A Thetical Rhetoric
Syllogistic reasoning requires comparisons and whole chains of comparisons, which involve questioning the consistency or inconsistency of two or more things—their similarity or difference. To argue that a man is a “rational animal” is to identify the similarities and differences between the terms rational, man, and animal. If the set of comparisons need support, an orator might evoke a mental image in which those similarities and differences are embedded in a simple narrative. A vivid mental image of an animal’s “nonrational” animalism would serve the argument, for it would evoke rational analysis of the inconsistency between that “animalism” and what might have been expected of a “man.” That would expose the meaning of “rational” when applied to “man.” Once a conclusion like “man is a rational animal” does not need to be argued anymore, it can itself become one side of another syllogistic comparison. For example, since “man is a rational animal,” any given man’s nonrational animal behavior is inconsistent with the higher expectations of “manly” behavior. In acting so irrationally (inconsistently) the given man is also contradicting the expectation that he should actively use his rational capacity to analyze his own behavior. The man’s behavior is doubly irrational. When speaking of the rational and of reasoning here, I shall be referring to the mental capacity to sort through similarity and difference. In this chapter I will consider how that mental capacity relates to the rhetoric of Bacon’s (1625) Essayes or Counsels and Donne’s Essayes in Divinity.[1]
The forgoing example of Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning draws attention to some comparisons I want to make below. Just as mental images can serve a metaphoric comparison by compressing arguments about the things compared within that metaphor or compressing the complexities of one of the things into imaginative vision, so an abstracted commonplace like “man is a rational animal” is also a form of compression that serves further mental analysis of sameness and difference. What I shall call a thetical commonplace compresses whole arguments into propositions with a “conclusive” status. Of course, thetical commonplaces can turn back into mental images if situated in an imaginable location. This is part of what happens in the making and reading of emblem books. Michael Bath has shown how emblems, as “speaking pictures,” speak a range of connections from simple metaphoric links to whole arguments compressed into familiar commonplaces.[2] While showing how emblems translate into commonplaces and vice versa, Bath notes Bacon’s comment in The Advancement of Learning that emblems “reduceth conceits intellectual to images sensible.”[3] “Emblems” here, for Bacon, are not just pictures in a book, since in context he is speaking of the capacities of memory. Emblems here are rather more like what I have been calling mental images. In any case, what all this highlights is the translatability of visual representation on the page, mental-visual representation in the imagination, and thetical commonplace argument compression, all via the faculty of memory. Such translations do not just happen at the orator’s instigation. If a reader is thinking through the consistency between a thetical commonplace and something else in memory, what is to stop him or her from creating a mental image with the imagination that encapsulates new connections or disconnections just made, especially if certain textual elements are taken by that reader as enargeia signals? Obviously, nothing. Thetical commonplaces and their own potential mental images evoke a larger range of rational analysis than simple metaphoric connections, though that very analysis may draw on other simpler comparisons. It is a small step for writers used to thinking about the mind this way to conceive of the possibility of shaping a reader’s range of analysis through creative arrangements of commonplaces and mental images. How does Bacon instigate rational analysis in his Essayes, and what does that tell us about Donne’s?
Linking such reasoning to rhetorical planning suggests the following questions. What makes readers or listeners feel as if a point has been demonstrated? What conceptions of reasoning did Bacon’s Essayes or Counsels and Donne’s Essayes in Divinity draw on in relation to demonstration? Why? In Bacon’s case especially, given the more obviously public nature of his Essayes or Counsels, what kind(s) of reasoning did he envisage the Essayes would activate in his readers’ minds? If a thetical rhetoric compresses familiar arguments and mobilizes them into new argument structures, how exactly do Bacon’s and Donne’s essays organize their thetical commonplaces? Why are they so arranged? Mary Thomas Crane has helpfully drawn attention to the way that decontextualized commonplaces were gathered, framed, and reframed by individuals—both writers and readers—for new and different purposes.[4] Yet what is at issue here is how the rhetor envisaged the mental operations involved in such reframing. What happens when certain commonplaces are applied to other familiar material in memory?
I shall consider the Essayes of both men in the context of the “meditation” and different conceptions of it. Despite the religious connotations the concept of a meditation had for Bacon, he still associated his essays with the concept and drew attention to its lineage. In a letter dedicating the 1612 version of the Essayes to Prince Henry, Bacon spoke of them as “certain brief notes . . . which I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca’s epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epistles.”[5] Bacon links the concept of the meditatio to Seneca’s epistles in order to make it a recognizable literary form. But the meditation did acquire meaning as a psychological experience in the context of its religious history as a contemplative monastic activity. Bacon can hardly have failed to be aware of this lineage too, given the way he starts the letter with the affirmation that he has “divided” his life “into the contemplative and active part.”[6] Contemplative obviously has a secular meaning for Bacon. Yet the comment draws on a very familiar distinction from religious history. Much scholarly work has recently been done on the links between monastic meditation, memory, and the rhetorical skill of inventio.[7] I shall argue that when situating Bacon’s essays as forms of contemplative meditation, the role of the reasoning faculty and thus his thetical rhetoric comes into clearer focus.
There are other sources lying behind the “essay” that make us think twice about the extent to which Bacon’s Essayes or Counsels and Donne’s Essayes in Divinity fit the model. Neither Bacon nor Donne offers us the sort of discursive and self-disclosing chains of enthymematic reasoning exhibited by other “essays” such as those of Montaigne and William Cornwallis. Seneca’s epistles are more consistently “argued” than Bacon’s Essayes—even the 1625 version that I focus on here. The disputative style of the essay was also shaped by the Progymnasmata textbook’s “thesis” exercise. The “thesis” and the “commonplace” exercises in the Progymnasmata textbook were major classical curriculum sources for the “theme” exercise practiced in English grammar schools, a task closely related to the “essay.”[8] We can hardly think of Bacon or Donne in their essays as disputers who bring the most persuasive commonplaces to bear on their arguments and try to move the audience as fast as possible toward assent with syllogistic language. At times it is not even clear what Bacon is arguing, and it is far from clear that Donne had anyone in mind but himself when writing his essays. Both draw as much attention to inconsistencies as consistencies. They encourage their readers (and themselves) to explore various forms of accord between ideas and images that may be new or traditional. Part of Bacon’s purpose for his essays is to train readers to pay closer attention to their own “idolatrous” thinking patterns by making the effort of reasoning come to the forefront of the reading process rather than recede into the background. Donne’s essays, I shall suggest, are a searching tool helping him find coherence in the Christian faith among the variety of theological teachings he needed to sift through. Neither of them employs a thetical rhetoric aimed at making persuasion simpler. The role of the reasoning faculty is thus critically important for understanding the thetical rhetoric of both men’s essays.
I will argue here that their essays give the reasoning faculty of readers and themselves the task of searching for sufficient “mental accord” between the thetical commonplaces offered and all other relevant remembered material evoked and not evoked by Bacon and Donne. Before examining what a thetical rhetoric is and how it illuminates both men’s essays, I want to demonstrate first what is at stake in neglecting the relevance of the reasoning faculty to the rhetoric of Bacon’s and Donne’s Essayes.
Little sustained attention has been given to the role of the reasoning faculty in the rhetoric of Bacon’s and Donne’s Essayes. At times critics have actively downplayed its role. The neglect is perhaps understandable, given that Donne’s essays have often been read as amateur preparations for a clerical career, not intended for a particular audience, and Bacon’s are far from typical disputations.
The relationship between Bacon’s literary essays and his other, philosophical works has often seemed awkward.[9] When critics split them up, it sometimes has the effect of making the faculty of reason seem relevant only to Bacon’s philosophical texts and irrelevant to the reading of his literary ones. One early account of Bacon’s rhetorical practice in his 1625 Essayes made them out to be texts that are “straightforwardly instructive, but without any attempt to justify rationally the knowledge which they transmit.”[10] The idea-nuggets Bacon puts across “are retailed as proven from experience, and backed up by any material which will contribute to their acceptance by the reader.”[11] Seen that way, Bacon cannot be arguing a case because he uses only parables, exempla, and the sententiae of his Antitheta Rerum.[12] The truth or falsehood of these bits and pieces therefore seem irrelevant because there is little syllogistic language by which the critical reader can consider the rationality of Bacon’s moral and political propositions. Thus the Essayes, on this model, use Bacon’s “magistral” or forceful teaching method, not his open, accountable aphoristic one.[13] This would mean that Bacon’s rhetoric principally worked through its affective power, for it made no appeal, apparently, to the critical faculties. But we might reasonably ask, in that case, how the essays can have any import for readers whose minds Bacon wants to train in anti-idolatrous reading? Why would he not want the Essayes to contribute to his larger project, since almost every other Baconian text leans in that direction?
