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The Early Stuart Epicure

cholars agree that in the middle part of the seventeenth century Epicureanism enjoyed something of a revival in England, aided in large part by the efforts of Pierre Gassendi but also by the

experience of a civil war. * There is considerably more debate over the factions that are responsible for this revival,2 but with few exceptions scholars conclude from the evidence of the revival that Epicureanism was mocked out of court prior to the 1640s and 1 6 5 0 s . ~

Certainly Epicureanism was hardly a dominant concern in the first

I . On the mid-century revival, see Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in Englandfrom Hariot to Newton (Oxford, 1966); Thomas Franklin Mayo, Epicurus in England, 1650-1725 (Dallas, 1934); Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate ofHistory in an Age ofScience (Cambridge, 1987); Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991); and Margaret J. Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991).

2. Christopher Hill includes the Epicureanism of Nicholas Hill among the scientific trends that were the product of radical politics in Intellectual Origins ofthe English Revolution (Oxford, 1965). pp. 144-45. Hugh Trevor-Roper has led the chorus of disapproval in his Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (Chicago, 1987), p. 7. John Henry challenges the also influential argument of R. K. Merton’s Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England that Puritanism fostered the scientific revolution. See Henry’s “Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum,” BritishJournalJor the History ofscience, I 5 (1982), 2 1 I -

39. Sir Kenelm Digby’s “Aristotelian atomism” is a good example, he argues, that “in reality things were very mixed up” in the politics of atomism.

3. The exceptions include Don Cameron Allen, “The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and His Theory of Pleasure in the Early Renaissance,” Srudies in Philology, 41 (1944). 1 -15; Charles Trawick Harrison, “The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 45 (1934). 1-79; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, “Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory,” Studies in English Literature, 3 I (1991). 69-94; and Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (New York, 1989). For medieval Epicureanism, see Emerson Brown, Jr., “Epicurus and Voluptas in Late Antiquity: The Curious Testimony of Martianus Capella.” Traditio, 38 (1982). 75-106; and “Epicurean Secularism in Dante and Boccaccio: Athenian Roots and Florentine Revival,” in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor ofRobert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos et. al. (New York, 1986), 179-93,

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four decades of the century, and it is also true that the “Epicure” was often reviled. Even so, Epicureanism challenged early Stuart culture to clarify or to redefine its positions, especially on such vital issues as the nature of sovereignty, of divinity, and of freedom. In several extended meditations on Epicurus and in a multitude ofshorter forays between 1600 and 1640, defendants of the court and its church repre- sented their ideals in Epicurean terms, or found their beliefs refigured in debates over atoms, pleasure, and otiose gods. Affiliations between the court or its church and Epicureanism produced a variety of effects: Epicurus’ physics, hedonism, and theology bolstered but also sub- verted James I, Charles I, and their designs on government and worship. Epicureanism was dangerous no matter whose hands it fell into, and it was traded between men and women of radically different viewpoints and status, all of whom recreated the philosophy in their image. Its perils were not negated even when royalists from Charle- ton to Stanley labored to redeem Epicurus at and after mid-century.4

In the first section of this essay I consider the political currency of atomism and pleasure for the early Stuart court, in the second their religious import for Archbishop Laud’s church and its enemies. In the third section, Robert Burton’s Anatomy provides the stage on which to review the conflicting values and ramifications of Epicureanism in the Stuart search for true liberty. In all three sections the trials of Epicureanism show how early Stuart culture is both determinate and complex in its positions and alignments. Early seventeenth-century interest in Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius is often committed to defending Charles’s court and Laud’s church, even if Charles and Laud would be shocked at the lineage of the defense. But this investment does not elide the democratic and antinomian tenor of a belief in the radical dispersion of atoms, in the refutation of ceremonial superstition, and in the infinity of space set forth by Epicures from Lu- cretius to Bruno.5

4. Thomas Stanley, The History ojPhilosophy (1655); Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epituro- Gassendo-Charltoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms, ed. Robert Hugh Kargon (New York, 1966).

5 . For a good example of revisionist history-which attempts to challenge the monolithic status of such categories as court and country and to question the Whiggish view of Stuart history as the inevitable victory of the forces of freedom-see Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (New York, 1989); for critics of the revisionists, see Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Con+ in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642 (New York, 1989).

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In the seventeenth century English authors were often careless in their references to the Epicurean tradition. They had no systematic understanding of the relations between Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, although scholarly care was on the rise.6 Sometimes seventeenth-century authors were unclear, misinformed, or simply unconcerned about the nexus between physical atomism and an ethics of pleasure. But there was ample and growing interest in these top- ics, from the Humanists’ and Montaigne’s meditations on voluptus to Thomas Hariot’s manuscript discussions of the atom.’ Pleasure is obviously crucial for the early Stuarts and their promotion of innocent sport or mirth. Yet the atom also accrued a metaphorical value for the defense of an unassailable monarch (whose sovereignty was indivisible) and his refined courtiers. With its physical basis in ethereal, indivisible units, and with its combination of progressive reform with stable natural laws, atomism offered a new, although dangerous, way of figuring the virtue and power of the court.

In one of his many considerations of the atom, Francis Bacon clarifies how politics and atomism might go together. In describing the prime philosophy, Bacon writes in the Advancement of Learning that if “ ‘the nature of everything is best seen in its smallest portions,’ ” then this applies both to “the atoms of Democritus” and to the origin of the commonwealth in the family.8 From Nicholas Hill to Thomas Carew, the atom and its qualities are compared with the royal and noble persons of the nation. Both sides of the analogy, the natural and political, pose the pure and fundamental “principle” against the mixed and derivative dross of the world. O n a number of occasions Carew imagines noble men and women to be made of atoms. In one case he refers to the dead Count of Anglesey as a “heape of Atomes,” but that image of mortality says less than the poet’s account of the moment of sublimation in an ideal masque:

6. For Renaissance scholarship on the relations between Epicurus and Lucretius, see Diskin Clay, Lucrefius and Epicurus (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983). p. 54.

7. Among the Humanists writing extensively about Epicureanism are Erasmus. More, Valla, Ficino, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Filelfo. Epicurus and Lucretius are everywhere in the works of Bruno and Montaigne, whose influence on seventeenth-century England is pervasive.

8. De Augmentis Scienriarum, in The Philosophical Works ofFrancis Bacon, ed. John M. Robert- son (New York, 190$), p. 454.

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It fill’d us with amazement to behold Love made all spirit, his corporeal1 mold Dissected into Atomes melt away To empty ayre, and from the grosse allay Of mixtures, and compounding Accidents Refin’d to immaterial1 Elements.9

Carew refigures the court’s Platonism in atomic terms, which trans- form the royal and aristocratic masquers into pure ideas. Their move- ment from “mold” to “Atomes” represents a first step away from bodies toward the invisible and transcendent virtues that the court claims for its own. Although the atoms verge on mere emptiness, they are considered marvelous here because they are ethereal-un- available to the senses, and so a wondrous source of the masque’s “Knowledge and pleasure.”

In Carew’s day readers had access to a number of authors often quoted, including Lucretius, Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, who discuss the chief qualities of atoms as invisibility and indivisibility. Despite its association with fortuity, the atom or principiurn offers a fundamental certainty against skepticism, and a promise of nature’s stable economy against empirical flux. What is more, Carew suggests (as Henry More later declares) that there is a kinship between Platonic forms and Epicurean atoms as the invisible principles and guarantors of the universe.’” Atoms are unbreakable and pure; they can be counted on to endure when kingdoms and indeed worlds have crumbled.

Carew was not the only writer to link the court with atoms. In Gondibert, William Davenant likens the subtle “Designs” of the court to “small Atoms.”’l Like Carew, yet at greater length, Walter Char-

y. T h e Poems .f Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), p. 76. All future references appear in the text.

1 0 . For Platonism and atomism, see Henry More, “Democritus Platonissans, or an Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles,” in T h e Complete Poems 4Dr. Henry More (1614-1687), ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York, 1967). Cf. Stephen Kogan on the masque: “Platonism and naturalistic illusions are woven in a single vision” ( T h e Hieroglyphic K i n f : Wisdom and Idolatry in the Seventeenrh-Century Masque [Rutherford, 1 ~ 8 6 1 , p. 135) . Or as Louis Bredvold has put it: materialism and mechanism often came with an “idealistic super- structure’’ attached ( T h e Intellectual Mil ieu ofJohn Dryden [Ann Arbor, 1 ~ 5 6 1 , p. 52). The indivisibility of atoms was debated in the seventeenth century as in ancient Greece; see Hariot’s speculations on the infinite, in British Library MS. Harley 6002. (fols. 7-10), e.g., or Lord Herbert’s D e Veritate (Paris, 1624).

I I . See Condibert , 1ll.vii.

