¹ The broad concept of grammar, which involves a thorough examination and interpretation of a text, was consistent with the Stoic concept of reality and, therefore, basic to Stoic education. According to the monistic philosophy of Stoicism, every order in the hierarchy of reality was a physical emanation from the One, which, as Divine Reason, pervades, controls, and governs everything in the universe. Man's happiness, his degree of virtue, was proportionate to his conformity with Divine Reason equally at work in the universe and in the human mind. Hence, the Stoic needed to acquire a knowledge of universal nature, of the Universal Divine Law, in order to regulate his own individual nature according to the Divine Reason and to aim at his ultimate end—namely, virtue. To further his knowledge of universal nature, the Stoic advocated a careful scientific study, not only of physical nature itself, but especially of literature, since the word, as the last stage in the series of physical emanations, was identical with the first principle, the One, or Divine Reason. Hence, too, the allegorical method found favor with the Stoic who sought analogies to implement his interpretation of physical nature in terms of Divine Reason.

² The balanced classical concept of rhetoric, represented by Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and St. Augustine, maintains a fundamental balance between sound subject matter and style. In the quinquepartite qualitative division, as first enunciated by Aristotle and continued by the balanced rhetoricians, priority is given to invenlio over dispositio and elocutio, which are subordinated and functionally ordered to the purpose of the oration. Departures from the balanced tradition result in either the exaggerated dialectical tradition, represented by the Stoics, or the exaggerated stylistic tradition, represented by the Sophists. In the Sophistic tradition the concept of rhetoric is narrowed to a preoccupation with elocutio and, as happened in the medieval period, inventio and dispositio are absorbed by dialectics.

³ Pre-eminently among the Church Fathers, St. Augustine applies the full impact of the grammatical-rhetorical method to Scriptural exegesis. In the De Doctrina Christiana he says: “There are two things on which all interpretation of Scripture depends: the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained” (Works of Awrelius Augustine, ed. Rev. Marcus Dods, Edinburgh, 1873, ix, 7–8). To the service of Scriptural interpretation Augustine brings all the resources of the Stoical concept of grammar—knowledge of sacred and profane languages, of the nature of being, of dialectics in order to refute Sophism and to divide the matter properly, of eloquence, of mathematics, of law; for the communication of Scriptural matter he elicits the services of rhetoric and prescribes in Book IV the same general oratorical principles that Cicero had laid down in his De Oratore.

⁴ By assigning a logical primacy to the Divine Will, Ockham makes It the only basis for morality, implicitly denies the existence of absolutes in the speculative, as well as in the practical, order, and ultimately repudiates an objective and immutable norm of morality. Although Ockham's repudiation of the proper activity of the human intellect would tend to a voluntarism in the natural order, his theory of justification as a relatio externa contradicts this tendency. Justification and immorality are not exclusive; natural morality is undermined; and supernatural virtue is destroyed.

⁵ Foster Watson in The Old Grammar Schools (Cambridge, 1916) describes the Renaissance “as the attempt to return to a study of grammar (including in this term literary appreciation of authors) and rhetoric (which served as a systematic analytical study of good Latin style)” (p. 8). For more recent studies of Renaissance Christian humanism see Ernest R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1953), and Myron P. Gilmore, The World of Humanism, 1453–1517 (New York, 1952).

⁶ Bishop Foxe expressed this ideal in his “Prefatio de fundatione,” cited in Thomas Fowler's History of Corpus Christi College (Oxford, 1893), p. 37.

⁷ “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” Works, ed. John Keble (Oxford, 1865), Pref. vii.l. (All subsequent references to the Polity will be to the Keble edition and will be given in the text.)

⁸ “Lest therefore any man should marvel whereunto all these things tend, the drift and purpose of all is this, even to shew in what manner, as every good and perfect gift, so this very gift of good and perfect laws is derived from the Father of lights; to teach men a reason why just and reasonable laws are of so great force, of so great use in the world; and to inform their minds with some method of reducing the laws -whereof there is present controversy unto their first original causes, that so it may be in every particular ordinance, thereby the better discerned, whether the same be reasonable, just, and righteous, or no” (lxvi.l).

⁹ He refers to the Puritans as a “special refined sect of Christian believers” who compare with the “infidels, Pagans, or Turks” in their iconoclastic practices (v. xvii.6. See v.x.l; xxx.i.4; hcdv.l; kxxi.10; vn.xv.15; xvi.9; xx.5; vru.lv.7).

¹⁰ Hooker's juxtaposition of wit and judgment, on the one hand, with fancy, imagination, and affections, on the other, indicates both his criticism of the Puritans' unbalanced view of man, as well as his own balanced and ordered view. Hooker consistently associates the affections with man's lower faculties, opposes them to reason and judgment, and insists that reason must “bridle” man's “wayward” affections. Fancy and imagination are, likewise, subordinated to man's judgment and are associated with “sensible actions” and the “inferior powers” of the soul. When man is guided by fancy, he imagines rather than conceives, forms opinions and misconceits rather than true conceits, and ultimately falls into error. The subordination of reason and judgment to fancy and the affections incurs for man singularity and eventual disorder.

¹¹ In his MS. note to the Christian Letter Hooker attacks the Puritans for their failure in this respect. See Polity i.vii.6, n. 68.

¹² “That which wanteth in the weight of their speech,” says Hooker, “is supplied by the aptness of men's minds to accept and believe it” (Polity i.i.l; see Pref. viii.l0).

