by David Riggs
Since ‘the nature of things has provided us with no knowledge of boundaries’, Cicero could see no way around this problem: ‘In no case at all if we are questioned by degrees – is he rich or poor, famous or obscure?… – do we know how much is to be added or subtracted before we can answer definitely.’ Rather, he continues, ‘this class of error spreads so widely that I don’t see where it may not get to.’ Dialecticians prized the heap precisely because it revealed the void that underlay their own methods – so that, in Cicero’s fine summation, ‘this same science destroys at the end the steps that came before, like Penelope unweaving her web.’
The ‘argument of little by little’ is notoriously effective at erasing the boundaries that demarcate different classes of person. How many hairs does a man have to lose before he turns bald? If Shakespeare’s King Lear requires a hundred knights to accompany him, how many does he have to lose before he turns into a mere mortal: one? fifty? ninety-nine? When does Tamburlaine cross the line that separates a mere mortal from a king? At what point does Dr Faustus join the ranks of the damned: when he commits the sin against the Holy Ghost? or signs a blood-pact with the devil? or has sexual intercourse with a demon? or makes his final exit with one? The same radical instability haunts modern debates about abortion. When does an embryo become a person?
The dialecticians’ all-out investment in probability testified to their belief that certainty is either trivial or unattainable: for ‘there is nothing which may not be disputed, and debated on all sides with great virtuosity. In all these matters, therefore, probabilities are examined, since necessities cannot be.’ Mr Jones assured his students that dialectic has no intellectual agenda, that it is just a way of finding and arranging arguments. The clever ones took this disclaimer with a grain of salt. Dialectic provided Renaissance undergraduates with a prolonged education in scepticism. Although Cicero and his modern followers insisted that dialectic was simply a method, they envisioned a clear-cut path leading from dialectic to a sceptical philosophy of life: sceptics can believe in anything that has enough probability to secure their provisional assent, so long as they do not confuse it with the truth.
The dialecticians’ eclectic search for ‘probable’ doctrines shaped their understanding of religion. Cicero agreed with Plato and Aristotle that religion is the foundation of public morality, but he remained sceptical about choosing among rival creeds. In ‘this medley of conflicting opinions one thing is certain,’ Cicero concludes. ‘Though it is possible that they are all of them false, it is impossible that more than one of them is true.’ Cicero’s position opened the way for a sceptical critique of modern faiths. Consider the case of Marlowe’s plays. Earlier English drama had opposed good Christians to bad pagans, or more recently, good Protestants to bad Catholics. Marlowe’s works assess the rival claims of Muhammad, Christ and the classical gods, or of Christian, Muslim and atheist beliefs, without arriving at any definitive conclusions.
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Marlowe’s afternoon lecture on rhetoric complemented his morning class on dialectic. The Cambridge tutor Richard Holdsworth advised his BA students that ‘those two faculties cannot be parted asunder’, for ‘Logic without Oratory is dry and unpleasing and Oratory without Logic is but empty babbling.’ Holdsworth explains that the studies ‘of the afternoon’, namely ‘History Oratory, & Poetry’, were
not less necessary than the first [i.e. logic], if not more useful, especially Latin & Oratory … without those you will be baffled in your disputes, disgraced and vilified in Public examinations, laughed at in speeches & Declamations. You will never dare to appear in any act of credit in the University, nor must you look for Preferment by your Learning only.
The dialecticians’ embrace of credibility, the looser standard of proof that pertains to oratory, opened the way for a merger between the sister arts of logic and rhetoric. The logician took over the job of finding arguments from the rhetorician, while the rhetorician clothed the logician’s arguments in elegant figurative language. Gabriel Harvey, a university lecturer in Rhetoric at Cambridge and the author of an influential book on Cicero, urged undergraduates to ‘employ the double analysis which we have hitherto been using and apply both dialectic and rhetoric continually’. Since the figures were grounded in dialectic, Harvey continued, ‘Merely pointing out … the ornaments of tropes and the embellishments of figures, without indicating the stores of arguments … seems to me tantamount to displaying a body that is surpassingly beautiful and lovely, but devoid of sense and life.’ If the King’s School taught Marlowe to speak like a Roman, Cambridge showed him how to think like one.