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leton argues a kinship between the engines of a masque and the mechanics of an atom. Nature, he says, is so subtle with its “slender Hooks, Lines, Chains, or the like intercedent Instruments” that it outmasques the court:

Nay, in a Mask at Court, we have seen a whole Chorus of Gods descend into the theatre, as from the clouds, only by Wires and other lines, so fine and slender, as that all the light of the tapers burning therein was not sufficient to discover them to the sight of the Spectators: and vast [and] ponderous Scenes so suddenly and dextrously shifted, by the almost inobservable motions of Skrews, Elevators, Pulleys, and the like Archimedean Engines and Devices, that the common Beholders, judging only by the Apparence, or (rather) Non-apparence, have thought those great machines to have been Automa- tous, or to have moved themselves, and at last to vanish into nothing.12

In Charleton’s text the connection between masque and mechanics is transported into a Christian defense of those atoms that, according to Gassendi or to Bruno, are not self-moved but moved by God. In the decades prior to Gassendi and Charleton, however, the machinery of the masque was embroiled in a debate over the proper representation of Stuart power and virtue. So closely tied to atomism, mechanism challenged but also cooperated with the “more removed mysteries” of the masque.

The debate, fueled by Ben Jonson’s diatribe against Inigo Jones, concerned the relative merits of the moral truth or mystery enshrined in the poetic text of the masque and of the machinery by which the masque was produced. As Kathleen McLuskie says of one scene in Tempe Restord, “the magnificence of the court of England and its basis in lust-free love could now be presented by ‘Ingining,’ while the moral message of the masque was appended to the printed text.”*3 In the face of his own demotion, Jonson complained that the elevation of engines to chief importance in the masque amounted to a gross materialism.

But we should not overemphasize the conflict between moral and machinery: the courts of James and Charles often saw the two as collaborators that could not do without each other. If atoms provide the metaphor for everything Platonic or ideational in the masque, then machinery moves those ideas, those atoms, down into the court

12. Charleton, Physiologia . . . , p. 344. 1 3 . The Revels History ojDrama in English (New York, 1981). IV, 147.

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itself. The idea, atom, machinery, and courtier all dance inseparably, on a continuum, producing mysteries at once more and less removed. Indeed, scholars such as Stephen Orgel, Roy Strong, and R. Malcolm Smuts have remarked that Stuart court culture, including the masque, has deep investments in Baconian science. More precisely, with its ethereality and indivisibility, atomism serves to glorify the monarchy, as in “The King and Queenes Entertainement at Richmond” where the poet congratulates the Queen for her miraculous creativity:

See, Madam, here, what for your sole delight Is rais’d of nothing to wast out this night. Scarse is the Author: what he meanes lesse knowne None will the words, none will the Musique owne. Yet here it is; and as o’th’ world some thought That it by Atomes of it selfe was wrought: So this concurring with your high commands Came to be thus compacted, as it stands; For Princes like to Gods with vs on earth Project on nothing, yet produce a birth. 14

This argument-that atomism affirms the power and providence of the royal gods-gets ample attention in the theological debates considered below. Here the Queen can create the glorious masque without even getting her hands dirty. But the atomism of the masque also produces “delight,” refiguring the Epicurean attempt to redeem pleasure from the same scheme of values that rejects the hooks and cables as a lapse into vicious materialism.

The commitment of the masque-makers to a reconciliation between virtue and pleasure strengthens the tie that binds Plato and Epicurus in the court productions. With regard to Stuart interest in

14. “The King and Queenes Entertainement at Richmond” (1636). dedication to the Queen. Orgel and Strong argue that the machinery and perspective of the masque detracted from its “magic”: “the better word is, perhaps, scientific. For the masque is the form that most consistently projects a world in which all the laws of nature have been understood and the attacks of mutability defeated by the rational power of the mind. Nature in the masque is the nature envisioned by Baconian science; its pastorals embody not innocence but the fullest richness of experience” (InigoJones: The Theatre of fhe Stuart Court, z vols. [Berkeley. 19731, 1, 1 3 ) . Cf. R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalisf Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987). pp. 154-59. In a satirical passage from The Fortunate Isles, Jonson has one Meerfool led to believe that he “shall see i’ the air all the ideas, / Spirits and atoms” (Orgel and Strong, I, 372): one can see here the connection between Stuart Platonism, atomism, and fairy- lore, all “rather admirable / Than any way intelligible.” Indeed, Herrick has his fairies dine on atoms.

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the justifications of pleasure, the masque is only the tip of the iceberg. Notable among others, Burton and Sir Thomas Browne carried on the humanist tradition of redeeming Epicurus from the charges of glutton and atheist-indeed of showing how demanding his ethical claims were yet how much better they were than the sour fatalism of the Stoics. l 5 But pleasure is everywhere in early Stuart literature-in commentaries on Ecclesiastes, in masques and poems, and in treatises on the good life. Often its dangers are declared, then mitigated in the name of “good use.” For example, when The Holy Court warns its courtly audience about the dangers of pleasure, the same text reconsiders and even challenges the vulgar opinion of Epicurus, even if that means blaming the Epicures for pursuing health at such a feverish intensity that their goal of tranquility is thwarted.16 As the kings and their policy makers worked to defend “unreproved pleasures” ranging from innocent sports to the sensory delights of church ceremony, their opponents denounced the policies as an outgrowth of gross “Epicurism.” Taking aim at what they considered exorbitant prelates and libertines, William Prynne and others tried to separate the Stuarts from a hedonism temporized as spotless mirth and tradition.

In the 1640s Alexander Brome flaunted the libertine pursuit of pleasure in his verse. Forever at drink or seduction, Brome and his fellows gave more matter to the argument that the ancient distinction between the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics was only nominal for them. Prior to Brome, however, the Stuart poets, masquers, and essayists give us reason to challenge Maren-Sofie Rrastvig’s thesis that the innocent Epicure appeared only after the Restoration. Even in the absence of any reference to Epicurus, poets for the court often claim, with Jonson, that they can “interweave the curious knot, / As ev’n th’ observer scarce may know / Which lines are Pleasure’s and which

1 5 . Thomas Browne’s defenses of Epicurus did not go unnoticed. Alexander Ross attacked him (and Kenelm Digby too) for depending too much on Democritus and Epicurus. See George Williamson, “Milton and the Mortalist Heresy,” Studies in Phi/o/ogy, 32 (1935). 553-79. Allar- dyce Nicoll summarizes the importance of the theme of pleasure reconciled for Stuart masques: “the metaphysics of a court wherein pleasure and virtue occupied twin thrones and Platonic visions vied with the material loveliness of Venus” (Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Sfage [New York, 19631, p. 157). Lucretius’ Venus plays a complex part in Renaissance ideas of love: she is the fertile and historically important Muse of the poem, but she also epitomizes the ills of sexuality which Lucretius condemns and from which (legend had it) he suffered.

16. Nicholas Caussin, The Holy Courf, tr. T. H. (Rouen. 1634). 111. IZI. Plutarch also thought that the Epicureans made their own ideal impossible to achieve.

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not.” Yet Epicurus and Lucretius make their way into many texts; for instance, Nicholas Coeffeteau separates the Epicures who thrive on excessive and guilty pleasures from Epicurus, “affirming that hee made no account but of the Pleasures of the mind.” In a treatise appended to Leonardus Lessius’ Hygiasticon, we are told that “Nay, very Epicurus himself, however (he may thank Tullies slanders) his name is . . . infamous, yet placed his chief delight this way in no greater dainties then Savourie Herbs, and Fresh Cheese.”17 Like their humanist precursors, a number of writers in the 1620s and 1630s admit or insist that pleasure for Epicurus meant a virtuous austerity, tranquility, or (at the very least) a freedom from pain. Cicero and Plutarch had assailed the Epicureans for their devotion to the body or for their ambiguous definitions; but not everyone accepted these assessments on faith. Indeed, in the early decades of the century, there was some elaborate myth-making that serves, often unwittingly, to link Epicurean theories of pleasure and atoms to the fictions of court poets. The least political of these myths is Bacon’s reading of Cupid in terms of atomism.

Bacon’s struggle with Democritus and Epicurus was long and hard. On a number of occasions he praised the two Greeks as the very best of their age in finding the secrets of nature, and lamented their demotion over the course of time. O n other occasions he criticized the followers of Epicurus for their dogmatism or anthropomorphism- in the latter instance, for acting as if God were a masque-maker.l8 Scholars have argued that Bacon abandoned atomism and the void, but it cannot be said that he ever got Epicurus off his mind. He might deride the sect for their resemblance to the private escapism of the Anabaptists, or he might laud them for divorcing physics and metaphysics, but Bacon’s allusions to Epicureanism were striking enough

17. I quote Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue from Ben /onson: Selecred Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, r970), p. 170. See also Nicholas Coeffeteau, A Table ofHumane Passions, tr. Edm. Grimeston ( I ~ z I ) , pp. 291-92; and Leonardus Lessius. Hygiasticon: O r the Right Course qfPrrserving Lifpand Health (1636). appendix, p. 52. One fan ofBrome, R. Th. Jun.. said of the poet that “Lucrefius should have witness’d too, how he / Adrnir’d his Father Epicures’s Philosophy, / Explaind by thy new Organum of Poetry” (Alexander Brome, Poems, ed. Roman R . Dubinski [Toronto, 19821, I , 57). See also Maren-Sofie Restvig. The Happy Man: Studies in the Mefamorphoses Ofa Classical Ideal, z vols. (Oslo, 1962).