Bacon must have had a variety of readerships in mind—not least the “sons of science” who would lead his revolution. Reading, as Jardine, Grafton, and Sherman have shown, was a different activity in various contexts and could be put to various productive ends.[14] Bacon may have predicted a range of types of intellectual production stemming from his various readerships, but surely the daring potential pathfinders his wider project needed were foremost among them. If so, the activation of explorative reasoning is a significant goal of his essay-rhetoric.
Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts offered a model of rational reading in which reason was linked to the “experience” of reading the Essayes.[15] Fish points out the similarities between Bacon’s essays and other “self-consuming artifacts” like Plato’s dialogues, in which structures and syllogisms ultimately implode in order to reveal something else, a higher immutable truth. Fish ends up denying the explanatory power of his own category of the “self-consuming” for Bacon’s essays because, unlike Plato, Augustine, and Donne, the higher truth for Bacon is a truth about “the phenomenal world,” not one “above the phenomenal world.”[16] Furthermore, the category of the self-consuming virtually requires, at times, the assumption of a large gap between the traditional moral and civil “wisdom” Bacon presents, on the one hand, and the wisdom of natural philosophical progress he is “really” about. That is, traditional wisdom must be broken down, self-consumed, before the new Baconian science may emerge.[17] Yet Fish admits that “when Bacon has finished [an essay] the ideal remains” and that it is rather the illusion of achieving the ideal easily that has disappeared.[18] Those things make the Platonic self-consuming structure that much more difficult to apply to Bacon’s Essayes.
Furthermore, none of the models discussed so far take much account of the way in which the rationality required by the essays is useful for Bacon’s own self-representations as “good counselor,” especially in the post-1621 context, in which he needs to present moral and civil wisdom in a way that is compelling, even if at a deeper level it is sometimes subversive. I agree with Fish that the essays are all about the challenging rational experience of reading itself. However, I would suggest that understanding the essays as meditational structures allows us to describe that experience more fully within its political, moral, and scientific contexts.
For example, in 1625, when The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall came out, Bacon was in a very different situation from the one he enjoyed before his impeachment for bribery in 1621.[19] He had become totally marginalized from his previous status as bright court light and respected counselor. As Kiernan notes, Bacon had always craved the role of counselor, so that his impeachment took away more than his Lord Chancellorship. It took away a counseling role of great value to him, part of his own identity, reflecting the value of his own personal and professional experiences.[20] Bacon’s dedication to Buckingham, the king’s last “favourite,” in the 1625 edition, reflects the fact that his writing was one of the only means left to him of maintaining his old professional role.[21]
Given the situation, one of Bacon’s practical concerns in the 1625 edition is to make use of “counsel” in both the moral and careerist senses. Making people find reasoned mental accord anew serves that purpose too. He adopts the generic stance of “Advice to Princes.”[22] However, in doing so, Bacon must appear an exemplary counselor in at least two senses. His ability to sift traditional but testable moral precepts and present them as personally tested truths of moral conduct, applicable in the evolving political scene, will affirm him as an exemplary moral thinker. His ability to situate those testable truths in the context of inevitable compromise within the same political scene will affirm him as an exemplary pragmatic thinker. The tension between the two strands—the ideal and the compromised—is productively important. For the essays to “come home, to Mens Businesse and Bosomes,” and for his moral ideas to have a transformative impact on people, the essays need to speak commensurably to reasoning readers who will analyze the precepts they recognize within the matrix of their own memories, especially of the moral compromises that politics involves. The precepts Bacon quotes or paraphrases come out of a long tradition, but they are presented as if they were up for evaluation. That is because in Bacon’s view of the world, moral, political, and scientific constructs are all in a state of flux. The evaluative response that the essays initiate serves Bacon’s attempt to train readers in anti-idolatrous thinking, as well as serving his purposes of self-display.
Donne’s Essayes, however, have generally seemed to critics to be less polished, more confused, and less important than his other texts. Given that it was John Donne “the younger” who first brought them into print, critics have assumed that Donne never worked them into a publishable state.[23] For Simpson, the Essayes reveal Donne the private meditator, the growing theological thinker, and the prospective priest. Their winding and heuristic style flows out of that.[24] Given their private nature and unpolished form, the relevance of the reasoning faculty to the Essayes can seem pretty insignificant.
For other reasons, Michael Hall presents an essaying Donne who searches the scriptures and the faith rationally in his Essayes but reveals that the paradoxes he hits upon cannot be resolved and must therefore simply be embraced by faith, where “faith” is something like that which takes off when reason stops. For Hall, Donne “has undermined the rational process by revealing its shortcomings and showing that there are things which lie beyond the powers of human reason.”[25] Perhaps it is rather that Donne has undermined an enlightenment version of “reason,” for theological reasoning goes to work upon articles of faith in the same way that scientific reasoning goes to work upon scientific evidence—that is, if we think of reason as the cognitive ability to sift consistency and find accord. Hall’s conclusion is presented as if some sort of rational crisis were the inevitable result of Donne’s meditations, as if his paradoxes were his own insurmountable wall. Faith, on such a model, never could be reasonable for Donne. Donne is said to be celebrating the “superiority of faith to reason” and the “triumph of faith over reason.”[26] Apparently, neither has much to do with the other. But in seeking to understand what Donne is doing in these Essayes, it is important to look at where faith and reason actually come into contact. Donne, as Hall admits, “has no intention of undermining or subverting” the articles of faith, but if so, why is he celebrating their inherent “irrationality”?[27]
Anthony Raspa offers a more helpful approach to the contact between faith and reason in Donne’s context. Raspa situates the Essayes in a humanist tradition of exegetical commentary on Genesis and Exodus. Taken as commentary rather than essay, there is less ground, in Raspa’s view, for thinking that “the work is an unpolished document not ready stylistically and editorially for public reading.”[28] To that extent the essays reflect not a private implosion of rational ability but exegesis of scripture in support of traditional articles of faith. Faith needs the help of reason in this model because of faith’s “simultaneous perfection and imperfection.” Reason “completes” faith in the Essayes by using the exegesis of scripture (a rational enterprise) to explain what the mind believes.[29]
In those terms, Donne’s goal in the Essayes in Divinity might be better understood as an example of fides quarens intellectum —faith seeking understanding.[30] Such an activity involves Donne trying to find accord between different sources: classical propositions of Christian doctrine, the scriptures, as well as his familiarity with what it meant to live out Christianity in the early seventeenth century. It is often assumed that the Essayes in Divinity were composed sometime between 1611 and 1615, before Donne entered Holy Orders, and thus that they are a preparation for entering the ministry.[31] However, as Narveson has recently argued, he may also be simply participating in the common activity of those who “essayed divinity” as gentlemen amateurs, for which he might have a number of purposes, piety and more secular concerns included.[32] In either case, the Essayes involve the attempt to understand sources and experiences and to put them together in a satisfactory accord that “avoids the extreme.”[33] Essaying divinity sets out to balance Donne’s understanding.
So how exactly is the reasoning faculty supposed to work as it moves through both men’s essays? What is the mind supposed to do with the propositions, exempla, and quotations, when, in Bacon’s case especially, there is not much syllogistic language to lock onto? How is Bacon being strategic by making people do their own thinking work? How does Donne’s own writing illuminate that process? I shall argue that the meditative tradition of “recollective cogitation” and the idea of a “thetical rhetoric” will provide a model for developing answers to those questions. Before looking at some of the essays in detail, I shall try to make clear what is encompassed in such expressions.
