Richard Robinson rightly anticipated Philip Sidney’s pleasure in having a volume of Melanchthon’s prayers dedicated to him because he knew about Sidney’s studies abroad. Godly Prayers would have been familiar matter for students of that Reformer whom Johann Sturm called “the father of most educated men,” and even for the students of those Philippist students.1 Lines of paternity counted among these educators. Sturm identified himself as Melanchthon’s student, and, in the spring of 1573, Sturm became not coincidentally the first of Sidney’s teachers on the Continent. Once more, Sturm assumed that role at Strasbourg’s Academy because of the intercession of Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet, himself the disciple of Philip Melanchthon. (Sturm’s Academy was internationally famous for its ecumenical openness—the sons of both Catholic and Reformed gentry studied there, just as it became infamous as a breeding ground for tyrannomachy: John Calvin, Peter Martyr, Theodore Beza, François Hotman and Sidney all sharpened their pens inside its walls.) Ever the darling of old men—think of the attention lavished on him by Charles de l’Écluse, Henri Estienne, Francis Walsingham, William of Orange, in addition to the all-too-absent Henry Sidney—Philip possessed in abundance that signal luxury of youth, the promise of renewal.2 Reformed Christians in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had great need of renewal, especially that body of Christians who looked to Melanchthon as the “father” of their cause, and who longed to educate new sons in it.
Taking his cue from the Loci communes, the best known of Melanchthon’s religious works and the first methodical guide to Reformed theology, Robinson opens his dedicatory epistle to Godly Prayers with a characteristically non-sectarian, quietly non-dogmatic meditation about how God chooses to make himself present to “the inward eye of eche faythfull minde.”3 No attempt is made to engage in theological disputation. Instead, a rhetorically expansive analogy from nature concerning the sun’s light affords a logical departure for reflecting about how we best arrive at a knowledge of God. Natural law is the source of moral, metaphysical, even theological knowledge, and the world, both for Melanchthon and his Philippist students, a transparent book piously accommodated to pragmatic ends.4 The “how-to” quality of the text matters, as the extended title of Godly Prayers makes plain, reminding readers that the prayers are “to be used” in securing what Melanchthon calls in his Loci the practical benefits of Christ—his presence among the faithful. In one especially interesting translation, Melanchthon’s theology of presence is reproduced by a poetry of presence. Robinson’s translation of a versification of The Lord’s Prayer by Victorinus Strigelius, among the more internationally famous of Melanchthon’s students, contains a central stanza that begins with this invocation:5
Kindle our mindes with the true light,
And lightnesse of thy kingdome bright:
That here begin amongst us may,
The golden worlde of life for ay.
This is not great poetry. In fact, Robinson prefers to call himself in this work and elsewhere “a humble and faythfull Oratour” rather than a poet, after the example of Melanchthon’s lifelong celebration of sacra oratio, the preeminent power of dialectic and rhetoric. Since an oratio is also a prayer, his self-characterization puns wittily on the subject matter. But great poetry or not, Robinson’s stanza is certainly suggestive, first, because it speaks to the customary harmony maintained in Philippist humanism between faith and eloquence, piety and poetry, and suggestive, too, especially for Sidney’s readers, since Robinson’s verse, “The golden worlde of life for ay,” resonates so teasingly with the golden world of the Defence—as an idealized microcosm, an interior landscape of the mind made present through poetry.6 Robinson’s choice of verbs matters too. “Kindle” is precisely the right term to employ in asking God to light those sparks (igniculos) of divine goodness innate within the mind. When Sidney complains to Languet about his own lack of employment in the cause, he questions the value of the mind’s divinely implanted sparks “nisi locus illius exercendae detur,” [unless some place (some opportunity or cause) for exercizing them is given]. Epistemology recapitulates theology by virtue of an intellectual paternity. Sidney, too, speaks of a mind equipped with divine sparks—the mind itself, a particle of the divine mind—just as he longs for some purpose, some locus (the geographical-rhetorical-intellectual term assuming here teleological significance) to ignite that spark in the service of the cause. No wonder Languet was so pleased by the analogy. Son passing to another son flames from the father.7
Beyond seeking to secure God’s presence to the inward eye of faithful minds, Robinson’s Philippist text engages in an equally characteristic celebration of his presence within “his militant Church upon earth, and faythful congregations dispersed throughout the whole worlde.”8 Robinson could depend on Sidney’s pleasure in receiving translations of Melanchthon’s pious personal devotions, just as he could feel confident about his patron’s public and political support of the cause—the triumph of Reformed Christianity over its enemies in the Tridentine church. Robinson’s politics are internationalist, apocalyptic, and simultaneously patriotic. For both in his dedicatory epistle to Godly Prayers and more extensively in his translation of Melanchthon’s politically important history of the church, De ecclesiae autoritate, Robinson details the historical continuity between the Protestant church of Germany and the English church under Elizabeth. Considered properly—considered, that is, from the ecumenical vantage that Melanchthon’s history supplies—the two churches have common cause. As Robinson writes in the dedicatory letter to his translation of De ecclesiae autoritate:9
And agayne, as Germany hath bin a natural nurse to the universal dispersed and afflicted church of the gospel long agone, so have wee in England greate cause (praying God for both their prosperous estates at this day) to imbrace & commemorate the doynges of such godly learned fathers there living, as have bin & yet are sound faythful furtherers of Gods glory, & constant friends of that truth, which we also now professe.
To recount Melanchthon’s efforts to use his learning in the service of the cause, in addressing his prince at Ratisbone in 1541 on behalf of the Reformed church is not to recover a foreign or distant history. Rather, Melanchthon’s “doynges” are commemorated as a fatherly example for the present, an example continued by living “faythful furtherers” whose labors supply still more examples to the benefit of the English church. Paternity counts. The Imperial Diet at Regensburg (Ratisbone) began as an effort to unite the disparate confessions of Christendom. At the outset, Melanchthon even managed to craft an agreement about the meaning of original sin with Johann Eck, that aging defender of Catholic doctrine with whom Luther had debated furiously at Leipzig in 1519. The Diet ended, predictably, in confessional disagreement and disarray—but that ending is not Robinson’s principal concern.10 To use Robinson’s language, the summum bonum for Philippists is the triumph of the church—a church open to ecumenical compromise, but militant in defense of essential matters of doctrine—and it is a triumph depending always on the support of strong princes. As Melanchthon solicited “the Godly renowned Prince and defender of the truthe, Albertus Duke of Prusse” to aid the cause of Reformed Christianity, so Elizabeth is praised both as “the principall ornament of her owne house,” and “a light of excellent comfort unto the faithfull throughout all Christendome.”11 Robinson’s principal concern is liberty.
When Robinson’s translation of Strigelius’s Lord’s Prayer concludes, he prays that “when due time shall requere,” God will our souls “Set free.”12 Godly Prayers figures as an historically specific illustration of Sidney’s continuing ties to an international body of Philippists. It matters, too, as a locus in which to note briefly the moderate, inward-looking piety of Philippist humanism, its resistance to theological disputation and the tempered optimism of its natural theology. But Robinson’s translation of Strigelius matters, also, because it is a reminder from the outset of what I will call the “mediated” character of Sidney’s Philippism. Melanchthon is remembered in the Defence as a poet, as a preacher and a teacher, and he is recommended in Philip’s letter to his brother Robert as a distinguished chronicler of universal history, but it is simply not possible to know how many or which of his works Sidney read or studied.13 Much of what he knew about Melanchthon came to him second-hand from Languet and his circle. Such mediation matters because in the “second-hand” quality of that Philippist piety reflected importantly in the Defence, Sidney was the student of a reforming, cosmopolitan, intellectually elite Christianity that enhanced considerably the optimistic account of human agency espoused by the later Melanchthon.14
One small illustration must do in preparing for the larger argument. A prayer to God to set us free is sufficiently innocent in itself. But when that prayer belonged to Victorinus Strigelius, internationally famous for publicly debating and espousing the freedom of the will to cooperate with God’s grace in the work of salvation—for being what his enemies termed a “synergist”—a call for freedom, it is reasonable to assume, resonated both differently and emphatically.15 Once more, when that call for freedom was contained in Richard Robinson’s translation, whose one earlier translated work was Francesco Patrizi’s De institutione reipublicae, the most staunchly republican political treatise ever published in Elizabethan England, piety in support of liberty may well have assumed political overtones at once exciting and controversial.16 Neither Strigelius’s notorious debates about the will nor Robinson’s history as a translator afford proof of Sidney’s synergism or republican political interests, but both are reminders of the distinctive filter through which Reformed piety came to Sidney. Melanchthon came to Sidney not pure, but mediated, and mediated by humanists for whom the central message of the Gospel was freedom—freedom from the twin tyrannies of self-love (man’s original sin) and self-loving powers in the state, the tyranny of the despot and the mob.17 In turn, the principal vehicle of that freedom was faith—not faith conceived simply as the self’s unreserved commitment to God, but faith obtained by the certainty of the self’s knowledge about its relationship to God. Melanchthon’s God above all else wishes to make himself known, and knowledge of him is the necessary instrument of freedom.18
In his last years, the Philippists at Wittenberg made studied efforts to publish portraits of Melanchthon motivated, in no small part, by the need to shore up his authority as the legitimate heir to Luther’s mantle. Two of those portraits make an especially good introduction to the elder Melanchthon—the Melanchthon of the late 1540s and 50s, who is particularly important, because it was this Master Teacher (“Dominum Praeceptorem”) to whom Languet dedicated his life and for whose cause (“ut eius causa”) he placed himself in the greatest dangers (“in maxima pericula”).19 The dangers of such service were real. Between the defeat of the Schmalkaldan League in 1547 and his death in 1560, the elder Melanchthon found himself besieged by rivals who bitterly resented his temporizing with the victorious Emperor Charles V, and who accused him of contaminating the legacy of Luther’s reformation. Acrimonious opposition came especially from Niklaus Von Amsdorf and Matthias Flacius Illyricus, rival theologians—so-called Gnesio-Lutherans—who distinguished themselves from the Philippists in an increasingly embittered church that could no longer agree either about how to interpret the Augsburg Confession (that all-important expression of evangelical unity first drafted by Melanchthon) or how to protect the Protestant faith, on the one hand, from its traditional adversary Roman Catholicism or, on the other, from dilution by that second wave of the Reformation, the potent Calvinism of Geneva. Melanchthon’s legendary caution and moderation appeared to his enemies as weaknesses; his pursuit of evangelical unity through political and ecclesiastical compromise, capitulation; and his regard for humanist learning, abomination of the spirit.20 Two complementary portraits of the late Melanchthon, one as St. Basil (1559) and, the other as Ermolao Barbaro (1565), illustrate how his Philippist followers sought to define his identity and to defend his cause.
