manuscript that had come his way and that he had, as it were, made his own: the clandestine ‘Creed of wisdom’, the Symbolum Sapientiae.54 This was no longer a Christian text, not even a deistic one. Its author, probably unknown to Wachter, was a sceptic and an atheist, who confined himself to the perspective of secular reason.55

IV Having sketched Wachter’s sources and his scheme of tradition, we can now turn to the Theologia Martyrum itself. We are at the core of its 52 W. Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1742); see J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); German trans. (modified), Moses der A¨gypter: Entzifferung einer Erinnerungsspur (Munich, 1998). 53 Symbolum Sapientiae (as in n. 54), Prolegomena, x21: ‘Causae occultationis sat graves sunt, ne scil. 1) sapientia in vulgus sparsa a superstitiosa turba conculcaretur. Quod sine dubio fieret, si in publicum prodiret. Vulgo enim sapientia tam suspecta et invisa est, ut, si quis eam vituperare velit, secundo id populo facere potest. Vera autem sapientia paucis contenta judicibus, multitudinem consulto fugit. 2) Ne ex sapientia palam praedicata et male intellecta malitiae suae robur aut tegumentum capiat mens impura, atque sic doctrinam male collocando labem illi adspergat. 3) Quia uti non omnibus mortalibus insitum est studium magna et inusitata noscendi, ita non omnes, imo paucissimi, eo ingenio nascuntur, ut possint sapientiam attingere; plurimi ansas, quibus sapientia arripitur, non habent. 4.) Dixerunt Scaevola pontifex insignis, expedire in religione falli civitates, et Varro antiquarius insignis, multa vera esse, quae vulgo scire non sit utile, multaque, tametsi falsa sint, aliter aestimare populum conducat. Origenes certe et alii ex patribus Graecis, imo etiam Hieronymus, videntur asserere, deceptionem legislatoribus, non minus quam medicis esse licitam, citante Claudio Be´rigardio in Circulo Pisano XX. p. 130. 131. Fruere ergo, Lector, si qui futurus, veritate in spe et silentio.’ Cf. Wachter, Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 22. Claude Be´rigard’s (Berigardo’s) Circulus Pisanus (Udine, 1643) is cited also by Toland in Clidophorus (as in n. 2), 68, as a reference for the esoteric art of writing. 54 See now the critical edition by G. Canziani, W. Schro ¨ der, and F. Socas: Cymbalum mundi sive symbolum sapientiae (Milan, 2000). 55 Wachter was even a major propagator of the motto ‘Sapere aude’, which Kant made famous as the essential motto of the Enlightenment; see M. Mulsow, ‘Erku¨hne dich vernu¨nfftig zu seyn: Zur Herkunft des Wahlspruchs der Aufkla¨rung’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 Apr. 2001, N6.

376

Martin Mulsow

argument as soon as we understand the connection between subordinationism and emanation. For emanation from the One, Wachter uses the term synkatabasis, condescendence, or divine condescension (‘Bequehmung’), that is the self-mediation of God towards the world.56 But why is emanation or synkatabasis as generation of the filius primogenitus a problem in subordinationist theology? Obviously because it was suspected of being a hidden kind of pantheism. Particularly in Germany, following Jakob Thomasius, Platonizing emanation theories were often considered a threat to Christianity, because they suggested the pre-existence of matter to the Creation, indeed the eternity of the world.57 Spinoza’s monistic philosophy could be recognized in this 56 Wachter, Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 76, cites Bull, Defensio, in Opera (as in n. 11), 394: ‘Interrogabis forte a me, qualisnam fuerit illa to lgou ad condendum universa sugkatbasiv, (sive emanatio) de qua sancti Patres loquuntur? Quid vero si simpliciter respondeam, me nescire? haut propterea licet mihi venerandorum Patrum notionem (quorum ea fuit modestia, et Sacrosancti Mysterii Reverentia, ut e suo cerebello ipsam effinxisse neutiquam existimandi sint) tanquam inanem subtilitatem despicere et contemnere. Dic tu, qualis fuerit to lgou et Filii DEI, k
nwsiv et sugkatbasiv, qua propter nos homines et nostram salutem a Patre exivit, e coelis descendit, et incarnatus fuit: et ego tibi alteram illam sugkatbasin explicare conabor: ut scilicet insaniamus ambo, in DEI mysteria oculos injicientes: idque qui tandem? Nempe ii, qui neque ea quae ante pedes sunt, scire possumus, ut scite olim dixit Gregorius Nazianzenus. Ego non ausim hoc arcanum scrutari: Quanquam videre mihi videar, quod de ipso non inscite dici posset. Itaque ad Athanasium revertor, qui triplicem Filio nativitatem manifeste tribuit. Prima est, qua ut ` lgov ab aeterno ex Patre et apud Patrem extitit, utpote aeternae mentis Paternae coaeterna progenies (imo ipsa mens Patris, nam ejusdem mentis progenies spectat ad nativitatem secundam). Haec sola est to lgou qua DEI lgov est, et DEUS est, vere ac proprie dicta nativitas. Ob hanc nativitatem tn monogen seu unigenitum in scripturis dici ipsum censuit Athanasius: qui et eo solo nomine existimavit Filium esse k ptrov, hoc est ex Patre initium et originem subsistentiae suae traxisse. Vid. Athanas. Orat. III. Con. Arrian. Altera nativitas consistit in illa sugkatabsei (sive emanatione & condescensione), qua ` lgov exivit ad creationem universi. Hujus respectu dici illum in scripturis omnis creaturae primogenitum, statuit Athanasius. Ex hac nativitate nihil accessit divinae personae to lgou, utpote quae, ut dicit, fuit potius ipsius demissio et condescensio, id est, exinanitio, & diminoratio. Tertia demum ejus Nativitas tum fuit, cum eadem divina persona e sinu et gloria paterna (imo ex omnibus Sephiris decerpta,) exivit, seque intulit in uterum sacratissimae virginis; Itaque ` lgov srx g
neto, verbum caro factum est, sive natus est homo, ut nos homines per ipsum adoptionem filiorum acciperemus. Cave autem, hanc magni Athanasii interpretationem contemnas, quippe quae optissimam tibi clavem porrigat ad aperiendum veterum quorundam Mentem ac sententiam, quorum dicta Arriani olim imperite admodum in haeresis suae patrocinium traxerunt, et neoterici quidam Theologi, (PETAVIUS, SANDIUS, ZWICKERUS, & alii) haut minus imperite (ausim id dicere, quanquam illi prae aliis omnibus sapere sibi videantur,) Arrianismi incusarunt.’ 57 J. Thomasius, Schediasma historicum (Leipzig, 1665); see R. Ha ¨fner, ‘Jakob Thomasius und die Geschichte der Ha¨resien’, in F. Vollhardt (ed.), Christian Thomasius (1655–1728): Neue Forschungen im Kontext der Fru¨haufkla¨rung (Tu¨bingen, 1997), 141–64.

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

377

interpretational framework.58 So quite a few things depended on a clear definition of synkatabasis. This is a crucial point in Wachter’s argument, because if the suspicion of pantheism could not be removed, both Cabbala and Logos theology would become heretical—and in the scale of heresy pantheism was worse than anti-Trinitarianism. Budde had already argued against the Cabbala in that way. In his De haeresi Valentiniana he tried to point out what he considered to be the pantheistic perversion of the pure Cabbala.59 Budde, much like Henry More60 and after him Ralph Cudworth,61 strictly distinguished between the original Cabbala and the corrupted Cabbala, which he claimed was related to Valentinian gnosis. The original Cabbala was, according to Budde, quite close to the original teachings of God, relatively simple and unphilosophic, close to Pythagoreanism, and a kind of Physica mosaica. On the other hand, the Lurianic texts in the Kabbala denudata, with their speculations that lent themselves to a Trinitarian interpretation, belonged to the corrupted phase.62 They contained emanation theories which led to Spinozistic consequences: the identification of God and the world. But in fact it was these very texts that dealt with the subordinationist interpretation of the first-born and the only-begotten Son and that seemed so plausible to Wachter. Thus in Elucidarius cabalisticus he criticized Budde for rejecting these texts solely out of fear that one might, with Christoph Sand, find in them a philosophical and theological line that led to Arianism. So Wachter reduces the suspicion of pantheism to a pretext hiding the fear of Arianism.63 58 Cf. J. F. Budde, De Spinozismo ante Spinozam (Halle, 1701). In this book Spinoza’s doctrine is described as a descendant of Stoicism and Neoplatonism. For a similar perception of Origen, see R. Ha¨fner, ‘Johann Lorenz Mosheim und die Origenes-Rezeption in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in M. Mulsow et al. (eds.), Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693–1755): Theologie im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie, Philologie und Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 1997), 229–60. On the problem of the pre-existence of matter in the Church Fathers, see H. A. Wolfson, ‘Plato’s Pre-existent Matter in Patristic Philosophy’, in L. Wallach (ed.), The Classical Tradition: Literary and Historical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan (Ithaca, 1966), 409–20. 59 J. F. Budde, Introductio ad Historiam Philosophiae Ebraeorum. Accedit dissertatio de haeresi Valentiniana (Halle, 1702). 60 See A. P. Coudert, ‘A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1975), 633–52. 61 Cudworth, True Intellectual System (as in n. 39), 552, 625 and passim. 62 See W. Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Die Historisierung der Philosophia Hebraeorum im fru¨hen 18. Jahrhundert: Eine philosophisch-philologische Demontage’, Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte, 5 (2001), 103–28. 63 Wachter, Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 36–8: ‘Haec & talia Mysteria ab Hebraeorum Philosophis tradi sub vocabulis Unigeniti & Primogeniti Verbi Interni & Externi, ex

378

Martin Mulsow

In chapter 7 of Theologia Martyrum Wachter attempts a philosophical foundation for mediatorship, or the mediator (‘Mittelwesen’).64 He distinguishes, in much greater detail than Anne Conway, nine steps in the argument: 1. Creation needs a substance and cannot be conceived without a substance as it cannot be conceived without a craftsman. God’s Will and Power create everything out of nothing, but not without the substance . . . [which can only come from God]. Tatiano suo Vir Doctus haurire poterat qui, postquam se professus esset in Orat. ad Graecos, BARBARICAE, id est uti Vir Doctus recte interpretatur, Hebraicae Philosophiae sectatorem, hanc Doctrinam fundit: In ipso (universorum Domino) per potentiam verbi tum ipse, tum verbum, quod in eo erat, exitit. En verbum internum. Cum autem voluit iste, verbum ex simplicitate ejus prosiliit, non inaniter prolatum, sed primogenitum opus Spiritus ejus. En verbum externum. Hoc scimus esse Principium hujus mundi. Puta Principiatum illud primum, quo mediante omnia visibilia & invisibilia facta sunt. Natum est autem per divisionem, non avulsionem: Quod enim avellitur, a primo separatur, quod vero dividitur, id functione donatum propria nihil imminuit illum a quo vim suam sumpsit. Hoc addit, nequis verbum internum cum externo, unigenitum cum primogenito confundat, sed servata cuique naturae & functionis suae proprietate legitime ab invicem distinguat, sed non separet: Quis in hac Tatiani oratione in qua verba tantum Hebraea, Ensoph & Adam Cadmon desunt, vestigia Cabalae non deprehendat? Et mirum est, Viro Docto idem videri, nec tamen eum vestigia illa sua confessione Ebraea, legere. Metuit nimirum, ne Tatianus fuerit Arrii praelusor, neve aliter, quam nostris hominibus placet, sensisse deprehendatur. Sed hunc affectum quis aequo animo in Historico ferat? An Tatiana ideo non sunt Cabalistica, quia deinceps majori apparatu ab Arrio in scenam producta, aut quia receptis Scholarum opinionibus contraria? Viderint alii, an haec conclusio Historiarum conditori conveniat? Quid si vero vanus fuerit omnis ille timor? Nam neque de Christo perperam docuit Tatianus, ut ex Bulli defensione constat, neque occasionem Arrianismo praebuit. Arrianismus enim erat Praedicatio Primogeniti sine Unigenito, vel utriusque in unum commixtio. Et Arrius factus est Haereticus, non distinguendo, uti Tatianus, sed confundendo, uti Vir Doctus.’ For Tatian see M. Elze, Tatian und seine Theologie (Go¨ttingen, 1960). See also Theologia Martyrum (as in n. 32), 11 f.: ‘[Petau ist] der erste gewesen, welcher aus den Patribus den Unterschied zwischen dem Innern und a¨ußern Wort Gottes angemercket. Jedoch weil er so glu¨ckl[ich] nicht gewesen, daß er mit seinem Verstand diese Dunkelheiten hatte durch dringen ko¨nnen, ist er mit dem Hieronymo und Augustino auf die Gedancken verfallen, daß die Alt¼Va¨ter die vor dem Concilio Nicaeo gelebet dem Arianismo vorgezielet haben. Und das ists was SANDIUS und ZWICERUS nachmals aus Petavio fleißig ausgeschrieben haben, und daraus beweisen wollen, als wa¨ren die Alt¼Va¨ter von dem Concilio Nicaeo der Arianischen Meinung zugethan gewesen. Diese alle hat der beru¨hmte englische Theologus Georgius Bullus in seiner Defensione Fidei Nicaenae widerleget, die PATRES von dem Vorwurff des Arianismi befreijet, und die meisten Schwierigkeiten ho¨chst glu¨ckl[ich] aufgelo¨set, indem er gezeiget, und aus ihren Schrifften klar bewiesen, daß sie zwischen Eingebohrnen und Erstgebohrnen einen Unterscheid gemachet . . .’. 64 It is a fair surmise that these passages correspond to Wachter’s argument in a lost manuscript, which belonged to the context of his reading of Bull and the pre-Nicene Fathers. The manuscript was entitled Demonstratio philosophica, quod D[eus] O[ptimus] M[aximus] unus et altissimus nec esse nec concipi naturaliter possit, nisi Trinus in personis eo modo, quo fides Catholica docet. We know about it from J. F. Reimmann, Historia

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

379

2. But this is untrue and impossible if there is no mediation. . . . 3. However, there is nothing other than God that could originate mediation, only he himself, his perfections and his substance. We see from this that the mediating nature was born of God, as brightness is of light, and that this is the first-born Son of God. 4. This mediator is neither God nor creature, but the true mediator between the two. . . . 5. But it is the mediator’s nature to participate in both parts. . . . 6. We see from this how Creation is possible; for because the mediator can change to good, it is clear that he could create the small from the big . . . , the visible from the invisible, and all this by condescension to the creature (called sugkatbasiv by the ancients) . . . 7. . . . It is known to everybody under the name of nature. The sages called it so as well, for two reasons. First, because it was born of God—in this respect they called it NATURA NATURATA. Second, because it is the origin of all other natures, except the one from which it comes itself—in this respect, they called it NATURA NATURANS.

Here Wachter has adopted Spinoza’s terminology,65 and so he continues: 8. We can only grasp three attributes of this being, namely those covered by the terms Idea Corporis, Intelligentiae et Motus.

It is surprising that three attributes are listed here instead of two as with Spinoza. Perhaps Wachter added his ‘Idea motus’ as a reaction against Leibniz’s critique of Cartesianism, but also allusions to Jakob Bo¨hme may be possible. The concluding step brings him back to Christology: 9. All this taken together is called Jesus Christ, the external Word of God, the first-born of all creatures, the Sophia primigenia, the God-man, heavenly humanity, heavenly wisdom . . . 66

This concludes Wachter’s Spinozistic reconstruction of pre-Nicaean Logos Christology. universalis atheismi (Hildesheim, 1725), 517. The manuscript must have been earlier than 1706, or even 1702, for Wachter refers to it in Elucidarius (as in n. 31), 35. 65 For the concepts ‘Natura naturans/Natura naturata’, which were used for the first time by Michael Scotus, see s.v., Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, vi (Basle, 1984), 504–9 (K. Hedwig). 66 Theologia Martyrum (as in n. 32), 81 ff.: ‘I. Die Scho ¨ pffung muß einen Stoff haben, und kann ohne Stoff so wenig als ohne WerkMeistern begriffen werden. Der Wille und die Allmacht Gottes schaffen zwar alles aus nichts, aber nicht ohne die Substantz. Gott aber ist allein, und ist keine Materie neben ihm. Darum muß die Scho¨pffung aus der go¨ttlichen Substantz geschehen seyn. II. Das aber ist falsch und unmo¨gl[ich], wenns ohne Mittel werden wird. Denn wenn die Scho¨pffung aus der go¨ttlichen Substantz

380

Martin Mulsow

V Considered from today’s standpoint, the interpretative structure of Theologia Martyrum appears primarily as a highly complex sequence unmittelbahrer Weise geschehen wa¨re, so wa¨re Gott in eine Creatur vera¨ndert worden, als dann mu¨ste man Gott nicht durch seine eigene sondern durch fremde und widerwa¨rtige Eigenschafften begreiffen, und so wu¨rde Gott aufho¨ren zu seyn. Darum ist klar und offenbahr, daß Gott nicht ohne ein Mittel in die Creatur ausgegangen sey. III. Gleichwohl ist nichts, neben Gott, daraus ein Mittel werden ko¨nte, denn er selbst seine Volkommenheiten und seine Substantz. Daraus erkennen wir, daß die Mittlere Natur von Gott gebohren sey, wie der Glantz vom Licht, und daß dieses der Erstgebohrene Sohn Gottes sey. IV. Dieser Mittler ist weder Gott noch die Creatur, sondern das wahrhafftige Mittel zwischen beyden, ein besonderes himmlisches Wesen, dadurch Gott der Creatur na¨her komt, welches man allein mit dem Verstande begreiffen kan. In ihm wohnet die gantze fu¨lle der Gottheit leibhafftig. Denn er ist aus Gott gebohren und in Gott geblieben, und darum hat er alle go¨ttl[ichen] Eigenschafften in sich, ausgenommen diejenige, die in der Natur des Mittlers ipso cogitatu ausgeschloßen sind. V. Das ist aber die Natur des Mittlers, daß er von beyden Theilen participire. Gott ist an sich selbst unvera¨nderl[ich], die Creatur aber ist vera¨nderl[ich] zum guten und zum bo¨sen. So muß dann das Mittel zwischen Gott und der Creatur unvera¨nderl[ich] zum bo¨sen und vera¨nderl[ich] zum guten seyn. VI. Daraus erkennen wir nun, wie die Scho¨pffung sey mo¨gl[ich] gewesen; denn weilen der Mittler vera¨nderlich zum guten ist, so ists klar, daß er auch das kleine aus dem großen das gema¨ßene aus dem unerma¨ßlichen, die Portion aus dem gantzen, das Zeitliche aus dem ewigen, das Verga¨ngliche aus dem Unverga¨ngl[ichen], das du¨rfftige aus dem Volkommnen, das sichtbahre aus dem Unsichtbahren, habe hervorbringen ko¨nnen, und das alles durch die Bequehmung an die Creatur (von den Alten sugkatbasiv genand), welche ist eine Eigenschafft seiner Natur, sofern sie zum guten vera¨nderl[ich] ist. VII. Dieses Wesen fa¨llet nicht in die Sinnen, man siehts nicht, man ho¨rts nicht, man fu¨hlts nicht. Es ist weder Feuer noch Waßer, weder Lufft noch Erde, noch sonst etwas Elementarisches oder co¨rperliches, noch sonst was dessen, was von ihm geschaffen ist, und ist doch allen Menschen bekand, unter dem Namen Natur. Die Weisen haben es auch so genand, und zwar um zweyerley Ursachen willen. Erst[lich], weilen es aus Gott gebohren ist, so fern haben sie es NATURAM NATURATAM genennet, vors ander weilen alle anderen Naturen von ihm herkommen, ausgenommen die, von welcher es selbst herkomt, so fern haben sie es genand NATURAM NATURANTEM. VIII. In diesem Wesen ko¨nnen wir nur drey Attribute begreiffen, na¨ml[ich] diejenige, welche von der Idea Corporis, Intelligentiae et Motus eingeschloßen werden. Wo von es her nach unterschiedliche Nahmen beko¨mt, welche iedoch nicht so sehr von einander unterschieden sind, daß nicht einer vor den andern od[er] vor das gantze Wesen ko¨nte genommen werden. Nach dem Ersten Attribut ist es die Materie aller Materien und die inwendige Ursache aller Leiber welche aus ihm als aus einem allgemeinen Krafft-Laib hervor kommen, ohngeachtet es weder ein gemeiner Laib noch gemeine Materie ist, noch seyn kan, weilen aus Gott nichts gemeines noch geringes Ursta¨nden kan. Nach den andern attribut ist es die Spermatische Vernunfft der gantzen Welt, von welcher alle andere Vernunfften herkommen, und durch welche alles vernu¨nfftig geschaffen ist, und der Natur nach vernu¨nfftig wircket. Nach dem 3. Attribut ist es der Geist der Welt, von welchem alle Creaturen das Leben, die Kra¨ffte und die Bewegung haben. IX. Das alles zusammen genommen, heißet Jesus Christus, das a¨ußere Wort Gottes, der Erstgebohrene aller Creatur, die Sophia primigenia, der Gott Mensch, die himlische Menschheit, die himlische Weißheit, der Stoff und Werckmeister der gantzen Creatur. In ihm leben, weben und sind wir, gleich wie er selbst in Gott selbst lebet, webet und ist.’

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

381

of misdatings. Along with his contemporaries from Kircher to Jablonski,67 Wachter discerned a Philosophia symbolica in the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although he accepted Casaubon’s redating of the Hermetica, he held on to the thesis of a primeval Egyptian wisdom on premisses that are no longer sustainable. His dating of the Cabbala as an oral tradition to Old Testament times rested on a pseudo-epigraphic attribution which was soon to be exploded. In 1768, Jacob Emden dated the Sohar to the Middle Ages, rather than to antiquity.68 And even references to the pre-Nicene Logos theory were not free of the suspicion of insertions and backdatings from the times of the Arian controversy.69 Rectifications of this kind make Wachter’s idea of an esoteric rationalist tradition seem lopsided. Today we would ask what impact Philo’s notion of a double Logos had on early Christian doctrine, and whether it could possibly have influenced the later Cabbala. Wachter’s assumptions move in the opposite direction and are now, after a philological examination of the evidence, obviously obsolete, to say nothing of his Spinozistic interpretation of the whole conceptual framework. But disposing of Wachter’s ideas is not as simple as it might seem. It was none other than Gershom Sholem who pointed out that Wachter was right to recognize Spinoza’s dependence on the Cabbala, especially as far as Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo was concerned.70 Spinoza in the Cabbalistic tradition: this, at least partly, makes sense. But even some of Wachter’s other hypotheses are not completely up in the air. He was the first to suggest an Essene influence on Christianity, an idea that was to have a long career71 and that remains topical in connection with the Qumran findings.72 In the light of Jan Assmann’s claim about the connection between Akhenaton’s cosmotheism and the secret character See J. G. Wachter, De naturae et scripturae concordia (Copenhagen, 1752). See C. Schulte, ‘Haskala und Kabbala’, in M. Neugebauer-Wo¨lk (ed.), Aufkla¨rung und Esoterik (Hamburg, 1999), 335–54. 69 See C. Markschies, ‘ ‘‘Die wunderliche Ma ¨r von den zwei Logoi’’: Clemens Alexandrinus, Fragment 23—Zeugnis eines Arius ante Arium oder des arianischen Streites selbst?’, in id., Alta Trinita` Beata: Gesammelte Studien zur altkirchlichen Trinita¨tstheologie (Tu¨bingen, 2000), 70–98. 70 See G. Scholem, ‘Die Wachtersche Kontroverse u ¨ ber den Spinozismus und ihre Folgen’, in K. Gru¨nder and W. Schmidt-Biggemann (eds.), Spinoza in der Fru¨hzeit seiner religio¨sen Wirkung (Heidelberg, 1984), 15–25. 71 See W. Schro ¨ der, ‘Les Esse´niens plagie´s: Un manuscrit clandestin sur l’origine du christianisme’, in A. McKenna and A. Mothu (eds.), La Philosophie clandestine a` l’aˆge classique (Oxford, 1997), 361–70. 72 See e.g. the critical account by K. Berger, Qumran und Jesus: Wahrheit unter Verschluß? (Stuttgart, 1993). 67 68

382

Martin Mulsow

of Ramesside theology, including the echoes of it in the Hermetic writings, Wachter’s view of Egyptian wisdom, which built on Cudworth’s firm conviction that the Hermetic writings contained authentic ancient material, had not been totally wrong—as it might seem to be only a few decades ago.73 The situation is even more complex as regards the mutual influences of Jewish and early Christian traditions. Guy Stroumsa has recently opened up perspectives that may yet give back their bite to some other of Wachter’s theories. Stroumsa follows Casaubon’s views on the tradition of mysteries in Christianity, which was also Wachter’s assumption in Theologia Martyrum. He asks to what extent esoteric elements in early Christianity can be identified as adaptations from Judaism.74 This does not automatically mean Kabbalistic esotericism—even though today it is admitted that the Kabbalah might be quite old, dating back probably to the fourth or fifth century ad—but at least some kind of gnostic or apocalyptic esotericism.75 Here not only the question of how Judaism has influenced Clement and Origen and therefore also Arius76 arises, but also to what extent ideas of mystery in Origenism were influenced by Jewish sources. All this said, I do not wish to imply that the Theologia Martyrum as a whole, which Wachter himself regarded as incomplete later years 73 See J. Assmann, ‘Hen kai pan: Ralph Cudworth und die Rehabilitierung der hermetischen Tradition’, in Aufkla¨rung und Esoterik (as in n. 68), 38–52; id., ‘A¨gyptische Geheimnisse: Arcanum und Mysterium in der a¨gyptischen Religion’, in A. Assmann and J. Assmann (eds.), Schleier und Schwelle: Geheimnis und Offenbarung (Archa¨ologie der literarischen Kommunikation, V/2) (Munich, 1998), 15–41. 74 See G. G. Stroumsa, Savoir et salut: Traditions juives et tentations dualistes dans le christianisme ancien (Paris, 1992); id., Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden, 1996). 75 Stroumsa refers here to J. Danie ´lou, Message ´evangelique et culture helle´nistique aux 2e et 3e sie`cles (Paris, 1961), 360 ff.; see also id., ‘Les Traditions secre`tes des apoˆtres’, Eranos Jahrbuch, 31 (1962), 199–215. 76 See e.g. R. Lorenz, Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 224: ‘Von Origenes aufgenommenes judenchristliches und adoptianisches Gedankengut wurde im Arianismus virulent. Die Parallelen zwischen Arianismus und ju¨dischem Denken . . . reichen nicht aus, Abha¨ngigkeitsverha¨ltnisse mit Bestimmtheit zu behaupten. Ihr Gewicht im Ganzen, die Abweichung vom origenistischen Systemgedanken, verbunden mit der Wahlverwandschaft zwischen ‘Arianismus’ und ju¨disch-judenchristlichen Traditionen, die bei Laktanz, den Pseudoklementinen und Pseudo-Cyprian zu beobachten war, macht es nicht unwahrscheinlich, daß ju¨disch-ha¨retische und judenchristliche Einflu¨sse auf Lukian von Antiochien und Arius wirkten. Entscheidend ist jedoch, daß Arius vom Origenismus ausging, wenngleich dies in anderer Weise geschah, als bisher angenommen wurde.’ See also N. De Lange, Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge, 1976).

Wachter’s Theologia Martyrum

383

in life77, should today be read for the validity of its views. But, and this is the point that I should like to emphasize, the relevance of some of his ideas is not so strange as it may seem. The theory of the first-born Son as mediator of the Creation points to general problems in the history of religion.78 A rationalist and philosophical analysis of such problems makes good sense. And this is exactly what Wachter, with Spinoza’s help, tried to do. Spinoza’s teachings were to him nothing more than the most convincing scheme for a purely rational ontology. What nowadays we discuss in terms of ‘mystery religion’ and esotericism, Wachter, in the early years of the Enlightenment, interpreted in the double perspective of prisca sapientia and careful concealment. Persecution and the Art of Writing, to come back to Strauss, is a title Wachter could have claimed for himself. Being forced to write in clandestinity, Wachter, as a ‘martyr’ of free thought, became aware of the abysses which open up in the religion of the ‘martyr theologians’, if only they are read carefully enough: abysses of rational structures of creation and purification, which were common in the Orient, which shaped Christianity, and which are still part of philosophical discourse. 77 At the beginning of the 1740s one finds an embittered Wachter in Leipzig, advising young visitors not to follow in his footsteps. He rejects attempts by admirers to publish the Theologia Martyrum. He says that he has given up philosophy and regrets the time he has wasted on his ‘scriptiuncula’. His early works, he now thinks, are very imperfect and need complete reworking—an effort he is not prepared to make any more. It would be interesting to compare Wachter’s logos theory with that of Johann Christian Edelmann, which the latter expounds in his Die Go¨ttlichkeit der Vernunft. Edelmann did not know the manuscript of Theologia Martyrum, which circulated only in Zu¨rich, Memmingen, and Leipzig in the circle of Brucker, Lotter, Mencke, and Gottsched. He came to different conclusions. On Edelmann see W. Grossmann, Johann Christian Edelmann: From Orthodoxy to Enlightenment (The Hague, 1976); A. Schaper, Ein langer Abschied vom Christentum: Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767) und die deutsche Fru¨haufkla¨rung (Marburg, 1996), esp. 148 ff. 78 Compare for instance the problem of a mediated creation in Egyptian texts and in the Chaldean Oracles. See J. Assmann, Ma’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten A¨gypten (3rd edn.; Munich, 2000), 167–74; Oracles chaldaı¨ques, ed. E´. des Places (Paris, 1971), fr. 7.

This page intentionally left blank

11 Pierre Des Maizeaux: History, Toleration, and Scholarship Scott Mandelbrote

Pierre Des Maizeaux was born in 1673 at Paillat in Auvergne, the only child of Louis Des Maizeaux and Marie Dumonteil. By the time of his death in London, in 1745, the world in which he had grown up, as the son of a poor Huguenot pastor in the French countryside, had been swept away, and the world in which he had made his career, the cosmopolitan republic of letters of the Refuge, was facing profound change. The life of Pierre Des Maizeaux allows us to consider several aspects of the experience of the late seventeenth- or early eighteenthcentury Huguenot diaspora that may be relevant to the themes of toleration and scholarship. It encourages us to evaluate the extent to which persecution, and the disillusionment which it brought, may have acted as solvents to break down extreme religious conviction and to promote particular kinds of intellectual endeavour. It enables us to assess the effect that living a life both geographically and financially on the margins had on standards of religious, intellectual, or political probity. It forces us to see issues of scholarship and toleration through a perspective which takes in the whole of north-western Europe, but which focuses on the appreciation of life in England by someone born in France. Des Maizeaux’s literary career, like that of the more famous Pierre Bayle, married the scholarly pursuits of reading, collecting, and editing with those of journalism and polemic. Des Maizeaux indeed saw himself as an English Bayle who couched at least some of his opinions, and much of his writing, in an idiom that was self-consciously

386

Scott Mandelbrote

modelled on that of the great philosopher and critic of the Refuge in the Netherlands.1 Pierre Des Maizeaux’s personal links with Bayle were, however, relatively slight. Des Maizeaux’s family had fled to Avenches in the Pays de Vaud at, or slightly before, the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in October 1685. Louis Des Maizeaux was then on trial for sedition, as the result of a sermon criticizing the king which he had preached. From Avenches, Pierre Des Maizeaux went to study first in Basle, and then at the Lyceum in Berne, paying his way by acting as a tutor. Eventually, he progressed to the Academy in Geneva, in 1695, with the intention of studying for the ministry, and of following in his father’s footsteps. However, something about the atmosphere of controversy in late seventeenth-century Geneva must have disillusioned the younger Des Maizeaux, and turned him from this course. Perhaps the debates involving Louis Tronchin and Jean-Alphonse Turretini altered his attitude to traditional Calvinism; perhaps the experience of living in a cosmopolitan city, and being taught by men whose contacts stretched across Europe, seduced a young man into wishing to see more of the world than he would from an exile’s parish in some obscure mountain village. Fresh from his graduation, Des Maizeaux certainly made use of the contacts provided by his teachers, when he travelled from Geneva to Holland in the spring of 1699. In particular, Vincent Minutoli provided the letters of recommendation that introduced Des Maizeaux into the circle of Pierre Bayle in Rotterdam.2 Although he spent only a short time in the Netherlands, Des Maizeaux made a number of contacts there who would become useful to him during his future career in England, or on whom he would model himself during the pursuit of that career. In addition to Bayle himself, Des Maizeaux numbered Jean Le Clerc, the brothers Basnage, Charles de La Motte, and Benjamin Furly among his acquaintances.3 When he moved to England, after only a few months, he 1 Detailed studies of Des Maizeaux’s life include J. Almagor, Pierre Des Maizeaux (1673–1745), Journalist and English Correspondent for Franco-Dutch Periodicals, 1700– 1720 (Amsterdam, 1989); J. H. Broome, ‘An Agent in Anglo-French Relationships: Pierre des Maizeaux, 1673–1745’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1949); id., ‘Bayle’s Biographer: Pierre des Maizeaux’, French Studies, 9 (1955), 1–17. 2 See Almagor, Des Maizeaux, 1–3; Broome, ‘Agent’, 1–14; Martin I. Klauber, Between Reformed Scolasticism and Pan-Protestantism: Jean-Alphonse Turretin (1671– 1737) and Enlightened Orthodoxy at the Academy of Geneva (Selinsgrove, 1994); M.-C. Pitassi, De l’Orthodoxie aux Lumie`res: Gene`ve 1670–1737 (Geneva, 1992). 3 For a discussion of Bayle’s entourage, see M. Magdelaine et al. (eds.), De l’Humanisme aux Lumie`res, Bayle et le protestantisme (Oxford, 1996), 475–559, 623–33.

Pierre Des Maizeaux

387

carried with him recommendations from Bayle to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and from Le Clerc to John Locke.4 In London, Des Maizeaux quickly expanded his set of contacts, in particular gaining a reputation as a friend of Monsieur de Saint-E´vremond, the aristocratic exile from the court of Louis XIV. He started a correspondence with La Motte, who passed his letters on to Jacques Bernard, thus beginning a lengthy career as a journalist and reporter on English affairs, at first for Bernard’s Nouvelles de la Re´publique des Lettres.5 Over the course of his time in England, and in particular between 1710 and 1720, Des Maizeaux acted as the major source of news on English events and ideas, and of reports on and extracts from English publications, for the journals of the Refuge. These, in turn, were coming increasingly to serve the demands of a broad and enthusiastic republic of letters.6 Des Maizeaux, at one time or another, wrote for most of the French-language gazettes serving this market, juggling the demands of the conservative Journal des Sc¸avans, edited from Paris by the Royal Librarian, the Abbe´ Bignon, or of the Journal de Tre´voux, with those of the Huguenot press in Holland.7 He based his journalism on the circle of friends and patrons that he had been able to establish in England. This included Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and, later on, Isaac Newton, and Des Maizeaux’s closest friend and patron, Anthony Collins. Des Maizeaux also frequented the London coffee houses, such as Slaughter’s or the Rainbow, and drew on the conversation and concerns of the polite world to be found there. Although Des Maizeaux’s choice of England as a final destination for his talents may have owed something to Bayle’s enthusiasm for that country, he was aware that Bayle was too engrossed on the project of his Dictionnaire historique et critique to handle extensive communications. Thus, the younger man’s first correspondences were

4 E. R. Labrousse, ‘Bayle et l’e ´tablissement de Desmaizeaux en Angleterre’, Revue de litte´rature compare´e, 29 (1955), 251–7; R. A. Barrell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le Refuge Franc¸ais’: Correspondence (Lewiston, NY, 1989), 31, 215. 5 J. H. Broome, ‘Pierre Desmaizeaux, journaliste: Les nouvelles litte ´raires de Londres entre 1700 et 1740’, Revue de litte´rature compare´e, 29 (1955), 184–204. 6 Cf. H. Bots, ‘Jean Leclerc as Journalist of the Bibliothe `ques: His Contribution to the Spread of English Learning on the European Continent’, in G. A. M. Janssens and F. G. A. M. Aarts (eds.), Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, History and Bibliography (Amsterdam, 1984), 53–66. 7 See Almagor, Des Maizeaux (as in n. 1); Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1). Cf. A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995), 87–114.

388

Scott Mandelbrote

directed elsewhere.8 But Bayle remained the model for Des Maizeaux’s career, in particular for his activities as a historian and as a biographer. Indeed, Des Maizeaux laid claim throughout his life to the mantle of Bayle, and to the position of custodian of Bayle’s memory, from his first attempt to write the life of Bayle in 1708 until the time of his death, when he was working on a new revision to the French edition of Bayle’s works.9 Yet, despite the literary and stylistic model provided by Bayle, and the assistance given to the young Des Maizeaux by members of Bayle’s circle, for example Pierre Silvestre, who had inherited Saint-E´vremond’s manuscripts, the ideas with which Des Maizeaux appeared to sympathize in England were not always ones that would have appealed to Bayle.10 In particular, through his relationship with Anthony Collins, who was his dearest friend and patron during the 1710s and early 1720s, Des Maizeaux assumed a prominent position in the world of English freethinking and libertinism.11 The sentiments espoused by Collins and his circle seemed at times to conflict with Des Maizeaux’s more orthodox and critical assessments of the deist controversy, in some of his writing for the gazettes, and with his expressed admiration for the Church of England. Certainly, they went against the advice, given to him in 1701 by Bernard, not to trust people like the deist writer John Toland, whose work Des Maizeaux later came to champion.12 Moreover, the work of the English deists embodied a trend in contemporary attitudes to scholarship that would prove highly subversive of the attitudes of an earlier age of critics.13 Nevertheless, Bayle’s project for a Historical and Critical Dictionary was one that intrigued Des Maizeaux for much of his life, as well as drawing him into extensive controversy, with Prosper Marchand and the copyright holders to Bayle’s Nachlass, over the best way to edit and 8 E. R. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1963–4), i. 235–71; Labrousse, 9 Goldgar, Learning (as in n. 7), 131–7. ‘Bayle’ (as in n. 4). ´ vremond, see D. C. Potts, ‘Desmaizeaux and Saint10 On Des Maizeaux and Saint-E E´vremond’s Text’, French Studies, 19 (1965), 239–52; Pierre Des Maizeaux, ‘La Vie de Monsieur de Saint-Evremond’, in Œuvres de Monsieur de Saint Evremond, new edn., 5 vols. ([Amsterdam], 1740), i. 1–261. 11 Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1), 158–206; James O’Higgins, SJ, Anthony Collins: The Man and his Works (The Hague, 1970). 12 Broome, ‘Desmaizeaux’ (as in n. 5); on the links between Des Maizeaux and Toland, see S. H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Kingston, 1984), 147, 218; Broome, Agent’ (as in n. 1), 151–6, 294–5. 13 See J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992), 99–132; J. I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001), 599–627.

Pierre Des Maizeaux

389

update such a work.14 During the 1710s, Des Maizeaux made a number of attempts to embark on an English version of Bayle’s dictionary, in particular composing two sample entries (the second, as he admitted, far too long to be a dictionary entry), on the lives of John Hales (1584– 1656) and of William Chillingworth (1602–44).15 The choice of Hales and Chillingworth as typical subjects reflected some of the innovative, and controversial, features of Bayle’s dictionary, which had been specifically defended by Bayle himself in his clarifications to the work. Aspects of the careers of both of Des Maizeaux’s subjects had been disputed, as had their religious orthodoxy.16 Yet, like Bayle, Des Maizeaux believed in the utility of presenting all the information that he had obtained about his subject, and in using it to construct an essentially sympathetic biography. He followed the method of Bayle’s Dictionary, surrounding the main narrative with a massive apparatus of references, principally consisting of lengthy quotations from his sources, and extended discussions of the major controversies in which his subjects had engaged. Bayle’s stated aim in creating this form of dictionary entry had been to allow his readers to obtain the information that they required by consulting a single book, without the need for deep acquaintance with a vast and expensive library.17 This aim had much in common with Des Maizeaux’s life-long task of writing extracts of English books for the French gazettes; it introduced literature to a broader audience, and furnished that audience with the tools for enquiry, without involving them in lengthy study, or the expenditure of much time and money. However, both Bayle and Des Maizeaux sought also to make their biographical entries critical, to express their own points of view through writing the lives of their subjects, and to use the 14 Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1), 350–64; for discussion of the significance of dictionaries, see Israel, Enlightenment (as in n. 13), 119–55; I. Rivers, ‘Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chambers’, in ead. (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London, 2001), 135–69. 15 Pierre Des Maizeaux, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life and Writings of the Ever-memorable Mr John Hales (London, 1719); id., An Historical and Critical Account of the Life and Writings of Wm. Chillingworth (London, 1725); drafts for these two works can be found among Des Maizeaux’s papers, in Thomas Birch’s collections: British Library, Add. MS 4221, fos. 315–28 (notes on Chillingworth); Add. MS 4222, fos. 86v– 159r (notes on Hales). 16 Modern accounts of the lives of Hales and Chillingworth can be found in J. H. Elson, John Hales of Eton (New York, 1948); R. R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967); Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987), 166–230. 17 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1697), i. 5–6.

390

Scott Mandelbrote

dictionary as a whole to promote their own intellectual concerns, as well as their careers. In this way, theirs was a new form of scholarship that sought to bring the fruits of learning to a new public, aiming to convince by the rhetoric of erudition as well as through the style of polemic. Despite his preoccupation with the image of Bayle, and with Bayle’s example, it was not the case that Des Maizeaux was simply a cipher, encoding Bayle’s ideas of the Refuge. Unlike Bayle, Des Maizeaux had finally rejected the strict Calvinist doctrines of his youth. In particular, he showed little enthusiasm for the notion of election, as is suggested by his choice of subjects, Hales and Chillingworth, and by his presentation of them. However, like Bayle, Des Maizeaux continued to be attracted to arguments that stressed the legitimacy of the civil power of the magistrate, even when that magistrate held views that were contrary to his own.18 This was consistent with his detestation of the arguments of the nonjurors, in particular Jeremy Collier, in English politics, and with his enthusiastic support for the extreme Erastianism of Benjamin Hoadly during the Bangorian controversy.19 Yet it also fitted the heroic portrayal that he gave to Chillingworth, in the Life, for having taken up arms in defence of royal authority and of the person of Charles I.20 Des Maizeaux’s Refuge, like Bayle’s, showed little enthusiasm for the millenarian reaction to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes epitomized by the writings of Pierre Jurieu.21 But, whereas Bayle’s allies and supporters were the Dutch regent class, Des Maizeaux’s were the libertine aristocrats and gentlemen who inhabited the extreme fringes of English Whiggery.22 Nevertheless, like Bayle, Des Maizeaux was eager to ensure that the behaviour of the refugees, whom he represented in the republic of letters, was not so extreme as to provoke any angry reaction from their hosts. Unlike Bayle, however, he seems to have shown little enthusiasm for the hope that good behaviour abroad might help to win a return to France. Hence Des Maizeaux’s reaction to the preaching of the 18 For discussion of Bayle’s views, see T. J. Hochstrasser, ‘The Claims of Conscience: Natural Law Theory, Obligation, and Resistance in the Huguenot Diaspora’, in J. C. Laursen (ed.), New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge (Leiden, 1995), 15–51. 19 Almagor, Des Maizeaux (as in n.1), 54, 58, 65, 128–9, 136–8; Broome, ‘Agent’ (as 20 Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth (as in n. 15), 267–349. in n. 1), 241–4. 21 On Jurieu, see F. R. J. Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu: Theoloog en Politikus der Refuge (Kampen, 1967). 22 On the opinions of Des Maizeaux’s English patrons, see O’Higgins, Collins (as in n. 11); L. E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994); R. Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, La., 1984).