A different approach to the rational rhetoric of Bacon’s and Donne’s essays will be needed if we are to understand what is happening in their messy structures. It is possible to develop a useful approach by linking up a set of concepts that have been discussed in connection with rhetoric, the meditative tradition, and the ars memoriae. Those concepts are the rhetorical notions of ductus, ornament, and skopos.[34]
The term ductus became closely connected with rhetoric in the fourth century, first by Consultus Fortunatianus and then by Martianus Capella, as a useful term for the way a case might be handled holistically.[35] To the question “quid est ductus?” (what is ductus?), Fortunatianus answers: “quo modo tota causa agenda sit” (how a whole case is pleaded).[36] For Martianus Capella, “ductus autem est agendi per totam causam tenor sub aliqua figura servatus” (ductus is the course of action through the whole cause, preserved under whatever figure).[37] As Montefusco argues, Capella retains the “essential elements” of Fortunatianus’s view of ductus, that is, “the way to approach a case and to plead it consistently in its entirety.”[38]
George of Trebizond, who lived about a century before Bacon and Donne, had some impact on the transmission of the concept too.[39] But the older tradition of meditative cogitation more likely stands behind what they are doing in their essays. That tradition gave ductus a whole new meaning. Carruthers describes the practice of monastic meditation as a composition. Composition is a “flow” or a journey (ductus) from a start (status) to an end (skopos). It “guides a person to its various goals.”[40] Skopos, the end, from Greek, means “literally the target of a bowman, the mark towards which he gazes as he aims.”[41] An essay and its argument, just like a meditation, moves through a ductus toward its own goal, or skopos: the reader’s agreement or assent. In leading toward the goal, the ductus pathway involves a number of “ornaments,” which are not mere adornments but the material for reflection that the reasoning mind encounters on its way. In monastic meditation, these are commonly Bible passages but also church art and architecture, and memories of those, as well.[42] The mental process evoked by ornaments can be described as “recollective cogitation.” If we think of Bacon’s and Donne’s quotations, examples, Bible verses, sententia, and so on, as places on a ductus map, their apparent “ornamental” structure starts to make better sense as the path taken in a rational search for accord rather than as mere adornment. Carruthers describes this cogitative process as the “associational play of the mind at work.”[43] However, I shall use the ductus model as a way of describing how Bacon’s essays evoke actual critical analysis and Donne’s essays instantiate that process.
The most obvious problem of using the concept of ductus is working out how to plot the “places” in it. What is an essay’s “argument,” and what are the actual places on the ductus that advance it? The plotting can be done in different ways. One could use an essay’s partitio, say, if it has one, or look holistically, from the very start to the very end, or look within separate distinct parts that have their own beginning (status) and end (skopos). Furthermore, those “places” can be different things: ornaments, tropes, examples, and so on. Both men’s essays are notoriously awkward and seemingly convoluted structures. There appear to be lots of separate arguments going on, even in sections within them. It will be necessary then to focus on sections within the separate essays where a particular argument involves a particular ductus pathway moving through its own set of ornaments, since I am trying to show how the ornaments make an argument into a private reasoning experience, and what Baconian purposes that serves. While some might plot the ductus pathways differently, I am less concerned with plotting “correctly” than with how certain pathways might align as arguments—at least, that is, align with propositions purporting to be arguments.
Recollective cogitation involves examining a series of ornamental places on a ductus pathway, and those places are filled, in Bacon’s and Donne’s essays, by what can be called a thetical rhetoric—a careful deployment of compressed ideas and arguments.
A thetical rhetoric compresses arguments into ornaments and mobilizes them, but it also potentially decompresses by arranging them in a form that evokes critical questioning and the search for accord. Compressing an argument into a mental image or a commonplace can help manage the audience’s perception that something is demonstrated, not least because, as Aristotle highlights, it is usually the duty of an orator to speak to those who cannot take in a long and complicated chain of reasoning all at once.[44] Compression is achieved with a variety of things: maxims, proverbs, and commonplaces; aphorisms, sententiae, and adages, for example.[45] These tend to have an authority and status in cultural memory, which means that they do not have to be so well supported. Such compressions of arguments latch onto the homey world picture of a listener precisely because they look like its own furniture. Proverbs, for example, as compressed arguments, can be a form of evidence for Aristotle.[46] Literary references, says Quintilian, can also produce conviction by approximating the audience’s general assumptions.[47] Maxims, designed to state simply how the world is, are also immensely effective for connecting with the audience’s worldview.[48] Maxims can also be the premises and conclusions of new enthymemes.[49] In that way a maxim or other thetical proposition can both stand in for an argument and support another argument.
Compressed arguments are thetical because they are references to general truths rather than the details of the particular question in hand. Tobias Reinhardt describes the mature Cicero’s approach to a case as thetical because it favors consideration of “abstract, general questions” or (theseis) over mere “particular questions” or (hypotheseis), a distinction famously made by Hermagoras of Temnos.[50]
In more than one place in De Oratore, Cicero presents the view that, in every single legal case, the arguments and the decision will ultimately refer to abstract general ideas (theses) rather than simply the specifics of that case (hypotheses), with the result that the very distinction between the two approaches becomes problematic.[51] There are plenty of examples. The consul Lucius Opimius, say, is on trial for condemning Gracchus and his supporters unjustly. One argument the defense might make is that since it is the duty of a consul to uphold the safety of the state (compressed thetical commonplace) and since it can be shown that Gracchus’s reforms were a threat to the state (case details and a separate argument), what else could Opimius have done but condemn Gracchus?[52] The conclusion of any generalizing thetical argument—for example, that a consul’s duty is to uphold the safety of the state—having become a commonplace, it can then be mobilized into a quotable proposition for a new enthymeme.[53] Thetical principles get mobilized into excerptible statements that can be memorized, put into commonplace books, and requoted time and time again.[54] All such thetical forms of argument compression are useful for getting the bits and pieces of an auditor’s memory of common beliefs together for specific recollection and reconstruction. That is hugely important because in both Cicero’s and Rudolph Agricola’s teaching, making an enthymeme such as the one above seem demonstrated turns on how powerfully you draw the connection between Gracchus’s actions and what constitutes “unsafety.” If the connection seems natural you will probably have a persuasive argument.
For Agricola, a dubious belief must be supported by certitude from other better-known things.[55] For one idea to support another idea there has to be a relationship of similarity or inclusiveness between one key term and another. In the case of Gracchus above, that similarity would be between the precise qualities of Gracchus’s actions and the idea of “unsafety.” The “inventor” must find a similarity that inheres properly in the two key terms being analyzed. The two terms have to be seen as agreeing or compatible (consentanea). Once discovered, the similarity, or consentanea, can be used as the middle term for building a syllogistic argument of use to the rhetor.[56] On the kind of agreement an inventor wants, Agricola states:
For something to be used for confirmation of another, it needs to be joined through some reason as if it were a blood relation to that which it is supporting with proof, and must seem such that if you are affirming, the one thing cannot exist without the other, and if you are denying, that the one cannot be subverted without subverting the other.[57]
Opimius’s defense lawyer, taking that advice, would try to show that Gracchus’s actions cannot be understood in any way but as something that threatens the state. The problem with analyzing consentanea is that, since things and their properties are so immense, says Agricola, “no language or human mental power can comprehend individually every respect in which things agree or disagree.”[58] That is why we need the topics, which evoke a functional analysis of similarity and difference. They are called topics, Agricola continues, “because in them, just like a receptacle or a kind of treasury, are laid all the instruments for producing belief.”[59] Agricola implies here that the perception of demonstration will arise in the audience to the extent that the rhetor presents his necessary agreements (consentanea) as essential in the strongest possible way and hides any disagreements he sees. Whether the inventor’s analysis has the “force of certainty” for himself is a separate question.[60] Any sophist needs only to develop ways of enhancing the perceived connection between terms, and hiding the disconnections. When Bacon goes about organizing his thetical commonplaces in the Essayes to defamiliarize them and evoke rational analysis, it is the search for fresh perceptions of consentanea that he needs to initiate.
