Sympathy and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

and Philosophy

by

Seyward Goodhand

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto

© Copyright by Seyward Goodhand 2020

 Sympathy and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Poetry and
Philosophy

Seyward Goodhand

Graduate Department of English

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract
When historians of the Renaissance talk about sympathy, they tend to focus on its “occult”

associations. This project asks how such an occult concept could have become a key term for the

rationalist discourse of eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy. The usual story is that

sympathy reemerges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy as a way to

explain mysterious phenomena like magnetism or electricity. Then gradually it migrates inward

and becomes a psychological principle that governs human social and political relations. The

assumption is that modern science leaves no room for mystical explanations of natural

phenomena, and so sympathy loses its cosmic significance and becomes strictly emotional.

Through readings of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, Katherine Philips’s friendship poetry,

work by the Cambridge Platonists including Anne Conway, and commentaries by three

prominent Scottish Calvinist divines, I offer two counterclaims. First, sympathy was always-

already a psychological concept, even if it also bore associations with metaphysics, magic, and

religion. The notion that sympathy just changes into a moral concept is too simple. Second,

sympathy becomes a pillar of eighteenth-century moral philosophy precisely because it was

understood to be both an internal and an external law of attraction. When moral philosophers like

Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Smith, or Hume try to explain what ultimately binds free citizens

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together, they all invoke sympathy as a way to describe a type of political association that would

be governed less by the state’s external laws and dictates than by the subject’s deepest, most

natural desire to be connected with others. Sympathy’s odd status in sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century natural philosophy as both an external force and a personal feeling made it the ideal

foundation for a new form of political authority whose laws, as Rousseau said, would not be

“graven on tablets of marble and brass, but on the hearts of citizens.” Defined both as a feeling in

the bosom of nature that draws all things to their proper place, and as an impulse rooted in

personal human desires, “sympathy” suggests that creatures are determined by the order of

things, while allowing room for human freedom and creativity.

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 Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Early Modern Sympathy and the Political Subject……………………………………1

1.1 Background……………………………………………………………………………6

1.2. Seeking a Definition………………………………………………………………...14

1.3 The Politics of Sympathy…………………………………………………………….25

1.4 The Chapters…………………………………………………………………………27

1.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...29

Chapter 2: The Ancient and Renaissance Contexts of Sympathy………………………………..33

2.1 The Ancient Idea of Sympathy………………………………………………………34

2.1.1 Plato and Aristotle………………………………………………………….36

2.1.2 The Stoics…………………………………………………………………..38

2.1.3 Plotinus…………………………………………………………………….42

2.2 Sympathy in the Renaissance………………………………………………………..47

Chapter 3: Sympathy in Seventeenth-Century Britain…………………………………………..57

3.1 Medicine and Physic…………………………………………………………………58

3.1.1 The Paracelsian Influence………………………………………………….61

3.1.2 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont and Robert Fludd……………………………..63

3.2 Natural Philosophy…………………………………………………………………...68

3.3 The Cambridge Platonists……………………………………………………………73

3.4 A Calvinist Theology of Fellow-Feeling…………………………………………….80

3.4.1 James Durham……………………………………………………………...81

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 3.4.1 Robert Leighton……………………………………………………………84

3.4.2 George Hutcheson………………………………………………………….87

3.5 Toward the Next Century…………………………………………………………….89

Chapter 4: “Sympathy” in Paradise Lost………………………………………………………...93

4.1 Sympathy and Inanimate Nature……………………………………………………100

4.2 Sympathy and Ways of Knowing…………………………………………………..115

4.3 Sympathy and God’s Action in the World………………………………………….124

4.4 Sympathy and Females……………………………………………………………..128

Chapter 5: “Sympathy” in the Friendship Poetry of Katherine Philips………………………...135

5.1 Royalist Friend, Parliamentarian Wife……………………………………………..140

5.2 Wondrous Sympathy and Puritanism: Divine Weeks………………………………146

5.3 Sympathy and Puritan Women’s Poetry……………………………………………151

5.4 Philips and Cambridge Platonism…………………………………………………..152

5.5 Sympathy, Charity, and the Problem of Exclusivity………………………………..157

5.6 Women’s Friendship………………………………………………………………..162

5.7 Sympathy and Anne Conway……………………………………………………….171

5.8 Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism…………………………………………………...176

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...179

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………184

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 Chapter 1
Early Modern Sympathy and the Political Subject
One year before the Restoration, Robert Fludd, the Christian Cabalist and Paracelsian physician,
published Mosaicall Philosophy Grounded Upon the Essentiall Truth, or Eternal Sapience
(1659), a massive synthesis of occult philosophy and Puritan reform. In it, Fludd aimed to
replace the authority of Aristotle with that of Moses—not only regarding religion, but in matters
scientific and philosophical, too. “Theology, Physick, or the art of Curing, Astronomy, Musick,
Arithmetick, Geometry, Rhetorick…Meteoro-logicall Science…true Morall learning, and
Politick government,” as well as “all mysticall and miraculous Arts and discoveries” are
explained in terms of Fludd’s totalizing cosmological system rooted in God’s “radicall and
eternall Unity.” 1 From God’s radical unity stream all light and dark energies—including evil and
Satan—which “attain unto the knowledge and originall of the true sympathy and antipathy” that
organize things in this world.2 The qualities of expansion, relationship, warmth, creativity,
goodness, and love, according to Fludd, flow from the port of God’s “volunty.” Contraction,
separateness, darkness, coldness, destruction, chaos, and wicked energies pour from God’s
“nolunty.” Both come from the same source, participate in the same master plan, and, though
Fludd is well disposed to the Manicheans, 3 may be understood as opposing aspects of the same
God.

1 Robert Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy Grounded Upon the Essentiall Truth, or Eternal Sapience / written first in
Latin and afterwards thus rendred into English by Robert Fludd, Esq (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, at
the Prince's Armes in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1659), 17.
2 “This therefore being well observed, we may by the detection of these two abstruce and mysticall principles, I
mean, of Light and Darknesse, attain unto the radicall knowledge and originall of the true sympathy and antipathy,
being that it is evident, that the first proceedeth from that concording and vivifying love, which ariseth from the
benigne emanation of the Creator, which desireth to be joyned with his like, and seeketh to preserve his like by
union; and the other issueth from that discording, privative, and hatefull affection, which darknesse and deformity
doth afford unto the children of light and life, and to all the beautious offsprings thereof. By this therefore it
appeareth, that as before the separation of these different properties, or effects of one unity, namely, of light from
darknesse, which was brought to passe by the divine word, all things were one and the same without distinction and
difference, and that unity or one was no way to be numbered among those things which were created, so that light
was darknesse, and darknesse light, and neither of these discernable; nothing was really distinguished, but all were
one in the first matter of all things, which was in the eternall unity.” Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 143.
3 “IT is a wondrous thing, and passing all humane understanding, that out of one Unity in essence and nature, two
branches of such an opposite nature should arise and sprout forth, as are Darknesse (which is the seat of error,
deformity, contention, privation, or death) and Light, which is the vehicle of truth, beauty, love, position, and life. It
is not for nought, that the Sect of the Manichaeans did so stifly hold that there were two coeternall principles;
whereof they made one to be God whom they termed the Prince of Light, and the beginner and Author of life,

1
 2

About halfway through Mosaicall Philosophy, Fludd breaks from his inspired metaphysical
demonstration to offer an uncharacteristically folksy anecdote. “In Ireland,” he writes,

there were two wenches which came from the market, whereof the one had bought her a
pair of new shoes; these two travelling on foot homeward, and passing through a field not
far from a wood, it chanced in the mean time that they were overtaken by a tempest of
thunder and lightning; The one of the wenches seeing the thunder to approach, ran fast
and called to the other wench, to hasten and shelter her self under the trees. But she
laughed at her, lagged behind, and scorning, like a gallant, the thunder, said, Let the
thunder kiss my back-side (clapping her buttock with her hand); so as it hurt not my new
shoes, I care not. Which when she had uttered, the lightning struck off onely her posterior
parts, and spared her shoes, which were not touched; and so the contemner of Gods
wondrous and fearfull works died (according as she had said) miserably. Loe here, you
Christian Peripateticks, and see, whether there be not an intellectuall mover, and divine
volunty, in the lightnings, clean of another nature than your master Aristotle hath taught
you.4

This is one of a handful of times in Mosaicall Philosophy where Fludd shows us an example of
God’s disciplinary hand.5 Despite the dramatic punishment, though, I would say it is not only
God’s power that is at the centre of this anecdote but also the gallant wench’s autonomy. One
reason her autonomy seems so central is that God responds to her insult in a way that is too on-
the-nose, given the passage’s humourlessness. With all the striking of posteriors, it should be a
funny moment. Instead, it is God’s seriousness—the fact that the wench dies from her wounds—
that makes his response seem so chained to her irreverence. That God must obliterate this shoe-
loving imp from the face of the earth proves that for a moment she had been truly outside his
authority, in mind, if not in body. Only her dangerous outsiderness justifies his response. But in
a universal system of “radicall and eternall Unity,” how is it even possible that this wench could

health, and all goodnesse: the other they attributed unto the Devill, whom thy entitled the Prince of Darknesse, and
the originall and principle of oppositi|on, death, sicknesse, and all evill.” Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 138-139.
4 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 115.
5 Another immediately follows this passage. It tells the story of a young scholar amidst a company on horseback
who, during a storm, encouraged the others not to fear, for lightening, he said, was “nothing but a naturall thing,
caused of a hot and dry exhalation.” He was struck dead.
 3

willfully place herself so far beyond the pale? If God’s nolunty and volunty extend from the
same source, who is he chastising here, if not himself?

As well as highlighting an anxiety about how God’s immediate action in the world is
represented, I’ve begun my discussion of sympathy in seventeenth-century Britain with this
passage because it gets at what I will suggest is the concept’s core paradox about the powers of
freedom and Providence—about having authority over one’s own desires (our desires come from
the interior realm of subjectivity and freedom), and involuntarily suffering them (our desires
come from outside our mental interiors and our wills, from instinct, nature, stars, angels, or
God). Or, a paradox between, on the one hand, freedom to feel love and attraction for no
particular reason, and, on the other, an imperative to discipline our love so that it finds a right
object to which we can rationally justify our attachment. We are talking about the private
experience of desire. Can passion for an object such as new shoes be a harmless little thing just
for ourselves, or must it correspond to a natural, moral, or a political standard, rooted in an
underlying idea of how bodies in the cosmos are held together? If the latter, at what point should
the correspondence take hold?

In seventeenth-century Britain, “sympathy” is a newish, rediscovered idea that bears associations

with the occult, with astrology and the doctrine of signatures, 6 with discredited medical cures
like the weapon-salve and mumie,7 and with abstract metaphysical ideas inspired by a
Christianized engagement with Neo-Stoicism and Neo-Platonism about how the cosmos, the

6 During the civil war, and at odds with the College of Physicians, the radical republican astrologer and physician
Nicholas Culpeper managed to publish a number of extremely popular astrological-physical discourses in the
Paracelsian tradition, which paint a picture of a universe where God is in nature, rather than hidden behind it, and
where the human body is a microcosm of the grand scheme of things. Finding sympathies between plants and body
parts, or between stars and plants, might both direct us toward the finding of cures, and illuminate “The admirable
Harmony of Creation…all for the use of Man, wherby the infinite Power and Wisdom of God in the Creation
appears” (4). According to Culpeper, “Sympathy and Antipathy, are the two Hinges upon which the whol Model of
Physick turns” (88). See Nicholas Culpepper, The English physitian enlarged with three hundred, sixty, and nine
medicines made of English herbs that were not in any impression until this…Being an astrologo-physical discourse
of the vulgar herbs of this nation (London: 1653).
7 The “mumie” is a somewhat vampiric process of magnetically extracting healthy energies from “some perfect
body, not dying of any natural disease,” but, ideally, “of some violent death” and putting them into another person’s
body. See Paracelsus, Medicina diastatica, or, Sympatheticall mumie containing many mysterious and hidden
secrets in philosophy and physic, by the construction, extraction, transplantation and application of microcosmical
& spiritual mumie: teaching the magneticall cure of diseases at distance, &c. abstracted from the words of Dr.
Theophr. Paracelsus by the labour and industry of Andrea Tentzelius…; translated out of the Latine by Ferdinando
Parkhurst (London, 1653), 4. A wide range of thinkers promoted the weapon-salve, from the Protestant Reformed
occultists Paracelsus and Robert Fludd, to the Cartesian materialist Kenelm Digby.
 4

polis, and the individual are strung together by a hierarchy of divine powers. The question I ask
in this dissertation is: how and why does sympathy become one of the core terms of eighteenth-
century Enlightenment moral philosophy, which is inductive, rationalist, and unmetaphysical,
when not much earlier it communicated a set of ideas that, even when applied to more personal,
human contexts of love, pity, and friendship, were far less rationalist?

There are two influential stories of how this came about. The first, according to Seth Lobis,
comes from an essay published in 1934 by R.S. Crane called “Suggestions,” which argues that
the representation of people as “sympathetic creature[s],” so crucial to the cult of the eighteenth-
century ‘man of feeling,’ comes from the sermons of “the anti-Puritan, anti-Stoic, and anti-
Hobbesian divines of the Latitudinarian school.” 8 In this story, a line of influence is traced from
the Cambridge Platonists (especially Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, but one may also include
More’s student Anne Conway here), to Latitudinarian divines like Isaac Barrow and John
Tillotson who argued in the 1670s that sympathy is a human impulse “implanted” 9 by God to
guide us. From there, this influence streams to Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, to Francis
Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. 10 These thinkers are diverse in many ways, but they
share with each other—and with their continental peers, Gottfried Leibniz and Sophie de
Grouchy—a tolerationist attitude, a belief that “God care[s] far more for actions and morality
than for the structures, disciplines, and doctrines of a national church,” 11 and a general “wish to
stress the natural moral equality and connectedness of all.” 12 “[F]or as God made all Nations out
of one Blood, to the end they might love each other, and stand in mutual sympathy, and help
each other,” writes Anne Conway,

so he hath implanted a certain Universal Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as

being all Members of one Body, and (as I may so say) Brethren, having one common
Father, to wit, God in Christ, or the Word made Flesh; and so also one Mother, viz. that

8 Cited in Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 19.
9 Isaac Barrow, Of the Love of God and Our Neighbours, In Several Sermons (London: 1680), 278.
10 Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 20. See also Abrahm C. Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow
Feeling in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8.
11 Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans, 8.
12 Eric Schliesser, “Introduction: On Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 9.
 5

Substance or Essence alone, out of which they proceeded, and whereof they are real Parts
and Members; and albeit Sin hath in a wonderful Manner impaired this Love and
Sympathy, yet it hath not destroyed it. 13

The other story of sympathy’s “eighteenth-century explosion,” Ryan Patrick Hanley writes, “is
best traced to its unique status as a sophisticated philosophical response” to “the seismic shift in
the forms of social organization experienced over the course of the eighteenth century.” 14 In this
story, as European populations moved from the country to the city, 15 and as the engines of
empire and colonization drew people across the world by the millions, more intimate and
traditional forms of life fell away, and for the first time in history people were faced with a
society comprised mainly of strangers. At the same time, as religious “passions” are put aside in
the pursuit of common economic “interests,” there is a move toward secularization. In this proto-
bourgeois context, some “other-directed sentiment capable of sustaining the minimal social
bonds” is necessary. To avoid religious controversy altogether, it is best, Hanley remarks, if this
sentiment does not require “acceptance of the theistic foundations of Christian conceptions of
neighbor love.”16 Sympathy fills this void. It’s worth remarking on the irony that it does so at a
time when the international economic order is grounded on transatlantic slavery. Perhaps in some
situations, “sympathy” is a vaguer social ideal, than, for example, Christian charity, and makes
less immediate ethical demands. 17

Sympathy and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Philosophy aims to enrich these
stories. I claim that applications of “sympathy” across a range of discourses in seventeenth-
century Britain have a relationship to the problem of authority, whether it be of the state, the
church, of God, nature, or of the self’s own authority, and suggest that this carries over into the
eighteenth-century moral and political philosophies that place such an emphasis on sympathy. I

13 Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. & ed. Allison P. Coudert &
Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 178.
14 “The Eighteenth-Century Context of Sympathy from Spinoza to Kant,” in Sympathy: A History, 173.
15 Between 1650 and 1750 the percentage of urbanites in England and Wales nearly doubles, going from 8.8% of the
total population, to 16.7%. See Chris Cook & Philip Broadhead, The Routledge Companion to Early Modern
Europe, 1453-1763 (London: Routledge, 2006), 186.
16 Hanley, “The Eighteenth-Century Context,” 174.
17 Mary Nyquist discusses a similar paradox as she distinguishes the idea of “political slavery” from material
“chattel slavery” in Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013).
 6

tentatively suggest that the paradoxical balance of freedom and determinism that the concept of
sympathy evokes is reminiscent of Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the mental attitude of the
bourgeois political subject: “a certain measure of freedom (voluntariness: recognition and
affirmation of the bearer of authority, which is not based purely on coercion) and conversely,
submission, the tying of will (indeed of thought and reason) to the authoritative will of an
Other.”18 The subject bound to others by fellow-feeling is both responsible for freely
experiencing her own private sympathies, while at the same time aware that her sympathies arise
from a place beyond her will—either from a transcendent vale of influence, or immanently
through her material nature. It is because sympathy is a force imagined to both transcend
creatures and immanently affect and guide them that the concept is so totalizing, combining
theological with naturalistic explanatory frameworks.

At the same time, if our sympathies are as palpably present to us as our own bodies, we might
draw upon the incontrovertible truth of our sympathies to position ourselves against custom and
law. This is, for instance, how Milton uses ‘sympathy’ in The Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce, where sympathy is something more fundamental than whim, or opinion, or a rational
justification for a legal action that might enhance our wellbeing and pleasure, all of which can be
disputed. Instead, Milton equates it with “naturall order,” and claims that God “commands us to
force nothing against” it.19 Sympathy is what it is: more a state than a transitory mood or feeling.
Denying it is denying reality. This makes sympathy its own kind of authority, which might be
appealed to against civil and ecclesiastical forces.

In the following chapters, then, I examine the relationship between “sympathy,” authority, and
the formation of the early modern political subject, paying particular attention to the role played
by literature in establishing this relationship.

18Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority (London: Verso, 2008), 7.

19JohnMilton, The doctrine and discipline of divorce restor’d to the good of both sexes from the bondage of canon
law and other mistakes to Christian freedom, guided by the rule of charity (London: 1643), 18.
 7

1.1 Background
When I first began this project, I expected that I would uncover a “critical period of transition” in
the way seventeenth-century men and women thought of “sympathy.” 20 Once, it had denoted a
totality of animistic relations among all things—living and unliving, cosmic and terrestrial—
arranged at creation with loving justice and supreme reason by God, and offering inspiration for
how human beings might organize themselves into peaceful societies. Later, after an
enlightenment process that purged the mainstream intellectual Western tradition of occult forces,
it came to describe that specifically human feeling of co-suffering we understand it to mean
today. While the original concept is “universal and magical,” referring to “connections among a
totality of objects,” the more modern one is “interpersonal and moral,” having to do with
“connections between subjects.”21 My plan was to trace another instance of the internalization of
theological concepts—“[l]ong understood as an external reality, sympathy underwent a gradual
process of internalization”22—or to examine the emergence of psychology over Fate or
Providence in an increasingly secular context.

But soon I ran into problems. For starters, my historical narrative was too neat. All along,
“sympathy” had often been used to describe the specifically human experience of feeling
together, even when with Stoicism and Neoplatonism it also expressed the metaphysical ideas of
the relation of the soul to the body, or of the cosmos to the earth. In a medical context, starting
with Hippocrates and continuing with Galen, it described the phenomena of the interconnected
body, of relations in a single system, how something in the stomach could affect the feet, for
instance. Secondly, it was simply not true that in the past there had been a homogeneous vitalist
worldview which held that the cosmos was a living animal held together by bonds of sympathy,
as the Stoics believed, and as Plato implied in the Timaeus when he presented a picture of an
animated universe. Alongside the vitalist worldview, which many of us still hold today in our
feeling that the earth is suffering and as the metaphor of Mother Earth suggests, there has always
been an empirical, materialist view that is skeptical of anthropomorphic projections and believes
it is the duty of science not to romanticize nature but to observe it with a clear and objective

20 Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 3.

21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
 8

gaze. The ancient materialism of the pre-Socratic Democritus, for instance, was further
developed by the atomic theory of the Epicureans, and passed down to the Renaissance through
the Roman poet Lucretius, as scholars like Gerard Passannante have shown. 23 Even Aristotle,
whose status as a materialist is ambiguous, 24 critiqued Empedocles for proposing that Love and
Strife animated the cosmos just because those passions governed human affairs.

“Sympathy” appears in ancient and early modern materialist natural philosophy—for instance, in
Kenelm Digby’s Cartesian discourse on the weapon salve—as much as it does in the vitalist
metaphysics of the Stoics, Neoplatonists, Hermeticists, or Cambridge Platonists. Epicurus, for
example, uses “sympathy” twice in the context of his mechanistic physics, once in his materialist
account of perception, when he says that objects throw off a layer of atoms that sympathetically
merge with “coaffections” in the perceiver, and once in his discussion of the material affinity
between the corporeal body and corporeal soul. 25 All of this suggested to me that there is no clear
historical narrative of an animated worldview passing away into a disenchanted, materialist view
so much as there are, and seem to have always been—even in the same person—two competing
attitudes toward the world and nature.

Thus when it came to “sympathy” I realized there was no clean division between “cosmic”
versus “human,” “vitalist” versus “materialist,” or “magical” versus “moral” applications of the
term. At the same time, it was obvious that sympathy went from being a newly discovered notion
in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, having made its entrance into Western
Europe with the translation of Greek medical and Neoplatonic texts in Florence in the 1460s, to
emerge as a key concept in eighteenth-century English political and moral philosophy.

My question then became: what were the preconditions that made “sympathy” so attractive to
English and Scottish enlightenment philosophers like Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis
Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith? It was at that point I discovered that what I was

23 See The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011).
24 The standard view of contemporary philosophers like Martha Nusbaum and Hilary Putnam is that Aristotle is a
functionalist, not a materialist. This is questioned by scholars like L.S. Carrier, who argue that his functionalism
“should be given a materialist interpretation,” since he holds that “the essential nature” of perception and thought “is
to be some physical property.” See L.S. Carrier, “Aristotelian Materialism,” Philosophia 34, no. 3 (2006): 254-66.
25 René Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, 19.
 9

actually observing was not the gradual interiorization and disenchantment of “sympathy,” per se,
but the systematic application of “sympathy” to politics.

This project examines how and why a concept that is related to metaphysics, medicine, natural
science, and subjective human experience and perspective becomes a core political concept in
late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English moral philosophy. In order to accomplish this
task, I read early modern poetry with a sustained focus on “sympathy”—specifically the
friendship poetry of Katherine Philips and John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost—in the intellectual
context of Renaissance and ancient natural philosophy. In the seventeenth-century “sympathy”
was a highly technical, irregular word. Both Philips and Milton are very conscious when they use
it to describe how their characters, whether people or supernatural beings, are impulsively drawn
into relations with others who are “like” them. While for Philips “sympathy” between friends is a
distillation of sacred sympathy that empowers her speaker to become one with those with whom
she shares sympathy—especially her social superiors—for Milton “sympathy” is a cosmic force
that governs the behavior of vegetative matter to compel his least rational characters—
specifically females—to seek their likenesses. For both Philips and Milton, sympathy controls
relations between characters across vast distances, drawing individuals separated by
circumstance into a single society.

Herbert Marcuse, Charles Taylor, Terry Eagleton, and Victoria Kahn have all argued that the
early modern political subject was created when the long-standing ecclesiastical and monarchial
authorities weakened and the middle class acquired more autonomy and, with it, the need to
balance the private interests of individuals with “society’s interest in discipline” 26 in pursuit of a
‘common good.’ Consequently, the modern “self” with its feeling of inward depths and
uniqueness, but also of connection to nature and to a metaphysical wholeness, is a relatively
recent invention of Western individualist societies. 27 Specifically, what needed to be created is a
subject who understands itself to be born free, but who accepts the authority of the state. The
idea that people possess natural freedom is fundamental to modern subjectivity, but it must be

26Marcuse, A Study on Authority, 36.

27See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990); Victoria Kahn, Wayward
Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989).
 10

balanced at all times with the countervailing idea that, either, we are naturally bound together
into a community and naturally compelled to act in ways that will benefit its common good; or,
that it is rational to forge social contracts with one another even if we do not feel compelled to do
so out of benevolence. For Shaftesbury, “all the affections or passions are suited to the public
good or good of the species,”—that is, the common good and what is good for the individual are
perfectly correspondent—if we are behaving ‘naturally’—with the humorous, genteel,
spontaneous generosity and largesse of the aristocrat. 28 In this view, nature is good and equated
with God, so to align our internal feelings and desires with the natural order of the universe—
best represented, in Shaftesbury’s opinion, by a moderate Whig government—is to harmoniously
merge with a totality that sympathizes with itself in all of its parts, and which is ordered for the
best. For Shaftesbury, it is not, in the first place, by right reason or sound ethical judgment that a
person becomes good, but by cultivating a sunny, social disposition: “Since it is therefore by
affection merely that a creature is esteemed good or ill, natural or unnatural, our business will be
to examine which are the good and natural and which the ill and unnatural affections.” 29

In what follows I argue that “sympathy” offers a way for eighteenth-century political and moral
philosophers to conceptualize the relation between individuals and the whole community by
appealing to an idea that carries an aura of science and theological providence. It is an idea that
contains a series of tensions between the relative and the general, and between freedom and
necessity. It balances the particular, concrete experience of attraction with an idea of universal
wholeness. It suggests that the individual is the final authority on his or her own sensations,
while also implying that sympathies occur despite or even against our wills. Our sympathies
might lead us to ease the suffering of a group of people against the social order and despite the
cost, but the abstract sympathetic worldview may diminish individual suffering by seeing it from
the distant perspective of the grand, unified whole.

According to Taylor, Eagleton, and Kahn, the human subjectivity appropriate to the new middle-
class social order needed to carve out a significant space for the appreciation of everyday
experience rooted in the body. For Taylor, it is the significance of ordinary life with its constant

28 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212.
29 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 210.
 11

flow of sensation and private revelations that subtends the discourse of natural rights upon which
modern Western law is founded. This inner life of the self, this domain of concrete particularity,
is therefore, for Taylor, mixed up with a metaphysical idea of the good. As a result, “an inquiry
into the nature and conditions of the good takes us just as much inward as outward; as well as the
constitution of things, we have to examine our own desires, aspirations, inclinations and
feelings.”30 In his Marxist account, Eagleton gives a more historically rooted explanation for
how it came to be that the inner world of sensation and perception became such a central site of
scientific examination in the eighteenth century. According to him, the eighteenth-century
discourse of aesthetics developed out of a desire to anatomize the overabundant “world of
perception and experience,” recognizing that a proper understanding of this inner domain
“cannot simply be derived from abstract universal laws, but demands its own appropriate
discourse.”31

In Eagleton’s view, this came about in the first place due to “an ideological dilemma inherent in
absolutist power.” In order to contain the autonomy of the new middle class, power, Eagleton
claims, had to “take account of ‘sensible’ life.” 32 The new bourgeois political subject brought up
to accept its natural freedom, and with more economic autonomy than ever before, could not be
forced by power to go about its business, but needed to consent to authority if it was to retain
these fundamental ideas of its own liberty. A way had to be discovered for people to retain their
sense of individuality and freedom even as they submitted to the reigning political and economic
order. But “how,” Eagleton asks, “is a ruling order to root itself in the sensuous immediate, yet
elaborate this into something more compelling than a heap of fragments?”

The answer, perhaps, is that there is no need. Could we not stay with the senses
themselves, and find there our deepest relation to an overall rational design? What if we
could discover the trace of such providential order on the body itself, in its most
spontaneous, pre-reflexive instincts? Perhaps there is somewhere within our immediate
experience a sense with all the unerring intuition of aesthetic taste, which discloses the
moral order to us. Such is the celebrated ‘moral sense’ of the British eighteenth-century

30 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 257.

31 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic,16.
32 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic,15.
 12

moralists, which allows us to experience right and wrong with all the swiftness of the
senses, and lays the groundwork for a social cohesion more deeply felt than a mere
rational totality. If the moral values which govern social life are as self-evident as the
taste of peaches, a good deal of disruptive wrangling can be dispensed with. Society as a
whole, given its fragmented condition, is increasingly opaque to totalizing reason; it is
difficult to discern any rational design in the workings of the market place. But we might
turn nevertheless to what seems the opposite to all that, to the stirrings of individual
sensibility, and find there instead our surest incorporation into a common body. In our
natural instincts of benevolence and compassion we are brought by some providential
law, itself inscrutable to reason, into harmony with one another. The body’s affections are
no mere subjective whims, but the key to a well-ordered state.33

This elevation of individual sensation, perception, inner life, and concrete particularity becomes
a double-edged sword for the bourgeois political subject of the eighteenth century. While
subjects are compelled to come together into a totalizing social harmony through custom and by
the development of ‘proper’ sensibility, they also become more self-determining, their political
aspirations “superbly versatile.”34 The nobility and even sacredness of the concrete everyday
experience allows people to imagine a way of being that is separate from society’s ruling
concepts. Radical subjectivity “can become the basis of a radical critique.” 35

I propose that “sympathy” as it develops in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy and

literature is a foundational pillar of British eighteenth-century moral philosophy, which
inspired—through the developments of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume—the emergence of
aesthetics in Germany, with Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller.
“Sympathy” shares a number of coordinates with the “aesthetic.” Like the aesthetic, sympathy
encompasses the domain of subjective perception and sensation, alongside the sphere of abstract
universalisms. The presence of this strange new word, “sympathy,” in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century literature also articulates the unconscious of the body — of sensation,
perception, passion and experience — that is too fragmented and particular to be categorized by

33 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 34.

34 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28.
35 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 26.
 13

reason. But “sympathy,” unlike the aesthetic, always has one foot outside the human, in the
radically cosmic or in the upside down realm of matter. If the aesthetic takes human sensation
and perception as its subject, “sympathy” takes the presence of the outside, of Nature, and the
universe as it manifests itself in human sensation and perception, as its subject.

In cases such as in the development of Stoic metaphysics, where an abstract theology of cosmic
oneness and harmony dominates over sympathy’s other sphere—the subjective world of
attraction and taste—“sympathy” may lead to a coherent worldview, where everything in the
universe seems to be held in its right place by nature’s two fundamental “tasters,” 36 sympathy
and antipathy. But the presence of sympathy can also be destabilizing, self-alienating, and surreal
when it appears to subjects that they are following a cosmic or material rule of nature against
their will. This is certainly true, for example, of the reaction Shakespeare’s Mistress Page has to
the following letter of seduction John Falstaff sends to her and a number of other married women
in The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Ask me no reason why I love you, for though Love use Reason
for his precision, he admits him not for his counsellor. You
are not young; no more am I. Go to, then, there’s sympathy.
You are merry; so am I. Ha, ha, then, there’s more sympathy.
You love sack, and so do I. Would you desire better sympathy?
Let it suffice thee, Mistress Page, at the least if the love of sol-
dier can suffice, that I love thee. (II.1.4-10)

Here, in an act of supreme pompousness, the pedantic Falstaff hilariously intends the thrice-
repeated word “sympathy” to persuade the Mistresses Page and Ford by its own power. The
Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare’s least mysterious play. The flawed but generous
Windsor middle class pulls everything it is possible to hallow back down to earth—
disenchanting nobility, religion, Latin, medicine, patriarchy, and even belief in fairies with no-

36“[A]ll Nature hath two tasters, sympathy and antipathy…” writes Samuel Crook in a representative essay on the
character of a Christian. Ta diapheronta, or, Divine characters in two parts : acutely distinguishing the more secret
and undiscerned differences between 1. the hypocrite in his best dresse of seeming virtues and formal duties, and the
true Christian in his real graces and sincere obedience ..., 2. the blackest weeds of dayly infirmities of the truly
godly, eclipsing saving grace, and the reigning sinnes of the unregenerate that pretend unto that godlinesse they
never had / by that late burning and shining lamp, Master Samuel Crook ... (London: by C.B. and W.G., 1658).
 14

nonsense self-interestedness softened by good nature and forgiving largesse. “Sympathy” is

emptied of its metaphysical aura along with everything else. Still, for a moment after receiving
Falstaff’s letter, as though imbibing his projection of her through the powers of “sympathy”
thrice incanted, Mistress Page experiences a moment of double-consciousness we would now
associate with rape culture: “It makes me almost ready to/wrangle with mine own honesty. I’ll
entertain myself like/one that I am not acquainted withal; for, sure, unless he know/some strain
in me that I know not myself, he would never have/boarded me in this fury” (II.1.74-78). Unless
they respond with antipathy, Mistresses Page and Ford risk being drawn into the sympathy
Falstaff extends. In the kind of psychic mimicry that can exist between prey and predator,
intentions—even ones they did not consciously possess—lie open to contamination. “Sympathy”
comes to represent both radical freedom and absolute necessity, where we are at once masters of
ourselves and not our own.

1.2 Seeking a Definition

There is something untranslatable about “sympathy.” “Sympathy” comes from the Greek
συμπάθεια, and means, literally, the state of feeling together. In its travels through Latin and the
various European vernaculars, it kept to its original Greek, sometimes appearing in sixteenth and
seventeenth-century English medical and natural philosophy treatises in “The Table of Hard
Names” for the benefit of “ladies” or “meer English Readers.”37 It has many cognates—
compassio, pity, harmony, natural passion, friendship, love, empathy—but, looking closer, we
find that it is not reducible to any of them, and sometimes even seems to contradict them. If
sympathy is related to an idea like harmony, for example, it is also blamed for the horror of
contagious disease, as we find in the “astrological judgment of diseases” by the popular, though

37 Representative examples include: Thomas Willis, M.D, Five Treatises, viz. 1. Of Urines. 2. Of the Accension of
the Blood. 3. Of Musculary Motion. 4. The Anatomy of the Brain. 5. The Description and Use of the Nerves
(London: Printed for T. Dring, C. Harper, F. Leigh, and S. Martin, 1681); Guy Miege,
A new dictionary French and English with another English and French according to the present use and modern
orthography of the French inrich'd with new words, choice phrases, and apposite proverbs : digested into a most
accurate method : and contrived for the use both of English and foreiners (London: 1677); Lazarus Ercker, Fleta
minor the laws of art and nature, in knowing, judging, assaying, fining, refining and inlarging the bodies of confin'd
metals : in two parts : the first contains assays of Lazarus Erckern, chief prover, or assay-master general of the
empire of Germany, in V. books, orinally written by him in the Teutonick language and now translated into English ;
the second contains essays on metallick words, as a dictionary to many pleasing discourses, by Sir John Pettus ... ;
illustrated with 44 sculptures (London: 1683); N. H. The ladies dictionary, being a general entertainment of the
fair-sex a work never attempted before in English (London: 1694).
 15

highly contentious, English physician and radical republican, Nicholas Culpepper (1616-1654)—
just as it is, for that matter, responsible for the cure of diseases.38 This makes it difficult to talk
about sympathy in any systematic way.

Yet in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Britain, “sympathy” is used to refer to a wide range of
phenomena, both in the specialized discourses of natural science, metaphysics, medicine and
philosophy, and in the more playful and experiential world of poetry and drama. People have
used it to describe social curiosities like simultaneous yawning or giggles, the bond between
body and soul, mathematically derivable relations between planets and stars, the divine spirit that
infuses the universe and orders things into loves and discords, the distant action of magnets, the
spread of diseases, the resonance of musical strings, the fermentation of wine, and, also, the
moral problem of generating harmony among isolated individuals in divided societies.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the presence or absence of “sympathy” sat between
two worldviews warring over what it means to be human. As John Rogers has noted, mechanism
and Royalism tended to go together, 39 for instance in the thought of many of the scientists who
comprised the Royal Society after the Restoration, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and
Kenelm Digby. These thinkers often put violence and competition at the core of life, and their
ideas were countered by those usually moderate Whiggish thinkers who were committed to
making goodness, benevolence, or care one of life’s original instincts. In the various moral and
metaphysical systems of Christian vitalists like Henry More and Anne Conway, and later in the
Deist moral philosophy of Shaftesbury, 40 as well as in Rousseau’s romanticism, and in the

38 Nicholas Culpepper, Semeiotica uranica, or, An astrological judgment of diseases from the decumbiture of the
sick (1) from Aven Ezra by the way of introduction, (2) from Noel Duret by way of direction ... : to which is added,
The signs of life or death by the body of the sick party according to the judgment of Hippocrates / by Nicholas
Culpeper, (Gent: 1651); The English physitian, or An astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this nation
being a compleat method of physick, whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself being sick for
three pence charge, with such things only as grow in England ... / by Nich. Culpeper (London: 1652).
39 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, & Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 6.
40 Charles Taylor distinguishes between what he calls “Lockean Deism” and the kind of Deism implied by a thinker
like Locke’s student, Shaftesbury. While Locke “shares with the Puritans theological voluntarism,” Shaftesbury
emphasizes God’s goodness over his power. If Locke holds what Taylor calls “the extrinsic theory of morality,”
Shaftesbury holds a view of morality that is intrinsic. Because in this view “the highest good doesn’t repose in any
arbitrary will, but in the nature of the cosmos itself; and our love for it isn’t commanded under threat of punishment,
but comes spontaneously from our being,” it is through the freedom of internal searching that the truth of one’s
nature, and thus of cosmic goodness, can be ascertained. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 248-253.
 16

psychological and moral theories of Adam Smith 41 and David Hume, sympathy plays a central
role. This turns sympathy into a core philosophical commitment with serious political
implications.

But this does not make “sympathy” any less mysterious. Though in one sense sympathy is a
state, it is often used to describe an active cause. These causes, though their origin is ultimately
mysterious, are related to liking or loving something, in the sense of having sympathy for. Often,
as Eric Schliesser writes, “sympathy is a concept that might be put to work as a useful, innocent
placeholder while one is searching for underlying explanations for many different kinds of causal
processes,” such as magnetism, electricity, gravity, the spread and cure of diseases, and even the
mystery of personal preference for one smell or taste over another.42 Sympathy has had a steady
history since the seventeenth-century of gradually being expunged from natural scientific
discourse,43 only to make its way into psychological and moral theories, such as those by Adam
Smith and David Hume. With the recent discovery of mirror neurons by researchers at the
University of Parma working with macaque monkeys, however, sympathy is having a surprising
and sudden resurrection in the world of science and beyond.44

41 Donald Winch argues that “Smith’s theory of sympathy, as expounded in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, is an
augmented version of Rousseau’s conception of pitié.” See Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual
History of Political Economy in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72.
42 Eric Schliesser, “Introduction: On Sympathy” in Sympathy: A History, 7.
43 Two dominant accounts continue to shape scholarship on the history of the Enlightenment. First, there is the
disenchantment thesis advanced by Max Weber, reinforced in the English context by Keith Thomas’s 1971 Religion
and the Decline of Magic, recently updated by Charles Taylor, and popularized by Stephen Greenblatt’s passionate
and best-selling defense of secularism, The Swerve. Taylor names this new kind of disenchanted person, who
distinguishes between supernatural and natural forces and who trusts and promotes complex, individual experience
over philosophical schemas or “idols of the mind,” the “buffered” self. Unlike the pre-scientific self, the buffered
self is “not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and power” but possesses “confidence in our own
powers of moral ordering.” On the other side are the many revisionist historical accounts, for example by Lynn
Thorndike, Charles Schmitt, Brian Vickers and many others, which investigate how occult thinking underpins not
only the development of modern physical science, but the understanding of human emotion and psychology. In a
theological context, the “Counter-Renaissance,” writes Susan Snyder, replaced “rational inquiry for nonrational
revelation.” This religious imperative “has much to do with the movement of sacred poetry” in England at the time.
See: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27; Susan Snyder, “Introduction”
in The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas by Josuah Sylvester, trans. Susan Snyder,
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 75; Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 28; Max Weber, Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992); Keith Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1991); Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1923); Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983).
44 G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “Mirrors in the Mind,” Scientific American 295, no. 5 (2006): 54-61.
 17

Essentially, “sympathy” expresses the state of being affected by a person or thing without
touching. When we are moved to feel or to act, as we most frequently are, not by the threat of
physical force, but by finding ourselves under the emotional and spiritual persuasions of others—
whether people, animal, plant, or environment—we are moved by sympathy. Though it is
difficult to say how we affect and are affected by each other and the world, we know, at least,
that we do affect one another. Even our most private desires, even our free wills, are influenced
by our surroundings in ways we usually only understand in retrospect, if at all.

Before the Enlightenment, which made the distinction between mind and world, animate and
inanimate things, firmer, it was not only living creatures with passions who “sympathized,” but
the universe at large and all things in it, living or not. One way of historicizing the concept of
sympathy is to suggest that during the seventeenth-century the meaning of “sympathy” shifts
from denoting a force of attraction between things out in the world, both animate and inanimate,
to describing a specifically human, psychological identification between people that takes place
in the imagination. This is the argument made by Seth Lobis is his breakthrough study, The
Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England.45 Lobis
draws a portrait of two different species of sympathy. The first is what he calls “universal
sympathy.”46 This species descends from an older, magical worldview that understands relations
between things as animated by, as young Milton writes, “a twofold Seminary or stock in nature,
from whence are deriv’d the issues of love and hatred distinctly flowing through the whole
masse of created things.”47 In this view, which combines Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic
metaphysics with Arabic and Jewish mysticism and Christian scholasticism, the Supreme Being
shows his goodness through the complementary principles of plenitude and harmony. The
universe is enchanted with a divine coherence in which everything has its place. The order here
is externally imposed—it comes from God—though it makes itself felt deep in the affections of
individual objects and beings. In this view, animate and inanimate spheres, as well as body and
mind, are less distinguished. Lobis calls the second species of sympathy “human.” In a more
dualist worldview where mind and matter are clearly separated, sympathy migrates inward,

45 While scholars have written numerous works on sympathy in the eighteenth-century and after, where it is defined
in the way we currently understand it, as a strong and sometimes involuntary human passion, intellectual histories of
sympathy examining periods prior to the eighteenth-century are few and far between.
46 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 198.
47 John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 2nd vol. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 272.
 18

becoming a supra-rational instinct that governs interpersonal relations. Its cosmic significance
becomes moral significance. However, as Lobis has shown, the older metaphysical connotations
of sympathy do not go away in the eighteenth-century when it acquires the anti-mystical,
psychological meaning given to it by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.

Lobis’s historical analysis is compelling. In “following this broad historical movement from
natural to moral philosophy,” he is careful not to read the intellectual history of sympathy too
teleologically.48 Instead, Lobis claims, the older, animated sense of sympathy is carried through
into its modern usages. He is also careful to note that “the moral and the natural [applications of
sympathy] were not rigidly divided but importantly interconnected and overlapping.” 49 In this, he
follows revisionist historians Lynn Thorndike, Charles Schmitt, and Brian Vickers, who all
investigate how “occult mentalities played a role in the development of scientific thinking.” 50
While some writers—the materialist philosopher Kenelm Digby, for instance—sought to remove
all occult mystery from sympathy and to provide a rational explanation for it based on atomic
principles derived from René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, for many, even for an
Enlightenment figure like Francis Bacon, sympathy kept some of its aura of divine providence, if
not enchantment. Lobis also shows how some recent scholarship complicates both the
disenchantment and revisionist narratives, a tradition in which he places his own contributions.
In Boyle, for example, Michael Hunter cautions us not to think in terms of either a ‘decline of
magic,’ or loyalty to various occultisms. Rather, we should envision “a rise in schizophrenia in
this period,” a split in the zeitgeist between rational materialism and magical thinking. 51

On the one hand, I agree with Lobis that “sympathy underwent a gradual process of
internalization” as we move through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth-century.52 I have
also found it to be true that “[l]iterary and intellectual historians have tended to treat the two
concepts [of sympathy, the “universal” and the “human”] in isolation,” and recombining them
makes a fascinating contribution to revisionist histories of the Enlightenment.

48 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 3.