Pierre Des Maizeaux

391

refugees from the Ce´vennes, who began to gather followers about them in England in 1707, was one of ridicule and disbelief, which intensified as the antics of the French Prophets and their English disciples became more exaggerated and enthusiastic.23 Des Maizeaux shared Bayle’s scepticism, which he expressed across a range of intellectual debates, scorning not only the claims of the French Prophets to revelation, but the ontological proofs of the Cartesians. He added to Bayle’s own rationalism the exercise of reason in religion which was preached by English divines, such as Gilbert Burnet, on whose Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles (1699) Des Maizeaux commented favourably, or John Tillotson, who was the most appealing of English theologians in Des Maizeaux’s eyes, as well as in those of his patron, Anthony Collins.24 Des Maizeaux’s attempts to write the lives of Hales and Chillingworth sought to provide part of the intellectual background to the exercise of reason in religion, which he believed best characterized the attitude of the Church of England in its true form. Whilst he preserved much of Bayle’s approach to the Refuge, and to the intellectual, political, and religious problems of the exiled Huguenots, Des Maizeaux was also seeking to influence debates that were more properly English. Although his work embraced the whole of the Francophone world, Des Maizeaux did not seek to change the status of the Huguenots within that world, except by stressing their natural part in it, and by seeking to encourage toleration in the minds of their foreign hosts. In this, his approach was both secularizing, depending as it did on a rejection of the Calvinism of his youth, and assimilationist. Peter Des Maizeaux, as the naturalized Englishman became, was principally concerned about attitudes within England, and about attitudes to England. Hence he deprecated the French Prophets, who made themselves and their fellow e´migre´s look ridiculous in English eyes, in particular those of senior English churchmen, who had the power to circumscribe the religious liberty of the exiles.25 At the same time, he sought to win the friendship both of tolerant churchmen, like Gilbert Burnet, and of those politicians who were most likely to seek to curb the secular power of the Church, like Shaftesbury, Collins, or Thomas Gordon. 23 Almagor, Des Maizeaux (as in n. 1), 39–42; cf. Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and that Subtile Effluvium (Gainesville, Fla., 1978), and id., The French Prophets (Berkeley, 1980). 24 Almagor, Des Maizeaux (as in n. 1), 24–7, 53, 140; Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1), 20, 108–9, 313. 25 On clerical responses to the French Prophets, see Schwartz, Knaves (as in n. 23).

392

Scott Mandelbrote

In so far as life in England provided a safe and convenient refuge for Huguenot exiles like himself, Des Maizeaux held it up to the world as an example both of how to conduct a tolerant civil society, and of how, in such a society, arts and sciences might prosper. Yet, despite all this enthusiasm, Des Maizeaux’s personal aims remained those of acceptance and survival in England. For this, he depended on patronage, and on the receipts from his journalism, whose boundaries were so broad that they forced him to sound several notes at once, often out of harmony with one another. The experience of the refugee was one that encouraged an unhealthy scepticism, and perhaps also relativism, as well as promoting intellectual endeavour. Increasingly, the life of the refugee was bound up with the politics and thought of the host country, even at a time when Des Maizeaux’s writings most easily crossed all of Europe. At the beginning of Des Maizeaux’s career as a journalist, Jacques Bernard warned him that ‘nous vivons dans un Pays ou` nous ne sommes pas si libertins que vous eˆtes en Angleterre’, highlighting the fact that publication in Holland, though relatively unrestricted for the Francophone press, was still subject to control.26 In England, Des Maizeaux associated most closely with those whose philosophy constituted a modern form of libertinism, most notably Shaftesbury and Collins, who combined classical ideas of virtue and politeness with scepticism about revealed religion and satire. Des Maizeaux clearly admired his patrons, but he cannot have been under any illusions about the limits of toleration in English society, which placed them firmly on its margins. Although the impecunious Des Maizeaux depended in part on Collins for his living during the late 1710s and early 1720s, Collins also hoped to gain, both intellectually and politically, from his association with Des Maizeaux. Indeed, Des Maizeaux had prospects of becoming a government official for a time, when another of his patrons, Thomas Parker, Earl of Macclesfield, became Lord Chancellor.27 Despite the noble company and philosophy which was a feature of the tolerant circles around Saint-E´vremond or Shaftesbury, these groups were, 26 See Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1), 27; on restrictions affecting the Dutch press, see S. Groenveld, ‘The Mecca of Authors? States Assemblies and Censorship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic’, Britain and the Netherlands, 9 (1987), 63–86, and id., ‘The Dutch Republic, an Island of Liberty of the Press in 17th-Century Europe? The Authorities and the Book Trade’, in H. Bots and F. Waquet (eds.), Commercium Litterarium, 1600–1750 (Amsterdam, 1994), 281–300. 27 J. H. Broome, ‘Une Collaboration: Anthony Collins et Desmaizeaux’, Revue de litte´rature compare´e, 30 (1956), 161–79; evidence of Des Maizeaux’s search for office can be found in British Library, Add. MS 4289 (letters to Des Maizeaux), fos. 93–4, 98–9.

Pierre Des Maizeaux

393

in their way, just as isolated as Des Maizeaux and Anthony Collins would be in retreat in the Essex countryside. The way out of this marginal condition, as Des Maizeaux and others of the Refuge had already realized, lay in scholarship and publication, and in the new audience of readers who could be attracted by sceptical ideas. J. H. Broome has argued that Des Maizeaux was closely involved in the preparation of Collins’s later works, as well as defending him against the criticisms of Richard Bentley through his articles for the gazettes. The evidence for this is doubtful, however.28 So is the claim, which can be traced to Des Maizeaux himself, that he participated, like Collins, in open political debate around 1710, through the publication of A Letter from a Gentleman at the Court of St. Germains. Des Maizeaux may have translated this pamphlet (which has often but falsely been attributed to Daniel Defoe) from the original French, or he may even have helped to compose the text, which attacked Jacobites and High Churchmen, but he was almost certainly not its sole author.29 Similarly, he may have assisted Collins, but there can be little doubt that he did not write his books for him. Rather, Des Maizeaux was a beneficiary in his own right of the broader culture of print made possible in England after 1695 by the lapsing of controls and licensing for the press.30 Like his Whig friends, Des Maizeaux sought to defend such freedoms ‘when the enemies to our Constitution were contriving its ruin’.31 Both Des Maizeaux’s career and his journalism were creations of the polite world of the mind imagined by Shaftesbury, whose Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit (1699) gradually entranced the young Des Maizeaux when he was called upon to translate it; they were sustained by the more rumbustious journalism and the stronger political contacts of authors like Defoe. Yet Des Maizeaux also made his own contribution to encouraging the English to be more tolerant, through the sceptical and scholarly medium of the dictionary, a project through which he aspired to become an English Bayle.

28

Broome, ‘Collaboration’; cf. O’Higgins, Collins (as in n. 11), 237–41. On the various claims regarding the authorship of A Letter from a Gentleman at the Court of St. Germains, see P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-Attributions (London, 1994), 42–3; Furbank and Owens, ‘Daniel Defoe and A Letter from a Gentleman at the Court of St. Germains (1710)’, E´tudes anglaises, 48 (1995), 61–6; cf. British Library, Add. MS 4289, fos. 108–9, 159. 30 See L. Hanson, Government and the Press, 1695–1763 (London, 1936). 31 British Library, Add. MS 4289, fos. 108–9 (letter by Des Maizeaux, dated 18 May 1732). 29

394

Scott Mandelbrote

Des Maizeaux’s place in England, and indeed the place of his English as well as his refugee friends, depended on the maintenance of the English polity, in particular the settlement of 1688–9, and on its continued interpretation in as broad and generous a way as possible. As a result, he was not afraid to attack the enemies of the new regime, and he was eager to see it grow in strength. As an exile, he was painfully aware that ‘Que le pape re´side a` Rome ou a` Canterbury, c’est la meˆme chose pour nous’.32 His English friends lived at the extreme edge of what was tolerable in polite society. However, Des Maizeaux was never very familiar with English dissenters or their religious beliefs; on the contrary, he was aware of the refugee’s need to appear to have allies and acquaintances in the main stream. It was this need, as much as anything, which explained his enthusiasm for latitudinarian divinity, since, as he showed in his attacks on Richard Bentley, his own personal loyalties often lay with extreme, rationalist positions, which were beyond the bounds even of latitude. Like Collins, Des Maizeaux sought to establish a pedigree for himself within the history of a more tolerant tradition in the Church of England, ignoring what was inconvenient for such a view. He was genuinely attracted to the English Church, but he was also by training sceptical, and inclined, by friendship and by the experience of exile, to favour a broader definition of religion than that which might be generally acceptable to churchmen, of whose power he was inherently suspicious. Together with Collins and other freethinkers, Des Maizeaux sought to remind the Church of England of the tradition of toleration supposedly represented by John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694, and to promote the recovery of that heritage through study and writing. But where Collins favoured the arguments of natural religion and philosophy, Des Maizeaux argued historically, using the biographical method that he had learnt from Bayle.33 The lives of John Hales and William Chillingworth, which appeared in print in 1719 and 1725 respectively, represented interesting choices with which to exemplify an English historical and critical dictionary. To be sure, Hales and Chillingworth were modern figures, of continued renown and importance within the contemporary English church. Yet Des Maizeaux’s journalism was more often concerned with still more recent examples of English intellectual achievement, and, by 1720, his scholarly gaze was turning more and more to the achievements of 32 33

Quoted by Broome, ‘Desmaizeaux’ (as in n. 5), 199. Cf. O’Higgins, Collins (as in n. 11), 92–4; Broome, ‘Agent’ (as in n. 1), 109.

Pierre Des Maizeaux

395

English natural philosophers.34 However, the lives of Hales and Chillingworth were intimately bound up with the events of the early seventeenth century that had helped to create the England in which Des Maizeaux lived. As far as Des Maizeaux’s Whig patrons were concerned, those events, of Civil War and Republic, had established the principles of liberty and freedom that were protected by the Revolution of 1688.35 At the same time, the writings of Hales and Chillingworth were among the works that had been most heavily used by the Restoration Church of England to establish its intellectual links with the past.36 To Des Maizeaux, they really were figures that had advocated toleration, as their Anglican editors had presented them during the period of the persecution of the Church of England in the years immediately before 1660.37 Their lives also had a peculiar poignancy for Des Maizeaux, the exile; Hales had died in retirement during the Interregnum, bearing his sorrows with great fortitude, and Chillingworth had perished, having taken up arms for the losing cause, during the Civil War itself. Through his biographies of Hales and Chillingworth, Des Maizeaux hoped not only to establish his own reputation as an English Bayle, but also to provide a seventeenth-century tradition for the principles of toleration and reason that, he argued, distinguished the Church of England from other national churches. Yet, although he perceived the power of the appeal to the hearts of English divines of the Anglican martyrs Hales and Chillingworth, Des Maizeaux did not necessarily share their conceptions of what constituted toleration or reason. Des Maizeaux’s praise of latitude was the praise of his own values of scepticism, quietism (which was exemplified in the life of Hales), 34 See K. Figala, ‘Ein Exemplar der Chronologie von Newton aus dem Besitz von Pierre Des Maizeaux in der Bibliothe`que de Colmar’, Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel, 84 (1973), 646–97. 35 R. MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), 165–96; Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. by A. B. Worden (Camden Society, 4th ser. 21; 1978), esp. 17–55. 36 See J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 144; J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (2nd edn.; Edinburgh, 1874); Edward Stillingfleet, Irenicum (London, 1661); but note also the comments of R. Beddard, ‘Sheldon and Anglican Recovery’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 1005–17, on the limits of the influence of authors like Hales and Chillingworth. 37 For example, the preface by John Pearson, and the attached letter by Anthony Farindon, in Golden Remains of the ever Memorable Mr Iohn Hales (London, 1659), sig. a1r–4r; cf. the rather more critical views of Chillingworth’s ‘stiff monarchicall Opinions’, expressed by the Presbyterian Robert Wodrow in a letter of 18 Nov. 1726, copied by Des Maizeaux, British Library, Add. MS 4289, fo. 4r.

396

Scott Mandelbrote

loyalism (which Chillingworth embodied), and reason. At the same time, it was an attack on values which he detested, and which threatened his own security: those of Roman Catholics (with whom Des Maizeaux dealt particularly harshly in his comments on Chillingworth’s controversies with the Catholic apologist Edward Knott), and even of some members of the Church of England.38 Des Maizeaux could not conceal the fact that both Hales and Chillingworth had been subject to concerned scrutiny during their lives, and that their orthodoxy had occasionally been suspected. But, in the remarks which ran through the commentary and footnotes which Des Maizeaux appended to the narrative of their lives, he poured scorn on those who had criticized Hales and Chillingworth, in particular contrasting the lack of charity of their opponents with the generous characters of the Anglican martyrs.39 By showing the ungratefulness and hypocrisy of those who attacked Hales and Chillingworth, Des Maizeaux buttressed his own claims to be tolerated, and drew attention to the harsh treatment of his friends. He provided an orthodox pedigree for contemporary rational religion, by emphasizing the rational and tolerant aspects of the religion of Hales and Chillingworth. His description of the willingness of Hales and Chillingworth to try to overcome divisions within the Protestant community, whilst they continued nevertheless to attack the perceived pretensions of Rome, strengthened the hand of the Huguenot exiles, both at home and abroad.40 In these ways, the lives of Hales and Chillingworth were particularly well-chosen starting places for an English Bayle, who remained as concerned with the future of the Huguenot Refuge as with the spread of knowledge. Thus, the biographies that Des Maizeaux wrote of Hales and Chillingworth were far from being impartial. His special pleading became most apparent in his treatment of the charges of Socinianism levelled at his two subjects.41 In the case of Hales, he was able to show that Polish authors had in fact written the Socinian works that others had attributed to the Englishman. His defence of Chillingworth, however, was achieved mostly by sleight of hand rather than by scholarly reattribution: ‘It would be an easy matter to give a long catalogue of eminent 38

Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth (as in n. 15), 43–5, 104–231. Des Maizeaux, Hales (as in n. 15), 4, 8, 13, 28, 89–90; id., Chillingworth, sig. A3r–v, pp. 358–72. 40 Des Maizeaux, Hales, pp. vi–ix, 4, 20–5, 28–54, 80–90; id., Chillingworth, sig. A2r–3v, pp. 17–18, 37, 95, 125, 358. 41 Des Maizeaux, Hales, 4–8; id., Chillingworth, 370–2. 39

Pierre Des Maizeaux

397

persons, both Divines and Lay-men, who have been unjustly charged with Socinianism: but it will be sufficient, for my present purpose, to transcribe here a passage of the famous Mr. le Clerc, whose lot hath been to fall under the same invidious imputation.’42 Although Des Maizeaux was often critical of Socinians, neither his own principles, nor his concern for the all-encompassing nature of the republic of letters, would have allowed him to condemn Socinianism outright. His treatment of Hales and Chillingworth was doubly disingenuous as a result. For one audience (that of orthodox churchmen), it was essential to show that the charges against these paragons of toleration were groundless, whilst admitting that Hales and Chillingworth had entertained extremely rational ideas. But for another group of readers (those of the Refuge), it was desirable for Des Maizeaux to portray these apparently orthodox figures as the victims of tyrannical accusations and persecution, and it was tempting to suggest that they had responded cunningly, by being economical with the truth (as some Huguenots had themselves been forced to do). Des Maizeaux’s lives of Hales and Chillingworth, therefore, represented a stage in the dissemination of the ideas of Pierre Bayle about biography and criticism. They reflected the perceptions of English libertines and deists about the need for freedom of thought and of expression, and the desirability of a rational religion. They encapsulated the concern of the exile Huguenot community to remake their hosts in an image of toleration and of moral rectitude. Above all, they exemplified the wish of the Huguenots of the Refuge to tolerate and be tolerated. They castigated those who regarded toleration as less than the greatest of virtues, and they thus relegated to a subordinate position the doctrines and principles of formal religion (even those which were faithfully accepted and believed by Hales and Chillingworth themselves). They also demonstrated that historical biography could take its place alongside ridicule and polemic in the armoury of religious scepticism. These lives, then, cannot be understood without some knowledge of their author, Pierre Des Maizeaux, and of the peculiar and uncertain circumstances in which he found himself. Des Maizeaux’s scholarship is best characterized as that of a facteur of knowledge, or of an intellectual pedlar. He had quickly internalized a method, and a set of aims, whilst he lived in the ambit of Pierre Bayle, and he found that these continued to suit him in later life. One result of 42

Des Maizeaux, Chillingworth, 371.

398

Scott Mandelbrote

this personal history was an intense hostility to other interpreters of Bayle. It was important for Des Maizeaux’s self-image as an intellectual that he be Bayle’s sole heir, and the apostle of Bayle to the English.43 Although he disliked liars and falsehood, much of Des Maizeaux’s career involved being careful about what he said to whom. His audience was often deliberately deceived, and his true sympathies as an author concealed. The explanation for this lay in part in a common fear, among the exiles of the Refuge, that toleration might be withdrawn; yet it was also a product of the much more mundane, and, perhaps, less forgivable need of Des Maizeaux himself to make ends meet by working for all sides at the same time. Des Maizeaux’s modern reputation depends on his role as a disseminator of English culture, literature, science, and ideas, but his own image of England and of the English past was profoundly shaped by his experience as an exile and as a Huguenot. As a journalist, Des Maizeaux fulfilled Bayle’s programme of bringing literature to a broader audience, even if as a biographer his efforts were stillborn. But it is more difficult to know whether he succeeded in establishing the standing that he sought for himself in the republic of letters. Des Maizeaux defended himself and his friends tenaciously, and puffed them consistently. But he remained a marginal figure, caught between two intellectual worlds—one on which he commented, and one to which he reported. His importance in the world of letters diminished as Franco-British exchange became more normal, in the years of peace and rapprochement during the 1730s. Such exchange with the abiding enemies of the Refuge, however, could have done little to lessen Des Maizeaux’s own anxieties about the life of a journalist and critic in exile, and his continuing fear of religious and intellectual intolerance. 43 Des Maizeaux, Hales (as in n. 15), pp. v–vi; cf. John Toland’s expression of Lord Molesworth’s criticism of the draft of Des Maizeaux’s Hales, that it did not imitate Bayle closely enough, British Library, Add. MS 4465 (Papers of John Toland), fo. 36r–v.

12 The Pre-adamites: An Abortive Attempt to Invent Pre-history in the Seventeenth Century? Alain Schnapp

In February 1656 a Calvinist ´erudit in the service of the Prince de Conde´ was arrested in Brussels. He had just published in Amsterdam an explosive book: Praeadamitae, sive exercitatio super versibus duodecimo, decimotertio & decimoquarto, capitis quinti Epistolae D. Pauli ad Romanos, quibus inducuntur primi homines ante Adamum conditi.1 The author, Isaac Lapeyre`re,2 moved in ´erudit and libertin circles. He was in his sixties and had lobbied statesmen and scholars, promoting a scandalous hypothesis: that human beings had existed before Adam. Lapeyre`re was not the first in a long line of free and adventurous spirits to concern himself with the question, but the enthusiasm with which he expounded his theory, and the interest and curiosity it aroused among Calvinist ministers, Anglican pastors, and Catholic bishops and monks, brought him to the attention of the learned, the powerful—and the Inquisition. The dramatic arrest of Lapeyre`re, and his subsequent recantation (with the consent of Pope Alexander VII) before two inquisitors general, Cardinals Barberini and Albizzi, in Rome on 11 March 1657, constitute a notable episode in the history of libertinage ´erudit, and one of the culminating points of an intellectual process that began with Francis Bacon and reached its acme in the Enlightenment. But it is not part of 1 Amsterdam, 1655. The Praeadamitae is followed by Systema theologicum ex Praeadamitarum hypothesi, separately paginated; for the bibliographical situation, see Richard H. Popkin, Isaac Lapeyre`re (1596–1676) (Leiden, 1987), 42. 2 For Lapeyre `re see Popkin, Isaac Lapeyre`re and the bibliography in Klaus Gru¨nwaldt, Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, iv (Hamm, Westfalen, 1992), s.v.

400

Alain Schnapp

the history of archaeology as this is commonly understood. My purpose in what follows is to seek out the reasons for this absence, and to enquire into the relationship between theology, politics, and antiquarianism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the question of the origin of man was obviously a theological and a philosophical one before it became an object of antiquarian curiosity. In connection with the discovery of America, it exercised minds as diverse as Paracelsus, Walter Ralegh, and Giordano Bruno. According to Paracelsus, the inhabitants of America are so different from West Europeans that one has to assign a different origin to them: Thus we all come from Adam. But I should not omit to mention briefly those that have been found on hidden islands, and of whom it is still not known whether they can be believed to be descended from Adam; if it is not the case that Adam’s children reached these hidden islands, one would have to consider the possibility that these people are descended from another Adam, in which case they are unlikely to be friendly towards us on account of flesh and blood.3

For those who envisaged this possibility, the exploration of the world revealed a humanity whose history exceeded the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Richard Popkin has documented the reverberations of these ideas in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lapeyre`re’s predecessors used three types of argument: first, pagan sources—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese—went back much further than the Old Testament. Secondly, the discovery of the New World had confirmed the existence of human groups so different from each other that they could not be descended from the same ancestor. Thirdly, the Bible itself did not entail the assumption of a single Adam; read metaphorically, which was common practice among the English revolutionaries of the period, it allowed for the existence of several.4 In a word, the notion of 3 Theophrast von Hohenheim (called Paracelsus), Sa ¨ mtliche Werke, ed. K. Sudhoff (Berlin, 1929), 35: ‘also seind wir alle von Adam hie. und so mag ich das nit underlassen, von denen eine kleine meldung zu tun, die in verborgenen insulen gefunden seind worden und noch verborgen sind, das sie von Adam zu sein geglaubt mo¨gen werden, mag sichs nit befinden, das Adams kinder seind komen in die verborgenen insulen, sonder zu bedenken, das dieselbigen leut von einem anderen Adam seind; dan dahin wird es schwerlich komen, das sie fleisch und bluts halben uns gefreunt sein’ (quoted by Popkin, Isaac Lapeyre`re, 33). 4 Cf. Popkin, Isaac Lapeyre `re (as in n. 2), 39–40: ‘The radical English attack on the Bible, and its inclusion of claims of the existence of men before Adam seems to grow out of concerns to justify the egalitarian political views of the left wing of the Puritan Revolution. It was based not on classical evidence, theology, or reconciling the explorer data . . . ’.

The Pre-adamites

401

pre-adamites is not an invention of Lapeyre`re’s but the profile he gave it made an indelible mark on traditional thinking. The life of Isaac Lapeyre`re does not greatly differ from the lives of many other Calvinists of good standing in France.5 As far as is known he studied law, and seems to have professed opinions sufficiently heterodox to be prosecuted for atheism by a Protestant synod (1626). In 1640 he became the secretary of the Prince de Conde´ and joined the Parisian circle frequented by men as diverse and as illustrious as Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Franc¸ois La Mothe le Vayer, Gabriel Naude´, Guy Patin, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. In 1642 Richelieu refused the dedication of a book Lapeyre`re had presented to him and forbade its publication. Nonetheless, it appeared in Paris in 1643, without name of author or publisher, under the title: Du rappel des juifs. Jean-Paul Oddos has given a masterly analysis of the theological and political proposals of this strange work. Lapeyre`re’s aim is nothing less than a kind of refoundation of religion which would bring about a reconciliation between Catholicism and Protestantism through the return of the Jews to the bosom of a reformed and purified church: And this reunion of all Christians in one Church will be the first step towards the recall of the Jews and the conversion of the gentiles. To further this general conversion, Lapeyre`re envisages the erection of temples devoid of images or any ‘appearance of superstition’ in which a version of Christian theology would be taught, accommodated to the usage of Jews, gentiles, and Christians.6

This vast project of a universal conversion was to serve a political purpose: the unification of all the converted nations under one rule, that of the King of France, who would ensure social equilibrium and religious freedom. In this perilous and ambitious enterprise the pre-adamite idea had a decisive role in that it focused historical and theological thinking on the singularity of the Jewish people. Jewish history no longer coincided with the history of mankind. It was a particular episode of that history. The existence of men before Adam showed sacred history to be part of a larger whole. God’s alliance with the Jews occurred well after the appearance of the first men, while Christ’s word will not reach all mankind until the Jews return to the alliance with God. This theological tinkering may strike one as a private fantasy, but it touches on one of the 5 For the biography of Lapeyre `re, Jean-Pierre Oddos, ‘Recherches sur la vie et l’oeuvre d’Isaac Lapeyre`re’ (thesis, University of Grenoble, 1974) is essential. 6 Ibid. 147–8.

402

Alain Schnapp

firmest dogmas of Christianity, since it undermines biblical chronology, and thus deprives sacred history of its exclusive status. If the Bible is no more than the narrative of Jewish history, the ancient idea, propounded by Egyptian and Mesopotamian priests, Ionian philosophers, and Chinese, Indian, or American chronologists, of a humanity tens of thousands of years old, can be accepted without difficulty. Lapeyre`re’s theologico-political hypothesis was to history what Galileo’s heliocentrism was to cosmology—a radical break with received ideas and a challenge to the social order. It is hardly surprising that the hypothesis should have drawn fire from the Inquisition, and unsettled scholars and theologians of all persuasions. The old idea of an infinitely long historical time had appeared in all religions and all political systems but, since Saint Augustine, had been expelled from Christian thought. Now the monomaniac conviction of a Calvinist ´erudit was bringing it back, to general alarm, and to the delight of the libertins. In a sense, Lapeyre`re’s theory was not unexpected, having been sketched out in the Rappel des juifs of 1643, corroborated in the Relation du Groenland of 1647, and finally articulated in the Praeadamitae of 1655. The arrest and condemnation of Lapeyre`re are thus not merely an episode in the conflict between freedom of thought and religion in the seventeenth century; they are also part of a complex scholarly debate. The role of Lapeyre`re in this debate was revolutionary: he shook the Republic of Letters and unnerved the powers that be. Both defiant and submissive, he made his Preadamites an unparalleled success. As Oddos and Popkin have shown, few books, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, have provoked a comparable amount of discussion. Lapeyre`re had frequented the ‘cabinet Dupuy’, where he had met the elite of the libertinage ´erudit. And his reputation had spread abroad: Saumaise in Holland, Dal Pozzo and cardinals Albizzi and Barberini in Rome, the distinguished Danish scholar Ole Worm, and many others took an interest. His long and adventurous career, first in the retinue of the French ambassador to Denmark, and in the service of the Prince de Conde´, had taken him across Europe, from Spain to Denmark. He then went to Rome to meet the Pope and recant. His ideas had the attention of Pascal, Spinoza, Manasseh ben Israel, Richard Simon, and Bayle. Lapeyre`re was not just a theologian. He shared with the other participants of the cabinet Dupuy an interest in natural phenomena and in mathematical thought. During his stay in Copenhagen he befriended Ole Worm, a kind of Peiresc of the North, physician and collector, who had visited most of Europe before settling down to a university career in

The Pre-adamites

403

Copenhagen, from where he kept up a scholarly correspondence across the Continent. The contact with this uomo universale offered Lapeyre`re a new angle, geographical and ethnographic, on his Pre-adamite hypothesis which he had hitherto propounded in speculative and theological terms. Hugo Grotius had ridiculed the Rappel des juifs.7 Lapeyre`re drew on the learning acquired in the North to refute Grotius’ geographical arguments and point out his mistakes: I show at the same time the error of the author who has written dissertations on the origins of the peoples of America maintaining that they come from Greenland, and that the first inhabitants of Greenland came from Norway . . . And he has sought to make this credible by claiming a certain affinity between some American words ending in lan with the German, Lombard, and Norwegian land; also in respect of customs as between the Americans and Norwegians whom he takes for Tacitus’ Germans.8

The earliest inhabitants of Greenland and the Americas have nothing to do with Scandinavian populations. This can be established by philological argument but above all by ethnographic considerations. Learning from Worm, Lapeyre`re observed the fauna of the Scandinavian sea coast and drew conclusions which, as we shall see, corroborated his theological speculations. Likewise, direct observation enabled him to invalidate the theories of Grotius. The inhabitants of Greenland are not only distinct linguistically, they belong to a specific culture: Their cloaks, made from the skins of dogs and sea calves, their shirts from the intestines of fish, and one of their vests from the skins of birds with multicoloured plumage, hang, on account of their rarity, in Mr Worm’s cabinet, together with their bows, arrows, rods, knives, swords, and the javelins fitted, as are their arrows, with horns or sharpened teeth, and which they use for fishing.9 7

Hugo Grotius, De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio altera (Paris, 1643). Isaac Lapeyre`re, Relation du Groenland (Paris, 1647), 273–4: ‘Je de´couvre en meˆme temps le mesconte de celui qui a fait des dissertations sur l’origine des peuples de l’Ame´rique; lesquels il a fait venir du Groenland, et a voulu que les premiers habitants du Groenland soient venus de Norve`ge . . . Et nous l’a pre´tendu faire accroire par une certaine affinite´ qu’il s’est figure´e de quelques mots ame´ricains qui finissent en lan, avec le land des Allemands, des Lombards et des Norve´giens; et par rapport aux moeurs qu’il dit eˆtre entre les Ame´ricains et les Norve´giens, qu’il prend pour les Allemands de Tacite.’ 9 Ibid. 187: ‘Leurs habits faits de peaux de chiens et de veaux marins, leurs chemises d’intestins de poissons, et une de leurs camisoles faite de peaux d’oyseaux avec leurs plumes de diverses couleurs, sont pendues par rarete´ dans le cabinet de M. Vormius, avec leurs arcs et leurs fleˆches, leurs sondes, leurs couteaux, leurs espe´es et les javelots dont ils se servent a` la peˆche, armez de mesmes que leurs fleˆches, de cornes ou de dents aiguise´es.’ 8

404

Alain Schnapp

The specific traits of the Eskimo of Greenland as noted by Lapeyre`re amount to an ethnographic description accounting for the way of life and the material culture of a given population. In the published version of his Museum (1655) Ole Worm will confine himself to the traditional distinction between naturalia and artificialia. Lapeyre`re’s remarks go further. They tend towards the notion of ‘savages’ as a primeval type of human beings, close to nature and representative of the origins of mankind. Thus his curiosity and his determination to establish the consequences of his theories align him with all those of his contemporaries who, fascinated by the strangeness of ‘primitive’ customs and bodies, were constructing out of them icons of the past.10 In the Preadamitae Lapeyre`re develops his argument against Grotius and others who were attempting to articulate a historical geography on the basis of a kind of heroic history of tribes and conquerors derived from a combination of Graeco-Roman and Jewish sources. But Jewish history was not coterminous with universal history. Apart from historical evidence there was also a point of doctrine, which the historical evidence is used to underwrite, and which Lapeyre`re expounds at length. The economy of salvation is based on the typological correspondence between Adam and Christ. Just as Christ was not the last man, so Adam was not the first man. And just as Christ’s act of redemption had retrospective effect, so Adam’s act of transgression was ‘imputed’ to generations that preceded him. Through Adam all mankind became ‘constructive’ sinners—quite apart from actual, individual sinning, the consequence of an imperfect human nature—in order that, through Christ, all mankind might be saved.11 10 On all this see Ste ´phanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Stroud, 1998), especially the chapter on ‘Historical visions of national origins’, 66–107. 11 Cf. Lapeyre `re, Praeadamitae . . . (as in n. 1), 28–9: ‘Imo certe, ut perfectior constituatur antitypus inter Adamum et Christum, commodius multo erit asserere, Adamum non fuisse primum omnium hominum, qua ratione Christus non fuit ultimus omnium hominum. Commodius inquam erit asserere, imputationem ex peccato Adami (secundum quam culpae Adamicae rei facti sumus) retroactam fuisse in illos homines qui Adamum praecesserunt; qua ratione imputatio absolutionis quae est in Christo (secundum quam labe peccati Adamici diluimur), retroacta est in illos homines qui Christum praecesserunt. Minus ergo perfecte constitueretur Adamus antitypus Christi, si poneretur primus omnium hominum: neque eadem converteretur reciprocatio imputationis ex peccato Adami cum imputatione absolutionis in Christo, nisi retroageretur peccatum Adami in primaevos homines ante Adamum, quemadmodum retroacta est absolutio Christi de peccato illo in primaevos homines ante Christum.’ It should be borne in mind that the Praeadamitae is primarily an extended piece of exegesis, the text being Romans 5: 12–14, as the title specifies.

The Pre-adamites

405

Lapeyre`re’s trip to Scandinavia was a turning point in his career. Even though his project remained basically theological and political, the discovery of a way of treating and writing history significantly different from that of French and Italian antiquarians helped to reinforce his hypotheses. He used the observations of his Scandinavian friends to test his system against empirical facts. The fortune—or misfortune—of Lapeyre`re sprang as much from his ideas as from the way he expressed them. When the Praeadamitae appeared, a ‘horizon of expectation’ was already in place. In England, the Puritan Revolution had made such ideas an important factor in political debate. The appearance of the book in English, under the title Men before Adam, within a year of the publication of the original (1656), indicates an interest that will persist. A Dutch translation followed on the English,12 though a French version is yet to come. Theologians of various persuasions, including Protestant ones,13 were highly critical of the pre-adamites. Scholars, at least some, were more receptive. In England, in Holland with Saumaise, in Denmark with Worm, curiosity modulated to agreement along clearly defined lines. Worm in particular was openly sympathetic: Having had no letter from you for so long, I was troubled by various thoughts. Now I imagined that you had been captured by the Spaniards on your return journey, now that, moved by your interest in nations, you had transported yourself to the inhabitants of Iceland, Greenland, or indeed to the pre-adamites in America . . . When I was with his Serene Highness [Prince Christian, Christian IV’s eldest son] we spoke a great deal about your Preadamites, and I was made to expound the reasoning behind your opinions, which pleased the Prince greatly. When I told him various things about you and about our conversations, he regretted very much not having consorted with you when you were here. Had you been present when I was with that excellent Prince we would have drunk from a golden horn like Gascons.14

The relationship between Worm and Lapeyre`re was not merely one of personal cordiality. There was a strong intellectual affinity between them. Worm does not content himself with an antiquarian allusion to the discovery of a golden horn which had entered the royal collections, he recalls the many discussions he had had with Lapeyre`re during the latter’s stay in Copenhagen and the interest of Prince Christian for a [Isaac Lapeyre`re], Men before Adam (London, 1656); Preadamiten (n.p., 1661). Oddos, Isaac Lapeyre`re . . . (as in n. 5), 270. 14 Olai Wormi et ad eum doctorum virorum epistolae (Copenhagen, 1751), letter 887, 5 Mar. 1647 (old style), 945–6; Cf. Oddos, Isaac Lapeyre`re . . . (as in n. 5), 249–50. 12 13

406

Alain Schnapp

debate that, in France, would have called forth the rigours of the Inquisition. Giuliano Gliozzi15 has shown how the discovery of America had stimulated polygenic ideas, in terms of which a long series of authors debated the question of the origin of the Indians. The ‘pre-adamite Indian’ became a libertin topic, anti-ecclesiastical and anti-missionary, while discussion of the idea of the spontaneous generation of man tended to undermine the traditional model inherited from the Middle Ages. Vanini and La Mothe le Vayer had expressed views that were not very different from Lapeyre`re’s,16 but the latter’s formulations were sharper and more aggressive. In fact, Lapeyre`re opened the way for all those who wanted to shake off the ‘brevity of the times’ of JudaeoChristian orthodoxy and explore other possibilities. Antiquarians, at least some of them, took an interest in this kind of speculation, and if Lapeyre`re’s thoughts on the subject were cut short by his abjuration, they were taken up by others who elaborated a new antiquarian programme free of Adamic constraints. In 1684 the Parisian publisher Claude Barbin brought out a curious collection of apocryphal letters under the title L’espion du Grand Seigneur et ses relations secre`tes envoye´es au divan de Constantinople, de´couvertes a` Paris pendant le re`gne de Louis le Grand, traduites de l’arabe en italien par le sieur Jean-Paul Marana.17 Marana, who wrote the letters, had never been to the East, but he knew the Marquis de Nointel, French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and the numismatist and antiquarian Antoine Galland. He was also a friend of the diplomat and Orientalist Louis Marie Pidou de Saint-Olon, and of the latter’s brother, who helped him with the translation from Italian into French. The letters, which are part of the long tradition of turqueries, pseudo-oriental mirrors intended to reflect the defects of European states, contain passages on antiquities and world history which offer a sustained critique of the antiquarian practice of the time. The supposed ‘spy’, Muhammad, is 15 Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo: La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale. Dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence, 1977). 16 Ibid. 514–20. 17 An English translation began to appear in 1687 and reached its final shape in 1694: The eight volumes of letters writ by a Turkish spy who lived five & forty years undiscover’d at Paris: giving an impartial account to the Divan of Constantinople, of the most remarkable transactions of Europe . . . from . . . 1637 to . . . 1682. Written originally in Arabick, translated into Italian, from thence into English . . . [hereafter Letters]; quotations in the text are from the 24th edn. (Dublin 1754); for Marana cf. Giancarlo Roscioni, Sulle tracce dell’esploratore turco (Rome, 1992) and Salvatore Rotta, Le lettere ligure: La reppublica aristocratica (1528–1797) (Genoa, 1992).

The Pre-adamites

407

characterized as follows: Though he cannot be called an Antiquary, yet he appears a great Lover of Antiquities, and no less an Admirer of new Discoveries, provided they be both of them Matters of Importance, and worth a wise Man’s Regard. For it does not belong to either of these Characters that a Man is a curious Collector of Medals, Images, Pictures and a thousand other insignificant trifles, which can neither serve to illustrate History, regulate Chronology, nor adjust any momentous Difficulty in the Records of Time . . . Nor is he fond of every little Improvement in the Arts and Sciences which perhaps has no other Tendency than the Advantage of some particular Trade or Profession among men, and serves only to distract the Mind from more solid Objects. Whereas our Arabian aspires to higher Things: he loves Antiquities, but it is only such as draw the Veil from off the Infancy of Time, and uncover the Cradle of the World. This makes him insist with so much Zeal and Passion on the Records of the Chinese and Indians.18

The spy’s antiquarianism is different from that of simple collectors and specialists of detail. It aspires to the study of origins. In celebrated letters Peiresc had attacked the vanity of antiquarians who accumulated objects for the sole purpose of being known as their possessors. According to Marana, ‘our Arabian’ goes further: he wants to unveil the complex mystery of the beginnings of civilization. In a letter addressed to ‘Abdel Melec Muli Omar, Superintendant of the College of Sciences in Fez’, Muhammad asks the following question: ‘Resolve me, whether this mighty Fabrick [i.e. the world] be but of yesterday, that is of five or six thousand Years standing, as the Jews and Christians say; or, whether the Years of its Duration be not past a Calcule.’19 He answers it himself exactly as Lapeyre`re might have done: ‘We need not doubt that the Earth was inhabited before Adam’s time; and if that be granted, why might it not be peopled for Millions of Ages, as well as for the smallest Term that Ignorance and Error may assign to its Duration?’20 Jewish rabbis and Christian clerics fear the truth about the chronology of the world, subversive as it is of traditional belief: Both they [i.e. the Christians] and the Jews have corrupted the Truth with many Errors, and we must seek further for the original Science of Nature. The illuminated of God have always taught that the Earth was inhabited long before the Appearance of Adam. And all the Eastern Sages believe a Series of Generations to have dwelt on this Globe for indeterminate Ages.21 18 21

Letters, i, no. xviii. Ibid. 208.

19

Letters, iii, no. xiii, p. 205.

20

Ibid. 207.

408

Alain Schnapp

Lapeyre`re’s message had thus been heard, and it was brandished as a kind of manifesto of the Enlightenment. But it had no impact on the actual practice of antiquarianism, whose traditional ways continued undisturbed. To understand this failure of pre-adamite theories, it may be useful to examine the techniques of observation and the methods of exploration of Enlightenment antiquarianism. It is Ole Worm, the founder of the study of Danish antiquities, who provided Lapeyre`re during the latter’s Scandinavian travels with material that enabled him to refute Grotius’ theories on the populating of America, and to demonstrate, through the ethnic types of the northern populations, a human presence in Europe of very ancient date. Lapeyre`re was primarily a textual exegete. His idea of a pre-adamite humanity sprang from an interpretation of certain biblical passages and a comparison of the biblical tradition with the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese traditions, as well as with American sources. But from Worm he learned the value of non-textual evidence—apropos of unicorns’ horns, an obsessive fantasm of Renaissance collectors. Worm had shown in a dissertation presented in 1638 that these imaginary objects were in fact the tusks of a sea mammal, the narwhal.22 The idea was not new (it had been raised by the French collector P. Belon in 1533 and by the Venetian physician Andrea Marini in 1566), but Worm’s demonstration gave it new authority, and this was seized on by Lapeyre`re in his Relation du Groenland of 1647: It being established that all these kinds of horns which can be seen in Denmark are entirely like those found in France, and that the Danish ones come from Greenland, the question that arises is what animals have these horns in Greenland. Mr Vormius was the first to tell me that they are fish. And let me tell you that I had great disputes with him when we were in Christianople, because this explodes the view of all the ancient naturalists who have dealt with unicorns and have represented them as four-footed land animals, and because it goes against many passages in Scripture which clearly speak of four-footed unicorns.23 22 Ole Worm, ‘De Unicornu’, Institutionum medicarum epitome, lib. I, sect. 21, cap. XIII (Copenhagen, 1640). 23 Lapeyre `re, Relation (as in n 8), 65: ‘Cela pose´ pour constant, que toutes ces sortes de cornes qui se voyent en Danemark, sont entie`rement semblables a` celles de France, et que celles du Danemark viennent de Groenland; il est question de sc¸avoir quelles bestes ce sont qui portent ces cornes en Groenland. M. Vormius m’a dit le premier que ce sont des poissons. Surquoy je vous diray que j’ay eu de grandes disputes avec lui, lorsque nous estions a` Christianople; parce que cela renverse l’opinion de tous les anciens naturalistes, qui ont traite´ des licornes, et nous les ont de´peintes terrestres et a` quatre pieds: et que cela choque quantite´ de passages de l’e´criture saincte, qui ne peuvent eˆtre entendus que des licornes a` quatre pieds.’

The Pre-adamites

409

Confronted by the physician, the scholar, the explorer, and the antiquarian, the adversary cannot but admit the obvious: ‘Do not doubt, Sir, that the horn which is at Saint-Denis came originally from the same place, and was sold in this manner.’24 The physical and anatomical demonstration had the better of received wisdom—and raised an urgent question: if it was possible to accept that the legendary horns of the leading European collections were in fact no more than the tusks of ‘fish’ (sea mammals), why had not Worm drawn his visitor’s and opponent’s attention to the megaliths of which he had a detailed catalogue, and to the shaped flints present in his collection? Seventeenth-century antiquarians were especially drawn to three types of objects or monuments: protohistorical vases, shaped flints, and megaliths. These artefacts which, for us, belong to the earliest history of man, had excited the interest of the curious for some time. Urnfields in Poland had had their hour of glory when in 1416, at Nocho´w (Nochowo), in the presence of King Władysław Jagiełło, large quantities of jars were discovered, ‘formed—no differently than when a potter shapes them—by the wonderful operation and virtue of nature’.25 Yet, in the middle of the sixteenth century a burgher of Breslau (Wrocław), G. Uber, identified such objects as the remains of pre-Christian burials, and the celebrated mineralogist Georg Agricola, in his De natura fossilium of 1546, was unhesitatingly critical: ‘Uneducated people in Saxony and Lusatia are convinced that these vessels were born in the earth, the Thuringians that they were used by the dwarfs who a long time ago inhabited the caves of Seeberg. But in fact they are urns, in which the ancient Germans, not yet converted to Christ, buried the ashes of the incinerated dead.’26 Urns as much as horns were the salient features of cabinets of curiosities. By transferring them from naturalia to artificialia, from the world of nature to that of human creation, Agricola was 24 Ibid. 93: ‘Ne doutez pas, Monsieur, que la corne qui est a ` Sainct-Denis, ne soit venue¨ originairement de mesme lieu, et n’ait e´te´ vendue¨ de cette sorte.’ 25 Johannis Dlugosz Historiae Polonicae libri XII, t. IV, liber XI, in Opera omnia, xiii (Krako´w, 1877), 193–4: ‘in sua praesentia terram in plerique locis fodi iubens [sc. rex Wladislaus], ollas plures . . . mirabili opere et virtute naturae, non secus quam a figulo effigiantur, formatas, reperit’. 26 Georg Agricola, ‘De ortu et causis subterraneorum’, in De natura fossilium (Basle, 1546), 329: ‘Imperitorum Saxoniae et Lusaciae vulgus sibi persuasit opinionem, ea vasa intra terram esse nata: Turingi nanos his ipsis usos, qui olim in Sebergo habitarint excavato. Re autem vera fuerunt urnae, in quibus veteres Germani nondum ad Christum conversi, cineres mortuorum combustorum condiderunt.’ Cf. Hans Gummel, Forschungsgeschichte in Deutschland (Die urgeschichtliche Forschung und ihre historische Entwicklung in der Kulturstaaten der Erde, 1; Berlin, 1938), 12.

