The Politics of Truth in Herbert of Cherbury

Abstract

����� ��� What was Edward Herbert of Cherbury trying to accomplish when he published De veritate in 1624? Why was he most proud of this book, his earliest, more than of the other eight eventually published? 1 Like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other seventeenth-century thinkers appalled by the wars of religion, Herbert saw himself as establishing a philosophical basis for an ethics and a politics aimed at peaceful coexistence. Herbert asks, “Where, then, can an anxious and divided mind turn to find security and peace,” given “the multitude of sects, divisions, subdivisions and cross-divisions?” The answer is in his own pages (DV 75). 2 De veritate operates as a guide for the perplexed, tutoring them in how to discriminate among classes of truth and how to distinguish certainty from probability, possibility, and error. In the process, it issues a salvo against the fashionable skeptical opinion that nothing can be known (nihil scitur). While the political implications of his philosophy of mind are intimated in De veritate, they are more fully developed in his posthumously published Life and Reign of King Henry VIII (1649), one of Herbert’s last works and arguably his masterpiece. 3 For example, conformity and consent, key philosophical terms in De veritate, become simplified and politicized in The Life and Reign of King Henry VIII—as if historical events and pressures had deflated the aesthetic and metaphysical aspirations which Herbert attaches to these words. In my view, Herbert comes to terms with the political corollaries of his philosophy while composing his account of the Protestant Reformation for King Charles. These include a renewed appreciation for skills of arbitration and consensus; increased respect for Parliament and lawmaking; sympathy for neutrality as a political strategy; and support for a strong ruler capable of imposing order on quarreling factions, such as his idealized version of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with his hopes for the consensual process envisioned for the Council of Trent. Herbert surely did not foresee his own career as a historian when he delivered his disparaging view of historical writing at the conclusion of De veritate. “The entire body of history . . . is best described as probability” (316),