Sidney begins his account of poetry’s major aim or purpose, as I have shown, with a piece of rhetorical fanfare. He models his argument on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by “marking the scope of other sciences,” by contrasting, that is, poetry’s aims with those of rival disciplines (99). Sidney’s fanfare has a purpose: it heightens emphatically the status of the poet’s golden world as a vehicle of knowledge. It makes sense, then, in the allusive economy of the text that Sidney should conclude the central portion of the Defence of Poesy by returning to Aristotle’s Ethics. In order to establish a principle for weighing poetry’s value relative to that of rival sciences, he employs the Aristotelian term, architectonike or “master-science,” the science best suitable for “knowledge of a man’s self” (104). Poetry rather than history or philosophy, Sidney proceeds to argue, best suits that goal. The apparent simplicity of this movement from an Aristotelian structure of argument to an Aristotelian term of art is complicated, however, by the assertively non-Aristotelian character of Sidney’s conclusion.
Aristotelian argument and terminology are placed in the service of a non-Aristotelian aim, most importantly, because of Sidney’s fundamentally non-Aristotelian conception about what it means for human beings to have self-knowledge. While self-knowledge includes “ethic and politic consideration[s],” and results in the goal of “well-doing and not of well-knowing only” as “the ending end of all earthly doing,” it is a virtue simultaneously “having this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind … to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). Self-knowledge, for Sidney, is knowledge about the self created in the image of God. That is what it means to have a “divine essence.” But what knowledge about God is possible to fallen man—to “degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings”—beyond what the deity has chosen to reveal about himself in the Bible (104)? Closely connected to this question about knowledge are crucial issues concerning anthropology and culture. If salvation comes to human kind sola scriptura and sola fide, as an act of faith empowered by grace, then what sort of agency (if any) does the individual possess to realize his or her own salvation? What would be the point of “well-knowing” that leads to “well-doing” if works (practical or poetic) are without redemptive merit? And what kind of value could be claimed for the works of a classical tradition that precedes the knowledge of Christ? Pursuing answers to these questions about the scope of human agency in relation to the divine can clarify the character of that distinctive version of Christian piety animating Sidney’s poetics. Such clarity is necessary because when Sidney argues that poetry deserves “not to be scourged out of the Church of God,” he refers inclusively to the fictions of divine makers, such as David and Christ, as well as to the fictions of Homer, Virgil, Xenophon—all the bonae litterae of the classical tradition (99). At stake here is nothing less than the value of culture for Reformed Christianity.
Considerations of scope always matter for the interpretation of Sidney’s Defence, and such considerations have particular power to shed light on the piety of his poetics, in part because of the pious purposes to which the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi was prominently employed among his network of friends. As the preceding chapter has demonstrated, it is useful to turn first to Philip Melanchthon’s corpus to recover the rhetorical and dialectical significance of the term, but to understand how and why the scopus dicendi assumed significance among the confessional conflicts of late sixteenth-century Europe, it helps to move to the prose of another, more contemporary Philip, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. In Mornay’s first theological work, the Traicté de l’Église— written and published in London in 1578, and subsequently translated into English as the Treatise of the Church— the scopus dicendi furnishes argumentative power to a Reformed Christianity that is both soberly uncompromising and strategically moderate. It is the chief term in Mornay’s display of what I have characterized in Chapter 2 as the new hermeneutic. Three years later, in his most celebrated and erudite work, translated from the French into Latin as De veritate religionis christianae (1581), Mornay turns the oratorical scopus dicendi into a philosophical metaphor structuring his copiously documented, ecumenically inclusive demonstration of the truthfulness of the Christian religion.1 God is the target to which all right action aims. The scope of humankind, rightly understood, is knowledge about the self in relation to God—what Sidney calls “architectonic knowledge,” and such knowledge includes the “Reasons” and the “Testimonies” of the ancients. They are indispensable means for the Christian to survive within a world threatened by the ignorant—atheists, epicureans, Turks, Jews, and Christians indifferent to or unmindful of the truth of their own religion. Amidst the crises of confessional dispute, blasphemy, atheism and spiritual lassitude—all products of ignorance—the promise of the scopus dicendi is its power to create causeways across the spiritual abyss. Amidst such crises, too, questions about knowledge—knowledge about the self and about the relationship between the secular and the sacred—are more than abstract theological issues or questions for poetic debate. They are pressing matters of present-tense cultural concern.
Mornay’s Verité has long served as a touchstone for Sidney scholars eager to characterize the relationship between his piety, on the one hand, and his poetry and poetics, on the other. This eagerness extends from the close relationship between the two Philips, both friends and both champions of the cause of Reformed Christianity. The eagerness to identify Sidney’s pious beliefs with those of the Verité derives also from Sidney’s translation of some portion of the work, and the tacit approval of its piety that his translation implies.2 Over the past half-century, however, the Verité has proven an unusually slippery touchstone—and therefore an unusually difficult tool to employ in characterizing Sidney’s piety—because of the complexity of its own religious perspectives. D.P. Walker and Frances Yates have sought to align the Verité with various versions of Christian hermeticism, cabalism, and Rosicrucianism—as a sort of Protestantization of Pico della Mirandola’s aggressively optimistic “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” This reading has been pointedly rebuffed, in turn, by Andrew Weiner and Alan Sinfield, who insist on the Verité’s articulation of a darker, more pessimistic “Calvinist” orthodoxy.3 Whatever the merits of either position—or their several variants—the eagerness to identify the Verité with any single philosophical school, theological camp or confessional identity is already a misinterpretation of a text whose primary ambition is to remedy a cultural order ravaged by confessional conflict. The transcendence of the sixteenth-century’s identity politics is both its message and its mode. Turn from the Verité to the De veritate— the Latin translation of the work undertaken by Mornay in tribute to his Philippist mentor, Hubert Languet—and it is possible to locate its “scope” (its main aim or purpose) with far more clarity, and hence its utility as a touchstone for appreciating the ecumenical, moderate, cosmopolitan Christianity that informs Sidney’s Defence.4
Early in 1577 Mornay arrived in London for a stay of some 18 months, and established an intimate, enduring friendship with Sidney. Always a favorite among Continental Reformers, Sidney would be remembered by Mornay’s devoutly learned wife Charlotte d’Arbaleste as “the most highly accomplished gentleman in England.”5Sidney became godfather to Mornay’s infant daughter, baptized in June of 1578 as the politically correct Elizabeth. Mornay and Sidney established and continued a correspondence that lasted until the latter’s death, an event that provoked Mornay to write to Francis Walsingham, Sidney’s grieving father-in-law: “I have had troubles and labours enough in these sad days but none that touched me more to the heart so nearly. Henceforth I am resolved either to love no one, or to hate myself.”6Amidst the “sad days” of turmoil for Reformed Christians, the loss of Sidney was experienced—so closely had the two become identified—as a loss of self.
No one would have been less surprised or more pleased by the intimacy of their friendship than Languet, that Burgundian humanist and statesman whom Melanchthon praised so highly for his successful education of the Reformed elite.7 (High praise for the teacher from the teacher.) Five years older than Sidney, Mornay too was Languet’s studiously cultivated protégé, and as Roger Kuin has shown, Languet helped to plan for both young men similar cosmopolitan travels across similar political terrain.8Like Sidney, Mornay undertook a three-year tour of Continental Europe. He studied at the University of Padua, as Sidney would do. Like Sidney, he spent time in Venice in the ecumenically enlightened circle of the French ambassador, Arnaud Du Ferrier, a learned Catholic who some believed had secretly converted to Reformed Christianity, and there (like Sidney again) he made friends with François Perrot de Mézières, a Huguenot poet who several years after translated the Psalms.9 As Sidney would do, Mornay traveled to Florence and Genoa, he sojourned in Vienna among Languet’s circle of confessionally moderate humanists, and he ventured dangerously into Hungary. He too experienced first-hand the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August of 1572, and he even facilitated Languet’s escape from the city. Both Sidney and Mornay enjoyed an intellectual companionship with George Buchanan, Scotland’s leading Reformed humanist. Both contemplated military service in Ireland. Both were fascinated by the prospect of establishing plantations in the New World to defend against Spanish tyranny and to cultivate the freedom of the Gospel. Both shared a taste, too, for Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a pleasure acquired (one guesses) among the hills of Tuscany.10 In short, both were brilliantly educated, cosmopolitan humanists whose friendship was grounded first and foremost upon their shared commitment to the cause of a Reformed Christianity.
Once more, their commitment to the cause of a Reformed Christianity was impacted profoundly by their education under Languet—always the student and devotee of Philip Melanchthon. In a recent, extensive biography of Mornay’s political career, from the early years of the grand tour to his subsequent political suicide at the court of Henry IV, Hugues Daussy has brought new clarity to the convictions guiding his public life.11 In his detailed account of Mornay’s emergence during the 1570s as a diplomat and apologist for the Huguenot cause, Daussy attributes Mornay’s core political principles squarely to Languet’s tutelage. Those political principles merit attention here because of what they reveal about the character of Mornay’s personal piety and about that core of Christian beliefs shared among this circle of friends—beliefs with a shaping power over Sidney’s Defence.
Mornay profited from his access to Languet’s extensive international network of allies—from the politically important contacts made (among many others) with Arnaud Du Ferrier in Venice, Admiral Coligny in Paris, and William of Orange in the Netherlands. What he learned from Languet, however, in Daussy’s memorable phrase, was partisanship on behalf of “une moderation sans compromission” (a moderation without compromise).12 The uncompromising quality of Mornay’s commitment to the cause of international Protestantism is widely recognized. He shared Languet’s profound fears about the perils of the Catholic League—that militant coalition of Tridentine Catholic powers intent (as Languet’s réseau believed) upon the destruction of Reformed Christianity—and he advocated, among the godly driven to despair in defense of the church, militant opposition to those powers.13 In turn, he authored the century’s most sophisticated and most notorious defense of active resistance to tyranny, his Vindiciae contra tyrannos—a tyrannomachist tract with strong roots (as Chapter 4 will demonstrate) in the natural law politics of Languet’s circle. Mornay himself was a soldier, several times wounded, captured, and ransomed. By action and by word, Mornay’s uncompromising commitment allied him to those “forward Protestants” in England, who, as Blair Worden documents, urged active military intervention from Queen Elizabeth on behalf of beleaguered co-religionists on the Continent.
Less widely recognized, but equally crucial for understanding his public principles, was Mornay’s commitment to “moderation,” a term whose potential vagueness calls for historical contextualization. From Languet, Mornay learned the value of cultivating friendships with broad-minded and well-educated Catholics like the historian, Jacques Auguste de Thou, and the architect (years later) of the Edict of Nantes, Paul de Foix. Like those other moderate Catholics, Michel de l’Hospital and Arnaud Du Ferrier, both de Thou and de Foix were jurists educated at Padua, spokesmen for toleration (however variously conceived), and products of that classical rhetorical tradition of the interpretatio scripti, which mattered so profoundly for the creation of the new hermeneutic and which lent itself so readily (by its encouragement of accommodation and equity) to a politics of toleration. Just like Languet also, Mornay indulged tirelessly in lamenting the wounds that the French wars of religion had inflicted upon his homeland. He had a genuine, irenic horror of warfare. Once more, with the publication of his Exhortation á la paix aux catholiques françois (1574) and his Remonstrance aux Estats pour la paix (1576), Mornay emerged by the late 1570s as the Huguenot’s most avid and most capable advocate of toleration. As a minority within France, the Reformed could never expect a military triumph, and his promotion of mutual toleration between Catholics and the Reformed—parties united by their belief in the same Bible and the same God—was the product of strategic political calculation. Such advocacy was equally, however, the product of Mornay’s moderation—his irenicism and his principled conviction about the ultimate power of truth to triumph over falsehood. Toleration would enable civil conversation, and civil conversation (the discourse of right reason) would create concord among Christians of all persuasions.14 At the turn of the decade, Mornay reproduced those arguments on behalf of toleration for William of Orange in the Netherlands and on behalf of Philippists fighting to undo their demise under the Formula of Concord.15 “Forward Protestant” is too narrow a category inside which to situate the more complex and more nuanced public principles either of Mornay or, as I will show, of Sidney himself. Mornay’s Christianity was uncompromising in its militant opposition to Tridentine Catholicism and in its defense of those beliefs that he deemed essential to the Christian faith, but it was simultaneously moderate by virtue of its ecumenically inclusive appeal to all Christians for assent and its unqualified optimism about the power of reason, rightly articulated, to secure such assent.
In January of 1577, yet another French civil war appeared imminent because of Henri III’s determination to procure peace by returning to what he called “the unity of faith,” royalist code for the capitulation of the Estates General to the destruction of the Reformed church. To counter that threat, two rival factions of Huguenots arrived in London in order to pry loose the purse strings of the parsimonious Elizabeth. One of these factions came on behalf of Henri I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. Condé was a hard-liner, a “forward Protestant” in Worden’s sense of the term. What he hoped to secure through his envoy, Michel de La Huguerye, was English money to finance an immediate military campaign against Henri III with the intent of acquiring concessions for the faithful. The second faction of Huguenots came to London on behalf of Henri de Navarre, whose ambition to succeed to the French throne determined a wholly distinct plan of action. What Navarre plotted was a strategically moderate response to Henri III’s declaration of 3 January 1577 demanding “unity.” He would request money from Elizabeth for levying troops in Germany, but he would use those troops only if the threat of foreign military intervention failed to secure concessions from the king. Navarre, then, could represent himself to the nation as a force for unity—as a future sovereign genuinely interested in the welfare of all (he succeeded to the throne as Henri IV)—while preserving his image among the faithful as protector of the Reformed. Wave the olive branch, but brandish a great big stick.
This history is worth recounting (however briefly) because Mornay came to London in 1577 as a diplomat in the service of Henri de Navarre.16 In Navarre’s politically self-interested calculations, Mornay believed that he had discovered a powerful expression of that uncompromising moderation that would eventuate in the triumph of the Reformed church. “God hath called you,” Mornay wrote to Navarre, “for the establishing his kingdome, that you may thinke then to reigne most safely, when he shall reigne by his worde in the middest of you.”17 Navarre’s subsequent betrayal of that faith, similar to the Elector of Saxony’s betrayal of Languet and Elizabeth’s persistent frustration of Sidney’s political hopes, was experienced all the more acutely because of the fervor of Mornay’s conviction. That history also deserves recounting because it supplies the necessary cultural context for understanding Mornay’s first sustained contribution to contemporary theological discourse, his Treatise of the Church—a discourse composed as he first cultivated Sidney’s friendship. Amidst the political turmoil of 1577 and 1578, the ferocity of confessional divisions, and the imminence of war, the Treatise is a temperate, even a cool and calculated disquisition upon the nature of the church. Organized upon a set of binary distinctions between the invisible and visible churches, the pure and the impure, the Reformed and the schismatic (the Roman Catholic!), Mornay’s Treatise subordinates at every turn ecclesiastical controversies to theological questions whose ultimate determination depends upon the correct interpretation of scripture. Rather than a call to arms, the Treatise of the Church is a call to knowledge, a summons for Christians to acquire those “certaine principles” of right reading, which secure the truth—and hence the ecumenical unity—transcending confessional debate. Its three central chapters constitute a single, detailed exposition of exegetical hermeneutics—right reading employed in the new hermeneutic to target the public domain.18 Whatever else he shared with John Calvin, Mornay had none of his theoretical reticence about matters of biblical interpretation.
