Addison’s Cato and Liberty

 

George Cruikshank, "John Kemble in the role of Cato" (1816)

 

Citations of the play in parentheses refer to the 2004 edition edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin.  Numbers in  brackets indicate endnotes.

  

     This year, when the American election presents a choice between an outright fascist dictatorship under the most absurd of “strong men” and maintaining our longstanding bourgeois democracy, battered and compromised as it has been from the start by big money men, political dramas of the past seem reanimated with relevance.  I recently watched Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty with its neatly ironic plot of a cynical politician who succeeds only as long as he is corrupt.  A similar theme underlies Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men.  Willie Stark’s demagoguery, while in ways more benevolent than the current Republican Party, pointed at the country’s vulnerability to a demagogue. [1] 

     I picked up Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) thinking that his hero might offer an appropriate response to tyrannical leaders and that his Caesar might have something in common with the outlandish television performer and would-be caudillo who has mesmerized a third of the electorate.  In fact, this play, though rarely read and even more rarely performed, was once not only extremely popular, but more closely intertwined with American history and ideals than, perhaps, any other work of literature.

     Current neglect of the play is unsurprising.  While Addison’s journalistic essays were lively and colloquial, his drama is icily formal and abstract, the pentameters rolling like a slow but regular drum set loop.  A modern critic states as a matter of fact that “the literary merits of the work no longer attract appreciative comment.” [2]  Lacking the Enlightenment era’s love for the fresh idea of liberty, today’s readers are likely to yawn at Addison’s verse which is more reminiscent of Corneille and Racine than other English poets.  Observance of the “unities” and a lofty theme are no longer sufficient to impress readers or viewers.

     The characters speak in generalities and platitudes.  Cato’s initial determination and Lucius’ concluding moralizing are sufficient examples of this pervasive abstraction.    

 

Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal

Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason”

True fortitude is seen in great exploits

That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides,

All else is towering phrensy and distraction   

                                                            (II, I, 43-47)

               From hence, let fierce contending nations know

What dire effects from civil discord flow,

‘Tis this that shakes our country with alarms

And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,

Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,

And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.

(V, iv, 108-112)

 

Even the loves of Marcia and Juba, Portius and Lucia are subordinated to the grand political and philosophical themes of the play.  When Juba attempts to make love to Cato’ daughter Marcia by declaring the intention to emulate her father, she reproves him, saying the national crisis renders such personal goals as love inappropriate.

 

 

Juba: That Juba might deserve thy pious cares,

I’ll gaze forever on thy godlike father,

Transplanting one by one, into my life

His bright perfections, till I shine like him.

 

Marcia: My father never, at a time like this

Would lay out his great soul in words, and waste

Such precious moments.

(I, v, 18-24)  

  

     Meanwhile, Lucia prefers Portius specifically because Marcus is too passionate, “overwarm” (I, vi, 49).  The very signs of deep passion idealized in other drama are for Addison signs of weakness, making him “disfigur’d” (III, ii, 8). 

 

He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies:

His passions and his virturs lie confus’d.

(III, ii, 5-6)

 

Indeed, many critics including Voltaire, found the love scenes altogether out of place.  Voltaire praised the play as a whole, calling it the first “regular tragedy in English,” infused with “a spirit of elegance through every part,” yet he (inconsistently) found it marred “by a dull love plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.”  In 1764 an edition was printed with a Latin translation the play “without the love scenes” [3].

     The ill fit of a romantic story in a story glorifying Cato is consistent with the hero’s reputation as a Stoic hero.  Washington himself received an education more vocational than Classical, but had some familiarity and sympathy with Stoicism which was in his day, as in ours, in the air, [4] though sometimes these more modern Stoicisms have little in common with Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.  Cato himself left no philosophic writings, yet he became widely regarded as an exemplary Stoic, particularly in  light of his suicide. [5]

     The figure of Cato was already well-known at the start of the eighteenth century primarily from his biography in Plutarch, but Addison’s immensely popular play increased his reputation.  From the day of its opening Cato was “an immediate, a sensational success” and the play became one of the most frequently performed of the century, running through twenty-six English editions in print during the 1700s. [6]  In the colonies that were to rebel, productions were mounted in many cities, including Charleston in 1736, New York in 1750, Philadelphia in 1759, Providence in 1762, and, following the outbreak of hostilities, in Boston and Portsmouth in 1778. [7] 

     Addison had himself been an active Whig politician, seeking to strengthen the powers of Parliament.  He died well before the conflicts between the British and their American cousins came to a head, but the play was thoroughly pollical from the start.  In a remarkable and unlikely circumstance Frederick, Prince of Wales, produced the play privately at Leicester House in London to oppose the authoritarian tendencies of his own father George II.  Among the performers was Frederick’s son, the future George III to whom was given a new prologue including the lines 1749 to promote his own support for English liberty against the supposed tyranny of his father, George II of Great Britain. The cast featured four of Frederick's children, including the future George III, the bête noire of the American colonists, who spoke a specially-written prologue, which included the line "What, tho' a boy? it may with pride be said / A boy in England born, in England bred,” drawing attention to George II's birth in Hanover, Germany. 

     During the winter of 1778-1779 the Continental Army camped at Valley Forge, a season that has become legendary for the soldiers’ hardships.  After the harsh winter Washington flouted the congressional ban on theater (as well as “every species of extravagance and dissipation” [8]) and arranged for a production of Addison’s play before “a very numerous and splendid audience” [9] including his comrades-in-arms.   

Horatio Greenough's statue of Washington (1832)

     Cato was not only Washington’s favorite play.  It had so deeply entered the consciousness of American patriots that its words seem clearly to have shaped the best-known lines associated with the Revolution. [10]  For instance, Patrick Henry's famous line, reported in 1817 as the dramatic conclusion to a 1775 speech to the Second Virginia Convention "Give me liberty, or give me death!" restates, with dramatic compression, the sentiment of the play’s "It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death." (IV, iv, 84)  Nathan Hale’s last words, according to the account of British captain John Montresor who was present, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" resembles "What a pity it is/That we can die but once to serve our country." (IV, iv, 80-81)

     The extent to which Addison’s play had permeated American consciousness is clear from the numerous other citations and rephrasings of its lines in the writing of American revolutionaries.  The speech in which Portius says “Tis not in mortals to command success,/ But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it” (I, 2, 43-44) underlies passages in a letter from George Washington to Benedict Arnold dated December 5, 1775, a letter from Washington to Nicholas Cooke dated October 29, 1775, and a letter from John Adams to his wife of February 18, 1776.  Charles Thomson, in a November 1, 1774 letter to Benjamin Franklin, declared himself “ready to ask, with the poet, ‘Are there not some chosen thunders in the stores of heaven armed with uncommon wrath to blast those Men,’ who by their cursed schemes of policy are dragging friends and brothers into the horrors of civil War and involving their country in ruin?” (the quotation is a paraphrase of I, 1, 21–4).  These few examples in which his influence has been noted might be multiplied, and doubtless many reminiscences of the language of the play have not attracted the attention of historians. [11]

     Surely a part what made this play a sensation in the eighteenth century was the neo-Classical taste of the age which fancied high ideals and found abstractions more mighty than particulars.  While no one considered reinstating the old Roman (and Japanese) custom of honorable suicide, Britons and Americans alike admired the frugality, self-control, and dignity of the Stoic pose and cast their leaders in this mold.  The artificiality of the style reinforced what was seen as strength of character in a hero’s strong will. 

      In terms of content, both Old and New World felt the excitement of the fading of the old feudal absolute monarchy and the advent of emerging ideas of liberty and capitalism.  The movement forward, in which the United States played a critical role, inspiring patriots in France, Poland, and elsewhere for generations to come, must have been intoxicating at its outset.   Embodied in texts like Addison’s Cato, the excitement of these new ideas permeated the culture in a way that no play could do today. 

     What art remains from the movement against the Vietnam War?  How many people remember The Teeth Mother Naked at Last?  Surely no one would look at MacBird! today.   Even Country Joe’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" is a relic that requires footnotes for people younger than I.  Literary savants know the poets of World War I, but they were never popular in the way that Cato was.  A similar penetration of American culture could probably be achieved today only by a television series.  

     Today we like Cato face the threat of tyranny, but death and submission are not the only choices.  Perhaps an oblique approach to onetime ideals of the country’s founders through Addison’s play can provide a livelier sense of how inspiring self-government once seemed before its slogans became patriotic cliches, employed as often by the enemies of liberty as by friends.   

    

 

 

1.  Rossen had himself undergone historical trials.  Originally an uncooperative witness of the HUAC, he was blacklisted and eventually, like Elia Kazan, named names in order to resume work in Hollywood. 

2.  M. M. Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” The Review of English Studies, Volume XVII, Issue 66, May 1966,

3.  Voltaire, Letters on the English, Letter XVIII, “On Tragedy.”  For a full account see Lisa A. Freeman, “What's Love Got to Do with Addison's "Cato"?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1999), pp. 463-482.

