Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times 9780226473178

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Playing the Fool

Playing the Fool Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times

r alph ler ner

the university of chicago pr ess Chicago and London

ralph lerner is the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in the College and professor emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has written numerous journal articles on medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy as well as American revolutionary and constitutional thought and is the author, most recently, of Maimonides’ Empire of Light, published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-47315-4 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-47315-5 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lerner, Ralph. Playing the fool : subversive laughter in troubled times / Ralph Lerner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-47315-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-47315-5 (hardcover. : alk. paper) 1. Political satire—History and criticism. 2. Fools and jesters—Political aspects. 3. Laughter—Political aspects. 4. Political science—Language. 5. More, Thomas, Sir, Saint, 1478–1535—Language. 6. Bacon, Francis, 1561–1626—Language. 7. Burton, Robert, 1577–1640—Language. 8. Bayle, Pierre, 1647–1706—Language. 9. Franklin, Benjamin, 1706–1790—Language. 10. Gibbon, Edward, 1737–1794— Language. I. Title. pn6149.p64l47 2009 809.7'93581—dc22 2008051926 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

To Leo Strauss A final, grateful, fond salute

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit. . . . This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man’s art: For folly that he wisely shows is fit; But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit. shak espear e, Twelfth Night, 3.1.60–61, 65–68

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 2 3 4 5 6

Tomfoolery in Earnest 21 The Jiha¯d of St. Alban 31 Burton’s Antics 49 Remedial Education in Professor Bayle’s History Class 63 Franklin’s Double Take on Rights 89 The Smile of a Philosophic Historian 109 Index of Names 133

Acknowledgments

Chapter 2, “The Jiha¯d of St. Alban,” first appeared in Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 5–26. Part of this volume’s introduction first appeared as “Dispersal by Design: The Author’s Choice,” in Reason, Faith and Politics: Essays in Honor of Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. Arthur Melzer and Robert Kraynak (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 29–41. I thank these editors and publishers for their permission to reprint. Colleagues, students, and friends have directed their critical judgment to whichever of these essays I have exposed to their candor. The character of both the texts and the author are the better for it. I thank especially Clifford Ando, Zachary Cannon, Dean DiSpalatro, Ryan P. Hanley, Dennis J. Hutchinson, Sanford Kessler, Joel L. Kraemer, Carol Lerner, Elizabeth McCutcheon, Arthur Melzer, Svetozar Y. Minkov, Clifford Orwin, Gerald Stourzh, and above all Thomas S. Schrock.

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Introduction

In a world of strident certainties, individuals offering moderating second thoughts have had no easy time. Their call for us to think and think again is hard to hear, let alone heed. Faced with this persisting resistance, would-be counselors and critics may draw on a tradition of sundry devices to breach impervious ignorance. Doing so is not without risk, for, while power (monarchic or democratic) may invite truth to speak out, it quickly grows restive and resentful of what is said. Although an earnest speaker is well advised to remember that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall, an ingratiating manner will hardly suffice for the task at hand. This is so because, regrettably, the first painful step others need to be induced to take toward clarity and decency entails the subversion of their self-satisfaction or, what comes to the same thing, their complacency with the commonplaces to which they have long subscribed. That orthodoxies of various kinds had best be approached on tiptoe and in motley is hardly a modern discovery. Consider, for example, how deftly Chaucer punctures pretensions, showing, thereby, both his awareness of the hazards of public speaking and his appreciation of the quiet power of irony to let him have his say with safety. Notwithstanding such an instance or instances, one student of the Renaissance has been led to declare that credit for having recovered—after a long hiatus—the political use of wit and satire belongs to the leading lights of the Western Renaissance. It is “not until the paradoxical concept of the wise fool is developed that we find any striking examples later than classical literature of 1

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comic laughter teaching. As wisdom and folly confront each other in the same person, sustained irony becomes possible for the first time since the classical age, and in the laughter of fools the voice of wisdom is heard.” 1 Playing the fool has much to commend it—if one is sufficiently quick. A fool may vent the unspeakable to his master at no greater cost than a well-directed kick or drubbing. And, if a court jester is allowed as much, why may a man of letters not claim a comparable liberty to tease and to taunt, to prod and to provoke? Erasmus, for one, did not find it beneath his dignity as a theologian and scholar of the greatest international repute to engage in public horseplay, the better to express his profound critique of the state of Western Christendom. Let those who take umbrage at his tomfoolery think what they will, he says. He knows better: Well, if it pleases them, let them suppose that all this time I have been playing checkers to refresh my spirits or, if they please, that I have been riding a hobby-horse. For what an injustice it is, when we allow to each way of life its own recreations, that none should be permitted to studies! Especially when literary trifles may lead to serious matter, and fooleries may be so handled that a reader who is not altogether a fathead may garner more of profit from them than from the bristling and pompous arguments of some whom we know. As, for instance, one fellow praises rhetoric or philosophy in a pieced-up oration, another paints the glories of some prince, another exhorts to the end of making war against the Turks, another foretells the future; and still another works up a new set of little essays relating to—a lock of goat’s-wool. Nothing is more puerile, certainly, than to treat serious matters triflingly; but nothing is more graceful than to handle light subjects in such a way that you seem to have been anything but trifling.2

Erasmus knew full well that—of all mankind—his immediate addressee, his soul mate, Thomas More, needed no instruction on this theme or any special prompting to join in the game. What was said of the one may justly be said of each: “He saw that the great interests of his life could be best advanced by appearing under a mask, that the profoundest truths could only be spoken by him if he assumed the clothes of the jester.” Accordingly, both humanists brought to bear the rare qualities of “great play, great flexibility of mind” in their encounters with a menac1. Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 13. 2. Desiderius Erasmus to Thomas More, June 9, [1511], dedicatory preface to The Praise of Folly, by Desiderius Erasmus, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 3.

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ing and stupid world. And both succeeded in producing a masterpiece in which “the serious and the trifling are inextricable, and each reinforces the other.” 3 Now it is evident that any author worth his salt has to decide early on what kind of reader he means to address. All the more is this true of a thinker of high intent and quality, for what he has to convey may be fit for some but utterly inappropriate for others. But, given that a published volume is open to any desultory reader who peers into its contents, an author is driven to contriving devices for warding off those whom his lessons—whether understood or misunderstood—might lead to harming themselves or their fellows or, most pointedly, the author himself. Typically, this concern hardly figures with works presupposing a high level of competence in mathematics or physics or advanced biological science. The casual reader who stumbles on such a work quickly realizes that its threshold is too high for him and proceeds to leave the book and its author in peace. Not so in the case of books that address themes of general human concern: justice, providence, ways of life, and the like. Here is an arena where men kill over their differences. In addressing themes as momentous as these, an author may feel compelled to both attract and repel—to attract the specific kind of reader he means most to target and to leave all others undisturbed. The essays in this volume examine the art (a formidable one indeed) by which some prominent authors of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries used their written words to discriminate among potential readers the better to promote their arguably covert cause. It can come as no surprise that writers of such studied deception should leave simpleminded literalists in the dust, bamboozled and vexed, for it is not such folk that wise fools would address. Yet even the wariest readers may be led on a merry chase, prompting them to enlist all their scholarly resources to authenticate fanciful details these authors strew in their path or to otherwise end up in a cul-de-sac. Has it, then, come to this: that, in our earnest efforts to take an antic author’s meaning, we are doomed to be either mute or gulled? This impasse (if such it be) derives from our customary expectation that any competent writer has a point to make, that that point is reducible to a plain declarative sentence, and that it can be accepted or rejected in those terms. Such an expectation, however sensible when confronting 3. H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), 69, 102–3, 106.

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most writings, cannot gain us entry into minds of a peculiar structure. As little as a prose restatement of the “argument” of a sonnet by Shakespeare can tell us all that is going on in those fourteen lines, so too would our expectation be defeated by the wiles of a Thomas More, a Francis Bacon, a Robert Burton, a Pierre Bayle, a Benjamin Franklin, and an Edward Gibbon. Each is a master of his chosen languages; certainly, none is at a loss for words; yet each refuses to spare his readers the toil (and pleasure) of an intensely thoughtful engagement with arguments and considerations that counter and subvert one another. However: This is not to deny that some great writers might have stated certain important truths quite openly by using as mouthpiece some disreputable character: they would thus show how much they disapproved of pronouncing the truths in question. There would then be good reason for our finding in the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans and buffoons.4

We want decisiveness in our private and public affairs and victimize ourselves with impatience in its pursuit. In their several ways, these wise fools frustrate our plans by inviting us to pause and see an issue in the round. They make us aware of the limiting presuppositions with which we so assuredly view the world. Pretending to know little or nothing, the fool deploys his irony in shaming us worldly-wise people to recognize how little we understand. Paradoxically, we are more inclined to think well of someone who gives signs of doubting himself than of someone who would overwhelm us with his certainty. This inclination applies no less to authors who would teach us moderation. We cannot cozy up to a Jonathan Swift or a Voltaire who would bring us to our senses through an all-out corrosive satire. In contrast, one who subjects his own conclusions to a scrutiny prompted by self-distrust—a Michel de Montaigne, preeminently— makes us wish for such a friend. More than a few of our authors understand that a stance of modesty and candor can serve a teacher well. As has been suggested, there is an entire arsenal of devices available to authors who wish to rouse certain of their readers while leaving the others 4. Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8, no. 1/4 (November 1941): 503 (see also n. 21). For further indications why “a true Platonist” might feel compelled when speaking publicly to deck out his “serious teaching, the philosophic teaching, in . . . playful garb,” see Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, English Section (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 376–77.

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to slumber on. Irony, feigned madness, shocking frankness, silly-sounding earnestness, and even, as it turns out, the sheer disarray of presentation: all may serve to alert the mind and draw it up short. On this last point there is much to learn from authors lying far off the path of early modern studies. Yet the detour is, I submit, one well worth taking. The considerations raised by earlier practitioners of this art of writing provide a valuable frame within which to view the practices detailed in the subsequent six chapters of this book. For, among other themes, they discuss explicitly why an author might choose to be inexplicit and see a need to teach by indirection.5 adapting to the audience Moses Maimonides makes it abundantly clear that the dynamic of author and audience is anything but simple. While the public stands in need of an author who knows whereof he speaks, he in turn seeks readers who are competent to gauge his art and skill. Thus, a believer who is eager to ascertain what the divine law requires of him on some point of observance has only to turn to the great systematizer’s restatement of the Jewish oral law, the Mishneh Torah, to find the rule quickly and decisively. But, in being satisfied in his search of black-letter law, such a reader hardly reaches the core of Maimonides’ achievement. To grasp that takes another kind, one endowed with the judgment and disposition to discriminate among the ways of composition. By first recognizing the dispersal (taštı¯t) of those things in the oral law that are reassembled in the Mishneh Torah, a qualified reader may come to reflect on how Maimonides arrived at his singular arrangement.6 It is incontestable, even among Maimonides’ staunchest opponents, that his achievement in bringing order to the scattered presentations of the oral law is outstanding. Yet there is a respect in which the impressive organization and linear reasoning of his great legal work are both real and apparent—perhaps more apparent than real. For, when Maimonides had occasion some years later, in the Guide of the Perplexed, to examine the 5. The following sections of this introduction are adapted from my “Dispersal by Design: The Author’s Choice,” in Reason, Faith and Politics: Essays in Honor of Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. Arthur Melzer and Robert Kraynak (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 29–41. 6. Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection (Maqala fi teh.iyyat ha-metim), ed. Joshua Finkel (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1939), 4. For an English version, see Hillel G. Fradkin, trans., Treatise on Resurrection, in Ralph Lerner, Maimonides’ Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 156.

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rationale for the commandments of the divine law, he saw fit to rearrange all that matter in significantly different ways. What is more, as though to underline those differences, his classification in the Guide lists the correspondingly scattered places in the Mishneh Torah where he had earlier enumerated those commandments. Paradoxically, from the standpoint of the Guide (a work notorious for its apparent and perplexing disorder), the clarity and tautness so marked in the Mishneh Torah may conceal the fact that it is itself a dispersal. Different works, addressed to different audiences and with distinct questions in mind, may have to treat the same matter in highly divergent ways. Maimonides invites qualified readers to focus their attention on his mode of presentation. The author has had the opportunity to exercise choices, and those choices, in turn, demand consideration if his deeper intentions are to be grasped. Now it is hardly a new insight that a thinker, possessed of some proposition that he wishes to lay before an audience, has first to choose the form in which he will present it and then adopt an appropriate tone and style. The conventions of modern scholarship typically narrow the expectations of both writers and readers in these respects. The genre most often chosen is that of the treatise, where the presentation is supposed to be linear and clear. Yet there are notable precedents, ancient and modern, of a thinker selecting other modes of instructing or challenging readers. Dialogue, aphorism, letter, fable, parable, essay, novel, and poem have all been deployed in the service of philosophic teachings. For the most part, however, authors have taken care that readers find their writings’ organization and order of presentation visible and intelligible. Let us leave aside for the moment some outstanding exceptions, such as Maimonides himself on occasion and Montaigne and Montesquieu, all of whom call readers’ attention to their deviance from conventional modes. It remains the case, nonetheless, that the general expectation and practice are that an author will mount a coherent argument that either proceeds to confirm a stated proposition or else leads up to it as a conclusion to his presentation. The reader is not expected to cut, reassemble, and paste an author’s finished text in order to take his meaning. Why, then, would a thinker fully capable of making a lucid linear presentation eschew doing so? Further, why would such a thinker press on readers his reasons for disappointing their expectations and, in the course of doing so, necessarily raise new expectations? By looking at what some thinkers—ancient, medieval, and modern—have said about their own dispersal by design, we can begin to see the outlines of a mode of composition that invites further research and reflection. 6

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clement ’s ca moufl age An excellent starting point is the discussion by the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria.7 In his Stromata or Miscellanies, Clement confronts the drawbacks of written compositions as a preliminary to indicating how he means to overcome them. Knowledge belongs not to all, yet writings are accessible to all. At the same time as the politically incorrect Gospel counsels against casting pearls before swine, there is yet an obligation to pass on and spread the tradition of true knowledge. In its unadulterated form, that truth is incomprehensible to the ignorant. They can be spoken to only in parables lest they—and the truth—be grievously harmed.8 Clement is guarded, “not grudging—for that were wrong—but fearing for [his] readers, lest they should stumble” by mistaking his meaning. He would not be guilty of “reaching a sword to a child.” His concern expresses itself in self-restraint: “Some things my treatise will hint; on some it will linger; some it will merely mention. It will try to speak imperceptibly, to exhibit secretly, and to demonstrate silently.” All this in an effort to clear the ground of thorns and weeds, the better for it to receive and nourish “the spiritual seed cast into it” (1.1, 302–3). If Clement feels free to use Greek—that is to say, pagan—erudition and learning, it is for that higher spiritual end. The Stromata, he says, will use “the dogmas of philosophy” to cover over and hide the truth, “as the edible part of the nut in the shell. For, in my opinion, it is fitting that the seeds of truth be kept for the husbandmen of faith, and no others.” Dismissing “swinish and untrained hearers” with the back of his hand, Clement promises to “have the truth sowed sparse and broadcast, that it may escape the notice of those who pick up seeds like jackdaws; but when they find a good husbandman, each one of them will germinate and produce corn” (1.1, 303; 1.12, 312–13). Clement furthers his double goal of repulsion and attraction by insisting that this miscellany of his is precisely that: a crazy quilt of “varied character . . . patched together—passing constantly from one thing to another, and in the series of discussions hinting at one thing and demonstrating another.” We dare not dismiss these words as the perverse boast of an in7. And an excellent starting point for that inquiry is Ernest L. Fortin’s “Clement of Alexandria and the Esoteric Tradition” (1966), reprinted in his The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Christian and Medieval Thought, ed. J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 123–36. 8. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies, in Fathers of the Second Century, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 2 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, American Reprint of the Edinburgh Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), 1.1, 299; 1.12, 312; 6.15, 509. Citations are to book/chapter and page numbers in this edition. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

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competent writer. Rather, his work’s manifestly inconsequent reasoning makes it easy for careless and unskillful readers to go elsewhere. At the same time, he hopes that this very ungainliness will alert and stimulate “those who are of the truly golden race” to do some hard thinking on their own. He holds it sufficient to merely point out the direction those select few should take: “After this they must walk and find out the rest for themselves.” Qualified readers are well advised to act as those using winnowing sheaves, to repeatedly “shake and toss up this the great mixture of seeds, in order to separate the wheat” (4.2, 409–10; 7.14, 549). It is only his commitment to an esoteric presentation of “the germs of true knowledge” that can justify Clement’s resort to camouflage and concealment. The Stromata’s disorder and apparent disregard for beautiful arrangement and diction make for a shadowy and shaggy scene, anything but the lovely manicured landscape for which a reader might yearn. But all this is a matter of design, an attempt to discourage those who, in Clement’s view, have no business pilfering his ripe fruits and to hinder them from even detecting where his fruit-bearing trees are hidden. His true audience, “the husbandmen,” will invest the necessary labor and, in the process, grow quick in discovery. They will find concealed in the tangled mess the shoots and plants they can dig out and use to adorn “a beautiful park and a delightful grove.” Changing his metaphor, Clement concludes: “Many and various are the baits for the various kinds of fishes” (7.18, 556). Exoteric and esoteric presentations might well be thought of as different kinds of trolling for different kinds of fish and in that respect are obliged to take account of local conditions of time and place. Yet, for all its variations, the esoteric tradition on which Clement discreetly drew continued thereafter for over one and a half millennia. In the Islamicate world, it was especially pronounced in works on magic, talismanic art, astrology, and, above all, alchemy. Not surprisingly, such works exhibit those qualities of studied disarray and dispersal (tabdı¯d) to which we have been attending. A modern scholar’s epitome of a magical work, Picatrix (The Aim of the Sage), characterizes “this often disorderly book” in the following terms, noting that its heterogeneous themes are jumbled together throughout the book, with no discernible guiding principle. If a systematic arrangement is anywhere perceptible, it is in the astrological and astronomical material, though even this is far from selfcontained or methodically ordered. Subjects which belong together are separated . . . , long, discursive definitions, appearing in unexpected places,

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further break the sequence . . . —and there is a great deal more to make the reader’s task more difficult. This manner of writing may well be intentional, whether to make the magical sections appear less suspect by interlarding them with theoretical passages, or to make certain doctrines seem less strange by administering them in small doses, or to demonstrate the equal validity of the magical and philosophical material, or for a combination of all three reasons. At all events, a similar method of presentation is apparent in one of the principal sources of The Aim of the Sage, the encyclopaedia of the Brethren of Purity.9

Like Clement, later writers point to Plato as an inspiration and model for this mode of presentation. Ja¯bir ibn H . ayya¯n (721–815) refers to the bearing of Plato’s teaching for an understanding of alchemy: “Et dans la préface il souligne que le savoir (h.ikma) de Platon se trouve dispersé à travers ses écrits et qu’il faut faire de grands efforts pour l’en dégager.” 10 For all the talk of a concealed doctrine, at least this aspect of the mode of teaching was no secret. m aimonides’ private public speech The elitist premise that undergirds Clement’s esotericism is present in equal, if not greater, prominence in Maimonides’ writings. To be sure, Maimonides tries throughout his life to bridge the gulf in understanding between the vulgar and the few; nonetheless, that gulf remains for him a perduring and fixed fact of life.11 Indeed, it is precisely in view of that deep divide that he understands scripture’s use of language as well as the rabbinic injunctions against the free communication of the divine law’s secrets. Those injunctions, in turn, compel him to seek alternative modes 9. Martin Plessner, “Summary,” in “Picatrix,” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magˇ rı¯¸t¯ı , trans. into German from the Arabic by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner, Studies of the Warburg Institute, vol. 27 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1962; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1978), lix. 10. Paul Kraus, Ja¯bir ibn H . ayya¯n, Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, Ja¯bir et la science grecque (Paris: Société d’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1986), 49. (I owe this and the preceding reference to the kindness of Joel L. Kraemer.) 11. Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection, ed. Finkel, 22, 37; Fradkin, trans., Resurrection, 167, 177. See the terse and forceful statement in the Guide (2.36 [79b/372]). Citations of the Guide are to part and chapter numbers, followed by the page number in the Munk edition of the Judeo-Arabic text (Le guide des égarés [Dala¯lat al-h.a¯’irı¯n], ed. S. Munk, 3 vols. [Paris: A. Franck, 1856–66]) and the corresponding page number in the Pines translation (Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963]). Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

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of presenting the truth and lead him in the end to compose the classic text on dispersed teaching. The dilemma confronting Maimonides is even more daunting than that facing Clement. Not only are there contending needs both to mask the truth and to transmit it, but there is also an unequivocal and authoritative Jewish pronouncement limiting the conditions of transmission. Apparently, it was not enough for the rabbinic sages to know that the arcana of the law would necessarily be beyond the reach of the many and accessible only to the few. They went further, taking special care to stipulate the qualifications for even a potential aspirant to those mysteries. Mindful of the risks entailed in such explorations, they conjured their successors to teach with extreme reserve and caution. They bore in mind the talmudic report that, after four notable Tannaim had ventured into the enchanting garden of theoretical studies, only one emerged entire (1.32 [35a–36b/68–70]). Accordingly, Maimonides has much to explain for daring to put in writing what hitherto had been confined to intimate viva voce speech. His introduction in the first part of the Guide of the Perplexed makes it clear that only unprecedented urgencies of contemporary Jewish communal life could have compelled him to hazard violating the rabbinic injunction—for the sake of honoring its intent.12 Viewed from the outside, all these cautions and misgivings appear superfluous. To begin with, the sheer limitation of the human intellect, even in its highest manifestation, constricts both message and messenger. At best, Maimonides asserts, we can catch only fleeting glimpses of the truths of natural and divine science. Further, even if he chose to do so, a thoroughly competent teacher would still be incapable of conveying a completely clear and coherent account of whatever it is that he has, in fact, grasped. Instead, his teaching, be it oral or written, would perforce reenact the fits and starts that he himself experienced when he was first learning these matters. Maimonides concedes as much. Why, then, forbid what in any event cannot be done? Or, more narrowly and pointedly, why should Maimonides appear to go even further than God himself? The “divine purpose . . . concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths especially requisite for His apprehension.” Maimonides for his part promises to deal correspondingly with his chosen addressee, alternately flashing and concealing those truths, in the name of delivering that rarest of individuals from his perplexity (1.Introd. [3b–4b/6–8]). 12. All analysis of Maimonides’ modus operandi has to begin with its modern recovery in 1941 by Leo Strauss. See his “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” reprinted in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 38–94.

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The extra care and caution that Maimonides employs can be traced back to the inherent limits of written speech. Unlike the case of faceto-face oral communication, there is here no opportunity for teacher to gauge the response (or nonresponse) of student.13 There is no possibility of adjusting and readjusting one’s presentation to the student’s readiness and rate of progress. Yet written teaching must begin where all teaching begins: at the point where the student is. One starts with the simple, with the more readily conceivable, even if that requires assuming something that will afterward need to be explained and understood more deeply.14 An initial laxness will later be corrected by a more exact and demanding account (1.Introd., “Fifth Cause” [10a/17–18]).15 In advancing his argument on how to make arguments, Maimonides insists that he will follow the models offered by the rabbinic sages, by the Hebrew prophets before them, and by God’s Book itself. Just as his predecessors had recourse to such strategies of concealment as brevity, parables, riddles, and equivocal language, so too must he. Just as they divided and scattered their thoughts to render obscure what had to be kept obscure, so must he. Indeed, the purpose behind his composition of the Guide—the explication of those obscurities—must itself be kept obscure. Adopting the rabbinic expression, he says that he will transmit only “the chapter headings” of their secret teaching, nothing more: “And even those are not set down in order or arranged in coherent fashion in this Treatise, but rather are scattered and entangled with other subjects that are to be clarified” (1.Introd. [3b/6–7]). Maimonides suggests that this is not a matter of authorial discretion; the “divine purpose” will not have it otherwise. At the same time, this master system builder leaves readers in no doubt that his art has been fully engaged, indeed, engaged to a degree that most modern readers would find incredible. In a subsection of his introduction titled “Instruction with Respect to This Treatise,” Maimonides stakes out this claim: If you wish to grasp the totality of what this Treatise contains, so that nothing of it will escape you, then you must connect its chapters one with an13. See Clement, Stromata, 1.1, 301. 14. Thus, the conclusion following from certain principles of instruction becomes itself a premise or principle of instruction for further reasoning and investigation. Continuing in this vein, one may, ultimately, reach the principles of being. See secs. 8–9 of Alfarabi, The Attainment of Happiness (Tah..s¯ı l al-sa®a¯dah) (Hyderabad, 1345 a.h./1926), 6–8. For an English version, see Muhsin Mahdi, trans., Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 16–18. 15. Maimonides’ discussion of the barriers to an open presentation of “divine science” to beginners is beyond praise (1.33–34 [36b–41b/70–79]).

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other; and when reading a given chapter, your intention must be not only to understand the totality of the subject of that chapter, but also to grasp each word that occurs in it in the course of the speech, even if that word does not belong to the intention of the chapter. For the diction of this Treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision, and with care to avoid failing to explain any obscure point. And nothing has been mentioned out of its place, save with a view to explaining some matter in its proper place. You therefore should not let your fantasies elaborate on what is said here, for that would hurt me and be of no use to yourself. You ought rather to learn everything that ought to be learned and constantly study this Treatise. For it then will elucidate for you most of the obscurities of the Law that appear as difficult to every intelligent man. (1.Introd. [8b–9a/15])

It is no diffident author who tells his readers at the outset that any contradictory or contrary statements they might detect in his book are owing only to the requirements of teaching (already mentioned) or to a “necessity” that attends “speaking about very obscure matters” (1.Introd., “Seventh Cause” [10b, 11b/18, 20]). His sense of social responsibility impels Maimonides to carry out a project of vast difficulty. He must show and not show, tell and not tell.16 He must discriminate among his readers and lead them to segregate themselves according to their capacities. He must delight his intended addressee without leaving others who stumble onto his pages feeling disgruntled, angry, or shaken in their unphilosophic opinions. His every nerve is strained to inspire the venturesome few and strengthen the faltering many without subverting the members of either group. Such are the public considerations surrounding this disjointed and ostensibly private communication. diderot ’s dispersal by design Both Clement and Maimonides thought of themselves as purveyors of enlightenment, at least to the subset of humankind that was open to their challenge and otherwise fit to benefit from it. If they offered their teachings in a scattered and cloaked fashion, it was out of regard for the grandeur of the truth and the well-being of the society in which they lived. They were mindful of the corrosive effects of heady lessons ill conceived and ill digested. They were not given to conducting risky experiments on 16. See Clement, Stromata, 1.2, 304.

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human subjects. They were, in short, grave men attentive to the consequences of their actions. If their expectations were measured, it was not because these thinkers were congenitally timid but because they were proof against visionary projects. In this respect, a deep rift comes to sight, separating these earlier practitioners of dispersed teaching from a modern one, Diderot. At first glance, his and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia might appear to be the very antithesis of a dispersal. Their project is possible only by assembling a scattered society of men of letters and artists, enlisting their diverse talents, and subjecting them (to the extent possible in an enterprise that depends on the kindness and commitment of strangers) to some general editorial control.17 The early decision to present the articles in alphabetic rather than thematic order was recognized as being at odds with their vision of an encyclopedia as a coherent and unified exposition of knowledge. Far, then, from disassembling an argument or exposition, it would seem that the editors needed to conjoin its parts, enabling readers who might approach those articles in an unpredictable and random sequence to see any subject whole and in its various aspects. It is in this regard that Diderot draws attention to a device he believes and expects will meet the challenge of making fragmented, kaleidoscopic views cohere. Midway through his lengthy, self-referential article titled “Encyclopedia,” Diderot celebrates the advantages that he anticipates from the use of cross-references (renvois), “the most important aspect of encyclopedic ordering.” Of the types of references he discusses, two in particular command attention. “Cross-references of things” have a dual but opposing effect. They illuminate an object by tracing its connections to other objects, proximate and distant. They highlight commonalities and analogous principles. Thereby they lend unity to the whole and consequently support the credibility and persuasiveness of any particular account. “But when required,” Diderot says, such references can “covertly” subvert and render incredible and unpersuasive “some ridiculous opinions which one would not venture to disparage openly.” 18 Here is a double-edged instrument, one to be wielded not grossly but with art and finesse. 17. It is safe to say that Diderot’s headaches and frustrations as the editor of the Encyclopedia exceed those of the editor of a Festschrift by many orders of magnitude. 18. All citations of the article “Encyclopédie” in the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres (1751–72) give volume number and then page number in, first, the online French text available at http://artfl.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic31/getobject.pl?c.36:292. encyclopedie1207 and, then, Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 7, Encyclopédie III, Lettres D–L, ed. John Lough and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976): in this case, the reference is 5:642/221. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. The quoted passages from this article are taken, with

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The reach of Diderot’s ambition and the confidence that he brings to this task are sufficiently attested to by his readiness to lay his cards on the table for all to see. Cross-references will be the instrument of choice. In the hands of an “impartial” author—meaning, presumably, one who takes care to maintain the appearance of impartiality—these crossreferences “will always have the double function of confirming and refuting, disrupting and reconciling.” Diderot stresses the “secret utility” of such a procedure and its “silent effects” over the long term. An encyclopedia that speaks with forked tongue can generate large social benefits: Whenever a national prejudice commands respect, for example, that particular article ought to set it forth respectfully, and with its whole retinue of plausibility and persuasion [séduction]; but at the same time it ought to overturn an edifice of muck, dispel a vain pile of dust, by referring to articles in which solid principles form a basis for contrary truths. This means of undeceiving men acts very quickly on good minds, and ineluctably and without any disagreeable consequence, silently and without scandal, on all minds. It is the art of tacitly deducing the boldest consequences. If such confirming and refuting references are foreseen well in advance, and skillfully prepared, they will give an encyclopedia the character which a good dictionary ought to possess: that of changing the common mode of thinking. (5:642/221–22)

That Diderot and his associates conceived of the Encyclopedia as a machine de guerre has been generally acknowledged.19 In one way or another, all men are to be brought to look at their world, this world, with disenchanted eyes, their own eyes, and with a newly gained ability to take each thing for what it is. On the other hand, it has barely been acknowledged that the French master of “the art of tacitly deducing the boldest consequences”—or, rather, of the art of having the reader tacitly deduce the boldest consequences—is Pierre Bayle. It is hard to conceive of a young Denis Diderot who, while studying the great folios of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, fails to grasp the theory and practice of what might irreverently be called “the sentence-completion test.” Whether implantslight emendations, from the online English translation by Philip Stewart: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.did2222.0000.004. 19. See the acute observations in Daniel Brewer, “Language and Grammar: Diderot and the Discourse of Encyclopedism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 13, no. 1 (1979): 1–19, esp. 15–16. A fuller treatment of the Encyclopedia’s “methods and stratagems of war” is in Pierre Grosclaude, Un Audacieux Message, l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1951), 147–60.

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ing an impiety or an obscenity or a contrarian line of reasoning, Bayle shows how an artist, keeping a straight face and concealing his tongue in his cheek, can lead his readers to the brink of a precipice, then make a sharp U-turn himself, and watch the wreck of old opinions and beliefs from a safe distance. This lesson is not lost on Diderot. Yet, for all his insistence on a general or universal enlightenment, he has no illusions about mankind’s equal readiness and aptitude for his liberating message. The highest achievements of the human mind are beyond the grasp of “the general mass of the species.” An encyclopedia occupies some middle ground, neither above “the common ken of men” nor beneath it. There will be something here for both the man of the people and the scientist (5:637/187–88).20 In addressing that diverse readership, the author must forgo the temptation to be precious. There ought indeed to be some limited use of the “satiric or epigrammatic” renvoi, a kind of silent missile shot from a blowgun that hits its target without drawing attention to itself. But there would be little sense in resorting to allusive speech intelligible to perhaps only a few people today and destined to be altogether opaque to a later generation of readers. Diderot cites as an example of the Encyclopedia’s use of satiric cross-reference the studied pomposity of the article on “Grey Friars” (Cordeliers) and its subversion through its renvoi to the article on “Cowl” (Capuchon). This is mild stuff, so mild, in fact, that one is tempted to see it as a smoke screen. It seems to be of a piece with Diderot’s disclaimer that he doesn’t even like the example he has just cited and his subsequent insistence that he detests satires and would absolutely ban “the offhand remark, the subtle allusion, the dainty flourish.” At the same time, he praises “barbs that are not noticeable” and would have readers take this kind of cross-reference to be a hint of ironic intent and a signal that “the article needs to be read warily [avec précaution], carefully weighing all the terms employed” (5:643/224–25, 646/245–46). With all the assemblage and disassembling 21 going on in the pages of the Encyclopedia, it is plain that an effort is being mounted to counteract 20. Later on, Diderot cautions an editor of an encyclopedia, i.e., himself, against tolerating vague and abstruse writing by his contributors. An experienced and disciplined editor would willfully situate himself in the “middle class of minds.” However abstract the topic, his goal should be to “make it accessible to all readers” (5:648/258). This admonition is followed by an injunction to ignore two narrow classes of men at opposite ends of the distribution curve: neither transcendent geniuses nor imbeciles need teachers. 21. “One must know how to dismember a work skillfully, manage its distributions, present its outline, give an analysis of it in the body of an article, the references of which will indicate the rest of the object. The idea is not to break its joints, but to distend them; not to separate the parts, but to disassemble them and scrupulously preserve what artists call register marks [repères]” (5:645/242).