If Mornay’s purpose in the Treatise is to arm his readers with those “certaine principles” of right reading to secure the truth, then the armory from which he derives those principles is manifestly that same “new hermeneutic” whose features I have detailed in Chapter 2. He assumes the coherence of the biblical text and the importance of interpreting scripture as a whole. Against claims by Roman Catholics that the Bible is “imperfect,” Mornay argues at length for its authority and unity, equipped as the scriptures are with “a doctrine sufficient to salvation.”19 He reads constantly with an eye to authorial intention, citing frequently the Holy Ghost’s design to make his message “plaine and evident.”20 Against allegations of the Bible’s obscurity, its supposed “riddles or dark speaches,” Mornay argues extensively that “there is nothing more cleare and more simple than the doctrine of salvation.”21 He writes explicitly against the self-serving hermeneutic of the Church of Rome, ridiculing the application of “colde Allegorie” on behalf of such palpable “inventions” as purgatory and papal supremacy. 22 What is most revealing about Mornay’s commitment to the new hermeneutic, however, is his contention that just as “Geometry hath her Axiomes, Physicke her Aphorismes, and the Civill and Canon lawe their generall rules,” so too divinity “hath her certaine principles, able to decide al controversies which are amongst us,” and that those rules admit “no kinde of doubt, contradiction, or contraritie in them.”23 Those “certaine principles” consist of the rational, geometrically precise inquiry into what he calls “the scope and butt of the Scripture,” or those “two markes to direct our selves by, to which the whole Scripture tendeth: and they are, the glorie of God, and charitie towardes our neighbour.” All scripture teaches the rule of charity, as Mornay knows from Augustine, and all scripture contains a single, complementary purpose or “scope,” as Mornay recognizes in harmony with that exegetical line from Antioch to Wittenberg.24
In Mornay’s Treatise of the Church, the scopus dicendi is something more than an item in a schoolboy’s lexicon, a feature of purely rhetorical or dialectical significance. Its importance derives instead, as a distinctive component of his exegetical criticism, from its serviceability on behalf of an uncompromising moderation. Scope is the right tool for fortifying readers in the knowledge of the true church, a church threatened by the armies—and the falsehoods—of the Antichrist. Later in 1578, dismayed by the prospect of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic—and more troubling to Mornay and his friends—the grandiloquently self-seeking Anjou, Mornay left England for the Netherlands to serve as Navarre’s diplomatic representative to William of Orange. By doing so, he left Sidney to join Languet, and began work almost immediately on his Verité (1579–80), an extended scholarly meditation about the truthfulness of Christianity. If this is the work that secured Mornay’s international reputation as a master of Christian apologetics, among Reformed Christians and Catholics alike, it is also a book, demonstrably, with a special appeal to a particular community of Reformers, those followers of Melanchthon with whom Mornay was closely associated.25 After Languet’s death in 1581, Mornay dedicated to his memory its Latin translation, De veritate (1581), both as fulfillment of his mentor’s deathbed request and as tribute to his embodiment of those virtues of erudition and piety, knowledge and conscience, art and nature, which the work chiefly celebrates.26 In an era of dedicatory epistles assigned almost exclusively to the great and the powerful, his tribute signals an extraordinary devotion. Mornay’s dedicatory letter attributes to Languet (that Reformed Odysseus) the inspiration for the Verité’s first publication as well as for its translation into a medium (Latin, still the universal language of the learned) fit for dissemination “in omnes orbis partes” (in every portion of the world). In addition, the De veritate would be translated subsequently by two members of Languet’s circle, by Perrot de Mézières into Italian and by Philip Sidney (in some undetermined part) into English. Moreover—and this is a point both new and crucial for its interpretation—it is a text, similar to the Treatise of the Church, that organizes its central arguments upon the oratorical vocabulary of the scopus dicendi.
A letter from Mornay dated 15 November 1579 is telling about why the De veritate achieved its status among Languet’s wide network of friends. Based partly on his own preference among the sciences, Languet had been urging Mornay to write a history of the Christian religion that would have “pour principale matiere et per se la restauration de la vraie relligion en nos temps, apres tant de confusions dont l’ignorance des siecles precedens l’avoit remplie” (for its principle matter and purpose the restoration of the true religion in our times, after such great confusions which ignorance had so filled the preceding ages).27 What the mentor wanted from his pupil, then, on the basis of Languet’s own epistemic optimism about the power of knowledge to dispel ignorance, was a more comprehensive version of Johann Sleidan’s history of the wars of the Schmalkaldan League, a history with the presentist ambition of restoring God’s church.28 Mornay, however, refused to write that history, as he explains in detail, because of the impossibility while narrating events and their causes of appearing both truthful and unbiased. Captive to the truth of the foolish world (as Sidney would say), imprisoned by the accidents of mere contingency, the historian like Sleidan is quickly dismissed as a polemical partisan “par plusieurs de passion” (by an excess of passion). This is the same letter in which Mornay attacks the rhetorical excesses of John Stubbs—and with the same consideration about the need for moderation in the public domain. To bring about “the restoration of the true religion in our times,” it would be necessary to remedy passion “de dire la verité” (by speaking the truth) without blazoning one’s own colors—without waving the flag of one’s own confessional identity. In pursuit of what he calls “ung chemin du moderation” (a road of moderation), Mornay determined upon moving from history to philosophy about God, man and religion in the De veritate.29
The De veritate’s appeal to Languet’s circle derived not from its articulation of a party-political position or from its exposition of the theology of a particular confession. Precisely the opposite is true. Arthur Golding’s English translation of the Verité extends to 641 pages, and contains no references to Roman Catholics or Reformed Christians, much less to Huguenots, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anabaptists, or (in a nod to Christopher Plantin, the celebrated printer of its French and Latin versions) the Family of Love. There are no allusions to the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or to the piratical raids of the Sea Beggars. Mornay spends no time in disputes over the Eucharist or the value of good works, the matter of ubiquity or the question of predestination (single or double). His moderation is apparent, for example, in his treatment of human agency—particularly “this Question whether it lye in us to choose the way of Salvation or no” (223). Choice belongs to the faculty of the will, and arguments about the freedom or bondage of the will provoked many of the most divisive theological debates of the century, both between Catholics and Protestants and between rival camps among the Reformed. As a characteristic gesture of disdain for rabid theologians, Mornay pleads the weakness of human understanding about ultimate matters of divine disposition, and refuses even to address the question. As in the De veritate as a whole, his argument blunts the blade of the topical in order to sharpen the edge of the theoretical—since the crucial issue, considered as a question about the restoration of true religion in contemporary culture, is one of knowledge. Mornay goes on the attack not against the Antichrist of the Roman Church (as he had done in the Treatise of the Church), but against the ignorant—atheists, epicureans, Turks, Jews, and Christians indifferent to the truth of their own religion. The De veritate is an anti-confessional text in an age of confessionalism, whose appeal for Languet and the Philippists—given their ecumenical piety, their hatred for theological controversy, and their cosmopolitan regard for the value of humanistic studies—consisted in its scrupulously maintained moderation, its erudite and principled avoidance of theological contentiousness.30 It consisted also, of course, in its pious targeting of the scope of Christian truthfulness.
With enormous deliberation and scholarly care, Mornay labors for several hundred pages in order to bring into focus his argument’s main purpose. Then he lets fly the arrow. Arthur Golding’s translation reads:31
Of the Creatures here beneathe, some have but sence and appetite, and other some but only a bare inclination of nature: only man hath witte and will, which make him a man. Now all these are unfallibly directed whethersoever it pleaseth God, as the arrowe is leveled at some marke [scopum] by the Archer, who shooteth the Arrow streyght though it have no eye to see with. But man by a peculiar priviledge hath an understanding wit which was given unto him cleeresighted and cleane, that he might see the marke [scopum] whereat he is leveled; and will, which he receyved frank and free, that he myght repose all his delyght therein: the one to knowe and discerne it, the other to love and imbrace it; the one to see, and behold it, the other to obteyne and enjoy it. Nowthen, as the hither end [finis] of all Creatures here beneathe is man, and the furthest end of them is God: so the neerest and immediat end of man [summum & unicum eius bonum] is to knowe God, and his only welfare is to sticke wholy unto him.
Mornay translates an oratorical term of art (scopus dicendi) into its metaphorical tenor (the shooter’s mark) in order to articulate his theological point: God is an archer, and humankind is his target. So targeted, the human being must target in turn—by reason of his likeness to the deity—the knowledge and love of God as his highest and distinctive good [summum & unicum eius bonum]. In the De veritate, God is sometimes likened to a gardener, a craftsman, an architect, a painter, even a dramatist, but the representation of God as a divine archer is reserved for this definitive moment of argumentation, as a metaphorical incarnation of that vocabulary of the scopus to which Mornay repeatedly returns in his discussions about the ultimate purposes of God and man.
Mornay has recourse to the vocabulary of scope partly, of course, because of his own commitment to the new hermeneutic: it lends a teleological drive to arguments, shaping rhetoric with dialectical point and rhetorical power.32 As Sidney transforms oratorical terminology into the key elements of a poetics, Mornay in the very same years employs that same terminology at the foundation of his theology.33 Sidney’s poet is the maker of a golden world that has its own laws (the logic internal to its arrangement), its own natural power (in its substantiation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs), and its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). In turn, Mornay employs the vocabulary of the scopus because in his vision of the true religion God is best understood as an archer—as a divine orator, that is, whose understanding gives providential purpose to nature and to history, whose Word (Christ, the logos) is accommodated to human reason by means of scripture, and whose will (the Holy Spirit, divine energeia) forcibly summons the human will “to sticke wholy unto him.” Sidney’s maker closely resembles Mornay’s because both have a common conception of the divine Maker and those truths essential to Christian religion. This is not an argument about influence. Instead, it is an illustration of parallel and mutually illuminating intellectual engagements by members of the same republic of letters who possessed a common core of pious beliefs, a common vocabulary, and a common commitment to the new hermeneutic as a means of reforming the public domain.
Mornay’s De veritate does not simply advance an argument. Instead, as a remedy for the very ignorance it seeks to combat, it performs a dialectical and rhetorical enactment of its own argument on behalf of self-knowledge. The work is divided into three main parts.34 In the first part, Mornay considers the extent to which natural reason and the testimonies of the ancients can afford real knowledge about God. He moves next to a consideration of mankind and to the consequences of sin for human nature. In part three, he identifies the chief characteristics by which to obtain knowledge about the true religion. Considered in its summary form, the De veritate guides its readers to a theological destination by way of an extensive historical and anthropological journey. Right reason demonstrates both the truth and the necessity of the Christian religion. Once more, the power of reason is enhanced by the knowledge of that religion: “the truth beeing revealed, enlighteneth reason” (Preface, n.p.). Reason guides, but faith reveals. The debilitating consequences of the fall require that salvation comes from divine revelation, and such revelation is the unique gift of God’s Word in the Gospel, the sole authority for and distinguishing mark of the true faith.
This is argument by design. First, Mornay illustrates the vast range of human knowledge about God and his creation; next, how powerless (by itself) such knowledge is to satisfy the deepest human needs; and finally, how Christianity secures that knowledge indispensable for salvation. First, the anatomy of the disease, then the remedy. First the Law that brings consciousness of sin, then the Gospel that affords faith to justify the sinner. As an act of praise and love for the divine archer, the oratorical shape of the De veritate counterfeits, imitates and figures forth the biblical strategy of the Maker of that maker.
Toward the end of his Preface, Mornay likens his argument to a ladder, urging us “to read this booke throughout, for without mounting by degrees, a man cannot attaine to high things” (Preface, n.p.). (Always in the new hermeneutic, attention is focused on the whole book.) If the knowledge of Christ, as the “scope” of the scriptures, occupies that ladder’s summit, then its base stands upon reason—rational knowledge acquired from natural law (ius naturae) and embodied in that universal consent of mankind (ius gentium) whose testimonies are inscribed within the writings of the ancients. In its main outline, Mornay’s argument is traditional. As John McNeill demonstrated some 60 years ago, all of the so-called magisterial Reformers from Luther and Melanchthon to Calvin and Bullinger appeal (though in complex and diverse ways) to the authority of natural law. What makes Mornay’s argument distinctive, in part, is his copious display of erudition in assembling a massive body of “Reasons” and “Testimonies” among the ancients as proof of the truthfulness of the Christian religion. No wonder that Charlotte d’Arbaleste describes the De veritate as the book “all his early studies had been only a preparation for writing.”35
Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus—the vast networks of citation extend across cultures and across centuries, as heralds bearing universal witness to the most basic of Christian truths: the existence of one almighty God, his creation of the world, the operation of providence, the immortality of the soul, the disposition of punishments and rewards in the afterlife, even intimations of the doctrine of the Trinity. (Read Mornay, and who can remember that Olympus housed a polymorphous profusion of deities?) Made in the likeness of God, the human being discovers “naturally” among his own faculties of understanding, reason, and will a trinity reflecting, however dimly, the divine. The soul, he writes, “is immortall, divine, yea and almost a very God” (272). Just as Melanchthon and Calvin do (in the venerable tradition of scholastic theology from Bede to Aquinas), and just as Sidney does in his Defence, Mornay appeals to a theory of innate ideas. The ancients afford true “Reasons” and “Testimonies” of the right religion, he argues, because they have learned them “in one Schoole, and at the mouth of one Teacher, namely even their owne knowledge in themselves” (217). And just as other Reformers do, Mornay appeals repeatedly (in good Pauline fashion) to arguments from design for evidence of God in his creation: “the whole world … is a plaine booke laide open to all men, yea even unto Children to reade, and (as yee would say) even to spell God therein” (9). (Claritas, for a proponent of the new hermeneutic, is a mark of the divine Maker as well as the human.) Moreover, as one more illustration of his deep investment in arguments from nature, Mornay appeals to στoργή (storge)—a term from Greek, signifying “natural love or affection,” deployed several times in the De veritate to demonstrate the goodness of all beings in their original creation, designed as they are naturally with a “certain inclination” to love.36 In light of such arguments and in light of Mornay’s enthusiasm for quoting whole heaps of Iamblichus, Proclus, and Plotinus in support of them, the eagerness of D.P. Walker and Frances Yates to align the De veritate with the revival of the prisca theologica in Renaissance hermeticism is comprehensible, however unpersuasive ultimately.
Such an alignment is unpersuasive, partly, as Alan Sinfield and Andrew Weiner have argued, because it fails to measure the weight of sin upon Mornay’s depiction of anthropology and soteriology. That weight is profound. In Sinfield’s nicely turned phrase, “by the middle of the book he [Mornay] has brought both the heathen and his readers inexorably to the fall.”37 The law of nature teaches conscience, but it is consciousness of an “infinite gulfe” yawning between the individual at “Hellgate” and the “shewing of Paradise … farre of[f]” (356). In Mornay’s theology of the fall, seemingly small room is afforded to humankind to acquire the knowledge, much less the willpower, necessary for salvation: “by the same fall we be falne from our sovereine welfare into a bottomlesse pit of misery, where we creepe so lame as it is not possible for us to returne ageine to our former state” (348). Even Mornay’s claims for the efficacy of natural reason are apparently unmasked if not wholly erased by his representations of mankind’s impairment: “we may well deeme of our reason, as of an eysight that is either impayred or inchaunted. It hath the ground of sight still; but yet it standeth the partie in no stead, but onely to beguyle him by false images and illusions” (295). Only the Christian religion, founded upon “the worship of the true God,” “according to his worde,” has the power to “reconcyle … the man that followeth it” (365). As he weighs the heavy consequences of the fall, Mornay has clearly—or so Sinfield’s argument runs—“left the pagans behind.”38
There can be no question about Mornay’s orthodoxy among the Reformed in attributing to the Gospel the unique power of salvation, or the profound weight he attaches to sin in his Christian anthropology. It is no great surprise, then, when read selectively, that the De veritate has been identified as the partisan expression of what an earlier generation of scholars called “Calvinism”—on the assumption that Reformed Christianity is best explained as a dogmatic theology whose principles can be referred to writings of a single person, John Calvin. There can be no question either, however, that Mornay did not and could not construct an argument about the truthfulness of the Christian religion that “left the pagans behind”—if that phrase signifies a rejection of natural law or its “testimonies” inscribed in the bonae litterae of classical culture. The De veritate is a ladder—all of whose steps count—not a precursor of Stanley Fish’s self-consuming artifact. Reading the book “throughout,” and interpreting it as a whole, is necessary for understanding its “scope”—its main aim or purpose.
