   
Nature in the Sixteenth Century: a review article
by Orest Ranum, which discusses the writings of Margolin, Defaux, Horowitz,
Blair, Kaufmann and others
...Orest's other
reviews
I lent my copy (inscribed to me in a most friendly way) of Jean-Claude Margolin's
"L'Idée de Nature dans la Pensée d'Érasme" (Vortrage
der Aneas-Silvius-Stiftung an der Universität Basel, VII, 1967)
to Gérard Defaux, and he returned it with a note of thanks on a J.H.U.
French Department Memo pad with the following "to Orest; From Gérard,
Date Unknown, Subject Erasmus," with the following phrase below the address:
"Amici, mihi crede, nascunter atque finguntur." This friendly, almost
intimate message may serve not only to testify to the engagement in still
Humanistically framed ethical problems of a friend and colleague, but also
as a brief, but profound taking of a position on human nature. It also serves
as a testimonial to the learning and pedagogy of our mutual friend, Jean-Claude
Margolin.
In the De Pueris Erasmus says: "Homines, mihi crede, non nascunter,
sed finguntur" (Margolin, p. 55), an over-arching principle, a testimonial,
Margolin notes how ‘to become does not capture the full sense of finguntur
— "l'idée d'un effort, d'un modelage ou d'un façonnement
de l'être qui se fera homme." (p. 19) In a contemporary way, it
is possible to say that Erasmus is entirely on the side of nurture, which
is not to say that he ignores the importance of nature. His beliefs as a
Christian pedagogue make him an optimist in regard to humanization of all
but the most brutish of the species. He recognizes that there are some of
the latter, but it is the overwhelming number that are capable of being educated
into humanity that is his tour.
Were Margolin here in Panat, I would ask him immediately about Erasmus's
thought on the role of baptism in this process of humanization. To be sure,
for Erasmus the body is a temple of God, but I seem to recall that Erasmus
does not stress the sacraments as an element in humanization. It is doubtful
that Gérard Defaux neglected to think of baptism as that first great
step in the humanization of the animal, so something else is going on here.
Just how much of the "old Adam" is washed away? For Erasmus there is so much
teaching-humanizing to do — where the teacher and the teaching are in
such synthesis with the pupil that the pupil can scarcely learn one without
the other. Margolin does not say it, but there is almost the implication
that for Erasmus the teacher is the subject taught — not quite —
obviously, but still human nature requires another's humanity to learn.
(Parenthetically, it would be interesting to put together all that is said
about the pedagogue in the mirrors of princes — that mirror which refracts
the ‘author' often so intensely filled with ambition.)
Margolin on Erasmus on nature clearly establishes just how language is our
only access to nature, and the physical world. Aristotelian and Thomistic
uses of vocabulary are elucidated — essentially on the multiple meanings
of the word nature — what is the nature? what are the properties of...?
the questions, the methods of inquiry developed by Scholastics and by no
means abandoned by Humanists. Erasmus remained almost totally absorbed in
answering the first question — we shall see later that Bodin eliminates
one of the four great questions altogether. Margolin notes that Erasmus notes
the character, beauty, of whatever, of things, places, and conditions; he
expresses curiosity before different objects and situations — in other
words the ‘real world' is part of his thought, and he is not just turning
over examples from Pliny. His knowledge of math and astronomy seems to have
remained quite conventional — in his advice for teaching boys neither
is particularly privileged. More important for Erasmus is the Reason in all
things — universal — and powerful. (p. 15) Senecan and easily
conforming to Christianity through the divine laws that govern nature, the
Nature which is God's creation — His hand maiden — and this includes
man, of course — through it all it is possible perceive the divine,
if humans are educated to do so.
When Erasmus translates the first phrase of the Book of John "In the beginning
was the Word" sermo instead of verbum is used, thus avoiding
a transcending — dare one say Neo-Platonic notion of God, and of Christ.
As Margolin remarks, following Augustine: "identifier le Christ avec l'image
formée dans l'intellect divin, tout comme celle qui, dans l'intellect
humain, précède de l'oral." (p. 35) Sermo rather than Verbo;
Discourse or Speech, rather than the Word, contained almost in a word the
divine project of Erasmus. He by no means sought to make the divine less
divine by making divinity more human in symbiotic ways — nor would this
seem to be mere anthropomorphism.
Is Defaux, in wanting humans to be not only what is modeled or shaped by
teaching, but also born to be, picking an argument with Erasmus? Yes. Is
he grounding his argument on the body as ‘temple of God' argument, or
perhaps, the presence of the divine in Christ's human body, and therefore
making His birth as a man, and the two elements of the Eucharist grounds
for understanding man as being born as something different from other animals?
It would not be fair to Defaux or to Margolin to pursue these questions —
what they say is on a complex issue that is not easily reduced to formulaic
statements.
For the study of nature, the point is moot; humans in the sixteenth century
were part of it, and responded to laws governing nature, perhaps more than
their efforts to perceive the divine through the study of nature would suggest.
In the late 20th century so much study of the body, human and political,
is only the play with selected metaphors, or representations. For Erasmus,
and indeed, the still vigorous Aristotelians of the 16th century, the words
and signs used to signify the natural world and were not metaphor in the
same sense that word often has today. They certainly knew what figures and
metaphors were, but in our day so many scholars think they have said so much
when they discern something as metaphorical. I shall not go into bibliography
here. In what comes out as a dialogue with Michel Foucault at the end of
his essay Margolin quotes Foucault: "La nature est un tissu interrompu
de mots et de marques, de récits et de caractères, de discours
et de formes...connaître une bête, ou une plante, ou une chose
quelconque de la terre, c'est receuillir toute l'épaisse couche des
signes qui ont pu être déposés en elles ou sur elles"
(p. 42).