In Lucas Cranach the Younger’s plainly unhandsome portrait of Melanchthon (1559), the book tells all. Melanchthon holds an open book in his hands with two parallel texts displayed for the viewer to read. (See Figure 1). One (on the left) is a page from Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek edition of St. Basil’s Homilies; the other (on the right) is Melanchthon’s epigram, a poetic commentary on Basil’s text. As a sermon from the year prior to the portrait’s composition makes clear, Melanchthon identified strongly with Basil, as an early father of the church, because he too lived in turbulent times, oppressed by heretics and by the threat of tyranny, and because Basil, like himself, sought to defend the integrity of God’s Word from the leagues of the ignorant (“factionibus indoctorum”) by knowledge from good books (“ut doctrina philosophica non negligatur”).21 Basil is important to Melanchthon because of his longstanding history in the Reformer’s thought as a “custodem Ecclesiae” (a guardian of the Church). As early as 1539, in a polemic seeking to establish the Reformed church as the legitimate heir to a revised ecclesiastical history, De ecclesiae autoritate, Melanchthon singled out Basil as one of the fathers who best exemplify the legitimate role of the ecclesiatical leader: giving witness to the Word as the sole authority for saving doctrine.
Basil is an exemplary model of commitment to the cause, and just as important, of the indispensability of humanistic service to that cause. Leonardo Bruni’s enormously popular translation of Basil’s letter in defense of classical learning, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, propelled Basil’s name to the forefront inside Renaissance defenses of humanist study. A God who wishes to make himself known must be studied in his Word and his works, through Gospel and through Law, through Christian and classical letters, by means of theology and history, metaphysics and physics, geometry and mathematics, dialectic and rhetoric—by means of the universal complement of arts and sciences. Saving knowledge belongs solely to the Gospel, but the Gospel requires—as part of its revealed message of salvation—knowledge about the Law. The Law is scripted in the Old Testament as evidence of sin, just as the natural law—because of the Maker’s intention to be known—is scripted both in the best writings of the ancients and in the innate ideas (notitiae) of the human mind.22 The barbarians are at the gate—the legions of the ignorant, as Melanchthon incessantly complained (echoes resounding years later in Mornay’s Verité)—and knowledge is the right weapon for battling against them.
Figure 1 Melanchthon, by Lucas Cranach the Younger. By permission of Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
At the center of the portrait, Cranach displays a book made out of many books and all of them are significant for reading a Reformer whose character is defined (even constructed) by their conjunction. There are three important books – inside-the-book that Melanchthon displays, in addition, of course, to his own epigram. The first is that primary book represented, the Homilies of St. Basil, whose call for humilitas had special significance for the moderate, ecumenically minded Melanchthon. A portion of Basil’s Homily on Humility is quoted in Greek and paraphrased in Latin. The second important book is the edition of Basil represented. Opened to “Basilius pagina 388”—the Greek text chosen is edited by Desiderius Erasmus, that Dutch humanist to whom Melanchthon owed much of his own rhetorical knowledge and much of his fascination with the sermonis vim, the power of God’s word to manifest divine presence.23 The third book of importance to Cranach’s portrait is the book quoted inside Basil’s Homily on Humility, then paraphrased again in Melanchthon’s commentary, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. The passage cited is from I Corinthians 1:30–31, and concludes with the injunction, “your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” In addition to those three books by Basil, Erasmus, and Paul, the portrait highlights, most obviously and topically, Melanchthon’s own epigram (right page)—a text at once illumined by and, in turn, illuminating those other texts at hand.
By associating himself with Basil, Melanchthon defends the integrity of his pious commitments and his learning against the assaults of his Gnesio-Lutheran rivals. But Melanchthon more than associates himself with Basil. The formal design of Cranach’s portrait is at once more insistent and more telling about the full repertoire of Philippist aims on display. Cranach painted three other portraits of Melanchthon during this period that speak to those aims. In paintings of The Baptism of Christ (1556), The Raising of Lazarus (1558), and posthumously, The Last Supper (1565), Melanchthon is represented as physically present at a sacred event of saving significance, as a tribute to the power of his “witnessing” in the present historical moment.24 As Cranach’s other paintings erase historical distance to illustrate the living force of the Word, so the portrait of Melanchthon works even more abruptly to close the gap between sacred Word and present history. Cranach’s painting establishes an association, or even what one might call more accurately an identity between Basil and Melanchthon, as if the representation of Melanchthon book-in-hand is a revelation of the Reformer’s true identity as another Basil. To see Melanchthon as St. Basil is to understand his real self—a self whose reality lies, like Basil’s, in his humble service to the Word. Once more, the invitation to see Melanchthon as Basil is produced as a visual complement to the operation of Melanchthonian oratio. Put more simply, Cranach’s painting requires “reading” as if it were a text organized according to the dictates of the preceptor’s distinctive and detailed system of hermeneutic interpretation.
Like a well-methodized oration, the painting is arranged perspicuously (Melanchthon’s favorite oratorical goal) according to a logical scheme (assured by the presence of what are, arguably, the iconographic equivalents of loci communes).25 The book-in-hand is fully legible, as a painterly complement of rhetorical claritas. Consider the logical places upon which Cranach’s portrait is organized as the spectator is invited to contemplate those books-inside-the-book. The humility of Basil’s homily, the fideism of Paul’s Corinthians, and the philological learning of Erasmus’s scholarship are connected logically as well as pictorially, since humility is that fundamental virtue taught by the knowledge that faith (not human works) grants salvation, a knowledge dependent on understanding God’s Word ad fontes, through the diligent recovery of the scripture in its pure form (Erasmus’s act of editing) and in its true character (Melanchthon’s exegetical method treating the Bible as divine oratory, a Word only really understood when understood as rhetoric and dialectic).26 Moreover, as the portrait dramatizes visually, the act of reading itself possesses considerable power. The book both informs and transforms. Melanchthon has become one with Basil, the arrangement of the portrait logically denotes, because of his faithful apprehension of the Word, and it is the power of that Word to transform the self in humbling the old man into the new that serves as the portrait’s status causae (its overarching theme). Melanchthon can be seen to be another Basil because both have heard and studied the Word aright—felt its rhetorical power and understood its dialectical significance.
Consistent, too, with the aims of Melanchthon’s eloquence, the portrait appears designed both to reveal the true Melanchthon (as a Basil transformed by his love and knowledge of the Word) and to inspire by means of this exemplary image new custodians of the church, new laborers for the cause. The best evidence of that inspiration is scripted within the Latin epigram on the book’s right-hand page. At its conclusion, appended to the epigram are lines that conclude: “O Gospel, be with us and set our hearts afire with thy flame.”27 Inspired by the Word, Melanchthon inspires in turn, reciprocally and cooperatively. His epigram was composed originally as a poetic commentary on a verse from the Gospel of John (3:27), in which that first witness of Christ John the Baptist declares: “Non potest sibi homo sumere quicquam, nisi datum sit ei a Deo” (A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven). John 3 comprises the Epigram’s original heading. Relocated from the Epigrammatum into the space of Cranach’s canvas, where it is stripped of its heading and set side-by-side Basil’s homily on humility, Melanchthon’s poem acquires new meaning as a commentary upon that declaration of faith key to his identification with Basil. By way of direct quotation from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Cranach’s portrait testifies eloquently to the doctrine of salvation by faith, that core teaching of the Lutheran Reformation to which Melanchthon here declares his continuing faithfulness.
This is testimony with a difference, however, as Melanchthon’s appearance in the very person of St. Basil attests. Together with Chrysostom, Basil was Melanchthon’s favorite authority for his synergistic celebration of the power of human will to cooperate with divine grace in realizing salvation. Ever in search of the ecumenical middle ground, Melanchthon drew regularly upon St. Basil in illuminating the necessary cooperation of individual will and the holy spirit to make salvation possible: “God comes first toward us, but nevertheless that we should also will that he come to us.”28 That this is testimony with a difference appears more clearly still in Melanchthon’s epigrammatic commentary.29 With Pauline assertiveness, his poetry declares: “Nullius et felix conatus et utilis umquam, Consilium si non detque iuvetque Deus” (No effort is ever happy and useful unless God gives favor and gives assistance).30 But just as assertively, the epigram points to a necessary cooperation between the mind aware of rightness (“mens sibi conscia recti”) and Christ himself, whose aid is always present for those who request it (“simul auxilium praesenti a numine Christi”). Explicitly rejecting the Stoic doctrine of predetermination (“Nec Deus est Numen Parcarum carcere clausum, Quale putabatur Stoicus esse Deus”), Melanchthon frees himself from the determinism of those Reformers from Jena to Geneva who preached predestination and the utter depravity of the will. In Melanchthon’s theology, the promise of that Word is comprehended as universal—freely available to all—and correspondingly harbors no room for predestination, and no sympathy for depictions of God (to employ Melanchthon’s own vocabulary) as a tyrant.31 As the Greek prose of Basil’s Homily finds translation into Melanchthon’s Latin poetry, the eloquence of that poetic heightening testifies to the reality of such cooperation, as a reminder that the fire of the Word, setting hearts aflame, frees human words to cooperate with the divine. Cranach’s portrait is what Philip Sidney would call some years later, in different times but for related reasons, a speaking picture, a device to bestow a Melanchthon upon the world to make many Melanchthons. Melanchthon’s most celebrated theological work, the Loci communes, was subtitled in its first edition, seu Hypotyposes—or the speaking pictures.
