Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (review)

216 Reviews His steady refusal to be tempted by anything that is not true to his o w n experience also gives his verse an engagingly searching quality, especially after the fashionable, well-crafted but somewhat arid Delia sequence for which he remains best know~n in literary history. His other poems are, in fact, far more interesting. A Letterfrom Octavia, for examp is by the editors rightly described as 'a remarkable portrait of a sensitive w o m a n , hurt by her husband's adultery but having the dignity and intelligence to appear neither sanctimonious not excessively self-pitying' (p. 10). In other words. if Octavia appears to us as an attractive character, in Daniel's portrayal of her, it is because he humanises her rather than that he either presents her as mere victim or makes her a strident ideologue; m u c h current feminist criticism will have difficulty accepting this characterisation, because it is not stereotypical, though clearly sympathetic. Daniel w a s capable of questioning things rather than readily accepting, as the editors put it, 'the more reductive attitudes current in his age' (p. 12). If he had lived today, he would no doubt have been an enemv to the more reductive attitudes of our o w n age. The editors and the publisher are to be congratulated for producing this admirable scholarly volume, which is most timely. Joost Daalder School of Humanities Flinders University Horowitz, Maryanne Clive, Sec is of Virtue and Knowledge, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xviii, 373; 37 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. USS49.50. The concept of human mental seeds which 'grow' into sturdy plants blossoming with knowledge and virtue has been pervasive in European thought and provided m a n y metaphors and \isual motifs. Horowitz s book, showing us h o w this classical idea grew and flourished, is i t s e l f like a garden abounding with vegetative imagery of rebirth, growth, cultivating:, flowering, and, of course, farniliar Renaissance images of a garden of the soul' and a garden in which to meditate and talk. The ideas of the Stoics and the Platonising Stoic educators, Reviews 217 especially Seneca and Quintilian, were used by Hellenistic Jewish, patristic, medieval, Renaissance and Reformation writers. Their c o m m o n theme was that whereas the material of education comes from without, the seeds of wisdom, knowledge and piety already exist within h u m a n beings, and these interior seeds have to be cultivated, fertilised and weeds removed. Horowitz skilfully analyses their differences and underlying assumptions about h u m a n nature in different versions of this teaching, for example, the debate between Thomists and Augustinians whether the seeds are part of our creature nature, as in Aristotle (thus permitting distinctions within the h u m a n race, for example, between the sexes), or whether seeds of knowledge and virtue exist because humans are m a d e in the image of God, which, being a condition shared by all permits no such distinctions, and is therefore inherently democratic. The language of spermata, 'natural law' seeds of reason, knowledge, apprehension ofmoralbehaviour and virtue, occurred frequently in medieval theological, philosophical, literary and legal works, but these concepts were in potential conflict with Christian belief that reason was vitiated by the Fall. The conflict was reconciled partly by Augustinian doctrine that the soul developed to understand the transcendent presence of G o d already present within, so that knowledge grew inwardly to salvation rather than outwardly to virtue, and partly by explaining Stoic seeds and their development as the remnants of goodness which have survived original sin. Concepts of 'growth' of the h u m a n mind expressed in vegetative imagery were also central to educational programs of the Renaissance studia humanitatis, whose pursuit of knowledge for its o w n sake, intellectual framing necessary for the professions and public life, and acquisition of wisdom, judgement and virtue were (and still are), intended to develop 'vir turn eruditus, turn probus'. The Renaissance curricula of studia humanitatis therefore fed the young mind with exemplary fruits of virtue and knowledge, which, being...