Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: The Centrality of the Regime to Political Science. Warsaw: Wydawnicra Universytetu Warsawskiego, 2016.

 

This is exactly the kind of book that has long needed to be written, a book correcting the tendency of political scientists to reduce politics to sub-political categories—race, class, and gender being only the latest iteration of the practice. In so doing, political scientists have supposed it more scientific to make political science apolitical, confusing the political with mere partisanship. It is as if America’s civil-social egalitarianism—its democracy, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word—has inclined students of politics to such atomizing reductionism. Bates stoutly refuses to go along, aiming to restore the classical idea of the regime to its rightful place in political thought.

I look forward to a second edition. The excellencies of this one are vitiated by a few missteps; they are easily corrected. Meanwhile, the first edition is well worth inclusion in the reading list of any introductory university course in political science.

Bates begins by rightly distinguishing the modern state—that modern invention of Machiavelli, who intended it as an instrument for his projected conquest of ‘Fortuna’ and of nature—from the longstanding polis or ‘city-state.’ He goes too far, however, in contending that Machiavelli’s lo stato actually replaces the regime. He contends that the fundamental contrast isn’t between the state and the polis but between the state and the regime. The modern state, according to its philosophic progenitors, amounts to an act of human will aiming at a unified whole; this is indeed no regime. The modern state aims at being a “truly one united whole” having a supposed ‘general will.’ True enough, but it would be much better to say that Machiavelli himself distinguishes two regimes in the modern state—principalities and republics, rule of the one and rule of the many—and that his silence about regimes of the few, of aristocrats and of oligarchs, bespeaks his intention to centralize political communities, to get rid of those intermediary rulers through whom the regimes, the rulers, of ancient city-states and empires, along with those who tried to rule the more recent feudal ‘states,’ had needed to filter their authority in order to govern the people.

This has meant that all modern states have needed bureaucracies of some sort, agents of the regime of those states, and that bureaucrats’ loyalties to the regime are often suspect, as they maneuver themselves into a position of quasi-independence within the states. In so doing, bureaucrats become elements of the regimes of modern states, a status that has bedeviled presidents and prime ministers but also tyrants and despots—making bureaucracy a regime problem that cuts across all regimes in modernity.

How did political communities begin? After all, there remain places in the world in which extended families or clans count for more than any association of families, and even well-established modern states often see important family networks achieving predominance. Bates agrees with Aristotle in considering the family or household to differ from the polis in kind and not merely in size, the polis being the most authoritative form of association among humans. Oddly, he claims that Aristotle’s Politics never shows “how or why the polis became authoritative,” although Aristotle clearly describes the inadequacy of the family to the task of achieving a self-sufficient human life. But in foreclosing an (as it were) intra-Aristotelian account of political authority, he turns to an excellent and older source, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy; in this he cogently follows the scholarship of Heinrich Meier, who sees the political significance of the Greeks’ shift from worshipping the gods of the Underworld to the worship of the Olympians. “As Meier contends, the discovery of the political occurs when political life through community derived decisions override family/kinship derived decision processes.”

In the first play, the Agamemnon, the great military leader of their Greeks, returning to his city, Argos, after defeating the Trojans, brings home “many great prizes,” not the least being Cassandra, a Trojan princess. His wife, Clytemnestra, has proven no less unfaithful, forming a erotic-political alliance with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s “political enemy.” She justifies her animosity in view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, whom he made an offering to the gods as a means of winning their aid in the war. Clytemnestra murders her husband and king in revenge, enabling Aegisthus to accede to the throne. The citizens of Argos—really the subjects of the usurping royal couple—can think of nothing more than to wait for Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, “to remove the newly imposed tyranny.” “Although the citizens can easily rise up and kill both murderers, they lack the authority or sanction” to do so. Only the son has divine sanction to take vengeance on his father’s killers. “The city of Argos is thus reduced to the household of Agamemnon, where only the head of the household has authority to pursue policy”—ruled, as it is, under the authority of the gods of the Underworld, the Furies, the gods of families.

Orestes does return, and does kill his mother and stepfather, on command from the Olympian god, Apollo. The goddess Athena calls a jury trial of Orestes, and persuades the Furies, who would otherwise continue the family revenge-cycle, to integrate themselves into a new political order. The Furies pursue Orestes because he killed his mother, whereas his mother merely killed her husband, no blood relative. (This is the significance of the Biblical injunction, that a woman shall leave her parents upon wedding her husband, and they “shall be one flesh”—constitute a new ‘blood tie.’)  “The household bonds, expressed as kin loyalty, force one to a cycle of revenge, in order to right wrongs done to the family. There is no end to vengeance and no peace. The desire for peace, which is needed for the fulfillment of human happiness (eudaimonia), entails that one rise above one’s own—kin ties—to some other claim that is more authoritative. This other claim is that of the polis.” “Human beings must associate with more than their own kin in order to live well.” “The old gods are aligned with the household and the new gods are aligned with the city”; if human beings intend to live well, they must change their gods—or rather add some who are capable of making peace with the old gods. Human beings must become citizens.

The old gods don’t surrender easily. They hate the city, partly because they denigrate speech. “They will not let any mere words dictate to them,” the building-blocks of the law by which the city will be ruled, or rather through which the new gods will rule in the better interest of the citizens. More, the Furies are too powerful to be forced into line. Apollo unwisely uses words in an attempt to “exclude, reject, or spurn the Furies,” who are far too spirited to bow to the contempt of the Olympians. But Athena “offers them a new and more important role to play in the new dispensation. She offers them beauty and a role in defending the political community, whereas Apollo merely desires their downfall.” Bates calls this “an appeal to the vanity of the Furies,” but it is really an appeal to their thumos, their spiritedness. For Aristotle, it is well to notice, the bond between husband and wife is political, based on oaths, on choice, not merely on ‘biology’—generation or ‘blood.’ 

With respect to the political, Bates observes, Aeschylus identifies two cities with two different regimes. Argos is an elected kingship, Athens “some form of limited democracy.” Once elected, an Argive king passes on his title to his son. In murdering her husband and installing her lover as the monarch, Clytemnestra changes the Argive regime to tyranny. “It is tyrannical in that it both violates the law, nomos, of succession of the title of king from father to son and is rule over unwilling subjects.” That is, under the Argive regime “it is too easy to confuse the household of the king with the city”; “the inaction of the citizens of Argos and their awaiting Orestes to set things right shows that in Argos there is no distinction between household and city,” and that the lack of this distinction inclines the citizens (really subjects) to passivity. Political assassination is really anti-political, striking at the household—in which bond between husband and wife constitutes the one, limited, political dimension of life—and “also at the basis of all non-violent human association,” and “therefore the possibility of human flourishing—happiness.” The rule of sheer force emulates not the political, consensual, husband-wife bond in the family, nor the kingly rule of parents over children—rightly aimed at the good of the children. The rule of force emulates rather the rule of master over slave, a form of rule performed for the good of the master not the slave, the familial equivalent of despotism in the city. And tyranny is even worse than despotism, lacking even legal status and “treating persons as though they are merely slaves.”

This last formulation is odd. Are slaves not persons? Persons treated as if they are not persons, but machines, to be sure, but by nature persons nonetheless. Aristotle does of course identify a human category of ‘natural slaves,’ those whose best work is not self-directed because they are incapable of reasoning and need to be commanded by those who are capable. Aristotle suggests that such persons are fewer in number than one might want to think, if one is a master of slaves. Bates’s later critique of Abraham Lincoln should probably be considered in this light.

“If Argos were truly a city, the citizens themselves could have set affairs right and avoided the fate of Orestes. But Argos is not a city and the chorus are not citizens, rather they are subjects of the household and are totally without authority in this matter. This is why after Orestes takes vengeance on the murderers, the dramatic action must leave Argos and go to Athens.” That is the setting of the final play in Aeschylus’ trilogy.

The Athenian regime is a form of the rule of ‘the many.’ Even the goddess Athena “defers to the city.” Being the goddess of reason, Athena will not challenge the Furies directly. “In originally agreeing to having Athena hear the case, the Furies submitted their case to be judged by a deity who was a third party, not directly involved in the case. however, by deferring the authority of the case to the city, Athena defers divine sanction to political sanction. Or she establishes the legitimacy of decisions by the political body concerning such matters, whereas before these matters were contained within the moral realm of the household.” Athena casts her vote in favor of Orestes, indicating that marriage, which is political, trumps parenthood, which is ‘blood.’ For their part, the Furies will redirect their thumotic energy toward defending the city; unlike Apollo, Athena understands that “the political community as such needs the power of the Furies so that the city is able to defend itself”; “the alliance of the Furies to the city is intended to strengthen the city as the source of human fulfillment,” moderating the love of one’s own by widening it to the city, the home of speech, which recognizes marriage instead of parenthood as the fundamental familial bond because it is oath-based, not blood-based. Like Socrates, Aeschylus sees that the other extreme claim, that speech alone suffices to constitute the city, will not do. “Coercion or force is to be understood in this particular context, as the exercise of law,” putting teeth into the mouth that speaks. Accordingly, the Furies must “be tamed and managed rather than eradicated.” What Nietzsche would call the Apollonian must be supplemented not so much by the Dionysian but by the Furious, all under the rule of the reasonable, which reasonably sees its own limitations. 