True, there may be a margin of error in a name, but usually the name says
something about its nature. What follows here will be an uneven and halting
comment on a number of books on ideas about nature in the 16th century that
have been published recently, notably by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne Blair,
Thomas Kaufman, and Simon Schama. I may lose my bearings as I go along, and
have to turn to old anchors such as R.G. Collingwood's Idea of Nature
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1945) and Keith Thomas's Man in the Natural
World ( London, Allen Lane, 1983; Oxford, OUP pb, 1996). My overall aim
will be to get my bearings for more precise readings as a prelude to writing
a chapter on circles of creativity for a revised and expanded edition of
my Paris in the Age of Absolutism. I feel fairly competent on the
artistic side of this issue, but not on the 'scientific' one. I have many
limitations in undertaking this little project. "Dare to risk incomprehension,
dare to be in error," that is my motto at this point.
Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and
Knowledge
The dust jacket on Maryanne Cline Horowitz's Seeds of Virtue and
Knowledge (Princeton, 1998) is deep green, with an etching from John
Parkinson's Paradisi in Sole overlaying it. The binding of the book
is a lush more intense yellow green cloth, suggesting with the jacket the
colors of nature in all their vitality and freshness. Color, text, descriptions
of illustrative art, and illustrative art contribute to a deeply learned
and highly personal, yet monumental synthesis. M C H has written a most
remarkable book on a central theme that touches on almost every other theme
in human history. In a superficial way M C H's model is Lovejoy's classic
on the great chain of being, only her theme is the seeds of virtue and sparks
of knowledge that in Antique and later thought signified the particularity
of humanness, the agency for learning and for fundamental goodness on which
parents, teachers, and oneself (Cicero, Seneca, Montaigne, and Charron) might
nurture the distinct nature of humans.
The last three chapters of the book are really 3 little books, with each
devoted to a single figure — Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron. M C H has
put precise attention to understanding the works of these three, and it becomes
rightly evident that she has discerned a way of understanding their thought
as never before as a result of taking the seeds of virtue and common notions
theme as a key that unlocks their general thought. I am no expert, but I
think she is right, and in a fundamental, obvious way. M C H continues with
her very personal readings, moving along on main themes, but not hesitating
to include the important, very revealing aside. What has been the general
knowledge in the golden age of Renaissance studies in the U.S. — Baron,
Kristeller, Trinkhaus, Bouwsma, and Rice might just become unknown general
learning, unless books such as this are written with a view to re-articulating
that ensemble of learning, while contributing to it on a specific theme.
Her cultural context for that 16th century flowering is the longue
durée of the Stoic notion that sparks of Divinity and seeds of
virtue and knowledge grow in human nature. In a magisterial 2000 year history,
she shows the cumulative impact and merger of the Stoic image of seeds within
humanity growing to trees of wisdom and the Hebraic image of the righteous
person as a "a tree planted by the streams of water, that bringeth forth
its fruit in its season" (Psalm 1). The ancient Stoics have seeds and sparks
as foundations for their epistemologies. The "common notions" of the Stoics,
like the seeds and sparks, would be resorted to by thinkers, as their first
move in their writings. Aristotle is really the odd philosopher out here,
with his emphasis on observation and sensory powers putting him almost out
of the purview of this work. He does come in, of course, in Thomas's thought,
to permit a view different from Augustine's about human nature, and its relation
to the divine. Thomas's and other theologians' usage of "semina
virtutum" and "semina scientarum" M C H applies to confirming
when they are talking about the natural light of the intellect, rather than
the divine light received in illumination. Whether emanationist in time,
or in constant force during life; whether in the senses, the soul, partly
the body, the seeds and sparks became a point of departure — with the
options come enormous consequences for the thought, or image that followed.
It would be presumptuous for me to try to summarize just which option which
writer took; what I hope to do is to encourage everyone to read this book.
This work is intellectual history at its best; "strands" are discerned, nuances
are pointed out, and contexts are always kept right before the reader. There
are also points where M C H says she does not understand; others where she
says author X misinterpreted author W, still others where she says author
A clearly understood author F — a refreshing approach. Formal thought
and less learned thought are explored without condescension for the latter.
In examining the graphics of trees among Kabbalists and in Raymond Lull,
M C H considers whether visual imagery, for example of rising like a palm
tree to the Divine, might have suggested more human potency than the texts
claimed. She thus raises theoretical and historical issues concerning linguistic
and visual metaphors. The presentation of attempts to illustrate complex
thought over the centuries is also systematically laid out here; sometimes
the intellectual frames were deeply understood by scholars, as in the case
of Botticelli, perhaps less so in the relatively neglected forest fresco
of the Palace of the Popes, (Avignon) but the results in both cases are deeply
suggestive of just how deeply and coherently life in accord with ideas about
nature was pursued across the centuries.
M C H uses etymology sparingly, but appropriately to suggest how all pervasive
thought about life in conformity with nature was, a tradition, as it were,
something delivered to us, and certainly not dead. She recognizes that her
study is largely about figures, or metaphors, but she does not let the reader
ever infer that some other type of thought, or philosophical language would
be truer, or more revealing about human nature, or more powerful. Quite to
the contrary. There is an implicit critique of historiographies grounded
on the particularities of metaphor, or even representations, in this work.
The reason, I suspect, is that M C H has never had to climb out of some
functionalist historiography. Indeed the figures about nature become so pervasive
that the word mentality comes to mind for M C H , and rightly so, and for
all European languages, and down to the present. Parenthetically, I have
often taken 17th century prints of the "Ages of Man" genre (I know none of
women) and noted with students that the parallels with animals still have
resonances in our language; e.g. old goat, fox, rat, horny ( for the stag),
etc. Indeed, when one comes away from this book one has a sense of the still
quite small impact ‘modern' science has on everyday language. To be
sure, we immediately think of words such as thrust, and for Early Modern
science, force, but often these new words seem less social than the older
vocabularies in which nature seemed to offer a common understanding of the
observable world. And one has only to think of the influence of "upon
this rock..." or Washington's remark about not cutting down cherry trees,
to recognize just how M C H's book also is an answer by its learned historical
and linguistic contexts to the culture of shock dimensions of deconstruction.