I X . “And therefore Velleius the Epicurian needed not to have asked, why God should have adorned the heavens with stars, as ifhe had been an Edilis, one that should have set forth some magnificent shews or plays” ( T h e Philosophical Works, p. I 19).


to provoke a response from Charles himself. In T h e Advancement of Learning, Bacon contrasts the arguments for and against superstition. Aligning the Epicures with enlightenment against the travesties of superstition, Bacon writes that the sect has never caused trouble in an ancient commonwealth. In his copy of the text Charles responded in an empty spacejust next to the remark about Epicureanism that a man would be better off superstitious than profane. l9 But Bacon persists in sorting the good and bad from the Epicurean tradition, here arguing that Democritus was actually on the side of providence, there strug- gling to delineate the merits and demerits of pleasure.2”

Ironically, Bacon’s meditations on atomism involve a myth very dear to the Stuarts and especially to Charles and Henrietta Maria-the myth of Cupid. In two texts, D e Principiis atque Originibus and D e Sapientia Veterum, Bacon argues that the nudity, archery, youth, and blindness of the god refer to qualities of the atom. Lucretius might offer some precedent for this-after all, his atoms are “blind” in at least two senses, and Venus is the Muse of his poem (at least at first). But Bacon’s connection between the little god who appears everywhere in Stuart literature and the atoms which are uncaused, distant, and eternal principles is material for a politics of indivisible and mysterious sovereignty and of virtue reconciled to pleasure. N o matter what its intent, Bacon’s exegesis of the myth anticipates Carew’s “Love . . . Dissected into Atomes.”

Each of the qualities of Bacon’s Cupid accrues political value in the earliest and most extensive defense of Epicureanism to be written by an Englishman in the seventeenth century. Nicholas Hill’s Philoso- phia Epicures, Democritiana, Theophrastica (1601, 1619) has provoked a handful of scholars to try their luck at decoding its more than 500 brief sections. They agree that Hill’s Epicureanism is deeply indebted to Bruno’s animated version of atomism. For Hill as for Bruno, atoms are not lifeless; they are in fact the media through which God’s Spirit

19. Charles’ copy of Bacon’s Advancement (1640) is in the British Library; see p. 307. to. Bacon’s interpretation of Prometheus in De Sapientia Veterum is only one of many places

in which the complex relevance of Democritus and the Epicureans is apparent. There Bacon is attempting to work out the relations between providence and pleasure, and Democritus is in the middle of this negotiation. See Reid Barbour, “Remarkable Ingratitude: Bacon, Prometheus, Democrytus,” Studies in English Literature, 32 (1992). 79-90. In the essay on atheism Bacon praises Epicurus for his conception of the gods which is related to his conception of human blessedness. The Epicure’s anthropomorphisms, ethics, physics, epistemology, and theology engage Bacon’s attention on almost every page.

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is diffused into the infinite universe. But Bruno goes further than that: the atoms are not just vessels to be tossed away once the Spirit has reclaimed the world; rather, the atoms have a close correspondence to the maximum, to the Spirit of God itself. The analogy between them verges at times on identification, although Bruno sometimes with- draws from such a position. For Hill, too, the atomic qualities of remoteness, invisibility, and indivisibility correspond to God’s own mystery and unity.21

The correspondence between the atomic origin and the spiritual source of the infinite universe supports Bruno’s promotion of a universal emperor, be it the French king or English queen. But what about the politics of Hill? Hugh Trevor-Roper has traced Hill’s association with the Bassett plot against James I, and several readers have discussed Hill’s distrust of patrons. Yet as Trevor-Roper himself has said, Hill’s dismissal of high and low in the universe does not translate into a refusal of social hierarchies.22 Like Bruno, Hill is dedicated to energizing elite men to reform the world according to the physics and ethics of his seldom named but always present Epicureans. Hill has real disdain for the vulgar-arguing for their strict punishment at the slightest provocation-and elevates the power of the noble man over the sovereignty of law.23 In society, as in the physical world, Hill argues that there are principia-elite men and atoms bear that title. In the physical world atoms are first and best, pure and invincible, intimate with divinity. So it goes with superior men, animated by the highest spirit of grace and valor. They are the movers and the shakers, the fit and few.24

Hill’s text is extremely difficult. His relation to authority, especially

2 1 . See Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity, tr. with an introduction by Jack Lindsay (New York, 1964), especially pp. 28-30. For Hill, see Grant McColley, “Nicholas Hill and the Philosophia Epicurea,” Annals ofStience, 4 (1939-40). 390-403; and Jean Jacquot. “Harriot, Hill, Warner and the New Philosophy,” in Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Scientist, ed. John W . Shirley (Oxford, 1974), pp. 107-28.

22. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, pp. 1-39. 23. Hill’s propositions 439 and 447 are among several that envision the superiority of

“principle” men over the multitude and their laws. 24. For Bruno’s appeal to the English elite, see La tena dele ceneri ( T h e Ash Wednesday Supper),

ed. and tr. by Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden. Conn., 1977); and Hilary Gatti, T h e Renaissance Drama ofKnowledge: Ciordano Bruno in England (New York, 1989). Gatti discusses Bruno’s imperial vision as it relates specifically to Carew and the Stuart use of Bruno’s desire for a “new era of universal peace and tranquillity” (pp. 16-1 7). Any work on empire and Bruno is indebted to Frances Yates’ many essays and books on the subject.

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that of the church, is uneven, variously submissive and bold. One finds in his text no systematic treatment of law or monarchy, and detects a trace ofdisappointment in his refusal ofpatronage. But Hill’s commitment to the “principles” of nature and society recurs throughout the 500 propositions. The social elitism of Epicurean philosophy goes back further than Hill’s guiding light, Bruno, who looked to Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, and Elizabeth I for leadership into the brave new world. Lucretius, it should be recalled, also praised the elite few, “those who were pre-eminent in genius and strong in mind,” along with the kings who apportioned property “according to beauty and strength and genius.” While the elitism of Lucretius may well prove intellectual rather than merely social, the enemy in his account of civilization are the ambitious and envious vulgarians who over- throw the noble minority?

The elitism of Bruno and Hill, both atomists, helps explain how one of Bruno’s texts came to serve as the model for Carew’s masque, Coelum Britannicum. In his description of Aurelian Town- send’s masque, we have seen, Carew has the masquers fade into atoms as a sign that the court is invincible and pure-the source and cause of all good motions, virtue, and delight. At the same time, in the 1630s, Nicholas Hill’s writings enjoyed something of a cult re- viva1.26 But the atom was not the only facet of Epicureanism that lent itself to Stuart claims for the mystery and indivisibility of a sovereign who is at once animated by the spirit of God and the source of all good motions. Nor is it enough to cite the parallels between Epi- curean and Stuart redemptions of pleasure, including the Baconian analysis of Cupid. In addition to these shared interests, the Stuarts imagined themselves in a garden of tranquility-the very essence of Epicurean pleasure-where they could rest like gods free from the tumult of the vulgar world.

Seventeenth-century readers could find praise for tranquility in Stoicism and Skepticism, but a peace founded in austere fatalism and doubt would subvert the masque’s confidence and its commitment to revelry. As the most outspoken critics of the court attacked its liber-

25. De Rerum Nafura, tr. W. H. D. Rouse and M. F. Smith, Loeb Classics Library. (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1 9 7 ~ ) , s. I 105-1 I (464-65) and s . I 136-42 (466-67).

26. He is quoted by Wilkins and Burton, and a number of men are interested in his life and manuscripts, for which see Anthony Wood’s account of Hill’s life and Trevor-Roper’s analysis of this account.

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tine skepticism, Charles and his leading ministers were compelled to reinvent the “Puritan” as a fatalistic and pleasure-hating Calvinist.*’ Yet the desire for a pleasurable tranquility removed from the vicissi- tudes of the world was a recurring Stuart fantasy. Carew is one of many poets who found peace and revelry together in the fruitful garden of England for which the court is a model.

