Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and

Oriental Learning in Early Modern

Europe, 1544–1669 1st Edition Nil Ö.
Palab■y■k
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/silent-teachers-turkish-books-and-oriental-learning-in-
early-modern-europe-1544-1669-1st-edition-nil-o-palabiyik/
Silent Teachers

Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman
scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early mod-
ern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations,
study notes, and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates
the central but often overlooked role that T ­ urkish-​­language manuscripts
played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths
and misunderstandings of previous scholarship, this book offers a fresh
history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renais-
sance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporane-
ous Turkish sources.
This story hardly has any dull moments: the reader will encounter many
­larger-­​­­than-​­life figures, including an armchair expert who turned his al-
leged captivity under the Ottomans into bestselling books; a drunken
dragoman who preferred enjoying the fruits of the vine to his duties at
the Sublime Porte; and a curmudgeonly German physician whose pugna-
cious pamphlets led to the erasure of his name from history.
Taking its title from the celebrated humanist Joseph Scaliger’s com-
ment that books from the Muslim world are ‘­silent teachers’ and need
to be explained orally to be understood, this study gives voice to the
many and varied ­Turkish-​­language books that circulated in early mod-
ern Europe and proposes a ­paradigm-​­shift in our understanding of early
modern erudite culture.

Nil Ö. Palabıyık, Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at

Queen Mary, University of London, conducts research at the crossroads
of intellectual history, manuscript culture, and history of the book. As
a postdoctoral fellow funded by the British Academy and the Humboldt
Foundation, she worked at the Rylands Library and Institute, Man-
chester, and the ­Ludwig-­​­­Maximilian-​­Universität, Munich. Her love of
archives took her to the finest libraries in Europe, and led to visiting fel-
lowships at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden, and Herzog August Bibliothek,
Wolfenbüttel. She published on humanist scholarship, early modern ori-
entalism, and Greek printing in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern
Worlds of Knowledge
Series Editors: Harald E. Braun (­University of Liverpool, UK) and Emily
Michelson (­University of St Andrews, UK)
SRS Board Members: Erik DeBom (­KU Leuven, Belgium), Mordechai
Feingold (­California Institute of Technology, USA), Andrew Hadfield
(­Sussex), Peter Mack (­University of Warwick, UK), Jennifer Richards
(­University of Newcastle, UK), Stefania Tutino (­UCLA, USA), Richard
Wistreich (­Royal College of Music, UK)

This series explores Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowl-

edge (­c.­1400–​­c.1700) in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. The vol-
umes published in this series study the individuals, communities and
networks involved in making and communicating knowledge during the
first age of globalization. Authors investigate the perceptions, practices
and modes of behaviour which shaped Renaissance and Early Modern
intellectual endeavour and examine the ways in which they reverberated
in the political, cultural, social and economic sphere.
The series is interdisciplinary, comparative and global in its outlook.
We welcome submissions from new as well as existing fields of Renais-
sance Studies, including the history of literature (­including ­neo-​­Latin,
European and ­non-​­European languages), science and medicine, religion,
architecture, environmental and economic history, the history of the
book, art history, intellectual history and the history of music. We are
particularly interested in proposals that straddle disciplines and are in-
novative in terms of approach and methodology.
The series includes monographs, shorter works and edited collections
of essays. The Society for Renaissance Studies (­http://­w ww.rensoc.org.
uk) provides an expert editorial board, mentoring, extensive editing and
support for contributors to the series, ensuring high standards of ­p eer-​
­reviewed scholarship. We welcome proposals from early career research-
ers as well as more established colleagues.

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-­Studies-in-Renaissance-and-Early-Modern-Worlds-
of-Knowledge/­book-series/­ASHSER4043
Silent Teachers
Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in
Early Modern Europe, ­1544–​­1669

Nil Ö. Palabıyık
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Taylor & Francis
The right of Nil Ö. Palabıyık to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN: ­978-­​­­0 -­​­­367-­​­­35978-​­2 (­hbk)

ISBN: ­978-­​­­0 -­​­­367-­​­­35979-​­9 (­pbk)
ISBN: ­978-­​­­0 -­​­­429-­​­­34301-​­8 (­ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/­9780429343018
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
To Julia
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of figures xi
Note on names, titles, and transcription xiii

Introduction 1
1 Earliest printed books on Turkey: Georgievits and
Postel on the Turkish language 21
2 The advent of scholarly books on Turkey:
Leunclavius’ Ottoman Annals and History, Crusius’
Greece under Turkish Rule with Scaliger’s Annotations 54
3 First printed grammars of Turkish: Megiser and Du Ryer 90
4 Oriental studies in Leiden: The manuscript Turkish
dictionaries of Deusing and Golius 132
5 A fine library: Golius and his Turkish books 166
Conclusions 202

Appendix I: Scaliger’s Turkish marginalia 211

Appendix II: Three Turkish translations of Psalm 6 214
Appendix III: Paratextual material in Deusing’s and
Golius’ Turkish dictionaries 218
Appendix IV: Golius’ Turkish correspondence 221
Bibliography 224
Index 255
Acknowledgements

The research for this book was generously funded by The British Acad-
emy and the Alexander von H ­ umboldt-​­Stiftung. Throughout the years
spent in the elusive pursuit of Turkish knowledge among early modern
orientalists, my colleagues at the John Rylands Research Institute and
Library at the University of Manchester, the Near and Middle Eastern
Studies Institute and the History Department at ­Ludwig-­​­­Maximilians-​
­Universität, Munich, and the English Department of Queen Mary, Uni-
versity of London have all been full of encouragement and support.
Friends and colleagues across the world helped with various aspects of
the book. Among them special gratitude is owed to Alastair Hamilton,
who inspired and encouraged me to work on early modern orientalism,
and to Christoph K. Neumann, who supported this project from its in-
ception. I was guided by the advice and expertise of Colin Imber, Jan
Just Witkam, Hannah Neudecker, Frédéric Bauden, İsmail Erünsal, and
Hülya Çelik. I am particularly grateful to Alexander Bevilacqua, Arndt
Brendecke, Martin Mulsow, Warren Boutcher, and the two anonymous
readers for commenting on various chapters. While the book benefitted
from the expertise and input of these colleagues and friends, all the errors
that still remain are, of course, my own.
The Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and the Scaliger Insti-
tute at the Leiden University Library granted me fellowships to explore
their special collections. These and other libraries invited me to get lost
in them, inspired me, and allowed me to discover manuscripts and early
printed books. Many librarians went above and beyond to help, and ac-
commodated my innumerable requests. In particular, I would like to re-
cord my thanks to Stephen Parkin of the British Library, Yasmin Faghihi
of the Cambridge University Library, Arnoud Vrolijk of the Leiden
University Library, Gerda Huisman of Groningen University Library,
Alasdair Watson of the Bodleian Libraries, and John Hodgson, Julienne
Simpson, and Elizabeth Gow of the John Rylands Library, University of
Manchester.
x Acknowledgements

The ideas in this book were shaped by discussions held and findings
shared at various seminars, conferences, and workshops. Mordechai
Feingold, Anthony Grafton, Theodor Dunkelgrün, Natalie Rothman,
Vera Keller, Paul Babinski, Sam Kennerley, Simon Mills, Maryam Pat-
ton, Richard Calis, and numerous others joined in the conversation and
enriched my understanding of humanist scholarship and early modern
orientalism.
Figures

1 The reading room of Leiden University Library.

Engraving by Willem van Swanenburg after
drawing by Jan Cornelis van’t Woudt, 1610 5
2a, Bartholomew Georgevits, De turcarum ritu et
b, and c caeremoniis (Antwerp: Goris de Bonte, 1544), title-
page, sig. A1v, sig. F4v, copy from UCSD Library,
Geisel Special Collections, shelfmark Rare DR432.
G46 1544 29
3a and b Scaliger’s annotations in his copy of Leunclavius’
Historiae Musulmanae turcorum, de monumentis
ipsorum exscriptae, libri XVIII (Frankfurt am
Main: the heirs of Andreas Wechel, 1591), cols
871–72 and 893–94, copy from Leiden, Bibliotheca
Thysiana, shelfmark THYSIA 868:1 72
4 Scaliger’s annotations in his copy of Leunclavius’
Annales Sultanorum Othmanidarum, a Turcis sua
lingua scripti (Frankfurt am Main: the heirs of
Andreas Wechel, 1588), p. 198, copy from London,
British Library, shelfmark Or.70.b.12 74
5a and b Mader’s copy of Megiser’s Institutionum linguae
turcicae libri quatuor (Leipzig [and Breslau]:
[Hieronymus Megiser and Peter Kirsten], 1612),
fol. 9r and fol. 10r, copy from Princeton University
Library, shelfmark C0938 no. 835 101
6a and b André Du Ryer, Rudimenta grammatices linguae
Turcicae (Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1630; reissued with a
new title-page in 1633), original title-page and p. 94,
copy from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
shelfmark X-1885 111
7a and b Du Ryer’s Turkish Psalms translation, Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Supplément
turc 464, fols 249v–250r 118
xii Figures
8a, Deusing’s Persian-Turkish-Latin dictionary.
b, and c Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS turc. 270;
detail from verso of the first fly-leaf [8a]; fol. 51r
[8b]; and detail from fol. 159v [8c] 152
9a and b Golius’ Turkish-Latin dictionary, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Marsh 193, fol. [i]v and p. 228 170
10 Letter from Şeyḫzāde Meḥmed to Golius. Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Marsh 714, item no. 28 185
11 Letter from Nicholas Petri to Şeyḫzāde Meḥmed.
Leiden, Universiteitbibliotheek, MS or. 1228, fol. 134a 187
Note on names, titles, and transcription

This book argues that the sources, methods, and practicalities of schol-
arship in early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire had much in
common. The figures and the texts discussed here did not belong to a
single locality or domain but moved between Europe and the Ottoman
Empire, between cultures and languages.
This argument necessitates a fresh approach to the presentation of a
diverse set of titles, names, and concepts. I have broken here with the
scholarly conventions of early modern intellectual history and book his-
tory, as well as Near and Middle Eastern studies. In order to bridge the
existing gaps between these disciplines, I translated all the titles of books
in Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish into English. I give the original
title only in the first instance and use the English equivalent throughout
the book. I do so, because I believe that merely providing Latin titles or
transliterating Arabic, Persian, and Turkish titles without a meaningful
translation does a great disservice to the reader. Very often, even when
one has a good command of the language in question, it is difficult to
understand what a title means. Consider ­Turco- ​­G raecia as an example
of how vague a Latin title might sound initially. While this compound
noun could be interpreted in many ways, Crusius, the editor, explains
in his preface that he chose this title to designate Greece under Turkish
Rule. Arabic titles are notoriously difficult, and can often only be under-
stood by reading the text in question. Consider two standard grammati-
cal works, ­al-​­Muqaddima ­al-​­Āǧurrūmīya and ­al-​­Fawāʾid ­al-​­Ḍiyāʾīya. The
former is named after its author, meaning Introduction [to Grammar] by
Ibn Āǧurrūm, whereas the latter is named after the person for whom it
was written, Useful Extracts for [His Son] Ḍiyāʾ ­al-​­D īn.
A second difficulty arose from the trilingual culture of the Ottoman
Empire. In Ottoman Turkish, the author may move within a sentence
from Turkish to Persian to Arabic, and Turkish contains a great deal
of Persian and Arabic expressions. I follow the transliteration conven-
tions of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (­DMG) for Ara-
bic and Persian and Eleazar Birnbaum’s scheme for Ottoman Turkish.
Yet the same expression may be transliterated differently according to
whether it is an Arabic loan within a Turkish context or simply an Arabic
xiv Note on names, titles, and transcription

expression. For instance, Arabic ‘­embroidered (­munaqqaš)’ is transliter-

ated as münaḳḳaş in a Turkish context. Within the large scope of this
book, it is sometimes impossible to say where the Arabic or Persian ends
and the Turkish begins, so there are bound to be some inconsistencies.
This shift from Arabic to Persian to Turkish also affects names. Many
Ottoman Turkish rulers, officials, and intellectuals have Arabic names
that are used in a Turkish context and pronounced the Turkish way.
Here I have generally favoured their Turkish transliterated form, such as
Şāhidī, not Šāhidī, but for the Persian and Arabic individuals, I give their
names in Persian or Arabic transliteration, so Ǧāmī, not Cāmī. More-
over, where a locality or person is well-known in the West and there is a
standard appellation, I favour the Anglicised form. I also tried to give the
English equivalents of Ottoman ranks, titles, professions, and institutions
as much as possible, rendering ḳāżī as ‘­judge’, dervīş as ‘­brother’, müderris
as ‘­professor’, and medrese as ‘­college’, for instance, in order to emphasise
the shared role and function of these positions across communities.
I give the names of humanist scholars in Latinised form only if they are
known better by this name. So Franciscus Raphelengius for Frans van
Ravelingen but not Antonius Deusingius for Anton Deusing.
Introduction

On 15 October 1607, a frustrated Joseph Justus Scaliger (­­1540–​­1609)

wrote from Leiden to Étienne Hubert (­­1567–​­1614) in Paris, complaining
about his Turkish manuscripts. Scaliger, the most celebrated humanist
of the late Renaissance and a fine linguist, was struggling to decipher
the Turkish explanations for Arabic and Persian words supplied in his
Ottoman dictionaries. These books ‘­are written in the most elegant and
distinguished way (­Elegantissima et luculentissime scripta sunt illa)’, he
explained to Hubert, a physician and orientalist scholar whom Scaliger
never met in person but grew very close to towards the end of his life. Yet,
despite his best efforts, Scaliger could not understand even the foreword
to one of the dictionaries ‘­as if it were written in Gaelic or Finnish (­quam
si lingua Hibernica aut Finlandica scripta essent)’. Concluding that books
from the Islamic world need to be explained ‘­orally (­viva voce)’, Scaliger
termed his Turkish books ‘­silent teachers’.1
This study gives voice to the many and varied ­Turkish-​­language books
that circulated in early modern Europe yet remained silent until now.
Taking them off the shelves, I bring them into the core of the discourse on
early modern scholarship and erudite culture. It seems there was never a
dull moment in the early history of oriental learning. The readers will en-
counter many ­larger-­​­­than-​­life figures, including an armchair expert who
turned his alleged captivity under the Ottomans into bestselling books;
a drunken dragoman who preferred enjoying the fruits of the vine to his
duties at the Sublime Porte; and a curmudgeonly German orientalist and
physician whose pugnacious pamphlets led to the erasure of his name
from history.
An emerging field full of opportunities to excel, oriental studies in
Europe became a breeding ground for academic rivalry, imposture, and
theft. From a serial plagiarist who published the first printed grammar of
Turkish in Leipzig without any knowledge of the language to the French
divine who learnt Persian from a gifted student but claimed the sole
authorship of their collaborative work when the young man died pre-
maturely during an epidemic, there was no shortage of scandals. These
and many other stories are woven here into a new fabric illustrating the
history of oriental studies in vivid colours. This book is by no means an

