THREE
IN 1531 and 1532 the Discourses and The Prince were published by Blado in Rome with the papal imprimatur. By 1559 Machiavelli’s works appeared—along with those of Erasmus, Boccaccio, and Savonarola—on the papal index of prohibited books.1 The Counter-Reformation was in full force and Machiavelli was censured as an enemy to religion in treatise after treatise in Spain and Italy. In particular, Machiavelli was condemned as the proponent of reason of state—the use of any and all available means, however immoral, to preserve the state and to increase the power of its ruler. For many Counter-Reformation theorists, Machiavellian reason of state was simply the term the tyrannical prince used to rationalize his own immoderate desires and interests.2 To combat Machiavelli’s malignant influence and to rebut his charge that Christianity was detrimental to the state (D, 11–15), Counter-Reformation critics proposed a Christian reason of state, which claimed to reconcile religious belief and behavior with the exigencies of practical politics. In the case of Giovanni Botero, such a Christian reason of state amounted to a Christianizing of Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics.
Historians of political thought—particularly those who see Machiavelli as a secular and republican thinker—have tended to condescend to the literature of reason of state, relegating it to an obscure corner of the history of Machiavellism, a history of misreading, error, and naiveté. This is particularly the case with Botero, who attempted to reconcile Machiavelli’s analysis of politics with his own religious convictions in the first full-length treatise on reason of state, Ragion di stato (1589). Together with anti-Machiavellians such as Ammirato, Ribadeneyra, and many others, Botero is judged to have been incapable of appreciating the “true” Machiavelli—the secular analyst of de facto political power or the republican theorist.3 In this chapter I argue that a reexamination of Counter-Reformation treatises shows that Catholicism was not an impediment to an appreciation of Machiavelli, precisely because Counter-Reformation thinkers understood that Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics could be appropriated for their own purposes as well. As such, their works provide an important analogue to the Protestant reception of Machiavelli in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and an important corrective to the identification of the Machiavellian moment with republican or secular thought. By closely analyzing these works, we begin to see that the rhetoric of Machiavellism in the Renaissance is first and foremost the product of a religiously motivated critique of Machiavelli.4 But rather than rejecting such anti-Machiavellians, I suggest that these writers correctly perceived both what was threatening in Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics and what was open to appropriation or reinterpretation.
Specifically, I argue that Botero and his contemporaries were intelligent readers of Machiavelli not simply because they understood his “discourse of necessity,” as Meinecke and others have claimed,5 but because they understood his rhetoric: unlike many modern interpreters, Counter-Reformation readers were sensitive to the rhetorical form of Machiavelli’s work, and to the rhetorical dimension of his conception of politics. They read Machiavelli as Machiavelli had read Livy—as a storehouse of historical examples that could be appropriated for a variety of uses, analyzed in terms of a range of thematic and formal topics. Precisely because they had been schooled in the assumptions of humanist rhetoric and poetics, and the rhetorical dimension of princely conduct, they were able to understand how Machiavelli’s rhetorical conception of politics was applicable to the needs of Christian princes. They recognized the role that rhetoric and imitation can play in the construction of necessity and of political power; and they were particularly sensitive to the moral ambiguity—the potential immorality—of Machiavelli’s recommendations regarding the uses of representation—of reputation, simulation, and dissimulation. What was disturbing to Counter-Reformation critics of Machiavelli was less his discourse of necessity, and the possible conflict between the politic world of necessity and the city of God,6 than the realization that necessity can be feigned. But rather than ruling these recommendations out of hand, they attempted both to respond to them on Machiavelli’s own terms and to adapt them (in Machiavellian fashion) to their own religious and political purposes.
In particular, Counter-Reformation critics recognized the tension within Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics between a neutral, or instrumental, and a normative conception of rhetoric.7 But, unlike him, they attempted to forge a unity between the two that was compatible with the dictates of Christianity. They strove to find new ways of differentiating between true and false uses of representation, true and false prudence, while at the same time preserving the Machiavellian emphasis on practical results. While condemning certain uses of dissimulation, critics of Machiavelli argued for a legitimate feigning or imitation, whether in the form of well-intentioned deception or in the sublime spectacle of the prince’s power. Yet, their reflections on reason of state—what Botero would call reasoning from interest—also exposed the fiction of a sovereign reason, uncontaminated by interest; they thus dramatized the necessity of responding to Machiavelli by distinguishing not between Christian truth and Machiavellian falsehood but between more or less persuasive interests, more or less powerful results. It is not surprising that some of those who attempted to rebut Machiavelli on his own terms were themselves condemned as Machiavellian.
In the following pages I briefly discuss the intersection of rhetoric, poetics, and politics in cinquecento discussions of imitation, as a way of introducing the assumptions that governed the Counter-Reformation reception of Machiavelli. I then illustrate this reception through a close analysis of Botero’s Ragion di stato. I have chosen to focus on Botero not only because his treatise was one of the all-time best-sellers of political theory (contemporaries compared its popularity to that of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata) but also because, in its topical approach and in its reflection on the uses of rhetoric and imitation, Ragion di stato is representative of other treatises on reason of state in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of Botero’s contemporaries complained that his definition of reason of state was unconscionably wide, and argued for stricter moral and religious criteria for reason of state; others noted with approval what was implicit in Botero—that reason of state is only loosely or contingently related to moral considerations. But all of the authors who took up the challenge of Machiavelli and of reason of state reflected as Botero did on the relationship of virtue to success, means to ends, imitation to misrepresentation. Ragion di stato thus helps us to see that reason of state involved a rhetorical approach to politics that allowed the insights of the Machiavel to be wedded to those of the Counter-Reformation religious thinkers of the sixteenth century.8
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Politics
By the time Botero published Ragion di stato in 1589, there was a well-developed humanist discourse concerning the intersection of rhetoric, poetics, and politics. Many of the basic assumptions of this discourse were shared by Counter-Reformation writers, especially those who turned to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in an effort to rearticulate the relationship of rhetoric and Catholic theology in the wake of the Council of Trent.9 A brief discussion of the available arguments will help us see that sixteenth-century treatises on poetics and rhetoric shared with Machiavelli a language of imitation and persuasion, as well as a concern with the political uses of these faculties. A related concern with issues of persuasion and representation is apparent in sixteenth-century manuals of casuistry. Once we have surveyed these treatises, we will be in a better position to see that Botero read Machiavelli through these available discourses, while attempting to assimilate Machiavelli’s critique.
Most sixteenth-century treatises on poetics are governed by the axiom that poetry is like politics in dealing with practical matters and that poetry has political consequences. Alessandro Piccolomini discussed the close relationship of poetry and civic prudence in his Annotationi nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotile (1575), arguing that poetry, like politics, “is a habit of the practical intellect.”10 Giacopo Mazzoni made the same point in his Della difesa della Comedia di Dante (1587), claiming that poetry considered as instruction in moral philosophy is governed by the “civil faculty,” and that Aristotle’s Poetics is the ninth book of his Politics.11 Scipione Ammirato, who later wrote a commentary on Tacitus in which he condemned Machiavellian reason of state, also subsumed poetry under civil philosophy: “The poet bears the same relationship to the physician as the legislator does to the surgeon, and the ‘end of poetry is to induce virtue into the soul by driving vice out of it.’”12 For these and other critics, imitation does not simply have political effects but is like politics in being governed by the practical intellect or civil faculty.
