THE USES OF ANTIQUITY

AUSTRALASIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

VOLUME 10

General Editor:

R. W. HOME, University of Melbourne

Editorial Advisory Board:

W. R. ALBURY, University of New South Wales D. W. CHAMBERS, Deakin University

R. JOHNSTON, University ofWollongong H. E. LE GRAND, University of Melbourne

A. MUSGRA YE, University of Otago G. C. NERLICH, University of Adelaide

D. R. OLDROYD, University of New South Wales E. RICHARDS, University ofWollongong

J. J. C. SMART, Australian National University R. YEO, Griffith University

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

THE USES OF ANTIQUITY The Scientific Revolution and the

Classical Tradition

Editedby

STEPHEN GAUKROGER Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy,

University of Sydney, Australia

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Uses of antiquity . the scientific revolution and the classical tradltion / edited by Stephen Gaukroger.

p. cm. -- (Australasian studies in history and philosophy of science ; v. 10)

Inc 1 udes index. ISBN 978-94-010-5510-9 ISBN 978-94-011-3412-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-3412-5 1. Science, Anclent_ 2. SClence--Philosophy--History--17th

century_ L Gaukroger, S-rephen_ II. Series_ Q124.95.U83 1991 509--dc20 90-26819

ISBN 978-94-010-5510-9

Printed an acid-free paper

AlI Rights Reserved 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1991 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1991

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

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FOREWORD

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early -though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appoint-ments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of W ollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand.

'Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science' aims to provide a distinctive pUblication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further-more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively encouraged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question.

v

RW.Home General Editor

Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STEPHEN GAUKROGER / Introduction: The Idea of Antiquity ix

KEITH HUTCHISON / Copernicus, Apollo, and Herakles 1

JOHN SUTTON / Religion and the Failures of Determinism 25

JAMIE C. KASSLER / The Paradox of Power: Hobbes and Stoic Naturalism 53

UDO THIEL / Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness 79

ALEXANDER JACOB / The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature in More, Cudworth, and Berkeley 101

JAMES FRANKLIN / The Ancient Legal Sources of Seven-teenth-Century Probability 123

KIRSTEN BIRKETT and DAVID OLDROYD / Robert Hooke, Physico-Mythology, Knowledge of the World of the Ancients and Knowledge of the Ancient World 145

JOHN GASCOIGNE / 'The Wisdom of the Egyptians' and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton 171

GARRY W. TROMPF / On Newtonian History 213

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 251

INDEX OF MYTHICAL AND HISTORICAL FIGURES 253

Vll

STEPHEN GAUKROGER

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY

Antiquity was conceived of, put to use, and reassessed in various ways in natural philosophy and what might broadly be termed metaphysics in the period between Copernicus and Newton. The papers in this collec-tion deal with questions about the symbolic and polemical uses of antiquity, with antiquity as a fund of ideas or as a source of evidence, and above all with the ways in which an image of antiquity was constructed and put to use in contemporary debates. As an introduc-tion to these questions, I want to set the scene by drawing attention to a feature of pre-Enlightenment thought about antiquity that, in its more extreme form, can only be termed a Christian-allegorical reading of antiquity. It is a reading in which ancient thought is construed as leading inexorably to, and finding its culmination in, Christian dogma. This makes the interpretation of antiquity a question charged with controversy, and no more so than in the period under consideration in this collection.

During the Enlightenment, the period from Copernicus to Newton was pictured in terms of a struggle between those who relied exclusively on the storehouse of ancient wisdom, and those who managed to break free from the shackles of the past and start out on a fresh path, the struggle being won decisively by the latter. Voltaire summed up the victory in his article on Job in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, in the claim that there wasn't a book in science in his day 'that is not more useful than all the books of antiquity'. The failings of this picture of what came to be termed 'the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns' are now well known. It fails to face up to the way in which the past was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It fails to take account of the complex ways in which the past was conceived, and especially the way in which it was extensively drawn upon to defend or attack contemporary views both by the followers of the 'ancients', and the moderns alike. It also fails to take account of the fact that there was considerable uncertainty as to how the past was to be understood, on its significance, on what kinds of evidence could be drawn upon, as well as on the vexed question of cultural diffusion in antiquity. These latter

ix

Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses of Antiquity, ix-xvi. 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

x STEPHEN GAUKROGER

questions, about how antiquity was to be conceived, had a very signifi-cant bearing on how considerations about the past were used in argu-ment, and indeed the two sets of questions are in many respects intimately bound together.

