STOICISM AND ANTI-STOICISM IN EUROPEAN

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1640-1795

A thesis presented
by
Christopher Robert Brooke
to
The Department of Government
in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of Political Science

Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2003

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 © 2003 Christopher Robert Brooke
All Rights Reserved

This 2004 copy of the 2003 thesis is not strictly identical with the
submitted version: a handful of typos have been corrected, and the
formatting and pagination have been considerably altered.

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 Christopher Brooke

Stoicism and Anti-Stoicism in European Philosophy

and Political Thought, 1640-1795

Dissertation Advisers:

Professor Richard Tuck (Harvard University)

Professor Pratap Mehta (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Professor Patrick Riley (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Abstract:

Both the sixteenth and the eighteenth century uses of Stoic ideas have been the
objects of close study in recent years. This dissertation builds an historical bridge
between these two bodies of work, describing the contours of the ongoing arguments
about the interpretation and assessment of Roman and Greek Stoicism during a period
of crucial importance for the development of modern European philosophy and
political thought, form the emergence of the new philosophies of Grotius, Descartes
and Hobbes to the High Enlightenment.

The dissertation argues that distinctive Catholic and Protestant traditions of anti-
Stoic traditions developed over the course of the seventeenth century in response to the
popularity of Neo-Stoic ideologies. French Augustinians, including Jansen, Senault,
Pascal and Malebranche, concentrated on the moral psychology of the Stoics and
argued that Stoicism was an erroneous – indeed, heretical – philosophy of free will
rooted in pride; the Protestant critics from Bramhall and Cudworth to Bayle, by
contrast, tended to focus their arguments on topics in Stoic physics, and argued that
Stoicism presented a pernicious philosophy of determinism. The thesis argues that the
increasing philosophical interest in Marxus Aurelius’s Stoicism in the second half of
the seventeenth cenutry in part owes to its relative immunity from the central
arguments of the Augustinian anti-Stoic critique; and shows how the controversies
surrounding Spinoza’s philosophy at the end of the century helped to generate the
surprising verdict that the Stoics taught atheism.

The final part of the dissertation then delineates the legacy of these arguments for
and against Stoic philosophy for the European Enlightenment. First, it shows how
Stoicism was integrated both into the eclectic historiography of philosophy in the early
Enlightenment and into the post-Augustinian arguments of the British Moralists,
including Shaftesbury and Butler. Then it turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and argues
that the seventeenth-century encounter between Stoicism and its critics is of
considerable importance in understanding the foundations of Rousseau’s political
thought, as he searches for ways of working with and against the legacy of the Stoics
and the French Augustinians in the construction of a theory of radical democracy.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments, p.7

Dedication, p.9

A Note on the Notes, p.10

Prologue: Paris, Year III, p.12

Introduction, p.20

Part One, p.33

Lipsius and Neo-Stoicism: the State of the Question
in the Historiography of Political Thought
I: Lipsius, p.33
II: Grotius and Descartes, p.49

Part Two, p.58

Augustinian Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth-Century France:
Jansen to Malebranche
I: Stoicism in Book XIV of City of God, p.62
II: The Two Faces of Renaissance Humanism Revisited, p.77
III: Four French Augustinians Against the Stoics, p.84
IV: An Acceptable Alternative? The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, p.112

Part Three, p.123

From the Dictionary to the Encyclopaedia:
Stoicism in Protestant Europe from Bayle to Brucker
I: Protestant Anti-Stoicism in the Seventeenth Century, p.123
II: Stoicism in Bayle’s Dictionary, p.133
III: How the Stoics became Atheists, p.145

Part Four, p.163

Aspects of Stoicism in Enlightenment Europe
I: Eclectic Uses of Stoicism in Theory and Practice, p.164
II Rousseau: With and Against Stoicism and Augustinianism, p.178

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p.191

Bibliography, p.194

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 Acknowledgments

To Arash Abizadeh, Arthur Applbaum, Daniel Butt, Giovanni Capoccia, Katherine

Ibbett, Nany Kokaz, Tony Long, Patchen Markell, Pratap Mehta, Tamara Metz, Russ
Muirhead, Sankar Muthu, Martin O’Neill, Raj Patel, Jennifer Pitts, Patrick Riley,
Oxana Shevel, Naunihal Singh, David Siu, Travis Smith, Stewart Wood, Richard Tuck
– friends, colleagues, flatmates, supervisors, and quite often occupying more than one
of these roles simultaneously – my thanks.

All these people deserve more than a mention, but only a few will get it, for
reasons of space. Michaele Ferguson put up with me in the same apartment – 6 Maries
Avenue #2 – for four years. John Michael Parrish and I spent years of our lives writing
our dissertations on early modern political thought side by side, talking at equal length
about the Boston Red Sox and the Jansenists (though he stresses the first syllable more
than I do). We both enjoyed these conversations, but I think we are both quite glad that
they are over. And Josephine Crawley Quinn not only married me in 2001, but also
provided some helpful translations from Brucker’s eighteenth century Latin and some
very useful comments on my draft.

Political Science at Harvard taught me that institutions matter. Thanks, then, to

Harvard’s Department of Government and its Center [sic] for Ethics and the
Professions; to the Classics Department of the University of California, Berkeley; to
the President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford; and, most recently, to the
staff and scholars of The British School at Rome.

Money may or may not be the sinews of war, but it does make dissertation-writing
easier, and I owe thanks to those who provided financial support along the way: my
parents, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Harvard’s Center for Ethics and the
Professions, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Program [sic] on
Constitutional Government, which paid for me to learn some more Greek in the
Summer of 1999. I should also acknowledge here the past support of the UK Fulbright
Commission, which helped to fund my first two years in the US, 1995-7, and the
ongoing support provided by Magdalen College, which pays me to talk about politics
with interesting people.

It is hard to thank librarians enough. Thanks, then, are due to the staff in the Rare
Books Room of Stanford University’s Green Library, the Bancroft Library at Berkeley,
Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Bodleian, the British Library and the librarians here
at Magdalen, all of whom have been co-operative, friendly and efficient.

I’m grateful to various audiences for listening to earlier versions of some of this
material, especially Berkeley’s Roman Stoicism Seminar in May 1999, the APSA
meeting in Atlanta, GA, September 1999, and the Political Science Department of the
University of Pennsylvania in January 2000, which I thank here again for not then
offering me a job.

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 I should note, finally, that material that appears in this thesis has appeared in The
Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000) and in Grotius and the Stoa, ed. Hans W. Blom (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 2003), fine volumes both.

Dedication

This dissertation is for my friends,

some of whose names appear in the Acknowledgments,
and against the warmongers who govern the United States of America
and the United Kingdom at the present time.

A Note on the Notes

In this dissertation I have often used contemporary translations of the various authors
from whom I quote, checking the translations for accuracy against the originals (e.g.,
Lipsius, Senault, Bayle). At other times I have used recent translations (e.g.,
Malebranche, Rousseau). I have on occasion made my own translations, or used those
provided by colleagues (and where this happens, it is noted). A small number of
remarks have been left in the original French.

To avoid cluttering the notes, I use standard references for ancient authors. For ease of
reference, quotations from Greek and Latin texts that are not otherwise specified are
taken from the volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, and these are not listed
separately in the Bibliography at the end. (This is true, for example, in the cases of
Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca, Diogenes Laertius and others). In the case of Augustine,
some standardised references are given (e.g., to On Christian Doctrine, the
Confessions, etc.), though references to The City of God are to Book and Chapter,
followed by a page reference to the recent edition in the Cambridge Texts in the
History of Political Thought series: The City of God against the Pagans, translated by
R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Other sources are cited as follows:

• “Dictionary” refers to the second and most recent English translation of Pierre
Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, A general dictionary, historical
and critical... (London: J. Bettenham, 1734-1741), with citations appearing in
the main text with the name of the dictionary article enclosed by quotation
marks, followed by a reference to the relevant note.

• “Encyclopaedia” refers to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des

sciences des arts et des métiers, edited by J. L. d’Alembert and Denis Diderot
(17 vols., Paris, Geneva and Neufchâtel, 1751-1772).

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 • “Long & Sedley” refers to A. A. Long and David Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic
Philosophers (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

• “Search” refers to Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, translated by

Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus, OH: Ohio State
University Press, 1980).

• References to passages from Rousseau are generally keyed to the Pleïade

Oeuvres completes, given as OC, as well as to convenient English editions.

Bibliographical references follow the practice of what my copy of EndNote takes to be

the style of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. A full reference is given the first
time a source is cited, and in the Bibliography; thereafter the author and short title only
is presented.

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 Prologue: Paris, Year Three

On 29 Prairial, An III – 17 June 1795, according to the once and future Gregorian
Calendar – the French revolutionist Gilbert Romme, five of his fellow Montagnard
deputies, and various others, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal that had
been appointed to restore order to Paris after the popular uprisings of 12 Germinal and
1 Prairial. Shortly after the sentence was handed down, the six deputies attempted to
kill themselves with two concealed knives and a pair of scissors, in order to preserve
their liberty to dispose of their own lives rather than submit to the violence of the post-
Thermidorian state. Four succeeded, and thereby avoided death on the guillotine. Their
language was thoroughly Stoic: Romme had told the court that although “mon corps
est à la loi, mon âme reste indépendante et ne peut être flétrie”;1 his colleagues Pierre
Amable Soubrany, Jean-Marie Goujon and Pierre Bourbotte similarly used the rhetoric
of Epictetus and Seneca and invoked the example of the Younger Cato to explain their
resolve and their actions to posterity.2 The dramas of the French Revolution, Karl Marx
memorably noted, were often played out “in Roman costume and with Roman
phrases”, 3 and these Montagnards’ suicides were exemplary in this regard, earning
them the unofficial title of “the last of the Romans”.4

The Montagnards’ debt to the Romans was indeed many-sided. Miriam Griffin has
isolated three features which several well-attested Roman suicides shared. First,
theatricality, the suicides being elaborate, drawn out performances. Second, they had a
social character, and she mentions in particular the frequent physical presence of
friends at Roman suicides, in contrast to the general practice of modern suicides, who
tend to die alone. Third, the suicide remains calm, having resolved to die after careful
deliberation.5

The Roman “cult of suicide” was not exclusively Stoic: one of Griffin’s examples
is Cicero’s correspondent Atticus, who aligned himself with the Epicureans.6 But it is
reasonable to assert that the dominant philosophical current which both contributed to
and was popularly associated with this Roman ideology was Stoic, with all three of
Griffin’s motifs clearly present in Stoic texts on suicide. Epictetus’s language, for
example, is shot through with theatrical metaphors (“Remember that you are an actor
in a play, the character of which is determined by the playwright [ho didaskalos]: if he

1
J. Dautry, ed., Gilbert Romme et son temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966),
p.204.
2
Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995), pp.26-9.
3
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, 1958), vol.1, p.248.
4
Thomas Carlyle used this label to describe the Montagnards in 1837. Thom, Republics,
Nations and Tribes, p.312fn59.
5
Miriam Griffin, “Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide: I,” Greece and Rome 33, no. 1 (1986),
pp.65-6.
6
Ibid., p.67.

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wishes the play to be short, it is short; if long, it is long”7). In discussing the reasons
that could legitimate suicide, the social nature of the act was often foregrounded: thus,
in his doxography of the Stoics, Diogenes Laertius reported that “the wise man will for
reasonable cause make his own exit from life, on his country’s behalf or for the sake of
his friends, or if he suffer intolerable pain, mutilation, or incurable disease”. 8 And
while the Stoics provided more arguments in favour of suicide than the other
philosophical schools, theirs was not a blanket defence of the practice in any or all
circumstances. The Stoic discussions of suicide set out the appropriate reasons for
choosing a rational exit from one’s own life, so Cicero, for example, could report that
Cato was “delighted at having a reason for dying”, because “the god who rules within
us forbids us to depart hence without his orders”.9 Having made the decision to die,
there was no need for histrionics, and the Stoic suicide could remain composed.
Epictetus again:

“Do not become a greater coward than the children, but just as they
say, “I won’t play any longer,” when the thing does not please them,
so do you also, when things seem to you to have reached that stage,
merely say, “I won’t play any longer,” and take your departure; but if
you stay, stop lamenting.”10

When we make allowances for the extraordinary circumstances of the Montagnards’

suicide, all three of these characteristics – theatricality, sociality and resolve – can be
discerned, and their courtroom rhetoric advertised their stance as specifically Stoic in
addition to being generically Roman.

Two additional aspects of the Romme suicide that further emphasised its Roman
Stoic character are also worthy of note. In the first place, the suicide was a decisively
pagan gesture, owing to the long tradition of opposition on the part of the Christian
Church to the practice. There is no explicit condemnation of suicide in the Bible,
whose suicides include Samson, Saul and Judas Iscariot,11 nor in the early Christian
tradition. Thereafter, however, the Church has been consistently hostile. The first
significant Christian critic of self-killing was Augustine, who devoted four chapters of
the first book of City of God to the matter, with particular attention to the suicide of
women who killed themselves rather than suffer the shame of living on as the victims
of rape. Reports of the sack of Rome provided Augustine with contemporary examples
of this phenomenon, the episode of Lucretia a legendary example of the same, and his
position is clear: the virtue of chastity pertains to the mind rather than the body, and it
is not necessarily threatened by sexual assault; self-killing is prohibited because it is a

7
Epictetus, Manual, 17; also Discourses, I.24.44-49. For a discussion of Epictetus on suicide,
see A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), pp.203-6.
8
Diogenes Laertius, VII.130 (emphasis added).
9
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.74.
10
Epictetus, Discourses, I.24.20.
11
See Judges 16:26-30, 1 Samuel 31:1-6, and Matthew 27:3-5 respectively.

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form of murder;12 Lucretia was therefore guilty of the murder of an innocent and chaste
woman.13 Augustine’s assertion in the following chapter, that “the words ‘Thou shalt
not kill’ refer to the killing of a man – not another man; therefore, not even thyself...
[f]or he who kills himself, kills nothing else than a man”, 14 later became the
authoritative sentence for Thomas Aquinas in his own criticism of suicide in the
Summa Theologica, which subsequently became canonical within the Church.15 The
suicide taboo remained in place throughout the centuries that followed, and it is
significant that the authors who attacked it in the eighteenth century were among those
most celebrated for their lack of orthodox religion, including “that well-known atheist
Mr. Hume” in an essay of 1757, and the Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, whose
character Usbek mounted a defence of the practice of suicide in one of the Persian
Letters.16

The second additional respect in which the Montagnards sought to invoke a Roman,
Stoic past was in their political commitment to an idealised version of the actually-
existing, though thoroughly debased, res publica. The imaginative association between
Stoicism and a nostalgic republicanism had been forged above all by the Stoic Cato’s
suicide at Thapsus, after the victory of Julius Caesar, 17 and the mythology which
became attached to Cato’s death (and, though to a lesser extent, to that of Brutus) is
important, as mainstream Stoic doctrine did not in itself provide much explicit support
for republican politics. It is true that the Stoics had recommended that the wise man
engage in the life of his political community (politeuesthai),18 and, alone of the ancient
philosophical schools, they upheld the practical life of the wise citizen over the
contemplative life of philosophical reflection (bios theoretikos) preferred by

12
City of God, I.16-17, pp.26-7.
13
Augustine attacks the Roman idolisation of Lucretia, summing up his criticism in the pointed
question, “If she was an adulteress, why is she praised? If she was pure, why was she slain?”
City of God, I.19, pp.29-31. (This opinion of Augustine’s is attacked at length by Bayle,
Dictionary, “Lucretia”, note D).
14
While suicide falls under the prohibition of the sixth commandment (Exodus 20.13),
Augustine is quick to deny that the slaughter of “beasts and cattle” does, too. City of God, I.20,
p.32.
15
Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-IIae Q.64 Arts. 5, 6. For a contrasting mediaeval view of
suicide, cf. Dante: Inferno XIII.22-108 (the suicides in the seventh circle) and Purgatorio, I.28-
111 (the meeting with Cato at the foot of the mountain).
16
Hume’s essay was published posthumously and anonymously in 1777. David Hume, Essays
Moral, Political and Literary, Eugene F. Miller ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987),
pp.577-589. Montesquieu, Persian letters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), Letter 72,
p.152.
17
For Cato’s suicide, Plutarch, Lives: Cato the Younger; Seneca, Ep. 24.6. Also Griffin,
“Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide”, I and II, Greece and Rome 33, no.2 (1986).
18
“Again, the Stoics say that the wise man will take part in politics, if nothing hinders him...”
Diogenes Laertius, VII.121. The deponent verb politeuesthai means “live as a citizen”, so the
Greek term may not have the connotation Cicero places on it when he translates it into the Latin
claim that the “sapiens velit gerere et administrare rem publicam”. Cicero, De Finibus,
III.xx.68.

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Aristotle,19 or over the quiet apolitical life enjoyed in the company of one’s friends, as
Epicurus had recommended.20

But a robust link between Stoic philosophy and republican politics is harder to find,
for there is no obvious statement of a democratic or republican political theory in the
surviving fragments of Stoic political theory.21 The most radical Stoic text is Zeno’s
fragmentary Republic, though it would be hard to describe this straightforwardly as a
democratic or republican manifesto, and its influence on later Greek, Roman and post-
Roman political thinking is hard to ascertain.22 Although the Stoics denied Aristotelian
doctrines of the natural slavery of some human beings, their thinking was quite
inegalitarian, celebrating the “liberty” of the sage in contrast to the “slavery” of the
foolish multitude of men.23 Diogenes Laertius reports the Stoics’ bland preference for a
mixed regime incorporating democratic, monarchical and aristocratic elements but
gives no further details.24 Insofar as there was a developed republican political theory
presented in Stoic terms, it was the work of a non-Stoic, for Cicero was a follower of
the New Academy, 25 yet his De Officiis was one of his most markedly Stoic
philosophical texts, and his central argument that only what was honestus could be
utile certainly strikes a specifically Stoic chord. 26 On the other hand, Stoics wrote
textbooks on kingship, 27 Seneca wrote to legitimate the Principate, 28 and Marcus
Aurelius was Emperor of Rome. Nevertheless, the Roman Stoics did become powerful
symbols of resistance to imperial tyranny. In the second half of the first century AD
Seneca and Thrasea Paetus were two of the most celebrated Stoic suicides, and
Helvidius Priscus, whose courage was celebrated by Epictetus, was executed on the
orders of Vespasian.29 Yet we should hesitate again before interpreting these episodes
as supporting a republican politics: opposition to the Emperors did not necessarily
follow from a commitment to Stoicism, as the career of Seneca again makes clear, and

19
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1178b.
20
Diogenes Laertius, X.119-120, 131-2.
21
Patricia Springborg, “Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge
Contextual Historians,” Political Studies 49, no. 5 (2001), pp.857-9.
22
For contrasting views on the interpretation of Zeno’s Republic and lengthy discussion of the
surviving fragments cf. Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic idea of the city, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), Andrew Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa (London: Duckworth,
1990).
23
Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, V.
24
Diogenes Laertius, VII.131.
25
Cicero, De Finibus, V.iii.7.
26
For discussion of the relationship between what is honestus and what is utile, see De Officiis,
III.20ff. For details of the links between Stoicism and Cicero’s political thought, see Marcia L.
Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,
1985), vol.1, pp.89-104.
27
e.g, Sphaerus, reported by Diogenes Laertius, VII.178.
28
Miriam Griffin, Seneca: a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp.202-
221.
29
Epictetus, Discourses, I.ii.19-24. Dio, Roman History, LXV.12.1, 13.1-3.

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the once-popular notion of a coherent “Stoic opposition” to the Emperors has been
overstated.30

The links between a professed Stoicism and republican politics, then, are often far
from clear. But it is important to see that an act of aristocratic Stoic self-sacrifice or
self-killing could easily be - and often was - recoded in a republican fashion, owing to
the centrality of the values of freedom and the common good in both Stoic ethics and
republican political thought, both ancient and modern. Seneca in particular made
something of a fetish of the act of self-killing, and his rhetoric certainly yoked suicide
to a certain idea of freedom:

See you that precipice? Down that is the way to liberty... Do you ask
what is the highway to liberty? Any vein in your body!31

The good of the whole, furthermore, provides sufficient reason for action in both
traditions, and while the Stoic is chiefly concerned with his position in the kosmos (or,
its political analogue, the kosmopolis) rather than in the more mundane body politic,
yet, as Diogenes Laertius noted, a Stoic might reasonably choose to die “on his
country’s behalf” (huper patridos), a claim which bridges the gap between Stoicism
and republicanism to a considerable extent.32

With regard to these matters of religion and politics, therefore, Gilbert Romme’s
credentials were secure. He had certainly managed to politeuesthai, having served in
the revolutionary Convention as a deputy from Puy-de-Dôme and having been in
particular one of the chief architects of the new Calendar. 33 This work above all
secured for him a set of unimpeachable pagan and republican credentials, for the
Calendar transformed the representation of the passage of time itself into a permanent
celebration of the Revolution’s triumph over monarchical tyranny in France. 34 In
abolishing the seven-day week and replacing it with a Sabbath-less décade,
furthermore, the Calendar stood as one of the most impressive products of the
Revolution’s dechristianising zeal. Finally, the political degeneration of the Revolution

30
Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman
Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.598; Griffin, Seneca,
pp.363-6. Cf Neal Wood, Reflections on Political Theory: A Voice of Reason from the Past
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp.81-3.
31
Seneca, De Ira, III.15, 4. There are alternative Stoic opinions. Long notes of Epictetus, for
example, that he “shows none of Senecea’s fasincation with suicide, nor does he treat it, like
Seneca, as the supreme test of a Stoic’s freedom”. Long, Epictetus, p.204.
32
The Stoic argument for patriotic suicide is structurally quite similar to Aquinas’s second
argument against suicide: the Stoics argued that the part can sacrifice itself for the good of the
whole, a possibility which Aquinas denied. See note 15 above.
33
J. Dautry, ed., Gilbert Romme et son temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966),
pp.16-7.
34
Cf. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, XV. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London:
Fontana Press, 1992), pp.252-3.

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represented by the Jacobin Terror and the Thermidorian reaction set the stage for the
drama of Romme’s political suicide. Cato had killed himself rather than submit to that
other great reformer of the Calendar, Julius Caesar. Romme likewise killed himself as
a protest against the increasingly tyrannical government of the French Republic – and
one which would itself be supplanted in the not-too-distant future by the emergence of
a new Caesar in the shape of General Bonaparte and the inauguration of a new French
Empire.35

These parallels between the terminal crisis of the Roman Republic on the one hand
and the Paris of Year Three on the other with the careful reconstruction of a Roman
suicide drama are sufficiently striking to make Romme’s inheritance of the mantle of
Roman Stoicism seem reasonably uncomplicated. Yet when we think about the way in
which Stoicism is thus triply coded as pagan, patriotic and republican in this modern
context, we ought to be puzzled. For the most authoritative and the most popular
version of Neo-Stoicism which had been articulated to an early modern audience, that
of Justus Lipsius in the late sixteenth century, had drawn heavily on Roman Stoicism
in general and on Seneca in particular in order to fashion a doctrine which was fully
compatible (so he argued) with Christian orthodoxy, which condemned suicide, 36
which presented patriotic sentiment as the result of an intellectual mistake,37 and which
opposed Renaissance republicanism, advocated absolutist rule and denied authority to
representative assemblies on the terrain of politics.38

Between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, then, the meaning,
understanding and implications of Stoic philosophy were the subject of substantial
disagreements and reinterpretations which arose in a variety of sites of theological,
philosophical and political contestation across Western Europe. Yet while each of these
sites can be investigated with an eye to a deeper understanding of the local intellectual
context in which an argument about Stoicism took place, it is possible also to take a
step back and ask whether we can identify a broader pattern in the ways in which Stoic
arguments were both advocated and criticised over these two centuries, to see whether
a coherent historical narrative can be constructed which cuts across national frontiers in

35
For a more detailed account of the politics of the martyrs of Prairial, see Dorinda Outram,
The Body and the French Revolution: sex, class and political culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), pp.68-69 and ch.6, passim. She maps some of the contours of French
Revolutionary Stoicism convincingly, and gives a historical analysis of the rise and fall of the
practice of what she calls “heroic suicide”, with attention to both its gendered and social class
dimensions, drawing attention in particular to the aristocratic dimension of the Montagnards’
suicide insofar as they sought to avoid death at the hands of the (egalitarian) guillotine.
36
Justus Lipsius, Manuductionis ad stoicam philosophiam libri tres (Antwerp: 1604), 3.22-3.
37
Justus Lipsius, Tvvo Bookes of Constancie, trans. Sir John Stradling, Edited with an
introduction by Rudolph Kirk; notes by Clayton Morris Hall. ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1939), pp.85-99.
38
Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp.41-2, 47.

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order to help us illuminate a passage from the Neo-Stoicism of Justus Lipsius to that of
Gilbert Romme.

As we have already seen, the Stoic Epictetus was fond of comparing human life to
a theatrical performance: we learn our role, we act it out, and, when the time comes, we
willingly leave the stage. A Stoic would have understood perfectly well the
contemporary cliché that the best kind of acting is that which looks most natural, but
which is in fact the most artfully contrived. The suicides of Gilbert Romme and his
associates were presented to the world as the recreation of an archetypal Roman drama.
The argument of this dissertation will show how two centuries of preceding
philosophical argument helped to make this striking performance possible.

14
 Introduction

The project that culminated in this dissertation began, once upon a time, with a
rather banal observation, that there was a set of academic studies which dealt with the
Neo-Stoicism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and a growing
academic literature about the “Stoicism” of various figures of the European
Enlightenment, but there seemed to be comparatively little academic discussion of
what intellectuals were doing with and against Stoic philosophy in the intervening
period, roughly speaking from the time of Thomas Hobbes to that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.

The literature of Neo-Stoicism is now well developed, and now includes studies as
diverse as – to select a few, not quite at random - Richard Tuck’s Philosophy and
Government, Anthony Levi’s French Moralists, William J. Bouwsma’s recent Waning
of the Renaissance or Adriana McCrea’s Constant Minds, and the range of dates
specified in the subtitles of these books indicates the general agreement as to the
relevant time period for considering the impact of the revival of Stoic ideas on
European writing: 1572-1651, 1585-1649, 1550-1640 and 1584-1650 respectively.39
Turning to the eighteenth century, Peter Gay’s classic interpretation of the
Enlightenment as the triumph of a certain kind of modern paganism pushed the Stoic
thematic into the foreground and drew attention to the enthusiasm for Stoic authors
shared by Montesquieu, Diderot and others;40 and there has been an especial concern
with the Stoicism of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment in recent years, whether in
Richard Sher’s social history of the Edinburgh intellectuals or amidst the rich seam of
writing on Adam Smith.41

39
Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993); Anthony Levi, French Moralists: the theory of the passions 1585-1649 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1964); William J. Bouwsma, The waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: political virtue and the
Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584-1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
40
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an interpretation, 2 vols. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1967-70).
41
Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1985). For recent work on Adam Smith’s relationship to the Stoics, for
example, see Vivienne Brown, Adam Smith's Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and
Conscience (London: Routledge, 1994); Stewart Justman, The Autonomous Male of Adam
Smith (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith
and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Athol
Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995); Fonna Forman-Barzilai, “Adam Smith as Globalization Theorist,” Critical Review 14, no.
4 (2002). For a more sceptical view, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith,
Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp.
pp.131-4; and for the most detailed account of Smith’s use of classical sources, see Gloria
Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

15
 So the large question I became interested in was in how Europeans got here from
there, or, to be more precise, whether there was an historical story to be told which
might connect or build some kind of bridge between the early Neo-Stoicisms of the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the one hand and these quasi-
Stoicisms of the High Enlightenment on the other. In particular, what, if anything,
could we learn from a study of a time in which Stoicism was relatively unfashionable,
the object principally of criticism rather than adherence or positive inspiration?

***

Of the various problems inherent in any attempt to write a history of the

controversies surrounding Stoicism in modern European philosophical discourse, the
chief among them is that of determining just what is to be considered as “Stoicism” in
the first place. For Stoicism not some kind of transhistorical universal, and it is
important not to reify it as such. There is and there can be no “litmus test” criterion
which can be applied to separate real from merely apparent Stoics at any point in time,
and it would be a bad history which set out to attempt to isolate instantiations of
“authentic” Stoicism across great swathes of space and time. In any case, the ancient
Stoics modified their own teaching over time, hence the conventional and convenient
division into Early, Middle and Late Stoas. The school in Athens may have been the
home of Stoic orthodoxy, but it is a significant fact that no text written within and for
the use of the school itself has survived in more than fragmentary form. The ancient
Stoics acquired a reputation for monolithic dogmatism, but - by a happy irony of
history - this has been undermined by the multiple voices of the surviving texts which
express Stoic teachings most fully, for the Stoic books we do still possess by Cicero,
Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are diverse in terms of both philosophical
content and literary form.

The most recent generation of contemporary scholarship associated with A. A.

Long, Brad Inwood, Julia Annas, Malcolm Schofield, Michael Frede and others has
done much to transform the understanding and appreciation of technical, systematic
Stoic philosophy. In so doing, this tradition of scholarship has emphasised the central
role of Chrysippus, the head of the school 232-206 BCE and the creator of much of its
logic and physics, in defining the structure and philosophical content of what has come
down to us under the banner of Stoicism. Yet there is a major problem with attempting
to employ Chrysippan Stoicism as a fixed point from which to assess the degree to
which early modern authors were or were not truly Stoic in their arguments. The seven
hundred and five books which Chrysippus was reported to have written are all lost,
except insofar as they are preserved in fragments in the reports of later, occasionally
hostile, authors such as Plutarch, and it is only thanks to several centuries of
increasingly sophisticated textual scholarship, that contemporary scholars now possess
a significantly better grip on the nature and subtleties of this Stoicism than was
available to anyone in seventeenth or eighteenth century Europe. But it is not simply
the case that Chrysippus’s teachings were only imperfectly understood by or not
readily available to early modern writers; in fact he was often not considered central to
the Stoic tradition at all! On the one hand, early modern authors often followed the
16
practice of Diogenes Laertius, whose doxography of Stoicism is attached to the section
on Zeno, treating the founder of the school as ipso facto the chief representative of its
thought. 42 On the other hand, and more interestingly, some writers displayed a
considerable hostility to Chrysippus, treating him more as a deviant or heterodox Stoic
than as any kind of exemplar. Lipsius is typical of this line of argument, for example,
when he mentions “Chrysippus, who first corrupted that grave sect of philosophers
with crabbed subtleties of questions”.43

A further difficulty standing in the way of being able to write a history of thinking
about Stoicism is the lack of the right kind of institutional continuity. A history of the
development of Stoic doctrine in antiquity is at least in part a history of the Stoic
school itself, and vice versa. By contrast, there is no comparable single institution
which presides over Stoic studies in modern Europe, and which might be able to
provide a coherent structure and a degree of content to a modern narrative. There was a
distinctive Neo-Stoic movement centred around the life and writings of Justus Lipsius
and the University of Leiden, and this has been the object of detailed historical
studies. 44 Yet this dissertation is chiefly concerned with the period after this Neo-
Stoicism, from 1640 or so until the time of the high Enlightenment, during which no
particular institution, whether political, academic or ecclesiastical, ever achieved any
kind of generally-recognised hegemony over the legitimate interpretation of Stoicism
in Europe.

Shifting attention from institutions to individuals, it is important, as always, also to

recognise the perennial problems of tracing intellectual “influence”. In T. J.
Hochstrasser’s words, “When the notion of ‘influence’ is applied to a long span of time
and to a large number of writers it can easily deteriorate into nothing more than the
correlation of superficially similar doctrines.”45 On the one hand, it would clearly be a
pedantic and substantially pointless exercise to wade through the corpus of early
modern philosophical writing looking for any or every moment at which the arguments
that are deployed seem to bear a resemblance to Stoic theses. Nor is it helpful to label
anything that smacks of self-fashioning, self-discipline, fatalism, or imperturbability as
Stoic in its inspiration, for these themes are the joint property of various philosophical
schools and religious traditions, both ancient and modern. 46 On the other hand,

42
Diogenes Laertius, VII.38ff.
43
Lipsius, Of Constancie, ch.XVIII. For more on early modern hostility to Chrysippus, see Part
Three Section Two below.
44
Two excellent examples are Oestreich, Neostoicism, or Mark P. O. Morford, Stoics and
Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
45
T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), p.1. For a classic statement of the problem, see John Dunn, “The
identity of the history of ideas,” in Political Obligation in Historical Context, ed. John Dunn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
46
For an example of this error in action, see Léontine Zanta, La renaissance du stoïcisme au
XVIe siècle (Paris: 1914). T. S. Eliot is the most celebrated critic often thought to have made a
mistake of this kind, with his remarks about Seneca in Elizabethan drama. See “Shakespeare

17
however, it is equally important not to understand Stoicism so narrowly – as the
conscious endorsement, perhaps, of however many specific and carefully delineated
philosophical propositions – that we refuse to acknowledge the substantial presence of
Stoic ideas in any modern philosopher’s thinking or the productive consequences that
can flow from a constructive engagement with Stoic philosophy.47

But if this kind of hunt for “objective” evidence of influence is fraught with
difficulty, it cannot be set aside entirely in favour of locating those moments when
authors self-identify with Stoic ideas and arguments and expressly identify them as
such. For, as we shall see repeatedly in what follows, there is a politics attached to the
uses of Stoic label, and writers only advertise themselves as being or doing something
Stoic in particular and varying circumstances. Then again, while there is something to
be learned from a study of the conditions under which writers both embrace and
repudiate the term “Stoic”, there is more to the study of early modern Stoicism than
simply tracking the way that the label functions in argumentative discourse. Guillaume
Du Vair advertises his thinking as Stoic in inspiration in a way that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau does not, for example, yet the latter’s engagement with the legacy of the
Stoics is of considerably more interest than that of the former.

Hochstrasser is able to address the problem of determining intellectual “influence”

in more than an arbitrary manner through the study of “a range of contemporary
sources which discuss self-consciously the relation of contemporary practice to past
achievement”, in his case the “histories of morality” which were written in, especially,
Germany in the century following Pufendorf’s “De Origine et Progressu Disciplinae
Juris Naturalis” in 1678. 48 No single genre of philosophical writing serves as a
comparable backbone for this study, but it is fortunate in this regard that those who do
write about or indeed against Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
often make it clear what their contemporary concerns are which lead them to engage
with the ancient arguments. An elucidation of these links between contemporary
philosophical disputation and the legacy of the Stoics, I contend, provides the right
kind of connection between “contemporary practice” and “past achievement” to make
the enterprise worthwhile.

This work, therefore, is driven by the belief that a history of philosophy can be
written which is attentive to the contexts in which philosophical arguments are
developed without being reducible to them. It therefore intends to occupy a relatively
stable historiographical ground between two less tenable positions, on the one hand,

and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd enlarged ed. (London:
Faber & Faber, 1951).
47
This is the method followed by Gilles Monsarrat in his survey of English Renaissance
literature, and it leads him to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that there are practically no
Stoic authors writing for, or Stoic characters presented upon, the Elizabethan stage. (Hamlet’s
Horatio, he thinks, just about makes the cut.) Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch:
Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: 1984), esp. pp.129-30.
48
Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories, p.1, 38.

18
that the “timelessness” of philosophical problems is sufficiently self-evident that they
can be usefully studied ahistorically (Straussianism, according to its critics); on the
other hand, that practices of philosophical writing are so firmly embedded in particular
discourses and local traditions that the attempt to reach beyond their narrow confines
must be self-defeating (the “Cambridge school”, according to its).

There is, of course, a danger that a thesis which covers a lengthy stretch of time,
around one hundred and fifty years, and which cuts across national, confessional and
other frontiers will fail to be sufficiently well grounded in a determinate intellectual
context. The danger is unavoidable, but here I draw attention to two general features of
the argument which help the different strands of the discussion about Stoicism to hang
together across the period discussed in the pages that follow. First of all, at various
points in the dissertation I pay attention to the changing understanding of Stoic
philosophy in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe as this is expressed in three
kinds of works. There are the new editions and vernacular translations of Stoic authors
which were produced in several countries in every new generation, and which provide
useful information, especially in their Prefaces, about the ways in which early modern
scholars of the classics were approaching Stoic philosophy. Second, there are the many
books on the history of ancient philosophy, a discipline which develops with great
rapidity over the period. These are important not only as a store of factual information
and diverse opinions on ancient authors but also as contributions to a long-running
argument about the relationship of philosophy to its past. 49 Third, and partially
overlapping with this second category, are the classic reference books of the
Enlightenment, for Bayle’s Dictionary (1697) and the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and
d’Alembert (1751-1772) were for many readers the basic sources of information about
the Stoic philosophers, as they were about so much else. These three kinds of works
taken together provide a valuable contemporary scholarly infrastructure, a framework
within which particular lines of argumentation about the Stoics can be coherently
elaborated.

In the second place, the narrative concentrates as much, or even more, on anti-
Stoic writing as it does on the more constructive and sympathetic engagements with
Stoic ideas. This owes in part to a decision to focus on the period between the fading of
the Neo-Stoic movement in the first part of the seventeenth century and the renewed
popularity of Stoic opinions in the Enlightenment, a period when the dominant mood
of European letters is anti-Stoic in orientation. But the study of anti-Stoicism yields
valuable fruit of its own. Seventeenth-century anti-Stoicism in particular constitutes a
crucial dialogue with both past and present philosophy, and through an examination of
the ways in which critics try to assimilate their opponents to Stoic positions – and of
the lines of attack which they prosecute against those positions – we can better
appreciate what concerned contemporaries took to be at stake in the intellectual

49
For a comprehensive survey of the various sources, see the various volumes of the Storia
delle storie generali della filosofia (Brescia: La Scuola, 1979-) under the general editorship of
Giovanni Santinello.

19
upheavals occasioned by the introduction of the new philosophies of Descartes, Grotius,
Hobbes and others; and in this sense the dissertation offers a prismatic perspective on
the development of modern philosophy itself. In considering the breadth and depth of
the best anti-Stoic writings, furthermore, we also become better placed to understand
the tasks of those who later sought to revive or restate portions of Stoic theory, as
effective prior criticism of the Stoics’ major arguments moulded the intellectual
possibilities open to such attempts.

The dissertation presents itself as a history of arguments about Stoicism in

seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, but it is important to note its partial and
incomplete character, and in particular the way in which several different and equally
plausible narratives could have been offered in its place. The three figures who
dominate the structural and thematic organisation of the present work, for example, are
Justus Lipsius, Pierre Bayle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Alternative histories of
Stoicism in early modern Europe could by contrast have passed from Michel de
Montaigne via Benedict Spinoza to Immanuel Kant, or from Hugo Grotius through
Samuel Pufendorf to the Adams Smith and Ferguson, and rival accounts of the
engagements of the philosophers with the Stoa could be imagined which would cover
much of the same ground, yet end up with significantly different emphases and
substantially different content. Were we to map the concerns of the dissertation in
spatial terms, inspired by Franco Moretti’s example, we would find that France and the
Low Countries stand at the centre of the work; there is a significant amount of attention
to England, though much less to Scotland; Germany is comparatively neglected; the
Italian and Iberian peninsulas and Eastern Europe and Russia entirely so.50

There is also, furthermore, a degree of disciplinary indeterminacy. The project is

principally intended as a contribution to the history of political thought; it is offered as
a thesis in political science to a Department of Government; and it opens and closes on
familiar political terrain. Yet much of the middle of the essay concerns itself with
metaphysics, theology or classical scholarship, and often the sources under
investigation do more obviously belong to the world of moral psychology or religious
controversy than to political theory as it is conventionally understood. Only at the end
of the dissertation, in the sections on Rousseau, do I deal directly with what are
generally taken to be “mainstream” or “canonical” texts in the history of political
thought. It might not be too misleading, in fact, to say that most of the time the
dissertation’s concerns lie more with the politics of philosophy than with the
philosophy of politics. And it is worth being well aware from the outset that had those
opening and closing concerns lain elsewhere - in the worlds of moral theory or the
determinism/free will debate, for example - the resulting dissertation might have had a
very different argument at its core.

In part, these decisions about the content and focus of the dissertation have been
driven by a desire not to have to recapitulate too much of the existing academic

50
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998).

20
literature on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy and the
presence of Stoicism within it. There is, as mentioned earlier, a considerable and
expanding literature which engages the topic of the Stoicism of the Scottish
Enlightenment, both with respect to individual thinkers and to the movement as a
whole, and I have only touched on this briefly while my attention is largely engaged
elsewhere. There is also much good recent work on the Stoic thematics of leading
seventeenth century poets, which usefully addresses the political implications of a
commitment to Stoicism, and while this literature is of very great interest, it is one that
I avoid altogether. 51 Other subjects have simply proved too large adequately to be
addressed in these pages, such as that of Kant’s relationship to the Stoic tradition in
light of the present research.

Three recent books require particular mention. The first is Giovanni Bonacina’s
1996 volume on the use of the Hellenistic philosophical schools in the Enlightenment,
itself a reworking of his own 1993 doctoral dissertation presented to the philosophy
faculty of the University of Turin.52 To a considerable extent, the concerns of the book
and this dissertation are similar: Bonacina traces the presence of Stoicism in modern
philosophical texts in a survey which covers much of the eighteenth-century landscape,
ranging widely across authors and national contexts. Some of the same topics are
discussed in these two works, both of which provide a treatment of the Stoic theme in
Bayle, for example, together with a discussion of the historiography of philosophy in
the German Enlightenment.53 But in general the emphases of Bonacina’s book and this
dissertation are quite different. Over two thirds of the present study, for example,
address the period before Bayle, with whom Bonacina begins; and the only
Enlightenment thinker discussed in significant detail in the pages that follow is
Rousseau, whom Bonacina substantially ignores, as his narrative concentrates on
providing background to Kant and Hegel in particular, the two philosophers who
dominate the second half of his book. I am chiefly interested in examining how authors
from Bayle to Rousseau address a legacy bequeathed to them by the seventeenth-
century debates canvassed in the earlier part of the study; Bonacina’s work speaks
more directly to specifically eighteenth-century concerns.

The second recent volume worthy of note is J. B. Schneewind’s book on The

Invention of Autonomy, a comprehensive history of the development of European
moral theory from the time of Suarez and Grotius to that of Kant. 54 Schneewind

51
The best work of this kind is Andrew Eric Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the
Age of Milton: war and peace reconciled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
52
Giovanni Bonacina, Filosofia ellenistica e cultura moderna: epicureismo, stoicismo e
scetticismo da Bayle a Hegel (Firenze: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1996). Its only significant
review in an Anglophone journal was a deservedly favourable piece, Jose R. Maia Neto,
“Review of Filosofia ellenistica e cultura moderna,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2
(1998).
53
Bonacina, Filosofia ellenistica e cultura moderna, pp.27-32 and 50-56 respectively.
54
J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998).

21
organises his history in four sections: the rise and fall of modern natural law, the
development of a perfectionist ethic, the search for a moral theory that would stand
independently of the truth of particular religious claims, and the elaboration of a moral
ideal of autonomy. Although Schneewind discusses Grotius’s relationship to the Stoics
briefly in the account of the origins of modern natural law theory, the bulk of his
remarks about the modern legacy of Stoicism are reserved for his presentation of
Lipsius, Pierre Charron and Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the second section, on moral
perfectionism. But what is striking, setting his study alongside this one, is how central
themes from Stoic philosophy cut across all four of his chosen areas of study:
Schneewind’s Part Three discusses the contributions of both the Jansenists and Pierre
Bayle to the development of a secular ethic, while the work of Parts Two and Three of
this thesis brings out the extent to which these authors were concerned to fashion a
sharp critique of Stoic arguments and attitudes; on the matter of autonomy, finally, it is
readily apparent that the ancient sect who made the most of an ideal of moral
independence was that of the Stoics, and that Kant and Rousseau’s writing is most
heavily inflected with Stoic language and other Stoic tropes when they turn to meditate
on their not-so-different conceptions of moral autonomy. In this sense, rather than
offering a narrative to compete with, still less to contradict Schneewind’s, this study
should be read as a modest companion piece. His general conclusions about the history
and character of modern moral philosophy are ones which I am very happy to accept.

Finally, I should note that I did not encounter Hans W. Blom’s impressive study of
naturalism in seventeenth-century Dutch political thought until I was polishing the
final version of this thesis. Had I done so earlier in the project and thought carefully
about some of the questions which it raises, I imagine that this dissertation might have
become something quite different. It would certainly, for example, have had more
about Dutch writers in it.55

Overview of the Argument

To identify as a Stoic around the year 1600 was to embrace one of the most vibrant
currents in late Renaissance humanism. The Neo-Stoic doctrines that were being
elaborated at this time offered a set of personal therapies for troubled times, a political
teaching to strengthen the civil government of a virtuous prince, a public philosophy
that sought to avoid the scourge of religious war, and a philosophical view of the world
that sought harmoniously to blend Christian teaching with ancient wisdom. “Let it not
seem strange unto us that Philosophie should be a meanes to help Divinitie”, wrote
Thomas James, Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1598, “or that Christians may profit
by the Stoicks”. 56 Yet this optimism about the possibilities for Christian and Stoic
identities mutually to reinforce one another did not last, and the first three Parts of the

55
Hans W. Blom, Morality and Causality in Politics: the rise of naturalism in Dutch
seventeenth-century political thought (Utrecht: 1995).
56
From the Epistle Dedicatory, Guillaume du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks, trans.
Thomas James (London: 1598).

