For anyone interested

'The old Atheistick Cabal': Lucretius, Hobbes, and the Satires of the Earl of Rochester

Atheism in Restoration England: An Introduction

The publication of Thomas Hobbes’ (1588-1679) Leviathan in 1651 irrevocably altered English discourses around sense, God, reason, and mankind. By the 1670s, to be called a ‘Hobbist’ was to be charged with a heretical infraction of the highest order: as a term of abuse, ‘Hobbism […] had become part and parcel of political and religious polemic’ in Restoration England, ‘signifying the unacceptable boundaries of public discourse’ (Parkin 2007: 238). ‘Hobbism’ was widely associated with atheism to an extent approaching synonymy, allowed by the extant polysemy of ‘atheist’: rather than merely signifying ‘one who denies the existence of God’, ‘atheist’ denoted agnostic, deist, libertine, heretic, and outright amoral person (Fisher 2013: 167). The concurrent irruption of Hobbes’ mechanistic epistemology, new translations of Lucretius’ (c.99-55 BCE) De Rerum Natura, and the dynamic mechanistic discourses of the Royal Society into English society prompted vehement efforts by the Anglican Church to locate and denounce atheistic heresies. One of the champions of the anti-Hobbesian cause from within the clergy was Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), whose magnum opus, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), offered a sustained refutation of Hobbes’ thought. The work stands as an exemplum of the Church’s efforts to associate Hobbes with Lucretius, and both with corruptive atheism: in chapter 5, ‘A Confutation of Atheism’, Cudworth declared Hobbes to have inherited his theory of religion as a propagator of fear from ‘the old Atheistick Cabal’, Epicurus and Lucretius (Parkin 2007: 327). When Nathanael Vincent (c.1639–1697), Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge, preached to Charles’ court on 4th October 1674 that honour ‘must be instructed by the Principles of Religion […] from the School of Christ, and not of Plato, Aristotle, or any other, and worse Philosopher’, Hobbes was his ‘worse Philosopher’: Vincent went on to declare that honour ‘must be something more than what it is represented to be by the Leviathan Philosophy’ (Fisher and Jenkinson 2007: 547). For the young John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) in the early 1660s at Wadham, where Royal Society founder John Wilkins (1614-1672) had brought his experimental philosophical club as warden in 1648, the world of atomisms and atheisms was one of attractive intellectual frisson. Just as ‘Hobbist’ became a pejorative surrogate for ‘atheist’, Epicureanism was also becoming yoked to a peculiarly 17th century manifestation of religious scepticism associated with the libertine literati. The Rochesterian canon deftly enshrines this confluence of ideas, while the history of Rochesterian reception enshrines their conflation.

Following the first translation of Lucretius’ didactic poem De Rerum Natura into French, the earliest English translators of Lucretius accompanied their efforts with extensive Christian apologetics, in line with the natural philosophical and scientific treatment of Lucretius conducted by the likes of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and Walter Charleton (1619-1707).[1] John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681) began this project in the 1650s; an anonymous translator completed it in manuscript, and Thomas Creech produced the first publication of an English DRN in 1682 with various prefatory and paratextual denunciations of Epicurean philosophy. The allure of Lucretius’ verse prompted concerns from divines like John Edwards (1637-1716), who wrote ‘by the extraordinary Goodness of the Verse, the Badness of this Epicurean’s Notions is (I fear) unhappily instilled into the Minds of young Gentlemen’ (Edwards 1696: 119). Aware of this allure, Creech chose the epigram I, fuge, sed poteras tutior esse Domi, a pentameter taken from Martial translating as ‘Go then, flee! But you could have been safer at home!’ for his frontispiece; the ostensible purpose of the translation ‘is therefore explicitly rebranded as an educative and apotropaic tool to aid the Christian scholar via careful and controlled exposure to the enemy’ (Butterfield 2015: 63). In France, Gassendi sought to reconcile Epicureanism with Christianity with his voluntarist reading, aligning the collision of atoms with God’s preordination (Lololardo 2007: 158). Across the channel, Charleton made a similar claim in his effort to fold Epicurean atomism into a defence of Christianity: atoms were created ex nihilo, and their motion palpably demanded the ‘Constant Conservation and Moderation’ of God’s providence (Kargon 1964: 187). Their respective urgent efforts to baptise Lucretius point to the close association of Epicurus, Lucretius, and ‘Hobbist’ atheism in Europe. Though, of course, ‘Hobbes departed in many ways from the Epicurean system, notably in eliminating the possibility of Epicurean ataraxia or peace of mind’, throwing ‘great weight on human unhappiness’ in the absence of a humanly imposed State (Norbrook 2016: 225).

Lucretius and Hobbes collide curiously across Rochester’s canon. The ways in which Rochester adopts and modifies their ideas in his libertine lyrics and rancorous satires render his oeuvre a locus of transformations in which he plays with the strands of ‘atheist’ thought at his disposal, to often intractable ends. Unsurprisingly, this intractability was not acknowledged in his day: he earned vicious public denouncement by churchmen on many grounds, some of which he shared with Hobbes - his anticlericalism - and some of which he didn’t - his rakish infamy. Rochester certainly partook in atheistic dabbling in the spirit of free-thinking libertinage: ‘One day at an Atheistical Meeting’, Rochester recalled, ‘I undertook to manage the Cause, and was the principal Disputant against God and Piety, and […] received the applause of the whole company’ (Parsons 1680: 23). However, as he recounted to Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715):

As to the Supream Being, he had always some Impression of one: and professed often to me, That he had never known an entire Atheist, who fully believed there was no God. Yet when he explained his Notion of this Being, it amounted to no more than a vast power, that had none of the Attributes of Goodness or Justice, we ascribe to the Deity. (The Critical Heritage 1972: 53)

Likewise, nowhere did Hobbes deny the existence of God in the manner of ‘an entire Atheist’. Rochester’s libertine inflection of Hobbesian and Epicurean thought stands as a mirror for poetic trends in the Carolean court: he deposited his lyrics and satires in manuscript throughout his wide coterie and, as the textual history of ‘Upon Nothing’ (composed before 1678) shows, a number of his poems were probably the product of courtly collaboration. Where Rochester dons the mask of a bombastic satirical persona, the representation of his personal convictions becomes especially unstable: it is important not to presume the total sincerity of his satirical pessimism. In his libertine love lyrics, too, his tone shifts between reckless abandon and morbid pessimism – with an effect which Harold Love has termed ‘Rochesterian irony’ and Ken Robinson ‘Rochesterian ambivalence’ – which gives the poetry an epistemological uncertainty of its own (1999: xxxviii, 1984: 105). In this light, I will argue that the murky public representation of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes as various instantiations of religious scepticism finds a parallel in the representational instability of Rochester’s canon, in which his debt to Lucretius and Hobbes is one of satirical inflection, inversion, and departure.

‘The Epicurean Hypothesis’: Lucretius, Creech, and Rochester

At some point in the 1670s, Rochester selected the passage 1. 44-49 of DRN to translate. His rendering adheres to the original number of lines and faithfully preserves its meaning (Love 199: 434):

The Gods, by right of Nature, must possess

An Everlasting Age, of Perfect Peace:

Far off remov’d from us, and our Affairs:

Neither approach’d by Dangers, or by Cares:

Rich in themselves, to whom we cannot add:

Not Pleased by Good Deeds; nor provok’d by Bad[2].