Under this dispensation, justice no longer means vengeance but the rule of law. The city, with its laws and juries, “will indeed do what the Furies did—right wrongs and protect the family.” But it won’t right wrongs “with the same ruthless and destructive manner of the Furies,” which leads to an endless cycle of retaliation. “Rather, the justice of the city will be a compromise between the peace, which is an essential precondition for human happiness, and the demands that wrongs be righted and those who commit them be punished.” The terms of this compromise mean that “not all acts of injustice will be sought out and punished; rather, only those that threaten to destroy the peace or happiness of the human association.” To go further “would be irrational and harmful to the greater human good,” destroying many good things “to remove one single evil.” “Moderation is now to be the qualifier of justice.” 

Aristotle ranks moderation among the principal virtues, and it is to “the continuing significance of Aristotle for social and political science” that Bates now turns. Often criticized for having ignored the empire under which he lived and concentrating his attention on the Greek poleis, by now subordinate to Macedonia, Aristotle in fact did no such thing. As a citizen of Stagira living as a resident foreigner in Athens, Aristotle had to watch his step when it came to commenting on contemporary politics. Further, his emphasis on the polis has a heuristic purpose. It is in the small polis, not the big, sprawling, polyglot, multi-city empires that the regime is most clearly visible. The empires of his time had regimes—monarchies of one sort or another—but except for the annual exaction of tribute, one’s city didn’t much feel the pinch of rule. Day-to-day governance continued to occur within the city; that was what mattered in the lives of imperial citizen-subjects.

The regime or politeia “is something separate and distinct from the polis but gives shape and direction to the polis.” Bates links its definition to Aristotle’s four ’causes’: in its material character, every regime has institutions and offices; in its formal character, it “looks different” from other regimes; its efficient cause is the ruling body or politeuma of the city; its teleological or final cause is its view of justice or right. This may be a bit too schematic. Aristotle identifies four dimensions of a regime: its politeia strictly speaking, its form or institutional structure; its ruling body or politeuma; its way of life or Bíos ti; and its end, its purpose, its telos. Its ‘formal’ cause therefore is its institutional structure; its ‘material’ cause is its ruling body; its ‘efficient’ cause or archē is its founding. The way of life relates to the purpose as the means to an end. 

“The politeia is that which orders all the parts that constitutes the given political community” or polis. “Therefore, no politeia, no political community.” He proceeds to summarize Aristotle’s quantitative and qualitative criteria for regime classification: the one, the few, and the many; good and bad. These result in six basic regime types or species; although Bates says that Aristotle subtly undermines this simple classification, it is more accurate to say that he refines it, identifying ‘subspecies’ within each type. Bates carefully distinguishes Aristotelian from Hobbesian political science. “Contra the teaching of Hobbes and the modern teaching that follows from his understanding of government representing the whole body politic as such, and not merely a ruling part, Aristotle’s teaching about the nature of political rule is that a part of the political community acts on behalf of the whole (either for its own sake or for the common benefit).” Each polis has parts, especially the few who are rich and the many who are poor, each typically advocating a regime, including a way of life, which serves its own interest, both claiming to serve the interests of the whole. Political rule itself “is divided on the basis of functions suited to each political community: deliberating, deciding, implementing what’s been decided, and adjudication of legal cases arising as a result of those decisions and acts of implementation—law being “relative to the type of politeia.” Regimes change, but there is no fixed cycle of regimes, as propounded by Plato’s Socrates (probably for heuristic purposes) and more literally by Polybius. Regimes change because no one regime, even the good ones, will lack enemies who scheme against it. But this doesn’t make politics a futile endeavor. Far from it. “In contrast” to such modern utopians as Karl Marx, “Aristotle’s writings suggest the attempts to overcome politics or escape from it would fail, or end in despotism.”

Why was Aristotle’s understanding of politics as regime-centered brushed aside by later political philosophers? Imperialism challenged the value of political rule itself. Although the polis superseded the clan and the tribe, as Aeschylus shows, the empires overwhelmed many poleis with sheer military force, and ruled the cities despotically (if often desultorily) after their conquests. “Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader.” As in Argos, a family rules an empire; politics strictly speaking, ruling and being ruled mutually, finds little or no purchase. Following Aristotle, the Roman empire emerged from a republican regime, the res publica. The first, republican, Roman empire “incorporat[ed] local elites into Roman citizens,” but the regime changed in typical fashion, as anti-republican factions arose within it. Once consolidated under Augustus, the empire “was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) Caesar, Kaiser, tzar; (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen… the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex.” Finally, after Augustus died the later monarchs dropped the pretense of republicanism altogether, calling themselves imperators or emperors—issuers of commands, imperatives, the edicts of one-way rule, not of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. With no serious regime rival or rivals, Roman political thought began to neglect the regime question, and it began to fade from political science altogether.

By the Middle Ages it is no longer clear that thinkers knew Aristotle’s Politics, at all. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers got their sense of regimes from Plato and Polybius, and thus never had the Aristotelian inclination to deliberate openly over the character of regimes. Further, the Christian doctrine of the separation of sacred from secular government understandably preoccupied the best minds. It was therefore not until Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century that Aristotelian regime theory was recovered, but necessarily in a ‘Christianized’ manner; Thomas “does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and made compatible with Christian teachings.” For example, in following Aristotle’s argument that the rule of a good king is desirable but improbable, given “the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle,” particularly its instability, Thomas goes on to say that the kingly rule of God will solve that problem, once God returns earth, then transforms the cosmos itself, making a new heaven and a new earth. Aristotle might have doubted that promise, had he lived to hear it.

Starting with Machiavelli and his “modern concept of the state,” political science moved even farther from Aristotelianism. Machiavelli “does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it.” By this, Bates means that the moderns understand lo stato as “a product of will,” whether it be the will of the founding prince or the “collective will” of the individuals who form that state according to a ‘social contract.’ Because willed, the modern state “must have a unitary character,” inasmuch as a divided or schizophrenic will cannot be “good or healthy,” as will. The ruling institutions or forms of the modern state “are merely tools that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will,” in contrast to “the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle—where the political community composed of the fundamental parts—the household and other communities—give [the political community] body.” In the polis, unlike the modern state, these “many discrete parts” enjoy “commonality” thanks to “their shared life together, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life together.” But for Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers, the political community “is not by nature but is instead a humanly made construct.” For Hobbes, the ‘body politic’ that is Mighty Leviathan amounts to “a metaphor” for the relationship between the monarch and his realm; the sovereign isn’t any one, existing monarch but “the embodied will” that authorizes the existence of the political community. Hence the emphasis on the will in Rousseauian and Kantian ethics and politics, and eventually the shift away not only from natural right, not only from such natural-rights substitutes as Rousseau’s general will and Kant’s categorical imperative, but to the elaboration of historical right in Hegel, in whose writings “the modern state reaches its intellectual peak” as an entirely impersonal instantiation of the impersonal ‘Absolute Spirit,’ a being that encompasses natural even humanly willed right, explaining all of these theories as moments in its own unfolding.

If the modern state is a willed construct of the individuals who consent to it, then the substantial political bodies in the world no longer consist of families and intrastate factions but of the states themselves, which pit their wills against one another in a war of all against all. Since sovereign wills refuse to relinquish their sovereignty while at the same time wishing for the peace that the polis afforded when it subordinated the families and their Furies, “the establishment of modern international law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.” Such writers as Grotius, who applies Aristotelian natural right to international relations, and Vattel, who applies Lockean natural right to them, attempt to moderate the Hobbesian state of international war. Such conceptions were challenged, however, when historicist notions of nation-states, “cultural and racial/ethnic” constructions “that people cannot control” because they are the result of laws of historical development, replaced the ‘willfulness’ of social-contract theory. Bates wrongly charges Abraham Lincoln with fostering this notion in America; he is on firmer ground in assigning the responsibility to the Progressives and, it might be added, the Social Darwinists before them, their ontological if not socio-economic twins. 

The managers of political science’s “behavioral revolution” in the twentieth century found even Hobbesian materialism insufficiently materialist, with its willed social contract. “The scientific pretensions of later moderns as well as their materialism and reductionism led to a reaction against the willing agency of the modern Hobbesian state”; for them, real science tracks “the various impersonal forces of mass society acting and interacting with each other through the various institutionalism that historically emerged in each socio-ethnic grouping.” Eschewing all ‘qualitative’ claims as unscientific ‘value judgments,’ behaviorists retain his numerical regime criterion (one, few, many) and then calculate the level of measurable political ‘participation’ in relation to the numerical criterion. As democrats, they often betray a tendency to prefer the rule of the few, with high participation levels, as “rule for the common advantage,” but they aspire to ‘value-free political science.’ More recently, political scientist with such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol have added an institutional dimension, concentrating their attention on the state, which they consider an independent variable in political outcomes, rather like an Aristotelian formal cause. “But when we look at much of the regime analysis of those who came to champion the ‘Return to the State,’ all too often they employed many of the same overly democrat5ic and pluralistic assumptions” of the behaviorists. For them, ‘democracy’ “no longer is to be considered a form of regime, but rather as a universal human political form that all human communities should strive to achieve.” With great effort, today’s political scientists have scrambled back to quasi-Hegelian statism without the ontology that justifies it. 

None of these modern forms of political science is genuinely political. Instead of beginning with the household, with its already-political relationship of husband and wife and its grounding in real human associations aimed at achieving the real human end of eudemonia or “liv[ing] fully as a human being,” modern political science begins with individuals. It is atomistic or, at best, atomistic within a structuralist framework. By contrast, Aristotelian political science “does not understand the political community as a unitary composite that must be homogenized and centralized.” Rather, for Aristotle, “the regime is fundamental to a political community because it is that which holds it together as a whole; a whole composed of discrete parts.” This is the reality of political life, Aristotle’s therefore the truer science.