49 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 20.
50 Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.
51 See Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
52 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 3.
 19

But as Ann E. Moyer argues, a closer look at the history of sympathy as a Renaissance term and
concept shows that “sympathy” was not an ‘old’ idea at all, but a “rather new” one reintroduced
into Latin from Greek and representing “innovative humanistic scholarship.” According to
Moyer, the common story that says sympathy descended from an ancient, pre-rational world is
actually one that was written in the seventeenth century by detractors who “suggested that
theories of sympathy smacked of old-fashioned superstition, a charge,” Moyer emphasizes, “of
which they were not actually guilty.” While it is true that some advocates of sympathy—such as
those defending the contentious weapon salve treatment—“helped to lend credence” to those
who attacked them for holding superstitious attitudes, “sympathy” was a novel and technical idea
coming largely from discourses on medicine and natural philosophy that at the same time
managed to carry a theological aura. Moyer claims it is these seventeenth-century polemics—for
example René Descartes’s attack on occult sympathies,53 Francis Bacon’s charge against the
Idols of the Mind, Robert Boyle’s claim that chemical sympathies and antipathies are products of
our intellect rather than of the world, 54 or even John Donne’s portrait in “An Anatomy of the
World” of a naïve and antique past held together by “The cement which did faithfully
compact/And glue all virtues” —that are “the basis for the subsequent modern assertions that
sympathy had been a pervasive traditional, folk, or prescientific mode of explanation in
Renaissance thought and culture.”55

Rather than there being two kinds of sympathy—“universal” and “human”—I find that
“sympathy” is a concept whose purpose has always been to name perceived synchronicities
between “universal” and “human” spheres, to blend world and mind. “A careful examiner,”
writes the Scottish enlightenment theologian George Turnbull in 1740,

53 In Principia philosophiae, pt. IV, par. 187 Descartes says: “there are no qualities which are so occult, no effects of
sympathy or antipathy so marvelous or so strange, nor any other things so rare in nature (granted that it is produced
by purely material causes destitute of thought and free will), that reason cannot be given by [the principles of
mechanical philosophy.” Quoted in Ann E. Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” in Sympathy: A History, 98.
54 In a treatise called Reflections Boyle explains his dissatisfaction with the chemical “Doctrine” accompanied “with
a friendship or sympathy with bodies belonging to the same tribe or Family”: “For I look upon Amity and Enmity as
Affections of Intelligent Beings, and I have not yet found it explained by any, how those Appetites can be placed in
Bodies Inanimate and devoid of knowledge, or of so much as Sense. And I elsewhere endeavor to shew, that what is
called Sympathy and Antipathy between such bodies does in great part depend upon the actings of our own
Intellect.” Quoted in Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 13.
55 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 71-72.
 20

will find, that all our affections and passions are not only well-suited to our external
circumstances; but that they themselves, and all the laws or methods of exercising them,
with their different consequences, have a very exact correspondence with, and analogy to
the sensible world, and its laws. Is there not an obvious similarity between the principle
of gravitation toward a common center, and universal benevolence, in their operation?56

In Turnbull’s view, the behavior of inanimate objects and of human emotions operate in
synchronicity with each other by the same universal laws. Two centuries earlier this was the
view held by the Italian physician Fracastoro, as well; only in Fracastoro’s theory, the behavior
of both things in the world and feelings in the mind and body can be explained in entirely
physical terms derived from the materialist tradition starting with Democritus and Epicurus. 57 Or
observe the following idea developed by the father of the modern scientific method, Francis
Bacon. Because, as Bacon notes, “Men favour Wonders,” some observers are predisposed to find
sympathies where natural causes might suffice. This is true, for instance, when people imagine
“Secret Friendship, or Hatred” between species of plants that tend to grow in each other’s
company. Instead of that anthropomorphism, Bacon reasons that if plants draw the same
nutriments from the earth they will flounder as they fight for resources, while if they require
different nutriments, they will flourish.58 But if Bacon critiques the “lazy conjectures” of “the
devotees of natural magic,”59 he does use “sympathy” judiciously in “privileged instances” to
describe “instances of resemblance.” In a passage reminiscent of Foucault’s famous depiction of
the “Prose of the World,” or the “semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century”, 60
Bacon notes that structural resemblances we identify out in the world—say, between the roots
and branches of plants, or between the fins of fish and the feet of animals, between “tree resins”
and “rock gems,” teeth and beaks, scrotums and wombs—“are extremely useful in uncovering
the structure of parts of a whole,” “sometimes bring[ing] us step by step to sublime and noble

56 George Turnbull, The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, ed. Alexander Broadie (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 2005), 654.
57 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 84.
58 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, Or a Naturall History In ten Centuries. Written by the right Honble Francis Lo:
Verulam Viscount St Alban. Published after ye Authors Death by W: Rawley Dr of Divinity & c.. (London: Printed
for W. Lee, 1627), 127; 124-126.
59 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 71.
60 Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 22.
 21

axioms, particularly axioms relating to the structure of the world rather than to simple forms and
natures.”61 Most significantly, Bacon finds synchronicities between our organs of perception and
the things we perceive. In the case of the “the eye and a mirror” or “the structure of the ear and
echoing places”:

the organs of sense are of a similar nature to bodies which give off reflections to the
senses. Taking its cue from this fact, the understanding in its turn rises without difficulty
to a loftier and nobler axiom: namely that agreement or sympathies between bodies
endowed with sense and between inanimate objects without sense differ only in the fact
that in the former case an animal spirit is present in a body equipped to receive it, but is
lacking in the latter.62

Bacon’s synchronic tendencies, what Guido Giglioni calls “his effort to connect the level of
material desires with that of human desires,” are on full display here. 63 Bacon reduces the
ontological chasm between animate and inanimate things by claiming that the distinction is
founded “only” on the presence or absence of “an animal spirit.” Structurally and functionally,
animate and inanimate things operate by similar behaviours. While animate creatures sense and
inanimate ones “give off reflections to the senses,” both kinds of thing act and move, and omit
powerful evidence of their existence. If only animate things are capable of perceiving influence,
both animate and inanimate things are capable of receiving it. In Bacon’s view, where the world
and the creatures who inhabit it are nested in a weave of structural parallels, sympathy is both
simple and sublime. It is the idea that bodies come from the world and are designed to perceive it
and to interact with it by giving off reflections suited to the perceptual capacities of others. This
philosophical realism, where objects in the world correspond to human perceptual capacities, is
undone by the perspectivalism of Descartes and Locke, who claim we can only know what the
mind represents to itself, not what is outside of it.64 Already for Bacon human thoughts and
feelings are confined to the human mind and not experienced by plants, animals, or nature. But

61 Bacon, The New Organon,144.

62 Bacon, The New Organon, 144-145.
63 Guido Giglioni, “Francis Bacon” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68.
64 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 186.
 22

he still understands there to be structural synchronicities between human perception and the
things it perceives, even if humans and nature do not share a common feeling.

Schliesser is right when he notes that sympathy functions as a conceptual “placeholder while one
is searching for underlying explanations for many different kinds of causal processes.” But I
have found that sympathy’s lack of specificity, its ambiguity, mystery, and “placeholder” nature,
is precisely what the concept offers and what is desired from it. One of sympathy’s central
features is that it expresses the limit of understanding—both the limit of what we know (say,
when it comes to gravity), and the limit of our ability to give a reason for what we know we feel
(when it comes to our own loves and hatreds, for example). However, not many of the writers I
look at lament this. Often, mystery is what is desired when “sympathy” is used. Even in the
example above, Bacon expresses wonder at the “loftier and nobler axiom” that things—like an
“ear” and an “echoing place”—can and do form relationships with each other because they
possess structural parallels. Ultimately these are remarks upon the inexplicability of thisness.

Thus the concept of sympathy encompasses the phenomena of why things, both animate and
inanimate, are compelled to do one thing and not another. The idea that there are natural
attractions and revulsions, when paired with theories of imagination, perception and personality,
help to explain emotional responses, which takes us into the problem of human motivation,
impulse, and disposition. For the eighteenth-century moral philosopher Shaftesbury, following
Spinoza, we are affectively drawn toward certain abstract objects of understanding especially if
these objects are moral qualities we form in the mind, such as goodness. According to
Shaftesbury, an abstract idea like goodness operates completely in parallel with the innate,
involuntary compulsions of our natures. “Mental enjoyments,” he writes, “are either actually the
very natural affections themselves in their immediate operation, or they wholly proceed from
them, and are no other than their efforts.”65

While for eighteenth-century moral philosophers, “sympathy” is the affective logic said to
govern relationships between people, ideally, in this rationalist framework, it is first filtered
through the imagination and through consciousness, which allows it to be acted upon by the
faculty of reason so that we might judge whether our sympathies are proper before we express

65 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 295.

 23

them. While sympathy expressed through the body is frightening and linked to contagion and
lack of control, sympathy filtered through the mind might bring us into contact with the right
order of the cosmos. Thus when “universal sympathy” moves inward, as Lobis would say, it
pairs with a universal idea of reason. As Neil Saccamano has shown, Hume’s sympathy, for
example, is ideally a “general principle,” regulated by “general laws.” Otherwise, as Hume fears,
“what each man feels within himself [would always be] the standard of sentiment” and in the
ensuing anarchy of “particular case[s],” morality and truth would be left to individual
judgements. Instead, Saccamano writes, Hume emphasizes “the regulative function of generality
with regard to sympathy,” arguing “for the generalizing operation of sympathy.” 66 The generality
Hume thinks is so crucial for human experiences of sympathy, Shaftesbury earlier attributed to
God’s mind: “If there be a general mind, it can have no particular interest; but the general good,
or good of the whole, and its own private good, must of necessity be one and the same.” 67 This is
another way in which potentially anarchic, individual, relativist “human sympathy” retains some
of the order of “universal sympathy,” as Lobis suggests.

One can identify seven features of sympathy that are consistent across most usages, despite its
wide and varied application. These features are present in both magical and mechanistic uses of
the term. I list them below:

1. Sympathy is involuntary. It governs the behavior of both inanimate things and animate
creatures and people, acting on matter beneath consciousness and beyond the will.

2. The causes of sympathy are invisible. It is easy to observe, but hard to explain.

3. Sympathy is used to explain action at a distance.

4. Sympathy presupposes that things come together based on the logic of like-to-like,
whether this be likeness of circumstance, physical quality, or disposition.

66 Neil Saccamano, “Hume, Identity, and Aesthetic Universality” in Politics and the Passions 1500-1850, eds.
Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 180.
67 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 29.
 24

5. Particular cases of sympathy take place in the context of a general cosmic order
organized by relations based on likeness. Sympathy connects parts to a whole, whether
this whole be a body or the universe.

6. Sympathy is a concept about interrelations. Nothing sympathizes in isolation. It

suggests that individual things and creatures are porous and compelled to change under
outside influence. Individual things and creatures are affected by other things and
creatures, and by the world around them.

7. Sympathy is a principle of movement. It explains action and change inspired by the

influence of others.

All of these qualities suggest that sympathy expresses a natural, somewhat regulatory
phenomena. By “natural,” I mean that sympathy is active, but unconscious and unwilled,
governing the matter of which everything, both living and non-living, is comprised. An impulse
that acts upon both things and human psychology, it articulates what Heidegger calls “the
essential border” between consciousness and the Nature within us. 68 In the same way that
“nature” and the “natural” is frequently moralized and aligned with rightness, so too is sympathy,
so to be “unsympathetic” is to be “unnatural.”

For those such as the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips who emphasize the universal
harmoniousness governed by sympathy and cluster it with metaphors of friendship and love,
feeling sympathy leads us toward goodness and rightness, where our private, most earnest
desires correspond to the order of the world. But overall, sympathy has a complicated moral
connotation. For Shaftesbury, for example, this “social Affection” is both “of the highest
Delight”—“those Pleasures of Sympathy” that arise from “Participation with Others”—and at
the same time “a kind of Sympathy entering into the Concern of the People” that can spread by
“Contact of Sympathy” and lead to the “popular Fury” called “Panick” or “the Rage of the
People.”69 Always an impulsive command of desire, in the context of human societies sympathy
can either refer to spontaneous instincts that benefit our lives and increase our pleasure, such as

68 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), 239.
69 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 10.
 25

the desire for friendship, or to frenzied mass madness. Thus sympathy does not carry a consistent
moral connotation but describes an amoral, logical relationship of like-to-like. “Sympathy” can
depict both happy cohesion and frenetic smashing together and pandemonium. But whether
wonderful or horrific, it is usually represented as sublime because it is beyond conscious
understanding and control.

1.3 The Politics of Sympathy

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes:

There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby
things scattered through the universe can answer one another. The human face, from afar,
emulates the sky, and just as man’s intellect is an imperfect reflection of God’s wisdom,
so his two eyes, with their limited brightness, are a reflection of the vast illumination
spread across the sky by sun and moon; the mouth is Venus, since it gives passage to
kisses and words of love; the nose provides an image in miniature of Jove’s scepter and
Mercury’s staff. The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one
end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a
mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place
allotted to each thing.70

Foucault’s reading of resemblance and sympathy suggests that sympathy, being “a principle of
mobility” as well as reflection, shrinks the world down to a conceivable size and order, and
contains it in understanding. There is certainly something to this. On the other hand, these
principles of sympathy and likeness do not necessarily “overcom[e] the place allotted to each
thing.”71 Rather, they strengthen and solidify the place of things into a web of rightness, where
certain things should form relationships with certain other things.

Politically, the notion of cosmic sympathy is ambivalent. It can be used by those in power to
mystify the existing social order but it can just as easily be appealed to by those who wish to
challenge that order. For the former, “sympathy” expresses a kind of cosmic wonder at the way

70 Michael Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), 22.

71 Foucault, The Order of Things, 26.
 26

things are, a mysticism that rarely asks whether things can or should change. If the moon and
crabs, or iron and the lodestone, have a sympathetic relationship, or if one person likes a fugue
while another likes a jingle, those amities do no more than relay something unchanging about
innate dispositions. Certain things act one way, others another. As a political or metaphysical
ideal, it tends to be normalizing and optimistic, downplaying the importance of individual
suffering and inequality. If sympathy heals our feelings of loneliness by reminding us that we are
all connected to one another and to the world by bonds of natural love, it can also diminish our
experience as individuals because we simply do not matter in the grand, unified scheme of
things. Parts of a whole may treat each other unjustly, they may consume one another, or suffer
in a state of mutual antagonism and brutality, but that hardly matters from a cosmic perspective.
“[T]he order of the whole does not always give each individual thing what it wants,” Plotinus
writes. “Nevertheless, all things are woven into a unity and exhibit a wonderful concord.” 72

But for those inclined to social critique, sympathy could be used for more radical purposes. An
emphasis on cosmic order might justify existing political hierarchies if the cosmos and the polis
were seen to be in harmony, but it might also transcend them, pitting the divine, eternal law of
the universe against the unjust and arbitrary laws of local custom. For Milton, no “jurisdictive
power” can justly forbid his ending an incompatible marriage because it is not the place of
cannon law to manage “the inward and irremediable disposition of man, to command of love and
sympathy”73:

[W]hat can be a fouler incongruity, a greater violence to the reverend secret of nature,
than to force a mixture of minds that cannot unite, and to sow the furrow of man’s
nativity with seed of two incoherent and uncombining dispositions. Surely if any
noisomeness of body soon destroys the sympathy of mind to that work, much more will
the antipathy of mind infuse itself into all the faculties and acts of the body, to render
them invalid, unkindly, and even unholy against the fundamental law book of nature,
which Moses never thwarts, but reverences. Therefore he commands us to force nothing

72 Plotinus. The Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P Gerson, Richard
King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), IV.4.38, 15-18.
73 John Milton, The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, eds. Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2010), 87.
 27

against sympathy or natural order, no, not upon the most abject creatures, to show that
such an indignity cannot be offered to man without an impious crime. 74

Against those who argue that divorce would unravel the social fabric, Milton claims that it is the
individual’s sympathy that is the locus of “natural order,” not the cannon law or the state. For
Milton the individual’s secret heart is directly bonded to God. Only social custom comes
between that sacred relationship. The idea that there is sympathy between an individual and the
universe, unfiltered through local tradition or the community, could also offer a more universal
perspective rooted in cosmopolitan brother- and sisterhood that proved amenable to those
dissatisfied with the status quo’s religious and gendered prejudices, as it did, for example, for the
seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips and her contemporary the monist philosopher Anne
Conway.

Thus the sympathetic worldview encapsulates a fundamental political problem: what is good for
the whole might be bad for some of its parts. This leads to a problem of knowledge. What, then,
is the ultimate good? Cosmic sympathy emphasizes the right “place” of parts in the chain of
being, offering an aesthetic view of the totality that diminishes the plights of particular parts. On
the other hand, who but the sympathizing individual is the authority on what she or he feels to be
good, beautiful, or true? A worldview rooted in natural sympathies may thus preserve a concern
for the freedom and integrity of individuals, even as it emphasizes the ultimate rightness of the
totality. “Sympathy” is a concept that, in articulating a relationship between humans and the
cosmos, expresses both the coherence and the separateness of all things in the world, balancing
universalism and relativism.

1.4 The Chapters

In Chapters One and Two of this dissertation I sketch a broad historical picture of “sympathy,”
starting with its appearance in Aristotle and Plato and its development in the Stoic tradition into a
metaphysical principle organizing the universe. I continue on into the Renaissance, when
“sympathy” was reintroduced into European culture by the Neoplatonisms of Ficino and Pico,
and where the occult philosophies most famously represented by Agrippa and Paracelsus sought

74 Milton, The Divorce Tracts, 58.

 28

to harness the power of sympathy for magical purposes. Finally, I give an account of its spread to
Early Modern Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries, where it was met with both
welcome and resistance. For those like the Cambridge Platonists who make sympathy part of a
cosmological structure, “sympathy” is part of a systematic worldview expressed in technical
language. In the very different context of drama, however, sympathy is far more embedded in
individual experience. Because of this, the sympathies felt by Shakespeare’s characters are far
more relativistic and do not necessarily carry an imagining of the whole.

In Chapters Three and Four I turn to literature. Chapter Three examines the Neoplatonic
friendship poetry of Katherine Philips. Like Erasmus’s colloquy De Amicitia, Edmund Spenser’s
Four Hymns, and John Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which all use “sympathy”
to prove that it is wrong to force love where it is not felt or to deny love when it exists, Philips’
poetry links sympathy to natural law. But where the examples I just cited deal with friendships
between men or love matches from the perspective of a husband or male lover, Philips is
specifically concerned with friendships between women. While her poems raise the friendships
they describe to metaphysical heights of holiness, they also remove the friendships from this
world to the poet’s and her addressee’s interiors. At the same time, Philips is skeptical of
“minds” and the faculties therein. Minds can be “beauteous” if “one” with another mind;
otherwise they are “disordered.” Therefore I ask: if the “sacred sympathy” or “Love” that “ties”
Nature to its “Cause” does not reside in the mind—as, for example, conscience and the
imagination do—where is it? It is, I suggest, out in the world as much as it is in the individual’s
soul, for sympathy, for Philips, is nature’s organizing principle. Ultimately, freely forging one’s
own friendships is agreeing to “mutual victim[hood]”: one’s sympathies are at once determinate
in that one cannot help feeling them, and personal, private, and so ‘free.’

With Paradise Lost we arrive at a definition of sympathy that is more similar to our post-
Enlightenment one. This is the subject of Chapter Four. For Milton, sympathy describes the
spontaneous impulses felt by various characters to align themselves with others—but it is felt
only by Nature, demons and women. Despite what their own intentions may be, or whether, in
the case of “Nature,” intention is at all possible, sympathy appears to be something that acts upon
certain characters more than a sensation they freely experience. It is not surprising that such
determinism appears. What is surprising is that Milton’s male characters are relatively unaffected
by this “wondrous” operation of God and nature. They too experience spontaneous impulses, but
 29

these are signified by the less occult, more materialist word, “motion.” In Paradise Lost we
therefore see Milton draw a distinction between unconscious impulses experienced by the body,
and between impulses that have been filtered through consciousness and tried before reason. If
sympathy describes material forces and then evolves to describe internal psychological states, in
Milton’s poetry its progress is filtered through feminine subjectivity.

I have therefore built upon Lobis’s work by suggesting that because sympathy is related to a
generalizing order in both its “universal” and “human” manifestations, it carries hierarchical
assumptions. One of these assumptions is that women, people of distant nations, and the lower
classes are more susceptible to sympathy that acts upon the body by contamination. Milton’s Eve
is represented as having a fundamentally more porous physical composition than the male
characters around her—a familiar story. Sympathy leads to metamorphosis, because it represents
the internal limit where consciousness and the will meets the outside influence of the world, of
the body as a mechanism affected by other bodies. In Paradise Lost, “sympathy, or som
connatural force” is the mechanism by which God controls Sin and the fallen angels from the
seat of their interior desires. It is how divine order implants itself in the heart of things, by
creating natural friendships and antipathies that drive created beings to their rightful place and
away from their wrongful place. But sympathy’s relation to metamorphosis means it can also
seek to undo hierarchies. In my discussion of Katherine Philips’s friendship poetry, I show how
she represents herself as a person lower on the chain of being who looks up and seeks to
sympathetically rise and merge with those above her—both her aristocratic Royalist friends and
her husband.

1.5 Conclusion

Let’s briefly return to Fludd’s anecdote of the gallant wench and her shoes. Fludd’s passage
reveals its nervousness in its overwrought explanation of the moral of the story, addressed to
“Christian Peripateticks.” Elsewhere Fludd calls Aristotle “a deceiver of the Christian world” for
advancing the doctrine that created beings like the sun, stars, winds, elements, plants and animals
move and “act per se, essentially” —that is, according to their natures. For Fludd, this creates a
problem of authority. When it comes to how and why, say, lightning strikes, the Aristotelian
system “arrogat[es] ab[…]olute authority unto the Creature.” Lightning is lightning: its cause is
 30

natural. Instead, Fludd says, “the lightnings and thunders, yea, and all other meteors, are the
immediate works of Gods hand”; for God “acteth all in all.”75

According to Fludd, if, like Aristotle, we grant nature and creatures authority over their own
movements and actions, we give greater importance and reality to the material thing before us,
and less to the immaterial, invisible truth behind things: “Verily in so doing, they make the world
believe, that the Organ doth act per se, essentially, and not this hidden and centrall word, or
incorruptible Spirit, existing in every thing, which is the fountaine or foundation of the
true [...] or wisdom.”76 This makes us guilty of idolatry. But it also leads to some nervous
questions. For on the other hand, it should not be possible willfully to misperceive this truth if
God were exercising authority over the movements of our thoughts. If the planets, stars, and
weather demonstrate God’s immediate action in the world, how is it that a little thing like
consciousness can so easily deviate from the radical unity at the heart of things?

The other reason I opened with this passage is that it offers a moment of literariness in Fludd’s
otherwise philosophical discourse. It is a moment that behaves very differently from the majority
of the text: more nervous, more ambiguous, having a series of shifting tones. In his usual
philosophical mode, though Fludd may discuss mysterious, occult, or angelic forces, these are
not ambiguous: his statements are declarative. God uses sympathy and antipathy as his
instruments to act immediately upon all created things, both animate and inanimate, to organize
things into relations. He does this by compelling things to come together or to fly apart. All
action proceeds from the will of God:

But to return again unto the root of this business, the evident cause of Sympathy and
Antipathy of things, proceedeth from the radical Mystery of the opposite Attributes or
properties in God, which have the originall of their Emanation, from the secret and
hidden Volunty of God…. God the Father, or the radicall Unity, is the fountain from
whence all things spring; and his catholic emanation the immediate act; by which all

75 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 122-123.

76 Ibid.
 31

vertues, actions, and vivifications, are diversely effected, according onto his will which
sent it out, both in heaven and in earth. 77

This is the fundamental mystery at the heart of Fludd’s philosophical system, but it does not
seem terribly mysterious or unsettling until it is dramatized in a rare anecdote like the one above.
And then, it seems less a metaphysical mystery than it does a moral one. For, as Ralph Cudworth
notes in his massive cosmological exploration, The True Intellectual System of the Universe,
there can be no logical defense “of a Distributive or Retributive Justice, dispensing Rewards and
Punishments” if, like Fludd, we posit a “Divine Fate” by which God “Decree[s] and Do[es] all
things in us, (Evil as well as Good) or by his Immediate Influence…Determine[s] all Actions,
and so make[s] them alike Necessary to us.”78 Because literature is able to contain more
ambiguity, it is particularly good at revealing the paradoxes inherent in the concept of
“sympathy.” This is important because when “sympathy” becomes one of the fundamental
touchstones of eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, it seems at first glance to be
unproblematic: a totally familiar and natural feeling we all possess. But I aim to show that
“sympathy” is far more complicated than that.

For instance, is it possible that God’s action here makes him seem too passionately interested in
the affairs of humans, blasting off the bottoms of wenches who offend him, and might this not
have the unintended effect of reducing his majesty? Despite Fludd’s intentions, I would suggest
there is something endearing in the wench’s love for her shoes, not as a means to loving God, but
in themselves, just as there is something disappointing in God’s immediacy in this scene.
Perhaps there is something too ascetic in God’s annihilation of the gallant wench, even given the
Calvinist emphasis on “the terrible majesty of God,” which directs our energies more toward
“humble adoration” than toward “love.”79 Does he reject the little pleasures of his world too
much? If I experience some delight when the gallant wench claps her bottom, it is because she is
so liberal in inhabiting her body that she can afford to treat it, very briefly, with a bit of
disrespect. She is excessive, squandering a tiny portion of her gifts, which gives her largesse, and

77 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 190.

78 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; Wherein, All the Reason and
Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; And Its Impossibility Demonstrated (London: Printed for Richard Royston,
Bookseller to His most Sacred Majesty, 1678), 5-7.
79 Marcuse, A Study on Authority, 23.
 32

even, somehow, a cavalier honorableness: she dies for her shoes. In this anecdote it is God who
is quick to take back his gifts at the first sign that someone is misusing them, and as a result he
risks seeming cheap, his power fragile. When the gallant wench tries to separate herself from the
order of creation and for a moment stands as an independent and fearless being—whether or not
we think this is in sin—she succeeds. Ultimately, of course, her rebellious separateness is
chastised and she is brought back into God’s all-in-all through a process of annihilation. But her
ability to individuate is also at the centre of this scene, and she achieves her individuation—that
is, she becomes, temporarily, at least, an eccentric creature, a memorable diversity in this radical
unity—through her desire, in this case by desiring something she should not.
 Chapter 2
The Ancient and Renaissance Contexts of Sympathy
In this chapter I survey the ancient and Renaissance discourses of sympathy. The picture I sketch
is necessarily broad. As we will see, there are a number of different ways of invoking sympathy
in these periods: metaphysical, physiological, scientific, ethical and political. If once I had aimed
to tell of sympathy’s gradual interiorization and disenchantment as it transforms from a cosmic
into a strictly human or psychological principle, here I hope to unearth a greater complexity.
Starting with the appearance of sympathy in Aristotle and Plato and its development in the Stoic
tradition into a metaphysical principle organizing the universe, I then continue on into the
Renaissance, when sympathy was reintroduced into European culture by the neo-Platonisms of
Ficino, Pico and Della Porta, and where the occult philosophies most famously represented by
Agrippa and Paracelsus sought to harness the power of sympathy for magical purposes. One of
the most attractive aspects of ancient—particularly Neoplatonic—“sympathy” for Renaissance
thinkers was that it offered a system that was both theological, putting the divine One at the heart
of things and having it emanate down to all of creation, while also allowing room for human
freedom and creativity.

While sympathy was often discussed and anatomized by mechanistic philosophers staring with
Epicurus, those who wished to emphasize sympathy’s wondrousness and to associate it with
revelation happily remarked that ultimately the cause, origin, and behaviour of sympathy
remained unknown despite the attempts made by materialists and atheists to provide rational
explanations. In La Semaine ou Création du monde (1578), the devout Huguenot poet Guillaume
de Salluste, sieur Du Bartas took aim at the Roman disciple of Epicurus, Lucretius, and his poem
De rerum natura, hoping to re-mystify the natural phenomena that De rerum natura demystifies:
“But say (Lucretius) what’s the hidden cause/That toward the North-Starre still the Needle
drawes,/Whose point is toucht with Load-stone? lose this knot” (I.3.967-69).80 Sympathy is a
concept that straddles natural philosophy on the one hand, and magic, metaphysics, and theology
on the other. Renaissance humanists like Ficino, Pico, and Erasmus who rooted sympathy at the

80Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, trans. Josuah Sylvester, ed.
Susan Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.)

33
 34

core of nature and the cosmos believed that human republics and ethics should model the same
harmonic principles. One of the points I wish to make in this survey is that it is the combination
of natural science with mystery that allows sympathy to play a morally transcendental role in the
political imagination of those who incorporate it into their systems of thought. Ultimately I
suggest that “sympathy” is a concept that offers both a theological and a scientific explanation
for the joining together of people and things across vast, global distances.

2.1 The Ancient Idea of Sympathy

The idea that cosmic, earthly, and human levels of being are strung together by “bonds of
sympathy” is an ancient notion, occurring as far back as Pythagoras.81 In The Physics, however,
Aristotle offers a counterpoint to the Pythagorean system of animistic sympathies. In a challenge
to the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who claimed that “Love and Strife” cause all
motion in the universe, Aristotle writes: “he points to the fact that among mankind we have
something that unites men, namely Love, while on the other hand enemies avoid one another:
thus from the observed fact that this occurs in certain cases comes the assumption that it occurs
also in the universe.”82 Instead, for Aristotle sympathy is a naturalistic or physiological
phenomena, the body reacting instinctually and involuntarily to its surroundings. In fact when we
take a closer look at sympathy in Greek and Roman contexts, we can isolate two broad ways of
imagining the concept. It is either a naturalistic phenomenon or a magico-metaphysical one.

While Aristotle criticizes his pre-Socratic predecessor for projecting human qualities onto
cosmic phenomena, many ancient authors exhibit an urge to link the human to the cosmic. The
force that is thought to be shared by humans and the cosmos, and which binds them together, is
frequently “sympathy.” For both Epicurus and the Stoics, sympathy becomes a metaphysical
principle rooted in the structure of the universe, specifically one that binds together the corporeal
body to the corporeal soul. While in Epicurus’s atomic theory, sympathy behaves
mechanistically to organize the formation of particles into compounds which then interact
atomically with our senses, for the Stoics, sympathy is related to the divine pneuma or breath that

81 Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001),
13.
82 Aristotle, Physics, Book VIII. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.8.viii.html
 35

pervades the cosmos, depicted by them as a giant living animal. In a medical context,
Hippocrates and, later, Galen present the body as a fully interconnected system in sympathy with
itself.83 Against the mechanical explanations of bodily functions, in particular the late Hellenistic
physician Ascelpiades of Bithynia’s corpuscular model of the body, Galen argues that “the
natural faculties” responsible for nonconscious actions like generation and growth operate in
ways that are both “technical”—“in strategic pursuit of particular ends, here the flourishing of
the organism”—and “right” or “just.”84

For Galen biological functions rooted in sympathy prove that bare nature has skill,
purposefulness, and a sub-rational ability to recognize likenesses, even if these do not exactly
equal discernment. In the context of the natural magic tradition, followers of the naturalistic
work done by the Aristotelian botanist, Theophrastus, who undertook an inquiry into the
sympathetic relations among plant species, argue that there is a sympathetic magic in nature that
can be accessed by humans for the purposes of healing and divination. Later, in his Natural
History, which would go on to inspire the medieval and Renaissance Book of Wonders and
encyclopedia traditions, the Roman naturalist and naval commander Pliny the Elder compiled
examples of marvellous cases of sympathy occurring across animate and inanimate domains.
Pliny’s anatomy of wonderful sympathies is deist: though they are undoubtedly wonderous, he
attributes marvels of sympathy to “the Power of Nature, and how it is she only which we call
God.”85 In this influential account of sympathy, phenomena may be marvellous and amazing, but
they are still explicable by natural rather than occult or providential causes. It was Plotinus in the
third-century AD who combined theology with cosmic sympathy, “retain[ing] the Stoic emphasis
on sympathy as a universal principle but reconceive[ing] the substrate.” 86 Rather than a material
pneuma, he claimed that the universal force that holds all things together is an immaterial world
soul. Let’s take a closer look these accounts of “sympathy.”

83 In On Nutriment, Hippocrates writes: “Conflux one, conspiration one [sumpnoia mia], all things in sympathy
[sumpathea panta]; all its parts as forming a whole, and severally the parts in each part, with reference to the work.”
Quoted in Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 6.
84 Brook Holmes, “Galen’s Sympathy” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 63.
85 Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s Natural History. In Thirty-Seven Books, vol. 1, bk. 2, trans. Philemon Holland (London:
1601), 38.
86 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 7.
 36

2.1.1 Plato and Aristotle

In the work of Plato and Aristotle, “sympathy” appears only? a few times, and always in the
context of isolated physiological phenomena. In the Charmides Plato makes a first reference to
sympathy, but it is, as René Brouwer states, “tentative.” 87 As Charmides, Critias and Socrates
search for a definition of moderation, Socrates arrives, suddenly, at a loss for words when he
realizes that thus far all of their definitions have been deficient. Socrates describes what happens
next as he stood there gaping in silence: “Critias heard me say this, and saw that I was in a
difficulty; and as one person when another yawns in his presence catches the infection of
yawning from him, so did he seem to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty.”88 As Brouwer
notes, this little scene depicts sympathy as an instance where one body is compelled or “driven”
to reflect the influence of another body. Critias’s sympathetic befuddlement is a physiological
response to the powerful example of Socrates. Despite being embarrassed to find himself aping
his teacher, it is an involuntary reaction, beyond his control. For Aristotle, too, sympathy is a
physiological phenomenon. In an early essay of The Problems,89 called “Problems Connected
with Sympathetic Action,” sympathy appears to be a kind of physical mimicry, just as in the
Charmides. Bodies feel compelled to yawn in the presence of yawns, or to pass urine in the
presence of others doing the same, because these are behaviours related to moisture and fluidity
“where the desire is easily stirred” by sympathy. For Aristotle, as for Plato, sympathy is a
compulsion that overcomes the will, influencing bodily behaviour regardless of whether we want
it to or not.

Sympathy’s involuntariness is most obvious when it comes to the communication of disease.

“Why is it,” Aristotle asks,

that those who come into contact with certain diseases become affected by them, but no
one ever becomes healthy through contact with health? Is it because disease is a state of
movement, while health is a state of rest? If so, disease can set up movement, but health

87René Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), 16.
88 Plato, The Dialogues of Plato: Charmides, trans. B. Jowett [ebook] The Project Gutenberg EBook of Charmides,
by Plato. Release Date: August 15.
89 Scholars do not think Aristotle wrote every one of the nine hundred Problems, but it is generally agreed that he
was the main author of the earlier essays. See Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 17.
 37

cannot. Or is it because disease comes to us against our will, while health comes by our
own wish? Things then which occur against our will are different from those which occur
by our wish and deliberate choice. 90

For Aristotle, sympathetic action is comprised of a paradoxical combination of “desire easily

stirred” and bodily behaviour that we do not desire at all. Thus Aristotle starts to get at one of
sympathy’s frightening enigmas: we desire what we sympathize with, but we may not choose to
do so. Sympathy is at the same time intimate and involuntary. Its presence reveals to us that
desire is different from the will. Something that we do not want and even fear, like disease, can,
through sympathy, stir our desire until our bodies crave what we do not consciously choose and
potentially even revile. This mysterious, unwilled power of sympathy gives it a magical aura,
even if for Aristotle it is a strictly physiological experience suffered by bodies rather than by the
cosmos at large.

If sympathy only occurs in isolated cases for Plato and Aristotle, their successors extend the
concept. This in turn had an influence on how Renaissance thinkers understood sympathy in the
context of the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions. Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum,
Theophrastus, brought sympathy even further into the realm of natural science. Theophrastus’s
main contributions were his botanical treatises, Enquiry into Plants, and On the Causes of
Plants, which had a large influence on Renaissance science. “Building on the botanical work of
Androtion and the so-called root-cutters, in addition to Aristotle,”91 Theophrastus investigated
“similarly sympathetic behaviour” in things such as mating male and female animals, olive and
myrtle trees, goats and goatskins, and grapes and wine.92 When he tries to account for how and
why goatskins start to leak during the goat breeding season, he supplies a naturalistic account
rooted in the idea that an original goatish “virtue” in the skin can be “excited” and “affected” by
the “air,” which might carry a quality of the “breeding impulse” during mating season. The same
goes for garlic and onions, or any plant that when picked and dried becomes especially pungent
during sprouting season. In Theophrastus’s account of naturalistic sympathies, phenomena are
both rooted in material causes and remarkably wondrous. His claim that “Force[s] latent in such

90 Aristotle, “Problemata” in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 7, trans. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 886.
91 Ibid.
92 Theophrastus, Enquiry Into Plants and Minor Works on Odours and Weather Signs, trans. Sir Arthur Hort
(London: William Heinemann, 1916), 380.
 38

plants [can be] stirred into activity” suggests that sympathy, rather than being restricted to
individual cases like yawning, urinating, or the spread of disease, is a pervasive power active in
the universe.93 Similarly, while Plato does not explicitly mention sympathy except in passing,
and never in his cosmology or metaphysics, in the Timaeus he does present an animistic
worldview which went on to influence Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, who mapped out a
significant role for sympathy in their systems.

2.1.2 The Stoics

In Stoicism a metaphysic of cosmic sympathy comes together with the Stoic political ideal of
cosmopolitanism. By all accounts it is the Stoics who turn the physiological conception of
sympathy into a general universal principle. 94 This is because in Stoic metaphysics the universe
is a giant breathing animal that operates by animal laws. According to the third-century AD
biographer Diogenes Laertius, “The doctrine that the world is a living being, rational, animate
and intelligent, is laid down by Chrysippus in the first book of his treatise On Providence, by
Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius.”95 If for the pre-Socratic physician Hippocrates
all parts of the body are in sympathy with itself, the early Stoic Chrysippus can be said to apply
this medical concept to the universe at large. In On Mixture the second-century CE Aristotelian
commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias writes that it is Chrysippus who “first holds that the
whole is unified by a breath [pneuma], which pervades it completely, and by which the universe
is held together and stabilized and is sympathetic with itself.” 96 Similarly, the second-century CE
Stoic Cleomedes begins his treatise The Heaven by speaking of “sympathy of the parts of the
cosmos for each other.”97

93 Theophrastus, Enquiry, 382.

94 While there are complete works by the late Stoics Epictetus, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca,
the accounts of the early Stoics reach us through later commentators such as Cicero, Alexander of Aphrodisias,
Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Bishop Nemesius of Emesa, and Diogenes Laertius. These writers were sometimes
friendly but other times hostile to Stoic thought, and so their commentary must be taken with a grain of salt. See
Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 22-23.
95 Quoted in Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 26.
96 Quoted in Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 25.
97 Quoted in Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 22.
 39

As Brouwer notes, what makes this metaphysical idea of cosmic sympathy possible is the
underlying analogy it draws between humans and the universe, micro- and macrocosm.98 Just as
a human possesses a rational soul united by sympathy to its body, so the animate universe
possesses a rational component. This view is supported by Diogenes Laertius, who says: “The
world [kosmos] is a living thing in the sense of an animate substance endowed with sensation; for
animal is better than non-animal, and nothing is better than the world, ergo the world is a living
being. And it is endowed with soul as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of
it.” The divine active principle sitting at the heart of existence is defined by the Stoics as a
perfect entity that is not only alive and breathing but possesses perfect reason. As the classicist
A.A. Long writes, “According to Stoic cosmology, the world is under the direction of a supreme
nature named Zeus, who is perfectly rational and providential and present to all human beings (or
at least those who listen to the voice of reason) in Zeus’s law-like prescriptions and
prohibitions.”99 Rather than luck or fortune, it is providence grounded in the active principle’s
reason that brings bodies into contact with one another. While according to the Roman jurist
Cicero (writing as a supporter of late Stoicism), human beings share their cosmic citizenship
with the Gods because like the Gods they too possess reason,100 few people will ever develop
perfect reason, though in theory they are naturally capable of doing so if unhindered by
circumstance. If a person were to develop perfect reason, they would become a self-sufficient
and God-like Sage, and their reason would be in harmony with the providential reason of the
active principle. Thus the synchronicity between humans and the universe—a correspondence
itself governed by powers of “sympathy”—is one rooted in both universal animism and universal
reason. In the Stoic conception, there is a relationship between cosmic sympathy that feels, and a
rational cosmic mind that decides how to order all the parts of the world using feeling as its
instrument.

This relationship between cosmic sympathy and divine reason would be very influential, giving
impetus, as Long writes, to “two closely related and enormously influential ideas” developed by
the early Stoic, Zeno: moral universalism and natural law.101 If sympathy is a spontaneous,

98 Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” 28.

99 A. A. Long, “The Concept of the Cosmopolitan in Greek and Roman Thought,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 55.
100 See John Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism and Zeno’s Republic,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007):
20.
101 Long, “Concept of the Cosmopolitan,” 55.
 40

involuntary compulsion that draws people and things into arrangements, or that makes one
person love milk while another loves wine, it contains within it a danger of inexplicable
randomness: why is there an attraction between these things, and a revulsion between those?
Relativism of taste, of judgment, and of attraction has the potential to unsettle moral and
aesthetic certainties. It is impossible to say what is absolutely good, true, or beautiful, if the
sympathy that attracts one thing to another is irrational and even tends toward the thing’s
destruction, as is the case when diseases are sympathetically communicated. By making
sympathy not just a particular, eccentric, physiological phenomena as it is for Plato and Aristotle,
but a cosmic force, and then linking it to an idea of universal reason that rightly orders the world,
Stoic cosmology resolves the fear that sympathies are irrational and random. Though we may
experience them as involuntary impulses, our sympathies—if we are right-minded—are in line
with universal reason, with nature, and with providence.

According to Brouwer, the Stoic metaphysic of cosmic sympathy is related to the Stoic political
ideal of cosmopolitanism. What is more, it is in the relationship between cosmic sympathy and
cosmopolitanism that sympathy’s “human” application in eighteenth-century political and
economic philosophy is foreshadowed. The cosmopolitan ideal was apparently inherited by Zeno
from Diogenes the Cynic, who, when asked where he was from, famously replied, “I am a citizen
of the cosmos,” coining the term kosmopolitês.102 Critical of custom and law, Diogenes claimed
that his home was in nature itself, to which he was perfectly correspondent, needing no temple,
no currency, no court, no property, and sometimes no clothes. While the late Roman Stoics were
embarrassed by Diogenes the Cynic’s anarchist utopianism, they retained the idea of a
worldwide community that transcends all cultural, local, and racial divisions and is instead
bound together by enlightened values inspired only by human nature insofar as it is common to
all. “There are two communities,” Seneca writes in De Otio. While our local community was
assigned to us by accident of birth, our other “great and truly common” community “embrac[es]
gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of
our citizenship by the sun.”103

102 Quoted in Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 4.

103 Quoted in Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 1.
 41

For Roman Stoics like Seneca and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cosmopolitanism did not lead
to a political order rooted in the individual’s free and direct relationship to the world and to
nature, as Diogenes may have meant, but to one imperial world order of common law derived
from universal reason. In Meditations 4.4 Marcus Aurelius writes:

If a mind is common to us all, then so is the reason which makes us rational beings; and if
that be so, then so is the reason which prescribes what we should do or not do. If that be
so, there is a common law also; if that be so, we are fellow-citizens; and if that be so, the
world is a kind of state. For in what other common constitution can we claim that the
whole human race participates?104

The historian Plutarch expresses the idea similarly in On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander.
Here Plutarch defends the imperial world order created by Alexander the Great by finding a
precedent for it in Zeno’s Republic:

The much admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, is aimed at this one
main point, that our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes,
each one marked out by its own legal system, but we should regard all humans as our
fellow citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of life and order, like that
of a herd grazing together and nurtured by a common pasture. 105

If the Cynics hoped to achieve “the independence from political community characteristic of
gods and beasts,”106 the late Stoics they inspired imagined a world where individuals are freed
from local traditions but happily and willingly enmeshed in a universal political order controlled
by empire. While local laws are rooted in superstitious custom and tradition, the laws of empire,
these late Stoics imply, will be fairer because they are inspired by common human nature. In the
cosmopolitan ideal, the most normative implications of cosmic sympathy are manifested in an
exclusively human context. Subjects who are fully interpellated into the common law will
naturally feel the right kinds of sympathy, which will draw them to their appropriate stations in
society and compel them to respect that society’s fundamental social mores in ways that are

104 Quoted in Long, “Concept of the Cosmopolitan,” 56.

105 Quoted in Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 12-13.
106 Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 7.
 42

commensurate to the lot they have drawn. The cosmopolitan ideal is grounded in a metaphysic
that puts sympathy at the heart of the cosmos, pervading everything animate and inanimate, and
stirring all of its parts to acquiesce to the right order of the world in the name of naturalness and
goodness. Thus the first-century CE Hellenistic Jewish Philosopher Philo of Alexandria can
write in a passage inspired by Stoic thought: “the law-abiding man [Moses] is directly a world
citizen (kosmopolitês) because he regulates his actions by/reference to the will of nature by
which the entire world is administered.”107 In this way, a metaphysic of sympathy and a
cosmopolitan politic come together in the law.

2.1.3 Plotinus

Sympatheia is fundamental for Plotinus, because it accounts for the relationships souls participate
in: relationships between soul and body, between soul and soul, and between the Universal Soul
and individual souls of creatures. 108 It is also related to the emanations of influence streaming from
the internal activity of the higher principles and heavenly bodies down to earth, and to “the unity
of nature which is the basis for sensation and apprehension.” 109

If for the Stoics cosmic sympathy pairs with divine reason and providence to determine events in
the world, Plotinus’s account of cosmic sympathy results in a less deterministic relationship of
heaven to earth, in which individuals retain greater freedom. He accomplishes this by rooting
sympathy in the soul, rather than in the material of the pneuma, as the Stoics had done. Against
his adversaries the “astrological determinists, who see the stars as direct causal principles of
cosmic events, and even human activities and thoughts,”110 Plotinus is interested in protecting
human liberty, while also placing humans in a unified, animate universe bound together by bonds
of sympathy. Plotinus’s model of cosmic sympathy has at least four implications which would
exert considerable influence in the enlightened Christianized context of the Renaissance and early

107 Quoted in Long, “Concept of the Cosmopolitan,” 57.

108 Other than in one instance in the early treatise “If All Souls Are One,” where Plotinus argues that our tendency as
humans to sympathize with one another’s suffering and joy proves that all souls are connected, “sympathy” for him
is a metaphysical principle rather than a human or physiological phenomenon, related particularly to the
composition and activity of souls.
109 Gary M. Gurtler, “Sympathy in Plotinus,” International Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1984): 396. For
Plotinus, sensory perception does not take place mechanically through a medium, but sympathetically and “directly”
as a result of the universe being one unified body.
110 Gurtler, “Sympathy in Plotinus,” 396.
 43

modern periods: the heavens are not responsible for malicious effects on earth, human freedom is
preserved, nature works itself out immanently alongside human agency instead of transcendently,
and intuitive knowledge is superior to calculative reasoning. While individuals possess more
liberty in Plotinus’s cosmology, on the surface he is also more otherworldly and apolitical than his
Stoic predecessors.

At the unmoving centre of the Plotinian Neoplatonic universe is the One, the source of all Being,
which exists in an eternal state of self-contemplation, unmoved and unaffected by anything outside
of itself. Next to the One is the Intellect, also unaffected by what is below it, producing intellectual
forms as it contemplates the One. Next to this is the level of Universal Soul. It is the Universal
Soul that operates as the medium between the two higher spheres and the World. Unlike the One
and the Intellect, the Soul is affected and concerned by corporeal things beneath it, and it is this
concern and attention that pulls it down to bodies, where it can become trapped by them and even
manipulated by sorcery. Soul is divided into two parts, upper and lower. The upper Soul is the part
connected to thinking and to intellect. In every ensouled creature this upper soul is unique, distinct,
and separate from the souls of others. It is the lower soul, which is connected to sub-rational nature,
that is the same in everything. Sympathetic effects are produced when the lower soul is affected
and brought into vibrational contact with the universe. On this sub-rational level, all creatures both
animate and inanimate emit powers resulting simply from their existence, and are in a constantly
fluctuating relationship with all other creatures in the universe, near and far. 111 “Sympathy” is
therefore non-rational, even though it adheres to good order and to natural law.

Even the Universal Soul itself does not enter into sympathetic relationships rationally, or
“voluntarily.” “The souls go neither voluntarily nor because they have been sent,” Plotinus writes.

—or at least their volition is not such as would arise from a choice; it is more like a natural
leap, as it might be towards a natural desire for marriage, or in another case towards the

111“We should, then, grant that each particular thing has a certain non-rational power, having been formed and
shaped in the universe and somehow having a share of soul from the whole which is itself ensouled, and is
surrounded by a universe of this kind and is a part of what has soul—for there is nothing in the universe which is not
a part of it—with some parts having a greater capacity for action than others, both among those on earth and to a
greater extent those in heaven, inasmuch as these latter are endowed with a more vivid nature.” Plotinus, The
Enneads, trans. George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P Gerson, Richard King, Andrew Smith, James
Wilberding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), IV.4.37, 12-18.
 44

accomplishment of some beautiful deeds, not provoked by calculative reasoning…For the

universal bears down upon each thing, and the law does not derive its power of fulfilment
from outside, but it is given to be in things themselves that use it and bear it wherever they
go. And if and when the time comes, then what the law wants to happen happens through
the agency of the things which instantiate it, so that they bring it to fulfilment inasmuch as
they are bearing it, and it derives its strength from being located in them, as though
weighing down upon them and producing in them a desire and a pang to go where, in a
way, the law in them tells them to go. 112

Here, the balance between conscious agency and involuntary, non-rational impulse among earthly
creatures and heavenly entities is the inverse of what we find in Stoic cosmology. For Plotinus it
is earthly creatures who at least sometimes act through their own agency, while the heavenly
entities behave involuntarily through their desire and instinct. One reason for this is that calculative
reasoning is inferior to intuitive knowledge: “the need for calculative reasoning betokens a
diminution of intellect in respect of its self-sufficiency—as is the case with crafts, where
calculative reasoning is for craftsmen faced by difficulties, but when there is no problem the craft
itself takes control and does the work.”113

Traditionally scholars have disregarded Plotinus’s “cosmic sympathy” as a Stoic remnant that
actually contradicts Plotinus’s fundamental view that humans are free, self-responsible, and
isolated. “The sage is a monad, basically unrelated to any other monad,” writes the Plotinian
scholar, Paul Henry. “No solidarity exists of man with man, whether in good or in evil.” 114 Others,
though, suggest that it is by developing his own idea of cosmic sympathy as it relates to the soul
and to knowledge and perception that Plotinus “convey[s] his search for a way of expressing both
the individuality and interdependence at the heart of things.”115 Plotinus does not want individual
souls to dissolve into the Universal Soul, but he also doesn’t want individuals to be alienated from
each other or from the world. Through sympathy, Plotinus finds a way to simultaneously bring
souls into relations of sameness while allowing them to keep their difference and distinction. Souls,

112 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.3.13, 19-33.

