Justus Lipsius

Lipsius, Justus (1547-1606) Latin name of Joost Lips, Flemish humanist and scholar, renowned for his editions of Tacitus (1574) and Seneca (1589-1605). Lipsius sought to revive Stoicism, finding parallels between the classical submission to fate and Christian submision to providence. His own philosophical writings included De Constantia (1584), Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604) and Physiologia Stoicorum (1604).

Lipsius, Justus (Joest Lips; 1547–1606), Dutch humanist and philosopher. Justus Lipsius was the most widely published humanist of the end of the sixteenth century. With Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) and Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) he formed the famous triumvirate of learning that dominated the late Renaissance. The father of the Tacitist political tradition, he also led the Neostoic movement based on the works of Seneca, which Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) regarded as one of the origins of modern individualism. Lipsius's work illustrates how a pragmatic politics, ethics, and religion grew out of the convergence of classical humanism and the wars that wracked Europe during the Counter-Reformation.

Born to a well-to-do family in Overyssche near Brussels, Lipsius began his studies as a novice in the Jesuit College of Cologne, where he was recognized as a prodigy due to his extraordinary memory and voracious intellectual appetite. He first achieved renown at the age of nineteen for Variæ Lectiones, a work of Ciceronian Latin prose commentaries on the ancients, which he dedicated to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–1586), who was a minister of Philip II of Spain. Although in later life Lipsius repudiated this work for its flowery style, it caught the eye of Granvelle, who invited Lipsius to Rome as his Latin secretary. It was in Italy, between 1568 and 1570, that Lipsius blossomed as a scholar, visiting great libraries and working with famous humanists such as Paolo Manuzio (1512–1574) and Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606).

Lipsius's meeting with the French poet and humanist Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–1585), however, led to a defining intellectual epiphany. Lecturing in Rome, Muret was a pioneering scholar who was working on a set of commentaries on Tacitus's works. Lipsius now repudiated Ciceronian Latin eloquence and advocated Tacitus's concise, sententious style, effectively creating a second humanist rhetorical movement. In 1572 Lipsius accepted a chair at the Lutheran University of Jena in Germany, where he began his famed critical edition of the works of Tacitus, which was published in 1674. This work stands as one of the greatest monuments of Latin humanism. Mixing his own brilliant emendations with those of other scholars, Lipsius used his considerable philological skills to clear Tacitus's text of its medieval inaccuracies, differentiating the Annals from the Histories, and restoring the work closer to its original state. In 1581 he added historical and political commentaries and highlighted maxims with the aim of making Tacitus's work useful for practical life. Scaliger considered this his most important work and indeed, it became an international bestseller, elevating Tacitus to the status of a secular saint of practical politics and an acceptable stand-in for Machiavelli.

Of his many works, Lipsius considered De Constantia (1584; On constancy) and the Politicorum Libri Sex (1589; Six books of politics) to be his most important achievements. De Constantia explained the basic tenets of his Stoic philosophy that sought to transform contemplation and study into the basis for worldly action. Traumatized by the Spanish atrocities during the Dutch Wars and by the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (24 August 1572), Lipsius formulated a philosophy of personal discipline, ethics, and rational judgment in response to the chaos that engulfed Counter-Reformation Europe. The following work, Politicorum Libri Sex, was an exercise in Stoic practicality. Harnessing maxims from the ancients, in particular from Tacitus, he hoped to create a collection, or cento, of political maxims to be used as a tool by monarchs to control and stabilize their kingdoms. His theory of "mixed prudence" was an attempt to translate Machiavellian practical prudence into an acceptable tool of politics regulated by the ethics of public utility. This theory later formed the basis of Libertine political philosophy and was central to the works of Pierre Charron (1541–1603) and Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653).

Lipsius lived his life according to the Stoic principle of accommodation and rejected the religious fanaticism of his day. He was a member of the secretive, proto-Deist Family of Love movement that stressed peace and unity above denominational loyalty. A true accommodator, he went from Lutheran Jena to Calvinist Leiden in 1572, and in 1591 he returned to Louvain, where he again embraced Jesuit Catholicism and lived out the rest of his days. He supported the interests of Protestant provinces, but he also counseled the emperor on the way to a peaceful settlement of the religious strife that wracked Holland. His numerous works also include a manual of letter-writing, Epistolica Institutio (1580); a history of classical libraries, De Amphiteatro Liber (1584); De Militia Romana (1595), which inspired many of the military reforms of his day; and finally his masterwork of Senecan Stoicism, Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam (1604). His works remained popular into the seventeenth century.

Bibliography

Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger. Translated by David Mc Klintock. Cambridge, U.K., 1982.

Ruysschaert, José. Juste Lipse et les Annales de Tacite: Une méthode de critique textuelle au XVIe siècle. Turnhout, Belgium, 1949.

Saunders, Jason Lewis. Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism. New York, 1955.

Wasznik, Jan. "Inventio in the Politica: Commonplace-Books and the Shape of Political Theory." In Lipsius in Leiden: Studies in the Life and Works of a Great Humanist, edited by K. Enenkel and C. Heesakkers, pp. 141–162. Voorthuizen, 1997.

