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Castiglione and the Nicomachean Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred D. Menut
Alfred D. Menut*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

As though from a sudden awareness of the ethical void in which we have been living since the first World War, a growing number of scholars, several among them Americans, have lately been turning their attention eagerly and fruitfully to the doctrine of the gentleman. They have studied its varied aspects in different national environments and have examined painstakingly its effects upon human conduct as this is reflected in the various literatures of Western Europe. A large segment of that vast aggregation of dust-laden volumes bearing the forbidding name “didactic literature” has been taken from library shelves and scanned anew in this effort to lay bare the minutest details of the doctrine. The initiator of this contemporary revival of interest in the ideals which nourished the gentleman appears to have been Maurice Magendie, whose study of the doctrine in seventeenth-century France gave rise to a healthy polemic regarding the appropriate scope and methods of literary history. This work was followed by Ruth Kelso's Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, a model of erudite scholarship especially rich in bibliographical lore. Fittingly enough in a German work of the totalitarian period, August Hoyler's Gentleman Ideal and Gentleman Erziehung, dealing with the doctrine in England, sets up the Führerprinzip as the nucleus of the ideal. J. E. Mason's Gentlefolk in the Making continues Kelso's investigations down into the eighteenth century. The Italian contribution to the doctrine has been summarily discussed by F. R. Bryson. Written in semi-popular vein, In Praise of Gentlemen expresses the nostalgic longing of H. E. Sedgwick for a return to the social ideals of our forefathers. Perhaps the most complete analysis of the workings of the doctrine is found in E. Wingfield-Stratford's Making of a Gentleman. The number of these investigations is alone sufficient to show the interest which the subject holds for the literary and social historian, in spite of the doubt cast in some quarters on the present vitality of the ideal of the gentleman as an active social force. There is good reason to believe that we shall presently witness attempts, based upon these studies, to reinterpret the literature of the Renaissance as a reflection, in part, of the workings of the doctrine upon the minds of authors as disparate as Rabelais and Shakespeare or Spenser and Cervantes. Recalling the fruitful results obtained during the past half-century from the application of the investigations of Renaissance Platonism to literary interpretation, who can doubt that a similar success awaits the scholar who will launch forth upon a similar quest concerning the literary influence exerted by the concept of the “perfect gentleman,” of which concept Platonic love was but a part, however important?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 1943 , pp. 309 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

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References

1 La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l'honnêteté en France de 1600 à 1660 (Paris, 1925), 2 vols. The polemic is summarized in P. Van Tieghem, Tendances nouvelles en histoire littéraire, Etudes françaises fondées sur l'initiative de la Soc. des Professeurs français en Amérique, 22e cahier (Paris, 1930).

2 University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. xiv, nos. 1–2 (Urbana, 1929).

3 Leipzig, 1933.

4 Philadelphia, 1935.

5 The Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy (New York, 1935).

6 Boston, 1935.

7 London, 1938.

8 An intelligent beginning in this direction is J. L. Shanley's dissertation A Study of Spenser's Gentleman (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1940).

9 Cambridge, Mass., 1937.

10 R. Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman, etc., p. 71

11 J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (tr. Middlemore), London, 1904, p. 435.

12 Gargantua, ch. 57.

13 Kelso, op. cit., pp. 96–99; F. R. Bryson, The Point of Honor in 16th-Century Italy, pp. 2–14.

14 The first edition by Vittoriano Cian appeared in Florence, 1894; it has been republished several times with numerous editorial emendations. The edition by Michele Scherillo (Milan, 1928) deserves special praise for the fullness of its notes.

15 On courtly love, cf. the excellent summary by T. A. Kirby, Chaucer's Troilus, a Study in Courtly Love (University, Louisiana, 1940).

16 Cf. the notes of Cian and Scherillo. Perhaps the best brief account of the rise of Platonic love is that of J. Festiguière, La Philosophie de l'amour de Morsile Ficin (Coimbra, 1923), 169 pp. N. A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), is a valuable guide. For the history of the Medicean Academy, Arnaldo della Torre's Storia dell'Accademia platonica di Firenze (Florence, 1902), remains indispensable.

17 For convenience, citations are from Opdycke's translation, The Booh of the Courtier (New York: Liveright, 1929). Cf. ibid., p. 235 (iii, 72).

18 Kelso's excellent chapter on the moral code of the gentleman, op. cit., pp. 70–110, is little concerned with origins.

19 Cf. Jowett's translation, The Dialogues of Plato, ed. 1871, iii, 306–309. The Phaedo and Philebus contain important passages concerning the virtues. On the evolution of the concept of virtue among the Greeks, cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, trans, by Gilbert Highet (New York: 1939), especially pp. 1–12.

