They equally paid but slight attention to the logic and physics of the older schools.(1591) Virtue, to all of them, is the one great end of philosophic effort. They were all deeply impressed by the spiritual wants of the time,(1592) and they all felt that men needed not subtleties of disquisition or rhetorical display, but direct, personal teaching which appealed to the conscience. To all of them the philosopher is a physician of souls. Musonius and Epictetus were probably loftier and more blameless characters than Seneca. Epictetus especially, from the range and simple attractiveness of his teaching, might seem to many a better representative of the philosophic director than Seneca. Seneca, as the wealthy minister of Nero, excites a repugnance in some minds, which prevents them doing justice to his unquestionable power and fascination. His apparent inconsistency has condemned him in the eyes of an age which professes to believe in the teaching of the Mount, and idolises grandiose wealth and power. His rhetoric offends a taste that can tolerate and applaud verbose ba.n.a.lities, with little trace of redeeming art. He cannot always win the hearing accorded to the repentant sinner, whose dark experience may make his message more real and pungent. The historian, however, must put aside these rather pharisaic prejudices, and give Seneca the position as a moral teacher which his writings have won in ages not less earnest than ours.
Nor need we fear to recognise a power which led the early Fathers to trace the spiritual vision of Seneca to an intercourse with S. Paul,(1593) supported by a feigned correspondence which imposed on S. Augustine and S.
Jerome.(1594) The man who approaches Seneca thinking only of scandals gleaned from Tacitus and Dion Ca.s.sius,(1595) and frozen by a criticism which cannot feel the power of genius, spiritual imagination, and a profound moral experience, behind a rhetoric sometimes forced and extravagant, had better leave him alone. The Christianity of the twentieth century might well hail with delight the advent of such a preacher, and would certainly forget all the accusations of prurient gossip in the accession of an immense and fascinating spiritual force. The man with any historical imagination must be struck with amazement that such spiritual detachment, such lofty moral ideals, so pure an enthusiasm for the salvation of souls, should emerge from a palace reeking with all the crimes of the haunted races of Greek legend. That the courtier of the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, the tutor and minister of Nero, should not have escaped some stains may be probable: that such a man should have composed the Letters and the _De Ira_ of Seneca is almost a miracle. Yet the glow of earnestness and conviction, the intimate knowledge of the last secrets of guilty souls, may well have been the reward of such an ordeal.
Seneca"s career, given a latent fund of moral enthusiasm, was really a splendid preparation for his mission, as an a.n.a.lyst of a corrupt society and a guide to moral reform. He lived through the gloomiest years of the imperial tyranny; he had been in the thick of its intrigues, and privy to its darkest secrets; he had enjoyed its favour, and knew the perils of its jealousy and suspicion. He came as an infant from Cordova to Rome in the last years of Augustus.(1596) In spite of weak health, he was an ardent student of all the science and philosophy of the time, and he fell under the influence of Sotion, a member of the s.e.xtian School, which combined a rigorous Stoicism with Pythagorean rules of life.(1597) As a young advocate and prosperous official, he pa.s.sed unharmed through the terror and ghastly rumours of the closing years of Tiberius.(1598) His eloquence in the Senate excited the jealousy of Caligula, and he narrowly escaped the penalty.(1599) In the reign of Claudius he must have been one of the inner circle of the court, for his banishment, at the instance of Messalina, for eight years to Corsica was the penalty of a supposed intrigue with Julia, the niece of the emperor.(1600) Seneca knew how to bend to the storm, and, by the influence of Agrippina, he was recalled to be the tutor of the young Nero, and on his accession four years afterwards, became his first minister by the side of Burrus.(1601) The famous _quinquennium_, an oasis in the desert of despotism, was probably the happiest period of Seneca"s life. In spite of some misgivings, the dream of an earthly Providence, as merciful as it was strong, seemed to be realised.(1602) But it was, after all, a giddy and anxious elevation, and the influence of Seneca was only maintained by politic concessions, and was constantly threatened by the daemonic ambition of Agrippina.(1603) And Seneca had enemies like P. Suillius, jealous of his power and his millions, and eagerly pointing to the hypocrisy of the Stoic preacher, whom gossip branded as an adulterer and a usurer.(1604) The death of Burrus gave the last shock to his power.(1605) His enemies poured in to the a.s.sault. The emperor had long wished to shake off the incubus of a superior spirit; and the riches, the pointed eloquence, and more pointed sarcasms, the gardens and villas and lordly state of the great minister, suggested a possible aspirant to the princ.i.p.ate. Seneca acted on his principles and offered to give up everything.(1606) But his torture was to be prolonged, and his doom deferred for about two years. His release came in the fierce vengeance for the Pisonian conspiracy.(1607)
Seneca was an ideal director for the upper cla.s.s of such an age. He had risen to the highest office in a world-wide monarchy, and he had spent years in hourly fear of death. He had enjoyed the society of the most brilliant circles, and exchanged epigrams and repartees with the best; he had also seen them steeped in debauchery and treachery, and terror-stricken in base compliance. He had witnessed their fantastic efforts of luxury and self-indulgence, and heard the tale of wearied sensualism and disordered ambition and ineffectual lives.(1608) His disciples were drawn, if not from the n.o.blest cla.s.s, at any rate from the cla.s.s which had felt the disillusionment of wealth and fashion and power.
And the vicissitudes in his own fate and character made him a powerful and sympathetic adviser. He had long to endure the torturing contrast of splendid rank and wealth, with the brooding terror of a doom which might sweep down at any moment. He was also tortured by other contrasts, some drawn by the fierceness of envious hatred, others perhaps acknowledged by conscience. Steeped in the doctrines of Chrysippus and Pythagoras, he had subdued the ebullient pa.s.sions of youth by a more than monastic asceticism.(1609) He had pa.s.sionately adopted an ethical creed which aimed at a radical reform of human nature, at the triumph of cultivated and moralised reason and social sympathy over the brutal materialism and selfishness of the age. He had pondered on its doctrines of the higher life, of the nothingness of the things of sense, on death, and the indwelling G.o.d a.s.sisting the struggling soul, on the final happy release from all the sordid misery and terror, until every earthly pleasure and ambition faded away in the presence of a glorious moral ideal.(1610) And yet this pagan monk, this idealist, who would have been at home with S.