410

Alain Schnapp

contributing to the emergence of rational descriptions, useful both to antiquaries and to naturalists. Yet, more than a century later (in 1719), a field antiquary like A. A. Rhode still found it necessary to show up the absurdity of the theory of ‘spontanous generation’: ‘Had nature made these pots then she would also have made the incinerated bone remains contained in them, as well as the other accompanying objects, such as clasps, buckles, hairpins etc.’27 It is not until the early eighteenth century that urns, shaped flints, and megaliths finally leave the realm of nature and become historical objects. At the end of the sixteenth century the physician and antiquary Michele Mercati had established, against a tenacious medieval tradition, that shaped flints were implements manufactured by populations ignorant of iron.28 But this kind of idea found no response in the learned world until the belated publication of Mercati’s work in 1719, Antoine de Jussieu’s memoir of 1723, and Nicolas Mahudel’s of 1737. Megaliths were traditionally attributed to giants or to strange natural phenomena. George Owen, a contemporary of Mercati, had developed an interest in their origin and had arrived at the notion of stratified geological formations.29 Though his work remained unpublished for a long time, his hunches opened the way for the observations of John Aubrey in England, the seigneur de Cocherel in France, Johan Daniel Major in Germany, and Olof Rudbeck in Sweden, who, in the second half of the seventeenth century, demonstrated by excavation the funerary character of tumuli and of certain megaliths.30 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the archaeological nature of tumuli and megaliths was asserted by a generation of antiquarians who emerged from their studies to work on the ground. Their curiosity meets that of the naturalists like 27 Christian Detlev Rhode and Andreas Albert Rhode, Cimbrisch-Hollsteiniche Antiquitaeten-Remarques . . . (Hamburg, 1720), 9te Woche . . . 1719, 66: ‘Hat denn die Natur die To¨pffe gemacht, so wird sie auch gewiss die darinnen vorhandene Asche Knochen nebst anderen beygelegten Sachen, als Hefften, Spangen, Haar-Nadeln u. d.gl. zugleich mit denen To¨pffen gemacht haben.’ 28 Michele Mercati, Metallotheca, opus posthumum (Rome, 1719), arm. IX, loc. XII, cap. XVI, 244–5. See Noe¨l Coye, La Pre´histoire en paroles et en actes, me´thodes et enjeux de la pratique arche´ologique (Paris, 1998), 19–35, for a critical, nuanced assessment. 29 G. Owen, Description of Pembrokeshire, 1603, British Library, Harleian MS 6250; incomplete publication 1795–6 (from another MS), complete publication 1892. See Dillwyn Miles’s entry in Oxford DNB, xlii. 200–1. 30 Alain Schnapp, La Conque ˆte du passe´ (Paris, 1998), 217–66; Asgeir Svestad, Ollsakenes orden, om tillkosten av arkeologi (Oslo, 1995); Ola Jensen, Forntid i historien: En arkeologisk studie av synen pa˚ forntid och forntida la¨mningar fra˚n medeltiden till och med fo¨rupplysningen (Go¨teborg, 2002).

The Pre-adamites

411

Nicholas Steno,31 who begin to examine geological formations in stratigraphical terms. It will take over a century before antiquarian disciplines and geological sciences join forces. Lapeyre`re could admire Worm’s elimination of unicorns from learned discourse, but he did not obtain from his Danish friend an answer other than geographical to his question regarding the origin of man. In discussing Eskimos and Lapps he became convinced of the biological diversity of mankind, but some kind of invisible barrier separated his pre-adamites from the sparse fragments of prehistoric antiquity he found in Worm’s collection. Besides, Worm hesitated to classify ‘thunderbolts’ as human artefacts: The ceraunia takes its name from lightning because it is generally believed to fall from sky to earth together with lightning. It has various shapes, mostly that of a pyramidal wedge, or a hammer, an axe, or a club. It sometimes has a hole in the middle of the thicker part, formed in such a way as to be narrower on one side than the other. As to its origin, opinions vary somewhat: some, considering that its outer shape resembles iron implements, take it to be not a thunder bolt, but an iron implement of this kind, transformed into stone. But this is impugned by the observations of trustworthy witnesses who have found such stones in places—houses or trees—struck by lightning.32

His talent for observation and his medical experience notwithstanding, Worm remained an armchair scholar, more interested in the type of object or monument he discovered than in the context of the discovery. As a result, shaped flints were for him objects with no obvious function, and he did not apply to them—as he did to the narwhal—a comparative approach to elucidate their origin. Had he, as Mercati had done, attempted an ethnographic comparison—which was familiar to his Icelandic correspondents—he would have been in a position to offer Lapeyre`re a decisive argument in support of the pre-adamites. But this 31 Martin Rudwick, The Meanings of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (Chicago, 1976); Nicoletta Morello, La nascita della paleontologia nel Seicento (Milan, 1979); Gabriel Gohau, Les Sciences de la terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles, naissance de la ge´ologie (Paris, 1990). 32 Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, seu historia rerum rariorum . . . ab Olao Worm adornato (Leiden 1655), 74: ‘Ceraunias nomen a fulmine traxit, eo quod cum fulmine a nubibus decidere omnibus persuasum sit . . . Varias figuras prae se fert, maxima ex parte cuneum refert pyramidem, malleum, securim, clavam . . . Quandoque foramen in medio pollicis crassitie obtinet ita conformatum, ut ab uno latere angustius sit quam ab altero. . . . De eius generatione modo variant autorum sententiae. Quidam, cum instrumenta ferrea externa figura eum exprimere videantur, non telum fulmineum sed eius modi instrumenta ferrea, in lapides conversa esse arbitrantur. Verum refragantur fide dignorum observationes, qui tales lapides eruerunt in eo loco, ubi fulmine tactae erant domus, aut arbores. . . . ’ Cf. Ole Klindt-Jensen, A History of Scandinavian Archaeology (London, 1975), 23.

412

Alain Schnapp

was not to be, and the intuition of a theologian did not find corroboration in the observations of an antiquary. Long after his abjuration, dying in an Oratorian seminary in 1676, Lapeyre`re had not in fact renounced the essentials of his theory. As Rene´ Pintard puts it: Did the incorrigible heresiarch, in fact, change in the slightest the direction of his thinking? As he had been, a subtle and bold confusionist in regular attendance at Calvinist sermons, so he remained, assiduous at mass. And his fundamental ideas were no less outrageous to his new fellow worshippers, than they had been to his former ones . . . From this point of view, his conversion, however insignificant in itself, was a blow to libertinage: it deprived the movement of one of its most original, and most amusing baubles.33

Pintard’s ironic conclusion misses, it seems to me, an important point. Lapeyre`re’s oeuvre suffered two disappointments: the impassioned theologian did not manage to confront his thesis with the reality of archaeological discovery, and antiquarians after him failed to see the relevance of his theological insights. As Lapeyre`re dies and his work falls into oblivion, European antiquarians begin to leave their studies to engage in excavation. (translated by Christopher Ligota) 33 Rene ´ Pintard, Le Libertinage ´erudit dans la premie`re moitie´ du XVIIe sie`cle, 2nd edn. (Geneva, 1983), 423–4.

13 Hamann and the History of Philosophy Denis Thouard

There is really in the Temple of Learning an idol with the caption of philosophical history underneath it; and it does not lack for high priests or levites. (N ii. 62)

As is well known, it is a trip to London that determined the course of Hamann’s life.1 Leaving Ko¨nigsberg at the age of 26 after a period of desultory study, he arrived in London, having on the way visited Holland, in the late evening of 17 April 1757. He was under instructions from the Berens brothers to negotiate a business deal, an unlikely role for him, so much so that his opening moves provoked barely concealed amusement, while his taskmasters were pitied for having chosen so inept an emissary. One can also imagine Hamann’s bewilderment at his initial experiences. Still a ‘good-for-nothing’ (but will he not deliberately remain one for the rest of his life?), he engaged the services of an Islington market-crier to improve his English, paying high fees for a doubtful return.2 Realizing his lack of commercial talent, he spent the rest of the year feeling depressed and guilty. He was spending his German friends’ money without achieving any results. He ran into debt, 1 Gedanken u ¨ ber meinen Lebenslauf, N ii. 9–53 (N, followed by vol. and page number, refers to the edition by J. Nadler: J. G. Hamann, Sa¨mtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Vienna, 1949–57); ZH, followed by vol. and page number, refers to the edition of Hamann’s letters by W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel: J. G. Hamann, Briefwechsel, 7 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1955–79); for the London writings, see J. G. Hamann, Londoner Schriften, ed. O. Bayer and B. Weissenborn (Munich, 1993); for Hamann in England, see B. Gajek (ed.), Johann Georg Hamann und England: Hamann und die englischsprachige Aufkla¨rung (Acta des 7. Internat. Kolloquiums zu Marburg/L, 1996; Regensburger Beitra¨ge zur deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, R.B 69; Frankfurt-am-Main, 1999). 2 See N ii. 34.

414

Denis Thouard

lodged in a hovel, all but a beggar. He became a recluse, and sought comfort in an intensive reading of the Bible. An autobiographical memoir of Pietist tincture presents this study as leading to a conversion, dated to 31 March 1758, just under a year after his arrival in London. In consequence of it, Hamann decided to write an exegetical work,3 the Biblische Betrachtungen, which constitute the starting point of his thought, and make up, together with the autobiography already mentioned and the Brocken (Scraps), his Londoner Schriften. The spiritual crisis undergone in London is the background of Hamann’s oeuvre and remains a factor throughout his literary production. This is especially so in the case of the Sokratische Denkwu¨rdigkeiten written in 1759, after his return to Ko¨nigsberg, the first piece in which he presents himself as an ‘author’.4 In this work Hamann launches a critique of the historiography of philosophy as it had been practised from Stanley to Brucker, and proposes a new conception of the history of philosophy. The work, brief as are all his other works, engages with the tutelary figure of Socrates, much in vogue in the Enlightenment, to promote Hamann’s subtle contestation of the claims of reason. Hamann’s scheme can only be understood by tracing it through the complexities and confusions of his text. I shall attempt to do this after first examining the main elements of his Sibylline vocabulary. I begin by considering Hamann’s position in the Enlightenment, the significance for his purpose of the genre of Memorabilia, his sources, and the procedural elements apparent from the title and the dedications. Once these coordinates have been drawn, I shall attempt to show briefly how this text constitutes a metacritique of the historiography of philosophy. 3 Hamann’s source of inspiration here was James Hervey, through whom he discovered typology. He recommends warmly Hervey’s Aspasio to his brother to guide him in his Bible reading, and offers to translate it (ZH i. 243–4, Aug. 1758); he subsequently translated ‘Heinrich St. Johann Vitzgraf Bolingbroke und Jakob Hervey’ (N iv. 441 ff.). Hamann’s library included several works by Hervey: Meditations and Contemplations (London, 1755); Theron and Aspasio (London 1757); Letters (London, 1760); Jenk’s Meditations, with a preface of M. Hervey (London, 1757); Three Sermons preached on public Fast-Days (London, 1757); Remarks on Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and the Use of History (London 1762), N v. Biga Bibliothecarum, 42, 63. See the important study by S. A. Jørgensen, ‘Hamann und Hervey: Zur Bibellektu¨re wa¨hrend Hamanns Londoner Krise’, Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufkla¨rung, ed. H. Graf Reventlow et al. (Wiesbaden, 1988), 237–48. 4 N ii. 57–82; also S. A. Jørgensen’s Reclam edn. (Stuttgart, 1968); cf. F. Blanke, J. G. Hamanns Hauptschriften erkla¨rt. 2. Sokratische Denkwu¨rdigkeiten (Gu¨tersloh, 1959). English translation: Hamann’s Memorabilia, translation and commentary by J. C. O’Flaherty (Baltimore, 1967).

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

415

SOCRATES: A STRATEGIC CHOICE

Hamann in the Enlightenment Notoriously at odds with the Enlightenment, Hamman cannot be understood without it, as Rudolf Unger showed nearly a hundred years ago.5 His unquestionable originality resides in the way he was of his time, an Aufkla¨rer himself but also a convinced Lutheran. What sets him apart from Pietism, from which he borrows a great deal, is his conflictual but open relationship with contemporary culture, which he is always investigating, even if only the better to denounce it. There is no hatred in him, to my mind, of the Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin has suggested,6 but rather a rejection/attraction, criticism/connivance, an ironical subversion, well illustrated by his playful and mocking relationship with his friend Kant. The ‘metacritique’ he will propound of the latter is precisely a critique of critique, a denunciation of the shortcomings of what it springs from. His treatment of the historiography of philosophy pursues a similar path. If Hamann is, in his own way, a child of the Enlightenment, he is a difficult child. Besides, the Enlightenment itself is diverse, and a number of Hamann’s intellectual habits go back to its beginnings. He is a kind of enfant terrible of historia literaria. He reads widely, compiles, annotates, makes extracts and pre´cis, book lists—in a word he has a taste for erudition, an insatiable curiosity for texts in all languages which recalls the intellectual bulimia and disorder of the early Enlightenment polyhistors.7 But from this ill-assorted mass of knowledge of various kinds he extracts precisely defined elements to serve in his own invariably brief compositions which could not be more different from historia literaria. Hamann’s centos contradict by their often obscure concision the volumes of erudition they derive from. Beside the propensity to read as widely as possible, Hamann was aware of the culture of his time—he knew Fontenelle, Voltaire, the Encyclope´die, and English authors. Even before going to London he had R. Unger, Hamann und die Aufkla¨rung, 2 vols. ( Jena, 1911). I. Berlin, The Magus of the North and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. H. Hardy (London, 1993). 7 The catalogue of his library, Biga bibliothecarum, N v. 11–121, and the Annales studiorum, N v. 123–276, esp. 199 ff., give an idea of this. 5 6

416

Denis Thouard

translated Galiani, Shaftesbury,8 and, of direct relevance to this essay, the part dealing with philosophy of the anti-Jansenist Jesuit Rene´ Rapin’s Re´flexions sur l’e´loquence, la poe´tique, l’histoire et la philosophie (1686).9 The new point of view that his conversion gave him, with the conviction that God alone is the author of both history and nature, distanced him from Rapin, whose distrust of philosophy he radicalized, though most of the information comes either direct from Rapin or from authors he refers to.

Socrates between Xenophon and Plato The singling out of Socrates was in consonance with the fashion of the time.10 Not only was Socrates seen as the thinker who had given philosophy a desirable practical emphasis11 by breaking with the otiose speculations of his predecessors on the nature of things, ‘calling philosophy down from heaven’, as Cicero, quoted by Rapin, put it,12 i.e. establishing it among men, in the polis, but he was also a model of the virtuous pagan, an edifying example of ‘natural’ belief, without benefit 8 Sendschreiben von der Begeisterung [A letter concerning enthusiasm]; Sensus communis, ein Versuch u¨ber die Freyheit des Witzes und Scherzes in einem Brief an einen Freund [Sensus communis: an essay on the freedom of wit and humour in a letter to a friend]; N iv. 131–91. 9 Betrachtungen u ¨ ber die Philosophie, N iv. 43–129 (the translation dates from the years 1753–6). Hamann also possessed Rapin’s Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquite´ (Amsterdam, 1709), and Œuvres diverses (Amsterdam, 1695); see G. Santinello, Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, ii: Dall’eta` cartesiana a Brucker (Brescia, 1979), 54–5. Hamann translates philosophie in the spirit of the time, sometimes as Philosophie, sometimes as Weltweisheit. Socrates appears in section 5 (N iv. 49–51): the motif of Socratic condescendence (Herunterlassung), so important for Hamann, is present in Rapin (N iv. 50); see K. Gru¨nder, Figur und Geschichte: J. G. Hamanns biblische Betrachtungen als Ansatz einer Geschichtsphilosophie (Freiburgim-Breisgau, 1958), 21–82. 10 Out of a vast bibliography see B. Bo ¨ hm, Sokrates im 18. Jahrhundert: Studien zum Werdegang des modernen Perso¨nlichkeitsbewusstseins (Leipzig, 1929; 2nd edn. Kiel, 1966), which still offers a solid basis. For the more specific context of the philological and philosophical reception of Socrates, conditioned by the eclectic, sceptical, and Pietist reaction (Christian Thomasius, J. F. Reimmann, P. Poiret, J. Lange, J. A. Fabricius) against scholastic philosophy and the ‘Pedants’, see R. Ha¨fner, ‘Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philologie um 1700: Zum Verha¨ltnis von Polymathie und Aporetik bei J. F. Reimmann, Chr. Thomasius und J. A. Fabricius’, Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beitra¨ge zu Begriff und Problem fru¨hneuzeitlicher ‘Philologie’, ed. R. Ha¨fner (Tu¨bingen, 2001), 95–128. 11 See H. Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1986). 12 This is a veritable ‘motif’ of contemporary references to Socrates; N iv. 50; cf. Cicero, Tusc. disp. 5. 4. 10.

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

417

of Revelation, in the immortality of the soul.13 Moreover, his common speech and his easy manner with people of all classes make him a model of rhetorical simplicity: plain human reason, simple, sober, and useful. Contempt for speculative subtleties, recognition of the limits of human knowledge, concentration on practical objectives were values the Enlightenment could recognize as its own. Hamann’s choice of references went along with them. He drew on Xenophon rather than on Plato, or so it seemed. With Xenophon as source, it was the biographical approach that was going to dominate, Socrates’ life rather than his thought. This is partly to be explained by the neglect of Plato on the part of philologists since the Renaissance. Until Romanticism, it is Ficino that is re-edited and used, and there are practically no general studies throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth century.14 Heyne republishes Stephanus’ text with critical notes and Ficino’s translation between 1781 and 1787. A critical edition and a translation based on it will not be produced until the generation of the pupils of F. A. Wolf, in particular L. F. Heindorf (1802–10), I. Bekker (from 1816 onwards), Ph. K. Buttmann (who adapted Heindorf ’s edition ad apparatum I. Bekkeri, 1827–9), and Schleiermacher.15 Xenophon had fared better. Several editions appeared in Leipzig, and the Basle edition of 1569 remained available;16 also the Leiden philologists produced Annotationes.17 Xenophon was, in any case, a school author and a major text for philological apprenticeship. Yet Hamann does not refer to Xenophon’s text directly, though he places himself ‘mimetically’ in the genre of the Memorabilia and inserts 13 On the debate on the virtuous atheist started by Bayle, and some of the repercussions of Spinoza, a constant preoccupation of the time; on Socrates, Jesus, and Spinoza see U. J. Schneider, Die Vergangenheit des Geistes: Eine Archa¨ologie der Philosophiegeschichte (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1990), 158–82. 14 See H. Wismann, ‘Modus interpretandi: Analyse compare ´e des e´tudes platoniciennes en France et en Allemagne au 19e`me sie`cle’, in M. Bollack and H. Wismann (eds.), Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert II . . . (Go¨ttingen, 1983), 490–513. 15 See A. Neschke-Hentschke, ‘Le Texte de Platon entre F. A. Wolf . . . et F. Schleiermacher . . . ’, in A. Laks et A. Neschke (eds.), La Naissance du paradigme herme´neutique . . . (Lille, 1990), 245–76; Wismann, ‘Modus’ (as in n. 14), 499–500. 16 The catalogue of Hamann’s library, compiled in 1774, lists Xenofntov panta T. I Halae/S, 1540, Xenophontis Opera gr. & lat. Basileae 1569, Xenofntov tin ex ed. J. A. Bachii, [Leipzig] 1749, and, for the Memorabilia alone, Xenofntov $ Apomnhmone¸mata ex ed. Ernesti Lipsiae 1755; N v. 113, 15, 20. 17 L. C. Valckenaerius and D. Ruhnkenius, Annotationes in J. G. Schneider’s edition of the Memorabilia (Oxford, 1813), 285–313. Cf. the revised edn. of Ernesti’s 1772 edn. by Zeune, Xenophontis Memorabilia, rec. et Ernesti aliorumque et suis notis explic. Io. Car. Zeunius (Leipzig, 1781; reprints Ernesti’s 1772 Praefatio).

418

Denis Thouard

Platonic elements. Twenty-five years later, in connection with a new edition of the Sokratische Denkwu¨rdigkeiten, he admitted to his friend Scheffner that his documentation for it had been minimal— ‘Thomasius’ translation of Charpentier and Cooper’s English biography’—while also confessing, not very reassuringly for his readers, that he did not always understand what he wrote.18 This admission of limited reading could place a question mark over Hamann’s critique of the historiography of philosophy, were it not that it also occurs in the text itself (N ii. 63). This economy of means is, in this case, part of Hamann’s strategy. A brief analysis of his sources is necessary to understand it.

Hamann’s Sources It is true that, for the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten, Hamann contents himself with the two works he mentions. They provide the background, but his information is wider. He quotes Plato (or the pseudo-Plato of the second Alcibiades), Euripides, and Bacon and is obviously acquainted with Heumann’s Acta philosophorum, which could offer him a model for a new, ‘critical’ historiography of philosophy19 (which he will criticize), but also a mass of information on Socrates (1. 4–5; 3. 3), Diogenes Laertius and Aesop (2. 5; 6. 2; 8. 3–4), the Seven Sages (12. 4), and modern historians of philosophy—J. Jonsius, G. Horn, N. H. Gundling, D. G. Morhof, and above all T. Stanley (3. 6, pp. 523–44). Moreover, the restriction to Charpentier and Cooper is also significant: these two authors are in fact three, and between them, they stake out the field of Enlightenment historiography.

Cooper In terms of historical contextualization and the dispelling of legend, J. G. Cooper’s Life of Socrates (1749)20 falls short of Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735). Cooper’s work claims to be a denunciation of the way priests have banished free thought and made a martyr of Socrates. But it does not fulfil its promise, whence Hamann’s irony about it: it is no more than a school exercise, eine ZH v, N 808, 358, to J. G. Scheffner, 11 Feb. 1785. C. A. Heumann, Acta philosophorum, i (Halle, 1715), Vorbericht, sig. a5r: ‘Historia philosophiae philosophica, das ist Historische und Critisirende Beschreibung der Philosophie, was solche vom Anfange der Welt biß auf gegenwa¨rtige Zeit vor fata gehabt.’ 20 John Gilbert Cooper (1723–69) belongs, with Anthony Collins and John Toland, to the line of English freethinkers and deists. He was forthrightly anticlerical and partisan in his views; cf. Bo¨hm, Sokrates (as in n. 10), 79 ff. 18 19

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

419

Schulu¨bung, combining the defects of an encomium and a polemic (N ii. 65). The other source is more interesting, if only in its doubleness. If Cooper represents a particular tradition of English historiography, Charpentier is typical of the French spirit of the classical age.

Charpentier Franc¸ois Charpentier added to his translation of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a Life of Socrates of his own, in thirty-two chapters, basically a rewrite of Xenophon. It is in fact this Life, lacking in originality, merely supplementing Xenophon with Diogenes Laertius, that made him famous, rather than the translation which, a belle infide`le, shone more for its French than for its understanding of the Greek. For Charpentier, the entire life of Socrates pleads against the calumnies it has attracted, and he sets out to refute them. Hamann drew on Charpentier rather than Xenophon, but he deliberately used Christian Thomasius’ translation, which, in turn, is a specific adaptation of Charpentier.

Thomasius Christian Thomasius translated Charpentier in 1693, while taking tea, as he specifies. He not only takes up the defence of Socrates but also adopts him as an ally in the struggle against the pedantry and obscurity of German neo-scholastic philosophy, and for a more practical approach to philosophy, which should be expressed in accessible language. It is in this spirit that he lectured on philosophy in German, a first, at the University of Halle. The title he chose for the translation is eloquent: Das Ebenbild eines wahren und ohnpedantischen Philosophi, oder das Leben Socratis.21 Paradoxically, it was the use of the polite language of the Court that signalled the first timid attempts to popularize philosophy, which by the middle of the century the philologist J. A. Ernesti— invoking Socrates—will postulate as an obvious requirement.22 Thomasius’ Introductio ad philosophiam aulicam (1688; German translation 1710) is the best known of these attempts. And the 1720 re-edition of Leben Socratis, which is the one Hamann used, has the significant subtitle Der Kern wahrer und nu¨tzlicher Weltweisheit ehedessen 21

(Halle, 1693), 292 pp. J. A. Ernesti, Prolusio de philosophia populari (Leipzig, 1754); see D. Thouard, ‘Avec condescendance: Philosophie populaire et tradition rhe´torique chez J. A. Ernesti et Chr. Garve’, in Ph. Beck and D. Thouard (eds.), Popularite´ de la philosophie (Fontenay, 1995), 95–123 (the volume also contains a French translation of Ernesti’s Prolusio by R. Mortier). 22

420

Denis Thouard

von Xenophon in Beschreibung der Merkwu¨rdigen Dinge des Socrates vorgestellt.23 Thomasius explains in his preface how he is using the Frenchman Charpentier’s life of Socrates against the grain, to combat not only the pedantry of scholars but also the ‘gallant manners of the Court’. Thomasius stresses Socrates’ great patience, Geduld, at once patience and a capacity for suffering, for tolerating and bearing adversity,24 and his disinterestedness (he returned gifts)—all traits contrary to current mores, to the point of appearing ridiculous. Socrates represents a character that neither the Court nor the university is capable of appreciating, now or at any other time. Thomasius insists on the relevance of Socrates. Hamann will take this up, in his own way.25 Thomasius invokes Socrates against the pedants not only as someone who brought back wisdom among men, but also as a versta¨ndiger Politicus,26 guiding the spirit of random interlocutors towards the politically useful. However, this elaborate praise of Socrates has its limits. Thomasius is careful to point out that Socrates could go no further than the light of nature would take him, and that the least Christian is worth a hundred Socrateses. He denounces attempts, notably by Ficino and Symphorien Champier, to present Socrates as a forerunner of Christ and of Christ’s sufferings.27 All these features, which give Thomasius’ translation its particular slant, will be taken up in a modified form by Hamann as part of an original strategy, distinct from the tradition of the Christian Socrates and, in its ironical play, profoundly ‘modern’.

Hamann’s Strategy (title, subtitle, and dedications) Sokratische Denkwu¨rdigkeiten fu¨r die lange Weile des Publicums zusammengetragen von einem Liebhaber der langen Weile. Mit einer doppelten Zuschrift an Niemand und an Zween (Amsterdam, 1759). The title of a work is for Hamann like a face, from which one can ‘physiognomize’ it; in other words the title contains the work in nuce.28 23

See Blanke, Hauptschriften (as in n. 4), 44. Leben Socratis, cap. 5: ‘Von den Socratis entzuckten Meditationen, der Hartigkeit seines Leibes und seiner Gesundheit’; cap. 6: ‘Von des Socratis Hauswesen und seiner Geduld’; cap. 13: ‘Socratis grosse Geduld, absonderlich wider die Scha¨mung der Poeten’. 25 Hamann, using Pietist hermeneutic, will make an applicatio of this topic; see 26 Leben Socratis, preface, dated 29 Dec. 1692, in fine. Gru¨nder, Figur (as in n. 9). 27 Ibid., Vorbericht an den Leser. 28 See Unger, Hamann (as in. 5), 534–7; Hamann’s title embodies the rhetorical notion of action/hupocrisis, enlivening a work by converting it into a performance. 24

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

421

The dedications to ‘no one and to two’ play on the relationship with the reader and provide for oblique channels of communication. Hamann opts for the (established) German equivalent of Memorabilia (or Apomne¯moneumata), the usual title of Xenophon’s text. Denkwu¨rdigkeiten—what is worthy of remembrance, the remarkable things in someone’s life, things ‘it is good to think about’, what can be an object of reflection, ‘denk’ as in ‘denken’. This call to meditation can modulate to a questioning of the notion of obviousness (Selbstversta¨ndlichkeit), one of the key vehicles of Enlightenment thought. Denkwu¨rdigkeiten are thus what gives pause in the midst of the distractions and amusements of an intellectually lazy public which, habituated to clear discourses offering instant comprehension, consumes its daily portion of evidences, Selbstversta¨ndlichkeiten. The subtitle is a provocation: the reader is offered boredom by a lover of boredom. Boredom, lange Weile, is here literally ‘time that does not pass’, time as ‘impasse’, some very long duration figuring eternity, a muffled critique of the principle of economy and rapidity of modern reason. Taken as an invitation to remembrance and thought the Memorabilia can also dispel the public’s boredom by pointing towards the contemplation of things more important than philosophy.29 The title is the face of the work, but a masked face: in his refusal of the ideas of his time Hamann takes on the disguise of his preferred precursor, Socrates, though a modified Socrates, transposed from the pragmatic register to a prophetic one. Already in the dedication the shadow of Heraclitus is discernible behind Socrates, suggesting some subversion but also the need for interpretation, a hermeneutical warning. The first dedication says: An das Publicum, oder Niemand, den Kundbaren, and begins with a parody of public idolatry, in the form of a prayer, soon followed by the recognition that it does not exist. The public, like the idol, is endowed with eyes and ears but can neither see nor hear. It is an omnipresent unknown, a collective anonymous but which could be identified. This unknown, the reader will gradually realize, is also the divinity worshipped in Athens, identified by Paul in the speech on the Areopagus.30 In the second dedication, An die Zween, According to an anecdote repeatedly quoted by Hamann, Demosthenes considered hupocrisis to be the essence of rhetoric; cf. Unger, Hamann, 537–40; Blanke, Hauptschriften (as in n. 4), 51–61. 29 Cf. Blanke, Hauptschriften, 53–5. 30 Acts of the Apostles 17: 22–3: ‘Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this

422

Denis Thouard

Hamann is addressing two friends, J. Ch. Berens, merchant and economist, and Kant. They had suggested that he might translate an article from the Encyclope´die, and he is signifying his refusal, and also trying to wean them from their ‘enlightened’ beliefs, offering his piece as little cakes to be swallowed, not masticated (N ii. 60). The public addressed in the second dedication are effectively ‘those two’, Kant and Berens. The privilege is explained by a meditation on incomprehensibility. In ancient Greece, Hamann recalls (N ii. 61), the public could read Aristotle’s Denkwu¨rdigkeiten on the natural history of animals, but only Alexander understood them. Hamann reckons that, where the ordinary reader will see no more than mould, the reader guided by the ‘affect of friendship’ may discover a ‘microscopic wood’. His ‘mimetic’ writing is intended as an ‘aesthetic imitation’ of Socrates, and so itself Socratic, both analogical and ironical. The analogy is supposed to direct the reader towards a typological interpretation, elements within the work being related to elements outside it, e.g. to Socrates himself. Irony works here as a parody of rhetorical accommodation, the adaptation of the orator’s discourse to his audience. Appearing to make the language of the audience—here the theme of Socrates—his own, Hamann gives it a different meaning which is accessible to only a few: ‘but I have had to content myself with borrowing for my religion the veil woven for their unbelief and misbelief by a patriotic St John and a Platonic Shaftesbury’.31 The reference to Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury makes the irony explicit: Hamann’s religion is to be masked in the language of the Enlightenment.32 It is at this point that a mysterious alliance is made between Socrates and Heraclitus. An anecdote from Diogenes Laertius, quoted by Hamann via Charpentier,33 inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.’ Paul’s irony enters into Hamann’s reinterpretation of the life of Socrates. 31 ‘ich habe mich aber bequemen mu ¨ ssen meiner Religion den Schleyer zu borgen, den ein Patriotischer St. John und platonischer Shaftesbury gewebt haben’ (N ii. 61). 32 Cf. H. Meyer, ‘Hamann und Shaftesbury’, Hamann und England (as in n. 1), 197– 204; C. Deupmann, ‘Komik und Methode: Zu J. G. Hamanns Shaftesbury-Rezeption’, ibid. 205–28. 33 Cf. Diogenes Laertius 2. 22: ‘The story is told that Euripides gave him [sc. Socrates] the treatise of Heraclitus and asked his opinion upon it, and that his reply was: the part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it’; J. P. Dumont, Les E´coles pre´socratiques (Paris, 1991), 55 points out that the image is that of a diver, perhaps a pearl-fisher—not of a swimmer, as in the version adopted by Hamann. But Hamann’s purpose is served by the image of a horizontal swimmer rather than a diver.

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

423

becomes emblematic both for his style and the hermeneutic he postulates: Socrates, Gentlemen, was no ordinary critic. He distinguished in the writings of Heraclitus what he did not understand in them from what he did, and made a very proper and modest inference from the understood to the not understood. In this connection Socrates spoke of readers who can swim. A confluence of ideas and sensations in that living elegy of the philosopher made his propositions perhaps into a series of small islands for whose interconnection the bridges and ferries of method were lacking.34

With evident irony, Hamann identifies with Heraclitus, as much by the ‘insularity’ of his style,35 as by the recourse to coincidentia oppositorum in his formulations.36 But, bifrons as he is, he also identifies with Socrates, inviting the reader to follow him to the limit of comprehension—a hermeneutical Socrates, poles apart from the Enlightenment Socrates whose principal virtue was practical, ‘human’ simplicity. Hamann’s Socrates expects readers to be able to swim, a skill the Emperor Caligula, a man of many gifts, including theatre acting, lacked.37 Charpentier describes Heraclitus’ book in Diogenes Laertius’ anecdote,38 as a sea without bottom or coast, in which reason could easily suffer shipwreck.39 Hamann deliberately takes on the role of a pitfall for reason in order to worry the enlightened sophists who want to make man the measure of all things. And Socrates is a dual-purpose mask, both to attract his enlightened friends by making them feel at home with the personage, and to convey his opposition to their firm trust in knowledge professed to the detriment of a religion they distort, by emphatically deepening the 34 ‘Sokrates war, meine Herren, kein gemeiner Kunstrichter. Er unterschied in den Schriften des Heraklitus, dasjenige, was er nicht verstand, von dem, was er darin verstand, und that eine sehr billige und bescheidene Vermuthung von dem, Versta¨ndlichen auf das Unversta¨ndliche. Bey dieser Gelegenheit redete Sokrates von Lesern, welche schwimmen ko¨nnen. Ein Zusammenfluss von Ideen und Empfindungen in jener lebenden Elegie vom Philosophen machte desselben Sa¨tze vielleicht zu einer Menge kleiner Inseln, zu deren Gemeinschaft Bru¨cken und Fa¨hren der Methode fehlten’ (N ii. 61). 35 Hamann’s French formula, ‘l’atrocite ´ du stile insulaire’, in Lettre ne´ologique et provinciale (N ii. 282), sums up his stylistic preferences. 36 Hamann refers to Giordano Bruno’s use of the principium coincidentiae oppositorum, e.g. in the Neue Apologie des Buchstaben h von ihm selbst (1773), N iii. 107; Hegel mentions this in his review of the 1821 ff. edition of Hamann; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Ba¨nden, 11 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 330. 37 Cf. Suetonius, Caligula 54. 2: ‘Atque hic tam docilis ad cetera natare nesciit.’ 38 See n. 33. 39 Thomasius, Leben Socratis (as in n. 24), 26, translates: ‘Aber dieser Autor ist eines Lesers beno¨thigt, der wohl schwimmen kan. Womit er zu verstehen geben wolte, dass diese Buch einem Meer nicht ungleich wa¨re, welches weder Grund noch Strand hat, und wo die Vernunft sehr wahrscheinlich in Gefahr ist, Schiffbruch zu leiden.’

424

Denis Thouard

avowal of his own ignorance. While shrouding himself in the notorious obscurity of Heraclitus,40 Hamann asks his reader, through the mask of Socrates, for a sustained effort of comprehension, for without the ‘affect of friendship’ decipherment is impossible. The obscurity of Hamann’s style stems neither from an excessive preoccupation with originality nor from an incapacity for clear expression but is the necessary consequence of a reflection on interpretation.41

THE SOCRATIC MEMORABILIA: A METACRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In his Introduction (N ii. 62–5),42 Hamann states his topic, the history of philosophy, and outlines the basic features of his ‘mimetic’ approach. In miming the ancient documents concerning the exceptional figure of Socrates, he is trying to subvert a genre, using his ‘imitation’ as a vehicle for oblique criticism. He attacks the method of a historiography of philosophy that has become increasingly ‘critical’, with Bayle, Heumann, and Brucker. But he also denounces, more fundamentally, any attempt to trace the progress or the wanderings of human reason, as if reason could be the subject of philosophy. Against this idea, which belongs with the assertion of the autonomy of reason characteristic of the Enlightenment, Hamann sets his typology. The sole author both of nature and of history is God, and the history of philosophy can only be a part of this history, intelligible as one of the languages of God. The Fall has, no doubt, obscured the language of nature and that of history, but God’s word is present in Scripture, on the basis of which we can and should interpret other modes of the divine discourse. By reducing reason to the status of a mask of God’s discourse, Hamann establishes a higher point of view which enables him to conduct an ironic reading of human history. It will be clear that, contrary to what Lucien Braun suggests, not without some chronological distortion, Hamann was not the initiator of a ‘Romantic’ historiography which was to culminate in the Schellingian Friedrich Ast,43 but rather, by anticipation, its critic, as much as he was of Hegel’s conception of the history of philosophy, understood as a gallery of Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 3. 5 (1407b13). I have tried to show this in ‘L’ermeneutica e il problema dello stile’, in Prospettive sull’estetica del Settecento (Pratica filosofica, 7; Milan 1995), 107–25. 42 See Appendix for an English translation of the Introduction. 43 Cf. L. Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1973), 268 ff. 40 41

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

425

images in which the Spirit recapitulates itself. Hegel’s subsumption of history in absolute knowledge can, by antiphrasis, serve as an introduction to Hamann’s idea. The Phenomenology of Spirit puts it as follows: ‘History is the conscious, self-mediating becoming, Spirit emptied out into Time . . . This becoming presents a slow movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of images each of which [is] endowed with the full richness of the Spirit . . . ’.44 And, of course, the history of philosophy, which is an essential part of history since philosophy articulates in every instance the consciousness of time, figures ex officio in this gallery, through which pass the different stages of the Spirit developing its consciousness of itself.45 With Hamann the history of philosophy is conceived of not as a series of images to be inspected in a sequence specified by the selfdetermination of the Spirit, but as the statue of a minister, in fact the funerary monument of Richelieu by Franc¸ois Girardon, in the Church of the Sorbonne, commissioned by Louis XIV in 1694.46 (See Fig. 13.1.) The minister is shown recumbent on a sofa, at his feet a weeping female figure; another one holds him up by the shoulders. The sculpture evokes three possible attitudes: it can be a display of virtuosity, as it is for the artist;47 it can be a mark of power and an object of admiration, as it was for the commissioning monarch;48 but there is also, as Hamann enigmatically suggests, the reaction of Peter the Great humbly asking advice of the statue, hoping to learn political wisdom, and offering half his kingdom for it.49 Whereas for the sculptor and the king the 44 Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 492, slightly modified; cf. Hegel, Pha ¨ nomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), 563: ‘die Geschichte ist das wissende, sich vermittelnde Werden, der and die Zeit enta¨usserte Geist . . . Dies Werden stellt eine tra¨ge Bewegung und Aufeinanderfolge von Geistern da, eine Galerie von Bildern, deren jedes mit dem vollsta¨ndigen Reichtume des Geistes ausgestattet . . . ’. 45 But Hamann admits that the fault lies perhaps more in the use that is made of these picture galleries rather than in the galleries themselves: ‘Doch sind vielleicht die philosophischen Chroniken und Bildergallerien weniger zu tadeln, als der schlechte Gebrauch, den ihre Liebhaber davon machen’ (N ii. 63). 46 ‘Der Geschichte der Philosophie ist wie der Bildsa ¨ule des franzo¨sischen Staatsministers ergangen’ (N ii. 62). For the interpretation of the Introduction I follow F. Blanke’s running commentary; see Hauptschriften (as in n. 4), 80–104. 47 ‘Ein grosser Ku ¨ nstler zeigte seinen Meissel daran’ (N ii. 62). 48 ‘ein Monarch, der Name eines ganzen Jahrhunderts, gab die Unkosten zum Denkmal und bewunderte das Gescho¨pf seines Untertanen . . . ’ (ibid.). 49 ‘der Scythe aber, der auf sein Handwerk reiste, und wie Noah oder der Galila ¨er des Projektmachers, Julians, ein Zimmermann wurde, um der Gott seines Volks zu seyn, dieser Scythe begieng eine Schwachheit, deren Andenken ihn allein verewigen ko¨nnte. Er lief auf den Marmor zu, both grosmu¨thig dem stummen Stein die Ha¨lfte seines weiten Reichs an, wenn er ihn lehren wollte die andere Ha¨lfte zu regieren.’ (ibid.)

426

Denis Thouard

Fig. 13.1. Franc¸ois Girardon, Tomb of Cardinal Richelieu, Church of the Sorbonne, Paris

statue is an object, the ‘Scythian’ is prepared to listen to the mute stone. But this act of non-appropriation is overlaid by the illusion of Pygmalion: Peter sees himself as the ‘creator of his people’,50 as though this were humanly possible. But it can only be a fable, a poetic conceit. 50 ‘Ein Scho ¨ pfer seines Volkes’ (ibid.). The Pygmalion motif occurs again in a letter to J. G. Lindner (8 Aug. 1759, ZH i. 390): ‘Gott ist den Schwachen ma¨chtig; das sind aber keine schwache Leute, die ihre Na¨chsten so leblos beurtheilen, und an statt Hirten lebendiger La¨mmer sich anzusehen, sich fu¨r Pygmalions halten, fu¨r grosse Bildhauer, deren liebreiches Herz, den Othem des Lebens ihnen mitheilen wird, si Diis placet.’

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

427

Thus all three attitudes fail to do justice to the statue: the aesthetic attitude which considers, as was still the case in the Classical Age, history as a literary genre, the political one which makes of it an instrument of power, and the naive one which confuses reality and fiction. After this preamble, Hamann continues to work the sculptural image to denounce various approaches to the history of philosophy through prominent examples. The statue is now an idol in the temple of learning—‘philosophical’ history which was, in fact, attracting more and more interest. The high priests and levites who administer the cult of this idol represent three types of historiography, produced respectively in England, Germany, and France. By the side of those historiographical colossi, Thomas Stanley’s four folios,51 and Johann Jakob Brucker’s five quartos,52 bizarre and incomplete—i.e. just as the image of Helen composed by Zeuxis from the aspects of five beautiful women, incapable of forming a meaningful whole—Hamann sets the winsome chinoiserie of Andre´-Franc¸ois Boureau-Deslandes,53 a bibelot very much in the French taste. The mountains of pointless erudition produced by Stanley and Brucker, admired by gullible connoisseurs of learning but mocked by the wise, no less than the elegant superficialities of BoureauDeslandes, are wide of the mark, while each work is tinged by the nationality of its author and resonates with its national public. BoureauDeslandes, who follows Batteux, imitates nature only in so far as it is beautiful nature, i.e. in accord with decorum, and so misses the truth of both nature and history. While the learned compile centos of unrelated citations,54 which will never become living, unified history, Deslandes’s aesthetic rationalizations and short cuts—Houdar de La Motte’s reduction of the Iliad to twelve books is a comparable example55—lead to an abstraction remote from the subject matter and just as damaging. 51 T. Stanley, History of philosophy: containing the lives, opinions, actions and discourses of the philosophers of every sect, 4 vols. (London, 1655–62). 52 J. J. Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae a mundi incunabulis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1742–4). 53 A.-F. Boureau-Deslandes, Histoire critique de la philosophie (Amsterdam, 1737). 54 As Blanke, Hauptschriften (as in n. 4), 88, points out, Hamann will have come across the opinion of Gottfried Olearius, Stanley’s Latin translator (Historia philosophiae . . . variis dissertationibus atque observationibus . . . aucta (Leipzig, 1711)): ‘Tota haec historia plerumque nihil est aliud quam cento, ex ipsis veterum auctorum verbis contextus . . . ’ in Heumann’s Acta philosophorum (as in n. 19) I, 541. Hamann’s acquaintance with Heumann, from whom he could have picked up other, more or less secondary, references, is attested in a letter to G. I. Lindner, ZH i. 276 (end of Oct./beg. of Nov. 1758): ‘Fragen Sie den gelehrten Heumann, was Xantippe fu¨r eine Frau war?’ The critical sally sums up his position concerning the historiography of philosophy. 55 Houdar is one of the rationalizers Hamann attacks in Aesthetica in nuce (N ii. 203).