DOI: 10.4324/9780429343018-1
2 Introduction
exhaustive account of Turkish learning in early modern Europe. Rather,
it is a series of defining episodes involving Turkish books and their read-
ers that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
These interrelated episodes profoundly impacted the development of
Islamic learning via the introduction of new methodologies, source texts
and language tools for the study of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Tak-
ing their inspiration from the rich reserves of Ottoman scholarship and
learned culture, the main actors of Turkish studies in Europe not only
changed the course of oriental studies but also influenced literary cul-
ture, political discourse, theological disputes, and scientific knowledge
of the era at large.
Early modern oriental studies encompassed many languages, includ-
ing Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, and Turkish, sometimes even Geʿez,
modern Greek, Armenian, or Georgian.2 This book focuses on Turk-
ish studies yet necessarily touches upon Arabic and Persian learning in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, T ­ urkish-​
l­anguage reference tools such as dictionaries, grammars, and commen-
taries became key sources in the study of these two languages that were
widely taught in the Ottoman Empire. Rather than an ­east-​­west dichot-
omy, which does not seem to be the defining character of the discipline
during this early period, the term European orientalism is used through-
out this book in reference to the linguistic study of Turkish, Arabic, and
Persian. An orientalist was a person with a scholarly interest in the lit-
erature, history, philosophy, and scientific learning of what was then, in
most cases, the territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
The last four decades saw an emergence of academic studies on the his-
tory of Arabic learning and knowledge of Islam in Europe. The pioneer-
ing works by Alastair Hamilton, Robert Jones, Francis Richard, Gerald
Toomer, Mordechai Feingold, Noel Malcolm, and Bernard Heyberger
inspired a younger generation of scholars to dig deeper into the founda-
tions of early modern oriental scholarship. More recently, a m ­ uch-​­needed
shift from the emphasis on print sources to manuscript studies began to
take hold. Jan Loop’s monograph on Johann Heinrich Hottinger’s orien-
tal manuscripts,3 Alexander Bevilacqua’s study of Islamic knowledge in
Enlightenment Europe, in particular Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s compen-
dium Bibliothèque orientale, vastly incorporating Ottoman scholar Katip
Çelebi’s bibliographical encyclopaedia The Removal of Doubt from the
Names of Books and the Sciences (­Kašf ­al-​­ẓunūn ʿan asāmī ­al-​­kutub wa
­al-​­funūn),4 Asaph B ­ en-​­Tov’s intellectual biography of the relatively un-
known Jena professor Johann Ernst Gerhard (­­1621–​­1668), which charts
his learning in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic through his private
library and papers now kept in Gotha,5 and others have opened up the field
and brought new insights into the history of early modern orientalism.
Due to its linguistic focus on Turkish and its methodological approach,
the present book does not overlap with but complements past, ongoing,
 Introduction 3
and future research. Through the inclusion of new primary sources and a
fresh interpretation of existing scholarship, which takes into account the
literary culture and scholarly institutions of the Ottoman world, it offers
an alternative to the traditional narrative of European scholars conquer-
ing the knowledge of the East by bringing to fore the impact of Ottoman
scholarly sources and traditions on European orientalism.
The scope of the book is limited in temporal terms from the m ­ id-​
­sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. My geographic focus has been
on western and northern Europe, although learning of Turkish began
later and developed more slowly in this region compared to southern and
central ­Europe – ​­the ­so-​­called contact zones on the Ottoman border-
lands. The cities of Venice, Rome, and Vienna were important centres for
oriental learning owing to the l­ onger-​­standing and more intense relations
of the Venetian Republic, the Papal States, and the Habsburg Empire
with the Ottomans.6 However, my focus on Paris, various German uni-
versity towns and, finally, Leiden allowed me to concentrate on a specific
set of linked historical figures who influenced each other. These note-
worthy scholars became role models to others who engaged in the study
of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. I preferred to undertake an ­in-​­depth
analysis of the readings, annotations, and outputs of these figures, which
inevitably left considerable gaps in the historiography of early modern
oriental ­learning – ​­gaps that are being addressed by an inspirational
group of scholars who are affecting change in the field.
A new perspective that uncovers the manifold, complex, and mean-
dering routes to knowledge is already underway. Towards the end of my
research for this book and during a global pandemic, a welcome addition
to the field was published by Natalie Rothman. The Dragoman Renais-
sance uncovers how Ottoman interpreters have mediated linguistic, lit-
erary, and cultural knowledge between the Empire and the European
diplomats and scholars.7 In her book, Rothman persuasively argues
that the dynasties of C ­ onstantinople-​­born Venetian dragomans played
a decisive and unique role in shaping oriental learning in Europe. It was
through their close ties with Ottoman courtly and learned elites and the
linguistic depth and breadth of their upbringing and education that these
figures were able to become ‘­cultural brokers’, as she calls them. These
dragomans mobilised Ottoman expertise through philological knowl-
edge production, such as translations of Turkish literature into Euro-
pean languages and linguistic works explaining the language, religious
customs, and Ottoman institutions. For centuries, Venice was the closest
neighbour, rival, and trade partner of the Ottomans. Surely, the Venetian
dragomanate, imbued in the linguistic and cultural modes of both sides,
had an intimate knowledge of Ottoman political and cultural institu-
tions, as well as the administrative languages of both states.
Another valuable study has recently been carried out by Elżbieta
Święcicka on Giovanni Molino’s Dittionario della lingua ­italiana-​­turchesca
4 Introduction
printed in Rome in 1641. Święcicka’s ­long-​­standing research into this au-
thor, with the help of Maria Pia Pedani’s work on the correspondence
of the bailo (­the resident ambassador of the Republic of Venice in Con-
stantinople), revealed that Molino, who was associated with the Vene-
tian embassy, was, in fact, an Armenian scholar named John of Ankara
(­Yovhannēs Ankiwrac’i).8 Molino was one of those ­non-​­Muslim Ottoman
figures whose influence went beyond the borders of the Empire and found
a readership in Italy. Święcicka’s findings place Molino’s work in its right
context: in the long tradition of the contribution of Armenian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire to the standardisation of Turkish as a written
language. Her book also shows us the intricate cultural and diplomatic
relations between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire from
the perspective of Turkish studies.
Finally, the early modern oriental collections of the Viennese Imperial
Library and their famous keeper Sebastian Tengnagel (­­1573–​­1636) have
recently been the subject of a major interdisciplinary project undertaken
by Hülya Çelik, Paola Molino, Chiara Petrolini, Claudia Römer, and
Thomas Wallnig. The project team worked on Tengnagel’s study of Ara-
bic, Persian, and Turkish texts through his annotations, notebooks, and
correspondence, bringing to life the daily struggles and achievements of
an early s­eventeenth-​­century orientalist. Tengnagel occupies a unique
position in the history of European orientalism due to his many con-
nections in the Republic of Letters, as well as his undisturbed access to
an unusually rich and diverse set of sources in Vienna coupled with the
help of a Turkish native speaker, his enslaved scribe Derviş ʾİbrāhīm.9
Tengnagel amassed a sizeable collection of manuscripts from the Islamic
world including works on history, geography, medicine, poetry, and phi-
losophy.10 Although he never published anything drawing from his vast
knowledge of oriental languages, he kept an extensive correspondence
with other scholars. His correspondents included key members of the
Republic of Letters such as Isaac Casaubon and orientalist scholars in-
cluding Jacob Christmann, Peter Kirsten, and Wilhelm Schickard, some
of whom have been discussed in Chapter Three.11 Having never visited
the Ottoman Empire himself, Tengnagel made his purchases through
Imperial dragomans in Constantinople.12 His wide net of correspondents
included the Roman nobleman Pietro Della Valle, who learned Turkish
during his travels to the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and India.13 Tengnagel
and Della Valle exchanged manuscripts, as well as opinions on the works
they both studied.14
These three recent studies consider the contribution of a multitude of
actors and influences beyond the major intellectual circles of Western
Europe. The present book is another bold step in this new direction. My
study just scratches the surface of a complex and curious world shaped
by Western fascination and engagement with texts and books from the
Ottoman world. Yet it offers a unique perspective through the inclusion
 Introduction 5
of ­Turkish-​­language manuscripts and the orientalist scrutiny of the texts
therein. While presenting the often overlooked link between the intellec-
tual and scholarly traditions of the early modern Ottoman Empire and
the marked shift in sources, attitudes, and methods of European orien-
talists in the early seventeenth century, the book recounts several inter-
twined episodes that are now understood to be defining moments in the
history of oriental learning. Many of these stories take us to the Univer-
sity of Leiden, the intellectual powerhouse of the young and ambitious
Dutch Republic.
A famous engraving from 1610 depicting the reading room of Leiden
University Library is often conjured up when the collection, organisa-
tion, and presentation of knowledge in early modern Europe is discussed.
A temple to learning frequented by avid readers daily, the grand hall
features rows of books classified under the subject headings of history,
medicine, law, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and theology. In fact,
the primary purpose of this image was to publicise Leiden’s commitment
to bringing Ottoman erudition to Protestant Europe. To the right of the
image, in the foreground, we see a cabinet housing the precious oriental
manuscripts of Joseph Scaliger.15 To the left, along the wall under the
windows, we find the grandest single item in the hall: a ­twelve-­​­­metre-​­long

­Figure 1 The reading room of Leiden University Library.

