Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 411 - Pen Pals - Later French Humanism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Pen Pals, later French Humanism. As an American living in Germany, I obviously have regular opportunities to regret that I am not a native German speaker, but I also have regular opportunities to be glad that my mother tongue is English. This is especially so in academic settings. When there's an international meeting of scholars from, say, France, Finland, Italy, Germany, and Greece, their common language is bound to be English. I'm often the only native speaker in a group like that, which is sort of like showing up to a tennis tournament with a state-of-the-art graphite and carbon fiber racket while everyone else is using wooden ones. Most academic publishing is in English too, which suits me just fine. Of the European nations, it's really only France that has maintained its own language as the cheap vehicle for writing about philosophy. The French, of course, have a long and proud history of refusing to learn English. But in an earlier period of that history, they did switch into another foreign tongue in academic contexts, Latin. This is illustrated by the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger, the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, whom we covered in episode 401. In a letter written in 1608, the younger Scaliger relates with some chagrin how he fell into an awkward conversation with an Englishman in the Dutch city of Leiden. This visitor, admitted Scaliger, might as well have been speaking Turkish, and unfortunately, even the most learned Englishman pronounced Latin very badly. Sneering at the English for their lack of linguistic achievement, another long-standing French custom. Scaliger's letter was written in Latin, not in French, which was not unusual. His voluminous surviving correspondence runs to 1,653 letters, more than a thousand of which are in Latin. Scaliger regularly corresponded with other Frenchmen, not in their shared tongue, but in Latin, especially when discussing scholarly matters. This may seem surprising, but I've often seen something similar, Germans choosing to give papers in English in front of German-speaking audiences, on the grounds that they are not used to talking about philosophy in their native language. The correspondent to whom Scaliger sent the most surviving letters was the humanist Isaac Hausaubon, of whom Scaliger said that he was, The greatest Greek scholar that we have, he is my superior. The many messages they sent to one another exemplify a phenomenon that we have seen before, as with the surviving correspondence of Erasmus, and these stylish letters written by Italian humanists. It's also a phenomenon that will need extensive discussion when we get to early modern philosophy. I have in mind the so-called Republic of Letters, in which learned men, and occasionally women, around Europe, pursued scientific and philosophical questions by writing to one another, usually in Latin. By the turn of the 17th century, this Republic of Letters was well on its way to being founded. Scaliger, for instance, wrote two among many others, Tico Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Theodore Beza, Justus Lipsius, Philippe de Mornez, and for good measure, the kings of France and Scotland. But it makes sense that Casaubon was Scaliger's favorite pen pal, because they had so much in common. Both were Huguenots, who passed through the unofficial capital of the Calvinist world, Geneva. Casaubon studied there as a young man, while Scaliger became a professor of philosophy there, after fleeing France following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Both would spend their final years living abroad, Scaliger in the Netherlands until his death in 1609, Casaubon in England, where he would die in 1614. As leading humanists, both men, of course, excelled in Latin and in Greek. Directly celebrated is Scaliger's story of teaching himself ancient Greek, after having received instruction in Latin thanks to his famous father. According to this story, as a young man, Scaliger shut himself in his room and undertook a self-imposed crash course in the language. He read Homer, with the help of a translation, and mastered this archaic version of Greek within only three weeks. Clearly, Joseph inherited his dad's flair for self-promotion and exaggeration, because in fact he learned Greek from several teachers in Paris. There, Scaliger also met Guillaume Postel, a scholar of Jewish Kabbalah. This got him interested in studying Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Scaliger in turn helped inspire his friend Casaubon to study these Near Eastern languages. They of course discussed this project in Latin, in their letters to one another, with Scaliger advising Casaubon to learn Arabic directly from the Quran, and Casaubon writing to say that he was reading Avicenna's medical treatise, the Canon, in the original. Which was not unprecedented, Avicenna's preeminent standing in medicine motivated quite a few Renaissance doctors to learn Arabic. But to combine a deep philological interest in Greek and Latin with a similar interest in Semitic languages, as Scaliger and Casaubon did, was more unusual. Joseph Scaliger, again according to his own not-exactly-modest account, claimed that he was able to dispute with Jewish rabbis in Rome in Hebrew, and Casaubon's study of Hebrew was ambitious enough to be the subject of a whole book by modern-day scholars Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg. As they discuss, Casaubon was able to consult texts in the Hebrew original on a wide range of topics, from religion to mathematics. As an exercise, he liked to translate Hebrew into ancient Greek. An author of particular interest to him was Maimonides, whom he saw as an authoritative interpreter of the