22
dissertation anatomise the movement from Neo-Stoicism to anti-Stoicism in
mainstream Western European intellectual culture across the course of the seventeenth
century. With a neat symmetry, exactly one hundred years separate the births and
deaths of the two most significant writers for and against Stoic philosophy in early
modern Europe, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) and Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) respectively.

Why this transition? The dominant narrative of seventeenth-century history of

philosophy emphasises the rise of the new philosophies of Grotius, Descartes and
Hobbes in opposition to the older established scholasticism, and it is initially tempting
to surmise that the displacement of Aristotelianism in turn prompted a rejection of
other ancient modes of thought, including those derived from Stoicism. But this would
be to get things somewhat back to front. For the Neo-Stoics of the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries were themselves in what might be termed the vanguard of
early modernity, and their doctrines formed a constituent part of the collective effort to
displace the hegemony of scholasticism: Lipsius, for example, declared a preference
for Seneca and even Epicurus, whose “writings seem rosebeds to me, in comparison
with the thickets of the Lyceum”. 57 Stoicism also helped to furnish the new
philosophies of the seventeenth century with some of their most characteristic
arguments. Like Grotius, the Stoics taught that a natural instinct towards self-
preservation, which they called oikeiosis, was an important component of a proper
understanding of ethics. Like Hobbes, furthermore, the Stoics set forth an account of
ethics that was held to depend on a particular account of a deterministic physics. And,
quite like Descartes, finally, the Stoics taught that certain sense-impressions were so
vivid that they necessarily contained a criterion of their own truthful correspondence to
reality, and could therefore be used to set limits to what it was possible for a sceptic
reasonably to doubt.

The critics who attacked the new philosophies were therefore among the fiercest
critics of the Stoic currents in European philosophy and culture. In particular, the
sharpest religious critics of Stoic philosophy included the leading spokesmen for
distinctively Augustinian versions of Christianity. French Augustinian writers, both
Jansenist and Oratorian, worried that the oikeiosis which underpinned the modern
natural rights theory was the foundation of sinful pride rather than of universal
morality, and the second Part of the dissertation examines the anti-Stoic writings of
four authors – Cornelius Jansenius, Jean-François Senault, Blaise Pascal and Nicolas
Malebranche – on Stoic moral psychology, pride and original sin. Protestant critics in
England and Germany condemned the deterministic physics of the Stoics for crowding
out a space for the freedom of the will, and the third Part briefly considers the various
arguments advanced by Thomas Hobbes, John Bramhall and Ralph Cudworth before

57
Manuductionis, quoted in Giovanni Santinello, ed., Models of the History of Philosophy
(Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer, 1993), p.125. Oestreich has noted that there are only two
references to the works of Thomas Aquinas in the many published works of Lipsius, and one of
these is in his Lovanium, a guide to the university town of Louvain. Oestreich, Neostoicism,
p.40fn.

23
turning to the anti-Stoic arguments developed by the Huguenot controversialist Pierre
Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, which rejected the Stoic/Cartesian
epistemology of the “clear and distinct idea” and attacked Stoic cosmology as part of
his onslaught against the Spinozist philosophy.

The Christian writers of the seventeenth century may therefore be said to have
succeeded in breaking apart the alliance between Stoicism and Christianity and, in a
sense, forcing a choice between the two standpoints. Yet in the context of the early
Enlightenment, the victory was not quite as complete as they would have wanted it to
be, and this for two closely related reasons. On the one hand, the strongly Augustinian
theologies of the seventeenth century were themselves in decline in both Catholic and
Protestant Europe, and as they lost their grip on the European imagination this
particular anti-Stoic moment correspondingly passed from the philosophical scene. On
the other hand, the proliferation of new kinds of religious practice and belief –
including forms of pantheism and deism, as well as outright atheism – opened up a
space for a set of constructive engagements with parts of the Stoic legacy. The fourth
Part of the thesis therefore surveys some of the ways in which Stoic ideas were
transmitted across the Early Enlightenemnt, with the final sections considering the
political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in light of the preceding argument.

For whereas his Enlightenment predecessors had by and large accepted the most
obvious conclusion of the arguments of the previous century – that there was a
fundamental gulf between Stoic and Augustinian philosophy which could not be
bridged – and then worked within the intellectual space defined by this opposition, the
hallmark of Rousseau’s approach is to find ways of refusing this choice. Rousseau is
distinctive in the ways in which he returns to the battlefield of the seventeenth-century
arguments, especially to those considered in Part Two, and thinks both with and
against the Stoic and Augustinian traditions in order to fashion a new kind of theory
which incorporates the key insights of both parties, transcends the antagonism between
them, and issues in an argument for a radical democratic republican politics. What I
call Rousseau’s secular Augustinian Stoicism therefore brings the historical narrative
to a close, setting the scene for the radical Stoic republicanism of the great French
Revolution in order to bring us back to where we began, in 1795.

24
 Part One: Justus Lipsius and Neo-Stoicism:
The State of the Question in the Historiography of Political Thought

I: Lipsius

In 1914, Léontine Zanta published La renaissance du stoïcisme au XVIe siècle.

The significance of the event was twofold, for not only did this book help to inaugurate
the study of the cultural and intellectual movement which is often called “Neo-
Stoicism”, a tradition of research which continues to this day, but Zanta was also a
significant first-wave French feminist and the book was based upon her doctoral
dissertation, which had earned her the first Ph.D. degree to be awarded to a woman by
a French university.1 In the first place, Zanta’s book drew attention to the growing
interest in ancient Stoicism over the course of the sixteenth century, which manifested
itself in a variety of different ways, whether through the translation and dissemination
of classical texts or the increasing use of Stoic tropes, arguments and values in moral
and political writings. She then presented, second, an anatomy of the main ideas of the
Stoic “triumvirate” of Justus Lipsius, Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron, whose
books did much to systematise and popularise this Stoic current around the turn of the
seventeenth century.

That the early modern Neo-Stoics were a significant group of thinkers had already
been argued by Wilhelm Dilthey, who had argued (in Larry Frohman’s words) that
“the recovery of Stoic philosophy in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
played a central – in fact, nearly constitutive – role in the formation of the modern
individual and, more generally, in the transition to modernity”.2 Dilthey, however, was
mostly concerned with understanding the changing conceptions of rationality, the
transformation of individual consciousness and the development of the modern
scientific world-view. Zanta’s survey of the sixteenth century moralists, by contrast,
forged a path along which students of ethics and historians of political thought could
follow. It still took some time, however, for this “Stoic revival” to find a place in
general textbooks on the history of political thought. J. W. Allen’s 1928 textbook, A
History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, for example, contains no
mention of Lipsius or any of the other major Neo-Stoic authors, and no consideration
of the influence of Stoicism on the thought of the period at all.3 Even when the moral
philosophy of the Neo-Stoics was investigated, it could be isolated from their political
teachings. Thus, in the first book-length study of Lipsius in English, published in 1955,
Jason Lewis Saunders presented a biographical sketch of his writing career and
detailed expositions of the arguments of his Stoic writings on ethics and physics in De

1
Zanta, La renaissance du stoïcisme. For a sketch of Zanta’s life, see Robert Garric’s
introduction to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Leontine Zanta (London: Collins, 1969).
2
Larry Frohman, “Neo-Stoicism and the Transition to Modernity in Wilhelm Dilthey's
Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 2 (1995), p.263.
3
J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1977).

25
Constantia, the Manuductionis and the Physiologiae Stoicorum, passing over his
explicitly political writings altogether.4

Exactly fifty years after the publication of Allen’s book, things were quite different.
The second volume of Quentin Skinner’s magisterial 1978 treatment of The
Foundations of Modern Political Thought gave a detailed account of important aspects
of Neo-Stoic political thought. In common with Zanta, to whom Skinner referred when
writing these pages, a trio of modern Stoics was given prominence, but this time
around we find Michel de Montaigne considered alongside Lipsius and Du Vair, in
place of the later Charron. The central theme that bound these writers together, Skinner
asserted, was their stress on “the need to remain steadfast in the face of Fortune’s
changeability” in the age of the bloody civil wars of religion that tore apart both France
and the Low Countries. This late Renaissance troika all recommended an attitude of
Stoical forbearance and insisted upon submission to the existing order of things, both
to the established religion of their country and to the political authorities, with all three
being “vehemently opposed to any attempt to vindicate the lawfulness of political
resistance”, the central theme in the writings of both the Huguenot theorists and their
political and religious opponents, as well as of Skinner’s second volume as a whole.5

Yet if Skinner’s book successfully integrated the leading thinkers of the Stoic
revival which Zanta had chronicled into a general narrative of the development of
European political thought, it also served to highlight some of the difficulties which
surround the attempt to write about the continuing influence of Stoic ideas on late
mediaeval and early modern authors. In his Preface, Skinner presented the book as
“exemplify[ing] a particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of
historical texts” which he had laid out in “a series of articles published over the past
twelve years”. 6 In a famous passage Skinner wrote that “The reader may wonder
whether I have any new findings to report as a result of applying this methodology”,
and, with reference to the originality of his first volume, he answered in the
affirmative:

I have sought to emphasise the remarkable extent to which the

vocabulary of Renaissance moral and political thought was derived
from Roman stoic sources. A great deal of work has been done – for
example by Garin – on the Platonic origins of Renaissance political
thought. And recently a strong emphasis has been placed – notably by

4
Jason Lewis Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York:
The Liberal Arts Press, 1955).
5
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol.2, pp.279-81, 282. Cf. Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and
Literature, pp.1-2.
6
Skinner, Foundations, vol.1, p.x. The best collection of Skinner’s methodological articles and
their criticism is James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); the texts are revised and reprinted in the first volume of
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

26
 Baron and Pocock – on the contribution of Aristotelian doctrines to the
formation of ‘civic’ humanism. But I do not think it has been fully
appreciated how pervasively the political theorists of Renaissance Italy
and of early modern Europe in general were also influenced by stoic
values and beliefs. Nor do I think it has been fully recognised how far
an understanding of this fact tends, amongst other things, to alter our
picture of Machiavelli’s relationship with his predecessors, and in
consequence our sense of his aims and intentions as a political
theorist.7

Whereas Zanta had dated the Stoic revival to the sixteenth century, Skinner here made
a claim for the significance of Roman Stoicism in understanding the political thought
of the quattrocento.

Yet despite his trumpeting of this theme in his Preface, it is never very clear from
his book just what Skinner took these “stoic values and beliefs” to comprise. In his
discussion of the trecento republican Alberto Mussato, for example, Skinner notes that
he “draws extensively on stoic authorities in seeking to account for the final ‘capitivity
and death’ of the Paduan Republic at the hands of Can Grande in 1328”, but the claims
to which he draws our attention are republican commonplaces:

While he does not underestimate the contribution made by ‘internal

faction’ and ‘lethal ambition’, he mainly follows Sallust in
emphasising the baleful effects of ‘morbid cupidity’, ‘the lust for
money’, and the accompanying loss of civic responsibility...8

What Skinner labelled “stoic” often seemed little more than traces of the continuing
popularity and influence of Sallust and Cicero, neither of whom was professed
Stoicism (though Cicero was of course an important source for Stoic doctrine).9 In this
respect, Skinner’s work was vulnerable to the same criticism which has been advanced
against Zanta’s own book, for (to borrow Anthony Levi’s words) hers “was a pioneer
work, but its assumptions about the stoicism of the moralists have today sometimes to
be questioned”.10 A further piece of evidence that Skinner’s account of Stoicism was
not terribly precise came in the second volume, when he referred to Montaigne’s
behaviour being “very much in line with the stoic tendency to value the life of otium
more highly than that of negotium”, for although Seneca did provide a quasi-Stoic
defence of philosophical otium, in his essay of the same name, the basic teaching of the
school supported of the opposite opinion.11

7
Skinner, Foundations, vol.1, p.xiv.
8
Ibid., vol.1, p.43.
9
It is perhaps significant in this regard that the entry for “stoicism” in the index concludes with
the words, “See also under Cicero”.
10
Levi, French Moralists, p.5.
11
Skinner, Foundations, vol.2, p.276; cf. Seneca, De Otio, I.4, where he asks whether he is
“deserting his own party”, whose orthodox opinion is summarised in Rowe and Schofield, eds.,

27
 Skinner’s Foundations did not, then, provide the kind of authoritative treatment of
the relationship between Stoicism and Renaissance political thought which the Preface
might have led the reader to expect – the kind of treatment, for example, which
Anthony Levi had offered concerning the French debate over the theory of the passions,
or which William Bouwsma had contributed in his survey of the Stoic “face” of
humanist culture. 12 One contemporaneous academic project, however, which did
provide such a treatment with respect to the political thought of Dutch Neo-Stoicism,
at least, was that of Gerhard Oestreich. He had died in 1978, the year of Skinner’s
Foundations; his final book, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State was
posthumously published in 1982.13

For Oestreich, the importance of Lipsius and the Neo-Stoic “Netherlands

movement” was many-sided. Lipsius’s books – above all his De Constantia and
Politicorum – provided the definitive statement of a developing ideology which found
inspiration in Greek and (mostly) Roman texts and which foregrounded themes of
power, self-inspection, discipline, toleration and moderation. As well as helping to give
a definitive shape to this ideology, Lipsius was also a very significant progagandist for
it, and Oestreich stressed his role as a popular teacher, especially during his period at
the new university college at Leiden. Not insignificant either were his seven hundred
correspondents, scattered all over Western Europe, and the fact that his books were
sixteenth-century bestsellers, going rapidly through many editions, and being translated
into all the major European languages.14

Oestreich’s claims for the historical significance of Lipsius’s project were not
small. The new emphasis on discipline and organisation on the part of the writers who
contributed to the “Netherlands movement” played a key role in the military revolution
that transformed European warfare, and this in turn worked to reshape the way in
which the European states themselves were organised. Oestreich credited Neo-Stoicism
as being one of the main forces behind the consolidation of absolutist ideology, so that
this Neo-Stoicism might be said to mark the moment when the national security state
came to supplant the free city republic as the focus of political theorists’ attention and
loyalties. Oestreich further emphasised the contribution of the Netherlands movement
to the long-run secularisation of European philosophy.15 And if his claims about the

The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, p.436 and by Diogenes
Laertius, VII.121.
12
Levi, French Moralists, pp.51-95; William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism:
Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of
the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformation, ed. Heiko A. Oberman
and Thomas A. Brady Jr (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975).
13
Oestreich, Neostoicism. The volume is a translation and substantial reworking of an earlier
book, Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1969).
14
Ibid., pp.58-62.
15
Ibid., p.8.

28
impact and importance of Lipsius’s work were large, his own book was itself a
significant, and modestly understated intervention into one of the classic debates of
European historical sociology. Max Weber had famously drawn attention to the
importance of a “Protestant Ethic” associated above all with Calvinism for
understanding the increasing intensification of processes of rationalisation in early
modern Europe, and his argument was a contribution to a non-Marxist explanation of
the development and solidification of capitalist relations of production.16 While Otto
Hintze had subsequently suggested that there was an affinity between Calvinism and
modern raison d’état arguments,17 Oestreich went further and suggested that it was
Neo-Stoic ideology that helped to propagate an ethic of duty that bordered on
asceticism. In the context of the early modern absolutist monarchies, furthermore, it
made more sense to ascribe significant social and economic effects to this secular
ideology rather than to a specific religious doctrine.18

If Oestreich’s work on Neo-Stoicism increased scholars’ interest in a concept of

early modern social discipline (Sozialdisziplinierung), it also came to intersect and
partially overlap with the historical researches of Michel Foucault.19 For while neither
Lipsius nor Neo-Stoicism are specifically mentioned in Discipline and Punish,
Foucault did locate the origins of the disciplinary model of social institutions in the
military manuals of the early seventeenth century, and the writers he discussed,
including Louis Montgommery and Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen, themselves
strongly influenced by – if not plagiarists of – Lipsius’s military writings.20

The new histories of political theory published in the wake of Foundations – many
of which were substantially shaped by Skinner’s historical and methodological projects
– began to explore the complexities of Neo-Stoic political thought, and to situate it
carefully in its European context. In America, Nannerl O. Keohane traced the reception
of Lipsian ideas in France in her justly celebrated study of early modern French

16
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930).
17
Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975), pp.88-154, cited in Oestreich, Neostoicism, p.69.
18
Ibid., p.68ff.
19
Foucault’s elaboration of his concept of “governmentality” was closely related to Oestreich’s
work on Neo-Stoicism, and pupils of the two scholars came to realise the proximity of their
various research interests. Pasquale Pasquino may have been the first to notice the Oestreich-
Foucault connection in an article written after the latter’s death. Of the pair, he wrote: “But here
too we must not be misled: the essential focus of such research is not the organization of the
army (disciplina militaris) or the identity of the soldier with the prisoner, who would in turn be
seen as identical with the schoolboy. The problem under consideration is, rather, that of the
conditions of the possibility of modern society”. Pasquale Pasquino, “Michel Foucault (1929-
84): the will to knowledge,” Economy and Society 15, no. 1 (1986), p.98. See also Graham
Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: studies in governmentality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.12-14.
20
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1979), pp.135-8, 170.

29
political thought.21 In England, there was a series of books and articles emanating from
what increasingly came to be referred to as the “Cambridge school”. Martin Van
Gelderen provided the first detailed comparison of Florentine republicanism and the
Neo-Stoic political thought of the Dutch Revolt, and argued that while Machiavelli and
Lipsius agreed that “the essence of the art of politics was to establish how virtue could
conquer fortune in order to realise a vivere civile”, their divergent views on the dangers
of civil discord underpinned Lipsius’s preference for “unified, virtuous princely rule”
against Machiavelli’s vision of a vigorous, participatory republic. 22 Peter Burke’s
chapter in the Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 stressed the ideology
of detachment (apatheia or ataraxia) shared by both the “Stoics” and the “Sceptics” of
the later sixteenth century, for although they would disagree about, for example, the
existence and authority of the natural law (which Carneades considered oxymoronic)
the reaction of Sceptics like Montaigne was “not so different from that of Stoics such
as Lipsius and Du Vair who expressed their desire for a quiet life in a more heroic
language”.23 Most recently of all, in his elegant apology for ideologies of republican
patriotism, Maurizio Viroli gave a prominent place to Lipsius’s attack on the
assumptions of the earlier republican theories and to his argument which sought to
assimilate patriotic sentiment to the Stoic theory of the passions with a claim that it is a
mistake to get excited about one’s patriotic identification. (As Viroli is careful to point
out, however, this argument is above all an attack on pointless patriotic lamentations,
rather than a theory in any way designed to undermine citizens’ loyalties to the
political regimes in which they happen to find themselves resident.)24

Two of the more recent contributions, those of Richard Tuck and Robert Bireley,
require a lengthier comment. In Tuck’s Philosophy and Government, the significance
of Lipsius lay in his and Montaigne’s decisive contribution to the development of what
Tuck called the “new humanism”. Whereas the earlier Renaissance humanism had
been generally Ciceronian in orientation, this movement by contrast looked to Tacitus
for inspiration, and Lipsius’s credentials as a Tacitist had been secured in 1574 through
the publication of his authoritative text of Tacitus’s major works. But what Lipsius and
Montaigne added to the popular Tacitism of the time, according to Tuck, was a
powerful argument inspired by the confluence of Sceptical and Stoic philosophy. Tuck
moved beyond Burke’s observation that the Stoics and Sceptics of the period shared a
common goal, that of living a quiet life, by focusing on the structure and content of the

21
Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980).
22
Van Gelderen in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.209-10; also Martin Van
Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992).
23
Peter Burke, “Tacitism, skepticism, and reason of state” in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), esp. pp.494-5. For a similar view, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
24
Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.45-51.

30
arguments originally developed by the Hellenistic philosophers in antiquity. By
characterising Renaissance Scepticism as chiefly psychological rather than
epistemological, Tuck brought out what the two doctrines had in common, which was a
similar approach to eudaimonistic ethics. The Stoics believed that the wise man was
the man who had purged himself of his error-inducing passions; the Sceptics believed
that the wise man was the man who could suspend judgment concerning the content of
his harm-inducing beliefs; and the connection between the two was secured by the
“cognitive element in most emotions” together with the reasonable supposition that
“passion can in the end only be controlled or eliminated by the control of belief”.25
Lipsius, then, was no simple Stoic, and Tuck highlighted those moments in his writing
where he is sympathetic to the Sceptics: the attack on science in De Constantia is one,
the remark in the Manuductionis that “even Seneca regretted the disappearance of the
Sceptics”, whose goal of ataraxia had been “a high and laudable one” is another.26

Oestreich had both stressed the commitment of Neo-Stoicism to the promotion of a

stern self-discipline through intensive work on the individual’s passions and also
identified Lipsius’s arguments in the Politicorum on the subject of “mixed prudence”
(prudentia mixta) as a part of the raison d’état tradition.27 Tuck’s further suggestion
was that it was the Sceptical argument that provided the link between the Stoic moral
theory on the one hand and raison d’état political theories on the other (theories which
were often to be found articulated in the writings of the more conventional Tacitists of
the time). A major part of the narrative of Philosophy and Government, then, was the
story of how the major arguments of this “new humanism” ended up being transposed

25
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.xiii. Gordon Braden presents an alternative view of the
similarities obtaining between the early modern Stoic and sceptical stances: “Between the Stoic
and the Skeptic there is not always that much distance. The self aspires to be an imitation of the
cosmos, but it might as well be an arbitrary stand taken against a meaningless reality...” Gordon
Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985), quoted in Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature, p.4.
26
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp.50-51. In a recent paper, Anothny Levi agrees that
there is a confluence of “Stoic” and “Sceptical” opinion in the latter part of the sixteenth
century, but argues that this owes to two factors, that both philosophies “had, first, been
transmitted inside defective traditions, and the meanings of all the key terms had, second, been
altered by the scholastics”. On the second point, especially with regard to the scholastic
vocabulary of volition, Levi is compelling. But his case is weakened by his refusal to see the
deeper links between the Stoics and the Sceptics, at least in the Roman period, for he writes that
“On the whole they denoted reciprocally antipathetic modes of thought”. While it is true that
representatives of the two schools were always engaged in sharp philosophical disagreement,
the amount of common ground the rival schools shared during the period of the New Academy,
which these sixteenth century writers seem to have discerned, should not be underestimated.
Levi, in Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone, eds., Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 2000), p.92.
27
Oestreich, Neostoicism, pp.48-9. Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine,
trans. William Jones (London: Printed by Richard Field for William Ponsonby, 1594).

31
by Thomas Hobbes into the language and argumentative forms of the natural
jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius28, for as Tuck summarised,

The political analogue of this kind of self-discipline was naturally

going to be a kind of raison d’état theory, in which a population had to
be disciplined and manipulated in the interests of its security.29

The second work to consider here is Robert Bireley’s study of The Counter-
Reformation Prince. Bireley contends that Lipsius was, along with Giovanni Botero,
the founder of a specifically Catholic “anti-Machiavellian” tradition of Baroque
political thought. Lipsius’s chief concern, according to this author, was to “elaborate a
vision of practical politics, in response to Machiavelli, that would be moral, Christian,
and effective in the circumstances of the late sixteenth century”.30 To read Tuck and
Bireley on Lipsius side by side, therefore, is to be confronted immediately with an
interpretive puzzle. For whereas Tuck described a Lipsius who moved from being a
radical critic of the fashionable Tacitism of his time in 1572-4 to someone much closer
to the Italian Tacitists in the 1580s – and therefore much closer to pure
Machiavellianism – and ends his presentation with a brief discussion of Lipsius’s
alleged membership of the secretive and nonsectarian “Family of Love” group,
Bireley’s Lipsius by contrast is squarely located in a Roman Catholic tradition and is
explicitly presented as an anti-Machiavellian political theorist.

On the face of it we might prefer Tuck’s argument, for to treat Lipsius as a

distinctively Catholic thinker is clearly problematic, given his successive switches of
religious allegiance from Catholicism to Lutheranism to Calvinism and back to
Catholicism. Bireley is quite clear in his own mind at least about the primacy of
Lipsius’s Catholic identity: Lipsius claimed to regret his conversion to Lutheranism, he
tells us, and he notes that Lipsius “later claimed that during his years in Leiden he
never actually departed from the Catholic faith and never participated in heretical
services or in any form of political activity”, which Bireley considers “may very well
have been the case”.31 Although the Politicorum was published in 1589, when Lipsius
was a Calvinist teaching at Leiden, Bireley saves this work for Catholicism by pointing
out that he had been keen to leave Leiden “as early as 1586”. Bireley’s strategy, then,
is to take at face value whatever Lipsius said about the history of his religious
affiliations after his return to the Roman church, and the careful reservations of various
scholars are swept aside with the assertion that “There can be no doubts about the

28
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.xvii.
29
Ibid., p.xiv; also pp.56-8.
30
Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic
Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990),
p.73.
31
Ibid., p.74. He did, of course, put his expertise to use on behalf of Maurice of Nassau and the
military effort of the Dutch revolt, which is not without political significance. Oestreich,
Neostoicism, pp.77-9.

32
sincerity of his return to Catholicism”32 – but this is not obviously the most sensible
way of determining the truth of the matter.

When it comes to the content of the political thought itself, Bireley shows himself
to be as keen to save Lipsius on behalf of anti-Machiavellianism as he has been for
Roman Catholicism. His Lipsius is certainly “uneasy” about the tradeoffs between
political utility and morality, and he notes Lipsius’s willingness to license certain
breaches of conventional morality on the part of the prince. But the dominant theme of
the presentation is the repudiation of Machiavelli, so he draws attention those moments
when Lipsius denies that the prince should simulate virtue, for example; or when he
rules certain kinds of action as being beyond the bounds of his “mixed prudence”; or in
his angry response in De Una Religione to Coornhert’s allegation of
“Machiavellizing”.33

But as with Lipsius’s Catholicism, the evidence can be read both ways. It is
perfectly plausible that Lipsius should have wanted publicly to deny allegations of
“Machiavellizing”, whatever the nature of his relationship to the political thought of
the Florentine. Tuck finds two very striking affinities with Machiavelli’s most
controversial positions, first in that although Lipsius did not join his predecessor in
expressing sympathy with pagan religion, he did repeat Machiavelli’s move of
subordinating religion to political considerations;34 second, in Lipsius’s endorsement of
the Machiavellian view that “necessitie, which is the true defender of the weaknesse of
man, doth breake all lawes”.35 Bireley himself is aware of the limitations of his own
argument. He writes that Lipsius’s pragmatism “brought him perilously close to
Machiavellism himself”,36 and that with respect to the discussion of prudentia mixta,

At first blush he might seem to approve what could be understood as

Machiavellian procedures. But careful analysis combined with a look
at his later statements seems to preclude this conclusion except
perhaps in one or two instances.37

It is clear that Lipsius was not simply repeating Machiavelli’s arguments: he is no

defender of classical republican liberty for a start, and it is easy to find other

32
Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, p.74. Levi, in Kraye and Stone, eds., Humanism and
Early Modern Philosophy, p.96, usefully summarises the various opinions of twentieth century
scholars as to Lipsius’s religious views, including Zanta, Saunders, Grafton, Gerlo et al., and
prudently concludes that one should suspend judgment on the matter, at least until the
publication of certain relevant sections of his correspondence, which we still await.
33
Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, pp.80, 85, 88.
34
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.59; also Tuck, in Anthony Goodman and Angus
MacKay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990), pp.57-
8.
35
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.57.
36
Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, p.81.
37
Ibid., p.85. Emphases added.

33
disagreements that obtain between the pair. But to organise the analysis of Lipsius’s
political thought around the banner of “anti-Machiavellian” statecraft is too crude.

To examine Bireley’s work through the lens provided by Philosophy and

Government is to highlight its weaknesses, but to scrutinise Tuck’s book in light of The
Counter-Reformation Prince is also a valuable critical exercise, especially when
Bireley insists that “Lipsius’s doctrine on providence is most important if he is to be
understood as an anti-Machiavellian”.38 Tuck addressed the argument about providence
in De Constantia, calling it “the most commonly alluded-to feature of the work in
modern literature”, but he went on to note that “it is in fact dependent in some ways on
the notion of self-interest”, for it is the “combination of unalterable fate and the need to
protect oneself” which necessitates the performance of certain actions.39 We might,
however, want to question this interpretation of Lipsius’s argument. The “Lipsius” of
the dialogue of De Constantia begins as someone whose concern for self-preservation
has induced him to leave the war-torn Low Countries for the safety of Vienna. The
argument of his interlocutor, “Langius”, aims to persuade him that self-mastery, and in
particular the control of the passions and the cultivation of the virtue of constancy, is
more important than mere considerations of bodily self-preservation. In addition, he
gives prominence to a much more conventional Christian argument about God’s
providence:

That the earth has opened her mouth and swallowed vp some townes,
came of Gods providence. That otherwhere the plague hath consumed
many thousandes of people, proceedeth of the same cause. That
slaughters, war and tyranny rage in the Low-countries, therehence also
cometh it to passe... Against whom doest thou fret? I feare to speak it,
euen against GOD.40

Tuck was right to detect an affinity between Lipsius’s arguments and the tradition of
the Sceptics. But to take the theism intrinsic to his argument here seriously brings two
things into focus. First, that Lipsius characteristically drew on Sceptical arguments at
those moments when he wanted to downplay or deny the most obviously un-Christian
parts of Stoic philosophy, concerning the omnipotence of the wise man, for example,
or the impossibility of his sinning.41 Second, that the emphasis on divine providence in
De Constantia points to a much stronger affinity to the Stoics’ argument about the
desirability of making a rational submission to the existing order of things than to any
Sceptical argument, for the Stoic recommendation of cultivating apatheia is grounded

38
Ibid., p.77.
39
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp.53-4.
40
Lipsius, Of Constancie, I.XIV, p.104.
41
For Levi this is the only significant moment where Lipsius marries Scepticism to Stoicism,
and it is motivated by the desire to avoid creating an impiously omniscient sage incapable of
error. Levi, in Kraye and Stone, eds., Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, p.94.

34
in an understanding of the world as a deterministic, providentially-ordered whole:
physics and ethics are inextricably linked.

Lipsius was certainly enough of a Stoic to argue that the physics and the ethics
marched hand in hand, and his most striking anticipation of Hobbes’s system might
very well be his presentation of a system whose constituent parts included an
interrelated absolutist political theory and a deterministic physics. But the trouble with
Lipsius’s physics, which he presented above all in his Physiologiae Stoicorum, was
that, as A. A. Long has explained, they were neither especially Stoic nor especially
interesting.

Unfortunately, for Stoicism as systematic philosophy, Lipsius’ works

were a disaster. This is so for three main reasons. First, in spite of his
command of the ancient sources, he did not know or did not use that
evidence of Galen, Sextus Empiricus, the Aristotelian commentators or
Marcus Aurelius, and even his citations of Cicero are few compared
with what he drew from Seneca and Epictetus. Thus he bypasses much
of the more technical material on Stoic cosmology. Second, he tends to
confirm or correct the sources that he does cite by additional reference
to Platonist and Christian writers, so blurring or distorting the original
Stoic doctrines. Third, and most damaging, he accepts Christianity as
the criterion by which to judge the meaning and propriety of
Stoicism.42

In the crucial discussion in the Physiologiae Stoicorum, for example, on fate and
the freedom of the will, Lipsius twice modified Stoic doctrine. First, he insisted that the
Stoics addressed the problem of evil by locating its origin

not in God, but in matter... And so when God made man and the other
things, he formed all things good and all things for good; but in matter
there was some kind of opposing force and wickedness, and it is this
which dragged them elsewhere.

Second, he claimed that Stoic fate is fully compatible with the Christian teaching of
free will, for while “first causes” are fixed by fate, “proximate and ancillary causes”
fall under the domain of free will, thus softening Stoic determinism to a considerable
degree.43

42
See A. A. Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to
the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). (The quotation
comes from an unpublished draft manuscript that the author has kindly let me see).
43
Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition,”, Justus Lipsius, Physiologiae Stoicorvm
Libri tres (Antwerp: 1604), I.14; Saunders, Justus Lipsius, pp.148-155. The passages from
Lipsius are in Saunders’ translation, slightly modified. For Stoic arguments on the origins of
evil, see Long & Sedley, vol.1, pp.328-333.

35
 In the earlier De Constantia, Lipsius had distinguished between “Providence” and
“Destinie”, asserting that the former was “a power and facultie in God of seeing,
knowing and governing all things” and the latter was the concatenation of physical
causes which the Stoics called fate. On Lipsius’s view, this destiny was itself decreed
by a providential God and its operations remained subject to his will; another part of
God’s decree was that men should themselves possess free will, and so the operations
of destiny were willed in such a way as not to impinge upon this freedom of the will. In
a striking formulation from De Constantia, Lipsius asserted that God

would that men should vse deliberation and choyse. So do they,

without force, of their free-will. And yet, whatsoeuer they were in
mind to make choyse of, God forsaw from all eternitie. He fore-saw it
(I say) not forced it: hee knewe it, but constrayned not: he fore-told it,
but not prescribed it.44

Lipsius was distinctive among the Renaissance Stoics for his view that, in
Bouwsma’s phrase, “the heart of Stoicism is not its ethics but its philosophy of
nature”,45 but a part of his achievement was also to have presented that philosophy of
nature to his contemporaries not as a pantheistic determinist materialism – as had been
taught by the ancient Stoics themselves – but as compatible with a bland, non-sectarian
Christian orthodoxy.

In a way, then, Tuck was right. Insofar as Lipsius was original, it was because of
his use of arguments indebted to Hellenistic philosophy, which put a set of claims
about human psychology to work in the construction of a powerful and distinctive
political theory. We do, however, also need to recognise that as a part of this argument,
Lipsius leant quite heavily on a received Christian conception of providence, which he
presented as being more Stoic than it in fact was – and in which the tradition of
political thought that followed him (the main subject of the rest of Philosophy and
Government), was strikingly uninterested. It is with Grotius’s famous etiamsi daremus
argument, and not in the works of Lipsius, that we reach the moment when an
argument about self-preservation (which, as we shall see below, is deliberately cast in a
Stoic manner as a rejoinder to Scepticism) is carefully severed from considerations
about the divine ordering of the universe, and in a manner which both the Stoics and
Lipsius would have rejected.

44
Lipsius, Of Constancie, I.XX, p.122. Note that a little earlier “Langius” had distinguished his
“True destinie” from that of the Stoics “by foure markes. They make God himselfe subject to
Destinie... But wee doe subject Destinie vnto God... They appoynt a successiue order of naturall
causes from all eternitie: We doe not make the causes alwayes naturall (for God is often the
cause of woonders and miracles, besisdes or contrarie to nature) nor eternall... Thirdlie, they
take away all contingencie from thinges; wee admit it... Lastlie, they seemed to intrude a violent
force vpon our vvill. This bee farre from vs, who doe both allowe fate or destiniy, and also
ioyne handes with libertie or freedome of will.” (p.121).
45
Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism”, pp.63-64.

36
 What Lipsius presented, was a doctrine that he attempted to pass off as both
Christian and Stoic, and which could be used to authorise a substantially Machiavellian
or Tacitist political theory. Roughly speaking, Stoicism did for Lipsius what Aristotle
had previously done for Aquinas, providing a comprehensive philosophical structure
on which to hang theories about politics and ethics that could both coexist with and
lend philosophical support to traditional Christian claims. As with Aquinas,
furthermore, this structure drew legitimacy from its being rooted in one of the major
philosophical traditions of classical antiquity while simultaneously serving to defuse
the more radical elements of the challenge of pagan antiquity, associated above all with
a Ciceronian tradition of moderate Scepticism, republican politics and atheism.46 But in
Lipsius’s case, this was an attempt to mark out philosophical space in very unstable
intellectual territory, and it faced a double challenge, as we shall see in the pages that
follow. For on the one hand, the attempt to present Christianity as harmonious with any
kind of Stoicism was to prove anathema to some of the sharpest religious apologists of
the seventeenth century. On the other hand, it was through subsequent scholarship on
the Stoic authors and other ancient sources of Stoic doctrine, which Lipsius had
himself done much to promote, that the academic scholars of Stoicism would come to
understand the extent to which the more orthodox varieties of Christianity and Stoic
doctrine were mutually incompatible.

II: Grotius and Descartes

The wideranging impact of the Neo-Stoics on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century European culture is by now extensively documented. In addition to the work
on the history of political thought discussed above, scholars in a number of other fields
have recently been building on the classic works of Zanta, Oestreich and, for literary
studies, M. W. Croll, in order to chart the diverse aspects of the European encounter
with Neo-Stoicism.47 There have been works more narrowly focused on Lipsius and his
immediate environment,48 as well as those more broadly concerned with what William
Bouwsma has called the “high culture” of late Renaissance humanism and of the first
half of the seventeenth century. 49 Older studies have tracked the reception of Neo-

46
For this view of Aquinas, see Richard Tuck, “The Modern Theory of Natural Law,” in The
Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987).
47
M. W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
48
Anthony Grafton, “Portrait of Justus Lipsius,” American Scholar, no. 56 (1987), Morford,
Stoics and Neostoics, Christian Mouchel, ed., Juste Lipse (1547-1606) en son temps: Actes du
colloque de Strasbourg, 1994 (Paris: H. Champion, 1996), Pierre-François Moreau and
Jacqueline Lagrée, Le stoïcisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: actes du Colloque CERPHI (Caen:
Université de Caen, 1994).
49
Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: ancient legacies in early Stuart culture (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism”,
Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640.

37
Stoicism in France in the works of religious, political and philosophical authors,50 and
there is now a considerable literature on the reception of Lipsius and the interpretation
of Stoic values produced by scholars of English poetry from Shakespeare to Milton.51
The variety of contexts in which Neo-Stoic discourse has been profitably studied
continues to grow: one recent study discusses the Neo-Stoic contribution to the poetry
of the Silesian Baroque, and Peter Miller has written a fine article, “Stoics who Sing”,
on the libretti written for the opera in seventeenth-century Lucca.52

Before moving on to consider the developing philosophical criticism of these Stoic

currents, however, the two most significant uses of Stoic concepts in European
philosophy from the first half of the seventeenth century need to be mentioned. These
came in the work of Hugo Grotius and René Descartes, and the significance of their
arguments lurks in the background of many of the claims about and against Stoicism
that we will encounter in the pages to come.

Grotius

If writers like Lipsius or Du Vair had tried to repackage and defend a whole set of
Stoic positions, Grotius by contrast was chiefly interested in one particular concept
which the Stoics had developed and with which they were associated. This was based
on the rather simple thought, which would become the basis of Grotius’s theory of
natural rights, that all living creatures have a natural instinct towards self-preservation,
and that in pursuit of this self-preservation their behaviour is naturally guided towards
the appropriate kinds of goods which will help them to secure their continuing
existence. He invoked this Stoic concept in response to a hypothetical objection posed
by an imaginary Carneadean Sceptic in the “Preliminary Discourse” to The Rights of
War and Peace, that there is no such thing as justice, and that individuals only seek
their private advantage:

But what is here said by the Philosopher [Carneades], and by the Poet
after him [Horace] must by no Means be admitted. For Man is indeed
an Animal, but one of a very high Order, and that excells all the other
Species of Animals much more than they differ from one another; as
the many Actions proper only to Mankind sufficiently demonstrate.

50
Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, Levi, French Moralists, Julien Eymard
d'Angers, Récherches sur le stoicisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (New York: G. Olms, 1976).
51
Audrey Chew, Stoicism in Renaissance English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1988),
Monsarrat, Light from the Porch, Robert C. Evans, Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of
Renaissance Stoicism (Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic, 1992); much more interesting are
McCrea, Constant Minds and Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996); most interesting of all is Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature.
52
David G. Halsted, Poetry and politics in the Silesian Baroque: neo-Stoicism in the work of
Christophorus Colerus and his circle (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), Peter Miller, “Stoics
who Sing: Lessons in Citizenship from Early Modern Lucca,” The Historical Journal, 44
(2001), pp.313-339.

38
 Now amongst the Things peculiar to Man is his Desire of Society, that
is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any
Manner whatever, but peaceably, and in a Community regulated
according to the best of his Understanding; which Disposition the
Stoicks termed Οικειωσιν. Therefore the Saying, that every Creature
is led by Nature to seek its own private Advantage, expressed thus
universally, must not be granted.53

Here his focus is on Stoic oikeiosis as the basis of a natural sociability among men; but
later in the same work, he returns to the same concept, this time laying emphasis on the
idea of self-preservation that it encompasses:

Marcus Tullius Cicero, both in the third book of his treatise On Ends
and in other places, following Stoic writings, learnedly argues that
there are certain first principles of nature – “first according to nature”,
as the Greeks phrased it – and certain other principles which are later
manifest but which are to have the preference over those first
principles. He calls first principles of nature those in accordance with
which every animal from the moment of its birth has regard for itself
and is impelled to preserve itself, to have zealous consideration for its
own condition and for those things which tend to preserve it, and also
shrinks from destruction and things which appear likely to cause
destruction...54

The passage to which Grotius referred is from the speech Cicero put into the mouth of
Cato, his mouthpiece for the Stoics’ arguments:

It is the view of those whose system I adopt [i.e. the Stoics], that
immediately upon birth, for that is the proper point to start from, a
living creature (animal) feels an attachment for itself and an impulse to
preserve itself and to feel affection for its own constitution and for
those things which tend to preserve that constitution (ipsum sibi
conciliari et commendari ad se conservandum et ad suum statum
eaque quae conserventia sunt eius status diligenda); while on the other
hand it conceives an antipathy to destruction and to those things which
appear to threaten destruction. In proof of this opinion they urge that
infants desire things conducive to their health and reject things that are
the opposite before they have ever felt pleasure or pain; this would not
be the case, unless they felt an affection for their own constitution and
were afraid of destruction. But it would be impossible that they should

53
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (London: Printed for W. Innys and R. Manby, J.
and P. Knapton, et al., 1738), “Preliminary Discourse”, pp.xv-xvi.
54
From the excerpts from Grotius in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Moral Philosophy from Montaigne
to Kant, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

39
 feel desire at all unless they possessed self-consciousness, and
consequently felt affection for themselves. This leads to the conclusion
that it is love of self (se diligendo) which supplies the primary impulse
to action.55

Grotius thus followed the Stoics in arguing that both the natural inclination to self-
preservation and the natural disposition to a social existence have a common source, in
this concept of oikeiosis. Oikeiosis is a term that, like many technical terms from Greek
philosophy, is hard to render well in translation: Liddell and Scott give “a taking as
one’s own, appropriation”, and what we appropriate are precisely those things which
are appropriate to the particular kind of creature we are. 56 This impulse to self-
preservation is shared by all animals (“impulse”, or horme, is what distinguishes
animals from plants in Stoic philosophy57) and the same impulse is at the root of a
parent’s natural affection for its offspring. This impulse, according to Cicero (and this
is a point which is emphasised by Grotius), is “the starting-point of the universal
community of the human race” and of our being naturally suited “to form unions,
societies and states (coetus, concilia, civitates)”.58

Grotius was more than a generation younger than Lipsius, writing at a time when
the restatement of arguments drawn from ancient Scepticism was popular, and these
arguments were being formulated with great skill and devastating results. 59 In
particular, the discovery, exploration and settlement of large parts of the non-European
world together with the conquest and dispossession of its peoples was helping to
nurture the varieties of moral relativism which historically tend to accompany the
serious contemplation of cultural difference. Grotius’s distinctive – indeed, constitutive
– contribution to modern moral philosophy, which was to be hailed in the eighteenth
century by Jean Barbeyrac as his “breaking [of] the ice” of mediaeval moral
philosophy,60 was to claim that the natural instinct towards self-preservation served to
ground a natural right of self-preservation, and that this natural right could be used as
the foundation of a universally valid, non-relativistic moral code.

We ought not, nevertheless, to exaggerate the Stoic character of the resulting

theory.61 As Schneewind warns,

55
Cicero, De Finibus, 3.v.16-17.
56
For the most significant surviving original Stoic passages on oikeiosis and philosophical
commentary, see Long & Sedley, vol.1, pp.346-354.
57
Long & Sedley, vol.1, p.350.
58
Cicero, De Finibus, III.xix.62-3.
59
Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), chs.1-4.
60
See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp.174-5.
61
Nor, however, should we understate the Stoic character of this, and similar modern theories
of “sociability”. In an important discussion of the question of Smith’s “Stoicism” in the
postscript to the English translation of her excellent book, Adam Smith e la cultura classica,

40
 Cicero had sketched a Stoic theory of natural law in two works whose
influence was not lessened by the fact that they were preserved only in
fragmentary form. Since Grotius of course knew these fragments, it is
tempting to think that he was developing a Stoic doctrine of natural
law for modern times. Yet I think this would be a serious mistake. We
do not see him appealing to any of the metaphysics behind Stoic ethics.
He refuses to say anything, in the development of his theory of natural
law, about the relation of our reason and the divine mind. He sets aside,
as I have noted, questions of the highest good and of the best form of
the state, both of which Cicero discusses at length. He does not assure
us that all apparent evils are truly goods or at least matters of
indifference to us; he offers no therapy; and he says nothing about
individual perfection...62

Indeed, since the point of Grotius’s enterprise was to develop a theory which could
command general acceptance, he was careful to note that his argument was not
sectarian. Despite the Stoic foundation of his central argument, he considered that none
of the ancient schools would have objected to his emphasis on the right of self-
preservation, “For on this point, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Peripatetics are in
complete agreement, and apparently even the Academics have entertained no doubt”.63
The theory could, he thought, even stand independently of the truth of revealed religion,
and he became notorious for his claim that the argument would remain valid,
“[T]hough we should even grant (etiamsi daremus), what without the greatest
Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God, or that he takes no Care of human
Affairs”.64

Gloria Vivenza criticises those writers who, she thinks, have been too quick to judge Smith a
“Stoic” based on his use of the argument about “concentric circles” associated with the Stoic
Hierocles. She notes, for example, that “the well-known oikeiosis came to be attributed to
Stoicism mainly as a result of Max Pohlenz’s great authority in the twentieth century” and that
“it is therefore unlikely that Smith could have interpreted it as such as early as the seventeenth
century”. Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics, p.204. This is an important observation about
the historical interpretation of Hierocles, but it applies with less force to considering Grotius,
who does not rely on Hierocles for his argument, and who certainly does understand the
principle of oikeoisis / sociabilitas as having primarily (though not exclusively) a Stoic
provenance. For much more on Grotius’s uses of Stoicism, see Hans W. Blom, ed., Grotius and
the Stoa (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003). We should further note T. J. Hochstrasser’s discussion of
seventeenth-century natural law theories, in which he shows how critics in the circle of
Pufendorf explicitly understood arguments about sociability as deriving chiefly from Stoic
sources, which was an important point to them for the rebuttal of Hobbes. Hochstrasser, Natural
Law Theories, pp.58, 63-5. (None of this, of course, contradicts Vivenza’s concerns to show
how Stoic and Peripatetic elements were mixed together in any number of ancient sources).
62
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p.175.
63
Grotius, “Prolegomena” to De Indis, as quoted in Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p.173.
64
“Preliminary Discourse”, IX, in Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, p.xix.