113 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.3.18, 3-7.
114 Paul Henry, “The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought” in The Enneads 4th ed., ed. B.S. Page (New York:
Pantheon, 1969), xxxix.
115 Gurtler, “Sympathy in Plotinus,” 396.
 45

writes Plotinus, “want to be divided, even though unable to proceed to a full state of division,
preserving as they do both identity and difference, and so each remains one, and all together are
one.”116

In fact the sympathetic link Plotinus develops between terrestrial and cosmic spheres differs in a
crucial way from the one developed by the Stoic tradition. While for the Stoics, the active
principle is rational and operates in the world through Zeus’s perfect faculty of judgement, for
Plotinus the higher intelligible principles—the One, the Universal Intellect, and Soul—do not
intervene in earthly life through deliberation or planning. If it were the case that the higher
principles involved themselves in earthly affairs through calculative reasoning, we would have a
situation in which divine beings intentionally produce evil effects, a situation Plotinus wishes to
avoid. Instead, the influence of the higher strata on the lower occurs as an unconscious side
effect of their Being, through emanation, or irradiation. Plotinus explains the influence of the
higher intellectual powers on the world as explicitly unrelated to “calculative reasoning” or “acts
of choice,” but in terms of sympathy, instead:

This unified universe is actually in a condition of sympathy, and is one in the manner of a
living being, and the distant parts of it are actually close together, just as in a single
particular living being a nail, a horn, a finger or any other of the parts that are not
contiguous, but have something in between which is not subject to affection, are affected
by what is not near to them. For when things that are the same are not located
contiguously, but are set at an interval by other things in between, while being affected
sympathetically because of their sameness, what is done by what is not placed alongside
it necessarily reaches even to what is at a distance. And since it is a living being and
forms part of a unity, nothing is so distant spatially as not to be close enough to the nature
of the one living being in respect of being affected sympathetically. 117

Here we see Plotinus trying to balance the connectedness and sameness of creatures with their
innate freedom and distinction. He draws a fundamental difference between parts and wholes.
While parts are “affected” or controlled by other parts, wholes are unaffected and self-sufficient.

116 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.3.5, 13-14.

117 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.32, 4-24.
 46

Any creature with a soul is both a part of the universal body, thereby “undergo[ing] affections
from the other parts,” and has a quality of the universe’s wholeness—i.e. “the status of not being
altogether parts.” Because ensouled things possess an aspect of the universe’s wholeness and are
in a limited sense wholes themselves, individuals have a greater freedom here than they do in Stoic
cosmology. Contrasting his view with the Stoic one, Plotinus concludes that “things in the universe
do not come to be due to seminal principles.” The demiurge does not plant seeds or potentialities
in things and set them to unfold at a predetermined time. Instead, the influence of the One is looser,
more spontaneous, like that of a “producer” rather than a “prophet.” All things it creates, are “due
to expressed principles which include things which are prior to those on the level of seminal
principles.”118 These expressed principles are harmonic, reasonable, and proceed “in conformity
with numbers,” as if the entire universe was a “living being involved in [a] dance.” 119 All things
in the world sympathize with each other because they are a part of the same entity and share an
origin in the One, who produces the cosmos like an artist dancing or a musician playing his lyre,
that is, by intuitive emanation rather than by reasoning and judgment.

A consequence of the One’s ultimate freedom and inattentiveness is that it does not exactly intend
the effects it produces in the world. Even the higher beings’ “responsiveness to prayers” is not
“governed by choice, as some think,” but is instead an unconscious gift made available to anyone
who seeks it, good or bad, akin to water someone draws from a river. 120 Thus in Plotinus’s account
sympathy is as nondeliberate and involuntary for the higher beings as it is for humans. This is not
to say that because sympathy seems to be involuntary for the heavenly bodies that they do not
behave reasonably—they do. However, any effect we receive on earth seems to be through an
accidental “disseminating medium of soul,” “without any exercise of choice.” 121 Instead of
deliberating, creatures at every scale along the hierarchy of Being move “according to the
expressed principle” of the One. The consistency of the “expressed principle” throughout the
universe explains the natural “concord” between things. “Events here [below] are in a state of
sympathy with those there [above]” Plotinus writes, but he is unsure of what this sympathy consists
in. Is it a mere “concord” between above and below, or do the “configurations [of heavenly bodies]

118 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.39, 6-8.

119 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.35, 1-19.
120 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.42, 14-16.
121 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.35, 42-44.
 47

have the powers to control what is done”?122 Is the relationship between higher and lower spheres
a causal relationship, or an acausal but parallel relationship? Plotinus seems to suggest the latter.
If the Stoic metaphysic of cosmic sympathy is founded on an analogy between humans and the
universe, micro- and macrocosm, Neoplatonism develops a more complex model of relationality
between strata along the hierarchy of Being. It is not a relation of analogy, or likeness, at all, but
of accidental sameness.

But what results from creatures expressing the universal abstract principle of the One is actually
great variation and plenitude. One of the most attractive aspects of Plotinus’s philosophy for
those he inspired in the Renaissance was that he offered a system that is both theological, putting
the divine One at the heart of things and having it emanate down to all of creation, while also
allowing room for human freedom and creativity. After placing humankind at the centre of the
universe, Pico’s God famously grants it absolute freedom: “In conformity with thy free
judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix
the limits of nature for thyself.”123 Granted such absolute freedom, it is perhaps no surprise that
in a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe influenced by Neoplatonism with its “disposition to
blur the difference between matter and spirit” and to people the universe by a hierarchy of spirit
“thought to manifest all kinds of occult influences and sympathies,” 124 the pursuit of magic, as
Keith Thomas suggests, “became a holy quest”125 to understand God and nature—and to put
their powers to use.

2.2 Sympathy in the Renaissance

“Sympathy” was introduced into Renaissance Europe by the absorption of Greek texts into
Florence, especially Plotinus’s work as well as treatises in the realms of natural philosophy and
medicine.126 Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and medical discourses by Galen were especially
popular; though much of Galen’s work had long been available in Latin, during the “medical

122 Plotinus, The Enneads, IV.4.34, 10-15.

123 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller, and Douglas
Carmichael (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1965), 5.
124 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 265.
125 Thomas, Religion, 320.
126 Ann E. Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 70-71.
 48

Renaissance” even more texts were discovered and translated to huge effect. 127 While its first
appearances in humanist scholarship are fleeting, and even Plotinus’s translator Ficino does not
use it, within a few decades physicians like Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Girolamo
Fracastoro devote significant space to the concept of “sympathy.” Differences between occult
and materialist treatments of sympathy are already present at this time—Agrippa and Paracelsus
associate sympathy with natural magic, while in his treatise devoted to the concept, De
sympathia et antipathia rerum, Fracastoro claims that sympathy is a strictly natural power,
operating as part of a corpuscular physics on which his theory of contagion depends.128 But both
Paracelsus and Fracastoro share a common desire to harness the power of sympathy for human
wellbeing. In this way, Renaissance inheritors of “sympathy” wanted to popularize this “secret”
knowledge and make it available to as many people as possible to contribute positively to the
societies in which they lived. They believed that an understanding of “sympathy” or natural love,
interpreted rightly, could lead to peace, order, and health both physical and spiritual.

It is possible to distinguish between the believers in a mystical, occult, or divine sympathy, and
the sceptics who want it to have a strictly material meaning. The former tend to link philosophy
and theology, the latter to engage in philosophy as something distinct from religion. For Marsilio
Ficino, the man who translated Plotinus and some of the Hermetic corpus in the 1460s and who
published a Latin version of the Enneads in 1492, the tendency among thinkers schooled in the
Aristotelian tradition of medieval scholasticism to “separate philosophy from religion” could be
countered by a new Platonic and Hermetic tradition that offered a way to bring philosophy and
religion together in a grand unified system. 129 In the “Proem” that prefaces his 1469 corpus
Platonic Theology, Ficino writes:

Anyone who reads very carefully the works of Plato that I translated in their entirety into
Latin sometime ago will discover among many other matters two of utmost importance:
the worship of God and piety and understanding, and the divinity of souls. On these

127 See Andrew Wear, “Galen in the Renaissance” in Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in
Social and Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.)
128 See Concetta Pennuto’s recent translation. Girolamo Fracastoro, De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum, Liber I,
trans. Concetta Pennuto (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008).
129 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, Volume 1, trans. Michael J. B. Allen, (Harvard: Harvard University Press,
2001).
 49

depend our whole perception of the world, the way we lead our lives, and all our
happiness.130

For Ficino, when philosophy is properly engaged in it should compel us to orient ourselves to
God rather than steering us away, which he feared often happened. Ficino’s young friend the
eccentric young explorator, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was motivated by similar impulses.
Provoked by what they saw as irreligion in their society, Ficino and Pico—like Augustine in the
City of God—found that it was the Platonists who had come “the closest to us” because they
propounded “the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments after death, and an
immaterial realm that superintended the material world.” 131 Ficino believed there were “hidden
depths” in ancient pagan traditions that if absorbed into a Christian framework would
definitively prove the immortality and divine quality of the human soul, a matter on which
Aristotle had been circumspect, but which Ficino felt was fundamental to Christianity and to
belief in the resurrection.132

For those like Ficino who wanted to unite philosophy and religion, the human mind and the
things it produces directly participate in the original creative act. Thus contemplation and
creative expression become a way of worshipping God. “For nothing impels more toward
religion and the worship of God,” Pico writes, “than assiduous contemplation of the wonders of
God.133” But as Christopher S. Celenza argues, it is not only through contemplation that Ficino
and the physicians inspired by Neoplatonism suggest we might orient ourselves to God. We
might also perform magic operations. While Plotinus discusses ways that people might
manipulate natural forces for good or ill, he believed we drew closer to the One not through
magic but through interior processes and disciplines. Unfortunately, these devotions are so
difficult that only the highest sages could ever hope to achieve unification with the One, and only
fleetingly.

130 Quoted in Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and
the Search for Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 265-66.
131 Celenza, The Intellectual World, 251.
132 Celenza, The Intellectual World, 266.
133 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 29.
 50

But the practice of magic was something that both philosophers and ordinary people could
engage in. This was the argument made by the philosopher Iamblichus, a student of Plotinus’s
student and biographer, Porphyry. Iamblichus believed in theourgia or “theurgy,” which means
“divine work” or “working the divine.” Through “ineffable acts correctly performed…and by the
power of unutterable symbols which are intelligible only to the gods,” lowly mortals could
commune with the divine through the efficacy of the ritual itself. 134 It was magical objects,
rituals, or “tokens” that sympathetically drew the gods, not the intellect or consciousness of the
operator: “For in fact the actual tokens of themselves perform their proper function even without
our conscious thought, and the ineffable power of the gods, towards whom these things draw us
up, of itself recognizes its own images, but not by being summoned up by our intellectual
activity.”135 The idea that the ritual was the magic element corresponded to the idea, propounded
by Augustine, that the Christian sacraments functioned ex opera operato—“from the work
having been worked”—making the moral or intellectual quality of the priest who performed
them irrelevant.136

But there is something the magical practitioner can do to make his or her rituals more
efficacious. In Three Books on Life and in Platonic Theology, Ficino proposed that a human
operator could strengthen his magical abilities by observing and discovering natural sympathies.
For example, he might wear a ring that concentrates solar power to attract solar influence. In this
way, the operator “exercises choice and volition to move closer to God.” 137 Ficino was more than
a translator of Neoplatonism; he was an evangelist. According to Moyer, his hope was that his
readers would learn to manipulate and control planetary cosmic influence for their spiritual and
medical benefit.138 A line of thinkers after Ficino cultivated a fascination with performing rituals
that tapped into the natural sympathies and antipathies coursing through the universe, including
Pico, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Giambattista Della Porta, 139 and later the English occult

134 Iamblichus, De mysteriis, ed. Edouard des Places (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966), 2.11. Cited in John Dillon,
“Iamblichus’ Defence of Theurgy: Some Reflections,” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 1 (2007):
34.
135 Ibid.
136 Celenza, The Intellectual World, 272.
137 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 78.
138 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 75.
139 Della Porta’s work on sympathy and signatures shares features with Agrippa and Paracelsus but lacks a religious
tone and is more in the ‘book of secrets’ tradition inspired by Pliny’s Natrual History. Della Porta founded the
Accademia dei Secreti in Naples in 1560. See Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 89.
 51

philosopher John Dee, the cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno, natural scientist Bernardino
Telesio, the physician and mathematician Girolamo Cardano, the Wittenberg Lutheran
physicians Caspar Peucer, Philip Melanchton, and John of Jessen, the Swiss surgeon Walther
Hermann Ryff, and the Croatian-Venetian Platonist Francesco Patrizi da Cherso. 140 Other
physicians such as Albertus Schegelius, Girolamo Mercuriale, Anselm de Boot, Andreas
Vesalius, and Giovanni Francesco Olmo published work focusing on the production of
medicines, poisons and antidotes rooted in sympathetic principles.141 Once “sympathy” made its
way into the Renaissance imagination it exerted considerable influence.

But Ficino does not use the word “sympathy.” He translates it out of Plotinus and replaces it with
the Latin cognates compassio, harmonia, and influentia. This suggests that although the general
idea of cosmic sympathy was influential, “sympathy” itself didn’t stand out to Ficino as
specifically important—at least not important enough to keep the original borrowed word.
However, his friend Pico does use it once in an important passage from his introduction to his
nine hundred theses.

Writing the speech he never gave that came to be called “On the Dignity of Man” in 1487, only a
few years before Florence fell to the French armies of Charles VIII, Pico sought to secure human
happiness by joining all schools of philosophy into a grand unified system. Through the
balancing of Apollonian and Dionysian forces, and through the rigorous pursuit of dialectic, he
claimed we could “calm the turmoils of reason,” “calm the strifes and discords of opinion, which
shake the unquiet soul up and down, pull her apart, and mangle her.” 142 In particular Pico strove
to unite natural philosophy with theology by bringing Aristotelianism and Platonism into
harmony. While the tradition of natural philosophy rooted in Aristotle might calm us a little, it
could only do so “in such a way as to command us to remember that, according to Heraclitus, our
nature is born of war.” “True quiet and lasting peace” could only be found by turning to
theology, especially to Platonism and the mystical traditions of the Pythagorean, Hermetic, and

140 Telesio wrote De rerum natura…libri ix (1586) and Cardano wrote De subtilitate (1550) and De rereum varietate
(1557). See Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 90; Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 10; Tomáš Nejeschleba, “The
Theory of Sympathy and Antipathy in Wittenberg in the 16th Century” Philosophica-Aesthetica/Philosophica 8
(2006): 32.
141 See Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 90-92.
142 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 11.
 52

Zoroastrian corpuses, where all minds “in some inexpressible fashion become absolutely one” in
an act of supreme friendship that is the end of all philosophy.143

As well as writing about natural things and about metaphysics, Pico also famously “proposed
theorems about magic, too,” which ultimately got him into trouble with Pope Innocent VIII and
in the end prevented him from presenting his Oration. Pico maintained there are two kinds of
magic. One is monstrous, evil and the domain of demons. The other is “nothing but the absolute
consummation of the philosophy of nature.”144 This second kind of magic, “full of the deepest
mysteries” is synonymous with sympathy:

Having carefully investigated the harmony of the universe, which the Greeks very
expressively call συμπάθεια, and, having looked closely into the knowledge that natures
have of each other, this second magic, applying to each thing its innate charms, which are
called by magicians ίύγγες, as if it were itself the maker, discloses in public the wonders
lying hidden in the recesses of the world, in the bosom of nature, in the storerooms and
secrets of God.145

Here, Pico suggests that divine magic is equivalent to nature, and practicing this good kind of
magic is simply to examine closely “the bosom of nature.” In this view nature itself is magical
and to participate fully in it is to engage in the pursuit of scientific knowledge for the purpose of
harnessing nature’s sympathetic powers. While on the surface things are distinct and unique,
possessing their “innate charms,” all of this individuality sits atop the fundamental unified
structure underlying nature. The Greeks, Pico affirms, “carefully investigated” this structure and
“very expressively” called it συμπάθεια, “the harmony of the universe.”

The care that Pico takes with this new word συμπάθεια is interesting. By keeping it in the
original Greek and complimenting its expressiveness, Pico gives it an incantatory power. The
ancient Greeks in this passage have an almost Adamic genius to peer into the secret heart of
nature and bring forth the proper name for the harmony they have seen. Συμπάθεια is a
somewhat technical, somewhat esoteric word meant to persuade his readers with its mysterious

143 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 11-12.

144 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 26.
145 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 28.
 53

celestial strangeness and its practical complexity. But Pico’s efforts here also register an anxiety.
Magical practices were never theologically neutral. Magic had to be either demonic or divine. So
Pico must carefully distinguish between the two types. If demonic magic is supernatural, divine
magic is natural, in that the operator merely reaches out to gather some of the power streaming
through the universe as it undergoes its regular processes. Συμπάθεια is a word that expresses
something of the divine and something of nature and science. For Pico, true magic is “the utter
perfection of natural philosophy.” In this view, scientific knowledge exists in harmony with
universal sympathy.

Interestingly, Pico gives no sense of the ordinary practices of either kind of magic, offering no
picture of sorcerers in dark hovels making deals with the devil, or of scientists pulling back the
veil of nature’s mysteries. Instead, his discussion of magic immediately evolves into a discussion
of the “well ordered state.” While “all nations studious of things heavenly and divine” reject
demonic magic, they “approve and embrace” the second kind, which originates from nature’s
secret storehouse of sacred sympathies. 146 Demonic magic, Pico continues,

can be proved by no arguments nor certain founders; the second, honored as it were by
most illustrious parents, has two principal founders: Xalmosis, whom Abbaris the
Hyperborean imitated, and Zoroaster, not the one whom you perhaps think, but the son of
Oromasus. If we question Plato as to what is the magic of each of them, he will answer in
the Alcibiades that Zoroaster’s magic is nothing but that knowledge of divine things
wherein the kings of Persia educated their sons, that after the pattern of the republic of
the world they might themselves be taught to rule their own republic. 147

Just as Moses founded the nation of Israel in direct collaboration with Yahweh, so too did
Xalmosis and Zoroaster found the republic of magic in conjunction with the divine. This divine
knowledge, like the Mosaic knowledge of the law and of the creation of the world, offers people
a pattern of an ideal republic, drawing nature and human society into an alignment that would
lead to lasting peace. “Sympathy,” the harmony that structures the world, is a concept that is at
once intensely theological while also allowing Pico to relax his commitment to a strictly

146 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 27.

147 Ibid.
 54

Christian account of science and creation. Instead, the Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, Platonic, and
Hermetic mystical traditions all contribute to the great library of divine knowledge upon which
we might model our ideal state, if only we could draw all the pieces together. Pico’s synthesis
reveals his cosmopolitan impulse, as he deliberately combines traditions of mystical knowledge
from Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East. “Sympathy” was a concept that offered both a
theological and a scientific explanation for the joining together of people and things across vast,
global distances. It was therefore hospitable to Pico’s cosmopolitan view, and had the potential
to offer metaphysical support for a cosmopolitan politics.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s more sustained interest in magic demonstrated even further that
occult traditions can harmonize with the scientific discovery of natural causes, and with
medicine. In the vein of Ficino and Pico’s work, Agrippa’s 1533 Three Books Concerning Occult
Philosophy aimed to cure the skepticism of his age by providing a syncretic vision of magic
inspired by Neoplatonism in which the natural world combines with and is thoroughly saturated
by the celestial. In his view, magic was justified because its source was ultimately God and
nature, and in this way it was magic that could validate the truth of the Christian faith. In a
passage reminiscent of Pico’s, Agrippa writes:

For every day some naturall thing is drawn by art, and some divine thing is drawn by
nature, which the Egyptians seeing, called Nature a Magicianess, (i.e.) the very Magicall
power it self, in the attracting of like by like, and of sutable things by sutable. Now such
kind of attractions by the mutuall correspondency of things amongst themselves, of
superiours with inferiours, the Grecians called συμπαθιαν [sympathies].148

Like Pico, Agrippa introduces his readers to “sympathy” by retaining the original Greek
συμπαθιαν, an archaism that emphasizes its ancient pedigree and mysteriousness. As for Pico,
because Nature operates by the animistic principles of attraction and “mutuall correspondency,”
Nature is the original “Magicianess”; magical operators are therefore merely tapping into a kind
of divine power, rather than a magic moved by demons and witches. In this way, natural
operations were seen to be saturated with cosmological principles. This saturation of natural

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, or of Magick; Written by the Famous Man
148
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, bk. 1 (London: Printed by R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), 74.
 55

science with a strongly spiritual and religious sensibility, somewhat absent from the Aristotelian
tradition but present in the newly discovered Platonisms, also affected the physician known as
Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) and his followers. For
Paracelsus, Moyer writes, “the rejection of standard, classical medical authorities such as Galen
ran parallel with a desire to understand divine will via biblical revelation; conversely, the ability
to read a similar revelation in the book of nature gave a religious gravity to the study of
medicine.”149 Rejecting traditional theories of the composition of physical compounds,
Paracelsus turned to the cosmological view of the Platonists, which asserted that the upper and
lower universes are held together by bonds of sympathy. A believer in the idea of signatures,
Paracelsus argued that through careful observation even ordinary people could discover signs of
likeness that would link higher to lower things and offer clues for cures. For example, because
walnuts and brains look alike, walnuts must be good for brains. One ramification of Paracelsus’s
work is that this kind of knowledge rooted in observations of sympathies was more democratic
and not solely the possession of experts, as was the case in traditional natural philosophy. For
Paracelsus, ordinary practitioners were important sources of medical information, and he was
famous for scouring the country so as to interview village medicine women. The populism of
Paracelsianism and its insistence that medical cures were discovered through revelation when
sympathetic likeness showed itself, rather than through a process of formal education, has led
scholars such as Allen Debus to associate “many followers of Paracelsus with religious dissent
and Protestant thought in the religious Reformation.”150

However, there were materialist accounts of sympathy during this time, too. In 1546, the Italian
physician Fracastoro published a materialist account of sympathy in his two discourses De
sympathia et antipathia rereum and De contagion. According to Fracastoro, the treatise on
sympathy was written to accompany the main work on contagious disease by presenting a picture
of the physics underlying natural phenomena. Unless physicians had an understanding of the
fundamental physics underlying contagion, Fracastoro argued, they would be helpless against the
Italian-wide pandemics of plague. According to his most recent editor and translator Concetta
Pennuto, Fracastoro strongly rejected occult notions of astral influence to explain phenomena in

149 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 86-7.

150 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 87.
 56

the natural world, including disease. 151 Instead, Fracastoro’s project was to demystify natural
wonders and to understand medicine by appealing to a corpuscular physics derived from
Aristotle that could be discovered by reason rather than revelation. While sympathy and
antipathy play a role in Fracastoro’s physics, they do not behave in an animated way, or in a way
that seems saturated with divine feeling. Instead sympathy and antipathy mechanically explain
the movement of corpuscles in the air, which in turn explains how disease can spread across
distance as well as by contact. For over a century Fracastoro’s treatises were enormously
influential. Thirteen of twenty-one editions appeared before 1600, and the last was in 1671. 152
Thus from the very start of sympathy’s introduction into Western Europe through the translation
of recently discovered Greek texts, sympathy was an idea with a contested meaning and
application. This continues to be true in seventeenth-century Britain, to which we turn next.

151 See Samuel Cohn Jr., “Book Review: De sympathia et antipathia rerum, Liber I,” Medical History 53, no. 4
(October 2009): 616-18.
152 Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” 86.
 57

Chapter 3
Sympathy in Seventeenth-Century Britain
In the early modern period, “sympathy” is at once a newish concept in English discourse, and a
rediscovered ancient idea. It therefore carries an atmosphere of antique mystique, and reminds us
that easy distinctions between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ worldviews cannot be so cleanly made. A
quick EEBO search reveals that, in Britain, the word “sympathy” rapidly increases in usage over
the course of the seventeenth-century. Between 1578, when “sympathy” first enters English
discourse, until 1600, there are 344 hits in 183 records. Between 1600 to 1650 it appears 2295
times in at least 1114 records, and between 1650 to 1700, there are 6063 hits in 2407 records.

This chapter covers a broad range of discourses as it surveys seventeenth-century “sympathy” in

the British context. I touch upon medical discourse and physic, especially upon some popular but
contentious works in the Paracelsian tradition such as those by the astrologo-physician Nicholas
Culpeper and the Flemish chemist and physician Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, then upon the role
played by “sympathy” in the metaphysical systems of the Cambridge Platonists, before turning to
biblical commentaries by three prominent Scottish Calvinist divines celebrated for their
ecclesiastical and political moderation who write during the Resolutioner-Protestor controversy
of the 1650’s.

My claim in this chapter is that discussions of sympathy across a range of discourses in

seventeenth-century Britain have a relationship to the problem of authority, whether it be the
state’s, the church’s , God’s, nature’s, or the self’s own authority. One reason the relationship
between sympathy and authority exists is that “sympathy” is rarely either what Seth Lobis has
called “universal”—relating to a metaphysical idea of how the cosmos is held together—or
“human”—the supra-rational instinct that governs interpersonal relations.153 Rather than there
being two kinds of “sympathy,” one descended from an older worldview, the other more modern
and secular, in seventeenth-century Britain the concept of “sympathy” seems to span this divide;
it names perceived synchronicities between “universal” and “human” spheres in order to blend
world and mind. It is because sympathy is a force imagined to both transcend creatures and

Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New
153
Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 198.
 58

immanently affect and guide them that the concept is so totalizing for many seventeenth-century
British men and women. ‘Sympathy’ allows the thinkers I read in this chapter to combine
theological with naturalistic explanatory frameworks. It is defined both as a divine power that
organizes all things in the universe, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, and an instinctual,
impulsive, bodily sensation rooted in our human desires and tastes. Who but the individual has
authority over where his or her sympathies lie? And yet, our sympathies often don’t feel like our
choice, either.

3.1 Medicine and Physic

Seventeenth-century physic emerges from a long-standing tradition of thinking of the body as a

sympathetic system where all the parts are in felt relation to each other, and where cures are
either ‘sympathetic’ or ‘antipathetic.’ If there can be “sympathies and antipathies in insensitive
things” such as between iron and the lodestone, goes one popular line of reasoning, 154 then surely
sympathy exists between the ear and the mouth, or the heart and breast, or stomach and feet, or,
as was frequently proposed, between the womb or “matrix” and many parts of the body, such as
the liver, head, stomach, veins, and even the nose. 155 Not only is the body a sympathetic system
consisting of parts that are unconsciously, involuntarily in communication with each other;
seventeenth-century physicians often suggest that the world beyond the body is also coursing
with sympathies and antipathies. In the seventeenth-century tradition of astrological-physic,
which stems from Paracelsus and was taken up by the apothecary William Drage, 156 the

154 See Alexander Ross, Arcana microcosmi, or, The hid secrets of man’s body discovered in an anatomical duel
between Aristotle and Galen concerning the parts thereof: as also, by a discovery of the strange and marveilous
diseases, symptoms & accidents of man’s body… (London: 1652), Chap. II.
155 Of all body parts, the womb is one of the most “sympathetic” for a number of seventeenth-century physicians and
midwives. See, for example, Nicolaas Fonteyn, The womans doctor, or, An exact and distinct explanation of all such
diseases as are peculiar to that sex with choise and experimentall remedies against the same… (London: 1652); The
compleat doctoress: or, A choice treatise of all diseases insident to women. With experimentall remedies against the
same… (London: 1656); Thomas Chamberlayne, The compleat midwifes practice, in the most weighty and high
concernments of the birth of man. Containing perfect rules for midwifes and nurses, as also for women in their
conception, bearing, and nursing of children: from the experience not onely of our English, but also the most
accomplish and absolute practicers among the French, Spanish, Italian, and other nations… (London: 1656);
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s directory for midwives: or, A guide for women. The second part. Discovering, 1. The
diseases in the privities of women. 2. The diseases of the privie part. 3. The diseases of the womb… (London: 1662);
Mrs. Jane Sharp, The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifery discovered. Directing childbearing women how
to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books… (London: 1671).
156 William Drage, A physical nosonomy, or, A new and true description of the law of God (called nature) in the
body of man confuting by many and undeniable experiences of many men, the rules and methods concerning
 59

astrologer Joseph Blagrave, 157 and the populist, radical physician Nicholas Culpeper, stars or
planets might sympathize with herbs to cure diseases they themselves have caused. “Sympathy
and Antipathy,” writes Culpeper, “are the two Hinges upon which the whol Model of Physick
turns, and that Physitian which minds them not is like a Door off from the Hooks, more likely to
do a man a mischief than to secure him.”158

However, though “sympathy” was at the core of both traditional Galenic medicine and the more
revolutionary Paracelsian physic that emerged in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries—such
as Culpeper’s—different physicians defined it in different ways. In A Late Discourse…Touching
the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, for instance, the Cartesian Kenelm Digby
offered a materialistic explanation of sympathy’s powers: atoms of similar shape, texture, and
size were drawn by light toward one another in the air. According to Digby, the mysterious
weapon-salve’s efficacy is actually not mysterious at all: wrapping a weapon that caused
someone’s injury in a salve of the victim’s blood and “the Powder of Sympathy, doth naturally,
without any Magick, cure wounds without touching them.” 159

On the other hand, physicians working in the Paracelsian tradition, such as Robert Fludd,
Nicholas Culpeper, or continental physicians popular in England such as the Flemish chemist
Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, the German Simeon Particius, and the French physician Lazare
Rivière, posited that sympathy was a kind of “naturall magick” 160 (instead of a demonic or
supernatural force, as Paracelsus and his followers took pains to explain), which operated “in
terms of a cosmology which postulated that all parts of the universe were closely interconnected

sicknesses or changes in mans body, delivered by the ancient philosophers and moderns that followed them…
(London: 1664).
157 Joseph Blagrave, Blagraves astrological practice of physic discovering the true way to cure all kinds of diseases
and infirmities…being performed by such herbs and plants which grow within our own nation… (Reading: 1671).
158 Nicholas Culpeper, The English physician enlarged with three hundred, sixty, and nine medicines made of
English herbs that were not in any impression until this…Being an astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs
of this nation… (London: 1653), 88.
159 Kenelm Digby, A late discourse made in solemn assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France by
Sir Kenelm Digby, kt. &; touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy, translated by R. White, Gent.
(London: 1664), 3.
160 Robert Fludd, Doctor Fludd’s answer unto M. Foster or, The squeezing of Parson Fosters sponge, ordained by
him for he wiping away of the weapon-salve (London: Printed by J. Beale and G. Purslowe for Nathanael Butter,
1631), 135.
 60

and might sympathetically influence one another.” 161 These influences might be astrological, so
sympathy between bodies and within a single body was under the governance of the stars, or
they might be angelic, or directly from God, or from the earth. The distinction between what is
magic and what is not rested upon whether or not the sympathetic relation between two
individual objects corresponded to a larger cosmology that understood all the parts of the
universe to be governed by the same force. It is the idea of correspondence between radically
different scales—in this case, molecular and cosmic scales—that makes a phenomenon seem
charged with intelligence, sacredness, or a supra-material force. Physicians committed to such a
worldview were critical of those who were not. Jean Baptiste Van Helmont claims that
physicians working in strictly materialist, usually Aristotelian traditions, like Digby, “very
absurdly confound Sympathy…with Magnetism; and from that concludes this to be natural.”162
In doing so, materialist physicians forget that “[t]he sympathy betwixt objects removed at a
distance each from other, is done by the mediation of an Universall Spirit, which governing the
Sun, and other celestial orbs, is endued with exquisite sense.” 163 Unlike materialist accounts such
as Digby’s, which posit that sympathetic cures work through the chance collision of similar
atoms that “fly forth of their own accord,”164 as Van Helmont skeptically claims, a Reformed
physic like his own expresses the goodness and “primitive Intellect of the Creator.” 165

Although “sympathy” was a received idea in the seventeenth-century because it had been
rediscovered from ancient Greek texts, for the most part the physicians who considered it
fundamental to the art of diagnosing and curing disease were working in ‘new’ or radical
traditions; they tended to be critical of conventional medical cures and devoted to discovering
cures through direct experience and experimentation. Paracelsus, Nicholas Culpeper, and the
famous French barber surgeon Ambroise Paré fall into this category. Thus, medical discourses

161 Allen G. Debus, “Robert Fludd and the Use of Gilbert’s De Magnete in the Weapon-Salve Controversy,” Journal
of the History of Medicine 19, no. 4 (1964): 389.
162 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, A TERNARY OF PARADOXES. The Magnetick Cure of Wounds. Nativity of Tartar
in Wine. Image of God in Man. Written originally by Joh. Bapt. Van Helmont, and Translated, Illustrated, and
Ampliated BY WALTER CHARLETON, Doctor in Physick, and Physician to the late King. (London: Printed by
James Flesher for William Lee, dwelling in Fleetstreet, at the sign of the Turks, 1650), 28.
163 Van Helmont, A TERNARY OF PARADOXES, 18.
164 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, Van Helmont’s works: Containing his most Excellent PHILOSOPHY,
CHIRURGERY, PHYSICK, ANATOMY. Wherein The Philosophy of the Schools is Examined, their Errors Refuted,
and the whole Body of Physick REFORMED and RECTIFIED…(London: 1664), 616.
165 Van Helmont, A TERNARY OF PARADOXES, 14.
 61

foregrounding “sympathy,” as well as contentious and apparently old-fashioned sympathetic

cures such as the weapon-salve or mumie, exist more comfortably alongside the new
experimental method than we might expect.

In this context, where “sympathy” is so fundamental to seventeenth-century medicine and physic

across different schools of thought, it is not surprising that in one of the most important medical
discoveries of the century—Thomas Willis’s sympathetic nervous system, which he presented in
a number of Latin discourses starting in 1663—“sympathy” is such an important concept. As he
“attempted to correlate anatomical and physiological data with what was known of psychological
function,”166 Willis notes that “a certain manifest Sympathy” connects “the forces of the Passions
or Affections received from the Brain” to “the natural Instinct delivered,” for instance, “from the
Heart and Bowels.”167 The site where bodily function and psychological passion meet is,
according to Willis, “the Cerebel,” or “primary Root of the sensitive Soul.”168 It is here, where
body and mind meet—at the intersection of involuntary compulsion and consciousness—that “a
Sympathy and consent of action”169 is kept.

3.1.1 The Paracelsian Influence

Seventeenth-century thinkers working in the Paracelsian tradition are quite diverse. Some of
them, like Van Helmont, are frequently “critical of Paracelsus,” even while deriving their own
versions of natural philosophy through Paracelsianism.170 Nonetheless, those working in the
Paracelsian tradition tend to share the following commitments:

1. an appeal to experience and observation, including “popular” observations made by

common or folk medical practitioners, especially women;

166 Alfred Meyer, and Raymond Hierons, “On Thomas Willis’s Concepts of Neurophysiology (Part I),” Medical
History 9, no. 1 (1965): 1.
167 Thomas Willis, Five Treatises, Viz. 1. Of Urines. 2. Of the Accension of the Blood. 3. Of Musculary Motion. 4.
The Anatomy of the Brain. 5. The Description and use of the Nerves (London: Printed for T. Dring, C. Harper, J.
Leigh, and S. Martin, 1681), 109.
168 Willis, Five Treatises, 114.
169 Willis, Five Treatises, 142.
170 Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141. Van
Helmont rejects the astrological influence Paracelsus proposes.
 62

2. reliance on biblical authority over Scholastic authority; a sense that working in physic
is also a theological pursuit;

3. an understanding that when one body influences another it is through natural rather
than supernatural or demonic means;

4. the idea that on a universal scale harmony among contraries shows the existence and
goodness of God; the idea that God is in nature, and not behind it; and,

5. the idea that the universe is one united body and human beings are an epitome of it.

“Before we come to prognostick,” writes Nicholas Culpeper, “we must know that there is a
Sympathy between Celestiall and Terrestiall bodyes, which will easily appear, if we consider that
the whole creation is one entire and united body, composed by the power of an All-wise God, of
a composition of discords.”171 For Culpeper, following Paracelsus, it is the harmonious
“Composition of contrary Elements” that proves the wisdom and power of God. 172 In this view,
the contrariety over which God commands order is as necessary as his providence. The greater
the discord, the greater God’s power and goodness as he enforces harmony.

There is thus a tension in the thought of those physicians working in the Paracelsian tradition
between the freedom of creatures to exert anarchic power over themselves and others, and the
involuntariness with which they are ordered into a divine community where relations follow
God’s plan. On the one hand, affirms an English abstraction of Paracelsus’s work, “every thing
naturally is endued with a power of affecting another thing with its own qualities.” 173 On the
other, a “genericall community”174 arising from the “the appulses of the generall spirit of the

171 Nicholas Culpeper, Semeiotica uranica, or, An astrological judgment of diseases from the decumbiture of the sick
(1) from Aven Ezra by the way of introduction, (2) from Noel Duret by way of direction…: to which is added, The
signs of life or death by the body of the sick party according to the judgement of Hippocrates…(London: 1651), 29.
172 Nicholas Culpeper, The English physician enlarged with three hundred, sixty, and nine medicines made of
English herbs that were not in any impression until this…Being an astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs
of this nation… (London: 1653), 3.
173 Paracelsus, Medicina diastatica, or, Sympatheticall mumie containing many mysterious and hidden secrets in
philosophy and physic, by the construction, extraction, transplantation and application of microcosmical & spiritual
mumie: teaching the magneticall cure of diseases at distance, &c/ abstracted from the works of Dr. Theophr.
Paracelsus by the labour and industry of Andrea Tentzelius…; translated out of the Latine by Ferdinando
Parkhurst… (London: 1653), 18.
174 Paracelsus, Medicina diastatica, 26.
 63

whole World”175 underlies the private desires of creatures as they are drawn into certain
relationships and not others. It is the general community that “be the adequate cause of
sympathy.”176

3.1.2 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont and Robert Fludd

The complex interpenetration of, on the one hand, the divine medium thought to guide the
behaviour of both animate and inanimate creatures, and, on the other, autonomous creaturely
desire and will, is explored in particular by Jean Baptiste Van Helmont and Robert Fludd. Both
of these physicians working in the Paracelsian tradition ground their discussions of the ‘action-
at-a-distance’ sympathetic cure, the weapon-salve, in an original metaphysic that emphasizes
both the naturalness of the cure and its harmoniousness with a Reformed Christianity that sees
God acting directly in the world. Each did so in part to defend himself against charges of “Magi-
Calvini[sm]” launched especially by the Jesuit, Jean Roberti, against practitioners of the weapon-
salve, charges which were taken up by the English parson, William Foster, who wrote an attack
on Fludd in 1631.177

Writing of the mineral and vegetable kingdoms, Van Helmont notes,

There is almost nothing made in nature, without a proper motion: and nothing is moved
voluntarily or by itself, but by reason of the property put into it by the Creator, which
property, the Antients name a proper love, and for this cause they will have self-love to
be the first born daughter of nature, given unto it, and bred in it for its own preservation:
And when this is present, there is of necessity, also a Sympathy, and Antipathy, in respect
of the diversity of objects.178

Though Van Helmont might be called a vitalist in that he believes “sympathy, antipathy, choice,
yea and some sense or perceiving may be attributed to things without life,” he is careful to note
that this “sense,” when compared to human sense and consciousness, is to be understood as “an

175 Paracelsus, Medicina diastatica, 20.

176 Paracelsus, Medicina diastatica, 26.
177 Debus, “Robert Fludd,” 395. After attacking Roberti in a pamphlet published in 1621, Van Helmont was then
investigated by the Spanish inquisition for thirteen years and eventually sent for a short time to a Franciscan prison
in Brussels in 1634.
178 Van Helmont, Van Helmont’s works, 1114.
 64

Analogy.”179 “[I]n a proper sense,” he maintains, inanimate creatures are “deprived of choyce,
intention of acting, and foreknowledge of ends.”180 As a result, and contra Paracelsus, Van
Helmont sees no contraries in nature, in that objects, though they may seem to be in discord, do
not act “by contrariety, or a desire of destroying each other, but for the ends foreknown to God
alone, who is love and peace.”181 Self-love, and the “necessity” of sympathy and antipathy that
arise from it, does not equal other-hatred. Self-love is a “proper motion” implanted by God, and
when objects self-organize by this principle they are following God’s will rather than actively
causing discord.

This is true, at least, for minerals and plants. “Contraries,” however, “are in man, and Beasts, by
a power of animosity or angry hear [sic], which is banished as well from the Minerall, as
vegetable Kingdom.”182 The same freedom or “power” that makes it possible for humans and
beasts to sin enables them to be true actors in the world according to their own desires, and not
only “in the direction of the Creator, or Ordination of ends.”183 This power is an internal,
spiritual or mental one, related to the will. This becomes most clear when Van Helmont
discusses the greater or lesser power of physicians who use sympathetic cures. Unlike many
Paracelsians, who claim that the power of sympathetic cures issues from the stars, Van Helmont
remarks that “Sympathetical Powder” is most potent if applied by a person with the right
“Idea’s” rooted in “desire of good will”:

Therefore the Idea’s of him that applyeth the Sympathetical Remedy, are con-nexed in
the Mean, and are made the directresses of the Balsam unto the Object of his desire: Even
as we have above also minded in Injections, concerning Idea’s of the desire. Mohyns
supposeth that the Power of Sympathy doth issue from the Stars, because it is an imitator
of Influences: But I do draw it out of a far more near Subject: To wit, out of directing
Idea’s, begotten by ther Mother Charity, or a desire of good will: For from hence doth
that Sympathetical Powder operate more successfully, being applied by the hand of one,
than of another: Therefore I have always observed the best process, where the Remedy is

179 Van Helmont, Van Helmont’s works, 30.

180 Ibid.
181 Ibid.
182 Ibid.
183 Ibid.
 65

instituted with an amorous desire, and care of Charity: but that it doth succeed with small
success, if the Operator be a careless, or drunken Person: And therefore I have
thenceforth, made more esteem of the Stars of the Mind, in Sympathetical Remedies, than
of the Stars of Heaven.184

Despite the repeated mention of Christian “Charity,” it is easy to see why Van Helmont’s
enemies might have accused him of promoting magic, given his emphasis on the rather sorcerous
mental and spiritual powers of the practitioner. There is a fascinating mingling of “the Mean”
with the free “Idea’s” of a right-minded, charitable physician, upon the matter of the
“Sympathetical Powder.” But why is it “sympathy” powder in particular that is a hospitable site
for the confluence of the physician’s autonomous powers and God’s?

We can look for an answer in Robert Fludd. According to him, God operates immediately in the
world, rather than through a medium. Also, “Gods Actions in his creatures” “operateth in this
world, either sympathetically, that is, by a concupiscible attraction, or antipathetically, that is, by
an odible expulsion.”185 For Fludd, “Sympathy” is the process or, as Van Helmont would say, the
“proper motion,” by which God acts. Fludd notes that this view is in direct contrast to Aristotle,
“a seducer and deceiver of the world,”186 who advances the doctrine that created beings like the
sun, stars, winds, elements, plants and animals move and “act per se, essentially”187 —that is,
according to their natures. For Fludd, this creates a problem of authority. When it comes to how
and why, say, lightning strikes, the Aristotelian system “arrogat[es] ab[…]olute authority unto
the Creature.”188 Lightning is lightning: its cause is natural. Instead, Fludd says, “the lightnings
and thunders, yea, and all other meteors, are the immediate works of Gods hand”; God “acteth all
in all.”189

He does so by “divine influences…which spring from one capital, catholic, and eternall
emanation, who infuseth immediately his virtuous beams, as well of sympathy as antipathy.” 190

184 Van Helmont, Van Helmont’s works, 616.

185 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 36.
186 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 106.
187 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 117.
188 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 21.
189 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosphy, 122-123.
190 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 226.
 66

This “sympatheticall and antipatheticall irradiation” is all-encompassing, governing relations

across “the animal and the minerall, as between the animal and animal, or mineral and
mineral.”191 It is the total dominion of sympathy’s powers, sympathy’s ability to forge relations
between animal and mineral domains, that gives the weapon-salve its efficacy. The mineral
spirits, Fludd writes, “consent in harmony with the spirits of the bleeding man…[and] rejoyc[e]
in a kind of revenge which was taken on the weapon.”192

However, when applied to human beings or animals—that is, to creatures with their own wills—
the idea that all events in the world are God’s immediate acts leads to some anxious questions.
One of the main ones is, of course, the question of evil. For Fludd, the fact that God willingly
produces evil and discord through the sins of humanity is the greatest mystery, which will
eventually be solved at the end of time, when “he shall expel all contrariety and discord out of
this world, by making sympatheticall union amongst all the things.”193 The other problem is that
we feel we do have some agency, and that our thoughts, wills, and desires are not entirely
buffeted around by influences, whether divine or natural.

For Fludd, this perception both is and is not delusional. On the one hand, he carves out a space
for the freedom of human consciousness by noting that humans are made in the image of God.
Because of this, there is an analogy that can be drawn between God’s voluntariness and ours:

For as there are noted to be in generall, two several active Virtues in man’s spirit;
whereof the one is voluntary, which is the Prince over the other, and commandeth and
moveth the inferior actions, even as the Divine Angell Mitatron doth in the Primum
mobile of the great world, which is referred unto the Volunty, and moveth by it the
celestiall orbs, and Elementary world: so in the Microcosmicall Fabrick, the first mover is
that Divine mentall beam which is the head of man’s soul; and the other kind [the
subconscious vital action] is involuntary, because it is commanded and ruleth after the
will of the intellectuall or rationall beam, no otherwise then all the lower Orbs are
constrained to move, after the will of the mover in the Primum mobile; So the vitall
action in man, is one of those branches, which is involuntary, and no otherwise subject

191 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 229.

192 Ibid.
193 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 243.
 67

unto the Volunty of the mental beam, then the starry heaven; (which is the seat of life,
forasmuch as the Sun which is the heat of the world, hath his residence there) is
commanded by the Emperyall Spirit [Mitatron].194

Rather than positing an immaterial mind that rules over a material body, Fludd notes that there
are two “active Virtues in man’s spirit.” These are the “vitall action,” which might be defined as
bare, biological life, impulse, instinct, involuntary bodily movement or “the seat of life,” and
“the will of the intellectuall or rationall beam.” Because a human is a microcosm of the universe,
there is a portion that is free, analogous to divine intelligence.