Melanchthon’s rhetorical treatment of scripture descended in part from Erasmus, with whom he shared a belief in Christ as the “verbum et sermo dei” and an accompanying conviction of God’s immediate presence to the reader in his scriptures. He shared, too, Erasmus’s moderation, his pragmatic readiness for compromise, his detestation of theological dispute, and much of his broad tolerance for difference—and these, in turn, became core principles among the Philippists. However, Erasmus’s willingness to tolerate differences of opinion derived, in large part, from his skepticism—from his conviction that we human beings are ineluctably bound to the praise of folly. By contrast, Melanchthon’s readiness to distinguish essential beliefs from adiaphora, to compromise in the interest of agreement, came precisely from his opposite conviction that the truth is ultimately knowable, and that when reasonable people learn how to employ the right reading skills to the interpretation of texts, and most importantly, to the explication of scriptural texts, universal agreement will be at hand. Again, Melanchthon’s God is one who desires to be known, and one who makes certain knowledge about himself available. Ever the teacher and the systems builder, the proponent of ecumenical unity and civic tranquility, Melanchthon held an absolute conviction about the logical order of the mind and the universe, an order that had its foundations, at once, in the dialectical character of language and the providential operation of the deity.32
To see Melanchthon as St. Basil is to see his true self as the faithful guardian of the church, the unhandsome custodian of the handsome cause, but what did it mean for the elder Melanchthon, during these same critical years, to have been identified publicly with Ermolao Barbaro? Barbaro (1453–93) was a Venetian poet and statesman, a representative of Italian leadership in humanistic studies during the golden age of Lorenzo Valla, Angelo Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola. An exemplar of the brilliant intellectual cut off in his prime, the man of learning undone by political machinations, Barbaro was famous for his commentaries on Aristotle and, more important in this context, for his letters in defense of classical studies and eloquence. One such letter was Barbaro’s reply to Pico’s attack upon rhetoric as an empty discipline unworthy of attention from true philosophers, those who love wisdom. In 1534, dispensing with Barbaro’s actual reply, one of Melanchthon’s favorite students, Franz Burchard, devised his own response to Pico’s attack, providing in his extended mock-epistle a textbook example of what he would have written had he been Barbaro. Frequently reprinted with Melanchthon’s most popular rhetorical work, Elementorum rhetorices libri duo, Barbaro’s fictive letter, translated by Burchard, was, in turn, fictively attributed to Melanchthon by his son-in-law Caspar Peucer in 1565—so closely had the letter by that time, with its subsequent printings, become identified with Melanchthon himself. In none of those subsequent printings was the real author identified. Just as Burchard writes in Barbaro’s voice and assumes his persona, so too when that persona was misidentified in 1565 as the product of Melanchthon’s pen, Barbaro’s voice became officially what it had been assumed to have been for decades, the voice of Melanchthon himself.33 Considered from a formal perspective, then, the letter to Barbaro is the rhetorical complement of Cranach’s portrait, as once more the elder Reformer is provided by his Philippist followers with an idealized identity that defines himself and his cause. What matters to this argument is not who wrote Barbaro’s fictive letter. What counts is the letter’s historical status as a representation of the late Melanchthon by his Philippist followers.
If to see Melanchthon as Basil is to see him as the custodian of the church, then to see him as Ermolao Barbaro is to understand how eloquence empowers him in his duties. The fictive Barbaro begins his letter by lamenting the power that the barbarous scholastic philosophers have achieved over learning and by calling for the redemption of what he terms, again and again, “our cause”—the return of “the most eminent arts” of eloquence to their ancient glory.34 Eloquence receives in his reply to Pico a definition consistent with Melanchthon’s treatment of the topic in educational manuals from the Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1531) to the Erotemata dialectices (1547)—works that became standard university texts in the latter part of the century. Eloquence (oratio) is “a peculiar power and virtue” whose object “… is to paint, as it were, and to represent the mind’s thoughts themselves in appropriate and clear language.”35 Like Rudolf Agricola, Melanchthon sponsored the complementary treatment of dialectic and rhetoric, insisting in his pedagogy on the necessary subordination of figures of speech to figures of thought and on the preeminent necessity of “method” to the invention and arrangement of arguments. In fact, so closely intertwined are language and thought for Melanchthon that the arts of eloquence assume the status of a master-discipline. Burchard closely imitates the sentiments of his teacher when he writes: eloquent authors have painted a universal gallery of knowledge and morals (“images of all things which can occur in private and public life”) and “without those arts which are comprised in eloquence it is in no wise possible to search out and illustrate the other disciplines, the subject matter of physics, ethics, and theology.”36 Sidney was not the first to challenge Aristotle’s claims for the preeminence of politics as his culture’s architectonic form of knowledge.
So much of what is peculiar to the power and virtue of eloquence (oratio) in Melanchthon’s thought derives from his understanding of language as an action or event, and Burchard’s fictive letter highlights this quality.37 One indication of that peculiar power is found in his articulation (altogether appropriate for Barbaro’s persona) of an historically familiar defense of oratory from Aristotle to Cicero, the civilizing power of eloquence. “It has been said, with good reason, that when men were still dispersed and nomadic they were gathered together by eloquence, and that by it states were founded; by it rights, religions, legitimate marriage, and other bonds of human society were constituted.”38 This is an argument that he extends further by claiming that “the exercise of justice” (that is, the “managing the whole of our public and private life”) depends, too, on eloquence since it alone provides “for the right and proper exposition of matters of every sort.”39 True philosophy, in turn, depends on oratory since the right philosopher is “one who when he has learned things good and useful … takes a theory (doctrina) out of academic obscurity and makes it practically useful in public affairs .…”40 Even religion depends for its power and virtue on oratory. Basil and Jerome are counted among what he calls “the more eloquent theologians,” because of their clear and copious exposition of “obscure subjects.”41 But more radically still, scripture itself is treated as a form of sacred oratory, which as the foundation and model for all other forms of genuine eloquence, has as its goal the clear exposition of its mysterious doctrina and the inspiration of the mind to virtue. Scripture provides “pictures of good conduct (morum picturae) which are useful for exciting the mind to admiration.”42 Once more, it is precisely because the Bible has not been properly understood as oratory (as a rhetorical and dialectical discourse) that it is misinterpreted by the scholastics. How absurd are those philosophers who “have spent a lifetime” in dialectical studies, Barbaro opines, “never to see … what David or Paul is saying,” since what David, Paul, and the sacred writers as a body have to say is itself oratorical, both dialectical and rhetorical in mode.43
As the letter to Pico ends, the appeal of representing Melanchthon himself as Barbaro becomes more apparent. For the fictive Barbaro concludes his letter with what seems is both a prayer and a prophecy. As a remedy for the insane misinterpretations of “disputatious theology, … Christian doctrine ought to be called back to its sources.” In particular, the fictive Barbaro expresses his hope that “some Hercules will rise up to free the earth of those monsters [the scholastic philosophers] and restore the native beauty of philosophy and Christian doctrine.”44 To return Christian doctrine to its sources (ad fontes), in this context, means something more than the Erasmian restoration of scripture to its original languages and texts. Rather, the call is a Philippist summons to return to the source of scripture as oratio, as speech accommodated by God to man. Only in this way can its meaning be understood and its power for salvation harnessed. To make a prayer for, or better still, a prophecy of that return ad fontes is for Burchard in the very act of assuming the voice and persona of Ermolao Barbaro to pay tribute to his teacher, Philip Melanchthon as the new Hercules—less the Hercules of muscle and brawn, than that better favored Hercules of the early humanists, the emblematic hero of eloquence whose mouth emits golden chains to tie up powerfully the ears of his audience. Like the career prophesied for Hercules by Barbaro, the mock-epistle illustrates, Melanchthon’s has been devoted to freeing the church from the tyranny of ignorance and restoring the eloquent arts on which its health depends. Read that same prayer in the mock-epistle’s appearance as an appendix to the Elementorum rhetorices or in Caspar Peucer’s edition of 1565, and the prayer emerges even more powerfully as Melanchthon’s own act of identification with Barbaro and Hercules-the-liberator. Sidney’s Defence ends, it is interesting to note, with the promise (wittily phrased) that by praising poetry “you shall suddenly grow Herculea proles,” an off-spring of Hercules, this hero of eloquence (142). Again, paternity counts.