The problem is that modern states have regimes, too. It makes a difference to me if I live in contemporary France or Germany, in a commercial republic, or in contemporary China, an oligarchy. A second edition of this book should correct the argument in light of that obvious fact, thereby showing that Aristotelian regime theory ‘works’ for modern states as well as for city-states.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Ghazāli: The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Michael E. Marmura translation. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.

 

Born in 1058 and trained in Islamic law, al-Ghazāli is famous—in some circles, notorious—for claiming that Allah acts according to his will, not according to reason. He has been interpreted as teaching this by many Muslims, who have been known to abominate reason as the bringer of heresy and atheism. And it is surely true that the will plays a decisive role in al-Ghazāli’s understanding of Allah. As Michael E. Marmura remarks in his excellent introduction, the Asharite school of Islamic theology in which al-Ghazāli was trained regarded not only the original creation of the cosmos as an act of God but “regarded all temporal existents as the direction creation of God, decreed by His eternal attribute of will and enacted by His attribute of power.” That is, “what humans habitually regard as sequences of natural causes and effects are in reality concomitant events whose constant association is arbitrarily decreed by the divine will.” Miracles or divine disruptions of the apparently natural course of things are perennially possible, and the familiar Muslim coda, “God willing,” reflects this mindset. An examination of The Incoherence of the Philosophers suggests that the matter is more complicated than that. What is the status of reason according to al-Ghazāli, in this polemic?

“I have seen a group,” he writes, “who, believing themselves in possession of a distinctiveness from companion and peer by virtue of a superior quick with and intelligence, have rejected the Islamic duties regarding acts of worship, disdained religious rites pertaining to the offices of prayer and the avoidance of prohibited things, belittled the devotions and ordinances prescribed by the divine law, not halting in the face of prohibitions and restrictions.” For these duties, these rites, and the divine law they substitute “multifarious beliefs” produced by “speculative investigation, an outcome of their stumbling over the tails of sophistical doubts that divert from the direction of the truth”—mere “imaginings akin to the glitter of the mirage.” This group consists of philosophers, men who deny “revealed laws and religious confessions” and reject “the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks.” In “disdaining to be content with the religious beliefs of their forebears,” however, they have only “mov[ed] from one [mode of] imitation to another”; that is, far from ascending from the cave of customary opinions where they worshipped the shadows of man-made idols to the daylight of nature, they have merely encamped in another cave. Worse, they have abandoned the true light of divine, not merely natural law, for a cave beneath the cave of mere heresy, the cave of atheism and materialism. There is no lower rank in “God’s world” than that of these men, as “imbecility is… nearer salvation than acumen severed from [religious belief]; blindness is closer to wholeness than cross-eyed sight.” Al-Ghazāli’s stated intention “is to alert those who think well of philosophers and believe that their ways are free from contradiction by showing the [various] aspects of their incoherence.” He does not deny that Muslim theologians also contradict one another, contenting himself with saying that this isn’t his topic here.

He accuses philosophers of obscurantism, of claiming that “the metaphysical sciences” are esoteric, accessible only to those well versed in the arcana of mathematics and logic. On the contrary, al-Ghazāli replies, mathematics has nothing to do with metaphysics and logical argumentation can be understood by many more than the very few men who become philosophers. He proceeds with twenty “discussions,” sets of arguments similar in form to the writings of Christian Scholastics, who present the arguments of their opponents followed by point-by-point refutations. Discussions 1-16 address metaphysics; discussions 17-20 pertain to physics or nature. The two metaphysical issues in dispute are the philosophers’ claim that the cosmos is eternal and that God knows only universals, not particulars, and therefore does not intervene providentially in the cosmos He has created. The physical or natural issue in dispute is the philosophers’ (but especially Avicenna’s) teaching on the human soul and his denial of the resurrection of the body.

In arguing that the cosmos is eternal, philosophers offer three proofs. First, they say, if God is eternal and has created a cosmos at some point in time, making a possibility into a reality, this must mean that God Himself changed from a non-creator to a creator. But this is a contradiction, unless religionists pretend that there has been a “proceeding of the temporal from the Eternal without a change of affairs in the Eternal by way of power, instrument, time, purpose, or nature.” To counter this, al-Ghazāli says that there is no contradiction if the world was created in time “by an eternal will that decreed its existence at the time in which it came to be.” To this view is not to think that the “willer” changed to such a degree that He was no longer Himself; eternity isn’t sameness. Nor is creation in, or before, time necessarily impossible, a fact defying reason, if the willer withheld His act of creation—especially if “duration and time are both created.” “It is incumbent on you [philosophers] to set up a demonstrative proof according to the condition of logic that would show the impossibility of this.” When conjoined with power, will “differentiates a thing from its similar.” Light and darkness are opposites; they contradict one another. But to will into existence two opposite things is not to exercise one’s will in a self-contradictory way if the underlying intention behind that act serves some overarching rational purpose. The idea of willed creation would only be a violation of reason if one claimed that the Creator created ‘blackwhite.’ If philosophers were to assert that the inability to create ‘blackwhite’ calls into question divine power, omnipotence, al-Ghazāli answers: “the impossibility of realizing what is not possible does not indicate impotence.”

Philosophers also claim “that whoever asserts that the world is posterior to God and God prior to it” means either that God is “prior in essence, not in time, in the way that one is prior to two” or that God “is prior to the world and time.” If the former, then the Creator-created relationship is causative in the way a person’s movement causes his shadow to move with him; but these events presume the coexistence both the person and the movement. If the latter, then there must have been a time in which the world did not exist but God did; “before the existence of time, infinite time would have existed, and this is contradictory.” 

Al-Ghazāli replies that “time is originated and created, and before it there was no time at all,” as “God is prior to the world and time.” “By priority we mean only the appropriation of existence to Himself alone.” God exists with or without the world. In terms of reason, not of will, “a first beginning that is preceded by nothing” is not “disallow[ed],” that is, it is not self-contradictory. This doesn’t prove that ex nihilo creation occurred, only that it is not an irrational concept. When philosophers argue that “it is impossible for [the world] to be impossible and then to become possible,” he answers that he world “is eternally possible” in the sense that God could conceive it at any time, but it only became possible when He made it so.

Philosophers also observe that every “temporal existent” consists of both form and matter. Matter is prior to form, thus prior to every temporal existent, since existence consists of some form, a form distinguishing it from all other existents, imposed upon matter. Since “matter does not have matter [receptive of it]”—because there is no pre-matter matter, matter must not originate in time. It must be eternal. Al-Ghazāli answers that the question “reverts to a judgment of the mind.” No self-contradictory judgment of the mind is possible, in the sense that no one can form a mental image or idea of ‘blackwhite.’ Why, then, assume that matter is eternal, rather than God? Or vice-versa, one might add, but al-Ghazāli does not need to prove the eternality of God, only the rational possibility of an eternal God rather than eternal matter. He can afford to leave the question of whether matter or God is eternal, so long as he can show that the claim that God is eternal, not matter, is not irrational. “As regards affirming the true doctrine,” instead of merely refuting the philosophers’ doctrine, “we will write another book concerning it after completing this one, if success comes to our aid, God willing, and we will name it The Principles of Belief.“

“To refer possibility, necessity, and impossibility back to rational judgments is correct.” In that, the philosophers are right. They are also right to say that “the meaning of the mind’s judgment is [its] knowledge and that knowledge requires an object of knowledge.” Their mistake is to assume that this means that this knowledge need be knowledge of matter—that matter is prior to mind. But, for example, “one cannot conceive in existence a color which is neither white nor black nor some other color. The form of being a color, however, is established in the mind without detailing [different species of color], and one says of it that it is a form whose existence is in minds, not in concrete things.” “If this is not impossible, then what we have mentioned”—namely, ex nihilo creation—is “not impossible.” 

Philosophers also claim that the world is eternal—indeed, “pre-eternal,” if eternity means perpetuity in time ‘going forward.’ That is, they claim that the world not only has “no beginning for its existence” but also has “no end.” It will “continue to be,” always. Al-Ghazāli replies to this claim with the same arguments he used against the anti-creation claim. “The bringing about of existence and annihilation obtains through the will of the one endowed with power”; in both creation and annihilation, God “in Himself does not change, what changes being only the act.” “So long as the occurrence of an event by an eternal will is conceivable, there is no difference in the state of affairs whether what occurs is a privation or an existence.” 

Al-Ghazāli accuses philosophers of “obfuscation” when they call God “the world’s enactor and maker”; “with them this is metaphor, not reality.” He defines “agent” as “a willer, a chooser, and a knower of what He wills,” but philosophers use that term to mean “not one who wills, but has no attribute at all,” and for them ‘God’ is really the eternal cosmos, which “proceeds by compulsory necessity.” Logic is a form of necessity; to the philosophers ‘God’ acts rationally but without will, and ‘God’-nature-cosmos causes all things to happen by rational necessity. This is why al-Ghazāli emphasizes the will of God, the freedom of God, and it is also one reason why he can be interpreted as considering will to be prior to reason.