As an illustration, take the case of Joseph Glanville. Glanville was a staunch modernist, and was - with Cowley, Evelyn, and Sprat - one of the principal apologists for the Royal Society in the Restoration. He was an ardent follower of Bacon, an empiricist, and (despite his belief in witchcraft) a proponent of scepticism in all matters not scientifically demonstrable. In A Letter to a Friend Concerning Aristotle (1665), he spells out his modernist opposition to Aristotle in a way which, far from pitting the moderns against antiquity, uses antiquity to rebut Aristotle:

... the reverence 1 have to the more antient Sages, which Aristotle frequently traduced, and unworthily abused, animated me to more Severity against him, than upon another occasion had perhaps been so pardonable and becoming. And that Aristotle dealt so invidiously with the Philosophers that were before him, will not need much proof to one, that is but indifferently acquainted with his writings. The great Lord Bacon hath particularly charged him with this unworthiness in his excellent Advancement of Learning, wherein he says, that 'Aristotle as though he had been of the race of Ottomans, thought he could not reign, except that the first thing he did, he kill'd all his Brethren.' And elsewhere in the same Discourse 'I cannot a little marvel at the Philosopher Aristotle, that proceeded in such a spirit of difference and contradiction to all Antiquity, undertaking not only to frame new words of Science at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all the antient Wisdom, insomuch that he never names any Antient Author, but to confute or reprove him' consonant whereunto are the observa-tions of Patricius that he carpes at the Antients by name in more than 250 places, and without name in more than 1000. [H]e reprehends 46 Philosophers of worth, besides Poets and Rhetoricians, and most of all spent his spleen upon his excellent and venerable Master Plato, whom in above 60 places by name he hath contradicted. And as Plato opposed all the Sophisters, and but two Philosophers, viz. Anaxagoras and Heraclitus; so Aristotle that he might be opposite to him in, this also, oppos'd all the Philosophers, and but two Sophisters viz, Protogoras and Gorgias. Yea, and not only assaulted them with his arguments, but persecuted them by his reproaches, calling the Philosophy of Empedocles, and all the Antients Stuttering; Xenocrates, and Melissus, Rusticks; Anaxagoras, simple and inconsiderate; yea, and all of them in a heap, as Patricius testifies, gross Ignorants, Fools and Madmen. How fit then think you is it that the World should now be obliged to so tender and awful a respect to the Libeller of the most Venerable Sages, as that it should be a crime next Heresie to endeavour, though never so modestly, to weaken his textuary and usurp'd authority? when my veneration of the greater Antiquity extorted from me those strictures against the proud Antagonist of all the ancient and more valuable Wisdom? I

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY xi

In short, Aristotle is a parvenu, aggrandizing himself at the expense of his more illustrious predecessors. What Glanville seeks to put in the place of Aristotelian natural philosophy is a form of atomism, but his vindication of it lies not in its subsequent success as a natural phi-losophy in his own day, but in its claim to have been the first or original philosophy, this priority somehow being linked to its present success:

That the Aristotelian was not the antient Philosophy, but the Corpuscularian and Atomical, which to the great hinderance of Science lay long buryed in neglect and oblivion, but hath in these latter Ages been again restored to the light and it's deserv'd repute and value. And that the Atomical Hypothesis was the First and most Antient, of which there is any memory in Physiology, is notoriously known to all, that know the Age of Democritus; who was one of those Four Sages that brought the learning of the Aegyptians among the Grecians: Orpheus bringing in Theology; Thales the Mathe-maticks; our Democritus, natural Philosophy; and Pythagoras all Three, with the Moral. Now the learning of the Aegyptians came from the Chaldeans, and was convey'd to them, as some learned men affirm, by Abraham, who was of kin to Zoroaster to great Chaldean Legislatour and Philosopher; which Zoroaster lived 290 years after the Flood, and as Pliny saith, was the Schollar of Azonaces, whom Antiquaries affirm to have been of the Schoole of Sem and Heber. The Atomical Philosophy then coming from the Aegyptians to the Grecians, and from the Chaldeans to them; is without doubt of the most venerable Antiquity; and the Aristotelian a very novelty in compare with that grey Hypothesis: at the best, a degeneracy and corruption of the most antient Wisdom. Yea, and 'tis the complaint of several learned Men, which whoever knows any thing of Aristoteles Sectators will justifie, That the Modern Peripateticks have as farr receded from his sense, as from the Truth of Things. For it hath been the Fashion of his Interpreters both Greeks, Latins, and Arabians, to form whole Doctrines from catches and scraps of sentences, without attending to the analogy and main scope of his Writings. From which method of interpretation hath proceeded a spurious medly of nice, spinose and useless notions, that is but little of kin to Aristotle or nature. So that whatever of genuine Aristotelian is in those works that bare his name; There's little of Aristotle in his Schools. And 'tis no indignity to Antiquity or the Stagyrite, to oppose the corruption and abuse of both. And to endeavour to restore the Antients to their just estimation, which hath been usurp't from them by a modern and spurious Learning. And though I grudge not Aristotles esteem while it is not prejudicial to the respect we owe his Betters; yet I regret that excessive and undue veneration which fondly sets him so much above all the more valuable Antients.2

This kind of attempt to find the most ancient sources of modern doctrines is a coman one in the seventeenth century, and it has seemed to many commentators that Hermeticism provides the key to under-standing what lies behind such a project.3 But the reconstruction of ancient sources was not confined to Hermeticism at all, and the kind of project in Georg Horn's Historiae Philosophicae (Leiden, 1655) for

XlI STEPHEN GAUKROGER

example - where all philosophy is traced back to Adam, the various philosophical schools or sects being simply a result of the fall - is just a more orthodox version (at least in Protestant countries) of the kind of enterprise fostered by the Hermeticists. Moreover, Isaac Casaubon's demonstration, in 1614, that at least a very significant part of the Corpus Hermeticum dated from the Christian era, seriously under-mined the Hermetic attempt to establish the identity of Platonism and Christianity. It is true that writers such as Cudworth questioned a number of aspects of Casaubon's dating: he refuses to accept, for example, that the presence of elements of Greek philosophy precluded an earlier dating, on the grounds that since 'Pythagorism, Platonism and the Greek Learning in general, was in great part derived from the Egyptians, it cannot be concluded, that whatever is Grecanical, there-fore was not Egyptian.' 4 But Cudworth does not rely on Hermetic sources as evidence, as Fieino has done in his Theologia Platonica (1469-7 4), the pioneering Hermetic work of the Renaissance. This is instructive, for both the Theologia and Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe were concerned to combat materialist and naturalist philosophies which defend such doctrines as the eternity of the world, the mortality of the soul, and the regulation of nature by blind necessity. Moreover, both see the sources of these doctrines in Epicurean atomism, or in Stoicism or variants of Aristotelianism, both rely on Plato and especially Plotinus, and both provide complex gene-alogies for their own views. But whereas Ficino can simply take it that the Corpus Hermeticum provides conclusive evidence that Platonism and Christianity were essentially the same system, expressed differently, Cudworth is forced to be much more circumspect about the historical evidence. Moreover, his core metaphysical/natural-philosophical thesis, that an atomist natural philosophy entails a commitment to dualism, is supported both on historical grounds, by an elaborate reconstruction of early thought on which it transpires that the Pythagoreans were the first atomists, and on quite independent conceptual grounds, by means of an argument designed to show that an atomist construal of matter as essentially inert requires us to postulate active agencies in nature over and above matter.

Given this last argument, one may wonder why Cudworth devotes such an immense amount of attention to the historical case: just as one may wonder why Glanville - albeit no doubt influenced by his friend Cudworth - chooses to defend atomism, the scientific success of which

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY xiii

was secure at the time he was writing, in the way he does. The theo-logical acceptability of atomism was certainly at issue, and Glanville and Cudworth are just as certainly concerned with this, but what has the tracing of the doctrine back to the pre-Christian era to do with its theological credentials?