Other Renaissance theorists were interested in the same tension between things perceived as agreeing (consentanea) or as disagreeing (dissidentia). For Erasmus, an exemplum providing evidence is anything that “borders on analogy” or is related through similarities.[61] In a deliberative discourse persuading a friend to study the laws of England, Thomas Wilson suggests how to manage the perception of the agreement between “the law” and “the profitable.” Studying (and practicing) the law gives rise to money and learning, both of which are instances of the profitable, “so that he [the lawyer] gaineth always, as well by increase of learning as by storing his purse with money.”[62] Thus he doubles up the consentanea between “the law” and “the profitable” with two of the latter’s instances: learning and money. So the law is “profitable” because “profit” includes learning and money, both of which the law brings. When Wilson discusses the narratio stage of a speech, he claims that our narrations “shall seem to stand with reason” if, among other things, “our conjectures, tokens, reasons, and arguments be such that neither in them there appear any fabling, nor yet that anything was spoken which might of right otherwise be taken.”[63] That is, you cannot just leave dissidentia hanging out. It has to be hidden. But how is one to cover the suspicion of fabling (fake consentanea)? Wilson suggests a politics of nature, or the familiar. Our speech will seem more reasonable “if we frame our work to nature’s will,” that is, if we “accuse a spend-all of theft, a whoremonger of adultery, a rash quarreler of manslaughter,” and so on.[64] Wilson registers little or no concern for the injustice that might entail. Lodging the connections in a set of “natural” relations (things that one might expect to occur), says Wilson, will make them go down better. Persuasive knowledge construction, then, from the point of view of the orator, is a matter of selective recollection. It involves sifting through the connections of similarity between things that people commonly make. Actually communicating, though, involves either making a certain set of connections explicit or gently implying a range of possibilities, depending on how much the audience is expected to think. Either way, the connections that are made will need to be so familiar they are unquestionable for those listening or reading.
An orator can therefore make the search for consentanea, or rational accord between ideas and terms, a relatively unnecessary or necessary task for the reader, depending on the purpose. Does he or she want to persuade the reader or audience as quickly as possible or rather to make them think afresh? Ancient and Renaissance theorists, for example, noted how an orator could organize an argument in order to reduce the audience’s need to critically analyze it. The idea was to make persuasion as easy as possible, at the same time giving them a sense of being reasoned with. For example, Aristotle’s conviction was that deduction demonstrates things better than induction. That is why he suggested that examples and fables should go after an enthymeme rather than precede it. When going after the enthymeme they then sound like witnesses to what is already strong. When put first, the examples and fables will sound too much like the inductive evidence from which the enthymeme comes.[65] Erasmus felt that examples should be put in an order from lesser to greater proximity to the present situation or person that they relate to. It was a practical thing to do because the argument then accumulates force instead of losing it.[66] Wilson, in his discussion of exordium says that an orator should lump together, at the beginning of his speech, the faults of the person he is accusing or the virtues of the person he is defending.[67] Wilson’s assumption here is that the consequently stronger perceptions of goodness or badness created by that accumulation will increase or decrease the extent to which the listener perceives a “natural” relationship between the particular person on trial and the thing he or she is accused of, as if the goodness or badness itself were evidence. Bacon, however, seems to have organized his Essayes so that they evoke critical analysis. This happens, I would suggest, because their structures purport to be disputative arguments. They assert propositions about moral and civil wisdom and then provide thetical commonplaces as if they were evidence. Yet, at the same time, Bacon takes most of the syllogistic reasoning an audience expects out of them. A little more is involved in finding consentanea in Bacon’s Essayes, as in Donne’s.
If reasoning depends on perceiving consentanea among a satisfactory range of familiar remembered ideas and observations, what counts as a satisfactory range? That will obviously be dependent on the critical faculties of the reader but also on the writer’s rhetorical organization, and dependent on purpose. While Bacon’s Essayes aim to open up a meditative reading, they also move their readers toward a range of ways of constructing sufficient consentanea, or mental accord. Purposeful arrangements of thetical arguments can also evoke recollective “decompression” of thetical commonplaces in a way that challenges the reader to evaluate old claims and even, sometimes, to make new ones. That is an important part of what Bacon is doing in his essays. Donne shows us something of the same process. Bacon can rely on people taking his thetical commonplaces up and analyzing them in reference to their memories of lived experience because they have a special place in cultural and personal memory, and an authority that is based on that. This suggests that they are not just randomly organized. Bacon expects astute readers to find their own mental accord within a certain range of familiar material. The inquiry is not closed, though, by any means.
Thetical places bring the materials of memory together and suggest analytical questions that can lead, potentially, both to traditional approved forms of accord and to new ones. Donne, of course, sets out to approve the propositions of Christian doctrine, but he boldly sets himself the task of widening the range of familiar observations that need to be dealt with. For Bacon, though, the slowed process of reasoning and its productivity is the very thing he is aiming at.
Bacon’s essay Of Truth has two key arguments. First, he argues that “lies” can give people more delight than the truth. That is a better reason for why people do not seek truth than its difficulty. Second, he argues that the benefits of truth, however, are a much greater pleasure and good. They are not arguments as such but rather stated propositions. The ornaments that follow purport to give evidence for the propositions. Taking one at a time, I will discuss each stage of the ductus that is created as a result of the arrangement and consider what kind of reasoning they may be trying to evoke.
The first section where an “argument” is made (ll.1–35) has six stages or places.[68] We could plot them thus: first, a background focus, then a statement of the thesis itself, the images of daylight/candlelight, the images of pearls/diamonds, a rhetorical question, and last the illusion to the notion of poetry as “Vinum Dæmonum.” Those stages are not totally discrete units but rather areas of focus through which Bacon’s text moves.
The first gives some background and focuses on skepticism. Bacon opens by quoting Pilate’s rhetorical question “What is truth?” and claims (ll.2–10) that modern, though weaker, skeptics still exist. His quote and reference to “certaine discoursing Wits,” which even Kiernan feels required to identify, is likely to call to mind any such skeptics a reader might know from his or her own life. At the very least it begs the question. It potentially calls on the imagination (and memory) to reflect on real examples of skeptical thinkers and skeptical thought.
In a new stage Bacon makes a clear propositional statement of his thesis (ll.10–14), where he says that it is “a naturall, though corrupt Love, of the Lie it selfe,” which “doth bring Lies in favour” (ll.12–14). Even before looking at the support for this that follows, it is important to pause and ask what questions could be raised in the reasoning reader’s mind by the simple fact that the thesis follows the background given before. Assuming readers have already brought up examples of skeptics and skeptical thought through “recollective cogitation,” then, on encountering the thesis, one of the most natural questions will be whether the thesis explains the remembered material. Are the skeptics that I know delighted by Lies or falseness? Is a skeptical epistemology itself a kind of false delight? Is the idea that lies can be delightful really the best way to explain why people would be skeptics, or is there a good rational basis for their epistemological stance? These analytical questions require reasoned reflection on the material of memory that has been recollected.
Bacon then develops the thesis by alluding to Lucian of Samosata being at a loss to determine why people should seem to love lies, when they bring neither pleasure nor advantage. He follows by saying, “But I cannot tell.” The odd thing here is that Bacon has only just claimed that it is because lies bring some sort of pleasure that they are satisfying. So what’s the point of quoting Lucian? In saying “I cannot tell,” he seems to allow Lucian to negate his claim. But Bacon’s arrangement, perhaps purposefully, leaves dangling the question of what kind of pleasure the essay refers to. As a way of arguing, such an open method is certainly not what we might expect from a reasoned discourse. Surely, to be convincing, it would be better for Bacon either to choose another example than the Lucian reference or to define quickly and carefully what kind of pleasure he wants to link to the “Lie,” as distinct from whatever pleasure Lucian does not find in them. But that is left to the reader. In the following section, Bacon does effectively claim that there are different kinds of pleasure we can attach to lies and truth, some “higher” than others. Yet his refusal even at this second stage to support the thesis, by refining the concepts, opens up a space for recollected memory, in which readers’ memories of different kinds of pleasure can come into play as the meditation moves forward. Ideally, a reader’s own reasoning will contribute to the same skopos that Bacon has come to, or perhaps even a better one. The allusion to Lucian requires a reader to consider whether experience accords with prevailing wisdom, precisely because Bacon does not “close” the issue.