Persuasion was the royal road to any destination. Harvey agreed with the French dialectician Peter Ramus that the classical definition of the orator as ‘a good man, who excels in the art of discourse’ was ‘entirely defective. Why? Because the definition of any profession whatever is redundant which involves more than is contained within the subject matter of that art.’ Where Quintilian writes that ‘the orator will bring his activities to a close in a manner worthy of a blameless life spent in the pursuit of the noblest of professions’, Harvey notes in the margin: ‘It is of the greatest importance to the best of Orators to be exceedingly “Pragmatic”. As it especially profits the most distinguished “Pragmatic” to be a superlative Orator.’ Moral goodness was superfluous to the orator’s vocation. Persuasion was simply a means to an end – any end.
Marlowe learned this lesson well. His poetry and plays – from his signature lyric ‘Come live with me and be my love’ to Tamburlaine the Great to his erotic narrative Hero and Leander – emphasize the power of persuasive speech to move the will. Tamburlaine’s ‘working words’ compel admiration because they rally his makeshift forces to overcome the mightiest armies in the world. Leander qualifies as a superlative orator because he talks the most beautiful virgin in the world into sleeping with him. Morality takes a back seat to pragmatism.
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During his third and fourth years at Cambridge, Marlowe moved on to moral and natural philosophy. His preparation in rhetoric and dialectic left him ill prepared to work with Aristotle, who remained the dominant figure in the European university curriculum. The Oxford professor John Case’s undergraduate textbook on Aristotle’s Ethics brings out the peculiar limitations of Marlowe’s training in philosophy.
Case’s Mirror of Moral Questions in Aristotle’s Complete Ethics (1584) is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the Ethics, organized along the lines of an endless dialectical disputation. Case begins each chapter by posing a Question to Aristotle, who takes the part of the Answerer. When Case arrives at the chapter on magnanimity, for example, he asks, ‘Is greatness of soul a virtue?’ He gives Aristotle’s answer (yes), cites authorities on both sides of the question and then goes on the attack: ‘No virtue is the contrary of a virtue. But greatness of soul is the contrary of a virtue, indeed humility. Therefore, greatness of soul is not a virtue.’ The Answerer poses a counter-argument, and the two imaginary speakers conduct a disputation on the printed page. The Questioner has no settled convictions. He just opposes whatever the Answerer says. Nor do these mini-disputations ever lead to a synthetic compromise position that signifies agreement and closure. The Questioner and the Answerer just exchange probable arguments on both sides of the question until it is time for the next chapter of the Ethics.
Aristotle says that dialectic is ‘useful for the philosophical sciences because the ability to survey the puzzles on each side of a question makes it easier to notice what is true and false’. True and false were, however, alien concepts in the Elizabethan arts course; for Marlowe and his fellow undergraduates, philosophy was the puzzles on each side of a question. The Scholar had come to the intellectual crossroads of his undergraduate education: how did students trained in rhetoric and dialectic cope with ‘the philosophical sciences’?
Marlowe recalled this predicament when he wrote Dr Faustus. In the opening scene, the recent graduate decides that he will devote himself to
philosophy – until he tries to conceive of what that would mean. ‘[L]evel at the end of every art,’ he begins, ‘And live and die in Aristotle’s works: / Sweet Analytics, ’tis thou hast ravished me!’ But this choice only satisfies him for the space of a single line: ‘Bene disserere est finis logices,’ he continues, ‘Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?’ The dialecticians’ answer to this question was yes, that is what logicians do. This answer understandably fails to satisfy Dr Faustus, who asks at once, ‘Affords this art no greater miracle?’ (I.i.4–9)
Dr Faustus imagines that the definition he quotes in Latin (‘To dispute well is the end of logic’) comes from the ‘Sweet Analytics’, Aristotle’s two great treatises on formal logic. But the Doctor has never read these books and does not know what he is talking about. The rejected definition comes from Cicero, not Aristotle. The dialectician Peter Ramus adopted Cicero’s tagline as a slogan and repeatedly cites it in his textbooks. Dr Faustus, the dialectician’s disciple, scarcely understands what logic is. He can only conceive of it as a way of arguing about philosophical problems because that is what the dialecticians have taught him to do. It never occurs to him that logic could be a way of doing philosophy, of actually solving problems. Although Dr Faustus imagines that he stands on the brink of a brilliant career, his situation is akin to that of a second-year Cambridge undergraduate. He can ‘make our schools ring with sic probo’ (I.ii.2) – thus I prove – but he has no clue about where to go from there.
