Between Heathenism and Christianity · Charles William Super
SENECA: HIS CHARACTER AND ENVIRONMENT.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, surnamed the Philosopher to distinguish him from his father the Rhetorician, was born in Corduba,[1] in Spain, about 4 B. C.—authorities differ by several years as to the precise date. When quite young he was brought to Rome by his father. He devoted himself with great zeal and brilliant success to rhetorical and philosophical studies. In the reign of Claudius he attained the office of quaestor and subsequently rose to the rank of senator. In the year 41 he was banished to the island of Corsica on a charge that is admitted to have been false, but the nature of which is not clearly understood. In this barren and inhospitable island he was compelled to remain eight years. He was then recalled to Rome and entrusted with the education of the young Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who afterwards became emperor of Rome, and notorious as the monster Nero. For five years after his accession to the principate, the young emperor treated his former teacher with much deference, consulted him on all important matters, and seems to have been largely guided by his advice. He also testified his regard for him by raising him to the rank of consul. In course of time, however, the feelings and conduct of the prince underwent a change. The possession of unlimited power by a character that was both weak and vain; the adulation of the conscienceless favorites with whom he surrounded himself; the intrigues or cabals to whom the high morality of the philosopher was a standing rebuke; and the naturally vicious temper of Nero, all conspired to prepare the way for the downfall of Seneca. When the conspiracy of Calpurnius Piso against the monarch was discovered, the charge of participation, or at least of criminal knowledge, was brought against Seneca, and he was condemned to die. Allowed to choose the means of ending his life, he caused a vein to be opened and thus slowly bled to death. It was his destiny to be compelled to take his departure from this world in the way he had so often commended to others; indeed it is probable that his reiterated encomiums upon suicide as an effectual remedy against the ills of this life, was not without its influence upon his executioners. They probably wanted to give him the opportunity to prove by his works the sincerity of his faith.
During the closing scene he told his disconsolate friends that the only bequest he was permitted to leave to them was the example of an honorable life; and this he besought them to keep in faithful remembrance. He implored his weeping wife to restrain the expression of her grief, and bade her seek in the recollection of the life and virtues of her husband a solace for her loss. It was the fortune of Seneca not only to be well born, but also to be well brought up and carefully educated. That he appreciated the high worth of his mother is evident from the words, “best of mothers,” with which he addressed her in the Consolation to Helvia. His father, though wealthy, was a man of rigid morality, of temperate habits, of great industry, and possessed very unusual literary attainments. His older brother, better known as Junius Gallio from the name of the family into which he was adopted, was for some time proconsul of Achaia, in which capacity he is mentioned in the Acts, xviii, 12-17. Seneca’s younger brother was the father of Lucan, the well-known author of the poem, Pharsalia. Both his mother and his aunt,—he was an especial favorite of the latter—were not only women of exalted character, but they had acquired an intellectual culture that was very uncommon for their sex in their day.
Our authorities for a life of Seneca and for an estimate of his character are fairly ample and have been variously interpreted. Nothing can be gained by taking up the controversy anew. To some of his contemporaries even, he was more or less of an enigma. Others, again, regarded him as a time-server, a hypocrite, a man whose professions were belied by his actions. Still others,—and they are largely in the majority—are more lenient in their judgment; though they cannot exculpate him from inconsistencies, they excuse them by pointing to the extremely difficult position in which he was placed during the greater part of his life. He has strong partisans who are attracted and charmed by the sublime sentiments scattered so profusely through his writings; his enemies, in forming their opinions, lay the chief stress on what they regard as the inexcusable deeds of his life. It is too late to add anything to the evidence either pro or contra. All that it is proposed to do in this essay is to place before the reader a picture of the man, mainly from his own writings, as the chief exponent of the highest philosophy reached by the ancient world before this philosophy was supplanted by the new religion that was destined to take its place in the thought of mankind.
Seneca was next to Cicero, or rather along with Cicero, the most distinguished Roman philosopher; but as a philosopher he has received the far greater share of attention. Both were Romans at heart; both were earnestly engaged in the search for the supreme good; both were guilty of conduct inconsistent with their professions; both tried and tried in vain to combine a life devoted to reflection with with an active career in the service of the state; and both failed. But Seneca not only had a higher ideal than Cicero; he also came nearer attaining it. He was less vain, less hungry for public honors and applause, and attached less importance to mere outward display. As a thinker Seneca has more originality than Cicero, is less dependent upon books, knows better the motives that underlie human conduct. Both were essentially Roman in their views of life, and it is only by keeping this in mind that we are able to explain, if not to excuse, the lack of harmony between what they said and what they did; between what they preached and what they practised. Like that of Cicero, Seneca’s was no adamantine soul, no unyielding barrier against which the vices of his time beat in vain. He had the Roman liking for what is practical. He tried to be a statesman and was somewhat of a courtier when to be a courtier and an upright man was impossible. He was no Socrates to whom virtue, the fundamentally and intrinsically right, was more important than anything else, than all else, even abstention from the political turmoil of his time.