Following that, the ductus moves through two strong and related metaphors for truth and lies. The first is the difference between two kinds of light: lies are like candlelight and truth is like the daylight. The second is the difference in “price” between a pearl (the lie) which shines in “varied lights” and a diamond (the truth) which shines in the daylight. So lies are pearls in candlelight and truth is a diamond in the daylight. Pearls in candlelight may bring any number of memories to the imagination, among them perhaps oiliness and seductiveness, especially in distinction from diamonds and their sharpness, crispness, clarity, and value. Bacon asks that the jewels be compared with our ideas about falseness and truth, and thus he accesses implicitly a reader’s attendant emotional distinctions, wider conceptual associations, and connections to memories of personally experienced events—the remembered pleasures of owning diamonds and pearls. The arrangements are able to evoke a considerable range of analytic questions. Does the difference I can imagine, between pearls in dim light and diamonds by daylight, resemble the difference between the skeptical thinkers I know and the defenders of real knowledge? Does the difference between pearls and diamonds resemble in any way the difference between the comfortable older ways of understanding things and the frightening new knowledge we have recently gained? Of course I do not mean that such questions all had to occur to Bacon’s early modern readers in order for his argument to work. I mean merely that these are the kinds of analytical questions that Bacon’s thetical rhetoric is able to set in motion. Before coming to a new stage, Bacon states: “A mixture of a Lie doth ever adde Pleasure” (l.25). The question upon all that reflection might be: Can I agree? In a new place, Bacon then asks, rhetorically, what would be left if someone took away all the less than truthful or less than likely fantasies we uphold about our lives. Does that apply to me?
The thetical places encountered so far do not support the argument by forcing the reader’s reasoning to move in totally predetermined ways, but only in so far as Bacon expects people’s rational reflection to accord with memory as they go through the material he serves up.
The second section or “argument” in Of Truth brings that out more clearly. It has at least three stages. First, Bacon states his new but related thesis, figured in emphatically erotic terms. “Truth,” he says, shows us that seeking it, knowing it, and believing it “is the sovereign Good of human Nature” (ll.41–42). The second and third stages bring the concepts of light and sight into the concept of truth again in order to explain why it is “the sovereign Good of human nature.”
In the second stage (ll.42–48), Bacon makes us consider God’s enlightening creations of sense, reason, and the “Illumintation of his spirit” in the “workes of the dayes.” Truth here, just like the “light of seeing,” is the great work of God. The logical connection between the creation of light and the existence of truth can be described like this. If God’s consummate act in the “workes of days” is his great ongoing “Sabbath work” (l.44) of illumination, then our own acts of illumination by seeking the truth must also be our greatest, assuming that truth is like light and that God’s acts are a benchmark for ours. Whatever the problems with the syllogism’s premises, it potentially finds accord with early modern assumptions about God being the best role model. To that extent, the ornamental example provided in this second “place” has the potential to support the thesis that truth is the highest good of human nature.
The third stage shifts into a reflection on a paraphrase of Lucretius, which also provides explanatory material for why truth is the highest good of human nature. Bacon paraphrases Lucretius: “But no pleasure is comparable, to the standing, upon the vantage ground of Truth.” The implied premise it seems is that truth, as well as the lie, is a kind of pleasure. The very fact that, as a proverb, this paraphrase follows the thesis and the first example as if it were further “evidence” asks the reader to supply the implied premise and consider it. One way of putting it all together then is this. To the extent that “good” is a great and incorruptible kind of “pleasure,” then the fact that the (erotic) experience of truth is also a great pleasure means that we can describe it as a great good. The argument depends of course on the idea that truth is “good” and is a kind of pleasure, different from the pleasure people get out of “Lies.” A reflecting reader can only analyze the materials of the essay in this way by drawing on memories and feelings about different kinds of pleasures, as examples that can be brought to the act of reasoning.
The “argumentation” in Of Truth seems to encourage the kind of reasoning I’ve described precisely because no clear syllogistic framework is imposed by Bacon. Critically astute readers, therefore, cannot simply climb over the same old habituated structures of thought, and that makes Bacon’s thetical rhetoric useful for him. The compressions have to be unwound. Bacon’s thetical rhetoric does not obviate the need for thought, it initiates thought. Invention itself is required to come up with the reasoning that Bacon wants to evoke. Of course, it leaves open the possibility of disagreement, or at least the possibility that reasons invented out of one’s particular memories may not be quite good enough to validate the main proposition Bacon claims. The potential mismatch would challenge the assumptions built into a reader’s memories as well as the traditional wisdom itself. An argument built in this way while reading through a ductus pathway rather than a chain of syllogisms can bring about a much livelier kind of assent with the potential to train readers in thinking through the messy evidence on the ground of memory and having the courage to challenge traditional wisdom and either approve it or reject it. The new reflections encountered on every occasion of reading one of Bacon’s essays constantly facilitate a reevaluation of his moral precepts and their usefulness for guiding attempts to be good in the imperfect moral conditions of civil (and private) business.
Donne’s essay In the Beginning explores the “article of our belief that the world began” (19). In it he examines the coherence of that belief with respect to various other scriptures as well as the belief (or faith) of the philosophers that the world is eternal. Whatever his respect for the beliefs of ancient philosophers, the precept of the faith here that the world began is not something he is willing or in a position to deny. The task then is to find out how the “peaceable tyranny, and easie yoke of sudden and present faith” (19) accords rationally with other things that are of relative certainty for Donne, that is, scriptures whose precepts for Protestants are the sources of faith. Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, he will not try to reconcile the article of faith with the philosophers. That led Aquinas to assign it merely to faith’s “mysteries” (20). It is an article of faith, as Aquinas says, and therefore he will not be put under the “insinuations and mollifyings of persuasion” (19) in this matter. Rationality is only going to go so far, when there are no other axioms to work with that the meditator can respect. Reason, Donne says here, “is our Sword, Faith our Target” (20), echoing the meditative structure of the ductus with its constructive aim—skopos. Donne’s aim is to create a rationally satisfying construct out of respectable axioms.
In order to do this Donne takes a roving trip through some sources and ideas from within the Bible and without, accepting some and rejecting others, and trying to make sense of that beginning in Genesis wherein time began, wherein time replaced an eternity of nontime. Donne shows us, through the ductus of his meditative efforts, the kind of reflective reading that Bacon expects of his own readers.
Donne first draws into dialogue two “beginnings” from the Bible, one appearing in the first verse of Genesis and the other in the first verse of John’s gospel. John’s “beginning” has to have come first, Donne thinks, for there God simply “was” (20). Moses’s “beginning” was the beginning of time, for there God “did” (20), a time-bound concept that makes no sense in the frame of John’s eternal beginning. Confusingly, Donne’s pronouns make it difficult at times to tell whether he is speaking of one of those two beginnings in particular or the metabeginning of the moment of creation, where John’s beginning becomes Moses’s beginning and the world is born. He also plays with the idea of first and last when referring to the beginning outside time and the beginning of time, perhaps as a way of expressing some of the confusion bound up with time language applied to nontime. The whole section reads like Donne is meditating, not as if he were trying to make explicit for a reader exactly what he has in mind at each point.
Making sense of Moses’s beginning is fairly easy. Being the beginning of time, such a beginning was only momentary, “the first point of time,” and it “instantly vanished” as the next point of time took over, and so on.
John’s beginning, though, is another matter, and it raises the question of what its “Word” is.[69] The word that dwelt with God in John’s eternal beginning refers traditionally to Christ. Donne considers what the relationship between God the father and Christ the word means, in that eternal beginning, when it is related to the “next” beginning (of Moses) where time starts. He draws into his meditation two ideas that resemble Bacon’s thetical topics: (1) the Arian thesis that in the eternal beginning (John’s) God “made” Christ the word as an “assistant” (21) to help in his ‘next’ act of making; and (2) the comment made apparently by Jesus in Revelation 1:8 saying, as Donne quotes it, “I am the first and last, which is, and was and is to come” (21). Donne has to reject Arius’s insertion of an extra beginning (of Christ) into the equation, but not only because it was deemed heretical. He also rejects Arius’s christology because the traditional two-beginnings idea has more of “a consonance with our faith” (21), one shared even with Arius in Donne’s view: that is the idea that in John 1 the word means “the Son our Saviour” (21). How then, Donne asks Arius implicitly, could Christ have called himself “the first and last,” and thus associated himself with the word that was with God before the creation of anything, even time, if Christ was a “creature,” having his own beginning? Arius’s position contradicts itself, he says. Conveniently, but also rationally, in view of what Donne believed, he ends up affirming an orthodox Christology.