Jerome or Thomas a Kempis, had acc.u.mulated a vast fortune, and lived in a palace which excited the envy of a Nero. He was suspected of having been the lover of two princesses of the imperial house.(1611) He was charged with having connived at, or encouraged the excesses of Nero, and even of having been an accomplice in the murder of Agrippina, or its apologist.(1612) Some of these rumours are probably false, the work of prurient imaginations in the most abandoned age in history. Yet there are traces in Seneca"s writings that he had not pa.s.sed unscathed through the terrible ordeal to which character was exposed in that age. There are pictures of voluptuous ease and jaded satiety which may be the work of a keen sympathetic observation, but which may also be the expression of repentant memory.(1613) In any case, he had sounded the very depths of the moral abysses of his time. He had no illusions about the actual condition of human nature. The ma.s.s of men, all but a few naturally saintly souls, were abandoned to l.u.s.t or greed or selfish ambition. Human life was an obscene and cruel struggle of wild beasts for the doles flung by fortune into the arena.(1614) The peace and happiness of the early Eden have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of exhausted appet.i.te, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure, with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost.(1615) With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an evangelistic pa.s.sion, almost approaching S. Paul"s, to open to these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through the practical discipline of philosophy.
The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. Philosophy in its highest and best sense is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, nor the disinterested play of intellect, regardless of intellectual consequences, as in a Platonic dialogue.(1616) It is pre-eminently the science or the art of right living, that is of a life conformed to right reason.(1617) Its great end is the production of the _sapiens_, the man who sees, in the light of Eternal Reason, the true proportions of things, whose affections have been trained to obey the higher law, whose will has hardened into an unswerving conformity to it, in all the difficulties of conduct.(1618) And the true philosopher is no longer the cold, detached student of intellectual problems, far removed from the struggles and the miseries of human life. He has become the _generis humani paedagogus_,(1619) the schoolmaster to bring men to the Ideal Man. In comparison with that mission, all the sublimity or subtlety of the great masters of dialectic becomes mere contemptible trifling, as if a man should lose himself in some game, or in the rapture of sweet music, with a great conflagration raging before his eyes. In the universal moral shipwreck, how can one toy with these old world trifles, while the perishing are stretching out their hands for help?(1620) Not that Seneca despises the inheritance of ancient wisdom, so far as it has any gospel for humanity.(1621) He will accept good moral teaching from any quarter, from Plato or Epicurus, as readily as from Chrysippus or Panaetius.(1622) He is ready to give almost divine honours to the great teachers of the human race. But he also feels that no moral teaching can be final. After a thousand ages, there will still be room for making some addition to the message of the past. There will always be a need for fresh adjustments and applications of the remedies which past wisdom has handed down.(1623)
It is almost needless to say that Seneca has almost a contempt for the so-called liberal studies of his day.(1624) There is only one truly liberal study, that which aims at liberating the will from the bondage of desire. Granted that it is necessary as a mental discipline to submit to the grammarian in youth; yet experience shows that this training does nothing to form the virtuous character.(1625) Who can respect a man who wastes his mature years, like Didymus, in inquiries as to the relative ages of Hecuba or Helen, or the name of the mother of Aeneas, or the character of Anacreon or Sappho?(1626) The man of serious purpose will rather try to forget these trifles than continue the study of them. And Seneca treats in the same fashion the hair-splitting and verbal subtleties of some of the older Stoics. He acquiesces indeed, in their threefold division of Philosophy into Logic, Physics, and Ethics; but for the first department he seems to have but scant respect, though once or twice he amuses his pupil Lucilius by a disquisition on Genus and Species, or the Platonic and Aristotelian "Causes," in the style of the Stoic scholasticism.(1627) Seneca was writing for posterity; he has his intellectual vanity; and he probably wished to show that, while he set but little store by such studies, this was not due to an imperfect knowledge of them. It is because life is too short, and its great problems are too urgent, to permit a serious man to spend his precious years in fruitless intellectual play. He calls on Lucilius to leave such barren subtleties, which bring the greatest of all themes down to the level of intellectual jugglery.(1628)
For the department of Physics Seneca has much more respect, and he evidently devoted much attention to it. We have traces of some lost works of his on scientific subjects, and there is still extant a treatise in seven books on _Natural Questions_, which became a handbook of science in the Middle Ages.(1629) It deals with such subjects as we meet with in the poem of Lucretius, thunder and lightning, winds and earthquakes, and rising and failing springs. But it has perhaps less of the scientific spirit than Lucretius, according to our modern standards. We have abundant reference to old physical authorities, to Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Diogenes of Apollonia, to Caecina and Attalus. But the conception of any scientific method beyond more or less ingenious hypothesis, or of any scientific verification of hypothesis, is utterly absent. This is of course a general characteristic of most of the scientific effort of antiquity. The truth is that, although Seneca probably had some interest in natural phenomena, he had a far more profound interest in human nature and human destiny. The older Stoics, with some variations, subordinated Physics to Ethics, as of inferior and only subsidiary importance.(1630) Seneca carries this subordination almost to extremes, although he also is sometimes inconsistent.(1631) He thinks it significant that while the World-Spirit has hidden gold, the great tempter and corruptor, far beneath our feet, it has displayed, in mysterious yet pompous splendour, in the azure canopy above us, the heavenly orbs which are popularly believed to control our destiny in the material sense, and which may really govern it, by raising our minds to the contemplation of an infinite mystery and a marvellous order.(1632) To Seneca, as to Kant, there seems a mystic tie between the starry heavens above and the moral law within. In the prologue to the _Natural Questions_, indeed, carried away for the moment by the grandeur of his theme, Seneca seems to exalt the contemplation of the infinite distances and mysterious depths and majestic order of the stellar world far above the moral struggles of our mundane life. The earth shrinks to a mere point in infinitude, an ant-hill where the human insects mark out their Lilliputian territories and make their wars and voyages for their lifetime of an hour.(1633) This, however, is rather a piece of rhetoric than a careful statement of Seneca"s real view. In the Letters, again and again, we are told that virtue is the one important thing, that the conquest of pa.s.sion raises man to be equal to G.o.d,(1634) and that in the release of the rational or divine part of us from bondage to the flesh, man recovers a lost liberty, a primeval dignity. But in this struggle the spirit may refresh and elevate itself by looking up to the divine world from which it draws its origin, and to which it may, perchance, return. To Seneca"s mind the so-called physics really involve theology and metaphysics. In the contemplation of the vastness of the material universe, the mind may be aroused to the urgency and interest of the great questions touching G.o.d, His relation to fate, to the world, and man.(1635) The scientific interest in Seneca is evidently not the strongest. There are still indeed the echoes of the old philosophies which sought man"s true greatness and final beat.i.tude in the clear vision of abstract truth. But Seneca is travelling rapidly on the way which leads to another vision of the celestial city, in which emotion, the pa.s.sionate yearning for holiness as well as truth, blends with and tends to overpower the ideal of a pa.s.sionless eternity of intellectual intuition. In Seneca"s rapturous outburst on the gate of deliverance opened by death, making allowance for difference of a.s.sociations and beliefs, there is surely a strange note of kindred sympathy, across the gulf of thirteen centuries, with Thomas a Kempis.(1636)