—JACOB SOLL

This article is about the person. For the building named after him, see Justus Lipsius building

Justus Lipsius

Justus Lipsius, Joost Lips or Josse Lips (18 October 1547 — 23 March 1606), was a Flemish philologist and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia (On Constancy). His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden and Leuven.

His ideas about the ideal citizen—a man that acts according to reason, is answerable to himself, is in control of his emotions, and is ready to fight—found wide acceptance in the turbulent times of the Reformation. This Lipsian view, translated to politics, entails rationalisation of the state and its apparatus of government, autocratic rule by the prince, discipline dispensed to subjects, and strong military defence. These principles lie at the foundation of the early modern state.^[1]

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 The Justus Lipsius Name 4 External links 5 References

Life

The Four Philosophers (c. 1615. Oil on panel; 167 x 143 cm, Pitti Palace, Florence). One of Lipsius's students was Philip Rubens, the brother of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. In his friendship portrait of about 1615, the painter depicted himself, his brother, Lipsius and Jan Wowerius (left to right) along with Lipsius's dog Mopsulus. A bust of Seneca behind the philosopher references his work, while the ruins of Rome's Palatine Hill in the background further commemorate the classical influences. Rubens painted a similar friendship portrait while in Mantua around 1602 (now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) that also includes Lipsius.

Lipsius was born in Overijse, Brabant. His parents sent him early to the Jesuit college in Cologne, but they feared that he might become a member of the Society of Jesus, so when he was sixteen they removed him to the University of Leuven.

The publication of his Variarum Lectionum Libri Tres (1567), which he dedicated to Cardinal Granvelle, earned him an appointment as a Latin secretary, and a visit to Rome in the retinue of the cardinal. Here Lipsius remained for two years, devoting his spare time to the study of the Latin classics, collecting inscriptions and examining manuscripts in the Vatican. After he returned from Rome, he published a second volume of miscellaneous criticism (Antiquarum Lectionum Libri Quinque, 1575); compared with the Variae Lectiones of eight years earlier, it shows that he had advanced from the notion of purely conjectural emendation to that of emending by collation.

In 1570 he travelled through Burgundy, Germany, Austria, and Bohemia, where the University of Jena engaged him as a teacher for more than a year, a position which implied conformity to the Lutheran Church. On his way back to Leuven, he stopped some time at Cologne, where he must have comported himself as a Catholic.

He then returned to Leuven, but the Eighty Years' War soon drove him to take refuge via Antwerp to the Northern Netherlands, where, in 1579, the newly founded University of Leiden appointed him professor of history.

At Leiden, where he must have passed as a Calvinist, Lipsius remained eleven years, the period of his greatest productivity. It was now that he prepared his Seneca, and perfected, in successive editions, his Tacitus, and brought out a series of other works. Some were pure scholarship, some were collections from classical authors, and others were of general interest. One of this latter class was a treatise on politics (Politicorum Libri Sex, 1589), in which he showed that, though a public teacher in a country which professed toleration, he had not departed from the state maxims of Alva and Philip II. He wrote that a government should recognize only one religion, and extirpate dissent by fire and sword. This avowal exposed him to attacks, but the prudent authorities of Leiden saved him, by prevailing upon him to publish a declaration that his expression Ure, seca ("Burn and carve") was a metaphor for a vigorous treatment.

In the spring of 1590, leaving Leiden under pretext of taking the waters at Spa, he went to Mainz, where he reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church. This event deeply interested the Catholic world, and invitations from the courts and universities of Italy, Austria and Spain poured in on Lipsius. But he preferred to remain in his own country, and he finally settled at Leuven, as professor of Latin in the Collegium Buslidianum.

He was not expected to teach, and appointments as privy councillor and historiographer to Spain's King Philip II eked out his trifling stipend. He continued to publish dissertations as before, the chief being his De militia romana (1595) and his Lovanium (1605), intended as an introduction to a general history of Brabant.

He died at Leuven. For years, a street off the Wetstraat in the Etterbeek quarter of Brussels, commemorated his name. In the 1990s, construction for the new home of the Council of the European Union built over the road, but the honorific remains: the EU headquarters now resides in the Justus Lipsius building.

Works

• Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (Leiden: Plantijn, 1589)
• De Constantia Libri Duo, Qui alloquium praecipue continent in Publicis malis (Antwerp: Plantijn, 1584)
• Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam Libri Tres, L. Annaeo Senecae, aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis (Antwerp: Plaintijn-Moretus, 1604)
• Annaei Senecae Philosophi Opera, Quae Exstant Omnia, A Iusto Lipsio emendata, et Scholiis illustrata (Antwerp: Plantijn-Moretus, 1605)

The Justus Lipsius Commemorative Coin

The Justus Lipsius Name

The name of Justus Lipsius drew new public attention in 1995 when it was chosen for the new Brussels headquarters building of the Council of the European Union. He was also recently selected to appear on the 10 euro Justus Lipsius Silver commemorative Coin, minted by Belgium in 2006. The reverse side of the coin shows his portrait together with the years of his life (1547- 1606).

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry
• Justus Lipsius His First Book of Constancy
• Justus Lipsius His Second Book of Constancy
•  "Justus Lipsius". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Justus_Lipsius. 

References

1. ^ Oestreich, G: Neostoicism & the Early Modern State, Cambridge University press, 1982

• This article incorporates text from the article "Justus Lipsius" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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