When a long and acrimonious strife is carried on over a man it is evidence that he is no ordinary person. This has been the fate of Seneca in an eminent degree. During the Middle Ages, and even after their close, a great deal of attention was paid to his reputed correspondence with St. Paul. The National Library in Paris contains more than sixty MSS. of this pseudo-correspondence. That he was claimed as a Christian need surprise no one. The poet Virgil shared a similar fate; yet there is far less in the writings of Virgil to mark him a Christian, or rather as a writer who was in a sense divinely inspired, than there is in Seneca to stamp him as a man who had accepted the new faith. The rise and persistence of such a literature is not an anomaly in the history of thought. It is not out of harmony with the spirit of an age when the church was supreme in everything; when all questions were viewed from the theological standpoint, and when every means were employed to gain support for the existing ecclesiastical organization. It was honestly believed that the practice or profession of a high morality, except under the sanction and guidance of the church, was impossible. It was taken as a matter of course, that a good man, one who eloquently preached righteousness, who seemed to be conscious of a struggle within himself between the flesh[2] and the spirit, must have been enlightened from on high. Given the internal evidence of Seneca’s own writings, it was not difficult to supply the complementary external testimony.
This all-embracing and all-absorbing power of the church lasted about a thousand years and ended with the Reformation, though it had begun to decline some two centuries earlier. For this condition of things the Roman empire had prepared the way. It was the prototype to which, in part unconsciously and in part consciously, ecclesiastical authority was made to conform. Notwithstanding the fact that the Gospel was first widely proclaimed in Greek lands and the body of its doctrine formulated in the Greek tongue, when the church began to aspire to universal dominion it naturally assumed the garb of Roman secular authority. The Eastern Empire was regarded as an offshoot from, rather than as a continuation of, the empire that had so long ruled the world from the great city on the banks of the Tiber. The natural consequence was that the Latin language in time supplanted the Greek, and ecclesiastical thought flowed in the channels worn by the political thought that had preceded it. The struggle in later times for the supremacy of the state as against the church was merely the effort to return to a condition of things that had existed before the establishment of the church. The Greeks were not less patriotic than the Romans.
The state occupied just as prominent a place in their minds as it did in the minds of the Romans. But it was their misfortune to appear upon the scene of history, broken up into a large number of small polities of nearly equal strength, and the Greek mind never got beyond the particularism thus inherited. It was their fundamental concept of government. Rome represented a more advanced type of political development than Greece, and if it had been permitted to work out its own salvation without external interference,—for the city at its worst was hardly more corrupt than many a modern capital—it might be in existence to-day. The Roman empire endured so long because it was upheld by the patriotism of its citizens. This was often narrowly selfish, and frequently grossly unjust to foreigners, but it was effectual in maintaining the supremacy of Rome against all attempts from within or without to subvert it. The Romans that were drawn toward philosophy pursued it in a half-hearted manner because the state occupied the first place in their minds. To serve the state was the ultimate goal of their ambition. The emperors, even the most corrupt, still represented the government and as such received the homage of good men. If we keep this fact in mind we shall be able to understand the bravery and devotion to duty of many of the officers and even soldiers in the imperial forces. More or less out of reach of the contaminating influences that were so powerful in the capital, they performed the services expected of them as became Romans.
Long, long afterward, and when Rome was nominally a Christian city, a German monk left its walls as he was returning to his northern home, a far less zealous churchman than he had entered it. Strange coincidence! The city that had become the head of a spiritual empire was no less corrupt and corrupting than it had been as the head of a temporal empire. More than sixteen centuries of experience, some of it of the bitterest kind, had wrought no perceptible change. The Christian followed in the footsteps of the heathen. For us who have been brought up in the belief that morality and right and justice have a claim to our services for their own sake, without accessory support and under all circumstances, the devotion of the Roman to his government, even the most unworthy, is not easy to understand. Rome owed her greatness more to the bravery of her citizens in war than to any other cause. To this virtue they always accorded the foremost place, and to those who displayed it, the highest honors the state could bestow. But Seneca was a man of peace. This fact had without doubt something to do in producing the unfavorable estimate some of his contemporaries formed of him. Tacitus, too, was not a military man; yet he looks with a certain disdain upon those who devoted themselves to the arts of peace rather than to the profession of arms. He regards with less favor the man who has wisely administered a province than him who had extended the boundaries of the empire.