Another analogy employed toward the De veritate’ s conclusion is helpful in recuperating that understanding. Toward the climax of his argument about human knowledge of Christ as God, salvation history is likened to the stages of an individual life. As a lesson in divine accommodation, Mornay writes that at mankind’s birth “Nature” was provided “to be a Lawe unto us”; after our transgressions, like stumbling “yoong Scholers,” we received “the Law written” (God’s codification of natural law in the decalogue, “the Copie of a good Skrivener”); and in our maturity, after finding that we “cannot atteyne to the fashioning of one letter [of the Law] aright, furtherfoorth than his maister guideth his hand,” humankind was graced by Christ and the Gospel (588–9). Ontogeny recapitulates theology—those incremental measures by which humanity’s knowledge of God has grown by providential design. Human history is a book unfolding from divine intention. If Lawe is “the Interpreter of Nature,” and Gospel the plain exposition and fulfillment of the Law (Christ “did not change or abolish it, but more plainly expounded and fulfilled it”), then natural law remains a text demanding attention, and a notion that Mornay can ill afford to jettison (589). For Gospel rightly understood includes Law, and Law rightly understood is the interpretation of Nature—and the best of the “pagans” in turn indispensable witnesses about those natural laws inscribed in humankind. In an age of antinomianism, of chaos threatened by the lawlessness of the ignorant (of epicureans, atheists, Turks and “false naturalists” who acknowledge no law but lust, of Jews who misunderstand the Law, and of “ignorant” Christians who preach Christ’s coming as an abrogation of and liberation from the Law) saving ius naturae meant saving the foundations of moral and political order (Preface, n.p.). The challenge for Mornay—and for all of the magisterial Reformers—was to discover the “right” balance between the authority of nature (with its traditionally strong claims for human agency) and the core beliefs of a Reformed Christianity that made salvation available sola fide and sola scriptura. Instead of adjuring readers to leave the ancients behind, by precept and example Mornay demands repeatedly that they “take the peynes to reade them whole, that they may see how conformable the things which Christians teache, are to the wisedome of the best sort among the Heathen” (216).
God is the scopus to which all right action aims, and Christ, as the incarnation of saving knowledge, is the truth before which all other forms of human knowledge must appear folly. Even Christ’s entrance into history was calculated to coincide with “the tyme when learning did moste flourish … to the end that all worldly wisdome should acknowledge it self to be foolishnes” (627). Mornay’s insistence on the unique value of revealed truth is uncompromising—but so too is his insistence upon the Archer’s (the divine Orator’s) accommodation of his Word to human needs. As the scope of salvation history who imparts purpose and meaning to God’s continuing act of communication with mankind, Christ is a savior who wishes to be known. Mornay’s characterization of God in the classical vocabulary of the scopus dicendi is an illustration, at once, of divine accommodation (his perception that the ontological order of the universe is designed for the rational capacities of those creatures made to praise and love him) and of the indispensability of the classical tradition for knowing how and why that Maker made him. God, too, employs the language and logic of classical oratory in speaking to mankind through his world and his Word.
No reading of Plato or Aristotle, Cicero or Seneca, could ever have rescued the pagan from the sadness of life without grace.39 But such reading could teach him, as it teaches the Christian, to discern the disease of his fallen condition, to yearn for a remedy of that condition, to discover the marks of the true religion, and in the wake of that religion’s revelation—in his knowledge of Christ—to recognize the complementarity of moral and political knowledge from a classical culture with the needs of Christian civilization. Plato before Christ is folly. Plato after Christ is wisdom. Once the scope of human knowledge is obtained, then all forms of knowledge can and must be enthusiastically embraced. (Knowledge of the whole self—the whole text of history, human and divine, as well as the very logic and language of that history—demands it.) Like the De veritate itself, then, providential history is a book requiring reading “throughout,” and it has—by analogy—the unity of a ladder and the stages of a life. Only as we reach its summit or come to maturity in the discovery of that purpose organizing the whole, do we appreciate the value of each of the steps or stages—none of which, in this remarkably inclusive, remarkably cosmopolitan celebration of the truth of the revealed religion, contemporary culture can afford to “leave behind.” In his Epistle Dedicatorie, Mornay sounds the same theme. Either because of “ignorance” or “negligence,” he writes:
we consider not the incomparable worke of our Creator and Recreator, but by piecemeale, without laying the one of them to the other: like as if a man would judge of the Whole space of time by the night, or by some one season of the yeare, or by some one of the Elementes: or as if he would judge of a building by some one quarter: or of an Oration by some syllables thereof: whereas notwithstanding, God’s wisedome in creating thinges cannot be considered, but in the union of the partes with the whole, and of themselves among themselves: nor his goodness in recreating or renewing them, and in regenerating of mankind for whom he made the world, but by the heedfull conferring of all times from the first byrth of Man unto the seconde byrth, and repairing of him againe, which it hath pleased God to ordaine and make for him. (n.p.)
Mornay’s treatment of the “Reasons” and the “Testimonies” of the ancients bears upon issues about Sidney’s piety in the Defence because of the still-current assumption that Reformed Christians found pagan and secular literature inherently suspect. Even as Sidney appears to defend such literature in his poetics—so the argument runs—he was already predisposed to dedicate himself exclusively to the making of divine poetry. That argument rests upon a misreading of Mornay’s De veritate, as an analysis of the full text makes clear, and it extends to a misreading of Sidney. In the years following the Defence, Sidney did proceed to write divine poetry—he began a translation of the Psalms and translated, too, one book of Guillaume Du Bartas’s La semaine, but during those same years, he also produced some portion of Certain Sonnets, Astrophil and Stella and the unfinished revision of his major life’s work, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.
Sidney never abandoned the making of “right poetry”—fiction that has another scope than the praise or petition of God—and he continued those labors for reasons that Reformed Christians like Mornay (even with his decided preference for philosophy over poetry!) could well have understood. For Mornay and Sidney both, a cosmopolitan inclusiveness counts. For both, the embrace of knowledge, secular and sacred, was urgently required in a contemporary culture imperilled by atheists and epicureans on the one hand—Cecropians all!—and by confessional divisions threatening the church’s very survival on the other. Out of a perceived need to avoid partisan debate, Mornay targets his wide-ranging knowledge toward a single mark: the restoration of the true religion after the ignorance of so many ages. This was the kind of moderation that won Languet’s enthusiastic endorsement and that speaks so plainly about the character of Sidney’s piety in the Defence. It is also the kind of moderation that distinguishes the De veritate as sixteenth-century Europe’s masterpiece of Philippist argumentation, its most erudite and cosmopolitan expression of anti-confessional piety by a Huguenot who knew, from first-hand experience, the horrors of confessional combat. And who in a moment, in defense of Christian truthfulness, was prepared to rejoin that combat (like Sidney—his other “self”), if words should fail. Sidney’s personal coat of arms, it is well to recall, featured an arrowhead (always his eye on scope!)—a pointer to his own status as a confident moderator, simultaneously the militant soldier of Christ taming tyranny by the bow and the cosmopolitan poet targeting the public domain by the word.
Sidney knew the impact of a conditional clause, especially its power to temper cautiously and appropriately the claims of idealism. Right at the finish of the Defence’s central celebratory account of the making of golden worlds and the human consequence of that making in bestowing ideal heroes like Cyrus upon the world in order to make many Cyruses, he diverts rhetorical flourish into critical attention by a qualifying remark: such remarkable consequences are forthcoming “if” his readers “will learn aright why and how that maker made him” (101). His “if” has impact precisely because, if left to their own devices, people will not learn aright—given the nature of human nature. Sidney advances to the crucial stage of the argument on behalf of the poet’s powers. He writes, “with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: … our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (101). Impelled by his own conditional clause to outline that breach in the human condition that defines us—the division between wit and will—Sidney provides an account of natural defects that gives purpose to all human actions and all species of knowledge, poetry chief among them. Sidney works in this central discussion both methodically and teleologically, by defining, that is, essential characteristics of his subject with reference to what he calls its “scope,” its main aim or function.
Clearly a Christian anthropology motivates the subsequent definition of the poet’s “noblest scope”: both to delight and to teach, “to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly … and … to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved” (103). The phrasing itself is biblically stylized. A Christian anthropology is again invoked, just paragraphs later, as Sidney revists the question of poetry’s relationship to the other sciences. What counts now to the argument is sameness, rather than difference, as Sidney sets a target all of them must hit: “all, one and the other, [have] this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). The body is a dungeon because the will is infected, the mind a seat with its own divine essence because the wit remains “erect”—upright and uncontaminated in this unqualified characterization of its continued efficacy. The whole of the Defence’s subsequent argument depends on demonstrating that the poet targets this “scope” more successfully than his rivals—that poetry heals that breach in nature or, at least, matters profoundly to its remediation. Viewed piously, then, the poet’s job is one of liberation, of securing some portion of freedom from the consequences of original sin, the ordinary “dungeon” of the human condition. But how much success can it promise in that task? What is the extent of the claims made on behalf of poetry’s real power in human affairs? And what pious beliefs does Sidney bring to this discussion that explain the claims made for poetry?
Sidney’s premises presuppose substantial claims for the power of poetry, and those claims have been both especially important and especially troubling for contemporary scholars eager to establish claims of their own on behalf of the Defence’s Protestant poetics. They have been important because those assumptions about human nature at the foundation of Sidney’s claims for poetry are clearly Christian in character. The Defence is a document written in the shadow of the fall, and no account of its poetics ignoring that fact can explain (to accommodate Sidney’s rhetoric to an argument of my own) its “scope”—that overarching purpose to which its arguments relate. However, the claim that its poetics are Protestant—when Protestant poetics are assumed to be uniquely inspired by a Puritan or broadly Calvinistic theology—rests on historical assumptions very different in kind, and very difficult to square either with contemporary scholarly understandings about Reformed Christianity or with the actual arguments of the Defence.
The assumption that Reformed theology can be understood as dogma proceeding from the writings of a single person, John Calvin, has done much to obscure the plurality of its origins, the eclecticism of its employment of sources, and the diversity of philosophical and theological tenets espoused historically by its proponents.40 Mornay’s De veritate supplies only one outstanding example of such diversity. Sidney’s piety in the Defence supplies another. For while the anthropology of his poetics is indisputably Christian, and arguably specific to Reformed Christianity, the assumption that its pious principles are to be determined by reference to Calvin’s theology is from the outset a fundamental error about the variety and independence of a Reformed tradition that discovered models for its religious thought among a vast range of sources. Moreover, the assumption that Sidney’s pious principles are somehow inspired by or reasonably consistent with the theology of Calvin, however broadly construed, has from the first proved troubling to its proponents. For the new generation of religious historians from Richard Muller to Philip Benedict, “Calvinism” as such (as a corpus of dogmatic theology emanating exclusively from Calvin himself) is a dead issue. Only the history of critical debates about Sidney’s piety in the Defence requires that the body be exhumed—at least briefly—to define more accurately the confessional character of Sidney’s piety.
Consider briefly the troubles encountered by attempting to square Sidney’s conception of the “erected wit” with Calvin’s pronouncements on the state of postlapsarian mankind. The fall wreaks destruction on the whole nature of man. As Calvin puts it grimly in his Institutes:41
For even though something of understanding and judgment remains as a residue along with the will, yet we shall not call a mind whole and sound that is both weak and plunged into deep darkness .… Since reason, therefore, by which man distinguishes between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be completely wiped out; but was partly weakened and partly corrupted, so that its misshapen ruins appear.
Even a doctrine of total depravity does not exclude from the intellect a residue of efficacy—and Calvin writes with considerable ambiguity about reason’s postlapsarian power. However, without the assistance of the Law (God’s written word), reason is a mere ruin.42 Mornay’s De veritate echoes those sentiments in its account of the fall, but there is little in Calvin to match Mornay’s strikingly assertive claims for reason as a guide to faith. More difficult still is the task of reconciling Sidney’s claims on behalf of the individual’s still erected wit with Calvin’s characterization of the intellect as a misshapen ruin, and the recognition of that difficulty has prompted several different accounts of those pious principles at work here. Andrew Weiner, one influential critic espousing the significance of the Defence’s Protestant poetics, argues that Sidney must have assumed that the ideas of the golden world poet are inspired, like David’s, by “the promptings of the Holy Spirit.”43 After all, no “Calvinist” could endorse belief in a still-erected wit. Michael Raiger is even more assertive on the subject of inspiration. He too argues for a version of Sidney’s right poet as empowered by “the aid of the Holy Spirit,” not directly inspired like the writers of Scripture, but still remaining the Spirit’s instrument by ministering “to the word, through fidelity to Scripture.”44 As a consequence, he argues that Sidney’s aesthetic consciously “privileges the Christian initiate, while confounding those outside the special dispensation of Christ.”45 More recently, Michael Mack has claimed that Sidney characterizes fiction as “the channel of grace.”46 Such explanations have the sound of special pleading. For when Sidney writes about the ideas of the golden world poet, he explicitly dismisses claims to divine inspiration, just as he eagerly displays for admiration the exemplary ideas of pagan poets—Homer, Virgil, and Xenophon (not the traditional writers whom the Holy Spirit might be thought to prompt, and still less pagans whom he seeks to confound).47
More subtle variations on this theme have been attempted by later critics, specifically by Ake Bergvall. Writing in the frame of William Bouwsma’s portrait of a complex and conflicted Calvin-as-humanist, Bergvall appeals to the notion of “general grace” as a means of explaining how the Holy Spirit could illuminate even the minds of pagans “to produce writings of enduring value.”48 Praise for Xenophon is no recognition of the powers of the erected wit, Bergvall contends. Instead, such praise instances the divine operation of what Calvin conceived as “general grace.”49 Calvin’s own humanistic credentials were of a high order, and he writes approvingly of what those “regenerated by the Spirit” can accomplish by means of the human arts and sciences [v. 1, 189–90 (I. 15. 4)]. Even so, Calvin might very well have been both astounded and dismayed by the Defence’s claims on behalf of the wit, its luminosity and its zodiacal range.50 Nowhere in the Institutes can such optimism about the natural powers of human beings be paralleled, and, of course, nowhere does Sidney ever mention general grace. When Sidney makes his analogy between the zodiac and the wit, drawing upon that long familiar fascination with zodical compendages of universal knowledge from Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia to Marcus Stellatus Palingenius’s Zodiacus vitae, he sounds less like a theologian from Geneva, and more like his own teacher at Strasbourg, Johann Sturm. In a letter to Conrad Dasypodius, a newly appointed administrator at the Academy, Sturm seeks to energize his colleague by highlighting the capaciousness of the intellect: “There exists in us, though mortals, a natural energy or rather a divine force and power, to which nothing is impossible, nothing remains inaccessible .… It is marvelous that things that our senses cannot count, nor grasp, our spirit can nevertheless embrace, like the whole world, the sky, the seas, land. How many things astronomy taught you! What a variety of knowledge cosmography offers!”51 Reformers do not speak with a single voice. Sometimes they sing the praises of the wit.
Consider, too, the difficulty of reconciling Sidney’s account of the will with Calvin’s theology. At first glance, the “infected will” of the Defence sounds sufficiently bleak to serve as an echo of the Institutes’ recounting of the fall’s consequences: “As to the will, its depravity is but too well known” [1, 270 (II. 2. 12)]. As an anvil for his hammer, Calvin strikes heavily and liberally upon depravity in repeated portions of the argument: the utter corruption of the will, its insatiable appetite for sin, and its total incapacity to facilitate the process of justification and sanctification. The will is a cornucopia of concupiscence, and what the will wills is sin. As a theological tenet, the rigor—even the ferocity—of Calvin’s emphasis upon the individual’s complete dependence on grace for salvation sounds inconsistent with a critical argument like Sidney’s that relies so heavily on the poet’s power to move the will in order to advance its claims. In the De veritate, Mornay bypasses considerations about the will’s agency as a detour from theological contentiousness. The topic is too hot to handle—far too productive of confessional division. In his poetics, Sidney is considerably more assertive. For him, the will is clearly infected, but just as clearly, it is not terminally depraved. The whole of the Defence targets as its scope the activity of moving people to take goodness in hand, and its credibility depends on successfully demonstrating that such moving happens.