However, even as our intelligence rules over our “vitall action,” the vital action might be
overtaken at any moment by the overarching will of God. In fact, this is where Fludd suggests
God lives in human beings to guide their actions: not in their centres of consciousness, but in the
vitality that lies beneath it. This is also the domain of sympathy. In a complex reversal of
influence, the unconscious, vital part of people, the part that is ruled over by their reason, is also
the avenue by which “this mental beam receiveth the behests or influxions, of benignity or
severity from above.”195 On the one hand our reason rules our vital nature. On the other,

we find it manifested, as well by experience, as by the observation of the learnedest in

Physick and Philosophy; that the vitall action, which is over-ruled according unto the
mind of the superior Volunty, either is opened or enlarged by the dilative property of the
first movers will, and thereby openeth the cabinet of the heart, to produce in the vitall
spirit those good passions, which Sympathize with life and light, namely gladness, hope,
confidence, love, miserecord, and affability; or is contracted, and thereby gathereth
together also the spirits in the heart, whereby is engendered in the vitall spirit such bad
privative passions, as do antipathise with those good ones…196

There is therefore a tension that Fludd does not fully explicate between our own individual
rational wills and the rational will of God over our deepest passions and sympathies. On the one
hand we have authority over our vital natures, by which Fludd seems to mean both our biological

194 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 198.

195 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 199.
196 Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 198.
 68

lives and our dispositions, and, on the other hand, not at all. “Sympathy,” which is both an
involuntary compulsion and a feeling over which we have ultimate authority—at least, we have
the authority to identify it within ourselves—is a concept that expresses this problem about
whether or not we have power over our intimate desires.

3.2 Natural Philosophy

“[T]hey say Reason makes a Man differ from a Beast,” wrote Nicholas Culpeper, but “if that be
true, pray what are they that instead of Reason, for their Judgment, quote old Authors?” 197
Culpeper shared with many across the century—for instance, with the Cartesians and with the
Newtonians who would dominate British science by the century’s end 198—a devotion to reason,
experience, and experiment, instead of to the substantial forms, Platonic or Aristotelian, which
were taught in the universities. This devotion was as religious as it was scientific. In Newton’s
words, “there is no way (wth out revelation) to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by the frame
of nature.”199 As Sarah Hutton notes, the general context, post-Descartes, of seventeenth-century
British thought was marked by skepticism about received ideas and academic authority, and thus
“[r]evolutionary proposals for new beginnings” were taking place across all disciplines. 200

And yet, though the mid-century mechanical philosophy inspired by Descartes was enormously
influential, for many its spiritual and moral foundations were insufficient. Robert Boyle—that
“Christian virtuoso uniting scientific enquiry and religious devotion” 201—as well as Henry More,
Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Conway, were inspired by Cartesian physics and mechanics
while feeling that the new philosophy failed to ground its claims “in a satisfactory

197 Nicholas Culpeper, The English physician enlarged with three hundred, sixty, and nine medicines made of
English herbs that were not in any impression until this…Being an astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs
of this nation… (London: 1653), 3.
198 Descartes’s rejection of final causes was an insurmountable problem for most English thinkers who were
nonetheless shaped by Cartesianism. Newton’s late-century mathematical principles, by contrast, suggested that “the
existence and attributes of God might be inferred through systematic observation of the natural world.” Newton’s
orderly mathematical laws “had irresistible theistic implications.” See Philip Connell, “Newtonian Physico-
Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72, no.
1 (2009): 3; 1.
199 Isaac Newton, “Draft chapters of a treatise on the origin of religion and its corruption,” in The Newton Project,
http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00077.
200 Hutton, Anne Conway, 79. See also: Sarah Hutton, “Cartesianism in Britain,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Descartes and Cartesianism, ed. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019).
201 Philip Connell, “Newtonian Physico-Theology,” 16.
 69

metaphysics.”202 Part of Cartesianism’s appeal was that it “offered a unified physics deduced
from a few basic principles, governed by a few simple laws, consistent with the observable
phenomena of nature.”203 But there were many objections to Cartesianism, too, including
“Descartes’s failure to explain the interaction of soul (mind) and body, his making the pineal
gland the seat of the soul, his mechanistic conception of animals and other life forms,” and—
more than anything—his “repudiation of final causes,” which removed the need for a divine
intelligence residing behind nature’s wonders.204 The feeling that the mechanical philosophy
could not account for all phenomena, and the fear that it could lead inadvertently to atheism,
Christia Mercer suggests, “encouraged many in the second half of the century to rethink the vital
powers in nature.”205 This was particularly true for those working in the life or chemical
sciences. Known as “iatrochemistry,” this discipline combined the study of medicine with
chemistry to describe dynamic life processes of growth, change, and transformation. 206 Though it
incorporated aspects of the new mechanical philosophy, it did not displace “vitalist traditions,” in
which “causal agency continued to be explained in terms of the action of spirits, emanations or
the inherent properties of bodies and their constituent parts.” 207

One natural philosopher famous for rethinking the vital powers in nature was the physician and
physicist William Gilbert, whose De Magnete appeared at the start of the century, in 1600, and is
widely considered “a seminal text in the history of the experimental method.” 208 Though Gilbert
denied that “sympathy” or “fellow-feeling” was the cause of magnetism—“for no passion can
rightly be said to be an efficient cause”209—he nonetheless maintained that the earth, as well as
all “the bodies of the globes” were ensouled, and that sympathy had a cosmic role to play in the
universe:

202 Christia Mercer, “Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy: Stoicism, Platonism, Leibniz, and Conway,” in
Sympathy: A History, edited by Eric Schliesser, 107-138 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 114.
203 Hutton, “Cartesianism in Britain,” 497.
204 Ibid.
205 Christia Mercer, “Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy, 114.
206 Hutton, Anne Conway, 117.
207 Ibid.
208 John Henry, “Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert’s Experimental
Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 1 (2001): 99.
209 William Gilbert, On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and On the great magnet the earth; a new Physiology,
demonstrated by many arguments & experiments (London: Chiswick Press, 1900), 64.
 70

Therefore the bodies of the globes, as important parts of the universe, in order that they
might be independent and that they might continue in that condition, had a need for souls
to be united with them, without which there can be neither life, nor primary activity, nor
motion, nor coalition, nor controlling power, nor harmony, nor endeavor, nor sympathy;
and without which there would be no generation of anything, no alternations of the
seasons, no propagation; but all things would be carried this way and that, and the whole
universe would fall into wretchedest Chaos, the earth in short would be vacant, dead,
useless.210

Going further, Gilbert claims that “the formate life or living form of the globes” 211 is more
perfect and free of error than human life, because it is unhampered by faulty sensory organs and
faulty reason, which lead, over and over again, to misperceptions. “[W]ithout perception, without
error, without injury from ills and diseases,” the life of the earth, sun, and other planets is “fixed,
constant, directive, executive, governing, consentient; by which the generation and death of all
things are carried upon [their] surface.”212 He claims that magnetism is a kind of life or “vigour”
that arises from the earth:

there is a magnetick nature peculiar to the earth and implanted in all its truer parts in a
primary and astonishing manner; this is neither derived nor produced from the whole
heaven by sympathy or influence or more occult qualities, nor from any particular star;
for there is in the earth a magnetick vigour of its own, just as in the sun and moon there
are forms of their own, and a small portion of the moon settles itself in moon-manner
toward its termini and form.213

The lodestone shares a “unique form” with the earth—an earthy kind of life.214 Despite his
animism, though, Gilbert was clearly wary of relying on the explanatory powers of “sympathy or
influence or more occult qualities.” The combination of animism with a nervousness regarding

210 William Gilbert, On the Magnet, 209-210.

211 William Gilbert, On the Magnet, 210.
212 Ibid.
213 William Gilbert, On the Magnet, 65.
214 Ibid.
 71

the occult contributes to the observation that “it is not so easy to separate Gilbert’s research into
medieval and modern components.”215

In general, though, seventeenth-century natural philosophy was dominated by mechanical

science. Consciously continuing the legacy of Francis Bacon—who “advanced his system of
learning partly in response” to philosophers like Gilbert who “maintained sympathy as an
organizing principle”216—English “Mechanical” or “New”217 scientists like Robert Boyle “aimed
to establish a more rigorous ontological division between the animate and the inanimate
realms”218 than did either their scholastic predecessors or their more vitalist contemporaries, who
were “devotees,” as Bacon had skeptically remarked, not quite fairly, “of natural magic, who
deal with everything by sympathies and antipathies.” 219 Boyle, too, was concerned with the
origin of cosmic order. But rather than having it arise from ensouled globes, as Gilbert
suggested, he maintained that cosmic order stemmed from God’s immaterial intelligence
presiding behind all material things. One of Boyle’s broad aims was to use the new mechanical
philosophy to refute what was perceived to be the atheism of Epicurean atomism, as well as the
atheistic implications of Descartes’s rejection of final causes, 220 by “stress[ing] the importance of
the providential ordering of nature and the consequent lawful operation of the universe as a proof
of divine superintendence and of the power of the divine will.”221 It was essential for Boyle,
then, to firmly distinguish between material and immaterial realities.

Given this context, it is no surprise that, like Bacon, Boyle was suspicious of “sympathy,”
categorizing it as a substantial form of the peripatetic schools that obscured more than it
revealed:

215 Angus Fletcher, “Living Magnets, Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grace in Donne’s Religious
Verse,” ELH 72, no. 1 (2005): 2.
216 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 10.
217 These are Boyle’s terms, in addition to “Experimental,” “Virtuosi,” “Corpuscularian,” “Real,” and “Cartesian,”
which he treats as synonyms. See Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso: Shewing, That by being addicted to
Experimental Philosophy, a Man is rather assisted, than in disposed, to be a Good Christian (London: 1690), 4-5.
218 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 13.
219 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 109.
220 Hutton, “Cartesianism in Britain,” 504.
221 Scott Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context 20, no.
3 (2007): 451.
 72

And tho’ a vulgar Philosopher, that allows himself to refer the Obscurest things in Nature
to Substantial Forms, Real Qualities, Sympathy, Antipathy, and some few other Terms,
which, to be employ’d by him, Need not, and perhaps for their darkness Cannot, be
clearly Understood; and by which he pretends to explain all things in Nature; and may
indeed explicate one thing as well as another: Tho’ (I say) such a Titular Philosopher may
presume, that he understands every thing; and may be easily tempted to think, that he
must not hope, nor desire to learn from less able Men than his first Teachers; and that,
That cannot be true, or be done, which agrees not with his Philosophy; yet a Sober and
Experience’d Naturalist, that knows what Difficulties remain, yet unsurmounted, in the
presumedly clear Conception and Explications even of things Corporeal, will not, by a
lazy or arrogant presumption, that his knowledge about things Supernatural is already
sufficient, be induc’d to Reject, or to Neglect, any Information that may encrease it. 222

Sounding like a good Baconian, Boyle maintains that an “Experience’d” scientist will humble
herself before the material realities of nature, instead of arrogantly committing herself to the
abstract ideas she has inherited from her school days. In his view the “Experimental Philosophy
has a great advantage of the Scholastick” because rather than settling on “certain Substantial
Forms” like sympathy, it is free to embark on “deeper searches into the Structure of Things,”223
which is a “course of Studies [that] conduceth much to settle in Mind a firm Belief of the
Existence, and divers of the chief Attributes, of God.”224 Unlike scholasticism, which blocks
students from direct experience of nature with a wall of received ideas centuries high,
experimental science leads directly to natural religion, “which it self is pre-required to Reveal’d
Religion.”225 Natural religion’s first insight is to see the “Vastness, Beauty, and Regular
Motions” in the universe and to attribute them to a creator who is intelligent and good. 226 Its
second is to surmise “the Immortality of the Rational Soul,” which can only be done if we “form
true and distinct Notions of the body, and the Mind.”227 While the corporeal realm is perishable
and unfree, the rational domain—which human beings are graced with the ability to participate

222 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 104.

223 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 17-18.
224 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 13.
225 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 14.
226 Ibid.
227 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 21.
 73

in—can “exercise Free-will…[and] make Reflections on its own Acts, both of Intellect and
Will.”228 Unlike matter and bodies, human intellect moves voluntarily because it partakes in the
same immaterial reality as God’s intelligence.

If this immaterial realm were not so carefully separated from the material one, the mechanical
philosophy might logically lead to the conclusion that no part of experience or of nature is free.
Indeed, John Rogers has noted the logical similarity between a mechanical philosophy that
“confer[s] the ultimate authority for motion and change on a single, absolutist source of material
organization” and Calvinist predestination.229 Boyle—a devout Anglican—avoids having to
make this conclusion by separating immaterial intelligence from mechanical matter. If, as I have
claimed, sympathy carries a sense of physical involuntariness that can unconsciously work its
way into the realm of consciousness to affect not only our feelings and desires, but also our wills,
Boyle would, of course, have to reject it. And he does. Not only does he reject “sympathy,” the
substantial form which does not actually explain the phenomena it claims to, he rejects the
human feeling of sympathy, too. At least, he suggests, “sympathy” is a degraded, unvirtuous
feeling. In his Christian romance, The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, as Theodora and
Irene discuss the nature of their friendship while Irene tries to talk Theodora out of sacrificing
herself, Theodora remarks, “I hope our Friendship is not, and am sure it ought not to be, barely a
mutual fondness of two young Virgins; but that virtue had a greater share in making and
continuing it, than Sympathy and Inclination had.”230 As their friendship is “grounded chiefly
upon Vertue, [and] should be govern’d and regulated by it,” Theodora claims, Irene must use her
Christianized reason to let Theodora walk into martyrdom, instead of trying to stop her because
of the sympathetic bonds that pull on her. 231

3.3 The Cambridge Platonists

As we have seen, Boyle claimed that by allowing people to freely attend to the complex realities
of nature, the new mechanical philosophy would offer physical evidence to rational observers

228 Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso, 22.

229 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, & Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 7.
230 Robert Boyle, The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus (London: Printed by H. Clark, for John Taylor at the
Ship, and Christopher Skegnes at the Golden Ball, in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1687), 90.
231 Boyle, The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus, 91.
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that the universe was lawfully ordered by a divine intelligence, or watchmaker. Though they
were as concerned with combatting atheism as Boyle, two of the most prominent Cambridge
Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, however, blamed the mechanical philosophy for its
rise. In particular they worried that the mechanist worldview drained the universe of soul. If that
were the case, More writes, “[f]or assuredly that Saying was nothing so true in Politicks, No
Bishop, no King; as this is in Metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.”232 To treat the “errors” created
by the mechanical philosophy, writes Scott Mandelbrote, More and Cudworth “appeal[ed] to the
wondrous activity found in nature, of which regularity was only ever a part, and which required
the constant, creative involvement of a hierarchy of spiritual agents.” 233

These different responses to the problem of how God acts in the world came to a head in the
1660’s and 1670’s in a debate between More and Boyle. In his 1662 Antidote to Atheism, More
used some of Boyle’s experiments to support his hypothesis of the Spirit of Nature. 234 Boyle
didn’t respond until An Hydrostatical Discourse occasioned by the Objections of the Learned Dr.
Henry More, published in 1672, in which he argued that actually his results must be explained by
“mechanical affections of matter, without recourse to fuga vacui, or the anima mundi, or other
unphysical principle[s].”235 A polite exchange of letters ensued. Boyle maintained that the
phenomena he described in his experiments must be explained mechanically. More, “motivated
by concerns about the atheistical implications of the mechanical philosophy,” suggested that
Boyle’s findings supported the actions of an immaterial world spirit. 236 “The phenomena of the
world,” he told Boyle, “cannot be solved merely mechanically, but…there is the necessity of the
assistance of a substance distinct from matter, that is, of a sprit, or being incorporeal.”237

But the claim that spirit pervades the universe was not without problems. First, if matter and
spirit are ontologically distinct—as More and Cudworth maintained—and if, therefore, spirit
cannot impact or touch matter in a physical way, how is it that spirit does affect matter in order
to move, direct, or inspire it? For More, this broad question encompassed two others: how do

232 Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheisme, Or An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man,
Whether there be not a God (London: Printed by Roger Daniel, at Lovell’s Inne In Pater-noster-Row, 1653), 164.
233 Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology,” 452.
234 Hutton, Anne Conway, 134.
235 Quoted in ibid.
236 Hutton, Anne Conway, 135.
237 Conway Letters, 520. Cited in Hutton, 135.
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things in nature impact one another without touching, as happens with magnetism, sympathetic
cures, witchcraft, or in the simultaneously vibrating strings of two lutes, and, more nearly, how
are the soul and body connected? Second, the Cambridge Platonists maintained an anti-
voluntarist, intellectualist theological position that emphasized God’s goodness, justness, and
rationality. Despite the protestations of theists like Boyle, Cudworth claimed that the mechanist
worldview is founded on the idea of “Fate”—whether atheist or theist—and would eventually
lead people to conclude that all phenomena is “Necessarily Moved” with no room for free will.238
He argued that a culturally sustainable faith in God would have to hold that “Necessity is not
Intrinsecall to the Nature of every thing: But that men have such a Liberty, or Power over their
own Actions, as may render them Accountable for the same.”239 There could be no just system of
rewards and punishments in an afterlife if humans were not responsible for their own actions.
Therefore, if spirit did pervade the universe, it would still need to leave room for human agency.
What kind of all-pervasive world soul allows for the possibility of human freedom to think and
to act, therefore preserving the justice of God? The answer: something akin to a world vegetable
soul, which operates by unconscious sympathies. “Sympathy” suggests life and feeling, but also
a certain involuntariness because it operates on an unconscious register. It allowed More and
Cudworth to claim that while the universe was ensouled with divine spirit, God was not
consciously manipulating private human minds.

More’s ‘Spirit of Nature,’ or ‘Hylarchic Principle,’ and Cudworth’s ‘Plastic Nature’ are low,
humming vitalities that link all things in a sub-rational web of feeling without controlling the
higher faculties of conscious human wills. More defines his “Spirit of Nature” as a “substance
incorporeal, but without Sense and Animadversion, pervading the whole Matter of the Universe,
and exercising a plastical power therein.”240 Choosing his verbs carefully to suggest that the
world spirit operates through a kind of sorcerous inspiration rather than through blunt physics,
More says it is responsible for “raising” and “directing” matter and motion, even as it “cannot be

238 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; Wherein, All the Reason and
Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; And Its Impossibility Demonstrated (London: Printed for Richard Royston,
Bookseller to His most Sacred Majesty, 1678), A3.
239 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, A4.
240 Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, So Farre Forth as it is demonstrable from the knowledge of nature and
the light of reason (London: Printed by I. Flesher, for William Morden Bookseller in Cambridge, 1659), 450.
 76

resolved into meer Mechanical powers.”241 Likewise, Cudworth’s “Plastick Nature” is “devoid
of express Knowledge and Understanding, as subordinate to the Deity.”242 “[W]ithout such a
Nature” as this unconscious but sympathetic medium, “God must be supposed to Doe all things
in the world Immediately, and to Form every Gnat and Fly, as it were with his own hands; which
seemeth not so Becoming of him, and would render his Providence, to Humane Apprehensions,
Laborious and Distractious.”243 A lower faculty of soul than divine rational intelligence, this
sympathetic plastic nature is something like God’s unconscious, “acting neither by Knowledge
nor by Animal Fancy, neither Electively…[but] Fatally, Magically and Sympathetically.”244
“Fate, and the Laws or Commands of the Deity, concerning the Mundane Oeconomy,” by which
Cudworth means the operations of nature, “ought not to be looked upon, neither as Verbal things,
nor as mere Will and Cogitation in the Mind of God; but as an Energetical and Effectual
Principle, constituted by the Deity, for the bringing of things decreed to pass.” 245

Thus, though fate cannot justly determine human moral or historical affairs, it can run the
involuntary physical processes upon which the dramas of the human world take place. This
involuntary, inter-connected, sub-rational realm, the one that acts “Sympathetically,” is also, for
Cudworth, the domain of magic:

Now that which acts not by any Knowledge or Fancy, Will or Appetite of its own, but
only Fatally according to Laws and Impresses made upon it (but differently in different
Cases) may be said also to act Magically and Sympathetically. The true Magick is the
Friendship and Discord that is in the Vniverse: and again Magick is said to be founded In
the Sympathy and Variety of diverse Powers conspiring together into one Animal. Of
which Passages, though the Principal meaning seem to be this, that the ground of Magical
Fascination, is one Vital Vnitive Principle in the Universe; yet they imply also, that there
is a certain Vital Energy, not in the way of Knowledge and Fancy, Will and Animal
Appetite, but Fatally Sympathetical and Magical. As indeed that Mutual Sympathy which

241 Ibid.
242 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, A8.
243 Ibid.
244 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 161.
245 Ibid.
 77

we have constant Experience of, betwixt our Soul and our Body, (being not a Material
and Mechanical, but Vital thing), may be called also Magical.246

By emphasizing the magical quality of sympathetic nature, Cudworth paints a picture of a living,
mysterious, wonderous, ensouled universe that can elicit our sense of awe, and therefore save us
from atheism, but which leaves us free to direct our own moral lives, contrary to Calvinist
soteriological necessity. Because the universe was permeated with immaterial spirit, it was
meaningful, harmonious, and unified—even if it was all of these things unconsciously. By
asserting that the universe is a magical entity enlivened with spirit Cudworth is denying what he
calls the “Democritick Fate” of “Senesless Matter, Necessarily Moved”—a worldview
popularized by Lucretius. But Cudworth is not resisting everything about the new mechanical
philosophy. The idea that nature unconsciously follows laws “constituted by the Deity,” and that
things in nature are drawn into orderly alignment not through the “Knowledge and Fancy” of
parts but “Sympathetically,” implies that there is a distinction to be drawn between “true
Magick” and the occult, which both More and Cudworth would claim to reject.

Though ‘Plastick Nature’ and ‘The Spirit of the World’ may have helped Cudworth and More to
solve the moral problem of an omnipresent God’s over-involvement in worldly affairs—by
making his involvement more ‘sympathetic’ than conscious—it did not address how,
specifically, spirit and matter interact. In order to do this, More invents the concept “vital
congruity,” and Cudworth “vital sympathy” to demonstrate how spirit acts upon matter in order
to move it, but without actually touching it or filling it in a physical way. Instead, spirit and
matter meet in a sympathetic medium that has prepared each to receive the other. Though “it is
plain therefore, that this Union of the Soul with Matter does not arise from any such gross
Mechanical way,” claims More,

as when two Bodies stick one in another by reason of any toughness and viscosity, or
straight commissure of parts; but from a congruity of another nature, which I know not
better how to term then Vital: which Vital Congruity is chiefly in the Soul it self, it being
the noblest Principle of Life; but is also in the Matter, and is there nothing but such
modification thereof as fits the Plastick part of the Soul, and tempts out that Faculty into.

246 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 162.

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Not that there is any Life in the Matter with which this in the Soul should sympathize and
unite; but it is termed Vital because it makes the Matter a congruous Subject for the Soul
to reside in, and exercise the functions of life. For that which has no life it self, may tie to
it that which has. As some men are said to be tied by the teeth, or tied by the ear, when
they are detained by the pleasure they are struck with from good Musick or delicious
Viands.247

What makes this passage so complex and unsure is that at every turn it resists its own
foundational claim that matter and spirit are distinct. More claims that matter and soul share a
parallelism that is in some sense alive, though it is only the soul and the concord that are alive,
not matter itself. Because soul is more excellent, it is the primary possessor of this vital concord.
However, vital congruity “is also in the Matter” in the form of a “modification” that “fits the
Plastick”—or lower—“part of the Soul.” Life, therefore, “sympathizes” with matter, not because
matter is alive, but because, similar to Leibniz’s idea of preestablished harmony, it has been
modified to receive life. Most importantly for my purposes is the observation, “that which has no
life it self, may tie to it that which has” by this process of ‘sympathizing.’ Though the living and
spiritual principle is superior to matter, it cannot always control its surroundings or its reactions
to them. This leads to an anxious situation where, though spirit is more noble than matter
because the highest faculty of spirit is conscious and perceptive, it does not have authority over
matter, and can, of course, be affected by it—not physically, but through sympathy.

Consider the emotions: responsive, receptive, defensive, affected by the contingencies of our
surroundings whether we like it or not. Though “the Phenomena of the Passions” in humans and
animals cannot be explained “by pure Mechanicks,” More claims “it is evident that they arise in
us against both our Will and Appetite. For who would bear the tortures of Fears and Jealousies,
if he could avoid it?”248 Focusing more on physiology, Cudworth also considers the kinds of
actions that are either involuntary or partially so:

We have all Experience, of our doing many Animal Actions Non-attendingly, which we
reflect upon afterwards: as also that we often continue a long Series of Bodily Motions,

247 More, Immortality, 263-264.

248 More, Immortality, 220-221.
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by a mere Virtual Intentions of our Minds, and as it were by a Half a Cogitation. That
Vital Sympathy, by which our Soul is united and tied fast, as it were with a Knot, to the
Body, is a thing we have no direct Consciousness of, but only in its Effects.249

If much of human experience is unwilled—but also vital and alive—and if, as I have suggested,
More and Cudworth imply that “Plastick Nature” or “The Spirit of the World” is the part of
God’s soul that is analogous to the involuntary, sympathetic part of the human soul, is there a
sense in which God may be compelled by sympathy to act? When it comes to responding to the
sincere prayers of suffering Christians, Cudworth’s answer is yes. In a sermon preached before
the House of Commons in 1647, he asserted,

God forbid, that Gods own Life and Nature here in the World should be forlorn, forsaken,
and abandoned of God himself. Certainly, where-ever it is, though never so little, like a
sweet, young, tender Babe, once born in any heart; when it crieth unto God the father of
it, with pitifull and bemoaning looks imploring his compassion; it cannot chuse but move
his fatherly bowels, and make them yerne, and turn toward it, and by a strong sympathy,
draw his compassionate arm to help and relieve it. 250

Sympathy “cannot chuse but move his fatherly bowels.” Cudworth is clear that no rational choice
is necessary here as God is involuntarily compelled to respond to suffering Christians. This
obviously curtails God’s freedom and power. Cudworth gets around this problem by claiming
that the suffering creature to whom God responds is “Gods own Life and Nature here in the
World”—that is, a part of his own mystical body. In this view, God, the world, and human
beings, are all parts of a vast cosmic animal, and when God responds to one part of his suffering,
mystical body, he is ultimately tending to himself. While this explanation responds to the
question of what happens to God’s freedom if he is moved by sympathy, it also, as Jennifer A.
Herdt has argued, collapses God into nature, which contributes to the next century’s secularizing

249Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 160.

250Quoted in Jennifer A. Herdt, “The Rise of Sympathy and the Question of Divine Suffering,” JRE 29, no. 3
(2001): 373.
 80

trend.251 As we’ll see in the next and final section, Cudworth was not the only divine who
claimed that God feels “sympathy.”

3.4 A Calvinist Theology of Fellow-Feeling

It may seem counterintuitive to discuss sympathy in the context of a “Calvinist theology of

fellow feeling,” when we consider that the Latitudinarian divines who “paved the way to the
Scottish Enlightenment”—such as the Cambridge Platonists—were so explicitly anti-Calvinist in
their rejection of the doctrines of original sin and election. 252 But, as Abram Van Engen argues in
a recent monograph, “[u]nearthing this Calvinist theology of fellow feeling helps us see the
religious history of a concept that has largely been traced back to more secular roots in moral
sense philosophy.”253

The fact is that in addition to medical discourse and physic, “sympathy” is used most often in the
seventeenth century in the writing of biblical commentaries, many of them Calvinist. These are
line-by-line explications of books of Scripture intended for a general educated audience outside
the Latin-speaking world of scholarship. As well as unpacking biblical passages, they offer
instruction in “practical Divinity,”254 and are popular guides meant to instruct ordinary Christians
on how to live well. In this section, I focus on the prolific use of “sympathy” by Calvinist
preachers coming out of Scotland, 255 reading works by two Presbyterian divines, James Durham
(1622-1658) and George Hutcheson (1615-1674), and one Episcopal divine, Robert Leighton
(1611-1684).

The commentaries I read here were written in and around the tumultuous Resolutioner-Protestor
controversy of the 1650’s, which was, in part, a response to Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland—
resulting in the first division of the Church of Scotland into two competing factions since its

251 Herdt, “The Rise of Sympathy,” 367.

252 Abram C. Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 6; 8-9.
253 Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans, 3.
254 Robert Blair, “Preface,” in James Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT to the Church of Scotland; OR, A
Treatise concerning Scandal. Divided into Four Parts (Edinburgh: Printed by Christopher Higgins, in Harts Close,
over against the Trone-Church, 1659), 3.
255 “Early modern Scottish theology was much more universally Calvinist than has been imagined,” argues C.R.A.
Gribben, “The Literary Culture of the Scottish Reformation,” The Review of English Studies 57, no. 228 (2006): 65.
 81

Reformation in 1560. It is tempting to see the Scottish controversy of the 1650’s as a response to
an Anglocentric threat after a brief few years of Scottish ascendency, starting with the popular
subscription to the National Covenant (1638) and Solemn League and Covenant (1643)—
documents designed to effect what proponents hoped would be an international
Presbyterianism—which “involved more Scotsmen in a political act than ever before in the
country’s history.”256 If in the late 1630’s and early 1640’s English Puritans looked to Scotland
as they sought to finally expel its bishops and overthrow English episcopacy, by the 1650’s
“sectarian antipathy to the Scots” had become fairly entrenched. 257 During this factious time,
Scotland continued to engage in a program of systematic theology in order to fashion itself on
the international Reformed stage as an ideal Puritan nation. In this context, David Dickson, a
professor of theology at Edinburgh and Glasgow, commissioned a series of Bible commentaries
“designed for use by educated parishioners.”258 Hutcheson and Durham’s work are a part of this
series, and while Leighton’s was not, it follows in the same tradition.

These three writers have much in common. Each of them was celebrated in his time for his
moderation. Yet each rejects toleration, claiming that while small differences should not be
minced over, brethren must agree on the fundamentals of the faith. In their explications of Isaiah,
Job, The Song of Solomon, and the First Epistle General of Peter, they advise their Scottish
readers that while citizens have a duty to obey church discipline, on the other side, church
officials have a responsibility to magnanimously invite all but the most extreme defectors into
the fold. For these divines, the whole body of Scottish Calvinist brethren, which at the time
comprised almost the whole population of Scotland, is held together by friendly bonds of
“sympathy.”

3.4.1 James Durham

In James Durham’s commentary upon the book of Revelation, Christ’s love for humankind is
repeatedly compared to the “sympathie of a hundred natural fathers or mothers towards their

256 Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 113.
257 Crawford Gribben, “The Church of Scotland and the English Apocalyptic Imagination, 1630 to 1650,” The
Scottish Historical Review 88, no. 225 (2009): 50, 35.
258 Gribben, “The Literary Culture,” 78.
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children in difficulties.”259 As “a tender mother will be affected with her childs hazard, though it
doth not complain,”260 Christ has a constant, affectionate, feminized eye on his sibling-children:
“He dates and dandles them, as it were on His Knee.”261 In this naturalized, bodily, very
domestic depiction of the relationship of Jesus to Christians, “a sympathie, and fellow-feeling in
our Lord…is the very great ground” of intercession. 262 This “reall and humane sympathie” arises
from his being made flesh, which Durham emphasizes again and again in wonder. 263 While God
the Father has omniscience and benevolence and feels his own kind of sympathy for people, it is
Christ’s experiential acquaintance with humanity’s material nature that gives him a new, special
kind of knowledge of his church’s infirmities and passions. This is a consolation to Christians
and, Durham says, should inspire them to approach God with more “holy boldnesse” 264 than fear,
provided they pray directly to Christ the mediator, “without whom there is no access for a sinner
to approach unto, or worship acceptably, this One God.”265 Like a real eighteenth-century ‘man
of feeling,’ Durham’s Christ possesses both “a sweet and strong Sympathy flowing from such
bowels, as one Brother hath towards another.” 266

While Durham touches upon “the Soveraignity and freenesse of [Christ’s] intercession,” one gets
the sense that the consolation arising from Christ’s feeling actually has to do with sympathy’s
constraint on him: “Christ can refuse no cause put on Him, but must interceed”:

yea, if we will consider this freenesse more nearly, we will find, that this Intercession and
sympathie is not broken off and made lesse because of Believers sin; but is in some
respect the more stirred and provoked, because this sympathie floweth from the relation
that is betwixt Head and members, which sin doth not cut off; and it is as with a tender
natural parent, who cannot but be affected with the childs straits, even though he hath

259 Durham, James. A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation Wherein the text is explained, the series of the
several prophecies contained in that book, deduced according to their order and dependence on each other; the
periods and succession of times, at, or about which, these prophecies, that are already fulfilled, began to be, and
were more fully accomplished, fixed and applied according to history; and those that are yet to be fulfilled,
modestly, and so far as is warrantable, enquired into (Edinburgh: Printed by Christopher Higgins, in Harts Close,
over against the Trone-Church, 1658), 412.
260 Ibid.
261 Durham, Christ crucified, 364.
262 Durham, A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation, 408.
263 Durham, A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation, 410.
264 Durham, A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation, 413.
265 Durham, A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation, 14.
266 Durham, Christ crucified, 364.
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shamefuly brought them on himself; yea, his very failings do touch and affect: so our
high Priests sympathie, is not only in crosses, but it is to have pity on the ignorant, and
compassion on these that are out of the way, Heb. 5. and thus the very sin of a Believer
affecteth Him so, that He cannot but sympathize and be provoked to sympathize with
him. O what a wonder is this, the more sin, the more sympathie which ought to make
Believers humble. 267

Christ “cannot but be affected,” “cannot but sympathize.” By appealing to the transcendent
natural necessity of sympathy, Durham suggests, believers can make demands on Christ more as
if he were their equal. Christ is “touched otherwayes then God abstractly considered can be: and
otherways then an angel in heaven can be touched.” Not just a rational God with a will and a
plan, Christ is a God with longing and desire, Durham maintains. Sympathy, Durham implies, is
a necessity rooted in nature, the very ground of animation that energizes parts of a body to come
together into a whole. Both Christ and Christians are subject to it, and that they share this
subjection is the ground of the faith’s consolations.

According to Eric Gregory, this general atmosphere of benevolent Calvinism taking place in
Scotland at the time gestures, first, toward the natural religion of Hume, who finds a moral
authority not external to the self, “replac[ing] providence with sympathy of a thoroughly natural
kind”;268 and, secondly, toward the deism of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith,
who emphasize the transcendent goodness, reasonableness, and rightness of sympathy. As
Shaftesbury says, “to have this entire affection or integrity of mind is to live according to nature
and the dictates and rules of supreme wisdom.” 269

The relationship between authority and sympathy in Durham’s thought is best seen in his treatise
on scandal, which critiqued “lamentable liberty and vast Toleration” in order to promote—and
enforce, if necessary—the unity of the Church and of Scotland, at a “time when offences abound,
and when there is too great readinesse both to give and take offence.” 270 For Durham, authority is

267 Durham, A commentarie upon the book of the Revelation, 411.

268 Eric Gregory, “Sympathy and Domination: Adam Smith, Happiness, and the Virtues of Augustinianism,” in
Adam Smith as Theologian, ed. Paul Oslington (London: Routledge, 2011), 40.
269 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” in Characteristics, 206.
270 J.C., “THE Publisher to the Reader,” in James Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 8; Durham, The Dying
Man’s TESTAMENT, 40.
 84

most persuasive when it is sympathetic. In particular the application of Church discipline must
be done with sympathy: “In this a Church-judicatories procedour, ought discernably to differ
from a civil Court in that they are not only out of Justice censuring the party,” but out of
affection.271 There is “nothing more offensive” to the people than when Church officers lack
sympathy and tenderness, or when ministers gloat at the errors of others. 272 Instead, “hearing of a
persons stumbling, ought to stound and will stound the heart of a sympathizing Minister, as if it
were a fire in his bosome. And were this one thing in vigour, to wit, native sympathie with those
that are offended, it would usher-in all other directions: This would make Ministers pray much to
have it prevented, as our Lord doth.”273 Even when a person is “so infectious and unfit to have
communion in the Church” that they must be “Excommunicate, and casten out of His visible
Kingdom,” this is to be done “with such gravity, weightinesse, sympathy and authority, as it may
look like an Ordinance of Christ, and have an impression of His dread and Majesty.” 274 It is only
through the combination of sympathy, which focuses on an individual’s plight and depth of
feeling, with authority, whose aim is to maintain the structures of the whole society, that
personal and public goods might correspond: “in trying what may be most edifying, we are not to
look to one end along, to wit, the persons particular good only, or the publick good only, &c. but
to put all together and to try how jointly they may be best attained. 3. From this also it will
appear, that Church-officers ought with such tendernesse, love and sympathie to walk in publick
Censures.”275

3.4.2 Robert Leighton

How is it that sympathy can act both upon the individual’s private desire and love, and upon the
nation and its structures of authority? In his exposition of 1 Peter 3.8 276 the once-Presbyterian,
then-Episcopal Archbishop, Robert Leighton, celebrated by modern scholars for his “easy
cosmopolitanism, indeed budding ecumenicalism,” 277 writes: “This doeth not only mean Union

271 Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 66.

272 Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 68.
273 Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 51.
274 Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 239.
275 Durham, The Dying Man’s TESTAMENT, 65.
276 “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” Any
biblical passages are taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 4th Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
277 David Allan, “Reconciliation and Retirement in the Restoration Scottish Church: The Neo-Stoicism of Robert
Leighton,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50, no. 2 (1999): 255-56; Leighton, A Practical Commentary, 36.
 85

of Judgment, but it extends likewise to Affection and Action.” 278 The ideal unity he writes about
is not only a rational exchange, but involves the private movements of hearts. This verse calling
for love and sympathy, of course, follows upon the writer of 1 Peter’s injunctions to accept
authority, even if it is unjust.279

Leighton is concerned with a war against disorder. In this war, where the only choices seem to be
anarchic self-interest or submission to Church and state, authority must be accepted to fend off
chaos. Not only do people have a duty to accept authority, they should want to if they are at all
other-directed. In their turn, those wielding authority have a duty to be sympathetic. Sounding
very much like Durham, Leighton suggests that church magistrates should not “go on in a
Censor-like magisterial strain” but should “mourn” for their poor errant members in need of
discipline, and deal with sinners “with holy and humble sympathy.” 280 One way authority
coexists happily with sympathy is by choosing its battles well, defending and enforcing belief in
only what is most fundamental to the faith, “leaving a latitude and indifferency in things capable
of it.”281 David Allan notes that Leighton’s emphasis on “fundamental and unifying spiritual
questions rather than divisive outward forms” has “particular affinities” with the rationalistic,
liberal, latitudinarian movement of Cambridge Platonism, remarking that among Leighton’s
books were four volumes by Henry More and two by Ralph Cudworth. 282

Leighton’s sentiments also sound somewhat like Shaftesbury’s claim that magistrates should be
at all times level-headed and kind, not subject to the contagious panic and enthusiasms that
religious faction in particular can inspire:

The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand and, instead of caustics,
incisions and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with a kind of
sympathy, entering into the concern of the people and taking, as it were, their passion

278 Leighton, A Practical Commentary, 27.

279 “For the Lord’s sake, accept the authority of every human institution” (2.13); “Slaves, accept the authority of
your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh” (2.18);
“Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of you husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the words,
they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct” (3.1).
280 Leighton, A Practical COMMENTARY, UPON the first Epistle General of St. Peter, VOL. II., 36.
281 Leighton, A Practical COMMENTARY, UPON the first Epistle General of St. Peter, VOL. II., 30.
282 Allan, “Reconciliation and Retirement in the Restoration Scottish Church,” 270.
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upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavor, by cheerful ways, to
divert and heal it.283

The ultimate model of the kind magistrate who takes the passions of the people upon himself in
order to heal them, is, of course, Christ. But while Shaftesbury emphasizes the ‘artistry’ of the
kind magistrate, who acts sympathetically partially because he is well-disposed and partially
because this is the most pragmatic thing to do, Leighton stresses the naturalness of sympathy as
it draws individuals into one public unity:

‘[T]is not a bare speculative agreement of opinions, that is the badge of Christian Unity,
for this may accidentally be, where there is no further Union; but that they are themselves
one, have one life, in that they feel how it is one with another, there is a living sympathy
amongst them, as making up one Body, animated with one Spirit, for that’s the reason
why the Members of the Body have that mutual feeling even the remotest and distantest,
and the most excellent with the meanest, this the Apostle urges at large, Rom. 12.4. and 1
Cor. 12. And this lively Sense is in every living Member of the Body of Christ, towards
the whole, and towards each other particular part. This makes a Christian rejoice in the
welfare and good of another, as if it were his own, and feel their griefs and distresses as if
himself were really sharer in them, for the word comprehends all feeling, together feeling
of joy, as well as of grief, Heb. 13.3. 1 Cor. 12.26. And always where there is most of
Grace, and of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, there is most of this Sympathy. 284

While mere rational or ideological agreement arises from circumstance—“this may accidentally
be”—the “living sympathy” or “lively Sense” between “Members of the Body of Christ”
“follows the nature of things.”285 The implication is that if only we listen carefully and honestly
to our truest inclinations, we will be sweetly compelled to unite under the authority of the true
Church. If brethren are pure of heart, Leighton implies, they will find a harmony between their
private desires and the will of the collective.

283 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” Characteristics, 10-11.

284 Leighton, A Practical COMMENTARY, UPON the first Epistle General of St. Peter, VOL. II., 35.
285 Leighton, A Practical COMMENTARY, UPON the first Epistle General of St. Peter, VOL. II., 304.
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What are we to make, then, of the frequent injunction to give up our natural inclinations, which
we find in these commentaries? Instead of being urged to assert their own personal freedoms,
those reading Hutcheson, Durham and Leighton are encouraged to enlarge and preserve
themselves by joining the collective entity of the church. It is the church, backed by God, that is
the ideal political agent. While the church can resist large worldly powers—which the Church of
Scotland did in its criticism of prelacy and the Arminianism embraced by the most powerful
Anglican bishops 286—unequal distributions of power and resources within the church body must
be endured by individuals. In this case, then, a politics extending from the sympathetic union of
community members is one of both resistance and of stasis. The difference seems to hinge on
scale: on whether it is the church body that takes political action, or members within it.

3.4.3 George Hutcheson

In his commentaries on the prophecies of Zechariah and Amos, the minister George Hutcheson
articulates an anxiety about how far sympathy can and should incite people to political action. In
his exposition of Zechariah 2.8, 287 he develops the idea that it is God’s sympathy with the
Church’s afflictions that makes him ‘go out into the nations’:

As Gods severity against his people takes not away his sympathie with them in their
afflictions; so his sympathy makes the Churches trouble go very near his heart, which he
will in due time prove upon the instruments thereof; for this is the cause of his going unto
the nations, they spoiled you; and the reason is brought from his sympathie: for, he that
toucheth you, toucheth the apple of mine eye a touch of them on any part, is to his
sympathie, a touch of the apple of his eye, which is a most tender part. 288

God is bound to the Church by sympathy, which carries a material weight: God’s sympathy
compels his action. God and his Church share a body, and his interest in glorifying the Church is

286 Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans, 13.

287 “For thus said the LORD of hosts (after his glory sent me) regarding the nations that plundered you: Truly, one
who touches you touches the apple of my eye.”
288 Hutcheson, George. A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF THE Prophecies OF Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, (London:
Printed by T.R. and E.M. for Ralph Smith, at the Bible in Cornhill near the Royal Exchange, 1654), 58.
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related to his self-expression: “The Church of God is the society, where he sets forth his glory
more then among all the world beside.”

In order to solve the problem of God being compelled by his sympathy to act, which would
hinder God’s freedom, Hutcheson notes that it is God himself who decides to bring affliction
upon his Church in order to force his own entrance into political history. Unlike the individual
believer, the Church is not instructed to obey authority and suffer affliction, but, when afflicted,
to resist its enemies: “The Church will finde it to be a very unsafe course for her to joyne and
comply with her enemies.” Here, God’s sympathy with his Church inspires political aggression
toward a larger power—potentially the colonizing English power.

However, in his exposition of Amos 6.6, Hutcheson’s message sounds quite different. While he
notes, of the rich, that “it cannot but be sinful in a time of affliction” and an attack on “all
sympathie and fellow feeling” to “make themselves a good life, when others are undone,”
regarding individual suffering within the Church or nation, people are not to form factions of
resistance because their suffering actually has a good use:

Afflictions are sent upon some people, and not upon others, or on some part and persons
of a Nation, and not upon others, not onely for their own correction and exercise who are
afflicted, but to try the sympathie of others, and to see what use they will make of it; for,
Josephs affliction or the breach made upon him, tried these Grandees. 289

Here, sympathy for some enhances the goodness of many. This goes according to God’s overall
design, which is ultimately for the best. We find the same casualness regarding suffering in
Shaftesbury’s political thought: “It happens with mankind that, while some are by necessity
confined to labour, others are provided with abundance of all things by the pains and labour of
inferiors.”290 For Shaftesbury, too, this totalizing political vision, where individuals who are of
right reason and who hold natural affection fold seamlessly into the grand unified vision of the
whole, results in a rigid injunction. Among all the affability, one should keep to one’s place:

289 Hutcheson, George. A BRIEF EXPOSITION ON THE XII. Smal Prophets; the first volume containing an
EXPOSITION ON THE PROPHECIES OF Hosea, Joel, & Amos. (Edenburgh, 1655), 472.
290 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit.” In Characteristics, 214.
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He will find that in every different creature and distinct sex there is a different and
distinct order, set or suit of passions, proportionable to the different order of life, the
different functions and capacities assigned to each. As the operations and effects are
different, so are the springs and causes in each system. The inside work is fitted to the
outward action and performance. So that where habits or affections are dislodged,
misplaced or changed, where those belonging to one species are intermixed with those
belonging to another, there must of necessity be confusion and disturbance within. 291

If in the end the afflictions of some are purifying because they activate the goodness of others,
and if life with all its material exigencies is something to be waited out and endured for the sake
of an immaterial hereafter, there is not much impetus for political and social reform. While we
are tasked with taking personal measures to alleviate pain and poverty if we can—“For true
Piety, and Humanity flowing there from, do require that men do not deny sympathie, and what
help they can afford to the afflicted, were it but a room in their heart”—the structures of this
world have been erected by God, for purposes we don’t understand, and must ultimately be
obeyed.292

3.5 Toward the Next Century

In order to examine the relationship in seventeenth-century British thought between “sympathy”

and authority, we must consider the problem of mediation—of how God is bonded with creation,
exerts his power, and makes himself present to human consciousness. Whether the Cambridge
Platonist Ralph Cudworth’s “plastick nature,”293 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont’s sensible spirit of
the world that allows “Atomes” to be “wafted on the wings of a convenient medium,”294 the
national church’s body and its mystical union of members, Anne Conway’s “Christ,” or “Adam
Kadmon,” who is “a Medium between God, and all Creatures,”295 or Robert Fludd’s angelic

291 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit.” In Characteristics, 215.

