Philosophic Pride by Brooke Christopher;

Author:Brooke, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

FROM LIPSIUS TO CUDWORTH

The Neostoicisms of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had been explicitly intended as supplements to mainstream varieties of Christianity. Although Lipsius was notorious for switching confessional allegiance over the course of his life—from Catholicism to Lutheranism to Calvinism and back to Catholicism again—he remained consistent with his argument, presented most straightforwardly in De constantia, that Stoicism, with respect to both its ethics and its physics, provided an appropriate philosophical framework for a well-lived Christian life. Some of his contemporaries agreed, with Thomas James, fellow of New College, Oxford, and later Bodley’s Librarian, writing in 1598, ‘Let it not seem strange unto us that Philosophie should be a meanes to help Divinitie, or that Christians may profit by the Stoicks.’29

Given that the ancient Stoics had taught, among many other things, the materiality of God, indeed, the identification of God with nature, a strict physical determinism, and a doctrine of eternal recurrence, it might seem surprising that the Neostoics were able to recycle Stoic arguments in the service of the Christianities they professed. But there were ways in which this could be done. Lipsius, for example, had an effective monopoly over the interpretation of Stoic physics owing to his authorship of the standard textbook on the subject, the Physiologiae Stoicorum of 1604. This book presented a series of arguments that had something recognisably to do with the Stoics, and it provided a series of references to relevant Greek and Latin texts that had not previously been analysed or edited in any systematic way; but it also managed to falsify the arguments of the Stoics to a considerable extent: Lipsius denied, for example, that the Stoics taught a pantheistic materialism when he claimed that they had argued that ‘God is contained in things but not infused with them’.30 An alternative and more common approach was to avoid the matter of Stoic physics altogether. Guillaume du Vair (1556–1621), whose preferred Stoic text was Epictetus’s Encheiridion, found himself in his Moral philosophie of the Stoicks able to exalt the piety and the monotheism of the Stoics, presenting the God of the Stoics as identical to the God of the Christians, for the maxims of this short compilation stuck to moral exhortation and avoided the reefs of theological controversy.

Problems were therefore bound to arise for these syncretist understandings of Stoicism when the conditions that made these Neostoic interpretations plausible no longer obtained—and the Neostoics themselves inadvertently contributed to undermining their own arguments. On the one hand, Lipsius encouraged scholarly attention to the physics of the Stoics through his publication of the Physiologiae Stoicorum, yet a more assiduous investigation of the sources for those physics would prove troublesome for his argument about the symbiotic relationship that could obtain between Stoicism and Christianity. On the other hand, du Vair did much to popularise the philosophy of Epictetus in early seventeenth-century France, but a broader understanding of the systematic nature of his Stoicism and, in particular, sustained attention to the arguments of Epictetus’s longer

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