The _Natural Questions_ were, as he tells us, the work of his old age.(1637) He has a lofty conception of his task, of the importance of the subject to the right culture of the spirit, and he summons up all his remaining energy to do it justice. But the work falls far short, in interest and executive skill, of a treatise like the _De Beneficiis_, and the principle of edification-_omnibus sermonibus aliquid salutare miscendum_(1638)-is too obtrusive, and sometimes leads to incongruous and almost ludicrous effects. A reference to the mullet launches him on a discourse on luxury.(1639) A discourse on mirrors would hardly seem to lend itself to moralising. Yet the invention furnishes to Seneca impressive lessons on self-knowledge, and a chance of glorifying the simple age when the unkempt daughter of a Scipio, who received her scanty dowry in uncoined metal, had never had her vanity aroused by the reflected image of her charms.(1640) The subject of lightning naturally gives occasion to a homily against the fear of death.(1641) A prologue, on the conflict to be waged with pa.s.sion and luxury and chance and change, winds up abruptly with the invitation-_quaeramus ergo de aquis_ ... _qua ratione fiant_.(1642) The investigation closes with an imaginative description of the great cataclysm which is destined to overwhelm in ruin the present order. The earthquakes in Campania in 66 A.D. naturally furnish many moral lessons.(1643) The closing pa.s.sage of the _Natural Questions_ is perhaps the best, and the most worthy of Seneca. In all these inquiries, he says, into the secrets of nature, we should proceed with reverent caution and self-distrust, as men veil their faces and bend in humbleness before a sacrifice.(1644) How many an orb, moving in the depths of s.p.a.ce, has never yet risen upon the eyes of man.(1645) The Great Author Himself is only dimly visible to the inner eye, and there are vast regions of His universe which are still beyond our ken, which dazzle us by their effulgence, or elude our gross senses by their subtle secrecy. We are halting on the threshold of the great mysteries. There are many things destined to be revealed to far-distant ages, when our memory shall have pa.s.sed away,(1646) of which our time does not deserve the revelation. Our energies are spent in discovering fresh ingenuities of luxury and monstrous vice. No one gives a thought to philosophy; the schools of ancient wisdom are deserted and left without a head.(1647) It is in this spirit that Seneca undertook his mission as a saviour of souls.
Seneca, in the epilogue to the _Natural Questions_, remarks sarcastically that, as all human progress is slow, so, even with all our efforts of self-indulgence, we have not yet reached the finished perfection of depravity; we are still making discoveries in vice. In another pa.s.sage he maintains that his own age is no worse than others.(1648) But this is only because at all times the ma.s.s of men are bad. Such pessimism in the first and second centuries was a prevalent tone. We meet it alike in Persius, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal, and in Seneca, Tacitus, Pliny, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.(1649) The rage for wealth and luxury, the frenzy of vice which perverted natural healthy instincts and violated the last retreats of modesty, the combination of ostentation and meanness in social life, the cowardice and the cruelty which are twin offspring of pampered self-indulgence, the vanity of culture and the vanishing of ideals, the vague restless ennui, hovering between satiety and pa.s.sion, between faint glimpses of goodness and ignominious failure, between fits of ambition and self-abandoned languor, all these and more had come under the eye of Seneca as an observer or a director of souls.(1650) It is a lost world that he has before him, trying fruitless anodynes for its misery, holding out its hands for help from any quarter.(1651) The consuming earnestness of Seneca, about which, in spite of his rhetoric, there can be no mistake, and his endless iteration are the measure of his feeling as to the gravity of the case. Seneca is the earliest and most powerful apostle of a great moral revival. His studied phrase, his epigrammatic point seem often out of place; his occasionally tinsel rhetoric sometimes offends a modern taste. We often miss the austere and simple seriousness of Epictetus, the cultivated serenity and the calm clear-sighted resignation of Marcus Aurelius. Still let us admit that here is a man, with all his moral faults which he freely confesses, with all his rhetoric which was a part of his very nature, who felt he had a mission, and meant to fulfil it with all the resources of his mind. He is one of the few heathen moralists who warm moral teaching with the emotion of modern religion, and touch it with the sadness and the yearning which spring from a consciousness of man"s infinite capacities and his actual degradation; one in whose eyes can be seen the _amor ulterioris ripae_, in whose teaching there are searching precepts which go to the roots of conduct, and are true for all ages of our race. He adheres formally to the lines of the old Stoic system in his moments of calm logical consistency. But when the enthusiasm of humanity, the pa.s.sion to win souls to goodness and moral truth is upon him, all the old philosophical differences fade, the new wine bursts the old bottles; the Platonic dualism, the eternal conflict of flesh and spirit,(1652) the Platonic vision of G.o.d, nay, a higher vision of the Creator, the pitiful and loving Guardian, the Giver of all good, the Power which draws us to Himself, who receives us at death, and in whom is our eternal beat.i.tude, these ideas, so alien to the older Stoicism, transfigure its hardness, and its cold, repellent moral idealism becomes a religion.(1653) Seneca"s system is really a religion; it is morality inspired by belief in a spiritual world and "touched by emotion." In a remarkable letter, he discusses the question whether, for the conduct of life, precept is sufficient without dogma, whether a man can govern his life by empirical rules, without a foundation of general principles. Can a religion dispense with dogma?(1654) Seneca, as a casuist and spiritual director, was not likely to undervalue the importance of definite precept, adapted to the circ.u.mstances of the case. The philosopher, who was a regular official in great families, probably dealt chiefly in precept, on a basis of authority concealed and rarely scrutinised. But Seneca is not an ordinary professional director. He has a serious purpose; he feels that he is dealing with the most momentous of all problems-how to form or reform a life, with a view to its true end, how the final good of man is to be realised only in virtuous action. But action will not be right and virtuous unless the will be also right, and rightness of will depends on ordered habit of the soul,(1655) and that again springs from right general principles or dogmas. In other words, a true theory of conduct is necessary to virtue in the highest sense. Mere imperative precept and rule cannot give steadiness and continuity to conduct. The motive, the clear perception of the guiding principle, can alone dignify an act with a peculiar moral distinction. In order to possess that character, the external act must be rooted in a faith in the rational law of conduct.
Particular precepts may produce an external obedience to that law, but they cannot give the uniformity and certainty of the inner light and the regulated will.