We naturally incline to the opinion that no man who respected himself could accept service under such a ruler as Nero, or Caligula, or Domitian, unless it were in the hope that he might mitigate a ferocious temper or avert calamity from personal friends. And yet, many tyrants since the dissolution of the Roman empire have been served by honorable men; and they have usually requited their services in the same way, with exile, or confiscation of goods, or an ignominious death. The readiness with which many of the best Romans resorted to self-destruction as a release from misfortune strikes us with surprise. Suicide is often mentioned in the writings of Seneca, and always with approval. It is not hard to understand this attitude of mind if we recollect the relation the Roman regarded as existing between himself and the state. The government was in a sense a part of himself, and an essential part. To the Greek there was still something worth living for after the loss of country and citizenship. He could devote himself to literature, or philosophy, or to some more ignoble means of gaining a livelihood. To the Roman such a thing was well-nigh impossible, especially if he was a member of one of the ruling families. Exile, exclusion from service in the state, was to him the end of every thing. Many Romans of whom one would have expected better things are inconsolable so long as they are compelled to live away from the capital with no certain prospect of return. Need we wonder that to many others life was no longer worth living, and that they freely put an end to it with their own hand. Often the best men sought surcease of sorrow in this unnatural way.
Those in whom the moral sense was weak, plunged recklessly into debauchery and sensual gratification. Literature, too, was corrupted to minister to their corrupt tastes. We know little of the life of the average Roman citizen; but there is sufficient evidence within reach of the modern reader to prove that the ruling class had few redeeming traits. The downward tendency is plainly discernible in the last days of the Republic. Julius and Augustus Cæsar were men of depraved appetites and low morals. Their talents as military captains and administrators, their patronage of letters, and their tastes as literary men, have somewhat put their moral delinquencies into the background. There is no doubt that the example of these and such men, accelerated the evil propensities to which the Roman people were only too prone. When the lowest depth of moral degradation was reached, as in the declining years of Seneca, crime and debauchery held high carnival in the imperial household. There was no wickedness so flagrant, no species of immorality so bestial, no deed so horrible, that men shrank from it. For, had they not more than once the example of the prince himself? It is sometimes charitably said that Nero was insane. There are men who think it too degrading to human nature to hold it responsible for his crimes and indecencies. Yet Nero’s excesses were the natural results of unlimited power in irresponsible hands, when the hands were servants of a heart that was thoroughly corrupt, and a character that was weak, and vain as it was weak. The same things have often been repeated within the last eighteen hundred years; but never was vice so rampant and so unblushing, on such a large scale, as it was in Rome in the days of Seneca.
We must not believe, however, that there was no decency, no regard for morality, no love of culture, to be found in the Roman empire even in its worst estate. There were always groups and coteries of noble men and women who kept themselves free from the prevailing corruption. There was always a saving remnant that remained uncontaminated. Quintillian was the center of such a group, and what he was in Rome, Plutarch was in another part of the empire, for they were almost exactly contemporaries. The belief in God, in the immortality of the human soul, and in man’s personal responsibility to a higher power, kept some, perhaps many, who were not directly under the degrading influence of the court, or who had the moral strength to resist it, from deviating very far from the path of rectitude. There were slaves of whom better things could be said than of their masters. But what were these among so many?
Seneca and other writers of his time frequently express contempt for those men who professed to be philosophers, and whose lives brought only disgrace upon the fair name of philosophy. He does not seem to be aware that, in a measure at least, he is recording an unfavorable verdict upon himself. Does he think that his abstemiousness, his untiring industry, his devotion to study ought to cover his shortcomings? It looks so. He commends solitude, yet always remained in the noonday of publicity. He inveighs against riches, yet was the possessor of vast estates, and was not above lending money at usurious rates of interest. He teaches men to bear with fortitude the inevitable ills of life, and ends by commending suicide as a final resort. Compared with Socrates, to cite but a single name, Seneca was a very unworthy exponent of practical philosophy. The former took philosophy seriously, so seriously that he not only wanted to live for it but was willing to die for it. He kept aloof from politics because he felt that a public career would interfere with a duty he owed to a higher power. He, too, believed in a Providence, but with him this belief amounted to a conviction.