41
 Descartes

The other philosopher who deployed a version of a distinctive Stoic concept at a

crucial moment in his construction of an original and important body of modern theory
was René Descartes. In this case the concept was the Stoic phantasia kataleptike, or
“cataleptic impression”,65 and this appeared in his writing as the “clear and distinct
idea”, the concept which was used in the Third Meditation and afterwards in order to
reconstruct the body of knowledge about the external world which had been thrown
into question by the hyperbolical doubt of the First Meditation.66 In Stoic and Cartesian
epistemology, the “cataleptic impression” or the “clear and distinct idea” is something
apprehended by the mind that contains a criterion of its own truthfulness, or
correspondence with reality – a guarantee that it is as it appears to be. For the Stoics as
for Descartes, the chief way to avoid falling into error is to give one’s assent only to
those propositions which can ultimately be traced back to such an impression or such
an idea, with the difference between the Stoics and Descartes on the one hand and the
Sceptics on the other turning on the question of whether there are in fact any ideas or
perceptions which are sufficiently “clear and distinct” so as to warrant such assent.

In general, and with justice, contemporary commentators have pointed out that
there are significant differences between the Stoic and the Cartesian concepts. Stephen
Gaukroger, for example, writes that

Descartes may have been familiar with this [Stoic] doctrine, and if he
was it would have been from Book 7 of Diogenes Laertius... from
Cicero’s Academica, or from the very critical treatment in Sextus
Empiricus. But I think it unlikely that he was simply taking over the
Stoic doctrine, or even that he was influenced by the doctrine in its
specifically Stoic form. For one thing, the Stoic doctrine is restricted in
its application in the first instance to perceptual cognitive impressions,
other cognitive impressions deriving their guarantee from these,
whereas Descartes’ paradigm case is that of a nonperceptual cognitive
impression par excellence, namely mathematics: it is crucial to the
Stoic doctrine that the fact that our impressions have an external
source be taken into account, whereas in Descartes’ version of the
doctrine the question of the source does not arise.67

The movement of the argument in the Meditations is thus also unStoic, for Descartes
establishes his “clear and distinct” appreciation of the existence of God through non-

65
For the major Stoic texts and claims, see Long & Sedley, vol.1, pp.236-253.
66
René Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff,
and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.92-3.
67
Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: an intellectual biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
pp.118-9. Also cf. Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), p.271, E. M. Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978), pp.64-8.

42
empirical reasoning, and then uses this belief in a beneficent, non-deceiving God in
order to reestablish confidence in his perceptual impressions in the Sixth and final
Meditation.68

It is true that the Stoic and the Cartesian concepts are distinctively tailored and
operate in different ways as constituent components of their respective philosophical
systems. But in addition to these differences it is important to register the similarities
of function that these concepts serve, which we can trace by noting the parallels
between the ways in which Grotius and Descartes construct their respective arguments.
Both accepted that the Aristotelian scholasticism that had dominated European
philosophy since the time of Aquinas had no adequate response to the Sceptical
objections that were being pressed upon it. Both sought to overcome this Scepticism by
pushing a certain kind of Sceptical objection as far they thought it could reasonably be
pushed. Finally, both used a recognisable variant of a Stoic concept both to mark the
limits of plausible Scepticism and as a foundation for the reconstruction of a fully
developed ethical or epistemological system. That Stoic concepts, or adaptations of
Stoic concepts, could fill this role should not perhaps be surprising, for the Stoics had
been the most sustained opponents of the ancient Sceptics in the epistemological
debates among the Hellenistic philosophers, debates which had run on for generations
by the time of Cicero, whose Academica and De Finibus were two of the major sources
of information about these debates for the generation of Grotius and Descartes.

Grotius and Descartes, finally, were not just interested in Stoicism for these
arguments. Grotius had compiled an anthology of texts on the Stoics’ fate for use in the
controversies surrounding the theology of Arminius,69 and Descartes drew substantially
on Stoic ethical theory and on Epictetus in particular in the construction of his morale
par provision in the Discourse on the Method. In this text, it is the “Third Maxim”
which is most clearly Stoic in inspiration. John Marshall has shown how it is
established through a very different chain of reasoning from the one Epictetus had
employed, but its content is unmistakable, and could have come straight from the pages
of the Discourses:70

My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune,
and change my desires rather than the order of the world. In general I
would become accustomed to believing that nothing lies entirely
within our power except our thoughts, so that after doing our best in
dealing with matters external to us, whatever we fail to achieve is
absolutely impossible so far as we are concerned.71

68
Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, p.116.
69
Hugo Grotius, Philosophorum sententiæ de fato, et de eo quod in nostra est potestate
(Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1648).
70
John Marshall, Descartes's Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp.50-3.
71
Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, p.32. Cf. Epictetus, Discourses, I.i.7. Long
remarks that in this passage Descartes “offers an extraordinarily accurate and appreciative
synopsis of Epictetus’ philosophy”, noting that “he grasps and approves the psychological

43
 Despite this interest in other Stoic arguments, however, there would be no point in
an attempt to assimilate Grotius and Descartes to the earlier Neo-Stoic tradition. Each
was a substantially more original philosopher than Lipsius, for example, and neither
sought to derive any legitimacy for their philosophical constructions by associating
them with Stoic philosophy in the way that their predecessor had done; indeed,
Descartes, in the manner of both Hobbes and Spinoza, was quite reticent about his
philosophical sources, even when he drew on writers, such as Cicero, whose texts and
arguments would have been quite familiar to his contemporary audience. But if the
Grotian and Cartesian traditions went substantially beyond the Stoicism they had
inherited and transformed, they could never entirely sever themselves from it, and to
criticise the Stoics’ oikeiosis or the phantasia kataleptike was implicitly, sometimes
explicitly, to strike at the foundation of the new philosophies. The sections that follow
chart some of the ways in which this was done.

rationale of Stoicism” and that his “close reading of Stoicism is reflectedd in his recognition
(contrary to most popular accounts of the philosophy) that they attributed intellectual joy, as
distinct from bodily emotion, to their wise man”. Long, Epictetus, pp.266, 266n1.

44
 Part Two: Augustinian Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth-Century France:
Jansen to Malebranche

The Stoic last in philosophic pride,

By him called virtue, and his virtuous man,
Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing,
Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer,
As fearing God nor man, contemning all
Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life -
Which, when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can;
For all his tedious talk is but vain boast,
Or subtle shifts conviction to evade.
Alas! what can they teach, and not mislead,
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the World began, and how Man fell,
Degraded by himself, on grace depending?
Much of the Soul they talk, but all awry;
And in themselves seek virtue; and to themselves
All glory arrogate, to God give none;
Rather accuse him under usual names,
Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite
Of mortal things.

John Milton, Paradise Regain’d (1671) 4.300-318.

Introductory Remarks: Augustine and the Stoa

As in the case of the relationship between Montaigne and the Stoics, an influential
view among scholars has been to ascribe a distinctively Stoic phase to Augustine, in
which the early dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will is held to be the central text.
This period then gives way to the more developed and distinctive views of the later
Augustine which are characterised by the confident rejection of Stoic positions, or at
the very least by a drastic transformation of Stoic arguments.1 As is also the case with
Montaigne, furthermore, while there is enough truth in this view to make it a plausible
working hypothesis, it does tend to obscure more than it reveals about the nature of
Augustine’s lifelong engagement with arguments from Stoicism. The danger of such a
view is that it simultaneously helps to exaggerate the “Stoicism” of Augustine’s early
works while overlooking the extent to which he continued to work very closely with

1
This argument is most closely associated with Gérard Verbeke. Gérard Verbeke, “Augustin et
le stoïcisme,” Recherches augustiniennes, no. 1 (1958).

45
Stoic concepts in some of his later writings, and in doing so it constructs more of a
dichotomy between the “young” and the “mature” Augustine than is warranted. 2
Happily, there is now a considerable scholarly literature on the presence of Stoicism in
Augustine’s thought throughout his career, and within this body of work, Marcia
Colish’s volume on Stoicism in the Christian Latin Fathers stands out, with almost a
hundred copiously documented pages given over to the careful elucidation of the uses
of Stoic arguments in Augustine’s writings.3 Hand in hand with the increasing interest
of scholars of ancient philosophy in the Hellenistic schools over the last generation, it
is now also increasingly common for books on the development of philosophical
doctrine to include, and often enough to conclude, with discussion of the relationship
of the Saint of Hippo to what has gone before.4

When early modern authors tried to understand the relationship that obtained
between Augustine and the Stoics, on the other hand, they were engaged in a very
different kind of enterprise from that of late twentieth-century scholars. For while the
major texts of Augustine, Cicero, Seneca and others were well known to seventeenth-
century scholars, there had been no kind of the systematic work on the textual
fragments of Stoic philosophy which is so important to modern researchers, who rely
heavily on the edition of von Arnim or the compilation of Long and Sedley. 5
Montaigne recognised a part of what his era lacked, when in a discussion of the rival
conceptions of the sovereign good in antiquity he expressed the hope that in his own
lifetime “someone like Justus Lipsius” (whom he called “the most learned man left, a
polished and judicious mind”) would put together a compilation of the ethical opinions
of the ancient philosophers, “listed by class and by category”, and exclaimed, “What a
beautiful and useful book that would be!”6

The limited source material available to the early moderns certainly crippled their
understanding of Stoic logic, for example, which was usually dismissed throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as being of no value. (An important exception to

2
The structure of this problem is strictly preserved in another field of historiographical enquiry,
with Karl Marx standing in for Montaigne or Augustine, Louis Althusser and his coupure
épistemologique substituting in for Verbeke, and Hegel replacing the Stoics.
3
Colish, The Stoic Tradition, vol.2, pp.142-238. Her useful summary of the development of the
literature on Augustine and the Stoics is at pp.144-7, and her summary and criticism of the
“developmental” thesis is at pp.147-153. For a shorter summary of the present state of research
and a short bibliography, see the article on “Stoics, Stoicism”, in Allan Fitzgerald and John C.
Cavadini, Augustine through the Ages: an encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1999), pp.816-8.
4
e.g. Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
5
H. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-5).
6
“An apology for Raymond Sebond”, in Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de
Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p.652.

46
this rule is Pierre Gassendi, who was sympathetic.7) But a still more significant factor
shaping the appreciation of the early moderns for the Stoics – and one which made it
virtually impossible for them to understand what Augustine was doing in his writings
on Stoic thought - was the striking lack of interest in or attention to the historical
development of ancient philosophical doctrine. The doxographical template which
Diogenes Laertius had employed persisted into modern times, being employed by
Thomas Stanley, the major English scholar of the history of philosophy in the
seventeenth century, 8 as it was by many other writers before the emergence of the
modern “eclecticism” which sought to understand how new and significant arguments
developed out of the criticisms of the philosophical status quo ante (and which is
discussed in Part Three Section Three and Part Four Section One below). The set-piece
debates between the ancient schools which Cicero presented in De Finibus and
elsewhere were, of course, well known to the scholars of the Renaissance and
afterwards, and seventeenth-century scholars were adept at the critical comparison of
the arguments of one text or author with those of another, but there was very little
interest in the questions which command the attention of contemporary historians, of
why the various ancient philosophers made the arguments they did, and in response to
what, and of how these arguments then changed the terms of the philosophical
questions which their successors inherited from them. Contemporary scholars of
ancient philosophy are only now beginning to address the question of how Augustine
recasts and transforms Stoic doctrine; it is, to say the least, an exciting field of
enquiry.9

The discussion that follows is not concerned with Augustine’s transmogrifications

of Stoic doctrine, however, but with the tradition of anti-Stoic criticism which he
inaugurated, and how it was then appropriated and developed in the works of
seventeenth-century French Augustinian authors. It therefore begins with a detailed
exposition of Augustine’s important presentation of arguments from Stoic philosophy
in Book XIV of The City of God against the Pagans, in order to show how Augustine’s
critical engagement with Stoicism sits right at the heart of his political theology, an
important point which is not sufficiently emphasised in the existing treatments of
Augustine and the Stoics, and which is crucial to the concerns of this Part. The
argument then moves forward to the world of the Renaissance, with Section Two

7
For Gassendi on Stoic logic, see his De logicae origine, in Pierre Gassendi, Opera Omnia
(Lyons: 1658). For discussion, Santinello, ed., Models of the History of Philosophy, p.142. In
addition to the problem of sources there was also the continuing grip of at least one part of
Aristotle’s system on the philosophers of the seventeenth century with which to contend, for the
Stoics’ propositional logic was largely incomprehensible in the syllogistic world of the pre-
Fregean era.
8
Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy (2nd edition. London: Printed for Thomas Bassett,
1687).
9
Richard Sorabji’s recent volume on theories of the emotions is excellent in this regard,
concluding with a lengthy treatment of the relationship between Augustine’s analysis of lust
and the Stoic theory of the passions. Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).

47
presenting a critical account of William J. Bouwsma’s classic article on the “two faces
of humanism”, a treatment which incorporates discussion of a different Augustinian
text, the early and aforementioned dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will. The main
work of the chapter appears in Section Three, which is an account of the contours of
the Augustinian anti-Stoicisms developed in particular by Cornelius Jansenius (1585-
1638), Jean-François Senault (1601-1672), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and Nicolas
Malebranche (1638-1715), an ideology which revisits some of the themes outlined in
Part One and responds to the more immediate context sketched in the opening Sections
of this Part. The concluding fourth section considers the increasingly frequent recourse
to Marcus Aurelius over the second half of the seventeenth century, and argues that in
part this is to be explained by this Stoic author’s comparative immunity to the kind of
criticisms being developed in the Augustinian literature, whose major targets were the
contemporary varieties of Stoicism which drew most heavily on Seneca.

I: Stoicism in Book XIV of City of God

In significant ways, Book XIV is the pivot on which the rest of The City of God
Against the Pagans turns, for it contains Augustine’s analysis of the situation of Adam
and Eve in Eden and of their subsequent Fall. This is an episode central not only to his
theological project, for Augustine single-handedly created the doctrine of Original Sin
which dominated the thinking of the Church for so long, but also to his political theory,
owing to the work it performs in constructing the central categories of the argument of
the work as a whole. It is no accident, for example, that the most succinct summary of
Augustine’s political teaching belongs right at the end of Book XIV, for the famous
passage which begins “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves” (fecerunt
itaque ciuitates duas amores duo) is Augustine’s summary presentation of the position
won by the argument of Book XIV, and which the remaining books will expand upon
at very great length.10 The Book opens with the theme of the existence of two rival
cities, earthly and heavenly, already richly elaborated; but it is only in the course of
Book XIV that the origins and nature of each city – the core theme of the work as a
whole – are properly established, the one rooted in disobedience, or in pride rooted in
self-love, the other in charity, or love of God “extending to contempt of self”.11

The origins of the cities lie in different kinds of love, and these loves are central
not only to City of God but to Augustine’s entire body of moral and political
philosophy, since his theorisation of love directly shapes and gives content to his
theorisation of justice, the core normative political concept for Augustine as much as
for Plato and Cicero (or, indeed, later, the late John Rawls). It is not simply the case
that love of God is good and love of self is bad (though the Jansenists, whom we shall
encounter in the pages that follow did tend to read Augustine in this way), and this for

10
City of God, XIV.28, p.632.
11
For discussion of the ways in which the workings of pride imitate that of charity in the
context of the “two cities” doctrine, see John Michael Parrish, “From Dirty Hands to the
Invisible Hand: Paradoxes of Political Ethics” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2002), ch.2.

48
at least two reasons: first because the love of self is rooted in the nature of things, and
what is natural is created by God and is for that reason good; second because of the
divine commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, which implies the propriety
of a certain kind of self-love.12 The object of love is significant, but more important is
the ordering of one’s loves, and the quality of one’s loving, concerning which
Augustine deploys a vocabulary of charitable loving on the one hand and passionate
loving or lust on the other. The trouble with self-love is not intrinsic to it, but related to
the fact that in practice it so often issues in contempt of God, or pride, a misordering of
our loves and a denial of the love we owe our Creator. “Love”, wrote Augustine in one
of his commentaries on the Psalms, “but take care what it is that you love... Bridle your
passion, stir up your charity!”13 Given this centrality of love to Augustine’s ethical
theory in general and to the political argument of City of God in particular, it is
therefore a striking and an important fact about The City of God that these chapters in
Book XIV also contain by far the most sustained rumination upon Stoic philosophy to
be found in the entire work.

Book XIV does not by any means, however, mark the first appearance of the Stoics
in the City of God. In Book V Augustine considered the Stoic account of fate, for
example, arguing with and against the Ciceronian account presented in De Fato; and in
Book IX he addressed various topics in Stoic ethics. But neither of these is an
especially significant episode in the structure of the work. Insofar as Augustine was
critical of the Stoics’ fate, it was (reasonably enough) to attack their fondness for
astrology, and is best understood as a component part of the more general attack on
pagan superstition which dominates so much of the first ten Books; insofar as he was
sympathetic, it was to uphold the notion of a universe under the benign governance of
an omnipotent Deity in possession of perfect foreknowledge against both Cicero and
the Pelagians who worried that the chains of causation which God therefore foreknew
were incompatible with the possession of a truly free will by human beings.14 When
Augustine considered the ethics of the Stoics in Book IX, furthermore, he was content
to repeat Cicero’s criticism from De Finibus about the disagreements between the
Stoics and the Peripatetics being linguistic rather than substantial,15 a complaint which

12
Among other passages, Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.27 is explicit on this latter point.
For a more general account of self-love in Augustine which is exhaustive and compelling, see
Oliver O'Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1980). Cf Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, J. Vecchiarelli Scott and J. Chelius Stark
eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
13
Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, Psalm 9.
14
City of God, V, esp. chs.8-10, pp.197-206. For discussion of these passages, see Colish, The
Stoic Tradition, vol.2, pp.229-232.
15
Colish makes the useful observation that while Augustine repeats the form of Cicero’s
objection, the content is not identical. Ibid., vol.2, pp.208-9. Sorabji illuminatingly shows how
Augustine’s resistance to the Stoics’ claim that “first movements” were qualititatively
difference from the passions proper may have stemmed from his reliance on Aulus Gellius, who
in paraphrasing Epictetus substituted the verb pavescere (to grow jittery) for the correct
pallescere (to grow pale) and thereby encouraged his readers, including Augustine, to draw the

49
echoes a familiar trope in Christian writings about the endless capacity of the
philosophers for meaningless disputation. 16 In Book XIV, by contrast, Augustine
expounds a set of Stoic ethical doctrines in order to introduce his analysis of the nature
of the original sin, and while his verdict on the Stoics in the end is damning – indeed,
he really does demonise them, as we shall see – this judgment is passed only after he
has signalled his agreement with a very substantial part of the Stoics’ approach to
moral theory.

As is well known, City of God is divided into two unequal halves. The first ten
books were written against the Romans and their religion; the latter twelve present the
history of the citizens of the City of God on their pilgrimage through historical time
and a little beyond. These twelve books are further subdivided into four groups of three,
on the origin, development and end of the heavenly city, so that Book XIV is the final
book of the first part of the second half, bringing the analysis of the origin of the City
of God to a close.17 The discussion of the Fall is spread over two books, XIII and XIV,
but the main argument which engages the Stoics is entirely confined to Book XIV.
Book XIII considers the nature of death, which is, so Augustine contends, the divine
punishment justly incurred for the sin in the Garden; and it presents analyses of some
of the metaphysics which arise from thinking about the separation of the soul and the
body or the flesh of the saints. This Book ends with a discussion of the nature of lust:
in the absence of the “shameless stirrings of those parts which were not subject to the
control of the will”, how would men “have begotten offspring if they had remained as
they were created, without sin?”18 Augustine announces that “so large a subject cannot
be treated in so narrow a compass”, and that he will end Book XIII at this point, in
order that this important issue can be “treated more appropriately” in the pages that
follow. As promised, Book XIV does indeed answer the question Augustine has just
posed to himself, but only in its second half. The discussion of lust begins in XIV.16
and dominates the rest of the Book,19 but these passages on lust, however, only appear
after a lengthy discussion of Stoic philosophy, which in turn introduces Augustine’s
presentation of the actual Fall of Adam itself, and it is these chapters that will be
considered in most detail in this section.

conclusion that the Stoic wise man did in fact experience passions. “From a literary point of
view, this ambiguity [between actual fear and mere trembling] makes it [pavescere] an excellent
word to use. But from a philosophical point of view it is disastrous”. Sorabji, Emotion and
Peace of Mind, pp.375-380.
16
Lactantius, Divine Institutes, passim.
17
For Augustine’s own account of the structure of the work, see City of God XVIII.1, p.821.
18
Ibid., XIII.24, p.580.
19
This is a passage of argument which contains Augustine’s well-known (if peculiar) claims
that in Paradise men’s genitals remained under the strict control of the will (Ibid., XIV.26,
p.629) and that the Cynic philosophers who were alleged to have had sexual intercourse in
public places could not have done so, because “I believe that such pleasure could not have been
achieved under the gaze of human onlookers”. (Ibid., XIV.20, p.619).

50
 Book XIV opens with a reiteration of the claim, familiar from XII.22 and from so
many other Augustinian texts, that “the individual members of this [human] race would
not have been subject to death, had not the first two... merited it by their disobedience”.
But for the unmerited grace of God, Augustine comments that all men would have
been “driven headlong, as their due punishment, into that second death to which there
is no end”, and that it is the existence of this redeeming grace which has led to the “two
orders” of human society, or to the “two cities”. So far, so familiar, until Augustine
appeals to a Biblical distinction, for of the two cities, “The one is made up of men who
live according to the flesh (secundum carnem), and the other of those who live
according to the spirit (secundum spiritum)”.20 XIV.2 clarifies this distinction. On the
one hand Augustine is quite clear that the Epicureans recommended a life according to
the flesh, “for they place man’s highest good in the pleasure of the body”. 21 But
Augustine also and immediately insists that the Stoics also belong on the fleshly side
of this binary, even though, as he admits, they present virtue as the summum bonum
and understand it to be a property of the mind:

In fact, however, it is clear that all of these [i.e. the Stoics] live
according to the flesh in the sense intended by Divine Scripture when
it uses the expression.

The distinction between the flesh and the spirit is not identical with that between the
body and the mind, and Augustine provides several examples from Scripture where the
word flesh is not used “to mean only the body of an earthly or mortal creature”. The
text that provides him with his interpretive key is from Paul, at Galatians 5:19:

The works of the flesh are manifold, which are these; adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred,
variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings,
murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.22

Although Paul described these as the works of the flesh, Augustine observes that they
are all clearly “vices of the mind rather than of the body”, and to clinch his case, he
imagines a man who “tempers his desire for bodily pleasure out of devotion to an idol,
or because of some heretical error”. This man is nevertheless

still convicted, on the authority of the apostle, of living according to

the flesh; yet it is his very abstinence from the pleasures of the flesh
that demonstrates that he is engaged in the damnable works of the
flesh.23

20
Ibid., XIV.1, p.581.
21
Ibid., XIV.2, p.582.
22
Ibid., XIV.2, p.583.
23
Ibid., XIV.2, pp.583-4.

51
This is the first step in his argument, for having established that the domain of the flesh
extends beyond the realm of the body to include what goes on in people’s minds, it
remains for Augustine to show why the Stoics’ account of virtue should be categorised
alongside wrath, heresy, drunkenness and these other sins of the flesh.

Two new elements are therefore introduced in XIV.3. First, Augustine begins his
consideration of the “disturbances (perturbationes) of the mind”, and while he takes
his typology from Virgil, 24 the disturbances are the standard Stoic quartet of desire
(cupiditas), fear (timor), joy (laetitia) and grief (tristitia). Augustine departs from
Virgil’s Platonic interpretation of the perturbationes as having their origins in the
body,25 asserting as an article of “our faith” that “the corruption of the body, which
presseth down the soul, was not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment”.26 Second,
Augustine for the first time in Book XIV introduces the figure of the Devil, who will
continue to be a felt presence for the rest of the Book. If the Platonic teaching were
right, he observes, there would be a problem, for then “we should absolve the Devil
from all such vices, since he has no flesh”. Worse still,

[W]e cannot say that the devil is a fornicator or a drunkard, or that he

commits any other such vice pertaining to the pleasures of the flesh,
even though it is he who secretly tempts and incites us to such sins. He
is, however, supremely proud and envious (maxime superbus atque
invidus); and these vices of pride and envy have so possessed him that
he is doomed by them to eternal punishment in the prison of this
murky air of ours.

Augustine concludes that “It is not then, by having flesh, which the devil does not have,
that man has become like the devil. Rather, it is by living according to his own self;
that is, according to man.” Thus the operative dichotomy in the Book shifts yet again:
the classical dualism of body and mind was replaced by the Biblical binary of the flesh
and the spirit, and this binary is now transposed into a distinctively Augustinian key as
that between living according to man, or to self on the one hand, and living according
to God on the other.

This opposition is further elaborated in XIV.4, where Augustine represents living

“according to self” as living “according to falsehood”, because “man was created
righteous, to live according to His Maker and not according to himself”, and in XIV.5,
where he rejects the Platonists’ view that ascribes all vice to the nature of the flesh.
Each chapter adds a detail to the argument of the Book so far and strengthens its Stoic
characteristics: for the equation of sin with falsehood in the first is coupled with a note
that what Cicero calls the four “disturbances” are more usually rendered as the
“passions” (pathe), which can be said to “embrace all the vices of human conduct”;

24
Virgil, Aeneid 6.730ff.
25
City of God, XIV.3, p.585.
26
Ibid., XIV.3, p.585.

52
and in locating vice in the mind, and identifying it with both passion and falsehood in
the second, Augustine is, as he recognises, in agreement with the Stoics and opposed to
both the Platonists and the Manichees.27

The critique of the Stoics finally begins to take shape at XIV.6. Augustine’s first
line of attack is to insist that there are good as well as bad emotions (and in XIV.7
Augustine follows with a battery of Scriptural citations to reinforce the point):

What is important here is the quality of a man’s will (interest autem

qualis sit voluntas hominis). For if the will is perverse, the emotions
will be perverse; but if it is righteous, the emotions will be not only
blameless, but praiseworthy.28

Although Augustine’s insistence on the importance of will might seem to mark a sharp
departure from Stoic theory, as indeed with all earlier Greek ethics, interpretive caution
is required. When the need to make some allowances for a necessarily shifting
terminology is recognised, as Augustine transforms a technical Greek vocabulary into
his own distinctive Latin, his claim here still bears the traces of two very distinctive
Stoic claims: on the one hand, of Chrysippus’s argument that the passions were
consequent on poor judgment, rather than vice versa; on the other hand, of Epictetus’s
emphasis on the importance of the correct use of the will (or faculty of choice, the
prohairesis) in determining right action.29

There is of course a well-rehearsed Stoic response to this kind of objection, and it

is one that Augustine acknowledges in XIV.8, which is that the sage indeed does show
emotion, but that these are eupatheiai or constantiae rather than pathe, or “passions”
constituted by error.30 Augustine’s response to this objection contains four significant
elements. First, in XIV.8 he peppers his text with a large number of citations, mostly
Scriptural but some also drawn from Cicero and (oddly) Terence, to reach the (perhaps
unsurprising) conclusion that in the most authoritative literature the distinction the
Stoics insist upon is not upheld.31 Second, and importantly for his purposes, he notes
that Paul praised the Corinthians for having felt grief “after a godly manner”, although
the Stoics not only denied that the wise man feels grief but also refused to supply a
corresponding eupatheia as a substitute to describe what he does feel.32 In response to
this Pauline argument that “grief does seem to serve a useful purpose when it gives rise
to repentance of sin”, Augustine imagines a Stoic reply which would observe that since
the wise man does not sin, grief in the service of repentance cannot therefore arise in
his mind. In the story of how Alicibiades wept when Socrates showed him how he was

27
Ibid., XIV.5, p.589.
28
Ibid., XIV.6, p.590.
29
Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, esp. chs. 2, 21. For Epictetus on the prohairesis, see
Long, Epictetus, ch.8.
30
Again, Long provides a useful discussion of this point, in Ibid., pp.244-6.
31
City of God, XIV.8, p.595.
32
I Corinthians, 7:8ff; City of God XIV.8, p.596.

53
miserable because he was foolish, the Stoics had an example of this kind of grief; but it
is a grief that the wise man can never experience, precisely because he is wise. 33
(Augustine can allow this response to stand, since the Stoics’ dogma that the wise man
does not sin is a part of the rope with which he will hang them a little later in the
Book.) Third, in XIV.9 Augustine argues that the citizens of the heavenly city do feel
the four perturbationes, but this is

in a manner consistent with the Holy Scripture and wholesome

doctrine; and because their love is righteous, all these emotions are
righteous in them.34

They may even desire temptation, saying “Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my
reins and my heart”, and with reference to the many occasions on which Paul wept and
rejoiced and experienced longing, suffering and jealousy he proclaims that

if these emotions and affections, which come from the love of the
good and form holy charity, are to be called vices, then let us allow
that real vices should be called virtues.35

Finally, Augustine reminds his reader that Christ also experienced pathe on several
occasions.36 In this final section, he also rejects the Stoics’ contention that pity was a
vice, agreeing with Paul that we should denounce those who are “without natural
affection”, and with Cicero that to be entirely free of pain in this world would require
the cultivation of “savagery of mind and stupor of body”.37

These last observations pave the way for Augustine’s analysis of the central
category in Stoic ethics, that of apatheia.

If, then, we are to understand this ‘impassibility’ (impassibilitas) to

mean a life without those emotions which arise contrary to reason and
which disturb the mind, it is clearly a good and desirable condition. It
does not, however, belong to this present life.38

The saints may enjoy apatheia in a world to come, but for the moment,

We live well enough if we live without blame. But if anyone supposes

that his life is without sin, he does not avoid sin, but rather forfeits
pardon. Moreover, if apatheia is to be defined as a condition such that

33
Ibid., XIV.8, p.596.
34
Ibid., XIV.9, p.597.
35
City of God, XIV.9, p.599.
36
Mark 3:5, John 11:15, 11:35, Luke 22:15, Matthew 26:38. City of God, XIV.9, p.599.
37
Romans 1:31; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3.6.12; City of God, XIV.9, pp.599-600.
38
Ibid., XIV.9, p.600.

54
 the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would
not judge insensitivity to be the worst of all vices?39

The fact that apatheia is depicted as a life without fear reinforces the claim that it is
unsuited to this world, for on earth we rightly fear God if we wish to live rightly, and
only in “that life of blessedness which, it is promised, is eternal” will that fear come to
an end.40

Christians need not worry therefore that they are fearful, and that they experience
the various other perturbationes, for “a righteous life will exhibit all these emotions
righteously, whereas a perverse life exhibits them perversely”. 41 The Stoics, on the
other hand, are citizens of the earthly city, as the following passage makes clear:

The city, that is, the fellowship of the ungodly consists of those who
live not according to God, but according to man: who, in worshipping
false gods and despising the true Divinity, follow the teachings of men
or of demons. This city is convulsed by those emotions as if by
diseases and upheavals. And if it has any citizens who seem to control
and in some way temper those emotions, they are so proud and elated
in their impiety that, for this very reason, their haughtiness increases
even as their pain diminishes. Some of these, with a vanity as
monstrous as it is rare, are so entranced by their own self-restraint that
they are not stirred or excited or swayed or influenced by any emotions
at all. But these rather suffer an entire loss of their humanity than
achieve a true tranquillity. For a thing is not right merely because it is
harsh, nor is stolidity the same thing as health.42

This, then, is the characteristic vice of the Stoics, that their pride leads them to believe
that it is in their power to control their emotions. This is impious on two levels. First,
in that it triply fails to recognise that the passions are inevitable (because they are part
of the divine punishment for original sin), that there is a proper use of the passions or a
righteous way to experience them, and that the correct way of handling the passions
comes through a recognition of dependence on God rather than through a doomed
attempt to insist that humans can through their own efforts overcome them. Second, it
is impious because insofar as a Stoic does falsely believe himself to be in control of his
passions, so to that extent also his “haughtiness increases even as his pain diminishes”.
Nor is it accidental that the key Stoic vice of pride is the same as is ascribed to the
Devil a few pages before, as will become increasingly apparent below.

39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., XIV, 9, p.601.
42
Ibid., XIV.9, p.602. Emphases added.

55
 In XIV.10, Augustine returns to the First Couple. The chapter title asks “Whether
we are to believe that the first human beings were subject to emotions of any kind
when they were placed in Paradise, and before they sinned?”, and the body of the text
poses the question this way: did they feel “in their animal bodies the kind of emotions
which we shall not feel in our spiritual bodies when all sin has been purged and
ended”? His answer is that they did not:

The love of the pair for God and for one another was undisturbed
(inperturbatus), and they lived in a faithful and sincere fellowship
which brought great gladness to them, for what they loved was always
at hand for their enjoyment. There was a tranquil avoidance of sin
(erat devitatio tranquilla peccati); and, as long as this continued, no
evil of any kind intruded, from any source, to bring them sadness.43

They had been forbidden to eat from the tree, but Augustine is clear that they did not
desire the fruit against God’s decree and abstain from it “merely from fear of
punishment”. Nor was theirs a righteous fear of the kind discussed in the previous
chapter: they abstained out of righteousness pure and simple, and they lived without
the perturbationes of fear and desire.

How happy, then, were the first human beings, neither troubled by any
disturbance of the mind nor pained by any disorder of the body! 44

Is this a description of Stoic apatheia? Marcia Colish thinks not:

Not even Adam and Eve before the Fall possessed apatheia, Augustine
maintains, otherwise they could not have felt the desire for the
forbidden fruit. It is only in the next life, in which the saints will be
free from the capacity to sin, that apatheia will be possible for man.45

But is this correct? Augustine does not make the point which Colish ascribes to him in
XIV.10, to which her footnote refers; and it is not clear what is gained by her denying
that Adam and Eve lived in a state of apatheia; on the other hand, as we have seen, he
is quite clear that they lived without any kind of emotional disturbance, the defining
characteristic of apatheia both in the Stoic tradition and in his own account of XIV.9.
There Augustine affirmed that “This condition of apatheia will only come to pass
when there is no sin in man”, and in his description of Eden, Augustine is clear that
there is no sin present:

God forbid, I say, that before all sin, there already existed that sin,
committed in respect of a tree, of which, when committed in respect of

43
Ibid., XIV.10, pp.602-3.
44
Ibid., XIV.10, p.603.
45
Colish, The Stoic Tradition, vol.2, p.225. Emphasis added.

56
 a woman, the Lord said, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after
her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”46

Augustine certainly draws a distinction between the situation of the First Couple and
the eternal blessedness of the saints, which is that the latter enjoy the “certain
assurance that no one would sin and no one would die”,47 but he does not suggest that
this is a reason for affirming that the saints enjoy apatheia in a way that the first human
beings do not. Given Augustine’s repeated and deliberate use of Stoic categories and
vocabulary to describe the predicament of Adam and Eve – though, admittedly,
without using the word apatheia or impassibilitas itself – it would be odd to conclude
that he was here trying to deny that this was a genuine example of Stoic apatheia,
indeed, the only instance there will ever be of human beings in such a state.

In XIV.11 Augustine turns to the Fall itself. God had made man with a good will,
and “a good will is the work of God, since man was created with it by God”.

On the other hand, the first evil act of the will, since it preceded all
other evil acts in man, consisted rather in its falling away from the
work of God to its own works than in any one work. And those works
of the will were evil because they were according to itself and not
according to God...48

The will which Adam and Eve possessed was genuinely free, for “the choice of the
will... is truly free only when it is not the slave of vices and sins”, and theirs was not.49
They lived in a corporeal and spiritual paradise.

But then came that proud angel, envious by reason of that same pride
which had induced him to turn away from God and follow himself...
(Postea vero wuam superbus ille angelus ac per hoc invidus per
eandem superbiam a Deo ad semet ipsum conversus...)

Even if Eve’s status as a kind of Stoic sage – which was always a masculine ideal – is
thrown into doubt by her inability to resist the serpent’s temptation, Adam’s was not,
for Augustine makes it clear that he sinned knowingly. He had not been deceived (as
Paul told the Romans); rather, he “did not wish to be separated from his only
companion, even at the cost of sharing in her sin”.50

In the case of sinning knowingly, it is a logical truth that the evil will had to
precede the evil act, and in XIV.13 Augustine asks, “What but pride can have been the

46
City of God, XIV.10, p.603.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., XIV.11, p.604.
49
Ibid., XIV.11, p.605.
50
Ibid., XIV.11, p.606.

57
beginning of their evil will?” (Porro, male voluntatis initium quae potuit esse nisi
superbia?)

And what is pride but an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation? For
it is a perverse kind of elevation indeed to forsake the foundation upon
which the mind should rest, and to become and remain, as it were,
one’s own foundation. This occurs when a man is too pleased with
himself (Hoc fit cum sibi nimis placet).51

And then, a little later,

It is clear, therefore, that the Devil would not have been able to lure
man into the manifest and open sin of doing what God had prohibited
had not man already begun to be pleased with himself. That is why
Adam was delighted when it was said, ‘Ye shall be as gods’.52

The origins of sin lie therefore in Adam and Eve becoming pleased with themselves.
This is the beginning of self-love, which is the root of pride, which in turn is the
fountainhead of sin.

We have seen how Augustine’s descriptions of the Stoics in Book XIV consign
them to membership of the earthly city. They live “according to the flesh” and pride is
their defining vice. The Devil also concentrates on the works of the flesh, and is
supremely proud. To live according to the flesh is to live according to man or to self
and not according to God; the original sin was itself a choice to live according to self,
and was rooted in being “pleased with oneself”, in self-love, or in pride. In this
Augustinian schema, therefore, to bring to mind the pride of the Stoics with their high
valuations of self-sufficiency and autonomy is to be reminded immediately of the
Devil on the one hand, and of Adam’s transgression on the other. In one sense there is
nothing remarkable about this. Any sin can swiftly be related to the original sin – that is,
after all, a part of the point of the latter category. But Stoicism is more thoroughly
implicated in original sin than this. The obvious mistake the Stoics make from this
Christian point of view is to think that post-lapsarian humans can live without being
troubled by the perturbationes, and therefore without sin. Christians have it as an
article of faith that they cannot, and therefore that the claim of the Stoics appears as
ridiculous, impious, and prideful, insofar as it denies human dependence on God.

According to Augustine’s narration of the Eden story, furthermore, it is not just the
case that the Stoics mistakenly suppose something to be possible when it is not. For
even when it were once possible for a human being to live as a Stoic sage, untroubled
by emotions and therefore in possession of a genuinely free will, Adam nevertheless
became “pleased with himself”, before the perpetration of any “external” sin, and that

51
Ibid., XIV.13, p.608.
52
Ibid., XIV.13, p.610.

58
it was this which led to his disobedience of the divine command not to eat the fruit of
the tree. It is clear that humans cannot enjoy Stoic apatheia in this life because of
original sin; it is not too fanciful to think that Augustine is here suggesting that original
sin was incurred in part because Adam had lived in a state of apatheia, which precisely
helped to induce and then to nurture this feeling of pride. For Augustine, this apatheia
isn’t quite the same as the truly utopian state the saints will enjoy – concerning which
he stresses their unshakable love of God even more than their freedom of the will or
their lack of troubling perturbationes.53 The apatheia of Eden doesn’t solve – it doesn’t
even address – the question of the possible perversity of the will; yet the control of
their wills which the First Couple enjoyed, fostered, like Scarpia confronted by Tosca,
a forgetfulness of God — and in Book XIII Augustine is emphatic that Adam forsook
God before God forsook Adam.54

We have to be cautious here. Augustine is careful not to make a causal argument of

any kind about the effects upon Adam and Eve which their environment or their
predicament might have had. As with the theft of the pears in Book II of the
Confessions, which is closely modelled on the episode in the Garden, he deliberately
strips away any rational or explicable motive for the sin, until only the fact of
transgression undertaken for its own sake remains.55 But as in the case of the earlier
Fall, that of the Devil, the set of associations Augustine constructs between apatheia,
becoming “pleased with oneself” or proud, and Fall through the perpetration of sin is
unmistakable, as is the way these in which these associations are subsequently echoed
in a shadowy and erroneous fashion in the vanity of the Stoics of the civitas terrena.

There is, then, a significant philosophical critique of the Stoics in these pages, but
it is less important when set aside the ideological or polemical work which the Book
has performed upon them. Far from the Stoics being in any way preferable to the
Epicureans owing to their agreement with the Christians that virtue properly belongs to
the mind, their philosophy has been relegated to the realm of the flesh, implicated in
original sin, and found guilty of the same sins as those perpetrated by the Devil, sins
which were committed, furthermore, for exactly the same reasons. The familiar
Ciceronian objections to Stoic apatheia are repeated (that it is both an impossible and
an undesirable state of affairs at which to aim), but they are given new force through
the way Augustine situates them in his broad – indeed, vast - theological canvas. From
Cicero’s point of view, to declare oneself a Stoic was to make a number of significant
philosophical mistakes; from Augustine’s, it is also in a way to declare war on God.

II: The Two Faces of Renaissance Humanism Revisited

Many aspects of the persisting antagonism between Stoicism and Augustinianism

as they appeared in the writings of the humanists of the Renaissance have been well

53
e.g., Ibid., XXII.30, pp.1178-1182.
54
Ibid., XIII.15, pp.556-7.
55
Augustine, Confessions, II.4.

59
described by William J. Bouwsma in his 1975 article on the “two faces” of
Renaissance humanism. His distinctive interpretation of humanism was as a
“singularly complex movement”, but one with its own “underlying unity”.56 It was a
single movement, he claimed, “in much the sense that a battlefield is a definable piece
of ground”, and he suggested that the “two ideological poles between which
Renaissance humanism oscillated may be roughly labeled ‘Stoicism’ and
‘Augustinianism’”.57 Bouwsma was swift to concede that these were rather imprecise
labels, but he emphasised that they did usefully serve to “designate antithetical visions
of human existence” which were peculiarly relevant to the understanding of
humanism. 58 For too long, he contended, scholars had thought of humanism as an
attempt to recover an authentic classicism embodied in Plato or Aristotle, whereas it
was the rival philosophies of the Stoics and of Augustine which represented “genuine
alternatives for the Renaissance humanists to ponder”.59

This opposition between “Stoicism” and “Augustinianism” had many

dimensions.60 A Stoic, for example, “deifies the natural order” and emphasises that the
human being partook of the substance, rather than the image of God; whereas for an
Augustinian it is the other way around. A Stoic would insist that careful study of the
natural world would render it intelligible to us, and would be optimistic about the
possibilities of a natural theology. But for the Augustinian the truths of religion are
revealed in Scripture, not discovered in Nature. A Stoic would hold to the Socratic
teaching that it is impossible to know the good and not to do it, that virtue is a kind of
knowledge and that we come to virtue through reason. But an Augustinian would stress
the frailty of human reason, and its capacity to be led astray in the absence of divine
illumination. Not only the weakness but also the corruption of the will makes it
straightforward for an Augustinian that one can know what the right thing to do is, and
why it ought to be done, and yet still be unable to perform the required action. The
Stoics taught that it is wholly in our power to determine whether we lead a just and
virtuous life, thereby achieving a state of apatheia, or of philosophical detachment,
passionless existence and, therefore, of constant happiness. From the Augustinian
perspective, as we have seen, this was absurd, for such a view denies our dependence
upon God; the only tranquillity we will ever enjoy will be - might be - in a world to
come.

Stoicism and Augustinianism did present rival and incompatible visions of human
existence and excellence to the Renaissance humanists, and yet what Bouwsma showed
in his survey was the extent to which they rarely put themselves in a position where
they felt forced to choose one set of ideals and commitments and abandon the other.
Owing to the unsystematic nature of much humanist reflection and the limited

56
Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism”, p.19.
57
Ibid., p.20.
58
Ibid., p.20.
59
Ibid., p.22.
60
This paragraph draws on Ibid., pp.24-7.

