Vol. 5 No. 1 · 10 January 1983
pages 13-14 | 4229 words
Constancy
Blair Worden
- Neostoicism and the Early Modern State by Gerhard Oestreich, edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, translated by David McLintock
Cambridge, 280 pp, £25.00, August 1982, ISBN 0 521 24202 9
Neostoicism is neither as difficult nor as remote a subject as it may sound, although to grasp its full importance we would need a keener sense than most of us have of the pressing relevance of Classical Antiquity to the thought and values of Renaissance Europe. The term is given by historians to the cult of Stoic ethics – especially of Senecan ethics – at the courts and universities of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism offered a philosophy of fortitude and consolation not merely to intellectuals but to princes and statesmen. It was a philosophy for laymen, who found in pagan literature a restorative retreat from the conflicting ideologies of Calvinist Geneva and Tridentine Rome.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 5 No. 4 · 3 March 1983
From H.G. Koenigsberger
SIR: One-up-manship is the spice of academic reviewing, even if one may think that it is often more amusing for the reviewer than for his readers. But this good, clean fun gets a little soiled when it becomes the vehicle for pompous announcements about an author’s lack of competence to deal with the subject about which he has written his book, just because he has made a couple of slips. Blair Worden is right to point out the slips in Gerhard Oestreich’s book (LRB, Vol. 5, No 1), and, as its editor, I fully admit that I should have spotted Oestreich’s mistakes about Hobbes’s reference to Lipsius and about Bodin’s inclusion in a list of Calvinist writers. Of course Oestreich did not really think Bodin was a Calvinist. He gives no sign of such a notion on the twenty-odd other occasions he refers to him in his long book. In the two pages of his own review Worden has failed to spot a similar slip. Lipsius, he says, ‘switched to Lutheranism in 1572, when a professorship at Leiden offered him an escape from his troubled homeland’. Of course Lipsius did not become a Lutheran to go to Leiden, and of course Leiden was not a Lutheran university, as this quotation would suggest, and of course a scholar of Dr Worden’s standing does not think so either. He just made a slip in writing ‘Leiden’ for ‘Jena’.
As to Worden’s other point of scandal, Oestreich’s sentence that, ‘the strict Calvinist … favoured the idea of popular sovereignty,’ it is perfectly clear from the context that Oestreich did not mean every strict Calvinist. How could he, when he was precisely opposing this view to the attitude of the monarchical electors of Brandenburg who certainly thought of themselves as good Calvinists? But many, perhaps most, strict Calvinists in the Netherlands did believe in popular sovereignty. So did Althusius and so, in a sense, did the author of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The word ‘popular’ meant different things to different people: but it certainly never meant ‘monarchical’, and that was Oestreich’s point.
The rest of Worden’s criticisms of Neostoicism and the Early Modern State amount to little more than an elaboration of the fact that he found it a ‘strange book’ and that he would have written it differently if he had written it himself. He doesn’t even mention that half of Oestreich’s book is largely about the constitutional development of the Holy Roman Empire and the German states in the 17th and 18th centuries, a subject about which there is very little literature in English.
I wish Worden would write a book on Neostoicism. Most of his review is in fact an elegant essay on Neostoicism in England which I enjoyed reading. If he finds much of Neostoic belief unsympathetic and the character of Lipsius repellent, I share these feelings and so did Gerhard Oestreich. But the subject is strange only in the academic form it took in the 17th century. Who, at the present time, would say that Lipsius’s precepts for rulers and their subjects are not still a powerful force, or that Constantia, fortitudo and disciplina do not still have their prophets, admirers and even mass following?
H.G. Koenigsberger
King’s College, London