Seen from one perspective, Melanchthon is the guardian of the church. Seen from another, Melanchthon is the champion of eloquence. Both portraits are complementary to his pursuit of the cause. St. Basil succeeds in freeing God’s church from the armies of ignorance, as Cranach’s portrait illustrates so well, because of his knowledge of and inspiration from the books—the book of God’s Word as it is illuminated by the books of God’s students, Erasmus and (more emphatically!) Melanchthon. Hercules will free Christian culture from the monsters of ignorance, Barbaro’s mock epistle makes clear, because the study of eloquence (oratio) returns us to the source of scriptural power. Knowledge about God is the vehicle of liberation, and such knowledge depends mightily on the acquisition and display of the studia humanitatis.
Moreover, beyond their arguments, explicit or implied, both self-portraits complement each other in their formal designs. In both, Melanchthon assumes an identity that is an idealized revelation of his real self—as St. Basil and as Barbaro/Hercules—and in both, that alternative or idealized self is offered as a defense of the power of oratio and an illustration of its power-in-the-making. We are asked to see (visually or with our mind’s eye) Melanchthon-as-Basil and Melanchthon-as-Barbaro/Hercules as oratorical illustrations of the power of words to inform and to transform the self. In both self-portraits, then, we find ourselves at the juncture between Melanchthon’s notions of oratory and his concept of selfhood, or as Melanchthon might name that juncture more perspicuously, at that place where his doctrine of the Word and its indispensability for self-knowledge intersect.45 This is an intersection of some consequence, as I hope to show, for appreciating Sidney’s education in the cause under Languet.
In 1555, Melanchthon published yet another in a series of expanded and regularly revised versions of the Loci communes, the book that first appeared in 1521 as both an introduction to the reading of scripture and an exposition of the Reformed theology.46 As a product of those same later years in which Cranach fashioned his self-portrait as St. Basil and in which Burchard’s mock-oration circulated his image as a second Barbaro/Hercules, the 1555 Loci articulates Melanchthon’s continued commitment to the exercise of eloquence in the service of the cause. Eloquence is at the very heart of the Bible’s meaning. Melanchthon emphasizes this point from the book’s first publication: “You can see the design of the Holy Spirit in Scripture—how sweetly and charmingly he instructs the devout with only one purpose, that we be saved. The whole of Scripture is in some parts law, in others gospel,” and Melanchthon could well have added, in all parts oratory.47 There is nothing that he desires more, Melanchthon writes in his introduction to the first Loci communes, than for Christians to read “the divine Scriptures … and be thoroughly transformed into their nature.”48 When Melanchthon marvels at the design of the Holy Spirit in shaping the biblical text, the charm of his instruction and the singleness of his saving purpose, he draws attention to the Bible’s purposeful doubleness of organization. Law and Gospel combine over and again in the scriptures to instill self-knowledge: to inform us about sin and to transform us, through the promise of the Word, into Christians reborn. Both testaments offer teaching in the Law “so that [God] may effectively punish sin and produce in our hearts genuine and dreadful fright,” and both provide the promise of the Gospel to “bring merciful consolation to the frightened conscience.”49 The whole scope of the Bible’s oratio is contained, then, in those central Pauline concepts of Law, Sin, and Gospel—the essential loci of Melanchthon’s exegesis, loci that function simultaneously as logical principles that organize the Bible’s argument of salvation and as existentially rooted realities that define individual identity: the story of the old man, who under the Law has lost justitia originalis and stands guilty of the sin of self-love, the story of the new man, who through faith in the scriptures, is transformed into “their nature,” into the image of Christ.50
In 1521, Melanchthon began his Loci with an attack upon the Pelagian doctrine of free will. In 1555, by contrast, the Loci orients its discussion of free will with an assault on stoic determinism. Especially in his later years, Melanchthon created the foundations of a distinctive version of Reformed selfhood inflected by his increasingly assertive convictions about the significance of natural law, its implications for the moral life, and cultural activity—artistic and civil. In 1521, the Loci opened by illustrating the utter depravity of the will as an acknowledgment of man’s weakness before God; in 1555, the Loci begins by discussing what God is and how he is known as prelude to celebrating his “boundless goodness” and “beautiful works—heaven and earth, air and water, angels and men.”51 The shift in rhetoric serves more than rhetorical purposes. In harmony with his enhanced emphasis on providence, his insistence on God’s real presence in his works as well as his Word, the elder Melanchthon elaborated a natural theology grounded on his twin convictions about the complementarity between natural law and divine law and the fundamental goodness of nature.52 As he writes in his Loci of 1555: “If the beautiful order in this wondrous edifice which God made should be a testimony of him, and truly is an open testimony, then rational people should behold and contemplate this order.”53
Melanchthon enhanced, by such means, the status inside Reformed culture of what might best be called the civilized self. More steadfastly than Luther or Calvin, Melanchthon labored to create a positive engagement between Reformed religion and philosophy, providing in his ongoing conversation between the secular and the sacred a model for his anti-disputatious theology and a vision of Christian culture in which the church finds support from the enlightened prince and people. A voluminously syncretic thinker, inclusive in his pedagogical and theological vision, positive in his endorsement of human agency and civil life, Melanchthon found his most ardent supporters, not surprisingly, inside the universities and intellectual circles of Reformed Europe.
If Melanchthon’s God is a God who wishes to be known, then too he is a God who comes to be known chiefly by attending to causes. At every level of Melanchthon’s thought, from the identification of the sensus causae as the goal of dialectics, to the provision of affectively charged communes causae as the goal of rhetoric, to the investigation of causas … rerum in natural philosophy, to the study of first causes in metaphysics and theology, Melanchthon makes the pursuit of causes one primary object of his educational ambitions. He is a relentlessly teleological thinker, whose assayed unity of thought and universality of reference constitute a Protestant version of what he describes as the “architectonic” philosophy of Aristotle (brought into logical harmony with Plato’s!)—a philosophy that considers as a whole and in each of its parts the end that “embraces all the other ends.” As Melanchthon writes, “Thus the final gradation of goods, or the goal, ought always to be in sight, so that it may govern plans and actions.”54 Knowledge eventuates, properly and pragmatically, in action. As the public and political consequence of identifying ends to “govern plans and actions,” the “cause” of securing the triumph of God’s true church is linked, then, to the disciplined study of causes across the whole architecture of knowledge.
To be a Philippist, then, in the truest sense of the word, a follower of Philip Melanchthon—and there can be no question that Hubert Languet was one—meant to have one’s sense of self shaped by the preceptor’s politics, by his piety, and by a comprehensive intellectual program. It meant, in turn, as the educator of a Philippist—and there can be no question that Languet intended to be one—imparting a knowledge of the pragmatic political struggles of the cause and, simultaneously, a regard for the value of the disciplined study of causes. Sidney refers to such study in his Defence as “the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called architectonike, which stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only” (104). The intellectual paternity of such argumentation is Philippist in kind.
The conditions under which Sidney’s education took place were nothing short of extraordinary, and their extraordinary character gave that education an urgency that it would otherwise have lacked. At the very moment that Hubert Languet was seeking to recruit the young Philip Sidney into the cause, the cause to which he had dedicated his adult life was facing extinction. As Nicollier-de Weck’s account of Languet’s life makes plain, 1574 was a year of crisis for Philippism. It was a moment of irrevocable, catastrophic demise for a movement whose leaders would be dead within a decade (Camerarius the Elder died that year, Georg Cracow soon after, and Languet seven years later) and whose followers would be absorbed almost imperceptibly by diverse confessional allegiances. In 1574, the formerly sympathetic Protestant Prince, August of Saxony purged the Philippists from political power and theological influence, expelling them from Wittenberg and from institutional authority of any kind.
Languet’s zealous dedication to Philippism, historically considered, is the afterglow of an explosion—though to consider it as such requires historical knowledge unavailable to him or to his contemporaries. What appears clearly now to have been irrevocable catastrophe seemed at that time to Languet’s providentially idealizing mind a crisis still to be averted. It is worth distinguishing between catastrophe and crisis in this instance because, again, to Languet’s providentially idealizing mind, the young Philip Sidney could well have insured the difference between them. Among Languet’s several sad lifelong refrains, the most frequently intoned is the one written in a letter to the younger Camerarius about the demise of the cause: “princes do not wish to place the public good before their own pleasures.”55 Where August of Saxony had failed, where Maximilian II would fail, and later John Casimir and William of Orange and Robert Dudley, Philip—by virtue of distinguished family connections, brilliance, charisma, piety, and (vitally important among these) a good education—would not. In any case, Languet himself would see to the education. Between February and May of 1574, Languet’s correspondence returns repeatedly to the subject of his grief over the demise of his friends in Saxony and France, the consolation that he receives from Sidney’s friendship, and the expectation that he carries about Sidney’s future, as themes that speak at once to real grief and to real measures taken to redress that grief—the education of a new leader for the cause of Reformed Christianity. That education, in turn, speaks directly to the character of Sidney’s Philippism in the Defence.