60
availability of the more technical Greek Stoic sources, the sharp polarity which
Bouwsma described between Stoic and Augustinian points of view was not perceived
especially clearly. As Bouwsma observed of the Renaissance, “Its Augustinianism
consisted of a bundle of personal insights that had, indeed, legitimate affinities with
Augustine himself...; but its Stoicism was singularly confused”. 61 Yet even as the
humanists did come to understand some of the distinctive complexities of Stoic
philosophy, and of how it differed on the one hand from its rival systems of ancient
philosophy and on the other from the claims of mainstream Christian theology, many
writers continued to draw selectively on Stoic doctrines to in pursuit of some kind of
syncretism.62

In a final section, “From Ambiguity to Dialectic”, Bouwsma considered the turn of

the seventeenth century, and the essay ended with a glance at two late Renaissance
developments. One the one hand, there was the Neo-Stoic project of Lipsius and others,
which combined scholarship and advocacy to present Stoicism as “an increasingly
articulated system”, and one to which these “Neostoic writers even assimilated
Augustine, whom they often quoted”. 63 On the other hand, Bouwsma detected a
different “species of Stoicism”,

responsible for the attempt by such figures as Charron and Grotius in a

time when religious passion was a source of general disturbance, to
base ethics on the laws of nature...64

This attempt to build a secular system of ethics, Bouwsma thought, represented a kind
of Stoicism that could be reconciled with Augustinian Christiainty. His final
conclusion, then, was that

The two could be seen to complement each other, as law is

complemented by grace, or the earthly city by the heavenly city. But
such a reconciliation, which depended on the deracination of Stoicism,
was obviously a reconciliation on Augustinian terms. And Stoicism
had a peculiar facility for growing new roots; thus the tension between
the two old antagonists was never fully resolved.65

Considering the nature of the seventeenth-century tension that obtained between these
two old antagonists is the task of the rest of this Part and the next. But first, I want to
call aspects of this final judgment into question.

61
Ibid., p.58.
62
Ibid., p.60.
63
Ibid., p.60.
64
Ibid., p.64.
65
Ibid.

61
 There was, as we saw at the end of Part One, an important connection between the
development of the new secular ethical theory and the legacy of the Stoics, though
perhaps not the one Bouwsma had in mind. For when he alluded to the development of
an “ethics based on the law of nature”, the obvious link to the doctrine of the Stoics is
provided by the perennial association between Stoicism and natural law theory, given
its classic formulation by Cicero’s spokesman for Stoic opinions in his dialogue De Re
Publica, “Laelius”, when he proclaimed that “True law is right reason in agreement
with nature” (est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens). 66 Natural law
theories of the kind which might quote this line approvingly had, of course, been
around for generations; one of the major achievements of Thomas Aquinas had been to
build a Christian philosophy out of the systematic philosophy of Aristotle on the one
hand and the various strands of mediaeval natural law theory on the other.

The natural jurisprudence of the seventeenth century represented something

different, however, and the contrast between the older theories and the new ones
propounded by Grotius and his followers is well captured by the simple shift in
nomenclature, from theories of natural law to theories of natural rights. As with the
older theories, the new theory had a Stoic foundation, in the presentation of Stoic (or
something like Stoic, at any rate) oikeiosis, which Grotius had offered at the origins of
this tradition. To link the new theories with Stoicism therefore, as Bouwsma does, is
not unreasonable. But to call it a “reconciliation” between Stoicism and
Augustinianism “on Augustinian terms” is problematic, because of a significant
disagreement that obtained between the natural rights theory and the doctrine of
Augustine right at the heart of the theoretical edifice. For modern natural rights theory
turned on the thought that action undertaken purely for the sake of self-preservation
cannot incur just censure, and that is an opinion which Augustine challenged head-on
in his early dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will, in his treatment of the possibility
of a defensible killing.67

In the first book of that work “Augustine” and his interlocutor “Evodius” have
established that “inordinate desire” or “cupidity” lies behind an instance of evildoing,
and a distinction has been drawn between cupidity and “fear”: the one desires its object,
the other flees from it.68 The way seems to be open for one of the pair to make a natural
rights-style argument – that killing someone else because you fear that otherwise you
will lose your own life could be an example of or even a paradigm for a legitimate
killing. Instead, the dialogue takes a different turn, when “Augustine” asks whether a
man would be a murderer who “kills someone, not out of cupidity for something that
he desires to gain, but because he fears that some harm will come to himself...”?69

66
Cicero, De Re Publica, III.33.xxii.
67
Cf. discussion of the same passage in Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: political
thought and the international order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp.55-6.
68
Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p.6.
69
Ibid., p.6.

62
“Evodius” insists that this man does desire something, namely to live without fear, and
“Augustine” responds that this is not a blameworthy desire, and that it is therefore
outside the domain of cupidity. “Augustine” then takes a different example. “So
consider someone who kills his master because he fears severe torture. Do you think
that he should be classed among those who kill a human being but do not deserve to be
called murderers?” “Evodius” first replies that “No law approves of the deed in your
example,” but “Augustine” denies that an appeal to authority will suffice, as they are
trying to find out how it is that the law can be said to be just.70 Both initially agree that
the killing is unjust, and it is in order to establish why it is unjust that “Augustine”
makes his key move:

Augustine: It follows that, since the master is killed by the slave as a

result of this desire [to be free from fear], he is not killed as a result of
a blameworthy desire. And so we have not yet figured out why this
deed is evil. For we are agreed that all wrongdoing is evil only because
it results form inordinate desire, that is, from blameworthy cupidity.

Evodius: At this point it seems to me that the slave is unjustly

condemned, which I would not dream of saying if I could think of
some other response.

Augustine: You have let yourself be persuaded that this great crime
should go unpunished, without considering whether the slave wanted
to be free of the fear of his master in order to satisfy his own
inordinate desires. All wicked people, just like good people, desire to
live without fear. The difference is that the good, in desiring this, turn
their love away from things that cannot be possessed without the fear
of losing them. The wicked, on the other hand, try to get rid of
anything that prevents them from enjoying such things securely. Thus
they lead a wicked and criminal life, which would better be called
death.71

Instead of an appeal to a Stoic principle of a natural inclination to self-preservation as

the ground of a lawful killing, “Augustine” appeals to another principle, familiar above
all from Epictetus: the distinction between things which are and are not “under our
control”, here presented as the distinction between things that can and cannot “be
possessed without the fear of losing them”. 72 This then is the distinction which
provides “Augustine” with his basic criterion for distinguishing rightful from wrongful
killing.

70
Ibid., pp.7.
71
Ibid., pp.7-8. Emphasis added.
72
Epictetus, Discourses, 1.1.

63
 “Evodius” likes this distinction very much, and seems to embrace it more strongly
than “Augustine” himself. For the newly-enlightened “Evodius”, killing in order to
preserve “the things that one can lose against one’s will” – one’s life, for example –
can not now be justified in any circumstances. He is unfazed by “Augustine’s”
objection that if this is so then the law is unjust that allows a traveller to kill a
highwayman, for he confidently asserts that the law

permits lesser evils among the people that it governs in order to

prevent greater evils... The law does not force them to kill; it merely
leaves that in their power. They are free not to kill anyone for those
things which can be lost against their will, and which they should
therefore not love... I don’t blame the law that allows such people to be
killed; but I can’t think of any way to defend those who do the
killing.73

“Augustine’s” reply is weak, given his previous comment about the appeal to legal
authority: “And I can’t think why you are searching for a defense for people whom no
law condemns”.74 It is here that “Evodius” draws a distinction between the domains of
divine law and the law of what Augustine will later call the “earthly city”:

It seems to me, therefore, that the law written to govern the people
rightly permits these killings and that divine providence avenges the,.
The law of the people merely institutes penalties sufficient for keeping
the peace among ignorant human beings, and only to the extent that
their actions can be regulated by human government.75

“Augustine” applauds the conclusion that the hidden divine law may exist to punish
those who act wrongly yet who remain unpunished by human law, though he calls
“Evodius’s” formulation “tentative and incomplete”. (The rest of the dialogue, on the
nature of the good will, fills out the picture somewhat). But what is striking about the
opinions voiced here is that while Augustine’s conclusion – that keeping the peace
ought to be the goal of the secular authority – is identical to that of Thomas Hobbes,
the argument the two interlocutors develop precisely denies the validity of what is for
Hobbes and for other rights-theorists the basic building-block of their argument, the
principle that it is in general permissible to kill another for the sake of preserving one’s
own life.

Thus, from an Augustinian perspective, one shaped by an appreciation of the

divergent paths of the two cities, a natural rights theory could indeed form a part of the
earthly city’s self-understanding. Those who aspire to membership of the civitas Dei
should obey the law, which might understand itself to rest upon a natural rights

73
Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, pp.8-9.
74
Ibid., p.9.
75
Ibid., pp.9-10.

64
justification, and to which they should submit in accordance with God’s decree. But
they submit to that law because it is the temporal, positive law, which they must put up
with during their pilgrimage on earth, and not because it is thought to have any special,
rational, valid authority of its own. The natural rights theory might provide a morality,
but it cannot be considered the highest morality there can be, in which those matters
which pertain to grace always trump considerations of mere nature. We can certainly
carve out a space for a truce between an Augustinian political theory and a Stoic-
derived natural rights jurisprudence, and the different domains of the earthly and the
heavenly city do provide for the possibility of a coexistence of sorts. But to say that the
two cities “complement” one another, or that this is some kind of “reconciliation”
between them, let alone one “on Augustinian terms”, is too strong.

On the other hand, this contradiction, though real, was never the focus of
controversy. In part, confrontation was avoided for geographical reasons, as
seventeenth-century neo-Augustinianism was strongest in France, where Grotius had
few disciples. 76 The Augustinians themselves were not much preoccupied with the
possibility of establishing a natural rights theory.77 It was Pascal, unsurprisingly, who
was most keenly aware of the tension between the ethics of the earthly and the
heavenly cities, as we shall see below; the contradiction only became decisively
important in the case of an eighteenth-century writer who was profoundly ambivalent
about both the natural rights theory and the Augustinian tradition, and the final section
of this dissertation will consider the significance of these legacies in the work of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau.

III: Four French Augustinians Against the Stoics

The influence of the Stoic revival of the sixteenth century continued to be felt in a
variety of spheres in seventeenth-century France. In addition to the dissemination and
translation of Lipsius’s works, there had been a French variation on the Dutch Neo-
Stoic theme in the books of Guillaume du Vair. His Traité de la constance drew
inspiration from Lipsius’s work of the same name, and is given a distinctly French
setting, purporting to be the report of a conversation taking place during the siege of
Paris in 1590.78 It was an immensely popular work: Wade reports that it went through
fifteen editions before 1641. 79 Du Vair also published a short handbook on the
Philosophie morale de stoiques, which presented in summary form the main principles

76
Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, p.122.
77
There was one significant natural rights theorist associated with the Jansenists, Jean Domat,
although (in E. D. James’s phrase) he was “no more than a sympathiser with Jansenism”. See
Jean Domat, Les loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel, 2nd ed. (Paris: au Palais, chez la Veuve de
Theodore Girard, 1698), and, for some shrewd comments about “Jansenist political theory”, see
E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and humanist (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), p.138.
78
Guillaume du Vair, Traité de la constance et consolation ès calamitez publiques (Paris: L.
Tenin, 1915).
79
Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971), p.147.

65
of his doctrine. This was a Neo-Stoicism which departed in some ways from the
previously-established Lipsian paradigm: it is striking, for example, that he dropped
Lipsius’s scepticism about patriotic identification in favour of a very strong patriotic
ideology, which he expressed in almost Ciceronian terms; 80 and in general there is
much more use of the maxims of Epictetus’s Encheiridion, which he was one of the
first to translate into French,81 than is to be found in the Stoic works of Lipsius, who
barely drew on Epictetus at all. 82 If it is misleading to characterise them as being
straightforwardly Stoic, Montaigne’s Essais nevertheless helped to keep many of the
leading ideas of the Hellenistic philosophers before a wide reading public; and those
who wrote in his wake, especially Pierre Charron, the author of the best-selling De la
sagesse, would do the same. Stoic texts remained extremely popular in France, being
translated and re-edited often. In the case of Seneca, to take the most prominent
example, there were several Latin editions of his works in circulation, including those
edited by Erasmus and Lipsius, with new French editions appearing in 1595, 1604 and
1659, in addition to numerous editions and translations of individual texts.83 Nannerl O.
Keohane and Anthony Levi have documented the significant impact of Neo-Stoicism
in French debates on early seventeenth-century political thought and moral
psychology.84 Neo-Stoic texts were widely used in the Jesuit academies; and Pierre
Corneille put Stoic heroes onto the French stage.

The impact of Stoicism on French intellectual culture gave rise to a variegated

landscape: in his detailed surveys of the uses of Stoicism in the writings of (mostly)
French humanists and apologists in the first half of the seventeenth century, père
Julien-Eymard d’Angers distinguished six basic orientations towards the Stoics, which
he labelled “un stoïcisme christianisant” (e.g. Jean-Pierre Camus, Joseph Hall), “un
Christianisme stoïcisant” (Etienne Binet, Nicolas Caussin), “un humanisme chrétien”
(François de Sales, Jean-François Senault), “un humanisme cartésien”, “une double
attitude des libertins” and, finally, “un anti-stoïcisme naissant”, dating from the 1640s,
which will be considered in detail below. 85 That this anti-Stoicism came in a

80
“For good cause we owe of dutie more love unto our countrie, then unto al other things
contained in the world... Out of the fountaine of this worthie affection, what a number of
worthie and excellent deedes have gushed forth?”. Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the
Stoicks. On this, see also Viroli, For Love of Country, p.49.
81
Guillaume du Vair, Le Manuel d'Epictète (Paris: Langelier, 1591).
82
Lipsius’s passage on Epictetus in the Manuductionis dwells more on his life than on his
thought, which he sums up with the bland motto, Contine et abstine. He has praise for
Epictetus’s Discourses, but he has nothing of interest to say about them, and he does not cite
Epictetus as a source for any Stoic doctrine throughout either the rest of the Manuductionis nor
in the Physiologiae Stoicorum. Lipsius, Manuductionis, 1.19.
83
For full details, see d'Angers, Récherches sur le stoicisme, pp.4-8, 507-515.
84
Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, Levi, Frenh Moralists.
85
d'Angers, Récherches sur le stoicisme, pp.22-3. While Cartesian humanism accepted, for
example, the Epictetan distinction between what was and what was not in our power, it attacked
Stoic apathy using the categories of the new physics (which treated the body as a machine) and
the new physiology (which presented a distinctive account of the separation of body and mind

66
principally Augustinian form should not be surprising, given Bouwsma’s argument
about the “two faces of humanism”, and while the new anti-Stoicism took on its
distinctive form in the pages of Augustinus, it quickly demonstrated that it was not by
any means confined to narrow Jansenist circles.

Jansen

Cornelius Jansenius, the Catholic bishop of Ypr ès, died of the plague in 1638;
the controversy which was to bear his name began with the posthumous publication of
his Augustinus first at Louvain in 1640 and then again in Paris the following year.86
Convinced that much Catholic teaching on the key questions of grace and free will had
strayed too far from its Augustinian origins, and in particular that the free will teaching
espoused by the Jesuits, who followed the doctrine of Luis Molina, was both false and
dangerous, Jansen presented what he argued was the authentic and authoritative
teaching of the Saint of Hippo on these important matters. Predestination was
reasserted; the role that divine grace played as a necessary cause of right action was
emphasised, 87 as was the (apparently) arbitrary distribution of this grace across the
human species. Jansen’s strategy was to argue that the views he opposed were variants
of the Pelagianism which Augustine had strenuously opposed in the last great
theological controversy of his life, which began in 411 and continued until his death in
430 - encompassing, therefore, the entire period during which he was writing City of
God - and which the Church had officially decreed as heretical in two condemnations
of 416 and 417. Pelagius had taught that sin was in its essence voluntary, and, relatedly,
that Adam’s disobedience could not have resulted in an inherited original sin which
would afflict all of his descendants. In opposition to this view, Augustine had defended
the reality and heritability of original sin, arguing that (among others things) the
Church’s practice of infant baptism would otherwise be unintelligible. From
Augustine’s point of view, Pelagianism raised the logical possibility of a life led by a
person who consistently chose not to sin and for whom Christ’s redeeming sacrifice
was therefore in vain. If such a person then could not with justice be damned to Hell,
this in turn restricted the absolute sovereignty of God, yet it was axiomatic that God
could not be beholden to any part of His creation, or, to borrow the title of Leszek

and of the relationship between the two entirely alien to Stoic accounts). The “double attitude”
of the libertins was that while they approved of the Stoics for challenging the monopoly the
Christian apologists claimed to possess over virtue, they disapproved of the Stoics’ dogmatism
(p.29).
86
Cornelius Jansenius, Augustinus, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate,
aegritudine, medicina adversus Pelagianos & Massilienses, 3 vols. (Paris: Guillemot, 1641).
For valuable background to Jansenism, see Nigel Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
87
For a crisp account of the metaphysical underpinnings of Jansenius’s doctrine of the will, see
Robert Sleigh, Jr, Vere Chappell, and Michael Della Rocca, “Determinism and Human
Freedom,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber
and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.1205-6.

67
Kolakowski’s recent study of Pascal’s Jansenism, that God owes us nothing.88 Raising
the spectre of Pelagianism in the way that he did was bound to provoke intense
controversy: Jansen was not just accusing the Jesuit Molinists of a grave heresy; in
doing so he also appeared to many Catholics to be defending Calvinist positions
against the orthodoxies of Rome. (Both the Jansenists and the Calvinists insisted, of
course, that they were simply being good Augustinians in arguing as they did, nor is it
clear that either party was wrong to do so).

Given the foregoing, it should not be altogether surprising that Jansen found a
place for a critical treatment of Stoicism in his book. Since grace was the central site of
theological controversy, any attack on Pelagianism from an Augustinian standpoint
would have to give an account of the nature of the Fall – as Augustinus certainly did, at
great length – and we have seen that Augustine’s own narrative of the Fall is intimately
tied to his presentation and critical dissection of the Stoics’ ethics. In an important
respect, however, Jansen went beyond Augustine’s own account, being much more
explicit about identifying Stoicism as a stage in the genealogy of Pelagianism than
Augustine had been in any of his anti-Pelagian writings, in which his comments on
Stoic philosophy are few and far between.89

The most significant references to the Stoics in Augustinus appear in the first
volume, spread over the end of the fourth and the start of the fifth books. 90 The
nineteenth chapter of the fourth is devoted to the topic of apatheia, which he defines as
“an incapacity for suffering the perturbationes or passions by which the human spirit is
accustomed to being disturbed”, 91 and goes on to argue that the Pelagians taught
something equivalent, with their notion of the man without sin. A little later, in Chapter
XXII, Jansen asserts a link between Pelagianism and the Stoic claim that the wise man
is in the relevant respects the equal of God, in evidence of which he cites passages
from Seneca and Epictetus which compare the sage to the gods, as well as the verse
from Genesis (3:5) in which the serpent offers the First Couple the chance to be like
the gods (sicut Dii).92 The fifth book of the first volume is given over to a treatment of
three stages in the development of Pelagianism, which Abercrombie glosses as roughly

88
Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
89
They are not unmentioned, however. See Augustine’s anti-Pelagian Letter 104 (which
discusses and criticises the Stoics’ claim that all sins are equal), as well as Against Julian III.3.8
(on baptism), 4.12.58 (on Cicero’s arguments in De Natura Deorum), 4.15.76 (on the sects’
conceptions of the summum bonum), 4.14.72 (more on De Natura Deorum), 6.20.64 (on the
wicked) and 6.12.59 (on citing from the philosophers).
90
There are a handful of other references to the Stoics in Augustinus: 1.7.8 has a passage on the
“Astrologers and the Stoics” which draws on Book V of City of God. In the second volume,
there is a string of references to the Stoics across pp.599-614, in the section De statu naturae
lapsae, in which Jansen is criticising the various philosophical schools, with particular attention
to attacking the Stoics, compiling various things Augustine says about them in order to explain
just why they are so prideful. Also see De statu purae naturae, 2.8 (pp.819-824).
91
Jansen, Augustinus, Vol.1, p.225.
92
Seneca and Epictetus references, Jansen, Augustinus, p.232; the Genesis reference, p.233.

68
corresponding to Paganism, Semipaganism and Judaism, asserting that this division is
original to Jansen.93 In the brief treatment of the first stage (Ethnicismus), or secular
philosophy entirely uninformed by grace, all of Jansen’s citations are from Stoic
sources, and are mostly taken from Seneca.

The criticism of Stoicism was an incidental rather than central component of

Janesn’s theological project, and nothing in the ensuing controversy between Jansen’s
party and the representatives of a more orthodox Catholicism which produced the
official Papal condemnations of Jansen’s heterodox theology in 1653 with the
encyclical Cum Occasione and - much later - in the 1713 bull Unigenitus focused on
his treatment of the Stoics. But three interrelated aspects of Jansen’s treatment of the
Stoics were important in shaping the way in which the Augustinian anti-Stoics who
wrote in his wake, Jansenist or otherwise, developed their critique. In the first place,
the decision to bypass much more recent Catholic teaching in order to concentrate
directly on Augustine’s own texts helped to draw attention to the original categories of
the argument of Book XIV of City of God and to encourage an engagement with the
Stoics on something like Augustine’s original terms. Second, the link between
Stoicism and Pelagianism which Jansen explicitly suggested gave contemporary
Augustinianism a powerful ideological charge, yoking together French Neo-Stoic
intellectual and political culture on the one hand and Jesuit theology on the other as
objects of a common and scathing attack. In the third place, finally, while Jansen gave
roughly equal attention to the Epicureans and the Stoics in his book, it was the Stoics
who were presented as the school of pagan philosophers with which to reckon, on
account of their role in paving the way for the Pelagian heresy; and the role he assigned
to Seneca as the representative Stoic, made this philosopher function in turn as
something of a synecdoche for pagan wisdom in the pages of his book.

Jean-François Senault

Jansen’s argument was quickly taken up by other Augustinian writers, in the first
instance by the Oratorian father, Jean-François Senault (1601-1672), who was from
1662 General of the order. Whereas the anti-Stoicism of Augustinus came in a
formidably abstruse context, buried inside a dense, scarce and controversial book,
Senault presented a variation on Jansen’s Augustinian anti-Stoic theme to his readers
in much more accessible form. 94 The three texts to be considered here were all
published in the 1640s. De l’Usage des Passions is Senault’s major work, 95 an

93
Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism, p.128.
94
Levi argues that Senault “was acquainted with the Augustinus when he composed his
preface” to De l’usage des Passions, as he follows Jansen in reducing “the opinion of the
philosophers to those of stoics and Epicureans” and “denies the possibility of a state of pure
nature”, offering the same references that Jansen had used to passages in Augustine. Levi,
French Moralists, pp.215, 215-6fn5.
95
Jean-François Senault, De l'usage des Passions (Paris: 1641). The English translation is
Senault, The Use of Passions, trans. Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth (London: for J. L. and
Humphrey Moseley, 1649).

69
important contribution to the wideranging debates in French moral psychology about
the nature of the passions and the book for which he is best known today; it was also a
popular book, with fourteen editions being published in eight years.96 This book was
followed later in the decade with a pair of works of Augustinian theology, L’Homme
criminel in 1644, and its companion volume, L’Homme chrestien in 1648, which dealt,
as their titles suggest, with the fall of man through original sin and the foundations of
the Christian theology of grace respectively.97 Senault’s anti-Stoicism is presented in
three main passages in these books: in the Preface to De l’Usage des Passions; in its
opening chapter, “An apology for passion against the Stoics”; and in its most
comprehensive form, in the Preface to L’Homme criminel.98

In the Preface to De l’Usage des Passions, a string of stock Christian objections to

Stoicism are presented in polemical fashion, but they are now organised in an
ideological edifice structured by a series of stark Augustinian binaries: “Man had
freedom enough to undo himself, by his own proper motion; but he had not enough
thereof to save himself by his own strength: his ruine came from his will, and his
welfare could proceed from nothing but from Grace”. The Stoics “thought virtue the
only happiness”, “fill the soul with arrogance” and “imitate the pride of Devils”,
whereas Christians “allow of no felicity but Grace”, “acknowledg their weakness” and
“implore ayd from Grace”. The beliefs of the Stoics “do infinitely differ from the belief
of Christians”, but this fundamental divergence does not owe to errors of reasoning on
the part of the Stoics, for Senault concedes that the ancient philosophers “had a little
more light then others”. On the contrary, the mistake the Stoics make is not to realise
the limits of philosophical reason itself, and the root cause of this is their pride, the
same pride which led to the Fall, and, as in the Book XIV of City of God, pride
motivates behaviour in accordance with principles of self-love. Fallen man who lives
without the intercession of grace is “possesst with self-love” and “could propose no
other end to himself, but himself: He laboured either after Glory, or Pleasure”, with the
result that “in all his actions [he] raised himself no higher than his own interests”. In
the case of the Stoic philosophers, “whatsoever names they gave unto their Vertues,
one might easily finde, that they were animated onely by the desire of Honor or
Voluptuousness”.99

96
Levi, reporting Miloyevitch’s findings, Levi, French Moralists, p.214.
97
Jean-François Senault, L'Homme criminel, ou la corruption de la nature par le péché, selon
les sentimens de S. Augustin. (Paris: Jean Camus and Pierre Le Petit, 1644), Senault, L'Homme
Chrestien, ou la reparation de la nature par la grace (Paris: 1648); The English translations are
Senault, Man become guilty, or, The corrruption of nature by sinne, according to St. Augustines
sense, trans. Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth (London: Printed for William Leake, 1650) and
Senault, The Christian man: or, The reparation of nature by grace. (London: Printed for M.M.
G. Bedell, and T.C., 1650).
98
Cf. “Réfutation et utilisation augustiniennes de Sénèque et du Stoicisme dans L’Homme
criminel (1644) and L’Homme chrétien (1648) de l’oratorien J-F Senault”, in d’Angers,
Récherches sur le stoicisme.
99
All references in this paragraph are to the Preface to Senault, The Use of Passions, sig.c2v-
sig.c3v.

70
 In this Preface (and this is also true of that to L’Homme criminel) “the Stoics” are
treated generically: there is no significant effort to differentiate Stoic philosophers
from one another or to ground the argument in the texts of specific Stoic authors:
Senault’s “Stoics” are chiefly an ideological construct against which to juxtapose his
Augustinian orthodoxy. Senault does draw frequently on one Stoic, Seneca, in
particular, so that Levi reports, for example, that of 370 quotations from Latin authors
to be found in the book 151 are from Seneca, whose accounts of the passions and their
regulation are, by and large, treated quite favourably.100 But Seneca’s account of the
passions is not regularly identified as Stoic in this text, and while his doctrine may be
treated sympathetically, the man himself is the target of Senault’s ad hominem attack,
for example in this passage from L’Homme chrestien:

Reason without Grace hath hitherto brought up none but proud

Scholars... Whatever is rumored of the Letters and Conferences
between Seneca and Saint Paul, I have always believed the conversion
of that Stoick harder than that of the Covetous and most imprudent
Lascivious. The Pride that animated his spirit, was so strong a bulwark
against grace, that he had never stoopt to the Maximes of Christianity,
if that Conqueress of hearts had not employed all her charms and all
her forces to bring him under... This Philosopher, had he kept his
opinions, had been the first Authour of Pelagianisme in the world; and
his pride making him the capital enemy of grace, had obliged him to
side with reason against her... But not to combat Heresie, the Church
hath triumphed over so many ages since; nor to condemn Seneca
whom she hath anathematized in the person of Pelagius; It contents
me to say, that vertue to the end it may be solid, must be the gift of
God...101

Augustine, too, had been chiefly interested in a generic presentation of Stoic

doctrine, but the style of his exposition was quite different: he had came to the same
verdict - that Stoicism imitated the pride of the Devil - during the course of a lengthy
and sometimes surprisingly sympathetic examination of the central categoriees of Stoic
ethics. Senault by contrast leads off with a blunt condemnation of “the Stoics”, lacking
in nuance, in order to set up the contrast between secular error and Christian truth
which he wants to secure as the anchor for his argument, and which he can then
employ to indict the contemporary cults of glory and self-interest.102

Although both Augustine and Senault treat Stoicism as intimately bound up with
the Fall on the one hand and the problematic of prideful self-love on the other, their

100
Levi, French Moralists, p.214.
101
Senault, The Christian Man, pp.208-9.
102
For glory, see Levi, French Moralists, ch.7; for self-interest, A. J. Krailsheimer, Studies in
Self-Interest: from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

71
respective arguments address different moments in the Augustinian grand narrative.
For Augustine, the arguments of the Stoics are best employed to understand Man’s
predicament in Paradise: Adam-as-Stoic was the master of his passions and acted
freely in everything he did, but he ended up becoming “pleased with himself”, and the
consequence was the Fall from grace. Senault’s account, by contrast, treats Stoicism in
strictly postlapsarian terms, above all presenting it as a philosophy which denies
humanity’s fallen state and to which people subscribe because of the delusions induced
by their self-love, which makes them think that they can be sagelike and, therefore,
Godlike, by virtue of their own efforts.103 Armed with a set of radically false beliefs
about both human and cosmic nature, the inevitable result of the encounter between the
Stoic and the world is failure: the world does not cooperate with the Stoics’ ambitions,
nor indeed does the Stoic’s own human nature, and the result is a misery which
provokes ridicule:

These reasons so eloquently expresst by the Stoicks, have as yet

framed a wiseman onely in Idea. Their admirers have reaped nothing
but confusion; after having courted so Proud and so Austere a vertue,
they are become ridiculous to all ages. And the wisest amongst them
have found, that whilst they would go about to make so many Gods,
the Product hath been so many Idols.104

Or, elsewhere:

Amongst so many Impieties and Blasphemies which Pride extorted

from out their mouthes, they forbare not sometime to betray their owne
cause, and publiquely to acknowledge their owne Misery: For Nature,
which cannot lye long, made them find her disorders, and forced them
to confesse, that Faults were learnt without Teachers, that we are

103
Senault has more to say on the subject of self-love, and the extent to which these come close
to Nicole’s Augustinian formulations in his famous essay “De la Charité et de l’amour-propre”
is striking. See L’Homme chrestien, pp.5, 7, 8, 172-3 (on the “the lost resemblance between
Concupiscence and Charity”), and pp. 233-4, which demands to be quoted at greater length: “If
the learned Tertullian, had reason to call the Devil Gods Ape; methinks I may stile
Concupiscence the Ape of Charity, because she endeavours to copy her, therefore to obscure
her, promising her slaves the same advantages Charity makes her subjects hope for: she takes
the same course, continues the same designs, and in her opposition is so perfect a Transcript of
this Excellent Original, that the most part of Philosophers confound them together. Their ends
are rather contrary than different; but the means they make use of to come thither, are altogether
alike; Their Principles are opposite, but their Conclusions run parallel; Their thoughts clash, but
their language agrees; so that to compleat the Portraicture of Charity, I must draw the Picture of
Concupiscence, and make use of the same colours to paint them both”. For more, cf. Levi,
French Moralists, pp.225-7, Pierre Nicole, Moral Essayes (London: Printed for Sam. Manship,
1696), essay on charity and self-love, and Parrish, “From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand”,
passim.
104
Senault, The Use of Passions, pp.4-5.

72
 Borne out of Order, and that wee have much Stronger inclinations to
Vice then to Vertue.105

In the Preface to L’Homme criminel, the link between Stoicism and Pelagianism
which Jansen had posited is made stark: the text opens with assertions about the
centrality of pride to the lives of fallen man; the Stoics are introduced in the third
paragraph as a group of philosophers who, “enlivened by vain-glory”, make the claim
that “if man were irregular, ‘twas only because he Would be so”; and in the sentence
which follows, Senault remarks that “[D]iverse ages before Pelagius his birth, Zeno
and Seneca had tane upon them the Defence of Corrupted Nature”. Whereas Jansen
presented a developmental account, in which Stoicism featured as one stage in a
genealogy of Pelagianism, Senault by contrast keeps things relatively simple, and finds
that the Stoics taught the same errors as the Pelagians - and he even associates the
disappearance of the Stoa with the appearance of the Pelagian heresy itself, for “Their
Sect was borne down when the Pelagians raised up their heresie upon its ruines”. Saint
Augustine “hath triumphed over this proud and learned heresie”, but “hath it out-lived
that defeat”. Even today, Senault warns, “we speak the Language of the Pelagians”,
attributing “more to Liberty or Free-will then to Grace” as if “we will be Our Selves,
the Authors of our Salvation”.106

Senault was an able rhetorician and propagandist on behalf of his cause, rather than
a particularly incisive or original philosophical writer, yet in these texts he nevertheless
showed himself to be an author well able to position his arguments so as to speak to a
number of contemporary philosophical and theological concerns. Like Jansen, Senault
constructed an argument which could be deployed against both contemporary Senecan
Neo-Stoicism and the suspected “Pelagian” tendencies of much contemporary
theology; but whereas Jansen chiefly built his case on his rejection of the
Stoic/Pelagian conception of a man without sin, Senault organised his sharp opposition
between Stoicism and Christianity on the straightforwardly Augustinian terrain of the
problematic of charity and self-love. In renewing - and drastically simplifying -
Augustine’s critique of the Stoics, he helped both to elaborate and to popularise
Jansen’s original template for anti-Stoic criticism - and also helped to open the way to

105
Senault, Man become Guilty, Preface, sig.B2.
106
The Stoics and the Pelagians are also marshalled side by side in this related passage from
L’Homme chrestien: “Some others not so much in love with glory, but more in love with nature,
are perswaded that Vertue is nothing else but a naturall inclination guided by reason, and
perfected by Science; so that to live according to the Laws of Nature, was to live according to
the Laws of Vertue. This opinion is approved of by the Stoicks among Philosophers, and by the
Pelagians among Heretiques; it infuseth blindness and arrogance into the spirit of those that
side with it, and the esteem it puffs them up with of Nature makes them neglect the assistance
of Grace. It seems they would retrieve the state of Innocence, that they have a design to
perswade us that sin hath done no hurt to the will of man, that he is free under the captivity of
Concupiscence, as under the dominion of Original righteousness; and that Nature having lost
nothing of her primitive purity, may serve for a guide to guilty man, as well as to man an
innocent”. Senault, The Christian Man, p.208.

73
the considerably more imaginative criticisms of Stoicism in the later philosophical
interventions of two other French Augustinians, Blaise Pascal and Nicolas
Malebranche.

Blaise Pascal

In the document known as the “Discussion with M. De Saci”, which presents an

oral report of Pascal’s visit to Port-Royal in January 1655, we find the most elegant
statement of the Jansenists’ suspicion of Stoicism.107 In this text, Pascal stresses the
virtues of Epictetan ethics: the focus on the centrality of God for thinking about ethics
is salutary, he maintains, and Epictetus’s account of our duties is unrivalled; he
emphasises man’s dignity; he tells us what God would have us do with great clarity
and power. Pascal continues, however, by outlining the dangers of this ethics:

Our spirit cannot be forced to believe what is false, nor our will to love
something which makes it unhappy. These two powers are, therefore,
free, and it is through them that we can become perfect; man through
these powers can know God perfectly, love, obey, and please him, cure
him of all his vices, acquire virtue, and thereby become saintly and
God’s friend. These wickedly proud principles lead man into other
errors, such as that the soul is part of the divine being, that pain and
death are not evils, that we can commit suicide when we are so
afflicted that we have to believe God is calling us, and there are still
more.108

Epictetus is praised for his clear-sighted recognition of one half of human nature, the
dignity of humankind, but this comes at the cost of obscuring a clear view of its other
half, a profound wretchedness and inability to function without God. Montaigne, by
contrast, is the other philosopher discussed by Pascal in this passage, a philosopher
who understands the limitations of the human intellect very well, and whose scepticism
is a useful antidote against many errors; yet in the end he is unable to do much more
than tolerate present practices and search for a comfortable life within them. If the
Stoicism of Epictetus leads to pride, Pascal suggests, the scepticism of Montaigne
leads to laziness; and since Epictetus and Montaigne are the most eloquent spokesmen
for these two opposing philosophical standpoints, Pascal concludes, these problems
highlight the inability of humankind to live by reason alone. Pascal does not argue,
however, in the manner of the Renaissance humanists that these Stoic errors can be
corrected or mitigated by the addition of a Christian supplement, for the gap between
Stoicism and Christianity is understood to be a much more fundamental one than that.
Pascal presents Augustinian Christianity as the framework most suitable for a human
life which alone can comprehend the errors of the rationalist philosophers but which is

107
“Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy”, in Blaise Pascal, Pensées and other writings, trans.
Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.182-192.
108
“Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy”, in Ibid., p.183.

74
in no simple sense merely a position midway between two erroneous extremes. Armed
with a living Augustinianism, furthermore, the believing Christian is able to embark on
a careful reading of both Epictetus and Montaigne for the sake of the instruction they
are able to provide, while their errors will cancel each other out and do no real harm.109

A similar pattern of argument can be reconstructed from the fragments of the

Pensées -and has to be reconstructed given the radically incomplete nature of this work.
Only a handful of Pascal’s remarks address the Stoics, both in the “classified” and in
the unclassified portions of the surviving text, but it is possible to see reasonably
clearly how the Stoics function within the economy of the text as a whole. The general
tone is set early on, in an isolated pensée from the first liasse.

The stoics say: ‘Go back into yourselves. There you will find peace’.
And it is not true.

Others say: ‘Go out, look for happiness in some distraction.’ And that
is not true. Illness is the result.

Happiness is neither outside us nor within us. It is in God, and both

outside and within us.110

This pattern is then repeated, in diverse fragments. Some aspect of Stoicism is

identified, it is then juxtaposed against a rival and competing philosophical thesis
(usually Epicurean, though not in the above example), whereupon either (as in this
case) both are presented as instructively false, and a contrasting Christian truth is
enunciated, or the rival philosophical claims are treated as in some sense both true, but
incompatible, and so a Christian dogma is deployed as a way of making sense of the
paradox or riddle of human affairs.111

The most detailed commentary on Stoicism belongs in the liasse on the

“philosophers”, which is almost entirely concerned with the Stoics and begins with this
remark:

Even if Epictetus saw the way perfectly well he said to us: ‘You are
following the wrong one.’ He shows that there is another but does not
lead us to it. It is wanting what God wants. Jesus Christ alone leads to
it. Via, veritas.112

109
Ibid., pp.191-2
110
Ibid., #26, p.9.
111
This presentation draws on the discussion in Anthony R. Pugh, The Composition of Pascal's
Apologia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), esp. pp.122-135, though it does not
assume that his attempt to reconstruct what he takes to be Pascal’s intended text is necessarily
correct.
112
Pascal, Pensées, #172, pp.49-50.

75
Although other philosophical “sects” are alluded to in the remaining fragments in this
section, the Stoics are the only ones mentioned by name, and a series of charges are
elaborated against them, explicitly or implicitly, concerning their inability to provide a
pathway to God, the foolishness of their goal (“What the stoics propose is so difficult
and worthless”), and the famous criticism that “They conclude that you can always do
what you can sometimes do...” which leads Epictetus to conclude (so Pascal asserts)
that “because there are resolute Christians, everyone can be one.”113

The discussion begun in “philosophers” continues into the next liasse on “the
sovereign good”, owing to the centrality of the disagreements about the nature of the
sovereign good, or summum bonum in the arguments of the various sects. But as it has
come down to us, this section of Pascal’s work contains only two fragments. The first
is a short and bleak remark, directed against Seneca, who teaches his reader to be
content with himself and “end[s] up advising suicide”.114 The second is a far more
elaborate, wideranging and obviously unfinished fragment, in which the Platonists are
singled out among the pagan philosophers as having come closest to the nature of the
good, the decisive role played by God in any adequate account of the good is reiterated,
and, as in the previous fragment, it is the Stoics’ endorsement of suicide which is used
against their own lofty ideals:

He alone [ = God] is our true good. From the time we have forsaken
him, it is a curious thing that nothing in nature has been capable of
taking his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks,
animals, insects, calves, snakes, fever, plague, war famine, vice,
adultery, incest. From the time he lost his true good, man can see it
everywhere, even in his own destruction, though it is so contrary to
God, reason, and nature, all at once.115

Here it is instructive to compare Pascal's approach to the Stoics with that of

Senault. Both shared the diagnostic foundation that Stoicism is rooted in pride, and
both agreed that Stoicism fails in its own terms: the wise man is "only an idea" and the
would-be sage becomes a miserable, ridiculous figure for Senault; for Pascal, the ethic
is built on a lie ("and it is not true"). But whereas Senault's technique is to construct
Manichean dichotomies of Stoics and Christians to the advantage of the latter, Pascal's
more dialectical technique involves acknowledging the partial truths which Stoicism
expresses well, which opens the way to a more complex analysis of Stoicism and,
crucially, of its ideological appeal. Pascal, for example, is much better able than
Senault to acknowledge why people find inspiration in the surviving Stoic literature:

113
Ibid., #177, #179, pp.50-1. See Pugh, The Composition of Pascal's Apologia, pp.122-7 for a
treatment of other, unclassified fragments which might plausibly be considered in this section.
114
Pascal, Pensées, p.51.
115
Ibid., #181, p.52.

76
the errors of the Stoics are not simple errors, but seductive and ultimately instructive
errors.116

Just as Pascal presented Stoicism as (to use the later Hegelian jargon) a one-sided
philosophy, however, so too his reading of Stoicism was quite one-sided itself. For
Pascal proceeds from Augustinian premisses and never allows his examination of the
Stoics to call these premisses themselves into question. The best example of this is
encapsulated in one remark in the Pensées, “Thus we are born unjust, for each inclines
toward himself”.117 This claim straightforwardly functions as an Augustinian rejection
of the whole of the modern natural rights tradition, since it picks up on the Grotian
premiss of an instinct towards self-preservation, whose Stoic ancestry Grotius himself
had acknowledged, and squarely identifies it with the Augustinian account of the origin
of sin in self-love. Yet Grotius also understood that the oikeiosis that he invoked was
also the foundation of human sociability (see above, Part One Section Two, on
“Grotius”) as much as of the drive to preserve oneself, and the Stoic presentation of
oikeiosis aimed to explain altruistic as well as egoistic behaviour: this principle of self-
regard was intrinisically bound up with an account of the development of natural
affection towards others, and this twofold aspect of oikeiosis needed to be kept in view
at all times. Pascal’s argument therefore works better as a criticism of the natural rights
doctrine in its Hobbesian incarnation, in which sociability has been jettisoned, than it
does as a critique of Stoicism itself. All Pascal is willing to find in the Stoics is error,
dogmatism and vice, owing to his refusal to attempt to understand the Stoics on
anything like their own terms, but only through the lens of his Augustinian
commitment.

Any treatment of Pascal's thinking about the Stoics remains tentative. This is
necessarily the case when the two key texts under examination are a report of his
conversation and the incomplete manuscript of the Pensées. These texts certainly help
us understand how Stoicism was being discussed in the Jansenist circle in the latter
part of Pascal's life, but we need to be cautious before doing much more with them. For
a example of an Augustinian philosopher creatively working with and against the
Stoics in the second half of the seventeenth century in published work, we need to turn
to Nicolas Malebranche.

Nicolas Malebranche

116
The pattern of Pascal's argumentation is, in fact, quite close to that of Kant's, over a century
later, in the Critique of Pure Reason. Pascal’s “Stoics” and “sceptics” are there relabelled
sceptics and dogmatists, but in both cases the irreconciliable conflict between the two
standpoints prepares the ground for the “critical” solution, no longer Augustinian religion but
the critique of reason itself. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp.601-5.
117
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Éditions Hachette, 1976), p.183.
(This fragment is not included in the Levi edition and translation).

77
 We must speak to men as Jesus Christ did, and not as the Stoics, who
knew neither the nature nor the malady of the human mind. Men must
be told unceasingly that it is in a sense essential for them to hate and
despise themselves, and that they must not search for settlement and
happiness here below; that they must carry their cross...118

Scholars are interested in Malebranche these days as a major figure in the history
of seventeenth-century post-Cartesian metaphysics and the chief exponent of the
remarkable doctrine of “occasionalism” on the one hand, 119 or as a leading
controversialist in debates about the theology of grace on the other.120 The approach to
his work here comes at a different angle, in order to complete this survey of four major
figures in the tradition of seventeenth-century Augustinian anti-stoicism. An
Augustinian, though never a Jansenist, Malebranche spent his working life at the
Oratory in Paris - indeed, he served his novitiate when Senault was its General. His
major work, The Search After Truth, contains several passages which discuss the
Stoics, from Book One, Chapter Seventeen, where he makes many of the same moves
that Pascal had made with respect to mounting parallel criticisms of the Stoics and the
Epicureans regarding the nature of the Sovereign Good (le souverain bien)121, through
to Book Five, Chapter Four, in which he criticises the Stoics for their “confused
understanding of the disorders caused by Original Sin”. 122 This discussion will
concentrate, however, on Malebranche’s longest engagement with a Stoic author,
which comes in Book Two, Part Three, Chapter Four, in a discussion of “the
imagination of Seneca”.123

Two ways of thinking about the imagination should at this point be juxtaposed.
One strand of thinking about the imagination in the seventeenth century descended
from the arguments of the Neo-Stoics. In a standard Stoic presentation, it is imagined
future or present goods and bads which give rise to the erroneous passions of joy, fear,
and so on.124 Among the techniques taught by Stoic exercises, therefore, are a set of

118
Search, p.310.
119
A good recent treatment of Malebranche on human emotion, relating it to Cartesian and
occasionalist topics is Susan James, Passion and Action: the emotions in seventeenth-century
philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
120
For a valauble discussion that shows why Malebranche’s theology of grace is of interest to
political theorists, see Patrik Riley’s Introduction to Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature
and Grace, trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. pp.91-102.
121
Search, p.77.
122
Ibid., p.361.
123
For older accounts of Malebranche’s attack on Seneca, see G. Rodis-Lewis, “L'anti-
stoïcisme de Malebranche,” 7e Congres de l'Association Guillame Budé, Aix-en-Provence,
1963, (1964) or Joseph Moreau, “Seneque et Malebranche,” Crisis 12 (1965). Cf. Thomas M.
Lennon, “The Contagious Communication of Strong Imaginations: History, Modernity, and
Scepticism in the Philosophy of Malebranche,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed. Tom
Sorrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
124
Levi, French Moralists, pp.12-3, presents a good outline of this Neo-Stoic argument.

