[73] Now known to be unhistorical.
[74] Heb. i. 1.
[75] [Greek: polypoikilos dophia].
[76] See Acts xvii. 28; 1 Cor.; Tit. i. 12.
Let us then make a brief and final sketch of the three great Stoics whose lives we have been contemplating, with a view to summing up their specialties, their deficiencies, and the peculiar relations to, or divergences from, Christian truth, which their writings present to us.
"Seneca saepe noster," "Seneca, often our own," is the expression of Tertullian, and he uses it as an excuse for frequent references to his works. Yet if, of the three, he be most like Christianity in particular passages, he diverges most widely from it in his general spirit.
He diverges from Christianity in many of his modes of regarding life, and in many of his most important beliefs. What, for instance, is his main conception of the Deity? Seneca is generally a Pantheist. No doubt he speaks of God's love and goodness, but with him God is no personal living Father, but the soul of the universe--the fiery, primaeval, eternal principle which transfuses an inert, and no less eternal, matter, and of which our souls are, as it were, but divine particles or passing sparks. "God," he says, "is Nature, is Fate, is Fortune, is the Universe, is the all-pervading Mind. He cannot change the substance of the universe, He is himself under the power of Destiny, which is uncontrollable and immutable. It is not God who rolls the thunder, it is Fate. He does not rejoice in His works, but is identical with them." In fact, Seneca would have heartily adopted the words of Pope:
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul."
Though there may be a vague sense in which those words may be admitted and explained by Christians, yet, in the mind of Seneca, they led to conclusions directly opposed to those of Christianity. With him, for instance, the wise man is the equal of God; not His adorer, not His servant, not His suppliant, but His associate, His relation. He differs from God in time alone. Hence all prayer is needless he says, and the forms of external worship are superfluous and puerile. It is foolish to beg for that which you can impart to yourself. "What need is there of vows? Make yourself happy." Nay, in the intolerable arrogance which marked the worst aberration of Stoicism, the wise man is under certain aspects placed even higher than God--higher than God Himself--because God is beyond the reach of misfortunes, but the wise man is superior to their anguish; and because God is good of necessity, but the wise man from choice. This wretched and inflated paradox occurs in Seneca's treatise On Providence, and in the same treatise he glorifies suicide, and expresses a doubt as to the immortality of the soul.
Again, the two principles on which Seneca relied as the basis of all his moral system are: first, the principle that we ought to follow Nature; and, secondly, the supposed perfectibility of the ideal man.