6 Introduction
scroll with a panorama of Constantinople depicting the imperial capital’s
monuments and architectural wonders in captivating detail.16
The Danish artist Melchior Lorck created the panorama in 1559 while
in Constantinople as part of the embassy of Archduke Ferdinand I, led
by Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq. Today not as famous as the Turkish Let-
ters of the Flemish diplomat,17 Lorck’s impressive scroll was acquired in
the 1590s for Leiden by Janus Dousa, the University’s first librarian who
published an account of his own visit to Constantinople at the end of the
century.18 Once the room’s most e­ ye-​­catching feature, the panorama was
subsequently relegated to a dusty loft only to be rediscovered in the 19th
century. By that time, its original location was forgotten, the scroll badly
damaged, and cut into 21 sheets for easy storage. The Prospect of Con-
stantinople has recently been digitally reconstructed.19
Why would an image of Constantinople, the capital of a predomi-
nantly Islamic empire, feature so prominently in this room?
The engraving of the reading room was commissioned as part of a se-
ries of advertising materials promoting the new spaces for learning at
Leiden University. At the time, the city of Leiden and the University
fashioned itself the ‘­Dutch Athens (­Athenae Batavae)’ and endeavoured
to attract Protestant students from G ­ erman-​­speaking countries, France,
and England.20 The other engravings in the series of four showed the
operating theatre, where dissections and anatomy lessons took place, the
sports hall, where fencing, musket shooting, and equestrian training were
provided, and the botanical gardens, where new species of plants from
the Americas and East Asia were displayed.21 Together with these, the
image of the reading room, imagined as a hub of activity where scholars
exchanged new information and leaders of the future shared stimulat-
ing ideas, presented Leiden University as a very desirable destination for
young men internationally. As much as the unfamiliar places pointed to
on the globes aroused intense curiosity, the oriental manuscripts piqued
the interest of visitors and prospective students. The Dutch Republic’s
strong links with the world outside of Europe and Leiden’s treasures from
the Middle East and South East Asia made the University one of the most
attractive places to study sciences, medicine, theology, and philosophy,
as well as oriental languages during the seventeenth century.
The panorama of Constantinople is an accurate and faithful repre-
sentation of the cityscape of the Ottoman capital. It is not a soulless to-
pography but rather a vivid and animated snapshot of a lived moment.
Lorck’s Constantinople features ancient monuments bearing testimony
to its Roman past and grand mosques with large crowds chanting the
daily prayers. Here, the ­w ind-​­filled sails of boats of all sizes gracefully
flutter across the Golden Horn. Lorck even included himself in the pan-
orama. He is accompanied by a Turkish man in a turban and seen as
he is taking in this magnificent view from Galata, the neighbourhood
where the European ambassadors, merchants, and visitors resided. This
 Introduction 7
is a remarkable piece of Renaissance art, but it also bears testimony to
the awe and inspiration this melting pot of cultures, languages, and eth-
nicities evoked during an era that saw the proliferation of commercial,
political, and diplomatic links between Europe and the Ottomans.
With the establishment of trade companies and permanent consulates
by the French, English, and Dutch, the Ottoman Empire became the larg-
est trade partner of Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century.22
The common political enemy of Habsburg Spain helped the flourishing
of diplomatic ties of the Ottoman Empire to the British crown and the
Dutch Republic. Within the context of such intense partnership, Euro-
pean royalty, nobility, and other affluent individuals began recruiting
agents to collect oriental manuscripts as well as plants, seeds, animals,
artefacts, and art in the East. These agents were often individuals with
specific knowledge and skills, diplomats or others attached to an official
mission, such as chaplains, language assistants, or secretaries. Some of
these visitors, such as the French orientalist Guillaume Postel (­­1510–​­1581)
and the Leiden professor Jacobus Golius (­­1596–​­1667), were able to build
their own libraries of oriental manuscripts while serving their employers.
Other scholars never travelled to the East but made use of the collections
accumulated in major European institutional and private libraries on lo-
cation or via their correspondence networks.
In his colossal work on the booksellers of the Ottoman Empire, İs-
mail Erünsal shows us that Constantinople was the leading centre for
the book trade, including the commerce in manuscripts constantly flow-
ing in from the provinces.23 The former capitals of the Ottoman Empire,
Bursa and Adrianople, remained significant hubs for the book trade, as
did the traditional Islamic cultural centres of Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo,
and Baghdad. With the political unrest in the Safavid Empire during the
seventeenth century, books from Iran also began to be distributed via
Constantinople.24
The Ottoman court contained a scriptorium where costly books,
such as illuminated manuscripts with lavish miniatures, were produced,
whereas students copied the many textbooks they needed in their schools
or madrasahs. Dervishes belonging to many different religious orders
also contributed to book production.25 The local customer base of book-
sellers mainly consisted of professors, judges, and religious leaders.26
The bulk purchases of foreign visitors for European collections were a
vital component of the book trade. From the early sixteenth to the early
eighteenth century, book exports increased so much that they eventually
had to be banned. Such measures proved ineffective, and books contin-
ued to be transported to Europe in increasing numbers throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.27
Driven by their intellectual, scholarly, political, religious, or commer-
cial interests, Western visitors to the Ottoman Empire wrote reports, trav-
elogues, journals, and letters; they translated scientific and philosophical
8 Introduction
treatises, poetry, dictionaries, and grammars. They acquired texts on sci-
ences and mathematics, history, religion, geography, and literature and
brought them back to Europe for analysis and further study. Some visi-
tors studied these texts with local teachers, scholars, and friends.
Scaliger called the Turkish books in his possession ‘­silent teachers (­muti
magistri)’ precisely because he was unable to understand them without
the help of a native speaker. He was aware of the strong oral element
in Ottoman pedagogy. In the Ottoman schools, dictionaries, lengthy ex-
cerpts from poems and other course materials were memorised, recalled,
and recited orally. While both verse and formal prose rhymed, polite
conversation often featured puns, riddles, and quotes from classical texts
that would stay with the listener and be put to good use as the occasion
arose. An Ottoman subject navigated the world of knowledge through
their personal relationship to a w­ ell-​­connected and respected teacher or
master. Such lifelong ties carried great weight in academic progression,
as well as obtaining administrative and legal positions.
But what Scaliger really admitted to was the fact that the books Euro-
peans brought from the Ottoman Empire to adorn their libraries were
taken out of context and released into an environment where they made
little sense. Early modern orientalists not only had to immerse them-
selves in these texts for extended periods but also employ the many study
aids from the Ottoman Empire before these silent books began talking
back to them. Only through painstaking work were the European schol-
ars, whose annotations, study notes, and correspondence are laid out
in this study, able to give meaning to these texts. Over the course of a
few decades, they made remarkable progress, moving from rudimentary
word lists to scholarly histories of the Ottoman Empire based on orig-
inal sources, comprehensive dictionaries, and reliable translations and
editions.
Thanks to their collections and the expertise of their professors, Leiden
and Paris emerged as centres for oriental studies in Western Europe in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Paris, first Postel,
then Scaliger and Hubert recognised and acknowledged the importance
of ­Turkish-​­language sources for the study of Arabic but did not progress
enough in utilising the vast ocean of Ottoman written culture. Scaliger
moved from Paris to the influential University of Leiden in 1593 and con-
tributed to the shift in methodology from the teaching of Arabic through
Hebrew and biblical texts to the use of bilingual reference works from
Turkey. This was an important milestone: knowledge of Turkish, the offi-
cial language of the Ottoman Empire, came to be accepted as an integral
part of oriental studies in Europe both in its own right and to aid the
teaching of Arabic and Persian. If progress was to be made, it was to be
made in all three languages. This attitude reflects the Ottoman learned
practices that favoured comparative study of and simultaneous progres-
sion in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, often simply called ­elsine-​­i selāse
 Introduction 9
(‘­the three languages’). A true Ottoman intellectual would be able to read
scientific and philosophical texts in Arabic, compose letters and docu-
ments in Turkish, and recite poetry in Persian. In what follows, I show
that the Ottoman model was adopted in the study of Islamic texts during
the formative period of oriental studies in early modern Europe.
The first professor of Arabic at Leiden, Thomas Erpenius (­­1584–​­1624),
intended to learn Turkish in the Ottoman Empire but never made it fur-
ther east than Venice. There he acquired Turkish manuscripts and taught
himself the basics of the language, possibly with the help of a local tu-
tor.28 Erpenius’ student Golius, who succeeded him as professor of Ara-
bic, changed the course of oriental scholarship in Europe through the
use of ­Turkish-​­language sources and the manuscripts he acquired in the
Ottoman Empire. Golius spent the first three years of his professorship in
Aleppo and Constantinople studying Arabic, Turkish, and Persian and
collecting manuscripts in these languages. He made meaningful connec-
tions with local scholars, poets, and jurists but the texts he was able to
bring back with him both for the university library and his private collec-
tion made the greatest impact. Golius continued to acquire books from
the Empire even after his return through correspondence with contacts
who supplied him with the titles and texts he sought. It was these manu-
scripts that engendered the publication of several important Arabic and
Persian editions in Leiden.
Golius attracted students from all over Europe and had, at times, sev-
eral promising young men living with him. They benefitted from daily
interaction with their teacher, the use of his personal library, and the pri-
vate tuition that he lavished on them. One of these young students, Anton
Deusing (­­1612–​­1666), heeded the advice of his teacher and compiled the
richest European dictionaries of Persian and Turkish yet available, all
from standard Ottoman lexicographical works. He arranged the entries
in alphabetical order and translated Turkish explications into Latin
word by word. Golius’ monumental Arabic dictionary, Lexicon ­Arabico-​
­L atinum, published in Leiden in 1653, was also mainly based on Turkish
lexicographical sources.
The rise of oriental studies in Europe can be linked to a number of ma-
jor cultural and intellectual developments that occurred in the Ottoman
Empire.29 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, basic literacy
became common, the bureaucratic ranks swelled, a strong written cul-
ture developed, and a Turkish diction which heavily depended on Arabic
and Persian vocabulary and constructions emerged.30 Centuries of elite
Islamic tradition in Arabic and Persian were distilled into Turkish trans-
lations, commentaries, and explications that accompanied key texts.31
The school education in the Ottoman Empire centred on the Quran
and the traditions of the Prophet, with additional courses in algebra,
geometry, logic, and astronomy. In the important centres of learning,
such as Constantinople, Adrianople, and Bursa and throughout the core
10 Introduction
territories of the Empire, including Thrace and Asia Minor, the language
of instruction was mainly Turkish. Arabic and Persian grammar and vo-
cabulary were taught with the help of bilingual textbooks and dictionar-
ies; texts in these languages were read with the help of Turkish glossaries,
translations, commentaries, and explications.32
Good formal training in the three languages was necessary for career
advancement in the Empire. Two figures can illustrate the new intellec-
tual climate and training required to navigate it. The first is Ḳınalızāde
ʿAlī Çelebi (­d. 1572), an exceptionally gifted scholar with an ­in-​­depth
knowledge of law, philosophy, history, rhetoric, and literature; his most
famous work was the Sublime Ethics (­­Aḫlāḳ-​­ι ʿAlāʾī), concerned with so-
cial and political morality.33 Ḳınalızāde’s education and service are sim-
ilar to those of many other Ottoman intellectuals of this period. The son
of a ­h igh-​­ranking judge based in Isparta, in central Anatolia, he studied
in Constantinople for a career in the Ottoman legal establishment. After
several professorships in the colleges of Constantinople, Adrianople,
Bursa, and Kütahya, he held the prestigious judgeships of Damascus,
Cairo, Aleppo, Bursa, and Adrianople. He was serving as the military
judge (­ḳāżī ʿasker) of Anatolia when he passed away, leaving behind sev-
eral other works of note in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, including a col-
lection of poems (­d īvān), commentaries, a chronicle and a collection of
private letters (­münşeʾāt), which found a place in Golius’ library.
Ḳınalızāde took a young Ottoman bureaucrat by the name of Muṣṭafā
ʿĀlī of Gallipoli under his wing and helped him develop into a trilin-
gual author in his own right.34 Such apprenticeships carried great weight
in the formation of one’s public identity in Ottoman society. Cornell
Fleischer reconstructed Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s intellectual world, detailing the
cornerstones of the formative years of a typical young man born into the
class of ordinary subjects (­reʿāyā), as opposed to the military and ruling
class (­ʿaskerī). The latter included the class of legal experts and schol-
ars (­ʿ ulemāʾ) to which his mentor Ḳınalızāde belonged. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s
training began when he was only six with Arabic grammar and the study
of the Quran, and continued with reading scientific texts in Arabic and
poetry in Persian.35 In the sixteenth century, as a new form of learned
Turkish, which Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī termed ‘­a pure gilded tongue’, increasingly
replaced Arabic and Persian as the language of the literati, composition
and cultured discourse in Turkish became an important component of
Ottoman education.36 By the age of fifteen, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī was proficient
in all three languages and ready to embark on his higher education at
a reputed college in Constantinople.37 His classes now concentrated on
theology, law, quranic exegesis, sciences, and rhetoric, but what made an
Ottoman bureaucrat’s career was the intellectual and poetic circles he
moved in. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s inclusion in such refined society had begun in
his father’s home in Gallipoli and progressed upwards in his Constanti-
nople years when he was introduced to distinguished figures, including
 Introduction 11
Bāḳī, the most celebrated court poet of the time, as well as the already
mentioned Ḳınalızāde in Damascus later on.
The training that these two figures from different social backgrounds
received illustrates, again, the integrated way in which the Ottomans
approached the study of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Their methods
and sources for the study of texts in these languages profoundly influ-
enced how scholars in early modern Europe acquired the oriental lan-
guages, and read and interpreted texts in them. For instance, there exists
an undeniable overlap between what was considered essential reading in
the Ottoman Empire and the texts collected by orientalist scholars. The
lexicographic works that circulated widely, such as the ­Arabic-​­Turkish
dictionaries the Language Ladder (­Mirḳāt’ ­ül-​­luġa) and the Dictionary of
Aḫterī (­Aḫterī Luġati) and the ­Persian-​­Turkish Dictionary of Niʿmetullāh
(­­Luġat-​­i Niʿmetullāh) and the rhyming Gift of Şāhidī (­­Tuḥfe-​­i Şāhidī), be-
came the cornerstones of orientalist collections and directly influenced
the production of knowledge in Europe.38
Diplomatic staff representing European powers actively sought infor-
mation and recommendations from learned Ottoman bureaucrats on how
the Turks acquired languages. For instance, the French ambassador to
the Sublime Porte commissioned the chief secretary of the imperial chan-
cery (­reʾīs ­ül-​­küttāb), Meḥmed Efendi, to compile a pamphlet on Ottoman
scholarly practices and traditional education. Entitled The Seven Stars
(­­Kevākib-​­i Sebʿa), this treatise delineates the seven disciplines of learn-
ing followed in the Empire and recommends methods and sources for
the study of these fields. The author intimates that young pupils should
first memorise the Dictionary of the Angel’s Son (­Ferişteoğlu Luġati) for
Arabic, then move on to the Gift of Şāhidī.39 The Dictionary of the Angel’s
Son was compiled by Ibn Melek (­d. 1418), an Arabic pen name literally
meaning ‘­Angel’s son’. It is a verse dictionary containing the Turkish
equivalents of Arabic words found in the Quran. As such, it was the most
basic dictionary for a young child and could be easily memorised. The
Gift of Şāhidī was intended to accompany the reading of Rūmī’s Couplets
(­Masnāvī), the most celebrated sufi text in the Islamic world, which was
studied in colleges and read widely in dervish lodges.40 These dictionar-
ies were designed to help study difficult but essential texts, using rhyme
and meter to aid memorisation and learning. It is unlikely that European
learners memorised their copies the intended way, but they acquired and
utilised the same dictionaries, nevertheless.41
More advanced bilingual dictionaries listing Arabic or Persian ­head-​
­words accompanied by one or more Turkish equivalents or a longer ex-
plication in Turkish were highly influential in the compilation of oriental
dictionaries in early modern Europe. Franciscus Raphelengius’ Lexicon
­Arabico-​­L atinum, collected initially from Hebrew sources, was only wor-
thy of publication after Erpenius corrected and expanded it using three
Turkish sources: an untitled ­Arabic-​­Turkish wordlist and the Aḫterī, both
12 Introduction
of which Erpenius acquired in Venice, and the Language Ladder, which
was bequeathed to Leiden by Scaliger.42 Golius, similarly, depended
heavily on the bilingual lexica, including multiple copies of the Aḫterī,
the Language Ladder and Niʿmetullāh that he acquired in the Ottoman
Empire for his printed Arabic lexicon.43 What set Golius’ work apart
from that of his contemporary Antonio Giggei, who published his own
­Arabic-​­Latin dictionary in Milan in 1632, was his consultation of these
Ottoman sources in addition to the monolingual medieval Arabic dictio-
naries. The earliest printed Persian grammars and dictionaries produced
in Europe also drew heavily on Turkish sources.
Among the manuscripts brought from the Ottoman Empire to be stud-
ied in Europe, lexica, grammars, word lists, and phrasebooks take centre
stage in this study because they facilitated the learning of Turkish and
directly influenced the European works. That does not mean other types
of material were uninfluential. A wide range of genres, including com-
mentaries, literary prose texts, poetry, collections of proverbs, histories,
and chronicles both originally written in Turkish and the translations
from Arabic and Persian, as well as geographies, calendars, philosoph-
ical treatises, books on astronomy, medicine, music, geology, and hor-
ticulture were imported. In their intellectual biography of the French
diplomat and orientalist André Du Ryer (­c.­1580–​­1660 or 1672), Alastair
Hamilton and Francis Richard observe that when it came to the question
of what books to purchase and which texts to read and study, European
scholars followed in the footsteps of Turks.44 But what exactly did the
Ottomans read?
Studies into the private reading practices of early modern Ottomans
are rare. Christoph Neumann unearthed the contents of Evliyā Çelebi’s
personal library, which the famous ­seventeenth-​­century figure took with
him on his extensive travels through the Ottoman Empire.45 Yet, the re-
sults were rather underwhelming and devoid of detailed insights into his
personal taste. The titles of the books given to Evliyā Çelebi as presents,
first by Sultan Murad IV (­reign 1­ 623–​­40), then by Evliyā’s father prior to
his grand tour, disappointingly, comprise standard textbooks that were
typically followed in schools and colleges. These two lists even include
a few overlapping titles. In addition to works on Islamic jurisprudence
( ­fiqh), a Quran commentary (­tafsīr), and a couple of collections recording
the words of Prophet Muhammad (­ḥadīṯ), both his father and the palace
treasurer handed him Ibn ­al-​­Ḥāǧib’s grammatical works Sufficient Intro-
duction to Syntax (­­al-​­Muqaddima ­al-​­K āfiya fī ­l-​­naḥw), and the Satisfac-
tory [Introduction] to Morphology ([­al-​­Muqaddima] ­al-​­Šāfiya fī ­l-​­ṣarf ).
A standard textbook in Ottoman schools, the Sufficient Introduction
was printed in Rome in 1592 with a view to exploiting the mass demand
in the Empire for this text.46 The Medici Press had intended to sell this
and its other Arabic titles in the Ottoman Empire but failed to impress
the Turkish readers. According to the French orientalist Antoine Galland
 Introduction 13
(­­1646–​­1715), who reported coming across an unsold copy of Avicenna’s
Canon of Medicine with a 1593 Rome imprint some 80 years after its
publication, Muslims preferred manuscript copies even though printed
books were cheaper.47 Ultimately, the Arabic editions produced in Rome
came to be for European consumption.48 Erpenius, who expressed a
desire to revise and translate the 1592 Rome edition of the Sufficient
Introduction in his preface to his edition of another famous grammatical
work, the Introduction [to Grammar] by Ibn Āǧurrūm (­­al-​­Muqaddima ­al-​
­Āǧurrūmīya), was hoping to exploit the Turkish commentary that accom-
panied his manuscript copy.49 In Turkey, the Sufficient Introduction was
often studied together with the Arabic commentary by the Persian poet
Ǧāmī, a text so ­well-​­known that it was referred to simply as Mullah Ǧāmī
(­Monlā Cāmī).50 Both his father and the sultan made absolutely sure that
Evliyā Çelebi took a copy of Ǧāmī’s commentary with him. But it was
deemed indispensable also by Golius and other scholars in Europe, evi-
denced by the many copies that reached Europe during the early modern
period.51
During his long journeys, Evliyā Çelebi sought the delightful com-
pany of Persian poetry: he had both the Rose Garden (­G ulistān) and the
Orchard (­B ustān) by the celebrated Persian poet Saʿdī with him. In fact,
Evliyā’s library only contained Arabic and Persian books except for two
titles: Aḫterī’s ­Arabic-​­Turkish dictionary, a title owned and utilised by
Scaliger, Erpenius, Du Ryer, and many other orientalists; and the Trea-
sure of Secrets (­­G encīne-​­i Rāz), a long narrative poem (­masnavī) by the
celebrated Turkish poet Taşlıcalı Yaḥyā, whose King and the Beggar (­Şāh
u Gadā) Golius copiously annotated, collated, and translated into Latin
as discussed in Chapter Five.
A century later, as we learn from Henning Sievert’s study of the titles
mentioned by the bureaucrat and scholar Rāġıb Meḥmed Paşa (­d. 1763)
and commonly owned by other intellectuals of the era, little had changed
in the literary taste of a typical Ottoman gentleman.52 Ǧāmī’s version of
Yūsuf and Zulayḫā is still one of the most celebrated poems in Sievert’s
list, as it had been in Scaliger’s days two centuries earlier. Saʿdī’s Rose
Garden, which features heavily in Sievert’s list, was translated more than
once in Europe during the seventeenth century and remained popular
throughout the eighteenth.53 In other words, we have here what we can
call a canon of Persian classics that were read and cherished in the Otto-
man Empire.54 Although the status of works such as Ḥafiẓ’s Collected
Poems (­D īvān), Rūmī’s Couplets, and Saʿdī’s Rose Garden and Orchard
were long established in the wider Islamic world, it was the contemporary
responses they engendered among the Ottoman literati that made them
relevant and accessible to a European readership.55
In Sievert’s list, we find several Ottoman chronicles, such as Crown of
Histories (­Tāc ­üt-​­tevārīḫ) compiled by Ḫōcā Saʿdeddīn (­d. 1615), a title
that made its way to Vienna, Leiden, and many other European cities.
14 Introduction
Johannes Leunclavius’ Ottoman histories, the subject of Chapter Two
of this book, were partial Latin translations of this famous chronicle.
Golius read the Crown of Histories and several other Ottoman chron-
icles, as discussed in Chapter Five. It may not be not surprising that
Leunclavius turned to original sources in Turkish when he composed the
first scholarly history of the Ottoman Empire in Western Europe, but
other Islamic histories were also studied through Turkish translations.
Du Ryer, for instance, read ­al-​­Ṭabārī’s famous world history in Turkish
alongside the original Arabic. In fact, Du Ryer was so familiar with the
Turkish version of the text that he chose a short passage from it as sample
reading for his grammar, as discussed below in Chapter Three.
There are indications that contemporary literary trends and fashions
travelled in both directions between Western Europe and the Islamic
world. Prophecies, end of the world narratives and other occult books,
such as dream interpretation manuals, were consumed in the Ottoman
Empire at the same time as they occupied the printing presses of Europe
from Antwerp to Frankfurt. Sultan Süleyman’s court was fascinated by
the idea of Jesus returning as a Muslim messiah (­mahdī), while Johannes
Lichtenberger penned prophecies about the destruction of the world af-
ter the Turkish conquest of Cologne, as discussed in Chapter One. The
Leiden printer Justus Raphelengius was reading and annotating the
Turkish dream interpretation manuals he purchased in Constantinople in
the 1590s, perhaps with a view to publishing them in bilingual editions.56
The five chapters of this book trace the connections between what has
too often been perceived as two disparate spheres in the universe of early
modern scholarship. Early modern orientalists learned Arabic and Per-
sian through the same canonical texts, reference tools, and methods as
the Ottomans. The people, texts, and practices that Europeans encoun-
tered in Constantinople or other cultural centres of the Empire shaped
oriental studies in vital ways. Far from being marginal or peripheral, the
Turkish books systematically collected, copied, and annotated by Euro-
pean scholars transformed how Islamic knowledge was acquired, culti-
vated, and communicated. Much of what was achieved in Europe in the
field of oriental studies rested on the toilsome work of Ottoman lexicog-
raphers, translators, and commentary writers, as demonstrated through
numerous examples cited in this study.
Chapter One reconsiders the role of printed travel and captivity ac-
counts in the context of publishing and reading practices in Europe.
These ‘­eyewitness’ accounts, written by s­ elf-​­proclaimed experts on Turk-
ish culture and language, aimed to entertain their readers and carried
little scholarly value. Yet today, they are frequently misused as reliable
primary sources for the historiography of Islamic learning in Europe.
While modern scholarship presents the politically and commercially
motivated opinions voiced in these accounts as direct observations, the
­Turkish-​­language elements contained in them expose the incompetence
 Introduction 15
of their authors as well as the s­ econd-​­hand nature of the information they
afford.
Chapter Two explores the Ottoman chronicles compiled by Johannes
Leunclavius from original sources and Martin Crusius’ collection of
Greek documents from the Ottoman Empire through Scaliger’s mar-
ginalia. Following the learning experience of one of the finest linguists
of the era, the chapter reveals the resilient and ingenious ways in which
Scaliger collected Turkish, Arabic, and Persian vocabulary for his dictio-
nary from these unlikely sources. Scaliger’s correspondence reveals fur-
ther details about his interest in Turkish history, t­ ime-​­keeping practices
and literature, and his frustration with having limited access to primary
sources.
Chapter Three shows the limitations of writing the history of European
study of Turkish through printed editions. The first printed grammar of
Turkish was ­self-​­published by Hieronymus Megiser in 1612 in Leipzig.
Modern scholarship has hailed him as a pioneering figure, yet the an-
notations of a contemporary orientalist expose his skilful plagiarism of
a work sent to him from Constantinople without any knowledge of the
language. André Du Ryer, who learned Turkish during his diplomatic
career in the Ottoman Empire, published a Turkish grammar in 1630 in
Paris, which he believed to be the first. This work contains errors that
one would not expect from a competent language expert such as Du
Ryer, who gave us one of the most influential European translations of
the Quran and rendered Saʿdī’s Rose Garden into French. A fresh look at
his unpublished manuscript works, including a Turkish dictionary and
his translation of the Psalms into Turkish, helps us evaluate Du Ryer as
an orientalist and reveals that the printed grammar does not reflect his
impressive proficiency.
Chapter Four gives an overview of Turkish studies in Leiden, explaining
why the richest oriental dictionaries were produced there. Introducing
Anton Deusing and his groundbreaking Turkish and Persian dictionaries
compiled from Ottoman sources Golius brought to Leiden, this chap-
ter shows us that comprehensive Turkish dictionaries were produced in
Europe in the 1630s, decades before Franciscus à Mesgnien Meninski
(­­1623–​­1698) published his famous ­four-​­volume Thesaurus Linguarum
Orientalium in Vienna in 1680. A comparative analysis of entries from
the Turkish dictionaries of Deusing, Golius, and Meninski demonstrates
that we need to completely reevaluate what we knew about development
of oriental lexicography in Europe.
Chapter Five looks at Golius’ collection of Turkish manuscripts vol-
ume by volume, charting his progress and intellectual pursuits through
his extensive marginalia, notes, and translations. His private library, now
in Oxford, and his annotated manuscripts from the Leiden University
Library paint a picture of an erudite man who scoured many Turkish
books in diverse genres from poetry to history, from horticulture to
16 Introduction
astronomy. Golius’ Turkish correspondence, misinterpreted by previous
scholarship, shows that many years after his return from Constantino-
ple, he was still systematically collecting manuscripts and printed books
from the East. Golius continued reading Turkish literature and enriching
his Turkish dictionary until the day he died.