Seneca is not a sectarian dogmatist, although he lays so much stress on the necessity of dogma to virtuous conduct. He boldly declares that he does not follow absolutely any of the Stoic doctors. He defends Epicurus against the vulgar misunderstanding of his theory of pleasure, and the more vulgar practical deductions from it. He often quotes his maxims with admiration to Lucilius.(1656) In his views of the nature of G.o.d and His relation to the external world and to the human soul, Seneca often seems to follow the old Stoic tradition. There are other pa.s.sages where he seems to waver between different conceptions of G.o.d, the Creator of the universe, the incorporeal Reason, the divine breath diffused through all things, great and small, Fate, or the immutable chain of interlinked causation.(1657) It is also clear that, from the tone of his mind, and the fact that the centre of philosophical interest for him is the moral life of man, he tends towards a more ethical conception of the Deity, as the Being who loves and cares for man. All this may be admitted and will be further noticed on a later page. Yet Seneca, in strict theory, probably never became a dissenter from the physical or ontological creed of his school. He adhered, in the last resort, to the Stoic pantheism, which represented G.o.d and the universe, force and formless matter, as ultimately issuing from the one substratum of the ethereal fire of Herac.l.i.tus, and in the great cataclysm, returning again to their source.(1658) He also held theoretically the Stoic materialism, and the Stoic principle, that only corporeal natures can act on one another.(1659) The force which moulds indeterminate matter into concrete form is spirit, breath, in the literal sense, interfused in rude matter, and by its tension, outward and again inward upon itself, producing form and quality and energy. Mere matter could never mould itself, or develop from within a power of movement and action. But this material force which shapes the universe from within is also rational, and the universe is a rational being, guided by the indwelling reason to predestined ends, and obedient to a universal law.
The G.o.d of the Stoics is thus a very elastic or comprehensive conception.
He may be viewed as the ubiquitous, impalpable force, which may, in the lack of more accurate expression, be called air, ether, fire. He is the soul, the breath, the Anima Mundi. He is also the universal law, the rational principle, underlying all the apparently casual and fitful phenomena of physical nature and human life. G.o.d may also surely be regarded as the eternal Fate, the power in the ruthless, yet merciful sequence of inevitable causation.(1660) And, in milder and more optimistic moods, we may view Him as a watchful Providence, caring for men more than they seem to care for themselves, saving them from the consequences of their own errors and misdeeds. In Seneca, He develops into a moral and spiritual Being, the source of all spiritual intuition and virtuous emotion, the secret power within us making for righteousness, as He is the secret force in all nature making for order.(1661)
It seems a little crude and superficial to contrast the materialist and idealist conceptions of G.o.d in the later Stoic creed. What human conception of Him is free from similar contradictions? How can any conception of Him, expressed in human language, avoid them? And in Seneca"s conception of soul, even as material, there is something so thin, so subtle, and elusive, that the bounds of matter and spirit seem to melt away and disappear.(1662) However loyal he may be in form to Stoic materialism, Seneca in the end regards G.o.d as no mere material force, however refined and etherealised, but a spiritual power; not perhaps limited by the bounds of personality, but instinct with moral tendencies, nay, a moral impetus, which no mere physical force could ever develop.(1663) The growing dualism in Seneca"s metaphysics is the result of the growing dualism of his psychology. In accord with the old Stoic doctors, he sometimes formulates the material nature of the soul, and its essential unity. It is, like the Anima Mundi, warm breath or subtle fire, penetrating all parts of the body, discharging currents from the central heart to the several organs. It is primarily rational, and all the lower powers of pa.s.sion are derived from the controlling and unifying reason. It is a spark of the universal Spirit, holding the same place in the human organism as the Divine Spirit does in the universe.(1664) But experience and reflection drove Seneca more and more into an acceptance of the Platonic opposition of reason and pa.s.sion, an unceasing struggle of the flesh and spirit, in which the old Stoic theory of the oneness of the rational soul tended to disappear.(1665) This is only one, but it is the most important, modification of ancient theory forced on Seneca by a closer application of theory to the facts of human life, and a completer a.n.a.lysis of them. The individual consciousness, and the spectacle of human life, alike witness to the inevitable tendency of human nature to corruption. Even after the great cataclysm, when a new earth shall arise from the waters of the deluge, and a new man, in perfect innocence, shall enter on this fair inheritance, the clouds will soon gather again, and darken the fair deceitful dawn.(1666) The weary struggle of flesh and spirit will begin once more, in which the flesh is so often the victor.
For to Seneca, as to the Orphic mystics and to Plato, the body is a prison, and life one long punishment.(1667) Such is the misery of this mortal life, such the danger of hopeless corruption, that no one would accept the gift of existence if he could foresee the evil in store for him.(1668) And death, the object of dread to the blind ma.s.ses, is really the one compensation for the calamity of birth, either as a happy return to antenatal tranquillity, or as the gateway to a glorious freedom and vision of the Divine.(1669) Seneca, indeed, does not always express himself in this strain. He is often the consistent, orthodox Stoic, who glories in the rounded perfection of the _sapiens_, triumphing, even in this life, over all the seductions of sense and the fallacies of perverted reason, and, in virtue of the divine strength within him, making himself, even here below, equal with G.o.d in moral purity and freedom.(1670) In such moods, he will adhere to the Stoic psychology: reason will be all in all; virtue will be uniform, complete, attained by one supreme victorious effort. But the vision is constantly crossed and darkened by doubts which are raised by the terrible facts of life. The moral problem becomes more difficult and complicated; the vision of perfection recedes to an infinite distance, and the glorious deliverance is reserved for an immortal life of which the older Stoics did not often dream.
Still, we can find in Seneca all the Stoic gospel, and moral idealism.
"Nil bonum nisi verum" is the fundamental principle. The failures, aberrations, and sins of men arise from a false conception of what is good, produced by the warping effect of external things upon the higher principle. The avaricious, the ambitious, the sensual, live in a vain show. They are pursuing unreal objects of desire, which cheat and befool the reason, and turn to ashes when they are won. The "kingdom of Heaven is within." It is the freedom, the peace, the tranquil sense of power over all that is fortuitous and external and fleeting, which alone can realise the highest good of man.(1671) It is attained only by virtue, that is, by living in obedience to the law of reason, which has its voice and representative in each human soul. The summons to yield ourselves to the law of nature and reason simply calls us to obey our highest part (_t?