This passage pithily captures Lucretius’ notion of divinity: that divine entities take no interest in acting as moral arbiters over their creatures. Both untroubled and untroubling, they are remote because they are wholly fulfilled without enjoying any relation to mankind. That Rochester chose to translate this passage indicates his interest in the notion of God as an iteration of the deus absconditus which he described to Burnet: a necessary creator, but not a judge from whom moral imperatives flow. The passage’s anthropological implications are manifold: if no system of punishment according to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is imposed by the divine, then earthly subjects might take on an equal serenity (ataraxia). As we shall come to see, the intonation which this takes in Rochester’s passage leaves open a non-imitative response to the Gods’ serenity: without a system of divine justice, ambivalent detachment which threatens to beget nihilism regarding earthly ‘deeds’ might follow. Thomas Creech’s translation of the same passage reads:

For whatsoever’s Divine must live in Peace,

In undisturb’d and everlasting Ease:

Not care for Us, from fears and dangers free,

Sufficient to its own Felicity:

Nought here below, Nought in our Power it needs;

Ne’re smiles at good, ne’re frowns at wicked Deeds (1683: 3)

Some close comparison of the translations illuminates Rochester’s more ready departure from the Christian sensibility which shines through in Creech’s translation and in his extensive notes. In Creech’s hypermetrical opening line, the ambiguity of ‘whatsoever’s Divine’ hints towards the inaccessibility of knowledge regarding the nature of God for the pre-Christian Lucretius. The assertions in the proceeding lines about divinity’s remote and careless nature seem somewhat paradoxical in result; this irony was no doubt deliberate, given that Creech’s professed intention was to expose the folly of Lucretian ‘atheism’ to a discerning readership. In the notes to the second edition, he writes disapprovingly of ‘the Epicurean Atheist’ who ‘is the most foolish of all the Opposers of Natural Religion, all his proper Objections being drawn from the absurd notion of his Gods’ (1683: Dedicatory Epistle). Rochester, meanwhile, opts for the word ‘Gods’ in the opening line, giving polytheistic form to the divine and stressing the passage’s pagan flavour. Rochester also emphasises the relational distance between the man and the ‘far off remov’d’ deities: in the fifth line, the clause ‘to whom we cannot add’ depicts a frustrated attempt on the part of man to reach to the divine, whether it is to add to their felicity or to ‘provoke’ their ire with bad deeds. This dimension to the passage is absent in Creech, whose language in the sixth line does not imply any provocation by man, since the ‘deeds’ in question have no subjects. In result, Rochester’s translation carries more overt behavioural implications than that of Creech; without casting doubt on free will itself, it ascribes a nihilistic futility to man’s action when ‘The only predicate that belongs to mortals in the six lines’ is an impossible task: to get a rise out of the Gods (Kramnick 2012: 29). Creech’s sustained refutation of ‘Atheism’ in his capacity as a scholar aiming to be appointed a fellow at All Souls, which this translation helped him achieve, attests to the vehement renunciation of atheism in all its varieties which was jointly undertaken by the Church and the Universities. Whether Hobbist or Epicurean, the two strains of perceived ‘Atheism’ received equal charges of vulgarity.[3] Creech declares his purpose in the preface to the first edition:

‘For I have heard that the best Method to overthrow the Epicurean Hypothesis (I mean as it stands opposite to Religion) is to expose a full system of it to publick view: For Atheism usually enters at the Will, and That debauch’t makes the Understanding as blind as it self: and alltogether unable to look abroad into the World, and sedulously examine the beautiful order, and curious disposition of things’ (1682: Preface).

Creech closely associates ‘Atheism’ with ‘blindness’ to the proof of intelligent design in creation. In a similar vein, he elevates faith over a sense-oriented system reminiscent of Hobbesian mechanism in his 1682 commendatory verse to Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682) which prefaced the poem’s first edition:

But she rejects their Pretense,

And whilst those groveling things depend on Sense;

She mounts on certain wings and flys on high,

And looks upon a dazzling Mystery,

With fixt, and steddy, and an Eagle’s Eye (13-17)

‘Triumphant Faith’ rejects the Roman consistory’s ‘Pretense’; Creech aligns the trappings of the Romish religion with the base ‘Sense’ of ‘Weak Reason’ (5, 13, 14, 7). Creech’s polemic here chimes interestingly with Rochester’s most famous invectives, ‘A Satyre against Reason and Mankind’ (c. 1674-75) and ‘Upon Nothing’. Whilst Creech and Rochester’s anti-Papist convictions were shared, they employ the language of illumination to antithetical ends. Rochester’s narrator attacks ‘Reason’, but not the empirical, sense-guided ‘Weak Reason’ of Creech; rather, he denounces speculative reason which bolstered the ‘natural religion’ Creech defends, mocking those who believe the senses to be base but would ‘contrive/ a sixth, to contradict the other five’ (9). Any ratiocination which looks beyond ‘groveling […] Sense’ he deems a deceptive ignis fatuus leading the credulous believer down ‘fenny boggs and thorny brakes’ (15). The satirical narrator’s caricatured adversarius invokes Creech’s ‘dazzling Mystery’ of Faith with strikingly similar language of incandescence and soaring flight:

‘Reason, by whose aspiring Influence

We take a flight beyond Material sense;

Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce

The flaming limits of the Universe’ (15, 66–69)

Further, the narrator of ‘Upon Nothing’ derides the trope of the ‘blinding’ or dazzling inaccessibility of Christian mysteries of faith:

…Misteries are Bar’d from Laick Eyes

And the devine alone with warrant pryes

Into thy Bosome where thy truth in private Lyes (24-26)

‘The devine’ refers to diviners who claim a special access to the impenetrable religious mysteries whilst the ‘laic eyes’ remain in the shade, leaving Christian ‘mysteries’ of faith exclusively accessible to clergy who assert their own special authority in imparting truth. Burnet recalled Rochester’s disdain for the peddling of mysteries which ‘made way for all the Jugglings of Priests’: believing in mystery ‘he thought no man could do, since it is not in a man’s power to believe that which he cannot comprehend’ (The Critical Heritage 1972: 72). The ‘blind phylosophies’ of ‘A Satyre’ represent the ‘Jugglings of Priests’ (30). Blindness abounds in Rochester’s criticism of Christian dogma and its clerical arbitrators; meanwhile, sense, Hobbes’ superlative precept, is the dubbed the ‘Light of Nature’ (13).

‘Poore slaves to hope and fear’: Sense and Pessimism in Rochester’s Verse

Extolling Epicurean aponia, ‘A Satyre against Reason and Mankind’ heralds sense-oriented lawmaking which ‘helps to enjoy’, decrying the Christian contrivances of virtue and vice which demand that man lives in self-denial: ‘Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,/ Renewing appetites yours would destroy’ (104-105). That animals do not contrive a sixth ‘sense’ is the occasion of their superior harmony with nature; their behaviour, though merciless and unthinking, eschews the fruitless posturing of speculative reason which preys on and exacerbates ‘Base Feare’ (143). However, in Rochester’s poetic treatment of postlapsarian passions in a number of his short love lyrics, the simultaneous sovereignty and frailty of the senses become a source of torment. One sees the poet’s consciousness of Lucretius’s atomised world, untouched by its deus absconditus, suffusing his canon. Beneath the mournful lament of the late love lyric, ‘The Fall’ (date uncertain), there lies a fundamental doubt in the possibility of being a moral agent while enslaved to the postlapsarian passions. The lyric opens:

How blest was the Created state

Of Man and Woman er’e they fell

Compar’d to our unhappy fate:

Wee need not feare another Hell. (1-4)