Notes
1 Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert (­e ds), The Correspondence of Joseph Justus
Scaliger, 8 vols (­G eneva: Droz, 2012), vol. 7, p ­ . 322, lines 5­ 1–​­63. For a fuller
translation and discussion of this passage, see Nil Palabıyık, ‘­T he Last
Letter from Étienne Hubert to Joseph Scaliger: Oriental Languages and
Scholarly Collaboration in ­S eventeenth-​­Century Europe’, Lias: Journal of
Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 45 (­2018), ­115– ​­46, there
­121–​­24.
2 For a detailed summary of oriental studies in Europe from the sixteenth
to twentieth century, see Alastair Hamilton, Bridge of Knowledge: Western
Appreciation of Arab and Islamic Civilization in the Arcadian Library (­London:
The Arcadian Library, 2011), p­p. ­297–​­327. For a recent discussion of what
could be defined as early modern orientalism, see Daniel Stolzenberg, ‘­W hat
Was Oriental Studies in Early Modern Europe? “­Oriental Languages” and
the Making of a Discipline, in The Allure of the Ancient: Receptions of the
Ancient Middle East, ca. 1­ 600–​­1800 ed. by Margaret Geoga and John Steele
(­Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), p­p. ­343–​­74.
3 Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seven-
teenth Century [­Oxford-​­Warburg Studies] (­Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
4 Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the Euro-
pean Enlightenment (­Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2018).
5 Asaph ­Ben-​­Tov, Johann Ernst Gerhard (­­1621-​­1668): The Life and Work of a
­Seventeenth- ​­Century Orientalist (­Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021).
6 On ­Venetian-​­Ottoman cultural interactions, see Eric Dursteler, Venetians in
Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Medi-
terranean (­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
7 Natalie Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and
the Routes of Orientalism (­Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).
8 Elżbieta Swięcicka, Dictionary of ­ Italian-​­
Turkish Language (­ 1641) by
Giovanni Molino: transcripted, reversed and annotated (­Boston and Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2020). Also see her ‘­Interpreter Yovhannē s Ankiwrac’i also called
Giovanni Molino’, [Studia in honorem Stanislai Stachowski Dicata], Folia
Orientalia 36 (­2000), ­329–​­42.
9 The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (­d.
1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient, Proj-
ect Website <https://­geschichtsforschung.univie.ac.at/­forschung/­­laufende-​
­drittmittelprojekte/­oorpl/> [accessed 4 November 2021]. The findings of this
project are forthcoming with Brill as Court Librarian Sebastian Tengnagel,
Central European Christianity and Knowledge about the Orient, ­1600–​­1640.
10 On Tengnagel’s manuscripts, see Hülya Çelik and Chiara Petrolini,
‘­ Establishing an “­ Orientalium linguarum Bibliotheca” in ­17th-​­c entury
Vienna’, Bibliothecae.it 10 (­2021), ­175–​­231.
 Introduction 17
11 Robert Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (­­1505–​­1624) (­Leiden:
Brill, 2020), p­p. ­57–​­61.
12 Jones, Learning Arabic, p­p. ­24–​­25.
13 On Tengnagel’s travels and worldview, see ­Joan-​­Pau Rubiés, Travel and Eth-
nology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, ­1250–​­1625
(­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p­p. ­353–​­87, and John Gur-
ney, ‘­Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception’, Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 49 (­1986), ­103–​­16.
14 On a letter exchanged between Tengnagel and Della Valle, see Chiara
Petrolini, ‘­Roma, Vienna e l’Oriente. Le lettere di Sebastian Tengnagel e
Pietro Della Valle’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archive und
Bibliotheken 100 (­2020), ­359–​­73.
15 On the contents of this cabinet, see Arnoud Vrolijk and Kasper van Ommen
(­eds), ‘­All My Books in Foreign Tongues’: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden,
­1609–​­2 009 (­Leiden: Leiden University Library, 2009); Kaspar van Ommen,
‘­The Legacy of Josephus Justus Scaliger in Leiden University Library Cata-
logues, ­1609–​­1716’, in Documenting the Early Modern Book World Inventories
and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. by Malcolm Walsby and Nata-
sha Constantinidou, Library of the Written ­Word – ​­The Handpress World 31
(­Leiden: Brill, 2013), p­p. ­51–​­82.
16 Published as a facsimile in Melchior Lorichs’ Panorama of Istanbul, 1559, ed.
by Cyril Mango and Stéphane Yerasimos (­Istanbul: Ertuğ and Kocabıyık,
1999). On Lorck as an artist, see the major study Erik Fischer, Ernst
Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen (­eds), Melchior Lorck, 4 vols
(­Copenhagen: Vandkunsten Publishers, 2009), the last volume of which is
dedicated to the panorama.
17 Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Legationis turcicae epistolae quatuor (­Frankfurt:
Wechel’s heirs, 1595).
18 Janus Dousa, De itinere suo Constantinopolitano, epistola (­Leiden: Christoph
Raphelengius, 1599).
19 Now available in digitised form on the Leiden University Library website,
‘­Prospect of Constantinople’, <http://­hdl.handle.net/­1887.1/­item:2028347>
[accessed 26 October 2021].
20 A widely used Latinised name for the university town, it also appeared in a
book promoting Leiden, its learning facilities and its residents. A woodcut
with a similar view of the library was included above the section describing
the oriental collections and the panorama of Constantinople. Johannes Meur-
sius, Athenae Batavae, sive De urbe Leidensi, & Academia, virisque claris; qui
utramque ingenio suo, atque scriptis, illustratrunt: libri duo (­Leiden: Andreas
Cloucq and Elzevier, 1625). On this work, see Anthony Grafton, Athenae Bat-
avae: The Research Imperative at Leiden, 1­ 575–​­1650 (­Scaliger Lectures, 1)
(­Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2003).
21 Ilja M. Veldman, ‘­The Portrayal of Student Life and Universities in the Early
Modern Period’ in Education and Learning in the Netherlands, ­1400–​­1600, ed.
by Koen Gudriaan, Jaap von Moolenbroek and Ad Tervoort (­Leiden: Brill,
2004), p­p. ­315–​­38, there ­318–​­21; Claudia Swan, Rarities of These Lands: Art,
Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (­Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2021), p­p. ­18–​­20.
22 On English and Dutch trade in the Ottoman Empire, see Alfred Wood, A
History of the Levant Company (­London: Oxford University Press, 1935)
and Alexander De Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A
History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, ­1610–​­1630 (­Leiden: Nederlands
­Historisch-​­A rchaeologisch Instituut, 1978).
18 Introduction
23 İsmail Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık ve Sahaflar (­Istanbul: Timaş Yayın-
ları, 2013), p­p. ­69–​­81.
24 Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık, p­p. ­295–​­97. On the book culture in Ottoman
Egypt, see Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Mid-
dle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (­Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 2003). On private book collections from ­eighteenth-​­century Syria,
see Feras Krimsti, ‘­The Lives and Afterlives of the Library of the Maronite
Physician H ̣annā Al-​­T ̣abıˉ b (­c. ­1702–​­1775) from Aleppo’, Journal of Islamic
Manuscripts 9 (­2018), ­190–​­217 and Boris Liebrenz, Die Rifā ʿīya aus Dama-
skus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld
(­Leiden: Brill, 2016). On books and their owners in Bosnia in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, see Asim Zubčević, ‘­Book ownership in Ottoman
Sarajevo ­1707–​­1828’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2015.
25 Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık, p­p. ­298–​­99.
26 Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık, p­p. ­146–​­47.
27 Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Sahaflık, p­p. ­99–​­108.
28 On the presence and activities of ­Turkish-​­speaking merchants in Venice, see
Cemal Kafadar, ‘­A Death in Venice (­1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants
Trading in the Serenissima’, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (­1986), ­191–​­218.
29 For a general introduction to the literary language and culture of early mod-
ern Ottomans, see Selim Kuru, ‘­The Literature of Rum: The Making of a
Literary Tradition (­­1450–​­1600)’ in The Cambridge History of Turkey. Vol. 2:
The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, ­1453–​­1600, ed. by Suraiya Faroqhi
and Kate Fleet (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p­p. ­548–​­592.
30 On the development of written Turkish, see Linda T. Darling, ‘­Ottoman
Turkish: Written Language and Scribal Practice, 13th to 20th Centuries’,
in Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and Social Order, ed. by Brian
Spooner and William L. Hanaway (­Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsyl-
vania, 2012), p­p. ­171–​­96.
31 On the Ottoman translations from Persian, see Gottfried Hagen, ‘­Translations
and Translators a Multilingual Society: A Case Study of P ­ ersian-​­Ottoman
Translations, Late Fifteenth to Early Seventeenth Century’, Eurasian Stud-
ies 2 (­2003), ­95–​­134. On translation of scientific texts from Arabic in the
seventeenth century, see Harun Küçük, ‘­A rabic into Turkish in the Seven-
teenth Century’, Isis 109 (­2018), ­320–​­25. On the lively ­commentary-​­w riting
and ­deep-​­reading culture of the Ottoman Empire, see Khaled ­El-​­Rouayheb,
Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents
in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (­Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), especially p­p. ­60–​­130.
32 On the subjects and textbooks read in Ottoman madrasahs, see Cevat İzgi,
Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim, 2 vols (­Istanbul: İz Yayınevi, 1997) and Ömer
Özyılmaz, ­Manzume-​­i ­Tertib-​­i Ulûm, Tertibu’­l-​­Ulûm, Kaside Fi’­l-​­Kütübi’­l-​
­Meşhure Fi’­l-​­Ulûm, ­Kevakib-​­i Seb’a ve Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı’nın T ­ ertib-​
­i Ulûm İsimli Eserine Göre, XVII. ve XVIII. yüzyıllarda Osmanlı Medreselerinin
Eğitim Programları (­A nkara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 2002).
33 On Ḳınalızāde ʿAlī Çelebi and his literary circle, see Helen Pfeifer, ‘­Encounter
after Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in ­16th-​­Century Ottoman Damascus’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (­2015), ­219–​­39.
34 Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: Histo-
rian Mustafa Ali, ­1546–​­1600 (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),
p­p. ­25–​­43.
35 Fleischer, Mustafa Ali, p­p. ­18–​­20.
36 Fleischer, Mustafa Ali, ­p. 22.
 Introduction 19
37 Fleischer, Mustafa Ali, ­p. 24.
38 On ­Persian-​­Turkish dictionaries from this period, see Ani Sargsyan, ‘­­Persian-​
­Turkish Dictionaries of the ­m id-­​­­15th–​­16th Centuries: A Trajectory of Knowl-
edge Mobility’ in Knowledge on the Move in a Transottoman Perspective:
Dynamics of Intellectual Exchange from the Fifteenth to the Early Twentieth
Century, ed. by Evelin Dierauff, Dennis Dierks, Barbara Henning, Taisiya
Leber and Ani Sargsyan (­Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021), p­p. ­39–​­70.
39 Nasuhi Karaarslan, XVIII. Asrın Ortalarına Kadar Türkiye’de İlim ve İlmi-
yeye Dâir Bir Eser: ­Kevâkib-​­i Seb‘­a Risâlesi (­A nkara: Türk Tarih Kurumu,
2015), ­p. 72.
40 For an edition and English translation of this dictionary, see Antoinette C.
Verburg, ‘­The ­Tuḥfe-​­i Şāhidī: A ­Sixteenth-​­Century ­Persian-​­Ottoman Dictio-
nary in Rhyme’, Archivum Ottomanicum 15 (­1997), ­5 –​­87.
41 On the use of ­Tuḥfe-​­i Şāhidī by European orientalists, see Paul Babinski,
‘­Ottoman Philology and the Origins of Persian Studies in Western Europe:
The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers’, Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellec-
tual Culture and Its Sources 46 (­2019), ­233–​­315, there ­241–​­44.
42 Alastair Hamilton, ‘‘‘­Nam tirones sumus”: Franciscus Raphelengius’ Lex-
icon ­Arabico-​­L atinum (­Leiden 1613)’, in Ex Officina Plantiniana. Studia in
memoriam Christophori Plantini (­ca. ­1520–​­1589), ed. by Marcus de Schepper
and Francine de Nave, special double issue of De Gulden Passer ­66–​­67 (­­1988–​
­89), p­p. ­557–​­89, there ­p. 583.
43 Jacobus Golius, Lexicon ­Arabico-​­L atinum (­Leiden: Bonaventura & Abra-
ham Elzevir, 1653). Golius lists his sources on sigs *­6r-​­v.
44 Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies
in ­Seventeenth- ​­Century France (­London: The Arcadian Library, 2004), ­p. 75.
45 Christoph K. Neumann, ‘­Üç ­t arz-​­ı mütalaa: Yeniçağ Osmanlı Dünyası’nda
Kitap Okumak ve Yazmak’, Tarih ve Toplum: Yeni Yaklaşımlar 2 (­2005),
­51–​­76.
46 Giovanni Battista Raimondi (­ed.), Grammatica arabica dicta Caphiah auc-
tore filio Alhagiabi (­Rome: Typographia Medicea, 1592). On this edition, see
Jones, Learning Arabic, p­p. ­208–​­9.
47 Galland’s preface to Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dic-
tionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance
des peuples de l’Orient (­Paris: Compagnie des libraries, 1697), p. [ú]. On Gal-
land as a collector of oriental books, see Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic
Letters, p­p. ­23–​­29.
48 The inventory of the library of Muh ̣ammad a­ l-​­Taqawıˉ, a Muslim physician
in Aleppo, features a European printed edition of the Canon. ­A l-​­Taqawıˉ
was connected to Golius through the latter’s brother Celestin, who lived
in Aleppo, and Ah ̣mad ibn Husa ̣ ̄ m to whom we will return to in the con-
text of Golius’ correspondence and book collecting. See Benedikt Reier,
‘­Bibliophilia in Ottoman Aleppo: Muh ̣ammad ­al-​­Taqawıˉ and his Medical
Library’, Der Islam 98 (­2021), ­473–​­515, there ­489–​­90.
49 Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.4.8, item 2, once owned by Erpenius,
contains a running commentary in Turkish as well as the main text of the
Sufficient Introduction. It is bound together with the Introduction [to Gram-
mar] by Ibn Āǧurrūm. See Jones, Learning Arabic, ­p. 209, note 35 and p ­ . 161,
note 211.
50 The original title is Useful Extracts for [His Son] Ḍiyāʾ ­al-​­D īn (­Fawāʾid ­al-​
­Ḍiyāʾīya). On this work and its reception in the Ottoman Empire, see Ertuğrul
Ökten, ‘­ʿAbd ­al-​­Raḥmān Jāmī and the Ottoman Linguistic Tradition: Phi-
losophy of Language and ʿIlm ­al-​­Waḍʿ’, in Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The
20 Introduction
Reception of ʿAbd ­al-​­R aḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca.
9th/­­15th-​­14th/­2 0th Century, ed. by Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas
(­Leiden: Brill, 2008), p­p. ­283–​­308.
51 Recorded as ‘­A rabic grammar explained by Ǧāmī (­G rammatica Arabica illus-
trata Giami)’ in the auction catalogue of the sale of Golius’ books. Johannes
du Vivié, Catalogus Insignium in omni facultate, linguisque, Arabica, Persica,
Turcica, Chinensi &c. Librorum M.Ss. Quos Doctissimus Clarissimusque Vir
D. Jacobus Golius, Dum Viveret: Mathesios & Arabicae Linguae in Acad.
Lugd. Batav. Professor Ordinarius, Ex variis Regionibus magno studio,
labore & sumptu, collegit. (­Leiden: Johannes du Vivié, 1696), Addenda, Libri
MSS Compacti in Quarto, no. 16.
52 Henning Sievert, ‘­Eavesdropping on the Pasha’s Salon: Usual and Unusual
Readings of an E ­ ighteenth-​­Century Ottoman Bureaucrat’, Osmanlı Araştır-
maları /­T he Journal of Ottoman Studies 41 (­2013), ­159–​­95.
53 On D’Herbelot’s reading of Persian poetry, see Bevilacqua, The Republic of
Arabic Letters, p­p. ­121–​­24. On the influence of the s­ ixteenth-​­century Turkish
commentator Sudī Bosnevī on the European Gulistān translations, see Paul
Babinski, ‘­Ottoman Philology’, p­p. ­277–​­313.
54 Murat Umut İnan, ‘­Ottomans Reading Persian Classics: Readers and Read-
ing in the Ottoman Empire, 1­ 500–​­1700’ in The Edinburgh History of Reading:
Early Readers, ed. by Mary Hammond (­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2020), p­p. ­160–​­81.
55 See, for instance, the discussion of European responses to Sudī Bosnevī’s
commentary in Murat Umut İnan, ‘­ Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in
­Sixteenth-​­Century Istanbul: Ahmed Sudi on the Divan of Hafiz of Shiraz’,
Philological Encounters 3 (­2018), ­275–​­309, there p­p. ­280–​­82.
56 Leiden, Universiteitbibliotheek, MS Or. 1628, containing three Turkish trea-
tises on dream interpretation, carries Raphelengius’ ownership mark and
marginal notes.
1 Earliest printed books on
Turkey
Georgievits and Postel on the
Turkish language