Bible. We still have notes he made on a translation of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed. By contrast, he had little respect for Kabbalistic writings, a judgment shared by Scaliger. Referring to the theory of the alphanumeric Seferot, Casaubon remarked, the Hebrew masters not only waste their time, but actually make fools of themselves as they seek out the mysteries of holy letters. One reason Casaubon was interested in Hebrew is that he assumed it to be the most ancient known language. You'll remember the Flood recorded in the Book of Genesis, the one that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, which is about twice as long as it took Scaliger to learn Homeric Greek. After this cataclysm, Casaubon supposed, the only remaining language was Hebrew, meaning that all existing languages on Earth must be derived from it. To support this spurious notion, he proposed equally spurious etymologies that purported to show the derivation of Greek words from Hebrew ones. Not one of Casaubon's better ideas. But in another case, he was, like the face of a Roman emperor, right on the money. In the process of attacking a Catholic apologist named Cesare Baronio, Casaubon turned his attention to one of Baronio's sources, he Platonizing writings ascribed to the Greek Egyptian religious figure Thrice Great Hermes, or Hermes Trismegistus. This body of text had been significant for the history of philosophy since late antiquity, when they were in fact written. Hermes was used by Greek Neoplatonists, a name known to philosophers of the Islamic world, and celebrated as a source of great wisdom and antiquity by earlier Renaissance humanists like Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno. But Casaubon noticed that these writings could not possibly be an early Greek translation of an even earlier Egyptian source, as was claimed. He observed, for example, that the text indulged in wordplay that would make sense only if it was originally written in Greek, as when the word cosmos is linked to the Greek verb cosmin, meaning to adorn or decorate. More generally, he saw that the vocabulary, style, and thought of the Hermetic writings belonged to late antiquity. There are many words here, he argued, that do not belong to any Greek earlier than that of the time of Christ's birth. As we can see from this example, the French humanists were developing a more nuanced sense of the history of philosophy, and the same goes for plain old history. Scaliger is especially important here, because of his contributions to the field of historical chronology. Of particular interest in his own time was, of course, biblical history, but Scaliger did not hesitate to use pagan historical records too, all those Roman emperors with their faces on coins and their reigns recorded in classical literature, as he undertook nothing less than a reconstruction of all antiquity, a kind of map in time instead of space. He used a similar metaphor himself, saying that his system for time measurement would offer a guide to the chronologer who journeys through all the world and roams like a wandering stranger back through all ancient times and origins, so that when he reads the Acts, Annals, and Calendars of the Ancients, he may sometimes know where he is, and need not always be a stranger. Using his periodization, it would be possible to determine when biblical events happened, relative to events recorded in the writings of the pagan Greeks and Romans. Scaliger even made an attempt to sort out the times of ancient Egyptian dynasties, and admitted that there was good evidence to show that Egyptian culture existed before the supposed date of the world's creation, suggested by the Hebrew Bible. This may seem to be the ultimate antiquarian project, and in a sense it was. Scaliger was going beyond the study of individual ancient texts to the study of ancientness itself, in a pioneering attempt to create a universal timeline on which all events could be located. This meant more than editing and translating particular texts and rejecting them as forgeries when appropriate, though it certainly meant these things too. Scaliger was envisioning a unification of all the ancient cultures known to the humanists, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern, within a single chronological framework, something he was well placed to do, having learned nearly all the relevant languages. Yet neither Scaliger nor Casaubon thought that old things are valuable just because they are old. To the contrary, both men believed in scientific and scholarly progress. Casaubon once said, Great things take a long time to develop, and one age is not enough to work through them systematically, hence they have certain rude beginnings and are not passed on to us in their final state. That is why those who come later always devise new things to add to the discoveries of their ancestors. And Scaliger was scornful of followers of Peter Rames, who fetishized the pioneering mathematicians of antiquity. As far as he was concerned, the fact that these figures came earlier didn't mean that they were better at math. Being more traditional humanists in the mold of Erasmus, Budet, the elder Scaliger, and so on, these later French scholars were not apt to be impressed by the user-friendly, disruptive methods of Rames. Casaubon lamented that Rames was an unfruitful tree, which unfortunately had spread its branches through virtually all the universities of the Christian world. So around the turn of the 17th century, some humanists were distancing themselves from or debunking the Neoplatonic, Neopathagorean approach to ancient thought that had still been accepted by scholars like Ficino and Pico. And of course, humanists had long defined themselves in opposition to Aristotelian scholasticism, even before the user-friendly simplifications of Rames came along. That left an opening