But let us that in myrtle bowers sit Vnder secure shades, use the benefit Of peace and plenty, which the blessed hand Of our good King gives this obdurate Land, Let us of Revels sing . . . Tourneyes, Masques, Theaters, better become Our Halcyon dayes. (75, 77)

The famous halcyon motif of the Caroline court resembles Lucretius’ belief that “pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from the shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to per- ceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant.” We feel pleasure (he continues) in watching from afar “great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in the peril.”28

For the court, there is obviously a danger in narrowing the “secure shades” too far. While scholars are right to challenge the assumption that Charles and his court were completely isolated from the concerns and values of the kingdom at large, they should not ignore the contemporary fear that this fissure might happen. If a blessed existence can be had only within the garden or in what the Epicureans called intermundane space, then all the English, not just the court, must share in this pleasure: Carew’s “us” must extend to everyone. In dis- missing Parliament or in leaving Sweden to its own devices, Charles might be showing the goodness of his “blessed hand” or his trust in “supreame providence.” But opponents to court policy sometimes read the overreliance on corrupt advisors-made worse by the dismissal of that great advisory body, Parliament-as a sign that the King was no longer in control of his world: that the court had become

27. See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinis ts: The Rise qf English Arminianism, c. 1590-16qo (Oxford, 1987).

28. D r Rerum Natura, 11.1-6 (94-95). Michael P. Parker discusses the Vergilian pretexts ofthe poem in “Carew’s Politic Pastoral: Virgilian Pretexts in the ‘Answer to Aurelian Townsend,’ ” John DonneJourrial, I (1982). 101-16.


a vacuum from which its tranquil monarch, like Epicurus’ gods, could barely see the tumult in need ofhis attention.29 No matter what the Stuart claims to divinity, their myth of the kingfisher resting on the waves was potentially as dangerous to good rule as the entice- ments of pleasure and the fortuity of atoms.

The enemy within the court was probably not on Charles’ mind when he paused to record some doubt over Bacon’s belief that Epi- cureans were the best citizens to have in the commonwealth. But his court edged toward Epicureanism in its pursuit of a redeemed pleasure, of a secure tranquility, and of a metaphysical basis for an indivisible sovereign, his refined courtiers, and their program of reform. Epicureanism underwrote all these desires but it could not be faced squarely, although Bacon, Burton, Browne and Hill led the group of writers who tried. Enemies of the court were quick to decry the so- called Epicures-the devotees of belly and sex who flew in the face of God and the afterlife and who compromised a virtuous king. Such a caricature of the Epicure, however unfair to Stuart ideals, was based on careful attention to representations, official and unoficial, of court power and pleasure. With the emergence of the Laudian church, the relevance of Epicureanism to early Stuart culture extended to doctrine and discipline as well as monarchy.

I11 E P I C U R U S I N T H E TEMPLE

In most discussions of atheism, writers in the early decades of the seventeenth century single out the Epicureans as a strange case. If the Epicures are considered arch-atheists for denying the providence of God, they are also cited as the most compelling proof of God’s existence: since even they believed in God, the argument runs, atheism must be unnatural. Some authors suggest even further that atomism and the Epicurean notion of the gods are crucial for religion. In “Of Atheism,” Bacon summarizes the first point that atomism proves God against the skeptics: “Nay, even that school which is most ac-

29. There is a great deal of debate over how isolated the King was during personal rule. In a series of essays in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England, Kevin Sharpe reconsiders the issue, although we needn’t resolve the debate in order to realize that the King transformed into a tranquil god and removed from the most important agent of mediation between him and the people (Parliament) raised questions about the nature of sovereignty.

Reid Barbour 183

cused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty without a divine mar~hal .”~” In the same essay Bacon reclaims Epicurus from “temporizing” his belief in the gods, “for his words are noble and divine: Non Deos vulgi negare profanurn; sed vulgi opiniones Diis applicare profanurn. Plato could have said no more.”31 For Browne, too, “that doctrine of Epicurus, that denied the providence of God, was no Atheism, but a magnificent and high- strained conceit of his Majesty, which hee deemed too sublime to minde the trivial1 actions of those inferiour

At times Bacon considers the Epicureans idolatrous, both in the religious sense-that their gods were anthropomorphic-and in the epistemic sense of the Noourn Organum. But their obedient worship of tranquil gods fascinates seventeenth-century theologians. Even the author of Atheomastix, Martin Fotherby, wrestles with the claim that the Epicureans, more than any other sect, provide certain proof of God’s existence: “Yea, and Velleius, obseruing, with how great an applause, this natural1 anticipation, and presumption of a God, was receiued and vrged by all the Philosophers; he seeketh cunningly to deriue the whole credit of the first inuention of this Argument, vnto his Maister, the Epicure.”33 Fotherby doubts these claims, but in enlisting reason on his side, he appeals to Lucretius.

Nicholas Hill’s belief that Epicureanism and Catholicism could profit side by side might have been temporizing, but if so he had precedent in the complexities of the Greek philosophy itself. Epicurus dictated a reverence for the gods that Lucretius explained and memo- rialized in his poem. But Lucretius was also committed to removing any fear of the gods from our lives. His campaign against superstition was filtered into seventeenth-century culture in an uneven and round- about way: it could be embraced by a number of contemporary positions, against antinomianism here and counter to ceremonialism

30 . “Of Atheism,” in The Philosophical Works, p. 754. 3 1 . “Of Atheism,” p. 75s. 32. “Religio Medici,” in Sir Thomas Browne. The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (New

3 3 . Martin Fotherby, Atheomasfix (I~zz), p. 170.

York, 1977). p. 86.


there. Sir John Suckling’s epigraph from Lucretius (“temptat enim dubiam mentem rationis egestas”) may have helped earn his A n Ac- count $Religion by Reason the charge of Socinianism, but it was by no means an unusual reference for writers in the 1620s and 1630s.

No matter what the seventeenth-century complexities of his heritage, Epicurus’ name and creed enter consistently into three religious debates: over the nature of providence, the pleasure or sensory grati- fication associated with church ceremony, and the interpretation of Ecclesiastes. All three issues yield intersections between, and shared incriminations among, the so-called Epicures and the so-called Ar- minians. In “Arminianism and English Culture,” Nicholas Tyacke has shown how closely knit were the growths of Epicureanism or atomism and Arminianism in the England of Charles I. For their “anti-determinist views,” their association with a mitigated skepticism, their mutual attempt “to rehabilitate natural man” and his free will from the clutches of Calvinism: in all these ways the two move- ments were closely linked.34 What is more, the virtuosi who were atomists or who showed a very precise knowledge of Epicurean doctrine were often the close associates of leading Arminians. Mean- while, enemies of the Arminians satirized the link between the two, taking as their special evidence the recurring theme of hedonism enacted on the Caroline stage.

That the Epicures denied God’s governance of the world was well- known, although philosophers from Bruno to Gassendi did their best to cleanse atomism of its fortuity. But the Epicurean admiration for their quiet and blessed gods was of great interest to Stuart theologians. George Hakewill’s A n Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence $God in the Government ofthe World shows how attractive Lucretius’ D e rerum natuva could prove even for a staunch defendant of providence. On one occasion, Hakewill quotes the Latin poet on the importance of following experience, for “what can more certaine be then sence, / Discerning truth from false pretence.”35 On others, he

34. The article appears in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A . C. Duke and C. A . Tamse, (The Hague, 1981). V11, 94-117.

35 . George Hakewill, A n Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government ofthe World (2nd ed., 1630). p. 10. All future references will appear in the text. For a discussion of Lucretius and Hakewill on the matter of the world’s decay, see Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study ofthe Seventeenth Century Controversy over Disorder and Decay in the Universe (Chicago, 1949), pp. 192-94.

Reid Barbour 185

echoes the poet’s metaphors, some with reference to nature, others to the author’s own task. But above all Hakewill is intrigued by Lu- cretius’ treatment of matter and decay. Hakewill asserts that a belief in the decadence of nature impugns God’s providence, then quotes both Ecclesiastes and Lucretius to prove that matter abides and cannot return to nothing. In essence, Lucretius suits Hakewill’s economy of nature in which nothing is lost and all is recirculated.

Yet Lucretius is also morbidly obsessed with the dissolution of the world in what one critic has called his “eclipse of Venus.”36 Hakewill himself has to admit that God will destroy the world. Indeed, where St. Cyprian argues for the old age of the world, Hakewill follows a commentator who supposes that Cyprian is referring to ancient opinion, “perchance thereby intending Lucretius the great admirer and sectary of Epicurur, who of all the Poets I haue met with hath written the most fully in this argument” (p. 59). Having quoted some twenty- five lines of D e rerum naturu regarding the destruction of the world, Hakewill hastens to add that “heerein Lucretius likewise contradicted himselfe in other places of the same booke” (p. 60). In other words, the Latin poet defends the fixity ofnaturejust as surely as he meditates on its demise. Even after he has scolded Lucretius for denying God’s providence, Hakewill returns to the Epicure’s strong belief in the “circular progress” of nature, which is marshalled in the proof of God’s providence against discontented spirits.