In February, Languet writes about “the misfortunes of [his] native land” and how they have “overwhelmed [him] with weariness.”56 In March, he responds to Sidney’s concern that he takes too little care to protect himself against the prospect of attacks against his person by lamenting “the wretchedness in which [he] live[s]; for what can be more distressing to a man, who has the feelings of humanity, than to be a witness of such crimes, as for 10 or 12 years have been … perpetrated in my unhappy France?”57 On 1 May, he mentions again “the great misfortunes of [his] native land,”58 and writes, once more, a week later to recall the destruction of “in practically a single moment all [his] friends” in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the demise of his compatriots in Saxony, where fortune “proved most hostile to the men whose virtue and benevolence had made it possible for [him] to endure the burdens of [his] long exile.”59
In letter after letter composed during the same period, Languet opposes the misfortune of his grief by the consolation that he receives from Sidney’s friendship and future expectations. Amidst the tragedy of his native lands, Languet writes, “I have nothing but the memory of our friendship to cheer me.”60 Oblivious of threats against himself from the agents of the Catholic League, Languet writes, “I am anxious for your safety, because I consider your birth, your disposition, your thirst for goodness, the progress you have already made—and I know what your country has a right to hope of you.”61 In response to the misfortunes of France and Saxony, he writes, “so long as you are safe and sound, then I shall feel all is well with me too,” and a week later, praising Sidney’s eloquent letters, he remarks: “your excellent mental powers shine forth in them, and more and more they strengthen my hopes for the virtue you will attain.”62
Grief, consolation, and expectation are the commonplace themes of Languet’s early correspondence with Sidney, and for a correspondent who, even amidst his profound personal sorrows, never forgets his role as an educator (as he directs his student’s readings, praises his progress, and exclaims at his literary eloquence), commonplace seems exactly the right term to characterize a thematic pattern so deliberately maintained. I am not challenging the sincerity of Languet’s sorrows or the reality of his deep, even passionate affection for Sidney, but I do mean to challenge the post-romantic assumption that affective experience is somehow diminished rather than enhanced by evidence of rhetorical design. Something more specific and important than a general disposition of Sidney’s mind and heart to the cause is taking place in such letters, as attention to the aims of a Philippist education should make clear.
Everywhere in Languet’s correspondence is evidence of language carefully organized to produce a strong affective response and to advance dialectically a particular interpretation of historical events, locating for their obviously specific reader a specific place inside them. Designed with the architectonic aim of keeping in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions (what his own teacher had taught!), Languet’s letters are best understood as the carefully calculated performances of a humanist trained in Philippist oratio.63 In short, his commonplaces are strategically organized loci communes, logical appeals that go to the heart of the argument (Sidney’s necessary pursuit of the cause) as they appeal affectively to his heart. (Languet is convinced that Sidney’s nature, his innate humanity and virtue, insures their moving power.) It is best to understand his letters in this context, not to reemphasize what is already well known (Languet’s expectation that Sidney should some day assume the leadership in England of the international Reformed cause), but instead to demonstrate in historically real terms the meaning of that Philippist-inspired expectation for Sidney‘s lived experience. For Sidney to know himself, he must recognize the story of the cause as his story, as quite literally the narrative that he must adopt in order to be himself. To become what he is, he must change into what he naturally and piously should be. His story then requires metamorphosis, change that makes one all the more oneself. Scripted into the heart of their correspondence, Languet’s urgent personal and political motivations supply a speaking picture of that story.
From very early in their correspondence, Languet writes both about his expectations for Sidney’s future (Sir Henry’s hopes for a full harvest of filial virtues are recited side by side with news of papal defeats) and his resolve to place before young Philip’s eyes a model of “surpassing eloquence.”64 As Satan gnashes his teeth at the imminent collapse of papal power (to paraphrase his letter of November 1573), Languet recommends his pupil’s imitation of an especially splendid epistle from Pietro Bizarro of Perugia. Here again is the Philippist complementarity of a commitment to the cause and a devotion to oratio, with its peculiar conjunction of militantly anti-Tridentine, apocalyptic politics and literary stylistics. From the first, eloquence—an eloquence acquired via the traditional medium of humanistic imitation—assumes a formative role in Sidney’s vocational training. Imitation matters to Languet, first, for practical reasons. Sidney’s eventual success as a statesman, especially a statesman with an international role to play, depends on his mastery of Latin, written and spoken (and Languet nags Sidney repeatedly to improve his pronunciation), just as a knowledge of German seems more useful (particularly to a Reformed statesman) than his pupil’s academic interest in Greek and suspect flirtation with Italian. For similarly practical reasons, he discourages his pupil’s study of geometry. Languet recommends and appears often to have supplied books to Sidney, as models of style, and also (in good humanist fashion) as repositories of virtues to be imitated. In January of 1574, he writes to persuade Sidney to continue his study (for its supreme usefulness) of “that branch of moral philosophy which treats of justice and injustice”; to praise his “reading history, by which more than anything else men’s judgments are shaped”; and to advise him to pursue “the knowledge of the way of salvation, which is the most essential thing of all.”65 Imitatio, with its concern for the way of salvation and the final cause of knowledge, is here the vehicle of a pragmatic and principled biblical humanism.
More than persuading Sidney of the virtues of acquiring eloquence by imitation, Languet’s letters seek to embody that virtue in themselves. Cicero’s epistles to Atticus are the classically appointed models for his correspondence with Sidney. As early as January of 1574, Languet notes his approval of his pupil’s study of the “volumes of Cicero’s letters,” imitating thereby his own preceptor’s recommendation for how to make imitatio the proper pedagogical basis for mastering oratio.66 As Melanchthon writes in his extended discussion of imitation in his Elementorum rhetorices, it is Cicero, as the master-imitator among imitators, who perfected in his own age Roman eloquence (“eloquentiam Romanam perfectam fuisse”), and who is, thereby, the supreme model for teaching imitation.67 Moreover, Languet’s account of the value of Cicero’s letters points again both to his broad humanistic aims (read them, he writes, “not only for the beauty of the Latin, but also for the very important matter they contain”), and the philosophical character of those aims (“There is nowhere a better statement of the causes which overthrew the Roman Republic”). Always, he insists on the necessary work of identifying causes, especially causes that enhance or threaten liberty.
Similar to Cicero’s letters, with their reflections on the demise of the Republic, Languet’s are eloquently replete with warnings about the causes of Christendom’s always imminent overthrow—and though he neglects to say so here, replete with celebrations of an idealized friendship affording consolation amidst his woes. Friendship is the constant theme of their correspondence and key to Languet’s architectonic aim of keeping in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions. Cicero supplies useful matter for teaching Sidney how his “greatest happiness (next to the worship of God)” rests “in the cultivation of friendship with good men” (Languet’s pious qualification is telling).68 But in order to understand how friendship helps Languet realize his oratorical aims, the appropriate context to invoke comes again from Melanchthon. In his Epitome ethices (1532), Melanchthon defines friendship as:69
a form of justice in which benevolence is given in return for benevolence, and is made up of a certain particular and liberal communication of duties. And it must be known that friendship is a virtue, that we may cultivate friendships on account of virtue; and further it must be stated that it is also justice, so that we may religiously maintain our mutual faith and benevolence.
In view of the vast currency of the ideal in the Renaissance, there is little original about Melanchthon’s celebration of friendship as a virtue, or even as a form of justice (classical and contemporary precedents for both are legion). What does seem distinctively Philippist, however, is his insistence on the peculiar moral power of the virtue to educate—to provide for the “communication of duties”—and to secure a cosmopolitan community of pious, like-minded benefactors as a consequence. Nothing is more usual for Languet than to invoke the “laws of friendship” in order to impress upon Sidney a sense of his responsibilities—both personal and public, moral and religious. And no activist worked harder to acquire an international network (Nicolier’s “réseau”) of friends. Avuncularly intrusive, ready with advice on every subject from his diet and dress to his itinerary and companions, from his finances to his marital status, from his judgment of particular individuals to particular nations (and the list goes on and on), Languet is the very embodiment of Melanchthon’s portrait of the friend as liberal communicator of duties.
Languet echoes, too, his preceptor’s insistence on the mutual faith necessary to a community of friends. Applied by Languet in an era of fiercely divisive confessionalism, the “mutual faith” enjoyed by friends is interpreted literally. He advises Sidney to choose his friends according to similarity of religious belief, just as he writes frequently about “our friends” as a means of identifying members of his political party or, sometimes more loosely, fellow Reformed Christians or (indeterminately) fellow Christians. Languet calculates coolly, too, the advantages of a friendship between Sidney and the powerful Cecil, and necessary measures to cultivate more friendly ties with Walsingham. Having powerful friends matters to Sidney’s future success as a statesman, and emphasizing their usefulness supplies one more means by which Sidney’s mind can be focused on the cause that ought to govern plans and actions.
Friendship figures so prominently as a topic in their correspondence, also and just as importantly, because of Languet’s faith in the ideal economy of virtue into which true friendship affords access. It is necessary to write about an idealized economy of virtue because, inspired by conventional assumptions current among (though hardly peculiar to) Philippists, Languet views true friendship as the consequence of a mutual love of virtue, a mutual love that makes friend embrace friend (Melanchthon’s language is conventional here) as “another self.” Virtue becomes the cause of affection, and affection the cause of pleasure, and pleasure the cause of imitation inside friendship’s economy. Languet imitates Cicero by highlighting a virtue that itself operates as a species of imitation. As Melanchthon writes, “similitude is a common object of friendship. For universal nature so has it that like things are easily joined with like,” or as the point is restated, “friendship ought to bring about some similarity so that like may be friend to like.”70 In the love of virtue and the affection that proceeds from reciprocal benevolence, friend becomes like friend. This is the logic that explains, for instance, Languet’s self-congratulation for having successfully urged Sidney’s friendship with Philip, Count of Hanau (one of those several young Philips upon whose shoulders he placed the hopes of the Reformed cause), “for it is the similarity of your behavior, and your common pursuit of virtue, that have promoted it.”71 The same logic motivates Mornay’s lament, years later, over the loss of another self in losing Sidney at Zutphen.72 And it is this same logic, too, that explains the intense affection existing between Languet as an aging Burgundian at the twilight of a ruined career and the young, English Sidney, ripe with the expectation of a brilliant future. The two are united by a love of virtue, that all-encompassing abstraction that figures inside the correspondence as shorthand in its public and political implications for love of the cause.