??e??????_), which is a steadfast witness to the eternal truth of things, and, if unbribed and unperverted, will discern infallibly the right line of conduct amid all the clamorous or seductive temptations of the flesh or of the world. Nothing is a real good which has not the stamp and hall-mark of reason, which is not within the soul itself, that is within our own power. Everything worth having or wishing for is within. External things, wealth, power, high place, the pleasures of sense, are transitory, deceptive, unstable, the gifts of Fortune, and equally at her mercy. In the mad struggle for these ephemeral pleasures, the wise man retires un.o.bserved from the scene of cruel and sordid rapacity, having secretly within him the greatest prize of all, which Fortune cannot give or take away.(1672) If these things were really good, then G.o.d would be less happy than the slave of l.u.s.t and ambition, than the sensualist who is fascinated by a mistress or a minion, the trader who may be ruined by a storm, the wealthy minister who may at any moment be ordered to death by a Nero.(1673) The only real liberty and human dignity are to be found in renunciation. If we jealously guard and reverence the divine reason within us, and obey its monitions, which are in truth the voice of G.o.d, the Universal Reason, then we have an impregnable fortress which cannot be stormed by any adverse fortune. The peace and freedom so won may be called, although Seneca does not so call it, the "peace of G.o.d." For it is in fact the restored harmony between the human spirit and the Reason of the world, and the cessation of the weary conflict between the "law in the members" and "the law of the mind," which ends so often in that other peace of a "mare mortuum," a stillness of moral death.(1674)
The gospel of Seneca, with all its searching power, seems wanting in some of the essentials of an effective religion which can work on character.
Where, it may be asked, is the force to come from which shall nerve the repentant one to essay the steep ascent to the calm of indefectible virtue? And what is the reward which can more than compensate for the great renunciation? With regard to the first question, the Stoic answer is clear. The reforming force is the divine reason, indwelling in every human soul,(1675) which, if it is able, or is permitted, to emanc.i.p.ate itself from bondage to the things of sense, will inevitably gravitate to the divine world, from which it sprang. The question of necessity and freedom of the will has not much interest for Seneca, as a practical moralist. He believes theoretically in the old Stoic dogmas on the subject. From one point of view, G.o.d may be regarded as the eternal Fate, the inevitable law of causation. And as the Universal Reason, He cannot act otherwise than He does, without violating His very nature. But His action is self-determined and therefore free and spontaneous.(1676) This freedom man only attains by breaking away from the cruel servitude to pa.s.sion and external circ.u.mstance. As a practical moral teacher, Seneca is bound to say that we can take the higher road if we will. The first step towards freedom is to grasp firmly the fundamental law of the moral life-that the only good lies in conformity to reason, to the higher part of our being. If we yield to its bidding, we can at once cut ourselves off from the deceitful life of the senses, and the vision of the true beat.i.tude in virtue at once opens on the inner eye. When that vision has been seen, we must then seek to form a habit of the soul which shall steadily conform to the universal law, and finally give birth to a settled purpose, issuing inevitably in virtuous act.(1677) It is this fixed and stable resolution which is the Stoic ideal, although experience showed that it was rarely attained. The great renunciation is thus the entrance on a state of true freedom, which is realised only by submitting ourselves to the law of reason, that is of G.o.d. By obedience to rational law man is raised to a level far transcending the transient and shadowy dignities of the world. His rational and divine part is reunited to the Divine Spirit which "makes for righteousness"; he places himself in the sweep and freedom of a movement which finds its image and counterpart in the majestic and ordered movements of the heavenly spheres. If we ask, how can poor humanity, so abject, so brutalised, so deadened by the downward pressure of the flesh and the world, ever release itself and rise to those empyrean heights, the answer is, through the original strength of the rational, which is the divine element in the human soul. It may be, and actually is, in the ma.s.s of men, drugged and silenced by the seductions of sense and the deceptions of the world. But if, in some moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will at once seek the region of its birth, and its true home. It is in the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two apparently opposite points of view.
At one time the Stoic doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase, comforts his disciple with the vision of G.o.d holding out a succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the backslider of an eye "that seeth in secret." Woe to him who despises that Witness.(1678)
With such a conception of the relation of the human reason to the Divine, Seneca was bound to believe that human nature, as it is, had fallen away from original and spontaneous innocence. In the equal enjoyment of the unforced gifts of nature, in the absence of the avarice and luxury which the development of the arts, the exploitation of the earth"s hidden wealth, and the compet.i.tive struggle, born of a social life growing more and more complicated, have generated, the primeval man was unsolicited by the pa.s.sions which have made life a h.e.l.l.(1679) Yet this blissful state was one of innocence rather than of virtue; it was the result of ignorance of evil rather than determined choice of good.(1680) And the man who, in the midst of a corrupt society, fights his way to virtue, will take far higher moral rank than our simple ancestors, who wandered in the unravaged garden of the Golden Age. For the man born in a time when the n.o.bler instincts have been deadened by the l.u.s.t of gold and power and sensual excess, the virtuous will can only be won by a hard struggle.
Confronted with the facts of life, and fired with a pa.s.sion to win men to a higher law, the later Stoicism had in some points to soften the rigid lines of earlier theory. The severe idealism of the great doctors was a mere dream of an impossible detachment, the inexorable demand of a pitiless logic. Virtue, being conformity to the immutable law of reason, was conceived as a rounded, flawless whole, to which nothing could be added, and to which nothing must be wanting. It presupposes, or is identical with, a settled intellectual clearness, an unclouded knowledge of the truly good, which must inevitably issue in perfect act. It is a single, uniform mental state from which all the separate virtues spring as from a single root.(1681) The moral value of an act depends entirely on will, intention, that is, on the intellectual perception. And as there are no gradations in the mental state, so there are no gradations in moral conduct which issues from it. There are no distinctions between things morally good, between "divine" things; and so, just as in the older Calvinistic system, there is no cla.s.s intermediate between the wise and the foolish, the saved and the lost. And conversion, "transfiguration,"
the change from folly to wisdom, is regarded as instantaneous and complete.(1682) Even those who are struggling upward, but have not yet reached the top, are still to be reckoned among the foolish, just as the man a few inches below the waves will be drowned as certainly as if he were sunk fathoms deep. And, as there is no mean state in morals, so the extremes are necessarily finished and perfect types of virtue and reprobacy. The ideal _sapiens_, who combines in himself all the moral and intellectual attributes that go to make up the ideal of serene, flawless virtue, has been the mark for ridicule from the days of Horace.(1683) Such an ideal, soaring into the pure cold regions of virgin snow, left the great ma.s.s of men grovelling in filth and darkness. And it was in this light that the severe Stoic regarded the condition of the mult.i.tude. They are all equally bad, and they will always be bad, from age to age. Every generation mourns over its degeneracy, but it is no worse than its ancestors, and its posterity will be no better. The only variation is in the various fashion of the vices.(1684) In any crowded scene, says Seneca, in the forum or the circus, you have a mere gathering of savage beasts, a spectacle of vice incarnate.(1685) In the garb of peace, they are engaged in a truceless war, hating the fortunate, trampling on the fallen. Viewing this scene of shameless l.u.s.t and cupidity where every tie of duty or friendship is violated, if the wise man were to measure his indignation by the atrocity of the offenders, his anger must end in madness. But we are all bad men living among the bad, and we should be gentle to one another.