292 Hutcheson, George. AN EXPOSITION Of the BOOK of JOB: Being the Sum of CCCXVI Lecture, Preached in the
CITY of EDENBURGH, (London: Printed for Ralph Smith at the Bible in the first Court, entering into Greshem-
Colledge our of Bishopsgate-street, 1669), 76.
293 Cudworth, The True Intellectual System, 10.
294 Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, A TERNARY OF PARADOXES, 17.
295 Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. & ed. Allison P. Coudert &
Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167.
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intelligences who operate between God and creatures through the powers of sympathy and
antipathy, the idea that there is a sensitive medium subordinate to God and akin to nature that
connects human beings to the cosmos, allows these seventeenth-century writers to think about
the problem of where intrinsic necessity starts and voluntariness begins. Plant-like, vitalistic,
non-conscious, operating by a property of “self-love rest[ing] in the bosome of Nature”296 as Van
Helmont has it, this sympathetic ‘middle nature’ between free minds and the universe seems to
be the domain of unconscious, instinctual, biological life. If the domain of sympathy is sub-
rational and involuntary, it is fatalistic: we cannot help but follow our sympathies because it is in
our natures to do so. And yet, as these writers seek to become conscious of the fatalistic
compulsions of sympathy, there is a sense in which, merely by awakening to it, “sympathy” may
become subject to our voluntary wills and our moral judgments.

As I’ve mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation and in Chapter One, the narrative I’d
once proposed for this project stated that “sympathy” originated from the metaphysical and
medical philosophies of the ancients, and then, in a modernizing, secularizing process, moved
inward to become the psychological concept we understand it to mean today. However, in the
new British moral philosophy at the end of the seventeenth century—for example, in
Shaftesbury’s—this movement appears to be somewhat reversed. Rather than tunneling from the
cosmos in to human hearts, sympathy originates in hearts and, the idea is, may be successfully
applied to larger, more abstract totalities with the aid of our rational minds. For Shaftesbury and
the eighteenth-century moral sense philosophers emerging from the Scottish Enlightenment
whom he inspired, the bonds of sympathy attaching us to a remoter, abstract social totality
originate from our deepest, most instinctual recesses. This is an idea that responds to a problem
regarding how private individuals may be compelled to align themselves with a national
community that is more abstract than it is present to people in their everyday lives. As
Shaftesbury notes, sympathy and love are close, particular feelings between ourselves and others
who we come to feel intimate with, such as our “offspring,” “kindred and companions,” “clan or
tribe.”297 How did early modern British men and women apply these particular feelings to larger
abstractions as they sought civil, ecclesiastical, and even natural and metaphysical unity? If we

296Van Helmont, Van Helmont's works, 1113.

297Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51.
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love what is human and close, surely we lose the feeling when the object of our sympathy
becomes distant or abstract, as Shaftesbury realizes: “Universal good or the interest of the world
in general, is a kind of remote philosophical object. That greater community falls not easily
under the eye.”298 How, then, might we be compelled to keep our sights on a universal common
good?

Whether in the church of believers gathered together in the sympathetic body of Christ, in the
sympathies of planets and angels for terrestrial creatures, or in the sympathetic movements of the
hearts and imaginations of men and women who share a national identity, temperament, or star
sign, “sympathy” articulates the ways in which we either are—or desire to be—sweetly
compelled to forge relationships rooted in desire that feels both natural and destined. What the
Reformed Protestant Scottish biblical commentaries by Durham, Hutcheson and Leighton reveal
is that a view that sees ‘humans as intrinsically attuned to God’ can exist comfortably alongside
an exhortation to obey the external laws of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. This is so even
when there is an understanding that such obedience seems to thwart the desires of one’s truest
heart. Each author considers how sympathy unifies individuals into a larger totality through the
merging of private, personal desire with a kind of collective desire. By the next century, starting
with the liberal moral philosophy of Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury and continuing with those he
inspired, including Scots Adam Smith and David Hume and Ulsterman Francis Hutcheson,
“sympathy” will play an important role in the idea that unity might be compelled instead of
forced. Political philosophies with “sympathy” at their core suggest that the desirous cohesion of
a citizenry is just a natural extension of each individual’s sociability.

The mediated nature of the authority to which, I claim, sympathy has a relationship, is what
paradoxically carves out a space for the kind of experience that privileges individual freedom.
Rooted in a feeling of one’s inner depths and private desires, this kind of authority seems to be
an expression of one’s truest nature. Nearly a century before Shaftesbury, Nicholas Byfield, the
leading Calvinist preacher for James I, ponders a similar problem: “It (with what kind of love we
are to love our brethren) must be a natural love, that is, such a love as is not by constraint, but

298 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 52.

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ariseth out of our dispositions and inclinations.”299 It is through our radical subjectivities—an
interior realm which is also where we are most free—that we are compelled toward a universal
order. In this way, a person’s freedom creates the conditions for their submission to the greater
totality in which they have a clearly defined place: “Obey as the Members doe,” Byfield advises,
“in Vnion with the Head by faith; in Communion with the fellow-Members by Loue, and with a
natural voluntarie, and not extorted obedience.”300

In the readings that comprise this chapter, we can start to see how, with “sympathy,” the political
and moral philosophies of the eighteenth century will introduce a concept of involuntariness into
their systems of thought—an involuntariness the eighteenth-century citizen is nonetheless tasked
to become conscious of and is responsible for nurturing. The metaphor of “sympathy” serves to
naturalize the social “body” and asserts that the force holding this collective together is living,
vital, spiritual, in the service of God and nature. But also, we are asked to take charge of our
apparently involuntary, fatalistic urges, asked to exert our wills over the part of us that is totally
under the power of God and nature. Over our “plastick nature,” over this domain of sympathy,
there is, therefore, a battle of wills that takes place. The idea that we should follow our
sympathies opens up the possibility that doing so or not is our choice. We can choose to join
ourselves to the social body in a way we cannot choose to join our conscious experience to our
bodies, for instance. “Sympathy,” I suggest, offers an explanation for how and why action
continually occurs, and for why nothing remains stable. At the same time, the concept
encompasses the idea that there is universal regularity—or regulation—governing the movement
and organization of all things, human and nonhuman, as creatures seek their likenesses in nature.

299 Nicholas Byfield, A commentary upon the three first chapters of the first Epistle generall of St. Peter VVherin are
most judiciously and profitably handled such points of doctrine as naturally flow from the text. Together with a very
usefull application thereof: and many good rules for a godly life (London: 1637), 681.
300 Nicholas Byfield, An exposition vpon the Epistle to the Colossians Wherein, not onely the text is methodically
analysed, and the sence of the words, by the Help of vvriters, both ancient and moderne is explayned: but also, by
doctrine and vse, the intent of the holy Ghost is in euery place more fully vnfolded and vuged…Being, the substance
of neare seauen yeeres vveeke-dayes sermonds, of N. Byfield, late one of the preachers for the citie of Chester
(London: 1615), 123.
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Chapter 4
“Sympathy” in Paradise Lost

In Book Ten of Paradise Lost, as Sin and Death sit at the open gates of Hell gazing into the
abyss, Sin suddenly says:

O Son, why sit we here each other viewing

Idly, while Satan our great Author thrives
In other Worlds, and happier Seat provides
For us his offspring dear? It cannot be
But that success attends him; if mishap,
Ere this he had return’d, with fury driv’n
By his Avengers, since no place like this
Can fit his punishment, or their revenge.
Methinks I feel new strength within me rise,
Wings growing, and Dominion giv’n me large
Beyond this Deep; whatever draws me on,
Or sympathy, or some connatural force
Powerful at greatest distance to unite
With secret amity things of like kind
By secretest conveyance. Thou my Shade
Inseparable must with mee along:
For Death from Sin no power can separate…
Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn
By this new felt attraction and instinct. (PL 10.235-251; 262-63) 301

This and the following four-hundred line demonic interlude takes place after the Son clothes
Adam and Eve’s piteous nakedness and ascends back up to his Father’s side, but before “His
mighty Angels” leave Heaven to corrupt the sun, moon, stars and winds “as sorted best” with the
newly fallen world (10. 650-51). If Milton’s Fall narrative is based on doctrines attached to

References are to the New Edition of Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Hughes (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
301
Company, Inc., 1997).
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Genesis, and if the corruption-of-nature scene is inspired by the Patristic writings of Alcuin,
Anselm and Aquinas,302 this strange, allegorical detour is the poet’s invention. Milton must get
Sin and Death across the cosmos into Eden. Why does he use “sympathy, or some connatural
force” to do it?

I claim here that Milton’s use of “sympathy” in this scene is intentional and anxious. In the
Argument to Book Ten, Milton devotes three lines to describing Sin’s feeling of “wondrous
sympathy”:

Sin and Death sitting till then at the Gates of Hell, by wondrous sympathy feeling the
success of Satan in this new World, and the sin by Man there committed, resolve to sit no
longer confin’d in Hell, but to follow Satan thir Sire up to the place of Man: To make the
way easier from Hell to this World to and fro, they pave a broad Highway or Bridge over
Chaos, according to the Track that Satan first made…

Critics frequently discuss the moment of Sin and Death’s bridge building, noting that it is a
“petrific” inversion of the Son’s more organic creation scene, which Raphael narrates to Adam in
Book Seven. But the scene featuring Sin’s feeling of “new felt attraction and instinct,” (229-281)
is longer than the bridge building episode (282-324) by ten lines, and Milton devotes more
careful words to it in the Argument as well.

The purpose of the scene is not to relate how Sin and Death get to earth, but to dramatize in great
detail over the span of fifty-three lines the ways by which they know to make this journey at all.
Sin knows because she feels an impulse “rise” within her. Within her body, Sin detects a likeness
of herself that exists across the cosmos. That she can detect her own likeness even though it is a
universe away seems to confirm Foucault’s famous thesis in The Order of Things, that
“sympathy” collapses distance in space: a “principle of mobility” it “can traverse the vastest
spaces in an instant,” transforming and altering “in the direction of identity” so that, drawn to

A scenario at which Milton’s poet-contemporaries also try their hands, especially Francis Quarles, du Bartas,
302
Hugo Grotius and Robert Herrick. See Merritt Y. Hughes, “Earth Felt the Wound,” ELH 36, no. 1 (1969): 193-214.
 95

their likeness, things hold together—in some cases so intimately they risk becoming “the
featureless form of the Same.”303

Sin’s offspring Death, by contrast, perceives the Fall not through instinct but directly through his
senses, when “with delight he snuff’d the smell/Of mortal change on Earth.” However, it is not
quite this that compels him to leave Hell’s gates, “lur’d/With the scent of living Carcasses” (272-
73; 276-77). Death states that he will make the journey toward earth firstly because he has faith
in Sin’s instincts, and only secondly because the scent of gore entices him: “Go whither Fate and
inclination strong/Leads thee, I shall not lag behind, nor err/The way, thou leading, such a scent I
draw/Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste/The savor of Death from all things there that live”
(265-69). Sin leads, led herself by “Fate and inclination,” with Death’s sensory cravings
providing a navigational aid. There are many cognates of sympathy at work here and in the
passage at large—“inclination,” “instinct,” “amity,” “attraction”—but only one term which
Milton gives us in the Argument. It is because of “sympathy, or some connatural force,” this
“wondrous sympathy,” that Sin and Death make the fateful voyage toward Eden. On the one
hand, Milton is pointing a finger at this word and asking us to ponder its significance. On the
other, he shrouds it in mystery by rendering the whole episode in scene, not summary, and so
abandoning us to Sin’s faculties of expression. “Whatever draws [her] on,” it is, above all,
“secret,” “Powerful,” impulsing her to move by “secretest conveyance.” So Milton wants us to
notice this word “sympathy,” but he also wants it to remain ambiguous.

Milton’s use of “sympathy” in this scene differs from his use of it in his earlier poetry. Here,
Sin’s sympathy extends to the domain of interiority—both feeling and knowledge—as well as to
natural causes. In the earlier poetry, when figures such as Nature “sympathize,” there is nothing
like Sin’s subjectivity at play. Observe the first stanza of the “Hymn” section in “On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629):

It was the winter wild,

While the heaven-born child
All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge Classics,
303
2002), 26-27.
 96

Nature in awe to him

Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour. (29-36)304

The theme of the poem is the Incarnation, the comingling of divine and terrestrial natures. Not
only does Milton experiment with time—with action vaulting from the Creation to the Second
Coming and Apocalypse—he plays with the boundaries that distinguish animate from inanimate
things. Nature’s ability to “sympathize” with the new Son grants Nature agency, but upon closer
inspection it becomes clear that this agency is self-consciously fictional. First Nature participates
in Christ’s poverty, “doff[ing] her gaudy trim” and stripping down to a “winter wild” that
matches the “rude” conditions in the manger. Then having stripped herself, in the next stanza
Nature puts on a “saintly veil,” “To hide her guilty front with innocent snow” (39-42). And in the
next stanza after that, as if to compensate for her shame, a now fully personified and powerful
Nature “crowned in olive green, c[o]me[s] softly sliding/Down through the turning sphere,” to
wave her “myrtle wand,” which “strikes a universal peace through sea and land” (47-52). In all
of these sympathetic activities, though, is merely following the usual progress of the seasons and
its festivities—the poem moves from the bare branches of autumn, to snowy mid-winter, to Yule.
That Christ comes in the winter says nothing about this female allegory’s power to act. God has
agency. The poet has agency. Nature “sympathizes” only in so far as she follows the natural
course of things, which are made significant by the poet.

Until Paradise Lost, Milton uses “sympathy” similar to the way he would have seen it, since
childhood, in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks, vastly popular among
England’s Protestants. In keeping with his Reformed theology, Du Bartas keeps God’s way of
working above all secret—what we know is that stars and humors, bodies and souls, earth and
heavens, iron and lodestone are held together by “subtile, secret strength” (The Third Day. 57),
by “the secret cause of this rare” and “secret sympathy” (The Third Day. 63; The Story of Adam.
190). In these sympathetic alignments, we are meant to discern a lesson: “Canst thou the secret

John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jason P.
304
Rosenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 3-13.
 97

sympathy behold/Betwixt the bright sun and the marigold,/And not consider that we must no
less/Follow in life the sun of righteousness?” (The Seventh Day. 157). The logic of Du Bartas’s
analogy is simple. Just as the yellow marigold looks like the sun from which it draws its
sustenance, so we should become like God who sustains our being. It is the physical similarity
between this particular flower and the sun that acts as a divine signature alerting us to a hidden
wisdom. In this way, a physical likeness becomes a spiritual analogy. For Milton in, say, The
Maske at Ludlow Castle, not only are sympathies in nature the signatures that alert us to divine
messages; if, independently of natural observation—say, if we are blind or lost in a wood—we
happen to discover a moral truth, the Earth would respond sympathetically. When the Lady
refuses to explain “the sublime notion, and high mystery” of virginity to her attacker, Comus,
because it is a “notion” that one either ‘gets’ or not, she notes:

Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth

Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
To such a flame of sacred vehemence,
That dumb things would be moved to sympathize,
And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake
Till all thy magic structures reared so high,
Were shattered into heaps o’er thy false head. (785; 793-99)

Here the sympathy felt by the earth is explicitly contrasted with Comus’s “magic structures,” for
sympathy is not magic, but divine mystery. It is not her rhetoric or logic or ideas that sway, but
the wordless “pure cause” gushing through her “rapt spirits.” In this, she is like the Son in
Paradise Regained who is not moved primarily by rational knowledge, admitting he does not
know why he feels compelled to follow the power that leads him into the wilderness. It is faith
that moves him. In the presence of the Lady’s non-discursive understanding, Comus admits,
“She fables not. I feel that I do fear/Her words set off by some superior power” (800-01). If the
Lady’s Chastity is a divine virtue, to “know” this connaturally or sympathetically as well as
rationally, as the Lady seems to, is to come into contact with divine proclamation and to “know”
as the angels do, by intuition. For “dumb things” to “sympathize” is Nature’s inarticulate
response to the magnificent correspondence of private inclination and exterior natural law.
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But in Paradise Lost sympathy's physical or material associations become incorporated into a
unique activity of the mind. However, it is not a mental activity performed by everybody. In
addition to Sin and to the devils, who transform into serpents later on in Book Ten by a kind of
contagion Milton calls “horrid sympathy,” the only other figure in the epic to experience this
force is Eve (PL 540). As she narcissistically gazes into the inverse sky of the “Smooth Lake”
just moments after her birth, her watery image fixes her there “with answering looks/Of
sympathy and love” (4.464-65). It would be facile to say that this verbal resonance proves Eve’s
fallen nature before the Fall by linking her to Sin—but it does suggest something about the
motivations Milton imagines to be possible for certain kinds of characters. In all of his poetry, it
is “dumb things,” “Nature,” demons and females who are motivated by sympathy. Despite what
their own intentions may be, or whether, in the case of “Nature,” intention is at all possible,
sympathy appears to be something that acts upon certain characters, rather than a feeling they
choose to experience.

What I find surprising is that Milton’smale characters are relatively unaffected by this
“wondrous” operation of God and nature. They too experience spontaneous impulses and
feelings they don’t choose to have, but these are signified by the less occult, more materialist
word, “motion.” Thus Samson brings down the towers at Gaza because, like Sin, he is suddenly
compelled to do so when he “begin[s] to feel/Some rousing motions in [him] which dispose/To
something extraordinary [his] thoughts” (SA 1381-83).305 As in the scene with Sin at Hell’s
gates, there is a link here between feeling and “thoughts”—instinct and knowing. Neither Sin nor
Samson acts rashly or unthinkingly. Quite the opposite: they are so self-aware that they first
notice and then are able to articulate the bodily origin and progress of their urges. Similarly the
Son journeys into the wilderness for forty days when “by some strong motion [he] is led” (PR
1.290). Yet the kind of knowing these characters experience at these moments is not rational:
“And now by some strong motion I am led,” the Son says, “Into this wilderness, to what intent/I
learn not yet, perhaps I need not know;/For what concerns my knowledge God reveals” (1.290-
93).

John Milton, “Samson Agonistes,” in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose (153-204), ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt
305
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011).
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Why, in Paradise Lost, are Sin and Eve compelled by “sympathy” and not by “motion”? Over
the course of this chapter, I read the poem in relation to a number of discourses on sympathy, in
particular focusing on Kenelm Digby’s Discourse…Touching the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy,
and on a section of the Summa Theologica, which describes an impulsive, spontaneous kind of
judgment Aquinas calls “compassio sive connaturalitas.” I am not so much looking for direct
influence as I am trying to articulate as best as possible the very complex, and relatively
undefined, semantic field from which “sympathy” emerges. It is my belief that Milton could not
have been more deliberate whenever he uses the word “sympathy,” for as I’ll go on to
demonstrate, what he signifies by it is divine operation in the material world. The use of
“sympathy” in the passage cited at the start of this chapter is particularly rich, for it is in
Paradise Lost that Milton uses the word not to articulate the superanimated feeling of “dumb
things” (Maske 796) in “Nature,” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” 34) but to depict an
inner compulsion that presents itself to human, or human-like, consciousness.

Though Sin and Eve recognize the force of their feelings and in that sense are the authorities
over their intimate experience and desire, they do not choose to feel “sympathy” when they do.
Rather, I claim, “sympathy” is the Father’s movement in them, appearing in their feelings of
attraction. I suggest here that because “sympathy” is not rational or chosen, the fact that they are
guided by it carries Sin and Eve away from the social into an abyss of pre-creation, of elemental
reality, in which the bond of sympathy is the core organizing principle. It is no accident that Sin
and Eve are the epic’s female characters, either. Driven by their sympathies, Sin and Eve, I
suggest, are more under the sway of their elemental, material natures than the epic’s male
characters.

Above all, “sympathy” describes an elemental force shared by animate creatures and inanimate
objects. “Like love,” Giuseppe Gerbino writes, “sympathetic response is not an act of volition
but an irresistible and blind force. It is not a subjective participation in someone else’s emotions,
but an objective property of being.”306 If in the eighteenth-century “sympathy” eventually moves
inward, becoming, as we think of it, a psychological identification if not exactly an emotion, in

Giuseppe Gerbino, “Music and Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford
306
University Press, 2015), 103.
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Milton’s poetry its progress is filtered through feminine subjectivity. This is because for Milton
the category of the female is ontologically liminal, a borderland between Nature and Man.

4.1 Sympathy and Inanimate Nature

Milton’s critics have preferred not to linger at Hell’s gates with Sin’s sympathy. They seem to
find this moment either self-explanatory or embarrassing. But we do get some glosses. In his
note to the line, Merritt Y. Hughes says, “[h]ere and in the Argument to Book X sympathy has
the quasi-scientific meaning of attraction at great distances.” Stephen Orgel and Jonathan
Goldberg’s note is, “[i]nnate force linking us.”307 Neither of these definitions quite gets at
Milton’s purpose. Hughes’s is anachronistic, for what might be “quasi-science” for us, was not
for Milton, and Orgel and Goldberg’s definition describes a relationship between persons and is
therefore only applicable to human contexts—sympathy links “us,” and not “senslesse things” in
nature, which is how Milton himself used it in his earlier poetry. If we do a survey of English
lexicons from 1584, when “sympathy” first appears in glossaries, to 1668, one year after the
original edition of Paradise Lost was published, we see that sympathy was often defined as a
“concordance of natures and things,”308 applicable to “naturall qualities,”309 or describing
“consent or resemblance of qualitie,”310 or even “a likenesse in quantitie.”311 That is, the word
signifies “the agreements of nature,”312 as much as it expressed a psychological identification
between persons, as we now exclusively understand it. Even when early modern authors translate
the Greek “sympatheia” literally into “the state of being affected together,” or, more commonly,
“fellow feeling,” what they often mean is fellow feeling “betweene the head and stomacke in our
bodies: also the agreement and naturall amitie in diverse senselesse things, as between iron and

307 John Milton The Major Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 908.
308 Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, “A Table of Signification of Some Words as They Ar Used Before,” in The
Historie of Judith, trans. Thomas Hudson (London, 1584).
309 Claude Hollyband, Claude. A Dictionarie of French and English (London, 1593).
310 Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, “A briefe explanation of most of the difficulties through the whole worke, for
the ease of such as are least exercised in these kinde of readings,” in Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah
Sylvester (London, 1605).
311 John Bullokar, An English Expositer: teaching the interpretation of the hardest words in our language (London,
1616).
312 William Ames, “To the Reader,” in The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642).
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the load-stone,”313 or “similitude in [the] affection” of angles in trigonometry, 314 or the “mutual
passion” between “water, in coldness” and “the Earth.”315 Even as late as 1702, sympathy is
defined in English dictionaries as both “the natural agreement of things” and “a conformity in
passions, dispositions, or affections” between persons as well as things. 316 It is precisely because
sympathy acts upon all things—animate creatures and inanimate objects—that it is so wondrous,
or as Erasmus said in his Latin Colloquies of 1530, “admirable”: “But it seems most admirable to
me, that this Kind of Sympathy and Antipathy, as the Greeks call a natural Affection of
Friendship and Enmity, should be found even in Things that have neither Life nor Sense.” 317

These definitions suggest that natural things, and even abstract qualities like the angle of a
triangle, possess something resembling a creaturely appetite. In animating the inanimate, they
express the familiar conception of the oneness of the universe, which imagines that on the most
fundamental level of reality God or Nature is a single substance. “Sympathy,” in these models, is
the principle of relationality between things—animate and inanimate—in a unified plenum. It is a
metaphysical concept rather than a psychological one.

As I discuss in Chapters One and Two, roughly two versions of metaphysical sympathy were
prevalent during the Renaissance, one spiritual, the other mechanistic. The first was associated
with a Neoplatonic model of the universe that combined Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic
metaphysics with Arabic and Jewish mysticism and Christian scholasticism. In this hugely
syncretic model, which can be traced from Plotinus through Aquinas and up into the
Renaissance, the Supreme Being shows his goodness through the complementary principles of
plenitude and harmony. God is constantly emanating creative energy and bringing to life a
multiplicity of species and forms. The role of sympathy here follows from the fact that this great,
superabundant copiousness must be divinely organized in order not to be chaotic, and it is this
harmoniousness of teeming life that glorifies the maker. But sympathy does carry psychological

313 Pliny the Elder, “A briefe catalogue of the words,” in The Historie of the World, trans. Philemon Holland
(London, 1603).
314 Thomas Urquhart, The Trissotetras: Or, a Most Exquisite Table for Resolving all manner of Triangles (London,
1645).
315 Thomas Blount, Glossographia or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words, whether Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgrick, British or Saxon (London, 1656).
316 John Kersey the Younger, English Dictionary (London, 1702).
317 Desiderius Erasmus, De Amicitia, or Friendship. The Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. Rev. E. Johnson, M.A., trans.
Nathan Bailey (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878).
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connotations even from ancient times, and for some early modern thinkers, in particular for
Milton’s fellow monists, Anne Conway and G.W. Leibniz, it is related to consciousness in that it
signals an awareness and moral sensitivity to all the other creatures of God’s world. “The
underlying assumption,” Christia Mercer writes, “is that God causes creatures to have vitality,
from which it is supposed to follow that each creature responds sympathetically to the states of
all others.”318 This concept of “vitality,” or “self-sufficiency,” Mercer suggests, was commonly
related in the seventeenth century to “perception or sense and affinity.”

Creatures do not need to possess consciousness in order to demonstrate vitality and sensitivity, in
this view. They do not even need to be alive: a “creature” is used in the philosophy of Anne
Conway, for instance, to denote both living entities and inanimate things. The definition of a
“creature” is that it is created by God. In Conway’s system, “all creatures eventually become
conscious moral beings,” in order to share in the excellence and goodness of God. 319 All created
things contain within themselves the preconditions for consciousness, possessing both spirit and
corporeality. For Leibniz, consciousness is God’s coup de grace, his final way of amplifying
creation with the use of minds that can act like mirrors to replicate and inflect reality ad
infinitum:

If God did not have rational Creatures in the world, he would have the same harmony, but
barely and devoid of Echo, the same beauty, but barely and devoid of refletion and
refraction or multiplication. On this account, the wisdom of God required [exigebat]
rational Creatures, in which things might multiply themselves. In this way one mind
might be a kind of world in a mirror, or a dioptre, or some kind of point collecting visual
rays.320

Attributing vitality to inanimate matter was not an ‘idol of the mind’ or thoughtless
anthropomorphism, but intensely theorized to correspond to a worldview that places the

318 Christia Mercer, “Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy: Stoicism, Platonism, Leibniz, and Conway,” in
Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford, University Press, 2015), 126.
319 Mercer, “Universal Sympathy,” 136.
320 Gottfried Leibniz, “VI 1.438,” in Philosophical Essays, ed. Roger Ariew, trans. and ed. Daniel Garber
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989). Quoted in Mercer, “Universal Sympathy,” 133. Mercer notes that Van Helmont and
Ficino also compare creatures to mirrors.
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goodness of God at the centre of things. The potential for consciousness, if not consciousness
itself, exists prior to human beings, in the nature of the world.

On the other hand, as we have seen earlier in this dissertation, there are materialist conceptions
of sympathy that follow in the tradition of Lucretius and Epicurus. These presented a materialist
model of the universe in which atoms or other corpuscles formed compounds based on their
“sympathy” or “likeness” to one another. It is the naturalistic version that is most similar to Pliny
the Elder’s conception of sympathy in the Natural History, where he claims that sympathy is an
attracting force and opposes it to a repulsing force, antipathy. Pliny’s version influenced
Erasmus, who had produced an immensely popular edition of the History in 1525. In one of
Erasmus’ Colloquies, De Amicitia (1530), he relates sympathy in humans, animals, and
inanimate objects to natural inclination. In the colloquy’s Argument, Erasmus writes: “Men have
a secret Antipathy against some Persons. Boys themselves love one Play-Fellow, but shun the
Company of another. Erasmus at eight Years of Age had a mortal Aversion to a Lyar, by some
secret Guidance of Nature. Every one ought to avoid that Way of Livelyhood, that he has a
natural Aversion to. We ought to have Charity for all, but Familiarity with very few.” 321 The
essential freedom to pursue one’s natural inclinations is associated with the humanist thinking
that paved the way for liberalism: so long as a person “does no hurt to any Body,” he is free to
take up the vocation and company of his choice. This essential freedom to pursue one’s
affections is related, as Erasmus says in his Argument, to a “secret Guidance of Nature,” which
suggests that such freedom is good, even divinely sanctioned, precisely because it is natural. By
listing the incontrovertible and “admirable” “manifest Footsteps of Sympathy and Antipathy, no
Cause of it appearing,” “even in Things that have neither Life nor Sense”—for example in iron
or ash trees—Erasmus is implying what Milton will later claim outright in his Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce: sympathy and antipathy are inarguable laws of nature that justify even
social action. For Milton, these unconscious impulses give adequate grounds for a husband’s
decision to remain married or get divorced, for “sympathy” is equated with “natural order,” and
“[God] commands us to force nothing against” it. 322 However—and this is crucial for my

Erasmus, The Colloquies, 301.

321
John Milton, The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, eds. Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard (Pittsburgh:
322
Duquesne University Press, 2010), 58.
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argument—after the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, first published in 1643, Milton never
again uses the word to describe an impulse felt by a man.

In Italy the materialist model of the universe influenced Girolamo Fracastoro’s 1546 De
sympathia et antipathia rerum, a critique of the Florentine Neoplatonism that privileged spirit
and the occult. In it, Fracastoro argues that sympathy and antipathy are not spectral forces
governing cosmic relations, but instead “express the causal regularity of natural events.” 323
Francis Bacon expressed a similar view in “The History of the Sympathy and Antipathy of
Things,” and later so did Descartes, 324 Hobbes,325 and Pierre Gassendi in the posthumous
Syntagma Philosophicum (1658).326

But some treatises on sympathy sought a middle ground between mysticism and materialism. In
the context of Lutheran natural philosophy, for example, Philipp Melanchthon rejected
sympathy’s magical uses, which the Neoplatonists Ficino and Pico had emphasized. Unlike
Luther himself, Melanchthon was an advocate of astrology and believed in the sympathetic
relationship between the stars and sublunary world. For Melanchthon, sympathia is an expression
of universal harmony and proves that the cosmos is governed by God. And for later Lutheran
natural philosophers, Jacob Milich and Caspar Peucer, the sympathy between medicinal plants
and parts of the body is a divine gift providing humans with the tools to heal illness.327 But for all
the Christian writers, Catholic and Protestant, Neoplatonist and mechanist, medieval and early
modern, sympathy is a universal phenomenon that proves God’s providence and harmonious
ordering of reality. It radically levels the categories of human and nature—for all things move

323Tomá Nejeschleba, “The Theory of Sympathy and Antipathy in Wittenberg in the 16 th century,” Philosophica-
Aesthetica 32 (2006): 83.
324 In Principia philosophiae, pt. IV, par. 187 Descartes writes: “there are no qualities which are so occult, no effects
of sympathy or antipathy so marvelous or so strange, nor any other thing so rare in nature (granted that it is
produced by purely material causes destitute of thought and free will), that its reason cannot be given by [the
principles of the mechanical philosophy].” In Oeuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin/CNRS,
1964), 9.309. Quoted in Ann E. Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98.
325 In De Corpore Hobbes explains magnetism atomically: “the attractive power of the loadstone is nothing else but
some motion of the smallest particles thereof.” The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. ed. W.
Molesworth (Yarmouth: Elibron Classics, 1839), 4.26, 30.
326 Mercer, “Universal Sympathy,” 112.
327 Nejeschleba, “Theory of Sympathy and Antipathy,” 86.
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under the operation of this force—while at the same time justifying a natural hierarchy that puts
humankind at the centre of the universe and gives it dominion over the earth.

Given the significance of the concept in sixteenth and seventeenth-century natural philosophy
and its appearance in the poetry and prose of the time, why has “sympathy” in Paradise Lost
been met with critical silence? Even those who have written excellent studies claiming that
Milton was influenced by various occultisms—Neoplatonism,328 the Zohar, Lurianic Cabala,329
Christian Cabala,330 the Merkabah331—avoid discussing sympathy at all, and virtually never
engage with the passage at the start of this chapter. Maybe sympathies and antipathies, on the
surface at least, seem to lack complexity and therefore don’t suit the pen of our most “sublime,”
most “encyclopaedic” poet. Or maybe criticism in the last few decades continues to rebel against
what Kevin Killeen has called “a long-standing tendency to see Milton enmeshed in old science
and unsophisticated philosophy.”332 We might agree with Frances Yates that Milton’s epic is, at
least in part, “a great Renaissance poem, conceived with the angelic and demonic forces of the
cosmos” derived from Agrippa.333 And of course “influences,” “peculiar graces,” “contagious
Fire,” wounded Earths and “bonds of nature” abound in Paradise Lost. But critics have been
careful to tidily explain these away by making recourse to Milton’s monist metaphysics and
Christianized Neoplatonism. 334

328 See Michael Fixler, “Milton’s Passionate Epic,” Milton Studies 1 (1969): 167-192; “Plato’s Four Furors and the
Real Structure of Paradise Lost,” PMLA 92, no. 5 (1977): 952-962.
329 Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: The Dial Press, 1920).
330 Zwi Werblowsky, “Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
18 (1955): 90-113. Werblowsky argues that Milton was influenced by the Christian Kabbalah filtered through a
Neoplatonic view through Pico, Fludd and Henry More rather than by the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah. Kitty
Cohen argues that Milton’s syncretism includes “hebraic motifs.” The Throne and the Chariot: Studies in Milton’s
Hebraism (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 23.
331 See Michael Lieb, “Encoding the Occult: Milton and the Traditions of Merkabah Speculation in the
Renaissance,” Milton Studies 37 (1999): 42-87. Balachandra Rajan famously wrote that Milton was “alive to the
speculative issues of his time” in “Paradise Lost” and the Seventeenth-Century Reader (London: Chatto & Windus,
1947), 10. Frances A. Yates does not discuss sympathy in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London:
Routledge, 1979).
332 Killeen, Kevin. “A Nice and Philosophical Account of the Origin of All Things”: Accommodation in Burnet’s
Sacred Theory (1681) and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 46 (2007): 107.
333 Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 212.
334 Hughes’s eloquent article, “Earth Felt the Wound,” explains away moments of pathetic fallacy by claiming that
Milton is not solipsistically putting Man at the centre of the universe, but is instead writing a world in which nature
is “a plenum of delicately sensitive reciprocities” (201). I think this is fair to say of Paradise Lost. But it’s worth
mentioning that in the Seventh Prolusion, a younger, more ecstatic Milton sketches a Paracelsian image of the
learned man (or perhaps, poet) at the core of the stars, earth and sea, to whom “Mother Nature herself has
surrendered, as if indeed some god had abdicated the throne of the world…”
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Mysticism is one thing, but surely Milton, that rigorous academic, would not rely on occult
quack science to drive his plot. Thus we keep Milton a rational, deliberate poet and Paradise
Lost an aesthetically closed, intellectual endeavour. John Milton, suggests one of his best critics,
declined “to seek final refuge in mystery.”335 Amplifying Sirluck’s claim, Gordon Teskey writes:
“Milton is often difficult, but he is seldom mysterious; indeed, he is one of the least mysterious
of poets, especially of religious poets.”336

Even in close-readings of the passage at the start of this chapter, critics tend to veer away from
its term, “sympathy,” by translating it into a close cognate. In a recent article, for example, Neil
Graves argues that the ontological “interrelations” between Sin, Death, and Satan make them a
dark parody of the Eastern Orthodox Trinity as well as the Latin one, and therefore an even more
intense expression of Milton’s Arianism. When he comes to those lines,

sympathy, or some connatural force

Powerful at greatest distance to unite
With secret amity things of like kind
By secretest conveyance

he manipulates them ever so slightly, so that “sympathy” becomes “harmony”: “The satanic triad
also demonstrates the harmony of unitary action found in the persons of the orthodox Trinity due
to their consubstantiality.”337

Another critical move is to confront head on the weird metaphysical significance of this passage,
but then to tame it by claiming that though in this instance “sympathy” may represent an occult
remnant rearing its head “uncomfortably” out of the bog, upon contact with air it swiftly evolves
into its enlightenment application, ‘the social passion.’ This is the tack Kevis Goodman takes in
an excellent essay, one of the only pieces that discusses the role played by sympathy in Paradise
Lost:

335 Ernst Sirluck’s line is taken from Michael Fixler’s classic essay, “Milton’s Passionate Epic,” 167.
336 Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006), 95.
337 Neil Graves, “The Trinity in Milton’s Hell” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 117.
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This “sympathy or some connatural force,” the “secret amity” attracting like things across
great distances, takes us back to a more archaic—and from the theological perspective
more dangerous—sense of the word “sympathy”: to the practice of magic and astrology,
to a world of mystical incantations, charms, alchemy and strange humors. For the post-
Enlightenment reader versed in Hume or Smith, the occult philosophy of a Ficino,
Paracelsus, or Thomas Vaughn, with their quasi-scientific uses of the word, may seem
unfamiliar; yet even in so worldly a thinker as Adam Smith, as Christopher Herbert has
argued, the occult is never far removed from a postulate about the sympathetic bonds
underlying culture. For Milton, the use of “sympathy” as a term in spiritual and demonic
magic would still have lingered, existing rather uncomfortably alongside newer
applications, including marital relations.338

This view corresponds to the historical account that tries to balance disenchantment theses of the
renaissance with revisionist accounts that emphasize the period’s saturation in magic and the
occult. As Seth Lobis has shown, recent scholarship like Goodman’s complicates both of these
narratives. In Robert Boyle, for example, Michael Hunter cautions us not to think in terms of
either a ‘decline of magic,’ or loyalty to various occultisms. Rather, we should envision “a rise in
schizophrenia in this period,” a split in the zeitgeist between rational materialism and magical
thinking.339 Yet Goodman sides more heavily with the rational account when she goes on to fully
civilize the passage by making it a type for Adam and Eve’s make-up scene, which happens later
in Book Ten:

Eve “in Adam wrought/ Commiseration”: this, too, is a scene of making. Placed shortly
after the work of “wondrous sympathy,” that “Mole immense wrought” between Hell and
earth, [Eve’s] speech initiates a new if fragile structure of human relationships after the
destruction of all relations brought on by the Fall. 340

I say civilize the passage, but it is only possible for Goodman to do so because she first
overstates the “archaic” quality of sympathy, as well as Milton’s discomfort with it. Made

338 Kevis Goodman, “Wasted Labor?” Milton’s Eve, the Poet’s work, and the Challenge of Sympathy,” ELH 64, no.
2 (1997): 429.
339 Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 28.
340 Goodman, “Wasted Labor?”, 431.
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popular again during the resuscitation of Greek texts in Renaissance Italy, it was a relatively
new, highly technical word in English, appearing in lexicons at the end of the sixteenth-century,
as we just saw.

As is well known, its application has major social consequence in the eighteenth century—it was
the key term in the political philosophy of Adam Smith and David Hume, contributed to the rise
of sentiment, and helped to validate anti-slavery and labour movements because, as Goodman
notes, sympathy retained its objective, “scientific” or material suggestiveness, ergo, to
sympathize with far off brethren or fellow nationals meant, literally, that their souls were seeping
out and latching onto yours.341

Thus to banish sympathy along with Bacon’s Idols would be pre-emptive. Bacon himself
believed in “sympathy” so long as it was defined as a natural and not a supernatural power. In his
glossary of philosophical terms, he offers the following definition: “By Sympathy, Consent,
Attraction, &c. we are to understand, not any imaginary Powers; but real Appetites, or Laws of
Motion, or Nature, found in certain Things, whereby they have a Tendency towards, or operate
upon, one another at a distance.”342 If we are seeking, like Goodman, for moments of discomfort,
surely we can find it here in Bacon’s conflation of “Appetites” and “Laws of Motion.”
“Appetites,” though instinctual, suggest a degree of self-determination, for, logically, anyway, a
thing can choose whether or not to indulge its hunger, and to what degree. But “Laws of Motion”
are external in both origin and operation—laws are devised by a sovereign power outside the
law-abider, who, in this context, can only obey. Then there is the applicability of “Appetite” to
all things in nature, even inanimate ones. While we can imagine a rock obeying laws of physics,
it is harder for us to picture it experiencing desire. And yet, this is what Bacon’s language
suggests we should do.

Taking up Bacon’s call to naturalize occult forces, the English natural philosopher Kenelm
Digby—a Catholic member of the Royal Society—published his immensely popular

341 See, for example, Christoph Martin Wieland’s Neoplatonic poem, The Sympathy of Souls (1756), which was
translated from the French into English by F.A. Winzer in 1795.
342 Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, 1st vol., ed. John M. Robertson (London: Routledge,
1905), lxiii.
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Discourse…Touching the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy 343 in 1664, just three years before the
publication of Paradise Lost. The Discourse explains and defends Digby’s curative “Vitriol,” a
“secret” powder that Digby claims was brought to Europe by a religious Carmelite who had
spent time in the Far East, and then, having arrived back in Italy, disseminated it among a
pedigreed group of Dukes, Kings and Digby himself (11). The powder could ostensibly cure
wounds from a distance by the sympathetic and mechanical movement of atoms in the air. This
seemingly miraculous curative, Digby promised, worked by a completely natural, material
process based on seven principles derived largely from Cartesian philosophy.344 According to
Digby, if you dip a bloody bandage in a mixture of water and his “Powder of Sympathy”—so
long as the mixture is slightly warmed up and in the sun—the bloody atoms will join with the
Vitriol, and travel through the air back to their source, the wound, no matter how far away the
wounded person is. This is because once atoms are travelling in the air on beams of light, they
feel compelled to find “the proper source and original root whence they came…and so re-enter
into their natural beds and primitive receptacles” (135).

Digby’s Discourse was immensely popular while Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Though the
Catholic philosopher’s work resided in the library of Milton’s friend Dr. Nathan Paget, and so
was available to him, Milton’s critics tend to dismiss him. Stephen Fallon, for example, claims
that “[w]hile Digby illustrates one more attempt at mid-century to articulate a new metaphysical

343 Kenelm Digby, A late discourse made in solemn assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France by
Sir Kenelm Digby, KT. &; touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy. Rendered faithfully out of
French into English By R. White, Gent. The fourth edition, corrected and augmented, with the additions of an index.
London: Printed by J.G., 1664.
344 First, air is filled with light and “light is a material and corporeal substance, and not an imaginary and
incomprehensible quality, as many Schoolmen averre” (19). Second, as light rebounds off the surface of bodies, it
loosens atoms off of them and carries the particles away (21). Third, “the Air is full throughout with small bodies of
atoms, or rather that which we call our Air, is not other than a mixture or confusion of such Atoms” (34-35). Fourth,
bodies are infinitely divisible, which is why we do not notice their continual diminishment (44). Fifth, there are all
sorts of attractions between bodies “altogether differing from that which their universal causes should make them
hold,” such as suction, magnetism and electrical attraction (53). Digby’s powder, though, works by the attractions of
“the Flame,” as “when the smoke of a candle put out draws the flame of that which burns hard by,” and “Filtration,
whereby a humid body mounts upon a dry body, or when the contrary is done” (54). His sixth principle is a
sympathetic one: like attracts like and everything is drawn toward its natural place. Thus, “when Fire or some hot
body attracts the air, if it happens that within that air there be found some dispersed atoms of the same nature with
the body which draws them, the attraction of such atoms is made more powerfully than if they were bodies of a
different nature, and these atoms do stay, stick and mingle with more willingnesse with the body which draws them”
(68). Seven, bodies do not just emit atoms, they attract “like” atoms as well, and “the body which attracts them to
itself, draws likewise after them that which accompanies them, as also that which sticks, and is glued and united
unto them” (116).
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system, I do not treat him at length here because his work neither closely parallels Milton’s nor
presents, like Hobbes’s, a particular threat to Milton’s beliefs.” 345 Actually Digby’s work does
pose a threat to Milton’s beliefs. “The fact is,” writes John Henry, “Digby was not just a natural
philosopher who happened to be a Roman Catholic; he was a Roman Catholic natural
philosopher. That is to say, he was a natural philosopher who developed his philosophy
deliberately to underpin his Catholic religious beliefs.”346 Some of these beliefs directly
contrasted with Milton’s own, such as Digby’s commitment to the indestructible, immaterial
nature of the immortal human soul, which he aimed to prove by reason, as Catholics had been
called to do since Pope Leo X issued a Bull in connection with the fifth Lateran Council of 1513.
And unlike so many Protestant thinkers of the day who rejected scholastic authority—including
Milton—Digby claimed to be an overt Aristotelian, although he altered Aristotle’s doctrines to
suit his corpuscular theories. Perhaps most importantly, royalists like Hobbes, Rochester, and
Digby turn in varying degrees to materialism in a reaction against Puritan political rebellion,
which is so bound up with religious enthusiasm. 347

While for the Catholic royalist Digby, sympathy is a disenchanted natural force acting upon
bodies, for the radical puritan Milton it is a “secret,” “mysterious” power directly related to the
will of God. That said, one of the possibilities we must entertain is that Milton is being sarcastic
when he has Sin move by “sympathy or som connatural force.” If Sin, Death and Satan are a
dark parody of the Catholic trinity, it only seems logical that they might operate by, perhaps,
atomic forces developed by Catholic natural philosophers. But the tone of that “wondrous
sympathy” Milton speaks of in his Argument to Book Ten sounds genuine, not caustic. And later
we learn that the Father is directly responsible for inspiring Sin’s feeling of sympathy—hardly
possible if this were a simple parody.

Even when it would make sense to talk about this passage, critics don’t. In The Matter of
Revolution, John Rogers’ wonderful book on what he calls the “Vitalist Moment” at the heart of

345 Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 9, 99n23.
346 John Henry, “Sir Kenelm Digby: Recusant Philosopher,” in Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy, eds. G.A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorell, and Jill Kraye (New York: Routledge, 2010), 44.
347 This is Reid Barbour’s thesis, repeated by David Norbrook in his introduction to Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and
Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (London: Blackwell, 2001), xvii.
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the English and Scientific revolutions, “sympathy” is conspicuously absent. Rogers claims that
by “an analogical imperative”348 arising from the belief in the oneness of the universe,
seventeenth-century political philosophies and theories of matter were believed to be so
ontologically related that reform in one catalyzed radical alteration in the other. There is thus “a
powerful current of political energy charging the literature of materialism.”349 Rogers draws an
alignment on the one hand between theories of self-moving matter and an emerging liberalism,
and on the other between materialist theories that claim matter moves as a result of external force
and Puritan providentialism as well as political absolutism. In the ideological ferment of the mid-
seventeenth-century, Paradise Lost registers a particularly complex agitation: “The tension in
Milton’s poem between his science of vitalist agency and his seemingly Calvinist
providentialism exposes the necessarily dialectical origins of the ideology of liberalism with
which Milton has come to be so powerfully associated.”350 Though Rogers spends two chapters
examining Milton’s attempts to reconcile “the mechanistic conception of nature with the
Christian idea of providence”351 he, like most people interested in Milton’s science, focuses on
the poet’s portrait of Chaos, the Creation scene, and Raphael’s monist depiction of the universe
as a series of spiritual and physical levels ascending to God. Perhaps Rogers, like Hughes and
Goodman, does not consider “sympathy” to be anything more than a ‘quasi-scientific’ remnant.