Lucretius may give too much weight to the leisure of his gods and too little to their responsibility, but on the score of nature’s economy, the Latin poet is for good reason “much esteemed among the Anti- ents.” Hakewill finds, then, some comfort in D e rerum natura, assuring his readers that for all the “late distresses of the Church of Christ,” everything is well. Nothing new is under the sun: “in civil1 affaires and in the whole course of nature . . . a circular revolution” always returns the world to the same place like a ship at anchor. Sometimes Hakewill emphasizes gradual progress, but for the most part Lu- cretius, Solomon, and he concur that nature stays the same. For Hakewill, this stability of nature is crucial for the proof of God’s providence.

If the Epicures deny providence, then, they can figure strangely in its defense. But their position on the gods-believing in blessed

36. See Diskin Clay, Lucretius and Epicunts, pp. 226-34


divinities and a fixed economy of nature but not in divine governance of the world-opens a wider space for free will against fatalisms of whatever kind. To the opponents of the Arminian church, however, the Epicurean stance on providence and free will would sound more than vaguely familiar. As Tyacke argues, Prynne, Bastwick, Burton and others accused the English Arminians of diminishing God’s grace or providence and of elevating the human will and its “mortal seed.” Francis Rous is typical in charging that “Arminianism [is] an error that maketh the grace of God lackey it after the will of man, that maketh the sheep to keep the shepherd, that maketh mortal seed of an immortal God.”37 For Rous, there were political analogies to this: as the Arminians severed God and humanity, so they isolated the king, God’s representative on earth, from the people. For Prynne, the Arminian denial of providence is just like that of the Epicures because both groups want to wish away their own punishment for living a “vicious Epicurian life, and unsoundnesse in Religion.”38

The opponents of the Arminians traced their hedonism to popery. The most extended association between the papists and the Epicures is Henry Mason’s T h e Epicures Fast: or: A Short Discourse, Discovering the Licencious-nesse Ofthe Romane Church in her Religious Fasts (1626). Mason’s point is simple: the Romish Epicures use empty formality as a cover for their hypocrisy in fasting; their fasts allow such niceties as spices, preserves, sweet meats, and wine. In other words, the pleasure that the papists enjoy in fasting proves but one instance of a prelacy in love with Hedone and not with the absolute will of God. Against these charges, Arminians such as Grotius denounced Epicurus for his denial of God’s governing presence.39 But they could not dissuade their opponents from the belief that the atheistic denial of providence went hand in hand with a devotion to worldly delights.

The charges of hedonism directed at the prelacy extended to their investment in the music, stained glass, and incense-in sum, the pleasures-of the worship service. In one treatise after another En- glish champions of church ceremony were compelled to justify the

37. Commons Debafesfor 1629, ed. W. Notestein and F. H. Relf (Minneapolis, 1921). pp. 12-

38. T h e Popish Royal/ Fauourite (1643). p. 70. The charge is made on numerous occasions,

39. True Religion Explainedand Defended Againsf y e Archenemies Thereof in These Times (1632).

1 3 ; cited by Nicholas Tyacke in Anti-Calvinists, p. vi.

some of which are noted in Tyacke’s “Arminianism and English Culture,” pp. I 12-17.

pp. 12, 27, 62.

Reid Barbour 187

titillation of the senses within the temple. On the Continent, in the second decade of the century, J. C. Vanini had assaulted Epicurean hedonism in conjunction with the pleasures of church ceremony-the smell of incense, for example, or any other that facilitates the worship of God. But D. C. Allen is probably right to read this text, and specifically the link between Epicure and church, ironically.40 With little or no irony, English theologians from Richard Hooker to Jer- emy Taylor sought to justify the delight of the senses and the fancy in the services of the national church-Taylor, with reference to Lu- cretius and Epicurus. But in the 1630s, Nicholas Caussin’s The Holy Cowl gave much fuller attention to sorting holy and Epicurean pleasures for the inhabitants of the English court for whom the work was translated from the French.41

At the outset of his book Caussin asserts that the court can and should be the exemplar of all things pious, noble, virtuous, and beautiful. The opposite view-that courts are the haven of vice be- neath their glamour-eventually leads him to assail Epicureanism in its popular sense of libertinism. But even Epicurus, Caussin remarks, was led “(brutish though he were) to the knowledge of the Diuinity, when he figured to himselfe, that necessarily there was in the vniuerse an excellent Nature exalted aboue a1 the rest, and the best of al, and that this was God” (111, 12). The Epicures may very well have denied the providence of God so that they might sin without fear. Yet some groups, Caussin says, diminish providence by committing themselves to necessity and predestination. God’s providence, he concludes, demands our works-that we take salvation seriously enough to act on faith. According to Caussin, these works include the ceremonies of the Catholic church.

To the court of Henrietta Maria, Caussin suggests that providence approves the opulent church ceremonies comparable to the court’s own rituals. At the same time he divides holy pleasures from profane ones, which entails the analysis of a revived Epicurean presence at

40. J. C. Vanini, Amphitheatrum Aefernae Prouidentiae Diuino-magicum, Chrisfiano-physicum, nec non Astrolo~o-cafholicuni, aduersus ueteres Philosophos, Atheos, Epicureos, Peripafeficos, G. Sfoicos (1615). pp. 150-93. In The Anatomy o/ Melancholy, Burton calls temporizing formalists in religion by the name of “Epicure.”

41. For Stuart problems in justifying church ceremony in terms offancy and the senses, see Reid Barbour, “Liturgy and Dreams in Seventeenth-Century England,” Modern Philology, 88 (IYY1). 227-42.


court. The author is always prepared to denounce the new breed of Epicures, but not without giving them and their Greek ancestor a full reappraisal:

Experience teacheth vs, there is in the world a sect of reformed Epicures, who doe not openly professe the brutishnesse of those infamous spirits which are drenched in gourmandize and lust, but take Maximes more refined, that haue (as they say) no other ayme, but to make a man truely contented. For which purpose they promise themselues to driue a1 obiects from their minds, which may bring the least disgust, and to afford the body a1 pleasures which may preserue it in a flourishing health, accompanyed with grace, vigour, and viuacity of senses.

Heer may the iudicious obserue, that such was the doctrine of ancient Epicurus. For although many make a monster ofhim, a1 drowned in ordure & prodigious pleasure, yet it is very easy to proue that he neuer went about to countenance those brutish ones, who through exorbitance of lusts ruine a1 the contentments of the mind and body: But he wholly inclined to find out a1 the pleasures of nature, and to banish any impediments which might make impression on the soule or body. (111, 121)

Caussin lists those commentators who have failed to understand Epicurus, then includes Tertullian and Seneca among those “who better noted his doctrine” and his sobriety. Even so, Epicurus is “greatly reprehensible, in that he so deifyeth the contentments of nature, and this kind of life free from bodily payne and mind’s vn- quiet, that he makes a Soueraigne God of it, honouring and adoring it as a Diuinity” (111, 1 2 1 ) .

Epicureanism is misguided, but at least (Caussin insists) it is now reformed and refined. The sect is much too possessed with nature, health, and contentment; but its uses of nature are not so easy to dismiss as the swinish gluttony and atheism of popular tradition. The “iudicious” have learned from their courtly experience that this refined sect is a slippery cultural phenomenon. The modern-day Epi- cures may be too obsessive to achieve the Greek’s original agenda; and in general the sect is too utopian, wanting an ideal that they always lose “in the waues” of the world. Epicurus’ ideal is, in essence, a fantasy of Eden, one which eludes the fallen mortal who can never have health or contentment. But as Caussin’s discussion of the Epi- cure unfolds, it is unclear whether that ideal is entirely vicious. Some followers of Epicurus have been slaves to the body-have elided the mental facet of the ideal-but neither shame nor impossibility nor the

Reid Barbour 189

body’s tyranny provides the court with a final word on the new Epicureanism.

Caussin believes that the holy court is committed to the crosses of Christian mortification. Yet insofar as the court embodies beauty as well as piety, it must justify its own uses of pleasure. O f all the kinds of “delectation,” church authority allows at least one, a “holy” pleasure that derives from the joys of torment and martyrdom. Still, even its most ascetic members are devoted to ceremony; indeed, among the libertines we find those sects who reject church authority as superstition and follow their own whims into baser forms of pleasure. For the holy court, then, the redemption of Epicurus-whom Caus- sin nonetheless often condemns-resembles the church’s own need to reclaim its delights from the profane. The parallel is made stronger when Caussin announces that God is essentially tranquil, and that the divinity might best be depicted on a fortunate isle about which “should be litle nightingales, Halcyons, and holy Fishes, which cause a calme euery where” (ed. 1638, IV, 239). Smuts has argued that the God of the English Arminians was more tranquil than the Calvinist counterpart.42 So it is with the “holy court”: in austerity or in opu- lence, Caussin promotes a court that will achieve and cleanse the delights and tranquility vainly sought by the Epicureans. The court and its church must succeed, he implies, where the Epicureans have failed.

