Episode 66: Stoicism, Seneca, St. Paul

The History of Stoicism Up to 65 CE

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 66: Stoicism, Seneca, St. Paul. For several centuries, stoicism was the most pervasive philosophical school in the ancient Mediterranean.¹ Born in Athens in about 300 BCE, stoicism would, over the next five hundred years alone, captivate countless prominent historical figures, among them Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Ambrose, and quite possibly Saint Paul. This program will introduce you to the roots and rise of stoicism in the Ancient Mediterranean, culminating in the stoic philosophy of Seneca in the years between 65 and 75 CE, one of the most important decades in all literary history, for reasons we’ll soon discuss.

Stoicism: The Basics

Stoicism is a complex subject for many reasons. In investigating the first two centuries of stoicism’s history, we encounter a web of mostly secondary sources which sometimes include contradictory accounts of stoicism’s founding fathers. During the first century CE, as we begin to have more primary sources from the stoic canon, we encounter figures with very different intellectual capacities and philosophical interests, some interested in ethics, some in logic and dialectics, and others still in stoic physics and theology. But what’s most challenging of all, to me, is that in the Anglophone world, we are still living in a world dominated by stoic ideas, even if we don’t know it. Like the stoics and before them Socrates, we try to pursue virtue and personal excellence, because the private worlds of our ethics and choices are things that we can control amidst the turbulent forces around us. Like the stoics, we try to imagine that our choices are meaningful in a vast and seemingly deterministic universe. Like the stoics, we imagine that a single force is at work behind the universe, whether we believe this force is a deity, or physics, or some combination thereof. These ideas are so basic to us today in the twenty-first century that they don’t even seem like ideas as such. But each of them – the pursuit of virtue, the search for personal agency in a mechanistic universe, and the supposition that some animating force governs that universe – these are stoic concerns, through and through.

Before we go any further, let’s establish a brief, general definition of stoicism. Just as Epicureanism often gets misunderstood as a philosophy promoting hedonism, stoicism is often misconceived as a doctrine merely advocating emotionless aloofness. And while emotionless aloofness is part of stoicism, stoics promoted far more than simply being tough and detached. To simplify things dramatically, stoics believed that the pursuit of reason and virtue were the keys to happiness, that one should temper and control one’s emotions, passions, and desires, that the entire universe was, and was superintended by a single benevolent force, whether a deity or reason itself, and finally, that the universe existed on a cyclical basis of fiery destruction and rebirth. Stoics were also heavily interested in propositional logic and theories of perception and learning. Now if you’ve listened to Literature and History’s programs up to this point, these ideas probably sound familiar. Because even in 300 BCE, when the father of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, began hawking his philosophical wares on the Painted Stoa of the Athenian Agora from which stoicism gets its name, none of the notions I mentioned above were entirely new. The Ancient Egyptian “Instruction of Amenemope” of 1100 BCE, and thereafter Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs, and more generally the wisdom literature of the Ancient Mediterranean had long preached prudence, minimalism, and taciturn self-sufficiency as keys to prosperity. Similarly, stoic philosophy promoted a doctrine called monism – or the entire universe being one interconnected entity, and this notion predated stoicism by at least two centuries – the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides had advocated it in his poem On Nature in the bygone days of the Greco-Persian Wars. The notion of the creation and destruction of the universe being orchestrated by some all-governing being had dominated the theological epics of the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East since the 2000s BCE. And in brief, stoicism was a raft built of many prefabricated parts that had already been floating around the Mediterranean for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before its birth in Athens in 300 BCE. Stoicism did bring some sophisticated original contributions to philosophical history – specifically in logic, ethics, and epistemology. But its main apparatus – the notion that tempering one’s passions, rolling with the punches, and always having faith in the unity, order, and justice of the universe – these ideas had been around for a long time beforehand.²

Stoicism, over the course of its first five centuries, was part of a larger ideological evolution in the ancient Mediterranean. In the hundred plus hours of Literature and History that we’ve shared so far, we’ve seen a slow progression unfolding. This progression began with regional polytheistic pantheons – thunder gods generally ruling over lesser deities and theological epics that survive as entertaining circuses of violence, incest, rape, and special effects. The Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, the Descent of Inanna, the Hittite Kumarbi cycle, the Ugaritic Baal cycle, the Homeric epics, and certain parts of the Pentateuch and Prophetic Books all show deities and men in colorful and raucous conflicts that don’t seem especially characterized by any governing logic or morality. In fifth-century BCE Athens, however, and in later Biblical wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes, we begin to see a restless search for meaning amidst a grinding and fatalistic universe. So many Greek tragedies – Agamemnon, Oedipus, Antigone, the Bacchae – end with gloomy meditations on the powerlessness of man beneath the frenzied caprices of the gods. Job and Ecclesiastes, similarly, dare to ask what humanity can do when deities and the world alike leave us impotent to change our fates. In brief, theology and philosophy from the late 500s onward show citizens of the ancient Mediterranean becoming increasingly inquisitive, and increasingly self-assertive about their own specific places in the universe, and stoicism is an important part of this general tendency.

Back in Episode 40, which was called “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self,” we talked about how, in the chaos and mass-enslavements that followed the campaigns of Alexander of Macedon, cult religions focused on posthumous salvation, and new philosophies that emphasized the care of the self – philosophies like Epicureanism and stoicism – began to gain ground, providing adherents with a sense of stability and control denied to them by the warring states Alexander had left behind. Zeno of Citium, again the founder of stoicism, was born in about 334 – the very year that Alexander began his eastward campaign into Asia Minor and the Persian Empire. Zeno, who grew up in Cyprus, was about eleven when Alexander died, and his first ten years would have been full of news of the Macedonian conqueror’s bloody campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Cyprus at that point was a Phoenician settlement, and accounts differ about how, exactly, Zeno came to Athens. Sources agree that Zeno began his career as a seafarer, and arrived in Athens around the age of thirty – some say by a shipwreck, and others, due to a deliberate effort to pursue studies in philosophy. For whatever reason Zeno disembarked in Athens in the last years of the 300s BCE, when he did so, a chain of events had already been set in motion that would lead to the creation of one of the most enduring and influential schools of thought in human history. [music]

The Earliest Stoic Philosophers

When Zeno arrived in Athens a little before 300 BCE, a few different philosophical schools were in operation there. These schools were, to varying extents, reactions to Socrates, who had died in 399 BCE. They included the Platonic Academy, founded about a decade after Socrates’ death by Plato himself, and also the Lyceum, founded by Aristotle in about 335. Another school of thought Zeno encountered was cynicism, a philosophy that took Socratic minimalism and austerity to their logical extremes. Cynicism, which comes from the Greek word kynikos, or dog-like, was a philosophy that promoted indifference to personal possessions and wholesale disregard of social conventions. Its most famous practitioner, Diogenes, had died in 323 – the same year as Alexander – being known in his own time for being so poor that he slept in a large jar in the Athenian marketplace, for disparaging Athenians as effete and false, and for carrying out obscene practices like public defecation and masturbation.

When Zeno came to Athens, then, all the raw materials of stoicism were already present on the scene. Stoicism would be known as a philosophy that preached asceticism and staunch individualism – Socrates had promoted these values and Diogenes the Cynic had made austerity and nonconformity into public theater, at one point, famously, even insulting Alexander himself. Stoicism would grow increasingly interested in logic, as Aristotle and his philosophical school had been for the past few decades. Stoicism would promote the notion of the universe as a single entity continually fashioning itself in the pursuit of an eventual terminus point – Plato’s doctrine of the demiurge in his dialogue Timaeus and Aristotle’s doctrine of ontology in his Metaphysics were important precursors to stoic theology. Thus, in his first decade in Athens, as he initially followed a Cynic philosopher called Crates and later struck out on his own path, Zeno wasn’t so much a pioneer as he was a synthesizer.