Inside this economy of virtue, friendship is the theme most readily accommodated to Languet’s principal preoccupation, educating Sidney in the knowledge of himself. For a Philippist of Languet’s disposition and training, convinced that friendship is intimately tied to the communication of duties, the transition from one theme to the other, from friendship to identity, is easily accomplished, since the pursuit of duty (named alternatively virtue, excellence, or the way of salvation) defines who and what one is. In an early letter, Languet tells Sidney of his hope of befriending him to “those men who … love and admire excellence in any man whatsoever, since I had no doubt that by your behavior you would readily be able to win their favor.” Languet’s idealization of the young Philip is rhetorically purposeful. Sidney is both praised and held accountable to the judgment of that community of “friends” to which Languet has dedicated his life. He adds that Sidney should always succeed in having such friends “provided that you do not swerve from yourself or become a different man.”73
Similar reflections on his pupil’s success in cultivating friends lead to similar remarks about selfhood in another early letter: “My dear boy, as long as you do not swerve from yourself, nowhere will you be without good men to show you affection and courtesy.” Piously and paternally, Languet elaborates on this idealized version of Sidney’s self when he writes: “And if in early manhood your virtue bears such sweet fruit, what do you think will happen after twenty or thirty years, if you adhere steadfastly to your excellent intentions?”74 Sidney’s self is idealized, here as elsewhere in the correspondence, as a self-in-the making, a self whose excellence depends on fulfilling future expectations. That self, again, is dynamic and expansive, necessarily subject to change, even as (amidst these changes) it discovers the constancy of its own nature. Once more, as Languet is at pains to indicate throughout the early letters, his future expectations (about the changes that will make him who he truly is) proceed from divine providence: “God has bestowed mental powers on you which I do not believe have fallen to anyone else I know, and he has done so … for you to put them in the service of your country, and of all good men.” Sidney is merely “the steward of this gift,” those mental powers providentially granted for the service of his country and all good men, or to shift metaphors for the sake of clarifying the point, Sidney is merely an actor in a drama scripted by God.75
In contrast to this studied representation of Sidney’s idealized self, Languet writes with increasing frequency during the early correspondence about another, very different Philip Sidney—a Sidney too easily seduced by pleasure, luxury, ease and what his mentor refers to most often as idleness. As a Philippist, aware that salvation can be lost, that David the psalmist is also David the adulterer and murderer, Languet has fears about change as well. In the letters that date from the period of Sidney’s stay on the Continent, there are occasional references to his suspect pleasure in “lingering” too long in Italy, and constant complaints about his “negligence” as a correspondent. The volume of complaints about idleness echoes still more loudly in the later correspondence as Sidney returns to England in late 1575. As early as September, disturbed by the infrequency of his letters, Languet is already warning him to “shun that vile Siren, Idleness!” His choice of mythologies speaks to the nature of his fears: that the young heroic Philip will be seduced from his quest for what Languet elsewhere calls service to his country and all good men. It may be that Languet had real anxiety about Sidney’s taste for pleasure, and the potential sinfulness (particularly for young men) associated with such a taste. (After all, as a Philippist, Languet was schooled in Melanchthon’s reading of the fall and his distinctive emphasis on Adam’s original sin as an instance, simultaneously, of self-love and indolence.) More prominent, however, are Languet’s fears about Sidney’s continued devotion to the cause. A letter from August begins by threatening to blame his “weakness of spirit and love of leisure” should he cease “to cherish” eloquent accomplishments. It ends by detailing the threats of the Spanish and the Italians against “those in France and the Low Countries who profess the reformed faith,” concluding with the warning: “and once they are overwhelmed, I do not know how long you will be allowed to enjoy your luxurious idleness.”76 Idleness is such a dangerous siren because by threatening to seduce Sidney from his love of the cause, it threatens what Languet alludes to as his pupil’s divinely appointed story, his providentially appointed future and self: “Do not think that God bestowed so fine a mind upon you for you to let it decay through disuse; but believe instead that he demands more of you than of others to whom he has been less generous.”77
Languet’s counsels against the siren sin of idleness are of a piece, therefore, with his larger architectonic goal—to keep in Sidney’s sight the cause that ought to govern plans and actions. Christendom was threatened by tragedies, authored principally by the Pope and Spain, and the consequences of those papal arts were as plain as the death and exile of Languet’s compatriots in Saxony, the threat of renewed civil war in France, and Don John’s campaign of confessional cleansing in the Netherlands. Similarly dark plots threatened England too, as Languet reminds his pupil in letter after letter inveighing against the folly of remaining an idle spectator before Christendom’s impending catastrophe.
Languet’s letters summon Sidney to assume his providentially appointed role within what he represents as urgent historical drama, to employ his “virtue,” as one early letter has it, as the salvation both of himself and his country.78 In another, he writes: “see it you do not fail your country in its very grave peril.”79 By so summoning Sidney, Languet manifests, of course, his own devotion to the cause. Once more, he fulfills his responsibilities as Sidney’s teacher and friend. During his lifetime, Languet enjoyed few intimate relationships—and his most passionate relationships were the ones cultivated with Philip Melanchthon and with Philip Sidney. That fact goes some distance toward explaining the unique and fiercely personal status of this correspondence in his canon, and his evident desire to replicate in his friendship with Sidney the transformative intimacy that he enjoyed with Melanchthon, the teacher who, by his own account, both changed him and made him himself. (As that first Philip wrote: “similitude is a common object of friendship.”) More, however, than Languet’s all-too-obvious devotion to the cause, his moralizing pedagogy, and his friendship are involved in this summons to Sidney to assume his role in the drama of contemporary events.
Also important is the evidence of Languet’s commitment to Philippist oratio in the formal disposition of such a summons. When the Philippists sought to provide Melanchthon with a publicly persuasive account of himself and his cause, they did so, as I have shown, by constructing complementary portraits of him as St. Basil and Ermolao di Barbaro/Hercules. Set into the footsteps of Basil and Barbaro, positioned (that is) inside the idealized narratives of these historical figures as a means of clarifying the real story about himself, Melanchthon is subject to transformation as revelation. His complementary devotion to the Word and to words represents the essence of who and what he is. In turn, those portraits of the elder Melanchthon derive their formal logic from contemporary Protestant interpretations of scripture, with their emphasis on the shaping power of the Word (embodied in the natural words of scripture) to transform the old into the new man reborn in Christ—that new man identified as, yet again, an idealized narrative inside which the individual discovers another and (paradoxically) truer self.
Considered within this context, Languet’s early correspondence with Sidney appears similarly motivated. As a devotee of the cause, as a teacher and a friend, and as a humanist trained in Philippist oratio, with a belief in the transformative power of words and the Word, Languet seeks to imitate in his letters Sidney’s own virtue, so that informed and transformed by that architectonic knowledge of himself, Sidney can pass from well-knowing to well-doing in the service of his country and all good men. Invited to read in Languet’s correspondence an idealized story of himself as the potential savior of his country and his cause, to discover in self-knowledge his own devotion to liberty, Sidney is asked to see his life as a salvation narrative, even as a sort of saving fiction. Recovering the logic of selfhood that underlies the formal disposition of Languet’s correspondence matters so profoundly, on the one hand, because of its power in shaping Sidney’s sense of himself: the very fact that he gives his life for the cause is proof enough of that point.80 There is, on the other hand, a second reason for emphasizing the importance of the logic of selfhood that underlies the formal disposition of Languet’s letters. The identification of the self with an idealized story of the self, in representations designed at once to inform and transform, is both a Philippist principle of oratio and a foundational principle of Sidney’s poetics in the Defence. As I will show, Melanchthon is as crucial for understanding Sidney’s poetics as he is for appreciating his piety and his politics. Piety, politics, and poetry come to form a complex amalgam for Sidney, with real and unforeseeable consequences for his defense of fiction-making as the preeminent form of knowledge in the public domain.
1 “Johann Sturm to Michael Beuther,” 1565, p. 291.
2 Their birth years are as follows: Henry Sidney (1524), Charles de l’Écluse (1526), Henri Estienne (1528), Francis Walsingham (c. 1530), and William of Orange (1533). Sidney’s teachers, Sturm (1507) and Languet (1518), were the oldest of the old men.
3 Godly Prayers, p. ii (verso). See Bellucci on light in Melanchthon’s natural philosophical and theological texts, p. 229–34. Light is material and spiritual, splendid evidence of the son’s (sun’s) real presence in nature and the mind.
4 See Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), who is especially helpful in pointing to distinctions in his thought between nature and grace, Law and Gospel.
5 Godly Prayers, p. 65 (verso).
6 For Melanchthon’s success in stimulating the outpouring of neo-Latin literature in Germany (1540–1620), see Manfred P. Fleischer, “Melanchthon as Praeceptor of Late-Humanist Poetry,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 4 (1989), esp. 577–8, where he writes about the enormous popularity among these Philippist poets, such as Melissus, Sabinus, and Lotichius, of what he calls “the all-embracing metaphor” of German late-humanism, the golden world topos. See also the highly nationalistic celebration of German poetry in the extended preface to Crato’s edition of Epigrammatum Reverendi Viri Philippi Melanthonis Libri Sex, and the central role accorded to Melanchthon in encouraging its development.
7 Sidney to Hubert Languet, March 1578, in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1912–26), vol. 3, 119. For Languet’s pleasure in the remark, see Languet to Sidney, 2 May 1578, in Pears, p. 147: “Make use then of that particle of the Divine Mind (as you beautifully express it) which you possess, for the preservation and not the destruction of men.”
