ABSTRACT
Early modern French readers learned much about Stoicism from two men, Cicero and Seneca, who died violent deaths, victims of civil war or tyranny. The authors’ fate only made their lessons more relevant. France was ravaged by the Wars of Religion (1562-98): to die in battle, or at the hand of a murderer, perhaps as one of the victims of a massacre, was an entirely conceivable fate. Knocked unconscious by a fall from his horse, Montaigne’s first thought on coming round was that he had been shot in the head (Essais 2.6, 374/419-20).1 He might well have been: his area was on the front-line of the religious wars. The essay in which he recounts this event is called “De l’exercitation” (“On Practice”), a key theme of Stoic psychological pedagogy (see, for instance, Seneca, Ep. 76.34-5). Montaigne suggests that the experience of a sudden loss of consciousness is worth examining for the insight it may give us into the process of dying (2.6, 372/418). (Seneca himself compares the experience of dying with that of fainting; Ep. 77.9.) Philosophy can seldom have seemed more relevant to daily life. Its connection with politics is likewise clear. Almost every major exponent of Stoicism throughout the period uses political metaphors for psychological conflicts: the passions, for instance, are stigmatized as rebels against the legitimate authority of reason. Montaigne’s engagement with Stoicism is complex: but to say that is not to imply that
everyone else’s attitude was straightforward. Clearly, an early modern French person could not adopt the whole Stoic package of materialistic pantheism. But if the materialism was overlooked, and the Stoic language of divinity understood in a theistic sense, many aspects of the ethics could be Christianized. Guillaume du Vair’s Philosophie morale des Stoïques (1585; Du Vair 1945) is a good example of this. The restatement of Stoic ethics was occasionally conducted in a philosophically eclectic spirit (Seneca himself, after all, had authorized borrowings from rival schools): Descartes’s treatise on the passions makes no explicit reference to earlier philosophical discussions except to dismiss them en bloc; yet his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia shows him willing to attempt to synthesize Stoic, Epicurean, and Aristotelian ethical perspectives. Moreover, there is a strong anti-Stoic current throughout the period. Currents, rather: for while some authors simply criticize the theory on empirical-psychological grounds as impracticable, others reject it in terms of some alternative ethical theory, or for religious reasons. Those committed in particular to Augustinian theology were likely to espouse the master’s hostility to Stoicism, as an ethic based on pride. Yet even critics in this tradition such as Pascal and Malebranche concede the value of aspects of Stoic theory.