To find the answer to this question, we need to go beyond Hermeti-cism to the more general current of thought about antiquity in which Hermeticism was but one alternative. In this respect, it is interesting to note that we find disputes as early as the Patristic period over which pagan sources are closest to Christianity: Lactantius, for example, glorifies Hermes as a Gentile prophet whereas Augustine maintains that his foreknowledge of Christianity was due to communion with devils.s A deeply-embedded assumption in such disputes is that Christianity somehow pervades the whole of the pre-Christian era, and the thought and beliefs of this era are subjected to a kind of allegorical reading in order to yield or reveal what are often marvellous anticipations of Christianity. Such an allegorical reading of the past is not peculiar to the Church Fathers: there is evidence to suggest that Homer was being read allegorically as early as Plato's time, and the third-century Neo-platonists Porphyry and Plotinus developed this into an art form, subjecting Homer's works to a detailed allegorical reading which enabled them to present him as a sage with revealed knowledge of the fate of souls and of the mystical structure of the universe.6 They used this allegorical reading to attack Christianity, and it is not surprising that the Church Fathers should reply in kind: and with a vengeance, for the Patristic project was a far more ambitious and all-encompassing one than that of the Neoplatonists.

In the Patristic period, we witness a gradual 'Christianization' of philosophy (metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, etc.), begun by the early Fathers and brought to completion by Augustine. It amounts to a total translation of philosophy into Christian terms. Christianity is conceived of as the final form of philosophy. Using the language of the classical philosophers to formulate their theology, they attempted to show that Christianity was able to answer all the questions of classical metaphysics. In general terms, not only does Christianity supplement classical philosophy, it appropriates the teachings of this philosophy, denying that they were ever the property of the ancients in the first place, and it construes every philosophical question in terms of Christian teaching. This appropriation of earlier thought by Christianity

XlV STEPHEN GAUKROGER

made it possible for it to present itself as the final answer to what earlier philosophers were striving for, and in a number of cases it was strikingly successful in this respect: the great ease with which it transforms one of the central aims of Hellenistic philosophy (whether Stoic, Epicurean, Sceptic or Platonist), namely that of transcending the flux and disorder of life and the achievement of peace of mind ( ataraxia), into Christian terms is nothing short of remarkable.

In some areas, however, this appropriation was acutely problematic, and this is especially so on the question of the vexed relation between Christianity and its religious forebear, pre-Christian Judaism. In the early centuries of Christianity, there was for a while a close contest between those who saw Christianity as the true development of the religious precepts contained in the Old Testament, and those who saw the two as completely opposed. The Manichaeans and Gnostics had held that the Law of the Old Testament had been abrogated by the coming of Christ, and that as a consequence the Old Testament itself should be discarded. The second-century Gnostic Marcion, in his Antitheus, had set out the moral and theological discrepancies between the Old Testament and the Gospels, and argued that the former was the record of the Jewish God of Hate, something which was now super-seded by the message of the God of Love in the Gospels. Allegorical reading of the Old Testament was explicitly ruled out by Marcion as an attempt to save something which was in fact wholly alien to Christian tradition. The God of the Old Testament was still accepted as a God, however, with the result that two independent realms of evil and good were postulated, with independent Gods ruling over these. Augustine had in fact been a Manichaean in his early 20S,7 but quickly became one of its fiercest critics: it was crucial to Christianity, as he later construed it, that there was only one God, and that this God was the God of the Old Testament as well as the New. In shifting from Manichaeism to his mature position, he was strongly influenced by Neoplatonism, with its conception of the 'One' as incorporeal, immu-table, infinite, and the souce of all things: a conception which com-pletely contradicts the Manichaean/Gnostic idea that there could be a God who was vengeful and spiteful. In his discussion of Plato in Books 8 to lOaf the City of God, he speculates whether Plato could have had some knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures, and he suggests that the God of the Neoplatonists is the same as that of Christianity, and even that they speak, albeit in a confused way, of the Trinity. Yet these same