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passive reading. To be sure, one could still “look up” some topic and find out how one or another craft or industrial process works. But, even in such matters, and all the more in the philosophical articles, readers are invited or coaxed or situated so as “to coordinate related entries and put together their hidden, or at least underground, shape.” 22 Thanks to the creative use of the cross-reference, one’s engagement with the Encyclopedia constitutes an occasion for witnessing or participating in a number of different dialogues.23 Here, again, Diderot could not be oblivious of the precedent set by Bayle’s Dictionary with its fully three thousand references between articles.24 In the case of the Encyclopedia, the dialogues are not only between editor and contributor, between one article and an indefinite number of other articles, but also between the necessarily imperfect set of already-published volumes and the future.25 Very much remains to be discovered, so it is important that the references in an article be like a mason’s toothing stones, awaiting the extensions and decorations, correspondingly toothed, that at some later time will be fitted into that space (5:644/230). Diderot leaves the impression that, if he could, he would tell all and explain all—and all at once—but that he cannot. External constraints dictate a commodious division of the matter. An ever-developing body of knowledge demands an open-ended presentation by a multitude of au22. Stephen Werner, “The Encyclopédie ‘Index,’ ” in Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, ed. Daniel Brewer and Julie Candler Hayes, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2002:05 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), 266–67 (see generally 265–70). 23. “The editor knows what is being implied; he is leading the reader along. The process is similar to that of a Socratic dialogue, except that only the student is present. The reader-student must be forced to ask the correct questions and to give the correct answers.” Wilda C. Anderson, Between the Library and the Laboratory: The Language of Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 44–45. Anderson’s entire treatment of the Encyclopedia (see 40–47) is helpful and refreshingly plainspoken. See also Jean Starobinski, “Remarques sur l’Encyclopédie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 75, no. 3 (1970): 287. 24. Equally available to him was Bayle’s presentation of a stunning satiric renvoi (in all but name). The article “Caesar,” in remark L (2:421a [see n. 2, ch. 4, below]), stirs the question whether Caesar or Cato is to be preferred. Is it better to seek glory through bounty and munificence or through the integrity of an austere life? The nod goes to Cato, who desired to be an honest man rather than to seem so. A reference in the margin of the page (n. 100) points the reader to “Amphiaraus,” remark H (1:278b–279b), where Bayle offers “a few reflexions on a subject which will afford an infinite number.” The brilliant dialectical exchange that follows in three long folio columns—each statement more compelling than its predecessor— ends with the observation that it is much easier to conquer one’s own passions than those of one’s malevolent foes. A man secure in his sense of personal goodness and otherwise heedless of his reputation is a sitting duck. Enemies who have the cunning to conceal their wicked hearts and to nurse a reputation for virtue will have no trouble availing themselves of “the oblique ways of working upon the minds of the vulgar” to the ruin and despair of the genuinely virtuous man (1:279b). 25. One must, so to speak, detect where “the spirit of the nation” is heading and “outpace it” (5:637/186). See also Christie V. McDonald, “The Utopia of the Text: Diderot’s ‘Encyclopédie,’ ” The Eighteenth Century 21, no. 2 (1980): 128–44, esp. 141–42.

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thors of uneven expertise. And, of course, the omnipresent fact of censorship compels something less than public candor.26 Yet he is taken with the audacity of his project, indeed possessed by it: I have said that only a philosophical century could attempt an encyclopedia; and I said this because this work everywhere requires more boldness of mind than is normally possessed in centuries of cowardly taste. One must examine and stir up everything, without exception and unsparingly [Il faut tout examiner, tout remuer sans exception & sans ménagement]. . . . (5:644/233)

Buoyed by the achievements of a new science, technology, and philosophy and even more by the hopes and promises held forth by their promoters, Diderot remains confident that the best is yet to come. For him, as for Milton’s primal pair: “The world was all before them, where to choose / their place of rest.” But, unlike those expelled ancestors, he neither seeks nor expects a providential guide. He takes it for granted that “man is the sole point from which to begin and to which all must be brought back” (5:641/213). It is precisely that sense of human sufficiency that informs both the matter and the manner of his circuitous guide to everything. muffled messages Clement, Maimonides, and Diderot all had something to offer and something to fear. Each found the dispersal of his presentation a suitable, even indispensable, means of furthering his educative goals while avoiding harmful consequences for himself and others. To the extent that penetrating clarity is always subversive of unexamined opinion, each of these authors might be said to have entertained a subversive intent. But, considered more narrowly, here the similarity ends. Diderot, for one, shouted from the rooftop and was positively buoyant at the prospect of unsettling the world’s customary thoughts and ways. That exuberance had no counterpart in Clement or Maimonides. Their commitment to the highest expression of the truth was hardly inferior to Diderot’s, but they kept their advocacy muted and moderate. They 26. Diderot’s beau ideal of a censor is, of course, an ironic fantasy (5:648/260). The effectual truth of the matter was stated by d’Alembert in a letter to Voltaire (July 21, 1757): “No doubt we have bad articles in theology and metaphysics, but with theologians for censors, and a privilege, I defy you to make them any better. There are other articles that are less exposed to the daylight, and in them all is repaired. Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said.” Cited in John Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1886), 1:142. (I am grateful to Arthur M. Melzer for this reference as well as for other suggestions.)

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believed that, even if they were to succeed in reaching their chosen audience, this terrestrial world would continue to move much as it has. They knew of no alchemy that could transmute turgid human matter into gold. Accordingly, they spoke and wrote with careful regard for unintended consequences. However pathetic and even ridiculous much of ordinary opinion might have appeared to them, they did not rush to assume that its likely replacement would be preferable. Accordingly, of the three it was only Diderot who laughed out loud. Diderot had cause to fear the vengefulness of a theological-political censor. He dreaded another enforced visit to the Château de Vincennes, even though imprisonment would likely bring further honor to his cause and reputation. Persecution for Clement and Maimonides might well have been less benign. More to the point, they refused to be the miners and sappers of their respective religious communities. Even a hypothetical loyalty to the sect of the philosophers carried with it counsels of caution. Four centuries after Maimonides, and two centuries before Diderot, a wise head wrote for himself and others: “A man must not always say all he knows, for that were follie.” And elsewhere: “I speake truth, not my bellyfull, but as much as I dare.” 27 It is a measure of the vast change effected in Diderot’s time, and partly by him, that these observations by Montaigne, long thought sensible and correct, should now appear timid or quaint. Neither Clement nor Maimonides would have judged them so. Recovering the grounds for that judgment is as timely now as ever.

27. The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 3 vols., Everyman’s Library (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1915), 2:374 (bk. 2, ch. 17), 3:24 (bk. 3, ch. 2).

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thom as mor e, 1478–1535 Thomas More came to manhood at a time when profound changes were astir in the thinking and beliefs of Western Christendom: discovery of a wholly unsuspected quarter of the earth; resumed engagement with the learning of classical antiquity; and the fracturing of the dominant religion. These changes were to affect and afflict England, along with much of Europe, for centuries. It was More’s fortune or misfortune to stand astride an ever-growing chasm, to look deeply into it, and to try to damp the forces that would tear his world—and him—apart. From his boyhood on, More’s special qualities attracted the attention and patronage of the learned and powerful. His tact, erudition, and freewheeling wit marked him for worldly success. Although tempted for a few years to commit himself to a religious order, he immersed himself at last in the world of law, diplomacy, and governance. Great rewards awaited him there, and he appears to have savored the fame, wealth, and power that accompanied the exalted office of lord chancellor. Yet More himself was a highly complex man of faith: a lover and translator of the mordant writings of the second-century Greek satirist Lucian; a tireless opponent of Protestant reformers and a harasser of heretics; a caring paterfamilias who saw fit to employ a full-time fool in his household; an officer of the Crown who reportedly wore a hair shirt beneath his robes and gold chain. The price of his great worldly ascent was that he be bound to the will of Henry VIII, a tyrant who was incapable—in love as in politics—of taking no for an answer. For all his hesitations, More said yes until he felt he had to part ways, even if it meant parting with his head.

20

1 Tomfoolery in Earnest

It takes some boldness to enter with high hopes into that early Tudor maze that may be dubbed here Tom’s Foolery. After nearly five hundred years of scrutiny and interrogation, the text of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia remains tight-lipped. Its author’s adroit artfulness invites the belief that this book is a puzzle waiting to be solved while simultaneously undercutting that presumption. Much as Raphael Hythloday’s actions, pronouncements, and reports move in opposing directions, so too do the evasive More’s. Further, the philosopher-traveler and the diplomat-lawyer come across as opposed types. The former is opinionated, humorless, and all too ready to impress us with his secrets. The latter has in him nothing of the pedant. His honeyed words coat harsh medicine, and his quiet smile and soft-spoken humor can propel readers into a vertiginous tailspin. For, while his title page promises both profit and delight, his text in fact offers neither of these goods as simply free for the taking. More’s golden little book continues to demand a price of admission. Anyone who would enter into its author’s thoughts is obliged to reach into his own pocket or purse for whatever intellectual currency he can muster.1 1. “If More leads us down the garden path he also gives us certain signposts (admittedly sometimes mystifying ones) which allow us to find our way back or out or around. The work signals its own duplicities, then, and More is not, finally, trying to deceive us but to delight us at the same time that he startles us into inquiry, inviting us to discover his own art and to participate in an ongoing dialogue which he initiates. In fact, we can fully appreciate More’s art only when we see how he ‘deceives’ us; More faces the problem of every trompe l’oeil artist, who must signal his own duplicities.” Elizabeth McCutcheon, My Dear Peter: The “Ars Poetica” and Hermeneutics for More’s “Utopia” (Angers: Moreanum, 1983), 51. McCutcheon’s

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Just as the contradictions and tensions embedded in Raphael’s character and life story are there for all to see, so too are those in his account of Utopian practices and beliefs. A multitude of patient scholars have long since documented those incongruities. Raphael’s seemingly artless narration presents Utopia as a bundle of extremes parading as rational moderation. His manner invites us to unravel that bundle, to pair its oddments in such a way as to heighten their absurdity, and then to reassemble the lot with a view to understanding them better. By having Raphael employ matter-of-fact speech, More the author mutes the irony and satire. Our readerly pleasure is heightened as we detect what this world traveler apparently cannot see under his very nose. Even as he attacks European standards and behavior for being narrow and mean and Europeans themselves for failing to envision or entertain alternative ways of looking and thinking, this rootless cosmopolite succeeds in painting himself into a doctrinal and doctrinaire corner. Even when his own experience at the table of Cardinal John Morton should have taught him to qualify his assertions, he remains impervious and deaf. The final words of the fictional Thomas More on this character are telling and ring true: “I was not sure whether he could endure to listen to an opinion contrary to his own.” 2 We onlookers can only ponder. None of this is to argue that it is futile to attempt to explore More’s Utopia for its moral or political teachings. Where so much is offered, much may be presumed to be found. Yet we might be better off regarding this work as an exhibit that illustrates the pitfalls and opportunities entailed in thinking both “within the box” and “outside the box.” So conceived, the work might help us achieve a disquiet more productive of good sense than what ensues from self-satisfaction. From this perspective, More’s is a book that aims at being a standing provocation. It does not offer the answer and even sidesteps making a probable case for one conclusion or another about the various issues it stirs. Rather than settle matters involving religion, philosophy, and public policy, it invites us to rethink them. For all his righteous certitude, even Raphael somehow divines that. He insinuates on a few occasions that there is daylight between the Utopenetrating study (a delight in its own right) is indispensable for understanding More’s art of camouflage and concealment as well as his ability to hurl no end of curveballs and sinkers at his readers. 2. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller, Yale Nota Bene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 134. For the Latin original, see Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 248. Subsequent citations, with page numbers for first the English edition and then the Latin, will be given parenthetically in the text.

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pians’ notions of what is fitting and his own.3 This is significant, especially when we recall that we know nothing about the Utopians beyond what Raphael reports of them. Further, the character Thomas More both asserts and suggests that he and Hythloday do not see eye to eye on a number of points.4 Again, we need to remember that we know nothing of Hythloday beyond what the character Thomas More reports. Nor are we entitled to conflate the express or implied views of the character Thomas More with the views of the self-described author, “the most distinguished and learned gentleman,” the citizen and undersheriff of no insignificant English city (1/2). In short, More’s text repeatedly invites us to distance ourselves from every argument and alleged fact that it contains. I take this insistent suggestion to be expressive of his semiconcealed positive teaching. what price health? By the same token, that teaching gently directs us back to none other than—Plato.5 The opening poem by Anemolius, the “Poet Laureate” (of some other “Nowhere”?), makes that fact abundantly clear, and the text’s subsequent overt and covert references to Plato reinforce it. The conclusion is inescapable; a line has been drawn in the sand (1/18). The point of comparison is Plato’s polity, one that exists only as a city constructed in speech. This Utopia, in contrast, is a living presence. For that we have the assurance of a fictional eyewitness, a philosopher who is above lying. Plato’s imagined city was founded by and for philosophers, men who love the truth but are not above lying. This Utopia enjoys the benefit of being philosophical without having to endure resident philosophers. We might expect or hope that the account given on a sunny afternoon in a pleasant garden and bracketed by two good meals would be more open and 3. The strictures that Raphael utters against capital punishment in the presence of Cardinal Morton would apply no less to features of the Utopians’ slave code (30, 100/72–74, 192) and to their response to ad hoc policy discussions (59/122) as well as to cases of repeated adultery (99/192). All these may be treated as capital crimes. Likewise, Raphael hints at some reservations he may have regarding the islanders’ hedonism (81, 91/158, 178) and their insistence on premarital viewing in the nude, a custom contrived by them to ensure truth in advertising (97/188)! 4. The rift is broader and deeper than the dialogue’s prominent disagreement about the utility of offering rulers political counsel informed by philosophy (16, 35, 43–44/52, 80, 94–96). The character Thomas More summarily rejects Raphael’s insistence on communist equality (48, 134/104, 246), and he thinks no better of other unspecified features of Utopian warmaking and religious beliefs and practices that Raphael had reported without hesitation or demurrer (134/246). 5. This theme figures large in Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s “Utopia” (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991).

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forthcoming than that long night’s conversation (unrelieved by food or drink) within the house of Cephalus. At the very least, a consideration of similarities and differences might conduce to understanding both works better. One might think of More’s book as tracing a heavenly body’s elliptical trajectory: It draws near Plato’s writings, then pulls away, ultimately swings around, and then approaches yet again. The Republic and the Laws swim into and out of focus, leaving us confident that our author has never let his deep study of those works simply fade from his mind. Nor would he have us forget. When the character Thomas More tells (or accuses) Raphael to his face that he is Plato’s friend (35/80–82), he as much as signifies that he holds Raphael to be Plato’s man and that any reservations that he, Thomas More, may voice with respect to Raphael’s arguments may apply to Plato’s as well. The justice or unfairness of this conflation is not at issue, even when Plato’s position is being misrepresented (e.g., 47/100–102). The point, rather, is that Raphael’s account of Utopia lays bare what a contemporary “true city” or “healthy city” might look like (Stephanus 372E). It is in this sense that we are being invited to take its measure. Let us approach this question of health from another angle. Imagine the historic Thomas More asking himself: How might a latter-day Plato recast his thoughts, addressing not the feverish and fractured world of the Greeks but the feverish and fractured world of Christendom? Looked at from a great height, nothing has changed. Injustice and folly flourish as in olden times. Yet there is this development that Plato could not have foreseen: A message of universal love and brotherhood has been enlisted in the service of worldly ambition and ruthless power. Bearers of the message of the Prince of Peace have themselves become the greatest disturbers of the peace. A new Plato, posing his old question, would not be free to close his eyes to these developments. Given the presence now (in 1515) of technology (a legacy of Egypt and Rome), a body of literature and learning (a legacy of Greece), and a highly politicized transnational church, it is inevitable that health should take on a somewhat different aspect. To be sure, stretching out on rushes strewn with yew and myrtle, capping one’s simple vegetarian feast with roasted acorns, will not quite do. We aspire to more than the healthy simplicity (or, if you will, the idiocy) of rural life. Anticipating this resistance, the great far-seeing engineer and founder, Utopus, adjusted his prescribed institutions and laws accordingly. His success may be gauged by this startling fact, that his handiwork has withstood potentially powerful disruptions. Thus, the chance landfalls on his island’s shores—in the early fourth 24

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century of Romans and Egyptians and in the early sixteenth century of a very peculiar evangelist of enlightenment—did not entail what might normally have been expected: social, political, or religious upheaval for the inhabitants. A people with healthy habits of mind and simple tastes were kept that way by a system of social control as omnipresent and virtually undetectable as atmospheric pressure itself. Judicious accommodation and selective appropriation of alien imports proceeded apace—“not unwillingly,” as the Utopian quatrain would have it (2/22). But, whatever sense the Utopians made of Raphael’s stripped-down version of Christianity, it had to fit in nicely in the world crafted by Utopus, a world where society, not God, is all-seeing and where dread of shame, not of sin, reigns supreme. It might seem perverse to insist that Utopia is a land effectively purged of erotic longings. After all, the inhabitants are reported as denying that one must choose between virtue and pleasure. Nature herself commands the inhabitants, “Pursue pleasure, be happy!” Yet their pleasures and joys, their carnal satisfactions and their intellectual delights, are confined and slight, as routinized and judicious as a well-run camp for children. Raphael’s account sets forth a way of life cleansed of surprises that might agitate the soul. Utopia’s music is programmed to aid digestion every evening, and twice each lunar month it elicits the emotions appropriate in vast churches with designedly “dim and doubtful lighting” (126/234). Individuals who might incline to follow their own inner music—fanatics, fornicators, adulterers, idlers with wanderlust—are brought to heel quickly and decisively. One may doubt that Utopia has a poet laureate or (if it does) that one would relish his productions. Though their uniformly drab clothing leaves something to be desired, the daily lives of Utopians are not devoid of rations of cheer—even of tomfoolery. They play games and play at war. Spiritedness, too, has its prescribed time slot. The people have the gratification of adorning gardens under their temporary care and of trying to best others in the process. But, as might be expected in a scheme of things in which “there is no place at all” for pride (68/138), singularity of any kind is at least suspect and kept on a short leash. This is not to assert that the community is blind to considerations of special and, hence, unequal merit. Utopia privileges learning by exempting those who excel at it from the routine of physical labor to which the rest of the adult population is bound. The very few able-bodied men (and women) who enjoy this special status have to undergo long scrutiny and, finally, some sort of election. This is a system that rewards merit wherever it appears and is equally ready to demote those 25

Chapter One

who fail to live up to expectations. A city’s entire priestly, scholarly, and political elite—“barely five hundred”—including its shadowy ruler, a “Son of Zeus,” is drawn from this class (64/130). “Their priests are extremely holy and therefore very few” (123, 124/230, 232). The rarity of genuine holiness is a drumbeat in More’s text. And then there is another kind of holiness pursued by a significant number of Utopians whose notion of deserving rewards in the next life demands their rigorous rejection of the pleasures of this life. In the name of piety, these prodigies of self-denial seek out and joyfully accept whatever filthy, unremitting, backbreaking toil their island affords. But for this protective aura, their freely chosen hard life of ascetic, vegetarian celibacy would be regarded by the vast majority of Utopians as laughable (122/228), perhaps even insane (81, 91/162, 178). It is emphatically not out of this group of extraordinarily religious folk that the country’s priests are selected. More generally, those Utopians who think of themselves as singular had better keep their peculiar brands of self-satisfaction under wraps. They would be ill understood by their fellow citizens, men in sheep’s clothing—lovers of ease, comfort, pleasing smells, and a good night’s sleep untroubled by outlandish thoughts and aspirations. Properly brought up and cared for, the free men and women of Utopia are not inclined to imagine anything more gratifying than what they already enjoy. In contrast to the sharp confrontations that mark the first part of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday’s long narrative in the second part runs its course without interruption or formal challenge. To be sure, the Utopian practices and beliefs depicted there fairly cry for commentary and rejoinders going far beyond the marginal parerga. But Thomas More, the character, is too mature and diplomatic to play Glaucon. Instead, he plays the gracious host, at the end leading his exhausted and self-satisfied guest by the hand to dinner, all the while muttering amenities that conceal deeper misgivings. Even in sharing some of his thoughts with us readers, Thomas More, the character, refrains from total candor. Yet, for all their studied ambiguity, the reservations that he does report do effectively and gently bring us back down to earth from Hythloday’s vaporous heights. It appears that neither the author nor the character of the same name saw any pressing need to relieve us of what after all is our business once we have turned the last page. Raphael’s account draws us into a world where pride is fingered as the root of all evil. Gold, the darling coin of pride, is forcibly expelled from this fantasyland so as to corrupt other nations. Alternatively, it is used domestically to make chains for slaves and receptacles for collecting the 26

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wastes of human colons and bladders. This is body language with a vengeance. The preoccupations and behavior of most people, great and small, in most places and in most times, can hardly be dignified with the appellation human. Yet does all this Utopian rejection of excess and vainglorious display betoken health? And, if so, what kind of people would choose to be healthy? When we recall that exile, not death, is the extreme punishment in Utopia, we begin to realize how powerful is the society’s grip on its citizens’ imaginations. The economic security they enjoy, the comforting predictability of their lives, the all-encompassing sameness of places and persons: all these stroke and calm the soul, even unto numbness. Nonetheless, very large claims are made on behalf of this island commonwealth. We are invited to think of it as being both healthy and philosophical. This is, to say the least, puzzling. What would be its claim to the latter characterization? It has neither philosophy nor philosophers. Its unruffled social life makes it a most improbable venue for the appearance of some future Socrates. If the claim rests on an unstated presumption that the ancient conqueror-founder-lawgiver-engineer was guided by philosophical understanding, then it must be said that his was a philosophy to end all philosophizing. There is as little room in Utopia for gadflies as for proud disturbers of the peace. The same, however, is true of the healthy city portrayed in book 2 of the Republic, the one scuttled by Socrates after Glaucon pouted over the absence of relishes. Granted, the Utopia portrayed by Raphael is not without its relishes, but it falls far short of veering into the feverishness of worlds in which an Alexander VI and a John Morton, a Henry VIII and a Thomas More, can arise and flourish. This is enough—indeed, decisive—for Raphael as he celebrates Utopia and the Utopians’ success in beating down pride. He, for one, is proud of their achievement. It is hard to say that he gives any mind to the price they pay for that triumph. Compared to the grotesque abuses of contemporary Christendom, the human and social costs of Utopian living (barely hinted at) pale into insignificance. Hythloday’s pursuit of the perfect good trumps all other considerations. a legacy of puzzlement Inevitably, the question recurs, as it has for half a millennium: Where is our author in all this? With a straight face, he has led us into a fun house with dead ends and distorting mirrors lining the walls of a maze. He as much as says, “I’ll meet you when you exit, but for now you are on your 27

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own.” If we readers as tourists are too earnest, we will have missed the fun—and the point. If we are too light-headed, we will have amused ourselves but learned little. Immersion in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia can be an education in itself. After all the many scholarly attempts to divine More’s intentions in composing this book, there would seem to be little to add. Indeed, cautious readers might incline to concentrate instead on what More has done and leave it to an all-seeing God to search his heart and reins. I am suggesting that More’s profound engagement with Plato leads him to reconsider older thinking about human nature and human possibilities, about philosophic understanding and political necessities, as that thinking might bear on his own political world, a world he knew at first hand and through close observation. In proposing this, I am not so much dismissing the possible bearing of biographical fact and historical context on this enigmatic text as insisting that More’s thought was capable of transcending those contingencies. He might well have begun by taking the measure of the developments that had transpired since that long night in the Piraeus. Inventing his own comic representation of a philosopher, his genius found a vehicle for mocking self-satisfied readers of all times by invoking another city of pigs. In having us, his readers, muse over that fantasy, More, like Plato, would prod us into gaining greater self-knowledge. We are beginning to feel the sharp end of More’s stick. We hear him asking whether health, as Hythloday stipulates it, is not gained at appalling costs. One such price is that composition of little golden books such as this will likely become rarer than rare, perhaps no longer thinkable by authors, let alone readable by readers. To begin pondering such an upshot, we would need to know much more than we are told about what the Utopians make of the select packet of ancient Greek texts to which Raphael has exposed them. In the light of contemporary experience, it would be rash to entertain high hopes. We do well to cherish the golden books we have. ·

· ·

Imagine, after all this, a plainspoken man emerging from “Tom’s Foolery” still trying to make sense of what he has just experienced. What objection might such a person plausibly raise? “Small wonder,” he might begin, “that the argument of this best seller fell on deaf ears. It is too clever by half, and all this kowtowing of one humanist to another in the foolish letters and marginal comments that surround this text is distasteful. The whole thing 28

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smacks of self-congratulation, and that is as much true of its author as of his tedious character, Raphael Hythloday. To repeat, if, as you suggest (and you’re not too clear at that), the goal of these jokesters was to abash people sufficiently so that they might at least try to escape from their unthinking complacency, why then they were doomed to failure. The men in charge of state and church were focused on what they wanted for themselves (that’s how they got to where they were), and they of all people weren’t about to be kidded into losing their focus. And if you say that More and Co. were trying to get policymakers to be less keen on achieving perfect, final solutions to the problems of the day, then I need only point to the long queue of perfectionist fanatics who have continued to make this world such a nasty neighborhood. Your humanists saw that logic can’t carry the day against closed minds. But neither can wit (assuming that the people they were trying to reach even had a sense of humor). You can mock pride and its works all you will, but, when at last it is brought to heel, that’s either thanks to the exertions of other prideful men or through exhaustion. The joke, my dear fellow, is on us. It is not only the island of Utopia that is nowhere to be found. The same is true for intelligent moderation. I put it to you, is this something to laugh at or to cry over?”

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fr a ncis bacon, 1561–1626 first baron v erul a m, viscount st. alba n Perhaps no one since the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius has come closer to embodying that coincidence of philosophy and political rule dreamed of in Plato’s Republic. Francis Bacon was the enormously gifted and driven son of a well-connected family. As his ambition outran the resources at his command, he was doomed to spend much time and energy soliciting patronage for his scientific and political projects. In the world of Elizabeth Tudor and James Stuart, advancement depended on personal connections. In such a world, this “great little man” found no rest even when he rose as high as a man could as an officer of the Crown. Bacon was incapable of thinking small. He made no little plans, whether they concerned his lavish style of living, administration of the law, reorganization of all knowledge, or reconception of science as a collective, worldwide enterprise. His fall from grace (for alleged corruption) was even more precipitous than his rise, yet his dedication to reshaping our understanding of the world around us and our convictions about what matters in life continued unabated. General readers of his most popular and engaging works—the New Atlantis and his Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral—are treated to a fair sample of a most serpentine mind: utterly engaging, resolutely challenging, and supercharged with mixed messages. In trying to rouse humankind to undreamed-of possibilities, Bacon made sure that his readers would not doze off.

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2 The Jiha¯d of St. Alban

“So familiar, and as it were so natural to man, is the practice of violence, that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility. But the name and nature of an holy war demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe, that the servants of the Prince of peace would unsheathe the sword of destruction, unless the motive were pure, the quarrel legitimate, and the necessity inevitable. The policy of an action may be determined from the tardy lessons of experience; but, before we act, our conscience should be satisfied of the justice and propriety of our enterprise.” 1 The tone is unmistakable, the language inimitable. By insisting that we attend with particular care to the adjective, Edward Gibbon would have us recognize the special power of holy to both stoke our ardor and chill our qualms. This is no term to be bandied about lightly. Yet it would be hard to maintain that current usage respects either the historical or the linguistic niceties when speaking of holy war. The term evokes the distant Middle Ages, whether of the Christian West or of the Muslim East. Headlines today speak resolutely of a crusade or of a jihad, leaving readers to dredge their memories or their imaginations as best they can to supply the needed emotional and political charge. Such calls smack more of the language of the hustings and the pulpit than of the 1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 3:563 (ch. 58).

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philosopher’s study.2 We need not start, however, at the thought that, long before today’s alarms, philosophic minds should have scrutinized this remarkable phenomenon: war prompted by a sense of religious obligation. More surprising, perhaps, is the discovery that, from time to time, philosophers for their part too, have intimated a need to conduct somewhat analogous warfare. Indeed, prodded by their own sense of obligation, they have acted on that call. Standing apart and afar, a philosopher might be struck by the observation that each of the monotheistic religions finds room in its beliefs and practices for fighting the battles of the Lord. The differences between them in this respect are, to be sure, significant in both degree and kind. But unassisted reason can only wordlessly shrug off the notion that converting other believers on pain of extirpation is an avenue to one’s own soul drawing closer to God. Such a belief is hardly self-evident. Republican Rome’s relentless adventures beyond its borders had little or nothing to do with bringing light to the barbarians. Nor did ancient Israel’s permitted and obligatory wars look much beyond defense and the settling of old scores. In Christianity, where proselytism had a higher profile, there was for long (and especially in the Eastern church) a deep resistance to conflating just and holy. In Islam, on the other hand, matters were singularly and impressively different. Jiha¯d is one of several words in classical Arabic denoting war while conveying more generally the notion of moral or physical exertion and struggle. That it is so commonly and mistakenly translated as holy war is owing to the fact that the conduct of jiha¯d is a religious obligation imposed on believers with varying degrees of urgency and particularity. Islam presents itself as a blessing for all mankind, addressing its call to human beings of all colors, places, and conditions. While allowances may be made for other religionists among specified protected minorities living within the House of Islam, the religion thinks of itself as a standing offer that one cannot justly refuse. Resisting or declining that opportunity to acknowledge Allah and the Prophet is nothing less than a scandal. From the ensuing anger issues the explicit moral and legal obligation to embrace all the world’s peoples—by forceful speech if possible, by forceful deeds if need be. Islam accordingly provides for a political authority charged with realizing in this world the preconditions for enjoying the benefits of the next.3 2. See the sober, cautionary remarks in Peter Partner, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xv–xxvii. 3. Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), 94–95 and n. 198; Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philo-

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For those philosophers, however, who dwelt in lands where Islam held sway, a doctrine that might call for even extirpative war invited comparison to the teachings of their Greek predecessors. Plato and Aristotle, as far as their writings were known to the fala¯sifa, seemed not to speak with one voice or in simple agreement with the prescriptions of the Islamic law. Coercion was an acceptable, though not the preferred, mode of instruction. But it was far from clear that all peoples were, in fact, educable. Nor was it clear that one community had a general obligation to lift others out of darkness and to adopt a foreign policy that treated other nations as children and childish men.4 This line of inquiry, initiated and pursued by the fala¯sifa, was marked by a muted candor and a delicate artfulness. Their exertions took the form of a singular literary accommodation. Themes and considerations unknown to Islam or, indeed, even profoundly alien to it were raised and examined in language resonating with familiar Islamic teachings and motifs. In viewing the doctrines and ends and practices of the regnant religion through the spectacles of pagan philosophy, these latter-day philosophers were able to recover for their times and their intended audiences a perspective that gave pride of place to nature, reason, and political prudence. Sacred writ itself, revelation, prophecy, and the afterlife could now be viewed not only from within the prescribed cubits of the divine law.5 These men showed how it was possible, even in periods of orthodox rigor, not only to think freely for oneself but to aid others in doing so as well. The exertions of these philosophers—Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes among the Muslims and Maimonides among the Jews—might well be characterized as a jiha¯d of their own. This war had, indeed, a civilizing mission and was directed against a good deal of the prevailing self-understanding and crudeness of their coreligionists. But this was not a war consophic Foundation of the Science of Culture (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), 244–47; Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 114–15; Richard C. Martin, “The Religious Foundations of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,” in Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 92–93, 96–97, 110. 4. Joel L. Kraemer, “The Jiha¯d of the Fala¯sifa,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 303–4, 312–13, 318–20; Charles E. Butterworth, “Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s Statecraft: War and the Well-Ordered Regime,” in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition, ed. James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 83–85; Ralph Lerner, trans., Averroes on Plato’s “Republic” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), xvii–xviii, xxii–xxiii, 69n; Muhsin Mahdi, “Alfarabi et Averroès: Remarques sur le commentaire d’Averroès sur la République de Platon,” in Multiple Averroès (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1978), 100; Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, 115. 5. Kraemer, “The Jiha¯d of the Fala¯sifa,” 291, 293, 305; Butterworth, “Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯’s Statecraft,” 87; Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, 115–17.