The idealism and the pessimism of the earlier Stoics were alike fatal to any effort of moral reform. The cold, flawless perfection of the man of triumphant reason was an impossible model which could only discourage and repel aspirants to the higher life. The ghastly moral wreck of ordinary human nature, in which not a single germ of virtuous impulse seemed to have survived the ruin, left apparently no hope of rescue or escape. If morals were to be anything but an abstract theory, if they were to have any bearing on the actual character and destiny of man, their demand must be modified. And so in many essential points it was, even before Seneca.(1686) The ideal contempt for all external things had to give way to an Aristotelian recognition of the value of some of them for a virtuous life. And Seneca is sometimes a follower of Aristotle, as in the admission, so convenient to the millionaire, that wealth may be used by the wise man for higher moral ends.(1687) He will not be the slave of money; he will be its master. He will admit it to his home, but not to his heart, as a thing which may take to itself wings at any moment, but which may meanwhile be used to cheer and warm him in his struggles, and may be dispensed in beneficent help to dependents. In the same way, beside the ideal of perfect conformity to the law of reason, there appeared a cla.s.s of conditional duties. To conform absolutely to the law of reason, to realise the highest good through virtue, remains the highest Stoic ideal.
But if, beside the highest good, it is permitted to attach a certain value to some among the external objects of desire, manifestly a whole cla.s.s of varying duties arises in the field of choice and avoidance.(1688) And again the ideal of imperturbable calm, which approached the apathy of the Cynics, was softened by the admission of rational dispositions of feeling.(1689) These concessions to imperious facts of human life, of course, modified the awful moral ant.i.thesis of wise and foolish, good and reprobate. Where is the perfectly wise man, with his single moral purpose, his unruffled serenity, his full a.s.surance of his own impregnable strength, actually to be found?(1690) He is not to be discovered among the most devoted adherents of the true philosophic creed. Even a Socrates falls short of the sublime standard. If we seek for the wise man in the fabulous past, we shall find only heroic force, or a blissful, untempted ignorance, which are alike wanting in the first essential of virtue.(1691) As the perfect ideal of moral wisdom, imperturbable, a.s.sured, and indefectible, receded to remote ideal distances, so the condemnation of all moral states below an impossible perfection to indiscriminate reprobacy(1692) had to be revoked. Seneca maintains that men are all bad, but he is forced to admit that they are not all equally bad, nay, that there are men who, although not quite emanc.i.p.ated from the snares of the world and the flesh, have reached various stages on the upward way. He even distinguishes three cla.s.ses of _proficientes_, of persons on the path of moral progress.(1693) There is the man who has conquered many serious vices, but is still captive to others. Again, there is the man who has got rid of the worst faults and pa.s.sions, but who is not secure against a relapse. There is a third cla.s.s who have almost reached the goal. They have achieved the great moral victory; they have embraced the one true object of desire; they are safe from any chance of falling away; but they want the final gift of full a.s.surance reserved for the truly wise.(1694) They have not attained to the crowning glory of conscious strength. Seneca is still in bondage to the hard Stoic tradition, in spite of his aberrations from it. The great Catholic virtue of humility is to him still, theoretically at least, a disqualification for the highest spiritual rank.
And yet Seneca is far from wanting in humility. In giving counsels of perfection, he candidly confesses that he is himself far from the ideal.(1695) Indeed, his _Letters_ reveal a character which, with lofty ideals, and energetic aspiration, is very far removed from the serene joy and peace of the true Stoic sage. He has not got the invulnerable panoply from which all the shafts of fortune glance aside. He shows again and again how deep a shadow the terror of his capricious master could cast over his life, how he can be disturbed even by the smaller troubles of existence, by the slights of great society, by the miseries of a sea voyage, or the noises of a bath.(1696) In the counsels addressed to Lucilius, Seneca is probably quite as often preaching to himself. The ennui, the unsteadiness of moral purpose, the clinging to wealth and power, the haunting fears or timid antic.i.p.ations of coming evil, for which he is constantly suggesting spiritual remedies, are diagnosed with such searching skill and vividness that we can hardly doubt that the physician has first practised his art upon himself.(1697) Nor has he entire faith in his own insight or in the potency of the remedies which ancient wisdom has acc.u.mulated. The great difficulty is, that the moral patient, in proportion to the inveteracy of his disease, is unconscious of it.(1698) Society, with its manifold temptations of wealth and luxury and irresponsible ease, can so overwhelm the congenital tendency to virtue,(1699) that the inner monitor may be silenced, and a man may come to love his depravity.(1700) If men are not getting better, they are inevitably getting worse. There is such a state, in the end, as hopeless, irreclaimable reprobacy. Yet even for the h.o.a.ry sinner Seneca will not altogether despair, so long as there lingers in him some divine discontent, however faint, some lingering regret for a lost purity. He will not lose hope of converting even a mocker like Marcellinus, who amuses himself with jeers at the vices and inconsistencies of professing philosophers, and does not spare himself. Seneca may, perchance, give him a pause in his downward course.(1701)
Seneca"s gospel, as he preaches it, is for a limited cla.s.s. With all his professed belief in the equality and brotherhood of men, Seneca addresses himself, through the aristocratic Epicurean Lucilius, to the slaves of wealth and the vices which it breeds. The men whom he wishes to save are masters of great households, living in stately palaces, and striving to escape from the weariness of satiety by visits to Baiae or Praeneste.(1702) They are men who have awful secrets, and whose apparent tranquillity is constantly disturbed by vague terrors,(1703) whose intellects are wasted on the vanities of a conventional culture or the logomachies of a barren dialectic.(1704) They are people whose lives are a record of weak purpose and conflicting aims, and who are surprised by old age while they are still barely on the threshold of real moral life.(1705) With no religious or philosophic faith, death is to such men the great terror, as closing for ever that life of the flesh which has been at once so pleasant and so tormenting.(1706) In dealing with such people, Seneca recognises the need both of the great principles of right living and of particular precepts, adapted to varieties of character and circ.u.mstance.