78
ways of disciplining the imagination, of learning how to refuse to assent to its
appearances, and – thereby – of making accurate judgments about the world,
clearheadedly perceived. Stoic therapy performs a kind of critique of the imagination,
and in teaching the proper handling of the imagination, Stoicism shows a pathway to
the extirpation of the passions.

The second, separate strand of thinking about the problem of the imagination
centred around the elaboration of a notion of “vainglory”. Francis Bacon’s essay, “Of
Vain-Glory” is one important source, but for my purposes here Thomas Hobbes is the
decisive figure in this tradition.125 Four short extracts from Leviathan give the general
idea of his concept of vainglory:

1) Joy, arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability, is

that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING: ... but if
grounded on the flattery of others; or onle supposed by himself,
for delight in the consequences of it, is called VAINE-GLORY.
The vain-glory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of
abilities in ourselves, which we know are not, is most incident to
young men, and nourished by the Histories and Fictions of Gallant
Persons; and is corrected oftentimes by Age, and Employment.126

2) The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madness, is

either great vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and
self-conceipt; or great Dejection of mind.127

3) Vainglorious men, such as estimate their sufficiency by the flattery

of other men... are enclined to rash engaging; and in the approach
of danger, or difficulty, to retire if they can: because not seeing the
way of safety, they will rather hazard their honour, which may be
salved with an excuse, than their lives, for which no salve is
sufficient.128

4) Of the Passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one,
is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth...129

The problem of vain-glory is yoked to that of pride, and although Hobbes’s theory is
wholly secular, this gives it more than a surface affinity to Augustinian perspectives -
but it’s also tied to a problem of the imagination: the vainglorious come under the
sway of misleading ideas and impressions, and these ideas and impressions prompt

125
Francis Bacon, Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
126
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.42-3.
127
Ibid., p.54.
128
Ibid., p.72.
129
Ibid., p.206.

79
foolish and dangerous actions. Indeed, one of the three causes of war in the state of
nature, according to the analysis of Leviathan, is Glory, which makes some “invade...
for reputation” 130 . The proud - Aristotle, for example 131 - think themselves to be
superior to their fellow men, when in fact they are not (and, even if they are, they
should refuse to recognise themselves as such for the sake of the preservation of peace),
and this can also provoke war. The vainglorious likewise misestimate their own worth
and abilities, and this error is also likely to lead them into situations which will end in
violence.

In these related cases, the solution to the problem lies in good politics. The proud
are humbled by the might of the Sovereign, who is, following the original Leviathan of
the Book of Job, “king of the proud” or “king of all the children of pride”132); and in a
political world in which the only violence is that authorised by the Sovereign, the
problem of those who invade for Reputation will have been satisfactorily addressed. If
the vainglorious are still afflicted by their malady in civil society, there are at least
relatively safe outlets for it there (in reading novels, for example). Hobbes agrees,
therefore, with the Stoics, that those who do not know how to address the disorder of
their own imaginations will do badly in life; but, characteristically, the Hobbesian
solution lies in the imposition of a central authority which will solve the social problem,
rather than through the serial transformation of individual consciences through
philosophical instruction and exercises. The Stoic philosopher teaches an individual
techniques of self-discipline; the Leviathan prince disciplines an entire population.

In the passages of Senault, above, there are indications that something like the
Baconian or Hobbesian analysis of vainglory could be put to work in a decidedly
Augustinian context.133 In L’Homme criminel, whose English translation was published
in 1651, the same year as Leviathan, Senault’s Stoics are “enlivened by vain-glory”;
and we get a fuller account of the nature of this vice in L’Homme chrestien (published
1648, English’d 1650), in which Senault presented vain-glory as a kind of pride which
stokes ambition, embraces risk and is closely bound up with the concern for reputation:

The Ambitious have no other spirit but vaine-glory; This is that proud
passion which inanimates all their designs, inables them to surmount
all difficulties, engages them in conflicts where the successe is doutfull,
and obliges them to sacrifice their own lives to purchase a little
reputation.

130
Ibid., p.88.
131
Ibid., p.107.
132
Ibid., p.221; Job 41:33-4.
133
There is a connection to the Stoic strand, too: Levi notes that in his De l’Usage des Passions,
“the disorder of the passions is due to the opinion and the senses”, and that “the opinion is
associated with the imagination”, so that “the relegation of erroneous opinion to the imagination
[is] a help in preserving the integrity of reason”. Levi, French Moralists, p.222.

80
This isn’t quite the same theorisation which Hobbes provides, as Senault’s ambitious
man tends to end up dead, whereas the vainglorious in Hobbes prefer to sacrifice their
honour than risk their lives, but, these details aside, the core concept clearly functions
in a similar manner for both authors.

Turning at last to Malebranche, then, we find here an account that seems to draw
from both Hobbes and Senault. Malebranche deploys Hobbes’s distinctive concern
with the imagination, but merges it with an Augustinian criticism of sinful pride. The
subject of Book Two of The Search After Truth is the imagination; Part Three of this
book addresses the subject of the contagious nature of the strong imagination.
Malebranche begins his account by setting out the general problem of people who have
strong imaginations:

Strong imaginations are extremely contagious: they dominate weaker

ones, gradually giving them their own orientation, and imprinting their
own characteristics on them. Therefore, since those who have a strong
and vigorous imagination are completely unreasonable, there are few
more general causes of men’s errors than this dangerous
communication of the imagination.134

The imagination is dangerous, but it is not entirely bad; indeed, as with everything in
fashioned by God, it serves a useful purpose, and it will be no surprise to learn that this
purpose is one which speaks to the perennial Augustinian problematic of charity and
self-love:

To understand what this contagion is, and how it is transmitted from

one person to another, it is necessary to know that men need one
another, and that they were created that they might form several bodies,
all of whose parts have a mutual correspondence. To maintain this
union God has commanded us to have charity for one another. But
because self-love can gradually destroy charity, and break the bond of
civil society, it was appropriate for God to preserve it by also uniting
men through natural ties, which subsisted without charity and appealed
to self-love.135

Pierre Nicole had considered a version of the same problem: how does civil society
persist in a reasonably ordered fashion if human beings are as corrupt as the most
authoritative theology teaches? In his celebrated essay on charity and self-love he had
articulated and developed a line of argument rooted in Augustine’s writings on human
affairs which suggested that by a trick of providence the workings of self-love imitated

134
Search, p.161.
135
Ibid.

81
the workings of divine charity.136 Malebranche’s answer, by contrast, takes the same
Augustinian elements - God, self-love and imitation - and puts them back together
again in a different configuration: in this version God has created the world and our
natures in such a way that our self-love leads us to imitate one another, and that this
works to bring about a certain kind of social uniformity:

These natural ties ... consist in a certain disposition of the brain all men
have to imitate those with whom they converse, to form the same
judgments they make, and to share the same passions by which they
are moved. And this disposition normally ties men to one another
much more closely than charity founded upon reason, because such
charity is very rare.137

There are two chief causes of our disposition to imitate others. One is found in the soul,
is closely related to what Hobbes and others described under the heading of “glory”,
and is described as follows:

The inclination all men have for grandeur and high position, and for
obtaining an honourable place in others’ minds. For this is the
inclination that secretly excites us to speak, walk, dress, and comport
ourselves with the air of people of quality. This is the source of new
styles, the instability of living languages, and even of certain general
corruptions of mores. In short, this is the principal source of all the
extravagant and bizarre novelties founded not upon reason, but only
upon men’s fantasies.138

But it is the second which engages his attention over the following chapters, which is
“a certain impression made by persons of strong imagination upon weak minds, and
upon tender and delicate brains”.139 A strong imagination is “that constitution of the
brain which renders it capable of having very deep vestiges and traces that so occupy
the soul’s capacity that they prevent it from focusing its attention on things other than
those represented by these images”,140 and these come in two varieties: the first are the
insane (who “receive these deep traces from an involuntary and disordered impression
of the animal spirits”141); the second “receive them from the disposition found in their
brain substance”, 142 and are of more interest to Malebranche, for it is this kind of
imagination which produces the contagion with which he is concerned. It isn’t a defect

136
For further discussion, see Parrish, “From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand”; James, Pierre
Nicole, Part Five, Chapter Two; and the essay “Of Charity and Self-Love” in Nicole, Moral
Essayes.
137
Search, pp.161-2.
138
Ibid., p.162.
139
Ibid.
140
Ibid.
141
Ibid., pp.162-3.
142
Ibid., p.163.

82
to have a strong imagination, as long as “the soul always remains the master of the
imagination”. It can be a very good thing indeed, and it is the “origin of subtlety and
strength of mind”.143

But when the imagination dominates the soul, and when without
attention to the direction of will these traces are formed because of the
disposition of the brain and by the action of objects and the animal
spirits, it is clear that this is a very bad quality and a sort of
madness.144

People with strong imaginations of this kind, Malebranche claims, display above all
two defects: in the first place, they are unable to make “sound judgements about
difficult and intricate things”.145 Secondly, they are “visionaries, though in a delicate
way that is rather difficult to recognise”, and prone to exaggeration and distorted
perceptions:

They are vehement in their passions, biased in their opinions, and

always conceited and very self-satisfied.... They do not walk, they
bound... They ordinarily stop at the surface of things, and are
completely occupied with visible ceremonies and rituals of little
importance.146

Furthermore, and this is something that can be an advantage to them, but which can
also be extremely dangerous, people like this can be quite persuasive. Thus, in Chapter
Three, Malebranche turns to the trio of Tertullian, Seneca and Montaigne, three writers
who suffer in different ways from an excess of imagination.

In contrast to Senault, then, or Augustine for that matter, who attacked “the Stoics”
generically (as we have seen), Malebranche concentrates on one Stoic in particular. As
in the case of Jansen, Seneca provides the most suitable target, being the most easily
available Stoic author in contemporary France, and the major inspiration behind the
earlier Neo-Stoic current, so that, as with his subsequent attack on Montaigne, the
dissection of Seneca can be read as an intervention in the cultural politics of the day.
While Malebranche agrees with Senault (and the other Augustinian authors) that it is
the Stoic’s pride which leads him to write in the way that he does, his account is a
different one: Senault’s Stoics rely too much on reason, (“not knowing that reason was
blind”, etc.), and disregard religion on the one hand and their own experience of their

143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid., p.164.
146
Ibid., p.165.

83
corrupt human nature on the other. Malebranche’s Seneca, on the other hand, is a
rhetorician who does not reason clearly enough:147

As long as he makes great strides, designed strides in a precise

cadence, he imagines he has made great progress, but in truth he is like
a dancer who always ends up where he begins.

He convinces because he arouses the emotions and because he pleases,

but I do not believe he can persuade those who can read him calmly,
who are prepared against surprise, and who are accustomed to yield
only to the clarity and evidence of arguments.148

Seneca’s depiction of the wise man is “magnificent and pompous”, but also “vain and
imaginary”: Malebranche observes that “Cato had neither the hardness of a diamond
unbreakable by iron nor the solidity of rocks immovable by floods, as Seneca
pretends...” 149 It is in his comparison of Cato with Christ, St Paul and other early
Christians that we see how the errors of the Stoics cash out in concrete ethical contexts.

The virtue of the Stoics could not render them invulnerable, since true
virtue does not prevent one from being miserable and worthy of
compassion when one suffers some evil. St Paul and the first
Christians had more virtue than Cato and the Stoics. They nevertheless
admit that they were wretched because of the pain they endured,
although they were made happy by the hope of eternal reward.150

Cato’s celebrated patience, on the other hand, “was only blindness and pride”. 151
Seneca tells us that he regarded his enemies as beasts, against whom it would be
shameful to become angry, but this is not admirable at all.

How dangerous it is, especially to Christians, to instruct themselves in

morality from an author so injudicious as Seneca, whose imagination
is so strong, so lively, and so imperious that it dazzles, distracts and
carries away those with but little firmness of mind and much
sensibility for all that flatters the concupiscence of pride?152

147
Elsewhere, Malebranche does present Stoics who champion reason against experience, in a
much more Senault-like vein: “I grant that reason teaches us that we ought to suffer exile
witohut sadness, but this same reason teaches us that we should not feel pain when our arm is
cut off... But experience sufficiently shows us that things are not as reason say they should be,
and it is ridiculous to philosophize against experience”. Ibid., p.341.
148
Ibid., p.176.
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid., p.178.
151
Ibid., p.179.
152
Ibid.

84
Christ, on the other hand, when he was struck by an officer, was wounded but became
neither angered nor vengeful: he pardoned his assailant, an action which presupposed
an acceptance of the fact that he had been wronged.153

Following in Jansen’s footsteps, Malebranche explicitly compares the Stoic pride

that makes men want to become God – or, godlike, in the form of the sage - with the
serpent tempting Adam and Eve by telling them they could become like God, for the
serpent knew “that the desire for independence was the weakness through which they
had to be taken”.154 The serpent, like Cato, tends to be believed, because “when a bold
liar lies with great assurance, he often causes the most unbelievable things to be
believed, for the assurance with which he speaks is a proof that affects the senses, and
consequently is exceedingly strong and quite persuasive to most men”.155

All this shows that few errors are more dangerous, or more easily
communicable, than those with which Seneca’s books are filled. For
these errors are refined, suited to man’s nature and similar to that in
which the demon engaged our first parents. They are clad in these
books with pompous and splendid ornaments, which gain entry for
them into most minds. They enter, grasp, stun, and blind them. But
they blind them with a proud blindness... not a humiliating blindness
full of shadows that makes one aware that one is blind and force one to
admit it to others... Thus, nothing is more contagious than this
blindness, because the vanity and sensibility of men, the corruption of
their senses and passions, dispose them to search after it, to be struck
by it, and excite them to impress others with it.156

Not all of Seneca is false and dangerous, Malebranche conceded, for, echoing Pascal’s
argument about Epictetus and Montaigne, he “can be read with profit by those who see
things correctly and know the foundation of Christian morality”, (the same is also true
of the Qu’ran and the works of Nostradamus), and a keen awareness of our inescapable
dependence on our body, parents, friends, prince and country is sufficient “to destroy
the Stoic wisdom completely”.157

Having dealt almost exclusively with Seneca up to this point, Malebranche closed
his discussion with a critical observation against Epictetus, and a restatement of the
claim made earlier, not merely the Augustinian commonplace that we are dependent on

153
Ibid.
154
Ibid., p.180.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid., p.181.
157
Ibid., p.182. This may be the fundamental difference between Hobbes and Malebranche in
their respective analyses of the problem of glory/imagination: for Hobbes, the road to wisdom
lies in the recognition of equality rooted in mutual vulnerability; for Malebranche recognition of
dependence is crucial - and these are interestingly different recognitions.

85
God, but that in accordance with God’s command, we are dependent on every living
thing in His Creation:

Hence, this magnificent division of all things not dependent on us and

upon which we ought to depend is a division that seems consistent
with reason, but that is inconsistent with the disordered state to which
sin has reduced us. We are united to all creatures by God’s order, and
we depend upon them absolutely because of the disorder of sin.158

In the 1684 Treatise on Ethics, Malebranche presented a condensed version of his

fundamental criticism of the Stoics. “We must love God”, he insisted, “not only more
than the present life, but more than our own being. Order requires that it be so... We
cannot find our happiness and perfection outside ourselves. We can only find them in
God, since only God is capable of acting in us and making us happy and perfect.”159 He
then turned his attention to the Stoics, in order to flesh out his charge that “it is the
ultimate of crimes to place our end in our selves”:

That was the folly of the Stoic’s Sage, for whom happiness did not in
the least depend upon God. Convinced of our powerlessness and of
that of creatures, we must incline toward the Creator with all our
strength. We must do everything for God. We must trace back all our
actions to the One from whom alone we have the strength to do them.
Otherwise we injure Order, we offend God, we commit injustice. This
is incontestable. But we must search, in the invincible love which God
gives us, for our happiness and for motives which could make us love
Order. For, finally, God being just, we cannot be solidly happy if we
are not submissive to Order, and he hates his soul, who loves iniquity
[Psalms 10:5].160

The same text, finally, insisted upon the crucial difference between the Christian’s
duty of acting in accordance with universal Reason and the divine Logos and the
Stoic’s insistence on “following God or nature”. At I.I.22, Malebranche sets out an
important part of his doctrine concerning God’s “general laws” - so important, as
Patrick Riley has shown, in laying the ground for Rousseau’s theorisation of volonté
generale:161

When we resist the actions of men, we offend them. For since they act
only by particular wills, we cannot resist their actions without also

158
Ibid., p.183.
159
Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics (1684), trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic, 1993), I.8.16, pp.105-6.
160
Ibid., I.8.16, pp.105-6.
161
For more on this, and its significance in the history of political thought, see Patrick Riley,
The General Will before Rousseau: the transformation of the divine into the civic (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986), passim, but esp. ch. 3.

86
 resisting their designs. But when we resist God’s actions, we do not in
the least offend Him, and often we even promote His designs. For
since God constantly follows the general laws which He has set for
Himself, the combination of effects which are necessary consequences
therefrom cannot always be conformed to Order or suited to the
execution of the most excellent work...162

He then proceeds to attack the Stoics once more, undermining the central notion of
Stoic ethics that we should somehow choose to “follow nature”, where nature is
understood in term’s of God’s decree. On the one hand, “It is not a question of duty,
however, but of necessity for us to submit to His [i.e., God’s] absolute power”;163 on
the other hand, even if it were a matter of moral duty, unfailingly to “follow God or
nature” would be impossible, for the Stoics’ ethics fails to acknowledge the
unknowability and inscrutability of God’s decree for the world:

By contrast, we are able to know Order by way of our union with the
Eternal Word, with universal Reason. Therefore it can be our law, and
can lead us. But the Divine Decrees are absolutely unknown to us. Let
us not in any way make them into rules for ourselves. Let us leave to
the sages of Greece and to the Stoics that chimerical virtue of
following God or nature. For us, let us consult Reason, let us love and
follow Order in all things. To submit ourselves to the law God
invincibly loves and which He inviolably follows is truly to follow
him...164

In many ways, therefore, Malebranche’s critique of the Stoics represents the

culmination of the tradition of French Augustinian anti-Stoicism. More sophisticated
than that of Senault and far more attuned to issues and controversies in contemporary
philosophy than Jansen had been, Malebranche’s arguments against the Stoics are more
systematic and sustained than those found in Pascal - inevitable, perhaps, given the
state of Pascal’s text. In common with all three of his Augustinian predecessors,
considered above, Malebranche used the Stoics as a foil against which to present his
account of Christian truth. Yet while he followed the tradition in deploying the more or
less familiar criticisms of the Stoics (concerning the denial of human dependence on
God, for example, all of which was rooted in self-love or pride) he was also able to go
far beyond the terrain sketched out by Senault to consider further problems concerning
the imagination in a way which enabled him to construct a robust Augustinian response
to (among others) Hobbes and Nicole. The philosophy of Malebranche provides the
most developed and sophisticated post-Cartesian Catholic opposition to Stoic
philosophy in the seventeenth century; it is in the writings of Pierre Bayle, as we shall
see in Part Three Section Two below, that we find his Protestant counterpart.

162
Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics (1684) , I.1.22.
163
Ibid.
164
Ibid.

87
IV: An Acceptable Alternative? The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius

The Augustinian anti-Stoicism went mostly, but not entirely, unanswered in its
own day. In part, as is its habit, this particular owl of Minerva spread its wings shortly
after the falling of the dusk, for French Senecan Neo-Stoicism flourished in to the first
half of the seventeenth century, and this sustained Augustinian critique largely dates
from the 1640s, by which time the genre of French Neo-Stoic treatises on the passions
had largely run its course. But the criticism did call forth a certain pattern of responses,
and this fourth section will bring Part Two to a close by considering what some of
these were.

The major reply from the French Senecan camp came from Antoine Le Grand,
whose 1662 book on Le Sage des Stoiques set out a restatement of a Neo-Stoic theory
of the passions. 165 The details of that theory are not especially interesting from the
point of view of the philosophy of the passions; more significant from the point of
view of this discussion is a passage at the end of the second discourse in his book,
which explicitly engages the developing Augustinian critique. With reference to City of
God XXII.24 (“Of the blessings which the Creator has filled this life, even though it is
subject to condemnation”), 166 Le Grand picked up on the peculiar way in which
contemporary Augustinians were using an exaggerated binary of God – Nature,
presenting the latter category in excessively negative terms, even from a strictly
Augustinian perspective:

And even St Austin, though an Enemy to the Vertues of the Heathen,

attributing (with much heat) all to Grace, and seeming to grant Nature
nothing, that all might be owed to the assistance of Jesus Christ, is
astonished that Sin which brought all our Senses into a Cloud of Error,
darkened our minds, depraved our Wills, and poured into our Souls the
Seeds of all Vice, could not choak the inclination we have for that
which is good... Some of his Disciples doubted his Arguments, they
could hardly comprehend how that which makes the fountain of our
Crimes, should be the Original of our good Deeds, and that, against
those inclinations which he maintains, she often brings forth perfection
instead of Monsters... Methinks it is not very hard to clear all these
Doubts, and without stumbling at the Difficulties they lay down, it
may Suffice to propose them a Dilemma, to shew them the Truth by
day light. For after Adam’s fall it must be, either that God forsook his

165
Le Sage des Stoiques, 1662. The English translation is Anthony Le Grand, Man Without
Passion (London: C. Harper and J. Amery, 1675).
166
City of God, XXII.24, pp.1159-66.

88
 Works, or that he knew Nature potent enough to do well, without the
aid of written Laws.167

Le Grand ended this passage with a caution to anyone tempted by the rigour of the
Augustinian critique:

If to augment the guilt of the first Man; or diminish the rigor of his
punishment, you represent God infinitely offended; who justly denies
his assistance to Adams Descendants, be careful that you do not
equally question both his providence and his Mercy, and remember,
that you cannot take from him the Care of his Creatures without
offending his Bounty.168

Le Grand’s Neo-Stoicism failed ultimately to secure his own philosophical allegiance,

however, and he ended up renouncing Stoicism for Cartesianism, on behalf of which
he wrote a long and unsophisticated defence.169

Among those writers anxious to defend the moral probity of Stoic ethics who were
not attracted by the prospect of simply repeating Senecan pieties, the characteristic
move, frequently reiterated after 1640, was to make a deliberate move away from
Seneca in order to embrace the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as an acceptable
alternative source for Stoic moral theory. The story of the career of Marcus Aurelius in
European letters from the time of his first modern editor, Wilhelm Holtzmann (better
known as “Xylander”), down to the publication of the Encyclopaedia has been narrated
by Jill Kraye in an important recent article which is always erudite and often
entertaining. 170 Kraye begins with the observation that the Meditations became the
best-known Stoic text “in the second half of the seventeenth century”,171 and while she
does an excellent job of describing successive editors’ increasingly nuanced grip on the
Stoic philosophy expounded by Marcus Aurelius in his book, it is when we examine
the increasing popularity of the Meditations in light of the contemporary criticism of
Senecan Neo-Stoicism that it becomes easier to explain just why this text could
become so attractive for readers and editors in the decades after 1640.

167
Anthony Le Grand, Man Without Passion (London: C. Harper and J. Amery, 1675), pp.17-
18.
168
Ibid., pp.18-19.
169
For Le Grand’s confession of his own change of philosophical allegiance, see Antoine Le
Grand, The Entire Body of Philosophy (London: Samuel Roycroft, 1694), ch. XIII, p.367.
170
So, for example, Kraye reports that in Xylander’s Latin translation, one of the Emperor’s
characteristic reflections on human life (“Yesterday, a drop of mucus; tomorrow, a mummy’s
ashes”) was rendered as “Yesterday a fish; tomorrow, salted cod”! Jill Kraye, “'Ethnicorum
omnium sanctissimus': Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot,” in
Humanism and Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone (London: Routledge,
2000), p.118.
171
Ibid., p.107.

89
 The remarks that follow discuss four editions of Marcus Aurelius published in this
period: those of Meric Casaubon, Thomas Gataker, André and Anne Dacier, and
Jeremy Collier.172 Isaac Casaubon had been the first modern scholar to understand the
significance of the Meditations as a significant source of Stoic philosophy in his
commentary on Persius of 1605; his son Meric published the first English translation in
1634 and a Greek-Latin edition in 1643, and was the first editor to give the work its
modern title, Meditations concerning Himself.173 Thomas Gataker’s edition of 1652,
also a Greek-Latin edition, was a remarkable feat of scholarship:174 his extensive notes
covered a far wider range of sources in technical Stoic philosophy than Lipsius had
examined in his Stoic textbooks, and - most significantly for our purposes - the edition
was introduced with a preface, or Praeloquio, generally known in either of its English
translations as the “Preliminary Discourse”, which was by far the most authoritative
treatment of Stoicism for at least a century after its publication, and was widely
recognised as such.175 The husband and wife team of André and Anne Dacier produced
a major edition and French translation of the Meditations in 1691.176 Less scholarly and
less significant but not wholly uninteresting is Jeremy Collier’s edition of 1701, which
presented an accessible English translation, which was reprinted down to 1726 at least.

It is not surprising that these various editors all have praise for the Stoic Emperor
prominently displayed near the start of their volumes, since they are trying to interest a
reading public in the edifying content of their books and simultaneously trying to
persuade some members of it to buy it. More striking, then, is the fact that all of these

172
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, His Meditations concerning Himself, trans. Meric Casaubon,
3rd ed. (1663), Thomas Gataker, Marci Antonini Imperatoris De Rebus Suis, 2nd ed. (London:
Edward Millington, 1697), Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales avec des remarques
de Mr. & de Mad. Dacier, 2e ed. (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1691), Jeremy Collier, The
Emperor Marcus Antoninus his Conversation with Himself, (London: R. Sare, 1701).
173
Casaubon was clearly tacking with the prevailing political winds: Kraye notes that the
translation was dedicated to the royalist Archbishop William Laud, the Greek-Latin edition - by
contrast - to the parliamentarian John Selden. See Kraye, “'Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus'”,
pp.110-1.
174
Kraye reports the verdict of a recent history of Cambridge University Press, that it was “the
single major scholarly achievement of the press” during the period of the Civil War and
interregnum. Ibid. Gataker’s edition is still useful to scholars today: there is a copy of the 1697
edition on the open shelves of the library at the British School at Rome, where I write these
words.
175
Different portions of the Preliminary Discourse were translated and appended to the Collier
edition and to the Hutcheson edition; and it even formed the basis of an advertisement for a new
edition of Epictetus (never published) that was placed in The Present State of the Republic of
Letters, a London journal, in its issue of August 1730. Gataker is considered by Diderot in the
Encyclopédie to be one of the major Stoics of modernity, though Kraye also quotes Diderot’s
shrewd judgment that he “frequently sees Jesus Christ, St Paul and the Evangelists in the Stoa,
and it does not bother him that they are taken to be disciples of Zeno”. Ibid., p.122, quoting
from the Encyclopaedia, vol. XV, pp.525-33.
176
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales. For more on the interesting Anne Dacier,
see F. Farnham, Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist (Monterey, CA: Angel Press, 1976).

90
editors take potshots at Seneca in the course of establishing Marcus Aurelius’s
credentials as the more admirable representative of the Stoics’ philosophy. Meric
Casaubon touched on one central concern of the Augustinian critics of Stoicism when
he remarked that, “Yet shall you not find in him [= Marcus Aurelius] those
blasphemies, in exaltation of this humane power and libertie, which you shall in
Seneca, and other Stoics”. 177 Gataker’s edition discussed the three surviving Stoic
authors - Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca - and opined that, “Of these three,
Seneca is the first in Time, but in my Opinion, the least in Value, and Merit”.178 He
conceded that Seneca has his strong points (“He has a great many shining Sentences,
his Precepts are admirable, his Manner noble, and his way of arguing very acute in
many places...”179), but these are considered to be outweighed by his vices (flattery and
hypocrisy with respect to the Emperors, inconsistency of attitude with respect to the
Epicureans), and Gataker dislikes aspects of his philosophical style:

And lastly, he is sometimes guilty of the same Trifling, which he finds

fault with in Zeno and Chrysippus. He is Gay sometimes when he
should be Solemn, and Flourishes when he should strike home... He
gives you sometimes a turn of Fancy, instead of Solid Proof... [His
notions] have generally a Point, but no Weight of Body for
Execution.180

The Daciers in turn suggested that “Seneca has combined the virtues of the earliest
Stoics with all the pride of their disciples”; 181 whilst for Jeremy Collier, Marcus
Aurelius’s style of argument was to be preferred to that of Seneca, who “moves more
by start and sally”.182

Writing in a context in which a serious question mark had been raised over the
compatability of Stoic ethics with Christian theology, these editors drew attention to
those aspects of the Emperor’s thought which seem most congruent with Christian
morality. For Casaubon,

The chiefest subject of the Book, is, the vanity of the world and all
worldly things, as wealth, honour, life, &c. and the end and scope of it,
to teach a man how to submit himself wholly to God’s providence, and
to live content and thankfull in what estate or calling soever...183

But it is Gataker who presents the most elaborate account of the confluence of Marcus

177
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, His Meditations concerning Himself, Casaubon ed., pp.27-8.
178
Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation With Himself, p.33.
179
Ibid., p.35.
180
Gataker, in Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation With Himself, p.35.
181
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales, p.12.
182
Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation With Himself, sig.A3v.
183
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, His Meditations concerning Himself, Casaubon ed., p.5.

91
Aurelius’s Stoicism and Christian teaching. With respect to the ethical teachings of
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, he comments:

I think it may be boldly asserted, there are no remaining monuments of

the ancient strangers, which none nearer to the doctrine of CHRIST,
than the writings and admonitions of these two; Epictetus and
Antoninus. ‘Tis certain, whatever precepts our Lord himself has given,
in those sermons and conversations of his, ... of abstaining from evil,
even in thought, of suppressing vicious affections, of leaving off all
idle conversation; of cultivating the heart with all diligence; and
fashioning it after the image of God; of doing good to men from the
most single disinterested view; of bearing injuries with contentment:
of using moderation and strict caution, in our admonitions and
reproofs: of counting all things whatever and even life itself, as
nothing, when reason and the case demand them: and of undertaking
and performing almost all the other duties of Piety. Affection, Equity
and Humanity, with the greatest diligence and ardour: All these same
precepts are to be found in Antoninus, just as if he had habitually read
them; they are everywhere interspersed through this collection of his
thoughts and meditations; and continually inculcated with a surprising
strength and life, which pierces to the bottom of the heart, and leaves
the dart deep fixed in the soul. This every attentive reader will
perceive; every honest one confess...184

Asking why Christians should take instruction from this pagan author, Gataker replies
that, “A careful perusal and serious reflection on these Meditations of Antoninus, are
several ways useful”, before presenting the remarkable reply that what is “summarily
proposed” in the New Testament is “more extensively applied” and “more fully
explained” in the works of Marcus Aurelius.

Further, in these following books, the good Providence and kindness

of God shines forth; and He did not suffer his own image to be quite
worn out and lost in man who had fallen off from him.185

Far from divine revelation supplementing philosophical reason, the positions are here
swapped around.

These writers do acknowledge a string of positions Marcus Aurelius holds which

are unassimilable to Christian teaching, but they pass over them quickly, and find
various reasons for excusing the Emperor. For Casaubon, there are moments where
Marcus Aurelius “may give offence” for his views which are “repugnant to our

184
Gataker, in Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Hutcheson and Moor trans. (Glasgow: Robert
& Andrew Foulis, 1742), pp.470-3.
185
Ibid., p.476.

92
Christian faith, and impious, as when he seemeth to speak doubtfully of God, and his
Providence, and to adscribe all things to Fatal necessitie, and the like”; but he urges the
reader not to judge Marcus Aurelius only by reference to isolated passages, and in his
discussion of the Emperor’s treatment of Providence he cites groups of passages which
lend themselves to libertarian and determinist readings of the text respectively, going
on to argue in a somewhat Lipsian fashion that what Marcus Aurelius calls “Fate, or
Destiny” is “no other than God’s soveraign power and providence in ordering the
matters of the world”; and he ends his discussion by insisting that Marcus Aurelius
uses the vocabulary of providence, fortune and chance in a manner “allowed by the
best Schoolmen”.186 Gataker passes very swiftly indeed over the Stoic Emperor’s less
Christian opinions;187 and Collier follows in the footsteps of the Daciers by noting the
familiar charges that the Stoics “believ’d a Plurality of Gods, that the Soul was a part
of the Deity, and that their Wise Man might dispose of himself, and make his Life as
short as he pleas’d”.188

It should come as no surprise that the most explicit attempt to depict Marcus
Aurelius as a Stoic author unperturbed by the Augustinian critique of the Stoics should
be presented in the major French edition of the Meditations to be published in the
second half of the seventeenth century. The Daciers’ introductory essay to their
translation addresses this theme early on, when they contend that the Stoics presented
their ethics “car connoissaint la faiblesse qui est naturelle à l’homme”, pushing “ses
devoirs plus loin que la nature ne peut aller”, treating their readers in the manner of “un
arbre à qui on veut faire perdre son pli, & qui l’on courbé du côté opposé”, an approach
which seeks to turn on its head the Augustinian argument that the Stoics were radically
deficient in their understanding of human nature in general and human weakness in
particular.189 But the full presentation of their anti-anti-Stoicism came a few pages later,
in a central section of their Preface which sets out in schematic form a set of six
Augustinian objections to Stoic ethics which they propose to address: first, that the
Stoics do not teach that one is required to love God; second, that they do not ask of
Him the power to follow Him; third, that they do not teach man to hate himself, as they
ought; fourth, that they do not establish that man is both the most excellent and the
most wretched of all creatures; fifth, that they do not teach humility; and sixth that they
do not point out that the tendency to place ourselves above everything else is a sin
which comes naturally to us, and is one against which they provide no remedy.190

The Daciers then sought to demonstrate, rather ingeniously, that all of these
objections fail. In some cases, this is relatively straightforward – Marcus Aurelius

186
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, His Meditations concerning Himself, Casaubon ed., pp.25-7.
187
Kraye notes that he worries about “his ambiguity on the immortality of the soul. Kraye,
“"Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus",”,,, p.118.
188
Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation With Himself, sig.A3,
paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales, pp.11-12. Collier omits to repeat
the Daciers’ objection that the Stoics have neglected original sin.
189
Ibid., pp.4-5.
190
Ibid., pp.7-8.

93
repeatedly enjoins his reader to love and praise God, for example – but other attempts
to fit the Meditations to an Augustinian template are more surprising.

Il prouve en beaucoup d’endroits que l’homme est la plus excellente

de toutes les creatures à cause de son origine, & des perfections que
Dieu a daigné luy communiquer, & qu’en même tems il en est la plus
miserable à cause de ses vices qui luy sony perdre tous ses avantages,
& qui le rendent esclave en le separant de Dieu.191

The Stoics did not clearly teach the Christian virtue of humility, the Daciers concede,
and neither the Academy nor the Stoa had a word for it,

Mais si cette vertue consiste à connoître son neant devant Dieu, à

croire que c’est luy-seul qui est l’auteur de tout le bien, & qui ne fait
point de mal; & à enseigner qu’il n’y a de véritable être que Dieu, &
que toutes les autres choses sonts viles, perissable, momentanées, &
sujette à corruption, ils l’ont connuë, & ce livre d’Antonin en est
plein.192

The Daciers ended their response to the Augustinian objections with their most striking
claims: they first sought to meet the Augustinian argument about self-love head on, by
insisting that Marcus Aurelius follows Socrates in agreeing “que l’amour propre qui
porte l’homme a rompre les liens de la societé”, and that “à voulouir fare comme un
tout à part est une revolte contre Dieu”; and they go on to maintain that the core ethical
teaching of the Gosepls is, in fact, found in Marcus Aurelius, for whom “la première &
la principale condition de l’homme c’est d’aimer son prochain”. 193 They conclude,
therefore, that the Augustinian critique “est donc inutile” and the Stoic argument, by
contrast, “tres-solide, tres-vray” and “tres-conforme” to St Paul’s teaching at
Philippians 4.13 that “Je puis tout par la vertu de celuy qui me soûtient”.194

The Daciers’ presentation of an Augustinian Marcus Aurelius is rhetorically

attractive but unconvincing as a terribly serious interpretation of his philosophy. It is
one thing to argue that the Meditations are much better able to resist the charges of the
Jansenists and the Oratorians than the essays of Seneca and perhaps even the works of
Epictetus – and it is important to notice that the Daciers do not deny that the
Augustinian charges are good criticisms; they just deny that hit this particular target.
But it is quite another to take the step the Daciers take, and argue that with respect to
most of the major theological and ethical doctrines, the Gospels and the Meditations
march in lockstep. Indeed, this contrast so striking that it raises the thought that
perhaps the Daciers understood themselves to be doing what they claimed the Stoics

191
Ibid., p.9.
192
Ibid., pp.9-10.
193
Ibid., p.10.
194
Ibid., p.11.

94
had done before them, deliberately overshooting the mark in the way they packaged
their teaching, in order to correct for an existing bias in general perception of Stoic
moral psychology.

***

By the second half of the seventeenth century, the French Senecan Neo-Stoicism
which had been so popular in earlier decades was on the way out, a cultural moment
which had passed its zenith. These Augustinians’ critique was formidable, and
certainly helped to dispose of a certain kind of Stoicism, that represented by the
attempt pioneered by Justus Lipsius to produce a Senecan Neo-Stoicism which could
assimilate itself to and in turn work to support a traditional ecclesiastical Christianity.
But this Augustinian critique never carried all before it. First, there were always
alternative Stoicisms available, chiefly that of Marcus Aurelius, and to some extent
that of Epictetus, too, depending on how one read him. Second, the Augustinianism
which generated the critique was itself becoming weaker as time passed, and less able
to enforce its orthodoxy. Not only were the Jansenists themselves persecuted and
marginalised from mainstream French intellectual culture, but Augustinianism within
established Roman Catholicism was on the decline. Third, and relatedly, the desire of
European authors to produce a defensible version of Stoic ethics that would conform to
the canons of orthodox ecclesiastical Christianity also grew weaker over time. Stoicism
never reappeared in European ethics in anything quite like the Senecan aspect it had
taken on in the early seventeenth century, it is true. But reappear it would, first in
Spinozist and then in an Enlightenment guise. The Augustinian critique of self-love
which had done so much work in the attack on Neo-Stoicism was not without its own,
secular consequences in the work of first Mandeville and then Adam Smith. And it was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau who would be bringing it all back home, with his own
distinctive blend of elements drawn from Stoicism and Augustinianism, which will be
addressed in Part Four, below.

95
 Part Three: From the Dictionary to the Encyclopaedia:
Stoicism in Protestant Europe from Bayle to Brucker

The French Augustinians criticised Stoicism above all for its exaggeration of
human powers in general, and for the robust free will teaching of autonomy which they
found in Seneca and Epictetus in particular. Among Protestant critics, in striking
contrast, the criticism of Stoicism tended to focus on its physics and, in particular, on
its determinism. The first section of this Part will outline the contours of this Protestant
tradition of criticism, drawing attention to some of the major interventions and
encounters, before presenting and discussing in the second section the anti-Stoic
criticism mounted by Pierre Bayle in the pages of his Dictionnaire historique et
critique, the most impressive statement of this critical tradition. The third section then
turns to the controversy over Benedict Spinoza, and shows how the Stoics - previously
commended for their piety by Catholic and Protestant admirers alike - were
transformed into atheists with the assistance of the prevailing anti-Spinozist discourse,
before discussing how this argument was intertwined with the developments in the
historiography of philosophy, which in turn prepared the way for the most influential
textbook descriptions of the Stoics for the European Enlightenment in the works of J. F.
Brucker on the one hand and the pages of the Encyclopaedia on the other.

I: Protestant Anti-Stoicism in the Seventeenth Century

The origins of the Protestant engagement with Stoic physics go back to the origins
of the Calvinist Reformation. Jean Calvin had himself once been sympathetic to a
certain kind of Stoicism, fashionable at the time; indeed, he composed a rather
Erasmian commentary on Seneca's De Clementia before his break with the Roman
church.1 But following that break, he always maintained that his theology had nothing
to do with Stoicism, and he was especially concerned that nobody should think that his
doctrine of predestination had any kind of elective affinity with the Stoics’ account of
fate: predestination was an authentically Augustinian doctrine, he argued, and
Augustine was no friend of the Stoics.

Calvin’s concern with Stoicism wasn’t entirely focused on the problematic of

predestination and determinism, however. Reid Barbour notes, for example, that
Calvin also associated “Stoicism with the kind of libertinism that tends towards the
Pelagian elevation of human nature”, but this objection was cashed out in a somewhat
different manner from that of the Catholic Augustinians, in that it focused on a worry
about Stoic pantheism:

It is Calvin who assails the pantheism of those libertines who argue

1
This commentary has been translated and itself commented upon at length in Ford Lewis
Battles and André Maln Hugo, eds., Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's "De Clementia" with
introduction, translation and notes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969).

96
 that ‘instead of our souls... it is God who lives in us’. These libertines
not only underestimate the power of sin; they also participate in the
tradition of a few ‘ancient philosophers... who were fantastic enough
to think that there was only one spirit, extended everywhere, and that
all living creatures having movement and feeling were part of it, from
which they had come and to which they would return’.2

Indeed, one way of seeing the extent to which the early Protestants were not especially
concerned by the Roman Stoics’ account of the freedom of the will is to note the extent
to which interest in Epictetus in the sixteenth century was concentrated among scholars
who were, or who would become, Protestants in general and Calvinists in particular, so
that there does seem to have been a small theologico-political impulse behind the
decision to do work on the texts of the philosopher-slave.3 As in the case of Marcus
Aurelius, considered above, many of the early translators and editors of Epictetus
professed to being impressed by his piety, and in their prefaces or epistles dedicatory to
their editions often commented upon the ways in which Epictetan doctrine was close to
that of mainstream Christianity;4 and it is easy to see why Calvinists would have been
attracted by the teaching of a philosopher who shared their emphasis on the leading of
an intense and focused inner life. Had these writers taken the physics implicit in
Epictetan Stoicism seriously, of course, it would have been much harder to present his
philosophy as complementary to Christianity, but sixteenth-century interest in
Epictetus was almost entirely focused on the ethical maxims of the Encheiridion, rather
than the longer and more technical Discourses, and the contemporary understanding of
Stoicism was largely filtered through the relatively unsystematic Latin presentations of
Seneca and Cicero, rather than any Greek source.5

This background, then, suggests one way of reading Lipsius’s project, as an

attempt to produce a variety of Stoicism which softened the determinism and denied

2
The quotation is from Calvin, Treatise against the Anabaptists and the Libertines, quoted in
Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, p.211.
3
Rudolf Kirk notes, for example, that there were no editions of Stoic works published in
England during the reign of the Catholic queen Mary, and that all of the scholars in sixteenth-
century England who translated the Stoics were Protestants, or became so after the break with
Rome. “Introduction” to Lipsius, Of Constancie.
4
They were, however, careful not to assimilate Christian and Epictetan ethics too closely, and
common observations made in these texts include the thoughts that the ideal life of the Stoic
wise man was unattainable, or that the secular ethics of Epictetus needed to be completed by the
truths of revealed religion, which would help to correct some of the pagan errors on display in
the Encheiridion.
5
The Discourses were not entirely unknown; they were published in the sixteenth century, in
Trincavelli’s Greek edition, Venice, 1535. But until the time of Thomas Gataker they were
barely ever used as a significant source for technical Stoic philosophy - and certainly not by
Lipsius, who praises the Discourses but has nothing interesting to say about them
(Manuductionis, 1.19); and it wasn’t until Jonathan Barnes’s 1997 book that anyone took
Epictetus seriously as a logician: Jonathan Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden: Brill,
1997).

97
the pantheism altogether, in order to assuage the kinds of doubts about Stoic
philosophy which earlier Calvinist critics had articulated. Whatever the plausibility of
this approach to his texts, it does seem to be the case that it was in the wake of
Lipsius’s work that Stoic ideas were used most constructively in the theological
debates which arose within and against the tradition of Dutch Calvinism, in particular
at the 1619 Synod of Dort, which condemned the doctrines of the Arminians on the
one hand;6 and at the 1626 York House conference in London on the other.

