The history of Western thought is punctuated by revivals of Aristotelianism. And often a central part in those revivals is played by some renewed interest in Aristotle's ethics and politics. But such revivals are not lasting and characteristically are the prologue to some anti-Aristotelian mode of thought, so that the history of Western thought is also punctuated by rejections of Aristotelianism.
What causes these cycles of revival and rejection? There is certainly no single answer, but sometimes at least it seems to have been the case that moral and political Aristotelianism has been self-subverting, that it has been its protagonists who brought about its downfall. And perhaps this was how it was with some Renaissance Aristotelians.
I
In Philip Sidney's An Apologie for Poetrie the claims of the poet to be the preeminent teacher of the virtues are challenged by the moral philosophers and the historians. In this encounter the historians fare worst, but the moral philosophers turn out to be no better than the poets in telling us how we should live, while being a good deal their inferior at motivating us. So Sidney concludes of the poet that "therein, (namely in morrall doctrine, the chief of all knowledges,) hee dooth not merely farre passe the Historian, but for instructing, is well nigh comparable to the Philosopher; and for moving, leaves him behind him . . . . " What philosophers did Sidney have in mind?
At the very beginning of the Apologie Sidney provides a mocking portrait of those who compete with the poets for preeminence,
among whom as principall challengers step forth the morrall Philosophers, whom me thinketh, I see comming towards me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by day light, rudely clothed for to witnes outwardly their contempt of outward things, with bookes in their hands agaynst glory, whereto they sette theyre names, sophistically speaking against subtility, and angry with any man in whom they see the soule fault of anger: these men casting larges as they goe, of Definitions, Divisions, and Distinctions, with a scornefull interogative, doe soberly aske, whether it bee possible to finde any path, so ready to leade a man to vertue, as that which teacheth what vertue is?
Sidney probably wrote these words in late 1581, nine years after he had left Oxford. But he would not have had much, if any, occasion to encounter philosophers during his travels abroad or his time at court, so that it seems reasonable to suppose that it is the teachers of moral philosophy at Oxford whom he still has in mind. And the most notable of these was John Case.
Case was some thirteen years older than Sidney. It was in the same year (1568) that Sidney had entered Christ Church that Case had become a Fellow of St. Johns. Charles B. Schmitt in his splendid account of Case's life and work laid great emphasis both on the knowledge of Sidney's writings exhibited in Case's later work and on Case's acquaintance with some of Sidney's friends and with Sidney's sister. But while Sidney was an undergraduate at Oxford, Case's reputation as a moral philosopher had yet to be made. It was finally made by the publication in 1585, a year before Sidney's death, of his Speculum quaestionum moralium, in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis, a detailed exposition of and philosophical commentary upon the Nicomachean Ethics, printed by Joseph Barnes on the press recently given to Oxford University by its Chancellor, Robert Devereux Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sidney's uncle. (So began the long and marvelous history of the Oxford University Press.) And it is to the Earl of Leicester that Case's book is dedicated.
In the same year Sidney published his Discourse in Defence of the Earl of Leicester and it seems unlikely that he did not have some knowledge of the publication of Case's book. If he had read it, he might well have felt that its definitions, divisions, and distinctions provided confirmation for his stinging portrait of the moral philosopher. But Case's book is in an important way a reply to Sidney. I do not mean by this to imply that Case had read the Apologie, let alone that he had it in mind when writing the Speculum. The Apologie was not published until 1595 and, even if we entertain the remote possibility that Case had been shown the Apologie in manuscript, it is very unlikely that he could have seen it before a large part of the Speculum had already been written. What then do I mean when I say that Case's Speculum is nonetheless a reply to Sidney's Apologie? Just this, that Case's Speculum articulates more adequately than any other book (the claim was not peculiar to Case, but is found elsewhere among Renaissance Aristotelians) the thesis that the teaching of moral philosophy, rightly understood, is the teaching of the moral virtues, that the moral philosopher is preeminent, not only in affording instruction about the theory of the moral virtues, but in making those whom he instructs virtuous. If Case's arguments are sound, then Sidney's arguments for the preeminence of the poets fail.