With one minor exception, we have no primary texts from the first two centuries of stoic philosophy. The majority of what we know about Zeno and his immediate successors comes from the work of Cicero, writing in the 50s and 40s BCE, the biographer Diogenes Laërtius, at work in the early 200s CE, and a smattering of other smaller sources. Laërtius’ records of the earliest stoics are an amusing catalog of eccentric characters and the disputations between them. Zeno, Laërtius tells us, lived until the age of 98, having led a life of temperance, virtue and gravity, notwithstanding his rather mercilessly disparaging attitude toward those lacking virtue.³ Zeno’s pupil Ariston, called “Ariston of Chios, the Bald,” promoted a doctrine of indifference and disdained philosophical dogmatism.⁴ Zeno’s longtime student Cleanthes loved philosophical work, and while Cleanthes spent his days practicing philosophy, at night he worked as a manual laborer, watering gardens.⁵

From Cleanthes, we have our first text from the stoic canon proper – a hymn to Zeus. The Homeric hymns, back in the 600s BCE, had followed Homer and Hesiod as a mosaic of stories and devotional passages about prominent Greek deities – lengthy hymns survive to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite. So again Cleanthes, Zeno’s most important immediate successor, wrote a hymn to Zeus. In Homer, and much of the ancient Greek literature we currently possess, Zeus is a sort of sexual viking – a blundering hedonist who goes from rape to rape only pausing occasionally to blow something up. Zeus appears a bit differently in Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Let’s hear a section of this Hymn to Zeus, likely written at some point between 300 and 250 BCE, and consider how much Cleanthes’ Zeus sounds more like a wise and omnipotent deity than a churlish thunder god.

This entire cosmos which revolves around the earth obeys you, wherever you might lead it, and is willingly ruled by you; such is [the might of] your thunderbolt, a two-edged helper in your invincible hands, fiery and everliving. . .By it you straighten the common rational principle which penetrates all things, being mixed with lights both great and small. . .Nor does any deed occur on earth without you, god, neither in the aithereal divine heaven nor on the sea, except for the deeds of the wicked in their folly. But you know how to set right what is excessive, and to put in order what is disorderly, for you, even what is not dear is dear. For thus you have fitted together all good things with the bad, so that there is one eternal rational principle for them all. . .Zeus, giver of all, you of the dark clouds, of the blazing thunderbolt save people from their baneful inexperience and disperse it, father, far from their souls; grant that they may achieve wisdom with which you confidently guide all with justice so that we may requite you with honor for the honor you give us praising your works continually, as is fitting for mortals; for there is no greater prize, neither for mortals nor for gods, than to praise with justice the common law forever.⁶

That again was the stoic philosopher Cleanthes, more or less the second prominent stoic philosopher after Zeno. And that quote came from a book called The Stoics Reader, edited by Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson. Now, the notion of Zeus as the dispenser of divine justice wasn’t new in, say, 275 BCE, around the time Cleanthes wrote this hymn. Hesiod had called Zeus the aegisholder of justice in Works and Days (321-39) almost five hundred years earlier, and in general the notion of divine justice dates at least back to the ancient Egyptian concept of ma’at, or universal order chronicled in the Book of the Dead sometime after the First Intermediate Period.

What’s important to notice in Cleanthes’ hymn is its the way that it emphasizes Zeus’ ubiquity, and rationality – Cleanthes writes, “[Y]ou straighten the common rational principle which penetrates all things. . .Nor does any deed occur on earth without you, god, neither in the aithereal divine heaven nor on the sea.” In the same decades Cleanthes was writing this hymn, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, Alexandrian Jews were producing the Septuagint. And within the first Greek language Bible, Yahweh is comparably more temperamental than Cleanthes’ Zeus. Yahweh, who passive aggressively spars with the Egyptian pharaoh at the outset of Exodus, who intermittently massacres his own people in Numbers, who slays Job’s family and brags about wrestling sea monsters rather than explaining himself – this is not the numinous and omniscient entity we encounter in the early stoic philosopher Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Now, I don’t mean to cherry pick ugly episodes from the Old Testament, by the way – just to offer a simple point of contrast on a general line of evolution. Between 1,000 BCE and the birth of Christ, deities in Ancient Mediterranean texts were becoming less anthropomorphic and ornery, and more omnipotent and otherworldly. Because the various books of the Old Testament were written over the course of about a thousand years, we can see this evolution taking place in them, and we should note that plenty of Psalms and selections from the Prophetic Books do portray Yahweh as a distant, omniscient being more like the god of stoicism than the ones in the Homeric epics.

To return to Cleanthes, Zeno’s philosophical successor had his own successor, an important figure named Chrysippus. By all accounts, Chrysippus, who lived from about 279-206 BCE, developed and codified stoicism in ways that have defined it ever since. The later biographer Diogenes Laërtius attests that Chrysippus was a long-distance runner who eventually went into philosophy. The endurance athlete evidently applied his formidable work ethic to intellectual labor, producing more than 705 tracts on an encyclopedic range of subjects.⁷ Perhaps most famous for his work on logic and syllogism, Chrysippus was as intellectually remarkable as he was prolific. While Chrysippus’ works are lost, Cicero wrote about Chrysippus extensively.

Chrysippus, Cicero tells us, wrote the following: “[U]ncaused motion does not exist. If this is so, all things that take place take place by precedent causes; if this is so, all take place by fate; it therefore allows that all things that take place take place by fate.”⁸ Fate, then, or to use the more philosophically neutral sounding term, “determinism,” is at the core of stoic ideology. And to Chrysippus, fate, god, and the world were all one intertwined thing. As Cicero summarizes:

[Chrysippus] says that the divine power is placed in reason, and in the spirit and mind of universal nature; that the world, with a universal effusion of its spirit, is God; that the superior part of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and preserving the chain of all things; that the divinity is the power of fate, and the necessity of future events.⁹

In other words, to Chrysippus, the universe was a single organism, with its own intentionality, its many cells all operating in unison to the logic of a single mind. This notion is the heart of stoic theology, and we encounter it more or less unaltered three hundred years later in the philosophy of Seneca.

So, what we’ve covered so far is a substantially abridged story of how the ideology of Socrates in, say, the 420s BCE splintered into several different schools. While the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum each had their spin, the earliest stoic philosophers adapted Socrates’ asceticism, his emphasis on the importance of virtue, and his sense that providence propelled the universe along into their own ideology. Two hundred years after Socrates, stoicism was a robust intellectual movement but not yet a popular trend. It possessed broadly appealing qualities, certainly – namely that one could pursue virtue and wisdom willy nilly the turmoil of contemporary history, and that the seeming pandemonium of the present was merely the rumbling engine of providence. But at the same time, it had defects that limited its popular appeal. Its interest in self-renunciation, and its anti-materialism were blemishes to certain potential practitioners, and similarly, the logical acrobatics of figures like Chrysippus, while impressive to an inner core of the philosophically-minded, did not have a broad public appeal. Additionally, early stoic ideology’s notion that the entire universe is headed on a crash course with fiery destruction and subsequent rebirth seems to have been objectionable – after all, if the universe is a beneficent, purposive whole, why would its purpose be a long sequence of self-annihilations? The first generations of stoics had been vigorous and prolific but equally diverse. In the mid-100s BCE, the skeptic philosopher Carneades, based at the Platonic Academy in Athens, waged a concerted campaign against stoicism, and of the principal stoic philosophers of the early 100s BCE, very little survives.