In his apologies for holy pleasures Caussin reviews the vexed debate over Solomon’s flirtation with Epicureanism in Ecclesiastes. Infidels unconcerned with providence and salvation attempt (he says) to adopt Ecclesiastes as a weapon against Christians, not realizing that the “propositions of the wicked rehearsed in this booke [are] to be refuted” by Solomon himself. The themes linking Epicurus and Sol- omon are often discussed by seventeenth-century commentators who wonder why Solomon praises food and drink with such an emphasis. Further, they ask, why does he suggest that death is the end of all things, or chance the governor? How might his belief in nothing new under the sun be compared to Epicurus’ theory that nature perpetu- ates itself? Was Solomon unsaved? Caussin’s answer is echoed by other glossators who assert that we must read the speaker of Eccle- siastes as a persona, and the whole book as a retraction of Solomon’s

42. Court Culture, p. 233


life in the house of mirth. In their view misguided libertines may argue that Solomon was reprobate, but Ecclesiastes stands as the most convincing sign of his redemption.

Yet faced with passages that seem without question to promote hedonism, some commentators read Ecclesiastes as a directive on the proper uses of earthly resources. Michel Jermin’s treatise on the book (1639) scolds those sensualists who mistake the “heavenly meaning” to justify “their owne earthly and voluptuous liuing.” Such perver- sions of Ecclesiastes are analogous to the mishandling of Epicurean- ism: “It is a mistake, as some thinke, of the meaning of Epicurus, to imagine that he placed the chiefe good of man in a sensuall pleasure; but that he intended the sweet delight of vertue, and therein the happy contentment of mans minde, to be the bed of rest unto it. Now much more are they mistaken, who thinke that in this book a luxurious pleasure is commended to us: seeing it is from a discommendation of worldly things, in respect of the vanitie of them . . . that the Preacher laboureth to make us to deny the world . . . and to seate the minde above a sensuall ~ o n t e n t m e n t . ” ~ ~ The world’s vanity does not impugn the Creator’s works, for “it was from a mistake of the meaning of this verse, that Epicurus affirmed, Omnia temereferri, All things to be caried lightly and vainely” (p. 6). In sum, Epicurus and Solomon agree that the world and its pleasures should be used aright. For both, there is a hierarchy of pleasures that lends itself to confusion, especially if one forgets that “in comparison of eternal1 good things, even all things [are] vaine, yea, although they be good things temporally.”

Jermin shows too how far the proximity between Epicurus and Ecclesiastes can make a commentator stretch. When for a fourth time the preacher bids us eat and drink, Jermin remarks that “wee have reason to regard it the more” (p. 157). God promotes a comely pleasure, and perhaps only means to encourage us against despair in doing so. But, Jermin adds, when the Bible tells us that “there is nothing better for a man, then that he should eate and drinke, and that he should make his soule enjoy good in his labour,” we must resort to a theory of persona whereby the speaker is a voluptuary and “non” means “not” good rather than “nothing better” (pp. 62-63). The bread and wine of Christ are our only pleasure, although Jermin concludes that food and drink are rewards from God, and that (as Paul

43. A Commentary upon the Whole Booke oJEcclesiastes or the Preacher (1639). p. 2.

Reid Barbour 191

says) we should “use and enjoy the benefits of God with a quiet minde” or “with moderation, humility, thankfulnesse.”

Joseph Hall, Hugh Broughton, Thomas Granger, Francis Quarles, and Jean de Serres comment on the kinship between Solomon and the “honest Epicure,” and between the persona of Ecclesiastes and the evil Epicure.44 In their view a reconsideration of Epicurus can help us interpret the uses of pleasure in the Bible, while a condemnation of vicious Epicures enables us to combat those perverse readers or “fran- ticke heads” who insist on fortuity, immorality, and impiety in the text of the preacher. In turn, these commentaries are related to ethical or secular defenses of the uses of pleasure, which Robert Crofts calls “the enjoying of earthly happinesse freely and cheerfully (though in the good use thereof) and with a heavenly minde.”45 With Epicurus, Crofts invokes nature and necessity in defense of a pleasure neglected by those sects “too defective, stoical1 and rigid.” As he quotes Eccle- siastes 5 . I 8-20 in his cause, Crofts clarifies how the uses of pleasure elude the monkish ascetic but also the stoical fatalist who bears some resemblance in the 1630s to the stereotype of the pleasure-hating pre- destinarian. Indeed, “the prescriptions and customes, of the Church and Saints in all Ages” teach us how both abstinence and delectation can stir us to piety: Solomon’s edict that there is a time for all things justifies a church calendar of traditions regulating pleasure and pain. Pleasure is crucial to religion, not just in accommodating heavenly delights, but also insofar as religion is pleasure. With Richard Hooker, then, Crofts believes that reason, tradition, and faith promote the beauty of worship in the temple. So too William Pemble argues that Solomon intends a pleasure “within the rules of reason and common honesty. ”4h

The interpretive cruxes of Ecclesiastes absorbed the attention and efforts of commentators at a time when the English church was forced to defend its position on providence and pleasure. Nicholas Tyacke has laid out some of the Epicurean facets of these debates, but they are

44. Hall, Salomons Diuine Arts, ./ Ethickes, Politickes, Oeconomicks (1609); Broughton, A Comment vpon Coheleth or Ecclesiastes (1605); Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (1621); Quarles, Solomons Recantation, entituled Ecclesiastes, Paraphrased (1645); de Serres. A godlie and learned Commentarie vpon the excellent book of Solomon, commonly called Ecclesiastes, tr. John Stockwood (1585) .

45, The Terrestrial1 Paradise, or, Happinesse on Earth (1639). preface. 46. William Pernble, Salomons Recantation and Repentance, or the h o k e ofEcclesiastes briejy and

.fully explained (1627), p. 14.


often subtle and indirect as well as caricatured and explicit. Thus, while Henry Burton believed that God had stricken revelers abiding by the Book of Sports, Christopher Dow supported court policy by declaring that such instances were “accidents” of a “common and ordinary” kind, aligning himself by implication with Lucretius’ de- mystification of thunder and other threatening phenomena. Positions on providence and pleasure are linked further in this controversy when Burton chides Dow’s denial of providence as a cover for vicious indulgence. Dow, in turn, praises the right use of maypoles and morris dances against “a Philosophicall or Cato-like severity, to which these delights may seeme no better than folly: for grant, that wise men esteeme of them, as Solomon oflaughter and mirth, Eccle. 2 .2 . yet will it not follow, that such as by reason of their meane education and parts, hardly aspire to know the pleasure of other delights, should not use such, as they are capable of?’ For Dow, pleasure and chance prevail against a dangerous rigidity. For Burton and Prynne, the Arminian “pulls God out of Heaven, in depriving him, not onely of his all-disposing prouidence . . . but likewise of his absolute soueraigne power ouer all his creatures.” In their view, the prelates care only about “voluptuous pleasures, stately Palaces, Princes Courts, downe beds, and lazy idlenesse for Christ”-in essence, about “Epi- c u r i ~ m e . ” ~ ~

The presence of Epicurus in theological debates had political currency as well. The commentaries on Ecclesiastes often recall that Solomon was a king-in fact, one of the most important models for the Stuart monarchy. Solomon’s dangers were, by inference, those of the Stuart kings; not surprisingly, much was made out of the relative immorality and virtue of the courts of James and Charles.@ John Williams, for instance, insisted that James be compared to Solomon only for his virtues, although “wanton. . . and vnruly wits haue made their disputes” about the destination of Solomon’s Friend and foe of the court alike sought to protect Charles from the Epicurean

47. Innovations Unjustly Charged upon the Present Church and State (1637). p. 86. Cf. Henry

48. Prynne, A Looking-Classeforall Lordly Prelates, pp. 103.93; cf. his Healthes Sicknesse (1628). 49. For morality and the courts of James and Charles, see Lucy Hutchinson. Memoirs 4 t h e

Life ojColone1 Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (New York, 1973). pp. 44-47; and Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas, pp. 147-73. Throughout the first halfofthe century there is a great deal of literary interest in the post-Augustan Caesars and their immoral courts.

Burton’s A Divine Tragedie Lafely Acted (1636).