Having found mental accord around this “exposition” (21), Donne then extends that sense of accord by metaphorically imagining the ones who disagree—Jews and Arians—as the targets toward whom the sunbeams and arrows of his (traditional) reasoning have not found their forceful way. That is because the sunbeams and arrows have been “turned upon another mark than they were destined to” (21). It is a metaphor for the “misguided” reasoning of the Jews and Arians. The metaphor does construct Jews and Arians as enemies of the faith, the ones fought against with the sword of reason, but also (and slightly more generously), it constructs them as those who have not quite found their way through reason to the skopos of affirming Donne’s faith. Donne finds, seeking consonance everywhere he can, that for the Arians especially, there simply is not enough reliable evidence on which to base a conclusion about the “creation” of Christ, nor about what happened in the eternal beginning before Moses’s one. Donne of course thinks that the scriptures are the most reliable evidence for such things, and thus he says that “we are utterly disprovided of any history of the world’s creation, except we defend and maintain this book of Moses to be historical” (21). He goes on for a few pages discussing various arguments people have come up with regarding the history of creation and their limits (21–22). He ends up relying on the “stronghold, faith” and its conclusion that “this Beginning was, and before it, Nothing” (23). It is the best rational explanation he has yet found of the evidence he respects. His efforts are not irrational just because they disregard the beliefs of the philosophers about the world’s eternity. If they are rational, it is because they are consistent within their own framework and everything else that is brought into the meditation.
Anger must be controlled, says Bacon here. The idea that we might get rid of it entirely is “but a Bravery of the Stoickes” (ll.1–2). Yet, he admits in lines 25–26, one ought to take a stoic position “above the injury,” rather than below it. In addition, anger sometimes needs to be raised and appeased in other people for political purposes. I will focus on the thetical rhetoric deployed in the first section of this far from coherent essay. Sifting through the ductus Bacon has purposefully created is a search for coherence, for accord. The question in this first section is how the “Natural Inclination, and Habit, to be Angry” (ll.7–8) may be tempered.
For an answer to the question of how anger may be tempered, Bacon offers what reads like one of the aphoristic statements in his Novum Organum, only on a civil-moral topic. “There is no other Way, but to Meditate and Ruminate well, upon the Effects of Anger, how it troubles Mans Life. And the best Time, to doe this, is, to looke backe upon Anger, when the Fitt is throughly over.” (ll.12–15) An astute reader can pull at least a couple of separate claims out of this aphorism: that anger affects a person’s life negatively, that thinking about its negativity will show us why anger must be tempered, and that thinking about its negativity is a good way to temper it. The best way to do that analysis is to look back on our experience of it, our memory of it.
As if in support of these multiplicitous but related claims, Bacon leads his readers through four thetical places, each of which will be very familiar to his well-educated readership. They come from four familiar classical sources: Seneca, Luke’s Gospel, Virgil, and Plutarch, spread across lines 15–27. Those four sources, like the ornaments in a ductus, speak their authority and ask to be considered and tested for what they have to say about anger. Respectively, they compare anger to a breaking ruin, dispossession of the soul, bee stings, and a base weakness.
Seneca’s “place” (“That Anger is like Ruine, which breakes it Selfe, upon that it falls,” as Bacon puts it) invites for comparison personal memories of being angry, or seeing anger, along with any negative effects. Its power to evoke reasoning comes partly from its vivid physicality: It is easy to imagine. It also comes partly from being positioned after the aphoristic statement of Bacon’s that anger troubles life as if it were the adduced evidence. That evokes questions. Is the anger I can remember similar to a “breaking ruin”? Is Seneca’s place a satisfying description of the memories I have filed under anger? At the juncture of the highly compressed thesis and the material of memory lies much potential inductive and deductive reasoning.
The following thetical places play a similar role. When I am angry, is it true to say, along with the quotation from Luke’s Gospel, that I am out of control of my soul? In order to find an answer the reader must mine the memory for angry persons out of control. Again, does the example of the bee losing its life from stinging something have any concordant relationship to any of my personal experiences of being angry or seeing it, and the destruction of reputation it can sometimes entail? And so on. Does the metaphor accord with all my memories and my knowledge of other proverbial wisdom?
Since the thetical places—compressed arguments—are actually given in the form of propositions, they may be used to build a deductive argument if they have been agreed with. For example, if anger (self-destruction, lack of control, base weakness, and so on) always troubles life, and if it is true that my reflections on past anger and its negativity have made me want to get rid of it, then it is true to say, as Bacon does, that reflecting on anger’s negativity is a step toward its temperance.
I’m not suggesting that all such inductions and deductions are cogent nor that Bacon would have predicted them. I would argue, however, three things: that persuasion depends on logical cogency as it is found within a reader’s reflections on the evidence of personal memory; that the thetical places elicit and shape such reflections; and that Bacon thinks particular places are likely to be cogent because of his own analysis of personal and cultural memory.
The patient observation of memory required even from the writer at the level of rhetorical planning seems to be exactly the kind of thing that Bacon has in mind in De Augmentis when he links the construction of aphorisms to having done “some good quantity of observation.”[70] When Bacon speaks about the Magistral and Initiative methods, he explicitly links a knowledge gained by induction to the capability of retracing the footsteps of one’s cognition (about any topic) “and by that means to transplant it into another mind just as it grew in his own.”[71] This is just the kind of thing that the thetical propositions do. They transplant observation because they provide compressed materials that will be taken apart and used to analyze remembered examples from life in patterns that Bacon, through his own analysis, can be relatively confident will lead to agreement, or at least to the challenge of engaging carefully with the topic.[72] To that extent, Bacon’s moral statements and the thetical places he moves through as evidence resemble the aphorisms of his Novum Organum.
Bacon discusses the nature and usefulness of aphorisms in the second chapter of Book VI of De Augmentis, and he gives them there three particular qualities: first, aphorisms test the knowledge of the writer; second, “they give directions for practice”; and third, they “invite others to contribute and add something in their turn.”[73] In the preface to Regulae, Bacon suggests that aphorisms are useful because in presenting knowledge “distinct and disjoined” aphorisms “doth leave the wit of man more free to turn and toss.”[74] Aphorisms then can be understood as terse, summarized, and un-argued statements because they direct and open up discussion.[75] In that respect they are closely related to the thetical sententiae that make up Bacon’s “Preparatory Store,” from which he drew in writing the essays. For Vickers, the bits and pieces of Bacon’s Essayes are aphoristic precisely because the same “pregnant applicability” can be seen in the commonplaces of the Antitheta Rerum.[76] There is a clear conceptual similarity between proverbs, aphorisms, commonplaces, adages, sententiae, maxims, and so on, but what matters in this context is how they function in the “places” they occupy.
Their use of aphorisms highlights the close relationship the Essayes have to other texts in Bacon’s reform project such as the Novum Organum. Issues of morality and power interact in both texts. The rational unpacking and reconstitution required by a thetical rhetoric, as Bacon deploys it, shows up the flux involved in thinking through the complexities of moral ideas, old and new, and the compromises that empowerment brings to them. Ian Box highlights the tension across Bacon’s works between a Machiavellian political ethic (most prevalent in what the Novum Organum may do for the state) and the Christian ethic of philanthropic virtue (most prevalent in The New Atlantis). For Box, the tension is particularly acute in the essays and is difficult if not impossible to resolve.[77] At some abstract level called the “good of humanity,” the contradiction between the Machiavellian concerns of the civitas and the Christian concern with advancing human knowledge and well-being might be absorbed. But on the textual ground of the Essayes the contradictions remain for Box.
Yet the aphoristic thetical style does more than connect genres. It shows up the revisionism that Bacon expects of readers in all the different spheres: moral, political, and natural. The New Atlantis may be a dream of epistemological and moral harmony that escapes from the ugly realities of politics, but it was knowingly written to be read by people immersed in such compromises, asking them to consider their own moral impulses as they read, as well as what compromises those impulses and how the “good of humanity” may be newly implemented and even newly defined in spite of the political arena. For Miller, Bacon’s “progressive writings” address the “advancement of learning,” while the Essayes address the “advancement of the self.” That is what, for him, “determines their difference.”[78] But this takes no account of how the intellectual and moral evolution of the public individual—occurring in the midst of political compromise—might contribute to the positive evolution of political culture, not to mention Bacon’s vision of it. A secular government, after all, has its own ethos. There is no politics without an implied ethics.
Donne’s concern in Of God is to engage with the question of what God is. Of course, applying reason merely to the evidence of the world as we know it, we can “get no further, than to know what he doth, not what he is” (24). Using another article of faith helps Donne to find some rational accord.
