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Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), a Flemish humanist, philosopher, and classical scholar, was the founder of neostoicism, a key school of European thought in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Born near Brussels, Belgium, Lipsius was educated at the Jesuit College in Cologne, Germany, and the Catholic University of Leuven [Louvain] in Belgium, where he studied law and Latin classics. His early publications of criticism and emendation of notables such as ancient Roman philosopher Cicero garnered Lipsius an appointment in Rome as Latin secretary to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, one of the most influential church leaders and diplomats after the emergence of Protestantism in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century. While there, Lipsius’s studies of philosopher Seneca, historian Tacitus, and Roman stoicism initiated a lifelong philological and philosophical obsession that subsequently led him to Austria and Germany, where he obtained a chair of history at the Lutheran University of Jena and also spent some time in (Catholic) Cologne. In the late 1570s, he went to teach history at the newly founded Calvinist University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he spent the most productive period of his scholarly life, publishing, most notably, De Constantia in Publicis Malis (On Constancy in Times of Public Calamity, 1583–1584), or De Constantia for short, and the Politicorum Sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (Six Books on Politics or Civil Doctrine, 1589), known more simply as the Politica.

De Constantia, Lipsius’s first neostoic work, was a Senecan dialogue set in the violent religious and political struggles of the Netherlands that combined stoicism and Christianity in a new philosophy to help individuals cope. Repackaging stoicism as an antidote to the religious and political passions of the day and transforming stoic fate into divine providence, Lipsius’ brand of neostoicism became suitable for Christians. Effectively a work of practical psychology, De Constantia went through many editions and translations. Embodying elements of militant Calvinism as well as Jesuit arguments on free will, it became common cultural property during the Baroque period and influenced scholarship, poetry, and art until the Enlightenment.

A sequel to De Constantia, Lipsius’s Politica instructed rulers how to govern principalities in an ethical context, just as the former instructed citizens to endure and obey. The Politica combines a wide range of classical, medieval, and Renaissance sources. Its six books are devoted to virtue and prudence (book one), the purpose (civil concord) and forms of government (book two), political prudence of prince and advisors (book three), the prince’s military and civil prudence in matters human and divine (book four), and defense, just war, and civil conflicts (books five and six). In controversial sections dealing with the difficult relationship between state and church and religious tolerance, Lipsius expresses his views that peace and unity depended on a one-religion-per-polity approach; that the prince, without religious authority of his own, had the duty to ensure the unity of the church; and that peaceful religious dissidents were to be tolerated while those instigating civil unrest deserved no mercy. A supporter of monarchy and moderate absolutism, at least when based on stoic virtues, Lipsius thus, decades before English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, placed political stability above civil liberties and personal freedom.

The Politica was most enthusiastically received in France, Germany, and Spain, but also provoked both Protestants and the Roman Inquisition, which placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1590. Lipsius, seeking to avoid the resulting controversies, returned to Leuven in 1592 and, reembracing the Catholic faith of his youth, taught and wrote at the university until his death in 1606.

Bibliography:

Copp, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Inwood, Brad. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Levy, Anthony. “The Relationship of Stoicism and Scepticism: Justus Lipsius.” In Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. Edited by Jill Kraye and Martin Stone, 91–106. London: Routledge, 2000.
Morford, Mark. Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Wainwright,William, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Young, Robert V. “Justus Lipsius.” In Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts. Edited by Jill Kraye, 200–209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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