The claims made by Case were endorsed in some of the twenty-seven congratulatory Latin poems by his Oxford colleagues which precede the text. "The book," declares the Vice-Chancellor of the university, "teaches all the several virtues by philosophizing." And in the dedicatory epistle Case addresses the students of both English universities as one anxious to instruct them to practical effect. He is not merely engaged in expounding the text of the Nicomachean Ethics and in responding to a variety of objections to Aristotle's theses and arguments, but is doing so in order to make his readers, if they are seriously attentive, better human beings in a way that only the teaching of moral philosophy can achieve. So Case's Speculum asserts precisely what Sidney's Apologie denies. But in so doing Case encounters an obvious initial difficulty.
At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had argued that the young are not yet capable of learning what the moral philosopher has to teach. Their experience is too limited and they are guided by their as yet disordered passions (1095a 2-6). What they need is the discipline of practical habituation, not theoretical instruction. To act not only in accordance with what virtue requires, but virtuously is first to know what one is doing—that one's action is what justice or courage or generosity requires, secondly to do what one does for its own sake, to do it just because it is the just or courageous or generous thing to do, and thirdly to give expression in so doing to a stable disposition to perform just or courageous or generous actions, when ever they are required. But Aristotle emphasizes that it is not the knowledge that moves us to action (1105a 30-1105b 3). So that it is not only that the young are not the moral philosopher's appropriate audience. It is also that, on Aristotle's view, the kind of moral training that produces virtuous character is a type of practical habituation and not theoretical instruction in moral philosophy.
II
It must seem then that Case would only have been able to answer Sidney if he had been willing to repudiate Aristotle. But this is not at all how Case proceeds. Instead he radically reinterprets Aristotle, without recognizing that he is doing so. Aristotle had remarked that one can grow older without becoming mature and that there are therefore older people who remain in the condition of the young. Case seizes on this as a first step in arguing that "young" is to be understood as referring not so much to age as to mores. "Wherefore it is not by being few or many in years, but by inconstancy and levity of mores that I define 'young' in these passages" (lib. I, cap. 3). The student, that is to say, must have the habits of a good student, but this habituation is preliminary to the moral education afforded by instruction in the Ethics. When we remember the age of the undergraduates whom Case was teaching at Oxford and whom he addressed in his dedicatory epistle, the difference between Case and Aristotle becomes even clearer. (Sidney who, after four years at Shrewsbury School, had become an undergraduate at the age of thirteen was younger than most, but there were many not much older.) The adolescent student whose preliminary education has implanted a desire to excel and a willingness to learn from his teachers is treated by Case as someone who already has all the prior habituation that he needs in order to be moved to the acquisition and exercise of the virtues by philosophical instruction.
Both the scope and the power thus ascribed by Case to moral philosophy make it necessary for him also to revise Aristotle's conception of the virtue of prudence, phronesis, although once again Case was plainly unaware that he was engaged in such a revision. For Case in a preface addressed to the students of both universities had ascribed to the study of philosophical ethics great power: "It is the norm of mores, the mistress of the virtues, the gnomon (the measure on a sundial) of life, the rule of actions." So much so that when he comes to the discussion of prudence, he confronts the problem of distinguishing between moral philosophy and prudence. The problem arises because on his account it seems to be the case that "Moral philosophy is the habit of acting with true reasoning concerning human goods: therefore it is prudence." Case's reply is that "Moral philosophy treats these goods in terms of genus, prudence in terms of species" (lib. VI, cap. 5). The philosopher supplies a set of moral generalizations; the prudent agent applies them to particular types of circumstance. Prudence is, so to speak, applied moral philosophy and without moral philosophy the agent would not have the requisite stock of generalizations.