There is goodness, however, and then there is goodness, and all of the advocates for Sidney’s Protestant poetics have been eager to distinguish between Calvin’s rigorous denial of the capacities of man in spiritual affairs, and his more eager recognition of them in secular and social matters. That exception seems important, according to Weiner and Alan Sinfield—one more prominent advocate of Sidney’s Protestant poetics—because the Defence restricts the poet’s moving power to matters of “ethic and politic consideration,” to the this-worldly negotiation of moral and political activity. Sidney can celebrate the poet’s power to move, then, in a manner consistent with Calvin, they indicate, because he is only arguing about ethics and politics, matters appropriate to “human conceipt.”52 Even that restriction of the scope of Sidney’s Defence to the realm of the moral and the political, however, grants considerably more autonomy to the arts and sciences than Calvin permits. When Calvin expands in his famous chapter on the sciences as God’s gift to man, from his praise of “ancient jurists who established civic order” and “philosophers” who supplied “artful description of nature,” to his celebration of the skilled practioners of oratory and mathematics, he leaves out one crucially important category of humanist study: moral philosophy. For if Calvin clearly relegated statecraft and household economy to the realm of the earthly kingdom, as subject to human control, moral action belonged to the kingdom of God, and was beyond the scope of individual ability to control or master. Calvin can write positively about man’s ingenuity in obtaining “somewhat more understanding” of the five moral laws of Moses’s commandments (the latter five) than he possesses of those commandments of the First Table (about which he is wholly blind), but even that minor gesture toward authorizing moral knowledge recedes quickly before the dark vision of natural man refusing “to be led to recognize the diseases of his lusts. The light of nature is extinguished before he even enters upon this abyss” [1, 284 (II. 2. 24)]. Sidney’s whole argument rests squarely on the power of the poet to create, as a species of moral persuasion and instruction, “speaking pictures of virtue and vice,” and there is precious little room in Calvin’s theology for moral empowerment of that kind without the agency of “special grace.”
The difficulties of reconciling the arguments of the Defence with Calvin’s theology, however broadly construed, lead Weiner, Bergvall and Raiger, on the one hand, into appeals on behalf of divine inspiration to guarantee their consistency. On the other, those same difficulties lead Sinfield into historicizing arguments about the text’s inherent contradictions as a product of an oxymoronically described “puritan humanist project.”53 According to Sinfield, Sidney is a “puritan humanist” because he “experienced with special intensity the disjunction between humane letters and protestantism”—so intensely, in fact, that the Defence’s “sometimes forced” arguments on behalf of “secular” poetry demonstrate Sidney’s only partly occulted desire to follow Guillaume Du Bartas in heralding “the exclusive validity of divine poetry.”54 Such a disjunction, in turn, is grounded historically in what Sinfield characterizes as the cultural opposition between, on the one hand, Catholicism and humanism, which “encouraged belief in a continuity between human and divine experience,” and, on the other, Protestantism, which insisted “on the gap between the two, emphasizing the utter degradation of humankind and the total power of God to determine who shall be saved.”55 Like Weiner, Sinfield identifies Protestantism with a “Calvinistically” inspired Puritanism, and seeks on the basis of that identification to account for what he rightly argues are major discontinuites between Sidney’s arguments and Calvin’s beliefs. The question becomes how best to account for those discontinuities.
In pursuit of his answer, Sinfield employs a critical terminology inadequate for explaining the cultural history at issue. Understood in context, “humanism” (in all of its multiple versions) implies an attitude toward texts—a disposition toward educational practices of reading and writing that have their origin in classical culture—not a philosophy, unless one wishes to talk broadly about a “humanist” tendency to celebrate eloquence and the potentially “enriching character” (vague stuff that) of the eloquent arts. Critical talk about “humanism” in opposition to “Protestantism”—in a culture whose most erudite practitioners of the studia humanitatis included (among hundreds more) Calvin and Beza—is essentially empty. Once more, Sinfield employs as a vehicle of historical explanation what contemporary historians of religion have rejected as a too-totalizing model of “Protestantism.” That model requires adjustment to the real historical complexity of the later Reformation’s religious beliefs—an adjustment making room for various forms of faith that included, to think only of the Elizabethans, the radical apocalyptic Christianity of a John Foxe, the unbending institutional orthodoxy of a John Whitgift, the pragmatically flexible piety of a Henry Sidney, the celebrated moderation of a Richard Hooker, and the zealous Philippism of a Richard Robinson and a Daniel Rogers. The difficulties encountered by scholars in reconciling Sidney’s Defence with “Calvinism” speak much less clearly about the contradictions of the text, than about the failure of the critical paradigm imposed upon it. Such historicizing, in short, is just bad history.
Melanchthon devoted much of his extended career as an educator and theologian, as a student of classical and Christian literature, and as a mediator among confessionally divided factions of Catholics and Protestants, toward affirming crucial aspects of continuity between the human and the divine that Sinfield dismisses as inimical to Protestantism. Melanchthon was an educational giant at Wittenberg, and he is still useful as an educator in broadening awareness about the multiplicity of beliefs maintained among the so-called “magisterial” Reformers of the Reformation’s first generation, and the Reformed Christians of its second. He was both a systematic expositor of Reformation theology, and a committed humanist who produced during his career some 93 commentaries and editions of classical texts. The sheer volume of his labors is nothing short of astonishing. His commentaries on Virgil were among the most widely read in Europe—more popular even than Cristoforo Landino’s—and a number of his texts became international best-sellers, including his commentaries on Demosthenes’s orations and Cicero’s epistles.56 Constantly embattled by confessionally hostile imperial powers, Melanchthon had a taste for classical letters in defense of liberty.
Melanchthon was also a poet, as Sidney recognizes in the Defence. His volume of epigrams was published posthumously by Languet’s compatriot in Vienna, Johannes Crato, complete with a celebration of Melanchthon’s encouragement of a distinguished cadre of neo-Latin poets at Wittenberg (among them Georg Sabinus and Petrus Lotichius), and the value of literary study itself, “quam sonant Dei beneficio Ecclesiae” (which our Churches sound to the benefit of God).57 Crato’s celebration is the summary of a continuing devotion. As early as 1527, in his commentary on Colossians, Melanchthon began a lifelong championship of Philosophy—all of the arts and sciences, including poetry, oratory, mathematics, and jurisprudence, in addition to natural, moral, and political philosophy—as “a genuine and good creature of God.”58 By 1532, in his commentary on Romans, Melanchthon extended this celebration of the arts and sciences (always best exemplified by the classics) into theological arguments on behalf of those nine proofs afforded by natural reason of God’s existence as “the founder and preserver of things.”59 Three years later those proofs found their way into his revised edition of the Loci. Melanchthon’s persistent efforts to reanimate scholasticism (the method of the schools) in the service of Protestant truth are as evident as his debts—as the student of Johann Reuchlin—to the studia humanitatis, and the appeal of that methodology can be instanced by the replication of his scholastic arguments on behalf of reason’s power to apprehend God by Reformed Christians from Zacharias Ursinus to Pierre Du Moulin.60 Particularly in the last years, after the death of Luther and the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League, Melanchthon’s theology made room for a version of human agency considerably stronger than anything to be found in Calvin, while sufficiently tempered to adhere—at least in the view of his own circle—to the boundaries of Protestant orthodoxy. (Melanchthon went to his grave persuaded of his loyalty to God’s Word and to Luther’s.) As John R. Schneider argues so well in light of that continuing search to reconcile secular learning to sacred letters, “Melanchthon’s burden thus was not merely to forge what was the first Protestant summary of the faith, as is commonly acknowledged. It was (more profoundly) to hammer out its first model of human culture—in relation to that faith.”61
This is not to forget the formative years at Wittenberg. No convert of Luther’s was ever likely to slight the reality of sin, or that darkness to which Sidney alludes in his reference to “the dungeon of the body.” Melanchthon’s doctrine of the fall is sufficient proof of that. In the beginning, the Loci of 1555 makes clear, Adam and Eve enjoyed what he calls—together with Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas—“justitia originalis,” when the heart “was full of the divine spirit and light and joy in God.”62 Original justice was a result of the “sweetest of harmonies” between man’s native faculties, or to use Sidney’s language, a product of concord between wit and will, both the intellect and the affections united in love of God.63 At the fall, original justice was corrupted by original sin. Man’s love was displaced from God onto himself, and in consequence, Adam and Eve experienced “great wounds and shame,” even a corruption of the “wonderful image of God” implanted in them. His account of the fall is traditionally dark. In his very next sentence, however, Melanchthon hastens to add in his reassuring style: “However, we should pause and contemplate the great love in the divine Majesty toward human nature,” a love manifested by the promise of his “likeness” again restored to us when we come to “know the eternal Father, eternal Son, and the Holy Spirit.” That reassurance is afforded both by natural and spiritual means. To gain saving knowledge, God “in the creation placed a light in man, through which we might and should acknowledge him” and “for the natural light he also expressed his word, that therein we should know him.”64 The argument is orthodox, yet the reassuring rhetoric—in the deliberation with which Melanchthon pauses to balance the promise of the Word against the depravity of sin—is characteristically (though not uniquely) his own.
God’s providence in supplying man with both natural light and saving Word points to important elements of continuity between nature and spirit, the secular and the sacred, the human and the divine, already familiar to that late Melanchthon depicted so plainly Basil-like in the portrait by Cranach. As an essential component of his natural philosophy, from the Initia (1549) to the Liber de Anima (1553), Melanchthon constructed a discourse for describing what natural man can comprehend about God by the exercise of “earthly learning.”65 Reason can determine that God exists and that God will determine the disposition of souls in the afterlife, just as reason can discern essential attributes about the deity’s nature: for instance, that he is perfectly just, good, free, and chaste. Melanchthon stopped short of Mornay’s subsequent, less cautious claims for natural knowledge about original sin and intimations of the trinity, but the analysis is otherwise similar—root and branch. Once more, a pagan author like Aristotle affords real wisdom, not because of indirect revelation—the work of Calvin’s “general grace”—but because reason itself is naturally equipped to discern key truths.66 His belief that God fashioned the human intellect “to be the clearest testimony of his existence” speaks directly to the epistemic optimism suffusing his work, which even as it acknowledges shadows cast by the fall, insists that we can “discern what it is like in the eternal light.”67
Melanchthon’s later canon grows quietly assertive, too, about the power of human will to cooperate with God in securing salvation. (Again, this is a crucial conviction illustrated by Cranach’s portrait of the aging Reformer.) Retelling the story of Joseph’s triumph over his desire for his son’s wife, Melanchthon writes in the De anima: “Thus the holy spirit did not take away the freedom of the will, but corrected it and turned it toward God, according to the saying: ‘He who wills will find a plan’.”68 At the very moment that the human reaches toward the divine, the divine extends its saving hand toward the human. Melanchthon’s saying is adapted from that most eloquent of the early Antiochene fathers, “the golden-mouthed” Chrysostom—what his name means literally—and its source is a reminder that what is true in little about the will obtains at large in respect to culture, the potential remediating power of human agency in the public domain.69 Once more, just as Mornay’s De veritate does, Melanchthon’s De anima has recourse both to Augustinian ideas about the trinitarian construction of the mind and to the Pauline conception of στoργή—animate creation’s natural inclination to love—locating inside the human organism itself a natural foundation for the fulfillment of God’s promise to restore the ruins of his image.
Restoring the ruins of God’s image, igniting sparks of the divine fire innate to the human mind—Melanchthon’s passion for reading Greek and Roman texts is more than the appreciative rhetoric of that tired cliché, the “Christian humanist.” Instead, his reading represents the sixteenth-century’s most fully conceived technology for the transformation of classical hermeneutics into a vehicle for spiritual reawakening. Just one example must illustrate the point about Melanchthon’s success in imagining, by way of such readings, a vision of human culture in relation to Reformed faith. When Melanchthon writes about Virgil’s Aeneas in the Liber de anima, he does so in an extended passage intended to illuminate the power, authority, and necessity of the notitiae—those innate notions of knowledge implanted in the mind by God, and (as he habitually repeats) the source of all the arts. In this particular passage, Melanchthon’s object is to illuminate what we might call the lived experience of such “notions” in the mind, their pious inscription. “Just as Virgil said about Aeneas, perceiving the course of Roman history sculpted on his shield, that he was amazed and delighted by that image of events about which he was unaware, so we ourselves, even though we do not discern the substance of human minds with our eyes, nor hardly understand wonderful actions, are however delighted by the image.”70 As Aeneas gazes at his shield, in the Aeneid’s best known prophetic moment, he delights in a future good (the triumph of Augustan Rome). It is a future good, as Melanchthon takes pains to emphasize, that he both contemplates and heroically strives to achieve. In an exemplary moment then, imaged in an exemplary poem, Aeneas becomes in Melanchthon’s reading the exemplar of our human experience of coming-to-know those goods that God makes available to reason through the active contemplation of innate ideas (notitiae). Character enacts mind, as mind enacts natural law, as human culture enables (through the enabling power of God and nature) the action of both. Such connections are intricate and elegant, and bear explanation.
As Aeneas is separated from a triumph of Rome that he only dimly understands by an expanse of history, so we are separated from the goodness of the notitiae (inborn notions of the good that we barely comprehend) by an expanse of time—the time of fallen experience. As those “notions” are illuminated by consciousness, progressively fanned from sparks into flame by poetic images, such images produce for us, as for Aeneas in his quest to found the Roman empire, progressive knowledge about the good. Once more, just as Aeneas delights in an historical ideal fulfilled, those ideal notions inherent to the mind procure delight, since those images fulfill the demands of human nature as fully as the images of imparting a history to Rome satisfy the longings of Aeneas. Finally too, just as Aeneas is responsible for undoing the separation between present and future by heroic action, so the law of nature requires us to restore those goods inscribed by God in our minds.
In a reading like Melanchthon’s, heroism is no longer the business of dead Greeks or Romans or poetry the empty matter of tired aesthetic celebration. Heroism, instead, is reawakened as the ordinary and extraordinary vocation of all people, called to rebuild the ruins of Troy, of the church, of their own fallen worlds and selves. As Melanchthon reads Virgil, so he illuminates comprehensively and elegantly his understanding of the mind, of history, and of the necessary knowledge to be gained from the bonae litterae of the classical tradition—knowledge that restores our likeness to God. Always in Melanchthon, philosophy remains subordinate to Gospel, and has no saving power of its own, but always, too, its wisdom is acknowledged as essential for individual Christians and the commonwealth. Real knowledge about God as a Mens Architectrix is supplied by natural reason, the best of the ancient tradition, and God’s written Law. Saving knowledge, by contrast, comes solely from the Gospel’s revelation of the person of Christ. If the broad outlines of this double attitude toward the Law and “Philosophy”—the bonae litterae of classical culture—are familiar from Mornay’s treatment of the ancients’ Reasons and Testimonies in the De veritate, Melanchthon’s treatment of the topic merits attention partly because of his originality in devising the logic that shaped so much of Reformed Christianity’s approach to the classical past and partly because—once more—of the strong sense of cultural urgency that motivated his articulation of that logic. Urgency counts to that post-Bartholomew’s Day culture of the late 1570s.
In a detailed study of Reformation debates about poenitentia (repentance), Timothy Wengert traces a crucial turn in Melanchthon’s thought from the mid-1520s to the late 1530s toward the development of a forensic theory of justification—an essentially legal understanding about God’s mercy in freely justifying the sinner by an “imputation” of righteousness.71 The faithful are saved not by merit, but instead by the “imputation” of justice—sola fide, again. Imputed righteous, the sinner is freed from the accusations of the Law, but the individual remains—and this is the crucial point—still contaminated by the remnants of sin. The justified sinner’s continuing sinfulness is crucial because of Melanchthon’s need, consequently, to supplement Luther’s conception of the uses of the Law. Within Luther’s distinctively Protestant vocabulary, the Law had two uses, and two uses alone—to terrify the conscience and to coerce the flesh of the sinner. Within Melanchthon’s theology of forensic justification, an entirely new third use of the Law emerges: the Law’s employment as a vehicle whereby individuals must practice obedience (“ut exerceant obedientiam”), however imperfectly (even for the justified!) that practice proceeds—think of David and Bathsheba!72 Most importantly, the Law that has continuing importance for justified sinners is the Decalogue of Moses and its reflection in natural law, that law inscribed on the heart by God as notitiae: the innate notions of the mind, the true origins (as we have seen) of all of the arts, and the foundations for the bonae litterae of the classical tradition. The Gospel no more frees individuals from the Law, than it frees them from the need to breathe. Instead it requires and enables Christians to pursue obedience as the always-ongoing work of sanctification proceeds. By virtue of the weighty significance attached to natural law, the consequences of Melanchthon’s conceptual development were profound, then, both for his theology and his philosophy. Within these same years, Melanchthon initiated arguments on behalf of the necessity of good works for salvation (shades of the Majorist conflict!) and on behalf of the will’s necessary cooperation to achieve salvation (shades of the synergist controversy!). And Melanchthon continued, too, to produce his editions of Virgil and Ovid, his commentaries on Demosthenes and Cicero, and his teaching of Greek at Wittenberg—as necessary works of Christian obedience.73
Such works, too, were the necessary response to a deep sense of cultural urgency. Melanchthon’s theological development took place against a background of renewed peasant rebellions of the late 1520s, and such lawlessness gave renewed point and power to charges of antinomianism leveled against the Lutherans. No wonder he would seek to enhance the role of law in Protestant theology.74 His development took place, too, against the background of renewed efforts among the Protestant princes of Germany to form an alliance with Catholic France against the imperial powers of Charles V. In conversation with moderates like that fiercely independent Gallic Catholic, Guillaume Du Bellay, Melanchthon equipped himself with a revised theology, which by enhancing individual agency in the work of salvation, might bridge the confessional divide between Rome and Wittenberg. Such efforts proved fruitless, but the pursuit of order against lawlessness and ecumenical reunion against confessional division remained constant in the following decades, and they continued as major themes among his Philippist followers, Languet among them. Calvin, too, adopted the third use of the Law in his Institutes, and Mornay employed the concept in his treatment of the Reasons and Testimonies of the ancients.