Stoicism’s Journey from Greece to Rome

In the later 100s, however, a philosopher named Panaetius, who did much to bring stoicism from Athens to Rome, also modified the philosophy for a new generation of adherents, greatly influencing Cicero and later Seneca. Panaetius was from Rhodes, and according to the information we have on him, he seems to have softened some of the harsher aspects of stoic philosophy. Abandoning the older stoic notion of a self-destructing universe, he promoted the idea that the cosmos is eternal.¹⁰ Just as he pushed against stoicism’s apocalyptic ideology, Panaetius also countered the extremes of the philosophy’s asceticism. According to the biographer Diogenes Laërtius, the pivotal stoic philosopher Panaetius argued “that virtue is not sufficient [for happiness] but that there is a need for health and material resources and strength.”¹¹ This notion, commonsensical as it is, seems to have been a welcome contribution to stoicism’s more spartan tendencies. Another ancient biographer adds that “Panaetius claimed. . .that the goal [of stoicism] is living according to the inclinations given to us by nature.”¹² Following the mandates of the universe and nature, rather than a self-imposed set of ethical guidelines, was indeed a gentler brand of stoicism than what had come before. And maybe the most favorable assessment of Panaetius comes from Cicero, who is often a fierce critic of stoic philosophy. After accusing the stoics and the Aristotelians of particularly unappealing dogmatism, Cicero writes, “Panaetius strove to avoid this uncouth and repellant development of Stoicism, censuring alike the harshness of its doctrines and the crabbedness of its logic. In doctrine he was mellower, in style more lucid.”¹³

Panaetius, then, created a more palatable brand of stoicism for posterity, and he did it in the most advantageous places and times in republican Rome. The general, consul, and polymath Scipio Aemilianus, who’d been a patron of the historian Polybius and the playwright Terence, brought Panaetius into his circle in the 140s BCE – the same decade that Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War. Panaetius, maybe more genial and realistic than his predecessors in stoicism, found himself at the intellectual heart of brawny young Rome, and as the republic bested Carthage and annexed Greece, Panaetius gave offered it a streamlined and tided version of stoicism – a version which would, along with Epicureanism, have broad appeal to the Roman aristocracy.

The spotty records we have of stoicism up until Panaetius reveal a philosophy that was intellectually forceful, but too bleak and caught up in doctrines of self-abnegation to ever be popular. Its forebears and early practitioners, from the ascetic Socrates, to the street pooping Diogenes, to the fiercely elitist Zeno, to the endurance athlete Chrysippus had in common a ferocious individualism and puritanical disdain toward passions. Historically successful ascetic philosophies, like Buddhism or Christian monasticism, operate partially on incentive systems, promising enlightenment or posthumous salvation at the cost of worldly self-denial. Stoicism’s early centuries, by contrast, placed a bit too much emphasis on renunciation and not enough on reward. Its early critics, chief among them Cicero, mock the school for preaching dogmatic austerity and offering little in return.

Contrastingly, Epicureanism, with its emphasis on the pursuit of ataraxia, or tranquility, had a much better sales pitch. Eat and drink moderately, the Epicureans taught, and live in the stimulating cloisters of friends and family, and avoid the rough and tumble of public life, and you’ll be on your way to lasting serenity. Compared with this, early stoicism was a tough sell. However, as the first century BCE opened, historical and intellectual circumstances unfolded that paved the way for stoicism’s popularization and ultimate triumph over Epicureanism. One important factor in stoicism’s rise was the fine tuning that the philosopher Panaetius seems to have performed upon bringing stoicism to the center of the Roman world. And another is that, from Sulla to Augustus, Rome was in turmoil for a full half century, and afterward, as the first emperor confiscated the long standing rights of the Roman gentry, and the later Julio-Claudians put Rome on a teeter-totter of chaos and prosperity, there was a great need for a popular intellectual movement that valorized self-renunciation and glorified the idea of the man apart, content in a cocoon of his own pursuit of virtue. And thirdly, it’s important to emphasize that stoic asceticism as such does have its own specific appeal. A Horace, or a Virgil, once they were on the right side of the Second Triumvirate and installed in affluent literary circles, might comfortably devote themselves to Epicurean tranquility. Seneca, however, born with a lung disease and in real danger for much of his life, had compelling reasons to embrace a philosphy that largely renounced passion and preached the disciplined pursuit of virtue. And Marcus Aurelius, some time later, who wanted an intellectual life and spent so much of his adulthood fighting wars, found in stoicism a philosophy that helped him make sense of the self-renunciation he’d been compelled to undertake.

After Panaetius, then, as the gates of the first century BCE opened, Romans had access to an number of relatively recent philosophical schools – schools that explained their place as individuals in a convoluted and unfair world. When Cicero, following his consulship in 63 BCE, spent an extraordinary two decades writing tracts on ethics and philosophy, he worked to make these disciplines a legitimate pursuit in Rome. Cicero’s older Greek contemporary Posidonius carried the torch for stoicism after Panaetius passed away, but borrowed as much from Aristotle and Plato as he did form the early stoic philosophers, following Panaetius’ecleticism and his softening of stoic ethics. Thus, when Seneca was born in about 4 BCE, stoic principles were everywhere, but the philosophy was in a state of flux, blending, decade after decade, with other Hellenistic Greek philosophies. Aristotelian philosophy, Platonism, Epicureanism, and stoicism were a Venn diagram of overlapping principles, and one could almost say that individuals chose according to their dispositions, polymaths preferring Aristotle and Plato, aristocrats and artists favoring a light form of Epicureanism, and people traumatized or badly served by the Augustan Age being most attracted to stoicism.

In Seneca’s case, as we learned last time, poor health and a stringent father perhaps compelled him toward stoic philosophy. Physically handicapped, he couldn’t share the adventurous boyhoods of his equestrian neighbors in the vineyards of his family estate in Hispania, and so he found stoicism’s renunciation of passion and pleasure appealing. And again as we learned last time, Seneca’s tenure in the courts of the Julio-Claudians gave him ample reasons to believe that the private pursuit of virtue was a person’s only safe harbor, and to hope, as so many stoics did, that the seemingly pitiless universe was actually uncoiling according to a grand divine agenda. [music]

Tough-Mindedness and Minimalism in Senecan Stoicism

In this history of stoicism so far, we’ve hurried through three centuries of the philosophy’s evolution in order to get to Seneca. A notoriously rich man, and one who purportedly threw lavish parties, and a fixer for the murderous emperor Nero, Seneca is in many ways a very awkward torchbearer for Roman stoicism. A proper stoic, Seneca’s critics have been saying for nearly two thousand years, wouldn’t pursue vast personal wealth, or spend so much time with moneylending and usury, or perhaps worst of all, enable the murder of his longtime patron Agrippina the Younger to save his own skin. Nonetheless, Seneca left so much behind that he provides us with a sort of grand tour of stoic philosophy up to the 60s CE. While his life hardly matched up to his professed principles, Seneca worked so energetically to be a good stoic that his corpus of philosophical writings is a sort of long stoic’s diary, made of equal parts original philosophical work, self-justifying egotism, and quiet melancholy. And thus precisely because of the personality of Seneca, and his own consciousness of his personal deficiencies, Seneca continued to humanize stoicism for a broader audience, a process begun two centuries before by Panaetius and Posidonious. He wrote toward the end of his life that “This, I say, is the highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom – that deed and word should be in accord, that a man should be equal to himself under all conditions, and always the same.”¹⁴ And while he earnestly believed that actions should correspond with beliefs, he sometimes admits that his do not.

What I want to do now is use Seneca’s corpus of works to take you through some of the cardinal principles of stoicism as they existed in Rome in the middle of the first century CE. And while stoicism is far more than the stouthearted avoidance of emotional excess, curbing one’s passions is nonetheless an important of the philosophy, so let’s begin by talking about the stereotypically stoic parts of stoicism. In some of the last writings that he left behind, Seneca puts it fairly simply: “Philosophers of [the stoic] school reject the emotions.”¹⁵ It is an extreme statement, and Seneca offers context afterward.

Do not fear; I am not robbing you of any privileges which you are unwilling to lose! I shall be kindly and indulgent towards the objects for which you strive – those which you hold to be necessary to our existence, or useful, or pleasant; I shall simply strip away the vice. . .There is no vice which lacks some plea; there is no vice that at the start is not modest and easily entreated; but afterwards the trouble spreads more widely. If you allow it to begin, you cannot make sure of its ceasing. Every emotion at the start is weak. Afterwards, it rouses itself and gains strength by progress; it is more easy to forestall it than to forgo it. Who does not admit that all emotions flow as it were from a certain natural source? We are endowed by Nature with an interest in our own well-being; but this very interest, when overindulged, becomes a vice. . .Let us therefore resist these [emotional excesses] when they are demanding entrance, because, as I have said, it is easier to deny them admittance than to make them depart. (CXVI 1-3)

In this passage, Seneca explains and attempts to justify stoicism’s notorious disparagement of emotion. Emotion, to Seneca, is not altogether perverse, but instead a natural impulse that must be carefully governed. Without careful regulation, emotion can seep into the cracks of an otherwise orderly life and lead to the loss of contentment and productivity.