4.  See H. C. Montgomery, “Washington the Stoic,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Mar., 1936).  Montogomery says he acquired information about Stoicism from his friends the Fairfaxes and quotes the statement in Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Young George Washington that Washington had an English outline of Seneca “the mere chapter headings are the moral axioms that Washinton followed through life.

5.  His semi-ascetic ways such as going barefoot and wearing a toga without a tunic fit well with Stoicism’s recommended abstemiousness.  Fred K. Drogula, Cato the Younger: life and death at the end of the Roman republic (2019) argues that he may have seen himself instead as representative of Roman mos maiorum rather than as a Stoic. 

6.  See Iskra Fileva, “Stoicism as a Fad and a Philosophy,” Psychology Today, posted August 4, 2022 at  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202208/stoicism-fad-and-philosophy.  Fileva notes that in 2019 the word Stoic was used more times than in any earlier year in  history.  She lists a few of the best-selling self-help books claiming to represent Stoic ideas: The Power of Stoicism; The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism; Mastering the Stoic Way of Life; 5-Minute Stoicism Journal, and many others.

7.  Robert M. Keller, compiler, Performance Notices in The Colonial Music Institute database, http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/index.htm.

8.  The ban included “all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shows , plays and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”  See Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37.

9.  Mark Evans Bryan, "'Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010). 

10.  I provide no citation as these striking parallels have been noted by many historians. 

11.  A great many other echoes of the language of Addison’s play have been noted as well.  Among the many other correspondences between passages in Addison’s play and the literature of the American Revolution are Jonathan Mitchel Sewall’s new epilogue for the play (1778) which explicitly identified Cato with Washington, Juba with Lafayette, and Caesar with King George and included these lines.

Our senate, too, the same bold deed has done,

And for a Cato, arm’’d a WASHINGTON!

A chief in all the ways of battle skill’’d

Great in the council, glorious in the field! (25-28)

Scholarship as Recreation in Aulus Gellius

 

As this essay is in part intended to acquaint readers with the Attic Nights, I include several fairly long passages from it.  Quotations from Gellius are from the translation of J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Library edition of Attic Nights (1927), which the reader may conveniently consult online at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/gellius/home.html.   

 

     Surely the most critical adaptation of our species is our facility at manipulating symbols.  The evolution then of language enabled surely the more effective pursuit of prey but all subsequent thought, science, and culture as well.  Just as we perceive that cats relish stalking and imagine that orb-weaving spiders must take pleasure in a fine web, people enjoy practicing their most highly developed skill, sometimes simply as recreation in such verbal forms as jokes, songs, stories, and flights of conversation.  Since the Palaeolithic era people’s verbal play has constituted their primary form of entertainment.

     A taste for such semiotic dancing in both composer and consumer is the initial motive for all literature.  In certain written works, however, the human fondness for symbolic play is more highlighted, more naked, more joyously enthusiastic.  In journals, notebooks, and commonplace books, the jottings and sketchings of the mind may rarely rise to the level of the sublime, but they directly indicate our human pleasure in symbolic play, creating, carving, juggling, forming ever-new patterns in the immense catalogue of possibilities generated by grammar.  Among the greatest of such works are surely The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, and the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius.

     I have lately been reading in Aulus Gellius.  It is not a volume to read through one page after another, beginning to end.  I am opening the Loeb Library volumes at random and reading ten or twelve pages at a stretch.  The work invites that sort of approach.  It is a miscellany, an omnium gatherum, a rag-bag, and the author readily admits that the book lacks structure; its construction follows no discernable order but the wanderings of a human mind, all digressions and no central path.  The very title seems to hint at something torrid and tropical, warm zephyrs playing over a bare torso under loose robes, a cool glass of retsina at hand, and the book does indeed pursue a sort of hedonism.  For the author, though, some of the greatest pleasures are intellectual, undiminished in intensity by the fact that the fox his mind was hunting may bd either grand, such as the question of whether the phenomenal world be real, or minute, such as an obscure linguistic detail or an odd shred of natural history.  The primary association of the title for a Roman would have been its invocation of the revered Greek rhetorical and poetic traditions, inviting the reader for a bit of play in the realm of the recondite.

     The book is a collection of short comments and narrations, a paragraph or two or three on every sort of topic, but frequently concerning language or history.  As a result of this form Gellius is less often read for his style or for the impact of the book as a whole than remembered for the many fragments of lost writings he preserves which scholars may mine for historic and linguistic details.  Considered in itself the Attic Nights is a charming example of cognition as recreation, intellectual riffing as play.  The book’s unstructured form, its interest in oddities and details invites the reader to turn a curious imaginative gaze as the author points out the dramatic trees, pretty scenes, and unlikely hillocks of a great variety of scenes, whether encountered in lived experience or in books.  Gellius’ aesthetic intention is unmistakable.  He explicitly defines his aim as to be “entertaining,” that “recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds.”  He describes his method as “haphazard,” “without order or arrangement,” “off-hand, without premeditation” (Praefatio).  Such randomness is appropriate since the free process of ratiocination and the play of imagination are the goal more than any apodictic conclusion.

     Gellius displays his rhetorical sophistication even as he disclaims it, deploying the humility topos as he claims to write “almost in rustic fashion.”  While “bearing in mind my limitations,” he says he falls as far “short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style.”  Yet he goes on to define an ambitious goal, promising his book might be “a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts,” offering “the germs and the quality to make men's minds grow more vigorous, their memory more trustworthy, their eloquence more effective, their diction purer, or the pleasures of their hours of leisure and recreation more refined.”  For Gellius verbal facility is a source of pleasure as well as the chief means of cultivating the mind and, most importantly, the fountainhead of all intellectual work. 

     He goes so far as to warn off potential readers who do not delight in language, those “who have never found pleasure nor busied themselves in reading, inquiring, writing and taking notes, who have never spent wakeful nights in such employments, who have never improved themselves by discussion and debate with rival followers of the same Muse.”  Such people prefer to waste their time, he suggests, “in the turmoil of business affairs.”  Without criticizing earning a living, Gellius suggests that people do not become fully human until their time is their own. 

     A passage in Attic Nights (III, 1) provides a nearly cinematic enactment of what he is talking about.

 

     When winter was already waning, we were walking with the philosopher Favorinus in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun; and there, as we walked, Sallust's Catiline was being read, a book which Favorinus had seen in the hands of a friend and had asked him to read.  The following passage from that book had been recited: "Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate; it is ever unbounded, nor can either plenty or want make it less."  Then Favorinus looked at me and said: "How does avarice make a man's body effeminate? For I seem to grasp in general the meaning of his statement that it has that effect on a manly soul, but how also it makes his body effeminate I do not yet comprehend."  "I too," said I, "have for a long time been putting myself that question, and if you had not anticipated me, I should of my own accord have asked you to answer it."

     Scarcely had I said this with some hesitation, when one of the disciples of Favorinus, who seemed to be an old hand in the study of literature, broke in: "I once heard Valerius Probus say that Sallust here used a kind of poetic circumlocution, and meaning to say that a man was corrupted by avarice, spoke of his body and soul, the two factors which indicate a man; for man is made up of body and soul."  "Never," replied Favorinus, "at least, so far as I know, was our Probus guilty of such impertinent and bold subtlety as to say that Sallust, a most skilful artist in conciseness, used poetic paraphrases."

     There was with us at the time in the same promenade a man of considerable learning.  He too, on being asked by Favorinus whether he had anything to say on the subject, answered to this effect: "We observe that almost all those whose minds are possessed and corrupted by avarice and who have devoted themselves to the acquisition of money from any and every source, so regulate their lives, that compared with money they neglect manly toil and attention to bodily exercise, as they do everything else.  For they are commonly intent upon indoor and sedentary pursuits, in which all their vigoor of mind and body is enfeebled and, as Sallust says, ‘rendered effeminate.'”

     Then Favorinus again asked to have the same words of Sallust read again, and when they had been read, he said: "How then are we to explain the fact, that it is possible to find many men who are greedy for money, but nevertheless have strong and active bodies?"  To this the man replied thus: "Your answer is certainly to the point. Whoever," said he, "is greedy for money, but nevertheless has a body that is strong and in good condition, must necessarily be possessed either by an interest in, or devotion to, other things as well, and cannot be equally niggardly in his care of himself.  For if extreme avarice, to the exclusion of everything else, lay hold upon all a man's actions and desires, and if it extend even to neglect of his body, so that because of that one passion he has regard neither for virtue nor physical strength, nor body, nor soul — then, and then only, can that vice truly be said to cause effeminacy both of body and soul, since such men care neither for themselves nor for anything else except money."  Then said Favorinus: "Either what you have said is reasonable, or Sallust, through hatred of avarice, brought against it a heavier charge than he could justify."