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ducted under the banner, or in the spirit, of Écrasez l’infâme! Their political science, unlike that of Voltaire and his disciples, saw the continuing need for the kind of representation of truth that a rightly conceived religion could offer to all. Hence, as they worked to ease that popular understanding into paths less vindictive and bloody-minded and more consonant with God’s own mercifulness, they took care to preserve the dignity and honor of the religion itself. It remains to be seen whether comparable delicacy and restraint are displayed by those who, some centuries later, took up this jiha¯d of the philosophers. l arge pl a ns for a new wor ld Strange is a word that comes readily to mind when attempting to characterize Sir Francis Bacon’s Advertisement Touching a Holy War. Even by the usual standards of that master of simulation and dissimulation, this little piece is more than it seems even as it appears to deliver less than it promises. Bacon’s dialogue flaunts its disproportions and abrupt turns, and it encourages belief that the artist had left an unfinished work on his easel when he was overtaken by death. Yet other signals show quite emphatically that Bacon, for one, was prepared to consider the Advertisement complete as it stands. Among other things, he arranged for its posthumous publication by his chaplain (in 1629) and supervised its translation into what he thought of as “the general language,” Latin.6 His was indeed a message ready to be broadcast. Almost a fifth of the whole consists of a letter of dedication to the bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrewes, from his “loving friend, Fr. St. Alban” (15). Here, the fallen lord chancellor laments his ruin but takes heart that, like his models in disgrace—Demosthenes, Cicero, and Seneca—or even better than they managed, he may find consolation in writing. With this conceit, Bacon launches into a singular review of his opera omnia, both published and unpublished, written and projected. He will now invest his “poor talent, or half talent, or what it is, that God hath given me” in institutions proof against bankruptcy (13). From out of his present ignominy and political ruin he may yet emerge flush with perpetual fame. 6. Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, with an introduction, notes, a concordance, and an interpretive essay by Laurence Lampert (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 2000), 14. Page numbers for subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. Inexplicably, there is no indication that Lampert’s admirable introduction is carried over from ch. 4 of his Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), lacking only the earlier version’s outspoken final paragraph.

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Bacon’s conspectus of his extant and anticipated writings attests to a coherent and comprehensive program. In his mind’s eye, they all stand in a deliberated relation to one another: “But revolving with myself my writings, as well those which I have published, as those which I had in hand, methought they went all into the city, and none into the temple; where, because I have found so great consolation, I desire likewise to make some poor oblation. Therefore I have chosen an argument mixt of religious and civil considerations; and likewise mixt between contemplative and active” (15). Twice mixed, Bacon’s little dialogue is announced as going beyond his work to date, straight into the temple itself. It is not as though his earlier writings have not touched religion. But now something bolder is proposed in the guise of a poor oblation offered by a Christian who has tasted God’s consolation. In fact the Advertisement is no oblation at all, and he who offers it is no humble and contrite suppliant. The text moves into the temple ready to take command. A theological-political tract, it offers both analysis and a plan of action to some unknown addressee. Who knows, Bacon wonders aloud—in effect sweeping aside thoughts that might lead you to dismiss a dialogue of twenty-odd pages as slight stuff—who knows but that the right kind of reader might bend his energy and will to realizing my larger plans for church and society: “Great matters (especially if they be religious) have (many times) small beginnings: and the platform may draw on the building” (15). Bacon chooses not to anticipate the use or value of his works after he is gone, but he is not averse to urging on some avenger of his fallen state to effect a new resurrection.7 zeal r edir ected The dialogue begins by listing the names of “the persons that speak”— there are six—and then stating tersely the “characters of the persons”: “Eusebius beareth the character of a moderate Divine. Gamaliel of a Protestant Zelant. Zebedaeus of a Romish Catholic Zelant. Martius of a Militar Man. Eupolis of a Politique. Pollio of a Courtier” (17). But, since the Advertisement is a narrated dialogue, there are occasions for an unnamed voice to make itself heard, announcing the setting of the conversation (17), noting reactions and silences of the participants (20, 24, 25, 28, 30), and summarizing unreported discussions (26, 27). These interventions, whose number is not exceeded by any named person, are of course the 7. See Bacon, Advertisement, 15 n. 39, on “Exoriere aliquis.”

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author’s. They entitle us to include Francis Bacon among those who speak with the same freedom as he employed in including the totally silent and moderate Eusebius. The conversation takes place in the house of Eupolis in Paris, probably in the early summer of 1623. Here is an island of calm and civility set in a roiling sea. A “politique” and his guests have been discussing “the affairs of Christendom at this day” (18). Such a conversation must of necessity be much oppressed by recent and current history. No one in the room can be heedless of the bitter warfare between Catholics and Protestants that consumed France for the last third of the preceding century. So too must they be mindful of the religious war in Germany that broke out only five years earlier and was to rage for yet another quarter century. Can the rare conditions that sustain a conversation among diverse sectarians within the walls of Eupolis’s house—a good city indeed—also prevail outside those walls? Can a riven Christendom come to live at peace, at least with itself, or is this too but a dream? Pollio’s belated arrival from court is accompanied by a confession of drowsiness and a promise or threat to rouse the others’ sleepy discourse. Yet perhaps it is not the rest of the company that needs stirring, for Martius had already begun to sound the trumpet of war. Martius is invited by Eupolis to rehearse his speech—it deserves a second hearing—and shake the hot and exhausted courtier into a lively engagement with the other assembled conferees. Martius obliges with gusto. He is full of big plans as he faults Christian princes of the past fifty years for failing to think big. Their wars were merely territorial or geopolitical, “but as the wars of Heathen (of Athens, or Sparta, or Rome) for secular interest or ambition, not worthy the warfare of Christians” (19). It is, so to speak, unconscionable that the church’s proselytizing missions to the far corners of the earth are not seconded by Christian princes and potentates wielding their arms. Even European merchants hot in pursuit of jewels and spices are more daring than these princes, whose energies seem for the most part to be directed to Christian self-cannibalization. Martius can think of only three exceptions in the past fifty years where Christians have actually gone beyond waging “a war of nature”—that is, a defensive war—and brought aggressive actions on the infidels by waging “[a war] of piety” (20). Of these, only one, the naval battle off Lepanto in 1571 in which Christian forces engaged the Ottoman fleet, resulted in victory. In the other two instances, divisions among the Christians led to military failure. Martius’s highly selective memory prompts Pollio to bring up the relatively recent (1609–14) campaign in Spain that led to the expulsion or 36

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“extirpation of the Moors of Valentia.” This action is doubtless aggressive, but is it a war of piety? Martius is at a loss for words, and, in the momentary embarrassed silence, first Gamaliel and then Zebedaeus reenact the sectarian division that afflicts Western Christendom. For the Protestant Gamaliel, the whole campaign was misbegotten and misdirected: its perpetrators came to ruin, the supposed Moors proved to be true Christians “save in the thirst of revenge,” and the chapter is not yet closed. For the Catholic Zebedaeus, the Moors had no contractual right to remain in Catholic Spain, and, further, the eviction was accomplished legally, by royal edict, not by popular tumults (after the fashion of Anabaptist mobs). Eupolis tries to defuse this potentially explosive disagreement by introducing a consideration or distinction that Martius had not even hinted at and that Zebedaeus’s zeal prevents him from recognizing. Can one properly call war such an action of domestic oppression waged on nonresisting subjects? But, rather than stay for an answer, he urges Martius to proceed, “for methought he spake like a divine in armor” (21). This praise, if it is praise, emboldens Martius not only to press his case on inconsistent grounds but also to assert that, even if he were to speak only as “a natural man,” he would make the same argument as he has. Wars of piety pay. Not only Castile but all Europe has profited by the pillage of America. Speaking frankly, Martius is obliged to confess that the primary motivation for Iberian exploration and conquest was not the propagation of the faith but gain and glory. In what sense, then, can one speak of the acquisition of an empire on which the sun never sets as a war of piety? Martius’s untroubled, complacent answer is “that what was first in God’s providence was but second in man’s appetite and intention.” It is enough for him that the unintended consequences serve the cause of true religion. Wars for gain turn out to be wars of piety; happily, both “spiritual and temporal power and good have been in one pursuit and purchase conjoined” (22). Pollio intervenes to make another distinction that seems to have eluded Martius. One may regard a wild and savage people as comparable to the fauna of some land: title to them passes with possession. But the same cannot be said of a civil people. Martius is far from denying the distinction, but he emphatically rejects the relevance of the distinction. What does matter is whether “the greatest and most general good of people” is furthered by such wars of domination and subjection. The Incas, he insists, were no brute savages. Their idolatry was by and large civilized. In compelling their subjected nations to abandon worshipping idols and fancies and, instead, adore the sun, the Incas showed their higher quality. 37

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Much the same might be said of the people of Mexico or of the Eastern peoples conquered by the Portuguese. None of this, however, leads Martius to draw Pollio’s implicit conclusion: that brutal treatment of at least the Incas, Aztecs, and other civil people was unjust. Instead, Martius remains focused on his notion of the greater good: “If things be rightly weighed, the empire of the Turks may be truly affirmed to be more barbarous than any of these” (23). Turkish tyranny is a scandal, “a very reproach of human society” (24). Given that war against the aborigines of the New World is just, holy war against the Turks must be especially just. Martius’s tirade almost reduces the Turks to subhumans while abstracting from the fact that they are monotheists. Pollio insists that justice be done. If Martius is willing to discriminate between worshipping a base idol and worshipping the sun (and, in that respect, find in favor of the Incas), how much more ought he to credit the Turks with the “much greater difference between worshipping a creature and the Creator.” Those Turks may be barbarians, but they are believers in the first person of the Trinity. On these grounds alone, Martius’s bloody-minded ire is misdirected and overwrought. Again, Martius stands speechless, prompting Zebedaeus to display his ready zeal with (as Bacon reports) “a countenance of great reprehension and severity” (24). Unbeknownst to him, Pollio’s moderation has brought him tottering on the rim of heresy, the very heresy committed by the Byzantine Christian emperor Manuel Comnenus. When the latter publicly affirmed that “Mahomet’s God was the true God,” he invited the rejection and condemnation of the Synod of 1180 and a bitter reproach by the bishop Eustathios that Zebedaeus cannot even bring himself to utter.8 In berating the emperor for seeking to moderate religious passions, both the bishop and Zebedaeus throw their own derangement into sharp relief. When Martius recovers his composure after Pollio’s challenge and Zebedaeus’s fierce intervention, he unwittingly reveals both the good deal that he has not learned and the little that he has come to see about himself. He confesses outright that none of the challenges raised by Pollio have altered his own fanatic opinion one whit. He can conceive of no war, past or present, “more worthy” than a war on the Turk. Considerations of both religion and honor urge the same action, although, admittedly, circumstances might possibly suggest some other more eligible and vulnerable target. Yet the Turk is the enemy Martius loves to hate, and 8. The assiduous Lampert follows Bacon’s hint. He reproduces a twelfth-century spectacle of frenzy that mirrors seventeenth-century Europe’s incapacity to sustain civil moderation in the face of religious zeal. Ibid., 50–51.

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his awareness of his “zeal and affection to this cause” leads him to doubt whether he can make a case that can stand on its own legs. In taking a breather, he turns to others for help. Let those more adept in speaking and in interpreting the divine law supply the argument that would anchor his predetermined belief. With “some foundation laid of the lawfulness of the action” (25), Martius would then be prepared to resume his discourse and detail the means of executing this grand objective. Eupolis spies an opening, seizes the opportunity, and occupies the ground. Praising Martius for a moderation that he would hardly presume “in a person of your profession,” Eupolis at the same time makes clear the limits of that moderation. Martius has not been so far “transported in an action that warms the blood and is appearing holy” as to slight the point of lawfulness. Things look brighter for Eupolis: “Methinks this conference prospers.” The orchestrator of this improbable meeting is ready to effect a change in the order of battle. With the consent of all, Eupolis proposes that each of the conferees contribute his share toward a comprehensive treatment of the subject they have up to now only been reconnoitering. Let Zebedaeus “handle the question, Whether a war for the propagation of the Christian faith, without other cause of hostility, be lawful or no, and in what cases.” Let Gamaliel pursue the matter further by examining whether such warfare is not just permitted but obligatory for Christian princes and states. Then there is the large question concerning the urgency or priority that ought to be attached to this undertaking. Ought the “extirpation of heretics, reconcilements of schisms, pursuit of temporal rights and quarrels, and the like” take precedence over this civilizing mission, or be mingled with it, or yield to it? Let the hitherto silent Eusebius be charged with this comparative assessment, compelled (if need be) by penalty or pain to display his true character of a moderate divine. Eupolis presumes that the acute Pollio will regard all this as so much froth and fancy. Let them all plead with him “to crush this argument with his best forces” (26). Eupolis, for his part, will labor to counter Pollio as best he can, trying to show how this great enterprise is at least possible. If any portion survives the artful courtier’s onslaught, it will be time enough for Martius to then take up his technical discussion of military means for accomplishing the end in view. With all concurring to this distribution and assignment of parts and all ready to disband until the following morning, Pollio makes a preemptive move. Speaking out of turn, and in disregard of the just-announced division of labor, and in terms at once flippant and deadly serious, he displays his ability to amuse and subvert. (He is a practiced courtier indeed.) In a 39

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series of flashes and quick reversals, he shows how a kind of holy war can be conducted without waiting for the promised arguments that would establish that it ought to be mounted. But Pollio’s proposed holy war lies beyond the dreams of his drowsy companions: “I was ever of opinion, that the Philosopher’s Stone, and a Holy War, were but the rendez-vous of cracked brains, that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat” (26). As presently constituted and conducted, neither science nor religion can achieve its high pretensions. Just as one needs a different kind of science (already outlined by Bacon in the Advancement of Learning and the New Organon) if one is to secure results conducive to human comfort and happiness, so too with religion. Nothing less will do than to “bray [crush or grind] Christendom in a mortar, and mould it into new paste.” Only then would Pollio be prepared to abandon his long-standing opinion that all this talk is featherbrained. But that pounding and fine grinding in a mortar is, in effect, a holy war against Christianity itself, or at least against Christianity as traditionally understood. The mad project of converting others or of hastening them to their salvation—at sword point—needs to be overcome by another kind of zeal. Without waiting to be asked, Pollio boldly tells the others how to conduct the right kind of holy war, his kind of holy war: “Do as I shall tell you” (27). To those assembled in Eupolis’s house that day in the early summer of 1623, Pollio’s remaining two sentences may well have had the ring of a bizarre prophecy. But, in some reading these words of Bacon’s Pollio any time after their publication in 1629, they might have instilled (or even now prompt) a zeal and affection as genuine as Martius’s, albeit more muted and discriminating. The braying, Pollio insists, must begin at the top, and it is precisely there that he directs everyone’s eyes and thoughts: “This Pope is decrepit, and the bell goeth for him.” There is no need to incite or abet the assassination of this ruler; he will soon be out of the way:9 “Take order, that when he is dead, there will be chosen a Pope of fresh years, between fifty and three-score; and see that he take the name of Urban, because a Pope of that name did first institute the cruzada, and (as with a holy trumpet) did stir up the voyage for the Holy Land.” By early July 1623, Pope Gregory XV was dead, and, by early August, there was, indeed, an Urban VIII, aged fifty-five. Yet the fulfilment of Pollio’s curt job description could by no means be the fulfilment of Bacon’s expectations or, for that matter (within the terms of this fiction), Pollio’s. Anyone “who hath 9. It should go without saying that Attorney General Bacon viewed the papal doctrine of tyrannicide as criminal in the highest degree. See ibid., 60.

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a sharp wit of discovery towards what is solid and real and what is specious and airy” (25–26)—as Eupolis asserts of Pollio and as readers are ready to assert of Bacon—understands that their immodest proposal draws on philosophic grounds and objectives profoundly alien to members of the College of Cardinals. A radically new pope is required, and a radically different crusade needs to be mounted. The brave new holy land for which they are all to set sail and that they are to conquer has perhaps only a Hebrew name, Bensalem, in common with the old one in Asia. To all this and its implications Eupolis politely and shrewdly responds: “You say well; but be, I pray you, a little more serious in this conference” (27). The witty courtier is in dead earnest, but his conferees will sleep better that night if they take him to be jesting after his usual fashion. Eupolis’s kind hint is picked up the next morning by Pollio’s reported “sporting speeches” to the effect that he knows the war was already begun since he has “dreamt of nothing but Janizaries and Tartars and Sultans all the night long.” Zealots in the house may take that as they will. Before the planned roster of speeches can begin, Martius raises a misgiving prompted again by his zeal and affection. He is to speak on the particulars of the means and manner by which holy war is to be conducted, but only after Pollio and Eupolis have debated its possibility or impossibility. It would be best, he now thinks, if they were not to reach fixed conclusions on that point until they have heard him out. The available means that he will detail can shed light on the ends to be pursued. With the image of the execrable Turks firmly before him, Martius is loath to permit any erosion of support for his exalted project. He shows that he has grasped nothing of the holy war that Pollio has already proposed and that Eupolis has endorsed. After the entire company much commends “this grave and solid advertisement and caution of Martius,” Eupolis proposes an amendment of his own. He had originally asked Zebedaeus to examine whether the goal of propagating Christianity was sufficient ground for waging war independent of any other considerations. Now it seems to him that the question of lawfulness needs to be refined so as to compel the means to be governed by the end. How far is a holy war to be pursued? Ought it to encompass the “displanting and extermination of people”? Or ought it to be directed to enforcing a new belief and to vindicating or punishing infidelity? Or, finally, ought it to use “the temporal sword to open a door for the spiritual sword to enter, by persuasion, instruction, and such means as are proper for souls and consciences” (28)? It might be rash to assert that Eupolis’s answer is identical to Bacon’s, but it is not rash to insist that Pollio’s in41

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dications and Bacon’s other writings all point away from treating a civil people with a violence and bloody-mindedness fueled by zeal. The spiritual sword works by gentle speeches, masterful rhetoric, and the prospect (and delivery) of rewards that ordinary people can feel and see. The gray eminences who orchestrated life in the New Atlantis eschewed using their awesome technological and meteorological prowess to forcibly remake the rest of the world after their image. They preferred using subtler means: Let a dazzled seaman return home with an eyewitness’s tale promising wonders and rewards for all. A barely imaginable heaven might be enjoyed here on earth in this life. Bacon’s crusade extended far beyond his lifetime and his century. But he made sure that he had at least sounded his holy trumpet. If he were to succeed through the success of those whom he had roused, the “secular greatness and terrene honor” that Martius vainly sought through a war against infidels (21) would now be more surely within the grasp of St. Alban and his acolytes. absur dity on par ade At this point (but only after enduring a certain amount of marching and countermarching), readers of this dialogue are prepared for the series of speeches proposed and announced by Eupolis. Zebedaeus does, indeed, start off according to plan. But his speech is not only first but also last, and both the expectations that Eupolis had stirred and those that Zebedaeus himself raises in the course of his remarks are, in turn, ignored, or shunted aside, or simply contradicted. His long speech—it constitutes a third of the entire work, epistle dedicatory and all—is less an orderly reasoned account than an enactment. By attending to his manner no less than to his matter, we can grasp what Bacon took to be the problem afflicting “the affairs of Christendom at this day” (18). Further, we can see why, in Bacon’s judgment, nothing less than a radical braying would suffice to meet that challenge. Yet, if Zebedaeus exemplifies the problem, it is not simply or even primarily because he is a “Romish Catholic Zelant.” The Protestant Gamaliel is no better in the critical political respect, nor is that “divine in armor,” Martius. Each is a fit target for the civilizing jiha¯d of the philosophers. Zebedaeus’s speech bristles with discriminations and distinctions: six questions distinguishing lawful warmaking, three questions bearing on a right of intervention in another nation’s affairs based on the laws of nature and of nations, nine examples of lawful war that might be exercised by any nation whatever, and five grounds for regarding the nonpolitical or 42

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subpolitical connections between peoples as tantamount to an implicit confederation or a tacit league. All the more striking is it that this riot of casuistic loquacity is prefaced and interrupted by Zebedaeus’s three apologies for avoiding overnice precision and exhaustive examination and argumentation. Being in “conference” (29, 38), what is required of him is less a systematic treatise than a “speech of consultation” (30). The absurdities of Zebedaeus’s behavior testify to his single-minded goal, one that he can barely suppress and that he finally lets burst forth like a genuine divine in armor. Has he actually heard Eupolis’s charge to him? Barely. Does he remember it as he proceeds? Not at all. Does he hear himself speak? Perhaps, but only the part he really cares about, the executive summary buried in his speech. What matters to him is the program of action to which all his proofs, examples, and arguments are directed and by which they, in turn, are informed. As resolutely as Martius, who had a cause but no argument to bolster it, so too does Zebedaeus yearn for “a war against the Turk” (29). If he, unlike Martius, has many biblical and philosophical supports to prop up his desires, in the end it matters little. He is ready to quote scripture and its interpreters and as ready to ignore all that: “The more I think upon it, the more I settle in opinion, that a war to suppress that empire, though we set aside the cause of religion, were a just war” (30). He is ready to consult Aristotle on the grounds, according to nature, by which a superior man might justify his rule over others. But he is even readier to abandon the claims of the high, claims grounded on philosophic understanding, in favor of an opinion concerning low behavior: “Therefore the position which I intend is not in the comparative, that the wiser or the stouter [more valiant] or the juster nation should govern; but in the privative, that where there is a heap of people (though we term it a kingdom or state) that is altogether unable or indign [unworthy] to govern, there it is a just cause of war for another nation, that is civil or policed, to subdue them: and this, though it were to be done by a Cyrus or a Caesar, that were no Christian” (32). With terms so broad and zeal so warm, Zebedaeus now offers a license for intervention by any “civil” nation or state or society of people against any other nation or state or society of people deemed uncivil. For him, it is no longer a question of waging holy war against infidels for the propagation of Christianity or for the greater glory of God. It is enough for him that, using one criterion or another, he can find “that there are nations in name, that are no nations in right, but multitudes only, and swarms of people” (34). On such heaps and swarms Zebedaeus declares an open hunting season. They are outlaws, common enemies to the human race, 43

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whose extirpation is viewed by all nations and ages, according to him, “not only as lawful, but as meritorious even of divine honor” (38). Zebedaeus’s category of Untermenschen is nothing if not capacious. It includes those who prey on others—pirates and highway robbers. It includes those religious zealots who advocate and practice political terror—the Islamic sect of Assassins and the Anabaptists of Münster. It includes those who set the order of nature on its head—Amazons who presume women should rule over men, Mamalukes who presume slaves should rule over freemen. And, as for the Incas, those civilized idolaters whose conquest by the Spanish even Martius had come close to conceding was unjust, why, they are for Zebedaeus simply another one of those groups deserving to be subdued by “any nation that had only policy and moral virtue” (37). His catalog of their offenses is incoherent, hardly uttered before being withdrawn, until he settles on their human sacrifices and cannibalism. With this abomination, the Incas are forfeit of any title to their land and fit to be reduced or displanted.10 The irony of considering the conquistadores as representatives of a Spanish nation exhibiting “only policy and moral virtue” is lost on Zebedaeus even as he allows that their initial cruelties against the Peruvians went too far. What, if anything, can be said in extenuation of this torrent of pride and prejudice? Like Donne, Zebedaeus believes no man is an island entire of itself. But on what can he base this tacit league or confederation? Not on a shared aspiration and commitment to what is fine or noble or holy. Rather: “It is against somewhat, or somebody” (39). Is his a general humanitarian mission prompted by a sense of outrage at behavior “shocking to humanity, and . . . not to be tolerated in the neighborhood, and under the eye of a civilized and Christian people”?11 Not quite, for this zealot’s goal is less the reformation of an erring and unknowing people than their elimination: “No, it is against such routs and shoals of people, as have utterly degenerate from the laws of nature; as have in their very body and frame of estate a monstrosity; and may be truly accounted . . . common enemies and grievances of mankind; or disgraces and reproaches to human nature.” For us today, these chilling accents call to mind the many 10. Zebedaeus uses the authority of Francisco de Vitoria to reach an outcome in total opposition to that theologian’s conclusions. See ibid., 70, 74. 11. Thus, Chancellor James Kent was ready to extend New York State’s criminal law over Indians who were no part of that body politic and to punish them without the consent and against the will of their own governments. Goodell v. Jackson, 20 Johns. 693, 717 (N.Y. 1823). Even more ambitiously, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, could (in a memo of instructions dated December 6, 1846) confidently pronounce his nation “the main instrument in the Hands of Providence” for putting an end to the African slave trade. Quoted in J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 583.

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doctrine-driven abominations of the twentieth century. The reduction of countless men, women, and children to “noxious things,” fit to be liquidated, cleansed, and reeducated unto nameless death has been glorified by advocates and perpetrators as an act of humanitarian sanitation. Zebedaeus would have his own looming terror judged not so much by the principles of jurists as by the law of charity. To doubt the compassion that grounds his opinion, he asserts, “(if a man may speak freely) were almost to be a schismatic in nature” (39). the crusade to end crusades With these final words, Bacon’s dialogue ends. In effect, they are a quod erat demonstrandum, a display of the very disorder that afflicts the affairs of Christendom of his day as well as a display of the state of mind that might counter it. The zeal of Zebedaeus and his Protestant counterparts arises out of doctrine and sinks back into doctrine. Ready to acknowledge that “no nations are wholly aliens and strangers the one to the other” (38), this doctrinairism can, nonetheless, collapse into the most cold-blooded brutalities. Theirs is the certainty that kills with a clear conscience. It is precisely this kind of murderous belief that Bacon finds worthy of outlawry: “Such people, all nations are interessed, and ought to be resenting, to suppress; considering that the particular states themselves, being the delinquents, can give no redress” (39). More profoundly offensive than the Turks is the papal endorsement of political assassination. Arguing as attorney general in the King’s Bench a few years earlier, Bacon had leveled his guns against a more deserving enemy: “The doctrine, that upon an excommunication of the Pope, with sentence of deposing, a King by any son of Adam may be slaughtered; and that it is justice and no murder,” is itself a monster. He called for “some holy war or league amongst all Christian princes of either religion for the extirpating and rasing of this opinion and the authors thereof from the face of the earth.” Here was a “cruzada” or jiha¯d in which sober men of all persuasions might join, not least for the sake of relieving the Christian faith as a whole of such a slander. For far worse than the fanatic follies of the Anabaptists—an enthusiasm run amok—the papal doctrine “is a sad and solemn mischief: he imagineth mischief as a law; a lawlike mischief.” 12 An Advertisement Touching a Holy War is Bacon’s trumpet inflaming the 12. “The Charge of Owen, Indicted of High Treason,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857–74), 12:156–58.

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heart and powers of a man to daring and resolution. Pollio’s jiha¯d is his own, and, if Bacon’s invented speeches succeed in getting at least a few philosophical souls to look at the affairs of Christendom through his eyes, why, then there is hope. For “great matters (especially if they be religious) have (many times) small beginnings: and the platform may draw on the building” (15). By this fable’s end, readers may be able to draw a moral on their own. The very idea of a holy war seems deeply flawed, as does that of a just war. Our focus ought, rather, to be on questioning whether a proposed war is necessary or unnecessary. Always keeping that distinction in the forefront of our minds would contribute significantly to the sum of human happiness. Viscount St. Alban probably regarded that thought as a not unworthy oblation to bring into the temple and to the world at large.

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robert burton, 1577 –1640 Unlike Thomas More and Francis Bacon, who gloried in fame and prominence, Robert Burton maintained a low profile, or at least as low a profile as an author of a continuing and ever-waxing best seller could affect. Burton was a fellow of a college at Oxford where he immersed himself in the world of books. Happily, the new Bodleian Library had just been founded. One can easily imagine him devouring its contents, duly taking notes for the next edition of his book. He was also a vicar of some rural Anglican church, but his pastoral duties seem not to have weighed him down. Burton wrote in distracted times about individual distractions. His analysis—a self-styled “anatomy”—and his recommended cures carried heavy implications for an England (and a Europe) ripping itself apart over questions of church and state. But Burton was no adviser to princes. He would be a compassionate counselor to you, the reader. He would have you begin by facing your particular, individual distemper. There can be no politics of sanity (he seems to suggest) until such time as individuals, slowly, painfully, gain some control over their own wild gyrations and convulsions. Until then, Roundhead and Cavalier, Presbyter and Anglican, will devour themselves and all about them. Let the work begin!

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3 Burton’s Antics

Omnipresent, yet evanescent, Robert Burton roves at will through his massive Anatomy of Melancholy. Peeping from within his forest of adages, the master of all quoters challenges his readers to find him out. He is, to be sure, not one to hide his talent in a hanky. Proclaiming “Experto crede Roberto” is tantamount to telling one and all that he is a man to be trusted, that he speaks out of experience, and that his is a voice well worth heeding.1 Yet his acting on that challenge and promise is more perplexing than a good-natured reader might expect or even tolerate. For in marshaling a riot of sayings on one side of a question against an equally formidable profusion of quotations on the other, Burton has left his readers with the materials for reaching a conclusion on their own but otherwise in the dark about his private judgment. An author who appears and disappears with seemingly random suddenness is, paradoxically, an author who teases you not to put him out of mind. Why play this game of hide-and-seek? The question is more readily posed than answered. The Anatomy is both a public presentation and an intensely personal record. Burton tells us things about himself that are none of our business but simultaneously warns us off from prying: “Seek not after that which is hid. . . . I would not willingly be known” (1:15). The relationship he establishes between author, book, and reader is fluid, volatile, and subject to renegotiation. Think of 1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols. in 1 (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 1:22. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. This one-volume paperback edition retains the separate pagination of the three-volume Everyman’s Library edition of 1932.