20 The combination first appears in St. Ambrose, De Offciis, an attempt to christianize Cicero's work of the same title. The discussion in St. Augustine occurs in his De Morions ecclesiae caiholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum, ch. 25. Cf. O. Dittrich, Geschichte der Ethik, iii, 137–156 (Mittelalter bis zur Kirchenreformation, Leipzig, 1926).

21 L. K. Born, The Education of a Christian Prince by D. Erasmus translated with an Introduction on Erasmus and on Ancient and Mediaeval Political Thought (New York, 1936). A. H. Gilbert, “Notes on the Influence of the Secretum secretorum,” Speculum, iii (1928), 84–98.

22 C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1927), p. 342.

23 On the five mediaeval Latin versions of the Ethics, cf. Maisire Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Ethiques, ed. Menut (New York, 1940), Introduction, pp. 36–40.

24 Convivio, IV, xvii. Citations from the Ethics are numerous in De Monarchia; in De Vulgari Eloquentia there are five; Inferno, xi, 79–80, à propos the three dispositions which Heaven abides not, mentions the Ethics by name:

“Non ti rimembra di quelle parole
Colle quai la tua Etica pertratta…“

25 Cf. Convivio, iv, iii, 21–80; Le Roman de la rose, ed. Langlois, ll. 18607–18760.

26 George Lacombe, ed., Aristoteles latinus, Pars prior (Rome, 1939).

27 Taddeo's Italian rendering is contained in C. Marchesi, L'Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione latina medievale (Messina, 1904), Appendix ii. It is a translation of the greatly abbreviated version of the Ethics known as the Summa alexandrina Ethicorum, made from the Arabic by Hermannus Allemanus in 1243–4. Brunette's French version begins: “Ci commence de Ethique d'Aristote. Tous ars et toutes doctrines et toutes euvres et tous triemenz sont por querré aucun bien …” Cf. Li Livres dou tresor, ed. Chabaille (Paris, 1863), p. 255.

28 Oresme's was the first complete vernacular translation and commentary. Two curious references to the Ethics appear in the Pelerinage de la vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguilleville, a contemporary of Oresme:

“Quar ce qui est bon a nuclon
Si n'est pas bon a estalon.
C'est ce que Aristote dit
En Ethiques ou est escrit.“
(ed. Stürzinger, ll. 4705–08)
“Ethiques s'avoie leti
Tout recordé et tout sceü
Et aprez rien n'en ouvrasse,
Aussi com cil qui est cheü
En sa rois et en sa nasse.“
(Ibid., ll. 11169–74)

29 Cf. M. J. Pinet, Christine de Pisan (Paris, 1927), p. 358. The English edition bears the title Here begynneth the booke whiche is called the body of Polycye (London: J. Skot, 1521). The French remains unpublished.

30 This summary was twice published; Zaragoza, 1489 (?) and Seville: Ungert, 1493.

31 Published Zaragoza, 1509.

32 Brum's translation was made about 1420.

33 Made for Cosimo de' Medici, about 1455.

34 P. Monnier, Le Quattrocento (Paris, 1901), ii, 75.

35 It is precisely here that Castiglione acted to bring about the convergence of the two systems.

36 Ed. cit., p. 8.

37 Ibid., p. 9.

38 Ibid., p. 11.

39 Ibid., p. 118.

40 Ibid., p. 270. Castiglione follows Aristotle in holding magnanimity as the supreme virtue.

41 Ibid., p. 271.

42 Ibid., p. 244.

43 Ibid., p. 253.

44 Ibid., p. 267.

45 Ibid., pp. 104–105.

46 Op. cit.. p. 71.

47 Ed. cit., p. 24.

48 Ibid., p. 250.

49 Translation by H. Rackham in Loeb Classical Library, London and New York, 1926, p. 71.

50 Ed. cit., p. 265.

51 Trans. Rackham, p. 75.

52 Ed. cit., p. 274.

53 Trans. Rackham, p. 111.

54 Ibid., p. 95.

55 Castiglione cites Aristotle directly twice, in iii, 15 and 16, from the Problemata, referring to him as “a great philosopher” and “your philosopher.” Scherillo indicates a few passages, in iv, 29, 30 and 34, indicative of his acquaintance with the Politics. Both Cian and Scherillo attribute two passages, in iv, 29 and 40, to the Magna Moralia. However, since both the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia are in fact mere adaptations of the Nicomachean Ethics, the accuracy of these attributions remains doubtful.

56 Ed. cit., p. 283.