¹³ Order is necessary wherever there is number, “or else of force,” says Hooker, “there will be confusion” (Polity vn.viii.S; see v.lxxviii.l).

¹⁴ There is no common ground whatsoever between, on the one hand, Hooker's concept of a hierarchy of being that manifests an order wherein specific natures have been created in proportion to fore-conceived ends and, on the other, the nominalists' notion of the Divine Will, precisely because Hooker's emphasis on order, nature, and end supposes an emphasis on the Divine Intellect, whereas the nominalists' stress on the Divine Will permits them to conclude to the arbitrary nature of that Will, and, hence, to destroy the teleological character of Its activity and, ultimately, to sanction disorder.

¹⁵ Rejecting the extreme idealism of Plato, Hooker alludes to the doctrine of the divine ideas as the basis of ontological truth. See Polity i.iii.4; xvi.8; v.lvi.5—a passage which shows the marked influence of St. Thomas's De Veritate, qu. 1, a. 2, c.

¹⁶ Hooker speaks of the “inferior powers of the soul” and the “higher parts of the mind, the understanding” (v.xxxiv.l), and of the “natural intercourse between the highest and the lowest powers of man's mind” (v.lxv.ll).

¹⁷ Pref. ix.l. In his repeated juxtaposition of “affection” with “judgment” (Pref. iii.13; 1.1.3; ni.viii.8; rv.ix.2; vixxii.10, lxiii.2, lxxii.8, lxxviii.14, Ap. i.44; vi.i.l) Hooker indicates the need “to take good heed, lest affection to that which hath in it as well difficulty as goodness sophisticate the true and sincere judgment” (v.lxxvii.14; v. Ded. 5; v.xxii.12).

¹⁸ Although the Ciceronian periodicity of Hooker's style is a commonplace among historians of English prose, there has been comparatively little effort to evaluate that periodicity in terms of its appropriateness to his balanced world view and intellectual emphasis. Among the few that have noted the correspondence is C. S. Lewis, who in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 462, says that “the beauty of Hooker's prose is functional” and that its “structure mirrors the real movement of his mind.” In his article, “Style and Certitude,” ELE, xv (1948), 172, Don Cameron Allen notes the correspondence between Hooker's balanced world view and his periodic sentence: “The periodic style is the prose manner of those who have struck a balance, who have a system in which they can trust; hence it is the only style in which Hooker could have written, but it would have been organically discordant to the ultimate purpose of Bacon.” Coleridge in his essay “On Style” alludes to the inappropriateness of the Senecan period, “where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely strung together like beads, without any causation or progression,” for Hooker's subject matter, in which there is a “perpetual growth of the thoughts, one generating and explaining, and justifying, the place of another” (Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor, London, 1936, p. 217). T. S. Eliot explains the prose style of Hooker and Andrewes in terms of their “intellectual achievement” (“Lancelot Andrewes,” Essays Ancient and Modern, London, 1936, pp. 11–31).

The Ciceronian period, as employed by Hooker, is the “round,” oratorical period in which the dependent members are arranged so that they point forward to the central, climactic, or principal member, suspended until the end, and give it appropriate emphasis. Ordinarily the dependent members are parisonic phrases or clauses which, in turn, generally contain other subordinate units; usually, too, the period itself is followed by one or two short sentences which restate or echo the main thought.

The structure of the Ciceronian period is appropriate not only to the thought content of the sentences in which it is found but also to Hooker's fundamental world view. Just as natures are ordered to a fore-conceived end, so the dependent members of the period are directed teleologically to the main thought. The universal order and balance, as well as the hierarchy of being and of ends, is reflected in the parisonic structure. Finally, the many subordinate elements indicate the complexity of thought and the emphasis on reason that characterize Hooker's work.

¹⁹ The Stoic concept of language is based, of course, on the Stoic concept of reality. Since the word was the last stage of a process of physical emanations from the Divine Principle, to know the word was to know the Divine Reason and Will. Words were not merely arbitrary symbols but actually expressed the nature of the thing nominated; hence, precision and exactitude in diction were, for the Stoic, means by which to be identified with the Divine Nature which is in all reality. St. Augustine's concern in the De Doclrina Christiana to search out the meaning of the revealed signs in order to learn the Will of God in regard to things echoes the Stoical theory.

²⁰ In addition to the distinctions expressed in terms properly applied, diction must also be clear and precise (viii.i.2, v.lxi.5), plain and direct (iv.iii.l).

²¹ “The Letter of G. P. to R. B. Concerning this Woorke,” A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, ed. Herbert Hartman (New York, 1938), p. 6.

²² Morris W. Croll and Harry demons ed. (London, 1916), p. 91.

²³ Note how every word in the following paragraph contributes to forming an idea of the nature of law; how, in other words, the diction represents ideas which combine to define the nature of law: “All things that are, have some operation not violent or casual. Neither doth any thing ever begin to exercise the same, without some fore-conceived end for which it worketh. And the end which it worketh for is not obtained, unless the work be also fit to obtain it by. For unto every end every operation will not serve. That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a Law. So that no certain end could ever be attained, unless the actions whereby it is attained were regular; that is to say, made suitable, fit and correspondent unto their end, by some canon, rule, or law” (i.ii.l).

²⁴ For a treatment by modern scholars of Renaissance psychology and the theory of the passions see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951); Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes; Slaves of Passion (Cambridge, 1930); Ruth L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays (Iowa City, 1927).