On one hand, Dmitri Levitin's Ancient Wisdom is a work of impressive erudition; it seems unlikely that any similarly thorough history of seventeenth-century English approaches to ancient philosophy will soon appear. On the other, despite an affected reticence about “overarching ‘argument[s]’” (546), it is a highly polemical work. Among its targets are a slew of historiographical labels whose accuracy and explanatory value Levitin challenges: “prisca theologia,” “Cambridge Platonism,” “Epicureanism,” “latitudinarianism,” “ancients vs. moderns,” and, especially, the “early Enlightenment.” More fundamentally, Levitin rejects what he sees as a forced and reductive political contextualization of scholarship—originating in nineteenth-century Whig historiography and now exemplified by J. G. A. Pocock and Jonathan Israel—that misconstrues seventeenth-century intellectual change and its legacy. Instead of a transformative crisis of conscience c. 1680–1720, Levitin sees “the true revolution in attitudes” (8) that made historical contextualization de rigueur in discussions of ancient knowledge and belief as the fruit of humanist engagements beginning a century earlier.
His introductory chapter emphasizes that rather than disciplines or ideologies, Levitin is interested in the contingencies shaping how the people who mostly wrote and read philosophy in the seventeenth century did so, in the “intellectual culture” of institutions and of scholarly reception. In the ensuing chapters he traces in meticulous detail a series of historical engagements with different aspects of ancient wisdom. In chapter 2 he deals with discussions of Zoroaster and Near Eastern learning (particularly astronomy) from historian of philosophy and early fellow of the Royal Society Thomas Stanley to orientalist Thomas Hyde; in chapter 3 he deals with the relation between Mosaic and Egyptian wisdom in the work of greater and lesser clergymen and philosophers (among whom Henry More is singled out for historiographical demotion, and the “Cambridge Platonism” he purportedly represented for demolition). In both chapters, Levitin is at pains to remove the blinkers of sixteenth-century prisca theologia and eighteenth-century Enlightenment in order to see seventeenth-century scholarship on its own terms. The payoff Stanley sought in comparing pagan and Christian beliefs was not a timeless wisdom that swallowed both but a congruence with Joseph Scaliger's chronology and ideas of natural law; Mosaic primacy fell victim not to heterodox “syncretism” but to erosion by new sources and critical techniques.
Levitin pays rewarding attention throughout to the “astonishing level of integration” (80) between humanism and natural philosophy. Stanley's work furnished philosophers with a “store of previous opinions” and historical perspective on their development (77); fragments of ancient learning underpinned new theories of the earth, which in turn provoked scholarly responses that increasingly distinguished natural from sacred history. In chapters 4 and 5, Levitin turns to the historiography of natural philosophy itself, first in terms of ancient methods and then respecting physical doctrines. In chapter 4 he contrasts the efforts of humanist-influenced medical authors—including Francis Glisson, Thomas Sydenham and William Petty (not often granted a humanist pedigree)—to link their practice to ancient methods, with shallower attempts by proponents of experiment such as Thomas Sprat and Joseph Glanvill to interpret the history of Greek philosophy in anti-Aristotelian terms. In chapter 5 Levitin reexamines Pierre Gassendi's influence in England. The key to this was not his empiricist reading of Epicurean method or his recuperation of materialism, but the scholarly example that his contextualization of these subjects established.
In chapter 6 Levitin turns to the history of the early church and its links with pagan learning. Explorations of the Platonist vocabulary of the ante-Nicene fathers created problems for Anglicans eager to maintain both orthodox trinitarianism and a patristic identity for the church, but unable to anchor their doctrine in later church tradition and thereby close the door to charges of Socinianism. Here, again, the intellectual upshot was a common resort to contextual inquiry: not a sudden triumph of revolutionary ideas clearing the road to Enlightenment, but the institutionalization, over many decades, of humanist scholarly practices. In a brief conclusion Levitin restates his major claims while hinting at a previously unexplored question: the transformation of the philosopher's “persona” (546).
The foregoing does scant justice to the detail in Levitin's account; one of the book's overt points and great strengths is the density of scholarly culture and the necessity of getting beyond the big names and big-ticket ideologies that give the subject a place in grand narratives of scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Levitin's readings of his sources are close and convincing, a contrast with the procrustean tendencies of some of his targets. But one may ask whether so polemical a work should not engage those targets with more care; it is one thing to ditch grand narratives as a matter of methodological principle, another to lump together and collectively dismiss such different accounts as Israel's and Pocock's—to say nothing of others. The nuance that distinguishes Levitin's reading of seventeenth-century histories is less evident when he turns to more current work.
Levitin's dismissal of political context also invites examination. Perhaps universities pursued learning “without … any political implications” (15) and “historiographical conclusion[s] developed in one context” (418) were appropriated in others for their scholarly rather than their ideological qualities. Still, neither claim necessitates treating “politics” and “scholarship” as mutually exclusive contexts for “intellectual life” (16); and if attacks on Henry More were motivated by concern for episcopacy (138) or John Spencer's De legibus Hebraeorum by “a desire to attack non-conformist scripturalism” (164), or if “Interregnum divines” were able to abandon the anti-Nicene fathers beloved of Laud (460) while Episcopalians remained committed, the distinction begins to seem unhelpful. The meaning and scope of “intellectual culture” could likewise use clarification: when denying their links to “liberalism,” Levitin identifies his subjects as “a grouping of elitist érudits concerned primarily with their own scholarship” (15). Later, this scholarship concerns “the wider literate elite” (447); by the end of the book, humanist history of philosophy is held to have been central “to almost all intellectual culture” (542). If “Anglophone historiography” has “extolled the disenfranchised” (543) too long, equating intellectual culture with elite historical erudition risks overcorrection.