The long-range solution to the rupture between dialectic and ‘the philosophical sciences’ lay in the scholastic revival that began in the 1590s, and gradually drew Oxford and Cambridge back into the mainstream of continental philosophy. John Milton learned more about scholastic philosophy at Cambridge in the earlier seventeenth century than Christopher Marlowe did fifty years previously. By the 1620s Richard Holdsworth could assign his Cambridge tutees up-to-date textbooks on Aristotle’s logic, along with annotated editions of all his major works. In the absence of these resources, Marlowe’s generation found alternative ways of doing philosophy. The most important of these, for Marlowe’s purposes, was poetry.
Humanists believed ‘that poetry is a kind of elementary philosophy, which, taking us in our very boyhood, introduces us to the art of life’. Sidney argues that poetry is a superior kind of philosophy: for the poet ‘yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description’. In the traditional liberal arts course, Ovid’s Metamorphoses stood squarely between lower-level work in grammar, rhetoric and logic and upper-level work in natural philosophy. His fables served as exercise books in grammar school, but their subject matter was nature. When the dislodgement of Aristotle created a new opening for Ovid’s ‘strange philosophy of turned shapes’, Elizabethan printers and booksellers responded with editions of his poetry aimed at the academic book market. The first English imprints of Ovid’s Latin Works appeared in the 1570s and early 1580s. In 1574 the enterprising Thomas Vautrollier acquired exclusive rights to print Ovid in Latin for a period of ten years. The Cambridge University Press brought out George Sabinus’s Ethical, Scientific and Historical Interpretation of Ovid’s Fables (1584) when Vautrollier’s patent expired, just as Marlowe was embarking on the study of natural philosophy. ‘Poetry is nothing’, Sabinus explains, ‘if not philosophy joined together with metre and story.’ In the same vein, Sebastian Verro’s Ten Books of Natural Philosophy (1581) taught undergraduates that philosophy was nothing if not poetry informed by scientific ideas.
Dialecticians maintained that poems are repositories of scientific knowledge. Quintilian taught them that ‘there are numerous passages in almost every poem based on the most intricate questions of natural philosophy.’ Seton says that a vivid description is equivalent to a scientific definition and refers the student to the Palace of the Sun in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Carter sums up this tradition in a handy formula, explaining that poetic definitions are less abstract than philosophical ones: ‘in poetic description genus is for the most part omitted, whereas the contrary should be done in dialectical description.’
Marlowe knew from grammar school that lifelike representations lent an aura of reality to fictional entities like the Palace of the Sun. Poetic descriptions produced an illusion of presence, ‘so that our hearer or reader is carried away and seems to be in the audience at a theatre’. Now he learned that vivid description was the equivalent of a scientific definition. He was quick to grasp the dramatic potential of this figure. The you-are-there sensation of being ‘at a theatre’ took on even greater force when the protagonist was there, in the theatre, creating his own reality. ‘View but his picture in this tragic glass,’ says the Prologue to Tamburlaine, ‘And then applaud his fortunes as you please’ (7–8).
Ovid’s philosophy was naturalistic and libertine. Where Aristotle’s universe is eternal, and its God an unmoved mover, the Metamorphoses offers a universal history of changes, extending from creation – when ‘a god or nature’ fashioned the four elements out of chaos – to the poet’s own lifetime. The commentators’ philosophical explanations of these metamorphoses turn on the cosmological principle of harmony in discord. Ovid’s divine creator symbolizes mind, his chaos stands for matter. The history of Creation unfolds in encounters between mind and matter, the warring elements, love and strife, lusty gods and reluctant maidens. The Book of Genesis notwithstanding, creation is an ongoing process and the universe is polytheistic. Marlowe faithfully reproduced Ovid’s materialistic, ever-changing cosmos in Tamburlaine the Great and Hero and Leander. He recognized early in his career that a full-scale critique of Judeo-Christian morality would require a pagan creation myth and a Greco-Roman cosmology.