But that is not the claim he makes here. On the contrary, “if we suppose that a temporal event depends for its occurrence on two things, one voluntary and the other not, reason relates the act to the voluntary.” This is why, if one man murders another by throwing him into a fire, we call the man the killer, not the fire; the man has agency. At the same time, unlike men, the creator-God always wills rationally; His acts have a rational necessity backed by His power, which gives them physical necessity, but He chooses what acts He takes freely. Whether before or after the creation of time and space, God chooses among a set of acts, any one of which must be rational because His intention is without self-contradiction. It is true that human beings—created, limited beings—cannot fully understand “the essence of God.” Therefore “do not think on the essence of God” but on His creation. But that doesn’t mean that God has no essence, nor that He is not essentially rational; it means that He is all-knowing, and you are not.

Having discussed the philosophers’ inability to prove that the creator-God does not exist, and that ‘God’ is really the eternal world or cosmos, al-Ghazāli next denies their ability to prove that God does exist, and that He is one, not many. The ‘God’ of the philosophers is a First Principle, an impersonal, unmoved mover. They argue that without assuming the existence of such a First Principle, one commits the fallacy of infinite regress. While affirming the logical necessity of avoiding an infinite regress, al-Ghazāli simply points out that positing the existence of a creator-God equally avoids it. Further, if the cosmos is eternal and necessarily generates individual things over time, would this not mean that the number of things is infinite? Yet how can physical things, even things as small as atoms, be infinite in number and still increase in number?

Philosophers attempt to prove the oneness of their ‘God’ by tracing causation back to an origin which necessarily must have been singular, inasmuch as there can be only one causeless Causer. Once causation began, plurality began, but not before that. “The basic point for understanding their doctrine consists in their saying [that] the essence of the First Principle is one, the names becoming many by relating something to it, relating it to something, or negating something of it.” “The existence of [what is] other than Him is from Him.” Their ‘God’ is Intellect; He is a being “aware of Himself” who “apprehends Himself.” “Hence, His essence is an intelligible,” devoid of matter. “The existing order is a consequent of the intelligible order in the sense that [the former] comes through [the latter”; “His knowledge of the whole is the cause of the emanation of the whole from Him,” the consequence of His self-knowledge. He is not really a ‘He,’ a person, at all, but an impersonal, all-powerful, self-knowing and therefore all-knowing power.

Muslim theologians take a very different view. “Our knowledge” has two “divisions”: “knowledge of a thing that occurs as a result of the form of that thing”; and “knowledge which we invent, as with something whose form we did not perceive but which we formed in our souls, then brought into existence, in which case the existence of the form would be derived from knowledge, not knowledge from [the] existence [of the form].” God’s knowledge is “in accordance with the second division.” Given their “shortcomings,” our lack of supreme power, “our conception is not sufficient to bring about the existence of the form but requires, in addition to that, a renewed will that springs forth from an appetitive power” that “moves the muscles and nerves,” which then attempt to make things happen. It might be said that human beings lack perfect knowledge, perfect power, and indeed perfect will, inasmuch as we do not unfailingly will the good. That is why human beings need God to rule them. 

By contrast, the philosophers deploy such terms as knowledge, power, and will in describing God only as metaphors, since in their opinion God is not a person. As an impersonal being, their ‘God’ ‘knows’ only universals, not particulars. That is, there is no providence in the Biblical sense, only a set of general laws that prevail in the cosmos as it proceeds in its course. ‘God’ therefore does not intervene on behalf of any individual or set of individuals. But again, al-Ghazāli maintains, they have no proof that this is necessarily the case. “The realities of divine matters are not attained through rational reflection—indeed… it is not within human power to know them.” It is within human power to know His creation, including his revealed law. That is, we know what He has willed, and what His will is, insofar as He has chosen to reveal those things to us. We are entitled, even obligated, to reason about those things. When we attempt to reason about His essence, however, we quickly come to the limit of our reasoning. This doesn’t mean that His essence is unreasonable or arbitrary, nor that His will is unreasonable or arbitrary. 

It also does not mean that human beings cannot entertain reasonable suspicions about God’s essence. He must have an essence because “existence without quiddity and a real [nature] is unintelligible.” For example, “A rational person would indeed by astonished by a party that claims to delve deeply into [the world of] the intelligibles but whose reflection in the end leads to [the conclusion] that the Lord of Lords and the Cause of Causes has basically no knowledge of what occurs in the world.” If that were true, “What difference is there between Him and the dead, except for His knowledge of Himself? And what perfection is there in His knowledge of Himself, with His ignorance of what is other than Himself?” On the contrary, “all things other than Him” have “originated from His direction through His will”; as an agent in the true sense of the term, God’s will entails God’s knowledge, “for that which is willed must necessarily be known to the willer.” Because all things “are willed by Him and originated in His will,” God is all-knowing. This includes self-knowledge, which is necessary for Him to know what He wills, to know His own will.

According to the philosophers, “God enacted the world by way of necessity from His essence, by nature and compulsion, not by way of will and choice. Indeed, the whole [of the world] follows necessarily from His essence in the way that light follows necessarily from the sun.”; The ‘God’ of the philosophers “has no power to stop His acts,” which means, as he has emphasized that the ‘acts’ of ‘God’ do “not at all entail knowledge for the agent,” which isn’t really an agent in al-Ghazāli’s fuller definition of the term. But they have no sound proof of that claim which does not assume what they are trying to prove, namely, the existence of ‘God’ as they define ‘Him.’

Philosophers argue as follows: God is unchanging; particulars change; knowledge of change changes the knower; ergo, God cannot know particulars, only universals. God knows that solar eclipses occur, but knows nothing about any particular eclipse. Such knowledge is ‘beneath’ Him. Similarly, God “does not know the accidents of Zayd, Amr, and Khālid, but only man [in the] absolute [sense] by a universal knowledge.” By this doctrine “they uprooted religious laws in their entirety, since it entails that if Zayd, for example, obeys of disobeys God, God would not know what of his states has newly come about, because He does not know Zayd in his particularity.” God would be incapable of punishing violations of His own law. In response, Al-Ghazāli simply repeats that no one, even a philosopher, can know the limits of God’s knowledge, if in fact there are any.

Having established the limits of human knowledge of God, al-Ghazāli turns from metaphysics to the natural sciences. These are “rational sciences”; “the religious law does not require disputing them,” but they are within human powers to dispute, to investigate, to reason about. There are eight rational sciences pertaining to nature: physics, astronomy, knowledge pertaining to generation and corruption, meteorology, geology, botany, zoology, and psychology (which includes the science of both human and animal souls). “There is no necessity to oppose [the philosophers] in terms of the revealed law in any of these sciences,” except in four areas: their claim that the relation between observable causes and effects is necessary, making miracles impossible; their claim that “human souls are self-subsisting substances, not imprinted in the body,” and therefore death permanently severs the soul from the body; their claim that souls cannot be annihilated; their claim that “it is impossible to return these souls to bodies.”

Regarding the first question, philosophers do admit that miracles or disruptions of “the habitual courses of nature do occur” in “three instances”: in prophecy, when the imagination becomes so powerful and accurate that it surpasses ordinary sensual perceptions; in intuition, especially the perception of the several steps of a logical argument before the argument has been fully laid out; and in the “practical faculty,” which induces the body to obey the soul—perhaps as the result of ascetic exercises, for example. 

Al-Ghazāli begins with a critique of our understanding of causation, a critique that anticipates the critique David Hume advanced nearly seven centuries later. “The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary.” We suppose that fire is necessary to burn cotton, but that is only because we have seen this occur so many times that we assume a cause-and-effect relationship. But “a thing’s existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by [the thing].” “The continuous habit of their occurrence repeatedly, one time after another, fixes unshakably in our minds the belief in their occurrence according to past habit.” But God might have caused the cotton to burn. “He knew that He would not do it at certain times, despite its possibility, and… He creates for us the knowledge that He will not create it at that time.” But that is all.

Al-Ghazāli’s choice of occurrences that are naturally uncaused are unfortunate, as he supposes that some animals are spontaneously generated from the earth, and not by sexual reproduction. He goes so far as to claim that such matters are “beyond human power to know.” He retreats to firmer ground by defining the impossible as that which “is not within the power” of being enacted. He offers several examples of genuine impossibilities, things impossible even for God. “Combining blackness and whiteness” is impossible. For an individual to put himself in two places at once is impossible. To truly will something without knowing what one is willing is impossible. And it is impossible “to create knowledge in inanimate matter” inasmuch as “we understand by the inanimate that which does not apprehend.” That is, a self-contradictory action is impossible. But if we read in sacred Scripture that God moved the hand of a dead man, this is against nature but not impossible, since although the previous willer of movement is dead the current willer is alive, knowledgeable, and powerful.

Nor is the human soul necessarily self-subsistent, a substance that does not occupy space—as suggested in the Platonic dialogues, for example. Al-Ghazāli makes no objection to the philosophers’ description of the attributes of the human soul into “motive” and “apprehending” parts. The “motive” parts, the ones that ‘make things happen,’ include the desires, the power to activate nerves and muscles, and the “discerning” part, which can consider theoretical and prudential matters. The “apprehending” parts of the soul include the imaginative faculty, which perceives forms and the “estimative” faculty, which perceives meanings; so, for example, a baby goat perceives the form of a wolf along with its meaning, that is, the fact that it is dangerous to baby goats. The third “apprehending” part of the soul is the “cogitative” faculty, which combines the forms the imagination perceives to envision a flying horse or a flying machine. It is the “discerning” part of the soul which discovers whether a flying horse or a flying machine is possible in principle and, if possible, how one might come into existence. The practical dimension of the discerning part also can be made to rule the bodily faculties; when it does so we say that the soul has virtues.