Of equal importance for comprehending the piety of Sidney’s poetics, however, are the laments for the decay of culture that accompany these theological developments, as immediate background and continuing theme. With ever-more melancholy eloquence, Melanchthon’s celebrations of Philosophy, from his 1527 commentary on Colossians to his 1557 Oratio de studiis veteris philosophiae (Oration on the Ancient Studies of Philosophy), expressed his horror at the barbarians at the gates—from his early attacks against the “completely corrupted” minds of the ignorant who neglect God’s “best gifts” to his later, increasingly strident lamentations upon “the calamity of the most turbulent times” that threaten to reduce “the treasure house of the good arts” into the “trash and the squalor of primeval barbarity.” Like Mornay’s, Melanchthon’s defense of culture was never the product of a merely nostalgic humanism. Instead, it was a defense of knowledge against ignorance, fraught with a sense of that knowledge’s urgency for healing “the wounds of the Church” and freeing the public domain from confessional dispute.75
Melanchthon’s differences with Calvin were pronounced, sometimes sharply so. These two major architects of the Reformation disagreed about eucharistic theology—Melanchthon maintaining a position closer to Luther’s in regard to Christ’s real presence; they disagreed about the relation of state to church government—Melanchthon never supported the subordination of the state’s magistrates to the church hierarchy; they disagreed about issues of predestination and free will—Melanchthon was scrupulously cautious about pronouncements on theology that might lead Christians into despair, and that scrupulosity itself, one consequence of his epistemic moderation, made Calvin at times furiously impatient.76
Melanchthon, too, espoused a theology of liberation, with its constant celebration of the Gospel as the means for achieving freedom from sin that is without parallel in Calvin.77 Yet in spite of these disagreements in doctrine and differences in rhetorical emphasis, Melanchthon and Calvin maintained for decades a correspondence—replete with accusation and recrimination—that preserved a semblance of civility. That civility is comprehensible in terms of shared commitments: Calvin adopted many of his exegetical assumptions and much of his hermeneutic terminology from Melanchthon; he made extensive use of the Loci in organizing his Institutes; Melanchthon, in turn, moved increasingly to an interpretation of the Eucharist closer to Calvin’s than to Luther’s; both shared the concept of the third use of the law and a strong moral emphasis in their theology.78 For all their differences, these similarities were sufficient to have their enemies revile Melanchthon’s followers not merely as Philippists, but also as crypto-Calvinists.
With respect to Sidney’s mentor, Hubert Languet, however, the case was altered. Languet shared Melanchthon’s theological differences with Calvin. Once more, he made himself a despised figure in Geneva, a man whom Calvin came to revile as a dog and a heretic. Calvin’s fury descended on Languet because of his success in 1558 in rescuing that Protestant apostle of freedom, Sebastian Castellio, from a charge of heresy leveled against him by the Council and University of Basle. Castellio was a champion of religious toleration, a vigorous critic of predestination and church discipline, a spokesman for what seemed to his enemies a radically Pelagian concept of free will, and a perpetual thorn in the side of Calvin. Only because of Languet’s success in procuring a letter of support for Castellio from Melanchthon did this much beleaguered “heretic” manage to escape the fate of other renegades like Michael Servetus, death by fire. Castellio was Languet’s close friend, as Nicollier-de Weck describes him, and a figure admired by other figures intimately tied to Languet’s circle, including Camerarius the Younger and Robert Beale.79
Alluding briefly to Languet’s troubled history with Calvin and his close friendship with Castellio is one means of localizing and historicizing that version of Reformed Christianity into which Sidney was introduced during his education on the Continent. For, sharp as the disagreements were between Melanchthon and Calvin, Languet and his circle—while faithful to the teachings of Luther as they were filtered through Philippist Wittenberg—both practiced a version of piety wholly divorced from speculative theology and cultivated friendly relationships with figures at what can only be called the liberal fringe of contemporary Reformed Christianity. Of course, Languet cultivated friendly relationships with moderate Catholics too—he even made overtures to the Gnesio-Lutherans—but highlighting the contact with Castellio enhances a major point: the studied pursuit of freedom from confessional conflict, the urgent quest for agreement on fundamentals, through reasoned argument and limited toleration, that defined the Philippists in their pragmatic quest for freedom from the oppressive tyranny of ignorance and Rome.80
In light of the pious intentions that motivated this studied pursuit, it is well to recall once more that Vienna was Sidney’s chief home during his three-year Continental tour, and that he spent many months there reading and studying in the company of Languet and a variety of other Philippists and so-called irenicists—intellectuals active in seeking escape from confessional warfare. In the 1570s, the city was home to Johannes Crato Von Crafftheim, Johannes Sambucus, and Charles de l’Écluse, as well as to the medical doctor and natural philosopher, Tomáš Jordan, a Moravian resident of Vienna—all of them devotees of Melanchthon. As the court physician to Maximilian II and a Silesian by birth, Crato devoted much of his later life attempting to persuade the Emperor to grant freedom of worship to the Bohemian Brethren, just as he labored to ally the Brethren to the international Reformed community in Wittenberg, Geneva, and Heidelberg. Toleration was more than a guiding principle for Crato. It was an active political goal. At Vienna, too, Sidney came into close contact with Lazarus Von Schwendi, a committed Catholic, a former military officer in the service of Charles V, and a powerful advocate in the early 1570s of religious toleration for the Empire’s churches espousing the Augsburg Confession. Horrified by the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and persuaded that the Empire would be wracked by the bloody civil wars that had afflicted France for more than a decade, Von Schwendi urged Maximilian to secure peace for the Empire by granting the kind of religious freedom enjoyed by the various confessions of Poland.81 Crato, the Reformed Christian, and Von Schwendi, the moderate Catholic, spoke in Vienna with different voices to the same purpose: pleading the indispensability of toleration for peace. Together with that wider network of Languet’s friends, such a community reinforced both by example and by precept one central message of Melanchthon’s career, the value of secular studies for pious purposes, and their collective labors as artists, natural and political philosophers, educators and politicians, enhanced his characteristically tempered estimate of the real agency of good letters and those skilled in good letters to promote moderation in the public domain.
The moderate, ecumenically inclusive character of Sidney’s Philippist piety is everywhere apparent in the Defence. It is implicit in the text’s very setting. When Sidney opens his argument, he evokes the memory of the irenic Vienna of the Philippists and Maximilian II (the Holy Roman Emperor famous for calling himself not a Catholic but a Christian). Such moderation is implicit too in the witnesses summoned to testify on poetry’s behalf. Late in the Defence, Sidney composes a roll call of history’s worthies in order to dignify the status of poetry by highlighting the dignity of those notable individuals who have engaged in its practice. His roll-call is a model of inclusiveness. He summons to memory Hebrews and pagans (David and Sophocles), as well as ancients and moderns (the Emperor Hadrian and Robert, King of Sicily). He names “Such cardinals as Bembus and Bibiena” in parallel to the preachers and teachers, Theodore Beza and Philip Melanchthon—Roman Catholics balanced ecumenically with Protestants, and Calvin’s right-hand man with Luther’s. When Sidney expands the list, he incorporates “learned philosophers,” “great orators,” and “piercing wits,” only to conclude his roll-call by the rhetorically heightened celebration of a “grave” counsellor to be preferred “before all”: “that Hospital of France, than whom (I think) that realm never brought forth a more accomplished judgment, more firmly builded upon virtue” (131).
Sidney’s praise for Michel de l’Hospital is the appropriate and pointed culmination of this internationally and ecumenically inclusive parade of worthies in honor of poetry. L’Hospital was renowned as a champion of toleration. A longtime chancellor appointed by Catherine de Medici and a Catholic, L’Hospital spent the decade of the 1560s attempting to moderate the power of the Guises against the Huguenots. As an embrace of Gallican liberty, he authored the Edict of St. Germain, the most liberal grant of toleration to the Reformed prior to the Edict of Nantes, and he opposed (at the price of his political career) the anti-Protestant acts of the Council of Trent. Praise for L’Hospital is, also, in Sidney’s Defence, praise for the friend of his friends. L’Hospital was among Mornay’s chief mentors in devising his rhetorical appeals for toleration and he was personally instrumental to Languet in his efforts to secure a lasting peace for the Huguenots in the treaty that ended the slaughters at Amboise. Languet, in turn, thought L’Hospital both a great statesman and France’s greatest living poet, an opinion whose regard for the complementarity of civil polity and the civil arts points again to his pious education by Melanchthon. This is not to imply that Sidney’s praise for L’Hospital is unprecedented. Lionized as a great statesman and humanist by his French contemporaries, Andre Thevet and Theodore Beza, L’Hospital was celebrated by the former as a devout Catholic and by the latter as a crypto-Calvinist. There are no worthies proof against refashioning, particularly in a culture where the competition among confessions made the purchase price on humanist virtue enormously high. Such efforts to cash in on his virtue are worth calling to mind, however, because they highlight all the more powerfully Sidney’s calculated ecumenicism in refusing to make L’Hospital’s confessional identity an issue.82 His virtue is celebrated above and beyond the partisanship of confessional debate, and such celebration points decisively to the Philippist character of Sidney’s piety.
L’Hospital was a figure whom Sidney knew personally. The two met in Paris in 1572 just prior to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, an event that Sidney fortunately survived, and an event that cost L’Hospital his life some six months later, so shaken was he by the ransacking of his house by the Guises’s troops and by the public humiliation of his Reformed spouse compelled to take Roman communion. There is no mention of those events in the Defence, and (remarkable for this putatively “forward Protestant”) only one mention of the Massacre in all of Sidney’s writings, and that one occurs in a private letter to Queen Elizabeth. The pious response to confessional conflict is uncompromising moderation, always the celebration of virtue transcending the divisiveness of theological wrangling. Memories of that divisiveness shadow Sidney’s celebrations of poetry’s worthy defenders: L’Hospital is long dead, the Emperor Maximilian now buried, and the Spanish influence in Prague a powerful reminder about the threat of the Catholic League against the Netherlands, the New World, and England itself. Similar to Mornay’s, Sidney’s consciously pious effort to transcend confessional debate assumes its meaning against a background of urgent cultural conflict.
Sidney sympathized with the constantly reiterated aversion of his moderate friends in Vienna to religious wrangling, and he indulges in none in the Defence of Poesy and precious little elsewhere in his works. (The contrast with the sometimes splenetic Spenser or, in the next century, with the militant Milton could hardly be more dramatic.)83 Among his recent biographers, in fact, Katherine Duncan-Jones is so struck by the absence from his canon of the familiar papist-bashing of his contemporaries that she goes one step further than that contemporary Jesuit with whom Sidney conversed in Prague, Edmund Campion, to suggest that Sidney was not merely susceptible to conversion to Catholicism, but also that he actually became a crypto-Catholic.84 Other biographical connections are cited in support of this claim, including Sidney’s subsequent kindness to Lady Kytson, a Roman Catholic, in his (mistaken) efforts to reassure her that “a general mitigation” in recusancy laws would ease her family’s burden, and Sidney’s role as facilitator for some well-known Catholic gentry to establish a plantation in the New World, promising liberty of conscience as well as a handsome financial return.85 Evident in his literary productions as well as in his sometimes unusually kind treatment of contemporary English Catholics, Sidney’s moderation scarcely needs explanation, however, as the product of some putative crypto-Catholicism. His moderation is better explained by its consistency with the practice of his friends, Languet and Mornay—who themselves regularly cultivated friendships with distinguished Catholics—and by its accord with one of the guiding principles of his Philippism, its studied aversion to confessional divisions among Christians.
Those principles are everywhere on display in the Defence, especially at crucial moments of the argument that threaten to occasion theological wrangling. For instance, when Sidney concludes his discussion of the golden world by signaling the poet’s distinctive power to address humankind’s fallen condition, he can do so intelligibly, as this argument has indicated, only because he shares the optimism of a Melanchthon and the Philippists about human agency—the zodiacal range of the wit, the ameliorative potential of the will. But in good Philippist style, no theological arguments are forthcoming to bolster these optimistic assumptions. Sidney was too courtly, too urbane, and too pious to indulge in wrangling—his piety complementing here as everywhere in the Defence his stylish, humanistically inflected cosmopolitanism. Instead, in acknowledgment of the minority status of his own convictions, pious and poetic, knowing how his arguments will by few either be understood or granted, he moves “to a more ordinary” consideration of the matter—to the definition of poetry as an art of imitation and the delimitation of three varieties of poets (101). As Sidney constructs those categories, accommodating as he so often does Scaliger’s immensely influential Italianate Poetics to his own English ends, his work again sheds light on the anthropological assumptions of the Defence, and their origins in Philippist piety.
It is revealing to note changes that Sidney makes while accommodating Scaliger’s categories to his argument. Even by the loose standards of the Poetics, Scaliger’s discriminations among the major kinds of poets are shifting and provisional. Introductory discussions suggesting distinctions to be drawn according to “poetical inspiration,” give way to proposed groupings by historical age, and to a final attempt to achieve a scheme for understanding kinds of poetry by a consideration of “subjects.”86 That final attempt promises a three-fold grouping, one that consists of religious poets (pagan), one of philosophical poets, and some never-named group that Scaliger apparently forgets to discuss as he wanders into considerations about famous women writers and the Sibylls. A moment later, when considering whether Lucan was a real poet, Scaliger asserts that he must be one, since “Verse is the property of the poet.”87 For the methodically minded Sidney, educated in the new hermeneutic, this sort of vagary simply would not do.
Sidney chooses to discriminate among kinds of poets by attending to their scope—clarified in this instance by attention to the different targets of their imitations. Sidney transforms Scaliger’s category of pagan prophetic poets into “the first and most noble sort,” vates, by adding sacred poets to the discussion—for instance, the David of the Psalms and the Solomon of the Song of Songs. Their objects of imitation are “the inconceivable excellencies of God”—excellencies that they are enabled poetically to conceive, like David, because they have “eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith,” and excellencies, in turn, that become conceivable to the mind as faith (energized by the poetic image) performs its work of clarification (99). Sidney’s second group is as derivative as it is ultimately dismissible, consisting of those philosophical, historical, natural and moral poets whose imitations stay “wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject”—who counterfeit, that is, only by copying the brazen world of nature (102). The third category consists of those “right poets,” who imitating nothing but “what may be and should be,” create speaking pictures of virtue and vice, both to move and to instruct as “the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (102–3).
Sidney’s vocabulary brings several specific advantages to his argument. As a method by which to create distinctions, it concentrates attention on the “right poets, of whom chiefly this question ariseth”—the poets who work by “human conceit,” and who by reason of their debased reputation, most need defending (102). While making distinctions, his attention to scope also signals priorities. David’s Psalms are more excellent poetry than even, say, Virgil’s Aeneid, “as eternity exceedeth a moment” (Sidney writes later in considering the scope of the divine), and his judgment about their excellence is consistent both with his personal piety and with his sense about poetic excellency residing in the Idea or foreconceit imitated by the writer (106).88 The inconceivable excellencies of God—at once conceived by the eyes cleared by faith and at the same time clearing the eyes for faith—are more excellent than the Idea of magnanimity figured forth in Aeneas.