With regard to the latter debate, Reid Barbour has presented a lucid account of the
role played by Stoic physics. On the one hand, the Calvinists had been working for
fifty years to “sever the predestinarian God, celebrated in the 17th article of the English
church, from the determinism and pantheism of the Stoics”, a separation which was
“necessary for Calvinists largely because the association between Stoic fate and their
notion of irrespective decree seems so natural to many enemies of Geneva”. On the
other hand, the language of the Stoics provided all sides to the controversy with “a
fresh terminology in which to articulate the basis of their opposition, the possibilities
for their consensus, and withal their uncertainties over the doctrinal commitments of
the national church”. 7 Indeed, in the face of the libertarian Arminian challenge,
Calvinists could relax their own criticisms of Stoic physics, so that at the second
session of the conference, “[Richard] Montagu's critics condemned his rejection of
Stoic theology as one of his heresies”,8 and Barbour notes that in Cosin’s “slanted”
record of the proceedings

[t]he Calvinists proceed as if Stoicism approximated their own version

of orthodoxy, even though article seventeen, invoked as their standard,
has more to do with God's decrees and their spiritual effects than it
does with the mixture of God with the world.9

The debate between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall (at the time the Bishop of
Derry and one of the leading spokespersons for English Arminianism) on the subject of
liberty and necessity began as an oral disputation held before the Marquis of Newcastle
in the exiles’ community in Paris in the second half of the 1640s, and entered print in
1654, apparently against the wishes of both parties, the pirate publication then
provoking a further round of increasingly polemical public exchange between the
protagonists.10 The assortment of objections and replies remains of interest for several

6
For full discussion, see Gerard Brandt, The History of the Reformation and Other
Ecclesiastical Transactions in and about the Low Countries, down to the Famous Synod of Dort,
4 vols.
7
Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, pp.207-8.
8
Ibid., p.207.
9
Ibid., p.208. See pp.205-213 for further, technical discussion of Montagu’s uses of Stoicism in
his Appello.
10
The main texts are Thomas Hobbes, Of libertie and necessity. A treatise, wherein all
controversie concerning predestination, election, free-will, grace, merits, reprobation, &c., is
fully decided and cleared, in answer to atreatise written by the Bishop of London-Derry, on the

98
reasons, not least as an exemplary confrontation between the scholastic orthodoxy
represented by Bramhall and the spirit of the new kind of philosophy aggressively
deployed by Hobbes,11 but it is also the case that in the pages of the debate we get a
good view of the rhetoric surrounding the use of Stoic arguments in mid-seventeenth-
century English philosophical discourse.

Bramhall was keen to establish a connection between Hobbes's mechanistic

determinism and Stoic doctrines of fate: in his introductory remarks to the published
version of his own contribution he referred to Hobbes's argument as "this rare piece of
sublimated Stoicism",12 and the Stoic motif was introduced early into the discussion: in
the third section, Bramhall presented four reasons as to why he found Hobbes’s
account of liberty and necessity to be false, the fourth being that

This necessity which TH hath devised, which is grounded upon the

necessitations of a mans will without his will, is the worst of all others
and is so far from lessening the difficulties and absurdities which flow
from the fatal destiny of the Stoicks that it increaseth them, and
rendereth them unanswerable.13

As with the Jansenists' charge of Pelagianism against the Stoics, Bramhall considered
Hobbes's position a to be a deeply subversive one:

I hate this doctrine, which destroys liberty and dishonours the nature of
man. It makes the second causes and outward objects to be the rackets,
and man to be but the Tenis-balls of destiny. It makes the first cause,
that is, God Almighty, to be the introducer of all evil, and sin into the
world... It were better to be an Atheist... or be a Manichee... or with the

same subject (London, Printed by W.B. for F. Eaglesfield, 1654); John Bramhall, A defence of
true liberty from antecedent and extrinsecall necessity, being an answer to a late book of Mr.
Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, intituled, A treatise of liberty and necessity (London, Printed for
John Crook ..., 1655); Hobbes, The Question Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656;
John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes, his last animadversions, in the case concerning
liberty and universal necessity (London, Printed by E.T. for J. Crook, 1658); Thomas Hobbes
and John Bramhall, An answer to a book published by Dr. Bramhall ... called, The Catching of
the Leviathan. Together with an historical narration concerning heresie, and the punishment
thereof, Pt. 2 of his Tracts (London, Crooke, 1682).
11
Not all of those reasons are well represented in Vere Chappell’s otherwise useful recent
paperback edition of excerpts: in addition to leaving out the passages on the Stoics, which is
understandable, the edition omits Hobbes’s concluding polemic, found in his ‘Animadversions’
to XXXVIII, which is one of the funniest pieces of seventeenth-century philosophical prose. V.
C. Chappell, ed., Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall: on liberty and necessity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12
John Bramhall, Works (Dublin: Printed at His Majesties printing-house, 1676), vol.3, p.648.
13
Ibid., vol.3, p.653.

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 Heathens... than thus to charge the true God to be the proper cause,
and true Author of all the sins and evils which are in the world.14

Bramhall insisted that physical determinism must lumber God with responsibility for
sin, so that “Notwithstanding any thing which is pleaded here, this Stoical opinion doth
stick hypocrisy and dissimulation close to God, who is truth it self”,15 and he warned of
the dangers to piety if liberty were to be set aside.16 In the numbered sections of the
argument, part 18 is the setting for the most focused comments on the Stoics’ fate.
Bramhall began when he set out the charges against the Stoic argument in more detail,
closely following Lipsius’s presentation in De Constantia: the “Patrons of necessity...
have certain retreats of distinctions which they fly unto for refuge”, and Bramhall
identified and denied three different ways of distinguishing between “Stoical” and
“Christian” necessity:

First, say they, the Stoicks did subject Jupiter to destiny, but we
subject destiny to God; I answer, that the Stoical and Christian destiny
are one and the same fatum quasi effatum Iovis...

Next, they say, that the Stoicks did hold an eternal flux and necessary
connexion of causes; but they believe that God doth act, praeter &
contra naturam, besides and against nature. I answer, that it is not
much material whether they attribute necessity to God or to the Stars,
or to a connexion of causes, so as they establish necessity.

Lastly, they say, the Stoicks did take away liberty and contingence, but
they admit it; I answer, what Liberty or contingence is it they admit,
but a titular Liberty and an empty shadow of contingence who do
profess stiffly that all actions and events which either are or shall be
cannot but be nor can be otherwise, after any other manner, in any
other place, time, number, order, measure, nor to any other end than
they are, and that in respect of God, determining them to one; what a
poor ridiculous liberty or contingence is this?17

In his reply, Hobbes denied that he had ever distinguished between Stoic and Christian
necessity (which is correct, since Lipsius was the target of Bramhall’s charges on this
point), and he characteristically insisted that he had not “drawn my answer to his
arguments from the authority of any sect, but from the nature of the things

14
Ibid., pp.668. Bramhall was not the first to use this splendid image: cf. John Webster, The
Duchess of Malfi (1623): “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied / Which
way please them”. (V.iv.3).
15
Bramhall, Works, vol.3, p.669.
16
Ibid., vol.3, p.686.
17
Ibid., vo.3, p.p.692-3.

100
themselves."18 Bramhall in turn then noted, again correctly, that the two disputants had
different motives for their similar denials of this Lipsian distinction:

My reason is, because I acknowledge no such necessity... But yet he

likes not the names of Stoical and Christian destiny: I do not blame
him, though he would not willingly be counted a Stoick... If he had
been as careful in reading other men's opinions, as he is confident in
setting down his own, he might have found not onely the thing, but the
name it self often used. But if the name of fatum Christianum do
offend him, let him call it with Lipsius fatum verum who divides
destiny into four kinds: Mathematical or Astrological destiny, Natural
destiny, Stoical or violent destiny, and true destiny... and defines it just
as TH doth his destiny; to be a series or order off causes depending
upon the Divine Council... TH saith, he had not sucked his answer
from any sect; and I say, so much the worse; It is better to be the
disciple of an old Sect, than the ringleader of a new. 19

On this point, at least, both men understood one another well. When Hobbes came to
write his ‘Animadversion’ to this section of the debate, he wrote that Bramhall’s
mistake was to suppose that he “had taken my opinion from the authority of the Stoic
philosophers, not from my own meditation”, with the result that he “falleth into dispute
against the Stoics: whereof I might, if I pleased, take no notice, but pass over to No.
XIX.” But then Hobbes admitted that he found the Stoics’ doctrine accurate in its
substance, and that their mistake “consisteth not in the opinion of fate, but in feigning
of a false God”, since their Jupiter was not the true God; and in the same passage he
agrees further that Lipsius was right to identify fate as “a series or order of causes
depending upon the Divine Counsel”.20 And in his ‘Castigations’ - his own parting shot,
since his own death brought an end to the exchange - Bramhall reiterated in §§6 and 18
the ways in which the position Hobbes was adopting was more extreme than those
staked out by Lipsius on the one hand and the Stoics on the other: Lipsius, because “He
was no such friend of any sort of destiny, as to abandon the Liberty of the Will”, which
Bramhall insisted (not without justification) that Hobbes had denied; the Stoics
because they,

together with their fate, did also maintain the Freedom of the Will.
And as we find in many Authors, both theirs and ours, did not subject
the Soul of man, nor the will of man to the rigid dominion of destiny.
The Stoicks subtracted some causes, and subjected others to necessity.
And among those which they would not have to be under necessity,
they placed the will of man...21

18
Ibid., vol.3, p.693.
19
Ibid., vol.3, p.694.
20
For these various remarks, Hobbes, Animadversions, pp.244-5.
21
Bramhall, Works, vol.3, pp.767-8, 798.

101
 To what extent did Hobbes understand his own system as being similar to that of
the Stoics? One place to look is in a text not intended for publication, for in the thirty-
fifth chapter of his critique of Thomas White’s De Mundo, Hobbes returned to the
question of the Stoics’ fate, again with Cicero’s De Fato as the chief text, and here he
employed a very similar argumentative style to that he had employed against Bramhall,
and with reiterations of some of the same key moves. First, he implied that far from
copying the arguments of the Stoics, that the Stoics themselves probably arrived at
their understanding of determinism through the same chain of reasoning which he had
employed, through the careful study of definitions; 22 second, that White’s use of
meaningless jargon vitiated his own attempt to restate a viable determinism;23 and third,
that his own determinism did not result in his making God responsible for sin and evil.
On this last point, however, Hobbes was more explicit about the theological position
that underpinned his argument than he had been in the debate with Bramhall, and
elsewhere:

Personally, while I hold that the nature of God is unfathomable, and

that propositions are a kind of language by which we express our
concepts of the natures of things, I incline to the view that no
proposition about the nature of God can be true save this one: God
exists, and that no title correctly describes the nature of God other than
the word ‘being’ [ens]. Everything else, I say, pertains not to the
explanation of philosophical truth, but to proclaiming the states of
mind that govern our wish to praise, magnify and honour God. ...
Christians say of God that He is the author of every act, because it is
honourable to do so, but to say ‘God is the author of sin’ is
sacrilegious and profane. There is no contradiction in this matter,
however, for, as I said, the words under discussion are not the

22
“First of all, he [White] fixes the basis of the Stoics’ ‘fate’ as follows: Two propositions, an
affirmative and a negative, to do with the future are contradictory; therefore one of them is
necessarily true. Beginning with this basis [the Stoics] argued (he says) [the existence of] fate or
the necessity of things. How he can know this defeats me. That some [others] have similarly
argued is no reason for taking it as the conceptual basis upon which the originator of the [Stoic]
sect depended. They seem to me, rather, to have arrived at the above opinion through studying
the definitions of ‘cause’, ‘effect’ and ‘necessary’. Neither of us has any means of knowing
what principles and what methods were used by the teacher who first explained to his pupils the
above argument used by the Stoics. It seems sound enough to me, however.” Thomas Hobbes,
Thomas White's De Mundo Examined, trans. Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Bradford
University Press, 1976), p.428.
23
“Through a desire to pronounce it before he got it into proper order, however, he has
entangled himself in many contradictions and unusual words, such as ‘futurition’, and obscure
ones like ‘determinately true’ and ‘an indeterminately true proposition in the mind can
abstrahere’ and the like, and has involved himself and others in a fog [of obscurity].” Ibid.,
p.433.

102
 propositions of people philosophising but the actions of those who pay
homage.24

Reviewing the controversy between Hobbes and Bramhall, the Cambridge

Platonist Ralph Cudworth considered that Bramhall’s critique had misfired: he had
argued against Hobbes “like a Scholastick Divine”, and through his focus on points of
detail had lost sight of the big picture, not fully appreciating that Hobbes’s doctrine of
“physickall fatalism is really one and the same thing with Saddiceism and Atheism”,
and that to refute Hobbes it was necessary to show that self-moving spirit did exist.25
One part of Cudworth’s attack on Hobbes exists in the Treatise on Freewill, but there
his argument ran along the same lines as that of Bramhall earlier: Hobbes’s
determinism was assimilated to Stoic fate, which was then rejected with reference to
the kinds of categories and distinctions Hobbes himself had chosen to abandon. 26
Hobbes pretended to be original, Cudworth insisted, “and yet this childish and
ridiculous nonsense and sophistry of his was stolen from the Stoics, too, who played
the fools in logic after the same manner”, and he persisted in calling this a “ridiculous
sophistry” even though he himself conceded that the Stoics were persuaded by it and
that it also puzzled not only “Cicero but also Aristotle himself, so much as to make
them hold that propositions concerning future contingents were neither true nor
false.”27

A more substantial engagement with Stoics ancient and modern was planned in his
vast True and Intellectual System of the Universe which was, he tells us in its Preface,
originally planned as a refutation of determinism, and which only later became a much
larger-scale treatise.28 Three varieties of determinism were singled out for refutation:
“Democritic fate”, also called “physiological fate” or “atheistic fate”; “divine fate

24
Ibid., p.434. This opinion of Hobbes’s does not seem to be very well known among
seventeenth and eighteenth century critics. Cudworth ascribed the opinion to Hobbes that “The
attributes of God signify not true nor false, nor any opinion of our brain, but the reverence and
devotion of our hearts; and therefore they are not sufficient premises to infer truth, or convince
falsehood”. Mosheim, in the notes to his edition of Cudworth, claimed that he has been unable
to track down a version of this sentiment in either the English or the Latin works of Hobbes,
and suggested that the only place it might be found was in the “the preface to a very rare
collection of his treatises, De Fato et Necessitate, Lond. 1656, inasmuch as Leibniz... finds that
opinion advanced in that Preface.” Ralph Cudworth, The true intellectual system of the
universe: wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted, and its impossibility
demonstrated: with a treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, 3 vols. (London:
Thomas Tegg, 1845), vol.1, p.108fn. (Hereafter cited as TIS).
25
Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: seventeenth-century reactions to the materialism
and moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
p.128, quoting from the unpublished Cudworth papers #4979 fol.60.
26
From Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise on Freewill, reprinted in Raphael, ed., British Moralists,
§§152-3.
27
Ibid.
28
Cudworth, TIS, vol.1, Preface.

103
immoral and violent”, or strong versions of what Schneewind terms voluntarism;29 and
“divine fate moral and natural”, which Cudworth introduced with these words, saying
that God

suffers other things besides itself to act, and hath an essential goodness
and justice in [His] nature, and consequently, that there are things just
and unjust to us naturally, and not by law and arbitrary constitution
only; and yet [these Fatalists] take away from men all such liberty as
might make them capable of praise and dispraise, rewards and
punishments, and objects of distributive justice; they conceiving
necessity to be intrinsical to the nature of every thing, in the actings of
it, and nothing of contingency to be found anywhere...30

Cudworth noted that this third position was held by “the Stoics, but also of late by
divers modern writers”, but in the end this section of the True Intellectual System was
never written, as the book itself was never completed, and “divine fate moral and
natural” remained unrefuted. I will return to Cudworth below, for further discussion of
the Stoics’ God.31 Before then, however, it remains to consider the most original and
most interesting writer in this Protestant anti-Stoic tradition, Pierre Bayle.

II: Stoicism in Bayle’s Dictionary

Although there is no article devoted to “Stoicism” or “The Stoics” in Bayle’s

Dictionary of 1697, this does not mean a great deal: there are no entries for Plato or

29
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, passim, but esp. pp.8-9, 21-5, 250-1.
30
Cudworth, TIS, vol.1, Preface, xxxiv.
31
There are other interesting discussions of Stoicism in the pages of TIS which Cudworth was
able to complete. In the first volume, for example, he draws on Stoic arguments while
prosecuting his case against the “Democritical atomists. Against the widespread contemporary
belief that atomism entailed atheism - articulated by William Harvey and Meric Casaubon,
among others - Cudworth here asserts that “there is not only no inconsistency betwixt the
atomic physiology and theology, but... there is, on the contrary, a most naturall cognation
between them” (Ibid., vol.1, p.56), and a part of his argumentative strategy is to maintain first
that physical atomism must be incompatible with the exixtence of a corporeal God of the kind
taught by the Stoics (“Thus from the principles of corporealism itself, it plainly follows, that
there can be no corporeal Deity, because the Deity is supposed to be agennetov kai avolethron,
a thing that was never made and is essentially undestroyable, which are the privileges and
properties of nothing but senseless matter”, vol.1, p.119) and to argue, inter alia, that the
necessity of a first cause suggests that physical atomism presupposes the existence of self-
moving incorporeal substance. Later in the work there is also a useful discussion of the question
as to whether the Stoics thought the universe was a giant vegetable (on the whole they didn’t,
although Seneca “speaks so waveringly and uncertainly” on this point: vol.1, p.194), a passage
which stands at the head of a section of comprehensive exposition of the Stoics’ fundamental
cosmology covering the soul of the world, the repeated conflagration of the world, etc., all of
which is thoroughly documented with a range of reference which goes far beyond Lipsius’s
sources in the Physiologiae Stoicorum.

104
Descartes, either, in his notoriously idiosyncratic selection of articles. 32 In some
articles where we might expect to find discussions of Stoicism, furthermore, we find
none: indeed, in the article “Lipsius” the only opinion about the Hellenistic
philosophers which is cited is Dr. Conradus Schlusselburgius’s opinion that he was an
Epicurean! (“Lipsius”, note A.) 33 Yet Stoicism is by no means absent from the
Dictionary. The article on “Chrysippus” contains Bayle’s major critical discussion of
Stoic philosophy, and he makes important observations on Stoicism in “Arcesilaus”,
“Heracleotes”, “Hipparchia”, “Ovid”, “Jupiter”, in the famous articles on “The
Paulicians” and “Spinoza”, and elsewhere.

An Augustinian Calvinist, Bayle was the heir of both Catholic and Protestant
traditions of anti-Stoic criticism. In general, Bayle seems more indebted to the
Protestant critique than to that of the French Augustinians, for he is usually more
interested in the cosmological, metaphysical, theological and epistemological
arguments of the Stoics than in their treatments of ethics and human psychology. His
discussions of Stoicism barely mention Seneca or Epictetus, the most important
authors for the French critics. Yet there are also places where Bayle directly draws on
this French tradition. He repeats, for example, the chief complaint of the Augustinians
in his most extended comment on the figure of the Stoic sage, when he remarks that the
“capital error” of the Stoics was their “supposing that it was in the power of man to
root out every vicious passion”, a mistake which demonstrated their “ignorance with
regard to the state and condition of man” (“Ovid”, note H).

Beyond this commonplace, however, there is a deeper and more interesting debt to
the Augustinian anti-Stoic tradition. For these writers were distinctive in their refusal
to treat Stoicism as mere doxography as they attempted to diagnose the spirit of
Stoicism, to identify its inner principle or fundamental motivation. Bayle follows in the
footsteps of this tradition by presenting Stoicism in the Dictionary as something of a
distinctive world-view, a set of philosophical doctrines and arguments inseparable
from a particular philosophical style, and one which possesses its own characteristic
vices of the intellect. The false doctrines of the Stoics are generated, so Bayle seems to
claim, by their erroneous approach to philosophical disputation. Form and content,
philosophical substance and method are closely tied to one another.

32
Alternative discussions of the Stoic theme in Bayle are Bonacina, Filosofia ellenistica e
cultura moderna, pp.27-32 and Jacqueline Lagrée, “La critique du stoïcisme dans le
Dictionnaire de Bayle,” in De l'Humanisme aux Lumières, Bayle et le protestantisme: Melanges
en l'honneur d'Elisabeth Labrousse, ed. Michelle Magdelaine, et al. (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1996).
33
The text of this article is mostly given over to a discussion of Lipsius's religion and his stand
on toleration in his debate with Koornhert; his interpretation of Stoicism is discussed elsewhere,
in particular in "Chrysippus", note H. Bayle knew Lipsius’s books well, and he is frequently
cited on points of detail in Roman history, where he tends to be treated as something of an
authority almost a century after his death.

105
 It is this double concern, both with the content of several Stoic arguments and with
a certain philosophical style, which overdetermines the centrality of Chrysippus in
Bayle’s engagement with Stoic philosophy. On the one hand, while the works of
Chrysippus are, of course, all lost, it is clear from the discussions of his views in,
especially, Cicero and Plutarch, that he was the most significant Stoic thinker on the
philosophical topics that interested Bayle the most, including fate and free will and the
basis of perceptual knowledge. On the other hand, Bayle was also both inheriting and
recasting a tradition, both ancient and modern, of denigrating the character of
Chrysippus to an often extreme degree.

The ancient criticisms of Chrysippus are familiar enough: Plutarch in particular

took great delight in finding flawed arguments in the works of Chrysippus in his book
On Stoic self-contradictions.34 But the seventeenth-century critics of Chrysippus had a
distinct motivation. These were writers who wanted to defend Stoic or Neo-Stoic ethics
against some of the contemporary criticisms of Stoic philosophy, and, exploiting a
murky knowledge of the earliest development of Stoic philosophical doctrine, these
writers ascribed all that they found admirable in Stoic doctrine to Zeno and ascribed
the least defensible arguments, or the arguments which they were, at least, unwilling to
defend, to a kind of rogue Stoicism elaborated by Chrysippus. On this view, Zeno’s
pure doctrine came to be corrupted by the pedantic, systematising spirit of Chrysippus.
Kaspar Scioppius may have been the first to go down this road in his 1606 Elementa
philosophiae stoicae moralis (“Chrysippus”, note E); André and Anne Dacier followed,
explicitly pursuing the strategy in order to try to rebut Jansenist criticism of Stoicism,
so that their Chrysippus is one who wholly misunderstands the spirit of Stoicism. The
Daciers tell us, for example, that whereas Zeno had taught that “all sins are equal” in
order to insist that small transgressions still mattered morally, as well as great crimes,
but that this was transformed in the hands of Chrysippus into the odious doctrine that
there was no difference between acts of sacrilege and the theft of a cabbage.35

That Bayle belongs to this tradition is clear enough. In “Chrysippus”, and

elsewhere, the Stoic is criticised for a multitude of sins. He is slated, for example, for
his inconsistency - the way in which he did not stick to his principles “but altered them
daily” - for his “unintelligible Jargon”, the “ill use” he made of his wit, and for his
“hunting after idle subtleties”. Bayle also criticised him for his inability to see what
was a worthwhile philosophical problem, when he speculated about the location of the
rational soul (“Jupiter” note C), and on occasion he is condemned without argument for
particular opinions he held, including his notorious defence of incest and cannibalism
(“Chrysippus”, main text) and of Diogenes the Cynic “self-polluting the marketplace”
(“Hipparchia”, note D).

Yet Bayle departed from the tradition in an important respect. Where Scioppius
and the Daciers - and, later, Jean Barbeyrac, in his “Historical and Critical Account of

34
Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, passim.
35
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales, Preface, p.6.

106
the Science of Morality”, as we shall see, below - treat the morally reprobate
Chrysippus as a heterodox deviant from the Stoic mainstream, in order to celebrate the
contributions of other Stoic philosophers, Bayle’s near-silence about Zeno, Epictetus
and others focuses our attention entirely on the deficiencies of the Stoic philosophy and
of its chief representative, Chrysippus.36 Thus, when Bayle makes remarks about “the
Stoics” in general, they are almost always highly critical. They are called “the
Pharisees of Paganism” for their unfair campaign of vilification against Epicurus,
concerning which Bayle writes that “The Stoics professed a great severity in their
morals: to contend with these people was almost as dangerous as it is at this day to be
at variance with Bigots” (“Epicurus”, main text and note N). Elsewhere, he remarks
that

The Stoics, who applied themselves more than any other Philosophers,
to to moral philosophy and Ethics, approved Diogenes’s imprudent
obscenities; so that we may apply to them particularly St. Paul’s
general affirmation against the Heathens, professing themselves to be
wise, they become foolish. (“Hipparchia”, note D).

Why was it so important for Bayle to criticise the Stoics? Stoicism mattered for
Bayle because he took it to be the archetypal philosophy of constructive rationalism,
which not only sought to establish rational grounds for perceptual knowledge through
its epistemology, but which also claims through its physics to elucidate the structure of
the universe and to describe the nature of God. Yet philosophical reasoning was always
for Bayle a critical, rather than a constructive tool. E. D. James drew attention to
Bayle’s simile in “Acosta”:

Philosophy can be compared, says Bayle, to those caustics which clear

up sores, but which would go on to destroy sound flesh and bones if
allowed to do so. The simile is helpful in that by attributing to
philosophy a therapeutic function it claims for it a positive value. Its
value lies in correcting errors. Its danger lies in the fact that if it be not
limited to the correction of errors it attacks truths themselves...37

The Stoics attempted to deploy philosophical reason well outside safe boundaries, and
Bayle was in particular concerned about the destructive effects of the attempts by

36
There is a “Zeno” in the Dictionary, but it is Zeno of Elea, rather than the founder of the Stoic
school, Zeno of Citium. Bayle frequently cites Diogenes Laertius’s life of Zeno the Stoic from
Book VII of his Lives and Opinions of the Greek Philosophers, but he is less interested in Zeno
himself as in the doxography of Stoicism presented there. When Zeno does make an appearance
in the Dictionary, he is either referred to as simply “the founder of the Stoics” (e.g. “Epicurus”,
note N), or he appears in an anecdote that is being recounted to illustrate another philosopher’s
argument (“Arcesilaus”, note E).
37
E. D. James, “Scepticism and fideism in Bayle’s Dictionnaire,” French Studies XVI, no. 4
(1962), p.268.

107
contemporary theologians to use Stoic modes of reasoning in their enquiries
concerning God.

Three aspects of Stoic philosophy are therefore discussed in particular in the

Dictionary. First, the methods of the Stoics are presented as objectionably dogmatic
and rooted in vice, promoting obfuscation and error rather than helping to bring truth to
light. Second, the failure of Stoic epistemology to provide an adequate criterion of
truth is held to undermine a variety of arguments that purport to demonstrate the
existence of God or the truth of religious conviction. Third, the theological cosmology
of the Stoics is deplored: their doctrine of the soul of the world is atheistic and has
returned in the form of modern Spinozism; their determinism fails to absolve God of
responsibility for evil in the world.

Bayle agreed with Scioppius that the root cause of Chrysippus’s defective
philosophy was his desire for victory rather than truth in philosophical argument, and
he therefore continues to agree with the Augustinian critics who located a moment of
pride at the heart of the problem with Stoicism (“Chrysippus”, note E). Describing
Chrysippus’s style of arguing, Bayle draws on Plutarch (On Stoic self-contradictions,
1035F) to tell us that he

does not absolutely condemn the method of arguing pro and con upon
the same subject; but he advises us to do it cautiously, as the Lawyers
do. They can only act otherwise, says he, who pretend to doubt of
everything; for their arguing with the same strength pro and con serves
their turn, as it is proper to show that everything is uncertain. But he
who intends to establish a true knowledge, according to which we
ought to regulate our conduct, must indeed lay the whole subject
before us from the beginning to the end, and as occasion offers he may
mention the adversary’s objections, but only in order to weaken and
confute them. (“Chrysippus”, note G38)

Bayle strongly condemned this approach to philosophical argument:

Let us explore here the falsity of Chrysippus’s maxims. He pretended,

that they who undertake to teach only truth, must speak very sparingly
of the arguments that might be alledged on the other side of the
question, and ought to imitate the Lawyers. This was the reigning
opinion amongst the Dogmaticks... Now I assert, that the method of
the Domaticks was very bad, and did not much differ from the
deceitful art of the Sophistical Rhetoricians, which rendered them so

38
The thought that one might only mention one’s opponents ideas in order to confute them
provokes the discussion later on in this note of whether “they who prohibit the books of the
Heretics, ought to suffer that their objections be published in the books of the Orthodox, who
confute them?”

108
 odious, and which was, to make the best cause of that which was the
worst...(Ibid.).

In part the trouble was that in his desire for victory, Chrysippus unwittingly aided his
Sceptical opponents. On the one hand, his vanity led him to “collect... so many
arguments in favour of the Sceptical Hypothesis”, in order to refute them all together,
but “he could not afterwards confute them himself” (“Chrysippus”, main text), and
“thus furnished Carneades with weapons against them” (“Chrysippus”, note F, quoting
Cicero, Academica, 4.27). On the other hand, Chrysippus employed whatever weapons
were to hand in attacking sceptical arguments, with the result that he was frequently
led into the self-contradictions celebrated by Plutarch, who is quoted repeatedly and at
length by Bayle throughout these pages.

The deeper problem that Bayle associates with the “Dogmatick” style, however, is
summed up in the tag that Bayle quotes from Scioppius, “nimium altercando veritas
amittitur”, that “truth is lost by too much argument”.39 The pedantry encouraged by
strenuous argument on one side of a proposition has quite the reverse effect to what is
intended:

[T]he disputes between Philosophers produce quite another effect; they

make both the spectators of the battle and the champions lose the truth;
no body does nor can seize upon it in the sequestration in which it is
put, while the suit is depending. (“Chrysippus”, note E)

Bayle continues with this theme, cross-referencing his discussion to its continuation in
note E of “Euclid” and, from there, to note S of “Loyola”, recruiting Seneca, Augustine,
Montaigne and other authorities to support his claim about the pernicious results of
there being too much heated philosophical debate. His criticisms of the dogmatic style
prompt his more general reflections on philosophical method.

Observe that there were amongst the Ancients two sorts of

Philosophers; some were like the Pleading counsellors, and the others,
like a Recorder or Judge, who sums up the evidence on both sides...
The latter were the Scepticks or the Academicks. (“Chrysippus”, note
G)

While the Sceptic’s role of “Recorder” or “Judge” or, elsewhere, “Umpire” is the
appropriate one for philosophers to adopt, Bayle insists that it is a different matter for
the theologians:

But such a distinction has seldom been observed among the Christians,
in their Schools of Philosophers, and less still in those of Divinity.

39
The line is attributed to the poet Publilius Syrus, and recorded by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights,
17.14.

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 Religion does not suffer that academical or sceptical humour: it
requires that we absolutely deny or affirm. (Ibid.)

One who acts the Sceptic, presenting arguments on both sides of the case on questions
of theology “becomes odious and suspected, and is in danger of being treated like an
infamous prevaricator who betrays his own party” (Ibid.).

Although he never makes the connection explicit, Bayle does implicitly suggest
that the Stoic style of philosophy generates certain patterns of disreputable behaviour
on the parts of its practitioners. The faults which Bayle criticises in Lipsius, the
archetypal modern Stoic, for example, closely parallel his condemnations of
Chrysippus. Lipsius behaves badly in philosophical disputations: rather than tell us
what Lipsius argued in his debate concerning toleration with Koornhert, Bayle tells us
how Lipsius tried to get Koornhert's pamphlets suppressed (“Lipsius”, note C). Both
men are also criticised for their silences: Chrysippus when confronted by the problem
of the Sorites (“Chrysippus”, note O) and Lipsius when challenged by the accusations
in the anonymous tract Idolum Hallense (“Lingelsheim”, note A). Both men,
furthermore, are accused of producing bogus philosophical solutions to classic
problems: Bayle reports that Carneades found a Sorites paradox embedded in
Chrysippus’s attempted solution to the problem (“Chrysippus”, note O; see Cicero,
Academica, 2.92-6), and Lipsius’s attempt to solve the problem of evil by his
distinction between two kinds of souls displaces rather than resolves the problem of
theodicy (“Chrysippus”, note H).

While the use of the Stoics’ dogmatic method in theological controversy is perhaps
more excusable than in the philosophical realm, Bayle is here concerned to combat the
use of specific Stoic arguments. Bayle’s hostility to rational theology, or the attempt to
vindicate positive theological claims through the use of philosophical arguments, is
well known. In a few examples here we can see how Bayle specifically criticises the
attempt to use Stoic theses in theological debates.

When Bayle returned to the epistemological debates between the Stoics and the
Sceptics in the pages of the Dictionary, he emphasises precisely those sceptical
objections which can be brought to bear against the modern Cartesians. In “Arcesilaus”,
for example, Bayle tells us that it is reported that the question was put to Zeno:

[W]hat will be the case if the wise man should not be able to know any
thing clearly, and if he must admit of any thing for true which is not
clear and evident? and that Zeno answered, He will clearly
comprehend some things, and therefore will admit of nothing which is
obscure. He should afterwards have laid down a rule whereby to judge
what things are clearly comprehended. That which Zeno gave was
opposed by Arcesilaus, who urged to him, that falsehood may appear
under the shape of truth, as that therefore one would be at a loss to
distinguish the one for the other. Zeno granted that nothing could be
comprehended, if that which does not exist can appear in the same
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 form as that which does exist; but he denied that there could be that
conformity of ideas betwixt that which is and that which is not.
Arcesilaus on the other hand insisted upon this conformity.
(“Arcesilaus”, note E)

The mistake the Stoics make is to insists that there is necessarily a phenomenological
distinction between what is true and what is false. And as we might expect, given the
affinities between the Stoic notion of the phantasia kataleptike and the Cartesian clear
and distinct idea discussed in Part One Section Two above, this sceptical objection lies
at the heart of Bayle's anti-Cartesianism, too: the clear and distinct idea cannot be the
basis of indubitable knowledge, since it does not carry a guarantee of its own veracity.
The proofs of God’s existence presented by Descartes in the third and fifth of his
Meditations cannot be granted, and nor can any other theological proof that rests on
what is considered évident (the word which is used for the standards of clarity
demanded by the Cartesians in a philosophical proof).

In the article on “Heracleotes”, a Stoic philosopher better known as Diogenes of

Heraclea (a man who abandoned the Stoic school to embrace the more hedonistic
lifestyle of the Cyrenaics), Bayle radicalises this attack on the philosophical
theologians. Since Heracleotes professed Stoicism, and then professed something else,
Bayle asserts, he

[O]ught to believe that falsehood presents itself to our minds, and

impresses itself there under the same characteristic or image under
which truth exhibits itself; and consequently that this distinguishing
characteristic of truth and falsehood, which you trust to in affirming or
denying, is deceitful and illusive.

Bayle goes on to comment:

This objection may puzzle such modern Protestants, as assert that the
truths of the Gospel do not enter the mind by way of evidence
[évidence], but by that of sense [sentiment]. What will they say should
they be shewed some Christians, who change their religion, and who
in imitation of our Heracleotes, a long time espouse with incredible
zeal and ardor, the very tenets which they afterwards reject with equal
ardor? Does not the sensation of falsehood, will it be asked, impress or
stamp itself on the mind, with all the same characteristics as the sense
of truth? (“Heracleotes”, note C)

If Arcesilaus’s objection to Zeno is sound, while the qualities of clearness and

distinctness may make something évident, they still do not make it true. Here in
“Heracleotes” Bayle extends this objection to cover Protestant accounts of the truth of
religious belief: to claim that one’s sentiment or feeling of inner conviction carries a
guarantee of truth is equally fraught with difficulty. Instead, Bayle seems to suggest

111
that there can be no criterion to determine the truth of religious belief, and that the
philosophers’ search for such a criterion is misplaced.

Bayle, finally, argues that the Stoics’ theological cosmology is useless or

pernicious as an aid to thinking about God’s relationship to the world. On the one hand,
he rejects the arguments of the Spinozists that conflate God with Nature, insisting that
this is a “real Atheism” (“Jupiter”) and pouring scorn on the arguments which are
adduced to illuminate “the doctrine of the soul of the world” which made “a principal
part of the system of the Stoics” (e.g. “Spinoza”, note A). And on the other hand Bayle
follows the Calvinist anti-Stoic tradition when he insists that the Chrysippan doctrine
of fate, defended by Lipsius (at Physiologiae Stoicorum 1.14), for example, must make
God responsible for sin.

[Lipsius] only winds and turns himself about... He says that there are
some minds, which having been well framed from the beginning, go
without any hurt thro’ the storm, which falls upon them from fate; and
that there are others, which are so ill-framed, that if fate hits them ever
so little, or even not at all, they fall into sin by a voluntary motion.
This is owing to a natural imperfection, which is in the cause... In
order to clear his Chrysippus [Lipsius] supposes, that the Stoicks
ascribed the defects of the soul of man not to God, but to a real and
unconquerable imperfection of matter... But hark you, Chrysippus, if
this constitution and deviation be from Nature, how can you avoid
making God the author of evil? How is it possible that the Author of
Nature, who is nature herself, should not have produced evil, and bad
men, if he made them as they are? (“Chrysippus”, note H).

The Stoics’ attempt to carve out a space for human freedom fails to address the
problem of evil adequately, and Bayle insists that one who uses Stoic arguments will
not be able to hold onto both their claim that God is good and that He controls His
parts (“The Paulicians”, note G).

Bayle’s rejection of Stoicism operates on several levels: whether we employ Stoic

methods (the dogmatic style), Stoic concepts (the clear and distinct idea) or Stoic
doctrines (the soul of the world, Chrysippan fate), we will certainly not be assisted in
reaching either philosophical or religious truth. Although Bayle often repeats the
criticisms of ancient authorities like Plutarch, Cicero or Carneades, and also utilises the
seventeenth-century currents of anti-Stoic thought, he is nevertheless able to present a
wholly distinctive account of the nature and pitfalls of the Stoic philosophy, and he
drew from his engagement with the Stoics powerful lessons for his contemporaries. On
Bayle’s account, insofar as Stoicism has anything to teach us, it is only by negative
example. The role it plays in Bayle’s thought akin to that of Aristotelianism in
Hobbes’s philosophy, a confused and confusing, corrupt and corrupting philosophical
system that is best abandoned.

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 On this account, Bayle’s presentation of Chrysippus is almost unrelentingly
negative, so that it is not unreasonable to see Bayle as trying to construct himself as the
anti-Chrysippus, a philosophical writer who will depart from the Chrysippan mould in
almost every particular. Ira O. Wade, by contrast, preferred to stress what he thought
Bayle and Chrysippus had in common, for he discerned in Bayle’s “pen portrait” of
Chrysippus a certain “warmth”, a recognition of a kindred philosophical spirit. Here
are his words:

[Bayle noted] that “it is a great misfortune for a sect to have a writer
for their apologist, who has a vast, quick, ready and proud wit, and
who does not only aspire to the glory of a fine, but also of a fruitful
pen.” Still, he draws a careful pen-portrait of this kind of philosopher,
and one suspects that Bayle may be talking here more about himself
than about the stoic Chrysippus, whom he undoubtedly admired. The
main and only aim of such a writer, he begins, is to confute any
adversary he undertakes to oppose. He labors more for his own
reputation than for the interest of the cause. He attends chiefly to the
particular thoughts which his imagination suggests to him. He regards
but little whether they are agreeable to the principles of his party. He is
well enough pleased if they serve to elude an objection, or to tire out
his adversaries. Dazzled with his inventions, he does not see the wrong
side of them. He is for a present advantage and unconcerned with
things to come. He cannot avoid contradicting himself. “By this
means,” Bayle concludes, “he betrays the interest of his party and runs
from one extreme to another.” In this delineation of the philosopher,
there is certainly a bit of a confession.40

This seems to me to be as uncharitable to Bayle as Bayle has doubtless been to

Chrysippus. But there is, nevertheless, an even deeper parallel between the two
philosophers which goes unremarked upon here.

Large questions about Bayle’s own beliefs and motives continue to haunt much
writing about the Dictionary. Did he believe in God? To what extent was the
Dictionary intended to subvert religious orthodoxy? How badly did the eighteenth-
century philosophes misunderstand the book they admired so much? Following the
discussion presented here, we might ask why a man who repeatedly worried about the
effect that too many arguments have on anyone’s being able to reach the truth about
important matters chose to publish seven million extremely argumentative words? The
researches of Alan Charles Kors suggest one answer. Kors has argued that the rapid
spread of atheism in eighteenth-century France was fuelled by the widespread
availability of an enormous number of texts from the later parts of the seventeenth
century and afterwards, written by theists, which attacked the most common proofs of
the existence of God. Malebranchist, Cartesian and Aristotelian theologians all argued

40
Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment, pp.562-3.

113
strenuously against one another’s systems, producing thousands of carefully argued
pages against their rivals’ proofs of the proposition that God exists. “Refutations of
proofs of the existence of God”, writes Kors, “abounded by the late seventeenth
century, not because of the emergence of actual atheists, but because of theological
polemic on the issue of the proper philosophical structure for Christian doctrine”.41

It is tempting to surmise that Bayle himself perceived what Kors has detected, and
feared, rightly, that the result of this torrent of “atheistic” literature from the pens of the
orthodox would be to promote atheistic tendencies in Europe. On this view, then, the
endless theological controversies pursued in the Dictionary have an almost satirical
intent; Bayle does, as Wade indicates, seek to tire out his adversaries by showing them
again and again, and at inordinate length, exactly how all attempts to employ the tools
of rationalist philosophy in theological debate must fail. And so, just as Chrysippus
collected together the arguments of the sceptics into one place, in order to refute them
all at once, failed, and thereby performed a service for the very sect he aimed to
combat, so too Bayle’s attempt to bring an end to the debates of the rationalist
theologians by beating them at their own game ended in ironic failure. Following the
appearance in significant numbers of eighteenth-century atheists, Bayle’s Dictionary
inevitably became itself viewed as an extended manifesto for all varieties of religious
heterodoxy and even atheism. Just as Carneades could remark that he found all the
arguments he needed in the works of Chrysippus, so too the dialectic of unintended
consequences ensured that the Dictionary would become the “arsenal” of an
“Enlightenment” which Bayle himself would, in important respects, have loathed.

III: How the Stoics became Atheists

Jonathan Israel’s massive Radical Enlightenment presents an important new

interpretation of European philosophical culture in the period 1650-1750 with which
this study is strongly sympathetic.42 In contrast to the familiar, old-fashioned view of
the Enlightenment as a chiefly French phenomenon centred on the Paris of the mid-
eighteenth century, or the more recent view that depicts the Enlightenment in terms of
a wave of eighteenth-century continental Anglomania centred on reverence for the
achievement of the troika of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, or the most
recent view of J. G. A. Pocock which insists on a plurality of “Enlightenments”, 43
decisively rooted in their national and other local contexts, Israel argues for the
substantial unity of a genuinely pan-European Enlightenment. His Enlightenment,
however, is dated a little earlier than most, with its roots in the middle of the
seventeenth century, and its most decisive period from the half century after 1680. On

41
Alan Charles Kors, “’A First Being, of Whom We Have No Proof’: The Preamble of Atheism
in Early-Modern France”, in A. C. Kors and Paul J. Korshin, eds., Anticipations of the
Enlightenment (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp.18-9.
42
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
43
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).

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this account, therefore, the 1750s - traditionally conceived of as the decade of the
“High Enlightenment” in the Paris of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia - are
now presented as something of a coda to the drama of Enlightenment. Indeed, to use
Israel’s own words, “even before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s, the
real business was already over”.44

As to the best way of describing the structure of the arguments of this unitary
Enlightenment, Israel agrees with one contemporary observer, the Genose scholar
Paolo Mattia Doria, who considered his era to be dominated by a five-cornered
struggle between the conservative Aristotelian scholasticism (still officially
propounded in many of the continent’s universities and smiled upon by its crowned
heads and ecclesiastics) and three groups of moderni, made up of the Lochisti, the
Cartesiani-Malebranchisti and the Leibniz-Wolffians, all of whose divisions opened
the way to “the awesome fifth column” (those are Israel’s words) of the radical party,
or the “Epicurei-Spinosisti” (those are Doria’s)45. Israel’s central argument, running
throughout his many pages, is that it was this fifth column of the “Radical
Enlightenment” of Spinoza and his often clandestine followers which was the chief
impetus driving the most far-reaching transformations of European intellectual life in
all parts of the continent, including those, like England, often thought to have been
substantially unaffected by the dissemination of Spinozist ideas, and where the growth
of philosophic radicalism in the later seventeenth century has traditionally been
presented as a homegrown phenomenon.46

As the remark from Doria suggests, the Spinozist spectre haunting Europe from the
time of the anonymous appearance of the Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus in 1670
was often understood as a new form of Epicureanism - and, as in the case of Thomas
Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century, the Epicurean label was quickly slapped by
their critics onto a host of writers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
who scandalised respectable opinion, including Anthonie van Dale (1638-1708),
Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), 47 Bernard de Mandeville, and other radicals. It is
always interesting, of course, when writers get denounced as Epicureans, but it is
especially interesting in the case of Spinoza, owing to the extent to which he can be
understood as mounting a sustained argument in defence of a series of Stoic positions.
In recent years, it is Susan James who has set out at greatest length the reasons as to
why we should take seriously the idea of “Spinoza the Stoic”.48 Her presentation draws
attention not only to the obvious fact that Spinoza defends a series of controversial

44
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p.7.
45
Ibid., p.8, with reference to Paolo Mattia Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi
contro il Signor Giovanni Locke, ed alcuni altri moderni autori, 2 vols. (Venice: 1732), p.31-3.
46
e.g. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp.601ff.
47
Ibid., pp.372, 394-5.
48
Susan James, “Spinoza the Stoic,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorrell
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). A. A. Long makes a similar case in his survey of the legacy of
Stoicism. Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition”. See also the article by Alexandre
Matheron in Moreau and Lagrée, Le stoïcisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.