The true and solid foundation of conduct must always be the clear perception of moral truth, giving birth to rightly-directed purpose and supplying the right motive. For example, without a true conception of G.o.d as a spirit, worship will be gross and anthropomorphic.(1707) The doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the universal commonwealth is the only solid ground of the social charities and of humanity to slaves. Yet dogma is not enough; discipline must be added. The moral director has to deal with very imperfect moral states, some of quite rudimentary growth, and his disciples may have to be treated as boys learning to write, whose fingers the master must guide mechanically across the tablet.(1708) The latent goodness of humanity must be disenc.u.mbered of the load which, through untold ages, corrupt society has heaped upon it. The delusions of the world and the senses must be exposed, the judgment, confused and dazzled by their glamour, must be cleared and steadied, the weak must be encouraged, the slothful and backsliding must be aroused to continuous effort in habitual converse with some good man who has trodden the same paths before.(1709) Thus the great "Ars Vitae," founded on a few simple principles of reason, developed into a most complicated system of casuistry and spiritual direction. How far it was successful we cannot pretend to say. But the thoughtful reader of Seneca"s _Letters_ cannot help coming to the conclusion that, even in the reign of Nero, there must have been many of the _proficientes_, of candidates for the full Stoic faith. If Seneca reveals the depths of depravity in his age, we are equally bound to believe that he represents, and is trying to stimulate, a great moral movement, a deep seated discontent with the hard, gross materialism, thinly veiled under dilettantism and spurious artistic sensibility, of which Nero was the type. Everything that we have of Seneca"s, except the _Tragedies_, deals with the problems or troubles of this moral life, and the demand for advice or consolation appears to have been urgent. Lucilius, the young Epicurean procurator, who has been immortalised by the _Letters_, is only one of a large cla.s.s of spiritual inquirers. He not only lays his own moral difficulties before the master, but he brings other spiritual patients for advice.(1710) There were evidently many trying to withdraw from the tyranny or temptations of high life, with a more or less stable resolution to devote themselves to reflection and amendment. It is a curious pagan counterpart to the Christian ascetic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries.(1711) And, just as in the days of S. Jerome and S. Paulinus, the deserter from the ranks of fashion and pleasure in Nero"s time had to encounter a storm of ridicule and misrepresentation. Philosophic retreat was derided as mere languid self-indulgence, an unmanly shrinking from social duty, nay, even a mere mask for the secret vices which were, too often with truth, charged against the _soi-disant_ philosopher.(1712) Sometimes the wish to lead a higher life was openly a.s.sailed by a cynical Epicureanism. Virtue and philosophy were mere idle babble. The only happiness is to make the most of the senses while the senses still keep their fresh l.u.s.t for pleasure.
The days are fleeting away never to return in which we can drink with keen zest the joys of the flesh. What folly to spare a patrimony for a thankless heir!(1713) Seneca had to deal with many souls wavering between the two ideals. One of his treatises is addressed to a kinsman, Annaeus Serenus, who had made a full confession of a vague unrest, an impotence of will, the conflict of moral torpor with high resolve.(1714) In his better moments, Annaeus inclines to simplicity of life and self-restraint. Yet a visit to a great house dazzles him and disturbs his balance, with the sight of its troops of elegant slaves, its costly furniture and luxurious feasting. He is at one time drawn to philosophic quietude; at another he becomes the strenuous ambitious Roman of the old days, eager for the conflicts of the forum. He is always wavering between a conviction of the vanity of literary trifling and the pa.s.sion for literary fame.(1715) Cannot Seneca, to whom he owes his ideal, furnish some remedy for this constant tendency to relapse and indecision?
It is in the sympathetic handling of such cases, not in broad philosophic theory, that the peculiar strength of Seneca lies. His counsels were adapted to the particular difficulties presented to him. But many of them have a universal validity. He encourages the wish to retire into meditative quietude, but only as a means to moral cure.(1716) Retreat should not be an ostentatious defiance of the opinion of the world.(1717) Nor is it to be a mere cloak for timid or lazy shrinking from the burdens of life. You should withdraw from the strife and temptations of the mundane city, only to devote yourself to the business of the spiritual city, to cultivate self-knowledge and self-government, to inspire the soul with the contemplation of the Eternal and the Divine. Solitude may be a danger, unless a man lives in the presence of "One who seeth in secret,"(1718) from whom no evil thought is hidden, to whom no prayer for evil things must be addressed.(1719) And, lest the thought of G.o.d"s presence may not come home with sufficient urgency, Seneca recommends his disciples to call up the image of some good man or ancient sage, and live as if under his eye.(1720) The first step in moral progress is self-knowledge and confession of one"s faults.(1721) Ignorance of our spiritual disease, the doom of the indurated conscience, is the great danger, and may be the mark of a hopeless moral state. Hence the necessity for constant daily self-examination. In the quiet of each night we should review our conduct and feeling during the day, marking carefully where we have fallen short of the higher law, and strengthening ourselves with any signs of self-conquest. Seneca tells us that this was his own constant practice.(1722) For progress is only slow and difficult. It requires watchful and unremitting effort to reach that a.s.sured and settled purpose which issues spontaneously in purity of thought and deed, and which raises man to the level of the Divine freedom. There must be no pauses of self-complacency until the work is done. There is no mediocrity in morals.
There must be no halting and unsteadiness of purpose, no looking back to the deceitful things of the world. Inconstancy of the wavering will only shortens the span of this short life. How many there are who, even when treading the last stage to death, are only beginning to live, in the true sense, and who miss the beat.i.tude of the man who, having mastered the great secret, can have no addition to his happiness from lengthened years.
In the long tract of time any life is but a moment, and of that the least part by most men is really lived.(1723) And this unsettled aim is liable to constant temptation from without. We are continually within sight and earshot of the isles of the Sirens, and only the resolution of a Ulysses will carry us past in safety.(1724) In fact no isle of the Sirens can have been more dangerous than the life of a great household in the Neronian age, when the dainties and the vices of every land a.s.sailed the senses with multiplied seductions, and men craved in vain for a heightened and keener sensibility. Perpetual change of scene to the sh.o.r.es of Baiae, to Apulia, to some glen in the Apennines, or to the northern lakes, or even further, to the Rhone, the Nile, the Atlas, was sought by the jaded man of pleasure or the man struggling in vain to reform. But Seneca warns his disciple that wherever he may go he will take his vices and his weakness with him.(1725) Let him try to work out his salvation within his great palace on the Esquiline. Surrounded by splendour and luxury, let him, for a time, isolate himself from them; let him lie on a hard bed, and live on scanty fare, and fancy himself reduced to that poverty which he dreads so much and so foolishly.(1726) The change will be good for body and soul; and the temporary ascetic may return to his old life, at least released from one of his bugbears, and refreshed with a new sense of freedom.