8 Godly Prayers, p. iii (verso), epistle.
9 Ralph Keen reads the text as an address both to reform-minded Catholics and to Protestant princes and theologians in “Political Authority and Ecclesiology in Melanchthon’s ‘De Ecclesiae Autoritate’,” Church History 65, no. 1 (March 1996), 1–14. A Godly and learned Assertion, Epistle Dedicatory, n. p.
10 Just as predictably, Robinson mentions nothing about the failure of the Diet at Ratisbone (1541) to achieve meaningful compromise. For an historical account of that Diet, see MacCulloch, The Reformation, p. 221–5.
11 A Godly and learned Assertion, Epistle Dedicatory, n.p. Robinson echoes (unintentionally) Sidney’s letter to the Count of Hanau as he returned from the Continent in 1575, where he muses darkly on an England without Elizabeth: “She is to us a Meleager’s brand; when it perishes, farewell to all our quietness,” Sidney to Count of Hanau, 12 June 1575 in Osborn, p. 309. As is customary in Sidney’s canon, the term “quietness” is unambiguously positive.
12 Godly Prayers, p. 66 (verso).
13 Letter to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, in Feuillerat, vol. 3, 130.
14 In a recent essay, Bruce Gordon argues for the need while studying early modern religious cultures for scholars to “become increasingly sensitive to how religion was received, appropriated, and localized” (p. 68), and demonstrates in the context of Switzerland that Melanchthon’s legacy meant very different things to different communities, “Wary Allies: Melanchthon and the Swiss Reformers,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 45–68.
15 Strigelius was opposed by Flacius Illyricus during the so-called Weimar Debates (August 2–8 1560)—a series of public disputations about the subject of the will’s freedom, which James W. Richard has called “the most violent of all the Lutheran controversies of the sixteenth century,” The Confessional History of the Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1909), p. 371. As Richard writes, “the principal contention of Strigel was that sin is an accident in man, that he has been deeply wounded …”; for Flacius, by contrast, sin is a “corruption of the essence of man,” 360–61. For one, the will has a modus agendi of its own: God draws, but he draws him who is willing. For the other, the will is completely passive and without power to cooperate in the process of salvation; see esp. p. 358–72. For a recent translation of the Weimar Disputation, see Documents from the History of Lutheranism, ed. Eric Lund (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), p. 202–3. See too Luther D. Peterson’s “Synergist Controversy,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 133–5.
16 Francesco Patrizi, A moral methode of ciuile policie contayninge a learned and fruictful discourse of the institution, state and gouernment of a common weale. Abridged oute of the co[m]mentaries of the reuerende and famous clerke, Franciscus Patricius, Byshop of Caieta in Italye, trans. Richard Robinson (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576). The discrepancy between the book’s marginalia (strikingly orthodox) and its contents (openly republican) suggests Robinson’s low estimation of the censor’s aptitude for careful reading.
17 I am quick to note that citing Sidney’s interest in republican political thought is different from arguing for his commitment to “republicanism”: in the campaign to liberate the Netherlands, republican literature could and did provide intellectual arms against tyranny without supplying a model for government. For scholarly documentation of those interests, see Worden, p. 227–52. That same political interest is documented, too, in Victor Skretkowicz’s “Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, Henri Estienne, and Huguenot Nationalist Satire,” Sidney Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 3–24. My point in attending to Robinson’s republican politics in conjunction with Strigelius’s synergism is to highlight, in that spider’s web of the political and the pious, the paramount importance of liberty to Sidney’s mentors.
18 On Melanchthon’s increasing insistence in his late career on “the connection between faith and intellectual culture,” (p. 17), see Wilhelm Pauck, “Luther and Melanchthon,” in Luther and Melanchthon, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961). For a probing exposition of and assault on that connection, see Franz Hildebrandt, Melanchthon: Alien or Ally? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1946). “Deus ipse invitet nos ad hanc Philosophiam,” (God himself invites us to this Philosophy), as Melanchthon writes, since the study of philosophy brings real knowledge about God—not the saving knowledge coming from Gospel alone, but necessary knowledge enjoined by the Gospel itself, CR 21, 370. See Bellucci on the distinction between the knowledge of God afforded by grace, and what is possible from the exercise of natural reason, p. 202–5, 646–8. For a concise treatment of the issue in relation to Melanchthon’s full career, see David C. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 49–57. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see especially Chapter 3.
19 Languet to Gaspard de Niedbruck, 1 December 1553, quoted in Nicollier-de Weck, p. 32.
20 Melanchthon’s dedication to the studia humanitatis is evidenced by his lifelong position at Wittenberg as a professor of Greek. In his collected works, there are some 93 editions, commentaries and translations of Greek and Roman texts. His “humanism” is distinguishable from Erasmus’s partly, as Wengert demonstrates, because of sharp theological differences, and partly, as John Schneider argues, because of contrasts between their understandings of language and epistemology. See Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon and the Rhetorical Construal of Biblical Authority: Oratio Sacra (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), p. 58–9. Schneider is right to insist on Melanchthon’s status as a humanist precisely because of his deep belief in the indispensability of the studia humanitatis for the knowledge of God. “Primum enim omnino ilias malorum est inerudita Theologia,” (the worst of all evils is an uneducated theology) wrote Melanchthon—and a lack of education meant the absence (in great measure) of knowledge obtained from humanistic studies [ De philosophia (1536), CR 11, 280]. For a history of Melanchthon’s early struggle to adapt his education to his Reformed theology, see Wilhelm Maurer, Der junge Melanchthon zwischen Humanismus und Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967–69), 2 vols.
21 See CR 9, 442–3. An account of this portrait’s significance appears in Kusukawa, whose primary concern is the contrast between Luther and Melanchthon’s oral and visual epistemologies (p. 188–96). Kusukawa identifies Basil’s homily on humility in the particular Erasmian edition portrayed by Cranach, as well as the quotation from Corinthians. For a study of the individual portrait, see Werner Schade, Cranach, A Family of Master Painters, trans. Helen Sebba (Putnam: New York, 1980). For Melanchthon’s interest in Basil, see E.P. Meijering, Melanchthon and Patristic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 88–9. More recently, Joseph Leo Koerner has investigated Cranach’s representations of the theological controversy between the Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans in The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 388–401.
22 For Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae, see Bellucci, p. 363–70. For his concept of the Law and the extraordinarily important revision in his notions about the meaning of the Law (particularly his creation of the concept of the so-called Third Law) in relation to his developing natural theology, see Wengert’s Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), and Chapter 3.
23 See Manfred Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutics of Erasmus (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994) on Erasmus’s theologia rhetorica and the transformative power that he ascribes to bonae litterae, p. 4, 81.
24 For illustrations, see Schade. Roland H. Bainton highlights the popularity of this biblical literalism among the German Reformers in “Durer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows,” Art Bulletin 29, no. 1 (1947), 269–72. In that connection, see too the more recent study by Thomas Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Chapter 1, “‘Not I, but Christ’: The Puritan Self–Escape from Allegory?,” p. 1–33.
25 For a fuller discussion of Melanchthon’s rhetorical and dialectical thought, see Chapter 2. As Donald B. Kuspit has demonstrated, Melanchthon had an enduring interest in the visual arts as complements to the work of preaching, “Melanchthon and Durer: The Search for the Simple Style,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 1973), 177–202. Hence, the notion that a painting can be “read” as a book is familiar within an intellectual circle that conceived of loci communes—the commonplaces of rhetoric and dialectic—as “hypotyposes,” speaking pictures. When Cranach published a woodcut drawn from this same portrait a year later, he included a poem that points to the same connection between painting and books: “Philippus aber selber hat/In seinen Schrifften mit der that/Ein Muster seins verstands gar eben/Und hohen Gmüts an tag gegeben/Denn er hat selbs sein eigne gaben/Abmaln können .…” (But Philip himself revealed in his writings indeed a model of his power of mind and of his high spirit as well, for he was able to paint a picture of his own gifts.) See Schade, Woodcut 49. Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann argues for a similar interchange between rhetoric and the visual arts at the Hapsburg court in “The Eloquent Artist: Towards an Understanding of the Stylistics of Painting at the Court of Rudolf II,” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 1 (1982–83), 119–48.
26 On this point, see Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 58.
27 See Schade, p. 103.
28 See Loci Communes 1555: “Tantum velis, et Deus praeoccurrit. We need only to will, and God has already come to us,” in Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, trans. and ed. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 60.
29 As E.P. Meijering writes in a useful explanation of the history of Melanchthon’s thinking about free will, the 1555 Loci contains “the most important shift in Melanchthon’s views on free will: these spiritual acts [those involved in the work of salvation] are not the work of the Holy Spirit, but they are done with the help of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, when it is at work in man, needs the Word of God through which it speaks and it needs the consent of the human will …,” p. 134. More recent and more comprehensive discussion of the topic appears in Wolfgang Matz, Der befreite Mensch: die Willenslehre in der Theologie Philipp Melanchthons (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001).
30 Epigrammatum, E3 (verso)–E4 (recto), “De Dicto Johan. Baptistae.” See too CR 10, 651. Annabel Patterson notes the poem’s first appearance among Melanchthon’s epigrams in “Philip Melanchthon: Reading the Face and the Page,” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 4, suppl. (January 2001), 139–51.
31 See the introduction to the 1555 Loci by Hans Engelland who argues, by contrast, that Melanchthon had contradictory views about predestination, which suggest that he “does not reject predestination in principle—even in the sense of reprobation, but admonishes practically and pastorally about it,” p. xli. Later Philippists, however, largely opposed the concept, as Engelland notes (while showing his own interpretive biases): “The important theological deficiencies of the time following Melanchthon are more the responsibility of students who fragmented what he had fused,” p. xli. See Bellucci on Melanchthon’s rejection of Stoic determinism, p. 57–65. On page 63, he discusses Melanchthon’s refusal of determinism, lest God be viewed as a tyrant. See too on predestination, Timothy Wengert’s “‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 13–19.