Notice that none of this assumes that God treats human beings as if they are puppets whose every movement He directs, as per Ash’arite doctrine. Rather, we Muslims only “object to their claim of their knowing through rational demonstrations that the soul is a self-subsistent substance.” “We deny… their claim that reason alone indicates” that this is so, that a human being could know this without the guidance of revelation, “the religious law.” At best, their proofs indicate probabilities. They cannot demonstrate such claims. Nor can they demonstrate the immortality of the human soul. It is indeed immortal, but we know this with certitude only by revelation, not by reason. 

As to the disposition of the human soul after death, philosophers hold that souls endure “everlastingly” in a condition either of indescribable pleasure or pain, the life of pleasure having been reserved for “perfect, pure souls,” the life of pain for “imperfect, tarnished souls.” A soul attains perfection in this life through knowledge, purity through action. Knowledge leads to perfection because it perfects the rational faculty, whereas “preoccupation with the body makes [one] forget himself,” fail to cultivate the distinctively human characteristic of his soul. We know that “the intellectual pleasures than bodily pleasures” because “ferocious animals and pigs” seek only bodily pleasures, and because men are ashamed when caught in the commission of acts of adultery or cowardice. Action—works and worship—are needed for “the soul’s purification,” as the undisciplined body will cause the soul to become preoccupied with bodily desires, pleasures, and pains.

Muslims do not disagree with “most of these things.” The soul survives the separation from the body; certain pleasures are superior to others. “But we know this through the religious law,” not “by reason alone.” What Muslims deny is the philosophers’ contention that bodies are not resurrected along with souls. Life in God’s Paradise will offer “both kinds of happiness, the spiritual and bodily”; Hell will impose both kinds of misery. The one will be the more perfect pleasure, the other the more perfect pain. “What the religious law has conveyed [as true must be believed” if the soul would enjoy eternity in Paradise, avoid eternity in Hell. As usual, philosophers cannot disprove the possibility of the religious law’s teachings and commands by convicting it of self-contradiction.

In conclusion, al-Ghazāli calls the philosophers infidels on three main grounds. They claim that the world is eternal. They deny that God’s knowledge encompasses “temporal particulars”—i.e., they deny God’s providential rule. And they deny the resurrection of bodies on Judgment Day. He also calls philosophic doctrine “close to that of the Mu’tazila,” the main Islamic sect rivaling the Asharites.

With regard to the incoherence of philosophic doctrines—that they are not merely diverse but contradictory—al Ghazāli’s charge cannot be denied, any more than he would deny the countercharge that the doctrines of pious Muslims contradict on another. He shows the difficulty in formulating a logical proof of the existence either of God or of ‘God,’ leaning conspicuously on Koranic assertions to tip his argument in the direction of piety. Averroës replied in defense of Aristotelianism with his own polemic, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. 

 

 

 

William Shakespeare: Love’s Labor’s Lost.

 

In the royal park of the King of Navarre, Ferdinand outlines a singular policy to his three principal attendants, the lords Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine. Ferdinand is modeled after Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry III of Navarre. By the time Shakespeare wrote this play, Henry had seized the throne of France and had been crowned Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon line. Navarre was a Huguenot sanctuary, but after assuming the kingship of France Henry abjured Protestantism for Catholicism as a means of consolidating his authority in a predominantly Catholic country. As a reader and friend of Montaigne, however, in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, establishing toleration of Protestantism in an attempt to assuage religio-political animosities in the country. Shakespeare’s Ferdinand is also poised to ascend to the French throne, but by romantic rather than military means—means appropriate to comedy.

Berowne is Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, a noted Protestant soldier called the ‘Thunderbolt of France; Henry made him Marshal in 1594, but despite this distinction his loyalty remained suspect; he was beheaded on charges of treason a few years after Shakespeare’s play was first staged. Longaville is Henry I d’Orléans, duc de Longueville, a Protestant soldier who had defeated Catholic forces in a 1589 battle; Dumaine is Charles, duc de Mayenne, an ardent member of the Catholic League and former rival of Henry for the throne (they reconciled in 1595). Henry’s court thus consisted of aristocrats representing the two religious sects which had very recently put their arms down after years of civil war. Ferdinand’s court at Navarre is already a miniature version of the French court at the time of the play. 

King Ferdinand needs to unite Navarre, especially its ruling class. For this, he seriously proposes a Renaissance version of a plan devised (with characteristic irony) by Plato’s Socrates, who said that unless philosophers become kings, or kings truly and adequately philosophize, a just political regime will prove impossible. As neither the king nor his attendants are philosophers engaged in reasoned inquiry into the conventions of their country, perhaps they can truly and adequately philosophize or, less ambitiously, become more thoroughly the liberally educated men Renaissance scholars and politicians alike esteemed. 

If they are not philosophers, lovers of wisdom, why would they do such a thing? The king appeals not directly to their logos but to their thumos. “Fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live regist’red upon our brazen tombs, / And then grace us in the disgrace of death; / When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, / Th’ endeavor of this present breath may buy / That honor which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge, / And make us heirs of all eternity.” (I.i.1-7). He proposes a vast war, a war of the soul, but most emphatically not the kind of soul-war which has wracked Christian Europe. He will redirect his aristocrats’ souls towards becoming “brave conquerors” in the “war against your own affections,” the “huge army of the world’s desires” (I.i.8-10). “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world” (I.i.12), both a place of wondering and a place wondered at, esteemed, a Jerusalem of learning. “Our court shall be a little Academe”—a modern version of Plato’s school—”still and contemplative in living art” instead of roiling in war and vaunting in the art of war (I.i.13-14). 

To this end, the king has ordained that a comprehensive three-year fast, whereby he and his attendants—all young and unmarried—will abstain from strong drink, much food, and all women for the next three years. They will arm themselves for this psychomachia by pledging their honor with “deep oaths” now to be signed (I.i.23). The young king has a bit of ‘secularized’ Calvinism about him.

Longaville and Dumaine readily consent. For these three years, “the mind shall banquet, though the body pine,” Longaville avers, inasmuch as “dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits” (I.i.25-27). Dumaine, too, pronounces himself “mortified” against “the world’s delights,” intent rather on “living in philosophy” (I.i.32). Berowne has reservations. “Not to see a woman” in three years (I.i.37)? Harsh sumptuary laws? Even sleep deprivation in order to spend more time studying? “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep” (I.i.47). His earlier, verbal, oath he had “sworn in jest,” but an oath in writing is a serious thing (I.i.54). “What is the end of study, let me know” (I.i.55).

Ferdinand answers that the end of study is “to know which else we should not know” (I.i.56). You mean, Berowne asks, “things hid and barr’d… from common sense” (I.i.57)? Yes, “that is study’s god-like recompense” (I.i.58). Oh, but of course, Berowne rejoins, I have no problem in swearing to do those sorts of things—to study where I might dine well, especially on days when I am forbidden to do so; or to “study where to meet some mistress fine, / When mistresses from common sense are hid”; “Or, having sworn too hard-a-keeping oath / Study to break it, and not break my troth” by some exoteric show of compliance (I.i.63-66). This is (following Socrates’ own formula) to know what one doesn’t know. “Swear me to this, and I will ne’er say no” (I.i.69). But mere book-learning will never do. “Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, / That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks. / Small have continual plodders ever won, / Save base authority from others’ books.” (I.i.84-87). You, King, may aspire to Platonism but you will end in Scholasticism. [1] There is no real glory or honor in that. In this, Berowne plays the role of the girl who laughed at the philosopher who stumbled while gazing up at the heavens. Such “earthly godfathers of heaven’s light”—the astronomers—”have no more profit of their shining lights / Than those that walk and wot not where they are. / Too much to know is to know nought but fame; / And every godfather can give a name” to a star he can never reach (I,i.88-93). The Christian-Aristotelian peripatetics—those Roman Catholics who couldn’t beat the duc de Biron in battle—cannot make practical use of the phenomena they know merely by observation, in order to name. The end of the king’s new regime is as little likely as Socrates’ politeia. 

Ferdinand dismisses Berowne’s common-sense critique of Scholasticism as a self-contradictory effort “to reason against reading!” (I.i.94), and his loyalists concur. Berowne replies with an argument founded on nature as it is, obedient to the cycles of time. The king conceives of time as a death-dealing scythe against which only fame can triumph, a fame which only a three-year ‘regime’ of study governed by a uniform rule of conduct can win. But real nature is seasonal. “Why should proud summer boast / Before the birds have any cause to sing? / Why should I joy in any abortive birth? / At Christmas I no more desire a rose / Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows; / But like of each thing that in season grows; / So you, to study now it is too late, / Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.” (I.i.102-09). The king would require book-study of four men, including himself, who should instead be thinking of marrying, then of producing heirs to their estates. (The real King Henry would indeed die heirless.) “Study evermore is over-shot,” Berowne comments, after reviewing the king’s laws; “While it doth study to have what it would, / It doth forget to do the thing it should; / And when it hath the thing it hunteth most, / ‘Tis won as towns with fire—so won, so lost” (I.i.141-44). The king’s war for fame overlooks the conditions of life itself.