How then does Case deal with Aristotle's assertion that knowledge (scientia in Case's translation) plays little or no part in virtuous action (Nicomachean Ethics l 105b 2-3)? He does so by quoting the passage in question and replying that the knowledge thus referred to is theoretical, contemplative knowledge. The knowledge that is required for virtuous action is what he calls a knowledge of circumstances, by which he means, so it presently becomes clear, the knowledge of what kind of virtuous action is required in whatever circumstances (lib. II, cap. 4). But to this further objections have to be raised. That the scientia circumstantiarum that is needed is prudence seems evident from Case's definition of virtue, yet one can be learned without being prudent, so that the knowledge of circumstances—which presumably the learned possess—is not sufficient. Moreover the ignorant and uncultured often possess virtue, but, on this view of prudence, they cannot be prudent.
To this Case's response is that two kinds of prudence must be distinguished. There is on the one hand particular prudence, which is the limited knowledge of how to act virtuously in some range of particular circumstances and this knowledge can be in the less experienced and the less learned. But there is on the other hand "heroic and general" prudence, "which is the knowledge of living well and of acting in accordance with all the virtues in every circumstance, and this is not necessary for everyone." So the ignorant and uncultured can after all be prudent on this or that occasion, but only with an inferior form of prudence. And one can be learned without having the knowledge necessary for heroic and general prudence, a knowledge which is to be provided generally, even if not necessarily always, by moral philosophy. There remains one further objection.
"To obey the precepts of virtue is an act of virtue, but a boy can obey the precepts without prudence: therefore there can be an act of virtue without prudence" (lib. VI, cap. 13). What is noteworthy here is that Case does not reply, as Aristotle presumably would have done, by drawing a distinction between acts that conform to what the virtues require and acts that issue from the settled dispositions of a virtuous human being. Instead Case answers that ''As the act of virtue is in the boy inchoately, so is prudence . . . . "
Moral development then is from the inchoate moral virtue and prudence of the very young to the development of virtuous habits over a certain limited range of cases to the heroic virtue, requiring heroic and general prudence, for which an education into the substance of Aristotle's ethics is required. The notion that what Aristotle had provided was primarily a set of general moral precepts which can be taught to the well brought up young, so that they can then learn to apply these to their own particular circumstances, is not of course original to Case. It was this conception of Aristotle's ethics that had led Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke named the Governour (1531) to include the Nicomachean Ethics along with Cicero's De Officiis in the books of which tutors of young gentlemen were to make use. And when John Wilkinson published the first English translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in 1547 (not from the Greek, but from Brunetto Latini's Italian), his title page read: "The Ethiques of Aristotle, that is to saye, precepts of good behavoure and perfighte honestie, now newly translated into English."
Case however brings to the task of expounding Aristotle a kind of learning that is found in none of his English predecessors, but that matches the best of his European contemporaries. He draws upon both scholastic and humanistic sources and methods, making use of a wide range of older and newer commentators, including Aquinas, Buridan, and Burleigh. But his use of commentators is always subordinated to those educational purposes which provide his enterprise with its justification.
His methods of exposition were eclectic. He was, as an Aristotelian, opposed to Ramus's positions and influence and he contributed to the debates between Aristotelian and Ramist dialectic. But he made use of Ramist schemes of division and of Ramist diagrams in setting out his Aristotelian subject-matter, putting these devices to the service of a type of commentary modeled on the scholastic treatment of Quaestiones Disputatae, where exposition proceeds through the posing and answering of successive objections, something that I have already illustrated in Case's treatment of prudence.
Not every reader has been charmed by Case's modes of exposition. Nancy S. Struever has called them "technocracy run wild" and "reductive and baroque," concluding that "the message is virtually submerged under the weight of the organizational modes." And her criticism involves content as well as form, for she takes Case's aim to be "to put forward as many familiar and comfortable moralisms as possible with the least expense of effort of reconciliation." Struever's criticisms however miss the point in two different ways.