Cinquecento Italian commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics manifest an acute anxiety about mimesis as an instrument of deception and misrepresentation, and a corresponding awareness of the uses to which mimesis may be put to preserve the social and political status quo. In these treatises, acknowledging the political effects of imitation and rhetoric is only the first step to controlling them. Mazzoni, for example, argued that, although some kinds of poetry “disorder . . . the appetite with immoderate delight, producing complete rebellion against reason and bring on damage and loss to a virtuous life” (97), appropriate imitation will subordinate delight to civic instruction. In a discussion of the political effects of comedy and tragedy he remarked that these “two kinds of poems are directed by the civil faculty to the extinguishing of sedition and the preservation of peace” (105–106). In Mazzoni’s account, drama is a creation of the civil faculty, and the lessons of comedy and tragedy function as the rhetorical counterweight to the potentially destabilizing recognition of social inequality, whether on the part of humble citizens or proud rulers.13
Much of the Renaissance debate concerning the meaning of catharsis reflects similar considerations of its civil utility, that is, its usefulness in preserving the status quo.14 While critics sometimes argued that the effect of tragedy is to make us abhor and thus, potentially, resist tyranny,15 the usual discussions of catharsis stressed that purgation of the passions makes us more obedient citizens, whether of a monarchy or a republic. In Dela purgazione de la tragedia (1586), Lorenzo Giacomini argued that the purpose of purgation is to render the audience “obedient to exhortation” (Trattati, 3:368–69). Sperone Speroni, a defender of the Venetian republic, claimed that “republics need a purging of pity more than monarchies do, since the overly compassionate citizen is likely to be unjust in a republic, but in a monarchy a king is responsible for justice. The too-fearful citizen will not offer up his life for his country. Monarchies need pity and fear in the citizenry so the people will be obedient.”16 Although admitting that a poem can be directed to many ends, Giason Denores insisted that the correct end will be determined by the governor of the state (Trattati, 3:351; see Castelvetro, 2:227).
Cinquecento treatises on rhetoric are even more concerned with the civic dimension of persuasion. In his Dialogo della retorica (1542), Speroni argued that rhetoric is essential to a republic because “the orator’s art, governance, practices, and words are eminently civil matters” (cose propriamente cittadinesche).17 Similar assertions concerning the civil and practical function of rhetoric may be found in Francesco Sansovino’s Della rhetorica (1543), Daniele Barbaro’s Della eloquenza (1557), Antonio Maria Conti’s De eloquentia dialogus (1582), and Giason Denores’s Breve trattato dell’oratore (1574). And, as in treatises on poetics, here too we find a concern with the power of imitation or representation to move (and possibly to deceive) the reader or hearer, a concern that is equally evident in Counter-Reformation treatises on sacred eloquence.18
Cinquecento assumptions regarding the political uses and abuses of imitation and rhetoric are also apparent in commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics, and it is here we begin to see the explicit mention of Machiavelli. Bernardo Segni published an Italian translation of the Politics in 1549, the same year he published the first Italian translations of the Poetics and Rhetoric. Commenting on book 1, chapter 10, where Aristotle discusses the art of acquisition, Segni noted that the same precepts were in “buona parte” recommended by “Machiavello nel suo libro del Principe.” And, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics the following year, Segni also referred Aristotle’s discussion of parsimony and liberality to Machiavelli’s analysis of public relations in The Prince. That Segni read Aristotle in part through Machiavelli is also apparent in his dedication of the translation to Duke Cosimo: echoing chapter 15 of The Prince, he contrasted Plato, who discussed forms of government “which are beautiful to hear about but hard to see in the world,” to Aristotle, who pragmatically analyzed forms of government that were “less good,” even “transgressive or sinful,” in order to aid or improve them.19
Other commentators noted the similarities between the prince’s use of fraud and his manipulation of the passions in chapters 15 through 21 of The Prince, and the tyrant’s use of imitation and his appeal to the passions in book 5 of the Politics. As Rebecca Bushnell has recently reminded us, in his discussion of the tyrant in book 5 Aristotle “vindicates mimesis,” both pragmatically and morally. In the first case he teaches that “if the tyrant wishes to remain wicked and to maintain his illegitimate and absolute rule, he should at least practice public relations—or political theater” by appearing to be virtuous and kinglike. In the second case he argues that the best way to seem virtuous is to become virtuous, and that the tyrant may become a good king by pretending to be so.20 It was particularly the first, pragmatic lesson that Renaissance writers associated with Machiavelli. In his 1568 commentary on the Politics, Louis Le Roy commented on Aristotle’s advice to feign kingly Machiavelli has created a prince who is no different from the tyrant Aristotle describes in his Politics.”21 At times, this comparison had the effect of mitigating the charges against Machiavelli; at other times, as we will see, Machiavelli was read as recommending what Aristotle only described. But, in either case, the role of imitation in the creation and maintenance of political power was taken for granted.
In addition to treatises on poetics and politics, manuals of casuistry provided a source of reflection on the political uses of imitation in the sixteenth century.22 Both Catholic and Protestant writers on casuistry debated whether it was appropriate to misrepresent the truth in words or behavior; both argued that misrepresentation was justified in certain contexts, if governed by good intentions. Of particular importance to Counter-Reformation writers was the work of the Spanish Catholic, Martín de Azpilcueta—or Dr. Navarrus. In 1549 Navarrus published a casuistical handbook for confessors and penitents, in which he argued for the “licitness of mental reservation and dissimulation,” based on a distinction between the speaker’s intention, which God knows, and the spoken words heard by human ears.23 Navarrus linked such licit dissimulation to reason of state, and quoted with approval the Latin tag, Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare (He who does not know how to dissimulate does not know how to rule); at the same time, he rejected the use of mental reservation to dissimulate one’s faith. As these equivocal remarks suggest, manuals of casuistry were not only important as a context in which Machiavelli could be read and rebutted; they also offered a way of thinking that was compatible, to some extent, with Machiavelli’s remarks on dissimulation. Thus in his Trattati nove della prudenza, Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini applied Pontano’s and Machiavelli’s analyses of the prudent use of dissimulation for the purpose of self-preservation to cases of religious dissimulation.24
It is not surprising, given the widespread discussion of the uses of imitation in the sixteenth century, that Machiavelli’s own disturbing reflections on imitation were foremost in the minds of Counter-Reformation readers. Critics were particularly concerned to rebut chapters 15–21 of The Prince. As we have seen, these chapters parody the traditional humanist catalogue of princely virtues by exposing the inherent instability of the humanist doctrine of imitation. Imitation here is a means of misrepresentation or deception; and necessity is a function of rhetorical argument rather than of any external coercion. But Counter-Reformation critics also noted Machiavelli’s reflections on the use and abuse of imitation, and the feigning of necessity, in the Discourses. In book 1, chapter 11, Machiavelli had discussed Rome’s theatrical use of religious ceremony to instill fear and obedience in soldiers; and he had repeatedly emphasized the rhetorical effectiveness of violent and brutal examples throughout the Discourses. These passages from The Prince and the Discourses were regularly cited by Machiavelli’s detractors. In De libris a Christiano detestandis et a Christianesimo penitus eliminandi (1552), the Dominican priest Ambrogio Caterino Politi attacked Machiavelli as a heretic for seeing religion only as a “persuasive instrument of human credulity.”25 He went on to quote from and rebut in detail chapter 18 of The Prince. The Portuguese bishop Jeronimo Osorio also attacked Machiavelli for his remarks on religion in the third book of his De nobilitate christiana, which was published in Florence in 1552 and translated into English in 1576. He noted at the outset Machiavelli’s disingenuous claim in the Discourses that he was not attacking Christianity, only the misinterpretation of it; he particularly objected to Machiavelli’s arguments for the rhetorical force of Rome’s bloody sacrifice and omens, and for the political usefulness of “the counterfaite and deceiptfull resemblaunce of humaine vertue.”26