Emotional self-indulgence, Seneca and the stoics believed, left one weak and unprepared for the challenges of life. Throughout his life he wrote extensively about the importance of calmness and equipoise under duress. I’m going to read a quote from his tract On Providence which shows characteristic stoic contempt for emotionality and also showcases Seneca’s characteristically vivid writing style. Seneca wrote, perhaps during his exile in Corsica in the 40s,

Do not. . .dread those things which the immortal gods apply to our minds like spurs: misfortune is virtue’s opportunity. Those men may justly be called unhappy who are stupified with excess of enjoyment, whom sluggish contentment keeps as it were becalmed in a quiet sea: whatever befalls them will come strange to them. Misfortunes press hardest on those who are unacquainted with them: the yoke feels heavy to the tender neck. The recruit turns pale at the thought of a wound: the veteran, who knows that he has often won the victory after losing blood, looks boldly at his own flowing gore.¹⁶

The rhetoric here is as potent as it is distinctly Roman. Expose yourself to adversity, Seneca says, and you will become like steel tempered in a forge; avoid it, and risk becoming weak and feeble. One imagines Seneca’s aristocratic contemporaries reading passages like these and becoming stirred with a sense that masculinity and asceticism and martial valor were all woven in with one another, and that stoic practices were a gateway toward strapping Roman courage.

The most stereotypically stoic parts of Seneca’s stoicism, then, are fairly predictable. Keep your emotions close cropped, lest they grow out of control, he writes. And use hardship as an opportunity, because strong minds are steeled through calamities. As stirring as these ideas are, they’re so commonplace in Hellenistic philosophy and wisdom literature that we don’t need to spend much more time with them. Seneca often wrote exhilarating platitudes about embracing adversities, but he’s perhaps more interesting when he offers examples of how he himself sought staunch minimalism amidst the temptations around him.

This stoic doctrine – asceticism or minimalism, obviously different than simply tempering one’s emotions – is another cornerstone of the philosophy, and of course woven together with stoicism’s disparagement of emotions and passions. The basic idea of stoic minimalism isn’t that you need to sit in rags on a mountaintop and waste away, but rather that you can be content throughout your whole life with very few things. Seneca emphasized that the pursuit of possessions and sensory pleasures is a neverending addiction that derails one from tranquility and virtue. On this subject, he wrote in his Letters to Lucilius that

That is why I have forsaken oysters and mushrooms for ever: since they are not really food, but are relishes to bully the sated stomach into further eating, as is the fancy of gourmands and those who stuff themselves beyond their powers of digestion: down with it quickly, and up with it quickly! That is why I have also throughout my life avoided perfumes; because the best scent for the person is no scent at all. That is why my stomach is unacquainted with wine. That is why throughout my life I have shunned the bath, and have believed that to emaciate the body and sweat it into thinness is at once unprofitable and effeminate.¹⁷

Seneca often wrote about and touted his own minimalism. Health problems from a young age seem to have attracted him toward a moderate lifestyle. While it’s hard to belittle anyone for avoiding fine foods or other physical self indulgences, sometimes the very passages in which Seneca advertises his minimalism plainly show that he was not at all spending his days eating brown bread in a monk’s robe. In a late letter I mentioned in the previous episode, Seneca writes, “My friend Maximus and I have been spending a most happy period of two days, taking with us very few slaves – one carriage-load – and no paraphernalia except what we wore on our persons. The mattress lies on the ground, and I upon the mattress. There are two rugs – one to spread beneath us and one to cover us. Nothing could have been subtracted from our luncheon; it took not more than an hour to prepare.”¹⁸ A simple day in the country, thus, in Seneca’s mind, involves a mere carriage load of slaves and a luncheon that requires a paltry hour of preparation. He may have disdained oysters and perfume, but Seneca was nonetheless one of the ultra-rich, and in passages like the one just quoted, we see the extent to which his enormous wealth put him woefully out of touch with the plight of the common person on the Roman street. [music]

Senecan Stoicism and Public Activism

If we stopped right here, you’d have the sense of Seneca’s philosophy that most students of classics ultimately walk away with – that he was a rich hypocrite who wrote inspiring tracts on minimalism while wearing gold houseslippers. This is not untrue. For his ideological inconsistency, and for his ultimate profiteering from, and endorsement of autocracy, Seneca has been villainzed for almost two thousand years. But to do justice to Seneca’s contributions to stoicism, we need to bracket the hypocrisy issue and delve a bit more into the political and intellectual work that the philosopher was trying to accomplish.

Stoicism, unlike Epicureanism, did not disdain public and political engagement.¹⁹ Seneca’s stoic contemporary Thrasea was in the senate; Seneca’s nephew Lucan, also associated with stoicism, wrote an epic that vigorously denounced the autocracy that Julius Caesar had ultimately engendered. While stoic intellectuals were active in Roman politics in Seneca’s day, Seneca’s main role model was probably Cicero, that celebrity who somehow had done it all, entering fully into bareknuckle politics and all the while being on the cutting edge of intellectual history to boot. But there were problems that Seneca faced that never confronted Cicero. First, while the stoics, on paper, at least, disdained wealth and possessions, membership in the senate required an annual income of 300,000 sesterces. For stoics like Seneca and Thrasea, political engagement thus required the disregard of one of their philosophy’s central tenets – that of minimalism. Secondly, in the world of Cicero’s late republic, there was no autocrat dug into the center of politics, and thus oratory and other political work had much more substantial chance of actually making a political difference. In sum, then, Seneca wanted to be like Cicero, but Seneca’s adherence to stoicism made him painfully conscious of the impropriety of his ever-growing wealth – Seneca sought Cicero’s ability to impact domestic and foreign policy, but he was born into a dictatorship and not a republic.

Earlier, we explored the stereotypical parts of Senecan stoicism – the disdain of emotion and material possessions. While Seneca inherited these cardinal principles from his philosophical forebears, he also attempted to use stoic philosophy to make a political difference. Particularly, with his tracts entitled On Anger and On Clemency, he responded to the appalling things he’d witnessed in the courts of Caligula and Nero, and tried to deploy stoic philosophy to make Rome a better place. His ultimate lack of success in doing so shouldn’t distract us from the ultimate valorousness of his attempt, and calls for intellectual public engagement are not uncommon in his work.

Seneca valued public engagement, and one of his most memorable statements about virtue is a subtle indictment of Epicureanism’s praises for the sequestered life. In his book On the Happy Life, Seneca emphasizes that virtue does not ever shun civic and political participation, writing, “You will meet virtue in the temple, the market-place, the senate house, manning the walls, covered with dust, sunburnt, horny-handed: you will find pleasure skulking out of sight, seeking for shady nooks at the public baths, hot chambers, and places which dread the visits of the aedile, soft, effeminate, reeking of wine and perfumes, pale or perhaps painted and made up with cosmetics.”²⁰ The distinction is clear – stoics throw themselves into public lives, Epicureans slink away and seek out tranquility in the worlds of their tempered pleasures.

It was probably during his exile in Corsica, while recollecting the gruesome excesses of Caligula, that Seneca wrote a book called On Anger. The book’s purpose was duofold – it sought to bring stoicism to a higher understanding of how emotional impulses work, and at the same time to condemn emperors like Caligula and create ones more like Marcus Aurelius. The book begins by pinpointing anger as the unequivocal enemy of humanity. “[N]o plague has cost the human race more dear,” Seneca writes. “[Y]ou will see slaughterings and poisonings, accusations and counter-accusations, sacking of cities, ruin of whole peoples, the persons of princes sold into slavery by auction, torches applied to roofs, and fires not merely confined within city-walls but making whole tracts of country glow with hostile flame.”²¹ Caligula seems to be fresh in Seneca’s mind as he writes that anger is “above all other [passions] hideous and wild; for the others have some alloy of peace and quiet, but this consists wholly in action and the impulse of grief, raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood and tortures” (1.1). Yet Seneca’s book On Anger is more than a long condemnation. The book is also written to try and puzzle out an issue central to stoicism – what emotions are, where they come from, and how we process them. To this end, he argues that we experience emotions initially as impulses, or what he calls motus – we might jump at the sound of a loud noise, or tear up during a sad play, but these are transient reactions. Transient reactions, or motus, Seneca argues, do not need to transform into what he calls affectus, or real convictions.²² A discerning person can fall down a flight of stairs but realize that stairs are not intrinsically bad – the important thing is to maintain a barrier, or filter, between one’s immediate impulses and one’s real convictions. Anger, he emphasizes, all too often arises as a reaction to short term impulses and then congeals into a permanent disposition.