32 See Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, for an elaboration of this argument, p. 208–49. For an analytical account of the systematic employment of rhetorical and dialectical categories to the organization of Melanchthon’s whole range of thought—educational, philosophical, and theological—see Siegfried Wiedenhofer, Formalstrukturen humanisticher und reformatorischer Theologie bei Philipp Melanchthon (Frankfurt: Peter Lang; Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976). Wiedenhofer’s study comes complete, in the schematic tradition of German philology, with elaborately detailed charts of those interrelationships.
33 Erika Rummel correctly attributed the letter to Franz Burchard (Franciscus Vinariensis) in “Epistola Hermolai nova ac subditicia: A Declamation Falsely Ascribed to Philip Melanchthon,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 83 (1992), 302–5. My one minor disagreement with Rummel is her assertion that the printings of Burchard’s letter “clearly indicate[d] the extent of Melanchthon’s contribution,” p. 304. Insofar as the printings indicated that the book was edited “cum dispositione Philippi Melanchthonis, quia continent illustria exempla Dialectices,” the reprinting does clearly point to Melanchthon’s division of the text into sections and his annotating of its rhetorical arguments. In the absence of Burchard’s name, however, it cannot have been “clear” that the letter itself was written by someone other than Melanchthon since it was published with Melanchthon’s own Elementorum rhetorices. Such confusion seems especially likely since the very form of the letter as a mock-oration automatically renders the question of authorship a literary game. The “real” author wouldn’t identify himself as Melanchthon, of course, readers could very well assume, because the real author is—well—Barbaro himself!
34 Quirinus Breen, “Melanchthon’s Reply to G. Pico Della Mirandola,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 413–26. For the Latin text, see CR 9, 687–703. For a full exposition of the letter in relation to contemporary debates of its kind, see Erika Rummel, The Humanistic-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 147–51.
35 “Reply,” 416.
36 For a study of Melanchthon’s interweaving of logical and theological concepts, see Kees Meerhoff, Entre logique et littérature: Autour de Philippe Melanchthon (Orleans: Paradigme, 2001). For an argument on behalf of his rigorous subordination of rhetoric to logic, see p. 66–8. “Reply,” 418, 423.
37 On the performative aspects of Reformed understandings about language, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).
38 “Reply,” 416.
39 “Reply,” 417.
40 “Reply,” 417–18.
41 “Reply,” 421.
42 “Reply,” 422.
43 “Reply,” 425. See Oratio de studiis linguae Graecae (1549) in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. Robert Stupperich (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1951–75), vol. 3: 139, 143. In an extended defense of his own career, Melanchthon writes: “Diximus linguam Graecam magistram et quasi fontem esse non tantum caelestis doctrinae, sed et reliquarum artium …” (We assert that the Greek language is the teacher and, so to speak, the fountainhead not only of the heavenly doctrine but also of all the arts), elaborating on his assertion to demonstrate not only the importance of that knowledge (secular and sacred) contained in the fountain, but also the foundational rhetorical and dialectical tools required to access its waters. The pursuit of knowledge ad fontes goes well beyond linguistic or broad philological learning: Melanchthon’s claims are about the accessibility in the Greek language of the fountain of universal learning, divinely accommodated to human use.
44 “Reply,” 425.
45 In the 1550s, Melanchthon was stung by Osiander’s accusation that his adoption of the juridical language of “imputation” to his account of justification had diminished Luther’s emphasis on the transformative power of Christ’s presence inside the faithful. Against that charge, Melanchthon replied: “Haec de praesentia Dei seu inhabitatione in renatis clare affirmamus …; sed re ipsa praesentes Pater et Filius spirant Spiritum S. in cor credentis. Et haec praesentia et habitatio est hoc, quod dicitur novitas spiritualis” (We clearly affirm the presence or inward dwelling of God in the reborn …; the Father and Son are actually present, breathing the Holy Spirit into the heart of the one who believes. This presence or inward dwelling is called spiritual renewal), Condemnatio scriptorum Culmanni et Vetteri …, CR 8, 582.
46 For a chart illustrating changes from one version of the Loci to another, 1521 to 1559, see Wiedenhofer, p. 397–8.
47 Loci communes theologici (1521), trans. Lowell J. Satre and Wilhelm Pauck in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 73.
48 Loci (1521), p. 19.
49 Loci Communes 1555, p. 59, 155.
50 To know oneself is to accept as an act of faith the promise of the Word, to receive justification by virtue of faith, and to begin a progress of sanctification by which one is transformed into Christ—a progress of the self-in-the-making always ongoing since sanctification is necessarily incomplete in this world. It is possible for a Christian to lose his salvation in Melanchthon’s thought, so the activity of renewing faith by renewing knowledge lends an urgency to his story of soteriology unique among the major Reformers. See Condemnatio, CR 8, 582.
51 Loci Communes 1555, p. 39.
52 In his encouragement especially of astrology, mathematics, geometry, and physics, from Commentarius de anima (1540) to Initia doctrinae physicae (1549) to Liber de Anima (1553), Melanchthon first elaborated a comprehensive Reformed natural philosophy. Nature is a book of God’s works, “an open testimony” parallel to the book of God’s Word. Both “testimonies” invite investigation from rational beings whose pursuit of knowledge from all sources, natural and moral, secular and sacred, is endorsed as an inspiration, at once, to private virtue and to public civility—as well a necessary complement to the work of salvation. For a fuller explication of that “necessity” in relation to Melanchthon’s introduction of the concept of the so-called “Third Law,” see Chapter 3. For necessary cautions about fundamental distinctions between natural knowledge and the revealed knowledge (of Christ) that brings salvation, see Bellucci, p. 586, 650.
53 Loci Communes 1555, p. 39.
54 Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Book 1 (1546) in The Melanchthon Reader, trans. Ralph Keen (New York: Lang, 1988), p. 182. “Ita ultimus gradus bonorum seu finis semper in conspectu esse debet, ut consilia et actiones gubernet,” CR 16, 285.
55 “Istorum malorum fons et origo est quod nolunt suis voluptatibus quicquam Reip. causa decedere …,” Languet to Camerarius the Younger, 16 May 1569, cited by Nicollier-de Weck, p. 215–16.
56 Languet to Sidney, 19 February 1574, in Osborn, p. 149.
57 Languet to Sidney, 26 March 1574, in Pears, p. 42–3.
58 Languet to Sidney, 11 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 172.
59 Languet to Sidney, 7 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 185–6.
60 Languet to Sidney, 19 February 1574, in Osborn, p. 149.
61 Languet to Sidney, 26 March 1574, in Pears, p. 42.
62 Languet to Sidney, 1 May 1574 (p. 173) and 7 May 1574, in Osborn, p. 186.
63 His contemporaries thought highly enough of Languet’s humanistic skills to employ him on the enormous project of composing the Centuries, a history organized according to Melanchthon’s loci scheme for methodizing the study of theology. See Nicollier-de Weck, p. 46–7.
64 Languet to Sidney, 19 November 1573, in Pears, p. 2.
65 Languet to Sidney, 22 January 1574, in Pears, p. 26.
66 For Languet’s modeling of his letters to Sidney on Cicero’s epistles, see Berry, p. 32–48. My emphasis on Languet’s mediation of that model through his Philippist training elicits a different account of Sidney’s selfhood and education. While Berry highlights “the conservative conception of human nature” and “society” inscribed in the correspondence—peculiar terms to attach to these tyrannomachists—it is precisely the urgency to inspire change, the confidence in education to effect metamorphosis (that variety of change that makes us who we “naturally” are) that motivates Languet’s effort to educate Sidney in the meaning of the cause—and the meaning of liberty, as Cicero himself might have called it, p. 33. Languet to Sidney, 1 January 1574, in Pears, p. 20.
67 Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1542) in CR 13, 493. Melanchthon repeats the praise in his preface to his commentary on Cicero’s epistles, explaining that their eloquence renders them “Latinae linguae parentem” (the parent of the Latin language) partly for reasons of style, partly for reasons of matter—since their moral instruction fits what he calls the “praecipuus scopus” (chief purpose) of all education, CR 17, 13 and 17. Again, paternity counts.
68 Languet to Sidney, 5 February 1574, in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, 1573–76, ed. Charles S. Levy (Ph. D. dissertation, Cornell Univ., 1962), p. 72.
69 Summary of Ethics, in The Melanchthon Reader, p. 235.
70 Summary of Ethics, p. 236–7.
71 Languet to Sidney, 26 February 1574, in Levy, p. 89.
73 Languet to Sidney, 4 December 1573, in Levy, p. 12.
74 Languet to Sidney, 26 February 1574, in Levy, p. 89.
75 Languet to Sidney, 11 June 1574, in Levy, p. 193.
76 Languet to Sidney, 13 August 1575, in Levy, p. 269, 274.
77 Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 301.
78 Languet to Sidney, 5 March 1574, in Levy, p. 102.
79 Languet to Sidney, 18 April, 1574, in Levy, p. 140.
80 Sidney’s fullest expression of this vision about himself as an actor whose role in the world is scripted by God appears in a letter to Walsingham written shortly before his death at Zutphen. After declaring his “love of the caws,” he writes: “I think a wyse and constant man ought never to greev whyle he doth plai as a man mai sai his own part truly … I know there is a hyer power that must uphold me or els I shall fall, but certainly I trust, I shall not by other mens wants be drawn from my self,” 24 March 1586, in Feuillerat, vol. 3, 166.