In contrast, the Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius articulated an important defense of Machiavellian dissimulation in the service of reason of state in the fourth book of his Politics (1589). In this book Lipsius took up the topic of “mixed prudence,” or prudence tempered with considerations of political expedience. In his discussion of the difference between prudence and art, Lipsius stressed the rhetorical dimension of prudence to an even greater extent than did classical rhetoricians such as Cicero and Aristotle:
Now, if the things themselves are uncertaine, Prudence itselfe likewise must of necessitie be so, and so much the rather, because it is not onely tied to the things themselves, but to their dependents, having regard unto the times, the places, and to men and for their least change, she changeth her selfe, which is the reason why she is not in all places alike, no nor the same in one and the selfe same thing. But the nature of Art is farre different, We give best credit to that which we know of his owne nature is not subject to change. And surely it is impossible for any man to reduce that which is uncertaine to certaine and strict limits of precepts.27
Here prudence is no longer simply the faculty of responding to contingency but has itself become contingent. It is this contingency which critics of Machiavelli feared would “of necessitie” lead to force and fraud. Lipsius confronted the charge, distinguishing between licit and illicit kinds of “mixed prudence,” just as his Italian and Spanish contemporaries distinguished between true and false prudence and dissimulation. Precisely because we are embarked on a “tempestuous sea of the affayres of the world,” he argued, it is “sometimes lawfull, and reasonable to trace out indirect courses” (114):
Who will blame mee so farre herein, or demaund the cause why I forsake vertue? Wine, although it be somewhat tempered with water, continueth to be wine: so doth prudence not change her name, albeit a fewe drops of deceipt bee mingled therewith: For I alwayes meane but a small deale, and to a good end; Mothers, and Phisitions, doe they not often deceive little children, to the end they might beguile their improvident age by a deceiptfull taste: and the deceipt may not be perceaved? And why should not a Prince do the like towards the simple people, or towards some other Prince his neighbor? Surely when one is not strong enough to debate the matter, it is not amisse secretly to intrappe. And as the King of Sparta teacheth us; Where we cannot prevaile by the Lions skinne, we must put on the Foxes. I will alwayes with Pindarus prayse him, who in matters of variance [sic] doth make showe to have the courage of a Lion, but in Consultation is as craftie as a Foxe. Be thou the like in time, and place, and carelesse of that these young men do say at schoole, or within doores: whome I knowe, not to be capable hearers of civill doctrine, and much lesse iudges: and surely this tribunall seate requireth a man, who is not ignorant of those things which happen in this life. Of such a person we shall easily obtain this, neither will we so strictly condemne the Italian faulte-writer, (who poore soule is layde at of all hands) and as a holy person sayth, that there is a certaine honest and laudable deceipt. (114)
And in the margin, Lipsius noted “Some kinde of persons rage too much against Machiavell.”
In this passage, Lipsius touched on many of the important topics of Machiavellian rhetoric, while at the same time dramatizing their instability. In his justification of deceit, Lipsius used the topic of means and ends, asserting that “a small deale” of deceit is allowed to “a good end.” Thus, although he implied that success in this world is contingent upon one’s willingness to “forsake vertue,” at least as far as means are concerned, he required that such prudence be governed by a virtuous intention. And, while fracturing virtue into means and ends, and means into lawful and unlawful deceit, he insisted that prudence retains its identity. Yet, precisely because prudence is a faculty that is always shifting, its identity amounts to a nonidentity. This principle of nonidentity begins to inflect other terms of Lipsius’s rhetorical politics. For example, in his allusive gloss on chapter 18 of The Prince, Lipsius made it clear that force is not extrinsic to the rhetorical politics Machiavelli and he are expounding but is rather an argument among others, a part to be assumed: the courage of a lion is not simply something one possesses but that one “make[s] showe to have.” In the rhetoric of reason of state, force is, at least in part, a matter of representation. Similarly, what counts as prudence or reason will depend on the rhetorical criteria of person, time, and place.
Such criteria appear to make politics rhetorical for Lipsius in two ways. First, the ruler must “purchase the favor” of his subjects, he must “gaine the affections of men, and . . . appropriate them to [his] own use” (118). Echoing sixteenth-century discussions of rhetoric and poetics, Lipsius noted that such favor may be purchased by means of “a false tale,” and that the use of such indirect means gives “pleasure” to princes (who are the only ones to recognize such indirection and who are therefore their own audience). Second, the good ruler is one who is able to persuade his subjects of the necessity of reason of state: the uses of deceit
are referred to the profit of the common wealth, which easilie draweth and draineth to itselfe all the venime of vice that is therein. And as in the application of medicines, they do with approbation, mingle venimous drugs for the good of the patient, so these things do seeme profitable as it were a medicine. (119)
For Lipsius, a rhetorical politics does not simply use false tales to purge subjects of dangerous affections, but effects the simultaneous justification and purgation of its own Machiavellian means.28 In response to such arguments (and to the shifting religious and political allegiances that appeared to be one consequence of his belief in mixed prudence), critics condemned Lipsius as a figure of Protean inconstancy. One rival even accused Lipsius of “supporting the procedures of the Inquisition and, furthermore, of being a Machiavellian” himself.29
If Lipsius provided a justification of Machiavellian means that seemed to verge dangerously at times on stereotypically Machiavellian ends, Lodovico Zuccolo offered an analysis of reason of state that made ends a matter of deliberation as well. In his short treatise, Della ragione di stato (1621), Zuccolo argued that reason of state has no intrinsic or ideal moral content, nor is it tied to any particular form of government. It is simply a way of reasoning about the best means for realizing the interests of particular states:
because the immediate end of the ruler is to introduce and preserve that form of government which he has in mind, it emerges that reason of state is concerned with the knowledge and use of those means which are appropriate for ordering and preserving any form of government, whatever it may be.30
Such an instrumental definition of reason of state means that reason of state is not incompatible with the rule of law, though it is also not identical with it. It also implies that it is impossible to distinguish between a good and bad reason of state in terms of the ethical nature of the state to which such reasoning is applied:
in good republics reason of state is nothing other than prudence regarding the means and ways which we have discussed; and in bad governments, it is a certain shrewdness. . . . But, since that little bit of justice between corsairs and thieves is usually also called justice, perhaps it is not inappropriate to call the reason of state of tyrants and the powerful few prudence, on account of its resemblance to that other prudence. (30)
In fact, reason of state has no single identity, and no normative content, but is simply a way of reasoning about particulars. Yet, like most of his contemporaries, Zuccolo drew back from such a radical conclusion at the end of his treatise. Here he differentiated between those who describe the reason of state employed by tyrants in order to teach us how to avoid tyranny, and those who teach “the ways and means of using reason of state in bad governments,” such as “Machiavelli and his followers” (38).