While Seneca’s theory of anger and emotional impulse in his book On Anger isn’t earth shattering, it nonetheless was a discernible step forward for stoicism, written with the intention of protecting Rome from any future Caligula. And when a future Caligula appeared on the scene a decade or so later in the form of Nero, Seneca repeated his performance. His book On Clemency, which we talked a bit about last time, cautiously tried to counsel the teenage Nero toward benevolence and leniency. It is a curious book – in large part a piece of cajolery, but in other places, like On Anger, a serious philosophical endeavor attempting to praise clemency as a stoic ideal. Nero paid it little heed, but nonetheless On Clemency deserves to be recognized as another serious attempt to correct the dangerous impulses of the Julio-Claudians.

These were not the only texts that Seneca wrote that were geared toward stabilizing Rome’s executive leadership. I think that when we demonize him as an opulent hypocrite, and when we focus on how Seneca continued to remain attached to Nero during and after Nero’s murder of his mother, we forget that at several points in his career Seneca was taking stoicism’s principles of public engagement seriously. His tracts of ethical philosophy, unsurprisingly, did not manage to curb Nero’s violent megalomania, but they were nevertheless written by a person who was, in his own way, being brave and trying to use the tools he had to make the world a better place. [music]

Seneca and the Problem of Evil

As he wrote tracts like On Anger and On Clemency – long essays that tried to counsel Rome’s initial emperors toward enlightened despotism and away from murderous rampages – Seneca was fighting a more private intellectual battle. And this battle was making sense of the horrible things he saw around him in contemporary Rome. Stoicism, as we’ve learned, promoted the idea of universal, divine reason governing the cosmos and everything in it. And like any though system that preaches beneficent divine providence, stoicism had to deal with a certain thorny problem, which in theological history usually gets called “the problem of evil.” We talked about this back in Episode 20 on the Book of Job – put simply – the question of why the world frequently is such a nasty place if it is indeed governed by a benevolent plan.

Because, as far as I’ve seen, this question is unanswerable, those who rise to the challenge of trying to do so have to dodge it in various ways. In Job, God simply says that he clobbered the Behemoth and the Leviathan, and so Job needs to stand down, leaving no doubt about God’s might, but considerable continued uncertainty about why Job had to suffer. Seneca’s answer, as it’s printed in his books On Providence and On the Constancy of the Wise Man, is something we’ve already heard – evils and misfortunes are not evils and misfortunes, they’re only challenges sent by providence, and ones that the doughty stoic should see as opportunity. Seneca writes in On Providence,

Just as so many rivers, so many showers of rain from the clouds, such a number of medicinal springs, do not alter the taste of the sea, indeed, do not so much as soften it, so the pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of a brave man; for the mind of a brave man maintains its balance and throws its own complexion over all that takes place, because it is more powerful than any external circumstances. I do not say that he does not feel them, but he conquers them, and on occasion calmly and tranquilly rises superior to their attacks, holding all misfortunes to be trials of his own firmness.²³

The entire universe, Seneca writes, is a harmonious system, notwithstanding the extent that sometimes appears disparate – its overall connectivity and order is far too vast and harmonious to be accidental. And in this shimmering, concordant universe, we sometimes fail to see that the challenges we face are blessings, rather than curses. Speaking of the governing stoic deity, Seneca writes, “[God] does not pet the good man: He tries him, hardens him, and fits him for Himself.”²⁴ By way of example, Seneca recollects how Cato the Younger and Socrates suffered great calamities, but in their suicides, they incurred the eternal admiration of posterity.

Seneca’s answer to the question of the problem of evil is, plainly, ridiculously inadequate. Certainly we can all become stronger and wiser through overcoming adversity, and there is much to be said for making lemonade out of lemons. But in terms of deadly pandemics, natural disasters, child mortality, and other standard parts of the problem of evil question, Seneca fails to respond. One would expect a more satisfactory answer to the problem of evil from a man who’d seen Caligula slice and dice guiltless Romans for fun, and who knew of Tiberius’ murderous purges only a few years prior. But Seneca merely attests that the stoic sage is impermeable to the blows of fate – or as he puts it, “The wise man is safe, and no injury or insult can touch him.”²⁵ One wonders if Seneca watched the great fire of Rome in July of 64 CE and actually looked with contempt on the tens of thousands of Romans who allowed themselves to be devastated by deaths and material losses, not having coffers of sesterces to fall back on.

Whenever he comes close to the question of the problem of evil, as if by a sort of reflex reaction, Seneca asserts the ultimate indomitability of the stoic philosopher. He is at his most revolting, perhaps when he hyperbolizes the inviolable virtue of the stoic wise man. In a book called On the Firmness of the Wise Person, Seneca writes, “Just as sacred things escape from the hands of men, and no injury is done to the godhead by those who destroy temples and melt down images, so whoever attempts to treat the wise man with impertinence, insolence, or scorn, does so in vain.”²⁶ The implicit comparison of gods with stoic philosophers is hardly subtle here. But in terms of pure repugnance, Seneca begins his book On the Firmness of the Wise Person with what is possibly the most awful sentence ever written in the history of philosophy. And this sentence is, “I might truly say. . .that there is as wide a difference between the Stoics and the other sects of philosophers as there is between men and women, since each class contributes an equal share to human society, but the one is born to command, the other to obey.” I truly couldn’t wait to read the rest of that book after that luminous opening.

Like the Yahweh in the Book of Job, Seneca answers the question of the problem of evil with aggressive self-aggrandizement, although of a different sort. There can be no hardship to the wise man, says Seneca, because he lives in the invincible encasement of his own virtue – and as for women, children, and non-stoics, they don’t matter. Whenever he thought about, or experienced adversity, it seems, Seneca hurried to assert the indomitability of the stoic sage. Earlier in his career, during his exile on Corsica in the 40s, he assured his mother that rather than being heartbroken, he believed that he was becoming a god. “I distinctly tell you,” he wrote to his mother Helvia, “that I am not miserable: I will add, for your greater comfort, that it is not possible for me to be made miserable. . .I should not only say that I was not unhappy, but should avow myself to be the most fortunate of men, and to be raised almost to the level of a god.”²⁷ I think there’s really nothing wrong with rallying oneself a bit in the midst of trying circumstances. I equally think that there’s something distinctly pathetic about a person in his mid-forties telling his mother that the miseries of being exiled to a warm Mediterranean island with his wife and retinue of slaves was such a spiritually transformative experience that it was making him into a god.

Egotism like that of Seneca seems to have been a charge leveled against the stoics often. A hundred years after the death of Seneca, the satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote a fictional dialogue between an aspiring stoic and his acquaintance, and the aspiring stoic asserts that “[T]hose who endure to the end [of stoicism’s pursuits] reach the top, to be blessed thenceforth with wondrous days, looking down from their height upon the ants which are the rest of mankind.”²⁸ While Lucian merely mocks stoicism’s shrill arrogance, in the early 400s St. Augustine leveled more serious charges against Seneca’s philosophy. First, simply put, the confident and swaggering Seneca was a pagan, and Augustine, quoting the book of Isaiah (48:22), wrote that “contentment is the property of the good and godly.”²⁹ But Augustine had more specific objections to Seneca’s philosophy than its impiety. Augustine wrote with incredulity that the “[stoics] would have. . .the soul of the wise man. . .free of all vice. . .According to [stoics], therefore, none but the wise man wills, is contented, uses caution; and. . .the fool can do no more than desire, rejoice, fear, be said. . .Sorrow itself, too. . .the Stoics would not allow. . .represented in the mind of the wise man” (246, 380, 382). From a purely philosophical perspective, then, their religious differences aside, Augustine found Seneca’s ideology overly exclusive in addition to unabashedly arrogant. To Augustine, nobody got a free pass on life’s sufferings, and humanity was not divided between a tiny sect of bulletproof stoic sages, and everyone else. Augustine, who was in some ways orders of magnitude more brilliant than Seneca, most especially when it came to self-evaluation, swats stoicism like a fly throughout his writings.

