Seneca gives a lurid picture of the corruption of women in the general licence of his age.[1780] Yet he has a lofty ideal of what women might become. Like other Stoic preachers, it was his good fortune to be surrounded by good women from his infancy. He remembers the tenderness of his aunt, in whose arms he first entered Rome as a child, who nursed him through long sickness, and broke through her reserve to help him in his early career of ambition. Her blameless character escaped even the petulance of Alexandrian gossip.[1781] His letters to his mother, Helvia, reveal a matron of the best Roman type—strong, self-denying, proud of her motherhood, and despising the extravagance and ostentation of her class. In spite of her father’s limited idea of female culture, she had educated herself in liberal studies, and found them a refuge in affliction.[1782] Marcia was of a softer type, and gave way to excessive grief for a lost child. Yet it is to her that Seneca unfolds most fully his ideal of feminine character. He will not admit the inferior aptitude of women for virtue and culture.[1783] [pg 330]Women have the same inner force, the same capacity for nobleness as men. The husband of Paulina who surrounded him with affectionate sympathy, and was prepared to die along with him, the man who had witnessed the stern courage and loving devotion of the wives of the Stoic martyrs, might well have a lofty ideal of woman’s character.[1784] But to any true disciple of the Porch that ideal had a surer ground than any personal experience, however happy. The creed which Seneca held was at once a levelling and an elevating creed. It found the only nobility or claim to rank in higher capacity for virtue.[1785] It embraced in the arms of its equal charity all human souls, bond or free, male or female, however they might be graded by convention or accident, who have a divine parentage, and may, if they will, have a lofty, perhaps an eternal future.
And now, in taking leave of Seneca, let us forget the fawning exile in Corsica, the possible lover of Julia or Agrippina, the millionaire minister of Nero, who was surrounded by a luxury and state which moved the envy of the tyrant.[1786] Rather let us think of the ascetic from his early youth, who, raised by his talents to the highest place, had to reconcile an impossible ideal with the sordid or terrible realities of that rank which was at once a “pinnacle and a precipice.”[1787] He was continually torn by the contrast between the ideal of a lofty Stoic creed and the facts of human life around him, between his own spiritual cravings and the temptations or the necessities of the opportunist statesman. He was imbued with principles of life which could be fully realised only in some Platonic Utopia; he had to deal with men as they were in the reign of Nero, as they are painted by Tacitus and Petronius. If he failed in the impossible task of such a reconciliation, let us do him the justice of recognising that he kept his vision clear, and that he has expounded a gospel of the higher life, which, with all its limitations from temperament or tradition, will be true for our remotest posterity, that he had a vision of the City of God.[1788] He was not personally perhaps so pure and clear a soul as Plutarch or Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. But he [pg 331]had utterly cast off that heathen anthropomorphism which crossed and disturbed their highest visions of the Divine.[1789] Seneca is far more modern and advanced than even the greatest of the Neo-Platonic school, just because he saw that the old theology was hopelessly effete. He could never have joined in the last struggle of philosophic paganism with the Church. And so the Church almost claimed him as her son, while it never dreamt of an affinity with Plutarch or Plotinus.
Indeed, there needed only the change of some phrases to reconcile the teaching of Seneca with that of the great ascetic Christian doctors. Many of the headings of the Imitation might be attached to paragraphs of Seneca—“of bearing with the faults of others”; “of inordinate affections”; “of the love of solitude and silence”; “of meditation on death”; “of humble submission”; “that to despise the world and serve God is sweet”; “of the acknowledgment of our own infirmities, and the remembrance of God’s benefits”; “of the contempt of temporal honour and vain secular knowledge”; “of the day of eternity and this life’s straitness.” In truth, the great spirits of all ages who have had a genius for religion, after due allowance for difference of association and difference of phrase, are strangely akin and harmonious. And Seneca had one great superiority over other equally religious souls of his time, which enables him to approach mediaeval and modern religious thought—he had broken absolutely with paganism. He started with belief in the God of the Stoic creed; he never mentions the Stoic theology which attempted to reconcile Him with the gods of the Pantheon. In spite of all his rhetoric, he tries to see the facts of human life and the relation of the human spirit to the Divine in the light of reason, with no intervening veil of legend. God is to Seneca the great Reality, however halting human speech may describe Him, as Fate, or Law, or Eternal Reason, or watchful loving Providence. God is within us, in whatever mysterious way, inspiring good resolves, giving strength in temptation, with all-seeing eye watching the issue of the struggle. God is without us, loading us with kindness [pg 332]even when we offend, chastising us in mercy, the goal of all speculation, He from whom we proceed, to whom we go at death. The true worship of Him is not in formal prayer and sacrifice, but in striving to know and imitate His infinite goodness. We mortal men in our brief life on earth may be citizens of two commonwealths, one the Rome or Corinth of our birth, the other that great city of gods and men, in which all are equally united, male and female, bond and free, as children of a common Father. In this ideal citizenship, in obedience to the law of the spiritual city, the eternal law which makes for righteousness, man attains his true freedom and final beatitude in communion with kindred souls.