By comparison with Scaliger’s, Sidney’s categorization of poets is a model of clarity. But the categories are considerably more tricky to distinguish than might at first appear, depending on assumptions that we bring to them about the boundary lines between the sacred and the secular. Assumptions are crucial here. For instance, in the same sentence that Sidney calls his prophetic poets or vates the “most noble sort,” he claims for the “right poets … the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (102–3). Perhaps prophecy is not to be considered a form of learning, or perhaps (more likely) Sidney is for the moment restricting his attention to human learning. More tricky still is the claim made just before these remarks on nobility. In the sentence immediately prior, Sidney defines the characteristic activity of the right poet as ranging “into the divine consideration” of what may be and should be (102). This remark seems more difficult to explain—or to explain away, since it is difficult to know in what sense the term “divine” applies to the inventions of human conceit. These are just two of the many statements in the Defence that trouble the neatly conceived boundary lines established between the vates on the one hand and the “right poets” on the other—trouble, that is, if we assume that those boundary lines between the first and the third categories of poets (between the vates and the right poets) reflect a division between the sacred and the secular. This is precisely the assumption that needs to be undone in order to understand better how Sidney’s Philippist piety informs his poetics.
Sidney clearly does not attribute inspiration to the right poet (he explicitly rejects the Ion’s characterization of poetry as the “very inspiring of a divine force”), yet he claims that the right poet creates “with the force of a divine breath” (130, 101). Poetic making bears a likeness to divine making, but does not proceed from divine inspiration. Sidney just as clearly acknowledges real distinctions between the ethic and politic ends that define the humane sciences and the scope of divinity (knowledge about God), but when he discusses “the knowledge of a man’s self,” he describes that architectonic knowledge in close conjunction with humane learning that leads the individual to “the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104). It has been suggested that such statements are purely the products of rhetoric—the right poet benefiting from verbal association with his higher-ups.89 Sidney is not above employing such rhetorical tactics here or elsewhere in the canon, but there are other, more coherent explanations for those associations. At key moments like these, Sidney is a considerably more careful and methodical thinker than he is ordinarily credited for being.
Right poets and vates are so frequently associated in the Defence, first, because of the intimate connections that Sidney identifies between humane and sacred poetry. Both are species of eloquence, and as his education in the new hermeneutic taught him, both employ the best tools of the Greco-Roman tradition in order to achieve their best effects. David’s “notable prosopopeias” which “make you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty,” are textbook examples of a rhetorical device for amplifying poetic power, one available to humane and sacred poets alike (99). Hence, David is an altogether appropriate model for right poets, just as Sidney reminds us that the divine orator, Paul, can turn to classical tragedy for exemplary matter of his own. So too, Sidney balances a discussion of energeia in love poetry with a call for piously intentioned songs and sonnets, partly because the oratorical strategy in both categories of poetry is one and the same. Again, that same logic emerges in a later portion of the Defence’s discussion of admiration, so crucial to the “delightful teaching which is the end of Poesy” (137). Even though Plautus and Terence are the traditional authorities for illustrating delight in the theater, Sidney reserves his highest praise for “the tragedies of Buchanan” since they “do justly bring forth a divine admiration” (137). Plautus and Buchanan are distinguishable (perhaps) by their different “scopes,” but because the oratorical tools available to both are the same, they can be associated in the always syncretic, always inclusive web of Sidney’s critical argument. It is necessary to add a “perhaps” to that observation, however, in order to challenge more pointedly those usual assumptions about how to discriminate between the right poet and the vates. On what basis do we assume that Sidney would have judged Buchanan’s work prophetic or inspired? Or the poetry of Melanchthon and Beza, also singled out for praise in the Defence? And if not inspired, are those examples of poetry (although sacred in subject) better considered true species of right poetry? If the distinctions among kinds of poets are constructed on the basis of scope—the difference between their imitative marks or objects—what scope does Sidney imagine for human conceit?
When Sidney attends to the moral commonplaces of Christ employed in his parables, he does so in conjunction with the pretty allegories of Aesop (both illustrate the virtues of claritas). When he offers exemplary proofs of the “strange effects” of poetry in working its metamorphic power over the plebeian and the prince, the public man and the private, the community and the individual, he again balances, deliberately and self-consciously, humane and sacred texts—the stories of Agrippa and Nathan (114). The metamorphic power of humane letters is paired with the metamorphic power of the divine, as Agrippa’s agency in transforming the unruly members of Rome’s body politic into what it naturally should be (“the whole people”) is made coincident with Nathan’s skill in creating a story to restore the adulterous David to holiness (wholeness of nature) [114]. The pattern of association is too frequent not to be intentional, and while pointing in illustrative style to Sidney’s deep Philippist convictions about the close relationship between humane and sacred letters, the closeness of that relationship matters, in turn, for reasons that at once motivate and transcend considerations about poetics.
Humane and sacred letters are so closely associated in art because the human and the divine are so closely bound together in Sidney’s thinking about nature. An absolute division between the secular and the sacred—the gulf that yawns in Calvin’s theology between helpless man and omnipotent God—is irreconcilable with a conception of “human conceit” presented in terms of a still-erect Adamic wit, ranging in a zodiac of Ideas, whose authority is attributed to “natural conceit” and whose self-knowledge entails a discovery of “divine essence.” Instead, Sidney’s thinking about human nature models the pious epistemology of both Melanchthon and Mornay, two of those “learned men” to whom the Defence quietly alludes as having “learnedly thought that … the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book; seeing in Nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil” (113). That epistemology is “pious” since it assumes that God is the author of those innate ideas implanted in the mind, and “pious” too since those notitiae—those “notable images of virtue and vice” (everywhere the subject of Sidney’s puns)—convey truths ascending from moral commonplaces to knowledge about the soul’s afterlife. The scope of human conceit is not limited, then, to matters of ethic and politic consideration (as they are classically understood), and is not be confused, anachronistically, with a contemporary understanding of the secular. It is a scope limited, in fact, only by its inability to conceive (until eyes are cleared by faith) the inconceivable excellencies of God—not all of which, including his justice, goodness, providence and chastity—are beyond our natural power to “see” and to know.
The nature of the human story reflects the divine character of nature itself. The Defence’s opening narration celebrates poetry as “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse” and poets as the first “deliverers of their knowledge to posterity,” the antiquity of poetry underscored by its adaptation among the ancient philosophers, who originally went “under the masks of poets,” and then by ancient historians, who “have been glad” to borrow its fashion and “perchance weight” (96–7). Sidney’s purpose in narrating this background is less historical than anthropological, as his further reflections about the popularity of poetry among the Turks, the Irish, and the “most barbarous and simple Indians” indicate. As he attends to the power of its “sweet delights” to soften and sharpen “hard dull wits,” the point is not that poetry is primitive, but instead that it is primary (98). And this is a point Sidney makes “notably” about an art “not more notable in soon beginning than in long continuing” because of poetry’s intimate identification with the notitiae, those sparks of natural knowledge innate to the mind that are, at once, the source of the arts and evidence of God’s providence inscribed in his creations (96, 98). Poetry is as primary to the nurturing of civilization as the notitiae are to the growth of the mind. Here, in Sidney’s narration about the growth of human civilizations, phylogeny (the history of the species) recapitulates ontogeny (the development of the individual). Nature is destiny, and epistemology the prophetic map of cultural—not just individual—history. Or to proceed one step further in his strategically organized reflections, that identification of the primitive with the primary, of notable arts with the notitiae, accounts too for Sidney’s willingness—in the face of “vain and godless superstition”—to acknowledge that it was not “altogether without ground” that pagans recognized in poetry “some divine force” (98–9). As in Mornay and Melanchthon, historical anthropology shadows providential purposes. The pre-Christian past is always instinct with meaning for the present because nature speaks eloquently at all times about God, even as poetry’s natural eloquence (with its “number and measure in words and … high flying liberty of conceit”) appears god-like in delivering the knowledge upon which civilization depends for its maturity. Poetry is no more dispensable to culture than mother’s milk to infants or ancestors’ deeds to heroes.
Consider again how much power Sidney attributes to nature in the Defence. Nature (natura naturans) is that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine. It is also, as the previous chapter has indicated, the force energizing humankind in its appetite for goodness. While Melanchthon and Mornay write about the goodness of natural love implanted in all animate beings by God as στoργή—best exemplified by the mutual love of parents and children—Sidney substitutes for the abstract philosophical term (as poets are apt to do) speaking pictures of the virtue. When the reader is made to see Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness,” poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved, he argues. That argument, in turn, has force both because Sidney knows something about the power of Virgilian verse (as a rhetorical construction) and also because Sidney realizes that Virgil has tapped into power that exists at once “naturally” and divinely, those feelings of στoργή that bind one family member to another. Poets are able “to plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” only because of the human appetite for virtue, and that human appetite for virtue is asserted only because of the remarkable pious assumptions about nature at play in the text. What the will wills—by nature—is virtue.
Sin, by contrast, is the unnatural consequence of the infected will—from whose tyrannical consequences it is the poet’s special business to liberate us. From which of those consequences, however? Only from the moral and political forms of tyranny—however strange that only should sound? Or does the Defence imply stronger saving powers for the right poets? When Sidney discusses the persuasive power of poetic delight, he does so with reference to the dramatist’s portrayal of “things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature” (136). His discussion of delight is fascinating, partly because it permits him to explore psychologically the existential basis for the poet’s power to move and teach his readers—what it is about ourselves by nature that enables delight to be elicited. Partly, too, the discussion merits attention because of the transition that it affords between praise of classical comedy and (to recall the passage once more) the celebration of Buchanan’s tragedies for justly bringing forth “a divine admiration” (137). Unpacking Sidney’s divine pun is instructive. In the best known of Buchanan’s dramas, his tragedy of John the Baptist, Buchanan inspires the highest (or “divine”) admiration because of his poetic talent—his skill in delighting us with a narrative that speaks to (has a conveniency) “to ourselves or the general nature.” At the same time, Buchanan inspires “a divine admiration” because that narrative speaks to our nature about real human needs—the need to be liberated from the tyranny of illegitimate sovereigns and sovereign sin, and thereby inspires, too, an admiration for the “divine.” The tragedy is divine in method and in matter, as Sidney’s pun reveals, and that pun has a revealing consequence. For if admiration is a virtue that moves the will—as clearly it does—then Buchanan’s right poetry is a vehicle, in the language of Chrysostom and Melanchthon, for “he who wills to find a way.”
The old boundaries will not do. Sidney’s distinction between the vates and the “right poets” simply does not answer to anachronistically conceived boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Against Scaliger’s effort to make “verse” the distinctive characteristic of the poet, Sidney identifies the enjoyment of self-knowledge—the knowledge sparked into life by fiction’s notable images of virtue and vice—as poetry’s distinguishing activity. Such knowledge transcends the categories of the sacred and the secular since its scope is awareness of one’s own divine essence, an “architectonic” species of knowledge whose history begins with Aristotle but whose determinative significance derives from Melanchthon. The God who reveals himself to human beings through the exercise of reason is what Melanchthon calls repeatedly the Mens Architectatrix (the architectural mind). At once reminiscent of the demiurge from Plato’s Timaeus and the prime mover from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Melanchthon’s Mens Architectatrix manifests himself first and foremost as a maker, the maker of rational beings who inhabit a rationally constructed universe whose purpose is everywhere the same: to invite those beings to discover how and why their maker made them. Sidney’s phrase, “how and why their maker made them,” applied to readers of poetry, makes a fair translation of this central argument from the Liber de Anima: “Ita condita est hominum natura divinitus, ut fieri cogitationes in nobis, et formari ac ordinari imagines sciamus.” (Thus did God make human nature: so that we should come to know how thoughts and images are formed and ordered in ourselves.)90
If it is important to recognize, as Chapter 2 has argued, that Sidney’s golden world is more than a mere metaphor, that it is a concept determining the structure of fictions shaped according to specific philosophical (and pious!) assumptions—assumptions, for instance, about the rational design of the cosmos, its transparency to interpretation, and its purposefulness—then it matters, too, to recognize cognate conceptions about the Maker both in Mornay’s vision of God as the Divine Archer and in Melanchthon’s depictions of the creator as Mens Architectatrix. These are conceptions—infused by confidence about the goodness of nature—circulating among Protestants and Reformed Christians alike that challenge the adequacy of traditionally narrow views (within Sidney studies) about the limits of Reformation belief. When Sidney writes about self-knowledge as the scope of human learning, and identifies the discovery of our “divine essence” as key to obtaining that scope, he prepares the groundwork for celebrating poetry as architectonike, “the highest end of mistress knowledge.” That groundwork is prepared because Sidney endows the poet with the attribute most distinctive of the human being conceived as a mimesis—a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth—of the “divine essence.” The poet is a maker who best imitates the divine as he imitates aright.
The distinction between Sidney’s vates and his “right poet” is configured strictly and characteristically in terms of the scope that the Defence defines for each. The main purpose of the vates, like David in his Psalms or like those pious lyric poets whom Sidney hopes to summon into being during his review of English poetry, is to write in praise of God, providing thereby an outlet for joy in the divine and relief from affliction: “this poesy must be used by whosoever will follow St James’s counsel in singing psalms when they are merry, and I know is used with the fruit of comfort by some, when, in sorrowful pangs of their death-bringing sins, they find the consolation of the never-leaving goodness” (102). By contrast, the main purpose of the right poet, like Virgil in his Aeneid or like Christ in his parables, is to fashion speaking pictures of virtue and vice that restore through the art of the poet’s zodiacal wit the now infected (and de-natured) will to its original—its truly Natural—condition of goodness.
The subject of the vates is God, the subject of the right poet is humankind. The vates creates a poetry of contemplation—we see in David’s Psalms the otherwise inconceivable excellencies of God. The right poet creates a poetry of action—we are moved by speaking pictures of virtue and vice to act virtuously ourselves. However, just as the vates is credited in his contemplative work with the power to inspire actions of good consequence (expressions of joy and consolation), so too the right poet’s ability to move depends, first, on his architectonic power to impart (contemplatively) real self-knowledge. And, once more, just as the vates is regarded from the vantage of the human (with human needs for joy and consolation in mind), so too “the right poet” has a purpose inextricably connected to God—since self-knowledge entails in Sidney’s distinctively Christian anthropology, an enjoyment of what is divine in one’s own nature. Both kinds of poetry have the power to relate the human to the divine, each with its own scope—its own distinctive end—each with its own distinctive and appropriate balance of action and contemplation.91 In the most carefully considered sense of the term, then, Sidney’s categories of poets are a mutually complementary instance of his Philippism at work, as the reflection of his piety and the instrument of that humanism by which piety assumes poetic form in enhancing our liberation from the sovereignty of sin.
It is well to emphasize Sidney’s energy in reinforcing by message and by manner the “enjoyment” of divine essence as key to piety and poetics. The playfulness of his text is irrepressible, constant, and nowhere more visible or more serious than in his purposeful toying with the boundary lines between the secular and the sacred. At times, he seems bent on startling his readers into attention—the juxtaposition of Christ and Aesop as types of the right poet surprises, and such surprises are frequent. David the Psalmist is poetry’s hero, David the adulterer is a poetry’s patient, and those dual roles register, by their surprising contrast, Sidney’s Philippist vision of sanctification as an ongoing process—the reality of sin even for the saintly, the recurrent need always for Law (natural law embodied in Nathan’s tale of the sheep). At other moments, Sidney cultivates a teasing, deliberately coy mode of discourse that relates while refusing to equate. In weighing poetry’s value to human nature, core concerns about the erected wit and the infected will resonate theologically because of the explicit recall of Adam’s “first accursed fall,” but when Sidney characterizes the world of the poet’s making as superior to the fallen one, he describes it as “golden” not Edenic. Classical language and mythology enter the argument as a means, at once, of relating that idealized and potentially restorative world of the poet’s making to the Christian paradise—to that place where Adam and Eve enjoyed a natural concord between their wits and wills—without equating the poet’s golden world to Eden or, one step further removed, to a Miltonic “paradise within, happier far.”