Suppose you were a Western globetrotter before the age of social me-
dia. How would you prove that you have crossed Istanbul’s Golden Horn
with a local ferryman, eaten tasty dishes made by an innkeeper in Bursa,
gazed at the bustling port of Smyrna while sipping your coffee, or that
you read ancient Roman inscriptions on a mural in Ankara? Travel litera-
ture, written by early modern European visitors to the Ottoman Empire,
today preserved in hundreds of printed copies in rare book libraries,
provides the answer: boast about your knowledge of the local language
by incorporating original words and authentic phrases into your prose.
After all, no travel writer wants to be considered merely a tourist. But
how does one exude an air of expertise without doing all the hard work?
Add a few lyrics from a folk song, make a list of practical vocabulary,
spell out the names of the different parts of the seraglio, and voilà, you
have now become a connoisseur of all things Ottoman!
Travel literature and captivity accounts concerning the Ottoman
Empire flourished as a lucrative genre from the 1540s onwards.1 Some
of the b
­ est-​­known works in this genre are penned by George of Hun-
gary and Bartholomew Georgievits in Latin; by Guillaume Postel, André
Thevet, Pierre Belon, Jean Chesnau, ­Jean-​­Baptiste Tavernier, and Jean
Thévenot in French; by William Biddulph, Henry Blount, and George
Sandys in English; and by Melchior Lorch, Leonhard Rauwolf, and Salo-
mon Schweigger in German.2 Over the last two decades, these printed
texts received ample scholarly attention. We now have a considerable
body of academic research on travellers to the Ottoman Empire and their
writings.3 Majority of these studies dwell on the Western perceptions of
Muslims and highlight a broad spectrum of early modern attitudes to-
wards the Ottoman Empire, ranging from hostility and fearfulness to
admiration and envy.
Two authors of the genre have been regarded by modern scholars as
the trailblazers who laid the foundation for the European study of Turk-
ish by including specific sections explaining the language. The first is
a certain Bartholomew Georgievits (­­1505–​­66), who made a career out
of writing short pamphlets about his alleged captivity in the Ottoman
Empire.4 Georgievits, a ­self-​­proclaimed expert on Turkish culture and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429343018-2
22 Earliest printed books on Turkey
language, wrote in a style that oscillated between reportage and fiction.
He published a collection entitled On the Customs and Religious Ceremo-
nies of the Turks (­De turcarum ritu et caeremoniis), which contained a the-
matic word list and a fictitious dialogue between a ‘­Turk’ and a Christian
merchant. The second author, the orientalist scholar Guillaume Postel
(­­1510–​­81), wrote a popular book on Turkey entitled Histories of the East,
Mainly of the Turks (­Des histoires Orientales et principalement des Turkes).
Postel’s publication contains a short guide to Turkish grammar and a
slightly modified version of Georgievits’ word list.
This chapter will first look at these two authors and what aids they
offer to learn Turkish. After a detailed analysis of the vocabulary and
grammar they teach, it will quickly become apparent that these books
could hardly have helped anyone genuinely interested in improving their
Turkish-language skills. In particular, we shall pay attention to the print-
ing history of Georgievits’ treatises, which mark them out as widely read
pamphlets that influenced the popular discourse on Turks, yet had no
bearing on oriental scholarship. An account of Postel’s visits to the East,
his interactions with his J­ esus-​­loving Turkish teacher and his ambitions
to convert Muslims will follow. Finally, we will touch upon the popular-
ity of Islamic narratives of the second coming of Jesus and the prophecies
equating the advance of Turks with the end of the world that fascinated
early modern audiences both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The
chapter will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of printed texts
as primary sources for the historiography of oriental learning in Europe.
Georgievits’ first printed book, On the Customs and Religious Ceremo-
nies of the Turks (­De turcarum ritu et caeremoniis), is a short work con-
taining four chapters on the topic.5 As was customary with early modern
printed editions, it features an ‘­Epistle to the Reader’ in which the author
justifies the publication of the text in question. Georgievits ‘­did not think
it worth to soil the pages by detailing the base habits of the common
people, nor the practices of their most abject faith’.6 Therefore he pro-
vides his readers with ‘­the things that one should know about the religion
and manners of the Ishmaelites [i.e. the Muslims] as well as many words,
greetings, formulae for answering queries, expressing gratitude and say-
ing goodbye, together with the numerals of the Persian language, which
our people call Turkish’.7 According to Georgievits, the Turks spoke Per-
sian but a ‘­corrupt’ version of it ‘­as one can clearly understand from the
use of all the expressions’.8 Georgievits proudly declared that he ‘­pursued
the naked truth’ and ‘­never consulted any writer on Turkish matters’.9
The tone and the contents of the Epistle are indicative of the rest of the
book, which transmits nuggets of dubious information wrapped up in an
impassioned prose narrative.
The four chapters of Georgievits’ On the Customs and Religious Cer-
emonies of the Turks touch upon various topics. The first (­and longest),
entitled ‘­The origin of the Turks (­De origine turcarum)’, covers religious
 Earliest printed books on Turkey 23

­Figure 2a T
 itle-page of Bartholomew Georgievits’ On the Customs and Religious
Ceremonies of the Turks.

customs, fasting habits, circumcision ceremonies, education, monastic

institutions, weddings and funerals, pilgrimage, charity, and inheritance
matters. The second chapter, ‘­On the army (­De Militia)’, is concerned
with the military ranks of infantry and equestrian units, victory cele-
brations, and hunting ceremonies. The third chapter, ‘­On labourers and
24 Earliest printed books on Turkey
farmers (­De Operariis et Agricolis)’, comments on farming and produce,
animal breeding, food and drinks, and manufacturing of goods, clothing
and furniture. The fourth and final chapter ‘­On their vocabulary, greet-
ings and numbers (­De vocabulis, salutationibus ac numero eorum)’ con-
sists of a word list of 214 nouns, adjectives, and verbs.10
A large number of original Turkish vocabulary, given in translitera-
tion, dot the pages of Georgievits’ book. These strategically placed words
and phrases were included in the text for the ‘­exotic’ effect. It is often as-
sumed that captives like Georgievits ‘­became fluent in Turkish and could
thus converse easily with Muslims’ on account of the Turkish words and
phrases printed in their books.11 This feigned authoritativeness should
not be mistaken for a sound knowledge of the language. As Frédéric
Tinguely observed, early modern authors added these foreign words to
their prose as a literary device because the audio representations of the
strange sounds from unfamiliar lands gave credit to the travel and cap-
tivity accounts.12
A reader who skims through the first chapter will find about 50
Turkish words scattered across the Latin text. To supply an example
of how the Turkish vocabulary works in context, I have chosen one
of the few passages that express a neutral view of life in the Empire
which neither contains a zealous attack on presumed Muslim beliefs
nor assumes a seemingly positive take on Ottoman policies in order to
criticise Christians and shame them into a­ ction – ​­two modes of writing
that are frequently encountered in Georgievits’ treatises. I quote from
the passage under the section heading ‘­O n their schools (­D e Scholis
ipsorum)’:

They have places of instruction called OKVMACHGIRLERI in

their language, and and teachers whom they call HOGSIALAR,
both men and women. However, they teach separately: men instruct
men and women [instruct] women in astronomy, philosophy and the
art of poetry. While learning they move their bodies [from side] to
side, clamouring in a loud voice. They do not know music performed
with instruments, but invent poems according to set rules, which are
as such. Each poem is ought to comprise eleven syllables.13

We find some basic Turkish vocabulary in this quotation (‘­ reading’,

‘­place’, and ‘­teacher’). Then he quotes four hendecasyllabic verses of a
folk poem which is composed in simple, colloquial Turkish:

Verses called BETHLER by them

My woes multiplied ­five-​­fold, ­ten-​­fold
I ask for the creator’s help
I have left my possessions, my home behind
However I try, I cannot tame my heart.14
 Earliest printed books on Turkey 25
Georgievits remarks that this is ‘­a love poem of the Goddess called
ASSICH in their language’. But ʿāşıḳ is not a ‘­Goddess of Love’ as he
claims but simply a ‘­lover’, and by extension ‘­troubadour’ or ‘­bard’, who
would perform this type of folk poetry.15 This is his first misunderstand-
ing. He then puts on the show of translating what are rather some simple
Turkish verses into Latin word by word.16 He probably had access to a
translation which he deconstructed here and mapped onto each Turkish
word found in the poem. While the Latin rendering of the poem as a
whole is a cohesive text, the verbatim translation given with the formula
of ‘­Turkish word, id est [that is], Latin word’, imitating the style of late
Renaissance primary school textbooks for language instruction, makes
little sense from a pedagogical perspective. For instance, Georgievits’
‘­derdumi, id est tribulatione mea’ translates a singular noun in the accu-
sative case, with a Latin plural in the ablative. The mistranslation of the
third verse ‘­Terch eiledum zahmanumi gurdumi (­I abandoned my posses-
sions, my home)’ into ‘­neglexi patriae meae visitationem (­I neglected the
visit of my homeland)’ betrays his lack of lexical knowledge, as well as his
ignorance of Sufi practices of asceticism and renunciation. There existed
many flavours of Sufism in Anatolia which advocated the abandonment
of earthly possessions while perpetual motion and travelling were be-
lieved to make one closer to God.17 Georgievits erroneously translates
sāmān (­capital, furniture, household goods) as patria (­homeland), while
he assumes yurt (­home) means visitatio (­v isit). The point needs to be made
here that these verses, part of a mostly oral tradition, are far removed
from the sophisticated court poetry that was produced and recited by the
educated classes in the Ottoman Empire.
Likewise, Chapters Two and Three contain, respectively, 30 Turkish
technical military terms, including ‘­tspahalar (­plural of sipahī, cavalry-
man)’, ‘­svlihtarlar (­plural of silāḥdār, armourer)’, and ‘­vlachlaris (­plural
of ulaḳ, courier)’; and 18 Turkish food designations such as ‘­echmech
(­ekmek, bread)’, ‘­secher (­şeker, sugar)’, and ‘­p echmez ( ­pekmez, flavoured
molasses often made of grapes)’.
The word list in Chapter Four repeats the vocabulary already covered
in the first three chapters, adds about a hundred new words, and groups
them thematically under headings such as ‘­c elestial beings’, ‘­terrestrial
beings’, ‘­animals’, ‘­p ersons and positions’, ‘­clothes’, and ‘­household and
utensils’. This section is followed by examples of greetings and a sample
dialogue between a ‘­Turk’ and a Christian merchant in which the former
questions the latter about his destination and the nature of his visit in the
most bizarre way.
The Turkish dialogue suffers from persistent grammatical errors. For
instance, we repeatedly find the ­first-​­person singular possessive ­suffix –​
(­ ­i)­m where it should be the second person ­singular – ​­(­i)­ñ. As such, we find
‘­scizum’ for siziñ (­yours); ‘­g ioldassum’ for yoldaşıñ (­your companion) and
‘­tsenumle’ for seniñle (­w ith you).18 One is unlikely to make this mistake
26 Earliest printed books on Turkey
in written form since a mim (­‫ )م‬and a ­kēf-​­ī nūni (­‫ )ڭ‬look dissimilar on
the page but, in oral transmission, that difference may be lost to some-
one not familiar with the language. The more likely explanation for this
kind of error is that an n can be easily read as an m in manuscript Latin
transliteration, especially in a secretary or cursive hand. These and other
mistakes are repeated in all the subsequent printed editions.
The vocabulary given in context in the first three chapters is mainly in
the plural, whereas the exact words appear in the word list in the singular
form. Sig. F2v has a section entitled ‘­Rules (­Regula)’, explaining how the
Turkish plural suffix is added to nouns and verbs and takes the alternate
forms of -​­lar or -​­ler according to the preceding vowels in the word. The
rule of ‘­vowel harmony’ is one of the grammatical cornerstones of early
modern Turkish. We then find a list of numerals and numbers from one
to a hundred with a short guide on how to count further.
Therefore, the extent of the Turkish expertise on display in Georgiev-
its’ 1544 edition is somewhat limited: he quotes one brief folk poem, ex-
plains a few simple terms, provides some basic dialogue, which contains
mistakes, and offers guidance to the most basic of grammar rules: how
the vowel harmony works for the plural endings. Moreover, throughout
the chapter, we find inconsistent transliteration and misunderstandings,
for instance, the ‘­lover’ or ‘­troubadour’, who becomes the ‘­goddess of
love’. All of this hardly amounts to an ­in-​­depth knowledge of Turkish.
Yet, it is perhaps because of its simplicity that this work had the tremen-
dous commercial success that the very many subsequent editions verify.

The many editions of Georgievits’ pamphlets

It sometimes seems the field of history of Turkish learning is cut off from
history of the book and print culture as if they are estranged siblings.
This unfortunate disconnect often means that the scholars who studied
the contents of works on Turkey take little notice of the social and eco-
nomic circumstances of the production, circulation, and consumption of
these printed editions. The physical aspects of a ­book – ​­its size, length,
paper quality, typeface, binding; the number, style, and quality of the
woodcuts or engravings in it – give us valuable information about its
place and function in the world of early modern printing and book trade.
Yet, these aspects are hardly considered when popular printed books
about the Ottoman Empire are discussed. An exception to the rule is
Gerald MacLean’s recent piece discussing how Georgievits was able ‘­to
transform his captivity into a career’ via print. Georgievits found the
right conditions for economic success in Antwerp, the publishing capital
of Western Europe, where he first began churning out short books, as
MacLean puts it, ‘­designed as diatribes against the Ottomans’.19 Geor-
gievits’ success lay not in the reliability, originality or the quality of the
 Earliest printed books on Turkey 27
information contained in his books but in his publishers’, editors’, and
translators’ ability to tailor the contents, style, and tone of his pamphlets
to the taste and interests of the intended readership in each iteration.
On the Customs and Religious Ceremonies of the Turks first appeared in
1544 with the imprint of Goris de Bonte, a printer of devotional works,
who later abandoned ­book-​­selling to become a priest and chaplain.20 The
iconography of this ­three-​­sheet small octavo firmly places it in the do-
main of popular pious literature: the book opens with a winged angel
holding a shield carrying the initials of the author’s name and epithet,
B[arptolomaeus] G[eorgievits] P[eregrinus] H[ierosolymitanus]. The an-
gel stands above a pedestal on which is written: ‘­The whole law is this:
depart from evil and do good’, quoting a psalm in Greek and Latin.21 The
pamphlet closes with another woodcut depicting the author kneeling in
front of an icon of Jesus on the Cross, presumably in Jerusalem, wearing
a pilgrim’s cloak; above to the left is an angel holding a plate with the
inscription ‘­The God of Israel did lead him, and there was no strange god
with him.’22 A banner floats around the pilgrim reading ‘­thou hast loosed
my bonds / I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving’ in Latin.23
There are no other images in this edition.
The treatise is preceded by a dedicatory letter to Louis de Praet, the
stadholder (­lieutenant governor) of Holland, Zealand and Utrecht be-
tween 1544 and 1547. Georgievits does not explain why a book on the
Turks would appeal to this patron in the dedicatory epistle he penned in
Leuven on 1 January 1544.
In the same year, Georgievits published another short pamphlet enti-
tled On the Suffering of the Prisoners and Christians Living under Turkish
Rule.24 It is a dramatic and touching ­first-​­person account of his enslave-
ment under several Ottoman masters and his determination to keep his
Christian faith, coupled with a critique of the poll tax (­cizye) levied on the
Christian and Jewish subjects of the Empire.
The year 1545 saw the printing of Exhortation against the Turks
(­Exhortatio contra turcas), an ­eight-​­page propaganda text addressed to
Prince Maximilian, Archduke of Austria. In his Exhortation, Georgiev-
its complains that the superior and b ­ etter-​­armed Christians are still de-
feated by the ‘­ignorant’ and ‘­stupid’ Muslims. The pamphlet is full of
hateful rhetoric which aims to stir European readers into action:

I now ask this: what peoples would lead the Scythians and Thra-
cians into battle, who lack Italian ­k now-​­how and Spanish cunning?
Instead, they somehow are like wild beasts, barbarians, totally mind-
less and ignorant, uneducated and stupid. They are joined by lazy
and useless Greeks, ­self-​­indulgent and extremely depraved Asians,
Egyptians who are equally effeminate in mind and body, and dried
up, shrivelled, and bloodless Arabs.25
28 Earliest printed books on Turkey

­Figure 2b W
 oodcut depicting a winged angel holding a shield with Bartholomew
Georgievits’ initials, from his On the Customs and Religious Ceremo-
nies of the Turks.
 Earliest printed books on Turkey 29

­Figure 2c W
 oodcut depicting Georgievits as a pilgrim, from his On the Customs
and Religious Ceremonies of the Turks.
30 Earliest printed books on Turkey
Here, Georgievits is commenting on the racial inferiority of the groups
that formed the ethnic makeup of Ottoman armies. Soon after, he pub-
lished a prophecy in Turkish with a Latin translation and a long expla-
nation of its meaning and significance under the title Prognostication or
Foretelling of the Muslims, first about the defeat of the Christians, then the
destruction of their own people, translated from Persian into Latin.26 This
pamphlet aimed to give hope to Christian readers that the end of the
Ottomans was nigh. Although Georgievits’ title describes the prophecy
as ‘­Persian’, the text supplied in the book is in Turkish. We will return
to this text, its circulation, and the vogue for end of the world narratives
among Ottoman and European readers.
As Georgievits’ writing proved popular and his editions lucrative, they
came to be more cheaply produced. The 1545 Paris edition of On the
Customs and Religious Ceremonies of the Turks was a p ­ ocket-​­sized sexto-
decimo, a book format produced by folding a single sheet of paper four
times to make 16 leaves or 32 pages.27 In 1552, all four pamphlets were
published together in Rome in octavo format with added imagery in the
form of two crude woodcuts depicting various scenes from the narrative.
The following year, the Lyon printer Jean de Tournes appropriated the
collected works of Georgievits and issued them in the tiny sextodecimo
format under the title An Abridged Account of the Manners of the Turks
(­De turcarum moribus epitome).28 Six new woodcuts, five of which depict
scenes of violence inflicted by Muslims, were included in the Lyon edi-
tion. The cruelty grows in intensity in each scene: first, Muslims take ab-
lutions, then, a baby boy is circumcised, and next, a lamb is slaughtered
in front of a dozen onlookers in turbans. A little later, we find prisoners
of war in chains taken away by an Ottoman soldier while victims are left
on the ground to be picked on by vultures. Then, the captives are forced
into agricultural labour. Finally, fugitives and apostates are tortured to
death. Adding visual imagery to the text came at a cost, but the woodcuts
certainly delivered the desired impact. These six blocks were recycled
many times for further reprints between 1555 and 1629.
The collected works published by the Protestant printer De Tournes
feature an alternative dedication to the most scandalous senior figure
in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Innocenzo del Monte. In this dedica-
tory letter allegedly written in Rome on 13 September 1552, Georgiev-
its recounts his lucky escape from captivity in Asia Minor to Jerusalem
through the Syrian desert and how he found refuge at the convent of
Franciscan brothers there. The addressee, Innocenzo, came from hum-
ble beginnings, yet he was made a cardinal at the age of seventeen by his
adoptive uncle Pope Julius III. When the allegations of nepotism became
too strident, and the criticism that Innocenzo lacked the qualifications
necessary for such high office hit home, the Pope arranged for his pri-
vate tuition by the humanist scholar and poet Onorato Fascitelli. Despite
all these efforts to educate him, Cardinal Innocenzo remained virtually
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
approved of by us unconditionally. In the actual execution of such a
series of acts many of the stages are habitual reactions which, as
such, are not accompanied by the “idea” of their specific result as a
determining condition of their occurrence. The sphere of moral
freedom is arbitrarily restricted when it is assumed that an actual
volition is indispensable for every stage of the “free” action.
207. The reader should study for himself Locke’s famous chapter
(Essay, bk. ii. chap. 21). Locke’s treatment, hampered as it is by his
unfortunate retention of the discussion of his first edition side by side
with a somewhat modified re-statement, compares favourably for
clearness and sound sense with that of most subsequent
philosophers, notably with Kant’s unintelligible attempt to reconcile
the absolute freedom of man as “noumenon” (a fictitious quality of a
fictitious being) with his equally absolute unfreedom as
“phenomenon” (another equally palpable fiction).
For Leibnitz’s criticism of Locke, see Nouveaux Essais, II. xxi.,
particularly §§ 8-25. (The English translation by Langley can only be
used with extreme caution.) On the whole question the reader should
also consult Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, bk. ii chap. 1; Bradley,
Ethical Studies, Essay 1, and article in Mind for July 1902; W. R. B.
Gibson, “The Problem of Freedom” (in Personal Idealism).
208. Then, are “animals” free? I see no reason to deny that, since
their life, in as its degree, must have teleological continuity to be a
life at all, they too must possess a rudimentary degree of freedom,
though a degree not sufficient to fit them for a place as ἴσοι καὶ
ὄμοιοι in human society, and therefore, for the special purposes of
human ethical systems, negligible. Similarly, a human imbecile may
possess a degree of freedom which is important for the educator
who is interested in the “care of the feeble minded,” and yet may
rightly be treated for the different purposes of a penal code as simply
unfree.
209. Compare with what follows, Bradley, Ethical Studies, Essay
1, and the notes appended to it. For a typical statement of the
determinist case in its more sober form, see Mill, System of Logic,
bk. vi. chap. 2. It is harder to find a reasonable statement of the
opposite view, as most capable moral philosophers have adopted
the doctrine of self-determination. For a defence of thoroughgoing
Indeterminism, see James, The Will to Believe (Essay on The
Dilemma of Determinism). In Professor Sidgwick’s statement of the
indeterminist view (see, e.g., his posthumous lecture on T. H.
Green’s doctrine of freedom in Lectures on the Ethics of Green,
Spencer, and Martineau, pp. 15-28), Indeterminism seems to me to
be qualified to the point of being in principle surrendered.
210. See the admirable discussion of this experience in Dr. Stout’s
Manual of Psychology,3 bk. iv. chap. 10, § 7.
 CHAPTER V

SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF

ETHICS
AND RELIGION
§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision for the
gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic interests. § 2. But we cannot
assume that ethical and religious postulates are necessarily true in the forms
in which our practical interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while morality
would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence between
virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a genuine fact, “perfect
virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite progress” are logically self-contradictory
concepts. § 4. But this does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical
ideals. § 5. In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already
existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the temporal order can
be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6. This leads to the Problem of
Evil. “God” cannot be a finite being within the Absolute, because, if so, God
must contain evil and imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus not the
already existing realisation of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears when we
identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute evil can be seen to
be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be true that religious feeling, to
be practically efficient, may need to imagine its object in an ultimately
incorrect anthropomorphic form. § 8. The existence, within the Absolute, of
finite “divine” personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of
general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The principle of the
“ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be defended against the criticism
of Hume and Kant only if we identify God with the Absolute. The
“physicotheological proof” could only establish the reality of finite superhuman
intelligences, and its force depends purely upon empirical considerations of
evidence.