So with the human locked up in seeds, and divine action often but not always
in sparks, and humans producers of seeds (remember Onan's unnatural act?)
the issues go quickly beyond the epistemological to one of just how much
mental and moral capacity humans actually have. For the ancient stoics the
seeds were a starting point, and there were nuances on this very starting
point among ancient stoics, and others, while all the while major thinkers
including Cicero and Philo, whose thought would pull like magnets their later
Christian readers to fundamental positions about human mental and moral capacity.
This pulling back to generally clearly stated positions is such an interesting
phenomenon. Cultures evolve, and change in major ways, but there is this
tendency to reach back to some fundamentally stated views, and the "seeds
of virtue" argument is one of these. Augustine would make the seeds divine,
as it were, in essence; Thomas would accept the human to be made in God's
image, but not really sharing in divinity in the way the Neoplatonists who
inspired Augustine. Seeds of virtue could still also be "just nature" that
is something created by God, and responding to His laws, but not necessarily
divine. One would think that the differences on these matters would be clearly
refracted in the differences in doctrine of the various 16th-century reformers;
she exposes "seeds" at the heart of the debates of Erasmus and Luther, Sadoleto
and Calvin, and she contrasts Melancthon to Luther and Locke to Calvin in
the restoration of some confidence in the human garden. Her Epilogue suggests
further research to explore on the Enlightenment analogy of educational
approaches and horticultural techniques.
When presenting the thought of all the major figures of the Renaissance and
Reformation on thought about nature, and human nature, M C H dares on occasion
to say so and so's understanding of, say Philo or Seneca, is correct. These
extremely helpful evaluations help the reader to map the whole world of thought
about nature, but there is neither a heavy or a determinist or reductionist
hand at any point. Not getting something right does not make the thought
less interesting or less influential. It would be presumptuous for me to
try to present what M C H says about such important figures as Petrarch,
Pico, and Ficino, or Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin — the point is that
all face the triad of human, divine, and the seeds of virtue argument. For
M C H the enhancement of the dignity of humanity occurs, almost always in
a Christian frame in the 16th century, but would all of this happened without
the sparks? In this case the sparks are an understanding of ancient Stoic,
and Neostoic Platonic authors. It's interesting to note how so often all
this becomes a matter of degree or measurement — of just how much virtue
humans have by their seeds.
Throughout the work there is attention to where women and gender are in all
this. Few authors denied them the seeds of virtue, but differences by nature
could still prove to something to argue about. The seeds of virtue and knowledge
played a part in Stoic (note Epictetus) refutations of Aristotle on a slave's
capacities and in Italian women humanists' refutation of Aristotle on a woman's
capacities; it seems not to have been used to ground the rudimentary scientific
racism of the 18th century. The false assumption that plants propagate asexually
was a bulwark for the appeal in Christian Europe of the imagery of virtue
growing like a plant, as in Daphne's arborescence in fleeing Apollo. M C
H suggests that concomitantly with the scientific investigation in botanical
gardens of plant propagation, the paradigm of the mind as a plant gave way
to the paradigm of the mind as a machine. Yet the plant metaphors endure
in our cultivation of each new crop of graduate students.
I encourage the reader to go over carefully what M C H has to say about
Botticelli's Flora, and to compare it with what Charles Dempsey says on the
same subject — very interesting. There are also significant asides from
the history-of-reading field , and important contexts for understanding how
categories of knowledge, gardens, florilegia, commonplace books, maxims,
and theaters of nature are all natural forms of knowledge about nature: as
seeds of virtue they contain wisdom, sacred or profane.
Regarding Erasmus on the seeds of virtue, I think M C H would put more on
the nature side of the equation than does Margolin's interpretation, given
above. I suspect that Erasmus drew on this important argument in epistemological
thought in some contexts, but not in all. Where he finally stood would be
something that only M C H and Margolin (and Jim Tracy) could evaluate on
the topic in each specific context, throughout his oeuvre.
The chapter on Northern Humanism is fundamentally about the French, and the
frame is not only the ancient and Italian, but Erasmian thought. It is also
an account of the reception of Stoic thought. The exploration of nature and
culture, whether in Alciati's emblems, or in the botanical garden of Montpellier
confirms the general thesis that discourses about nature were at the very
heart of 16th century ethical thought. There are brilliant aperçus
— e.g. Rabelais on a fantastic plant that will not burn; he's heard
enough about exotic plants brought from around the globe to Europe. The
historical understanding of the antique sources becomes so firm for not only
Lipsius, but Du Vair, Montaigne, and Charron, that the Neostoicism becomes
a present past. Seneca, Cicero, and Philo, to mention only three crucial
sources, are really deeply grasped, understood, and lived. Each reads on,
and preud'hommie (for Charron, independence from the conventional attitudes
prevalent in one's own time) becomes an ideal, or aim in discerning wisdom,
sacred and profane, in studying nature. Bodin belongs here too; I simply
overlooked him because I want to read Ann Blair before really trying to say
anything about Bodin on nature, though M C H's treatment of same seems to
me to be highly convincing, to the point that he too belongs in the general
roster of recovered stoic thinkers. There are, to be sure, nuances and
differences in this school — one may write about reason much more frequently
than another, or one may see positive law, including Roman law as infused
by natural law, and others not. The theme of human dignity and capacity,
even potential for an active life in pursuit of understanding and living
according to nature is so strong among these thinkers that the late 16th
century should rightly be called a Neostoic moment.