Classical allusion asserts relationship, as it cools identification in acts of rhetorical gamesmanship that tease us into discovering significant relationships even as we are admonished to refuse easy equivalences. It is significant that the “right poet” is empowered, by his instruction of the wit and his moving of the will, to bring new concord to those faculties disrupted by the fall, but the justice that the poet restores (as the classical framing reminds us) is akin to Edenic concord, not equivalent to that justification imputed by God’s grace. Just as the Romans are made a “whole people” again by Agrippa’s tale, so David is made whole again by Nathan’s story—but, Sidney cautiously adds, poetry is the “second and instrumental cause” of that event in which God’s grace figures first (115). Again, gamesmanship refuses to equate what it relates, so that we discover how and why that maker made his text in the process of sorting through and making distinctions between what belongs to humane conceit and what to divine, what concord attends to Law, what comes from Gospel. Refuse to play that game and heavy-handed irony can quickly discover in Sidney’s classical allusions or their Christian counterparts evidence of the Defence’s parodic deconstruction of its own arguments. Refuse to play that game and supremely sober assertions about Sidney’s “Calvinism” or “Protestantism” or “evangelical Christianity” can just as quickly twist his argument into an exclusive celebration of divine poetry or a celebration of right poetry as exclusively valued by its channeling of grace. Sometimes poetic energy is channeled into wooing a mistress, and Sidney’s piety is sufficiently cosmopolitan to be unembarrassed by that fact, just as Sidney is sufficiently savvy to appreciate the analogy between human love and the divine. Amidst the serious gamesmanship of the Defence, enjoying our divine essence means appreciating both the relatedness and the distinction—our likeness to God and our (fallen) difference from him.
The right historical context for recovering the rules of that game is indicated briefly and best by Sidney’s own serious gamesmanship on the eve of his death. In Fulke Greville’s account of the event, Sidney entreated the “quire of divine Philosophers” assembled about his deathbed: “to deliver the opinion of the ancient Heathen, touching the immortality of the soul: First, to see what true knowledge she retains of her own essence, out of the light of her self; then to parallel with it the most pregnant authorities of the old and new Testament, as supernatural revelations, sealed up from our flesh, for the divine light of faith to reveal, and work by.”92 Only Sidney’s most intimate friends could have been aware of the complexity of the game he was playing. Readers of his poetry recognize his gamesmanship at once. At the moment of his death, Sidney was attempting to step from life into fiction, by inserting himself into the fourth book of his own Old Arcadia and rehearsing the actions of his princely heroes, who confronting death, like him contemplate arguments on behalf of the soul’s immortality. In the face of impending mortality, they contemplate the soul’s destiny to preserve quiet of mind. So too their maker. A Cyrus made by his own Cyruses, Sidney becomes on his deathbed the exemplary image of his own creations, Pyrocles and Musidorus.
It is not only readers of the Defence who are expected to take seriously his poetics of accommodation. Sidney himself enacted that poetics in his death—and enacted that poetics with a difference that speaks to the character and quality of his piety. Beyond the arguments of the pagans and his own Arcadia, through a process of sorting and refining, of relating without equating knowledge that comes from the soul’s own light with knowledge that comes from divine light, Sidney had that “quire of … Philosophers”—an appropriately cosmopolitan assembly of “excellent men, of divers Nations”—proceed to “the most pregnant authorities of the old, and new Testament.” Beyond the “ancient Heathen,” he requests the divines assembled about his deathbed to proceed to “the most pregnant authorities” of the Bible. Sidney’s serious gamesmanship extended as it enacted his own Arcadia, as a recapitulation at his deathbed of the inclusive, cosmopolitan Christianity of that other Philip whom he loved and admired, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. For Sidney’s wish to have been granted, that same choir of “divine Philosophers” would only had to have opened a copy of Mornay’s De veritate, and proceeded past its dedication to Hubert Languet, to rehearse the desired argument, step-by-step, in its full scope—inclusively, and with cosmopolitan piety, rehearsing arguments from the ancient heathens to the divine scriptures.
When Sidney promises at his argument’s outset an account of poetry “such as, being rightly applied, deserveth not to be scourged out of the Church of God,” he seems at once both to enable and to foreclose a description of the Defence as a Protestant poetics (99). That is a paradox worth exploring. His promise is so obviously enabling, on the one hand, because if poetry, rightly applied, has a place in the work of the church—and even that exegetically inflected “applied” speaks to pious purposes—then poetry has the power both potentially (in an imagined future of English verse) and actually (in the Psalms of David, the parables of Christ, and the tragedies of Buchanan) to do God’s work. On the other hand, even as it is expressed, Sidney’s promise seems simultaneously to foreclose such a description because of what can only be called the perceptibly hesitant, carefully delimited character of its rhetorical construction. Sidney’s argument that the poet deserves not to be scourged from the Church (witness Christ and the money changers) is different in kind from a Du Bartas-style delimitation of poetic scope to a strictly divine aim or purpose. Poetry rightly applied belongs in church, but it seems very well to belong too in court, in the university, in the schoolrooms where Aesop is taught, in the camps of warriors, and in the by-ways of cities where blind crowders sing the deeds of Percy and Douglas. Perhaps Alan Sinfield, by virtue of special revelation, has better insight into the text’s “only partly occulted desires,” but it does seem that had Sidney wished to write a Protestant poetics—a poetics uniquely dedicated to the celebration of godly matters—he would have done so. Sidney was, by education and disposition, too committed a humanist to restrict poetry to that end, and to dispense with the pleasure and the profit of that large and cosmopolitan body of humane letters that he cites everywhere in support of the value of poetry and as a model for the production of a contemporary English literature. Those critics who have advocated a description of the Defence as a Protestant poetics take wrong ways, then, not only in their misapplication of an historically inaccurate “Calvinist” paradigm to the text, but also in their underestimation of Sidney’s humanism.
One appeal of replacing the traditional critical vocabulary of “Protestant poetics” by the new historically specific terminology of “Philippism,” is the usefulness of that terminology in preserving the demonstrable power of Sidney’s humanist commitments to the argument of the Defence. To define the Defence as a “Philippist,” not a Calvinist, text is a special kind of critical proposition, very different from appealing for a trade-off of one label of confessional allegiance for another. For, properly considered in terms of their own historical activities and commitments, Languet and his circle in Vienna did not constitute a distinct religious confession—much less a Robinson or a Rogers in England. First and foremost, the Philippists were humanists—and anti-confessional humanists at that—whose labors across a full spectrum of arts and sciences (a sort of zodiac of elite disciplinary enterprises) were both inspired and informed by the deeply civilized piety of Philip Melanchthon—for so many of them, their “teacher,” as Languet most often calls him.
Melanchthon’s inspiration, in turn, provides a second major reason why applying a “Philippist” label to the Defence carries persuasive critical appeal. For while grounding the text inside a community whose labors served to contextualize and, no doubt, to validate Sidney’s assertiveness about the worth of secular studies, “Philippism” has explanatory force, also, in accounting for the importance of piety to its arguments. Against the too general neglect of the religious in Sidney studies as a whole and the too forward-looking characterization of his critical work as fully modern and therefore fully secularized—the argument of A.C. Hamilton among others—Sidney’s Philippist education accounts for the Christian anthropology of the Defence’s key arguments about poetic scope and for its persistent reference to the divine as the ultimate standard by which to value all things human.93 Once more, Melanchthon’s inspiration matters, as it came to Sidney through the mediation of his Philippist mentor and friends, because its carefully moderated optimism about human agency—its assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will and, most signally, its celebration of that agency’s scope in securing freedom from the sovereignty of sin—supplies precisely the right context for understanding the purpose of Sidney’s argument.
And how would Sidney himself have characterized the role of piety in his own Defence of Poesy? Speculative as the answer to this question must be, it is one worth posing seriously. It is unlikely that he would have called himself a Calvinist, a Lutheran, or even—surprising as this admission must initially sound—a Philippist. Although current in the vocabulary of sixteenth-century Europe, “Philippism” was not a term employed by Languet and his circle. As Beatrice Nicollier-de Weck indicates, “Philippism” was most often used as a term of abuse by rival factions of Gnesio-Lutherans to stigmatize those who remained faithful to Melanchthon’s teachings. The Philippists as a group were disinclined to identify themselves by a party-political label, and this disinclination is fully comprehensible in terms of their repeated expressions of horror about disputatious theology, and their studied pursuit of evangelical unity. To follow Melanchthon, according to such logic, and the tendency to identify Melanchthonian Lutheranism with true Lutheranism, and true Lutheranism, in turn, with the “cause”—with the triumph of God’s true church—meant, at least in principle, being a true Christian, rather than a sectarian or a party advocate. Sidney’s answer to the question would have been the same as Maximilian II’s. He would have ascribed the piety of his Defence neither to Calvin nor to Melanchthon, but to Christ. In this important regard, as in others, he shared Mornay’s ambition to create a pathway of moderation beyond the confessional disputes of late sixteenth-century Europe.
Even if such an estimation is right, however, the answers that scholars give to questions of this kind are sometimes necessarily different from the answers that might be supplied by the actors in those historical dramas we study. With increasing frequency and greater historical specificity and precision, contemporary scholars of early modern Europe have revived the vocabulary of Philippism in order to identify an important body of humanists who held in common distinctive political, religious, and educational convictions, and who so readily, like Languet, ascribed their debt for those convictions to their preceptor, Melanchthon. Without that vocabulary, that community would go nameless, and its labors—to borrow a phrase from Sidney—would die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
1 A notable treatise of the church, 1579. For the Latin translation of Mornay’s De la verité de la religion chrestienne, I have used De veritate religionis Christianae liber … Gallice primum conscriptus, Latine versus, nunc autem ab eodem accuratissime correctus (Lugduni Batavorum: Christopher Plantin, 1587; 1st pub., 1581).
2 No agreement currently obtains about Sidney’s role in the English translation “completed” by Arthur Golding, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. Mack cites Feuillerat (vol. 3, viii–ix) approvingly in attributing the first six books to Sidney [Sidney’s Poetics, p. 100]; D.P. Walker challenges those claims on semantic grounds in “Atheism, the Ancient Theology, and Sidney’s Arcadia” in The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), p. 133–4.
3 Walker, “Atheism,” p. 132–63; Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 176–9. (For a more recent version of the argument, see Howell, p. 112.) See also Weiner’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, p. 11–17; and Sinfield’s “Sidney, Du Plessis-Mornay and the Pagans,” Philological Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Winter 1979), 26–39. See too Sinfield’s extension of these arguments in “Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control,” in Faultlines, p. 143–80.
4 That “turn” has never been made in contemporary critical accounts of Mornay’s text. The Latin version of the Verité has gone without scholarly comment, even though it is clearly this version of the text upon which both Mornay and Languet depended to disseminate its message most widely.
5 The Memoirs of Philippe de Mornay Sieur du Plessis Marly, in A Huguenot Family in the XVI Century, trans. Lucy Crump (London: G. Routledge, 1926), p. 169.
6 Cited by Buxton, p. 172.
7 See “Testim. de Langueto” (1 June 1555) in CR 8, 491–2, in which Languet is celebrated as a Ulysses in the service of good doctrine.
8 “Sir Philip Sidney’s Model of the Statesman,” 93–117. For Mornay’s biography, see Raoul Patry, Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay: Un huguenot homme d’État, 1549–1623 (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1933).
9 See Alain Tallon for a discussion of the complex and anti-confessional character of du Ferrier’s religious beliefs, “Diplomate et ‘politique’: Arnaud Du Ferrier,” in De Michel de l’Hospital à l’Édit de Nantes, p. 305–36.
10 Worden, p. 54.
11 Les Huguenots et Le Roi: Le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, 1572–1600 (Geneva: Droz, 2002). For Languet’s shaping power over the young Mornay, see p. 52–6, and p. 149, where Daussy summarizes their shared political principles.
12 Daussy, p. 117.
13 For Mornay on war as the inevitable response of the Huguenots to despair about winning freedom to practice their religion, see his Remonstrance aux estats (1576) in Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2: “La defiance les mettra au desespoir, et le desespoir aulx armes …,” 72.
14 See Daussy quoting the irenic Mornay: “Il n’y a telle paix qui ne vaille mieux que la meillure guerre du monde” (There is no peace that is not better than the best war), p. 122. In his Remonstrance, Mornay assumes the persona of a moderate Catholic to argue: “Si nous les regardons, ce sont hommes de mesme nature et condition que nous … ils sont chretiens, adorans un mesme Dieu, cherchans salut en un mesme Christ, croiant une mesme bible …” (If we consider them, they are men of the same nature and condition as us … [T]hey are Christians, adoring the same God, seeking salvation in the same Christ, believing in one same Bible), 46. See Mornay’s call for “douceur et aimable conversation” (sweet and amiable conversation) and the conjoining of a council to create ecumenical unity, where “tous soions réunis en une relligion” (all would be reunited in one religion), in Remonstrance, 47, 60.
15 For Mornay’s contributions as a polemicist to William of Orange, see Daussy on his Discours sur la permission de liberté de religion, p. 160–61. For his alliance against the Gnesio-Lutheran Formula of Concord with Charles Quissarme, seigneur de Danzay (France’s ambassador to Denmark and Languet’s friend), see Daussy, p. 205–8 and Robert D. Linder, “The French Calvinist Response to the Formula of Concord,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no.1 (Winter 1982), 18–37.
16 For this history, see Daussy, p. 144–52. Worden’s account of Mornay in London pictures him as a “forward Protestant” scorned by Queen Elizabeth in his search for financial support to wage war against the Spaniards in the Netherlands. His political position was utterly more complicated than this interpretation supports. Mornay was not present in London to gain money for an immediate war, but rather for Navarre’s scheme of finance-and-delay. If he was initially scorned by Elizabeth in his pursuit of money for Navarre’s political project, that scorn was very likely the product of La Huguerye’s successful campaign against Condé’s rival, Navarre (and thereby against Mornay). It is worth mentioning, too, that Mornay did later receive money from Elizabeth on Navarre’s behalf (whatever her first response) and that disapproving as Mornay may have been of Anjou’s pursuit of Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, like Languet, Mornay labored immediately after his departure from England in Anjou’s service in the Netherlands. For an account of those services, see Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 129–30.
17 Dedicatory epistle, Treatise of the Church, n. p.
18 See Treatise, Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
19 Treatise, F. vi (recto).
20 Treatise, I. iii (recto).
21 Treatise, F. vii (verso).
22 Treatise, G. v (verso).
23 Treatise, H. viii (verso).
24 And beyond, even to Geneva. Scope is a term familiar to Reformed Christians of several churches, and its lack of a particular confessional stamp comprises some of its appeal for the ecumenically minded Mornay. Treatise, I. iv (verso); I. iii (verso).
25 For documentation about its wide appeal among Catholics and the Reformed, see Patry, p. 299–300.
26 The whole of the dedicatory letter celebrates Languet as the very embodiment of the cosmopolitan Christian Reformer, and directly attributes the inspiration for the De veritate’ s translation and the agency for its dissemination to him: “Auctor vertendi nobis, idem qui edendi fuit. Hubertus Languetus V.C. toto orbe Christiano, in primis notus.”
27 Lettre de M. Duplessis à M. Languet, 15 November 1579, in Mémoires et correspondance, vol. 2, 81.
28 Sleidan’s Commentaries on the Condition of Religion and Politics under the Emperor Charles V was, as Thomas A. Brady, Jr. notes, the “most widely read history by a Germanspeaking author during the entire early modern era,” and, I would add, among the most partisan, The Politics of the Reformation in Germany: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) of Strasbourg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 137–8. Mornay is clearly on Sleidan’s side, but he wants none of his partisanship.
29 Lettre … à M. Languet, vol. 2, 81.
30 For Mornay’s hatred of theological contentiousness—and expressions thereof in his alliance with Danzay against the Formula of Concord—see Daussy, p. 206–8.
31 Golding tr., p. 325. De veritate, p. 400. Note Mornay’s distinction between a finem for living creatures and a scopum for humankind and for God. All further citations of Golding’s translation will be included parenthetically in the text.
32 For another passage about God as an archer, see Mornay’s discussion of providence, p. 174. His use of the term “scope” is especially prevalent in Chapters XVIII–XXI, the heart of the argument. In parallel to his Treatise of the Church, Mornay includes in the De veritate extended exegetical discussions of the Bible; see Chapters XXV and XXVI.
33 See Ernesto Grassi on the philosophical implications of humanist rhetorical programs, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1980).