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this as a ménage à trois, odd but ordinary in that one will not understand the whole without first gaining some clarity about each of the parts. It is no surprise, then, that early on the author helps the reader situate himself in this triangle. Burton’s alter ego, Democritus Junior, urges his book to “wish for readers triflers like thyself ” (1:5). In a world quite mad, the reader is enjoined to view the picture of a raving madman (in the frontispiece) as a self-portrait: “ ‘Twixt him and thee there’s no difference” (1:8). “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse” (1:16). It is enough that a reader be mindful of his own particular malady or vulnerability for him then to read Burton’s book in the proper frame of mind. Yet, even here, appearances may be deceiving. The very title of the work and its elaborate dissection of causes, symptoms, and cures strongly suggest that Burton has produced a medical treatise. You need only recur to the analytic outlines that precede the three “partitions” of the work to be able to locate in short order the passages that deal with your condition. Expecting sober thoroughness, you will find it—and much more. Our confidence that we are on solid ground in regarding the Anatomy as a textbook of sorts is supported by the clear signal given toward the end of the introductory section, “Democritus to the Reader.” The preceding hundred pages have been intent on demonstrating “that all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it” (1:120). In holding up his unflattering mirror to our distracted selves, Burton claims no exemption for himself: “I confess it again, I am as foolish, as mad as any one.” Rather, he would have us come to accept his mockery of human foibles as a means of self-knowledge and, hence, of self-healing. Here, the physician speaks, seeking to help others and himself in coping with “so universal a malady, an epidemical disease, that so often, so much, crucifies the body and mind” (1:121). Yet this stance that the reader is encouraged to adopt toward author and book is subverted, if not belied, by Burton’s apology for having “overshot” himself in the preceding pages. He promises henceforth to be more serious, more sober, and “to omit all impertinent digressions” (1:120). But, having apologized thus far, he rears back from an imagined objection that he has been fantastic, “too light and comical for a divine, too satirical for one of my profession,” retorting: I will presume to answer, with Erasmus in like case, ‘Tis not I, but Democritus, Democritus dixit: you must consider what it is to speak in one’s own or another’s person, an assumed habit and name—a difference betwixt him that affects or acts a prince’s, a philosopher’s, a magistrate’s, a fool’s part, 50

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and him that is so indeed—and what liberty those old satirists have had; it is a cento collected from others; not I, but they that say it. (1:121)

Who then, pray tell, speaks in these pages? Nobody, hence don’t blame Robert! Our former confidence is further shaken. Hiding behind the name of Democritus, Burton insists on his right to adopt the manner of the laughing, scoffing philosopher of ancient Abdera. At one and the same time, the author insists that this is, indeed, his handiwork and that no one has said it, that it is nothing by nobody. At one and the same time, he insists on claiming his liberty to “speak [his] mind freely”—owing his reader not a thing and giving not a fig for his favor—and recanting, caring, fearing, and confessing his fault (1:122). His advice, addressed in both Latin and English “to the reader who employs his leisure ill” (1:124), is that you proceed with caution. It may turn out that, in rashly defaming him “or cavilling in jest against him,” the joke will be on you. If there is a rule for you, the reader, to bear in mind, it is that “one may speak in jest, and yet speak truth” (1:122). a show of modesty In adopting his peculiar stance toward his book and his chosen persona, Burton invites us to probe further and to discover (if we can) the man behind the mask. His motives are out in the open yet mixed. He engages in “this playing labour” to forestall idleness and the melancholy that otherwise would fill his empty hours (1:20). He would have us think of this as a private exercise designed to alleviate his troubled condition or perhaps as an exercise whose findings others might adopt as well to the advantage of their bodies and, even more, “their souls” (1:21). Or perhaps Burton chooses to display himself thus in hope of getting others to take note of him; this retiring fellow does not here affect to be indifferent to fame. Though his originating motive grows out of a private need, his sustaining motive is to help others “out of a fellow-feeling” (1:22). He can act confidently on these impulses by virtue of his special qualifications. “A good divine either is or ought to be a good physician, a spiritual physician at least, as our Saviour calls Himself, and was indeed” (1:37). It is of the nature of psychosomatic maladies such as melancholy that a physician of the soul and a physician of the body can do little severally but together “make an absolute cure.” Happily, this professional divine is also by inclination and private study knowledgeable about medicine, albeit short of claiming to 51

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be a doctor. Those crucified in both body and mind have, so to speak, a savior in Robert Burton. He is prepared to prescribe means for preventing and curing what ails them and most especially as regards the far more grievous diseases of the mind (1:121, 434). In this respect, at least, Burton feels justified in presenting himself as a latter-day, if junior, version of Socrates’ great contemporary. The resemblances that might be noted between Democritus and Burton himself—both being solitaries, melancholics, addicted to studies, and hearty laughers—go only so far. Burton eschews making any larger claim lest he be held guilty of “impudency and arrogancy” (1:17). Yet he is willing and able to take up a project that Democritus Sr. left incomplete and beyond recall. Democritus Jr. is ready “to revive again, prosecute, and finish in this treatise” a comprehensive treatment of melancholy and madness (1:20). Nor is this merely some self-deluding wish. Burton deliberately exposes himself (1:27) in such a way as to make both his strengths and his foibles so many qualifications for undertaking this daunting task. Compared to that great man, he is “insignificant, a nobody,” yet also a somebody: a lifelong scholar ready to do credit to Christ Church (“augustissimo collegio”) and the fine libraries (not least Sir Thomas Bodley’s [2:92]) that have sustained his decades of studious solitude in Oxford (1:17). He likens himself to “a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees.” He speaks of his “running wit,” his “unconstant, unsettled mind,” his “roving humour,” his “want of good method” in indulging his gluttonous appetite for books (1:17–18). The Anatomy of Melancholy is unmistakably the singular offspring of this singular mind (3:216). He may be “a mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures,” “a contemplator only” in matters of love, yet, for all that, he is not without an awareness of the world outside his cloistered study. Now and then he has left his rooms, made some observations of his own, and viewed the antic scene “not . . . to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion” (1:19, 3:184). Burton’s humane candor and modesty encourage the reader to discount his extreme self-deprecation. He apologizes for presuming to send out into the world this unrevised and ungainly book. He knows too that those who laugh at the follies of others deserve themselves to be mocked for being as “giddy-headed, and lie as open as any other” (1:111, 113). Don’t waste your time on this “rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills. . . . I confess all (‘tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself ” (1:26). For all that, the author presents himself and his handiwork to the judgment of others, sustained by a belief that, as he puts it, “though I be not so right or so discreet as I should be, yet not so 52

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mad, so bad neither, as thou perhaps takest me to be” (1:120). With these successive feints, dodges, and reversals, Burton compels us to consider his peculiar artfulness. com monpl aces with a t wist A reader first making the acquaintance of the Anatomy of Melancholy is unlikely to cast the issue in such terms. For, although Burton’s prefatory synoptic outlines bespeak a clear underlying organization and hold out a fair prospect of authorial control and intelligent design, the experience of entering into the warp and woof of the presentation—in short, the actual experience of reading—is far different. One has more and more the sense of being caught up in a “happening” where someone or something is running amok. The author’s sundry confessions and apologies may only reinforce the reader’s disorientation. Almost the first words Democritus Jr. utters in his invocation to his book are: O’er earth’s wide surface take thy vagrant way, To imitate thy master’s genius try. (1:5)

Vagrant is, indeed, the word. By his own account, Burton has lacked the time to revise his text or to expunge matter from five earlier editions that he now regrets having published (1:30–31). And, although he cites precedents for collections such as his, the fact remains that his materials are what they are: “excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, [and so on and on]” (1:26). There is no prettifying this matter. Burton is not orating, but conversing; he writes for the mind, not the ear; he calls a spade a spade (1:32). For better or worse, he writes as he speaks. Yet even the novice reader may get the uneasy feeling that artless Robert protests too much. A sentence as contrived as the following gives the lie to its very conclusion: [Lacking leisure, amanuenses, or assistants,] I must for that cause do my business myself, and was therefore enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccam venit [whatever came uppermost], in an extemporean style, as I do commonly all other exercises, effudi quicquid dictavit genius meus 53

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[I poured out whatever came into my mind], out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Acestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies, etc., which many so much affect. (1:31)

One would be ill-advised to take Robert at his word—or should one say at his one word rather than at his contrary word? Being a man of many words, he compels us to consider his words and thoughts in tandem. The same man who vaunts his artlessness has more than a few things to say about his art. It is striking that Burton proudly draws attention to certain features of his presentation that others might find dubious or even obnoxious. This suggests that he may have reasons for proceeding as he does regardless of whether he chooses to share those reasons. The seeming abandon that afflicts the page before one’s eyes is hooped within the logic of each partition’s analytic outline. Close up, we are beset by repetitions and redundancies; at a greater distance, we are ready to credit that they are not inadvertent. Indeed, how could they be? A principle hovers into sight here. Like Seneca, Democritus Jr. holds: “That is never said too often, which cannot be said often enough” (1:33). Perhaps this applies most of all to warnings and admonitions—like the multiple labels on power equipment—yet frequently our author acts as though this is a universal injunction to be observed, preferring rather to utter a hundred words too many than one too few (1:388).2 Similarly, Burton highlights the patchwork quality of his work: a “cento” laboriously collected from others’ words, at once theirs yet his as well. If there is “no news here” (1:22), it may be so for a very good reason. Originality is overrated, and our expectations as readers are excessive in this respect. Homer spews, and our poets lick it up; our divines and “story-dressers” do the like in quarrying and recycling the words of their predecessors. Hence, Burton can insist in good conscience that he is not a thief. “I have taken, not filched.” In crediting his sources, in digesting and assimilating what he has swallowed, and in applying a method of his own 2. If I am not mistaken, Burton mentions taciturnity only once: as the best way to avoid folly and madness (1.118). It is noteworthy that this divine finds no occasion for citing Eccles. 5:1, Ps. 4:5, or similar passages suggesting why silence might be especially becoming for mortals. Perhaps psychotherapy is inseparable from garrulousness.

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making, he stakes his claim to being not just a scholar and an honest man but above all his own man (1:24–25). A signature, perhaps the signature of Burton’s art, is his indulgence in digressions. These appear to arise out of his eccentric, roving nature and may occasion apologies for his self-indulgence,3 but there is no mistaking the deliberateness with which he employs them. A sure token of this is to be found in the analytic synopses of the three partitions. The fact that the elaborate, tight logic that governs the work’s order of presentation makes places for digressions—at least ten of them are so announced—suggests that these are not simply instances of the author’s having been carried away. Even when moving from his tongue-in-cheek discussion of those who are only “metaphorically mad” (absurd people “which no new hospital can hold, no physic help”) to a philosophical and medical anatomy of the disease, Burton will still feel called on to digress (1:120). He has his reasons. Some may dismiss such strayings as frivolous or impertinent, but Burton remains unmoved, holding with Beroaldus: “Digressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader, they are like sauce to a bad stomach, and I do therefore most willingly use them” (1:253). What is more, he offers a “consolatory digression” in hope of supplying relief or even a cure for discontented or troubled minds, even while bringing those who are already happy to self-knowledge and moderation (2:126–33). There is no denying that he enjoys digressions; they suit his roving temperament. In opening his delightful and provocative third partition, Burton begins anew. He begs leave “to refresh [his] Muse a little, and [his] weary readers” (3:6). Relative to the work as a whole, the treatment of “Love-Melancholy” that follows is a 432-page digression—but what a digression! “These my writings, I hope, shall take like gilded pills, which are so composed as well to tempt the appetite and deceive the palate, as to help and medicinally work upon the whole body; my lines shall not only recreate but rectify the mind” (3:7). It is no small thing to claim, in effect, that reading this book is itself the cure. Yet Burton asserts as much with a confidence at once modest and bold. Being a modern (my term), coming last (his term), is greatly advanta3. Burton’s vision of a utopia is bracketed by self-admonitions: “But I must take heed, ne quid gravius dicam [lest I say something too serious], that I do not overshoot myself. Sus Minervam [the sow would teach Minerva], I am forth of my element, as you peradventure suppose” (1.96). “Manum de tabella [I must call a halt], I have been over-tedious in this subject” (1:107). And, more charmingly, in his digression on the air: “But hoo! I am now gone quite out of sight, I am almost giddy with roving about” (2:60).

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geous: “Though there were many giants of old in physic and philosophy, yet I say with Didacus Stella, ‘A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself ’; I may likely add, alter, and see farther than my predecessors” (1:25).4 Thanks to his method and changing his metaphor, Burton can light his candle from the torches of a host of others. For all that, the art that governs this presentation is his and his alone. Whether lurking in the shadows or stepping forth into the light, whether staying close to his theme or wandering off into a digression, the great epitomizer decides “as shall seem best to me” (3:189). In the end, the sanity of this mad book must be sought in its author’s purposes. robert ’s generosity of spirit Uncovering Robert Burton’s purposes is not an exercise in bookkeeping. It would be laughably simpleminded to tally up, for example, all the arguments he relates against marriage (3:204–26), then range them with his counterarguments (3:248–53), strike a balance, and finally announce his bottom line. A book that promises laughter or wisdom may very well deliver both by relying on a blend of precept and whimsy. In the process, it might raise our spirits and enlarge our fund of good sense (1:5). From the emphatic but discordant assertions collected in this book—“so many men, so many minds” (1:27)—arises a cacophony. Burton means to give us pause, not to settle us comfortably into the torpor of certitude. He pleases, rather, to nourish readers with a roving cast of mind. Doubtless, pastors and toastmasters have for centuries riffled through his pages, lifted whatever adage or one-liner they deemed apt, and let it go at that. But the Anatomy is not designed to be a dictionary of quotations. While it invites readers to dip and meander, it resists being identified with, or judged by, any particular turn of phrase. To those who might take offense at some “smutty language” coming from a “learned pen,” Democritus Jr. instructs his book: Reply, “Good Sir, throughout, the context see; Thought chastens thought; so prithee judge again.” (1:6)

In presenting such varied matter with which to take in the human comedy, Burton invites active readers to join in this work of chastening. He offers 4. The pre-Burtonian history of this conceit has been exhumed and exhausted in Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, Post-Italianate ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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not answers but a dilemma that is his very own: “Shall I laugh with Democritus, or weep with Heraclitus?” (3:346).5 It is well to recall that, in his occasional forays into the wider world, Robert reports having declined to follow the examples of Diogenes and Democritus. He has observed human behavior “not as they did, to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion” (1:19). Burton would lead each of his readers to precisely this point. If they are willing to listen and learn, it is by virtue of the candor and modesty he displays in detailing his own melancholy. They may well sense that such a man has earned the right to lead others by the arm. He would have them develop a capacity to step back for a moment from their preoccupations and to challenge their firm convictions from another perspective. His is an education in moderation. Despair all too often arises out of immoderation or out of an immoderate response to the “dismal accidents” that may befall us (3:396). For the most part, human misery is of human making: “Some few discreet men there are, that can govern themselves, and curb in these inordinate affections, by religion, philosophy, and such divine precepts, of meekness, patience, and the like.” But this is not the case with the bulk of mankind. Left to their own devices, and “giving way to these violent passions of fear, grief, shame, revenge, hatred, malice, etc., they are torn in pieces, as Actaeon was with his dogs, and crucify their own souls” (1:258–59). It is striking (but on second thought no surprise) that the Anatomy of Melancholy should culminate in an inquiry in which the author claims to be on his own, having “no pattern to follow . . . , no man to imitate” (3:311), an extended inquiry into religious melancholy. This madness may be coeval with man, but Burton has no doubt that his own times surpass all earlier ages in this regard and that the harm wreaked by this psychic disorder exceeds that of wars, plagues, famines, and all the rest (3:312–13). Something there is about love of God that veers to extremes. On the one hand, zeal without knowledge leads to an overscrupulous obsession with inessentials, to impiety and superstition. At the other extreme lie worldly men with “cauterized consciences,” idolaters, and atheists (3:319, 389). Burton is little concerned to confute the latter, those suffering from a deficiency of religious feeling. Doing so would 5. The question is stated in the context of a consideration of the general symptoms of religious melancholy, but the issue has been raised at the very outset of the book. Burton devotes five pages to telling the story of how the citizens of Abdera, distressed by Democritus’s obsessive laughter at the condition of the world, commissioned Hippocrates to cure the philosopher of his supposed madness. After a careful examination of the patient, the great physician pronounces: “Notwithstanding those small neglects of his attire, body, diet, the world had not a wiser, a more learned, a more honest man, and they were much deceived to say that he was mad” (1:47–52).

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require a volume of its own, adding to an already considerable (and largely ineffective) literature (3:392). In truth, there is no talking to these atheistic spirits; they are beyond reach, beyond persuasion, beyond conversion (3:382). Rather than indulge in futile exercises, Burton turns to the zealots at hand. He is impelled by the havoc wrought by the madmen and manipulators of his own times to focus attention on the pathology of loving God both unwisely and too well. Writing in the midst of Western Christendom’s latest prolonged exercise in self-cannibalization, the Thirty Years’ War, Burton does not want for examples. Murderous mania abounds. More to the point, however, is this Anglican divine’s ability to transcend sectarian divisions and to direct his readers to the underlying sickness that afflicts them all. Wherever one turns—to pagan antiquity, modern Europe, and all times and places in between—the same wretched scene recurs. There is, then, no cause to be astonished by the strange idols and absurd practices prevailing today in the East and West Indies “when we see all out as great effects amongst Christians themselves; how are those Anabaptists, Arians, and Papists above the rest, miserably infatuated!” (3:326). No, the wonder is not that a people, “carried hoodwinked like hawks” (3:340), should be gulled into false worship and pathetic self-torture by a tissue of fables. Ask rather “how such wise men as have been of the Jews, such learned understanding men as Averroes, Avicenna, or those heathen philosophers, could ever be persuaded to believe or to subscribe to the least part of them, aut fraudem non detegere [or at least did not expose the deceit]; but that, as Vaninus answers, . . . they durst not speak for fear of the law” (3:352–53, 330, 384). Owing to their ignorance, the common people remain mired in superstition, condemned to be jiggled by those who play on their immoderate hopes and fears (3:327, 336, 338). Rude idiots can be made to believe anything, however impossible or incredible, prone as they are to “take up religion a-trust, as at mercers’ they do their wares” (3:331, 339). Burton traces all this delusional credulity back to its first mover, the devil, and to his instruments or factors (3:325). Practitioners of statecraft and priestcraft seem to converge in his account, to the point that it is hard to say whether political Machiavellians have taken a page out of the book of “our priests (who make religion policy)” or vice versa (3:328–29, 331). What is clear is that Robert Burton views the religious controversies that have roiled England and Europe for over a century hardly at all as a matter of doctrine but overwhelmingly as a matter of individual and social hygiene. His guns are leveled at whatever targets of opportunity present themselves among “the chief kinds of superstition, which, beside us 58

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Christians now domineer and crucify the world, Gentiles, Mahometans, Jews, etc.” (3:347). He finds little to choose between them. Alike, these sectarians insist that “they alone, and none but they, can be saved” (3:350). Alike, they display the tenacity of addicts who will not and cannot be moved (3:375). Their myopic preoccupations with meaningless ceremonies and distinctions have occluded for them the lessons and benefits of a religion where “the true God is truly worshipped,” a religion that “begets generous spirits,” is “a light yoke,” and “rears the dejected soul of man” (3:320). Burton’s picture of “true religion” barely goes beyond this sketch. Readers are left to infer its character from its opposite, the superstition that is fueled by “blind zeal, which is religion’s ape, religion’s bastard, religion’s shadow, false glass” (3:321). Our world is so suffused with religious polemics, those expressions of immoderation and breeders of the same, that “the serenity of charity is overclouded” (1:35). It is symptomatic of those suffering from religious melancholy that they bear extraordinary love for those who are of their own sect and vehement hatred toward those of other sects or those who deviate from them in ritual practice (3:347–48). Burton inveighs especially against the zeal that encourages fantasizing about matters lying beyond human knowledge. Enthusiasts lose themselves in “absurd and brain-sick questions, intricacies, froth of human wit, and excrements of curiosity” that literally drive them mad (2:58–60; 3:421). Perhaps the greatest harm comes from “those thundering ministers” (a monopoly of neither Rome nor Geneva nor Amsterdam) who work on the feelings of their flocks as they lose themselves in needless speculations about election, predestination, grace, and other mysteries: “The terrible meditation of hell-fire and eternal punishment much torments a sinful silly soul” (3:397–99). And to what end? Should one laugh or weep? Burton’s antics and his very choice of a pseudonym invite us to view him as a laughing philosopher—but he is a philosopher under a cloud. He stirs some issues that he is not free to discuss as he might, “upon pain of ecclesiastical censure” (3:424). His estimate of human nature cannot hold out prospects that would cheer him or us. The habits of mind (or mindlessness) that incite and sustain the distempers of the times do not admit of simple remedies. His survey of possible cures leaves him in the middle, somewhere between “that fourth Fury,” the Spanish Inquisition, and a full toleration where no one would be compelled for conscience’s sake. Public policy might gag or cure the promoters of untoward zeal and disband the unwholesome conventicles that keep their members at a boil. Try admonitions, promises, threats, commitment to Bedlam (3:377–79). In the last 59

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analysis, however, the responsibility for recovering psychic and physical health begins at home. At the end of his book, Burton falls into a sermonizing mode as he urges this precept on the distracted: “Give not way to solitariness and idleness. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ ” (3:432). How odd! This book, which promises to help us find our way back to sanity, is itself a product of the solitude and desultory habits of its author. Nor could we be in a position to be helped by it had we not ourselves the solitude for reading these many pages as well as a tolerance for triflers. Or is the joke that, in fact, none of us has been alone, none of us idle? Thanks to Robert, with his book in hand, we have been in the company of many, many others. Happily, they chasten us even as they chasten each other.

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pier r e bayle, 1647 –1706 Like Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle was a bookman, though not nearly so reclusive. As a Huguenot struggling to breathe free in Louis XIV’s France and, ultimately, forced to seek refuge in Holland, he could hardly have abstracted himself from the politics of the day. Nor could he safely mind his business in private once the Consistory of the French Reformed Church of Rotterdam made his business its business. In short, Bayle never suffered from a want of critics—hence also of targets. He was a voracious reader, an engaged and happy controversialist, and perforce a compulsive writer. But, for all those millions and millions of words that flowed from his pen, he never failed to challenge and entertain and shock readers. Human history, in his account, is replete with absurdities, chicaneries, self-serving duplicities, and terrible cruelties dressed up in plausible-sounding, high-minded nonsense. All perpetrators should be held to account: princes and pastors, historians and demagogues, all. Perhaps the better way—better, that is, than anger and striking out—is the deft use of a pointed wit to prick the inflated balloons offered to the world as facts, truths, and certainties. As long as people are intellectually lazy and accepting, Bayle will not rest. He means not only to enlighten, but also to entertain, and in the process to enlist his readers as recruits in the Truth Squad of the Republic of Letters.

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4 Remedial Education in Professor Bayle’s History Class

In an age nurtured on religious, political, and philosophical polemics, there necessarily were readers who found much to savor in Pierre Bayle’s writings. Ordinary readers, dazzled by his fireworks, attended to his deflation of pretensions, his frequent off-color insinuations, and his bravura performances. Thanks to these features, the Historical and Critical Dictionary gained almost instant international celebrity and held it for decades into the eighteenth century. But shrewder members of his public sought more from the author—and found it. The delight and horror of those connoisseurs grew out of an awareness that they were dealing with a master not only of erudition but also of artful presentation and manipulation. While Bayle did not wear his heart on his sleeve, he wrote and argued in a manner that would draw some at least to ponder what might indeed lie in his heart of hearts. This was a point not lost on competent readers of yesteryear: it is enough to mention the names of Diderot, Lessing, and Nietzsche. All the more striking is it, then, that the eighteenth-century figure of a determinedly subversive Bayle has largely been eclipsed for the past fifty years by modern scholars’ preoccupation with ascertaining what kind of a “fideist” this odd fellow must have been. (The formidable researches of the late Mme Elisabeth Labrousse have been decisive in this respect for two generations of scholars.) Yet, in proceeding from this premise, much of prevailing scholarship has found it hard to account for, or give adequate weight to, those many discordant notes and emphases in his 63

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arguments that undermine the very positions he piously purports to uphold. One ought to hesitate to settle for the conclusion that poor Bayle simply refused to accept the logical consequences of his own reasoning. Rather than evade these difficulties by presuming that our author is fundamentally incoherent or temperamentally incapable of living up to his own high standards or madly having fun at our expense, it is safer to give him the benefit of the doubt and accept his repeated claim that he knows what he is doing and that it is for us readers to follow his winding trail. We are much encouraged to pursue this approach by the patient unraveling of Bayle’s modus operandi in recent scholarship, most especially that of Gianluca Mori. Along with earlier analyses that have long appeared marginal or been altogether lost in the shadows, these post-Labrousseian studies invite us to rediscover a focused, radical thinker. The present essay attempts to do precisely that by following the historiographic thread running through the Dictionary’s many articles. By retracing, as it were, the manner in which Bayle gets readers to articulate conclusions on their own—conclusions he prepares them to draw but refrains from stating aloud himself—we may gradually come to sense the daring and reach of his message. Never one to shy away from a repetition, Pierre Bayle harps again and again in his Historical and Critical Dictionary on what is entailed in “doing” history. The theme is like a steady drumbeat throughout that text of seven or eight million words, urging readers and would-be historians alike to attend to their respective duties. Nor is that all. His great folios are offered as an exemplar, even a monument, of historiography rightly understood and properly conducted. Exhortation and performance are bound together in an exuberant display of the printer’s art. And, to the end that no member of the Republic of Letters fail to take his message, Bayle enlists all the traits and tactical moves at his command: patience, assiduity, attention to detail, straight-faced humor, irony, obscenity, and more. His is a formidable arsenal employed in a campaign in which the author (for all his demure protests to the contrary) may not intend to take any prisoners.1 1. The literature bearing on Bayle’s self-presentation and rhetorical stratagems is rich, nuanced, and helpful. I single out here in chronological order: Robert Marie Emile De Rycke, “The Preoccupations of Pierre Bayle in the Dictionnaire historique et critique” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1966), esp. 31–56, 141–45; Herbert Dieckmann, “Form and Style in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique,” in Essays on Literature, in Honor of Liselotte Dieckmann, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Herbert Lindenberger, and Egon Schwarz (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1972), 179–90; Zephyra Porat, “The Art of Deceiving: The Rhetoric of Veiled Writing in Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary,” Iyyun: The Hebrew Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1973): 183–206 (Hebrew), 322–318 (English summary with reverse pagination);

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Mixed messages beset the reader on even the first public appearance of the very idea of such a dictionary. Bayle’s prospectus of 1692 offers a justification for this project and candidly establishes his fitness for undertaking it. While indicating that the task of hunting for errors in others’ works is endless, Bayle is yet sure of bringing down his quarry. Although he may appear to be focusing on useless trifles, he will, in fact, be promoting the public good. Bayle would have readers believe that his single-minded hunt for errors and snares is but an expression of his version of the Golden Rule. Just as he is unsparing of his own faults, so ought he not to indulge those of others. The critics’ many volumes of purported scholarship are better viewed as monuments of human ignorance and fallibility. All this is vanitas celebrating itself. But it takes a man proud of his self-contempt—a Bayle—to detect and punish such charlatanism by rendering it publicly detestable. Alternating between modest claims for his project and exalted ones, Bayle leaves readers wondering what or whom to believe. If the bottom line is that we ought to be wary of what others assert to be history, chronology, or even brute facts, why ought not the same critical doubt be applied to the Dictionary and its author? Even if we take at face value his characterization of his work as less a work of reasoning than a heap of trash and filth (the detritus of pseudolearning), what warrant have we for believing that Bayle has it right and that his compilation is comprehensive and fair? And, even if we grant that we stand in need of an “InsuranceOffice of the Republic of Letters,” with what confidence dare we hold that this Dictionary will supply that want? The claim is bold: Bayle has designed “a book suited to the use and capacity of every reader.” Thanks H. B. Nisbet, “Lessing and Bayle,” in Tradition and Creation: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson, ed. C. P. Magill, Brian A. Rowley, and Christopher J. Smith (Leeds: W. S. Maney & Son, 1978), 13–29; Kenneth R. Weinstein, “Atheism and Enlightenment in the Political Philosophy of Pierre Bayle” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992), esp. 50–61; Gianluca Mori, Bayle philosophe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 13–53; Robert C. Bartlett, “Interpretive Essay,” in Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), esp. xxvi–xxvii, xli–xliii, and xlv nn. 14–15; Patricia Jane Armstrong, “The Textual Strategies of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2000), esp. 130–39, 144–60, 171–82, 192–208, 240–44; Gianluca Mori, “Persécution et art d’écrire: Strauss, Skinner et Pierre Bayle,” in Leo Strauss: Art d’écrire, politique, philosophie; texte de 1941 et études, ed. Laurent Jaffro, Benoît Frydman, Emmanuel Cattin, and Alain Petit (Paris: J. Vrin, 2001), 197–219; Jean-Michel Gros, “L’art d’écrire dans les ‘Éclaircissements’ du Dictionnaire historique et critique de Pierre Bayle,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 195, no. 1 (2005): 21–37. On the problem of coming to terms with Bayle’s historical Pyrrhonism, compare the approach of Ruth Whelan, whose elaborate study rests on Mme Labrousse’s premise, with that of Carlo Borghero, whose perspective is close to that of the present essay. Ruth Whelan, The Anatomy of Superstition: A Study of the Historical Theory and Practice of Pierre Bayle, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 259 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), esp. 175–79, 233–40; Carlo Borghero, La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), 217–52.

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to it “all sorts of readers” will be able to ascertain whether the accounts in other dictionaries and in “all sorts of other books” are true.2 But, as the claim is great, so too must be the burden of proof. It can come as no surprise, then, that the first threshold to be crossed on entering Bayle’s magnum opus concerns the character of the historian himself. bayle’s ethos The case that Bayle makes for the general utility of his Dictionary bears the marks of a sincere conviction. It is also a moderate claim and, hence, invites us to begin with its concessions and reservations. It goes without saying (yet Bayle is obliged to say it more than once) that a work of this nature never attains perfection and is never at an end. There are too many minutiae, too many particularities, too many uncertainties and ambiguities about its subjects to expect closure: “This is the fate of dictionaries.” Even in the case of the most learned and attentive author, it is to be expected that subsequent revisions will gradually bring his book closer to its “just and becoming stature” (“Babylas” F, 1:595ab; “Camden” D, 2:279ab). Authors need help, and Bayle is explicit in inviting—indeed, urging— his readers to join in the unending effort. By openly confessing that he is ignorant of some particulars or that he is in doubt about some point, he will follow a tried and true way of “excit[ing] the curious to communicate their discoveries to the public” (“Abelli,” 1:34). In a digression titled “Advertisement to the Reader Once for All,” Bayle emphasizes his special need for their assistance. Unlike other historical dictionaries, his does not settle for giving a general account of someone’s life. His inquiries are more intense and penetrating: “I examine, I discuss, I prove, I confute, as there is occasion.” In the absence of proof, he is forced to let a falsity stand, but in no way should his silence be mistaken for a warranty that the facts are as alleged. Let readers contribute to the socially valuable task of correcting mistakes and setting the record straight (“Priolo” B, 4:775b). It is no easy task for an author to establish that he knows whereof he speaks and deserves to be trusted. He cannot point to a physician’s wall 2. The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle, ed. Pierre Desmaizeaux, 2nd English ed., 5 vols. (London, 1734–38; reprint, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), Project, 5:788. (This edition is also available on microfilm in the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, no. 7190.2. The French text of the work in the edition of 1740 is available online at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/ projects/dicos/BAYLE/.) References to articles in the Dictionary proper are by title and lettered “remark,” followed by volume number, page number, and column in the English translation. Auxiliary materials included in that edition, as, in this instance, “A Project of a Critical Dictionary, in a Letter to Mr du Rondel,” are cited by volume and page (e.g., Project, 5:784–96).

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displaying framed diplomas and certificates. Nor can he sit in a corner like Little Jack Horner singing his own praise. He must proceed, rather, by indirection. By insisting on the qualifications that a historian ought to have, and by showing repeatedly how others rarely have, or most often have not at all, measured up to that standard, Bayle effectually invites readers to judge him by his own high pretensions. According to Bayle, no one is entitled to set himself up as a historian until he has first examined his conscience: “An historian can never stand too much upon his guard; and it is almost impossible for him to be altogether free from prejudices.” Yet the office demands no less. Those who are incapable of purging their attachments and hatreds should be advised to stick to writing romances and polemics and leave the writing of history to “lukewarm and indifferent men” (“Remond” D, 4:862b). Someone who cannot purge his resentments or partiality in a case ought, rather, to recuse himself. “History ought not to be handled but by clean hands,” not by those who figuratively or literally have imbrued their hands in combat. Failing that, it is but a short step until a writer, with all sincerity, lets his prepossessions intrude into his narrative (“Hall, Richard” B, 3:345b; “Gregory I” P, 3:224b). Readers ought to focus on the author’s honesty, his disinterestedness, and his hatred of lying (whether by invention or by suppression of evidence). The would-be historian ought to display “above all things the power of resisting the instinct of a religious zeal, which prompts one to cry down what he thinks to be false, and to adorn and embellish what he thinks to be true” (“Remond” D, 4:861b–863a).3 In entering, then, into this vexatious field, Bayle must know that he can expect, not general acclaim, but suspicion, anger, and perhaps worse. The truth is not to all men welcome. It is no accident that so few historians have dared speak freely. A faithful, unbiased writer such as William Camden, beset by enemies on all sides, was obliged to dodge and feint lest his thoughts be made accessible to all or his manuscript be altered by the powerful (“Camden” G K, 2:282b, 284b). Bayle cites Socrates’ prudence in 3. On the corruption of history by seductive writers, see “Morgues” L, 4:258ab; and “Marillac, Louis de” A, 4:142b–143a. By this test, even an otherwise superbly qualified historian may fail for want of displaying a perfectly equitable judgment. Consider T. B. Macaulay’s insistent forensic overkill. It is not enough for him to present the Toleration Act of 1689 as a flawed but prudential piece of legislative accommodation. Most of his seven-page discussion (in ch. 11 of his History of England from the Accession of James the Second) reads as an indictment. As he catalogs the act’s inconsistencies, absurdities, and injustice, Macaulay heaps vivid example on example—only to spring his trapdoor. This act, devoid of “any principle, sound or unsound,” may be for that very reason the model of “a great English law.” It accomplished what “the greatest masters of political philosophy might have failed to do”—remove “a vast mass of evil without shocking a vast mass of prejudice.” In pursuit of an effect, Macaulay allows his celebration of moderation to drown in a torrent of excess.

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responding in the Phaedrus to a query about belief in the tradition of the rape of Orithya. Some few knowing persons may judge rightly of a matter, recognizing an idle tale for what it is, but they take care to “explain their thoughts cautiously upon that subject in a public work.” Bayle finds here an occasion for moral reflection on the weakness of human understanding. “We must argue in this manner” when speaking of any traditions, ancient or modern (“Boreus” G, 2:82ab). Readers ought constantly to bear in mind that writing history as it ought properly to be done is both difficult and dangerous. For all Bayle’s flat assertions about a historian’s duty, it seems that acting on that sense of duty takes some consideration. A Tacitus, to be sure, would find his road well marked and clear: above all a historian ought to make it his business both to preserve the memory of virtuous deeds and to deter others from engaging in detestable actions and speeches by making them dread the judgments of subsequent chroniclers of infamy (“Dissertation on Defamatory Libels” VIII, 5:747, n. cc; “Louis XI” N, 3:803b). There is much about this line of thinking that Bayle finds congenial. He takes special pleasure in representing historical figures as they actually were. It is not his office to play the panegyrist, puffing up the good, and suppressing the bad. He holds out instead the practice of scripture, which portrays its characters warts and all (“Clarification on Atheists” IX, 5:812; “David” L, 2:611b). Bayle follows that inspired model with gusto. He urges the historian to use “the boldest strokes” in bringing out his actors’ characters. Boldness is, indeed, the order of the day, for truth ought to be preferred “before all things” (“Domitia Longina” A, 2:685a; “Haillan” G, 3:336a). If the timid or fastidious are repelled by his account, that is not his concern. The details he adduces need not be personally offensive. After all, it is not as if one had been surprised by some overheard nasty talk; readers choose what they put before their eyes (“Guarini” D, 3:260b; “Sforza” E, 5:133ab). Far, then, from apologizing for devoting two long columns of small print to the remarkable custom of ancient Cynics copulating in the streets, Bayle asserts the privileges or duties of a historian to mince no words. At least as regards those long dead, there is no prudential reason to suppress notorious facts, however infamous (“Hipparchia” D, 3:460a).4 Bayle reserves his special contempt and ire for those who tell half a story. It is inexcusable, he thinks, that a historian should dwell on one party’s out4. Not content to exercise his privilege, Bayle takes care in this remark D to lead his reader on to “Diogenes” L (2:669b–670a) and from there on to the multitude of stories in “Lais.”