Caterino, who condemned Machiavelli outright as a dissembling heretic, and Zuccolo, who condemned Machiavelli in an afterthought, represent the two poles of the Counter-Reformation reception of Machiavelli: the outraged rejection of Machiavellian dissimulation versus the assimilation of this problem to an analysis of reason of state as a formal capacity for reasoning about means and interests. In the first case, Christian ethics are applied, as it were, from without in order to pass judgment on Machiavelli’s own use of religion as an instrument of persuasion; in the second case, reason of state is analyzed as a morally neutral faculty of reason, one that is chiefly concerned with reasoning about the means to a given end. Whereas Caterino assumed Christianity as the framework within which he reasoned, the logical conclusion of Zuccolo’s analysis is that the “end” of the state is itself subject to deliberation. As we will see, Botero’s Ragion di stato lies somewhere between these two extremes: for Botero is more receptive to the challenge of Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics than Caterino and more intent on preserving a normative content for reason of state than Zuccolo. In attempting to derive the superiority of Christian reason of state from a rhetorical and pragmatic analysis of political interests, Botero is closer in method to Machiavelli than either of his fellow critics.
Botero’s Ragion di stato
Something of the context of Ragion di stato can be reconstructed from Botero’s own biography and from the dedication of the treatise. Botero was educated as a Jesuit and although he eventually left the order, he remained closely tied to its vision of a resurgent Catholicism throughout his life. While still in the order, he taught philosophy and rhetoric in Jesuit schools in Italy and France. After leaving the order, he was briefly secretary to Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, which was then a center of Counter-Reformation intellectual activity. Under the tutelage of Borromeo, he published a treatise on ecclesiastical rhetoric, entitled De praedicatore verbi dei (1585), in which he discussed the sublime style appropriate to the Counter-Reformation preacher (and, as we will see, to the Counter-Reformation prince). He traveled to France as part of a diplomatic mission of Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, and it was here that he observed the French religious wars and became acquainted with the work of Bodin and perhaps Gentillet. He later became tutor to Borromeo’s cousin, living in Rome and fraternizing with humanists such as Piero Maffei and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso.31
Like many of his Catholic contemporaries, Botero associated the burgeoning interest in reason of state not only with Machiavelli and Tacitus but also with reformers such as Luther and Calvin. And he saw his treatise as part of the Counter-Reformation effort to reestablish the political as well as spiritual hegemony of the Catholic church. In the dedication of Ragion di stato, he writes:
chi sottrae alla conscienza la sua giuridizione universale di tutto ciò che passa tra gli umonini, sì nelle cose publiche come nelle private, mostra che non have anima, nè Dio. Sino alle bestie hanno uno istinto naturale, che le spinge alle cose utili e le ritira dalle nocevoli: ed il lume della ragione e ’l dettame della conscienza, dato all’uomo per saper discernere il bene e ’l male, sarà cieco negli affari publici, diffetoso ne’ casi d’importanza? Spintô io non so se da sdegno o da zelo, ho più volte avuto animo di scrivere delle corruzioni introdotte da costoro [Machiavelli and Tacitus] ne’ governi e ne’ consigli de’ prencipi, onde hanno avuto origine tutti gli scandali nati nella Chiesa di Dio e tutti i disturbi della Cristianità. (52)
he who would deprive conscience of its universal jurisdiction over all that concerns man in his public as well as in his private life shows thereby that he has no soul and no God. The very beasts possess a natural instinct which turns them towards useful things and away from harmful ones: shall then the light of reason and dictates of conscience, bestowed upon man to enable him to distinguish between good and evil, be obscured in affairs of state, mute in matters of importance? Provoked by indignation or zeal, I have often been emboldened to write of the corruption fostered by these two men [Machiavelli and Tacitus] in the policy and counsel of princes, from which have arisen all of the scandals within the Church of God and strife among Christians. (xiv)
To combat Machiavelli and Tacitus was also to combat those who “have strayed from the truth of the Gospels, sowing everywhere the seeds of heresy, revolution and the overthrow of kingdoms” (2.16.138, 67).32 One way to do so was to insist on the unity of reason of state and conscience, the interest of the prince and of Christianity. Yet, despite the dedication’s language of natural law, Botero does not simply counter the Reformers’ emphasis on conscience with an appeal to Aristotle’s Ethics. Nor does he simply assert that there are two reasons of state—a good Christian one and a bad Machiavellian one. His goal is rather to show that there is only one truly effective reason of state, only one truly effective rhetorical politics—one that both justifies and transforms Machiavellian means by suffusing them with Christian ends.
From the very beginning of Ragion di stato, it is clear that Botero shares Machiavelli’s rhetorical approach to politics, and that he has designed the treatise as a rhetoric for producing political effects. Botero defines reason of state as “knowledge of the means appropriate to founding, preserving, and extending the state” (notizia di mezzi atti a fondare, conservare ed ampliare un dominio). In this definition, reason of state is like rhetoric in that it involves deliberating about the means appropriate to the realization of one’s ends in particular circumstances. It also includes rhetoric in the sense that among those means are imitation and techniques of persuasion—the resources of the actor and orator. In fact, the prince is described as a political rhetorician who must learn the topics of particular disciplines, not in order to become an expert but “to make judicious use of those” who are; like the orator, the prince must to be able to “calm a nation, win round the multitude, or soothe their passions” (see especially 2.1.104–106, 34–36). The prince must also stage theatrical spectacles and religious ceremonies to instill obedience in his subjects; he must encourage ecclesiastical preaching (3.1.48–51, 74–75); and he must strive to create the impression of virtue and power (2.11.120–26, 54–58).
That Ragion di stato offers a rhetoric of practical politics is apparent not only from the definition of reason of state but also from the form of the treatise. Like The Prince, Botero’s work is organized topically around such subjects as the acquisition, maintenance, and increase of reputation; the uses of the virtues; the control of magistrates. Like Machiavelli, Botero insists on the impossibility of exact rules in the realm of practical politics; in a chapter entitled “capi di prudenza” (maxims of prudence), which reads as a compendium of advice drawn from The Prince and the Discourses, Botero urges: “Deliberate carefully the enterprise you are about to undertake, but do not plan the details of its execution, for this must depend largely upon circumstances and opportunities, which are continually changing” (2.6.111, 46). The formal corollary of such an injunction is that each chapter individually, and the treatise as a whole, appears as a storehouse of commonplaces, maxims, and examples, which can be used or abused by the reader.
If Ragion di stato is like The Prince and the Discourses in offering the reader a compendium of political commonplaces, it is also like Machiavelli’s work in registering a tension between a neutral and a normative conception of rhetorical politics. Botero does not simply want to present the reader with a storehouse of examples that may or may not be put to good uses (however the good is defined). Rather, his aim is to present the reader with a rhetorical politics that is at once descriptive and prescriptive. He does not want simply to demonstrate that the resources of rhetoric may be used in utramque partem but also that a truly pragmatic analysis of political affairs will prove the superiority of a rhetorical politics informed by Christianity. This tension is particularly apparent in Botero’s discussion of imitation, which he describes both as a morally neutral faculty and one that reveals the ultimate pragmatism of Christian virtue.