§ 1. The metaphysician is perhaps at times too ready to treat

experience as though it were constituted solely by intellectual
interests; as though our one concern in dealing with its deliverances,
as they come to us, were to construct out of them a system of
knowledge satisfactory to our demand for coherent thinking. This is,
of course, a one-sided, and therefore, from the standpoint of
Metaphysics itself, an imperfect expression of the nature of our
attitude as intelligences towards the world of our experience. Our
moral, religious, and artistic, no less than our logical, ideals
represent typical forms of our general interest as intelligent beings in
bringing harmony and order into the apparently discordant material
of experience. Hence no study of metaphysical principles, however
elementary, would be complete without some discussion of the light
thrown by these various ideals upon the ultimate structure of the
system of Reality in which we and our manifold interests form a part.
If it is the fundamental principle of a sound philosophy that all
existence forms a harmonious unity, then, if we can discover what
are the essential and permanent features in the demands made by
art, morality, and religion upon the world, we may be sure that these
demands are somehow met and made good in the scheme of things.
For a world which met our ethical, religious, and aesthetic
demands upon life with a mere negative would inevitably contain
aspects of violent and irreconcilable discord, and would thus be no
true world or systematic unity at all. In what follows I propose to
discuss the double question, What appears to be the “irreducible
minimum” of the demands which morality and religion make of the
world, and how far the general conception of existence defended in
our earlier chapters provides for their liquidation. The consideration
of our aesthetic ideals and their metaphysical significance I propose
to decline, on the ground both of its inferior practical interest for
mankind at large, and of the very special and thorough training in the
psychological analysis of æsthetic feeling which is, in my own
judgment at least, essential for the satisfactory treatment of the
question.
§ 2. In dealing with the subject thus marked out, it will be
necessary to begin with a word, partly of caution, partly of
recapitulation of previous results, as to the attitude towards the
practical ideals of morality and religion imposed upon the
metaphysician by the special character of his interests as a
metaphysician. It will thus be apparent why I have spoken in the last
paragraph of an “irreducible minimum” of ethical and religious
postulation. There is a marked tendency among recent writers on
philosophical topics, encouraged more specially by Professor James
and his followers, to urge that any and every ideal which we think
valuable for the purposes of morality and religion has no less claim
to be accepted in Metaphysics as of value for our conception of
Reality than the fundamental principles of logical thought
themselves. Logical thinking, it is contended, is after all only one of
the functions of our nature, by the side of others such as moral
endeavour towards the harmonising of practice with an ideal of the
right or the good, aesthetic creation of the beautiful, and religious co-
operation with a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.”
Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is
more specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect
than those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the
“creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the
logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the
same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or
the artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more
than “postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it
satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? Must we not, in fact,
say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art,
“Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are
made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to
advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk,
no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates
of the others”?
The doctrine I have attempted to summarise thus briefly, I believe
to be partly irrelevant in Metaphysics, partly mistaken, and therefore,
so far as mistaken, mischievous. I pass lightly over the curious
mental reservation suggested by the claim to believe as you list “at
your own risk.” As George Eliot has reminded us in Adam Bede, it is
a fundamental fact of our position as members of a social order, that
nothing in the world can be done exclusively at the risk of the doer.
Your beliefs, so far as they receive expression at all, like all the rest
of your conduct, inevitably affect the lives of others as well as your
own, and hence it is useless to urge in extenuation of a false and
mischievous belief to which expression has been given—and a belief
which gets no kind of expression is no genuine belief at all—that it
was entertained at your “personal risk.” That no man liveth to himself
is just as true of the metaphysician as of any other man, and he has
no more claim than another to disregard the truth in practice.
To pass to a more important point. It is no doubt true that the
attainment of satisfaction for our intellectual need for a coherent way
of thinking about existence is only one of a number of human
interests. And thus we may readily grant that morality, religion, and
art have a right to existence no less than Logic. Further, the question
whether any one of the four has a better right to existence than the
others seems to be really unmeaning. There seems to be no sense
in asking whether any typical and essential human aspiration has a
superior claim to recognition and fulfilment rather than another. But it
does not seem to follow that for all purposes our divergent interests
and attitudes are of equal value, and that therefore they may not
legitimately be used as bases for mutual criticism. In particular, it
does not seem to follow that because Logic and morality, say, have
an equal right to exist, there must be an equal amount of truth in the
principles of Logic and the postulates of Ethics. Truth, after all, is
perhaps not the “one thing needful” for human life, and it is not self-
evident even that truth is the supreme interest of morality and
religion.
On the face of things, indeed, it seems not to be so. Primâ facie, it
looks as if the logician’s ideal of truth and the moralist’s ideal of
goodness were, in part at any rate, divergent. For it is by no means
clear that the widest possible diffusion of true thinking and the
general attainment of the highest standard of moral goodness must
necessarily go together. It may even be conducive to the moral
goodness of a community that many members of it should not think
on certain topics at all, or even should think erroneously about them.
[211]
And the ideals of goodness and beauty, we may remind
ourselves, seem to be similarly divergent. It is by no means self-
evident, and might even be said to be, so far as history enables us to
judge, probably untrue, that the society in which the appreciation of
beauty is most highly developed is also the society with the highest
standard of goodness.
Now, if truth and goodness are not simply identical, we cannot
conclude that the ultimate truth of a belief is proportionate to its
moral usefulness in promoting practical goodness. And therefore the
metaphysician, who takes ultimate truth as his standard of worth,
would appear to be quite within his right in refusing to admit moral
usefulness as sufficient justification for a belief, just as the moralist,
from the point of view of his special standard of worth, may rightly
decline to take the aesthetic harmoniousness of a life as sufficient
evidence of its moral excellence. Until you have shown, what the
view I am here opposing appears tacitly to assume, that truth, moral
goodness, and beauty are one thing, you cannot rationally refuse the
metaphysician’s claim to criticise, and if necessary to condemn as
not finally true, the “postulates” of which Ethics is entitled to assent,
not that they are “true,” but that they are practically useful.
And, of course, the same liberty must be granted to Ethics itself.
The moralist, I would not only admit but insist, has a perfect right to
criticise, from his special standpoint, the doctrines of the
metaphysician. It may perfectly well be that certain “truths” are better
not generally known, in the interests of practical goodness, and the
moralist is fully justified in dwelling upon the fact. But when the
metaphysician asserts the truth of a proposition solely on the
strength of its value for the promotion of morality, he is deserting the
criterion of value which he is bound in his capacity of metaphysician
to respect. It is quite true that logic is not the only game at which it
interests mankind to play, and that no one need play this special
game unless he prefers it; but when you have once sat down to the
game you must play it according to its own rules, and not those of
some other. If you neglect this caution, you will most likely produce
something which is neither good Metaphysics nor sound Ethics.
There is every reason for Metaphysics to beware of a “will to believe”
which in practice must mean that licence to indulge in uncriticised
assertion which Socrates in the Phædo calls by the appropriate
name of “misology,” and identifies as the psychological source of the
worst forms of practical “disillusionment with life.”[212]
It follows, if these reflections are sound, that we must not, as
metaphysicians, allow ourselves to assume the truth of any and
every conviction about the nature of the world which we find
personally inspiring and attractive, or even which we believe to have
an invigorating effect upon the moral practice of mankind in general.
We cannot, on a priori grounds, dismiss the suggestion that it may
make for practical goodness that all of us to some extent, and many
of us to a very great extent, should be dwellers in the imperfectly
illuminated regions on the “mid way boundary of light and dark.”[213]
On the other hand, it would manifestly be incompatible with the
presence of any rational unity of structure in the experience-world
that there should be a final and absolute lack of harmony between
that world, as it must be conceived by true thinking, and as it must
be if our ethical aspirations are to be satisfied. Somehow and
somewhere, if the world is a teleological unity at all, these
aspirations must be provided for and made good by its real structure,
though possibly not in the form in which, with our present limited
insight, we desire that they should be met, and though, again, we
may be unable ever to say precisely in what form they are met. What
is simply inconceivable in a rational world is that our abiding
aspirations should meet with blank defeat.
§ 3. What, then, appears to be the “indispensable minimum” of
accord between known truth and our “ethical postulates,” without
which the moral life itself would become irrational? On the whole, I
think we may say that morality cannot maintain itself except upon
two suppositions—(1) that in the main and on the whole the world is
so ordered that our moral struggle for fuller and stronger individuality
of life is successful; that by living the moral life our individual
character does become richer in coherent interest and more
completely unified; and (2) that the gain thus won by our private
struggles does not perish with our disappearance from this mortal
scene, but is handed on to the successors who replace us in the life
of the social order to which we belong. Speaking roughly, this means
that unless morality is a delusion, the moral life is, on the whole, the
happy life, and that there is such a thing as social progress. Now,
both these conditions, I would contend, are shown by the actual
experience of mankind to be met by the constitution of the real world.
It was by the analysis of actual social life, and not by an appeal to
postulates of a transcendental kind, that Plato and Aristotle showed
that the good man is, in the main, even in the present state of
society, the “happy” man. And it is by a similar analysis that the
modern thinker must convince himself, if he convinces himself at all,
that human societies are progressive.
 So far, then, no question of ultimate metaphysical issues seems to
be involved in the practical demand of the moral life. The case
would, of course, be different if we were with Kant to regard it as a
necessary demand of Ethics that the world shall be so constituted
that, in the end, and for every individual agent, happiness shall be
exactly proportioned to virtue. Still more so if we went on to assert
that morality is a delusion unless every individual is predestined, by
the nature of things, to the ultimate attainment of complete virtue and
complete happiness. Views of this kind would manifestly have to be
defended by an appeal to metaphysical principles which do not find
their complete justification in the empirically known structure of
human society. So too the demand that human society itself shall be
progressive beyond all limits, cannot be shown to be justified by
what is empirically known of the structure and the non-human
environment of our society. And if Ethics really does postulate either
the complete coincidence of virtue with happiness for the individual,
or the infinite progress of society, it is clearly committed to the
postulation of very far-reaching metaphysical doctrines.
Further, it must be frankly owned that these postulates, as they
stand, are inconsistent with the scheme of metaphysical doctrine
expounded and defended in the present work. For both moral
goodness and moral progress are bound up with finite individuality
and its characteristic form of existence, the time-process. Of
“progress” this is manifest: all progress is advance in time, and is
advance from a relatively worse to a relatively better. And with
“virtue” it stands no otherwise. For to be virtuous is not simply to
have an individuality which is at once harmonious and rich in
contents, but to make such an individuality for ourselves out of the
raw material of disposition and environment. Only in the progress
towards fuller individuality are we moral agents, and, just because
we are finite, the complete attainment of an absolutely harmonious
individuality is for ever beyond us. Hence absolutely perfect virtue—
and consequently absolutely perfect happiness—are incompatible
with our nature as genuine but finite individuals. In all finite
individuality there is inevitably some aspect of imperfection and
consequently of sadness, though sin and sadness ought to fill, and
can be empirically seen to fill, an increasingly subordinate place in
proportion to the degree of individuality attained. The same
reasoning is equally applicable to the case of any finite society.
Nor does this seem any ground for regarding the constitution of
the universe as ethically unsatisfactory. To repeat the previously
quoted remark of Mr. Bradley, no one has a right to call the universe
morally unsatisfactory on the ground that it does not precisely
apportion happiness to virtue, unless he is prepared to show that
more goodness would be produced by making the correspondence
exact, and to show this is impossible. Still more absurd would it be to
censure the universe because neither perfect virtue nor perfect
happiness is attainable. For morality itself has no existence except
as the creation of finite individuals, and hence we cannot without
absurdity censure the universe on moral grounds for containing finite
individuals, and so providing for the existence of morality.
§ 4. Would the case be altered if we had, or thought we had,
grounds for holding that the progress of human society has fixed and
knowable bounds set to it by the nature of things? If we could know,
for instance, that the physical environment of humanity is so
constituted that human life must ultimately disappear from the earth?
I cannot see that it would. No doubt the widespread acceptance of a
belief that the end of things was at hand within a calculable period,
might tend to lessen our moral earnestness, and if the period were
taken to be sufficiently short, might lead to downright licence and
wickedness. But so does a belief in the approaching dissolution of
any historic and wide-reaching social order; and yet the fact that
societies suffer dissolution is not commonly regarded as reasonable
ground for an indictment against the universe. Nor is there any
logical connection between such beliefs and their consequences. We
cannot say that because human society is perishable, if it is
perishable, its achievements must have been wasted and therefore
its progress useless. The result of our achievements might, in some
way unknown to us, survive our extinction as a race, even as we can
partly see that the results of the individual life are preserved after our
death.
And, in any case, it is beyond the power of Metaphysics to set any
fixed limits to the existence and progress of human society. As we
have seen, Metaphysics gives us no reason to deny, though it does
not enable us to affirm, that the social life begun under present
conditions may be continued under unknown conditions beyond the
grave. And even the disappearance of physical human life within a
calculable period cannot be shown to follow from any principle of
Metaphysics. At most we can say that if certain assumed physical
laws, especially that of the dissipation of energy, are valid for all
physical processes, and if again, the psychical factor in living
organisms is incapable of reversing the “down-grade” tendency of
energy to pass into forms unavailable for work, then the human
society we know must come to an end within a calculable time. But
whether the assumptions upon which this conclusion is based are or
are not true, Metaphysics by itself cannot determine.
We are thus left in the following position. That on the whole the
virtuous life is also the happy life, and that there is genuine social
progress,[214] seem to be empirically known certainties. “Absolute
perfection” of the finite as finite, and “infinite progress” seem alike
excluded as metaphysical impossibilities. But no definite limits can
be set by Metaphysics to the possibilities of individual and social
advance towards greater virtue and greater happiness. As for the
theories in Physics which appear to threaten humanity with extinction
within a measurable time, their truth is, to say the least of it, not
assured, and we have, in our metaphysical conception of Reality as
an individual whole, the certainty that, whatever becomes of the
human species, nothing of all our aspirations and achievements can
be finally lost to the universe, though we may be quite unable to
imagine the manner of their preservation. And for the purposes of
the moral struggle from a worse to a better, this seems to be quite as
much conformity to our aspirations as we need ask of the world. For
the suggestion that our ideals are not worth living for unless we
enjoy the fruit of our labours in the form we in particular should like,
seems nothing better than an appeal to the baser Egoism.
§ 5. When we consider the specially religious attitude of mind, we
shall find that its demands upon the world go further than those of
mere Ethics, and are, in part, of a rather different character. It would
be impossible in a work like this to discuss at length the nature of the
religious attitude, but this much at least would probably be admitted
as beyond doubt. The religious attitude towards the world of
experience is distinguished from all others partly by the specific
character of the emotions in which it finds its expression, partly by
the intellectual beliefs to which those emotions give rise. Specifically
religious emotion, as we can detect it both in our own experience, if
we happen to possess the religious “temperament”,[215] and in the
devotional literature of the world, appears to be essentially a mingled
condition of exaltation and humility arising from an immediate sense
of communion and co-operation with a power greater and better than
ourselves in which our ideals of good find completer realisation than
they ever obtain in the empirically known time-order. In the various
religious creeds of the world we have a number of attempts to
express the nature of such a power and of our relation to it in more
or less logically satisfactory conceptual terms. But it is important to
remember that, though a theological belief when sincerely held may
react powerfully upon religious feeling, the beliefs are in the last
resort based upon immediate feeling, and not immediate feeling