Donne first advances an allegorical model within a mental image of how faith and reason work together, of how each is implicated in the actions of the other. They who would seek the essence of God “onely in his creatures, and seeming Demonstration” (24) are like mariners searching the seas for new lands before the invention of the compass. Faith then can be likened to a compass:
But as by the use of the Compass, men safely dispatch Ulysses dangerous ten years travell in so many dayes, and have found out a new world richer then the old; so doth Faith, as soon as our hearts are touched with it, direct and inform us in that great search of the discovery of Gods Essence, and the new Hierusalem, which Reason durst not attempt. (24)
The compass of faith directs the traveling strength of reason to the rich “new world,” where faith, working together with reason, can comprehend him to some extent. Faith directs the strength, reason supplies the equipment. Reason is on the lower end of the same spectrum. The faithful heart, just like the compass, can flicker.
And though the faithfullest heart is not ever directly, and constantly upon God, but that it sometimes descends also to Reason; yet it is [not] thereby so departed from him, but that it still looks towards him, though not fully to him: as the compass is ever Northward, though it decline, and have variations toward the East, and West. (24)
Working only at the lower end of the spectrum, in reason applied to the familiar world, the faithful heart can flicker. Working at the higher end, where reason interacts with faith, it stays on north. The journeying mind resembles the way a compass behaves. In that way the very compass becomes more than the pious mariner’s tool; it now describes the mariner’s own journeying mind as it seeks God’s essence with varying levels of inter-implicated faith and reason.
Following his compass analogy, Donne now describes the conclusion of faith concerning the essence of God that he wants to hold onto: “By this faith, as by reason, I know, that God is all that which all men can say of all Good; I believe he is somewhat which no man can say nor know. For, si scirem quid Deus esset, Deus essem.” (24) That, Donne affirms, is faith comprehending God “all at once,” rather than in the “degrees” by which “acquired knowledge” comes (24–25). Quite apart from the fact that that conclusion is a proposition and thus amenable to the “reason” that exists in all language, faith’s conclusion aligns with reason also to the extent that it still remains for Donne a better conclusion than the alternatives he is about to run through.
Donne now asks his own soul if it can be satisfied in the search for God’s essence with some of the common attempts made by the journeying mind with the help of reason only—that is, reason working on axioms that come from other places than “the faith.” Donne’s ductus here is structured like a series of rhetorical questions. An early example engages the via negativa. In the search for God’s essence, Donne asks himself: “Canst thou rely and leane upon so infirm a knowledge, as is delivered by negations?” “Will it serve thy turn,” he continues, “to hear, that God is that which cannot be named, cannot be comprehended?” (25) He wonders also whether the names “good,” “just,” and “wise” may be reasonably applied to God, since each of them “can never be without confessing ‘better, wiser, and more just’” (25). Related suspicions are directed at the use of abstract nouns, such as “goodness” (25). The answer to the rhetorical questions in each of these places is, of course, no. They are failed attempts to find accord, for Donne at least. Arguably Donne finds less accord here than in other essays, since “God’s essence,” after all, is, in Donne’s handling here, more a theological question than a biblical one. However, after rejecting a variety of reasoned solutions, he restates faith’s conclusion that God is “all Good” but “somewhat which no man can say or know” (24). That remains for him the only sufficient thing to do. The “erroneous pictures” (26) that Donne has tried and found wanting, like the via negativa, ought not to be demolished but, he tells his soul, they cannot be the building’s foundation; faith’s assertions must be. Since they are applications of reason to things familiar in the world only, they will never and can never hit the infinitely expansive “mark” of faith. Faith, in Donne’s exegetical movements, finds a reasonable path. Indeed it must.
If Donne’s Essayes really undermined reason, as Hall seems to think, it would be hard to see how they could communicate anything at all.[79] Yet the essays do not resound with skeptical despair or deeply ironic playfulness. They are rather, as Evelyn Simpson described their tone, “the kindest, the happiest, the least controversial of Donne’s prose works.”[80] Donne does seem to have arrived somewhere through his reflections. He has sought and he has found, even if what he has found is just a more coherent belief in what he believed before. “Some form of understanding is advanced,” as even Hall admits.[81]
A “thetical rhetoric” as it has developed across this chapter means a way of compressing, mobilizing, and decompressing arguments that appeal to general principles. A thetical rhetoric, just like an enargetic rhetoric, will try to access what is familiar to people, and to that extent it can help make persuasion easier by obviating the need for readers to think more carefully, since commonplaces can stand in for whole arguments. However, the structure of Bacon’s and Donne’s essays engage the reasoning faculty by using thetical rhetorics designed to challenge the reason.
Bacon’s essays give him another genre with which to break down “idolatrous” reading habits, such as the over-hasty rush through well-known syllogistic structures. This is something he makes explicit in Novum Organum. Readers of Bacon’s Essayes cannot just jump across the page, relying on the habituated syllogistic structures that he could have wound into his “arguments” but chose not to. To be sure, that would have made them easier to read, easier to agree with, and more “magistrally” reinforcing. Yet his readers need to construct the argumentation themselves instead. Donne, in another context, gives us some idea of how that search for rational and emotional accord might happen. That is to say, Bacon relies on his readers doing something like what Donne is doing for himself in his own Essayes.
A creative thetical rhetoric, without the syllogistic connective bits, gives Bacon a space to access what is familiar to people as well as the opportunity to encourage evolving thought on moral, civil, and natural questions by setting various familiar things alongside and even against each other. Some things will be affirmed and some disaffirmed. Donne goes through the same process in seeking an understanding of the faith, though of course the intellectual world he inhabits has less room for rejecting traditional teachings than Bacon’s.
Though it is deliberately elided, syllogistic reasoning is required of Bacon’s astute readers in the Essayes. His thetical rhetoric is one more step toward the new habit of slowing down moral, civil, and natural observation. To that extent the rhetorical procedure here in the Essayes connects interestingly with the rhetorical procedure in Novum Organum. Even there, where syllogistic thought is explicitly discouraged, it has ways of coming back, indeed necessarily so.
The enargetic and thetical rhetorics deployed in Bacon’s and Donne’s texts are resources they can use to analyze the cognitive processes of mental image making and reasoning that they expect audiences to bring to certain rhetorical techniques. Once again, in talking about an “enargetic” and a “thetical” rhetoric, I do not simply mean the techniques that Bacon and Donne deploy. I mean also, in connection with them, the long history of making links between rhetorical techniques and the processes of mental image making and reasoning. Bacon’s and Donne’s own styles are selected from what they knew of such histories. The next chapter, in a similar vein, looks at the emotional dimensions of the same cognitive model and the skills that were linked to passionate feelings in theory and practice.
1. References to Bacon’s Essayes are to the line numbers from Michael Kiernan’s edition: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 15 (1985; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 2006). In-text references to Donne’s Essayes are to the page numbers from Essayes in Divinity: Being Several Disquisitions Interwoven with Meditations and Prayers, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2001).
2. Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 28–56.
3. Ibid., 49. For the comment of Bacon’s, see Advancement (Works, III: 398–99).
4. See Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
5. See Spedding, Works, XI: 340. For commentary, see also Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 677–78.
6. Spedding, Works, XI: 340.
7. The most useful discussions for my purposes have been those by Mary Carruthers, especially The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Other helpful discussions of the “meditation” are Ceri Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580 to 1603 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Margery Kempe's Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literature, Liturgy, and Iconography (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2007).
8. See Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24–31.
9. For examples, see R. S. Crane, “The Relation of Bacon’s Essays to His Program for the Advancement of Learning,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972), 272–92; Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 227–48; John J. Miller, “‘Pruning by Study’: Self-Cultivation in Bacon’s Essays,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 31, no. 4 (1995): 339–42; and Ian Box, “Bacon’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 278–79.
10. Jardine, Discovery, 234.
11. Ibid.
12. Bacon discusses the Antitheta Rerum in detail in De Augmentis, Book VI, chapter 3, in the context of his discussion of rhetoric: Spedding, Works, I: 688–706 (translation: Works, IV: 473–492).
13. Jardine, Discovery, 225. On Bacon’s methods, see De Augmentis, Book VI, chapter 2: Works, I: 662–68 (translation: Works, IV: 448–53).
14. See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990); Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,” in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 78–155.