In Ragion di stato, as in cinquecento treatises on poetics, imitation is not chiefly a source of disinterested pleasure but a means or instrument for preserving the social and political status quo. Imitation, correctly used, is tied to the faculty of civic prudence. And, as in such treatises, the awareness that a prince can feign virtue as well as faithfully represent it, that he can stir up the passions as well as purge or channel them, leads to significant tensions. Botero wants to acknowledge the utility of imitation for the prince, and to preserve the prince from the charge of mere expedience or feigning. Similarly, he wants to acknowledge the effect of imitation on the passions and interests of the audience, and to ward off the threat of Machiavellian manipulation. At times Botero tries to control the wayward rhetorical effects of imitation by specifying the content, means, or intention of imitation and by insisting that the prince be what he seems. At other times he accepts Machiavelli’s displacement of the criterion of imitation from truthful representation to rhetorical effect; and he attempts to respond to Machiavelli’s advice about sembling and dissembling on its own pragmatic terms.
Botero’s remarks about the prince’s reputation can serve as an example of the rhetorical effects of imitation, unconstrained by moral considerations. In book 2, chapter 11, Botero treats “De’ modi di conservare la riputazione” (how to preserve reputation) in a manner reminiscent of chapter 21 of The Prince, as well as of Castiglione’s discussion of sprezzatura in The Courtier. He observes that “many weak rulers have succeeded in maintaining a reputation for strength not by making themselves stronger, but simply by hiding their weakness” (2.11.120, 54) and urges that the prince ration his appearances in public so he will be respected more (2.11.124, 57). In this and other maxims, Botero suggests that the reputation of prudence and valor is not simply maintained—but also created—by strategic understatement or display. As Hobbes would write in his own account of reason of state in Leviathan, “Reputation of power, is Power,” and “Eloquence is power; because it is seeming Prudence.”33 The same is true, according to Botero, of the reputation of religion. In his discussion of the uses of religion Botero notes, as Machiavelli did in the Discourses, that the Romans never embarked on any military campaign without first staging the necessary religious spectacles, since they “regarded religion as one of the chief bases of government.” And he mentions Aristotle’s advice in the Politics that “the tyrant should do his utmost to be thought pious” (2.15.133, 63). Christianity is particularly recommended for its practical effects; in a passage that takes up his prefatory remarks concerning the blasphemous separation of reason of state from conscience, Botero argues that it is far more practical to join them both by appearing to be religious and by encouraging religion in one’s subjects:
tra tutte le leggi, non ve n’è alcuna più favorevole a prencipi che la cristiana, perchè questa sottomette loro non solamente i corpi e le facoltà de’ sudditi, dove conviene, ma gli animi ancora e le conscienze, e lega non solamente le mani, ma gli affetti ancora ed i pensieri, e vuole che si obedisca a’ prencipi discoli nonchè a’ moderati e che si patisca ogni cosa per non perturbar la pace. (2.16.137)
of all religions none is more favorable to a ruler than the Christian law, according to which not merely the bodies and possessions but even the souls and consciences of his people are subject to him: their affections and thoughts are bound, as well as their hands, and they are enjoined to obey wicked rulers as well as moderate ones, and to suffer rather than disturb the peace. (66)
In this description, which glosses Machiavelli, Romans 13, and contemporary arguments about the right of resistance, Christianity proves to be the best way of maintaining power, whether of a tyrant or a good ruler.
Yet, at other moments, Botero draws back from such amoral advice, and insists that imitation and persuasion be morally serious in intention and content. Thus in book 3 he recommends the use of spectacles, especially tragedy and “the spectacles [trattenimenti] provided by the church,” to “please, delight, and divert” the people; and he warns by way of contrast that the too frequent viewing of violent tournaments will make the populace itself violent and rebellious (3.1.148–50, 74–75). Similarly, in book 5 he cautions against the enervating effects of theater with the example of Caesar Augustus, “who set out to break the pride of the Romans and to convert them from devotion to arms to a preference for the delights of leisure by encouraging spectacles and the theatre” (5.4.184, 102). And in the conclusion to the chapter on reputation, Botero urges that the prince “Tenga per risoluto finalmente, che la riputazione dipende dall’essere, non dal parere” (finally be convinced that reputation depends upon what is, rather than what seems [2.11.126, 58])—an injunction that attempts to respond, by fiat, to the fear provoked by Machiavellian dissembling and the staging of political power.
Although Botero vacillates between amoral examples and moral prescription in much of Ragion di stato, he also proposes a dialectical argument that attempts to reconcile the two: rather than asserting a priori that the prince should follow the dictates of Christianity, Botero argues that the necessity of morality and Christian faith emerges from within a rhetorical and practical analysis of the interests of state.34 Specifically, he uses the concept of interest to bridge the gap between a rhetoric based on the useful and one informed by the Christian criterion of the good: he insists that it is in the prince’s interest to imitate the conventional virtues, because the prince’s staging of these virtues is interesting both to his subjects and to God. As Botero writes: “Religion is the foundation of kingship, for all power proceeds from God, and since the grace and favour of God can only be won by piety, any other foundation will be disastrous” (2.15.135–36, 65). Just as the virtues are part of the rhetoric the prince uses to secure power over the people (2.14), so religion is the rhetoric he uses to address God as well as the people: since all power comes from God, it is a good political wager to be religious. As with Botero’s earlier discussion of the uses of imitation, God is revered for his power, and religion is valued first and foremost in terms of its effects. But, Botero goes on to argue, in the long run it is in the prince’s interest to be religious—because, in the end, being religious is more effective than seeming so. Thus he claims that the prince should avoid simulation, not only because it is morally wrong but also because “it cannot last, and when it is discovered entirely discredits the dissimulator” (2.16.138, 67). And, referring to the passage in the Politics where Aristotle advises the tyrant to feign religion, Botero comments: “It is, however, extremely difficult for one who is not truly religious to be thought so, for nothing lasts so short a time as pretence” (2.15.133, 63).35 The criterion of political behavior is not in the first instance faithfulness to an a priori standard of the good but rather efficacy; it is precisely such calculations of effects that transform a rhetoric of seeming into one of being. In an ironic revision of Machiavelli’s reflections in chapter 18 of The Prince and chapters 11–15 in book 1 of the Discourses, it turns out that being religious is the most efficacious way of seeming religious (though we should also note that such a subordination of being to seeming makes being religious indistinguishable from perfect dissimulation).36
As these examples illustrate, Botero vacillates in his attitude toward the rhetorical dimension of princely power. On the one hand, while propounding a rhetoric of seeming—even to the point of suggesting with Machiavelli that reputation creates, as well as represents, the virtues of the prince—Botero also insists that the prince be what he seems. On the other hand, while defining reason of state as reasoning from interest, Botero argues in Aristotelian fashion that it is in the prince’s interest to conform to the dictates of the Church—and that the most effective way of seeming religious is actually to be so. If, in the first case, Botero presents reason of state simply as a means subordinate to Christian ends, in the second case he claims that Christian ends are generated from within a rhetorical and pragmatic analysis of interest. Undoubtedly, it was this second argument that led Botero’s contemporaries to object that Botero was uncomfortably close to Machiavelli’s pragmatic approach to politics. The view that all positions are interested, but not all interests are equal, is a consequence of the rhetorical politics that Machiavelli himself espoused—though to different ends. It is this argument, according to which imitation does not simply reflect the truth but is inextricably intertwined with the interest of actor and audience, that Botero pursues in the 1598 appendix to Ragion di stato, and that provides the most intriguing, and unsettling, reflection on reason of state.