for influence from other ancient philosophical traditions, especially stoicism and skepticism. We already looked at the greatest exponent of Stoic thought in the late Renaissance, Justus Lipsius, and discussed his thought in an interview with John Sellars. That was in episode 391 and 392. But it would be worth touching on a French exponent of neo-stoicism who was a contemporary of Casaubon and the somewhat older Scaliger. His name was Iom de Verre. Where Lipsius' stoicism was inspired especially by Seneca, for de Verre the most important ancient author of the school was Epictetus. He wrote a work called The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, which was published as a commentary to his own French translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion. Then he wrote a dialogue with the title On Constancy. That may sound familiar, since Lipsius did exactly the same thing and for similar reasons. Both of them were responding to the upheaval of the wars of religion, with the immediate event provoking de Verre's treatise being a Huguenot siege of Paris in 1590. Though de Verre was heavily under the influence of Lipsius, he did bring something distinctive to the late 16th century revival of stoicism. It has been said that he was the Christian and nationalist among the neo-stoics. He counts as a nationalist because of the political context and content of his work and because he was deeply engaged with French politics. He was, among other things, a member of the Paris Parliament and the President of the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence. In this period of constitutionalist challenges to the monarchy, de Verre may be counted among the conservative monarchists. He wanted the nobility, to which he belonged, to work closely with the king to keep the lower classes in line. This despite the fact that he shows clear sympathy for the poor in his dialogue On Constancy. The challenge thrown down for stoic philosophy to solve is that there is so much misery in the France of his day, as illustrated by horrifying stories of hunger among the people as a result of the constant warfare. There have even been rumors of children being eaten. But as de Verre says, no evil is so great that reason and philosophical conversation cannot overcome it. Part of his response is to compare our life on earth to a battle. God's providence is compatible with the evils and suffering we see around us because he wants us to rise to this challenge. Yet in something of a twist on classical stoicism, and certainly a departure from de Verre's favorite source, Epictetus, who focused especially on the individual's will and virtue, de Verre emphasizes the need to come together as a political community, rather than looking to self-interest. After all, as one of his characters says, there's no point saving your house if the whole country falls. Still, to de Verre's mind, true consolation in the face of evils cannot be found in anything that is done or achieved in this world. This brings us to the distinctively Christian aspect of his thought. In his work on the Stoic's moral philosophy, de Verre presents a rather un-Stoic vision of our ultimate good, namely beatitude in the afterlife, through contemplation of God. In this life, we should work to embrace, alongside the standard virtues recognized by the ancients, also the distinctively Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. More faithfully Stoic is de Verre's relentless emphasis on the importance of avoiding false belief, which he places under the pejorative heading of mere opinion. People are miserable, not so much because of the things that happen to them, but because of the false beliefs they have about these things. For example, that so-called external goods are truly valuable, or that the world is governed by chance rather than divine providence. When reason judges are right, then constancy in the face of misfortune is close at hand. The reason I say that this sounds faithful to Stoicism is that the ancient Stoics likewise stressed the importance of seeing the world aright and argued that misery derives from false belief. The perfect sage, who makes no mistakes, would be guaranteed to enjoy happiness. But even here, de Verre departs from what he would find in Epictetus or earlier Stoics. He incorporates into his moral theory Plato's analysis of the soul, according to which there are lower parts, spirit and desire, which can undermine reason by leading it away from the correct values and beliefs. De Verre suggests using philosophical medicine to cure the soul of such misconceptions, for example the Epictetan teaching that we should value only what is up to us. Another remedy can be found in the anecdotes and sayings, usually drawn from antiquity, that the humanists called exempla. De Verre's inspiration, Lipsius, was an avid purveyor of such material. But neither of them was the most famous author of the period to make extensive use of exempla. That honor would go to another Frenchman who wrote toward the end of the 16th century and who was more oriented toward another Hellenistic school, skepticism. This was Michel de Montaigne, whose famous collection of essays is absolutely chock full of quotations from ancient authors, good stories drawn from classical history, and passages praising heroes of antiquity, especially Socrates. Occasionally, ideas do come in from the Stoic tradition, but Montaigne found such rigorous ethical teaching too demanding and also too certain of itself. He was a man of moderation, who allowed himself to enjoy pleasure and also allowed that he was uncertain of many things. But given that Montaigne's favorite subject, the topic he found fascinating above all others, was Montaigne himself, I daresay he'd be sure that you should join me next time as we delve into his essays here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.