But had Rogers engaged with Sin’s experience of sympathy in Book Ten, his reading of the
creation scene in Book Seven may have been different. Milton’s primordial Chaos of warring
atoms is often read as an engagement with Hobbes’s mechanistic materialism and, following
Rogers’s thesis, the analogous state of war between individuals before sovereignty. As Milton
shows Chaos to be vitalized and transformed by divine infusion, claims Rogers, so he poetically
overcomes Hobbesian materialism. But at the moment of infusion, something in the epic’s logic
goes awry:

Darkness profound
Cover’d th’ Abyss: but on the wat’ry calm

348 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry & Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 9.
349 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, xi.
350 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, xii.
351 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 147.
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His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,

And vital virtue infus’d, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg’d
The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life; then founded, then conglob’d
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the Air. (7.233-41)

“In one remarkable line,” Rogers writes, “Milton appears to indicate that there remained a
portion of the deep for which the process of spiritualization simply did not take.”352 The “black
tartareous cold Infernal dregs” are the remarkable excrement of a creation process that in
Paradise Lost is strangely as digestive as it is gestative. They represent “a residual trace of
dualism” or even a Manichean shadow, which “a truly monist universe, permeated entirely with
divinity, cannot logically accommodate.” This seems true if we consider the view of Milton’s
contemporary monist Anne Conway, for whom God’s goodness, wisdom, and vital creativity are
“intimately present” 353 in everything in existence, which leads her to claim that there is no hell
and that all creatures, no matter how evil will infinitely ascend toward God. 354 A. S. P.
Woodhouse’s observation in regards to Milton’s description of Chaos can probably be applied
here, suggests Rogers: “It would appear that this is a relic of some anxious consideration of the
problem of evil.”355 Rogers goes on to claim that the process of digestion and excretion taking
place just before creation is akin to the “electoral process of sifting and refining,” which Milton
sketches in The Readie and Easie Way, written just before the Stuart Restoration in 1660. As
Milton’s youthful ideals “toward utopian egalitarianism” morphed “toward a hierarchical
segregation of elements according to what is essentially their degree of spiritualization,” so the
distribution of the Son’s “vital warmth” throughout all of creation is prefaced by an essential
purge.356

352 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 134.

353 Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter Loptson (The Hague:
Martinues Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 149.
354 Conway writes: “And that the worst of Creatures; yea, the most cursed Devils, after many and long-continued
Torments, shall at length return to a State of Goodness.” Principles, 191.
355 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 137.
356 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 139.
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It is true that the purging happens before creation. Once those things “Adverse to life” are
banished, “then” the Son begins separating elements and “conglob[ing] like things to like,”
initiating a system of organization based on the principles of sympathy and antipathy. After the
purge, says Rogers, “the Miltonic chaos is transformed by Creation into an autonomous universe
through a single, nonrepeatable act of divine infusion.”357 But the Son is not the only one who
‘creates,’ nor is this the sole instance of divine infusion, though it may be the most clear and
unimpeded one. First, the Father has already made heaven, hell, the angels, and the Son, and all
the tools used by the Son during his act of creation are from “God’s Eternal store” (7.226).
Second, Sin and Death perform a parody of creation when they, too, engage with primordial
matter to build their “broad highway” connecting hell to earth:

Then Both from out Hell Gates into the waste

Wide Anarchy of Chaos damp and dark
Flew diverse, and with Power (thir Power was great)
Hovering upon the Waters; what they met
Solid or slimy, as in raging Sea
Tost up and down, together crowded drove
From each side shoaling towards the mouth of Hell.
As when two Polar Winds blowing adverse
Upon the Cronian Sea, together drive
Mountains of Ice, that stop th’ imagin’d way
Beyond Petsora Eastward, to the rich
Cathaian Coast. The aggregated Soil
Death with his Mace petrific, cold and dry,
As with a Trident smote, and fix’t as firm
As Delos floating once; the rest his look
Bound with Gorgonian rigor not to move… (10.282-297)

Critics are right to read this as a direct inversion of the Son’s act of creation. While the Spirit
spreads his “brooding wings” upon the water, with ‘brood’ evoking both a sense of maternal care

357 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 132.

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and deep thought, Sin and Death “hove[r]” like a stench, or as beasts about to pounce. While the
Son’s “infusion” is organic and leaves the enlivened matter free to grow and move, Sin and
Death petrify the “aggregated Soil” and bind “with Gorgonian rigor” something ambiguously
called “the rest” with Death’s “look” (293-97). While the Son rightly sorts Chaos’s materials by
the principle of “like to like,” Sin and Death grab whatever comes within their clutches and force
them unnaturally together in perverse conglomerations of unlike-to-unlike. However, the impulse
that compels Sin to lead Death out of hell in the first place, the sudden surge of feeling that rises
within Sin and forces her, almost instantaneously, to obey its movements, this “wondrous
sympathy” is another kind of divine infusion—the Father’s, not the Son’s. We know this because
he tells us so:

See with what heat these Dogs of Hell advance

To waste and havoc yonder World, which I
So fair and good created, and had still
Kept in that state, had not the folly of Man
Let in these wasteful Furies, who impute
Folly to mee, so doth the Prince of Hell
And his Adherents, that with so much ease
I suffer them to enter and possess
A place so heav’nly, and conniving seem
To gratify my scornful Enemies,
That laugh, as if transported with some fit
Of Passion, I to them had quitted all,
At random yielded up to their misrule;
And know not that I call’d and drew them thither
My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth… (10.616-30)

In this rather Shakespearian soliloquy, we see two things clearly. The first is that the Father
“call’d and drew” Sin and Death toward Eden himself, without alerting any of the angels or the
Son, and without needing to change his own position in space. The second is that he did so in
such a way that Sin and Death “know not” exactly what happened. Already it appears that the
mode by which the Father “drew them thither” is none other than this “wondrous sympathy,”
arising from Sin’s interior, bonding her to its desire, and directly affecting her “resolve.”
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Because Milton’s theology defines evil in an Augustinian way as the total absence of good,
critics such as Stephen Fallon have aimed to prove that Sin and Death are ontologically different
from the epic’s other characters. They are, after all, surprising—and for many readers starting
with Dr. Johnson, distressing—allegories in an otherwise mimetic narrative. But there is no
getting around the fact that they possess “Power.” “Thir Power was great,” the narrator states
(10.284). Sin and Death are given what appears to be absolute sanction to wreak “Outrage” and
“Discord” on a fallen earth (10.707). But they are compelled to do so no less absolutely by the
Father himself, making the triumph of Sin and Death a victory for God. In the final analysis then,
Regina Schwartz, I think, is right to say that “subsuming this Other, evil, to divinity is the project
of [Milton’s] theodicy.”358 What we might broadly call ‘subsumption’ is also the project of
Milton’s aesthetic. By allusion, parody or other “double-voiced” discourses, he draws in other,
sometimes enemy, literary, philosophical or theological universes, and forcefully reorients them
toward that opaque, nominalist mystery, the Mount of God. That he sometimes fails—that Satan
is more alluring than Milton probably intended, that the allusions to classic works retain their
own seductive reminiscence that conflicts with the epic’s telos—is paradoxically one of the
reasons for the poem’s enduring tension and resonance.

4.2 Sympathy and Ways of Knowing

Let’s return to the beginning. The passage at the start of this chapter dramatizes two kinds of
character motivation. First, Sin rationalizes her decision to act. Hell is the only place that can
“fit” Satan’s crime, so if he’s not in hell, he’s not being punished, ergo, he must be succeeding.
But logic can only take her so far. What Sin really means is that she has an authoritative feeling
that Satan is succeeding. She senses something “of like kind” across space, to which she is
unified. It is herself she detects out there, “the sin by Man [on earth] committed,” and to remain
herself, she must gather together all the aspects of her being. This begs us to ask what exactly Sin
is, and how she differs—if she does—from the epic’s other characters. Surely, because she is
Sin, her essence is specifically moral in that she has a moral power to spread corruption, discord,
and woe. But does the fact that Sin is a dark moral figure necessarily mean that she is immaterial

Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: University of
358
Chicago Press, 1988), 17.
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as well? Are the allegories, as Stephen Fallon argues, “insubstantial beings,” dramatic
encapsulations of “the Augustinian conception of evil as the privation of entity,” and “of a
different order of reality from those [characters] of mimetic narrative”? 359 We’ll begin with the
hypothesis that Milton’s allegorical figures, because they reflect the ideas they represent, are
motivated by external forces (that is, their actions are motivated by the intellectual imperative
upon which they are based), while his mimetic characters are motivated by internal,
psychological forces that someone of their “type” would most likely experience. What we can
glean from this is that ‘type’ characters—and Milton’s mimetic characters are types—are similar
to allegorical characters, only the idea that organizes allegory so obviously, such as “sin,” is
relocated to the character’s interior where they mingle with the character’s more unique
personality. Thus Eve is vain, not Vanity. Or, Eve contains vanity, as well as other traits that
conflict with and are in excess of vanity.

Does Milton give Sin the same capacity to self-generate emotions and judgements as, say, Adam,
who chooses to eat the apple “without least impulse or shadow of Fate” (3.120) on God’s part,
but because he, himself, feels the “Link of Nature draw [him]” too strongly to Eve? Or is she
merely a receptive vessel with a heightened degree of consciousness, who notices, articulates,
and then responds to the instincts that arise deep within her, despite herself? If Sin lacks the
ability Milton gives to Adam, to reach her own desire and judgement, surely it is this that makes
her an allegorical figure, for allegories obey the abstraction they represent. They do not have
wills of their own. What to do, then, with Sin’s spontaneous experience of sympathy?

In the passage, Sin experiences an “instinct” or “attraction” that compels her to move. If we
recall Digby’s Discourse, in which he states that atoms are drawn toward “the proper source and
original root whence they came,” we can conclude something similar in regards to Sin. Emerging
as a personification of Satan’s perverse desire before the creation of Adam and Eve, at the
moment of the fall she is compelled to join her original (135). That sympathy appears here as a
“connatural” force rather than a natural or supernatural one is regular enough. Digby uses
sympathy, attraction, and connaturality as cognates in his Discourse when, for example, he
discusses the phenomenon of wine “awakening” in the spring: “Now those winy spirits that issue

359 Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 168; 171; 172.

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from the buds and flowers, filling the air, (as the spirits of Rosemary used to do in Spain) are
drawn into the vessels by the connatural and attractive virtue of the wine within…” (80).

The category of the “connatural” is especially developed in the work of Thomas Aquinas, where
it is discussed in the context of ways of knowing. Where a natural inclination is something we
are born with and cannot help (for example, we are naturally inclined to breathe and to eat) and a
supernatural inclination is one that originates from a place totally beyond humanity’s power and
comprehension (the grace of God would make itself known to us by supernatural inclinations
toward belief in and worship of God), connatural inclinations are instincts we are not born with,
but acquire by a process of habit or acclimation until they become ‘natural.’ Thus, in a human
context at least, connaturality is related to what we would now call development by ‘nurture,’
and what Aquinas called “second nature.” It is, in other words, our ‘nature’ in the sense of
personality, which we develop by being situated in a greater world.

But “connatural” can describe phenomena outside the human context as well, and in this case it
indicates an attraction between two things caused by something they share, whether that be a
common origin, or a quality such as shape, weight, or density. If two things share an origin, they
are “related.” This is the sense in which we saw Digby use it when he articulates a relationship
between fermenting wine and pollinating vines (because the wine had once been “buds”), and it
is what Milton means when he has Adam say to Michael in response to the violent theatre of
human history the angel shows him, “But is there yet no other way, besides/These painful
passages, how we may come/To Death, and mix with our connatural dust?” (11.527-29) If, on
the other hand, two objects share a quality, for example, if two or more atoms share the same
“figure” of, say, smoothness, they form a relationship based on “resemblance.” In every case,
“connaturality” describes the nature of a thing in its environment, accounting for the influences
that contribute to its formation, whether the “thing” is a human mind, fermenting wine, or dust.

In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas considers the special kind of inspired wisdom that compels a
person to seek out the good. Unlike “knowledge,” which resides in the intellect, is a subset of
“judgement,” and is specifically human, by “wisdom” Aquinas means a subset of judgement that
resides in the intellect but has its “cause” in the will or appetite, and which is not human, but a
“gift” of divine charity. If at this moment in Paradise Lost Milton is alluding to something like
Aquinas’s complex account of “connaturality,” does this mean that Milton has Sin act because
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she is compelled to do so by a special kind of wisdom, which is a gift corresponding to charity?

That he would place the apparatus of grace in Sin’s being is, of course, an astounding
dramatization of Aquinas’ injunction to “hate, in the sinner, the sin, and to love in him, his being
a man capable of bliss; [for] this is to love him truly out of charity for God’s sake” (ST II-
II.25.6.corpus).360 Quite obviously, Milton’s Sin is neither a “[hu]man,” nor “capable of bliss.”
Then what is Milton doing? Is this just another one of his parodic inversions? For now, suffice it
to say that in this scene Sin’s cognitive framework resembles a Thomist one, which implies, first,
that she will forge a connatural relationship with the object of her contemplation, and, second, if
the object of her contemplation is “a Divine thing,” her impulse to contemplate it is “a gift of the
Holy Ghost.” In this context, contemplation does not need to be conscious or rational and can
instead be an unspeakable feeling of attraction toward an end. In the Summa Theologica the
theological objects our “wisdom” compels us to contemplate are always virtues (the example
Thomas uses in this Question is chastity). Obviously Sin cannot be intentionally contemplating a
virtue. It remains to be seen whether at this moment in Paradise Lost Sin is contemplating a
virtue accidentally, despite herself.

First we need to deal with the word I’ve kept using here: contemplation. Aquinas claims there
are two ways to attain correct judgment of “Divine things,” or virtues. One is by “perfect use of
reason” and the other is by “sympathy or a connaturality [compassio sive connaturalitas] for
Divine things”:

I answer that, As stated above (A. 1), wisdom denotes a certain rectitude of judgement
according to the Eternal Law. Now rectitude of judgment is twofold: first, on account of
perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter
about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with
his reason forms a right judgment, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who
has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality.

Accordingly it belongs to the wisdom that is an intellectual virtue to pronounce

right judgement about Divine things after reason has made its inquiry, but it belongs to

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1st Complete American Edition, 2nd vol, trans. Fathers of the English
360
Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1967).
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wisdom as a gift of the Holy Ghost to judge aright about them on account of
connaturality with them: thus Dionysius says (Div. Nom. Ii) that Hierotheus is perfect in
Divine things, for he not only learns, but is patient of, Divine things.

Now this sympathy or connaturality for Divine things is the result of charity,
which unites us to God, according to 1 Cor. Vi. 17: He who is joined to the Lord, is one
spirit. Consequently wisdom which is a gift, has its cause in the will, which cause is
charity, but it has its essence in the intellect, whose act is to judge aright, as stated above.
(I-II, Q. 14, A. 1)

(ST II-II.45.2)

To be clear: the objects being contemplated by wisdom here are moral and theological virtues.
This is a practical kind of wisdom related to our apprehension of good and evil, and how to live.
Aquinas divides wisdom into two species: rational thought, and a more instinctual and
spontaneous kind of knowing. At various times he refers to this second way of attaining
knowledge as “judgment by inclination,” “affective cognition” (cognitio affective) or
“experiential cognition” (cognitio experimentalis).361 This affective, appetitive, and instinctual
kind of knowing is closely related to Jerome’s term “synderesis,” which can be defined as “the
immediate apprehension of the first practical moral principles of the natural law.” 362
“Immediate” is the key term. While it is the painstaking rationalization of virtue—the kind
Aquinas is performing in the Summa Theologica—that may “pronounce right judgment about
Divine things” in a prescriptive way, it is “sympathy or connaturality for Divine things” that
enables us to act rightly at any given moment, without first having to think about it. We are
dealing with complex moral instincts here rather than evident self-preserving ones—the instinct
to act chastely because we have an immediate apprehension of fortitude, not the instinct to
withdraw our hand from a furnace. So in the sense of connatural knowledge, what I’ve called
Sin’s contemplation is, in fact, unconscious. For Aquinas and also for Milton, moral laws are
“natural laws” and cannot be thought of as something distinct from nature. Aquinas had faith that

361 I am drawing heavily upon Taki Suto’s thorough description of connaturality in “Virtue and Knowledge:
Connatural Knowledge According to Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 1 (2004): 61-79.
362 Robert A. Greene, “Instinct of Nature: Natural Law, Synderesis, and the Moral Sense,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 58, no. 2 (1997): 173.
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nature and human society are linked, of the same moral order, and comprehensible to one
another.

While wisdom by “right reason” is intellectual, wisdom by “connaturality” is practical and has
more to do with a person’s ethos than his or her mental capacity. So Aquinas firmly locates
wisdom by right reason in the intellect, but is less sure about what to do with wisdom by
connaturality. It isn’t clear why in this passage Aquinas keeps connatural knowing in the intellect
by “essence,” in other words, in terms of the “act” of right judgment, when, he admits, it “has its
cause in the will.” No surprise, then, that later Bonaventure moves this instinctual, non-
discursive kind of knowing to “the affective rather than the intellectual part of man’s nature.” 363
In others words, even in Summa Theologica, the implication is that “sympathy or connaturality”
(compassio sive connaturalitas) is a kind of wisdom that comes from the body and governs the
relationship between the body and nature. This is, of course, how we think of “instincts” now.

Aquinas clearly states that “sympathy or connaturality for Divine things is the result of charity,
which unites us to God,” “charity” being of the will, not the intellect. 364 “Charity” refers both to
the charity of God, which is why this kind of wisdom is also a “gift,” and to our own feelings of
charity. In fact, our charity is also divine charity, and that is why we are united to God through
its power. By loving our neighbour, we love God. Thus “sympathy,” as in so many other places,
is here related to “love.”

We can demonstrate this more rigorously. Earlier in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas describes
the precise mechanism by which charity unites us to God in relation to “desire”:

Because where there is the greater charity, there is the more desire; and desire in a certain
degree makes the one desiring apt and prepared to receive the object desired. Hence he
who possesses the more charity, will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more
beautified.365

363 Ibid.
364 “Now charity is in the will as its subject, and not in the intellect…” II-II, Q. 45, A. 2.
365 ST I, Q. 12, A. 6.
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Here, once again, the “object desired” is a moral object that we draw into ourselves by a complex
process of cognition, which I’ll describe in a moment. Because it is love (amor) that brings
desire, and desire is an appetitive force that always accompanies charity, and charity causes
sympathy or connaturality for Divine things, connatural knowing is a kind of love. “Love,” in
turn, is a “principle of movement” governed by sympathies and antipathies, or, as Aquinas says,
“attraction” and repulsion”:

Now, in the movements of the appetitive faculty, as it were, good has a force of
attraction, while evil has a force of repulsion. In the first place, therefore, good causes, in
the appetitive power, a kind of inclination, aptitude or connaturality in respect of good:
and this belongs to the passion of love. 366

It needn’t bother us too much that here connaturality is in the appetite rather than in the intellect,
for nowhere does Aquinas give a systematic account of connatural knowledge, and as we just
noticed, even when he does place connaturality in the intellect he is careful to say that its “cause”
is charity, which arises from the will. 367

Sympathy in Paradise Lost and elsewhere operates by mimicry: so, for example, by watching
each other metamorphose into serpents, the devils of Book Ten themselves change. This “horrid
sympathy” (10.540) is the mechanism or “mysterious ter[m]” (10.173) of justice by which God
takes possession of their bodies. Aquinas writes:

Now in each of these appetites, the principle of movement towards the end loved is called
love. In the natural appetite the principle of this movement is the appetitive subject’s
connaturality with the things to which it tends, and can be called natural love: thus the
connaturality of a heavy body for the centre is by reason of its heaviness and can be
called natural love. In like manner the coaptitude of the sensitive appetite or of the will to
some good, that is to say, its complacency in good, is called sensitive love, or intellectual
or rational love.368

366 ST I-II, Q. 23, A. 4.

367 Suto, “Virtue and Knowledge,” 65.
368 ST I-II, Q. 26, A. 1.
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While the various kinds of love are divided into “rational” and “natural” categories,
“connaturality” functions identically upon immaterial and material reality. Just as a person who
acts chastely has “sympathy or connaturality” for the moral virtue of chastity, so a heavy body
has connaturality for its appropriate place—the centre—“by reason of its heaviness.” There are
severe and, to us, terrible normative implications here. Only those with dispositions tending
toward the good will make correct moral judgments, while those with dispositions tending
toward evil will make wrong moral judgments. These laws of what you might call moral motion
are as absolute as the law that draws iron to a lodestone.

This idea seems to limit human freedom, for human beings would navigate the world not as
individual agents but as manifestations of moral realties, or as likenesses. The passive act of
merely recognizing one’s image motivates behaviour, even against our will. Thankfully,
according to what one writer calls Aquinas’s “general optimism concerning human nature,” 369
we are not necessarily stuck with our “good” or “bad” dispositions. Here is where
“connaturality” comes into play. Aquinas distinguishes between “first nature” as something we
are born with, and “second nature” as the personality we develop after a process of education. In
the example of “chastity,” the chaste person’s connaturality for chastity arises from an acquired
aptitude for fortitude, resulting from the divine gift of charity. Their chasteness is part of their
“second nature.” By living charitably, we habituate ourselves to the good over a process of time
and practice. This doesn’t mean that everyone will form happy habits and correct moral
judgement. It does mean that anyone who acts out a moral virtue, such as chastity, will come to
understand chastity as a “Divine thing” because they become connatural or coeval with it. Once a
person is connatural with a virtue, it becomes less likely that he or she will sin. Thus
connaturality, or what I’ve called the logic of like-to-like, does not operate by tautology after
all—not quite—but by a complicated process of indwelling.

Again, “charity” can be translated as a “desire” to know virtue properly. To get at the nuts and
bolts of this process, we should look not just at kinds of knowing, but at how Aquinas explains
the process of cognition, or acquiring knowledge. He describes cognition by the postulate that
“the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver” (receptum est in recipiente

Meghan J. Clark, “Love of God and Neighbor: Living Charity in Aquinas’ Ethics,” New Blackfriars 92 (2011):
369
419.
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per modum recipientis).”370 In other words, the “received,” or object being contemplated, must
adapt itself to fit the “receiver,” or human intellect. This sounds almost Kantian, except Aquinas
has none of Kant’s scepticism. Truths can be known, understanding can occur, Aquinas is sure,
by divinely ordained processes that bridge the abyss between material reality and
comprehension.

To Aquinas, the human intellect is immaterial. When the immaterial human intellect is cogitating
upon a material object, it cannot “receive” that object unless the object changes into an
immaterial likeness (similitudo) of itself. However, when the immaterial intellect cogitates upon
moral or religious virtues, these do not need to change themselves into likenesses because they
are already immaterial. In this case it is the receiver, or human intellect, which needs to change
into a likeness of the virtue. Metamorphosis of this kind is a necessary phase in the act of
thinking upon virtue at all. This is the process of connaturality by which we become virtuous
simply by attempting to comprehend virtue. Taki Suto describes the phenomena in more detail:

Following Aristotle, Aquinas often claims that the cognizer becomes identical with the
object of cognition in the act of cognition. In speculative cognition [or cognition of
material objects], the statement is understood to mean that the cognizer becomes the
object by receiving its form. In affective cognition or cognition through connaturality, on
the other hand, the statement is understood to mean that the cognizer becomes the object
by himself becoming like the object. For example, in loving music, one understands
music profoundly by becoming profoundly musical, and in loving honor, one understands
honorable actions by becoming honorable. 371

Suto’s elucidation strikes a chord with a comment John Peter Rumrich makes, that in Comus
“sincere devotion to Chastity transforms the body “by degrees to the soul’s essence/Till all be
made immortal” (462-63).”372 Metamorphosis catalyzed by mimicry seems to be one of the core
organizing principles of Milton’s fictional universes, as it is for Aquinas’s cognitive model. This
is true even for the Father in Paradise Lost, who finds the image of his thoughts reflected back to
him—and so, perhaps, crystallized or clarified—in his Son’s face. But if all the characters are

370 Suto, “Virtue and Knowledge,” 71. The Aquinas quote is from ST I, Q. 84, A. 1.
371 Ibid.
372 John Peter Rumrich, “Metamorphosis in Paradise Lost,” Viator 20 (1989): 313.
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drawn toward their likenesses or images, only in some cases are these compulsions called
“sympathy.”

I don’t claim that Milton was thinking of Aquinas’s lines here, but consciously or not the cluster
of complex phenomena which Aquinas relates to this kind of connatural knowledge appears also
in this moment of Paradise Lost. We have two acts of judgement in Sin’s reasoning that Satan
succeeded and then in her more “affective” decision to travel across the universe to him. Also,
the act of “connatural” judgment is related to a “principle of movement,” in that Sin will cross
the cosmos to find her likeness. At this moment in his epic, Milton is dedicating a significant
number of lines to dramatizing a “secret” and “wondrous” kind of wisdom. Sin is, quite literally,
possessed. She knows she can and must make this journey. The questions then are: how does she
know, and why does Milton devote so much space to gesturing toward, but refusing to articulate,
the mystical root of her knowledge?

4.3 Sympathy and God’s Action in the World

What we know for certain is that Sin’s feeling rises within her because God wills it to. As we
saw earlier, the Father himself reveals that Sin and Death “know not that I call’d and drew them
thither/My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth/Which man’s polluting Sin with taint hath
shed” (10.629-31). I have not thus far spoken of the sin committed in Eden, focusing instead on
Sin’s compulsion. It is now important to state that though the Father does explicitly “call” Sin
and Death toward Paradise by the operation of sympathy, he does not do so to bring evil into his
creation, but to absorb the evil “Which man’s polluting Sin with taint hath shed.” Licking up “the
draff and filth,” these “Hell-hounds” are something like animated dumps, absorbing the rancid
milk and putrid meat from the once pristine kitchen of this rather edible universe. Death
certainly—and Death’s vulture-like maw—is figured as an archetypal consumer, or decomposer.
Though the Father does not create Death, once Death is there, he uses him for an essentially
natural purpose. Milton can therefore have it both ways: he can emphasize God’s transcendent
power over Sin and Death without compromising God’s goodness.

But I would still like to make clear that the Father’s call represents his active, not permissive,
will. Even before this moment, as far back as Book Two, during Satan’s own cosmic journey
from hell to Eden, the narrator clearly states God’s intentions regarding Sin and Death in a rather
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odd prolepsis: “So he [Satan] with difficulty and labor hard/Mov’d on, with difficulty and labor
hee;/But hee once past, soon after when man fell,/Strange alteration! Sin and Death
amain/Following his track, such was the will of Heav’n,/Pav’d after him a broad and beat’n way”
(2.1021-26). It is fascinating, but not surprising, that the first two lines of this summary mimic
the syntax of the Priestly version of the creation scene at Genesis 1.27: “So God created
humankind in his image, in the image of God created he them; male and female created he
them.” The point may be that Milton is parodying Satan’s false creativity by nodding at the
“difficulty and labor” he suffers versus the ease with which God says, “Let there be!” But
alluding at this moment to the creation scene signals that Satan’s voyage through Chaos is
another occasion for divine infusion, which continues to happen behind the scenes, extending
from what is surely the absolute mystery at the epic’s core: God’s will.

It is helpful here to consider the distinction between making and deciding, which Teskey draws
in his discussion of Milton’s God: “in all cases, [creation] is rooted not in the concept of making
but in that of decision. By such decisiveness God’s creating the world is an act of divine will, not
of divine skill. God does not fashion the world, like an artisan; God decides that this world shall
be rather than not be…Creation is thus an act not of God’s power but of his will.” 373 Paradise
Lost shows us an act of divine making in its dramatization of Genesis 1 and 2. The Son
circumscribes space, broods on waters, separates elements, brings light and matter into being by
his word, and breathes life into the dust to make man. But behind all this is a separate, more
mysterious act of divine willing, for the Son’s extended creation scene is nested in the Father’s
“Immediate” command, which the Son, as the embodied Word, performs (8.175). True, the view
of creation we get from Raphael must be accommodated to our senses, and is thus reluctantly
rendered in narrative time, a staged reluctance directed as much at the Genesis account as at
Milton’s own, for the poet is hardly unaware of scripture’s ‘literariness.’ Perhaps it is for this
reason that Milton imbeds the Son’s creative act—the Genesis account, that is—in the Father’s
thought. There is no biblical precedent for such a palimpsest. It follows that if Rogers’s claim is
correct, that the Son’s divine “infusion” is a “single, nonrepeatable act,” it is not the case that the
Father’s creative activity is limited to a onetime happening. That the devil and his legion of
fallen angels are able to rise at all from the burning lake, that Satan is “left…at large to his own

373 Teskey, Delirious Milton, 101.

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dark designs,”—these, the narrator tells us, are due to the “high permission of all-ruling
Heaven,” “the sufferance of supernal Power” (1.213; 212; 241). Of course to suffer one’s
creature to act freely is different than to will one’s creature to act. This is crucial in Milton’s
view and distinguishes God’s permissive from his creative will. But when Sin and Death follow
Satan’s path toward Eden at the moment of the fall, it is explicitly “the will of Heav’n.” Such a
view corresponds with Anne Conway’s: “For so God perpetually worketh; and his Work is to
Create, or give Being to Creatures, according to that Eternal Idea or Wisdom which is in him.”374

Sin’s motivation thus represents an unconscious compulsion to align the self with divine willing.
It is, as I’ve said, a kind of possession, an impulse that rises within her but originates from
without. Sin’s description of her feeling—“sympathy or som connatural force”—enhances the
dramatic irony of this moment, as she unwittingly alludes to the special kind of “wisdom”
Aquinas calls “sympathy or connaturality for divine things.” If “knowledge” means what is
known, “wisdom” is the quality of having good judgment. The joke is, Sin has it.

So in Paradise Lost it would seem that “sympathy” is explicitly related to active divine will—not
just passive divine sufferance—being an operation of the Father’s which he performs upon
creatures who “know not” what is happening to them. Certainly God’s active operation upon his
creatures by sympathy is explicit during the wonderful scene in the middle of Book 10 where the
devils in Hell are forced to change into serpents after the Son has delivered his terms of justice
all the way across the world in Eden. Satan, “wond’ring at himself” has already transformed into
a snake, as have his high-ranking officials, and as they slither in panic out of Pandemonium into
the “open Field” where the demonic army await:

Sublime with expectation when to see

In Triumph issuing forth thir glorious Chief;
They saw, but other sight instead, a crowd
Of ugly Serpents; horror on them fell,
And horrid sympathy; for what they saw,
They felt themselves now changing; down thir arms,
Down fell both Spear and Shield, down they as fast,

374 Conway, Principles, 161.

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And the dire hiss renew’d, and the dire form

Catcht by Contagion, like in punishment,
As in thir crime. (10.536-45)

Eventually, says the narrator, “thir lost shape, permitted, they resum’d,/Yearly enjoin’d, some
say, to undergo/This annual humbling certain number’d days,/To dash thir pride, and joy for
Man seduc’t” (574-77). Though the Father passively “permits” the demons’s badness—they
resume their powerful forms for most of the year—he actively “enjoins” the punishment at least
some of the time. This is in keeping with the theology Milton shares with humanist reformers
like Erasmus, which makes sin and death not a result of God’s predestination, but a necessary
reaction to his creatures’ perverse wills, which he permits them to have. By the logic of this
ethic, God can actively punish evil, but he cannot actively invite it into the world without
possessing an evil element himself. To punish sinners is thus to perform a cleansing act similar
to the one that Sin and Death perform on earth. Like Sin, whose interior is possessed by a
compulsion that she is not responsible for, the demons are as “self-abstracted” as Satan is when
he first looks upon Eve in Eden and becomes “stupidly good” (PL 9.465). As in all situations
where we are carried along by events beyond our control, we become spectators of ourselves, not
authors. And so Satan “wonder’d” at his changing form; his legion “felt themselves now
changing.” But it is the mechanism through which this happens that I am interested in here—for
Milton pauses to name it: “horrid sympathy,” which, like the feeling of “horror,” “fell” upon
them. At once arising from the most elemental material of their bodies and descending upon
them from heaven, this peculiar force seems to be catalyzed by recognition. In seeing what they
are, they assume their true form. The devils are horrifically passive as they suffer with each
other. Sympathy is passive: something happening to that reveals itself to consciousness but
against which the will is paralyzed. At the moment that recognition and perception are
hyperactive, the will is stunned into torpidity. This is the experience of nightmares. In this scene,
to recognize a form one disapproves of as one’s own, and then, in the recognition, to realize one
has assumed it, is coupled with the metaphor of plague: the “dire form” is “Catcht by
Contagion.” Sympathy describes the experience of something alien that roots itself deep in the
interior. If for materialists bodies are impacted on the outside by other bodies, at least interiority
keeps its integrity, even in the destruction of the creature. But there are no seal tight monads in a
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sympathetic worldview.375 Creatures are open to emanations and affects that alter identity. It is
not always possible to maintain integrity.

Paradise Lost emphasizes over and over again that God is not responsible for Adam and Eve’s
bad decisions, “Authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose” (3.122-
23). But if Milton’s characters author their conscious, logical processes—“what they judge and
what they choose”—they are both less responsible, and more celebrated, for their irrational
instincts. It is only by obeying their natural impulses to worship, love, name, work, and arrange
themselves into the proper hierarchy that they behave like what they are meant to be: refractions
of God’s image. But the list I just gave reveals a problem. To worship, love, name, and work is
to establish a relationship between the self and the world based on care. Such intimacies, Milton
suggests, are good because they are natural. However, hierarchy is a relationship based on
abjection, and it is not always natural. In a political context, hierarchy may instead be arbitrary
and expedient.

While the behaviors Paradise Lost dramatizes for us—the spontaneous praying, the holy sex, the
sacred work, the proper naming, the nakedness, the angelic gratitude—are celebrated for being
natural, there is the repeated suggestion that the hierarchical political organization at the core of
both heavenly and earthly dominions, this “happy state,” was not ever natural, but is an arbitrary
“Decree,” of God (5.536; 602). If God’s decree is distinct from human and angelic natures, then
obedience is a choice, not a compulsion. However, as we now know, this is not the case for Sin,
who obeys without realizing it when she is overtaken by “sympathy or som connatural force.”
Nor is it true for the devils, who, self-abstracted, “felt themselves now changing” in “horrid
sympathy” for what they see. But we don’t feel that Sin or the devils have been treated unjustly
or problematically. They get what they deserve.

4.4 Sympathy and Females

375In his monadology Leibniz wants to have it both ways: in his system everything hangs together by
“preestablished harmony” while the individual monads remain separate and distinct, as they do in Descartes’s
materialist monadology. Fallon has remarked that Milton’s monist vision shares features with Anne Conway’s.
Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 208-209.
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As we’ll recall, Eve too experiences the force of “sympathy” in the moments after her creation
when she, in an episode that is directly inverse to Adam’s awakening scene, mistakes sea for sky,
image for reality. If the alignments I’ve drawn between sympathy and active divine willing hold,
must we not conclude that Milton’s Eve is uniquely manipulated, right from her conception, by
divine powers? Not only are the verbal echoes between Sin’s sympathetic detection of her
likeness across the universe and Eve’s scenes anxious. Milton’s implied author does not inhabit
Eve with the same psychological rigor he uses with his other characters. Even when the narrative
is focalized through her mind, Eve’s surface, Eve’s body, intervene. This is why the only scene
in which the author is alone with Eve happens in the mirror:

That day I oft remember, when from sleep

I first awak’t, and found myself repos’d
Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issu’d from a Cave and spread
Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov’d
Pure as th’ expanse of Heav’n; I thither went
With unexperienc’t thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth Lake, that to me seem’d another Sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A Shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas’d I soon return’d,
Pleas’d it return’d as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt
Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warn’d me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes; but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
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Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee

Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy… (4.449-72)

Of all the uses of “sympathy” we find in Milton’s poetry, this seems the most psychological or
emotional, the closest approximation to our use of sympathy today. But I would like to suggest
this it is not so. “Sympathy” is not something Eve feels here, but something she sees. It is not—
yet—a cathartic fellow feeling or identification with an Other that takes place strictly in the
imagination, as it would be for Adam Smith. Rather, “sympathy” is a “loo[k],” and is of the same
order as the “peculiar graces” or “contagious fire” that “sh[oot] forth” from Eve’s beauty, and
against which Adam is powerless (5.15; 9.1036). It would appear that Eve too is powerless in the
face of her particular, Medusa-like quality. She is Paradise Lost’s eccentricity, the only female
in the created world other than Sin, if we consider Sin to really exist. Even Satan is self-
abstracted in her presence (9.463-64). This potent creature with a wrong impulse to bend toward
the earth rather than spring up in the direction of heaven is not human in the way that Man is.
She is the archetypal “Mother of human Race,” mater, Mother Nature. Unlike Adam who upon
waking not only stands on his feet, but then rationalizes his instinct to do so “as thitherward
endeavoring,” Eve is rather mindlessly drawn from her bed of flowers to the “murmuring”
waters. There was a pool; she “thither went.” This is the extent of Eve’s logic. But why? If as
Mary Nyquist says, “murmurs, waters and cave [are] all being associated symbolically with
maternality,” Eve, like Sin, is at this moment drawn toward her own likeness. As for Sin, this is
not a thought or rationale, for Eve’s thoughts are explicitly “inexperienced,” but rather a bodily
attraction. If her created task is to self-replicate “Multitudes like thyself,” it seems she is drawn
to this mission immediately upon achieving consciousness. Her self-sympathy is a strange
hybrid, partly related to her instinctual knowledge of her purpose, and partly related—I will
claim now—to the inanimate material comprising it. For, as we have seen, sympathy describes
an elemental force shared by animate creatures and inanimate objects. The same force that
transforms the matter of the devils into serpents, or that draws the iron to the lodestone, inhabits
Eve’s interior, Nature’s processes. And like Digby’s atomic model of sympathy, the organizing
principle that underlies Milton’s sympathy is origin. As Digby’s atoms are drawn toward “the
proper source and original root whence they came…and so re-enter into their natural beds and
primitive receptacles,” so Sin is cheekily drawn toward her origin, original Sin, and Eve is drawn
toward a cluster of symbols representing Earth’s womb, themselves a remainder of the “wat’ry
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calm” and “fluid Mass” which the Son infused at creation (7.234; 237). Eve thus occupies a level
of being closer to brute nature than Adam’s. But she is not beast or plant-like. She is even more
elemental than these. She is like water, like an animated humour, and this is why Milton can use
the word “sympathy” to describe her motivation.

In her comparison of Adam and Eve’s awakening scenes, Nyquist has shown that Adam’s self-
knowledge and, more importantly, his expressed desire for a companion are rendered in a highly
stylized disputational mode, and that “the very form of the colloquy establishes that this desire is
rational.”376 Eve, by contrast, tells the story of her genesis in a “markedly lyrical” style,
describing her progress from original error to truth in an Ovidian pastiche that has her gently
forced to abandon her own narcissistic “gleam” in the pool and to recognize herself as Adam’s
image.377 Eve’s peculiar experience at the pool before the divine voice intercedes, and her initial,
highly subjective judgment of Adam as “yet methought less fair,/Less winning soft, less amiably
mild,/Than that smooth wat’ry image,” have, Nyquist argues, “the defining features of the
“private” in an emerging capitalist economy”: feminine, autonomous, non-productive,
sentimentalized, and in this case, “false” by comparison to the greater “public” world beyond it
(4.477-80).378 Eve, like the teenager that she is, would rather sweetly but wrongly sit in front of
the mirror all day with no thought for her social obligations, and the adult Adam corrects her by
demanding her “meek surrender” with both his “gentle hand” and by reciting his legal, and thus
public, rights: “to give thee being I lent/Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart/Substantial Life,
to have thee by my side/Henceforth an individual solace dear” (4.494; 488; 484-86).

It is paradoxical to sentimentalize the private sphere, for it is only by spying on the female’s
privacy that her moral progress can be aestheticized, and so what the “private” really comes to
mean is “naked.” And by telling Adam the story of his seduction of her, Eve is confirming, for
his benefit, both his acquisition of her “mysterious parts” and, as Nyquist has shown, her
surrender to the paternal order where Adam, whose image Eve is, acts as the “embodiment of the
reality principle” in opposition to “the specular image in which her desire originated” (4.312). 379

376 Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jason P.
Rosenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 566.
377 Nyquist, “The Genesis,” 568.
378 Nyquist, “The Genesis,” 568-69.
379 Nyquist, “The Genesis,” 569.
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But it is precisely because Eve is dutifully telling this story to Adam that we cannot, exactly,
believe her. Though she has learned to recite the moral— “beauty is excell’d by manly grace”—
her narration lingers upon the image in the gleam—“That day I oft remember,” she sighs (4.490;
449). By having her repeat her initial reluctance, Milton retains Eve’s winsome coyness. But
there is more. This entire exchange is being watched by Satan, who at this moment is both a
political spy and a sexual voyeur. It is because Satan knows about Eve’s desire for her reflection
that he hatches the plan to tempt her with an idealized image of herself. Eve’s feelings of
“sympathy and love” are on the one hand as “secret” as those parts are “mysterious,” and on the
other hand they are the powers that holds all things in the universe together. The feelings she
confesses she has are both personal and universal. Now Satan knows that Eve will pursue her
image as predictably as a magnet will be drawn toward a lodestone because she is, on some
level, an object under the sway of external law. This scene thus infringes upon Eve’s privacy
absolutely. Not only do we see Eve’s desire. We continue going into her until she is no longer a
person with desire, but comes to resemble a depersonalized natural process. This is where Eve’s
“sympathy” takes us.

The level of molecules remains simultaneously secret—because invisible—and public in that it is

open for scientific observation and contemplation. It is at once far below the dignity of Man, and
all-powerful, holding creation in its bonds. In this, the elemental is as strangely vacillate as the
category of the female, with its ‘lack’ or “nothing.” 380 Eve’s mental and physical ‘lack’ proves
her secondary status in the human order, but her lack is strangely enticing, for Adam (and Satan,
too) cannot help desiring—but more importantly identifying, to a degree—with Eve and her
‘lack.’ In fact Eve is Adam’s lack: she is his missing rib. It is his desire to reunite with the
missing part of himself that sends Adam “transported” during sex into a featureless reality of
pure touch, pure element, a reality that verges on death, which he contrasts to the visible world of
“Taste, Sight, Smell” (8.527). By merging with Eve in “Transported touch,” “Commotion
strange,” Adam is in serious danger of becoming ‘like’ his wife (8.530-31). This is why Raphael
advises him to find some “self-esteem” and reassert the difference between the sexes (8.572).
Milton has his Eve occupy a space that is closer to pure Nature than Adam’s. To identify with

See Terry Eagleton’s Freudian analysis of Othello in “Nothing’: Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus,” in William
380
Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 64.
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her is to fall away from the social into an abyss of pre-creation, of elemental reality, in which the
bond of sympathy is the core organizing principle.

This becomes even more illuminated if we compare Eve’s “sympathy” with the instinctual
feeling Adam claims he has upon awakening. Like Samson and the Son of Paradise Regained,
Adam experiences impulse not as “sympathy,” but as “motion”:

As new wak’t from soundest sleep

Soft on the flow’ry herb I found me laid
In Balmy Sweat, which with his Beams the Sun
Soon dri’d, and on the reeking moisture fed.
Straight toward Heav’n my wond’ring Eyes I turn’d,
And gaz’d a while the ample Sky, till rais’d
By quick instinctive motion up I sprung,
As thitherward endeavoring, and upright
Stood on my feet…(8.253-61)

Like Eve, Adam wakes on a bed of flowers, only he is directly under the sun while she is under
shade. Already this is a crucial difference. In this radically digestive universe where creatures
may transform gradually into an essence more and more like the divinity based on what they
ingest, the sun feeding upon the moisture of Adam’s skin brings him into intimate contact with
the world and its system of possible ascension. Being in shade, Eve does not commune with the
heavens like Adam does, but with the earth and its waters, as we’ve seen. Like Eve, Adam is
compelled to act unconsciously—by “quick instinctive motion”—but this impulse is immediately
followed by an analogy, which holds the key to its interpretation. Adam is moved to stand on his
feet because he (rightly) wants to carry himself closer to heaven. Thus his physical choreography
has an analogous relationship to his spiritual progress. He can articulate this analogy himself—
“As thitherward endeavoring”—and so Adam’s very first movement is coupled with his first act
of interpretation. This is not so for Eve, who requires the divine voice to interpret her narcissistic
gazing for what it is. Eve can articulate the feeling that held her at the pool, “sympathy and
love,” but the naming of her compulsion is merely descriptive, not analytical. Adam’s “motions,”
like Samson’s and the Son’s, are divinely inspired, unwilled, a charitable gift of God. They
behave similarly to that “Umpire Conscience” in that motions, too, inspire right behaviour
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(3.195). Only, “motions” are strictly experienced by Milton’s male characters, while
“conscience,” the Father says, is for “them” (3.194).

When God draws Sin to earth by “wondrous sympathy” and transforms the devils into serpents
by a “horrid sympathy,” he is operating materially upon the world through what Anne Conway
calls “Intrinsick Presence.”381 Milton’s God does not compel his creatures from the outside, with
storms or lightening bolts. Instead he manipulates them in a more Ovidian way: his creatures
follow uncontrollable passions that have entered them in a way not unlike Cupid’s arrow,
although Milton does not give us a material symbol to represent the process but chooses to leave
it mysterious. However, it is his female characters, his allegories, Nature, or demons that he most
often treats this way. The effect is to draw the category of the female toward a strange ontology
that is more base and elemental than the place on the spectrum occupied by the category of the
male. All of his characters experience sudden impulses. But there is a world of difference
between calling instinct “sympathy” or “motion.”