115
positions which his seventeenth-century audience would have immediately associated
with the Stoics, including, among others, the identification of God with Nature (Deus
sive Natura), the equation of the passions with false judgements, and that of virtue with
happiness; but also to a considerably less obviously aspect of his thinking, when she
argues that “Spinoza displays an awareness of the objections to which the Stoic
account of virtue was habitually subjected, and that in responding to them he draws
still further on the resources of Stoic philosophy”.49 In particular, James demonstrates
the manner in which Spinoza rebuts contemporary objections to the Stoic insistence
that virtue was incompatible with passion by restating a Stoic account of rational action,
which insists that it is the rational person who acts, whereas the passionate person is
merely acted upon by external things.50 This opinion, that Spinoza is a sophisticated
kind of modern Stoic, is not one, furthermore, which is confined to late modern
commentators such as James or Long: during the Spinozist controversy itself, both
Bayle (as we have already seen, above) and Buddeus (as we shall see, below) found the
Stoic label an appropriate one to use when considering the content and structure of
Spinoza’s arguments, and the ever-perceptive Giambattista Vico was clear about the
continuities, referring at one point in The New Science to the Stoics, “in this respect the
Spinozists of their day”.51

The disputes of the Early Enlightenment, it seems, could have been articulated in
terms of an ongoing critical engagement with Stoicism, but most of the time in fact
were not. Striking in this regard is Leipzig professor Carl Günther Ludovici’s verdict
on Christian Wolff’s 1737 edition of the Theologia Naturalis, describing it as his most
devastating assault on the Radical Enlightenment of “atheism, fatalism, deism,
Naturalism, materialism, Spinozism and Epicureanism”.52 In this litany of heterodox -
isms, “Stoicism” is conspicuous by its absence - yet to the Moderately Enlightened
party of Ludovici and Wolff, it would not have been at all unusual to consider the
arguments of the Stoics as constituting yet another variety of atheism, deism,
naturalism, materialism and Spinozism (though not, of course, of Epicureanism).

While in general it is the reluctance explicilty to engage the Stoics that is striking
in these debates of the Early Enlightenment, there was one site of debate in particular,
around Spinoza’s “pantheism”, which did have important repercussions for the ways in
which Stoicism was interpreted and understood. For it is as a result of this controversy
that the Stoics became characterised for the first time in modern times as atheists, and
this is a verdict which had important repercussions for the way in which Stoicism was
described in the most influential reference works in the High Enlightenment. It is this
story, of How the Stoics became Atheists, which is recounted in this section.

49
James, “Spinoza the Stoic”, p.292.
50
Ibid., pp.310-6.
51
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Bergin and Fisch (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), §335.
52
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p.555.

116
 ***

As noted in the previous section, Bayle, in his Dictionary entry on “Spinoza”,

observed that the Stoic doctrine of “the soul of the world” was the same as Spinoza’s
argument, and in “Jupiter” he described the pantheism of the Stoics as “a real Atheism”.
From the standpoint of a present in which atheism is usually taken to be the denial of
the proposition that God exists, it might seem odd to describe a form of pantheism
which argues that God exists, but is physically coextensive with the universe (and is, in
fact, identical with it) as a variety of atheism, but as Israel makes clear, the standard
discourse of anti-Spinozism branded as atheist any opinion which sought (or which
seemed) to deny the existence either of divine Providence or of punishment and reward
in the hereafter.53

Bayle’s opinion is, of course, a judgment which stands in conflict with that of the
earlier generation of Christian Neo-Stoic apologists: Lipsius - who had effectively
possessed a monopoly over the interpretation of systematic Stoic physics, owing to his
authorship of the standard textbook on the subject - had denied that the Stoics taught a
pantheist materialism, arguing that “God is contained in things but not infused with
them”, refusing to follow the Stoic texts in understanding God in material terms.54 Du
Vair, by contrast, whose preferred Stoic text was the Encheiridion of Epictetus, was
able to get away with exalting the piety and the monotheism of the Stoics, and to
present the God of the Stoics as identical with the God of the Christians, for the
maxims of this short compilation stick to moral exhortation, and avoid the reefs of
theological controversy.55 Clearly, therefore, problems were going to arise for these
syncretist understandings of Stoicism when the conditions which made these
interpretations plausible no longer obtained: on the one hand, a more assiduous
investigation of the sources for Stoic physics would inevitably undermine Lipsius’s
arguments; on the other hand, a broader understanding of the systematic nature of
Epictetan Stoicism would undermine Du Vair’s, in a world in which scholars were no
longer satisfied with basing their understanding of the philosophy of Epictetus on the
maxims of the Manual.

In this context, it is clear that Thomas Gataker’s presentation of Stoicism occupied

a radically unstable position. In spite of his sophisticated knowledge of Stoic physics
and a much deeper interest in Epictetus than that which had been possessed by the
sixteenth-century Neo-Stoics, Gataker remained anxious to present his Stoics as fairly
conventional theists, and certainly as thinkers in whom contemporary Christians could
find inspiration. He therefore expounded their core theological position in these ringing
terms in his “Preliminary Discourse”:

53
Ibid., p.9. Elsewhere he quotes Father René-Josephe Tournemine’s judgment on
Malebranchisme as a “spinosime spritiuel”, and whose Journal de Trévoux insisted in 1708 that
Malebranche “annihilates the Divinity by reducing it to the totality of the world”. Ibid., p.42.
54
Lipsius, Physiologiae Stoicorum, I.8; Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition”.
55
e.g., Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks.

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 They hold that God Almighty governs the Universe; that his
Providence is not only General, but Particular, and reaches to Persons
and Things: That he presides over Humane Affairs; that he assists Men
not only in the greatest Concerns, in the Exercise of Virtue, but also
supplies them with the Conveniencies of Life. And therefore that God
ought to be Worship’d above all Things, and applied to upon all
Occasions; that we should have him always in our Thoughts,
acknowledge his Power, resign to his Wisdom and adore his Goodness
for all the satisfactions of our Being. To submit to his Providence
without Reserve. To be pleased with his Administration; and fully
persuaded that the Scheme of the World could not have been mended,
nor the Subordination of Things more suitably adjusted, nor all Events
have been better timed for the common Advantage; and therefore that
‘tis the duty of all Mankind, to obey the Signal, and follow the
Intimations of Heaven, with all the Alacrity imaginable: that the Post
assign’d us by Providence must be maintained with Resolution; and
that we ought to die a thousand times over, rather than desert it.56

It is in the arguments of Gataker’s Cambridge contemporary Ralph Cudworth that

we can begin to see how anxieties about Stoic theology began to be articulated.
Cudworth ultimately followed Gataker, Lipsius and Du Vair in accepting that the
Stoics were theists - theirs, as mentioned earlier, is presented as a teaching of “divine
fate, morall and naturall” - but the discussion of Stoic cosmology in the second volume
of The True Intellectual System of the Universe is the major discussion in the
seventeenth-century English tradition which seriously raises the question as to whether
the Stoics’ physics should allow their philosophy to be interpreted as a form of theism.
In a lengthy discussion, Cudworth aims at refuting the charge that, though they were,
in his own well-chosen words, “sottish corporealists”57, the Stoics were not themselves
atheists; though, as he remarked casually in the third volume, they were “imperfect,
mongrel and spurious theists”.58 In his account, the decisive issue is that of Creation:

[A]s to that controversy so much agitated amongst the ancients,

whether the world were made by chance, or by the necessity of
material motions, or by mind, reason and understanding; they [ = the
Stoics] avowedly maintained that it was neither by chance nor by
material necessity, but divina mente, ‘by a divine and eternal mind’
every way perfect.59

56
Gataker, in Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus his Conversation with Himself, sig.b4-
b4v.
57
Cudworth, TIS, vol.2, p.97.
58
Ibid., vol.3, p.83.
59
Ibid., vol.1, p.98.

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 Furthermore, Cudworth has some praise for the way in which Cicero had set out
the Stoics’ arguments for the existence of God under three headings at De Natura
Deorum, using first an argument from design, second an argument from “universal
harmony”, and third an argument from the “scale of nature“, all adding up to a set of
reasons which was not “at all contemptible, or much inferior to those which have been
used in these latter days.”60 And while he acknowledged and copiously documented
evidence of the Stoics’ polytheism, he concluded these passages of exposition with a
stress on Epictetus’s and Cleanthes’s invocations of a single deity, “because many are
so extremely unwilling to believe that the Pagans ever made any religious address to
the supreme God as such”, and he reprinted the famous hymn of Cleanthes both in the
original Greek and in a Latin translation by “my learned friend Dr. Duport”.61

The appearance of Spinoza’s major works, however, gave those who might have
been unsure as to just how to categorise the Stoics with an incentive to adjust the
criteria as to what was to count as theism, until the Stoics could be presented as not just
atheists, but the worst kind, Spinozist atheists. For although the most detailed
arguments about the nature of Spinoza’s God were elaborated in the First Part of the
Ethics, first published as a part of the Opera Postuma in 1687, the notorious argument
against the possibility of miracles in chapter 6 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
which ignited the controversy in 1670, deployed an account of the nature of things
which touched on Stoic cosmology in important ways. Spinoza’s argument against the
possibility of miracles was premissed, in the first instance, on the identification of the
laws of nature with the decrees of God, and on a very general level an ‘intellectualist’
conception of God’s role and function in the universe of this kind cannot but evoke the
kind of language deployed by the Stoics which has always led to their being associated
with development of Christian natural law philosophies. More particularly, however,
the violence which Spinoza’s account of God in the Tractatus performed on the
traditional Christian notions of Providence immediately conjured into view all of the
anxieties and objections which had been expressed against Lipsius’s arguments about
Stoic fate and divine Providence in De Constantia. For Spinoza to assert that “God’s
decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s Providence are, in truth, nothing
but Nature’s order” was unflinchingly to proclaim the truth about Stoic determinism
which Lipsius had endeavoured to deny, and which had made his various critics so
intensely suspicious of his Stoic thought.62

60
Ibid., vol.1, p.98. Leibniz, in his notes on the True Intellectual System, registered his triple
agreement with Cudworth, Cicero and the Stoics and his disagreement with the Epicureans (and
Hobbes) with respect to a part of the argument for the existence of God, writing, “...
Atheistarum prava opinio apud Cicer. de nat. d. I.213: Nulla naturalis charitas, omnis
benevolentia oritur ex imbecillitate... Ita recentior ( + Hobbes +) jus Deo esse a sola potentia
irresitibili.” (Leibniz’s reference system is different to the one generally used today: the
reference is to Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I.121-2. G. W. Leibniz and ed. Gaston Grua, Textes
inédits (Presses Universitaires de France: Paris, 1948), vol.1, p.328. I am grateful to Patrick
Riley for the reference.
61
Cudworth, TIS, vol.1, pp.117-9.
62
Tractatus Theologico-philosophicus, p.132 in the 1925 Gebherdt ed., cited in Israel, p.221.

119
 Jonathan Israel identifies Jakob Thomasius - the father of the more eminent
philosopher Christian, and the tutor of Leibniz - as the first scholar to publish a
refutation of the argument of the Tractatus: Spinoza’s book was first published in
Amsterdam in January 1670 (though the title page said Hamburg), and Thomasius had
his own Adversus anonymum, de libertate philsophandi published at Leipzig in May of
the same year.63 And, interestingly, Thomasius was also the first author to worry at
length about the atheistic implications of the materialist cosmology found in the Stoics’
physics: he published a neo-Aristotelian attack on Lipsius’s ambition to reconcile
Christian theology and Stoic physics in his 1676 treatise, Exercitatio de stoica mundi
exustione,64 and claimed that “Nothing has more disgracefully corrupted the history of
philosophy than the attempt to reconcile the Christian faith, now with Plato, now with
Aristotle, now with the Stoics or other pagan groups”.65 In particular, first, he criticised
Lipsius’s interpretation of the inseparability of the two principles (active and passive)
which the Stoics argued structured the universe; second, he identified and criticised the
Stoics’ conflation of God and the world, which Lipsius had endeavoured to deny; third,
he insisted that Lipsius’s attempt to deny that God was responsible for evil, given his
Stoic premisses, had to fail.66

When Bayle presented the Stoics’ view of the “soul of the world” as “a real
Atheism”, then, he was serving up a version of Thomasius’s argument to the readers of
the Dictionary. The writer who was most interested in investigating, elaborating upon
and continuing to denounce the axis of Stoic-Spinozist-atheist evil, however, was
Bayle’s near-contemporary Johann Franz Buddeus, professor at the new foundation at
Halle, who devoted a series of studies over the length of his academic career to
different aspects of this matter. The first was a short work on the errors of the Stoics,67
which was followed by a treatise on “Spinozism before Spinoza”, 68 a widely-read
treatise on Atheism and Superstition,69 an edition of Marcus Aurelius, with a detailed

63
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp.281-2. See also p.32 for the claim that Thomasius and
Leibniz were aware much earlier than most of the real identity of the book’s author.
64
Jacob Thomasius, Exercitatio de Stoica mundi exustione: cui accesserunt argumenti varii,
sed inprimis ad historiam Stoicae philosophiae facientes, dissertationes XXI (Lipsiae:
Sumptibus haeredum Friderici Lanckisii, 1676).
65
Thomasius, quoted in Santinello, ed., Models of the history of philosophy, p.416.
66
For more extended discussion of Thomasius’s argument, see Jacqueline Lagrée, in Mouchel,
ed., Juste Lipse (1547-1606) en son temps: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1994, pp.43-4.
67
J. F. Buddeus, De erroribus stoicorum in philosophia morali (Halle: 1695). For a description
of the significance of this book and its content, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp.634-5.
68
J. F. Buddeus, De Spinozismo ante Spinozam (1701).
69
J. F. Buddeus and Hadrian Buurt, Theses theologicae de atheismo et superstitione (Traiecti ad
Rhenum: apud I.H. Vonk van Lynden, 1737), more widely read in its French translation, Jean-
François Buddeus, Traité de l'Athéisme et de la Superstition, trans. Louis Philon (Amsterdam:
1740).

120
introductory essay, 70 and his important volumes on the history of philosophy, 71 to
which I shall now turn.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the standard approach to writing the
history of philosophy - which at this time still almost universally meant the history of
what we now think of as ancient philosophy - was still closely modelled on Diogenes
Laertius’s book on the Lives and Opinions of the Greek Philosophers. A typical work
on the subject would be organised by sect, each section being subdivided by author,
with a doxography of the sect’s distinctive arguments presented in the section devoted
to its founder. 72 Passages on later philosophers belonging to the particular school
would follow the treatment of the founder, in broadly chronological order. While
mention would often be made of particular specialisms or idiosyncracies which
appeared in the work of these later adherents, there would not be any detailed treatment
of what we would today recognise as the basic stuff of the history of philosophy, a
discussion of how the course of philosophical argument over time might have led to
modifications in the doctrines maintained by the schools. To take one example, then,
which we have already encountered in the pages above, modern authors could attribute
Chrysippus’s modifications of Zeno’s doctrine to his failure to understand his master’s
teaching or to personal vice, but not to his attempt to work out the logic of Zeno’s
ideas as he fashioned a comprehensive system of Stoics philosophy. Those who wrote
on the history of philosophy could discuss whether theses were true or false, in light of
the best philosophical accounts of their own age, or of revealed religion, but they had
no doctrine of how progress could be made in philosophy.

The leading English work in this vein was Thomas Stanley’s compendious History
of Philosophy, first published in 1655 (when the author was twenty eight):73 as might
be expected from this discussion, in this work he treated the Stoics in isolation from
other philosophical schools and followed the lead set by Diogenes by following his life
of Zeno with a comprehensive doxography of the Stoic school. He has little to say
specifically about Stoics after Zeno. 74 When it came to the theism of the Stoics,

70
J. F. Buddeus, Introductionem ad philosophiam stoicam ex mente M. Antonini (Leipzig:
1729).
71
J. F. Buddeus, Analecta historiae philosophicae (Halae Saxonum: Sumptibus Orphanotrophii,
1706), and the posthumous Compendium historiae philosophicae, observationibus illustratum
(Halae Saxonum: Typis & impensis Orphanotrophii, 1731).
72
For detailed descriptions of the contents of many such works, see Santinello, ed., Models of
the History of Philosophy, and Giovanni Santinello, ed., Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker, vol. 2,
Storia delle storie generali della filosofia (Brescia: La Scuola, 1979), passim.
73
Stanley, The History of Philosophy.
74
There are two pages on Cleanthes (Ibid., pp.481-3), five pages on Chrysippus (pp.483-7,
largely given over to the lengthy catalogue of his works), and fewer than two pages in total on
Zeno of Tarsis, Diogenes of Seleucia, Antipater of Sidon, Panaetius and Posidonius, the other
Stoics treated in his Part Eight. There is nothing on the Stoics of the Roman period. For some
remarks on Stanley’s treatment of different periods of ancient philosophy, see Santinello,
Models of the History of Philosophy, p.180.

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discussed in Part VIII, Chapter XVII, he noted that the historical record reported a
variety of opinions about the Stoics’ God,75 and the problem with treating the Stoics as
simple monotheists is clearly in view, given the way in which Stanley tacks back and
forth between the “God” and the “Gods” of the Stoics in his reports of the teachings
found in his various ancient authorities (in this section, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius
and Cicero). The closest he comes to resolving this tension is by suggesting that “God
is a Spirit, diffused through the whole World, having several denominations, according
to the several parts of the matter through which he spreadeth, and the several effects of
his power shewn therein”, before rattling off a variety of these names (Dia, Minerva,
Neptune, etc.).76

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, a revolution in writing the history of
philosophy pioneered by Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) and Christian Thomasius
(1655-1728), associated with a new understanding of “eclecticism” in philosophy,
paved the way both for a coherent notion of philosophical progress and for the large,
multivolume histories of philosophy written in the eighteenth century.77 But another
development in the technique of writing the history of philosophy pioneered in the
early eighteenth century, associated in particular with Buddeus, was the ambition to
identify the “nuclear” principles of the ancient philosophical doctrines, from which the
other doctrines could be said to follow, as a way of distinguishing the core from the
peripheral arguments of the various schools, and of coping with the fact - quite an
obvious fact in the case of the Stoics, as we have seen - that a number of the source
materials for the study of especially the Hellenistic schools were self-contradictory.

Given Buddeus’s triple preoccupation with atheism, Stoicism and Spinoza, it is

perhaps not surprising that his methodological innovation in the historiography of
philosophy had a specific application to precisely this polemic. Indeed, this distinctive
historiographical method seems to have been developed out of Buddeus’s extensive
reflections on Stoicism:

Buddeus was initially attracted by the many statements of Seneca and

75
e.g., “The substance of God, Zeno affirms to be the whole World and Heaven; so also
Chrysippus in the 11th of the Gods, and Possidonius in his first of the Gods. But Antipater in his
Seventh of the World, affirms his substance to be aerial. Boethius in his Book of Nature, saith,
the substance of God is the Sphere of fixed Stars. Sometimes they call him a nature containing
the World, sometimes a nature producing all upon Earth”. Stanley, The History of Philosophy,
p.478.
76
Ibid. See also Santinello, Models of the history of philosophy , pp.200-1.
77
For a full discussion of these developments in writing the history of philosophy, see
Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories, esp. pp.150-9 on Buddeus. Also Johann Jakob Brucker,
Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig: Literis et Impensis Bern. Christoph. Breitkopf, 1742-44).
There are brief remarks in A. A. Long and John M. Dillon, eds., The Question of "Eclecticism",
Hellenistic Culture and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), in the
contribution from Pierluigi Donini on “The history of the concept of eclecticism” (pp.15-33).
See also the article, “Eclectisme”, by Diderot in the Encylopaedia.

122
 Marcus Aurelius, so many of which were recalled by Lipsius, which
seemed to make Stoicism easily assimilable to Christian truth. But
investigating the system closely he noticed that it was nothing but
another form of Spinozism. Holding onto this supposition, he could
understand the significance of the morals of the Stoics, apparently so
noble and rational, in their deceitful and empty reality.78

Thus, in Buddeus’s presentation, the most important dogma of the Stoics was their
identification of God with the world, and the various other principles ultimately flow
from this one.79 In the realm of Stoic moral philosophy, the contradiction between the
admirable individual maxims of the Stoics and the impious premisses by which they
are generated seems to find its expression in the hypocrisy of individual Stoic
philosophers, a subject in which Buddeus was quite interested.80

Thus, in the work on atheism, Buddeus distinguishes between two varieties of

atheists:

Je mets dans la prémière, Ceux qui nient effrontément & sans détour,
l’existence de Dieu, ou Ceux, qui étant de mauvaise foi, ne peuvent
nier, ni ignorer que l’Athéisme suit necessairement de leurs principles.

Je mets dans la deuxième Classe, Ceux qui établissent des principes,

dont l’on peut tirer par la voie d’une bonne conséquence des
conclusions ou préjudiciables ou injurieses à la Providence & à la
liberté de Dieu.81

Buddeus assigns the Epicureans to the first, and the Stoics and Aristotle to the second
category, but then he distinguishes between the latter two, in order to make an
argument as to why the latter are closer to Spinoza than the former:

Ils regardoient Dieu comme l’ame du Monde, & ils l’unissoient à la

Matière par un lien indissoluble. Et comme Aristote se contentoit de
dire que Dieu étoit la forme assistante du Monde, les Stoïciens
soutenoient qu’il étoit une forme informante, comme la clairement
prouvé JAC THOMAS de Exustione Mundi Stoica Dissert. 15. Ainsi
leur Systême approche encore plus de Spinoza, que le Systême
d’Aristote.82

78
Santinello, ed., Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker, p.393. (My own translation).
79
Ibid., p.390, quoting Buddeus, Compendium historiae philosophicae, pp.253-4.
80
Santinello, ed., Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker, p.390, referring to Buddeus, Compendium
historiae philosophicae, p.265.
81
Buddeus, Traité de l'Athéisme, Preface.
82
Ibid., p.28fn2.

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In this text, we can see the distinctive Buddean move in two places, both with regard to
the supposed “piety” of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Early in his study, he notes
that many readers have found in the Stoics “leurs belles sentences touchant la Religion,
la vertu, &c.”, and he comments, “Mais elles ne servent qu’à montrer que l’on peut
tirer de véritables conclusions, de faux principes, ou du moins que les Stoïciens
n’avoient pas toujours raisonné conséquemment”.83 And a little later he observes that
he doesn’t intend to say anything specific about Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, yet that
while no one objects to their atheism, their cases are covered by the earlier general
treatment of the Stoics.84

Buddeus is not well known today, but he remains an important figure for
understanding the presentation of Stoicism in the early eighteenth century, and there
are two Enlightenment sites in particular at which we can discern the distinctive impact
of his arguments about the Stoics. The first is in academic writing on the problem of
understanding the Stoics, and one place where we can see the implications of this new
approach to the history of philosophy being followed through very clearly is in the
extensive commentaries prepared by another German Moderate Enlightenment
academic, Johann Laurenz Mosheim (1694-1755) for his edition of Cudworth’s True
Intellectual System, published in 1733. 85 Methodologically, Mosheim clearly aligns
himself with Buddeus’s approach when he wrote that

The discipline of this sect is not to be learned from the magnificent

phrases of this or that Stoic, but the whole of it ought to be placed
before our view as a system, and afterwards a judgment formed as to
the utility and excellence of the several dogmas... Wherefore, if the
dogmas or sayings of this or that Stoic be considered in themselves,
we shall never be at a loss for arguments to justify and uphold the
cause of this sect. For my part, I consider that the goodness and
badness of any doctrine should be judged of from its fundamental
principles, and from its general tenor and context, and that we should
take into especial consideration, not what some have said or written,
but what they ought to have said or written consistently with the rest of
their opinions.86

Taken together, indeed, Mosheim’s notes construct an extremely interesting dialogue

between two exceptionally learned representatives of seventeenth and eighteenth
century academia, which ranges across the interpretation of philosophical authors both

83
Ibid., p.28fn1.
84
Ibid., p44n1.
85
Ralph Cudworth, Systema intellectuale hujus universi, J. L. Mosheim ed., 2 vols. (Jena, 1733).
Mosheim’s notes are translated in Cudworth, TIS.
86
Mosheim, in Cudworth, TIS, vol.2, p.119.

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ancient and modern and discusses at length any number of topics in metaphysics and
theology.87

On the face of it, Mosheim and Cudworth might not seem to be very far apart in
their interpretations of Stoic theology. Cudworth labelled the Stoics “spurious theists”
but refused to categorise them alongside other ancient atheists; Mosheim, too, was
unwilling to use the atheist label. But the different reasons each author leans on when
drawing their similar conclusion are decisive in indicating their general attitude to
Stoic theology. Cudworth’s interest in Creation, intelligent design and monotheism
ultimately inclined him to a generous judgment concerning Stoic theology; Mosheim’s
concerns, by contrast, were those dictated by the Buddean anti-Spinozist polemic, and
invited a harsher verdict. So, for example, while he refrained from calling the Stoics
atheists (“That the Stoics professed a certain God or fiery nature, eternal, wise and
provident, admits of no controversy”88), the two particular features of Stoic theology to
which he drew attention in the ensuing exposition were precisely those canvassed by
Buddeus when he was expounding the distinction between the two different kinds of
atheists. The first of these was the question of God’s freedom of action on the one hand,
for the Stoics “openly acknowledged, that this God was unable to accomplish all that
he wished, and that he did not possess the power of free agency, being bound down by
the fate inherent in the very nature of matter”,89; and the second was the matter of
“external justice”, or the divine justice of punishing and rewarding, which the Stoics
denied, “[B]y doing which they extinguish in mankind all motive for the practice of
virtue and destroy the very foundations of divine worship”.90 Mosheim and Buddeus
may not have agreed on the appropriate label to be deployed, therefore, but they
certainly were of one mind when it came to the substance of Stoic cosmology.

The second place to look in order to find the influence of Buddeus’s analysis of
Stoicism is in the works of his most illustrious student Johann Jakob Brucker, whose
massive, multivolume Historia critica philosophiae became the standard work of
reference on the history of philosophy before first the Kantians and then the Hegelians
got to work on rewriting that history in order to foreground the achievements of these
latter day masters.91 Brucker is a far more significant figure than Buddeus, considered

87
For examples of this dialogue on the proper understanding of Stoicism, see in particular
Cudworth and Mosheim in Ibid., vol.1, pp.62, 118, 195, 211, 300, 331; vol.2, pp.97-8, 105-7,
112-3, 119-22, 142-4, 270, 289-91; vol.3, p.82, 145.
88
Mosheim, in Ibid., vol.2, p.119.
89
Mosheim, in Ibid., vol.2, p.120.
90
Ibid.
91
Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae. For an abridged English version of Brucker’s
discussions, see William Enfield, The History of Philosophy from the Earliest Times to the
Beginning of the Present Century drawn up from Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophia, 2 vols.
(Dublin: 1792). For a comment on the rewriting of the history of philosophy at the end of the
eighteenth century, see Tuck, “The Modern History of Natural Law”. With regard to the
Hegelian transformation of the history of philosophy, it is tempting to understand the approach
that Buddeus took as a bridge between the approach of someone like Pascal and that of Hegel.

125
both in terms of his own historiographical achievement and of his influence upon
academic posterity, but when it came to writing about the Stoics, Brucker was largely
content to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor.92 Thus, the passages on the Stoics
in the Historia critica philosophiae contained a series of clearly Buddean observations,
as when Brucker observed that we should not judge the Stoics from words and
sentiments “detached from the general system” but rather should “consider them as
they stand related to the whole train of premisses and conclusions”.93

Following Buddeus again, Brucker’s judgment on Stoicism was resolutely hostile,

and, despite his “critical” method, his discussion is couched in familiar terms: the
Stoics wasted much time and threw away much ingenuity “upon questions of no
importance”, 94 they “largely contributed towards the confusion, instead of the
improvement of science, by substituting vague and ill-defined terms in” in place of
“accurate conceptions”;95 with respect to their moral philosophy, Brucker found that it
was “an ostentatious display of words, in which little regard was paid to nature and
reason”,96 which, while it aimed at raising “human nature to a degree of perfection
before unknown” in fact served “merely to amuse the ear” with “fictions which can
never be realised”. His conclusion was that “a system of philosophy, which attempts to
raise men above their nature, must commonly produce either wretched fanatics, or
artful hypocrites.”97 Turning then from the ethics to the physics, he resisted the move
of those apologists for the Roman Stoics, who tried to equate Stoic fate with divine
Providence:

This doctrine, according to Zeno and Chrysippus (who herein meant to

combat Epicurus’s doctrine of the fortuitous concourse of atoms)
implies an eternal and immutable series of causes and effects, within
which all events are included, and to which the Deity himself is
subject: whereas the later Stoics, changing the term Fate into the
Providence of God, discoursed with great plausibility on this subject,
but still in reality retained the antient doctrine of universal fate.98

When Pascal discussed Epictetus at Port-Royal (as when the other French Augustinians
grappled with Senecan Neo-Stoicism), he was engaged in the diagnostic enterprise of
explaining the what we might call the spirit of Stoicism; Buddeus places the notion of “nuclear”
principles at the heart of his historiography; and in part Hegel’s subsequent revolution in the
historiography of philosophy is to put the notion of the spirit of the system, itself now
incorporated into a far-reaching account of historical progress, at the heart of his inquiries.
92
Santinello, ed., Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker, pp.577, 597.
93
Brucker, in Enfield, The History of Philosophy, p342.
94
Ibid., p.339.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid., p.340.
97
Ibid., p.341.
98
Ibid., p.343.

126
And in his discussion of the modern authorities who had written on the Stoics, Brucker
consistently criticises the syncretist ambitions of Lipsius, Heinsius, Schioppius and
Gataker, appealing to the scholarship of Thomasius and Buddeus in support of his
opinions.99

Brucker drew heavily on Buddeus when writing his account of Stoicism, and
Brucker was, in turn, the chief source for Diderot when he was compiling the articles
on the history of philosophy for the Encyclopaedia. Indeed, many articles on this
subject essentially consist of lengthy passages from Brucker’s work, translated into
French and lightly edited, and the article on “Stoicisme” is a very good example of
this.100 In this way, therefore, Buddeus’s anti-Spinozist, Moderate Enlightenment views
on the nature of Stoicism ended up being presented substantially intact before a
substantial new reading public in the pages of the Encyclopaedia. Presenting in outline
form the basic principles of the Stoics, Diderot worked closely with Brucker and
agreed with Buddeus when he wrote that, “il n’est pas difficile de conclure de ces
principes, que les sto ïciens étoient matérialistes, fatalistes, & à proprement parler
athées”. The difference this time around, of course, was that in Diderot’s presentation
to be a materialist, fatalist atheist was no bad thing at all.

99
On Gataker, Brucker wrote: “I think it is clear enough from the above that this most erudite
man was deceived by his study of the Stoa and did not attend to the real hypotheses of the
Stoics accurately enough and without prejudice. He was surely in the grip of emotion and hatred,
through which he persecuted the Epicurean philosophy, even tacitly attacking Gassendi himself,
who was fighting on behalf of the most learned Epicurus - so there is no need to add more
here.” With thanks to Josephine Crawley Quinn for the translation. Brucker, Historia critica
philosophiae, vol.4, p.500.
100
Encyclopaedia, “Sto ïcisme”, vol.15, pp.525-532.

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 Part Four: Aspects of Stoicism in Enlightenment Europe

In the final section of the previous Part, I noted the surprising reticence to consider
the new philosophy associated with Spinoza and his followers and widely considered
subversive under the banner of Stoicism: new movements were more often attacked as
Epicurean, even though in important ways their ancestry was Stoic. But this final
section also charted the elaboration of a specific academic discourse, centered around
the German historiography of philosophy of the period, which sought to depict the
Stoics as Spinozist atheists, and vice versa. In assessing the roles and functions of
Stoicism in the early decades of the eighteenth century, it is worth keeping this dual
perspective in mind, because it helps us to identify two processes at work amidst the
rival and competing uses of the Stoics in these years. On the one hand, paralleling the
articulation and growing popularity of an “eclectic” style in philosophy, there was an
ongoing selective appropriation and integration of arguments deriving from the Stoics
into the rapidly developing body of contemporary moral theory. On the other hand, a
tradition of Stoic radicalism persisted throughout the period. This tradition was not
only kept alive through the interest in Stoicism of a small number of members of the
Radical Enlightenment. The possibility of a Stoicism that would be both politically and
theologically radical Stoicism also existed in virtue of the fact that some of the
arguments being anathematised in anti-radical literature were themselves recognisably
Stoic (even if they were not being called that). Thus, in a world in which people
continued to read Stoic authors and in the context of the loosening grip of ecclesiastical
religion on Europeans’ minds, it always remained possible to assemble a radical deist
or pantheist position, which owed much to the arguments of the Stoics (and which,
later in the century, could adopt the political vocabulary of Ciceronian politics as it
transmuted itself into the discourse of radical republicanism).1

This fourth Part makes no claim to any kind of comprehensive coverage of the
various uses of Stoicism in eighteenth century politics and philosophy: with the
exception of the argument which I make below about Rousseau, for example, I do not
consider the place of Stoicism in the culture of the French Enlightenment, although this
is clearly an extremely important subject; and there will be nothing else about German
scholarship in the remainder of this dissertation. The work of this Part is rather to
delineate some aspects of the legacy of the arguments about Stoicism which had been
developed in the seventeenth century, and in particular to draw attention to two
distinctive outcomes. The first section of this final Part addresses various moderate or
eclectic appropriations of the Stoics and the transformation in the discourse
surrounding Stoicism in, especially, eighteenth-century England, in order to show how
portions of Stoic theory could be integrated into various intellectual projects in the

1
Cf. Kors’s argument discussed above about the origins of French atheism: the discourse of
anti-Stoicism enabled the profession of Stoicism to become a radical position even in the
absence of many self-identified Stoics. Kors in Kors and Korshin, eds., Anticipations of the
Enlightenment.

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absence of Augustinian anxieties. An eclectic or integrative approach to the Stoics was
possible, however, only for those who were no longer troubled by some of the
questions that haunted the seventeenth century controversies. The second section of
this final Part by contrast then concentrates on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s rival and
competing approach to the legacies of the seventeenth century confrontation between
Stoicism and the Augustinians and argues that the general architectonic of his social
and political thought can be plausibly regarded as having been very considerably
shaped by his own distinctive and transformative response to this intellectual heritage.

I - Eclectic Uses of Stoicism in Theory and Practice

Jean Barbeyrac and the Historiography of Eclecticism

The academic work of discrediting systematic Stoicism associated above all with
Buddeus opened the way for more sophisticated and often quite open appropriations of
parts of the Stoics’ philosophy. Indeed, it is in one of the most important texts for the
development of philosophical eclecticism itself that we can see this approach to
Stoicism quite clearly. Jean Barbeyrac’s “Historical and Critical Account of the
Science of Morality” was published as a preface to his celebrated edition of
Pufendorf’s treatise Of the Law of Nature and Nations of 1706. This essay presented an
account of the history of moral philosophy which was organised around a central
argumentative thread, and which linked together ancient and modern ethics,
culminating in his account of the natural law system of Pufendorf as the one which was
uniquely able to come to grips with the problems bequeathed by the Grotian system,
which itself had, in his famous phrase, “broken the ice” of the scholastics’ moral
thought. In chapter XXVII of this work, Barbeyrac discussed the Greek Stoics.2

In contrast to many of the Stoic and anti-Stoic writings of the seventeenth century,
Barbeyrac’s style is analytical rather than either apologetical or polemical. His points
are backed up with precise references to both ancient texts and modern scholarship,
and he generally follows the best authorities: Bayle, Thomasius and Buddeus feature
repeatedly in his apparatus. He was also careful to make sure his observations were
relevant to the philosophical subject matter under discussion. When he referred to the
accusations of hypocrisy and vice which attend the lives of various Stoics, for example,
he comments that “these are personal faults, and extend not to their doctrines”, and
while he mentions what are generally taken to be the least acceptable opinions of the
Stoics — cannibalism, incest, the doctrine that all sins are equal, and the fact that
“What the Stoics said about the love of Beautiful boys is, at least, liable to very odd
constructions”3 — his rejection of these positions is peripheral to his main inquiry, for
he understood the interest and importance of Stoic ethics to lie elsewhere.

2
Barbeyrac, “An Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality”, in Pufendorf, Of
the Law of Nature and Nations, Kennett trans., London, 1749, pp.59-63.
3
Ibid., p.63.

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 The distinctive move that Barbeyrac wanted to make was to divide Stoic physics
from its ethics. With regard to the former, he wrote: “These principles, I must own, are
monstrous; and the several philosophers of that Sect have, each in particular, added
thereto some new Absurdities.” 4 With regard to the latter, his opinion was quite
different: “However, except a few things, nothing can be more beautiful than their
Morality, very near approaching that of the Gospel, which alone is entirely
conformable to the Dictates of right Reason.”5 In contrast, therefore, to the argument of
Buddeus (and, later, Brucker), which sought to yoke the Stoics’ ethics to the physics in
order to condemn the seemingly attractive ethics by highlighting its basis in the
defective physics, or to that of Pascal and the other French Augustinians, who had
argued that the various errors of Stoicism were rooted in its animating spirit of pride,
Barbeyrac’s aim was to break the Stoics’ system apart, and to examine their ethics with
respect to the rest of the history of moral philosophy, rather than with respect to any
other part of the Stoics’ system.

Considering the basis of Stoic ethics, therefore, Barbeyrac was careful to give one
of its central claims, the notion of a life according to nature, a rather vague reading,
which has the effect of relaxing the notorious rigour of the Stoics’ system:

By this Nature, some of them meant directly the Constitution of the

Human Nature; or that light of Reason by the help of which we discern
what is truly suitable to our state, and condition; others meant
universal Reason or the will of God... and others again meant both
these things.

The ethics of Marcus Aurelius are presented (following Gataker, to some extent, whom
he cites as “learned Englishman”6) as an example of how far natural reason can lead a
sincere enquirer after truth, an account which presupposes that Marcus Aurelius was
engaged in the kind of moral theory which aims to contribute to a “science of
morality”. 7 Barbeyrac, who was himself attempting to contribute to the science of
morality, draws these conclusions concerning the Stoics: that for all its fine content
Stoic virtue cannot be a complete account of the matter, for the Stoics did not present
any hope of another life; the Stoics did not properly acknowledge the immortality of
the soul; and they failed to appreciate that “rigid and over-strained maxims are not at

4
Ibid., p.59.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., p.60.
7
This is in contrast to the contemporary view, elaborated in particular by Pierre Hadot, which
takes Marcus Aurelius to be engaging in a set of the Stoics’ spiritual exercises, or writing
exercises following various conventions dictated by the logic of Stoic practice, which
presupposes the truth of Stoic moral theory, rather than being in any sense an inquiry into the
correctness of that theory. Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
esp. ch.3.

130
all proper to inspire virtue”, or that there ought to be no place for the use of paradoxes
in moral philosophy.8

In this light it is perhaps not surprising that the ancient ethical writer for whom
Barbeyrac professes most admiration is Cicero, and he praises De Officiis in particular,
presenting its author as himself a kind of eclectic, who borrowed as he saw fit from the
various doctrines of the sects.9 On the face of it, this might seem to mark a retreat to a
kind of Renaissance Ciceronianism, with Barbeyrac holding up Cicero’s Stoic-like
moral doctrine as the one to be preferred, whilst disdaining interest in the Stoics’
philosophy of nature, but it is important to see that it is not. Barbeyrac’s broader
argument is that it is the modern natural rights tradition in general and the system of
Pufendorf in particular which provides the right account of the proper justification of
the content of ethics; and from this standpoint, the Ciceronianism of the Renaissance
represents the last appearance of the ancient doctrines, before they were swept away by
the Grotian revolution in the post-sceptical “science of morality”, a revolution which
gave rise to the modern natural law theory which was able to fashion an adequate reply
to the sceptical criticisms of Cicero’s ethics which had been formulated by
Montaigne.10

On one level, therefore, Barbeyrac agreed with Buddeus: Stoic physics is full of
error, and when the Stoic system is fully understood, it has to be rejected. But the
contrasts in their respective styles and approaches are dramatic. Buddeus’s
historiography was one in which Stoicism as a system appeared in both ancient and
modern contexts, substantially unaltered, whether in the theory of Chrysippus or
Spinoza; 11 Barbeyrac’s presentation has no time for this kind of transhistorical
arguments: the true scientists of morality learn from one another’s mistakes, neither
simply replicating nor anathematising the Stoics’ ethics. By breaking up the unity of
the Stoics’ system, furthermore, Stoicism becomes a series of philosophical resources
or arguments that can be drawn upon selectively, indeed, eclectically. And in moving
to insulate the Stoics’ ethics from their physics, finally, we find that Barbeyrac makes
an important move, and one which Adam Smith will subsequently reiterate later in the
century.12

8
Barbeyrac, “An Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality”, p.63.
9
De Officiis is “that excellent work, so well known to the world... without Dispute, the best
Treatise of Morality, that all Antiquity has produc’d; the most regular, the most methodical, and
what comes the nearest to a full & exact system”. Ibid., ch.XXVIII, esp. p.63.
10
Ibid., p.64.
11
This technique also crops up in, Joh. Christoph Wolf (1683-1739): Manichaeismus ante
Manichaeos et in Christianismo redivivus (1707), which was modelled on Buddeus' de
Spinozismo ante Spinozam, and is discussed briefly in Santinello, ed., Dall'età cartesiana a
Brucker, p.370.
12
The famous discussion of Stoic ethics in The Theory of Moral Sentiments substantially
ignores the major topics in Stoic physics, and concludes with a rejection of the accuracy of the
Stoics’ conception of “Nature”. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael
and A. L. Macfie ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp.272-293.

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 Stoicism and the British Moralists: Shaftesbury and Butler

Significant borrowings from the Stoics had been taking place from the middle of
the seventeenth century in the tradition of British moral theory. Nathaniel Culverwell,
for example, had drawn on notions found in the Stoic authors when setting out his own
version of classic (i.e. Suarezian) natural law theory; 13 and in Part Two, I drew
attention to a part of Cudworth’s engagement with the physics of the Stoics. And it is a
significant feature of this tradition, observable from the time of Cudworth to the time
of Adam Smith, that many of the leading participants in this ongoing argument about
moral theory turn to specific parts of Stoicism to make some of their most distinctive
arguments. If Mandeville and Hobbes are the leading “Epicureans” in this discourse, it
is quite striking that Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson and Smith all re-theorise portions
of Stoic ethics, often in the course of constructing replies to predecessors’ arguments,
themselves often Stoic-inflected to a quite considerable degree. The remarks that
follow will concentrate on the cases of Shaftesbury and Butler, where the use of Stoic
arguments is most pronounced, and most central to their own theoretical contributions.

Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, drew on the resources of the

Cambridge Platonist tradition when he was fashioning his response to the moral theory
of his tutor, John Locke - for although much of what Shaftesbury wrote functions as a
challenge to Hobbesian theory, it seems clear that he chiefly had Locke’s philosophy in
his sights.14 Three key areas of agreement that obtain between Shaftesbury’s theory and
that of the Cambridge Platonists stand out. First, Shaftesbury agreed on the need to
resist what Cudworth had called “divine fate immoral”, that is to say, those varieties of
determinism and materialism that seemed to issue in atheism. Second, there is a shared
insistence that divine sanction - the threat of punishment, or the inducement of reward
after death - does not provide the motive for distinctively moral action, an opinion
which derives from their shared (and deep-rooted) rejection of theological voluntarism.
Third, both Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists devoted themselves to
developing what Stephen Darwall helpfully labels a “normative theory of the will”, in
order to produce an account of self-determination, which they considered a necessary
element in a non-voluntarist theory of morals.

13
Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature
(Indianaopolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). For discussion, see Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics;
also Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), ch.2.
14
In his famous words, “’Twas Mr. Locke, that struck the home blow: for Mr. Hobbes's
character and base slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy.
‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world,
and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural; and without
foundation in our minds....”. From the correspondence, in Benjamin Rand, ed., The life,
unpublished letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Swan
Sonnenschein & Co., 1900).

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 Three disagreements with the Cambridge Platonists also need to be noted. First,
Shaftesbury’s religion was clearly far less orthodox than theirs, and this is briefly
discussed below. Second, as Schneewind describes, Shaftesbury’s account of the
passions broadly descends from the anti-Stoic theory developed by Locke, which
argued that the passions have neither a common origin nor a common object, in
opposition to the “Socratic” or “neo-Stoic” theory of the passions employed by the
Cambridge Platonists (and also, Schneewind notes, by Spinoza, Leibniz and
Malebranche).15 Third, and this is the point of disagreement which Darwall emphasises,
and which I take as my point of departure for highlighting Shaftesbury’s reworking of
Stoic ethical theory, Cudworth’s interest in theorising the self-determining will aimed
to produce a theory of accountability, whereas Shaftesbury’s theory did not.