And yet it’s very possible that we would not have Augustine if it weren’t for stoicism, and equally possible we would not have the New Testament in its current form if it weren’t for Hellenistic philosophies like stoicism. There are things about stoicism that were as hard for Augustine to swallow in 410 CE as they are for us today. Seneca writes in a book called On the Happy Life that a good stoic “should be unbiased and not. . .conquered by external things: he ought to admire himself alone, to feel confidence in his own spirit, and so to order his life as to be ready alike for good or for bad fortune.”³⁰ Here, the stoic sage is the ultimate narcissist, living forever in a calyx of his own self-sustaining grandeur. Elsewhere, Seneca wrote about relishing the time he had alone to think about himself. In On Anger, he wrote, “When the light has been taken away, and my wife, who has long been aware of my habit, is quiet, I examine my whole day, and I retrace my actions and my words. I hide nothing from myself.”³¹ But what Seneca describes here – a session of introspective meditation – is one of the ultimate images of Hellenistic theology and philosophy. The geographically anchored, communitarian polytheisms of the Bronze Age had given way to a cosmopolitan spiritual eclecticism. Loosely codified ethical philosophies focused on self care, by the time of Seneca’s death in 65 CE, were everywhere. Cult religions built on initiation ceremonies promised blessed afterlives and individual relationships with deities, and they’d been proliferating for centuries leading up to Seneca’s birth. And while the stories told in the Gospels likely bear the imprint of Hellenistic cult religions, as we’ll see in a moment, perhaps no other philosophical school influenced the New Testament as much as stoicism did.

So, I hope that thus far I’ve offered a decent introduction to stoicism, a general sense of how it evolved, and what some of Seneca’s own contributions were. I’ve said almost nothing about some of the more interesting and original parts of stoic philosophy – its ethics and its formal logic, and Seneca’s own corpus of surviving works is so enormous that I’ve only introduced you to a tiny sampling. On the whole, my goal with Literature and History is an introduction to Anglophone literature. And because the New Testament and Old Testament are the right and left legs of Anglophone literature – and because stoicism may have been a major philosophical influence on the New Testament, my primary motivation in telling you the story of stoicism is to explain one of the often unacknowledged pillars of Christian thought. Like Christians later would, stoics believed in a universe governed by reason and beneficent order. Like Christians later would, stoics believed that doing what they believed was virtuous was ultimately more consequential than wealth or fame. And just as Seneca reports doing, Christians, through prayer and moral introspection, have always believed that individual actions have far reaching consequences, even in spite of an overall system governed by divine providence.

What I want to do now is to move on to the third portion of this particular episode. We’ve had an abridged history of stoicism, and a general introduction to Senecan stoicism. The title of this episode being Episode 66: Stoicism, Seneca, St. Paul, it’s time to discuss those passages of the New Testament that show the imprint of stoic philosophy most clearly. I realize we haven’t covered the New Testament yet, and so for some of us this will be new material. But I can’t, at this point, simply blast by the 60s BCE, by which time the Pauline epistles had already been written, and during which the earliest gospel, the Book of Mark, was likely composed, without saying a bit about the Apostle Paul, an almost exact contemporary of Seneca, who shared so much in common with the Roman stoic philosopher. [music]

The Life of St. Paul: Some Basic Background

When we read the New Testament, whatever our backgrounds, often the powerful, hypnotizing, and ultimately tragic narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are so unforgettable that we find other portions of the book drier by comparison. The story of Christ’s sacrifice being the central thesis of the book, the philosophical portions of Acts, and the often ideologically repetitions portions of the epistles don’t always have the effects of books like Luke and Revelation. However, it’s important to remember that behind the strictly theological aspects of the New Testament, there is a massive and stunning intellectual heritage – a heritage that borrows and synthesizes aspects of many late Hellenistic philosophies, chief among them stoicism. And at the core of this heritage is Saint Paul of Tarsus, who lived from about 5 CE until the mid 60s, and who likely wrote about seven of the New Testament’s 27 books, and had six more attributed to him, beginning, scholars believe, with 1 Thessalonians, which is often dated before 50 CE, or some time during the reign of the Emperor Claudius³²

Paul the Apostle, who began the process of writing what would be the New Testament about two decades after the death of Christ, was the son of devout Jewish parents, and he was born in the eastern Mediterranean city of Tarsus around 5 CE. Tarsus, in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey, was a city that perfectly reflected the twilight of the Hellenistic period. Even during the Bronze Age, the territories of modern day Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, western Syria and southern Turkey had been the axis of east and west. Through the international language of Koine Greek, in Paul’s time, intellectual and theological trends from everywhere were intermingling in the intellectual centers of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the university at Tarsus was dominated by stoic philosophy. Two generations before Paul’s birth, a stoic philosopher called Athenodorus had lived and taught in Tarsus, and later gone to give instruction in stoicism to the future emperor Octavian during the young man’s studies in Greece.

While Paul could have imbibed stoicism from the educational institutions of Tarsus, as a self-declared Pharisee (Phil 3:5), his ties with stoic ideas ran even more deeply. The historian Josephus, a generation younger than Paul, recollected following the teachings of the Pharisees, precisely because they were “a sect having points of resemblance to that which the Greeks call the Stoic school.”³³ To the Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Julio-Claudian dynasty, then, stoic ideas were alive and well and living in universities and religious sects alike, everywhere within a 500-mile radius of Jerusalem and beyond. As biographer Tom Wright explains, imagining Paul’s youth, when his name was Saul,

[W]hether Saul has read the non-Jewish philosophers of his day or the great traditions that go back to Plato and Aristotle, he knows the ideas. He has heard them on the street, discussed them with his friends. He knows the technical terms, the philosophical schemes that probe the mysteries of the universe and the inner workings of human beings, and the theories that hold the gods and the world at arm’s length like the Epicureans or that draw them into a single whole, to pan, “the all,” like the Stoics. It’s unlikely that he has read Cicero, whose book On the Nature of the Gods, from roughly a century before his own mature work, discussed all the options then available to an educated Roman (this does not, of course, include a Jewish worldview). But if someone in the tentmaker’s shop were to start expounding Cicero’s ideas, Saul would know what the conversation was about. He would be able to engage such a person on his own terms. He is thus completely at home in the worlds of both Jewish story and non-Jewish philosophy. We may suspect that he, like some of his contemporaries, somewhat relishes the challenge of bringing them together. (Wright, Tom. Paul: A Biography. HarperOne, 2018, p.16)

The Book of Acts, in which Paul embarks on an astonishing journey throughout the eastern and central Mediterranean, is the story of a missionary, bringing the newborn faith of Christianity westward into the cultural centers of Anatolia, Greece, and Rome. And yet when we read Acts and the letters of Paul carefully, we see that what he was bringing to potential converts was not some exclusively eastern theology, but instead the teachings of Christ armored and augmented with some of the greatest intellectual traditions of ancient history.

As Paul stands on the Athenian Areopagus and preaches in the Book of Acts, he quotes the Greek didactic poet and astronomer Aratus (Acts 17:28), who had influenced Theocritus, Callimachus, and Virgil’s Georgics.³⁴ When writing to the Corinthians, Paul quotes a Greek iambic trimeter of the playwright Menander (1 Cor 15:33). In his letter to his delegate Titus, at work on the island of Crete, Paul quotes a hexameter penned by the Greek poet Epimenides, written six and a half centuries earlier. In general, when you read Paul’s writings in an annotated Bible, you meet not so much a strict votary of Christ parroting his teacher’s teachings, but instead a Christian intellectual virtuoso whose righteousness is matched by his erudition.