upon beliefs. In this sense, at any rate, it is true that all genuine
religious life implies the practical influencing of feeling and action by
convictions which go beyond proved and known truth, and may
therefore be said to be matters of faith.
What the convictions to which we thus surrender the practical
guidance of life are, in any individual case, seems to be largely a
question of individual constitution and social tradition. Not only are
the convictions as to the nature of the higher power represented by
the great typical historical religions very various, but what we may
call the individual religion of different persons exhibits even greater
variety. There is hardly any important object of human interest which
may not acquire for some man the significance which belongs to the
completed realisation of his highest ideals. It is no more than the
truth to say that a mother, a mistress, a country, or a movement,
social or political, may be, as we often phrase it, a man’s “religion.”
Amid all this variety two general principles may be detected which
are of primary importance to the metaphysical critic of religious
experience. (1) It is essential to the religious experience that its
object should be accepted as the really existing embodiment of an
ideal. This is the point in which the religious attitude of mind differs
most strikingly from that of mere morality. In the ethical experience
the ideal is apprehended as something which does not yet exist, but
has to be brought into existence by human exertion. Hence for the
purely ethical attitude of mind the world has to be thought of as
essentially imperfect, essentially out of accord with what it ought to
be in order to correspond to our demands on it. Thus there is not for
morality, as we shall directly see there must be for religion, such a
thing as the “Problem of Evil.” That the world, as it comes to us in the
temporal order, contains imperfection and evil which must be done
away with, is a practical presupposition without which morality itself
would have no raison d’être.
But in religion the case is otherwise. It is only in so far as the
object of our adoration, whatever it may be, is taken to be the really
existing embodiment of our highest ideals, that it can produce, in our
spiritual communion with it, that combined emotion of exaltation and
abasement, that feeling of being at once ourselves already perfect
so far as our will is one in its contact with our ideal, and absolutely
condemned and “subject to wrath” so far as it is not, which
distinguishes the religious from all other states of mind. But all real
existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual.
Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as
already existing in individual form. This is why devotion to an
abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy,
humanity, proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of
religious life, to devotion to a person, however imperfect.[216]
(2) It follows that mere appearance in the time-order cannot be the
ultimate object of religious devotion. For the time-order itself, as we
have seen, is essentially unfinished and incomplete, and no part of it,
therefore, can be perfectly individual. The completely individual, if it
exists at all, must have an existence which is not temporal. Hence no
part of the temporal order of events, as such, can be finally
satisfactory as an object of religious adoration. So far as it is
possible to succeed in worshipping anything which forms part of that
order, such as a man or a cause, this can only be done by regarding
the temporal facts as an imperfect appearance of a reality which,
because completely and perfectly individual, is in its true nature
timeless. And it further follows that, since all finite individuality is, as
we have already seen, only imperfectly individual, and because
imperfect is temporal, the only finally adequate object of religious
devotion must be the infinite individual or timeless Absolute itself.
That the great philosophical religions of the world have felt the
force of this, is shown in history by the way in which they have
inevitably tended to credit their various “gods” with omnipotence.
Thus the god of the Hebrew religion, as at first presented to us in its
earlier records, is represented as limited in power by the existence of
other divine beings, and temporally changeable and mutable. But in
the later Old Testament writings, the New Testament, and the
subsequent constructions of ecclesiastical theology, we see the
gradual development from these Hebrew beginnings of an idea of a
God who is “all in all,” and limited neither by the existence of other
divine beings with opposing aims and interests, nor by the inherent
resistance of “matter,” to His purposes. So the Zoroastrian religion, in
which the limitation of the power of the good being Ahura Mazda by
the existence of a co-ordinate bad being, Angro Mainyus, was
originally a fundamental tenet, is said to have become among the
modern Parsis a pure monotheism.
§ 6. Now, it should be noted that this inevitable tendency of
Religion itself to identify its object with ultimate Reality, conceived in
its timeless perfection as a complete and infinite individual whole,
leads to the difficult metaphysical “problem of evil.” For if God is the
same thing as the Absolute, it would appear that evil itself must be,
like everything else, a manifestation of His nature. And if so, can we
say that God is strictly speaking “good,” or is the complete realisation
of our ideals? It is this difficulty about evil, more than anything else,
which has led many philosophers in both ancient and modern times
to distinguish between the Absolute and God, and to regard God as
simply one, though the highest and most perfect, among the finite
individuals contained in the Absolute.[217] In the following paragraphs
I propose not so much to offer a solution of this time-honoured
puzzle, as to make some suggestions which may help to put the
issue at stake clearly before the reader’s mind.
The doctrine of the finitude of God does not appear in any way to
remove the difficulty about evil; in fact, it renders it, if anything, more
acute. For evil must now appear in the universe in a double form. On
the one hand, it admittedly is taken to exist outside God, as a hostile
factor limiting His power of shaping the world to His purpose. But
again, as we have seen, every finite individual, because finite, falls
short of complete internal harmony of structure, and thus contains an
element of defect and evil within itself. Thus evil will be inherent in
the nature of a finite God, as well as in that of the existence
supposed to be outside Him. We have, in fact, one more illustration
of the principle that all limitation involves self-limitation from within. It
is only by forgetting this fundamental truth that we can conceive the
possibility of a being who is “perfectly good” and yet is less than the
Absolute.
And even when we overlook this, our difficulties are not removed.
For a “finite” God with a further reality outside and in some way
opposed to His own nature, even when illogically thought of as
perfectly good, must be at best only such another being as
ourselves, though on a larger scale. He, like us, must be simply a
partly successful, partly unsuccessful, actor in a universe of which
the constitution and ultimate upshot are either unknown or known not
to satisfy our religious demand for the complete individual reality of
our ideal.[218] This is the view which has in history been actually
adopted by religions like those of the Hellenes and the Norsemen, in
which the gods are regarded as ultimately subject to an inscrutable
and unethical Fate. But a finite being struggling, however
successfully, against such an alien Fate is, after all, a fit object only
for moral respect and sympathy, not for religious adoration. Such a
being, however exalted, is still not that complete and harmonious
individual realisation of all human aspiration for which Religion
yearns, and is therefore not, in the full and true sense, God.
If, then, a finite ethical individual, however exalted, cannot be an
adequate object of religious devotion, how does the case stand with
the infinite individual whole of Reality? Can we worship the
Absolute?[219] This is a question which needs some careful
examination before we can venture on a positive answer.
§ 7. The problem, let it be observed, is not strictly psychological.
Experience shows that individual men can derive religious support
from belief in the most varied and most defective conceptions of the
nature of the Deity. Beliefs which bring one man “peace in believing”
might, if seriously entertained, blight another man’s life; one man’s
God may be another’s devil. This is, however, not the point. The real
question is, whether the Absolute can be made into an object of
religious worship, as we have seen that finite individuals cannot,
without a breach of logic. Has it the character which, as we have
seen, anything which is to correspond to our ideal of “God” must
logically possess?
At first sight it certainly would seem that it has. For, as we have
seen, the Absolute contains all finite existence, and contains it as a
perfectly harmonious system. And therefore all finite aspiration must
somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though
not necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited
knowledge and goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The
Absolute whole is thus, as nothing else can be, the concrete
individual reality in which our ideals have actual existence. As all our
ideals themselves are but so many expressions of our place in the
system and our relation to the rest of it, so the system itself is their
concrete harmonious embodiment.
It is true, as we have already seen, that our ideals may not be
realised in the whole just in the form in which we conceive them, but
it must be remembered that in so far as we set up our private
judgment and wishes as standards to which the whole is bound to
conform on pain of condemnation, we are adopting an attitude which
is at once illogical and irreligious. It is illogical, because it implies the
assumption that with fuller knowledge of the system of Reality as a
whole we should still desire the fulfilment of our aspirations in the
special way which at present recommends itself to our imperfect
insight. It is irreligious, because the demand that human desires
shall be fulfilled in our way and not in “God’s way” involves the
setting up of human wisdom against God’s, and is thus irreconcilable
with genuine union of heart and will with the divine order.[220]
What then becomes, from this point of view, of the problem of evil?
How can the presence of moral evil in the temporal order be
reconciled with the thought of the Absolute whole as the complete
and harmonious realisation of human ideals? I need not say that the
detailed solution of the problem is out of the question. As beings
whose insight is necessarily limited by our own finitude, we cannot
hope to see how in detail everything that appears to us as evil might,
with larger knowledge, be known as an integral constituent of a
whole which, as a whole, is the realisation of human aspiration, and
therefore free from evil. But it is at least possible to make
suggestions which may show that the problem is a mere
consequence of the inevitable defects of our insight, and that it
would disappear with fuller knowledge. It is not hard to see that there
are two main reasons why the structure of the universe seems to
finite insight partly evil. Our insight into the nature and connection of
our purposes themselves is never complete; we are all, in part,
ignorant of exactly what it is to which we aspire. Hence our purposes
in part appear to be met by existence with a negative just because
we are only imperfectly aware of what they mean and whither they
tend. There is no more familiar fact than this, that even within the
limits of our human life growing experience is constantly teaching us
how confused and defective our judgment at any moment as to what
we really want, can be. Largely, then, our ideals seem to be at
variance with actual existence, because we never fully know what
they are.
Again, our knowledge of the effects of our acts is always imperfect
in the extreme. We seem to fail because we cannot see far enough
to understand fully what it is we have effected. And both these
causes of the apparent discrepancy between the real and the ideal
may be traced to a single root. Existence appears to be in part evil,
because we cannot take it in at once and as a whole in its individual
structure. We have to make acquaintance with it by piecemeal, and
as a succession of fragmentary events in the time-series. And
imperfection, we have seen, belongs to the time-series. Hence we
can see that evil is at once a mere appearance, and an appearance
which is inevitable to the finite experience conditioned by the
temporal form. The so-called “problem” is thus in principle insoluble
only so long as we falsely think of the time-order itself as a
characteristic of the Absolute whole in its real individuality.[221]
May we say, then, that the Absolute or whole is known in
Metaphysics to be “good”? The answer depends upon the precise
meaning we attach to the statement. In the sense that it is the really
existing embodiment of the ideals we are trying amid our ignorance
and confusion to realise, we clearly must say “yes.” But if we use the
word “good” in a narrower sense, to mean “ethically good,” we can
hardly say without qualification that the whole is good. For “ethical
goodness” belongs essentially to the time-order, and means the
process of the gradual assertion of the ideal against apparent evil. To
be morally good is to have an ideal that is not realised in the events
of the time-order as they come to us in our finite experience, and to
mould those events into conformity with the ideal. The moral life is
from first to last a struggle, and where the struggle is absent it is
misleading to speak of morality. Hence it is better not to call the
Absolute “moral.”
But we must remember that the Absolute is only not moral,
because it is something very much more than moral, only not ethical
because there is in it no divorce of ideal from actuality, as there is in
the imperfect experience of its finite members. Or, as we might say, it
is something more than “good” precisely because it is already good.
In morality, let it be remembered, we have, as in all the experience of
finite beings, a process which is throughout directed upon a result
that, once attained, would transcend the process itself. Morality
would not be content with anything less than the total abolition of the
evil in the world; and with the disappearance of evil, the struggle
against it would itself disappear in some higher form of experience.
Similarly, knowledge is constantly striving to exhaust the object of
knowledge. So long as the object is in any respect unknown, the task
of knowing is incomplete; yet if once we could so know any object
that nothing further remained to be known about it, there would be
no aspect of not-self in the object which could distinguish it from the
subject by which it is known, and knowledge itself would thus be
done away. Thus we may see from the side alike of cognition and of
will how the whole life of the finite being forms a constant endeavour
to widen experience into the complete apprehension of a content
which, because infinite, could not be apprehended without the
disappearance of finitude itself. Thus does experience witness to the
truth of our fundamental doctrine, that the finite individual repeats in
itself, in an imperfect and inadequate form, the structure of the
infinite individual of which it is an appearance.
I do not know whether it is necessary to say more than a word with
reference to the thoughtless objection so often urged against all
philosophical and religious doctrines which deny the ultimate reality
of evil, or, what is the same thing, the existence of an independent
devil. If existence is already perfect, it is said, why should we seek to
make it better at great trouble and inconvenience to ourselves by
moral and political endeavour? Ought we not rather to sit with folded
hands acquiescing lazily in “things as they are”? The doubt might
even be carried further than this. For to “take things as they are” is
just as much a course of self-chosen action as any other line of
conduct, and it might hence be argued that abstention and moral
effort are alike out of place and absurd in a world where everything is
“perfect.”
The objection, of course, turns upon a mere confusion of existence
as it is in its individual reality, and existence as it appears to us in the
time-series. The argument for Quietism is based purely upon
attributing to the essentially imperfect and incomplete series of
temporal events the perfection which only belongs to the timeless
whole. In that perfect whole our moral ideals and moral effort, as
finite beings belonging to the temporal order, are of course included
along with everything else, and its perfection is therefore no ground
for treating them as nugatory. Our own moral struggle with the
apparent evil of the time-series is itself an integral part of the Reality
which, in its complete individual character, is already perfect, if we
could but win to a point of view from which to behold it as it is. As
Plotinus expresses it, “our striving is after good and our turning away
is from evil, and thought with a purpose is of good and evil, and this
is a good.”[222]
If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good,
and certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still
less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” For the
Absolute is only not ethical because it is already all that ethical life
consists in striving to become. Hence the higher a finite being stands
in the ethical scale, as judged by the double criterion of the wealth of
its interests in the world and the degree of harmony between them,
the more adequately does its structure repeat that of the whole, and
the higher is its degree of reality. And this means that the good
man’s ideals are realised in the world-order with less of modification
and reconstruction than the bad man’s. In a sense, as Professor
Royce maintains, even the bad man’s confused and warring ideals
get their fulfilment, since he too is aiming, however blindly, at a
complete individuality as the goal of all his striving. But he is seeking
it where it is not to be found, in the gratification of desires which
cannot be allowed the supreme place in the direction of life without
leading to the distraction and mutilation of the self. As Plato puts it,
the bad man “does as he pleases,” and for that very reason never
“does what he wills.” Hence the place of the good man in the
economy of the universe is very different from that of the bad, and
the world-order itself is the very reverse of “indifferent” to the
distinction between them.[223]
My own conclusion, then, which I offer to the reader simply as my
own, is that anything less than the Absolute is an inadequate object
of religious devotion, and that the Absolute itself has the structure
which such an object requires. If it should be further suggested that
at any rate, when we come to actual experience, we find that we
cannot represent the object of our worship to ourselves in an
individual form of sufficient concreteness to stir effectual emotion and
prompt to genuine action without clothing it in imagination with
anthropomorphic qualities which metaphysical criticism proves
inapplicable to the infinite individual, I should be inclined to reply that
I admit the fact. And I do not think we need shrink from the
conclusion that practical religion involves a certain element of
intellectual contradiction. Thus, though God is not truly God until we
deny the existence of any independent “evil” by which His nature is
limited, it seems probable that the thought of ourselves as “fellow-
workers with God” would hardly lead to practical good works unless
we also inconsistently allowed ourselves to imagine God as
struggling against a hostile power and standing in need of our
assistance. But this only shows that the practical value of religion in
guiding action is not necessarily dependent upon its scientific truth.
§ 8. Of course, it would be quite open to us to hold that there may
be, within the Absolute, finite beings of superhuman power and
goodness with whom humanity is capable of co-operating for ethical
ends. Only such beings, if they exist, would not be God in the same
sense in which the Absolute may be called God. They might deserve
and win our reverence and our co-operation, but because