Henry More as reader of Marcus Aurelius

ABSTRACT

I examine Henry More’s engagement with Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, in his Enchiridion Ethicum. More quotes from Marcus’ Meditations throughout the Enchiridion, leading one commentator to note that More ‘mined the Meditations’ when writing his book. Yet More’s general attitude towards Stoicism is more often than not critical, especially when it comes to the passions. I shall argue that while More was clearly an avid reader of the Meditations, he read Marcus not as a Stoic but as a ‘non-denominational’ ancient moralist who confirms a range of doctrines that More finds elsewhere in ancient philosophy. In this sense More continues the Neoplatonic practice of downplaying doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers in order to construct a single ancient philosophical tradition. This is quite different from the approach of his contemporary and fellow Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, who was keen to highlight doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers.

KEYWORDS:

• Henry More
• Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism
• Cambridge Platonism
• Ralph Cudworth

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was prompted by an invitation to speak at the workshop on More’s Enchiridion Ethicum at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, in September 2014. I thank Christian Maurer for the invitation and all the participants for productive and enjoyable discussions. I thank Sarah Hutton for the invitation to contribute to this special issue and for her comments and editorial guidance. I also acknowledge comments from the journal’s anonymous reviewers. Finally I thank Michael Beaney for his comments and support through to publication.

ORCID

John Sellars http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2041-8549

Notes

1 The Enchiridion Ethicum (hereafter abbreviated to EE) was first published in 1668 and reprinted in 1669, 1679 (in More’s Opera Omnia), and 1685. It was translated into English under the title An Account of Virtue (hereafter AV) in 1690, with a second edition in 1701. In what follows I rely on the first editions of each version. ‘EE 2.8.2’ refers to Book 2, Chapter 8, Numbered Section 2. For convenience I also include the pagination of AV. I have also consulted the version of EE printed in More’s Opera Omnia, which differs from the first edition at various points.

2 Casaubon’s 1634 translation, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Roman Emperor, was reprinted in 1635, 1663, 1673, and 1692. His 1643 edition of the Greek text (with a facing Latin translation), Marci Antonini Imperatoris De Seipso Et Ad Seipsum libri XII, appears not to have been reprinted at all. See further Wickham Legg, ‘A Bibliography’, 26–7.

3 Gataker’s 1652 edition, Marci Antonini Imperatoris de rebus suis, sive de eis qae [sic] ad se pertinere censebat, Libri XII, was reprinted in 1697 and 1707. See again Wickham Legg, ‘A Bibliography’.

4 More quotes from the Meditations using Gataker’s section numbering of the text. For example in EE 2.1.6 he cites Meditations 7.55; Casaubon’s Book 7 only has 47 sections, whereas Gataker’s Book 7 is divided into 75 sections. Modern editions (by, e.g. Haines, The Communings with Himself; Farquharson, The Meditations; Dalfen, Marci Aurelii Antonini Ad Se Ipsum Libri XII) all follow Gataker’s division of the text.

5 There is no mention of More in Kraye, ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’ (or in the later revised version, ‘Marcus Aurelius and Neostoicism in Early Modern Philosophy’).

6 For general accounts of the reception of Stoicism, see e.g. Spanneut, Permanence du Stoïcisme, Neymeyr, Schmidt, and Zimmermann, Stoizismus, and, most recently, Sellars, The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition. On the Renaissance reception briefly outlined here, see Sellars ‘Stoicism’.

7 On the reception of Seneca in the sixteenth century, including ongoing debates regarding the authenticity of the correspondence with St Paul, see Kraye, ‘The Humanist as Moral Philosopher’.

8 On the circulation of the Meditations in the Renaissance, see Farquharson, The Meditations, xx–xxviii.

9 One of the few people to engage with Marcus before More was Jean Reuchlin (1455–1522) who, writing before the editio princeps of 1559, drew on a manuscript copy of the Meditations. See further Ceporina and Vesperini, ‘Quinze citations de Marc Aurèle dans Reuchlin’.

10 The label ‘Neostoic’ is a modern invention used to refer to a brand of Christianized Stoicism popular in the wake of Justus Lipsius. See further Lagrée, Le néostoïcisme.

11 Recently re-edited for the ‘Standard Edition’ of Shaftesbury’s works in 2011 and reviewed in this journal, BJHP 21/3 (2013), 613–16.

12 The translation was published anonymously in 1742; it has recently been re-edited in Hutcheson and Moor, The Meditations.

13 I quote the English printed in AV. In fact this comment is not in the first edition of EE. It is however in the version of EE printed in More’s Opera Omnia II.1, 25: De quibus omnibus contra Stoicos statuendum est, quod sunt sua natura bonae. Evidently EE was revised by More between 1668 and 1679. A quick glance at the second edition of 1669 reveals that this reference to the Stoics was already present then, so More must have revised the text almost immediately after first publication. Indeed, he revised it substantially: in the 1668 edition Book 1 has 8 chapters, while the 1669 edition is expanded to 13 chapters. All this highlights the need for a modern critical edition of the text.