And while Paul’s knowledge of Ancient Greek philosophy, literature, and science seems to have been broad and deep, what comes across most is his widespread familiarity with stoic principles. There are so many close textual parallels between the Pauline portions of the New Testament and the work of Seneca that generations of readers have theorized about Paul borrowing from Seneca, or the other way around. As I mentioned last time, by the 200s or 300s CE a fictional correspondence between Seneca and Paul began showing up in manuscripts, and in antiquity the more bookish readers of the New Testament knew that Seneca and Paul shared a very specific connection. This connection was as follows.

In about 52 CE, Seneca’s older brother Gallio was the proconsul of Achaia, and Paul was based in the Greek city of Corinth for a year and a half during Gallio’s tenure there (Acts 18:11). Greek Jews who were disquieted by Paul’s unorthodox Christian teachings brought charges against the missionary, and Seneca’s brother Gallio had to decide what to do. Taking a path common for Rome’s regional rulers, Gallio kept his hands out of religious matters, telling the offended Jews in the Book of Acts, “If it were a matter of crime or serious villainy, I would be justified in accepting the complaint of you Jews; but since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves; I do not wish to be a judge of these matters” (18:14-15). Thereafter Paul was left alone, and he moved on to continue his missionary work in Syria.

Senecan Ideology in the New Testament

Thus, while an apocryphal correspondence survives between Paul and Seneca, it is not at all impossible that they actually knew of one another, and one another’s work. Without the intervention of Seneca’s brother Gallio, Paul may indeed have been killed in Corinth in 52 CE, his missionary work nipped in the bud, his chapters of the New Testament never written, and Christianity radically different thereafter. But by the 60s, Paul had come to Rome, Seneca had rarely left, Seneca was slowly trying to extricate himself from Nero’s court, and Paul, on house arrest, was trying to get converts out of Nero’s subjects. It’s little surprise, then, that so many striking parallels exist between the work of Seneca and the teachings of Saint Paul, and I think we should look at some of them.

We’re going to get pretty granular here for a moment, so stay with me. I’m going to read a passage from the New Testament, largely from Paul’s Areopagus sermon in Chapter 17 of Acts, and then follow with a parallel passage from Seneca, most often from his Letters to Lucilius – citations, editions, page and line numbers are at literatureandhistory.com if you want them. First textual parallel. Both Paul and Seneca emphasize that God needs no temple, but that the world is God’s temple. Paul attests, “[H]e who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24).³⁵ Seneca writes, “[T]he whole world is a temple of the immortal gods, and, indeed, the only one worthy of their greatness and splendour.”³⁶ Second parallel. Paul and Seneca assert that God does not need human servants. Paul says, “Nor is [God] served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:25). Seneca writes, “God seeks no servants. Of course not; he himself does service to mankind, everywhere and to all he is at hand” (Epistulae XCV.48). Third parallel. Both specifically say that God needs no carved idols. Paul asserts, “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” (Acts 17:29). Seneca agrees, writing, “[G]old or silver[?]; an image that is to be in the likeness of God cannot be fashioned of such materials” (Epis XXXI.11). Fourth textual parallel. Each writer emphasizes God’s ubiquity. Paul maintains that “[I]ndeed [God] is not far from each of us” (Acts 17.27). Seneca writes “[E]verywhere and to all [God] is at hand. . .God is near you, he is with you, he is within you” (Epis XCV.47;XLI.1). Fifth parallel, again, each writer holds that God’s spirit lives in everyone. Saint Paul writes, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). And Seneca, similarly, writes, “[A] holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian” (Epis XLI.1).

I realize that a slurry of quotes like that is hard to digest in podcast form. But it’s worth studying the details, because there is a fascinating possibility that a direct connection existed between these two writers, or that whoever wrote the Book of Acts, which is thought to have been produced twenty or thirty years after the death of Paul and Seneca, knew Seneca’s philosophy.³⁷ Whether or not we see direct cross pollination occurring in these parallels, it’s possible that Paul was influenced by the ideas and rhetoric of stoic theology. Even outside of the Pauline portions of the New Testament, we see close textual parallels between the Bible and Seneca. The anonymously authored Hebrews declares, “And before [God] no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account” (Heb 4:13), and Seneca writes, “For what avails it that something is hidden from man? Nothing is shut off from the sight of God” (Epis LXXXIII.1).

Put very simply, enormous portions of Seneca sound like the New Testament, and the same is true the other way around.³⁸ In Seneca’s own stoic theology, and the theology of stoics before him, we meet a god very much like the Christian one – a being who is male, singular, beneficent, omniscient, omnipotent – a being who monitors the actions of individual believers and takes careful notes. And most particularly in Saint Paul’s ethical teachings, we are encouraged to act like a Senecan sage – to make do with very little, to shun material possessions and wealth, and to have faith that likeminded believers are ultimately immune to the buffetings of adversity. A minute ago, we got into the nitty gritty of parallels between Seneca and Paul. What I want to do now is to look at portions of Paul’s writings that, while they don’t have textual connecting points with Seneca, nonetheless sound as much like stoic philosophy as they do Christianity.

Earlier in this episode we discussed Seneca and the problem of evil. And we learned that again and again, when Seneca thought about bearing misfortunes, he turned to the idea that the stoic sage could all but walk through fire, since his wants and his fears were equally so few. In Saint Paul’s writings, the stoic sage becomes the faithful Christian, armored by faith and nurtured by hope in posthumous salvation. Let’s look at a passage from Paul’s disciple Timothy where we can see this happening.

Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (1 Tim 6:6-10)

The lines could have come directly from Seneca, not to mention Epicurus, or Zeno, or Aristotle, or Socrates, or the Ancient Egyptian “Instructions of Amenemope.” Reconcile yourself to a modest lifestyle, forget wealth, and focus on good personal conduct – in other words, generic Ancient Ethics, 101. Along the same lines, in Philippians, Paul preaches stoic minimalism, writing, “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, or having plenty and of being in need” (Phil 4:12). If Paul had merely been a cautionary moralist philosopher, however, his work wouldn’t be sitting on quite so many bookshelves.

To me, the most important difference between Seneca and Paul – other than the utterly obvious fact that Paul was one of the helmsmen of a new religion that ended up taking hold throughout much of the world – the most important difference between Senecan stoicism and Pauline Christianity is the way that Paul modifies Seneca’s doctrine of the stoic sage. Seneca, as we learned earlier, congratulated himself often on his resilience, at one point even telling his mother that stoicism almost rendered him into a god. Seneca is at his most arrogant when he delineates the stoic sage as actually, and ultimately invincible, dwelling as he does in the unbreakable shell of his own emotionless rationality. In Seneca, stoic sages are hard, isolated nodes – pinpricks of cold and inextinguishable light amidst the benighted masses.

Paul, maybe due to the moving humbleness and even egalitarianism of Christ’s teachings as we encounter them in the Gospels, didn’t share Seneca’s particular brand of elitism. A single passage from 2 Corinthians shows Paul asserting that like stoic sages, the earliest Christians were ultimately immune to the turns of fortune’s wheel, but that this immunity came from the divine, and not their own steely-jawed asceticism. And by the way, this passage opens with a metaphor of people being ultimately fragile, like clay jars. Paul writes,

[W]e have this treasure [of our faith] in clay jars, so that it may be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies.” (2 Cor 4.7-10)

You don’t have to share Paul’s beliefs to appreciate a simple fact about this passage, which is Paul’s use of an inclusive pronoun. Christians, Paul emphasizes, are as vulnerable as anyone else, but they are a collective, and as a collective they adhere to something greater than themselves. As a writer, Paul is often at his most potent and persuasive when he is making stoicism Christian, as in this later section of 2 Corinthians. Paul writes of he and his fellow Christians, “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and not yet killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing: as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:8-10). As a stylist, Seneca was equally capable of writing snappy and laconic parallelisms – Roman literature’s genres of epigrams and elegies encouraged such concision. But Paul’s string of parallel clauses here are made all the more powerful due to their inclusivity, each one a gentle invitation, and an assurance that although Christians aren’t superhumans, and although they have to weather the same storms that everyone else does, they have their loving god, and they have one another.