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rageous behavior without even recounting the facts that provoked such a reaction. As far as he is concerned, this suppression of information is analogous to a seller’s defrauding an innocent buyer through concealment. Nay, it is worse: so perfidious a breach of faith is a crime (“Abdas,” 1:13; “Elizabeth” U, 2:759b). The long and the short of it is that a historian has to purge himself of any passion that might urge him on to flattery and calumny. In the interest of serving truth and truth alone, he must transform himself into a being disengaged from any lingering sentiments, loves, and loyalties (“Usson” F, 5:531ab). Bayle speaks of the behavior of a “sensible historian” (“Pope Joan” G, 4:736b), but the being he describes is more like a dedicated priest. In consecrating himself to exactitude, he acknowledges that he may become a source for a public that will take him at his word. But, even as the historian ought to be cautious in his characterizations of others, so too ought readers and critics take care in judging his work. They had better first grasp the laws of history and privileges of a commentator that apply here. As little as one would fault a physician or a lawyer for setting down the historical facts (however obscene or shameful), should one deny Pierre Bayle the comparable privileges of a “commenting historian” (“Quellenec” A E, 4:799a, 804a; “Remarks on a Pamphlet” IX, 5:799). That said, Bayle allows as to how a historian would do well to know when to hold his tongue. He cites with approval Bernard du Haillan’s reasoning that led him to cut short his historical narrative before reaching his own times. A man who writes the history of recently deceased kings exposes himself to “an unlucky alternative”: He must either dissemble the truth, or provoke persons who are most to be feared. The first of these inconveniencies shocks an historian’s honor and conscience, the other offends against his prudence. It is best therefore to say nothing. (“Haillan” E, 3:334b)

There are times that will not endure having the truth spoken; or, perhaps better said, there are always times that will not endure having some truth spoken. In such circumstances, silence is preferable to lying, for the public is concerned that whatever finds its way into print be true (“Basta, George” B, 1:674b). Here, then, is the historian’s dilemma. He is enjoined by “the Legislator of Historians” not to dare to say anything that is false and to be bold to say all that is true. But, given the state of this postlapsarian world, this command is as impracticable (Bayle says) as those of the Decalogue—but 69

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with this difference. Obeying the Decalogue would lead one to eternal life. Obeying the Lawgiver of the Historians would lead one almost inevitably to a premature temporal death: “A man must be foolish to the highest degree to fulfill the Laws of History” (“Bonfadius” D, 2:65b). Bayle directs readers to the preface to the first edition of his Dictionary. There, he asserts that he has “religiously observed” the first of these laws. But as for the other of “the two inviolable laws of history” mentioned by Cicero in De oratore—to speak the whole truth—he says: “I cannot boast that I have always observed it. I believe it sometimes inconsistent, not only with prudence but also with reason” (Preface, 1:7–8).5 pseudohistory ar r aigned Having as one of its major aims the detection and correction of others’ errors, the Dictionary abounds with examples of bad history. Bayle proves himself to be a man of his word by showing in detail the faithlessness of others. On this, he is firm and unbending. Even while cutting some slack for eulogists (whose task, after all, is to flatter), he draws the line at fabrications and unseemly excess (“Badouin” E, 1:693b). It is perfectly understandable that, confronted with the extravagant flatteries heaped by churchmen upon princes, an honest hearer or reader feels sick to his stomach and cries out: “Date mihi pelvim—Give me the basin” (“Alpaide” C, 1:233b). If one intends a work to pass as a history, then one must forswear committing “the indignities which are offered to history” (“Bellai, William du,” 1:722). This means forswearing any practices that blur the difference between fictions, tall tales, polemics, libels, and flattery, on the one side, and a dispassionate and verifiable account of what actually transpired, on the other. It is “surprising,” to say the least, that modern historians should be so particular in their descriptions of the Christians’ victory over the Muslims at Tours in 732, given the silence of the ancient annalists (“Abderame,” 1:16 and L, 1:16b–17b). Bayle finds it insufferable that latter-day writers should treat their sources with open disdain by dressing up the received account to suit their fancy. Josephus plays fast and loose with Moses’ “memoirs,” and “all the ancient historians” take comparable liberties with their sources. Astonishingly, all this passes for history today! (“Abimelech” C, 1:39ab). The charming Herodotus seems incapable of maintaining a distinction 5. Montaigne’s treatment of frankness in his Essays casts its shadow over all these pages of Bayle.

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between history and a piece of poetry; everything in his pages has to appear wondrous, nothing in its simplicity (“Psammitichus” B, 4:790a). Guicciardini has trouble keeping his advocate’s brief apart from his narrative line and, to that extent, also fails to discharge his duty (“Savonarola” H I, 5:65a). In extreme cases, such writers “murder all the facts.” It matters little whether their distortions are owing to negligence or corruption, predetermined hostility or flattery. These public poisoners and seducers deserve to be punished at the tribunal of the commonwealth of learning for profanely violating the most sacred laws of history (“Sabellicus” A B, 5:1a, 2a; “Timaeus” C E, 5:358b, 359ab; “Guevara” B, 3:268a). Bayle does not, however, always act the part of prosecuting attorney. There are whole subsets of historical writing that he shuns as worthless, or worse. It is a waste of time to contest the details of mythological history. Nor is there any point in trying to straighten out the inconsistencies and fables in the ancients’ history of the philosophers (“Achilles” A, 1:75a, 76a; “Archelaus the Philosopher” A, 1:416a). All too many authors, especially but not only in the past, have felt free to pass off their conjectures as affirmations. Can one wonder that “historical Pyrrhonism” increases daily? (“Virgil, Bishop” A, 5:493b–494a). It is not enough, however, to steer clear of this sort of nonsense and leave it to gather dust in a justly deserved obscurity. One must also expose it and not rely on a sense of shame to keep later writers from following bad examples. Wranglers will not be denied. Their better knowledge and scruples stand mute before their eristic zeal (“Bezanites” B, 1:790; see also “Cayet” O, 2:246b). And in this, sad to say, their worst impulses are seconded by the literary marketplace. A corrupt public taste encourages and feeds on the agents of its corruption. Long before the National Enquirer, there has been an unstoppable demand for that kind of impudent fabulous production (“Annat, F.” B, 1:343b–344a). This is even more true of satire than of flattery, for mercenary pens soon disgust, but “men greedily swallow detraction and malice.” The overall effect is one of contagion (“Marillac, Louis de” A, 4:142b–143a). Rulers, for their part, see the advantage of manipulating the news. The people, for their part, have “the bent and disposition to give into such artifices: they easily believe what flatters them, and they wait patiently” (“Defamatory Libels” B, 5:749a). Under such circumstances, who can wonder that it would take a Pierre Bayle to sift through a vast mass of dross to find a tiny bit of truth? Yet, for all his hatred of the lie and of self-serving deception, Bayle is accepting of “the common steps of political prudence.” In the press of events, a false persuasion may sometimes help, sometimes hinder, just as 71

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with a true one: “The public good requires the use of rhetorical figures.” That is to say, in current usage, we cannot do without “spin.” Hence, he does not blame those who deceive the public for its own good. In so acting, masters of the art of governing resemble physicians with respect to their patients. Bayle only wishes that these fallacious accounts not be printed, for that cloaks them with an undeserved credibility undetectable by future historians (“Defamatory Libels” B C, 5:750a, 752a; see also “Hadrian, Emperor” M, 3:319a). Given the powerful constellation of forces affronting history— ignorance, malice, animosity, sycophancy, and avarice—“true prudence will not suffer us to believe any thing too lightly” (“Bellai, William du” F, 1:722b; “Defamatory Libels” B, 5:749b). Hatred and credulity give currency to negative stories; they pass into print, get repeated and reprinted, and are adopted by reputable authors who fail to press for evidence. Yet, in the absence of proofs, the matter at issue should, rather, be presumed false and chimerical (“Alciatus, J. P.” D E, 1:198a, 199b; “Beza” U, 1:795ab). Alleged abjurations on the scaffold, deathbed confessions, and the like are for Bayle so many pious frauds bespeaking, above all, the insolence of their fabricators (“Berquin” H I, 1:780a). Reaching for a general rule in all such cases, Bayle counsels his readers: “In order to judge rightly of them, we must pay no regard to this principle, It is not probable that, if this were evidently false, any one would dare to publish it” (“Annat” B, 1:343b–344a). Historians and readers alike cannot be too much on their guard. a proper sta nce Gradually, it emerges that the stance Bayle recommends for the writer of histories is not far removed from that which he recommends for the reader of histories. Each stands in need of a habit of mind, an internal control, a willingness and ability not to rush to judgment. Each should be wary of controversialists, men who are zealous to advance a cause or a doctrine (“Brenzius” B, 2:131b). The office of the historian is not to play grand inquisitor. He should stick to narration and leave the reader to judge for himself (“Timaeus” L, 5:362b). It would be a mistake, however, to read this appeal for impartiality as an argument for value-free neutrality. Bayle does not unequivocally demand of a historian the studied coolness of a judge pronouncing sentence against robbers and murderers: “Some pointed reflections do not become him ill.” But he should know that indulging in such remarks carries a high risk of being misunderstood. We are so far gone in general corruption, he 72

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says, that an unvarnished account is treated as libelous; the more truthful the relation, the more likely that people will cry defamation. To avoid crossing that faint line, historians would do well to show as little emotion as possible. They should purge the spirit of sharpness and air of anger so characteristic of satire and, instead, faithfully report the good and the bad (“Bruschius” D, 2:160b–161a). Bayle offers Suetonius’s history as a model to emulate. Free from hatred, flattery, and passion, it does not fail to report the good qualities of the very criminals it depicts. Indeed, “the most eminent glory of a historian is to do justice to his greatest enemies.” By this token, Bayle pronounces Thucydides a true hero (“Suetonius” D, 5:263ab; “Remarks on a Pamphlet” XV, 5:801). Yet this very balance and impartiality, so lauded in these pages, is more generally in the world condemned and decried. People do not tolerate an argument that runs afoul of their prepossessions. For Bayle, on the contrary, the very mark of a history’s perfection “consists in being unacceptable to all sects and nations.” An equal-opportunity offender deserves praise (“Clarification concerning Obscenities” XI, 5:846). While prospective historians might take courage from Bayle, they otherwise would find small consolation for their troubles. It is not easy to be impartial—secret passions may corrupt one’s judgment quite unawares— but it is even harder to appear impartial. Furthermore, where would such a paragon find readers who were comparably free of prejudice and open to his sincere and truthful account? The closer the narrative moves to our own times, the more suspicious and irate his readers become. The audience’s partisanship interprets the author’s calm impartiality as a betrayal of their cause (“Capriata” C, 2:310b–311a; “Remond” D, 4:862b). Clearly, the true historian’s lot is not a happy one. His public repays his labors of diligence with the coin of indignation. No wonder, then, that good historians are rare. Nor will the situation improve until such time as readers are better instructed. It is to this task that Bayle dedicates his Dictionary. With so much learning to be done, Bayle’s text abounds with both offending examples and caveats. He expressly denies that people living “in such a philosophical age as this” have much to crow about. Yes, there may now be more individuals “able to oppose the stream and combat error.” But, taken as a whole, our age is as gullible and vulnerable to whatever flatters its passions as any other (“Abaris” I, 1:7b). The world continues in its accustomed way. We accept what pleases us and reject the rest—not at all embarrassed at using “two weights and two measures” as the occasion 73

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demands so as to leave our cherished prejudices unchallenged (“Jonas the Prophet” B, 3:579a). The moral that Bayle draws from the conflicting reports of the ancient historians may serve as well for a rule for life. One should be wary of reading without attention and believing without examination (“Horatius” A, 3:485b). Examine, rather than accept. Hear also the other side, and inform yourself as well of what is said in response to that (“Mahomet II” Q, 4:56b). And, when confronted with apparent incongruities, repetitions, transposed passages, and the like, challenge the text with your suspicions. Bayle urges readers on in his campaign against passive acceptance. His quasi-pious exception in favor of the Bible is followed by a “nevertheless” and appears in a long and notorious article bristling with suspicions (“David” C, 2:606a). The beginning of wisdom consists in an education in the assessment of evidence.6 A reader wishing to learn to see with his own eyes must first recognize the anachronisms concealed in conventional accounts. Establishing an exact chronology and keeping to it does not figure large in the intentions of eulogists. As a result, their works’ inaccuracies and improbabilities befuddle the honest inquirer (“Caussin” G, 2:403b). It is no small job to ascertain a sequence of events, and the same can be said of facts in general, especially those of recent history (“Pericles” H, 4:570b–571a). In many cases, historical truths may be “impenetrable,” and the investigator is compelled to re-create the most likely account. Young readers, in particular, need to grow accustomed to searching among the variations of historians for the ground of the greatest probabilities (“Chatel” C, 2:463a; “Concini” G, 2:543b; “Duellius” C, 2:726b–727a). Bayle reinforces that habituation numberless times in the double columns of the “remarks” that fill his pages. The state of mind he seeks to promote might well be likened (anachronistically!) to that of a country where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.7 The Man from Missouri is not satisfied simply to be handed a writer’s account; his 6. The original, unexpurgated article on “David, King of the Jews” exhibits in miniature some of the features of such an education. Bayle deftly exalts his subject with one hand while damning him with the other. “This holy monarch” is, according to the testimony of God himself, “a man of blood.” His conduct fails to meet the test posed by “the strict laws of equity and rigid morals of a faithful servant of God.” Yet, for all that, he was “filled with piety and a great zeal for the glory of God.” Even when judged by ordinary standards of “law and reason,” some of his actions “compared to natural morality” proclaim David guilty of “one of the greatest crimes that can be committed.” Bayle does not overstate the matter when he opens this article, saying: “We should not consider him a royal prophet who was after God’s own heart.” Yet, six or seven folio pages later, Bayle’s last “remark” coolly notes: “This royal prophet was unfortunate in his children” (“David,” 2:605 and H I M, 2:608b, 609b, 610ab, 612b). 7. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 1, ch. 1.

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philosophic method (so to speak) inclines him otherwise. He insists that a narrative be accompanied by circumstances of time, persons, etc., in the absence of which an account is but “a body without a soul, or a machine out of order” (“Erfurt” C, 2:816a).8 He insists on knowing how that writer reached his conclusions. He insists that the writer produce the authorities on which he relies, naming names, giving exact references, adducing good proofs—all this with a view to forestalling false inferences about the extent and cogency of the supporting evidence (“Vergerius [2]” K, 5:459a; “Cimon” D, 2:502ab). However strong a case for historical skepticism may be, there are still “public laws in point of history” that govern what is admissible testimony. An author is not free to accept or reject as suits his fancy. “Grave authors,” “good historians,” are one thing. Their reasonings will withstand scrutiny and deserve credit. But hundreds of authors copying one another through the ages cannot gain admissibility for what may be at bottom only a piece of special pleading (“Guevara” D, 3:269a; “Leo X” I, 3:764b). It comes down to distinguishing fact from pseudofact. in point of fact Nothing contributes more to the perplexity of unprejudiced readers than this uncertainty about facts. On the face of it, their needs and demands are simple enough. In reading an account of past events, they would like to know exactly what is blamable and what is excusable in each party. To reach a well-founded judgment “it is absolutely necessary to consider the facts in their true situation.” But, here, a host of obstacles arise resulting in confusion, claims, and counterclaims. Bayle’s account reminds of the petty drama of domestic family court writ large: prejudicial testimonies that harp on wrongs endured and ignore provocations of one’s own making, confusion artfully introduced with fraudulent intent, “a too turbulent zeal,” and plain old-fashioned dishonesty. With forces such as these at work, the discovery of the truth is likely to be laborious and, perhaps, embarrassing (“Elizabeth” L, 2:756b). The Dictionary is a veritable storehouse of such transgressions and absurdities. Historians have had the temerity to forge speeches that they would have the world believe had actually been delivered. Wholesale falsi8. Yet there is such a thing as suspiciously too much circumstantial evidence: “This is the ordinary method in telling of news; the last relater is generally the most decisive, and fullest of circumstances. One would think that here is a sort of auction, where people are to bid one higher than another, because the goods are adjudged to him that bids most” (“Henry III” S, 3:413b–414a).

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fication, edifying fables passing as truths, someone concocting “all out of his own head” the particulars of an event that had transpired thirteen centuries earlier: Bayle’s catalog of horrors goes on and on (“Guicciardin” K, 3:274a; “Guevara,” 3:268 and B, 3:268a; “Gregory I” R, 3:226b; “Fausta” A, 3:19b–20a). Dishonesty takes many forms. It is predictable that those dependents who have received great favors should massage the facts they relate so as to suppress anything that might tarnish the memory of their masters (“Geldenhaur” K L, 3:148b).9 But mendacious audacity goes further: “The art of historians is remarkable: they make use of a fact when they can draw any advantage from it, and they deny it when they find themselves incommoded by it” (“Boleyn” B, 2:55b). Once these distortions and downright lies enter the stream of transmission, passing from generation to generation, their true character might come to light only through some piece of good luck. There is no substitute for recurring to the source, to the original source rather than to the selective use that modern authors make of it (“Loges” F, 3:856b; “Brasavolus” B, 2:120a; “Anaxagoras” K, 1:308a). Predictably, there are all too many pillagers of others’ writings who never verify anything. It is enough for them to use their easy and ready method to “fill up ten great volumes without much fatiguing themselves.” Not so Bayle. He speaks with warmth (and firsthand knowledge) of “other quoters who trust none but themselves,” who attempt to verify everything, who “always run to the fountain,” attend to the context of the quoted passage, and engage in the very labor-intensive work of comparing authorities (“Epicurus” E, 2:778b). One might say that the great and radical vices afflicting hearsay are present in full force in historical tradition as such. Consider that we are more apt to recall the substance of a fact than the circumstances attending it. In the retelling, people plump up the account and fabricate missing details according to their tastes (or malicious inclinations). This observation, Bayle asserts, may be “universally applied” to readers and auditors alike. In time, these variant accounts make their way into the writings of historians and become more credible the farther removed we are from the time and place of the alleged event (“Anaxagoras” M, 1:308b; “Hacket” A, 3:314ab; “Horstius, J.” C, 3:487b). We need not, however, abandon all hope that the truth will out. “Sometimes,” Bayle allows, “flesh and blood lay down their arms and submit to a light which does not please them” (“Beaulieu” F, 1:708b). Such occasions 9. Bayle seems not to have contemplated the former butler or maid or hairdresser peddling recollections of household scandal.

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may be all too rare when some truth trumps partisanship and even the most prejudiced and most passionate men fold. Especially is this so in times of sectarian strife. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Bayle’s project to correct errors and expose fraudulent accounts is altogether visionary. There already is a healthy skepticism that discounts the oaths and protestations of people on their deathbeds or facing the gallows (“Boleyn” B, 2:55b). This, to be sure, is but a beginning, and Bayle devotes himself to habituating his readers to a more active and penetrating scrutiny of the world. An intelligent traveler cultivates his powers of careful and cautious observation—a most helpful acquisition for the would-be historian (“Brutus, J. M.” B, 2:168b). Students of the Dictionary are themselves taken on a grand tour. In an article in which four full columns of small print are devoted to instances of blunders committed by historians, Bayle makes his intentions transparent: I expect to be charged with insisting too much upon trifles: But I would have it understood that my motive to this is not from any supposed importance in the things themselves, but only to insinuate, by evident examples, that we ought to be very diffident of what we read, and employ our talents in the discerning matters of facts. This application enlarges and improves the faculties of the mind. I imagine therefore the reader will not think my labor has been ill bestowed. (“Cappadocia” K, 2:309ab)

Bayle calls for his readers, historians and nonhistorians alike, to make a new beginning—a Cartesian beginning. Shun the way of least resistance wherein the testimony of others is mindlessly accepted and mindlessly passed on. Rather, “examine every thing afresh without any regard to what others have written concerning it” (“Goulou, John” F, 3:204a). At the same time, expect no easy victories; it is devilishly difficult to confute someone on a matter of fact (“Luther” Z, 3:947b). Nor will the kind of history that emerges from this critical, dispassionate, truth-seeking enterprise be likely to please. Citing a “judicious author” with approval, Bayle asserts in his own name that “history is nothing else but a representation of the misery of mankind” (“Orosius” G, 4:424b). Be that as it may, let the genuine facts speak for themselves. judgment The conclusion to which this line of analysis points might appear at first sight to be both banal and implausible. The Dictionary aims above all to be 77

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instructive. Bayle affirms this time and again. But what kind of an education is it that readers are offered? Surely not one preoccupied with correcting misstatements and blunders concerning picayune details of the lives of a motley assortment of historical figures. Many of those personages barely rise to the level of also-rans; their inclusion in the Dictionary is less a consequence of their fame than the occasion of what little renown they have. Neither Bayle nor his indulgent publisher could presume an audience clamoring to be set straight about a multitude of individuals most of whom were beyond their ken or interest. Consider, rather, that the wild, ungainly assemblage that constitutes the Dictionary is Bayle’s soberly meditated means of teaching moderation and good judgment to a broad public. Granted, this suggestion seems counterintuitive. Could one find a more impressive testimonial of the author’s immoderation and flawed judgment than these mighty folios? Bayle’s hyperexuberant attack on others’ exuberant irrationality must give readers pause—likewise, his zealous campaign waged against political, philosophical, and theological zealotry. Message and manner proceed on different tracks. Can one judge an author moderate after realizing that he has consumed a third of his entire work leading the reader from “Aaron” only as far as “Curio, Coelius Secundus”? Do those repeatedly digressive “remarks” bespeak an author in control of his material, to say nothing of himself? Yet these objections and demurrers, to which many more might be added, have little bearing on the general thesis: Pierre Bayle wants to effect a change in how people view themselves and their world to the end that they might become competent judges. Beyond that lies a political hope and possibility. Democratic self-governance forms no part of Bayle’s vision, but a decrease in human misery most emphatically does. His project of enlightenment is sober in its expectations but antic in its chosen means. He knowingly runs the risk of befuddling expectations in order to raise them. All this testifies to his astonishing degree of self-confidence. Bayle is under no illusion that good judgment comes easily. To begin with, most men judge others by themselves. Reading of acts of great nobility, they are quick to dismiss such accounts as so many lies—and on no better grounds than that they cannot imagine themselves doing the like (“Bembus” N O, 1:744b). Further, zealous disputants are loath to extend equity to all, to wicked as well as good men (“Mahomet” H, 4:29a). Yet a good critic has to be both fair and accurate. In the absence of these two “essential qualities,” words will be freely construed to support one’s predetermined censure. The result will be a muddled and perplexing record, 78

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the tangled mess with which Bayle the historian struggles so manfully in his researches. To be sure, not all variations between manuscript accounts are traceable to fraud. There may be “innocent causes” such as authorial laziness, ignorance, and scribal error. But, all too often, additions and omissions in the record can be attributed to the source’s passion, private interest, and prejudice. It is never a mistake to inquire closely into the partisan advantage that might have accrued from any particular skewed narration (“Polonus” B, 4:709b, 711b). Actions and speeches are first to be ascertained as far as possible and then judged: “It is of great importance to the true religion that the lives of the orthodox be judged by the general notions of justice and order.” Much more is at stake here than defending Christian morality against the jibes of libertines. For in refusing to make any exception for David—“this great prince, this great prophet”—Bayle is insisting more generally on an unblinkered view of the world (“David” D, 2:607b). As remarked earlier, the historian owes it to his readers to deliver more than the facts. But, in introducing both facts and judgments, he must proceed with caution. Citing Trajan Boccalini, Bayle too holds that “a judicious historian imitates the grape-gatherers and gardeners,” forbearing to harvest unripe fruit. Wait, rather, until time has brought out all the facts, until the perpetrators of evil acts are dead and their children are no longer in a position to avenge themselves on one who publicizes those acts (“Bonfadius” D, 2:65a). But, when relating those practices, a good historian ought not simply to settle for reportage (as does Machiavelli in relating his “very pernicious maxims”) but condemn them: “This makes a great difference between this Florentine’s book and history; and yet it is certain that, by accident, the reading of history is very apt to produce the same effect as the reading of Machiavel” (“Machiavel” E, 4:12b). With this evaporating “great difference,” both The Prince and history stand equally condemned or excused. As always, a light touch is best. Bayle cites the sophist Theon as exhibiting “great politeness and judgment” and good taste in this regard. Far from highlighting moral and political sentences and reflections, “like a book embossed in relievo,” he artfully worked his judgments into the body of his narrative. For rhetorical and other reasons, a low profile is best (“Theon,” 5:326–27 and C, 5:327b). a writer’s advisory Bayle rarely passes up an opportunity to cast his critical eye on the writings of other historians. His is a relentless search for models to follow or 79

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shun. He is equally ready to display a connoisseur’s appreciation and a satirist’s scorn, but always from the standpoint of a man committed to the highest standards. In so doing, he simultaneously allows readers to approach his writing table and catch a glimpse of his own principles of composition. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, just as the special character of his Dictionary is always on his mind, so too would he have his readers be aware of its singularity. If he finds much to admire in the works of the ancient historians, he also finds much to deplore. Our need as readers for telling details is not satisfied by authors who accustom themselves to “relate things only in the gross.” Would that they had had the “art of specifying facts in few words, and by the by.” But, lacking either the will or the skill to practice it, they have, instead, left a legacy of endless disputes (“Archelaus [4]” K, 1:422b– 423a). Nor is the level of frustration diminished when an author affects a style of studied ambiguity. Bayle is unstinting in his praise of the writings of Tacitus—“one of the greatest efforts of the human mind”—but, for all that, he subscribes to the tough judgment of Anonymiana: “In an obscure manner of writing the mind of the reader roves where it pleases, when it is not tired, and forms imaginations which frequently have no exactness or proportion to the things.” Tacitus would have served himself and his readers better had he aspired to Caesar’s unaffected clarity (“Tacitus,” 5:279– 80 and E, 5:280a). Ambiguity of another kind afflicts ecclesiastical history. Lacking order and precision, this genre is productive only of contention. In the absence of a reliable and distinct thread of principal events, people are reduced to arguing from different facts attested to by one author or another. Nothing would be lost if this whole genre vanished, were there but one good historian left to tell a coherent story (“Arius” E, 1:476a). Bayle finds it impossible to insist too much or too often on the need for precise diction, careful references, and “a most severe exactness”—all traits that would forfend the blunders and misunderstandings that otherwise only multiply in the retelling (“Micraelius” D ii, 4:211a; “Hosius” B, 3:500b; “Carneades” E, 2:328b). More positively put, exactitude is of much service. Historical works that abound with exact quotations “do extreamly abridge the way of instruction.” Rather than leave the demanding reader guessing, they point the way for him to retrace and evaluate the historian’s chain of evidence (“Marillac, Louis de” K, 4:147b).10 10. Bayle develops this theme in “An Observation upon Books Full of Quotations.” Some writers eschew quoting anyone as a matter of prideful principle. Other writers delight in borrowing whatever might embellish their own productions. It would be facile and false to see this difference in practice as an expression of the difference between genius and narrow minds, between energy and sloth. Bayle finds it enough

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But such candor and courtesy are uncommon. “Great authors” expect to be believed on their word, and most of their readers (confirming such presumption) accept matters on trust or remain in doubt rather than take the pains to verify a statement for themselves (“Hosius” B, 3:500b). Descartes rightly observed that our errors in philosophical matters stem from our crowding more things in our judgments than our distinct ideas present to us. Analogously, the mistakes in critical writings stem chiefly from the license critics take of overextending the authorities on whom they build (“Cassius Longinus, Caius [2]” A, 2:351a). Bayle means to expose such fraudulent behavior whenever he can, regardless of public scorn: “I know there are a great many readers who will accuse me for insisting longer than I ought upon punctillio’s. . . . But I shall not concern my self at all with the ill taste of such censurers.” Eminent men before Bayle thought such inquiries worthy of their attention, and that fact suffices for him to persist (“Carneades” N, 2:334b). Then again, there are models of authorial self-control to be held before the historian’s eyes. In citing a lengthy encomium bestowed by Rapin on Juan de Mariana’s General History of Spain, Bayle in effect invites us to ask whether the author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary comes up to that standard. Has he the kind of wisdom and reserve to keep watch over himself, to measure his words, “to leave room for those who read history to imagine what ought not always to be said?” In short, does the Dictionary exhibit a judicious spirit (“Mariana” D, 4:126a)? bayle’s “apology” Bayle is keenly aware that he and his Dictionary have much to answer for. His response, however, is neither simple nor unambiguous. At times, he is ready to explain himself and to justify features of his work that some people, at least, find offensive or bizarre. At other times, he waves all such objections aside and insists that he is his own man and owes nobody— least of all, unqualified judges—a defense and apology. It would seem that he cannot have it both ways, yet he tries to do just that. Before presuming to attack his work, critics had better first gain some clarity about the kind of work it is. They need to see that the author of the Dictionary has been obliged to bear two characters, that of the historian to recall such great authors among great quoters as Plutarch, Seneca, and Montaigne; these men were manifestly not wanting in originality. In a clearly self-referential aside, Bayle adds: “There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought” (“Epicurus” E, 2:778a–779a).

