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An Allegory of Existence: Justus Lipsius’ Philosophic and Philological Strategies Reading of the World
Abstract
This article is devoted to the two most important works of Justus Lipsius – De constantia libri duo (1584) and Politicorum, sive Civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589) – although the research is primarily focused on the former. The author tries to show how the wartime reality of the 16th-century Netherlands permeates the ideological and rhetorical fabric of a literary work, influencing the strategies of literary discourse used and the direction of thinking about reality, which is political in terms of the state but spiritual in an individual understanding. The author was mainly interested in one aspect which is present in the work of Lipsius, namely, the thread of eternal change as seen by a humanist from the perspective of the philosophical stoic doctrine, although conveyed in a literary vision of a strongly poetic and allegorical nature. The dialectic of values, the polarization of meanings, the dynamics of the presentation of a world subject to change and in which man finds himself caught between the obligation to act and the necessity to escape, are present in the ideological layer of works, which explain wars and other cataclysms by the concept of punishment for offenses, on the one hand, and on the other by the principle of care by God to preserve proportion, harmony and order in the universe. But they are also to be found in their rhetorical structure, where language becomes a tool by means of which the aesthetic principle of diversity and the wise (divine) beauty founded on it are reflected. The strategies of exploiting the literary heritage of antiquity and the early Christian era used by Lipsius, which were the building blocks of the works by this humanist (as evidenced by their centonic and palimpsest nature), in confrontation with the new language of art developed by him and with whose help he articulates ideologically difficult content, allows the reader of the Dutch professor’s works to observe the process of consciously transforming philology into philosophical matter, and as a result, their strong interweaving. In the opinion of the author of this article, this process expresses the essence of the Leipzig style of writing and the expression of thinking, which should be understood as a coherent and fresh quality, one present and distinctive against the background of contemporary humanistic writings.
Keywords:
stoicism, garden, philosophy, war, transformation, politics, rhetoric, language, philologyDetails
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