Sublime Politics in the Aggiunta on Reputation
While Ragion di stato analyzes the rhetorical and political uses of imitation, Botero’s 1598 addition, “On Reputation,” both reasserts the centrality of rhetoric to reason of state and explores some of the more subversive implications of locating the prince’s power in reputation and interest.37 As we have seen, Botero had already discussed reputation in book 2 of his treatise; his prefatory letter to the Aggiunta makes clear that this “supplement” is central to the entire work precisely because reputation is the crucial supplement to political power, seeming the crucial supplement to being:
Uno de i principali fondamenti di Stato, e di governo, à giudicio di più intendenti, si è un certo concetto alto, e fermo, che si ha della saviezza, e del potere di un Prencipe. Il qual concetto viene ordinariamente chiamato Riputatione. Conciosia cosa che, si come à un mercatante non è meno necessario il credito, che i contanti; cosi a un Potentato non importa meno l’essere stimato possente, che la possanza istessa. Perche questa è soggetta à molti pericoli, & incontri, dai quali la tien lontana, e la fa quasi riparo, e scudo la fama, e la opinione, che si ha della stabilità, e grandezza. Quinci è avvenuto che alcuni personaggi di molta qualità, si come si son dilettati particolarmente di quel capo della mia Ragion di Stato, nel qual io discorro della Riputatione, come di cosa nuova, e non trattata ordinatamente da altri: cosi hanno desiderato, che io alquanto più diffusamente ne trattassi. (33)
One of the principal foundations of state and government, in the judgment of the prudent, is a certain high and fixed conception that is held of the wisdom and power of the Prince, which conception comes ordinarily to be called reputation. For just as credit is not less necessary than cash to a merchant, so to a potentate it is no less important to be deemed powerful than to have the power itself, because the latter is subject to many perils and accidents, from which the fame and opinion, which result from stability and greatness, protect it and serve almost as a rampart and shield. Hence has it come about that some personages of great quality, as they are delighted particularly with that chapter of my Ragion di stato in which I discourse on Reputation as of something new and not ordinarily treated by others, have thought that I should treat it here at more length. (231)
As his parenthetical “as of something new” suggests, Botero was well aware that Machiavelli had discussed the uses of reputation in chapters 15–21 of The Prince. In particular, in chapter 17, he had notoriously recommended the manipulation of the passions (“it is much safer to be feared than loved”), and in chapter 18 he had linked the use of deception to reputation and power:
Alcuno principe de’ presenti tempi, quale non è bene nominare, non predica mai altro che pace e fede, e dell’una e dell’altra è inimicissimo; e l’una e l’altra, quando e’ l’avessi osservata, li arebbe piú volte tolto o la reputazione o lo stato. (P, 74)
A certain prince of our own time [Ferdinand of Spain], whom it’s just as well not to name, preaches nothing but peace and mutual trust, yet he is the determined enemy of both; and if on several different occasions he had observed either, he would have lost both his reputation and his throne. (51)
In the Aggiunta, Botero pursues the implications of Machiavelli’s remarks on reputation, even to the point of identifying reputation and power. In the passage quoted above, Botero makes reputation more powerful than force itself, less vulnerable to “perils and accidents.” And, in book 2 of the Aggiunta, he effectively identifies reputation and the throne when he uses the language of acquisition and conservation (Italian: acquistare, conservare) that Machiavelli reserves for “lo stato” (39, 237). Insisting that the ability to confer reputation rests with the prince’s subjects, Botero then proceeds to analyze the ways in which the prince can manipulate the passions and interests of his subjects in order to ensure his reputation and maintain his throne. Specifically, he recommends that the prince engage his subjects’ interest by staging what I would like to call—borrowing from Botero’s own treatise on sacred rhetoric—a politics of the sublime.38 If Ragion di stato is a rhetoric of princely behavior in general, the Aggiunta is itself a rhetoric for producing the subject’s experience of sublimity and its corresponding political effects. The goal of such political rhetoric is both to manipulate and to mask the prince’s dependence on his subjects. Yet, in analyzing the operations of such rhetoric, Botero also reveals the instability of the prince’s power, its availability for conflicting interests. The Aggiunta plays the Discourses to Ragion di stato’s Prince.
Although, in his discussion of reputation in the Aggiunta, Botero touches on what Aristotle termed ethos (the character of the speaker) and logos (the material for constructing arguments about reputation), he is chiefly concerned with reputation as the effect of the subject’s interests and passions. Concerning interest, he writes,
perche la riputatione di un Prencipe è posta nell’opinione, e nel concetto, che il popolo ha di lui, la materia, nella quale egli si deve, per far acquisto di un tanto bene, occupare, deve esser tale, a che il popolo vi habbia interesse, e tali sono la pace, e la guerra. (36)
because the reputation of a Prince consists in the opinion and in the conception that the people have of him, the material with which he ought to occupy himself, to acquire so great a good, should be such as the people would have an interest in. Such are peace and war. (233)
Interest is maintained by awesome deeds and a “loftiness of virtue and perfection . . . almost . . . beyond the ordinary limits of human nature” (36, 233). It is maintained, in short, by staging a sublime spectacle of the prince’s greatness or his power. In book 1 of the Aggiunta, Botero defines the man of reputation as “that man whose virtue (virtù), by its not being possible to be penetrated and comprehended at a stroke, would be worthy of being more and more often considered and estimated” (35, 232); and he goes on to describe the subject’s experience of reputation as one of sublime greatness:
Non è cosa, che habbia maggior somiglianza con la riputatione che la meraviglia, ma non è l’istesso. Perche la meraviglia si stende più alle cose speculative, e naturali, che alle humane, e prattiche; ma la riputatione non si allarga fuor delle cose prattiche. Quella nasce perche non s’intende la ragione dell’effetto. Onde l’ecclisse della Luna, e del Sole, la cometa, e le altre cose cosi fatte, paiono meravigliose à chi non ne sa il perche. Mala riputatione procede non perche non si sappia la ragione dell’effetto; ma perche non si comprende facilmente la sua grandezza. (35)
There is nothing that has more resemblance to reputation than wonder; but it is not the same. For wonder extends more to the speculative and natural than the human and practical; but reputation does not extend beyond practical matters. The former occurs because the reason for the effect is not understood. Therefore the eclipse of the moon, and the sun, and the comet, and other such phenomena appear wondrous to him who does not know the reasons for them. But reputation is not the consequence of our not knowing the reason for the effect, but of our not easily understanding its greatness. (232–33; translation modified)
Such lack of easy comprehension provokes an activity of reflecting, of considering and estimating, which itself confers value on its object.39
Whereas book 1 stresses the sublime difficulty of comprehending the prince’s greatness, in book 2 of the Aggiunta Botero emphasizes the sublime effect of the prince’s imitation of divine power:
Prudente sarà colui, che con poche asprezze, & esecutioni, terrà i suditi in officio, e si sarà tener per terribile, imitando in ciò Dio, il quale con tuonare spesse volte cagionna ne gli animi de gli huomini paura, e terrore senza danno; ma accioche i tuoni non perdano il credito, per non far mai colpo, tra mile tuoni saetta qualche volta, e per lo più qualche cima d’albero ò giogo di monte. (42)
That man is prudent who, with little harshness and few executions, holds his subjects to their duties, imitating in this God, Who by thundering frequently causes in the minds of men fear and terror without hurt; but so that his thunderbolts will not lose their credit by never reaching their mark, amid a thousand such bolts, one occasionally strikes, and most of the time the top of a tree or the peak of a mountain. (241; translation modified)
In this spectacular demonstration of power, which causes “fear and terror without hurt,” the prince places his subjects in the position of the Lucretian spectator who looks on shipwrecks without fear. In staging his power, the prince masks its coerciveness as persuasion—as an appeal to the independent judgment of the spectator. The prince’s interest in maintaining his power is aestheticized as the spectator’s interest in a sublime scene, one that includes a few executions.