There is also a drum beating out the measures of change. In the end M C H's
Bodin seems engaged in various ordering projects, a great thinker on the
older side of the temporal divide from Montaigne. But then, ideas about
sovereignty are not the subject here, nor are ideas about nature central
to the brilliant formulation of them. Bodin found patriarchy in the divine
law of the Old Testament, not on some natural order of the family sort of
argument. Sometimes one thinks that Bodin was really writing for himself,
but I must not venture into these channels until after reading Ann Blair.
Neoplatonic resonances in Du Vair's thought (see also Menager on this subject
in the CMR 17 colloque in Bari), the images of the garden as the soul, of
the tree, the seeds...there is a respect for authority but a remarkable distance
seems to have developed between these writers and the institution of the
Church. And in Bodin, in particular, there is a questioning of the whole
notion of original sin; the human soul is still submitted to a duel between
the angel and the devil, but with the latter being only instruments for divine,
not manichean action. In all, Bodin seems to me to have genuinely feared
disorder more than Montaigne, though both combat disorder with the tools
of the Stoics.
Montaigne is more deeply smitten by the revival of learned skepticism, but
this did not impede him from turning to nature, and the seeds of virtue as
a foundation for natural human goodness. His figure for describing the human
thought process as it pursues wisdom is the sieve; we humans even sift knowledge
about God, rejecting this or that "proof" for His action in nature. And above
all the ironic twists and deconstructions of literal meanings from stories
and common places, he sifts himself. The interpretations of Physiognomy and
the coaches come along very nicely to confirm M C H's argument regarding
Montaigne's fundamental belief in human potential. The relation between notions
of a golden age, and knowledge of the behavior of Amerindians is brilliantly
held in tandem by M C H — leaving the reader to sift through the assertions
about just how difficult it is to see behind the masks that Montaigne puts
before his readers.
Certainly Montaigne enriched the "tradition" in which he was writing, more
so, I think, than did Bodin, and opposition to cruelty, including cruelty
to animals would seem until one thinks about it, just a quirk, but no, as
MCH suggests, it is a remarkable inference from the thought as a whole. His
travel journal is filled with remarks about how his own body works, especially
in relation to different waters; his skepticism about the capacity of humans
to reason and discern truth squares with his sense of the soul, the self,
being all over in the body, by nature. Jotham Parsons's chapter on Montaigne
in his thesis on Gallican thought clearly elucidates how custom may in fact
bear more just and natural law than other positive laws, grounded on rational
principles. What grows naturally out of society — without professional
reason — may in fact carry within it nature's laws for human kind.
Throughout M C H's discussion of Montaigne there is a tentativeness that
yields greater authority than the typical declarative authoritative statement
might. She has lived with Montaigne for decades.
The third and final major general interpretation after a chapter on Bodin
and another on Montaigne, is on Charron. Noting that he was more read in
17th century than Montaigne, M C H moves to the heart of what was the truly
fundamental problem facing thinkers in France after a couple of decades of
killing and raping in the name of religious beliefs. Founding ethics on an
unshakable first premise that was autonomous from religion became essential,
and that was what Charron did. If Bodin's answers to this situation was the
idea of absolute sovereignty, and a kind of naturalist universalism along
with patriarchy, Montaigne's was self understanding and custom. Charron would,
of course, ground his ethics on a seeds of virtue first principle, with following
that the human nature being to pursue preud'hommie (honnestas
in Bodin) by distancing oneself from the conventional thinking around one,
including the religious. This is as about as anti-Aristotelian as anyone
could be, in regard as to how humans should act in society. For Charron humans
have potential; conventional thinking in society is not to be conformed to.
The links to the devotionalism of the "interior" seems evident, for it is
what emanates from the self, self-thought — secreting, secreted thought,
that humans must rely on — again anti-Aristotelian because the senses
are not relied on for learning.
Skepticism, to be sure, but not as an instrument to be used in public discourse
in the way Popkin describes the influence of Sextus on the period, since
it is an instrument to be used by the self, for the self. Charron's really
quite lofty view of human capacity for self knowledge leads him to create
a deeply individualist ethic. The seeds of virtue are so numerous that Grace
is not even called upon to play much of a role in becoming a
preud'homme. The reader of Montaigne is all over Charron, but there
is a major, personal dimension in Charron's thought that is anything but
derivative. He seems caught up in Seneca on benefits when he criticizes the
human effort to assure his own salvation. Like giving with the thought in
mind of what might be received in return, Grace is that divine totally free
gift ending for some in salvation. Human love for God must be disinterested.
M C H hesitates and moves with caution in interpreting Charron, and well
she might. Did he hold contradictory positions? Did he know what he was writing?
Was he confused, or was he moving along fine lines on matters of doctrine
that we no longer discern? There is certainly also a danger in making matters
clearer than Charron; one comes away with the sense that he was not fearful
of souls being lost as a result of reading his book! Just think of a seminar
of readings from Gene Rice, Hans Baron's review of Rice, now M C H, and Charron
himself. An alternative would be to read between the lines, a tendency,
gratefully which M C H does not have.
Coming away from all this there is wonder before the word religion in all
three of these thinkers, but especially Charron, and how religion relates
to the church. The seeds of virtue argument for him meant that no matter
how deeply to the interior of humanness one went, there was no danger, the
divine was simply discerned more deeply and fully.
Charron's placing of ethics within human nature, and in effect making religion
depend on virtue rather than the other way around, set a philosophical agenda
for the rest of the 17th century, and indeed, some of the 18th century as
well. References to Rousseau in this book remain more linked to Montaigne
and egalitarianism, but the notions of the seeds of virtue, and the goodness
of natural humankind are not to be dismissed.