The religious overtones of the opening line immediately set up a tension with the erotic subject: the word ‘blest’, which also occurs in the final line of ‘The Mistress’ (date uncertain), signals the lack of original sin in Eden and recalls the popular Restoration usage of the concept of ‘bliss’ as ‘perfect erotic consummation on earth’ (Berman 1964: 357). Consummation is only ‘perfect’ in its prelapsarian state, wherein ‘Each member did their wills obey/ Nor could a wish sett pleasure higher’ (7-8). This depiction of prelapsarian bliss alludes to St Augustine’s (354-430) definition of chaste love before mankind’s Fall in Book XIV of City of God: 'Nevertheless, that is no reason why it should seem incredible that the will, which is now obeyed by so many members, might also have been obeyed in the absence of this lust by that one part as well' (2003: 902). By stark contrast, Rochester’s living hell, the fallen man’s ‘unhappy fate’, is one of enslavement to the passions: in equal measure, irrational hope and fear hold man captive. These anticipatory passions are more salient than the experience of pleasure itself: ‘Joyes […]  lessen still as they draw nere/ and none but dull delights endure’ (10, 11-12). Line 9, ‘But we poore slaves to hope and fear’, is reminiscent of line 140 in ‘A Satyre’: ‘wretched man is still in arms for Feare’. The men of ‘A Satyre’ are kept in a perpetual state of war driven by fear; the war of ‘The Fall’ is an interior clash between will and body. In the final stanza, the speaker forsakes Biblical language to invoke the Greek nymph Cloris: 

Then Cloris while I Duly pay

The nobler Tribute of a heart,

Be not you soe severe to say

You Love me for a frayler part. (12-16)

The ‘sovereign position’ of Cloris, an imperfect surrogate for divinity, is somewhat ‘undermined by the fear that she might fail to assign her priorities correctly’ and yield to a second ‘fall’ by loving the speaker only for his sexual capacity, an unstable, ‘frayler part’ of his being (Thormählen 2000: 28- 29). Warren Chernaik has contended that the ‘central paradox of Restoration libertinism’ is that it ‘equates freedom with mastery, reducing all sexual relations to ‘new Conquests’ in an endless war (1995: 214). He identifies a tenet of Rochesterian sexuality in Sir Charles Sedley’s paraphrase of Hobbes in Bellarima (1687): ‘In matter of Women, we are all in the State of Nature, every man's hand against every man. Whatever we pretend’ (1995: 214). However, in ‘The Fall’, there is less a state of war between the sexes than between the frailty of erotic sensuality and the individual will which yields to it. The final line concludes the poem with a tone of tacit anxiety which seems to promise the second ‘Fall’ and, by extension, recurrent ‘falls’ bound up in love’s tumult.

Rochester plainly enumerates his preoccupation with enslavement to the passions, the resistance of which is futile, in ‘Songe of the Earle of Rochesters’ (also known as ‘Against Constancy’ as in David M. Vieth’s 1962 edition) (date uncertain). The speaker opens with a cry against Constancy, ‘the frivolous pretence/ Of Cold Age, narrow Jealouzy,/ Disease, and want of Sense’ (2-4). No relationship between this lyric and Lucretius’ treatment of love and sexual appetite in Book IV of DRN has yet been discussed, though there is a striking resonance with Lucretius’ warnings against idolising erotic love, especially lines IV.1030-387. This injunction follows from ‘love’s false beliefs about the properties of its object’; the gaze of the lover upon the desired, distorted by simulacra and the impetus of ‘antecedent desires and concerns’, leaves him at the mercy of an irrational impulse towards monogamy or ‘constancy’ which must be cured by sexual laxity (Nussbaum 1994: 165). Lucretius’s caution against love contends that ‘till be wise, and prudent to remove […] all incentives unto Love,/ And let thy Age, thy vigorous Youth be thrown/ On All in Common, not reserv’d for One’ (1683: 133)[4]. Rochester echoes this exhortation: ‘old men, and weake’ […] ‘Ought, to bee constant Lovers’, as should the young who ‘in Love excell’ (9, 12, 15). However, the morbid language of the final line – ‘I’le change a Mistress, till I’me dead,/ And Fate change mee to Wormes’ – enacts a typical Rochesterian ironic twist: rather than compounding an earnest critique of obsessive monogamous love in the interest of optimising happiness, he associates his hedonistic surrender to adultery with death (20). In this moment, the ‘kaleidoscopic effect’ of Rochesterian irony which ‘established one tone only to shift suddenly to another and another’ is most salient (Robinson 1984: 93-94). Lucretius’ Epicurean dictum, to ‘take the sweet without the pain’, is overturned: the poem’s final note is more sour than it is ‘sweet’ (1683: 133).

In Rochester’s other surviving translation from DRN, the opening lines from the proem to Book I, he amplifies the poetic figures and doubles the number of lines from the original. Considering the discrepancy in faithfulness between Rochester’s pair of translations, Love posits that ‘The pair may […] have been written as an exercise in competing modes of translation, the strict and the free’ (1999: 434). The proem is a laudatory hymn to Venus, ‘Greate Mother of Eneas and of Love’; ‘fruitfull earth, do’st bless, since ‘tis by thee/ That all things live, which the bright sunn do’es see’ (1, 7-8). Venus blesses and begets all creation simultaneously; the language of flowing and morphing liquid presents her as a kind of divine source from which all things emanate. Unlike the ‘remote’ deities from Book I, Venus is immanently present in the fruitfulness and perpetual motion of the earthly realm. The waves are ‘hills’; light is made of ‘sprinkle’d dropps’; the Sun bears witness to the fruits of Venus’ creation (6, 3). Jim Owen has recently read into the passage that ‘Rochester’s vivid understanding of the way that atoms form the core of all existence: those ships that traverse the sea were once groves of forests on the hills of Scotland, nurtured by the waters from the sky’ (2015: 346). However, as Stephen Harrison notes, Lucretius’ proem functions not as a tenet of his philosophical order of nature, in which his Roman context transmutes certain elements of Epicurean Hellenism, but as a poetic invocation in which ‘Venus is a symbolic instantiation of the poem’s capacity to deliver Epicurean voluptas (pleasure) in both form and content’ (2016: 42). As such, it is an overreach to attribute a laudation of atomised Nature to Rochester based on his selection of these lines to translate; whilst it evinces his poetic interest in Lucretius, it cannot tell us much about his positive metaphysical convictions. In fact, of Rochester’s surviving classical translations, it is anomalous in its beatific tone. By February 1679, Rochester had translated a passage from Act II of Seneca’s tragedy, Troades, beginning with the totalising mortalist maxim uttered by the Chorus: ‘After Death nothing is, and nothing Death’ (1). A castigation of the ‘senseless Stories, idle Tales,/ Dreams, Whimsies, and no more’ of heaven and hell, the passage exhorts its audience to forsake thought of the afterlife and overcome their passions, matching the impartiality of Death itself (17-18). Rochester invokes Seneca’s ‘Whimsies’ which hold believers in thrall in ‘A Satyre’: ‘the misguided follower climbs with pain/ Mountains of whimseys heapt in his own brain’ (16-17). Rather than emanating from the deity of Love herself and existing ‘fruitfully’, matter is begotten of the corpses of men in an eternal cycle where Death is the cornerstone of existence:

After this Life they shall be hurl’d;

Dead we become the Lumber of the World:

And to that Mass of Matter shall be swept,

Where things destroy’d, with things unborn are kept.

Devouring Time swallows us whole;

Impartial Death confounds Body and Soul. (7-12)

Rochester notably employs the rhyme ‘world’ and ‘hurl’d’ in his translation addressing Venus: ‘Whither vast regions of that liquid world/ Where groves of shipps on watry hill’s are hurl’d’, and in ‘A Satyre’: ‘All this with Indignation have I hurl’d/ At the pretending part of the proud World’ (5-6, 174-175). This sustained association between the world – by extension, with natural philosophical attempts to understand it – and the violent verb ‘hurl’d’ reflects, in a microcosm, the turbulent poetics with which Rochester addressed these philosophies. With particular force in the satires, his poetic ‘world’ vacillates between wholesale endorsements of hedonism and bitter expressions of post-orgasmic disgust, both within and across his verses. Here, Graham Greene’s slick assertion that ‘Hobbes and his followers, who did not believe in any final judgement, were afraid of the vast nullity of death’ rings true (1988: 164). In a manner hardly consistent with Epicurean ataraxia, Rochester lifted Epicurus, through Lucretius’ lens, into a context of debauchery and tumultuous sexual enterprise which ended with his early death at the mercy of venereal disease, ‘drained by ulcers leaving little but skin and bone’ (1988: 180).