In book 2 of the Aggiunta, Botero develops his rhetoric of political sublimity, by discussing how “to make without ostentation a showing of one’s own powers” (39, 237). In particular, he discusses how the illusion of greatness may be achieved by understatement in word and action. As in his earlier remarks in Ragion di stato, he recommends secrecy, which keeps the prince’s subjects “in a state of suspense and eager[ly] awaiting his intentions”; in addition, he devotes some attention to the rhetorical ideal of brevitas, which he associates with Tacitus. Botero had also discussed brevity as a rhetorical ideal in his treatise De praedicatore verbi dei. Like other Counter-Reformation writers on sacred eloquence, Botero saw brevity as a sign of divine inspiration and of sublimity—rather than of rhetorical artifice. Yet, Tacitean brevity was also regularly perceived as a difficult style, at odds with “easy comprehension.” Thus, although the recommendation that the prince “avoid . . . amplifications and . . . hyperbole” might seem to conflict with the emphasis on grandeur in book 1 of the Aggiunta, the two share a structure of incommensurability that provokes reflection and admiration in the viewer. As in Ragion di stato, Botero pursues this insight by translating the stylistic ideal of brevity into one of scarcity, arguing, like Shakespeare’s Henry IV, that the prince “should not show himself daily and in all places, but rarely and on occasion. Continuus aspectus verendos magnos homines, ipsa satietate facit” (Continuous sight causes great men, by the very satiety, to be less respected [42, 241]). Just as in Ragion di stato, so here Botero articulates what will become the Hobbesian logic according to which reputation of power is power.
Yet, precisely because the people are “by nature insatiable and hard to please” (37, 234; translation modified)—one might say hard to keep interested—the response of admiration needs to be mixed with that of fear. Describing the passions that subject the people to the prince, Botero insists that “every principate be supported by one of three foundations, that is on love, or fear, or reputation; of which the first two are simple, the third composed of both” (37, 234). He goes on to argue for the superior stability of a rule based on reputation, which is brought about chiefly through “spetie di timore” (images of fear):
perche l’amore è in podestà del suddito: ma il timore dipende da chi si fà temere: e le maniere di rendersi amabile non sono cosi sicure, & universali come quelle di farsi formidabile. D’amore e di timore, si compone la Riputatione, che è migliore dell’uno, e dell’altro: perche contiene quel ch’è di buono, e di utile in ambidue. Conciosia che ella prende dall’amore l’unione dei sudditi col Prencipe, e dal timore la soggettione: perche quello unisce, e questo sottomette. Ma mi domandarà alcuno, quale ha più parte nella riputatione, l’amore o il timore? il timore senza dubio; perche si come il rispetto, e la riverenza, cosi anche la riputatione, sono per la eminenza della virtù, onde procedono, spetie di timore, anzi che d’amore. (38)
For love is in the power of the subjects, but fear depends on him that causes the fear; and the means of keeping himself lovable are not so sure and universal as those of making oneself formidable. From love and fear is composed reputation, which is the better of both; since it contains what is good and useful in each. For it takes from love the union of the subjects with the prince, and from fear, the subjection; because the former unites, and the latter subjects. But someone asks me, “Which has more influence in reputation, love, or fear?” Fear, without doubt. For just as respect and reverence, through the eminence of virtue whence they proceed, are images of fear, rather than love, so also is reputation. (235)
If reputation lies in the one granting reputation rather than in the reputed, the prince can nevertheless minimize his dependence on the people and assure his control by creating images of fear.
Like Machiavelli’s Prince, Botero’s Aggiunta teaches the prince how to consolidate his power by manipulating the realm of appearances; yet, like The Prince, Botero’s rhetorical analysis of the political sublime also exposes the resources of princely power, even as it counsels brevity and concealment. Two examples dramatize this instability of rhetorical politics, its availability to subjects as well as to sovereigns. In book 1, as we have seen, Botero recommends that the prince rely on fear rather than love, and he cautions that princes “chosen with the greatest acclaim” who ignore this teaching will be found “abandoned or dead” (37, 235). He then proceeds to illustrate the power of images of fear with the example of Cid Ruidias:
Hor di quanta importanza sia la riputatione si può conoscere da questo, che anche huomini morti hanno con essa fatto cose, da huomini vivi. Conciosia che si legge di Zid Ruidias, personaggio di altissimo valore nell’arme, che havendolo doppò morte i suoi acconcio sopra un cavallo, con la sola presentia di lui vinsero un grosso essercito di Mori, venuti sopra la Città di Valenza: e Baldrino Panicaglia fù di tanta riputatione presso à Soldati, che anco dopò morte si reggevano quasi per lui; imperoche portavano il suo corpo imbalsamato attorno, e li piantavano il padiglione, come quando era vivo, e con certe sorti esploravano il suo parere, e con esse si governavano. . . . Tacito scrive, che Tiberio già vecchio, conosceva che le cose sue si mantenevano più per beneficio di riputatione, che per fondamento di forze: e Nerva, veggendo che, per esser troppo vecchio, haveva perduta la riputatione, depose l’Imperio. (38)
Now of how great importance is reputation can be known from the fact that even dead men have by this accomplished things with living men. For it is read of Cid Ruidias, a personage of the highest valor in arms, that his men placed him after his death upon a horse, and by his presence alone they beat a great army of the Moors who had come against the city of Valencia. Also Baldrino Panicaglia had such a great reputation with his soldiers that even after his death they were ruled, as it were, by him; since they carried around his embalmed body and erected his pavilion as when he was alive; also by certain lots they sought his wish from him, by which they were governed. . . . [And] Tacitus writes that Tiberius, when aged, realized that his affairs were maintained more by his reputation’s efficacy than on the basis of force. Also Nerva, seeing that by reason of growing old he had lost his reputation, resigned the Empire. (236; translation modified)
This passage demonstrates the subversive implications of the rhetorical and figurative analysis of sovereign power. In the story of Cid Ruidias the distinction between history and poetry collapses, since the dead body of the historical Cid turns into something like the poetic figment of a hero; and, as with the poets Botero discusses in Ragion di stato, so with Cid Ruidias’s men: “Even if what [they] tell us is false, they tell it in such a manner as to rouse a man’s spirits.” Interestingly, once representation is defined in terms of its effects rather than its faithfulness to the truth, a dead prince turns out to be as effective as a live one, the fiction of “presence” as powerful as its reality. Whereas in his earlier discussion of princely power, Botero showed how such a figurative logic worked to consolidate the prince’s power, here he shows the converse—that the fiction of sovereignty can be manipulated by the people as well: the corpse of Cid Ruidias becomes the representative and instrument of his men. Furthermore, fear is no longer the emotion that the subjects experience in the presence of their prince but rather the effect that is created in others by their own rhetorical adroitness.