428

Denis Thouard

Hamann admits that from the way he has judged these ‘honourable and fine attempts at a critical system of philosophical history’ it is a fair inference that he has not read any of them (N ii. 63). What sounds like a disavowal is in fact a critique twice over: ‘honourable’ and ‘fine’ are ironical—Hamann does condemn the works in question—and so is the critical discourse on them, a parodistic offering to flatter those he is writing for (ibid.). Hamann then goes on to hint at what he thinks would be the right kind of historiography: one that takes into account the modulations of times, minds, families, and peoples, produced not by professionals but by ‘idle spectators’. The likes of Aesop and La Fontaine, no high fliers, the one a late developer, the other a simple soul, better able to empathize with animals than with men, might have something more lifelike to offer than painted portraits of philosophers, or elegantly mutilated busts of them (‘zierlich verstu¨mmelte Brustbilder’). A bust is exactly what the historiography Hamann is tilting against is capable of: a head without a body, pure intellectuality, as though philosophers were not human beings with an animal side to them. Against this kind of repression, Hamann has recourse to scatology and systematic animalization,56 by way of advocating an imaginative, poetic approach. This is thematized in the Aesthetica in nuce, which formulates the need for poetic imagination in the interpretation of history, thus foreshadowing the poetico-hermeneutic conception of historiography which will find full expression in Humboldt (Die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers, 1820). The Aesthetica is concerned with nature after the Fall, a congeries of jumbled up verses, disiecti membra poetae,57 which it is the scholar’s task to collect, the philosopher’s to interpret, but, more important than either, the poet’s to imitate, or, better still, restore to order (N ii. 198–9). The incitement to poeticize philosophical history and to show a little heroism in the matter is thus a major feature of Hamann’s enterprise: not just the intellect but also the emotions, even the body, in a word, the entire person. Caesar in tears as he thinks of the achievements of Alexander, Alexander himself jealous of Achilles, Erasmus all but kneeling before Socrates, or Georg Ludwig von Bar58 making Molie`re’s Thomas Diafoirus extol god-like pagans suggest a 56 Cf. his remarks on Buffon and Descartes; D. Thouard, ‘Hamann et la langue des philosophes (trois notes en forme de miettes sur Descartes, l’ordre du franc¸ais et Buffon)’, 57 Horace, Satires i. 4. 62. Rue Descartes, 26 (Dec. 1999), 93–105. 58 G. L. von B(a)ar (1701–67), German Anacreontic poet, wrote in French, according to the fashion of the time, i.a. Epıˆtres diverses sur des sujets diffe´rens (London, 1740), several subsequent editions; the second ‘Lettre a` Thomas Diafoirus’ quotes Erasmus’ ‘Sancte Socrates ora pro nobis’; cf. Bo¨hm, Sokrates (as in n. 10), 170–1.

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

429

different type of engagement with the philosophical figures of the past, a passionate one, so lacking in the ´erudits. Hamann is advocating here application in the sense of a Pietist hermeneutic: submission to the text, allowing oneself to be moved by it, not just using it. Hamann goes on to sum up the intent of his metacriticism: to counter the abstract approach of rationalist historiography, which, in all its varieties, anatomizes its object and analyses it away. It eliminates the sensibility and the animality of man, reducing him to a pure spirit, which is an affront to the living God. For Hamann neither nature nor history has any autonomy that might justify a separate study of them. Both are God’s discourse, in a veiled mode, and man possesses the organs needed to understand and interpret this discourse—sight and hearing, and, more fundamentally, their combination in language. But the ackowledgement of this state of affairs requires a preceding act of faith, failing which one can only invent hypotheses, as Buffon does for nature and Montesquieu for history. The only author there is to interpret is God, who condescends to make himself known to us in the ‘dialect of his works’, if only we have faith to hear him. Collecting the philosophical remains of the past, and in particular striving to retrieve what has been lost in transmission disregards divine providence, which has seen to it that we have enough. What matters for Hamann is not the completeness of the record but our ability to understand it, and to do so within the framework of a history that makes sense. This critique of misdirected learning, which he compares to an artist threading lentils through the eye of a needle (N ii. 64), struck a chord with Nietzsche.59 Hamann has thus passed from a methodological critique of the history of philosophy as exemplified by Stanley, Brucker, and Deslandes, to a critique of its presuppositions. He concludes his introduction by announcing a historiographical programme of his own, which he proceeds to apply in the body of the work. True to his preferred strategy, which is to treat authors as carriers of meaning they are not necessarily aware of, he bases himself ironically on Bacon, as he will do to a much greater extent in the Aesthetica in nuce, and on Bolingbroke. Bacon provides him with the model of knowledge based on experiment which makes it possible to use Bacon’s interpretatio naturae as a sensitive (‘aesthetic’) exegesis of nature and history.60 From Bolingbroke Hamann borrows the parallel between ancient history and pagan mythology, and gives it added 59 F. Nietzsche, ‘Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen’ 2, in Werke iii/2: Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin, 1973), 305. 60 Cf. S. A. Jørgensen, ‘Hamann, Bacon und die Hermeneutik’, in Hamann und England (as in n. 1), 131–41.

430

Denis Thouard

emphasis. Bolingbroke spoke better than he knew: the advice to study history as mythology or as a poetic dictionary implies a specific decipherment which requires ‘ploughing with another heifer’ (cf. Judges 14: 18), other than reason. Ancient history is a ‘sealed book’ which is mentioned in Scripture.61 To open it one needs the succour of Revelation. The anecdote Hamann quotes to bring his ‘meta-historiographical’ Introduction to a close sums up his hermeneutical stance: Socrates visited frequently the workshop of a tanner who decided to set down their conversations in writing. This ‘historiographer’, Hamann suggests, is to be preferred to Plato. Reading the latter, Socrates is supposed to have asked, ‘What does this young man intend to make of me?’ ‘If only I can understand my hero as well as Simon the Tanner did!’, Hamann exclaims (N ii. 65). CONCLUSION Hamann has no intention of being a ‘historiographer’. He is merely proposing matter for meditation on Socrates. But this apparent modesty is part of his endeavour to undermine the arrogance of Enlightenment reason by envisaging the history of philosophy at the level of the lives of philosophers, and not solely in terms of their thought or system. Blackwell did this for Homer, and Hamann will do it in his various confrontations with philosophers from Descartes to Kant, which will also be an opportunity for a searching satire on the spirit of his time. For Hamann does not merely oppose Socrates to the latter-day sophists, he also sets up a typological parallel between Socrates and Christ, combining Platonic with Pauline irony. The difference between this gambit and the traditional interpretatio christiana of the figure of Socrates is that Hamann gives contemporary relevance to certain characteristic situations in the life of Socrates. This kind of applicatio makes out of typology a critical instrument. Hamann’s coded, enigmatic language is a challenge to the reader, inviting him to engage with the text both intellectually and emotionally, to be an active, ‘concerned’ interpreter of it. In this Hamann goes against the spirit of the time, with its gospel of ‘enlightenment’, its premium on easy and rapid understanding. Far from aiming at as large an audience as possible or trying to shape opinion, he relies on the sagacity of the isolated friendly reader. 61 Cf. Isa. 29: 11: ‘And the vision of all is become as the words of a book that is sealed . . . ’.

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

431

With all this Hamann is not as distant as one might think from the historians of philosophy who established the discipline, at least in Germany—Heumann, Brucker, and, to a certain extent, Christian Thomasius, whom he uses. The new discipline tends to a form of eclecticism, aligning divergent systems of belief and submitting them to the test of reason. This can and does, notably with Brucker, lead to a critical view of such systems, in so far as they themselves claim to be works of reason.62 Brucker’s Pietist inspiration is entirely compatible with the idea of a ‘critical history of philosophy’, for doubt as to the validity of the philosophical enterprise is a basso continuo in the monumental work of reconstructing its past.63 Hamann, whose anti-intellectualism was likewise of Pietist inspiration, with further reinforcement from Hume, of whom he is an early German translator,64 does perhaps no more than spell out the implications of the sceptical vein in Brucker: instead of erecting a colossus of vanity in honour of the idol Reason, it may suffice to denounce the assumptions of the forgetful and abstract enterprise of that same Reason . . . (translated by Christopher Ligota)

62 With Heumann too, eclecticism is a critical tool against dogmatism and syncretism, the philosophers he calls ‘polemico-orthodoxi’ and ‘philosophische Synkretisten’. As Gottfried Arnold for the history of the church, Heumann advocates ‘impartiality’, looking in philosophy not for quis dicat but quid dicatur et sentiatur. Remote both from dogmatic zealots who reactivate the praeiudicium auctoritatis and from syncretistic sophists for whom anything goes, critical eclecticism recommends: ‘Pru¨fet alles, das gute behaltet’; cf. Acta philosophorum (as in n. 19), x (1719), 571–9. 63 Cf. W. Schmidt-Biggemann and Th. Stammen (eds.), Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), Philosoph und Historiker der europa¨ischen Aufkla¨rung (Berlin, 1998). 64 Cf. G. Gawlick and L. Kreimendahl, Hume in der deutschen Aufkla ¨ rung: Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 1987), 42–3 et passim.

432

Denis Thouard

Appendix: Socratic Memorabilia, Introduction The history of philosophy and the statue of the French minister of statea shared a common fate. A great artist1,b demonstrated the power of his chisel on it; a monarch,2 whose name became the name of a whole century, provided the expenses for the monument, and admired the creation of his subject; the Scythian,3 however, who traveled in the interest of his trade, and, like Noah or the Galilean of the schemer Julian, became a carpenter in order to be the god of his people, this Scythian indulged in a weakness, the memory of which alone could immortalize him. He ran toward the marble image, offering magnanimously to the dumb4 stone the half of his vast kingdom, if it would teach him how to rule the other half. If our history should become mythology, this embracing of a lifeless teacher, who unselfishly performed miracles of achievement, would be transformed into a fairy tale which would seem similar to the relics of Pygmalion’sc life. In the language of our witd a creator of his people will after an inconceivable time have to be understood, just as poetically, as a sculptor of his wife. Indeed, there is an idol in the templee of learning which [62] bears beneath its image the inscription, ‘The History of Philosophy’, and which has not lacked for high priests and Levites. Stanleyf and Bruckerg have provided us with colossi which are just as strange and incomplete as the image of beauty which a Greekh composed from the charms of all the beautiful maidens who were intentionally and accidentally provided for him—masterpieces which might always have been very much admired and sought after by learned connoisseurs of the arts, but on the other hand were secretly ridiculed by sensible people as fantastic growths and chimeras or were even imitated for the sake of whiling away the time, and in theatrical drawings.i Since Stanley is a Briton and Brucker a Swabian, they have both entertained the public in the interest of their fame, although the public also deserves to be praised for the complaisance with which it [63] overlooks the unequal faults of these national writers. Deslandes,j an author of encyclical5,k intellect, has produced a Chinese mantelpiece figurinel for the cabinet of Gallic taste, The creator of beautiful From: J. C. O’Flaherty, Hamann’s ‘Socratic Memorabilia’, a translation and commentary (Baltimore, 1967), 145, 147, 149, 151. Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins Press. The numbers in square brackets refer to the pagination of the German original in Nadler’s edition (N ii). Numbered notes reproduce Nadler’s annotation; notes marked by letters are the ‘translator’s notes’ printed as endnotes. These contain references to other parts of his book, which interested readers will have to consult. 1 [Franc 2 Louis XIV. 3 Peter the Great. ¸ois] Girardon. 4 Hab. 3: 19. 5 See The Clouds, p. 94 [of Nadler text].

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

433

naturem seems to have condemned the greatest minds of France, just as Jupiter formerly condemned the Cyclopesn to the blacksmith shop, to produce the flashes and squibs that he needs for paleo sheet lightning and ethereal fireworks. From the judgments I have passed on all these honorable and fine essays concerning a critical system of the history of philosophy, it is to be concluded as more than probable that I have read none of them, but seek merely to imitate the verve and tone of the scholarly crowd, and to flatter by imitation those on whose behalf I am writing. Meanwhile, I believe more firmly that, if one had studied or knew how to study the fate of this name or word, philosophy, according to the coloring of the times, minds, races, and peoples, not as a scholar or philosopher even, but as an idle6 spectator of their Olympic games, ‘standing off like a painter’,7 our philosophy would necessarily have another form. A Phrygian like Aesop, who, as one now says, had to take time to grow wise in accordance with the laws of his climate,p and such a natural simpleton as a La Fontaine,q who knew better how to accommodate himself to and to adopt the manner of thinking of the animals than of men, would show us, instead of the paintings of philosophers or their decoratively mutilated busts, quite different creatures, and would imitate their customs and wise sayings, their didactic and heroic legends, in colors that would be more lifelike. Nevertheless, the philosophical chronicles and picture galleries are perhaps less to blame than the ill use which their fanciers make of them. A little enthusiasm and superstition here would not only deserve indulgence, but something of this leaven is necessary in order to put the soul in the ferment required for a philosophical heroism. A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquerr all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of a philosopher.s [64] When Caesar sheds tears at the statue of the Macedonian youth,t and the latter jealously recalls at the grave of Achilles what a herald of glory the blind minnesingeru was; so an Erasmus mockingly bends his knee to the saintly Socrates, and the Hellenistic muse of our von Barv must disturb the comic shade of a Thomas Diafoirusw in order to preach to us the subterranean truth: that godly men did exist among the heathen, and that we should not despise the cloud of these witnesses, that heaven has anointed them as its messengers and interpreters, and consecrated them to precisely that vocation among their people which the prophets had among the Jews.8 Just as nature was given us to open our eyes, so history was given to us to open our ears. To dissect a body and an event into its primary elements means A man without any occupation is called ‘Argus’ in Greek. Eurip[ides] Hecuba [line 807]. 8 ‘Was not the scholastic Thomas perhaps chosen to become the apostle to the Peripatetics who had not yet submitted to the faith and were not yet tamed? A conceited and self-willed company, averse to authority, always building on reason and always inquiring after the Why.—I believe that this last mission of Thomas Aquinas was not futile.’ The Christian Socrates, by Balzac [Jean Louis Guez de], Discourse V. 6 7

Denis Thouard

434

attempting to detect God’s invisible being, His eternal power and Godhead. Whoever does not believe Moses and the prophets always becomes, like Buffonx writing on the history of creation and Montesquieuy on the history of the Roman Empire, a poet against his knowledge and intention. If a young sparrow shall not fall to the earth without our God, no monument from ancient times has been lost to us which we should lament. Should not His providence extend to writings, since He himself became a writer, and since the Spirit of God was at such pains to record the value of the first forbidden books, which a pious zeal on behalf of our religion sacrificed to the fire? We admire Pompey’s destroying the writings of his enemy Sertorius as a wise and noble action; why not admire our Lord’s allowing the writings of Celsus to perish? I think, therefore, not without reason, that God showed at least as much vigilance concerning all the books which have any importance for us as Caesar did for the written scroll with which he jumped into the sea or Paul for his parchment at Troas.9 Did not the artist who succeeded in throwing a lentil through the eye of a needle have in a bushel of lentils enough for the exercise of his acquired skill?z One would like to put this question to [65] all scholars who do not know how to use the works of the ancients more sensibly than that person knew how to use lentils. If we possessed more than time has chosen to give us, we ourselves would be compelled to throw our cargoes overboard, to set fire to our libraries, or to proceed like the Dutch with their spices.10,aa I am surprised that no one has yet undertaken to do as much for history as Baconbb has accomplished for physics. Bolingbrokecc gives his pupil the advice to study ancient history in general as heathen mythology and as a poetic lexicon. But perhaps all history is more mythology than this philosopher thinks, and is, like nature, a book that is sealed, a hidden witness, a riddle which cannot be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason. It is not my intention to be Socrates’ historiographer. I am simply writing his memorabilia just as Duclosdd published a comparable work on the history of the eighteenth century to alleviate the boredom of the polite public. Just as clever an essay could be written on the life of Socrates as that which Blackwellee has provided on Homer. Should not the father of philosophy be more entitled to this honor than the father of poetry? What Cooperff has published is nothing but a school exercise, which is characterized by the offensiveness of a eulogy on the one side find a polemic writing on the other. Socrates often visited the workshop of a tanner11 who was his friend, and, like the host of the Apostle Peter at Joppa, was named Simon. The artisan was the first to have the idea of writing down the conversations of Socrates. The latter perhaps recognized himself better in them than in those of Plato, upon the reading of 9 11

10 See Interesting and Curious Miscellanea, vol. x. 2 Tim. 4: 13. See The Clouds, p. 95 [of Nadler text].

Hamann and the History of Philosophy

435

which he is supposed to have asked in surprise, ‘What does this young man intend to make of me?—If I only understand my hero as well as Simon the Tanner!’

Translator’s Notes [page 62] a ‘Des franzo¨sischen Staatsministers’: Armand Jean du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu (1585–1642). b ‘Ein grosser Ku¨nstler’: Franc¸ois Girardon (1630–98). Hamann refers to a much admired sculpture by this artist which still can be seen in the church of the Sorbonne. c ‘Pygmalion’: this legendary figure is said to have been artist-king of Cyprus. Having fashioned in ivory the beautiful image of a maiden, Pygmalion fell in love with it. Aphrodite heard his prayer that the image might receive the breath of life. d ‘Sprache unsers Witzes’: Hamann always uses ‘Witz’ and ‘witzig’ negatively in the Mem. (For other internal evidence, consult 62: 3 and 67: 16.) As Kainz points out, Witz meant Scharfsinn or Verstand in the eighteenth icentury (K, 229), but since it was construed as ruling out all emotional and spiritual connotations, it became anathema to the Magus. Moreover, it was associated closely with the French esprit (Hamann translated Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois as ‘Witz der Gesetze’; N, Ill, 158: 17; cf. Jansen Schoonhoven, HE, V, 102–3). Before his conversion, however, Hamann’s attitude was different. Thus, in his Daphne period he had appeared as an apostle of Witz in Germany. See G. J. Sahme’s letter to him of August 20, 1751; ZH, I, 1–2. But in the Beylage zu Dangeuil he seems to be well on the way to his later attitude in his use of witzig and Witz. N, IV, 230: 19, 31; for his employment of these words in the Socratic year, consult ZH, I, 354: 14, 16; 376: 21; 410: 30. e ‘Es giebt in dem Tempel ’: cf. N, II, 394, for several of the ten fragmentary attempts by Hamann to exegete for the Princess Gallitzin the paragraph beginning with these words. f ‘Stanley’: see p. 114, n. 8, above. g ‘Brucker’: see p. 114, n. 9, above. h ‘Ein Grieche’: Zeuxis. See p. 115, n. 13, above. i See above, p. 115, for a discussion of a passage beginning ‘Meisterstiicke’ and ending: ‘nachgeahmt werden’. [page 63] j ‘Deslandes’: see p. 116, n. 14, above. k ‘Encyclischen’: see p. 72, n. 28, above. l ‘Chinesische Kaminpuppe’: see p. 116 and n. 15, above. m ‘Der Scho¨pfer der scho¨nen Natur’: Charles B. Batteux (1713–80). See p. 111n, above. n ‘Cyclopen’: see p. 112 and nn, above. o ‘Taub’ is used here in the same sense as in the statement ‘das Metall ist taub’, meaning, ‘the metal is dull’ or ‘lacks luster’. p ‘Klug zu werden’: the allusion is to the proverbial dull-wittedness of the Phrygians. q Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95) was famous for his fables. r ‘Eroberungswuth’: when Hamann desired, some years later than the Mem., to express his approval of Herder’s Oldest Document of the Human Race, he indicated that the author had approached his material with ‘Eroberungswuth.’ N, Ill, 126: 19–20. s ‘Der Heldengeist eines Weltweisen’: see pp. 92–93, 107–8 and nn. 34–35, above. t ‘Des macedonischen Junglings’: Alexander the Great. u ‘Der blinde Minnesa¨nger’: Homer.

436

Denis Thouard

v

‘Unsers van Bar’: Georg Ludwig von Bar (1702–67), a German who wrote in French.) He was praised by Gottsched for his literary merit. See Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, n. 44. w Comical figure of Molie`re’s Malade imaginaire. Von Bar wrote a poem in which Thomas Diafoirus praises the great figures of Greece and Rome as the counterparts of the prophets among the Jews. x Georges Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon (1707–88), a French naturalist and author of Histoire naturelle, ge´ne´rale et particulie`re (1749–1804), in forty-four volumes. Hamann appreciated Buffon’s work in certain regards, but he was of course finally hostile to it because of Buffon’s thoroughgoing naturalism. ‘Hamann hat klar das Neue erkannt, das in Buffons Naturgeschichte zu Tage tritt. . . . Er will nur Gelehrter sein und reine Wissenschaft bringen. Daher schliesst er aus seinem Werk die Religion und Gott vollsta¨ndig aus. . . . ’ Saemann, J. G. Hamann und die franzo¨sische Literatur, p. 55. Buffon’s observations on style were, on the other hand, important for Hamann. Ibid; cf. especially ZH, 1, 307: 10–12. y Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). Miss Saemann refers to the present passage of the Mem. in the following apt formulation regarding Hamann’s relation to Montesquieu: ‘Als Historiker hat Hamann den Franzosen allerdings nicht sehr gescha¨tzt, denn er ha¨lt ihn auf diesem Gebiete nicht fur objektiv genug, er sei ‘‘ein Dichter wieder sein Wissen und Wollen’’, da er schon in der Darstellung der Scho¨pfung von der historischen Quelle der Bibel abweiche.’ Ibid., p. 37. z ‘Hatte der Ku¨nstler . . . zu gebrauchen wissen’: the literary reference in this passage is obscure. See p. 108n above. [page 65] aa Blanke writes concerning this passage: ‘The Dutch were accustomed to destroy their harvests in Indonesia, if they were too abundant, in order to keep the prices up artificially.’ B, 100. bb Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the philosophers most influential in the shaping of Hamann’s thought. Shortly before the composition of the Mem. he wrote to J. G. Lindner (July 3, 1759): ‘so ist jetzt Bacon mein Philosoph, den ich gleichfalls [as well as Hume] sehr schmecke.’ ZH, I, 356: 28. He used Bacon’s empiricism against those who would make an abstract system of nature: ‘Eure mordlu¨gnerische Philosophie hat die Natur aus dem Wege gera¨umt . . . Bacon beschuldigt euch, dass ihr sie durch eure Abstractionen schindet. Zeugt Bacon die Wahrheit; wohlan! so werft mit Steinen—und sprengt mit Erdenklo¨ßen oder Schneeballen nach seinem Schatten.’ Aesthetica in nuce, N, II, 206: 4–5, 13–15. For a discussion of Hamann’s relation to Bacon, see Metzke, pp. 117–18, and Sven-Aage Jørgensen, ‘Hamann, Bacon, and Tradition.’ cc ‘Bollingbroke’: see n. g to page 61. dd Charles Pinot Duclos (1704–72). His best work is Conside´rations sur les moeurs de ce sie`cle (1751), but Hamann refers in the present passage to Me´moire pour servir a` l’histoire des moeurs du XVIIIe sie`cle (1751), which is purely anecdotal. Hamann’s spelling of the name with an umlaut is an idiosyncrasy. ee Thomas Blackwell (1701–87). Hamann possessed his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (published anonymously in 1735). Although Blackwell manifests a genuine appreciation of Homer, his work suffers from a lack of method. ff See p. 59 above.

14 Theory and Methodology of History from Chladenius to Droysen: A Historiographical Essay Alexandre Escudier

The present essay is more in the nature of a survey than an exhaustive study (even though the literature it is based on can lay claim to a fairly extensive coverage).1 It will attempt to outline developments in the theory and methodology of history2 in Germany3 between 1750 and 1860, beginning with Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–59) and concluding with Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84). The choice of topic and its chronological span may seem arbitrary and has its dangers. I shall try to account for it first by discussing recent research in the field (I) then sketching out the variety of theoretical and methodological themes developed (II) in the Enlightenment (what is traditionally known as Aufkla¨rungshistorie) and (III) in the period of Historismus, distinguishing in the latter the Rankian model (IIIa) from, as it seems to me, the major turn inaugurated by Droysen’s Historik from 1857 onwards (IIIb).

1 I refer here to my doctoral thesis: Le Re ´cit historique comme proble`me the´orique en France et en Allemagne au XIXe sie`cle (Atelier de reproduction des the`ses; Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), 1215 pp. 2 For reasons of space, but also of coherence, I have excluded philosophies of history, confining myself to its theory and methodology, terms that, for the purpose of this essay, largely overlap. 3 Even though the question has its importance and remains controversial, I shall not attempt to distinguish the national provenances of authors writing in German (Switzerland, Austria, north Germany, south Germany, Prussia, Saxony, etc.—as many national and territorial concepts were still quite unstable in the 18th c.).

438

Alexandre Escudier I. NATURE OF TOPIC AND TY PE O F APPROAC H—A PROPOS OF T HE RECENT REDISCOVERY OF AUFKLA¨ R U N G S H I S T OR I E

It is still a frequent assumption in studies of the history of history that the science of history did not emerge as a discipline in Germany until the nineteenth century. Recent research has shown the case to be quite otherwise. It is the German historical school of the nineteenth century, no doubt a very powerful formation, that imposed this perspective by, so to speak, repressing its own ancestry. One may elect to study its imaginaire, provided one makes clear that this is what one is doing—by treating it as part of the nineteenth-century dream of itself as the ‘historical century’—in Germany, in France, and elsewhere. But rather than dwell on these somewhat worn ideas,4 it is of much greater interest to consider the re-evaluation undergone by German Enlightenment historiography—Aufkla¨rungshistorie5—in Germany, but also in the Anglo-Saxon world.6 In terms of the history of ideas this re-evaluation is not entirely new. And in Germany it is the product of a specific historiographical conjuncture. It is not entirely new because voices were raised already in the nineteenth century—in defiance of prevailing views and not without professional risk7—against the claim of contemporary German historians to have all but reinvented the historical sciences. Building on his Leipzig doctoral thesis of 1875,8 Hermann Wesendonck produced in the 4 Not necessarily an ideologically innocent exercise, as in the case of Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (1878–1951) whose survey of German historiography, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Munich, 1950–1), serves as a vehicle for his sympathies with German conservative, if not National Socialist, thought. 5 A convenient term, which I shall use throughout this essay. 6 One should recall here the pioneering work of P. H. Reill, ‘History and Hermeneutics in the Aufkla¨rung: The Thought of Johann Christoph Gatterer’, Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973), 24–51, and The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975). Also deserving of mention, of course, is the work of G. G. Iggers, even though it still tends to concentrate on the political dimension of the historiographical discourse—cf. id., The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 7 Cf. R. Deutsch and W. Weber, ‘Marginalisierungprozesse in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter des Historismus’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichte, 35 (1985), 174–97. 8 H. Wesendonck, Der Stand der neueren deutschen Geschichtsschreibung vor Gatterer und Schlo¨zer: Als Einleitung zu einer Wu¨rdigung der Verdienste Gatterer’s und Schlo¨zer’s (Leipzig, 1875), under Hermann Wuttke.

From Chladenius to Droysen

439

following year a larger study designed to show how Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99), and above all August Ludwig Schlo¨zer (1735– 1809), marked an epoch in modern historiographical thought.9 He underplayed the differences between the two,10 subsuming them under the general category of the school of Go¨ttingen,11 with Gatterer in the role of a mere precursor of Schlo¨zer, the author, supposedly, of a major epistemological turn in the critique of sources and generally in historical method. Even though, with a solid dose of teleology, this position tended to present the two protagonists as forerunners of the German critical school of the nineteenth century, it was not enthusiastically received by the profession intent on canonizing Niebuhr and Ranke as the founding fathers of modern historical science.12 For Franz Xaver von Wegele (1823–97), surveying in 1885 German historiography from Humanism to the nineteenth century, modern historical research begins with Niebuhr.13 Aufkla¨rungshistorie is classified as prescientific. Enunciated in what remained for a long time a standard work of reference, repeatedly recommended by Ranke to the Historische Commission in Munich, this judgement was not easily gainsaid. E. Fueter (1876–1928) attempted in 1911 to rehabilitate somewhat eighteenth-century historiography,14 but the mechanism of rejection was soon in operation again, notably in the writings of G. von Below (1858–1927),15 9 H. Wesendonck, Die Begru ¨ ndung der neueren deutschen Geschichtsschreibung durch Gatterer und Schlo¨zer, nebst Einleitung u¨ber Gang und Stand derselben vor diesen, . . . von der philos. Fakulta¨t der Univ. Leipzig gekro¨nte Preisschrift (Leipzig, 1876). 10 H. W. Blanke, to whose work I shall return, drew attention recently to the controversial relationship between Schlo¨zer and Gatterer in Go¨ttingen in the 1770s; see his introduction to Schlo¨zer’s Vorstellung einer Universal-Historie (Go¨ttingen, 1772–3; repr. Waltrop, 1997), pp. ix–xliv, with a dossier of documents showing notably Herder’s attacks against Schlo¨zer, directly inspired by Gatterer. 11 Limits of space oblige me to leave out the important and controversial question of the particular status of the University of Go¨ttingen—suffice it to refer to the fundamental study by L. Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Go¨ttingen 1770–1820 (Go¨ttingen, 1995); rev. and enlarged German version of I maestri della Germania: Go¨ttingen 1770–1820 (Turin, 1975). 12 As far as is known, Wesendonck’s book had one review, Historische Zeitschrift, 39 (1878), 119–20, signed W. (probably F. X. von Wegele or G. Waitz); critical remarks in O. Lorenz, ‘Friedrich Christoph Schlosser und u¨ber einige Aufgaben und Principien der Geschichtsschreibung’, Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, phil.- hist. Kl., 83 (1877), 159 n. 1; cf. F. Meinecke’s sharp criticism in Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936; repr. 1959), 286 n. 1. 13 F. X. von Wegele, Geschichte der deutschen Historiographie seit dem Auftreten des Humanismus (Munich, 1885), 995. 14 E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (Munich, 1911). 15 For Below it is the German Romantic notion of individuality that constitutes the decisive turn, Aufkla¨rungshistorie being at best a precursor, tainted by incorrigible

440

Alexandre Escudier

reinforcing the cult of a few monumentalized historiographical figures (though it would be going too far to speak of foundation myths).16 Nor did the polemical—indeed self-serving—use of the history of history and its method that Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) put it to from 1896 onwards, in the quarrel over his Deutsche Geschichte (1891 ff.), contribute to an opening of minds. Lamprecht went as far as to declare, at the 6th Congress of German Historians at Nuremberg in 1898, that Niebuhr and Ranke stood at the end rather than the beginning of a historiographical era,17 but this only increased his isolation in the profession. Besides, the empirical basis of his arguments was not too secure,18 and he did not possess the philosophical acuity that served Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) in 1901,19 and Ernst Cassirer (1874– 1945) in 1932,20 when they tried to refute the cliche´ of a rationalist, antihistorical eighteenth century. In the context of these various attempts at revision, F. Meinecke’s (1862–1954) Enstehung des Historismus, of 1936, plays an ambiguous role. It presents Aufkla¨rungshistorie as the product of a new sensibility spreading across most of Europe at the time, but it does so, as far as Germany is concerned, on a somewhat slender rationalism which debarred it from an organic understanding of the past; see id., Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung von den Befreiungskriegen bis zu unseren Tagen (Leipzig, 1916; 2nd rev. and enlarged edn. Munich, 1924). 16 See Below’s review of Fueter, Vierteljahrsschrift fu ¨ r Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 10 (1912), 457–63, interesting to compare with B. Croce’s review, ‘Von der Geschichte der Geschichte’, Internationale Monatsschrift fu¨r Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, 7 (1913), 835–56. 17 See K. Lamprecht, ‘Die Entwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft vornehmlich seit Herder’ (1898); id., Alternative zu Ranke: Schriften zur Geschichtstheorie (Leipzig, 1988), 316: ‘Niebuhr steht also nicht am Anfang, sondern am Schluss einer wichtigen Entwicklung; er ist nicht der Vater unsrer heutigen geschichtlichen Methode, sondern fast schon deren Vollender’; on Ranke, ibid. 323: ‘Aber auch Ranke war, wie Niebuhr, kein Anfa¨nger, sondern ein Vollender’; on Gatterer and Schlo¨zer, p. 313; on Herder, Mo¨ser, and late Enlightenment historiography, pp. 318 ff. 18 But he did encourage a whole generation of pupils to rewrite the history of modern European historiography; see H. W. Blanke, ‘Selbstreflexion der Historie im Umbruch: Historiographiegeschichte bei Karl Lamprecht und seine Schu¨lern’, in id. (ed.), Transformation des Historismus: Wirtschaftsorganisation und Bildungspolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg . . . (Waltrop, 1994), 112–53, esp. 133 ff. 19 See W. Dilthey, ‘Das achzehnte Jahrhundert und die griechische Welt’ (1901), Gesammelte Schriften, iii (Leipzig, 1927), 210–75. 20 See E. Cassirer, Philosophie der Aufkla ¨ rung (Tu¨bingen, 1932), 263–312 (ch. 5): ‘Die Eroberung der geschichtlichen Welt’; similarly in Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, iv (Stuttgart, 1957; repr. Darmstadt, 1994), 225 ff. However, Cassirer seems to me to exaggerate the importance of Herder’s philosophy of history for the German 18th c., and to remain too close to Meinecke’s categorical judgements in Entstehung des Historismus (as in n. 12).

From Chladenius to Droysen

441

and excentric basis—Lessing, Winckelmann, Justus Mo¨ser, Herder, and Goethe, all of them thinkers about history rather than historians. It disregards central figures like Chladenius, Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), Gatterer, Schlo¨zer, Ludwig Timotheus Spittler (1752– 1810), or Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren (1760–1842).21 The book had an occluding effect of several decades’ duration, and only recently have German historians felt compelled to reopen the issue on a far wider evidential basis. It has taken real erudite investigation to break the pattern. The call, launched in a somewhat publicist manner, to supersede traditional historicism22 by a sociological orientation (Historische Sozialwissenschaft) was not enough.23 It was necessary to retrieve what the nineteenth-century historical school, capped by Meinecke,24 had repressed in the memory of the human sciences since the eighteenth century. Since the mid-1960s, and systematically since the 1970s, a whole series of publications on learned academies,25 historical journals,26 and universities has come off the press, considerably modifying the image of an anti-historical eighteenth century.27 There has also been a flow of monographs and intellectual biographies,28 as well critical new editions and reprints of eighteenth-century texts on the theory and methodology of history.29 The work of Reinhart Koselleck, sustained by a strong 21 See Meinecke, Enstehung (as in n. 12), 286–8, 326; M. Bloch’s critical review, Annales d’histoire sociale, 1 (1939), 429–30. 22 See W. J. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (Du ¨ sseldorf, 1971). 23 See H. U. Wehler, Geschichte als historische Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1973). 24 See O. G. Oexle, ‘Meineckes Historismus: U ¨ ber Kontext und Folgen einer Definition’, in id. and J. Ru¨sen (eds.), Historismus in der Kulturwissenschaften: Geschichtskonzepte, historische Einscha¨tzungen, Grundlagenprobleme (Cologne, 1996), 139–99. 25 Deserving of particular mention is A. Kraus’s pioneering Vernunft und Geschichte: Die Bedeutung der deutschen Akademien fu¨r die Entwicklung der Geschichtswissenschaft im spa¨ten 18. Jahrhundert (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1963), marred somewhat, however, by Kraus’s incomprehensible prejudice against Gatterer. 26 Again pioneering is I. Salzbrunn, Studien zum deutschen historischen Zeitschriftenwesen von der Go¨ttinger Aufkla¨rung bis zur Herausgabe der ‘Historischen Zeitschrift’ (1859) (phil. diss., Mu¨nster, 1968). 27 See K. Hammer and J. Voss (eds.), Historische Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert: Organisation, Zielsetzung, Ergebnisse (Bonn, 1976). 28 See e.g. G. Hu ¨ binger, Georg Gottfried Gervinus: Historisches Urteil und politische Kritik (Go¨ttingen, 1984), and C. Becker-Schaum, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen Aufkla¨rung und Historismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). 29 Apart from the re-editions of Chladenius, Semler, and Schlo ¨ zer quoted from in the course of this essay, see in particular, among the numerous critical reprints in the series

442

Alexandre Escudier

anthropological component,30 has been of major importance here, notably his contribution on the obsolescence, between 1770 and 1820, of the topos historia magistra vitae,31 and on the emergence, in the last third of the eighteenth century, of the notion of Geschichte as an allembracing collective singular, whose scheme of secularized temporality, oriented by the time arrow, becomes the matrix for all possible individual histories.32 Between 1971 and 1982, the nine volumes published under the editorship of H. U. Wehler in the series Deutsche Historiker brought back from near-oblivion figures like Gatterer, Spittler, Schlo¨zer, Justus Mo¨ser (1720–94), Heeren, Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805– 71),33 or Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann (1785–1860).34 In the wake of J. Wach’s major study, little noticed when it first appeared, on the history of ‘understanding’,35 certain major texts, such as those of Chladenius, a Protestant theologian, have been rediscovered by philosophical hermeneutic (H. G. Gadamer), then by literary hermeneutic (P. Szondi), and finally by the historical sciences (Koselleck).36 Wissen und Kritik (Waltrop, Spenner), Wilhelm Wachsmuth (1787–1866), Entwurf einer Theorie der Geschichte (Halle, 1820, repr. 1992); Friedrich Rehm (1792–1847), Lehrbuch der historischen Propa¨deutik und Grundriss der allgemeinen Geschichte: Zum Gebrauche bei academischen Vorlesungen (Marburg, 1830, repr. 1994); Friedrich Ru¨hs, Entwurf einer Propa¨deutik des historischen Studiums (Berlin, 1811, repr. 1996); Friedrich ¨ ber Erkenntniss und Kunst in der Geschichte (Dresden, Wilhelm Tittmann (1784–1864), U 1817, repr. 1999). 30 See R. Koselleck, ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’, in id. and H. G. Gadamer, Hermeneutik und Historik (Heidelberg, 1987); id., Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000), reprinting i.a. ‘Historik u. Hermeneutik’. 31 R. Koselleck, ‘ ‘‘Historia magistra vitae’’: U ¨ ber die Auflo¨sung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte’ (1967), in id., Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeit (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1979; 2nd edn., 1989), 38–66. 32 See R. Koselleck, s.v. Geschichte, Historie (sections I and V–VII), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ii (Stuttgart, 1975), 593–5; 647–717. 33 Of particular relevance to the subject of this essay is Gervinus’s Grundzu ¨ ge der Historik (Leipzig, 1837). 34 See R. Hansen, ‘F. C. Dahlmann’, in H. U. Wehler (ed.), Deutsche Historiker, v (Go¨ttingen, 1972). 35 J. Wach, Das Verstehen: Grundzu ¨ ge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Tu¨bingen, 1926–33; repr. Hildesheim, 1966). 36 J. M. Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, worinnen der Grund zu einer neuen Einsicht in allen Arten der Gelahrtheit gelegt wird (Leipzig, 1752); repr. with preface by R. Koselleck (Vienna, 1985). For a convenient survey of the fortuna of Chladenius until the early 1970s, cf. C. Friedrich’s introduction and P. Szondi, Einfu¨hrung in die literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1975), 27 ff. In this fortuna, in which oblivion alternates with rediscovery, E. Bernheim, J. Wach, H. G. Gadamer, P. Szondi, and R. Koselleck have had a considerable part, variously concentrating on textual

From Chladenius to Droysen

443

However, it is relatively late that the theme of the theory and methodology of history moved centre-stage.37 Set up by Theodor Schieder (1908–84) and Reinhard Wittram (1902–73), and presided over by Rudolf Vierhaus, a working group calling itself ‘Theorie der Geschichte’ met regularly from 1975 to 1988 at the Werner-Reimers-Stiftung in Bad Homburg to re-examine the current epistemology of history in the light of the intellectual heritage of the end of the eighteenth and above all the nineteenth century.38 Finally, in the last decade or so, the study of the history of history has firmly, and I think fruitfully, allied itself with an inquiry into the epistemology of the discipline. The five volumes of Geschichtsdiskurs, published under the direction of W. Ku¨ttler, J. Ru¨sen, and E. Schulin between 1993 and 1999, are a valuable record of this happy development.39 In these circumstances, the rediscovery of Aufkla¨rungshistorie has its difficulties and dangers. It is very tempting to make it the victim par excellence of nineteenth-century historicism,40 and thus to obscure the differences that separate the two in respect of the degree of institutionalization and professional organization, as well as of method in the use of sources. This misprision is all the more to be deplored as it is liable to provoke neo-Rankian reactions, of which the work of Ulrich Muhlack, hermeneutics in Chladenius (Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernu¨nftiger Reden und Schriften (Leipzig, 1742; repr. Du¨sseldorf, 1969)), or on the general theory of historical comprehension (Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft as above). 37 Interest in it has sometimes gone hand in hand with first-order theorizing, as with J. Ru¨sen, who beginning with his doctoral thesis, Begriffene Geschichte: Genesis und Begru¨ndung der Geschichtstheorie J. G. Droysens (Paderborn, 1969), has steadily pursued the elaboration of a modern theory of history, the re-evaluation of Droysen’s Historik, as well the disinterment (together with his pupils—see infra) of texts in the German methodological tradition forgotten since the 18th c. As a symptom of the rising interest in the theory of history in the 1970s, see H. Berding, Bibliographie zur Geschichtstheorie (Go¨ttingen, 1977). 38 The group published six volumes of papers (Munich): R. Koselleck et al. (eds.), Objektivita¨t und Parteilichkeit (1977); K. G. Faber and C. Meier (eds.), Historische Prozesse (1978); J. Kocka and T. Nipperdey (eds.), Theorie und Erza¨hlung in der Geschichte (1979); R. Koselleck et al. (eds.), Formen der Geschichtsschreibung (1982); C. Meier and J. Ru¨sen (eds.), Historische Methode (1988); K. Acham and W. Schulze (eds.), Teil und Ganzes: Zum Verha¨ltnis von Einzel- und Gesamtanalyse in Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften (1990). 39 Frankfurt, Fischer: Grundlagen und Methoden der Historiographiegeschichte (1993); Anfa¨nge modernen historischen Denkens (1994); Die Epoche der Historisierung (1997); Krisenbewusstsein, Katastrophen und Innovationen (1997); Globale Konflikte, Erinnerungsarbeit und Neuorientierung seit 1945 (1999). 40 See e.g. the introduction to H. E. Bo ¨ deker et al. (eds.), Aufkla¨rung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 1986; 2nd edn., 1992).