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and that of the commentator. Each office has its rules, duties, and privileges. As a historian, Bayle reports; as a commentator, he compares and judges. As a historian, he tells what others have done and opined about anything and everything. As a critical commentator on his own text, he offers his reasons for advancing whatever opinion he has. There is nothing alarming in all this. Bayle is only a private man totally unconcerned to be at the head of a movement. He is entitled to a greater freedom of expression than, say, a doctor of divinity, a preacher, or a professor, all of whom are presumed to speak with a view to instructing and persuading others to yield to their authority (“Explanations: A General and Preliminary Observation,” 5:810; “Continuation of the Remarks” XXVI, 5:804; “Remarks on a Pamphlet” VII, 5:799). Bayle’s message to public authorities concerned with seditious thoughts is, “Relax!” He invites comparisons with Montaigne: “When a layman, without a title, speaks, he makes no great impression; his particular opinions are looked upon as things spoken at random, and consequently his Pyrrhonism is of no dangerous consequence.” Whatever “venom” there might be in the offending text is buried in a book heaped up and tacked together without method or order. The implication (warranted or unwarranted) is that its toxicity is neutralized (“Charron” O, 2:454b). That said, Bayle claims only to be doing his job, performing his duty, exercising his privilege as a historical commentator. He is obliged to present all the evidence available to support his narrative: “Let this be said once for all” (“Mahomet II,” 4:57). If overly nice and scrupulous critics find such plain talk offensive, that is their problem, not his. It is inevitable that, in speaking of wicked men, one has to mention “impure things and such as sully the imagination.” Likewise when narrating the history of sects and their tainted doctrines and actions: “The most cautious style can never hinder [historians] from presenting filthy and obscene images to their readers.” For none of this is Bayle culpable. He has gleaned his assemblage of absurdities and obscenities from books that are publicly sold, to say nothing of the rich collection of “the most shocking impurities” incorporated in the writings of the ancient church fathers (“Adam” G, 1:103b): “We ought never to censure an Historian Commentator ‘till after being instructed in the laws of history and the privileges of a commentary” (“Remarks on a Pamphlet” IX, 5:799). Readers ought also to bear in mind the challenge posed by Bayle’s presumed or targeted audience. He is obliged to try to please (or at least not disgust) sometimes one sort of reader, sometimes another. He is most emphatically not writing for the incurious, for whom less would be more: “I 82

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make this declaration once for all” (“Explanations,” 5:810; “Gomarus” B, 3:173b; “Gournai” D, 3:207a). He aims to satisfy those who will not settle for a superficial knowledge of famous men but rather want to know them from the inside out, “exactly intus & in cute”: “I am certain the pains I take to shew them the picture of the heart, according to the lineaments I find of it in books, where authors have painted themselves, will be acceptable to them” (“Haillan,” 3:339). Not surprisingly, the resulting self-portrait invites some reflections, which Bayle is equally confident his more knowing readers will welcome as well. The resulting long reflection is, indeed, priceless: a stunning contrast of a great historian’s haughtiness and self-promotion and a greater philosopher’s untainted modesty (“Haillan” M, 3:339b–341b). No doubt some readers will chafe at this mode of presentation: “To what purpose so many quotations, so many merry thoughts, so many philosophical reflexions, &c?” Such are the complaints of perfectionists who look down their noses at whatever offends their exquisite taste. For Bayle, the answer lies in a simple choice. Pleasing these overly refined “purists” would condemn his folios to gather dust in the bookseller’s warehouse. He fully intends to reach a broader and more varied readership. In failing to understand that the Dictionary ought to be of some use to all sorts of readers, these censurers, for all their choice wit, demonstrate that “they want the most necessary notion to pass a right judgment upon this work” (“Poquelin [Moliere]” G, 4:744b–745a). In some respects, it seems as though the utility of Bayle’s Dictionary is, in his eyes, a function of its comprehensiveness and its author’s voracious appetite for arcane information and falsifiable misinformation. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what Bayle would reject as unfit matter for his multifolio cabinet of curiosa. The very fact that scripture’s story of Abel has given rise to such a varied “heap of absurd notions and errors” makes it especially eligible for inclusion. Readers should note that such a collection “answers the end and design of this Dictionary” (“Abel,” 1:24; see also “Barcochebas” D, 1:648). Or consider the conflicting hearsay accounts that Pope Alexander VII had been contemplating turning Huguenot: here is an irresistible subject for inclusion. If true, it belongs inasmuch as this is a historical dictionary; if it is a fabrication, it belongs inasmuch as this is a critical dictionary (“Chigi” G, 2:474b). Nor should one cavil at including true accounts of obscene customs. Even the most rigid critics don’t object to historians detailing a villainous murder or a horrid treason. But, when it comes to reporting customs contrary to chastity, they raise a hue and cry. Yet would not inquiry into such customs yield some social benefit by affording insight into the 83

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“infinite varieties” of human follies and extravagancies? Here is matter fit for further historical research, given the appropriate author and the appropriate book (“Blondel, F. [2]” A, 2:31ab). Austere as he was in all the usual objects of human appetite, in this respect Bayle seems incapable of feeling replete. A glutton always has room for more. The collection of the crimes and misfortunes of mankind does not exhaust his understanding of why studious men read history. “Without going out of their closets” they learn that moral and physical evils do not wholly fill up history or our experience as human beings: “There are every where some things that are physically good and morally good; some examples of virtue and some examples of happiness.” These too have their place in Bayle’s capacious understanding of history (“Manichees” D, 4:94b).11 And then there is the matter of digressions. Bayle’s text is studded with them, and, what is more, he has a few devoted to the very theme of digressions. Critics are too quick and overnice in their taste to rail against such literary detours. Granted, an author may nod and, forgetting himself, wander off.12 But what may strike one reader as extraneous to the purpose might appear differently to one who has a firm understanding of the book’s overall design (“Theopompus” E F, 5:329a–330a). Bayle candidly concedes that digressions have their use but also that they may be abused. He seeks a middle ground between two extremes. Theopompus may, indeed, have gone too far, needlessly trying readers’ patience and compelling them to lose the train of his thought. On the other hand, digressions may serve as so many resting places where readers can refresh themselves with a charming incident or thought. A narrative written in the spirit that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points might be stylistically correct, but do not be surprised if it makes its readers “gape and even sleep.” Imagine stripping Montaigne’s Essays of their “happy irregularity”; would they not be deprived thereby of their chief beauty? As for the Dictionary, it follows the ways of both Philistus and Theopompus. The 11. It is precisely this mixture of happiness and virtue with misery and vice that makes the heretical hypothesis of the sect of Zoroaster so compelling. Yet that tenet of two eternal, independent, warring principles “cannot be maintained by any one who admits the Holy Scripture, either in whole or in part.” “It was a happy thing,” Bayle says in his own name, “that St. Augustin, who understood so well all the arts of controversy, abandoned the Manichean heresy; for he would have removed its grossest errors and framed such a system as, by his management, would have puzzled the Orthodox” (“Manichees,” 4:91–96). The numerous cross-references in this article make it clear that this is only the tip of Bayle’s iceberg. See also his lengthy reflections on the mixture and proportion of good and evil in life in “Xenophanes” D E F (5:576a–583b). 12. See the comic depiction of a learned fool who has to display everything that he has ever read (“Helen” S, 3:373b–374a).

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historical part is terse and direct. But the commentary is a compilation of miscellany, and, in that sort of writing, the author is obliged to introduce variety lest he weary his readers (“Philistus” E, 4:619b–620b). By raising the question whether an apparent digression is indeed one or is only that, Bayle redirects readers to the author’s intention and overall design. No less must this be our question to him. The Dictionary’s historical inquiries seem preoccupied with collecting errors, “a most useful part of history” provided they are clearly labeled as such (“St. John the Evangelist” A, 3:576a). But this preoccupation with falsehoods does not preempt inquiry into things that can be shown to be true and into other things that can only be shown to be uncertain. These inquiries do not lack fruit: A great many people may profit, morally speaking, by the reading of a collection of historical falshoods, well proved to be falshoods, though it were only by growing more circumspect in judging of other men, and more capable of avoiding the snares which satire and flattery lay on all sides for the unwary reader. Now, is it of no use to correct the bad inclination we have to make rash judgments? Is it of no use to learn not to believe lightly what we see in print? Is it not the very nerve and sinew of prudence not to believe hastily? (Project, 5:795)

In these terms, Bayle spells out the benefits of a trained judgment, benefits that redound to an entire society and justify his all-consuming project and the liberties he has taken to speak his mind. It is striking to see Bayle’s coolness and composure when he comes under fire. As noted earlier, he openly disdains the pronouncements of those who have not studied the rules, rights, and privileges of a historical commentator: “I know better what I write, than such a one knows how to judge of my writings” (“Haillan” I, 3:337b). This is no idle brag. For one who speaks so often of prudence, Bayle needs no lessons in exercising caution when writing under conditions of persecution (“St. Augustin” G, 1:565a). For one so concerned with censorship, he knows that suppressing anything gives it greater luster and draws attention to it (“Bosquet” A, 2:94ab). And he observes that, rather than expose themselves to rash popular judgments, most (not all) men of reason and temper “sometimes swim with the stream in order to live in quiet and free from suspicion” (“Drusius” Q, 2:708ab). For all that, Bayle boldly stakes his claim to the liberty of an unusual state of nature. Bayle depicts a commonwealth whose members enjoy extreme freedom. This is no imaginary republic but one within which he even now lives, 85

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works, and thrives. It is a world of its own and of no concern (he claims) to the larger society to which its individual members may belong. For, lacking any intent to commit seditious libel, these commonwealth men provide no occasion for the sovereign authority to notice, let alone punish, them. This is the Republic of Letters, the commonwealth of learning. Within it, only the empire of truth and reason is acknowledged as holding sway, and, under their protection, an innocent war of each against all is waged. Innocent—but unremitting. In this oddly Hobbesian world, no considerations of blood ties or friendship can temper each particular individual’s right to wield his sword against error and ignorance. This is a world of perfect reciprocity, a level battlefield. In acting as witnesses and accusers exposing the blunders and pretensions of other authors, these critics run the same risk themselves. For, unlike libelers, they act openly, adduce proofs, and expect to be answerable for what they charge (“Catius” D, 2:389ab). Bayle extends an invitation to any and all to join him in this bracing world of spirited combat. The inventiveness of this warrior and the dazzling arsenal that he commands fit him to bring his message of rising expectations to a most varied audience. Those who are sensitive to contradictions and absurdities will catch his message that way. Those for whom silences are pregnant with meaning will register his intent that way. Those who note his exaggerated protests or defenses will be roused to greater attention by those means. One way or another (and there are many ways available to him), Bayle will stir his readers from their drowsy passivity—or at least any reader willing to walk through his looking glass. His messages to them are few but insistent. And, as an early-eighteenthcentury Jesuit critic remarked, they are not for the risk averse. “What a misfortune it is that, having possessed in the highest degree the precious talent to embellish what is most dry and most arid in the sciences, he was content to cultivate it only on the edges of precipices, where he could not be followed without danger!” 13 One can easily imagine a smiling Pierre Bayle saying, “Précisément!”

13. Cited in Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 296. The source is article 47 of the Journal de Trévoux, ou Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts 7 (April 1707): 706. The French text is available online at http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination=Gallica&O=NUMM-30639.

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benja min fr a n k lin, 1706 – 90 No American of the eighteenth century was as renowned or as resented in his time as Benjamin Franklin. Given his very long life and his prominence in so many areas of endeavor, he was bound to become a celebrity and, hence, a target of jealousies. For all that, the private man remained veiled. The public face of this polymath and genius is a mosaic composed of the many masks he contrived over his lifetime and behind which he chose to address his public. Franklin had studied his Francis Bacon early and well and enlisted in furthering that philosopher’s agenda. Being no orator, he counted on the printed word to attract, inform, and persuade his audience. He understood, however, that Bacon’s message had to be recast in terms a democratic readership could grasp, accept, and enjoy. To that end, he crafted a supple, unassuming, engaging language, free of convolutions and formalities. He had a farseeing vision of what the world might be but shunned the exuberance and excess of an enthusiast or a true believer. Common sense says that our existing conditions of life can be made better, yet movement in that direction requires that people first develop a high regard for common sense and its rather earthly concerns. Concurrently—as with Pierre Bayle—people need to develop a healthy suspicion of the highfalutin. Franklin took less the stance of a Cynic than that of our now proverbial Man from Missouri. For Franklin, that kind of Main Street skepticism was hardly enough. But, without it, one could not even begin to counter the evil consequences of prideful men seeking to lord it over others. Franklin’s ambition gave him the confidence to mask his ambition, the better to move the world along in a tolerable direction.

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5 Franklin’s Double Take on Rights

Renowned for his many political and scientific achievements, Benjamin Franklin is famous as well for this: that he is a bearer of messages, teaching through maxims and his own exemplary life. Yet, as often as not, those messages are put forward by the author in masquerade. This strategy adds to the charm of his presentations, but at a price. It introduces a degree of uncertainty about the message itself. We are led to wonder, Who speaks? Do we detect daylight between the fictional spokesperson and the masked stranger behind the scenes? We had better pay close attention, especially when this master of irony and double meaning is at his most disarming self. It is hardly surprising, then, that readers, even learned ones, have come away from Franklin’s pages with strikingly divergent judgments. A humorless professor, tone-deaf to a joke, misses its point and confidently draws large conclusions from supposed facts. Other wits get the joke but are not much amused. In both cases, readers do not like what they see: a dullcolored, heavily blinkered drudge preoccupied with getting (if not spending), a calculator devoted to propagandizing for an unerotic, antipoetic, joy-killing way of life. A founding father indeed! And then there are the earnest fellows who take to heart the message of getting up early. They eschew the Late Show and labor diligently in expectation that their reward will come in the form of increased wealth and reputation. Do these good fellows notice that the kinds of satisfaction Franklin holds in prospect for them are but a shadow of the satisfactions 89

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he seeks for himself? It is unlikely that the bulk of his admirers and followers, ever focused on what lies nearest at hand and in the short term, will have either the vision or the leisure or the taste to emulate their master’s grander aspirations. One way or another, it would seem, Franklin’s peculiar strategies of presentation serve to cloak his fullest and deepest intentions. Even as we are led to laugh at his stories and foibles and odd mouthpieces, he works on us through indirection and insinuation. But he leaves it to us to catch his drift. This shifting of the burden from author to reader is strange—and all the more so given Franklin’s concern with being an effective communicator. He means to be understood. Even as a young apprentice, he contrives exercises in composition in the hope that he “might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which [he] was extreamly ambitious.” 1 His recommended curriculum for a proposed English school prescribes that all the young scholars “should be taught to express themselves clearly, concisely, and naturally, without affected Words, or high-flown Phrases” (352). The business of life demands no less, and Franklin himself gives repeated instances in his autobiography where his ready pen helps promote the public’s good—and his own. Why, then, notwithstanding all this insistence on lucid prose, does he choose to engage in games of verbal hideand-seek? What interest is served by indulging in tomfoolery? It is well to begin by calling to mind the narrow stage on which young Ben made his debut. Boston and Philadelphia were large villages edging toward becoming small towns. Each had a political establishment with a decided religious complexion. Their local magnates displayed neither the inclinations nor the behavior of democrats. Conscious of their own worth, they expected others to acknowledge no less. The line demarcating sauciness from sedition and scandalous heterodoxy was dim. So even here, on the western fringe of the Anglo-American world, there was good reason to watch one’s tongue and mind one’s manners. The restive had their own thoughts and hopes, to be sure, but they had to proceed with caution. Franklin’s precocity is striking in this respect as well. Under his father’s tutelage, he has learned to observe, and, thanks to his native intelligence, he is quick to draw lessons from his observations and experiences. So, although he continues to suffer the vulnerability of the young and has to 1. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay, Library of America, no. 37 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 1320. Page numbers for subsequent citations of the works of Franklin will be given parenthetically in the text. With the exception of “The Interest of Great Britain Considered” (for which, see n. 5 below), all parenthetical references will be to this edition.

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cope with his passions and his impatience with perceived inferiors, he manages to skirt some serious, even ruinous pitfalls. His retrospective account mutes the dangers to his reputation that his willfulness exposed him to. He may genially call them “errata,” 2 but observers might reach for darker terms. We readers might rather deduce, for example, that he has largely himself to blame for having to become a fugitive. If he has to flee home and family on the sly, it is in good measure thanks to his irrepressible pride and spiritedness. Soon enough he learns to camouflage the first and tame the second. His earliest, tentative exercises in masquerade will mature into the habits and proficiency of a master. Indeed, the sheer audacity and skill with which Franklin carries off his legerdemain make it irresistible to try to follow out some thread of his argument whenever it might appear and wherever it may lead. This effort is prompted less by a desire to discover or assert the consistency or inconsistency of this long-lived thinker and man of affairs, interesting as those findings might be. Rather, the object is to detect the message or messages that he may be conveying both by his assertions and by his silences, by his zany characters’ arguments and by the discounts he invites us to apply to those arguments after reflecting on those characters themselves. One may say without exaggeration that Franklin’s first and last words to the public are an incitement to look with clear eyes and a skeptical mind at the commonplaces of his age and ours. To test this proposition, let us turn to what are, indeed, Franklin’s first and last writings addressed to the public at large. cl aims in contention Much might be, and has been, said about the extraordinary character that burst full-grown from the sixteen-year-old apprentice’s mind: Ms. Silence Dogood. She is, of course, anything but silent, and her dedication to doing good is anything but measured. When first introducing herself to us, she proclaims herself “a mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government & unlimited Power.” This warning shot across the bow announces the arrival of an American. She confesses to being “naturally very jealous for the Rights and Liberties of my Country; & the least Incroachment on those invaluable Priviledges, is apt to make my Blood boil exceedingly” (8). Anticipating by fifty-three years (almost to the day) the shot heard round the world, 2. The autobiography testifies to some anxieties, but errata suggests some typographic blunders that are relatively easy to fix and, once fixed, over and done with. See Ralph Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 44.

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this daughter of Massachusetts shows she is not to be trifled with. By matter and manner, she impresses us with her well-defined self-esteem. Ms. Dogood is not just an American but a revolutionary American. Yet one dare not make too much of this. We don’t know what she means by “my Country.” Writing after the formation of the United States, Jefferson still used that locution to denote Virginia. And what are those “Rights and Liberties” so readily invoked? Do these hark back to the charter of Massachusetts Bay Colony, or to the common law, or, indeed, to nature itself? Ms. Dogood doesn’t say, nor should we expect her to. But we might anticipate that her creator, who had another sixty-eight years and one day to clarify and elaborate his thoughts on rights, would leave some further evidence for our consideration. All the more surprising is it, then, that, in a place and time where talk of rights was ubiquitous, Benjamin Franklin was so guarded and reserved. The readiness of Jefferson to invoke the concept and array its sources is not for Franklin. The confidence of Madison that we human beings have not only a right to property but also a property in our rights is likewise muted in Franklin almost to the vanishing point. It is not that Franklin eschews the word but that he surrounds it with hesitations that make it less a matter of legal or moral claim than of prudential or politic consideration. This invites a closer look. To repeat, at issue here is not whether a content analysis of Franklin’s voluminous writings would yield a finding that he resorts to the language of rights, liberties, privileges, and duties often or seldom. Rather, it is to discover, if possible, the import he gives to those terms. The general query he poses in 1732 (at age twenty-six)—“Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?” (207)—calls for clarification and elaboration. Perhaps the words betoken an early expression of what later would be called republican jealousy, encouraging a wary stance toward authority of any sort. More pointed, however, is another query to be asked the Junto: “If the Sovereign Power attempts to deprive a Subject of his Right, (or which is the same Thing, of what he thinks his Right) is it justifiable in him to resist if he is able?” (212). The long train of arguments that this hypothetical sets up is more apt to generate heat than light, yet it is a theme to which Franklin the public person will be forced by rightsminded interlocutors to address repeatedly over the next half century. His general reticence and seemingly offhand remarks prompt doubts about his understanding of, and commitment to, rights. He shows little taste or patience for the precise delineation of contending claims of alleged rights. Yet how would he have such conflicts resolved? Is a subject’s right indeed “the same Thing” as whatever he surmises it to be? What might possi92

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bly mediate between one person’s subjective assertion and another’s? In the political arena, one can hardly leave matters at the playground level of schoolboys shouting “It is mine!” Must there not be some principled grounds apart from my heated opinion and yours by which our rival claims can be judged and composed? Or must reason stand mute while passions run high? What clues there are to Franklin’s thoughts on these matters need to be sought in his writings themselves. Franklin’s most positive and unqualified argument in favor of an appeal to a higher norm is pronounced from behind the mask of Polly Baker. This woman (we cannot call her a lady) certainly knows her mind. She has the confidence to present herself as the living oracle of “Nature, and of Nature’s God.” Still more, she offers herself as an exemplary practitioner of their command: “A Duty, from the steady Performance of which nothing has ever been able to deter me” (308). Ms. Baker, to put it plainly, is prolife, not prochoice. Alas, ‘tis pity she’s a whore. In a dazzling series of sophisms, she succeeds in transforming herself from a repeat offender into a prosecutor indicting an unnatural law. It is not she but an unjust law that has to answer for inducing abortions, encouraging bachelors’ irresponsibility, and (to top it all) persecuting poor women such as herself: “Abstracted from the Law, I cannot conceive (may it please your Honours) what the Nature of my Offence is” (306). Ms. Baker’s appeal to the higher law is a smoke screen that obscures the fact that she is in the dock, not for failing to take adequate precautions, not for producing yet another bastard (her fifth!), but for persistent fornication. Her argumentative adroitness invites us to damn the law for criminalizing what comes naturally to healthy, lusty people, indeed, for criminalizing behavior in which we are all duty bound to engage: “Increase and multiply” (308). The appeal to a higher law exposes the law of the land for the pitiful convention that it is. Having access to that higher truth, and looking from the highest vantage point, an individual would hardly think the law of the land worth looking at or thinking of at all. Instead, knowing she has a backbone, she would choose to live her life according to her nature regardless of consequences.3 This haughty assertiveness is almost never again echoed in Franklin’s subsequent writings—except by way of parody. Beginning with the 1750s, his thoughts turn markedly to the larger world in which America has to find a secure place. His vision is imperial, his thinking geopolitical, 3. See Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” in Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, Library of America, no. 124 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2001), 40–42. The line from Polly Baker to John Brown is clear. Thoreau pointedly contrasts the latter’s earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard in his 1860 address “The Last Days of John Brown,” in ibid., 426.

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and his understanding of British North America continental. He grasps what provincial minds in both Whitehall and the colonies cannot bring themselves to see. But his promotion of the Albany Plan of Union of 1754 founders on the fragmentation, disorder, and jealousy that beset political life in the metropolis and its periphery. Looking back in 1789 on the dashing of his earlier hopes, Franklin notes the irony that the Crown rejected the Plan of Union for being too democratic while the several colonial assemblies rejected it for tilting too much toward the royal prerogative (401). The parties concerned had conflicting notions of what was “essential to English liberty.” Partisans of the prerogative were wary of a confederal council in whose membership royal governors would lack a power of appointment or even a veto. On the other hand, more democratically minded partisans feared that such an extension of executive power would infringe “what they take to be English liberty” and “give great dissatisfaction” and unease (387). This enhanced executive would be deeply at odds with the common understanding, the supposition of “an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.” To presume otherwise, they thought, would be to treat the colonists as a conquered people rather than as the “true British Subjects” they take themselves to be (405). Franklin struggles manfully to refocus the discussion away from legalistic debates over whether “the native Rights of Britons” survive unimpaired among the transplanted colonists (407). The decisive consideration for him, rather, is the dictate of good sense and sound policy: “In Matters of General Concern to the People, and especially where Burthens are to be laid upon them, it is of Use to consider as well what they will be apt to think and say, as what they ought to think” (404). Metropolitan policy formed in blithe disregard of that simple thought would be doomed. We hear Franklin harking back to the schoolyard. What people believe turns out to be of the essence: what a man holds to be his right is, politically, what Franklin will treat as if it is his right. the pursuit of adva ntage—within bounds It would be a mistake to detect something limp or even generous in that piece of practical wisdom. Franklin looks at the facts of life, both individual and international, with an unblinking, steady gaze. In doing so, he manages to avoid the distortions of rose-colored glasses and the myopia of those who can only count battalions. Nowhere does he more strikingly display his particular brand of political realism than when discussing the 94

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matter of rights and power in his “Canada Pamphlet” of 1760.4 Franklin writes the pamphlet in anticipation of a British victory in the Great War for the Empire (otherwise known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War and in America as the French and Indian War). The drubbing that the French are receiving in various theaters of that worldwide conflict occasions a reexamination of the parties’ original war aims. Ought the British to settle for—that is, adhere to—the goals they had when first entering into armed struggle? Or ought the prospect of impending victory reopen the question? Two large themes drive the analysis: that of security and that of the desirable geopolitical configuration of the British nation. For Franklin, these considerations are inseparable. But, where one would expect an example of hard-boiled, unadorned power-political calculation, the pamphlet surprises by first stirring the question of rights. It is not too early to ask what right we have against an enemy merely in virtue of besting him militarily. Precisely now, while the outcome is still undecided, we have the leisure to debate and consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of alternative peace settlements. Franklin is not speaking of nonnegotiable conditions, precisely because no one can anticipate the ultimate state of affairs when hostilities cease. Nonetheless, a just war in which we may triumph permits us to reconsider our initial war aims. In “recovering our just rights,” we need to review how much security we can claim and get as well as the appropriate indemnification for what it has cost us to recover those rights. Our claims before the war had some security elements—not enough, to be sure, but all that “we could rightfully claim” at the time. Now, however, the situation is altered: “Advantages gain’d in the course of this war, may increase the extent of our rights.” Being now in a position to demand more security for ourselves, “the demand of more is become reasonable.” 5 Granted, it is an old story that security considerations have been the grounds on which both conquerors and the conquered have immoderately asked for too much (64). Each party may be tempted to overreach, but, given the asymmetry of the relationship, it is no surprise that “security and quiet of princes and states have ever been deemed sufficient reasons, when supported by power, for dispos4. The pamphlet’s formal title is “The Interest of Great Britain Considered, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe.” The context and analysis of the pamphlet’s argument are set forth in masterly fashion in Gerald Stourzh, Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 65–82. 5. Benjamin Franklin, “The Interest of Great Britain Considered, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe,” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 39 vols. to date (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 9:59–100, at 61. Page numbers for subsequent citations of this essay are given parenthetically in the text and are from this edition.

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ing of rights; and such disposition has never been looked on as want of moderation.” If the more powerful party has the right to ask for a cession of territory and does so “not merely to serve the purposes of a dangerous ambition,” it is no argument against that party’s doing so that its power will thereby be increased. That’s the point of winning! (65). Franklin distinguishes three desirable kinds of security for America: (a) the security of knowing that France relinquishes its ability to drive us British out of the country; (b) security for the settlers exposed to Indian depredations on the frontier; and (c) the security of knowing that Britain can engage in wars anywhere in the world without having yet again to defend its North American holdings (66). Each one of these kinds of security successively involves more claims against the French than its predecessor. The more decisively the British defeat the French, the more are they entitled to escalate their security demands. The country ought not have to depend on there being a succession of wise and vigorous British administrations to guard against future bad outcomes (71). Nor should we think only of gaining security type a. Think, rather, of a vast British empire—prosperous, numerous, and ever waxing. This is an interest of the whole British nation, not a parochial American interest; all parts of the empire have a stake in that (74–75). Even if one is justified in looking down at the people living on the frontiers (“generally the refuse of both nations” [65]), they nonetheless have a legitimate claim on the mother country’s care: “Where the frontier people owe and pay obedience, there they have a right to look for protection” (74). Some farsighted people might (and, in fact, did) opine that, from Britain’s point of view, it is better that the colonists not feel overly secure. They might in future be tempted to go their own way and unite against Britain’s interests. Franklin pronounces such jealousy against the Americans unwarranted: “People who have property in a country which they may lose, and privileges which they may endanger; are generally dispos’d to be quiet; and even to bear much, rather than hazard all. While the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure, such subjects will be dutiful and obedient. The waves do not rise, but when the winds blow” (90–91). Do the right thing, Franklin urges the shapers of British imperial policy, and America will remain divided, grateful, and true. Take a lesson out of the Romans’ imperial book: “They set no value on the title [of sovereigns]; they were contented with possessing the thing; and possess it they did, even without a standing army” (93). Here indeed is an extraordinary manifesto for imperial expansion. Not least interesting are the arguments and justifications that Franklin openly 96

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or silently rejects. He spurns expansion driven by naked ambition. Expansion for the sake of some higher mission—bringing light, or the true religion, or a just regime to an ignorant and suffering world—is likewise eschewed. Not for Franklin the self-satisfied complaisance of Manifest Destiny imperialists of the following century for whom it was enough to want some territory and intend to have it in order to claim it by right.6 At bottom, a just claim against another’s territory rests on one’s need for security—and depends no less on the ability to enforce that claim. But security concerns are neither absolute nor fixed. There is an argument for moderating one’s claims somewhat out of regard for another nation’s needs or self-respect, but there is no reason for bashfulness or hesitation in claiming the advantages of strength and the responsibilities that attend it. Yet, for all his enthusiastic embrace of “that fine and noble China Vase the British Empire” (993) and his conviction that “the Foundations of [its] future Grandeur and Stability” lay in America (760–61), Franklin is ever wary of allowing pride in military success or a conviction of one’s rights to cloud sound judgment. rigidity’s bit ter fruits The bulk of Franklin’s efforts as colonial agent during the decade of agitation triggered by the passage of the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act illustrates a common theme of his politics: he would resolutely tame expressions of pride and eschew political grandstanding. In his attempts to lower the volume and intensity of competing claims from both the mother country and the colonies, he assiduously avoids casting blame or asserting rights. Speaking as a Briton to the authorities who are in a position to grant or deny, Franklin insists instead on the interest of the stronger to secure the cooperation of the weaker. Even a master, fully conscious that his slave is his property, knows as well that he does not own the slave’s goodwill. That remains the slave’s to bestow where he pleases: “It is of some importance to the master’s profit, if he can obtain that good-will at the cheap rate of a few kind words, with fair and gentle usage.” The American colonists, however, “are not, never were, nor ever will be our slaves” (563). They think themselves Britons and entertain certain notions based on their history and on their reading—mistaken or otherwise—of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. Franklin does not enter into such interpretive questions of “our 6. This is the “Young America” movement so mercilessly caricatured and impaled by Lincoln in his February 11, 1859, lecture on discoveries and inventions.

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common constitution,” leaving those to “wise and learned men” to discuss and settle “benevolently.” It is enough for his purposes that the Americans desire “a continuance of what they think a right, the privilege of manifesting their loyalty by granting their own money, when the occasions of their prince shall call for it” (564–65). That fixed belief of theirs is and ought to be a primary datum in any calculation of public policy. The same point is made in the heavy-handed irony of a 1766 letter to the press, “Pax Quaeritur Bello.” Writing in the guise of the bloodyminded “Pacificus,” Franklin shows himself a master of newspeak. “Peace is sought by war” is the theme. Pacificus affects astonishment that there are some persons besides the Americans who are “so amazingly stupid, as to distinguish in this Dispute between Power and Right.” For him, it is enough to know that the “Right of Conquest invests the Conqueror with Authority to establish what Laws he pleases, however contrary to the Laws of Nature, and the common Rights of Mankind” (578). The Americans, unfortunately, fail to grasp both their true situation and their error: “They will not tamely give up what they call their natural, their constitutional Rights. Force must therefore be made use of ” (579). With this, Pacificus launches into precise instructions for imposing a Carthaginian peace in British North America. Whatever his other faults may be, Pacificus appears to suffer from absurd confidence as well as confusion of mind. He seems to grant that there are, indeed, “Laws of Nature” and “common Rights of Mankind,” even while insisting that they are trumped by the “Right of Conquest.” On the other hand, he distances himself— like Franklin—from “what they call their natural, their constitutional Rights.” Quick to identify the other party’s unqualified assertions, Pacificus counters with his own. The only peace likely to emerge from such a confrontation is that of the graveyard, an outcome he accepts with calm assurance. “Pax Quaeritur Bello” belongs to a class of writings in which Franklin displays especial skill and gusto. A senseless premise is advanced and developed with apparently rigorous reasoning. Even as the conclusion is pronounced on a note of triumph, the whole is revealed after a moment’s thought as a case study in how not to do it. Many examples come to hand: “rules, by the Observation of which, a Man of Wit and Learning may nevertheless make himself a disagreeable Companion” (346–47). Another, his biting proposal to requite Britain’s “tender parental Concern” in peopling the colonies with felons by shipping the mother country American rattlesnakes in return (359–61). Another, his madcap reasons for restoring Canada to the French—with the telling observation that the only reason for not 98

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doing so is that it would be a blot on Britain’s honorable “consistence of character” in generally failing to follow a prudent course in negotiations (532–35). And, of course, two of Franklin’s most famous hoaxes, the alleged private briefing paper to a minister, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” (689–97), and the purported “Edict by the King of Prussia” rehearsing against the British descendants of the king’s German subjects all the high-handed claims and regulations now being leveled by the British against their American subjects (698–703). In all these writings, Franklin in effect holds up a magnifying shaving mirror to the reader’s (and minister’s) face. Consider, if you will, what your policies and justifications look like—up close and in good light. But these efforts to make another see are of no avail unless there is a willingness to look. Franklin’s campaign in the London press founders not least owing to official disregard for the psychic bonds of empire. In a perceptive historian’s words: “Only pride, and the prejudice, jealousy, and fear it both fed upon and nourished, Franklin ultimately concluded, could explain why metropolitan leaders ignored his objections and advice.” 7 This emphasis on the affective aspects of the conflict deserves close attention notwithstanding that Franklin’s analysis fell on deaf ministerial ears in London. The publication “Causes of the American Discontents Before 1768” lays bare his profound regard for the reality and relevance of public opinion. Never one to assume that the voice of the people is the voice of God or even that generally held opinions are generally true, Franklin nonetheless insists: “They are not unnecessarily to be thwarted, how absurd soever such popular opinions may be in their natures” (608). He adopts the stance of a Briton offering his readers a “short historical state of facts” (607), writing as “an impartial Historian of American facts and opinions” (612). He neither intends nor expects to persuade his fellow Britons, only to report “the wild ravings of the at present half distracted Americans” (615). Still less does he mean to support “the American principle” that money is not to be levied from English subjects but by their own or their elected representatives’ consent. Practically speaking, it matters not at all that the Declaratory Act of 1766 has “refuted” these colonial pretensions by reasserting Parliament’s own power and authority to bind the overseas subjects of the Crown “in all cases whatsoever.” The Americans remain unmoved by reason. So “fixed and rooted” are their “inveterate prejudices”—Franklin reports this with a straight face—“that 7. Jack P. Greene, “Pride, Prejudice, and Jealousy: Benjamin Franklin’s Explanation for the American Revolution,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 136. For a comprehensive account, see ibid., 119–42.