First they ignore the excellence of most of Case's expositions of Aristotle. Generally his use of techniques of division clarifies effectively what would otherwise be obscure to the student and his distinctions are just those that the beginning Elizabethan student needs. This is a book that reflects the experience of teaching undergraduates and that speaks to the teaching needs of Case's colleagues as well as to the needs of his and their pupils. The questions put to Aristotle may not be quite the same as either the questions put by their medieval predecessors or their modern successors, but Case's book is well-designed to move the attentive reader from being a naive questioner of Aristotle to someone who has begun to learn from the text how to question Aristotle in Aristotle's own terms.
Secondly, what Struever says may suggest that Case merely asserts what she calls "moralisms." But it is of the first importance that these moralisms are presented by Case as the conclusions of philosophical arguments. And it is on the philosophy that everything turns. It is perhaps because of their recognition of this that the verdict of Copenhaver and Schmitt on Case is very different from Struever's: "More effectively than any other Englishman, he combined traditions of scholastic and humanist Aristotelianism that had been separate in the previous century . . . . It was Case who brought the new humanist-scholastic Aristotle to Renaissance Oxford, reviving interest in standard philosophical questions." The morality emerges from the philosophy and is so presented that the Aristotelian moral philosopher emerges as a moral teacher. What then is the content of that argumentative teaching?
III
It is of course for the most part a content that would be recognizable to Aristotelians of any time and place. But as well as those topics on which Case does no more than expound Aristotle, there are topics where he puts to Aristotle questions that are not precisely Aristotle's and topics about which he gives answers that are very certainly not Aristotle's. Let me give an example of each.
On courage Case follows Aristotle closely. And he also affirms Aristotle's view that the good human being is directed towards the achievement of that human being's own good. When therefore it turns out that the supreme exemplification of the exercise of courage is, if necessary, to give up one's life for the sake of the defense of one's city, the question arises of how to act thus can be to act for the sake of one's own good. Surely to act thus is to sacrifice one's own good for the sake of the good of others. The good of one's country and one's own good no longer coincide. Case's response to the objection is both terse and Aristotelian: "He gives his life to his country, as the philosopher teaches, but he preserves his virtue (which is the greatest good) for himself" (lib. IX, cap. 8).
On lying Case is closer to Aquinas than he is to Aristotle. It is not that his conclusions are at variance with Aristotle's. Neither were Aquinas's. But his idiom is Thomistic rather than or as well as Aristotelian. Yet his account is not entirely the same as Aquinas's. Aristotle tells us simply that a lie is in itself bad and culpable (1127a 28-9). Someone with the virtue of truthfulness tells the truth both when nothing else is at stake and, even more scrupulously, when something further is at stake (1127b 3-5). Aquinas sets out the grounds for this condemnation of lying (Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, 110) as Aristotle does not, and in what Case says about lies as perversions of the order of speech and as directing the intellect away from its proper object, truth, he remains close to Aquinas. But where Aquinas had insisted that the essential property of a lie is that it is the intentional utterance of a false statement, Case (lib. IV, cap. 7) makes an intention to deceive, either by word or deed, central to the definition of a lie.
Aquinas treats the intention to deceive as an additional evil of almost all lies (110, 1). Case treats the wrong done to whomsoever is deceived by a lie as an essential part of the wrongness of lying. Yet Case is at one with Aquinas, not only in his assertion that the prohibition of lying is unqualified and unconditional, but also in his acknowledgment that this prohibition applies even in just wars. Ruses and stratagems by which an enemy may be deceived are permitted. But nothing that involves a violation of good faith is permitted (lib. III, cap. 11).
Consider by contrast an issue in which Case departs from Aristotle's text in such a way as to put himself at odds both with Aristotle and Aquinas and one that is all the more striking because of Aquinas's evident influence on Case's discussion of the relationship between natural law and positive law (lib. V, cap. 7). Both Aristotle and Aquinas had condemned tyranny, but on resistance to tyranny Aquinas seems to have twice changed his mind. In De Regimine Principum he had emphasized the dangers involved in attempts to overthrow a tyrant. In the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae (42, 2), written about half a dozen years later, however, Aquinas, having argued that sedition is always a mortal sin, says bluntly that the overthrow of a tyrannical government is not an act of sedition, except when the disorder that it produces is a greater evil than the tyrant's rule. It is rather the tyrant who is guilty of sedition in harming the community. Since the text makes it clear that violence may be involved in such acts, Aquinas seems finally to have returned to his earliest position on these matters, when he had followed Cicero in holding that on occasion it is praiseworthy to kill a tyrant in order to liberate one's country (Commentary on the Sentences II, D. 44, 2, ad 5).