This reversal of cause and effect, ruler and subject, is reminiscent of Hobbes’s Leviathan, where fear—the effect of the sovereign threat of force—is also the cause of the sovereign’s absolute power. So for Botero fear is both the effect and the cause of reputation. As the example of Cid Ruidias suggests, one implication of this sublime rhetoric of political effects is that sovereignty as well as reputation is a figure of the subject’s passions. Another, related implication is that the ruler who does not represent the interests of his subjects will either resign (as Nerva did) or be found “abandoned or dead”; for a justification of regicide is one logical consequence of rooting the prince’s rule in the approval of his audience, that is, the consent of his subjects.
The second example of the instability of rhetorical politics is the comparison of the prince’s sublime rhetoric with God’s display of thunder and lightning, quoted above. The comparison works both ways: just as the prince needs to be “credited” with reputation by his subjects (33, 231), so “in order that the thunders do not destroy his credit by not ever causing damage, among a thousand thunders, sometimes [God sends] a flash of lightning” (42, 241). We can now see that a further implication of Botero’s analysis of the force of representation is that God himself uses reason of state—or what Botero defines in the Aggiunta on neutrality as “reasoning from interest” (223)—to stage his representation of himself to men. In a world where the exigencies of imitation make even God a rhetorician and Machiavel, the rhetoric of reason of state seems as much a cause of divine sovereignty as an effect. This is the implication of the myth that Botero reports to confirm his remarks on the importance of fear to the creation of reputation:
Hor chiara cose è, che nella riputatione compariscono molto più le proprietà, e gli effetti del timore, che dell’amore: perch’ella hà più forza di ritirare, e di separare, e di dispareggiare, che di conciliare, ò di unire, ò di uguagliare. Di questo parere fù anche Ovidio là, dove havendo vagamente detto, che doppò l’antico Chaos, le cose restarono un gran tempo confuse, senza distintione di maggioranza, or di minoranza: si che li Dei di bassa lega si ponevano spesse volte à sedere presso à Saturno, & à Giove; soggiunge che finalmente l’honore, e la riverenza diedero à ciascuno il grado, & il seggio conveniente. Onde nacque la maestà; presso à cui si assisero il rispetto, e la paura. (38)
Now it is clear that in reputation the properties and effects of fear are more in evidence than love; for reputation has more force to make shrink back, to separate and make unequal, than to conciliate, or to unite, or to equalize. Of this opinion also was Ovid, there where, having charmingly said that after the ancient chaos things remained for a long time confused, without distinction between the majority or the minority, so that the Gods of low degree set themselves many times to be seated near Saturn and near Jove, he adds that finally honor and reverence gave to each his place and suitable seat. Thence is born majesty, near to which respect and fear are seated. (235–36; translation modified)
In this myth, hierarchy and sovereignty, decorum and the “suitable seat,” are the effects rather than the causes of respect and fear. Even divine majesty is begotten from a rhetoric of majesty and reputation.
Not surprisingly, Botero draws back from the subversive consequences of his argument, insisting in the conclusion to book 2 of the Aggiunta that princes should be what they seem: “Reputation in the long run depends on being, not appearing” (45, 245); “majesty without forces is little secure” (45, 246). As in the conclusion to book 1, so here the example of Tiberius appears again, this time to opposite effect:
Onde scrive Tacito, che Artabano disprezzava la vecchiaia di Tiberio, come imbelle, & inetta all’arme: & il medesimo Tiberio nun [sic] hebbe ardire di risentirsi contra le minacie di Getulico, perche considerava, Publicum sibi odium, extremam aetatem, magisque fama, quam vi stare res suas. (45)
Therefore Tacitus writes that Artabanus deprecated the old age of Tiberius as unwarlike and unsuited to arms; and Tiberius himself had not the boldness to resent the threats of Gaetulicus, because he was considering “the public hate of himself and his extreme age, and that his fortunes stood more on fame than strength.” (246)
The effect of these contrary uses of the example of Tiberius is not, however, to secure the prince from the contaminations of rhetoric, but to illustrate that any example is open to a variety of interpretations and uses. As in Ragion di stato proper, the criterion of use (including the use of quotations) is not in the first instance moral virtue but rather interest. But, like Machiavellian virtù, interest is a flexible criterion that may be used not only pro and contra morality, but also pro and contra princely rule.40
As these examples illustrate, and as Botero’s contemporaries recognized, reason of state—reasoning from interest—is threatening because it is not a faithful imitation of reason but—like all imitation—a necessary supplement to it. As Botero writes in book 1, chapter 1, of Ragion di stato:
Stato è un dominio fermo sopra popoli e Ragione di Stato è notizia di mezzi atti a fondare, conservare ed ampliare un dominio così fatto. . . . E sebbene tutto ciò che si fa per le suddette cagioni si dice farsi per Ragione di Stato, nondimeno ciò si dice più di quelle cose che non si possono ridurre a ragione ordinaria e commune. (55)
State is a stable rule over a people and Reason of State is the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved, and extended. . . . And although all that is done to these purposes is said to be done for Reasons of State, yet this is said rather of such actions as cannot be considered in the light of ordinary reason. (3)
The ambiguity of these remarks is exemplary: whereas, on the one hand, reason of state seems to involve ordinary reasoning about the means of founding, preserving, and extending a state, on the other it refers specifically to actions that “cannot be considered in the light of ordinary reason.” Ragion di stato shows that ordinary reason must always be supplemented by a rhetoric of the passions and interests—both the prince’s and the people’s. Once reason of state is defined as a supplement to reason, once rhetoric is recognized as a supplement to the prince’s power, it becomes impossible to distinguish between prudence and astuteness in terms of either means or ends. What distinguishes Botero’s prince from Machiavelli’s is not a truer representation of the virtues or even truer interests but—so Botero claims—a more powerful use of them.
As the preceding pages have illustrated, Counter-Reformation readers of Machiavelli were particularly sensitive to the moral ambiguity of Machiavelli’s recommendations regarding the uses of rhetoric and representation. Yet, in attempting to respond to Machiavelli on his own terms, they dramatized the very ambiguity or equivocation they attempted to preclude. As the German Caspar Klockius was to write a hundred years later, in his Rationis status monstrosa aequivocatio (1685): “Ratio status manet aenigma saeculi, materia subtilitatum; cum Proteo, Thetis; cum Paride, Helena; cum Ulysse, Penelope” (Reason of state remains the enigma of the age, the material of subtleties; with Proteus, it is also Thetis; with Paris, Helen; with Ulysses, Penelope).41 In arguing that the Christian prince is more successful in practice than the Machiavel, Botero and his contemporaries ran the risk of idealistically equating virtue with success; while in admitting that tyrants such as Tiberius were effective in maintaining their power, they seemed to suggest that reason of state might on occasion take the form of a Machiavellian abuse of power. Ironically, the concept of interest—invoked as a way of mediating between intention and effect, morality and politics—involved the same dilemmas. At the same time, it exposed the fiction of a reasoning about politics uncontaminated by rhetoric.
Finally, Counter-Reformation treatises on reason of state illustrate the ways in which rhetoric, as a means of responding to the contingency of “practical matters,” may also aggravate that contingency. They show the difficulty of using rhetoric as an instrument of ideological closure, since rhetoric provides argument on both sides of a question and thus contains its own immanent critique of ideology. To answer Machiavelli on his own terms is to run the risk of making ends as debatable as means. For this reason, many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers preferred to demonize Machiavelli, even as—or precisely because—they took to heart his rhetorical politics.