444

Alexandre Escudier

based, for the eighteenth century, on an inadequate corpus of evidence, is a telling example.41 Apparently remote from ideologically charged topics, the rediscovery of Aufkla¨rungshistorie has, nonetheless, an openly political dimension, which needs to be borne in mind. In present-day Germany, the history of history is not exempt from the trauma of the Nazi past. The recent new departures in historiography stem in large part from a desire to throw off the conservative historicist tradition of a century and a half (1800–1950) which in its relegation to the shadows of the historiographical heritage of the Enlightenment, is seen—somewhat teleologically— as having contributed to the ‘German Catastrophe’ (Meinecke).42 This state of affairs, as long as it bears on the choice of subject, and not on the way of treating it, need cause no concern. It is just another instance of the emergence of a scholarly agenda being brought about by cultural and socio-political determinants. The fact is that the wish to dethrone a historiographical tradition considered politically harmful has contributed to the retrieval of another, an undoubted enrichment of the discipline which one would expect to be judged on what it has or will produce, and not scouted, as some continue to do, on account of its genealogy. Of this historiographical conjuncture I shall name the protagonists and summarize the main achievements before indicating briefly where my own assessment differs. The principal retrievers of Aufkla¨rungshistorie, in particular of its theoretical and methodological aspects, have been a group around Jo¨rn Ru¨sen, first at the University of Bochum, then at Bielefeld. It is in this milieu that P. Leyh produced, in 1977, the first critical (but not annotated) edition of Droysen’s Historik,43 and it is at Bochum (in 1982) that the first major conference was held on the transition, seen as a paradigm shift, from Aufkla¨rungshistorie to Historicism.44 This has been followed by major contributions—editions of 41 See U. Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufkla ¨ rung: Die Vorgeschichte des Historismus (Munich, 1991). 42 F. Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (Wiesbaden, 1946). 43 J. G. Droysen, Historik: Rekonstruktion der ersten vollsta ¨ ndigen Fassung der Vorlesungen (1857). Grundriss der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. P. Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1977). Two further volumes were planned but did not appear. I was given access to Leyh’s incomplete manuscript, and I have prepared an annotated edition in French, in three volumes: 1: Historik (1857); 2: Grundriss der Historik (1882) and Textes de jeunesse et gene`se de l’Historik (1828–56); 3: Textes de la maturite´ (1857–84) and Correspondance choisie (1828–84), in course of publication by Le Cerf, Paris. 44 H. W. Blanke and J. Ru ¨ sen (eds.), Von der Aufkla¨rung zum Historismus: Zum Strukturwandel des historischen Denkens (Paderborn, 1984); cf. the critical review by G. G. Iggers, History and Theory, 26 (1987), 114–21.

From Chladenius to Droysen

445

sources45 and critiques of historicism—by H. W. Blanke,46 D. Fleischer, H. Schleier,47 H. J. Pandel,48 F. Ja¨ger49, and S. Jordan.50 These publications have had considerable impact. They have certain features in common, in particular those of Blanke and Fleischer. They are conceived as histories of historiographical paradigms, and their central preoccupation is to show how the eclipse of Aufkla¨rungshistorie by nineteenth-century historicism has been reversed by the historische Sozialwissenschaft practised by the school of Bielefeld.51 They are largely inspired by T. S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, of 1962 (somewhat revised in a postscript of 1969, since become famous).52 The idea of ‘disciplinary matrix’ (disziplina¨re Matrix), elaborated in this connection by J. Ru¨sen, has articulated what has also become an attempt 45 See H. W. Blanke, Dirk Fleischer, and J. Ru ¨ sen, ‘Historik als akademische Praxis: Eine Dokumentation der geschichtstheoretischen Vorlesungen an deutschsprachigen Universita¨ten von 1750 bis 1900’, Dilthey-Jahrbuch, 1 (1983), 182–255; Blanke and Fleischer (eds.), Theoretiker der deutschen Aufkla¨rungshistorie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990); Blanke and F. Ja¨ger, ‘Historik in akademischer Praxis: Eine Dokumentation der geschichstheoretischen Vorlesungen und Seminaru¨bungen an deutschsprachigen Universita¨ten von 1900 bis 1914’, in Blanke (ed.), Transformationen des Historismus: Wissenschaftsorganisation und Bildungspolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Interpretationen und Dokumente (Waltrop, 1994), 272–308. For the period 1800–60, see the magisterial study by S. Jordan, Geschichtstheorie in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die Schwellenzeit zwischen Pragmatismus und klassischem Historismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), and his anthology, Schwellenzeittexte: Quellen zur deutschsprachigen Geschichtstheorie in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Waltrop, 1999). 46 H. W. Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1991). I am well aware that the theses put forward in this book have not met with general acceptance. I myself accept them only in part, but I wish to stress the scholarly standard of Blanke’s work, irrespective of whether one agrees or not with its conclusions. There are two levels of debate here which have not been properly distinguished. The fact that Blanke concentrates on the genre of the theory of history (Historik), and in particular on the school of Go¨ttingen should be central to any critique of the views he propounds. 47 D. Fleischer (apart from the publications cited above) and H. Schleier have been in charge of most of the critical new editions/reprints, mentioned above, in the series Wissen und Kritik (Waltrop, Spenner). 48 H. J. Pandel, Historik und Didaktik: Das Problem der Distribution historiographisch erzeugten Wissens in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft von der Aufkla¨rung zum Fru¨hhistorismus (1765–1830) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990); id., Mimesis und Apodeixis (Hagen, 1990). 49 F. Ja ¨ger and J. Ru¨sen, Geschichte des Historismus: Eine Einfu¨hrung (Munich, 1992); F. Ja¨ger, Bu¨rgerliche Modernisierungskrise und historische Sinnbildung: Kulturgeschichte bei 50 See above, n. 45. Droysen, Burckhardt und Max Weber (Go¨ttingen, 1994). 51 This is the weakest aspect of the undertaking and it has incurred criticism—see in particular O. G. Oexle, ‘Einmal Go¨ttingen—Bielefeld einfach’, Rechtshistorisches Journal, 11 (1992), 54–66, and the ensuing discussion in that journal. 52 German translation of the augmented edition: Die Struktur wissenschaftlichen Revolutionen (Frankfurt am Main, 1973).

446

Alexandre Escudier

to contextualize the evolution of the historical sciences in Germany since the eighteenth century. As a tool for abstract modelling, indeed for graphical projection, of the social and cultural locus of historical knowledge, the concept of ‘disciplinary matrix’ has helped to inventory and position in respect of each other the different aspects (social, political, cultural, cognitive, etc.) of a high-definition history of history. Ru¨sen distinguishes five principal factors in a dynamic process: (1) requirements of orientation in presentday societies (‘society’ remaining to be specified as different social groups and other formations within a national entity); (2) consequent on these a turning of attention by these societies towards societies of the past; (3) methodological directives for historical research; (4) modes of presenting the results of research; (5) function of historical knowledge within a given society with feedback affecting the structure of such knowledge.53 It is, no doubt, its dialectical dimension that accounts for the attractiveness of this schema. In 1984 Ru¨sen sketched out a revised conception of the history of history which took the shape of an ambitious description of the spiral relationship, within a society, between knowledge interests, the need to represent the past, the production of historical knowledge, the writing of history, diffusion and reception in public spaces (conveyed orally, in writing or by image) of knowledge so obtained, all this entailing shifts in the attention towards the past, that is in the mental horizon of historians and their public. Divested of the status of pure science, history thus found itself involved in a dynamic social context. This five-factor ideal type has since spurred a number of authors to think of the (historically relative) ‘scientificity’ of a given discipline as a complex process of chain interactions. And, whatever reservations the unwieldiness of the model may provoke, it is, I think, useful as a safeguard both against ideological reductionism, seeing the shape and results of historical investigation solely in terms of the political context,54 and 53 J. Ru ¨ sen, ‘Von der Aufkla¨rung zum Historismus: Idealtypische Perspektiven eines Strukturwandels, Von der Aufkla¨rung . . . (as in n. 44), 15–56, rev. version in id., Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur (Frankfurt-amMain, 1993), 29 ff. Ru¨sen had already sketched out a programme of research in terms of paradigm changes: ‘Fu¨r eine erneuerte Historik: Voru¨berlegungen zur Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft’, in F. Engel-Janosi et al. (eds.), Denken u¨ber Geschichte. Aufsa¨tze zur heutigen Situation des geschichtlichen Bewusstseins und der Geisteswissenschaften (Munich, 1974), 227–52. 54 The work of M. Asendorf is a good example of the limitations of ideological critique; see his Aus der Aufkla¨rung in die permanente Restauration: Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland (Hamburg, 1974); Geschichte und Parteilichkeit. Historisches Bewusstsein in Deutschland (Berlin, 1984).

From Chladenius to Droysen

447

the possible excesses of a postulate of epistemological discontinuities, too inclined to identify transitions from the pre-scientific to the scientific. The application of Ru¨sen’s disciplinary matrix has been essentially the doing of Blanke55 and Fleischer.56 Yet, somewhat paradoxically, the debate their work has occasioned has tended to concentrate on the question whether, on the one hand, one can justifiably speak of an epistemological hiatus between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiography, and, on the other, of an innovative critical line linking Enlightenment historiography to that of the second half of the twentieth century. These conflicts of interpretation have frequently had a bearing on the major classical questions of the history of science transposed to the history of history. Can one speak of the ‘scientifization’ (Verwissenschaftlichung and Entrhetorisierung) of historical studies between 1770 and 1830? To what extent does the calling of the historian become professionalized? Do these disciplines cross a qualitative threshold in that period in respect of academic institutionalization (the emergence of ‘historical seminars’ being a major development)? Many questions belong to the general history of historiography, and tend to combine heterogeneous levels of analysis: a cognitive level of subject matter held to be constitutive of the discipline (established by textual analysis); a socio-history of the political and moral determinants of its practitioners (ideological critique); an institutional and disciplinary level (history of universities, learned academies, etc., but also history of the discipline in respect of the professionalization and self-organization of the community of historians); and, finally, a detailed analysis of the transfers of knowledge across Europe (in particular Scotland, England, France, Germany, and Italy). But, so far, the exact terms of what constitutes the hiatus between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century have not been stabilized. The criteria for describing the paradigms supposed to overlap and finally succeed each other between, roughly, 1800 and 1820 have not been agreed, and it looks as though the debate will not be settled until the epistemological mechanisms of Aufkla¨rungshistorie on the one hand, and of historicism on the other, have been sufficiently analysed for a 55

See his theoretical introduction to Historiographiegeschichte (as in n. 46), esp. 29 ff. See H. W. Blanke and D. Fleischer, ‘Artikulation bu¨rgerlichen Emanzipationsstrebens und der Verwissenschaftlichungsprozess der Historie. Grundzu¨ge der deutschen Aufkla¨rungshistorie und die Aufkla¨rungshistorik’, Theoretiker (as in n. 45), 19–102, esp. 65 ff. 56

448

Alexandre Escudier

meaningful confrontation between them to be possible. Blanke and Fleischer have, nonetheless, tried to obtain this result by concentrating on the theoretical reflection on history (Historiken) as it has developed since the eighteenth century. Their choice of subject and focus of analysis stem from a general thesis concerning the evolution of modern German historiography. Retracing the emergence of an immense effort of self-awareness in historical studies in the eighteenth century has resulted in this case in the theory and methodology of history appearing as the major symptom of a process of scientifization and professionalization that began, so it is now believed, well before nineteenth-century historicism. There is clearly an attempt here to shift the debate from sterile moral condemnation to a diagnosis in terms of paradigm change. One thing at least is certain: it would be a pity if these quarrels of interpretation were to obscure the results achieved by recent research into Aufkla¨rungshistorie. Blanke and Fleischer have radically altered the field by retrieving a corpus of material largely ignored since the nineteenth century. Whether or not one agrees with what they make of it, they have in fact established an inventory of eighteenth-century history chairs and courses in the theory and methodology of history (based on university records), to which should be added lectures in the history of history: as early as 1713, and increasingly so from 1760 onwards, recommendations appear to combine the teaching of the theory of history with that of the history of the discipline.57 These two levels should be clearly distinguished because authors of theoretical reflections on history were not necessarily historians or holders of history chairs— they could be theologians, philosophers, or state scientists (Statistik).58 That is why the corpus of evidence has to extend beyond historical studies.59 Aware of these difficulties, Blanke and Fleischer have 57 In 1713 Jacob Friedrich Reimmann calls for a ‘Historie von der Historie’; see Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam Literariam insgemein und deren Teutschen insonderheit (Halle, 1713), i. 63; similarly Gatterer in 1761 and again in 1765; see ‘Von der Historie u¨berhaupt und der Universalhistorie insonderheit’, introd. to id., Handbuch der Universalhistorie nach ihrem gesamten Umfange von der Erschaffung der Welt bis zum Ursprunge der meisten heutigen Reiche und Staaten (Go¨ttingen, 1761) (repr. in Theoretiker (as in n. 45), 303); id., ‘Vorla¨ufige Einleitung’, in id., Abriss der Universalhistorie nach ihrem gesamten Umfange . . . , 1. Ha¨lfte, nebst . . . Einleitung von der Historie u¨berhaupt und der Universalhistorie insonderheit, wie auch von den hierher geho¨rigen Schriftstellern (Go¨ttingen, 1765), 1 ff. (repr. in Theoretiker, 312). 58 In the primary sense of the term: the synchronic study of the state describing its condition at a given moment in time; see M. Rassem and J. Stagl (eds.), Geschichte der Staatsbeschreibung: Ausgewa¨hlte Quellentexte 1456–1813 (Berlin, 1994). 59 As the thematic survey of Aufkla ¨ rungshistorie, pp. 450–463 below, attempts to do.

From Chladenius to Droysen

449

assembled evidence for lectures on the theory of history, a widespread practice in German universities, varying in scope and purpose: introductory courses for young students, rapid surveys of the history of the discipline, critical or edifying, encyclopedic courses on the theory/ methodology of history. All but ignored until this investigation, this kind of topography of theoretical discourse on history has obvious limitations: university registers of courses taught (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse) normally list no more than titles, so that content is beyond recall. The treatise of Georg Andreas Will (1727–98), Einleitung in die historische Gelahrtheit, found in manuscript and edited by Blanke, is in this respect a happy but exceptional discovery.60 The corpus of extant printed sources covers only in part what was taught in eighteenth-century German universities, so that the proportion of oral vs. written in the teaching of the theory of history is difficult if not impossible to determine. But a certain interaction between the two (on predictable lines) can, in fact, be observed. Some authors dispense orally what they have previously published. Some published texts serve as manuals for students (propaedeutics). A course on the theory of history, successful in oral delivery, will, in a revised form, become a written work of scholarship, etc. On the basis of this and by comparison with what is accessible today by way of printed texts of the period, one can form some estimate as to what proportion of this oral teaching at the university has been preserved for posterity in writing. It might be contended that this is of no great interest since so much has been lost by way of manuscript record of the detail of oral teaching. But the mere awareness of a lacuna that will probably never be filled is of some importance (i) because research tends to concentrate on written sources alone, and (ii) the identification of blind spots is an integral part of historical investigation. So much for an outline of the state of research. I shall now review the range of themes present in eighteenth-century theories and methodologies of history. This will proceed not as a general history of the discipline but in terms of a history of texts, and I shall confine myself to such as relate explicitly to the theory and the practice of history. I shall draw on the work of others for the social and institutional history of various branches of knowledge but I shall not attempt to relate the 60 See H. W. Blanke, ‘Georg Andreas Wills Einleitung in die historische Gelahrtheit (1766) und die Anfa¨nge moderner Historik-Vorlesungen in Deutschland’, DiltheyJahrbuch, 2 (1984), 222–65 (from the Will Nachlass in the Nuremberg Stadtbibliothek).

450

Alexandre Escudier

historiographical positions I shall be describing to the social and institutional situations of their authors. I reserve this aspect for another study, to proceed along the lines suggested by Blanke,61 and W. Weber’s work on the nineteenth century.62 II. AUFKLA¨ RUNGSHISTORIE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Explicitly directed against the rhetorical conception of history still current at the time, many texts of Aufkla¨rungshistorie deal with the methodology of history. They are part of a movement of reform in historical studies. The be-all and end-all of historical studies since Mabillon’s De re diplomatica, source criticism (Quellenkritik), is at the centre of attention. In 1752 Chladenius problematizes, under the notion of ‘historical channel’ (historischer Kanal),63 the mechanism of perception and the conditions of transmission to posterity of a historical event, before it crystallizes in fragmentary sources, which are the historian’s material. Moreover, numerous historians of religion, following Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), such as Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694–1755) or J. S. Semler, try to base current theological debate on a corpus of verified sources. This is partly an attempt to eliminate disagreements based on false sources but above all—and this is an urgent matter, as Semler notes—to separate the chaff from the grain, so as to diminish the mass of material the historian has to examine, often to no purpose, in order to arrive at valid results. What nineteenth-century historicism will postulate both as a requirement and a practice is beginning to establish itself: the critical examination of all available documents relating to any given event, establishing their genealogy and degree of reliability. Thus chains of documents are constituted—primary witness, secondary document, copy, forgery: each type is assessed for the kind of evidence it can yield. 61 See H. W. Blanke, ‘Historiker als Beruf: Die Herausbildung des Karrieremusters ‘‘Geschichtswissenschaftler’’ an den deutschen Universita¨ten von der Aufkla¨rung bis zum klassischen Historismus’, in K. E. Jeismann (ed.), Bildung, Staat, Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Mobilisierung und Disziplinierung (Stuttgart, 1989), 243–60. 62 See W. Weber, ‘Priester der Klio’: Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1800–1970 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985). 63 See Chladenius, Geschichtswissenschaft (as in n. 36).

From Chladenius to Droysen

451

Semler’s Versuch den Gebrauch der Quellen in der Staats- und Kirchengeschichte der mitlern Zeiten zu erleichtern . . . (1761) has had a considerable impact in this connection.64 Gatterer,65 Schlo¨zer, and many others follow suit, so that in the last third of the eighteenth-century source criticism enters the university, having earlier established itself in the learned academies.66 Most of these texts are declaratory in character but they reflect actual practice, for which there is direct evidence in the numerous treatises by Gatterer on the auxiliary sciences of history, the foundation, on his initiative, of a ‘historical institute’ in Go¨ttingen in 1766,67 and Schlo¨zer’s critical work on Swedish and Russian history.68 And there is more. At a time when in France Abbe´ Mably (1709–85) is still singing the praises of a humanist historiography faithful to the models of antiquity (obligation to truth, rules of fine style, invented speeches, etc.),69 Schlo¨zer sets forth his ideas on the procedures and the organization of the historian’s me´tier under the species of a manufacturing metaphor (Fabrik), inspired, no doubt, by the division of labour observable in various undertakings in this era of protoindustrialization.70 64 The subtitle specifies: Bey Gelegenheit der angefangenen Fortsetzung der Baumgartenschen Kirchengeschichte aufgesetzt; further, ‘Vorschla¨ge von einer neuen Sammlung, ¨ bersetzung der vornehmsten Quellen der alten Ausgabe, oder auch besondern teutschen U und mittlern teutschen Geschichte’, in id., Historische Abhandlungen u¨ber einige Gegen¨ ber den wahren Begriff der sta¨nde der mittlern Zeit . . . (Leipzig, 1782), 349–68; and ‘U Kirchenhistorie’, in id., Neue Versuche der Kirchenhistorie der ersten Jahrhunderte mehr aufzukla¨ren (Leipzig, 1788), 1–4. The last two texts are reprinted in Theoretiker (as in. 45), 579–89; 397–400. 65 See e. g. J. C. Gatterer, ‘Na ¨here Nachricht von der neuen Ausgabe der gleichzeitigen Schriftsteller u¨ber die Teutsche Geschichte’, in id., Allgemeine historische Bibliothek, viii (Halle, 1768), 3–22. This article, supplied with numerous footnotes, was reprinted in 1820 by Karl Georg Du¨mge, one of the first editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, in Archiv der Gesellschaft fu¨r a¨ltere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 1 (1820), 203–25. 66 A. Kraus is one of the first to have shown that, for quite a long time, it is the learned academies in Germany, not the universities, that were at the forefront of critical studies; see Vernunft (as in n. 25), 136–60. 67 On the inauguration, see Go ¨ttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, no. 29 (1767), 33. 68 See A. L. Schlo ¨ zer, Allegemeine Nordische Geschichte: Aus den neuesten und besten Nordischen Schriftstellern und nach eigenen Untersuchungen beschrieben (Halle, 1771); Probe russischer Annalen (Bremen, 1768); Nestor: Russische Annalen in ihrer slavonischen Grundsprache, 5 vols. (Go¨ttingen, 1802–9). 69 See Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De la manie `re d’e´crire l’histoire (1783), in Collection comple`te des œuvres de l’Abbe´ Mably (Paris, 1794–5; repr. Aalen, 1977), 12, 365–571. 70 Schlo ¨ zer envisaged the establishment of a kind of factory of learning, distinguished from existing factories, as Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte (as in n. 46), 131–2, has observed, by the absence of a manager/entrepreneur; there is only a space of general communication within which all workers participate in universal reason.

452

Alexandre Escudier

In this scheme of interrelated functions, with each depending on the one before it and conditioning the one after it, there is a distant anticipation of what Michel de Certeau has called the ‘historiographic operation’, which he articulates as the ‘relation between a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession or business, etc.), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature)’.71 Schlo¨zer writes as follows in 1784: I see the whole business of history writing as a big factory consisting of any number of parts, in which a hundred master craftsmen of entirely different trades and a thousand helpers have to work hand in hand. The dresser in the manufacture of cloth, the gilder in the building of a St Peter’s church, the history painter in historiography, are all valuable, necessary artists; but they are not much use in society unless others prepare the ground and collaborate. The history painter depends in particular on the history collector, the historical investigator, and the historical writer: these three do not need the painter and do their work regardless, but the painter needs them; and the three depend on each other.72

This is an emblematic moment in Aufkla¨rungshistorie, and it is worth dwelling on. With his seven functions in total,73 Schlo¨zer’s flight of metaphoric fancy—which consists in showing how the implications of a metaphor articulate a system of knowledge and its procedures— produces a synthetic image of the difference between the rhetorical and the ‘scientific’ conception of historiography. He seizes on Mably’s sole 71 See M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. and introd. by T. Conley (New York, 1988), 57. 72 A. L. Schlo ¨ zer, ‘Aus einem Schreiben . . . an den teutschen Herausgeber [der] Mably’schen Schrift’ (preface to G. B. Mably, Von der Art Geschichte zu schreiben, oder u¨ber die historische Kunst, translated and annotated by F. R. Salzmann (Strasbourg, 1784), ¨ ber die Geschichtsverfassung’ in Theoretiker (as in 13–14) reprinted under the title ‘U n. 45), 590 ff. at 594–5 (English trans. under the title ‘On Historiography’ (by H. D. Schmidt), History & Theory, 18 (1979), 41 ff. at 45–6, consulted): ‘Ich stelle mir na¨mlich die ganze Geschichtschreiberei als eine grosse unendlich zusammengesetzte Fabrike vor, wo hundert Meister von ganz verschiedenen Metiers, und tausend Handlanger, einander in die Ha¨nde arbeiten mu¨ssen. Der Appre´teur in der Tuchmanufaktur, der Vergolder bey Auffu¨hrung einer Peterskirche, der Geschicht-Maler bei der Historiographie, sinde all wu¨rdige, notwendige Ku¨nstler; aber ohne Vor- und Mitarbeiter, weiss ich nicht, was mit den Leuten in der bu¨rgerlichen Gesellschaft anzufangen sei. Der Geschicht Maler besonders ha¨ngt vom Geschicht-Sammler, dem GeschichtForscher, und dem GeschichtSchreiber ab: diese drei brauchen den Maler nicht, und tun gleichwol ihre Dienste, aber der Maler braucht sie; und unter sich ha¨ngen abermals alle 3 von einander ab.’ 73 In addition to the four detailed in the section quoted, there is ‘GeschichtMagazinist (history journalist)’, ‘Geschicht-Leser (history reader)’, and ‘Geschicht-Lerer (history teacher)’; on these Schlo¨zer does not elaborate here, but see below, n. 87.

From Chladenius to Droysen

453

figure of the history painter, and shows that it presupposes several other distinct, yet interdependent, functions without which it could not exist, and none of which it can perform itself.74 The specificity and the complexity of the modern historical method entail a collective organization and an institutional division of labour. No painter makes his own pigments, much less procures the primary materials for them. A cloth dresser is not expected to concern himself with sheep farming, or even spinning and weaving wool. Similarly scientific history, which Schlo¨zer presents as one type of production among others within civil society (bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft).75 History painting (visualization) is secondary to history writing, to say nothing of all that goes before the latter. To insist on it in isolation, as Mably does, is to reduce history to belletristic ‘fine stories’ (scho¨ne Geschichten).76 Schlo¨zer counters this by insisting on the number of distinct operations in the historiographical process. The history collector (Geschicht-Sammler) alone performs five.77 He has to know all the facts on a given subject, say Charlemagne—to be found in all the world’s archives (das ganze historische Weltarchiv),78 which implies a variety of languages and material forms of preservation. He will then extract and compile all these facts without exception, with the greatest care and regard for their context.79 Third, he must do this in such a manner that his reader can find at once what and how many attestations there are of a given fact, and which are the publications that 74 See the example given by Schlo ¨ zer, ‘Geschichtsverfassung’ (as in n. 72), 594, of the history of Charlemagne which, requiring various kinds of preliminary knowledge, could not be encompassed by one person. 75 The reception of Adam Smith in Germany is relevant here—cf. W. Treue, ‘Adam Smith in Deutschland: Zum Problem des ‘‘Politischen Professors’’ zwischen 1776 und 1810’, in W. Conze (ed.), Deutschland und Europa. Festschrift fu¨r Hans Rothfels (Du¨sseldorf, 1951), 101–33. 76 Another objection of Schlo ¨ zer’s is that Mably’s scho¨ne Geschichten are not comprehensible to the general public. Only scholars, who already know, can benefit from them. One should follow the natural order of the mind, and begin with easily accessible, ‘light’ stories (leichte Geschichten), preparing the reader for more complex ones, and finally, ‘fine’ ones. (‘Geschichtsverfassung’ (as in n. 72), 594. 77 ‘Geschichtsverfassung’, 595–7. 78 Ibid. 595. 79 Schlo ¨ zer, ibid., stresses that not a single fact must be left out, in case an apparently insignificant detail turns out, unpredictably, to be important: ‘Ein Factum kann, jetzo, a¨usserst unbedeutend scheinen, und u¨ber lang, oder u¨ber kurz, fu¨r die Geschichte selbst, oder doch die Kritik, entscheidend wichtig werden.’ This passage can easily be misinterpreted. It concerns source criticism, i.e. that a given detail, apparently insignificant, might turn out to be decisive for establishing the validity of a document—and not the larger question of historical perspective: that certain facts, considered secondary in current historical thinking, might come to the fore when that thinking changes.

454

Alexandre Escudier

reproduce them. Fourth, he will order chronologically the chaos of the material he has assembled, and articulate it for the reader’s convenience by marginal numbers, column headings, variations in typeface, etc. Finally, he will vouch on his honour that there exists no printed source that he has not consulted.80 The corpus of material so assembled can be further rationalized by establishing variorum texts: twelve editions of one chronicle can be compressed into one, with indications of variants; similarly, six chronicles found to copy each other can be represented by one, with indications of variants.81 The result of these efforts is a special type of written product that might be called e.g. Materia Historiae Caroli M.82 The task of the ‘Geschicht-Sammler’ is to make historical material manageable; that of the ‘GeschichtForscher’ is to test it. He submits it to lower and higher criticism (kleine Kritik, ho¨here Kritik), the former concerned with the accuracy and authenticity of documents, the latter with the truth value of any given testimony, and the selection of which is likely to be the true one if there are several contradictory ones.83 Here too, the task is an onerous one, and in some cases a lifetime will hardly be enough to reconstruct a chronicle, with its variants, copies, etc.84 Yet without this critical labour the historiographical edifice will be constantly at risk from accidental discoveries in unsurveyed material. Schlo¨zer’s idea is to put together critical, systematically ordered collections of sources, e.g. for antiquity, Materiae Historiae Aegyptiacae, Persicae, Parthicae, etc.85 After the collection and critical examination of the material comes the stage of constructing the narrative, the remit of the ‘GeschichtSchreiber’. Given the various expectations of the public and different types of historical knowledge, no unique narrative can be aimed at: Out of one Materia Historiae Aegyptiacae one can write ten different, equally valid Egyptian histories depending on whether one is writing for children, for young people concerned with learning, or for the reading public at large; depending on whether one’s topic is national character, state administration, or religion.86 80 ‘Geschichtsverfassung’ (as in n. 72), 596; Schlo ¨ zer admits that this is an ideal, hardly 81 Ibid. 597. to be attained; ibid. 596 n. 4. 82 Ibid. 596. 83 Ibid. 597 f. 84 Having worked for many years on Russian annals, Schlo ¨ zer speaks from experience. 85 Ibid. 598. 86 Ibid.: ‘Aus Einer Materia Historiae Aegyptiacae lassen sich 10 ganz verschiedene und doch gleich gute a¨gyptische Geschichten schreiben, je nachdem der Verf. fu¨r Kinder, oder fu¨r Ju¨nglinge, die zu Gelersamkeit zugezogen werden, oder fu¨r das grosse lesende

From Chladenius to Droysen

455

The facts are what they are, but any given narrative will embody a specific selection and a specific arrangement.87 Here, without explicit reference, Schlo¨zer adopts Chladenius’ theory of viewpoints,88 and while he is not a Pyrrhonist, he is not a naive objectivist either: he allows for the fact that, at the level of narrative, the past is shaped by the present— current issues and social demand. If the shaping is deliberate and controlled, it is compatible with enhanced historical knowledge. As for the ‘history painter’ (Geschicht-Maler), dear to Mably, Schlo¨zer will allow for him, not quite seriously, as a genius yet to arise, able to absorb whole libraries of the best history books, if such come to be produced by the cumulative efforts of ‘Geschicht-Sammler’, ‘Geschicht-Forscher’, and ‘Geschicht-Schreiber’, and to acquire, more rapidly than is possible at present, the widest historical knowledge. ‘He will then surpass— presumably in elegant writing—all the models of the Greeks, Romans, French, Britons, and Germans’.89 More generally, not just in relation to source criticism, and beyond the factory metaphor, a number of key notions appear towards 1760–70 that will dominate methodological discourse in history for about half a century and begin to disappear towards 1820. It is a mistake, still current in the literature, to attribute the critique of the naive empiricism allegedly characteristic of historical studies until the middle (indeed until the end) of the eighteenth century to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies of history. The notion of ‘pragmatic’ history, of Polybian descent, makes its appearance in the 1760s.90 A product of reflection on universal history, it sets itself up against the type of a largely Publicum schreibt; je nachdem er auf Charakter der Nation, oder auf Staatsverwaltung, oder auf Religion, ein vorzu¨gliches Augenmerk richtet.’ 87 It is to the problem of reception of historical writing and to the social purposes it may serve that Schlo¨zer’s categories of ‘Geschicht-Magazinist’, ‘Geschicht-Leser’, and ‘Geschicht-Lerer’ belong. Significant in this connection, but also in connection with other didactic questions (not only in respect of history) is Schlo¨zer’s polemic with Basedow in the foreword to his translation of Louis-Rene´ de Caradeuc de la Chalotais’s Essai d’e´ducation nationale ou plan d’e´tudes pour la jeunesse (1763): ‘Anmerkungen und Vorrede, die Unbrauchbarkeit und Scha¨dlichkeit der Basedowschen Erziehungs-Projecte betreffend’, L. R. de La Chalotais, Versuch u¨ber den Kinder-Unterricht (Gotha, 1771), pp. iii–xciii and 3 ff. at back of vol. Apart from the magisterial analyses of Pandel, Historik (as in. 48), 74 et passim, see E. Ku¨noldt, Caradeux de La Chalotais und sein Verha¨ltnis zu Basedow: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pa¨dagogik im 18. Jahrhundert (Oldenburg, 1897). 88 See p. 461 below. 89 ‘Geschichtsverfassung’ (as in n. 72), 598. 90 The best survey to date is G. Ku ¨ hne-Bertram, ‘Aspekte der Geschichte und der Bedeutungen des Begriffs ‘‘Pragmatisch’’ in den philosophischen Wissenschaften des ausgehenden 18. und des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv fu¨r Begriffsgeschichte, 27 (1983), 158–86.

456

Alexandre Escudier

compilatory, regional historiography by postulating a structure of interconnections tending towards an integrated whole. Reduced to a psychologism of individual actions, this programme of historiographical reform will disappear in the early nineteenth century. The prejudice against it persists to this day, witness the recent publications by D. Fulda91 and S. Jordan.92 Early nineteenth-century historians saw themselves as breaking with what was in effect a caricature of Enlightenment pragmatism. It deserves to be examined on its own terms. Under the catchword of ‘back to Polybius’,93 historians are encouraged, from the 1760s onwards, to bring to light not petty individual secrets, but interconnected layers of causality, so as to construct a rational account of historical evolution, in opposition to polyhistory and providentialist history, prevalent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the vocabulary of the period, ‘system’ is opposed to ‘aggregate’, and it is the passage from the latter to the former that is the characteristic proposition of this historiographical reform movement. In 1767 Gatterer speaks of the need to examine events (Begebenheiten) according to the ‘systems’ they belong to,94 and not as isolated items, having no apparent connection with each other. Gatterer coins the term nexus rerum universalis,95 to which a whole generation of historians will refer, the method of aggregation (Aggregat) functioning in this perspective as a counter-model, what must not be done (especially in universal history). A wide-ranging ‘aggregate’ may constitute an ensemble of sorts, but it will never be more than a collection (Sammlung), achieved by the juxtaposition (Nebeneinanderstellung) of special histories.96 A ‘system’, 91 D. Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst. Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860 (Berlin, 1996). 92 Jordan, Geschichtstheorie (as in n. 45). Jordan is excellent on the self-perception of 19th-c. historians as to what they were reacting against, but a history of history requires distance towards the positions one is analysing, and not unreflected identification with them, which is what Jordan falls into, thus failing to advance our comprehension of 18th-c. historiography. 93 To my knowledge, Johann David Ko ¨ ler (1684–1755), De historia pragmatica (Altdorf, 1714), is the earliest instance of a modern reformulation of Polybian pragmatism. His psychologizing conception of historical causality will be discarded in the Polybianism of the last third of the 18th c. 94 See J. C. Gatterer, ‘Vom historischen Plan und der darauf sich gru ¨ ndenden Zusammenfu¨gung der Erza¨hlungen’, in id., Allgemeine historische Bibliothek von Mitgliedern des k. Instituts der historischen Wissenschaften zu Go¨ttingen, i (Halle, 1767), 80. 95 Ibid. 85. 96 See A. L. Schlo ¨ zer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Go¨ttingen, 1772–3), repr., with introd. and comm. by H. W. Blanke (Waltrop, 1997), 14.

From Chladenius to Droysen

457

on the other hand—and hence the possibility of universal history free of the discontinuities of juxtaposition—will come about where a general view (‘allgemeiner Blick’)97 allows the historian both to relate his particular subject to the generic subject of history, mankind, and to determine the place and role of particular nations in the great revolutions of the world. The opposition of aggregate to system bears on intelligibility and form, not on source criticism. The material brought together in an aggregate may all be valid but, in respect of universal history, nothing of significance will result. The product will be a series of histories of individual nations according to their habitat, their language, or their political make-up.98 But the sum of such histories will not add up to universal history. For, however coherent or self-contained the history of a particular nation may appear, there is always a background in the shape of the ‘world’, or ‘mankind’, and it is structuring the relationship to this background that gives a ‘living representation of the whole’ and constitutes universal history as a system.99 Not that the world and mankind are here epistemologically on a par. Universal history has only one true subject, mankind, for which the world and its transformations is a stage and a set of conditioning causes. Universal history will thus be a genuine system when the components of historical diversity are reduced to the major revolutions that have taken place in the world, and articulated in relation to a unity, mankind.100 This entails, for the universal historian, a basic criterion of selection: not nature (its history belongs to a different science—see below), not the world (it is only a frame, though occasionally a constraining one), not all nations (they are only the subelements of mankind), but only such nations as have had an impact on 97 Ibid. 18. In this general view the historian scans the parts, derives a conception of the whole from them, in the light of which he rearranges them. One is put in mind of Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’. Schlo¨zer has no such term, but he is moving along similar lines—a general function of thought which different disciplines apply according to their particular 98 Ibid. 15 ff. topics. 99 See ibid. 18: ‘Nun stelle ich alle diese Theile neben einander, und der Annahme nach fehlte kein einziger Theil, der mo¨glich wa¨re: alle Theile wu¨rden ein Ganzes, alle Specialgeschichten wu¨rden eine Universalhistorie ausmachen. Aber es wu¨rde nur ein Aggregat, kein System von Weltgeschichte seyn: der Leser wu¨rde nur Sicyoner, Gersauer, und Indostaner, nicht die Welt, nicht das menschliche Geschlecht, kennen lernen. Ein Bild in Theile zerschnitten, und aufmerksam nach diesen abgesonderten Theilen betrachtet, gibt noch keine lebendige Vorstellung des Ganzen.’ 100 See ibid. 18–19: ‘Noch fehlet der allgemeine Blick, der das Ganze umfasset: dieser ma¨chtige Blick schafft das Aggregat zum System um, bringt alle Staten des Erdkreises auf eine Einheit, das menschliche Geschlecht, zuru¨ck, und scha¨tzt die Vo¨lker bloss nach ihrem Verha¨ltnisse zu den grossen Revolutionen der Welt’ (author’s emphasis); cf. 13.

458

Alexandre Escudier

the world or on other human groupings, the nature of this impact being designated by the generic term ‘revolution’. Thus for Schlo¨zer, as for most ‘pragmatist’ historians of his time, the designation of humanity as the principal subject of history meant giving history an axis of relevance, determining selection and elimination, and structuring man’s relationship to the entirety of his past. Universal history attends to some nations rather than others according to their importance in the transformations of the world.101 The unselected others rate no more than summary acknowledgement of their existence. This might seem arbitrary, if not ethnocentric, but it is nothing of the kind. The intention is to break with the traditional, uncritical pattern of significance and to substitute for it a structure of significance empirically arrived at by the examination of causes and effects. For example, monarchs will no longer be major figures merely by virtue of being such, but only in so far as their actions have had an impact on the world. Otherwise they will be no more than chronological markers (bloss wie chronologische Bestimmungen).102 This corresponds to the Enlightenment rejection of the deferential historiography of the Ancien Re´gime, but in structural rather than polemical terms. This critical hierarchy of importance will apply not only to objects but to the kind of information (Nachrichten) the universal historian will convey. It should be confined to what sheds light on the character of the nations singled out for attention. The rest is ‘dross’ (Schlacke), of no interest for universal history, though possibly of use to the Specialgeschichtsschreiber and the Kritikus in their respective orders of knowledge.103 This second selection will bear on the kind of sources to be used for universal history. Then comes the point of view of the system, the drawing of relationships that establish a whole. Passing from aggregate to system, the historian no longer treats nations as autonomous entities, tracing the individual development of each alongside that of others, but divides the past into homogeneous ‘epochs’, bunching several of these entities together. Endeavouring to go beyond the juxtaposition of parts scientifically established but still separate, Schlo¨zer isolates the need to uncover links between them, not hitherto perceptible (sichtbar).104 This

Schlo¨zer, Vorstellung (as in n. 96) 20. Ibid. 21: ‘So stehen ihre Namen nebst der Anzeige ihrer Geburts- und Sterbejahre in der Weltgeschichte, bloss wie die Namen gekro¨nter Taugenichtse in der Spe103 Ibid. 21–2. cialgeschichte, bloss wie chronologische Bestimmungen, da.’ 104 Ibid. 22–3. 101 102

From Chladenius to Droysen

459

tracing of links shifts the perspective of description: ‘ethnography’ is replaced by ‘chronography’—not each nation according to its own development, ‘lengthwise’ (nach der La¨nge), but several together within temporal segments according to the relationships between them, breadthwise (nach der Breite).105 Here aggregate and system do not exclude each other but are complementary: in order to be able to ‘read’ the world as universal history (logic of system), one has first to spell it out (logic of aggregate).106 This historiographical mutation, characterized by the requirement of an elevated vantage point (allgemeiner Blick) from which to survey the ‘whole’,107 is envisaged by most authors of the last third of the eighteenth century under the invocation of Polybius108—a Polybius held to have been the only author in the past to differentiate between ‘system’ and ‘aggregate’,109 and to understand—and remain himself misunderstood—that certain revolutions of the world (e.g. the effects of Roman conquest) require a ‘form’ radically different from that characteristic of most ‘specialized histories’ (Specialhistorien).110 This Polybian discrimination points to a universal history that is at once ‘poorer’, ‘richer’, and ‘more useful’.111 Reduced to essentials, causes, and effects, it sheds the undergrowth of erudition with which compilers (and polyhistorians) have burdened it. Discarding superfluous learning makes it ‘poorer’, but this very process brings to light hitherto unnoticed relationships 105 Ibid.; cf. 46. The notion of ethnography means here a particular type of description of peoples or nations as self-contained entities. For this notion and the rejection of monarchical axioms in Schlo¨zer’s historiography, see G. Mu¨hlpfordt, ‘Vo¨lkergeschichte statt Fu¨rstenhistorie: Schlo¨zer als Begru¨nder der kritisch-ethnischen Geschichtsforschung’, Jahrbuch fu¨r Geschichte, 25 (1982), 23–72. 106 See Schlo ¨ zer, Vorstellung (as in n. 96),  7 n. 18 (footnote added by Schlo¨zer in the 2nd edn. of Vorstellung, 1775, p. 237, quoted editorially by Blanke): ‘Aggregat muss voraus gehen, und System folgen: so wie etwa niemand eine lange Periode im Zusammenhange und mit Verstand lesen kann, der nicht vorher Buchstaben, Sylben und Worte derselben einzeln und zusammen lesen kann, und die Bedeutung einzelner Worte und Redensarten versteht.’ Schlo¨zer thinks of history itself under the figure of a book that one reads. This initial book is rehearsed in works of historiography from specific points of view. Hence the antithetical pairs, aggregate/system, length/breadth, spell/read. 107 Ibid. 23. 108 The various stages of the reception of Polybius in 18th- and 19th-c. theory of history will be discussed in a forthcoming article. 109 See Polybius 1. 4. 6–11, quoted in extenso by Schlo ¨ zer, Vorstellung (as in n. 96), 110 Schlo ¨ zer, Vorstellung, 23. 24–5. 111 Ibid. 25: ‘Eine Universalhistorie, nach diesem Ideal des alten Arkadiers, entha ¨lt eine andere, und sowol in der Materie als in der Form verschiedene Einrichtung, als sie bisher in den gewo¨hnlichen Handbu¨chern gehabt. Sie wird a¨rmer, reicher und brauchbarer’ (author’s emphasis).

460

Alexandre Escudier

which make for better intelligibility, and so enrich it and enhance its usefulness. This theoretical programme, with its focus on universal history, was to cause Aufkla¨rungshistorie to be criticized in the nineteenth century for privileging the Universalhistoricus at the expense of the Kriticus and of Specialgeschichten. But the fact remains that, against polyhistory, devoid of any structuring scheme, Aufkla¨rungshistorie formulated rules and procedures for what it claimed to be modern historical method: (i) to collect material (sammeln); (ii) select from it (auswa¨hlen) what is relevant to the historian’s range of interests and to current topicality;112 (iii) link to each other (verketten) the factual units established by source criticism, i.e. interpret them for purposes of explanation and understanding; and (iv) arrange (anordnen) the results of the investigation by specific techniques of exposition, governed in each case by the type of knowledge sought and the kind of public the historian is addressing. This last point deserves particular emphasis: Aufkla¨rungshistorie thematizes exposition, the presentation in narrative form of the results of research, as an epistemological problem. Not content with the humanist commonplaces of rhetoricized history, it postulates a critical view of the way historical narrative is constructed, and of its effect on the reader, both in terms of knowledge conveyed and of psychological impression. Of capital importance here are Chladenius’ reflections on narrative in his Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft (1752), as well as Gatterer’s reiterated approaches, from 1767 onwards, to the notion of ‘historical plan’ (historischer Plan).113 Moreover, the development of pragmatic historiography in the second half of the eighteenth century brings about a differentiation between historiography, the production of ascertained historical knowledge, and historiomathy, the communication and appropriation of such knowledge, and it is in terms of these two notions that the debate is conducted 112 Here Aufkla ¨ rungshistorie could be said to anticipate, with less terminological elaboration, what Droysen will call in 1857 ‘historische Frage’ and ‘diskussive Darstellung’, and what, at the beginning of the 20th c., Max Weber will single out as topics under the terms ‘Erkenntnisinteresse’, ‘Kulturinteresse’, and ‘Problemstellungen der Gegenwart’; cf. p. 478 below. 113 See J. C. Gatterer, ‘Vom historischen Plan und der darauf sich gru ¨ ndenden Zusammenfu¨gung der Erza¨hlung’, in id., Allgemeine historische Bibliothek, i (Halle, 1767), 15–89. Edited by Gatterer in Go¨ttingen, the two major historiographical journals of the period, Allgemeine historische Bibliothek (1767–71), and Historisches Journal (1772– 81), devote considerable space to the question of historical plan in both contemporary and earlier historical works.