‘Greate Negative’: Inversion and Negation in Rochester’s Encomium

Clothed in the irreverent mask of the satirist, Rochester plays around with the epistemological implications of false illumination by clergymen – the ‘dazzling Mystery’ of Creech’s ‘Triumphant Faith’ – and guiding Sense, the ‘light of Nature’. A reader of Hobbes, he was likely aware of Hobbes’ elevation of the senses in spite of their fundamental limitations: for Hobbes, sound ratiocination relies on the senses, but full knowledge remains unattainable through them. In turn, Rochester’s satires point towards the inaccessibility of truth. Hobbes’ influence on Rochester’s thought is most explicit in ‘Upon Nothing’and ‘A Satyre’, in which the narrator rancorously denounces the authoritative measures of Crown and Church as viable methods for securing Hobbes’ civil peace. Where Rochester’s playful poetics is most distinctly libertin, following the tradition of free-thinking libertinage pioneered by Jacques de Barreaux (1599-1673) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711), his positive convictions become increasingly difficult to pin down. In tandem, the satires make clear that Rochester considers no system of theoretical reasoning to be beyond scope for satire, levying paradoxes against the Christians of his day whilst chiming with and diverging from the nuances of Hobbes’s epistemology and moral philosophy. Hobbes himself defined the ‘paradox’ in Questions of Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656): ‘The Bishop speaks often of Paradoxes with such scorn or detestation, that a simple Reader would take a Paradox […] for Felony […] whereas perhaps a Judicious Reader knows […] that a Paradox is an opinion not yet generally received’ (2016: 629). Rochester’s paradoxes stand as some of the most vicious and ironic paradoxes of his time, catalysing his usual flamboyant profanity with clever subversion in the spirit of the satirical persona who demonstrates the same pride as he attacks. It is this aspect of his pessimistic poetics which resists determinations of sincerity.

Rochester’s preoccupation with nihils finds its zenith in his epigrammatic satire ‘Upon Nothing’. The satire is remarkable for its deft mimesis of the very absurdity which it attacks, but less so for its formal construction: composing encomiums to ‘Nothing’ was a popular practice in the 17th century which was animated, in large part, by Jean Passerat’s (1534-1602) sensational poem in 70 hexameters, De nihilo (1582). In his recent work on Passerat’s nihil, Paul White has noted the affinity of the paradox of concretising ‘Nothing’ and the early modern poetic paradigm of serio ludere. This observation is apt to be applied to a view of Rochester’s satires, in which his irreverent placement of lofty ideas pertaining to creation, the afterlife, and institutional authority appear in a lurid sequence of caricatures, enshrining the notion that ‘literary games’ could be ‘serious business’ (2020: 238). ‘Upon Nothing’ lampoons the philosophising of statesmen and clergymen through the absurd prism of its central conceit: the attribution of ‘thingness’ to ‘Nothing’, which, by extension, produces a triumphant mockery of abstraction itself. Each triplet ends on a hexameter to bombastic effect, splicing the poem into discrete units which create an effect of cumulative mockery. Dryden was a proponent of this ‘hexametrical majesty’, employing the alexandrine in his translation of the Aeneid and hailing its ability to confine the sense into three lines which ‘would languish if it were lengthened into four’ (Quentin 2000: 91). The opening triplet is an arresting subversion of ex nihilo cosmogony; Rochester does not halt at attributing nominal and describable being to non-being, but vexes the paradox by rendering ‘Nothing’ an atypical progenitor, an ‘elder brother’:

Nothinge, thou elder brother, even to shade,

Thou had’st a beinge ere the world was made

And (well fixt) art alone of endinge not afrayd (1-3)

The proceeding triplets account for the creation of life and the elements: ‘Something, the Generall attribute of all/ Sever’d from thee’ and ‘snatch’d men, Beasts, birds, fyre, water, Aire, and land’ from Nothing’s hand (7-8, 12). The verse is pregnant with oxymora: ‘thy fruitefull Emptinesses hand’ unwillingly begets creation, the mortal subjects of which are driven back into ‘thy hungry woombe’ by Time (11, 21). These lexical antitheses bolster the amplification of Hobbes’ discussion of absurdity in Leviathan in the first seven stanzas: Hobbes relegates ‘the priviledge of absurdity’ to ‘man onely’:

And of men, those are of all most subject to it, that professe Philosophy. For it is most true that Cicero sayth of them somewhere; that there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers. And the reason is manifest. For there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the Definitions, or Explications of the names they are to use (I.V: 35).

Hobbes decries the process of ratiocination using concepts whose definitions have not been ‘settled’ and which are often expressed in synonymy; instead, only phenomena with settled definitions and clear boundaries such as Time, Place, Matter, and Form can be employed in sound philosophy (I.V: 35). Rochester deals in such abstractions but renders them absurd: ‘Nothing’ is a ‘boundless’ entity into which the ‘Leagues’ of man and beast return after death and the futile promises of kings ‘flow swiftly’ and find their eternal end – though vacuum-like, Nothing contains all, so cannot be void (9, 16, 51). Rochester’s irreverence towards the concrete characteristics of these concepts is anathema to Hobbes’ methodological precept which required that the philosopher painstakingly parse the bounds of named things before reaching conclusions. Rochester’s Something might as well signify nothing whilst Nothing certainly is, in the schema of the poem, something. In endowing ‘Nothing’ with a ‘local habitation and a name’, Rochester takes advantage of the ‘preserve of the lunatic […] and the poet’: to resist the Parmenidean exhortation which ‘warns us in such strenuous terms of the dangers of the path of ‘is not’, for ‘you could not know what is not […] nor indicate it’ (Quentin 2000: 90).

Though the satire’s narrative exposition clearly lampoons Christian cosmogony, the exact nature of the events is, as Rochesterian reception shows, equivocal. The third triplet, in which Something is ‘sever’d’ from Nothing before begetting creation, is the locus of some critical dispute: Dustin H. Griffin has asserted that an ‘incestuous union’ occurs between the separated entities, following which ‘Matter is born of Nothing but frustrates Nothing’s desire for incestuous union […] joining in rebellion against Nothing with Form, Light, Time, and Place’ (1973: 270). Marianne Thormählen has pointed out that ‘there is no need to envisage any incestuous unions’ and notes instead that ‘Something is dissolved in Nothing when severed from it’, bringing about fusion through separation (1993: 143). The latter argument is a more convincing interpretation in the light of the satire’s consistent negation of the negative itself. An equally striking subversion occurs in the poem’s only mention of light. Rochester dubs it ‘Rebell Light’, rendered a hyphenated compound in the 1875 reprint of Merry Drollery Compleat, which has been noted as an unmistakeable riff on Abraham Cowley’s (1618-1667) ‘Hymn to Light’: Cowley heralds Light as the banisher of vice and the mediator through whom ‘Heav’n to earth make[s] love’ (Griffin 1973: 270-272). There is no such pristine lovemaking in Rochester. A possible, as yet unremarked, dimension to the curious image of line 9, wherein Something ‘Into thy boundless self must undistinguish’d fall’, exhibits the fraught sexual experience of near-simultaneous fusion and revolt which concerns many Rochesterian love lyrics. The dissolution of Something back into its progenitor before begetting Matter in line 13, ‘the wickedest ofspringe’, seems to reverse the contingent order of climax and impotence which the narrator of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ laments. This passage includes the famous conceit of dissolution as orgasm as ‘In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’re’, until ‘Succeeding shame does more success prevent/ And Rage at last Confirms me Impotent’ (15, 29-30). Generativity in ‘Upon Nothing’ takes on an up-ended character which shares the contra naturam flavour of the sexual act, fruitful up to orgasm and fruitless beyond that, delineated in ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’. Rebellion is creation’s cornerstone: even Body is the ‘foe of Nothing, as bodies are the result of Form and Matter coming together after Matter’s escape’ (Thormählen 1993: 143). Where critics have neglected to investigate the presence of Hobbes in this satire is with regard to ‘Body thy foe’ (17). In Leviathan, Hobbes’s definition of Body – the target of Cudworth’s aforementioned condemnation – is the coequal of Rochester’s ‘Somethinge, the Generall attribute of all’; both have their binary opposition in Nothing:

every part of the Universe, is Body; and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it, is Nothing, and consequently no where. Nor does it follow from hence, that Spirits are nothing: for they have dimensions, and are therefore really Bodies; though that name in common Speech be given to such Bodies onely (4. 46: 524-525)[5].

Hobbes’ meditation on language’s propensity to give misleading titles to things which are fundamentally ‘Body’, though they may immediately seem contrary to it as in the case of ‘Spirits’, provides an unexplored paradigm to Rochester’s satirical verse. If concepts can appear to be downstream of words, even if they are not, as Hobbes would have it, then the playful poetic treatment of these words places such concepts (and, by extension, their exponents) at the mercy of the poet’s wit. Thus, with ‘impish delight’ would Rochester produce satires both rancorous and highly pleasing for the Carolean court, fusing wit and malice ‘with such apt words, that Men were tempted to be pleased with them’, as recounted by Burnet (Pinto 1962: 73).

The seventh stanza closes the poem’s satirical creation narrative and transitionally gives way to the satire’s onslaught against the abuses of foolish priests by asserting the mortality of the soul: time, ‘bribe’d by thee destroyes their short liv’d Raigne/ And to thy hungry woombe drives backe thy slaves againe’ (20-21). The clerics ‘Reverend shapes and forms devise’ and don buffoonish ‘Lawne Sleeves and furs and gownes’ to disguise their native ignorance with the cloth of divine illumination (44-45). Fashioning ‘Gods everlasting fiery Jayls’ alongside vain ‘Hopes of Heaven’, the diviners are the ‘Rogues’ of Seneca’s Troades (14, 4, 15). The diviners who ‘wicked wisely pray’ in line 27 chime with Hobbes’ vehement anticlerical portrayal of clerics fabricating falsehoods for worldly gain in Leviathan:

But evil men under pretext that God can do any thing, are so bold as to say any thing when it serves their turn, though they think it untrue; It is the part of a wise man, to believe them no further (1.2: 17).

For Rochester, the trenchant doctrine of an afterlife of bifurcated salvation and damnation, with its grounding in the immortality of the human soul, was a significant source of his anticlericalism. This becomes more developed in ‘A Satyre’, whilst his translation from the Troades augments the animadversions against the Christian view of the afterlife, the ‘Whimsies’ of heaven and hell, across his canon. Rochester’s engagement with scepticism regarding the orthodox Christian view of the afterlife was enmeshed in a context of dynamic late 17th century discourses around hell. English Platonists such as Henry More (1614-1687) and after him the more radical Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), accompanied by continental movements such as the theodicy of Leibniz (1646-1716), alike sought to mitigate, and in some cases reject, the scriptural view of hell. Burnet’s reformatory hell, in which conflagration is not eternal, shares an unlikely kinship with Leibniz’s view of a dynamic afterlife in which souls can be refined: each reject the orthodox position on the static nature of eternal punishment in hell[6]. Rochester naturally decries the vindictive fancy of eternal damnation without explicit reference to esoteric private doctrines which were circulating at the time, but nevertheless reflects a contemporaneous moment of fractious debate. He also seems to hark back to Lucretius: in Book I of DRN, Lucretius disdains the ‘furious Threats’ of ‘grave and holy Cheats’ who peddle harrowing lies about the afterlife, reiterating the injunction to be serene in un-knowledge since ‘we know not yet, how out Soul is produc’d’ (1683: 114). However, Rochester does not side with Lucretius in the wider satirical schema: his rejection of creatio ex nihilo doesn’t favour the Lucretian alternative expressed so lucidly in I.15. Instead, his blatant subversion and liberal usage of words pertaining to creation doctrine more broadly – words which dissolve into the ‘greate united what’ of the satirical topos – denigrate the project of theoretical reasoning as a whole (6).

Unmistakably denouncing Christian doctrine as an ignis fatuus as well as mocking the certainty of Lucretius’ ex nihilo nihil fit assertion, Rochester uses the ludic tradition of encomiums to ‘Nothing’ to voice a scepticism which negates doctrines of creation spanning centuries without having to offer a serious rebuttal. By contrast, Richard Crashaw’s (1613-1649) translation of the Latin epigram ‘Steps to the Temple’ reaffirms a creatio ex nihilo doctrine with reference to Christ’s silence in Matthew 27: 12:

O Mighty Nothing! unto thee,

Nothing, wee owe all things that bee.

God spake once when hee all things made,

He sav’d all when he Nothing said.

The world was made of Nothing then;

‘Tis made by Nothyng now againe. (1927: 91)

At the junction of these encomiums, David Farley-Hills’ suggestion that Rochester can be viewed as one of the first poets of the absurd rings true (1983: 164). Whilst Crashaw’s nihil reasserts God’s omnipotence by attributing the world’s redemption to Christ’s wordless power, Rochester’s encomium mocks the foolishness of Christian diviners who claim access to divine truth when no such truth is available: this he asserts by framing truth-seeking through ratiocination as a total absurdity.

Rochester’s anticlericalism flows swiftly into a wholesale criticism of the vain posturing of statesmen, reaching a crescendo in the final two stanzas. The penultimate stanza reads:

French truth, Duch Prowesse, Brittish pollicy

Hibernian Learninge, Scotch Civility,

Spaniards dispach, Danes witt are mainely seene in thee; (46-48)

Reducing the diverse boasts of respective nations to Nothing, the satire now demands that Nothing take on an implication beyond non-entity – futility and vacuity – whilst retaining its deified status. The climactic final stanza places ‘Kings promisses’ adjacent to ‘whoores vowes’: equally vacuous, they ‘Flow swiftly into thee and in thee ever end’ (50, 51). The negative matrix of the poem naturally accompanies this comprehensive denouncement of forms of governance and authority which stands against Hobbes’ edict that ‘to prudent men, we commit the government of our selves’ (1. 10: 67). Indeed, Hobbes’ famous criticism of ‘priestcraft’ undergirded his belief that the power of the clergy should be harnessed by means of subordination to the sovereign, rather than done away with altogether (Parkin 2007: 321). Here as in ‘A Satyre’, Rochester’s agreement with Hobbes’ anti-clericalism is perpendicular to his pessimistic clash with Hobbes’ political theory.