Ovid’s creation story relates the origins of the universe, the world, plants and animals and man and woman, together with the fall into wickedness, the race of giants, the Flood and its two virtuous survivors – stories that recall the parallel account in Genesis. Although they set out to show that pagan tradition corroborates the Scriptures, the commentators’ concerted effort to grasp Ovid’s world on its own terms compromised the Bible’s privileged status as the master code of revealed natural religion. At the same time, the chronological reach of humanist scholarship made it increasingly difficult to argue that the events recounted in Genesis had occurred at the beginning of history. Baines quoted Marlowe as saying that ‘many Authors of antiquity have assuredly written of above 16 thousand years ago, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years.’
The ancient historians Polybius, Plutarch and Livy further revealed that Roman statesmen had introduced the fear of the gods in order to fashion law-abiding subjects: ‘the only resource is to keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort.’ These disclosures gave new meaning to the question that Ovid’s philosopher-hero Pythagoras poses in the last book of the Metamorphoses: ‘O race of men, stunned with the chilling fear of death, why do you dread the Styx, the shades and empty names, the stuff that poets manufacture, and their fabled sufferings of a world that never was?’ Pythagoras introduced Renaissance undergraduates to the ancient (un)belief system of Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius: hell is a fable, and belief in hell a craven superstition; the body metamorphoses into the elements after death; poets and rulers invented divine retribution to keep men in awe of authority. Renaissance divines understandably concluded that epicureans were atheists.
The philosopher John Case encountered clouds of these unbelieving ‘scorpions and locusts’ at Oxford. Laurence Chaderton, the Master of Emmanuel College Cambridge, wondered ‘Whence come such swarms of atheists?’ Many emerged from within the college walls. Atheism came readily enough to undergraduates who had studied the ancient prototypes of modern unbelief. The ‘monstrous opinions’ that Baines attributed to Marlowe included many doctrines that hark back to the blasphemer’s college reading. Marlowe’s claim that ‘the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’ and his advice ‘not
to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins’ come right out of Ovid, Lucretius, Polybius and Livy.
Tamburlaine invokes Ovid’s creation myth to justify his winner-take-all ideology, and dies alluding to epicurean teachings on death. Small wonder that Marlowe’s protagonist was soon dubbed ‘that atheist Tamburlaine’. The epicurean Dr Faustus asserts that ‘hell’s a fable’ (II.i.129). The Machiavellian Prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta boasts that: ‘I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance’ (14–15). Atheism as such was not the issue in Marlowe’s case. Renaissance academics and statesmen inherited the Roman view that philosophers and rulers were entitled to a sphere of private unbelief. Marlowe took the further, more provocative step of circulating epicurean ideas among the general public.
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The Cambridge BA course prepared graduates for careers in the Church, but taught them little about Christianity. Holdsworth noted that ‘It is necessary to have some entrance in Divinity before you commence’, and advised his students to obtain a theological handbook before their graduation exercises. Marlowe’s generation used Wolfgang Musculus’s Commonplaces of the Christian Religion – for all intents and purposes a recapitulation of Nowell’s Catechism.
Twice a week, one of the college Fellows explicated a passage of the Scriptures, ‘whereupon he taketh occasion to entreat of some commonplace of doctrine, the which he proveth by Scripture and doctors’, after morning prayers. Since the students then went to ‘the same lectures … at the same hours as upon the former days’, these lessons did not take up much of their time. On Fridays at five o’clock, Marlowe listened to two of the Fellows dispute about ‘a problem in Divinity, which continueth two hours’. Although the Fellows argued over fundamental points of Christian doctrine, the rules of dialectical disputation required them to argue for and against every thesis, and thus to uphold heretical or even blasphemous positions. Henry Barrow recalled that these exercises treated God’s word ‘as a tennis ball’.