Case's position could not be more sharply opposed. In his discussion of justice he concludes that arms are not to be taken up against any prince, whether good or bad. To do so is madness (furor). It is to fail to uphold the dignity of the state (lib. V, cap. 3). In one way this purported version of Aristotelianism that involves a condemnation of all rebellion against any political authority is very strange, but in another not surprising at all. Pius V's condemnation of Elizabeth in 1570 had legitimized rebellion by her Catholic subjects, and in the two years before the publication of the Speculum a variety of conspiracies to overthrow Elizabeth's government had been exposed. Case needed to show that an Aristotelianism such as his, influenced as it was in its interpretation by Aquinas's commentary, nonetheless enjoined unconditional loyalty to the Elizabethan settlement.
IV
Case was in fact not merely a loyal, but an enthusiastic subject of Elizabeth (the seventeenth-century rumor transmitted by Antony à Wood that he was "popishly affected" seems to have no foundation in fact; academic gossip then as now was unreliable). His book on politics, the Sphaera Civitatis, published in 1588, the year of the Armada, like the Speculum, contains nothing that would have been unacceptable to Elizabeth's government. The Aristotle whom he presents in both books is an Aristotle from whom Elizabeth's regime has nothing to fear. This was in itself a controversial stance, for not all Case's English contemporaries took this view of Aristotle. After Essex's rebellion in 1601 had failed, a plea for clemency was advanced on behalf of one of the rebels, the young Earl of Southampton, on the grounds that he had been corrupted by being made to read Aristotle's Politics by his tutor while abroad. And perhaps there is more to be said for this view of Aristotle than for Case's.
Case's enthusiasm for Elizabeth's rule becomes explicit in his unpublished Apologia academiarum. Elizabeth is here saluted as the protector of universities, and universities are praised as institutions whose flourishing is necessary for the well-being of both church and state: "Without universities and men educated in letters great empires are nothing other than dens of wolves and tyrants" (quoted by Binns, p. 251). What is the function discharged by universities which might have afforded Case grounds for this extraordinary claim?
It surely can be nothing other than their function as institutions of moral and political education. The responsibility for carrying through the tasks necessary to discharge this function certainly falls in part on the tutors who oversee the living conditions, the studies, the recreations and the discipline of their students—in the Apologia Case praises the English universities for their superiority in these respects to their European counterparts—but an essential role has to be that of the teacher of moral philosophy, that is, of Aristotelian moral philosophy and this just because education in moral philosophy is the capstone of moral education. Case's view of the importance of universities becomes fully intelligible only when we remind ourselves of his conception of the moral philosopher as the teacher and inculcator of virtues in those who are going to serve the high purposes of the Elizabethan state.
In making this claim Case had put himself further at odds with Aristotle. I noticed earlier how far he had departed from Aristotle in his view of how the virtues are acquired, at least at the level of heroic and general virtue, and more generally of how philosophical theorizing is related to practice. Now we have to take note of Case's unargued assumption that the Elizabethan state is an Aristotelian polity or, at least, that the Elizabethan state satisfies Aristotelian requirements for an acceptable polity, so that by assimilating his Aristotelianism his students will be well fitted for political and other advancement. And the problem here is not just one of anachronism, of the differences between any fourth-century polis and any sixteenth-century kingdom.