All his reported words and deeds testify to this, while Seneca acts and writes as if trying to convince himself quite as much as others. Socrates had an abiding faith in a personal God who not only watched over his life, but cared for him in death. Duty was to him a thing of such supreme importance that he never hesitated to perform it, no matter what the consequences to himself might be. Socrates taught nothing he did not himself practice; Seneca, much. Socrates feared neither God nor man; Seneca was afraid of both. Socrates expected nothing of others that he did not exact of himself; Seneca sets up a higher standard of morals than he, under all circumstances, attained. His precepts are better than his practice. His fatal mistake lay in trying to do two things that have always been found incompatible: to be a successful politician and an upright man. There were others besides Socrates, before the days of Seneca, in whose life and character philosophy had had more consistent exponents and faithful devotees than in him. But when they found that philosophy and a career in the service of the state were incompatible and reciprocally exclusive, they unhesitatingly gave up the latter. Seneca can always admire high ideals, but he cannot always imitate them. He is fascinated when he gazes on the lofty heights to which virtue had sometimes attained, and he often makes heroic efforts to follow after; but he is only now and then successful. It is no wonder, then, that Socrates had even in his lifetime many ardent admirers and enthusiastic disciples that remained true to his memory, while Seneca had none.
Canon Farrar is mistaken when he calls Seneca a “seeker after God.” God was in no man’s thoughts oftener than in his. Nor has any uninspired writer given utterance to a larger number of noble sentiments and lofty precepts than he. It is easy to extract from his writings a complete code of morals, a breviary of human conduct, that would differ but little from that contained in the New Testament. He is a conspicuous example of the heathen of whom Paul says, they are without excuse. But while Seneca is not a seeker after God he can with justice be called a seeker after Christ. He is an earnest inquirer after the peace that passeth understanding; after that serene confidence that sustained the greatest and the least of the Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs no less. He lacks that Christian enthusiasm that comes only through faith in a living Christ and in His atonement. Seneca now and then caught a glimpse of that universal kingdom which the company of believers expected would one day be established upon the earth. He says, “No one can lead a happy life who thinks only of himself and turns everything to his own use. If you would live for yourself, you must live for others. This bond of fellowship must be diligently and sacredly guarded,—the bond that unites us all to all and shows to us that there is a right common to all nations which ought to be the more sacredly cherished because it leads to that intimate friendship of which we were speaking.”
It is hard to see how he could write the following striking passage without thinking of himself; for, though guiltless of some of the vices he condemns, there are others of which he cannot be acquitted. After defining philosophy as nothing else than the right way of living, or the science of living honorably, or the art of passing a good life, and denouncing the fraudulent professors of it, he proceeds: “Many of the philosophers are of this description, eloquent to their own condemnation; for if you hear them arguing against avarice, against lust and ambition, you would think they were making a public disclosure of their own character, so entirely do the censures which they utter in public flow back upon themselves; so that it is right to regard them in no other light than as physicians whose advertisements contain medicine, but their medicine-chests, poison. Some are not ashamed of their vices; but they invent defenses for their own baseness, so that they may even appear to sin with honor.” To the same effect is the testimony of Nepos: “So far am I from thinking that philosophy is the teacher of life and the completer of happiness, that I consider that none have greater need of teachers of living than many who are engaged in the discussion of this subject. For I see that a great part of those who give most elaborate precepts in their school respecting modesty and self-restraint, live at the same time in the unrestrained desires of all lusts.”
Both Seneca and Plutarch are firmly convinced that man is the arbiter of his own happiness; but the former found great difficulty in making a practical application of the doctrine to his own case. Notwithstanding the sorry spectacle presented to the world by many professed philosophers, neither lost faith in philosophy. It was the court of last resort. For the man to whom philosophy will not bring happiness there is no happiness in this world. To the importance and benign influence of this culture of mind, Seneca reverts again and again. He contends that “He who frequents the school of a philosopher ought every day to carry away with him something that will be to his profit: he ought to return home a wiser man. And he will so return, for such is the power of philosophy that it not only benefits those who devote themselves to it, but even those who talk about it.” “You must change yourself, not your abode. You may cross the sea, or as our Virgil says, ‘Lands and cities may vanish from sight, yet wherever you go your vices will follow you.’ When a certain person made the same complaint to Socrates that you make, he answered, ‘Why are you surprised that your travels do you no good, when you take yourself with you everywhere?’ If we could look into the mind of a good man, what a beautiful vision, what purity, we should behold beaming forth from its placid depths! Here justice, there fortitude; here self-control, there prudence. Besides these, sobriety, continence, frankness and kindliness, and (who would believe it?) humaneness, that rare trait in man, shed their luster over him.”
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.