381 Conway, Principles, 191.

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Chapter 5
“Sympathy” in the Friendship Poetry of Katherine Philips
The reverend Jeremy Taylor’s 1657 A discourse of the nature, offices, and measures of
friendship is a public response to a question that was asked of him by Katherine Philips,
seventeenth-century England’s most famous woman poet—known as the “Matchless Orinda” or
“English Sappho”—regarding “how far a Dear and perfect friendship is authorized by the
principles of Christianity.”382 Twice in his discourse Taylor criticizes the kind of Platonic
friendships that are rooted only in feeling, “sympathies,” and “natural inclinations”—exactly the
kind of friendship that Philips eulogizes in a number of passionate poems in the 1650s. His first
critique occurs in a more general note about the failures of “Platonic love” to amount to anything
more than “tinsell dressings.” Even Christ had special favourites like Lazarus, writes Taylor, by:

a certain cognation and similitude of temper and inclination. For in all things where there
is a latitude, every faculty will endeavour to be pleased, and sometimes the meanest
persons in a house have a festival; even sympathies and natural inclinations to some
persons, and a conformity of humours and proportionable loves, and the beauty of the
face, and a witty answer may first strike the flint and kindle a spark, which if it falls upon
tender and compliant natures may grow into a flame; but this will never be maintained at
the rate of friendship, unless it be fed by pure materials, by worthiness which are the food
of friendship. Where these are not men and women may be pleased with one another’s
company, and lie under the same roof, and make themselves companions of equal
prosperities, and humour their friend; but if you call this friendship, you give a sacred
name to humour or fancy; for there is a Platonic friendship as well as a Platonic love; but
they being but the Images of more noble bodies are but like tinsell dressings, which will
shew bravely by candle-light, and do excellently in a mask, but are not fit for
conversation, and the material entercourses of life. 383

382 Jeremy Taylor, A discourse of the nature, offices, and measures of friendship with rules of conducting it/written
in answer to a letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M.K.P. by J.T. (London: Printed for R. Royston, 1657),
3.
383 Taylor, A discourse, 36-37.
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Here Taylor suggests there is a difference between friendship rooted in what he considers
“witty,” passing qualities such as attraction, “natural inclinations,” “conformity of humours,” or
“sympathies”—and a more sacred and permanent friendship rooted in “conversation” and
“material entercourses,” which are “pure materials” born of “worthiness.” His distinction is part
and parcel of an anti-Platonic, materialist thread that runs throughout his discourse. With
regularity he advises Philips to distinguish between mere feeling—a combination of capricious
bodily attraction and what he takes to be empty “Images” of idealized or imagined friendship, or
“Castles in the aire”384—and more pragmatic, rational, and self-interested varieties of friendship,
which come under the government of reason and judgement. Friendship’s “great indearments,”
Taylor writes, are “excellency and usefulness”385. In a truly “sacred” friendship, he maintains,
both parties must be dutiful to each other and work toward mutual gain, or “usefulness”: “True
and brave friendships are between worthy persons; and there is in mankind no degree of
worthiness, but is also a degree of usefulness, and by everything by which a man is excellent, I
may be profited.”386 For Taylor, it is the solid acts of love, rather than happy feelings or well-
wishing, that are the markers of true friendship. These acts, he says, are superior to “Platonic
friendships” which are based on the whimsies of the moment. As we can see, “sympathy” falls
into this category of passing humour. It is, Taylor suggests, fickle, capricious, and temporary.

Taylor’s second critique of Platonic friendship also links “sympathy” to what he considers to be
negative qualities: to the unconscious, irrational impulses of natural bodies, in particular to what
he understands to be the menial bodies of plants and animals:

Some friendships are made by nature, some by contract, some by interest, and some by
souls. And in proportion to these ways of Uniting, so the friendships are greater or lesser,
vertuous or natural, profitable or holy, or all this together. Nature makes excellent
friendships, of which we observe something in social plants; growing better in each
others neighbourhood then where they stand singly: And in animals it is more notorious,
whose friendships extend so far as to herd and dwell together, to play, and feed, to defend
and fight for one another, and to cry in absence, and to rejoice in one anothers presence.

384 Taylor, A discourse, 38.

385 Taylor, A discourse, 10.
386 Taylor, A discourse, 33.
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But these friendships have other names less noble, they are sympathy or they are instinct.
But if to this natural friendship there be reason superadded, something will come in upon
the stock of reason which will ennoble it… 387

Just as for Aristotle the rational soul is both superior to and dependent upon the foundations of
the vegetable and animal souls, so, Taylor goes on to claim, while “necessary friendships” like
the love between parents and children are fundamental because they arise from “Nature,”
friendships of “choice” are superior to “necessary” bonds because in these relationships both
parties make choices that are rational and free, uniting by “contract,” or, even better, common
“interest.” In these “virtuous” or “holy” relationships, the friends exercise their individual
freedom, but they do so together, making the real demands on each other that allow both people
to express their best selves. The “freedom” Taylor lauds, both “freedom of conversation,” and
the ability to take liberties with each other, is analogous to the freedom one takes with one’s
property: “if I buy land, I may eat the fruits, and if I take a house, I may dwell in it; and if I love
a worthy person, I may please myself in his society…”388 There is only one “exception” to the
freedom between friends and that is when the persons are of a “different sex: for then not only
the interest of their religion, and the care of their honour, but the worthiness of their friendship
requires that their entercourse be prudent.”389

For Philips, there was something surely cutting in Taylor’s association of “sympathy” with
irrationality, “humours,” and “nature.” Nor might she have liked his claim that friendships rooted
in “sympathy” are “less noble” than higher forms of self-interested, reasoned friendship. By the
time Taylor wrote his discourse, Philips had either already written—or would very shortly go on
to write—lines in her friendship poetry like, “But neither Chance nor Compliment/Did element
our Love;/Twas sacred Sympathy was lent/Us from the Quire above,” and “Nature subsists by
Love, and they do tie/Things to their Causes but by Sympathy,” and “The chiefest thing in
Friends is Sympathy,” and “Where Sympathy does Love convey,/It braves all other Pow’rs,” and
“The purity of Friendship’s Flame/Proves that from Sympathy it came,” to list less than half of

387 Taylor, A discourse, 58-59.

388 Taylor, A discourse, 85.
389 Ibid.
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the available examples. “Sympathy” is a core fascination and trope in the poetry of Katherine
Philips.

In her Neo-Platonic poetry, usually about the passionate friendships she shares with other
women, Katherine Philips gives the concept of sympathy metaphysical significance, making it
the fundamental sacred force that governs the order of the world at large. For Jeremy Taylor,
however, sympathy is not metaphysical, but natural. While for Philips sympathy exceeds
reason’s capacities and signifies the sublime, for Taylor it is beneath reason’s awareness, coming
from the body, or from the instinctual, sensory reality of plant and animal life. This difference is
especially significant if we overlay gender onto Philips’s and Taylor’s conceptualizations of
sympathy. The friendships between the women in Philips’s poems operate in a sacred space of
souls united, and are thus linked to the divine. For Taylor, friendships rooted in sympathy carry
either a base animal taint or a tarnish of airy fantasy—both of which render them unreliable. If
the friends in Philips’s poetry amplify each other’s being and enhance one another’s goodness,
Taylor implies that the model of friendship Philips draws reduces both speaker and addressee to
imaginary nothings or witty expressions of humour. In Taylor’s vision of ideal friendship, both
persons retain their worthiness, or moral selfhood. There is no mystical merging into one another
as we find in Philips’s poetry.

In proceeding chapters I have drawn a portrait of two different species of sympathy, and
discussed how they interact. The first is what Seth Lobis calls “universal sympathy.” 390 This
species descends from an older, magical worldview that understands relations between things as
animated by “a twofold Seminary or stock in nature, from whence are deriv’d the issues of love
and hatred distinctly flowing through the whole masse of created things.”391 In this view, which
combines Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic metaphysics with Arabic and Jewish mysticism and
Christian scholasticism, the Supreme Being shows his goodness through the complementary
principles of plenitude and harmony. The universe is coherent and enchanted with a divine order
in which everything has its place. The order here is transcendently imposed—it comes from
God—even as it makes itself felt deep in the affections of individual objects and beings. In this

390 Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 198.
391 John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 2nd vol. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 272.
 139

view, the borders between animate and inanimate spheres, including the one between body and
mind, are less distinguished. Lobis calls the second species of sympathy “human.” In a more
dualist worldview, where mind and matter are clearly separated, sympathy migrates inward,
becoming a supra-rational instinct that governs interpersonal relations. Its cosmic significance
becomes moral significance.

In both its “universal” and “human” manifestations sympathy is understood to be involved in

both the intimate interiority of feeling and thought and the external movements of matter,
whether atoms, corpuscles, light, cells, hormones, or mirror neurons. An impulse that acts upon
both things and human psychology, it articulates what Heidegger calls “the essential border”
between consciousness and the Nature within us. 392 Above all sympathy leads to metamorphosis.
It describes a relationship where one party is affected by another. It represents the limit where
consciousness and the will meet the outside influence of the world, of the body as a mechanism
affected by other bodies. In Paradise Lost, as I argued, “sympathy, or som connatural force” is
the mechanism by which God controls Sin and the fallen angels from the seat of their interior
desires. It is how divine order implants itself in the heart of things, by creating natural
friendships and antipathies that drive created beings to their rightful place and away from their
wrongful place. But sympathy’s relation to metamorphosis means it can also seek to undo
hierarchies of place. In the following discussion of Katherine Philips’s friendship poetry, I show
how she represents herself as a person lower on the chain of being who looks up and seeks to
sympathetically rise and merge with those above her—both her aristocratic Royalist friends and
her husband. While Taylor’s conception of sympathy derives from a familiar idea that sympathy
expressed through the body is frightening and linked to contagion and lack of control, Philips’s
image of sympathy filtered through the mind and soul, might help us, as young Milton says in
Latin oration, “grasp the nature of the whole firmament and of its stars.” 393

In this chapter I suggest that the clash between the metaphysical kind of sympathy Philips praises
and the more naturalized version Taylor advises her to rise above acquires both a political and a
gendered dimension. Thus I follow critics of Katherine Philips such as Carol Barash and Hero

392 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), 239.
393 John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, eds. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich,
and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Random House, 2007), 798.
 140

Chalmers who claim that her friendship poetry is not just a lyrical expression of her private
feeling but representative of her politics.394 In engaging with the royalist entanglements of her
aesthetic, I do not wish to sideline Philips’s obvious concern with gender. It is not unusual at this
time for women writers to paint a picture of female liberation that is linked to submission to a
monarch and a traditionally rigid view of society based on hierarchies of class; or for women
writers to invert that relationship, evoking an ideal society of free citizens where women know
their rightful place as supportive helpmeets for their republican husbands. The radically proto-
feminist Margaret Cavendish is a royalist and political traditionalist; the radical republican Lucy
Hutchinson is traditionalist when it comes to women and sex. As Barash says, “shifting models
of gender and political authority in this period…tend to make women’s friendship a very
complicated royalist trope with a range of overlapping meanings.” 395 This is also true of
Katherine Philips, especially when we consider the added complication that her royalist politics
are not something given to her by the milieu in which she was born, but are an identity she
chooses for herself.

5.1 Royalist Friend, Parliamentarian Wife

Katherine Philips was a royalist who was married to the Parliamentarian MP of Cardigan, James
Philips. She was brought up as a Puritan but was “drawn to royalism through friendships she
made with other girls at Mrs Salmon’s school in Hackney.” 396 Here she began writing and
circulating poetry, and entered the orbit of the 1650s cavalier circle of artists surrounding the
former master of the King’s music, Henry Lawes. She romanticized these friendships by giving
her friends nicknames taken in most cases from royalist romances written by John Barclay,
William Cartwright, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, and George Wither. Though in letters
Philips frequently represents her “duty” to her Parliamentarian husband as intermingled with her

394 See: Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996); Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650-1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). For
political readings of Philip’s translations of Corneille see: Catherine Cole Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration
Stage,” Comparative Literature 37, no. 3 (1985) 233-251; Andrew Shifflett, “How Many Virtues Must I Hate”:
Katherine Philips and the Politics of Clemency,” Studies in Philology 94, no. 1 (1997): 103-135; Anne Russell,
“Katherine Philips as Political Playwright: “The Songs Between the Acts” in Pompey,” Comparative Drama 44, no.
3 (2010) 299-323.
395 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 56.
396 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 10.
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love, creating a persona that transcends politics and exists in a rarified sphere where individuals
come together in bonds of friendship purged of the partisan commitments of this world, their
interests—particularly their financial interests—were not divergent.397 James Philips is also a
member of Katherine Philips coterie of friends. James Philips, however, was not named after a
romance character. Instead Philips gave him the moniker “Antenor” after the moderate and
diplomatic counsellor to Priam during the Trojan War, who in book seven of the Iliad wisely
advises the Trojans to give Helen back to the Greeks. In her correspondence with her royalist
friends, James Philips the traitor is transformed into Antenor the sensible advisor and moderate
who can get on with everyone, exchanging favour for favour with political enemies as well as
allies, as though his political alliances are merely circumstantial and lightly held. Nothing
personal.

And after the Restoration, the Philipses needed favours. After James Philips was banned in 1661
from holding public office and suspended from the Commons for having “sat as a member of the
High Court of Justice which had sentenced a leading royalist, Colonel John Gerrard, to death in
1654,”398 Katherine Philips regularly corresponded with her friend, Charles Cotteral, master of
ceremonies to the King, asking him for help in securing James Philips’s exoneration. And in
1662, when James Philips regained his election but a few months later lost it again when it was
declared void, she agitated to get Cotteral himself elected MP of Cardigan in James Philips’s
stead. In a letter to Cotteral dated 15 July 1663 Katherine Philips writes that she is “overjoy’d” to
see that Cotteral has won the election, “tho’ I could foresee no less both from the Equity of your
Cause, and the Interest you had to support it.” By helping Cotteral get the seat, Philips wittily
implies that it is now his turn to help her husband, though she passes off her request for
assistance as the naughty frivolity of a wife who just wants to come to London to visit her
friends: “You must contrive some plausible Pretence to make him [Antenor] believe, that by
being there I might be very useful to his Affairs by the means of your Friendship, and by the
Assistance of my other Friends.”399 Just prior to this statement, however, Philips describes her

397 It is worth mentioning that though James Philips was once believed to be thirty-eight years Katherine Philips’s
senior, a marriage certificate was recently discovered which reveals he was only twenty-four when they married in
1648.
398 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 83.
399 Katherine Philips, Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. The second edition, with additions (London: Printed for
Bernard Lintot, 1729), 156; 158.
 142

recent business affairs in Ireland more seriously, in some detail. And in a letter dated 17
September 1663, presumably after an occasion to visit London presented itself that did not offer
James Philips any assistance, Philips drops the playful pretence and is more explicit:

I have already taken the Freedom to tell you, how things stand with us in relation to our
Estate, and how just a Desire I had to receive no Satisfaction myself, which must be
prejudicial to my dear ANTENOR; that therefore I could not propose to myself any way
to recover the Happiness of your Company, unless I had a Prospect at the same time of
doing him some Service; for I should never be able to endure the inward Reproach of not
having promoted his Interest to the utmost of my Power.400

I suggest that the Royalist Taylor reads the politics of Philips’s friendship poetry as too frivolous
and uncommitted because in its mysticism it ignores the material interest that he feels defines the
highest forms of friendship. But her commitment to the idea that women’s friendship is not only
a worthy and serious subject of poetry, but also a way to experience the divine love that holds the
universe together, is extremely serious. For Philips, sympathy is not a disenchanted natural force
acting upon bodies as it is for royalists like Hobbes, Digby, Rochester, and Taylor, who to
varying degrees turn to materialism and social pragmatism in a reaction against Puritan political
rebellion, which is so bound up with religious enthusiasm. 401 For Philips, sympathy is “sacred”
and the love between friends “religious.” Philips thus partakes in the “early modern language of
idealism,”402 aligning her philosophy and theology with the Cambridge Platonists or Latitude
Men, as some of her critics have shown. 403

The political stakes of Philips’s Neo-Platonist leanings are two-fold. On the one hand, the notion
that souls can shed their bodies and merge in a deathless, untouchable realm that is both more
hallowed and real than this disjointed world appealed to royalist exiles separated by fortune, and
especially to royalist women writers, who could claim poetic authority by saying their souls, if

400 Philips, Letters, 164.

401 This is Reid Barbour’s thesis, repeated by David Norbrook. “Introduction,” in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and
Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (London: Blackwell, 2001), xvii.
402 Andrea Brady, “The Platonic Poems of Katherine Philips,” The Seventeenth Century 25, no. 2 (2010): 300.
403 See Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664,” Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 34-
60; Llewellyn, Mark. “Katherine Philips: Friendship, Poetry and Neo-Platonic Thought in Seventeenth Century
England,” Philological Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2002): 441-468.
 143

not bodies, were equal to men’s, while simultaneously alluding to Henrietta Maria’s bygone
court of “Platonick Love.”404 On the other hand, to align one’s theology with the Latitudinarians
was to take a political middle ground in so far as the emphasis on natural theology attempted to
find a compromise among different Protestant groups by turning away from scriptural
interpretation and revelation toward observed facts and experience. 405 In a different vein, the
Platonic imagination risked departing from politics altogether in order to view the world from an
apparently transcendent vantage point, asserting an abstract “harmony,” “love” or “sympathy” so
detached from current affairs, these ultimately aesthetic expressions, while they might rouse us
to feelings of peace and compromise, are benevolently ineffectual in the realm of policy, and, to
a critic, at worst escapist. Taylor seems to have had this in mind when he remarked that one
should not “look upon friendship, as upon a fine Romance,” nor “by dreaming of perfect and
abstracted friendship, make them so immaterial that they perish in the handling and become good
for nothing.”406 Though Philips identified as a Royalist, in 1657 she was still enjoying the
material benefits of her Parliamentarian husband’s position in local government and her late
Puritan father’s purchase of confiscated Irish lands. 407 Though both job and assets would be
taken away at the Restoration, of course neither Taylor nor Philips knew this at the time.

This is not to say that she rejects the connection Taylor pointedly emphasizes between friendship
and self-interest. This is clear from a number of letters to her friend, Charles Cotteral, and in
poems such as this one addressed to her husband, titled “To my dearest Antenor, on his Parting”:

Each of our Souls did its own Temper fit,

And in the other’s Mould so fashion’d it,
That now our Inclinations both are grown,
Like to our Interests and Persons, one… 408

404 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 74-82.

405 Norbrook, “Inroduction,” xx.
406 Taylor, A discourse, 38.
407 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 76.
408 Katherine Philips, Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda. To
which is added Monsieur Corneille’s tragedies of Pompey and Horace, with several other translations out of French
(London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1710), 97.
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Rather, she would either reject Taylor’s subordination of “nature” to “interest,” or would
associate “sympathy” with the level of friendship Taylor relates to “souls.” This is evident if we
read the poem in its entirety:

Though it be just to grieve, when I must part

With him that is the Guardian of my Heart;
Yet, by an happy change, the loss of mine
Is with advantage paid in having thine.
And I (by that dear Guest instructed) find
Absence can do no hurt to Souls combin’d.
As we were born to love, brought to agree
By the impressions of Divine Decree:
So when united nearer we became,
It did not weaken, but encrease, our Flame.
Unlike to those who distant Joys admire,
But slight them when possest of their Desire.
Each of our Souls did its own Temper fit,
And in the other’s Mould so fashion’d it,
That now our Inclinations both are grown,
Like to our Interests and Persons, one;
And Souls whom such an Union fortifies,
Passion can ne’er destroy, nor Fate surprise.
Now as in Watches, though we do not know
When the Hand moves, we find it still doth go:
So I, by secret Sympathy inclin’d,
Will absent meet, and understand thy Mind;
And thou at thy return shalt find thy Heart
Still safe, with all the Love thou didst impart.
For though that Treasure I have ne’er deserv’d,
It shall with strong Religion be preserv’d
And besides this thou shalt in me survey
They self reflected while thou art away.
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For what some forward Arts do undertake,

The Images of absent Friends to make,
And represent their Actions in a Glass,
Friendship it self can only bring to pass,
That Magick which both Fate and Time beguiles,
And in a moment runs a thousand Miles
So in my Breast thy Picture drawn shall be,
My Guide, Life, Object, Friend, and Destiny:
And none shall know, though they employ their Wit,
Which is the right Antenor, thou, or it.409

Philips’s association of “secret Sympathy” with “That Magick which both Fate and Time
beguiles” is emphatic here. Though the couple may originally have married for the sake of
shared “Interests,” in the process uniting their “Persons,” “now,” the poet emphasizes, it is not
interest or law but “Inclinations” that sacralises their marriage. The sympathy that inclines wife
to husband in his absence is not a mechanical process, nor one that Philips relates to nature,
atoms, body or instinct. Rather, it is a magical process taught to her by “that dear Guest,” Christ,
who she, like all Christians, must love in his absence. If “sympathy” describes a force of order in
the world that keeps things in their place as steady as clockwork, it also, in this case, tends to
undo hierarchy by drawing the wife and husband into an alignment that is not just spiritual but
metaphysical, accounting for all their being. It is through sympathy that the poet gains
understanding of her husband’s “Mind,” and he gains preservation, in her, of his “Heart” and
“Love.” In calling Antenor her “Guide,” “Life” and “Object” Philips at first asserts traditional
hierarchy; but “Friend” and “Destiny” levels poet and husband. And in the poem’s final
metafictional turn, the “right Antenor”—if not the “right” James Philips—is the possession and
creation of the poet, a turn that unravels the most conventional reading of that word, “Object.”
Here, Philips implies, the husband is the poet’s, not the wife’s, “Object.” And unlike the gaze of
the male love poet, which so often undoes its object, Philips promises not to use hers to “slight”
him when possessed of her “Desire.” In fact, lacking blazons or any kind of physical description,

409 Philips, Poems, 97-98.

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Philips’s poem veils both husband and speaker in spirit. It is easy to see why Philips’s first
readers would have lauded her for being a chaste poet. This reading, however, lacks complexity.

5.2 Wondrous Sympathy and Puritanism: Divine Weeks

It is possible that Philips’s Puritan leanings reveal themselves in this poem, which would have
been of concern to Jeremy Taylor, a former cleric in the Church of England who received
patronage from William Laud before the latter’s execution in 1645. The Church of England
adopted the view of natural theology, claiming that “true religion could be derived from rational
knowledge of the universe.”410 Philips’s “secret sympathy” is more mystical and wondrous than
it is rational. Though “Platonists viewed the absolute goodness of God as incompatible with
Calvinist predestination,”411 and though Calvinists did not believe, as the Platonists did, that the
soul differed from God only by degrees, there was at least a small degree of harmoniousness
between Calvinist theology and Neo-Platonism, at least insofar as both were stridently opposed
to the reduction of spirit by the materialist logic we see present in Taylor’s essay. If the English
materialists—who tended, in most cases, to be royalist—wished to naturalize occult forces like
sympathy and so empty them of their moral dimension in order to combat the mysticism upon
which revolutionaries and reformers drew their inspiration (this, at least, is David Norbrook’s
argument), the non-materialists wished for forces like sympathy to retain their mystery. The
more “secret” sympathy remained, the more absolute its power, the more related it was to divine
order, and the more available it became for multiple social uses, at least insofar as the word
added rhetorical fervency. It is with some frequency that Calvinist writers use “sympathy” to
describe the mystical union of Christ and his church, soul and body, heaven and earth and all
things in it. Perhaps the most significant and influential Calvinist poet to do so is Du Bartas.
Pausing to examine Du Bartas’s epic nature poem Divine Weeks—specifically Joshua Sylvester’s
translation of it—will help us to understand both why Katherine Philips may have been inspired
to centre so much of her poetry on the concept of sympathy, and how she, and a number of other
women extend the concept of sympathy to repair gender relations.

410 Norbrook, “Introduction,” xxxv.

411 Brady, “The Platonic Poems,” 300.
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La Semaine ou Création du monde (1578) by the devout Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste,
sieur Du Bartas, was one of the most influential works of literature in late sixteenth and early
seventeenth-century England. Sidney, Spenser, Marvell, Milton, Hutchinson, Cowley, Fletcher,
Moffett, Beaumont, and Dryden were all influenced by Du Bartas’s “Christian muse,” as well as
by his ambitious synthesis of divine and philosophical poetry. “All the Metaphysicals sound as if
they had been brought up on him, or on Sylvester’s translation,” writes C.S. Lewis. 412 Writing in
a high, ornate, allusive style, Du Bartas took aesthetic direction from a group of mid-sixteenth-
century poets called La Pléiade, who sought to renew and celebrate the French language by
innovating upon Greek and Roman poetic forms. In his Défense et illustration de la langue
française (1549), one of the Pléiades, Du Bellay, called for a reinvigoration of French “raised
above the ordinary by periphrases, coinages, new constructions, and new metaphors drawn from
the learned arts and sciences.”413 And in the Divine Weeks, published in 1605, Du Bartas’s
English translator, the merchant-adventurer and zealous Protestant Joshua Sylvester, anglicized,
lengthened and amplified the already ample ornamentation of the original. According to John
Arthos’s study of nature description in the eighteenth century, Sylvester’s Du Bartas is the “great
source” of many previously irregular and afterwards popular terms like “aetherial, ball,
exhalation, orb, pole, vapor, vital,” most of which were imported from scientific discourse. The
aim of using scientific words, Arthos suggests, is one of “referring an object to its place in a
philosophic or mythological scheme.”414 The effect is vastness contained by an encyclopedia,
bounded sublimity, in which an ocean of detail and defamiliarizing wit is contained by frequent
walls of devoutness.

In Divine Weeks, the recurring image of the iron and lodestone functions as an anchor of
certainty in a sea of wonder. Here is a figure that epitomizes the divine magic that orders the
teeming universe of the poem from the ground of sensory experience. Because nobody knows
how magnetism works, this wonderful phenomenon cannot be rationalized away or reduced to
materialism. Instead, for Sylvester/Du Bartas, it is evidence of God’s mystery. Threaded
throughout the poem’s forays into nature and the cosmos, the iron and lodestone operate by

412 C.S. Lewis, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 544.
413 Susan Snyder, ed. The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas by Josuah Sylvester
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 4.
414 Snyder, The Divine Weeks, 92.
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“Secret,” “rare,” “sacred,” “firme,” “admired,” “vertues,” “conquering,” “Sympathy,” which is

“but a spark or shadow of that Love/Which at the first in every thing did move” (II.1.3.61-2).
“Sympathy” is a specialized term here, with one foot in science and the other in mystery, as suits
a style that seeks to enrich itself “with erudite and technical words.”415 Du Bartas does not use
“sympathy”; he uses “amour.” Thus in what follows I will be describing Sylvester’s ‘sympathy.’

The world of The Divine Weeks is as dark and full of terrors as it is wondrous. The story is
familiar. Monstrosity, faction, and discord lurk in the heart of chaos, the original cosmic force. A
transcendent God brings order, but the days of perfection are brief. After the Fall, The Earth
behaves not like “a Mother, but a Step-dame rather:/Because (alas) unto our losse she
beares/Blood-shedding Steele, and Gold” to tempt our war lust and avarice and “bewitch[h]” the
“Bodies and soules of greedie men” (I.3.904-10). Most horrifically, “The secret roots of sinfull
Atheisme” quietly nurse in the breasts of men like Cain and Cham (II.2.1.86), justifying the
enslavement of their descendants by the elect. Only God’s power—at the moment of creation
and at every unfolding moment—saves us from utter ruin. Without divine intervention, ruination
seems to be the natural tendency of all things:

Even in the birth this Ball did ruinate,

Save that the Lord, into the Pile did poure,
Some secret Mastike of his sacred Power,
To glew together and to governe faire
The Heav’n and Earth, the Ocean, and the Aire.” (I.1.308-12)

In the nightmare of one’s smallness before the universe, the mere fact that living things exist in
ordered relation to one another is the only consolation. Bodies exist at all because components of
bodies feel compelled to come together “With so firme bonds” (I.1.350). Sylvester calls the
impulse to come together, and the process by which it occurs, “Sympathy.”

Sympathy’s domain is total: it holds together every aspect of existence. It governs physical
relations among elements of the material world—linking fire to fire and earth to earth—in a
process that logically binds like-to-like. So when populating the oceans, God makes creatures “of

415 Snyder, The Divine Weeks, 53.

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waterie matter,” and when he makes “The slimie Burgers of this Earthly Ball:/To th’end each
creature might (by consequent)/Part-sympathize with his owne Element,” he “tookest Earth” “to
forme thine Earthly Emperour,” Adam (I.6.501-10). But it also describes a relation between
things that are radically unalike. For example “Through Sympathie” “Our Soules and Bodies
doth together Marrie,” just as it is by sympathy that the moon, planets, and stars influence the
earth as well as “Our minde and humours” (I.4.475-80). Likewise, in one of Sylvester’s own
insertions, “Soveraigne James,” whom he hoped would patronize his efforts, “attracts
th’attentive service of all such/Whose-mindes did ever vertues Loadstone touch” by “the secret
virtue” of “sacred beames” (I.3.1161-64). Finally, Du Bartas/Sylvester hopes The Divine Weeks
will itself act like a magnet—not to attract “vertues Friends,” who are already excellent—but
those who have fallen away from the right path: “And with the Load-stone of my conquering
Verse,/Above the Poles attract the most perverse” (I.4.15-6). Most frequently, Sylvester’s
sympathy describes condescension extended down from a greater to a lesser entity. What the
greater entity offers is itself, and the attending possibility that what is less and “perverse” might
become like what is great and good. It is an original act of grace that touches chaos and coaxes
elements to bond together in the first place. Sympathy, for Sylvester, is a materialization of
grace:
As th’Iron toucht by th’Adamants effect
To the North Pole doth ever point direct:
So the Soule toucht once by the secret power
Of a true lively Faith, lookes every hower
To the bright Lampe which serves for Cynosure
To all that saile upon this Sea obscure. (I.7.569-74)

By contrast, materialists strive to unveil and articulate the universe’s physical secrets. Katherine
Philips’s contemporary, the catholic Kenelm Digby, for instance, went to great lengths to
naturalize sympathy by meticulously outlining an atomic theory that could explain how it
operates. By naturalizing occult forces, one reduces the zeal of believers who justify political and
theological decisions, in part—as John Rogers has shown—by a physics of feeling. Rogers
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claims that by “an analogical imperative” 416 arising from the belief in the oneness of the
universe, seventeenth-century political philosophies and theories of matter are so related that
reform in one catalyzes radical alteration in the other. There is thus “a powerful current of
political energy charging the literature of materialism.” 417 For non-materialist Puritans like Du
Bartas, Sylvester, and Katherine Philips, it is necessary that a force like sympathy remain
“secret.” A power that transcends understanding cannot be rationalized. That said, the physical
manifestation of this power, represented by the iron and lodestone, is important not only for its
mystery but for its realism. Sylvester is especially taken with, even dependent upon, the example
of the iron and the lodestone for this reason. In another original insertion he writes:

Cleere-sighted Spirits that cheere with sweet aspect

My sober Rymes, though subject to defect;
If in this Volume, as you over-reade-it
You meet some things seeming exceeding credit,
Because (perhaps) here proved yet by no-man;
Their strange effect be not in knowledge common:
Think, yet to some the Load-stone’s use is new;
And seemes as strange, as we have try’d it true:
Let therefore that which Iron drawes, draw such
To credit more then what they see or touch. (I.3.987-96)

The mystery of God presents itself in the happy, miraculous example of the magnet’s
sympathetic pull. While the iron and lodestone are natural, inanimate actors, Sylvester links them
by analogy to more human phenomena. In the above passage it is his poetry, he hopes, that might
act like a magnet. In another original insertion, Du Bartas’s “firme zeale and fast affection” by
which “the Stone doth love the Steele, the Steele the Stone,” is compared to the attraction
between lovers: “As bash-full Suiters, seeing Strangers by,/Parley in silence with their hand or
eye” (I.3.945-6, 951). Sympathy, that “hidden Force, with sacred secret Charmes” is for

416 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry & Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 9.
417 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, xi.
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Sylvester a remnant of the original outpouring of God’s grace (940). It governs both material and
human relations.

5.3 Sympathy and Puritan Women’s Poetry

Under the influence of Du Bartas, a number of Puritan women poets at this time use the “hidden
Force” of sympathy to describe the union between wife and husband. The strongly Calvinist poet
Anne Southwell, writing at the end of the sixteenth-century and perhaps re-transcribing her work
in the 1630s, addresses an imaginary husband in her fourth Precept on the Sabbath:

Nor art thou bidd to labour here alone

but thou art bound to bring thy familye
thy wife & thee, two loving hartes make one
Christ & his church explane that simpathye
thy children & thy servants are exprest
by thee & them gods vineyard must bee drest. 418

Here we find a rather familiar paradox: while the wife and husband are equal and united in soul,
in the world it is the husband who must “expres[s]” his wife, servants and children. But in
claiming the position of poet who instructs husbands in this regard, Southwell is taking
responsibility for the proper expression of herself as a wife, at least in private manuscript.
“Simpathye” here works in the wife’s favour, making her ontologically identical to the husband.
By “ontologically identical,” I mean the husband and wife become the same not only in spirit, a
common enough idea, but in all their fundamental elements, soul and body.

As well as describing the special relationship between wife and husband, Southwell, like
Sylvester, uses “simpathye” to express the method by which God brought order out of chaos at
creation:

& from the light the darke did seperate

deviding cold & moyst the hott & drye,

Anne Southwell, “Precept 4,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, eds. Jill Seal Millman and Gillian
418
Wright (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 65.
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yett ech with others to participate

& propagate by a sweete simpathye.
Soe that, not men, but Angells, stares & spheares
ech one the elementall livery weares. 419

In this monist vision of the universe so similar to Du Bartas’s, “men,” “Angells” and “stares” are
composed of the same matter, which corresponds to itself by a morally inflected “sweete
simpathye.” In this vision, matter is incorporated into a larger spiritual design, and animated by
God. It does not interact with itself by chance collisions and accident, as for example Hobbes
would have it, following Lucretius. Likewise, in A Muzzle for Melastomus, Calvinist Rachel
Speght responds to Joseph Swetnam’s claim that Saint Paul says it is better not to marry by
advocating “the sympathy which ought to be in man and wife each toward other.” 420 This
sympathy between wife and husband relates to the “formal cause” of woman’s creation. If her
“material cause” or “matter whereof [she] was made” was “a part of man,” where man’s is “the
dust of the earth,” her “formal cause, fashion, and proportion” is identical to man’s: “And as the
temperature of man’s body is excellent, so is woman’s…And (that more is) in the image of God
were they both created; yea and to be brief, all the parts of their bodies, both external and
internal, were correspondent and meet each for other.”421

5.4 Philips and Cambridge Platonism

While “To my dearest Antenor, on his Parting” follows the association of “sympathy” with the
marriage bond that we find in the writings of Calvinists like Southwell and Speght, it differs
from writings by these Puritans in that it strongly aligns “sympathy” not with “parts of their
bodies,” “temperature” or “elementall livery,” but with “Magick.” In this regard, Philips is
associating herself with the work of Cambridge Platonists like Henry More and Ralph Cudworth.
The affiliation of Philips’s poetry with Neo-Platonic philosophy was apparent to her first readers.
The elegist John Crouch described her poetry as the “Summe of thy [Plato’s] Divine
Philosophy,” and Philips quotes from Henry More’s Cupid’s Conflict of 1646 in her poem

419 Southwell, “Precept 4,” 66.

420 Rachel Speght, “A Muzzle for Melastomus,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 8th ed., ed.
Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 1547.
421 Speght, A Muzzle, 1548.
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“God.”422 Similarly, the poet’s claim that “As we were born to love, brought to agree/By the
impressions of Divine Decree:/So when united nearer we became,/It did not weaken, but
encrease, our Flame,” corresponds to the Platonic idea that truth is not something seen for the
first time on earth, but something remembered from the soul’s pre-birth experience in the realm
of Ideals. Love, for Philips, is star-crossed, but in a religious rather than a romantic sense, and
requires unfolding over time to move from common “Interests” to “Inclinations.” In this,
Philips’s poem recalls a moment in Spenser’s Neo-Platonic hymn, In Honour of Beautie:

For Love is a celestiall harmonie,

Of likely harts composed of starres concent,
Which joyne together in sweete sympathie,
To worke ech others joy and true content,
Which they have harboured since their first descent
Out of their heavenly bowres, where they did see
And know ech other here belov’d to bee.

Then wrong it were that any other twaine

Should in loves gentle band combined bee,
But those whom heaven did at first ordaine,
And made out of one mould the more t’agree:
For all that like the beautie which they see,
Streight do not love: for love is not so light,
As straight to burne at first beholders sight. 423

As well as sharing a general philosophy and some irregular words (“sympathy,” “mould” and the
less irregular “agree”), Philips’s poem shares with Spenser’s a critique of desire mistaken for
love at the same time that its contains a social imperative. The voice in Spenser’s poem claims
that because love is divinely ordained and can only be recognized when it corresponds to the
lovers’ internal ideals, arranged marriages are unethical. Similarly, Philips suggests not only that

422Brady, “The Platonic Poems,” 302-303.

423Edmund Spenser, “An Hymne In Honour of Beautie,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund
Spenser, ed. William A. Oram (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 716.
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good marriages are ones based in “Friendship,” but that she—not any “Wit”—is the only
intelligence able to see who is, and who isn’t, the “real” lover. “Sympathy” in both poems is the
mystical, even magical, source to which the poets appeal to prove the authenticity and
appropriateness of their love. In this Philips and Spencer share a reforming impulse with, for
example, Erasmus and Milton, who also, when arguing for the freedom to choose one’s
relationships, define “sympathy” as a law of nature that inarguably justifies certain social
liberties, at least for some members of society. In Erasmus’s humorous and light 1530 colloquy
on friendship, all the bawdry jokes and entertaining anecdotes about various sympathies and
antipathies in nature resolve at the end into a political statement: by listening to the “admirable”
and “secret Guidance of Nature,” that is, to “sympathy,” everyone ought to be free to choose his
own associates and vocation. 424 In his 1643 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton will go
on to claim outright what Erasmus leaves implied: sympathy and antipathy are inarguable laws
of nature that justify social action. For Milton, these unconscious impulses give adequate ground
for a husband’s decision to remain married or get divorced, for “sympathy” is equated with
“natural order,” and “[God] commands us to force nothing against” it. 425

The social application of “sympathy” remains vaguer in the work of the Cambridge Platonists,
such as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, who use the concept to prove, broadly, that there is a
natural, logical, and sentient moral order in the world. While More and Cudworth were highly
critical of the “wildest Philosophicall Enthusiasmes” of the alchemists Paracelsus and Robert
Fludd, they nonetheless wished to retain a place for “Magick Sympathy” in their metaphysical
systems.426 To combat a potential association between this “Vital,” “Magick” force and irrational
chaos, the Platonists also claimed it was “Sentient and Intellectual.”427 Emphasizing the magical
quality of the sympathetic force holding together parts of the universe allowed the Cambridge
Platonists to distance themselves from the mechanical philosophers. Foregrounding the sentience
of the universe aligned their position with that of the natural theologians and official Church.

424 Desiderius Erasmus, “De Amicitia, or Friendship,” in The Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. Rev. E. Johnson, M.A.,
trans. Nathan Bailey (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878.)
425 John Milton, The Divorce Tracts of John Milton, eds. Sara J. van den Berg & W. Scott Howard (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2010), 58.
426 Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656); and Henry More, Immortality of the Soul (1659). Cited in Seth
Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven:
Yale University Press), 207-208.
427 Cudworth, The True Intellectual System. Cited in Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 208.
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Because the sympathetic order of the universe was rational and conscious, Cudworth and More
related “sympathy” to fate, carving out a space for Providence in a realist system where the will
of an interested deity is circumscribed by the laws of nature that he made. In a gloss of a passage
in the Enneads where Plotinus is looking back to Empedocles, Cudworth writes:

The true Magick is the Friendship and Discord that is in the Universe; and again Magick
is said to be founded…In the Sympathy and Variety of diverse Powers conspiring
together into one Animal. Of which Passages, though the Principal meaning seem to be
this, that the ground of Magical Fascination, is one Vital Unitive Principle in the
Universe; yet they imply also, that there is a certain Vital Energy, not in the way of
Knowledge and Fancy, Will and Animal Appetite, but Fatally Sympathetical and Magical.
As indeed that Mutual Sympathy which we have constant Experience of, betwixt our Soul
and our Body, (being not a Material and Mechanical, but Vital thing) may be called also
Magical.428

Here Cudworth distinguishes between a kind of “Sympathy and Variety of diverse Powers” that
leads to “Magical Fascination,” or sentient awareness of itself (just as More and Cudworth
believed it was the existence of God that led to a conscious awareness of God) and a “Vital
Unitive Principle” that is neither mental—of “Knowledge and Fancy”—nor of the body—of
“Will and Animal Appetite.” But though this force is not of the mind or body, and though it is the
force responsible for an individual’s relationship to the universe, it does not come from outside
the individual by decree. Rather this “Fatally Sympathetical” force exists somewhere between
the soul and body even as it exists in the universe at large, holding together animate and
inanimate reality in “Mutual Sympathy.” This “Spirit of the World,” as More called it in
Immortality of the Soul, “has Faculties that work not by Election, but fatally or naturally.” 429
Where the Calvinists believed in the arbitrary decrees of a God who was bound by no natural
law, and the materialists claimed that the universe was not harmonious or ordered but, in fact, the
opposite, Cudworth and More maintained that both reality and morality were “Regular,”430
natural and discoverable through thought. Because this intellectual system is both realist and

428 Cudworth, The True Intellectual System. In Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 208-209.
429 Cited in Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 209.
430 From Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System. Cited in Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 209.
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teleological, the implication is that humans need only discover natural forces such as sympathy,
which they should then apply to the creation of their societies. It is a view presented earlier by
the Italian humanist and Neo-Platonist Pico della Mirandola, who writes that there are two kinds
of magic, one monstrous and demonic, the other “among the virtues sown by the kindness of
God and planted in the world.” This second kind of magic, “full of the deepest mysteries” is
synonymous with sympathy:

Having carefully investigated the harmony of the universe, which the Greeks very
expressively call συμπάθεια, and, having looked closely into the knowledge that natures
have of each other, this second magic, applying to each thing its innate charms, which are
called by magicians ίύγγες, as if it were itself the maker, discloses in public the wonders
lying hidden in the recesses of the world, in the bosom of nature, in the storerooms and
secrets of God.431

The uses to which this magic can be put are political. It is “nothing but that knowledge of divine
things wherein the kings of Persia educated their sons, that after the pattern of the republic of the
world they might themselves be taught to rule their own republic.” 432

But it is not at all clear how the general, optimistic claim that the universe is sympathetic
translates into specific political and ecclesiastical policy. As Seth Lobis convincingly writes:
“Cudworth’s and More’s experience of the Civil Wars produced no clear fissures in their thought
and work. In the unity of their systems there was a broader message of cultural unity—in
opposition to political and religious dissent.”433 Though the rhetoric of Cudworth’s and More’s
discourses and sermons promoting cultural unity are rousing, there is a static undercurrent that
runs through them. Rather than agonistically working out consensus or contracts, it must be the
inner feeling of love, Cudworth claims, that “will draw men on with sweet violence, whether
they will or no.”434 Cudworth’s assertion is reminiscent of the claim Clarendon makes in the
1660 speech he writes, that Charles II can “look into mens hearts” with divine omniscience:

431 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller and
Douglas Carmichael (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1965), 28.
432 Pico, Dignity of Man, 27.
433 Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 213.
434 Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons (Cambridge: 1647). Cited in
Lobis, Virtue of Sympathy, 213-214.
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“You know that Kings are in some sense called Gods, and so they may in some degree be able to
look into mens hearts; and God hath given us a King who can look as far into mens hearts, as any
Prince alive.” While Clarendon sweetens Charles II’s powers by emphasizing the extension of
his own heart “with a pious and grateful joy, to finde all His subjects at once in His arms, and
himself in theirs,” this nation bound together in royal love is quite obviously so absolutist it will
do everything in its power to penetrate the private thoughts of its subjects. Along with love
comes the threat of jealousy and hate, for “if He be provoked by evil looks, to make further
inquiry into mens hearts, and findes those corrupted by Envy and Uncharitableness, He will
never choose those hearts to trust and rely upon.”435

If in such formulations there is a danger that the privacy of the individual’s potentially
unsanctioned love, or her attractions to various causes and friendships, may become, suddenly,
public, it is also true that the experience of her own sympathy becomes a knowledge the
individual can levy in defence of her feelings and compulsions. In this sense, claiming that one
feels “sympathy” or “antipathy” has a similar clout to the assertion that one is divinely inspired.
An appeal to sympathy is like crying one’s conscience: both acts transcend debate to access a
truth that cannot be denied. The question then becomes not whether “sympathy” is a valid
fascination or even, as Philips is concerned, a core principle to apply to one’s life, but whether
the object of “sympathy” is, as Taylor suggests, “worthy.” By returning to the tension between
Philips’s definition of “sympathy,” and Taylor’s, we can see more clearly how the “broader
message of cultural unity” both does and does not offer coherent, practical advice to the
sympathetic individual.

5.5 Sympathy, Charity, and the Problem of Exclusivity

Considering that “sympathy” for Philips is “sacred,” her question to Taylor—“how far a Dear
and perfect friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity”—reveals a telling anxiety.
Unlike the more inclusive, Christianized metaphysic of Philips’s contemporary, the vitalist
philosopher Anne Conway, who claimed that “all creatures from the highest to the lowest are

435Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellors, to
the Two Houses of Parliaments; On Thursday the 13 of September, 1660 (London, 1660). Cited in Victoria Kahn,
Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004), 193.
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inseparably united one to another, by means of Subtiler Parts interceding or coming in between,”
Philips’s model of metaphysical friendship is self-consciously exclusive.436 She regularly
distinguishes between her ideal friendships and “the dull brutish World that know not Love.” In
her poem, “A Dialogue of FRIENDSHIP multiply’d,” she stages an argument between her own
persona, Orinda, who defends exclusive love between select people, and a voice defending
general Christian charity:

MUSIDORUS.
Will you unto one single Sense
Confine a starry Influence?
Or when you do the Rays combine,
To themselves only make them shine?
Love that’s engross’d by one alone,
Is Envy not Affection.
ORINDA.
No Musidorus, this would be
But Friendship’s Prodigality,
Union in Rays does not confine,
But doubles Lustre when they shine,
And Souls united live above
Envy, as much as scatter’d Loves.
Friendship (like Rivers) as it multiplies,
In many Streams, grows weaker still and dies.
MUSIDORUS.
Rivers indeed may lose their force,
When they divide or break their Course,
For they may want some hidden Spring,
Which to their Streams Recruits may bring;
But Friendship’s made of purest Fire,

Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter Loptson (The Hague:
436
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982,) 164.
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Which burns and keeps its Stock entire.

Love, like the Sun, may shed his Beams on all,
And grow more great by being General.
ORINDA.
The purity of Friendship’s Flame
Proves that from Sympathy it came,
And that the Hearts so close do knit
They no third Partner can admit;
Love like the Sun does all inspire,
But burns most by contracted Fire.
Then tho’ I honour ev’ry worthy Guest,
Yet my Lucasia only rules my Breast.437

The ORINDA speaker suggests that because the materials of love represented by “the Sun” are
readily and plentifully available to everyone, “Friendship” has no responsibility toward the
“General.” Though love might “inspire” everyone to friendship, this hallowed relationship
manifests itself only in “contracted” form. The paradox between general and particular interests,
or between duty to one’s Christian neighbours and freedom to love and coddle one’s favourites,
ORINDA suggests, can be smoothed over by raising “Souls united” over both “Envy” and
“scatter’d Loves.” Here “Sympathy” defends an elite worldview by an appeal to natural law. If
sympathy simply means the attraction of like-to-like and if friendship comes from sympathy,
then exclusivity—if we define it as seeking after a second self, or as restricting one’s interests to
self-interests—is justified in a natural or divine sense. The questions then become: how is
likeness defined, can likeness occur across class, sex and political boundaries, and what kind of
behaviour toward the “General” is sanctioned by loyalty to one’s elect group?