Discussions of ‘Upon Nothing’ would benefit from explicating ‘the name they are to use’: that of Rochester himself. Though it is unclear whether Rochester collaborated with his coterie in authoring the satire (fellow court wits like Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701) and Charles Sackville (1653-1706) may be viable candidates), such a scenario remains possible and aids an explanation of the poem’s formal properties. Offering ‘every conceivable kind of editorial problem’, the satire’s textual tradition is defined by progressive corruption: the intricacy of its metre coupled with its syntactically confounding paradoxes were by no means easy for copyists to faithfully follow (Love 1999: 544). Though he nods to T. L. Pebworth’s concept of performative coterie writing as a possible theory for the satire’s composition, Love defends its assumed monogenetic origin on unexplained grounds. Across manuscripts, lines 12 and 42 are consistently metrically defective, replacing the usual hexameter with pentameter, which Love supposes is the idiosyncratic mark of a single author (1999: 543). However, to read so much into these elusive missing feet seems circumspect; it remains possible that, even if Rochester collaborated with others, he – or another court wit – was responsible for both of these metrical decisions. Vieth, in the notes to The Complete Poems (1962) and Attribution in Restoration Poetry (1963), makes no mention of the possible scenario that Rochester issued a series of incomplete transcripts to various friends in Whitehall as an exercise in collaborative composition. The discrete, triplet-bound paradoxes appear to compete with one another in their wit and subversion; coupled with the absent need for the appearance of serious ethical commentary, the possibility of polygenetic origin appears more open than Love admits. If ‘Upon Nothing’ is a product of Rochester ‘circulating manuscript copies’ with ‘impish delight’ and inviting competitive collaboration, the thematic disjunct between the first seven stanzas and the final ten may be evidence of such collaboration (Pinto 1962: 73). The triplets ending in hexameter, praised by Dryden for their containment of conceits, support the thesis that the poem was a coterie effort. That this satire may be an instance of experimentation in paradox between jousting court wits further stresses the dangerous task of ascribing sincerity or a case for consistency in Rochester’s personal philosophy, as Reba Wilcoxon does. In virtually the same breath as Wilcoxon acknowledges the ‘weight of the tradition of paradox’ which ‘makes it difficult to certify what part of the initial argument Rochester believes’, she attempts to make a case for his moral consistency by distinguishing epistemology from ethics: ‘the ethical dimension is separate from the epistemological and metaphysical [which] is not relativistic. There is a right way of human behaviour, which ‘ought’ to be’ (1975: 189). The imputation of a positive ‘right way’ into the latter half of the poem, a compulsion to the ‘ought’, neglects the purely reactionary and ironically prideful nature of the caricatures: any ‘ethical’ dimension is dissolved into the great negation of the satire. Further to this rich textual consideration, deciphering the earnest moral position of the poet through the poem is a task rendered totally precarious by the cultivation of bombastic personae which inhered in early modern satire. The ubiquity of normative invocations of ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’, ‘God’ and the ‘Devil’ in his poetic language, as we shall come to see, reinforces that the persona adopted in ‘Upon Nothing’ goes even further to efface the poet’s biographical presence than his anonymous existence in manuscript.

‘Voyd of all rest’: A Railing ‘Satyre’

Preaching before the King on 24th February 1674, the Reverend Edward Stillingfleet launched an attack against satirical invectives against reason, defending reason as the chief impetus for the vindication of natural religion:

And because it is impossible to defend their extravagant courses by Reason, the only way left for them is to make Satyrical Invectives against Reason; as though it were the most uncertain, foolish and (I had almost said) unreasonable thing in the World: but it is a pity such had not their wish, to have been Beasts rather than Men (quoted in Paulson 1971: 658).

Kristoffer Paulson has convincingly argued the case that Stillingfleet was making reference to lines 1-173 of Rochester’s ‘A Satyre’, making an example of the known profligate sinner as anathema to Christian virtue. Paulson’s thesis that Rochester was likely in the audience and thereafter caricatured Stillingfleet in the lines belonging to the adversarius is an unproven conjecture which Vieth has categorically dismissed (Paulson 1971: 657; Vieth 1984: 77). Paulson’s article nevertheless paints a lively and concrete picture of the ‘formal band and beard’ to which Rochester reacted so vehemently in his most infamously misanthropic satire (46).

In ‘A Satyre’, with remarkable deftness, Rochester weaves together the bombastic central theriophilic paradox with libertine platitudes regarding the fulfilment of the ‘appetites’, which both resonate with and mutate the Epicurean line, and makes similarly wrangling reference to Hobbesian thought. Unlike ‘Upon Nothing’, it is a discursive satire between the railing narrator and his adversarius. Accordingly, reception of the satire has been dominated by attempts to decipher a systematic approach to both reason and mankind, finding in the poem various degrees of consonance with Hobbesian mechanism and Epicurean hedonism. Pinto remarks that Rochester, having ‘started as a wholehearted disciple of Thomas Hobbes’, shows himself to move towards a ‘bitterly ironic commentary on the mechanistic conception of humanity which was the logical outcome of the new science’ (Pinto 1962: 374). Vieth offers a more synchronic reading: the poem is split between two divisions, the metaphysical ‘Hobbesian’ and the nihilistic ‘libertine’, which are fundamentally irreconcilable (1972: 124). Whilst Pinto appreciates the subtle similitudes and discrepancies between Hobbes and the primary narrator of ‘A Satyre’, Rochester nowhere appears to be a ‘wholehearted disciple’, even in his view of the primacy of the senses. Neither does the narrator’s discourse on animal pleasure as preferable to human fear render the poet entirely split between two opposing sides: if the opening theriophilic paradox is read as being equally as pessimistic as the later lines on mankind, ‘victimised by his depraved nature’ who ‘cannot rise to [animals’] moral level’, and unfettered sensuality is never a viable counterpoint to man’s unhappiness, the poem is comprehensible in its unerring character of pessimism (1972: 127). 

The opening paradox of ‘A Satyre’ announces the narrator’s desire to be ‘any thing but that vain Animal/ Who is so proud of being Rational’ (6-7). Rochester here draws on ‘Cynic and Stoic ideas of animal oneness with nature […] contrasted to the idea that humankind had become divorced from nature, that human reason had somehow become 'unnatural’’, while accusing man of the cardinal vice, pride (Gill 1988: 32). Rochester is known to have enjoyed this paradox in his personal correspondences, writing in a letter to Henry Savile (1642-1687): ‘most human Affairs are carried on at the same nonsensical rate, which makes me (who am grown Superstitious) think it a Fault to laugh at the Monkey we have here, when I compare his Condition with Mankind’ (1941: 60). The ensuing lines hold that ‘Reason’ is ‘an Ignis fatuus’ which leaves ‘Light of Nature, sense, behind’ and that the prideful man deems the senses ‘too gross’, so ‘hee’ll contrive/ A sixth to contradict the other five’ (12, 13, 8-9). Here, the narrator is both ‘Hobbist’ and not. Hobbes defends the primacy of the senses at the outset of Leviathan: ‘there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense’ (1.1: 3). However, he insists that sensible qualities in objects are merely the appearance of such qualities: ‘apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming’ (1.1: 12). Thus, ‘Man can know the world only through experience; yet as an experiencing creature he is isolated from the world’; always living in un-knowledge, he must yield to State authority in order to live in peace and security (Blits 1989: 421). Rochester’s narrator doesn’t dwell on the inherently unilluminable nature of the world, but rather aims his diagnosis of limited knowledge towards the ‘dazled sight’ of the misled philosopher, one who enacts theoretical reasoning and finally meets ‘Eternal night’ in death (23, 24).

After the satirist decries Reason as ‘an ignis fatuus of the mind’, the following lines amplify the appellation: Reason is a dwindling light leading the erroneous Christian through ‘fenny boggs’ (12, 15). Here, Rochester likely subverts contemporary Anglican arguments for Reason as the ‘human compass’, named so both in Cowley’s poem ‘Reason’ (1656) and Samuel Butler’s (1613-1680) prose discourse on ‘Reason’ (Griffin 1973: 211). Echoing line 24 of ‘Upon Nothing’ – ‘mysteries are bar’d from laic eyes’ – the narrator attacks the dishonesty of fabricated Christian mysteries of faith:

From Patricks Pilgrime, Sibbs Soliloquies;

And tis this very Reason I despise.