 

     As the anecdote opens, a group of friends appears at leisure, enjoying a stroll as the last days of winter give way to early spring “in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun.”  Among the party is the philosopher Favorinus, an Academic Skeptic and Gellius’ teacher.  One of the party carries a copy of Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline and reads aloud as they walk.  The modern reader is struck by the depiction of a culture in which a promenade might be accompanied by reading aloud, and abstract questions are discussed for the sheer joy of debate more than in the interest of problem solving or academic rivalry.  Thinkers naturally lead the group, here the center is Favorinus, advocate of a strict skepticism and, incidentally, described as a born eunuch, yet celebrated for his philosophic powers.  Favorinus became sufficiently controversial not because of his ambiguous sexuality but due to Hadrian’s arbitrary disfavor that Corinth tore down the statue the city had erected in his honor, causing him to remark drily that it was a pity that had Socrates had such statue to serve as his proxy, he might have been saved from execution.

     Here, however, Favorinus is simply moderator of a discussion to which all present are welcome to contribute.  The coterie is preselected; one participant is identified as “a man of considerable learning” and another as “an old hand in the study of literature,” giving their remarks depth and weight, and instructing the less experienced by their tone and manner more than by their opinions.  A modern American reader is likely to be struck by the issue they consider: whether avarice saps one’s strength, rendering a person effeminate.  This idea recalls the preface’s contemptuous dismissal of those who devote themselves to “business affairs,” a refreshing attitude to those of us who inhabit a culture in which making money is considered the hallmark of manly vigor. 

     For this party of leisured ancient Romans, though, the question in the end is left open.  Sallust may or may not be correct or he may be correct in part; he may have expressed himself accurately or perhaps in a misleading, “over-artful” fashion.  There is no certainty, only inquiry, the Greek meaning, in fact, of the word skepticism.  These Romans revel in practicing cognition, in juggling ideas, and in the social contact with other thinking beings capable of the same amusement, Plato’s clique freed from great ideas and allowed the smallest of small talk for the simple fun of it, just passing the time on a warming afternoon.

     Though Gellius’ entries are more often presented as third-hand accounts of opinions than in dialogue dramas like this, in each the author carries on a colloquy with acquaintances, writers of the past, and inevitably with the presumed reader.  Gellius interests himself, it seems, equally in every topic.  He discusses the smallest details of language and usage or of history with the same absorbed interest that he accords major issues of epistemology.  Always animated by the spirit of disinterested inquiry, pure self-justifying research, ludic thought, the weight of each section of text is equal to any other.  A review of a few passages, chosen as randomly as my desultory reading of Attic Nights, illustrates the author’s sensibility.

          This Favorinus who asked that Sallust be read aloud was an Academic Skeptic in the tradition of Arcesilaus.  At one point in the Attic Nights Gellius defines their position.

 

Those whom we call the Pyrronian philosophers are designated by the Greek name σκεπτικοί, or "sceptics," which means about the same as "inquirers" and "investigators."  For they decide nothing and determine nothing, but are always engaged in inquiring and considering what there is in all nature concerning which it is possible to decide and determine.  And moreover they believe that they do not see or hear anything clearly, but that they undergo and experience something like seeing and hearing; but they are in doubt as of that nature and character of those very things which cause them those experiences, and they deliberate about them; and they declare that in everything assurance and absolute truth seem so beyond our grasp, owing to the mingling and confusing of the indications of truth and falsehood, that any man who is not rash and precipitate in his judgment ought to use the language which they say was used by Pyrro, the founder of that philosophy: "Does not this matter stand so, rather than so, or is it neither?" For they deny that proofs of anything and its real qualities can be known and understood, and they try in many ways to point this out and demonstrate it.   On this subject Favorinus too with great keenness and subtlety has composed ten books, which he entitled Πυρρωνεῖοι Τρόποι, or The Pyrronian Principles.                                  (XI, 5)

 

     The following section of this entry goes on to emphasize the absolute skepticism of the Pyrrhonians who in contrast to the Academic Skeptics question even the certainty of uncertainty.  The schools are so similar that he says they are often confused.  Both base their inquiries into the meaning of appearances (φαντασίαι) which both Pyrrhonians and Academics regard as reflecting not “the nature of the objects themselves,” but rather “the condition of mind or body of those to whom these appearances come.”  These data are unreliable since they consider “all things that affect men's sense” to be “τὰ πρός τι,” that is, "things relative to something else," a notion resembling the Buddhist “pratītyasamutpāda,” or dependent origination.  For this reason everything possesses only a qualified and ambiguous reality.

     Accepting that nothing can be finally verified might seem to disable research before it begins, but the skeptic is an inquirer.  The denial of a dogmatic conclusion need not halt the process of seeking truth.  The assumption of the tight web of causality apparently linking every element in what seems the phenomenal world endows every bit of information with a gleam as numinous as the next bit.  A sensibility like that reflected in this book will look with interest on any information at all, but, as a homo sapiens, with a particular fancy for the play of signification in language.  The meaning may hold secondary importance of none at all.  Gellius can manipulate abstractions based on observation like a painter imagining the design of a picture while observing decorative fountains.  He elevates what might be an idle fondness for trivia into a philosophic enterprise by celebrating the pure play of thought.  Though Gellius exhibits no piety as such, his relish for every detail illuminates his inquiry like an interior lit by stained glass windows; his book is a lengthy series of tiny side chapels in the cranium.

     Modern readers who are not specialists in historical philology may have little sympathy for the appeal of a topic like the question of “Whether affatim, like admodum, should be pronounced with an acute accent on the first syllable; with some painstaking observations on the accents of other words.” (VI, 7)  In Gellius’ circles, however, such minutiae engaged many.  He records, for instance, that when he wrote a friend, noting that he had written twice before, making this the third time (tertium), his correspondent raises an issue of usage, asking why he had written tertium and not tertio and going on to inquire whether “one should say tertium consul, meaning "consul for the third time," and quartum, or tertio and quarto.” (X, 1)  Is the author a tiresome pedant or a crusader for precise language?  I suggest he is neither as much as he is simply a denizen of a semiotic realm, enjoying his environment, swimming in an ocean of words as the shark glides through the sea, in his case by making conversation with a friend.  The topic of their talk is of little moment.

     Even the most sympathetic reader would concede that a good deal of Gellius’ book consists of matter that looks rather like abstruse nit-picking.  At times the Attic Nights seems a monument of pedantic minutiae like those grand tomes of Chandler on accents or Denniston on Greek particles with the difference that Gellius’ work has less practical use.  While those works were composed to aid the reader of Classical texts, only by unlikely coincidence might a topic Gellius addresses be useful in reading a text or solving a problem.  The only excuse for reading Gellius is to pass the time pleasantly, but any human end higher than this must rest on shaky ground. 

     Gellius’ imagination possesses not only a microscope to examine with detail and precision the niceties of language; he had as well a telescope capable of a focus far beyond the horizon.  His grand topics enter through the same intimate social context he uses for what seem more trivial issues.  His approach to basic issues of semiotics and epistemology goes far to account for his sensibility and the character of the book that preserves, as though in amber, indications of his consciousness.

 

     Chrysippus asserts that every word is by nature ambiguous, since two or more things may be understood from the same word. But Diodorus, surnamed Cronus, says: "No word is ambiguous, and no one speaks or receives a word in two senses; and it ought not to seem to be said in any other sense than that which the speaker feels that he is giving it. But when I," said he, "meant one thing and you have understood another, it may seem that I have spoken obscurely rather than ambiguously; for the nature of an ambiguous word should be such that he who speaks it expresses two or more meanings. But no man expresses two meanings who has felt that he is expressing but one."                            (XI, 12)

 

     The Stoic Chrysippus, (who may have been acting the provocateur) argues that all utterance is ambiguous and indeterminate in meaning.  He here approaches the position of Gorgias and, a few generations later, Pyrrho that communication is impossible.   His interlocutor objects that every speaker has a meaning in mind which must then be considered the single correct meaning.  Such meaning is unchanged even if one’s audience misunderstands.  As always, Gellius simply presents both sides of a question (just as Diogenes Laertius [VII, 7, 183] says that Chrysippus would do), and Diodorus’ confidence is unpersuasive since intentions may be far from clear even to the individual, and language that may sometimes convey signification accurately is little better than language that always fails.  For Gellius there is always more to talk about tomorrow.  

     His anecdote of the Greek Cynic Peregrinus Proteus introduces a character more intriguing perhaps than his teaching. 

 

     When I was at Athens, I met a philosopher named Peregrinus, who was later surnamed Proteus, a man of dignity and fortitude, living in a hut outside the city. And visiting him frequently, I heard him say many things that were in truth helpful and noble. Among these I particularly recall the following:

     He used to say that a wise man would not commit a sin, even if he knew that neither gods nor men would know it; for he thought that one ought to refrain from sin, not through fear of punishment or disgrace, but from love of justice and honesty and from a sense of duty.  If, however, there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment.  "But," said he, "if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly."  Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:

See to it lest you try aught to conceal;

Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.

     Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

 

    In the opening of the story, the reader glimpses once more the social context for Gellius’ sensibility.  He and others knew Peregrinus personally, a man not only with opinions, but with a distinct lifestyle as well, living in a “hut” outside of town in imitation of Diogenes to indicate his contempt for worldly values.  Peregrinus had, like Augustine, passed through phases in his spirituality, having for some years practiced Christianity in Palestine.  In the end he announced his intention to commit suicide go demonstrate his indifference to death and carried out this intention during the Olympics when crowds might appreciate his gesture.  Lucian who witnessed the event described his motive.

 

He said that he wanted to put a tip of gold on a golden life; for one who had lived as Heracles should die like Heracles and be commingled with the aether. And I wish, said he, to benefit mankind by showing them the way in which one should disregard death.                                                             (De Morte Peregrini, 33)

 

In Gellius’ story, the philosopher himself cites a line from a tragedian as support for his ideas and this line reminds Gellius of another passage which he cites, though unsure of its author.  The fact that the source of his phrase has slipped his mind only emphasizes the casual quotidian character of his inquiries.  They are like his breathing a matter of daily experience. 

     Many of Gellius’ anecdotes reflect the social world of his day, in which it seems everyone (among the elite) was a verbal artist and everyone a philosopher.  One story relates how a student risked death in order to hear Socrates speak, in contrast to the dissipated youth of the present generation.

 

The philosopher Taurus, a celebrated Platonist of my time, used to urge the study of philosophy by many other good and wholesome examples and in particular stimulated the minds of the young by what he said that Euclides the Socratic used to do.  "The Athenians," said he, "had provided in one of their decrees that any citizen of Megara who should be found to have set foot in Athens should for that suffer death; so great," says he, "was the hatred of the neighbouring men of Megara with which the Athenians were inflamed.  Then Euclides, who was from that very town of Megara and before the passage of that decree had been accustomed to come to Athens and to listen to Socrates, after the enactment of that measure, at nightfall, as darkness was coming on, clad in a woman's long tunic, wrapped in a parti-coloured mantle, and with veiled head, used to walk from his home in Megara to Athens, to visit Socrates, in order that he might at least for some part of the night share in the master's teaching and discourse. And just before dawn he went back again, a distance of somewhat over twenty miles, disguised in that same garb.  But nowadays," said Taurus, "we may see the philosophers themselves running to the doors of rich young men, to give them instruction, and there they sit and wait until nearly noonday, for their pupils to sleep off all last night's wine."                          (VII 10)

 

Taurus had been, in fact, Gellius’ own teacher, so this note likely records an actual lecture.  Euclides of Megara went on to write dialogues and commentaries himself (though very little remains) maintaining a monistic view still based on his master’s teachings, a kind of revival of Parmenides’ non-dualistic thought.  According to Diogenes Laertius (II, 6, 106) “he held the supreme good to be really one, though called by many names, sometimes wisdom, sometimes God, and again Mind, and so forth. But all that is contradictory of the good he used to reject, declaring that it had no existence.”  Apart from this simple yet radical view Euclides was receptive to rhetoric and eristics, attracting criticism from Socrates himself who preferred the pose of a disinterested pursuit of truth.

     Gellius would have stood with Euclides in his extravagant use of regardless of truth-claims.  Specific teachings are hardly an issue in Attic Nights.  Whatever the theme or the conclusion, what is important here is the process, the social dialectics, people tossing ideas about in public and at dinner parties, recreational discussion, playful inquiry, and artful use of words, people acting people-like.   

     The taste for linguistic discernment and verbal play evident in Gellius animates as well the world of Petronius’ Satyricon, for instance, which antedated Attic Nights by about a hundred years.  The characters depicted by the arbiter elegantiae play with words as often as they play with each other’s bodies.  They debate the merits of teachers of rhetoric, spout poetry to make a point, play word games, refer to Homer, and discuss issues of no immediate relevance.  Today, a not dissimilar taste is evident in contemporary bumper stickers, graffiti, advertising slogans, and internet memes as well as in popular music and drama.  The character of some of the earliest human burials indicates that this taste for the symbolic has existed since prehistoric times.

     Wherever the reader opens the Attic Nights, there is Gellius exercising his gratuitous ingenuity, a kind of joyously superfluous symbolic manipulation, semiotic fooling for its own sake, toward no end whatever but the celebration of our oh-so-human minds.  And the reader may perform the part of silent dance partner, relishing the grace notes, the subtleties, the fine texture of another’s consciousness as though it were an abstract pattern.  Here is the very fountainhead of art, science, and philosophy.  Arguments about the origin of language may be always unresolved, but perhaps our species began communicating simply because it was so much fun.  If the hunters bagged more game that way, they also afforded themselves greater leisure to talk away the long evenings of their days.  And Gellius was doing much the same in antiquity as I do now, reading Gellius on my computer screen as he read from  manuscripts, and you the reader have joined as well, an equal partner in the endless conversation.

Marius the Epicurean as a Modern

Page references in parentheses are to Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (New York: The Modern Library). My copy bears no date but was printed after the time the series carried the Boni & Liveright imprint but before Random House, probably in the late 1920s. Endnotes are in brackets.