A chef d'oeuvre in the modern sense — a completely accomplished work
by a mature scholar who has worked long and hard on all these issues. I feel
immensely pleased by the accomplishments of late 20th century historiography.
Who can forget the writers who in the 70's and 80's said that the "history
of ideas" was finished? In M C H there is also so much more than erudition,
there is her presence in sharing the joy of learning.
Ann Blair, The Theatre of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science
Ann Blair's The Theatre of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science
(Princeton, PUP, 1997) is a work of Humanistic historical culture in ways
somewhat different from M.C. Horowitz's Seeds of Virtue... Instead
of working within one, vast intellectual current—written and
pictorial—AB aims to write a "histoire totale" of one book, a
project Humanistic not unlike the numerous attempts made by Renaissance and
Renaissance inspired thinkers to discern the microcosm's perfection (the
latter word in the 16th century sense), or in the macrocosm. Indeed, the
overlaying of Bodin's aims, and AB make this a striking book in a Humanistic
genre. Seeking to have his theatre of nature include what humans can know
about nature, Bodin expressed supreme faith in the divine design in and behind
nature, and human intelligence sufficient to 'see it.'
If what humans can do is to study and to categorize all the signs of the
natural recalling what Margolin says about Erasmus and Foucault, the macrocosm
of nature ought to be capturable in one book of those signs; Montaigne's
project of writing himself entirely in to his book (Defaux,) is also a project
not unlike Bodin's, with the human being as the microcosm of creation. We
in the 20th century might think that getting the physical into a book might
be more difficult than the spiritual or ontological, but AB on Bodin's
Theatre... offers an understanding, indeed, a demonstration, of how
such a project could be scientifically imagined. The Essais may also
be considered a theatre of nature, perhaps, albeit quite free of the modified
scholastic method of 'doing physics' that is the methodological character
of Bodin's project.
For writing the histoire totale of such a rich and complex book—the
final 'flower'(pace Horowitz!) in an antique genre of natural philosophy
(Pliny)—AB mastered three quite distinct problematics—the history
of ideas, the history of the book, and the history of science. The word awesome
immediately comes to mind, and erudite as well, but also sympathetic in the
Dilthey sense, and not pedantic. AB does not offer an apologia for the work,
but she is deeply sympathetic to Bodin's larger aim of a search for and creation
of order in a universe of apparently discrete things, religious beliefs,
and civil and international wars. For Bodin the scientific study of nature
would enable humans to know more about the divine, apparently the only theme
which Bodin considered sufficiently worthy to employ the "language of wonder."
Between the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1572), and
The Theatre of Nature (1596) there appeared the Demonology
(1587) and the Six Books of the Republic (1593), as well as other
learned and civic activist works. AB is right not to impose some sort of
grid, or program on Bodin's writings (after all, it is not her project),
but if we take her main point that as a philosopher Bodin's search for and
creation of order in and through his own reflection, reading, and writing,
there would seem to be a trend in his work toward less and less the study
of human behavior and human nature, particularly in society, and more and
more toward the study of nature beyond the human, for discerning order and
nature's laws. The woodcut on the title page of the first edition of the
Prolemata Bodini shows the philosopher alone, so alone, measuring
a globe. In the end, learning about nature, and the divine seems to be a
lone, if not lonely activity. There isn't even a lion to keep him company!
The Demonology is already a shift toward studying God's agents and
soldiers for helping and punishing humans; the Republic is many things,
but the trajectory in the works suggests that it too may in fact occupy a
space in the universe that is good, superior, and there more natural and
divine, than some of the other bodies that float around is space. The unnatural,
the monstrous, the criminal, violent, are not included in the chose publique
as normative elements in the divine program.
The Theatre of Nature is about those aspects of the universe that
man can glimpse, but over which he has really no powers. The open window
in the woodcut mentioned above reveals nature that has not already been signified
on to a globe, but like the natural philosophers who were his predecessors
and successors Bodin concentrates on a "canon" of questions and observations
that had changed little since Pliny. As AB observes him sympathetically going
through these "facts", and thus doing physics, it becomes possible to discern
his grander scientific and religious project. This book makes one feel close
to Bodin's mental operations, and in particular his emphasis on seeing over
hearing. And he's like Rabelais and Montaigne (Horowitz) in that he is not
at all swept up by the amazing new facts that are coming from the new world,
no indeed (pace my dear friend, Sir John Elliott).
Just why he is so hostile to Aristotle, and which Aristotle is, however,
not so clear. There are disagreements, to be sure, but additionally there
seems to be a welling up to the ad hominem attack against the
Philosopher—to the point that this reviewer wonders whether or not this
critique is not Bodin's more important, though apparently veiled aim in writing
the book. In saying this I do not wish to underestimate his stated intentions,
or accomplishments, but to attack Aristotle as "obscure and arrogant"(p.
92) could either seem gratuitous, immature, or the point of the project,
and perhaps certainly consistent with his pious quest.
Though there are no sources to confirm it, Bodin very probably worked from
common place books that he had developed over the years (F. Goyet, A. Moss).
The "Seeds of Virtue" argument is there, p.89) and along with some 80 references
to the Bible, mostly the Old Testament. Bodin seems not to confront the Biblical
text with a source that contradicts it; it seems too early for that, but
more important, throughout the work it seems that he had a need for the divinity
as an immensely powerful and sovereign presence in the universe, not like
Erasmus on this point. This is not a matter of doctrine, but of tone, or
undertone, below the argument, as it were. Augustinian in characterizing
evil as the absence of good, and divine programming to bring good out of
evil, Bodin moves forward his quest for order without, it seems, ever commenting
on what humans cannot know. Are mysteries a part of his thought? The writings
on the soul and intermediary bodies attest to his faith in God, and in the
powers of human reason.