14 This entire chapter is absent from the first edition of EE (see previous note). The Latin in the Opera Omnia II.1, 39 reads: Quae certe sunt multo aequiora atque humaniora quam quae reperias apud Stoicos & quosdam Platonicos.

15 See Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, § 59, as printed in More’s Opera Omnia II.2, 216: obstinatum inconsideratumque Stoicismum. The original English version published in 1656 does not mention the Stoics here. The English ‘sullen and inconsiderate Stoicism’ comes from Enthusiasm Explained of 1739 (‘Extracted from a Learned Piece of a late Eminent Writer’), 25.

16 More’s references to the Enchiridion follow the divisions of the text used in the seventeenth century that divided it into 79 chapters. In 1741 John Upton introduced a new division of the text in 52 chapters and then in 1798 Johannes Schweighäuser subdivided one of these to generate the 53 chapter division that has been used ever since. Here I provide More’s original reference followed by its equivalent in the current system.

17 EE quotes the Greek anechou kai apechou; AV has it in Latin: sustine et abstine.

18 I quote from Oldfather’s translation of Epictetus; the version in AV reads ‘Wherefore think upon God, and call upon his Holy Aid and Assistance’.

19 Here and in what follows I quote from the translations of the Meditations in AV.

20 Gataker’s edition of the Meditations prints to memnêsthai theôn (the parallel Latin translation reads meminisse Deorum), as do modern editions of the text. In the first edition of EE More prints to memnêsthai theou; in the Opera Omnia version of EE (II.1, 51) this is translated into Latin as Meminisse Dei.

21 In AV this is presented as part of the passage from the Meditations. In the text of EE printed in More’s Opera Omnia (II.1, 89) it is simply a gloss (prefaced with ‘i.e.’). It is absent in the first edition of EE.

22 Strictly speaking the Stoic God is one of two corporeal principles that constitute the cosmos.

23 See, e.g. EE 2.8.16 (AV 143) citing Meditations 6.47; EE 2.8.20 (AV 145) citing Meditations 12.27; EE 3.3.23 (AV 205); EE 3.4.2 (AV 209) citing Meditations 7.54 (not ‘2.54’ misprinted in AV) and 3.11, respectively. Note also (on kindness) EE 3.7.4 (AV 233) citing Meditations 11.18.9 (not ‘10.18’ in EE or ‘1.18’ in AV).

24 I quote the English version in AV 161. The Latin in EE 2.10.2 reads: Sic istiusmodi bonorum praesentia nihil fere addit, nec detrahit quicquam ipsorum absentia Beatitudinis perfectioni; quandoquidem cum Virtutis perfectione comparata nullam ad eam proportionem habere plane deprehenduntur.

25 On this notion in Marcus Aurelius see Berryman, ‘The Puppet and the Sage’.

26 Cudworth’s material on free will was intended to become the third part of The True Intellectual System but was never published. It survives in a series of manuscripts now in the British Library (BL Addit. 4978–82), one of which (4978) was published posthumously in 1838 as A Treatise of Freewill. On Cudworth’s engagement with Stoicism in this text, see Sellars, ‘Stoics Against Stoics’.

27 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

28 See Pascal’s Entretien avec M. de Saci (Oeuvres complètes, 560–74, esp. 563).

29 On these two points see Pitkin, ‘Erasmus, Calvin, and the Faces of Stoicism’, 150–4.

30 See Sedley, The Philosophy of Antiochus, 80–103, for Antiochus’ role as historian of philosophy and 334–46 for the ancient evidence for his views. On the subsequent development of this approach, see Karamanolis, Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?

31 See further Santinello, Models of the History of Philosophy, 14–25.

32 For the reception of Simplicius’ commentary, see Hadot, ‘La survie du Commentaire de Simplicius’, discussing both Poliziano and Smith.

33 Hall, in his Henry More, 71, comments that Cudworth’s approach ‘paralleled that of his friend Henry More’ (although Hall qualifies this by saying that he makes ‘no pretence here of examining Cudworth’s possible role as an historian of philosophy’). By contrast, Santinello, Models of the History of Philosophy, 282–5, highlights the differences between the approaches of More and Cudworth, especially with reference to their focus on the occult and scholarship respectively.

34 See Sellars, ‘Is God a Mindless Vegetable?’ on Cudworth’s approach to the history of philosophy and, 131, his attention to disputes within the Stoa.

35 More’s traditionalism here, if we can call it that, may in part simply reflect the fact that he was writing a textbook rather than attempting to offer anything radically new. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

36 This comes from James’ preface to his translation of Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks, 45.

37 See further Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 127–48, and Sellars, ‘Is God a Mindless Vegetable?’

38 More, The Immortality of the Soul, 3.18.12, p. 534 (cf. Immortalitas Animae, in Opera Omnia II.2, p. 454).

39 Both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are discussed in relation to Stoicism in Maurer, ‘Stoicism and the Scottish Enlightenment’.