     The twenty-first century reader may perhaps be excused for thinking of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as an outdated old Victorian volume. The author indeed revels in archaic language to represent his second century characters, a strategy that makes about as much sense as film actors accenting their English to indicate that they are to be understood as speaking a foreign tongue. His elaborate prose style, whatever pains he may have taken over it with whatever success, has little general appeal these days. Some of his sentences, once they have taken off, hover over clause after clause, each with pendants of attached phrases, until the reader who fails to be entranced may begin to wonder when the soaring syntax will ever come in for a landing, though it generally sets down with considerable grace in the end.
     Since fictional representations of late antiquity and the early Christian era were exceedingly popular toward the end of the nineteenth century, they naturally seem outmoded today. The original buyers of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean may have expected something similar to the immensely popular novel by Marie Corelli Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy (1893). [1]
     Pater’s book, however, did not conform to a formula likely to produce a best-seller. His connoisseurship is evident in his inclusion of a miniature library of literary genres of the era in which he set his work: the entire Cupid and Psyche episode from The Golden Ass of Apuleius as well as Fronto’s oration, Eusebius’ letter, and a good bit of Lucian's Hermotimus. Though this assemblage might seem weighty with scholarship and bookish tastes, Marius the Epicurean was in fact attacked, not for being dryasdust, but as an enemy of public morals. The dangers some once saw in The Renaissance as an invitation to antinomian hedonism seem now distant indeed, but Yeats’ words can perhaps suggest the reaction of many less sympathetic readers in Pater’s own time and after. Though he says of the novel, “it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to all of us, the only great prose in modern English,” “yet I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.” [2] Yeats’ attitude surely expresses his personal regret at the dissolute ways and premature deaths of several associates including friends in the Rhymers’ Club, but newer forms of self-destructive behavior have rendered the aesthetic pose decidedly démodé.
     Even those with no lost bohemian friends once felt that Pater was potentially toxic. Legouis and Cazamian’s masterful and thorough literary history included a warning on Pater that must have made his readers feel as though they were in danger of contracting a dreadful and lethal progressive disease: “This consistent hedonism does not stop short of its ultimate stage; it shakes off all the chains with which society and the hygiene of souls have loaded the skillful search for pleasure, unmindful of the collectivity, it makes for the death of the individual along a path blossoming with roses and strewn with ashes.” [3]
     In spite of his place in what today seems quaint controversy, prose that strikes many as fustian, and absorption in the past, Pater’s recent editors claim him as a modernist of sorts. The prolific critic Harold Bloom deemed Marius the Epicurean “one of the more remarkable fictional experiments of the late nineteenth century," and considered Pater the inspiration of “all the High Modernists.” [4] while to Michael Levey the book "look[s] forward beyond its century to modern works of fiction". [5] To critic Gowan Dawson the book displays “a self-conscious manipulation of various levels of discourse and genre that anticipates the fictional techniques of modernism.” [6] One might in fact with some justice call the book postmodern on the basis of its substitution of bricolage for plotting, its self-referentiality and intertextuality, as well as its themes of decentered truth and ineluctable flux. In fact, Marius the Epicurean in both content and form is distinctly modern.
     Chapter VI titled “Euphuism” can be read as Pater’s apologia for his stylistic and narrative innovations, justifying highly artificial, ingenious, and learned rhetoric, yet mixed with vigorous and colorful demotic expressions, thereby constituting a “late” manner and forming a dramatic contrast to the realism and naturalism popular at the time of the book’s publication. Rather than ideals of spontaneity, sincerity, and directness, he claims for “the literary art,” “the secrets of utterance,” the sole power to convey “the intellectual or spiritual power within one.” (77) He praises Flavian’s taste: “What care for style! What patience of execution! What research for the significant tones of ancient idiom – sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building! – gravis et decora construction!” (80) Though he likens his values to those of the writers of late antiquity and of the Elizabethan period, his style is, for his own age, a significant innovation.
     The modernity of the book in both style and content is evident if unintended from the statements of its most prestigious and hostile twentieth century reader, T. S. Eliot. While Yeats recalled Pater with admiration mixed with the pain of personal loss, Eliot’s far more influential criticism in “Arnold and Pater” aspires to a magisterial tone. To Eliot Pater followed Arnold in chipping away at the grounds for revealed religion (as though Darwin, Freud, Frazer, the Sacred Books of the East series, and the Higher Criticism had had little to do with God’s decline in the late nineteenth century). He objects to Arnold’s concept of Culture as a “study of perfection” as that “arrogates” too much from religion. Insisting on the value of the irrational, Eliot says with that without supernaturalism religion degrades into art and morality as though it were somehow thereby condemned. He tosses barbs even at those who seek to salvage spirituality: Spencer for preferring to call the divine “the Unknowable,” and Arnold for the “eternal-not-ourselves.” He imagines he can turn aside Pater’s comment that traditional religion is “impossible for a man of culture” by simply calling the remark “tedious.” While recognizing the very real phenomenon of what he calls the nineteenth century “dissolution” of thought,” Marius is significant to him chiefly for its inadequacy as religion. Eliot dismisses Pater’s life-work and characterizes his influence as noxious, saying, “The degradation of philosophy and religion, skillfully initiated by Arnold, is competently continued by Pater.”
     This is really the sum of his case, though he adds a few specific observations meant in the way of evidence. In formal terms Marius is “incoherent,” “a series of fresh starts,” a “hodgepodge.” While these departures from conventional narrative may support the book’s modernity to some, to Eliot they are simply signs of its failure. What really alarms Eliot, however, is not Marius the Epicurean but his preexisting discomfiture at finding religion in his day “partially retired and confined.” Paradoxically, for Eliot to lack religious faith is to be, as he calls Pater, “incapable of sustained reasoning.” [7]
     Pater, whether the fact pleases or dismays, was clearly looking forward while Eliot, who had made such technical innovations and so finely expressed twentieth century Angst in his early work, came to assume a defensive and reactionary posture, doing his best to look backwards to an age of universally shared faith. [8] The real modernity of Pater’s vision, though, emerges only upon a closer examination than Eliot cared to make. Though Marius is often said to have considered Epicureanism and Stoicism before becoming Christian in every way short of baptism, [10] this analysis neglects both the novel’s treatment of the Cyrenaic predecessors of Epicureanism and the likelihood that Pater had good reason to magnify his sympathy with Jesus and downplay Aristippus and Epicurus.
     Marius’ original orientation in the book is a sort of unreflecting traditional observance, but he then learns a spiritual goal from Plato, particularly from the Phaedrus, promising a vision like “a bride out of heaven” to the seeker who “fastidiously” selects “form and color” and mediates “much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth.” (26-7) Yet the higher rungs of Plato’s ladder of love strike him as fabulation. For him human nature is “bound so intimately to the sensuous world.” (121)
     The thoughtful young Roman admires the Stoicism of that remarkable emperor Marcus Aurelius, yet finds it unsatisfying. He leaves the imperial household feeling that, for all its temperance and humanity, his strongest impression was of “a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once really golden.” (189) He condemns the Stoic and the medieval monk alike for despising the body and calling for worshippers to “Abase yourselves!” while contrasting their rejection of life with his wholesome “Cyrenaic eagerness . . . to taste and see and touch.” (165) It is because of his contempt for the world, Marius thinks, that the emperor can tolerate blood sports involving beasts in the amphitheater. (198)
     The philosophical position of Marius and presumably of Pater is best defined in the chapter title “The New Cyrenaicism.” He is a total skeptic for whom the phenomenal world, not to mention any notion of an afterlife, is a “day-dream.” (121) He feels a particular affinity for Lucian, who appears in the book and whose work Is enfolded within Pater’s text and who made the greater part of his humor out of debunking the claims of religious and philosophical systems. While the cruder sort of hedonist may occupy himself with satisfying grosser appetites, the wise man who realizes that he “can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the vail of immediate experience” will prefer the pleasures of “the highest moral ideal” which will lead to doing the “Father’s business.” His slogan emphasizes what a Buddhist might call mindfulness: “Be perfect in regard to what is here and now.” (120) The wise man who pursues an “esthetic education” in all the arts will find himself in the end with “a kind of religion – an inward, visionary, mystical piety” consistent with the sort Marius had instinctively displayed from his youth. This “new form of the contemplative life” would rest on “the intrinsic ‘blessedness’ of ‘vision’ – the vision of perfect men and things.” (122) This religion requires no irrational faith, no “unverified hypothesis” and, Pater drily adds, “makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic.” (123) In this way one might makes one’s own life a piece of music allowing one participation in the “’perpetual motion’ in things.” Moral and spiritual and aesthetic taste are revealed to be essentially the same (212) as the fine-tuned imagination will inevitably turn to morality’s service. (230)
     Criticism long before Yeats and Eliot yet on a similar moral or religious basis rather than a literary one disturbed Pater and he reacted. Indeed the very composition of the novel may well have been a project to clarify and redeem his value system. Pater says in a footnote to the 1888 edition of The Renaissance, “This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.” Anxious to avoid the accusation of fostering immorality, he distorted his own views to portray Christianity in a more favorable light and to emphasize morality and even chastity to an extent that would never have occurred without the public controversy.
     Vague charges of “immorality” often represented euphemistic accusations of homosexuality. Though Pater tried to be fiercely private, his sexual orientation, no unusual thing in an academic culture that forbade marriage for Fellows until 1882, cannot be doubted. Stung by accusations that The Renaissance encouraged behavior the more shocking for being unspecified, he produced in Marius a singularly eremitical epicurean. It is of prime importance that “The blood, the heart, of Marius were still pure.” (124) Indeed, one critic at least finds that Pater “seems to spiritualize the search for pleasure as far as sacrifice pure and simple.” [10] To him Christianity is “the most beautiful thing in the world.” (303) (How this conviction differs from faith is unclear.) He not only finds the Christian home itself a (presumably sufficient) bride (277) and admires what he calls “the virginal beauty of the mother [!] and her children” (288) but he goes on to declare outright, “Chastity – as he seemed to understand – the chastity of men and women, amid all the conditions, and with all the results, proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest conservation of that creative energy by which men and women were first brought into it.” (288) Even had it not been for such contrary assertions as his decision that he must be a “materialist” and “cling” to “the body and the affections it defined – the flesh” as opposed to incorporeal Platonic ideas, (103) he must surely be making such a conspicuous virtue of chastity to answer past critics and forestall future ones.
     Similarly, Marius’ approach to Christianity which never quite leads to conversion can only be an accommodation to the prejudices of his era. Pater’s father was himself an unbeliever and Pater felt strongly enough during his university days to found the Old Morality Club, often described as an agnostic group. Marius’ Christ-like self-sacrifice for Cornelius belies the insistence on the joy of Christianity in contrast to “the heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy” he sees in Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism. (103) Aware of the strong tendency for Christianity to view the body as corrupt, the world as hopelessly fallen, and the divine judge as stern indeed, he claims that the era of the Antonines represented a milder Christianity, one in which “gladness” is most welcome to God. (292-3) In this form of the church he finds its primary element to be Love. (338) Thus Cornelius’ “pleasantness” is the result of his faith, and to Marius the very first thing “he must ask of the powers” is to be happy in the world. (313) This agreeable sort of Christianity suits Marius’ nature as a “rich and genial character.” (112) Who could argue with a system that promises to deliver a “more durable cheerfulness” of which Greek pagan “blitheness” is a mere “transitory gleam”? (241-2)
     Nothing could be more modern than Pater’s acceptance of a world without certainty, without prescribed or revealed values except for those inherent in the human subject. Much of what he says is akin to the Existentialist writers of a half century ago or to more recent post-structuralist ones. Pater finds images for this flux and uncertainty, reusing old tags like a skillful bricoleur. The phrase from Lucretius “flammantia moenia mundi,” which in De rerum natura refers to a specific location between earth and heavens [12] is for Pater a beautiful and nearly mystical image of unknowability, the unstable flux of things and the mysterious boundaries between the human realm and the kosmos, “what might really lie behind,” (110). He cites Hadrian’s lines beginning “Animula, vagula” (101) to represent Marius’ speculation upon the death of Flavian, a poem which simply wonders about the soul’s wandering and the mystery of death, suggesting no answer but only a tone of pathos. The most powerful image of Pater’s enduring skepticism is perhaps the epigraph which might be translated "a winter's dream, when nights are longest." [13] Though Lucian speaks of a specific dream he means to discuss for the edification of the young, the notion of a long winter’s sleep is as well a skeptic’s view of human life experience, unsure of what is real and what is not, experiencing the hallucinatory fantasms of consciousness as we huddle in night-clothes against the cold of life’s inevitable suffering. More than a century later this powerful borrowed image seems not so much modern as timeless.