34 For a concise account of Mornay’s argument, see Henri Holstein, “Aux origines de l’apologétique moderne: La verité de la religion chrétienne de Duplessis-Mornay,” in L’homme devant Dieu: mélanges offerts au pêre Henri de Lubac (Paris: Aubier, 1964), p. 235–48.
35 See John McNeill, “Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,” Journal of Religion 26 (1946), where he notes, too, that there is “no real discontinuity between the teaching of the reformers and that of their predecessors with respect to natural law,” 168. Memoirs, p. 173.
36 For Mornay on the virtue of στoργή, see De veritate, p. 217, 384. The term does not appear in Golding’s translation. Beyond its copious display of erudition, Mornay’s appeal to natural law is distinguished also by its sometimes startling assertions of epistemic optimism. Such assertions are often most startling in those extended passages of translation from Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus, Iamblichus—or nearer to home—Pico della Mirandola, interwoven among the arguments (primarily) of the De veritate’ s first section. It is one thing simply to assert reason’s power to apprehend truths from nature; it is quite another to quote “against those which pretend a weaknesse of the Soule” long passages from Plotinus in proof of the mind’s power, as it adjusts its aim from mortal to immortal things, to become “after a sort a very World of understanding & light,” Golding tr., p. 273. Mornay’s phrase “after a sort” is a rhetorically and piously prudent qualification of that optimism—and such qualifications count, both in individual sentences and in the book as a whole—but the phrase falls considerably short of deflation. In one of the most intriguing sentences in the De veritate, Mornay writes: “And so farre off is Reason from abasying fayth, to make us attaine thereto, that contrariwise she lifteth us up as it were upon her shoulders, to make us to see it, and to take it for our guide, as the onely thing that can bring us to God; and the onely schoolemistresse of whome we ought to learne our salvation” (Preface, n. p.). What makes this sentence so intriguing is its purposeful ambiguity. When Reason places us upon the shoulders of faith, and makes us see faith and take faith for our guide, she does so—and here the semantic sense hovers amidst syntactical uncertainties—either because Reason is the only “schoolmistresse” from whom we ought to learn our salvation or because faith is that sole “schoolmistresse.” (The sentence can be read both ways.) Only on second reading, after a reasoned analysis of the sentence’s sense, does it become clear that Mornay must have the latter meaning in mind, not the former: only faith is the “schoolmistresse” who “can bring us to God,” and only because of faith can one so reason. Such confusion is purposeful because of the intimate cooperation that Mornay asserts between human reason as a guide toward faith, and the power of faith once achieved to enhance reason (“the truth beeing revealed, enlighteneth reason”). His sentence, then, elicits from his readers the very cooperation that is its subject.
37 “Sidney… and the Pagans,” 29.
38 “Sidney … and the Pagans,” 29.
39 Mornay represents human beings before Christ as incurably sad. Like the Africans of his own day, “they feele a mischief within them, whereinto neither the eye of the Phisition can see, nor the medicine that he ministreth can atteyne” (318). The best sort of ancients asked the right question—how the individual can acquire self-knowledge, what Sidney calls “architectonic knowledge,” and what Mornay terms “the first precept” of the “arte of healing the Soule” (309). They provided the right analysis of the soul’s disease—its sinfulness, pride, and corruption by the passions of self-love (311). They understood mankind’s fallen condition and yearned for relief from it: “The philosophers were sore combered in finding a meane to cleanse Mankynd from his filthinesse; some would have done it by the Morals; some by the Mathematicals; and some by Religious Ceremonies; but in the end they confesse that all these things can doe nothing in that behalf” (318). Their knowledge extended, then, even to an awareness of their impotence and sadness in the absence of the true religion, which they could wish for, but not obtain. In sum, as Mornay writes, the ancients were “fooles in their remedies, but wise in discerning the disease” (318). Reading “them whole,” in turn, undermines the too-easy rhetoric that might oppose foolish pagans to wise Christians, a dispensable classical tradition of secular letters to a uniquely valuable sacred one. Right argument complicates such oppositions because of the inseparability of folly and wisdom among the ancients.
40 For a concise elaboration of this argument, see Carl R. Trueman, “Calvin and Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 225–44. For an extended scholarly treatment of the diversity of Reformed theology, see Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part One,” 345–75 and “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” 125–60. For similar emphasis on the doctrinal diversity of the Reformed tradition, with a focus on its social and cultural history, see Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed.
41 Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), vol. 1, 270 (II. 2. 12). All additional citations will be presented in the text inside parentheses.
42 For a concise view of Calvin’s treatment of reason in respect to issues of conscience and the Law, see William Klempa, “Calvin and Natural Law,” Calvin Studies 4 (1988), 1–23. See too, Guenther H. Haas, “Calvin’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, p. 93–105.
43 Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, p. 36.
44 “Sidney’s Defense of Plato,” Religion and Literature 30, no. 2 (1998), 41–2.
45 Raiger 40.
46 Mack, p. 127.
47 On Plato, Sidney writes (tongue-in-cheek), “he attributeth unto Poesy more than myself do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man’s wit,” 130.
48 “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992), 120. See William J. Bouwsma’s fine biography of Calvin as conflicted humanist, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
49 Bergvall, 120–21.
50 For learning about virtue and vice, when passion has been mastered, Sidney writes, “the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book”—or even better, he adds, since that light speaks clearly from “natural conceit” (113). The notion that Ideas contain authority—genuine authority—by virtue of “natural conceit” rather than divine grace seems inconsistent with Calvin’s theology, however broadly conceived. Calvin does write about “natural law,” but he defines its purpose darkly (“to render man inexcusable”), (vol. 1, 282; II. 2. 22).
51 Letter of March, 1565 in Johann Sturm on Education, p. 295–6.
52 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 202–3 and Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney. Weiner writes as a paraphrase of Sidney’s central argument, “If poets cannot make all things well, at least they can make some things better by making some men act better,” p. 48. This is a strangely flat restatement of the Defence’ s metamorphic claims about the power of poetry to transform individuals (to make a Cyrus who makes many Cyruses).
53 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 198. For complementary articulations of similar contradictions in the Defence, see Gary F. Waller, “‘This Matching of Contraries’, Bruno, Calvin, and the Sidney Circle,” Neophilologus 56 (1972), 334 and D.H. Craig, “A Hybrid Growth,” 68–70. Alan Hager writes about the Defence in relation to “the sonneteer’s mock encomium of self” in Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1991), p. 103–14. As an alternative perspective, see Martin Raitiere, “The Unity of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 21, no. 1 (1981), 37–58.
54 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 187. For Du Bartas’s popularity in England, with particular reference to Sidney, see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 167–234.
55 Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 144.
56 For a study of the dissemination of Melanchthon’s commentaries through northern Europe’s major intellectual centers, see Meerhoff’s “Logic and Eloquence,” 357–74.
57 Epigrammatum … Melanthonis, p. A2 (verso).
58 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, p. 46.
59 Commentary on Romans, p. 77.
60 See Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” 135.
61 “Melanchthon’s Rhetoric As a Context for Understanding His Theology,” in Melanchthon in Europe, p. 142.
62 Loci communes 1555, p. 76.
63 For Melanchthon’s detailed elaboration of the concept of original justice, see his De anima (1553) in A Melanchthon Reader, p. 277. All further citations are documented in the text parenthetically. For Sidney on the need for “jump concord” between the wit and will and his direct attribution of that idealized harmony to principles that he acquired from Languet, see his beast fable, “As I my little flock on Ister bank …”, among the Eclogues which conclude the third book of The Old Arcadia. See, too, for an earlier discussion of concord as a guiding principle in Sidney’s poetics, Stillman’s Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1986), p. 192–213.
64 Loci communes 1555, p. 71–3. Melanchthon’s preference—like that of Strigelius in his debates with Flacius—is for the vocabulary of sickness or injury applied to the consequences of the fall (he writes here of Adam and Eve’s wounding), rather than for Calvin’s harsher language of ruination. Like Calvin, he can write about those consequences in terms of “destruction,” but the emphasis and meaning are elsewhere.
65 See Bellucci, p. 199–217.
66 For an extension of this argument, see Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon, p. 141.
67 De anima, p. 254–5. Melanchthon asserts powerfully the real existence of true discernment in the mind. Such optimism is qualified—epistemically moderated—as Melanchthon’s well-known commitment to the concept of adiaphora indicates. Matters essential to salvation can be known with certainty, while the mysteries of God’s providence remain unsearchable; but matters about which rational argument cannot secure agreement, like the divisive trivialities of debates about ceremony, are, at once, deemed undecidable and hence dismissible as topics for the civil conversation required among Christians. See Wengert, Human Freedom, p. 146–7 and Schneider, Philip Melanchthon p. 124–5. For that same “epistemic moderation” linked to anti-tyrannical argumentation in an English context, see Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens, OH: Ohio Univ. Press; Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1977), esp. “The Truth of Adiaphoristic Liberty,” p. 32–114.
68 De anima, p. 276.
69 See Bellucci, p. 63. The incarnation of the Word in the best of human words, the classical rhetoric of Greece and Rome, makes cooperation between the realm of the secular and sacred, the human and the divine, indispensable to the cultivation of the mind and civilization. The same Aristotelian philosophy that Melanchthon reviled in his first lectures at Wittenberg, he later rehabilitates (with an eclectic mix of Plato and Cicero, Paul and Augustine) in expository treatises like the Epitome moralis as the foundation of a Christian moral philosophy. Aristotle’s celebration of justice as “queen of all the virtues,” a harmony of elements in the soul and a parallel harmony of members in the family and factions in the state, is compared to and contrasted with the “universal justice” to be discovered in revealed scripture. See his Summary of Ethics (Epitome ethices, 1532), trans. Keen, p. 219.
70 “Ut de Aenea intuente seriem Romanae historiae in clypeo sculptam Virgilius inquit, Miratur, rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet: ita nos, etsi nec humanae animae substantiam oculis cernimus, nec mirandas actiones penitus intelligimus, tamen imagine laetemur,” CR 13, 5.
71 See Wengert, Law and Gospel.
72 Wengert quotes the phrase from Melanchthon’s Scholia 1534 in Law and Gospel, p. 196.
73 For a history of those debates, see Scheible’s copiously detailed biography and Peterson’s The Philippist Theologians. For recent translations of primary texts relevant to those debates, see Lund, Documents from the History of Lutheranism, 1517–1750. See, too, Carl E. Maxcey, Bona Opera: A Study in the Development of the Doctrine in Philip Melanchthon (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1980).
74 Kusukawa details the historical background for these theological concerns during the 1520s in his chapter, “Law and Gospel,” p. 27–74.
75 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, p. 50; and De studiis veteris philosophiae (CR 12) for these reflections on “calamitate[m] turbulentissimorum temporum,” the descent of the “thesaurum bonarum artium … in sordes et squalorem pristinae barbarieri” and the desired restoration of the arts “ut his Ecclesiae vulneribus ipse [Christ] medeatur …” (240–42).
76 For a comprehensive account of that relationship, see 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.
77 On this point, see Bouwsma, p. 50: “Calvin’s emphasis on obedience … had a negative corollary in his distrust of liberty, even of that Christian liberty which Luther so valued.”
78 For Calvin’s debts to Melanchthon’s exegetical practice, see John L. Thompson, “Calvin as a Biblical Interpreter,” in The Cambridge Companion to Calvin, p. 58–73 and Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin, p. 108–17.
79 For a full discussion of Languet’s involvement in the Castellio affair, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 59–73. Castellio was dead by 1563, but he remained a figure of considerable importance for at least one of Sidney’s close associates. Robert Beale, while Clerk of the Queen’s council, received a pointed letter of rebuke for distributing to London’s schools a translation of Castellio’s De fide; see Sebastien Castellion: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre, ed. Ferdinand Buisson (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1892), vol. 2, 499. For Beale’s use of adiaphora in defense of “a Christian toleration” and liberty of conscience, see John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), vol. 1, 283–8; vol. 3, 87–98.
80 In view of their apocalyptic politics, the Philippists’ ready identification of the Pope with the Antichrist and their hatred for Tridentine Catholicism, it is necessary to write, almost oxymoronically, about their dedication to a “limited toleration”—limited to Christian perspectives that excluded the Antichrist of Rome, the lawless Anabaptist, the Jew, the Turk, and the atheist.
81 In addition to Louthan’s The Quest for Compromise, see Olivier Christin’s “Lazarus von Schwendi, ‘Politique’ allemand?,” in De Michel de L’Hospital, p. 85–96. Christin charts his development from a militant Catholic to a politically pragmatic proponent of toleration.
82 For a full discussion of the contrasting portraits, see Frank Lestringant, “Autour du portrait de Michel de l’Hospital: Bèze et Thevet,” in De Michel de L’Hospital, p. 137–50. Michel de Montaigne knew a talented Latinist when he read one, and he too lavishes praise in his essay, “Of Presumption,” on L’Hospital’s Carmina. For Languet and L’Hospital, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 156–60. For Languet’s appreciative and amusing comments on L’Hospital, see Simon Proxenus’s Commentarii de itinere francogallico, ed. Dana Martinkova (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979), p. 32. For Mornay’s debts to L’Hospital’s rhetoric of toleration, see Daussy, p. 308–10.
83 Militant Milton needs no illustration, but splenetic Spenser may. As Error’s “Impes of heaven accurst” drink their mother’s blood until their full bellies burst and bowels gush forth, Spenser launches what is arguably one of his more grisly assaults on the monstrosity of Roman Catholic error (Faerie Queene, I. i. 26). Sidney usually avoids, by pious and political principle, even the appearance of this sort of partisan attack.
84 Duncan-Jones writes that “Perhaps Sidney really was a discreet Catholic fellow traveler for a while after his meetings with Campion,” p. 127.
85 For the letter to Lady Kytson, see Feuillerat, vol. 3, 134–5. Wallace, too, notes Sidney’s aversion to anti-Catholic prejudice, but ascribes that aversion—less sensationally, if more sentimentally—to his “natural goodness of heart,” p. 287. For fuller accounts of these incidents from the life (without the suspicion of cryto-Catholicism), see Stewart, p. 242–3 and p. 265–76. It is interesting to note Stewart’s real surprise that Sidney could have supported “freedom of conscience” for Catholics, and his ascription—by consequence—of Sidney’s involvement in the plantation scheme to patriotic, not to pious motives. For a more detailed, more recent version of Sidney as crypto-Catholic, see Duncan-Jones, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Debt to Edmund Campion,” in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), p. 85–102.
86 Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, p. 16. On Sidney’s debts to Scaliger, see S.K. Heninger’s Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker, esp. Chapter 4, “Critics on Imitation,” p. 127–222.
87 Scaliger, p. 17.
88 For Prescott’s commentary on Sidney’s Davidic-inspired effort “to turn the reader’s own gaze inward,” see “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” 131–51. She is correct in disagreeing with Robinson’s assertion that “There could be no speaking picture … of wisdom received through grace” p. 101, since Sidney’s whole purpose is to argue the poet’s skill in creating such speaking pictures. This is a point illustrating at the conjunction of aesthetics and theology another enormous gap between Sidney and Calvin—for whom, of course, any effort to image the excellencies of God would have been idolatry. Raiger attempts (for obvious reasons) to have Sidney retract that point (“despite what Sidney himself suggests”), 47.
89 See Sinfield’s Faultlines, for example, p. 202–3 on Sidney’s effort to encourage “confusion.”
90 CR 13, 121. Once more, the power of the Gospel awakens in the mind its own natural likeness to the trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—an Augustinian expression of the argument that Melanchthon proceeds to elaborate. For Melanchthon, the mind’s very power to create images is a reflection of its innate divinity, a shadow of that divine act of creation in which God the Father produces from his own intellection the Son, as a perfect image of himself.
91 Raiger has several interesting pages on Sidney’s three categories of poets that attempt to make sense of those categories—as my own do—by reference to the final end, aim, or mark of the poets’ mimetic acts, 28–32. His discussion anticipates mine, and I gratefully acknowledge his lead. However, attempting to impose a Calvinist paradigm on Sidney’s text, Raiger interprets those categories very differently, as he argues on behalf of an unbridgeable gap between the vates “who marks the separation between Creation and God” and the right poet “who presents an image of goodness that is within reach of the human” (30).
92 Greville, p. 157.
93 See his essay, “Sidney’s Humanism,” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Literary Achievements, p. 117–18.