Abstract
For early modern men and women, striving for full self-knowledge was a religious obligation—and achieving it was an impossibility. On the one hand, following Augustine, the quest for self-knowledge was conceived as coterminous with the quest for God. On the other, as a range of sceptical and Reformed authors—from Montaigne to Hooker—argued, true self-knowledge was thought to pose an insurmountable challenge precisely because of what might initially seem to be an epistemic advantage: that is, the proximity of the self to the self. In the Reformed tradition, I argue, this scepticism about the self’s intelligibility was levied for pastoral ends as a source of comfort and reassurance, introducing an element of welcome doubt to temper the blistering certainties of Calvinist predestination. The second half of the chapter explores the highly visceral, sensory terms in which authors frequently describe the pursuit of self-knowledge. I focus in particular on early modern iterations of an ancient analogy comparing the soul to an eye which cannot see itself. For Sir John Davies in his poem Nosce Te Ipsum (1599), self-knowledge is (paradoxically) predicated on a productive form self-estrangement. Poetic language is instrumental here, as metaphor works to make the soul extraordinary to itself, untethering it from its own illusory over-familiarity. Such analogies articulate or ‘make visible’ the limits of our knowledge: they function as a means of expressing, and thereby knowing, human ignorance.
Research leading to this chapter received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617849. Many thanks to Shani Bans, Joan Pong Linton, Rachel Willie and the editors of this book for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter.
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- 1.
‘The Art of Poetry LXXX: Geoffrey Hill’, an interview with Carl Phillips, p. 275.
- 2.
Donne, ‘The Second Anniuersarie’, G1r.
- 3.
On Montaigne’s transformation of ‘the Socratic tradition of philosophy as self-knowledge’, see Ann Hartle, ‘The Essay as Self-Knowledge’, pp. 63–83.
- 4.
Auerbach, ‘L’Humaine Condition’, p. 301.
- 5.
Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Repenting’, Ss4r.
- 6.
As Luiz Eva argues, pace Auerbach, ‘instead of helping to achieve knowledge of the self, [Montaigne’s essays] should be taken … as exhibiting how he fails to gain self-knowledge’: ‘Scepticism and Self-Knowledge’, p. 73.
- 7.
Montaigne , ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, Dd1v.
- 8.
Montaigne , ‘Apologie’, Ee2r-v.
- 9.
See Cicero, Academica, trans. Rackham, II.XXIII.72 and II.XXXI.100–101. Montaigne writes, ‘humane reason hath perswaded, that she had neither ground nor footing, no not so much as to warrant snow to be white: And Anaxagoras said, it was blacke’: ‘Apologie’, Cc3v.
- 10.
Although there may be an intentional irony in Montaigne’s use of probabilistic language (‘more likely’) to undercut Academic probabilism.
- 11.
Montaigne , Les Essais, p. 561.
- 12.
Montaigne , ‘Apologie’, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame, p. 421. The translations by Frame and Screech are both based on the Bordeaux copy of the Essais, whereas Florio used the 1595 edition by Marie de Gournay. See Mack, ‘Montaigne and Florio’, pp. 78–79.
- 13.
Elyot, The boke named the Gouernour, X2r (164). On the oracle’s pagan and diabolical associations, see Parke and Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, p. 389; and Ossa-Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle.
- 14.
Augustine , Confessions, Book V, K10r (211); Book X, Cc2r-v; and Book VIII, V12v.
- 15.
Calvin, The Institution, A1r (fol. 1).
- 16.
Donne, ‘A Sermon Preached At the Earl of Bridgewaters house at the mariage of his daughter [1627]’, in Fifty sermons, Ff1v.
- 17.
Jansenist thinking on this subject is treated by Michael Moriarty in Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves (see especially pp. 305–15). Moriarty also explores suspicion of the transparency of experience (including self-experience) in his earlier Early Modern French Thought. On ‘hyper-Augustinianism’—a radical interpretation of grace as a necessary obliteration of the depraved human will—see Taylor, Sources of the Self, especially pp. 246–47, 332–34.
- 18.
Nicole, Moral Essays, B2v.
- 19.
On the connections between scepticism and Jansenism, see Lennon, ‘Jansenism and the Crise Pyrrhonienne’.
- 20.
For a cogent account of self-knowledge in On the Trinity, see Brittain, ‘Self-Knowledge in Cicero and Augustine’, pp. 119–36.
- 21.
On the doctrine of privileged access, see Cassam, ‘Contemporary Reactions’, p. 483. See also Matthews, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv.