16. Ibid., 152–53.
17. For example, Fish finds a “pattern” everywhere in Bacon’s essays in which “familiar and reverenced witticisms” are followed by “the introduction of data that call their validity into question”; Ibid., 92.
18. Ibid., 118.
19. Marwil comments on how the successive versions of Bacon’s essays (1597, 1612, and 1625) relate to the rising and falling public fortunes of Bacon the careerist counselor; see The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976), 87–91, 130–33, 186–87.
20. Kiernan, “Introduction,” in Essayes or Counsels, xxvi.
21. Bacon was barred from court, and he may have been thinking of Buckingham’s potential influence with Prince Charles. Ibid., xxvi–xxix.
22. See Vickers, Major Works, 713.
23. Simpson, for example, says that “they are essentially private meditations, whereas the Devotions were carefully prepared for the press.” Evelyn Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd ed, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 204.
24. Ibid., 203.
25. Michael Hall, “Searching and Not Finding: The Experience of Donne’s Essays in Divinity,” Genre 14, no. 4 (1981): 430.
26. Ibid., 430.
27. Ibid., 427.
28. Raspa, “Introduction,” in Essayes in Divinity, xx.
29. Ibid., xxxv–xxxix.
30. John Hill explores some of the links between the fides quaerens intellectum tradition and its importance for Renaissance Christian humanism. see John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith, and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
31. See Simpson, Prose Works, 203, and Raspa, Essayes, 5. The deduction is based on the younger Donne’s dedication To the Reader prefixed to his 1651 printed edition, where he suggests that his father wrote them in the context of his “many debates betwixt God and himself, whether he were worthy, and competently learned to enter into Holy Orders.” The tone of the essays, says Simpson, also dates them after Ignatius His Conclave (1610).
32. See Narveson’s discussion, which states that writing “in divinity” allowed lay elites alongside their clerical fellows the chance to “identify with the challenge of ordering and overseeing a godly society.” Kate Narveson, “Donne the Layman Essaying Divinity,” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 28 (2009): 18.
33. Jeffrey Johnson, “‘One, Four, and Infinite’: John Donne, Thomas Harriot, and Essays in Divinity,” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 22 (2003): 131. Avoiding extremes is part of what Johnson calls Donne’s “hermeneutic of the center,” at the center of which is the infallible framing authority of the Word of God. Thought of as self-display, Donne would particularly want to avoid sounding like an “extreme” papist or zealot.
34. The most useful discussions of these concepts for my purposes here have been those by Carruthers, especially The Craft of Thought and The Book of Memory.
35. As Monfasini notes, Quintilian’s mention of the controversiae figurate (Institutio Oratoria, 9.2.66) seems to prefigure the idea of ductus, but Fortunatianus’s influential use of the term does not seem to predate him. John Monfasini, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and His Logic (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 280–81.
36. Fortunatianus, Artis rhetoricae, in Rhetores latini minores, ed. Halm (1863; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1964), 84.
37. Martiani Capella, Liber de arte rhetorica, in Rhetores latini minores, 463.
38. Lucia Calboli Montefusco, “Ductus and Color: The Right Way to Compose a Suitable Speech,” Rhetorica 21, no. 2 (2003): 119–23.
39. On George of Trebizond’s influential understanding of ductus, see Ibid., 123–28.
40. Mary J. Carruthers, “Late Antique Rhetoric, Early Monasticism, and the Revival of School Rhetoric,” in Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham (London: Continuum, 2002), 240–43.
41. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 79.
42. Ibid., 261–69.
43. Ibid., 117.
44. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1357a1–5, 41.
45. The crossover in meaning among these terms leads Lanham to include them under the term proverb. Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 124–25. Bacon describes the “commonplaces” in his Antitheta Rerum as “skeins or bottoms of thread which may be unwinded at large when they are wanted” (Works, IV, 472), and again as “seeds” rather than “flowers” (Works, IV, 492).
46. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1376a1–5, 105.
47. Quintilian, IO, 5.11.39–40.
48. The author of Ad Herennium makes that point at IV. 25. In doing so, he simply follows Aristotle’s treatment of maxim, who observes that people are pleased when an orator “hits upon opinions that they themselves have about a particular instance.” Rhetoric, 1395b1–5, 168.
49. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1394a25–30, 165.
50. See, Cicero, Topica, ed. and trans. Tobias Reinhardt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.
51. See Cicero, De Orat., II. 133–35, where Crassus explains the problem. Cicero summarizes his thetical approach in the following way: “Nulla denique est causa, in qua id, quod in iudicium venit, reorum personis ac non generum ipsorum universa dubitatione quaeretur” (There is in fact no case wherein the issue for decision turns on the personalities of the parties, and not on the abstract discussion of general conceptions), II. 134.
52. Ibid., II. 165–66: “Si consul est, qui consulit patriae, quid aliud fecit Opimius?” (If a consul’s duty is to consult the interests of his native land, what else has Opimius done?).
53. Mortensen describes how one of Cicero’s concepts of locus, the “ideal locus,” such as the duty-of-a-consul notion above, can easily be developed into another locus-concept, the “affective” kind, which refers to excerptible or clichéd passages in speeches and literature. Daniel Mortensen, “The Loci of Cicero,” Rhetorica 26, no. 1 (2008): 39–51.
54. The practice of keeping commonplace books facilitated this excerpting tendency. The early modern commercial practice of inserting quotation marks into printed books in order to indicate certain passages that may be lifted out indicates just how much the commonplace book practice “served the habit of looking for excerptible material.” See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 211.
55. Agricola, De inventione dialectica (1539; repr., Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1967), 2, hereafter cited as DID: “nulli dubiae rei queat ex se constare fides, sed ex aliis quibusdam notioribus atque magis exploratis de unoquoque certitudine colligamus necesse sit” (Credibility cannot be set up by itself from something dubious, but we must gather individual certainty out of other more well-known and well-established things).
56. For a proper explanation of how this works as well as the place that the search for consentanea holds in Agricola’s system, see Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 170–71.
57. DID, 7: “Ergo ut ad alterius confirmationem aliquid possit adhiberi, coniunctum quadam ratione, et velut cognatum esse oportet illi cui probando adhibetur, taleque videri, ut non subsistere res sine illo, si affirmes: non subverti, si neges, possit.”
58. Ibid., 9: “ut omnia quae singulis conveniant aut discrepent, singulatim nulla oratio, nulla vis mentis humanae possit complecti.”
59. Ibid., 9: “quod in eis velut receptu et thesauro quodam, omnia faciendae fidei instrumenta sint reposita.”
60. The distinction between plausible arguments and necessary ones sometimes dissolves in Agricola’s concept of an argument; see Mack, Renaissance Argument, 141, and the discussion of probability in Agricola, 169–73.
61. That includes proverbs, allegories, and comparisons; see Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, trans. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 25:85; hereafter De Conscrib. For the Latin text of De Conscrib., see Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969–2009), hereafter cited as ASD: “breviter quicquid similitudinibus est affine, id exempli vim habet,” 1–2, 333.
62. Wilson, Art, 78.
63. Ibid., 140.
64. Ibid..
65. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1394a10–15, 164.
66. Erasmus, De Conscrib., CWE 25, 87; ASD 1–2, 335–36.
67. Wilson, Art, 134.
68. For the most part I shall use the terms stage and place interchangeably.
69. John 1:1–2 reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (1991; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
70. Spedding, Works, IV, 451.
71. Ibid., 449.
72. I shall discuss Bacon’s variety of methods, intiative or aphoristic, and magistral, further when coming to the Novum Organum. To the extent that these essays involve the open reasoning capabilities of readers I argue that they are rightly described as an example of the initiative or aphoristic method and work in a manner strongly analogous to the aphorisms of Novum Organum.
73. Spedding’s translation, Works, IV, 450–451.
74. Ibid., VII, 321.
75. Jardine, Discovery, 176–77, states that: “In aphoristic presentation . . . information is digested into a terse, general, clearly comprehensible sentence.” Aphorisms are “clear summaries of an aspect of a topic,” though of course Jardine did not link the aphoristic method to the method of Bacon’s Essayes.
76. Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 86–87.
77. Box, “Moral Philosophy,” 278–79.
78. Miller, “Pruning,” 340–41.
79. Hall, “Searching and Not Finding,” 438.
80. Simpson, Prose Works, 206.
81. Hall, “Searching and Not Finding,” 438.