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY xv

Neoplatonists cannot reach God. They mistakenly believe that they can reach Him by purely intellectual means, whereas in fact He can only be reached through the sacraments, which were instituted with the Incar-nation of Christ. For Augustine, the superiority of Christianity over ancient philosophies and over the contemporary rivals of Christianity lay in the institution of the sacraments. But it is not so much that Christianity is ancient philosophy plus the sacraments; a more accurate way of putting it would be to say that ancient philosophy is Christianity minus the sacraments. Christianity is the culmination of all previous philosophical reflection and religious belief, something that can be glimpsed by the appropriate allegorical readings of the ancient philoso-phers and sages just as much as it can by the allegorical reading of the Old Testament: and part of the error of the Manichaeans and Gnostics was precisely their refusal to join in such an allegorical reading, and instead to take the Old Testament literally.

The problem of the literal or allegorical reading of the Old Testa-ment, I am suggesting, brings with it the more general problem of the interpretation of ancient thought and belief. The procedure of alle-gorical interpretation does not appear to have originated with Christian readings of the Old Testament, as I have indicated, and in any case Augustine'S reading of Plato, for example, is just as allegorical as any of his readings of the Old Testament.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the theology of which was domi-nated by Augustine,8 this problem resurfaced, and the question of the relation between Christianity and its religious and philosophical prede-cessors opened up again, albeit in a new way. During the Reformation, abuse within the Church stimulated a nostalgic desire for a return to earlier times when Jesus' simple message had been understood without the interpolations of Medieval Christianity. The 'return to Scripture' immediately opened up the question of the relation between the Old Testament and the Gospels, as the project was that of reconstructing Christianity on the basis of a reading of the New Testament that was free from the corruptions introduced by the interpretations of the Medieval Church, and the way to do this was to read the Gospels against the background of a more literal understanding of the Old Testament, an understanding often aided by reliance on the Rabbinic tradition, despite the rampant anti-Semitism of the time.9 The project was of course a dangerous one, with radicals like Michael Servetus arguing that such corruptions began as early as the Council of Nicaea

xvi STEPHEN GAUKROGER

(325) and the (in his view) clearly polytheistic doctrine of the Trinity. Others, more cautiously, saw the problems beginning later, perhaps as late as the ninth century. But irrespective of when the corruptions were thought to have begun, this line of thought places a new and heavy responsibility on the interpretation of antiquity. Antiquity now begins to be seen not just as a precursor of Christianity, but as a source of clarification about the very nature of Christianity.

'Antiquity' here covers not just pre-Christian Judaism, but those classical philosophies from which Christianity borrowed so much in formulating its basic doctrines. Because Christianity had now to be 'rediscovered', as it were, by studying its origins, antiquity had to be reassessed. And on this reassessment turned the correct understanding of Christianity. Given this, it is not surprising that, especially in Protestant countries, the question of the interpretation of antiquity is a key one, and one charged with controversy.

NOTES

1 Joseph Glanville, A Letter to a Friend Concerning Aristotle, appended to Scire/i tuum nihil est: or, The Author's Defence of the Vanity of Dogmatizing . .. , London (1665), pp. 84-5. The reference to 'Patricius' is to Francesco da Cherso Patrizi (Franciscus Patritius) whose erudite Discussiones peripateticae (1581) is the source of the criticism that Aristotle took his philosophy from those he attacked. 2 Ibid., pp. 89-90. The reconstruction of ancient thought offered here derives from Cudworth, even though his main treatment of it, in his True Intellectual System, was not to appear for another thirteen years. 3 The book that really established this interpretation was Frances Yates' immensely influential Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London (1964). Yates' enthu-siastic defence of the role of Hermeticism has recently been SUbjected to a number of challenges; see, for example, the discussion in the editor's introduction to Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge (1984). 4 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London (1678), p. 326. 5 See Yates, Giordano Bruno, op. cit., Ch. 1. 6 See Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, Berkeley (1986). 7 See Ch. 5 of Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, London (1967). 8 See the exemplary discussion in Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, New Haven (1980), Ch. 2. 9 See Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony, Athens, Ohio (1983) on the use of the Rabbinic tradition in the sixteenth century.

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