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it is supposed not a single man among them has been convinced of his error by that act of Parliament” (609). Only by moderating, perhaps even muting, these shrill claims and counterclaims about the nature of English liberty can members of the enlarged British nation recover their former mutual trust and harmony. Franklin tries to move men in that direction by treating matters of rights within the overarching framework of beliefs and opinions. This is not for him a debate or contest where the winner takes all. What does matter is that the governed accept the legitimacy of the manner in which they are governed. Prior to the ill-advised and ill-fated Stamp Act, the Americans were accustomed to a method of requisition “which the Colonists looked upon as constitutional.” Willfully scrapping that method in favor of raising revenue by stamps, George Grenville had led Parliament into “thwarting, unnecessarily, the general fixed prejudices of so great a number of the King’s subjects” (609). Whatever this was, it could not be called policy. The pamphlet on American discontents goes even further in detailing their causes. On the very level of interest where Franklin would have the ministers reconsider their recent actions, good sense has been sacrificed for paltry considerations. The Americans lose heart when they see “how lightly the interests of all America” are regarded “when the interest of a few inhabitants of Great Britain happened to have the smallest competition with it” (612). Old, long-suppressed grievances come to life again and are revolved afresh in their minds. Reflecting on the whole tendency of present regulations, they conclude that “the interest of any small body of British Tradesmen or Artificers” can carry the day against the interest of “all the King’s subjects in the Colonies.” The immediately succeeding thought is a dramatic shift in argument. Now the talk is no longer of interest but of natural right: “There cannot be a stronger natural right than that of a man’s making the best profit he can of the natural produce of his lands, provided he does not thereby injure the State in general” (613). By infringing on that right, Britain has touched the most elemental human nerve. It would be tempting to see in these words something close to the conservative jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of the nineteenth century, but that would be going far beyond Franklin’s intent. Explaining his views on property to the financier Robert Morris (in a letter of December 25, 1783), Franklin makes it clear that, for him, the claim of a natural right to property—a line beyond which government authority shall not tread—is significant but highly restricted: “All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the 100

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Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Public.” This is because such “Property superfluous” is conventional and only to be enjoyed on whatever terms civil society may choose. Anyone entertaining more far-reaching notions of his property rights and chafing under such conditions is free to “retire and live among Savages”: “He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it” (1082). One might say that, for Franklin, the right to self-preservation is indefeasible and inalienable, but with this double footnote: first, he does not choose to put the thought in these terms; and, second, his notion of preservation is bare-bones and seems to encompass little more than mere subsistence. The claim expands somewhat when Franklin undertakes to expose the injustice of a proposed British act to prevent emigration. In an effort to placate hardfisted Scottish and Irish landlords distressed over their tenants’ fleeing to greener fields abroad, the government would deny those wretched Britons a right that “God has given to the Beasts of the Forest and to the Birds of the Air.” If brutes enjoy a right of expatriation in pursuit of “a more comfortable Living, . . . shall Man be denyed a [comparable] Privilege” (709)? Resort to this argument, such as it is, can establish neither that Franklin is a true believer in natural rights and natural duties nor that he considers them largely pleasant-sounding nonsense. The fact remains that he recurs to this language at times in family correspondence. He thinks that he has “some kind of Right” to the salary generated by his having “hitherto executed the Duties of [colonial postmaster] faithfully.” His fall from ministerial favor (and office) is owing to his acting “in Compliance with another Duty, that to my Country. A Duty quite Distinct from that of Postmaster” (863). He insists to his Loyalist son William: “There are Natural Duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguish’d by them” (1097). Yet, for all this talk of rights and duties, Franklin still believes that the resolution of the Anglo-American conflict must be sought at the less lofty level of political prudence. With this, we once again descend and touch earth. The scene that greets us is the disordered, even haphazard manner in which the public’s urgent business gets—or, more often than not, fails to get—done. Franklin repeatedly proposes structures that promise to focus attention and assign responsibility: in short, means to address common objectives with effect. Apart from the matter of scale, his 1754 Albany Plan of Union (378–401) is of a piece with his 1732 “Rules for a Club Formerly Established in Philadelphia” and “Proposals and Queries to Be Asked the Junto” (205–12). 101

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That impulse toward order and resolution may also account for Franklin’s concurrence with Joseph Galloway that “the old Harmony will never be restor’d between the two Countries, till some Constitution is agreed upon and establish’d, ascertaining the relative Rights and Duties of each.” It might be comforting to surmise that, “if three or four reasonable Men were to meet for that purpose, and discuss coolly the contended Points,” differences would be resolved.8 But Franklin has seen too much of the world to pin all his hopes on men of goodwill coming to an agreement on principles. A more likely source of political accommodation is an agreement on mutual forbearance—if only the parties can bring themselves to that.9 Early and late, Franklin understands that “in every fair Connection each Party should find its own Interest” (684) and that true mutuality has to be based on the “broad bottom of reciprocal advantages.” 10 The case for holding back and refraining from acting to the limits of one’s power or presumed right is made in a letter to William Strahan of November 29, 1769. The lucidity, tautness, and sustained momentum of Franklin’s prose at its best are there in full force. For all this letter’s talk of contending claims of right, the upshot is that this preoccupation distracts from what really demands attention. British policy has led to a profound alienation of affection; American reactions have prompted retaliatory measures; and these, in turn, “have only exasperated their Minds and widen’d the Breach” (851). The plain but unpalatable truth is that “the Subjects on the different Sides of the Atlantic, have different and opposite Ideas of Justice or Propriety.” A composition of those principled disagreements is, in fact, impossible: “The best will be to let each enjoy their own Opinions, without disturbing them when they do not interfere with the common Good” (852). But such moderation presupposes an ability in the more powerful party to recognize where it has gone astray: “It is the persisting in an Error, not the Correcting it that lessens the Honour of any Man or body of Men.” A parliament intent on reasserting its supremacy will find that supremacy “best preserv’d by making a very sparing use of it, never but for the Evident Good of the Colonies themselves, or of the 8. Letter to Joseph Galloway, January 11, 1770, in Labaree et al., eds., Papers, 17:24. The editors’ n. 5 on that page supports the conclusion that constitutional reform with a view to a federal imperial union was only a theoretical desideratum for Franklin. 9. Franklin finds and praises a rare instance of such British forbearance as regards America in his masterly essay of 1772 on toleration in Old and New England: “The same wisdom of government, probably, that prevents the sitting of convocations [Church of England synods], and forbids, by noli prosequi’s, the persecution of Dissenters for non-subscription, avoids establishing bishops where the minds of people are not yet prepared to receive them cordially, lest the public peace should be endangered” (676). 10. Cited in Stourzh, Franklin and American Foreign Policy, 148 (reference on 294 n. 5). For discussions of the centrality of this principle for Franklin’s approach to politics, see ibid., 84–85, 253, 258–59.

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whole British Empire” (849). The posturing that goes on in legislative preambles is totally counterproductive, serving mainly to exacerbate colonial fears and resentments. Once again, the fact that the colonists “think . . . their Most Important Rights” are endangered (850) is a political fact of the first importance. The people of Britain “may still, if it pleases them, keep up their Claim to the Right of granting [our money],” a hollow claim of no good use to them. But so be it. Americans will still act on “the Opinion now universally prevailing among us that we are free Subjects of the King” (852). This is Franklin’s prescription for restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies. Without such a course correction, he foresees—accurately—a steady descent into the maelstrom: rash measures, resentment, more rash measures, alienation of both people’s minds, mad actions by some “warm patriots,” culminating in “implacable Malice and Mutual Hatred” (854). a n earthly, hum a ne vision At the very end of his life, Franklin shifts his gaze toward the next century’s great American domestic maelstrom. A Quaker memorial to Congress (to which he is a signatory), arguing against the slave trade and for the melioration of the slaves’ condition, becomes itself the focus of a bitter debate in the House of Representatives. In a forceful and wide-ranging speech on March 16, 1790, Representative James Jackson of Georgia warns Congress against even touching the issue, let alone considering the memorial on its merits.11 A day after the congressman’s speech is reported in the March 22, 1790, issue of the Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Evening Post, Franklin composes and submits his rejoinder in the form of a letter to the editor. Written on his painful deathbed, Franklin’s last public words are both a masquerade and a hoax. They are an altogether fitting closure to the career of a political wizard that began with Silence Dogood. In Van Doren’s lovely words: “The dying philosopher feathered his last arrow with a wit still light and swift.” 12 The letter comes from one “Historicus,” who is prompted by Congressman Jackson’s “eloquent” speech to recall a comparable one he has read in “Martin’s Account of His Consulship [in Algiers], Anno 1687.” The parallels in the reasonings of the two speeches are striking, but that is no 11. For the text of the memorial, see Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, vol. 12, Debates in the House of Representatives, Second Session: January–March 1790, ed. Helen E. Veit et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 725–34. 12. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 3-vol. ed. (New York: Viking, 1938), 775.

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matter for bewilderment. They “only show that men’s Interests and Intellects operate and are operated on with surprising similarity in all Countries and Climates, when under similar Circumstances” (1157–58). Once again, Franklin holds up a magnifying mirror to the faces of one and all. The purported speech is by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers, that is to say, a Muslim councilor in a state that lives by piracy, hostage taking, and the slave trade. A sect called “Erika, or Purists,” has petitioned the government to abolish piracy and slavery as being unjust, and it is to quash that petition that the councilor musters all his argumentative forces. His main concern is to show the impolicy of the proposal. In the short run, the cessation of the slave trade would lead to the economic ruin of the masters and of the state as a whole. Who would do our unwholesome work for us? Property values would plummet. In the long run, the result must be wholesale manumission. Who will then indemnify the masters for their loss? And what is to be done with the freedmen? These European Christians reject our religion and manners, and our own people would not deign to “pollute themselves by intermarrying with them.” Rendered unfit by slavery to work for themselves, and unwilling to return to their homelands, where a vastly harsher servitude awaits them (one imposed by European despots on their fellow religionists), these people would finally see the truth. Our slaves have, in fact, significantly bettered their condition under our brand of slavery. Here, Franklin introduces a consideration that American defenders of what used to be called Negro chattel slavery did not entertain until the nineteenth century but that—with a slight change—Congressman Jackson would, perhaps, not have rejected had it occurred to him. In being conveyed into “a Land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light, and shines in full Splendor,” our slaves at least enjoy the opportunity of being exposed to “the true Doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal Souls”: “Sending the Slaves home then would be sending them out of Light into Darkness” (1158–59). Both Sidi and Jackson display considerable testiness toward the holier-than-thou petitioners. Sidi insists that it is senseless for the government to “justify the whims of a whimsical Sect” (1158). If some of those “religious mad Bigots, who now teaze us with their silly Petitions, have in a fit of blind Zeal freed their Slaves, it was not Generosity, it was not Humanity, that mov’d them to the Action,” but the burden of a guilty conscience (1159). These purists may hope thereby to avoid eternal damnation, but this sort of deathbed confession will not bear generalization as state policy. Moreover, these zealots are utterly mistaken about the status 104

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of slavery according to holy scripture. Far from disallowing slavery, the Koran accepts and assumes it: “Nor can the Plundering of Infidels be in that sacred Book forbidden, since it is well known from it, that God has given the World, and all that it contains, to his faithful Mussulmen, who are to enjoy it of Right as fast as they conquer it” (1160). The result of these deliberations in Algiers, Historicus reports (according to “Martin’s Account”), is that the divan resolved as follows: “The Doctrine, that Plundering and Enslaving the Christians is unjust, is at best problematical; but that it is the Interest of this State to continue the Practice, is clear; therefore let the Petition be rejected” (1160). Lest this message still not be grasped, Historicus restates his own conclusion in the form of a final prediction to the editor. “And since like Motives are apt to produce in the Minds of Men like Opinions and Resolutions,” he foresees that similar petitions for abolishing the slave trade will suffer the same fate in the Parliament of England, “to say nothing of other Legislatures” (1160). At bottom, “the African’s speech” (1158) and the Georgia slaveholder’s speech are the same, however grating each might find that equation. Their reasonings are alike triumphs of self-justification driven by interest. The classic Franklinian example of this form of self-delusion is the homely—and, hence, ever memorable—instance depicted in the autobiography. Young Ben, still adhering to the strict vegetarian principles of his seventeenth-century “Master,” Thomas Tryon, is overcome by the sight and smell of cod coming hot out of the frying pan: “I balanc’d some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” And eat he did. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do” (1338–39). This charming tale bespeaks a stance that distances Franklin from any and all assertions of certainty. It seems not to matter for him that those claims derive from principle, from rights, from intimations of religious truth, from philosophy, or perhaps even from natural science. Once an individual or sect or party or government is confident that it knows, absolutely, that such and such is the case, entry is effectively barred to any further evidence or reasoning. Pride overwhelms the kind of modesty that befits beings of finite understanding. Indeed, good sense itself is eclipsed, and prejudice becomes ingrained. It is hardly to be denied that Franklin maintains a critical distance from any and every orthodoxy or 105

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heterodoxy. Partisans of Presbyterianism, family values, even Baconian science, could not or would not face the problematic character of their premises. Franklin does, and that is enough to keep him from getting carried away. It is easy to imagine how suspicions and resentments might be stirred in those who see him cock an eyebrow or turn a slightly crooked smile at their certitudes. Indeed, the misgivings of John Adams and some of his other contemporaries live on to our own times. Readers continue to ask: Does this cool and collected spectator have any principles or core beliefs of his own? The answer is to be sought in his deeds. For all his psychic distance and refusal to be carried away, care he does. For America, first as the jewel in the imperial crown, then as a jewel in its solitaire setting. For Philadelphia, laboring tirelessly both before and after his retirement from business for its inhabitants’ security and quality of life. Turning to his sundry projects, this savvy man of affairs is well served by his clarity of mind. In confronting any particular situation, condition, or impasse, he steers clear of the commonplaces that are the stuff of ordinary discourse. These, he learns from experience, are less shortcuts to truth than barriers to understanding and resolution. In tracing Franklin’s recurring reference to the language of rights, we see that he treats the subject gingerly. People are wont to make large claims based on their notions of their rights. Their theory, so to speak, encourages them to overreach and to presume greater confidence in their cause than the facts may warrant. What is even more to the point, these beliefs themselves are better fit for battle than for peaceful composition. In resorting to his many hoaxes, Franklin would have his readers come to recognize for themselves that just about any ringing abstract claim invites its equally assertive counterclaim. He offers another way. Franklin’s greatest project consists in shaping a life—his own—that assiduously serves itself while performing acts of genuine beneficence toward others. And perhaps his finest act of beneficence consists in his engaging us to attempt in some small way to make such a life for ourselves. Franklin’s fertile imagination devises countless modes of getting us to see ourselves by laughing at—and then contemplating—his cast of zany characters. This experience may not teach humility, as most people understand that term. But it can inculcate a habit of hesitation, and of taking a second look, and of having a second thought. In securing that small interval, Franklin hopes that our “badly constructed” species (1047) might relent somewhat in behaving as “Devils to one another” (865). His hopes, such as they are, turn on that possibility. 106

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Franklin’s famous strategy of humility aims at getting people off their doctrinal high horses, and that includes claims of rights as well. With their feet more solidly planted on earth, human beings might now engage fruitfully with one another and with the world as it is. This, he thinks, ought to be the focus of our concerns; it is here that we have our work cut out for us. We ought neither passively accept the cards we are dealt by accident or Providence, nor curse them, nor ignore them. Instead, Franklin urges that we concentrate on whatever lies within our grasp and means. Caring so deeply about human providence, he makes it his business to help others try their hand as well.

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edwar d gibbon, 1737 – 94 No less than some other figures we have encountered, Edward Gibbon was an avid, even extreme bookman. He devoured books the better to tell his own story to others. His studied, calm, ironic, stately prose belies his brief, even tempestuous religious struggles. During his first year at Oxford—an education in which he later could find no redeeming value at all—he mysteriously abandoned a tepid Anglicanism in favor of Roman Catholicism. This was a scandal not to be endured. It was impossible for him to remain in college, so his dismayed father packed him off to Lausanne for a Swiss Calvinist cure. There an able and understanding “deprogrammer” not only retrieved Gibbon’s soul from popery but launched him on a genuine education. Once he was formally back in the Anglican ranks, Gibbon reports having “suspended” his religious inquiries and settled for an implicit belief in conventional Christianity—a belief not reflected on every page of what would be his great work. He was now free to concentrate on acquiring the linguistic and other foundations that would fit him for a life of humane scholarship. The rest, as they say, is history. It took years before Gibbon found the subject that would engage his powers to the limit. It took years for him to develop the language, style, and tone that combined to make the Decline and Fall a unique and enduring classic of English literature. In an age when European empires were in great flux, both aborning and disintegrating, Gibbon offered a “philosophic history,” one that took a long view and encouraged its readers to do no less.

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6 The Smile of a Philosophic Historian

To use irony is one thing, but to be famous for doing so is yet another matter. Why this should be the case is not self-evident. When an auditor or a reader detects an ironic intent in someone’s words, he enjoys a mildly pleasant sensation. The discovery confirms his sense of competence and shrewdness. Others, he presumes, will most likely miss the wink, the joke, the double meaning. He, however, proves himself to be one of the happy few worthy of being let in on the speaker’s or writer’s inner thoughts. But all this presupposes an occasional surprise, not a routine. Encounters with a notorious ironist are more apt to disgust than charm. Consider the outrage and oath with which Thrasymachus bursts into the conversation in the Republic (337a): “Heracles! Here is that habitual irony of Socrates.” This explosion is not without its own staged theatricality (this itinerant sophist is trolling for tuition-paying students and means to make an impression), but it also vents the unease we feel when suspecting deviousness and insincerity in others. Why all this weaving and bobbing, ducking and feinting? Simple candor bespeaks integrity, while artfulness bodes dissimulation. We are at once warned and put off by anyone whom general opinion tags as belonging to those who say and not mean or who mean and not say.1 1. Small masterpieces dealing with this theme, while bristling with ambiguities, are Sir Francis Bacon’s essays “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” and “Of Cunning” and Benjamin Franklin’s “On Simplicity.” Concerning the latter, see Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 8–10.

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The habitual ironist might cry foul and protest that such easy judgments are too facile. A series of univocal declarative sentences is altogether fitting for a manual on assembling a bicycle or using an instrument. But, where the human heart and mind are to be explored, a spirit of finesse makes demands of its own. Simple accounts may border on caricature, but complex accounts may mystify or offend. For all our interest in learning what philosophers and historians—and, for that matter, poets, playwrights, and novelists—have to say about motivations, passions, and reasonings, we also fancy ourselves tolerably good readers of human nature. That sense of self-satisfaction makes us less than receptive to arguments and evidence that challenge and disturb our mental picture of the world. Bearers of unfashionable thoughts had best proceed with caution and good sense. This is so even in places where the burning of books and authors is barely a faint memory. For, if the aim is to inform and persuade an audience of diverse beliefs and abilities, then the propounder may find it necessary at times to hint rather than holler and to set a train of thought in motion without hammering its conclusion home. It is from this vantage point that Edward Gibbon and his tour de force, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, deserve another look. None of this is to deny what any reader of the work can discover independently within fifteen minutes: that its author is uncommonly clever and not at all shy about making a show of that, even as he soberly amasses the results of his erudite labors. But, in repeatedly referring to coolness and smiles, Gibbon employs terms that stir us further to note his distance from the text he has himself composed. The confidence with which he displays and even discusses his art is nothing less than an invitation (to some readers at least) to observe both his skill as a historian and his artfulness as a master ironist. If he is to succeed in the end, he must so entangle his readers that they move from looking at him to looking with him. The experience of reading the Decline and Fall thus might be said to be an eduction, a drawing out of a way of looking and thinking. Given his audience’s diversity and, in many instances, his orthodox readers’ presumed hostility toward his political and religious stance, Gibbon is obliged to insinuate his ways. All cannot be said out loud, and even the remainder cannot be said at once. He lacks the option of injecting his truths into his readers’ minds. He must educate by fits and starts, treading gently, employing whatever scholarly and stylistic and rhetorical means he can command toward the end he has in view. Thus, for all his dogged insistence on getting the historical record straight, a “philosophic historian”—and this is

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how Gibbon is pleased to characterize himself—is obliged perforce to say and not mean and to mean and not say. inducements to r econsider Most surprising in a long narrative with a foregone conclusion is the author’s ability to bring his readers along and to keep them. In giving his great work so plain and prosaic a title, Gibbon makes certain that no reader will be in suspense about how the story ends. His is, indeed, an account of relentless decay and decline, interrupted only by delusions of recovery. Yet, for all the mayhem and ruination that fill his pages, Gibbon has written no dirge. His expressed regrets at the corruption and loss of some of the finest achievements of ancient civilization do not set the tone of the work as a whole. The Decline and Fall is, rather, an astonishing re-creation of the vibrancy and rich variety of human life, its barbarity and nobility, its blind subjection to barely perceived impersonal forces and to singularly willful men and women. From first to last, Gibbon presents a spectacle that cries out for both attention and judgment. He paints scenery on the broadest canvas and examines character with a jeweler’s loupe. It is this juxtaposition of the grand and the minute that grips even a reader for whom twenty reports of battlefield carnage suffice and sixty pages detailing schismatic disputations are more than enough. Thanks to his art, Gibbon is able to gratify our human craving to observe and to judge—by making us crave for more of the same. One might think that he could best accomplish this feat by sticking to narration and leaving the judging to us, but, in fact, he does no such thing. The Decline and Fall abounds with the author’s judgments, some blatant, some muted, some insinuated, some apparently contradictory. As his story unfolds, he leaves readers with ever-increasing matter to digest and assess, and his judgments themselves gain in complexity, not to say ambiguity. A common enough device favored by Gibbon is to present a seemingly rounded account but then to amend or undercut it some pages or even lines thereafter. The effect is kaleidoscopic. Consider the first character to occupy center stage. Augustus is praised for having introduced “a spirit of moderation into the public councils.” 2 Rome’s greatness was owing to the immoderation of the republic: a senate that grasped for more as a 2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1995), 1, ch. 1:31. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text.

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matter of policy, consuls who never tired of trying to outdo one another, and a people who loved war. But that was then, and now (Augustus calculated) an expansionist foreign policy would likely entail greater costs than benefits. “Inclined to peace by his temper and situation,” he thought it better not to gamble on the chances of war and, instead, to confine the empire within its present seemingly natural limits. Was this wisdom on the emperor’s part? Gibbon asserts as much when contrasting his immediate successors’ motives in adopting the same policy. Driven by their fears and vices, they enjoyed the good effects of Augustus’s “moderate system” (1, ch. 1:32). They made sure that Roman generals saw that their duty as well as their interest consisted in maintaining the status quo on the frontier; high-flying adventurism in pursuit of personal glory would be regarded by the emperor as a trespass on his prerogative. As a result, ambitions were kept in check without putting the empire itself at risk. But, even when Augustus’s successors deviated from his wise policy, Gibbon detects at least a trace of advantage. “After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid [Claudius], maintained by the most dissolute [Nero], and terminated by the most timid [Domitian] of all the emperors” (33), much of Britain submitted to the Roman yoke. It is not clear from Gibbon’s account that the conquest was worth the trouble, let alone that it gratified Roman avarice, but there is this to be said for it: at a time when the imperial throne was “disgraced by the weakest, or the most vicious of mankind,” Rome’s generals “maintained the national glory” by abandoning the first emperor’s moderate injunctions. If the conquest of Britain was something of an exception to the policies of Augustus, the accession of Trajan brought an overt reversal. That “virtuous and active prince” (1, ch. 1:35) was fixated on fame, intoxicated by the example of Alexander, and possessed of the talents and means of following in his steps. His “martial and ambitious spirit” (37) found an audience of admirers: “As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters” (35). Trajan’s conquests in the East were brilliant but transient. The “splendid prospect” (36) of projecting Roman power to the very edge of India came to an end with his death. His successor, Hadrian, made it the first business of his reign to withdraw from all of Trajan’s Eastern conquests and retire to the boundary (and policy) prescribed by Augustus. Gibbon sees in this singular act of relinquishing conquered territories evidence of prudence and moderation. But flying in the face of ancient prejudice and prediction might also betoken a ruler’s gritty daring. Romans had long flattered 112

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themselves that the god Terminus himself presaged that the boundaries of Roman power would never recede. Hadrian unceremoniously set all that aside. Were his actions a sign of sober policy or, rather, of a new emperor driven by envy of his predecessor? The latter might seem too ungenerous a reading, but Gibbon raises the doubt without affirming or denying. He does concede that Hadrian could hardly have confessed more openly that he was not the man that Trajan was, that he was not up to the task of defending what the great destroyer had accomplished. Gibbon’s ambivalent accounts mirror those of his literary sources. The ancient chroniclers on whom he relied were themselves torn between admiring the all-too-rare instances of imperial moderation and thrilling to the spectacle of Rome bestriding the entire world. Both restraint and conquest demanded and displayed confidence in one’s greatness. To that extent, they were equally praiseworthy. Going beyond his sources, however, Gibbon retells the story with a distinctive obbligato of his own. He would have us see what his actors usually failed to see—the gap between what they were doing and what they thought they were doing. Romans, of all people, were hardly strangers to deceit. Gibbon invites us, through his ironic distance, to see how often they were victims of self-deceit. A reader might expect after all these turns that the author would serve up a plainspoken conclusion. But, once again, expectations fail. Augustus’s general system was adopted successfully by three emperors of radically different temperaments. Hadrian was a bundle of contradictions. Driven relentlessly by curiosity and vanity, his life was “almost a perpetual journey” (1, ch. 1:37); he could be, “by turns, an excellent prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant” (1, ch. 3:100). His adoptive son and successor, the amiable Titus Antoninus Pius, was a picture of “gentle repose” (1, ch. 1:37), stirring no farther from his palace in Rome than to his villa in the country. Gibbon sees the happy continuation of “the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue” (1, ch. 3:100) in the following reign, that of the rather more severe “philosophic monarch” (1, ch. 1:38), Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. It was a golden moment, for the consecutive reigns of the two Antonines were “possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government” (1, ch. 3:102). This much, then, might be said in favor of Augustus’s policy: that it fulfilled its stated aim of keeping Rome secure, respected, and dominant. Successive emperors, both lesser and greater men than Augustus, had discovered the utility of his policy and pursued it. This was no small achievement. Gibbon goes so far as to assert that “the reigns of Hadrian and 113

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Antoninus Pius offer the fair prospect of universal peace” (1, ch. 1:38), but we should resist picturing that world as pacific. The famed Pax Romana rested on terror. Gibbon’s pleasing story is qualified in passing when he notes as some exceptions “a few slight hostilities that served to exercise the legions of the frontier” (37–38). And then there are exceptions to the exceptions that crop up in his footnotes. Hadrian had to suppress a furious insurgency, “though only in a single province”;3 the generals of Pius had to conduct “two necessary and successful wars” against Moors in North Africa and against Brigantes invading Roman Britain; and there were several other wars of record as well (38 n. 27). None of this should obscure Gibbon’s main point: “The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war; and while justice regulated their conduct, they announced to the nations on their confines, that they were as little disposed to endure, as to offer an injury” (38). Here is a noteworthy spectacle: a superpower that speaks softly and carries a big stick. By and large, barbarian nations in the time of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius got the message. Rome was not to be trifled with. When Parthians and Germans in the time of Marcus Aurelius failed to comprehend, provoking that philosopher’s “resentment” at their hostilities, they ended having to learn their lessons the hard way through successive defeats on the Euphrates and the Danube. Gibbon’s twisting account of Augustus’s moderate policy and restrained imperialism becomes clearer. At the core of that policy was an expectation that Romans and barbarians alike had to grasp: Roman arms guaranteed that Rome’s will could, should, and would prevail. To be sure, the military establishment of the emperors was not that of the republic, let alone that of “the purer ages of the commonwealth.” No longer was its governing spirit that of “citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain” (1, ch. 1:38). Warmaking had improved as an art since the early days of citizen-soldiers but then “degraded into a trade.” External conquests and internal corruption proceeded apace. Soon Rome, like the states of modern Europe, had to recruit its common 3. Gibbon studiously marginalizes that unnamed province; his vantage point is the metropolitan seat of a world empire. Seen from there, Palestine is “a territory scarcely superior to Wales, either in fertility or extent” (1, ch. 1:53), but “the sixteenth part of the Eastern empire” (1, ch. 16:579), a “distant and narrow province” (3, ch. 58:564). The Hadrianic persecutions that triggered and then quashed the rebellion of the Jews are unmentioned in Gibbon’s text but are still memorialized to this day in the martyrology section of the Yom Kippur service.

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soldiers from the dregs and far reaches of the empire. Having no stake in their army’s society, these “mercenary servants of a despotic prince” (39) could hardly be led by anything resembling patriotism. In its place, there was concocted a heady brew of honor and religion, culminating in the adoration of “the golden eagle, which glittered in the front of the legion.” The motives stirred by this “imagination” were reinforced by a system of rewards and, especially, harsh punishments. Gibbon praises the “laudable arts” by which such unpromising human matter was simultaneously broken to discipline and hardened to firmness “by the sanction of religion” (40; 1, ch. 6:155 n. 22). In following the meanderings of this tale, we can observe Gibbon’s legerdemain at work. A fairly simple proposition—namely, that Augustus switched Rome from an expansionist politicomilitary posture to a defensive one—is unpacked and dissected to reveal unsuspected causes and consequences. One need only stir the surface of Gibbon’s pages to discover decay, decline, and harsh nastiness at every turn. Sometimes the point is made in a lapidary sentence: “On that celebrated ground the first consuls deserved triumphs; their successors adorned villas, and their posterity have erected convents” (1, ch. 1:50). Sometimes the point is made by shifting the angle of vision. How did Roman peace and prosperity appear to Rome’s allies and conquered peoples? “The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome, were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude” (1, ch. 2:63). Rome brought an offer most could not refuse: assimilation, good administration, and a public authority that was absolute and uncontrolled. The gradual extension of citizenship during the republic aggravated the vices of popular assemblies “and soon contributed to the ruin of public freedom.” But, before long, that would cease to matter. When the emperors assumed control and suppressed the assemblies, “the conquerors were distinguished from the vanquished nations, only as the first and most honorable order of subjects.” It is striking that these grim realities appear under the heading “Freedom of Rome” (61). Gibbon’s twisting paths lead back to the establisher of “this artful system” (1, ch. 3:98). Hasty readers have here another opportunity to revisit the impressions they first formed on reading the book’s opening paragraph; they need to pay more attention to its nuanced hints. There they were presented with “a happy period” during which a civilized people enjoyed prosperity, good government, and more: “The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors 115

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all the executive powers of government” (1, ch. 1:31). This pleasing picture says much for “the wisdom of Augustus” and his “prudent vigor” (32). Two chapters later, however, the drapery is abruptly cast aside when Gibbon looks more closely into the Roman constitution under the Antonines. That chapter begins by stepping back from Rome for a moment and examining what its caption calls the “idea of a monarchy.” The inspiration is at least as much eighteenth-century Britain as early republican Rome. At any rate, Gibbon offers a definition of limited government and a prescription of “the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince” (1, ch. 3:85). This benchmark serves as the cue for the reappearance of Octavianus, he whom a spineless senate would gravely rename Augustus and whom Gibbon now dubs “dictator,” “Triumvir,” and “conqueror.” The wisdom and prudence for which he was praised in earlier pages gain new resonance as Gibbon refers repeatedly to the “tyrant” and his “studied oration” (86), to “the crafty tyrant” feigning resistance to the senate’s heaping new powers and honors on him (87), to the “artful founder” (95), and to “that subtle tyrant” (96). Gibbon would have us see through this make-believe and recognize it as a house of mirrors: “Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names” (1, ch. 3:96). “A feeble senate and enervated people” needed but to be treated with respect and reassured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom for them to join cheerfully in the comic charade: “The names and forms of the ancient administration were preserved by Augustus with the most anxious care” (91–92). People contested eagerly for these offices— the lifeless exoskeletons shed by a passing insect. The “artful prince” himself pretended to humbly solicit the votes of his fellow citizens, and they, in turn, pretended that it was in their power to give or to withhold. The whole system was founded on the dignity and authority of the senate, and that body went through the motions as though it still mattered. The fascinating retelling of how Octavianus subverted the principles of a free constitution, step-by-step, fully warrants Gibbon’s epithets and sneers: It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it, was still more dangerous. . . . The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed, can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. With the same hand, and probably with the same temper, he signed the proscription of Cicero, and the pardon of Cinna. His virtues, and even his vices, 116

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were artificial; and according to the various dictates of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the father, of the Roman world. (87, 96)

The young Octavianus, an obscure fellow from nowhere, was equally intent on expunging his past and assuring his future. By luck and cunning, this self-made man had come far. He meant to go farther, but he had much to fear on his way to the top. As a careful reader of men, he grasped the cautionary lessons of recent days. His patron, Caesar, had overreached both in appearance and in reality, to the point that the great man’s most favored friends had conspired against him. Nor were the several betrayals that accompanied and followed the assassination such as might teach the armies to check their seditious inclinations. Between his finely honed manipulative skills and the general human capacity for self-deception, Augustus saw his way clear to his goal. “He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” (1, ch. 3:96). In this, he succeeded beyond expectation. The system of imperial government that he instituted was, simply put, “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.” He built well, and those of his successors who were not consumed by their personal demons were able to maintain the structure and sustain the illusion: “The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed” (93). rome’s mixed legacy Gibbon’s ability to effect a U-turn within a very small compass is demonstrated time and again in the pages of the Decline and Fall. He can assess a condition or situation from the standpoint of a people living in a distant place and time and then, without missing a beat, reassess matters from his own modern perspective. Chapter 2, “Of the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines,” is a striking case in point. The chapter as a whole is a brilliant survey of Roman achievement: good laws, good government, a “universal spirit of toleration” (1, ch. 2:56), a politic assimilation of conquered peoples and even of slaves, a preoccupation with improving and adorning the empire’s public spaces—in short, those advantages that might accrue to inhabitants of an extensive and secure empire. There was much to celebrate, and provincials as well as Romans did so. Gibbon’s own judgment is that this self-congratulation is 117

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“perfectly agreeable to historic truth” (82). Indeed, he continues (without batting an eye), how could contemporaries ever have thought otherwise? As beneficiaries of the long peace under the Antonines and the uniform government bequeathed by Augustus, they enjoyed a general felicity all too rare in human annals. But they were correspondingly ill equipped to detect the “slow and secret poison [that had been introduced] into the vitals of the empire” (83). The three paragraphs that bring this respectful and generally appreciative chapter to a close are the philosophic historian’s hard, unblinking assessment of Roman greatness. For all the benefits that a single extended hegemony brought from East to West and from West to East, it also extorted a high price in terms of constitutional freedom and the life of the mind. The interconnectedness of these two is one of Gibbon’s deepest convictions. Assimilation into the empire and all its attractions came at the cost of the suppression of a vital provincial public life and the acceptance of tyrannical rule. “The most aspiring spirits” of those formerly independent nations “resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life” (1, ch. 2:83).4 The empire’s homogenizing egalitarianism fostered communal and, even worse, intellectual mediocrity. True, learning was fashionable—even “the faintest glimmerings of literary merit” were rewarded—but, in general, “this age of indolence” lacked writers of genius or elegance. Philosophy stagnated; the beauties of ancient poets and orators “inspired only cold and servile imitations” (84). Gibbon presents to his readers’ imagination a vortex that diminishes and sucks downward everything that might bring honor to our species. Courage, learning, taste, genius: all were cheapened and corrupted: “This diminutive stature of mankind . . . was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies.” The remedy, terrible and terrifying, lay elsewhere. An exhausted world was brought to life again by a violent rape. It would take the invasions of the barbarians, “the fierce giants of the North,” to mend “the puny breed” and restore “a manly spirit of freedom.” Thus were set in motion the changes that after a millennium would reinvigorate and revolutionize European civilization. A comparable display of Gibbon’s deftness in shaping a tale that compels readers to reconsider its emerging “message” appears in one of the 4. See the comparable analysis of the effects of the French nobility’s abandonment of the countryside for Paris in Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la Révolution, bk. 2, ch. 12.