50. Creaf Brifains Solomon (1625).

Reid Barbour I 9 3

dangers around him. Prynne wanted to save Charles from the hedo- nists at court and temple. Many critics feared that Charles would become too isolated from his people, or that the King, in worshipping an otiose God, would become one in the hands of corrupt advisors. No matter how much acceptance there was of personal rule, Burton was not alone in urging Charles to disprove the charge that “this King had no regard to sacred Vowes, and solemne Protestations,” and that innovators “intercept[ed] from the people that gratious influence of protection”: “Nor am I ignorant, how busie many would be to divert your Maiestie from the Consideration of such matters, as this; as if the great affaires of a Kingdome pertained not to the King, but that hee might take his pleasure, and leave the care of his Kingdome to others.”51 Not everyone was happy with halcyon days: years later Clar- endon would marvel that this had been the case.52

By 1641, critics of the Arminians were certain that the Epicures of the temple were the siblings of those at court, those “Sucklingto- nians” who ignored God’s “direction and protection” in their de- bauchery. At court and in the temple, apologists for official policy could take a little comfort in Meric Casaubon’s reminder that in the days of Aurelius, Christians “were generally accounted no better, then meere Atheists and Epicures. For indeed Atheists, Christians, and Epicures, were commonly joyned together as names, if not of the same signification, yet of very great affinity, and hardly distinguished by the vulgar, but that of the three, the Christian was thought the

Things were certainly better than that in the 1630s. Even so, the same apologists could take only a little more comfort in the “democratical” and antinomian guises of the recuperated Epicure, whose atomism and hedonism were sometimes associated with radi- calism in politics and religion. Any solace derived from attaching blame to the subversive “other” was compromised, however, to the extent that the radical implications of Epicureanism sometimes arose from apologies for the King and his church, and undermined the apologists from within their own defenses.

5 1 . For Codand the King (1636). p. 108; A n Apology ofan Appeale (1636). p. 3 . 52. Edward Hyde. Earl ofclarendon, The History ojrhe Rebellion, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols.

(Oxford, 1888). I , 93. 53. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. with notes by Meric Casaubon (2nd ed., 1635). preface,

p. 9; Aurelius. often torn between atomism and providence or fate, is likened by Casaubon to Solomon, both of whom (he says) spent time in the house of mirth.

I94 English Literary Renaissance

IV RADICAL E P I C U R U S

The court and its church had no monopoly on Epicureanism. In prais- ing John Evelyn for translating Lucretius, Edmund Waller named atomism “democratical,” thus connecting the fortuitous dispersion of atoms to the enfranchisement of the populace.54 The modern histo- rian Christopher Hill would agree with Waller or with the letter though not the spirit of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras that the children of grace had the best access to atoms.55 In the 1630s, Thomas Browne feared the fragmentation of Christianity into “Atoms in Divinity,” and identified the Familialist with the “Atomist.” In each of these instances atomism belongs to political and religious radicals, and epitomizes either freedom or chaos. Another Epicurean mainstay, mortalism, was also associated with the antinomian sectaries. So too pleasure-mongering: in a recent book Derek Hirst has suggested what Caussin argued long ago, that hedonism was one of the perils of a theology of grace that gave no credit for charity or works.56 O n a number of counts, then, the creeds of the Epicure were thought to run hand in hand with the beliefs of the democrat and antinomian.

I have been arguing that the seventeenth-century recovery of Epi- cureanism shared a network of concerns with the court and its church. As David Mathew writes, “there was a fairly widespread desire to find a basis for the Authoritarian State that was not theological”; it should come as no surprise, then, that poets such as Thomas Stanley and royal physicians such as Charleton led the Epicurean boom at mid-century.57 But this does not erase the radical implications of the Epicure, ranging from his mortalism and materialism to a distrust of religious rituals and of court intervention in private lives. Neither the court, its opposition, nor the Epicureanism with which they flirted was monolithic. When Lucy Hutchinson translates Lucretius and Margaret Cavendish versifies atomism, it seems clear that Epicurean- ism empowered women more than some orthodox creeds did. Yet

54. “That chance and atoms make this all / In order democratical, / Where bodies freely run their course, I Without design, or fate, or force” (ed. G . Thorn Drury [New York, I 8931, p. 149).

5 5 . Intellectual Origins ofthe English Revolution, pp. 14-84; for the Browne quotations, see Religio Medici, ed. Patrides, pp. 88, 130. Butler writes in Hudibras that Sir Ralpho sought “ideas, atoms, influences” as well as ‘hew light.”

56. Derek Hirst, Authority and ConJict: England 1603-1658 (London, 1986). p. 69. 57. David Mathew, The Age ofCharles I (London, 1951). p. 244.

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these women responded to the radical or heretical doctrine of the Epicure from different religious and political orientations and therefore in different ways.58

The Stuart hegemony could not afford its debts to Epicureanism because the philosophy suggested dangerous possibilities even within the most obedient texts. In the 1620s and 1630s, the most complex reenactment of Epicurean ideas-one in which both conservative and subversive positions are almost inextricable from one another-was Robert Burton’s Anatomy ofMefanchofy. Burton’s was a popular book, seeing five editions between 1621 and 1638. At least some of its interest to readers in these years derived from the impresario Democ- ritus Jr. Burton’s choice ofhis persona has a host of motives, but one is that persona’s struggle with the heritage of Epicureanism. We have seen that in these decades, political and religious writers manifest a vital interest in Epicureanism. Experimentation with atomism can be found in the private correspondence and papers of Hariot, Walter Warner, Kenelm Digby, and others.5’ But authors were working through the physics and ethics of the Epicure in print too. The atomist Daniel Sennert’s works made their first appearance in England in the 1630s’ adding to the writings of Bacon (and others) whose studies were already published.60 As a preface to The Anatomy, Burton cul- tivated the garden of his Democritus Jr. in these decades when En- glish writers were newly attentive to the philosophy that Democritus transmitted. Burton’s text also dramatizes the ways in which Epi-

5 8 . Lucy Hutchinson’s presentation copy of her translation of Lucretius (British Library Add. MS. 19333) includes her preface, which explains both why she took on the translation and why she now despises it. Ashamed of the very doctrine whose mastery allowed her “to understand things I heard so much of,” Hutchinson hints at the double bind ofeven more radical women whose zealous search for new discourse is accompanied by the persistent demands of womanly humility. For Cavendish, Epicurean atomism was the impetus for the freedom of authorship: “though the Opinion of Atoms is as Old as from the Time of Epicurus, yet my Conceptions of their Figures, creating and disposing, are New, and my O w n ” (Philosophical and Physical Opinions [ 16631). Yet she justifies her atomistic poetry as good domestic work-as fidelity to her husband’s property and to her King.

59. For Hariot, see BL Harley 6002, fol. 2-10; for Warner, Birch 4394. fol. 396; see also Na- thaniel Torporley, “A synopsis of the controversie of Atoms,” British Library Birch 4458. fol. 6.

60. Daniel Sennert’s Epitome Naturalis Scientiae (3rd edition) was published in Oxford in 1632; a chapter of his Practical Medicine was translated into English in 1637; in the controversy over salves, the citations ofatomic theory are in line with the position of the Church of England as stated by William Foster: “Wee of the Church of England detest superstitious and magicall cures.” Bacon’s The Wisdom 0 1 t h Ancients was translated into English by Arthur Gorges in 1619.


cureanism defines freedom as the relocation of society within bound- aries that no political authority can breach.61

Within its covers T h e Anatomy adopts a number of attitudes toward Epicurus and Epicures. Burton often uses “epicure” to mean a vicious sensualist, Machiavel, or atheist. But from time to time he attempts to redeem Epicurus and his followers, including Nicholas Hill whom he cites with approval on the infinity of the universe. One emphatic defense of Epicurean hedonism appears in the middle of Burton’s encyclopedia. “A quiet mind,” Burton writes, “is that voluptas, or rummum bonum, of Epicurus . . . not to grieve, but to want cares and have a quiet soul, is the only pleasure of the world, as Seneca truly recites his opinion, not that of eating and drinking, which injurious Aristotle maliciously puts upon him, and for which he is mistaken . . . slandered without a cause, and lashed by all posterity.”62 A few pages later Burton offers another extended apology for Epicurean pleasures. From the very outset of his book, however, Burton hints that his choice of Democritus Jr. entails a more troubling confrontation with Epicureanism. 63

At first Democritus Jr. denies any association between his persona and “some prodigious tenent, or paradox of the earth’s motion, of infinite worlds, in injni to vacuo, e x fortuita atomorurn collisione, in an infinite waste, so caused by an accidental collision of motes in the sun, all which Democritus held, Epicurus and their master Leucippus of old maintained, and are lately revived by Copernicus, Brunus, and some others” (I. IS). In the digression on air, however, Burton approves Nicholas Hill’s theory of infinite worlds, and spends consider- able time explaining its “prodigious” corollaries. Between the garden

61. For a good discussion of Epicurean freedom and its influence on the pastoral, see Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, 1969), esp. Ch. 5 .

62. The Anatomy ofMelanrholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 1977), 11, 102. All future references appear in the text.

63. Democritus appears as the laughing philosopher in a number of literary contexts often without any sign of his atomism. See William Baldwin, A Treatise ojMorall Philosophie (1635), fol. I 5 ; R. Barckley, The Felicitie ofMan, or, His Summum Bonum (163 I ) , pp. 97-99. A jestbook put out in 1607 by Samuel Rowlands features Democritus. According to Norma Kroll, “The Democritean Universe in Webster’s T h e White Devil ,” in Drama in the Renaissance, ed. Clifford Davidson et al. (New York, 1986). pp. 236-54, the “indifferent chain of random action and reaction” in the play is signalled by the early reference to Democritus. No matter how imprecise his contemporaries were about the affiliations of Democritus, Burton knew exactly which sect the laughing philosopher had fathered.