This too brief characterization of Bodin as captured by AB on the theatre
of nature does not do the work justice. I really do not know how to present
the questions and reasoning that Bodin does in any other way than AB, hence
readers must read the book. One could ask why such old questions had so much
authority (one could say the same about Fermat's theorem). There must be
a lot of good research and writing on the history of questions, but since
I have not read it, I must fall silent. I recall Brian Tierney's work on
the role of questions in the training of canon lawyers. Was the quod libet
something of a genre, or simply part of the general scholastic, and then
antique way of doing sciences? One thing is evident in Bodin: the jurist
may come out of the court room, but he pops up again when doing physics when
he observes that demonstrations of the force of reason on the impious to
acknowledge god is as strong as the application of torture (p.41). Bodin's
way would not lead to conversion of the impious or the protestants; St. Francis
of Sales et al rejected argumentation in favor of exemplarity. But
the analogy of reason and torture reveals something of the juridical training
in Bodin, or it would seem so. At one point he comes close to the type of
reasoning that is at the heart of the sovereignty argument, and on the very
important subject of the nature of the soul: "either none of these things
is true, or not more than one of them is true, because it cannot be that
more than one thing is true..." (p.90)
As we read about Bodin's work to discern order and the divine in nature it
becomes possible to imagine a history of cultures as learning to live with
categories that are vague, e.g. miscellany, and extravaganza (the title of
part of the book catalogue in the Wolfenbutel Library), and argument about
the very order of disorder, which Louis Marin made about Pascal's
Pensées.
AB leaves Bodin as the culmination of a tradition, and Bacon as the departure
for a newer one, more distinctly modern. The history of science question
of modernity, and discerning breaks is very much at work here. I must read
Dennis Deschene's book on pre-Cartesian Aristotelianism in order to understand
the fault lines a bit more from the perspective of the history of philosophy.
It is not that I doubt AB's conclusions, no indeed, but what is haunting
is the contrast between the undoubted influential modernity of the sovereignty
argument (the Republic), of the modernity of the appeal to reading
all histories (The Methodus...), and more especially the history of
wars written by one's enemies, in order to understand what happened, and
the apparent continuities in the 'doing physics' part of Bodin's program.
For the sake of symmetry, I guess, or my own search for order in Bodin, I'd
like to suggest that perhaps his anti-Aristotelianism was a quite bold and
modern step. To be sure, there were predecessors, but were they as free as
Bodin from some other ancient philosophic template, most often neo-platonist?
Did Bodin's genuine understanding of and respect for Jewish methods of reasoning
play a part here?
This book is a treasure house of smaller studies, notably on the dialogue
as a genre, reception history, and on such important words for the Renaissance
as theatre. On the latter it might have been interesting to explore the
etymologies in dictionaries, including the far-fetched ones, not only because
the history of the origin of words is a major approach in philological history,
but because it was so frequently practiced, notably by Humanists in the 16th
century. Mais on ne peut pas tout faire dans un seul livre! Was there a
jeu between theo and thea, for example, with the result
being more than just seeing? Space within the theatre may have been sacred
for Bodin in ways that could be teased out by close reading. Another small
study within the study contributes to the history translation. Parenthetically,
on the photo reproduction of the title page of Fougerolle's translation of
the Theatre, the name Simon Basin (or Bazin, the two spellings were
often interchangeable in that name), in a late 16th-17th century hand. While
a frequently found name, the library stamp of the Jacobin community on the
rue St. Honoré confirms the possibility that the copy belonged to
Simon Basin, son of Simon, First Physician to Anne of Austria, a preacher,
and panegyrist (mediocre) of Louis XIII and Richelieu (which is how I got
to know about him). One can never be certain that owners read their books,
but it is nonetheless interesting to note in whose hands a particular copy
landed.
Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature
My first reading of Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann's The Mastery of Nature...
(Princeton, PUP, 1993) was one of the inspirations for reading the other
books in this ‘essay', as they came along. The honesty, erudition,
willingness to strike out beyond beaten tracks is evident from the very beginning
of this book, which is a presentation of the chapters in the book after an
account of how various tendencies in the discipline of art history, and various
tendencies and expertises within the Warburg intersected for TDCK to make
the backdrop of this book. How to build on and extend the brilliant achievement
of R.J. Evans's Rudolf II and his World. The book takes Rudolf's court
as its principal focus, but here again one is tempted to think of it as the
microcosm for a general cultural macrocosm. Evans used such words as Mannerist
in his work, and Baroque, and that has set off bells in the minds of art
historians. So much the better. In general Kaufmann rarely comes back to
the problems of definition of these terms, and this is much to his credit.
His meanings are clear and add to the general analysis.
TDCK has probed in manuscript collections to find in verse or treatise textual
parallels with works of art, and then deepen the quest for understanding
of both and the culture out of which they came. The results are deeply satisfying
to this reader, with the result being that one senses how not only Humanism,
but Classicism were such learned creative moments — the century of Louis
XIV being not all that far from that of Rudolf in reception of Antiquity
in far beyond literalist ways, indeed, in playful ways. Oh, someone will
come up with Longinus, of pseudo Longinus, and Boileau, and perhaps assert
that my generalization is unfair because of them. Soit!
The book begins quietly, but oh so fulfillingly by exploring the relations
between marginal illustrations in private devotional works, and the rise
of still life painting as a genre. Rosaries, flowers, pilgrim badges (Henry
Walters was so right in buying some of these for his collection!) insects,
hares, and, oh horror, skulls, are objects in nature. Indeed, these objects
were seen and treasured, in a sense, as natural and capable of inspiring
wonder and if not devotion, at least a reverent mood in preparation for it.
From pilgrim badges and flowers stuck in prayer books to painting them in
prayer books would seem to be a small, but important step toward still-life
painting. Pilgrim medals, or the plaques with the names and images of loved
ones attached in pilgrimage churches (Montaigne at Loreto) turns on the
‘legibility' of the object, and its place in a code that is natural
and artful.