From Chladenius to Droysen

461

between 1760 and 1830114 on the relationship between the theory (Historik) and the teaching of history.115 It is clear that there is nothing naively objectivist about the theory and methodology of history advanced by Aufkla¨rungshistorie, especially its ‘pragmatic’ tendency. It is far removed from theories of the mirror image (Abbildtheorie) developed in the nineteenth century, and more like some of the constructivist propositions of recent date. It is not content with source criticism but poses a variety of specified approaches to the past, and of ways of expounding them. This methodical pluralism is not a concession to a Pyrrhonist view of history. On the contrary, Gatterer,116 and others of his generation, adopt Chladenius’ theory of the ‘point of view’ (Sehepunkt), presented in 1748 and 1752, which, based on Leibniz’s monadology, is an attempt to counter the Pyrrhonist contention that history is incapable of the kind of hypothetico-deductive certainty achieved by the natural and the mathematical sciences.117 Chladenius maintains that the same object can give rise to different perceptions and narratives without compromising its truth. The theory of history based on this idea need not fear the necessarily fragmented nature of human perceptions of the world. Its purpose is to elaborate rules for constructing a view of the past critically integrating various partial witnesses (and hence not corresponding to any actual perception of it). Against the epistemological imperialism of the exact sciences,118 Aufkla¨rungshistorie

114 Friedrich Rehm (1792–1847) uses the pair historiography/historiomathy differently: the former is the art of historical composition, while the latter designates the domain of research—cf. the section on ‘Propa¨deutik’ in his Handbuch der Geschichte des Mittelalters, i (Marburg, 1821), 69 ff.; also his Lehrbuch der historischen Propa¨deutik und Grundriss der allgemeinen Geschichte. Zum Gebrauche bei academischen Vorlesungen (Marburg, 1830), 46 ff. for historiomathy; 65 ff. for historiography. 115 See Pandel, Historik (as in n. 48)—a basic work. 116 See J. C. Gatterer, ‘Abhandlung vom Standort und Gesichtspunckt des Geschichtsschreibers oder der teutsche Livius’, Allgemeine historische Bibliothek, v (Halle, 1768), 3–29. 117 See M. Scheele, Wissen und Glaube in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Studien zum historischen Pyrrhonismus in Frankreich und Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1930); M. Vo¨lkel, ‘Pyrrhonismus historicus’ und ‘fides historica’. Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987). 118 The history of this conflict is yet to be written. It goes much further back than the well-known debate from the 1850s onwards on erkla¨ren versus verstehen, Naturwissenschaften vs. Geisteswissenschaften. Droysen, Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) represent secondary reformulations, with Max Weber attempting to put an end to the debate by dismissing the opposition between explanation and comprehension as both sterile and illegitimate.

462

Alexandre Escudier

attempts to formulate a distinct regime of rationality entitling it to scientific status.119 Moreover, Aufkla¨rungshistorie anticipates some twentieth-century historiographical trends by breaking with the dominance of political history and extending historiographical interest to other domains. The dynastic historiography of the Ancien Re´gime (Regentengeschichte) is denounced for its uncritical assumption of significance,120 and a vogue sets in for a diversity of historiographical topics: trade, tobacco, banking, universities, brandy, technologies, food supply, even women and race.121 Not all of these topics are pursued with equal detachment (notably women and race), but the historiographical horizon undoubtedly becomes wider, the emancipatory impulse stemming from milieus engaged in the Aufkla¨rung.122 It should also be noted that this enlargement is balanced by a contraction: the foregrounding of secular history (historia civilis) leads to the relegation of the traditional genres of sacred (or divine) history and natural history, the former to a separate domain, the latter outside history altogether, to the natural sciences, where it is drawn upon occasionally as an aid in documenting this or that aspect of historical conditioning. In this rapid survey of Aufkla¨rungshistorie, I have, of course, stressed the innovative aspects. Obviously, the changes in the structure of historical knowledge were neither sudden nor all-embracing. Side by side with programmes of reform traditional themes continued—the Tacitean sine ira et studio, the requirement of truthfulness, probity, and elegant style. Nonetheless, most of the distinctive marks of a modern methodology of history make their appearance. These theoretical propositions, formulated—with the exception of Chladenius and Schlo¨zer— in a scattered order, will be partly taken up and systematized by the 119 Nor are explicative hypotheses necessarily avoided. Among the texts brought together by Blanke and Fischer in Theoretiker (as in n. 45), see e.g. F. W. Bierling, no. 2, x6, 164 ff.; S. J. Baumgarten, no. 4, 182; J. M. Schroeckh, no. 37, 613 and 618; 120 See p. 468 above. Anonymous, no. 1, 146–8. 121 See e.g. A. L. Schlo ¨ zer, Versuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Handlung und Seefahrt in den a¨ltesten Zeiten, translated from the original Swedish edn. of 1758 (Rostock, 1761); id., ‘Erste Bekanntwerdung des Tabaks in Europa, besonders in Deutschland’, in Schlo¨zer’s Briefwechesel, meist historischen und politischen Inhalts, iii (Go¨ttingen, 1778), 153–65; ‘Erfindungs-Geschichte des Branntweins’, ibid., vii (1780), no. 37, 3–14; C. Meiners (1747–1810), Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, 4 vols. (Hannover, 1788– 1800). The trend continued in the 19th c. (authors largely forgotten), e.g. J. H. M. Poppe (1776–1854), Geschichte aller Erfindungen und Entdeckungen im Bereiche der Gewerbe, Ku¨nste und Wissenschaften von der fru¨hesten Zeit bis auf unsere Tage (Stuttgart, 1837). 122 See Blanke, ‘Historiker’ (as in n. 61), for an excellent survey of Aufkla ¨ rungshistorie as an evolving discipline in its social and professional aspects.

From Chladenius to Droysen

463

following generation (Scho¨nemann,123 Feßmaier124) before sliding into oblivion, from which only the recent movement of rediscovery, sketched out in the first part of this essay, has rescued them.

III. N I NET EENTH - CENT UR Y H I ST OR I CIS M

(a) From Early to Classical Historicism—the Rankean Scheme By way of preamble to this third and last part of my essay it will be useful to distinguish between two radically different meanings of the term ‘historicism’ (Historismus). The common definition (which will also be the one used here for convenience) refers to the German historical school after Niebuhr, i.e. to a methodical empiricism, in the end quite banal in the sciences, combined with idealist presuppositions characteristic for nineteenth-century German historians (Ideenlehre).125 The second meaning is not tied to any particular historical school, Niebuhrian, Rankean, or other. According to the retrospective diagnostic offered by Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) in 1922,126 largely inspired by Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fu¨r das Leben of 1874, historicism is a cultural phenomenon characteristic of modernity. It consists in the historicization of sensibility in belief, thought,127 and action. The history of this enhanced sense of history is, for the most part, yet to be written.128 It belongs not so much to the history of the practice of history 123 Carl Traugott Scho ¨ nemann (1765–1802) attempted to systematize in an encyclopedic form the positions of Gatterer but did not get beyond a general plan; see his Grundriss einer Encyclopa¨die der historischen Wissenschaften zum Gebrauch seiner Vorlesungen entworfen (Go¨ttingen, 1799). 124 See Johann Georg Feßmaier (1775–1828), Grundriss der historischen Wissenschaften vorzu¨glich nach Gatterers Schriften zum akademischen Gebrauche bearbeitet 125 See below. (Landshut, 1802). 126 See E. Troeltsch, ‘Die Krisis des Historismus’, Die neue Rundschau, 33/1 (1922), 572–90; id., Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tu¨bingen, 1922). 127 Suffice it here to point to the question of the historicity of philosophy and to the eminently philosophical problems raised (since K. L. Reinhold, Hegel, E. Zeller, etc.) by the very idea of the history of philosophy; see the pioneering work of L. Goldsetzer, Die Philosophie der Philosophiegeschichte im 19 Jahrhundert: Zur Wissenschaftstheorie der Philosophiegeschitsschreibung und -betrachtung (Meisenheim/Glan, 1968), and the suggestive survey of the period 1880–1932 by M. Ha¨nel, ‘Problemgeschichte als Forschung: Die Erbschaft des Neukantianismus’, in O. G. Oexle (ed.), Das Problem der Problemgeschichte 1880–1932 (Go¨ttinger Gespra¨che zur Geisteswissenschaft, 12; Go¨ttingen, 2001), 87–127. 128 The work of O. G. Oexle in Go ¨ ttingen points the way; see the collection of his articles, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus. Studien zur Problemgeschichten

464

Alexandre Escudier

and its theory as to that of the existential and cultural consequences of the impact of relativity resulting from the recognition of the implications of historical change. It overlaps with the history of Nietzscheanism, but goes further back, to the eighteenth century, and comprises a number of factors—political, religious, intellectual, and artistic, which between them undermined the authority of traditional norms of human behaviour. Historicism in this second meaning expresses itself typically in the notion of ‘perspectivism’, greatly in vogue as a philosophical theme since Nietzsche, without much attention being paid to its eighteenth-century cultural and historiographical antecedents. My purpose in this part of the essay being to answer the question what constitutes the methodological core of historicism, I shall be concerned exclusively with the first of the two meanings of the term outlined above. Given the number and variety of nineteenth-century theoretical pronouncements on history, any reply with the slightest tinge of definitiveness is likely to be, if not partial, at least insufficient and reductive. For any statement counterexamples can be found. I shall nonetheless risk a schematization, and propose a general outline in order to elicit the logic of a disciplinary model. As for Aufkla¨rungshistorie, the examples chosen will be no more than illustration, in the hope that a detailed study of them would show their representativeness. After a period of transition, roughly 1800 to 1820, in which the remains of Enlightenment historiography overlapped with the forerunners of a historicist one,129 the genre of universal history finds itself completely rejected, with source criticism moving centre-stage as a methodological topic. All previous historiographical production becomes a priori suspect: lacking sound method, earlier historians had no immunity against legend. This gesture of refusal and methodical doubt signifies a programme: the new German historical school intends to reconstruct the entirety of historical knowledge on a sound critical base, beginning with the history of the main European nations. With the der Moderne (Go¨ttingen, 1996), and, in his footsteps, the doctoral thesis of A. Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des Problems (Go¨ttingen, 1992). I shall return briefly to this topic in my conclusion. 129 I cannot enter here into the detail of authors and positions. Let a list of names for this period of transition suffice: J. E. E. Fabri (1755–1825), A. H. L. Heeren (1760– 1842), L. Wachler (1767–1838), G. F. Creuzer (1771–1858), K. L. von Woltmann (1770–1817), K. H. L. Po¨litz (1772–1838), J. G. Feßmaier (1775–1828), K. von Rotteck (1775–1840), F. C. Schlosser (1776–1861), H. Luden (1780–1847), F. Ru¨hs (1781–1820), F. W. Tittmann (1784–1864), W. Wachsmuth (1787–1866), F. Rehm (1792–1847).

From Chladenius to Droysen

465

first two volumes of his Ro¨mische Geschichte, 1811–12, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) is the first major player in the field.130 Relegating early Roman history to the realm of legend, he becomes a model, soon to be drawn upon, notably by Leopold Ranke (1795–1886; von Ranke since 1865) who applies his method to modern history from the sixteenth century onwards. The latter’s work may be said to embody the essence of historicism, and I shall concentrate on him in order to show both the gulf that separates him from Droysen and the heterogeneity inherent in the movement itself. While still a history teacher at a provincial secondary school, the unremarkable Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder,131 in 1824 Ranke published two works jointly, one narrative, the other critical, one the finished edifice, a most exact reflection of reality, the other the scaffolding that led to it. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Vo¨lker von 1494 bis 1535,132 above all its preface, is rightly considered as Ranke’s discourse of method. Ranke claims to have constructed his narrative from original sources in the closest adherence to the paradigm of ocular witness. The method of using this basic material is set out in the companion volume, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber.133 In these two works, the obverse and the reverse of the historicist methodology of history, Ranke formulates the basic principles of his scholarship which he will follow throughout his life. First, in opposition, as he saw it, to Enlightenment historiography, modern historical science is not called upon to judge the past. It does not presume to offer lessons for living (magistra vitae),134 or to act as a moral tribunal awarding prizes: ‘History has been invested with the office of judging the past, and of instructing the contemporary world for the 130 The third volume of Ro ¨mische Geschichte appeared posthumously in 1832, with a preface by Johannes Classen. 131 The celebrated University of Frankfurt an der Oder had lately been transferred to Breslau, as a consequence of the foundation of the University of Berlin. 132 Only vol. 1 was published; revised edition (alteration of end-date in title to 1514), id., Sa¨mmtliche Werke, 33 (Berlin, 1874, repr. 1884); among the revisions is the change from ‘blos sagen’ to ‘blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen’. On this the best study remains W. P. Fuchs, ‘Was heisst das: ‘‘bloß zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen’’?’ (1979), in id., Nachdenken u¨ber Geschichte: Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze (Stuttgart, 1980), 54–81. 133 L. Ranke, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber: Eine Beylage zu desselben romanischen und germanischen Geschichten (Leipzig, 1824); re-ed., id. Sa¨mmtliche Werke, 34 (Berlin, 1874), and again in 1884; all subsequent references to the 1874 edn. 134 R. Koselleck, ‘Historia’ (as in n. 31), 55, has shown that Ranke still has recourse to this Ciceronian model ten years later, when he is editor of the Historisch-politische Zeitschrift (Feb. 1832 to Aug. 1836).

466

Alexandre Escudier

benefit of future years; the present essay attempts no such exalted function: it wishes merely to show what actually happened.’135 Second, historical exposition is strictly tied to the material. As against his French opposite numbers (e.g. Augustin Thierry), Ranke has little use for the novels of Walter Scott, greatly in vogue at the time: neither ways of understanding the past, nor grand hypotheses which they offer (e.g. territorial conquests and their long-term effects, like the Norman Conquest) have any appeal for him. He objects to the liberties the historical novel takes with source information and will not allow aesthetic considerations any weight against factual accuracy. Poetic invention is for him totally at odds with historical writing: ‘the strict exposition of the facts, however graceless and limited, is without doubt the highest law’ of the discipline.136 This principle, formulated in 1824 and repeated in 1874, will be reasserted by E. Bernheim (1850–1942) in his influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode of 1889.137 Ranke himself, together with Niebuhr, achieves canonical status as the founder of modern historiography in the late 1830s. These few methodological indications in Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Vo¨lker (of which, usually, only the wie es eigentlich gewesen is cited) become a procedure of uncompromising revision in Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber. Its subject is both earlier historiographical work and source criticism. Ranke’s purpose can be summarized in three points: (i) to justify the use of original documents and secondary authorities in the main work (stylistically still very much under the influence of Johannes von Mu¨ller (1752–1809); (ii) to supply a reliable bibliography of recent history; (iii) to initiate the constitution of a corpus of tested source material on the basis of which the history of modern times can be rewritten.138 The object is to introduce order into the congeries of sources, to define the status of each in relation to the facts, in a word to separate the true from the false. For criticizing the documents of the past means 135 See Ranke, Werke (as in n. 132), p. vii: ‘Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen der zuku¨nftigen Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen; so hoher Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwa¨rtiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen [sagen in 1824, see n. 132], wie es eigentlich gewesen.’ 136 Ibid.: ‘Strenge Darstellung der Thatsache, wie bedingt und unscho ¨ n sie auch sei, ist ohne Zweifel das oberste Gesetz.’ 137 It went through several editions: 2nd, fully revised, 1894; 3rd–4th, revised and enlarged, 1903; 5th–6th, revised and enlarged, under the modified title of Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, 1908. 138 See Ranke, Kritik (as in n. 133), p. iii.

From Chladenius to Droysen

467

above all converting their random diversity into a true diversity which reflects accurately, if redundantly, the original light of the facts.139 It is clear that the diversity of narrative sources stems from the diversity of intention on the part of historians of contemporary events. The remedy here is to establish the filiation of distortions, concentrating on historians who had had the greatest influence in transmitting them,140 for instance Beaucaire, followed uncritically by Sismondi in his Histoire des re´publiques italiennes du Moyen Age,141 or Guicciardini, taken more or less at face value from Bodin to Daru.142 The result of the scrutiny is to show the false pretences of authors such as Guicciardini: they cannot be treated as reliable sources but as interpretations, arbitrary and defective, of sources. Quoting them uncritically only perpetuates error.143 In an almost anachronistic return to the eighteenth century, Ranke invokes here the topos of ‘naked truth’, nackte Wahrheit, as the unconditional ideal of historiography.144 Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber is thus a foundational book, both for the master and for his pupils,145 and Ranke 139 This metaphor is very common in historiographical texts of the first half of the 19th c. and deserves a separate study; a brief sketch in my thesis (as in n. 1), 337 ff. 140 That the criterion of which historians should be subjected to critical scrutiny was their influence on posterity is shown by Ranke’s decision to include Machiavelli, who was not a real historian (‘kein eigentlicher Historiker’) cf. Kritik (as in n. 133), p. iv and ‘Anhang’, 151–74. For the rediscovery of Machiavelli in the 19th c., see A. Elkan, ‘Die Entdeckung Machiavellis in Deutschland zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Historische 141 16 vols. (Zu ¨ rich, 1807–18). Zeitschrift, 119 (1919), 427–58; on Ranke 453 ff. 142 See Ranke, Kritik (as in n. 133), 19; the work in question by Daru is his Histoire de la Re´publique de Venise, 7 vols. (Paris, 1819), 2nd edn., 8 vols. (Paris, 1821). 143 See Ranke, Kritik (as in n. 133), 30: ‘Erkennen wir klar, daß das unbedingte Ansehen, welches dies Buch [sc. von Guicciardini] bis jetzt genossen, ihm mit unrecht gewa¨hrt worden, daß es nicht eine Quelle, eine Urkunde, sondern allein eine Bearbeitung, und zwar eine mangelhafte zu nennen ist, so ist unser Zweck erreicht; so mu¨ssen die Sismondi aufho¨ren, unter jeder Seite den Guicciardini und immer den na¨mlichen zu citieren; sie wissen daß er nicht beweist.’ A. H. Horawitz (1840–88), writing in the 1860s, by which time Ranke and Niebuhr are firmly established as the guiding lights of historicism, sees this ‘destructive’ criticism of Guicciardini as parallel to Niebuhr’s treatment of Livy; see Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der deutschen Historiographie . . . XV. Jahresbericht u¨ber das k. k. Josephsta¨dter Obergymnasium fu¨r das Schuljahr 1865. Mit einem Programme (Vienna, 1865), 24. Horawitz’s little treatise, with only a local circulation, is a good indicator of the wider prevalence of historicism outside specialist circles. This kind of evidence has not, so far, received the attention it deserves. Only a thorough trawl through it will make it possible to relate credibly the analysis of major authors to the historiographical practice of historicism, which is today largely forgotten—so as to transform the history of classical history into a cultural history of historiography. 144 See Ranke, Kritik (as in n. 133), 24; H. Blumenberg, ‘Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie’, Archiv fu¨r Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960), 7–142 at 55: ‘Fast klingt es schon wie ein aufkla¨rerischer Anachronismus.’ 145 See Droysen’s acute summary, Historik (as in n. 43), 155.

468

Alexandre Escudier

was to repeat the formula of a documentary companion volume or appendix in many of his subsequent works.146 A whole generation follows suit: Wilhelm Do¨nniges (1814–72),147 Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95),148 Wilhelm Roscher (1817–94),149 and many others150 proclaim the virtues of source criticism. Methodological propositions and stated objectives stay more or less the same. To write the history of a given event (e.g. the First Crusade, Sybel’s earliest work) one must first examine all the texts relating to it from the time of its occurrence to the present. This documentation must then be dated and arranged in chronological order, so as to constitute a kind of genealogy and to place each document in chronological relation to the event. The resulting classification allows the historian to rate the material according to its value as witness—ocular, report at one remove, tertiary transmission (copies, counterfeits, legendary embellishments, etc). The factual having been separated from legendary accretion,151 a narrative can be attempted, not without informing the reader in a substantial 146 Apart from annexes—Beilagen or Anha ¨ nge—frequent in his works, Ranke compiled what he called Analecten, which usually consisted of two critical sections: (i) archival sources (ii) historiographical products; see e.g. Englische Geschichte, 8 ( ¼ Sa¨mmtliche Werke [hereafter in this note SW] 21, 113 ff.). This order is sometimes reversed, as in Franzo¨sische Geschichte, 5 ( ¼ SW 12), or in Geschichte Wallensteins (SW 23, 317 ff.); see also Zwo¨lf Bu¨cher preußischer Geschichte (SW 27/28, 569 ff.), Die Osmanen und die Spanische Monarchie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (SW 35/36, 529 ff.), Die ro¨mischen Pa¨pste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, 3 ( ¼ SW 39, 3 ff.), Serbien und die Tu¨rkei im 19. Jahrhundert (SW 43/44, 523 ff.), Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege 1791 und 1792 (SW 45, 251 ff.). Moreover, some volumes of SW are simply editions of sources, with or without introduction and/or commentary. Thus Franzo¨sische Geschichte, 6 ( ¼ SW 13) is a selection of letters of the Princess Palatine (Elizabeth Charlotte d’Orle´ans, 1652–1722). ‘Es sind Belege der Erza¨hlung’, writes Ranke in the preface to the first edition (1861 ¼ SW 13, p. viii), but they can also be read for their own sake. For this arrangement see also Englische Geschichte, 9 ( ¼ SW 22), and Die deutschen Ma¨chte und der Fu¨rstenband: Deutsche Geschichte von 1780 bis 1790 (SW 31/32, 457 ff.) 147 Wilhelm Do ¨ nniges, Kritik der Quellen fu¨r die Geschichte Heinrichs des VII. des Luxemburgers (Berlin, 1841). 148 Heinrich von Sybel, Geschichte des 1. Kreuzzugs (Du ¨ sseldorf, 1841; 2nd rev. edn., Leipzig, 1881). 149 Wilhelm Roscher, Klio: Beitra ¨ ge zur Geschichte der historischen Kunst I: Prolegomena. Leben, Werk und Zeitalter des Thukydides. Mit einer Einleitung zur Aesthetik des historischen Kunst u¨berhaupt (Go¨ttingen, 1842). 150 See Weber, ‘Priester’ (as in n. 62), for 19th-c. genealogies of master/pupil; also S. Jordan’s fine work (Geschichtstheorie, as in n. 45). 151 The documentary value of the latter receives no recognition at this stage, e.g. for the history of mentalities (this is very clear in Sybel, but also in others). As so often, there is a price to pay for methodological innovation. This pattern of invention/exclusion will be my red thread in a general history of modern historical method structured in terms of a history of controversies, as has become habitual in the history of science.

From Chladenius to Droysen

469

introduction about the sources used, with indications of lacunae, and of what remains to be done. The transition from source criticism to the construction of narrative is thus hardly thematized: Rankean historicism proceeds on the assumption that the mere accumulation of fact accurately established on an archival basis generates of itself good history. Ranke takes an optimistic (Droysen will soon say naive) view: ‘I see the time coming when modern history will be based . . . entirely on ocular witness and on the most authentic and immediate sources.’152 This preponderance of source criticism was embodied institutionally. Historical seminars were set up, modelled, no doubt, on the eighteenthcentury philological seminars,153 but departing from their model to assert the autonomy of the science of history.154 Contrary to received wisdom, the public institutionalization of historical seminars in the universities did not occur until the last third of the nineteenth century. In the years 1820–60 they are in the nature of small private groups formed around a distinguished scholar (G. A. H. Stenzel in Breslau, L. Ranke in Berlin, J. G. Droysen first in Kiel, then in Jena, G. Waitz in Go¨ttingen, H. von Sybel and F. Rehm in Marburg, etc.). Moreover, in continuation of the erudite work of the learned academies and the leading universities of the eighteenth century, numerous publication programmes were launched, some under private patronage—e.g. the Monumenta Germaniae Historica initiated by the patriotically motivated Baron H. F. K. vom Stein (1757–1831) in 1819;155 others under the 152 The complete passage, since rubbished from many quarters, is as follows: ‘Ich sehe die Zeit kommen, wo wir die neuere Geschichte nicht mehr auf die Berichte, selbst nicht der gleichzeitigen Historiker, außer in so weit ihnen eine originale Kenntniß beiwohnte, geschweige denn auf die weiter abgelegten Bearbeitungen zu gru¨nden haben, sondern aus den Relationen der Augenzeugen und den echtesten unmittelbarsten Urkunden aufbauen werden. Fu¨r die behandelte Epoche ist diese Aussicht schon nicht mehr fern’; Ranke, Sa¨mmtliche Werke, 1 (1874), pp. ix–x; similar statements in Vorlesungseinleitungen, ed. V. Dotterweich and W. P. Fuchs, Aus Werk und Nachlass, iv (Munich, 1975), 147 (summer 1841); 155 (summer 1844). 153 Those of C. G. Heyne (1729–1812) in Go ¨ ttingen, F. A. Wolf (1759–1824) in Halle, and C. D. Beck (1757–1832) in Leipzig. There were two types of seminar: a private one in which a few interested students would work under the direction of a scholar (Beck, begun in 1784), and a public one set up within the framework of the university, with a programme and research grants (Wolf, begun in 1797). Beck’s seminar, attended by Ranke, became public in 1809. 154 More so as historische U ¨ bungen, beginning in the 1820s, and as historische Gesellschaften, beginning in the 1840s—cf. H. J. Pandel, ‘Von der Teegesellschaft zum Forschungsinstitut: Die historischen Seminare vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Kaiserreichs’, Transformationen des Historismus (as in n. 18), 1–31. 155 More exactly, it is the Gesellschaft fu ¨ r a¨ltere deutsche Geschichtskunde that is founded in 1819, in Frankfurt-am-Main, and it is the title of the first volume of sources

470

Alexandre Escudier

aegis of a ruler through local academies of sciences—e.g. the Historische Kommission in Munich in 1858.156 More and more journals focusing on history as an autonomous discipline begin to appear.157 In 1844 W. A. Schmidt (1812–87) founded Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichtswissenschaft, which became Allgemeine Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichte in 1846, and disappeared in 1848. In 1859 Sybel founded Historische Zeitschrift,158 the principal organ of the discipline, still extant, and a model for similar publications in other countries, notably Revue historique in France, founded in 1876. Intradisciplinary networks were established, with source criticism being both applied to specific documents and reflected on theoretically. But, reiterated professions of empiricism notwithstanding, all this had a clearly political, and, indeed, a theological dimension. Political, in so far as the passion for Antiquity of the French Revolution—for ancient political forms which it tried to adopt by literal imitation—provoked lasting hostility among German historicist historians in the early nineteenth century. The revolutionaries had shown no sense for the specificity of time and place. Niebuhr denounced this in 1811 as the ‘paralogism of homonymy’159 (Volney had said something similar in his Lec¸ons d’histoire of 1795160) . The historicist programme came polemically into its own: fundamental revision of the whole of historical knowledge on the basis of a corpus of critically sifted sources, on the strength of which careful interpretation will establish the identities and the differences published under its supervision in 1826 by G. H. Pertz (1795–1876) that will give its name to the undertaking; see cf. H. Bresslau, Geschichte der ‘Monumenta Germaniae Historica’ (Hannover, 1921); H. Fuhrmann, ‘Sind eben alle Menschen gewesen’: Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, dargestellt am Beispiel der ‘Monumenta Germaniae Historica’ . . . (Munich, 1996). 156 See H. von Sybel and W. von Giesebrecht (1814–89), Die Historische Kommission bei der k. bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1858–1883 . . . (Munich, 1883); Die Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1858–1958 (Go¨ttingen, 1958); Die Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1858 bis 1983. In memoriam Theodor Schieder (Munich, 1984). 157 See Salzbrunn, Studien (as in n. 26) 158 See T. Schieder (ed.), Hundert Jahre Historische Zeitschrift 1859–1959 (Munich, 1959 ¼ Historische Zeitschrift, 189). 159 ‘Paralogismus der Homonymie’, Ro ¨mische Geschichte, i. 8–9. 160 C. F. de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), Lec ¸ons d’histoire prononce´es a` l’Ecole Normale en l’an trois de la Re´publique franc¸aise (Paris, An VIII). The subtitle is, for my purpose, quite eloquent: ‘Ouvrage e´le´mentaire, contenant des vues neuves sur la nature de l’Histoire; sur le degre´ de confiance et le genre d’utilite´ dont elle est susceptible; sur l’abus de son emploi dans l’e´ducation de la jeunesse; et sur le danger de ses comparaisons et de ses imitations ge´ne´ralement vicieuses en matie`re de gouvernement.’

From Chladenius to Droysen

471

between past and present. It was the differences that were foregrounded, giving the whole undertaking an anti-revolutionary direction. Only by disregarding the basic temporal differential between one body politic and another could one envisage the transplantation of the American or of the French Revolution onto German soil. The transplant would be rejected, and violently so (Savigny, Ranke161). On this point historicist methodology (Quellenkritik), political legitimism, and a historicoorganicist conception of law are three facets of one intellectual formation reacting against the French Revolution and movements of reform inspired by it. Niebuhr will be literally thunderstruck by the 1830 ´eclair de Juillet (Michelet), and will not long survive it: the democratic folly of imitation had erupted again. Also, historicism takes on a distinctly theological colouring. Wolfgang Weber speaks of ‘priests of Clio’ in his sociological study of the movement.162 The phenomenon is, no doubt, partly attributable to the preponderance—as against the eighteenth century—of pastors’ sons among historians, or at least of a strongly fideist family background. This conditions certain basic traits of thinking, emblematically represented in Ranke. At the begining of the 1820s Ranke is at the crossroads: should he become a pastor or a historian? His option for the latter was guided by the idea that attending to the details of Creation was an essentially religious activity, given that the least fragment of reality was part of a divinely ordained whole. The historical process is a ‘hieroglyph of God’ which it is the historian’s task to decipher with the aid of historical method and with the internal disposition of a priest.163 A second basic trait, which enables the historical sciences to assert their autonomy over philosophies of history (Hegel, Fichte,

161 Ranke’s famous ‘Politisches Gespra ¨ch’, Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, 2 (1833), 775–807, a disguised mise-en-sce`ne of a discussion between F. C. von Savigny (1779– 1861) and Ranke, is quite clear in this respect. 162 See Weber, ‘Priester’ (as in n. 62). 163 See Ranke’s letter to his brother Heinrich, Mar. 1820, Das Briefwerk, ed. W. P. Fuchs (Hamburg, 1949), 18: ‘Fichte sagt ja schon, denk’ich, daß dies Leben eines vergangenen Lebens, na¨mlich seiner Idee, dies innerliche Treiben und Kennenlernen des Altertums in seiner Tiefe zu Gott fu¨hrt . . . In aller Geschichte wohnt, lebet, ist Gott zu erkennen. Jede Tat zeuget von ihm, jeder Augenblick prediget seinen Namen, am meisten aber, du¨nkt mich, der Zusammenhang der großen Geschichte. Er steht da wie eine heilige Hieroglyphe, an seinen A¨ussersten aufgefaßt und bewahrt, vielleicht, damit er nicht verloren geht ku¨nftigen sehenderen Jahrhunderten. Wohlan! Wie es auch gehe und gelinge, nur daran, daß wir an unserm Teil diese heilige Hieroglyphe enthu¨llen! Auch so dienen wir Gott, auch so sind wir Priester, auch so Lehrer.’

472

Alexandre Escudier

Schelling) is the positing of a direct, creaturely relation to God. ‘Every epoch is immediate to God’, Ranke declared in 1854.164 As against a panlogical conception of history for which history is a system of abstract mediations, Ranke asserts that nations are ‘ideas of God’,165 and that it is all but blasphemous to see in any object of historical enquiry anything higher than itself and to establish hierarchies of historical importance. As for individuals who are all equal before God, to suggest any difference of value between generations or peoples is to impute an injustice to the Creator.166 The various historical individualities— peoples, nations, states, etc.167—realize the concept of humanity in a multiple refraction of the one light of God.168 The idea of progress is relative: it applies only in a material sense. In the spiritual order, every man being made in the image of God;169 no historical epoch can be considered superior to any other.170 The Hegelian theodicy of the Concept is a pagan usurpation—and Droysen is its prophet (Ranke’s reiterated remark in private, so great was the disagreement between the two on this and other points). 164 ‘Jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott’; U ¨ ber die Epochen der neueren Geschichte (first published in 1888), ed. T. Schieder and H. Berding, in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ii (Munich, 1971), 59–60. 165 Used repeatedly; see e.g., Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 130; 316. 166 See Ranke, Epochen (as in n. 164), 62–3: ‘Die Gottheit . . . denke ich mich so, daß sie, da ja keine Zeit vor ihr liegt, die ganze historische Menschheit in ihrer Gesamtheit u¨berschaut und gleich wert findet. Die Idee von der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes hat allerdings etwas Wahres an sich, aber vor Gott erscheinen alle Generationen der Menschheit als gleichberechtigt, und so muß auch der Historiker die Sache ansehen.’ Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 260: ‘Der Gedanke, daß jede vorhergehende Generation im allgemeinen von den folgenden u¨bertroffen [werde,] mithin die letzte die bevorzugte, die vorhergeheneden aber nur die Tra¨ger der folgenden seien, wu¨rde fast eine Ungerechtigkeit der Gottheit sein.’ The best analysis is still that of F. Meinecke, ‘Deutung eines Rankewortes’ (1942), in id., Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1959), 117–39, esp. 119–25; 137. 167 It is this theology of historical individualities that inspires Ranke’s historiography of the ‘great powers’, its conceptual instrumentarium deriving from Thucydides and Machiavelli; see ‘Die großen Ma¨chte (Fragment historischer Ansichten)’, Historischpolitische Zeitschrift, 2 (1833), 1–51. Ranke’s major narrative works on German Reformation history, on modern French, Prussian, and English history constitute the progressive realization of the ideas contained in that important article. 168 See L. Ranke, Fru ¨ he Schriften, ed. W. P. Fuchs, Aus Werk und Nachlass, iii (Munich, 1973), 496: ‘Die Farben wechseln, das Licht ist dasselbe, das sich in ihnen bricht’ (1818). 169 See Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 133, 141, 257–60; Epochen (as in n. 164), 68 ff., 445 ff. 170 L. Ranke, ‘Idee der Universalhistorie’ (1831–2), Vorlesungseinleitungen, 72–89, esp. 74 and 87.

From Chladenius to Droysen

473

Finally, yet another theological motif emerges in the last third of the nineteenth century. For Ranke, humanity is not a ‘becoming God’, as Hegel would have it.171 God’s point of view172—here Ranke’s thought has parallels in K. L. Woltmann173 and K. C. F. Krause174—the point of maximum objectivity from which the entirety of historical relationships would be perceptible, is beyond human ken.175 Combining as many partial points of view as possible, the historian may try to approach it but, finite being that he is, he will never attain it: ‘God alone knows universal history.’176 Its major trends can never be fixed in a concept, they can at best be described,177 any attempt to achieve the former representing for Ranke not only the blasphemy of ‘progress’, but the Promethean (i.e. Hegelian) temptation of God’s point of view. Thus universal history, conceivable if not attainable through the reform of national historiographies, acquires theophanic status. While the eighteenth century saw in it a way of rationalizing memory, of comprehending the logic of the evolution of the world,178 Rankean historicism makes of it a locus of contemplation of the work of God, not one science among others but the science par excellence, die go¨ttliche Wissenschaft.179 171 See Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen, 188: ‘Die Geschichte auf diesem [sc. hegelschen] Standpunkte ist eigentlich eine Geschichte des werdenden Gottes.’ 172 See Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen, 35–6. 173 See K. L. Woltmann, ‘Von der historischen Arbeit und vom Urteil u ¨ ber dieselbe’, Geschichte und Politik, 5. Jahr (Berlin, 1804), 2, 252–76 at 257: ‘Das ho¨chste historische Werk wa¨re die Darstellung alles Geschehnen.’ 174 See K. C. F. Krause (1781–1832), Handschriftlicher Nachlass IV,1,1, Die reine d.i. die allgemeine Lebenlehre und Philosophie der Geschichte zur Begru¨ndung der Lebenkunstwissenschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1843), 6: ‘Das Eine Leben ist . . . der eigentliche Gegenstand der ganzen Geschichtswissenschaft. Da nun das Leben . . . als unendlich sich erweist . . . die Geschichtswissenschaft eine unendliche Aufgabe ist. Der endliche Geist kann von dieser unendlichen Wissenschaft . . . nur einen endlichen, beschra¨nkten Theil zustandebringen. Wer aber sich zu dem Gedanken Gottes erhoben hat, Wer Gott erkannt hat . . . Der anerkennt . . . dass . . . die Eine ganze Geschichtswissenschaft nur bei Gott ist.’ 175 See Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 199; 259. 176 See Ranke, ‘Universalhistorie’ (as in. 170), 83: ‘Man sieht, wie unendlich schwer es mit der Universalhistorie wird . . . wie wollen wir nur den Kausalnexus allenthalben ergreifen; geschweige das Wesen der Totalita¨t ergru¨nden. Diese Aufgabe durchaus zu lo¨sen, halte ich fu¨r unmo¨glich. Die Weltgeschichte weiß allein Gott.’ 177 See Ranke, ‘Epochen’ (as in n. 164), 66. 178 See the 18th-c. theme of Versinnlichung, making sense through the senses and reason of the historical evolution of mankind. It is found in Schlo¨zer, Vorstellung (as in n. 10), 45 ff., and in other authors included in Blanke/Fleischer’s Theoretiker (as in n. 45): J. G. Sulzer, no. 9, x42, 291; G. A. Will, no. 13, x9, 315, and in particular x95, 341; C. R. Hausen, no. 10, 302; J. G. A. Galletti, no. 45, 724. 179 See Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 199 ff. and note h (lecture of 1848).

474

Alexandre Escudier

We are here, I think, at the heart of the historicist credo: absolute objectivity is an unattainable ideal—the creaturely historian has no vantage point over against Creation—but it has a regulative function which points to the possibility of gradually constructing a panoramic view of history based on the observable interplay of political forces. This trait of historicism—the preponderance of an optical schema—was noted at the end of the nineteenth century by P. Yorck von Wartenburg in his correspondence with Dilthey,180 and the observation was taken up by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit (1927).181 Yorck called Ranke ein großes Okular. This theologically grounded model of visuality involved difficulties and limitations which attracted criticism in the last third of the nineteenth century, in particular on the basis of Droysen’s Historik. Borrowing its analytical procedures from classsical philology, historicist history remained a textual science, based on written documents, not excluding narratively structured ones. The focus was on the truth value of ocular testimony, which tended to exclude events or phenomena whose occurrence was not directly perceptible to the senses. In spite of criticisms put forward by Heeren,182 August Boeckh (1785–1867),183 and Droysen pointing out the need to include ancient trade and economy in the historian’s remit, a whole range of phenomena—notably longue dure´e socio-economic and intellectual movements—remain outside the purview of historicist enquiry, and will only begin to attract attention in the 1880s. Moreover, beside this narrow canon of relevance in terms of objects of enquiry, historicism finds itself in an almost complete impasse on the question of interpretation. Few and far between are the authors who draw attention to historiographical postulates and the conditions of their emergence, which determine, mostly without reflection on his part, the historian’s approach to a particular subject at a particular time, and the cognitive tools at his disposal. This methodological blindness or deafness 180 See W. Dilthey, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg 1877–1897, ed. S. von der Schulenburg (Halle/S., 1923), 59–60 (letter of 6 July 1886). 181 Sein und Zeit x77, where Yorck’s letter is quoted, is a mosaic of quotations from the Dilthey/Yorck correspondence. 182 See A. H. L. Heeren, Ideen u ¨ ber die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Vo¨lker der alten Welt, 4 vols., 3rd edn. (Go¨ttingen, 1815). 183 See A. Boeckh, Die Staatshaltung der Athener, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1817); id., Metrologische Untersuchungen u¨ber Gewichte, Mu¨nzfu¨sse und Masse des Alterthums in ihrem Zusammenhange (Berlin, 1838).

From Chladenius to Droysen

475

is partly self-induced, the result of rejecting, on grounds of critical rigour, what Gatterer and Schlo¨zer called the nexus rerum, or the System der Begebenheiten of an age. While his colleagues concentrate (at least in theory) on establishing individual facts from such traces (mostly textual) as they can find, Droysen puts forward the thesis that it is relationships in time between individual facts, i.e. the meaning of historical processes, that constitute the true object of historical enquiry. The facts themselves (Tatsachen) are only a transitional stage of that enquiry, and interconnections first emerge from it—they will not be found in any source, least of all a textual one. Droysen reverts to the notion of Zusammenhang, an ensemble of relationships other than merely chronological: to uncover it is the task of interpretation, which Droysen places at the centre of historical method.184 This brings him into direct opposition to the strictly political historiography of his time and lays the ground for other types of historical enquiry (e.g. the history of commerce, a paradigmatic instance). Other aporiai of historicism stem from its idealist and objectivist leanings. The theory of ideas (Ideenlehre) is an impediment.185 It will not be attacked until about 1900, mainly by Karl Lamprecht and his followers. Its source may have been Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers of 1821,186 but the way historicist historians used it soon made of it something else: the notion that the essence of historical enquiry is an untiring quest for the Ideas of God (or ‘historical individualities’) which reveal themselves in time and space. Despite programmatic declarations and claims to kinship, this was far removed from the criticist tenor of Humboldt’s text (inspired by Kant’s theory of regulative ideas and the theory of imagination in the Critique of Judgement).187 The epistemological status of these ‘Ideas’—at once empirical (in respect of the objects of enquiry) and theoretical (in respect of the enquiring subject)—was never made explicit by historicism. A theologizing idealism never properly worked out was coupled unreflectingly with the exaltation of source criticism. Not surprisingly, the result was a naive objectivism professing the possibility of a mirror-like reflection See J. Ru¨sen’s judicious analysis, Konfigurationen (as in n. 53), 259. See the classical study by J. Goldfriedrich, Die historische Ideenlehre in Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften, vornehmlich der Geschichtswissenschaft und ihrer Methoden im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1902). 186 See W. von Humboldt, Werke in fu ¨ nf Ba¨nden, i (Darmstadt, 1960), 585–606; Eng. trans., History and Theory, 6 (1967), 57–71. 187 See R. A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the ‘Critique of Judgment’ (Chicago, 1990). 184 185

476

Alexandre Escudier

of reality (Abbildtheorie). The 1820s mark the abandonment of the hermeneutical openings initiated by Chladenius’ theory of the ‘point of view’: the filters of interpretation cease to be a topic, while there is a return to the pre-critical one of what is morally required of a historian, neither fear nor favour, Tacitus’ sine ira et studio.188 This amounts to no methodological rule; the ethos,189 constantly reaffirmed, of a corporation, that of historians, functions in lieu of a theory of knowledge.190 Likewise, the problem of the construction of historical narrative receives no theoretical attention other than reflections on literary accomplishment which do not go beyond the appreciation of individual talent,191 and thus do not generate any formalized, transmissible discourse on method. Talent and taste constitute the field.