Such were some of the precepts by which Seneca strove to fortify the struggling virtue of his disciples. But he never concealed from them that it is only by struggle that the remote ideal can be attained. "Vivere militare est." And almost in the words of S. Paul, he uses the example of the gladiator or the athlete, to arouse the energy of the aspirant after moral perfection.(1727) "They do it for a corruptible crown."(1728) The reward of the Stoic disciple is vain and poor to the gross materialist.
But, from the serene heights, where ideal Reason watches the struggle, the only victor is the man who has adopted the watchwords-self-knowledge, renunciation, resignation. Only by following that steep path can any one ever reach the goal of a.s.sured peace within, and be delivered from the turmoil of chance and change. The misery of the sensual, the worldly, and the ambitious lies in the fact that they have staked their happiness on things which are beyond their own power, which are the casual gifts of fortune, and may be as capriciously withdrawn. This state is one of slavery to external things, and the pleasure, after all, which can be drawn from them is fleeting. Hence it is that the sensualist is equally miserable when his pleasures are denied, and when they are exhausted.(1729) He places his happiness in one brief moment, with the danger or the certainty either of privation or satiety. The wise man of the Stoics, on the other hand, has built his house upon the rock. He shuns, according to the Pythagorean maxim, the ways of the mult.i.tude, and trusting to the illumination of divine Reason, he takes the narrow path.(1730) His guiding light is the principle that the "kingdom of heaven is within," that man"s supreme good depends only on himself, that is, on the unfettered choice of reason. To such a man "all things are his," for all worth having is within him. His mind creates its own world, or rather it rediscovers a lost world which was once his. He can, if he will, annihilate the seductions of the flesh and the world, which cease to disturb when they are contemned. He may equally extinguish the griefs and external pains of life, for each man is miserable just as he thinks himself.(1731) Human nature, even unfortified by philosophic teaching, has been found capable of bearing the extremity of torture with a smile. The man who has mastered the great secret that mind may, by its latent forces, create its own environment, should be able to show the endurance of a Scaevola or a Regulus.(1732) All he needs to do is to unmask the objects of his dread.(1733) For just as men are deluded by the show of material pleasure, so are they unmanned by visionary fears. Even the last event of life should have no terror for the wise man, on any rational theory of the future of the soul. The old mythical h.e.l.l, the stone of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, Cerberus, and the ghostly ferryman, may be dismissed to the limbo of fable.(1734) For the man who has followed the inner light, death must either be a return to that antenatal calm of nothingness which has left no memory, or the entrance to a blissful vision of the Divine.(1735) Even in this luxurious and effeminate time, men and women of all ranks and ages have shown themselves ready to escape from calamity or danger by a voluntary death.(1736) And what after all is death? It is not the terminus of life, a single catastrophe of a moment. In the very hour of birth we enter on the first stage in the journey to the grave. We are dying daily, and our last day only completes the process of a life-long death.(1737) And as to the shortness of our days, no life is short if it has been full.(1738) The ma.s.s of men are only living in an ambiguous sense; they linger or vegetate in life, they do not really live. Nay, many are long since dead when the hour of so-called death arrives. And the men who mourn over the shortness of their days are the greatest prodigals of the one thing that can never be replaced.(1739) In the longest life, on a rational estimate, how small a fraction is ever really lived! The whole past, which might be a sure and precious possession, is flung away by the eager, worldly man.(1740) The fleeting present is lost in unrest or reckless procrastination, or in projecting ourselves into a future that may never come. Thus old age surprises us while we are mere children in moral growth.(1741)
At certain moments, the Stoic ideal might seem to be in danger of merging itself in the self-centred isolation of the Cynic, a.s.serting the defiant independence of individual virtue, the nothingness of all external goods, the omnipotence of the solitary will. And undoubtedly, in the last resort, Seneca has pictured the wise man thus driven to bay, and calmly defying the rage of the tyrant, the caprices of fortune, the loss of health and wealth, nay the last extremity of torture and ignominious death. His own perilous position, and the prospect of society in the reign of Nero, might well lead a man of meditative turn so to prepare himself for a fate which was always imminent. But the Stoic doctor could never acquiesce in a mere negative ideal, the self-centred independence of the individual soul. He was too cultivated, he had drunk too deep of the science and philosophy of the past, he had too wide an outlook over the facts of human life and society, to relegate himself to a moral isolation which was apt to become a state of brutal disregard of the claims of social duty, and even of personal self-respect.(1742) Such a position was absolutely impossible to a man like Seneca. Whatever his practice may have been, it is clear that in temperament he was almost too soft and emotional. He was a man with an intense craving for sympathy, and lavish of it to others; he was the last man in the world who could enjoy a solitary paradise of self-satisfied perfection. It is true the Roman world to the eyes of Seneca lay in the shadow of death, crushed under a treacherous despotism, and enervated by gross indulgence. Yet, although he sees men in this lurid light, he does not scorn or hate them. It was not for nothing that Seneca had been for five years the first minister of the Roman Empire. To have stood so near the master of the world, and felt the pulse of humanity from Britain to the Euphrates, to have listened to their complaints and tried to minister to their needs, was a rare education in social sympathy. It had a profound effect on M. Aurelius, and it had left its mark on Seneca.(1743)
Two competing tendencies may be traced in Stoicism, and in Seneca"s exposition of it. On the one hand, man must seek the harmony of his nature by submitting his pa.s.sions and emotions to his own higher nature, and shaking himself free from all bondage to the flesh or the world. On the other hand, man is regarded as the subject of the universal Reason, a member of the universal commonwealth, whose maker and ruler is G.o.d.(1744) The one view might make a man aim merely at isolated perfection; it might produce the philosophic monk. The other and broader conception of humanity would make man seek his perfection, not only in personal virtue, but in active sympathy with the movement of the world. The one impulse would end in a kind of spiritual selfishness. The other would seek for the full development of spiritual strength in the mutual aid and sympathy of struggling humanity, in friendship,(1745) in the sense of a universal brotherhood and the fatherhood of G.o.d. There are two cities, says Seneca, in which a man may be enrolled-the great society of G.o.ds and men, wide as the courses of the sun; the other, the Athens or the Carthage to which we are a.s.signed by the accident of birth.(1746) A man may give himself to the service of both societies, or he may serve the one and neglect the other.
The wise man alone realises to the full his citizenship in the spiritual commonwealth, in pondering on the problems of