Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge.

Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xviii + 373 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 0-91-04463-5

Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge is an account of rhetorical use in literature and the visual arts, from Antiquity through the later Renaissance, of vegetative imagery, often in conjunction with light imagery, to express an originally Stoic conception of an inherent human connection with natural law and so with divine reason. Horowitz uses her anthology of seeds, trees, flowers, gardens, inseminations, sparks and lights to show how these figures of speech and thought provided writing about natural law and the pursuit of virtue with a persuasive and consciously intertextual evocation of a vital, epistemic capacityF of humans for a natural, plant-like blooming of inner potential. Focussing on "Italian humanists in the fifteenth century and French humanists in the sixteenth century" (4), the book represents how the "fusing together of [this] cluster of ideas from a multiplicity of sources allows creative thinkers to draw a variety of implications from the Stoic idea that human dignity is enhanced by the seeds of v irtue and knowledge" (254).

The work has a longish literary introduction, connecting its ideas with contemporary French theory, and a more straight forward epilogue which reads like a prospectus for the book. In between are ten chapters accompanied by thirty-seven illustrations. The first two chapters establish a tradition of thought and debate carried on through the images of vegetation and light by the ancient Stoics, the Bible, stoicizing and christianizing late ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian authors, and the two masters of medieval theology, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The middle four chapters concentrate on the medieval debate between visions of human depravity and human dignity and its continuation, as Horowitz argues, in Renaissance and Reformation debates over the freedom or servitude of the will. These chapters summarize medieval and Renaissance uses of the imagery, discuss Ficino's seminal role in the flowering of vegetative imagery in the works of female and male humanists, and look at Botticelli, Innocent III, Pico della Mirandola, Lefevre d'Etaples, Luther versus Erasmus, Margurite de Navarre and Elizabeth I, Calvin versus Sadoleto, Melanchthon and the Council of Trent.

The beginning of the third chapter introduces a scheme of what may be termed Augustinian and Aquinian interpretations of the symbolic language of vegetation that is central to the account unfolding in the rest of the book. Heightened awareness of the distinction between divine transcendence and human immanence in Jewish and Christian uses of the pagan tradition resulted in four distinct but intertwined ways of utilizing the epistemological confidence engendered by belief in seeds of virtue and knowledge. Thus an author could use this language to underwrite the possibilty of seeking either contemplation of God or attainment of virtue and prudence for effective life action either by the path of divine illumination or by means of natural human effort.

The final four chapters, set in the context of the Northern Renaissance and the French Wars of Religion, move from Erasmus and Alciati through study of Du Vair, Lipsius, Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron. These chapters present a first emergence, in the form of a reassertion of authentic ancient Stoicism, of the liberal Enlightenment conception of humans as autonomous beings within nature equipped in their own nature to master both themselves and their natural environment by the use of natural will and reason.

Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, written entirely in the present tense, is deeply influenced by a decorum which requires the analytical themes to emerge organically in the presentation of the literary evidence and gradually blossom until, in the last three chapters, they thoroughly dominate the text. Though the ideational content of each diverse use of the images is certainly unpacked, Horowitz defends and utilizes their integrity and generative ambiguity as figural understanding in the argument of the text itself. The universal present tense, though it at first offended my reading habits, enhances the intertextuality and historical continuity of the materials and argument. A reader who does not mind subverting the book's rhetorical strategy might, however, do well to read the epilogue, which recapitulates the whole argument about human dignity and natural law, first of all.

I found this book to be a fascinating and deeply humanistic presentation of significant humanistic scholarship. Truly a humanist, Horowitz means her scholarship to have an ethically formative impact on its reader as a contribution not only to historical and literary learning but to the ongoing ecumenical search in contemporary western civilization for foundations for a reaffirmation of human dignity and human goodwill. I must say I feel sure Erasmus would have approved not only the purpose but the content and style of Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge. As Mary Jane Barnett has argued in a recent article in this journal (49.3 [1996], 542-572), Erasmian linguistic practice also depended on the glamour of allusive, metaphorical, and allegorical discourse to present and represent the fecundity and fundamental mystery of meanings in such a way as to elict transformative intellectual action from the reader who would be moved by fascination to find the kernal of reality within the shell of words.