- 22.
Augustine , On the Trinity, pp. 48–55.
- 23.
See Porphyre [Porphyry], Sentences, nos. 43, 830–32. The analogy was elaborated by Cicero before it was adopted by Augustine: ‘the soul has not the power of itself to see itself, but, like the eye, the soul, though it does not see itself, yet discerns other things’, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, p. 79.
- 24.
Augustine , On the Trinity, pp. 27, 47.
- 25.
Gilpin, Demonologia sacra, Dd3v. For an earlier iteration, see Phillipe de Mornay: ‘notwithstanding how lyuely and quickesighted so euer the eye be; it séeth not it self. Woonder not therefore though thou haue a soule […] that the same soule sée not it self’, Mornay, The trewnesse of the Christian religion, Q4v.
- 26.
Popkin, History of Scepticism.
- 27.
Susan Schreiner takes what she calls ‘the passion for certainty’ as a central stimulus of religious controversy in the sixteenth century, perhaps underestimating the extent to which reformers and counter-reformers alike were prepared to accommodate doubt and uncertainty: Are You Alone Wise?, especially Chap. 2. On the pejorative associations of ‘securitas’ for Luther , see Giles Waller’s Chap. 6 in this book.
- 28.
Greenham , A most sweete and assured comfort, D8v and D11r-v.
- 29.
Hooker , A learned and comfortable sermon, B1r, B2r.
- 30.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, pp. 62–63.
- 31.
Gowland, ‘Melancholy, Passions, and Identity’, p. 86.
- 32.
Paster, Humouring the Body, p. 12. In addition to Gowland, other recent critiques of humoural psychology include Mullaney, The Reformation of the Emotions, pp. 54–60, and Meek and Sullivan, ‘Introduction’.
- 33.
On embodied self-scrutiny, see Sawday, ‘Self and Selfhood’.
- 34.
Greenham , A most sweete and assured comfort, D2v.
- 35.
Birken, ‘Crooke, Helkiah’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- 36.
Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, C1r-v. As David Hillman notes, ‘Crooke’s rhetoric […] conflates an objective knowledge of the human body with an understanding of subjective human nature’: Shakespeare’s Entrails, p. 34.
- 37.
As Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman suggest, embodiment might productively be treated as ‘a constellation of different kinds of sensory and perceptual engagement with the world’: ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
- 38.
Charron, Of wisdom, B3v.
- 39.
The phrase ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu’ is actually of indeterminate origin, but was often attributed to Aristotle in the early modern period. See Cranefield, ‘On the Origins of the Phrase’.
- 40.
Aristotle , De Anima, p. 187.
- 41.
For a cogent account of Aristotle’s ideas about the common sense, see Roazen, The Inner Touch, p. 38.
- 42.
Reynolds, Meditations, E4v-E5r.
- 43.
The etymon is the classical Latin informāre: to give form to, shape, fashion, to describe, to form in the mind, to form an idea of, to mould. ‘Information, n.’ OED Online. [accessed 15 July 2016]. oed.com/view/Entry/95568
- 44.
On the poem’s indebtedness to Montaigne , see Nemser, ‘Nosce Teipsum and the Essais of Montaigne’, 95–103.
- 45.
Nicole, Moral essays, F11v.
- 46.
Eric Langley similarly notes Davies’ concern with the limits of self-knowledge, although he is more concerned with the ethics of self-knowledge than with its epistemology, and reads the poem as a conventional statement of the limitations which the flesh places on the body: Narcissism and Suicide, pp. 43–44, 49–50.
- 47.
Davies , Nosce teipsum, C3r.
- 48.
Augustine , On the Trinity, p. 53.
- 49.
Davies , Nosce teipsum, B2v, B3r, H4r.
- 50.
As Brian Cummings comments, ‘art or literature [is] intrinsically reflexive … the very act of writing involves reflecting upon the self’: Mortal Thoughts, p. 24.
- 51.
Sherlock, A defence, L3r.
- 52.
On the history of the idea that ‘reading and writing can play a fundamental role in the individual’s search for self-knowledge and wisdom’, see Stock, ‘The Self and Literary Experience’.
- 53.
Davies , Nosce teipsum, C1v, C2v-r, F4v-G1r, I1v-2r; C3v-4r.
- 54.
Browne, Religio Medici, A8v-B1r.
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Swann, E.L. (2018). Nosce Teipsum: The Senses of Self-Knowledge in Early Modern England. In: Mukherji, S., Stuart-Buttle, T. (eds) Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71359-5_9
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