60-75 CE: A Pivotal Decade and a Half

While there are consequential differences between Seneca and Saint Paul, they were products of the same decades, and the same civilization, and thus it is little wonder that their ideologies ultimately share so many parallels, and so many specific turns of phrase. Roman citizens beneath the Julio-Claudians, the two writers sought to produce codes of ethics suited to monarchies, and perhaps Seneca puts it best when he writes in On the Happy Life that “We have been born into a monarchy: our liberty is to obey God.”³⁹ As provincial citizens of imperial dictatorships, the two men found stoic ideas a profound compensation for their ultimate vulnerability. They died within a year or two of one another, Seneca in 65 CE and Paul some time a little beforehand or afterward. And as the first generation of Romans who had spent their whole lives under Rome’s emperors passed – as generational memories of the republic faded further into the rear view mirror, a decade began that saw Christian theology developing rapidly on the printed page while Rome shuddered and nearly fell apart.

This decade’s prelude was the Great Fire of Rome under the Emperor Nero in July of 64, and the death of the apostle and first Pope St. Peter around this same time. Two years later, due to longstanding sectarian tensions and high taxation, the first Jewish-Roman war broke out, a war which saw plundering and final destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple in 70, the rise of the future emperor Vespasian, and culminated in the awful siege at Masada in 73. In this war’s early years, the Emperor Nero died in disgrace in the summer of 68, and by the end of 69, Rome had seen four emperors rule over the course of a single year. And within a few years or so on either side of 69 – the year of the four emperors – the second part of the most influential book in history was being written in earnest.

Though they were likely redacted after his death, Paul had finished his epistles by the mid sixties. Biblical scholars often date the earliest Gospel – the Gospel of Mark, to a period between 66 and 70 CE.⁴⁰ Matthew and Luke, which make use of the Gospel of Mark, were composed later, 85 being an approximate date often associated with Luke and John, with Matthew thought to have been written some time between 90 and 135.⁴¹

In the central and eastern Mediterranean, then, the years between 65 and 75 saw the end of the Julio-Claudians, the deaths of Christianity’s first pope and greatest missionary, and the destruction of the 600-year-old Second Temple of Jerusalem. This decade also saw a nascent religion taking shape in writing – a religion which had begun on paper by taking the teachings of Jesus Christ and incorporating some of the most compelling aspects of several Hellenistic philosophies. Stoicism itself continued to be practiced by a new generation – prominently the one-time slave Epictetus, and in the next century by Marcus Aurelius, to whom we’ll devote an episode. Stoicism, unlike many Hellenistic schools of thought, continued to flourish side by side with Christianity as it grew. But while Seneca himself was initially lionized by church fathers like Lactantius, Tertullian, and Saint Jerome, as Rome Christianized and the church codified its teachings, Seneca’s reputation slowly faded. Later readers like Augustine, as we heard earlier, found Seneca’s egotism unconscionable, and as a rich profiteer of the Julio-Claudians, Seneca began to stink of the vices of the pagan past. But however much later Christian history, and many of us today seek to differentiate the teachings of Seneca and Saint Paul for various reasons, I think it’s actually an injustice to the earliest Christians to downplay their eclecticism for the sake of imagining their ideas as something altogether new. Paul, as well as Seneca, was an intellectually complex person, and his education as a Pharisee in southern Anatolia, and thereafter in Jerusalem was broad and interdisciplinary. The strength and dynamism of his religious beliefs, and his missionary work, and the portions of the New Testament that he wrote, came from his broad multicultural learning just as much as it did faith in the new religion he promoted.

We talk about Rome Christianizing – that in the autumn of 312 CE, Constantine had a dream before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and thereafter the rest was history. But in this episode, I hope you’ve seen that much of the New Testament was written by a Roman citizen with a voluminous and multicultural education, and that Christianity was Roman before Rome was Christian.⁴²

Moving on to Senecan Tragedy

It’s not quite time, however, for us to turn in full to the New Testament. Because there’s one more aspect of Seneca that we have largely ignored, and that is his tragedies. Reading Senecan tragedy after reading Senecan philosophy is a bit like finding out that your stuffy philosophy professor is in a death metal band. In fact, Senecan tragedy is so dark, so violent, and so full of passion and hate that for a time Seneca the philosopher and Seneca the tragedian were thought to be different people.⁴³ They were not, however, and Senecan tragedy is captivating for a number of reasons.

In terms of pure influence, no other classical playwright shaped early modern tragedy as much as Seneca did. As biographer Emily Wilson writes, “A performance of Seneca’s Phaedra in Rome in 1485 can be seen as the starting point of early modern drama.”⁴⁴ We would not have Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Faustus, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Titus without the works of Seneca, the architect of the revenge tragedy play. But there’s another reason to read Senecan drama. Rome and Early Modern Europe shared something ruthless between them – a culture of public spectacles of violence. The Coliseum, the gladiatorial arena, the gallows, the stages of public torture – violence was entertainment in these epochs of history, and so it’s little surprise that the European dramatists of the 1500s and 1600s saw something in Seneca that spoke to them, having witnessed various persecutions related to the Protestant Reformation. By the time Seneca wrote his tragedies he had witnessed the bloodiest excesses of Caligula, and thus staging fictional spectacles of violence seems to have appealed to these different periods of history partly due to the the darker aspects of their public cultures.

We’re going to do two shows on Senecan tragedy – one on his play Thyestes and one on his play Phaedra. While Senecan tragedy has never had a spotless reputation in literary history, its later cultural impact, and its sheer entertainment value, make it well worth our effort. Additionally, Seneca’s plays are the only complete works of theatrical tragedy that we have from all of Rome’s literary history, and so they’re absolutely worth knowing. So next time, we’re going to hear the story of what’s often considered Seneca’s masterpiece – his play Thyestes. The brother of Atreus, the uncle of Menelaus and Agamemnon, Thyestes suffers one of the most horrifying experiences in literature – one that Seneca delivers in excruciating detail. We have shouldered some dense material lately, from the gorgeous but complicated Metamorphoses to the convoluted story of Seneca and the Julio-Claudians to the subject of stoicism and early Christianity in this show. But for the next show, get ready for some good old fashioned blood and thunder guilty pleasure. Because in addition to writing tracts on ethical philosophy, Lucius Annaeus Seneca could also write one hell of an entertaining play. I have a quiz on this episode at literatureandhistory.com if you want to review the who’s who of stoic philosophy. For you Patreon supporters, just because we’ve got some dark and dreary plays coming up, I’ve recorded two poems by Edgar Allan Poe – “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” – works which are just really fun to read and listen to. Got a song coming up if you want to hear it. If not, thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.

Still listening? Well, I really couldn’t let Seneca off the hook without a good salvo. After spending a month or so with him and his work, I do have a fondness for him, and it’s hard not to admire stoicism up to a point, but really he’s the kind of guy that you just need to make fun of. So I got to thinking and wondering about the best way to showcase some of Seneca’s contradictions in music, and I thought that a modern electronic music type style would be suitable – the kind that has the beat that goes boots-pants-boots-pants. And – humor me for a second – but there’s this chord progression that seems to always, always, always, always get used in self-affirming pop songs – it’s 6, 4, 1, 5 specifically. [sample] Basically, if you hear a self-assertive breakup song, or a song about somebody deciding they’re okay with who they are, everyone else be damned, or that kind of thing, this is the chord progression that gets – to me – agonizingly overused. So I thought I’d do the chorus of this Seneca song in this horribly hackneyed chord progression. This one’s called “I’m a Stoic” – hope it’s alright, and get ready for some blood splattering fun for whole Ancient Mediterranean family next time, with Seneca’s Thyestes. [“I’m a Stoic” Song]

References

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