Aphorism and the Counsel of Prudence in Early Modern Statecraft: The Curious Case of Justus Lipsius

I: Introduction

In Of Reformation (1641) Milton lamented that, ‘there is no art that hath bin more canker’d in her principles, more soyl’d and slubber’d with aphorising pedantry than the art of policie’.¹ Milton further contended that it was the ‘masterpiece of the modern politician’ to mould ‘the people’ with precepts. Milton evidently questioned this development and condemned the modern tribe of ‘Aphorismers and Politicasters’ for undermining or ‘breaking a national spirit’.² The early seventeenth century, despite Milton’s disapprobation, was nevertheless very much the age of the politicaster. No source of aphorisms was as useful to the practice of that distinctive early modern character, the politician, than the Politica of Justus Lipsius. Lipsius, through his recensions of Seneca and Tacitus, and his careful selection of quotations to illustrate political and personal predicaments and the means for their prudential resolution, established, in effect, the Neostoic foundations for the evolving early modern European ‘art of policie’.³

This essay examines the character of Lipsian political thought, the distinctive rhetorical genre in which it was promulgated, and the political and moral implications of his prudential advice. It will evaluate Lipsius’s counsel, not only in his more popular works the Politica (1589) and De Constantia (1584), but also in his less well-known later works the Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604), the Monita et Exempla Politica (1605), and Physiologiae Stoicorum (1605). The aphoristic style Lipsius pioneered in the Politica and the Monita et Exempla Politica will also be considered. This will be evaluated in the light of Eric Voegelin’s claim that the ‘aphoristic style’ is unusually valuable for the historian of ideas, because ‘here he will find ideas, which in themselves are elaborated more clearly in later systems, at the point where they begin to separate as symbols from the matrix of sentiments and where the motives that animate their creation are still visible’.⁴

Significantly, the aphorizing style that Milton dismissed, somewhat problematically given his own penchant for commonplace books, took a long time to fade. Its appeal, which suited the prevailing Counter-Reformation mode of casuistic moral and political discourse, declined only at the Enlightenment as philosophy became theoretical rather than practical and prudential. In fact, the aphoristic idiom declined as the casuistic mode of understanding gave way to an ideological cast of thought. Who, we might, therefore, initially ask, was Justus Lipsius and what exactly was the rhetorical purpose of the Politica and his other works of theologico-political counsel?

II. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) and the Ambivalence of Late Northern Humanism

By the first decades of the seventeenth century, the major works in the Lipsius canon had been widely disseminated across Europe. In 1637, his Antwerp publisher, Plantin-Moretus, had published a definitive four-volume Opera Omnia complete with Rubens’s frontispiece set by the Galle atelier.⁵ His status lay in both his apparent support of centralizing, absolutist states and his introduction of a carefully crafted, Christianized, Neostoicism to a European elite audience. As a philological scholar, his editions of Tacitus and Seneca and his guide to Stoic thought the Manuductio established him as the leading Northern humanist of the late sixteenth century. His work on Stoic fortitude and his commitment to an ethic of constancy in troubled times notwithstanding, Lipsius enjoyed both a contemporary and posthumous reputation for tergiversation. More particularly, Dutch Protestants, engaged in an existential struggle for the survival of their republic after 1578, criticized Lipsius for duplicity, shape shifting and, somewhat ironically, inconstancy. This accusation reflected Lipsius’s apparent willingness to change his confessional allegiance as circumstances demanded. Educated at the Cologne Jesuit college, Bursa Nova Tricoronata, in 1568 the young Joest Lips (Lipsius) entered the service of Cardinal Granvelle as his private secretary. Granvelle played a leading role in the evolving Spanish policy of repression towards its Netherlands dependencies. Subsequently, as the Dutch Calvinists resisted their Spanish masters, Lipsius sought preferment at the court of the Hapsburg emperor, Maximilian II, and found a post at the Lutheran University of Jena...