1. The genre included not only Corelli, a best-selling author for decades, but also books like Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), Kingsley’s Hypatia (1853), Wilkie Collins’ Antonina or The Fall of Rome (1871) Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896). On such texts was built Hollywood’s industry of Biblical epics.

2. William Butler Yeats, “More Memories LXXIII,” The Dial, August 1922, p. 148, reprinted in The Trembling of the Veil.

3. See p. 1273 of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (first published by J. M. Dent in one volume in 1930). For a general treatment see Matthew Potolsky, “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” ELH, Volume 65, Number 3, Fall 1998, pp. 701-729.

4. The first comment from Bloom is on page x of the introduction to the 1970 NAL edition; the second on p. 441 of Genius (Warner: New York, 2002).

5. See Michael Levey’s introduction page 8 of the 1985 Penguin edition.

6. Gowan Dawson, “Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and the Discourse of Sciencein Macmillan’s Magazine," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005.

7. T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” originally appeared in The Bookman, Sept. 1930, LXXII, 1, and was later published in his Selected Essays. He was not alone in his opinion. According to Denis Donoghue Eliot’s essay “damaged Pater’s reputation beyond hope of repair in the English-speaking world.” Paul Elmer More had earlier made a similar attack in his Shelburne Essays, 8th Series “Walter Pater.” See also “The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe,” Comparative Critical Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2008, p. 330 and David Weir’s “Decadence and Aestheticism: Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” chapter 4 of his Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

8. Eliot was sufficiently frightened by all the alternatives that he notoriously and rather absurdly called himself, in his preface to the volume For Lancelot Andrewes “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”

9. See Harold Bloom, Genius (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 441 “The greatness of Pater is his secularization of the religious epiphany, a displacement in which so many were to be his heirs: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps all the High Modernists.” For his influence on Joyce see again David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

10. See, for example, Lee Behlman, “Burning, Burial, and the Critique of Stoicism in Pater's Marius the Epicurean,” Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol. 31, No. 1 , Spring 2004 or Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism by Carolyn Williams.

A Skeptic’s Faith [Sextus Empiricus]

     I have pursued art rather than religion or philosophy because it seems to me to offer greater access to reality. Indeed, when the practitioners of those other realms appeal to me, in the person of the Buddha, say, or St. Francis, Plato, or Nietzsche, I assimilate them to art. After all, each of these sought symbolic manipulation that would in part make life seem livable. For me, understanding religion is largely a matter of interpreting metaphors, and philosophy’s most important role is that defined by the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese alike: to enable one to live a good life.

     Much of religion and art as well employs ample metaphorical mediation in rendering the world, often glorious and grand as in the Mahabharata or Dante. While I agree that the subtleties of human insight are more precisely expressed in the indirection of figuration, I also appreciate the early Daoists, and some among the practitioners of Zen and Vedanta who look at reality directly, without illusion or protective rhetoric and yet find illumination in that rigorously spare vision. I find elements of the same sort of consolation of philosophy digestible even to a faithless twenty-first century reader in certain of those philosophers of late antiquity, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics for whom the Olympian gods had become unsatisfying, but who were not attracted to the salvationist mystery cults of the era. I turn to the pre-Socratics for poetry, to Plato and Aristotle for magisterial system, but to Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, stories of Diogenes, and to the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus for strategies aimed at a well-lived life.

     Though Pyrrho of Elis, whose ideas we know primarily from Sextus Empiricus, is often named the originator of Greek skepticism, his ideas were by no means altogether novel. The Greek σκέπτομαι means to look about carefully, to view or consider, and thus a skeptic would originally have been simply an inquirer. Indeed the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus encourages continuous questioning and declines to be dogmatic even in its doubts, insisting that one must withhold judgment in the present state of knowledge while allowing for the possibility of knowledge through some future improvement in reasoning and perhaps through non-ratiocinative processes as well. Long before Sextus’ time, late in the fifth century B. C.E. the sophist Gorgias was the author of a lost book titled On Nature or the Non-Existent (an epitome is in Sextus’ Against the Professors) in which he maintained that nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. A more thorough nihilism is difficult to imagine.

     In some dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as a doubter, saying in the Apology “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” [2] Similarly the conclusion of the Theaetetus seems to leave the question of what constitutes valid knowledge entirely unresolved.

     Academic skepticism descended through later thinkers associated with Plato’s school, constituting an alternative Skeptical tradition to Pyrrhonianism, embodied in the work of what was also called the New Academy of which Carneades was the most prominent exponent. As a kind of skeptic fundamentalist in this long-established tradition, Sextus aims at providing a systematic formulation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and thus mounting a persuasive and thorough polemic against the Dogmatists , meaning chiefly the Stoics, but including all believers of every sort. He rejected the Stoic faith in reasoning as well as their monistic pantheism and qualified acceptance of sense data as an accurate register of reality.

     Aiming at providing a thoroughly reasoned case even at the risk of trying his readers’ patience, Sextus repeats the same series of arguments a good many times. His most telling points called tropes or modes, were for the most part inherited from Aenesidemus. [3] His most often repeated argument is that of infinite regress. Since the reason justifying a conclusion itself requires justification, no proposition can be certainly established. [5] For Pyrrho and Sextus every criterion for truth must itself be proven and the criterion used for that proof in turn requires always another proof. The Skeptics insist, in opposition to the implications of everyone’s daily behavior, that we never can be certain we are in fact perceiving reality nor can we know that our own perception is the same as another’s. Since different thinkers come to different conclusions, not only about ideas but even about sense impressions, since all humans are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatus, since consensus is inadequate as proof, [4] it is difficult or impossible to find truly “self-evident” propositions from which to rebuild, like Descartes, a structure of thought ascending all the way to the heavens.

     Perhaps the most surprising result of Pyrrhonian skepticism as described by Sextus is the state of mind that can occur after one admits one’s ignorance. According to Sextus the goal (or τέλος) of skepticism is ἀταραξία , a quietude in mind. According to Eusebius’ account of Pyrrho’s follower Timon the skeptic experiences “first speechlessness, and then imperturbability, but Aenesidemus says pleasure.” [6] Sextus readily recognizes that this calm may be imperfect and he allows for “moderate feeling” when “unavoidable.” [7] For Sextus as for Buddha, desire is the source of pain. When one suffers what seem to be “natural evils,” one “deems himself to be pursued by Furies, and when he becomes possessed of what seems to him good things he falls into no ordinary sense of disquiet both through arrogance and through fear of losing them.” [8] Pyrrho himself was said to have traveled eastward with Alexander and to have studied with Indian yogis (the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” whom the Macedonian king himself regarded most highly) as well as with Persian magi before returning to Greece. Many of the anecdotes recorded about him after he set up as a philosopher upon his return relate to his detachment and imperturbability, though tales of his needing to be protected from walking off cliffs or being run down by carts are doubtless hyperbolic. He so impressed his fellow-countrymen that he was made chief priest during his life (his agnosticism having been found no impediment), and statues were erected in his honor both in his native town of Elis and in Athens.

     Sextus emphatically insists that his skepticism in no way denies appearances which he recognizes “induce our assent involuntarily.” [9] To him the problem is in the account given of the appearances. We cannot deny, he says, that honey seems sweet, “but whether it is sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt.” He is not performing intellectual stunts (as one might suspect Gorgias of doing) but rather, as he says, “pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists.” [10] Like all people, he relies constantly on his sense impressions and his cognitive abilities. He differs only in thinking that these useful abilities may fall short of delivering Reality to the consciousness. This is far from being a cul de sac for him; it is rather a beginning. On the first page or so of his book, Sextus warns his readers that he does not “positively affirm” of any of his statements “that the fact is exactly as we state it, but we simply record each fact, like a chronicler, as it appears to us at the moment.” [11] He later restates the concept while commenting on the highly practical matter of his own medical professions’ remedies: “we are unable to say what is the true nature of each of these things, although it is possible to say what each thing at the moment appears to be.” [12]

     For Sextus the same tentative acceptance of the phenomena of everyday reality applies to dialectic, the art of logical argumentation. Thus Sextus concludes his book with a curious passage in which he says that the skeptic sage, being a “lover of his kind,” wishes, like a good physician, to “cure” the delusions of others. He will select the argument to use in a given situation, not on its rational superiority to other possible arguments, but on the basis of what is appropriate to use with a given opponent. [13] “Proof” is not a matter of positivistic conclusions, but rather of rhetorical victory, the verbal formulation that will accomplish the speaker’s task.