Taylor’s Discourse registers the same anxiety regarding how the concept of friendship so
important for the creation of “worthy societies” can and should be differently applied generally
to all humanity, or particularly to one’s caste. On the one hand Taylor states: “when men contract
friendships, they inclose the Commons; and what Nature intended should be every mans, we

437 Philips, Poems, 177-178.

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make proper to two or three.”438 But though “it were well if you could love, and if you could
benefit all mankinde,”439 “the Universal friendship of which I speak, must be limited, because we
are so.”440 Taylor first distinguishes between “Universal” and “limited” social realities, and then
describes what kinds of material exchanges are incumbent upon the friend in each case.
Universal friendship, writes Taylor, is more properly called “Charity”: “Christian Charity is
friendship to all the world.”441 For Taylor, “Charity” is defined by a general, abstract feeling of
generosity and an injunction to do what one can: “A good man is a friend to all the world; and he
is not truly charitable that does not wish well, and do good to all mankind in what he can.” 442
“But,” Taylor goes on, “though we must pray for all men, yet we say speciall Latanies for brave
Kings and holy Prelates, and wise Guides of souls.”

Taylor’s Christian charity is fairly nonchalant, defined by vague “sociable” and “friendly”
feelings.443 It asks of people to do their bit when they can. However, “actuall friendship,” writes
Taylor, which “is nothing but love and society mixed together,” is far more demanding. 444
Taylor’s definition of “society” is, essentially, caste. “Where vertue dwells there friendships
make,/But evil neighbourhoods forsake,” rhymes Taylor.445 When it comes to particular
friendships between members of the same “society,” the demands upon friends change,
becoming almost exclusively material. First, writes Taylor, we should only be friends with
“good” and “vertuous” men. But by “good” and “vertuous” Taylor does not mean the
“philosophical excellencies of some morose persons” who possess “justice” (“a good entercourse
for Merchants”), nor “temperance” (which helps to make a man “good company” and “wise”),
nor “charity,” nor “devotion,” but “something else.” 446 For Taylor, an ideal friend is active,
useful, and pragmatic. A virtuous man, he claims, is “ready to do acts of goodnesse and to oblige
others, to do things useful and profitable, for a loving man, a beneficent, bountiful man.” 447 “A
good man,” he continues, “is a profitable, useful person, and that’s the band of effective

438 Taylor, A discourse, 7.

439 Taylor, A discourse, 9.
440 Taylor, A discourse, 14.
441 Taylor, A discourse, 6.
442 Taylor, A discourse, 14.
443 Taylor, A discourse, 15.
444 Taylor, A discourse, 17.
445 Taylor, A discourse, 18.
446 Taylor, A discourse, 19.
447 Taylor, A discourse, 21.
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friendship,”448 for “he only is fit to be chosen for a friend, who can do those offices for which
friendship is excellent. For (mistake not) no man can be loved for himselfe.” 449 This kind of
friendship, dependent upon the material benefits friends can offer to one another tending toward
their mutual self-interest, is also related to the “union of souls,” “worthiness of manner” and
“greatness of understanding,” which makes friendship superior to necessary bonds like filial
ties.450 That Taylor privileges a kind of fraternity men are at liberty to choose for themselves
over the “necessary” bonds of family should come as no surprise in this context when we
remember that his implied reader, Katherine Philips, has family ties to Parliamentarians and
Puritans. It is also important to note that Philips comes from a lower social order than the royalist
women she writes friendship poems about, at a time when her own fortunes had dramatically
improved. For example, Lucasia (Anne Owens), the ruler of ORINDA’s breast in “A Dialogue,”
was, according to Carol Barash “far more affluent than Katherine Philips.” During the
Interregnum, when James Philips was MP of Cardigan, Owens and her royalist Welsh family
“were willing to swing their local influence to whoever was politically ascendant during that
tumultuous period.” Barash thus offers a different reading from much of the scholarly work on
Katherine Philips, which sees the poet’s profusions of love for Lucasia, or lamentations of the
pain Lucasia has caused her, as entirely genuine if not homoerotic. 451 Barash’s reading is far
more cynical: “the deference shown to Anne Owen in many of the poems and letters from
“Orinda” to “Lucasia” begins in Philips’s political alliances with Owen’s family.” 452

It is possible that Taylor is critiquing the Platonic ideal of friendship Philips lauds for what he
perceives to be her opportunism. For when he emphasizes the material exchanges between
friends, he is not only talking about a general absence of miserliness, the giving of gifts, or
lending aid in time of need. What most defines ideal friendship for Taylor is a mutual
commitment between both parties to support each other’s wealth. Friends, for Taylor—like for
Philips—represent an elite society within society at large. Amongst themselves the aristocratic

448 Taylor, A discourse, 23.

449 Taylor, A discourse, 24.
450 Taylor, A discourse, 70.
451 See, for example, Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips”; Harriette Andreadis, “Re-
Configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire,” SEL 46, no. 3 (2006): 523-542;
Paula Loscocco, “Inventing the English Sappho: Katherine Philips’s Donnean Poetry,” The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 102, no. 1 (2003): 59-87.
452 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 76.
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caste he is referring to share their property: “it is certain that amongst friends their estates are
common.”453 This kind of shared, material interest is limited to one’s caste. In a burst of
rhetorical enthusiasm, which, Hero Chalmers remarks, “sounds like a eulogy of the royalist
defence of Anglican orthodoxy,”454 Taylor writes: “it is a precept of Christian charity, to lay
down our lives for our Brethren, that is, those who were combined in a cause of Religion, who
were united with the same hopes, and imparted to each other ready assistances, and grew dear by
common suffering.” But he is quick to check himself. In an actual sense, of course, “we will
hardly die when it is nothing, when no good, no worthy end is served, and become a sacrifice to
redeem a foot-boy.”455

5.6 Women’s Friendship

While charitable feelings are demanded of Christians in a vague, well-meaning sense, on the
level of the particular Taylor is critical of feeling. Thus we might say Taylor critiques Philips for
applying abstract ideals of love and sympathy to friendship in particular cases, and of thus
making rhetorical profusions that are not backed up with material weight. Toward the end of his
Discourse, he associates this critique not with her potentially suspect Parliamentarian ties, which
might prevent her from putting her money where her mouth is, but with her sex, thereby
reasserting the staunch patriarchal values of the caste she is seeking to join at this moment of
political instability, and, as a result, limiting her ability to do so. Though he is willing to “admit
your [Philips’s] sex into the communities of noble friendship,” as some wives have been the best
of friends—for example Brutus’s wife, Portia, who stabbed herself in the thigh to demonstrate
her ability to keep a secret—yet he “cannot say that Women are capable of all those excellencies
by which men can oblige the world. 456 “A man is the best friend in trouble,” Taylor writes, “but a
woman may be equal to him in dayes of joy.”457 Women are, he concludes the “beauties of
society and the prettinesses of friendship.”458

453 Taylor, A discourse, 54.

454 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 64.
455 Taylor, A discourse, 44.
456 Taylor, A discourse, 86, 88.
457 Taylor, A discourse, 89.
458 Taylor, A discourse, 90.
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If Philips did not already feel Taylor’s condescension here, she need only flip back a few pages
to understand what he was really implying by “prettinesses.” Earlier in the Discourse,
distinguishing between friendships that are “profitable” and ones that are merely abstract, he
writes: “For I do not think that friendships are Metaphysical nothings, created for contemplation,
or that men or women should stare upon each other’s faces, and make dialogues of news and
prettinesses, and look babies in one anothers eyes.” 459 It is far better to have “wheat” in
friendship, Taylor claims, than “the prettiest Tulips that are good for nothing.” 460

Taylor’s understanding of “sympathy” is that it is a natural force rather than a metaphysical one.
For him, “sympathy” is related to “natural inclinations” and to “humours.” Using it to describe
an impulse related to the body and to blood, to “nature” and “instinct,” his implication is that
Philips is misguided to think that friendship stems from “sacred sympathy.” In elevating
“nature” to the level of the “sacred,” her version of friendship is empty of “reason,” which for
Taylor means that it lacks an emphasis on pragmatic, material, mutual self-interest. However,
Philips herself often pulls out the rug from under the ideals she fashions in the epigrammatic
turns of some of her poems’ final lines. Philips’s poem, “FRIENDSHIP,” for example, is ode-
like in its elevated tone and considerate praise of its single subject, until the very end:

Let the dull brutish World that know not Love

Continue Hereticks, and disapprove
That noble Flame; but the refined know
‘Tis all the Heav’n we have here below.
Nature subsists by Love, and they [Nature] do tie
Things to their Causes but by Sympathy.
Love chains the diff’rent Elements in one
Great Harmony, link’d to the heav’nly Throne…
He’s worse than Beast that cannot Love, and yet
It is not bought for Mony, Pains or Wit;
For no chance or design can Spirits move,
But the eternal Destiny of Love:…

459 Taylor, A discourse, 23.

460 Taylor, A discourse, 38.
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This, this is Friendship, that abstracted Flame

Which groveling Mortals know not how to name…
Friendship (like Heraldry) is hereby known,
Richest when plainest, bravest when alone;
Calm as a Virgin, and more Innocent
Than sleeping Doves are, and as much content
As Saints in Visions, quiet as the Night,
But clear and open as the Summer’s Light;
United more than Spirits Faculties,
Higher in Thoughts than are the Eagle’s Eyes;
What shall I say? when we true Friends are grown,
W’are like—Alas, we’re like our selves alone.461

In this poem, which self-consciously resembles “heraldry” in that the qualities of friendship
parade by as if in a pageant, the speaker lauds features that someone like Taylor would criticise.
Here, friendship is disassociated from “Mony, Pains or Wit” and praised for being “abstracted.”
The speaker congratulates herself for being one of the “refined” who possesses understanding of
that “noble Flame,” and attaches herself to “eternal Destiny” in contrast to the “groveling
Mortals” squelching out their bitter existences on the “dull brutish World.” The entire procession
is, of course, demoralized by the last line, which playfully asks the reader to consider whether
the preceding stream of metaphors were only hopeful movements of the speaker’s mind.
However, it is not necessarily the case that by winking at her pageant to friendship the poet is
inverting all of her poem’s statements into something ironic. If she undoes the final procession of
her metaphors and similes—the aphorisms at the start of the poem seem less affected. “Nature
subsists by Love, and they do tie/ Things to their Causes but by Sympathy” and “Love chains the
diff’rent Elements in one/Great Harmony, link’d to the heav’nly Throne” are formally
declarative and their function is to testify on behalf of a metaphysic that the poet claims to have
true knowledge of, though such knowledge, she is aware, is as much a product of her thoughts as
are her metaphors. In this Platonic—and royalist—vision of the universe, “Nature” joins forces
with its master, “Love,” to tie everything together in one great hierarchy starting at the bottom

461 Philips, Poems, 99-101.

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and ascending to “the heav’nly Throne.” “Sympathy” here is the mechanism “Nature” and
“Love” use not only to bind everything together in a physical sense but also to make these
divinely sanctioned attractions available to awareness. It is, the poet implies when she calls
friendship “clear and open,” a mechanism that is simple, insofar as the sorting of like-with-like is
easy to understand. By vaulting at the very end into metafictional awareness, the poem
transcends itself, thereby attempting to merge visions with the transcendent truth-statements that
front it. In so doing, it naturalizes both the Platonic metaphysic it describes, and the royalist
politics that this metaphysic expresses so well by analogy.

Yet the Platonic method of going inward to thought in order to seek after external truths raises
the question of solipsism. In a poem called, “The ENQUIRY,” Philips confronts this fear. In all
but the last of the poem’s eight stanzas, the poet asks question after question:

But as our Immortality

By inward Sense we find,
Judging that if it cou’d not be,
It wou’d not be design’d:
So here how cou’d such Copies fall,
If there were no Original?
…
Why is’t so difficult to see
Two Bodies and one Mind?
…
Why do we step with so light Sense
From Friendship to Indifference. 462

While elsewhere in Philips’s poetry, feeling “sympathy” offers incontrovertible proof that one’s
affections are sacrosanct, holy and right, and that one is conducting oneself in society in
accordance with divine decree, in the seventh stanza of “The ENQUIRY” the poet contrasts ideal
sympathy with the waxing and waning attachments we actually experience:
If Friendship Sympathy impart,

462 Philips, Poems, 101-102.

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Why this ill-shuffled Game,

That Heart can never meet with Heart,
Or Flame encounter Flame?
What does this Cruelty create?
Is’t the Intrigue of Love or Fate?463
But upon closer inspection it is clear that the power and goodness of “Sympathy” is not being
questioned here. Rather, Philips doubts humanity’s ability to realize it. In her final stanza the
poet concludes that friendship and sympathy offer just a taste of heaven, without which we
wouldn’t know of heaven’s existence at all. Because we are kept wanting the full manifestation
of ideal sympathy, experiencing it only in a lesser form, we constantly shape ourselves toward a
higher end that is constantly deferred. This, too, is fairly consistent with the Platonic relationship
between goodness and love that we find in something like The Symposium, where “love” in
Diotima’s final analysis is not a God or positive essence but a desire for and movement toward
the good.464 Though Philips would not have read The Symposium, her friend Francis Finch (alias
Palaemon), the brother of philosopher Anne Conway,465 defined “Love” this way in an essay he
wrote for “Lucasia-Orinda” in 1653 called Friendship: “for Love itself is like the Planet
Mercury, which hath no influence properly its own, but follows the predomination of those other
Planets with whom he is in Conjunction, and so is good with the good, bad with the bad: and just
so is Love, vitious or virtuous according to its objects.”466 Such a definition of love reveals, also,
the darker side of sympathy. For if sympathy simply means the ‘well-shuffled’ alignment of
“Heart” to “Heart” and “Flame” to “Flame,” how does the feeler of sympathy know that the
object of her attraction, and therefore she herself, is good?
Philips addresses this more ‘horrid’ vision of sympathy is a poem written to commemorate the
death of Anne Owen’s first husband, John Owen, who died in 1655. The poem is called “To my
dearest Friend Mrs. Owen, upon her greatest Loss”:

As when two Sister Rivulets, who crept

463 Philips, Poems, 103.

464 “…love is the permanent possession of goodness for oneself…” Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49.
465 Elaine Hobby, “Orinda and Female Intimacy,” in Early Women Writers: 1600-1720 (New York: Addison Wesley
Longman Limited, 1998,) 79.
466 Francis Finch, Friendship (London: March 1654,) 3.
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From that dark Bed of Snow wherein they slept,

By private distant Currents under Ground
Have by Meanders eithers Bosom found,
They sob aloud and break down what withstood,
Swoln by their own Embraces to a Flood:
So when my Sympathy for thy dear Grief
Had brought me near, in hope to give Relief,
I found my Sorrow heightned when so join’d,
And thine increas’d by being so combin’d… 467

“Sympathy” here is more similar to its current usage than in any of Philips’s other poems. To
merge identities with the object of one’s sympathy so significantly that suffering only increases
until the banks burst is to turn grief into something like ecstasy. As much as the speaker feels sad
for her friend, here, the poem is as much about the speaker’s fascination with the mystical
conjunction of hearts she experiences with the addressee. What she feels is amplified when it is
reflected in someone else until both parties lose their identities and merge in a flood of tears.

Sympathy puts one at risk of emotional contagion. Its powerful communicativeness, though, is
what makes it special: it is by sympathy that people extend themselves into the world and into
the hearts of those around them to leave their impression. Listing friendship’s qualities,
Conway’s brother Finch says it is both “Communicative: and this keeps Friendship in perpetuall
Motion and Action, and so makes it more resplendent,” and also “Virtuous,” for “it delights in
nothing more than preserving those in the paths of virtue whose inclinations hearken to the
worse.”468 And: “Friendship does the same thing to the whole Man that the Rationall Soul does
to the imperfect Embryo: as that adds a higher and more sublime life to what had only Vegetation
and Sense before, so does this to that.”469 Without these kinds of social encounters, human beings
would be, on some fundamental level, inactivated.

It is also the case that the “Sister Rivulets,” equal in size and sorrow, offer a counter vision to the
disproportionate absorption of wives into husbands so often implied by the figure of “rivulets”

467 Philips, Poems, 169.

468 Finch, Friendship, 9-10.
469 Finch, Friendship, 31.
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and its comparison to Rivers. In The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights published in 1632,
for example, marriage is represented as the incorporation of the wife into the husband through
the use of a watery simile:

It is true, that man and wife are one person; but understand in what manner. When a
small brook or little rivulet incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or Thames, the poor
rivulet loseth her name; it is carried and re-carried with the new associate; it beareth no
sway; it possesseth nothing coverture. A woman as soon as she is married is called
covert; in Latin nupta, that is, ‘veiled’; as it were clouded and overshadowed; she hath
lost her stream. I may more truly, far away, say to a married woman, her new self is her
superior; her companion, her master. 470

Philips’s poem continues its subtle critique of the kind of description of marriage we see in The
Lawes Resolution when the speaker lauds Owens’s dead husband for valuing her autonomy: “As
Husbands serious, but as Lovers kind,/He valu’d all of her, but lov’d her Mind.” If we place
Philips’s line beside others written upon marriage, the difference is more stark. Consider the
following line from Thomas Carew’s poem, “A Married Woman.” Perhaps not coincidentally, it
has an identical rhythm to Philips’s line: “When I shall marry, if I doe not find/A wife thus
moulded, I’le create this mind.”471 Carew’s speaker sardonically implies that his future wife’s
mind may well be formless, leaving him free to sculpt her interior experience into whatever suits
him. Even his choice of pronoun emphasizes that he and this hypothetical wife are a
fundamentally different species. ‘I’ appears three times in this one short line, because the “I”
here is active, present, and full of desire and judgement. The possible wife lacks all definition
and specificity, as well as identity. She is “a wife.” Even her mind is not “hers” but “this mind,”
the speaker’s.

“Sympathy” in “To my dearest Friend” emphasizes the metaphysical sameness of the speaker
and her object, a sameness in which both “Rivulets” combine to produce a “Flood,” equally lost,
one in the other. Experiencing “Sympathy,” both poet and Owen give up control of themselves,
merging together equally and freely in a flood of tears. Rather than one woman losing herself to

470 Cited in Elaine Hobby, “The Politics of Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry Donne to
Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993,) 32.
471 Cited in Hobby, “The Politics of Gender,” 45.
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the superior identity of her husband, each woman doubles in size as she finds her second self in a
relationship between equals.

There is a related tension in Finch’s essay, and I would also suggest in Taylor’s Discourse,
between the power of friendship to alter our inclinations and the freedom we have to choose our
friends. Liberty to choose friends, liberality between friends, and freedom of conversation among
friends is, for Finch, Taylor and also for Philips, of the utmost importance. Like Taylor (and also
like Philips in her poems “Friendship” and “A Friend”), Finch suggests that friendship is
superior to both filial bonds and the marriage tie. He also claims it is superior to political loyalty:

I do not think the love of any Relation hath that Candour, Vigour, Complacency, and
eminent Perfection, which is in the love of Friends. And the reason here of (to my present
apprehension) is, that in all other Relations, whether Naturall or Politick, our love is a
Duty imposed; on this a Duty too, but freely chosen at first, and made so by ourselves. 472

Yet, where for Taylor mutual “interest” is the core prerequisite for choosing a friend, for Finch,
as for Philips, the essential thing is “naturall affection.”473 Also unlike Taylor, Finch does not
distinguish between friendships where both parties are men, women, or of different sexes. “All
Souls are Equall,” Finch writes when he comes to the question of sex. 474 Finally, where Taylor
associates “sympathy” with relations less rational and less controllable than friendship, with
“nature,” and with “instinct,” Finch does not use the word at all. Considering the frequency with
which Philips uses it, and that she usually does so in declarative, aphoristic statements, I suggest
that the absence of the word in Finch’s essay is significant, not necessarily because Finch was
intentionally omitting it, but because given the similarities between Finch’s vision of friendship
and Philips’s, the fact that she repeatedly emphasizes sympathy suggests how important the
concept is for her, at least for a time in the 1650s.

Thus for Philips, Taylor, and Finch, freedom is an essential quality of ideal friendship. For
Philips, this is most evident in her rather straight-forwardly academic poem, “A FRIEND.” Here,
too, friendship is “Nobler than Kindred, or than Marriage-band,/Because more free,” “Essential

472 Finch, Friendship, 4-5.

473 Finch, Friendship, 6.
474 Finch, Friendship, 34.
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Honour must be in a Friend,” “none can be a Friend that is not Good,” “A Friend should find out
each Necessity,/And then unask’d relieve’t at any rate” for not to do so is to make of friendship a
“Formality.”475 Also, women’s friendship shares the nobility and “vast Capacity” of all true
friendship, and is not a lesser version of that sacred friendship between men:

If Souls no Sexes have, for Men t’exclude

Women from Friendship’s vast Capacity,
Is a Design injurious or rude,
Only maintain’d by partial Tyranny.
Love is allow’d to us, and Innocence,
And noblest Friendships do proceed from thence

This may allude to Finch’s assertion that “Souls are Equall” and also rebuff Taylor’s claim that
women can only offer a second-rate version of the friendship men can offer. Unlike both Finch
and Taylor, however, Philips stresses that friendship is an abstraction of universal love:
“Friendship’s an Abstract of this noble Flame,/’Tis Love refin’d.” Also unlike Finch and Taylor,
she not only carves out a place for “Sympathy” in her model of friendship, but makes
“Sympathy” “The chiefest thing”:
The chiefest thing in Friends is Sympathy.
There is a Secret that doth Friendship guide,
Which makes two Souls before they know agree,
Who by a thousand mixtures are ally’d,
And chang’d and lost, so that it is not known
Within which Breast doth now reside their own.
For Philips, as we saw with Du Bartas, sympathy orders all the friendships in the world and in
nature. Sympathy is a “guide” that fatefully steers us in directions pleasing to God. It is
predestined that certain souls will meet and be changed by “a thousand mixtures” into new kinds
of people. This plentiful, thousand-mixtured view of what makes a friendship, and the belief that
people can transform into each other not only emotionally but essentially, both in “Soul” and
“Breast”, corresponds to the metaphysical system devised by Anne Conway, Francis Finch’s

475 Philips, Poems, 119-122.

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sister. Pausing for a moment to consider Conway’s Principles will help us to understand the final
point to be made about the ramifications of sympathy in the friendship poetry of Katherine
Philips.

5.7 Sympathy and Anne Conway

The point I wish to make is that although in an orderly view of the universe like Du Bartas’s,
where things are drawn out of chaos and put in their place, sympathy may seem like a static
principle, binding things to their true likenesses and helping them to express their right natures, it
is also the case that sympathy is a principle of metamorphosis, the power that may make a person
“chang’d and lost.” Sympathy’s power to change people and things is what makes it a threat of
contagion. It is also the means by which, in a Neo-Platonic view, creatures ascend up the scale of
being toward goodness and to God. One of my suggestions here is that there is a relationship
between the way seventeenth-century philosophers understand change, and their acceptance or
rejection of sympathy. Idealists like Leibniz and Conway who accept change (specifically
evolution toward goodness) as an aspect of the physical and spiritual universe also have a central
place for “preestablished harmony” or for “sympathy” in their systems. Those Cartesians and
“monistic materialists” like Hobbes and Spinoza 476 who believe that change is the result of
random, arbitrary collisions of matter are highly sceptical of “sympathy.” Philips falls into the
former camp, Taylor into the latter.

Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy was not published until
after her death in 1690, nearly forty years after Katherine Philips was writing her friendship
poetry. But during the interregnum Anne Conway was developing her ideas under the instruction
of Henry More, and Katherine Philips certainly would have known about her. Not only was she
Francis Finch’s sister, but also at this time, Anne Conway’s husband, Edward Conway, was the
patron and protector of Jeremy Taylor, who, as a Church of England divine was regarded by the
English Republic with suspicion.477 Though the Conways were royalists, like the Philipses they
were tolerant of their political opponents if there was economic gain to be had. Edward Conway
had “united would-be royalists behind Cromwell and the English parliament” in Ireland against

476 Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004,) 3.
477 Hutton, Anne Conway, 26.
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the rebels, thus securing his safety and stability during the interregnum. 478 In matters of religion,
Edward Conway was “broad church” and tolerant of some dissent so long as it had no radical
political or economic ramifications. Anne Conway was more radically inclined. At the end of her
life and against the wishes of her family and her teacher Henry More, she became a Quaker. The
“design” of Quakers, according to Edward Conway, like that of Anabaptists, “is only to turn out
the landlords.”479 Yet attracted to the Quakers’ liberal theology of universal redemption, to their
emphasis on the goodness and mercy of God, to their doctrine of “the light within,” and, as a
lifelong sufferer of terrible headaches, to their conviction that suffering purifies, Anne Conway
surrounded herself at the end of her life with a Society of Friends. This ecumenical quality is
reflected in Anne Conway’s metaphysics, which suggest that salvation is not only possible but
inevitable, not only for Christians and human beings of other faiths, but for all creatures, even
inanimate material. According to her biographer Sarah Hutton, Conway’s system can “in one
sense be regarded as an exercise in ecumenical deism: a rational account of God and the world,
with which non-Christians can engage.”480

Conway’s monist vision of the universe is one of the most vital of all seventeenth-century
philosophers. A pupil and close friend of Henry More, she is today most famous for being a
forerunner and inspiration of Leibniz in a number of respects, including commitment to the
goodness and rationality of God and the conception of “every substance being a thinking thing,
with a graded hierarchy of types of thinking.”481 According to Leibniz himself, he shared with
Anne Conway “a middle position between Plato and Democritus,” believing that “all things take
place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes argue” and at the same time “that everything
takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes.” 482 Conway’s broad
convictions were that “true philosophy is also sacred philosophy” 483 and that creation should

478 Hutton, Anne Conway, 19.

479 Hutton, Anne Conway, 178.
480 Hutton, Anne Conway, 171.
481 Peter Loptson,“Introduction,” in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 3.
482 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften von G.W. Leibniz, 3rd vol., ed. C. I. Gerhardt
(Berlin: 1875), 217. Cited in Hutton, Anne Conway, 233.
483 Hutton, Anne Conway, 157.
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express the fundamental qualities of its creator. 484 These qualities are goodness, wisdom, and
vital creativity.

One potential problem with Conway’s conviction that the likeness between God and nature
extended to the very substrate of creation, was that it implied pantheism. In Conway’s system,
everything except God is a combination of body and spirit, possessing a kind of mentality and
corporeality. She is emphatic that God is a different substance from all the other substances;
despite acknowledging similarities between her system and the work of her philosophical and
atheistic enemies, Spinoza and Hobbes, this is the issue upon which she differs with them. Each,
she writes, “confounds God and Creatures in their Essences, and denies that there is any
Essential Distinction between them.” 485 Instead she argues that there is a hierarchy of three
species: God, who is immaterial, changeless and good, Christ, who possess matter and spirit, like
us, and whose goodness cannot change, and creatures, who are all of one spiritual and corporeal
substance and who can change toward goodness or toward evil, although ultimately they are
predestined to increase in perfection infinitely, though “there can never be a Progression or
Ascension made unto God.”486 In addition to the idea that all creatures can turn into each other
because they share a substance, 487 Christ as Middle Nature is Anne Conway’s original invention.
Indeed one of her core aims is to demonstrate the existence of Christ as metaphysically
necessary.488 Drawing on the Neo-Platonism and Kabbala denudata introduced to her by Henry
More and Francis Mercury van Helmont, 489 she reasons that because God in his immateriality
and changelessness is so different from all of his created things, he requires an instrument in
order to move them. While he “is not divided, or separated from [his creatures]; but most strictly
and in the highest degree intimately present in them all,” he is nonetheless so “distinct” from
them it is not possible for him to directly interact with them. 490 Thus he diminishes himself to
create “a certain Circular Vacuity of Space of Worlds.”491 Into this space he projects an

484 Hutton, Anne Conway, 153.

485 Conway, Principles, 222.
486 Conway, Principles, 224.
487 Loptson, “Introduction,” 17.
488 Though, Hutton argues, “[h]er concept of Middle Nature is, in many respects, a divinized version of the
intermediary causal principle posited by the Cambridge Platonists—More’s ‘Spirit of Nature’ or Cudworth’s ‘Plastic
Nature’.” Hutton, Anne Conway, 201.
489 Hutton, Anne Conway, 140.
490 Conway, Principles, 149.
491 Conway, Principles, 151.
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intervening agent—Christ—who, like the Kabbala’s Adam Kadmon, shares the nature of
creatures in order to act as God’s creative medium. 492 This concept of Middle Nature, Hutton
writes, is “a barrier between creatures and God every bit as much as it is a bridge between God
and the world.”493 It explains divine immanence in all created things, and safeguards Conway
against the charges of pantheism and atheism which were commonly levelled against the single-
substance monadologies of Spinoza and Hobbes.

Because God’s nature is to be good and to create, and because God is and cannot be other than
his nature, he creates infinitely, meaning there are infinite worlds embedded in infinite worlds.
This saturation of infinity with vital, living substance is possible due to the infinite divisibility of
everything. If our universe is comprised of innumerable atoms, in each of those atoms is another
universe comprised of innumerable atoms. Things in this unthinkable plenitude are related to
each other, as for Du Bartas, by sympathy:

MOREVOER the consideration of this Infinite Divisibility of every thing, into parts
always less, is no unnecessary or unprofitable Theory, but a thing of very great moment;
viz. that thereby may be understood the Reasons and Causes of Things; and how all
Creatures from the highest to the lowest are inseparably united one with another, by
means of Subtiler Parts interceding or coming in between, which are the Emanations of
one Creature into another, by which also they act one upon another at the greatest
distance; and this is the Foundation of all Sympathy and Antipathy which happens in
Creatures: And if these things be well understood of any one, he may easily see into the
most secret and hidden Causes of Things, which ignorant Men call occult Qualities. 494

For Conway “the Goodness of God in its own proper Nature is Communicative, and
Multiplicative.”495 “Sympathy” describes the nature of this communication of goodness, which
occurs through the subtle distribution of infinitesimal parts. In Conway’s metaphysic there are

492 “But this is to be understood of that union and Communion which Creatures have with God; so that although God
immediately operates in all things, yet he uses this Medium as an Instrument, by which he co-operates in his
Creatures; because it is, in regard of its Nature, more near unto them; and yet because he is more excellent than all
other Productions, which we call Creatures, and that too in his own Nature.” Conway, Principles, 169-170.
493 Hutton, Anne Conway, 176.
494 Conway, Principles, 164.
495 Conway, Principles, 154.
 175

two fundamental truths: everything is alive, and everything is connected. This view directly
opposes the materialist metaphysic, where inert atoms are confined within themselves against
each other. Radically syncretic, holding to the belief in a philosophia perennis which conflates
“ancient and modern philosophy into one timeless system of thought,” 496 her Principles express
Conway’s universalist spirit:

And so that which Paul speaketh concerning Man, may in like manner be understood of
all Creatures, (who in their Original State were a certain Species of Man so called for
their Excellencies, as hereafter shall be shown;) to wit, that God made all Nations, or
Armies of Creatures, out of one Blood: And certainly here the reason of both is the same;
for as God made all Nations out of one Blood, to the end they might love each other, and
stand in mutual Sympathy, and help each other; so hath he implanted a certain Universal
Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as being all Members of one Body, and (as I
may so say) Brethren, having one common Father, to wit, God in Christ, or Word made
Flesh; and so also one Mother, viz. that Substance or Essence alone, out of which they
proceeded, and whereof they are real Parts and Members; and albeit Sin hath in a
wonderful Manner impaired this Love and Sympathy, yet it hath not destroyed it. 497

Not only are all creatures—human, animal and beyond—made of “one Blood,” but they are
made so for a particular end devised by God in accordance with his goodness: to “love each
other, and stand in mutual Sympathy, and help each other.” This benevolent, optimistic view of
nature has ramifications for religious and political toleration. Inspired by the Quaker George
Keith, who denied the existence of hell and extended salvation to all people and animals, one of
her aims is to conceive of a trinity in God that omits the idea of three distinct persons because
this idea causes “Offence to Turks, Jews, or any other People.” 498 Repeatedly she emphasizes
that her Principles are true because they have a global perspective and are acceptable to other
nations and faiths. Sympathy, for Conway, is a divinely implanted force that compels us to live
in a state of universal friendliness.

496 Hutton, Anne Conway, 11.

497 Conway, Principles, 178-179.
498 Conway, Principles, 149.
 176

While she concedes that “particular Love” between parents and children or those with the “same
Nature” is powerful, her main emphasis—unlike Philips’s or Taylor’s—is on “Universal Love in
all Creatures.” She sketches three “Foundation[s] of all Love or Desire.” These are likeness or
similarity of substance, one creature having its being from another (Taylor’s “necessary
friendships”), and goodness, but it is goodness that “is the most vehement or powerful Magnet.”
Because God is the entity that is most good, he is the also the most loved and the greatest
compeller of sympathy.499 What is more, if a person or thing is compelled toward goodness, their
own goodness is enhanced until eventually they ascend higher and higher up the chain of being
toward God.500 There is a chain of being in Conway’s system, but aside from declaring the
absolute separateness of God from the creatures, she de-emphasizes all other hierarchies, which
other writers—like Milton—focused on. Conway draws no moral distinction between male and
female, animals and humans, or among species, or even between animate and inanimate
domains. Instead she concentrates on the unity between creatures and the inevitability that in the
grand scheme of things all creatures will infinitely ascend toward goodness.

5.8 Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism

If, in Philips words, “Great Harmony, link’d to the heav’nly Throne” describes a hierarchical
chain of being culminating in God, where the higher the level the more rarified the substance or
person, “Secret” “Sympathy” describes the process by which movement up the scale of Being
can occur: by one body magically metamorphosing into another under the greater body’s
influence.

This, I suggest, is a cosmopolitan worldview. In her poetry and in her letters, Philips created an
ideal persona who is familiar and at ease in different societies. She is a Parliamentarian Puritan
so comfortable with Royalists she became one; she is a Royalist so comfortable with

499Conway, Principles, 198-200.

500Just as infinite divisibility is a necessary component of Conway’s universe, so is penetrability not only of spirit
but of body. What this means is that “every Body may be turned into a Spirit, and a Spirit into a Body; because the
distinction between Body and Spirit is only in Modo, not in Essentia.” Like Leibniz’s, Conway’s philosophy is
optimistic. Though creatures become one with whatever they associate, and can thus ascend toward goodness or
descend toward evil, on a grand scale such transformations ultimately tend toward goodness: “And that the worst of
Creatures; yea, the most cursed Devils, after many and long-continued Torments, shall at length return to a State of
Goodness.” These transformations occur over one lifetime, or across many lifetimes, as Conway, following the
heterodox theologian Origen, believes in redemption through metemphychosis.
 177

Parliamentarians she married one. She is a woman who models a close platonic friendship with
men. Though their work and dispositions are very different, Philips shares an ecumenical spirit
with Anne Conway, though Philips’s is more limited. For both of these writers, the image of
sympathy as a benevolent cosmic unifying power expresses their cosmopolitanism. To
experience sympathy aligns them not only with cosmic feeling but with cosmic reason. Such an
alignment of individual to cosmos resembles the Stoic idea of sympathy as a cosmic force. In the
Stoic view, as we saw in Chapter Two, once a person has both perfected his or her rational
capacities and assented “to those impulses that are in line with the course of the active principle
that governs the world,” “he or she will automatically become a ‘world citizen’ (kosmopolitês),
participating on the highest level of being.”501

By keeping “Sympathy” both “sacred” and “Secret,” Philips’s friendship poetry bears out Derek
Hirst’s thesis, enriched by Victoria Kahn’s analysis of Caroline aesthetic production, that the
royalist fascination in the 1650s with romance and lyric tended to “sacralize authority.”502 Hirst
claims that such sacralization ultimately sought “to render statecraft mysterious.” He opposes
royalist cultural production to republication cultural production, which, he says, “sought to
demystify statecraft.” Kahn generally agrees with Hirst but with the caveat that while many
royalist writers did not wish to desacrilize statecraft, they also wanted to explain why the
“aestheticism” of Charles I’s and Henrietta Maria’s court had failed. Likes Hobbes, writes Kahn,
many royalist writers, particularly of romance, “suggest that a frank recognition of the centrality
of interest is the foundation of any secure government. Unlike Hobbes, however, the authors
want to resist the complete demystification of the passions—the reduction of the passions to
varieties of self-interest.”503 If we remember that Philips is a person who is close to the highest
echelons of her society while remaining ultimately barred from various realms of power, her
emphasis on the magical, transformative power of “Sympathy” starts to look like a self-interested
impulse, albeit one wrapped in an affective, metaphysical cloak. “Sympathy” can make “Orinda”
“ally’d” to anyone—her husband, or her aristocratic friends. Of course, nowhere in her poetry
does one of her speakers sympathetically merge with a person lower on the social scale. And
perhaps this offers a clue as to why Jeremy Taylor would reduce Philips’s “sacred,” “Secret”

501 René Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34-35.
502 Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 226.
503 Ibid.
 178

“Sympathy,” to a force “less noble.” Looking down the ladder of social powers, Philips’s
“Sympathy,” if accepted, implies political and existential reformation, reformation that even she
might not have been consciously willing to accept if it were to come, for example, to class.

Yet, as for Anne Conway, “sympathy” gives Katherine Philips a metaphysical ground for a
general temperament of cosmopolitanism and ecumenism. If Conway’s optimism and openness
extended farther than did most people’s at this time—to Muslims, Jews, and to radical Christians
like the Quakers, not to mention to animals and inanimate material—Philips had something of
the same spirit, though for her it was far more limited. As Orinda, she fashioned herself into an
entity who could transcend political enmity and difference of sex, if only within her very
restricted coterie of friends. It is perhaps not surprising that two seventeenth-century women
would feel compelled by such a liberal orientation. While the authority Philips appeals to in her
poetry is her own female self, Conway takes aim at the entire philosophical tradition established
by men: “Philosophers of every sort have laid a poor foundation for their philosophy, and
therefore the entire structure must collapse.”504 For both of these writers, sympathy offers a way
of defending the simple and sacred fact that they exist out in the world, bonded to their societies
and to the cosmos.

Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. and trans. Allison P. Coudert and
504
Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63.
 179

Conclusion

During his young years at Cambridge between 1661 and 1664, Isaac Newton kept a set of notes
that have since been named “Certain Philosophical Questions.” They concern his interests and
uncertainties surrounding developments in the natural philosophy of his day. Section 109, “called
“Sympathy & Antipathie” could at first glance seem unremarkable, a point-form note on a
subject to which Newton never returned.

To one palate that is sweete which is bitter to another

The same thing smells gratefully to one displeasingly to another
Objects of sight move not some but cast others into an extasie
Musicall aires are not heard by all with alike pleasure. The like of touching.505

In this short, almost plaintive passage, “sympathy” means liking something for no clear or
justifiable reason. In matters of taste, smell, sight and sound, there is no universal pleasantness or
odiousness. What someone likes comes down to their perception. Nothing is sweet or bitter;
things only seem sweet or bitter to a particular person. But why do perceptions differ? Why does
one person like one piece of music, another something else? Can we say that anything is truly
deserving of our ecstasy?

Newton offers no explanation for sympathy’s behavior. The sympathies and antipathies tracked
here do not correspond to a grander idea of how the universe is held together. Nothing in this
passage would suggest that Newton’s “sympathy” is at all like his contemporary Henry More’s,
for example, who writes of

that Magick Sympathy that is seated in the unity of the spirit of the World, and the
continuity of the subtile Matter dispersed throughout: the Universe in some sense being,
as the Stoics and the Platonists define it, one vast entire Animal.506

505 Isaac Newton, Certain Philosophical Questions, Sec. 109, MS Add. 3996 (Cambridge University Library,
Cambridge, UK.), Newtonproject.ox.ac.uk.
506 Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, ed.. A. Jacob (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publisher, 1987), Bk. II,
Ch. 15, Sec. 8.
 180

What “unity” or “continuity”? For Newton in this passage, the discombobulating contrariety of
human experience is not tamed by an idea of cosmic order or underlying web of relationships
that connect us despite our differences. In this radically relativistic account of “sympathy” and
“antipathie,” there are no principles governing how things will be perceived or experienced by
one person or another. For the young Newton who wrote this passage, sympathy and antipathy
are lawless, irrational.

If, as Newton implies here, “sympathy” really is lawless, this leads to serious political and moral
complications. For if the kind of human experience governed by sympathy—such as attraction,
taste, and instinctive judgement—are ruled by nothing but temperament and mood, then might it
not be the case that human relations more generally, being rooted in attraction, are doomed to
suffer the same arbitrariness if they are not overruled by the collective projects of politics and
tradition, which aim to organize society according to principles derived through reason?

As I have shown in this dissertation, what makes “sympathy” so difficult to define, and allows it
have such varied applications, is that it has these two opposing implications. On the one hand,
sympathies are relativistic: certain individuals are attracted to certain things, while others are
repulsed by those same things. A serpent, Erasmus writes in his colloquy on friendship, Amicitia,
loves milk and hates garlic, but garlic is very friendly to lilies.507 Like Newton, Erasmus gives no
rhyme or reason for this, just as he cannot exactly say why “boys themselves love one Play-
Fellow, but shun the Company of another,” other than that something in the object corresponds
to something in the subject’s taste. On the other hand, sympathy is universalizing in that it often
carries with it an imagining of a whole, whether that whole be a body or the universe, or, as
Henry More writes in Psychodia Platonica, the spirit of the universe, “that great vitall
spright,/The sacred fount of holy sympathy.”508 Thus “sympathy” might describe both the
subjective impulse of liking something, and a universal force or natural magic that orders the
world by the reasonable principle of like-to-like and prevents everything from falling into chaos.

507 Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. N. Bailey (London: Reeves & Turner, 1878), 300.
508 Henry More, Psychodia Platonica, or, A platonicall song of the soul consisting of foure several poems…: hereto
is added a paraphrasticall interpretation of the answer of Apollo consulted by Amelius, about Plotinus soul
departed this life (Cambridge, 1642), 5.
 181

The first of these is highly concrete and particular, inarguable (we cannot deny that someone
loves the moon or hates a sponge), and disconnected from the realm of abstract concepts; the
second notion of “sympathy” engages with universality, is open to dispute because it expresses a
worldview that might be accepted or denied, and is in the domain of abstracted philosophical
concepts.

Confusingly, both of these notions often come together when someone writes of “sympathy.”
Take the example we’ve started with, Erasmus’s colloquy Amicita. Erasmus’s list of wonderful
attractions and aversions in nature are in the ‘book of wonders’ tradition inspired by Pliny’s
Natural History, immensely popular in the Renaissance, meaning that the sympathies are not
explained or probed, they are simply listed as particular, eccentric examples of loves and hatreds
in nature.509 And yet at the same time, Erasmus equates his list of sympathies with a more
encompassing and abstract “secret Guidance of Nature” that we should respect if we want to be
happy. Erasmus therefore takes the idea of a nature that reveals itself to us through subjective
sympathies and antipathies, and applies it to a generalizing moral philosophy. For Erasmus, it
would seem, individual sympathies are extremely relativistic and subjective, but Nature's
sympathies are universal. What results from this combination of the particular with the universal
is the sense that “sympathy” is both inexplicable, and undeniable. Inexplicable because the
ultimate source of these sympathies is mysterious and beyond the control of the individuals
suffering them; undeniable because the feeling of loving or hating something is powerfully
present to experience and carries the authority of nature, and of natural law.

Since the 1980s, the influential Dutch-American primatologist Frans De Waal has been
redefining the biological understanding of human nature by dismantling the idea, developed by
people such as the Austrian ethnologist Konrad Lorenz after World War II, that humans are
anciently and fundamentally “killer apes.”510 Through his work with chimpanzees and especially
bonobos, De Waal has discovered a range of empathic behavior in apes, from consolations after

509 Ann Moyer, “Sympathy in the Renaissance,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 82.
510 Frans De Waal, “The Antiquity of Empathy,” Science 336, no. 6083 (5/2012): 874. See also Waal’s books
written for a popular audience, especially: The Age of Empathy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); The
Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2013).
 182

fights, to sharing food with those who are particularly in need, such as the disabled. By
positioning these apes as “our closest primate relatives,” De Waal continues the tradition of
looking to apes to understand our own primordial origins, our fundamental, unchanging natures.
His conclusion is that sophisticated mammals, but also animals like rats, are in a vital sense
empathetic from the earliest stages of evolution, and that this stems from mammalian maternal
care. But “empathy,” that idea of ‘putting yourself into someone else’s shoes’ he contends, may
be too sophisticated to properly describe the instinctual, spontaneous feeling that we are
momentarily linked to another person, especially during heightened moments of pain or joy.
Instead, he suggests we think of empathy as a “simpler process”:

Human empathy has been described as taking the perspective of another or imagining
oneself in another’s position. Psychologists commonly apply this cognitively demanding
explanation of empathy even if the immediacy of the response hints at simpler processes.
If we see a child fall and scrape its knee, we flinch, and exclaim “ouch!” as if what
happened to the child happened at the same instant to ourselves. Another way of looking
at empathy is as a multilayered phenomenon that starts with automatic state-matching on
motor mimicry and shared neural representations. We should not be surprised, therefore,
by unconscious empathy, such as when human study participants mimic observed facial
expressions and report corresponding emotions even though the expressions were
presented too briefly for conscious perception. In this view, which may map onto nested
neural processing, cognitive perspective-taking is a secondary development built around
more elementary mechanisms, such as state-matching and emotional contagion. 511

De Waal’s assertion here that “empathy” is more biological and unconscious than the
sophisticated cognitive maneuver of imagining ourselves to be someone else suggests that what
he means by that nineteenth-century aesthetic term, “empathy,” is actually the far older idea of
“sympathy.” If in the earlier part of the twentieth century we had believed that we rationally
choose to be empathic or not, De Waal argues the opposite: “humans don’t decide to be
empathic; they just are.”512 It is a matter of brain structure.

511 De Waal, “The Antiquity of Empathy,” 875.

512 De Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 132.
 183

What I find especially fascinating about this passage is that even though the phenomenon De
Waal describes is so fundamental and familiar, so inarguably a matter of physical structure, he
must prove it to us in the authoritative language of neuroscience, just as half a century earlier the
behaviorists had proven the opposite in the authoritative language of psychology. As ever, who
we are remains up for debate. This much is clear: when we are persuaded that our nature is a
certain way, fundamentally aggressive or fundamentally caring, this has immediate political and
ethical ramifications for how we organize ourselves in society. The discourse of what we are
might veer toward the discourse of what we should be.

Early modern encounters with the rediscovered concept of sympathy fascinate us because our
work of explaining our natures to ourselves both through the objective and generalizing
observations of science, and through the subjective means of art, continues. In our culture,
evolutionary theory often plays the role that metaphysics did for early moderns, providing a
conceptual background through which we understand our natures and our place in the universe.
While making empathy fundamental to evolutionary theory may simply be the objective work of
science resulting from the close observation of mammals, as De Waal presents it, I suggest it is
also a way to bring an idea of the Good into a biological and material framework where morality
has no clear place. We desire a place for goodness in our conceptual foundations, but we fear
being overburdened with specious moralizing and universalisms. In the early modern period,
with its scientific revolutions, religious pluralisms, and violent global encounters,
“transcendental guarantees of morality,” as Victoria Kahn writes, became increasingly illegible.
Drawing together the discourses of natural science, philosophy, medicine, and aesthetics, early
modern men and women found that “sympathy” expressed a power in the world and in human
experience that could be theological, putting the goodness of the One at the heart of things and
having it emanate down to all of creation, while also allowing room for human freedom and
subjectivity. “Sympathy” conveys the mystery of finding ourselves together in the world, in
possession of feelings, instincts, and confidences that arise, seemingly, out of nowhere and that
compel us toward others.
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