This supernatural Gift, that makes a mite

Think hee’s the Image of the Infinite;

Comparing his short life, voyd of all rest,

To the Eternall, and the ever blest. (73-79)

As in ‘Upon Nothing’ and the translation from the Troades, Rochester attacks the certitude of Latitudinarian preachers – here he names Puritan theologian Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) – in their doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Sibbes notably extolled the superiority of vision over the remaining senses and invoked the ‘pure light’ of sanctified reason, as opposed to carnal reason, in a number of discourses including Beames of Divine Light, a Description of Christ in Three Sermons, and Bowels Opened (both 1639). Griffin has suggested that, as a child, Rochester was ‘force-fed’ Sibbes’ sermons by his ‘pious Puritan mother, and carried with him a distasteful memory’ of his writings (1973: 195). Rather than making reference to the threat of hell, here his paradox is somewhat more ridiculous: he conflates the immortality of the human soul with godliness. There is certainly no echo of Lucretius’ doctrine of the joint mortality of Soul and Mind, who ‘make up one single Nature closely join’d’, in Book III of DRN (1683: 73). In such moments, the satirist’s deliberately obtuse argumentation is most glaring, and its function as a vehicle for any serious debate least probable; this moment thus serves as a mockery of the very debate surrounding the human soul itself. This was a debate which saw Anglican treatises vehemently respond to Hobbes and attempt either to denounce Epicurus, as Creech did in his translation of Lucretius, or to welcome some aspects of Epicurus while staunchly defending a Christian pneumatology. Walter Charleton notably wrote on The Immortality of the Human Soul, Demonstrated by the Light of Nature (1657), whose title alone highlights that Rochester’s association of the ‘Light of Nature’ with sense data was a nominal paradox. Henry More also penned a discourse On the Immortality of the Soul (1659) in reaction to Hobbes. Rochester’s satirist here objects to a crucial theological debate of the Restoration period which his adversarius reaffirms: ‘An Everlasting Soul has freely given/ Whom his Creator took such care to make/ That from himself he did the Image take’ (61-63). Alluding to Genesis 1: 26-7, the adversarius defends a point of scripture which Rochester is known to have doubted, reporting to Burnet that ‘the first three Chapters of Genesis he thought could not be true, unless they were Parables’ (The Critical Heritage 1972: 66).

Fear of hell, perpetuated by churchmen, is merely one iteration of mankind’s ‘Base Feare’ from which the animal kingdom is spared (141). The narrator identifies the crippling fear which holds mankind in a state of permanent enmity as an irrational force which is far removed from self-interest and thus comparatively unfavourable to the competitive but instinct-governed animal kingdom:

Which is the Basest Creature, Man or Beast.

Birds feed on birds, Beasts on each other prey,

But savage Man alone does man betray:

Prest by necessity they kill for food,

Man undoes Man to do himself no good. (128-132)

Animal predation is ‘through Necessity’; the perpetual betrayal and war of man is through ‘Wantonness’ (138). Here, the narrator moves into Hobbesian territory by declaring the ubiquity of fear, repeating the noun in four succeeding lines:

Whilst wretched man is still in arms for Feare:

For feare he Arms, and is of arms afraid,

By fear to fear successively betray’d.

Base Feare! The source whence his best passion came,

His boasted Honour, and his dear bought Fame (140-144)

This climactic passage combines the narrator’s seemingly Epicurean credo – to live according to self-interest alone – with his diagnosis of society as driven by Hobbes’ fear. Where Hobbes sees fear as a primary motivation for human action which can, and should, be usefully directed by the authority of the ideal State, the satirist pessimistically deplores the very nature of fear and overrides any hope in existing with it. Any action driven by fear is ‘sheer hypocrisy; if people lived according to their instincts […] a mass of public virtue’, including deferential acts, ‘would vanish: an outcome which Hobbes would hardly regard as favourable’ (Thormählen 1993: 179). Where Hobbes sees the possibility for statesmen and clergy to properly direct man’s fear into civility, Rochester sees clergymen and statesmen, the ‘formal band and beard’, as perpetrators of metaphysical blindness; his offer to ‘Recant my Paradox to them’ in the final lines, should the adversarius find proof of a cleric who is not hypocritical, compounds his insistence that no such man can exist (221). Thus, he clashes with Hobbes and appears to align with Epicurus. Further, in lines 98-105, rationality is couched in terms of pursuing physical pleasures to satisfy the appetites without consideration for anything which would hinder this end:

I own right reason, which I would obey;

That Reason which distinguishes by Sense,

And Gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence:

That bounds Desires with a reforming Will,

To keep them more in vigour, not to kill.

Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,

Renewing appetites yours would destroy. (98-105)

These lines at first appear to chime with Hobbes on the supremacy of ‘distinguishing by Sense’, but in distinguishing between a pleasing reason, ‘right reason’, and a hindering reason, the narrator makes a subtle departure once again. For Hobbes, reason is functionally the same as right reason: ‘Reason it-selfe is alwayes Right Reason’ (1.5: 33). The narrator also echoes Hobbes’ dichotomy of ‘appetite’ and ‘aversion’ to describe ‘motions’ which are apt to be labelled good or evil according to their relation to us (1.4: 31). Whilst this passage launches the satire into an exposition of the classical Epicurean assertion that ‘Our sphere of Action is Lifes happiness’, the poem proceeds into a polemical defence of knavery and a depiction of hedonism contrary to the idyllic state of peace laid out in Book II of DRN (96). The narrator reaches the apex of his zealous pessimism by identifying the baseness of even the most rational human action, self-interest: ‘And Honesty’s against all common sense;/ Men must be Knaves, tis in their own defence’ (159-160). Thomas H. Fujimara’s comment enshrines the same reductionism of contemporary Anglican reception of ‘A Satyre’, epitomised in Stillingfleet’s answer, by aligning this form of negative hedonism with both Epicurus and Hobbes: ‘If we decry these ideas as hedonistic, we might remember that they are no more sensual than the views of Epicurus or of Hobbes’ (1958: 579). To the contrary of Fujimara’s gloss, the narrator’s conclusions do not resemble Epicurean hedonism, speaking nothing to the tranquillity of living in harmony with nature’s laws as in Book II of DRN, especially lines 29-33. Neither does he advance a political ethic or imagine a state of civil peace in which the individual’s ‘reforming Will’ is bent to the higher wisdom of a prudent sovereign. Rochester’s turbulent relationship with Charles II, which saw him compose invectives like ‘In the Isle of Brittain’ (1673), adds an edge of biting actuality to the narrator’s rejection of sovereign rule. Rochester delivered ‘In the Isle of Brittain’ at Whitehall at the 1673 Christmas festivities which resulted in his temporary exile until February, perhaps a lenient measure given the plain parrhesia of the final lines which state, unclothed in arcane paradox, that ‘I hate all Monarchs and the Thrones that they sitt on/ From the Hector of France to th’ Cully of greate Brittaine’ (32-34).