Elizabethans were apt to understand the relationship between membership in the nobility, virtue, and the qualities of the upwardly mobile in complex and not wholly coherent ways. Elyot had "identified wisdom, virtue and nobility," supposing that nobility had first originated in a grant of possessions and dignity by the people "to him at whose virtue they marvelled." But now, Elyot declared, the nobility in order to achieve the virtues need an education informed by Cicero and Aristotle. Noble birth is by itself insufficient for virtue. And later on it became possible to assert that noble birth is not always necessary. Sir John Ferne as a herald in his Blazon of Gentrie praised most highly the "mixed noblenes" that combines virtue and noble blood, but also declared, even if contentiously, that he who had achieved the status of gentle man "by industrie of his virtues" was to be preferred before those with ancient lineage, but without virtue.
Elyot, Ferne—and indeed Case—write at different stages in an ongoing Tudor debate about the relationship between nobility of birth, the virtues, and the achievement, by whatever means, of wealth, status, and power. The setting for that debate is an intensely competitive social order, one in which the possibility of upward mobility at the expense of others or downward mobility as a result of the rise of others are such that pleonexia in the form of ambition and acquisitiveness is a dominant quality. It was only three and a half years after Case's death in 1599 that the fourteen-year-old Thomas Hobbes became an Oxford undergraduate, and his later remark that there is "a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power" (Leviathan I, 11) is perhaps more apt as an observation of the later Elizabethan and Jacobean society in which he had grown up than as the generalization about human nature as such which he intended.
V
What I am suggesting then is that Case had set himself and his colleagues the Quixotic task of teaching Aristotle's ethics to a generation of students whose aspirations and ambitions were directed towards success in an increasingly Hobbesian social world and that it should therefore be no surprise that the effect of such teaching, insofar as it had any effect, was often, as with Hobbes himself, to turn the student against Aristotle. The moral and political Aristotelianism of John Case therefore failed in two ways. Its pretension to teach the virtues was bound in the longer run to discredit it, since the inculcation of the virtues into the young cannot be achieved by the teaching of moral philosophy, something that Case should have learned from Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics is not meant for undergraduates. But in addition Case failed to recognize that the social and political world shared by him and his pupils was one to which Aristotle's ethics and politics were to a significant and increasing degree alien and antagonistic.
The widespread rejection of Aristotle's moral philosophy from the early seventeenth century onwards has been explained by historians of thought in a variety of ways. Teleological modes of explanation were taken to have been discredited by the new science. There were influential theological movements in both the Protestant and Catholic worlds from whose standpoint Aristotle appeared as a pagan antagonist. The types of social, civil, and religious conflict by which seventeenth-century societies found themselves afflicted had rendered Aristotelianism irrelevant. Or so it has been claimed. And perhaps each of these types of explanation has something to be said for it. But reflection on John Case's writings suggests that perhaps something more and other also needs to be said.
For it may be that, even if the scientific, theological, and social climate of Western Europe of the early seventeenth century had not been in these ways inhospitable to Aristotle's moral philosophy, that moral philosophy would still have fallen into disfavor and deservedly so. Why? Because it would have been discredited by the unfounded claims made for it by some of its sixteenth-century teachers. They had advanced large claims for their teaching as a form of practical moral education that it was impossible to sustain. Before they were defeated by others, they had therefore perhaps themselves made their own defeat inevitable. But note that they had done so precisely because they had not learned enough from their reading of Aristotle. Their conception of moral education was inadequate in just those respects in which it rested on a gross misinterpretation of Aristotle's views. And so also did their failure to recognize the extent to which a genuine allegiance to Aristotle's morals and politics would have put them at odds with the political culture of their own society.
To this it may be said that we are not entitled to generalize from one or even from a few examples, that Aristotelian moral philosophy had a number of very different protagonists in the sixteenth century, and that, even where Case himself is concerned, a good deal more reading and a good deal more argument is needed. And this is true.
What I have been proposing are therefore questions rather than answers, questions that need to be raised more generally about teaching of Aristotelian moral philosophy in the universities and schools of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. But until we have done this historical work, there can be no fully adequate answer to the question of why in the seventeenth century the protagonists of Aristotle could for the most part no longer make their voices heard in moral debate.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, ed. Thomas Hibbs and John O’Callaghan (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999/2016). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
