Abstract

This dissertation evaluates the Early Modern English critique of Classical, Catholic and Scholastic theories of ethical habituation. Particular attention is given to the Protestant revaluation of both the Aristotelian belief that virtues are states of character that provide practical wisdom, and the Stoic belief that passions, identifiable as disordered beliefs or judgements, can be extirpated given a regimen of habitual meditation. ;Reformation theology, beginning with Luther's anti- perfectionism and extending throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, outspokenly criticized ethical eudaemonism and Classical theories of habituation. Much of the Reformation critique held that creaturely virtue cannot be perfected by repetition and habituation, and that moral progress is not achievable in the absence of a divine infusion of grace. Such an infusion of virtue is often described as habitus, a supernaturally endowed disposition to act ethically, but never expertly, given the Protestant preoccupation with backsliding and incontinence. The problem, however, that all Early Modern theologians faced, was that pastoral discipline and practical instruction in virtue always seemed to require an element of moral training that resembled the therapies offered by Classical virtue theory, in spite of the anti-classical rhetoric sounded by the most influential preachers of the period. Through a close analysis of Shakespearean tragedy, English Puritan and Conformist sermons, and the poetry of John Milton and Thomas Traherne, the dissertation discusses the various Early Modern attempts at resolving such fundamental Classical-Protestant tensions regarding moral habituation.