TDCK brings all this together with immense accomplishment in his exploration
of the works of the painter, Georg Hoefnagel, whose painted dragon fly bodies
had real dragonfly wings attached to them. Palissy used animals to cast his
sculptured plates and still-life portraits of salamanders, etc. This chapter
brings the actual objects and their religious location in parallel; chapter
3 gives the intellectual paradigm that accounts for why natural objects are
art.
As one looks at the photo reproductions from pages from prayer books, one
sees quite strong, thick lines between the texts, and the floral and other
marginal illustrations. Marginal is probably not the mot juste; there is
a difference here from what L. Randall finds as marginal illustrations, but
I'm not sure whether it is a difference in kind or degree. Are the boundaries
just a convention, or some sort of true boundary. A true boundary could need
a bit of definition; it could be the limits between floral painters and letter
painters, for example, but the boundary always deserves to be pondered. Cellini
designed letters for the tomb of a loved one to look like branches or vines
or leaves (we do not know, he just says something about looking natural).
In illustrating PATIENTIA in 1569 Hoefnagel constructed letters from flower
covered branches, borderless, as if nature resists borders more than letters.
What is the plant? As usual, I am out of my depth here, so I should stop
writing and go off to spend 6 months reading up on the subject.
Chapter 2 on perspective and shadows in paintings is a careful analysis of
learned writings on the subject from Alberti down through Da Vinci, to Desargues.
As TDCK puts it:"It seems theorists needed to make an intellectual breakthrough
before they could demonstrate a correct rule for solar shadow projection."
(p. 76) But just where was the breakthrough? In a picture, or in a series
of geometrically cut stones? There had to be also a problem to be solved,
and it was the design of stones for the corners of outside supporting geometrical
staircases that led Desargues to work out the formula for a vanishing point.
I haven't kept up, but isn't that what I learned from Blum's book on Bosse?
How to cut the corner supporting treads and stones in a stairway that only
had the exterior wall to support it? These stairs were objects of wonder
in the 17th and 18th centuries(I particularly like the ones, huge ones, at
the Invalides) as were the ceilings such as in the city hall at Arles, where
angles on each stone were so carefully cut that the sheer weight of the stones
holds up the whole ceiling. Just how Desargues's work became applied to painting,
I cannot recall, but there were probably intermediaries before Bosse's painful,
tragic collision with Le Brun and the supporter of Da Vinci's writings on
the subject. This chapter resembles somewhat a history of science article;
there is a telos toward the right answer or formula, with plenty of evidence
about the false steps, and their makers.
With Chapter 3, the Nature of Imitation, TDCK opens up what one could almost
call the mechanical theory of Humanistic culture. There are urtexts, in this
case both Durer's and Horace received by Hoefnagel, all written out in a
librum amicorum. After the religious undercurrents held up in books of devotion
art, it is the theory of imitation as recovered from Antiquity by Durer and
Hoefnagel in an essentially neostoic vein, that is at the heart of this chapter.
Hoefnagel's ways of building his writing around Horatian tags in his verse
can only confirm the hypothesis that he had a really quite deep, not simply
literalist understanding of the theory of imitation. Confirmation of this
point is certainly the sense of movement — of direction — of
‘progress' and refinement in the human ability to depict nature, and
to write about it, that is at work. This poem on Durer is a profoundly Humanist
pedagogical work, beginning with praise and exemplarity for the achievement
of a great artist-citizen, or should we write citizen-artist? and military
figure whose works began the decoding of the Antique theory of imitation.
Hoefnagel captures in two genres, writing and painting, the principal elements
of this theory. All this is very important for not only his time, but for
establishing a sense of 'progress' within learned culture over time. This
emphasis on perfection, on progress, on movement, and refinement, is not
something brought in to the work of creating people of the sixteenth century
by readers of nineteenth century progressivists. It is there, and part of
the recovered antique theory of imitation. Not only instrumental for
commemoration, but for acquiring sagesse through the study of nature, imitation
became an understanding that would underlie all classicizing cultures. And
the more particular Hoefnagel became about his friends, Ortelius and Rademaker,
the more almost universal in ethics and civic-mindedness —no real
distinction here — he became. From the utterly magnificent painting
of an iris by Durer (BN) it is possible to go to the "naturalness" of
Melanchton's open shirt, or Hoefnagel's hare, a naturalist work imitated
from Durer, yet not 'slavishly' as Hoefnagel dared really to progress, to
be different. The very coherent force of theory and practice are articulated
here, inseparable, and banal, I suspect, but so very interesting as revealing
how the hand and mind are joined together in creative action.
TDCK makes a method of close reading of learned literary works that shed
light on artistic pieces — usually directly — a very effective
and convincing history is the result. There are large general questions,
not just in art history, but in cultural history in general posed, explored,
and partially answered. The point is that complete answers can never be given
to these big questions; but partial answers press research energies forward.
From Alberti to Leonardo, then Fonteo, Comanini, and Lomazzo the textual
richness sustaining and enriching meanings in learned painting — makes
the reign of Rudolf II a truly remarkable moment. One has the sense that
all the theoretical work is done until the next burst forward under Watteau's
and Caylus's learned (one cannot say more learned, or more historical), 'private'
and modernist moment. Archimboldo's famous paintings — the seasons and
elements series, along with the portrait of the emperor as Vertumnus, have
found there consummate interpreter in TDCK. It is amusing to read some of
the foolishness written about these works of art, as summed up by TDCK, but
it would be embarrassing for their authors to present them here.
The "mastery" of nature becomes understandable in this context — the
literature of praise flourishing to assure the Holy Roman Emperor's divinity,
and universal powers, in nature, and in realms of humans. Arcimboldo's elements
and seasons are serious play, and always in the sense that in the Horatian
reception there is invention (contemporary sense) within the general program
of imitation.