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History’s great set pieces, the chapter devoted to the civil law. Gibbon enters into the subject of Roman jurisprudence “with just diffidence” but ends up sixty-six pages later with a tour de force. He begins on a high note: in searching out the roots of Roman law, he breathes once again “the pure and invigorating air of the republic” (2, ch. 44:779). The laws—and their silences—are a window into the preoccupations and successive transformations of a people. Nature and experience, reverence and tawdry selfserving, contend to shape an environment in which some, or most, or all parts of the body politic can breathe. It is well to recall that, long before this thematic chapter 44, Gibbon has been casting sidelong glances at the laws as an indicator of Rome’s political health or sickness. Very early in his opening chapter he had referred to “the purer ages of the commonwealth” when citizens were girded by a seemingly inextricable bond of military service and “some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain” (1, ch. 1:38). But the republic too had its corruptions, and, by the time of Caracalla, the extension of citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire had led to a profound debasement of the name and its attendant privileges (1, ch. 6:178). Politically, the center of gravity moved from Rome and Italy to the periphery. Worse yet, those in command of the army were no longer “men who had received a liberal education [and] were well instructed in the advantages of laws and letters.” The security of the state and the very lives of its nominal rulers depended on a lawless army of “peasants and barbarians of the frontiers” (186). Clear-eyed analysis might perceive the absolute necessity of restoring “the oppressed majesty of the laws,” but it was already too late, Gibbon insists, for a people so far gone in moral decay (1, ch. 10:262–64). These strands are drawn together in the philosophic historian’s comprehensive overview of Roman jurisprudence, one that stretches from Romulus, Numa, and Servius down to Justinian. His final judgment is, to say the least, ambiguous. He readily acknowledges the enduring contribution of “the public reason of the Romans” to the institutions and laws of modern Europe (2, ch. 44:778). Yet, in threading one’s way through his complicated and conflicting accounts, one often senses that the laws’ long efforts “to reform the tyranny of the darker ages” (791) were mixed— indeed, that there was even a countermovement from light to darkness (842 n. 206). “A new spirit of legislation, respectable even in its error, arose in the empire with the religion of Constantine,” and, under the cover of pure motives, a policy of exquisite (and irrational) cruelty was pursued with a clear conscience (838–39). Further, those who had a vested interest in assuring that the law remain “a mysterious science and a profitable 119

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trade” succeeded in holding their ground (843). By the time of Justinian, the codifiers’ efforts to simplify and clarify the legislative accumulation of thirteen hundred years stand revealed in Gibbon’s pages as the pliable, arcane instruments by which the minds, bodies, and property of the many were oppressed by the arbitrary will of their earthly masters. bemused equa nimity These convolutions do not spring necessarily from the author’s apparent reluctance to draw and state a conclusion. He is eager to shed light on a turbid past, and his readers expect no less of him. At the same time, however, Gibbon is intent on preserving the play of mixed motives, misapprehensions, and cross-purposes that afflict human plans and deeds. Discerning the linkage between causes and consequences, and distinguishing them from what may be only symptoms, is a task that cannot be done on the wing. Gibbon’s artful account invites readers to revisit and reconsider and thereby gain a perspective of their own making. Granted, the adroitness with which Gibbon plays out his interpretive line has more than a little vainglory in it. Even so, he has not failed to leave a trail of observations and hints that come to the aid of readers trying to puzzle out his modus operandi. Sometimes the camouflaging of thoughts becomes itself a theme—and an invitation for us to ponder further. Sometimes the report of someone else’s smile prompts the suspicion that Gibbon too is smiling and that he expects us to follow suit if we are quick enough to take his point. On more than a few occasions, the pages of the History are so suffused with the author’s disdain for the actors, arguments, and actions being described that declamation and explicitness would be redundant. This master ironist is happy to let his tone convey his thoughts. In general, Gibbon’s treatment of the political and religious manias that abound in his narrative is studied and calm. His very moderation sets their extremism in a most unflattering light. Readers not similarly afflicted can infer the author’s judgments and are free to adopt them as their own. Instructive in this regard is Gibbon’s account of how “the fashionable irreligion” of the age of the Antonines manifested itself. To be sure, a worldly satirist such as Lucian would never have dared to exercise his profane wit on the gods of his country, going after them with hammer and tongs, were they not already “objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of society” (1, ch. 2:58). But his was not the way of most of the cognoscenti, nor does it appear to be that of Gibbon. For all their squabbling differences, the philosophers of antiquity agreed 120

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in assuming a stance of politic concealment when it came to matters of popular belief: Viewing, with a smile of pity and indulgence, the various errors of the vulgar, they diligently practiced the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods; and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith, or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might chuse to assume; and they approached, with the same inward contempt, and the same external reverence, the altars of the Lybian, the Olympian, or the Capitoline Jupiter. (59)

Such a cast of mind did not and would not sink to bigotry. Similarly, those contributing factors that incited and sustained state-sponsored persecution—a recurring theme throughout much of the Decline and Fall—were absent in that ancient pagan world. Magistrates and senators alike had absorbed the lessons of the schools of Athens. They well understood the politic use of religion. Far from being shocked by the scandal of multiplicity and variety of beliefs, they might be said to have anticipated the relaxed judgment of a Jefferson who spoke of religions “of various kinds, indeed, but all good enough.” 5 By this way of thinking, the inundation of Rome by a host of foreign deities appeared in time less a matter of concern than a natural consequence of the ancient city’s having become a cosmopolis, the proud center of an extensive empire. Yet the Roman policy of incorporating and naturalizing its conquered peoples’ gods—a cool but respectful acceptance—was put to the test at first by the Jews (who would have no part of it) and thereafter by their ever more zealous offspring, the primitive Christian schismatics. These were filled with abhorrence for pagan idolatry and were worlds removed from those refined minds of peculiar structure who could view the empire’s bazaar of gods and beliefs with a bemused equanimity: “The philosopher, who considered the system of polytheism as a composition of human fraud and error, could disguise a smile of contempt under the mask of devotion, without apprehending that either the mockery, or the compliance, would expose him to the resentment of any invisible, or, 5. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query XVII, in Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, Library of America, no. 17 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 287.

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as he conceived them, imaginary powers” (1, ch. 15:459). Only rarely does Gibbon record a Christian ruler whose zeal is tempered by a concern for peace. In this respect, Theodoric, the barbarian conqueror of Italy, is held forth as a model. Under his anxious care, Italy became once again a kingdom marked by industriousness, prosperity, and a sense of personal security. No small credit for this achievement, Gibbon suggests, was owing to the king’s politic moderation. He kept his mind and eye focused on what mattered here and now: A difference of religion is always pernicious and often fatal to the harmony of the prince and people; the Gothic conqueror had been educated in the profession of Arianism, and Italy was devoutly attached to the Nicene faith. But the persuasion of Theodoric was not infected by zeal, and he piously adhered to the heresy of his fathers, without condescending to balance the subtile arguments of theological metaphysics. Satisfied with the private toleration of his Arian sectaries, he justly conceived himself to be the guardian of the public worship, and his external reverence for a superstition which he despised, may have nourished in his mind the salutary indifference of a statesman or philosopher. (2, ch. 39:546).

How was it that this barbarian (and Christian) rose above his principles, so to speak, and reached those calm heights? Gibbon leaves it at suggestion. Theodoric had first to prove capable of seeing his actual situation clearly; only then might he attain the long perspective. Unlike most of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors—that is, unlike most human beings—Theodoric was in an age, not simply of it. By closely observing his times with this cast of mind, he discovered opportunities where others saw none. Like the enterprising Octavianus/Augustus, he was able to manipulate names and images to affect real things. Theodoric was surely no philosopher, but his policies and behavior accord with the code by which one might imagine a philosopher, or a ruler informed by philosophy, would conduct himself. To begin with, he avoids directly challenging by word or deed the most cherished beliefs of his particular society.6 The code not just permits but demands hypocrisy on the part of those who presume themselves to be knowers lest they bring harm to the polity at large—and to themselves. It accepts as a fact, without notice6. “The superstition of the Greeks might indeed excite the smile of a philosopher: but his smile would have been rational and temperate, and he must have condemned the ignorant folly of a youth who insulted the objects of public veneration” (3, ch. 48:49). The youth in question is Michael III, a model of an education in corruption.

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able hesitation, that in some matters the public has to be deceived for the sake of its own good. It recognizes, with some caution, the exceptional occasion that calls for “a splendid act of patriotic perfidy” (1, ch. 24:954) and “a crime which was necessary to introduce into Italy a generation of public felicity” (2, ch. 39:534). It is, in short, the code of one who takes in the human comedy and tragedy without anger, looks at the world from a distance through the prism of realpolitik, but still has attachments to a particular place and people. How deep that devotion might be, relative to other commitments he might have, remains beyond the ken of mortals. At the least, an individual with such an outlook should be able to observe and assess events without the grosser distortions prompted by parochial and partisan passions. The cast of mind being extrapolated here from Gibbon’s account of Theodoric would fit no less the psychic profile of a philosophic historian. It is precisely this combination of temperament and discernment that can deliver what we readers of histories crave. We require more than the bare recitals of a chronicler, though, truth to tell, even the pedestrian task of reconstructing a reliable sequence of past deeds makes special demands on a historian. All the more is informed discretion necessary for refined historical analysis and judgment. A philosopher’s “calm suspicion” ferrets out the secret that what passes for fact in the “astonished fancy of the multitude” is but a tissue of fraud and fiction. People positively adore prodigies, and writers “of profane or even [!] of ecclesiastical history” have fed that frenzy (1, ch. 20:740). It is to the explosion of such self-serving tales that Gibbon devotes so much of his text. The energy and assiduity he brings to this task rival the earlier awesome labors of Pierre Bayle. Both men are propelled by a deeper desire than some irresistible impulse to tie up loose ends. Their smiles cannot conceal that they are hunting for big game. a n alter native history It is beyond dispute that the notoriety attached to Gibbon and to some of the chapters in his great work is earned. Even the casual reader, turning pages with imperfect attention and oblivious of nuance, cannot fail to note the coiled energy and purposiveness that mark his accounts of the progress of the Christian religion (ch. 15), the Roman persecutions of the first Christians (ch. 16), and the theological history of the doctrine of the Incarnation (ch. 47). In each case, Gibbon enters into his discussion with the brisk tone of a man about his business, a man engaged in “a candid but 123

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rational inquiry” (1, ch. 15:446), about to relate the relevant facts “in a clear and rational manner” (1, ch. 16:515) and to conduct “a modest enquiry” into a troubled, not to say muddled, doctrinal history (2, ch. 47:932). Yet, far from welcoming this opportunity to set the record straight, Gibbon almost expresses regret or reluctance in the face of a thankless undertaking. His findings are not likely to be pretty or gratifying. Already one detects the rumblings of distant thunder: “The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian” (1, ch. 15:446). The former captain of the Hampshire militia knows how to answer the call of duty. He must press on, ask hard questions, and follow the threads of historical evidence wherever they lead—“though with becoming submission” (447). With this bare formality out of the way, Gibbon leans into the wind and proceeds with his self-appointed task of deconstruction and demolition. It is hard to imagine that as many readers were taken in by the somewhat demure tone of these chapters’ opening lines as were in fact fooled by Dean Swift’s modest proposal to relieve the poverty of the Irish by relieving the dreariness of the English diet. Were we to attempt to place Gibbon on the continuum between antique philosophic reticence and full-throated Lucianic mockery, he would fall somewhere between the extremes. For the most part, he keeps his sardonic and nasty side in check; he avoids letting any grating laughter carry across the room. There is no hint of triumphalism in the manner of a village atheist purporting to have made a demonstrative proof. Rather, Gibbon is all business: he is searching for facts and will serve up as true a reconstruction of past events and thoughts as the imperfect surviving record admits. Beyond that, he is content to leave it to his readers to tally up the sum of his findings. He is content to smile as they utter aloud his unwritten final sentences.7 Gibbon’s account of how the Christian religion rose from being a small sect of despised, impoverished folk to its worldwide prominence in his 7. David Wootton asks: “How did he manage to discuss the early years of the Christian religion without falling foul of the law of blasphemy? . . . Clearly Gibbon manages not only to extricate himself without too much danger, but also to mount an effective assault. How can he accomplish both manoeuvres simultaneously? ” Wootton goes on to show, through a fine, nuanced analysis of ch. 15, that “Gibbon is engaged in a delightfully complicated game of proof and persuasion, where he wants to pretend to prove some things (his literal meanings), while persuading you of others (by employing irony), and insinuating yet others (by slipping from history into philosophy).” David Wootton, “Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed. David Womersley, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 355 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 217–28, 217, 218.

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own time would not have consumed sixty pages had he been satisfied with the “obvious but satisfactory answer . . . that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author” (1, ch. 15:447). This truism is not so much rejected by the philosophic historian as bypassed. Truth and reason have a hard time in this world, and it is not surprising that providence should work in mysterious ways to effect its purpose. No pious eyebrows need be raised when Gibbon turns immediately to an examination of what he calls the “secondary causes” of the Christian church’s rapid growth. Among these is the doctrine of a future life. Certainly, the notion of an immortal soul was no discovery or invention of the primitive Christians. In Gibbon’s account, the ancient philosophers had toyed with the conceit. Most rejected it; some few, however, thinking that our species deserved something better than the fate of the beasts of the field, put their minds to the question and came up with a doctrine flattering to their vanity. Yet there is no evidence, Gibbon insists, that any of the eminent figures in the age of Cicero and of the first caesars ever governed his conduct by “any serious conviction of the rewards or punishments of a future state.” Indeed, the ablest orators of Rome saw no risk of alienating their audiences when they exposed that doctrine as “an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding” (464). One might think that, where philosophy falls short, religion would come to the rescue. But the pagan religion of the Greco-Roman world was sadly unequal to the task. Its conception of the underworld was a playground for the imaginings of poets and painters. To the extent that the seriously devout of the time thought at all of providence, it concerned the happiness and misery of public communities in this world. True, the doctrine had more currency in barbaric lands—India, Assyria, Egypt, and Gaul—but that success (Gibbon again insists) must be ascribed to “the influence of an established priesthood, which employed the motives of virtue as the instrument of ambition” (1, ch. 15:465). There is nothing more to it. One might further think that, if any portion of humankind should be entrusted with news of this great boon, it would be “the chosen people of Palestine,” but, in fact, the law of Moses utters not a word about the immortality of the soul. That the doctrine appears at all among the Jews is owing to latter-day borrowings by the Pharisees. The Jews, being zealous by nature (according to Gibbon), warmed to the idea, but that zeal “added nothing to its evidence, or even probability: and it was still neces-

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sary that the doctrine of life and immortality, which had been dictated by nature, approved by reason, and received by superstition, should obtain the sanction of divine truth from the authority and example of Christ” (1, ch. 15:466). This is a conclusion of more than ordinary effrontery. Having spent half a dozen pages showing that nature dictates no such doctrine, that reason in the form of the finest minds of antiquity rejected or barely countenanced the possibility of individual immortality, and that such acceptance of the doctrine as there was owed its success to the manipulations of a barbaric priesthood—Druids, no less, and their like—Gibbon leaves it to readers to draw the necessary conclusion: it took nothing less than the Passion and the Resurrection to gain credence for the promise of eternal happiness. Yet that offer, once made, could not lightly be refused. Conversion to the new dispensation was mightily fostered by belief that the end of the world was drawing near and that a Millennium and the Second Coming would follow. Gibbon dwells a bit on the nasty triumphal confidence of resentful Christians that the pagans who so oppressed them would in time get their comeuppance. Persisting in remaining ignorant of the divine truth or disbelieving it would condemn even the wisest and most virtuous of the pagans to eternal torture. In the eyes of the primitive church, the greater part of mankind “neither deserved nor could expect a pardon from the irritated justice of the Deity” (470). Gibbon concludes the discussion of this “secondary cause” of Christianity’s success with a passage whose plain, matter-of-fact tone can barely conceal his disgust for that “zealous African,” Tertullian, who rejoiced almost obscenely in the promised travails of the damned and his equally profound contempt for the utility the church found in its judicious reliance on terror: Doubtless there were many among the primitive Christians of a temper more suitable to the meekness and charity of their profession. There were many who felt a sincere compassion for the danger of their friends and countrymen, and who exerted the most benevolent zeal to save them from the impending destruction. The careless Polytheist, assailed by new and unexpected terrors, against which neither his priests nor his philosophers could afford him any certain protection, was very frequently terrified and subdued by the menace of eternal tortures. His fears might assist the progress of his faith and reason; and if he could once persuade himself to suspect that the Christian religion might possibly be true, it became an easy task to convince him that it was the safest and most prudent party that he could possibly embrace. (1, ch. 15:471) 126

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the stifling of sobriety Gibbon was fortunate in his chosen subject matter. It supplied him with innumerable opportunities to initiate his readers into his way of looking and judging. It also permitted him to note with barely concealed pleasure how small doctrinal differences, and especially imaginary ones, led the zealous and the ignorant adherents of a doctrine of peace and love into an endless succession of murderous follies. The many pages in chapter 21 devoted to the multiplication and persecution of heresies concerning the Logos and the Trinity depict a world drunk on the most abstruse theological questions. Gibbon brings this out with the patience and care of a pathologist, even descending momentarily into “the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss” (1, ch. 21:783 n. 59). He confesses, with apparent regret, that, “in every step of the enquiry, we are compelled to feel and acknowledge the immeasurable disproportion between the size of the object and the capacity of the human mind” (776). No such awareness tempered the fomenters of religious faction and discord: “An eager spirit of curiosity urged them to explore the secrets of the abyss; and the pride of the professors, and of their disciples, was satisfied with the science of words” (1, ch. 21:775).8 After encountering more instances of the same, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is not so much the insufficiency of human understanding that Gibbon is lamenting as the vanity, ambition, and ignorance that can infect an entire world. The controversy was itself sterile—“leaves without flowers and . . . branches without fruit” (785). Yet these zealous preoccupations might also be thought of as remarkably fertile—in engendering an infinite number of warring sects and subsects. Tertullian’s boast “that a Christian mechanic could readily answer such questions as had perplexed the wisest of the Grecian sages” testifies to the dimensions of the problem.9 It was one thing for a select few to “silently meditate, and temperately discuss,” these abstruse matters “in the gardens of Athens or the library of Alexandria” (1, ch. 21:776). But that was then, when philosophic reticence was more the rule than the exception. Now the democratization of discourse meant that everyone had a 8. This recalls the philosophizers who were eager to establish, one way or another, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul: “With this favourable prepossession they summoned to their aid the science, or rather the language, of Metaphysics” (1, ch. 15:463). 9. Gibbon directs his readers to Bayle’s “profound and interesting” observations on Tertullian’s rash claim (1, ch. 21:776 n. 34). To see Pierre Bayle at his sober best, consult his Historical and Critical Dictionary, s.v. “Simonides,” remark F.

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voice, with that of the weakest understanding best distinguished “by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence” (777). Theological disputation became all the rage, most especially in the provinces of Egypt and Asia. The cultivation of the language and manners of the Greeks in those regions made their population especially vulnerable to “the venom of the Arian controversy” and supplied the clergy and the people alike “with an inexhaustible flow of words and distinctions” (787). For some time, Gibbon reports, the emperor Constantine viewed the object of this theological dispute “with cool and careless indifference.” Ignorant of the hornets’ nest into which he was venturing, this Roman general with an imperfect grasp of the nuances of philosophical and theological Greek, undertook to address the contending parties in the language of moderation. In writing thus, he expressed (to his credit) “the untutored sense of a soldier and statesman” and rose above the mind-set of his episcopal advisers: “He attributes the origin of the whole controversy to a trifling and subtle question, concerning an incomprehensible point of the law, which was foolishly asked by the bishop [Alexander], and imprudently resolved by the presbyter [Arius]” (789). Viewed from a safe distance, this was much ado about very little, certainly nothing that warranted the raising of Christian arms against fellow Christians and the persistent disturbance of the public peace. Yet the lasting impression of Gibbon’s account is not of the emperor’s good intentions but of his profound ignorance of the character of his audience. Far better would it have been had Constantine maintained his earlier indifference and contempt. But he lost “the calm possession of his own mind” and convened the Council of Nicaea: “He extinguished the hope of peace and toleration, from the moment that he assembled three hundred bishops within the walls of the same palace” (790). There is no mistaking Gibbon’s firm conviction that the theological disputes he reports in such detail over hundreds of pages are phantasms. In his eyes, they are generated and sustained by men who are mad or manipulative or both. The loss over the centuries of the bulk of that controversial literature is no matter for regret for Gibbon or, as he would have it, for any sensible human being. If the mass of all that paper and parchment had been consumed as fuel in the public baths of Alexandria, “a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind” (3, ch. 51:286). This is contempt writ large, not left to insinuation. Indeed, by the time Gibbon’s narrative reaches the theological history of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the sundry schisms associated with it (ch. 47), the historian’s scorn fairly oozes from every page. Cyril of Alexandria is treated as a fanatic and murderous tyrant who deserves and 128

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gets no mercy (2, ch. 47:942–46). Perhaps one might say in mitigation of this harsh judgment that Cyril had the misfortune of living in a polemical age and that the very ardor and ability that he brought to controversy made him more insufferable to observers in a later, calmer age than he otherwise would have seemed. As Gibbon says in another context, displaying his own brand of malicious pleasure: “To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues” (3, ch. 49:139). Yet it is not a man of the cloth who bears the full weight of Gibbon’s disdain but the emperor Justinian himself: a prince, a conqueror, a lawgiver, and—by his own inner urges—a theologian. For a prince to descend to “the narrow and peevish character of a disputant” (2, ch. 47:969) is, indeed, an offense against his own dignity. What damns Justinian most in Gibbon’s eyes is that the emperor thought just the opposite. He delighted in playing the theologian. He devoted his nights to theological study and debate so that, when attending ecclesiastical conferences, he “might shine as the loudest and most subtle of the disputants.” Gibbon writes in acid. The emperor was guilty of abandoning his post: “The duty of father of his country was often sacrificed to that of defender of the faith” (968). At this juncture, the philosophic historian no longer smiles. Instead, he allows himself and his readers to emerge from “the gloom of impenetrable orthodoxy” (942) so that the sane principles of his own code might stand revealed to full light: While the Barbarians invaded the provinces, while the victorious legions marched under the banners of Belisarius and Narses, the successor of Trajan, unknown to the camp, was content to vanquish at the head of a synod. Had he invited to these synods a disinterested and rational spectator, Justinian might have learned, “that religious controversy is the offspring of arrogance and folly; that true piety is most laudably expressed by silence and submission; that man, ignorant of his own nature, should not presume to scrutinise the nature of his God; and, that it is sufficient for us to know, that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity.” (968)

Gibbon’s footnote to the quotation may serve as well for the coda to this entire discussion: “For these wise and moderate sentiments, Procopius is scourged in the Preface of Alemannus, who ranks him among the political Christians . . . abominable Atheists, who preached the imitation of God’s mercy to man” (2, ch. 47:968 n. 83 [references suppressed]). It is a measure of the mania that Gibbon devoted himself to attacking that such sobriety should have appeared to some so vile. 129

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beneath the sophisticate’s veneer Dull indeed would be the reader who fails to note the strong narrative line that Gibbon creates and sustains through the three thousand pages of the Decline and Fall. That achievement, in and of itself, testifies to the author’s confidence as well as to his mastery of his materials. But, by the same token, those rare occasions when the line is interrupted or when Gibbon stops to explain why he is pausing or digressing or abridging are arguably also manifestations of authorial control.10 There is, of course, a necessity to which he must bow when new actors are about to enter his and our field of vision. Thus, it is not enough to learn that the Persians on one side and the Germans on another flank are mounting threats to the empire. We need to know what manner of people these are and how they have come to reach the point where they require our full attention. So the narration must pause while Gibbon takes a long step backward and depicts the barbarians of the East (vol. 1, ch. 8) and the barbarians of the North (vol. 1, ch. 9) and, later on, the conquering forces that swept out of the Arabian Peninsula (vol. 3, chs. 50–51). Perhaps an analogous necessity compels Gibbon to devote two full pages to laying out his organization of the final third of his work. The paucity of the sources available to him, the poverty of much of what he does have, and the fact that in critical respects he is working all too often from texts accessible to him only in paraphrases and translations: these definitely complicate his task. In switching his account to the Eastern Roman Empire he must cast his net very far afield. Nonetheless, he is confident that he can do so without jeopardizing his work’s “unity of design and composition”: “As, in his daily prayers, the Musulman of Fez or Delhi still turns his face towards the temple of Mecca, the historian’s eye shall be always fixed on the city of Constantinople” (3, ch. 48:25). Let the reader rest assured; Gibbon’s hand is on the tiller. Other interruptions and deviations in Gibbon’s flow of narrative betoken something else—not necessity, not accident, but artistic intent (see, e.g., 1, ch. 17:602–3; and 2, ch. 37:411). Could any unsuspecting eighteenthcentury reader of the Decline and Fall have anticipated wading through four hundred pages devoted to the first three centuries of the Common Era before even encountering the Christian religion? Gibbon’s delay heightens his reader’s tension, and, when relief comes at last, it comes in 10. “In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment: . . . and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on our remembrance” (3, ch. 48:84).

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the smile of a phil osophic historia n

a form more likely to astonish than calm. From time to time—and obviously at times of his choosing—Gibbon produces set pieces where narration yields to a theme and the theme itself is considered in the round. This is true alike of chapters devoted to the causes of the growth of Christianity (vol. 1, ch. 15), the Roman persecution of the early Christians (vol. 1, ch. 16), the origin, progress, and effects of the monastic life (vol. 2, ch. 37), the theological history of the doctrine of the Incarnation (vol. 2, ch. 47), and the introduction, worship, and persecution of images in the Christian church (vol. 3, ch. 49). There is a common thread here for all the diversity. Gibbon takes care to carve out enough space in his story so as to be able to explore these subjects with the fullness and patience of a prosecuting attorney building a case. Nor are these the only instances where his focused attention to a subject leads Gibbon to suspend his narrative. We have seen that he cares deeply about the rule of law, not least on account of its ability to sustain— and temper—the vigor of an engaged citizenry. Here, too, he finds a great deal to present and ponder. The range of considerations is broad, and the historical complications preclude a simplistic linear retelling. Inevitably, for such a mind as Gibbon’s, there is much that leads him to raise a philosophic eyebrow. His ironic smile is never far behind. Yet, for all this, his driving force is not merely negative and destructive. By virtue of his herculean labors, Gibbon has earned the right to teach his audience a lesson or two. If they have a mind to listen, they may come to adopt a healthy skepticism toward the certainties of their own age and a wariness of political and religious panaceas of every kind. A people so instructed would suffer neither from the insularity and indifference associated with leading a wholly private life nor from the dangerous delusion of expecting to set human affairs aright once and for all. Gibbon’s readers may learn that selfawareness is dearly purchased and, hence, not to be expected of mankind at large. Yet some at least must gain that critical distance, and they of all people should refrain from slighting “a train of useful prejudices combating on the side of national manners” (1, ch. 10:264). The philosophic historian teaches moderation to a world all too prone to believe it knows not why or, failing that, knows not what to believe. In undertaking this educative task, he may often choose to enlist the aid of a manner and style associated with a salon of eighteenth-century sophisticates. But there can be no mistaking that Gibbon—smiles, coolness, and all—is pursuing his serious business in earnest.

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Index of Names

Alemannus, Nicolaus, 129 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 13, 17n Alfarabi. See Farabi Anderson, Wilda C., 16n23 Antonine emperors, 113–14, 116–18, 120 Aristotle, 33 Augustine, 84n11 Augustus, 111–18, 122 Averroes, 33–34, 58 Avicenna, 33–34, 58

Constantine, 119, 128 Cyril of Alexandria, 128–29

Bacon, Francis, 30, 34–46, 88 Bayle, Pierre, 14–16, 16n24, 62–86, 88, 123, 127n9 Beroaldus, Philippus, 55 Boccalini, Trajan, 79 Burton, Robert, 48–60

Fala¯sifa, 33–34, 58 Farabi, 33–34 Franklin, Benjamin, 88–107

David, 74n6 Democritus, 50–52, 57 Descartes, René, 74, 77, 81 Diderot, Denis, 13–18 Diogenes, 57 Donne, John, 44 Erasmus, Desiderius, 2–3, 50

Gibbon, Edward, 31, 108–31 Greene, Jack P., 99 Guicciardini, Francesco, 71

Camden, William, 67 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1 Cicero, 70 Clement of Alexandria, 7–10, 12–13, 17–18

Hadrian, 112–14 Heraclitus, 57 Herodotus, 70–71 Hippocrates, 57n

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in dex of na mes

Ja¯bir ibn H . ayya¯n, 9 Jackson, James, 103–5 Jefferson, Thomas, 92 Josephus, 70 Julius Caesar, 80, 117 Justinian, 120, 129

Plato, 9, 23–24, 27–28, 33 Plessner, Martin, 8–9 Plutarch, 81n Procopius, 129

Kaiser, Walter, 1–2 Kent, James, 44n11 Kraus, Paul, 9

Seneca, 54, 81n Socrates, 27, 67–68, 109 Stella, Didacus, 56 Strauss, Leo, 4 Suetonius, 73 Swift, Jonathan, 4, 124

Rapin, René, 81

Labrousse, Elisabeth, 63 Lincoln, Abraham, 97n Lucian, 20, 120, 124

Tacitus, 68, 80 Tertullian, 126–27 Theodoric, 122–23 Theon, 79 Theopompus, 84 Thoreau, Henry David, 93n Thrasymachus, 109 Thucydides, 73 Trajan, 112–13

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 67n Machiavelli, Niccolò, 58, 79 Madison, James, 92 Maimonides, Moses, 5–6, 9–13, 17–18, 33. See also Fala¯sifa Mariana, Juan de, 81 Mason, H. A. (Harold Andrew), 2–3 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 21n Milton, John, 17 Montaigne, Michel de, 4, 6, 18, 70n, 81n, 82, 84 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 6 More, Thomas, 2–3, 20–29 Mori, Gianluca, 64

Van Doren, Carl, 103 Vaninus, Julius Caesar, 58 Vitoria, Francisco de, 44n10 Voltaire (François-Marie-Arouet), 4, 34 Werner, Stephen, 16 Wootton, David, 124n

Octavianus. See Augustus Palmerston, 3rd Viscount, 44n11 Philistus, 84

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