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of Democritus and the open universe of Bruno, Burton poses the recurring dilemma of his Anatomy-the nature of freedom. In this sporadic essay on liberty, the physics and cosmography of Democ- ritus, Epicurus, Bruno “and some others” provide a metaphorical subtexture as well as a setting.

The author and his persona’s search for true liberty-from disease or madness, from patrons or other authorial impediments-is poised on the fulcrum between dispersion and fixity, release and restraint. From Burton’s statement about the prodigious tenets of the Epicure, or for that matter from Donne’s sermons and meditations, it is clear that the atom represents utter dispersion in the first half of the seventeenth century. 64 Democritus Jr. has a pervasive interest in dispersion; “an accidental collision of motes” is familiar to him on a number of levels. For one thing, as Devon Hodges argues, he is an anatomist who must winnow the body in order to find the form, cause, or “seat” of its disease.65 But Democritus Jr. frets his own accidental method and its fragmentation into too many texts or too many tasks. For his own dispersion, the persona has several tropes-for instance, the “ranging spaniel” or the ubiquity of “news”-yet he will describe himself in any of these terms rather than the atomism of Democritus.

Although Democritus Jr. fears a personal atomism, he also rejoices in the open and vital possibilities of dispersion. Eventually, Burton finds an Epicurean context for the unlimited playground on which his persona romps. In the digression on air the author celebrates the unconfinement of his thoughts among the infinite spaces of Bruno’s universe, despite fears that he has overstepped all proper bounds in soaring through the zodiac of his own wit. At times, when he resents the pressure exerted on him by patron and reader alike, Burton proposes-in the tradition of Sidney’s Apology or Nashe’s Lenten Stuf-a vacuum in which his ranging thoughts might exist like so many Epicurean gods, otiose and free from the restraints of the anxious world. Yet Burton himself is at pains to insist the very opposite-that freedom depends on severe restraints. Even as he rejects the tyranny of patrons, Burton declares that he like all divines gains freedom from his king, a good patron, and the church.

64. Donne. like Jonson, expressed disdain for Nicholas Hill’s theory of atoms, but in the sermons, devotions. and even in the love poetry (e.g.. “The Ecstasy”), Donne used the atom to great metaphorical effect. See Hirsch, “Donne’s Atoniies and Anatomies.”

6s. Rrnaissance Fictions qfAnaromy (Amherst, 1985).


Thus freedom can stand with Lucretius on a hill that surveys the world of tumult and fear below; such a liberty agrees with Burton’s unmewed hawk released into infinite space. Or freedom can thrive in a peaceful garden surrounded by the world, and accountable to that world only by rendering unto Caesar what is his-by obeying the falconer’s pull on the string. For Burton, there is something entirely fixed and stable about the Democritus who is a sage in the garden, and to whom the world must look for constant laughter and a sure remedy. This stability can signal an obedience to higher powers, but it can also claim the same kind of individuated fixity that the atom possesses, unbreakable in its obedience only to nature’s laws, whatever fortuities those laws dictate. So it is with political liberty. As Bacon suggests in The Advancement of Learning, the garden of Epi- curus can epitomize the order lacking in the vulgar world at large. O r as his reader Charles feared, it can permit-because it conceals-the most unsettling practices of disobedience, unknown to the authorities who remain outside its walls and perpetrated by “individuals” who imagine themselves beyond the reach or power of any demigod and his policies.

All these freedoms intersect in the garden of Burton’s Democritus Jr. In the 1620s and 1630s other scholars were beginning to discover that the heritage of Epicureanism was mixed when it came to freedom: Democritus denied human liberty while Epicurus allowed it in the most whimsical fashion. Like Lucretius, Burton negotiates the extremes. Democritus Jr.$ moments of disobedience are strident. In addition to his satire on patrons, Burton’s persona insists upon his unconfinement by readers and other “straits”: “If you deny me this liberty, upon these presumptions I will take it . . . I owe thee nothing (reader), I look for no favour at thy hands, I am independent, I fear not” (I, 122). In pursuit ofhis own autonomy-ofa personal atomism that is individual in the Epicurean sense of indivisible-Democritus invokes the Roman goddess of rural pleasures, Vacuna. Yet this goddess resembles in name the “vacuo” from which the persona has distanced himself. In an infinite waste or vacuum, the gods of Epi- curus recreate themselves without interruption; theirs is a lasting if ill- defined vacation, a true otium.66 Burton’s text, an exercise in idle writing, applauds the Epicurean desire for health of body and peace of

66. For the origins and meanings of “otium” in Epicurean contexts, see Rosenmeyer, T h e Green Cabinet, pp. 67-68.

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mind, for a life without cares. It goes further, however, to suggest the paradox of liberty as it relates to the gods in Epicurean thought. The gods play in the zodiac of their own wits out there in the intermundane spaces. But equally free are the blessed mortals who have come to realize that the gods are absent from human lives. Burton expresses a total commitment to the omniscient divinity, but he also wishes for the absence of those punitive and demanding authorities who want to control a fiction that they do not understand. For this complex state of affairs he has precedent in Bruno and Nicholas Hill, two Epicureans of a revival that Burton at once embraces and eschews. With Bruno and Hill, he searches for a political guardian who can nurture his work, only to imagine the vacuous apolitical spaces in which the work will be unleashed.

For Burton, the wish for unconstraint and autonomy is a fleeting one; even his Utopia delights in regulation and hierarchy. His roving wit always comes back to the “straits” that make it meaningful or even possible: “No, I recant, I will not, I care, I fear, I confess my fault, acknowledge a great offence” ( I , 122). Clearly Burton wants no kinship with the “prodigious” novelties of his day-for instance, with the mortalists who ranged from the radical sectary Richard Overton to the libertine with his refined materialism. In the world of atoms and pleasure there are so many ways in which liberty can go wrong; no wonder that Burton is so willing to let his persona just laugh. Close on the heels of Burton, Thomas Hobbes would argue that any alignment between a corpuscular or mechanical theory of the physical world and a defense of absolutism implies the erasure of those gods who have for so long sponsored kings and fictions alike. When Hobbes praises Davenant for removing the gods from his dramatic epic, the philosopher writes large what Inigo Jones, Thomas Carew, and Robert Burton inscribed in the margins of their culture: that mechanism and the atom were always at work somewhere in its representations, and that this presence spelled trouble from outside and inside the halls of the court.

For Hobbes, although no atomist in the end, the artifice of the monarch, that indivisible atom of rule, was in fact a mixed body comprising other particles, the people by whom power is made and set in m ~ t i o n . ” ~ Even his enemies, at least some of them, were

67. In addition to Kargon’s treatment of Hobbes, see also Tom Sorell, “The Science in Hobbes’s Politics.” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G . A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford,


compelled to allow for atomism in their celebration of divine right. For instance, Ralph Cudworth, insisting on a coalition among kings, providence, and immortal souls, tried to make Moses a better atomist than Epicurus, and atomism (if properly Christianized or Platonized) the true friend of the monarch.68 At mid-century the vexed and troubled politics of atomism was enacted on center stage, but this antimasque of the atom had been rehearsed in the decades between Nicholas Hill and Burton’s fifth edition.

From the beginning of the century, with Montaigne and the Hu- manists for pretexts, the myth of the Epicure invaded the strategies by which the early Stuarts defined their mirth, security, freedom, and authority. Epicurus and his sect haunted the early Stuarts at every turn; like Cupid and the atom, they infiltrated the desires and conflicts of Stuart culture from afar, unevenly but sure. The laugh of Democ- ritus and the great poem of Lucretius told the Stuarts that their gods and myths were at once so protected yet so exposed; that the masquers turned into refined atoms might disappear into thin air. In their consideration of pleasure or physics or providence, the early Stuarts found in Epicureanism the most ethereal yet material challenge to their own grasp on a world at once upside down and perfectly tranquil. While Epicurus helped the early Stuarts to divide themselves neatly into camps, his recuperation in the early decades of the century clarified just how messy cultural divisions could become. In their struggles with the dangers and delights of an Epicurean revival, the early Stuarts lived the theory that culture is both fixed and dispersed like the atoms falling through the sunlight of their brave new worlds.

U N I V E R S I T Y OF N O R T H C A R O L I N A A T C H A P E L HILL

1988). pp. 67-80; and Louise Tunick Sarasohn. The InJuence of Epicurean Philosophy on Seven- teenth-Century Ethical and Political Thought: The Moral Philosophy ofPierre Gassendi (Ann Arbor,

68. Ralph Cudworth, The Infellectual Sysfem ofthe Universe (1678); cf. Danton B. Sailor, 1979).

“Moses and Atomism,”]ournal ofthe Hisfory ofldeas, zs (1964). 3-16.

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