     Both this acceptance of admittedly imperfect vision and the elaboration of rhetorical goals sound to me very like poetry. While we cannot grasp at Truth and hold it firm in the hand, we can record a snapshot of the play of subjective mind, and, if we do so accurately enough, it will resonate in others. Every poem, every work of art, no less than the propositions of a skeptic, might begin with the words “it is as if . . .” If such a declaration is the closest we may approach to Truth, it is the part of wisdom to accept that reality and follow Pyrrho and Sextus and those Renaissance writers whom they influenced such as Montaigne in making the most of it.


1. See Sextus Empiricus I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21d. I use the Loeb Classical Library edition with a translation by R. G. Bury. Though quotations are in English, references are to sections of the original text. See also Diogenes Laertius II.32.

2. Apology 21, d.

3. Ancient skepticism described their basic arguments as tropes or modes. Sextus Empiricus’ attempt to set forth his position systematically leads to a great deal of repetition. Modern comments taking his arguments into account include those by Karl Popper and, later, Hans Albert who coined the term “Münchhausen trilemma” to describe the choice between dogmatism, infinite regress and “psychologism” (trusting sense impressions) in terms very similar to those used in antiquity.

4. See Sextus Empiricus I, II, 43 on consensus of the majority. The Academic Skeptic Carneades had attacked consensus as a basis for theism.

5. See, for instance Sextus I, I, 116.

6. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk.XIV, ch. 18, 1-5.

7. Sextus I, II, 25.

8. Sextus I, III, 237.

9. Sextus I, I, 19.

10. Sextus I, I, 20.

11. Sextus I, I, 3-5.

12. Sextus I, I, 93. As a physician, his name Empiricus would seem to suggest that he practiced in the Empiric tradition though he notes at one point that the Methodic school had much in common with Pyrrhonism, in that it “follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient.” [Sextus I, I, 237] Both schools were opposed to the Dogmatists.

13. Sextus I,III, 280-281.

Rereading the Classics [Montaigne]

Page references in the notes in parentheses are to the Modern Library Giant with the 1603 translation by John Florio, the friend of Giordano Bruno and very likely of Shakespeare. My own copy, purchased well-used, already browning and worn fifty years ago, is still quite serviceable.


Montaigne’s attitude does not vary through the thousand pages of his essays. His curiosity, learning, skepticism, tolerance, and taste are all evident from the first essay (on “By Divers Means Men Come to a Like End”) to the last (“Of Experience”). The reason for this consistency is announced at the outset of his work when he declares to his readers “it is my selfe I pourtray.” He aims not at sublimity but rather “mine owne genuine, simple and ordinarie fashion, without contention, art or study.” For this project he found it necessary to invent a new form, the essay and a new formulation of skepticism based on “natural judgement.”

Though born to a high position and corresponding social responsibilities, he retired from public life in his late thirties [1] to cultivate his private studies and to record his thoughts in an ever-growing volume.
For the reader this desertion of many social duties and the resulting introspection resulted in the most delightful of books. Since Montaigne is primarily interested in his own regard for what he studies rather than in final truths about the object itself, all topics come to seem equally fruitful and all conclusions tentative. Freed from the Procrustean demands of dogma to regularize his vision, which he recognizes as inherently flawed, he may, like a poet, be loyal to the precise recording of impressions. In this way he produced an altogether new sort of prose, a candid “trail map” of consciousness utterly absorbing to any reader who finds pleasure in meditative ratiocination or who relishes the sensibility of others.

What other volume can one open at random to find such entertaining and irresistible data as these, chosen only just now and wholly, I guarantee, at random.

1) With a vivid and persuasive image, he says our unnecessary appetites crowd out the natural like visitors outnumbering the residents of a city. A few lines later, Montaigne provides a series of stories of beasts in love with humans. (418)

2) “A physitian boasted unto Nicocles, that his Arte was of exceeding great authority, It is true (quoth Nicocles) for, it may kill so many people without feare of punishment by Lawe.” (690) [2]

3) He sketches out a marvelous set-piece, the description of a performance
sponsored by the Roman emperor Probus featuring first, thousands of ostriches,
bucks, stags, and boars imported to be hunted by the common people, followed by a day of lions, leopards, and bears “to be baited and tugged in pieces,” and finally three hundred pairs of gladiators. (817)

Sauntering through his pages is, so far as I am concerned, the best way to read Montaigne, with little concern for form and less for conclusions, but with a continual delight in his unpredictability, erudition, candor, and style. Only a relaxed and expectant audience can appreciate the divagations of the scant two page account “Of Smels and Odors.” (Bk. 1, Ch. LV) The essay begins not from direct observation, but from a book, noting Plutarch’s report that Alexander’s body had naturally a “sweet smelling savour,” but this bookish opening, it seems, was designed to lead directly to its inverse in all-too-real lived experience. Most people, Montaigne says, are “cleane contrarie” to Alexander, which is to say, they stink. He continues to develop the polarity between unpleasant body odor and a “clean” smell, which is to say, no smell at all. He indicts perfumes as a partial mask of fouler scents. Then succeeds a whimsical account of his mustaches as guardian of his nostrils of service in avoiding not only stench but even contagion. This suggests Socrates’ reputation for resisting plagues, implying that not only world conquerors but also wise men may develop semi-supernatural powers. Physicians might, he thinks, make better use of what today enjoys a bit of a vogue as aromatherapy. This leads to a recognition of the role of incense in religion which slides rapidly into the use of spices in cuisine. The reader next relishes a snapshot of the extravagant kitchen of Charles V, the vapors from which would perfume the whole neighborhood of the palace. He concludes by noting his distaste for the “fennie and marish” location of Venice and the “durtie uncleannesse” of Paris. The rapidly shifting focus is reminiscent of montage in filmmaking or successions of images in poetry.

His style, too, is lush and sensual, though at the same time colloquial. Montaigne indulges to the full a “late” fondness for citation, bricolage, architectural sentences, and endless paragraphs, running for pages, as though they confess their inability ever quite to contain their meaning, but which approach ever closer with each telling detail. He cites the ancients because he realizes we have no evidence for anything beyond our own experience and what we can learn of the experience of others. He piles one quotation upon another, knowing that it is never enough, the case will not be settled, we will be collecting evidence to the end of our days, and, if we reach no satisfying conclusion, we will at least have diverted ourselves in the most human of ways.

Montaigne’s method led to an extraordinary modernity, not just in the assumption that the subjective is for better or worse inevitable and not a choice at all, but also in its complement, a tolerant pluralism, both ethnic and religious. His essay “On the Canibales” goes so far as to treat the West Indian natives as representatives of a better-than-golden age, “little bastardized” by civilization. (164) Even their poetry he finds to have the loveliness of ancient Greek. (170) Though they killed and ate captives of war, they were impressed that the Portuguese were yet more “smartfull” and “cruel” and had to teach the Indians ingenious methods of torture. (436)

There is however, a philosophic basis for Montaigne’s sensibility, though it is not my project here to refine the schema of some critics that portrays him moving from Stoicism through Skepticism to Epicureanism. I am a tourist only in philosophy, satisfied to call him a skeptic throughout. What matters to me in his thought I hardly distinguish from Richard Rorty. In my own figure I would call his philosophy consistently paradoxical in that it requires a rejection of the ordinary claims of philosophy, a rejection the Renaissance Frenchman shares with Zen and Dada but with few in his own day. What could be plainer than the personal medal he had coined engraved with the maxim of the great skeptic Pyrrho “epecho” (“I abstain” or “withhold judgment”) and the French “Que sçay-je?” The likeness of Pyrrho’s expositor Sextus Empiricus was prominent among the savants he had carved in the woodwork of his personal library. His Christianity was sufficiently doubtful that his book spent centuries on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. [3]

The fullest exposition of his skepticism and the longest individual essay is “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond.” Sebond, a professor of theology at Toulouse, had argued that reason was not incompatible with faith. To him illumination can arrive only through divine revelation, primarily in scripture, but, once one has learned the basic facts of god’s reality, the entire creation will testify further to the divine will. Similarly, human logic, once harnessed to the Church’s teachings, can amplify and reinforce religious truth. Montaigne’s father had, toward the end of his life, asked that his son undertake a translation of Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis, perhaps to strengthen his own faith as well as the faith of other French readers. Montaigne praises Sebond’s wit and piety, and, after translating the work, went on to write his own defense of the theologian’s ideas, ostensibly adding another polemical work on behalf of Christianity. But he deviated considerably from his learned and orthodox source.