Nonsense, the king replies. He shall “of force dispense with this decree”; it will then rest “on mere necessity” (I.i.145-46). But, Berowne replies, such necessity will simply cause men in their weakness to fail in their compliance, “For every man with his affects is born, / Not by might mast’red but by special grace” (I.i.149-50). Spoken like a Protestant, but a prudent one. I shall sign your oath, my liege (Paul the Apostle also requires obedience to rulers), but I predict that I, who am the last to sign, “will last keep his oath” (I.i.158).

Meanwhile, Ferdinand offers a form of recreation to relieve his austerity regime. There is now in Navarre “a refined traveller of Spain,” a “child of fancy,” a man “in whom all the world’s new fashion is planted,” and so a fit object for courtly entertainment at his expense (I.i.161-62,168). This Quixote, named Don Adriano de Armado, will serve as court jester; Berowne and Longaville relish the prospect of mocking such a comical land-armada of a man.

But first the court must deal with the first arrested violator of the king’s decree, the rustic Costard, who arrives in the custody of Constable Dull with a letter from Armado. Costard has been caught speaking with a country wench, Jaquenetta; “such is the simplicity of man to hearken after / The flesh” (I.i.211-12), he confesses. The king reads aloud Armado’s verbose letter, in which he witnesses to Costard’s crime while professing to be “besieged with sable-colored melancholy” (I.i.225). Amused into mercy, Ferdinand sentences the malefactor to a week of bran and water and to the rule of Armado. Considering the evidence before him after the king and the other two attendants have left, Berowne tells Costard, “I’ll lay my head to any good man’s hat / These oaths and law will prove an idle scorn,” to which the rustic can only reply with similar humor, “I suffer for the truth, sir; for true it is I was taken with Jaquenetta, and Jaquenetta is a true girl” (I.i.287-291).

Costard won’t become Armado’s Don Pancho, as he already has one—his page, Moth. Armado wonders at his own melancholy; much badinage later (all of it to Moth’s advantage), he answers his own question, confessing his love for “a base wench,” none other than Jacquenetta (I.ii.57). His complaint against Costard was simply an attempt to eliminate his rival, a rival soon to be returned to him as a servant, despite his intention to get him out of the picture. Meanwhile, he begs Moth for examples of “great men” who “have been in love” (I.i.63). The examples the boy offers—Hercules and Samson—should be far from comforting. When Moth tells him that Samson’s beloved Delilah had a green complexion (for jealousy) and “a green wit” (an immature one), Armado insists that “My love is most immaculate white and red”—colors symbolizing purity and modesty (I.ii.86-87). This should be no source of confidence, master, as such colors mask “maculate thoughts” (I.ii.88). To illustrate, he breaks into a lyric, saying that blushing cheeks betoken faults, whiteness fear of their discovery. “A dangerous rhyme, master, against the reason of white and red” (I.ii.103). Rhyme or poetry sets prudent limits on a too-schematic rationalism that readily ossifies into convention. 

When Constable Dull delivers Costard (Berowne evidently having delegated that duty), Armado decides to impose a fast on his rival and to take Jaquenetta to the royal park, where she’ll be the “day-woman” or dairy-maid (I.ii.125). He confesses his helplessness against Cupid, the boy-god whose “glory is to subdue men” (I.ii.167)—even men of physical strength such as Samson and Hercules, even a man of wisdom, Solomon. He can only appeal for strength to “some extemporal god of rhyme,” lest he “turn sonnet” (I.ii.169-70). Ex-temporal: beyond time. Turn sonnet: become transformed, as in an Ovidian poem, not into another form of nature but into a poem. Only prudence can save him now—a virtue absent from his moral repertoire.

Elsewhere in the royal park, a delegation has arrived from France, a delegation headed by the king’s daughter. The Princess (a fictional character, as King Henry III had no children) is accompanyied by attendant ladies Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine, Lord Boyet and two other lords. She has come to negotiate a dispute over the neighboring French province of Aquitaine, described tellingly by Lord Boyet as “a dowry fit for a queen” (II.i.8). Given the King of Navarre’s edict, she cannot approach him without permission, so she sends Boyet to request an audience. The Princess views Boyet with some suspicion, deprecating his flattery and telling him, when he says he is “proud of employment” in the mission, “All pride is willing pride, and yours is so” (II.i.35).

She prudently asks her attendants for character assessments of the principal members of the king’s court. Each has encountered one of them previously. Maria judges Longaville as “a man of sovereign parts, peerless esteem’d / Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms” (II.i.44-45), if a bit too sharp-witted, a man “whose edge hath power to cut” and does so too readily (II.i.50). Katharine considers Dumaine “a well-accomplish’d youth,” but one who has “most power to do most harm” because “least knowing ill” (II.i.56-58)—a certain hazardous naivete. As for Berowne, Rosalind admires his merry disposition and ready wit, his “sweet and voluble” discourse (II.i.76). The Princess suspects aloud that her ladies are “all in love” and, given Lord Boyet’s remark about Aquitaine being a fit dowry for a queen, the possibility of marriage indeed seems to waft in the spring air.

King Ferdinand, however, dampens the mood when he arrives in the park, failing to extend his hospitality by inviting his visitors to the castle, given his decree to keep women at arm’s length. He is all business. Having fought on France’s side in the religious wars during his father’s time, Ferdinand expects France to honor the agreement to pay the expenses, half of which France still owes. In the meantime, Navarre holds part of Aquitaine as surety. The problem is that a letter from the French king intimates that the money has already been paid, and so Navarre should yield back the territory; yet Ferdinand has no record of the payment. “Dear Princess, were not his requests so far / From reason’s yielding, your fair self should make / A yielding ‘gainst some reason in my breast, / And go well satisfied to France again.” (II.i.149-53). He requests proof of payment, but Boyet has none, promising that the diplomatic pouch containing them will arrive tomorrow. Please then, Princess, “deem yourself lodg’d in my heart, / Though so denied fair harbor in my house” (II.i.173-74). He leaves, but Berowne stays behind to flirt with Rosaline, who rejects him; Dumaine and Longaville soon return to confess their interest in Katharine and Maria, respectively. Boyet answers them with courtesy laced with irony, then suggests to the princess that the king is in love with her.

It is easy for romantically-inclined modern readers to overlook the stakes, although the courtly audience of Shakespeare’s play would not. There is the potential for a serious diplomatic incident, here. The French king does not likely send his daughter to head a mission to the bachelor king of Navarre without political intent. Does he hope to marry her off and cement the alliance? Or does he hope to evade a debt by sending such a charming delegation of ladies? What is love’s labor? How might it be lost? What will be the consequences if it is lost? With no war against common enemies to unite them, will France and Navarre (now with a foothold on French soil) turn on each other? This comedy might or might not end happily.

In still another part of the forest, Armado grants Costard his liberty and money in exchange for carrying a letter to Jaquenetta, evidently trusting that these boons will overcome any feelings Costard may still entertain for the girl. On the way, Costard meets Berowne, who gives him a letter for delivery to Rosaline. One cannot expect these arrangements to end well, given Costard’s mixed motives, to say nothing of his doltishness. 

In her part of the park, the Princess expects to leave soon, after proof of payment arrives. Meanwhile, she prepares, Diana-like, to hunt a deer, conferring with the forester who directs her to “a stand where you may make the fairest shoot” (IV.i.11). Pretending that he praises her beauty with the word “fairest,” she builds the exchange into a criticism of King Ferdinand’s policy. To accept praise for beauty would be vain; better to deserve praise for merit. Praise is a form of glory or fame, the ambition with which Ferdinand sought to fire the lords in support of his regime of austere pursuit of learning. But “Glory grows guilty of detested crimes, / When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part, / We bend to that the working of the heart; / As I for praise alone now seek to spill / The poor deer’s blood that my heart means no ill.” (IV.i.31-35). The quest for honor interferes with more natural loves, great and small. As for the greater hunt she and her attendants evidently have undertaken, however, “praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord” (IV.i.41-42). In that case, honor honors nature.

Speaking of which, Costard arrives, misdelivering Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta while announcing it’s a letter from Berowne to Rosaline. Badinage about arrows and pricking ensues. The Princess, her attendants, and Boyet now know more about ongoing love aspirations than anyone in Navarre. They have achieved a substantial diplomatic advantage, thanks to superior intelligence-gathering. How will they exploit it?

The final pair of characters now enter the play. The schoolmaster Holofernes and his curate friend, Sir Nathaniel, are passing the time with Constable Dull, a man neither of great learning or of conspicuous piety. Costard and Jaquenetta enter with the love-sonnet letter they suppose to be from Armado. They need someone to read it to them. Holofernes does so; in recognizing the real author, he tells them to deliver it “into the royal hand of the King,” who will find in it evidence of Berowne’s disobedience (IV.ii.134). Sir Nathaniel approves of this charge as a thing done “in the fear of God, very religiously,” an act of deference to a ruler, as commanded by Paul the Apostle (IV.i..138). But Holofernes cares more about the author’s literary style, which he deems “very unlearned, neither savoring of poetry, wit, nor invention” (IV.ii.149-50). He promises a thorough critique at dinner.