One would like to press a bit further on two issues; the first is the relation
between the religious and the elegiac, especially as refracted in the mirror
of nature. Rudolf is of a divine order, his body and soul are not of the
same essence as every one else's, thanks to his election and coronation.
One notes that his portrait is the only one of the oeuvre reproduced here
that includes three distinct natural families, flowers and vegetables and
fruits, the first for his clothes, the second for his body, and the third
for his nose and hair, not unlike wunderkammers which are organized by sea,
land and air strata, in that natural order. I am no doubt saying something
terribly obvious here, since I do not know the literature about these paintings,
but it seems to me that throughout the book there are moments when TDCK becomes
so preoccupied by the text that he does not describe sufficiently the works
of art. There probably is only a specialist v general reader difference
here, as is so often the case. Air does not have a human face constructed
of birds because humans cannot fly, non?
In the chapter on Science, Technology, Humanism, and Art, quite a bit is
rightly made of the reception of Copernicus's theory, but whether or not
backing away incredulous from the works of Yates, Panofsky, and Evans on
the general subject, or not, TDCK seems to have trouble accepting just how
closed, elitist, esoteric, and favor bound court cultures were. Does he keep
a foot in the egalitarian 20th century just to bring along the uninitiated.
Perhaps. The idea of service to the prince pervaded the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, making the civic expressions of Hoefnagel about Durer a distinctly
different relation between creators, if not the creations themselves, than
the ones prevailing at court.
Chapter 6 on Archimboldo's drawings on silk manufacture provides a perfect
case study of just how invention in rhetoric and genius moved out from their
moorings in that discipline to give words to visual experiences (I think
back on the meaning of this word as researched by Blair) such as dreams.
TDCK searches for modernity in through here, and finds it, in very interesting
and important ways. He rightly frames all this in ancients v. moderns, leaving
the impression that Rudolf's learned court formulated and put into practice
the cultural and scientific programs that the French would repeat under Louis
XIV? Did the academism make much of a difference? If so, exactly when and
how? The Italians, Leonardo especially, gave a language to Europeans for
expressing artistic creative action — Rudolf's court witnesses the triumph
of this Italianate understanding, confirming and deepening it before it was
updated by Galileo.
The chapter on kunstkammers treads water on whether or not these were
public. C'est une question mal posée. The confirmation of Galileo's
findings through use of a telescope sent up to Prague probably did not make
as much of an end to secret knowledge locked up in courts, as printing, which
in fact made a new kind of secret knowledge articulated in creative circles,
communities, literary republics, but not public in the sense that Hoefnagel
would have understood it, or we would understand it today. Galileo's
Dialogo... is written by the philosopher and first mathematician of
the most serene Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the dedication is to him as well.
I cannot recall if whether or not Galileo writes as if there is a public
there to read him — I just don't remember. The imperial dreams of the
learned around Rudolf, Henry III, Elizabeth, and Louis XIV are often not
classical republic, and they are pondered by those who knew the difference
between Rome of the Republic, and Rome of the Principate. Oh, yes, the link
between Nuremberg in Durer's time, and Rudolf's Prague are the iconographic
programs in the arches of triumph put up and paid for by the city fathers
when illustrious princely visitors deigned to make an entry into the city.
If one thinks of the Imperial kunstkammer as a collection of profane relics
(Pomian) complementing the great Habsburg collections of religious relics,
we are left still with the religious in both in the sense that the divine
can still be discerned beneath the operations of nature in the kunstkammer.
The Hermeticism that TDCK finds in Bacon, the kunstkammer as microcosm, and
the universes of Brahe and Kepler and Galileo as macrocosms, all measured
but still very often described in the language of wonder (TDCK does not use
this phrase, and he might object to it) these territories do not seem all
that different from those described by Horowitz and Blair. This is not at
all to suggest that TDCK's work is redundant — no, not at all, especially
since it is grounded on very different locales and personae. And neither
Horowitz nor Blair had a way of reaching the theory of imitation.
Still, I think that TDCK ought to have stressed a bit more the notion of
conquest of nature in his general argument regarding the importance of all
this for science in the modernizing sense. When Kepler writes: "O telescope,
instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any scepter! Is not he who
holds thee in his hand made king and lord of the works of God" going a bit
beyond the neostoic programs for discerning the divine through the study
of nature? How to apply new knowledge for enhancing imperial power, that
was a question, if not the question. The exhortation to and celebration of
conquest gave me much to ponder years ago when I was working on Artisans
of Glory. I found that it was the learned who created this language,
historicized it, and wrote it up or painted it in elegiac tones. Mastery
of Nature? Conquest of Nature? It would have been blasphemous to put the
scepter second to knowledge of nature if that knowledge were not, in fact,
about God.
Coming to the end of this book, one may sense that TDCK may need to breath
a more contemporary air. OUF! Rudolf's court, like that of Louis XIV'S places
a weight of professional and scholarly search for understanding on one, even
becoming heavy at times. I may be wrong here. I may be just projecting how
I felt at the end of Artisans... One wonders how Yates, Panofsky,
Schramm, Ullmann, et al. could live so long in these imperial worlds.
My original purpose was to turn from Kaufmann to Simon Schama's book on landscape
and memory, but here it is August 17th, and we must turn our thoughts to
closing up the house and garden. I've read a 100 pages of Schama, and found
it much more impressive than the earlier books that I have tried to but failed
to be able to read. Perhaps Schama writes too much like I do, with my ego
evident, happily going along sharing discoveries with others. It is highly
possible that similarities of style make me uneasy with Schama, but I should
dig beyond this and recognize the learning, flair, and analytical breadth
that Schama has in far greater measure than I do. Soit.
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