For Montaigne grace is more elusive and reason more deeply suspect than it was to Sebond. Montaigne argues for a radical skepticism that insists we cannot know anything at all. Though he makes occasional orthodox obeisances to Christian doctrine, his rhetoric mounts an ever more devastating attack against the possibility of attaining any sort of truth at all. Backed into a corner of utter unknowing, he will then plaintively note that only through god’s favor can one be sure of the indubitable truths of religion. But to the reader, and, one suspects, to the author, they did not seem at all so certain.
Montaigne speaks to us directly, and many have commented on the extraordinary modernity of his colloquialism (and eloquent it is) and his lack of ethnocentrism. Perhaps even more dramatically contemporary is Montaigne’s desperation in his final grasp after some sort of redemptive assurance which seems always futile, Sisyphean, Existential. It is both a cliché and a fact that Montaigne exemplifies the Renaissance assertion of the individual. His break with the corporate body of the Church and his wavering faith are part of the price he paid for his integrity.

The result, however, is a thoroughly radical doubt. With charming modesty he says, though “Knowledge is, without all contradiction, a most profitable and chiefe ornament . . . yet I doe not value it at so excessive a rate as some have done.” (385) This elegantly understates his view. For Montaigne the celebrated case of Martin Guerre whose impersonator deceived even his wife for years suggests that nothing can be certainly known. (933) He cites Plato saying that nature, far from shadowing forth eternal truths is “nothing but an aenigmaticall poesie,” which he describes, in a compressed version of Plato’s cave [4] as “an overshadowed and darke picture, enter-shining with an infinit varietie of false lights.” All philosophy, he concludes, is itself no better than a “sophisticated poesie” whose propositions “are all dreames and mad follies.” (481)
He concedes that “Atheisme” is, course, “execrable” (386), yet he finds no reason whatever to embrace religion’s dogmas. Even Augustine, he notes, admitted that “many things may be, and have been, whereof our discourse can never ground the nature and the causes.” (398) His voice seems more desperate than confident when he argues that only the divine can make man more than man (547) and that “it is faith onely, which lively and assuredly embraceth the high mysteries of our Religion” (388) Faith itself can be suspect, too. For Montaigne the fact that children and the aged tend to piety implies that religion were “bred by imbecility.” (393) Similarly those who find god only in times of affliction have a flimsy sort of belief. (392) A pretense to certainty may cloak what amounts to nothing more than a means of social control. (457) Well aware that god has been conceived in a great variety of forms (459), he expresses a sympathetic awareness of non-Christian religious systems, declaring that due to the “generall blindnesse” of our minds, humans must have images to worship. “As for me,” he continues “I should rather have taken part with those who worshipped the Sunne.” Heliolatry is at least potentially monotheistic, but Montaigne further says he prefers to follow “those that worshipped the Serpent, the Dogge, and the Oxe” than to credit the “hurly-burly of so many Philosophical wits” (461) Quoting Xenophanes’ celebrated claim that the beasts would imagine beast-gods, he extends it to imagine the theology of a pious goose. (477)

How feeble, he says, is religious belief when everyone can see that people pay more regard to the opinions of their neighbors, kinsmen, and masters than they do to what they claim to believe to be god’s will. The universality of a fear of death indicates men do not truly believe. (391) Montaigne agrees with Hamlet that only “feare” “keepes a foole joined to his bodie.” (443) It is clear that in general Christians behave no better than Turks or pagans, and the organized church is notoriously corrupt. [5] Most people merely “perswade themselves” that they believe. “Justice . . . is used but for a cloake and ornament.” (389) For him conviction – of anything at all, mind you, and not just the consolations of faith -- is nothing but accommodation to our own weakness and ignorance, asserted in the interests of pitifully egocentric opportunism. He categorically declares that it is beyond human power to know “the least part” of the universe. (396) All opinions are but “smoke and wind.” (435) All the great thinkers have “sported themselves with reason, as of a vaine and frivolous instrument, setting forth all sorts of inventions, devices, and fantasies, sometimes more outstretched, and sometimes more loose.” The whole is endlessly variable, amounting to nothing but “dreames” and “devises.” (490)

His own intellectual lineage is obvious since his pages throng with classical citations while Biblical ones are all but absent. He admits to being “altogether ignorant” of Scripture, (387) though he scrupulously shrinks from explicit agnosticism or heresy. His closest ancestor in thought is surely Pyrrho, (449) the radical skeptic for whom the knowledge that we can know nothing at all leads to a relaxation, a release of mental tension that allows the ataraxia sought by Epicureans and Stoics as well as by Buddhist monks and Shaivite saddhus. For him the celebrated glories of philosophy seem nothing more than parlor tricks to pass the time. “Difficulty is a coin that wisemen make use of, as juglars do with passé and repasse.” (453) He mercilessly pares away pride, insisting on “ the emptinesse, vacuitie, and no worth of man.” (395) The demonstrations of philosophers may be at first appealing, but fact is that their opposites could be proven just as convincingly. “Nothing seemeth true, that may not seeme false.” (his italics, 451) Where can truth be sought, when no two sages agree, and “reason yeeldeth appearance to divers effects? (525-531) There is little room for compromise when “humane science cannot be maintained but by unreasonable, fond, and mad reason.” (535) “Philosophie presenteth unto us, not that which is, or she beleeveth, but what she inventeth.” (484) He cannot remind us often enough that the dubious consolations of philosophy amount to nothing but “foolish vanitie” built upon “fond ridiculous foundations.” (436)

Much of the essay, in fact, goes beyond even skepticism to a chastening of all human pretensions. For Montaigne people cannot even claim an intellectual advantage over beasts. “What sufficiency is there in us, that we must not acknowledge from the industry and labours of beasts?” Apart from the fact that we cannot make out their consciousness with any precision, they clearly have superior senses in some ways. Even the activities of spiders have depths we cannot plumb. (401-3, 541) A hog may act is a more sensible manner than people. (436) The mad may indeed enjoy greater felicity than the sane, (442) and the naked cannibals are at least as civilized as Europeans. The “primitive” New World natives are calmer and happier than over-sophisticated European hypochondriac neurotics. (438, 444) Whatever powers our minds may possess are as often as not overturned by illness, intoxications, and stupefaction. (494) The “spittle or slavering of a sick dog” can vanquish even Socrates’ reason. (495) “The least things in the world wil turne [our reason] topsy-turvy.” (509)

Not knowing even themselves, (505-6) people’s opinions are a sort of natural phenomenon like winds (519) and for this reason, acceptance of generally received truths is the best policy. “Keepe your selves in the common path, it is not good to be so subtill, and so curious.” (503) In fact the ignorant and the foolish are not only happier than people of a more intellectual cast, they are also better lovers. (437) Montaigne quotes Horace to the effect that the illiterate’s erection is the equal of his better’s. (433)

The picture is bleak indeed, though balanced by the writer’s evident delight in the multifarious and endlessly fascinating world about him. He argues along with the ancient Stoics and Epicureans that positive pleasure is a phantom; the best one can experience is a lack of pain. He quotes Ennius: Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali. Even sex is only a release of tension; true ataraxia is undesirable if not unattainable. (439)

Montaigne approaches a sort of via negative mysticism, but he is far too susceptible to emotion to find real transcendence. He does indeed call man “a thing of nothing,” (445) but nirvana means nothing, an it may well be that Ultimate Reality is better known by our not knowing, by the divine “cloud of unknowing,” as the medieval author had it. When Montaigne condemns any proposition – especially anthropomorphism -- about the divine, citing Cicero and Plato, he might also have noted the line from Exodus . [7] “but my face shall not be seen” or Maimonides or Aquinas, for that matter.

Montaigne concludes his third and last book with a citation from Horace which from his pen is far from dryasdust, but rather poignant, and heart-felt, and touching. The author hopes in his “old yeares” to be sound of mind “nor wanting musicke to delight my eares.” He had spent his entire life in the energetic exercise of that definitive human characteristic, adeptness at manipulating symbols, both in the exhilaration of composition and in the connoisseurship of appreciation of his fellow humans. The ancient concept of philosophy, in Greece as in China and India was the study of how to live a good life. In this sense Montaigne was among the wisest of philosophers.


1. He was persuaded to assume the local role of mayor of Bordeaux.

2. Montaigne had a suspicious distrust of doctors and for years refused their treatment of his kidney stones.

3. Among the authors forbidden by the Church before the end of the list in 1966 were Dante (only the Monarchia), Rabelais, Descartes, Hume, Pascal, Rousseau, Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal.

4. Bk. V, the Republic.

5. Montaigne ingeniously notes that, though this fact might lead one to unbelief, another might find it miraculous that so crime-ridden a body as the Catholic Church can maintain its sacred role. This becomes then another instance of wholly ambiguous truth, both substantial and empty at once. (I am thinking of Nagarjuna with those adjectives.)

6. Odes, Bk. I, 31.

7. Exodus 33:20. For Maimonides see, for instance, The Guide for the Perplexed, I, 37; for Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, Q, 3.