(b) Droysen’s Historik—Point of Arrival and Epistemological Break Between 1857 and 1882 J. G. Droysen lectured, first in Jena, then in Berlin, on the ‘Encylopedia and methodology of history’. Starting from the basic principles of historicism, he offered a comprehensive review of the gaps and difficulties in the theory of modern historiography. This 188 The examples are many; cf. e.g. Ranke, Vorlesungseinleitungen (as in n. 152), 458–9: ‘Und die Frage ist immer, ob die nahe Beziehung, in der man zu den Dingen steht, es mo¨glich macht, ihn mit der Unbefangenheit und Objektivita¨t zu behandeln, die . . . der Zweck ist und selbst eine moralische Pflicht. Historische Unbefangenheit ha¨ngt nicht so sehr, wie man glaubt, von der Na¨he und Ferne der Gegensta¨nde ab: sie fordert u¨berhaupt eine Erhebung des Gemu¨tes u¨ber alle perso¨nliche Beziehungen; wer diese nicht besitzt, der wird auch die a¨lteste Geschichte . . . aus dem Gesichtspunkt einer politischen oder wissenschaftlichen Partei ansehen: wer aber fa¨hig ist, durch Geist und durch reinen Willen, der wird auch das Na¨here, so weit es dem Menschen u¨berhaupt vergo¨nnt ist, rein auf sich wirken lassen und aufnehmen. Es beruht auf geistiger Fa¨higkeit; diese aber kann nicht sein ohne moralische Kraft. Der Geist ist noch nicht zu seiner Wahrheit gekommen ohne den Charakter.’ 189 The theme is still present here and there in the 18th c.—cf. Theoretiker (as in n. 45) for texts by Sulzer (no. 9, xx45–6, 291–3; 1759), Will (no. 13, xx123–5, 348–9; 1766), and an anonymous author (no. 1, 142, 149–52; 1773). For the idea of true (i.e. nonpoetical) history, defined as the love of truth and a perfect congruence between narrative and reality, cf. ibid., G. Stolle (no. 8, x4, 274; 1736) and J. L. Holderrieder (no. 19, x2, 421; 1750). 190 As late as 1882 W. Maurenbrecher (1838–92) presented a catalogue of the ¨ ber historian’s virtues as though it were a theory of historical knowledge; see ‘U die Objectivita¨t des Historikers’, Historisches Taschenbuch, 6. Reihe, 1, no. 51 (1882), 327–43. 191 See e.g. H. von Sybel’s obituary of G. Waitz, Historische Zeitschrift, 56 (1886), 484: ‘vollends die ku¨nstlerische Darstellung erha¨lt ganz und gar von der Perso¨nlichkeit des Ku¨nstlers ihr Gepra¨ge’.

From Chladenius to Droysen

477

project has, to my knowledge, no equivalent in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and so a discussion of its main points may suitably conclude this essay. Droysen was taught by both Hegel and Boeckh in Berlin in the 1820s. He reacted by bringing the philosophy of history and classical philology to bear on each other, in opposition to each in isolation. Texts from the early 1830s, so far unpublished, show the path that will lead to the Historik. It is being traced away from both Ranke’s exclusive emphasis on textual philology and the Hegelian odyssey of the Concept at work in history. This is not the place to enter into questions of genesis and interpretation, but it can at least be said that, in the history of the theory and methodology of history, the Historik constitutes, by virtue of its binary structure (Methodik/Systematik), a point of arrival, notwithstanding its foundational intent. It is, indeed, a foundational text in so far as it formalizes, for the first time to so advanced a degree of analytical elaboration, the methodological achievements of previous historiographical practice. But it is also a closure in that it combines a Methodik with a Systematik, a methodology with a theodicy of history.192 This combination is capital, and any attempt to ignore one of its terms in order the better to show the modernity, or else the obsoleteness, of the other, is a misrepresentation of the nature of the enterprise. 192 Regarding the history of the reception (or rather the non-reception) of Droysen, it should be noted that the text of the Historik, available today in Leyh’s edition, was not accessible to contemporaries except as delivered ex cathedra. Only an extremely condensed version of some fifty pages appeared in Droysen’s lifetime, under the title Grundriß der Historik, first as the cyclostyled script (‘als Manuscript gedruckt’) of his lectures in 1858 and 1862, then commercially with Veit, Leipzig, 1868; 2nd edn., ibid., 1875, 3rd edn., considerably revised with three new texts added, ibid., 1882, the last version of Grundriß to be authorized by Droysen; it was republished with an introduction by E. Rothacker (Halle/S., 1925), who added the ‘private preface’ (Privatvorrede) of vol. 2 of Droysen’s Geschichte des Hellenismus (Hamburg, 1843), a text known today under the apocryphal title of ‘Theologie der Geschichte’. The first ‘full’ edition is by Droysen’s grandson, R. Hu¨bner (Munich, 1937): Historik. Vorlesungen u¨ber Enzyklopa¨die und Methodologie der Geschichte, the standard text until P. Leyh’s edition of 1977. The latter makes available for the first time Droysen’s course as it was first given in 1857. Hu¨bner’s edition is a conflation of the various extant manuscripts covering the years 1857 to 1882 (the last year of the course), a kind of optimum text, structured by the detailed table of contents given in the Grundriß (not always adhered to in the lectures). It reads well but is, in fact, a philological fiction. For any serious study of Droysen’s historiographical thought the various layers have to be kept separate, and considered each in its own right, in terms both of content and of chronology, especially if one is concerned with reception in Germany and elsewhere. Strictly speaking, Droysen’s Historik does not exist as such; it is an object of reception and interpretation which vary according to the point in time of their occurrence. Translations of the Historik, and its reception outside Germany, involve even more complex questions.

478

Alexandre Escudier

In the first part of his overall theory of history, Droysen deals with the ‘theory of historical method’ (Methodik). He offers an exhaustive review of the main procedures of the historiographical operation. He invents the device of the historical questionnaire (historische Frage): before embarking on his enquiry the historian should formulate the questions he is going to ask of his material, the objects of knowledge he wishes to pursue, and the various reasons, as often as not immediately obvious, implicit in his conditioning by the present he belongs to, that preside over the selection of topics of research. The value of any historical investigation depends on the way ‘problems’ are posed, as Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch (the latter especially in his Apologie pour l’histoire ou me´tier d’historien, 1941–2) will reiterate, while at the beginning of the twentieth century Max Weber will speak of the cognitive consequences and the historical relativity of knowledge interests (Erkenntnisinteressen) and of problems that prestructure the work of the human and social sciences (Problemstellungen).193 The ritual prosternations before the totems of modern scientificity obscure the fact that, with his concept of historische Frage, Droysen isolated, in 1857, the problem of the fundamental historicity of all historical enquiry. If only the hazards of reception and the lack of historiographical culture can be overcome, there is no reason why the Historik should not become a major element in the autoreflexivity of our disciplines and their genealogical memory. After these preliminaries, the Methodik posits four principal operations: heuristic, source criticism, interpretation, construction of narrative. Heuristic (Heuristik) deals with the collection and selection of material which enables the historian to substantiate his answer to the preliminary question regarding the choice of subject. Source criticism (Kritik) is concerned with testing the evidential value of material collected. As for interpretation (Interpretation), rejecting the primacy of source criticism and, within it, the concentration on textual evidence, it establishes significant connections (historischer Zusammenhang) in historical series on the supposition that no source will disclose them and, consequently, that they can only be arrived at reflectively, by formulating methodically reasonable hypotheses and testing them against the critically sifted material. The fourth operation, called ‘topic’ (Topik, or Darstellungslehre), specifies various modalities of emplotment, i.e. of 193 See M. Weber, ‘Die ‘‘Objektivita ¨t’’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’ (1904), in id., Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur Wissenschaftslehre (7th edn., Tu¨bingen, 1988), 146–214 at 161 and 206.

From Chladenius to Droysen

479

transforming the results of research into continuous prose, with due regard both to lacunae in the material and the kind or level of knowledge intended. Four basic types of exposition are distinguished: investigative (untersuchende Darstellung), narrative (erza¨hlende Darstellung), didactic (didaktische Darstellung), and discussive (discussive Darstellung). This articulation enables Droysen to take a clear stand vis-a`-vis the historical novel: while most historians scorn it in theory but ape it in practice, Droysen shows that (i) narrative exposition is not by any means the only legitimate manner of presenting the results of research; (ii) the problem of historical exposition is a problem of method requiring formalization and a set of transmissibile rules, without which, under the pressure of the reading public and the book trade, historical science will continue to succumb to the blandishments of the historical novel; a theory of historical exposition worthy of the name must be aware of the various possible effects of the various types of emplotment, conditioned as these are by the exigencies of research, by the current political situation, and, more generally, by the historian’s present. This doctrine of interpretation with its posulate of different types of historical exposition goes back to an epistemological pluralism of Kantian descent. It breaks with historicist theories of the mirror image (Abbildtheorie) and invites the historian to consider reflection on his subjective input as a methodological requirement. Against the recycled moral injunctions of a Tacitus or a Lucian of Samosata,194 against the ‘eunuchian objectivity’195 of people like Ru¨hs, Wachsmuth, Ranke, et al., painstakingly ‘extinguishing their ego’ and ‘allowing the facts to speak’,196 Droysen emphazises the contextual character of all knowledge, and the transcendental conditions of the constitution of all historical

194 See Lucian of Samosata, How to Write History, 41 and 51, on how a historian should be without allegiance, ‘as a stranger in his books, a man with no country, independent, subject to no sovereign (poliv, utnomov, bas‹leutov)’, concerned solely to ‘state the facts’ (t‹ p
praktai l
gwn), his mind ‘like a mirror, clear, gleaming-bright, accurately centred (katptr} oiku·an . . . ql} ka› stilpn ka› kribe· t¿ k
ntron)’ (trans. K. Kilburn (Loeb; London, 1959), vi. 57, 65). 195 See Droysen, Historik (as in n. 43), 236. 196 See Ranke, Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im siebzehnten Jahrhundert (1859– 69), in id., Sa¨mmtliche Werke, 15 (Berlin, 1884), 103: ‘Ich wu¨nschte mein Selbst gleichsam auszulo¨schen, und nur die Dinge reden, die ma¨chtigen Kra¨fte erscheinen lassen, die im Laufe der Jahrhunderte mit und durch einander entsprungen und erstarkt . . . ’. A very frequent motif; see e.g. F. Ru¨hs, Entwurf einer Propa¨deutik des historischen Studiums (Berlin, 1811), 254: ‘Es ist also das Hauptgesetz fu¨r die historische Darstellung, dass nur die Tatsachen allein sprechen.’

480

Alexandre Escudier

knowledge.197 The fourfold articulation of Methodik sketched out above was taken up by the generation of historians after Droysen, even if the Hegelian aspects of his system met with reservations.198 But Droysen’s design went further than questions of method. In the second part of Historik he develops a ‘systematic theory of history’ (Systematik) which amounts to nothing less than a Christian theodicy of history with an admixture of Hegelian dialectic. This may be surprising for a historian so perspicacious in matters of method, but its logic is not difficult to discern: history is for Droysen an anthropologically and theologically meaningful process which a properly constituted science of history, whose emergence is itself historically conditioned, brings to light at a particular point of its evolution. The ambiguity of the term ‘history’—Geschichte—both science and what it is science of, comes here into its own. The self-knowledge of history as process is its temporal orientation towards fulfilment: through the doings of men as finite beings it moves towards Parousia and Last Judgement, in which the antinomies of finitude will come to rest ‘in the bosom of God’ (Schoß Gottes).199 Droysen’s Systematik is allowed to oscillate between the two meanings of Geschichte (history/History), no doubt deliberately. Whereas in the Methodik, with its articulation of the historian’s practice, derived from such practice, Droysen moves away from Hegel, in the Systematik he draws inspiration from his master to delineate the dialectic of ‘culture’ (Bildung), the ‘ethical world’ (sittliche Welt), and the ‘work of history’ (geschichtliche Arbeit) through the successive forms taken in space and time by the development of the concept of ‘liberty’ (Freiheit). History becomes here the queen of the moral sciences; it supplies their subject matter: ‘The ethical system of any given time is only the speculative version and recapitulation of previous development, only an attempt to summarize and express it in terms of its theoretical content.’200 What genus is to animals and plants, history is to mankind. As empirical actualization, it is its ethical development; as reflexive 197 A somewhat similar critique of historicist objectivism was to be offered by G. Simmel (1858–1918) in his doctoral thesis, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, of 1892 (reprinted in id., Gesamtausgabe, ii (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 297–421, cf. esp. 321 ff.). 198 See in particular Bernheim, Lehrbuch (as in n. 137), and, in France, C. V. Langlois (1863–1929) and C. Seignobos (1854–1942), Introduction aux ´etudes historiques (Paris, 199 See Droysen, Historik (as in n. 43), 411. 1898). 200 Ibid. 434: ‘Das ethische System irgendeiner Zeit ist nur die spekulative Fassung und Zusammenfassung des bis dahin Entfalteten, nur ein Versuch, es seinem theoretischen Inhalt nach zu summieren und auszusprechen.’

From Chladenius to Droysen

481

recapitulation of the past, it is its passage to consciousness, to ethics as a system. Of the tripartite canon of sciences since Antiquity, logic, physics, and ethics, Droysen modifies radically the third term: ‘Ethics is the doctrine of ethical powers, not merely of the individual attitude towards them and within them.’201 It has to be ‘widened into history’, for it is only in this larger form, when it is understood as history, that ethics has the right to stand on a par with logic and physics.202 Ethics thus becomes synonymous with history in correspondence with the twofold meaning of the term: as empirical substance and as method (mankind being by turn the subject and the object of history). Ethics and the theory of history are, so to speak, coordinates. For history shows the genesis of the ‘postulate of practical reason’, which ‘pure reason’ could not discover.203 A number of consequences follow from this. History as science has the task of bringing history as reality to a provisional close in individual consciousness; it recapitulates empirically and reflexively the historical experience of humanity; it constructs a spatio-temporal map of the progress of liberty. In brief, it acts on the celebrated words of Goethe’s Faust: ‘That which you inherit from your fathers / You must earn in order to possess it’ (trans. R. Jarrell).204 Having worked to reappropriate the past, the individual returns to the present equipped with the knowledge of the defining difference that sets off the present from the past as the product of that past, that is with the lucidity required for any action in the future. For Droysen clearly more is involved than the mere elaboration and transmission of a branch of knowledge. Historical knowledge and understanding transforms the individual from a notional carrier of freedom into a fully constituted free ‘ethical subject’, an active member of the human race, capable of a share in the shaping of the future. Droysen would surely not have disagreed with the words of G. Deleuze: ‘History is what separates us from ourselves, and what we have to cross and traverse to think of ourselves as ourselves.’205 201 Ibid. 444: ‘Die Ethik ist die Lehre von den sittlichen Ma ¨chten, nicht bloß von dem perso¨nlichen Verhalten zu ihnen und in ihnen.’ 202 Ibid. 393: ‘Wir werden sagen du ¨ rfen, die Ethik hat sich zur Geschichte zu erweitern, erst in dieser gro¨ßeren Gestaltung, erst als Geschichte begriffen, hat die Ethik das Recht, zwischen Logik und Physik zu stehen.’ 203 Ibid. 444: ‘Ethik und Historik sind gleichsam Koordinaten. Denn die Geschichte gibt die Genesis des ‘‘Postulats der praktischen Vernunft’’, das der ‘‘reinen Vernunft’’ unfindbar blieb.’ 204 i. 682–3: ‘Was du ererbt von deinen Va ¨tern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen’; quoted by Droysen, Historik (as in n. 43), 460; echos at 15, 62, 106–7, 111. 205 G. Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris, 1990), 130: ‘L’histoire est ce qui nous se ´pare de nous-meˆmes, et ce que nous devons franchir et traverser pour nous penser nous-meˆmes.’

482

Alexandre Escudier

Droysen is poles apart from historicist positivism. The Historik is basically a form of historical genealogy, a hermeneutic of history understood as a ‘second Bible’ (from St Augustine to Lessing, with Sebastian Franck on the way). Its purpose is to outline the incarnation of God through the evolution of mankind. Moreover, through the theme, not of ‘historical rights’, but of the ‘right of history’ (das Recht der Geschichte) to continue to bring forth new forms of liberty, it involves the heterogeneity of what is (has been) and what ought to be. It thus anticipates Weber’s decisionism by assigning to politicians the problem of the ‘conflict of duties’ (Kollision der Pflichten)206 and of the axiological indeterminateness of liberty. The statesman may well be in a position to know the historical conditions under which the problems he is confronted with have emerged; indeed he has to, if he is not to become ‘dogmatic’ (doktrina¨r). He may also be able to predict, to some extent, the unintended side-effects of his actions, though the resources of prediction at his disposal are in practice slight, forecasting the future being rather the luxury of an ‘a-priori history’.207 But at a certain point neither retrospect nor prospect will avail against the tragedy of action uncertain of its results. Droysen is remote from any political angelism which, to soothe its conscience, speaks to us of a world that is not of this world, a world free of negativity. The statesman has to choose. The study of history thus issues in political practice, which would remain blind and powerless, an inconsequential activism, without a preparatory elaboration according to the constitutive rules of historical knowledge. For Droysen ‘the statesman is a practical historian’.208 The ominous implications of this formula—an all-powerful, arbitrary State going after the freedom of the individual—are countered by Droysen’s articulation of the nature of freedom: ‘Freedom means unhindered participation in, and experience of, every ethical domain, with no one domain encroaching on, or limiting any of the others, and exclusion from none.’209 It is up to the legislative and juridical organs of a body politic to translate this abstract principle into regulated practice. See Droysen, Historik (as in n. 43), 442. Kant defines the possibility of one as follows: ‘Wie ist eine Geschichte a priori mo¨glich?—Antwort: wenn der Wahrsager die Begebenheiten selber macht und veranstaltet, die er zum Voraus verku¨ndigt’—Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798) II, 2, Werkausgabe, xi (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1977), 351. History so produced would be the true 208 Historik (as in n. 43), 449. romance of the ‘producer’s’ individual will. 209 Ibid. 442: ‘Freiheit heisst, an dem Teilhaben und Mitleben in jeder der sittlichen Spha¨ren nicht gehindert, durch die eine nicht in der anderen gesto¨rt, verku¨rzt, von keiner ausgeschlossen zu sein.’ 206 207

From Chladenius to Droysen

483

However, there remains in Droysen’s theory of historical knowledge a major unresolved difficulty. He asserts the historicity of the individual ego,210 but does not elaborate, in the light of this, on the status of the historian as a knowing subject.211 The problem will find an echo, in an explicitly philosophical context—philosophy of life vs. phenomenology— in the exchanges between Dilthey and Husserl under the general heading of Historizismus.212 Pointing to the question of historicism in Troeltsch’s sense,213 the history of this aporia remains to be written; and it is in connection with it that I should like to conclude.

IV. CON CLU SI O N I have attempted in this essay to describe a number of theoretical positions in relation to history and its method from Chladenius to Droysen. Some general demarcations emerge from this which, I think, entail a reconsideration not only of the eighteenth century, but also of later developments, marked notably by Droysen’s Historik within a nineteenth century seen erroneously as uniformly historicist. Much remains to be clarified. It is not enough to analyse theoretical positions on history. They have to be related to the state of the discipline, and, away from sociologizing reductionism, to the social, confessional, and political circumstances of their proponents (cf. xI above). Work on this is in progress. Much more problematic is the lack of historiographical studies, of the kind I have discussed here, for countries other than Germany. One can only hope that this lacuna will soon be filled. It is only then that it will be possible to make comparisons, to trace cultural transfers, and so to contextualize the development I have tried to trace. But, given the amplitude of coverage of the history of history, an approach like this

210 See ibid. 399: ‘Das historische Forschen setzt die Einsicht voraus, daß auch der Inhalt unseres Ich ein vielfach vermittelter, ein geschichtliches Resultat ist’; similarly at 106 and 425. 211 See, by contrast, Max Weber, ‘ ‘‘Objektivita ¨t’’ ’ (as in n. 193), 155, on the recognition by a culturally ‘other’ Chinaman of the validity of a sociological argument as a criterion of such validity. 212 See E. Husserl, ‘Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft’, Logos, 1 (1910/11), 289–341; W. Dilthey, ‘Der Briefwechsel Dilthey–Husserl’ (June–July 1911), in F. Rodi and H. U. Lessing (eds.), Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys (Frankfurt am 213 See pp. 463–4 above. Main, 1984), 110–20.

484

Alexandre Escudier

could not belong merely to the history and sociology of science. It is only by integrating the history of historical knowledge and its methods, in the full sense postulated above, with a cultural history of historicism as a historically determined existential condition (Troeltsch) that the history of history will be in a position to develop the potentialities it has been credited with for some time, but so inarticulately that it is not always easy to see what they are. Such a history of history would be in a position to present a coherent account of the conceptual landscape that established itself at the end of the eighteenth century, re-emerged in other forms around 1860, and achieved a degree of definition in the epistemology of Max Weber, and, more recently, in the ‘ontology of the present’, sketched out by Michel Foucault in his meditation on Kant.214 The recognition of historical relativity from which no department of human endeavour is exempt need result neither in total Pyrrhonism (advanced by some today), nor in a ‘crisis of historicism’, proclaimed time and again between roughly 1880 and 1945, whether to reassure or to strike fear. It can inaugurate a specific philosophical ethos based on historiographical enquiry as an unceasing exploration of limits. There is, in any case, no doubt that, since Droysen, history has assumed the indefinite task of reflecting on the present; no doubt, either, that a gulf separates us from him which must be surveyed if we are not to succumb to false identities. We think that we have definitely ‘given up Hegel’, that we no longer attempt to decipher history as a theodicy in which the unfolding of liberty is the mother of all plots. ‘All the components which were engaged in the concept of the Cunning of Reason— private interests, the passions of great historical figures, the superior interest of the State, the spirit of nations and the world spirit— have come apart, and appear to us today as membra disjecta of an impossible totalization.’215 The idea of historical continuity has had its day, and the present can no longer be envisaged as the decipherable totalization of the historical process. The Historik has, so to speak, been detheologized severally by genealogical criticism and an archaeological approach. A durable intellectual configuration has emerged from this attempt to identify conceptualizing history with philosophy, to make of historiographical practice a non-essentialist philosophical enquiry on 214 See M. Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumie `res?’ (1984), in id., Dits et ´ecrits, iv (Paris, 1994), 679–88, esp. 687. 215 P. Ricoeur, Temps et re ´cit, iii: Le temps raconte´, pt. 4, x2, ch. 6, ‘Renoncer a` Hegel’ (Paris, 1991), 370–1.

From Chladenius to Droysen

485

difference: ‘ ‘‘We are difference’’ and we know no better.’216 The relationship to the present in this configuration is central, not by way of making historical relativity acceptable, but as the basis for a constant reinvention of the present by means of a permanent exploration of its historical make-up. A history of historicism that is more than a survey of historiographical practices will have to integrate an analysis of the successive forms taken in the last two and a half centuries, by the ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, diagnosed by Michel Foucault in 1984 as the ‘attitude of modernity’ par excellence, as a ‘philosophical ethos’ in which the ‘critique of what we are is at once an analysis of the limits we encounter and a probing of the possibility of exceeding them’.217 Such a history of history is, of course, another story, but it is essential as a horizon of enquiry, if one is to uncover certain general schemas of our modernity. It would go far beyond a history of knowledge and bear theoretically on the ‘question of the historicity of conceiving the universal’,218 and practically on the manifestations of the ‘patient effort which gives form to the impatience of freedom’.219 Inured, since the 1970s, to a socio-historical analysis of the disciplines, both quantitative and discursive, the history of history faces the challenge of transforming itself into a historical anthropology of historicity. (translated by Christopher Ligota) 216 P. Veyne, ‘Un arche ´ologue sceptique’ in D. Eribon (ed.), L’Infre´quentable Michel Foucault: Renouveaux de la pense´e critique: Actes du colloque Centre Georges-Pompidou . . . 2000 (Paris, 2001), 19–59 at 54. 217 M. Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumie `res?’ (1984), in Dits (as in n. 214), 562–78 at 575, 570, 577 (originally published in English in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault 218 Ibid. 687. Reader (New York, 1984), 32–50; repr. London, 1991). 219 Ibid. 578.

This page intentionally left blank

Index ps.-Abdias 203 academies and learned societies 16–17, 194n, 279n, 285n, 322–3, 441, 451, 469–70 Adam, Melchior (d. 1622) 1n Addison, Joseph (1672–1719) 387 Adelung, Johann Christoph (1734–1806) 1n Aelius Stilo Praeconinus, Lucius 148 Aeschylus 75, 79n, 91–2, 93, 94, 95n, 96n, 103n Aesop 418, 428 Agathemeros 40n Agricola, Georg (1494–1555) 409–10 Agustı´n, Antonio [Augustinus] (1517–86) 117 Alba, Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of (1507–82) 254 Albert, archduke of Austria (1559–1621), governor general (after 1598 sovereign prince) of the Low Countries 131 Albizzi, Francesco (1593–1684), cardinal 399, 402 Alciato, Andrea (1492–1550) 128, 129n Aldrich, Henry (1648–1710), dean of Christ Church, Oxford 330n Alembert, Jean Le Rond, called D’ (1717–83) 16, 195 Alexander of Aphrodisias 240 Alexander Severus, Roman emperor 321 Alexander the Great 177, 422, 428 Alexander VII (1599–1667), pope from 1655 399 Alexandria, catechetical school of 326 Alexandrian scholars 2, 3n, 11, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 174 Alfonso de Madrigal, ‘el Tostado’ [Alphonsus Tostatus] (1400?–1455) 295n

Ambrose of Milan 167n, 168n, 259n ps.-Ambrose 227 Amelius, Neoplatonic philosopher 215 Amerbach, Veit [Vitus Amersbachius] (1503–57) 210, 219, 220–1 Ammianus Marcellinus 119 Ammonius of Alexandria (early sixth century ad) 141 Ampelius, Lucius 40, 52 Andronikos I Komnenos, Byzantine emperor Contra Iudaeos ascribed to 81, 82 Annius of Viterbo 233 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe (1731–1805) 17n Anthologia Graeca 47 Antigonus of Alexandria 141 Antigonus Monophthalmos, king of Macedon 42 antiquarianism 6, 9, 11, 12, 32, 53–4, 113–34, 136, 160n, 172, 192, 331, 355, 375n, 400–12 Apicius 86n Apollonius Dyscolus, Alexandrian grammarian 148 Apollonius Rhodius, poet and librarian of the Museum in Alexandria 147, 209 Apollonius Sophista, author of a Homeric lexicon 174 Aquaviva, Claudio (1543–1615), general of the Jesuits 270 Arabic 9n, 18, 40, 284–6 Arias Montano, Benito (1527–98) 102n, 254, 259, 263, 270 Aristarchus 141, 146, 148, 153, 157n, 174, 180 Aristeas of Rhodes 141 Aristeas, Letter of 298, 326 Aristocles 141 Aristophanes 240 Aristophanes of Byzantium 147, 148, 153

 Authors of secondary literature are not included. Dates are provided for early modern and modern figures, not for ancient and medieval ones. Vernacular forms are normally given first (thus ‘Saumaise [Salmasius]’), except in cases where the Latinized or Hellenized form has practically replaced the vernacular one (Grotius, Melanchthon . . . ).

488

Index

Aristotle 19n, 20, 21, 23, 138n, 139n, 141, 144, 164, 170–1, 177–8, 179, 240, 374n, 422, 424n Arius 215, 216, 360, 378n, 382 Arius Didymus 350 Arnobius of Sicca 33, 77n, 78, 85–90, 94, 97–101, 103, 105, 107, 110–11, 348 Arnold, Gottfried (1666–1714) 431n, 450 Asclepiades of Myrleia 144, 149, 151, 173 Ashe, St George (1658–1718), bishop of Derry 323n Ast, Friedrich (1778–1841) 424 Athanasius of Alexandria 168n, 344, 348, 361, 376n Athanasian Creed 338–9, 354 Athenaeus 83, 136, 140n, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168–9, 245, 292n Athenagoras 364, 366 Aubrey, John (1626–97) 410 Augustine of Hippo 12, 37, 166, 168n, 224, 259n, 272n, 293n, 348, 378n, 402, 482 Augustus, Roman emperor 113–34, 203 Aulus Gellius 139, 159 Aurelius Victor 82, 118, 119 Ausonius 153 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 14, 17–24, 25, 28, 32, 37, 399, 418, 429, 434 Baillet, Adrien (1649–1706) 15n Baius, Michael [Michel de Bay] (1513–89) 253 Baker, Thomas (1656–1740) 9n Balbi, Giovanni [Joannes Balbus, de Ianua] 226 Baluze, E´tienne (1630–1718) 319n, 324, 325n Balzac, Jean Louis Guez de (1595–1654) 433n Bar, Georg Ludwig von [Georges Louis de Baar] (1701–67) 428, 433 Barberini, Francesco (1597–1679), cardinal 399, 402 Barbin, Claude (d. c. 1698), bookseller in Paris 406 Barlow, Thomas (1608/9–91), bishop of Lincoln 312n, 337–8, 339, 340 Barnabas 330 Epistle of 205, 322–4, 334, 348, 350n, 351 Gospel of 205, 371 Barnes, Joshua (1654–1712) 93n, 107

Baronio, Cesare [Baronius] (1538–1607), cardinal 3, 164, 168, 345 Bartholdi, Fre´de´ric-Auguste (1834–1904) 52 Basedow, Johann Bernhard (1723/4–1790) 455n Basil of Caesarea 168n, 199, 201, 348 Basnage, Henri (1657–1710) [Basnage de Beauval], brother of next 386 Basnage, Jacques (1653–1723) 386 Batteux, Charles (1713–80) 427 battle of the books (dispute of Ancients and Moderns) 16, 310 Baudier, Dominique [Baudius] (1561–1631) 175 Baudouin, Franc¸ois [Balduinus] (1520–73) 86n Baxter, Richard (1615–91) 315n, 340 Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706) 36, 239, 299, 325n, 385–6, 387–90, 391, 393, 394, 397, 398 Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) 4n, 7n, 75, 85 Beaucaire de Pe´guillon, Franc¸ois de [Belcarius] (1514–91), bp. of Metz 467 Beck, Christian Daniel (1757–1832) 469n Bedford, Hilkiah (1663–1724) 306 Bekker, Immanuel (1785–1871) 417 Bellarmine, Robert (1542–1621), cardinal 34, 251–75 Bellerus, Gaspar (fl. c. 1600), printer in Antwerp 240, 249 Belon, Pierre (d. 1565) 408 Bentley, Richard (1662–1742) 327, 393, 394 Benzelius, Eric, the younger (1675–1743), abp. of Uppsala 332n Berens, Carl (1725–89), brother of next two 413 Berens, Georg (1739–1813) 413 Berens, Johann Christoph (1729–92) 413, 422 Be´rigard, Claude Guillermet, seigneur de (1591?–1663?) 375n Berkeley, George (1685–1753) 29 Bernard, Edward (1638–96) 312n, 318n Bernard, Jacques (1658–1718) 387, 388, 392 Bernheim, Ernst (1850–1942) 466 Bertram, Bonaventure Corneille (1531–94) 239

Index Bible and biblical scholarship 28–30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 81, 102n, 107n, 108, 153–4, 156–7, 163n, 165, 166–7, 183–9, 400, 404n, 414 Canon of the Old Testament 185, 186, 198 Septuagint 187, 199, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263n, 264, 272n, 326, 353 Canon of the New Testament 186, 202–8, 223, 307, 308, 345 Greek New Testament 231–50, 312, 330, 333 interpretation of the Bible 46, 293–304, 341–5, 349, 400 Bibliander [Buchmann], Theodor (1504–64) 210, 219–20, 221, 222, 223, 224 Birch, Thomas (1705–66) 389n Bignon, Jean-Paul (1662–1743) 387 Birck, Sixt (1500–54) 217 Blackwell, Samuel (c. 1642–1719), canon of Peterborough 331n Blackwell, Thomas (1701–57) 418, 430, 434 Blount, Charles (1654–93) 299 Bodin, Jean (1530–96) 467 Boeckh, August (1785–1867) 194n, 474, 477 Bo¨hme, Jakob (1575–1624) 379 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount (1678–1751) 308, 422, 429, 434 Boncompagni, Giacomo (1548–1612) 232n Bopp, Franz (1791–1867) 279 Borremans, Anthonij (d. 1683) 2n Borromeo, Federico (1564–1631), cardinal 34n Bossuet, Jacques Be´nigne (1627–1704), bp. of Meaux 186 Boureau-Deslandes, Andre´-Franc¸ois (1690–1757) 37, 427, 429, 432 Brahe, Tycho (1546–1601) 156 Brokesby, Francis (1637–1714) 305n, 306n, 307n, 312n, 316n, 324n, 337, 340 Brucker, Johann Jakob (1696–1770) 37, 383n, 414, 424, 427, 429, 431, 432 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600) 400, 423n Budde, Johann Franz [Buddeus] (1667–1729) 367–8, 377 Bude´, Guillaume (1468–1540) 164 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de (1707–88) 428n, 429, 433

489

Bull, George (1634–1710), bp. of St David’s 35, 320n, 359n, 360–1, 364, 365, 367, 368, 370, 376, 378n, Burigny, Jean Le´vesque de (1692–1785) 308n Burman, Pieter, the elder (1668–1741), uncle of next 2n, 108–9 Burman, Pieter, the younger [Petrus Burmannus secundus] (1713–78) 180, 183 Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715), bp. of Salisbury 306, 308, 309n, 315n, 353n, 391 Burnet, Thomas (1635?–1715), master of Charterhouse 365 Busbecq, Augier de (1522–92) 113, 114, 117, 120, 123, 126n, 133 Buttmann, Philipp Karl (1764–1829) 417 Byzantine studies 77–8, 81, 82, 85, 326 Caesar, Julius 125, 148, 330n, 428, 433 Cajetan, Tommaso de Vio (1469–1534) 270, 271 Calamy, Edmund (1671–1732) 310n, 356 Calderini, Domizio [Domitius Calderinus] (1446–78) 164n Calepino, Ambrogio (1435–1511) 175n Caligula, Roman emperor 423 Callimachus 147, 153, 178 Calliopius, grammarian 146 Calov, Abraham [Calovius] (1612–86) 293n Canini, Angelo (1521–57) 34, 238–50 Canisius, Heinrich (1555–1610) 321n Cano, Francisco Melchor [Melchior Canus] (1509?–1560), bp. of the Canary islands 259n, 260n Canter, Dirk [Theodorus Canterus] (1545–1617), brother of next 88n, 94, 97–8, 99–100, 103, 110 Canter, Willem (1542–75) 79–80, 96n, 103, 105 Cappel, Louis (1585–1658) 183, 187 Caradeuc de La Chalotais, Louis-Rene´ de (1701–85) 455n Carafa, Antonio (1538–1591), cardinal 264, 266 Cardano, Girolamo [Cardanus] (1501–76) 178 Carretus, Ludovicus [Todros Hacohen] ( fl. mid-sixteenth cent.) 240–1, 250

490

Index

Carrion, Louis (1547– c. 1595) 83, 84, 85–6, 88, 89, 98, 101, 105 Casaubon, Isaac (1559–1614), father of next 2n, 3, 115, 116n, 136, 141, 154n, 157n, 162–71, 175–6, 177, 178, 179, 183, 192, 352, 373, 381, 382 Casaubon, Me´ric (1599–1671) 163, 165, 325n Cassius Dio Cocceianus 124, 125n, 126, 127, 132, 134 Castellio, Sebastian (1515–63) 211, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219 Castro, Leon de (d. 1586) 263 Catullus 75, 76n, 84, 102, 105, 110 Cave, William (1637–1713) 316, 320n, 322n, 324n, 325n, 327, 328, 336, 343, 352 Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe, comte de (1692–1765) 51 censorship 8–9, 81, 102–3, 189, 252–3, 273–5, 299, 355, 392, 393 Centuriators of Magdeburg (1559–74) 189n, 217, 228, 229 Cerva, Seraphinus Maria [Crijevic´] 2n Cervini, Marcello [Pope Marcellus II] (1501–55) 263n Chaco´n, Pedro [Ciaconius] (1527–81) 100 Champier, Symphorien (1472?–c. 1535) 420 Chappelow, Leonard (1683–1768) 277, 300 Chares of Lindos, sculptor 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55 Charlemagne 453 Charles I (1600–49), king of England from 1625 390 Charles II (1630–85), king of England from 1660 312 Charlett, Arthur (1655–1722), master of University College, Oxford 319n Charpentier, Franc¸ois (1620–1702) 418, 419, 420, 422 Chasteigner de la Roche-Posay, Louis [comte d’Abain] (1535–95), French ambassador in Rome 81 Cherry, Francis (1667–1713) 305n, 325n, 330, 340 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of (1694–1773) 16n Chillingworth, William (1602–44) 389, 390, 391, 394–7 Chishull, Edmund (1671–1733) 307, 310, 333n

Chladenius, Johann Martin (1710–59) 437, 441, 442, 450, 455, 460, 461, 462, 475 Christian, Prince of Denmark (1603–47), son of King Christian IV 405–6 Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626–89) 15, 317n chronology 155–6, 170, 178, 188, 307n, 320–1, 327, 329, 330, 342–3, 400, 402, 407 Chrysippus 147 Chwolson, Daniel Avramovicˇ (1819–1911) 284, 285, 286n, 287n Cicero 21, 94, 108, 164, 179, 218, 331, 416 Cinquarbres, Jean [Joannes Quinquarboreus] (1514–87) 256 Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729) 310n classical scholarship 3, 5, 7, 16, 32, 113–34, 136–56, 175, 179–80, 329, 330, 416–20 Clement of Alexandria 200, 201, 205, 206, 212, 218, 219, 297n, 366, 373n, 374n, 382 Clement of Rome 322–3, 347, 348 Cle´nard, Nicolas [Clenardus] (1493/4–1542) 255 Cobet, Carel Gabriel (1813–89) 76 Cocceius, Johannes [Johann Koch] (1603–69) 302 Cocherel, lord of ( fl. 1670–1685) 410 Cohen de Herrera, Abraham (c. 1570–c. 1639) 361, 367, 381 Collier, Jeremy (1650–1726) 390 Collins, Anthony (1676–1729) 308, 387, 388, 391, 392, 393, 394, 418n Colomie`s, Paul (1638–92) 2n, 86n Coluthus 198 commentaries 119–20, 127–31, 141–2, 318, 324, 351 Commodian 334–7 Conde´, Louis II de Bourbon, prince de [le Grand Conde´], 399 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de (1743–94) 16 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Byzantine emperor 45, 46, 50 Constantine, Roman emperor 201, 218, 315, 335, 344 Conway, Anne (1631–79) 361–3, 366, 367, 378 Cooper, John Gilbert (1723–69) 418–9 Corbinelli, Jacopo (1535–c. 90) 157n

Index Cotelier Jean-Baptiste (1629–86) 322, 323, 334 Cousin, Jehan, the younger (c. 1522–c. 1595) 48, 61, 62 Crates of Mallus 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153 Crell, Johann (1590–1633), grandfather of next 300n Crell, Samuel (1660–1747) 300, 359n, 370 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich (1771–1858) 464n criticism 26, 27, 33–4, 135–95, 415 Cromer, Martin (1512–89), bp. of Ermeland 210, 219 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), Lord Protector of England 312 Ctesibius 41 Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88) 35, 350n, 360, 368–70, 374, 375, 377, 382 Cujas, Jacques (1522–90) 77, 79, 106, 118, 124 Cyprian of Carthage 259n, 313–4, 316, 332, 335, 336, 337, 348 Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph (1785–1860) 442 Daille´, Jean (1594–1670) 373n Dalı´, Salvador 54 Dal Pozzo, Cassiano (1588–1657) 402 Daniel, Pierre (1530–1603) 118 Daru, Pierre (1767–1829) 467 Defoe, Daniel (1661?–1731) 393 Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of Macedon 42, 44 Democritus 10, 19, 20, 21, 169 Demosthenes 243, 421n Des Maizeaux, Pierre (1673–1745) 36, 385–98 and Protestant Refuge 385–6, 390–1, 397 and journalism 387, 392, 393 as biographer 394–7 Descartes, Rene´ [Cartesius] (1596–1650), and Cartesianism 14–17, 28, 310, 379, 391, 428n, 430 Desmarets, Roland [Maresius] (1594–1653) 179–80, 188n, 195 Detournes, Jean, the younger [Tornaesius] (c. 1539–1615) 106 Deyling, Salomon (1677–1755) 293n Dicaearchus Messenius 40n

491

Dickinson, Edmund (1624–1707) 369 Diderot, Denis (1713–84) 195 Didymus of Alexandria, grammarian 141 Digest 94 Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911) 31, 440 Dio Chrysostom 140, 170, 177 Diocletian, Roman emperor 315n Diodati, Giovanni [Joannes Deodatus] (1576–1649) 157n Diodorus of Sicily 42, 43n Diogenes Laertius 153, 154–5, 174, 418, 419, 422, 423 Diognetus, epistle to 4 Diomedes, grammarian 175 ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite 211, 352, 361n, 366n Dionysius of Halicarnassus 144, 155, 156n, 159, 330 Dionysius Thrax 140, 152 diplomacy 81, 113–5, 117, 240n, 241n, 406–7 Dodwell, Henry (1641–1711) 35, 305–56 and Athanasian Creed 337–9 and Canon of Scripture 307 and charisms 343–5 and episcopacy 307–8, 309, 314, 337, 351, 346–7, 351, 353 and interpretation of Scripture 341–5, 349 and Ireland 311–12, 313, 333 and martyrs 307, 314–16 and mortality of the soul 307, 333, 353 and non-jurors 306, 310–11, 329–30, 331–3 and Platonism 349–52 Donatus, Aelius 141, 148 Do¨nniges, Wilhelm (1814–72) 468 Dopping, Anthony (1643–97) 313n, 340 Dorat, Jean (1508–88) 79, 80n Dorotheos of Sidon 39 ps.-Dorotheus of Tyre 327–8, 346 Droysen, Johann Gustav (1808–84) 31, 37, 194n, 437, 444, 460n, 465, 467n, 469, 472, 474, 476–83, 484 Drusius, Johann (d. 1616) 168n, 250 Du Cange, Charles Du Fresne, sieur (1610–88) 321, 328 Du Pin, Louis Ellies (1657–1719) 343n Du Prat, Guillaume (1507–60), bp. of Clermont 239, 242 Duclos, Charles Pinot (1704–72) 434

492

Index

Dudith, Andreas (1533–89) 239 Du¨mge, Karl Georg (1772–1845) 451n Dupuy, Claude (1545–94), father of next 84n, 118, 119, 124, 147n, 157n Dupuy, cabinet (of Pierre and Jacques Dupuy) 402 Eckersall, James (fl. 1680–93) 332n Edelmann, Johann Christian (1698–1767) 383n Edwards, John (1637–1716), fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge 309n, 310 Edwards, John (fl. 1677–1711), fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge 321n Eiffel, Gustave (1832–1923) 52 Eliot, George (1819–80) 4 Elijah ben Asher ha-Levi Ashkenazi (1468/ 9–1549) [Elias Levita] 154n, 166n, 234, 244n Elisabeth [Isabelle] of Austria (1554–92), wife of King Charles IX of France 117 Elizabeth, Princess Palatine (1618–80) 15n Elmenhorst, Geverhart [Elmenhorstius] (1580–1621) 100, 110, 163n, 171n Emden, Jacob (1697–1776) 381 emendatio 75, 77, 78–9, 81, 82–3, 84, 85, 86–90, 93, 97, 99–100, 104, 110, 140n, 146, 147, 150, 153, 155, 160, 161, 162, 164n, 169, 173, 174–5, 178, 180, 181, 183, 264, 265, 266, 267–8, 333, 335–6, 417 Ennius 155n Ephrem Syrus 319n Epictetus 240 Epicurus 10, 20 Epiphanius of Salamis 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 229, 286, 296 Episcopius, Simon [Bischop] (1583–1643) 302n Epitome de caesaribus 115n, 117, 118, 119–20 Erasmus 189n, 230, 232, 245, 254, 258, 317n, 428, 433 Eratosthenes 40, 55, 56, 178 Ernesti, Johann August (1707–81) 76, 417n, 419 Ernst, Prince of Hesse-Rheinfels (1623–93) 319n Erotian, grammarian 141

