ABSTRACT
In his classic article “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” the historian William Bouwsma postulated a confrontation between two polarities in Western culture and explored the ways in which the tension between them constituted an internal struggle within early modern humanism. Noting that “pure” Stoics or Augustinians are hard to find, he nevertheless suggested that the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467-1536) exhibited stronger Stoic tendencies, while the French religious reformer John Calvin (1509-64) found in the Latin church father Augustine of Hippo (354-430) “a model of the open, developing spiritual life, of the mind in movement which [was] perhaps the central feature in Augustine’s significance for the Renaissance” (Bouwsma 1990: 52, 68). Subsequent scholarship has sought to answer Bouwsma’s call for closer study of individual figures and to nuance his image of Stoicism in the era of the Renaissance, which Christoph Strohm has rightly criticized as unspecific (Strohm 1996: 121-2). Jill Kraye has argued that Erasmus’s editorial engagement with Seneca (c.4 BCE to 65 CE) launched a “humanist re-evaluation of Seneca” and in particular his moral philosophy that was advanced by Marc-Antoine Muret (1526-85) and found its culmination in the work of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) (Kraye 2005: 328). At the same time, Peter Walter has questioned Bouwsma’s placement of Erasmus among the more Stoic-minded in light of Erasmus’s clear rejection of traditional Stoic views of the affections (Walter 2008: 522-3). Judgments concerning Calvin’s relationship to Stoicism have been even more diametrically opposed; some have claimed that he baptized Stoicism, while others contend that he was sharply critical of Stoic philosophy and ethics (see Battles and Hugo 1969: 46*–47*). Two recent and nuanced reassessments that find continuity between certain aspects of Stoic anthropology and Calvin’s mature understanding of human agency and his view of the nature of the emotions are by Paul Helm (2012) and Kyle Fedler (2002). There is no doubt that the relationship of both Erasmus and Calvin to the early modern
receptions of Stoicism was extremely complex, highly eclectic, and dependent on the topic in question and the text being investigated. Yet it also seems to me that greater precision is possible in conceptualizing the key roles that these two figures played in shaping the image of
Stoicism in their day. Rather than seek to answer the insoluble question of which of these early sixteenth-century editors of Seneca was more or less Stoic, I explore in what follows two entangled but ultimately divergent paths that point to the related but ultimately distinctive ways that Stoic impulses and themes expressed themselves in their thought. After a brief consideration of the contexts shaping their conceptions of Stoicism, the discussion will examine first the major commonalities and differences in their editorial projects on Seneca. Then the investigation will trace how Erasmus’s and Calvin’s interactions with themes arising out of the Stoic intellectual tradition in their wider body of writings led them to focus on distinct aspects of Stoic teaching. My delineation of their divergent emphases aims to identify the dominant tendencies in the early sixteenth-century engagement with Stoicism and to suggest that Erasmus and Calvin ultimately mediated and presented different elements of the Stoic heritage to their age. Both reflect the culmination of trends in the reception of Stoicism in the Latin West and also provide bridges to the more systematic assessment and retrieval of Stoic thought in Neostoicism in the latter part of the sixteenth century.