In his unpublished Treatise on Free Will, as Sarah Hutton efficiently explains in a

recent article, Cudworth had argued that the responsibility for an action lies with the
originating intention (he uses the example of the clock-maker, not the bell-hammer,
being responsible for the clock striking the hour). Considering the ascription of
responsibility for moral action, Cudworth turned to two pieces of Epictetan language:
first, to the distinction between what is and what is not in our power; second, to the
Epictetan notion of the hegemonikon, or (to use Hutton’s gloss) “an internal principle...
which performs the function of the will in directing the soul how to act”. Cudworth
ascribed to this hegemonikon both the function of directing the soul towards the good,
and the power of initiating actions with this end in view, with the consequence that
persons are reasonably held responsible for their actions which flow from such self-
determination, both by their fellow persons and by God on the day of judgment.16

Shaftesbury’s theory of the will was developed along similar, Epictetan lines.
Although Cudworth’s Treatise on Free Will remained unpublished, it may (as Hutton
suggests) have had an important influence on Locke’s theory of the will; Darwall notes
that Shaftesbury may have read the Cudworth manuscripts when visiting Damaris
Masham, Locke and Oates. 17 But whereas Cudworth had worked on developing a
theory of accountability or moral responsibility, Shaftesbury was principally interested
in the question of the generation of internal obligation. Darwall elucidates the different
standpoints well:

The pattern of ideas connecting obligation with self-determining

motivation in Shaftesbury is almost the reverse. Quite unlike
Cudworth (or Locke), Shaftesbury holds no brief for the notions of
warranted blame or punishment. On the contrary, he is profoundly

15
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, pp.298-300.
16
Sarah Hutton, “Liberty and Self-Determination: ethics, power and action in Ralph Cudworth”,
in Luisa Simonutti, ed., Dal necessario al possibile: determinismo e libertà nel pensiero anglo-
olandese del XVII secolo (Milan: F. Angeli, 2001). Note the strong rejection of Augustinian
voluntarism implicit in these various claims.
17
Darwall, The British Moralists, p.191.

133
 skeptical of ethical systems in which these ideas figure prominently.
He is, however, very much concerned to work out the necessary
conditions of an enduring will or practical self, as well as their relation
to the ability to author a life. These conditions include, he argues, that
the agent have available a critical standpoint on her own life which she
regards as practically authoritative and thereby obligating. The
recognition of this internal ‘ought’ is, Shaftesbury claims, a condition
of the very possibility of a practical self.18

The Epictetan hegemonikon, then, is understood as providing this critical standpoint,

that of what Darwall calls “reflective moral agency”, which enables a genuine self-
government to be carried on.19

The most radical and remarkable expression of Shaftesbury’s commitment to

Stoicism, however, was presented not in anything he ever intended for publication, but
in his private notebooks, which were composed around 1698.20 In these pages, we can
see how a Roman Stoicism, made available in part through the scholarship of the
seventeenth century, was deployed for a genuine experiment in living, the social,
political and biographical context of which Lawrence Klein describes well.21 Marcus
Aurelius and Epictetus were the two dominant influences on the construction of this
text: quotations from their writings, in both Greek and English, fill the notebooks,
giving it to some extent the appearance of a commonplace book. What is most striking
about these writings, however, is Shaftesbury’s interest in deploying the technical
vocabulary of Epictetan Stoicism, rather than in the content of the ethical maxims
themselves; the overall sense is of a writer who intuitively understands Marcus
Aurelius’s Meditations in the way expounded above all in our era by Pierre Hadot, as a
set of philosophical exercises written as part of an project of self-fashioning, rather
than as part of a search for philosophical truth.

In place of the ecclesiastically mainstream Cambridge Platonists’ personal God, as

noted above, Shaftesbury’s theology was unorthodox, positing the existence of an

18
Ibid., pp.190, 180.
19
Shaftesbury’s “Stoicism” has several other elements. Schneewind notes that “Despite his
non-Stoic view of the passions, Shaftesbury’s thought is Stoic in important respects. He
detaches virtue from the agent’s occupation, from the structure of his society, and to some
extent from his material possessions”. We might also note his account of the “natural
affections” which are rather similar to those described in Stoic ethics, his insistence on the unity
of beauty and virtue and self-interest, and also his language concerning “enthusiasm”, which
carries a resonance of the Stoic exercises described by Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of
Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. chs.3, 8-10.
20
See Laurent Jaffro’s article in Moreau and Lagrée, Le stoïcisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.
Much of the text of the notebooks has been edited imperfectly and published in Rand, ed.,
Philosophical Regimen. There has never been a critical edition.
21
Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).

134
impersonal God, whose presence was felt in the contemplation of the natural order. To
an extent, this theology was simply an extension of the growing interest in Marcus
Aurelius: we saw above both how this text provided an attractive version of Stoicism
which seemed less vulnerable to anti-Senecan objections, and also how limited the
major attempt had been — that of the Daciers — to present this presentation of
Stoicism as compatible with Christian orthodoxy. A Deism which drew on Stoic
sources was a part of the Radical Enlightenment; and if Shaftesbury’s moral theory
was his contribution to the Moderate, and often academic Enlightenment, his theology
put him on the side of the radicals. In particular, as we have seen, it was the denial of
punishment and reward in the hereafter which was regarded by critics of the Stoics at
the turn of the seventeenth century as being the constitutive element of their atheism;
and Shaftesbury was definitely not interested in defending the existence of a punishing
God.

We should not overstate, however, the radicalism implicit in this Stoic-Deist

position. For while it might seem that the appeal to the Stoics contains a radicalising
moment which embraces the denial of providence, which was key to the charges of
Stoic atheism, the Deist discourse also contained a moderating moment, too. For a
moral theory which insisted on the separation of concerns about divine sanction from
questions of moral motivation in fact permitted the godliness of the Stoics to be
restated, this time as a counter to the supposed godlessness of Epicureans past and
present. Thus, in Anthony Collins’s work, we have an example of a radical who sought
to dissociate his own necessitarian position from Epicurean materialism, preferring to
adopt a Stoic label in his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty of 1717.
Israel has drawn attention to Collins’s insistence that his argument be understood as
descending from the Stoics rather than the Epicureans, for (he maintained) not only
were the Epicureans on the side of the libertarians in this controversy but their “absurd
principles” could not be used to ground anything at all.22 The key issue in this section
of his argument in fact turned on a question of religiosity: Collins distanced himself
from the “Epicurean Atheists, who were the most popular and most numerous sect of
the Atheists of antiquity”, as well as being “the great asserters of Liberty” in order to
identify his argument with that of “the Stoicks, who were the most popular and most
numerous sect among the religionaries of antiquity” and “the greater asserters of fate
and necessity”.23

As is well known, Joseph Butler’s fundamental criticism of Shaftesbury’s ethics

was organised around his scepticism that there in fact existed “a happy tendency of
virtue” to serve self-interest or promote human happiness, as Shaftesbury, following
the Stoics, had supposed. 24 This important doubt raised the question of where
obligation might in fact be generated once the link between virtue and interest had been

22
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p.618.
23
Anthony Collins, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (London:
Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997), pp.40-1.
24
Joseph Butler, Sermons, Gladstone ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), Preface, §20.

135
severed, for “[T]he greatest degree of scepticism [concerning virtue’s promoting our
own good] which he thought possible will still leave men under the strictest moral
obligations.” 25 On Butler’s account, therefore, both self-love and benevolence were
desires for one’s own or others’ happiness, but, in Darwall’s words, “neither involves
any conception of its own deliberative authority”, which is what, Butler argued,
“autonomous agency requires and the principle of reflection or conscience provides.”26

Butler therefore developed two separate strands of theoretical argument to provide

the account of the authority of conscience which he considered to be lacking in
Shaftesburean ethics, and it is noteworthy that both of these drew substantially on Stoic
ethical resources. The first set of arguments worked to develop a naturalistic ethics
with a strong functional bent to them. His famous watch analogy was deployed to
suggest that “our nature, i.e. constitution, is adapted to virtue”, as a watch’s nature “is
adapted to measure time”. As Long notes, the reference which follows to “the ancient
moralists”, who had argued that injustice and pain were contrary to nature and that
“inward feeling” or “inward perceptions” were required to establish a sense of right
and make possible self-government, is to the Stoics — and the references to Epictetus,
Marcus Aurelius and Cicero which recur throughout the Sermons strengthen this
identification.27

Long in particular emphasises Butler’s use of the teleological argument about the
human constitution presented in Book III of Cicero’s De Finibus when he was fleshing
out his account of the ways in which self-love and benevolence, properly understood,
do not come into conflict with one another at all, but are mutually complementary:

Butler and the Stoics, then, agree to the following theses: 1. Nature,
with respect to human beings, is a term that has multiple reference. It
is natural for us to seek to fulfil those appetites that are conducive to
the material well-being of ourselves and our fellow human beings.
But “following nature”, as a moral principle, refers to our uniquely
human capacity to reflect on our thoughts or possible actions, to
approve or disapprove of them as morally appropriate, and to treat
conformity to this faculty as our sovereign good and virtue. 2. There
is no basis in our given nature for any necessary conflict between
self-love and benevolence, or between benevolence and our
individual happiness.28

The Stoic concept of oikeiosis was once again the central part of this argument, but
owing to Butler’s refusal to privilege either the self-regarding or the other-regarding
side of the self-love / caritas binary, he was able to work far more closely with the

25
Ibid., Preface, §22.
26
Darwall, The British Moralists, p.246.
27
Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition”.
28
Ibid.

136
Stoics’ own theorisation of the development of natural affection than anything we have
hitherto encountered in either the natural rights or the Augustinian traditions.

In addition to this portion of Stoic theorising, Butler also supplied a Stoic-like

argument for the authority of conscience. As Darwall puts it, Butler “holds that the
authority of conscience is a condition of the very possibility of an agent’s having
reasons to act at all, since only a being who has the capacity for maintaining a self-
regulated constitutional order can have reasons for acting, and this capacity depends on
the agent’s taking her conscience to be authoritative”.29 Butler’s concept of conscience
was clearly Epictetan in its origin, given the latter’s interest in the “approving and
disapproving faculty” which is so important in Butler’s presentation.

Butler was no thoroughgoing Stoic. He was working to modify an inherited moral

discourse rooted in the Lockean account of the passions, which (like Shaftesbury
before him) he broadly accepted, far more than he was trying to replace that discourse
with a full-blooded return to Stoic ethics. But in both of his most distinctive lines of
argument, we can discern a careful, measured reworking of significant Stoic arguments,
which highlight the extent to which the Stoic problematic could appeal to and resonate
within this particular branch of Enlightenment moral theory. Butler’s is also, and
importantly, a decidedly post-Augustinian moment in the history of moral psychology:
he staked out his position with respect to the French debates in the Preface to the
Sermons, advertising the eleventh sermon on the subject of self-love, with a
straightforward attack on the Augustinian tradition:

There is a strange affectation in many people of explaining away all

particular affections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but
one continued exercise of self-love. Hence arises that surprising
confusion and perplexity in the Epicureans of old, Hobbes, the author
of Reflexions, Sentences, et Maximes Morales, and this whole set of
writers...30

This English tradition of moral theory was never dominated by the categories of
Augustinian ethics in the way that the French discourse had been: Cudworth’s ethics
struck a somewhat Pelagian chord, given its insistence on the reality of free will and an
account of culpability which gives a human agent moral (and divine) credit for just
action; but Shaftesbury’s impersonal God is clearly miles away from Augustinian
orthodoxies. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the onslaught against
Jansenism, and the de-Augustinianising moves taken by the Roman Catholic Church
itself all weakened the institutional foundations of Augustinian theology and

29
Darwall, The British Moralists, p.247. He goes on to remark that “The second line of
argument is a version of autonomist internalism, asserting, in effect, both halves of Kant’s
reciprocity thesis”.
30
Butler, Sermons, Preface §29. The author of Reflexions is La Rochefoucauld, an edition of
whose book was published under that name in 1705.

137
philosophy on the Continent.31 One paradoxical result of this process was that the most
striking presentation of the Jansenist moral psychology of self-love in the eighteenth
century came in a thoroughly secular guise, in the (im)moral philosophy of Bernard de
Mandeville (and, later, in the pages of Adam Smith).32

Elizabeth Carter’s Epictetus

One signpost of the extent to which the English discourse surrounding Stoicism
had emancipated itself from the theological anxieties of the previous century is visible
in the story of Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) and her 1758 English translation of the
extant works of Epictetus, the Discourses as well as the Encheiridion.33 Carter was a
friend of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury and himself a schoolfriend and
theological ally in church politics of Butler. One of Carter’s correspondents noted of
her edition:

Many people would study Mrs. Carter’s translation who would scorn
to look in a Bible; fine gentlemen would read it because it was new;
fine ladies because it was Mrs. Carter’s; critics because it was a
translation out of the Greek; and Shaftesburian heathen because
Epictetus was an honour to heathenism and an indicator of the beauty
of virtue.34

In the Preface to her edition, Carter presented an overview of Epictetan Stoicism. She
saw that there was far more to the Discourses than a collection of edifying homilies
and anecdotes, and that the teaching rested upon a distinctive philosophical system.
The bulk of the Preface, therefore, was given over to a lucid and accurate outline of the
major technical vocabulary and conceptual structures of Epictetan Stoicism without a
knowledge of which, it was suggested, the Discourses would not make much sense.

Carter found much to criticise in Stoicism, especially its logic, which, she
suggested, contained “tedious and perplexed arguments” taken to “a trifling degree of

31
See esp. Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing, pp.102-110.
32
Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Liberty Fund, 1988); for commentary which
emphasises Mandeville’s debt to Jansenism (and Smith’s debt to Mandeville), see E. J. Hundert,
The Enlightenment's Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Parrish, “From
Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand”, ch.7.
33
Epictetus, All the works of Epictetus, which are now extant; consisting of his Discourses,
preserved by Arrian, in four books, the Enchiridion, and fragments, Elizabeth Carter, ed.
(London, Printed by S. Richardson, 1758). This was not the first vernacular Discourses. There
had been a French translation in the seventeenth century: Epictetus, Les morales d'Epictete de
Socrate de Plvtarqve et de Seneqve, trans. Desmarets de Saint Sorlin (Paris: Av Chasteav de
Richeliev; De l'imprimerie d'Estienne Migon, 1653).
34
Alice C. C. Gaussen, A woman of wit and wisdom; a memoir of Elizabeth Carter (London:
Smith, Elder & co., 1906) Gaussen also claims that Russia’s Catherine the Great admired
Carter’s translation.

138
subtilty”. Stoic theology was “strangely perplexed and absurd”, and its deviations from
Christian teaching, such as the acceptance of suicide, were denounced not merely as
being against Christian morality but also as bad Stoicism, for “It is remarkable, that no
Sect of Philosophers ever so dogmatically prescribed, or so frequently committed,
Suicide, as those very Stoics, who taught that the Pains and Sufferings, which they
strove to end by this Act of Rebellion against the Decrees of Providence, were no
Evils”. On the other hand, the Stoics’ piety towards a single God was commended, as
was their belief in providence and rejection of Epicurean chance: they possessed above
all, “excellent rules of self-government” and “of social behaviour”, and they had “a
noble reliance on the aid and protection of heaven”. These are familiar enough verdicts
on Roman Stoicism which had been restated in every generation treated in this
dissertation; what is significant here is that it is the systematic element of Epictetan
Stoicism which was being emphasised, in a best-selling work of the eighteenth century
(for Carter’s Epictetus earned her £1,000 and enabled her to buy a London property).
In common with Pascal in the previous century, but still working with the tenor of
eighteenth-century eclecticism, Carter considered that the individual conclusions of
Stoic moralists might be endorsed, but that to endorse a conclusion was not necessarily
to endorse the philosophy that generated it. Also striking in Carter’s presentation is the
way in which praise and blame is meted out in a not at all urgent manner. Stoicism is
here discussed not as a philosophy which we might be thinking about embracing in
toto, as a “live option” by which to live. Carter was neither interested in patching up
the deficiencies she detected in the Stoic edifice, nor in condemning Stoicism as a kind
of Spinozism before its time. A great deal of distance stands between this Preface and
the heated debates of the previous century, to say the least.

139
II: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: With and Against Stoicism and Augustinianism

Yet if Rousseau’s philosophy proved vastly more attractive and

influential, and was deeper and more original than that of most other
philosophes invoked by the Revolution, it is no more true of him than
of such derivative (and, in some cases, hack) utopians, proto-socialists,
and atheistic materialists as Morellet, Mably, Mirabeau, d’Holbach,
Naigeon, Maréchal, Saint-Just, and Babeuf that the core radical ideas
arose, or were principally shaped in the later eighteenth century. Nor,
any more than the others, does Rousseau represent a basically new set
of concepts and approaches. On the contrary, any proper appreciation
of Rousseau’s role and greatness has to concede that his thought
springs from a long, and almost obsessive dialogue with the radical
ideas of the past...

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment,

“Epilogue: Rousseau, Radicalism, Revolution”,
p.718. [Emphasis added].

It is well established that the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are

significantly shaped by his critical engagement with themes and arguments from the
Stoic and Augustinian traditions. Although Alasdair MacIntyre could write in 1983
that a “general blindness to the importance of the continuing influence of
Augustinianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” had meant that “books of
the highest importance about Rousseau tend with few exceptions to ignore the
importance of any reference to Augustine”, 35 the situation is considerably changed
today. MacIntyre’s words served to introduce Ann Hartle’s study of Rousseau’s
Confessions, in which she systematically compared the autobiographical techniques
Rousseau employed with those in Augustine’s work of the same name; Patrick Riley’s
subsequent volume on The General Will Before Rousseau showed in exhaustive,
splendid detail how the central concept in Rousseau’s political theory had first been
elaborated for use in the theological arguments of the previous century by French
Augustinian writers. These included the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (who may have
coined the term), the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche and the Calvinist Pierre Bayle –
the latter two no strangers to this study - as they sought to elucidate the notorious
Pauline claim at 1 Timothy 2:4 that “God wills all men to be saved”. 36 Owing to
Rousseau’s concerns to defend a certain conception of autonomy and to identify and
attack relations of dependence, the Stoic strand in his thinking is much more readily
apparent, and scholars have been alert to it for considerably longer: it is a theme in

35
Alasdair MacIntyre, Preface to Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau's Confessions: a
reply to St. Augustine (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p.x. An important
exception to MacIntyre’s rule would be Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France.
36
Riley, The General Will before Rousseau.

140
Jean Starobinski’s classic study, for example,37 and Kennedy Roche attempted a book
on the subject;38 among the more recent important work on the subject are two fine
articles by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.39

Given the tasks Rousseau set himself, an engagement with certain aspects of Stoic
and Augustinian philosophy was inevitable. On the one hand, as part of his project to
improve upon the political science he had inherited from Grotius and Hobbes,
Rousseau was taking part in a discourse partially shaped by Stoicism, for it was Stoic
philosophy which had provided Grotius and his followers with the richest accounts of
the natural inclination to self-preservation which they used as the basis for their
theories of natural rights. On the other hand, as part of his project to describe the moral
psychology of his contemporaries, Rousseau gave a prominent place to the pathologies
produced through amour-propre, or self-love, a concept which had hitherto been given
most prominence with an Augustinian tradition that offered a powerful account of
humans’ prideful self-love as the fundamental vice that was responsible for actually-
existing human misery.

***

The seventeenth-century French Augustinians had not themselves been especially

concerned with the question of the viability of a natural rights theory, but in seeking to
establish a set of sound “principles of political right” Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the
eighteenth century certainly was. For although Rousseau denounced the principles of
Grotius and his followers as false,40 declared Grotius to be a “child in bad faith” in the
field of “the science of political right”, and denounced Hobbes for “bas[ing] himself on
sophisms”,41 he showed himself to be an exceptionally careful student of the natural
rights and related social contract traditions, and his own political theory presented a
radical and sophisticated development of these traditions rather than a fundamental
alternative.42

37
Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988)
38
Kennedy F. Roche, Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic (London: Methuen, 1974). This book is
deservedly obscure: Judith Shklar observed that “the title of this book is entirely misleading”,
but acknowledged that “one would, however, have difficulties in finding any suitable title for a
book that has no theme at all”, concluding her notice of the book with the dismissive comment:
“this is not a serious work of scholarship”. Judith N. Shklar, “Book Review: Rousseau: Stoic
and Romantic,” American Historical Review 81, no. 1 (1976).
39
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud,” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 34, no. 3 (1996), pp.335-56. “Rousseau’s Therapeutic Experiments”,
Philosophy, 66 (1991), pp.413-34.
40
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic
Books, 1979), p.467.
41
Ibid., p.458.
42
See Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, pp.197-207.

141
 Given his reputation as the most effective Enlightenment critic of the classical
Augustinian doctrine of original sin, we might therefore expect to find Rousseau fully
embracing the dichotomies proposed by the seventeenth century Augustinians and to
take sides against them alongside the Stoics, the Pelagians and the modern natural
rights theorists. Yet this would be much too simple. For while Rousseau did indeed
reject the central planks of Augustine’s theology of grace and original sin, his own
arguments retained deeply Augustinian elements with respect to both content and
structure, and it is in the way in which he synthesised and thereby transformed the
Stoic and Augustinian traditions that his philosophy is at its most creative and original.

On matters concerning grace, Rousseau opposed the Augustinian claims of the

Jansenists. Where Augustine had argued that divine grace was not and could never be
merited by human action but was instead distributed across the human species in a way
that could only seem arbitrary and mysterious to human intelligence, Rousseau
presented a radically different doctrine. It was most dramatically expressed in a letter
in the sixth part of the epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise in which Julie’s lover
St. Preux repudiates, piece by piece, Augustine’s teachings on grace and free will:

In creating man he [= God] endowed him with all the faculties needed
for the accomplishment of what he required of him, and when we ask
him for the power to do good, we ask him for nothing he has not
already given us. He has given us reason to discern what is good,
conscience to love it, and freedom to choose it. It is in these sublime
gifts that divine grace consists, and since we all have received them,
we are all accountable for them. ... I do not therefore believe that after
having provided in every way for man’s needs, God grants to the one
and not to the other exceptional assistance, of which he who abuses the
assistance common to all is unworthy, and of which he who makes
good use of it has no need. This respect of persons is prejudicial to
divine justice.43

The arguments between the Jansenists and their opponents had always turned on the
precise interpretation of a small number of verses in the letters of St. Paul, and St.
Preux breaks with this method of conducting theological dispute by rejecting the
authority of Scripture:

Were this harsh and discouraging doctrine deduced from Scripture

itself, is not my first duty to honor God? Whatever deference I owe to
the sacred text, I owe even more to its Author, and I would sooner
believe the Bible falsified or unintelligible than God unjust or evil. St.
Paul does not allow the vessel to say to the potter, why hast thou made

43
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or, The New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, The
collected writings of Rousseau (Hanover:: University Press of New England, 1997), pp.561-2
(OC, II.683).

142
 me thus? That is all very well if the potter demands nothing more of
the vessel than services he has made it capable of rendering; but if he
rebuked the vessel for not being suited to a use for which he had not
made it, would the vessel be wrong to say to him, why didst thou make
me thus?44

It was these passages that led Rousseau to his celebrated exchange with the official
French censor Malesherbes, who rightly declared this to be “A most daring doctrine on
grace, a revolt against the authority of holy scripture, an ad hominem argument against
St. Paul” and, therefore, “more than is needed to require... excision”. 45 Rousseau’s
response, that “If St. Preux wants to be a heretic concerning grace, that is his
business...”, was disingenuous insofar as there were no strong reasons for thinking that
the opinions put into the mouth of St. Preux were not the author’s own. When it came
to the privileged position of Biblical texts in theological argument, Rousseau dropped
this insistence on the separation of author and his fictitious character:

As for what M. de Malesherbes calls revolt against the authority of

Scripture, I call it submission to the authority of God and of reason,
which must take precedence over the Bible’s, and serves as its
foundation: and as for St. Paul, if he does not admit of counter-
argumentation, he ought not to argue himself, or at least he should do
it better.46

Yet even as he asserted this heterodox theology Rousseau was not wholly abandoning
Augustine, but rather marking a retreat from the older Augustine’s obsession with
grace to the younger Augustine’s account of the nature of the free will, which had been
given its definitive incarnation in the dialogue On the Free Choice of the Will, a
section of which was examined above. For where this “young” Augustine, Stoicism
(especially in its presentation by Epictetus) and Rousseau most strikingly converge -
with intimations, furthermore, of the Kantian revolution in philosophy to come - is in
their shared belief that a rightly-directed will is the only genuinely unqualified human
good. Augustine’s bona voluntas, directed to the proper love of God; the Epictetan
hegemonikon, which learns to distinguish between that which is and that which is not

44
Ibid., p.562. (OC II.683).
45
R.A. Leigh, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau : edition critique (Genève:
Institut et musée Voltaire, 1965-1995), #1298 (quoted in Rousseau, Julie , p.718).
46
Leigh, Correspondance complète, #1350 (quoted in Rousseau, Julie , p.718). Émile too ran
into trouble for similar reasons, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris Christophe de Beaumont
complaining that Rousseau’s language was “at complete variance with the doctrine of Holy
Scripture and of the Church concerning the revolution which has come about in our nature”.
Christophe de Beaumont, Mandement, portant condamnation d’un livre qui a pour titre EMILE,
OU DE L’EDUCATION..., quoted in Timothy O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999),
pp.241-2, where the name is erroneously given as Charles de Beaumont, an error I foolishly
copied into my own contribution to Patrick Riley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

143
truly under our control; and Rousseau’s volonté générale, whereby the individual
citizen enjoys freedom by living in accordance with the shared civic will of the
political community. In each case the right kind of will is the one which transcends the
narrow horizons of the self-centered agent to find fulfillment through aligning itself
with something of universal, infinite, or general value.

Augustine ascribed significant enough powers to the rightly-directed freely-

choosing will in On the Free Choice of the Will that his Pelagian opponents quoted his
own words back at him during their long-running polemic many years later. In the
Retractationes, compiled at the end of his life, Augustine insisted not that the early
account was wrong, but that it was incomplete:47

In these and similar statements of mine, because there was no mention

of the grace of God which was not the subject under discussion at the
time, the Pelagians think or may think that we held their opinion. But
they are mistaken in thinking this. For it is precisely the will by which
one sins and lives rightly, a subject we discussed here. Unless this will,
then, is freed by the grace of God from the servitude by which it has
been made - ‘a servant of sin’ - and unless it is aided to overcome its
vices, mortal men cannot live rightly and devoutly.

One of Augustine’s main worries in his dispute with the Pelagians was that they
seemed to deny the Fallen state of humankind, making nonsense of the Church’s
claims about the post-lapsarian need for redemption through Christ. And if the early
Augustine’s account of the will is not coupled with his much later account of grace, he
suggested, we may be very close indeed to Pelagianism.

As we have seen, Rousseau did indeed combine a strong account of the freedom of
the will with a denial of Augustinian grace, but he joined to this “Pelagian”
combination a secular narrative of Fall which provided a functional equivalent for the
Augustinian account of original sin which is lacking in the Pelagian schema. Like its
Augustinian alternative, Rousseau’s conjectural history of the emergence and
entrenchment of inequality in human society, presented in the Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality, sought to explain how humankind passed from an original state of
contentment to one of degradation, corruption and misery. To use Ernst Cassirer’s
phrase, Rousseau sought to transpose the traditional problem of theodicy onto the
terrain of politics, locating the origins of evil not in any original sin by the First Couple
but in the consequences of the organisation of human societies.48 Yet with unmeritable
grace denied and the problem transposed into a new register, Rousseau’s account
retained unmistakably Augustinian elements. First, in its form, the Discourse, like

47
Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Mary Inez Bogan (Washington: Catholic University of
America Press, 1968), p.32.
48
Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd ed. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989).

144
Book XIV of the City of God, presented an account of human life in its pre-lapsarian
state, told a story of how that state came to be abandoned, and in so doing taught
something about the contours of any possible redemption. Second, the story it
presented was one in which self-reinforcing patterns of behaviour were attendant upon
the original corruption which served to mire humankind ever deeper in its problems,
foreclosing any non-radical solution to the problem presented by the Fall. Third,
Rousseau’s narrative agreed with Augustine’s in having as its pivot a distinctive
account of the nature and malign consequences of self-love, or, to use the word
extensively discussed by the seventeenth-century French Augustinians, of amour-
propre.

According to Rousseau’s narration, primitive humans originally lived in a

prepolitical, presocial state of nature in which “the produce of the earth furnished him
with all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it”. But as these primitives began
to encounter difficulties - whether they took the form of other animals, variable “soils
climates and seasons” - and opportunities, such as the chance discovery of fire, for
example, then

the way these different beings and phenomena impinged on him and
on each other must naturally have engendered in man’s mind the
awareness of certain relationships... which we denote by the terms
great, small, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and the like...49

They began to understand the ways in which they are superior to animals - they knew
how to catch them, for example - and they began to feel a certain pride.50 As early
societies formed and humans interacted one with another, and did things together, they
learned how to make comparisons, and to form judgments about what is better and
worse, and to acquire preferences. This was very bad, for as “each one began to
consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn... thus a value became attached to
public esteem”. A reflexive characteristic entered human thinking for the first time:
they came to think more highly of themselves if they thought themselves to be highly
thought of by others, and this, says Rousseau, was “the first step towards inequality,
and at the same time towards vice”.51 Comparative judgments, a sense of superiority,
the desire for the approval of others: all are aspects of amour-propre, the self-love
which comes to poison the simplicity of the primitive life, and which leads to hierarchy,
poverty, slavery, misery, property, and to the social division of labour.

This is all quite Augustinian, in its way, but Rousseau does not want to embrace all
of the Augustinian argument, even in this radically secularised form. The implication

49
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social
Contract and Discourses, G. D. H. Cole ed., Everyman Classics (London: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1973), p.85 (OC III.165).
50
Ibid., pp.85-6 (OC III.165-6).
51
Ibid., p.90 (OC III.169-70).

145
of the Augustinian critique, especially in its strict Jansenist interpretation, as we have
seen, is that self-love is always and everywhere bad, that the principle of self-love or of
the natural instinct towards self-preservation could not serve as an adequate foundation
of a natural rights theory. And it is this thought that brings us to the famous distinction
between self-love as amour-propre and self-love as amour de soi in Rousseau’s
thought, and also brings us back to Stoicism.

In the Preface to the Second Discourse, Rousseau wrote:

[C]ontemplating the first and most simple operations of the human

soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles, prior to reason, one of
them [self-love as amour de soi] deeply interesting us in our own
welfare and preservation, and the other [pity, pitié] exciting a natural
repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of
our own species, suffer pain or death.52

The famous distinction between self-love as amour de soi and as amour-propre

appears in other books by Rousseau, notably Émile, and in important respects
Rousseau’s amour de soi closely resembles Stoic oikeiosis. For the Stoics as well as for
Rousseau, for example, this principle had more content than merely being a mechanical
instinct towards bodily self-preservation. Stoic oikeiosis helps to explain the care that
parents have for children and the affection that the children have for them; in
Rousseau’s Emile, also, we are told that “we have to love ourselves in order to preserve
ourselves”, and that it therefore “follows from the same sentiment that we love what
preserves us. Every child is attached to his nurse”.53 Amour de soi is presented as “the
source of all our passions”,54 but Rousseau quickly qualifies this to note that where the
“gentle and affectionate passions are born of amour de soi... the hateful and irascible
passions are born of amour-propre”, reminding us of the distinction the Stoics drew
between the harmful passions and the benign eupatheiai which would come to replace
them. 55 (Rousseau often use the word “sentiment” to refer to the affectionate and
desirable passions). The fit is not perfect: the Stoics would not, for example, have
considered oikeiosis a principle “prior to reason”, but one involving judgment, or
mental assent, however instinctive it might seem to be.

But if Rousseau’s amour de soi does serve as a version of Stoic oikeiosis, then
what he is doing is clear. He is accepting the full force of the Augustinian argument
about the centrality of self-love - amour-propre - in accounting for the corruption of
human society; but he denies what was implicit in the seventeenth-century Augustinian

52
Ibid., p.47 (OC III.125-6). Notice the way in which Rousseau’s theorisation of pitié as a
fundamental principle of human nature allows him to avoid running into the traditional
objection to varieties of Stoicism which portray pity as a vice.
53
Rousseau, Emile , p.213 (OC IV.492).
54
Ibid., p.212 (OC IV.491).
55
Ibid., p.214 (OC IV.493).

146
argument, that the baneful effects of self-love can serve as an indictment of a natural
rights theory resting upon a principle of self-preservation. What the French
Augustinians found to condemn in self-love only speaks to the domain of amour-
propre, and this amour-propre, we might say, doesn’t go all the way down. It is not the
most fundamental principle of post-lapsarian human nature, in the way that the
Augustinians alleged. Oikeiosis - or, here, amour de soi - can still serve perfectly well
as the foundation of a natural rights philosophy, as well as serving as the ground for
Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of humankind.

There is an obvious objection to this line of argument. In the passage immediately

following the one cited above from the Preface to the Discourse on Inequality,
Rousseau remarks that

It is from the agreement and combination which the understanding is

in a position to establish between these two principles [amour de soi
and pitié] without it being necessary to introduce that of sociability,
that all the rules of natural right appear to me to be derived.56

At first glance, it looks as if Rousseau is here repudiating the Stoic foundation of

natural rights theory altogether. Grotius’s approving discussion of Cicero on
sociabilitas formed a part of the demonstration that there was a significant appeal to
Stoic philosophy in the argument for natural rights. Yet what is going on in this
passage is that Rousseau is denying a principle of the natural sociability of human
beings that could be used to defend the naturalness of political society. Here, Rousseau
follows Hobbes, whose contract theory is premissed upon the artificiality of political
community, which has to be a radical construction of human will. In denying the
principle of human sociability in the way that he does, Rousseau is not abandoning
Stoic principles: his account of amour de soi might generate certain kinds of other-
regarding activity, as it does in Emile, but it cannot generate the thicker account of
human sociability which Hobbes’s natural lawyer critics were keen to defend.57

In positively valuing some form of self-love, was Rousseau abandoning the

Augustinian tradition decisively? It is not clear that he is, for the French Augustinians
of the seventeenth century often deployed more rigid distinctions than those which
Augustine himself had used. Although Augustine taught that “two loves created two
cities”, and says much to condemn self-love, we should remember – as Antoine Le
Grand reminded his Augustinian contemporaries, above - that for Augustine nothing in
created nature is ever inherently bad and that the self-love he deplored was the prideful
love of self which - crucially - leads one to despise God. Oliver O’Donovan’s
extensive discussions make it clear how nuanced - and how complex - Augustine’s
treatment of self-love was, and how implausible it is to reduce his analysis to a single,

56
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.47 (OC III.126).
57
See Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, pp.151-2, 197-200.

147
negatively-valued concept of amour-propre.58 Rousseau’s whole argument is basically
secular, and it is this feature of his argument which most clearly marks a break with the
Augustinian tradition, not his positive valorisation of self-love as amour de soi.

It seems also that Rousseau developed this theory in opposition to an alternative

Augustinian social theory, which was presented by the Jansenist Pierre Nicole, whose
argument we have touched upon from time to time above. A natural question to pose to
strict Augustinians is to ask how human society is able to function in any tolerably
well-ordered way if humanity is as Fallen as they maintain. Nicole had famously
argued that although self-love - amour-propre - was indeed depraved, the ties of self-
interest that bound one person to another worked to produce a kind of social
cohesion. 59 These ties were generated by a disreputable cupidity, not by a worthy
charity, to be sure, but the resulting society could look very similar to what a society
might look like, if all its inhabitants were to have been motivated by true charitable
love of God and neighbour. On this account, it is when we begin interacting with other
people, generating ties of interdependency through the exchange of goods and services,
adjusting our behaviour to fit the expectations of others, that the depraved effects of
self-love begin to be redeemed, in an earthly register, at least. Human action remains
motivated by a sinful self-love, and is to that extent deplorable, but a trick of divine
providence brings about a certain kind of social harmony.60 Rousseau’s account in the
Discourse on Inequality thus reverses Nicole’s at a crucial moment. While humans are
substantially independent of one another, living in the state of nature, with their amour
de soi guarding over their self-preservation, amour-propre is barely existent and poses
no particular problem. But when early societies begin to develop, the interactions
among people provoke and inflame amour-propre, and it is these repeated social
interactions which quickly translate into relations of dependency, inequality and
oppression. For Nicole it is social existence that corrects some of the bad effects of
self-love; for Rousseau it is the social existence that produces these bad effects in the
first place, perverting natural amour de soi into the potentially awful amour-propre.

The problem facing Rousseau’s political philosophy, then, is that of discovering a

way in which amour de soi can be preserved and nurtured, minimising the influence of
amour-propre as much as is possible, disciplining it and channeling it into productive
outlets. This problem is structurally analogous to the problem facing Stoic philosophy,
too. The task of Stoicism is to find a way of living in accordance with nature, an
important part of which involves extirpating the (harmful) passions, and especially
anger; in Rousseau’s vocabulary, amour de soi is presented as entirely natural; amour-
propre as the origin of all the “hateful and irascible passions”. But whereas the Stoics
present their philosophical training and their programme of spiritual exercises as the

58
O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine, passim.
59
See his essays “De la grandeur” and “De la Charité et de l’amour-propre” in Nicole, Moral
Essayes.
60
James, Pierre Nicole, pp.148-61.

148
most suitable means of attaining their goal, Rousseau turns to democratic politics
instead.

The democratic citizen republic of The Social Contract describes the institutions
within which a people may live together without inflaming their amour-propre. The
rough economic equality of citizens prevents the development of hierarchies and of
certain forms of dependence and oppression. So does the transparency of the
majoritarian political process, which insists upon the equal status of all citizens.
Rousseau attacks oratory or partial associations - interest groups, factions and parties -
both of which are ways for individuals and groups to acquire more significance in the
common life than they deserve to possess. A citizen’s life under the general will is a
disciplined life, as is the life of the Stoics’ sage, lived in accordance with the universal
law of the cosmos, but in both cases the discipline provides, paradoxically enough, the
best chance of being able to live in accordance with nature, or of living in freedom.
Stoicism brings about the moral transformation of an individual; Rousseau’s politics
deals with the collective moral transformation through politics of an entire people,61
with the role of the Stoic philosopher being played from time to time either by the
Legislator, “beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them”,62 or
by the Tutor, whose pupil tells him at the end of Emile that he has chosen ”to remain
what you have made me and voluntarily to add no other chain to the one with which
nature and the laws burden me”. 63 Just as Augustine himself once found Stoic
philosophical vocabulary helpful for describing the condition of Unfallen Man,
Rousseau’s Stoic democracy aims to preserve an entire people in a certain kind of
Unfallen condition, safe from the miseries induced by too much unrestrained amour-
propre. It’s not too much, perhaps, to call Rousseau’s political theory a strikingly
original piece of secular Augustinian Stoicism.

Although the historical record itself is mixed on this point, as we saw in the
Preface above, the Roman Stoics acquired for themselves a reputation for being pillars
of republican virtue, and enemies to those who sought or occupied the Imperial throne.
This Stoic pantheon included Cato of Utica, Marcus Brutus, or Helvidius Priscus, who
steadfastly refused to submit to the dictators or tyrants they opposed. Justus Lipsius
and the early modern Neo-Stoics, by contrast, had been theorists of a centralised,

61
For Rousseau's comparison of Socrates and Cato, to the latter's advantage, see the Discourse
on Political Economy, OC III.255. See also the unpublished Discourse on Heroic Virtue (OC
II.1262-3) for similar sentiments.
62
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.213.
63
Rousseau, Emile, p.471.

149
absolute monarchy; they opposed representative assemblies, and they denied popular
sovereignty. Not the least part of Rousseau’s Stoic achievement is to have articulated a
theory of a participatory republican politics, a theory that many people through the
ages had often felt was somehow implicit in the Stoics’ philosophy of freedom.

150
 Concluding Unscientific Postscript

This dissertation began with the Montagnards’ suicide in the Paris courtroom in
Year III; its historical narrative ends a little over thirty years earlier, with Rousseau’s
near simultaneous publication of Emile and The Social Contract, the arguments of
which help to set the stage for the republican Stoicism of the radical French revolution
after 1789. For if Lipsian Neo-Stoicism had provided an influential theorisation of
what we might usefully call the national security state, a theory of politics given its
definitive presentation in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, one of Rousseau’s major
achievements was to turn the social contract tradition he inherited inside out,
recuperating the language and emphases of Stoic philosophy for an older republican
tradition of the free republic which looked back to Cicero and Machiavelli, but which
Hobbes had decisively repudiated.

The free republic and the national security state are still the state forms which
dominate the world of feasible political choices today, in the absurd world of John
Ashcroft, the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security; and Rousseau’s
reminder that freedom is a product of democratic discipline, rather than anything that
can be imposed by bureaucratic fiat resonates through the politics of the present.
Rousseau reclaimed the language of Stoicism for radical democratic republicanism,
and that tradition is still the one best placed to hold onto it, if it chooses to do so.

Nor are the concerns of this thesis irrelevant to the period bookended by the French
Revolution on the one hand and President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” on the
other. For two distinctive and alternative Augustinian social theories were introduced
into the discussion of Rousseau, above. On the one hand, there was Pierre Nicole’s
argument, about the unintended consequences of self-love, which is more familiar to us
in Adam Smith’s later version, where it became known as the Invisible Hand argument.
If everyone’s behaviour is motivated by narrow self-interest - the secular version of
Augustinian self-love1 - then the aggregate outcomes can still tend to the benefit of all,
including the poorest members of the society (who later political theory would learn to
call “the least well off”).2 As Smith secularises the Augustinian argument, interestingly
enough, he also Stoicises it, too, for he was concerned with Stoic moral philosophy,
and much of it found its way into the pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Smith’s other great book, The Wealth of Nations, inaugurated the tradition of the
Classical Political Economy, which later included David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill.
Although a revolution in value theory took place in the 1870s, beginning what we now
call the Neo-Classical Economics, which is still taught in universities today, and which

1
Parrish, “From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand”, ch.8.
2
Smith, The Wealth of Nations, IV.ii.9; The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp.184-185. This
edition reports H. B. Acton’s judgment that the passage from TMS immediately preceding the
invocation of the invisible hand was written to oppose Rousseau’s account of inequality in the
Second Discourse.

151
is the basis of the rational choice theory that is still popular among political scientists,
the Nicole-Smith argument was still retained right at the heart of the new economic
science. On the other hand, there was Rousseau’s argument - also a form of secular
Augustinian Stoicism, as I’ve suggested - that human society is corrupted and divided
most severely by the results of precisely the kind of social and economic interactions
that are valued on the Nicole-Smith approach. In unequal societies where amour-
propre runs rampant, people are alienated from their authentic or natural selves:
appearance and reality diverge. As Rousseau writes, it “became the interest of men to
appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different
things.” 3 On his account, furthermore, human society was divided into brutal and
entrenched class hierarchies: the poor are exploited by the rich, and the rich own great
property, but their title to this property is despicable, for it rests ultimately on crime, on
the seizure and private appropriation of the common land. 4 In Rousseau’s political
theory, only a rather severe form of democratic action can bring an end to this
alienation and exploitation, holding open the possibility of a society in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

I’ve just redescribed Rousseau’s ideas, of course, in the language of alienation and
exploitation, terms made familiar to us above all from the writings of Karl Marx,
Rousseau’s great successor in the tradition of European radical democracy and, like his
predecessor, a stinging critic of the social division of labour and a thinker fiercely
aware of the necessity for a far-reaching social equality as an essential condition for
liberty in modern societies. The occasional references to Rousseau in Marx’s writings
exhibit a variety of attitudes: there is the famous sneer of the Critique of the Gotha
Programme: “In short, one could just as well have copied the whole of Rousseau”;5
there is the approving quotation from the Discourse on Political Economy in the first
volume of Capital:

‘I will allow you’, says the capitalist [Marx’s replacement for

Rousseau’s ‘rich man’], ‘to have the honour of serving me, on
condition that, in return for the pains I take in commanding you, you
give me the little that remains to you.’6

And there is his most persistent note, sounded both in the essay On the Jewish
Question and in The Grundrisse, where Marx links Rousseau’s “abstract notion of
political man” to the radical individualism found in the later theorists of “civil society”,
and describes his theory as the political analogy of the “Robinsonades” of the
eighteenth century political economists. 7 Nowhere, however, is Marx’s debt to the

3
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, p.95 (OC III.174).
4
Rousseau, Ibid., p.84, pp.97-8 (OC III.164, 176-7). Cf. Marx on the expropriation of the
commons, in Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), vol. 1, chs. 27-8.
5
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes,
vol.2, p.19.
6
Marx, Capital, p.698n.
7
Karl Marx, The Grundrisse (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p.17.

152
spirit and substance of the Second Discourse properly acknowledged, though it
remained both deep and lifelong.8

If this is a plausible sketch of the passage from Rousseau to Marx, then the
question of whether one is an apologist for liberal capitalism on the one hand, or
sympathetic to the claims of radical socialism on the other, comes to turn in part on
which secularising and Stoicising transformation of the Augustinian problem of
original sin one comes to prefer. And if that is the case, to conclude, then the legacies
of the Stoic and Augustinian traditions are of critical importance not just for the
political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, but for the
political and social theories of the twenty-first.

8
Della Volpe finds a striking congruence between Rousseau’s discussion of the ideal of
equality in the Second Discourse and Marx’s arguments for the inherent inegalitarianism of an
ideology of “equal right” in the second half of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Galvano
Della Volpe, “The Marxist Critique of Rousseau,” New Left Review, no. 59 (1970), pp.101-9.

153
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