Scholars have identified in ‘Holofernes’ a demi-anagram for the name ‘John Florio,’ the famous scholar who first translated Montaigne into English. They point to the contemporary debate over the question, ‘Love or Learning?’—the theme of the play. The eminent Cambridge University scholar Gabriel Harvey was the leading polemicist among the defenders of learning, called the ‘Artists.’ Cambridge University graduate and satirist spoke for the ‘Villainists,’ who argued in favor of love and of experience generally—Nashe contending, for example, that the debtors’ prison from which he had also graduated offered more useful instruction than the university did. Florio was a learned man who translated the learned Montaigne, a man who nonetheless commended experience, subtly praising Machiavelli rather than the Renaissance humanists, whose vast learning both Montaigne and Machiavelli could be said to have matched. Shakespeare, well-acquainted with Florio’s translation, would have noted the paradox. And he would have known Florio’s stricture, “It were labor lost to speak of love,” since there are so many books about it. Obviously, Shakespeare disagreed, and his Florio-figure is a figure of fun. But will Shakespeare side with Machiavelli’s understanding of the lessons of experience, given the framework of geopolitical plotting of the story he tells?

It’s now the Navarrians’ turn to learn the truth about one another, about how they fought love with the law and love won. Berowne soliloquizes about his losing attempt to conquer his desires. “By heaven, I do love,” he confesses to himself, “and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy”—the melancholy of the lover who knows not whether he’s loved in return, who must admit he cannot maintain his self-sufficiency, even in banding together with his peers in the study of books (IV.iii.11-12). Seeing the king approach, he hides, quickly seeing that Ferdinand too has turned sonneteer. In his poem for the Princess, the king takes up the traditional imagery of his lady’s eyes, which are something like the sun, making her lover’s tears shine in “thy glory through my grief” (IV.iii.33). “O queen of queens! how far dost thou excel / No thought can think nor tongue of mortal tell.” (IV.ii.36-37). The rhyme of love sets limits on the prose of reason.

The king himself now hides, as Longaville arrives, his own sonnet in hand, unwittingly to join the king’s “sweet fellowship in shame” (IV.iii.45). Against courtly and scholarly rhetoric, “the heavenly rhetoric” of Maria’s eye, “‘gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,” has “persuad[ed] my heart to this false perjury,” this evasion of the king’s law (IV.iii.56-58). If rhymes set limits on reason, they also set limits on love as “guards on wanton Cupid’s hose,” in attentive Berowne’s words (IV.iii.53). To make rhyme requires the speaker to set his passion to music, to give it measure, to form unreason to a rule of reason. Set to rhyme, love’s reason is not the king’s ‘rationalist’ or book-learned reason; it is rather the kind of reason right for loving and for lovers. For Longaville, poetry enables him to justify his love as lawful: “A woman I forswore; but I will prove, / Thou being a goddess, I forswore not thee. My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love; / Thy grace being gain’d cures all disgrace in me, / Vows are but breath and breath a vapor is; / Then thou, fair sun, which on my earth dost shine, / Exhal’st this vapor-vow, in thee it is. / If broken, then it is no fault of mine; / If by me broke, what fool is not so wise / To lose an oath to win a paradise?” (IV.iii.61-69). Berowne immediately spots the fallacy, which consists of the argument’s false premise, “which makes flesh a deity / A green goose a goddess—pure, pure idolatry” (IV.iii.70-71). The argument will need a natural, not a theological premise, if it is to hold.

No time for that, as Longaville too hides and Dumaine (as he supposes) soliloquizes on Katharine. “Once more I’ll mark how love can vary wit,” Berowne remarks (IV.iii.96). Dumaine is a man of fewer words than the others. His imagery isn’t sunlight or tear-water or the earth, nor does he attempt initially to reason either legalistically or theologically. For him, the ruling image is another element, air. “Love, whose month is ever May, / Spied a blossom passing fair / Playing in the wanton air.” (IV.iii.98-100). Love “wish’d himself the heaven’s breath,” so that he could blow on the cheeks of his beloved: “Air, would I might triumph so!” (IV.iii.106). The theology comes at the conclusion of Dumaine’s sonnet, not at the beginning, as he pleads, “Do not call it sin in me / That I am forsworn for thee,” since Jove himself loved Juno, “turning mortal” for her love (IV.iii.112-16). Like Dumaine, Jove loved one who resisted his advances. He won her heart by transforming himself into a helpless little bird, which the kindly goddess did love; he then transformed himself back into a god, and his lady’s love kept on. Dumaine’s sonnet is the intended bird, singing to his lady. He will send “something more plain,” too, more prosaic, “express[ing] my true love’s lasting pain” (IV.iii.117-18)—as pitiable, he hopes, as Jove in a form of helplessness.

In turn, each hidden man steps forward, Longaville to accuse Dumaine, Ferdinand to accuse Longaville, Berowne to accuse the king and the others. He justly rebukes their “inconstancy,” asking rhetorically, “When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?” (IV.iii.177). Right away, as it happens, as Costard and Jaquenetta pop up, his love-sonnet to Rosaline in hand.

This calls for a conference to settle on a change of policy and to formulate a justification for the correction. Fortunately, Berowne already had argued against the king’s regime, and so has an argument ready, this time addressing an audience eager to give its consent.

“Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace: / As true we are as flesh and blood can be,” he begins (IV.iii.210). Since “young bloods doth not obey an old decree” (IV.iii.213); since beauty makes old age feel “new-born,” giving “the crutch the cradle’s infancy,” being “the sun that maketh all things shine” (IV.iii.240-42); since all these things are true, Berowne is more than happy to fulfill the king’s request to “prove our loving lawful, and our faith not torn” (IV.iii.280-81). It is really quite simple, Berowne explains. For young men to swear “to fast, to study, and to see no women” in obedience to a king who rules by convention is nothing less than to commit “flat treason ‘gainst the kingly state of youth” (IV.iii.288-89)—that is, against nature, which ordains the seasons of life. His companions have spoken of nature’s light, earth, water, and air, but they have forgotten nature’s other element, fire. “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: / They are the ground, the books, the academes, / From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire” (IV.iii.298-300). “Where has any author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye” (IV.iii.308-09). Where did you, who came so recently to sonneteering, find “such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes / Of beauty’s tutors have enrich’d you with?” (IV.iii.318-19). Surely not in “leaden contemplation” (IV.iii.317). Love “first learned in a lady’s eyes / Lives not alone immured in the brain, / But with the motion of all elements / Courses as swift as thought in every power, / And gives to every power a double power, / Above their functions and their offices.” (IV.iii.323-27). Love is what sets the other elements of nature in motion, harmonizing and vivifying all the senses, and also every virtue, whether it be courage, wisdom, or moderation. Love civilizes the savage and, with respect to justice, “plant[s] in tyrants mild humility” (IV.iii.345) by teaching them the happiness of unforced reciprocity. Therefore, let us “lose our oaths to find ourselves” (IV.iii.357). As the Gospels teach, “charity itself fulfills the law, / And who can sever love from charity?” (IV.iii.360-61).

Having declared war on love, which he’d conceived as low, unworthy of the human mind, newly-converted King Ferdinand now declares war for Saint Cupid: “Soldiers, to the field!” (IV.iii.362). Newly respectful of nature’s time, and timing, the king urges haste in preparing for the campaign, “some entertainment for them in their tents” (IV.iii.369), “for revels, dances, masks, and merry hours / Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers” (IV.iii.375-76). He drafts none other than Quixote-Armado for the task, who in turn engages Latin-mangling pedant Holofernes and the English-bungling curate Sir Nathaniel for the task—men who “have been at a great feast of language and stol’n the scraps,” as impish young Moth remarks, men who “have liv’d long on the alms-basket of words,” as plain-speaker Costard puts it (V.i.35-38). Under Holofernes’ direction, they will present a pageant of the Nine Worthies, famous conquerors from Joshua to Pompey the Great. As there are nine worthies but only four players to represent them, Holofernes will play several. Never will so many owe so little to so few.

With the gentlemen absent, the ladies are beginning to bicker amongst themselves, with Rosaline and Katharine exchanging barbs. Pronouncing the exchange “a set of wit well play’d,” the Princess redirects their hostilities toward the suitors, asking them to compare the love-sonnets they’ve received (V.ii.29). Rosalind deprecates Berowne’s flattery: his “numbers” or metres are “true,” but his “numbers” or reckoning exaggerated; according to him, “I were the fairest goddess on the ground” (V.ii.36-37). With characteristically greater asperity, Katharine dismisses Dumain’s effort as “a huge translation of hypocrisy, / Vilely compil’d, profound simplicity” (V.ii.52-53). As for Longaville, Maria confines herself to opining that she wishes his poem shorter, the accompanying chain of pearls longer. The Princess finds the King Ferdinand’s poetry equally verbose, although she has kinder words for the diamond necklace he enclosed with it. (“We shall be rich ere we depart” [V.ii.1]). In all, “We are wise girls to mock our lovers so” (V.ii.59), and as for the young men, “none are so surely caught, when they are catch’d / As wit turn’d fool; folly, in wisdom hatch’d / Hath wisdom’s warrant and the help of school, / And wit’s own grace to grace a learned fool.” (V.ii.69-72). As one scholar has observed, in Love’s Labor Lost “the word wit is used more often than in any of the other plays” [2]; among other things, the play is a witty meditation on wit. When learning outpaces prudence it acts as an accelerant to “fool’ry’s” fire, providing false proofs of stupid thoughts (V.ii.76).