In ‘A Satyre’, Rochester’s narrator turns to a pessimistic surrender to the inevitable enmity guiding man’s most rational action, concluding that to be ‘a Knave of the first rate’ is most sensical (173). Cowley lamented this confluence of enmity and knavery in his essay ‘Of Liberty’ (1668): ‘That is the nature of Ambition […] to make men Lyers and Cheaters […] to cut all frindships and enmities to the measure of their own Interest’ (1906: 378). Rochester, likely familiar with Cowley’s discourse, renders Ambition the only answer to the ubiquity of fear.[7] Again, where Hobbes appears to be integrated into the satire, his relation to the satirist is one of discrepancy. Contemporary reception of ‘A Satyre’ by no means appreciated this discrepancy. Nicholas Fisher has brought Thomas Lessey’s (1649/50-1724) ‘A Satyr, In Answer to the Satyr against Man’, first published in a miscellany entitled Poetical Recreations (1688), to attention: Lessey’s target is both Rochester and ‘men of sence’, especially Hobbes (2006: 200). Hobbes becomes the arch-villain of the ‘Answer’: ‘wretched Hobbes... Hell's great agent Hobs...The Devills Apostle' (11. 86, 152, 154) as well as his follower, amongst whom Lessey clearly includes Rochester (2006: 200). Lessey identifies Hobbes in Rochester’s lines, responding with such energetic vitriol to ‘Hobbism’ in his answer to Rochester’s satire that the two men become practically sublimated into one.

A Hobbesian reply to the satirist’s final declaration that ‘man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast’ in line 225 would be that man is distinguished from beast by his noble pursuit of knowledge in an embattled world of darkness, owing to the human ‘care of knowing causes’:

Desire, to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man: so that Man is distinguished, not onely by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure (1. 6: 44).

The satirist describes the appetites in the crude terms of hunger in lines 107-109 – his hunger ‘bids me eat’ and his Reason of aponia allows him to – which resemble the ‘carnall Pleasures’ which Hobbes sees as more defining aspect of animals than men. It is never clear that Rochester is Hobbes’ ‘wholehearted disciple’, however indebted he is to the concepts laid out in Leviathan, at any point in the satire. Instead, just as Something revolts against that which begat it, Rochester seems to revolt against the thinker whose ideas lurk beneath so many of his lines.

‘The Readyest way to Hell’: A Conclusion

Recounting Rochester’s widely reputed religious scepticism and satirical wit, Anthony à Wood (1632-1695) observed that Rochester ‘made a great noise in the world for his noted and professed atheisme, his lampoons and other frivolous stuffe; and a great noise after his death for his penitent departure’ (1892: 2:492). His ‘penitent departure’, the sensational deathbed conversion recounted by Burnet in Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Honourable John Wilmot Earl of Rochester (1680), prompted Thomas D’Urfey (1653-1723) to pen a poem invoking Rochester’s spirit, entitled ‘A Lash at Atheists: The Poet speaking, as the Ghost of a Quondam Libertine, suppos’d to be the late E[arl] of R[ochester] reflects on that part of Seneca’s Troas beginning at “Post Mortem nihil est”’ (1690). In it, Hobbes is invoked, ‘the disciples of whom (including the circle of court wits surrounding Buckingham) “Like Attoms, danc’d and wanton’d in my Crimes” (line 11)’ (Fisher and Jenkinson 2007: 548). D’Urfey presents a man who was invisibly plagued by secret regret even during his ostensibly unregenerate days: ‘in each vile Harrangue/ The Atheist speaks he feels a secret Pang: Poor tortur’d/ Conscience peeps through his disguise’ (43–45). While D’Urfey’s depiction of Rochester dramatises the penitential earl of Burnet’s account, it evokes the same self-reproach Rochester put into verse even before he was on his deathbed. Some of Rochester’s miscellaneous verses provide an enlightening glimpse into his guilt-ridden self-regard. Following an incident at Epsom on 17 June 1676 in which Rochester and his companions engaged in a fracas before fleeing and leaving one of their own, Captain Downs, for dead, he penned ‘To the Postboy’ (1676). In it, his speaker exhorts a postboy: ‘Son of a Whore, God Damn you, can you tell/ A Peerless Peer the Readyest way to Hell?’ and confesses to various crimes including blaspheming God and libelling kings (1-2). Rochester here alludes to the infamous invectives he penned against his protégé, Charles II, which accompanied their myriad quarrels. The pithy, laconic direction given by the postboy reads: ‘The Readyest Way, my Lord’s by Rochester’ (16). Here, Rochester’s conscience does more than to ‘peep through his disguise’. His songlike impromptu ‘Rochester Extempore’ (c. 1670) is another such instance of distilled and profound self-reproach: looking ‘much simply like himselfe’, Rochester’s vision of himself cries out in aguish after singing the twelfth psalm: ‘With eyes turn’d up as white as ghost/ He cryd ah lard, ah lard of Hosts!/ I am a rascall, that thou know’st’ (3, 4-6). In both short poems, the portent of divine judgement is a palpable reality for the poet. Perhaps Rochester here exhibits what Hobbes recognised as ‘something inherent in man’: a ‘desire for permanence’ in the eternal afterlife (McClure 2016: 204).

Rochester’s poetics is not just a libertine vulgarisation of Epicurean hedonism which trampled on Hobbes’ optimistic political theory; his poetry deals closely with fraught epistemology with defiant non-conclusion. However, in a time of polemical public distortion of Epicurus and Hobbes into crude atheism and dangerous ‘Hobbism’, Rochester playfully took advantage of this dubious categorisation with his invectives and paradoxes (which, in the end, conveniently vindicated such conflations). Showing an attraction to the un-religiosity of Hobbes and Lucretius, Rochester nevertheless damns their certitude with equal fervour as he does that of the clergy. One sees a poet keenly stoking the flames of Anglican ire towards Hobbes and Lucretius with his brash, caricaturing libertine poetic character. In its infamy, his poetry accompanied the ongoing polemical conflation of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes into a crude ‘Atheistick Cabal’. Nevertheless, Rochester the poet was no unequivocal atheist, Epicurean, or Hobbist disciple. Rather than forging his own path through natural philosophy’s ‘fenny boggs’, he chose poetry: a place where ‘false Reasoning’ could reign freely.

With the irruption of Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) Principia (1687) into print seven years after Rochester’s death, the perception of Epicureanism via a libertine lens would begin to give way in England. Newton, furthering Charleton’s defence of Epicurus’ Morals (1656), wove Epicurean atomism into a defence of the necessity of God: mechanism, untenable in and of itself, indicated a providential signature underscoring all motion.[8] If Rochester did sorely regret his libertine modulation of Epicureanism in verse, which D’Urfey’s Rochester denounces as a hubristic exercise in wit and nothing more, perhaps he would have been gladdened by Newton’s Principia, had he only lived to see it.

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[1] Michel de Marolles (1600-81) translated DRN into French in 1650. An anonymous prose translation, Bodleian, Rawl. Ms D 314, has a terminus post quem of 1659 (Butterfield 2015: 62-63).   

[2] All quotations of Rochester’s poetry are taken from Harold Love’s 1999 edition, The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[3] Aphra Behn’s (1640-1689) praise of Lucretius in her commendatory verse to Creech, ‘To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius’ (1683) exemplifies the common association between Lucretius and libertine writers of the Restoration.  

[4] In the interest of proximity to the context of Lucretian reception in Restoration England, all quotations from DRN are from Thomas Creech, Lucretius Carus The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English VERSE. With NOTES (Oxford: 1682; rev. edn, Oxford: 1683).

[5] All quotations from Leviathan are taken from Hobbes’s Leviathan ed. by W. G. Pogson Smith, 7th edn. (Oxford: Clarendon).

[6] For a comprehensive study of 17th century reactions against the eternity of Hell, see D. P. Walker’s 1964 work The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London: William Clowes).

[7] See Treglown’s edition of the Letters, p. 242 for Rochester’s quotation of four lines from a Martial translation which Cowley appended to ‘On Liberty’.

[8] See Catherine Wilson’s study, ‘Epicureanism in early modern philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).