Estienne [Stephanus], family of printers in Paris and Geneva Estienne, Robert I (1499–1559) 107n, 108 Estienne, Henri II (1528–98), son of Robert I 95n, 155, 158–60, 417 Estienne, Robert II (c. 1530–70), son of Robert I 95n Estienne, Paul (1566–c. 1637), son of Henri II 109 Eudorus of Alexandria, Platonist philosopher 363 Eudoxus of Cnidus, mathematician 178 Euripides 78, 81, 82, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 103, 107, 109, 110, 155n, 418, 422n Eusebius of Caesarea 200, 201, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 224, 226, 229, 259n, 294, 342n, 344n, 346n, 350 Eutropius 119, 121, 203n, 211, 228 Evagrius Scholasticus, ecclesiastical historian 210, 224 Ezekiel the Poet, Hellenistic writer of tragedies 297n Fabri, Joannes (fl. 1475–91), printer in Turin 225 Fabri, Johann Ernst (1755–1825) 464n Fabricius, Johann Albert (1668– 1736) 26, 318–9 Fabroni, Carlo Augusto (1651–1727), cardinal 273 Faerno, Gabriele (1510–61) 78, 79, 80 Farindon, Anthony (1598–1658) 395n Fathers of the Church 8, 11, 80, 167–8, 191, 199, 307–8, 309–10 ante-Nicene Fathers 219, 229, 312–13, 324–5, 338, 341, 347–8, 358–9, 360, 366, 367, 370, 372, 373, 378n apostolic Fathers 322–4, 351 Fell, John (1625–86), bp. of Oxford 312, 313–4, 315–6, 317–8, 319, 325, 340, 355 Ferdinand of Hungary (1502–64), emperor from 1556 113 Ferrari, Ottavio (1518–86) 374n Ferrarius, Hieronymus (fl. 1542) 99 Ferretti, Emilio (1489–1552) 128 Feßmaier, Johann Georg (1775–1828) 463, 464n Festus 95n, 110, 121, 136, 147

Index Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814) 471 Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99) 359, 361, 417, 420 Fisher von Erlach, Johann Bernhard (1656–1723) 50, 65 Florinus 343 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de (1657–1757) 16, 415 Foreiro, Francisco [Forerius] (1522?–1581), dominican 239 Foy, Nathaniel (1648–1707), bp. of Waterford and Lismore 332n Francis I (1494–1547), king of France from 1515 89n Franck, Sebastian (1499–1542/3) 482 Fre´ret, Nicolas (1688–1749) 16n, 194–5, 308n Frevier, Charles-Joseph (1689–1770/78), Jesuit 268 Frick, Johann (1670–1739) 160n friendship 1, 77, 79, 81, 117, 157, 171n, 175, 255, 313, 340, 387, 391, 394, 402, 406, 415, 418, 422, 424 Frisius, Johann Jakob (d. 1611) 25 Fuligatti, Giacomo (c. 1577–1653), Jesuit 252n Furly, Benjamin (1636–1714), Quaker merchant and bibliophile 386 Gale, Thomas (1635?–1702) 317, 325 Galen 139n, 141, 169 Galiani, Ferdinando (1728–87) 416 Galilei, Galileo (1564–1642) 179, 402 Galland, Antoine (1646–1715) 406 Gallus, Gaius Cornelius 105 Gandy, Henry (1649–1734) 311n Gassendi, Pierre [Gassend] (1592–1655) 10, 13n, 401 Gatterer, Johann Christoph (1727–99) 439, 441, 442, 448n, 451, 456, 460, 461, 474 Gelenius, Sigismundus [Sigmund Gehlen/ Zikmund Hruby´ z Jelenı´] (1498–1554) 86, 88n, 89, 90n, 94, 97–8, 99, 100, 103, 259n Genebrard, Gilbert (1537–97) 242n, 252n Gennadius 335 Gennep, Andre´ [Andreas Gennepius] (1485–1568) 254 Germain, Michel, Maurist (1645–94) 320n

493

Gervinus, Georg Gottfried (1805–71) 442 Giambullari, Pier Francesco (1495–1555) 233 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94) 7n, 15–16 Giesebrecht, Wilhelm von (1814–89) 470n Gillot, Jacques (c. 1550–1619) 171n Girardon, Franc¸ois (1628–1715), sculptor 425 Giselin, Victor [Giselinus] (1543–91) 105 Glareanus, Henricus [Heinrich Loriti] (1488–1563) 228 Godeau, Antoine, bp. of Vence (1605–72) 190–1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) 441, 481 Go¨tze, Gottfried Christian [Goetzius] (d. 1724) 331n Gordon, Thomas (d. 1750) 391 Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–66) 383n Goullet, Robert (c. 1480–c. 1560) 259n Grabe, Johann Ernst (1666–1711) 317, 318, 320n, 325, 331, 343 Gratian 204, 205 Gregory the Great 352 Gregory XIII (1502–85), pope from 1572 253, 263, 264, 275 Gregory XIV, pope dec. 1590–oct. 1591 267 Gregory of Nazianzus 83n, 168n, 199, 200, 201, 348, 376n Gregory of Nyssa 77, 80, 168n, 347n, 348 Gregory Thaumaturgus 347n Gronovius, Joannes Fredericus (1611–71) 180n Grosseteste, Robert 325n Grotius, Hugo [De Groot] (1583–1645) 168, 183, 293n, 302, 347n, 401, 403, 404, 408 Gruter, Janus [de Gruytere] (1560–1627) 129n, 150n, 160n, 189n Gude, Marquard [Gudius] (1635–83) 319 Gue´rin, Victor-Honore´ (1821–90) 51 Guicciardini, Francesco (1483–1540) 467 Guichard, Simon (c. 1500–1574), Minim 239 Guillaume d’Auvergne 294n

494

Index

Gundling, Nicolaus Hieronymus (1671–1729) 418 Gunning, Peter (1614–84), bp. of Ely 339n, 348n Hai ben Sherira Gaon 241 Hales, John (1584–1656) 389, 390, 391, 394–7 Hall, Joseph (1574–1656), bp. of Norwich 347n, 349n Halloix, Pierre (1571–1656), Jesuit 322n, 343n Hamilton, William John (1805–67) 51 Hamann, Johann Christoph (1732–78), brother of next 414n Hamann, Johann Georg (d. 1744) (1730–88) 28–31, 36–7, 413–36 Harbin, George (d. 1744) 327n Harpocration 176 Hearne, Thomas (1678–1735) 306, 307n, 311n, 314n, 320n, 330n, 331n, 333n, 334n, 339n, 348n, 352, 355 Hebrew 154n, 163n, 166, 198, 233, 242, 254–8 Heemskerck, Maarten van (1498–1574) 49, 50, 51, 63, 64 Heeren, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig (1760–1842) 441, 442, 464n, 474 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) 19n, 423n, 424–5, 471, 473, 477, 480, 484 Hegesippus 205, 227 ps.-Hegesippus 211, 227 Heindorf, Ludwig Friedrich (1774–1816) 417 Heinsius, Daniel (1580–1655), father of next 146, 151n, 176–9, 180, 192, 233 Heinsius, Nicolas (1620–81) 87n, 106n, 180n Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van (1614–99) 361, 362n, 366, 367 Henri II (1519–1559), king of France from 1547 89n Henri IV (1553–1610), king of France from 1589 171n Heraclitus 421, 422, 423, 424 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward Herbert, Baron (1583–1648) 279, 280 He´rauld, Didier [Heraldus] (c. 1575–1649) 97, 100, 110 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803) 28n, 441

Hermann, Gottfried (1772–1848) 93n Hermogenes of Tarsus 159 Herodian [Aelius Herodianus], grammarian 148 Herodotus 278, 292n Hervey, James (1714–58) 414n Heumann, Christoph August (1681–1764) 27, 37, 418, 424, 427n, 431 Heylyn, Peter (1600–62) 348n Heyne, Christian Gottlob (1729–1812) 417, 469n Hickes, George (1642–1715) 311n, 312n, 333 Hilary of Poitiers 348 Hippocrates 141, 145n, 158 Hippolytus of Rome 318–22, 366 Hippolytus Thebanus 320 Historia Augusta 163n, 329 historia literaria 2, 24–7, 28n, 36, 415 Hoadly, Benjamin (1676–1761), bp. of Winchester 347n, 390 Hochstetter, Andreas Adam (1668–1717) 353n Hody, Humphrey (1659–1707) 326n, 327, 331n Hoeschel, David (1556–1617) 82 Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d’ (1723–89) 308n Holstenius, Lucas [Holste] (1596–1661) 324 Homer 146, 153, 170, 177, 209, 243, 418, 430, 434 Horace 83n Horawitz, Adalbert Heinrich (1840–88) 467n Horn, Georg (1620–70) 418 Hottinger, Johann Heinrich (1620–67) 287n Housman, Alfred Edward (1859–1936) 97, 109–10 Hudson, John (1662–1719), Bodley’s librarian 330–1, 333–4 Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630–1721), bp. of Avranches 281n, 369 Humann, Carl (1839–96) 115 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835) 428, 475 Hume, David (1711–76) 29, 431 Hyginus, Gaius Julius 43, 148

Index

495

Ibn al-Nadı¯m see Muhammad ˙ Meı¨r Ibn Ezra, Abraham ben (1092–1167) 241, 244n, 262, 272 Ibn Wa’hshı¯ja, Abu¯-Bakr A’hmed ben ’Ali 284 Ignatius of Antioch 322–3, 331, 333, 348, 351 Ignatius of Loyola 251 Irenaeus 168n, 206–7, 316–18, 342–4, 345, 346n, 348 ps.-Irenaeus 277 Isaak ha-Levi [Joannes Isaac Levita] (1515–77) 259 Isidorus 174

Kepler, Johannes (1571–1631) 156 Keyselitz, Gottfried (fl. 1736) 197n Kimhi, David [Radak] 262 King, John (1696–1728) 93n King, William (1650–1729), abp. of Dublin 332n, 333, 353 Kircher, Athanasius (1602–80), Jesuit 381 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian (1636–89) 361, 367 Knott, Edward [alias Matthew Wilson] (1582–1656), Jesuit 396 Ko¨ler, Johann David (1684–1755) 456n Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich (1781–1832) 473

Jabez, Joseph (d. 1507) 224n Jablonski, Paul Ernst (1693–1757) 381 Jacob ben Asher [‘the Ba’al ha-Turim’], 272 James II (1633–1701), king of England 1685–8 315, 328, 333n Jerome 136, 168n, 187, 189n, 234n, 248, 255n, 257, 259n, 260n, 261n, 262, 271n, 272, 291n, 294n, 344, 348, 375n, 378n Jo¨cher, Christian Gottlieb (1694–1758) 1n, 181n John Chrysostom 77, 80, 167n, 168n, 219, 259n, 261, 291n, 344 John of Damascus 210, 224, 226 Jonas, Justus [Jobst Koch] (1493–1555) 197 Joncourt, Pierre de (d. 1725) 302, 304 Jones, William (1746–94) 279 Jonsius, Joannes (1624–59) 418 Joseph Hacohen (1496–1578) 240 Josephus, Flavius 200, 201, 211, 213, 215, 216, 220, 227, 259, 260n, 270, 272n, 283n, 298, 331 Judah ha-Levi 357 Jurieu, Pierre (1637–1713) 390 Jussieu, Antoine de (1686–1758) 410 Justin Martyr 213, 219, 298, 333, 348, 363, 366 ps.-Justin 219 Juvenal 152

L’E´cluse, Charles de [Carolus Clusius] (1526–1609) 123 La Barre, Rene´ Laurent de (d. 1628) 94, 99 La Bletterie, Jean-Philippe Rene´ de (1696–1772) 17n La Croze, Mathurin Veyssie`re (1661–1739) 300, 370n La Fontaine, Jean de (1621–95) 428 La Mothe le Vayer, Franc¸ois de (1583–1672) 401, 406 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de (1672–1731) 427 La Motte, Charles de (d. 1751) 386, 387 Labbe´ de Monve´ron, Charles [Labbaeus] (1582–1657) 163n Lachmann, Karl (1793–1851) 91n, 111n Lactantius 212, 213, 219, 229, 316, 324–5, 348 Lambeck, Peter [Lambecius] (1628–80) 25, 27n Lambin, Denis (1519–72) 79, 189n Langbaine, Gerard (1609–58) 326 Lange, Joachim (1670–1744) 416n Lange, Johann (1503–67) 212 Langius, Carolus [Karel de Langhe] (d. 1573) 85, 105–6, 121 Lapeyre`re, Isaac (1594/6–1676) 36, 399–412 Larroque, Daniel (c. 1660–1731) 325n Latomus, Jacobus [Jacques Masson], the elder (1475–1544) 255 Laubrussel, Ignace de (1663–1730), Jesuit 188–9, 190 Laud, William (1573–1645), abp. of Canterbury 309, 311, 321, 355 Le Ce`ne, Charles (1647?–1703) 360

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 28–31, 375n, 415, 422, 430, 455, 475, 484 Kennett, White (1660–1728), bp. of Peterborough 316n, 331n Kettlewell, John (1653–95) 332n

496

Index

Le Clerc, Jean [Clericus] (1657–1736) 7n, 188, 189, 192–3, 302, 314, 333n, 344, 347, 386, 387, 397 L’Estrange, Roger (1616–1704) 331 Le Fe`vre, Nicolas [Faber] (1544–1612) 84n, 118 Le Fe`vre, Tanneguy [Tanaquillus Faber] (1615–72) 86n, 145n Le Moyne, E´tienne [1624–89] 324n Le Nain de Tillemont, Se´bastien (1637–98) 12n, 191, 319n, 334n, 343n, 355 Lee, Francis (1661–1719) 311n Lefe`vre d’E´taples, Jacques [Faber Stapulensis] (1450?–1537) 203 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 16n, 319n, 379, 461 Lemprie`re, John (c. 1765–1824) 51 Lenfant, Jacques (1661–1728) 314n Leslie, Charles (1650–1722) 332n Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81) 441, 482 Lethmaet, Herman [Hermannus Lethmatius] (1492–1555) 263n Levi ben Gershom [Gersonides] 272–3 Levita, Elias, see Elijah ben Asher Levita, Joannes Isaac, see Isaak ha-Levi libraries 46, 84, 92, 94n, 106n, 118–9, 151, 273, 317, 389, 414n Bodleian Library 163, 319–20, 321, 325, 326, 327, 329 Cottonian Library 325 English Royal Library (London) 323 French Royal Library (Paris) 328, 387 Laurentian Library 323, 324n Turin Library 334 Vatican Library 80–1, 92n, 106n, 320n, 323n Lightfoot, John (1602–75) 231, 246, 250 Ligorio, Pirro (c. 1510–83) 4n, 320 Limborch, Philippus van (1633– 1712) 293n, 302 Lindanus, Guilielmus Damasus [Willem Damasz. van der Linden] (1525–98), bp. of Ruremonde 258–9, 264n Lindner, Gottlob Immanuel (1734–1808), brother of next 427n Lindner, Johann Gotthelf (1729–1776) 426n Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606) 15n, 33, 75, 78n, 79, 82, 83n, 90, 98, 115, 116, 123–34, 156n, 160–1, 162, 171n

Livineius, Johannes [Jan Lievens] (1546/47–99) 33, 77–90, 98, 107, 110–11 Livy 180n, 467n Lloyd, William (1627–1717), bp. of Worcester 312n, 313–4, 316, 318, 321–2, 327, 328–9, 340, 353 Locke, John (1632–1704) 344, 355, 358, 387 ps.-Longinus 159 Lotter, Johann Georg (1699–1737) 383n Louis XIV (1638–1715), king of France from 1643 425 Lo¨wenklau, Johann [Leunclavius] (c. 1541–c. 1594) 115, 123 Lucas, Paul (1664–1737) 115 Lucian of Samosata 158, 479 Lucretius 91n Luden, Heinrich (1780–1847) 464n Lu¨ders, Carl Ferdinand (fl. 1865) 51 Luther, Martin (1483–1546) 34, 197, 200, 252, 273, 372n Lysippus, sculptor 43, 51 Mabillon, Jean (1632–1707), Maurist 190–1, 320n, 450 Mably, Gabriel de (1709–85) 451, 452–3, 455 Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800–59) 311 Machiavelli, Niccolo` (1469–1527) 467n, 472n Macrobius 43n, 159 Mahudel, Nicolas (1673–1747) 410 Maimonides, Moses 282–93, 357 Major, Johann Daniel (1634–93) 410 Malalas, John 327 Al-Ma’mu¯n, seventh ‘Abba¯sid caliph 286 Manasseh ben Israel (1604–57) 402 Manetho 283 Manilius 39, 95, 97, 102n, 104, 110 Manuzio, Aldo [Aldus Manutius], the elder (c. 1450–1515), father of next 94, 96, 102, 189n Manuzio, Paolo (1512–1574) 102n Marana, Giovanni Paolo (1642–93) 406–7 Marchand, Prosper (1678–1756) 388 Mariana, Juan (1536–1624), Jesuit 270 Marini, Andrea (d. 1570) 408 Marmontel, Jean-Franc¸ois (1723–99) 195 Marsh, Narcissus (1638–1713) 313n

Index Marsham, John (1602–85) 290–2, 299, 302, 371 Martial 47 Martoni, Nicola 48 Mary II (1662–94), queen of England from 1689, 306, 329, 339 Al-Mas’udi 284 Maulde, Franc¸ois de [Franciscus Modius] (1556–97) 81n, 83–4, 85, 86, 88n Maurenbrecher, Wilhelm (1838–92) 476n Maussac, Philippe Jacques de [Maussacus] (c. 1590–1650) 176 Maximus the Confessor 199 Mayr, Georg (1564–1623), Jesuit 256–7 Meiners, Christoph (1747–1810) 462n Melanchthon, Philipp (1497–1560) 197, 201 Me´nage, Gilles [Aegidius Menagius] (1613–92) 180n Me´nard, Nicolas-Hugues (1585–1644), Maurist 322n, 323n Mencke Friedrich Otto (1708–54) 383n Mercati, Michele (1541–93) 410, 411 Mercier, Josias (d. 1626) 239n, 242n, 317 Mersenne, Marin (1588–1648) 401 Meursius, Joannes [van Meurs] (1579–1639) 97, 101, 110 Meyer, Johannes (1653?–1725) 304 Michael Scottus 379n Michael the Syrian (Michael I Qıˆndasıˆ), Patriarch of Antioch 45 Michaelis, Johann David (1717–1791) 28 Michelet, Jules (1798–1874) 471 Mill, John (1644/5–1707) 318–21, 323, 328, 329n, 330 Minucius Felix 78, 86–90, 335n Minutoli, Vincent (1639–1709) 386 Molesworth, Robert, Viscount (1656–1725) 398n Molie`re, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as (1622–73) 428 Moller, Johannes (1661–1725) 2n, 160n Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903) 114, 115, 116n, 130 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92) 22n, 81, 123, 148n Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de (1689–1755) 429, 433 More, Henry (1614–87) 361, 362n, 363, 377

497

Morhof, Daniel Georg (1639–91) 25n, 26–7, 160, 418 Morin, Jean (1591–1659), Oratorian 183n Morsius, Joachimus (1593–1642) 151 Mo¨ser, Justus (1720–94) 441, 442 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von (1694–1755) 450 Moultou, Paul-Claude (1731–1787) 308 Muh: ammad ben Ish: a¯q al-Nadı¯m 286 Muis, Sime´on Marotte de (1587–1644) 257n Mu¨ller, Friedrich Max (1823–1900) 279 Mu¨ller, Johannes von (1752–1809) 466 Mu¨nster, Sebastian (1489–1552) 234–5, 236, 241 Muret, Marc-Antoine de (1526–85) 79, 81, 102, 189n Myle, Cornelis van der (1570–1640) 168n Mylius, Johannes (fl. 1557) 200 Nannius, Petrus [Nanninck, Pierre] (1500–57) 258 Naude´, Gabriel (1600–53) 401 Neander, Michael [Neumann] (1525–95) 34, 197–230 Nelson, Robert (1656–1715) 311n, 360n Nero, Roman emperor 47, 49 Newton, Charles Thomas (1816–94) 51 Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) 300, 370, 387 Nicander of Colophon 147 Nicephorus Callistus 200, 211, 215, 326, 332n Nicetas David (of Paphlagonia) 49n Nicholas of Lyra 246 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (1776–1831) 439, 440, 463, 465, 466, 467n, 470, 471 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900) 429, 463–4 Niger, Antonius (c. 1500–1555) 200n ps.-Nilus 198, 199 Nointel, Charles-Franc¸ois Olier, marquis de (?–1685), French ambassador in Constantinople 406 Nonnus of Panopolis 176, 201 Noris, Enrico (1631–1704), cardinal 327 Notitia dignitatum 121 Numenius of Apamea 352 Nye, Stephen (1648?–1719) 360n

498

Index

Olearius, Gottfried (1672–1715) 427n Olieschlager, Jan [Joannes Olivarius] (c. 1545–1624) 118 Oporinus, Johannes [Johann Herbst] (1507–68) 96, 200, 212, 217, 219, 222, 228 Origen 156, 187, 189n, 296, 314, 317n, 319n, 361, 366, 375n, 377n, 382 Ormonde, James Butler, duke of (1610–88) 313n Orosius 203n, 211 Orsini, Fulvio [Ursinus] (1529–1600) 78, 83, 90, 97n, 98, 100, 105 Osiander, Andreas (1498–1552) 244 Ovid 43n, 87n, 102n, 103, 107, 209 Owen, George (1552–1613) 410 Padniefski, Filip (c. 1510–72), bp. of Krako´w 220 Pagi, Antoine, the elder (1624–99), Conventual Franciscan 316n, 318n, 327 Palaephatus 148 Palladius of Helenopolis 344 Pamphilus of Alexandria 140 Panegyrici Latini 77, 85 Papias of Hierapolis 342 Papebroch, Daniel [Van Papenbroeck] (1628–1714), Jesuit 330 Paracelsus [Theophrast von Hohenheim] (1493–1541) 400 Parker, Matthew (1504–75), abp. of Canterbury 8 Parker, Samuel, the younger (1681–1730) 331 Parker, Thomas, earl of Macclesfield (1667–1732) 392 Parmenides 20n Pascal, Blaise (1623–62) 10, 401, 402 Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis 324–5 Patin, Guy (1601–72) 319n, 401 Patisson, Mamert (d. 1601), printer in Paris 95n, 102n, 104n patristics, see Fathers of the Church Patrizi, Francesco [Patricius] (1529–97) 19n, 21n, 297 patronage 80–1, 83, 197, 239, 355, 388, 392, 399, 401 Pattison, Mark (1813–1884) 3, 162n Paul the Deacon 203n

Pearson John, bp. of Chester (1613–86) 316, 321n, 334n, 342n, 395n Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de (1580–1637) 407 Pellicanus, Konrad (1478–1556) 273n, 294n Perez de Valentia, Jacobus [Jaime Perez] (d. 1490), Augustinian hermit 234 periodicals 308, 387, 441, 460n, 465n, 470 Pertz, Georg Heinrich (1795–1876) 470n Petau, Denis (1583–1652), Jesuit 118, 358–9, 360, 363, 366, 370, 376n, 378n Peter the Great (1672–1725), tsar of Russia from 1689 425–6 Petersen, Johann Wilhelm (1649–1727) 366, 374 Petronius 77, 95n, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 140n Petrus Comestor 203n, 211, 224 Pfaff, Christoph Mattha¨us (1686–1760) 277, 299, 301–4, 334 Pflug, Julius (1499–1564), bp. of Naumburg 232n Philip Sidetes 326 Philips, Ambrose (1674–1749) 309n Philo of Alexandria (Philo Iudaeus) 200, 201, 270, 292, 297, 398, 349, 350, 351, 361–4, 366, 371n, 381 Philo of Byzantium (Philo Mechanicus), writer of the 2nd cent. bc 41 Philo of Byzantium, rhetor 41, 47, 51, 54, 55 Philodemus 138n Philoponus, John, Christian Neoplatonist 141 Phocylides 198 Photius 82, 92n Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94) 372 Pidou de Saint-Olon, Franc¸ois (1646–1720), brother of next 406 Pidou de Saint-Olon, Louis-Marie (1637–1717), French consul in Ispahan 406 Pierce, Thomas (1622–91) 339n Pindar 43n Pinelli, Gianvincenzo (1535–1601) 157n

Index Pirckheimer, Charitas (1467–1532), abbess of the convent of the Poor Clares at Nuremberg 225 Pithou, Nicolas, sieur de Changobert (1524–98), brother of next 118, 119 Pithou, Pierre (1539–96) 95n, 103, 104, 118, 124 Plantin, Christophe (c. 1520–1589), printer 78n, 82, 83, 85, 99, 102–3, 105–6, 107, 111, 117, 121, 266 Plato 19, 37, 43, 139n, 153, 164, 174, 178, 298, 338–9, 349–52, 353, 359, 363, 364, 368n, 417, 418, 430, 434–5 Neoplatonism 139, 338, 374n, 377n Plautus 105, 111, 146 Pliny the Elder 43, 44, 45, 46, 148 Pliny the Younger 180, 216 Plutarch 21, 83n, 278, 291–2 ps.-Plutarch 350n Pococke, Edward (1604–91) 281 Po¨litz, Karl Heinrich Ludwig (1772–1838) 464n Poelman, Theodore [Pulmannus] (c. 1512–81) 105, 118, 121 Poiret, Pierre (1646–1719) 302, 304 politics 9, 128–31, 133, 171n, 315, 393, 470–1 Poliziano, Angelo [Politianus] (1454–94) 78, 86n, 90, 98, 136, 139, 141–2, 144n, 150, 161n, 164n, 240 Pollux, Julius 245–6 Polybius 44, 171n, 182, 455–6, 459 Polycarp of Smyrna 322–3, 342, 346n Pomponius, Sextus 124n Poppe, Johann Heinrich Moritz (1776–1854) 462n Porphyry 291 Porta, Giuseppe (fl. 1700) 192n Porthaise, Jean [Porthaesius] (1520?–c. 1603) 163, 166, 167n Postel, Guillaume (1510–81) 208–9, 222, 223, 229, 233n, 236–8, 239, 241, 243 Post(h)ius, Johannes (1537–97) 84 Presocratics 19–21, 24n, 418 Prideaux, Humphrey (1648–1724) 319n prisca theologia 19n, 165n, 203, 229, 351–2, 358 Priscianese, Francesco [Priscianensis] (fl. 1540–47) 99 ps.-Prochorus 202n, 216

499

Proclus 82, 352 Prodromus, Theodorus 201 Promnitz, Syphard von ( fl. 1540–70) 202 Propertius 81, 84, 87, 90, 105, 110 Pru¨ckner, Nicolaus ( fl. 1533–1551) 95, 104 Psellus, Michael 212, 214 Ptolemy 40, 57, 179 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, king of Egypt 263n, 353 Ptolemy IV Philopator, king of Egypt 353 Pythagoras 163n, 177, 198, 199 Quatreme`re, E´tienne (1782–1857) 284 Quintilian 142, 159, 162n, 180 Quirini, Angelo Maria (1680–1755), cardinal 316n Ralegh, Walter (1554–1618) 400 Ramus, Petrus [Pierre de La Rame´e] (1515–72) 138n, 143n, 374n Ranke, Heinrich (1798–1876), brother of next 471n Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886) 31, 37, 439, 440, 465–8, 469, 471–4, 476, 477 Rapin, Rene´ (1621–87), Jesuit 416 Rashi [Solomon ben Isaac] 241, 244, 272, 273–5 Rawlinson, Richard (1690–1755) 325n Rehm, Friedrich (1792–1847) 442n, 464n, 461n, 469 Reimmann, Jakob Friedrich (1668–1743) 27, 378n, 448n Renan, Ernest (1823–92) 284–5 Republic of Letters 8, 12, 111, 189, 385, 387, 397, 402–3 Reuchlin, Johann (1455–1522) 244n, 372 Reynolds, George (1699/1700–1769) 308n Rhode, Andreas Albert (1682–1724), son of next 410 Rhode, Christian Detlev (1653–1717) 410n Richardson, John (1647–1725?) 341n Richelieu, Armand Jean Du Plessis, cardinal duke of (1585–1642) 401, 425 Riccio, Paolo [Paulus Ricius] (1480/85–c. 1542) 295n

500

Index

Rickert, Heinrich (1863–1936) 31 Rigault, Nicolas (1577–1654) 334–7 Rittershausen, Konrad [Rittershusius] (1560–1613) 171n Rivet, Andre´ (1572–1651) 7n Robortello, Francesco [Robortellus] (1516–67) 150 Roscher, Wilhelm (1817–94) 468 Rossi, Azariah ben Moses dei (c. 1511–77) 232 Rotteck, Carl von (1775–1840) 464n Rottiers, Bernard Euge`ne Antoine (1771–1858) 51 Rudbeck, Olof [Olaus Rudbeckius] (1630–1702) 410 Ru¨hs, Friedrich (1781–1820) 442n, 464n Rufinus of Aquileia 201, 210, 211, 215, 216, 226, 229 alleged translator of Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae 259n Ruhnken, David [Ruhnkenius] (1723–98) 417n Rulaeus, Evaldus [Ruyl?] (fl. 1681), brother of next 318n Rulaeus, Philippus (fl. 1674) 323, 324n Saadiah ben Joseph Gaon 241 Sabeo, Fausto [Sabaeus], keeper of the Vatican library (died c. 1556) 86, 88n, 89, 90n, 99 Saint-E´vremond, Charles Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de (1613–1703) 387, 388, 392 Saint-Vertunien Lavau, Franc¸ois de [Franciscus Vertunianus] (d. 1608) 145, 146–7, 151, 155, 157, 158, 162 Sallust 107n Sambucus, Johannes [Ja´nos Zsa´mboki] (1531–84) 77, 105, 111, 123 Sancroft, William (1617–93), abp. of Canterbury 312n, 315n, 328n, 329 Sand, Christoph [Sandius] (1644–80) 359, 360, 363, 376n, 377, 378n Santes, Pagnino [Pagninus] (1471–1541), Dominican 261, 262, 263 Santoro, Giulio Antonio [Sanctorius] (1532–1602), cardinal 232n Sarrau, Claude [Sarravius] (c. 1600–1651) 7n, 181n

Saumaise, Claude [Salmasius] (1588–1653) 7n, 100, 101, 188, 233, 250, 402, 405 Sauppe, Hermann (1809–93) 76 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von (1779–1861) 471 Scaliger, Joseph Justus (1540–1609), son of next 33, 46, 75–6, 77, 80n, 81n, 85–6, 88n, 89n, 95, 101, 102n, 104, 110, 111, 119, 124, 136, 138n, 140–1, 145–59, 160, 162, 163n, 164, 166, 167n, 171n, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 188, 192, 195, 233, 240, 250 Scaliger, Julius Caesar (1484–1558) 33, 142–5, 178 Scaurus, Quintus Terentius, grammarian 148 Scheffner, Johann George (1736–1820) 418 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854) 471 Schelwig, Gottlieb (fl. 1700–1724) 334 Scheurl, Christoph (1481–1542) 225–6, 227 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805) 109 Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829) 194n Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834) 19n, 194, 417 Schlo¨zer, August Ludwig (1735–1809) 439, 441, 442, 451, 452–5, 456n, 457n, 458–9, 462, 473n, 474 Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph (1776–1861) 464n Schmidt, Wilhelm Adolf (1812–87) 470 Schneider, Johann Gottlob (1750–1822) 417n Scho¨nemann, Carl Traugott (1765–1802) 463 Scholars, papers of 78, 82, 163–5, 273, 323n, 324n, 362n, 365–6, 388–9, 398n, 449n, 477n Schoppe, Kaspar [Schoppius, later Scioppius] (1576–1649) 150n, 161–2 Schott, Andre´ (1552–1629), Jesuit 33, 79, 82, 115, 116, 117–23, 124, 126, 127 Scott, Walter (1771–1832) 466 Scrivener, Matthew (1622?–1688) 341n

Index Scriverius, Petrus [Schryver] (1576–1660) 151, 157, 163n, 166, 173–4, 176n Selden, John (1584–1654) 368, 374 Semler, Johann Salomo (1725–91) 28, 441, 450, 451 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the elder, father of next 159 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the younger or the philosopher 15n, 81, 172 Septimius Severus, Roman emperor 334 Serres, Jean de [Serranus] (c. 1540–1598) 168n Servet, Miguel [Michael Servetus] (1511–53) 359 Servius 141 Sextus Empiricus 33, 140, 144, 149–50, 151, 172–3, 292n Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of (1671–1713) 387, 391, 392, 393, 416, 422 Al-Shahrastani, Tadj al Din Abu¯ l-Fath Muhammad 284 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 50 Sharp, John (1645–1714), abp. of York 333n Sibylline Oracles 34, 217–19 Sigogne, Franc¸ois de (fl. 1669), lawyer in Limoges [or, rather, Poitiers] 145n Sigonio, Carlo [Sigonius] (1524?– 1584) 156n, 265n Silius Italicus 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 103 Silvestre, Pierre (1662–1718) 388 Simeoni, Gabriele (1509–75) 239n Simmel, Georg (1858–1918) 480n Simon, Richard (1638–1712) 186–8, 252n, 274n, 402 Simplicius, Neoplatonist 141, 240 Sirleto, Guglielmo (1514–85), cardinal 78, 80, 81, 82, 263–4 Sirmond, Jacques (1559–1651), Jesuit 335 Sisenna, Lucius Cornelius 148, 153 Sismondi, Jean Charles Le´onard Simonde de (1773–1842) 467 Sixtus V (1521–90), pope from 1585 266, 267, 269 Slingsby, Sir Henry (fl. 1686) 312 Smalbroke, Richard (1672–1749), bp. of Coventry and Lichfield 307–8, 309 Smalbroke, Thomas (fl. 1695) 359n Smetius, Martin (d. 1578) 115n, 123

501

Smith, Adam (1723–90) 453n Smith, Thomas (1638–1710) 2n, 312n, 313n, 316n, 323n, 324n, 325, 331, 332n, 333, 334n, 339n, 351n Smith, William (1651?–1735) 330n Smith, William Robertson (1846–94) 278–9, 282n Socinus, Fausto Paolo [Sozzini] (1539–1604) 295, 302 Socrates 20n, 36–7, 414, 416–30, 432–5 Solinus 270 Sophocles 78, 81, 82, 89, 92 Souverain, Jacques [often mistakenly called ‘Matthieu’] (1645/50–1698/ 99) 359n, 360 Sozomen 200, 207, 215, 229 Spanheim, Ezechiel (1629–1710) 188 Spark, Thomas (1655–92) 325n Speeth, Johann Peter [‘Moses Germanus’] (d. 1701) 365, 368, 369 Spencer, John (1630–93) 35, 277–304, 368, 369–70, 371 as alleged founder of the comparative history of religion 278–9 and Maimonides 281, 288, 292–3 possible Socinianism of 299–300 Speusippus 177 Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77) 184–6, 193, 194, 357, 365, 366–7, 368, 372, 373, 376–7, 379, 381, 383, 402 Spittler, Ludwig Timotheus (1752–1810) 441, 442 Stange, Thomas (d. 1559) 197, 200 Stanley, Thomas (1625–78) 21n, 414, 418, 427, 429, 432 Statius, Achilles [Aquiles Estac¸o] (1524–81) Stearne, John (1624–1669) 341 Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Freiherr vom (1757–1831) 469 Steno, Nicolaus (1638–86) 410–11 Stenzel, Gustav Adolf Harald (1792–1854) 469 Stephanus of Byzantium 148, 214 Stewech, Godescalc [Stewechius] (1551–86) 97, 100, 106–7, 111 Stiblin, Kaspar [Gasparus Stiblinus] (fl. 1555) 103, 109 Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–99), bp. of Worcester 342n, 343n Strabo 43, 44, 45, 46, 136 Strauss, Leo 357, 373, 383 Strigel, Victorinus (1524–69) 201

502

Index

Suda 140, 200, 201, 203, 210, 211, 215, 216, 219–21 Suetonius 83, 116n, 119, 120–2, 123, 124, 126–7, 152, 164, 165, 168n, 423n Sulaima¯n I, the Magnificent (1494–1566), Turkish sultan from 1520 113 Sulpicius Severus 344 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 312 Sybel, Heinrich von (1817–95) 468, 469, 470, 476n Sylvester I, bp. of Rome 335, 336, 337 Synesius of Cyrene 374n Tacitus 7n, 75, 90n, 94, 122, 123–4, 127–31, 132, 133–4, 403, 476, 479 Talmud 154n, 244–5, 275 Tassin, Rene´ Prosper (1697–1777), Maurist 2n Tatian 366, 378n Tauriscus 144, 149, 173n Tempesta, Antonio (1555–1630) 46, 59 Tenerus, Edmundus (fl. 1570), Jesuit 256n Terence 146 Tertullian 169, 249n, 263n, 309, 325n, 335, 348, 366 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 325, 350, 352 Theodore of Mopsuestia 293n Theodore of Studios 81, 82 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 200, 201, 215, 229, 291n, 294n Theognis 198 Theophanes (d. ad 818) 44, 46 Theophilus of Antioch 213, 214, 219, 334, 344, 364 Theophrastus 178 Thevet, Andre´ (1516–90) 48–9, 54, 61, 62 Thierry, Augustin (1795–1856) 466 Thomas Aquinas 256n, 433n Thomasius, Christian (1655–1728) 26, 293n, 304, 418, 419–20, 423n, 431 Thomasius, Jacob (1622–1684) 2n, 376 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de [Thuanus] (1553–1617) 171n, 239 Thucydides 472n Tiberius, Roman emperor 122, 126, 127, 130 Tibullus 84, 105 Tillotson, John (1630–94), abp. of Canterbury 391, 394

Timosthenes of Rhodes 40, 55, 56 Tittmann, Friedrich Wilhelm (1784–1864) 442n, 464n Toland, John (1670–1722) 10, 35, 308, 357–8, 370, 373n, 375n, 388, 398n, 418n Tommasi, Giuseppe Maria (1649–1713), cardinal 2 Torrentius, Laevinus (Lieven Vander Beke) (1525–95) 33, 78n, 80, 83, 85, 121 Torresani, Gian Francesco [Franciscus Asulanus] (c.1480 [or, rather 1498]–1557/8) 103 Trajan, Roman emperor 216, 342 travels 9, 48, 51n, 80–1, 113–5, 117, 171, 197, 239, 252, 265, 300n, 312–13, 323, 334, 353n, 365, 385–7, 402–3, 406, 408, 413–14 see also diplomacy Trimnell, Charles (1663–1723), bp. of Winchester 309n Trinity 35, 212, 218, 219, 229, 337–9, 357–83 Triphiodorus, epic poet 198 Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923) 463, 483, 484 Tronchin, Louis (1629–1705) 386 Tryphon, Alexandrian grammarian 148 Turne`be, Adrien (1512–65) 75, 79, 123, 189n Turner, Francis (1637–1700) 328, 329n, 332n Turner, John (1660–1720) 309n, 310n Turretini, Jean-Alphonse (1671–1737) 386 Uber, Georg (fl. 1544) 409 universities 26–7, 123, 194, 197, 252–5, 263, 301, 312, 328–9, 340, 355, 386, 402–3, 419, 420, 441, 448–9, 451, 465n, 469 Ussher, James [Usserius] (1581–1656), abp. of Armagh 317, 322n Valckenaer, Lodewijk Caspar [Valckenaerius] (1715–85) 417n Valentinus, Gnostic theologian 345 Valerius Flaccus 83n Valla, Lorenzo (1406–57) 164, 228–9, 230, 232 Valois, Henri de [Henricus Valesius] (1603–76) 180–3, 184, 185, 325n

Index Valverde y Gandia, Bartolome´ de [Valverdius] (1520–1600) 269 Vanini, Giulio Cesare (1585–1619) 406 Varro 3n, 6, 136, 146, 148, 149, 153, 156n, 161, 175, 375n Vatable, Franc¸ois (1493–1547) 240, 242n Vegetius Renatus, Flavius 106, 111 Velleius Paterculus 4, 134, 330 Veranzio, Antonio (1504–73) 113, 114, 123 Vergara, Francisco (1484?–1545) 240 Vergil 95n, 252 Vertranius, Marcus Maurus (fl. 1550–88) 128–9 Vettori, Pier [Petrus Victorius] (1499–1585) 78, 79, 84, 95n, 108 Vezzosi, Antonio Francesco (1708–83) 2 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744) 23 Victorinus, Marius 175n Viger, Franc¸ois (1590–1647), Jesuit 350n De viris illustribus 117 Voet, Gijsbert [Voetius] (1589–1676) 15 Volney, Constantin Franc¸ois de Chasseboeuf, comte de (1757–1820) 470 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet, known as (1694–1778) 308, 415 Vossius, Gerardus Joannes (1577–1649), father of next 2n, 7n, 179, 368 Vossius, Isaac (1618–89) 7n, 145n, 317, 318n, 319n, 320, 322n, 323, 324n, 327 Wachler, Ludwig (1767–1838) 464n Wachsmuth, Wilhelm (1787–1866) 442n, 464n Wachter, Johann Georg (1673–1757) 35, 357–83 Waitz, Georg (1813–86) 469, 476n Wake, William (1657–1737), abp. of Canterbury 322n Wakefield, Robert (fl. 1524–32) 233n, 235–6, 244n Warburton, William (1698–1779), bp. of Gloucester 375 Weber, Max (1864–1920) 478, 482, 483n, 484 Wegele, Franz Xaver von (1823–97) 439 Wells, Edward (1667–1727) 330–1 Whiston, William (1667–1752) 300 Whitby, Daniel (1637/8–1726) 313n

503

Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von (1848–1931) 3n, 5, 32, 53, 137n, 161n Wilhelm, Johann [Janus Gulielmus] (1555–84) 90 Will, Georg Andreas (1727–98) 449 Willemsz, Johan [Johannes Harlemius] (1538–78), Jesuit 254, 255, 256n, 259, 263 William I, Prince of Orange (1533–84) 253 William III (1650–1702), king of England from 1689 306, 329, 339 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–68) 441 Windelband, Wilhelm (1848–1915) 31 Wits, Herman [Witsius] (1636–1708) 281n Władysław II Jagiełło (1351–1434), king of Poland from 1386 409 Wodrow, Robert (1679–1734) 395n Wolf, Friedrich August (1759–1824) 76, 417, 469n Wolf, Johann Christoph (1683–1739) 166, 167, 285n, 300, 334, 370n Woltmann, Karl Ludwig von (1770–1817) 464n, 473 Wolzogen, Johann Ludwig von (d. 1658) 295, 301 Wood, Anthony (1632–95) 312n, 328, 329n, 355 Woodward, John (1665/68–1728) 311 Worm, Ole [Olaus Wormius], the elder (1588–1654) 402–3, 404, 405–6, 408–9, 411 Wotton, Nicholas (c. 1497–1567), English ambassador in France 241n Wower, Johannes [Wowerius] of Hamburg (1574–1612) 2, 101n, 157, 163n, 171–6 Xenocritus of Cos 141 Xenophon 37, 417, 419, 421 Young, Patrick [Junius] (1584–1652) 321, 322n Zay, Franz Freiherr von (1498–1570) 113

504

Index

Zedler, Johann Heinrich (1706–51) 26n Zeno 20 Zenodotus 141 Zeune, Johann Carl (1736–88) 417n Zosimus 81

Zu´n˜iga, Baltasar de [Balthasar Suniga] (d. 1622), Spanish ambassador in Brussels 240n Zwicker, Daniel (1612–78) 359, 360, 376n, 378n