The lovers have arrived, Boyet announces, and they have disguised themselves as Russians. He overheard their planning session—quite by accident, or so he says. He advises the ladies to prepare their defenses, and the Princess is battle-ready: “Saint Dennis to Saint Cupid!” (V.ii.87). The Cupidians of Navarre will meet the forces of Saint Denis, the third-century martyr who brought Christianity to Gaul, was eventually named Bishop of Paris, then martyred by the Romans. One might have expected the Princess to invoke St. Louis, patron saint of the French monarchy, but instead she chooses the patron saint of the French people. A republican at heart? Perhaps rather a just sharer in monarchy. The real French king who preceded Henry of Navarre, Henry III, provoked a popular uprising after murdering his brothers; his criminal attempt to secure his authority undermined it. Under those circumstances it is better to invoke the saint of the people instead of the so-recently betrayed saint of a monarchy turned unsaintly.

Be this as it may, she tells her attendants to confuse the invaders by posing as—one another, masking themselves and claiming each other’s identities (Rosaline will play the Princess). Each man will woo the wrong woman. Crucially, based on Boyet’s somewhat slanted account, the women assume that the men come only to mock them. Just as there’s no fool like a learned man, so “there’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown” (V.ii.153). 

The Navarrians walk into the trap and exit soon after, verbally cut and bruised. “The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As the razor’s edge invisible,” Boyet gloats (V.ii.256-57). The Romans beheaded Saint Denis; his devotees have beheaded the followers of Saint Cupid. The Princess pronounces it to have been an unequal battle: “Better wits have worn plain statute-caps,” the headgear of commoners (V.ii.281). After his beheading, Saint Denis was said to have carried his head in his arm, continuing to preach sermons; Boyet predicts that the Cupidians will be equally resilient. When they do return, Rosaline advises the Princess, we should mock them for their silly disguises, and so they will.

Berowne has now understood Boyet, that “ape of form, Monsieur the Nice” (V.ii.325); he sees what the Princess had seen, that Boyet wears a mask of flattering words. When the king worries that the ladies see through the men’s disguises and now will “mock us downright,” Dumaine recommends, “Let us confess, and turn it to a jest” (V.ii.389-90). Very well, but this will only reinforce the ladies’ conviction that they are being toyed with. They in turn reveal their ploy of disguise to the still-unsuspecting men, to which intelligence Berowne can only scold Boyet: “Might not you / Forestall our sport, to make us thus untrue?” (V.ii.472-73). Boyet smirks, “Full merrily / Hath this brave manage, this career, been run” (V.ii.483-84). 

As the men prepare to retreat a second time, Costard arrives, announcing the approach of the Nine Worthies. When the king worries that the impending farce will only “shame us” further, Berowne cogently replies that that can scarcely happen, given the ignominy of their defeat. What is more, “’tis some policy / To have one show worse than the King’s and his company” (V.ii.509-11). As for the Princess, her appetite for watching men make fools of themselves has yet to be sated: “That sport best pleases that dost least know how” (V.ii.514); and most acutely, when “zeal strives to content, and the contents / Dies in the zeal of that which it presents,” such “confounded” form “makes most form in mirth,” as “great things laboring perish in their birth” (V.ii.515-18). “A right description of our sport, my lord,” Berowne tells Ferdinand (V.ii.519), and indeed it is a fine assessment of the nature of incompetence in love and poetry, to say nothing of philosophy, piety, and play-writing. The Princess has explained how love’s labor is lost, how any kind of labor can be lost.

As hapless Holofernes and his troupe essay their entertainment, the forces of saints Dennis and Cupid unite for the first time in heckling them. Eventually, the Princess takes pity on the poor players; she is less thoroughly merciless than she has seemed. Even Armado begins to see how silly he is. Player and audience alike have moved toward self-knowledge—the purpose of all true comedy, which holds up the mirror to human nature.

Human nature is political, and a messenger arrives to remind everyone of that. “Thou interruptest our merriment,” the Princess complains, but the news is grave: her father, the king of France, is dead. Graciously excusing herself from Navarre, with both an apology for any offense given and a reminder that the men had earned it, she thanks the King Ferdinand for granting her “great suit” for recovering Aquitaine (V.ii.727)—the first mention of it since the beginning of her embassy. She has successfully completed the diplomatic mission her father sent her to accomplish. The French ladies will leave in triumph.

Ferdinand now presses his own mission, the love-suits undertaken by himself and his attendants. Offering an apology in both senses of the word—a defense and an expression of regret—he argues that “your beauties, ladies, / Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humors / Even to the opposed end of our intents,” making we lovers seem both ridiculous and cynical (V.ii.744-46). This being so, “ladies, our love being yours, the error that love makes / Is likewise yours. We to ourselves prove false, / By being once false for ever to be true / To those that make us both” (V.ii.760-62). Our falsehood, our Russian gambit, admittedly was “in itself a sin,” but the true intent behind it purifies, “turns to grace” the foolish and sinful attempt at deception (V.ii.763-64). “Now, at the last minute of the hour, / Grant us your loves” (V.ii.775-76). Do not let the cormorant of time devour us.

The Princess repeats her own defense, that her party had interpreted the king and his court as mockers, pretenders in love. A most politic woman, she will not be pressured into a hasty decision, become an idolater of time. The last minute is “a time, methinks, too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in” (V.ii.777-78). She intends to observe the right form, to mourn her father’s death for the next twelve months. If you, King, will yourself retreat “to some forlorn and naked hermitage,” then I shall marry you at the end of that time (V.ii.782). Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria make the same guarantee—Katharine characteristically with more reserve (“then, if I have much love, I’ll give you some,” Lord Dumaine [V.ii.818]), and Rosaline characteristically with more rigor. Berowne is not merely to seclude himself but to reform himself, learn to bridle his sarcasm by visiting the sick and dying, to learn that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it” (V.ii.849-51). If Berowne finds his jesting ill-met by ill men, “throw away that spirit, / And I shall find you empty of that fault, / Right joyful of your reformation” (V.ii.855-57). Navarre is Protestant, a man of the Reformation; French Catholic Rosaline would reform the Reformer, who has too often deployed his wit to reform others, seldom turning it on himself. His love must become Christian, charitable.

Berowne reflects. “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy,” but it hasn’t (V.ii.862-64). The men’s foolish and conventional love-labors have been lost, new and more austere love-labors imposed. As one scholar puts it, the ladies’ final commands, their final love-test, will discover whether the Navarrian aristocrats can love after they’ve endured a year outside courtly conventions. [3] The king is ready for the challenge; after all, a year is only one-third of the time his men had agreed to. Berowne remains as skeptical as ever in assessing such vows. “That’s too long for a play,” he concludes (V.ii.867). It is indeed too long for a theatrical play, a fiction, and also too long to sustain a self-deceiving vow. This love-test will uncover the reality of the men’s vows (and the women’s), one way or the other.

The play isn’t too long for a closing song. Newly-sobered Armado returns, this time with a shorter, simpler, and much more pointed performance by his players. During the time of the love-test, and for the rest of their lives if they pass it, the men will know the anxiety love’s exclusivity necessarily brings. The first song, sung by “Spring,” reminds them that in that season “The cuckoo then on every tree / Mocks married men, for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo,'” cuckhold (V.ii.885-86), “a word of fear, / Unpleasing to the married ear” (V.ii.897-98). The second song, sung by “Winter,” “when icicles hang on the wall,” reminds them that in that season every night “the staring owl” sings “Tu-who, Tu-whit, Tu-who”—a “merry note” heard indoors, out of the cold (V.ii.900-07). While the anxiety of unknowing, unsure love comes with summer, winter brings men indoors, where they know, can say, can name (to-wit) those to whom they can truly address their love. To say ‘tu’ is to say ‘you’ with intimacy. It bespeaks knowing love of one’s own, one’s own household—the persons there, the warming fire, the food cooking on the stove. 

The song reprises Berowne’s prosaic initial critique of King Ferdinand’s planned regime, sets it to music. Nature imposes the cycle of seasons, over time. Both the not-knowing and the knowledge of love will occur and recur, throughout every human life. Contra Florio, there is always more to write about love, because love is the fire that moves the elements of nature, and nature cannot forever be denied by philosophers, theologians, or rulers. For commoners like Armado, Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Jaquenetta, Costard, Moth, Dull, and the Forester, the outdoor nature of the summer meadow and singing birds and the indoor household amidst the winter snow (where “birds sit brooding” [V.ii.910]) will limit the pretensions of those who would rise above their station with self-inflating talk. For aristocrats like the Navarrian gentlemen and the French ladies, each season will limit the pretensions of those who would rise above their station as rulers, to suppose themselves Platonic philosophers minus Socratic irony, pretensions both impolitic and unnatural, ruinous both to rule and to philosophizing. For rulers, the harsh realities of war, territorial disputes, and succession crises jar them out of the pretensions peculiar to the prominent, the thought that their sayings must make things so.

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” Armado says, to both sides (V.ii.917). Mercury’s words come from the gods; Apollo, god of music, makes reality seem sweeter than it is. And finally, Armado delivers himself justly of a thing he had longed to deliver unjustly and foolishly: a command. “You that way: we this way” (V.ii.918). You aristocrats, we commoners. You French devotees of Saint Denis, we Navarrian devotees of Saint Cupid. You Catholics, we Reformers. If unity comes, it will need to be an articulated unity, the hard-won unity of lovers who remain distinct from one another—not a rushed and thoughtless amalgamation but a unity founded on practical wit, not on the unsteady show-wit of learning for fame’s sake.   

 

Note

1. There may also be a critical glance at the Protestant emphasis on book-learning in the form of Book-learning, Bible study.
2. C. L. Barber: Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 99.
3. Barber, p. 112.