Yet, as in mediaeval and puritan religious theory, there is in Seneca a strange conflict between pessimism and idealism. To the doomed philosophic statesman of the reign of Nero, the days of man’s life are few and evil. Life is but a moment in the tract of infinite age, and so darkened by manifold sins and sorrows that it seems, as it did to Sophocles, a sinister gift.[1790] On the other hand, its shortness is a matter of no importance; the shortest life may be full and glad if it be dignified by effort and resignation and conformity to the great law of the universe. The wise and pious man, ever conscious of his brief time of probation, may brighten each passing day into a festival and lengthen it into a life. The shortness of a life is only an illusion, for long or short have no meaning when measured by the days of eternity. And the philosopher may unite many lives in one brief span. He may join himself to a company of sages who add their years to his, who counsel without bitterness, and praise without flattery; he may be adopted into a family whose wealth increases the more it is divided; in him all the ages may be combined in a single life.[1791] To such a spirit death loses all its terrors. The eternal mystery indeed can be pierced only by imaginative hope. Death, we may be sure, however, can only be a change. It may be a passage into calm unconsciousness, as before our birth, which will release us from all the griefs and tumults of the life here below. It may, on the other hand, prove to be the morning of an eternal day, the entrance to a radiant and untroubled world of infinite possibilities. In any case, the spirit which [pg 333]has trained itself in obedience to eternal law, will not tremble at a fate which is surely reserved for the universe, by fire or flood or other cataclysmal change. The future in store for the soul is either to dwell for ever among things divine, or to sink back again into the general soul, and God shall be all in all.
CHAPTER II
THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY
The gospel of philosophy expounded by Seneca was rather an esoteric or aristocratic creed. With all his liberal sentiment, his cosmopolitanism, his clear conception of human equality and brotherhood, Seneca always remains the director of souls like his own, enervated by wealth, tortured with the ennui of jaded sensibility, haunted by the terror of the Caesars.[1792] Indeed Stoicism was always rather a creed for the cultivated upper class than for the crowd. In its prime, its apparatus of logical formulae, its elaborate physics and metaphysics, its essentially intellectual solution of the problems both of the universe and human life, necessarily disabled it from ever developing into a popular system. And in the later days of the Republic, theory became more important than practice, and logic passed into casuistry.[1793] But in the first century, Stoicism came to be much more a religion than a philosophy, or even a theology. Its main business, as conceived by men like Seneca, is to save souls from the universal shipwreck of character[1794] caused by the capricious excesses of luxury, the idolatry of the world and the flesh, which sprang from a riotous pride in the material advantages of imperial power, without a sobering sense of duty or a moral ideal. But, in the nature of things, this wreck of character was most glaringly seen among the men who were in close contact with the half insane masters of the world in the first century, and who possessed the resources to exhaust the possi[pg 335]bilities of pleasure or the capacities of the senses to enjoy. It is to people of this class, who still retained some lingering instincts of goodness, weary with indulgence, bewildered and tortured by the conflict of the lower nature with the weak, but still disturbing, protests of the higher, that Seneca addresses his counsels.
But what of the great masses lying outside the circle of cultivated and exhausted self-indulgence, that plebeian world of which we have seen the picture in their municipalities and colleges? It is clear from the records of their daily life, their ambitions, their tasks and amusements, that, although perhaps not generally tainted with such deep corruption as the nobles of the Neronian age, their moral tone and aspirations hardly correspond to the material splendour of the Empire. Even apart from the glimpses of low life in Petronius, Martial, and Apuleius, apart from the revelations of Pompeii, and the ghastly traditions which haunt the ruins of countless theatres and amphitheatres, the warnings of preachers of that age, such as Dion Chrysostom, and the reflections of the infinitely charitable M. Aurelius, leave no very favourable impression of the moral condition of the masses.[1795] How could it be otherwise? The old paganism of Rome did indeed foster certain ancestral pieties which were the salt of the Roman character. But it unfortunately also gave its sanction to scenes of lust and cruelty which went far to counteract in later times any good it did. Nor had the old religion any means for edification and the culture of character. It had no organisation for the care and direction of souls in moral doubt and peril. If its oracles might, from a few old-world examples, seem to supply such a spiritual want, the appearance is delusive even according to pagan testimony. Poets and moralists alike thundered against the shameless impiety which often begged the sanction of a prophetic shrine for some meditated sin,[1796] and the charge has been confirmed by the resurrection of these old profanities from the ruins of Dodona.[1797] But even without [pg 336]direct testimony, we might fairly conclude that the Antonine Age was, by reason of its material development, in special need of spiritual teaching and evangelism. The whole stress of public and private effort was towards the provision of comfort or splendour or amusement for the masses. And, within the range of its ambition, it succeeded marvellously. Nor should an impartial inquirer refuse to admit that such an immense energy has its good moral side. The rich were rigorously taught their duty to society, and they improved upon the lesson. The masses responded to their generous public spirit with gratitude and affection; and the universal kindliness and fraternity diffused through all ranks on days of high religious festival or civic interest, afforded a very wholesome and gratifying spectacle.[1798] There was an undoubted softening of the Roman character. And the labours of the great Stoic lawyers were giving expression to cultivated moral feeling, in a more liberal recognition of the natural rights of the weak and oppressed, of women and of slaves. Yet a society may be humane and kindly while it is also worldly and materialised. To us at least, the forces of the Antonine age seem to have expended themselves chiefly on the popular pleasures and external adornments of life, or a revival, often in the grossest and most absurd forms, as we shall see in a later chapter, of the superstitions of the past. With all its humanitarian sentiment and all its material glories, the Roman world had entered on that fatal incline, which, by an unperceived yet irresistible movement, led on to the sterilisation of the higher intellect, and the petrifaction of Roman society which ended in the catastrophe of the fifth century.